#oneaday Day 125: Don’t forget the text

I’m currently playing through the Silent Hill 2 remake and absolutely loving it. I was uneasy about the prospect of one of my favourite games of all time getting the remake treatment, but I’m pleased to confirm that Bloober Team absolutely, completely and definitely 100% understood the assignment, and have done a fabulous job.

I haven’t yet finished it, though, so I’m not going to write about it (likely on MoeGamer) until then. What I did want to comment on was a more general observation about modern games, of which Silent Hill 2 just happens to be the most recent example.

And that observation — more of a question, really — is this: what happened to descriptive text?

In the original Silent Hill 2, lest you’re unfamiliar, walking up to anything vaguely important-looking and pressing the “action” button would prompt a short text description, implied to be “thought” by the protagonist, at the bottom of the screen.

The most commonly seen couplet in all of Silent Hill 2 was “It looks like the lock is broken. I can’t open it,” close friend of its 32-bit predecessor “The lock is jammed. This door can’t be opened.” This occurred any time you attempted to open a door that would lead to a room which wasn’t relevant to the game — rather than waste time and dev resources on rendering rooms that had no relevance to what was going on, potentially confusing players in the process, we instead had about a zillion “broken locks”. It was silly, but at least it made things absolutely clear that this door was not going to open at any point in the game.

In the Silent Hill 2 remake, meanwhile, you open doors just by walking into them, as in most modern games that use realistic visuals. All well and good, until you reach either a locked or “broken lock” (irrelevant) door, at which point protagonist James just sort of bumps into it like he’s slightly drunk. No text on screen, and no indication as to whether you’re dealing with a “locked” or “broken” door until you look at the map.

Similarly, in the original Silent Hill games, you could examine inventory objects and get a short text description of them. Now, “investigating” them from the inventory screen simply cuts to a close up of James holding the thing in his hand, allowing you to rotate it approximately 10 degrees in either direction, but never actually saying anything. (The only exception to this are the various bits of paper and memos you pick up during the game, which thankfully you can re-read, and which are optionally presented in clearly legible typeface as well as the handwritten scrawl they are depicted as using. All this is standard practice for “adventure game-adjacent” games in the moderate to big-budget space these days.

Now, look. I get it. The idea behind this is to be “immersive”, and also to show off the fact that textures are so good now you can actually read the small print on a petrol canister you happen to find. The aim is to minimise interruptions to the gameplay, and waiting for someone to press X to clear a text box is somehow seen as more obtrusive than waiting for them to press O to put the inventory item away and return to the main play screen. I suspect it stems from the same mentality that writing more than one sentence at once will cause every TikTok addict in the room to immediately stop paying attention.

Thing is, I liked those text boxes. (Also fuck TikTok addicts. That site is a net negative for humanity. But I digress.) They added a little flavour to proceedings, allowing you to “hear the thoughts” of the main character on various topics. They also made it clear what you were looking at in situations where that might not be immediately obvious. And for all the graphical fidelity of today’s big budget games, there are still situations where you’ll encounter something and go “uh… what?”

Not only that, but these little textual interludes could also conceal fun little bonuses and Easter eggs. Who remembers the thing in Resident Evil 2 where if you examine that one desk enough times, you get a picture of Rebecca Chambers in a basketball uniform? If you do, you are a pervert and a dirty old man (like me!), but you know what I’m talking about. (The photo is still in the very good Resident Evil 2 remake from a few years back, but the process to acquire it is somewhat more convoluted and less… Easter eggy.)

I could go off on a big rant about accessibility here, but I can’t be bothered because other people have almost certainly done so better than I would ever be able to. I just miss the text boxes because they were a uniquely “video game” sort of thing that I always found it fun to engage with. I found it interesting to see which seemingly innocuous objects throughout the game world had been blessed with a bit of descriptive text, and often thought that it would be neat to have a game where the entire world was “examinable” and offered up little snippets like that. (I even started making a game in that ilk myself with RPG Maker VX Ace… one day I might finish it.)

Anyway, yeah. I guess my point is: don’t skimp on the text just because you have fancy-pants 4K graphics and super high resolution textures. Some of us actually like reading the words!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 124: Dead Aim

During quiet moments at work, I, as most people do these days, I suspect, like to pop on a YouTube video or two to cheer myself up and distract from a gradually growing sense of how existence is futile, we’re all sitting atop a doomed planet, and that any “legacy” we might leave behind is largely meaningless.

Today I decided to watch a clip of comedian Jon Richardson talking about men pissing. I present it below for your consideration.

It’s true. Men can’t aim. Well, they can, but they can’t aim well, and at any given moment one is at great risk of one’s penis refusing to accept the commonly agreed laws of physics, and just do something completely unexpected with one’s piss stream. And, inevitably, as Richardson points out, this always happens when you are not at home, making it an embarrassing situation that you have to determine exactly how to deal with.

The most embarrassing time it happened to me was on a trip to hospital. I’d been suffering some pains, so I’d gone along to the walk-in centre, and they’d taken me in to the emergency room, as is seemingly fairly standard procedure with abdominal pains.

