2313: Reimagining

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I’m going to resist ranting on about how good Ys II was, even though I finished it this evening, and instead talk a little more generally about something that divides opinions somewhat among gamers: the idea of remakes.

The reason I bring this up now is that the first two Ys games have the dubious honour of being some of the most frequently remade and rereleased games of all time. Beginning life on the PC-88, they subsequently found themselves ported, remade and rejigged on platforms ranging from the Sega Master System to modern Windows PCs. And, from what I know of these different versions, they provide markedly different experiences, at least in terms of their aesthetic, but also to a lesser extent in terms of gameplay and narrative content, too.

The situation with Ys reminds me somewhat of the ’80s and early ’90s in gaming, when multiplatform releases were noticeably different from one another due to the wildly different capabilities different hardware had. The ZX Spectrum version of a game, for example, tended to be the “worst” in most cases thanks to that system’s slow processor, lack of RAM and poor graphics and sound capabilities, while the Commodore Amiga version tended to be the most impressive version thanks to being a 16-bit rather than 8-bit computer, plus all the dedicated graphics and sound hardware in that system that made it one of the most impressive computers on the market during that period.

Ultimately, the Windows PC came along and made all this sort of thing mostly irrelevant, which was probably for the best — at least from a development perspective, as developers no longer had to create ten or more completely different versions of their game — but I sort of miss the differences between platforms, since there’s really very little to choose between Xbox One and PS4 versions of games these days, while the PC version is usually the “best” if your hardware is up to the job and the port has been handled with actual PC gamers in mind. The margin of “best” is much smaller than it was back in that period, though; in most cases, it’s only the very worst type of insufferable frame-rate buff that will be able to highlight (and probably talk about at great length) the differences between PC and console versions.

But back to Ys and the concept of remakes in general. The version of Ys and Ys II that I played was the Chronicles+ version, which is — for now, anyway — the absolute latest version. This features lovely PS1-style pixel art, a glorious live-recorded soundtrack (plus the option for two of the older incarnations of the music, too), some really rather fabulous 2D lighting effects and an excellent, excellent localisation by Xseed Games. In comparison to the earlier versions, the script also fleshes out some of the character and world backstory, too, making for a much more “complete”-feeling experience. It is, in short, probably closest to what the fine folks at Falcom wanted to create when Ys was first put together.

Ys is an example of a remake done extremely well. It’s true to the original game, but acknowledges modern tastes. For example, it incorporates analogue control, which simply didn’t exist in the console space when Ys first came out. It also features modern trappings like cloud saving and achievements — the latter aspect of which was added by Xseed and adds an enjoyable “metagame” to the experience, encouraging you to seek out some secrets you might not have found otherwise.

Other solid remakes I’ve come across include Atelier Rorona Plus on PS3. This was a curious situation in that the original Atelier Rorona was a PS3 title too, and only a couple of years earlier than its Plus incarnation. Plus turned out to be the definitive way to enjoy Rorona’s adventure, though, thanks to improved character models, a better interface and an overall better game experience all round. It was a less radical reinvention than the various Ys remakes, but it was still significant and ultimately to the game’s benefit.

Where I find myself raising my eyebrows a bit are when it comes to “remakes” that are little more than ports. Sure, it’s nice to be able to play, say, a PS2 classic in 1080p at 60 frames per second, but sometimes I wonder what a true remake of these older games might be like with modern technology. That’s a lot more work than a port, of course, but I can dream — and it is possible to do something along these lines. Ultimately this type of remake is mostly valuable for those who perhaps missed out on a game on its original platform, so might as well play a technically superior version for (theoretically) the “best” experience with it; contrast with, say, the Ys remakes, though, which provide value even for those who are already veterans of the source material.

Anyway. Remakes can be good; really good, in fact. And I’m more than happy to support them when they’re of as high a quality as the two Ys games I’ve just played through. It’s got me thinking about remakes I’d really like to see, too — though perhaps that’s a subject for a separate post on another day.

2312: After 1.5 Games, I Already Like Ys More Than Any Zelda I’ve Played

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A controversial statement, perhaps — and I make no apologies for a third post about Ys in a row — but one that I feel confident in making, even having only finished the first game and made it about halfway (I estimate?) through the second. (Aside: given how much I’ve enjoyed the first two games so far, you can count on a month of Ys over on MoeGamer at some point in the near future.)

Ys speaks to me in a way that Zelda never has. This isn’t to say that I don’t like Zelda, mind you — I count A Link to the Past, Link’s Awakening and Majora’s Mask among some of my favourite games of all time — but there’s something just… kind of magical about Ys that I’ve been delighted to discover over the past few days, and a little disappointed in myself that I never took the plunge and explored this series earlier.

Let me try to explain what I mean.

I think the thing that sticks out to me most of all is how Ys provides a much more coherent and continuous feeling in its narrative than Zelda does. The fact that Zelda games up until Link’s Awakening still referred to the various dungeons as “levels” made it pretty clear that despite the sprawling overworld in each instance, these were basically games designed on the same linear principles as more traditional action/arcade adventures. This very much gives Zelda games a feeling that persists today: a sharp demarcation between the overworld and the dungeons. This is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it particularly unusual; many RPGs make this distinction, and massively multiplayer games in particular have an even more stark divide between the two types of content, with dungeons tending to be cooperative multiplayer affairs, while overworld action tends to be (for the most part) solo or social in nature.

But with Ys, there’s no such demarcation. The world is continuous and coherent, and consequently far more believable. You’re not pausing your exploration to get through the mysteriously puzzle-filled castle that happens to stand between you and your objective; you’re continuing your journey, exploring the world, fulfilling the promises you made to the people who believe in you. It’s a continuous, flowing process and narrative, rather than one that is heavily punctuated. Exploration flows into conversation flows into combat flows into more exploration; the only real punctuation comes in the form of the boss fights, which don’t necessarily come at as predictable points as in Zelda games.

