1443: Death to the Chimera

It's another Final Fantasy XIV post, I'm afraid, but I feel compelled to share the experience I just had, as I think it's something that's going to stick with me for some time.

A bit of context, first, for those who don't play. My character is primarily a Black Mage, which is part of the group known as "DPS" (damage per second" or damage dealers. I don't have a lot of health, but my spells do hit hard and do a considerable amount of damage. When playing as a member of a party, I rely on the "tank" character to keep the enemies' attention off me, and occasionally the assistance of a healer to keep my health topped up if I do happen to get hit by something. For the most part, my responsibility is to avoid getting hit as much as possible, and to simultaneously ensure that I'm doing as much damage as possible.

I'm at level 50 on my Black Mage, which means I'm no longer gaining experience and have instead been gathering better and better equipment. My average item level is now 71, which is significantly stronger than where you are when you first hit 50 — though the effectiveness of all said equipment is scaled down accordingly if you happen to run a dungeon that's lower than level 50.

Which, as it happens, is exactly what I was doing earlier. I decided to run the dungeon Cutter's Cry, because I was well behind on my "Hunting Log" for the Immortal Flames Grand Company, and wanted to actually polish it off and make some progress. (In the game, your Hunting Log is a checklist of specific monsters to defeat, with rewards on offer for completing items on the list, and larger rewards on offer for completing a complete difficulty rank. The Grand Company is an organisation tied to one of the three main city-states in the game, and is effectively where your character pledges their allegiance to.)

Our run through Cutter's Cry didn't go as smoothly as it could have done. Our tank — the guy who stands at the front and gets hit, as well as the guy who generally leads jaunts through dungeons — wasn't especially skilled, and was having trouble maintaining the attention of monsters that really wanted to chomp on our healer's testicles. I spent a lot of the dungeon casting my Sleep spell to take a bit of the heat off the party and allow us to concentrate on a single monster at a time, and it overall seemed to work pretty well, with a few minor mishaps along the way.

We eventually reached the dungeon's boss monster Chimera, albeit with a different healer to the one we started with, who disconnected. Our first attempt failed miserably in a matter of seconds. The second, however, is where things got interesting and exciting.

It was going reasonably well for a while. We were doing decent damage to the Chimera, and the tank was successfully maintaining the attention of the enemy, allowing the party's Bard and I to pelt it from a distance with arrows and fireballs respectively.

Then something went horribly wrong. The tank didn't quite move far enough to get out of the path of one of the Chimera's special attacks, and hit the deck. The Bard followed shortly afterwards, leaving just me and the party's healer to deal with a by now very pissed off Chimera.

I thought this would almost inevitably be the end, but on a slightly selfish whim I decided to see what I could do. We'd already whittled the beast's health down to an amount that certainly looked doable, so I started alternating running away from it and flinging a few spells at it whenever it stopped to try and do one of its special attacks. The healer cottoned on quickly to what I was doing, and supported my efforts while the tank and Bard lay on the floor — the fight's too hectic to make raising party members practical, particularly if the tank's down.

The Chimera's health bar continued to deplete, and I somehow remained standing, successfully dodging each and every one of his special attacks and only occasionally taking damage from an occasional claw swipe. Meanwhile, I'd continue to electrocute him with my Thunder spells — which causes him to continually take small amounts of damage over a short period of time — and pelt him with fireballs whenever I had enough distance between us to make casting practical and safe-ish.

Finally, his health was into the "holy shit, are we actually going to pull this off?" territory — and conveniently, the party's Limit Break bar was fully charged at this point. (The Limit Break bar builds up gradually through combat, and any one party member can trigger it once it's charged high enough for a powerful special ability according to what class they are — in the case of Black Mage, it summons, as you might expect, a devastatingly destructive spell.)

"Limit Break!" called the party members. I was skeptical as to whether or not it would do enough damage, but I put some distance between the Chimera and I, waited for the perfect moment and then began casting.

The screen exploded in fire and my speakers erupted with the sounds of falling meteorites… and then there was a deafening screech as the beast collapsed to the floor and dissipated into a cloud of aether. The Chimera was down!

