#oneaday Day 685: I'm In Hell

Bullet hell, that is.

Despite not being very good at them, bullet hell shooters are rapidly becoming one of my favourite genres to unwind with. Actually, "unwind" might not be quite the right word, given the sense of tension they tend to provoke, but… oh, I don't know. They're fun, all right?

Most recently, I've been playing Gundemonium Recollection, which is available on PSN and Steam. It's cheap, too — at about £8 for it and two other excellent shmups, it's certainly one of the more low-cost entries in the genre out there. Hell, even Cave's iPhone games cost more than that.

Not only does Gundemonium Recollection have a fabulous title, it also exemplifies many of the things that I — as a relative newcomer — believe are "typical" for the genre. We have a cute, big-eyed anime art style. We have lots and lots of bullets. We have game mechanics that go a little beyond "move" and "shoot" but not by much. And we have beautifully, wonderfully cheesy music.

The whole aesthetic is one of the things I find most endearing about the whole thing. Speak to your stereotypical dudebro about what constitutes a "hardcore" game and, depending on how into their games they are, you'll get all manner of different answers. They will likely involve either first person shooters or MOBA games, however, and almost certainly will feature the colour brown prominently. What they likely won't feature is 18th century anime girls with Old West-style revolvers flying through the sky and shooting down everything from things that look like Angry Birds to scantily-clad women with massive knockers sitting astride gigantic rocket launchers.

And yet, from experience, I know what the more hardcore game is.

You can get good at, say, Call of Duty or Halo relatively quickly, and certainly be able to beat the games on their Normal difficulties without too much, well, difficulty. They're friendly to short, quick-fire play sessions in multiplayer, and even the single player campaigns tend to be split into bite-size, episodic chunks, with you running from one setpiece to the next — in Call of Duty's case, perpetually following along behind an NPC who gets to have all the fun while you watch — towards an eventual, inevitable conclusion.

Gundemonium Recollection, meanwhile, is hard with a capital ARRRRRRGH. While the whole game is no more than about 15-20 minutes in length, as is typical for the genre, reaching the end of the game is a significant feat, particularly as you're encouraged to attempt it without continuing. And once you do manage to make it through to the end, you then have your score to consider. How can you pump it up? How can you maximise your scoring potential in each stage?

Bullet hell shooters are less mindless than their name suggests. The stereotypical "shmup" involves dodging up and down while hurling increasingly-ridiculous weaponry at incoming enemies. And yet in bullet hell shooters, the actual "shooting" side of things is the least important factor. The skill you have to practice is dodging all those bullets — no easy task, but successfully pulling it off makes you feel like a badass.

In fact, achieving anything in the game, whether it's progressing twenty seconds further than you did previously or beating your high score, makes you feel like a badass. There is, in fact, quite a comic juxtaposition between how badass you feel having achieved something in the game and the incredibly cute anime art style and music.

Such is the way of Japanese games, though. The culture of "gamer" (whatever that actually means) is significantly different over there, meaning we get little gems such as Gundemonium Recollection and its two sequels springing up out of nowhere and providing something infinitely more fun that Brown Shooty War-Bang Soldier of Duty XIV.

Assuming you don't mind failing. A lot. Perhaps that's the key difference. In a title like Gundemonium Recollection, you can fail. You can fail embarrassingly quickly if you suck as much as I do. Conversely, to go back to our earlier examples of supposedly "hardcore" Western games, there's little to no consequence for failure. Die in a single player Call of Duty level and you just restart from your last checkpoint. Lose a multiplayer match and you can just try again — it doesn't matter at all, because you still got XP and a little closer to the next batch of unlocks.

In practice, you're actually achieving much the same kind of thing in Gundemonium Recollection, only the progress you've made isn't necessarily reflected with perpetually-filling progress bars and unlocks. Rather, you're making progress with your own skills, improving your own abilities at playing the game, and as a natural extension of that, you'll be able to get further, score better, or take on the more frightening difficulty levels. (I haven't graduated off "Novice" yet, and still felt like a badass when I finally took down the final boss.)

So, then, the next time you describe yourself as a "hardcore gamer" to someone, just consider that somewhere out there there's someone playing a game about flying magical girls with revolvers who is infinitely more hardcore than you could ever hope to be.

#oneaday Day 681.5: RIP GamePro

[Apologies for the interruption to the ongoing story — it will end tomorrow. This needed to be said today, though.]

Today, an era came to an end, as the announcement came that GamePro in its current form would be no more as of December 5, 2011. Both the website and the new quarterly magazine have been shuttered, and all of us on staff suddenly find ourselves without a job. The GamePro brand itself will be folded into PC World, where it will most likely die a quiet death, unnoticed.

