#oneaday, Day 335: My Synapses Are Cold

I think it's pretty much a given now that I'm a fan of creative indie games, particularly ones that put unusual twists on established formulae. There's one I haven't really talked about here yet, and I feel I should rectify this forthwith.

My brother (John Davison of GameSpot, for those three of you who haven't realised that yet and are now going "Oh, yeah!") mentioned on Twitter the other day that asynchronous multiplayer was "multiplayer for grown-ups". Or specifically, multiplayer for people with little to no free time. Eminently suitable for those with jobs. Or those with families. Or those who simply suck at action/skill-based multiplayer titles.

Mode 7 Games' Frozen Synapse caters for this crowd, specifically the subset of it who wish that they could pull off a headshot at a hundred paces but no longer have the reflexes of a twelve-year old with too much sugar and caffeine in their system. Frozen Synapse is, at heart, a team-based first-person shooter, albeit one represented from a top-down view played in turns by only two people. So not a lot like a first-person shooter at all, really.

Except that it kind of is. For the uninitiated, Frozen Synapse features a wide selection of different game modes, many of which will be familiar to players of shooty-shooty-bang-bang games. The simplest is Extermination mode, which simply tasks one team with killing the other team before five turns are up.

Each turn represents a five-second period of time, during which your little people can run, walk, duck, crawl, aim, shoot and focus on specific targets. It's your job to set up a plan of action for them by setting waypoints and actions, then testing your plan to see where they'll end up after five seconds, then committing your plan. At the same time, your opponent is also doing this, and when both of you have committed your plans, the outcome is shown, and it may not be what you had anticipated.

The cool thing about it, though, is that you don't both have to be online to play. It's essentially play-by-email, with the game sending a message to your opponent when you've taken your turn and it's time to check out the carnage. This means that you can have a whole bunch of games on the go at the same time, and be able to rattle through them all in a matter of minutes. It's a great idea, and it's awesome to see this kind of idea work in a setting other than a game with With Friends in the title.

Best of all, the game plays well and it's not even finished yet. The final product promises a single-player campaign mode, puzzle mode and all manner of other goodies. Those who are keen to support the game can pre-order and play the beta version right now, though, and you get a free copy to give to a friend, too. Which is nice.

Even better than that, the game is 30% off until Christmas. So if you're the slightest bit interested in the unusual concept—and it genuinely does work really rather well—I'd encourage you to support the hard-working three-man team that is Mode 7 and pre-order a copy now.

If you do, be sure to send me a challenge. I cordially invite you to the turn-based bloodbath.

#oneaday, Day 334: That Seems A Bit Expensive

Those who doubt the value of the iOS platforms as serious gaming devices should take a look at some of the stuff that's come out recently. The iPhone and iPod touch are becoming gaming powerhouses, and not just for portable versions of timewasters like Bejeweled Blitz and Farmville.

No, in just the last couple of weeks, we've seen some spectacular games show up. Epic's Infinity Blade, for example, provides spectacular graphics and a cool update on, of all things, Punch-Out!! Trendy Entertainment's Dungeon Defenders gives us an interesting multiplayer twist on both the action RPG and tower defense genres, despite being a little bit too ambitious for its own good on the small iPhone screen. (Stick with it past the tutorial, though; once you're done with the screen-filling tutorial text, the interface is still a little bit cluttered, but less burdensome). Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light provides the same experience as the console and PC versions—complete with co-op. And Aralon is pretty much Oblivion in your pocket.

Stop and think about those for a minute. Those are all pretty fucking impressive games to run on a phone. Things get even more impressive when you look at the prices for each—the most expensive of those mentioned is Aralon, which is three English pounds and ninety-nine pence. Compare and contrast with Oblivion, which launched at £40 on consoles.

The thing is, though, the App Store and its customers appear to operate in some sort of weird parallel economy. Aralon's predecessor, Ravensword, sells for 59p and offers a pretty thorough RPG experience. And yet there are reviewers who say that they have "wasted their money" because it didn't have one feature they thought it should have in it.

