2354: They’re Both for Monsters

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(yes, I found a way to put a beard on my model in ComiPo! Woo!)

I’ve been playing a bit of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt lately. I’ve been meaning to give it a go for ages, but it’s never quite dropped in price enough for me to want to jump on board; thankfully, the combination of the Steam Summer Sale and Andie generously buying me a copy as an anniversary present means that I can now explore this game to my heart’s content.

Playing Witcher 3 alongside Ys: Memories of Celceta is an interesting experience, because it’s a study in contrasts between Western and Eastern game design philosophy. Both of them have a surprising number of elements in common: they’re both action RPGs, they both involve exploring a large overworld, fighting monsters and completing quests, they both feature a muscle-bound man with white hair tied back in a ponytail (though he’s not the protagonist in Celceta, instead acting as a Dogi-substitute and cipher for the ever-mute Adol) and they’re both very good. But they’re both very different.

Celceta is fast-paced and action-packed. Its combat is very arcadey, with lots of flashy special effects, overblown sound effects, rockin’ music and celebratory messages flashing up on the screen as you do things like use the right attack type to take advantage of enemy weaknesses. In contrast, Witcher 3 feels almost sedate in its pacing, even in combat, which, thanks to its excellent animations and fluid movement, has an almost dance-like feeling about it as opposed to the frenetic leaping around of Celceta.

The upshot of this is that Witcher 3 is a surprisingly relaxing game to play. This might sound strange, given that the setting for the Witcher series is one of the darkest, bleakest takes on Western fantasy out there, but I’ve absolutely found it to be the case. While in Celceta you can’t relax for a moment when you’re out in the overworld because everything is trying to kill you, in Witcher 3 there’s plenty of opportunity to explore, wander off the path into the bushes and just start walking in a direction to see what’s there. Worthwhile things are marked on the map so you’re not wandering completely aimlessly — unless you want to — but for the most part the game’s rather sedate pacing has the pleasant feeling of a walk in the countryside or the woods rather than constantly fighting for your life, even though the countrysides and woods of Witcher 3’s world are far more dangerous than what your average rambler might have to contend with.

Both games have their place, then, and I’m enjoying them both a great deal. I feel like on the whole, I tend to enjoy the more frenetic, chaotic, joyful pace and tone of the Japanese approach to RPGs more — they cheer me up with their sheer energy — but there’s most definitely something very appealing and oddly relaxing about the more sedate pacing and carefully crafted periods of solitude in games like The Witcher 3.

2353: Be a Better Sportsman, Online or On the Field

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One thing that I don’t think school P.E. lessons focused on enough was good sportsmanship. The people who were good at sports did well and enjoyed themselves; the people who were bad at sports (like me) got picked last for teams and put in places where they didn’t have to do much, like goalkeeping. (Which always seemed a bit weird to me, given that the goalkeeper is the last line of defense in a football match and consequently should probably be quite good at protecting the goal. I was not.)

The upshot of this unfortunate tendency was the reinforcement of these positions: the people who were good at sports continued to be good at sports and grew to expect everyone on their team to be on their level and would sometimes even become abusive towards those who they perceived to be not pulling their weight; the people who were bad at sports grew increasingly bitter and resentful of games that, while competitive, should be fun.

Bad sportsmanship hurts everyone. It means the good players don’t get to nurture up and coming talent, help people improve and introduce new players to the activity they love, making them more likely to be able to get a good game. And it means the less skilled players feel ostracised and like they will never have an opportunity to learn more about something they might actually be quite interested in.

It’s unfortunate that this happens in online games, too. I don’t play a lot of competitive multiplayer games, but I can comment on it a bit with regard to Blizzard’s new title Overwatch, whose ranked competitive mode launched late last night.

For the most part, the Overwatch community actually seems pretty good; the game is a team game with variable character skills and statistics, so everyone needs to cooperate to achieve a common goal. If you don’t, you lose; it’s pretty simple. Unfortunately, there are players out there who seem to believe that if they just make unhelpful comments and call the rest of their team “noobs” that they somehow have the moral high ground and are justified in complaining and whining.

The trouble, I think, is that this particular type of player doesn’t like to lose. It’s more than that, even: this particular type of player thinks that they have a right to win every game they play. Whether this is due to overconfidence in their own abilities, a misplaced sense of entitlement or having grown up in the obnoxious “everyone’s a winner!” culture of many educational establishments these days, I don’t know, but it’s not a helpful way to be.