This is, of course, suckitude of the highest magnitude, but it wasn't entirely unexpected. It is tough times in the super-competitive publishing industry, particularly in the overcrowded video games market. I shan't pretend to understand the business reasons behind the closure of GamePro when we were enjoying viewing figures the likes of which the site had never seen — but it seems to be something of a sad truth in today's games journalism industry that nothing lasts forever. If you want job security, it ain't the sector you should get yourself into.

What has been touching is the amount of support people have shown for GamePro on Twitter and various other social networks today. The magazine and site was a lot more widely-known than I thought — at times I'd wondered if UK journos and industry types were even aware of it — and everyone, it seems, was sorry to see the back of what had, after all, been a fixture in gamer culture for many, many years, particularly in the U.S.

GamePro, of course, has personal meaning to me, too. My brother spent ten months giving both the magazine and its web presence a much-needed shakeup (see his blog post today for more) and made it something that was interesting and relevant to the modern gamer. And once he left and I had the opportunity to jump in on news reporting duties, I know my contributions played a part in the site's growing success — growth that has been sadly cut short by today's news.

While I'd never met many of the GamePro team face to face, it was a close-knit bunch of people who got on well together, from what I could make out, anyway! I felt like a valuable member of the team despite being halfway across the world, and I always felt like my hard work was appreciated — which is why I continued to work so hard and contribute as much quality content as I could to the site. I made a distinct effort to not cover the same stories that all the big news blogs did — that's counter-productive. Rather, I took inspiration from sources such as GameSetWatch (which, coincidentally, also died today), Kill/Screen and numerous others to dig up interesting nuggets of information on fascinating indie titles, peculiar happenings in gamer culture and opportunities for discussion and debate. I was happy with the approach; I feel it gave GamePro a unique take on the news which wasn't just a case of rewriting press releases and rewording stories from other sites. And on the occasions where I did write stories based on press releases, I made a conscious effort to actually write a story rather than just reword the press release. I'd read up on the background of the companies involved, find out precedents for interesting events and throw in some interesting trivia if I had some to hand.

And now it's all over. I'm sorry to see GamePro go, but I'm hopeful that the staff will be able to find themselves suitably awesome positions to move on to. As for me? I couldn't say. Working for an American site has been a great deal of fun but it's had the side-effect that I'm known more in the States than I am in my own country. While I'd hope my experience and output would speak for itself regardless of the geographical location of the site on which it was published, I do wonder which side of the pond any future writing gigs might come from.

With that, then, ladies and gentlemen, please raise your glasses and toast the late GamePro. You'll be missed.

#oneaday Day 651: Circle of Blood

Having beaten Xenoblade, I was in two minds as to what to play next. Should I go and grab something brand new, or should I delve into the Pile of Shame?

I opted for the latter. Broken Sword, to be specific, and the new(er) Director's Cut version, which features (marginally) updated graphics and some extra Nico-centric scenarios. The new stuff so far is cool — some immensely satisfying codebreaking puzzles are a particular highlight — but the fact that the sound quality is so markedly different to that from the original game is a little jarring.

I have fond memories of Broken Sword. It came out when I was doing work experience down on PC Zone. That particular issue saw me writing a bunch of captions for some material about Quake, and publishing an entire review on Virtua Fighter PC in which I used the then-fashionable terminology on Zone of "turbo nutter ninja bastard" to mean "very powerful". But that's beside the point.

Broken Sword comes from a very different era to the console-centric experiences we have today. This is obvious in a number of ways. Firstly, it's a point and click adventure, and while we do still get some of those nowadays, they're a lot rarer than they used to be — and I can't remember the last time a point and click adventure would have been regarded as a triple-A title. Secondly, none of the characters feel the need to run everywhere. They saunter around at a leisurely pace, mercifully just short of being infuriatingly slow. This relative slowness, however, gives the game a much more "sedate" feeling pace while you're playing — it's almost relaxing to play, despite the fact that you're chasing down a murderer.

Perhaps it's the sensation of using your brain in ways it hasn't been used for a while. The concept of "puzzles" in a lot of adventure-style games these days tends to (still) involve pushing blocks around or finding ways to get to switches. Broken Sword, meanwhile, involves good old fashioned adventure game puzzles. In order to open a door early in the game, you need to pull on a cross on the wall, wedge it open with a shell casing you found earlier, insert a stone tube into a socket that opens up, pull out the shell casing (which hopefully you had remembered to flatten under the door earlier, otherwise you'll have to repeat the above process) and use it to lever open the stuck door that had been partly activated by your insertion of the stone tube. It sounds a little silly, sure, but it makes sense while you're playing — and by golly it's satisfying when you work it out for yourself without the aid of GameFAQs. And it's not as stupid as the rubber ducky puzzle in The Longest Journey, a game I'm finding myself hankering to replay very soon.

