One A Day, Day 43: Synaesthetic

Played a bit of Chime tonight. This is a game I picked up from XBLA a little while back but it got sort of lost in the midst of Mass Effect 2's marvellousness. I took the time to go back and play through the other levels in it tonight and wouldn't you know it? It's great.

If you're not familiar with Chime, it's "that charity game", where 60% of the game's royalties go to the OneBigGame cause, who in turn pass it on to Save the Children and the Children's Starlight Foundation. And it's only 400 points, which is not bad at all, especially considering it's actually a good game, too.

It's a puzzle game that initially appears to be very much like Lumines. You have a grid with a beat bar moving across it, there's various shapes of increasing awkwardness thrust into your hands along with a hypnotic, minimalist, reactive soundtrack. It's there the similarities end, though, as in Chime you're not dropping things in a Tetris style, rather you're sticking them wherever you like on the grid in an attempt to produce "quads" – rectangles and squares of at least 3×3 in size. When you create a quad, it gradually fills with colour and while it's doing this, you can stick further shapes to it to make it bigger. Once it's full, it becomes locked in place and will only disappear once the beat bar passes over it. When it disappears, it leaves a mark on the grid, and it's your eventual aim to cover as much of the grid as possible in this manner.

That's it. As all good puzzle games should be, it's simple but addictive. Where Chime really shines, though, is in how the gameplay shapes the music. Where you put the shapes on the grid, coupled with how large the quads you produce are, affects the music. As time progresses, the basic backing of the music goes through its structure, but various melodic passages, stings and samples are triggered by the things you have stuck to the grid. All of it is completely seamless, too, meaning that there's none of the "forced" sound that Lumines sometimes has.

One of the nicest things about Chime is that you can just use it as a musical toy, too. The game's "Free" mode allows you to simply place shapes and create quads without a time limit pressuring you to cover as much as possible, and the game's six tracks are all very different from one another, ranging from the artsy end of things with a Philip Glass track, through Moby, one of the guys from Orbital and one of the guys from Lemon Jelly, among others. Six tracks may not sound like much, but the replay value offered by the different "mixes" that your gameplay will produce makes them more than enough. Plus, for 400 points you really can't complain too much.

I've been fascinated by synaesthetic (if that's even a word) games ever since I first played Rez on the Dreamcast, and Chime is a more than worthy addition to that canon.

One A Day, Day 41: Storm Passed

I just finished Heavy Rain. I'm intending on writing a more lengthy piece about it for BitMob over the next couple of days, but for now I'd just like to share some bullet-point thoughts with you all, hopefully without spoilers. In no particular order…

Agent Norman Jayden is the only character in the game who doesn't pronounce the name "Norman" correctly.
Those facial animations are incredible. There's a number of scenes where characters show "genuine" emotion.
I dig the fact that the interface conveys emotions. If a character is scared or nervous about something, the interaction icon for it wobbles about to varying degrees. Same for the "thoughts" you can pull up by pressing L2.
Say what you like about QTEs, Heavy Rain's are some of the best around. Several of them actually left me with sweaty palms.
The integration of Sixaxis motion controls in the QTEs is a nice touch. Thumping someone around the head by actually slamming your controller into their face is immensely satisfying.
I didn't think the voice acting (a common criticism) was that bad. The characters sounded like real people, which is something video game actors often forget. The simple fact that the characters puff, pant, wheeze, grunt and moan convincingly as well as just talking helps with this.
The camerawork is very realistic. I don't think there were any parts where the camera stays completely "still". It always has a slight "hand-held wobble" to it.
The game is genuinely emotionally engaging throughout. I can't put my finger on why, but I know that once I started playing, I didn't want to stop. As a result, I've finished it two days after acquiring it. With no regrets.
Finally we've got a game who can make CG characters cry reasonably convincingly…
…but still not kiss very well.
This is the first game I've seen where characters can actually put on and remove clothes without having to cut away to avoid animating cloth.
I'm now intrigued to try another playthrough, knowing what I know now. It likely won't have the same emotional impact, but I'm interested to see if there were any… ahh… "clues" throughout.

Right. Enough, otherwise I'll get into spoiler territory. Off to bed!

One A Day, Day 39: Inclement Weather Conditions

Whoops! I know this is technically breaking the rules but as long as I'm caught up by the end of the day, it doesn't matter.