A competitive, two-team game by its very nature has a winner and a loser. Every time. You cannot rely on always being the winner — more than anything, that would make the game itself pretty pointless if the outcome was already known before you started. And being on the losing side doesn’t make that game a bad experience, either; some of the most interesting, exciting Overwatch matches I’ve had to date have come when I’ve lost, but it’s been close. And in those matches where it wasn’t close, I can usually learn something from the experience. You take it on the chin, you try again, you get better — perhaps you even help out people you were playing with that you know could do something differently.

What you don’t do is rage and piss and moan at the rest of your team (or worse, just say “………”, which is pretty much the least helpful thing you can possibly say — literally saying nothing is more helpful than that) because that sure as hell isn’t going to make them want to play with you again.

And what you absolutely shouldn’t do is go off in a strop because you’re not absolutely dominating the other team, which is what happened to me in one game I played earlier today. Said player decided he had the “perfect” way to play and wanted everyone to fall into line with him, regardless of where his teammates skills’ and expertise lay. The match was pretty even — our opponents scored 2 points on offense, then we scored 2 points on offense, then our opponents scored another 1 point on their final round of offense, meaning we still had the potential to win, or at least draw and push the match into Sudden Death… and Salty McSaltyson decided that no, he wasn’t going to stand for having to actually put in some work to winning, he would, instead, leave the match altogether, leaving us down a team member and thereby at a significant disadvantage. Shortly afterwards, another player left in frustration, putting us two people down and therefore completely unable to be competitive at all. The rest of us, to our credit, carried on playing until the “you can leave without penalty when this timer expires” timer expired, but then it fell apart, leaving our team with a loss that could have been avoided. It was a shame, since it had been a great match up until then; our opponents were gracious and apologetic about it, so at least it wasn’t a completely negative experience, but still.

That one player being a twat spoiled the match for eleven other people. I doubt he even thought about that when he clicked “leave game” and accepted the penalty the game gives you for leaving Competitive games early — but it really did spoil the whole match which, like I say, could have gone either way in that last round.

Be a better sportsman. Accept that sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. And if you think you’re better than other people — you might well be! — how about actually offering them some advice and help to get better rather than just being a dickhead? Everyone benefits in the long term.

2352: Fuzzy Head

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I’ve had a horrible, fuzzy head today. I don’t mean physically — although after getting my hair cut yesterday, my head is a bit fuzzy — but rather a not terribly pleasant feeling of “detachment”; of being slightly “out of phase” with the rest of the world. And a slight headache.

I’ve felt this before, and it’s usually a symptom of depression and anxiety. In this instance, the fact I haven’t been sleeping well for the past few nights and am feeling especially worried about my future have been contributing particularly to the way I’m feeling. It’s not nice, so after writing this I’m going to go and sit in bed and relax with a bit of Ys: Memories of Celceta, then try and actually get off to sleep at a reasonable time if at all possible.

I actually have a job interview tomorrow. As usual when this happens, I’m being struck with anxiety over whether or not I’m actually suitable for the job and whether or not I’m going to make an idiot of myself in the interview. (Mind you, last time I thought I made an idiot of myself in the interview I ended up getting the job. Of course, that turned out to be the worst job I’d ever had, but that’s perhaps beside the point.) The thing I’ve been telling myself — and Andie said the same earlier — is that if I looked completely unqualified and unsuitable for this job, the company wouldn’t have got in touch and offered me an interview in the first place. This isn’t any guarantee that I’ll actually get the position, of course — given the geographical location, I’m not sure I’d want it, anyway, as it would mean a bit of a commute each day — but we’ll see.

All in all, I haven’t had a particularly good day. Not for any particular reason — nothing actually bad has happened, I just feel shitty.

Such is the way of things when your own mind likes to do its best to sabotage your life and happiness, though.

Oh well. All I can do, I guess, is take tomorrow as it comes and see how it goes. It’s not as if the interview I have tomorrow is the only iron I have in the fire at the moment, so it doesn’t really matter one way or the other as to whether I get it. But, you know, getting back into a routine and actually having an income would be nice.

One step at a time.

2351: One Year Anniversary

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My wife Andie and I have been married for one year today. Good going, us.

For those of you who were unable to attend our wedding last year, I thought now might be a good time to share the speech I made at said reception, as it’s still relevant now. (Apart from all the bits that refer to “today”, which you can take to mean “June 27, 2015” instead.)

