Despite my day job, which is reviewing mobile and social games for the fine folks over at Inside Network, I have to confess that the reason some of these games end up being quite so popular eludes me. Don't get me wrong, I'm trained to spot a free-to-play game that's going to be profitable a mile off… I just can't pin down the reason as to why some of these games resonate with people so much. And no-one seems to want to tell me, either.
(Naturally it probably goes without saying that these are my personal, not professional views. But I'll say it anyway. Oh, I already did.)
Let's take a title called Rage of Bahamut as a case study. Rage of Bahamut is a game for iOS and Android devices. Ostensibly it's a "card battling" game in which you collect (virtual) cards a la Magic: The Gathering and then use said cards to do battle, either against other people or "boss" monsters. There's also a large number of "quests" that you can take one of the characters represented on your cards on, the ability to organise players into "Orders" and cooperate, trade cards, help each other out on difficult fights and all manner of other stuff.
Sounds pretty good, right? Well, it's not. The game features one of the most dreadful user interfaces I've ever seen, with most of the game looking like a Web page from the early '90s, albeit without animated "Under Construction" GIF files. The "quest" feature consists entirely of tapping a button, watching a short animation of a monster dying and observing your stamina bar gradually decrease as your experience and "quest progress" bars increase. Battling another player involves selecting your cards in advance, pressing "Battle" and then doing absolutely nothing. Battling a boss involves selecting your cards in advance, pressing "Battle" and then doing absolutely nothing. Oh, and there's no sound, either. It wasn't deemed necessary, it seems. The game's sole slightly redeeming feature is that the anime-style artwork for the cards is quite nice, but that certainly doesn't make it any fun to play. At all. Go on, try it. (Android users, go here.)
Despite this crippling lack of entertainment value, somehow the game is presently the third top grossing game on the iPhone — and it has been at the top of that chart in the last few days, too. It's free to download, meaning that people are enjoying this hateful, monotonous, tedious pile of steaming un-fun crap enough to want to voluntarily hand over money.
Why?!
It's not the only game of this type which has enjoyed success, it's just the most recent. Various studies by research companies indicate that the majority of profitable apps on the various app stores of the Internet include in-app purchases in one form or another — and many of these titles are of the free-to-play variety. I have nothing against free-to-play as a concept or business model, but I do question the taste of some people when something as unbelievably lacking in virtue as Rage of Bahamut proves itself to be more profitable than lovingly-crafted paid apps which developers have poured large quantities of time and money into. This depressing tale from Joystiq springs to mind.
I can't help but feel that the press is partly to blame in all this. Titles like Rage of Bahamut often get great reviews from the press despite their lack of innovation, gameplay, interface design or anything even resembling entertainment, when in fact they should be summarily panned for providing an experience akin to scrolling through an Excel spreadsheet equipped with a macro that requires you to click "OK" every ten seconds.
But then I guess I've never seen the appeal of football management games, either…
(Incidentally, if you're looking for a card-battling game that's actually good, try Gamevil's Duel of Fate, Hothead's Kard Combat or Kyle Poole's Shadow Era.)
I have mentioned these issues a couple of times over the past few days but I've come to the conclusion that they're actually making me feel a bit depressed. I know that there's little point in getting depressed or upset over "the way the world is" and there are far bigger problems in the world, etc. etc. but, I mean, wow. Something really needs to be done.
I am referring primarily to the treatment of Anita Sarkeesian, better known on the Interwebz as Feminist Frequency, the author of a number of feminist perspective critiques on popular culture. Sarkeesian recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund her newest piece of research and criticism, dubbed simply "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games". The proposed series of videos Sarkeesian is intending to produce will deconstruct the most commonly-seen female character tropes in video games, highlighting recurring patterns and discussing them rather than simply pointing the finger and going "LOOK! THIS IS BAD."
The response to Sarkeesian's campaign was both good and bad. On the positive side, the campaign was fully funded in the first 24 hours, and since that time a number of "stretch goals" have been smashed, allowing Sarkeesian to produce a much larger amount of content than initially proposed.
I really shouldn't be astonished by things that people say on the Internet any more, given that it is widely regarded as a wretched hive of &c &c despite all the lovely and intelligent people who also populate it. But these incidents really bothered me. They happened quickly and relentlessly… and they were clearly organised — likely by noted Internet cesspits 4chan and 9gag. This fabulous piece by Foz Meadows sums up the key aspect of the problem, I think: in attempting to defend themselves against accusations of sexism, misogyny and the promotion of a rape culture, those who deliberately and maliciously harassed Sarkeesian resorted to, you guessed it, sexism, misogyny and the promotion of a rape culture.
