1376: Turnabout Weekend

I am glad this week is over. Really glad. It's not been a great one.

Granted, pretty much all of the "bad things" that have happened have actually happened to Andie rather than me — she's the one who got ill, then her phone broke, just to add insult to injury — but what with me being somewhat of the anxious persuasion, all this has had a bit of an effect on me too.

Still, pretty sure the worst of everything is over and done with now, which means we can hopefully enjoy a quiet, peaceful weekend and get back to some semblance of normality next week. Andie's not yet sure if she's going back to work next week or not, but that's up to her, not me, of course.

So what am I up to? Well, I spent a chunk of this evening playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory and finally cleared the enormous backlog of sidequests I'd built up, leading me to achieve a "perfect 40" rating for a chapter, which is what I was really after. Helpfully, chasing all these sidequests has equipped me with some powerful items and levelled my characters up to "comfortably overpowered" status, so the remainder of the story should be reasonably straightforward — though, of course, there will be plenty more sidequests to do along the way, too.

I also downloaded Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies (aka Ace Attorney 5) yesterday, and am already in love with it. Those who know me well will know that the Ace Attorney series is one of those few series that, like Neptunia, I will immediately purchase a new installment of without question and without reading reviews. I'm only partway into the game's first chapter so far, but it's already impressive stuff.

The DS versions of the Ace Attorney series were actually enhanced ports of Game Boy Advance games, and thus were rather technologically limited. It wasn't until brand new content was added in the fifth case of the first game, the fourth game in the main series and the Ace Attorney Investigations spinoff came out that we started to see some slight variations on the formula — better use of the touchscreen, for example, along with objects that could be examined in 3D.

Ace Attorney 5 is a bit of a milestone for the series, then, in that it's the first installment to be specifically built for the platform it's on rather than based on old code and assets. And it shows.

I was a little worried when I heard that Capcom was making the shift to 3D characters and environments — the 2D artwork of the original games was always charming and full of character, and I was concerned that the move to 3D would lose some of this. Thankfully, it hasn't; the 3D characters are cel-shaded and look convincingly like much better-animated versions of their 2D counterparts, with a few tweaks here and there. Phoenix Wright looks noticeably older, for example, but this makes sense — by this point, he's a veteran defense lawyer, not the frantically sweating rookie he was in the first game.

The 3D aspect also allows for more dramatic, cinematic presentation; occasionally, in the old games, the view would switch to an overview of the courtroom while the peanut gallery would mumble about something that had just been said. Now, rather than this being a static image, it's a dynamic pan across the courtroom that looks much cooler. It's a small touch, but it's neat.

There's anime sequences, too, to depict things that don't really work with just the usual visual novel-style narration. This also means that characters have a voice; I'm pretty sure Wright is voiced by the same guy who did Jude in Tales of Xillia, which will continue to prove distracting until I find out for sure.

In fact, let me research that right now.

………

Yes, he is. Here's proof. Well, that answers that. So long as Wright doesn't start coming out with things like "I wish we didn't have to fight, but we must!" I think we'll probably be all good.

Oh, yeah. You should buy Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies. I'm sure there will be more enthusing about it in the very near future. Now I'm off to play Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies and flip the bird to this week. Mata ne.

1375: Desu

A few weeks into my Japanese evening class and I'm enjoying myself. There's been a fair amount of stuff I'd managed to pick up naturally simply through watching anime, playing games and looking things up myself out of curiosity, but it's nice to know that I was at least correct in all of these cases.

I'm finding the process of learning enjoyable. It's been a while since the opportunity to learn something in a classroom-style environment — and no, I don't count teacher training days — and it's good to get back to it. I can't help but feel that, having chosen to do this, I'm appreciating it far more than if I was obliged to be there at, say, school or even, to a lesser extent, university.

It's also enjoyable to be in a group where there's a decent mix of abilities. I know first-hand how frustrating it is to teach a mixed-ability group, but it's quite satisfying to sit in a room with other people and be able to tell — this sounds bad, but what the hell — that I'm not the worst person there. In fact, so far I'm feeling quite confident in my own abilities with regard to pronunciation, remembering phrases and so on.

