1335: Perrrrssssppp

Hello! We fixed our Internet, no thanks to BT; Andie called 'em up earlier and they wanted to spend several days "testing our line" before calling us back on Tuesday, presumably with an engineer visit to follow after that if necessary — which it probably would be, since it appeared to be our fibre modem that was borked. Thankfully, a past example of BT's incompetence meant that we did, in fact, actually have two fibre modems, so we tried the old one and it turns out it still works. Win.

Anyway, enough of that. What I want to talk about today is the PSP.

The PSP came out in 2005, some five years after the launch of the PS2 and a year before the PS3. It failed to make a significant impact in the West upon its original launch and has sometimes been considered one of the problem children of Sony's lineup. There's a degree of justification for that — its reliance on a proprietary physical media format (UMDs); a laudable but ultimately doomed attempt to jump into the "all-digital" future well before the world was ready for it (PSP Go); a distinct lack of prominent marketing — but in the intervening years since its original launch, the PSP has actually become one of my favourite systems.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about it is the fact that after eight years, it's still relevant and doesn't show any sign of going away any time soon — and it has the Vita to thank for that. Vita is the best way to play PSP games due to its lovely OLED screen and its second thumbstick — which, when playing PSP games, can be assigned to emulate buttons, allowing for a fairly convincing fudging of dual-stick control for games that previously only supported a single stick — and as such has, in many cases, given the surprisingly vast PSP library of games a whole new lease of life.

This isn't a case of "it's backward compatible so you can still play old games" either — people are legitimately still making brand new games for the PSP. Just recently we've had Sweet Fuse, for example, and JRPG fans were all aflutter recently when it was announced that Xseed and Carpe Fulgur would be bringing the second part of the magnificent Trails in the Sky to English speakers in the near future.

Access to the entire PSP digital library is, for me, a convincing enough reason in itself to own a Vita — as I noted above, PSP games look and play great on Vita, with the only slight issue being that you can't play physical versions of games due to Vita's lack of a UMD drive. It's also something you can point to any time people complain that Vita has no games — a complaint which is getting more and more inaccurate by the day, incidentally.

So although the PSP is very much one of Sony's more troublesome children, I have to give the company a huge amount of credit for creating a platform that has endured as long as it has. The PSP has some fantastic games, if you've never explored them for yourself, and you might just find yourself discovering some new favourites. And with the impending release of Vita TV — which I'll be very surprised if we don't see in the West — all those of you who don't like playing on handhelds for whatever reason will be able to play these great games on your TV, too. Which sounds pretty great to me.

Now I'm going to go sit in bed and play Sweet Fuse.

1332: Sweet Otome

I started playing the PSP game Sweet Fuse: At Your Side after finishing Corpse Party and it's been an interesting experience, particularly given my gaming background.

Sweet Fuse is what's known as an "otome game", you see — in stark contrast to "bishoujo games" that tend to have a male protagonist and a veritable harem of dateable female characters, otome games are the complete opposite: female protagonist, veritable harem of dateable male characters. (There are also yuri variations where the female protagonist can date female characters, much as there are yaoi titles for men, where a male protagonist can date male characters. But let's not get off the point: Sweet Fuse is an otome game in its purest sense.)

I was somewhat intrigued by the prospect of playing Sweet Fuse since although I'm no stranger to playing female characters in games, where romantic options exist I will still generally pair up my heroine with another woman in preference to anything else — my Dragon Age character made a beeline for Leliana, for example, while my LadyHawke in Dragon Age II went for Merrill, as I recall. Sweet Fuse, being an otome game, was going to make me (or rather, my female protagonist) date a male character and like it. And although I'm fairly open-minded about such things, I confess I did feel somewhat skeptical about whether or not I'd feel the same degree of emotional engagement seeing a relationship grow from the opposite way around to how it's usually depicted in this sort of game.

Why shouldn't I, though? In your average dating sim or visual novel, you are not playing as the protagonist; you're along for the ride and making occasional decisions on their behalf. You see stuff unfold and occasionally get frustrated at the protagonist not doing things exactly as you would have done them — but therein lies a sense of dramatic tension. In practice, the only thing that is different between a bishoujo game and an otome game is the fact that the voices are all female in one and all male in the other; and the same for the on-screen portraits of other characters.