Hello everyone, thanks for coming. It’s great to see so many of you together here in one place — in some cases, we haven’t seen each other for quite some time. I think there’s a relevant Lord of the Rings quote here, but my best man Tim is more suitably equipped to be able to make that reference, so I’ll leave that to him.

I wanted to start today with something that is probably the height of impropriety, and that’s to acknowledge that this isn’t the first time I’ve done this. I think most of you here already know that, but it’s important to acknowledge it, I feel — not only to dispel any awkwardness that might result from that knowledge, but also because it’s relevant to why I’m standing here today.

First time around, you see, things were a whirlwind. And in all the excitement, I failed to realise some very important things: that while it absolutely is possible to make a partnership work if the two of you have disparate interests, if either or both of you find it difficult or impossible to meet the other halfway and at least respect the things that they’re into even if you don’t share those interests, things will go south pretty quickly.

Now, I don’t want to dwell on that too much, because that’s not the reason we’re here today. Suffice to say, however, that awkward situation is a thing of the past — and while my new wife and I certainly have our own interests that we’re happy to pursue independently of one another (I like Japanese video games with saucy artwork, she likes painting intricate designs on her fingernails) we also share some very important things that have become a big part of our life.

Those of you who know your video games will recognise a lot of today’s festivities as involving Final Fantasy — particularly Final Fantasy XIV, an online multiplayer installment of the long-running series that I’ve been playing since 2013, and which Andie later joined me in, much to my surprise and delight. Through that game, we’ve forged some very close friendships — as close as the friendships we have with many of you sitting here — and as such, I thought it was eminently appropriate for my proposal to Andie to be delivered as part of our in-game characters’ wedding ceremony back in January. Unusually, this means that there’s an actual video of how I proposed thanks to our guildmate recording the whole experience if you ever want to go and watch it and make me blush a bit. (It’s not hard.) [Editor’s note: I genuinely don’t know what the link is to this or if it’s still online. But it may still be out there somewhere.]

Now, unfortunately, as our guildmates are scattered across the world, most of them couldn’t join us here today, but we know that they’re here in spirit — and I did want to particularly show my gratitude to Chris, aka Reimi, healer extraordinaire, for sharing today with us. The rest of our fellow adventurers are eagerly awaiting photos and videos of our big day, so please do share any media you create today!

But back to Andie and me. I feel that our shared love of Final Fantasy XIV is actually rather symbolic of the journey we’ve taken together in many ways. We both play the game to a high level, taking on some of its toughest challenges together with our friends. Together, we’ve toppled the mighty dragon Twintania, fended off meteors and ancient pillars dropping on our heads long enough to dispatch Nael deus Darnus, and even vanquished the very angry — justifiably so — Elder Primal Bahamut himself.

And we’ve overcome our own challenges in reality, too. I shan’t go into details for now, because it really isn’t the time — suffice to say, though, both of us have dealt with our share of real life raid bosses: challenges that seem insurmountable and want nothing more than our complete annihilation, but challenges that we could overcome by working together, supporting one another and simply being there for each other. I’ll forever be grateful to my new wife for standing by me through some difficult times — and I hope she feels the same way too.

Sappy bit over. I believe it falls to me to deliver some “thank yous”, because a lot of hard work has gone on behind the scenes to make today happen.

Thanks to Andie, first of all, for doing the lion’s share of the organisation, because I’m a man and therefore useless at sorting this sort of thing out.

Thanks to our parents: Agnes, Val and John, for working together to help today be truly special.

Thanks to Rob for his generous loan of the PA system which we’re pumping music through over the course of the afternoon and evening.

Thanks to my best man Tim for his support in the weeks leading up to the wedding, and for being one of my most trusted friends who doesn’t spend most of his time pretending to be a catgirl on the Internet.

Thanks to everyone else who has contributed their time, money and effort towards today; I’m almost certain there are people I’ve forgotten or don’t know by name well enough to acknowledge you individually, but believe me, your labours are very much appreciated.

And thank you all for being here today. It means a great deal that you can share this special day with us.

Finally, Googling “who does the groom toast” reminded me that I’m supposed to toast the bridesmaids at the end of my speech. Before I do that, I’ll also thank them for their contributions today — and for both being an important part of Andie’s life. So please, if you would, raise your glasses, and join me in a toast to the bridesmaids.

