#oneaday Day 498: Forgetful... again

Ooh, I forgot to write something yesterday, again. To be honest, yesterday just sort of went by in a haze. I don't feel like I really "achieved" anything. We went food shopping, which was something, but aside from that, not a lot happened. I didn't even really feel like I had much time to spend doing things I enjoy — before I knew it, the day was just over.

I did play the demo for the upcoming Nighthawks on Steam, though. I'll likely write something more substantial about this soon, but my first impressions on this short-but-sweet demo were very encouraging.

For the unfamiliar, Nighthawks is an adventure game/visual novel/RPG type thing published by adventure game maestros Wadjet Eye Games and developed by The Curiosity Engine. It's a vampire-themed game that obviously takes some heavy cues from Vampire: The Masquerade without actually using the World of Darkness license. Which is good, because it sounds as if the long-awaited Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has turned out to be… not so good. As if anyone is surprised at that after its cursed development cycle.

Nighthawks, though — that gets the whole World of Darkness vibe, with a few interesting twists. For starters, in the world of Nighthawks, humanity is aware of the existence of vampires, so no need for the "Masquerade". That said, making use of your vampiric powers somewhere that you can be noticed is still frowned upon, so you still have to be a bit careful.

The game starts with you creating a character by establishing some elements of your background: where you came from, who your sire was, what your specialisms are. From there, you're thrown into the plot proper, where you arrive in town in search of a former contact who has absconded with something precious to you. As a pretty new vampire, you have no money to your name, no contacts and no reputation, so it's up to you to establish all these things — and I believe the full game ends up with you owning the eponymous nightclub and having to run it.

I really like what I've seen so far, and I'm going to try playing the demo again with a different character archetype to see what — if anything — changes. It looks as if it's going to be one of those games where you can very much "role-play" your character and have a markedly different experience depending on your choices, both during character creation and once the game proper is underway.

The demo is still up at the time of writing as part of Steam Next Fest, so be sure to download it and give it a go if it sounds like your sort of thing. In the absence of a good Vampire: The Masquerade game (though I must confess I never played those visual novels from a while back) it's looking like it has the potential to be a very good substitute.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 494: Goddamn gacha

Recently, Square Enix announced that it was doing a new Dissidia Final Fantasy game. For a brief, blissful moment, I was hoping that we might actually have a proper new Dissidia, and not whatever that last thing on PS4 was, but no. Of course it's a fucking free-to-play gacha game. Of course it is.

I'm so sick of gacha games. I'm sick of them exploiting people, I'm sick of them being poorly designed games, I'm sick of them being the only peep we hear from once-beloved franchises, and I'm even sick of them leaning hard into the "sex sells" angle. And I say that as a card-carrying lover of anime tiddies.

The new Dissidia game supposedly has Final Fantasy characters brought to real-world Tokyo and has full Japanese voice acting. Great! Why isn't it a proper game? Because I'm sorry, another thing I'm sick of is people who scold you for "looking down" on gacha games "because they're successful".

Gacha games are shite. They're marginally less shite today than they once were, but they're still shite.

I'll give you a bit of context. Following the surprise and sudden closure of GamePro, I found myself working on a business-facing publication that looked at mobile and social games. Free-to-play games — both on mobile and, at the time, Facebook — were really starting to take off around that point, so I was paid a frankly impressive salary to suffer through playing them every day.

One that I remember specifically being encouraged to look at was Rage of Bahamut by Cygames. This, I was told, was part of a new trend for what was, at the time, known as "card battling" games. Great, I thought. I like Magic and Ascension and Dominion — this'll be a great fit for mobile.

Except Rage of Bahamut had about as much gameplay as a '90s webpage — and had an interface to match. Progressing through the game's plot literally involved nothing more than clicking the "Advance" button multiple times, watching your "Energy" bar decline with each step and your "Experience" bar increase concurrently. Occasionally you'd be thrown into "battle", during which the numerical values of the cards in your hand were added up and compared to your opponent's, and whoever had the bigger number won. There was absolutely no interactivity whatsoever — the sole "strategy" for the game, if you can call it that, was making those numbers as big as possible. And, of course, the most efficient way to do that was to pay money, which would guarantee you "rare" (higher value) cards.

Zoom forward a few years and you have games that are at least attempting to hide this formula somewhat, but they're all still, at their core, nothing but "make bigger number than opponents" games. Two of the most popular examples, Cygames' Granblue Fantasy and Aniplex's Fate/Grand Order, dress it up with fancy turn-based battles that look like they're from proper RPGs, but ultimately both are about just making sure you have valuable enough cards to overpower everything in your path.

The frustrating thing is that these games often have quite good, interesting stories to them, but the gameplay is so unimaginably tedious that I have absolutely no desire to play them whatsoever — and even if that wasn't the case, the utterly exploitative monetisation would do the trick for me.