That is a reasonably big difference, to be fair, but the fact is that in both cases, you're still watching two people who aren't you get together rather than pretending to get off with some virtual girl/dude from the first person. In that sense, it's not really any different to reading a novel with a love story, or watching a movie with love scenes. So why should playing as a protagonist of the opposite sex who becomes attracted to people who are the same sex as you make you feel weird?

Answer: it doesn't. In the admittedly limited time I've spent following the adventures of Saki Inafune and her six gentlemen friends as they attempt to defuse the bombs a terrorist who is also a pig secreted in her uncle Keiji Inafune's theme park — yes, that is indeed the creator of Mega Man — I've been surprised to find myself feeling much the same as I do when playing a bishoujo game.

Specifically, I've found myself playing "favourites" with the cast of dateable characters. I can't quite pin down if it's due to actually finding them attractive, or simply liking their characters, but I've naturally found myself gravitating towards one of the characters in my first playthrough, much like I would in a typical bishoujo game. (I tend to "go with my gut" for my first playthrough of this type of game, then go back and systematically pursue the remainder of the cast/endings one at a time in order to see everything the game and its stories have to offer.)

It helps that Sweet Fuse has a cast of male characters easily as diverse — possibly more so, even — than your average bishoujo game. There's the cold, stern detective; the young boy band idol; the aggressive, overly-compensating male escort (who reminds me of Kanji from Persona 4 to a distracting degree); the world-weary reporter; the shut-in; and the "mystical guy". The latter, a guy named Urabe, is the one I have my eye on for this first playthrough, but we'll see where it goes.

I'm only on the second "stage" of my first playthrough so far so there's probably quite a way to go yet. There's some interesting mechanics in the game that I'll talk about a bit more on another occasion. In the meantime, if you have the slightest interest in character-centric, story-focused games — and a PSP or Vita — then you could certainly do far worse than check out Sweet Fuse. Full review coming soon over on USgamer.

1330: Closed Book

Andie (and some of you, I'm sure) will undoubtedly be delighted to hear that I finished Corpse Party: Book of Shadows last night, which means I will no longer be sitting in the dark before going to sleep with the sounds of Japanese schoolgirls screaming emanating from my headphones.

So what of Book of Shadows as a whole? Well, I enjoyed it — as much as it is possible to "enjoy" a Corpse Party game, anyway — and, as I noted the other day, I particularly appreciated its unconventional narrative structure. For those who didn't read that post the other day and are too lazy to click on that link, Book of Shadows essentially acts as a collection of "deleted scenes" and alternate endings to the original Corpse Party for the most part, with each chapter focusing on a different group of characters and either exploring "what if?" scenarios if things had gone differently in the original game, or acting as a means of expanding on and exploring the stories of a number of incidental characters who were either already dead by the time the first Corpse Party's story unfolded, or who showed up in the game's "Extra" chapters after you'd finished it.

One of the strengths of the original Corpse Party was how well-realised all of the characters were, and this continues in Book of Shadows, even in the chapters that explore characters other than the main cast of the first game. Each character is an interesting person to spend time with, and the fact the game is structured as more of a visual novel than the original game was means that there's a lot more in the way of narration from each chapter's protagonist than there was in the original. This lets you get inside the head of these characters to a much greater degree than previously, and this, coupled with the again fantastic Japanese voice acting, makes for an experience where you really get a strong sense of who these characters are, what they're like and how they're handling the horrific situation in which they find themselves. And, as I noted in my previous post, there's not usually a happy ending, since by the time the cast of the first Corpse Party arrive at Heavenly Host Elementary School, most of the people they come across are dead.

Once you've worked your way through all the main chapters of Book of Shadows, you unlock a hidden final chapter called Blood Drive. (If you've finished the game and haven't unlocked this, you either need save data from the original Corpse Party on your memory card or to see all of the Wrong Ends from all the previous chapters before it will unlock.)

Blood Drive is the "true" sequel to the original Corpse Party, following on directly from where the previous game left off. Unfortunately, the chapter Blood Drive is but a preview for the game Blood Drive, which is not yet even out in Japan, meaning that the game ends on one hell of a cliffhanger that won't be getting resolved in the immediate future. Still, the amount of "oh NO!" I felt as the credits rolled for the last time is testament to how engaging I found the game as a whole — I liked these characters, enjoyed spending time with them and felt bad for them when they suffered, and I really, really want to see how the story continues (or ends?) in Blood Drive.

