2435: Memories: Read

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I finished Read Only Memories earlier. I liked it a lot! I posted a review on Steam, but I thought I’d post it here too because I’m feeling lazy.

Read Only Memories is an adventure game in the ’90s mould, seeming to draw specific inspiration from titles like Snatcher and Rise of the Dragon, and set in the same world as the (later, and wonderful) VA-11 HALL-A.

On the whole, it’s a great experience. The pixel art aesthetic really works for the game and has clearly been designed by people who know what good pixel art looks like. Everything about the interface, including the font, is well-designed to look like a retro adventure game, and the FM-synthesis soundtrack complements it nicely.

Puzzles are relatively thin on the ground but in a couple of cases are more interesting than “use the thing on the thing”, which is worthy of note, though the final puzzle in the game seems to play by some inconsistent rules that can lead to failure seemingly by no fault of your own.

The story is well-written and filled with interesting characters, plus deserves note for having a number of possible solutions to various situations, though not all will lead to the “best” ending. The game encourages you to consider the consequences of your actions and the things that you choose to say, even though those consequences may not become apparent until much later. I very much liked that your behaviour over the course of the whole game affected some later events rather than choices having an immediate impact on what was going on.

The overall plot is one of tolerance and understanding, and strikes a good balance between casting the player (whom you can name and gender as you desire, since you never see them) as an “everyman” sort of character prone to putting their foot in their mouth when confronted by groups they don’t quite understand, and presenting a solid message about acceptance, learning to trust one another and personal growth.

The only real criticism I’d level at the game is that its handling of gay and transgender characters feels a little ham-fisted, with their presence and the “reveals” of their identity seemingly being calculated to go “SURPRISE!” rather than simply blending them into the setting. Big burly, manly bartender dude? SURPRISE! Next time you meet him, he has another big hairy dude all over him calling him “hon” at every opportunity (though that said, I couldn’t help but like Gus). Meet an eccentric, long-haired, bearded TV producer? SURPRISE! They’re a lady! That and the presence of a non gender-specific character demonstrates just how awkward using singular “they” as a pronoun is in dialogue.

Ultimately it doesn’t hurt the overall plot at all, but these instances stick out like sore thumbs when they happen as they just don’t quite feel like they’re in keeping with the tone: the implication elsewhere in the plot is that society has moved beyond discrimination by gender and sexuality, and instead onto discrimination against those who are “augmented” in some way, either through cybernetics or genetic hybridisation. To specifically draw attention to gay and transgender characters in this way as the game does feels counter to this implication, which is otherwise well handled.

This game’s spiritual successor VA-11 HALL-A handles gay characters much more elegantly by them simply… just being there, no big deal, no big fuss about who they are, no sense that the game is holding you down and urging you to admire how progressive its views are.

I played this game before the big update that adds voice acting, and if you’re interested in this game, I’d encourage you to do the same. The few parts of the game that do already have voice acting (just the intro and epilogue at present) are immensely jarring with the rest of the game’s presentation, and the delightful beepityboopityboop noise that dialogue makes throughout the rest of the game is a much more powerful stimulus to the imagination than a voice actor whose interpretation of the character may not match the one you have in your head after reading the text.

Overall, Read Only Memories is a game I give a solid thumbs up. The issues I mentioned above are minor in the grand scheme of things, but hopefully the team will learn from them — and from the things VA-11 HALL-A did better, despite being produced by a different team — and produce even greater works in the future.

2434: Crewsin’

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I’ve been spending some time with Ubisoft’s The Crew for the last few days. I actually picked it up shortly after release but didn’t play it all that much. With the recent announcement that the base game would be free throughout September (you can still claim a copy here at the time of writing) I thought I’d give it another go.

What is The Crew? Allow me to elaborate in video form, because I can.

I’m left wondering why I didn’t play The Crew more when it first released, because it occurs to me that it’s what I wanted from a driving game for quite some time: the elusive ideal of the “caRPG”, or an RPG with cars if you prefer less clumsy portmanteaus.

The Crew ticks all the boxes that I wanted. For one, it has a plot that is reasonably interesting and features some characters that, while a bit cliched, occasionally have some entertaining things to say — the protagonist offhandedly complaining to his FBI handler that he really wanted a shower because he’d been in his damn car for days was a nice bit of self-reference to the fact that The Crew doesn’t have any on-foot missions. The plot itself may be Fast and Furious-level nonsense, but it works in context.

