1288: Final Fantasies

I've been thinking a lot about the Final Fantasy series recently, prompted in part by the impending release of the third Final Fantasy XIII game Lightning Returns, which is actually looking rather spiffy. It's a series that, as I've noted a few times before, I've followed from VII onwards, though I later went back and educated myself on earlier installments in the series.

As such, here's a few thoughts on each mainline entry.

FINAL FANTASY I: Generic as hell, right down to the monsters ripped straight from the D&D Monster Manual and its high fantasy setting. Minimal plot, incomprehensible plot twist right at the end. Worth playing to see the series' origins, but feels very grindy these days.

FINAL FANTASY II: Very interesting, particularly when you compare it to other JRPGs around at the time. Not only was it an early example of a Final Fantasy game focusing on plot, its mechanics were kind of cool. Okay, they had their problems, too, but indirectly Final Fantasy II set the template for the "use it to improve it" skill system seen in, among other things, the Elder Scrolls series.

FINAL FANTASY III: By now, the pattern of odd-numbered Final Fantasy games focusing on mechanics and even-numbered ones focusing on plot was set in place. Final Fantasy III had minimal plot, even in its later 3D remake, but it's a game worth playing to see the genesis of the Job system that made frequent reappearances throughout both the mainline series and its numerous spinoffs.

FINAL FANTASY IV: Heavy on the plot, light on the mechanics. In Final Fantasy IV, you're stuck with whatever party members the plot dictates you have at any one point, with minimal customisation. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though; it allows you to focus on the plot which, while basic and clichéd these days, was impressive, epic stuff back when it first came out, and noteworthy for having characters with distinct personalities.

FINAL FANTASY V: I must confess to never having finished this one, but it has one of the best implementations of the Job system of the whole series, allowing you to blend abilities from two different Jobs, assuming you've already learned some from the Job you're not actively equipped with. Once again, it's an odd-numbered Final Fantasy so the plot is somewhat disposable, but again, the mechanics are the reason to explore this game.

FINAL FANTASY VI: For many, the best Final Fantasy but again, I must confess to never having beaten this, and somehow never having had the ending spoiled for me. VI gives a good balance between the predefined characters of IV and the customisation of V by having distinctive characters whom you could teach spells to. The plot, meanwhile, was excellent, if arguably overly ambitious for the technology it had available to tell it.

FINAL FANTASY VII: I'll always have a soft spot for this one, what with it being the reason I like JRPGs as much as I do today. I haven't played it for probably a good ten years or so, but I'm open to the idea of revisiting it at some point. Those awful field screen character models bugged me even back then, though; I believe the PC version allows you to mod them.

FINAL FANTASY VIII: Much-maligned, but this is one of my favourites of the series. A touching love story coupled with some world-shattering silliness, with one of the best final encounters of all time — even if the finale itself was somewhat nonsensical.

FINAL FANTASY IX: One of the best battle themes in the series, though the child-like characters looked a little strange after the realistically proportioned people in VIII. IX has a ton of series fanservice, as it was the series' swansong on PS1.

FINAL FANTASY X: The change to PS2 and full 3D was very jarring to me, especially when combined with the move to a fully turn-based system. Said turn-based system was great, though, particularly the way you could manipulate the turn order to your advantage. This mechanic would later be seen in a whole bunch of other JRPGs — Trails in the Sky is one that springs to mind — so it proved to be massively influential. Also noteworthy for having a cool level-up system that made for highly customisable characters… and for having a terrible conversion to PAL consoles, with ugly black borders at the top and bottom of the screen and a frame rate significantly slower than the NTSC (Japan and US) versions.

FINAL FANTASY X-2: Gloriously camp, and delightful as a result. Final Fantasy X-2 may have taken place in the same world as X, but it had a completely different character. X was melancholy throughout; X-2 was rambunctious and joyful. This ultimately wasn't to everyone's taste, but the game certainly didn't suffer as a result. A non-linear structure combined with a fantastic implementation of the Job system made Final Fantasy X-2's small party of three immensely customisable, and there was a ton of stuff to do in the game, much of it optional. Highly recommended.

FINAL FANTASY XI: The first of the two MMOs in the series, Final Fantasy XI is noteworthy for being one of the first games of its type to actually make an effort with narrative progression alongside the otherwise relatively straightforward MMO gameplay. There was a story, there were bosses, there was even a final boss. Subsequent expansions continued the stories into ever more exciting encounters, but you had better be ready to invest a lot of time — the game had one of the slowest rates of levelling of any MMO, and though this was marginally improved over time, it's still painfully slow and dependent on playing in parties.

FINAL FANTASY XII: XII took a bunch of ideas from the MMO XI and transplanted them into a single player game. It was the biggest shift the mainline Final Fantasy series — many fans don't count Final Fantasy XI due to its online nature — had seen for a long time, since it abandoned the old-school turn-based or active time battle systems in favour of a quasi real-time system somewhat akin to that seen in a Western RPG like the later Dragon Age. In fact, Dragon Age pinched a few ideas from Final Fantasy XII itself, such as being able to program the game's AI to respond to specific circumstances.

