1415: Return to Normality

Whew. There we go. That was, as I previously mentioned, a bit of an ordeal to write. Perhaps not my best piece of creative writing, but certainly one of the more therapeutic ones. Now I can get back to posting about random crap only I care about. Something something Hyperdimension Neptunia.

So, what to write about this evening? It is late in the day but I'm not all that tired just yet, thanks largely to the vast amounts of coffee I inevitably consume whenever I go over to my friend Tim's for a board game evening. And this evening I went over to my friend Tim's for a board game evening.

My local friends and I have been playing board games together for quite some time now, and our tastes have gradually evolved over time. Our tastes haven't always necessarily evolved in the same directions, however, which isn't always easy to deal with, but we're currently trialling a new system whereby we 1) get to play regularly rather than semi-regularly and 2) pick games in such a way that no-one is ever waiting for too many sessions before they get to play something that would be high up on their list of personal preferences.

One of the issues we have is that two of our number (two out of five) are big into fairly hardcore strategy games that require a degree of mathematical, analytical thinking that, as a largely creative, artistic person, I'm ill-equipped to deal with as well as them. I would love to get better at this sort of game, but I'm just not very good at being able to look several moves ahead or have contingency plans if the things I want to do suddenly become unavailable. Perhaps I should start playing with a notepad to hand so I can scribble things down and work them out as I go. (Actually, that's not a terrible idea. I may try that at some point in the near future.)

Another two out of our group — including me — tend to prefer cooperative games, particularly those that enjoy either dungeon crawling or battling eldritch horrors from beyond time and space. These games tend to have a longer run time, be more heavily thematic and, in many cases, have a stronger element of luck involved. I love them, at least in part due to the fact that they have a much stronger sense of "narrative" than the often drier world of Euro-style strategy games.

Ultimately I just like the opportunity to get some boards, cards and chits onto the table, really, so I don't mind all that much what I play despite my regular protestations against Agricola. I'm grateful to have a group of friends I can share that with on a regular basis, and if you're looking for something fun, enjoyable and highly social to do with your friends, I can't recommend the wonderful world of board gaming enough.

1406: Sunday Night

It is, as the title says, Sunday night, and as usual I have left writing this until the last minute, and as such rather than churn out the first thing that comes into my head while tired, I'm instead going to hold fire on the ongoing story until tomorrow. This week I'm going to attempt to write each installment in the morning before I start work rather than saving it until the last thing in the evening.

This will also (hopefully) have the side-effect of allowing me to focus on those aspects of it that are a little more challenging to write — i.e. the bits drawn from my personal experience as a teacher — while my brain is reasonably alert and thus able to process things a little more clearly.

This, then, leaves this entry free for some generic ramblings about what I've been up to. So, okay then, let's do just that.

After a short break, I've been getting back into Final Fantasy XIV and it remains just as compelling as it ever was. Over the last few evenings, I've been completing the "Lightning Strikes" questline, in which the heroine from Final Fantasy XIII and its upcoming spinoff Lightning Returns shows up in the lands of Eorzea and enlists your assistance in defeating various unpleasant beasties, culminating in a battle against a giant… thing called "Aspect of Chaos". It's essentially an advertising event for Lightning Returns, which came out in Japan recently and comes out in the West in February. (And yes, the event is repeating in February.) But it's pretty well done. The usual Final Fantasy XIV battle music is replaced by the brilliant "Blinded by Light" from Final Fantasy XIII, until the final boss battle, which is accompanied by Final Fantasy XIII's boss music, the name of which escapes me right now.

The equipment you get out of it allows you to cosplay as either Lightning or Snow from Final Fantasy XIII, depending on your character's gender, but it's not particularly good equipment — it's just level 13, so it's all but useless to those who are bumping their head against the level cap. That said, the Free Company I'm in is considering doing some low-level dungeon runs all in Lightning gear, so that might be fun to do at some point.