"Holy shit," said the fallen Bard afterwards as the healer helped him to his feet. "Good job."

I don't often like to toot my own horn, but in this case? Yeah, I have to agree.

1441: Panic!

Having tried Escape yesterday, Andie and I gave Castle Panic a go earlier. Despite the title, it's a somewhat more sedate affair than Escape, though you're still dealing with difficult odds and a distinct chance of being horribly defeated at any point.

Castle Panic is a cooperative game in which you and up to five other players are tasked with defending your castle from an incoming onslaught of goblins, orcs and trolls. Your castle is made up of six towers, each of which has a wall protecting it. Lose all the towers (but not necessarily the walls) and everyone loses; get through all the monster tokens and kill everything and everyone wins, but whoever scores the most points wins slightly more than everyone else.

Gameplay is pretty straightforward. The board is split into three coloured sections, each of which is subdivided into two numbered areas and five different rings. The outermost ring is the "forest" surrounding the castle area; the next three rings represent the effective ranges of your archers, knights and swordsmen respectively; the innermost ring is inside your castle walls and is where you're trying to prevent the beasties getting to.

In order to deal with the incoming hordes, you need to play cards from your hand. Many of these take the form of a coloured archer, knight or swordsman, which means you can deal one point of damage to a monster in the appropriately coloured section of their respective ring on the board. Different types of monster take different amounts of damage — goblins only take one, for example, while trolls and some "boss" monsters have three and orcs have two.

There's a selection of special cards in the mix, too — a "lucky shot" card allows a monster to be outright killed rather than damaged when used in conjunction with an appropriate card; "hero" cards can attack any ring in one coloured area of the board; barbarians can attack enemies who have managed to breach the castle walls.

Each turn, more and more enemies show up to make life difficult, and the enemies already on the board move in by one ring. If they hit a wall, they destroy it and take a damage, and likewise for the towers. Certain monster tokens cause more monsters to show up, or move further than they would normally, or rotate around the board. Giant Boulder tokens roll across the board, killing everything in their path but also destroying the first wall or tower they meet, making them something of a mixed blessing.

Andie and I won the game we played earlier, which surprised me somewhat — I'm used to cooperative games smacking me about somewhat more than this one did, but it may have been a lucky combination of card and monster token draws.

I'm interested to try the game with more people, since then you have smaller hands of cards but are able to trade more cards with people at the start of your turn.

It's an interesting take on cooperative because there's a competitive element, too — while you're all working together for a common goal, there is a scoring mechanic to encourage you to try and be the "best", too. This somewhat discourages the "alpha player" problem that some cooperative games suffer from, in which one player takes charge and orders everyone else around. In Castle Panic, there's not so much scope for that to happen and turns are pretty quick, so everyone can feel like they're contributing.

It's a good game, in short. I'm looking forward to trying it some more.

Talking about all these board games has given me a blogging idea for January — I'm thinking I might go through my collection and compile some detailed posts on selected (or perhaps even all!) of the games I own, sharing some thoughts, images and details on them for those curious. I have a pretty decent collection now, and it would be nice to do it justice with some more detailed posts. So look forward to that!

1440: Escape!

I spent some of my Christmas money today on some board games — I grabbed Castle Panic, which I've never played but which I understand is an enjoyable moderate-length game that isn't horrendously complicated, and Escape, which I hadn't heard of prior to today, but which came recommended by some board gamers I follow on G+.

Escape is a really interesting game, as it happens, and I'm looking forward to trying it out with various different group sizes. Andie and I gave it a shot today, initially not quite sure what to make of it, but after a third playthrough — a game is only ten minutes long — we nailed it.

Escape is a cooperative game that unfolds in real time. You and your compatriots play intrepid explorers who have gone and got themselves stuck in the middle of a temple, with no idea of where the exit is. (Presumably they fell in through the ceiling or something.) It's your job to find the exit, then exit through it. Simple, right? NOPE.

The temple, being a mysterious old temple, is cursed, and in order to be able to escape you need to not only find the exit, but also activate some magical gems along the way. Each gem you activate makes it easier to escape, but attempting to activate them takes up valuable time.