FINAL FANTASY XIII: The first HD Final Fantasy divided opinion significantly. I really liked it, but others didn't appreciate the streamlined first 20 hours or so, in which you have a bunch of options locked off as you're forced by the game to familiarise yourself with specific party setups with limited — but still some — customisation. The battle system shifted from micromanagement to switching character classes on the fly, and was very fast-paced. When the game opened up very late on, there was a ton of side content to do, and you could go back and do more after you'd beaten the final boss. Whatever you think of the game, though, it's hard to deny the fact it's one of the most beautiful games you'll ever see on any platform.

FINAL FANTASY XIII-2: Many of the criticisms against Final Fantasy XIII were addressed with XIII-2, but the previous game had built up such an inexplicable bank of ill-will that many people never even bothered with it. The time-travelling story was convoluted and hard to follow, but the non-linear game structure provided a lot of interesting things to do. There were also some actual puzzles in the game, which the series hadn't seen for quite some time.

Lightning Returns: FINAL FANTASY XIII: Details are relatively thin on the ground for this upcoming new entry in the series too because everyone's so angry about the fact that Lightning has jiggly boobs, but it sounds like it's going to be more "actiony," but provide you with a number of different means of tackling various situations. An open world section is also promised, along with some Final Fantasy X-2-style dress-up funtimes that I'm looking forward to very much.

FINAL FANTASY XIV: The second massively multiplayer incarnation of the series was reportedly awful, but I never played it.

FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn: The second incarnation of the second massively multiplayer incarnation of the series is simply marvellous, however, and I'm looking forward to playing it when it releases later in August. It takes the good things about Final Fantasy XI — the Final Fantasy-like presentation, the music, the diverse characters, the implementation of a plot into a massively multiplayer game — and throws out the grindy stuff in favour of a wide variety of stuff to do, friendly to both solo and group players, and a number of mechanics inspired by other successful MMOs such as Guild Wars 2.

FINAL FANTASY XV: Details are scant on this one as yet, but early videos look pretty spectacular. Will it be a next-gen system seller? Who knows? I'm certainly looking forward to finding out.

1287: Thunderbolts and Lightning

Japanese gaming never died. It just shifted its focus. And that's a good thing.

I find myself contemplating this topic for a few reasons, including Twitter discussions on various related topics, and a few articles I've seen posted around the Web recently on the subject of Japanese gaming making "a comeback".

Japanese gaming never went anywhere. It may not be the focus of the games industry now — a side-effect of the very American Xbox 360 dominating a healthy proportion of the console generation we're just coming to the end of now — but it's still been ticking along very nicely, and in fact, for my money, it's been doing a much better job of catering to unique audiences than focus-grouped Western titles.

Japanese role-playing games used to be a big deal. Or, more accurately, a new Final Fantasy release used to be a big deal, particularly back in the PS1 era, which carried some of the best installments in Square Enix's long-running series. The JRPG market was always far broader than just Final Fantasy, even in the West, but Final Fantasy was in the unique position of being a Japanese role-playing game — by all accounts, a fairly "niche" genre, even back then — that successfully achieved mainstream penetration thanks to its impressive presentation. There were plenty of other JRPGs that flew under the mainstream radar but which are still fondly remembered by fans, but Final Fantasy was the one that everyone latched onto — with good reason.

These days, however, Final Fantasy enjoys a curious reaction from press and public alike. Ever since Final Fantasy XIII came along, there's been a significant amount of negativity directed at the series — negativity that isn't altogether justified.

Final Fantasy XIII, like every other Final Fantasy before it, mixed up the formula rather than just being a reskinned version of the previous game. It abandoned the micromanagement of previous games' battles in favour of a fast-paced take on the Active Time Battle system that focused more on carefully-timed switches of character roles rather than choosing individual commands. It provided a focused experience, pushing the story constantly forwards, forwards, forwards down a linear path until a point close to the end, where you suddenly had a large open world to explore.

Past Final Fantasy games have actually followed this exact formula to the letter — linear beginning that gets more and more open as you proceed towards the finish line, with the game completely "open" by the time you reached the end. Final Fantasy XIII just didn't hide it quite as well as the previous ones — and intentionally so; game director Motomo Toriyama wanted players to concentrate on the story for the beginning part of the game without distractions.

This is something to be criticised, apparently, yet it honestly baffles me as to why. Final Fantasy XIII's extreme linearity for the first 20-30 hours or so means that the story is constantly moving rather than doing the usual RPG thing of stalling for hours at a time while the player goes off and breeds chocobos or something. You're always moving from place to place, seeing new things, meeting new characters, fighting new enemies and learning new nuances of the game's systems. By the time you come out the end of this "20-hour tutorial," as some people call it, you're fully equipped to take on the challenges of the open world you're dropped into — and you have characters that are beefed up enough to be able to take on some significantly powerful monsters.