Unfortunately, I'll be waiting a while yet. Still, it's not as if I'm short of other things to play right now — not least of which is Idea Factory's Sweet Fuse, which I've been looking forward to for a while.

Sachiko-san, onegaishimasu. Sachiko-san, onegaishimasu. Sachik– shit, how many times was I supposed to chant it again?

1326: Books with Shadows In Them

I have — I believe — two more chapters to go on Corpse Party: Book of Shadows, the sequel to one of my favourite PSP games, and, like its predecessor, one of the most emotionally engaging games I've ever played.

Book of Shadows is much more of a visual novel than its predecessor was — the RPG-style wandering around and pressing X on things is all gone now, to be replaced with either straight-up "read many, many pages of narration and dialogue" or, slightly less frequently, with some first-person perspective wandering and mild point and click adventuring.

The change in gameplay style isn't the most interesting thing about Book of Shadows, though; instead, it's the narrative structure. Rather than telling one continuous story like its predecessor, Book of Shadows is more of a spin-off than a true sequel — at least, as I understand it, anyway, until the final chapter — and instead chooses to spend its time telling self-contained stories that are either prequels to the events of Corpse Party, or "alternate universe" tales that answer a number of hypothetical "what if?" scenarios. For example, one scenario explores what would have happened if a character who died in the original Corpse Party had instead been rescued; another fleshes out one of the original game's "wrong ends" by showing you exactly what unpleasantness happened to a particular character; another still looks at the story of some incidental characters from one of Corpse Party's "extra" scenarios.

The fact that the game is being so experimental and exploratory in its various "short stories" is, in itself, interesting, but an even more intriguing thing about it is that the "correct" ending for each of the chapters is not necessarily a "good" one. Indeed, in many cases, all of the possible outcomes are filled with death, pain and suffering, but only one of them is the "correct" one that allows you to proceed to the next chapter. It's honestly surprising to see something really quite horrible happen to a particular character — even though I was expecting it, given the context — and for the game to then cheerfully announce that I had "cleared" that particular chapter.

This idea of a conclusion to a chapter not necessarily being a happy one is something the first game played with — the "true" ending to the first chapter of the original Corpse Party often has people reaching for the "reload" button the first time they see it — but Book of Shadows really runs with it. It's something that it's interesting to see games experimenting with, since most games still take the "happy ending" as the default, "best" or only option, and it's pretty rare to play something that genuinely ends on a downer. (Of course, I don't know how Book of Shadows as a whole concludes, but I have the distinct impression that at least one or more of the characters will probably not get out unscathed.) There are a few exceptions, of course — Conker's Bad Fur Day being one of the most surprising, best examples I can remember — but for the most part it's still quite rare to come across something deliberately designed to bum you out. (You have achieved a trophy: "Pass the Kleenex." Wait, that sounds wrong.)

Anyway, two more chapters and I can stop freaking myself out with this game — there's a deliciously uncomfortable, oppressive atmosphere about the whole game that makes it quite "hard work" to play, but it's enjoyable in that perverse sort of way good horror is. Next on the agenda, portable-wise, anyway, is Sweet Fuse, aka That Game Where You Play as Keiji Inafune's Niece.

1322: Online Gamers Aren't Always Jerks

Sep 1 -- Online Gamers People who play games online are always dickwads, right?

Wrong. For starters, if you've ever taken that attitude, it's entirely possible that you aren't a dickwad yourself and just simply find the prospect of coming face to face with a dickwad distasteful — and thus it stands to reason that there are probably other people out there like you. (You may also take that attitude because you're a dickwad yourself, and use it as an excuse to behave like a dickwad. If that is the case, I'd encourage you to take a good, long, hard look at yourself, and perhaps indulge in some self-flagellation until you see the error of your ways.)

Anyway, I have a specific story that happened today — one that filled me with a pleasant amount of hope. It was only a little event in the grand scheme of things, but it was one where I felt happy after it had transpired.

A little context, first: Final Fantasy XIV allows you to play cooperatively with other players in one of two ways: either forming a party with them manually, or by letting a mechanic called the Duty Finder match you up with people who are looking to complete the same challenges. The advantage of the former option is that you can get together with people you know, or at least people on the same server with whom you'll be able to communicate with afterwards. The advantage of the latter option is that it allows you to play with the entire player base of the game, rather than just the 5,000 (maximum concurrent players at the time of writing) present on your specific server. Both approaches have drawbacks, though: in the former case, it can often be difficult to find people who are available at the same time who want to do the same thing; in the latter case, you're usually paired up with complete strangers, with all the inherent risks that carries.

