2095: Exploring Space

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I'm starting to get a bit interested in Elite Dangerous after chatting about it with a friend the other night. It sounds like the ongoing, active development of the game is starting to pay off a bit with some actual Stuff to Do, albeit Stuff that gets a bit repetitive after a while, from what I understand. There's a great deal of potential there, however, and with the status of Star Citizen a little uncertain, Elite Dangerous is starting to look a little more like the "safe" choice for next-gen space opera action.

I'm a little loathe to pay full price for Elite Dangerous at this point, however, since the thing I'm particularly interested in — the Horizons expansion, which adds planetary landings to the mix — costs about the same as the base game of Elite Dangerous and, in fact, comes with a copy of Elite Dangerous included, too, meaning that if you want to play Elite Dangerous now and enjoy Horizons when it comes out, you effectively have to pay for it twice, which is a bit poo, but that's not what I'm going to get into today.

Anyway. The point is, while I was looking at Elite Dangerous and willing the price to magically drop by itself, I spotted some "related" games on Steam that looked intriguing. One in particular caught my eye: Rodina. I became even more interested in this after reading a user review that compared it favourably to 16-bit classics Starglider and Damocles, so I decided to check out the free demo this evening.

Rodina is a game that prides itself on seamless exploration. And for once, that isn't an exaggeration: you start the game on foot on an asteroid, follow a signal to find your spaceship, hop into your spaceship, wander around inside your spaceship, take off, fly around the asteroid, find some bits to make your spaceship better, take off again, leave the asteroid, start flying around the solar system and start investigating planets for a mysterious alien menace that appears to have thwarted humanity's attempts to colonise the stars.

Rodina is technically in Early Access at the moment, but it is possible to "finish" it already, apparently, by seeing through the whole story. The story is primarily told through text boxes that appear through a combination of messages you receive on your ship's communication system and data crystals you find scattered around on the various stellar bodies around the solar system. It's an intriguing little tale with some good writing, though seeing interactions between people depicted through this rather cold medium makes the game itself feel like a rather lonely experience — doubtless intentional.

The premise is intriguing enough, to be sure. The execution… well, it's difficult to make a fully informed judgement based on just an hour of the demo — take note, Mike Diver of Vice and your atrocious Senran Kagura 2 review, no I haven't forgotten about you — but I have mixed feelings so far. On the one hand, it's cool to see a game with such a great sense of scale; the solar system in which the game unfolds feels big, and stellar bodies feel like more than bitmaps you fly towards until they suddenly, magically become a 3D planet surface. There's a cool atmospheric re-entry system where you have to wrestle with your ship's controls as you descend, and successfully popping out of the bottom of this is always a satisfying moment.

Trouble is, like many games of this type, the scenery is a little bit bland, or at least it has been in what I've seen so far. Everything, be it planet or asteroid, appears to be variations on "coloured ground with procedurally generated mountains"; there aren't any real geographical features to speak of, so don't expect something like No Man's Sky from this. This takes a little bit of the fun out of the exploration; a key part of space exploration simulators — and what I'm hoping Elite Dangerous: Horizons will nail later in the year — is allowing you to discover all manner of weird and wonderful things around the galaxy. Rodina has plenty of things to discover, for sure, but for one thing, they're all signposted with waypoints when you get close enough, and secondly, everything I've discovered so far has been nothing more than a few randomly scattered crates and barrels and one or two data crystals. While the story these apparent crash sites was revealing was interesting, by the end of the demo it was already starting to get a little bit tiresome to track down these logs.

There's a lot of potential, for sure, and just as I was finishing the demo, the game was starting to open up a bit, suggesting that I travel to the actual planets in the system to deal with the alien menace rather than just finding log after log. It sounds as if at the present time, there aren't really any friendly NPCs to interact with, which is a shame, but it's something the developer intends to include in the future.

I'm not sure I liked the demo enough to want to drop 11 quid on the full game just yet, but it's certainly an intriguing little game with a great deal of potential that I'll probably keep my eye on to see how it develops. I'm all for more space games, since we've been deprived of them for a good few years; hopefully this is the beginning of a renaissance.

2093: Pondering Crowdfunding

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I've gone back and forth in my opinions on crowdfunding a little, but after seeing a number of people spilling a bunch of salt yesterday over nothing more than a rumour that Square Enix might be looking into the possibility of using it to bring more niche, "unlikely" titles over from Japan to the West, a bit of reflection has convinced me that, on the whole, I'm in favour of it.

It is important to accept, however, that there have been a number of crowdfunding fuckups over the years — and, more importantly, a number of high-profile projects that have so far failed to live up to their potential or deliver what was originally promised. Anita "I Hate Fun" Sarkeesian's Tropes vs. Women YouTube series (which I seriously regret chipping in even $5 towards, feeling the way I do about the social justice crowd these days) is several years behind schedule; Keiji Inafune's Mega Man successor Mighty No. 9 has been delayed several times and has had a number of setbacks along the way; Chris Robers' Star Citizen is in a state where no-one seems to quite know what's going on with it and if we're ever going to see it at all, despite it being the most crowdfunded thing in history.

All of these projects still arguably have time to redeem themselves if the finished product comes out worthwhile (fuck Sarkeesian, mind, the joyless hoop-eared twat) but it's understandable that issues like this have caused some people to view crowdfunding with a certain degree of trepidation.