I was there for pretty much the whole day, largely because the combination of my own anxiety and what are apparently some incredibly stubborn veins meant that a gradually escalating series of medical professionals were completely unable to draw any blood from me via conventional means, and there was a very long wait between one giving up and them bringing in someone higher up the doctors’ food chain.

At some point as afternoon was turning into evening and I was developing increasing discomfort and unease about the cannula jammed into my hand, it was decided that I Must Piss. I was presented with one of those bedpans made from like eggbox material and invited to get on with it.

At this point I should say that I am not a regular hospital attendee. In fact, I have never been admitted to hospital, which is one of the main contributing factors to my anxiety over them. The other is the print ad for the computer game Life and Death by The Software Toolworks (below), which traumatised me as a child and has ensured that I am, and always have been, absolutely terrified at the prospect of Having An Operation.

Anyway, I’m drifting off the point somewhat. We were here to talk about piss. Fact is, I wasn’t sure what the, err, “etiquette” was for using this bedpan. And, given that I had a pointy thing stuck in my hand that was becoming both increasingly uncomfortable and a growing source of considerable anxiety, I wasn’t entirely thinking straight. So rather than doing the sensible thing of toddling off to the bog to piss in the egg box, I just whipped it out in the little cubicle and thought I’d do it there and then. The curtains were closed, I figured, and no-one was making any indication of coming by to check on me, so I thought I’d just piss and be done with it.

My knob had other ideas. It chose that moment to enter full on “lawn sprinkler” mode, spraying almost everywhere except the direction I was actually pointing it. I was absolutely mortified as soon as the whole hideous process started, but of course, I was powerless to prevent that which had already happened. Thankfully, I managed to wrestle it back under control soon enough to be able to provide a convincing sample in the receptacle, so that was one job taken care of.

Now, there was a more pressing matter to deal with: the fact that I had pissed all over the bed (which, thankfully, was covered with one of those thick black sheets that fluids just sit on top of, which I suspect is precisely for situations like this) and it was dripping onto the floor. I had to act quickly, less the proof of my shame flow out underneath the curtains into the adjacent cubicle, so I frantically looked around for something with which to deal with the situation. I settled on a box of tissues conveniently placed on the shelves at the back of the cubicle, and began mopping up. I supplemented the initial mop-up with the antiseptic wipes one of the numerous attempts to draw blood from me had left behind, and after a bit of effort, I suspect no-one would have ever known that I had, just moments earlier, sprayed the entire room like a particularly horny un-neutered tomcat.

Not long after, the hospital let me go, my eventual diagnosis being effectively a shrug of the shoulders and the vague suggestion it might be a small kidney stone, but it was probably nothing and I should just go home and rest. No mention was made of any smell of piss there may or may not have been in the cubicle, and the cannula came right back out, unused.

And so that was that. My worst pissing shame, a completely wasted day and a sore hand. Have a pleasant evening.

#oneaday Day 123: In my restless dreams, I see that town

As I type this, I am eagerly awaiting the delivery of my PS5 copy of the Silent Hill 2 remake. I was skeptical when this was first announced, but after playing the Resident Evil 4 remake a while back — I still haven’t actually played the original — I have a bit more faith that a modern developer can do justice to a PS2-era classic.

I absolutely adore the original Silent Hill 2, and I have some vivid memories attached to it.

It was my third year at university, and I was living in a nice but relatively pokey house in the middle of “the Flowers estate”, also known as “the dodgy bit of Bassett” in Southampton.

The house was quite a find; its rent was incredibly reasonable (like, in the region of £30-something a week, compared to our previous year’s shithole that had been £57 a week) and the house was in, frankly, amazing condition for something that was being rented out to students. So I, my friend’s girlfriend and our perpetually absent housemate snapped it up. (Seriously. She didn’t stay a single night in that house during our entire year there. Her room just sat completely empty, but she dutifully paid her rent and bills on time every month from… somewhere. To this day I have no idea what the deal was.)

If you’re wondering why I was living with my friend’s girlfriend, it’s because she also happened to be my friend; I refer to her as “my friend’s girlfriend” because I knew my friend, the boyfriend in question, first. He was one of my best pals in the latter years of secondary school and sixth form, as it happens. He was studying in Reading and subsequently in the Netherlands, whereas she was studying in Southampton, so when it came to time for everyone to find a place to stay in their second year, we decided to team up and help each other out, since both of our respective groups of friends had sorted themselves out without us.

As it transpired, while he was in the Netherlands he got super into weed (like, proper addicted to it, to a degree it was severely affecting his behaviour) and became kind of abusive and horrible, so he stopped being both my friend and my friend’s girlfriend at some point during that period. You’d think this might have made things a bit awkward, but no, she appreciated having me as a non-judgemental confidant; she knew that despite chappy being a good friend from school days, I wasn’t going to side with him being a complete drug-addled tool to her. And this wasn’t a “nice guy” thing in the hopes of getting some either; I liked the lady in question, but just as a pal, and I’m sure the feeling was mutual. Just so we’re clear on that note. I did fancy our perpetually absent housemate, though, after meeting her once. But then I never saw her again, so that was that.

