1608: Soul Suspect

I've been playing a game called Murdered: Soul Suspect today. It's a game that immediately intrigued me back at the Eurogamer Expo last year when I attended a hands-off gameplay demo and developer talk about it.

For the uninitiated, the premise is this: You play the role of Detective Ronan O'Connor, a sharp-eyed investigator in the traditional sense, complete with perpetual smoking habit and the dress sense of someone from the 1940s. Ronan is investigating a murder. Nothing unusual for a detective, you might think, until you discover that the murder he's investigating is his own. He's dead, you see, and not altogether happy about the situation in which he finds himself. And, in traditional ghost story fashion, he can't fully shuffle off this mortal coil until he unravels the mystery keeping him chained to existence.

Murdered: Soul Suspect has received rather poor reviews to date, with its Metacritic rating varying anywhere between the low 60s and the 40s depending on which platform you look at. And yet, as I've found in so many cases recently, these numbers do not paint an at all accurate picture of what the experience of playing the game is like.

It's enormously enjoyable. It's engrossing, well-written, well-acted and intriguing. Its blend of noir-style detective fiction and ghost stories is excellently handled, and the main storyline is backed up by some truly excellent supporting material, ranging from an exploration of setting Salem's history to some entertaining, authentically "campfire-style" ghost stories that you can unlock by discovering collectibles around the various environments in which you find yourself.

Gameplay-wise, it's rather simplistic: you wander around, you uncover clues — occasionally using your ghostly abilities to do so — and every so often you're quizzed on what you've discovered in order to progress. These quizzes may involve putting a sequence of events in the right order, deciding on the right piece of information to use to get a witness to do something, or simply making deductions based on the evidence you've found. Some of the questions and answers throughout are a little obtuse — and some are deceptively obvious — but the game never feels like it's punishing you for picking the wrong choice. Story is king here, and in this sort of game that's exactly how it should be.

In many ways, the game feels like a late '90s PC game, with its open, non-linear environments, lack of minimap and objective markers and… I don't know, there's just something about the general atmosphere of the whole thing that calls to mind titles like the original Deus Ex, Kingpin, Thief and any number of other titles from that similar era. It feels like a game out of its own time — and I kind of like that. (Oh, the PC version is also a tad buggy, too; I had to tweak an .ini file to get it running above 30 frames per second, and it works better with keyboard and mouse than it does with gamepad, but neither of these issues are something that has particularly hampered my enjoyment.)

There's an interesting cast of characters to explore, and some enjoyable banter between Ronan and Joy, a young medium who becomes his "sidekick" and pair of physical hands as his investigation progresses. The story itself — which I'm yet to finish — is looking like it might end up being fairly predictable overall, but that's not necessarily a bad thing; plenty of hardboiled and noir fiction is, in itself, predictable and formulaic, but that doesn't make it any less enjoyable.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Murdered: Soul Suspect has been unjustly lambasted by much of the press. I'm not entirely sure what people were expecting from it going in to it; I'm really enjoying it so far, and its simplistic gameplay certainly doesn't detract from the fact that it tells an enjoyable, interesting and unusual story. And that's what I want; I don't need fast action sequences, sprawling open worlds or a story that drags itself out unnecessarily over the course of 40+ hours. With Murdered: Soul Suspect what I've got is a good, concise, enjoyable interactive story that doesn't overcomplicate itself with unnecessary mechanics and irrelevant content.

It's a game worth playing, in other words, and another nail in the coffin for the usefulness of most modern reviews, so far as I'm concerned.

1606: A Little Pleasantness Goes a Long Way

I partied up with, I think, the absolute worst party I have ever played with in Final Fantasy XIV earlier — skills-wise, I mean; there wasn't much in the way of ego on display, thankfully — but despite this, it was actually pretty fun.

I was running Haukke Manor's normal mode as part of the daily "Low-Level Roulette" system, whereby you're randomly thrown into one of the pre-level 50 dungeons with three random strangers and, depending on whether you're still earning experience points or at endgame, earn big bonuses that are of benefit to you regardless of what level you actually are. There's also an "Adventurer in Need" bonus for classes there are a shortage of at any given time — given that there's about 4,500 gil on offer for jumping in to the requested class, it's worth doing if you have the classes available.

