I'm away for the weekend again, this time a little further afield, but the purpose of the weekend — eating, drinking, and playing board games (thank you, Oxford comma, for preventing unfortunate misunderstandings as to what I was doing with board games) — is the same as the last.
Today we played a couple of different games, including Small World — an entertainingly lightweight but fun empire-building game that is considerably easier to understand than many others of its ilk — and, once again, Betrayal at House on the Hill. The latter is always particularly interesting to play because it's so different each time; the scenario we played this time around had no extra "monsters" running around the house, for example, and instead consisted of a traitor player (this time it was me) running around with considerably increased powers from their original human self and trying to kill the "hero" characters while trying not to be caught in a fire that started in the basement.
Tomorrow we're going to be giving XCOM: The Board Game another shot, as one of our number is yet to play it. It should be an enjoyable time; XCOM is a great game, though I'm skeptical as to our chances of victory, since it's pretty tough even by the usual co-op games standards, and even more so when there's a newcomer in the mix. Still, it should be enjoyable regardless; part of the fun of games that have a "real-time" element — other examples include Escape: Curse of the Temple and Space Alert — is watching everything go disastrously, horribly wrong in the usual, somewhat more sedate "resolution" phase.
Anyway. I'm pretty tired right now so I will be leaving that there. Probably time for a touch of Love Live! School Idol Festival before sleep, and then there's plenty of games to be played tomorrow — including the somewhat daunting-looking (but apparently very good) Terra Mystica. Looking forward to it — it's been a busy week for once, so it's nice to have some time to just enjoy things.
I've been a fan of music-based "rhythm action" games ever since they started being a thing around the time of the PS1 era, and while there aren't anywhere near as many around these days as there were in their heyday, there are still some great ones out there. And, of course, those old games are, in most cases, just as playable today, so long as you can deal with some dated graphics!
Without further ado, then, here are five* of my favourites.
Bust-A-Groove
I can't quite remember if this was my first ever encounter with rhythm action, but it was certainly one of my favourite games of the PS1 era. It's also the sort of game that would probably never see a retail release these days: it'd be much more likely to be a £15-20 downloadable game. (In fact, why isn't it downloadable on PSN? Get on that, Sony!)
Bust-A-Groove was an unusual and creative title that took the overall aesthetic of a one-on-one fighter and transplanted the hot versus action into the context of a dancing competition. Each song was based on four-beat bars, and in each bar you'd have to make sure you hit one of the face buttons on the PlayStation controller on the fourth beat. As you built up combos, you were given more and more directional inputs to squeeze in before that all-important fourth beat, but these didn't need to be in time. You were usually pressing O or X on the fourth beat, but pressing Triangle would allow you to use one of your character's special attacks (limited in the number of times you could use them per stage) and pressing Square would allow you to dodge an incoming special attack from the previous bar; failure to do so would put you out of action for a few bars and allow your opponent to get ahead.
Bust-A-Groove wasn't perfect, particularly in two-player mode, where two equally matched players tended to reach a stalemate due to the way the game's scoring worked. But as a single-player rhythm action game in particular, it's still hard to beat — and it had some of the most memorable songs of any game I've ever played.
Frequency/Amplitude
I always get Frequency and Amplitude mixed up — one was the sequel to the other — so I'll cop out and put them both in here, since they were fairly similar to one another, as I recall.
Frequency and Amplitude were early titles from Harmonix, who would go on to create the Rock Band series. And it's clear where the inspiration for those later, more popular titles came from: Frequency and Amplitude had the "note highways" almost as we recognise them today, but with a twist: you were playing all the parts on your controller.
This wasn't as ridiculous as it sounds; what you'd do is pick a "track" (as in, part of a song, not a whole album track or something) and bang out a decent combo on it. After a short period, that track would "lock" in place and continue playing, allowing you to move on to another one and gradually build up the texture of the music, effectively creating a dynamic remix as you played. Perform well enough and you'd be able to get all the parts going together; perform badly and it would sound like a teenage wannabe rock group attempting to perform a piece far too ambitious for them one lunchtime at school.
Space Channel 5 Parts 1 and 2
Yes, I know that's two games, making my "five" rather dishonest (particularly after including both Frequency and Amplitude), but really, Space Channel 5 deserves to be considered as a complete… thing. Because it's quite something.
I've often described Space Channel 5 as "the gayest game ever" (the second-gayest game ever being Final Fantasy X-2) and I stand by that sentiment. Gloriously, unabashedly cheesy and camp as fuck with a kitschy '60s sci-fi aesthetic, Space Channel 5 sees the leggy pink-haired beauty Ulala strutting her way to fending off an alien invasion and eventually saving the galaxy from the machinations of an evil villain.
Space Channel 5's gameplay is extremely simple, essentially boiling down to a game of rhythmic Simon Says. Flowing pretty much seamlessly from cutscene to gameplay, Ulala would be confronted with some sort of sticky situation to resolve, and would have to do so by copying the moves of whatever dastardly (or, in many cases, not-so-dastardly) foe she's facing this time. The twist on the usual Simon Says formula is that you have to do it in rhythm as your "partner" did it, too, and there are some seriously challenging rhythms to deal with. Once you learn it, though, you should be able to rattle through the whole game in about twenty minutes or so, but it's very replayable, much like an entertaining short movie. Space Channel 5 Part 2 also comes with a sort of "challenge mode" alongside the main story, and that's a lot tougher.
Space Channel 5 Part 2 is also noteworthy for featuring a bizarre cameo from a low-polygon depiction of the late Michael Jackson… sorry, "Space Michael".