Most of the gacha games in my experience provide various different "packs" of the premium currency required to draw new cards, characters or whatever, but pretty much every one has required that you spend at least twenty quid in order to get a worthwhile draw. The alternative is grinding, grinding, grinding through the tedious, shitty gameplay in the hopes of being given a scrap of premium currency to draw some rare cards once in a blue moon. Twenty quid can buy you multiple good games that you can just enjoy at your leisure from thereon!

And many of these games are flagrantly, transparently attempting to use quasi-erotic artwork as a means of extracting money from their player base. Azur Lane is one of the worst in this regard, with more recent competition from Nikke: Goddess of Victory, a game with more jiggling arses than I think I've ever seen, even in Senran Kagura. They'll offer a "limited banner" of some exceedingly attractive character in a skimpy outfit, and players will gullibly throw money at the game in the hopes of getting a PNG or a Live2D image of their waifu, and the cycle will repeat over, and over, and over again.

These games have no soul. These games have no value. And I wish they would go away. But after over 10 years of suffering their presence, it doesn't seem like they're going anywhere any time soon, with a significant number of companies now seemingly reliant on the obscene income they draw in (and the minimal expenses they almost certainly cost to run).

Mobile gaming is dead to me. And, apparently, so is Dissidia. At least I still have the two PSP games to enjoy.

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#oneaday Day 493: The breakneck pace of Final Fantasy IV

As one of several games I have on the go right now — for a bit of variety, like — I decided to start up Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster. I've played Final Fantasy IV I think twice before — and one of those was on PlayStation, so your sympathies are gratefully received, though that version at least isn't quite as bad as PS1 Final Fantasy VI — and remembered it being quite short, though I had forgotten quite how fast it moves.

I'm two hours in and already — apologies in advance if any of this is a spoiler, but the game came out in 1991 — the main character has committed a war crime, adopted an orphan child that he was directly responsible for orphaning, become separated from his best friend (who inevitably turns traitor), rescued his loved one from a deadly bout of Desert Fever by retrieving a valuable gem from a slobbering Antlion, rescued a prince from the ruins of his devastated castle and his broken heart, and attempted (mostly unsuccessfully) to fend off an assault on another kingdom.

It moves so fast. I had forgotten how fast. I have played so many modern (relatively speaking) games that feature epic-length story sequences between the core "gameplay" sections that it almost feels rushed. I mean, hell, after two hours in a Persona game from 3 onwards, you're barely through the initial character introductions and you almost certainly haven't set foot in a dungeon yet.

This is both a strength and a weakness of Final Fantasy IV, looking at it with a 2025 pair of eyes. It's a strength because it means that there's never particularly long to wait before you're doing stuff again — exploring the world, clearing dungeons, fighting monsters, levelling up, buying new equipment — and that is quite a refreshing change from today's narrative-centric games that, while undoubtedly considerably more ambitious in their storytelling, sometimes do feel like they're getting a little bogged down. Not only that, but Final Fantasy IV is done and dusted in less than 20 hours, which makes it a veritable light novel by RPG standards.

However, it's also a weakness, because there are some sequences that were clearly intended to be quite significant narrative moments, but the way the game just whizzes through them makes them feel almost laughable.

I'll give you an example. Rydia, the girl that the protagonist, Cecil, rescues from a war crime he inadvertently committed at the behest of his king, is a Summoner in Final Fantasy Job terms. This means that not only can she summon big things to deal heavy damage, but she can also cast both white and black magic spells. When you first get her, she's an inexperienced kid at level 1, so she barely knows any spells, but a bit of levelling in the field will net her a few initial, useful spells. Except you'll notice one black magic spell is prominently missing: Fire.

Think about it for a moment and it's obvious why: because she lost her entire village, including her mother, in a fiery explosion, she is, of course, going to be hesitant to call upon the power of fire. This little bit of characterisation is initially delivered without the game drawing any attention to it whatsoever, but you can notice it early from a simple browse of the menu. Very cool. Ambitious for the time, even!

What is less cool is when the party finds their path up a mountain blocked by a big chunk of ice, and the other members, eventually getting Rydia to admit that she "hates fire", pretty much tell her to stop snivelling and get over it because they jolly well have a quest to accomplish. It's almost certainly not intended to come across that way — the other members are all "yay, you did it, I always believed in you" after she does successfully cast her first Fire spell, presumably with tears streaming down her face and the knowledge that this is probably going to need years of therapy to truly deal with — but with at least a couple of decades' worth of games that handle sensitive topics rather more delicately behind us, it does feel rather… blunt.