A toast to Andie, too, for putting up with me while dealing with all the things she has to deal with, too. She’s stronger, more capable and more wonderful than she’d ever care to admit (and me attempting to say this to her face normally results in her wriggling off uncomfortably somewhere, so I’m saying it here instead) and I love her to bits.

Here’s to many more years ahead of us. And I say that with confidence.

2350: Back to It

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It’s back to the jobhunting grindstone tomorrow. My wife Andie has found herself a new job and is starting tomorrow, which finally brings this difficult period of both of us being out of work simultaneously to a close, so now I just have to secure myself a position of some description.

Thankfully, there are a few possibilities on the horizon, for once. I sent out a huge number of applications over the last few weeks, taking a chance on positions that I might not have done before, but which I had the appropriate skills to be able to do with a bit of training. While I still wouldn’t describe myself as feeling particularly ambitious, I want to do something a little bit more lucrative than retail work; while I enjoy retail work for the most part, the pay is pretty shit, and certainly not proportionate to what you have to put up with on a daily basis.

While I’ve had a few rejections already, the fact I’ve sent out so many applications means that I don’t feel quite so bad about these as I have done in the past, because — this sounds bad, but you’ll know what I mean — I’m not especially invested in having that specific job. It’s not the perfect wonder-job; it’s just something I’ll be able to do that will pay a decent amount of money and give me the opportunity to progress if I want to — and, importantly, time to myself when I’m not there. A job that I can leave behind at the end of the day and the week and just get on with enjoying life; no taking my work home, like there was in teaching.

I got a voicemail message on Friday offering me an interview for one of these positions I’ve applied to. It’s not ideal due to where it’s located — I’d rather keep commuting time and distance to a minimum — but it’s something, at least. I also wasn’t able to get in touch with the contact who left the message for me because by the time I received it after taking care of some other business, they weren’t answering their phone, since they left me the message at the very end of the working day. Tomorrow’s job, then, is trying to get hold of this person and hopefully sorting myself an interview out for later this week. And then, if that happens, getting the haircut I’ve been putting off for the last six months as usual.

In the meantime, I’m hanging in there, just about. I’m continuing to update MoeGamer in my spare time — expect a gushing writeup on VA-11 Hall-A this week — and I’m also casually studying the material for the IT qualification known as the CompTIA A+, which if I can attain will make me eminently more attractive to employers in the IT field, what with it proving that I actually know my stuff about computers rather than me having to convince them using nothing more than a CV and a cover letter. I’m attempting to use my time productively when I’m not lapsing into depression, in other words, and on those occasions where I do lapse into depression, at least I have plenty of things I can enjoy to take my mind off said negativity.

Everything is going to be all right. Probably.

2349: Arcade Golf…?

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To my surprise, the game I’m enjoying most out of the Neo Geo collection I got recently is Neo Turf Masters, a golf game. Now, I’m not averse to a good golf game at the best of times, but I’m really surprised and impressed with how well Neo Turf Masters adapts the standard golf game format to a (relatively) fast-paced, challenging arcade format. It really works!

Neo Turf Masters is pretty simple and straightforward as far as golf games go. You don’t have to worry about things like elevation when driving your way up the fairway, just smack the ball in the right direction and make sure it doesn’t land in places it shouldn’t. When it’s on the green, line up with the hole and hit the button when your power meter is around the same point as the handy mark showing where you should hit it. Repeat.

It’s refreshingly simple, even as the more cartoony golf games (such as Sony’s Everybody’s Golf series) adopt more complex mechanics, and it works really well for a quick game of golf. Despite the simplicity of the basic mechanics, the game instead provides most of its challenge through some surprisingly fiendish course designs and an extremely unforgiving structure designed to keep you pumping coins into the arcade original version. (Of course, on the port you can simply continue as many times as you like, but this isn’t really in the spirit of playing arcade games.)

No, Neo Turf Masters’ biggest challenge comes from its unusual “lives” system. You begin the game with 3 lives or “holes” and spend one of these lives any time you get a Par. (For the non golfing-literate, this means putting the ball in the hole in the exact number of shots the hole’s Par says.) If you get a Bogey (one more shot than the Par) you spend an extra hole on top of this. But if you get a Birdie (one fewer shot than the Par) you not only don’t lose the hole, you get an extra one to add to your stock. I haven’t seen what happens if you do worse than a Bogey or better than a Birdie because my skills at Neo Turf Masters are thoroughly average.

