#oneaday Day 914: Chinese Whispers

Twitter was angry today. There was some degree of justification — the horrific shooting in Aurora at the screening of the new Batman movie had emotions running high, and I certainly don't begrudge anyone that. But it demonstrated, once again, some of the dangers inherent in social media — a force which should, by all accounts, be a positive thing.

Misinformation spreads like wildfire on the Internet thanks to services like Twitter. People post things without thinking, without bothering to back things up with research and evidence. Journalists encourage this, with TV news being a particular offender, inviting people to contribute their own thoughts on a particularly pertinent story using hashtags. It thus becomes something of a challenge to determine exactly what the facts are, and what is simple hyperbole dreamed up by the increasingly-hysterical mass of people who suddenly all think that They Know Best.

I shan't talk too much about the Aurora shooting specifically here because I haven't read up on all the gory details myself as yet. I will refer to a couple of other recent incidents where this phenomenon became particularly apparent, however.

Most recently was the "Arctic Ready" campaign, in which Shell apparently made the amateurish misstep of opening up a slogan competition on a controversial subject — drilling in the Arctic — to the public. The "Let's Go! Social" gallery page promptly became filled with anti-drilling, environmentalist slogans and it looked, by all accounts, to be one of the most colossal fuck-ups in social marketing history.

Except that it wasn't. It was actually a genius piece of social marketing, but not by Shell. No; the whole thing was, in fact, a clever ruse by Greenpeace, who then went on to troll Shell even further by picking a "winner" from the supposed competition and putting it on a billboard right outside Shell's Houston headquarters.

It should have been pretty obvious to anyone who stopped to think about the whole thing for a moment that this clearly wasn't Shell's doing. The kind of people who handle social media marketing are generally fairly savvy sorts (though there are exceptions) and would have stepped in to deal with the mass trolling of the supposed competition. In fact, they would have probably removed it altogether fairly sharpish. They certainly wouldn't have left it up for several weeks, opened up a new Twitter account just to repeatedly request that people don't retweet "offensive" adverts and generally keep poking the fire.

Unfortunately, it wasn't obvious to a lot of people. It caught people out not once, but twice — first, when the "Arctic Ready" site first appeared, and again a few weeks later when the Twitter account appeared. People posted, retweeted and commented without stopping to think about whether or not it was real. Others who were wise to it posted, retweeted and commented about how it was clearly fake. But amid all the noise from both sides it became impossible to differentiate who was talking sense and who was simply repeating the digital equivalent of what they had heard down the pub while drunk.

The Shell incident isn't the only one either. The "Today Is The Day They Went To In Back To The Future Part II" hoax has been around twice, too. Both times it caught people out. Why? Because, again, no-one bothered to check. No-one took a moment to fire up the movie and take a look. If they had, they would have seen that the claims made by whoever started that ridiculous rumour on each occasion were patent nonsense.

It happens in journalism too, and particularly in games journalism. One site posts a "Rumour:" or "Report:" story, and others pick up on it. The content spreads and becomes somewhat distorted over time. It happened today with a story from MCV which, as it turned out, apparently misreported the facts in the first place (or rather, more accurately, posted a story with a misleading headline) and was then sourced by Destructoid and a ton of other sites. This then inspired Ben Kuchera, official unelected and self-styled arbiter of How To Do Games Journalism On The Internet, to pen this piece bemoaning the whole situation, and by God I hate agreeing with Ben Kuchera — but he had a point. With a bit of research (or indeed just carefully reading the quotes that MCV included in its own piece) it's clear that the "story" (or, more specifically, the headline) that was going around simply wasn't true.

It's exhausting at times to keep up with all this stuff, and while it's great to be able to tap the pulse of everyone at the same time on a hot topic, it's less great to find yourself in the world's biggest game of Chinese Whispers. So do me a favour. Before you blindly retweet something that seems a little "off", take a minute and check to see whether or not it's actually genuine.

#oneaday Day 911: Drizzt's Big Adventure

As promised at some point in the near past, we got to play The Legend of Drizzt as a larger group tonight, and it was fun.

The thing with a lot of dungeon-crawlers is that they often take a long time to set up, a long time to play and only tend to become especially rewarding if you have a group of players who can commit to a long-term campaign with player characters gradually increasing in strength through acquired treasures and levelling up.

The thing with The Legend of Drizzt is that it ignores all that, creating an experience very friendly to a board game group more normally accustomed to self-contained experiences. Each adventure in the Legend of Drizzt book is playable within an hour or two (less if you mess up particularly badly!) and is constantly moving forward thanks to mechanics that minimise "downtime" and help prevent the age-old Advanced Heroquest problem of a randomly-generated dungeon becoming so sprawling it covers the entire table.