But, again, you have to remember that this was 1991, just a year after the SNES had come on the market, and Final Fantasy IV was on a cartridge that contained less than a megabyte of data in total. In fact, during development, the script had to be cut considerably to fit on its cartridge; lengthy exposition was something that developers simply couldn't afford to do back in these days, because every byte mattered, and text can potentially take up a lot of space if there's enough of it. As such, it's not altogether surprising that some sequences feel like they move a tad fast by modern standards — short of shipping on a larger capacity cartridge, which was presumably a decision that needed to be made relatively early in development, there were very real constraints on what Final Fantasy IV would be able to do.

Of course, Final Fantasy IV has been expanded on quite a bit in later remakes such as the polygonal 3DS version, the Game Boy Advance version and the PSP version; each of these had their own additions to the basic Final Fantasy IV formula.

But the Pixel Remaster; that's based on Final Fantasy IV as it originally existed, graphics and music aside, and thus you have the plot that speeds off over the horizon as you just think you're getting caught up on proceedings.

All this is no shade on Final Fantasy IV, of course; it's a game I like very much (though it's far from my favourite Final Fantasy) — I just found it interesting to revisit this after so many years and be reminded that at one time, RPGs moved a lot more quickly than they do now!

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#oneaday Day 491: Some first impressions from Death end re;Quest Code Z

I am a big fan of Compile Heart's Death end re;Quest series. For the unfamiliar, it's a series of three (to date… with it looking like there's more on the way) narrative-centric console RPGs with strong horror themes, and involvement from some maestros of the genre like Makoto "Corpse Party" Kedouin on scenario duties and Kei "Mary Skelter" Nanameda on the art.

What I've found very interesting about Death end re;Quest to date is that all the games in the series have been very different from one another. Mechanically, the first two were quite similar, but tonally and thematically they were very different. The first game primarily involved an "if you die in the game you die for real" kind of MMO-gone-mad situation, while the second was based around horrible goings-on in a tiny European town that doesn't appear on any maps. As Compile Heart games, both of them also involved more than a touch of yuri to them — particularly in the case of the second one.

Death end re;Quest Code Z, meanwhile, changes up both the narrative setting and the game's core mechanical conceits. Narratively, I'm not far enough into the game to know exactly what the situation is, but it involves characters from both of the previous two games, many of whom didn't interact with one another directly in their original games — and, moreover, some characters who were very much dead in previous games, such as the father of the second game's protagonist, Mai — are alive in this one. I can't comment on that further as yet, but I'm interested to know more.

The most obvious difference between Death end re;Quest Code Z and its predecessors is that it's now a Mystery Dungeon-like. For those not familiar with such things, this is a Japanese take on the roguelike genre that typically (though not always) favours cutesy visuals; grid-based, turn-based movement and combat; a heavy degree of resource management; limited inventory space; and, of course, a series of increasingly deep, procedurally generated dungeons in which to hack, slash, explore, level up and loot.

Death end re;Quest Code Z mostly plays things relatively straight in this regard, with the exception of one thing: rather than an "energy" or "hunger" bar, the protagonist, Sayaka, has a sanity rating. This gradually declines as you explore, with various "milestones" on the gauge corresponding to her field of view contracting, the background audio becoming more distorted (or completely replaced) and, in the case of extremely low sanity, interface elements like the minimap being unusable and the likelihood of her harming herself going up considerably.

This is very much in keeping with the horror tone the series has always had, but it also means that the game has quite a "survival horror" feel to it as well. Since you're juggling your health, sanity and available items as you progress through each dungeon, you have to make some tough and interesting choices as you play — particularly if you're playing on the "Expert" mode (which I actually recommend in this case), where Sayaka's level is reset every time she leaves a dungeon, and she suffers notable losses in terms of inventory items and weapon power-ups if she's actually killed.

The other interesting thing relates to the series' titular "Death Ends". In prior games, Death Ends came about if you made bad choices during the storytelling sequences, and usually resulted in the protagonist and/or members of the core cast suffering a horrifying, gory death, described in excruciating detail. Towards the end of the first game — mild spoilers, I guess — one of the characters becomes aware of you, the player, and starts addressing you as "God of Death" in recognition of the number of times you have led the cast to a sticky end, and Death end re;Quest Code Z builds on this further by having the main protagonist, Sayaka, constantly aware of and communicating with you — even putting her trust in you.

There's some interesting conflict here, because Sayaka trusts you to lead her through the challenges ahead of her, and you need to successfully do so in order to progress through the story. But! And this is a big but: if you let her die, you can make her stronger. Because every time you see a unique Death End in Death end re;Quest Code Z, Sayaka gets a skill point that you can invest in passive boosts to her basic abilities and resistances, and even complete immunity to certain status effects. The more she dies, the stronger she gets and, presumably in theory, the easier the game gets.

