1381: The Hand You're Dealt

There's been a whole load of drama recently surrounding resolutions — exactly what resolutions PS4 and Xbox One games will run at; the fact that Deadly Premonition for PC only runs at 720p; the fact that Typing of the Dead renders at 720p even if you set its resolution to 1080p — and I find it very difficult to care.

I mean, sure, I acknowledge and accept the fact that if you've spent a thousand quid or more on a PC — or bought a brand-new next-gen console, for that matter — many people want everything they play to take full advantage of their hardware and look as good as possible… but if it doesn't, I just shrug my shoulders and move on. It ultimately doesn't matter; I can think of very few situations where technical deficiencies have significantly impacted my experience to such a degree that something becomes unplayable or even that word that NeoGAF appears to enjoy throwing around: "unacceptable". (The last was Guild Wars 2, and that was an extreme case; something the game doesn't like about my particular system configuration makes it run at about 5 frames per second, which really is unplayable.)

I wonder if part of the reason I feel like this is the fact that I've spent a significant proportion of time over the past few years playing games that aren't at the technological forefront. I've played a lot of pixel-art indie games, for example, but I've also played low-poly stuff, games from the early 3D era, games on PS2, handheld games and even low-budget PS3 games. Hell, three of my favourite games in recent memory — the Hyperdimension Neptunia series — are some of the most technically flawed titles I've played for a while, struggling to reach even 30 frames per second at a resolution that I'm pretty certain is not 1080p.

It could also be the fact that I grew up with PCs that weren't always the most powerful or the best and as such quickly learned how to optimise detail settings for a good balance between looking good and running smoothly. I remember playing Doom on a 386 and finding that balance; that said, I also remember us getting a 486 and it being like a completely different game.

Yes, it's lovely when something looks beautiful and animates smoothly to boot — one of the best things about upgrading or replacing your PC is trying out something that brought your previous system to its knees and seeing that it runs butter-smooth — but it really doesn't spoil my day in the slightest if something doesn't run at 60 or even 30 frames per second. It's just not something that matters to me in the slightest. For me, the important thing is the actual game itself: is it fun? Is it emotionally engaging? Do I like the characters? Am I enjoying the experience? Do I want to talk about it to friends? Whether or not I can give positive answers to any or all of those questions, "does it run at 60 frames per second?" is not something that even enters my mind at any point.

Note: I'm not saying you shouldn't care about 60 frames per second or 1080p or whatever — it's your decision what to care about, of course. I'm simply giving my take on all this — and it transpires that I don't really give a shit about it at all. I'm happy just to play a new Typing of the Dead, or Deadly Premonition on PC, or… you get the idea.

1380: Suffer Like QWERTY Did?

There's a new Typing of the Dead game out.

There's a sentence I never thought I'd have the opportunity to type truthfully, but here we are on October 29 in the year of Our Lord 2013, and there's a new Typing of the Dead game out.

Lest you're unfamiliar with Typing of the Dead, allow me to explain.

Sega have a franchise known as House of the Dead. Originally, it was one of those big-screen arcade machines that you and a friend point plastic guns at and pretend you're blasting zombies. House of the Dead and its various sequels were notorious for having some of the worst voice acting ever witnessed in a video game, but also for being fun light gun shooters that didn't take themselves too seriously.

The Typing of the Dead, which came out in arcades in 1999 and was followed a couple of years thereafter by Dreamcast and PC ports, was a… varation on House of the Dead 2. Specifically, it replaced the light-gun shooting aspect with what essentially amounted to a series of touch-typing challenges — zombies would shamble towards you with letters, words or phrases attached to them, and in order to defeat them you'd have to type out their letters, words or phrases before they reached you. As the game progressed, the things you had to type got increasingly complex and silly, culminating with a final boss fight in which the ending you got was determined by how honestly you typed out the answers to a series of questions you were presented with.

The Typing of the Dead Overkill, which came out today, does for House of the Dead Overkill what The Typing of the Dead did for House of the Dead 2. In other words, it's pretty much the same game, only you type things out instead of shooting them. And it's glorious.

I never played House of the Dead Overkill when it came out as a Wii and PlayStation Move-based shooter — lightguns have long gone the way of the dodo — but I was dimly aware of the fact that it was Sega taking the inherent silliness of House of the Dead and turning it up to the maximum, producing a game that is refreshingly unafraid to be completely offensive to absolutely anyone and everyone as often as possible, but which underneath its boobylicious, foul-mouthed exterior, is an immensely enjoyable arcade game of the old-school variety.