Play is much more strategic than I was expecting, too. With multiple players, positioning and turn order becomes much more important as you carefully consider how to tackle the situations you face. Do you kill every monster you come across? Do you spread out and push "forward" in as many directions as possible or focus your efforts? When victory is in sight, do you race for the goal or play it safe?

The high level of difficulty in the game helps matters enormously. Because it's highly likely you'll get to each scenario's "endgame" with a sliver of health and a selection of depleted abilities, securing victory becomes a matter of making some very difficult choices as a team and determining whether or not taking big risks is going to pay off. In the case of the adventure we played this evening, we scraped victory by the narrowest of margins — one of our number was down for the count, and if the turns had come around to him one more time, we would have lost with the finish line in sight. Fortunately, we prevailed.

I'm very pleased with how the play session went this evening and look forward to playing it again in the near future. It's a great game that I can highly recommend to anyone who enjoys the dungeon-crawling experience but who doesn't have the time (or inclination) to commit to a lengthy campaign. I'm curious to try the other two games in the series — Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon — and see how it's possible to link the games' various components together, as the core system seems very much designed to be expanded and experimented with.

For now, though, bed, and dreams of being able to play games with friends on a more regular basis in the near future…

#oneaday Day 910: Continued Adventures in The Secret World

I'm still playing The Secret World and still enjoying it. Generally a pretty good sign for an MMO is if it can maintain my attention through the first month and convince me to continue paying the subscription fee (if applicable) past that point. The Secret World is certainly keeping me occupied and entertained, and I'm enjoying it a great deal.

I've progressed somewhat since the last time I discussed the game. I'm in the second of the game's main "adventure" areas, which is another part of the Innsmouth-style Lovecraft town. Rather than the more "towny" area that you start in, the second part is more like a forested outskirts area. There are fewer houses, streets tend to wend their way into the depths of the woods, and there are creepy Twin Peaks-style lakes with mist rolling off them (and monsters lurking in the fog, of course).

The missions continue to display an excellent amount of variety. There are a few more "kill [x] of [y]" action missions than I'd perhaps prefer there to be, but they generally have more of a narrative incentive to progress than in other MMOs. For example, in one mission I completed tonight, I was tasked with killing a bunch of draugr and then burning their bodies. This attracted some more powerful draugr, which I then had to kill and impale on some spikes. This attracted a draugr queen, which I then had to kill and splay out on a pointy rock. This attracted a draugr berserker, which I… you get the idea. This process continued through several steps, with increasingly more difficult fights along the way. At the end of the quest, my "handler" and I reached the conclusion that the draugr had an organised hierarchy and chain of command that could potentially be exploited in the future. Much cooler than simply returning to a questgiver and them going "thanks for killing all those wolves". (Praise should also be given to the fact that, this being the modern world, you turn in quests simply by phoning your handler rather than having to return to whoever gave you your quest.)

The fact that most missions incorporate something a little more than just plain killing is the best thing, though. In another one I completed today, I had to gather mushrooms from various areas around the map (guarded by horrible slobbering things from the depths of the ocean, natch) and then mix them together according to a recipe on a scrap of paper I had to remember I'd been handed at the start of the quest. The Secret World assumes a certain degree of intelligence on the part of the player, and doesn't remind you that, say, the instructions you need to complete a quest are safely in your journal — or, indeed, that sometimes you have to use the crafting interface to complete an objective.

Speaking of the crafting interface, it's a surprisingly cool approach somewhat reminiscent of Minecraft, of all things. Disassembling equipment you don't need rewards you with raw materials, which can then be combined together to make various objects. The twist is, you have to arrange them into the correct formations to produce the things you're after. You can then add things like glyphs to give them special abilities and bonuses and customize them.

I even tried a bit of PvP the other night. I normally hate PvP in MMOs because in most cases it's a horribly unbalanced afterthought that simply isn't any fun whatsoever. It is terrible in Star Wars: The Old Republic, for example, and I've never really been a fan of it in World of Warcraft, either. The Secret World has some interesting ideas, though, that make PvP well worth engaging in.

There are currently (I think) three PvP areas in the game. Two of these are instanced battlegrounds in which players take part in timed team-based matches according to whichever faction they're on. The other, though, is a large map which has persistent PvP going on at all times. A number of facilities cover this map, and it's up to each faction to capture (and, ideally, hold) each of these locations. There's a strong incentive to do so, because all players of a given faction receive ongoing buffs according to how many facilities their secret society is in control of.

And people are playing it well. The chat channels in the PvP areas are full of people actually bothering to talk to each other, strategise and coordinate their efforts. The Templars appear to have a bit of a numbers advantage, but that certainly hasn't stopped my faction, the Illuminati, from having a bit of fun — especially during quiet periods. Which is nice.