Broken Sword is quite impressive in that it has been around for a very long time in computer game terms and still "works" as a game today. Sure, the pace may seem relatively snail-like to console gamers (though the original did come out on PS1 and Game Boy Advance, among others) but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the puzzle and dialogue-heavy gameplay. In fact, we could stand for a few more games like that these days, and a few less that involve you staring down the barrel of a gun.

#oneaday Day 648: Xenoblade Chronicled

Finished Xenoblade Chronicles and can say with some confidence that it's my Game of the Year so far. With only a few months left and only a few things on the horizon which could be contenders, it's looking good for Monolithsoft's epic RPG extravaganza.

Of course, my Game of the Year vote is of interest only to my friends. Gamer culture at large will undoubtedly vote Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3 or Uncharted 3 (hang on a minute… there's a pattern there somewhere) as GotY. But that doesn't matter.

Xenoblade Chronicles toes the line perfectly between JRPG and WRPG. On the J front, you have your floppy-haired protagonists who wield physically improbable weapons; you have your large-breasted female companions (one of whom spends most of the game clad in "armour" that really wouldn't protect anything besides her modesty — and even then only just); you have your small, annoying creature; you have your ultimately quite predictable JRPG finale (I still love 'em, I don't care how cliched they are). On the W front, you have a huge open world with minimal loading breaks — individual zones are huge in area and packed with things to do: monsters to kill, quests to complete, people to find. Straddling the line between both, we have an excellent combat system somewhat reminiscent of MMOs like World of Warcraft or, probably more accurately, Guild Wars.

Why the Guild Wars comparison? Well, like that game, you only have a finite number of skills which can be "equipped" at once, from a larger potential bank. The number of skills you acquire in Xenoblade Chronicles isn't as ridiculous as NCSoft's title, but then you do have several characters to manage all at once. Mercifully, you only have to control one of them at once, with the AI doing an excellent job of performing whatever role each character is ideally suited to in the party.

Gameplay-wise, it's top notch. Simply proceeding through the areas, completing quests and following the story when I'd "cleared" an area was enough to get me almost to the very end — there was only a few levels' worth of grinding required to safely get through the home straight, and by that point you've learned plenty of EXP-boosting skills so it's not as painful as it could be.

This is all very clinical and mechanical — and that's fine, as an RPG can live or die on its mechanics. But the real star of the show in Xenoblade Chronicles is its cast. Brilliantly voiced by an English cast, the characters are all memorable and, despite my "floppy haired protagonist" comment earlier, manage to not fall into the usual stereotypes. Each of them is an interesting individual whom you get to know throughout the course of the game, both through story sequences and through optional "heart to heart" conversations, where two characters have a chat and come away from it either liking each other a little more or a little less.

Characterisation isn't just limited to story sequences, however — different combinations of characters in a battle party elicit different battle cries and responses to one another. And, as characters develop their Affinity for one another, they start to talk to each other during battle differently, often engaging in some light-hearted banter that makes them seem a lot more human. Okay, you'll hear "what a bunch of jokers!" and "my rifle's getting hotter!" an awful lot throughout the course of the game, but on the rare occasions where they start teasing each other after a successful battle, it'll definitely raise a smile.

For me, the sign of a good RPG is whether you have a kind of "empty" feeling after it's all over — you won't be spending any more time with these characters, and that's sad. I felt it particularly strongly with Persona 4, whose ending sequence made me tear up, and I'm not ashamed at all to admit it. Xenoblade Chronicles gives me that feeling, too. It's a different sort of ending to Persona, but once it's over you have very much left those characters behind to get on with their lives in their post-adventure world. It's a bittersweet moment.

By far the saddest thing about Xenoblade Chronicles, however, is how few people will get to play it. While it got a release in this country, it's likely to become harder and harder to find as the months go on — and there's sure to be plenty of people who will dismiss it out of hand purely because it's on the Wii. This isn't even getting into the whole fiasco of Nintendo of America stubbornly refusing to bring the game to the States, despite there clearly being an audience for it. The game is already translated and ready to go — we Europeans have to deal with American spellings in most games, so would it really kill you to put up with the words "armour" and "learnt"? No — but Nintendo of America apparently doesn't see it that way, presumably believing that sales will be poor.