The part that's doubtless going to be somewhat more challenging is the learning of the Japanese characters, beginning with the hiragana set. I can remember a couple of "sets" of these without too much difficulty, but others are a bit harder to remember — and it takes me time to parse them into the syllables they represent. I'm sure that's something that will come with practice, but it's my one real stumbling block at present. It's not a massive problem since the majority of the initial work we've been doing is in romaji rather than kana, but I rather optimistically picked up the textbook the course is using in its kana incarnation, not realising that it pretty much expected you to have both hiragana and katakana pretty much sorted by the time you start learning words and phrases. I may have to invest in the romaji version for at least the early weeks — that or spend a bit more time doing self-study on hiragana and katakana, anyway. It'll come in time, I'm sure.

So far we've only learned a few basic words and phrases — introducing ourselves, saying good morning/afternoon/night/bye, giving our phone number — but things seem to be moving along at a reasonable pace, and the class is working well together. I still feel a bit nervous about interacting with relative strangers, to be honest, but I've been going for three weeks now, including talking to people, and haven't exploded or shat myself or anything like that, so that's good.

I'm interested to see how far this initial course takes things. I've certainly got the taste for learning again, so may well end up continuing my studies once it finishes in January — or perhaps that's the time to switch to self-study. We'll see. Either way, I'm enjoying myself at present, and hopefully it will prove useful (or at least vaguely bragworthy) at some point in the near future.

1374: Nep-Ko

Now that I've finished Tales of Xillia I am, as promised, once again playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory. I'm now pushing 60 hours of playtime, a significant proportion of the last few of which have been spent doing nothing but non-story content.

And lordy, what a lot of non-story content there is. There's sidequests to do, which tend to have fairly modest rewards but challenge you to battle powerful monsters and master the game's various mechanics. There's a crafting system, which requires you to discover new recipes for various items, then gather the materials for them either from enemies or "harvest points" in dungeons. There's the Scout system, in which you send out numerous NPCs on your behalf to check out dungeons and potentially manipulate the items, enemies, drop rates or experience point gain in particular areas and occasionally discover completely new places. And there's little tricks like earning money by gathering an item called "Invisible Cloth," purchasing a cheap costume, combining it with the aforementioned Invisible Cloth to make a new item of clothing and then selling them for 1.5 million credits a pop.

All of this side stuff is conspiring to prevent me from advancing the game's story. Said story is immensely entertaining as it always has been in the Neptunia series, but Victory's mechanics and optional content are far more solid than even Neptunia mk2, which certainly had plenty of things to do. The combat system has been refined into something that is immensely enjoyable to repeatedly engage in, the difficulty has been ramped up considerably over the rather straightforward mk2, and just chasing down these sidequests and items is extremely addictive.

Although the Neptunia series is widely derided by the mainstream press, I'm consistently impressed by what it's managed to achieve over the course of three games. What initially began as something of a cheap joke at the expense of the games industry and the "console wars" in particular has developed into something much more over time — each of the game's main characters has been developed into their own unique person with a distinctive personality. Okay, there's plenty of standard anime tropes at work, but combined with the fact that these characters are supposed to represent games consoles and manufacturers, it really works; why wouldn't PlayStation be a tsundere who enjoys nothing more than working too hard, and why wouldn't she have a sister afraid of never quite being able to match up? Why wouldn't Nintendo live in a vibrantly-coloured candyland but actually be ruthless, cold and prone to bouts of completely irrational anger?

By nearly 60 hours into Victory, I'm no longer really thinking of the Neptunia cast as "the Sega one, the PlayStation one, the Microsoft one"; they've become great characters in their own right, and their interactions with one another are a real highlight. In fact, such is the popularity and success of the series in its native Japan, it's got its own anime spinoff which I'm curious to watch at some point, and there are several new games on the way, too.