Almost everything you do in Escape hinges on the roll of the dice. Each player has five dice they can roll, and there's no need to take turns — you just keep rolling until you get what you want, and you can set aside dice that you haven't used to perform an action. Roll a black mask, however, and that die is out of commission until you roll a golden mask to return up to two of your dice to play. If you're in the same room as another player, you can use your golden masks to "heal" another player's dice, too, so it's in your interests to team up rather than get too far apart.

Activating the gems is generally a matter of rolling a certain number of either torch or key symbols. Certain rooms allow you to activate multiple gems in collaboration with other players by pooling your dice, but obviously rolling 10 of one symbol is going to be a little more time-consuming than rolling, say, 4, so you have to weigh up the risks and potential rewards.

Just to add a little more stress to the mix, at two points during the ten-minute play session, a gong sounds, and then you have a short span of time to get back to the central chamber or lose one of your dice permanently. Conversely, if you manage to escape before someone else does — by both finding the exit and then rolling as many keys as there are gems left in the pool, plus one — you can give one of your dice to another player. If you haven't all escaped by the time the third gong and countdown ends, you all lose, regardless of how many people have escaped.

Escape makes use of an audio CD to manage the time limit, but also provides a sand timer for when you're playing in quieter environments. The CD is a lot of fun, though, being full of ambient noise and dramatic stabs when you're all racing back to the central room. It reminds me of the somewhat more complicated Space Alert, another cooperative game that involves working together against a tight time limit — unlike Space Alert, however, which unfolds in hilariously painful slow motion after the CD is over, Escape happens in completely real-time, which takes a certain degree of getting used to but gives it a pleasingly enjoyable, frantic feel to it.

Looking forward to trying it some more and adding the "Curse" and "Treasure" modules for additional complexity and strategic options. In the meantime, if you're looking for a super-quick game to hit your table as a filler or warmup, it's well worth a look.

1439: Titanic

Been making good progress with Final Fantasy XIV over the last few days and once again I'm pleasantly surprised by how much I've taken to the multiplayer-centric endgame content.

Tonight's job — the last-but-one step in the quest to acquire the almost-but-not-quite-ultimate weapon for my level 50 Black Mage class — was to fell Titan in his "Hard Mode" fight, a notoriously difficult boss battle that I had a considerable degree of uneasiness about going into — and which I was terrified of the prospect of jumping into with strangers.

As it happens, the fight wasn't all that scary if you know what you're doing — much like every other fight in the game. You'd think I'd have learned that by now.

Titan, like Ifrit and Garuda before him, is one of the "Primals" — major bosses that crop up over the course of Final Fantasy XIV's main story, and a good opportunity to test your party's skills against one very strong opponent without having to run through a long dungeon first. The battles against them — known as "trials" in game parlance — tend to be unfold in deceptively simple boss-fighting arenas, but the simplicity of the environment is to ensure there's nothing to distract you from the important thing: paying attention to what your opponent is doing.

Ifrit, Garuda and Titan all have abilities that are far beyond almost anything else you fight in the game, and a party that doesn't know what it's doing can wipe out very quickly if they're not careful. They're highly mobile fights that demand you recognise your opponent's attack patterns and know how to counter them — and how to avoid them. Titan in particular is highly dependent on the party being able to avoid a relentless string of devastating attacks — and the healers being able to deal with the few, less-damaging attacks that are unavoidable for the whole party.

Aside from Titan, I spent a bit of time playing with the Conjurer class earlier — this is the healing class that later becomes White Mage, but also has a few offensive skills, too. It's an interestingly distinctive class to play when compared to Black Mage, and a good demonstration of how Final Fantasy XIV makes even ostensibly similar classes play markedly differently from one another.

Black Mage and its predecessor Thaumaturgist involve highly destructive spells that cost large amounts of magic points to cast. The key mechanic to get your head around with Black Mage is the balance between "Umbral Ice" and "Astral Fire" — the former causes your ice-based spells to cost more to cast, but increases your magic points regeneration enormously, while the latter causes fire-based spells to cost more to cast and deal considerably more damage, and also stops all magic points regeneration. Essentially, Black Mages have a limitless pool of magic points that mean they can continue casting indefinitely, so long as they make the switch between Umbral Ice and Astral Fire at appropriate junctures — and, at higher levels, make good use of the MP-free, instant-cast spells that occasionally trigger.