But that places you, as her "Partner" (she very pointedly keeps referring to you as such) in a difficult position. Because in keeping with series tradition, every time Sayaka carks it, there's a lengthy narration of exactly how she dies, often delivered in something of a mocking tone. This is coupled with a gory (and often somewhat sexualised) event image depicting her dying yet again. Thus you are faced with a quandary: do you kill Sayaka a bunch in order to power her up? Do you deliberately lead her to her death multiple times in succession to score some easy skill points at the outset of the game? Or do you actually try and take care of her somewhat, knowing that in doing so you are leaving her as a somewhat sub-optimal character?

Death end re;Quest Code Z forces the player to interrogate their relationship with the death of their on-screen avatar — particularly one that is supposedly aware of them. Sayaka never remembers any of her deaths, but you know you caused them, and there's a helpful checklist of all 104 possible ways to die and the skill tree itself to remind you quite how many times you've seen her devoured, eviscerated, beaten to a bloody pulp, disintegrated, decapitated and any number of other nasty words you might care to mention. Undoubtedly the most "efficient" way to play is to repeatedly let Sayaka die in the first dungeon, but doing so is tedious — and thinking that should give you pause. You are repeatedly murdering someone, and it's boring. Are you that desensitised to violence that you can bring yourself to do that?

Some of you will be absolutely fine with it, I'm sure, and I'm not judging you for it. But after a few initial deaths in that first dungeon, I really started to hesitate and think "hang on a minute, this doesn't feel right at all". And I can't remember the last time a game made me feel quite like that about the protagonist, through my actions, being killed off.

This has made me determined to see how far it's possible to progress without killing Sayaka repeatedly. I've reached a point where I don't give a toss about PlayStation trophies any more, so I don't have the "pressure" from the two that related to getting all the Death Ends and unlocking all the skills weighing on me — and thus it really is up to my own feelings of morality about whether I want to buff up Sayaka by murdering her over and over again, or if I genuinely want to see her succeed, taking her shortcomings into account.

Thus far this is turning out to be one of Compile Heart's most interesting games. I'd expect nothing less from a series whose other two entries were also thoroughly fascinating. I'm intrigued to play more — and it certainly is the season for a bit of horror.

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#oneaday Day 490: Normalise roasting shitty customers

Earlier today, the publisher of the new automation-centric indie game Little Rocket Lab — by all accounts a thoroughly nice-looking, charming game that seems to have mostly gone down well — shared a few Steam posts, noting that they had completely lost patience with the idiots who cry "DEI" any time a woman or non-white character is included in a video game, and had just taken to responding to them in as blunt and unforgiving a manner as possible.

Here's the prime example:

And this one's pretty good, too:

Now, of course, this had A Certain Type of Gamer up in arms about the developer being "hostile" or "butthurt" to players, and to that I say… good. He has every right to be hostile when some little shit comes in and starts shooting their mouth off about something completely, utterly stupid. He has every right to want to curate his community and filter out toxic individuals — even in the case of a single-player game like this. He has every right to say that he's happy certain types of person are not going to play the game because they can't handle the presence of women and people who otherwise look a bit different from them.

I wish this attitude was a bit more normalised. Because it of course sucks to be on the receiving end of rudeness, but if you act like a twat then you should expect to be called on it, likely in anger, and that's a bit different from someone coming up to you and, completely unprovoked, telling you that they hope you die. Unfortunately, the culture of making everything as PR-friendly as possible these days means that even if you're receiving a torrent of abuse from some blowhard on the Internet, you're supposed to just quietly endure it, accept it, thank them for their feedback and move on with your day.

Well, honestly, it's not that easy. I, regrettably, have considerable experience from multiple positions I have worked over the years with people being complete shits to what they believe is a faceless social media account, and it sucks absolute donkey dick. Sometimes it's just weird, such as the one guy who harassed me when I was on GamePro because he thought debit cards were a conspiracy by George Bush to control society. But sometimes — often, even, I'd say — it's downright scary.

Under most circumstances, you're not allowed to respond in kind, you're not allowed to express any sort of frustration and you're absolutely not allowed to make the dickhead in question feel like they are the one who has done anything wrong.

I know why this is the case, of course. It's because the second a company steps out of perceived "line", particularly when it comes to something that has A Community around it, a million and one YouTube videos will appear with "[Brand Name] said WHAT??!!" and, in turn, further harassment will be sent the way of whatever poor sap is having to man the social media mines that day — and said poor employee of the company in question will probably find themselves facing if not disciplinary action, then certainly an awkward conversation with Management the next day.

It shouldn't have to be that way, though. In an age where you can't even walk into a coffee shop or doctor's office without prominent notices about how abuse and harassment of staff members will not be tolerated, why are we still sort of okay with it online? Why do we put up with this garbage treatment from "customers" who, in many cases, are not our target audience in the first place? Why can't we say that these people are not welcome in our community and shouldn't buy our products?

