1336: Where's My Paid-For Version?

Disney released a sequel to its popular iOS game Where's My Water? recently. Where's My Water?, if you're unfamiliar, is supposedly one of the best iOS games out there, and even managed to pick up an Apple Design Award at WWDC in 2012. It's an extremely popular game that was well received by both press and public alike, and spawned a couple of spin-off games prior to the recently released official sequel.

The official sequel is, inevitably, free-to-play, unlike the 69p original. Said original did have in-app purchases, yes, but they were mostly actual additional content — new levels and so on — plus, until recently, the game was continuously supported with weekly challenges that kept the game relevant over time. (The removal of these weekly challenges in the most recent update has annoyed a bunch of players, incidentally, but surely they can't expect Disney to continually support a game from 2011 forever.)

Where's My Water 2 has, unsurprisingly, been torn a new one by App Store reviewers for being free-to-play — and with good reason. Like Plants vs. Zombies 2, there is not one single convincing reason why making it free-to-play is a good thing for anyone except Disney. At least you can play Plants vs. Zombies 2 for as long as you like, however; Where's My Water 2 adds the ultimate insult of incorporating an energy mechanic into the game, effectively blocking people from continuing to play every few levels unless they pay up.

I hate energy systems. They were a fucking pain in the arse when I had to review mobile and social games because they meant I could only play the game for a certain amount of time before having to leave it for several hours (because I sure as fuck wasn't paying), and they're a fucking pain in the arse if I just want to enjoy a mobile game these days. They're a slap in the face to the player, and effectively a sign that the developer/publisher of the game don't trust their player base to actually slip them some money if they're enjoying themselves. It represents the absolute worst of everything about free-to-play, and it needs to stop.

I'm glad that App Store reviewers are starting to speak up against things like energy systems and excessive in-app purchases, because it's getting out of control. I find myself actually wanting Where's My Water 2 to fail, because it will teach Disney a lesson. This may sound harsh — I haven't played Where's My Water 2, so for all I know it could be a great game, and I'm sure the dev team worked hard on it — but this continuing trend of games that hold their content hostage needs to stop. Rather than it being an incentive to download and try something for myself, I will now actively avoid games on the App Store that are "free". And since most of the games on the App Store are now "free", this means I'm simply avoiding most of the stuff on the App Store, which is probably doing a great disservice to the few people out there who are doing great work, and who are treating their players with respect.

You want to see how to do free-to-play right? Go play Card Hunter.

1335: Perrrrssssppp

Hello! We fixed our Internet, no thanks to BT; Andie called 'em up earlier and they wanted to spend several days "testing our line" before calling us back on Tuesday, presumably with an engineer visit to follow after that if necessary — which it probably would be, since it appeared to be our fibre modem that was borked. Thankfully, a past example of BT's incompetence meant that we did, in fact, actually have two fibre modems, so we tried the old one and it turns out it still works. Win.

Anyway, enough of that. What I want to talk about today is the PSP.

The PSP came out in 2005, some five years after the launch of the PS2 and a year before the PS3. It failed to make a significant impact in the West upon its original launch and has sometimes been considered one of the problem children of Sony's lineup. There's a degree of justification for that — its reliance on a proprietary physical media format (UMDs); a laudable but ultimately doomed attempt to jump into the "all-digital" future well before the world was ready for it (PSP Go); a distinct lack of prominent marketing — but in the intervening years since its original launch, the PSP has actually become one of my favourite systems.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about it is the fact that after eight years, it's still relevant and doesn't show any sign of going away any time soon — and it has the Vita to thank for that. Vita is the best way to play PSP games due to its lovely OLED screen and its second thumbstick — which, when playing PSP games, can be assigned to emulate buttons, allowing for a fairly convincing fudging of dual-stick control for games that previously only supported a single stick — and as such has, in many cases, given the surprisingly vast PSP library of games a whole new lease of life.

This isn't a case of "it's backward compatible so you can still play old games" either — people are legitimately still making brand new games for the PSP. Just recently we've had Sweet Fuse, for example, and JRPG fans were all aflutter recently when it was announced that Xseed and Carpe Fulgur would be bringing the second part of the magnificent Trails in the Sky to English speakers in the near future.

Access to the entire PSP digital library is, for me, a convincing enough reason in itself to own a Vita — as I noted above, PSP games look and play great on Vita, with the only slight issue being that you can't play physical versions of games due to Vita's lack of a UMD drive. It's also something you can point to any time people complain that Vita has no games — a complaint which is getting more and more inaccurate by the day, incidentally.