Secondly, it has a levelling system that is actually meaningful. Unlike games such as Forza Motorsport, which largely seem to have a levelling system just to show how long you’ve been playing, The Crew’s levelling system actually works like one in a more conventional RPG — some gear is level-locked, your cars get more powerful as you level up and there’s an MMO-style “endgame” once you reach the cap, further improving your abilities by getting better and better loot.

Which brings us on to the third point. The Crew is also a loot-whoring game, which is something I never thought I’d say about a racing game, but it’s true. Any activity you complete rewards you with loot, with better results giving you better gear. You get immediate feedback on whether the gear is better or worse than your current setup by means of an “item level”-like system for each of your cars, and events have recommended vehicle levels so you never tackle anything that is going to be way too difficult for you.

In case you’re still not quite convinced about The Crew secretly being an RPG, well, there are different classes of cars, too. Fullstock cars are exactly as they came out of the garage. Street cars are modified street-legal cars for road races. Dirt cars are suitable for offroading and stunts. Raid cars are powerhouses that can take a beating and dish one out too. Perf cars are extremely fast. And there’s plenty more where that came from — even more with the Wild Run expansion, which adds several “extreme” specs to the list, too.

And then there’s the multiplayer, which to be honest I haven’t tried all that much yet. There’s a sort of passive multiplayer a la Test Drive Unlimited as you zip around the open world, occasionally passing other players by. You can queue up for PvP-specific missions. You can recruit people to help you out with story missions, which then have to be played fully cooperatively — race missions, for example, mean that your teammates just have to make sure that you win by fair means or foul, whereas missions where you have to wreck a fleeing vehicle are likely to be much easier with company.

And on top of all that, The Crew makes driving around its vast open world interesting by 1) having some lovely scenery and 2) scattering Project Gotham-style skill challenges around the roads, tasking you with everything from slaloming around markers to simply getting as far away from your start point as possible. Each of these reward you with loot and experience, making them the equivalent of “trash” enemies in a more conventional RPG.

I’m enjoying the game a lot. Handling is enjoyably slidey and arcadey, just how I like it, and there’s a ton of stuff to do, yet enough structure to ensure that you never get overwhelmed with too many options at any one time. And it feels like the best use of Ubisoft’s open-world formula to date, with plenty of hidden things to find that reward you with experience, loot and even hidden cars to uncover.

The Crew is free for the rest of the month on PC. Be sure to claim your copy here.

2433: Read Only Voices

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This evening, prompted by an earlier discussion on Discord, I fired up Read Only Memories for the first time. This is a game I’ve been meaning to play ever since I discovered it had significant connections to the wonderful VA-11 HALL-A, my love for which has been well-documented.

For the unfamiliar, Read Only Memories, or ROM for short, is a retro-style pixel art cyberpunk point and click adventure/visual novel hybrid. Its emphasis is thoroughly on story rather than brain-taxing puzzles, though unlike VA-11 HALL-A it does have more substantial puzzles than determining what drink everyone wants — one where you have to reroute a taxi to end up back where it started is a particularly good one.

Like VA-11 HALL-A, ROM is, at present anyway, text-based. Dialogue appears on the screen for you to read, and it is accompanied by that lovely old-school “bloobloobloo” noise that we’ve been hearing since the technological Dark Ages. (ROM’s particular take on “bloobloobloo” specifically reminds me of Paul Woakes’ Mercenary series, which is fitting because all of the dialogue in that was delivered by your somewhat sarcastic personal computer Benson.)

I say “at present” because the team behind ROM are currently working on a significant update to the game to coincide with its PS4 and Vita release. The main addition to this new version of the game is voice acting. I was already erring on the side of thinking “oh, no” when I first heard this announcement, and then I watched the voiceover trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GoLDgZpPag

Oh boy. That is… not good. Not good at all. Particular anti-props to Jim Sterling for making absolutely no attempt to disguise his distinctive voice. Thankfully, the voices will apparently be optional, and recognisable, potentially contentious voices such as Sterling are seemingly mostly confined to relatively minor characters.

My reaction to this trailer actually makes me feel a bit bad for the game, and for people who will only be playing the new version when it releases. I genuinely think that the current version with its retro sound effects and wonderful Kefka-style synthesised laughter is better than what this promises to be; adding voices to a presentation that otherwise screams mid-’90s retro gives a strong sense of dissonance to the whole affair; voices just don’t fit with the aesthetic the game was going for and had already captured extremely well. And while the voices can be turned off, they’ll be turned on by default, meaning that most people’s first experience with it will not be with the charming retro-style presentation, but with anachronistic voice acting.