Sarkeesian's suffering isn't in any way the only time this has happened, of course, though it may have been the most high-profile one in recent weeks. The Hitman: Absolution trailer I mentioned a few posts ago stirred up plenty of controversy, and anyone speaking out against it tended to get shouted down by people who couldn't see the problem with it in the most abusive manner possible. Disagreements and differences in taste; threatening others and calling them abusive names because of those disagreements is not.
Even princess of geekdom Felicia Day wasn't immune to this bullshit. Her recent video "Gamer Girl, Country Boy", released as part of her entertaining "Flog" series on Geek & Sundry, attracted a swarm of completely unprovoked hateful comments. The hornets' nest had already been stirred up, so another target for their ire was just a happy bonus. Whatever you think of Day's past work, it should be clear to most people that there's clearly not a malevolent bone in her whole body, and the whole incident clearly upset her very much. I'm not "white knighting" here, it's a clear and simple fact. Who wouldn't be upset by an organised campaign to troll and flame something you'd worked hard on?
All of this is just a bit much to take. I've always been someone who likes to try and see the best in people — to a fault, really — but to see that some people hiding behind that ever-present veil of anonymity prove themselves to really be complete and utter cunts doesn't make me feel great. Obviously my own take on the matter pales in comparison to what Sarkeesian, Day and anyone else who has suffered at the hands of these trolls must be feeling about all this, but it's genuinely upsetting to know that there are people that vile and disgusting out there — people who supposedly share the same passions and hobbies as I do.
It needs to stop. That will only happen with concerted efforts from everyone involved, and it goes back to what school always told you about handling bullies. Be assertive, but not aggressive. Tell the bully that what they are doing is upsetting and unpleasant. And tell someone else. Don't be afraid to talk about it. Don't suffer in silence. Because while someone (or, indeed, a thrown-together Internet lynch mob) being a complete arsehole can utterly ruin your day, week, month, year, it's infinitely worse if you have no-one to turn to for support.
Let's stamp this odious attitude out. Freedom of speech is one thing; using said freedom to intimidate, harass and silence others is not its intention. I fully support and endorse Sarkeesian's Kickstarter campaign, and while I won't insist that you do so too, I would certainly like to encourage you all to stand up to bullying when (not if, sadly) you see it happening — even if it's not directly involving you. Good Samaritan and all that.
Above all, don't be a dick. And if it all gets a bit much, then pay this site a visit.
I've been playing a lot of the Yakuza series recently — I'm intending on playing them all back-to-back, and at the time of writing am probably slightly less than halfway through Yakuza 2.
I'd specifically like to talk about Yakuza 2 because the first Yakuza game was covered in a suitably comprehensive level of detail by the Squadron of Shame in this podcast:
The original Yakuza was great. It was another fine example of a "kitchen sink" game — a type of game which incorporates a wide variety of other experiences to produce one surprisingly coherent whole. In the case of Yakuza, it blends JRPG, brawler, dating sim, scavenger hunt and open-world adventure into one of the finest experiences of the PS2 era, marred only by long-ass loading times, a sometimes-clunky fighting engine and the questionable decision to use American voice actors (including some surprisingly big names like Eliza Dushku, Mark Hamill and Michael Madsen) swearing more than your average Tarantino movie to depict the unique idiosyncracies of the Japanese criminal underworld.
Yakuza 2, still on the PS2, fixes almost everything that was flawed about its predecessor. It's still riddled with loading breaks, but they're much shorter than in the first game. The American voice acting has been replaced by a much more authentic Japanese voice track — though the subtitles are well-localised and entertainingly written rather than being a literal translation. The fight sequences have been refined to be much more fluid, incorporating far fewer instances of protagonist Kazuma facing the wrong direction and unleashing a devastating combo onto thin air and far more situations where it's possible to make use of the brutal (and darkly amusing) "heat" actions — smashing people's faces into walls, battering them over the head with street furniture, sticking a beer crate on their head and then punching them repeatedly in the stomach to name just three.
For the uninitiated, the Yakuza series' game flow is much more akin to a traditional JRPG than something like Grand Theft Auto, to which it got rather unfairly compared on its first appearance in the West. Kazuma wanders around the extremely well-realised fictional district of Kamurocho (based on Kabukicho in Tokyo) in an attempt to get to the bottom of whatever disaster is befalling him and his buddies in the organised crime world this time. Along the way, he'll encounter a wide variety of non-essential activities to distract him, many of which are deep, involved quests in their own right, and the pursuit of which causes a game which can be completed in about 12 hours to balloon up to well over 40 hours in length.