Anyway, this was supposed to be about Silent Hill 2. One day, some pals from back home — former school friends again — came by this very house to visit for a few days. We did the usual things you do when getting together with friends in your early 20s: we got drunk, we ordered takeaway curry, we repaired a Sega Saturn controller using only a cotton bud and a bottle of cheap vodka. You know, the usual.

One of these friends was someone who always bought the “big” new games the moment they came out, and this time was no exception; he’d brought his shiny new copy of Silent Hill 2 along with him. We’d all enjoyed the first Silent Hill while we were still at school, so we were excited at the prospect of the sequel, intending to play it through together.

What actually happened is that my two friends fell asleep, full of curry, vodka and alcopops, while I played through the entire thing in a single night, surrounded by the increasingly fragrant remnants of our takeaway and the dregs of the bottles we’d glugged our way through. I got the “In Water” ending. And I was blown away.

My friends and I had already become convinced that video games could absolutely be art after playing Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid, but there was something about Silent Hill 2 that even my undergraduate self could tell was truly special. This was a game that was about far more than just what was being depicted on screen and explicitly said. This was a game where the horror was not about scary monsters and loud noises — though both had a presence — but rather about the lurking horror and gradual realisation of psychological trauma.

It was around this time in my life that I first started learning about mental health, and particularly depression. A young woman with whom I was particularly intimate was the first person with depression that I’d really had close contact with, and she was happy to talk about and explain things to me. It helped me a great deal; it helped me to understand that I, too, had been suffering from it for quite some time and just hadn’t really had the words or the knowledge to be able to express that.

That might sound silly these days, when pretty much everyone on the Internet is self-diagnosing their own litany of mental health conditions on a daily basis, but this was 2001, we were still using dial-up Internet and social media hadn’t been invented. So it was all very new to me, and while it was a bit bleak, it was also interesting. The workings of the mind had always fascinated me — my creative writing projects for GCSE and A-Level English had always involved a heavy psychological component — and finally getting a sense that I was starting to understand why I sometimes felt the way I did was a revelation.

Silent Hill 2, dealing with a lot of heavy themes concerning mental health, came at exactly the right time for me. It came at a time where I was learning to understand and recognise these feelings and how different people deal with them, and living through James Sunderland’s traumatic experiences on the screen of my 27-inch CRT telly in the lounge was oddly cathartic. It was one of a few games from the period that I felt really spoke to me, and it’s continued to occupy an important space in my head ever since.

It’s a game that I’ve replayed and loved many times over the years, so I’m excited to see what looks set to be a genuinely interesting but respectful take on it with the new game. Whether it will recapture that same magic remains to be seen, but having heard some thoughts on it from people who have already played it, and whose opinions I respect, I feel positive about what I’m about to head into.

Now I just have to wait for the dang thing to arrive. Come on, Argos!

#oneaday Day 122: “We Need” and the cult of perpetual dissatisfaction

As someone who works in marketing, there are two little words I’m bloody sick of seeing. Because they always show up beneath announcements of cool things, prompts for discussion… anything, really.

“We Need”.

It doesn’t matter what you’re posting online, someone somewhere will decide that the thing you just posted about is completely irrelevant, and that they have decided to take on the heavy burden of representing the entire audience of Thing.

“We Need”.

Sometimes it’s a thing you know is coming anyway, so you can’t say anything. Sometimes it’s a thing that has been previously requested, but which isn’t practical right this second. And sometimes it’s a completely outlandish, unreasonable suggestion that no-one who knows the slightest thing about the business you’re working in would declare with such confidence that “We Need”. Always, though, it’s something other than the thing you have just posted about.

I know I’m not alone in this, because when I look at marketing posts from other companies, I inevitably see at least one “We Need” in the wild, fulfilling the exact same function outlined above. Talking about anything other than the thing that has just been announced or promoted, and instead speaking on everyone else’s behalf that “we” are absolutely, completely and utterly entitled to a thing that hasn’t even come up in conversation once.

Back around the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle — remember that? — I took umbrage at games journalists calling gaming enthusiasts “entitled” for whining at developers and publishers. I still don’t think productive discussions were had back around then. But honestly, some 10+ years later, I 100% get it. It’s downright exhausting to want to share things you’re personally genuinely excited about that you’ve been working on, only to be hit with the inevitable “We Need”s.

I’m pretty sure this all stems from a broader issue online: the cult of perpetual dissatisfaction, where a certain, loud-mouthed proportion of people on the Internet are never satisfied with the thing that has just been put in front of them, no matter how excellent it is. Cool new thing just announced? Yesterday’s news. “We need” the next thing, immediately, preferably sooner. Long-awaited and much-requested upgrade to something confirmed? Pish. “We need” something completely unrelated. Product getting excellent reviews from press and public alike? Balls. “We need” something that no-one else has asked for, ever.

This ties in with another theory I have about modern online discourse: the fact that there are people out there who don’t feel like they have anything to say if they’re not criticising. Saying “this is good” is anathema to them, because then they can’t “offer feedback” or “give constructive criticism”, even where none was asked for.