I find it quite odd but also rather pleasing how much this game series has resonated with me since I first picked it up on a whim out of interest one day. "Objectively" speaking — in as much as it's possible to be "objective" when talking about pieces of entertainment — there are far better games out there, both in terms of gameplay and technical proficiency, but something about the adventures of Neptune and the gang has really spoken to me ever since that clunky first game, and has ensured that any time something with the words Hyperdimension Neptunia is released, it's pretty much an instapurchase for me. It's been a while since a "big-name" game has elicited that sort of feeling from me.

1373: Steem-Powered

Although I grew up with the Atari 8-bit range of computers, some of my fondest early memories of using computers and playing games relate to that range's successor: the Atari ST. Unlike the 8-bit range, the ST was a 16-bit machine with an 8MHz processor, either 512K or 1MB of memory, support for MIDI, hard drives and floppy disks that held up to 720K of information. It was a huge leap over the 8-bit systems in many ways — though it did suffer from an appalling soundchip that actually sounded worse than the 8-bit range's POKEY chip in the hands of anyone other than the most skilled chiptune musicians.

I had a sudden urge to revisit some old ST memories the other day, prompted partly by a discussion with Andie on the subject of chemistry, of all things. (Andie's in hospital right now, if you didn't know, so discussions naturally turn to vaguely medicine- and science-related things on occasion.) Our discussion caused me to randomly remember an old Atari ST puzzle game from Psygnosis and Blue Byte called Atomino in which you had to create molecules by attaching atoms to one another and not leaving any… err… connecty bits (I'm not a chemist!) dangling loose. Remembering turned into downloading the Steem emulator and a copy of the game just to see if it held up. And it does!

I played Atomino for a bit until the emulation crashed (I think it was more a problem with the dodgy pirate disk image rather than the emulator itself) and then suddenly remembered a few other things — specifically, a few entries from the demoscene that I used to enjoy indulging in on occasion.

The demoscene is an odd old beast when you think about it, but it was a popular movement that, I believe, is still going on today. For the uninitiated, a demo disk was exactly what it sounds like: it was something you booted up when you wanted to demonstrate what your computer was capable of. More often than not, said demos were technically impressive in some way — they might use graphical trickery to get more than the normal 16 colours on screen, for example, or they might show off by putting graphics in places where it was normally "impossible" for the ST to render graphics. They'd often have good music, demonstrating skilled chiptune artists' mastery of the ST's crappy three-channel sound chip, and they were also often notable for quite how much stuff they fit onto a single disk.

One demo I remember particularly fondly — and which I successfully found a disk image of, so am enjoying while I type this out — was called The B.I.G. Demo. I can't remember why we had a copy with our original computer — chances are it was one of the disks acquired via my dad and brother's attendance at the local "computer club" (actually more of a local piracy swap meet — everyone was at it in the '80s and early '90s) that adorned the several big boxes of 3.5-inch floppy disks we had for the ST.

Anyway, The B.I.G. Demo was pretty neat. It wasn't the absolute flashiest demo I've ever seen, but it was cool. It had graphics in the borders, it had 256-colour visuals, and it had renditions of a wide variety of music from the 8-bit era. In fact, the main point of the demo was to act as a jukebox, providing access to a huge number of C64 classics in glorious ST-o-phonics. There was also a "Digital Department" menu that loaded separately and included digitised (more than likely MOD file-based) renditions of a number of the same tracks. Aside from this, though, everything in The B.I.G. Demo was loaded into the ST's memory, meaning no loading breaks whatsoever — not bad for a 512K machine.

One of the most interesting things about many of these demos was the scrolling text that inevitably adorned them. In many cases, the length of the scrolling message in the demo was the source of considerable bragging rights for the developers — not an unreasonable boast, given that when you only have 720KB tops to play with on a double-sided ST disk, even a short bit of text can and will eat into that space significantly.

The B.I.G. Demo had a whole bunch of scrolling messages, including one on the main screen that bragged about its lower border artwork, and the demo's crowning glory, the B.I.G. Scroller. This was quite simply a scrolling message that whizzed past in large print and would make you quite dizzy if you watched it for more than a few minutes at a time, but reading the whole thing would take you a significant amount of time. I can't remember a lot of the content from the B.I.G. Scroller (and haven't tried to read it since re-downloading the demo), but more often than not these "scrolltexts" took the form of stream-of-consciousness ramblings from one of the demo's creators, and were often quite interesting to read. In many ways, I guess they were a precursor to stream-of-consciousness blogging, and they're certainly an artifact that is very distinctive to the late '80s and early '90s.