The comic juxtaposition between the amusingly mundane things you're typing and the profanity-laced dialogue going on the in the background is hilarious, plus I can't not like a game whose three difficulty levels are "Bitch", "Agent" and "Motherfucker". Aside from the humorous aspect, though, Typing of the Dead Overkill seems to be a solid game underneath, too; there's lots of secrets to find in each level, which you need to grab by hitting the Tab key when you see them on screen in the environment, and a combo-based scoring system rewards you for being as accurate, skilful and quick as possible, so there's plenty of potential for enjoyable high-score chasing.

The voice acting isn't quite as bad as that seen in the original House of the Dead games, but while the actors involved are now clearly professionals, it's pretty clear they've been told to ham it up as much as possible. The characters — including the original House of the Dead's hero G — are broadly-painted stereotypes who all call each other "bitch" and "motherfucker" all the time, and the whole thing just revels in its childishness. It's refreshing.

Also, I've just discovered that the game also includes all of House of the Dead Overkill for those who want to play a traditional lightgun-style shooter. Bargain.

1374: Nep-Ko

Now that I've finished Tales of Xillia I am, as promised, once again playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory. I'm now pushing 60 hours of playtime, a significant proportion of the last few of which have been spent doing nothing but non-story content.

And lordy, what a lot of non-story content there is. There's sidequests to do, which tend to have fairly modest rewards but challenge you to battle powerful monsters and master the game's various mechanics. There's a crafting system, which requires you to discover new recipes for various items, then gather the materials for them either from enemies or "harvest points" in dungeons. There's the Scout system, in which you send out numerous NPCs on your behalf to check out dungeons and potentially manipulate the items, enemies, drop rates or experience point gain in particular areas and occasionally discover completely new places. And there's little tricks like earning money by gathering an item called "Invisible Cloth," purchasing a cheap costume, combining it with the aforementioned Invisible Cloth to make a new item of clothing and then selling them for 1.5 million credits a pop.

All of this side stuff is conspiring to prevent me from advancing the game's story. Said story is immensely entertaining as it always has been in the Neptunia series, but Victory's mechanics and optional content are far more solid than even Neptunia mk2, which certainly had plenty of things to do. The combat system has been refined into something that is immensely enjoyable to repeatedly engage in, the difficulty has been ramped up considerably over the rather straightforward mk2, and just chasing down these sidequests and items is extremely addictive.

Although the Neptunia series is widely derided by the mainstream press, I'm consistently impressed by what it's managed to achieve over the course of three games. What initially began as something of a cheap joke at the expense of the games industry and the "console wars" in particular has developed into something much more over time — each of the game's main characters has been developed into their own unique person with a distinctive personality. Okay, there's plenty of standard anime tropes at work, but combined with the fact that these characters are supposed to represent games consoles and manufacturers, it really works; why wouldn't PlayStation be a tsundere who enjoys nothing more than working too hard, and why wouldn't she have a sister afraid of never quite being able to match up? Why wouldn't Nintendo live in a vibrantly-coloured candyland but actually be ruthless, cold and prone to bouts of completely irrational anger?

By nearly 60 hours into Victory, I'm no longer really thinking of the Neptunia cast as "the Sega one, the PlayStation one, the Microsoft one"; they've become great characters in their own right, and their interactions with one another are a real highlight. In fact, such is the popularity and success of the series in its native Japan, it's got its own anime spinoff which I'm curious to watch at some point, and there are several new games on the way, too.

I find it quite odd but also rather pleasing how much this game series has resonated with me since I first picked it up on a whim out of interest one day. "Objectively" speaking — in as much as it's possible to be "objective" when talking about pieces of entertainment — there are far better games out there, both in terms of gameplay and technical proficiency, but something about the adventures of Neptune and the gang has really spoken to me ever since that clunky first game, and has ensured that any time something with the words Hyperdimension Neptunia is released, it's pretty much an instapurchase for me. It's been a while since a "big-name" game has elicited that sort of feeling from me.

1372: The Good Old Days of the App Store

I'd been pondering this a little recently, but I actually confirmed it for myself today: the games on the App Store of today are not a patch on those that were on it when it first went live.