White Mage and its predecessor Conjurer, meanwhile, are very different. Spells are considerably cheaper to cast, but there's no Umbral Ice mechanic to quickly regenerate magic points in a hurry — so you have to manage your spellcasting a little more carefully. The class also has an interesting "stance switch" option, allowing the white mage to swap their Intelligence (determines spell damage) and Mind (determines healing power) stats around, effectively making them either damage- or healing-focused at the touch of a button. And then, of course, there's the fact that white mages are mainly regarded as healers rather than damage dealers, and as such you have to be a lot more aware of people around you so you can heal them. The tradeoff for this, of course, is that people tend to like you because you can stop them from dying — and, once you reach a high enough level, you can even bring them back from the dead.

I jumped into one of the short party-based "Guildhests" earlier on to have a go at healing as part of a group with a relatively straightforward challenge. The party I was with was clearly very inexperienced — the fighter charged ahead without waiting for me to cast protection spells on him, and the damage-dealing mage seemed to take as much damage as he inflicted. I managed to keep everyone alive, though, and my reward from these random strangers whom I'll probably never see again was three "Player Commendations" — a new system introduced in the latest patch which allows players to show their appreciation for random teammates they were matched up with through the Duty Finder system. It's a very nice, friendly addition to the game, and I can't deny feeling a pleasantly warm and fuzzy feeling inside after a successful dungeon run when I see that little "You have received a player commendation" message in my chat window. Even better when there's more than one.

Anyway. With Titan down, the only thing left for me to do to get my Black Mage relic weapon is to collect 400 more Allagan Tomestones of Philosophy by running dungeons — should be easy enough. Once I've done that, I'll be well on the way to being appropriately geared for the Binding Coil of Bahamut, the most difficult dungeon in the game… or I can just start working on one of the other classes, with the eventual goal of getting their Relic weapons, too.

This post was probably indecipherable to those of you who don't play Final Fantasy XIV but eh. Whatever. Tomorrow I'll write about kittens or something.

1438: Mario Time!

Finally picked up Super Mario 3D World today with some of our Christmas money. (Andie spent all hers on Lego; I still have some left, which I'm probably going to spend on board games.)

What do you know? It's fantastic, and to be honest I feel a bit sorry for anyone playing through the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One's weak launch lineup in preference to the variety of really great games available for Wii U this Christmas time, with Super Mario 3D World certainly being a candidate for strongest of a strong bunch.

I've played through two "worlds" so far, and already it's shown considerably more invention and creativity than almost any other game I've played in recent memory. Nintendo just gets "fun". The Mario devs know what would be enjoyable and memorable to play, and they implement it in such a way that it manages to be consistently surprising and delightful even as you continue to progress through the levels. Rarely does it become predictable, and rarely does it get so hung up on a single trick that it becomes stale or boring; often, you'll come across an enemy or trap that shows up maybe once or twice and is then never seen again — a far cry from some other games that repeatedly fling the same generic tricks and traps at you over the course of a lengthy adventure.

The thing I particularly like about Super Mario 3D World and its predecessor Super Mario 3D Land for the 3DS is how intuitive it is. You'll very rarely be given an explicit tutorial or an insultingly simple level to teach you how things work; rather, you'll immediately be given a new item and it be implemented in such a manner that you can't help but figure out how it works and what it's for straight away. Beautiful game design.

Take the very first level: almost right off the bat, you're given Super Mario 3D World's new power-up, the cat suit. You're not explicitly told how the cat suit works — how you can run up the walls, how you can "pounce" while you're in the air — but the way the first level is designed encourages you to try these things out for yourself. You'll naturally discover how the mechanics work, and it's always pleasing and delightful to do so. The first time I found that wearing the cat suit allowed Mario and friends to climb up the flagpole at the end of the level for an easy gold flag put a genuine smile on my face.

