2425: Life in the 8-Bit Era

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I’ve been on a proper nostalgia trip with my old magazines and retro machine emulation recently, so I thought I’d share some memories and factoids about growing up in a household filled with home computers rather than games consoles.

This post was inspired by a conversation with my friend Chris earlier today, who noted that it’s an area of gaming history that he’s not as familiar with as the consoles of the time.

I’m writing this from the perspective of someone who grew up with the Atari 8-Bit range of home computers. Your experiences may vary if you were a Commodore 64 or Spectrum child!

The early machines were massive

The Atari 400 and 800, the first models of home computer released by Atari, were absolute behemoths — the size and weight of a typewriter. The reason for this was that due to FCC regulations regarding signal leakage protection, their innards had to be encased in solid aluminium.

This is the Atari 400.

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And this is the Atari 800.

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There were a few differences between the two. The 400 was originally set to ship with 4K RAM and the 800 with 8K, but by the time they hit the market, the price of RAM had already come down enough to outfit them both with 8K. The 800, which had expandable memory, eventually underwent numerous upgrades to end up with a then-massive 48K of RAM.

The 400 had a horrible membrane keyboard (which many users, including our family, replaced with mechanical keys) while the 800 had mechanical keys as standard. Both featured a then-revolutionary bit of kit called Serial Input/Output or SIO, which could be regarded as a modern precursor to USB in that it allowed the connection of multiple, automatically configuring devices to the computer. It was mostly use to connect tape decks and disk drives.

The later machines were smaller and looked a bit nicer

Here’s the 64K 800XL, probably the most direct competitor to the Commodore 64:

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And the 128KB 130XE, whose extra power went largely unused due to it coming out pretty late in the 8-Bit life cycle; its resemblance to the 16-bit Atari ST is no coincidence.

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(Here’s the ST, for comparison’s sake:)

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Early games came on cartridge

Part of the thinking behind the early systems was that they should be as user-friendly as possible. With that in mind, the very simplest method of getting a program up and running on the 400 and 800 — and indeed all subsequent Atari 8-Bits — was to plug in a ROM cartridge, turn on the power and enjoy the instantaneous load times of the format.

Many of the 8-Bit’s earliest and most well-regarded games — most notably the excellent Star Raiders, one of the first 3D space sims, and still a great game today — came on cartridge, but eventually games got big enough that they needed to be distributed on cassette tape or 5.25″ floppy disk instead.

The 400 and 800 had four joystick ports

…but very few games used them. However, one of the very best games on the system, Electronic Arts’ highly competitive strategy game M.U.L.E., allowed for four players simultaneously. Later versions of the Atari 8-bit only had two joystick ports, so true four-player titles remained rare.

Programming for the Atari and other 8-Bit machines was a big British industry

A lot of the software companies that are doing proud business today — Eutechnyx (formerly Zeppelin Games), Rare (formerly Ultimate Play the Game), Codemasters (still Codemasters) and Electronic Arts began their lives in the 8-bit era, and many of them (all of the above except EA, among others) started in Britain.

The 8-Bit era saw the birth of what we would now call the indie games industry. Single programmers or small teams of friends would assemble games in school holidays or during free time and release them on cassette at budget prices. Many would go on to become hugely popular. And many of them chose to create extremely creative titles rather than lazy copycat clones of arcade shoot ’em ups — though make no mistake, there were plenty of lazy clones around, too.

The reason why so many people got into programming on their Atari is that when you booted it up you were straight into Atari BASIC and could start writing code straight away. Granted, BASIC wasn’t the speediest language in the world, but learning it formed a great foundation for discovering more complex languages.

Loading from tape took ages

This can’t be overstated. It’s a well-known fact that loading a game from cassette took a long time, but really. It took a long time. In the case of the Atari, you’d have to ensure the system going “BURRRRRRRRR, BURRRRRRRRRR!!” over and over while the data loaded from the cassette.

Loading from disk made a great noise

One thing I really miss from the original 8-Bit days when using an emulator is the sound that loading things from disk made. There was this weird farting sound when the machine started up, then loading combined the whirring snark of the drive’s mechanisms with a weird “BLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBL” noise, punctuated by zurbits from the drive. I was always a bit disappointed when developers poked the appropriate memory location to make loading quieter. (And yes, “poke” actually is the technical term.)

And of course someone’s made a YouTube video featuring that noise. It’s number 4 in this video:

Magazines were a key part of the ownership experience

Getting copies of Analog, Antic, Atari User and Page 6 each month meant that we were never short of toilet reading material. And as I noted yesterday, the articles you got in these old mags ran the gamut from in-depth technical explorations of the systems themselves (and how to harness that technology) to the sort of game reviews we’re familiar with today.

The Atari sound chip was awesome

Commodore’s SID chip gets all the love these days, but Atari’s POKEY was no slouch either. Here’s a selection of fine tunes from renowned composer Adam Gilmore.

Piracy was rife

It’s a wonder we didn’t kill the fledgling games industry completely in the ’80s, since very few people seemed to purchase original games; I know it was certainly a rare treat in our household.

Instead, bootleg cassette tapes and floppy disks did the rounds in the schoolyard, at workplaces and even at gatherings specifically for people to swap dodgy copies of the latest goodness. I was too young to attend at the time, but I remember my father and brother attending a local “computer club”, which was the source of most of the boxes full of floppy disks I still own today.

Interesting, for the pirates themselves, piracy was less about getting something for free and instead all about proving their worth. “Cracked” games often came with elaborate introduction sequences (typically including some great chiptune music) and made use of advanced compression technologies to fit multiple games on a single floppy disk. Today, retro enthusiasts are as keen to preserve cracked versions of games as they are originals.

The systems weren’t as powerful as consoles, but they tried hard

Being general-purpose computers rather than dedicated games machines, the Atari 8-Bit range struggled to keep pace with the specialist machines from Sega and Nintendo, but that didn’t mean developers would rest on their laurels. Particularly late in the 8-Bit’s lifespan, developers were squeezing every possible ounce of graphical power they could out of the little machine’s chips, and the results could be both impressive and heavily stylized. Check out Lucasfilm’s games in particular, which featured full 3D fractal landscapes and detailed sprites.

Here’s strange action adventure The Eidolon, in which you travelled through time, fought mushrooms and battled rather arrogant-looking dragons:

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Here’s wonderful flight sim/first-person Defender-alike Rescue on Fractalus, surprisingly one of the most terrifying games in existence for reasons I’ll leave you to discover if you ever play it:

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And here’s the rather strange (but impressive) Koronis Rift:

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I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the 8-Bit era was probably one of my favourite times to be into computers. It was exciting, it was accessible and it felt like these machines could do anything; there was none of the cynicism or taking things for granted that we have today.

Oh to go back, eh.

2424: This Month in Old Gaming Magazines, 1988 Edition

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Since I’ve spent the last two days downloading approximately 40GB of old magazine scans comprising near-complete collections of ACE, Atari User, Page 6, Antic and Analog, I thought I’d look back at a few of them to see what was going on this month in the dim and distant past.

Chosen entirely arbitrarily by seeing which issue of ACE had “September” on it first, I thought we’d have a look at 1988 today.

“Games Without Frontiers”, ACE issue 12

“Once upon a time it was just you against the Galaxians,” writes Andy Wilton in issue 12 of ACE. “But revolutions in communications technology are going to bring about tremendous changes in the way we play — and who we play against.”

This should be interesting.

The article begins with a discussion of PBM (Play-By-Mail) games — as in, games you played through the postal service — which, as ridiculous as it sounds today, was once a viable means of playing multiplayer games. Obviously this style of multiplayer lends itself primarily to turn-based strategy experiences, and indeed the first example Wilton mentions is legendarily cynical backstab-o-rama Diplomacy.

Wilton’s designs for PBM are somewhat grander, though; he goes on to conjecture that “if the Royal Mail lets you run a game that’s inconveniently large for a living room, why not set up a game you couldn’t possibly fit in a house?” Why indeed.

Wilton then goes on to discuss play-by-email games; indeed, this remained a viable way to play games as modern as Civilization IV until relatively recently, since the format of the email messages could be made in such a way that the computer program could decode it without any external input required. Clever, but largely irrelevant to today’s constantly connected world.

“Far more exciting things are afoot than postal or pseudo-postal games,” continues Wilton. “For some time now there’s been the technology to get a whole load of people playing the same computer game by means of networking.” He then goes on to describe what we now know as server-based play, or taken to its natural extension, massively multiplayer online games. He does not, however, predict that one day we will have network setups specifically for games, or indeed the Internet: “for a networked game to really catch on,” he writes, “the network it runs on must already be in use for other purposes. Hardware’s the important factor here: setting up several machines, close together, connected with special cables, is a lot more effort than most people will go to for a game.”