Oh sure, they're technically more impressive, with all manner of lovely "console-quality" (whatever the fuck that means) graphics and download sizes that will easily fill up a lesser phone, but there's really something missing from modern App Store games that was there in spades in early titles.

The title that really drove it home for me was a game called Tilt to Live. This was a score-attack action game that some described as "the iPhone's Geometry Wars". It's not quite an accurate comparison, since Geometry Wars is a twin-stick shooter and Tilt to Live doesn't involve any shooting whatsoever, but they share a couple of important similarities: they're easy to understand and super-addictive.

Tilt to Live, lest you've never had the pleasure, sees you controlling a small arrowhead-shaped… thing as it attempts to fend off the unwanted attentions of its red dot rivals. In order to destroy red dots, you have to pick up powerups, each of which has a specific effect. Nukes explode at the spot where you picked them up, for example, taking anything caught in the circular Missile Command-style explosion with them, while lasers take a moment to charge before firing a broad beam in the direction you're travelling. As you progress through the game, you unlock more and more different weapons which are then available from the outset in subsequent playthroughs; the more weapons you have, the easier it is to maintain a combo of dot-killing without stopping, and consequently attain higher scores.

Tilt to Live is so genius because it's built for its platform. It uses nothing more than the iPhone's built-in accelerometer, tuned to perfection, and all you have to do is tilt your device around like one of those old "Labyrinth" games. Nothing more than that. There are a couple of other modes, but in essence, all you're doing in each of them is tilting to move your arrow and attempting to avoid red dots. Simple. Addictive. The perfect mobile game.

Tilt to Live was far from the only game from the App Store's early years I have fond memories of, though. The early stuff from ngmoco was fantastic, for example — titles like Dr. Awesome (essentially tilt-controlled Qix), Dropship (Defender meets Thrust meets Geometry Wars) and Rolando were all top-notch games that were pretty much essential purchases in the early days of the App Store — everyone who had an iPhone downloaded them, and Apple even featured them in advertising for both the iPhone and iPod touch, the latter of which it looked for a while like Apple was attempting to position as a serious handheld gaming device.

So what happened? Why have I largely lost interest in what the App Store has to offer today? Well, this is probably a gross oversimplification of the matter, but essentially I believe things started to go downhill with the addition of in-app purchases to the App Store.

I remember being skeptical about the supposed benefits of in-app purchases when the upcoming new feature was first announced — it sounded awfully like what triple-A publishers were doing with downloadable content for console games, and that was something that a number of teams had proven could be done very, very wrong. Oddly, initially only paid apps could have in-app purchases, meaning that free apps were always just that — free, though sometimes ad-supported.

Nowadays, of course, the words "free" on an app more often than not mean that you can download the app in question for free, but are often then expected to cough up extra, particularly in the case of games. In-app purchases have gotten so out of control on iOS that it's rarer not to see a game have a "Get More Gold" button allowing you to purchase in-game currency. And, of course, the moment you see that "Get More Gold" button, you have to start questioning whether the game has been deliberately made more grindy and inconvenient — experts call this "adding friction" or "fun pain" — in the name of squeezing a few extra pennies out of you.

Herein lies the issue, I think: modern App Store games are designed to be money-making machines that trick people into thinking they're having fun, then encourage them to open their wallets to have even more fun. It's all a ruse, of course; the "fun" is more often than not an illusion created through carefully-paced rewards and ego-massaging, and the "pain" is created by suddenly denying the player access to these rewards that they've come to accept. It's good business design, but bad game design.

Compare and contrast with a game from the App Store's earlier era such as Tilt to Live, or ngmoco's early games. These are games designed for pure fun — and more to the point, they're highly creative, interesting, distinctive games. Not one of them is a predictable "tap on everything, then wait until you get a push notification to tap on everything again in three hours" title; while some are inspired by classic retro games (or even more recent games such as Loco Roco in the case of Rolando), they each put their own twist on things, respecting the player's time and wallet in the process — in other words, once you bought these games, they wouldn't ask you for money again, except in some rare instances such as in Tilt to Live where the developers later added a whole new game mode and sold it rather than bundling it in as a free update.