The presentation is immaculate, too. A rock-solid 60fps; some well-designed, clear visuals; a minimal but informative interface; and some really, really great music performed on real instruments — Super Mario 3D World is without a doubt one of the most polished Mario games I've seen in recent memory, though I understand the Super Mario Galaxy games — which I'm yet to play — probably give it a run for its money, albeit in standard definition.

I'm looking forward to playing more, but I flattened the GamePad battery playing earlier. Perhaps I should invest in one of those new high-capacity batteries!

1435: Something to Try This Steam Sale

"Lock up your wallets," the tired old joke goes, "it's Steam sale time." And indeed, the Steam holiday sale is a great opportunity to pick up tons of games for not very much money.

The trouble is, the Steam sale tends to encourage people to pick up as many games as possible, then never get around to playing them. In previous Steam sales, I've probably gathered sufficient games to keep me busy for literally years now — to such a degree that it's now quite hard to find something new I might want to buy when a new sale comes around — and yet have still only barely scratched the surface of the games I own.

A lesser-appreciated thing that you can do around Steam Sale time, though, is try out something that you might not have given a chance normally. Perhaps it's in a genre you don't normally like, or you've been put off by mixed or middling reviews, or you're simply not sure if you'll enjoy it from what other people have told you about it.

The Steam sale is the perfect time to take a chance on these games, though, and see how well you get on with them. If you like them, great! Keep playing! And if you don't… well, you've only spent a few quid on them at most — at least if you've obeyed the Unwritten Law of Steam Sales, which is to not buy anything unless it sees a larger-than-50% discount — preferably 75% off.

One might argue that demos fulfil much the same function as what I'm proposing here, but demos don't often give you the full picture of how a game plays in the long term — often, they provide a simple slice of gameplay divorced from its surrounding context, which in many cases doesn't do it any favours, particularly if the game itself is a complex one. Grabbing a copy of a game you've been on the fence about for a few quid, meanwhile, allows you to jump into the experience with beginner's mind, try it out for yourself and give it a fair shot without having to worry about it "expiring" or anything just as it starts getting interesting.

I've got my eye on a few things I might be interested in trying this Steam sale, and they're all titles I probably wouldn't buy under normal circumstances.

First up, I grabbed XCOM the other day, since everyone says it's great. I don't know if or when I'll get around to playing it, but it's nice to have the option.

Second, I'm interested in taking a look at WarGame: AirLand Battle after a friend of mine expressed some interest in potentially playing it multiplayer sometime. Military war games aren't usually my thing, but that may be just because I haven't tried many of them in the past. AirLand Battle sounds like it does some interesting things that I quite like the sound of, but I'm worried I'll be embarrassingly shit at it and never be able to get anywhere.

Thirdly, I have the original version of Sins of a Solar Empire in physical format and quite liked it, but didn't get super-into it. The latest version Rebellion is in the Steam sale, and I'm umming and ahhing over giving it another shot — particularly since, again, it's something I might be able to play with friends.

Finally, Divinity: Dragon Commander looks like an enjoyable time, featuring, as it does, jetpack-wearing dragons, political intrigue, RPG elements atop a strategy game. I saw a very early version of this back at Gamescom in 2010 and liked it a lot, so I'd be interested in giving the full version a go.

If the price is right on any of these over the course of the Steam sale — they're all a little high at the time of writing — then I'll more than happily give them a go. Who knows? I might find a new favourite among them. Why don't you try doing the same?

1434: Free Company

The Internet is by turns a strange and wonderful place, filled with all manner of people from fair to foul. Wander inadvertently into the wrong corner of it and you'll find yourself surrounded by some of the very worst people in the world; somewhere else and you'll find people who will go on to become lifelong friends.

Online gaming is somewhat troublesome in this regard at times, particularly for those of us who struggle somewhat in social situations. The prospect of talking to strangers in an online game is, to me, pretty much as frightening as the prospect of walking up to a random stranger in a bar — particularly if voice chat is involved. With text chat, it's somewhat easier since you have more time to consider your responses, but the inability to express your tone of voice can sometimes lead to misunderstandings, and it's still nerve-wracking to, say, ask a favour of someone.