All in all, then, Funcom have done an excellent job in shaking up the very stale MMO space and creating something that it distinctive, entertaining and downright compelling. Its writing is good, its world is beautifully crafted and the whole experience is wrapped together with some unconventional but very effective game mechanics that successfully distinguish it from the million and one World of Warcraft clones out there. I strongly suggest you give it a try if you get the chance.

#oneaday Day 908: Customer Disservice

I wanted to share a customer service experience I had today as I found it immensely disappointing. It was partly my fault, I accept that, but the way in which it was handled left me with a very sour taste in my mouth and a feeling of disillusionment in a company for whom I had previously had nothing but good things to say.

After purchasing a copy of Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition in the currently-running Steam Summer Sale, I decided that the time had come for me to get an arcade stick and see if I could actually improve my generally-dreadful fighting game skills. I took a trip into town to my local CEX — they'd opened recently so I wanted to support them — and was pleased to see that a Street Fighter IV Tournament Edition FightStick was in the window for half its usual "new" price. A bit of preliminary research online had revealed that this stick from MadCatz was one of the best ones out there, and to see it for half its usual price was a deal too good to pass up.

The stick in question was designed for PlayStation 3, but uses a USB connection. I looked online and consensus said it worked with some PCs, though the chipset the computer in question was built on determined whether or not it would actually work. Intel chipsets were fine, apparently, but nVidia or AMD ones were not. Having been poking around inside my computer recently to fit a new power supply, I was pretty confident I had an Intel chipset.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. I brought the stick home, connected it up to the computer, Windows recognized it and then… nothing. No response from the stick in Control Panel, no response in game, no means to get it to register any inputs whatsoever. I tested it in the PS3 to make sure the device wasn't actually faulty, and sure enough, the PS3 had no issues with it whatsoever. Unfortunately, I don't have any fighting games (or even "arcade-style" titles) for PS3 that would necessitate the use of an arcade stick, so I had essentially wasted £70.

Or had I? No, I thought, if I head straight back to town now I'll have time to return it, get my money back and be home in time for dinner. So off I went, back to CEX, and queued up in an attempt to return it.

"I'd like to return this," I said, explaining the situation. Being an honest sort of guy — curse that particular character trait — I said that the stick wasn't faulty, but that it didn't work with my computer. (To be fair, lying and saying it was broken wouldn't have achieved much — CEX has a rigorous policy of testing things to prevent shysters trading in broken crap.)

"This isn't the selling till," said the woman behind the counter. "You need to join that queue."

I was taken aback by the bluntness for a moment after she had been helpful earlier in the day when I had purchased the thing. Fortunately, her colleague jumped in and pointed out that I wasn't trying to sell something to the shop, I was simply trying to get a refund.

She took the stick and scanned it, then explained to me that CEX's policy was that since it wasn't faulty, all she could do was give me store credit.

"Well, do you have an Xbox 360 stick available?" I asked. (Xbox 360 sticks work with Windows no problem.)

"No," she said.

"Okay," I said. "Then that's no help to me, really, is it? I've spent £70 on something I can't use. I would like my money back, please."

It was at this point that the cashier in question — Emily, her name was — decided that she couldn't handle this and called her supervisor who then launched into an obviously-rehearsed speech.

"I'm sorry it didn't work for you," she said with an incredibly patronising tone of faux-understanding. "I appreciate that it's frustrating, but unfortunately we're only able to give a refund as store credit."

I was really not in the mood for argument — I hate confrontation at the best of times — so after asking whether or not the voucher could be used online — apparently it can, but only through an unnecessarily convoluted process that involves paying the full price for the item then claiming a rebate — I grudgingly accepted and was on my way. I left immensely disappointed with the poor service I had received from CEX, and thinking that I would be considering things very carefully before making use of their services again.

Here's the thing that annoyed me most about the whole thing: there was no sense of the staff wanting to help me. I was quoted policy and simply shut down without any discussion. No consideration was given for the fact that I had bought the item that same day and had returned it in the exact same condition in which it had been sold to me. No consideration was given for the fact that I had wasted £70 and was being offered store credit in exchange when there was nothing I wanted to spend it on in said store. No effort was made to make me feel better about what I freely admit is my own mistake. Rather than doing something that would have built goodwill and allowed me to leave satisfied and happy while leaving them no worse off than they had been before I bought the thing in the first place, I was simply the recipient of a speech that had obviously been given many times before.