Aside from Final Fantasy XIV, I've also finally got around to playing Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, aka 999. I was expecting to like this, so I was unsurprised to find myself enjoying it a great deal. It's a very clever game that makes good use of the DS' twin screens to present its visual novel-style storytelling sequences effectively — dialogue on the top, narrative on the bottom — and features some enjoyable "room escape" puzzle sequences. There are six endings to the game; so far I've seen three of them, and they've all involved the untimely death of the entire cast, which is unfortunate. There is a "true" ending but I haven't yet determined the conditions that cause you to proceed down that path — I have my suspicions, but I'm investigating thoroughly since a single playthrough doesn't take very long and I'd like to see all the different endings, even if most of them are "BAD END"s.

Anyway. Now I'm off to sit in bed and find yet another way to kill off the whole cast. The story will continue tomorrow, assuming I manage to haul myself out of bed in a timely manner.

1381: The Hand You're Dealt

There's been a whole load of drama recently surrounding resolutions — exactly what resolutions PS4 and Xbox One games will run at; the fact that Deadly Premonition for PC only runs at 720p; the fact that Typing of the Dead renders at 720p even if you set its resolution to 1080p — and I find it very difficult to care.

I mean, sure, I acknowledge and accept the fact that if you've spent a thousand quid or more on a PC — or bought a brand-new next-gen console, for that matter — many people want everything they play to take full advantage of their hardware and look as good as possible… but if it doesn't, I just shrug my shoulders and move on. It ultimately doesn't matter; I can think of very few situations where technical deficiencies have significantly impacted my experience to such a degree that something becomes unplayable or even that word that NeoGAF appears to enjoy throwing around: "unacceptable". (The last was Guild Wars 2, and that was an extreme case; something the game doesn't like about my particular system configuration makes it run at about 5 frames per second, which really is unplayable.)

I wonder if part of the reason I feel like this is the fact that I've spent a significant proportion of time over the past few years playing games that aren't at the technological forefront. I've played a lot of pixel-art indie games, for example, but I've also played low-poly stuff, games from the early 3D era, games on PS2, handheld games and even low-budget PS3 games. Hell, three of my favourite games in recent memory — the Hyperdimension Neptunia series — are some of the most technically flawed titles I've played for a while, struggling to reach even 30 frames per second at a resolution that I'm pretty certain is not 1080p.

It could also be the fact that I grew up with PCs that weren't always the most powerful or the best and as such quickly learned how to optimise detail settings for a good balance between looking good and running smoothly. I remember playing Doom on a 386 and finding that balance; that said, I also remember us getting a 486 and it being like a completely different game.

Yes, it's lovely when something looks beautiful and animates smoothly to boot — one of the best things about upgrading or replacing your PC is trying out something that brought your previous system to its knees and seeing that it runs butter-smooth — but it really doesn't spoil my day in the slightest if something doesn't run at 60 or even 30 frames per second. It's just not something that matters to me in the slightest. For me, the important thing is the actual game itself: is it fun? Is it emotionally engaging? Do I like the characters? Am I enjoying the experience? Do I want to talk about it to friends? Whether or not I can give positive answers to any or all of those questions, "does it run at 60 frames per second?" is not something that even enters my mind at any point.

Note: I'm not saying you shouldn't care about 60 frames per second or 1080p or whatever — it's your decision what to care about, of course. I'm simply giving my take on all this — and it transpires that I don't really give a shit about it at all. I'm happy just to play a new Typing of the Dead, or Deadly Premonition on PC, or… you get the idea.

1380: Suffer Like QWERTY Did?

There's a new Typing of the Dead game out.

There's a sentence I never thought I'd have the opportunity to type truthfully, but here we are on October 29 in the year of Our Lord 2013, and there's a new Typing of the Dead game out.

Lest you're unfamiliar with Typing of the Dead, allow me to explain.

Sega have a franchise known as House of the Dead. Originally, it was one of those big-screen arcade machines that you and a friend point plastic guns at and pretend you're blasting zombies. House of the Dead and its various sequels were notorious for having some of the worst voice acting ever witnessed in a video game, but also for being fun light gun shooters that didn't take themselves too seriously.