I, unfortunately, don't really have an answer to that. But I have plenty of respect for "Rave" (aka Mike Rose from publisher No More Robots) above, not only for responding the way he did, but also for sharing the crap that anyone involved in the production of games — or games journalism, for that matter — probably finds depressingly familiar at this point in time. We're long overdue a good, long talk about this, and how we can make things better. I'm just concerned it might be far too late to do anything about it.

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#oneaday Day 489: You've got Fun Factor

I've written about this before, but I write a lot of shit on this blog, so you may not have seen it, particularly since I last wrote about it in March of this year, when you may not have even been reading this blog. (The viewing figures would seem to suggest that quite a few more people are reading this blog now than there were in March. Although the other day I had approximately 900 bot visits from China, so I may take those figures with a pinch of salt or ten.)

Anyway, what I would like to talk about is the Fun Factor podcast, hosted by the experienced writers and video game enthusiasts, Ty Schalter and Aidan Moher. "Oh great," you might say. "Another video games podcast. Like we need any more of those!"

To that, dear reader, I say fie and pfaugh and other such expectorations! Fun Factor is different. Fun Factor isn't just a bunch of dudes sitting around talking about what they'd played that week, maybe coupled with the gaming news headlines they'd picked off their favourite website. Fun Factor is, as you might have determined from the name, about something which is very close to my heart and soul: magazines.

Each episode of Fun Factor takes a close look at an individual video game magazine. The present "season" is focusing specifically on the "Generation Gap", which covers the years between 1995 and 1997. This was a time when gaming underwent a quantum shift as we moved from 16-bit pixel mastery into the brave new frontier of (texture-mapped, Gouraud-shaded) polygonal 3D thanks to platforms like the Nintendo 64, PlayStation and Sega Saturn.

It was an exciting time, and the press of the period reflected that — for many, this was a real golden age for games magazines, as the Internet was early enough in its mainstream adoption (i.e. a lot of us were still on dial-up, particularly outside the US) that it hadn't yet taken the place of traditional publishing.

Rather than attempting to summarise the entire magazine, an episode of Fun Factor instead primarily focuses on a single piece in that magazine: a "review of a review", as it were. Along the way, Aidan and Ty both take a bit of time to flip through the magazine as a whole and contextualise what they're about to do a deep-dive into, including commentary on what was going on in games at that time, what they were both up to in their own personal lives (and experience with gaming) — and even a look at some of the weird and wonderful adverts that cropped up in print.

What I particularly enjoy about Fun Factor is that it has a breezy, friendly tone that one iTunes reviewer quite correctly described as "being like reading old magazines with friends". It's unmistakably modern, as Ty and Aidan are not above pointing out how these magazines often demonstrate how social attitudes and conventions have changed over the years, but, crucially, this never becomes in any way overbearing or preachy. There is plenty to criticise and lessons to be learned in these old mags — but also plenty to celebrate, too, and the show always finds an excellent balance between reflecting on how we've grown (or not, in some cases!) and what a wonderful time it was to be interested in video games.

Both Aidan and Ty cite classic games magazines as being formative in their own decisions to get into professional writing, so it's all done out of love for the medium. I've seen all too many online discussions of '90s magazines and ads in particular descend into nothing but laughing at the terrible taste and attitudes we all had, but Fun Factor has never, to date, across 13 episodes at the time of writing, found anything completely irredeemable in the publications they've looked at.

Even in instances where both Ty and Aidan have disliked the review that was published — such as Edge's truly strange Final Fantasy VI review — there have been positives to pull out. And some of the best examples of reviews from that period have, so far, ended up coming from the most unexpected places — like, say, sports games.

I adore old magazines and have a small collection of them that I treasure — mostly from well before the era that Aidan and Ty are presently covering on Fun Factor — but I don't have many people that I feel I can talk and enthuse about them with, or who understand why they hold such meaning for me. One of the reasons I value Fun Factor so much is that it helps me feel like there are other people out there who get it, who understand why magazines, at one time, held such importance for us as video game enthusiasts — and why many of us miss those days greatly.

If you're after something new to listen to and the above sounds like fun, you can find more information about the Fun Factor podcast on their official website, funfactorpod.com. You can also subscribe to the podcast's channel on YouTube, and I'd encourage you to check out the video versions of the podcast, since each episode displays scans of the pages that Ty and Aidan are talking about, allowing you to "read along" with them to a certain extent.

Thanks for the entertainment, fellas, and I look forward to hearing more from you. Plus if you ever need to hear stories about old Atari magazines, Year 10 work experience on PC Zone or freelancing for the Official Nintendo Magazine here in the UK, you know where I am!

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#oneaday Day 488: Home ports deserve remembering too

I feel like I've talked about this before, but whatever. I feel like talking about it today, so talk about it I will.

