1483: Virtue's Almost-Last Reward

I will finish this game. I will finish this game. It's been 40 hours. It's a matter of pride now.

There may be mild spoilers for Virtue's Last Reward in this post. There will almost certainly be spoilers for 999. I haven't quite worked out what I'm going to write yet; I just feel like I need to do something like a brain dump in order to try and work out what on Earth is going on.

Putting in a "read more" tag so those casually browsing the front page don't run into any spoilers… see you after the jump if you're continuing to read.

Continue reading "1483: Virtue's Almost-Last Reward" →

1481: Faceoffs are Magic

Picked up a copy of the My Little Pony Collectible Card Game the other day, and Andie and I gave it a shot tonight. After some initial confusion over some of the rules and how it all worked, I think I've grasped how the flow of play goes now, and I'm interested to try it again.

I haven't played a CCG since the name Portal was primarily associated with Magic: The Gathering rather than Valve. I never really got hugely into Magic (or the game I half-heartedly started collecting but never once played before, the Star Trek: The Next Generation Collectible Card Game) but recently, with some attempts at Netrunner (not technically a CCG, but it was originally) and now this, I'm interested to play more.

Being based on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, the My Little Pony CCG isn't based around direct conflict. Rather, it's based on the rather family-friendly premise of solving problems and giving "troublemakers" the boot before they cock up your plans to solve the aforementioned problems.

The mechanics are relatively straightforward, though not introduced massively clearly in the rulebook. Essentially, each turn you have a certain number of action points to spend, which is determined by the player with the highest score. Consequently, a trailing player has the potential to catch up somewhat by the fact that they'll still have the opportunity to play more cards.

During your turn, you can play "Friends" either directly to one of the two Problems in play, or into your Home, from which they can later be moved at a cost of two action points per card. Cards often have prerequisites and costs in order to play — for example, in order to play one card, you might need to spend two action points and already have two yellow Power points on the board.

Once you've spent all your action points, you check to see whether you've amassed enough Power of the appropriate colours to "confront" a Problem and score a point for it. If two players both have enough power to confront a Problem, after you score a point, you have a Faceoff over it, where you compare your respective Power levels, replace the Problem and score bonus points. On the off-chance you've scored from both Problems in play at once, you have a Faceoff, even if your opponent doesn't meet the requirements for either. Again, this replaces the problems, sends all the Friends home and discards any other cards, meaning both sides then have to start building up Power again to confront the next Problems.

What's difficult to judge from just one play of the game is how the different colour decks play. It seems apparent that the Fluttershy starter deck is concerned with amassing strong amounts of Power very quickly — the Caretaker ability that pops up quite often allows certain cards to boost the power of other ("Critter") cards, for example, which means you can quite easily muster an unassailable force of Friends to hoover up Points nearly every turn — while the Pinkie Pie starter deck is more concerned with fucking over your opponent by reducing their power or removing certain cards from the board.

There's a couple of aspects of the game that appear to be fairly key to strategy — firstly, how you "flip" your main character card, and secondly, how you use Troublemakers.

To the first point, "flipping" your character card involves meeting a specific condition, after which you can turn the card over and use its more powerful "Boosted" side for the rest of the game, which generally has a higher base Power level, a special ability and fewer restrictions on the cards you can keep in your Home area. Fluttershy seemed quite easy to flip, since she simply needed to confront a Problem with another Critter in tow, whereas Pinkie Pie seemed significantly harder to flip — she has to confront a problem unopposed by any of her opponent's cards, which means she probably has to make a bee-line for her own starting Problem before things get too hectic.

To the second point, Troublemakers are cards you play and flip over on your next turn, which then block your opponent from being able to confront a problem, since they first need to beat the Troublemaker at a Faceoff. The flip side of this inconvenience you give them is that if they do beat the Troublemaker in a Faceoff, they score points for doing so, then can potentially pick up some points for the Problem too. With some Troublemakers worth 3 points, that's potentially a gain of 4 or more points in a single turn, which has the potential to completely swing a game from one way to another — you play to 15.