So where was I last night? Heavy Rain is the simple answer to that.

The gamers among you will already be familiar with this game and you'll probably have your own opinions on it, but for those of you who haven't come across it yet or were asking about it, here's what it's about.

Heavy Rain markets itself as "interactive drama". Despite being on the PlayStation 3, it's keen to distance itself from the idea of traditional "video games" and by its own admission isn't afraid to "break with conventions". This basically means that it's an interactive movie where you take part in the murder/kidnapping mystery story as four protagonists (none of whom are guaranteed to survive to the end credits) and interact with the world, making choices about how to act, what to say and so on.

Those of you who have played adventure games before will think this all sounds terribly familiar, but it's the means through which Heavy Rain is executed which makes it something a bit different from the norm. For starters, it doesn't play like a traditional "adventure" as such. You don't have an inventory screen, for one thing, there are no status screens, menu bars or anything like that. Interaction all takes place by moving your character around the various locations and small icons popping up with "movements" depicted on them. The movements are intended to mimic what your hands would actually do to take that action in reality, so for example, opening a door is often a case of pulling down (to move the handle) then "out" (to open the door). It also makes use of the motion sensitivity of the PlayStation 3's controller, so, for example, to kick a door down you might "throw" the controller down (obviously making sure you hold on to it).

It's an interesting method of interaction that was first seen in the developers' previous game, Indigo Prophecy (or Fahrenheit, as it was known in Europe) – a game which also had pretensions of being a movie rather than a game, including the "New Game" option on the title screen being replaced by the "New Movie" option.

The thing I particularly like about Heavy Rain is the emotional engagement factor. The story is unashamedly adult, and that doesn't mean gratuitously violent or sexual (though the game isn't afraid to show either) – it means a mature story that deals with themes and emotions that (I imagine) children would find difficult to comprehend, such as bereavement, anxiety, depression and, at times, outright panic. There are quite a few things that happen (and I won't spoil anything here) that it's unusual to see handled in a "video game" with the same degree of care that they are here – at least, I think so. There are others who feel differently, but in a sense I think the fact that this game means different things to different people (whether those things they feel are positive or negative) is a good thing.

One protagonist, Ethan, suffers from anxiety, depression and discomfort around crowds, all things which I've had experience of. His reasons for suffering these things are very different from mine, but I can understand the emotions which he is going through which are depicted in the game. Much of the early part of the game revolves around his increasingly uncomfortable relationship with his son, and the game does awkward silences well, too. You have the option to sit Ethan down next to his son, but when the conversation options run out, there's not necessarily an indication that it's "time to move on" – you could find yourself sitting in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes, and unlike other games where you're constantly pushed on to the next objective, sitting in uncomfortable silence feels like an important part of the Heavy Rain experience.

The term "interactive movie" will inevitably conjure up images of the terrible video-based games that were around in the mid-1990s, but it's good to see that with the advent of impressive, realistic graphics that can be rendered in real-time that we can finally have a movie-like experience with some interactions that are rather more meaningful than "movie stops, click a button to see the next clip". There's a touch of the Uncanny Valley about the characters to some, but there's no doubt that particularly when it comes to facial animations and lip-sync that these are some of the most realistic controllable computer-generated characters you'll see. I remember being struck by this some time ago when this first promotional video was shown:

Interestingly, this movie is from several years back, and the characters look even better now.

I played for a while last night and the game clearly had an impact on me, as I feel like I spent most of the night dreaming about it. I don't often dream about games, movies or books, so there must have been something there which had an "impact" – even Mass Effect 2, absolutely the best game I've played recently both in terms of story and gameplay, didn't have the same effect.

I look forward to seeing how the story continues, and if the developers' much-vaunted "YOUR DECISIONS MATTER!" schtick is genuine.

One A Day, Day 35: Eve of the War

Don't know what happened with yesterday's post – I definitely wrote the whole thing, but for some inexplicable reason, half of it disappeared. Oh well. Can't go back now.

Well, here it is – the end of my week-long vacation, which has gone by far too quickly for my liking. I feel suitably rested – or I did, at least. Right now? I don't feel very good about tomorrow. I have a 40 mile drive followed by 8 hours of being somewhere I don't want to be with people I don't want to be with, followed by another 40 mile drive back. But at least there are only four weeks to go. Four weeks! I can manage that, right? Of course I can.