Earlier today, I took on one of Final Fantasy XIV's dungeons with a party of random people found through the Duty Finder. Things were going reasonably well to begin with — though I would have preferred that the tank mark targets to help mages like me know what order to set fire to things — but after a while I started to notice one of the players behaving a little strangely.

Her in-game name was "Amelia," and she was a black mage like me. She'd obviously run the dungeon before, as she was regularly charging ahead well before the rest of us had got our bearings — sometimes even causing enemies to start attacking before we were ready. Partway through the dungeon, I could see her continually running off in the opposite direction to us, only to come running back when the tank started the next combat. I could tell she was getting frustrated, but she wasn't saying anything for some reason. So, once the next combat had finished, I spoke up.

"Amelia," I typed. "If there's something you'd like to show us, please say something rather than just charging off by yourself. Thanks!"

I gritted my teeth and was prepared for a barrage of abuse. A lot of online players don't like being told how to play the game and get very defensive if someone criticises them. I was all set for "Amelia" to start yelling at me, or even to quit the party in a huff. It wouldn't be the first time I had seen something happen.

What happened next surprised me.

"Yeah," she replied. "I was just thinking that myself."

The rest of the party stopped — the tank hesitated before pulling in the next group of enemies — and I could feel virtual eyes on me.

"Communication helps," I typed. "Is there some treasure down there or something?" I asked, referring to her continual attempts to run off to the south.

"Yes," she replied quickly. "There's two chests down there."

"Okay," I typed. "Let's go get those before we go any further then."

After that, we followed Amelia's lead and, sure enough, found our way to some extra enemies and some treasure chests. I was sure to thank her for her help, and when it came to time to fight the boss at the end of the dungeon, she volunteered some helpful information that ensured we were able to take it down without too much difficulty.

Ultimately, a bit of communication helped rescue a party that was at serious risk of falling apart. I'm not-so-secretly quite proud of the fact that I was the one to initiate communication and help hold things together — and I was very pleasantly surprised to discover "Amelia" was receptive to the things I was saying, and apparently knew she wasn't handling things as well as she could have done.

So wherever you are now, "Amelia," thanks. And I hope we get the chance to play together again soon.

1318: Cooperative Collective

I probably don't need to tell you this by now, but Final Fantasy XIV is really great, predictable MMO launch issues aside.

One thing I've been very pleasantly surprised with is how well it handles group cooperative content. This is something that its predecessor, Final Fantasy XI, did not handle as well as it could — which was unfortunate, since progression in Final Fantasy XI was pretty much dependent on you being able to reliably get into a group of other players.

Final Fantasy XIV has a nifty system called the Duty Finder, which is essentially a cross-server matchmaking system that picks up players who are looking to play a specific part of the game, groups them together in an appropriately balanced party, then sends you on your way to do the thing you said you wanted to do. It's a good system, though you can sometimes be waiting for up to half an hour or more depending on what type of character you play.

If you're unfamiliar with the way massively multiplayer online RPGs tend to do things, there's a fairly standard setup for a productive, cooperative party to complete cooperative content, and that is this: at least one "tank", who is designed to take the brunt of the damage from enemies and protect the other party members; at least one healer, whose role is self-explanatory; and the rest of the slots taken up by damage dealers, whose role is also self-explanatory. In Final Fantasy XIV, you'll either be in a "Light Party," which is made up of four members (one tank, one healer, two damage dealers) or a "Full Party," which is, I believe, eight people — though I'm yet to encounter anything that requires that many people.

Early to mid-level content is based on playing in a Light Party which has a few benefits: firstly, it's easier to gather four people together than eight; secondly, it helps everyone in the party understand what their role is and see how they're contributing to the group effort. In larger parties, it can sometimes be difficult to understand exactly what you're actually doing. If you're one of just four people, each of whom has a clearly defined role, however, you can see the effect you're having.

The established party structure has one unfortunate side-effect, though, and that is the fact that it's easy to assume that completing challenges will be impossible if you don't have all the requisite members. This isn't always true, as my experiences this evening proved.