Customer service is a fine art, and CEX in Chippenham is clearly sorely lacking. CEX's return policy as a rule is unnecessarily harsh on those who make honest mistakes, and leaves no room for employees to "surprise and delight" a customer. I don't think this case is actually in breach of the Sale of Goods Act as the goods do work as described — the stick worked fine on PlayStation 3 and the people at the shop didn't explicitly tell me it worked on PC — but the fact is from a customer service perspective, CEX let me down. Store policies shouldn't be so inflexible that they leave a customer walking out of the store dissatisfied, disappointed and upset. Apple are good at this, often exchanging items for free simply as a means to, as said above, "surprise and delight" their customers. Head into an Apple store with a pair of dodgy iPod headphones, for example, and the store team will usually swap them straight out for you, no questions asked. Go in there with a broken iPhone/MacBook/whatever that's just out of warranty, and if you ask nicely they'll often help you out as if you were still covered. And on those occasions when they do turn you down, there's usually a good reason for them not being able to help you.

It would have cost nothing for CEX to help me out today. Had they refunded me and taken the stick back, they would have been no worse off than they had been this morning, and I would have left satisfied and confident in purchasing from them again. Instead, I am left with a piece of paper worth £70 and, currently, nothing to spend it on, as the Xbox 360 version of the stick is not available online. I am also writing about my poor experience on the public forum that is the Internet rather than praising them or simply keeping quiet.

So basically, CEX Chippenham, I'm exceedingly disappointed in the service (or lack thereof) I received today and will be thinking very carefully before I buy anything expensive from you again. You had the chance to surprise and delight me; instead you stonewalled me and flipped the bird. THANKS A LOT.

#oneaday Day 907: A Party Game for Horrible People

I had my first chance to try out Cards Against Humanity tonight. If you're unfamiliar with Cards Against Humanity, you can find out more and even print your own copy here.

Cards Against Humanity is a project that was initially funded through Kickstarter last year, but which has since gone on to make its money via direct sales of its core set and expansion. Unusually, though, the game is distributed under a Creative Commons licence, which means you're free to download and print a copy yourself if you have the appropriate equipment to do so. It also means that you're free to tweak, change and otherwise mangle it as you see fit so long as you don't then decide to sell your modified version as an original work. Which is nice.

Cards Against Humanity is a very simple concept. The Onion AV Club described it as "Apples to Apples for the crass and jaded" and indeed the concept is almost identical: each turn, the "card czar" player (which changes every turn) draws a single black card that features a question or fill-in-the-blank phrase — this is the equivalent of Apples to Apples' green cards — and players then submit a white card, each of which contains a word or phrase that could potentially fit whatever is printed on the black card. The card czar then shuffles them around so they have no idea who submitted what, and then reads them all aloud. After this, they choose which one is "best" by whatever arbitrary criteria they wish, and give the black card to the winning player as an "Awesome Point". Play then continues until… whatever you like, really. You could play to a score limit, a certain number of cards or, as the game suggests, until the "Make a Haiku" card comes up. The exact rules are deliberately open-ended to encourage experimentation and a feeling of simply having stupid fun rather than rules lawyering. It's a party game, not SRS BIZNZ.

It's extremely simple and easy to play, and works with groups of four or more people. While the rules that determine who "wins" a hand are deliberately vague and arbitrary, after a few turns it becomes clear that there is a degree of psychology in play rather than simply everyone rushing to put down whichever card has the word "penis" on it. Does the current card czar find dick jokes funny, or would they rather you tried to do something clever? Would a surreal and incongruous answer make them laugh? Assuring victory is much more than simple luck, and sometimes you need to know when to give up on a hand and just submit your "worst" card for consideration in the hope of getting something better next time.

Cards Against Humanity is gloriously politically incorrect, but only occasionally explicitly obscene. A lot of the dark humour in the game comes from certain combinations of cards and the interpretations thereof rather than cards that are simply outright offensive. That said, there are plenty of white cards that are deliberately provocative — "Firing a rifle into the air while balls-deep in a squealing hog" is one particular favourite — but these are spread throughout more "mundane" offerings to balance things out rather than making the game a tiring journey through everything taboo. There are plenty of amusing pop culture references in the cards, too, though a few are a little too American for international audiences.

Cards Against Humanity is a great party game, then, that deserves to sit alongside titles like Balderdash and Eat Poop, You Cat! as a Fun Thing To Do After (or perhaps Before, depending on how late your host cooks) Dinner. I recommend getting some friends together and giving it a shot yourself as soon as possible, as there was plenty of mirth and merriment tonight, to the extent that one participant (whose blushes I shall spare) laughed so hard their drink came out of their nose.

#oneaday Day 906: Drizzle Bizzle

I recently acquired a copy of one of the Dungeons & Dragons boardgames: The Legend of Drizzt, a game based on everyone's favourite Dark Elf and the one character from D&D lore that most people can remember.

I've given the game a couple of goes so far — twice solo and once with Andie. I'll be playing it with a larger group next week, all being well, too.