The thing is, though, Nintendo is in a difficult position right now. The 3DS is ailing, the Wii is fading and the core of the gamer community has all but left the company behind. For Nintendo of America to bring Xenoblade Chronicles to the States would be a gesture of goodwill to all the loyal fans who still defend the company, even amid its gradual move away from the core audience. It would give people more faith in Nintendo's current and future products, and, in the long term, it would help attract people to the Wii U as people see it as a system that will cater to the core.

Sadly, it doesn't appear it's going to happen — so if you're an American and you would very much like to play Xenoblade Chronicles, I would say don't hesitate — import it, mod your Wii and enjoy. There's over a hundred hours of absolutely top-tier entertainment there, and you will not regret the time you spend in its highly distinctive world.

Now I better go to bed. Off to Legoland tomorrow!

#oneaday Day 642: M-M-M-Multiplay!

I don't generally play a lot of multiplayer games. There are a number of reasons for this, chief among which being the fact that I never seem to be any good at any I try out — or perhaps it's just that the sort of people who play multiplayer-focused games tend to play them to such a degree that they get really, really good at them and take great delight in "pwning noobs" or whatever imbeciles like to call it.

Cooperative games fare a little better but I've always found myself hesitant to take on cooperative challenges with anyone other than friends that I know well and trust. I have never played Left 4 Dead with anyone other than people I have been talking to and playing with for many years now. Perhaps this reflects my own idealised view of what I would like the situation to be were a real zombie apocalypse to happen — I would want to be with people I trust.

Part of the matter is due to the attitude of some people online, however. I recall giving Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach a go a while back and liking the game a great deal, until I did a dungeon run with a party, at least one of whom had obviously done the quest before. I was still new to the game and learning how it worked, so I made a few mistakes along the way, and a rather poorly-designed platforming part towards the end of the quest caused me a bit of difficulty. Rather than having a good laugh about it afterwards, like I would have done were it someone else in the same situation, I ended up with a torrent of abuse hurled in my direction. I logged off and never went back. An overreaction perhaps, but I was in no hurry to spoil something that was supposed to be fun with the bad attitude of arrogant people who think they know best.

I don't play much multiplayer on Xbox because I don't like voice chat, for reasons outlined here. And also, there aren't that many games that support multiplayer on Live that I'm in a great hurry to indulge in — the Xbox has a reputation as "the shooter console" for a reason. There are exceptions — I loved Need for Speed Hot Pursuit online, and Burnout Paradise could often be a lot of fun, but driving games were often also prone to the "everyone else is better than you" problem.

This lengthy preamble is a way of leading up to the fact that I am very much enjoying playing Trendy Entertainment's excellent Dungeon Defenders in the manner in which it is supposed to be enjoyed — multiplayer. Sure, you can play it single-player, but you'd be a fool to do so, since it's extremely difficult solo, and even more so with certain classes. Rather, it's a game that is well balanced for its four player cooperative action, and features a good balance between cooperation, competitiveness and communication.

I've played a few games of it now, and the best sessions I've had were the ones where people were communicating — not in a "hurry up u noob" sort of way, but in a helpful "this is going to happen on this wave, so put that there and then be ready for it" sort of way. I'm always pleasantly surprised when I come across people like that, and I always make a point of thanking them after the game when I do so. It's a genuine pleasure to play this sort of game in the way it was designed — with up to four people working together for a common goal and helping each other out along the way, rather than berating each other for their mistakes.

To cut a long story short, I'm of the strong belief that Dungeon Defenders will be the first game in a very long time that will see me regularly playing online with random strangers. My first experiences have been so good that I don't feel any of the usual uneasiness about partying up with randomers to hack a few orcs to pieces. It helps that the game itself is excellent and easily understandable, too, and challenging without being unfair.

If you haven't checked it out yet and the idea of an action RPG crossed with a tower defense game sounds like something that appeals, I strongly recommend you give it a shot. It's $15 (or local equivalent) on Steam, and also available via PSN and Xbox Live Arcade. I haven't played the console versions, but I will say that the mouse and keyboard controls of the PC version work extremely well

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have another dungeon to defend before bed.

#oneaday Day 629: The Hypocrisy of Isaac

I've posed this question on a couple of social networks today, but I thought I'd discuss it here, too. I'm not sure what the "right" answer is, if any, but I'd be interested to hear anyone else's thoughts on the subject.

This year, two games have come out that feature gross, puerile humour and content obviously deliberately intended to offend, shock or make people guiltily laugh. Those two games are the high-profile, legendarily-delayed Duke Nukem Forever, and independent developer Edmund McMillen's latest opus The Binding of Isaac, which I discussed a little here. Despite both featuring extreme gross-out humour, one of them was lambasted as being a smear against all that is good and pure, while the other has been praised and hailed as being daring, forthright and all manner of other superlatives expressing positivity towards its utterly shameless nature.