A common criticism of that "20-hour tutorial" is that there's "nothing to do but fight," which is an argument I can sort of see, but which I disagree with. Sure, in game terms you're doing little more than running forward and fighting, but in the process you're seeing things happen around you, meeting new characters, learning about the world — not to mention the fact that you're choosing how your characters develop and crafting weapons to improve their performance… and not to mention the fact that the fighting is fun. Final Fantasy XIII may not populate its world with gimmicks and sidequests, but that doesn't make it bad at all. It simply means it's not to some people's tastes, and that's fine; what the people who find it distasteful don't seem to realise, however, is that "I don't like it" is not the same as "this is bad" — the very same thing that happens with other, more "niche" JRPGs like Hyperdimension Neptunia, Ar Tonelico and Time and Eternity: games with a laser-sharp focus on exactly the sort of person they want to be playing that game. (Me.)

The initial reaction to Final Fantasy XIII unfortunately meant that its sequel Final Fantasy XIII-2 was met with everything from indifference to hostility on its release, when it was actually a remarkably solid game. Its time-travelling story was confusing and convoluted, yes, but much like the weak, forgettable story of Final Fantasy XII didn't affect the fact that the game itself was good, so too was the case with XIII-2, which built on and evolved many of XIII's ideas. It addressed most of the criticisms people had about Final Fantasy XIII while simultaneously remaining recognisably true to its predecessor.

And now we find ourselves coming to the third game based around Final Fantasy XIII's world: Lightning Returns. Once again, this game is being met with outright hostility for a variety of reasons. Particular attention is being paid this time around to the matter of the main character Lightning, whom everyone seems to have suddenly decided is massively offensive. Game director Motomu Toriyama is clearly enamoured with his creation and that's absolutely fine — in many ways, it's delightful to see a creator so passionate about something he's created; at the same time, I don't blame Square Enix for indulging in some gratuitous cross-promotion such as putting Lightning in a special quest in the upcoming MMO Final Fantasy XIV, or putting out some promotional art of her wearing the starting costume for one of Final Fantasy XIV's character types and doing a(n admitedly provocative) pose from that character's set of default "emote" animations.

It's here that Final Fantasy's background as a niche title with mainstream acceptance is working against it. With the JRPG genre regularly losing out to more popular types of game like first-person shooters and open world adventures, it seems that Toriyama is choosing to focus the Lightning Returns experience on a smaller niche that will appreciate it, and in the process is alienating the mainstream. In the case of most modern JRPGs, which have been happily ignoring the mainstream completely for several years now, this is fine; when you have a property as well-known as Final Fantasy, though, it's an issue. Not that Toriyama and co are trying to focus on a more niche audience, mind you — that's something I wholeheartedly encourage — but that people seem pissed off that Square Enix isn't making the games they want them to make.

Well, to that, I simply say good on Square Enix for sticking with what they want to do. Not every game needs to be a focus-grouped mass appeal game designed to shift five million copies. I often find the ones that are to be rather soulless experiences at their core, so I wholeheartedly encourage and embrace any title with the balls to say "don't like this? Fine. Leave." rather than grabbing onto their ankles and screaming for them to "PLEASE DON'T GO". Games are a business, yes, but that doesn't mean that those who create them have to be beholden to the whims of the public; ultimately it should be the creator's decision what to, you know, create.

I'm looking forward to playing Lightning Returns. You may not be, and that's fine. But if you're not, try not to push your opinions on everyone else as gospel, because there are a lot of people in the world, and everyone has their own take on things. No-one's forcing you to play or like Lightning Returns; just respect the fact that there are people out there who will be playing it, and who may well end up liking it as a result… just like any other game out there.

Stepping away from the Internet now.

1286: Take a Note, Nep-Nep

When was the last time you played a video game that required you to either 1) map it yourself or 2) make notes while playing? I'm willing to bet it's quite a long time, unless you've either 1) been playing the Etrian Odyssey series or 2) been playing an old-school Sierra game.

I've been playing a much more recent game and making notes, however. The game isn't demanding that I make notes, but I'm getting a strange sense of satisfaction from figuring the game out for myself rather than immediately reaching for the walkthroughs, as is the common approach these days.

The game in question is Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, which I'm now 40 hours into and probably about halfway through the plot, I estimate. I could have raced through and finished by now, I'm sure, but there's something about this game in particular — even more than the previous two Neptunia games, which I adored in all their flawed glory — that is making me want to take my time and soak everything up.

It's a different kind of wanting to soak things up to something like Ar Tonelico, though. In the case of Gust's oeuvre, I wanted to continue immersing myself in the world; spend more time with the characters; see every possible conclusion to that lengthy story that I'd been enjoying so much. With Victory, meanwhile, my enjoyment is coming from the game mechanics as much as the setting and characters.

The three Neptunia games have a fun setting and some immensely entertaining characters, you see, but I wouldn't call the world especially "immersive". The only real "exploring" you do is going into dungeons, and these are primarily designed for being 1) a place to fight monsters and 2) a place to harvest items for use in crafting and/or quests. There's a lot of repeated content — some dungeons are just variations on the same map, a la Phantasy Star Online and Dragon Age II — and thus they're best regarded as a backdrop for the more interesting stuff that's going on with the game mechanics.

More so than any of the previous Neptunia games, Victory is a case of a number of individually simplistic systems and mechanics coming together to create something significantly more complicated and deeper than the sum of its parts would appear to create at first glance. Sure, you can play through Victory without exploring these aspects of it, and that's a perfectly valid way to play. But since mk2 in particular, I've found the gameplay of this series so satisfying that I want to indulge myself in all its nuances as much as possible.