In this age of being able to easily emulate the original arcade versions of games, I feel like one thing gets easily lost from the "preservation" aspect of retro rereleases on today's systems: home ports that are notably different from simple attempts to recreate the original arcade games.

I was reminded of this when watching the YouTuber Classic Gaming Quarterly playing Gauntlet for NES earlier. I legitimately had no idea that Gauntlet for NES is not, in fact, a straight port of the arcade game and is, instead, a completely different game. I did know that Gauntlet IV for the Mega Drive also pulls this stunt, but I did not know that this extended back to the NES version. And for my money, pretty much all the home ports of Gauntlet are much more fun than the quarter-munching arcade version — particularly if you're playing on emulation and thus have infinite credits and therefore infinite health.

There are others, too. The Mega Drive port of Toaplan's Slap Fight features an entirely new game mode. The NES versions of the Double Dragon games are completely different to their arcade counterparts. And I'm sure there are countless others — to say nothing of the "home-exclusive sequels" we saw to numerous arcade games, often put together by western developers who didn't quite get what made the Japanese originals so good. (That said, I will happily go to bat for OutRun 2019.)

A few publishers are cottoning on to the fact that there is value in preserving multiple versions of classic games, including both the arcade originals and popular home ports, but it's by no means the norm. The reasons are likely due to licensing complications — in many cases, while the rights to the original arcade game remain with the original creators (or a company that has succeeded the original creators and/or bought the rights), home ports were developed by different teams, meaning that the rights would, I assume (IANAL), be split between the original creators of the arcade game and whoever made the port. This is not a problem when those are one and the same — like the Double Dragon games, for example — but there are plenty of situations where the home versions of a game were made by a completely different company, or even an individual at times.

The takeaway I have from all this is something that I've thought for a while: in many cases, I actually prefer playing the home conversions of games to the original arcade versions, even when the arcade version is obviously technologically superior. There are several reasons for this: firstly, those home conversions are often a good example of what their host platforms are (and are not) capable of. Secondly, since home ports are not obliged to keep people feeding coins into a machine, they are often balanced much better than their arcade counterparts. And this, in turn, makes them considerably more enjoyable to play.

Because there absolutely are arcade games out there that take "quarter-munching" way too far. I adore the beat 'em up genre, for example, but I'd much rather play Streets of Rage 2 than the arcade version of Final Fight, simply because Streets of Rage 2 is balanced much more fairly — and the beat 'em up genre appears particularly prone to this issue. The same is true for any sort of competitive game with a "1P vs COM" mode, be it a fighting game or a puzzle game. In their arcade incarnations, these tend to become absolutely impossible after just one or two levels, whereas in their home incarnations, they tend to save their biggest bullshit for their final challenges. Still annoying at times, yes — particularly in puzzle games, where final bosses tend to have superhuman capabilities as well as, more often than not, ways to "cheat" — but a little less galling than only being able to get through two or three stages before having to wipe your score and "Continue?"

Thankfully, while official licensors are seemingly hesitant to let those often flawed ports back out into the wild when one can just emulate the arcade version on a veritable toaster of a machine these days, one can make use of alternative means to enjoy them through software emulation or FPGA solutions. And I would encourage everyone to do so, because while everyone will inevitably have a preference as to which version of something is "best", it's worth exploring those versions rather than simply assuming the most technologically advanced version is automatically the most enjoyable.

Now, I think I might give Gauntlet on the NES a bit of a go for myself!

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#oneaday Day 485: Forgetful

Missed yesterday. I have no excuse, I just forgot. You can blame Final Fantasy Tactics or God. I did make some videos and write about Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, though. You can read that here.

Speaking of Final Fantasy Tactics, I'm really impressed with the new The Ivalice Chronicles version. I wasn't initially sold on the new look of the "remastered" mode, but seeing it in action makes it make a lot more sense than still screenshots might suggest. There's a nice almost "fabric"-like texture to everything, which makes the game sort of look like it's unfolding on a tapestry, which is entirely appropriate for the nature of the narrative it's telling.

The biggest upgrade by far is the full voice acting. I remember back in the PlayStation 1 era thinking that it was a bit sad, if understandable, that big games like RPGs didn't have full voice acting. The reality is that the voice data for a game as big as Final Fantasy Tactics probably wouldn't fit on a CD! We have no such constraints today, however, so a fully voiced Final Fantasy Tactics is a thing of wonder, and there's an incredible voice cast doing their thing with the excellent War of the Lions script from the PSP version — definitely an upgrade from the borderline nonsensical PS1 original.