Seriously. These people need to get a little perspective. 59p for 20-30 hours of entertainment is pretty outstanding value whichever way you slice it. £3.99 for the same amount of gameplay is still pretty fucking amazing value. There are games that are considerably technically inferior to these games we're getting on iOS devices now selling for £20-35 on the Nintendo DS. Ace Attorney on the iPhone is a tenth of the price it is on the Nintendo DS, and it's the same game. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is 1200 Microsoft Points on XBLA, whatever that means. It's 4 quid on the App Store. And again, it's the same game—except it actually shipped with co-op built in.

iOS gamers, you've never had it so good. At some point, developers will figure out that they're vastly undercharging people for these awesome games, and prices will rise. So stop bitching and make the most of these incredible experiences while they're still the price of a coffee in Starbucks.

#oneaday, Day 333: Internet Games #1: The TwitPic Game

You're sitting in front of your computer right now. You're either working, or bored, or wondering what on Earth you should do with yourself. You probably wouldn't be reading this otherwise.

So today, I present to you a simple and fun game which you can play whenever you've read the whole Internet and are at a loss for what to do next. It's a simple game, and there's no real "winning" as such. But it can be played solo, or as a social game with the aid of additional participants on Facebook, Twitter or the social network of your choice. You can even play local multiplayer with people in the same room, either hotseating on one computer, or with a collection of different computers.

The game is very straightforward to play. The image-sharing website "TwitPic" is used to share images on Twitter. The URL format for TwitPic is http://twitpic.com/stringoflettersandnumbersgoeshere. You can probably guess the rest, but for those of you who haven't cottoned on yet, simply replace "stringoflettersandnumbersgoeshere" with a code of your choice (keep it no more than 5 letters or numbers in most cases) and then see what out-of-context images you can discover.

Here's some samples from a quick go today:

http://twitpic.com/spack comes up with this delightful image of someone's dinner. The plastic tray and plastic cutlery seem somewhat at odds with the battered shrimp, corn and unidentifiable green shit in the corner.

http://twitpic.com/felch comes up with this image, with the caption "THIS. My cousin is me all over", worryingly, though as the astute commenter beneath the picture observes, there is no actual felching in the picture.

http://twitpic.com/crunk displays this disappointingly dull image of someone on their way to Charlotte for training. Unless Charlotte is a person, in which case the implied "training" which will be going on can take on an altogether more interesting meaning.

http://twitpic.com/arse gives us more food. People really love to show each other what they're eating on Twitter, it seems. It appears that one of the stereotypes about Twitter users is true.

http://twitpic.com/butts gives us a sleeping man. Why is he asleep? No-one knows. But the cameraperson is certainly very close to this sleeping man. Sleeping man also appears to not be wearing a shirt and have slightly flabby shoulders.

And finally, http://twitpic.com/dirty gives us a collection of jazz music, thereby confirming something we've all known for a very long time: the fact that jazz music is dirty. The internet has proved it.

This game also works with a variety of other sites, including imgur, yfrog and numerous others. For the truly brave, you could also try it with URL shorteners such as bit.ly and tinyurl. There's no telling where you might end up with those, and so that, dear friends, is a game we shall save for another day.

Found any awesome TwitPic URLs yourself? Do let me know. That's what them thar comments are for.

#oneaday, Day 332: Fire The Canon... He's Not Pulling His Weight

What are those games you have to play?

The answer, of course, is none at all, but there are plenty of people out there who believe that you can't call yourself a "true gamer" (whatever that means) unless you've played this game or that game. And for sure, at one point that was true, simply because the volume of games being released was such that it was easy enough to keep up to speed on at least all the big releases, if not absolutely everything that was available.

Nowadays, though, gaming is such big business that it's impossible to keep up with triple-A releases, let alone delve into the increasingly-awesome pool of independent and/or smaller titles out there.

Rather than this being a frustrating thing, though, this is a very positive sign. Speak to someone who's a film snob and they will probably turn their nose up at the prospect of a Michael Bay film, yet there are plenty of people out there who go and watch various childhood-raping movies that ensure you can never look at Transformers in quite the same way ever again.