This coherent feeling is particularly apparent in Ys II, which expands on the excellent worldbuilding of its predecessor. Characters move around as the story progresses, and they make reference to the places you find yourself travelling to. Sometimes you run across them on your travels as they get up to things independently of you; sometimes you’ll return from an adventure to find them acknowledging your deeds when you speak to them. Contrast with Zelda’s worlds, which tend to be rather static in nature; populated with weird and quirky characters in many cases, sure, but there’s not a lot of feeling of things going on while you’re not there, with the exception of Majora’s Mask, of course, where this sort of thing was the whole game’s central design tenet.

My friend Chris also points out that Ys makes him feel powerful, and he’s absolutely right. This is a big contrast between Ys and Zelda, and it’s partly due to the nature of the protagonist character. While both games sport a visually distinctive but mute self-insert character for the player to inhabit and play as they see fit, Zelda’s hero is a child, while Ys’ hero is a young adult. There’s always been an element of childish clumsiness to Zelda’s combat; even once the series moved into 3D with Ocarina of Time and started having more complex combat mechanics than a single attack button that always did the same thing, Link always felt… not incapable or incompetent as such, but like he perhaps wasn’t quite as comfortable holding a sword and shield as he perhaps should be. Which is understandable in several of the games, where he has the whole “Hero” thing kind of thrust upon him suddenly.

In the case of Ys, meanwhile, there’s a strong feeling that, when played well, you are overwhelming your enemy with superior skill and power. This is depicted differently in both Ys I and Ys II, despite both being based on the same fundamental “bump” system, which allows for button-free attacking and a style of gameplay where you never really have to stop moving.

In Ys I, the feeling of overwhelming power is brought about by the rather brief levelling curve: with a level cap of just 10, each one of those 10 levels is a significant jump in power for protagonist Adol. If you keep pace with where you’re “supposed” to be as you proceed through the story, you’ll take down most enemies in a single hit. It’s not until the very latter stages of the game, when you’ve been level 10 for a while, that you’ll come across enemies that need multiple hits to fell, and even then, no more than one or two extra hits.

In Ys II, meanwhile, the combat is rejigged so that individual hits do less damage, but you can inflict them incredibly quickly, particularly while attacking diagonally. You also push enemies backwards while attacking them, giving the combat a feel somewhat akin to the sport of fencing, where dominating your opponent and forcing them to move how you want them to move is key. In Ys II, careful, tactical movement of enemies — not shoving them into a large group of their friends, for example, nor pushing them into a corner behind a rock that makes it difficult for you to keep up the assault — is absolutely key, and getting it right is an immensely satisfying feeling completely unlike any other action RPG I’ve played.

Then you have things like the items. In Zelda, the items you unlock as you proceed through the game are predictable and are used based on clear, recognisable visual cues that stay the same throughout the game. In Ys, meanwhile, you might use each item only once or twice throughout the game in circumstances where it makes narrative sense to do so, not because it would make a good puzzle or dexterity challenge. This gives the game much more of a traditional “adventure game” feel to it, and I like that very much about it. In Ys II, there are also a number of items you can use in unconventional ways, too, and the game rewards experimentation with, for example, giving healing items as gifts to NPCs, or using the “Alter” magic to turn yourself into a Roo and talk to monsters. While very few of these things are necessary to complete the game, they, like so much else in these games, provide a lovely sense of a world that has been well thought out and beautifully crafted, particularly in these revamped Chronicles+ versions that I’m playing on PC.

This is all my opinion, of course, and doubtless there are some die-hard Zelda fans out there who would feel the complete opposite to me — and doubtless some other people out there who would gleefully point out that Ys and Zelda aren’t really directly comparable at all — but so far, I don’t feel it’s premature to say that I’m already in love with this series, and intend to devour as much of it as I can in short order. Count on further enthusing as and when that happens.

2311: I Finished My First Ys

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It’s something of a novelty these games to start and beat a game over the course of a couple of days — particularly an RPG — but with Dungeon Travelers 2 being considerable in both length and difficulty, I felt that a palate cleanser of some sort was in order before I tackled the remaining 15+ floors of that game’s final dungeon. I considered picking up the new Doom, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to spend that much on it, so instead, as I noted yesterday, I turned to the Ys series.

This evening, I beat Ys I. Here are some things I thought about it.

Things I liked

That music! The PC version I was playing has three mixes of the soundtrack available: the original FM version, a remastered MIDI version from a later incarnation and a full-on rock the fuck out version from Falcom’s in-house band. I must confess I didn’t try the two earlier versions, as Falcom’s band is pretty damn amazing. Wailing guitars and pounding drumbeats complemented the action perfectly, and brought a pleasantly nostalgic feeling over me, making me think of both Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (which had plenty of widdly-diddly guitars) and my brother (who was always very good at widdly-diddly guitars when I was growing up).
Levelling up is meaningful. There are ten experience levels in Ys I. Each one is a significant jump in power. From level 1 to level 2 is the difference between taking 4 or 5 hits to kill an enemy and being able to splatter it in a single hit. Your power continues to increase hugely as the game progresses.
You have an HP bar that gets bigger. I don’t know why I like this, I just do. I liked it in Metal Gear Solid, I liked it in Kingdom Hearts and I like it here. It’s a satisfying visual representation of your growth in power.
Your HP bar shows how much damage the last hit you took chipped off. This is really nice. Similar to how fighting game health gauges work, your HP bar in Ys highlights the amount of damage the last hit gave you in a brighter shade of red so you can estimate roughly how many more individual hits you can take before needing to worry about healing.
Tactical health regeneration. Healing items are few and far between in Ys I, so it’s fortunate that you regenerate health by standing still… though only when you’re in a place where you can see the sky. Later in the game, you acquire a healing ring that allows you to regenerate in dungeons, too, but for the majority of the time, finding an open-air “clearing” in a dungeon makes a nice checkpoint.
Cute girls. My goodness. I want to cuddle Feena forever.
The sense of place and character. I mentioned this yesterday, but Ys I’s world feels remarkably coherent, even with its relatively tiny size compared to some other RPGs. By the end of the game, you recognise every character, and the character notebook feature in the game suggests that the writers thought long and hard about each and every NPC in the game, regardless of their importance (or lack thereof) to the plot.
The interesting structure. Ys I is broadly split into two parts: the first half sees you charging around the overworld completing various quests, and this will probably bring you up to the level cap of 10. Once you’ve done everything out in the world, you then enter the 25-floor final dungeon Darm Tower, where you’ll need to use everything you’ve learned (and a few other things besides) to make it to the top and kick the last boss’ face in.
The last boss is the hardest thing in the game. I’ve lost count of the number of RPGs I’ve played where the final boss is an underwhelming battle thanks to the ability to overlevel yourself for it by doing all manner of side activities beforehand. In narrative terms, the final boss should really be your most significant challenge, so it’s always a little disappointing when you can mash it in a couple of turns. Not so in Ys I; this asshole puts up a fight.