This got me thinking about voice-over work in games in general, and how you have to be extremely careful when implementing voice acting. It’s not a universal catch-all to make a game better as was once believed in the early days of the CD-ROM era. (If you don’t believe me, go back and play Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and see how long it takes you to switch back to text-only mode.) With interactive entertainment now sophisticated enough to bring us both realistic-looking movie-style experiences as well as beautifully pixelated work that explicitly looks “like a computer game”, it’s all the more important for developers to make careful decisions about how to present their work, particularly in the latter case, where more stylised presentation typically implies that the player is going to be expected to use their imagination a bit.

This then got my mind going off on a tangent about why I typically like to play Japanese games with English subtitles but Japanese audio. Aside from the fact that the Japanese voice acting is very often (though not always!) of a higher quality than the English dub, I feel that experiencing a game in this way allows you to enjoy the best of both worlds: you get to enjoy the additional nuance and meaning that the English translation affords while at the same time also being able to recognise and appreciate the verbal tics, non-standard speech forms and honorifics in the Japanese speech that simply aren’t possible to replicate directly in English. To take an example from a recent game I’ve been playing, Tiara from Fairy Fencer F’s attempts to seem like a “princess” are emphasised further by her use of “desu wa” rather than the more usual “desu” at the end of sentences. Likewise, you can infer things from whether male characters refer to themselves as “watashi”, “ore” or “boku”, or whether female characters use “watashi”, “watakushi” or “uchi”. Obviously everything I’ve said in this paragraph requires that you have a passing understanding of Japanese (and I mean passing, I’m by no means fluent!) and consequently may not apply to everyone, but that’s how I feel, at least.

Ultimately my concerns about ROM probably don’t matter all that much because, like I say, the option is still there to play without voices. (And they better not remove the “bloobloobloo” if you choose to play in text-only mode!) I’m just a bit worried that what the developers clearly seem to think is an “upgrade” to the game is actually significantly at odds with the audio-visual aesthetic they were going for in the first place. Not to mention the fact that the inclusion of certain cast members seems deliberately… antagonistic. But that’s probably a subject for another time!

Read Only Memories is £14.99 on Steam right now, and I’d say probably worth playing before its big new update hits.

2432: Still Not Doing Great

I’m still not doing all that great. And I really don’t know what else I can do.

The thing that is making me feel most shit and useless is the fact that I don’t have a job, so I am trying my best to sort that out. I’ve revamped my CV multiple times, tailored cover letters to job specifications in various ways according to advice I’ve read and discussed with people, attempted to put across my desire to be a valuable member of someone’s team, but… nothing. Nothing at all.

All this is conspiring to make me feel like a complete waste of space. To be perfectly honest, I’ve felt like this ever since USgamer kicked me to the curb with little warning the day before my birthday in 2014. Nothing quite makes you feel valued like being booted out of a job you loved and seeing your replacements half-arsedly covering the things you were passionate about in a way that is both frustrating and upsetting. (And not just for me; I’ve had numerous messages since I left USgamer expressing their sadness that I was no longer the site’s resident Japanese games specialist.)

I’ve had dribs and drabs of other jobs since. My longest ongoing gig, if you can call it that, is my current semi-regular freelance work for an e-learning company, which I can’t complain too much about aside from how sporadic the work is. At least I get to work from home.

My next longest position was with energy company SSE, and if my ejection from USgamer made me feel bad, this just made things all the worse. SSE is a company that doesn’t value employees as individuals in the slightest — a common complaint with large corporations, I’m sure — and patronises everyone with primary school-level presentations and activities on Health and Safety. In the meantime, their spectacularly inefficient working processes meant it took absolutely forever to do the most simple task. It took them over two years to launch a new website thanks to their adoption of the most cumbersome, shitty piece of content management software I’ve ever had the misfortune to get hands-on experience with. It would often take several days to get a simple spelling mistake corrected on the existing site. And I ended up getting punished because I worked quickly and efficiently and ended up with nothing to do, which made me look like I was twiddling my thumbs doing nothing. I guess that’s not how you do things in corporate culture; should have worked more slowly.

SSE tried its very best to drain the individuality out of me — people weren’t people there, they were “resource” (singular, which always bugged me almost as much as the word itself) — but I figured I should try to stay on for as long as I could to get some experience with being a content editor. That’s an actual job title that I can search for, and indeed I’ve been applying for a number of positions in that vein.

Nothing, though. Nothing at all. Not even a rejection in many cases. And so it is that I’m sitting here at half past eleven on a Friday night with £10 in my bank account, utterly despondent and completely out of ideas as to what else I could possibly do to make things better for myself.

Nothing is springing immediately to mind. I guess I just have to persevere for the moment.