One of the saddest sights in the App Store is, I think, the massive decline in quality that ngmoco's titles have taken since those early days. Games like the aforementioned Dr. Awesome and Rolando were genuinely excellent games that helped to define the platform; now, however, all ngmoco does is churn out some of the most tedious, derivative, copycat titles in the entire industry, all in the name of exploiting the social gaming bubble. RIP ngmoco; I thought you were going to be the next big thing in creative indie games at one point, but it was not to be.

True creativity and distinctiveness in the App Store isn't dead; but with well over a million apps and games on the App Store now, and the charts dominated by free-to-play titles that have effectively bought their rankings rather than earned them, it's getting harder and harder to find them. How sad.

1370: What's Up, Red?

As predicted, I completed Tales of Xillia (like, Platinum completed) earlier, but prior to jumping back into Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory I decided to give Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller a try.

I've had my eye on Cognition ever since it was a modest Kickstarter campaign from a group previously best-known for a(n admittedly very good) King's Quest spinoff. It sounded interesting for a number of reasons: firstly, that it was a modern adventure game — the supposed "death" of the point-and-click genre was somewhat exaggerated — and secondly, that Jane Jensen (of King's Quest VI and Gabriel Knight fame) was acting as "story consultant". While this isn't quite the same as having her actually write it, it would, I thought, at least provide a greater-than-average chance of the game having a decent, well-written story.

I played through the first of the game's four episodes earlier, and was not disappointed. Given that most people I know who have played it seem to think that the first episode is the weakest, I'm very excited to see what follows.

Cognition follows the adventures of FBI agent Erica Reed, a feisty redhead haunted by her inability to save her brother from a serial killer three years prior to the events of the main plot. Erica's a little unusual, however, in that she has a strange supernatural ability that enables her to relive and even manifest memories from the past simply by touching things. Initially, all she can do is touch an object or body and witness a short snippet of what happened, but as the game proceeds, she learns a couple of new abilities under the tutelage of the Wise Old Mystic Woman Who Runs the Antique Shop.

It would have been easy for Cognition to play up its supernatural aspect and even rely on it too much to carry its mystery story, but Erica's abilities are used sparingly, subtly and effectively. It's rarely a "magic bullet" that allows her to do things a good forensics team wouldn't be able to do given enough time; it is, more often than not, used as a means of ushering the story along by providing clues.

It's much more complex than just flashbacks, though; in one of the best puzzles in the game, you're tasked with using your "regression" ability to reconstruct the memories of a key witness who can't remember some important information you need. By collecting information and using it to prompt the witness to remember things, you're able to manipulate the images of his memories to provide specific details — the colour of someone's dress, the time a photo was taken, what was written on a note — that ultimately lead you to the answers you seek. It's a clever system that works really well without resorting to mystical mumbo-jumbo — it's just something Erica can do and while it's clear that part of the plot is going to revolve around her struggling with these visions, for the most part she accepts it as just another tool in her arsenal.

Jensen's influence is apparent in the characters, all of whom are strongly defined. Erica herself initially appears to be somewhat "flat" personality-wise, but over time it becomes clear that she is, more often than not, being quite deadpan, and when she's around people she likes and trusts, she opens up and shows her more good-humoured side.

One of the things I'm particularly enamoured with is that I'm getting a slight "Dr. Naomi" vibe from Cognition. It's not quite the same, of course — Erica is an FBI field agent compared to Naomi's forensic investigator — but there are certain similarities. Most notably, on a number of occasions you're "quizzed" by characters on what you've learned from your investigations, with progression dependent on you giving the correct answers. The penalty for giving an incorrect answer isn't as harsh as in Trauma Team — there are relatively few moments in the game where you can die or "fail" — but it's nice to have a game check that you're paying attention in a suitable, plausible context.

I'm intrigued to try the subsequent episodes now. I have a feeling that four won't be enough!

1369: Closing Tales

Finally closing in on the end of my second playthrough of Tales of Xillia, and it's led to some interesting observations.

First up, Xillia's handling of New Game Plus is well-implemented, enjoyable and unusual. As you play, you unlock a number of "Titles" by completing various in-game achievements such as using certain abilities a particular number of times, completing various numbers of sidequests and passing various milestones in the story. Depending on the difficulty of (or endurance/patience required for) each of these titles, you're awarded various amounts of "Grade" points. These are useless until you've completed the game once, at which point you can spend them when you start a New Game Plus.