If you've not seen the game before, here's the deal. It's not really a conventional dungeon crawler in the mould of Hero Quest and its various expansions and sequels. It is, however, a challenging cooperative game that I anticipate will require at least a small degree of working together to survive.

Basically the flow of play goes like this. Each hero may move and attack, attack and move or move twice on their turn. If they end their turn on the edge of a dungeon tile, a new one is drawn and a monster appears on the tile more often than not. Some tiles also cause an "encounter" to occur, which more often than not is detrimental to the players. After that, any monsters that the current player "controls" (i.e. revealed on their turn) make their moves and attacks according to the logic on their cards, then play passes to the next player and continues until either the players have completed the objective for their chosen quest or a single hero is defeated without any remaining "healing surges" to restore them.

Combat uses a loose interpretation of D&D 4th Edition's "Powers"-based system. Each character has a hand of "Powers" to use when they attack — some are "At Will", meaning they may always be used, some are "Daily" meaning they may only be used once, and some are "Utility", some of which may only be used once and others of which provide supporting abilities. Combat results are determined by dice rolls with bonuses according to the Power chosen — some have a greater chance to hit, some hit more monsters simultaneously and some do more damage.

It's a simple, elegant system that keeps the game flowing well at a good pace. It captures the feel of D&D 4e's excellent combat system without getting bogged down in scenario design — or the requirement to have a human "dungeon master". And it's considerably more accessible to non roleplayers than even a basic D&D module. At the same time, it doesn't have the complexity of a lot of dungeon crawlers, doesn't take nearly as long to play and encourages cooperation between players.

I'll be very interested to see what the dynamic is like with more people as I feel it has a lot of potential. As a cooperative game, it looks set to have plenty of the usual brutal difficulty factor without the Byzantine rules of a title like Arkham Horror — much as I love the ol' Lovecraft-em-up, I think pretty much every time we've played we've forgotten at least one rule.

It also comes in an absolutely humongous box and is packed with cool figures and lots and lots of cardboard tokens of various kinds. It's a veritable nerdgasm to open up that box, and closing it makes the best "box fart" I've heard for a long time. So kudos for that.

I'll offer a full report on the game following our play session next Tuesday; for now rest assured that if you're the slightest but interested in low-maintenance dungeon crawling and monster bashing, you could certainly do far worse than check out any of the three D&D Adventures games.

#oneaday Day 905: The Breakfast Show

It was announced today that self-professed "saviour of Radio 1" Chris Moyles is stepping down as the host of the station's Breakfast Show, a post he has held since January of 2004. Moyles' early-morning show is the longest-running show in Radio 1's history, but it is sadly coming to an end in September of this year.

I like Chris Moyles. I have done ever since I first inadvertently discovered him by tuning in my radio to our local station at 10pm one night when I was a teenager. I was enraptured by his irreverent humour and continued listening long into the night. I was accustomed to DJs on said local station being characterless, personality-devoid track title reading machines, so to hear someone actually acting like a human being — taking the piss out of the music he was playing, having light-hearted jabs at callers and taking an irreverent (though never offensive) approach to reviewing the day's happenings — was something of a revelation.

I was delighted when, a number of years later, I rediscovered Moyles on Radio 1. I hadn't followed his career after I stopped listening to the radio regularly, so I had no idea what he had been up to in the interim. But having him back on my stereo entertaining me in the mornings as I endured a lengthy commute to a job I hated was a bright spot in an otherwise fairly dark part of my life. The chemistry he had with his team was excellent, and the fast pace of the show was just the thing I needed to wake me up in the morning. Some criticised him for "talking too much" but I actually preferred listening to the team's light-hearted banter to the musical monstrosities that make up the majority of Radio 1's playlists.

At some point, it became fashionable to hate on Moyles. This happens with certain comedians, usually once they have reached a certain level of fame and ubiquity. Recently, it's happened with Peter Kay (everyone loved him for a while, around the time of Phoenix Nights, then suddenly everyone hated him), Michael McIntyre (who appeared semi-regularly on shows such as Mock the Week for a while before everyone arbitrarily decided that he was no longer Flavour of the Month) and, as I say, Moyles, who is most frequently criticised for being egotistical and arrogant.

Moyles' "persona" certainly has a large ego and a degree of arrogance, but it's important to note that it is a persona — it's a character he plays, a mask he puts up to the public. It's the act he's always done, ever since I first heard him on that late night local radio show, and I've always found it entertaining, because it's abundantly clear to anyone who listens that all the self-aggrandisement is done with a knowing wink to the listener. Moyles was well aware that his ego and arrogance seemed ill-placed — he knew he wasn't the most attractive guy in the world, that his occasional beard made him looked like a tramp and that he was overweight — so he played it up deliberately to an absurd degree. Some people took that literally, however. Understandable, but inaccurate. When he needed to be, Moyles could be genuine and heartfelt, and some of his most memorable moments on radio came when he was at his most earnest and honest.