Anyway. To cut a long story short, I won, 15-3, though I'm not sure it really counts since it was a training game. I'm intrigued to try it again, and potentially to try out some of the other character decks and see how they work. Looking at discussion of the game online, its apparently simplicity appears to be somewhat deceptive — there's a fair amount of deep strategy possible to incorporate, as with any good CCG, though naturally there's always the question of who has the "better" cards if you've started delving into the world of booster packs.

There will be more ponycards in the near future!

1478: Virtue's Numerous Penultimate Rewards

I'm still plugging away at the sequel to 999, Virtue's Last Reward. This is an interesting game in many ways, but one of the most fascinating things I've found about it so far is how it's far more willing to withhold an ending from you than 999 was. In 999, there was only one ending that had a "prerequisite" — i.e. you had to finish one path before you could finish the "true" path — but in Virtue's Last Reward, there are numerous plot branches that end prematurely with a "To Be Continued" message that may only be unlocked using knowledge obtained in one of the other narrative paths. Consequently, a big part of the game's challenge looks set to revolve around determining precisely which order you should do things in.

To speak too much about this aspect of the game and why it's structured in this way would be to get somewhat spoileriffic, and I know that at least one person who might be reading this is currently playing through the game at the same time as me, a number of hours behind where I am. As such, I'll refrain from discussing this aspect of it too publicly for the moment and satisfy myself simply by saying that I find this approach really interesting.

It's one of the things I like best about the visual novel medium, as it happens. It's also one of the main means through which the visual novel medium distinguishes itself from conventional novels and other linear forms of storytelling. The branching nature of visual novels means the medium inherently lends itself to a form of storytelling whereby you only get the complete picture of what is going on by seeing things from multiple perspectives. And I'm not necessarily talking about switching narration perspectives to different characters — in most cases I'm simply talking about the protagonist making different choices, proceeding down a different path and consequently demonstrating a different side to themselves.

In some cases, these different paths are manifested as the protagonist changing in different ways. In Katawa Shoujo, for example, each narrative path sees the protagonist learning something from his chosen partner, and growing into a markedly different person as a result. He's still Hisao at heart, but each of the girls bring a different aspect of him to the forefront — Rin brings out his artistic side, for example, while Emi encourages him to never give up and to always keep on with whatever he's put his mind to.

In other cases, these different paths simply allow us to see how the protagonist responds to different life situations. In Kira Kira, for example, each of the main narrative paths corresponds to each of the very different female members of the cast, each of whom have their own story to tell. By seeing all of these stories through to their conclusion, you get a complete picture of who they are — and perhaps the reasons they do the things they do.

One of the best examples I can think of in recent memory is School Days HQ, too. I'm still yet to see 100% of the scenes in this, but I've seen enough of the endings to know that knowledge gained in some narrative paths can completely change the way you look at others. What may superficially seem to be a romantic scene can be tinged with sadness or tragedy when approached from a different angle with different knowledge already in your mind. And if you're unfortunate enough to catch that game's most notorious bad ending on your first run through… well, I pity you trying to see the rest of the game in the same way afterwards.

Rather than separating narrative paths into their own discrete threads that neatly tie themselves up, then leaving the player to do all the mental fingerwork to weave them all together into a complete picture, it seems that Virtue's Last Reward is deliberately structured in such a way as to encourage you to explore all the different options — including the "bad" endings. In the path I played tonight, making a "bad" choice ultimately proved to be something I actually needed to do in order to progress the story further down another route. That's something I've never seen before, and it's proving to be a real highlight of the experience for me.

But as I say, in discussing this we're getting dangerously close to spoiler territory, and I'm keen to avoid that. So I'll leave that there… and now I'm off to go and see if I can't actually make it to one of the endings before I go to sleep this evening.

1476: Go There, Do That

One thing I've discovered that I quite enjoy doing with regard to writing about games is writing walkthroughs, guides and that sort of thing.

