1356: Exhaust Port

Wow. More tired than I thought I was. Today hasn't exactly been strenuous, consisting largely of visiting Andie's sis and significant other — plus, more importantly, their new kitten — but I am absolutely wiped out. I think a combination of a weirdly stressful week (the details of which I'll spare you), the lack of a weekend thanks to EGX and overall not feeling all that great since last night have all conspired to make me feel pretty shitty today.

Still, tomorrow should be equally stress-free, beginning with what is supposedly the best breakfast in Wiltshire, and proceeding to what I can only assume (and hope?) will be a lazy afternoon probably consisting of some combination of Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy XIV, Tales of Xillia, Sweet Fuse and/or Velocity.

This is a short one I know but I'm on my phone and consequently can't judge word counts. Also I am exhausted. So there.

Signing off. See you on Sunday.

1355: Impending Lie-In

Good golly gosh, I'm knackered.

This is at least partly due to the fact that I didn't really have a weekend last weekend. (Actually, there's no "really" about it; I flat-out didn't have a weekend last weekend, since although Eurogamer Expo was enjoyable, I still had to work through it, and also had to overcome my not-inconsiderable social anxiety in order to actually, you know, talk to developers and stuff. I think I did fairly admirably, all things considered.)

Anyway. Consequently, I am looking forward to having a weekend this weekend, and the first thing I shall be doing with said weekend is having a lie-in. I've been waking up relatively late each morning this week and desperately wanting a lie-in — in some cases even dropping off until about half an hour before I need to start work (which, fortunately, as you probably know, involves walking from my bed to my study, and I don't even have to put on pants if I don't want to) — and not being able to have it. But tomorrow morning, I can have a lie-in, and it will be glorious.

Except going on recent past experience, the opportunity to actually have a lie-in is usually a signal for my body to wake up promptly at 7am and be unable to get back to sleep. This is infuriating when it happens, because any hope of catching up on sleep is then completely ruined. Of course, it's often quite nice to deliberately wake up early and have considerably more hours available in the day than usual, but come on. It's the weekend. I want to lie in bed and not move for more hours than I'm normally able to, then get up, have a bacon sandwich (or similarly greasy equivalent) and do nothing of any value for the remainder of the day.

Ah well. We'll see how it goes tomorrow morning. Perhaps I'll play some Sweet Fuse until the early hours and see if that will lull me into a deep sleep filled with bishounen.

(Speaking of Sweet Fuse, I'm still enjoying it a great deal. What a silly game. I'm glad it exists. If you'd have told me ten years ago that one day I'd be playing a game in which I took on the role of Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune's niece as she wandered around a theme park that had been taken over by a pig-like terrorist, I would have probably laughed in your face. I have since learned, of course, that anything goes in gaming, and when you take into account the possibilities of less interactive genres such as visual novels, you really can tackle pretty much any subject matter as a "game". But that, as ever, is a discussion for another day, I feel; time to head bedwards for me — Saki Inafune and her harem of gentlemen friends is awaiting me.)

1354: GTA is More Fun with Friends

I'm not talking about Grand Theft Auto Online, either, which is, so far as I can make out, still a predictably shambolic mess after throwing its doors open to the public earlier this week. No, I'm talking about that peculiar joy you get from playing a game made for… well, play… with someone else.

To put this in some sort of context, allow me to explain. I played through Grand Theft Auto V and enjoyed it. I liked the characters, I found the story enjoyable and the gameplay entertaining enough to keep going after the credits rolled. Can't ask for more, really.

Except this evening my good friend Sam came over and we played together. Sam and I used to play Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City together when we were at university, usually drunk. (We'd play Grand Theft Auto drunk, not we were usually drunk at university. Though we were drunk quite a lot at university.) Since going our separate ways and entering what careers advisors insist on calling "the world of work", though, the only games we've really played together have been things specifically designed for group play with structured rules — things like board games and the like. I thought it would be interesting to see if GTAV would recapture the magic of the previous games, so I invited Sam over this evening primarily to play it, and if it didn't, well, there's a shelf full of board games to play instead.