A group of us — three "Free Company" (guild) members and a random fourth person — had entered the dungeon Halatali using the Duty Finder. All was going reasonably well until I had an unfortunate crash, and it took me a few minutes to get back into the game. When I returned, the random fourth person had vanished, apparently having tried to get the rest of the party killed before leaving. Dick. The three of us fought our way through a few enemies while waiting for a fourth member to come and join up. When they eventually arrived, we were good to go.

Unfortunately, our tank had a connection problem towards the end of the dungeon, leaving me, the other damage dealer and the healer stranded wondering what to do next. Eventually, we decided to charge forwards anyway and see if we could survive the dungeon's main boss — and you know what? We did, thanks to some excellent teamwork, and everyone doing their job properly. Sure, we probably could have done it a bit easier if we actually had our tank with us, but it was a fun challenge to do it without someone drawing the boss monster's attention away from me flinging fiery death at all and sundry.

We all had a good laugh about it afterwards — particularly at the fact that we finally managed to get a new tank to join us just as we were whittling down the boss' last 15% of health. By the time he'd run through the dungeon and met up with us, the boss was lying defeated on the floor. Immensely satisfying — and very amusing.

Anyway. Yeah. FFXIV is great — even for someone like me who is normally quite uncomfortable playing with strangers. I'm having a blast. And when the servers calm down, you should totally give it a chance, too.

1315: Twitchy

I'm still thoroughly baffled by the phenomena that are Let's Play videos and livestreaming of video games.

In the latter case, I sort of get why it would be useful for e-sports — it allows audiences to watch matchups between skilled players, just like real-world sports — but in the former case… hmm.

The argument tends to run that Let's Play videos and livestreaming allow people to get a feel for games they might not have tried. And that's a fair point, with one fairly major-ish issue: the popular Let's Play and livestream feeds are all for the same games all the time… and they're popular games that people already know all about. ("Hey guys, DarkPhantom123 here; welcome to part 527 of my Let's Play Minecraft video!")

The current trend is for people to post videos of them taking on Spelunky's Daily Challenge, a randomly-generated level that is the same for all players worldwide. This can occasionally be amusing, but when there are hundreds of people all posting these same videos, I have to confess I find myself feeling like I'd just rather play the game for myself. Perhaps you can learn something from watching someone else's run, but in my experience, most of these videos tend to be characterised by blind luck and fluke, with genuine skill only entering the picture relatively occasionally. It might just be the people I've watched videos of though.

The thing that strikes me the most about all this, though, is that it feels like such a massive waste of time. I love games; they're my go-to form of entertainment, and I'm fortunate enough to be able to call playing the games I like my job, too. However much I love games, though, whenever I look at, say, the Twitch front page, I feel no desire whatsoever to watch other people playing games; I would rather just get on and play myself. I have lots of games I want to play; it simply, as I say, feels like a massive waste of time to watch other people doing so, particularly when a lot of these streams appear to be nothing more than vanity projects.

I clicked on a few streams on Twitch the other day out of curiosity and felt no desire to keep watching. The first was a guy playing Blizzard's new World of Warcraft-themed card game Hearthstone, and featured a picture-in-picture webcam view of him playing — hardly the most interesting thing to watch, since he wasn't talking or looking at the camera; all you saw was him looking engrossed in the game. The second was someone playing the free-to-play MMO Ragnarok Online 2, which featured some dreadful backing music and footage of someone apparently just running around doing random solo quests. Again, why would I watch that? Particularly when Ragnarok Online 2 is free-to-play, even, meaning that if I was genuinely curious about it I could just, you know, download it and actually try it out for myself?

Perhaps this is a generation gap thing; maybe I'm just too old to understand why people would want to treat games as a spectator sport when they're not designed to be — e-sports excluded, obviously. If I have some free time to devote to games, I want to spend it playing games, not watching other people doing so. Other people apparently disagree, and that's cool — I just wish I understood the phenomenon a bit better. Can anyone explain it to me?

1314: Day One in Eorzea

So it's finally here: Final Fantasy XIV. Of course, this isn't the first time I've played, as well you'll know if you've been paying attention to my enthusing, but we're at last at the stage where the game won't be "turned off" for significant periods of time (maintenance periods aside), and all characters people are playing as now are for keeps. (Here's mine, if you happened to be curious.)