And it's the same with gaming. There is no one set "canon" of games that you absolutely must play. I've come around to this idea, having had it first mooted by my good buddy and fine, upstanding gentleman Calin. There are games that are important to the history of gaming, sure. But they're not things that everyone has to play. If everyone plays all of the stuff from history that is supposedly "important", they'll never get to anything from today. It's a balancing act.

What I've been wondering is if it's possible for someone who is a full-on gaming enthusiast to spend their time playing nothing but non-triple A titles. Surely there are enough indie and "cheap-fu" titles out there now to enable someone to have an enjoyable experience without having to spend $60 a time for the privilege? And yes, I'm using dollars to illustrate my point because I'm in the States. When in Rome and all that.

This approach isn't for every gamer, just like watching only foreign and/or arthouse movies isn't for everyone who purports to "like movies". I love ASCII-based roguelike Angband, for example, and have sent any number of heroic @-signs to their death now, but I don't expect everyone to find that sort of experience palatable. I can certainly play that game and find it enjoyable, however, and there are times when I'd pick playing that over something like, say, Halo. I'd certainly always pick it over Call of Duty.

But there are people who feel the opposite too. And it's pretty cool that we've reached a stage where we can say that about the gaming industry. The only difficulty that comes with this territory is the fact that the gaming press is not able to cover everything that is out there, meaning some spectacular stuff can get completely overlooked, or sell poorly, or be unfairly judged.

This is where word of mouth comes in. You found something awesome you think friends might enjoy too? Tell them. Don't keep it to yourself. I know that I've convinced at least a few people to play Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale since I started banging on about it a few weeks back, and I'm sure there are others out there who might be interested in trying other things I've mentioned. Similarly, my obsession with Persona 3 and 4 can be entirely attributed to a blog post my friend Mark wrote extolling the virtues of Persona 3, a post which was enough to make me think "I have to play this game."

We're in an age of active involvement and active socialisation. The gaming press still certainly has a place—I should hope so, anyway, since I'm involved in it—but there's just as much importance, if not more, on word-of-mouth recommendations and discussion.

Think about the last game you played. Was it something you played because reviews were good? Because people were talking about it? Or something you took a chance on and then felt like telling everyone how good/bad it was?

In my case, the last two games I played (Recettear and DEADLY PREMONITION) were the latter two. I took a chance on Recettear and adored it. And I couldn't not play DEADLY PREMONITION after hearing some of my closest friends discussing it in appropriately reverent tones. I actually can't remember the last time I bought a game purely on the strength of a review.

#oneaday, Day 331: Like A Ro-ogue, Killed For The Very First Time

Horatio Spankington was one of several children to a Serf, and a credit to his family. He had brown eyes, curly red hair and a dark complexion, lending him a somewhat distinctive look that his father often joked would probably "end him up in some freak show somewhere".

He joined the ranks of the Paladins at an early age, and by the time he was 18 he had determined that it was time to go dungeon-delving. He rented a room in a small village above a notorious dungeon, and prepared for the long quest ahead.

One morning, he awoke, and his God spoke to him, granting him the power to detect evil things. Rushing straight for the stairs down into the dungeon, he was eager to try out his new power. Concentrating as hard as he could, he prayed fervently for sight beyond sight, to see where the evil things dwelled.

The effort caused him to faint out cold for a few minutes. When he awoke, all was as it was before, though he wasn't in a hurry to ask his God for anything else for a little while.

He pulled out the makeshift weapons and armour that he had acquired, and lit his torch. He looked around.

"What a boring place," he thought.

He looked around the room he found himself in and found a curious scrap of paper on the floor. It read "pro redam."

"Pro redam," he said out loud. Suddenly, he felt more knowledgeable, and figured that he could probably figure out exactly what the next thing he looked at was, whatever it might turn out to be. He stowed the magic scroll in his pack and headed for a tunnel in the wall nearest to him.

The tunnel was quite long, and went around several twisting corners, but eventually led him to a long, narrow room. There was a curious smell in the room. He gazed around, looking for the source of the stench and eventually found it in the form of a patch of grey mould. Figuring that he may as well cleanse the dungeon of filth as well as evil, he strode boldly toward the grey mould, broadsword in hand.