Admitting this is the sort of thing that gets me some funny looks, since writing guides and walkthroughs is often regarded as one of the lowliest jobs in the business. But I still like it — and in order to do it effectively, it does require a distinct combination of skills: the ability to write and explain things clearly being the main one.

I'm currently assembling a bunch of guides for Final Fantasy XIV with a mind to publishing them around the time of the PlayStation 4 version's release, which is when the game is likely to see a bunch of new players trying it for the first time. I'm finding it enjoyable to write the guides for several reasons: firstly, it's another means of writing about a game I like a whole lot, and secondly, it's an opportunity to demonstrate my knowledge and pass on the things I've learned to other people. (Thirdly, it's an opportunity for me to remind myself — or learn for the first time, in some cases — the exact details of how everything in the game works.)

Perhaps the reason I think so fondly on writing guides is the fact that it's how I got my real start in writing for publications. (Okay, that's not quite true — I had a couple of reviews published in an Atari enthusiast magazine when I was quite a bit younger, but that didn't have nearly the same reach of the games press I've written for since.) After doing some work experience on the magazine my brother was in charge of at the time — the now sadly defunct PC Zone — I published a number of guides and walkthroughs for sprawling games such as Lands of Lore II, Final Fantasy VII and Discworld II. They were hard work to assemble and the remuneration I received for each piece probably wasn't what it could have been, but I have fond memories of putting them together.

It also led to one of the things I'm most strangely proud of in my career: the fact I wrote a tips book for the notorious crash-and-smash game Carmageddon, which was cover-mounted on PC Zone one month and was subsequently included as a pack-in extra with Virgin Megastores' special edition bundle pack of the game one Christmas. After that, some years after I thought I'd ever see a copy of it ever again, popular digital distribution storefront GOG.com saw fit to include a PDF version of my tips book in with their newly modernized version of this classic game. Digital immortality — and not a royalty cheque in sight, but I'm not really bitter about that.

I wonder if my enjoyment of writing tips and walkthroughs stems from the fact that when it didn't make me want to kill myself, I actually enjoyed teaching? It's a similar sort of skill, after all — taking a potentially complex concept and introducing it to people who may not be familiar with it at all — and thus I feel that's a plausible explanation. If that's the case, though, it's perhaps a shame it's a form of writing that's not taken particularly seriously — although I feel the enthusiasts doing it for free over on GameFAQs are something to do with that.

Anyway. That's my revelation for the day. I like writing walkthroughs. So there. And here's my walkthrough for EA's Dungeon Keeper on iPhone: 1. Press and hold the icon on your home screen. 2. Tap the "X" that appears in the corner. 3. Tap the "Delete" button.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

1475: Thundercards

We've finally got our Internet back after it being down for most of today as well as last night — not to mention BT's site noting that the problem was reported at 4:30 am and would be fixed by 12 am (errr…) — but yes. Internets we have. Woo!

While it was down, Andie and I went out for a bit, initially to have a scary grown-up talk with a mortgage advisor. We're well on the way to owning our own house, though I'm hesitant to talk too much about it right now in case it all falls through. Exciting, though.

Anyway, Andie buggered off after lunch to go and see a friend in Portsmouth, so I thought I'd have a wander into town and see what was what. Actually, I had a vague idea in mind that I wanted to pick up a copy of the board game Mage Knight that I could play solo while the Internet was down — while our regular gaming group is hesitant to return to the game again since our last 5-player game took literally all day, I do like the idea of the solo game, which is much shorter owing to the lack of downtime.

Long story short, I went to Forbidden Planet (which appeared to be playing host to a Magic: The Gathering tournament of some description — interesting to know) and had a browse of their board games. There was no Mage Knight — they haven't had that in for a while, I don't think — but they did have a game called Thunderstone which I recalled seeing positive comments about in the past.