That or win the lottery.

2431: I Also Made This

I made another video today in an attempt to further solidify my knowledge of Hitfilm 4 Express, and indeed to refresh my subject knowledge with regard to video editing in general, as it’s one of those skills that can atrophy from non-use, particularly with how non-intuitive professional-grade programs can be.

I’m still in two minds about the advent of video on the Internet and how, for young people in particular, it has taken the place of good old fashioned text Personally speaking, I’d still rather read a good article with nice screenshots than watch a video — particularly if I’m out and about on my phone and am not in a situation where listening to the audio of a video would be practical — but I’m forced to reluctantly admit that for gaming content, video does sort of make sense.

Video games are, for the most part, a dynamic, audio-visual medium in which the way things move around the screen and the noises they make are just as important as what they look like as still images. This is more true for some genres than others — shoot ’em ups such as the two games I’ve covered with my videos over the past couple of days are a good example. But even in more sedate games, there’s value to being able to actually demonstrate what the thing looks like in motion, how its interface works and all manner of other things. And while you could take the TotalBiscuit approach and make hour-long videos about options menus — there is value there for some people — I think the real strength in video coincides with the atrocious attention span most people have these days: short, snappy summaries of what something is all about and why you should pay attention to it.

I don’t yet know if I’ve nailed that format in my videos just yet, but I’m enjoying making them if nothing else. Plus insofar as creative projects go, they could potentially end up forming a “portfolio” of sorts should I find myself in a position where my video-making skills might potentially get me a job of some sort. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? I’m trying not to think about it too much, but as I’m broke it’s kind of constantly on my mind.

Still, I guess this counts as a vaguely productive use of my time, and I did at least apply for two jobs earlier today, so I can say I got something done. Unfortunately none of those somethings quite pay the bills at present, but, well, doing something is better than nothing, non?

2430: I Made This

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It’s been a surprisingly productive day, both in terms of “things I wanted to do” and “things I had to do”. I got the bit of work I had to do done, and even had time to write a hefty piece on One Way Heroics’ mechanics over on MoeGamer and make a short video about Atari classic River Raid.

Here’s said video, if you’re curious.

I wanted to take a moment to talk about making this video, as its production involved the discovery of a really fine piece of free software: Hitfilm 4 Express.

Hitfilm 4 Express is a fully-featured non-linear video editor in the Final Cut mould, with a particular emphasis on compositing. It allows you to import media in a variety of formats — both still images and video sequences — and edit them together using an extremely professional-looking (and rather daunting!) collection of tools. Once your masterwork is complete, you can then export it to all the usual formats as well as upload it completely seamlessly to YouTube with minimal fuss.

I’m particularly enamoured with the YouTube connectivity as my past experience with making movies using my PC has been with Windows Movie Maker, which by default exports in a horrible format that YouTube then has to spend several hours converting and optimising after you upload it. This video, meanwhile, was ready to watch mere minutes after uploading, suggesting that Hitfilm 4 Express was smart enough to encode it in the appropriate format for YouTube automatically without me having to do anything else. It even kept it in 1080p/60fps format, which is arguably a bit wasteful for a video about an Atari 2600 and 8-Bit game, but eh; YouTube viewers are picky bastards and whinge if you don’t upload in the highest quality possible even if it is of practically no benefit to the source material whatsoever.

Anyway. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Hitfilm 4 Express offers so far, but I’m in love. It’s a full, professional-grade package for free that can be further expanded by purchasing effects modules that plug into it — which is where they make their money. It’s free software that isn’t riddled with toolbars for your browser, pop-up adverts and nag screens — it’s simply an excellent package that did exactly what I wanted it to with minimal fuss, albeit a little bit of reading the manual.

On that note, probably time for bed. (If you’re wondering about the posting time, Andie is working nights at the moment which means both our sleep patterns are pretty screwed. I’m taking advantage of the quiet time to Get Things Done.)

2429: Ads Ruin Everything

(This was supposed to post last night but didn’t for some reason.)

If anyone here is in advertising or marketing…kill yourself. It’s just a little thought; I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can.

Kill yourself.

Seriously though, if you are, do.

Aaah, no, really. There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay – kill yourself.

Seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good.

Seriously.

No this is not a joke. You’re going, “There’s going to be a joke coming.” There’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your fucking soul. Kill yourself

Planting seeds.

I know all the marketing people are going, “He’s doing a joke…” There’s no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend – I don’t care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations. Whatever, you know what I mean.

I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too: “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing? He’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market. He’s very smart.”

Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking, evil scumbags!