It's the other obstacles that are in my way that are stressing me out more, to be honest. The daily grind I can just about deal with, by simply telling myself "It doesn't matter" (in the style of The Rock) repeatedly, over and over again. The things I'm not looking forward to are the two-day Parents Evening (yes, you read that correctly – a two-day Parents Evening), where I will inevitably be stuck 40 miles from home until late at night; the inevitable re-inspection of the school (which, knowing it doesn't matter, I don't really care about the result of but still don't want to have to put up with the stupidity of); and finding a new job.

I don't have a new job yet. I have applied to several. I haven't heard anything back from any of them yet, but going on past experiences of applying for jobs, HR departments are extremely slow. I haven't given up hope yet, and the Universe may well surprise me by throwing something I actually want to do for a good amount of money my way. Until then, though, the uncertainty is the killer. If I had the security of knowing that I had a new job to go to – to look forward to – after the end of this particular nightmare, I'd feel a lot better about my remaining time.

Still, can't be helped. All I can do is just keep applying for things and eventually someone will appreciate me. Right? Right. Of course.

On a lighter note, we recorded the SquadCast for Machinarium tonight – an adorable little indie point-and-click adventure featuring robots and no language. My current tentative plan is to edit that next weekend, so keep an eye out for that one. Also watch this space for more exciting Squadron of Shame podcast news.

See, I like doing that stuff. The annoying thing is no-one wants to pay me for it!

One A Day, Day 29: Netbook 'em, Danno

I bought a netbook today – specifically, an Asus Eee PC 1005P. Why that one? Well, it seemed to have a number of decent reviews around the Net, was reasonably up-to-date specs wise (though it could possibly do with another gig of RAM) and was reasonably priced.

A while back, I was under the impression that netbooks were particularly pointless. I even remember a number of us fairly mercilessly laying into our buddy Luke for picking one up – though this was largely due to the fact that at the time he bought one, netbooks were very much in their infancy, no-one really understood quite what they were for, no-one really understood Linux (which was all you could get them preinstalled with) and, of course, we all worked for Apple at the time.

Nowadays, they're a different beast to what they were. This machine – which I'm typing on right now, in fact – runs Windows 7 Starter (with the opportunity to upgrade to Home Premium) and seems plenty quick enough to do most things on the Internet. The 10-inch widescreen is a comfortable size – not too small to be illegible, yet compact enough to be endearingly cute. The speakers are on a par with most laptops – i.e. shit – but they're plenty loud enough to be able to hear the soundtrack on a video.

The reason I bought this was so that I actually have my own portable computer to take with me to PAX. My wife has a MacBook but I would only be able to pry that out of her cold, dead fingers – and I don't particularly want to kill her purely for the sake of having something to blog on in Boston. We have several laptops in the house right now – my wife's old ThinkPad (complete with that dumb "nipple" pointing device), a Sony Vaio laptop that switches on if it's in the right mood (which it usually isn't) and the MacBook – and now this.

Every time I buy a new computer, it strikes me how far things have come. This thing that's sitting on my lap right now is about ten times more powerful than the first desktop PC that I owned, yet it's an "entry-level" machine with "limited" use. Hell, I remember being excited the day we upgraded our 386 to a 486 DX2 66MHz – finally we were able to run DOOM in high detail mode.

I'll be intrigued to see how well it handles various tasks. It's certainly more than fine for email and web browsing – I'm going to be seeing if latest Squadron of Shame mission Machinarium will run on it as soon as it's finished downloading. Reports will inevitably follow on Twitter.

One A Day, Day 26: One Week To Live

Well, that's that. For now, at least. I've reached the end of my penultimate half-term at the school I'm working at and the deputy head came in to thank me for doing a "great job" with the class I'm lumbered with. She also apologised for me not having the support I should really have as a new primary teacher, and for the "challenging… to say the least" behaviour of the pupils. Jane pointed out to me tonight that however bad it feels to you when you're in the middle of a bad situation, other people inevitably think you're doing a better job than you think you are. She put it better than I did, but it's late and I'm tired. She's probably right – it's just hard to remember that sometimes.