Anyway, jump in as a healer (the Adventurer in Need) I did, and Haukke Manor began. It quickly became apparent that the tank, a level 28 Gladiator who hadn't yet upgraded to the advanced job Paladin, hadn't been there before, as there were enemies that he didn't know to watch out for. He was also being very cautious, taking great care to mark enemies with thoroughness — an admirable enough trait, but he didn't need to be quite so thorough — and taking his time working his way through.

I snuck a peek at his gear and some of his equipment was a little low-level for the dungeon we were challenging — a fact further emphasised by the fact that I, the healer in the party (typically the "weakest" player in terms of attack and defense power) had more hit points than him. Still, we pressed on, and as the healer I made sure he didn't die as much as I possibly could.

I noticed after a little while that he didn't appear to be using the skill Shield Lob, a useful trick in the Gladiator/Paladin's arsenal and the typical way most battles begin. The Gladiator/Paladin flings their shield at an enemy, which attracts their attention onto the Gladiator/Paladin, and starts the fight off right, with the enemy in question attacking the tank. This is then, usually, followed up by a couple of Flashes, which attract the attention of nearby enemies. Once this is done, the enemies' attention is usually pretty firmly on the tank, which then allows everyone else to go hog wild killing them.

Our tank in this group wasn't using Shield Lob because he didn't have it. He was level 28; you get Shield Lob at level 15 by completing the appropriate Gladiator class quest at that point, meaning he hadn't done that. To be fair to him, the first time I tried tanking in a dungeon I forgot to pick up Shield Lob first, but that was a little different in that I was still level 15 at the time. Tanky boy here was nearly double that level, and still didn't have it. Whoops.

When you spot something like this happening in an MMO, you're always faced with a choice. Do you press on and hope the rest of the group is strong enough to make up for the weak link's shortcomings? Or do you quietly slip away, leaving them to fend for themselves? Being an altogether decent sort of person, I chose to stick around and offer the struggling tank some helpful, non-aggressive advice. (One of my partymates was less understanding, his only utterances throughout the whole dungeon being "lol", "omfg" and "wtf". Great communication there, chap.) As a result, we eventually — very carefully — managed to make it through the entire dungeon intact. I was genuinely pleased to see the tank make it through in one piece and pick up some good new equipment along the way, and I hope he felt the same way.

I can't entirely blame the "lol omfg wtf" guy for his attitude, because it's easy to get into that mindset when you've been playing for a while. It's easy to assume that everyone is as skilled at the game as you are, and that everyone has the same knowledge of the game's mechanics and systems as you are. This is what leads to feelings of anxiety about living up to people's expectations — feelings that even people like me, who have been playing for hundreds of hours by now, still feel regularly.

The reality is, in fact, somewhat different. People make mistakes. Some people don't know the game well. Some people might not even really know what "tanking" actually is, thinking the "dude with sword and shield" character class is more of a hack-and-slash affair rather than the important defensive role they play. Some people might not know that you have to do your class quests every 5 levels to get all your abilities — though to be fair, the game is pretty explicit about this at the outset.

In a game like Final Fantasy XIV, it's everyone's responsibility to help make the game a pleasant, friendly place for everyone to enjoy. It's everyone's responsibility to help out those who are struggling, or who don't understand. It's easy to laugh and point fingers at "noobs" or "bads", but it's much more beneficial in the long run to help educate them so they know how to play the game better.

After all, what's better: people leaving the game in droves because of elitist attitudes, or the gradual growth of the available base of players who understand the game mechanics and are able to take on its toughest challenges? It's not a stumper, really, is it?

1605: Let's Have Another Word About Vita

I got a bit annoyed earlier, prompted primarily by a tweet from Kotaku's Stephen Totilo depicting a "neglected" (his words) Vita stand in Sony's booth at E3. Indeed, in his photograph, no-one was playing the Vitas in the picture — one of which was proudly displaying the excellent upcoming rhythm game Hatsune Miku Project Diva f 2nd — but that's not really the point: the point is that his wasn't the only tweet I saw like this today, and all of them had something in common.

None of them appeared to be making any effort to rectify the situation.