Those who are gamers will already know that Duke Nukem, the high-profile, well-known title, was the one which got seven shades of shit beaten out of it by the press, while McMillen's more recent The Binding of Isaac has been hailed — by the same critics who ripped Duke a new one in some cases — as something excellent.

Those readers who are not gamers may not already be familiar with the content of both of these games, so permit me a moment to summarise both titles in an attempt to compare and contrast the type of material on display therein.

Duke Nukem Forever is the fourth in a very long-running series of games which stars the titular Duke — a parody of 80s action heroes with a flat top, an arsenal of bizarre weaponry and a fine line in one-liners. The first two Duke Nukem games were very simple and featured no offensive content whatsoever. From Duke Nukem 3D, the third in the series, the developers let loose and had Duke raising hell in all manner of locations that had not previously been seen in many games — strip clubs, porn theatres, dodgy "rent by the hour" hotels and, eventually, space stations, moon bases and strangely organic alien vessels. Dotted through the bloody carnage — which was all against alien villains — were women. These ranged from strippers in the strip club, who'd flash their pasties at you if you walked up to them and pressed the "Use" key, to women imprisoned by the aliens, who were all nude and typically tied down to something with plant-like tendrils snaking around them, conveniently covering their lady-parts.

The sequel, some 13-plus years in development, featured a lot of similar content, only with the vastly improved graphics that 13-plus years of development will give you. (Some would argue that the game's visuals don't represent 13-plus years of progress, but that's not the matter we're discussing here.) The game, once again, features the grittier, seedier side of human existence, with one non-violent dream sequence taking place in a strip club. At various other intervals, numerous things happen: it's implied that Duke is getting fellated by a pair of twins dressed as schoolgirls who may or may not be incestuous lesbians; Duke has the opportunity to pick up a piece of poo and fling it around; Duke can draw whatever he likes on a whiteboard and in the book of a fan who asks him to autograph it; there's numerous groanworthy puns throughout; there's a lot of swearing; and one level, dubbed "The Hive" and representing by far the most infamous piece of offensive content in the game, features women very much like those in Duke Nukem 3D tied to things with alien tentacly things wrapped around them, evidently being raped and impregnated with alien offspring. At one point during this level, Duke comes across the twins from earlier in the game, who are caught in this inescapable situation. There's a wince-worthy joke about them losing pregnancy weight, then they explode as their alien offspring burst forth and attack Duke. (Later in the same level there's also, inexplicably, a set of tits on the wall, which Duke can wander up to and slap to watch them wobble, giggling as he does so.)

Pretty offensive — or at least of questionable taste — I'm sure you'll agree. Now, what about The Binding of Isaac?

McMillen's game is a parody of the '80s Nintendo Entertainment System game The Legend of Zelda. It features a top-down view of a randomly-generated dungeon which players have to explore, kill monsters, retrieve special items and make their way to the level's boss and, subsequently, exit.

So far so good. Nothing to worry about here, right?

Wrong.

The Binding of Isaac's protagonist is the titular Isaac who, as in the Biblical story, was about to be offered up to God as a sacrifice from his apparently insane and abusive mother. Isaac decided not to stick around to find out if God would stay his mother's hand so instead escapes, naked and crying, into the basement of the house. Said basement is inexplicably filled with monsters, most of which resemble Isaac to one degree or another, all of which bleed copiously when attacked. Most of these monsters have a degree of "body horror" about them, with swollen heads, growths, body parts such as eyes missing, blood dribbling from places that it shouldn't dribble from, and all manner of other things. One boss monster attacks you by pissing on you, while others bleed, vomit, bite and shit on you. Isaac attacks his enemies by firing his tears at them.

Isaac can upgrade his abilities by picking up special items which randomly appear on each level. Each one of these has an effect on Isaac's appearance as well as his abilities. For example, taking growth hormones causes his head to swell up with tumorous growths, while finding a wire coat hanger (a possible reference to abortion) sees Isaac jam it through his head to make him cry more. He gains health by eating dog food, as he is obviously used to it from his abusive mother, and special weaponry on offer include a suicide bomber vest, a sanitary towel, the Anarchist's Cookbook, a glass of lemonade which immediately causes him to piss himself and numerous other items.

The eventual aim of The Binding of Isaac is to kill Isaac's mother. By the end of the game, the crying infant of the outset is usually unrecognisable, clad in the random combination of special items he has picked up on his quest — on one occasion he might be wearing his mother's pants, have horns growing out of his head, be crying blood from his bleeding eye sockets and have a beating heart strapped to his chest. On another, he might have made a pact with the Devil and turned completely black. On yet another, he might have cybernetic implants and vampiric teeth.