Fortunately, GTAV very much has the old magic. In several hours of play, we didn't do a single structured piece of content in the game — no missions, no races, no Flight School, nothing. Instead, we'd set largely improvised challenges and then attempt to complete them. First up, we wanted to get to the Los Santos airport and successfully steal a plane — something we'd regularly try to do in GTAIII — without getting shot to pieces by the police who were summoned the moment you step on the runway. Eventually we managed that, so we turned our attention to the enormous Mount Chiliad, the peak that dominates the north end of the map. First we tried to fly a plane over the top of it and parachute onto the summit. Having successfully accomplished that (once — never again after that) we discovered a pair of dirt bikes near the top, and a conveniently-placed jump ramp nearby.

After an unsuccessful attempt to make the jump that ended in the unfortunate demise of poor Trevor, we tried to get back on top of the mountain — firstly by parachuting again, then by driving and finally by walking. All of these attempts ended in failure — my parachuting concluded prematurely when I failed to realise that leaping out of a plane at a couple of hundred knots would cause you to go flying at a couple of hundred knots, too, and ended up plastering myself all over the site of the mountain; driving up the mountain was stymied by the fact that most vehicles can't drive up near-vertical rock walls (though driving the front of a big rig past some very surprised hikers was enormously entertaining while it lasted); walking up the mountain concluded after several "trip-and-fall" incidents that saw Trevor rolling part of the way down the mountain, with the last fall being a big one that brought his life once again to a premature end.

I haven't laughed so much at a game for ages. GTAV still has the magic.

1353: Criminology

I watched my first ever episode of CSI today. Or CSI: Miami, to be exact, since the original CSI isn't on Netflix as far as I can make out.

I enjoyed it! It reminds me how much I do enjoy police procedurals and crime thrillers — yes, even the cheesy, stupid, unrealistic ones — when I watch them, yet it's pretty rare I'll actually seek them out. It's one of those things that I forget I like, if that makes sense, and I'll just occasionally stumble across the, and remember all over again.

As with many forms of non-interactive media, I find myself thinking that there should be more procedural games. Trauma Team on Wii was a great example — particularly from the crime scene investigation angle — plus the Ace Attorney series has always provided a neat combination of private detective-style investigation and courtroom drama. I'd like to see more of that kind of thing.

There's the Police Quest series, of course, which I'm still yet to try, though those have the dubious distinction of being Sierra adventures (i.e. already brutally difficult, and not necessarily in a fair way) that are notoriously finicky about you actually following police procedure to the letter. There's nothing wrong with this, of course — how many other "police sims" are there out there? — but it doesn't necessarily push exactly the same buttons as a police procedural drama on TV.

I'm surprised that over the years we haven't seen more games branching out into popular TV genres. We've done sci-fi and fantasy to death, obviously, because both of those are eminently compatible with the most common means through which we interact with a game world: attacking it. We've also seen crime drama through the eyes of the criminals a lot thanks to titles like Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row. But what we haven't seen a lot of is a game about being a doctor, or a policeman, or a lawyer, or a journalist. I remember having a conversation with fellow Squadron of Shame members a while back about how cool it would be to play a war-themed game in which you weren't one of the American soldiers on the scene, but instead an embedded war reporter tasked with covering the conflict from the front lines. Plenty of scope for interesting storytelling there, plus gameplay that doesn't involve shooting people with a different skin colour to your character.

We could even expand that, though. Sci-fi and fantasy games don't have to be about killing, either; how about a sci-fi "future police" game? Or a "future medicine" game? (I guess that's Trauma Center, but still.) Or a game where you play a member of the Watch in a typical fantasy city? Plenty of scope for interesting things, and yet — at least in the mainstream — we still rely on the same old stuff.

Ah well. The times are a-changin', and we are starting to get more and more interesting thematic content in our games that isn't just about stabbing and shooting. I just wish there was a bit more.

1352: Critical Urgency

I can't remember if I've talked about Velocity here before, so here I am talking about Velocity.