By far the best thing about Yakuza is the sheer variety of things to do. It's an evolution of the Shenmue series' anal attention to detail, though rather than providing players with the ability to open every drawer in every house for no apparent reason, Yakuza provides players with a well-realised city district in which they can romance hostesses, get into street fights, collect lost locker keys, gamble at an illegal casino, get a "massage" of questionable morality, play slot machines, play a crane game and play baseball. Yakuza 2 adds even more to the mix, including a lengthy sequence where you have to run your own hostess club; another lengthy sequence where Kazuma becomes a host at a club in an attempt to unmask the manipulative, abusive owner; a full Mahjong simulation; a first-person fighting game; golf; "video booths" where Kazuma sometimes learns new abilities; and some other stuff I doubtless haven't discovered yet. Oh, and Yakuza 2 also includes a whole other district almost as large as Kamurocho again, also packed full of things to do.
None of this stuff really feels like "filler" though, because it is clearly optional — the experience point rewards for completing any of these activities are generally laughable, though sometimes you get some cool items. Rather, the inclusion of all these activities helps the world of Yakuza to feel far more alive than almost any other game world I've ever encountered. Not only that, but it gives the player an incredibly strong understanding of Japanese culture, with a particular focus on the seedy underbelly of it — the side that Japan doesn't like to talk about. It's a game that draws you in with its interesting story and then encourages you to stay for the hostess bars, gambling dens and men with "FART" written on the back of their hoodies.
Of course, the great thing about the series is that if you do want to rush through them and just see the story, you're not penalised for doing this in the slightest. I'd already played the first Yakuza back when we recorded the aforementioned podcast, but I just wanted to remind myself of what happened, so I raced through without doing any of the side missions and still had a satisfying experience. (In fact, one could argue that the story is a little more coherent if the game is played in this way, but I wouldn't trade all the other stuff for anything.)
Yakuza 2, so far, then, is proving to be every bit as good as its predecessor and then some. I have no idea how long it's going to take me to beat, but I'm enjoying taking my time with it so far. And once it's done, I get to move into the HD age with Yakuza 3 and 4… and possibly the utterly bizarre Dead Souls after that. It's quite a ride.
As I type this, Indie Game Music Bundle 3 has just 21 hours left on the clock. The package aims to give your ears a good rogering with the soundtracks to Terraria, Plants vs. Zombies, Dustforce, Ilomilo and Frozen Synapse, and is a cheap date, too — it's available under the fashionable "pay what you want" scheme.
There's a caveat, though — break the $10 barrier and you get a bunch of extra soundtracks, too. Specifically, you get the following additional albums on top of the already-awesome package detailed above:
Offspring Fling Original Soundtrack — Alec Holowka
Mubla Evol Ution: NoituLove 1&2 and More — Joakim Sandberg
Cardinal Quest Original Soundtrack — Whitaker Blackall
InMomentum Original Soundtrack — Gareth Coker
Impeccable Micro — _ensnare_
Bluescreen Chiptune/Jazz — Protodome
Beautiful Lifestyle — George & Jonathan
Rise of the Obsidian Interstellar — Disasterpeace
Deorbit — Disasterpeace
Gungirl 2 Original Soundtrack — Josh Whelchel
Astroman Original Soundtrack — Jeff Ball
The Blocks Cometh Original Soundtrack — Hyperduck Soundworks
Fittest Original Soundtrack — Zircon
Songs for the Cure '11 — Various Artists
Songs for the Cure '10 — Various Artists
You may not be familiar with any or all of the above artists, but rest assured that this is a fantastic bundle to pleasure your lugholes with for 19 and a half hours, covering a wide range of different musical styles. To be honest, it's worth your money for the fantastic Frozen Synapse soundtrack alone, which is aural sex.
Game music is traditionally a "love it or hate it" sort of thing, though in recent years we've started to see a huge shift in attitudes towards it. Whereas game soundtracks were once bleepy-bloopy loops made to fit into the amount of memory it takes to write a single sentence in a Microsoft Word document these days, today they're impressive affairs that are frequently on par with movies.
In fact, big-budget triple-A video games (particularly those from the West) try a little too hard to be movies, with sweeping orchestral scores composed by the likes of Hans Zimmer. In some respects, these modern soundtracks, while impressive, have lost a lot of the character that game music used to have — by working around the technological limitations of the era, old-school game musicians came up with catchy earworms that you'd remember for years afterwards. This happens much less these days because composers can pretty much run free with whatever they want to do. As an exercise, hum the Super Mario Bros. theme to yourself now. Then hum the Modern Warfare 3 theme. You probably can't do the latter. (Though you probably can hum the Halo theme, showing that some composers still "get it".)
Anyway, my point is that soundtrack composers for independently-developed titles such as these tend to "get" what made game soundtracks of the past so memorable much better than those composing for big-budget titles, and these indie composers are then able to apply this knowledge to modern compositional techniques and technology in order to create some truly excellent pieces of music. Some deliberately make use of chiptune sounds; others have their own distinctive aural aesthetic. All are unique. All are most definitely worth your $10.