The things you can spend them on vary from carrying across various things like items, levels, money, shop levels and so on, or they can be spent on bonuses such as boosters to experience and money gain. By carefully spending your Grade, you can put together a "package" of bonuses that makes your subsequent playthroughs of the game work the way you want them to.

Personally, I'm playing through with 10x the normal amount of experience, double the normal amount of money gained and carrying over the "Devil's Arms" special weapons that I acquired through a sidequest in the first playthrough. This made the game quite easy, so I bumped up the difficulty to Hard, and it's now providing a suitably-paced challenge even though I've been well over the recommended levels for most of the game, and will cap out at 99 before taking on the final boss in my second playthrough.

What's also interesting about Xillia is its two-protagonist structure. For probably about 80% of the time, the game is the same regardless of whether you chose Jude or Milla at the outset of the game, but the points where it splits are interestingly distinct from one another. For those who are yet to play the game but who are planning to, I strongly recommend you play Jude's storyline first, if only for the fact that a certain event that occurs partway through the story is infinitely more dramatic from Jude's perspective than it is from Milla's. I'll spare you the details in the name of spoiler avoidance, however.

Playing both stories gives you an interesting amount of context and insight into the two characters, though. Jude's story gives you a good understanding of the overall events of the game, while Milla's focuses a little more on her as an individual character — thankfully, she's an interesting character in her own right who is more than worthy of a little specific exploration.

Reviews of Xillia criticised it somewhat for being "clichéd" or "typical JRPG" in its narrative, but this is a lazy descriptor that tends to be levelled at pretty much every JRPG out there — and I'm not even sure how true it is, anyway. Xillia's cast is unconventional and interesting, consisting as it does of a broad mix of ages from 12 to 62, male and female. The adventure they go on boils down to the usual "do a couple of laps of the world" but the setting is interesting and well-realised, and by the end of it you have a thorough understanding of the setting's culture, spiritual beliefs and society. It's a convincing game world that it's easy to immerse yourself in; it feels like far more than just a backdrop to cutscenes, though I would argue that the areas between the major towns are a bit bland at times.

By far the highlight of the game, though, is the sense of companionship and camaraderie between the party members, emphasised by the optional "skits" that pop up in response to your actions throughout the game. There's a real sense of these characters being real people, real friends and sometimes rivals, and they've been written with a wonderful sense of chemistry between them. It's one of the most enjoyable RPG casts I've had the pleasure of hanging out with for 90 hours or so, and I'll be sorry to leave them behind; but, of course, at least some of them will be back in the upcoming Tales of Xillia 2, so all is not lost.

Should polish off the rest of Xillia tomorrow, and then I can finally get back to Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, which I was really enjoying prior to me having to play Xillia for review.

1368: Confessions of a Failed Mayor

I played it for a good few weeks on its original release in the name of understanding what the hell everyone was so excited about, but I have to admit defeat and confess that I didn't really like Animal Crossing all that much.

I'm not saying it's bad, per se, more that I just don't really understand the appeal of it. For sure, it does what social gaming companies like to call "invest and express" gameplay far better than any of the shite churned out by Zynga ever will — and without continually begging the player for money, more to the point — but the trouble is that what Animal Crossing offered just wasn't enough to hold my attention.

There's lots to do in Animal Crossing, for sure, and the game drip-feeds you new things happening in your town every few real-time days to keep you coming back. MMO-style special events allow you to compete against your friends at catching bugs or whatever, and the game world expands a little over time — though not by much.

Trouble is, most of the stuff to do in Animal Crossing wasn't very interesting or enjoyable to me. By my last few days playing, I had settled into a tedious routine of picking fruit, going to the island, catching as many bugs as I could put in the box, selling them all, then paying off part of my loan. I'd then close the game because I'd found the experience so mind-numbing that I didn't really want to play any more. It was feeling more like a job than a game; I was feeling obliged to earn money just to give to Tom Nook, and it just wasn't enjoyable. By the time I'd done my daily "chores" I just wanted to turn the game off and do something else — usually go to sleep, since I inevitably put off said chores until last thing in the evening.