The Typing of the Dead, which came out in arcades in 1999 and was followed a couple of years thereafter by Dreamcast and PC ports, was a… varation on House of the Dead 2. Specifically, it replaced the light-gun shooting aspect with what essentially amounted to a series of touch-typing challenges — zombies would shamble towards you with letters, words or phrases attached to them, and in order to defeat them you'd have to type out their letters, words or phrases before they reached you. As the game progressed, the things you had to type got increasingly complex and silly, culminating with a final boss fight in which the ending you got was determined by how honestly you typed out the answers to a series of questions you were presented with.

The Typing of the Dead Overkill, which came out today, does for House of the Dead Overkill what The Typing of the Dead did for House of the Dead 2. In other words, it's pretty much the same game, only you type things out instead of shooting them. And it's glorious.

I never played House of the Dead Overkill when it came out as a Wii and PlayStation Move-based shooter — lightguns have long gone the way of the dodo — but I was dimly aware of the fact that it was Sega taking the inherent silliness of House of the Dead and turning it up to the maximum, producing a game that is refreshingly unafraid to be completely offensive to absolutely anyone and everyone as often as possible, but which underneath its boobylicious, foul-mouthed exterior, is an immensely enjoyable arcade game of the old-school variety.

The comic juxtaposition between the amusingly mundane things you're typing and the profanity-laced dialogue going on the in the background is hilarious, plus I can't not like a game whose three difficulty levels are "Bitch", "Agent" and "Motherfucker". Aside from the humorous aspect, though, Typing of the Dead Overkill seems to be a solid game underneath, too; there's lots of secrets to find in each level, which you need to grab by hitting the Tab key when you see them on screen in the environment, and a combo-based scoring system rewards you for being as accurate, skilful and quick as possible, so there's plenty of potential for enjoyable high-score chasing.

The voice acting isn't quite as bad as that seen in the original House of the Dead games, but while the actors involved are now clearly professionals, it's pretty clear they've been told to ham it up as much as possible. The characters — including the original House of the Dead's hero G — are broadly-painted stereotypes who all call each other "bitch" and "motherfucker" all the time, and the whole thing just revels in its childishness. It's refreshing.

Also, I've just discovered that the game also includes all of House of the Dead Overkill for those who want to play a traditional lightgun-style shooter. Bargain.

1379: Press Pause

The assertion that "video is the future" of online media is probably more hyperbole than anything else — much like the argument that "free-to-play is the future" of gaming — but it still concerns and frustrates me somewhat.

This isn't to put down any of the hard work that genuinely talented video producers, editors and performers do, of course. It just makes me worried — particularly given my occupation — and also frustrates me as someone who still likes to, you know, read things.

You see, I don't like video as a generic means of consuming information. It's intrusive, it's noisy, it's disruptive and it demands your full attention for a fixed period of time. This is fine if what you are specifically doing is sitting down to watch a video, but when you want to get a piece of information quickly, video quite simply can't compare to a simple piece of text and possibly a Find function.

Video is not particularly portable, either. While mobile phone data networks — and the devices with which to access them — have improved considerably over the last few years, there's still a significant chance that if you're out and about on the go, you may not be able to watch a video link, and even if you do, there's the risk of running afoul of your mobile provider's data limits and/or fair use policies. A simple text link, meanwhile, is something that is quick to download and, perhaps more importantly, easy and discreet to browse in public or while doing other things.

It also makes me a little sad to see people well-known for their entertaining writing skills stepping back from penmanship in favour of video content. Let's take Jim Sterling, for example. This isn't specifically to "pick on" Sterling; he's just a good example of what I'm talking about.

Sterling's work around the Web has historically been somewhat provocative, but to an entertaining degree rather than any attempt to deliberately cause offence. He's mellowed somewhat from his quasi-"shock jock" nature of a few years back and become someone who can bellow well-informed vitriol without alienating people — or at least, without alienating people who don't deserve to be alienated. His reviews and opinion pieces over on sites like Destructoid were always a good read — he wrote in a distinctive voice, but from a well-informed perspective, and even if you didn't agree with his points, he usually made a convincing argument.