Things I liked a little less

The bosses are a bit primitive. This is perhaps understandable, given the game’s heritage — despite this being a modern remake, the original Ys I came out in 1987 and the bosses in particular make this abundantly clear, with very simple attack patterns that have no “intelligence” whatsoever — simply either randomised or predictable path-based movement.
The last boss is the hardest thing in the game… but for all the wrong reasons. The final boss is all kinds of bullshit. He bounces around the screen, frequently going out of reach. When you hit him, the floor falls away underneath where he was, and this can either kill you instantly or trap you in a corner if you’re not careful. He shoots fireballs that split into so many bullets it’s literally impossible to dodge them all. Fighting him is more a matter of being able to inflict enough damage on him before he kills you than any real skill at recognising and dealing with his patterns.
Inconsistent item behaviour is a little unfair. You can’t use items or change your equipment in boss battles. This means you can’t use that healing potion you’ve been saving, or the magic mirror to freeze your opponent in place. Worse, the various rings you acquire throughout the game — which vary in effect from doubling your damage dealt to halving your damage taken via allowing you to slowly regenerate when standing still — have no effect whatsoever in boss battles, either.
There are a number of instances where the game kind of forgets to tell you what to do next. This happens for the first time right at the very beginning of the game, where no-one tells you that in order to trigger an important event you first have to speak to each and every NPC in the starting town. There are a number of other such incidents later in the game, too, but again, this is perhaps a remnant of the game’s 1987 heritage, when games were a lot less hand-holdy.

Ultimately, none of the things I liked a bit less about Ys I distracted me from playing it through from start to finish and really enjoying the experience. I’m not sure whether I’ll go back and play it on the notorious Nightmare difficulty — I’m not sure I can face some of those bosses again! — but it’s a definite possibility. For the immediate “now”, though, I think I’m going to move straight on to Ys II to see how Adol’s adventure continues.

Yep. I’m 100% on board with this series, and I look forward to exploring the rest of it.

2310: My First Ys

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I’ve been meaning to check out the Ys series for quite some time — my Steam library informs me that I have owned a number of the PC versions for several years, and I also have a number of the PSP versions loaded on my Vita, too. For some reason, though, I’ve never got around to it.

I decided that it was time to change all that, so I booted up Ys I to start at the beginning. And, well, I kind of wish I’d done this sooner.

Ys is a series I’ve been dimly aware of for many years. I remember some seriously random things from my childhood, and one of the things that is still stored in my memory for some inexplicable reason was seeing a review of Ys III: Wanderers from Ys in the SNES magazine my brother’s girlfriend at the time was working on, Control. Something struck me as very interesting about this side-scrolling hack and slash adventure, and I often found myself wondering what it would be like to play. For one reason or another, though, I never did check it out, but the Ys series had always been at the back of my mind ever since.

Ys I is a rather different affair from Ys III, which took a distinctly Zelda II-esque approach of attempting to reinvent the series as a side-scrolling platform action RPG rather than the more traditional top-down perspective of other installments. But Ys I isn’t like any other RPG I’ve played, either. It’s not like Zelda because of its use of the rather peculiar (but fun and satisfying) “bump” combat, wherein you attack enemies just by walking into them, and whether or not they do damage to you depends on the angle you hit them at. It’s not like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest because it’s not a turn-based RPG, nor is it a globetrotting adventure. Instead, it’s something that very much has its own identity.

Ys I — and, indeed, most of the subsequent Ys games — casts you in the role of one Adol Christin, a redheaded adventurer lad who washes up on the shores of the land of Esteria against all odds after surviving a strange phenomenon surrounding the island called the Stormwall. After a brief convalescence — and specifically against the recommendations of his doctor and nurse — he heads out into the world to explore and figure out what is going on, and before long, oh, wouldn’t you know it, he’s some sort of Chosen One at the centre of all sorts of mystical happenings that appear to converge on Darm Tower, a hulking, sinister structure on Esteria that seems to be the source of everyone’s troubles and woes.

Where Ys shines is in its small scale. In this sense, it’s rather similar to the only other Falcom game I’ve played to date, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. Trails in the Sky featured a fairly hefty journey for its main cast, but its real appeal was in how much character and personality it gave each and every party member, shopkeeper, NPC on the streets and distinct region of the world. Ys I is the same, only in more concentrated form; the island is a very small place that you quickly learn to find your way around, even with the game’s total lack of any sort of map function, and it’s not long before you feel like you’ve got to know pretty much all of the 88 characters who are scattered around the game world, some of whom have something interesting to say, others of whom are simply background colour.