Elite Beat Agents
Elite Beat Agents is one of the best games on the Nintendo DS, and, surprisingly, one of the most effective examples of storytelling I've ever seen.
The titular Agents are tasked with jetting off around the world to save people from various mishaps, and they do so by dancing at them. Exactly how this solves the problem is anyone's guess, but it seems to work, even going so far as to fend off an alien invasion accompanied by Jumpin' Jack Flash in the wonderful finale.
The game uses licensed tracks (albeit cover versions in most cases) to complement the on-screen action and help tell their stories, and there's at least one instance where the combination of music, subject matter and events in the story are genuinely emotional. You know the one if you've played it. (Also, it's in the video above.)
But aside from all this, Elite Beat Agents is a strong rhythm game that makes excellent use of the DS' touchscreen and stylus — and is a challenge and a half even for the most seasoned rhythm game pro, to boot. It's just a pity we never saw the sequel over here.
Hatsune Miku: Project Diva f
I include Project Diva f (and its PS3 counterpart F, though I greatly prefer playing on Vita) on this list rather than its (apparently superior) sequel largely because I haven't played said sequel. Project Diva f is a great game in its own right, however, and made me all sorts of happy the first time I played it, largely because it reminded me of the old PS1-era games.
It's no Bust-A-Groove, though; no regular beats for you here. Instead, you're expected to play Project Diva f's levels like a percussion instrument. Depending on the piece in question, you might be accompanying the vocals, lead guitar and synth, rhythm section or even playing some completely different counter-rhythms that complement the main bulk of the music. The lower difficulties are deceptively easy; the higher difficulties are as challenging as playing an actual instrument.
It's satisfying though. Pulling off a "Perfect" score on a difficult level is a wonderful feeling, and it's something that will only come with practice — remember that, when games didn't hand victory to you on a plate? Yes, in order to get good at Project Diva f you're going to have to do more than just try each song once or twice; you're going to have to actually learn them, so that eventually you don't even need to look at the incoming note patterns, you can just perform them. When you reach that stage, then you're a true Miku master.
Senran Kagura: Bon Appetit!
I won't lie, I've lost count now, but I'm pretty sure we're not doing "five" any more. Oh well.
Senran Kagura: Bon Appetit! is a game in which the ninja girls of Senran Kagura take time off from fighting each other and worrying about youma to indulge themselves in a cooking competition organised by pervy old ninja master Hanzo, who apparently wants nothing more than to watch his granddaughter and her friends literally cook each other's clothes off in an attempt to secure a Super-Secret Ninja Art Scroll that will grant one wish.
It is as ridiculous as it sounds, but there's actually a really solid, fun — albeit simple and straightforward — rhythm game underneath, with some wonderful pieces of original music; for those less familiar with Senran Kagura, it has consistently great soundtracks, and Bon Appetit! is no exception; good job for a music game, huh?
Not only that, but the game actually makes an effort to put all this ridiculousness in context with story sequences just like those in the mainline Senran Kagura games. It does take great pains to point out that you probably shouldn't take Bon Appetit! too seriously or expect it to be acknowledged in the "canonical" Senran Kagura narrative, but it's more than just a generic rhythm game with the Senran Kagura characters hastily slapped atop it.
It's lewd as fuck, though; if you thought the clothes-ripping action of the main games was a touch on the suggestive side, you've not experienced anything until you've seen the cast posing provocatively and naked atop various delicious-looking desserts. But that is what Senran Kagura does, and by golly, we love it for it.
Love Live! School Idol Festival
The most recent addition to this list (which I've been keeping in my head prior to this post), Love Live! School Idol Festival is one of a few games that have got me playing games on my phone again for the first time in ages.
The basic rhythm gameplay of School Idol Festival is solid, and designed well for touchscreens — the icons you have to tap are all arranged in an inverted arc across the screen, making it easy to hit them all with your thumbs even when holding on to your phone. The songs are a lot of fun, too, capturing a lot of the energy of the show — and, of course, making use of some of the show's most well-known and loved songs.
But arguably the more interesting thing about School Idol Festival — and the thing that keeps players coming back to it day after day — is its comprehensive metagame. At its core, it's a fairly standard Japanese style collectible card game — collect cards of varying rarity, sacrifice cards you don't need to level up cards you do need, increase the rarity of cards and assemble a powerful team — but the attachment to Love Live! makes it very endearing, and the game even goes so far as to include fully-voiced (in Japanese) visual novel-style story sequences as you make progress. The metagame also affects your performance; better cards will allow you to obtain better scores, and different cards have different "skills" that trigger over the course of a song and provide you with bonuses or other benefits.
You'll obviously get the most out of School Idol Festival if you're already familiar with Love Live!, but even if you're not, it's a solid rhythm game in its own right — so long as you like super-happy, cheerful, saccharine-sweet J-idol music. And I'm not sure I trust anyone who says they don't!
Brave Frontier has some lovely and distinctive artwork; screenshots in this post are all from it.
I've been highly resistant to mobile free-to-play games for some time now, a fact I primarily attribute to the extremely well-paid but soul-crushing period I spent reviewing them for the industry-facing sites Inside Mobile Apps and Inside Social Games, both of which have subsequently been folded into AdWeek's SocialTimes blog.
I describe this period as "soul-crushing" not because I disliked the work or the people I worked for — on the contrary, it was an enjoyable opportunity to work with some fun people — but because it was just so utterly disheartening, as a fan of "games as art", to see the cynical money-machine games being churned out by the boatload, with no-one truly having the confidence to innovate, instead simply reskinning established systems with a different theme and hoping no-one would notice.