Now, Sterling is primarily doing video content, in which he does much the same thing. No bad thing, you might think, and indeed I've specifically sat down and watched a good few Jimquisition episodes when I wanted to have a giggle at the game industry's expense. But I'm significantly less likely to watch a Jimquisition video than I am to read an article simply because of the time involved — and now he's taken to variations on Let's Play videos I now have even less interest in his content whatsoever. It's a bit sad, though I also recognise that I am but one person and he is simply doing what there is apparently demand for.

I've made my thoughts on Let's Plays reasonably clear in previous posts, but I'll reiterate and perhaps reinforce them, since I've had a while to think about them as the format has grown in popularity: I'm not a fan. At all. Particularly Let's Plays of story-based games, which, to me, completely defeat the object of a story-based game. People already get pissy at the slightest hint of a spoiler about games, movies and other media, and yet there are people out there doing nothing but spoiling games… in more ways than one. This is baffling to me; I understand the basic concept of a Let's Play as an opportunity to see how a game plays and get some commentary about it, but to watch a story-based game with someone babbling over the top of it rather than playing it is just, frankly, the absolute last thing I want to do with my time. Again, though, I recognise that the format has popularity and there's apparently demand for it.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't want traditional media to go away. I don't want to see the death of long-form articles about games — or even short, snappy news pieces, though I wouldn't mind seeing the back of two-sentence placeholder pieces. I want to see talented writers continue to have the opportunity to express themselves in a medium that they're comfortable with; I don't want to be forced to watch a video just to find out what a voice I trust thinks about a particular game or issue in the industry, particularly when I'm out and perhaps want to share it with friends.

By all means, then, video content producers and consumers, keep doing what you're doing; just don't forget that the way you do things is not the only way to do things.

1376: Turnabout Weekend

I am glad this week is over. Really glad. It's not been a great one.

Granted, pretty much all of the "bad things" that have happened have actually happened to Andie rather than me — she's the one who got ill, then her phone broke, just to add insult to injury — but what with me being somewhat of the anxious persuasion, all this has had a bit of an effect on me too.

Still, pretty sure the worst of everything is over and done with now, which means we can hopefully enjoy a quiet, peaceful weekend and get back to some semblance of normality next week. Andie's not yet sure if she's going back to work next week or not, but that's up to her, not me, of course.

So what am I up to? Well, I spent a chunk of this evening playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory and finally cleared the enormous backlog of sidequests I'd built up, leading me to achieve a "perfect 40" rating for a chapter, which is what I was really after. Helpfully, chasing all these sidequests has equipped me with some powerful items and levelled my characters up to "comfortably overpowered" status, so the remainder of the story should be reasonably straightforward — though, of course, there will be plenty more sidequests to do along the way, too.

I also downloaded Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies (aka Ace Attorney 5) yesterday, and am already in love with it. Those who know me well will know that the Ace Attorney series is one of those few series that, like Neptunia, I will immediately purchase a new installment of without question and without reading reviews. I'm only partway into the game's first chapter so far, but it's already impressive stuff.

The DS versions of the Ace Attorney series were actually enhanced ports of Game Boy Advance games, and thus were rather technologically limited. It wasn't until brand new content was added in the fifth case of the first game, the fourth game in the main series and the Ace Attorney Investigations spinoff came out that we started to see some slight variations on the formula — better use of the touchscreen, for example, along with objects that could be examined in 3D.

Ace Attorney 5 is a bit of a milestone for the series, then, in that it's the first installment to be specifically built for the platform it's on rather than based on old code and assets. And it shows.

I was a little worried when I heard that Capcom was making the shift to 3D characters and environments — the 2D artwork of the original games was always charming and full of character, and I was concerned that the move to 3D would lose some of this. Thankfully, it hasn't; the 3D characters are cel-shaded and look convincingly like much better-animated versions of their 2D counterparts, with a few tweaks here and there. Phoenix Wright looks noticeably older, for example, but this makes sense — by this point, he's a veteran defense lawyer, not the frantically sweating rookie he was in the first game.