Interestingly, Wilton then goes on to discuss distributed processing — the kind of thing Microsoft promised with its “Xbox Cloud” nonsense and has never quite managed to show any real evidence of. While there are noteworthy examples of distributed processing being successful — Folding@Home is a well-known example — it’s yet to be leveraged for gaming.

The article then concludes with the conjecture that the new frontier in multiplayer gaming will be using satellites. Well, plausible — a number of Japanese companies in particular experimented with satellite distribution of games — but again, it never really caught on, because the Internet became a thing.

An interesting article through modern eyes.

“Very Clever System”, Atari User Vol. 4 No. 5

Two issues before it was consumed by its longtime rival Page 6, Atari User took the bizarre step of kicking off a series of deep-dive articles exploring not the Atari 8-Bit, nor the Atari ST… but the by then 9-year old VCS/2600 console.

Actually, it’s not quite as unusual as you might think; the 2600 actually enjoyed a lifespan that the PS3 and Xbox 360 would be proud of; indeed, article author Neil Fawcett notes that an estimated one million 2600 systems were sold in 1987, with more than a hundred thousand of those in the UK.

Fawcett kicks off his article with an examination of how the 2600 differs from the Atari 8-Bit range of home computers. In other words, he defines what a games console is.

“It’s basically a dedicated box of electronics to be attached to your television to play games plugged into it,” he writes. “You can’t attach a disc drive or tape deck, nor can you type in the listings which appear in Atari User.”

On that latter point, one interesting thing about the computer magazines of the time was that in lieu of the downloadable demos or cover-mounted discs we take for granted these days, many magazines simply filled their paged with program listings that you could copy into your computer, save to floppy disk or tape and then run at your leisure. Free software — if you were willing to put the time in to type them in, of course. (Side note: I attribute my speed and accuracy of typing today to the sheer number of these listings I typed in as a kid.)

A little disappointingly, Fawcett’s article doesn’t delve deep into how the 2600 itself works, though he does include an annotated diagram of its guts, for all the good that does to someone who doesn’t know how electronics work. Instead, he reviews both old and then-new 2600 titles, in this case California Games from Epyx (“nice graphics and neat sound effects add a wonderful feeling of reality to each game”), Ghostbusters from Activision (“considering the 2600 is only a games system, the standard of Ghostbusters is superb”), Kung Fu Master from Activision (“The 2600 version may not be as graphically good as the arcade version, but it has the atmosphere and playability of the original”) and H.E.R.O. from, again, Activision (“the best conversion of a home computer game I have seen for the VCS”).

“Adventure!”, Page 6 issue 34

Page 6 often had themed issues or at the very least cover features, and this edition was very much focused on adventure games — the kind we now tend to describe as “interactive fiction” rather than the more recognisable point and click adventures we see more of today.

There were several type-in listings of adventure games in the issue, but the real attraction for adventure game fans was the in-depth interview with Level 9, a British software company that specialised in these games.

When I say in-depth, I mean it; the interview goes on for seven full pages with very few images; a far cry from the obnoxious “too long; didn’t read” mentality of many modern readers.

Level 9’s Pete Austin described his company’s formation as being born from a love of Dungeons & Dragons. “The form of D&D that we played is very unlike that played elsewhere,” he admits. “We played political D&D where, frankly, if you had to fight your way out of a situation then you had done something wrong. The basic idea was to bluff and blackmail people in the game and use political intrigue and spy techniques, that sort of thing.” It’s clear to see how this approach to tabletop gaming would naturally transplant itself to creating narrative-centric, text-heavy experiences that were entirely turn-based.

The interview goes on to describe how the team at Level 9 went on to produce their own programming language called A-Code to create their games, in effect creating one of the earliest examples of a game engine, albeit a text-based one. It also describes how Level 9 had people asking for clue sheets for their games even before they were released, showing that even back in 1988, some people still wanted to get through games by fair means or foul. This is perhaps more understandable for narrative-based games such as text adventures, however.

CES ’88, Analog no. 64

In his editorial introducing the September 1988 issue of American Atari magazine Analog, Lee Pappas notes that his 14th Consumer Electronics Show (CES — a show that still goes on today) was one of mixed emotions, in that he had “nothing to report on the 8-bit news front”.

Instead, what he discovered was a world where “the big names in software now read Nintendo or Nintendo compatible. Even Apple Mac and PC supporters were missing.”

The trouble Atari was having at the time was that its peculiar computer-console hybrid the XE Game System didn’t really know what it wanted to be, and being based on already dated technology — the 16-bit computers such as the Amiga and the ST were already available by this time — it struggled to secure releases that were 1) technically impressive and 2) good.

“Most of the games are starving for state-of-the-art graphics and just don’t have the imagination that is clearly evident in the Nintendo and newer Sega products,” writes Pappas. “Face it, the Nintendo and Sega don’t have keyboards. In the Nintendo’s case the unit is plain and boring in appearance and the controls are simple. What those have, however, are spectacular, well-thought-out programs, many of which go far beyond the shoot ’em up concept.”

True indeed. And while the Atari 8-Bit computers certainly weren’t short of imaginative titles in their heyday, by this point we were well into the age of consoles — an age that we would never look back from, with one exception; PC games eventually found a way to thrive alongside their console brethren. But the dedicated, proprietary-format computer was well on the way out.

2423: 15 Reasons Moe is Awesome

With love to The Mary Sue

Apropos of nothing, here are 15 reasons moe — the art of character design intended to instill empathy, sympathy and feelings of affection in the audience — is awesome.

1. Colours!

It’s become increasingly fashionable to use what is often mockingly referred to as a “grimdark” aesthetic these days — all dark blues, browns and greys. Moe anime and video games are a stark contrast to this by remembering what primary colours are and how nice they can make you feel.

2. Characters!

Moe anime and games tend to have deliberately exaggerated rather than realistic characters, but these exaggerated characteristics can make for highly impactful, emotional moments when they reveal their deeper secrets. And it’s pretty rare to find a character in any anime who is exactly what they seem — even in the most fanservicey, perverted, filthy ecchi thing you can possibly think of.

3. Girls!

You want awesome female characters? Look no further. Many moe anime and games feature all-female casts running the gamut from confident, loud types to introverted, intellectual types. The whole point of many of these shows is to demonstrate that these all-girl groups are capable of doing absolutely anything from winning a local talent show to saving the universe — and they certainly don’t need no man to do their thing.

4. Story!

Related to the characterisation issue, it’s hard not to get drawn in to a moe anime or game due to the emotionally engaging stories they typically include. A core part of the “empathy” part of moe is making the audience root for the characters, and there’s no better way to do this than seeing them overcoming all manner of adversity to come out on top.

5. Mood!

Miserable? Watch an episode of Love Live! and I defy you to still be miserable afterwards. (NB: do not apply this challenge to Clannad or Ano Hana.)

6. Easily parsable visual language!

(I knew I’d regret doing the “one-word heading” thing as soon as I started it.) Moe anime is easy to understand, even for beginners to Japanese media, because it makes use of such clear visual language alongside its writing. Everything from hair colour to eye shape is designed to give us an immediate understanding of a character — and perhaps subvert our expectations at a later time.

7. Blurring gender lines!

Here’s a contentious one for you: looking at moe anime through less enlightened eyes, it would be easy to consider it somehow “girly” — compare and contrast toys “for boys” and “for girls” in the ’80s and ’90s for a good example of what I mean. “Boys'” toys would use muted, dark or aggressive colours whereas “girls'” toys would use bright, vivid colours. Moe is something that, according to this stereotype, should be “girly”, but there’s enough to appeal there to men as well as (not instead of!) women.

8. Always something new!

You’ll never run out of moe stuff to enjoy. In fact, you’ll almost certainly never be able to catch up on all the moe stuff that already exists, even if Japan in its entirety stopped producing it altogether.

9. Music!

Moe anime has some of the most catchy, memorable music in existence, even if you don’t speak Japanese. Doubly so if it’s a music-themed anime such as Love Live!

10. Talking about stuff that doesn’t normally get talked about!

Moe anime isn’t all ditzy girls blathering on about bullshit in an airheaded manner — though, of course, such examples do exist and can be enormously entertaining in their own right (hello, Yuru Yuri). Nope, sometimes moe works can deliver an emotional gutpunch by combining cute, cheerful visuals with surprisingly dark, even harrowing storylines. See The Fruit of Grisaia for a masterclass in how this is done.

11. Community!

The community of moe fans on the Internet is one of the most passionate, enthusiastic communities around; become a part of it and you’ll always have something to talk about and someone to talk about it with.

12. Waifus and husubandos!

For those who like to pin their allegiance to a particular person or thing, moe as a cultural phenomenon has you thoroughly covered. Declare a waifu and/or husubando and you’re making a clear but light-hearted statement about yourself. (Declaring everyone else’s waifus as “shit” optional.)