There's a surprising dearth of good roguelikes on mobile platforms. While I wouldn't wish to shoehorn the ridiculous number of key commands from something like Angband onto a buttonless phone, the basic concept is a good fit. Explore randomly-generated dungeon, kill monsters, get treasure. The basic controls you need to make a roguelike work — directions and inventory, mostly — are pretty workable on a touchscreen, and the turn-based nature of the genre means that the frustration factor of trying to be accurate with non-physical controls is simply not there.
This isn't to say there aren't good roguelikes out there, however. On iOS, there's 100 Rogues, Sword of Fargoal and several others I haven't tried. On Android, the pickings are a bit more slim, though there are a few out there for the taking.
Today, iOS added Cardinal Quest to its lineup, a rather wonderful little roguelike with a pleasing retro aesthetic, streamlined gameplay and the kind of addictive nature that is perfect for mobile games.
Cardinal Quest isn't a new title, however; it's been available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux machines for quite a while now, and there's a free demo you can play over on Kongregate. But its release on iOS today marks its first jump onto portable devices.
For the uninitiated, Cardinal Quest is a simplistic dungeon-crawler that cites Gauntlet, Golden Axe and red-box Dungeons & Dragons games as its key inspirations. Taking on the role of one of three different pixelated heroes, the player descends into the randomly-generated dungeons to seek their fortune and hopefully defeat the evil minotaur lurking in the depths. Along the way they'll discover treasure and a variety of different spells to make their journey easier.
Cardinal Quest adds a few nice little twists on the conventional roguelike formula. Walking over an item of equipment, for example, causes your character to automatically decide whether it's better than what he already has or not, and replace it if necessary. There's no faffing around with comparing stats, it simply takes care of it for you. This might irk purists a bit, but it keeps things nice and pacy.
Similarly, special abilities aren't learned, but are instead found as treasure. Five can be equipped at once, while others are stored in the inventory. Instead of using a magic points system, each skill has a cooldown determined by one of the character's stats, making some inherently more suitable for certain classes than others — though, so far as I can tell from my brief time with the game so far, any class can use any spell.
Also, while the game does feature permadeath as all good roguelikes should, there's a bit of a safety net in place in the form of a "lives" system that lets the player walk away from a couple of fatal encounters before succumbing to oblivion. It makes the experience a little more friendly to newbies while still remaining brutal enough to provide genre veterans with a decent challenge.
Wrap the whole thing in pleasingly blocky pixel-art, retro sound effects and chiptune music and you've got Cardinal Quest in a nutshell. Grab it here for $1.99.
It's not easy to change your own opinions, for any reason. It's even harder to change it when someone else makes a convincing argument as to why you are wrong and therefore a big dumb-dumb poopy-head. But sometimes it's something you have to do in order to move with the times.
I have two very different issues in mind for which I've encountered the above concept. I'll tackle them in order of difficulty to comment on.
First up is mobile gaming.
Last year, I wrote this post. In it, I described how I thought the supposed pressure from Nintendo's investors for the Japanese giant to start developing for smartphones rather than its own proprietary hardware might not actually be a terrible idea. I actually still don't think it's an awful idea, but after a year of reflection, observation and immersion in the mobile gaming industry, it's clear that what I describe and suggest in that post isn't going to happen.
For all some iOS developers' attempts to take the iPhone and iPad seriously for gaming purposes, there are at least ten times as many developers churning out free-to-play or quick-hit casual games. For every developer who is up front about the cost of their app and refuses to nickel-and-dime the player with additional in-app purchases, at least ten times as many incorporate some sort of means of endless monetization, be it an "energy" system, a means for players to buy in-game currency without earning it or the facility to unlock content without having to progress naturally through the game.
I don't begrudge these developers their income, of course — games cost money to make, and every developer wants to make it big with their titles. But, unfortunately, the prevalence of such business models in the mobile gaming space makes it all but impossible for the "core" gaming community to take it seriously. As much as many of us moan about grinding for levels or money in games, a lot of us secretly quite enjoy it — it provides us with "war stories" about how we played Mahjong for six hours straight in Yakuza 2 in order to be able to afford a fancy dress to give to a girl, or how we accumulated fifteen bajillion souls in Demon's Souls only to die and then die again on the way back to retrieving them, losing them all forever.
In short, the effort and personal sacrifice involved in accomplishing feats in some of these games is rendered meaningless if someone can just come along and pay ten quid to bypass all the pain and suffering. Sure, it's convenient, but it renders achievements meaningless — particularly if the game's monetization strategy features "pay to win" items, whereby players can pay real money in order to gain a significant in-game advantage, be it the ability to "continue" after death without score penalty or simply acquiring powerful new equipment.