Amid the dross churned out by companies like Zynga, King and their ilk, there were the occasional little gems, though, and they almost always hailed from our Eastern cousins in Korea, Japan and other nearby regions. Eastern mobile game development was by no means infallible, of course — titles which grew to inexplicable popularity, such as Rage of Bahamut, were often just as vapid as their Western counterparts — but on the whole, when a genuinely good free-to-play mobile game hit the app stores, it was, more often than not (and with a few notable exceptions) of Eastern origin.
This feisty lady is the pride of my party at present.
Fast forward to today and I find myself enjoying not one, not two, but three separate free-to-play mobile games, and there's a fourth that I had some fun with but have left alone for a while now. All of these games are, once again, of Eastern origin; meanwhile, offerings from established Western big hitters like Zynga, King, Nimblebit, Gameloft and EA all fail to hold my attention because they're still relying on the same old crap they were a few years back when I was reviewing them.
So what's the difference with these Eastern-developed games? Well, primarily it's the amount of effort that appears to have been put into them — and the fact that they're fun.
Brave Frontier, which I've talked about in a few previous entries, for example, is an enjoyable battle-centric RPG in which you assemble a party of collectible heroes, power them up and send them on quests — either story-free "Vortex" quests which are themed each day of the week and allow you to acquire specific items more easily, or a lengthy, story-driven campaign that, while cliched, has actually proven to be surprisingly compelling so far.
Puzzle and Dragons, meanwhile, takes the Puzzle Quest formula of combining casual colour-matching puzzle gameplay with Pokemon-esque collection and levelling mechanics, creating an engaging, enjoyable game that blends the best bits of RPGs and puzzlers.
Love Live! School Idol Festival, on the other hand,not only serves as wonderful fanservice for the anime show itself — which I'm currently in the middle of watching, and am enjoying a great deal — but is also a really fun rhythm action game.
Finally, I don't play much of Valkyrie Crusade any more, but it made enough of an impact on me to want to write about it in a bit more detail over on MoeGamer.
Interestingly, all four of these games are based on the same basic system — something which I criticised Western-developed free-to-play mobile games for above — but manage to distinguish themselves from one another by the additional elements they stack on top of this basic structure. Western free-to-play games, conversely, tend to adopt one system and stick with it, without adding anything in particular to the formula.
There are a few common systems in use in Western mobile free-to-play games.
There's the "citybuilder" genre, which superficially resembles simulation classics like SimCity and Transport Tycoon, but actually requires no strategic thought or knowledge of human geography. Instead, these games effectively act as a simple toy set in which you wait for timers to expire, then tap on buildings to get money out of them, which you then subsequently invest in more buildings so you end up with more timers to wait to expire and then tap on. Paying up in these games can skip timers — which are often ridiculously lengthy — and allow you to get more currency without having to actually "grind" to acquire it. Examples of this type of game include Nimblebit's Tiny Tower, EA's The Simpsons: Tapped Out and numerous attempts to stomp SimCity into the ground,Fox's Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff and Gameloft's My Little Pony. Farming games such as SuperCell's Hay Day and Zynga's own FarmVille are also pretty much the same as citybuilders, too, except they involve building up a small farm instead of a whole city. Mechanically, however, they're exactly the same.
There's the "casual puzzler" genre, which generally rips off PopCap's Bejeweled by challenging you to swap coloured gems/sweets/fruits/farm animals around to make lines of three or more like-coloured gems/sweets/fruits/farm animals, at which point they disappear and more take their place. These generally involve a linear sequence of levels, and paid options in the games generally take the form of additional "lives" to continue playing after failing a level several times — lives otherwise regenerate over a long period of real time — and, in many cases, power-ups to make the game significantly easier, to a game-breaking degree in some cases.
Then there's the "midcore strategy" game, which, in the same way as the "citybuilder" genre bears only a superficial resemblance to the original SimCity, bears only the most cursory of resemblances to actual strategy games. Midcore strategy games generally involve building a base through a similar means to a citybuilding game — yes, that means more timers to tap on, this time to get resources — and recruiting units, which also take varying periods of real time to build. There's usually a competitive element to them, though, where you can take your recruited units to another player's base and throw them at it in the hope that they might be able to do some damage. While these sequences tend to resemble classic real-time strategy games such as Command & Conquer and StarCraft, the lack of input you generally have means that coming up with a "strategy" is next to impossible, so it becomes more a matter of a numbers game: how many powerful units can you afford to throw at your foes? Payment options in these games are generally similar to citybuilders — speed up timers, buy currency, acquire exclusive units and buildings to give yourself an advantage over other players.
There are other types of Western-developed mobile free-to-play games, but these three types are by far the most widespread. The thing they all have in common is that the paid options deliberately break the game; they're effectively paid cheats. The most egregious example of this is the ability to simply buy in-game currency rather than having to earn it: it effectively removes any need for the player to develop any sort of "money-making engine", which has been a core part of simulation and strategy games involving resource management since the early days. But "power-ups" such as those seen in King's games are almost as bad; in some cases, these power-ups even allow you to completely skip a level, meaning you're effectively paying not to play the game. (Powerups like this are inevitably paired with unreasonable difficulty spikes or nigh-unbeatable levels, forcing many players into a position where they feel they have to pay up if they want to continue playing.)