13. Cultural osmosis!

While exaggerated media such as anime and video games can give you a somewhat distorted view, they can be a catalyst for the audience to learn more about a culture other than their own, in turn leading to greater mutual understanding.

14. Relatability!

Tied in with the waifu/husubando equation is the fact that most moe anime will feature at least one character that at least one member of the audience will relate to in some way or another. By extension, this can help some people feel more comfortable talking about certain issues by being able to put them in some sort of context rather than feeling like they’re dealing with them alone.

15. An international cultural phenomenon!

Moe anime has given broader culture a lot of things to chew on — mostly with regard to character and narrative tropes. It can be particularly interesting to see people from outside Japan attempt to make use of these tropes and put their own spin on things — the wonderful visual novel VA-11 HALL-A from Venezuelan developers Sukeban Games is an excellent example of this.

2422: A Different Time

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I’ve been doing some retro gaming stuff recently which involved trawling the AtariAge and AtariMania forums for information, and as it happened, one game I was looking for information about — the rather peculiar Pondering About Max’s [sic] — linked to a scan of an old edition of New Atari User magazine, the very publication that I, my brother and my father all used to contribute to.

I spent quite a while distracted by the format of the magazine, because it’s a relic of a very different time indeed. New Atari User — or its former incarnation Page 6 — wasn’t a games magazine per se, though coverage of the latest video game releases on Atari 8-Bit and ST formed a core part of each issue. What I found much more interesting was the inclusion of other features. I was well familiar with the Making Music with Your Atari column that my Dad used to write, as I think our whole family remembers numerous MIDI incarnations of various ’60s and ’70s classics blaring out from the studio at all hours of the day — but I was surprised to see quite how… specialist some of the other articles were.

Take the issue I was looking at earlier, for example. There’s a three-page feature in this issue about maths. Just maths, and how to make use of it in Atari BASIC. The article begins with an exploration of the use of the RND function in BASIC, which generates a random number between 0 and 1, expands on this by describing how using multiplication allows you to generate random numbers between 0 and much higher upper limits, and concludes by using the INT function to generate only whole numbers. This is stuff that most bedroom programmers were already familiar with, but the article then goes on to look at powers and roots, signs and absolute values, logarithms and exponentials and finally probabilities — each of which was punctuated with a short BASIC listing for you to type in on your own computer to see how the functions worked in practice. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

Elsewhere in the same issue there’s four pages devoted to making the Atari 8-bit display an 80-column text screen — this was deemed exciting enough to get a mention on the front cover of the magazine, which is unthinkable these days — an in-depth exploration of the AtariLab computer-aided scientific experimentation kits, and plenty of other things besides. It really is a fascinating relic of a period in computer media that I thought I remembered pretty well, but evidently have forgotten more than a few things about over the years. Looking back on it now… I miss those times a lot.

If you want to enjoy a bit of nostalgia — or are just curious what computer and games mags used to look like back in the early days — then AtariMania has a substantial collection of scans that you can enjoy right here.

2421: Go 8-Bit

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A new TV show launched on well-known Freeview channel Dave this evening: Dara O’Briain’s Go 8-Bit.

It’s a type of show we haven’t seen since the days of GamesMaster, only now everyone who used to watch GamesMaster is in their 30s and 40s and enjoys knob gags. Yes, it’s a show that focuses primarily on competitive computer game challenges.

A bit of cursory research reveals that it’s actually an adaptation of a live show also called simply Go 8-Bit, the creation of Steve McNeil and Sam Pamphilon, who take the role of regulars on the TV incarnation. O’Briain occupies the host’s chair, while McNeil and Pamphilon each have one special guest each — in the case of the first episode, topical comedian Susan Calman and England goalkeeper David James, both of whom are proud gamers in their own right. The cast is rounded out with the inclusion of journalist and podcaster Ellie Gibson, who has contributed to Eurogamer on numerous occasions in the past.

O’Briain is a natural fit for the show’s host, because his enjoyment of video games is well-documented, usually using this still-entertaining six year old clip from Live at the Apollo as evidence:

He’s proven himself to be a capable host of a variety of different shows over the past few years, ranging from the topical Mock the Week to the educational Science Club. His role on Go 8-Bit is, as you might expect, closer to the former than the latter, and for the historical and cultural context and significance of the games covered on each show, he defers to Gibson, who is the resident “expert” — she’s the show’s Richard Osmond to O’Briain’s Alexander Armstrong, for those who watch the surprisingly addictive Pointless.

The first episode featured a pleasingly diverse mix of titles, beginning with classic puzzler Tetris, continuing with Chuckie Egg, then on to Tekken, Star Wars Battlefront (the new one) and closing proceedings with a custom version of Bust-a-Move specifically created for the show, and for use with the custom Makey Makey controller, a kit which can turn anything which conducts electricity into a game or computer controller. Since their custom version of Bust-a-Move was entitled Bust-a-Moob, the custom peripherals attached to the Makey Makey were, as you might expect, human beings — specifically, an old man with an impressive beard sporting a questionable Dr. Robotnik cosplay; an old lady with an even more questionable Chun Li cosplay; a skinny, hairy dude in his pants forming a rough approximation of Zangief; and, um, a Cher impersonator.

The show made for genuinely enjoyable entertainment. The banter between O’Briain and the guests was amusing, and the trash-talk during the games was fun. It was also wise to focus the show around people who are enthusiastic about games but not necessarily good at them, too, because this made for some hilarious sights, such as an epic Tekken match largely decided by the old faithful sweep-kick to the shins move over and over and over again. There could be value in a show about e-sports professionals playing one another, of course, but it wouldn’t be Go 8-Bit; it would be an altogether more serious affair, and a scene that is already pretty well covered by the online streaming scene rather than television.

The show was, so far as I’m concerned, a resounding success: genuinely amusing, entertaining to watch, even for non-gamers, and just enough tidbits of gaming history to keep enthusiasts happy, too. And best of all, it wasn’t trying to be cool, young, dudebro or in any way hip — it understands that a significant chunk of the gaming audience these days is over 30, perhaps because most of the people involved with it are over 30.

It’s not, by any means, an in-depth documentary about the history of gaming, but it’s not trying to be — it’s simply a new format of show that, as I say, we haven’t really seen anything like since GamesMaster. The only thing I’d change, if anything, would be the slightly cringe-inducing big deal they make out of their rotating stage every time they spin it through 90 degrees so the players can face the game screen at the back of the stage, but that might just be me being a miserable old git.

That aside, it was a great show, and one that I look forward to tuning in to watch each week.

Go 8-Bit is on Dave on Thursday nights at 10pm UK time. You can find out more and watch the recently aired first episode here. (You may need to fiddle around with VPNs and whatnot if you’re watching from outside the UK.)

2420: Gaming History and Archiving

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At the time of writing, the copy of Launchbox on my computer is loaded with over 16,000 games across a number of different platforms ranging from the early days of computing right up until (relatively) recently with some PlayStation 1 titles.

I can happily lose several hours going back through some of these games — particularly those which I used to enjoy when I was young, and which I am now better equipped to fully understand. The advent of the Internet also means that any games which are somewhat obtuse or abstract can be researched easily, which is something we simply didn’t have access to back in the ’80s and early ’90s — many of the games we had on home computer platforms in particular were copies of questionable origin and consequently didn’t have any instructions included, and as such you had to either figure out how to do things yourself or already know how the game worked.

Games were often simpler back then, of course, although there are plenty of examples of titles that pushed their hardware to the limits in an attempt to simulate something with a reasonable degree of accuracy — Sublogic’s Flight Simulator II on the Atari 8-bit springs to mind, as does MicroProse’s submarine simulation Silent Service on the same platform. Even among the simpler titles, though, there are plenty of games whose abstract goals aren’t necessarily very clear, or there might be a few hidden controls on the keyboard the game doesn’t explicitly tell you about — we were in the age of both “joysticks with one button” and “games without tutorials” at this point, remember.

Playing these old games always gets me to thinking, though. While there are a number of websites out there cataloguing and in some cases even hosting dumps of these old games, is anyone doing anything more than saying “this game came out in 19xx, it was released on [platforms]?” Is anyone approaching the subject with a bit more of an eye to historical interpretation, rather than just plain cataloguing and archiving?

Some people out there probably are already, but I feel like it’s time I added my unique perspective to the mix. I feel like this every time I have a conversation with someone where I have the opportunity to bring up games like Star Raiders II and Final Legacy. I want to do something about it.

I’m currently determining the best way to go about it, but I’m very interested in the idea of some sort of project to highlight and explore noteworthy games from history — particularly those on more (relatively) obscure platforms such as the Atari 8-bit and ST. Whether this takes the form of a website, a book (or several books), a series of videos or all of the above is something I haven’t quite determined yet, but while I have some time on my hands it would be something for me to sink my teeth into and keep me occupied, much like MoeGamer has been.