Let me explain what I've been doing and taking notes on this evening. In doing so, you'll hopefully see how the different individual systems at play in Victory combine to make something that is a surprisingly deep experience.

Each dungeon in Victory has a bank of monsters you'll encounter. Like mk2 and unlike the first game, you can see the monsters on the map and attack or avoid them as you desire, though a single monster figure on the field actually represents a party of enemies that might include other opponent types.

Each monster drops at least one item, most of which are "trash" items that don't have any use by themselves. But most of these items are used either in crafting recipes — crafting an item once means that it's then available for purchase in all of the game's shops, so it's something you need to do — or for completing quests. Already we have several overlapping systems here — exploring dungeons leads to combat, which leads to the acquisition of items, which can be sold, used in crafting recipes or traded in for quest rewards.

As well as tangible rewards, quests also manipulate the game's "shares" mechanic that has been around since the first game. I haven't studied the effects these shares have in great detail yet, but if it's anything like the first two games, the characters associated with a particular nation will be powered up or down according to how high their shares are. In my experience, it's not a huge increase or decrease, but I'll need to analyse things more comprehensively to figure that out. In mk2 the shares values also determined which ending you got; I don't think that's the case in Victory but I could be wrong.

Now, here's the twist on the usual "monsters drop shit" thing — partway through the game, you gain access to a mechanic called Scouting, whereby you can send several NPCs off to scout dungeons while you do other stuff. Depending on how much you pay them and their level of proficiency, they may come back with items, money or, more importantly, a report that something has changed in the dungeon they were scouting. This could be a change in the amount of credits monsters drop or the experience points they award, or it could be a shift in the harvestable items or the monsters wandering around the dungeon.

The latter two are significant, because they are the only means of acquiring some items that are, again, used for crafting or completing quests. Most dungeons have at least one optional boss monster, and it's usually these that are manipulated through the Scout system. Normally, these optional bosses are referred to as "Dangerous", which simply means they're tougher than the other stuff in the dungeon and have their own cool battle theme. However, a Scout spotting a shift in the monster patterns may turn them to either a "Risky" monster, which drops chips that can be used to burn discs with specific characteristics, abilities and stat improvements on, or a "Tough" monster, which drops medals that can be traded in to acquire the actual discs required to make use of this mechanic.

Whether a "Dangerous" monster becomes "Risky" or "Tough" when a scout finds it — actually finding something at all is determined largely by chance, but is influenced by both how much you pay the scout and their own abilities — is decided by whether a "flag" item in a dungeon is standing or broken. If it's standing and your scout spots a change in monster patterns, you'll come across a "Tough" monster; if it's broken, you'll meet a "Risky" monster. These shifts in monster patterns only last for one in-game "day", though, so if you've sent your scouts off to random places all over the world and they've all found new monsters, you'll need to decide which ones to take on. It becomes necessary to think about where you send your Scouts and why, otherwise it's a bit of a waste of time.

This "flag" system also determines which harvestable items become available when a scout spots a change in the items available in the dungeon.

Confused? I was initially, too, because the game doesn't explain this in great detail, which I was initially a bit annoyed about. However, having sat down and actually taken some notes this evening on each dungeon — what the normal lineup of collectable items and monsters are, and the differences that successfully Scouting it has, both with the flag broken and standing — I now feel like I understand this game mechanic. It isn't explained in great detail because it's not something you need to use to finish the game. You're told regularly by NPCs that you don't need to do quests and you don't need to use Scouts, but if you do, you'll find more cool stuff.

I could, of course, have simply gone to GameFAQs and looked all this shit up myself. But there's something inherently very satisfying about figuring out how it all works myself. It makes me feel like I'm really "beating" the game at what it's doing — learning how to leverage its rules to my own advantage, rather than simply getting someone to tell me how to do it. It's something I can see myself doing a lot more in the future, as I'm appreciating the game a great deal more as a result.

1282: Dead Body Gathering

I've been replaying Corpse Party recently due to the fact that I've owned the sequel Book of Shadows for ages and haven't gotten around to it yet. Since Book of Shadows is more of a spinoff that tells other concurrent stories that take place during the first Corpse Party, I figured it would probably be a good idea to refresh my memory on the original.

I'm reminded how much I liked the game first time around, for a number of reasons. It has its frustrating elements, sure — chief among which is the lack of a "fast forward" function for scenes you've seen before and want to skip after reloading from a "Wrong End" — but there's a lot more to like than there is to dislike.

The most impressive thing about Corpse Party is still its sound. Not only does it have some fantastic music, but it also makes use of some utterly brilliant 3D sound effects that are alarmingly realistic when listened to on headphones. There's one sequence partway through where a character is listening to someone's voice on their phone, and the way the sound is positioned actually makes it sound like a phone held up against your ear. Elsewhere, careful positioning of sounds in the stereo field can make it sound like they're coming from over your shoulder, or off in the distance.

Alongside the marvellous 3D sound is some incredible voice acting. I have pretty limited knowledge of Japanese seiyuu, but it's clear that those who signed on to voice Corpse Party's cast really know what they're doing. The delivery of their lines is packed with character and some really genuine-sounding emotion. When a character shouts, they sound angry. When a character is crying, it's heartbreaking. When a character screams, it's enough to send shivers down your spine.