But then at the other end of the spectrum — and here's where my overall positive attitude towards it comes in — there are the success stories. Ambitious visual novels that people once believed would never see a Western release are being localised, for example — the Grisaia trilogy saw its first release a few months back, with the second installment's translation nearing completion; Clannad is coming along soon; and Muv-Luv's Kickstarter is a hair's breadth away from its final stretch goal — and crowdfunding has proven to be an effective means for people to demonstrate that yes, they really want to see things like a new 2D Castlevania (in everything but name), a third installment in the Shenmue series, or the return of early '00s-style isometric role-playing games. Without crowdfunding, none of these things would have happened, because the (understandably) risk-averse games industry as it exists in 2015 would have a tough time convincing shareholders and the like that yes, it really would be a good investment of time and budget to put together something along the same lines as a game released 15 years ago.

One of the most common arguments I see against someone like Square Enix dipping their toes into these waters is that "they have enough money already; why do they need us to give them our money up-front?" Well, for exactly the reasons just mentioned: game companies are, like it or not, a business first and foremost — though they may be staffed by artistic, creative types — and as such, they need to know that any project they undertake is going to be worthwhile for them. Crowdfunding is a means of not only gauging interest in a potential project — with little to no risk if the desired target isn't reached — but also generating some initial operating funds to get it underway. Some projects run over budget, of course, while others are specifically designed with additional funding sources in mind — Shenmue III springs to mind in this instance, for example — and others still, like Star Citizen and Broken Age, end up with a whole lot more money than they originally expected and have to make some tough decisions on how that money is to be spent. The point stands, though; crowdfunding is an easy way to demonstrate that yes, there is an audience for this sort of thing, here's a rough estimate of how big that audience is, here's what we might be able to do for them.

Crowdfunding also taps into an important development in modern society: social media, and the effect this has had on the concept of "word of mouth". I wrote a while back about how the Kickstarter for Muv-Luv comfortably achieved its initial funding goal entirely through word of "mouth" (with "mouth" in this instance also covering "keyboard fingers"), without a peep from the mainstream press — though Kotaku, to their credit (there's something you won't hear me say all that often) did eventually put up a story about it a few days later. We're no longer in an age where new products are dependent on the press to get noticed and promoted; there are plenty of creative works out there across all media now that don't have any column inches — be they print or virtual — devoted to them but are still regarded with love by their fans.

So I don't necessarily think that Square Enix delving into crowdfunding is particularly greedy. They're a business — and a big one, at that — who need to ensure that they're going to be able to make money on any projects they undertake, particularly as they've become a bit more cautious in the last couple of years after a few big-budget failures. Something like RPG series that have traditionally sold quite poorly in the West (hello, Dragon Quest) don't represent a particularly good return on investment for them to just do out of the goodness of their hearts, whereas if fans can show their support for such projects financially up-front, Square Enix is more likely to sell more copies and fans are more likely to get things that they previously thought they'd never be able to enjoy if they were leaving things entirely to the Men In Suits.

As such, if Square Enix decides to jump into the crowdfunding arena, I say good on them. If it means we get games that we wouldn't get otherwise, I am all for it. The traditional model is no longer the only way of funding and buying games, and we should embrace new ways of showing our support for the things that we want to see rather than pissing and moaning about the inevitably drab nature of commercially "safe" products. There's always going to be dull-as-dishwater commercially viable megahits; they're never going to go away, not with the size of the industry as it is today. But what we do have some control over is the smaller end of the market: the niche interest titles that have the most passionate fans in the world; the games that have enthusiasts who will do anything to play a new installment in their favourite series; the games who have fans that are willing to put their money where their mouth is and show that little projects matter, too.

The end result is a more interesting, colourful and diverse games industry; the alternative is a situation where we're subjected to nothing but Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed and Forza Motorsport until the end of time. And while all of those games are good, if that's all there was to play, I wouldn't be nearly as interested in and excited by gaming as I am today. So if a way to support alternatives presents itself, I'm going to take it; you should think about it, too.

2092: I Can Have a Darkside If You Want Me To

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I decided that I was going to get over my "rut" with Final Fantasy XIV today and get my mojo back, so I booted it up and decided to try something I hadn't done before: give Dark Knight a go.

Dark Knight is the new tanking class that was added in the Heavensward expansion. So far, I've levelled Paladin (the main "defense tank") to 60 as my main, and I have Warrior (the main "wallopy tank") at 50, so I have a reasonable understanding of it. Dark Knight was a bit of a mystery, though; although I'd read a bit about it, I didn't really have a bead on how it might actually feel to play it.

Turns out it feels like a hell of a lot of fun — far more so than the rather weedy-but-graceful-feeling Paladin, and, for my money, also more so than the cumbersome swings and heavy hits of Warrior.

I've only levelled fro 30-34 so far (you start Dark Knight at 30, unlike pre-expansion classes, which start at 1) so I don't have a huge amount of experience as yet, but I've enjoyed what I've done. The class feels like a good balance between the relatively straightforward, set combos and defense of Paladin and the more intricate combos and damage-buffing of Warrior. There also seems to be a bit more in the way of "stance-dancing", since there are a number of abilities that only work when you have a specific status effect active — or in some cases, if you don't have it active. The skill "Blood Weapon", for example, which increases your attack speed and allows you to drain MP from enemies, will not work if you're in the defensive "Grit" stance, but that's fine, since Blood Weapon is an offensive skill and Grit carries a hefty damage penalty, so the two aren't really compatible.