What this means is that "core" gamers as a community don't take mobile gaming seriously, which means that when developers do come along wanting to do something serious and non-exploitative, they often get ignored — particularly if their game is seen as "expensive" compared to the myriad free and 69p apps out there. If you want a recent example of this in action, just consider the Kickstarter campaign for Republique that I wrote about here. Despite starting as an effort to get "triple-A" games on iOS, the team behind the project gradually had to accept that this mission statement wasn't going to get them the funding that they wanted, and eventually had to expand and promise PC and Mac versions. Even then, it looked for a long time like they weren't going to make it.
Anyway. I was wrong. I accept that. Mobile gaming is its own thing, and that's cool. I will continue to appreciate it when a developer treats me as a player rather than a customer (or worse, cash cow) and provides me with deep, meaningful, worthwhile experiences on iOS, but I'm no longer holding my breath for it to be the next big thing in portable gaming — at least not for the "core" audience. There is still a place for dedicated handhelds.
Now for the second issue. I kind of don't want to talk about this much because there's been a lot of angry table-thumping surrounding it in recent weeks. There are, too, a lot of very vocal commentators on the subject and I really don't want to attract their ire — firstly, because that is by no means my intention, and secondly, because I've seen people really get laid into as a result of such arguments.
I am, of course, talking about gender issues and the question of whether or not the video games industry constitutes a rape culture.
Some context, first. Apologies to those whom the following offends, but it's necessary to include it for context. (NSFW, duh.)
This trailer for the upcoming game Hitman Absolution made a lot of people very angry, for various reasons. The ridiculous nun disguises covering impractical porn-star dominatrix outfits. The question of how exactly a nun conceals a rocket-launcher inside her habit. The fact that this really didn't look like the Hitman series people knew and loved.
By far the biggest concern, though, was the violence towards women depicted in the trailer.
I am not going to get into the broader discussion of whether or not this is indicative of a rape culture here as, to be frank and honest with you, I do not know enough about the subject and therefore feel ill-qualified to comment on it.
What I can discuss, however, is how my own thought processes went.
My initial reaction to the trailer was simply "WTF". This was shortly followed by "that's clearly sexist and unnecessary", and I commented as such on Twitter around the time it was emerging. My opinion was that the trailer was the result of a horny marketing department making deliberately sexually-provocative promotional material in order to get people talking about the game. On that note, it certainly worked.
I thought little more of it for a while, until articles like this one started to appear, claiming that the trailer was indicative of a larger problem — the trailer was, to paraphrase Brendan's piece, not simply sexist, but evidence of a culture that normalised violence against women, and specifically sexual violence. In short, a rape culture by its very definition.
I had no idea what "rape culture" meant when I saw the initial discussions surrounding this trailer. My initial reaction, like many others, was to assume that "rape culture" in fact meant "directly endorsing rape". Despite being conscious of the fact that I had publicly spoken out against the trailer, the accusations flying around and the increasing anger of commenters on the subject — on both sides — made me feel deeply uncomfortable and, yes, defensive. No-one likes to be told that something they care deeply about has such an odious undercurrent, after all.
But I stepped back for a moment and considered what was going on. This was clearly a hot-button issue for a lot of people, and one that I knew wading into with ill-informed opinions would be desperately, desperately unwise. I'd already seen a few weeks previously that a friend who had inadvertently ventured into a similar discussion got very publicly torn a new one (a little unfairly, I feel — though that's an altogether different story) as he attempted to discuss the matter.
So here's what I did: I stepped away. I read through the various angry tweets, blog posts and articles with a degree of detachment, attempting to understand where these people were coming from and why those who were saying "it's no problem, what's the big deal?" were pissing them off so much. I read up a little on what "rape culture" as a term actually meant.
And I came out of it feeling differently to the defensiveness I felt before. I already knew there was a problem with sexism in the industry, but now I felt I had an increased (though by no means comprehensive) understanding of the issue. I am aware that there are still things I do not understand about issues of feminism, gender, sexuality, rape culture and cultural norms — people spend years studying these things, after all — but I am willing to at least learn about these subjects before sticking my oar into a debate I am currently ill-qualified to have. I am also aware that many of the commenters who feel so passionately about this issue are not, as might first appear, condemning the entire industry and everyone involved in it as sexist, misogynist perpetuators of a rape culture, because gross generalisations are never helpful.
Let's get off the specifics because, as I've said several times, I don't want to get into that particular discussion right now.
The key issue is that a little consideration and reflection goes a long way. Knee-jerk, immediate, passionate, emotional and ill-informed reactions might feel good in the short term, but often they leave you looking like a jackass. I'm glad that I stepped back and considered the way I felt about the discussion surrounding this issue — and why — before even thinking about jumping in and potentially making a twat of myself.
It pays to have flexible opinions, a willingness to educate yourself and, yes, the ability to admit you were wrong (and understand why), in short. That's not to say that you should blindly follow the herd — quite the opposite, in fact. You should take the time to explore an issue, find out as much as possible and gather sufficient information for you to be able to accurately decide whether or not your initial reaction was, in fact, correct.
