#oneaday Day 138: Marked

I’m currently playing Death Mark, a game I’ve had on my shelf (along with its two sequels) for quite a while now, but have never gotten around to. I’ve been meaning to play it for “spooky season” for a few years now, but for one reason or another the timings have never quite lined up. This year, I made it happen!

As with most things, I’ll do a full writeup on MoeGamer once I’ve finished it, but four chapters in now I can offer some reasonably well-informed thoughts on what I think so far.

For the unfamiliar, Death Mark is a horror adventure game by Experience Inc. Experience Inc. is a developer primarily known for making dungeon crawlers with beautiful artwork such as the excellent Demon Gaze series. Death Mark eschews most of the role-playing game trappings in favour of adventure game mechanics — though Experience haven’t completely left behind what they’re known for.

The premise of the game revolves around individuals suddenly finding they are “Marked” with a strange scar that looks like a bite mark. This indicates that very soon, they are going to lose their memories and then die horribly. The game consists of a series of discrete cases, during which you, as the Marked amnesiac protagonist, are tasked with helping out one or more companion characters and hopefully giving a restless spirit — the source of the Mark — some peace.

This involves exploring an area from a first-person perspective, discovering clues, solving puzzles and, when the time comes, confronting the spirit directly.

The first-person exploration is where Death Mark is closest to Experience’s dungeon crawlers, though the locations you move between are static images rather than polygonal environments. If you know a pathway exists, you can simply hit a direction on the D-pad to go that way, but in some cases you’ll need to investigate the environment in a point-and-click style with your torch to find hidden routes.

As you explore, you’ll start to learn more about the Ghost of the Week. In the tradition of Japanese ghost stories, all the restless spirits have been wronged in some way, and they are designed to have rather sympathetic stories — even if their ordeals turned them into vicious, violent monsters. And this is relevant when it comes to confronting the spirit at the end of each chapter.

A “battle” with a spirit unfolds in a turn-based fashion. Each turn, you and your companion can use one of the items you’ve found during the chapter. Some items can be used repeatedly, others have a limited number of uses. And some items can be used in combination, allowing you and your partner to cooperate and achieve something.

The process of the battle generally consists of a couple of rounds of you finding ways to counter the spirit’s attacks, and then, when they get close enough, you have the option of either killing them violently, or doing something that will pacify them and lay the troubled soul to rest once and for all. Taking the former option is usually a more obvious, easier choice, but will usually result in the death of your companion. Taking the latter option requires that you really have searched the environment thoroughly and acquired all the necessary clues to resolve the situation.

It works really well. The game is good about not allowing you to get into “unwinnable” situations, as if you mess up you can simply restart from a previous decision point or, in the case of the spirit battle, from the start of the confrontation. This means that even if you’ve reached the “finale” of a case, you can still wander off and make sure you haven’t missed any important clues before taking on the spirit.

It’s a game that is, for the most part, creepy rather than “scary” — there aren’t many in the way of “jump scares”, and the horror mostly comes from the gradual realisation of what has happened to the poor souls you’re laying to rest. There are some gory, violent scenes, though, and many of these have a somewhat fetishistic angle, which, as you might expect, caused more than a few people to sniff and tut when it was originally released.

As anyone with basic media literacy knows, though, sex and horror are inextricably linked, and have been for the longest time in both the eastern and western traditions of the genre. So Death Mark is just doing what comes naturally for the genre; while this leads to some genuinely uncomfortable scenes, it’s also good to see a game that doesn’t feel like it has to hold back from showing you these things.

Anyway, that’s enough for now. I’ll have much more to say when I’ve beaten the whole thing. I believe I have two more cases to go, so I reckon I’ll probably have it done by the end of the week. We shall see, though; in the meantime, it’s been a great pick for Spooky Season so far, and I’m looking forward to exploring the follow-ups!

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.

#oneaday Day 137: No, NTSC YOU

One thing I’ve been meaning to do for a while is make using my NTSC-U (North American) PS2 more convenient, particularly now I have a RetroTink 5X to get a lovely picture on the big TV. I make the intended process sound more complicated than it really was: all I essentially needed to do was to get another video cable to connect to the American PS2, but for one reason or another I’ve been putting it off forever.

No longer! I grabbed a set of component cables from Retro Gaming Cables and hooked them up to the Tink today. The reason I went with component rather than RGB SCART is that I already have my PAL PS2 connected to the Tink via RGB SCART, and going with component means I can plug both in at once without having to change cables over — all I need to do is switch the input on the Tink. The quality is, from what I’ve seen so far, near-identical on both; the only sticking point I had was when I first plugged them in, I got sound and no picture, meaning I had to navigate the PS2 menu by sound alone (and with judicious referring to my working PAL one) to switch it to YPbPr mode. But once that was done, everything was fine and dandy.

I don’t have that many North American games, but the few I do have are quite precious to me. On the PS1 front, there’s Parasite Eve, Brave Fencer Musashi and Xenogears, three games that I originally picked up around the same time on a trip over to the States to visit my brother. The copies I have now are not the same ones I had as a kid, but they’re in almost as good condition, and I’m looking forward to revisiting them.

On the PS2 front, there’s Mana Khemia 2: Fall of Alchemy, which I played and adored a couple of years back, plus the first and third Xenosaga games because, inexplicably, we only got the middle episode here in PAL-land. I haven’t played those yet but would like to set aside some time for them at some point, as I know they are very well regarded.