This is something that's held me back a little from fully enjoying some online games, because sooner or later you're going to have to play with people you don't know personally. Your friends won't always be available to play with you, or you might need more help than your friendship groups can provide, or you might be playing a game mode where you're organised into teams. Whatever the reason, it can be anxiety-inducing.

In the case of MMOs, you have to put your virtual life in the hands of strangers quite often, whether it's for running a dungeon, beating a boss or getting a piece of equipment crafted. It's easy to forget that a lot of people playing these games are in a similar situation where they need help from others to progress, and thus it's in their interests to be nice to one another.

There are, of course, exceptions. The team-based e-sports games Dota 2 and League of Legends have notoriously "toxic" (the word that's most commonly bandied about) communities that are somewhat unforgiving of newcomers attempting to learn the game "in the wild," as it were. MMOs, too, have elitist players who are quick to complain at those whom they do not think are playing the game "properly", and players who are impatient with newcomers just trying to have fun and learn how to get through some of the tougher dungeons and fights.

I get it. It's frustrating for these people, who want to play in a particular way, to find themselves having to change their play style to support someone who's perhaps less familiar with a particular challenge. But there's really no excuse for rudeness.

That's me in the big black coat in the background.

I've been extremely lucky with my time in Final Fantasy XIV so far. While most of my runs through dungeons and boss fights have been with friends, the few times I've dared to jump into the Duty Finder alone and be grouped up with strangers have been very pleasant surprises. Pick-up groups (or PUGs, as they're sometimes called) have a rather poor reputation in most MMOs, and indeed in Final Fantasy XIV's case most people seem to have at least one tragically amusing Duty Finder story where they played with someone who was just a colossal dickhead. I'm glad to have escaped that fate to date — but it also makes me extremely nervous about "going solo", as it were: in other words, braving things like the new Duty Roulette system, which picks a random dungeon for you and three other random players to play in exchange for some very generous rewards, and indeed other group-based content I need to complete in order to proceed further in the game.

Which brings me on to my main point: how grateful I am to have a group of regular players whom I enjoy playing with, and whom I like. I'm a member of the "Giant Bomb" Free Company after being invited by someone I know through some combination of 1up, Twitter, The Squadron of Shame and possibly some other places — I forget the exact details — and am very happy that what I originally hoped would transpire when I started playing Final Fantasy XIV — that I'd make some friends with whom I felt comfortable playing — has indeed come to pass.

The interesting thing is that I don't really know anything about the people I'm playing with, so they're basically still "strangers" to me — just strangers I'm somewhat more familiar with. I'm not an active member of the community on the Giant Bomb website, so outside of my friend who originally invited me in the first place, I can't relate any of these in-game names to real names or even usernames.

It sort of doesn't matter, though; when we're online in FFXIV, we're there to play FFXIV. There's the occasional mention of real-life things — usually when someone has to go and make dinner, or go out, or whatever — but for the most part, conversation in the game is about the game. We're all enthusiastic and passionate about the game, and we all enjoy talking about it, whether that's sharing our thoughts on the new content in the latest patch, sharing strategies for clearing dungeons, or collaborating on group projects such as the Free Company house and the various weird and wonderful objects therein.

I'm really very grateful to these people for making my experience with the game so enjoyable and welcoming, and the pleasant feeling of friendship and camaraderie I have with these folks is the main thing that keeps me coming back to the game time after time. Final Fantasy XIV is a great game in its own right, but when played with the right people, it becomes even more enjoyable — even for an old hermit like me.

1432: They Don't Look Like That Any More

Hello.

Video games today look like this:

Or this:

Or, indeed, many other things besides.

So why, then, any time some switched-on young advertising executive wants to, for some inexplicable reason, make use of the idea of "video games" to advertise something completely different — like, say, shoes — it ends up looking like this?

I have… quite a few issues with this campaign. First of all, why the hell does it even exist? It sort of looks cool, I guess, but it has nothing to do with Schuh's stock in trade which is, unsurprisingly, shoes. I get the impression that someone just thought "hey! Video games are cool and popular! Let's do something with them to advertise our product!"