I haven't kept up on the demoscene since I was a daily user of the Atari ST but I'm sure this sort of thing is still going on. I wonder how long the longest scrolltext is today?

1372: The Good Old Days of the App Store

I'd been pondering this a little recently, but I actually confirmed it for myself today: the games on the App Store of today are not a patch on those that were on it when it first went live.

Oh sure, they're technically more impressive, with all manner of lovely "console-quality" (whatever the fuck that means) graphics and download sizes that will easily fill up a lesser phone, but there's really something missing from modern App Store games that was there in spades in early titles.

The title that really drove it home for me was a game called Tilt to Live. This was a score-attack action game that some described as "the iPhone's Geometry Wars". It's not quite an accurate comparison, since Geometry Wars is a twin-stick shooter and Tilt to Live doesn't involve any shooting whatsoever, but they share a couple of important similarities: they're easy to understand and super-addictive.

Tilt to Live, lest you've never had the pleasure, sees you controlling a small arrowhead-shaped… thing as it attempts to fend off the unwanted attentions of its red dot rivals. In order to destroy red dots, you have to pick up powerups, each of which has a specific effect. Nukes explode at the spot where you picked them up, for example, taking anything caught in the circular Missile Command-style explosion with them, while lasers take a moment to charge before firing a broad beam in the direction you're travelling. As you progress through the game, you unlock more and more different weapons which are then available from the outset in subsequent playthroughs; the more weapons you have, the easier it is to maintain a combo of dot-killing without stopping, and consequently attain higher scores.

Tilt to Live is so genius because it's built for its platform. It uses nothing more than the iPhone's built-in accelerometer, tuned to perfection, and all you have to do is tilt your device around like one of those old "Labyrinth" games. Nothing more than that. There are a couple of other modes, but in essence, all you're doing in each of them is tilting to move your arrow and attempting to avoid red dots. Simple. Addictive. The perfect mobile game.

Tilt to Live was far from the only game from the App Store's early years I have fond memories of, though. The early stuff from ngmoco was fantastic, for example — titles like Dr. Awesome (essentially tilt-controlled Qix), Dropship (Defender meets Thrust meets Geometry Wars) and Rolando were all top-notch games that were pretty much essential purchases in the early days of the App Store — everyone who had an iPhone downloaded them, and Apple even featured them in advertising for both the iPhone and iPod touch, the latter of which it looked for a while like Apple was attempting to position as a serious handheld gaming device.

So what happened? Why have I largely lost interest in what the App Store has to offer today? Well, this is probably a gross oversimplification of the matter, but essentially I believe things started to go downhill with the addition of in-app purchases to the App Store.

I remember being skeptical about the supposed benefits of in-app purchases when the upcoming new feature was first announced — it sounded awfully like what triple-A publishers were doing with downloadable content for console games, and that was something that a number of teams had proven could be done very, very wrong. Oddly, initially only paid apps could have in-app purchases, meaning that free apps were always just that — free, though sometimes ad-supported.

Nowadays, of course, the words "free" on an app more often than not mean that you can download the app in question for free, but are often then expected to cough up extra, particularly in the case of games. In-app purchases have gotten so out of control on iOS that it's rarer not to see a game have a "Get More Gold" button allowing you to purchase in-game currency. And, of course, the moment you see that "Get More Gold" button, you have to start questioning whether the game has been deliberately made more grindy and inconvenient — experts call this "adding friction" or "fun pain" — in the name of squeezing a few extra pennies out of you.

Herein lies the issue, I think: modern App Store games are designed to be money-making machines that trick people into thinking they're having fun, then encourage them to open their wallets to have even more fun. It's all a ruse, of course; the "fun" is more often than not an illusion created through carefully-paced rewards and ego-massaging, and the "pain" is created by suddenly denying the player access to these rewards that they've come to accept. It's good business design, but bad game design.