I didn't know much about Thunderstone, but a quick browse of its BoardGameGeek page revealed that it was very positively received by the community as a whole (an average rating of 8.1 is very high for that notoriously picky community) and was something that may indeed be worth picking up, particularly since it was £10 off as part of Forbidden Planet's sale. So I grabbed it, took it home and gave its solo version a go — yes, the fact it supports solo play is one reason I was willing to give it a shot.

Many board games take a significant amount of time to "unpack", what with all the counters and tokens you need to pop out, but Thunderstone takes the cake in that there are about a bajillion cards, all of which need to be sorted into their own little compartments — though thankfully the game does include special "divider" cards to make organising the box pretty straightforward.

The game itself is a deckbuilding game with elements that are similar to both Ascension and Dominion, but with enough unique flavour and mechanics to make it clearly its own beast. The gist is that you're a faceless hero attempting to save the realm of Numenera — a setting I'm not familiar with, but which I understand is relatively popular in fantasy enthusiast circles — from "Doom," some sort of amorphous unpleasantness that has been hopping through dimensions from the original incarnation of Thunderstone to the version I bought today.

Your "goal," such as it is, is to defeat an evil horrible Thunderstone Bearer, a powerful monster who shows up later in the game, and one who brings about the end of the game if you allow him to advance far enough. In order to do this, you'll need to recruit heroes, purchase equipment and then tonk a whole load of monsters on the head with various blunt and sharp implements until Big Bad comes out, you tonk him on the head and save the day. (Or until Big Bad comes out, you fail to tonk him on the head and the world is swallowed by eternal darkness, or something.) Victory is determined not by whether or not you beat the Thunderstone Bearer, but by the number of Victory Points you've earned at the end of the game — this is a competitive game at heart, though in solo play you are playing against the game itself rather than simply attempting to amass as many points as possible.

Each turn, you can either visit the village or delve into the dungeon. Going to the village allows you to spend money up to the value of the cards in your hand to purchase various items or the services of local heroes. You can also use XP tokens gathered through previous successful combats to level up your existing heroes — so long as they're in your hand on that turn.

Yes, this being a deckbuilder, you're somewhat at the mercy of the cards you draw, though through careful use of various abilities that let you "discard" (remove temporarily) or "destroy" cards and manage your hand more effectively. Although there's a random element that can, at times, be frustrating when you don't quite get what you want, as with most deckbuilders it's about considering what you might need a little way down the road, and planning accordingly. It's all very well recruiting a deck full of "Strong" heroes (massive Physical damage, may only level up after combat instead of in the village) but as soon as a monster that requires you to twat it with Magical damage at least once shows up, you're buggered if you haven't allowed for that eventuality.

The monsters all have interesting abilities. Some force you to destroy cards in your hand before you can confront them, some provide benefits after you've killed them — you add them to your deck as trophies rather than keeping them separately as in Ascension — and one particular category, known as Ultraterrestrials, all have an infuriating special ability where if your total damage exceeds — or, in some cases, is not exactly — a particular value, then you simply can't kill them, even if you would have otherwise obliterated them off the face of the planet. This makes for more interesting strategies than simply acquiring as much power as you possibly can — it's worth your time to gather some abilities that will let you reduce the amount of damage you inflict, too.

Anyway, I played a solo game and lost to the game. It was reasonably close, though — I think it was 54-46 in favour of the game, if I remember rightly — which isn't bad for a first attempt. I'd be interested to see how the dynamic changes with more than one player, so hopefully I'll have a chance to get it to the table at some point in the near future.

1473: Ruined

Oh, EA. Why. Why. Why. Why.

I am, of course, talking about the new iOS version of Bullfrog's classic Dungeon Keeper, which was released today and is, of course, utter bobbins.

Why? Because it's a free-to-play mobile game.

And yes, I think we've reached the stage where it pretty much is reasonable to brand free-to-play mobile games a universally bad thing, because the fucking awful ones far outnumber the very, very few good ones. In fact, I can't think of any good free-to-play mobile games offhand, whereas on PC I can name plenty.