I like this way of playing; rather than Paladin's approach of sticking with Shield Oath most of the time and giving it a bit of Sword Oath only when you have a hefty aggro lead on the rest of your party, Dark Knight allows you to switch back and forth a lot more freely, giving combat a much more dynamic feel. The rhythm I was getting into by the end of tonight's session saw me doing my basic aggro combo, weaving in the "Low Blow" stunning kick (which is off the global cooldown) and also dropping in the off-GCD "Reprisal" proc to reduce enemy damage after a successful parry. Then, when Blood Weapon was up — it actually has a pretty short cooldown — I'd drop Grit, hit Blood Weapon, unleash as many attacks as I could manage — including DRK's DoT, which, unlike PLD's, isn't part of a combo, so can be applied immediately — before switching back into Grit again once Blood Weapon dropped. The timing of Blood Weapon's cooldown usually meant that I could rotate defensive cooldowns at the same time as throwing up Blood Weapon, too, so I could mitigate at least some of the increased damage I'd be taking by dropping Grit's considerable (20%) reduction in incoming damage.

DRK's AoE aggro move is also a bit more intuitive than PLD's Flash, whose radius I'm still not entirely 100% sure of. Unleash, meanwhile, displays a very clear area of effect when you use it, making it extremely apparent whether your positioning is right or not. It's not quite as satisfying as WAR's cone-area Overpower, being a weird-looking spell with an annoying sound effect rather than a distinctly HULK SMASH-style swing of your axe, but I've also found so far that DRK appears to be able to hold aggro pretty well even with only a couple of Unleashes at the start of the fight — perhaps a side-effect of its increased damage when compared to something like PLD.

I'm digging DRK so far, then, and although it's another tank class like my main, it feels different enough from PLD already that I feel like it's going to be enjoyable to level. And who knows? I might even end up maining it if and when I get it to 60.

2090: Fighting Games Are Confusing Love Max!!!!!

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Was playing a few games with Andie earlier, and on a whim I decided to give Arcana Heart 3 Love Max!!!!! a try, since it had been eyeing me up from the Steam store for a while, and I'd been curious to give a modern fighting game a go.

My history with fighting games is a bit patchy. I played a lot of Street Fighter II back on the Super NES; I had an American copy, so it ran in super-widescreen thanks to NTSC/PAL differences, but it was still pretty fun. I also played a bit of Street Fighter IV on the 360, and various installments in the Dead or Alive series over the years. But I've never really got my head around anything more complex than the original Street Fighter II which, as fighting game enthusiasts will doubtless know, is considerably simpler than the monstrosities we have today.

One of the reasons I decided to give Arcana etc etc a go was because it appears to be regarded as a reasonably accessible example of a genre that has become increasingly impenetrable to newcomers over the years. It still has its fair share of complexity, mind you, and a few systems whose use isn't immediately obvious — not to mention a lack of in-game tutorial — but once you get your head around the basic systems, it's relatively straightforward.

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The basic controls are pretty simple. You have a light, medium and heavy attack, and standard Street Fighter-style button combinations (various quarter and half-circles along with the Dragon Punch Z-shape plus an attack button) tend to unleash special moves for most characters. There's also a "homing" button, which is Arcana Heart's main distinguishing feature from other games of its ilk; tapping this causes you to home in on your opponent, and tapping it again causes you to home in more quickly while allowing you a certain degree of control over your trajectory. By using this, you can have some pretty impressive mid-air battles rather than being confined to the ground; it also makes for some interesting dodging mechanics that I haven't quite got the hang of yet.

The Arcana part of the title refers to a significant addition to the usual fighting game formula: as well as selecting a character, you also pick an Arcana to assign to them. Each of these Arcana have their own set of benefits and drawbacks as well as a few extra special moves; essentially, they allow you to tweak and customise the character you're using in various ways according to how you like to play. It also effectively makes the character roster expand considerably, as equipping a new Arcana in many cases makes a character play rather differently.

The bit that usually confuses me about modern fighting games is all the gauges on screen at any time. Arcana Heart, despite doing a piss-poor job of explaining these in the game itself, is relatively easy to understand once you know what they all do. Your health bar is self-explanatory; the little curvy bar next to it is called the "Focus bar" and allows you to trigger a short-lived mode where you move faster and have some other buffs; the bar at the bottom is your "Arcana bar" and is expended on super-special moves of various descriptions. The Arcana bar starts at one-third of its maximum possible value; in order to expand it, you have to land attacks or get hit, but the bar will only grow if it's not in the process of recharging. In other words, you have to restrain yourself a bit with the supers if you want to grow the bar to its maximum potential, which you'll need to do if you want to unleash the most devastating moves in your character and Arcana's respective arsenals.

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I absolutely haven't got my head around how to play the game well yet, but I feel I at least understand the basic systems, which is more than I can say for some other modern fighting games out there. I feel like with a bit of practice — as well as curtailing my tendency to panic when playing fighting games and lapse into button-mashing mode — I might be able to get the hang of this, and hopefully have the opportunity to teach it to some friends, too, as I can see it being a lot of fun against other people owing to its inherent ridiculousness.

A decent investment, then; I'll be curious to see how much — or indeed if — I improve with a bit of practice.

2087: Virtual Photography

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I've been fascinated by the idea of "virtual photography" for quite some time now. For those wondering what on Earth I'm talking about, I'm referring to the idea of creating aesthetically pleasing screenshots using video games as the base medium, but sometimes involving editing software to touch them up a bit or get rid of some of the inevitable glitches you find in polygon-based games.

A lot of modern games are embracing their photo-realistic nature by including a photo mode right there in the game itself; these modes often include numerous realistic filters and settings that work like an actual camera, as well as, often, an enhanced version of the game engine that sacrifices framerate in the name of visual fidelity, since virtual photography is more concerned with the quality of still images than fluidity of movement.