Compare and contrast with a game from the App Store's earlier era such as Tilt to Live, or ngmoco's early games. These are games designed for pure fun — and more to the point, they're highly creative, interesting, distinctive games. Not one of them is a predictable "tap on everything, then wait until you get a push notification to tap on everything again in three hours" title; while some are inspired by classic retro games (or even more recent games such as Loco Roco in the case of Rolando), they each put their own twist on things, respecting the player's time and wallet in the process — in other words, once you bought these games, they wouldn't ask you for money again, except in some rare instances such as in Tilt to Live where the developers later added a whole new game mode and sold it rather than bundling it in as a free update.

One of the saddest sights in the App Store is, I think, the massive decline in quality that ngmoco's titles have taken since those early days. Games like the aforementioned Dr. Awesome and Rolando were genuinely excellent games that helped to define the platform; now, however, all ngmoco does is churn out some of the most tedious, derivative, copycat titles in the entire industry, all in the name of exploiting the social gaming bubble. RIP ngmoco; I thought you were going to be the next big thing in creative indie games at one point, but it was not to be.

True creativity and distinctiveness in the App Store isn't dead; but with well over a million apps and games on the App Store now, and the charts dominated by free-to-play titles that have effectively bought their rankings rather than earned them, it's getting harder and harder to find them. How sad.

1371: Cutting the Cord

You'll recall that I've been contemplating this for some time now, but as I promised to myself, I've reached a decision: the Monday after this one just coming, I'm deactivating my Facebook account.

"Who cares?" I hear you say. And, well, that's sort of the point, really; I don't care about Facebook. It is largely useless to me these days.

As I noted in my post a few days ago, there's been a noticeable shift in the quality of posts among my Facebook friends recently. While I don't blame any of them for wanting to share things that are important to them personally, it's getting to the point where there's so much noise that there's not any room for conversation any more.

Social media is increasingly becoming "fire and forget"; people post something designed to get noticed — perhaps a passive-aggressive status update, or some sort of sociopolitical rant, or an Upworthy article with a particularly smug title — and then wait for the comments and likes to roll in. And then… nothing. Nothing at all. There's no discussion — except in rare sociopolitical cases where you can guarantee there'll be at least one person coming along to state the opposite opinion and start a tedious circular argument in which no-one ever agrees to disagree — and no real value to it all. For me, anyway.

I remember being resistant to Facebook when it first started getting big. A number of my real-life friends were encouraging me to jump aboard — remember, Facebook used to only allow you to add people you actually knew — but I thought it was going to be a passing Myspace-ish fad, and as such held off for a long time. I finally gave in while I was on holiday in the States visiting my brother, and Facebook proved to be a good means of sharing the photos I'd taken — photos that I was particularly keen to share because I'd started experimenting a bit more with composition and editing.

All was good for a while; Facebook's Groups and Events features served their purpose for a while, too, proving to be a practical means of organising collections of people and inviting people to events. But increasingly, over time, and as Facebook started to become more and more popular and more open, these features lost their value. When was the last time you responded to an Event invite? When was the last time you joined a Group?

I can trace the beginning of Facebook's downfall from my personal perspective to a fairly precise moment — it was back when they started making it into a "platform" instead of simply a site; back when Facebook games and "apps" first started appearing. I was initially in favour of this — the accompanying site redesign that came with the launch of the Facebook platform made the site look a whole lot better on big, high-resolution monitors, and it was and still is a potentially good idea to have the site act a bit like an operating system.

Unfortunately, things just declined from there. There started to be too much of everything. Too many games, too many people, too many ways of posting. People felt obliged to share each and every mundane little thing about their lives, egged on by other people and the mass media. Today, you can't watch the news without the newsreader demanding to "let us know what you think"; you can't watch a new TV show without a hashtag appearing in the corner.

These things aren't bad in isolation, of course. It's neat to be able to discuss a TV show in real time while it's on; it's cool that people have a medium of self-expression and communication that simply wasn't really possible and practical pre-broadband and smartphones. But everything just adds up to a frustrating experience, and it all but destroys the original point of Facebook — a cosy little private network where you could easily communicate with your real-life friends and share select photos and notes with them.