The game, as I've said on a few occasions previously, is also a masterclass in that essential part of horror — "less is more". While Corpse Party has its share of explicitly gory moments, its most horrifying scenes are completely invisible in terms of visuals, instead unfolding entirely through sound effects, text and occasional flashes of colour. The imagination really gets to work in these scenes, filling your mind with some truly, truly unpleasant mental images that are all the worse for the fact you know that you're responsible for picturing them. I often find myself wincing at explicit, gory horror movies, but Corpse Party is the only game that's managed to genuinely get me squirming using nothing but a minimalist approach.

I'm into the game's fourth chapter, so I'm making good progress on my playthrough. I've managed to avoid a lot of the "Wrong Ends" so far, though the growing completionist streak I appear to be developing will probably insist I go back and get them all in order to fill in all those "Ending List" stars at some point. And this time I will actually play the "Extra" scenes that you unlock as you play through, too — for some reason I didn't get around to those last time around.

Anyway. Yeah. Corpse Party. If you're yet to experience this creepy classic on PSP and Vita and are hungry for something scary, get on that right now.

1280: More Truckin'

I had an all-too-brief chat with my good friend Mr Alex Connolly earlier today, during which I briefly extolled the virtues of Euro Truck Simulator 2, which I played for a good few hours today. This post is primarily intended for Alex — and anyone else who is similarly curious about Euro Truck Simulator 2 — since we only had a brief moment to talk earlier.

Here's what Euro Truck Simulator 2 is all about, then.

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You start the game by creating your driver profile by giving yourself a name, naming your haulage company-to-be, choosing a logo for yourself and selecting a truck you like the look of. You then choose a home base somewhere in Europe, and then it's off to work you go.

Your first job is what is later referred to in the game as a "quick job" — you're provided with a truck already loaded up with cargo, and all you have to do is deliver it to the destination. If you elect to follow the tutorial, you're walked through various elements of the interface, though you're not told where a few important keys (headlights, windscreen wipers, indicators) are, so you'll need to check the options menu for that. (I recommend assigning all of those controls to a controller, if you're using one.)

Delivering cargo is a simple matter of following your GPS, which sits in the corner of the screen like a space sim's multi-function display. (Indeed, here it is multifunction, too, allowing you to switch between views of your route, diagnostic information and other helpful bits and pieces.) While driving, you'll have to be reasonably careful. Hitting things can damage your truck and potentially cargo, too — the latter will cost you some of your fee at the end of the run. Similarly, breaking the rules of the road will cause you to be fined, though much like reality, you can get away with speeding so long as no-one catches you doing it.

The roads are convincingly rendered, meaning you'll have to merge carefully onto motorways, slow down for country roads, and stop-start-stop-start at the traffic lights found in city centres. If you're driving in the UK, you'll have to drive on the left; head out onto the continent, meanwhile, and you'll be on the right. Both left- and right-hand drive trucks are available.

Once you reach your destination, there'll be a glowing parking space that you must reverse into. This is harder than it sounds, as trucks and trailers behave strangely when in reverse. You can, of course, press the "auto-park" button, but if you do so you're effectively declaring that you're a big wuss.

Once you've successfully parked and detached your cargo, you'll be rewarded with money and experience points, with a bonus if you parked yourself. Levelling up rewards you with skill points, which you can plug into one of several different skills — one allows you to transport hazardous (and consequently higher-value) cargo of various types; another allows you to take on more long-distance jobs; another still provides you with larger rewards for heavy, oversized or otherwise valuable cargo. You can effectively tailor your driver's profile according to the types of job you like to do.

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After a couple of successful runs, you'll be invited to head along to a truck dealership that sells the type of truck you indicated was your "preferred" type at the outset of the game. A new truck will inevitably be much too expensive for you to afford with the few thousand Euros you've acquired from a couple of jobs, so you'll receive an email shortly afterwards from the bank inviting you to take out a loan. Here you have a choice; keep doing quick jobs for reasonable pay until you can afford to buy a truck outright, or take out a loan, buy your own truck immediately, and ensure you make enough money each in-game day to pay off that particular instalment.

Once you have your own truck — which can be customised in numerous ways, more of which open up as you level up — you have a lot more freedom. You can freely drive around Europe at your leisure, and the in-game map keeps track of how much of the road network you've explored. Arriving at new towns "discovers" them and unlocks them as a starting point for future jobs; coming across "?" markers on the map reveals new truck dealerships, recruitment agencies for hiring additional drivers for your fleet and other facilities; stopping at petrol stations or hotels allows you to restore your fuel and fatigue levels respectively.

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Having your own truck allows you to take jobs from the "Freight Market" rather than the "Quick Job" menu. Here, you have to actually drive to the place where the job offer is — they expire after a while, so if you don't get there quickly enough, you're not doing the job — and then manually attach the trailer to your truck.