The three Eastern games I mentioned above, as I noted previously, are all ostensibly based on the same system, known as gacha. This is a system based on those capsule toy machines that you see in supermarkets, and which are rather popular in places like Japan. Essentially, using either a currency earned in-game or one that you purchase with real money, you can "draw" something to add to your collection — a playable character in Brave Frontier's case; a monster to add to your party in Puzzle & Dragons' case; a card depicting one of the Love Live! cast in the case of School Idol Festival. Generally speaking, the things you draw using the "hard" currency — the one you can pay for — are better than the ones you acquire using the currency you earn in-game (which usually takes the form of a "social currency", earned through interacting with other players in a rather limited manner). This may sound game-breaking in the same way as buying a power-up in Candy Crush Saga or buying currency in CityVille, but there's a key difference: you still have to do something with the things you acquire by paying, and they're not an immediate "win" button. Sometimes you're not even able to use them right away.
Take Brave Frontier as an example. While it may be tempting to simply throw money at the game in an attempt to recruit an entire party of five- and six-star heroes, this simply won't work early in the game due to the "cost" limit placed on your party, which increases as you level up your player. Not only that, but these five- and six-star heroes still start at level 1, so you'll still need to actually play the game in order to level them up and get them fighting at their maximum potential; otherwise, they simply look cool.
Notably, these games generally also allow you to acquire the "hard" currency at a slow rate and enjoy a trickle-feed of these high-quality heroes/monsters/adorable wannabe idols. And, in fact, this makes acquiring one feel more meaningful and more of an event; it actually makes it feel less like the game is trying to force you to spend money, and instead inviting you to do so if you'd like to enjoy more of the same. I don't mind admitting that I tossed a fiver at Brave Frontier during a special "you might get one of these special heroes!" event the other day because I've been enjoying playing it; I certainly haven't, at any point, felt like I need to spend money on it to enjoy it, however; my current party (which is pretty kick-ass, I have to say) has been assembled entirely for free.
The big contrast between Eastern and Western philosophy with these games, then, appears to be the attitude towards getting the player to pay up. Western games, in my experience, are fond of creating what is rather horrendously called "fun pain", which can be alleviated by paying up; in other words, inconveniencing the player in an otherwise fun experience to such a degree that they reach for the credit card just to shut the game up. Eastern games, meanwhile, appear to provide paid items as an optional extra that is, under no circumstances, required to have an enjoyable experience with the game.
The other thing that's interesting is that Eastern games appear to be more open to the idea of combining different gameplay types together — Puzzle & Dragons, for example, combines an interesting twist on match-3 puzzlers with RPG and gacha mechanics, while Valkyrie Crusade features gacha, turn-based RPG combat, deckbuilding and optimisation, and even citybuilding, the difference in its use of the latter aspect being that while you're waiting for your wait timers you have other things to do rather than twiddling your thumbs or reaching for the credit card.
There are exceptions to both of these rules, of course; there are great Western free-to-play mobile games just as there are horrible, shitty, exploitative Eastern free-to-play mobile games. But on the whole, in my experience, it would appear to be the Eastern-developed games that have the right idea — creating a fun experience and hoping at least a few people will be happy to pay up in gratitude for a fun experience — while the Western free-to-play mobile market, more concerned with making a quick buck, seems to be floundering somewhat.
Today's pre-lunch game was Betrayal at House on the Hill, a game that I got a while back and have only managed to get to the table once so far. I was excited to try it again, as I really enjoyed our first shot at it, and was also interested to see quite how differently the 50 different potential scenarios would make it on a subsequent playthrough.
For the unfamiliar, Betrayal at House on the Hill is an interesting board game that starts as cooperative and later becomes asymmetric competitive. In the first part of the game, all the players take on the role of explorers looking around a creepy old horror-movie house, finding items, experiencing strange events and encountering "Omens". The more Omens that are found, the more likely it is that "The Haunt" begins, and the combination of the Omen found and the place where it was picked up when The Haunt is triggered determines which one of the 50 scenarios you then move on to for the second part.
In the second part, things vary considerably between scenarios. Sometimes the player that becomes the traitor — who isn't always the person who revealed the last omen, and isn't always known to the table right away — remains on the board attempting to directly interfere with the efforts of the other players. Sometimes they're removed from the board and take on more of a "dungeon master" role, controlling hordes of monsters. Sometimes there are a variety of special mechanics to the various rooms in the house. And sometimes it's a fairly straightforward hack-and-slash sort of affair.
The scenario we played involved the one who found the last omen being caught under the spell of a rat god. His job was to make it to the "Pentagram Room" in the basement, then complete a ritual. Meanwhile, the other players' job was to stop him, either by killing all his rat minions that spawned around the house, or by killing him outright — though once he got into the Pentagram Room and started performing the ritual, he could no longer be attacked.
The interesting thing about the way Betrayal at House on the Hill handles this asymmetry is that it keeps certain pieces of information secret from each side. There are two separate books, in which the two "sides" find out what their objective is, but not usually what their opponent is trying to do. There might be some hints or special rules that provide a clue, but it's usually not spelled out explicitly. In this way, part of the challenge of the second half of the game is determining exactly what your opponent is trying to do, and how best to stop it while completing your own objectives as efficiently as possible.
It's a really cool game with a lot of atmosphere and a great sense of unfolding narrative as the house gradually reveals itself and strange things happen to all the players. And it's ridiculously replayable, too; even if you play the same scenario twice, the randomly generated nature of the game map and the items and events you'll stumble across in the process means that it will be a different experience every time.
Plus it plays relatively quickly, which is a blessing for groups like ours that tend to meet on a weeknight when we're not devoting entire weekends to gaming. In contrast to titles like Arkham Horror, which are magnificently atmospheric and a lot of fun to play but take three or more hours to plough through, Betrayal at House on the Hill plays comfortably in 90-120 minutes, depending on the scenario, making it a good game for those looking for a fun horror fix without having to, say, sit in their friend's "sweaty balls chairs" for hours at a time.