What’s fascinating about Ys is that even the incidental, “useless” NPCs are full of personality and have clearly been written with a greater context in mind. They each have their own little stories to tell, and over the course of Adol’s adventure, the things they say change subtly, giving you a good feeling of the sort of person they are and what they think about everything that’s been going on. And the game sometimes surprises you by making what appeared to be an incidental character rather more important than they first appeared.

Couple all this with some really lovely pixel art in the field, some gorgeous visual novel-style illustrations when speaking with the more important characters, and an absolutely rockin’ soundtrack, and, well, you have a game that is really rather good: unconventional, memorable, interesting and, most of all, fun.

If Ys I, the oldest and most primitive title in the series, is this appealing to me, I can only imagine how enjoyable the most well-regarded entries like Oath in Felghana and its ilk are. I’m looking forward to investigating the rest of the series in detail, and anticipate that I may well become a bit of a Falcom fanboy by the time I’m done with them.

2309: Ingress’ Real-World Cyberpunk Shows Us What Mobile Games Should Aspire To

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One of the most popular buzzphrases that mobile game developers use is “console-quality graphics and gameplay”. (This ranks just behind “THE #1 RPG ON MOBILE!!” — as voted by the developer’s mum, presumably.) And indeed, it certainly is impressive how powerful today’s mobile phones are; I remember when Epic first released that cool tech demo showing Unreal Engine working on the iPhone (and it later turned out to be the rather uninspired Infinity Blade) and everyone lost their shit over mobile phones killing dedicated gaming handhelds.

Here’s the thing, though: I don’t want a console-quality experience on my mobile phone, and I doubt many other people do, either. In circumstances where the only gaming-capable device I have on my person is my phone, I probably don’t have the time or inclination to sit down and play some sort of battery-guzzling game that looks great but takes ages to load, demands more than a couple of minutes of my time for a meaningful play session and controls like complete ass because touchscreens suck for traditional input schemes. To put it another way, if I want to play games while I’m out and about, I’ll have my Vita in my bag; a device with actual buttons on which I can play games that are actually good, don’t require an Internet connection, don’t try and fleece money out of me at every opportunity and, as previously mentioned, don’t control like complete ass.

Mobile games are very much in a rut at the moment, with the vast majority of the most successful titles being Asian-origin “gacha” games, in which you draw cards/items/heroes/weapons of varying rarity with real money or in-game currency, add them to your party and level them up until they overpower everything the game has to offer. The exact execution of these games varies — Granblue Fantasy looks and plays somewhat like a traditional JRPG without the exploration, for example, while Love Live! School Idol Festival is a rhythm game — but their basic structure and game loop is always the same:

Log in, get daily bonus
Spend all your energy points (or equivalent) on either linear main story quests (if you’re trying to level up) or daily dungeons (if you’re trying to collect specific items)
Draw a free crap card/hero/item/weapon
If you’ve earned enough premium currency/paid for premium currency, draw guaranteed “rare or above” card/hero/item/weapon
Use collected crap cards/heroes/items/weapons to fuse with “rare or above” cards/heroes/items/weapons to level them up
Close game, wait for energy to regenerate
Repeat

Once you’ve played one, you’ve played them all, with the only real variation being the exact execution of how the quests play out. Even then, they tend to be grossly simplified versions of what you’d get on a full console — Granblue Fantasy’s combat, for example, has very little strategy beyond picking the right element for each enemy and/or overpowering them with overleveled or rare heroes.

It’s this rut that mobile gaming has been stuck in that means I have very little interest in modern mobile games — and it makes the original, bold claims that mobile gaming was something new and revolutionary that was going to take over the whole gaming industry look somewhat laughable.

However, there are some experiences out there that do make good use of mobile gaming’s unique capabilities, and Ingress is one of them. Ingress is a daunting prospect to get into, but I’ve spent a bit of time with it today, and it turns out it’s not nearly as scary as I thought it was.

Ingress is an augmented reality game — that is, it’s a game that overlays fictional game elements on the real world. The concept is that “exotic matter” or “XM” has started leaking into our world, and aliens called “Shapers” are up to some sort of mischief. Two factions have risen up to try and deal with the XM situation in their own way: the Enlightened want to learn more about it and how they can use it to help humanity, while the Resistance want to get rid of it and protect humanity from the unwanted machinations of the Shapers.

At the start of the game, you pick one of these two factions, and that’s your team for the duration you play the game. You can switch sides, but it’s a lengthy process to do so and effectively entails you starting the game all over again, so there’s not a lot of point unless you really need to play for the other team.

Ingress’ augmented reality nature comes in the form of “portals” scattered around the real world. It’s the job of the Ingress players on both sides to proceed to these portals — like, actually go to the places they are — hack them to acquire various useful items, and capture them for their respective faction. You can then use the items you’ve acquired to protect your own portals from enemy attack or go and try to cause some mischief on enemy portals. There’s an overarching metagame that tasks you with linking nearby portals strategically and covering the map with triangles made up of three linked portals to score points for your faction, too, and meanwhile the game’s overall plot unfolds organically in the background with special, live events around the world, video clips that you can loot from portals and all manner of other goodies.

Even its core game loop is interesting:

Check the intel site for portals you’re interested in visiting/hacking/attacking/capturing
Go to the portal location
Hack the portal to acquire items if it belongs to your team
Attack the portal’s resonators with weapons if it’s an enemy portal
Capture the portal with your own resonators if you sufficiently weakened it
Link captured portals together with Portal Keys acquired through hacking — but note that links can’t intersect, so do this strategically
Form Fields by linking three portals together in a triangular formation, capturing a region of the map for your team and adding MU (Mind Units — overall score) to your faction’s overall rating.