If it was — in your opinion, anyway — then you'll be well-equipped to argue your case. And if it wasn't, it's important to be humble enough to admit it.
[Now updated with some titles I meant to include in the first place but forgot because it was late when I wrote this and I was tired and WHARGGGHHH. Or something.]
Space, they say, is big. Really big. There's a whole universe of infinite possibilities out there, and being boring old humans we're (mostly) stuck on this planet, unable to explore the great black beyond. We can, of course, observe it and take exciting pictures and footage, such as what we've seen from the recent Venus transit. But for the everyday person, exploration of space is the stuff of pure science fiction.
Video games are a great way to immerse yourself in that sense of exploring the great unknown. Plenty of games are set in space, obviously, but it's a smaller subset that actively deals with exploration and discovery rather than simply blowing shit up. Star Trek as opposed to Star Wars, if you will, though I'm aware that's a gross oversimplification of and a great injustice to both series. But never mind.
Here are some of my favourite space games.
Star Control II
What a fantastic game this is, well deserving of its classic status. Star Control II casts the player in the role of a human captain returning to Earth after a long stint on a faroff colony only to discover that our homeworld has been captured and enslaved by the evil Ur-Quan. Thus begins a galaxy-spanning adventure of diplomacy, combat and collecting lots of minerals.
Star Control II is one of those games that blends lots of different play styles together to create a distinctive whole. You have Asteroids-style combat incorporating ideas from one-on-one fighting games — each ship has its own "special moves" and is well-matched against certain other vessels. You have space exploration — the game tells you very little about where to find things, and God help you if you don't note down the offhand mentions of alien species that some characters make. You have resource management in the form of keeping an eye on your ship's crew, fuel and cargo space. You have RPG-style upgrading as you turn your ship into an unstoppable behemoth and recruit various escort vessels to accompany you. And you have adventure-game style dialogue trees as you make contact with the weird and wonderful races of the galaxy in an attempt to recruit them to your cause.
Best of all, you can grab the enhanced port of the 3DO version for modern computers here, or pick up the original version and its prequel from GOG.com.
Star Trek Online
Star Trek Online is an excellent Star Trek game, although it may be a little too heavy on the combat to be completely true to its source material. The game does successfully capture the feeling of piloting a huge vessel around the galaxy to seek out new life and new civilisations and all that jazz, though, and the fact that the game has a strong focus on user-generated content ranging from player-constructed alien races to full mission sequences makes it a great deal of fun. It's not as polished as it could be and PvP is broken as hell, but it's a free-to-play title that doesn't gouge you for in-game purchases at every opportunity.
I wrote a little about the upcoming 4X space strategy title Endless Space a little while back. The game is now in beta testing as it gets closer to release. I haven't tried it yet but am planning to give it a go over the weekend.
Endless Space is less "personal" than other titles due to the fact that you're not controlling your own individual vessel, you're overseeing a whole empire. That doesn't stop it from being full of the joy of discovery and exploration, however — finding a star system with planets rich in valuable resources is immensely satisfying, and successfully defending it against incurstion from your opponents is even more satisfying.
X: Beyond the Frontier
I haven't played this game for ages, nor have I played its sequels and expansions. But the original game struck me as an impressive experience that truly made you feel like an insignificant speck in a massive galaxy that would most certainly go on with its own business without you. Over time, in true space opera style, you could make a name for yourself and work your way up to being an immensely powerful individual, but the journey was a long, slow, tough one — rewarding, though.
Having returned to playing this recently I had forgotten quite how excellent the space section of this game was — it's certainly the most well fleshed out component.
After designing your custom race's custom spaceship, you then take to the randomly-generated stars to colonise new planets, trade with other spacefaring races, toy with the natural order of things on developing worlds, discover lost relics, complete missions, mine for valuable resources, paint planets and carve obscenities into the ground using rivers. It's very freeform in how the player can tackle it, which gives each game the potential to be completely unique.
Will you seek peaceful solutions to conflict? Will you only expand your empire to planets already capable of supporting life, or will you terraform barren rocks into new Edens? Will you go to war with rival empires or attempt to buy them out? And will you satisfy yourself with building out your empire, or will you embark on a quest to get to the centre of the galaxy and uncover the mysteries of the universe?
I played this game on the Atari ST. It was brilliant. It was a relatively early title from Electronic Arts, and was immensely freeform in its gameplay. Taking on the role of a starship captain, the player was simply tasked with exploring the galaxy. This involved flying to new star systems, descending to planets, exploring in a "rover" vehicle, engaging in diplomacy between alien races and battling enemies. There was supposedly an overarching plot, but I never got that far when playing it as a youngster — I simply enjoyed flying around and exploring space. It may well be one to revisit with the eyes of an adult.