Velocity, in case you've never come across it before, is a game from the Brighton-based indie developer FuturLab. It began its life as a PlayStation Minis title for PS3 and PSP, then was subsequently ported to Vita with numerous enhancements as Velocity Ultra. So positive was the reception to the first game, it seems, that the team at FuturLab is currently in the process of putting together a sequel — a sequel that's looking rather fab, if the early version I had the good fortune to play at the recent <a href="http://www.usgamer.net/articles/egx-turning-up-the-velocity" target="_blank">Eurogamer Expo</a> is anything to go by.

But I want to talk about the original today, or rather Velocity Ultra. I reviewed Velocity Ultra a while back for USgamer and enjoyed it a lot, but I must confess that in the process of reviewing it, I didn't make it through every little bit of content it had to offer — largely because doing so would have taken significantly longer than I had time for, and also because I'd already seen a lot of it in Velocity's previous incarnation as a PlayStation Minis title.

I've been going back to clean up what I missed in the game recently, though, and I'm reminded of what a fantastic game it is. Beginning as what appears to be a relatively straightforward top-down shooter, the game gradually evolves, changes and grows in complexity as it progresses; firstly, you get the ability to teleport over short distances (including through walls); then you get the ability to drop telepods at strategic points in the level in order to teleport over long distances and take alternative routes. By the time you get through all 50 of the game's main levels, you're practically playing a different game.

Things are mixed up along the way, too. Sometimes you'll have levels that are filled with enemies; other times they'll be complex maps with multiple paths. Other times still you'll have a very tight time limit and have to get through as quickly as possible. Different types of level require different strategies.

Where the truly addictive gameplay in Velocity comes in, though, is medal-chasing. Upon completion of a level, you're ranked according to how many survivors you rescued, how many points you scored and how quickly you successfully completed the level. Attain the highest accolade in all of these categories without dying once and you'll earn a "perfect" medal, and it's chasing these "perfects" that is so ridiculously addictive. The reason for this is that the difficulty of achieving the goals is pitched just perfectly; it's always just tantalisingly out of reach rather than seemingly impossible. Pretty much anyone with a good handle on the mechanics will be able to attain at least a few Perfects along the way, though it does get significantly more difficult as the levels become more complex.

And then there are the secret levels. Secret levels! I can't remember the last modern game I played that had secret levels, and yet here they are in Velocity, unlocked through getting your tiny Quarp Jet into places you wouldn't normally expect it to go, usually as a result of checking the map and spotting something out of place. There are a further 20 secret levels on top of the 50 main levels, and not all of them use the standard game mechanics. There's a 10-level Thrust-inspired minigame, for example; there's a twist on FuturLab's earlier game Coconut Dodge; there's even a version of Snake. Successfully contend with all those and you have the incredibly challenging but rewarding and addictive "Red Zone" and "Blue Zone" levels in which time limits are tight, the pathways tighter and the slightest clipping of a wall will destroy you.

I was delighted that the upcoming Velocity 2X felt so much like the first Velocity when I played it at Eurogamer Expo — and particularly pleased that the brand new sections where you get out of your ship and run around for some platforming sections make use of pretty much the same mechanics, with the only real difference being that you're now affected by gravity. I'm really looking forward to playing the sequel, but in the meantime, I've got a whole bunch of Perfect medals to try and attain, so if you'll excuse me I'm going to challenge a few more before I go to sleep.

1351: After Story

I was surprised to discover that Manga Video had a booth at the Eurogamer Expo over the weekend, so I took a moment to rifle through their collection between seeing various bits and pieces.

As good fortune would have it, it would seem that Clannad After Story has recently been released in "complete series" box set format, so I snapped up a copy — £25 is eminently reasonable for six DVDs, particularly when compared to some other anime DVDs, and particularly particularly when compared to the exorbitant prices Forbidden Planet charges for anime DVDs.