The mould let out a cloud of spores, which tickled his nose and made him sneeze. Undeterred, he whacked the patch of mould with the flat of his sword, dispersing it.

He looked around the room. There was nothing of interest here, save several tunnels in the walls. He chose one and strode valiantly into it.

After a couple of twists and turns, he came to a closed door. Trying the handle, he found it to be unlocked, so he opened it carefully and peered into the room beyond. He couldn't see anything in there, so he stepped through the archway and took a look around.

The room was pretty dark, so he walked along the walls, using the light from his torch to get his bearings. His first impressions were correct; there was little of note here. In fact, the room was more of a wide corridor, with two tunnels leading off in different directions at one side, and another closed door at the other.

He tried the handle on the door, and found it to be locked. Pulling out a safety pin he always kept for emergencies such as this, he inserted it into the lock and fumbled around inexpertly and to his surprise, succeeded in opening the door. He stepped through the doorway cautiously, unsure what he might find beyond.

The corridor beyond the door extended for a short distance and turned a few corners before opening up into a large, light room. This, too, was empty of interesting details, but there were tunnels leading off in a number of directions, along with another door in one wall.

Figuring that the doors hadn't steered him wrong yet, he headed for the door and tried the handle. It was locked, but again he tried his safety-pin trick and to his surprise, it worked.

Beyond the door was a long, twisting and turning corridor that seemed to go on forever. Eventually, it opened up into a long, thin room, and there was that terrible smell again. Another patch of mould sat waiting for him. Feeling bold, he charged for it.

Suddenly, an acrid black smoke filled his nostrils and stung his eyes. He tried to brush it away, but he couldn't. He tried to blink his eyes clear, but he couldn't see anything. The smoke was too thick. He staggered around blindly, setting off the trap several more times, stinging his eyes more and more each time.

The stench of the mould was getting stronger and stronger. He flailed wildly at the mould, trying to destroy it, but he felt the spores blow up his nose, into his throat, filling his lungs. He began to feel sick.

Something crawled on him. It felt blubbering and icky, and he heard a chewing sound. He still couldn't see, and the foul smell and darkness were confusing him.

He felt weak. Finally, coughing up blood and vomit, he barged head-first into a granite wall, collapsed onto his back and whimpered.

Horatio Spankington died just 50 feet below the surface of the earth. Few people mourned his passing, least of all the family of the drooling village idiot he claimed to have "accidentally" killed upon leaving a shop one morning.

The dungeon lay unconquered still. Many had come to tackle its dangers. None had survived so far.

Try it for yourself if you can stomach a bit of hardcore ASCII dungeon-crawling. Download Angband here.

#oneaday, Day 330: On Death And Videogames

Kids today, huh? Don't know they're born. Want everything on a plate. In my day, we died by touching a piece of wall that was the wrong colour. And then we had to start all over again!

I am, of course, referring to the changing face of failure in video games. Failure happens these days, particularly in shooters, but nowhere near as much as it used to. And certainly the penalties are far less harsh than they used to be. In days of yore, you ran out of lives, that was it. A few years later, we started to see the arcade-style "credits" system in our home games. Later still, we had games in which you could continue indefinitely. And today, we have games in which it is almost impossible to fail because of the abundance of checkpoints, regenerating health and the like.

I picked up the Sly Cooper Collection for PS3 this week, and I've been playing through Sly Cooper 1. I was a little surprised to discover that it is a pretty punishing game. Our hero doesn't have a health bar and dies at the faintest hint of water, spiky things, fire or dogs with giant hammers. This was initially frustrating, but it was a simple matter to readjust to the way we did things in 2002. It was also marginally less frustrating in the fact that this was the era of unlimited continues, making the use of "lives" almost irrelevant.

I say "almost", because running out of lives does send you back to the start of the level instead of your last checkpoint, so there is incentive to take a bit more care. But it's not frustrating, particularly as the game is designed so well that any screw-ups are usually the player's fault, not the game's.