Space Rogue
A space sim from Origin (as in the software company, not the digital distribution platform) that cast the player in the usual role of a "privateer", Space Rogue was interesting for the fact it wasn't just about flying around shooting things and hauling goods from planet to planet. Landing at a base launched a top-down roleplaying component during which you could explore, talk to people, engage in combat against enemies and take part in a galaxy-spanning plot that, again, I can remember very little about besides a series of fetch quests that involved you ferrying messages back and forth between two sisters called Cebak and Tiwa. There were text-based adventure sections, too.
Space Rogue, then, was something of a precursor to the next game I'm going to mention.
Space Rangers 2
An utterly bizarre yet lovable game from Russia, Space Rangers 2 takes players on a wild ride across the galaxy, taking in turn-based strategy, real-time strategy, third-person shooter combat, text-based adventures, trading, RPG-style levelling up and all manner of other crap along the way. It's an absolute Frankenstein's Monster of a game and all the better for it. It's almost futile to describe the experience of playing it, particularly when you can check it out for yourself for super-cheap thanks to GOG.com.
E3's leaving me a bit cold this year. The fact I'm not covering it for a gaming website is actually a blessed relief, as it means I don't have to stay up until ass o' clock in the morning watching cringeworthy live performances from executives who should know better. But I'm not even feeling particularly inspired to seek out the big news from it myself — nothing's grabbing me as hugely exciting. The most interesting thing to me is probably Nintendo's new console, which does some genuinely innovative and cool things — but we'll have to wait and see on pricing.
E3's not necessarily about people like me though. It's first and foremost about the suits and the money, secondly about the press and the actual gaming public comes in a distant third somewhere. It is, in essence, a huge PR circus whereby lots of companies can make outlandish promises about their new products and hope no-one remembers by the time the product in question actually comes out. (See: anything Peter Molyneux or Microsoft have ever said, anything regarding motion control, anything regarding Vitality Sensors.) It's an important time for publishers to show off their big new titles to keep their shareholders happy, and for the press to help keep the buzz flowing.
I've never been to an E3, so I can't speak for what the experience of actually being there is like. I'm sure smaller developers and publishers are there, too, but I feel a bit sorry for them. As is always the case, the big news is always about what Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Ubisoft and EA are up to — and probably something Call of Duty-related from Activision, too. Smaller companies are there to get their products noticed, too, but it must regularly seem like an uphill battle to them when all the big sites want to cover is Halo 4, Call of Duty 300 and other Games With Guns In.
There have been a few surprises, of course. Ubisoft's Watch_Dogs is looking cool — at least it did until the dude pulled a gun out — and David Cage's latest project is sure to be just as interesting and divisive as his previous work. I'm not yet convinced by The Last of Us (ugh, zombies) and I want to know more about pricing before I get too excited about Wii U.
Herein lies the rub, though. I couldn't give a crap about the "big games". I know that plenty of people do, otherwise we wouldn't be on our sixth Halo game, our fifth Assassin's Creed game (not counting spinoff titles) and our four hundred and seventy-sixth Mario title. And the big sites certainly cover the big games with aplomb. But where is the discussion about more niche titles like Larian Studios' upcoming new Divinity game and the batshit-crazy looking Dragon Commander? Where's the love for independent developers? Where can I find what I'll be putting in my shopping cart without question next time there's a Steam sale?
This information is out there, I'm sure, but it's hard to find. It's easy to be cynical about E3 because of the information that gets the highest priority. "Biggest budget" seems to equate to "most important" in the eyes of a lot of press and public alike, and that's a bit of a shame. For me, the most important titles should be the ones that move the genre forward, the ones that do genuinely interesting things, the ones that I'd want to discuss on the Squadron of Shame SquadCast. But I guess they call things like that "niche" for a reason.
Also, fuck E3 memes. If one more person makes a "my body is ready" joke I will punch them. Hard.
Apparently Nintendo did some thing today, but I haven't been paying attention. The reason for this is that I was (still am, in fact) at my friend's house playing a series of excellent board games, including Ticket to Ride, Puerto Rico, 7 Wonders and Arkham Horror.
I really like Arkham Horror, though it takes so long to play and we almost inevitably start so late that we rarely finish a complete game. Tonight, we actually got to the end of a game. Okay, it was by losing. But that's still something, at least.
For the uninitiated, Arkham Horror is a cooperative board game that uses HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos to excellent effect, challenging players to compete against all odds in a desperate struggle to prevent various old, evil things from returning to the Earth. It is very strongly thematic, featuring a particularly prominent sense of emergent narrative as the players compete against the game itself in an attempt to come out on top… and usually fail.