What I've found more interesting over the years, though, is the ability of games to let us photograph things we simply wouldn't be able to in reality. Fantastic structures, stylised characters, improbable situations, that sort of thing. And as such, although I like the idea of photo modes in stuff like Forza Motorsport and its ilk, I'm inevitably drawn much more towards games that allow you to photograph characters and fantastic environments rather than cars. Nothing against cars, of course; I'm just more interested in people and places.

Second Life

A few years back, I spent quite a lot of time in the social/creative MMO Second Life. I was going through some difficult stuff at the time, and the people I met in there helped me through it a great deal — more than they perhaps knew. To my shame, I haven't been back for quite some time and I don't know how many of them would remember me now — it's been a good five years or so since I logged in, I think — but I have fond memories from that time, and pleasingly, I have a visual record of many of those fond memories.

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Early on in my time "on the Grid", as Second Life players called it, I developed a fascination with photographing people's avatars. Since your avatar was a reflection of your personality in Second Life — you could change appearance at will, and there was no "level-locked" equipment or anything; you just had to create, find or purchase items — I found this to be an interesting means of coming to understand various people. Above you can see one Kade Klata, someone who was a great friend to me during the aforementioned difficult times, and someone who got me into this whole virtual photography thing in the first place.

Kade disappeared off the Grid one day and I was never sure where she went; wherever you are, Kade, I hope you're happy, and I hope you know you touched my life for the better.

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This was an early experiment with using heavily stylised filters to smooth off the rough edges of Second Life's graphics. This particular image was taken in a region called "Botanical", which was renowned for having beautifully constructed scenery. Worthy of note is the fact that all the buildings, scenery and objects in Second Life are constructed by the "players", so someone had spent a lot of time on this place; it seemed only fitting to immortalise it somehow.

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I normally hate taking pictures of myself, but even though I loosely modelled my Second Life avatar on myself, I actually enjoyed putting myself into virtual photographs. This image was in a moody area called "Templum Ex Obscurum"; I forget what its actual purpose was — perhaps just to look pretty — but I was pleased with how this shot came out, and even more pleased with the fancy lighting I managed to create while figuring out how Photoshop worked.

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I don't mind admitting that when I was most involved in Second Life, I was somewhat emotionally fragile. One of the things I liked most about that virtual world when I was in it, though, was the fact that there were all manner of ways to express yourself. This image, taking alongside one "Rylan Carling", who graciously agreed to come and model for me, was actually rather cathartic to create. (That's "me" in the background; by this point, I'd been given something of a virtual makeover by a friend.)

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…Yeah, I was pretty emo around that time. (Hell, I still am; I still like this image and what it symbolised when I was putting it together.) Anyway, enough of that; if you want to see more images from that time, take a peek at my long-abandoned Flickr account.

Final Fantasy XIV

The inherent drama in a role-playing game makes for some great "photos", assuming you can time pressing that screenshot button correctly. Like this:

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Or this:

ffxiv_30062015_163714 And then, of course, like Second Life, there's the self-expression element of everyone's avatars thanks to the "Glamour" system, whereby you can make one piece of gear look like another.

This image is pretty special to me; it's our whole Free Company meeting for a "group photo" shortly before the release of the first expansion pack Heavensward.

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Custom Maid 3D 2

And finally, it would be remiss of me to talk about virtual photography without mentioning Custom Maid 3D 2, which I introduced to you all the other day. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the "photographs" I've taken using this are, shall we say, not entirely suitable for publication on this particular blog (I have a few standards!) but, well, here's a few that I feel I probably can just about get away with…

The thing that's impressed me most about CM3D2 so far is the fact that it's the closest I've seen 3D graphics get to 2D art. The character models, the art style, the outlining, the cel-shading and the expressiveness of the faces — all of those things combine to create something that is not at all "realistic", of course, but which is a very convincing recreation of the idealised anime style.

As you'd expect from something with the word Custom in its title, the character creation system in CM3D2 is pretty astounding, allowing you to customise pretty much anything from face and body shape to eye style and whether or not the character has one or two of those cute little "fangs" you sometimes see anime girls depicted with. You can even set how heavy their boobs are. And choose their clothes, obviously. Dressing your maids up is one of the most fun parts of the game that doesn't involve doing lewd things.

Even the lewd bits are eminently suitable for virtual photography, though, since there are a number of "actions" that simply pose rather than… you know… do stuff. Combine these poses with the control you have over their costumes as well as the camera control mod that allows seriously precise positioning of your viewpoint plus the wonderful ability to make the characters look at the camera on command (assuming it wouldn't be physically impossible) and you have a virtual photo studio that's a whole lot of fun to play around with.

Games are art, yo.

2086: Souls: Reaped

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I finally got around to beating the Diablo III: Reaper of Souls campaign today. I originally wasn't going to bother, as I was primarily interested in playing the new(ish) Adventure Mode rather than grinding through the campaign again, but I found myself enjoying the experience more than I expected, particularly in Act V.

I often think of Blizzard games as being rather weak on the story front. There are exceptions, of course — Warcraft III was particularly strong, for example — but on the whole, I've never really come to Blizzard games for the story. They are masters of their art when it comes to gameplay, but when it comes to storytelling, there are people out there who do it a whole lot better.

Or at least, that's what I'd been thinking. But replaying the Diablo III campaign and having my first run through the Reaper of Souls Act, I was actually quite surprised to see some reasonably decent writing along the way. I mean, the overall plot is still the sort of thing an angsty teenager would come up with if they wanted to write something dramatic (Angels! Demons! Eternal Conflict! Killing death itself!) but the individual moments that you encounter along the way are actually pretty good, even if some of the more supposedly "shocking" moments — the death of Cain, for example — were underwhelming due to their presentation.