Actually, having inadvertently stumbled across the agency that came up with this bizarre marketing effort, it seems that, unless "Isobel" isn't telling us something, that pretty much is all there was to it.

"Schuh's 'Start Xmas' Christmas campaign was inspired by the retro theme of 1st Generation arcade games," Isobel explains. "We won the creative pitch against several other agencies earlier in the year."

Um. Well done? As I say, it looks cool but has absolutely fuck all to do with shoes. The main concept appears to be the word "start", which is a button commonly found on video game controllers and arcade machines, and then they've just gone and run with it. "Start" Xmas. Geddit?

The problem is, though, that as I mentioned at the beginning, video games don't look like that any more, with the exception of some indie games that are deliberately channelling the super-pixelated styles of yore. This style of video game is not something that is massively culturally relevant to the sort of person who would fall for a marketing campaign based around video games — namely, a young and rather stupid person. A young and rather stupid person who likes video games probably plays stuff like Halo, Battlefield, Call of Duty or FIFA — no judgement on older, wiser people who also play those games, naturally — and not Space Invaders.

Ultimately the whole thing comes off as a bit desperate. It caught my eye when I walked past the store earlier today, but it certainly didn't make me want to buy shoes. It did, however, make me want to write this blog post, so well done for that. It also made me feel that the people from "Planarama" behind the campaign haven't actually played a video game ever. Can you name any games that actually say "game on" when you start them — even games from the '80s? I can't.

I guess it's sort of cool that video games have reached a sufficient degree of cultural penetration for a mainstream shop like Schuh to attempt to use them to peddle their wares, but it's also indicative of the fact that the average person in the street likely has very little clue that video games have advanced significantly in the last 30 years — to such a degree that they'd be all but unrecognisable to someone from the '80s.

Still, I guess the super-pixelated art style is a convenient shorthand for "video games" but that doesn't really address the core problem I have with this campaign: it's for a shoe shop's Christmas sale. No amount of pixelated Christmas puddings or aliens in Santa hats will hide the fact that it's a campaign completely irrelevant to the product it's trying to sell, and just, in fact, looks rather foolish.

On the other hand, it compelled me to talk about it and mention Schuh several times, so perhaps it is doing its job after all.

1431: Relics and Rebirth

I must say, I wasn't sure I'd enjoy it, but I'm really having fun with Final Fantasy XIV's endgame content. Part of this is due to the fact the new content update that dropped earlier in the week added a significant amount of stuff to do for people who had hit the level cap, but I'm also enjoying working my way through the stuff that was already there. A lot of it encourages you to try stuff that you might have ignored throughout the rest of the game.

Take the A Relic Reborn quest, for example, which culminates in you getting your class' powerful Relic weapon, which can subsequently be upgraded to a Relic +1, for those who just like to be slightly better than the best.

A Relic Reborn tasks you with a number of different things to do, the first of which is acquiring a specific weapon and melding specific materia to it. (For those less familiar with Final Fantasy, materia are things you can plug into items of equipment to improve their abilities; in Final Fantasy VII they determined what specific spells and other actions your characters could perform, while in XIV they tend to confer bonuses to various stats.)

I had gone through pretty much the whole game without melding any materia to anything. This was partly because I wasn't able to do it myself — in order to meld materia to a piece of equipment you need to have one of the crafting classes up to a high level, and my efforts as a Weaver were stalled by my running out of lightning crystals — and partly because I'd been replacing my equipment reasonably often as I levelled up, and consequently didn't see the value in upgrading an item only to discard it a few levels later.

I was hoping a member of my Free Company might be able to meld the necessary materia to the weapon in question, but no-one had the right skills, so I had to brave random strangers. As someone with social anxiety, the prospect of approaching a random stranger and asking for a favour is, as you might expect, rather nerve-wracking — particularly when you're not quite sure of the etiquette for doing so in this particular community. Should I offer them some (in-game) money? Is it rude to ask them if they want paying? How do I find them in the first place?