Dungeon Keeper does every offensive thing it's possible for a shitty free-to-play mobile thing to do. It has wait timers, it has premium currency, it has the ability to purchase resources and other things rather than collecting them yourself (by, you know, playing the game) and worse than all the monetisation crap is the fact that they've taken a game that was originally an interesting, fun and original idea and made it into something utterly predictable and boring.

Dungeon Keeper is clearly aiming to ride the coat-tails of popular "midcore" strategy games such as Clash of Clans but this isn't a particularly good thing, either; Clash of Clans is an unashamedly pay-to-win title whose "top players" ride high in the leaderboards for no other reason than the fact they have paid more money into the game. Thousands of dollars, in many cases.

This is the second time EA has trawled Bullfrog's back catalogue to "re-imagine" them for iOS — the first being Theme Park — and it's the second time it's proven to be a complete insult to the memory of a great game. The people behind this monstrosity should be disgusted with themselves — as profitable as free-to-play games are and as much sense as they make from a business perspective, there's no getting away from the fact that the games themselves are complete shit, being devoid of any real depth and compromising good game design in the name of being more exploitative .

Stop it, EA. The people you're hoping to court with these games' names are the people you're pissing off the most.

1471: Netrunning, Again

It was supposed to be one of our regular gaming evenings tonight, but two of the usual five participants were unable to make it, so the remaining three of us decided to try something a little different — concentrate on a single, two-player game and really get a feel for it.

The game was Android: Netrunner, which I talked about a short while back, and after tonight I feel I have a stronger grasp for the "feel" of the game and how it works.

In particular, what I've found interesting is quite how different the various factions play. The recommended starter decks — Jinteki for the Corporation player, Shapers for the Runner player — include an interesting balance of abilities, but can often see a game ending somewhat quickly. The Jinteki deck in particular is rammed with traps to set for the Runner player, most of which do various types of "damage" to him, causing him to discard cards and lose the game completely if he has to discard more cards than he has in his hand.

A key part of the Jinteki deck strategy appears to be making good use of these traps. One, known as Project Junebug, is particularly deadly in that it can be quite well "disguised" as one of the point-scoring Agenda cards by spending credits to "advance" it, then unleashed when an unsuspecting Runner hacks into it, only to discover an ambush waiting for him that does more damage than your maximum possible hand size early in the game. I won a game in this way this evening; my friend Tim likewise won one against my other friend Sam by making use of a similar strategy, though this time by simply setting two identical traps, luring Sam into the belief that one was an Agenda and the other was not, but actually revealing after the fact that both were deadly Project Junebug cards. Nasty.

Part of what is clearly the most interesting thing about Netrunner came out in our game this evening: it's as much about reading your opponent's psychology as it is about playing the optimum cards. In my game against Sam, for example, I left an Agenda card completely unguarded for a significant part of the game, building up defences in front of my other cards — including Project Junebug, which I then proceeded to "advance" in order to further cement the appearance that it was, in fact, an Agenda. By the time I laid some defenses in front of the previously unprotected Agenda and started to advance it, Sam was firmly of the belief that the more well-guarded card was the more valuable one — and from there, I was able to eliminate him easily.

Conversely, when Sam and Tim played one another, they tried different decks. Tim tried the Criminals Runner deck, while Sam went for the Haas-Bioroid corporation. It was quite hard to get a feel for how the Criminals deck played — it appeared to be quite focused on attaining a decent amount of wealth, which can subsequently be spent to enhance your capabilities during a "run" — but the Haas-Bioroid deck was a clear contrast from Jinteki. While Jinteki is all about bluffing and setting traps, Haas-Bioroid is all about setting up impenetrable defenses that are quite difficult for the Runner to get through. Conversely, a Criminals vs Haas-Bioroid match went on for significantly longer than the Shaper vs Jinteki matches we had previously tried — and rather than the games ending quite quickly, this matchup resulted in a much more protracted battle in which either side could have feasibly won.