The game is still just as hard as it ever was, though. It will absolutely kick your ass if you don't take a bit of time to buff up your characters — and you still need to use a solid strategy during the missions themselves, even if you've levelled up a bit and got good equipment. The computer-controlled "Guest" characters are still as dimwitted as ever, unfortunately, which can lead to some annoying situations, but you can just look at it as these characters being true to their personalities. I can't say I was sorry any time Argath got knocked out.

One of the little things I like the most is the fact that all your "cannon fodder" party members — i.e. the ones who aren't directly relevant to the story — have their own voices, too. And rather than having just one male voice and one female voice, there are actually several, so your individual, "unimportant" characters each have their own personality, which helps you become attached to them. And, given that Final Fantasy Tactics has permadeath (albeit a somewhat forgiving take on it, where you have a few turns to resurrect them before they're gone forever) that's an important part of the experience.

I'm not far into the game as yet, but I'm enjoying it a lot, and I suspect I will get a lot more out of it now than when I played it back in the day. It's a truly great game, and I'm thrilled that it's got a new release — and a release in Europe, which it never had back in the day!

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#oneaday Day 479: The PS1 retro revival

I saw a fun trailer last night for a game called, rather amusingly, Parasite Mutant. Those of you of a certain age are probably already thinking "I wonder if that's anything like Parasite Eve", to which the answer is yes, yes it is, very much so.

The great thing is that this isn't even the only Parasite Eve-like that is on the way — the folks who made the excellent visual novel VA-11 HALL-A have also been working on one for quite some time. And it looks awesome — though when it comes out is anyone's guess at this point.

Yes, indeed, we are well and truly in an age where the original PlayStation is retro enough to have modern homages to it. In fact, we've been there for a while, with the indie horror scene latching on to the system's distinctive 3D aesthetic a few years back, and more and more developers deliberately adopting low-res, low-poly, unfiltered 3D as their game's distinctive look and feel.

So with all of the above in mind, here's a few PS1 games from back in the day that I think would be simply smashing to see some modern imitators of. In fact, some of these already have modern imitators on the way — I will do my best to link to those where I am aware of them. (If you are aware of any I missed, please do let me know.)

Ridge Racer

C'mon. Obviously. The 16-bit-style arcade racer has been present and correct in the modern scene for a while thanks to titles like Horizon Chase Turbo and Slipstream, and we've even seen a couple of homages to Virtua Racing, but we haven't seen that many Ridge Racer-likes. I'm not sure we've seen any, in fact — though I am aware of one that is currently early in development.

Yes, we're getting a new Screamer, but it's trying to be all modern and do the twin-stick drifting thing that Inertial Drift did. That's not a bad thing in itself, but it's not "PS1". Just make a new Ridge Racer or equivalent. Namco even released the original Ridge Racer on modern consoles, so there's a market for it!

Parasite Eve

On the off-chance some of you don't know what Parasite Eve is, the elevator pitch is that it's a cross between Resident Evil-style survival horror (fixed camera angles, limited resources) and an RPG. Combat unfolds using a variation on Final Fantasy's Active Time Battle mechanics, with a time bar that gradually fills up and allows you to act when it's full, but the twist of being able to move freely while it's charging. This adds an interesting blend of real-time and turn-based mechanics, whereby you can avoid enemy attacks, but you still have to wait your turn.

Parasite Eve was noteworthy for what was beautiful presentation at the time: pre-rendered backdrops with detailed (for the late '90s) polygonal characters atop them, punctuated by completely pre-rendered FMV sequences depicting major plot moments. It had two sequels, neither of which I've played (yet) but is currently in rights hell, making an official rerelease exceedingly unlikely — leaving the stage wide open for imitators (complimentary).

Brave Fencer Musashi

From the same era and publisher as Parasite Eve came something completely different. Brave Fencer Musashi was also a blend of things we'd seen before — in this case, the early 3D platformer (a la Crash Bandicoot) with the action RPG. It was a fully polygonal action game with a fair amount of platforming in it, and a delightfully silly script. I don't know how true the English script was to the Japanese original and kind of don't care, because the introductory "Princess! Sir Little Turd!" sequence is the stuff of legends.

Brave Fencer Musashi has a little in common with Konami's Mystical Ninja series, particularly its first N64 incarnation Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon. And we've had a Mystical Ninja-like in recent years in the form of Bakeru, so surely a Brave Fencer Musashi-like isn't too much to ask for, no?

Any form of puzzle game

The PS1 was a golden age for puzzle games. And not just the competitive "versus" kind that still have a certain following today — the PS1 also played host to a wide variety of puzzlers, most of which could be enjoyed by a solo player for hours at a time.

The rise of the free-to-play mobile game all but killed the standalone puzzle game genre, but releases like Tetris Effect and Puyo Puyo Tetris have showed that there's still something of a market there for them. It'd be lovely to see some developers have a crack at mechanics similar to those seen in lesser-known puzzlers like Starsweep and Landmaker as well as the predictable bubble shooters, match-three and line-clearing games we occasionally get today.