I had a great time this weekend; hearty thanks to Sam, Tim and Tom for making my "birthstag" celebrations memorable and enjoyable.
It's my combined birthday/stag weekend this, uh, weekend, and so we kicked off the celebrations with a shot at XCOM: The Board Game. Since my three companions for the weekend have not played the game before, we had a go at the tutorial scenario, which I had already familiarised myself with beforehand. The tutorial essentially gives you a predictable setup, then walks you through two complete "rounds" of the game before continuing as the "Easy" difficulty until it concludes either with your victory or crushing defeat at the hands of the aliens.
My immediate reaction to the game after having tried it with a full complement of four people is that this is clearly how the game is intended to play. I enjoyed the couple of solo attempts I had, but it is a lot of things to keep track of at any one time, since you're effectively doing the work of four people. When you're against the clock, as you are in each round's timed phase, this is very difficult to do effectively — though not, I might add, completely impossible.
With four people, meanwhile, everyone can specialise and concentrate on their own area, hopefully contributing to the overall war effort against the invading aliens. The Central Officer can concentrate on reading the game app and distributing information as well as allocating his "satellite" resources either to orbital defense against UFOs or special abilities and technologies. The Commander has overall control of the budget, and if there is a dedicated person controlling nothing but that role, it's a lot easier to keep track of how much you're spending during a turn, which is important because overspending carries some pretty harsh penalties!
The Chief Scientist, meanwhile, has overall control over technology research. Up to three technologies can be put into the research queue each turn, and technologies, once completed, effectively become extra special actions for one of the four players. Many of them have some sort of "automatic success" ability, allowing you to make combat or completing mission tasks easier or more resource-efficient, while others have other special effects that manipulate the game flow in some way, perhaps allowing you to "rescue" units that would otherwise be destroyed or gain resources that you wouldn't be able to collect normally.
Finally, the Squad Leader takes control of the ground forces, and is responsible for completing missions — which bring the team closer to unlocking the final mission and, consequently, the victory condition for the game — and defending the XCOM base, which is one of the two main means through which you can lose the game. (You lose either if your base is destroyed, or two regions on the board reach the "danger zone" on the panic tracker.)
Once everyone had the rules sorted — and, unlike many Fantasy Flight games, they are pretty simple, elegant and easy to learn quickly — the game flowed nicely, and managed to become extremely exciting and tense. One of our number commented that he doesn't usually find dice-centric games particularly exciting as they're rather chance-based and it's difficult to become invested in something you don't have complete control over, but the overall setup of XCOM means that it develops a very clear sense of "narrative" as you progress through the game, and consequently those dice rolls become much more meaningful. By the end of the game, we were making up names for our Interceptor pilots; praising "Simon's" brilliant defense of Europe and chastising "Pancho Gonzalez" for failing to defend South America adequately and ultimately costing us the game just before we could complete the final mission objective.
It's a great game. I'm looking forward to trying it without the training wheels tomorrow, and probably failing to repel the alien invasion in spectacular manner. Unlike many co-op games, it all but eliminates the "alpha player" problem, where one player dominates the table talk and effectively runs the game by themselves by telling everyone else what to do. Because of the "timed phase" mechanic, there simply isn't time for any one person to dominate the discussion; everyone has to take responsibility for their own area's actions, and everyone else has to trust them to make the right calls. It's a really interesting means of handling co-op, and it works really, really well.
I find myself thinking this a lot recently, particularly as sites like Polygon do increasingly stupid things on a seemingly daily basis (just recently, they managed to piss off the entire community of people who enjoy modern niche Japanese RPGs with a spectacularly ill-informed piece that I posted a lengthy rebuttal to over on MoeGamer, and subsequently baffled everyone by complaining that The Witcher 3 didn't appear to have any black people in it, and that in a setting where, canonically, women are treated like shit, the women were treated like shit) and I find myself increasingly turning to smaller sites on the few occasions I do actually want to read someone else's thoughts about games — and to Twitter on the more frequent occasions when I want to talk about games with people who share my interests.
The games press used to be the very definition of "enthusiast", in that it was, well, enthusiastic. Upcoming new games were anticipated with excitement, unexpectedly brilliant games were celebrated, legendarily awful games became famous in their own right. In most cases, coverage was handled in a light-hearted, humorous and often irreverent manner, not afraid to crack politically incorrect jokes and generally seem like the people responsible for it were actually having a good time.
These days, I go to a site like Polygon and often come away feeling like its writers actively hate the medium they claim to specialise in. It seems like every other week there's a new big controversy of some description, and these sites seem to take it upon themselves to take a Firm Moral Standpoint on such issues, usually with the strong implications that If You Don't Agree With This, You Are An Awful Shit and Should Probably Be Killed.
Sometimes these controversies become justifiably big deals — although, to be honest, it's getting harder and harder to think of genuine examples, simply because of the amount of noise spouted on a daily basis. It's the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" syndrome; the more you shout and scream and rave about How Awful Everything Is, Oh My! *faints* the less likely people are to take you seriously. Particularly when it's just so incongruous; I can't quite work out if the abrupt gear-change into "by the way, this is misogynist and probably racist too" in Polygon's otherwise very positive review of The Witcher 3 is hilarious or tragic, but either way, I can't take it seriously any more, because it's just parroting the same points I've seen over and over again, without any real consideration of context.