I'm yet to delve into the more complicated side of building your own deck to play the game with, but even the differences between these starter decks are fascinating. I'm really looking forward to having the opportunity to play the game again and see how differently the other factions play to one another.

1468: Magick and Mend

I'm just shy of level 49 on the White Mage class in Final Fantasy XIV, which means I'll more than likely hit 50 tomorrow, which in turn makes Final Fantasy XIV the first MMO that I've not only reached the level cap and done some endgame stuff, but also the first MMO in which I've reached the level cap more than once. Granted, once you've done it once, subsequent levelling is significantly quicker thanks to the "Armoury Bonus" mechanic — bonus experience points based on the difference between your current class' level and your highest class' level — but it still demands a significant amount of commitment and, as the complete-once quests around the world dry up, creativity and flexibility in terms of how you're going to level up 49 times.

This second run to 50 has been interesting for a number of reasons, firstly because it's involved playing the game in a completely different way. During my first runthrough, in which I took the Thaumaturgist/Black Mage class up to 50, I was following the game's "Main Scenario" questline, which takes you through a complete, authentically Final Fantasy story in the purest sense. And it's a resolutely old-school Final Fantasy, too, all about crystal-related mysticism, powerful ancient forces stirring to cause chaos and, of course, a cast of villains in memorable-looking but impractical armour that probably makes it impossible for them to go to the toilet without lacerating their genitals. It's also paced in such a way that aside from a slight "dry spell" in the mid-40s, it's always taking you to new places in the world and providing you with a bunch of sidequests to do — by the time you reach the grand finale, you'll be level 50 and have a thorough understanding of how your class works, and consequently should have little difficulty challenging the "final" eight-player dungeons and obliterating the Big Bad from the face of Eorzea.

Conversely, once you're done with all that, there's not quite the same narrative push to keep you earning XP and progressing — the game switches, for the most part, from being all about following a linear storyline to "living" in the game world and making your own fun to a certain extent. It takes on a much more freeform feeling — though there's still something of an "optimal" route to level up as quickly as possible — and provides fun of a different sort. There's also a lot more flexibility to take on your own personal challenges — I'm hoping to eventually collect all the unique sets of equipment from the various dungeons, for example, but this will require me to be a bit more organised than I currently am, clear out my bulging Armoury Chest and make some checklists. Soon. Soon.

As well as this shift in play style, playing a completely different type of class has been interesting, too. Ever since my first serious attempt at playing an MMO — World of Warcraft — I've largely focused on playing heavy damage dealers, usually mages or the local equivalent. While these roles are demanding in their own right — particularly later in the games, there's an expectation that you have a thorough understanding of your abilities and how to use them efficiently to inflict as much damage as possible in as short a time as possible — there's often not as much "responsibility" as comes with the other two important roles in a typical MMO party: the "tank" and the "healer". Consequently, when I came to Final Fantasy XIV, I wanted to start with something I was familiar with — and while Black Mage comes with its own unique mechanics that I haven't seen in an MMO before, it was still largely about flinging flamey things at bad things until they fall over.

Switching to Conjurer/White Mage, though, was truly interesting, and it becomes particularly clear how different it is to play a healer the moment you step into a dungeon. No longer are you concentrating on the enemies and queueing up devastating attacks; instead, you're focusing your attention for the most part on the little party window in the upper-left corner of the screen, and making use of your restorative abilities to ensure none of those numbers reach zero as much as you can. This is very easy early in the game — a lot easier than I was expecting, in fact — but becomes more challenging the more abilities you have available to you. By the time you're healing later dungeons, you're having to content with status effects (dispatched with a swift cast of the "Esuna" spell) and bosses that inflict damage on the whole party at once. You start having to prioritise your actions carefully — can the tank take a few more hits while you buff up the armour of the more squishy party members, or should you fling him a heal or two first? — and the responsibility of knowing that the fate of the party largely (though not completely in many cases) lies with you becomes more obvious.