Ever since I got to the end of Clannad — which wasn't that long ago — I've wanted to see After Story, which picks up directly where the original leaves off. It's the anime adaptation of the second half of the original visual novel, and continues the story beyond the end of school over the course of the following seven years.

This alone makes it noteworthy in anime, since most "slice of life" or school-based drama shows restrict themselves to just the school years, so it's unusual to see the characters actually grow older and move on from school and into their lives proper. Indeed, this is usually the case with visual novels, too, which often tend to have high school-age protagonists and heroines, and stick that way. There are exceptions, of course — Kana Little Sister and Kira Kira immediately spring to mind — but it's something that, in my experience anyway, happens more often than not.

I've only watched a single episode of After Story so far so I can't comment with any great authority on what the new series is like, but I'm looking forward to exploring it. The original Clannad series didn't end how I was expecting it to end — no spoilers — but in retrospect, I think this was because I wasn't aware that After Story was not just a direct follow-up, but the continuation and conclusion of the complete narrative.

I can guarantee now that it's going to make me cry at least once, though. I found the Fuko arc in the first Clannad series incredibly emotional, and if After Story is going to go where I think it's going to go, it's going to be about three bajillion times worse. That's okay, though; the reason I'm even watching Clannad in the first place is because I know it's sad. This may sound like a strange reason to watch something, but there's something oddly enjoyable (if that's even the right word) about getting emotionally engaged with something to such a degree. People still watch sad movies and listen to sad music, after all — and, despite the fact I know absolutely nothing about Breaking Bad (and don't want to right now, thanks; I'm going to watch it when everyone else shuts up about it, which should hopefully be soon now that it's finished) I understand that it's not exactly the most cheerful thing on the tellybox.

Further reports as I continue watching, I'm sure.

1350: Open-World Ridiculosity

As you'll know if you've been reading recently, I finished Grand Theft Auto V the other day, and have approximately 75% on the completion-o-meter. Once I got back from Eurogamer Expo today, I thought I'd fire it up and specifically piss around in the open world rather than doing anything structured. (Okay, I cleaned up a couple of Strangers and Freaks missions, but aside from that… yeah.)

I'm pleased to confirm that Grand Theft Auto V's open-world freeform silliness is possibly the best it's ever been. In about an hour or two of play, I tripped over and rolled all the way down a mountain without dying; had a police shootout at a truck stop (where I did die, sadly); successfully landed on the roof of a car park at the airport by using a billboard as a jump ramp; successfully leapt onto a passing train (and then fell off while attempting to climb down and hijack it); inadvertently attracted the attention of the police and decided to run up the steepest face of a mountain, surviving quite a while and single-handedly taking down six helicopters before finally tripping over, rolling all the way down the mountain and failing to survive this time; cycled all the way from one end of the map to the other; and a few other things besides.

I'm happy that the idea of "I wonder if I can do that?" has survived intact from Grand Theft Auto III; many was the night back in university when drunken incarnations of me and my friend Sam would get home after a cheap night at Poundstretcher or Lennon's and cause chaos in Liberty City until the small hours. It's a concept that I haven't felt nearly as strongly in the more recent Grand Theft Auto titles, though I don't doubt it's there.

And it's a different feeling to Saints Row's open-world mayhem. Saints Row is very much a map with Things to Do scattered across it, clearly signposted for your reference. Grand Theft Auto, meanwhile — particularly in V's case — provides you with a map filled with cool and interesting stuff, but doesn't signpost a significant amount of it. It's not all "activities", either, in GTA's case; in some instances, it's just breathtaking views, or impressively detailed locales, or the location of a hidden vehicle.

Both approaches very much have a place in modern gaming culture, but it should be evident that Saints Row and Grand Theft Auto are not the same game, and have not been for a very long time. In the case of Saints Row IV in particular, the two have diverged sufficiently to pretty much be different genres; Saints Row IV is now an open-world superhero game, while Grand Theft Auto V is a more realistic (albeit skewed) look at modern society. Saints Row is self-consciously kooky, silly and funny; Grand Theft Auto's humour can be just as obvious, but it's not pushed to the forefront of the experience in the same way as it is in Saints Row; it's just part of the experience.