From here, it's a case of proceeding to do more jobs and build up your available funds, then gradually build up your fleet of trucks and drivers so it's not just you hauling shit around Europe, but your very own army of bearded chain-smokers too. Each of your hired drivers can be levelled up the same way as your own character, so you can get different drivers to specialise in different things.

All in all, it's a really neat game. I didn't think it would have much to offer beyond the initial appeal of "WOW I'M DRIVING A LORRY" but there's actually a surprisingly competent game in there, too. And even if you struggle to handle one of these many-wheeled beasts, you can have some fun by causing chaos on the open world. Which is nice.

Anyway, there's my enthusing on the subject of Euro Truck Simulator 2. It's surprisingly worth your time, particularly if you like open-world driving games where you just pootle around rather than killing everybody. Plus there's something inherently satisfying about driving such a gigantic vehicle and not killing everyone around you, or ending up on your side. (Though it is possible to end up on your side.)

So there you have it. Euro Truck Simulator 2. Enjoy.

1279: Hauling Ass (and Wood, Propane and Other Exciting Things)

I picked up Euro Truck Simulator 2 in the Steam Sale the other day on a bit of a whim. This is one of those simulator games that, like Farming Simulator, was roundly mocked upon its original release, but promptly turned out to be a rather good game.

I haven't spent a huge amount of time with it so far and I don't know how much time I will spend with it in the long term, but early impressions are that it is basically a game that I've thought should exist for a long time — that is to say, it's Elite, but on the roads instead of in space.

Okay, that's perhaps not quite accurate; you're not really "trading" stuff, you're simply taking jobs and hauling shit (sometimes literally) from one place to another, and there's certainly no "combat" besides any accidents you deliberately cause yourself, but the idea of fusing a management/business game with a vehicle simulator is a sound one, and it has always surprised me somewhat that we've only ever seen it happen in space, really.

Euro Truck Simulator 2 is an odd experience. It's a driving game, but without all the jostling for position and chaos that normally accompanies driving games that focus on racing. It's an open-world game, but without anything to really "do" besides seek out truck dealerships, try and visit every road in the game and sightsee. I haven't got far enough into the game to look at the business sim side of things yet, but I assume that will add an element of light strategy to the mix, particularly once you start hiring other drivers, too.

It's a peculiarly relaxing experience to play. Once your truck is out on the open road, you don't really have to do a lot besides ensure you don't hit anything, and try not to get caught by speed cameras. But it's pleasingly chilled out to just trundle along at 50mph down some convincingly-realised (if geographically-inaccurate) roads that go to real, actual places with recognisable landmarks. It also implements another feature that I've always thought should be in open-world driving games — the ability to stream Internet radio stations as the soundtrack to your drive. I was listening to some pleasingly mellow German jazz while I drove from Southampton to Dover earlier.

I say it's a relaxing experience to play. Well, that's only mostly true: it's relaxing until you reach your destination and have to reverse the fucking thing into a parking space. Parking a truck is horrendously difficult and I have new-found respect for anyone who is able to do it successfully, particularly in a yard that doesn't have very much space available. I don't really understand how to make it go the correct way when I'm reversing it yet, but I'm sure it's something that comes with practice.

Anyway, I guess what I'm saying in a roundabout way is that if you've seen Euro Truck Simulator 2 in the Steam sale and are mildly curious about it, do yourself a favour and download it. You might just find yourself enjoying the experience. It's just a shame there isn't multiplayer; hauling stuff around Europe with a friend would be a lot of fun, I feel.

1277: Failing to Resist the Urge to Call This Post 'Rim Job'

I'M SORRY. (I'm not sorry.)

I went to see Pacific Rim this evening with my similarly-named friends Tim and Tom. This, along with Akira the other night, means that I've officially been to the cinema more times in the past week than I have in the last year.

As for Pacific Rim, it was enjoyable, if cheesy. Good, dumb fun on the surface, but a movie clearly designed with an appreciation — possibly even reverence — for Japanese giant robot anime. Throughout the whole thing, I couldn't help thinking that the movie might have been better just as a straight-up anime. In fact, partway through the movie, I found myself making mental comparisons with the visual novel Deus Machina Demonbane, with which Pacific Rim actually shares a significant number of similarities.

Lest you're unfamiliar with Deus Machina Demonbane but have seen Pacific Rim, the former is a visual novel about giant robots battling monsters loosely inspired by the work of HP Lovecraft; the latter is a movie about giant robots battling monsters with too many mouths. Already quite similar, albeit the Lovecraftian twist on Demonbane is a pleasant break from the norm.

Then we have the whole "you need two people to pilot a giant robot" thing, which is present in both Demonbane and Pacific Rim; in the former, the pilot is paired up with a "tome" (in the case of the protagonist, an absolutely adorable personification of the Necronimicon), while in the latter, two people have to "drift" together and share their consciousness, or memories, or something.

Then there's the fact that the main "hero" robot gets the crap kicked out of it repeatedly, yet somehow always gets repaired to immaculate condition every time, which is present in both works.

And the fact that the giant robots fighting do just as much damage — if not more so — to the places they're trying to protect than the monsters they're fighting, which is, again, present in both works.