I have some thinking to do, it seems!

2419: Happy Anniversary, Titan Quest

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Titan Quest Anniversary Edition is currently just £5 on Steam, and it’s completely free if you own any other Titan Quest products already. You should go buy it and play it, because I have spent most of the evening doing so and I like it a whole lot.

Titan Quest Anniversary Edition combines the original Titan Quest and its expansion Immortal Throne into one package, cleans the whole shebang up for modern computers — the original came out in 2006, hence the “anniversary” thing — and unleashes it on the world for existing fans and newcomers alike to enjoy.

Having never played Titan Quest, I fell into the latter category. It had just never quite appealed to me for some reason, despite it being the sort of hack and slash loot-whoring game I enjoy coupled with Greek mythology, which I was in love with as a child — and despite the game often being discussed in hushed, reverential whispers any time anyone brought it up.

£5 for a remastered version of the game and its expansion in one complete edition was too good an offer to turn down, though, so I took the plunge and gave it a go, partly to sate my own curiosity and partly to have something to play online with my friend Chris, who had also been going back and forth about whether or not he wanted it.

If you, like me, have never played Titan Quest, here’s the deal. You play a male or female Greek person who initially has no character class. You save a farmer’s horse from being eaten by satyrs, then you embark on a journey to cleanse the land of evil seemingly for no other reason than “because why not”. Your character is given precisely no backstory and no real motivation to do their thing, but in this sort of game that’s probably a good thing. While the lore in the Diablo games is substantial and interesting, its execution in-game leaves a lot to be desired, and in latest installment Diablo III in particular, by far the most enjoyable way to play the game is in “Adventure Mode”, which dispenses with the narrative and linear structure altogether in favour of giving you freedom to go anywhere at any time to chase down various objectives.

Titan Quest doesn’t quite go that far in abandoning the traditional narrative structure — you still progress from “unknown Greek person” to “hero of legend” over the course of the game — but the plot is very much de-emphasised in favour of the excellent mechanics.

At level 2, you unlock a “specialism” — essentially a character class with its own skill tree plus a mastery meter you need to pump skill points into in order to unlock the next “tiers” of skills. (Said meter isn’t entirely useless; each point you put into it gives you a substantial increase to your base stats.) Then at level 8, you unlock another specialism and can start pumping skill points into that as well, allowing you to effectively mix and match skills from two entirely different classes to create your own custom build.

And these classes aren’t your usual warrior-thief-mage trinity, either — they’re all interesting, and all present interesting combinations when combined together. All together, there is a caster type that specialises in cold and electricity; another caster that specialises in fire and earth; a close-range physical attacking type person; a highly defensive physical attacker (who can apparently do some tremendous things with shields later in the game); a tree-hugging hippy that can summon wolves, heal things and infect enemies with plague; a hunter type that is good with bows and spears; and a backstabby thiefy rogue type deal that is good at inflicting pain but not so good at taking it.

The great thing about this system is that you can make a variety of different character types — all together, there are 36 different combinations, each of which has its own unique name. You can combine the Defense and Warfare masteries to create Conqueror, for example, which is a tank that also hits incredibly hard. Or you could combine the Earth and Nature masteries to create Summoner, a character that is able to summon a variety of different minions to do their bidding, including an earth golem, some wolves and a nymph, and be able to sit back, pelt the enemies from a distance and heal their minions as needed.

The combat itself is fundamentally satisfying. Humanoid enemies are thrown around with satisfying ragdoll animation; birds explode in a shower of feathers; skeletons shatter into pieces. The variety of skills mean that there are a lot of different ways you can protect yourself or go on the offensive, too, and so far I haven’t felt like there’s a “bad” combination; with two different masteries, you can either cover the weaknesses of the first with the second, or enhance the first’s strong points with the second.

Then, of course, there’s just something wonderfully enjoyable about hacking and slashing through recognisable creatures from mythology. The game appears to act as pretty much an Ancient Greece’s Greatest Hits, promising confrontations with Medusa, the Hydra and numerous others over the course of the adventure — and I believe you also take a trip to ancient Egypt and China later, too, which opens up possibilities for all manner of interesting confrontations.

I hadn’t expected to like the game quite as much as I did when I booted it up for the first time. But, well, the 5 hours of playtime Steam has already recorded for me — I bought it earlier this evening — probably speaks for itself.

2418: The Bonds of True Friendship

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As someone who, for the most part, tends to put narrative concerns front and centre when considering what to entertain himself with, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that the main thing that draws me to my favourite genre of video game — RPGs — is not the stat-crunching mechanical goodness that goes on behind the scenes (though good mechanics can make a game I’m already emotionally invested in even more satisfying) but the almost overwhelming sense of camaraderie and “all being in it together” that a good ensemble cast brings to the table.

When considering narrative tropes, this sense of comradeship is regarded as “true companions” or sometimes nakama, from a Japanese word that translates to “friend” or “comrade”. Indeed, if you turn the Japanese voices on in many JRPGs, you’ll hear the word nakama used pretty liberally when characters are talking about their friends and travelling companions in the party; it’s a contrast to another Japanese term referring to friendship, tomodachi, which is typically used when talking about friends in a more social, casual manner. To put it crudely, your nakama friends are the ones who travel with you, who will go to the ends of the earth with you, the ones who are closer than family; your tomodachi friends are the ones you go down the pub with once or twice a month and talk about girls or football.

This sense of true companionship is, for me, what defines a great RPG story, and it’s a big part of why I find solitary experiences like Skyrim and Fallout — which, mechanically at least, ought to be right up my alley — so fundamentally unsatisfying: you don’t get that sense of being part of a group of people with complex and interesting relationships.

So with that in mind, I thought I’d share some of my favourite ensemble casts from the past few years. You can probably guess at least one of them.

Neptune and the gang

Yup, you were right! The biggest thing that keeps me coming back to the Neptunia series time after time — and the thing that kept me persevering with the shaky first game in the series — is the wonderful sense of camaraderie between the characters.

Interestingly, Neptunia’s cast can be split into a few different elements, each of which overlap a little and which all have Neptune as their common element.

First up, you have IF and Compa, who will always have an important place in any Neptunia fan’s heart due to them being pretty much the first characters you have a meaningful conversation with in the series. IF and Compa are friends, but also a study in contrasts; IF is somewhat sullen and tsundere (with a secret otaku side) while Compa is feminine, ditzy and honest. They’re good foils for one another, and with the chaotic personality of Neptune in the middle, just these three make for a good cast by themselves, and indeed a significant portion of the original Hyperdimension Neptunia consisted of just these three core cast members fighting alongside one another.

Then you have the more well-known faces of the series, the CPUs Blanc, Noire and Vert. These were introduced in the original Hyperdimension Neptunia almost as antagonistic characters, but over time their personalities have softened somewhat, and the four of them (including Neptune) have become very close friends with one another. Once again, they work as a group because of how they contrast with one another. Noire is determined and driven to a fault, but secretly wishes for close friendships; Vert likes to play the older sister but in many ways is one of the most immature of the group, often disappearing for days at a time to indulge in her hobbies rather than doing her job; Blanc, meanwhile, despite her youthful appearance, seems calm and mature until something — it doesn’t take much — attracts her ire, at which point she becomes a devastating force of fury.

mk2 onwards introduced the sisters of the CPUs to the series, and again, they made heavy use of contrast to make them stand out from one another. Neptune’s sister Nepgear, for example, is the opposite of Neptune in almost every way: she’s smart where Neptune is dim; she’s articulate where Neptune tends to let her mouth run away with herself; yet she’s timid where Neptune is (over)confident. Blanc’s twin sisters Rom and Rom contrast both with each other and with Blanc, with Rom being quiet and shy, while Ram is loud and rambunctious. And Noire’s sister Uni, in her own way, contrasts with the rest of the group altogether by actually being similar to her sister — a little too similar at times, so closely does she follow in her sister’s footsteps.

All together, you have a substantial ensemble cast with a variety of contrasting character types. They often clash with one another, as contrasting personalities tend to do, but their shared hardships and common goals bring them together time after time. The particularly dark mk2/Re;Birth2 story is arguably the catalyst for their closeness, thanks to the especially unpleasant events that occur therein, but by now their relationship has grown so close that each new Neptunia game feels like being reunited with a group of old friends. It’s a delight.

The Witcher

The Witcher series is an unusual case in that they’re not party-based RPGs, but they nonetheless carry a strong sense of camaraderie, friendship and even romance between their major characters. This is helped along in part by the fact that the games are based on some already extensive pre-existing lore from the original novels, but even if you’re unfamiliar with the source material, The Witcher’s relationships are a real highlight of the whole experience.