Having all this up and running makes me want to seek out a few more North American titles I had back in the day. I’m tempted to try and track down the Lunar games, but since those are getting ports to modern consoles soon it’s probably not worth the expense. Final Fantasy Tactics is another tempting one; I know the PSP port is “better” in many ways, but I still have extremely fond memories of the PS1 original. Other NTSC titles I had back then — most notably Final Fantasy IX and Metal Gear Solid — are readily available in PAL format; I got them back in the day because back then, North American releases were months ahead of European releases, sometimes even years.

Then there’s a ton of RPGs that never made it to Europe that I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on at some point… trouble is, PS1 games have been steadily increasing in price for a while, particularly RPGs. So it’s entirely possible that I might never be able to get my hands on some of these, which will be a shame. (I’m also super-salty that I got rid of my excellent condition PS1 copy of Symphony of the Night back in the day, but at least there are multiple alternative options for playing that today.)

Still, it’s nice that I now have a solid solution for playing the games that I do still own on original hardware. Because as fun as emulation is, there’s still something altogether magical about having the originals of these games.

Anyway, it’s not as if I’m short of stuff to play. But options are always good! Now, should I revisit Brave Fencer Musashi, Parasite Eve or Xenogears first…?

#oneaday Day 125: Don’t forget the text

I’m currently playing through the Silent Hill 2 remake and absolutely loving it. I was uneasy about the prospect of one of my favourite games of all time getting the remake treatment, but I’m pleased to confirm that Bloober Team absolutely, completely and definitely 100% understood the assignment, and have done a fabulous job.

I haven’t yet finished it, though, so I’m not going to write about it (likely on MoeGamer) until then. What I did want to comment on was a more general observation about modern games, of which Silent Hill 2 just happens to be the most recent example.

And that observation — more of a question, really — is this: what happened to descriptive text?

In the original Silent Hill 2, lest you’re unfamiliar, walking up to anything vaguely important-looking and pressing the “action” button would prompt a short text description, implied to be “thought” by the protagonist, at the bottom of the screen.

The most commonly seen couplet in all of Silent Hill 2 was “It looks like the lock is broken. I can’t open it,” close friend of its 32-bit predecessor “The lock is jammed. This door can’t be opened.” This occurred any time you attempted to open a door that would lead to a room which wasn’t relevant to the game — rather than waste time and dev resources on rendering rooms that had no relevance to what was going on, potentially confusing players in the process, we instead had about a zillion “broken locks”. It was silly, but at least it made things absolutely clear that this door was not going to open at any point in the game.

In the Silent Hill 2 remake, meanwhile, you open doors just by walking into them, as in most modern games that use realistic visuals. All well and good, until you reach either a locked or “broken lock” (irrelevant) door, at which point protagonist James just sort of bumps into it like he’s slightly drunk. No text on screen, and no indication as to whether you’re dealing with a “locked” or “broken” door until you look at the map.

Similarly, in the original Silent Hill games, you could examine inventory objects and get a short text description of them. Now, “investigating” them from the inventory screen simply cuts to a close up of James holding the thing in his hand, allowing you to rotate it approximately 10 degrees in either direction, but never actually saying anything. (The only exception to this are the various bits of paper and memos you pick up during the game, which thankfully you can re-read, and which are optionally presented in clearly legible typeface as well as the handwritten scrawl they are depicted as using. All this is standard practice for “adventure game-adjacent” games in the moderate to big-budget space these days.

Now, look. I get it. The idea behind this is to be “immersive”, and also to show off the fact that textures are so good now you can actually read the small print on a petrol canister you happen to find. The aim is to minimise interruptions to the gameplay, and waiting for someone to press X to clear a text box is somehow seen as more obtrusive than waiting for them to press O to put the inventory item away and return to the main play screen. I suspect it stems from the same mentality that writing more than one sentence at once will cause every TikTok addict in the room to immediately stop paying attention.

Thing is, I liked those text boxes. (Also fuck TikTok addicts. That site is a net negative for humanity. But I digress.) They added a little flavour to proceedings, allowing you to “hear the thoughts” of the main character on various topics. They also made it clear what you were looking at in situations where that might not be immediately obvious. And for all the graphical fidelity of today’s big budget games, there are still situations where you’ll encounter something and go “uh… what?”

Not only that, but these little textual interludes could also conceal fun little bonuses and Easter eggs. Who remembers the thing in Resident Evil 2 where if you examine that one desk enough times, you get a picture of Rebecca Chambers in a basketball uniform? If you do, you are a pervert and a dirty old man (like me!), but you know what I’m talking about. (The photo is still in the very good Resident Evil 2 remake from a few years back, but the process to acquire it is somewhat more convoluted and less… Easter eggy.)

I could go off on a big rant about accessibility here, but I can’t be bothered because other people have almost certainly done so better than I would ever be able to. I just miss the text boxes because they were a uniquely “video game” sort of thing that I always found it fun to engage with. I found it interesting to see which seemingly innocuous objects throughout the game world had been blessed with a bit of descriptive text, and often thought that it would be neat to have a game where the entire world was “examinable” and offered up little snippets like that. (I even started making a game in that ilk myself with RPG Maker VX Ace… one day I might finish it.)