It's for these reasons that I'll miss listening to Chris Moyles on the radio. Granted, I haven't had the Breakfast Show on for a while now — I tend to get up a bit late for it these days, and I don't have a clock radio by my bed any more — but Moyles and the team were very much a fixture in my life for a considerable amount of time, and I'll be sorry to see them go. I hope they find a new home somewhere else — Moyles is certainly well over the unofficial "age limit" to become a Radio 2 presenter!

#oneaday Day 902: Follow the Rules (That Haven't Been Written Yet)

I've been playing a bunch more of The Secret World today and I stand by my initial impressions that it's a significant step, nay, leap forward for the MMORPG genre. My only slight criticism would be that so far I've had very little incentive to actually play alongside other people, but 1) this is nothing unusual for modern MMOs and 2) I haven't tried any "dungeon" missions yet.

It's in the Investigation missions that I mentioned yesterday where the game truly distinguishes itself. I shall try and resist spoiling specifics at this point, but completing one today involved searching for something in the game world, finding a laptop (password-protected, natch) and then having to break into it. The clue on the computer was vague at best, and there was nothing in the immediate vicinity to help. A little exploration was required, and then some actual honest-to-goodness deduction and lateral thinking on the part of the player. It was a true case of "I wonder if this works… holy crap, it does." As I say, spoiler-free, but it involved the sort of shenanigans normally reserved for "alternate reality games". Which is impressive stuff.

What all this clever puzzle-solving leads to, though, is something of a dilemma for the community. In other MMOs, the General chat channel is the home for people asking how to do things — when it's not the home of teenage boys soliciting sex from hot female Night Elf avatars, of course. It's sort of expected that if you ask a question such as "where is quest objective x?" that you'll get a straight answer. And that's fine — a lot of MMOs are still a bit clunky on the whole "user-friendliness" part and thus often forget to point the player in the right direction, necessitating either a lot of tedious searching the game world or simply asking other players.

In The Secret World, however, the confusion inherent in these Investigation missions is part of the appeal. The sense of satisfaction when you unravel one of the game's cryptic clues is unprecedented in the usually rather predictable MMO genre. Assuming you worked it out yourself, of course — and herein lies the problem.

Players coming to The Secret World straight from titles like World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic will come to General chat or the dedicated Help channel and pose the usual sorts of questions. One of two things then almost inevitably happens — 1) someone posts the answer and everyone then yells at them for spoilers. 2) someone posts a vague clue and the new player then gets annoyed at not being able to get a straight answer.

Actually, this is an exaggeration — so far, from what I've seen, the vast majority of the community is on the side of "give hints, not answers" and only a few people ruin that. The trouble is, if you happen to glance at General chat when one of these people is spoiling a quest solution — perhaps unintentionally — then you can't unsee it. You'll know forever that Dr Bannerman's computer password is — wait, hang on, you won't get it out of me that easily!

Funcom's GMs are apparently being pretty strict about those they catch posting spoilers in the chat channels, so hopefully the community will be "trained" out of that particular practice sooner rather than later. The trouble is, tempers often run unchecked online, meaning that some people will fly off the handle to a disproportionate degree at these spoiling types — who, in many cases, simply hadn't yet got a handle on the game etiquette. Sure, it's common sense that in a game with a heavy puzzle-solving component that people might not want to just hear the answers blurted out, but it's entirely possible for the reasons I mentioned above that people may not have considered this. Getting yelled at and verbally abused by people isn't going to help them change their behaviour — it's simply going to make them defensive and often lash out back at their "aggressors", thereby perpetuating a cycle of people bitching and complaining at each other unnecessarily.

In many ways, it's the same as in teaching. In the classroom, if you spot someone misbehaving — or if another child comes up and "tells on" the miscreant, the worst possible thing you can do is yell, shout, scream and otherwise draw attention to their inappropriate behaviour. In many cases, the child was simply seeking attention, so to succeed so completely — even if it's with negative attention — will not train them to behave more appropriately in the future. Instead, a more assertive approach is the way to play it — take the child aside and discuss quietly and discreetly with them why what they did was wrong rather than encouraging them to get upset and strike back.

Now, obviously most of the players of The Secret World are a little older than primary school children (hopefully), but this approach is still a sound one. If someone behaves inappropriately — such as by posting spoilers — it may be easy to simply publicly shame them in General chat with an "FFS" and a few choice expletives, but all that will do is make them call you a "moron" (or worse) and ensure that you both end up on each other's Ignore lists. Instead, a simple, polite private message explaining why what they did was inappropriate or unacceptable is the way forward. No malice, a simple — but assertive — desire to help them out and make the experience more pleasant for everyone involved. Easy, right? Well, it should be. In practice it doesn't always work that way, but people will settle down over time as the "norms" of the game community are established.