Demonbane does have a bit of a twist in that the antagonists are given personalities and stories of their own, rather than just being "GRRR ARRGH MONSTERS". There's an overall "bad guy" in Demonbane, who is responsible for the Lovecraftian beasts invading our dimension, and there are some truly loathsome "lieutenants" who give the protagonist and the other characters in the story a lot of grief, to say the least.

Also, there is more fucking in Demonbane, while there is none in Pacific Rim, what with it being a 12A and all while Demonbane is an adults-only title. For the most part, the sexual scenes in Demonbane are more horrific than titillating, though; it's one of those "I can't fap to this!" games, unless you have some seriously weird tastes. Likewise, you cannot fap to Pacific Rim, but for different reasons.

Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that if you enjoyed Pacific Rim and you're open to the idea of playing sexually explicit visual novels, then you should give Deus Machina Demonbane a look. It's one of the more memorable, well-written visual novels I've played in my time, and it's satisfyingly hefty in length, too, particularly if you go for all the endings.

I am hot and sweaty. I am going to drink something cold and go to bed. Good night.

1269: In Sickness and In Health

So, now I've written my review for USgamer, I can talk a little about Time and Eternity, the game I've been playing recently.

For those too lazy to click through and read my review, the gist: Time and Eternity is an anime-inspired JRPG that makes use of hand-drawn, hand-animated anime cels instead of polygonal characters. Its story is based around two people — one of whom is actually two different people in a single body, so it's actually three people, I guess — who are trying to get married but find their wedding interrupted by assassins. Naturally, the thing to do when this happens is to travel back in time and get to the bottom of what is going on.

I won't go on too much about the game itself, because my review covers that territory in more detail. What I did want to talk about is how much I appreciate the fact this game exists, and how it highlights some issues with conventional criticism.

Time and Eternity has been mostly panned since its release, leading to severely negative preconceptions about it, even among the hardcore JRPG-lovin' community. I personally enjoyed it a lot — I've finished it once, and am contemplating going back for a New Game Plus run to get the "special ending" — but at the same time acknowledge the fact that it most certainly isn't a game that has universal appeal.

However, just because it doesn't have universal appeal is not to say that it doesn't have any appeal whatsoever. This is the thing that a lot of reviews I've seen seem to be missing to a certain extent; this is a game aimed at a specific, niche audience, which means by definition that it won't appeal to everyone. Should it be punished for this fact? Absolutely not; in fact, it should be celebrated.

To qualify that statement, let me explain. One of the most common criticisms of modern gaming — modern mainstream gaming, I should say — is the dumbing down of popular franchises to appeal to a mass market. The idea that a new entry in a popular series needs to sell literally millions of copies to have been worth making in the first place. All too many times recently, we've seen high-quality games fail to reach the overambitious expectations set by their publishers and be declared a failure, despite the fact that something like Time and Eternity would kill for those numbers.

Meanwhile, however, titles like Time and Eternity from niche-focused publishers like NIS America bob along under the radar, only to be occasionally noticed by reviewers who aren't really into the niche they're aiming for, and thus get woefully, woefully misunderstood. Consequently, they get treated unnecessarily harshly.

This isn't me being defensive about a game I enjoyed that everyone else didn't; this is something that I feel is going to become a bigger issue as time goes on. Not every critic bears in mind the potential target audience for something; very few outlets have the "specialists" on staff to be able to handle all titles in an appropriate manner, and I've mentioned before how frustrating it is to read a criticism of something from someone who obviously hasn't given it the amount of time it deserves, or who isn't "well-read" enough in the genre to be able to make informed comments. I am under no illusions that I am able to handle every type of game out there, but I know what I'm interested in, and I know the things that I know well. I wouldn't take on a review project for a genre I didn't know well or didn't have experience of; it wouldn't happen in any other medium.

So anyway. If you've read my Time and Eternity review you'll know that I quite liked it, but wouldn't recommend it to everyone. There are only a select few people in my circle of friends that I would specifically recommend it to, in fact, but I have a feeling those people would enjoy it. Everyone else will probably not. And that's fine. Not every game is for everyone, and the sooner we figure that out the better.

1261: Registered Version

The resurrection of various video games from my youth is interesting.

I'm not talking about remakes here — though this discussion is in part prompted by the upcoming Unreal Engine 3-powered remake of Rise of the Triad — but instead, the rerelease of old DOS games, suitably tweaked and DOSboxed up in order to make them work properly on modern machines.

An awful lot of these games that are being resurrected were once "shareware" titles. For those of you too young to remember the shareware model — I'm not even sure it's still around these days — it was a means of distributing usually independently-developed games that involved giving away a significant proportion of a finished product for free, then inviting people to cough up for a more fully-featured "registered version" if they liked it.

The distinguishing factor between a shareware version and a good old-fashioned demo was the fact that demos are usually crippled or limited in some way; shareware versions, meanwhile, are fully-functional, just not quite as fully-functional as the registered version.

I didn't explain that very well. Let me give you a practical example that might make it a bit clearer.

Let's take the PC game Rise of the Triad, since it was that that got me thinking about this today. Rise of the Triad's shareware version was subtitled The HUNT Begins and featured ten levels in which you could only play one of the different characters available in the full version. These ten levels did not appear anywhere in the registered version, which was known as Dark War. This meant that you could play through the shareware version, decide you liked the game, buy the "full" version and play through a completely new series of levels.