By contrast, I’ve often found that these people tend to do a better job of shutting down conversation than actually starting a worthwhile discussion. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve expressed my appreciation and enjoyment of something, only for someone to come along and feel the need to list everything they think is wrong with it, everything “We Need” to see fixed about it. When that happens, I just lose all interest in attempting to have a discussion, because that person isn’t interested in knowing what I liked about the thing. They just want the opportunity to “offer feedback”.

Feedback can be a helpful, useful thing under the right circumstances. But it needs to be asked for, or, in extreme cases, obviously needed. And by “needed” I mean “there is something demonstrably wrong with the thing”, not “this one dude doesn’t like the way the thing does something”.

“We Need.”

We need to learn to be satisfied and happy with things, because perpetual dissatisfaction is no way to live. Just stop for a moment and enjoy the thing. It’s much more fun than never reaching a point where you can do that.

#oneaday Day 121: Tedious Nostalgia

I’m all for nostalgia — hell, most of my online presence is built around it these days — but I’m becoming increasingly tired of social media accounts that are nothing but what I’m going to call “nostalgia fluff”. What I mean by this is that they post something that effectively says “This is a thing that existed.” and then don’t provide any sort of additional commentary or context. To put it another way, they are indulging in the exact behaviour depicted in this excellent video from the one and only Mr Biffo of Digitiser:

There’s a simple explanation for this, of course: it’s engagement bait, as is 90% of anything on any social media platform these days. By posting “Count Duckula is a cartoon series that was once on television”, the poster is counting on people showing up in the replies by the score to say “Wow! I remember this!” and “SO NOSTALGIC!” and suchlike.

Trouble is, all of that is completely fucking meaningless. It rarely starts a meaningful discussion, and the person who posted the thing in the first place certainly isn’t interested in leading a discussion, otherwise they would have posted something more substantial in the first place. So why do it at all?

Number go up, of course. Those sweet likes and shares. The cynical would note that many engagement bait accounts aim to attract large numbers of views, comments and shares so they can then sell on the account to someone else, but this doesn’t always happen. Some people really are convinced that their context and commentary-free acknowledgements that something indeed existed at some indeterminate point in the past are “good content”. Some of these people will even get snippy if someone “steals” their “content”, by which I mean posting something about the same thing they posted.

There’s a difference between this sort of thing and what I do. When I write an article or make a video about something, I’m not doing so just to go “this existed, look how knowledgeable I am for knowing this thing existed”. Rather, I do so for one of two reasons: one, to introduce the thing to other people, and that requires some additional context and commentary to explain why the thing is noteworthy; and two, to share my personal recollections of the thing in question, which often ties in with the first point.

That takes effort, though. That requires researching beyond a simple glance at Wikipedia to make sure you got the date right. That requires actual knowledge and experience, and a willingness to do something beyond the bare minimum to cater to the lowest common denominator online.

I often find myself annoyed at the perception that you “shouldn’t” post anything too long or in-depth online, “because people won’t bother to read/watch it”. This, to me, just leads to a situation where you are encouraging something undesirable. By assuming everyone is as stupid as an attention-deficit social media addict who can’t read more than a paragraph without wanting to Alt-Tab into Roblox, we just make that the norm. And that’s what these low-effort nostalgia engagement bait accounts are doing: making the bare minimum the norm.

I find the idea that you should make things as short as possible “because people will click off within 3 seconds” or whatever kind of insulting. It’s insulting to the people who don’t click off within 3 seconds to assume that everyone’s attention span is as addled as the worst people on the Internet, and it’s insulting to me to suggest that if the thing I’ve done isn’t “interesting” within 3 seconds it has no value. So far as I’m concerned, if someone is incapable of reading more than a paragraph of text or digesting a video that is more than 30 seconds long, I don’t really want them looking at my stuff anyway. It’s not for them.

That may sound gatekeepery but honestly I don’t give a shit any more. I hate how much the Internet has become a race to the bottom, and I fear it’s reached a point where it is actively harmful to both community and culture.

So I will keep going into things in as much depth as I damn well please, and if you don’t have the attention span to deal with it, that is 100% your problem.

(I know none of you reading this fall into this category, of course. Keep being excellent.)

#oneaday Day 120: Don’t let completionism ruin your fun

There’s been a marked shift in people’s attitudes towards finishing games over the course of the last 20 years or so. Well, several, I think, brought about by a number of “innovations” (for want of a better word) that, in several instances, I’m not entirely sure are a positive thing.

There’s one group of people who never finish anything they start playing. I’ve talked about That One Guy In That Discord I’m In before, and the way he does things — installing (and, presumably, uninstalling) multiple huge games per day, playing them for seemingly about twenty minutes before starting something else — drives me absolutely nuts. It evidently works for him, though, and it’s not my place to tell him how to enjoy himself.

Also falling into a similar category are the Oh, That Game’s On Game Pass crowd, who will maybe try something for twenty minutes because it’s “free” (no it’s not, you’re renting it with that subscription fee you’re paying) and then never beat it. These people also drive me nuts, and I am less forgiving of them, since I firmly believe Game Pass is a net negative for the games industry.