Within that, there’s plenty you can do to mix things up. You can collaborate and coordinate with other nearby players to carry out a heavy assault on a well-defended portal. You can strategise with teammates on what will be the best formation for linked portals and fields. You can post and follow “Missions” — sequences of portals designed to take you on a tour. Or you can simply use the game as an excuse to get out and about to visit some places.

By far the best thing about Ingress is that it’s something that couldn’t be done anywhere other than on a mobile device. Everything about it — the fact that it’s GPS-based, the fact that it pulls information from the Internet, the fact that it’s an inherently social game, the fact that it works best on a device you can keep on your person at all times — is made for mobile gaming: it’s a completely unique experience that simply wouldn’t work anywhere else, and it’s a much, much better experience for it.

Also its cyberpunk-style aesthetic is absolutely gorgeous, with neon, glowing colours on a black background; stereotypical “computer” noises and speech synthesis; dramatic “ping” noises as you approach a portal; and well-produced videos to advance the ongoing plot. It’s an extremely well-crafted product, all round, and best of all it’s completely free to play, with no play throttling attempting to squeeze money out of you at any point by preventing you from playing as much as you’d like.

I spent a good couple of hours just wandering around the local area experimenting with Ingress earlier, and I enjoyed the experience enough to know it won’t be the last time I do so. It’s one of the most interesting mobile games I’ve ever played, and studios considering churning out yet another identikit gacha RPG should take a long, hard look at Ingress to see how to really take advantage of mobile devices as a platform for unique, fascinating gaming experiences.

2308: An Open Letter to @wilw About Games as a Lifeline, “Male Tears” and Inexplicable Blocks

Hi Wil,

You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. Apparently I’ve done something to offend you in the past, though, because you have me blocked on Twitter. I don’t know why and I don’t know when this happened because as far as I know, we’ve had no direct interaction on any occasion ever, but I will apologise for whatever it was anyway. I will also express my sincere disappointment that someone I used to look up to as a bastion of what modern nerd culture should aspire to feels somehow threatened or upset with something I’ve done in the past — threatened or upset enough to simply cut me off from the prospect of ever interacting with him.

I was an avid viewer of many of the Geek and Sundry videos when it first launched — particularly Tabletop, which introduced my friends and I to a number of board games that are still in our regular rotation. Tabletop was an excellent show that gave a good flavour of how the various games played — even if there were occasional bits of fuzzing over the rules in the name of keeping things snappy! — as well as providing a great opportunity for some of the most entertaining, fun people in geek culture to come together and have a good time. A good time that was infectious — so enjoyable was the atmosphere on Tabletop that it felt like the audience was right there with you all, sitting around the game table, rooting for your favourite player to win and commiserating with you when you inevitably came lost. (As the resident person in our tabletop gaming group who perpetually comes last in pretty much everything, I could relate to your position quite a bit.)

On a more serious note, nerd culture in general is something that I’ve talked a lot in the past about giving me a lifeline when I needed it. In the case of video games, they’ve provided a constant and much-needed centre of stability in a life that has often been chaotic and beyond my control and understanding; in the case of tabletop gaming, they provide one of the few means of face-to-face social interaction in which I feel completely comfortable, whether it’s with close friends or, as it was for me this Friday evening just gone, complete strangers. I think it’s the fact that interactions over a tabletop game are, for the most part, clearly structured: it’s why I gravitate towards games with clear rules, turn structures and player roles as well as those with strong themes that include flavour text I can read out dramatically to our group. Conversely, those games that require a certain degree of negotiation or freeform interaction are those I feel less comfortable with, since I’m sometimes not quite sure what I’m “supposed” to say.

But all that’s by the by; it’s just a bit of context of who I am. Needless to say, games of both the video and tabletop variety are extremely important to me; as you said in your keynote speech at PAX East in 2010, “some of the happiest days of our lives would not exist without games and gaming. Games are important. Games matter.” I agree entirely, and when I took a risk, flying from the UK to Boston, MA for that PAX East — my first time attending such an event, and only, I think, the second time I’d taken a solo trans-Atlantic flight — I found somewhere that I really felt like I belonged. My life was, at that point, a bit of a mess: my marriage was falling apart — my wife at the time would go on to leave me shortly after I returned from Boston — and I didn’t have a reliable source of income. Games gave me a sense of being grounded; somewhere to retreat to when I couldn’t face the terror that everyday life at the time confronted me with. Games gave me common ground with which I could interact with other people; games gave me something to talk about, something that I could call “mine”.

That time in my life was turbulent. I’ve had ups and downs since then, and as I type this I’m very much in a “down”. Over the years since 2010, I’ve come to recognise the importance of acknowledging one’s emotions, the causes of these emotions and the ways to deal with them. I’m not afraid to cry as I once was back in high school; as someone who sometimes has difficulty expressing exactly what he wants to say verbally, there are times when bursting into tears says more than words ever can; there are others when the act of opening those floodgates allows the repressed emotions to be released in a more controlled manner once you’ve calmed down a bit, letting you communicate what’s really bothering you after the storm has subsided. Crying is important. Crying matters.

Which is why this image you posted on Twitter bothers me so much:

For anyone reading this letter who doesn’t already know, the expression “male tears” is usually used by the more toxic side of online activism as a means of demonising men — usually straight, white men — when they wish to express themselves. It’s largely brought out during arguments between the more militant side of feminism and those — usually, but not exclusively, men — who are tired of all the sociopolitically charged fighting that takes place every day on the Internet, particularly those who fight back somewhat aggressively with foul language, threats and exhortations for people to kill themselves. The “joke”, such as it is, is that all this unpleasantness just bounces off the noble “progressive” types — referred to disparagingly by their critics as “Social Justice Warriors” or “SJWs” for short, an epithet which these people flip-flop between absolutely hating and trying desperately to reclaim in the same way black culture has largely reappropriated “nigga” for itself — and is just interpreted as straight, white men crying about something not going their way for once; the fact that “male tears” is written on a mug allows the “progressive” activist the opportunity to drink from it, suggesting that they relish the opportunity to feed on the tears of their enemies.