So although the PSP is very much one of Sony's more troublesome children, I have to give the company a huge amount of credit for creating a platform that has endured as long as it has. The PSP has some fantastic games, if you've never explored them for yourself, and you might just find yourself discovering some new favourites. And with the impending release of Vita TV — which I'll be very surprised if we don't see in the West — all those of you who don't like playing on handhelds for whatever reason will be able to play these great games on your TV, too. Which sounds pretty great to me.

Now I'm going to go sit in bed and play Sweet Fuse.

1334: Blackout

Our Internet has gone down. Proper down, too — there's not even any signal coming through the magic box on the wall into the modem, though the phone still works.

As such, I'm writing this on the WordPress app on my phone, which means I have no word counter and thus have to roughly judge how much I've written. (For those who haven't been following me for that long, my personal target for these daily posts is at least 500 words apiece, which I usually achieve — it's a bit harder to judge when writing on the small screen of my phone, though.)

It's quite fortunate that we have mobile devices with their own Internet connections these days, as it means we don't have to be completely cut off from the world when something like this happens. But I do always find it interesting to think back to a time pre-broadband when this happens — a time when you had to tell everyone in the house if you were going online, because doing so meant tying up the phone line. There was also no means of illicitly going online in the middle of the night, either, because of the horrendous screechy noises that modems made, and also due to the fact that all your midnight porn browsing would show up on the phone bill at the end of the month.

Sometimes I do think it would be nice to go back to those times, when there wasn't the pressure on everyone to share stupid photos of pointless shit, six-second videos of someone being a twat or misattributed quotes and unresearched scare stories.

Then I need to look something up and I remember the Internet is an important part of modern life, and that there ain't no going back now.

1333: Passé

Considering how exciting the iPhone was when it first launched, I'm surprised how unmoved I am by the prospect of the new ones. At present, my 4S is still working just fine, and for the first time in many years of phone upgrades, I'm feeling no particular desire to have the latest and greatest piece of technology in my pocket.

I think part of the reason is what I've already said: my 4S is working fine, still — though it remains to be seen whether iOS 7 will kill its performance — and thus I certainly don't need a new phone. The other part is the fact that smartphone upgrades each year have become so incremental that it's just not particularly exciting any more — the new iPhone looks much like the old iPhone, and will probably work much like the old iPhone, except perhaps a bit faster, depending on what it is you're doing.

One reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest iPhone, iPad, whatever would be if you're a big game player on these devices. And I've come to the conclusion recently that I'm just not.

This may surprise you, given the amount of waffling on about games that I do on this here blog, but it's true: I haven't played an iOS game for probably months now, and every time I look at the App Store, I have very little desire to even try a lot of the stuff that churns its way through the front page and into the abyss beyond, never to be seen again.

There's the odd exception; I still have something of a soft spot for the various excellent iOS versions of board and card games, but in most cases I'd rather play the real thing. For the most part, though, iOS gaming carries little to no interest for me; it's not for me any more. It is, instead, for children, or people who aren't particularly "game-literate", or people who don't mind increasingly obtrusive business models. There's relatively little with any "meat", though; nothing you can get stuck into for hours at a time, and in fact an awful lot of games are specifically designed to stop you from playing after a short while by causing you to run out of "energy" or "fuel", or for your car to require "repairing" — and, of course, you can instantly get back into the game if you'd just hand over your credit card details… No, thank you.

I'm probably painting a somewhat unfair picture of the iOS landscape there, since I know there's a lot of talented developers working on the platform — some out of necessity, some out of choice — but I'm sort of over the idea of mobile gaming, for now at least. There are too many exciting things going on on other platforms — including dedicated gaming handhelds — for me to muster up any enthusiasm for a platform prone to making really, really stupid collective decisions when it comes to the way games should be made.

Perhaps I'll revisit mobile gaming if it ever emerges from the free-to-play rut it's currently stuck in, but I'm not holding my breath for that to happen any time soon.

1332: Sweet Otome

I started playing the PSP game Sweet Fuse: At Your Side after finishing Corpse Party and it's been an interesting experience, particularly given my gaming background.

Sweet Fuse is what's known as an "otome game", you see — in stark contrast to "bishoujo games" that tend to have a male protagonist and a veritable harem of dateable female characters, otome games are the complete opposite: female protagonist, veritable harem of dateable male characters. (There are also yuri variations where the female protagonist can date female characters, much as there are yaoi titles for men, where a male protagonist can date male characters. But let's not get off the point: Sweet Fuse is an otome game in its purest sense.)