I played through the campaign as the female Wizard, who has an endearingly posh voice and a penchant for sarcasm. Consequently, I found myself liking her a whole lot, which is not something you can usually say about the mostly-mute protagonists of loot-whoring dungeon-crawling action RPGs. Her interactions with some of the more tiresome characters — such as the perpetually grumpy head of the angels — were particular highlights for me. "Know this, nephalem," he said. "You may defeat Malthael, but I will not thank you for it." "No," replied my character, sighing. "Of course you won't. And that's part of your charm."

Since I'd already levelled my Wizard a fair bit in Adventure Mode before running through the campaign, I hit the level cap well before the end and started earning Paragon experience. The last time I played Diablo III, this system wasn't in place, so I was interested to see how it worked. Turns out it makes for an enjoyable endgame experience that doesn't rely on long-winded grinding for currency or large amounts of effort for relatively small, incremental amounts of progress. It would be completely inappropriate for a full-on MMO, mind you, given that it has the potential to totally unbalance your character if you put the time into it, but for Diablo, which has always been a series about seeing how big you can make the numbers that pop out of monsters when you smack them in the face, it's perfect.

If you've never capped a character in Diablo III and are curious, the Paragon system works like this: once you hit the current cap (level 70) your experience bar turns blue from its original orange, but you continue to earn experience as you did before. Early Paragon levels cost considerably less experience than the top end of the regular levels (7 million XP to go from regular Level 70 to Paragon Level 1 vs 83 million XP to go from regular Level 69 to 70) but the amount required increases gradually as you gain levels.

Gaining a Paragon level gives you a point to spend in one of four categories in turn. Your first point is in the Core Stats category, which includes your class' primary stat, which affects damage; Vitality, which affects your maximum HP and defence; Movement Speed, which is self-explanatory; and Maximum Resource, which is the thing your character spends to use skills or cast spells. Your next point is in the Offense category, which includes attack speed, critical hit rate, critical hit damage increase and cooldown reduction. Then there's the Defense category, which includes maximum life, armour rating, your natural regeneration rate and bonuses to your resistances. Then your fourth point goes in the Utility category, which includes area damage, the amount of life you get back per successful hit on an enemy, the amount of bonus gold you find and a reduction to the costs of your skills. Once you've spent a point in each of the four categories, your fifth goes into Core Stats, your sixth into Offense and so on.

The interesting thing about the Paragon system is that it's account-wide — in other words, your Paragon level applies to all your characters, even the ones that aren't yet at the level cap. This means that you can make levelling subsequent characters much easier if you have a decent Paragon level, because they'll be operating at a considerably stronger level than they would normally be otherwise. What's also quite nice is the fact that you can redistribute the Paragon points whenever you like (so long as you're not in combat) and each character can have a different setup as you see fit; the "shared" part is just how many points you have available.

Now I've beaten the campaign properly, I can focus on Adventure Mode, and now I'm at level 70 I can investigate some of the really interesting stuff like Greater Rifts and tracking down the Keymaster monsters. Endgame Diablo III certainly sounds like an intriguing time, and certainly a far cry from the completely non-existent endgame that it launched with. I'm glad I'm coming to it now, though; having experienced MMO endgame play in Final Fantasy XIV, I now understand the appeal of an endgame and why Diablo III needed one, whereas when I originally played the game I didn't really get why people seemed to be so annoyed that it was lacking in level-cap content.

Anyway. Time for bed before I get tempted to try and reach Paragon Level 30 this evening…

2085: Be Good to Your Meidos

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References to lewd stuff ahead. No actual porn though.

Largely out of curiosity (and in part due to being a filthy pervert) I decided to check out Custom Maid 3D 2 on the recommendation of some friends who also enjoy such things. And I've been pleasantly surprised by what this delightful package of filth offers.

Custom Maid 3D 2, is, like its similarly named predecessor, a sex game. I don't mean that in the way that mainstream press tends to refer to visual novels with explicit content, though it is Japanese, much like the visual novels in question; I mean it's a game where a significant component of the gameplay revolves around sex. I've long been fascinated with various interactive depictions of "virtual sex"; frankly, I find the whole scene to be a rather interesting means of living out all manner of fantasies safely and without hurting anyone, though naturally I hasten to add that nothing compares to actually having a real partner and doing things in the 3D world. I know that during "dry spells" over the years, though, stuff like this has proven to be an adequate substitute, if you know what I mean.

But anyway. I don't want to focus specifically on the pornographic aspects of Custom Maid 3D 2 because although it is hot as hell, the fact it depicts sex is not the most interesting thing about it. No; it's the fact that rather than being a straightforward "interactive porn movie" type of experience, there's actually a surprisingly deep and involved game in there too. Whether or not it is in good taste is another matter, of course, but if you can deal with the sexy stuff, there's an interesting experience to be had.

Custom Maid 3D 2 casts you in the role of the owner of an exclusive club. Your uncle passed it on to you, telling you only the bare minimum of details before buggering off to get married and leaving you with a failing business deep in debt. Essentially, the establishment you find yourself taking ownership of is an "adult entertainment" club where the maids who staff it, among other things, provide "night service" to paying customers. Unfortunately, owing to your uncle apparently being more of a playboy than a businessman, the club isn't in a particularly good state when you get your hands on it; there aren't even any maids left working there aside from your uncle's loyal secretary, who is strictly off-limits for anything other than professional discussions.