Pretty unpleasant however you look at it, and while the original intention may not have been to reinforce traditional ideals of what these same people call “toxic masculinity” — stereotypes such as “big boys don’t cry” and “be a man for once” — I can’t help but look at it that way. Speaking as a (straight, white) man who does cry, isn’t ashamed of the fact that he cries and, in fact, has cried quite a bit over the last few months due to his own life situation and the suffering of the person he loves most dearly in the world: to see the idea of “male tears” used so gleefully and indiscriminately as a means of oneupmanship, of proving one’s “progressiveness” feels grossly distasteful and insensitive. To have it proudly promoted by someone I once looked up to as almost an idol; someone I thought I could aspire to follow in the footsteps of; someone who proved that a person with my interests could find success and a place for themselves in the world? That just feels like a stab in the back, with a few good twists for good measure.

I don’t deserve to feel like that, and I’m pretty certain I’m not the only person who feels this way. Some may express their disappointment and upset with this more eloquently or more aggressively than others, but however they choose to register their discontent and however much or little I agree with their methods of expressing it, I understand it completely. As someone who, now 35 years of age, was often ostracised and ridiculed for his interests and hobbies in his youth, was subsequently delighted when geek culture started to become fashionable over the course of the last decade and most recently has noted with a growing sense of discomfort that the things he finds most relatable, most important to him are those that are getting relentlessly torn down in the name of being “progressive”? It hurts. A lot.

I haven’t done anything wrong. I haven’t hurt anyone. I just want to be left alone to enjoy the things I enjoy with friends who also enjoy those things, and likewise to leave those who are interested in different things to do what they enjoy. I don’t care about this perpetually raging culture war that has all but destroyed meaningful online discourse around video games in particular over the last five or six years, and put a serious strain on a number of friendships. I don’t believe in a “one size fits all” approach to inclusivity and diversity, which is what many “progressive” types seem to argue for; I instead subscribe to a “many sizes fit many” ethos, which makes for a more vibrant, interesting and cross-pollinating culture in the long-term. And yet somehow, at some point, I’ve been branded with a scarlet letter, thrown in the pit with all the other social rejects. I’ve also been called a paedophile, a pervert, a misogynist and plenty of other things besides. My crime? I like Japanese video games with pretty girls in, and frequently argue against the misrepresentation of these games as soft porn in the mainstream press by those who won’t take the time to engage with them.

Frankly, the whole situation makes me want to cry, but now I feel I shouldn’t, because it will just, apparently, give you some sort of satisfaction. And that, to be honest, seems like the very inverse of your own credo, your own Wheaton’s Law, of “Don’t be a dick!”

You almost certainly won’t read this, Wil, because having blocked me on Twitter I’m not sure there’s any way you’ll see it outside of someone you haven’t blocked directly sharing it with you, and I don’t see that happening. But I wanted to post it anyway; even if you don’t read it, hopefully it will bring some sense of comfort to those who feel the same way I do about all this; put some feelings into words; provide a sense of solidarity.

As you argued in your speech, this feeling of solidarity, of belonging, is extremely important. We should all strive to help each other feel like we belong doing the things we love with the people we love in the places we love. With photos like the one posted above, you deliberately block off people from feeling like they can engage with this part of culture they adore, and people they might well otherwise get on with. And whether or not you believe that “male tears” only applies to men who don’t know how to behave themselves politely and appropriately, know that it can — and will, and has — been interpreted in a way that just comes across as exclusive, combative and gatekeeping: the exact opposite of what you yourself argue we should aim for.

This whole situation needs to stop, as soon as possible. I hate it. Everyone else I know hates it. Can’t we all just get around a gaming table and settle this the old-fashioned way: with dice, cards and chits — maybe even some fancy miniatures?

Thank you for your time, and thanks for reading, whether you’re Wil Wheaton (unlikely) or some random passer-by who just wanted to see what I had to say.

Love & Peace
Pete

2307: The Trip

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When I can’t sleep or am otherwise in a position where I am too mentally impaired to do anything active — in other words, all I want to do is stare dumbly at a screen — rather than, as some people do, put the TV on and just watch it, even if I’m not interested in what’s on, I like to trawl Netflix for things I’ve never seen and haven’t even heard of before, but which sound interesting.

I’ve discovered a bunch of interesting things this way, the last of which was the rather wonderful (if cringeworthy) W1A, and more recently I’ve been watching a show called The Trip, starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.

The Trip is an interesting concept that builds on the fashionable “fake docudrama” trend that began with The Office. Casting Coogan and Brydon as fictionalised, exaggerated versions of themselves, the series follows them as they take a tour of the North of England, stopping at some of the supposed best restaurants in the region with a mind to writing an article for The Observer Magazine. Coogan’s original plan for the trip was to take it as a romantic getaway with his American girlfriend Misha, and still be able to use it as paying work, but prior to the start of the series, she moves back to the States to pursue her own career dreams in Hollywood, leaving Coogan more distraught and lonely than he’d care to admit, only inviting Brydon seemingly as a last resort.

The pair’s trip across the North is largely irrelevant to the main point of the show, though it does take in some of Northern England’s most spectacular sights, a number of which I hadn’t heard of before. Instead, the main aspect of the show is the relationship between Brydon and Coogan, and more specifically how Brydon’s easygoing nature and sense of contentment with his life — even as he is, according to Coogan’s standards, less successful than his friend — gradually draws out Coogan’s true feelings about his situation.