Times have changed. I haven't gone with them. And I'm fine with that. As such, the Monday after next, my Facebook account is going kaputt. I'm leaving a week's leeway in order to ensure that those people who do want to stay in touch have the opportunity to pick up my alternative contact details; those who don't bother? Well, it's probably time I cut those people out of my life, anyway.

If you're reading this, have (or indeed had, if you're reading this after the fact) me on Facebook and want to know alternative means of getting in touch with me if you don't already have them, let me know via a comment on this post — be sure to leave your email address in the appropriate field.

Tata, Facebook. It's been fun. It's not you, it's me.

Actually, it is you.

1370: What's Up, Red?

As predicted, I completed Tales of Xillia (like, Platinum completed) earlier, but prior to jumping back into Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory I decided to give Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller a try.

I've had my eye on Cognition ever since it was a modest Kickstarter campaign from a group previously best-known for a(n admittedly very good) King's Quest spinoff. It sounded interesting for a number of reasons: firstly, that it was a modern adventure game — the supposed "death" of the point-and-click genre was somewhat exaggerated — and secondly, that Jane Jensen (of King's Quest VI and Gabriel Knight fame) was acting as "story consultant". While this isn't quite the same as having her actually write it, it would, I thought, at least provide a greater-than-average chance of the game having a decent, well-written story.

I played through the first of the game's four episodes earlier, and was not disappointed. Given that most people I know who have played it seem to think that the first episode is the weakest, I'm very excited to see what follows.

Cognition follows the adventures of FBI agent Erica Reed, a feisty redhead haunted by her inability to save her brother from a serial killer three years prior to the events of the main plot. Erica's a little unusual, however, in that she has a strange supernatural ability that enables her to relive and even manifest memories from the past simply by touching things. Initially, all she can do is touch an object or body and witness a short snippet of what happened, but as the game proceeds, she learns a couple of new abilities under the tutelage of the Wise Old Mystic Woman Who Runs the Antique Shop.

It would have been easy for Cognition to play up its supernatural aspect and even rely on it too much to carry its mystery story, but Erica's abilities are used sparingly, subtly and effectively. It's rarely a "magic bullet" that allows her to do things a good forensics team wouldn't be able to do given enough time; it is, more often than not, used as a means of ushering the story along by providing clues.

It's much more complex than just flashbacks, though; in one of the best puzzles in the game, you're tasked with using your "regression" ability to reconstruct the memories of a key witness who can't remember some important information you need. By collecting information and using it to prompt the witness to remember things, you're able to manipulate the images of his memories to provide specific details — the colour of someone's dress, the time a photo was taken, what was written on a note — that ultimately lead you to the answers you seek. It's a clever system that works really well without resorting to mystical mumbo-jumbo — it's just something Erica can do and while it's clear that part of the plot is going to revolve around her struggling with these visions, for the most part she accepts it as just another tool in her arsenal.

Jensen's influence is apparent in the characters, all of whom are strongly defined. Erica herself initially appears to be somewhat "flat" personality-wise, but over time it becomes clear that she is, more often than not, being quite deadpan, and when she's around people she likes and trusts, she opens up and shows her more good-humoured side.

One of the things I'm particularly enamoured with is that I'm getting a slight "Dr. Naomi" vibe from Cognition. It's not quite the same, of course — Erica is an FBI field agent compared to Naomi's forensic investigator — but there are certain similarities. Most notably, on a number of occasions you're "quizzed" by characters on what you've learned from your investigations, with progression dependent on you giving the correct answers. The penalty for giving an incorrect answer isn't as harsh as in Trauma Team — there are relatively few moments in the game where you can die or "fail" — but it's nice to have a game check that you're paying attention in a suitable, plausible context.

I'm intrigued to try the subsequent episodes now. I have a feeling that four won't be enough!

1369: Closing Tales

Finally closing in on the end of my second playthrough of Tales of Xillia, and it's led to some interesting observations.