“Ooh, you know what Bill’s doing now? He’s going for the righteous indignation dollar. That’s a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We’ve done research – huge market. He’s doing a good thing.”

Godammit, I’m not doing that, you scumbags! Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet.

– Bill Hicks

It makes me feel a little bit sick inside to recall that when I was a child, I used to actually enjoy the advert breaks on commercial TV. There were ads I used to look forward to seeing, and ads that I still remember today that, to my knowledge, I only ever saw broadcast once.

The reason this memory makes me feel a bit sick is because I look around today and look at all the damage advertising has done to so many aspects of modern life, and I’m disgusted and ashamed.

Mobile phone games, once thought to be a true competitor to home computers and consoles, have been ruined by advertising. Creative work has been devalued to such a degree that it’s now a significant risk for a developer to release anything at a price point above “free” (with in-app purchases of up to £80 a time, mind you), with ads punctuating every aspect of the game experience — or, in the worst-designed cases, actively getting in the way of what you want to do.

Games journalism has been ruined by advertising. Earlier today I saw a link to a “review in progress” of a soccer game. The “review in progress” format is usually reserved for games that it is impossible to review based on a launch-day experience — things like MMOs or multiplayer-centric titles. But it’s increasingly being used by publishers to stake a claim on all-important search engine optimisation terms and ad revenue by posting an article that includes both the game name and the word “review” in its URL — thereby attracting anyone casually Googling “[game name] review” — without having to actually do a full job of reviewing a game in the traditional sense, and lapping up the ad revenue in the process. Not only that, we have sites spamming articles about the latest, most popular games — even if the sites’ verdict on said game was that it wasn’t very good, as has happened with Rock, Paper, Shotgun and divisive space sim No Man’s Sky — and pulling in those precious ad revenue clicks by anyone Googling the game in question.

Online video streaming has been ruined by advertising. Earlier I was attempting to watch an episode of 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown — hardly the most thrilling or cerebral viewing, but I was enjoying it at the time as an accompaniment to dinner — and the ad break halfway through the programme crashed. When this happens, there is no way to skip the “broken” ad because oh no, you have to watch five minutes of adverts before you can see the rest of the programme, and if you can’t watch those five minutes of ads, well then, you’re not seeing the rest of the programme.

The Internet in general has been ruined by advertising. I can’t think of many sites I’ve been to recently that haven’t had some sort of obtrusive background, auto-playing video trailer or worse, complete page takeover making the browsing experience actively unpleasant. One of the worst offenders is one of the most useful sites on the Web: Wikia, which allows users to create wikis for any topic under the sun, but which makes the site practically unusable on mobile by first loading the page in, then loading a full-page pop-over ad a couple of seconds later which you inevitably click on when you’re trying to simply follow a link in the text.

Computer software has been ruined by advertising. Whether it’s Windows bugging you to upgrade or anti-virus software promising you a “free gift” that is actually just the ability to subscribe to its premium service for the same price it always is, not even in the world of productivity can you escape someone, somewhere trying to extract money from you.

I hate, loathe and despise it, particularly when I see how demoralised it makes people who want so desperately to do things ethically, but who inevitably find themselves trampled underfoot by people with fewer scruples.

I think I hate it most of all for what it’s done to something I love, though: writing about games. There’s little to no room for passion in the commercial games press today; instead, it’s all “you must have [x] articles about [insert popular game name here] up by the end of the week”. It does the wonderful diversity of the medium an incredible disservice, and I feel sorry for those people who, like me, are genuinely passionate about the things they enjoy, but who struggle to get heard and can’t even think about making a living from what they love.

Unfortunately, it’s the world we live in now. I’m kinda with Mr. Hicks on this one.

2428: Seal the Vile God… For Good!

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I finished my first playthrough of Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force tonight. I completed my first playthrough, as I’m sure most people do, on the Goddess route, which is (mostly) the same as the PlayStation 3 original. Having never quite gotten around to the PS3 original, it was all new to me, so it was an exciting journey to take.

I found Fairy Fencer F — the Goddess route, anyway — to be an interesting experience because it’s by far the most “traditional” RPG that Compile Heart has put out, in that it has a spiky-haired male protagonist who goes on an Oprah-worthy journey of personal growth over the course of the entire story, a band of plucky companions that he attracts to his cause through his own charisma and personal magnetism, a plot that involves aspects of faith and religion, and a suitably climactic battle against a supernatural being at the end.

This is in stark contrast to, say, the Neptunia series, where the overall plot is often the least important aspect of the game (though MegaDimension Neptunia V-II placed greater emphasis on the overall plot and was one of the best Neptunia games I’ve played as a result) and instead the main attraction is the developing relationship between the recurring cast members.