Then, at the absolute other end of the spectrum are the people who don’t believe they’ve “finished” a game until they’ve “Platinumed” or “100%ed” it. These are the people I’m specifically pondering today.

Among these people are those who will specifically seek out games that are “easy Platinums” to bolster their stats, which no-one actually gives a shit about. I have dabbled in that direction before, particularly around the Vita era, when I liked to take aim for a game’s Platinum trophy as a means of showing my appreciation to the people who made it. Developers do use achievements and trophies as metrics, after all, so seeing that someone had taken the time to do everything in their game would presumably count for something.

But playing like that is two things. One: it’s incredibly time consuming. Two: it’s quite tedious. Because while there are some interesting and creative uses of achievements and trophies out there, the vast majority of them involve either simply making progress in a game, or completing some sort of task that takes a long while and, more often than not, involves a significant amount of repetition.

So I’ve stopped. I no longer aim to Platinum games I play on PlayStation, and I don’t give much of a toss about achievements on other platforms. Moreover, I actively prefer playing on platforms that don’t have achievement functionality at all, like the Switch and anything pre-Xbox 360/PS3.

Right now, as you’ll know if you’ve been paying attention, I am playing through the .hack series on PlayStation 2. This set of four games clock in at about 15 hours each, but you can spend quite a bit more time on each entry grinding out various things. Optional things; things that you don’t need to do in order to beat the game or even to have a satisfying experience with it.

I pondered taking the time to try and “100%” the first entry, .hack//INFECTION, before I moved on to the second episode, .hack//MUTATION. I’d beaten the main story and had the opportunity to go back into the game world to clean up some optional tasks before transferring my data to the next game. I started looking into the possibility of what I might need to do to achieve that, and the answer was, effectively “grind”.

“Fuck that,” I thought, saving my game and reaching for the next game’s case. Now I’ve moved on, and I’m perfectly happy about that. I’ve been enjoying the game nicely in my way, and I’ve been trying to avoid looking up too much information, because I, like a lot of us, I suspect, have got into the habit of looking at walkthroughs and other information about games as I play to “make sure I don’t miss anything”.

Well, I got thinking. When I was playing games back in the PS2 era, I didn’t really care if I “missed anything”. Sure, it was nice to know if there were some secrets and cool things I could find, but I didn’t go out of my way to do anything that sounded like it might be boring, annoying or overly time-consuming. And my gaming experience certainly didn’t suffer for that attitude. So I’m trying to get my head back in that space now, in 2024, while I play through these 20 year old action RPGs. It doesn’t matter that I can’t get first place in the Grunty race on Theta server, because it’s an optional side activity that not everyone is expected to complete. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t traded with every single NPC possible to get the books that give me an extra stat point in all my stats, because while a single stat point does make a difference in .hack, there’s also lots of shiny equipment that boosts your stats, too.

Checklists, achievements, wikis and all manner of other things have the potential to really suck the fun out of games at times. These things are supposed to be fun and enjoyable, not work. So I’m making a specific effort to try not to care about “whether I missed anything”, and just do the things that I happen to stumble across as I play until I’ve completed them to my satisfaction.

I’ll add to all this that I am a firm believer in completing games, particularly when we’re talking narrative-centric games like RPGs. I cannot abide leaving a story half-finished, regardless of medium, so I still make an effort to finish the games I start. It’s the stuff that isn’t directly related to that central story aspect that I’m doing my best to let go of. Not as a general rule or anything, but more from a perspective of not deliberately going out of my way to make a game un-fun.

Because these days, the temptation to make a game un-fun is everywhere. Look at a walkthrough and you’d think there was only one possible way to beat every game, because some guy on the Internet says so. No. There are many ways to beat many games, and the best thing to do is to find what works for you. If that means 100%ing it, more power to you; you are the reason all those optional side activities exist. But if you find yourself getting annoyed or frustrated with those same optional side activities, no-one — not even the developers — is going to judge you for saying “fuck this, I just want to see how the story ends”.

That said, I’ve spent two hours searching for Grunty food in .hack//MUTATION this evening. But it was my choice to do so. Besides, I had fun levelling Kite, BlackRose and Mistral in the process anyway, so it’s not as if it was wasted effort or anything.

Anyway, yeah. If you’ve ever found yourself contemplating something you were playing and thinking “gosh, I wish there was less to do in this game”, you are the one in the position of power. You are the one holding the controller. Unless the game is specifically requiring you to do each and every little thing it offers, you are the one with the power to say “fuck this” and just get on with what you deem to be “the fun bit”.

So exercise that power!

#oneaday Day 119: One quarter dotHacked

Ten to one in the morning again, oh no. But hah, it’s Friday night so it doesn’t count. Well, okay, it does, because this probably now means I’m going to sleep until lunchtime tomorrow, but who cares. The weekend is for enjoying, and a valid means of enjoying it is sleeping late.

The reason I am once again coming to you from the Dark Hour is that I finished .hack//INFECTION this evening. I’ve beaten this before, but never actually played the other three, despite owning them all back in the day, then reacquiring them all at moderate expense a few years back. (Reacquiring them now would be great expense, so I’m glad I nabbed them when I did… although I discovered my copy of .hack//QUARANTINE has the wrong manual, and people online want somewhere in the region of fifty fucking dollars just for the manual, so fuck that, it can just be wrong.