This isn't to say that either approach is "wrong," of course; I've played both games and really enjoyed them both. The difference is that after I finished Saints Row IV's story I didn't really feel the need to continue exploring the open world — over a thousand collectible items is just too many, yo — whereas this evening I was actually quite excited and interested to be able to zip around GTA V's world without the pressure of story missions or other external influences getting in the way.

And then, of course, there's all this, but that's something to explore if and when I ever reach 100% completion…

1349: Zeds

I am tiiiiiiired. So tired, in fact, that I very nearly forgot to write something today. That would have been disastrous. (I'm sure no-one would have minded if I "caught up" tomorrow, but that always felt like cheating somehow, and after 1,349 days it's a matter of pride.)

Here I am at 1am, then, wondering what to write about before I fall asleep. I could talk about the Eurogamer Expo again, I suppose, since that's been occupying literally all of my time since Thursday.

It's the last day of the Expo tomorrow. I'm probably not going to hang around until the end because I want to get home, but I am going to catch a couple of last developer sessions and spend some time with my friend Mitu's game Redshirt. It'd also be nice to actually have a chance to fiddle around with a PS4 and/or an Xbox One, but the queues for those have been so ridiculous it hasn't really been practical up until now. I had to lurk around the Nintendo booth before the show opened to be able to play Bayonetta 2, so I shudder to think what hoops I'll have to jump through to see the things that people are really excited about. (Aside: Bayonetta 2 has been drawing an impressive queue of people each day — thought obviously not on the scale of something like Call of Duty or Titanfall — which was nice to see.)

What else? Today I met Mike Bithell, and he's a thoroughly pleasant person — a preview-cum-interview type thing I did with him will be up on USgamer on Monday. I also had the good fortune to meet both Damien McFerran and Johnny Cullen, both of whom are people I have, until now, only known through Twitter. It's nice to put names to faces, and Damien in particular had some very kind things to say about my work that pretty much made my day, so thanks for that, sir, if you're reading.

I've eschewed the evening social gatherings while I'm here, much as I did when I went to Gamescom. The workload has been less insane here than it was at Gamescom, but I've still been working into the evening most nights. I'm also not all that great socialising with people I don't know all that well who do know each other, either — I know there's no way to fix that aside from actually jumping in and getting involved myself, but frankly I haven't quite felt up to it! I do like the Eurogamer lot on the few occasions I've met them, though, so perhaps some other time I'll have the opportunity to hang out with them socially.

I've remained relatively swag-free from this visit, with my freebie acquisitions being limited to a T-shirt that's too small for me from the The Evil Within presentation the other day, a poster from the indie game Cloudbuilt that I was awarded for being only the second person to beat a particular level on display, and some flyers from FuturLab for their upcoming PS4 and Vita game Velocity 2X which, in all honesty, has been one of my favourite things I've seen at the show. I'm thinking of framing both the poster and one of the flyers, since both of them have super-distinctive artwork that would look great on display. We'll see.

Anyway. I'm yawning my head off and it's getting hard to concentrate so I'm going to leave that there. Tomorrow's entry will be from back in my own home rather than this not-all-that-bad-really-but-I-can't-believe-how-expensive-the-tariff-displayed-in-reception-is hotel room.

1348: A Part of It

I've been on and off the show floor at Eurogamer Expo over the last couple of days, with more to come tomorrow and Sunday.

One thing that struck me today is an immense sense of pride to be part of such a vibrant, enthusiastic and exciting industry. Speaking with developers like FuturLab about Velocity 2X (day one purchase for me) and Witch Beam Games about Assault Android Cactus as well as seeing Sony's legendary indie guru Shahid Ahmad speak on stage just gave me the overwhelming sensation that the business has never been in a healthier place — particularly from a cultural perspective.