What then transpires is that you hire a maid to your own specifications (providing a loose narrative excuse for a shockingly detailed character creator that is almost the most fun part of the package) and then spend ten days "training" her to be a… suitable employee for this type of establishment. This involves a combination of sending her out to classes in the daytime, each of which affect various stats, usually in positive ways, and at night… well, you bang her, obviously.

Here's the interesting part: the sexy bits actually involve a certain degree of strategy and RPG-style resource management, of all things. Before you get it on, you have a certain amount of "stamina" you can spend on setting up a "playlist" of various activities. some of which are conditional on the location and whether or not she's drunk; going over the stamina limit will cause your maid to pass out during the session and perform poorly the following day, so it's in your interests to try and spend this as efficiently as possible.

Once you get started, each "activity" has several different actions you can take. Each one of these has an impact on a number of things according to what the action and overall activity is. Usually, an action will increase some sex-related stats significantly while reducing some of the more "innocent" stats (like "charm" and "leadership abilities") to a lesser degree. At the same time, the action will impact the maid's excitement, mind and reason levels; excitement affects the animations that play (and possibly the effect on stats? I haven't researched thoroughly yet), mind presents a limit on the actions you can perform during a single activity — running out of it means you can't do anything else, though it gets restored when you start a new activity — and reason causes negative impacts on stats to be stronger when it runs out.

On top of all that, the maid gains overall experience for each activity she participates in as well as "mastery" of the various activities. Improving mastery results in stronger, more efficient stat gains when performing that activity, and can also unlock new activities. Yes, we are indeed talking about a game with a skill tree that consists entirely of lewd things. Gaining experience can allow the maid to perform her various duties better — she has a separate level and "class" for sexy and non-sexy duties — and her disposition can change according to the activities she masters and does most frequently. In other words, you can "build" each maid as you see fit, and the game provides a number of special events and achievements as incentive for you to experiment with the maids you hire and discover the different types of character you can create.

It's an oddly fascinating little game, really; while there are doubtless people out there who will likely take umbrage at the very concept (particularly the "training" aspect), those of you with a penchant for the lewder side of life may want to give it a look. Just don't complain to me if you find yourself as engrossed by the gameplay as you are by the rude bits!

2082: Naked Fairies Blow Shit Up

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I seem to be having a bit of a shoot 'em up kick at the minute, which is no bad thing, since I have quite a good selection of them now. Most recently, aside from Eschatos, which I talked a bit about recently, I've been very much enjoying Raiden IV: Overkill on PC.

I like the Raiden series a lot. Raiden Project — an enhanced port of Raiden I and II — was one of the first games I played on the original PlayStation, and I've followed the series on and off ever since. Raiden IV, I'm pleased to note, remains very much true to the series' roots while being rather more up-to-date in terms of presentation — the recently released PC version happily runs in full 1080p resolution, which looks glorious.

One of the reasons I like Raiden — and Eschatos, for that matter — is that it's not a bullet hell shooter. I enjoy bullet hell shooters, don't get me wrong, but sometimes it's nice to enjoy something that isn't quite so buttock-clenchingly tense at all times. This isn't to say Raiden is without its moments of tension, mind; there's plenty of buttock-clenching throughout the course of a playthrough, but these instances tend to be spread out a bit more than in something like DoDonPachi Resurrection.

Another reason I like Raiden is its weapon system — and this is another contrast from many bullet hell titles. Rather than having a weapon that is enormously overpowered from the very beginning of the game, Raiden has always had three different weapons to choose between, plus three different subweapons to go alongside them. The standard Vulcan cannon has good power and, when upgraded, can happily fill the screen with a wide volley of bullets. The blue laser, meanwhile, is rather narrow, even at its highest power level, but is also the most damaging of all the weapons. And then there's the infamous "toothpaste laser" in the purple containers, which remains one of the most inadvertently (or perhaps deliberately?) hilarious weapons in a shoot 'em up ever, tying itself in knots as more and more enemies come onto the screen.

Interestingly, in Raiden IV you actually have several different ships to choose from. There's the default Raiden IV ship, which is like the ship from the previous games, only the basic, low-level Vulcan cannon you start with has a bit of a spread shot already applied to it. Then there's the ship from the previous games, whose basic Vulcan cannon fires straight ahead and only spreads when upgraded. And then there's a naked fairy — fairies have traditionally been the hidden, secret score items in Raiden games — that is much more agile than the standard fighters, and has her own complement of weapons that behave rather differently to the default ones.

Raiden IV Overkill is a comprehensive package with a number of different ways to play, each of which force you to approach it a little differently. The standard Arcade mode is where I've been spending most of my time, but the titular Overkill mode is fun, too; here, when you destroy a non-popcorn enemy you can continue shooting it to increase an Overkill meter, with bigger bonuses awarded for more post-mortem damage inflicted before it finally explodes. This forces you to play a bit more aggressively in order to score Overkills and collect the resulting medals, and it's an interesting twist on the original formula.

I am absolutely rubbish at Raiden IV so far, but as I've managed to improve my skills somewhat at Eschatos with a little practice, I don't doubt I'll eventually be able to get all the way through Raiden IV on a single credit, even if it's only on the easiest difficulty.

Still, as monstrously difficult as it is, it's a whole lot of fun, at least. I highly recommend grabbing a copy if you enjoy a good old-fashioned shoot 'em up.