The 3D aspect also allows for more dramatic, cinematic presentation; occasionally, in the old games, the view would switch to an overview of the courtroom while the peanut gallery would mumble about something that had just been said. Now, rather than this being a static image, it's a dynamic pan across the courtroom that looks much cooler. It's a small touch, but it's neat.

There's anime sequences, too, to depict things that don't really work with just the usual visual novel-style narration. This also means that characters have a voice; I'm pretty sure Wright is voiced by the same guy who did Jude in Tales of Xillia, which will continue to prove distracting until I find out for sure.

In fact, let me research that right now.

………

Yes, he is. Here's proof. Well, that answers that. So long as Wright doesn't start coming out with things like "I wish we didn't have to fight, but we must!" I think we'll probably be all good.

Oh, yeah. You should buy Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies. I'm sure there will be more enthusing about it in the very near future. Now I'm off to play Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies and flip the bird to this week. Mata ne.

1374: Nep-Ko

Now that I've finished Tales of Xillia I am, as promised, once again playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory. I'm now pushing 60 hours of playtime, a significant proportion of the last few of which have been spent doing nothing but non-story content.

And lordy, what a lot of non-story content there is. There's sidequests to do, which tend to have fairly modest rewards but challenge you to battle powerful monsters and master the game's various mechanics. There's a crafting system, which requires you to discover new recipes for various items, then gather the materials for them either from enemies or "harvest points" in dungeons. There's the Scout system, in which you send out numerous NPCs on your behalf to check out dungeons and potentially manipulate the items, enemies, drop rates or experience point gain in particular areas and occasionally discover completely new places. And there's little tricks like earning money by gathering an item called "Invisible Cloth," purchasing a cheap costume, combining it with the aforementioned Invisible Cloth to make a new item of clothing and then selling them for 1.5 million credits a pop.

All of this side stuff is conspiring to prevent me from advancing the game's story. Said story is immensely entertaining as it always has been in the Neptunia series, but Victory's mechanics and optional content are far more solid than even Neptunia mk2, which certainly had plenty of things to do. The combat system has been refined into something that is immensely enjoyable to repeatedly engage in, the difficulty has been ramped up considerably over the rather straightforward mk2, and just chasing down these sidequests and items is extremely addictive.

Although the Neptunia series is widely derided by the mainstream press, I'm consistently impressed by what it's managed to achieve over the course of three games. What initially began as something of a cheap joke at the expense of the games industry and the "console wars" in particular has developed into something much more over time — each of the game's main characters has been developed into their own unique person with a distinctive personality. Okay, there's plenty of standard anime tropes at work, but combined with the fact that these characters are supposed to represent games consoles and manufacturers, it really works; why wouldn't PlayStation be a tsundere who enjoys nothing more than working too hard, and why wouldn't she have a sister afraid of never quite being able to match up? Why wouldn't Nintendo live in a vibrantly-coloured candyland but actually be ruthless, cold and prone to bouts of completely irrational anger?

By nearly 60 hours into Victory, I'm no longer really thinking of the Neptunia cast as "the Sega one, the PlayStation one, the Microsoft one"; they've become great characters in their own right, and their interactions with one another are a real highlight. In fact, such is the popularity and success of the series in its native Japan, it's got its own anime spinoff which I'm curious to watch at some point, and there are several new games on the way, too.

I find it quite odd but also rather pleasing how much this game series has resonated with me since I first picked it up on a whim out of interest one day. "Objectively" speaking — in as much as it's possible to be "objective" when talking about pieces of entertainment — there are far better games out there, both in terms of gameplay and technical proficiency, but something about the adventures of Neptune and the gang has really spoken to me ever since that clunky first game, and has ensured that any time something with the words Hyperdimension Neptunia is released, it's pretty much an instapurchase for me. It's been a while since a "big-name" game has elicited that sort of feeling from me.