This was one approach to the shareware model. Other games, such as Rise of the Triad's spiritual predecessor Wolfenstein 3D, were split into discrete "episodes", with the shareware version consisting of only the first episode and usually not featuring all the enemies, weapons and graphics from the full version.

The reason I'm thinking about this today is because when I was young and playing shareware versions of these games that I got from various magazine cover CDs and downloaded from CompuServe (yeah, you heard me), attaining the registered version appeared to be something that was all but impossible to me as a teenager with no credit or debit card. Digital distribution of paid-for titles was unheard for, so there was no "just download it from Steam", and many shareware titles required you to order the registered versions from America, leading to exorbitant shipping costs.

As such, I didn't really get to play many registered versions of shareware games I remember rather fondly until much, much later. It's a lot of fun to be able to revisit these games so quickly and easily these days and discover that the registered versions were indeed rather fun, after all.

Do they still hold up as decent games after all this time, though? Your mileage may vary somewhat, but I certainly still have a soft spot for things like Rise of the Triad, and am very much looking forward to seeing what Interceptor Entertainment have made of the upcoming reboot, which I preordered today. (It's $15, and you get four old Apogee titles for free when you preorder, including the original Rise of the Triad, its expansion and the two Blake Stone games. Not a bad deal at all.)

1259: Gross

My year and a bit reviewing social and mobile games was enough to make me never, ever want to play one of them ever again, but I feel it is worth educating people on the things that these games are doing — seriously unpleasant things.

I'll preface this with the caveat that not all social and mobile games do these things. But a huge majority of them do. And you should be aware of it, if you're not already.

First thing to do is read this.

If you read that, I probably don't actually need to say any more. But I will anyway.

"Coercive monetization." Sounds horrible, doesn't it? Well, it is; it's the practice of convincing players that they "need" to spend money, and that it's their "choice" to spend money. It's underhanded trickery, in other words, and it's massively commonplace in the free-to-play sector — but particularly in the realms of mobile and social games.

That post's author Ramin Shokrizade describes the use of coercive monetization techniques in relation to "fun pain" — a term coined by Roger Dickey from Zynga to describe games that actively put obstacles in the way of the player's fun. These could be any of a wide variety of things — an energy system telling them they can't play any more; a timer saying they can't use this building/hero/object until it's been readied/built; an object which is just slightly too expensive, and which is all but necessary to progress. All of these things are used in order to get the player making that all-important first payment — to "convert" them from a freeloading bastard (albeit one with some common sense) into a person blindly willing to continue paying into an obviously manipulative business model while under the illusion of having "fun".

Shokrizade cites one of my least favourite games ever in his piece — King's Candy Crush Saga. This game is immensely popular, yet is 1) a Bejeweled ripoff and 2) one of the most manipulative, exploitative, outright unpleasant games I have ever encountered.

It begins innocently enough. You're given levels that are pretty straightforward to complete, and you'll make good progress through them. Gradually, they'll get more difficult, but not noticeably so — not until you reach an artificial barrier on the game map that requires you to either spam your friends with requests or pay real money to progress. Since to many people, spamming one's friends with Facebook requests is becoming something of a taboo, many choose to pay the $1 fee to progress — but in doing so they break that seal and "convert" themselves into a paying player.

King knows this, and thus makes the levels after this barrier noticeably more difficult. But it doesn't do this in a fair way; as with Bejeweled (and particularly its free-to-play social counterpart Bejeweled Blitz) Candy Crush Saga is primarily based on luck rather than skill — you can't plan ahead because you don't know what's going to fall from the top of the screen, so more often than not running out of moves is unavoidable. What Candy Crush Saga does as it progresses is weight the behind-the-scenes random number generators significantly against the player so it will be very difficult for them to progress without paying up for boosts, or extra lives, or permanent upgrades, many of which are extremely expensive.

You may feel that there's no harm in this, and indeed some people make it a badge of personal pride to play through something like Candy Crush Saga without paying a penny. But in the process, they're having a frustrating, boring experience. Why would you deliberately do that to yourself, when you can pay, say, $1 for the iOS version of Bejeweled and have literally infinitely more fun than with Candy Crush Saga?

These manipulative business models are not harmless, nor are they worthy of praise, regardless of how many millions of dollars they're bringing in every day. They're making money from conning gullible idiots — and while some of you may argue that people with no common sense need to be woken up a bit, it's not really fair to take advantage of people in this manner, particularly when many of them are children.

I find the whole practice utterly reprehensible, and I can't help hoping that the whole bubble on free-to-play social and mobile games bursts very soon. Unfortunately, with the amount of money many of the more popular titles are making every day — and the sheer number of the bastard things that are released each day — I don't see that happening any time soon, making mobile gaming in particular all but a lost cause for me these days.

Do yourself a favour: if you're currently playing something like Candy Crush Saga or its ilk, stop. You're being manipulated. Find a low-cost game with the same mechanics, pay for it, then play it as much as you want. This is the way it's always been in the past, and I long to go back to a time where that is the only model.

"Coercive monetization" is gross. It is borderline unethical. So don't support it.