Anyway, yeah. I guess my point is: don’t skimp on the text just because you have fancy-pants 4K graphics and super high resolution textures. Some of us actually like reading the words!

#oneaday Day 123: In my restless dreams, I see that town

As I type this, I am eagerly awaiting the delivery of my PS5 copy of the Silent Hill 2 remake. I was skeptical when this was first announced, but after playing the Resident Evil 4 remake a while back — I still haven’t actually played the original — I have a bit more faith that a modern developer can do justice to a PS2-era classic.

I absolutely adore the original Silent Hill 2, and I have some vivid memories attached to it.

It was my third year at university, and I was living in a nice but relatively pokey house in the middle of “the Flowers estate”, also known as “the dodgy bit of Bassett” in Southampton.

The house was quite a find; its rent was incredibly reasonable (like, in the region of £30-something a week, compared to our previous year’s shithole that had been £57 a week) and the house was in, frankly, amazing condition for something that was being rented out to students. So I, my friend’s girlfriend and our perpetually absent housemate snapped it up. (Seriously. She didn’t stay a single night in that house during our entire year there. Her room just sat completely empty, but she dutifully paid her rent and bills on time every month from… somewhere. To this day I have no idea what the deal was.)

If you’re wondering why I was living with my friend’s girlfriend, it’s because she also happened to be my friend; I refer to her as “my friend’s girlfriend” because I knew my friend, the boyfriend in question, first. He was one of my best pals in the latter years of secondary school and sixth form, as it happens. He was studying in Reading and subsequently in the Netherlands, whereas she was studying in Southampton, so when it came to time for everyone to find a place to stay in their second year, we decided to team up and help each other out, since both of our respective groups of friends had sorted themselves out without us.

As it transpired, while he was in the Netherlands he got super into weed (like, proper addicted to it, to a degree it was severely affecting his behaviour) and became kind of abusive and horrible, so he stopped being both my friend and my friend’s girlfriend at some point during that period. You’d think this might have made things a bit awkward, but no, she appreciated having me as a non-judgemental confidant; she knew that despite chappy being a good friend from school days, I wasn’t going to side with him being a complete drug-addled tool to her. And this wasn’t a “nice guy” thing in the hopes of getting some either; I liked the lady in question, but just as a pal, and I’m sure the feeling was mutual. Just so we’re clear on that note. I did fancy our perpetually absent housemate, though, after meeting her once. But then I never saw her again, so that was that.

Anyway, this was supposed to be about Silent Hill 2. One day, some pals from back home — former school friends again — came by this very house to visit for a few days. We did the usual things you do when getting together with friends in your early 20s: we got drunk, we ordered takeaway curry, we repaired a Sega Saturn controller using only a cotton bud and a bottle of cheap vodka. You know, the usual.

One of these friends was someone who always bought the “big” new games the moment they came out, and this time was no exception; he’d brought his shiny new copy of Silent Hill 2 along with him. We’d all enjoyed the first Silent Hill while we were still at school, so we were excited at the prospect of the sequel, intending to play it through together.

What actually happened is that my two friends fell asleep, full of curry, vodka and alcopops, while I played through the entire thing in a single night, surrounded by the increasingly fragrant remnants of our takeaway and the dregs of the bottles we’d glugged our way through. I got the “In Water” ending. And I was blown away.

My friends and I had already become convinced that video games could absolutely be art after playing Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid, but there was something about Silent Hill 2 that even my undergraduate self could tell was truly special. This was a game that was about far more than just what was being depicted on screen and explicitly said. This was a game where the horror was not about scary monsters and loud noises — though both had a presence — but rather about the lurking horror and gradual realisation of psychological trauma.

It was around this time in my life that I first started learning about mental health, and particularly depression. A young woman with whom I was particularly intimate was the first person with depression that I’d really had close contact with, and she was happy to talk about and explain things to me. It helped me a great deal; it helped me to understand that I, too, had been suffering from it for quite some time and just hadn’t really had the words or the knowledge to be able to express that.

That might sound silly these days, when pretty much everyone on the Internet is self-diagnosing their own litany of mental health conditions on a daily basis, but this was 2001, we were still using dial-up Internet and social media hadn’t been invented. So it was all very new to me, and while it was a bit bleak, it was also interesting. The workings of the mind had always fascinated me — my creative writing projects for GCSE and A-Level English had always involved a heavy psychological component — and finally getting a sense that I was starting to understand why I sometimes felt the way I did was a revelation.

Silent Hill 2, dealing with a lot of heavy themes concerning mental health, came at exactly the right time for me. It came at a time where I was learning to understand and recognise these feelings and how different people deal with them, and living through James Sunderland’s traumatic experiences on the screen of my 27-inch CRT telly in the lounge was oddly cathartic. It was one of a few games from the period that I felt really spoke to me, and it’s continued to occupy an important space in my head ever since.

It’s a game that I’ve replayed and loved many times over the years, so I’m excited to see what looks set to be a genuinely interesting but respectful take on it with the new game. Whether it will recapture that same magic remains to be seen, but having heard some thoughts on it from people who have already played it, and whose opinions I respect, I feel positive about what I’m about to head into.

Now I just have to wait for the dang thing to arrive. Come on, Argos!

#oneaday Day 120: Don’t let completionism ruin your fun

There’s been a marked shift in people’s attitudes towards finishing games over the course of the last 20 years or so. Well, several, I think, brought about by a number of “innovations” (for want of a better word) that, in several instances, I’m not entirely sure are a positive thing.