As discussed the other day, .hack//INFECTION is an interesting beast in that it’s the first part of a tetralogy (apparently that is the correct term, not “quadrilogy”, I learned something today) of PS2 games that tell one coherent story in four parts. The cynical would suggest that this was done so that they could make four times the money out of one normal length RPG, as each individual part is around 15 hours long, and they’re probably right. But it’s still interesting. To me, anyway.

In each part, you play the role of Kite, a player in the online RPG The World, and much of what you do in each of the four volumes is… simply play The World, which is a Phantasy Star Online-style affair in which you head off into dungeons with or without some companions in tow, hack and slash your way through a bunch of enemies and gather lots of phat loot along the way.

Its unique twist is that its various areas are generated through various combinations of keywords that control everything from the level of the enemies in the area to the weather and geographical features you might stumble across. This is an aspect of the game they don’t explain very well and no-one over the course of the last 22 years appears to have successfully figured out, so you’ll just have to take their word for it. What it essentially boils down to is that you can jam three unrelated words or phrases together and it will send you to a new area with an amusing name like “Bottomless Someone’s Giant” or “Raging Pagan Fuckwhistle”.

There is a certain amount of method to the madness, because in combining different keywords together, you can cause different elements to have dominance in the field, which means you’re more likely to find items related to that element. And elemental weaknesses are worth exploiting in The World… plus the items that temporarily boost your affinity for a particular element are a popular trade item with the in-game NPCs, so they’re worth collecting to get your hands on the often rare stuff they might give up in exchange.

.hack//INFECTION (and its three follow-ups) are not RPGs I would necessarily recommend to everyone. They’re a far cry from the big budget cinematic spectacles many had come to expect from the genre post Final Fantasy VII, and thus they suffered a bit in reviews back in the day. However, if you’re on board with what they have to offer, which is a convincing simulation of playing a 2002-era online action RPG with lots of dungeon crawling and loot collecting, there’s a lot of fun to be had. The basic mechanics are simple and straightforward, but there’s a pleasant purity to just ploughing your way through a dungeon and watching everyone’s levels and related statistics go up.

My main draw is that I’ve always been a sucker for the “something sinister is going on in a computer game” trope ever since I read the short story Vurfing the Gwrx from a book called Peter Davison’s Book of Alien Monsters as a child. (The Peter Davison in question who endorsed that book was, in fact, Doctor Who, but my family and I just found it entertaining that “I” had a book.) I don’t remember much about the story — I should probably revisit it with grown-up eyes — but I do remember finding it both entertaining and pleasingly chilling as a kid. And I like .hack because I get a similar sort of vibe from it.

.hack doesn’t go quite into the “if you die in the game you die for real” territory that Sword Art Online ran with some years later, but the idea of a video game (and the virus contained therein) causing people to fall into real-life comas is a concept I found intriguing and creepy, in a good way. To this day, I still don’t know where the story goes after the conclusion of .hack//INFECTION, which really just acts as an introduction and setup more than anything, so I’m intrigued to finally dive into the follow-ups and see where things go from there.

For now, though, I think I’ve earned that lie-in.

#oneaday Day 118: I left this too late again

Oh dear. Half past midnight and I haven’t written anything. Time to quickly think of something off the top of my head!

Err… quick! Video games! I bought Victory Heat Rally today. This is a game I’ve had my eye on for a while (though not as long as some other people have, from the sound of things) after I played its excellent demo a few Steam Next Fests ago. I’m going to do a full writeup and video on this at some point in the very near future, but suffice to say for now that it’s very good.

It’s a game that takes aim at Sega’s “Super Scaler” racers in style, with Power Drift being a particular inspiration. It doesn’t slavishly try to ape the retro style, mind — though there is a nice “pixelise” filter option for the visuals — and rather makes use of some nice pixel art for the characters, cars and some roadside objects, and low-poly environments. It moves along at a fair old clip even on my mini PC that doesn’t have a graphics card, and it’s a lot of fun to play.

Besides Power Drift, it also draws inspiration from Ridge Racer (drift-heavy handling, ’90s rave soundtrack), Sega Rally (rally stages with exaggerated handling), Mario Kart (multiple tracks set in a limited number of environments) and probably some others that I can’t think of right now because I’m tired. It takes all these elements and blends them together to make an immensely compelling game that I’ve played for about 5 hours this evening.

The first series of championship challenges is a bit easy, but the second ramps things up nicely to a good challenge level. There are also some truly infuriating bonus stages known as “Joker” levels where you have to race through checkpoints against the clock while performing some sort of precise driving task. The one I’m presently stuck on requires you to take full advantage of the “drift boost” mechanic the game has borrowed from Mario Kart and boost through various checkpoints. This is a lot harder than it sounds, particularly with the awkward placement of some of these checkpoints, and it has cause many expletives to belch forth from my mouth this evening.