Fairy Fencer F is ample proof that Compile Heart has what it takes to butt heads with the masters of the genre, though, at least in terms of characterisation and storytelling. Their method of interacting with the game world affords it fewer opportunities for demonstrating the sheer level of detail Falcom puts into works such as the Legend of Heroes series — Compile Heart RPGs typically flow like visual novels punctuated by dungeon crawling rather than the more free-flowing experience that is a Falcom RPG — but the game nonetheless manages to paint a convincing picture of the world in which the story takes place, and the people who make the story happen. It achieves this by taking an approach Compile Heart also adopts in many of its other games: keeping the scale of things relatively small. Fairy Fencer F features only one town and a few dungeons in its immediate (rather geographically diverse) vicinity, and consequently you get to know the area and the people in it pretty well, both through the main story and the optional interactions with incidental characters around the town and its various locations.

Of particular note in the story as a whole is the protagonist Fang and his relationship with the two leading ladies of the piece: his fairy Eryn, with whom he constantly bickers but obviously trusts absolutely, and Tiara, whose first encounter with Fang and Eryn comes when she tricks them into drinking paralytic tea so she can steal the Fury the duo were in pursuit of. Tiara in particular demonstrates herself to be a complex character over the course of the complete narrative, and while the big “revelation” about her identity may not be a big surprise to those who have played a lot of RPGs, the story takes some very surprising twists and turns, particularly immediately leading up to the “split point” where the new version diverges into three different narrative paths.

Also noteworthy is the game’s tendency to demonstrate that people aren’t necessarily always as “good” or “evil” as they might immediately appear. Indeed, one of the most squeaky-clean characters in the game turns out to be a bit of a bastard, while overtly playing for Team Evil is a noble swordsman whom Fang can eventually recruit to his cause (fail to do so and he kills himself, a shot of darkness I’m not entirely used to seeing in Compile Heart games!), a young woman who spends her free time caring for orphans using the Obligatory Big Bad Corporation’s funds, and a salaryman who is only perpetrating less-than-noble deeds to care for his wife and child, whom it is clear he genuinely loves a great deal.

This “people aren’t exactly what they seem” theme is also seen to a lesser extent through Tiara, who acts like a “proper lady” — her Japanese speech is riddled with watakushi and desu wa, both of which are verbal signals that we’re dealing with someone who either is “noble” or at least wants to put across the impression that they are — but is actually, as Fang puts it, “nasty” underneath. And the trope is explicitly lampshaded in the form of the character Pippin, who appears to be a strange green cat-like creature, and who constantly extols the virtues of not judging a book by its cover. Indeed, Pippin remains something of an oddball enigma right up until the very end of the game, but after a while you just start thinking of him as an odd person, not an odd green cat-like creature.

All in all, my 50-hour first playthrough of Advent Dark Force leaves me feeling like it’s Compile Heart’s strongest game to date — yes, even better than the already excellent MegaDimension Neptunia V-II — and hungry for more. Fortunately, there is more — I have two more narrative routes to play through, plus a Platinum trophy to chase. I’m particularly interested to see how the two other narrative routes differ from the Goddess route — whether it’s a few changed events or a complete restructuring of the story. I’m kind of expecting the latter based on what I’ve seen people discussing, but either way, I’m looking forward to spending more time with this great cast of characters.

Serious talk: if you’re still rejecting Compile Heart games just because they’re Compile Heart games, you’re missing out on some truly great RPGs. Including this one.

2427: 10 Atari 8-Bit Classics*

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Still curious about the Atari 8-Bit? Here are 10 classic games.

River Raid

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The 2600 version of River Raid has been whored around the place numerous times over the last few years, but the infinitely superior Atari 800 version never gets any love.

While the formula remains the same — fly up the river, don’t crash into the sides, don’t run out of fuel, blast any helicopters, ships and bridges in your way — the execution is better thanks to the addition of numerous features that use the additional power the 8-Bit computers had over the 2600.

Atari 8-Bit River Raid also had tanks, hot air baloons, jet planes that flew across the screen ignoring the river boundaries and more complex level designs. It’s still a top-notch shoot ’em up today.

Miner 2049’er

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Any self-respecting Atari enthusiast will almost certainly put this game near the top of their “favourite games” list, though interestingly I didn’t warm to it much first time around. Replaying it again now, however, I see its appeal — it’s a well-crafted platform game with interesting environmental puzzles that never gets too complicated for its own good.