As it happened, finding them was a simple matter of wandering into the Ul'Dah marketplace and yelling really loud. Virtually, of course; it's a matter of typing "/shout [message]" rather than literally having to bellow your message into the ether. Just as well, too; if I was using voice chat, there'd be no doubt in anyone's mind that my short-but-pretty female redhead character was being played by a big hairy bloke. Not that I think anyone would care; playing off-gender is pretty common if our Free Company is anything to go by. And occasionally, playing a female character can allow you to flutter your virtual eyelashes and get people who might not otherwise help you out to play with you. (Well, it worked in World of Warcraft; the land of Eorzea appears to be a somewhat more egalitarian and less sexually frustrated society, perhaps due to the fact that the player base is slightly older than that of World of Warcraft.)

Anyway, it took me a matter of seconds to be bombarded with people who wanted to help me. Eventually I picked someone whose name I'd seen in public chat before, and whom I remembered didn't seem to be a jerk. I met up with him at the Goldsmiths' Guild, used the game's convenient "request materia meld" interface to indicate what I needed and offer him suitable compensation — my Free Company brethren had suggested 5,000 gil per meld was a good starting point — and within a matter of moments it was done. We bowed courteously to one another and went about our business.

That wasn't so hard, was it? No, of course it wasn't; as anyone with social anxiety will know, the reality of a particular social situation that gives you cause for unease is rarely as bad as what you build it up to be in your mind. And this is just as true in the online space as it is when you're meeting people in reality — even with online games and virtual worlds' capacity to let you represent yourself in any way you wish.

Anyway, the upshot of all that is that the quest to construct my Relic weapon is now well underway, and a big punch-up with Chimera is in my near future. But that is a story for another day.

1429: Call me Farmer Heathcliff

Before we get started, a shout out to the person who found this blog by searching for "are there any games on facebook that arent crap" [sic]. In answer to your question, good sir and/or madam, the answer is "no". Thank you for your time.

Right then, to business.

Tonight we played a game of Agricola: Farmers of the Moor, the expansion to Agricola. Agricola is still not my favourite game in the world, but the expansion does add some interesting new elements to it — and, crucially, multiple ways to do well. By way of example, the top two players out of our four-player game this evening scored 61 and 60, adopting two totally different approaches to one another. (I came third, with 27 points, but at least I didn't come last, which I count as a personal victory.)

My difficult with Agricola is a matter of prioritisation, and of finding an efficient strategy to do the things I want to do. I get that you should spend the early game building a house, the mid-game building up your family and the end-game racking up as many points as possible, but I find it very difficult to determine what are the best possible actions to achieve those things, and on top of that, what the best Occupation and Minor Improvement cards to achieve those things might be. My tablemates are always talking about "synergies" and "combos" but I have real trouble spotting all but the most obvious combinations.

I know that part of the problem is that I just haven't played it enough compared to them. I should get in more practice with my own copy — yes, I own a copy, despite having somewhat mixed feelings about it — or the iOS version. But it's one of those things that when I consider actually sitting down to play it, I start thinking I'd rather do something else instead. Not in the "I'd rather light my own eyeballs on fire" sense; it's just something fairly low down the list of things I feel like doing, somewhere behind "playing Bravely Default", "playing Final Fantasy XIV until 5 in the morning" and "watching several episodes of The Office back-to-back". (Incidentally, The Office — the American incarnation — is something I'd very much like to talk about, but I'll save that for another day.)

On the whole, we had a decent game this evening and I was reasonably pleased with most of my game — right up until the last turn where my lack of contingency plan was brought into stark focus by someone taking the one space that would screw me over almost completely. Consequently, I spent the last turn frantically gathering the food needed for survival rather than racking up points — and even then, I forgot the fuel needed to heat my home and took a two-point hit for having a sick person. Bollocks.

Oh well. Fortunately, I managed to get Yeoman Farmer (take no negative points, except for unused farmyard spaces and Begging cards — of which I had neither) out when things looked like they might go a bit pear-shaped. If I hadn't managed to get that out, my pathetic farm at the end of the game would have had a truly embarrassing score; possibly my worst of all time.

Still, as my tablemates say, it was a training game — it's only the second time we've played with the expansion — and so we all probably have a lot to learn, still.