Today, I played a variety of different games, each of which was a markedly different experience. I played a peculiar abstract game in which you guide a cube through a floating tunnel-like structure; a platform game in which you can independently control your shadow and use other shadows as platforms; a third-person parkour platformer inspired by Sonic and Mega Man; a first-person psychological horror adventure with low-poly textureless graphics combined with gorgeous lighting; the newest Final Fantasy; and a game that purports to be a spiritual successor to Flashback while successfully combining both top-down shooting and side-on platforming.

At no point did I feel the sense of fatigue or cynicism people sometimes direct at the industry; the show floor was a vibrant place filled with creativity and experience for all ages and ability levels. Even from the press office where I was doing the majority of my writing, I could look one direction and see Surgeon Simulator 2013, look the other way and see Microsoft's representatives jumping, whooping, hollering and cheering on stage as they showed off new Kinect games, look another way still and see people staring intently at a multiplayer digital card game.

It's easy to get lulled into a sense of thinking that "all new things are the same; everyone's risk-averse", but it's not until you see a significant proportion of the industry spread out in front of you like that that you realise that no, that's not the case at all; the risk-averse triple-A sector is just one of many parts that make up the whole — and, judging from the number of people who attended Shahid Ahmad's talk on indie games on Sony platforms, one that's quickly being caught up to by other sectors.

So well done, games biz; you're all right. Now it's just a case of successfully countering the cynics with reports of fascinating, intriguing, creative projects that people from all over the world are doing. You can start by taking a peek at my coverage from the Expo over at USgamer.

1347: Om Nom Nom Nom (Plus)

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+ is a magnificent game, though I'm still at a loss as to whether or not Namco are taking the piss with that title or if they genuinely thought Pac-Man needed that many suffixes.

To be fair, though, Pac-Man CE DX+, as I shall refer to it from hereon, isn't actually all that unreasonable a title if you analyse it. It's a variation of Pac-Man (hence Pac-Man) that evolved into a version designed specifically for competitive play (hence Championship Edition) that subsequently evolved further into a considerably expanded version (hence DX, short for Deluxe) which was then expanded even further with some additional content for the new PC version (hence Plus).

If you haven't played Pac-Man CE DX+ yet, you'll be pleased to know that it's now available for PC via Steam as well as consoles, so you can play it pretty much regardless of whatever system you favour.

If you're a fan of the original Pac-Man, be warned, though; Pac-Man CE DX+ is a noticeably different game, though its ancestry is obvious.

While the original Pac-Man required you to repeatedly clear the same screen of dots over and over again while contending with the unwanted attentions of four ghosts, Pac-Man CE DX+ is a much faster-paced game. The maze is divided into two halves, each of which, when cleared, causes a piece of fruit to appear in the other half. Eating said fruit causes the empty maze to regenerate with a new layout, and thus the process repeats. In the main modes, you're against the clock, attempting to score as many points as possible in either five or ten minutes, so it's in your interest to find the quickest routes possible.

The twist on the formula that DX added was the ridiculous number of ghosts that can be involved. Rather than the four ghosts of the original Pac-Man, each maze half in Pac-Man CE DX+ has a number of sleeping ghosts who are disturbed if Pac-Man passes by them, at which point they form an increasingly long chain and chase him, following the same route he does. High scores are dependent on eating a power pill and then gobbling up a massive chain of ghosts, so as well as finding the best route through the dots, it's actually in your interests to attract as many ghosts in your wake as possible, too. There's very much an "optimum route" for each of the courses in the game, though human error means that, unless you've practiced enough to be literally perfect every time, there'll be slight variations in each run you make — usually costing you a few points or precious seconds in the process.

It's a really interesting game that maintains the basic mechanics of the original Pac-Man while simultaneously turning it into a kind of game that's hard to define. Is it a score attack game? Yes. Is it a puzzle game? Yes. Is it a racing game? Yes, kind of.

It's one of the most peculiar games I've ever played, and revisiting it thanks to the new PC version reminds me that it's also one of my favourite games of all time, and I highly recommend you give it a try if you've never had the pleasure. Enjoy, and I make absolutely no apologies if you end up addicted.