Brydon lives in a small but comfortable family home with his wife and children; Coogan lives in a fancy apartment in London by himself now that Misha is gone. Brydon enjoys his life and calls his wife just to hear her voice, flirt with her and occasionally get a bit down and dirty with her; Coogan calls Misha in the States, sometimes forgetting the timezone difference, sometimes not respecting what she wants, perpetually unusure of what he wants. Brydon brings a sense of levity to any situation he’s in, often filling uncomfortable silences with his (admittedly impressive) impersonations of famous people — something which Coogan is forever frustrated that he’s just not quite as good at as Brydon; Coogan takes everything much too seriously, sometimes admonishing Brydon for his happy-go-lucky approach to life, sometimes clearly wanting to say what’s really on his mind and on one — only one — occasion frustrating a for-once quiet Brydon, who just wants to enjoy the scenery, with a lengthy geological explanation of how the Malham Cove limestone pavement came to be.

The contrast between Coogan and Brydon is potent; it shows two ways you can approach modern life. You can follow Brydon’s path, which is arguably the most traditional, straightforward, unambitious path, and enjoy a happy, contented life while never quite attaining true dizzy heights of, say, stardom or being the top of your field. Or you can follow Coogan’s path, which is a much more significant gamble: throw everything you have into trying to be the best in your field that you can be, and run the risk of being frustrated that other people can’t see what you know about yourself. Coogan’s frustration — outright depression, at times — at his situation is downright heartbreaking; his gamble hasn’t at all paid off, though he does have the opportunity to make one final one by moving to the States with Misha to do a pilot TV show for HBO. By the end of the first season, however, Brydon has clearly rubbed off on him: after what is clearly an agonising session of soul-searching, he decides not to take that gamble, and instead — presumably — to focus on making himself happy rather than continually being let down by his life and the people he thought he cared about.

The Trip is a funny show; it’s a comedy at heart, and the interactions between Brydon and Coogan are well-written, snappy and genuinely amusing. But there are considerably more tragic undertones with Coogan’s own personal journey as the titular trip continues. While Coogan comes across as an arrogant dickhead at the start of the show — and still bears this character trait to a certain extent at the end — as the episodes proceed and we get an occasional glimpse into what he’s really thinking and feeling, it’s hard not to feel bad for him, and the contrast between how his and Brydon’s respective lives have turned out is certainly thought-provoking.

I haven’t yet watched the second season, but on the strength of the first, I’m very interested to. If you like well-written, fairly gentle, character-driven comedy drama with more than a slight tinge of pathos — as many other good comedies have — then The Trip is well worth your time to take on.

2306: Happy Birthday, Discord

Back in the early days of “going online” — after the days of Bulletin Board Systems but before the widespread Internet we know today — our family used CompuServe to get at information online.

For a teenager like I was at the time, it was very exciting. For the first time, I was able to “meet” and communicate with people from all over the world, discuss common interests and even exchange files.

One of my favourite features of CompuServe was an area it rather grandiosely referred to as the “CB Simulator”, after the units used by ham radio operators to communicate with other enthusiasts over the radio waves. In reality, it was simply what we now know today as a chatroom, but it was a revelation to the young me, who had always had a bit of difficulty finding new people to talk to, particularly those who were into the same things.

In the CB Simulator, I could talk to people without fear of them, say, judging me for my appearance, or my mannerisms that clearly indicated I was uncomfortable with talking to strangers, or how I tended to go the colour of beetroot when talking to girls I liked. No; in the CB Simulator, I was able to communicate in the way I had always felt most comfortable: through the written word.

A few years later, when “the Internet” started to become more of a thing and self-contained, fenced-off communities like CompuServe and AOL were starting to become less of a thing, I looked into Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. There, I found a similar experience to that which I’d had in CompuServe’s CB Simulator: the ability to communicate and express myself through text to people from all over the world. And now, I could “emote” too, which in turn led to my first experiences with online roleplaying through a group that “simulated” Star Trek missions through text chat.

I was kind of sad when chatrooms fell out of favour with the rise of what we now know as social media, but for those of you, like me, who always used to enjoy the real-time nature of talking in chatrooms, may I introduce you to the wonderful service that is Discord, which is now celebrating its first birthday.

Originally designed as a free, lightweight alternative to Skype and Teamspeak, Discord has been actively developed over the last year to become one of the best — arguably the best — real-time chat application out there, particularly if you’re a gamer.

For the unfamiliar, it works in a slightly different way to instant messaging services such as Skype and its earlier counterparts AIM, MSN and Yahoo Messenger. Instead of focusing on private chats with individuals on your friends list, Discord is instead server-based, much like IRC was. Within that server — again like IRC — there are channels for whatever purposes the server admins desire. Anyone who is a member of that server — and servers can be public or private — can hop in to a channel and text chat. There’s voice chat facilities, too, which have very good, reliable, clear voice quality and connections, making it an ideal solution for “party chat” on PC, or even using alongside games that don’t normally offer voice communication: the Splatoon community, for example, use it quite a bit, since that game has no means of direct communication whatsoever.

Mostly the thing that excites me about Discord is how much it feels like those old IRC servers, only with a more modern coat of paint. Inline image posts, markdown formatting, animated GIFs and link previews are all a natural evolution of the purely text-based chat that IRC offered, and Discord’s cross-platform nature — it works via the Web, on PC or Mac desktop clients or even on mobile — makes it an ideal means for keeping in touch with groups of friends or specialised communities.

I’m very happy that Discord has been such a success since it originally launched, and hope it continues to be A Thing for many years to come yet. It’s been a great way for me to interact with friends from elsewhere on the Internet in new, more immediate ways than services like Twitter offer, and, depending on the server, it can be a nice quiet safe haven away from the noise of more public social media channels.

I’m a member of several different Discord servers, but the one on which I’m most active is probably the one I’m an admin of. If you’d like to stop by and say hi — the server is largely focused on video games, anime, lewds and general shitposting, but everyone there is just happy to have a good chinwag — then you can do so by following this link.

Happy birthday, Discord, and happy chatting to those of you who choose to come and join us!