1373: Steem-Powered

Although I grew up with the Atari 8-bit range of computers, some of my fondest early memories of using computers and playing games relate to that range's successor: the Atari ST. Unlike the 8-bit range, the ST was a 16-bit machine with an 8MHz processor, either 512K or 1MB of memory, support for MIDI, hard drives and floppy disks that held up to 720K of information. It was a huge leap over the 8-bit systems in many ways — though it did suffer from an appalling soundchip that actually sounded worse than the 8-bit range's POKEY chip in the hands of anyone other than the most skilled chiptune musicians.

I had a sudden urge to revisit some old ST memories the other day, prompted partly by a discussion with Andie on the subject of chemistry, of all things. (Andie's in hospital right now, if you didn't know, so discussions naturally turn to vaguely medicine- and science-related things on occasion.) Our discussion caused me to randomly remember an old Atari ST puzzle game from Psygnosis and Blue Byte called Atomino in which you had to create molecules by attaching atoms to one another and not leaving any… err… connecty bits (I'm not a chemist!) dangling loose. Remembering turned into downloading the Steem emulator and a copy of the game just to see if it held up. And it does!

I played Atomino for a bit until the emulation crashed (I think it was more a problem with the dodgy pirate disk image rather than the emulator itself) and then suddenly remembered a few other things — specifically, a few entries from the demoscene that I used to enjoy indulging in on occasion.

The demoscene is an odd old beast when you think about it, but it was a popular movement that, I believe, is still going on today. For the uninitiated, a demo disk was exactly what it sounds like: it was something you booted up when you wanted to demonstrate what your computer was capable of. More often than not, said demos were technically impressive in some way — they might use graphical trickery to get more than the normal 16 colours on screen, for example, or they might show off by putting graphics in places where it was normally "impossible" for the ST to render graphics. They'd often have good music, demonstrating skilled chiptune artists' mastery of the ST's crappy three-channel sound chip, and they were also often notable for quite how much stuff they fit onto a single disk.

One demo I remember particularly fondly — and which I successfully found a disk image of, so am enjoying while I type this out — was called The B.I.G. Demo. I can't remember why we had a copy with our original computer — chances are it was one of the disks acquired via my dad and brother's attendance at the local "computer club" (actually more of a local piracy swap meet — everyone was at it in the '80s and early '90s) that adorned the several big boxes of 3.5-inch floppy disks we had for the ST.

Anyway, The B.I.G. Demo was pretty neat. It wasn't the absolute flashiest demo I've ever seen, but it was cool. It had graphics in the borders, it had 256-colour visuals, and it had renditions of a wide variety of music from the 8-bit era. In fact, the main point of the demo was to act as a jukebox, providing access to a huge number of C64 classics in glorious ST-o-phonics. There was also a "Digital Department" menu that loaded separately and included digitised (more than likely MOD file-based) renditions of a number of the same tracks. Aside from this, though, everything in The B.I.G. Demo was loaded into the ST's memory, meaning no loading breaks whatsoever — not bad for a 512K machine.

One of the most interesting things about many of these demos was the scrolling text that inevitably adorned them. In many cases, the length of the scrolling message in the demo was the source of considerable bragging rights for the developers — not an unreasonable boast, given that when you only have 720KB tops to play with on a double-sided ST disk, even a short bit of text can and will eat into that space significantly.

The B.I.G. Demo had a whole bunch of scrolling messages, including one on the main screen that bragged about its lower border artwork, and the demo's crowning glory, the B.I.G. Scroller. This was quite simply a scrolling message that whizzed past in large print and would make you quite dizzy if you watched it for more than a few minutes at a time, but reading the whole thing would take you a significant amount of time. I can't remember a lot of the content from the B.I.G. Scroller (and haven't tried to read it since re-downloading the demo), but more often than not these "scrolltexts" took the form of stream-of-consciousness ramblings from one of the demo's creators, and were often quite interesting to read. In many ways, I guess they were a precursor to stream-of-consciousness blogging, and they're certainly an artifact that is very distinctive to the late '80s and early '90s.

I haven't kept up on the demoscene since I was a daily user of the Atari ST but I'm sure this sort of thing is still going on. I wonder how long the longest scrolltext is today?