There’s one group of people who never finish anything they start playing. I’ve talked about That One Guy In That Discord I’m In before, and the way he does things — installing (and, presumably, uninstalling) multiple huge games per day, playing them for seemingly about twenty minutes before starting something else — drives me absolutely nuts. It evidently works for him, though, and it’s not my place to tell him how to enjoy himself.

Also falling into a similar category are the Oh, That Game’s On Game Pass crowd, who will maybe try something for twenty minutes because it’s “free” (no it’s not, you’re renting it with that subscription fee you’re paying) and then never beat it. These people also drive me nuts, and I am less forgiving of them, since I firmly believe Game Pass is a net negative for the games industry.

Then, at the absolute other end of the spectrum are the people who don’t believe they’ve “finished” a game until they’ve “Platinumed” or “100%ed” it. These are the people I’m specifically pondering today.

Among these people are those who will specifically seek out games that are “easy Platinums” to bolster their stats, which no-one actually gives a shit about. I have dabbled in that direction before, particularly around the Vita era, when I liked to take aim for a game’s Platinum trophy as a means of showing my appreciation to the people who made it. Developers do use achievements and trophies as metrics, after all, so seeing that someone had taken the time to do everything in their game would presumably count for something.

But playing like that is two things. One: it’s incredibly time consuming. Two: it’s quite tedious. Because while there are some interesting and creative uses of achievements and trophies out there, the vast majority of them involve either simply making progress in a game, or completing some sort of task that takes a long while and, more often than not, involves a significant amount of repetition.

So I’ve stopped. I no longer aim to Platinum games I play on PlayStation, and I don’t give much of a toss about achievements on other platforms. Moreover, I actively prefer playing on platforms that don’t have achievement functionality at all, like the Switch and anything pre-Xbox 360/PS3.

Right now, as you’ll know if you’ve been paying attention, I am playing through the .hack series on PlayStation 2. This set of four games clock in at about 15 hours each, but you can spend quite a bit more time on each entry grinding out various things. Optional things; things that you don’t need to do in order to beat the game or even to have a satisfying experience with it.

I pondered taking the time to try and “100%” the first entry, .hack//INFECTION, before I moved on to the second episode, .hack//MUTATION. I’d beaten the main story and had the opportunity to go back into the game world to clean up some optional tasks before transferring my data to the next game. I started looking into the possibility of what I might need to do to achieve that, and the answer was, effectively “grind”.

“Fuck that,” I thought, saving my game and reaching for the next game’s case. Now I’ve moved on, and I’m perfectly happy about that. I’ve been enjoying the game nicely in my way, and I’ve been trying to avoid looking up too much information, because I, like a lot of us, I suspect, have got into the habit of looking at walkthroughs and other information about games as I play to “make sure I don’t miss anything”.

Well, I got thinking. When I was playing games back in the PS2 era, I didn’t really care if I “missed anything”. Sure, it was nice to know if there were some secrets and cool things I could find, but I didn’t go out of my way to do anything that sounded like it might be boring, annoying or overly time-consuming. And my gaming experience certainly didn’t suffer for that attitude. So I’m trying to get my head back in that space now, in 2024, while I play through these 20 year old action RPGs. It doesn’t matter that I can’t get first place in the Grunty race on Theta server, because it’s an optional side activity that not everyone is expected to complete. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t traded with every single NPC possible to get the books that give me an extra stat point in all my stats, because while a single stat point does make a difference in .hack, there’s also lots of shiny equipment that boosts your stats, too.

Checklists, achievements, wikis and all manner of other things have the potential to really suck the fun out of games at times. These things are supposed to be fun and enjoyable, not work. So I’m making a specific effort to try not to care about “whether I missed anything”, and just do the things that I happen to stumble across as I play until I’ve completed them to my satisfaction.

I’ll add to all this that I am a firm believer in completing games, particularly when we’re talking narrative-centric games like RPGs. I cannot abide leaving a story half-finished, regardless of medium, so I still make an effort to finish the games I start. It’s the stuff that isn’t directly related to that central story aspect that I’m doing my best to let go of. Not as a general rule or anything, but more from a perspective of not deliberately going out of my way to make a game un-fun.

Because these days, the temptation to make a game un-fun is everywhere. Look at a walkthrough and you’d think there was only one possible way to beat every game, because some guy on the Internet says so. No. There are many ways to beat many games, and the best thing to do is to find what works for you. If that means 100%ing it, more power to you; you are the reason all those optional side activities exist. But if you find yourself getting annoyed or frustrated with those same optional side activities, no-one — not even the developers — is going to judge you for saying “fuck this, I just want to see how the story ends”.

That said, I’ve spent two hours searching for Grunty food in .hack//MUTATION this evening. But it was my choice to do so. Besides, I had fun levelling Kite, BlackRose and Mistral in the process anyway, so it’s not as if it was wasted effort or anything.

Anyway, yeah. If you’ve ever found yourself contemplating something you were playing and thinking “gosh, I wish there was less to do in this game”, you are the one in the position of power. You are the one holding the controller. Unless the game is specifically requiring you to do each and every little thing it offers, you are the one with the power to say “fuck this” and just get on with what you deem to be “the fun bit”.

So exercise that power!