I think back to the days when I used to read games magazines before the Internet came along and ruined that industry. I think back with fond memories on the specific magazines I used to read — mostly the ones my brother worked on, for obvious reasons — and can actually remember a lot about them: the articles therein, the games covered, the reasons I liked taking them into the toilet to read while I was having a shit even if I'd already read them from cover to cover multiple times. Advanced Computer Entertainment (aka ACE); Zero; Mega Drive Advanced Gaming; Control (later Super Control); ST Action; Atari User; Page 6; The Official Nintendo Magazine; N64 Magazine; PSM; GamesTM; PC Player; PC Zone; EGM; OPM; and doubtless some others I've forgotten — I don't remember any of these magazines ever taking a Firm Moral Standpoint on controversial issues, and I certainly don't ever remember them directly attacking either portions of or their whole audience. (Well, except for Charlie Brooker's "Sick Notes" section in latter-day PC Zone, in which people wrote in to him specifically to get insulted.)
Meanwhile, today, we have a far more fast-moving games press in which articles are generally disposable, forgettable, designed to get quick, immediate clicks right now and, for the most part, not remain "evergreen" and stand the test of time. That means a rise in tabloid-style controversy and moral panics, and a decline in writers having the opportunity to express their own specific, creative voices or specialisms. And that's really sad.
One positive thing that is coming of the growing sense of dissatisfaction a lot of people like myself feel with the big gaming sites is the fact that smaller sites are on the rise, and doing a good job from a content perspective of catering to niches that are typically underserved by the mainstream publications. The situation isn't ideal as yet — most of these outlets aren't able to pay their staff, since making money from writing words on the Internet is harder than it's ever been, given people's reluctance to pay for things online, and even greater reluctance to allow themselves to be advertised at — but it is undergoing a change.
I'm glad to see that, in some respects, but sad in others; as time goes on, we move further and further away from what I now recognise, with the rose-tinted spectacles of +1 nostalgia, as the Golden Age of Games Magazines. Fashions come and go, of course, but with the way the media has been advancing over the course of the last ten or twenty years, I don't see us returning to anything like it any time soon.
Up until now, I've been a bit resistant to PlayStation Plus, the subscription service that Sony provides for its PlayStation platforms.
Don't get me wrong, I haven't been outright against it or anything; it's more that I've never really seen the need for it in my life.
A bit of context for those less familiar with it, then: PlayStation Plus is required for you to play online multiplayer games on PlayStation 4. (It is not required to play online with PlayStation 3 and Vita.) This aspect of it I can take or leave, since I don't play a lot of online games — Final Fantasy XIV is the only one I play with any regularity, in fact, and I play that on PC.
PlayStation Plus also allows you to upload save games to "the cloud" so that you can easily, say, transfer them between different devices or delete a game and restore your progress later on. Again, I haven't had much need for this; the one and only time I wished I had it was when I had a downloadable review copy of Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection on Vita, subsequently got a physical copy (because I like physical copies) and discovered that it was impossible to delete the downloadable version without also deleting its save data due to Vita's somewhat restrictive file system. If I'd had PlayStation Plus, I would have been able to back up my save, delete the downloadable version then bring it back in to play with the physical version.
PlayStation Plus also provides you with discounts on games from the PlayStation Store each month. These are often quite significant discounts, but you do have to bear in mind that you're paying the subscription fee each month, so you're perhaps not saving quite as much as you think you are.
And finally, PlayStation Plus provides you with "free" games each month. I put the term "free" in quotation marks because you don't own them in the same way as you would if you'd actually bought them outright, either in physical or downloadable form. Rather, you have unlimited access to them for as long as you continue to subscribe to PlayStation Plus; they're effectively extended rentals, if you like.
Now, this latter aspect had been the part I'd probably been most "against", because I like to own my games, preferably in physical format, and PlayStation Plus didn't seem especially compatible with that mindset. What I hadn't counted on, as I've discovered since I signed up for my trial period on my new PS4, was the fact that PlayStation Plus actually provides you with a risk-free means of trying out some things you'd perhaps found interesting, but didn't really want to hand over the money for in case they weren't all that good.
This month, for example, one of the "free" games on PS4 (and PS3 and Vita, for that matter) is a title called Race the Sun. This is an independently developed game in which you fly a low-polygon spaceship across a randomly generated low-polygon world that changes every real-time day, attempt not to crash into anything and usually fail. It starts extremely simple, almost insultingly so — I nearly put the game down a few moments after starting it because it seemed so bare-bones and simplistic — but gradually grows in depth and complexity as you complete objectives and "level up", with new mechanics gradually unlocking as you progress through the levels. Now I'm about halfway through the unlocks and finding it an addictive little affair; the somewhat Star Fox-esque aesthetic is appealing, the music is good, the gameplay is frustrating but addictive and it has a somewhat more satisfying feel than your average mobile phone endless runner — which, let's face it, is basically what it is, with a few extra knobs on.
Would I have spent money on Race the Sun? Well, I certainly wrote about it a bit when I was still working at USgamer, as I thought it looked interesting. It had never quite looked interesting enough for me to actually want to hand over the cash for it, though, and as such it initially passed me by, though I still contemplated it every time I saw it in a Steam sale.
Here's the power of PlayStation Plus, then; it allows me to investigate these games that I've found interesting but, for one reason or another, never bought my own copy of. There's no risk in me doing this, and I get a decent selection to choose from each month. It's more effective than a demo because you get the whole game. And it's less morally questionable than piracy because you're still paying for the game and the devs are getting a cut — it's just getting to them via different means.
And if I end up actually really liking something I've got through PlayStation Plus? There's nothing stopping me actually buying a copy to keep permanently in my collection even if I let my subscription lapse.
So okay, I admit it; I should have probably checked PlayStation Plus out sooner. But better late than never, huh?
My brother bought me a copy of XCOM: The Board Game for my birthday, so I spent a bit of time learning it today since you can play it solo, and I'm planning on playing it with some friends this weekend.