Vita has been a self-fulfilling prophecy for some time now so far as the games press is concerned. It's an astonishingly good games system with backwards compatibility for PSP titles — enhanced backwards compatibility, more to the point, due to the fact you can map the right stick and touchscreen to PSP functions, allowing you more control flexibility than the original games offered — as well as a ton of its own interesting exclusives, ranging from the engaging and unusual 3D action-adventure Gravity Rush to the fantastic cartoonish golf game Everybody's Golf (aka Hot Shots Golf in the States) and a ton of Japanese role-playing games like Demon Gaze, Conception II, Persona 4 Golden and numerous others. On top of all that, it's rapidly becoming the de facto handheld for independent developers to deploy handheld versions of their games, so we're starting to see portable versions of indie classics previously confined to PC and TV-connected console: titles like Spelunky, Fez, Thomas Was Alone and, again, numerous others.

Still it goes without coverage. Still the narrative continues that Vita is "doomed" — or, in some cases, the system is ignored altogether. Is it any surprise that it's not selling particularly well if none of the tastemakers in the industry — and, like it or not, games journos, that's what you are — are celebrating the things it's doing well, or even acknowledging its existence in some cases?

Sony could be doing a better job, of course. Vita didn't get a lot of stage time at the company's E3 press conference, Japan's Vita TV has been rebranded PlayStation TV for the West and it's rare to see the Vita in promotional artwork by itself — it's more commonly depicted as a GamePad-like accessory for the PlayStation 4 — but at least they're trying, and representatives such as Shahid Ahmad are doing their best to keep the profile of the system high and solicit regular feedback from the people who do own it.

But I place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the press here, who initially set unrealistic expectations for the platform — do you really want to play a triple-A experience on a small, handheld device? I certainly don't — and then followed this up with the aforementioned dismissal or lack of acknowledgement mentioned above. It's a sorry state of affairs, to be sure, made all the more tragic by the fact that Vita has a genuinely great library of games.

The situation mirrors Nintendo's struggles with Wii U somewhat, where the narrative has again been that the system is "dying" which has, in turn, made people more hesitant to pick it up. There's a slight difference with Wii U this time around, however, because Nintendo wisely chose to focus on Wii U with its E3 presentation. This year, 3DS — a system which is doing just fine — was hardly touched on in Nintendo's main presentation, while the bulk of the company's livestream was focused on Wii U and its upcoming games. It was a successful decision; people came away from Nintendo's presentation excited about the future of Wii U, even though a significant number of the games shown wouldn't be with us until next year.

I don't know what the answer is for Vita, or even if there is one. But what I would like to see, as my days in the games press draw to a close, is journalists taking a stab at not following the herd, at not perpetuating the established narrative, and instead attempting to explore what makes this wonderful little machine tick — and why it makes people like me so happy.

Will it happen? No idea. Regardless of whether people start giving Vita a fair chance, I'm extremely happy with it — and if you're at all interested in any of the types of games I mentioned above, I strongly recommend grabbing one as soon as you can.

1604: Dissonance

There are two, great, bizarre pieces of dissonance in the games industry right now, and Nintendo's live video presentation earlier highlighted one of them very obviously.

Both pieces of dissonance are very similar: they regard how good, interesting and widely-praised a platform is, and how poorly they're selling. The systems in question are, of course, Nintendo's Wii U and Sony's PlayStation Vita — both of which are excellent systems, both of which have a ton of excellent games, and both of which are selling like shit despite passionate, if small, install bases.

Why is this happening? Well, it's at least partly due to the fact that the big-hitters of the industry — Sony and Microsoft — are now doing a much better job of appealing to the mainstream market than Nintendo were during the Wii era. The market that Nintendo courted with the original Wii — casual, family gamers — have since moved on to mobile phones and tablets (where they're having vastly inferior experiences, but that's a subject for another day). This leaves a different kind of mainstream market — the Call of Duty-playing beer-and-pretzels multiplayer brigade who are, for sure, bringing a ton of money into the industry, but who are also indirectly pushing budgets sky-high and encouraging some of the worst practices in the industry.