#oneaday Day 119: One quarter dotHacked

Ten to one in the morning again, oh no. But hah, it’s Friday night so it doesn’t count. Well, okay, it does, because this probably now means I’m going to sleep until lunchtime tomorrow, but who cares. The weekend is for enjoying, and a valid means of enjoying it is sleeping late.

The reason I am once again coming to you from the Dark Hour is that I finished .hack//INFECTION this evening. I’ve beaten this before, but never actually played the other three, despite owning them all back in the day, then reacquiring them all at moderate expense a few years back. (Reacquiring them now would be great expense, so I’m glad I nabbed them when I did… although I discovered my copy of .hack//QUARANTINE has the wrong manual, and people online want somewhere in the region of fifty fucking dollars just for the manual, so fuck that, it can just be wrong.

As discussed the other day, .hack//INFECTION is an interesting beast in that it’s the first part of a tetralogy (apparently that is the correct term, not “quadrilogy”, I learned something today) of PS2 games that tell one coherent story in four parts. The cynical would suggest that this was done so that they could make four times the money out of one normal length RPG, as each individual part is around 15 hours long, and they’re probably right. But it’s still interesting. To me, anyway.

In each part, you play the role of Kite, a player in the online RPG The World, and much of what you do in each of the four volumes is… simply play The World, which is a Phantasy Star Online-style affair in which you head off into dungeons with or without some companions in tow, hack and slash your way through a bunch of enemies and gather lots of phat loot along the way.

Its unique twist is that its various areas are generated through various combinations of keywords that control everything from the level of the enemies in the area to the weather and geographical features you might stumble across. This is an aspect of the game they don’t explain very well and no-one over the course of the last 22 years appears to have successfully figured out, so you’ll just have to take their word for it. What it essentially boils down to is that you can jam three unrelated words or phrases together and it will send you to a new area with an amusing name like “Bottomless Someone’s Giant” or “Raging Pagan Fuckwhistle”.

There is a certain amount of method to the madness, because in combining different keywords together, you can cause different elements to have dominance in the field, which means you’re more likely to find items related to that element. And elemental weaknesses are worth exploiting in The World… plus the items that temporarily boost your affinity for a particular element are a popular trade item with the in-game NPCs, so they’re worth collecting to get your hands on the often rare stuff they might give up in exchange.

.hack//INFECTION (and its three follow-ups) are not RPGs I would necessarily recommend to everyone. They’re a far cry from the big budget cinematic spectacles many had come to expect from the genre post Final Fantasy VII, and thus they suffered a bit in reviews back in the day. However, if you’re on board with what they have to offer, which is a convincing simulation of playing a 2002-era online action RPG with lots of dungeon crawling and loot collecting, there’s a lot of fun to be had. The basic mechanics are simple and straightforward, but there’s a pleasant purity to just ploughing your way through a dungeon and watching everyone’s levels and related statistics go up.

My main draw is that I’ve always been a sucker for the “something sinister is going on in a computer game” trope ever since I read the short story Vurfing the Gwrx from a book called Peter Davison’s Book of Alien Monsters as a child. (The Peter Davison in question who endorsed that book was, in fact, Doctor Who, but my family and I just found it entertaining that “I” had a book.) I don’t remember much about the story — I should probably revisit it with grown-up eyes — but I do remember finding it both entertaining and pleasingly chilling as a kid. And I like .hack because I get a similar sort of vibe from it.

.hack doesn’t go quite into the “if you die in the game you die for real” territory that Sword Art Online ran with some years later, but the idea of a video game (and the virus contained therein) causing people to fall into real-life comas is a concept I found intriguing and creepy, in a good way. To this day, I still don’t know where the story goes after the conclusion of .hack//INFECTION, which really just acts as an introduction and setup more than anything, so I’m intrigued to finally dive into the follow-ups and see where things go from there.

For now, though, I think I’ve earned that lie-in.

#oneaday Day 118: I left this too late again

Oh dear. Half past midnight and I haven’t written anything. Time to quickly think of something off the top of my head!

Err… quick! Video games! I bought Victory Heat Rally today. This is a game I’ve had my eye on for a while (though not as long as some other people have, from the sound of things) after I played its excellent demo a few Steam Next Fests ago. I’m going to do a full writeup and video on this at some point in the very near future, but suffice to say for now that it’s very good.

It’s a game that takes aim at Sega’s “Super Scaler” racers in style, with Power Drift being a particular inspiration. It doesn’t slavishly try to ape the retro style, mind — though there is a nice “pixelise” filter option for the visuals — and rather makes use of some nice pixel art for the characters, cars and some roadside objects, and low-poly environments. It moves along at a fair old clip even on my mini PC that doesn’t have a graphics card, and it’s a lot of fun to play.

Besides Power Drift, it also draws inspiration from Ridge Racer (drift-heavy handling, ’90s rave soundtrack), Sega Rally (rally stages with exaggerated handling), Mario Kart (multiple tracks set in a limited number of environments) and probably some others that I can’t think of right now because I’m tired. It takes all these elements and blends them together to make an immensely compelling game that I’ve played for about 5 hours this evening.