I must confess that I'm not actually massively familiar with XCOM as a whole, though I did play UFO: Enemy Unknown back when it first came out, and I do at least own a copy of the more recent reboot, even if I have never actually booted it up as yet. I know the principle, though, and I also know that knowledge of the video game series isn't particularly important for enjoying the board game, as the board game has a somewhat different focus than the video game.
Basically, aliens are invading and everyone is fucked unless you save them. You do this by responding to UFO sightings around the world, completing missions, researching technology and, hopefully, eventually thwarting the alien menace. While you're doing this, the various regions of the world are gradually getting more and more panicked by the Bad Things that are happening everywhere, so you need to try and take care of them as much as you can lest your funding gets pulled from that region.
XCOM: The Board Game is a cooperative affair for one to four players. However many players are playing, four "roles" are used, with multiple players taking on more than one role if you're playing with less than a full complement. The Commander is in charge of the overall budget. The Science Officer is in charge of research. The Squad Leader is in charge of leading the troops on the ground. And the one I've forgotten the name of is in charge of other important stuff like communications and whatnot.
Yes, communications; XCOM: The Board Game has an interesting twist on the usual "players against the game" formula of cooperative tabletop games: there's a companion app for smartphones/tablets, and it is required to play, not optional. The reason for this is the "real-time" phase of each round, which requires someone to be in charge of the app and bark out orders to the other players as the app issues them; the players, in turn, then have strict time limits in which to complete their actions, and the exact "phases" through which a turn proceeds are part randomly generated, part determined by the information you pass the app about the current situation of the game.
It's an elegant solution to the sometimes clunky nature of cooperative games that rely on "event cards" or equivalent to help build the narrative of a play session. Those who like to know all the possible things that might happen in a turn may balk at the idea of not having a deck of cards to flick through before or after the game, but the element of mystery is very much a part of the XCOM experience, as is responding to unexpected threats at a moment's notice.
The real-time phase is pretty hectic — and, I can imagine, prone to some horrible disasters. It's followed by a resolution phase in which the app walks you through each step in turn and tells you how to resolve each action. Unlike the real-time phase, the order of actions in which is part-randomised (though you always get new technologies and budget first in a turn), the resolution phase follows a fixed order, so learning this will allow you to formulate effective strategies.
The basic mechanic of the resolution phase is press-your-luck dice rolls. Generally speaking, for every (insert appropriate unit here) you have on a particular task, you get a blue die, which is marked with some blank sides and some "success" sides. Each task requires at least one success to complete; enemies generally require multiple successes to defeat. If you fail to get the successes you need on one roll, you can press your luck and try again — the risk factor comes in the fact that the "threat level" increases for this task each time you do it, making it more likely that you'll take losses even if you're ultimately successful in completing the task. Losses are determined by a special red eight-sided die; this is marked with numbers, and rolling equal to or under the current threat level (it begins at 1 and goes up to 5, so there'll never be a guaranteed loss) counts as a loss, which usually means military units are killed and "reusable" units such as scientists and satellites are exhausted, meaning they'll be out of action for a whole round.
The mechanics are simple to understand and seem to combine a good amount of luck and strategy. You can, of course, manipulate the amount of "luck" you'll be relying on by assigning more units to a particular task, but there are limits in place — not to mention something of a shortage of units to scatter around the world!
I lost both the solo games I tried earlier; once from two continents falling into full-on panic (which results in an immediate loss) and once from my base being destroyed by alien intruders. I had a great time, though, and I'm very interested to see how the play dynamic changes with multiple people around the table; it's rather overwhelming to take responsibility for everything!
I'm a big fan of the work of Carpe Fulgur, the small, independent localisation team previously responsible for bringing English-speaking audiences the excellent Recettear, its predecessor Chantelise and the charming Metroidvania-ish Fortune Summoners, and who have most recently been working on the sprawling behemoth that is Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter alongside Xseed Games.
I was pretty intrigued, then, when Andrew Dice of Carpe Fulgur proudly announced the team's fifth project: a peculiar affair called This Starry Midnight We Make. Unlike Carpe Fulgur's previous output, it's not a role-playing game. It is… well, it's kind of baffling, to be honest. I guess technically it's a puzzle game of sorts, but I actually want to describe it more as a game about experimentation.
I sat down and played the demo version — available now on Steam, with the full version coming later this month — and recorded my experiences, bewilderment and all. Here's what happened when I had a go:
As you can see if you watched the video, the game blends visual novel-style storytelling with its main mechanic: creating "stars" in a magical basin that appears to influence what happens in Kyoto according to the astrological phenomena you create.
The basic format of the game involves plopping stones into this basin and watching them do stuff, then figuring out how to make them do other stuff. The basin is split into five elemental areas, represented by faint swirling coloured gases, and the combination of the elemental area you drop a stone into and the type of stone you drop determines what happens next.
As you progress through the game, you're tasked with a series of quests that ask you to create specific phenomena. What's interesting is that after an initial, rather brief and unenlightening tutorial, you're pretty much left to figure everything out for yourself. How, exactly, do you create a nebula? The game sure isn't going to tell you right off the bat, though it will record the phenomenon in your notebook once you've created it once, allowing you to refer back to it and check how you did it if you're not sure.
Beginning with the simple task of creating individual stars, the quests later start demanding that you create evolved forms of stars that involve mixing different types together, manipulating the amount of elemental gas in an area of the basin and even using "clay stars" to fuse others together. Beyond that, you're tasked with creating "constellations" using specific combinations of stars that you've created, and the game hints that once these have been created, they'll be used as "tools" to further manipulate your astral creations, though the demo stops before you get to see what this means for yourself.