I really like this system, though. It has the arcadey addictive quality of wanting to “1cc” (1 Credit Clear) it without using the Continue function, but considering I can only make it to about hole 4 or so before getting a Game Over, I feel it may be a while before I can manage a full round yet. Still, this is a game designed very much in the old-school mould, where you couldn’t just plough through it from start to finish — you had to get good at it. And that’s fine! If you could just hammer straight through it would be back on the shelf in less than a couple of hours; with only four courses on offer, there’s not a lot of “content” (as modern gamers like to say) here, but it will sure as hell take you a while to master the game and its courses enough to be able to clear each of them.

Easy to pick up, difficult to master, then; something of a mantra for retro games, arcade games in particular, and I can see that the Neo Geo library, regardless of genre, very much seems to be designed around this particular philosophy. And I like it!

2348: I Beat Ys Seven

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I beat Ys Seven tonight. That leaves just one more Ys game to play through before I’ve beaten every one of the currently available games in the series, making me eminently ready for Ys VIII, whenever that makes its way West, because it almost certainly (hopefully) will.

Ys Seven is an interesting change after the three games built on the Ys VI engine — Ys VI, Oath in Felghana and Ys Origin. I kind of miss some of the defining aspects of those three games — most notably the platforming elements, which are completely absent from Seven — but Seven very much does its own thing and takes ownership of it, creating an experience that is satisfying in its own right, even if it’s a slightly jarring change of pace initially.

The first thing to note about Ys Seven is that it’s at least twice the length of previous Ys games. This still puts it at well under the average length of a typical JRPG these days — it took me 24 hours to beat on Normal — but makes it feel significantly longer than the previous titles. This isn’t a bad thing, though; along with the greater length comes greater scope: Ys Seven’s narrative feels more ambitious and, for want of a better word, epic than its predecessors; while past Ys games felt very much like you were taking care of business in a small, localised area, Ys Seven does a good job of making you feel like the fate of a whole country is at stake. There’s a sprawling overworld to explore, and several villages, each with their own unique aesthetic.

This rather more sprawling scale comes at a slight cost: while past Ys games’ small geographical area meant that pretty much every character in the game had a name and a story to tell, Ys Seven’s NPCs, for the most part, feel quite a bit more generic. This is partly due to the fact that none of them have names, instead being called things like “Obliging Maid” and suchlike — with the curious exception of questgivers, who all have very Western names like “Kevin Lassiter” — but I suppose it does help keep the focus on the main cast, which, in keeping with the rest of the experience, is significantly bigger than previous Ys games.

Even your party is bigger. Adol is no longer alone, bringing up to two companions in tow this time, and there’s a reason for this: enemies now have various resistances, meaning you need a balanced party that can cover all types of damage, otherwise you simply won’t be able to kill some enemies. For most of the game, there’s little reason to switch out from the default party of Adol, longtime companion (but first time playable) Dogi and whoever fills the third slot at that point in the party, but upon reaching the final boss the reason for the total squad size being seven members becomes clear. Be sure to keep everyone’s equipment up to date — thankfully, inactive characters gain experience at the same rate as the front line, so there’s no need to go out of your way to grind too much.

One aspect of the game that feels very different comes when you’re fighting a boss. Whereas in past Ys games boss fights were almost puzzles and dexterity challenges, where you’d have to dodge incoming attacks and take advantage of openings, Ys Seven’s bosses are often damage sponges that, at least on Normal difficulty, feel like they can be beaten more through brute force than anything. On the harder difficulty levels I can see them being stiffer challenges, because you’re more limited in the healing items you can carry, but certainly on Normal, I could get through most bosses without too much difficulty by just making sure I had enough potions on hand. It wasn’t until the final boss, which has significantly more complex mechanics than any of the other fights in the game, that I found myself having to be a bit more careful with what I was doing.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; Ys Seven’s boss fights are enjoyably hard work and feel like you’re struggling against a powerful opponent. Like a lot of other things in the game, though, coming straight off Oath in Felghana, Origin and Ark of Napishtim, it’s a bit of an adjustment for sure.