I actually thought this experience would be terrifying — to be frank, I was worried I'd fuck it up and get yelled at by people who died as a result of my incompetent healing — but I've found myself enjoying the experience a great deal, and seemingly being quite good at it. I haven't yet been thrown into an eight-player dungeon — the first of those don't show up until you reach level 50 — and I'm a little nervous at the prospect since I'm not quite sure how two healers divide up the workload of healing a much larger party, but I'm sure I'll figure it out. Plus it's always nice to be useful, and healers are certainly that.

Anyway. Time for bed. It's been a pleasantly peaceful day today, and I can feel my head gradually getting back to whatever passes for "normal". Not quite perfect yet, but getting there.

1462: Filthy Lucre

There are many things that bug me about free-to-play games — specifically, those of the mobile and Facebook variety — but one of my biggest bugbears is the ability to purchase in-game currency. Frustratingly, this is an option that has transcended its free-to-play origins and is now starting to infest other types of game — including full-price retail games on the new consoles.

The ability to purchase currency is usually touted as a time-saving feature that eliminates the need for grinding. In some cases, it's simply that — an option. In others, it becomes abundantly clear before very long that the game's economy has been balanced on the assumption that most players probably will purchase in-game currency at some point, and consequently those who just want to play the game without having to get their credit card out every ten minutes can just go fuck themselves.

Now, in many ways, choice is a good thing. Not everyone has time to spend earning virtual money in games to achieve somethingorother. But does that mean they should have the option to spend real money in order to get ahead in the game? I'm not so sure.

You see, the second you put that option there, it devalues the efforts of those willing to put in the work to earn the money themselves. Why would you bother working for something if you can just throw money at it, effectively paying to not play the game?

The reason I bring this up is that my Free Company in Final Fantasy XIV has started saving up for a medium-sized plot of land on which to build a house for guild activities. We already have a small plot, but the shed-like house that fits on the small plots is already full to bursting with the furniture that the crafters have been churning out. Consequently, active members of the guild have been working together to earn money in order to purchase one of the larger plots, which allows you to build significantly larger houses.

This evening, we spent a couple of hours in a "spiritbonding party" — we grouped up together, equipped with items of jewelry that weren't part of our normal equipment loadout, and then proceeded to battle hordes of monsters until said pieces of jewelry were "spiritbonded" to us — a mechanic in Final Fantasy XIV that means you can then break the item of equipment down and turn it into "materia". Materia are items that can be socketed into pieces of equipment for various stat bonuses, and certain among them — particularly the better ones — sell for pretty high prices due to their usefulness in completing the high-level "A Relic Reborn" quest that culminates in a character acquiring their almost-best weapon.

As you may have surmised already, someone in the guild had the bright idea of mass-producing a bunch of these jewelry items, taking them to an area with enemies that respawned quickly, and then indulging in some mass Water Sprite genocide until we had all Spiritbonded with the items enough to turn them into materia. We could then sell the resulting materia and plough some (or all, depending on how generous we were feeling) of the profits into our fundraising efforts for the new house.

The point is, while the act of going through the spiritbonding process is rather tedious — it largely involves killing lots of things that you're way overpowered for — it was something that brought a lot of us together for an enjoyable time. The experience was meaningful, worthwhile and even fun for the fact we were working together on it, even though the actual things we were doing were pretty mindless. And, when each of us successfully and finally spiritbonded with the items we had equipped, there was a feeling of achievement; a feeling of achievement that amplified considerably when the little message popped up on screen some time later saying that the materia we created had sold for a respectable amount of money; a feeling of achievement that amplified even more when voluntarily donating some of our own in-game currency to the guild coffers.