What I found initially offputting but subsequently rather compelling about This Starry Midnight We Make is what I hinted at above: you have to figure out everything for yourself. And this is a huge adjustment from a lot of modern games, which spend much of their early hours walking you through every step of the mechanics you might be using throughout the game until you're absolutely sure you know what you're supposed to be doing. Not so in This Starry Midnight We Make. You are, in effect, a scientist, given some interesting things to fiddle around with and left to your own devices to try things out and see what happens. Some of the things you do will work — and these form genuine "Eureka!" moments, since you've figured them out for yourself — and others will not work, forcing you to analyse your "mistakes" and learn from them… or perhaps determine what caused an unexpected reaction to happen.
I find it difficult to envision how the game will carry this strange concept through a full-length narrative, but I'm kind of intrigued to find out. It's a slow burn of a game, for sure, and its obtuseness will doubtless put many people off within about ten minutes of starting, but if you put some time in and make the effort to actually experiment with it yourself, you'll find a strangely compelling experience waiting for you.
Do I recommend it? I'm hesitant to do so before seeing the full version, but I can at least recommend that you give the demo a try for yourself to see what you think and whether it might be for you. It's available now from Steam.
One of the games I've been playing a bunch on my shiny new PlayStation 4 is Resogun, a game that I was previously moderately excited about, and which, prior to Omega Quintet (and, arguably, Final Fantasy Type-0, which I'm interested to try at some point in the near future) was a game I often cited as the only (then-current) reason that I'd be interested in a PlayStation 4.
But it wasn't enough by itself to make me want to buy one. For a new platform to be truly compelling for me, there needs to be some long-form games that I'm interested in, whereas Resogun is an arcade game, intended to be enjoyed in relatively short bursts. This isn't a criticism of it, mind, but I'd have had a tough time justifying a PlayStation 4 purchase to myself purely on the strength of what is, essentially, next-gen Defender.
But oh, what a game Resogun actually is! I'm still skeptical of whether I'd have found it worth buying a PS4 for by itself — although in retrospect, I bought an Xbox 360 primarily because of Geometry Wars, which is even more simplistic than Resogun — but I'm absolutely in love with it, because it represents a true fusion between classic old-school arcade-style gameplay and modern presentation.
At its core, as previously noted, Resogun is similar to the classic arcade game Defender. You fly a little ship that can move and fire left and right at will. Like Defender, the game unfolds on a scrolling, wrapping stage, though here it's represented as a cylinder that you fly around the outer surface of. Like Defender, your job is to save little green humans from being abducted by invading alien flying saucers. Unlike Defender, there's significantly more to it than that.
For starters, the humans are held in captivity before you can rescue them. In order to do so, you need to destroy "Keepers" — special enemies that show up every so often with a green glow surrounding them. You'll get an audible announcement when some Keepers show up, but not a visual indicator showing where they are if they're around the other side of the level, so you'll need to find and destroy them quickly to save the human in question, because if you miss any of them — or, in some cases, destroy them in the wrong order — the human will immediately die. Succeed, however, and the human will pop out of his little prison box and start running around on the ground, at which point he becomes vulnerable to being abducted, falling into holes, drowning and being splattered by unpleasant things. He also becomes available to be picked up by your ship and transported to one of the rescue pods at the top of the level.
To complete a level, you need to proceed through three "phases". Each phase requires you to destroy a certain amount of enemies represented by a bar filling up at the bottom of the screen. When you complete a phase, you get a brief "time out" where you can still move and fire, but you're invincible and the enemies move in slow-motion. This allows you a moment to compose yourself and get yourself into an advantageous position before proceeding. The end of the third phase, however, jumps directly into a boss battle, with bosses taking the form of various peculiar geometric shapes that warp and twist before your very eyes as you shoot chunks off them and chip away at their energy bar. When the boss is dead, the whole level explodes and you move on to the next one. Repeat for five levels, beat game.
Except that's not all that there is to Resogun — at least not with the excellent DLC packages that have been released since it originally came out. Between these two packages (available as a bundle or individually) there are several new modes, including Survival, which places you on a single level and tasks you with surviving through a series of increasingly difficult days, acquiring power-ups by picking up humans; Protector, which requires you to deliver humans to cities to rebuild them and subsequently defend them from giant alien flying saucers; Commando, which casts you as a human attempting to protect his house from falling meteors in scenes somewhat reminiscent of Missile Command for a new generation; and Challenge, which gives you a series of unconventional ways to play the game and tasks you with completing some generally pretty fiendish objectives.
Resogun is unabashedly a score-attack game, and consequently it naturally comes with online support, allowing you to compare your scores both to your friends and the rest of the world's players. You can also filter these scores by time, allowing you to challenge friends each week or month to see who is truly the best (this week/month), and scores are tracked completely independently for each mode and difficulty setting.
Combine this with a robust ship editor, allowing you to create your own custom ships using the 3D "voxel" pixels from which the entire game is built (and which it is very fond of exploding things into at a moment's notice) and the ability to share said creations online and you have a remarkably "complete"-feeling package that, now I've spent some time with it, I'm pretty confident in recommending as an essential purchase for anyone with a PlayStation 4. (Assuming you like shooting things and watching numbers go up. And who doesn't like shooting things and watching numbers go up?)
Interestingly, all four of these games are based on the same basic system — something which I criticised Western-developed free-to-play mobile games for above — but manage to distinguish themselves from one another by the additional elements they stack on top of this basic structure. Western free-to-play games, conversely, tend to adopt one system and stick with it, without adding anything in particular to the formula.