This is, of course, arguably the whole point of Animal Crossing. It's a reflection on modern life and the joyless things we do to get ourselves through the day with enough money to put food on the table. Of course, in Animal Crossing you can't actually starve to death or be turfed out of your house for being unable to keep up repayments on your mortgage, but the feeling of guilt is there — that feeling that you should be doing something more, that feeling that you should be pursuing your ambitions but instead you're trapped in a rut barely scraping by unless you make some sacrifices in the name of being more profitable. (In Animal Crossing's case, the sacrifices I was having to make included "playing games that I found more fun," which was ultimately not something I was willing to give up.)

Multiplayer, too, was confusing. While it was neat to be able to invite friends over, ultimately all I found myself doing when I visited a friend's town was admire how their trees and houses were in slightly different places to my own trees and houses, and nod knowingly if they had discovered how to make "paths" using designs printed on the floor. I never knew what I was supposed to do when I was in someone else's town; there was no structure to it, and no real incentive to actually play together beyond pinching each other's fruit and planting it, or occasionally doing that hilarious thing you can do with Pitfall Seeds. The only multiplayer stuff I found enjoyable were the structured "tours" on the island, and even those weren't all that interesting or competitive to me.

I certainly don't begrudge people their enjoyment of Animal Crossing. I just… don't get it. And I'm cool with that; time to move on.

Pokémon, on the other hand, that I'm starting to come around to. But that's a story for another day.

1367: Alpha

Eurogamer published the first of its "alpha and beta reviews" earlier on the subject of Peter Molyneux's possibly rubbish new God game Godus.

The posting of said review, coupled with the accompanying justification for it (including why it doesn't carry a score) immediately prompted the usual snark on Twitter. This made me gnash my teeth in frustration.

After the previous paragraph, it will probably not surprise you to learn that I'm actually in favour of Eurogamer doing what it's doing — and no, not just because I work for their sister site USgamer. No, I actually think this is an important thing, particularly given recent developments in the growing "early access" model of selling games — and the fact that some people apparently aren't aware of said developments.

You're probably already familiar with the basic "early access" programme — buy something, often for a cut-down price, and get immediate access to an early version of the game so you can 1) try it out before everyone else does and 2) provide some feedback that can actively help with development. It worked for Minecraft, it worked for Frozen Synapse and there's plenty of others out there it's worked for too.

Here's the strange new development, though: a number of free-to-play games have put themselves in Steam's Early Access catalogue. Nothing unusual, you might think, until you notice that they're actually charging for you to play this early version. In effect, you're paying to be part of a closed alpha/beta test for a game that won't cost any money to download when it's finished.

This is weird, no?

Okay, in most cases you're not just paying for access — in the case of Snow, you get some bonus items and in the case of Magicka: Wizard Wars' upper tiers, you get a full copy of Crusader Kings II for considerably less than its full retail price — but it still seems a little odd; I can't get away from the fact that you're "buying" a free-to-play game.

And this is why Eurogamer's idea of specifically reviewing commercially available alpha and beta versions is a sound one. It's something distinct from a hands-on preview — which is what most of the snark from earlier was comparing it to — because it discusses something that people can actually hand over money for right now, despite the fact it's not finished. A hands-on preview typically comes from something that not everyone has access to, be it a play with the game at a developer's office, a behind-closed-doors look at a trade show, or even a report on a demo from a consumer show such as Eurogamer Expo that not everyone would have had the opportunity to attend for whatever reasons; by contrast, an alpha/beta review lets people know whether or not it's worth spending their hard-earned money on something that may or may not cost a different amount of money when it's finished being developed — or indeed something that may be completely free when it's finished.

Being informed is important, particularly when it comes to making a decision about whether or not to spend money on something. I think we'll start to see more of this sort of thing in the near future, and it's going to be an important part of how we look at the development process of games in the coming years.

1362: Caged Animal

I like David Cage's stuff, and I'm not ashamed to say that.

I shouldn't have to point that out, really, but it seems it's become rather fashionable to bash Cage's work in journalist/critic circles recently and frankly I'm not altogether sure why — it seems to be one of those things that has just become accepted without much argument. Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain and now Beyond: Two Souls all have their flaws, sure, but they're also some of the most genuinely impressive interactive stories I've ever had the pleasure of playing through. (I haven't finished Beyond yet, but given that it's had me absolutely glued to the screen for the last several hours, I feel I can say that with some confidence.)

Let's talk about Beyond, because it's had enormously mixed reviews.