The main point is, though, The Binding of Isaac is pretty consistently horrifying and amusing at the same time. Like Duke Nukem Forever, the offensive, horrifying content is in there quite deliberately to provoke a reaction — to attempt to provoke a guilty laugh, or if not, to offend and repulse. If anything, I'd argue that Isaac's content is more repulsive than that of Duke Nukem Forever, but this fact seems to have been totally skimmed over in many critics' appraisals of the game.

Note that I'm not arguing in favour of censorship of either game here. I have played and enjoyed both, and found both amusing in a very dark sort of way. Duke's humour was mostly lowbrow and silly, with the exception of the Hive level, while The Binding of Isaac consistently mixes the lowbrow poo and fart jokes with sadistic body horror elements.

So, then, given that these two games are arguably on a par with each other in terms of "offensive" content, why did Duke get his ass handed to him by critics? It can't surely be because of the quality of the game, can it?

Well, perhaps it can. Duke's gameplay was regarded as too little, too late by many critics, and roundly panned as a result. (I liked it precisely because it was like old shooters, but you know me, ever contrary.) Smelling blood, said critics decided to denounce it as The Worst Thing Ever, drawing particular attention to the Hive level and declaring it morally bankrupt, seemingly losing their black senses of humour in the process.

Along comes The Binding of Isaac, meanwhile, and it can do no wrong. It's a potent allegory, say the critics. It's refreshingly brave. It's up-front and honest. That's as maybe, but those things you're laughing at — poo, wee, farts and some gross bloody violence — are pretty similar to those you denounced Duke Nukem for. But The Binding of Isaac is a good game, they argue, meaning that the questionable content can be taken in your stride.

To that, I say simply this: one of the most common reasons Duke Nukem was panned was because it felt dated. However, as I said earlier, The Binding of Isaac takes inspiration from The Legend of Zelda, a game from 1986. It couples this inspiration with material from roguelikes (Rogue itself also appearing in the mid-80s) and Gauntlet (1985). Hmmmm.

As I said at the start, I'm not sure there's a right answer to this, as your take on both games' content will be largely subjective — and, like it or not, will seemingly depend on how much you like the game as well — but to me, it certainly smells like there's more than a whiff of hypocrisy about the whole thing. Do indie developers get a free pass to be more gross and offensive/"daring" simply for being indie developers who aren't tied to a big publisher?

Oh well. I shan't worry too much. I have played and enjoyed both games and, for me, that's the important thing.

#oneaday Day 627: Hashashin

Finally started playing Assassin's Creed again tonight — yes, the first one, and yes, I know the later ones are much better, but I want to know the story from the beginning.

Assassin's Creed is a story whose premise intrigued me immensely as soon as the details of its now well known "meta plot" leaked out. I mean, sure, simply leaping around various cities and stabbing people in the neck is fun, but having a context for your actions that went beyond just Altaïr's story was a cool idea — and I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with the upcoming Revelations.

Assassin's Creed the first has its problems, sure, mostly relating to the "investigation" segment of the game, which tends to get a bit repetitive. (Also, the sheer pointlessness of the flag-collecting, which needless to say I shan't be bothering with.) But it does so many things right. It has a wonderful sense of scale and height. Freerunning across rooftops and nimbly hopping from beam to beam never gets old. And the combat system, though relatively simple, is cinematic and satisfying.

I'm not sure why I didn't finish it first time around — I think something "higher priority" came around and I never got around to returning to it — but I'm looking forward to seeing how the series pans out. I know Assassin's Creed II and Brotherhood are better, for example, but I don't know how. Since I've managed to find super-cheap copies, I will shortly be finding out.

The thing that's struck me the most from playing this first game though is how much you can forget that top-tier games can feel truly "alive". When you spend all day reading the marketingspeak that publishers of said top-tier games spout in press releases (coupled with utterly meaningless quotes from their VP of Talking Nonsense In As Many Words As Possible) it's easy to forget that these games are exciting creative works, and the teams who work on them treat them as such.

Assassin's Creed, for example, is awash with gorgeous details in its graphics and sound. Its cities are satisfying to explore and climb all over, even if there's not really any incentive to beyond "woo, look at that view!" But if all the information you had on the game came from Ubi press releases, you wouldn't know it, because they describe it as a product to be sold, not a creative endeavour to be enjoyed. And that's kind of sad — though somewhat inevitable given the times we live in.