It got me thinking, though. The Sly Cooper Collection is bringing this style of gameplay to a whole generation reared on regenerating health—heroes who can simply hide behind a pillar until they wipe all the jam off their eyeballs—and is a very different approach to what people might be used to. While many modern games encourage experimentation and exploration, Sly Cooper punishes stupid moves by killing you immediately. This has the side-effect of keeping the player on track and discouraging them from going too off-piste or attempting to "break" the game (or, heaven forbid, encouraging those assholes who use the word "glitch" as a verb) but I can imagine it would be frustrating to "modern" gamers.

I understand the later Sly Cooper games do have a health bar, suggesting that the latter years of the PS2 may have started gamers' shifting towards being the pussies they are today.

Yeah, you heard me. Pussies. You don't know pain until you've got to the last level of Castlevania only to lose all your lives and have to start all over a-fucking-gain.

The nearest to this experience we have these days is in the humble roguelike, which has the decency to delete your save game once you die. Better not get too attached to that awesome set of armour you found, because this might happen:

And no-one likes to die by stumbling drunkenly into a wall, having had a blubbering icky thing crawling on them and brown mold spores spurting up their nose.

#oneaday, Day 329: Be A Dick Mode

With the increasing mechanical complexity and narrative ambitiousness of many modern games, it's easy to forget the purity of how gaming used to be. Just a player, a joystick, and an arbitrary number representing how "good" the player was at the game. In other words, the score.

Games with scores aren't dead, though. Far from it. And in this age of global communication thanks to the Internet, one could argue that games with scores are more relevant than they've ever been.

The reason for this? The hidden option that you won't find on any game's menu. The mode that allows you to compete against your friends and mercilessly taunt them when you prove yourself—with numbers—to be objectively better than them.

I am talking, of course, about Be A Dick Mode.

Be A Dick Mode crops up in many game, though it's not just any game with a score and leaderboards that it works with. Shatter on PSN and Steam, for example, is not an example of a game featuring a Be A Dick Mode, despite being in possession of leaderboards and scores which frequently extend into the hundreds of millions. Geometry Wars 2, conversely, has Be A Dick Mode in spades. After Burner Climax? No dick action there. Pac-Man Championship Edition DX? Dickishness in spades.

There are few games with a more powerful, potent Be A Dick Mode than Adult Swim's seminal two-button masterpiece Robot Unicorn Attack, however. It was bad enough when the game was first released on Adult Swim's website. Twitter became awash with screenshots of everyone's latest and greatest high scores.

But now, they've gone and embraced Be A Dick Mode with open, err, arms.

How have they done this, you may ask. Simple: put it on Facebook.

For all Facebook's faults, privacy concerns and stupid, stupid UI redesigns, the one thing that it is magnificent at is promoting friendly (and not-so-friendly) competition between diverse friends across the globe. The ability for Facebook applications to access your name, profile picture and activity in applications you have in common with your friends was a masterstroke, privacy concerns aside. There's nothing better than looking at a leaderboard filled with the real names and photographs (or avatars) of your friends and seeing yourself at the top of it.

And there's nothing worse than seeing yourself in second place, with first place tantalisingly out of reach. There's nothing worse than knowing that the next time you log onto Twitter, there will be an @mention in your direction inviting you to check out Facebook and suggesting you might want to play some Robot Unicorn Attack instead of whatever it was you were planning on doing.

And then you play Robot Unicorn Attack. And you fail to beat your friend. And then you play it again. And some more. And then you get annoyed, so you go and play Bejeweled Blitz instead, but then you realise that someone else has pipped you to the top of the scoreboard on that too, so you go back to Robot Unicorn Attack and play it until that Erasure song has burnt itself into your memory and you can't see a field of horses without wanting to sing and fart rainbows at them.

In short, Be A Dick Mode will ruin your life and the lives of your friends. But you know you wouldn't have it any other way.

#oneaday, Day 325: Interactive Fiction

There's a lot to be said for interactivity (or at least the illusion of interactivity) in storytelling. It allows things to be done that are simply impossible with non-interactive media such as books, TV and film.