For starters, despite protagonist Geralt usually working alone for each of the games, there’s a strong sense of comradeship between him and his fellow School of the Wolf witchers, some of the last remaining witchers in the world. Months or even years can pass between them seeing one another in some instances, but when they do meet up with one another, it’s like no time has passed. The Witcher 3 in particular plays with this delightfully in a scene where Geralt and his witcher buddies get absolutely hammered before going to try on the fancy outfits of sorceress Yennefer, Geralt’s significant other (or onetime squeeze, depending on how you’ve chosen to play that particular subplot out) and play with her megascope. In game terms, it’s utterly irrelevant to the main plot and doesn’t give you any mechanical benefits, but it’s a beautifully captured moment that emphasises the fact that despite the work of witchers typically being solitary, they, too, still have need of the ties of friendship.

Then there are the recurring characters like Dandelion the bard and Zoltan Chivay the, um, dwarf. These characters show up throughout the novels and all three games, and their relationship with Geralt is likewise one of close friendship and trust. Indeed, the bond between Dandelion and Geralt is so seemingly close that all the in-game journal entries tracking your quests are written not from Geralt’s perspective or even that of an omniscient third-person non-participant narrator, but as if Dandelion is narrating Geralt’s tale in the past tense to an eager audience. It’s a nice touch.

The Witcher prides itself on shades of grey, though, and this is true for Geralt’s relationships, too. In The Witcher 3 in particular, Geralt will come into contact with a number of people with whom he’s had dealings in the past, many of whom will seem like unquestionable friends if you’re unfamiliar with their history. Yet depending on the choices you make and Geralt’s subsequent actions, their relationships can take some very surprising — sometimes tragic — turns. The arc with former spymaster Dijkstra in The Witcher 3 is particularly interesting to see play out.

The Witcher, then, definitely has an ensemble cast of the kind I find particularly appealing, even if they’re not all there obediently running along behind Geralt for the whole game. In the case of The Witcher 3 in particular, it’s proof positive that it’s more than possible for the Western open-world RPG to pull off this sense of “true companionship” — even without a persistent party — and that Bethesda should consider trying a bit harder in this regard with future Elder Scrolls and Fallout games.

Tales of Xillia

Two of my favourite RPGs in recent years were Tales of Xillia and its sequel, and the strong ties between the party members in those games are what made those games special for me.

The first Xillia had two overlapping storylines that were mostly identical apart from their very beginning and a significant chunk in the middle. The two protagonists were Jude, a somewhat idealistic young medical student who gets swept up in a series of rather peculiar events, and Milla, a mysterious young woman who claims to be the earthly incarnation of the deity Maxwell.

The journey through the two Xillias is very long, but its epic nature works to its benefit, because it allows us to get to know the two protagonists and the party members they gather around them very well indeed. There’s Jude’s childhood friend Leia, who is clumsy but charming; there’s butler Rowen, who turns out to be a highly regarded former general; there’s the cynical mercenary Alvin who seems like a pleasant enough “big brother” type but is clearly hiding something; and there’s young girl Elize, who captures the feeling of a young girl being alone in the world and finally finding people who understand her perfectly.

Xillia’s cast works because of the game’s frequent use of “skits”, where action stops for a moment and the party members have a quick chat about something. This might be important to the plot, or it might be seemingly irrelevant information, but all of it is essential to the characterisation of the group as a whole. In the first game in particular, Milla is the centrepiece of the group, and we come to understand the world of Rieze Maxia through her eyes, with her party members explaining and supporting her along the way. That said, Milla isn’t a helpless waif by any means; on the contrary, on more than one occasion her companions have to hold her back from getting a little too inappropriate with her explorations of life among the humans.

Xillia 2 takes an unusual step in this day and age by actually being a direct sequel to the first game. All the characters from the original make a reappearance, along with a couple of new ones — just enough to keep it feeling a bit different from the original, while still familiar and recognisable as a continuation of the same story. Interestingly, Xillia 2 introduces a new protagonist named Ludger, and for your first playthrough he’s an almost entirely silent protagonist, his contributions mostly being limited to grunts and gasps. (Calm down.) There is a narrative-related reason for this that I shan’t spoil for you here, but the use of a silent protagonist is also often a way of making the player feel like “they” are in the world rather than just controlling a character who isn’t them.

Regardless of the reasons for his silence, Ludger forms a suitable nucleus for the party in much the same way as Milla did in the first Xillia game, and once again we’re treated to a variety of enjoyable skits on a variety of subjects, both plot-relevant and inconsequential. By the end of the two games, you really feel like you’ve been on a lengthy journey with a group of people who have come to be close friends.

Persona 3 and 4

Shin Megami Tensei purists may thumb their nose at the later installments in the Persona series, but for me the thing that made them special to me is their strong emphasis on the bonds between people.

In both Persona 3 and 4, these bonds take many forms. They might be the bond between the protagonist and a member of an extracurricular club he attends, who gradually grows comfortable enough to open up a bit about their own concerns. Or they might be the bond between party members who come to understand one another as events start spiralling out of control around them.

In Persona 4 this latter case is particularly true, given that the majority of the dungeons are themed around one of the characters confronting their “true self” and admitting something that they would previously rather keep quiet about for one reason or another. The game goes to some surprisingly daring places in terms of subject matter, though it also leaves a few bits and pieces just ambiguous enough for you to come to your own interpretation of what you just witnessed.

Like Xillia, one of the biggest strengths of both Persona 3 and Persona 4 is the sheer amount of time their respective quests take — and the fact that, in both games, you can actually see how much virtual time you’ve spent in the world thanks to the ever-present readout of the in-game date, which also acts as a reminder that each month, you are on a tight deadline to ensure things don’t go horribly wrong for someone you know.

The sheer amount of time you spend with the characters in both Persona 3 and 4 coupled with the game’s setting in a school and its surroundings means that you really come to think of these characters as friends by the end of the game. This makes a relatively minor aspect of Persona 4’s ending, where you leave on a train and see all the people whose lives you touched standing on the platform to see you off, incredibly touching and borderline heartbreaking. It is likely no coincidence that one of the most frequently heard pieces of music on the soundtrack is called Heartbeat, Heartbreak.

The Witch and the Hundred Knight

This is an unusual one in that it’s an action RPG in which you play a distinctly non-human silent protagonist and don’t actually have a party gathered around you at all times, but nonetheless it manages to have that strong sense of “true companions”, with numerous characters who go through significant developmental arcs over the course of the complete narrative.

In The Witch and the Hundred Knight, you play the Hundred Knight, a mythological creature that turned out to be a bit disappointing in the flesh. You were summoned by the witch Metallia, who lives by herself in a swamp and is pretty much a psychopath. Your stated aim at the outset of the game is to spread Metallia’s swamp across the land so she is able to move freely and dominate the world — she can’t go far from her swamp — but over time things become much, much more complex.

The Hundred Knight, despite being the playable protagonist, is in many ways the least important part of the plot, though his actions do serve as the catalyst for most of the major plot beats throughout the narrative. Instead, the story is about Metallia: why she is so angry, why she is so violent — and why she is so sad. The tale itself features some gut-wrenchingly horrible moments to depict Metallia’s seemingly “beyond redemption” status, but her growth as a character across the entire narrative — a process witnessed and helped along by a young cursed noblewoman called Visco, who eventually becomes very important to Metallia — and the three possible finales, none of which can be called particularly “happy”, makes for a game that takes the unusual step of being an outright tragedy in terms of its narrative.

The story works, once again, because of the close bonds between the characters. We see how horrible Metallia is at the beginning of the game, and we see how poorly she treats Visco. But we see how Visco keeps coming back for more, obviously seeing something in Metallia that others don’t, and we see how Metallia, despite continuing to be foul-mouthed and aggressive, softens a little as she realises that she is developing feelings of friendship — arguably more — for this young woman cursed with the face of a dog. I shan’t spoil the “bad” ending (which is actually the most significant ending, despite the game’s terminology) but suffice to say the Metallia at the end of the game is a completely different person from the one at the beginning, and as the Hundred Knight, we’ve been there to see that whole process.

Fairy Fencer F

And perhaps most relevantly, given that I’m still playing through it at the moment, I was delighted to discover that Fairy Fencer F has a wonderful ensemble cast, too — and despite its aesthetic similarities to the Neptunia series thanks to artist Tsunako on character design duty, it has an overall darker tone to its stablemate, allowing for its characters to share hardships and sadness as well as good times with one another.

Like Neptunia, FFF’s cast can be split into a number of components. There’s the core cast of playable characters who centre around protagonist Fang, who is initially lazy and cynical, but later turns out to be far more responsible and caring than he would care to admit. Then each of these characters has a companion fairy, who form a sub-cast of their own who are usually with their human partners, but sometimes get the chance to do things by themselves. Then there’s a cast of villains, too, but without spoiling too much, let’s just say that on the Goddess route, at least — the narrative path that comprised the original Fairy Fencer F, rather than one of the two new ones introduced for the PlayStation 4 version — the lines between “good” and “evil” are frequently blurred to quite a significant degree.