Everything I've described above would have been utterly meaningless had the option to purchase currency been in there. Attaining the medium-sized house would have felt like a hollow victory, as we wouldn't have done it through our skill and dedication to the game — we'd have done it through how deep our collective pockets are. That carries no meaning in the game world; one of the nicest things about Final Fantasy XIV's land of Eorzea is that the real world never intrudes. There's no "cash shop", the game never once asks you for your credit card details — you set up your subscription before you start playing — and once you're in the virtual world, everything you do relates to the virtual world somehow. It's a highly immersive experience, and one of the best things about the game.

Drop in a "Buy Gil" button and that goes out of the window. When working hard to attain something challenging in the game that costs a lot of money, the thought would always be there: "I wonder if I should just pay up and get it instead." And sure, it's certainly nice in the short term to be able to buy your way to victory — but in the long run, it's much more satisfying to know that everything you've achieved is because you've put the effort in.

A bit like life, you know.

1458: Wonderful!

I was fortunate enough to catch a pricing error on Nintendo's Web store yesterday — I didn't even know they had a Web store until yesterday, incidentally — that enabled me to score copies of The Wonderful 101 and Pikmin 3 for Wii U for just £8.95 each. It was touch-and-go as to whether Nintendo would honour these low prices, as it is any time a pricing error such as this comes up, but fortunately they honoured my purchase and I'm now the proud owner of digital copies of both of the aforementioned games. (I'd normally prefer physical, but my Wii U isn't exactly heaving with other downloads, so I can live with these two being boxless.)

You may ask why I didn't already own these two games, given that many Wii U owners regard one, the other or both as among the best games on the console. Well, the simple answer is that I wasn't sure if I'd like either of them — and certainly not enough to drop £50 on them. £8.95, while a relatively high price compared to what you can pick up in a Steam sale, is well within "impulse purchase" territory, however, and I was happy to give them both a go for that price.

I tried The Wonderful 101 tonight. I have enjoyed the Platinum games I've played to date — particularly Bayonetta, which in retrospect is probably one of my favourite games of the console generation just gone — but had heard that this was somewhat challenging and tough to get to grips with. As such, I approached it with a certain degree of trepidation.

It is somewhat challenging and tough to get to grips with, but much like Bayonetta rewarded you spending some time with it and getting to know how everything worked, so too does this game — and it doesn't take all that long to get your head around what's going on enough to improve your end-level ranking by a considerable degree.

For the uninitiated, The Wonderful 101 is a bizarre game in which you play a small army of superheroes as they attempt to fend off an alien invasion. The entire band moves as a group following whichever character is currently marked as the "leader", and various button presses can cause their formation to expand or contract.

The key mechanic in combat is making use of the "Wonder Line", which allows you to do various things with your small army of minions. By drawing shapes on the touchscreen of the Wii U GamePad or twiddling the right stick in various ways, you can perform "Unite" attacks — drawing a circle causes a number of the party to form a giant fist, for example, while drawing a straight line allows them to form a sword. You can also stretch your line of heroes over gaps and up walls to make bridges and ladders, too, and in order to snag some of the levels' secrets it's entirely necessary to do this.

The game is obviously very different to Bayonetta, which focused on a single character with a diverse variety of skills, but it also has a number of things in common with its spiritual precursor. For starters, all the enemies have distinctive "tells" to show when they're about to attack, and by learning these you'll know when to dodge and when to make use of the hilarious "Unite Guts" move, in which the entire party morphs into a giant pudding and shields against an attack. In Bayonetta, dodging attacks was key to the experience as it allowed you to trigger "Witch Time" in which time slowed down and you could send your score into orbit; in The Wonderful 101 it's a much more practical affair — it simply prevents you from taking damage, though in some cases, successfully blocking can rebound projectiles back at enemies or flip armoured vehicles onto their rooves.

I've only played two levels so far — both of them twice — but having got a handle on how everything works relatively quickly I now feel I "get" what the game is doing and look forward to trying more. I don't know if I'll end up obsessing over it quite as much as I did with Bayonetta when that first came out, but it's certainly got a lot of the same ingredients — and if you're a Wii U owner who has enjoyed Platinum's other work, I'd say you probably can't go all that far wrong with this.