The reason Arkham Horror is such a challenge is to do with its complexity. It's not complex in the sense that it's difficult to understand — each of the basic mechanics are pretty straightforward, in fact — but it is complex in the sense that there are a lot of rules to remember, many of which are very easy to forget. There really is nothing worse in a gaming session than snatching victory from the jaws of defeat and then realising to your horror that you've actually been playing it wrong somewhere along the line. It kind of takes the edge off your victory somewhat.
It's frustrating to lose, too. The game puts up a hell of a fight (no pun intended) against the players. Sometimes things seem to be going well then everything just goes disastrously wrong for reasons that seem to have been out of your control. On reflection, though, it is usually the case that such a fate could have been avoided — and anyway, if you were practically guaranteed a win every time, where would the fun be? As it is, Arkham Horror is the board game equivalent of something like Dark Souls — it kicks you repeatedly in the testicles each time you play, and the only way to improve is to practice. This isn't always practical, unfortunately, given that the game's large box contains approximately a million components and takes a long time to set up. The game is, however, possible to play solo, which is always a bonus in my book.
If you're looking for a fun, challenging cooperative game to play with friends on a long, rainy afternoon, Arkham Horror certainly fits that bill well. And if the base game isn't challenging enough for you, the various expansions ensure that not only will the play area take over most of your living room, but you'll be battling the Ancient Ones until the small hours.
I've finally beaten Logic into submission and got it up and running on my new Mac, which means I've finally been able to edit the most recent Squadron of Shame SquadCast. Here it is:
(Direct link for those who can't see the inline player)
The subject of the podcast is Nier, an action RPG for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 published by Square Enix and developed by Cavia. You may recall I was enthusing about this game quite a lot back in early May, and that enthusiasm was what sparked the desire for us to do this particular podcast.
Nier is a fascinating game. Whether or not it's actually a good one is up for debate somewhat, but it's certainly a unique experience in the console space. In fact, to call it an "action RPG" as I did above is a gross injustice, since the game also incorporates elements of bullet hell shooters, text adventures, 2D platform games and open world quest-based "traditional" RPGs. The only games I can think of that offer a comparable experience include Space Rangers 2 and King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame, both for PC, and both offering wildly divergent experiences from Nier, but both taking this "kitchen sink" approach to genre blending.
Nier also distinguishes itself by having a mature plot that is worth following through. Sure, it's pure fantasy, but it's good, compelling fantasy — and the fact that the game was released as part of a much larger opus that spans several forms of media is very much apparent if you take the time to read up on it using sources such as Grimoire Nier. The game can most certainly be enjoyed in its own right without exploring any of the additional background material, but it becomes a far richer experience once you delve into the lore of the world — and, for that matter, the story of the game's creation. It's very much an example of a game whose world and characters are "bigger" than the game they inhabit, much like an author who plans out their characters by writing scenes for them that never appear in the book in question.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Nier, though, is its treatment of "New Game+" — the ability to go back and replay it after you've beaten it once. In many role-playing games, taking on a New Game+ is simply a matter of starting again with all your awesome items, equipment and buffed-up characters from the end of your first playthrough and then romping through the game slicing off heads with gay abandon and nary a fear for your own safety. Nier certainly does this — on subsequent playthroughs, boss fights that were once challenging are an absolute joke — but it's not the most important point.
Without getting into spoilers, Nier's New Game+ gradually adds new layers of complexity and nuance to the plot, calling into question the actions that you undertook without even thinking in your first playthrough. The player is given additional context with which to understand exactly what is really going on — and this manages to seamlessly pull the player's perspective around between several different characters and conflicting viewpoints while still keeping them in direct control of the titular hero. It's a very interesting experiment in a variation on the "unreliable narrator" trope, and one which could really only be done so effectively in an interactive form of entertainment such as a video game. It also makes Nier's New Game+ something that is actually worth doing rather than something which is just there for a bit of fun — and it's worth noting that it makes it abundantly clear when you've done absolutely everything there is to do by actually deleting your save file when you're done. In the context of the game, this somewhat dramatic action makes a great deal of sense (though you are asked to confirm whether you're sure you're okay with this five times) — but can you imagine what would have happened if, say, Mass Effect had pulled something similar? It would have been brilliant, but those complaining about the game's ending would have been even more furious than they are.
The final thing worthy of note about Nier is that it takes no more than 40 hours to do absolutely everything in the whole game including three New Game+ runs (an utterly stupid real-time farming minigame aside, which can be easily gamed by dicking around with your console's clock), making it eminently friendly to the busy lifestyles we grown-ups tend to lead these days.
So if you've never given Nier a shot, give it a chance. You might be pleasantly surprised. And if you have played and loved Nier — or, indeed, have no intention of ever playing it, ever — be sure to listen to our podcast for some in-depth discussion on this remarkable game.