Above all, though, Ys Seven keeps the heart of Ys firmly intact. It’s wonderfully sincere about everything, but isn’t afraid to show a sense of humour now and again. That said, it’s overall considerably darker than any of the previous installments, particularly around the middle of the story, giving it a distinctive feel. It’s not overly grimdark or anything — it’s still a bright, colourful, earnest quest featuring a silent protagonist who quite literally lives for adventure — but it was a little surprising to see things like a shirtless Adol getting tortured in a jail cell after a particularly dramatic revelation partway through.

I enjoyed it a lot, in other words. Now I just have Memories of Celceta to go and I’m up to date. And then I will have to physically restrain myself from going back to the beginning and doing a Nightmare run, I feel…

2347: Discovering the Neo Geo

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To date, my knowledge of the Neo Geo platform has largely been limited to “it was that one where games cost over £100”. Thanks to a recent Humble Bundle, though (running for another 16 hours at the time of writing) I’ve had the opportunity to have a go at what my friend Chris assures me are a pretty classic selection of games from the platform.

I’m kind of sorry I haven’t checked out Neo Geo games earlier, because they fulfil every criteria I have in my head for what I think an “arcade game” should look, sound and feel like. This is largely because as well as being a home console, the Neo Geo also powered plenty of arcade machines in its time, and the versions you played on the console were exactly the same as you’d play in the arcade. Very few other consoles at the time could boast arcade perfect gameplay and presentation.

But what do I mean by what an arcade game should look, sound and feel like? Well, it’s largely a nostalgia thing. When I think of arcade games, I think of childhood trips to the seaside — primarily either Hunstanton if we were going for a day trip, or Newquay if we’d gone on holiday to Devon and/or Cornwall — which always involved a trip to the arcades. To Americans, this might sound like a strange thing to get excited about, but here in the UK, we never really had much of an arcade culture — except, for some reason, at the seaside. In other words, an arcade was a rather unusual sight unless you happened to live on the waterfront, so it was a rare treat to be able to pump some small change into these games, many of which either didn’t see home ports at all, or saw vastly inferior ports to home computer and console hardware that couldn’t keep up with the specialised, dedicated arcade hardware.

When I think of these trips to the arcade, I think of several things. I think of the feeling of putting a coin in. I think of the sound the machines would make when it accepted your credits. I think of the sounds they’d make when you’d press the Start button, and the dramatic presentation of a new player joining or the Game Over screen.

I think of beautifully defined pixel art, far sharper and more detailed than anything I’d see on a system connected to the TV. I think of impressive animation. I think of sprite scaling and rotation. I think of specialised controls.

When I boot up a Neo Geo game, all of these feelings come flooding back to me. Individually, these elements aren’t much, but they add up to the “arcade experience” for me, and said experience carries some fond memories.

I’ll talk a bit more about the specific games I’ve had a go with in a later post, but for now I’ll just say that, in terms of gameplay, the Neo Geo games are a reminder of a time when gameplay was first and foremost, and “gitting gud” wasn’t something seen as elitist or exclusionary — if you wanted to see the end of the game, you either had to git gud at the game, or you had to keep throwing those coins into the machine. (Of course, when playing at home, you have the option to keep putting virtual credits in indefinitely — though as any shmup fan will tell you, the real challenge in these games is going for a 1CC, or 1 Credit Clear — beating the game without ever using the Continue feature.)

I like them a lot, in other words, and I’m looking forward to exploring the rest of these interesting, unusual and extremely addictive games further in the near future.

2346: Please Buy VA-11 HALL-A

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I’ve been playing a bunch of VA-11 HALL-A over the last couple of days, and I adore it. You can see some random screenshots and thoughts over on my Pile of Shame microblog.

I also wrote a review on Steam for it earlier, so I figured rather than spending time thinking of a different way to write the same enthusiastic words, I’d simply share it here, too.

I’ve been waiting to play the full version of this for quite some time now, ever since the very early demo enraptured me with its snappy writing, strong characterisation and wonderfully distinctive take on the dystopian future setting. And I’m delighted that the full version has, so far, surpassed all my expectations and hopes.

VA-11 Hall-A is kind of hard to pin down. At heart, it’s basically a visual novel, but rather than making binary choices that filter you off down one of several discrete routes, the choices you make as protagonist Jill when going about her daily life at home and at work affect what happens next in the story, including the characters you encounter, how Jill gets along with her clients and co-workers and how everyone reacts to the events unfolding in the backdrop.