While I'm not exactly what I'd call a hardcore MMO player, I have been present at the launch of a number of reasonably-to-large-sized MMOs, including World of Warcraft, Star Trek Online, DC Universe Online and a few others I've doubtless forgotten. And I have to say I've been pleasantly surprised at how well things have been going for Final Fantasy XIV so far — more often than not, an MMO's launch is a complete disaster, with servers going down, significant gameplay problems and at least one Legendary Error that becomes a meme before the first day is out.

Today's experience on Final Fantasy XIV hasn't been completely flawless — on more than one occasion, there has been problems with the instance servers, for example. For those not au fait with MMO lingo, an "instance" is a private copy of part of the game world specifically for your character and, in some cases, your party. Final Fantasy XIV makes extensive use of instances not just for multiplayer dungeons, which is how World of Warcraft popularised their use to the world, but also to keep significant "story events" for your character private and free of naked catgirls wandering around ruining the atmosphere (or enhancing it, depending on your view on naked catgirls).

FFXIV isn't completely reliant on these instances, thankfully, but the game's main story quest and class-specific quests do make use of them quite frequently, so the fact that they haven't been working properly for part of today has meant some people haven't been able to make as much progress as they'd like to have done. Naturally, some players have expressed anger at this — this is the Internet, after all, where people start petitions to remove Ben Affleck as the next Batman, for fuck's sake — but, as ever, this isn't particularly reasonable. Sure, it'd be lovely to have the game working as intended from the moment it's turned on, but we're currently in an "Early Access" period, with official service not starting until Tuesday for players who didn't preorder or play the previous incarnation of the game. As such, it's a good opportunity for Square Enix to work out any last-minute kinks — like this instance issue — and ensure things are running as smoothly as possible when new, non-preorder players start to arrive.

I should also draw attention to the fact that Square Enix hasn't just been sitting back and letting these problems go on; they've been investigating the causes and trying their best to fix them. There was a maintenance period earlier today that temporarily fixed the instance issues, but then they came back; as I type this, they think they've found the solution, but are testing it thoroughly before rolling it out to the game proper. By later tonight, it should hopefully be a lot more stable.

So far, then, FFXIV's launch has been one of the smoother ones I've seen. It hasn't been without issues, no, but at the same time they've been handled as well as can be expected — and things can only improve from here.

So here's to many more adventures in Eorzea; I've had fun today, and I'm looking forward to the further adventures of my character Amarysse as she becomes an ever more skilled thaumaturgist.

1311: Shorty and the EZ-Mouse

Aug 21 -- Bust A Groove "Kitty-ENN. Versus. GAAAAAS-OOOOOOOOO!"

…

"I will never ever run away, I will live to fight another day, I will make you re-a-lise, I'm always here, right by your side, now our love is sanc-ti-fied, I'm here to bust this groove."

…

"It is me or is the timing off a little bit?"

"Nah. I'm just more skilled than you are."

"No, I seriously think the timing's off."

"C'mon, man, stop being a sore loser."

"No! I'm serious! I'll go and get my PlayStation right now and prove it."

"Fine. Go ahead. And you'll see that I'm just better."

"All right. See you in a bit."

…

"So, do you believe me, now?"

"…Fine. All right. I believe you."

—

That incident actually happened. The game in question was Bust-A-Groove, a PlayStation offering that helped spawn (or at least popularise) the now all but dormant music game genre. This was no Guitar Hero precursor, though; Bust-A-Groove was very much its own thing, and there hasn't really been a game quite like it since. (Well, apart from Bust-A-Groove 2, but that's sort of a given.)

Bust-A-Groove was a peculiar blend of fighting game (sort of) and rhythm-based music game. Each "bout" was a one-on-one competition between two of the weird and wonderful characters, and victory was determined by whoever the camera was closest to at the end of the bout. (Yes, really.) In order to attract the camera towards yourself, you have to correctly punch in the directional inputs on the screen and then tap either the circle or X button in time with beat "4" of a bar. If you press the triangle button instead of O or X, you'll unleash an attack on your opponent, which will interrupt their flow if it hits them, but which they can dodge if they tap the square button instead of O or X.

That's it. That's all the game was, and yet it was massively addictive, thanks at least in part to the magnificent soundtrack. Each character, much like in a fighting game, had their own stage with unique crazy animations going on in the background, and each stage had its own piece of music that told you something about the character — it was implied that, in most cases, the "owner" of the stage was singing the song, and it helped give both the game and its cast a huge amount of personality.

Also it ended with you defeating a giant robot by standing on a rooftop and dancing at it, which was awesome.