An crucial moment at the midpoint of Fairy Fencer F carries more emotional weight than I’ve ever seen from a Compile Heart game, eschewing the company’s usually breezy comedy and satire — both of which are present in Fairy Fencer F when appropriate, make no mistake — in the name of something truly awful happening as a catalyst for one of the three subsequent divergent narrative paths that follow. This moment only works because of the first half of the game, in which we get to know Fang and his ragtag group of companions very well indeed, and because of its sharp, surprising contrast with what we, the player, had been led to expect would happen at that point in the story.

I haven’t yet seen how things turn out. I can guess, but given that this game has already surprised me more than once with the direction its narrative takes — mostly with regard to how dark it gets at times — I’m not going to believe it until I actually see it. It’s been an enjoyable journey so far, though, so I’m looking forward to seeing how it ends. And then seeing the other two ways in which it ends after that.

2417: The Steam Shmup Sale

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There’s a sale running on Steam right now, centred around shoot ’em ups in the classic mould. You can see the full list here, but here are a few selections that I can personally recommend:

ESCHATOS

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The follow-up to Judgement Silversword (which is also worth a go, and available in a bundle with ESCHATOS) is a Raiden-style shoot ’em up (i.e. non-bullet hell) that unfolds over the course of several stages, taking you from an Earth-like planet, into space and finally into the bowels of an alien world. It’s a spectacular, thrilling journey, presented in uncomplicated but nonetheless impressive 3D polygonal visuals but playing from a top-down perspective.

ESCHATOS has a couple of ways to play depending on how complex you like your shmups. For my money, the simpler mode is actually a more enjoyable way to play — this doesn’t involve any powering up of your weapons and simply requires that you defeat complete waves of enemies without missing any to build up your score multiplier. The higher the difficulty you play on, the higher the multiplier can go (and the faster it rises), so for the highest scores you need to take on the toughest challenges the game offers.

ESCHATOS has a fantastic soundtrack, fluid graphics with some wonderful setpieces, and gameplay to die for. If you’re a shmup fan, this should without question be a part of your collection.

Deathsmiles

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Regarded as one of Cave’s more accessible bullet-hell shooters, Deathsmiles is a horizontally scrolling affair for one or two players where you take on the role of one (or two) of several different goth loli chicks, each of whom handle slightly differently. You can shoot in both directions using either a rapid-fire shot, a charged beam or a lock-on laser, and advanced players will need to learn which attack should be used for which enemy, since the scores and collectible items they yield vary according to how they were dispatched. If you’re a shmup beginner, mind, you can ignore this aspect of the game completely and just try to get through the game, because that’s challenging enough in itself.

Deathsmiles has a gorgeous Gothic rock soundtrack a la Castlevania, some varied levels and some brilliant boss fights, culminating in a battle against the spectacularly named “Tyrannosatan” accompanied by Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue. There’s a lot of hidden depth to the scoring system once you get your head around the bullet patterns, and variable difficulty settings that you can change on the fly between levels help give it some longevity. It’s one of Cave’s finest games, and well worth a look.

Savant Ascent

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Based around the music of electronica artist Savant, Savant Ascent casts you in the role of a masked alchemist who has to make his way up a tower to defeat the weird… thing that has manifested at the top. It’s a twin-stick shooter with a twist — in each of the game’s battlefields, the character can only stand in preset places, with pushing directions on the stick moving him from one to the other either by rolling or jumping between them.

The “Story” mode in the game lasts about five minutes and is easily beaten, but the meat of the game comes in the modes that unlock afterwards. Time Attack throws you into a horde of enemies and challenges you to 1) survive and 2) complete the game as quickly as possible. Endless, meanwhile, simply tasks you with surviving for as long as possible.

Longevity in the game comes through score attack and collectible CDs of Savant tracks, each of which unlocks a new gameplay element. What initially appears to be a very simple twin-stick shooter gradually unlocks new depths as you collect more of the CDs and progress further. It’s a beautifully presented game, too, with lovely graphics and a thumping soundtrack courtesy of Savant, obviously.

Horizon Shift

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An interesting twist on the genre, Horizon Shift is presented in a minimalist Geometry Wars fashion, with simple controls and visuals, a thumping soundtrack and immensely challenging gameplay.

Your job in Horizon Shift is to protect your “horizon”, a line dividing the screen into two halves. Your ship can face either up or down, and you can use this ability to dodge bullets, since only bullets on the same side as your ship can destroy you. Your ship can also jump and double-jump, providing another means for avoiding projectiles on the occasions when the “horizon” disappears and requires you to face in one direction only.

Enemies in Horizon Shift are a combination of kamikaze types that destroy part of your horizon when they hit it — meaning you’ll have to jump the gaps or die — and enemies that spew bullets at you. Blasting any type of enemy builds up a chain bonus, and unleashing a smart bomb (which must also be charged by killing enemies) allows you to “bank” this chain bonus; conversely, dying loses the chain bonus altogether.

Horizon Shift has a cool aesthetic, with simplistic visuals in the foreground and a busy but low-brightness backgrounds that evolves as you play through the game. Particularly cool (and cheesy) is the giant laughing “skull” face that dominates the background any time you’re fighting a boss.

Shmups Skill Test

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Blend WarioWare with a shoot ’em up and you have Shmups Skill Test, a short, quick-fire game that challenges you to complete several minigames in succession, then humiliates you about your lack of skill afterwards.

Minigames vary from the delightfully named “TANK TANK TANK TANK TANK” — in which there are lots of tanks to shoot — to one where you have to precisely shoot timebombs off the side of a rocket without blowing the rocket up, and all of them are very challenging indeed, with the possible exception of the one where you have to shoot tin cans (in space) into a giant waste-paper basket (in space) to “save the earth”.

After you’re finished, you’re given a breakdown of your skills, a comparison to the online average rating and your “gamer age” is calculated a la Brain Age on the Nintendo DS — the lower the better.

This game is hard, but it has a lot of staying power thanks to a variety of minigames, online leaderboards and support for up to four-player competitive play. Plus, as its name suggests, it’s actually good training for the various skills modern shmups demand of you.

2416: I Was Right

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Back in 2014, when I was still somewhat raw from being let go from USgamer (hell, I still am somewhat raw from being let go from USgamer, assholes) I happened to have the misfortune to stumble across the site’s review of the PlayStation 3 version of Compile Heart’s RPG Fairy Fencer F, a game which combined the art of Tsunako (best known for her work on the Neptunia series for Compile Heart) with contributions from Final Fantasy veterans Yoshitaka Amano (concept art) and Nobuo Uematsu (music).

The review (which you can find archived here if you’re curious) struck me as doing the game a tremendous disservice, because it spent most of its time telling the readers how awful Idea Factory are in the writer’s eyes — even going so far as to say they had supposedly been nicknamed “Idea Fuck” (seriously, you couldn’t come up with anything better?) — and talking very little about the game.

I wasn’t happy. I hadn’t played Fairy Fencer F myself at that point, but I’d played enough of Compile Heart’s previous work by that point to know that, while their productions were inevitably low-budget and low-tech compared to the Final Fantasies of the world, their work consistently had a huge amount of soul to it that shone through via the writing, the character designs and their snappy, often biting use of satire and parody. They knew who their audience was, and they designed games to appeal to that audience.

I’m using the past tense, but all this is still true two years later, the only difference being that they’ve jumped into the next generation of games consoles and are now making games that run at frame rates more in line with what we tend to expect from modern games.

Anyway, I had a feeling that the Fairy Fencer F review on USgamer was unfair to the game, and playing through a substantial chunk of its new PlayStation 4 incarnation Advent Dark Force — which includes the original game, plus two extra narrative routes, all tarted up with some enhanced game mechanics such as a larger party size — I can indeed confirm that said review was not only unfair, it was also just plain inaccurate in places, too.

Shall we pick it apart? Sure, I’m feeling petty and vindictive right now, so why not.

“During the last console generation, we had some serious fears that the Japanese-developed RPG would soon be a thing of the past.”

Uh, no. I believe I’ve previously covered this in detail, but it bears saying again: JRPGs never went anywhere. However, what did happen was that the companies developing these sprawling epics didn’t have the time or the resources to keep up with technology so much as some other genres that favour shorter, more focused experiences that can be designed more easily around spectacular setpieces. Consequently, they became regarded as “niche” — and developers, recognising this, started to develop for this niche rather than for the mass market.