The first series of championship challenges is a bit easy, but the second ramps things up nicely to a good challenge level. There are also some truly infuriating bonus stages known as “Joker” levels where you have to race through checkpoints against the clock while performing some sort of precise driving task. The one I’m presently stuck on requires you to take full advantage of the “drift boost” mechanic the game has borrowed from Mario Kart and boost through various checkpoints. This is a lot harder than it sounds, particularly with the awkward placement of some of these checkpoints, and it has cause many expletives to belch forth from my mouth this evening.

While these levels are infuriatingly difficult, the rest of the game seems pitched at a pretty sensible difficulty level. The opening championship eases you into things nicely, then things ramp up from there. I suspect the third series of championships will be genuinely quite difficult, if the escalation in the second series is anything to go by.

But anyway. Half past midnight, like I said, so I should probably close everything down and go to sleep. There can (and probably will) be more racing tomorrow.

#oneaday Day 117: Car Racing

This evening, I felt like playing some random PlayStation 2 shenanigans, so I fired up R: Racing for the first time. (My wife misheard the name as “Car Racing” and was somewhat incredulous; I almost didn’t want to correct her.)

For the unfamiliar, R: Racing is a game from Namco where they sort of wanted to make a new Ridge Racer, but also wanted to get in on this “racing sim” action that had been growing in popularity since the original Gran Turismo at the tail end of the previous generation. To that end, they made what is essentially a new Ridge Racer game, but featuring real cars and circuits along with the requisite tuning options that no-one understands.

One of the things that excited me most about R: Racing back when it was originally announced was that it had an actual story mode. This was very unusual for racing games at the time, and when it first released I still hadn’t come to the conclusion that no, not all games need stories, a subject that I was sure I’d blogged about at some point in the past, but couldn’t find any evidence thereof.

Anyway, long story short, for one reason or another I never picked up R: Racing back in the day, despite it being something that appealed quite a bit… but it is one of the many titles I added to my PS2 collection when I stumbled across it in CEX for somewhere in the region of 50p and subsequently never got around to actually trying. Until now!

Honestly, of all the things it reminds me of, it’s actually most akin to the Ace Combat series. Perhaps not surprising, since they’re both Namco titles — and there’s a strong argument to suggest the Ridge Racer series unfolds in Ace Combat’s Strangereal setting — but it works pretty well. The narrative sequences are kept short and snappy — arguably to a fault — but it provides a certain incentive to progress through the game’s 14-chapter “Racing Life” mode, which appears to be primarily intended as an introduction before what I assume is “the real game” starts. Put it this way: I’m 6 chapters into that 14-chapter story after a little over an hour of play, and my save file says it’s 12% complete. That suggests you beat the story and there’s a whole lot more stuff to fiddle around with.

The narrative involves Rena, a female protagonist — quick, alert the Woke Content Detector idiots! — who works as an ambulance driver. One day, she displays some fancy moves on the job, and her coworker, who apparently never sleeps, signs her up to be part of a mysterious organisation known as “G.V.I.” who are somehow involved with motorsports, but in what appears to be a not entirely trustworthy sort of way. Rather than being a racing team themselves, it appears that they work with racing teams and… honestly, I don’t really understand at the point I’m at in the narrative because it hasn’t really explained anything other than the fact it somehow caused Rena’s amply-bosomed rival Gina to be pissy with her pretty much immediately upon first meeting her.

What then follows is a series of races and championships, beginning with a straightforward speedway race that is easy to win, and progressing through track, street and rally racing across several courses, many of which appear to have several variations in the same way that the Ridge Racer series’ tracks typically unfold as different routes through the same environments.

R: Racing’s unique selling point appears to be its “pressure” mechanic, whereby if you get up another driver’s arse for long enough, a bar above their car starts filling up, and when it fills, they’ll get so stressed out at your proximity to their rectum that they’ll do something stupid, allowing you to pass easily. There’s no obligation to fill the bar, and indeed doing so for every opponent is probably quite inefficient, but it’s fun nonetheless — and it’s a mechanic I’ve not really seen in a racer before. Presumably it’s attempting to reflect the sort of stress the player feels when they have an opponent bearing down on them in their rear-view mirror; in execution, it’s a tad “artificial”, but, well, it’s a mechanic that is there to be taken advantage of, so you might as well do so!

The soundtrack hails from post-Ridge Racer V Namco so unfortunately we’ve left the funky acid jazz beats of the late PS1 era far behind and are into cacophonous EDM territory. R: Racing’s soundtrack isn’t quite as obnoxiously awful as Ridge Racer V’s, but it’s almost aggressively bland, which is a bit of a shame. The Ridge Racer series has some serious highs when it gets music right, so it’s always unfortunate when an entry doesn’t really live up to those standards.

Still, it’s an enjoyable enough game. Although definitely more sim-esque than the mainline Ridge Racer titles, it’s also a lot more forgiving than the Gran Turismos and Forza Motorsports (do they still make those?) of the world. There’s a braking assist function for those allergic to actually using the brakes themselves, which makes the game feel really arcadey (and a tad easy), but you can still throw the cars into power slides if you’re aggressive enough with them. It’s just not necessarily the best thing to do at every opportunity in R: Racing, unlike mainline Ridge Racer.

I enjoyed what I played this evening! I’m looking forward to exploring it a bit further. It occupies a nice sweet spot between sim and arcade that I rather like, and the story mode is intriguing, even if, as I suspect, it turns out to be a bit rushed and doesn’t really go anywhere. Even if that does end up being the case, I suspect the “Event Challenge” mode, or whatever it’s called, will have a fair bit of meat on the bones to fiddle around with. We’ll see, I guess, and I’ll write something more substantial once I’ve spent some more time with it.