Playing the role of renowned (and rather chubby) mountie Bounty Bob, it’s your job to make your way through a uranium-infested mine in search of the nefarious Yukon Yohan. In order to do this, you need to “paint” every platform in each screen by walking over it, while simultaneously avoiding the mutant uranium beasties that prowl the platforms. But in true Pac-Man tradition, grabbing a bonus item allows you the temporary ability to turn the tables on the meanies, eliminating them from the screen and helping to clear a path for you.

Star Raiders

Again, the 2600 version of this has been re-released time after time, but the Atari 8-Bit version is much better. It’s the original 3D space sim, essentially being a more action-oriented take on the traditional grid-and-vector-based “Star Trek” game that can be played on anything from a mainframe to a graphic calculator.

Aliens are invading the galaxy. You need to stop them. You do this by reviewing the galactic map, determining which of your starbases are in most immediate need of attention, then warping to the aliens’ location, blasting them to smithereens and then repeating the process until the galaxy is safe once again.

Notable for being more complex than simply “point and fire”, you had to manage your energy levels by determining when was (and wasn’t) an appropriate time to switch on systems such as your shields and targeting computer.

Star Raiders II

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Not perhaps as fondly regarded as the legendary original, I still loved Star Raiders II (originally intended to be a licensed game of the movie The Last Starfighter), because to me it kept what made the original great while improving almost every aspect of it.

Instead of a grid-based galactic map, you now had a convincing looking solar system map and could even orbit planets. The enemies you confronted were more than just fighters that went down with a single shot, too; in one of the earliest examples of boss fights, Star Raiders II often put you up against enemy destroyers and battlecruisers, requiring you to change tactics somewhat.

Star Raiders II also saw you going on the offensive rather than playing strictly defensively, too; when you thought you saw an opportunity, you could warp into the aliens’ star system and bomb their planets in an attempt to stop their invasions once and for all.

Oh, and you could fly your ship into the sun and the on-screen cockpit would melt.

Ballblazer

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An early Lucasfilm game, Ballblazer was a split-screen arcade sports game for one or two players. The basic premise was similar to soccer in that you had to gain possession of a ball and shoot it between the opponent’s goal posts, but there was only one person on each team and the goalposts moved.

Ballblazer made use of a convincing first-person 3D perspective using a patchwork grid effect on the ground and automatic 90-degree turns whenever you needed to face the ball. Despite its simplicity, the game was fiercely competitive, and had some fantastic music, too.

Rescue on Fractalus

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I mentioned this the other day, but I can’t talk about 8-Bit classics without discussing Rescue on Fractalus, another early Lucasfilm game.

Unfolding from a first-person in-cockpit view, you were sent down to the planet Fractalus (so named because its 3D landscape was generated using fractals) to rescue crashed pilots and fend off the evil Jaggi forces. The game was remarkably complex for its time, featuring numerous keyboard commands that made it feel like a proper simulation of flying an advanced spacecraft, and the 3D graphics were extremely impressive.

Rescue on Fractalus was most noteworthy for its little touches: the sound of a pilot banging on your airlock door would get more and more faint if you failed to open it for him in a timely manner; if you switched your engines back on before the pilot was on board, you’d fry the poor bastard to a crisp; and occasionally on later levels, the downed pilots would turn out to be aliens that would leap up and hammer on your windshield. Absolutely terrifying… until you switched the engines back on for their benefit and watched them fry.

M.U.L.E.

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One of the finest multiplayer games of all time, and one of the finest strategy games of all time. Accessible and understandable yet filled with complexity, M.U.L.E. was — is — an absolute masterpiece.

Marooned on the planet Proc Irata (seriously) for six or twelve months depending on the difficulty you were playing on, it was up to you to make the most of the situation by making use of the land that was granted to you and which you bought at auction. You could assign land to harvest food, energy, smithore or, on the higher levels, a “cash crop” called crystite. The type of terrain determined what type of facility a plot was most suitable for, with the river running down the middle of the map being the most abundant for food, while mountains were best for smithore.

M.U.L.E. challenged you to combine cooperative play with competitiveness — while you were competing against three other players, all of whom could be human-controlled if you had an Atari that supported four joysticks, if you didn’t all work together to ensure the colony as a whole had enough food, energy and smithore to survive the next month, you’d all be in trouble.

The game made use of an interesting graphical depiction of negotiating prices by allowing buyers and sellers to “walk” up and down the screen to determine the prices they were willing to buy or sell at. By meeting another player — or the colony store — you could buy and sell goods as you saw fit — stockpile for later or sell for a high price right now?