So, what now? I have a week to burn. It will probably go by much too quickly, but here are some of the things I intend to get done:

Do some writing – both on here, on BitMob and possibly a return to Helium, an interesting site for aspiring writers.
Do some music – I have the piano scores for the Persona 3/Trinity Soul and Persona 4 soundtracks, so I may try and record those. They're easy-ish arrangements so shouldn't take too long.
Play some Mass Effect 2 – I love what I've played so far, but have only really had the chance to play in short bursts with distractions recently. I'll hopefully have the opportunity to spend a bit more time in the company of Commander Shepard and company.
Play some Star Trek Online – I reached Lieutenant Commander level last week, which meant I got the chance to pick up a brand new ship. I went for a Science vessel which looks a bit like Voyager and is named the U.S.S. Penetrator, after the Syreen vessels in Star Control II. (My character is a Syreen, thanks to the excellent character editor allowing the production of blue-skinned Amazonian women – albeit ones in Starfleet uniforms – as player characters)
Play through Machinarium for the Squadron of Shame. I know next to nothing about this game, and am looking forward to trying it.
Go fiddle with Gowalla and Foursquare some more – I really dig these apps and find them an interesting idea. They're a good reason to go out and just explore the area around you. Foursquare finally works properly in the UK, but I've been using Gowalla for a while now so have gained a bit of "loyalty" for it. I'm interested to see what – if anything – Foursquare offers over and above Gowalla.
Wander into the forest and take some more photos – I enjoyed my wander around the deserted New Forest landscape the other day. I want to find a more "wooded" bit though – despite being technically "in the forest", the part I went to didn't have much in the way of trees.
Have a coffee and a catch-up with some ex-workmates.
Remind Jane regularly that she has an essay to write. (Yes, it's still there. Get off here and get on with it.)

That's my plan, then. It seems like a sound one to me.

One A Day, Day 20: >LOOK

Hill Top

You stand atop a gently-rolling hill that is fairly featureless aside from a few bramble bushes, some small, dead-looking trees and, just next to you, a small stone monument.

There is a wooden bench here.

I'm in the Great Outdoors, specifically the New Forest, though the bit I'm in right now isn't very foresty. After the week that was, the peace and solitude is just lovely. There are very few people here, and the ones that are here are the type of people who politely say "hello" to you as you pass, even though you've never met them before. They also have dogs with names like Gladstone and Horatio.

It's striking to me, sitting here now, just as it was when I went to Lepe Beach to take those photos the other day, that there isn't a game out there yet which has got "the great outdoors" right. Games like Oblivion, World of Warcraft and numerous other open-world adventures and RPGs have tried, but none quite capture this feeling of peace and solitude. (Perhaps because wherever you are in an RPG world, you're only ever a stone's throw from something that wants to kill you.)

Actually, to say that no games have pulled this off is inaccurate. The games that do it best are interactive fiction titles, they of the complete lack of graphics and the only minimum system requirement being an imagination that still works.

Up here, I'm particularly reminded of Andrew Plotkin's "A Change In The Weather", the only game I know of where your final confrontation is with a thunderstorm. Of course, right now it doesn't look like I'm going to have to race against time to prevent a rickety old bridge from being washed away, but the atmosphere is the same. Peace. Quiet. No-one but you. And definitely no needy, whining, squabbling children, stick-up-their-arse inspectors or faux-concern headteachers.

Sitting here, you can say "sod off" to the world, and no-one can do a damn thing about it.

One A Day, Day 15: Blips

Blips today. Nothing that interesting to say, so I'll go with the snippet approach.

Back to work today. Boo. But at least I could get away with making them all do a writing test this morning, so I didn't have to do very much for the first hour or so. Hooray! I also tidied my classroom and filed the bajillion bits of paper that were littering the top of my desk… some (well, most) into the bin and others into actual files with dividers and everything. Suddenly, by doing that, I feel a bit less incompetent. Still doesn't make me want to carry on though – teaching's had its chance.

Took me two hours to get to work this morning. It's usually an hour's drive. The last hour was taken up by the last three miles of the journey. It was one of those annoying traffic jams where it wasn't at all obvious what the problem was – and there probably wasn't anything at the front of it. It had snowed a little bit, but not enough to make the roads perilous, so I'm not sure that could be an excuse. I could be wrong though.

Currently installing Mass Effect 2. I've been replaying the prequel as a Renegade (went as a Paragon on my first playthrough) but overenthusiastic tweets from friends have made me want to jump on board and import my old Paragon character.