The market that plays Call of Duty and other big-budget triple-A games on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, in other words, is much larger than the market that plays Mario on Wii U or JRPGs on Vita. This has led to both Wii U and Vita being perceived as "failures" somehow, despite the fact that they're both trundling along quite nicely, seemingly mostly oblivious to the rest of the industry. Both platforms, notably, provide something markedly different from what is seen on PS4 and Xbox One; Xbox One and PS4, conversely, currently have relatively little to distinguish between them — a swathe of predictable triple-A games, a promising-looking indie lineup and a bunch of features a significant number of people aren't sure if they really want or not.

It was highly apparent during Nintendo's event today in particular that the games on offer for Wii U are completely distinct from anything coming down the pipe for Xbox One or PS4. They're colourful, they're family-friendly, they're creative — they're the sort of things computer and video games used to be, in other words. I'm not saying that this is inherently "better" than the muted blues, greys and browns of modern triple-A — those games have their place, even as people like me aren't interested in them — but that they provide something immediately more noticeable and distinctive than the identikit worlds of Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Call of Duty and Battlefield.

Vita, too, has a ton of interesting, unusual and distinctive games, whether it's colourful JRPGs or portable takes on indie titles. Developers for the platform have long since given up trying to make a "portable triple-A" experience and I, for one, am glad about that. Vita doesn't need to be a portable PS3/PS4 — it needs to be its own thing. And, despite the relatively small number of people who have one, even as more and more people yell about how great games like Persona 4 Golden are, it's doing a very good job at catering to the clear and distinct audience it's been building up.

All this doesn't make Sony's announcement and subsequent retraction of an announcement for Final Fantasy Type-0 on Vita any less frustrating, however. Still, Final Fantasy Type-0 in HD is one more reason to pick up a PS4 or Xbox One, and those, for me, are in short supply so far.

1601: On Not Assuming the Worst is the Most Representative

I had an interesting conversation with my friend Calin the other day. Calin is someone I've known for quite a while, have shared lots of interesting and enjoyable gaming stories with over the years — mainly through the Squadron of Shame — and even managed to meet face-to-face on one occasion at PAX East in 2010, an event which, as a whole, I regard as the last great thing in my life before everything came crumbling down shortly afterwards. (I have since largely rebuilt my existence, but there's still some work to do after that chaos.)

Anyway, the point is: Calin is, if you must put a label on such things, a "gamer". And yet he confessed to me that he's not entirely comfortable admitting that any more, for fear of being lumped in with what he regards as "gamers". His definition of gamers, it transpires, are those who are the most vocal on the Internet, and often the worst examples of the gaming community. They who shout loudest get the most attention and all that.

This is, of course, a gross generalisation about the entire community of people who enjoy computer and video games, and I said as much in our conversation. The IGN and Gamespot comments sections are not representative of the entirety of humanity who enjoy computer and video games, in other words; there are plenty of other people out there who don't rage and swear at one another, who don't tell writers to kill themselves over reviews they disagree with, who don't act like spoiled children when things that they, personally, aren't interested in show up.

And yet I can understand Calin's position somewhat. As I noted above, those who shout loudest get the most attention, and it's entirely natural to start believing "gamers" as a whole are the scum of the Earth if the representatives of the community you seem to hear the most from are the ones who are acting like complete tools.

In vaguely related news, earlier today I observed a Twitter exchange between the members of Witch Beam, developers of the excellent upcoming arcade-style shoot 'em up for PC, PS4, Vita and Wii U, Assault Android Cactus. They were feeling disheartened by a tweet from a member of the Gamespot community who made some disparaging remarks about Sony "only" having titles like Assault Android Cactus — smaller-scale, lower-budget but no less interesting or enjoyable games — to show at E3, while Microsoft was promising that its Xbox One-centric E3 presentation would focus on games, presumably triple-A by implication. I commented to them that it's not worth worrying about the opinion of people who believe that triple-A is all there is to video games. In a way, those people are also judging something in its entirety by a small subsection of it — in this case, that anything outside the big budget triple-A space is somehow unworthy.

The important thing in all this is to remember that not everyone agrees on everything, and not everyone behaves in the same way. For some people, trash talk and being a jackass online is just part and parcel of the way the modern Internet-connected world works. For others, they prefer to spend their time actually playing games rather than typing comments or tweets to each other online. And for others still, they prefer to engage in intelligent, lengthy discussion about things some people may not have heard of. (I kind of straddle the latter two categories.)