For now, though, an evening well spent, I say.

#oneaday Day 116: Should you finish a game before talking about it?

I’ve seen some discussion about the above topic recently, largely as a result of some idiotic blowhard on the dying, burning remains of Twitter making the bizarre assertion that all games journalists should be obliged to upload full, unedited footage of them playing every game they cover to “prove” that they played it properly and to demonstrate their “authentic” reactions.

This is, of course, absolutely unworkable today, particularly for those working in the more “mainstream” end of gaming, where sprawling games that want to be your one and only game forever (or at least until their next annualised installment comes out) have been creeping towards being the norm for a while now. But it’s also unworkable for those working in niche spaces, be that esports, visual novels, role-playing games or any other sectors you might care to mention. There simply isn’t time.

Now, I have mixed feelings about this, because back when my brother was in charge of Electronic Gaming Monthly and The Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine at Ziff-Davis, I vaguely recall him saying that he expected his writers to finish everything they wrote about — and this was, in the case of EGM, a publication where each reviewer had to write approximately 50-100 words at most, given the way their reviews were handled.

The reason I recall this is that one time when my parents and I were visiting him in the States, I was able to spend the day with him in his office (and I have oddly vivid memories of someone’s computer in the office having something saying “Lucky sonuvabitch” every time they got an email) and he tasked me with playing through Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (now available on Evercade, don’tchaknow!). I forget exactly why, but I suspect it was so he could make effective use of my time while I was there, get my thoughts on it, and then use my experiences playing the game to give him a head start on writing something. Possibly. Maybe. Anyway, regardless of the circumstances, I have a memory in my head that I’m fairly convinced is real that says “my brother once expected all of his staff to beat every game before they reviewed it”.

In the PS1 era, this was probably practical. RPGs were a thing, sure, but they came out relatively infrequently in English (even more infrequently if you were unfortunate enough to be European) and often long after their Japanese releases, so there was plenty of advance notice to get these done. And other games were significantly shorter, tending to be somewhere between 2 and 10 hours on average, with the odd exception in both directions. (Ridge Racer? 20 minutes. Dragon Quest VII? Yes, I know it’s an RPG, but 150+ hours.)

We also had a lot more in the way of “arcade style” games that were split into short levels or missions, or games that were highly replayable — Ridge Racer may be 20 minutes, but it’s 20 minutes you’ll be happy to spend again and again. Thus it seems perfectly reasonable to expect a games journo to play through everything they might be writing about.

These days? Absolutely definitely not, although there is still something to be said for allowing a writer to provide a full, in-depth discussion of a game after completing all of it. After all, it’s kind of absurd to suggest that it’s possible to “review” a visual novel without reading all of it, as the whole point of the damn thing is the story. Sure, you can probably give a wiffly-waffly “buyer’s guide”-type review saying what you think of the graphics, sound and interface, but if you want to actually discuss and critique it, you need to have played all of it.

I think the distinction between “review as buyer’s guide” (which is basically what a lot of people online want) and “review as quasi-academic critique” (which is what a lot of writers want, but rarely get the time to indulge in) is an important one here. The former can be done after just an hour or two of play at most. The latter requires more in-depth research. The former can be shat out for an embargo date. The latter is something best served for well after launch.

Unfortunately, the modern Internet doesn’t tend to really reward the latter approach at all until well after the fact — and then only if a game ends up commonly agreed to be some sort of “hidden gem” or “best game that no-one played” or whatever. It increasingly leads me to the conclusion that the very best approach to games writing if all you’re concerned about is the quality of the writing is to say “fuck it” to anything that is brand new, and instead focus on games that came out ages ago. Perhaps even generations ago. In-depth explorations of those games are the pieces people are still going to be reading for years to come — and it’s what I’ve always striven for with the stuff I’ve done on MoeGamer, because it’s what I like to read.

I don’t give a shit if the latest Assassin’s Creed is the same or a bit different from the last one. I do care if some obscure PS2 RPG from 20 years ago is actually the best thing ever and still kind of cheap because no-one bought it or knows its name.

Ah, who am I kidding. RPGs are never cheap.

Anyway, I guess my answer to the question in the title is “no, if you’re reviewing something current in a buyer’s guide style”, but “yes, if you’re aiming for quasi-academic critique or analysis”. And even then, there’s wiggle room. Even recently, I wrote about a couple of the games in UFO 50 before I’d technically “beaten” them, because I’d gained enough knowledge of how they worked to be able to comment on them authoritatively. (I then promptly beat them shortly after writing about them, much to my satisfaction!)

So no. Games journos should not be expected to upload full, unedited gameplay footage of them playing through (and reacting to) a game for review. That’s absolutely absurd. But I do feel like we should strive for better in our games criticism and analysis. Those “buyer’s guide” reviews do not stand the test of time very well, whereas articles that take the time to really get to know a game and find out what makes it tick are what insufferable SEO types like to call “evergreen content”. And, as much as I hate to agree with anyone who enjoys SEO, it’s those articles that people are going to come back to years after a game’s release to find out all about it.