Also found one of the best apps out there for iPhone 1st gen/3G owners – iVideoCamera. It's 59p and is a fully-functional video camera with export to camera roll, Twitter, YouTube and Wi-Fi. The quality isn't quite as good as with a proper 3GS, but it's certainly acceptable. You can use it in either 160xsomething mode at full frame rate for unlimited recording, or 320xsomething at 10fps for "high quality" mode. Both look just fine, and are certainly enough to shoot a quick video and post to Twitter or something. So if you still have a 3G like me, then it's a great app. And cheap.

Well, that's about that for today. Sorry I don't have more to say. But the whole thing with "one a day" is that not every day is vastly interesting. Go and look at my photos from yesterday if you haven't already. The low-level pebbly beach shot with the nice depth of field is currently my desktop background.

One A Day, Day 13: Round Midnight

Yes, I'm aware it's after midnight. But the official One A Day rules clearly state (somewhere… possibly not on that page, but I can't be bothered to look it up right now) that the "day" is from when you get up until when you go to bed. And I'm not in bed yet. So there.

It is, however, late, so this entry is going to be somewhat phoned in. Fortunately, there's not a great deal to talk about today. Got up, played some Mass Effect in preparation for the sequel, played some Star Trek Online (which the official Head Start has now begun for) and went to my buddy Sam's for some board games, Chinese and booze. We played Power Grid. I lost. Then we played Carcassonne, and I also lost. Still, never mind. It's the taking part that counts, and all that.

We did rediscover the wonder of gin and tonic though. In recent years, I've found that a lot of booze leaves me with an unpleasant feeling of heartburn very quickly, meaning I can't drink much of a lot of things and when I do, I don't enjoy them that much. The G&Ts we had tonight went down rather too smoothly if anything, and made the already-lengthy game of Power Grid last even longer than usual. That's no bad thing, though, since it's a fun game that taxes your brain.

Tomorrow I may be taking a trip with Sam to take some photos. Haven't got my camera out to take some proper photos for ages, so if we do go it'll be good to get back into it. Interesting ones will, of course, be shared here.

Right. Now it's time for bed. G'nite.

One A Day, Day 11: Violet Tendencies

Just completed an interactive fiction title called "Violet". It's been a while since I played an IF game from start to finish so my puzzle-solving is a bit rusty. Fortunately, Violet is one of those games where the focus is not so much on the puzzle-solving, rather on the entertaining prose and bizarre situations you find yourself in.

It's a "one-room" game, meaning you're confined to one place for the duration of the game and have a number of challenges to overcome. In this case, you're a struggling PhD student trying to write your dissertation. Your Aussie girlfriend, the titular Violet, has issued you an ultimatum to spur you into action against your own procrastination: write a thousand words today, or she's flying back to Australia, never to return.

It sounds simple. The instructions at the start of the game tell you that "all you need to do is WRITE". So you type "WRITE"… and thus begins a long sequence of hilarious distractions from the job at hand, which I won't spoil for you here. Suffice it to say, by the end of the experience you've suffered a number of amusing mishaps that do nothing for your dignity.

The interesting thing with Violet is its writing. Most IF is written in a second-person perspective, with an omnipresent, omniscient narrator that tells you what you're doing and whether what you're trying to do is successful. Violet, conversely, is written from the perspective of Violet, or more specifically, "your" memory of Violet. This means that the narrator's attention is just as likely to wander as your own, with a number of cheeky asides about your coworkers, old flames and seeming inability to get anything useful done cropping up throughout the course of the story as you desperately do something – anything – to keep your mind on your work. It also means that there's a lot of character in even the simplest of interactions – the traditional "Taken." prompt upon picking something up is replaced by Violet saying something like "Yours, wallaroo" or a variety of other pet names. Despite Violet not being physically present throughout, her comments (or rather, what you imagine her comments would be) on the various things you do and the objects you look at give you a good insight into the characters of both the protagonist and Violet herself.

It's a great little story that starts with a vaguely serious tone and ends up somewhat farcical. It's pleasantly short, too, with a hint system (and no penalty for using it) for those who simply want to enjoy the tale without having to think too much.

You can download it here – there's full instructions on how to get it up and running on your system on that site. If you have Frotz for iPhone, you can download it straight into the app.