Of those groups, the people acting like jackasses are but a small part of the whole. They're a problem, for sure, and it's difficult to know what — if anything — it's possible to do about their behaviour. (Hint: It's not posting lengthy social justice-themed editorials on the sites they frequent; that just makes them defensive and even more inclined to be obnoxious.) But here's the important thing: they are not everyone. They do not represent an entire medium. They do not represent the entirety of people around the world who are interested in games. Chances are, in my experience, there's a considerable amount of crossover with those people who believe in nothing but triple-A.

Fuck those guys. If you enjoy games — however you enjoy them — enjoy them in your own way, and never, ever feel ashamed of something you enjoy because of the behaviour of people you probably have nothing to do with on a regular basis. In an extreme case, simply think back to how it all was before the Internet came along and ruined rational discourse for a lot of people; everyone could enjoy video games without feeling ashamed, guilty or disgusted then, because you never, ever came into contact with the more objectionable parts of humanity. Simply stay out of comments sections and only talk about games with your friends, just like things used to be. Works out pretty well for me, personally.

And if you're one of the jackasses I've mentioned in this post? If you've ever told a writer to kill themselves over giving a game an 8 when you thought it deserved a 9? (For those who don't frequent gaming sites, this actually happens on occasion, though it's usually over more extreme differences of opinion.) If you believe there is only one "true" way to game, and that everyone else's interests and passions in one of the most diverse creative mediums in the world is somehow invalid? Take a good, long, hard look at yourself and decide whether or not that's the person you really want to be.

1599: Through the Maelstrom Again

Final Fantasy XIV patch day! If you don't play an MMO, it's probably difficult for you to understand why people get excited about patches, but we really do.

The reason for this is that, more so than any other type of game out there, MMO patches can considerably improve the experience of the game for everyone playing as well as adding new content to enjoy. And Final Fantasy XIV has definitely been delivering on that front since it launched.

Since launch, the game has, so far, enjoyed two major content patches and a few smaller patches along the way. These smaller ones are arguably the most interesting ones in many ways, because they tend to be the ones that improve the players' "quality of life" in various ways — perhaps through interface refinements, perhaps through balancing tweaks, perhaps through adjustments to the way the game works based on the community's feedback.

So far, we've seen all of the above. We've seen the easy to miss red targeting markers for enemy attacks replaced with more brightly coloured, pulsing markers. We've seen the addition of the Challenge and Sightseeing logs to give people more things to do and ways to earn rewards. We've seen adjustments to the endgame currencies as the average "item level" of endgame players gradually increases. And we've seen much-appreciated little usability tweaks, like the fact you can now get off a chocobo you're riding by pressing the shoulder buttons on your controller rather than having to twat about with hotbars and icons.

The game is still recognisable as what it was when it launched — it was already a solid game then, after all — but the refinements it has enjoyed ever since mean that it has been consistently, constantly improving — and, more importantly, it's proof that the development team is both willing to listen to players and implement some of their best ideas.

The game is going from strength to strength, in other words. And they said subscription-based MMOs were dead.

1598: Filling a Niche

While the "next-gen" consoles are struggling to provide compelling reasons for people to pick them up beyond their launch lineup and a couple of more recent stragglers, there's never been a better time to be a fan of the more niche side of interactive entertainment — particularly the Japanese "otaku games" that I'm such a fan of.

This week alone there's Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection and Monster Monpiece (in Europe, anyway; North America has had the latter for a little while already). Later in the month there's Atelier Rorona Plus, and prior to that we've had interesting, intriguing titles like Nippon Ichi's surprisingly bleak The Witch and the Hundred Knight and Kadokawa Games' excellent dungeon crawler Demon Gaze.

Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection (Neptunia PP for short — stop giggling at the back) is a curious little game that I've been playing for the past couple of days. Ostensibly an "idol management" game — a genre we haven't really had in the West before — it's actually roughly equal parts stat-building life sim, relationship-building dating sim and visual novel. Unlike the rest of the Neptunia series to date, the game unfolds from the perspective of yourself as a participant narrator rather than an omniscient viewpoint which the characters occasionally break the "fourth wall" of. It's a fitting shift in narrative tone and perspective, because the relationship between a Japanese pop idol and her producer is a close one, and this is one of the many things the game explores. Mostly I'm just happy for the opportunity to virtually date Noire, but the game itself, while simplistic and straightforward, is proving to be an enjoyable little statbuilder accompanied by a strange "live performance" minigame that I haven't quite got my head around yet and an enjoyable, characteristically silly narrative starring the Neptunia gang.

Monster Monpiece, meanwhile, I'm yet to boot up but I'm looking forward to trying out. Notorious for its "First Crush Rub" system — I defy you to find a single article about it which doesn't mention this aspect of the game — in which you essentially have to wank off your Vita while tweaking erogenous zones on pictures of moe girls in order to power them up (a process which, in a somewhat Ar Tonelico-ish twist, causes them to become somewhat more disrobed with each increase in strength), the game is actually, by all reports from people who have actually played it rather than getting outraged about what is, essentially, a fairly minor mechanic, rather good. (That was a clumsy sentence, I know. But you get the gist.)

Monster Monpiece is, at heart, a collectible card game. You'll collect cards that depict various monster girls, and then throw your deck of up to 40 cards into battle against either AI opponents in the story or live online opponents via the Internet. Rather than a straightforward Magic: The Gathering-alike, the card battles unfold in a distinctive fashion, allowing you to summon your forces into several lanes, then pitting them against one another. Units advance along the "board" and clash if they run into each other, meaning you'll have to engage your strategic brain and think a few moves ahead in order to succeed. Like I say, I'm yet to actually play it myself, but its mechanics sound interesting and enjoyable to engage with. Plus, you know, Vita wanking.

Atelier Rorona Plus, meanwhile, is a considerably enhanced version of Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland, an RPG-cum-crafting-strategy-game-type-thing by Gust that I started playing a while back but held off playing further upon hearing the Plus version was coming. The Plus version in question features considerably enhanced graphics — the in-game character models now look like their 2D counterparts rather than their little brothers and sisters — as well as tweaked, refined game mechanics based on the later installments of the series (which have, themselves, also had Plus overhauls, but were less in need of them). Again, I'm yet to play this new version, but it certainly looks lovely and I really enjoyed what I played of the original Atelier Rorona, and as such I'm very much looking forward to getting stuck in to this.

So there's three games to get stuck into over the course of the next month — all of which are fairly lengthy affairs, particularly if you want to investigate all the narrative paths each of them offer. I know what I'm going to be doing for the next little while! Just as well, really, since I'm about to have a whole lot of time on my hands…

1597: Mario Kart 8 is Fucking Great

(Hey, that rhymes. It's like it was meant to be.)

So, yes, Mario Kart 8 is, as the title says, fucking great. And it's a surprisingly complete-feeling package this time around, too; past installments of the series have typically not been anywhere near as interesting if you're sitting around by yourself, but the excellent online mode in Mario Kart 8 means that there's always some interesting, enjoyable competition to be had even if you don't have anyone to play with in the same room as you.

As ever, though, it's when you have people over to play that the game absolutely shines. I bought it primarily with the intention of this evening happening — my regular board gaming friends came over, we ate curry and then played Mario Kart 8 instead of something tabletop. And it was fab.

The thing that has always been good about multiplayer Mario Kart is also the thing that frustrates people the most — the fact it can all turn at a moment's notice. One minute you'll be happily driving along in first place, not a care in the world, and the next you'll be pelted by blue, red and green shells, knocked back into the middle of the pack as you friends whizz by you, giggling.

This is, of course, infuriating when it happens to you, but with the nicely tuned balance of Mario Kart you'll have the chance to get your revenge before very long. The further down the pack you are, the nastier the items you get are, so unless you were knocked out of the running moments from the finish line — which isn't beyond the realm of possibility — there's always a chance to claw your way back to a respectable position.

Ultimately, the nice thing is that it doesn't matter all that much because it's simply fun to play. The simple controls and well-tuned difficulty level mean that anyone can pick it up and have a go, while the myriad shortcuts and special techniques mean that those who want to take their game to the next level can do so. Just remember, though, getting out in front effectively paints a big target on your back, so don't be surprised when the dreaded blue shell comes a-knockin'.