2081: Adventures in Sanctuary

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On a bit of a whim — well, after talking a bit about it with Andie the other day — I reinstalled Diablo III and thought I'd give it another go. I bought the expansion pack a while ago, anyway, and hadn't really explored it all that much; my main stumbling block with it was that in order to access "Adventure Mode", which was the thing I was really interested in, you had to complete the campaign storyline. I had completed the campaign storyline, but due to Diablo III's online nature coupled with Blizzard's region-locked servers, the fact I had done so on the North American servers back around the game's time of release didn't allow me to pick up where I'd left off in Europe.

Fortunately, I timed my return well: a new Season has just begun, and Seasonal characters can jump right in to Adventure Mode without having to complete campaign first. So that's exactly what I did. (For the uninitiated, Seasonal characters in Diablo III are similar to Diablo II's ladder characters; their progress is tracked separately from your regular characters, and you can't twink them out with gear you've put in your Stash on previous characters. In other words, they effectively allow you to start the game "from scratch" and see how quickly you can accomplish things like getting to the level cap and suchlike.)

Adventure Mode, as it turns out, is exactly what I hoped it would be: in other words, exactly what the Diablo series should have been doing for a long time: providing a freeform, flexible, grinding-and-loot-whoring experience where even though there's no real "finish" to it, there are plenty of short- and long-term goals to pursue as well as short mini-quests you can play around with for half an hour or so and still feel like you've achieved something.

Adventure Mode, when you start out, is basically split into two main components: Bounties and Rifts. Bounties are quests that are scattered around the game world; each of the game's five Acts have five Bounties available at any given time, and completing all five rewards you with Stuff. One of the Acts has a Bonus Bounty attached to it, too, which means you get more Stuff when you complete all five Bounties. The Bounties are different each time you play; sometimes it will involve killing the big bosses of the game, others it will require you to complete special events and sidequests. There's a nice amount of variety, and each session feels quite focused as a result.

Rifts, meanwhile, are self-contained dungeons that basically take everything in the game, put it all in a blender and then tell you to go have fun. You'll face a random combination of enemies in a random combination of dungeons, and be tasked with defeating a specific amount of enemies to summon a boss, at which point you have to defeat the boss to clear the rift. Rifts differ slightly from normal dungeons in that they have some interesting "Pylons" around the place that imbue you with significant special effects that are more powerful than the regular shrines you find in the base game. One particularly enjoyable one, for example, sees you automatically spewing lightning that pretty much instantly kills most foes for about 30 seconds or so, allowing you to build up some impressive multi-kill combos.

Once you reach a particular level, you can start tackling Greater Rifts. I don't know how these work yet, but I'm interested to find out.

What I particularly like about Adventure Mode is that it abandons all pretence of having a coherent story — something that the Diablo series has never really handled all that well, despite its lore being interesting and well-crafted — and instead fully embraces its "game-ness", which is why most people keep playing Diablo, after all. Diablo III's story was enjoyable enough the first time around but ultimately forgettable, and so I wasn't particularly enamoured with the idea of running through the whole campaign again. And once you've beaten it once, you probably skip all the cutscenes and conversations anyway, so a dedicated mode that trims out all that fat and means that you're not forced into following the campaign's linear sequence of progression is wonderful. I just wish it was automatically unlocked for non-Seasonal characters, but it's not the end of the world; when the current Season ends, Seasonal characters become regular characters, at which point I can take my geared and levelled Seasonal character through the Campaign on the lowest difficulty and curbstomp everything in a couple of hours to quickly unlock Adventure Mode, I guess.

Anyway, I've been enjoying my return to Sanctuary, and it's been a really pleasant surprise quite how much the game has changed since I last played it shortly after its initial release. It's grown into a really solid, interesting, enjoyable game that will appeal greatly to those who enjoy grinding and seeing numbers go up into astronomical values; I don't know how long I'll stick with it this time around, but it's proving to be an enjoyable distraction at the moment.

2079: WTF is Wrong with Video Games? Absolutely Nothing

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Yesterday, social media was abuzz with something stupid that gaming site Polygon published. This is, of course, nothing unusual, since Polygon appears to have shifted its identity from "reinventing games journalism" to "posting the most idiotic things possible in the name of those sweet clicks from people who think we're dumb, but really they are the dumb ones for clicking on it, oh wait, don't use archive.is please, stop it, my aaaaad revenuuuuuue".

Said article was called WTF is Wrong with Video Games? and was, in fact, an excerpt from an e-book of the same name by self-professed "Mean Guy" Phil Owen. As the title suggests, it's yet another in a long series of navel-gazing articles that suggest video games need to "grow up" if they really want to be respected as art. And the main thrust of Owen's argument throughout the piece is that "gameplay" gets in the way of "art".

Dara O'Briain did a good comedy routine about Call of Duty a few years ago in which he commented on the seeming absurdity of a game restricting access to the rest of the story based on your skill — and yet it's something that, over the years, we've become accustomed to. The concept of "story as reward" is a powerful motivation for many game enthusiasts — I'm one of them — and being able to advance an enjoyable story as a result of proving your own skills is often inherently more satisfying than just having a story served up to you passively.

But Owen's argument is also a gross oversimplification of the situation. Let's ponder a few things.

The interminable game/not game argument

As a medium, video games have expanded and flourished enormously over their lifetime — far more quickly than any other medium in history. Early games were technically limited and as such tended to focus on the mechanical aspects while making narrative little more than an afterthought. In other words, the technology simply wasn't there for games to be able to tell a compelling story convincingly, so as such the mechanical aspects were emphasised, because even with primitive technology, it was possible to make something that was fun to play.