Said niche had considerable overlap with the otaku community, who enjoyed Japanese animation and manga for a variety of reasons — the complex, intertwining storylines; the strong characterisation; the distinctive character design; and, yes, sometimes being sexually provocative or even explicit. These were people who knew what they enjoyed in their entertainment and were willing to pay considerable amounts of money to demonstrate their love for their favourite franchises. So why not capitalise on that?

“Thankfully, history proved our anxieties false — take a look at the 3DS’ library and you’ll see one of the best JRPG collections known to humankind.”

I have to take issue with this. The 3DS, while a good platform, is not the place to go if you want JRPGs. Off the top of my head, I actually can’t think of all that many. Off the top of my head: Fire Emblem Awakening and Fates, Bravely Default, the upcoming Dragon Quest VII, Monster Hunter, Etrian Odyssey and… any more? Possibly a MegaTen game in there somewhere? The situation is similar even when you throw in backward compatibility with the DS, though admittedly you can add several excellent Dragon Quests and Final Fantasy III to the list in this case.

Compare with its contemporary the Vita, which has multiple Neptunia games, Dungeon Travelers 2 (one of, if not the greatest dungeon crawler ever created), Criminal Girls, Trails of Cold Steel, Ys: Memories of Celceta, Persona 4 Golden, Stranger of Sword City, Demon Gaze, Ray Gigant, Final Fantasy X/X-2 and numerous others — not to mention backward compatibility with the PSP’s astronomical library of fantastic JRPGs including the Disgaea series, all of the Final Fantasies up to IX, Trails in the Sky, multiple Ys games, Persona 1, 2 and 3 and all manner of other goodies.

You want JRPGs, you don’t buy a 3DS. You buy a Vita. (And then maybe a 3DS as well, because what JRPGs it does have are good stuff.)

“Even in the hand-wringingest days of JRPG doom and gloom, one group managed to quietly pump out console game after console game without garnering much attention: Compile Heart, a developer that mainly specialises in role-playing experiences for the anime crowd. So why didn’t we ever hail this company as saviours of this once-distressed genre? Well, their games just aren’t very good.”

We’ve covered above why it was a natural evolution for RPG makers to court the anime crowd. The article itself covers why they tend to be low-budget experiences by noting that “Japanese developers may struggle to produce 40-60 hour RPGs with HD assets — as would any developer”.

Aren’t very good, though? Hmm. I’ll give you that their earlier work was of noticeably lower quality than what they’re putting out now — the difference between the original Hyperdimension Neptunia and even its first sequel Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 is astronomical — but they still had that core charm about them. They spoke to the player. They worked within their limitations.

And, more importantly, with each and every new release, Compile Heart has improved and refined its work. Every Neptunia release has been superior to the last — they even went back and rewrote mk2 and Victory using the new Re;Birth engine on Vita and PC, and MegaDimension Neptunia V-II is a quantum leap forward for the series. A modern Compile Heart game is virtually unrecognisable from one of five years ago.

But, sure, let’s write off their whole catalogue as “not very good.”

“There’s a reason their parent company, Idea Factory, is affectionately known by the nickname ‘Idea Fuck’ by those who understand their M.O.”

I have literally never seen this anywhere on the Internet except in this article.

“It seems Compile Heart may be aware of their less-than-stellar reputation…”

The people who keep buying the Neptunia series time after time — the people who cause Idea Factory International to sell out of limited editions every time a new Neptunia game comes out — would like a word with you.

“…since their latest RPG to hit the States, Fairy Fencer F, carries two extremely well-known names: Nobuo Uematsu and Yoshitaka Amano, two men who defined the look and sound of Final Fantasy until the early ’00s. Unfortunately, their material doesn’t rise above Compile Heart’s house style — sink some time into the game, and you wouldn’t have guessed these two massive talents contributed a single song or sketch.”

I’d agree that Amano’s influence isn’t particularly recognisable in the game itself — but I’d also argue that the vast majority of games in the Final Fantasy series don’t make particularly strong use of Amano’s art, either; when it is included in the form of character portraits and suchlike, it’s immensely jarring with the rest of the visual style. The PSP port of Final Fantasy II, for example, features immensely distracting character portraits in the dialogue window, in which protagonist Firion looks uncannily like Murray Crofts, the boy who used to sit behind me in Year 7 tutor group, and who was a complete wanker. Thankfully, you can turn them off.

Uematsu’s influence, however, is immediately apparent if you’ve ever listened to any of his work with The Black Mages or Earthbound Papas. Fairy Fencer F features numerous heavy rock numbers that are strongly reminiscent of Uematsu’s work with his various bands, and each track is melodic and catchy, just like Uematsu’s most well-known themes from Final Fantasy.

“At first, I assumed the inclusion of these two greats meant Compile Hearts [sic] wanted to forge a new path with their RPGs, but Fairy Fencer F is basically indistinguishable from anything else they’ve produced for the PlayStation 3 — meaning it’s pretty lousy.”

As I noted before, play Trinity Universe, then Hyperdimension Neptunia, then Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, then Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, then Fairy Fencer F, and you’ll see a developer that knows how to hone and refine its style. While some might argue you should probably get it right first time rather than evolve gradually over the course of several games, Trinity Universe and Hyperdimension Neptunia aren’t actually bad games in their own right, and everything that’s come since has improved on what they put in place — or in some cases, like Omega Quintet, completely wiped the slate clean and started again.

“At least Compile Heart seems to understand just what kind of game they’re making. Fairy Fencer F opens with your standard RPG premise: the unassuming hero must collect X number of magic somethings to seal away some great evil. Unlike RPGs that go to great lengths to pad out their extremely basic premises with hundreds of thousands of words, Fencer F [sic] drops the basics of the plot into your lap, and doesn’t feel the need to focus on elaborate lore or world-building… there’s not really a story worth telling here, so Compile Heart keeps the narrative mercifully brief.”

Fairy Fencer F opens in media res with aforementioned unassuming hero Fang locked in prison for stealing food. After escaping, we flash back to three days earlier, when he pulls a “Fury” out of the ground, thus releasing the fairy within, who takes the form of a girl called Eryn. Those who draw Furies in this way form an unbreakable bond with their fairies, and said fairies come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from Eryn’s adolescent appearance to giant robots, small cat-like creatures and rather overbearing matronly types.

Eryn realises that she has few memories about her past life from before Fang pulled the Fury out of the ground, but knows the legends behind the Goddess and the Vile God, who were sealed away by the Furies after they had a great battle with one another that threatened to devastate the world. It is said that whoever collects all of the Furies — there are over a hundred of them — will be able to wake the Goddess, and whoever wakes the Goddess will be able to have one wish granted. Fang, realising he is stuck with Eryn whether he likes it or not, begrudgingly agrees to assist her in the quest for her lost memories, but the two quickly become great friends, albeit friends who bicker all the time.

Not long after the story opens, Fang and Eryn encounter a mysterious young woman called Tiara, who initially poisons Fang with paralytic tea and makes off with the Fury he and Eryn were pursuing. She subsequently gets caught by a low-level hoodlum (who, in Compile Heart’s trademark satirical style, is well aware that he is a low-level hoodlum that “always shows up at times like this”) and rescued by Fang and Eryn, against their better judgement. Reluctantly forgiving her for her earlier transgression when it transpires she, too, is seeking the Furies to have a wish granted — world peace, in her case, though it becomes apparent there’s something more to her than meets the eye — they team up to continue their quest.

All this takes place in the first hour or so. Don’t tell me this has a throwaway plot, particularly with some of the surprisingly emotional moments later in the narrative.

“In terms of gameplay, Fairy Fencer F feels like a low-rent Tales of game.”

Fairy Fencer F plays nothing like a Tales of game. Tales of games feature zone-based open-world design — you can run from one end of the world to another — while Fairy Fencer F features an overall world map (much like the Neptunia games) and discrete dungeons within, some of which are story-relevant, others of which are purely for grinding or item acquisition purposes. Tales of games feature real-time action game-style combat; Fairy Fencer F features entirely turn-based combat.

“Its battle system tries to incorporate some action-y elements, but they only serve to create the illusion of complexity. Enemy encounters work via a turn-based system, where you’re given a limited range to move (without any sort of time restriction) and the chance to perform a single action.”

Yes, that is how turn-based games work. However, it does not incorporate any action-y elements whatsoever. The closest it gets is with the “launch/pursue” system of moves, where one attack knocking an enemy in the air can be made more effective if followed up by a move specifically designed for “pursuing” an airborne enemy, but there’s no timed button-presses here; a launched enemy goes into slow motion so you have ample time to press the next attack button. Theoretically, you could miss it, but you’d have to be pretty much paralysed from the neck down to do so, in which case you’d probably have trouble pressing the attack button in the first place.

“Outside of area of effect spells and abilities, your location on the battlefield doesn’t really matter.”

YOU LITERALLY JUST SAID WHY YOUR LOCATION ON THE BATTLEFIELD MATTERS.