I shall be romping through the Assassin's Creed series alongside Xenoblade at present. Maybe I'll finish all of them before Revelations comes out. Or perhaps if I take my time a bit I can finish them all by the time Revelations gets a bit cheaper!

Oh, and if you spoil anything about any of the series, I will kill you dead.

#oneaday Day 619: Bound by Isaac

Edmund "Super Meat Boy" McMillen and Florian "I Work With Edmund 'Super Meat Boy' McMillen Quite A Bit" Himsl have a new game out — you may have heard of it. It's called The Binding of Isaac and it costs just £3.59, or $5 to you American types. It's also a prime example of a project that would never have got greenlit by a large publisher, for many reasons.

These reasons start with the very premise of the game — you play a nude, crying child attempting to escape from his mother who has been hearing messages from God and believes that she must rid her child of corruption by, as in the Biblical story, killing him. Little Isaac isn't willing to stick around and wait and see if God stays his psychotic mother's hand, however, so he escapes into the basement, only to be confronted with numerous manifestations of his own fears and nightmares. What follows is a genuinely horrifying yet darkly amusing quest through a series of Zelda-inspired randomly generated dungeons where Isaac dispatches his enemies by crying on them and powers up through a series of items, most of which affect his appearance in some sort of particularly grotesque and inappropriate manner. Sound fun? Or just plain weird? It's both.

The exact items you'll encounter are different on each playthrough, making each run through the game's short dungeons a genuinely unpredictable experience. On one run you might come across a syringe full of steroids first of all, which beefs up Isaac and makes his head swell in an unpleasantly tumorous manner. On another run you might come across a wire coat hanger which, revoltingly, he impales through his own head and increases his capacity for crying. On yet another run you may find something else — there's about 100 different items to find and discover the uses of, and every one of them affects little Isaac's appearance in one way or another.

This being a game from McMillen, it's got a distinctive art style that is entertaining, amusing and horrifying all at once. Cute little worms slither around, only to come flying at you with fang-filled maws agape as soon as they become aware of your presence. Nightmarish clones of Isaac with no eyes in their sockets stagger around — and continue to do so even after Isaac has blown their heads off. And flies buzz around destructible lumps of shit before turning on Isaac in anger.

It's an utterly bewildering game, but strangely compelling and addictive. The fact that a single death forces you to go back to the start of a new dungeon and try again means potentially limitless replay value, and a huge number of unlockable items — including extra characters — only add to this. The game parodies the NES original Zelda dungeons perfectly, right down to the mostly mute shopkeepers with just three wares lined up before them — only in the case of Isaac's adventure, the shopkeepers are effigies of him that have been strung up by their necks and hang from the ceiling.

At $3.50, it's certainly worth giving a shot, even if you play it once and are too horrified and disgusted to play it ever again. If nothing else, it's refreshing to see fairly traditional play mechanics married to an aesthetic and setting which is utterly shameless and doesn't hold back from showing things that are either darkly hilarious or stomach-churningly revolting — I haven't quite made my mind up yet.

One thing's certain — for more reasons than one, you're never going to see this one on Xbox Live Arcade.

#oneaday Day 604: TrackMania 2, Day 1

It's been a good week for game releases that I'm excited about, and not one of them has been on console or what I'd call a "mainstream" title — further confirmation that there's more than enough entertainment out there for people without having to always play the "biggest" and "best" games there are. In just the last couple of days, we've seen Minecraft's official update to version 1.8, which adds some significant new content; the re-release of Wing Commander III on Good Old Games; and, of course, TrackMania 2 Canyon being unleashed on the public.

I've been playing it a bit tonight so I thought I'd share some observations.

First up: it's good. It's still recognizably TrackMania — the interface and sound effects are pretty much identical. The driving model for the cars on offer in the Canyon environment is fun, though — strongly drift-based and very reminiscent of arcade racers such as Burnout, Daytona and Ridge Racer. This is a little different from the variety of cars seen in TrackMania United, where for the most part, drifting was discouraged as it lowered your speed. In the Canyon, however, if a corner is more than a slight wiggle you're encouraged to throw your car around it sideways. Always fun.

The potential disappointment of the game that I had on my radar was the fact that it only has a single environment — the titular Canyon. Fortunately, there are enough blocks and combinations thereof to mean that this environment offers more than enough variety to carry a whole game. And the single player campaign is nicely paced, alternating between twisty mountain roads, rollercoasteresque elevated tracks and traditional speedway circuits. Despite remaining in the same cars in the same canyon for the whole game, it's not a worry — for now, at least, and by the time it may start feeling a bit stale, there'll surely be some modders out there with new textures and addons to improve the game. And following that, the Valley environment will be released — and who knows what beyond that?