While these levels are infuriatingly difficult, the rest of the game seems pitched at a pretty sensible difficulty level. The opening championship eases you into things nicely, then things ramp up from there. I suspect the third series of championships will be genuinely quite difficult, if the escalation in the second series is anything to go by.

But anyway. Half past midnight, like I said, so I should probably close everything down and go to sleep. There can (and probably will) be more racing tomorrow.

#oneaday Day 117: Car Racing

This evening, I felt like playing some random PlayStation 2 shenanigans, so I fired up R: Racing for the first time. (My wife misheard the name as “Car Racing” and was somewhat incredulous; I almost didn’t want to correct her.)

For the unfamiliar, R: Racing is a game from Namco where they sort of wanted to make a new Ridge Racer, but also wanted to get in on this “racing sim” action that had been growing in popularity since the original Gran Turismo at the tail end of the previous generation. To that end, they made what is essentially a new Ridge Racer game, but featuring real cars and circuits along with the requisite tuning options that no-one understands.

One of the things that excited me most about R: Racing back when it was originally announced was that it had an actual story mode. This was very unusual for racing games at the time, and when it first released I still hadn’t come to the conclusion that no, not all games need stories, a subject that I was sure I’d blogged about at some point in the past, but couldn’t find any evidence thereof.

Anyway, long story short, for one reason or another I never picked up R: Racing back in the day, despite it being something that appealed quite a bit… but it is one of the many titles I added to my PS2 collection when I stumbled across it in CEX for somewhere in the region of 50p and subsequently never got around to actually trying. Until now!

Honestly, of all the things it reminds me of, it’s actually most akin to the Ace Combat series. Perhaps not surprising, since they’re both Namco titles — and there’s a strong argument to suggest the Ridge Racer series unfolds in Ace Combat’s Strangereal setting — but it works pretty well. The narrative sequences are kept short and snappy — arguably to a fault — but it provides a certain incentive to progress through the game’s 14-chapter “Racing Life” mode, which appears to be primarily intended as an introduction before what I assume is “the real game” starts. Put it this way: I’m 6 chapters into that 14-chapter story after a little over an hour of play, and my save file says it’s 12% complete. That suggests you beat the story and there’s a whole lot more stuff to fiddle around with.

The narrative involves Rena, a female protagonist — quick, alert the Woke Content Detector idiots! — who works as an ambulance driver. One day, she displays some fancy moves on the job, and her coworker, who apparently never sleeps, signs her up to be part of a mysterious organisation known as “G.V.I.” who are somehow involved with motorsports, but in what appears to be a not entirely trustworthy sort of way. Rather than being a racing team themselves, it appears that they work with racing teams and… honestly, I don’t really understand at the point I’m at in the narrative because it hasn’t really explained anything other than the fact it somehow caused Rena’s amply-bosomed rival Gina to be pissy with her pretty much immediately upon first meeting her.

What then follows is a series of races and championships, beginning with a straightforward speedway race that is easy to win, and progressing through track, street and rally racing across several courses, many of which appear to have several variations in the same way that the Ridge Racer series’ tracks typically unfold as different routes through the same environments.

R: Racing’s unique selling point appears to be its “pressure” mechanic, whereby if you get up another driver’s arse for long enough, a bar above their car starts filling up, and when it fills, they’ll get so stressed out at your proximity to their rectum that they’ll do something stupid, allowing you to pass easily. There’s no obligation to fill the bar, and indeed doing so for every opponent is probably quite inefficient, but it’s fun nonetheless — and it’s a mechanic I’ve not really seen in a racer before. Presumably it’s attempting to reflect the sort of stress the player feels when they have an opponent bearing down on them in their rear-view mirror; in execution, it’s a tad “artificial”, but, well, it’s a mechanic that is there to be taken advantage of, so you might as well do so!

The soundtrack hails from post-Ridge Racer V Namco so unfortunately we’ve left the funky acid jazz beats of the late PS1 era far behind and are into cacophonous EDM territory. R: Racing’s soundtrack isn’t quite as obnoxiously awful as Ridge Racer V’s, but it’s almost aggressively bland, which is a bit of a shame. The Ridge Racer series has some serious highs when it gets music right, so it’s always unfortunate when an entry doesn’t really live up to those standards.

Still, it’s an enjoyable enough game. Although definitely more sim-esque than the mainline Ridge Racer titles, it’s also a lot more forgiving than the Gran Turismos and Forza Motorsports (do they still make those?) of the world. There’s a braking assist function for those allergic to actually using the brakes themselves, which makes the game feel really arcadey (and a tad easy), but you can still throw the cars into power slides if you’re aggressive enough with them. It’s just not necessarily the best thing to do at every opportunity in R: Racing, unlike mainline Ridge Racer.

I enjoyed what I played this evening! I’m looking forward to exploring it a bit further. It occupies a nice sweet spot between sim and arcade that I rather like, and the story mode is intriguing, even if, as I suspect, it turns out to be a bit rushed and doesn’t really go anywhere. Even if that does end up being the case, I suspect the “Event Challenge” mode, or whatever it’s called, will have a fair bit of meat on the bones to fiddle around with. We’ll see, I guess, and I’ll write something more substantial once I’ve spent some more time with it.