Final Legacy

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A lesser-known game, this one, Final Legacy was a strategic shoot ’em up with elements of Missile Command to it, and, like many other games of the period, was the embodiment of Cold War paranoia.

In Final Legacy, you were in charge of the good ship Legacy and were tasked with destroying the nasty horrible enemy missile bases that were pointing their nasty horrible missiles at your cities. You had to torpedo enemy ships, blast the enemy bases with your laser cannon and shoot down the missiles that inevitably got fired the moment you started attacking a base.

Later difficulty levels added some interesting mechanics such as having to destroy “Intelligence” ships in order to find out the locations of the enemy missile bases, but mostly the game was about frantically zipping back and forth between four different screens and hoping you didn’t accidentally let anyone get nuked.

Batty Builders

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Another lesser-known game, this time from the once-prolific English Software. Batty Builders saw you in the role of a builder attempting to build a wall. In order to do so, you’d have to catch bricks falling from the conveyor belt at the top of the screen, then toss them into place in the wall, all without killing yourself in the process.

That’s pretty much all there was to it, but it was enormously addictive, and is noteworthy for being one of the earliest examples of a frantic puzzle game I can remember.

Bruce Lee

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An interesting and peculiar game, Bruce Lee combined elements from a number of different game types, most notably beat ’em up and platform adventure.

As Lee, you’d have to make your way through each screen collecting lanterns. Attempting to stop you from doing so were an anonymous ninja and The Green Yamo, both of whom would pursue you around each screen with a surprising amount of simulated intelligence (or, in the case of Yamo, who could be controlled by a second player, actual intelligence), making your life miserable. Fortunately, you could deal with them by giving them a smack in the chops or a flying kick to the face, though they’d always be back.

Bruce Lee remains one of the finest licensed games out there, thanks in part to the fact that it’s not trying too hard to follow any particular movie. It’s still a fun platformer today.

* your definition of “classic” may vary, but I enjoyed all these.

2426: If You’re Going to Play Multiplayer, FFS Stick it Out Until the End

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I played my ten placement matches for season 2 of Overwatch’s Competitive mode earlier. Nine out of those ten games featured at least one salty asshole quitting the game early because their team lost a round — both on the team I was on and on the opposing team on different occasions — and in Competitive mode, the game doesn’t backfill positions with people queued up to play like it does in Quick Play; when you queue for a Competitive game, you’re put into a game from the very beginning rather than immediately joining one in progress if a space is available.

This was mildly annoying the first time it happened, but with each subsequent time it got more and more irritating. It’s not only bad sportsmanship to strop off in a sulk if you’re losing, it’s also a major pain in the ass to the rest of your team. It would be akin to Wayne Rooney suddenly deciding that he doesn’t feel like playing any more and wandering off the pitch in the middle of a football match. Except in Overwatch, the teams are only six people, so the loss of just one person is keenly and immediately felt.

The trouble that these early leavers have is that they can’t handle losing. They’re unwilling to accept the possibility that the team who just “lost” could enjoy a comeback in the subsequent round — this can and frequently does happen in Overwatch, which is mostly very well balanced like that — and instead ditch the match altogether, leaving their team a man or more down and on the way to what is now pretty much a guaranteed loss rather than something that could be fought back from.

What’s particularly dumb about early leavers is that when they leave a game, the match is counted as a “loss” in their records anyway, so they’re taking the worse option — a 100% chance of getting a loss versus a less-than-100% chance of getting a loss by staying and trying to help the rest of the team to a comeback.

I sort of understand. It can be demoralising to feel like you were steamrollered by another team who perhaps genuinely were more skilled than you. But it’s the very height of special snowflake syndrome to believe that you are entitled to win every game you play — perhaps these players were the kids who grew up in schools that had sports days with “participation trophies” rather than actual winners. And clawing your way to a victory when the jaws of defeat were closing on you is immensely satisfying — my favourite games of Overwatch are the ones that end up being really close, not the ones where my team smashes our opponents into the ground.

Blizzard have penalties in place for those who leave matches early, but they’re clearly not severe enough. For the Competitive scene in Overwatch to succeed, early leavers need to be actively discouraged through harsh punishments. I hope that the Overwatch team are paying attention to this problem and that it gets resolved in the next season of Competitive play.

In the meantime, if you’re an online player, do the decent thing and see your matches through to conclusion, even if they don’t seem to be going all that well. As I say, you keep playing, you have a less than 100% chance of getting a loss recorded on your all-important statistics. Leave early, however, and you absolutely definitely will get that loss. So stop being selfish pricks and play your damn matches to completion.