First up, Xillia's handling of New Game Plus is well-implemented, enjoyable and unusual. As you play, you unlock a number of "Titles" by completing various in-game achievements such as using certain abilities a particular number of times, completing various numbers of sidequests and passing various milestones in the story. Depending on the difficulty of (or endurance/patience required for) each of these titles, you're awarded various amounts of "Grade" points. These are useless until you've completed the game once, at which point you can spend them when you start a New Game Plus.

The things you can spend them on vary from carrying across various things like items, levels, money, shop levels and so on, or they can be spent on bonuses such as boosters to experience and money gain. By carefully spending your Grade, you can put together a "package" of bonuses that makes your subsequent playthroughs of the game work the way you want them to.

Personally, I'm playing through with 10x the normal amount of experience, double the normal amount of money gained and carrying over the "Devil's Arms" special weapons that I acquired through a sidequest in the first playthrough. This made the game quite easy, so I bumped up the difficulty to Hard, and it's now providing a suitably-paced challenge even though I've been well over the recommended levels for most of the game, and will cap out at 99 before taking on the final boss in my second playthrough.

What's also interesting about Xillia is its two-protagonist structure. For probably about 80% of the time, the game is the same regardless of whether you chose Jude or Milla at the outset of the game, but the points where it splits are interestingly distinct from one another. For those who are yet to play the game but who are planning to, I strongly recommend you play Jude's storyline first, if only for the fact that a certain event that occurs partway through the story is infinitely more dramatic from Jude's perspective than it is from Milla's. I'll spare you the details in the name of spoiler avoidance, however.

Playing both stories gives you an interesting amount of context and insight into the two characters, though. Jude's story gives you a good understanding of the overall events of the game, while Milla's focuses a little more on her as an individual character — thankfully, she's an interesting character in her own right who is more than worthy of a little specific exploration.

Reviews of Xillia criticised it somewhat for being "clichéd" or "typical JRPG" in its narrative, but this is a lazy descriptor that tends to be levelled at pretty much every JRPG out there — and I'm not even sure how true it is, anyway. Xillia's cast is unconventional and interesting, consisting as it does of a broad mix of ages from 12 to 62, male and female. The adventure they go on boils down to the usual "do a couple of laps of the world" but the setting is interesting and well-realised, and by the end of it you have a thorough understanding of the setting's culture, spiritual beliefs and society. It's a convincing game world that it's easy to immerse yourself in; it feels like far more than just a backdrop to cutscenes, though I would argue that the areas between the major towns are a bit bland at times.

By far the highlight of the game, though, is the sense of companionship and camaraderie between the party members, emphasised by the optional "skits" that pop up in response to your actions throughout the game. There's a real sense of these characters being real people, real friends and sometimes rivals, and they've been written with a wonderful sense of chemistry between them. It's one of the most enjoyable RPG casts I've had the pleasure of hanging out with for 90 hours or so, and I'll be sorry to leave them behind; but, of course, at least some of them will be back in the upcoming Tales of Xillia 2, so all is not lost.

Should polish off the rest of Xillia tomorrow, and then I can finally get back to Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, which I was really enjoying prior to me having to play Xillia for review.

1368: Confessions of a Failed Mayor

I played it for a good few weeks on its original release in the name of understanding what the hell everyone was so excited about, but I have to admit defeat and confess that I didn't really like Animal Crossing all that much.

I'm not saying it's bad, per se, more that I just don't really understand the appeal of it. For sure, it does what social gaming companies like to call "invest and express" gameplay far better than any of the shite churned out by Zynga ever will — and without continually begging the player for money, more to the point — but the trouble is that what Animal Crossing offered just wasn't enough to hold my attention.

There's lots to do in Animal Crossing, for sure, and the game drip-feeds you new things happening in your town every few real-time days to keep you coming back. MMO-style special events allow you to compete against your friends at catching bugs or whatever, and the game world expands a little over time — though not by much.

Trouble is, most of the stuff to do in Animal Crossing wasn't very interesting or enjoyable to me. By my last few days playing, I had settled into a tedious routine of picking fruit, going to the island, catching as many bugs as I could put in the box, selling them all, then paying off part of my loan. I'd then close the game because I'd found the experience so mind-numbing that I didn't really want to play any more. It was feeling more like a job than a game; I was feeling obliged to earn money just to give to Tom Nook, and it just wasn't enjoyable. By the time I'd done my daily "chores" I just wanted to turn the game off and do something else — usually go to sleep, since I inevitably put off said chores until last thing in the evening.