I could tell that the game was well-received by my friends from the amount of foul language it was producing. I find it remarkable that Nintendo's family-friendly games provoke more bitching, swearing and cursing than pretty much any other game I know. Even our go-to multiplayer titles like Super Street Fighter IV and TrackMania don't make us yell and curse like we were during our Mario Kart session this evening, and the cursing grew in volume and intensity as we worked our way through the eight cups. Eventually, my friend James was reduced to a gibbering wreck, no longer using words and simply making what he apparently believed to be insulting noises, having previously passed through stuttering, peculiar insults ("W-wank yourself!") and some frankly unprintable utterances that would probably get certain quarters of the Internet angry at me (or James) were I to repost them here.

Anyway. That's that. I hope there will be more Mario Kart 8 in my future, because that was one hell of a lot of fun. Nintendo very much still has the magic.

1593: Niche Gaming's Struggle for Coverage

A blog post by the inimitable Mr James Mielke really resonated with me earlier today, because it touches on something that regular readers will know I feel particularly strongly about: the lack of coverage for interesting, niche games on mainstream, large-scale, commercial gaming sites.

Mielke's piece focuses on the growing Japanese doujin (indie) scene and the excellent games that are emerging from it — titles like, as Mielke mentioend, the joyfully retro Kero Blaster, the smashing mech shooter Armored Hunter Gunhound EX and Edelweiss' spectacular shmup Astebreed, and a list to which I'd also add intriguing, enjoyable titles like Croixleur, Cherry Tree High Comedy Club, Gundemonium, Exceed and numerous others — but it's a problem with niche games in general. These days, if you're not a triple-A game with an astronomical marketing budget and a PR team working overtime to ensure at least ten trailers are released every week, you'll struggle to even get noticed by the big hitters in the industry.

Why is this? Well, there are lots of reasons at play. A huge consideration for many sites these days is determining what's going to pull in traffic. Since we're still not in a position where people will pay for quality content on the Web — and frankly, I don't see that changing any time soon, unfortunately — most sites still make use of an advertising-based revenue model, which is largely reliant on ensuring that eyeballs are directed on pages which, as well as interesting content, feature advertising in noticeable, prominent locations. Some sites are more obtrusive than others when it comes to advertising, but one thing all commercial gaming sites have in common is a reliance on advertising for revenue.

This means that sites have a perceived obligation to serve up content that will "sell" — i.e. stuff that will guarantee eyes on pages and, by extension, ads. This means covering the latest hotness at any point — the Grand Theft Autos, the Mass Effects, the Watch Dogs…es of the world. And covering them as much as possible. Previews. Reviews. Guides. News stories. Everything you can possibly think of until there's nothing more that can possibly milked out of the latest big triple-A release, at which point you then proceed to do the same thing with the next one.

Depending on the size of your staff at a publication, this then doesn't leave all that much time for coverage of other stuff — whether it's a Japanese doujin project put together by a single dude in his bedroom or a sprawling grand strategy extravaganza that may well be one of the most fascinating, ambitious games ever created. There is still time to cover these things to a certain extent, but a whole lot of stuff has to fall by the wayside. I regularly felt enormously guilty when I simply had to ignore a lot of stuff coming into my inbox on a regular basis because I was obliged to cover certain things in favour of others. It made me enormously sad to see hard-working pros like Tom Ohle of Evolve PR continuously bang their heads against a brick wall in an attempt to get the smaller — yet, in many cases, considerably more interesting — projects even considered by your average outlet. There simply isn't the manpower to do so.

And it's doing the audience a disservice, too. When there's nothing to choose between all the big sites' almost-identical coverage of Watch Dogs, Call of Duty or whatever is big this month, there's little reason for people to look around for interesting takes. Sites could benefit hugely from specialising in particular areas — or simply making more of an effort to not cover exactly the same things all the time at the behest of the most powerful triple-A PR representatives.

I made a point of covering niche games when I had the opportunity. I reviewed the games that no-one else would look at — and often in more depth than when other sites acknowledged their existence. I celebrated interesting games through my weekly columns. And here I am, staring down redundancy at the end of next month. So that worked, then.