Interestingly, VA-11 Hall-A presents its overarching narrative almost entirely from the perspective of Jill behind the bar and in her apartment. Significant things happen in the world, but you don’t see them directly; instead, you tend to see the people involved immediately before and/or after the events, or read about them on the news web pages and forums the morning after. Sometimes whether or not you dosed them up with alcohol before the event in which they were involved has an effect, too; prepare to feel guilty if that happens!

To give too many examples would be to spoil the experience, so I’ll leave it at this: VA-11 Hall-A does a much better job of almost any visual novel I can name at making its world feel “alive” and like the actions you take actually matter, rather than simply picking a route through the story. There’s nothing wrong with the latter approach, of course, but this way of doing things helps keep the people who expect a bit more in the way of traditional “gameplay” happy as well as those of us who are along for the ride primarily from a narrative perspective.

To sum up: great writing, wonderful characterisation, superb music and a glorious, beautiful PC-88 style aesthetic (with perfect pixel aspect ratio even scaled up to 1920×1080) makes for an absolutely lovely, unconventional and entirely memorable game.

I adore VA-11 Hall-A and pray with all my heart that it sees the success it deserves, both here on Steam and elsewhere on the Internet.

I haven’t yet finished a playthrough, but you better believe when I do there will be some detailed thoughts and feelings about the whole thing going up either here or over on MoeGamer (from which my previous article on the game’s demo is quoted on the Steam store page! Awesome!) — so watch out for those.

This is exactly the sort of highly creative, wonderfully inventive, beautifully presented and sharply written stuff I love to see from the indie scene. And I hope it becomes the sensation it sincerely deserves to be.

Find out more about the game and buy it — please, please, please buy it — on the official site.

2345: Keep Talking

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I went over to my friend Tim’s house this evening for our semi-regular games and food event that we at least attempt to have on a fortnightly basis. Tonight it was just three out of our usual five members, so we spent the evening playing VR games on Tim’s HTC Vive.

The most interesting experience we had was with a game called Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, which I’ve been curious to try for a while. This is a game that doesn’t actually need VR to play, but keeping one player quasi-isolated with a VR headset adds a great deal to the experience and makes it considerably more fun. It’ll be even better when full support for the Vive controllers is added; at present, the room-scale movement works, but you have to interact with it using a standard gamepad.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a party puzzle game in the Spaceteam mould in that it’s asymmetrical in terms of player roles and requires good communication in order to be successful. The player with the VR headset on is faced with a bomb consisting of a number of discrete modules, while all the other players (which can be literally as many as you want) are “experts” telling the VR player what to do. The twist? The “experts” can’t see the bomb, so the VR player has to describe what they see in the hope that the experts can decipher the rather garbled instruction manual and make the correct decisions.

The bombs start off simple with modules such as collections of wires, which require you to read a sequence of logical statements and cut the appropriate wire according to which one is true. There are also buttons that require you to first of all determine a specific condition and then, in some cases, press and release the button with appropriate timing. These are pretty easy to work out and execute.

The more complicated modules range from a memory test that requires you to push buttons according to one of four logical statements, some of which refer to things you did in previous steps, to working out a five-letter password using the available letters in each position to determine what it’s most likely to be from a list of possibilities. Then there’s a more advanced wire-cutting exercise that requires deciphering a ridiculous Venn diagram according to the colour of the wire and whether or not lights and stars are lit up, and a maze that the VR player has to navigate without being able to see where the walls are.

After a little while, it’s possible to “learn” how all these modules work, so at this point the game starts introducing distractions. Initially these are simple: the lights occasionally go off, meaning that you can’t see the bomb (but can still interact with it if you remember what you’re doing), or an alarm clock starts bleeping obtrusively. Later there are so-called “needy modules” on the bomb which can’t be disabled and keep doing inconvenient things during your defusing attempts, so you have to divide your time between taking care of these persistent pests and making progress on the actual disposal effort.

I really liked it as a game. It’s simple and intuitive to play, surprisingly immersive as both the “experts” and as the VR player, and has a real, genuine sense of tension to it all. Some of the modules are pretty difficult to work with — the Morse code one being the worst by far — but what’s a game without challenge?

I’m glad we gave it a go, and I’m looking forward to playing it again sometime soon. If you’re lucky enough to have a VR headset and at least one friend, I recommend grabbing a copy. Even if you don’t have a VR headset, for that matter, it’s worth a play — just make sure your “expert” players can’t see your screen!