I spent a couple of hours this afternoon playing Digital: A Love Story, a wonderful game set on the desktop of an Amiga "five minutes into the future of 1988". If you haven't played it yet and are intrigued by the premise, I suggest you play it before reading on, because I'm probably going to spoil some things about it. I'll try not to be too explicit.

At the outset of the game, the player is the proud recipient of a brand-new "Amie" computer with a built-in modem. Your benefactor also provides you with a phone number of a BBS that you might want to check out. And so the story begins with the player dialing into the BBS, complete with terrifyingly authentic-sounding dial and modem tones screeching from your computer's speakers. The player quickly gets friendly with a person named Emilia and things develop quickly in a manner that will be immediately familiar to anyone who has ever had an online relationship.

All is not as it seems, however, and the player, through a bit of investigation, discovers that there are strange things at work. The BBS crashes, and there is no way of getting in contact with Emilia. Just prior to the crash, she said she was "leaving home" and "getting out". Thus begins a quest across several BBSes, ARPANet and Sprint's long-distance calling-card system to track down Emilia and discover what happened.

The game is completely linear. Things happen in a set order, right up to the ending, when the player is faced with an inevitable conclusion that there really is no way around. At this point, we reach one of the most powerful things that gaming can do, and ironically one of the least interactive things about narrative games.

Offer the player the opportunity to do two things: do something, or walk away. Walking away is usually not an option, though Heavy Rain managed to convincingly offer this as an alternative at several points throughout its narrative. Digital: A Love Story, however, makes it abundantly clear that there is only one course of action open to you, and it's an unpleasant one. Given the great pains that the game has taken up until this point to make you "feel" for the characters involved, despite being based around screens of text, it is difficult to make that final mouse click.

This is something you just can't do with a book. Stopping halfway down the page and printing "Turn the page to see what happens next" is not an established literary convention, nor should it be. Same with TV and film; with those media, we're just along for the ride. It's the reason very few books save the Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure series are written in second-person perspective.

But with a game, the player has been driving the story all along, even if there is only really ever one thing they can do at a time to advance the plot to the next "event". That illusion of interactivity allows the player to be all the more invested in the story, as if they're part of the game world. This is further aided in titles such as Digital: A Love Story, which don't break "character" for a moment. As far as the player is concerned, they're using an Amiga… sorry, "Amie". They're not playing a game, they've been transported back in time to 1988, a land of 320×200 graphics, questionable multitasking capabilities and scanlines.

The ending of Digital: A Love Story is bittersweet and if you've engaged with the game up until that point in the way it is intended to be engaged with, you'll find it genuinely emotionally affecting. It's always interesting when a title which looks so unassuming can actually end up being more powerful than self-consciously "epic" CG cutscenes and over-the-top orchestral music with people singing in Latin.

So, if you remember 1988, if you ever had an Amiga or you remember the golden age of the BBS, check out Digital: A Love Story. It's free, and well worth your time.

#oneaday, Day 323: A Little Balance On The Gaming Issue, Please

An hour ago, the BBC aired an episode of Panorama, our go-to investigative journalism programme, on the subject of video games. The subject, predictably, was the ever-present "are video games addictive?" question that has been raised and not answered many, many times prior to now.

The programme made a few fair points that are more common sense than anything else. Firstly, those with addictive personalities are prone to becoming addicted to games. Many games have in-built reward mechanics which those who get easily addicted to things will… well, get addicted to. Social games like Farmville, MMOs like World of Warcraft and popular multiplayer titles like Call of Duty all take great pains to ensure a regular stream of rewards and gratification being sent in the player's general direction. Whether it's a "medal", a "completed quest" or simple experience points, there's a constant flow of something that leads the player to believe they're achieving something. Those who become addicted to things easily can use that as a justification.

Secondly, the programme pointed out that parental controls need to be used more effectively. Many children and teenagers are given free reign on their use of video games and as such don't limit themselves on how much to play, to the exclusion of other things. Parents need to get better-informed about the facilities available to them to control their children's playing habits. This is, sadly, something that many parents are very resistant to, despite the fact that the tools are there for use, particularly on the Xbox, which offers some of the most robust family controls that there are—as does the Mac, oddly enough.