For now, though, an evening well spent, I say.

#oneaday Day 116: Should you finish a game before talking about it?

I’ve seen some discussion about the above topic recently, largely as a result of some idiotic blowhard on the dying, burning remains of Twitter making the bizarre assertion that all games journalists should be obliged to upload full, unedited footage of them playing every game they cover to “prove” that they played it properly and to demonstrate their “authentic” reactions.

This is, of course, absolutely unworkable today, particularly for those working in the more “mainstream” end of gaming, where sprawling games that want to be your one and only game forever (or at least until their next annualised installment comes out) have been creeping towards being the norm for a while now. But it’s also unworkable for those working in niche spaces, be that esports, visual novels, role-playing games or any other sectors you might care to mention. There simply isn’t time.

Now, I have mixed feelings about this, because back when my brother was in charge of Electronic Gaming Monthly and The Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine at Ziff-Davis, I vaguely recall him saying that he expected his writers to finish everything they wrote about — and this was, in the case of EGM, a publication where each reviewer had to write approximately 50-100 words at most, given the way their reviews were handled.

The reason I recall this is that one time when my parents and I were visiting him in the States, I was able to spend the day with him in his office (and I have oddly vivid memories of someone’s computer in the office having something saying “Lucky sonuvabitch” every time they got an email) and he tasked me with playing through Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (now available on Evercade, don’tchaknow!). I forget exactly why, but I suspect it was so he could make effective use of my time while I was there, get my thoughts on it, and then use my experiences playing the game to give him a head start on writing something. Possibly. Maybe. Anyway, regardless of the circumstances, I have a memory in my head that I’m fairly convinced is real that says “my brother once expected all of his staff to beat every game before they reviewed it”.

In the PS1 era, this was probably practical. RPGs were a thing, sure, but they came out relatively infrequently in English (even more infrequently if you were unfortunate enough to be European) and often long after their Japanese releases, so there was plenty of advance notice to get these done. And other games were significantly shorter, tending to be somewhere between 2 and 10 hours on average, with the odd exception in both directions. (Ridge Racer? 20 minutes. Dragon Quest VII? Yes, I know it’s an RPG, but 150+ hours.)

We also had a lot more in the way of “arcade style” games that were split into short levels or missions, or games that were highly replayable — Ridge Racer may be 20 minutes, but it’s 20 minutes you’ll be happy to spend again and again. Thus it seems perfectly reasonable to expect a games journo to play through everything they might be writing about.

These days? Absolutely definitely not, although there is still something to be said for allowing a writer to provide a full, in-depth discussion of a game after completing all of it. After all, it’s kind of absurd to suggest that it’s possible to “review” a visual novel without reading all of it, as the whole point of the damn thing is the story. Sure, you can probably give a wiffly-waffly “buyer’s guide”-type review saying what you think of the graphics, sound and interface, but if you want to actually discuss and critique it, you need to have played all of it.

I think the distinction between “review as buyer’s guide” (which is basically what a lot of people online want) and “review as quasi-academic critique” (which is what a lot of writers want, but rarely get the time to indulge in) is an important one here. The former can be done after just an hour or two of play at most. The latter requires more in-depth research. The former can be shat out for an embargo date. The latter is something best served for well after launch.

Unfortunately, the modern Internet doesn’t tend to really reward the latter approach at all until well after the fact — and then only if a game ends up commonly agreed to be some sort of “hidden gem” or “best game that no-one played” or whatever. It increasingly leads me to the conclusion that the very best approach to games writing if all you’re concerned about is the quality of the writing is to say “fuck it” to anything that is brand new, and instead focus on games that came out ages ago. Perhaps even generations ago. In-depth explorations of those games are the pieces people are still going to be reading for years to come — and it’s what I’ve always striven for with the stuff I’ve done on MoeGamer, because it’s what I like to read.

I don’t give a shit if the latest Assassin’s Creed is the same or a bit different from the last one. I do care if some obscure PS2 RPG from 20 years ago is actually the best thing ever and still kind of cheap because no-one bought it or knows its name.

Ah, who am I kidding. RPGs are never cheap.

Anyway, I guess my answer to the question in the title is “no, if you’re reviewing something current in a buyer’s guide style”, but “yes, if you’re aiming for quasi-academic critique or analysis”. And even then, there’s wiggle room. Even recently, I wrote about a couple of the games in UFO 50 before I’d technically “beaten” them, because I’d gained enough knowledge of how they worked to be able to comment on them authoritatively. (I then promptly beat them shortly after writing about them, much to my satisfaction!)

So no. Games journos should not be expected to upload full, unedited gameplay footage of them playing through (and reacting to) a game for review. That’s absolutely absurd. But I do feel like we should strive for better in our games criticism and analysis. Those “buyer’s guide” reviews do not stand the test of time very well, whereas articles that take the time to really get to know a game and find out what makes it tick are what insufferable SEO types like to call “evergreen content”. And, as much as I hate to agree with anyone who enjoys SEO, it’s those articles that people are going to come back to years after a game’s release to find out all about it.