#oneaday Day 114: dotHack and Slash

I’ve been playing .hack//Infection for the last couple of days on PlayStation 2. I’ve had the full set of four games on my shelf for a very long time and been meaning to properly run through them all, but have somehow never gotten around to it. I have previously completed Infection a very long time ago, but I’ve never gone through all four games and seen how it all ends — nor have I been spoiled on any of it. I also own a copy of the .hack//G.U. remasters on PlayStation 4, so I’ll have to get to those at some point, too, but I wanted to knock out the PS2 games first.

For the unfamiliar, .hack was one of the first (possibly the first) “MMO gone mad, if you die in the game you die for real” series. Unusually, it was designed from the outset as a fully transmedia production: not only were there four PS2 games in the series, each of these games also came with a DVD featuring an episode of a specially made anime known as .hack//Liminality which tells a “real world” story that unfolds concurrently with the events of the game, and there was a completely separate anime series known as .hack//Sign. Since that time, there have apparently been several other anime and manga series, along with the aforementioned .hack//G.U. trilogy of games, which originated on PS2 but which were ported to PS4 in 2017.

That may all sound terribly complicated, but be at ease: you can have a satisfying .hack experience if you just play the games. .hack//Infection, the first of the original set of four games, tells the story of “you”, an 8th grader who has just signed up for the hottest new MMO, The World, at the recommendation of your friend Yasuhiko, a veteran player. You join up and in that inimitable “early 2000s MMO” sort of way, you party up with Yasuhiko, or “Orca” as he’s known in the game, who destroys absolutely everything before you can even get a hit in by virtue of him being 50 levels higher than you.

But something goes horribly wrong. After an encounter with a mysterious young girl who is seemingly being chased by a bizarre creature carrying a red wand, Orca is entrusted with a strange book and shortly afterwards, his character is “Data Drained”, leaving the real Yasuhiko comatose. You end up taking possession of the book, which manifests itself as a strange bracelet that equips you with the power to Data Drain enemies in the game, and it’s then up to you to investigate the strange happenings in The World and determine if there’s any truth to the game seemingly having an impact on the real world.

The cool thing about .hack//Infection is that the entire PS2 game is diegetic, intended to represent you using your computer to check your mail, read the news and log in to The World. You never see the actual real world yourself in the game — hence the inclusion of the Liminality DVDs — but instead all your investigation is online. This unfolds through a combination of you checking and replying to mails (with predefined responses) and browsing through the official message boards for The World, looking for clues.

Canonically, .hack//Infection is supposed to be unfolding in 2010, but obviously in 2002 developers CyberConnect2 had to make something of a best guess as to what that near-future setting might look like. They actually got a fair few things right, such as high-speed, always-on Internet access being pretty much universal and fibre-optic cables being the main means of this infrastructure being implemented — though here in the real world, fibre broadband is a little more recent than 2010.

What’s quite interesting is the design of The World itself, because it could quite plausibly work as an online RPG — though perhaps not in the way that western players understood “MMOs” at the time. For context, World of Warcraft came out in 2004, two years after .hack//Infection, so “MMO” up until that point in the west meant either EverQuest or Ultima Online.

The World is closer in execution to something like Sega’s Phantasy Star Online from 2000 in that there are small, shared communal areas (known as “Root Towns”) where you can hang out with other players, but your actual fighting and questing takes place in discrete areas that you teleport to rather than exploring a coherent world. It’s not quite the same as the “instanced” areas seen in World of Warcraft and, later, Final Fantasy XIV, as you can meet up with other players who happen to be visiting the same area, but the nature of how The World is structured means that you’re relatively unlikely to stumble across someone at random.

Anyway, let’s not get bogged down too much in details as I’ll probably want to write about this on MoeGamer once I’m finished. Suffice to say for now that .hack//Infection and its subsequent parts unfold as a combination of you just flat-out playing The World to get treasure, gear and helpful items, and gradually working your way through the core mystery at the heart of everything. At most points in the game, you can put the main plot on hold and just go dungeon-crawling to your heart’s content — and it’s probably advisable to, since you’ll need to level both your own character and the various companions you can recruit to your cause.

.hack//Infection is somewhat clunky by more recent action RPG standards, but once you get a feel for it and an understanding of its mechanics, it’s enjoyable. There’s a variety of enemies to deal with, and their different strengths and weaknesses will often require you to think about various strategies to deal with them. And, since the game is supposed to be simulating an MMO, you can pretty much concentrate on your own play; any companions you bring with you will usually do a pretty good job of fighting alongside you, though you can issue various orders to them if you need them to, say, heal or unleash their most powerful abilities. You can also micromanage their equipment to a certain degree, and since equipment has skills attached, by doing this you can try and optimise them for the challenges you’re about to face.

I can completely understand the criticisms of .hack from back in the day. It is repetitive. The dungeons are very obviously constructed from pre-built blocks with different textures put atop them, and there’s not a lot of variation to them. And yet there’s something about .hack that I’ve always found fascinating and compelling. I think it’s the oddly menacing atmosphere the whole thing has; The World, as a game, is designed to be cheerful and colourful, but it’s very obvious that there are dark things going on beneath the surface, and that the players of the game are clearly being used for some nefarious purpose.

I’m in no rush to plough through all four games, but I’ve enjoyed making a start on .hack//Infection this weekend, and as a long term project I’m looking forward to seeing how it all comes together in the end. And there will, of course, be in-depth articles on MoeGamer (and possibly videos) to go along with it.