As the overused cliché goes, games journalism is broken. And I wish I knew how to fix it.

1591: Beat It

I beat the "bad" ending of The Witch and the Hundred Knight this evening. I'm not going to talk about that right now, though, because I feel there's at least one MoeGamer post in that game and its interesting story. What I instead wanted to talk about was the idea of "beating" games.

I love finishing games. I love the satisfaction of fighting the final boss — usually, if the game's sound team has any sense, accompanied by the best piece of music in the game — followed by the story's conclusion and the credits roll. Well-designed games feature satisfying conclusions that wrap everything up nicely, but at the same time leave you a little sad that you'll be leaving the main cast behind. Even poorly designed games can give a palpable sense of relief once they're all over.

Interestingly, though, I don't seem to see an awful lot of people talking about beating games. There's occasional talk of scoring a Platinum trophy — usually from trophy whores who make a point of earning Platinum trophies on even games they don't particularly like — but I very rarely see people publicly expressing satisfaction that they've completed a game, seen its end sequence and have finally achieved some closure.

I wonder why that is? Perhaps it's to do with the excessive spoilerphobia we have on the Internet these days. You can't mention a single plot point from recent popular media — be it games, movies or TV — without someone complaining about spoilers. It's a fair concern, if we're being honest; it's always nice to have a few surprises in an unfamiliar story. But it does make talking about interesting stories extremely challenging at times. How can you talk about School Days without talking about the ending where Kotonoha kills Sekai? How can you talk about Nier without mentioning the bit where it deletes your save file piece by piece in front of you as your character is erased from existence? What discussion of Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory is complete without mentioning the fact that the main villain is a disgruntled, embittered Atari? (Okay, maybe it's just me who cares about that last one.)

Or perhaps people simply don't finish games as much as they used to. And if so, that's rather sad: all those dangling plot threads, ever to be unresolved; all those final bosses, waiting to show you their awesome piece of battle music, ever to remain unfought; all those 20-minute staff rolls left unread.

I'm actually the opposite; I finish a whole lot more games these days than I used to. I remember one of the first games I ever beat — Super Mario World on the Super NES — and it being a huge deal. It was an even bigger deal when I got that magic "96" on the main menu: the 16-bit equivalent of earning a Platinum trophy. Despite the fantastic feeling that came from beating that game once and for all, it would be quite some time before I'd beat any others, though by the time I started getting into point-and-click adventures you couldn't stop me from reaching the end credits of even the most stubborn games (hello, Discworld) if you tried.

I'd be interested to see the statistics for how many people beat particular games. It sort of is possible to get a general idea these days by looking at achievements — the cynical (or observant) might suggest that achievements are more a means of metrics-tracking for developers than an actual reward mechanism for the player, anyway — but it's not always easy to get the global picture using these. I have a strange feeling that a lot of games might get started but never finished by a lot of people, and this can be at least partly attributed to the ridiculous pace with which things come out these days. In some cases, you're barely out of the tutorial levels of one game before the Next Big Thing comes along vying for your attention, and the natural thing to do is to want to try out that Next Big Thing, which leaves the Last Big Thing languishing.

I've had to discipline myself pretty ruthlessly to avoid this going on. Once I start something, I try and finish it — unless I'm really not enjoying myself, in which case I'll abandon it. Spanners have occasionally been thrown in the works by review obligations, but after the end of June I won't have to worry about those any more, meaning I can concentrate on clearing my ample backlog. (And purchasing all the titles I mentioned yesterday, of course, along with a couple of others I'd forgotten about — Mind Zero and Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection). For the most part, this strategy works well; I'm in the good habit of playing a game as much as I find enjoyable, then setting it aside once I'm done, perhaps to be replayed at some time in the future. For games I particularly enjoy or want to show my appreciation to, I make an effort to obtain that Platinum trophy; not only is it satisfying to know I've been rewarded for everything the game is offering rewards for, it also provides the aforementioned feedback to developers that someone, somewhere out there enjoyed their game enough to want to see everything it had to offer.

So, an open question to anyone reading and comment-inclined: how often do you beat games? Do you tend to focus on a single game and play it to completion, or juggle lots of games at the same time? How do you keep track of them all, if so?