The way online communities interact with one another is something that's always been fascinating to me, and the fact that The Secret World is even running into this issue at all shows what a big shift away from conventional, predictable MMO thinking it really is. The community is going to have tom come up with established conventions and ground rules — perhaps policed by GMs in the early stages — and those used to a different set of norms will have to adjust and adapt appropriately.

Anyhow. That's that. If you haven't figured it out already, The Secret World is most definitely worth your time and money, particularly if you have the slightest interest in Lovecraftian horror, or if you enjoyed Funcom's adventure titles The Longest Journey and Dreamfall. While it has its flaws and its bugs, it's certainly a far more interesting experience than the vast majority of other online titles out there, and I recommend you give it a shot — even if you're not normally into MMOs.

#oneaday Day 901: Lost in The Secret World

Well, I've spent a great deal of today playing Funcom's new MMO The Secret World and… and…

Well. Wow.

You remember how everyone hailed The Old Republic as a massive step forward for MMORPGs — before everyone realised it was actually just World of Warcraft in space, that is? Yeah. The Secret World actually is a significant step forward for MMORPGs.

Why, you ask?

Well, let's consider its thematic content for starters. The Secret World is a lush, rich combination of all manner of influences, including, among other things, Illuminati/Templar/some Asian dudes conspiracy theories, The X-Files and the work of H.P. Lovecraft. The early stages of the game feel very much like what a hypothetical Arkham Horror Online would play like — you're an "investigator" for one of the three factions in a town called Kingsmouth (which, in the "creepy American small town" stakes is in the unenviable position of being somewhere between Lovecraft's Innsmouth and Silent Hill's, uh, Silent Hill), you wander around trying to get to the bottom of what has caused a zombie apocalypse (I KNOW, ZOMBIES, but bear with me) and the mysterious fog that has come in from the sea. Also, big slobbering tentacle monsters. And people going "a bit mental." Apparently Cthulhu is involved at some point, but I haven't got that far as yet.

So The Secret World eschews the usual fantasy or sci-fi tropes of the MMORPG genre in favour of a modern-day setting dripping with Lovecraftian atmosphere — at least in its initial stages, anyway. And it actually bothers to tell a fully-realised story (with full speech and cutscenes) rather than a limp, loosely-connected set of questlines. But it's not just the theme and the strong narrative that distinguishes The Secret World from its numerous competitors. The game systems are also an impressive breath of fresh air.

Let's start with the quests. While some quests do include objectives such as "kill [x] [y]s", these are usually part of a longer chain of events. Where things get interesting are when you break away from what the game refers to as "action" missions and you get to take on "sabotage" and "investigation" quests. While "action" missions, as you might expect, involve killing things, "sabotage" and "investigation" challenges are a little different.

In a sabotage mission, stealth and environmental puzzle solving is emphasised. In an early example, you have to retrieve a number of security cameras from abandoned businesses around the town and set them up in strategically advantageous places for both the police and your faction. Many of the cameras are out of reach from ground level, necessitating a bit of exploration as you figure out how you can actually reach them. As the mission progresses, you eventually find yourself exploring an instanced "mini dungeon" in which you have to avoid security cameras and laser tripwires while working out a route to disable various control panels without being spotted.

Investigation missions, meanwhile, are a lot more elaborate. The current one I'm working on has 18 steps in it. If you consider that your average MMO quest has 3 steps at most (get quest, kill/collect shit, return to questgiver), this is pretty impressive. When you look at what some of these steps involve, it's even more impressive.

In investigation missions, the fourth wall is broken slightly as the player has to put their own intelligence to the test. Clues are given for various challenges, and it's up to the player to figure out how to solve them. An early, simple example involves working out the password for someone's computer using a couple of hints they've left around the place, but later ones see you doing everything from deciphering morse code messages to making use of the in-game web browser to research real-world things. (Of course, you could just cheat using said web browser, but the community is already rather sensitive about spoilers, so you'll be surprised at how few "answers" are out there already.)

This brilliantly diverse questing system is coupled with an excellent levelling mechanic. Players level up at a consistent rate throughout the game and can eventually unlock all the skills from all the disciplines — but it's only possible to equip seven active and seven passive skills at once, much like how Guild Wars does things. It's possible to save these "decks" of skills, however, allowing you to easily switch your character build on the fly according to the situation you're in or what the group you're with needs you to do.

Combat, too, is quite interesting. While it's the usual "hotbar and cooldown" approach, there's a much more "action game" feel to it here, thanks in part to the fact that positioning is important — particularly when baddies start doing area-of-effect attacks. You can take on a lot more enemies at once than in many other MMOs, giving the game a much more exciting, dynamic feeling rather than simply getting into the rhythm of pressing the number keys that titles like World of Warcraft offer.