Today, of course, there are very few technological barriers to realising a creative vision. Modern 3D technology is more than capable of rendering photo-realistic scenes at convincing framerates; virtual reality allows us to immerse ourselves fully in virtual worlds; and many games have production values that rival the most expensive movies. But at the same time, alongside this improved technology has come the understanding that "video game" these days means far more than its literal definition. "Game" no longer means just something in which you prove your skill or master mechanics; it can refer to all manner of interactive entertainment, whether or not there's a way for you to "lose" or "win".

This aspect of things is what gets a lot of self-professed hardcore gamers' backs up. "Gone Home isn't a game!" they'll cry, since Gone Home is the habitual poster boy for being "not a game". "Visual novels aren't games! Walking simulators aren't games!"

Well… yes they are, assuming we're using the term "game" as is most commonly used these days to refer to any form of interactive entertainment, however limited the interaction might be. They may not be the sort of games you want to play, but that doesn't make them not games by the popular definition. All they show, really, is that the term "game" has really become woefully inadequate to describe the diversity of experiences we have these days. And none of them are "invalid" or "need to grow up"; some of them simply might not appeal to particular groups. And that is absolutely fine.

Games as art

I've been a believer in games as art since I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time, and its story blew me away with its emotional intensity and drama. It may be clichéd and laughable these days, but back on its original release, it was incredible. And I've held strongly to the fact that games are art ever since, with my understanding of what this really means changing and growing over time.

The mistake a lot of people make — Owen included — is assuming that "art" is synonymous with "narrative", and this absolutely isn't the case at all. Sure, some of the most explicitly "artistic" games out there place a strong focus on their narrative, but there's plenty of artistry in purely mechanical games, too.

There are few places where this is more apparent than in the more technical side of arcade-style games: specifically, fighting games, shoot 'em ups and rhythm games. Fighting games — good ones, anyway — are precisely and immaculately tuned to be balanced in such a way that skilled players can make the on-screen characters do exactly what they want as the result of split-second decisions. Watching skilled fighting game players going at it is a thing of beauty, and something that relatively few of us can hope to master to quite such a degree.

Shoot 'em ups, meanwhile — again, good ones, anyway — are crafted in such a way as to be intricately choreographed, enemy waves hurtling onto the screen in such a way as to be both positioned in a way for the player to be able to defeat them and to be aesthetically pleasing at the same time. Bullet hell games become a ballet of the player sprite weaving through screen-filling, moving patterns that, although initially appearing chaotic, are in fact orderly, predictable and navigable.

As for rhythm games, well, anyone who has played Project Diva f on Hard difficulty or higher will know well the fact that playing that game is more playing a percussion part for an actual piece of music from memory than paying any attention to what is actually happening on screen at any given moment. Just as shoot 'em ups are choreographed, so too are rhythm games, with player inputs complementing the existing music in such a way as to immerse the player in the creative work in a way that simply isn't possible if you're listening in a more passive way.

Games are art, and art doesn't mean narrative. Deal with it.

WTF is wrong with video games?

Really? Nothing. Nothing at all. There may be some individual games that you, personally, don't care for or enjoy playing, but that doesn't mean the amorphous concept of "video games" has anything wrong with it. It simply means that you're not playing the right games for you.

This, I think, is a key problem with Owen's argument that the "game" gets in the way of the "art" (meaning "narrative", in his case). Some people like that. Some people like being rewarded with story, or in-game trinkets, or numbers going up or whatever — and that's an important part of the gaming medium as a whole. It's not something that is present everywhere in gaming, of course, and when inappropriate mechanics are shoehorned into a situation where it really doesn't make sense, it can be jarring and uncomfortable. But a lot of designers these days have a pretty good idea of what elements go well together with what. Naughty Dog made the decision that crafting shivs in The Last of Us complemented the game's post-apocalyptic storyline, and the game as a whole was well-received for its combination of storytelling and gameplay.

At the other end of the spectrum, of course, we have stuff like The Fruit of Grisaia, which is almost completely non-interactive — there are only five decisions to make in a single playthrough, three of which are totally irrelevant for four out of the five routes — and yet still manages to be incredibly compelling. So the kind of experience Owen is apparently looking for — interactive narrative without any requirement for skill — already exists, and is pretty damn good, too. Not only that, it comfortably exists alongside games that are pure skill — the aforementioned fighting, shooting and rhythm games — without anyone needing to tell each other that what they're playing "isn't a game" or that their experiences are somehow invalid.

I think the only W that is TF with video games right now is the unreasonable expectations and preconceptions some people come to the medium with. Video games are not everything to everyone, and neither should they be. No form of art is universally appealing to everyone, and video games are no exception. If you object to crafting shivs in The Last of Us, don't play The Last of Us. If you object to wandering around a house without killing anything in Gone Home, don't play Gone Home. It's not as if you don't have any other choices as to what you can experience from a medium that has become as incredibly broad and fascinating as gaming in 2015, and it can sometimes lead to pleasant surprises if you step out of your comfort zone and try something new once in a while.

Let's not water down and homogenise gaming into a single, bland, lowest-common denominator, non-offensive, "universally appealing" form; let's instead celebrate all the different experiences we can have on our computers, consoles, handhelds, phones and tablets. Let's marvel in how easy it is for us to explore new worlds, to put ourselves in the shoes of another, to immerse ourselves in narratives more deeply than any other medium, to challenge our prejudices, to show our skills in ways that don't require physical strength or even mobility and to engage our emotions in everything from a feeling of "fun" to blood-curdling "terror".

WTF is wrong with video games? Absolutely nothing, so stop moaning and go play something.