“Attack the side or back of an enemy and you’ll do the exact same amount of damage as if you attacked it from the front.”

Wrong. This system has been in place since Neptunia mk2. You’re also more likely to hit an enemy’s back or sides.

“I guess it’s possible to coordinate your location around enemy attacks, but since there’s no way to tell their movement range, or what action they’ll be taking next, the game gives no compelling reason to do anything other than attack.”

Okay. Let me explain a bit about Fairy Fencer F’s battle system. Each character is a Fencer equipped with the Fury whose fairy they formed a bond with. This means you can’t buy new weapons throughout the game, but you can upgrade the one you have with new moves and even give it the ability to transform into other forms.

Damage in Fairy Fencer F has numerous different types — sword, greatsword, axe, scythe, gun, spear, glaive and knuckles — as well as elemental affinities. These all matter a great deal. Attacking an enemy with a damage type they are weak to reduces their Guard gauge — initially hidden, but the character Harley who joins your party later is able to make it visible. When the Guard gauge breaks two things happen: the enemy temporarily takes more damage from physical skills (i.e. not the combo moves you unleash when you hit “attack” and various button combinations) and magic spells, and the possibility of an “Avalanche Attack” occurs, allowing any characters who are adjacent in the turn order to get a number of “free” attacks on the enemy before taking their actual turn.

Enemies have damage types and elemental affinities, too, and equipping each character with supplementary fairies can affect these stats significantly, to such a degree that a character could be easily one-shot if they have a negative resistance to an element an enemy specialises in, or take no damage at all if their resistance is high enough.

As for not knowing how far enemies can move or what they’re going to do, well, just like in every other RPG, you have to watch what they do for a couple of turns, then figure out the best way to deal with them.

On top of all that, enemies can generally hit multiple characters with a single attack, so once again, your position matters — keeping your party spread out but within close enough range of each other to be able to heal/buff as necessary is essential.

Nothing to do but attack, sure.

“Character progression in Fairy Fencer F offers some different ways to tailor your party, though it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. Your team can equip Furies — think of them as Final Fantasy materia or espers — which brings them new abilities and stat boosts over time, and battles yield a resource called WP, which can be spent to upgrade parameters and buy new spells and abilities.”

This isn’t quite right, either, though this is not surprising by this point. You can’t equip Furies; each character’s Fury is fixed. You can, however, equip fairies that you acquire from the Furies you collect, and these level up independently from the characters, increasing the stats they boost further as well as unlocking a number of passive abilities that range from adjusting the “wearer’s” elemental resistances to boosting their HP at the end of combat.

WP, meanwhile, are used to upgrade the character’s Fury by boosting its base stats (physical attack and defense, magical attack and defense, range, combo length and the degree of stat boost they get while in “Fury Form”, a transformed incarnation similar to Neptunia’s HDD form). WP are also used to learn new combo moves (including different weapon types if desired — each Fury can transform into four different forms), physical skills and magic spells as well as passive abilities. Each character has their own unique loadout of possible abilities to learn and don’t learn any passively as they level up; their development is entirely up to you. So while their endgame forms might be identical to one another from one playthrough to the next, their early game forms might be completely different.

“It’s all your standard RPG stuff, though Fairy Fencer has one interesting idea, even if it’s pretty basic: once upgraded, your Furies can be placed on any location with enemy encounters, and grant these areas bonuses and penalties. I wanted to level up faster, so I stuck my Fury with a 30% experience point boost on a dungeon — though this boost also came with an effect that lowered my defense by 10%. A neat idea, but it’s ultimately drowned out by Fairy Fencer F’s surrounding blandness.”

This part neglects to mention that it is possible to overlap these “World Shaping” effects, as they are called, in order to potentially nullify any negative effects you might get. For example, overlap the aforementioned “EXP +30%/P-DEF -10%” with a “P-DEF +10% / M-ATK -10%” and you nullify the penalty to your defense, taking a hit to your magic attack instead. If your party is set up for physical attacks, you’re all good.

The further you progress in the game, the higher the “rank” of the Furies you obtain, too. C-rank Furies generally have one moderately good benefit and one moderately bad drawback. B-rank Furies generally have one very good benefit and one very bad drawback. A-rank Furies tend to have three effects — a combination of at least one excellent benefit and one pretty bad drawback and one other thing. S-rank Furies, meanwhile, which are understandably rare, have no drawbacks at all.

There are some interesting “risk and reward” mechanics at play here. Do you want to boost your experience point and WP gain by a considerable amount but have all damage (taken by you and the enemy) doubled in the process? Do you think you can get through a dungeon with your physical attack skills locked? Do you think you can survive without the ability to restore your HP, or heal status effects? The Furies provide the opportunity for interesting challenges, none of which fundamentally break the game but which often demand you think about things slightly differently. And, outside of stabbing them into the ground to unlock dungeons when they first appear, their use is entirely optional, too.

Oh, and the more you stab into the ground, the taller the secret dungeon gets, too, up to a maximum of 40 floors.

“The biggest issue affecting Fairy Fencer F, though, has to be its astounding lack of polish. Developers have been making PS3 games for nearly a decade, so it’s unclear why Compile Heart can’t squeeze a good frame rate out of an RPG with assets that don’t look more complex than what you’d find on the PS2.”

I’ll give you this one, with a caveat. Frame rates in Compile Heart games on PS3 suck. They’re outperformed by the Vita versions, for heaven’s sake. However, with the PS4-based Advent Dark Force (along with its stablemates Omega Quintet and MegaDimension Neptunia V-II), this is no longer an issue, with the framerate remaining (mostly) stable at 60.

As for this looking like a PS2 game, that’s a lazy criticism. Fairy Fencer F isn’t pushing lots of polygons around, but it has some interesting environments with nice background details, and the character and monster models reflect their 2D counterparts nicely. There may be a couple of PS2 games that looked on a similar standard — Dark Chronicle springs to mind — but on the whole, I think you think PS2 games looked a lot better than they actually did.

As for the 2D art… oh, God, the 2D art. Compile Heart’s games have gorgeous 2D art. Tsunako’s influence on Fairy Fencer F gives it more than a passing Neptunia resemblance at times, but there’s enough unique about the aesthetic to make it clear it is its own game with its own identity.

“While Fairy Fencer relies on 2D assets to tell most of its story, it does so artlessly, sliding around body parts like the cheapest of ancient Internet Flash animation.”

Fairy Fencer F uses Live2D, a system whereby 2D artwork can be wrapped around a 3D mesh to provide very smooth animation, particularly for smaller, more subtle movements like breathing or a shake of the head. Compared to many visual novels with completely static character sprites (this isn’t a criticism!), Fairy Fencer F’s characters are positively lively, and their subtle animations are complemented by spot-on lipsyncing, too.

“After playing more than 35 hours of Danganronpa 2, which understood its limited assets required a stylish approach, Fairy Fencer bored me with its lack of flair.”

Fairy Fencer F has a pretty distinctive style that admittedly overlaps somewhat with how Neptunia does things. Tsunako art + Live2D + occasional event scenes with light animation. It may not be as in-your-face “stylish” as Danganronpa (which admittedly sets a pretty high bar for distinctive game aesthetics), but it’s certainly immediately recognisable and does the job without distractions and without trying too hard.

“I’d really like Compile Heart to surprise me one of these days…”

Then maybe don’t start reviews by saying all their games aren’t very good. Try going into one with an open mind. Try actually engaging with the characters and getting involved with the plot — put yourselves in the shoes of someone who would enjoy it, even if you don’t, and ask yourself why they find Compile Heart’s games so appealing. Because for all your moaning, they’re still making games, and people are still buying them.

“They seem pretty content to keep churning out these dull, low-budget RPGs, which usually come with a healthy does of pandering to distract players from their lack of quality and originality.”

There it is! You didn’t think it’d be possible to go through an entire review of a Japanese game without whining about “pandering”, did you?

Let’s not forget the target market for these games: otaku game fans, who are used to seeing heavily stylised characters in a variety of cool situations, including provocative, sexualised scenarios, like it or not. Fairy Fencer F, as it happens, is pretty light on the sexytimes, with only one early scene with Harley taking her trousers off springing to mind, and this is played for laughs and as a reference to Harley’s slovenly, shameless personality rather than as wank-bank material.

“And, in a world with so many other RPGs to play, it’s hard to understand why anyone would waste their time on something as stale as Fairy Fencer F.“

Why waste your time on anything? Do you always pick the movie with the biggest budget? The most expensive thing on the menu? Read the bestselling book? No; sometimes it pays to have a look at the smaller-scale stuff out there — the indie movies, the burger joint around the corner, the novel by your friend — and you might just be pleasantly surprised if you go in with an open mind.

“But I’ll give it this: It sure gets an ‘A’ for alliteration.”

E for effort. Try again.