In short, The Secret World is evidence that there is still some creativity among those who make MMOs. Not everyone wants to make a World of Warcraft clone, and Funcom have succeeded in creating an experience that is very much its own thing — and very much worth your time and money. C'mon. You can't say the prospect of doing a raid on Cthulhu doesn't appeal just a little bit.

#oneaday Day 900: Gravity Rush Wrap-Up

I finished Gravity Rush on Vita tonight. I was rather disappointed to note it's a game that gets significantly worse the further you go rather than better. That's not to say it's not worth playing, however — more that it's clear roughly 75% of the way through that the team simply ran out of ideas.

Gravity Rush is a joy to play initially. Once you get your head around the strange gravity-flipping mechanic and realise it's different from a conventional "flight" system (you can't really steer while "falling", for example — you have to stop and then start "falling" in a different direction) it's a lot of fun to swoop around, run up walls and leap down onto things.

The thing is, the whole gravity-shifting thing seems somewhat underused. There aren't any particularly clever puzzles through the game that require you to run up walls or on the ceiling or anything, so after some time you begin wishing that protagonist Kat could just fly like a proper superhero.

This problem is compounded when we get to the dreadful aerial combat, which coincidentally is the reason the game's "fun factor" takes a significant nosedive when on the home straight. I mentioned this a few days ago, but it became the cause of significant teeth-gnashing frustration as the game progressed. Allow me to explain.

When floating in the air, Kat is able to launch a "gravity kick" move by aiming the on-screen reticle at something and then holding the Square button. She then swoops towards the thing you pointed at, hopefully causing damage. Fair enough.

The trouble with this is that a lot of enemies, particularly later in the game, are only vulnerable in specific weak points. If said weak point is on the far side of an enemy, Kat will simply plough into said enemy and do no damage whatsoever, usually putting herself in harm's way. (This isn't helped by the fact that a lot of late-game enemies also have the ability to fire bullets at Kat, which the player has to dodge by swiping on the touchscreen.) A lot of late-game combat simply becomes a case of launching Kat at enemies from a distance and hoping she hits them — because more often than not, they'll simply dodge out of the way before impact, and it's honestly difficult to tell whether or not the game actually "locks on" to these enemies or not. (I believe it is supposed to, though you could have fooled me.)

By far the worst thing, though, was the "Special Forces" DLC that came free with the "special edition" of the game I got — it was the same price as the normal game for a limited period, so I figured there'd be no loss in getting it.

Oh man. If ever there was an argument for DLC being tacked on, pointless, moneygrabbing shite, this is it.

It contains just two missions, both of which are immensely tedious "fetch and kill" quests, and the latter of which incorporates a totally unreasonable time limit in which to accomplish your objectives — which, by the way, aren't marked with navigation pointers unlike in the rest of the whole game. The latter mission also makes heavy use of the game's idiosyncratic "throwing" system, whereby Kat can pick up objects in her gravity field and then fling them at things. The trouble is, this mission requires Kat to fling things precisely, but the game regularly decides that you actually wanted to aim at that enemy a little to the left of where you were actually pointing when you pressed the "throw" button. In a non-time sensitive situation, it would have been helpful to have this quasi-"lock on" facility when throwing things; when attempting to fling water towers at fires, however, it's a pain in the arse.

I'll be honest, I didn't finish the DLC because it irritated me so much — thankfully, it's possible to cancel out of the missions once they've started and simply proceed back on with the main story. As a matter of fact, the second mission in the pack soured me so much on the game by making its flaws so abundantly apparent that it significantly impacted my enjoyment of the finale which, on reflection, wasn't terrible.

Gravity Rush isn't a bad game. In fact, it's a very good game, and a fine showcase of the Vita's capabilities and unique features. But with a bit of work it could have been an amazing game. It looks fantastic, it has an endearing main character and a wonderfully entertaining core game mechanic, but it simply falls to pieces at the end with a string of unimaginative fetch and kill quests. These just make you want to get to the end so you don't have to play any more, not because you want to see the end of the story (which, incidentally, leaves a whole lot of frustratingly unanswered questions).

It may sound like I'm being unduly harsh on this game and perhaps I am. I did like it overall, and I'm glad I played it. If you own a Vita, you should play it too.

It's not perfect. It has potential, though, and that's quite exciting. The possibilities that a Gravity Rush sequel might offer are very intriguing indeed. For my money, I'd like to see more creative use of the gravity mechanic for puzzle-solving, less aimless open world flying around, less combat (or at least combat that isn't so incredibly irritating) and a story that wraps up properly.

That's that for now, though. Next up is Persona 2.