If you're not a TrackMania fan then the fact the base of the game is fundamentally not that different probably won't be enough to sway you — though the improved driving model makes it a little more accessible than the sometimes-idiosyncratic handling of United's lineup. Series purists are bemoaning the lack of Platform and Stunt levels in the single player campaign, though these were always lesser-played modes anyway, and Nadeo have also said that there's the possibility of putting these modes back in through a future update — the whole point of the "ManiaPlanet" platform is to be able to evolve it on a regular basis.

A pleasing new addition is the four-player split screen mode. I haven't tried it as yet, but if you have your PC hooked up to your TV as I do, this will make for some highly entertaining party play. The Hotseat mode of the original is present and correct, too, as is LAN play. And online is as fun as ever, with servers already offering a wide variety of creative community tracks and intense competition for up to 200 people at once.

So first impressions of the game are very good, then, and especially as it's just £20. While the lack of other environments is a shame, with the game releasing at a lower price point I certainly won't object to paying more for extra environments in the future — particularly if each comes with its own campaign, as is likely to happen. And the future also holds the highly intriguing possibilities offered by ShootMania and QuestMania, information on which is very limited right now. QuestMania is probably the one I'm most excited about, as I'm very interested in the implementation of user-created RPG quests. I hope it turns out to be good. We'll see!

You can grab TrackMania 2 Canyon now from its official website, and I recommend that you do.

#oneaday Day 602: The Systematic Destruction of Everything You Once Held Dear

So EA has officially confirmed the existence of Syndicate from The Darkness developer Starbreeze, and lo and behold, it's a first person shooter. After X-COM, this makes two once-beloved PC strategy franchises pillaged in the name of popularity and commercialism.

Now, to be fair to both the new X-COM and Syndicate games, no-one's played them in any great detail yet. (Except the developers, obviously.) So there's every possibility that they might be very good. Syndicate in particular has a setting which lends itself to Deus Ex-style first person exploration and cyberpunk shenanigans. Perhaps it will even be able to out-Deus Ex Deus Ex: Human Revolution — given the somewhat mixed opinions I've heard regarding that game (mostly of the "it's great but the boss fights suck" variety) that's a distinct possibility.

X-COM, though, is missing the point to a spectacular degree. The whole point of the X-COM series was to repel an alien invasion through careful management of your strike teams, of your vehicles and bases. It was a complex series of games, but an immensely satisfying one as a result. Its isometric turn-based battles laid the foundations for many future games and indeed, some might say, the whole strategy RPG genre. And it's not as if strategy RPGs have fallen out of favour, as the recent Tactics Ogre release on PSP, Disgaea 4 on PS3 and Final Fantasy Tactics on iPhone will attest. So why pillage a beloved franchise and turn it into a shooter?

Perhaps they believe that they'll be telling an excellent story from the first person perspective. It worked for BioShock, after all (right up until that stupid ending) and it worked for the Half-Life series. But herein lies the rub — the original X-COM was an emergent experience where the story unfolded naturally as you played, and everyone's experience was a little different. Sure, there was an end to the game (which very few people saw, I'd wager) but the route you took to get there was up to your own strategic mind and the decisions you made — and not in a BioWare RPG binary choice sort of way, all the decisions you made regarding the makeup of your team, their equipment, where they were based, how you developed them and so on. To pre-script the whole thing again seems to be missing the point somewhat.

Perhaps it's just misplaced nostalgia that makes us ageing gamers want to remember these games as they once were, not as the populist reboots that they're getting. After all, as gaming has become more and more mainstream and more and more people come to these big-name titles, games in once-niche franchises use the cachet of their name to attract veteran gamers while providing the quick-hit thrills of the popular FPS genre to attract younger players reared on a diet of Call of Duty.

Sadly, though, it doesn't really work — the younger players haven't heard of the series in question and simply come to the game because it looks interesting (and because people are talking about it) and the veteran gamers take one look at it, think it doesn't bear even a passing resemblance to the game they once loved and thus dismiss it. They'd be much better off making proper sequels to Syndicate and X-COM in their original styles (with appropriately upgraded graphics, obviously) to appeal to those veterans — who would doubtless snap up such products in a trice — and leave the youngsters to newer IPs.

Alternatively, as someone said on Twitter earlier (I forget who, sorry if you're reading) — if X-COM and Syndicate can become first-person shooters, why can't Ghost Recon become an isometric turn-based strategy game? I'd play that. (And yes, I know it has already done this on the 3DS — with X-COM creator Julian Gollop behind it, no less — but I'm talking about a proper computer version, preferably PC exclusive, with renamable characters.)