There were no concrete conclusions drawn, however. The "conclusion", if you can call it that, was that more research was needed from an independent body.

The thing is, this discussion has been going on for decades now, and no-one has thought to actually do that research in an appropriately investigative and non-biased manner.

I was reading through a few Formspring answers from Leigh Alexander (I think) the other day and she made the very good point that those of us out there who write about games can't be called "journalists" in the same sense as those who write for, say, national newspapers on breaking stories. Our role as members of the games press involves reporting on carefully-disseminated information provided by PR companies, critiquing products on general release (occasionally before general release) and sometimes interviewing a developer from the industry. There's no real "investigation" there, there's no hard-hitting stuff. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but given that mainstream media tends to come down on the more negative side of the fence when investigating gaming, I think there's certainly scope for a counter-argument: someone who does know the industry well investigating the burning issues. And investigating them thoroughly using established journalistic, sociological research techniques.

Who's going to be the first person to step up and do that, though? More to the point, would anyone read it or take it seriously? Gamers, by their very nature, are defensive creatures, having been made out to be "the bad guys" by the mainstream media once too often. And those not "in the know" are often inclined to have their minds made up by sensationalist stories in the aforementioned mainstream media.

What we need is balance. What we need is a hero.

Wait, what?

#oneaday, Day 320: Achievement Locked

I've just done something I haven't done for a while. I've beaten a game with no Achievements. No, I don't mean that I played the game so terribly that I didn't get any Achievements (I don't think there's a single Achievement-supporting game out there that will allow you to do that)—I mean I started, played, enjoyed and beat a game which did not support Achievements of any kind, be they Steam Achievements, Xbox Achievements, PSN Trophies or a built-in Achievement-like system.

Said game was Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, which I enthused about at some length a few days ago. I beat it tonight, but there's a load of stuff after the ending, too, so this isn't the end of my time with the game. I am, however, glad that there were no Achievements along the way.

Achievements are generally considered to be a good thing. And for some games, they are. Freeform games like Crackdown use Achievements to encourage players to try crazy things that they might not have thought to do otherwise. Skill-based games like Geometry Wars use Achievements to display player skill. But when you get into the territory of "Fire your gun 500 times", you know it's getting a bit silly.

I played Oblivion a while back and greatly enjoyed it. I got all 1250 Achievement points in it. The thing is, though, that wasn't the whole game. There are tons of sidequests in Oblivion which don't have associated Achievements. How many people do you think bothered to do them? Not many, I'd wager.

Achievements often direct your experience and encourage you to play in a specific way. For some types of game, that is good. In others, it's not. Part of the joy of Recettear is the discovery of how different things in the game work. Over time, you naturally figure out which customers you can get away with charging a bit more to, which ones will come in at what times of the day, which products appeal to which people and all manner of other things. Even the adventurer characters you can take into the dungeons have their own individual quirks for you to learn. As soon as you add Achievements like "Sell 20 Baked Yams" to that mix, you start playing differently in order to get that Achievement. You start focusing on becoming the best damn Baked Yams supplier there ever was, to the exclusion of more profitable things like treasure and adventuring equipment.

Achievements are, on balance, a good idea, I think. They provide an additional reward mechanic above and beyond that which the game should be offering anyway. But it's when they start to take over, to become the most important reward mechanic—more than the inherent rewards built into the game itself—that things aren't quite right with the world. It's a fine line, and I don't think making the support of Achievements mandatory is the correct way to be. Or if there's no way around that, let's see more games like DEADLY PREMONITION, which simply has an Achievement for beating each chapter, one for each difficulty level and one for 100%ing the game. Nothing more. Nothing more needed. Even then, I'm pretty sure there will be at least one person out there who will go back and replay the whole game just to get all three difficulty level Achievements. That shouldn't be why you replay DEADLY PREMONITION. You should replay it because it's awesome.

So, anyway. Don't be afraid to pick up a game with no Achievements. You might be surprised. Games can be fun without having to tell you how awesome you are every ten minutes.