The timing issue I alluded to above came from the fact that, at the time Bust-A-Groove came out, I was struggling on with a Japanese PlayStation, and consequently, in order to play European games, I had to prop the system's lid open with a biro lid and a bit of Blu-Tac, boot it up with a Japanese game in, whip the Japanese disc out when it stopped spinning quite so quickly then quickly swap in the European disc. (I later acquired an actual European PlayStation after I completely knackered the lens on the Japanese system by doing this all the time. I promptly chipped it so that I could play import games. Still one of my favourite consoles of all time; I wish I still had it.)

Anyway, the fact that a Japanese PlayStation is designed to run on a 60Hz display and a European PlayStation was designed to run on a 50Hz display (this was the pre-HD era, folks) meant that the Japanese PlayStation ran slightly faster than the European game was expecting it to, meaning that the on-screen button prompts did not line up properly with the beat of the music. Having grown accustomed to this naturally, I didn't notice it, but my friend Woody, with whom I was playing the game's two-player mode, was immediately thrown off by it. (We were both absolute S-Rank Bust-A-Groove players, so every match should have ended in stalemate; he was perturbed to find himself repeatedly losing due to being unaccustomed to my PlayStation's wonky timing.)

Not sure why I shared that little anecdote, but whatever. Bust-A-Groove was great… and I am now searching Amazon and eBay for cheap copies.

1309: Dress-Up

A guilty pleasure of mine that I've always had is playing dress-up. It doesn't matter if it's in reality or in some sort of virtual world (more commonly the latter these days, to be honest) — I love picking out outfits and accessories and attempting to coordinate and/or clash them horribly. It's ironic, really, given my own complete lack of interest in fashion — though this comes about more from being a big guy who can't get any decent clothes that fit than anything else.

A number of different interactive experiences have scratched my dress-up itch over the years. Most recently, I've been having fun with the "attachments" feature in Namco Bandai's Tales of Xillia, which allows you to deface all of your party members with various accessories, extra bits of hair and glasses, then enjoy your monstrous creations in battle, in the field and in cutscenes. Despite the potential for mischief, though, I've stayed largely restrained and sensible: protagonist Milla is sporting a pair of elf ears (that really suit both her looks and personality); "childhood friend" character Leia is sporting some adorable pigtails and half-rim glasses; young girl Eliza has her adorability factor amped up to 11 with the addition of wiggly rabbit ears and a fluffy tail.

Final Fantasy XIV has its share of amusement value from clothing and appearance options, too. I spent quite a long time on creating the look of my character this time around, eventually settling on a Hyur (human) female with red hair (of course) with some bright highlights giving her a slightly "frosted" look — very Final Fantasy. XIV's character creation tools give you a wealth of options to play with, some of which you'll only ever see in cutscenes, but it's nice to be able to take advantage of them. My character, for example, has a small heart-shaped tattoo on her cheek that is all but invisible unless you look closely, and also has odd-coloured eyes. No-one I'm playing the game with will notice those things as, generally speaking, you don't get close enough to other players to see that much detail. But when I see her doing her thing in cutscenes, I'll see those little details I added and she'll feel like my avatar, rather than something arbitrarily chosen for me.

I used to play on a roleplaying server for World of Warcraft, which meant a significant proportion of my time in the game was spent sitting around talking to other players and pretending to actually be our characters. It was a lot of fun, particularly as WoW offered you a few "non-combat" outfits that you could dress in. Since my character was a skilled tailor, she'd managed to make herself a nice array of different dresses to suit various occasions, and it was always fun to show up in a new outfit and have it acknowledged.

This particular guilty pleasure of mine means that there's one type of DLC I have a total weakness for, even with my general like of nickel-and-dime pointless DLC that doesn't add anything to the experience, and that's costume DLC. If I have the option to customise my characters' appearances further with new downloadable costumes, chances are I will take that opportunity. This likewise means that if a game provides the opportunity to earn a new costume by completing various challenges, I will generally drop everything I'm doing to try and earn that costume. I recall a ridiculous amount of grinding in Dark Chronicle (aka Dark Cloud 2 to earn a leopard-print bikini, but man, it felt good to finally earn it and subsequently take on the final boss in a woefully underdressed state.

Anyway. I digress, before I start getting into a lengthy discussion of how immensely fashionable my Second Life avatars were in their heyday…