2305: Fighting Talk

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I spent a bit of time playing some Dead or Alive 5 Last Round online with a friend from Final Fantasy XIV earlier. (Hi, Neon!) I’ve never really played a fighting game online before — it’s a genre that has something of a reputation as being brutally unforgiving to newcomers, and with good reason, since the fighting game genre is one that attracts significant numbers of people good enough to actually get paid to play these games.

Thankfully, my friend Neon appears to be of a roughly equal level of skill to me, since we had a series of matches and we both came out roughly equal in terms of victories and losses.

So far in Dead or Alive 5 I’d been focusing on the Training mode, attempting to learn some combos and moves for characters I liked the look of, because I’d love to get past the “button mashing” phase that everyone goes through when they first pick up a fighting game. As such, I was a bit hesitant to even jump into the story mode, because I didn’t feel like I knew any characters well enough. But I thought I’d give fighting another person a go — and I’m glad I did.

Fighting Neon gave me a potent reminder of exactly why I’ve always liked the Dead or Alive series in preference to perhaps more established, popular fare like Capcom’s Street Fighter series. It’s kind of hard to describe the exact feeling, but I think it’s best described as the game feels instinctive, almost primal. You can spend hours learning the specific button combinations to pull off specific moves at the right time — and doubtless the really good players do that — but at a fairly rudimentary level, which is where I’d generously put myself, the fighting system works in such a way that you can look at what’s going on on the screen, push directions and attack buttons and have something that “feels” right unfold in front of you. Opponent blocking high blows? Get in there with some low kicks. Taunting you? Charge in and tackle them with a running throw. Knocking you off balance with a flurry of blows? Block, block, block dammit, oh for fuck’s sake. (I never have quite mastered blocking in fighting games; given how important and helpful — and tied to the series’ iconic countering system — it is in Dead or Alive, I should probably do something about that.)

I haven’t yet picked a “main” to play with. I will almost certainly end up going with Kasumi, at least initially, because Kasumi is hot and I vaguely know some of her effective moves. Today I also particularly enjoyed playing as Hitomi (who appears to have wonderful reach with her kicks) and Momiji (though I haven’t done any training with her yet, so I was taking wild stabs at her moves). I also discovered that, as I previously thought, I want to steer clear of slower, heavy-hitting characters, because I very obviously don’t know how to handle them effectively and tend to get my ass handed to me if I try and fight with them in the same way as the Kasumis and company of the world.

My few games today were an eye-opening experience, then. I’m definitely up for playing some more; if you, too, suck at fighting games and would like a punching bag to play with, feel free to hit me up on PSN under the ID Angry_Jedi.

2304: Blizzard’s New Phenomenon

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I know I wrote about Overwatch the other day, but having been, well, present on the Internet for the past few days I think it’s fairly safe to declare that Blizzard has an honest-to-goodness phenomenon on its hands.

Overwatch’s open beta (read: free demo — the best marketing tool they could have possibly used) ended at the start of this week, but people haven’t stopped talking about it since. They also haven’t stopped producing fan art, incorporating Overwatch characters into memes and cartoon strips, discussing strategies, taking the piss out of people who play nothing but Bastion and admiring Tracer’s admittedly fine posterior.

It’s kind of remarkable, really, because it seems to have come out of nowhere and evolved organically without a trace of interference from the marketing or PR machines. A few weeks ago, I knew very little about Overwatch and had little interest in it; after a couple of days with the beta on both PS4 and PC, I’m well and truly sold and am happily enjoying the wealth of fan-made content that’s been produced seemingly in just the last few days.

Blizzard has always been a somewhat unconventional developer-publisher, producing wildly popular games that eschew popular conventions — mechanically, aesthetically and even functionally. Their insistence on using their own proprietary client Battle.Net to distribute, update and even sell their latest games initially drew criticism — particularly in the case of Diablo III — but as the world has become more and more comfortable with the idea of being always online and multiplayer-centric titles, these complaints have started to fade into the background until now, Blizzard’s ecosystem allows it to have extremely successful titles without having to rely on the more established distribution channels such as Steam.

Overwatch’s stealth marketing is another example of this. While there have been TV spots, video ads and site takeovers for the game, it has never felt like an aggressive marketing push in the same way that a Call of Duty or a Battlefield sees. Instead, Blizzard chose to rely on the most powerful marketing tool in the world these days: word of mouth. Putting their absolute confidence in their game and releasing it to the public for free for a few days achieved more than any multi-million dollar marketing campaign ever would; it allowed people to try the game for themselves and either confirm that yes, they did want to play it, or, in many cases, sate their curiosity as to what it was all about. In more than one case, the satiation of that curiosity has led to additional sales.

So why is Overwatch such a phenomenon? Well, a lot of it has to do with its striking visual design — it’s immediately recognisable — but I think the biggest contributing factor is its wildly varied selection of playable characters. There’s something for everyone in Overwatch’s cast, whether you’re into moody, dark types; big, stompy robots; hot girls; cute girls; frightening muscle-bound girls who probably have a Tumblr page; Westerns; sci-fi… there’s a bit of everything. And somehow despite this massive variety in its cast, Overwatch feels coherent and none of its characters feel like token inclusions.

This, naturally, leads to people picking favourites — never underestimate the power of the waifus! — which, in turn, leads to people producing fan-created content based on their favourite characters. And, from there, other fans can enjoy this content and express how much they like their favourite character through sharing these fan-made productions or engaging with the artists. Over time, a whole meta-community outside of the game builds up, even bringing in people who don’t actually play the game but just like watching it, or appreciate the art direction, or like the look of the characters.

In short, Blizzard would have to do something absolutely spectacular right now to fuck up Overwatch. I’m really looking forward to giving the full version a go at the end of the month, and if you’re up for a multiplayer rumble in its wonderfully colourful world, be sure to hit me up.