This is, of course, arguably the whole point of Animal Crossing. It's a reflection on modern life and the joyless things we do to get ourselves through the day with enough money to put food on the table. Of course, in Animal Crossing you can't actually starve to death or be turfed out of your house for being unable to keep up repayments on your mortgage, but the feeling of guilt is there — that feeling that you should be doing something more, that feeling that you should be pursuing your ambitions but instead you're trapped in a rut barely scraping by unless you make some sacrifices in the name of being more profitable. (In Animal Crossing's case, the sacrifices I was having to make included "playing games that I found more fun," which was ultimately not something I was willing to give up.)

Multiplayer, too, was confusing. While it was neat to be able to invite friends over, ultimately all I found myself doing when I visited a friend's town was admire how their trees and houses were in slightly different places to my own trees and houses, and nod knowingly if they had discovered how to make "paths" using designs printed on the floor. I never knew what I was supposed to do when I was in someone else's town; there was no structure to it, and no real incentive to actually play together beyond pinching each other's fruit and planting it, or occasionally doing that hilarious thing you can do with Pitfall Seeds. The only multiplayer stuff I found enjoyable were the structured "tours" on the island, and even those weren't all that interesting or competitive to me.

I certainly don't begrudge people their enjoyment of Animal Crossing. I just… don't get it. And I'm cool with that; time to move on.

Pokémon, on the other hand, that I'm starting to come around to. But that's a story for another day.

1367: Alpha

Eurogamer published the first of its "alpha and beta reviews" earlier on the subject of Peter Molyneux's possibly rubbish new God game Godus.

The posting of said review, coupled with the accompanying justification for it (including why it doesn't carry a score) immediately prompted the usual snark on Twitter. This made me gnash my teeth in frustration.

After the previous paragraph, it will probably not surprise you to learn that I'm actually in favour of Eurogamer doing what it's doing — and no, not just because I work for their sister site USgamer. No, I actually think this is an important thing, particularly given recent developments in the growing "early access" model of selling games — and the fact that some people apparently aren't aware of said developments.

You're probably already familiar with the basic "early access" programme — buy something, often for a cut-down price, and get immediate access to an early version of the game so you can 1) try it out before everyone else does and 2) provide some feedback that can actively help with development. It worked for Minecraft, it worked for Frozen Synapse and there's plenty of others out there it's worked for too.

Here's the strange new development, though: a number of free-to-play games have put themselves in Steam's Early Access catalogue. Nothing unusual, you might think, until you notice that they're actually charging for you to play this early version. In effect, you're paying to be part of a closed alpha/beta test for a game that won't cost any money to download when it's finished.

This is weird, no?

Okay, in most cases you're not just paying for access — in the case of Snow, you get some bonus items and in the case of Magicka: Wizard Wars' upper tiers, you get a full copy of Crusader Kings II for considerably less than its full retail price — but it still seems a little odd; I can't get away from the fact that you're "buying" a free-to-play game.

And this is why Eurogamer's idea of specifically reviewing commercially available alpha and beta versions is a sound one. It's something distinct from a hands-on preview — which is what most of the snark from earlier was comparing it to — because it discusses something that people can actually hand over money for right now, despite the fact it's not finished. A hands-on preview typically comes from something that not everyone has access to, be it a play with the game at a developer's office, a behind-closed-doors look at a trade show, or even a report on a demo from a consumer show such as Eurogamer Expo that not everyone would have had the opportunity to attend for whatever reasons; by contrast, an alpha/beta review lets people know whether or not it's worth spending their hard-earned money on something that may or may not cost a different amount of money when it's finished being developed — or indeed something that may be completely free when it's finished.

Being informed is important, particularly when it comes to making a decision about whether or not to spend money on something. I think we'll start to see more of this sort of thing in the near future, and it's going to be an important part of how we look at the development process of games in the coming years.