Vagrant Story

If someone wants to get really ambitious, they can pay homage to Vagrant Story, a thoroughly interesting Square Enix title that forms part of the loose "Ivalice" series that includes Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy XII. (Although apparently its connections may just be fanservice.)

Vagrant Story was interesting for its ambitious storytelling and its unusual combat system, which, a bit like Parasite Eve, blended real-time and turn-based elements together, this time placing an emphasis on "risk". You could attack as often as you liked, but doing so would build up Risk, which reduces your hit rate but increases your critical chance. It's a tad more complex than that, with things like damage to individual limbs being tracked, but I think it's high time we revisited some of its ideas.

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#oneaday Day 477: The things all modern games do

I saw a fun comment a little while back — I forget who it was and even where it was posted, so apologies to the person who originally made it — that put forward a theory: you could release a game from ten years ago today, such as Metal Gear Solid V, and no-one would be any the wiser, outside of maybe some improvements in performance and/or resolution.

This made me laugh, because there's a certain amount of truth to it. It feels like modern mid-to-big budget games that have chosen "quasi-photorealistic" as their aesthetic of choice are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from one another. This type of visual style has long since stopped impressing me, and it's actually kind of starting to bug me how much all the top-end developers appear to be shamelessly cribbing from one another.

So here's a list of things that I would really rather see less of. Very few of these things are "bad" as such, it would just be nice to see some games that didn't do them.

Gears of War cam

You know the one. Third-person, camera shifted a little back from the character enough to see most of their upper torso but not their legs (because if you can see their legs you can see that we still can't quite animate people going up and down steps properly) and to the right, positioning the character just to the left of centre on your screen.

Bonus points if the camera wobbles around when the character is sprinting, in simulation of a cameraman running behind the character while attempting to hold an unwieldy camera steady.

The slow pan down to interactivity

The "seamless transition from cutscene to gameplay" thing stopped being impressive a long time ago. Final Fantasy VII pulled it off (kind of) in 1997. Just once, just once, it would be nice for a cutscene to end without a slow pan to Gears of War-cam while the background audio and music fades to calmness and the protagonist slowly, but perfectly in time with the camera pan, takes a stance ready for action.

Painfully obvious objective markers

"Go through the door". No, really? This door that I just spent half an hour solving puzzles to open? Really? You want me to go through it?

A health bar that grossly misrepresents how much damage you can take

To be fair, this has been a problem since Namco's Rolling Thunder gave you a segmented health bar that suggested you would be able to take up to eight hits before keeling over, then immediately killed you if you got hit by a single bullet. But this has become so common it's a bit of a problem ever since everyone decided that everything needs, to one degree or another, to be a Souls-like.

If you're giving me a health bar of a reasonable length, I don't want 75% of it to fall off the moment I take one hit from an enemy. Not every game has to have "brutal, hard-as-nails" combat, as marketing people like to put it. Sometimes it's okay — even desirable — to have flashy, button-mashy combat where the protagonist can take as much punishment as the enemies do.

Opening a single drawer from a chest and finding nothing

I don't know which game first did the "protagonist searches a chest of drawers by opening one completely empty drawer and 90% of the time doesn't find anything" thing, but it's an absolute plague these days. Granted, at the other end of the spectrum we have Shenmue, a game which can be looked upon at least in part as the world's most detailed cupboard-opening simulator, but I feel like there's probably a happy medium somewhere.

See also: lootable objects in non-RPGs with nothing in them. Why do you do this?

Progression mechanics in games that aren't RPGs

Stop it. I don't need to level up and I don't need to grind in every single game. Just give me what I need to beat the game from the outset. You may — may — under certain circumstances unlock new moves and weapons as the game progresses, but these should not be tied to any sort of "experience" system.

Photo mode and New Game+ added as post-launch updates

You know you're going to do them. Just put them in from the start.

And just for good measure, one thing I wish we saw more of:

Post-game unlocks that significantly alter the game

My benchmark for this is Silent Hill 3, which, under the correct circumstances, allows you to dress the protagonist Heather up in a retro-futuristic outfit and unleash her devastating "Heather Beam" on enemies. Optionally, you could also add an on-screen health bar to the game, which is not normally present because it's a survival horror game. These two elements completely changed the feel of Silent Hill 3, and offered an incentive to replay that wasn't just "play through the entire thing again with some minor changes to get a different ending".

These days, sadly, costumes are primarily DLC and additional modes that significantly alter the way the game plays just don't really feel like a thing any more. Part of this is down to modern games being considerably expanded in length over stuff from, say, the PS2 era (which is when Silent Hill 3 originally came out), but also some developers just don't seem all that willing to have a bit of silly fun with their creations. And that's a bit sad!

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