Beyond is the spiritual successor to both Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit in that it combines Heavy Rain's realistic appearance with the more supernatural aspects of Fahrenheit's narrative. It's got a peculiar structure in that it jumps back and forth in time rather than unfolding chronologically like Heavy Rain, but there is at least a narrative framing device in place to justify it. (Whether or not you think it's a good narrative framing device is a matter of opinion, but I have no objections to it.)

Like its predecessors, Beyond is an interactive movie above all else. That is, this is largely David Cage's story, and you have the opportunity to influence it along the way with your action or inaction rather than having complete freedom. In this sense, it is more like a fully animated visual novel than a traditional "game" per se, and the experience is crammed full of contextual actions and quick-time events. These are, much like the interactive movie style as a whole, very much a matter of taste.

One of the most common complaints levelled at Cage's work is that he might as well be making movies. He might, since he's clearly a talented director and cinematographer, even if — arguably — his writing skills don't quite match. However, I've still found all his works considerably more interesting, enjoyable and engaging than a traditional movie for the simple fact that even the relatively limited interaction offered by contextual actions and quick-time events means that you're involved in the game. You're physically doing things to participate in the game; perhaps you're not controlling the character with complete freedom, but that doesn't matter — you're determining whether they succeed or fail at something, and you're making choices that actually have an impact. It's the same reason a visual novel, where 90% of the "gameplay" is you pressing a button to advance the text, can still be compelling.

This isn't to put down games with strong emergent narrative or freedom to do as you please, of course — my recent stories about Grand Theft Auto V should be enough to convince you of that — but as a card-carrying narrative junkie, I'd always, always much rather play a game with a strong, pre-composed story and perhaps limited freedom than something where I have the ability to go completely off-piste and run riot.

Short version: if you liked Cage's past work, you should most definitely pick up a copy of Beyond: Two Souls. More thoughts — both here and at USgamer — when I've actually beaten it.

1359: Lady of the Wind

I'd been putting it off, but I finally beat the Garuda boss fight in Final Fantasy XIV this evening, renowned by some as one of the harder battles in the game's main story.

The "Primal" fights that you engage in over the course of the main quest's narrative are genuinely thrilling engagements that reward cooperation, communication and everyone knowing what they're doing. Sure, the fact that there's the possibility of instakill moves is frustrating, but with a good party gathered you shouldn't fall foul of them, particularly if you've taken the time to either discuss the fight with more experienced combatants beforehand, or learned from past mistakes.

The thing I've been most impressed with by the Primal battles in particular but also a number of other setpiece engagements in the game is how exciting they are. This is something I'm not altogether used to in MMOs, many of which are focused on doing things by rote as efficiently as possible. Final Fantasy XIV's combat, while not deviating hugely from the template set by World of Warcraft, requires that you stay on your toes, survey your surroundings and move around the battlefield according to what's going on. In the case of the Garuda fight, there's a lot of cowering behind pillars (until the horrid harpy destroys them all, anyway) and then ensuring that you don't get sucked into the increasingly tumultuous storm all around you during the latter stages of the fight.

I played through most of World of Warcraft up through Wrath of the Lich King and I can only think of a few fights I participated in that elicited the same feeling of heart-in-mouth excitement as these Final Fantasy XIV battles. The difference is that in World of Warcraft's case they were all high-level or endgame content, while Final Fantasy XIV spreads them out over the course of its entire main quest. And then you get to do them all again, but harder, once you hit the level cap. They're some beautifully designed encounters, and I'm interested to see how Yoshi-P and the team intend to top them in the coming content updates.

It's that heart-in-mouth feeling that feels most authentically Final Fantasy to me. I can vividly recall the first few times I beat Final Fantasy VII (because I beat it a whole bunch of times in my teenage years) — every single time I reached that final cutscene before the final boss ("And Sephiroth! … To the settling of everything!" — God bless that game's appalling translation) I would feel real, honest-to-goodness excitement. I'd get a delightful feeling of "butterflies in the stomach" before the screen went all swirly and Birth of a God started playing, and it would continue right through the final fights, even if I was hopelessly overlevelled, which I usually was.

In fact, a good JRPG (hell, game, full stop) these days will still give me that feeling, and if a game makes me feel that way I'll immediately think considerably more fondly of it than those that don't. It'll be a sad day for me when I can't get fired up by a game's final confrontation at all — I hope that day never comes, and I shall continue to enjoy that pleasurably anxious feeling for as long as I can in the meantime.