1372: The Good Old Days of the App Store

I'd been pondering this a little recently, but I actually confirmed it for myself today: the games on the App Store of today are not a patch on those that were on it when it first went live.

Oh sure, they're technically more impressive, with all manner of lovely "console-quality" (whatever the fuck that means) graphics and download sizes that will easily fill up a lesser phone, but there's really something missing from modern App Store games that was there in spades in early titles.

The title that really drove it home for me was a game called Tilt to Live. This was a score-attack action game that some described as "the iPhone's Geometry Wars". It's not quite an accurate comparison, since Geometry Wars is a twin-stick shooter and Tilt to Live doesn't involve any shooting whatsoever, but they share a couple of important similarities: they're easy to understand and super-addictive.

Tilt to Live, lest you've never had the pleasure, sees you controlling a small arrowhead-shaped… thing as it attempts to fend off the unwanted attentions of its red dot rivals. In order to destroy red dots, you have to pick up powerups, each of which has a specific effect. Nukes explode at the spot where you picked them up, for example, taking anything caught in the circular Missile Command-style explosion with them, while lasers take a moment to charge before firing a broad beam in the direction you're travelling. As you progress through the game, you unlock more and more different weapons which are then available from the outset in subsequent playthroughs; the more weapons you have, the easier it is to maintain a combo of dot-killing without stopping, and consequently attain higher scores.

Tilt to Live is so genius because it's built for its platform. It uses nothing more than the iPhone's built-in accelerometer, tuned to perfection, and all you have to do is tilt your device around like one of those old "Labyrinth" games. Nothing more than that. There are a couple of other modes, but in essence, all you're doing in each of them is tilting to move your arrow and attempting to avoid red dots. Simple. Addictive. The perfect mobile game.

Tilt to Live was far from the only game from the App Store's early years I have fond memories of, though. The early stuff from ngmoco was fantastic, for example — titles like Dr. Awesome (essentially tilt-controlled Qix), Dropship (Defender meets Thrust meets Geometry Wars) and Rolando were all top-notch games that were pretty much essential purchases in the early days of the App Store — everyone who had an iPhone downloaded them, and Apple even featured them in advertising for both the iPhone and iPod touch, the latter of which it looked for a while like Apple was attempting to position as a serious handheld gaming device.

So what happened? Why have I largely lost interest in what the App Store has to offer today? Well, this is probably a gross oversimplification of the matter, but essentially I believe things started to go downhill with the addition of in-app purchases to the App Store.

I remember being skeptical about the supposed benefits of in-app purchases when the upcoming new feature was first announced — it sounded awfully like what triple-A publishers were doing with downloadable content for console games, and that was something that a number of teams had proven could be done very, very wrong. Oddly, initially only paid apps could have in-app purchases, meaning that free apps were always just that — free, though sometimes ad-supported.

Nowadays, of course, the words "free" on an app more often than not mean that you can download the app in question for free, but are often then expected to cough up extra, particularly in the case of games. In-app purchases have gotten so out of control on iOS that it's rarer not to see a game have a "Get More Gold" button allowing you to purchase in-game currency. And, of course, the moment you see that "Get More Gold" button, you have to start questioning whether the game has been deliberately made more grindy and inconvenient — experts call this "adding friction" or "fun pain" — in the name of squeezing a few extra pennies out of you.

Herein lies the issue, I think: modern App Store games are designed to be money-making machines that trick people into thinking they're having fun, then encourage them to open their wallets to have even more fun. It's all a ruse, of course; the "fun" is more often than not an illusion created through carefully-paced rewards and ego-massaging, and the "pain" is created by suddenly denying the player access to these rewards that they've come to accept. It's good business design, but bad game design.

Compare and contrast with a game from the App Store's earlier era such as Tilt to Live, or ngmoco's early games. These are games designed for pure fun — and more to the point, they're highly creative, interesting, distinctive games. Not one of them is a predictable "tap on everything, then wait until you get a push notification to tap on everything again in three hours" title; while some are inspired by classic retro games (or even more recent games such as Loco Roco in the case of Rolando), they each put their own twist on things, respecting the player's time and wallet in the process — in other words, once you bought these games, they wouldn't ask you for money again, except in some rare instances such as in Tilt to Live where the developers later added a whole new game mode and sold it rather than bundling it in as a free update.

One of the saddest sights in the App Store is, I think, the massive decline in quality that ngmoco's titles have taken since those early days. Games like the aforementioned Dr. Awesome and Rolando were genuinely excellent games that helped to define the platform; now, however, all ngmoco does is churn out some of the most tedious, derivative, copycat titles in the entire industry, all in the name of exploiting the social gaming bubble. RIP ngmoco; I thought you were going to be the next big thing in creative indie games at one point, but it was not to be.

True creativity and distinctiveness in the App Store isn't dead; but with well over a million apps and games on the App Store now, and the charts dominated by free-to-play titles that have effectively bought their rankings rather than earned them, it's getting harder and harder to find them. How sad.

1370: What's Up, Red?

As predicted, I completed Tales of Xillia (like, Platinum completed) earlier, but prior to jumping back into Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory I decided to give Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller a try.

I've had my eye on Cognition ever since it was a modest Kickstarter campaign from a group previously best-known for a(n admittedly very good) King's Quest spinoff. It sounded interesting for a number of reasons: firstly, that it was a modern adventure game — the supposed "death" of the point-and-click genre was somewhat exaggerated — and secondly, that Jane Jensen (of King's Quest VI and Gabriel Knight fame) was acting as "story consultant". While this isn't quite the same as having her actually write it, it would, I thought, at least provide a greater-than-average chance of the game having a decent, well-written story.

I played through the first of the game's four episodes earlier, and was not disappointed. Given that most people I know who have played it seem to think that the first episode is the weakest, I'm very excited to see what follows.

Cognition follows the adventures of FBI agent Erica Reed, a feisty redhead haunted by her inability to save her brother from a serial killer three years prior to the events of the main plot. Erica's a little unusual, however, in that she has a strange supernatural ability that enables her to relive and even manifest memories from the past simply by touching things. Initially, all she can do is touch an object or body and witness a short snippet of what happened, but as the game proceeds, she learns a couple of new abilities under the tutelage of the Wise Old Mystic Woman Who Runs the Antique Shop.

It would have been easy for Cognition to play up its supernatural aspect and even rely on it too much to carry its mystery story, but Erica's abilities are used sparingly, subtly and effectively. It's rarely a "magic bullet" that allows her to do things a good forensics team wouldn't be able to do given enough time; it is, more often than not, used as a means of ushering the story along by providing clues.

It's much more complex than just flashbacks, though; in one of the best puzzles in the game, you're tasked with using your "regression" ability to reconstruct the memories of a key witness who can't remember some important information you need. By collecting information and using it to prompt the witness to remember things, you're able to manipulate the images of his memories to provide specific details — the colour of someone's dress, the time a photo was taken, what was written on a note — that ultimately lead you to the answers you seek. It's a clever system that works really well without resorting to mystical mumbo-jumbo — it's just something Erica can do and while it's clear that part of the plot is going to revolve around her struggling with these visions, for the most part she accepts it as just another tool in her arsenal.

Jensen's influence is apparent in the characters, all of whom are strongly defined. Erica herself initially appears to be somewhat "flat" personality-wise, but over time it becomes clear that she is, more often than not, being quite deadpan, and when she's around people she likes and trusts, she opens up and shows her more good-humoured side.

One of the things I'm particularly enamoured with is that I'm getting a slight "Dr. Naomi" vibe from Cognition. It's not quite the same, of course — Erica is an FBI field agent compared to Naomi's forensic investigator — but there are certain similarities. Most notably, on a number of occasions you're "quizzed" by characters on what you've learned from your investigations, with progression dependent on you giving the correct answers. The penalty for giving an incorrect answer isn't as harsh as in Trauma Team — there are relatively few moments in the game where you can die or "fail" — but it's nice to have a game check that you're paying attention in a suitable, plausible context.

I'm intrigued to try the subsequent episodes now. I have a feeling that four won't be enough!