I was somewhat intrigued by the prospect of playing Sweet Fuse since although I'm no stranger to playing female characters in games, where romantic options exist I will still generally pair up my heroine with another woman in preference to anything else — my Dragon Age character made a beeline for Leliana, for example, while my LadyHawke in Dragon Age II went for Merrill, as I recall. Sweet Fuse, being an otome game, was going to make me (or rather, my female protagonist) date a male character and like it. And although I'm fairly open-minded about such things, I confess I did feel somewhat skeptical about whether or not I'd feel the same degree of emotional engagement seeing a relationship grow from the opposite way around to how it's usually depicted in this sort of game.

Why shouldn't I, though? In your average dating sim or visual novel, you are not playing as the protagonist; you're along for the ride and making occasional decisions on their behalf. You see stuff unfold and occasionally get frustrated at the protagonist not doing things exactly as you would have done them — but therein lies a sense of dramatic tension. In practice, the only thing that is different between a bishoujo game and an otome game is the fact that the voices are all female in one and all male in the other; and the same for the on-screen portraits of other characters.

That is a reasonably big difference, to be fair, but the fact is that in both cases, you're still watching two people who aren't you get together rather than pretending to get off with some virtual girl/dude from the first person. In that sense, it's not really any different to reading a novel with a love story, or watching a movie with love scenes. So why should playing as a protagonist of the opposite sex who becomes attracted to people who are the same sex as you make you feel weird?

Answer: it doesn't. In the admittedly limited time I've spent following the adventures of Saki Inafune and her six gentlemen friends as they attempt to defuse the bombs a terrorist who is also a pig secreted in her uncle Keiji Inafune's theme park — yes, that is indeed the creator of Mega Man — I've been surprised to find myself feeling much the same as I do when playing a bishoujo game.

Specifically, I've found myself playing "favourites" with the cast of dateable characters. I can't quite pin down if it's due to actually finding them attractive, or simply liking their characters, but I've naturally found myself gravitating towards one of the characters in my first playthrough, much like I would in a typical bishoujo game. (I tend to "go with my gut" for my first playthrough of this type of game, then go back and systematically pursue the remainder of the cast/endings one at a time in order to see everything the game and its stories have to offer.)

It helps that Sweet Fuse has a cast of male characters easily as diverse — possibly more so, even — than your average bishoujo game. There's the cold, stern detective; the young boy band idol; the aggressive, overly-compensating male escort (who reminds me of Kanji from Persona 4 to a distracting degree); the world-weary reporter; the shut-in; and the "mystical guy". The latter, a guy named Urabe, is the one I have my eye on for this first playthrough, but we'll see where it goes.

I'm only on the second "stage" of my first playthrough so far so there's probably quite a way to go yet. There's some interesting mechanics in the game that I'll talk about a bit more on another occasion. In the meantime, if you have the slightest interest in character-centric, story-focused games — and a PSP or Vita — then you could certainly do far worse than check out Sweet Fuse. Full review coming soon over on USgamer.

1331: Not That Irish Band

Been a while since I talked anime (relatively speaking, anyway) so, well, here we go.

I finished watching the second season of Haiyore! Nyaruko-san recently and enjoyed it a great deal — perhaps not quite as much as I liked the first season, but certainly enough to regard it very fondly — and have now moved on to a series I've seen a lot of people mention in the past, but have never checked out myself: Clannad.

I know very little about Clannad save for the fact it was originally a visual novel (that, to my knowledge, never received an official English release, nor a complete fan-translation — do please correct me if I'm wrong) and that it was a show with a certain degree of notoriety for being emotional and moving. As those of you who have been following me a while will know, I have a real soft spot for emotionally engaging media, and take a perverse pleasure from works that are genuinely "harrowing" in some way. I liked Corpse Party so much, for example, because I found it genuinely horrifying, disturbing and upsetting — you might think that would make it unappealing, but in my mind it was just a sign that it was achieving exactly what it set out to do. I think fondly of To The Moon because it legitimately made me properly full-on cry at the ending, and I feel the same way about Kana Little Sister. You get the idea.

So I was always going to check out Clannad sooner rather than later, despite knowing next to nothing about it. And after four episodes, I still know next to nothing about it, but I do know enough to talk a little about my first impressions and what I like about it.

Clannad initially appears to be one of the many slice-of-life high school comedy dramas that make up so much of the modern anime landscape. I'm a big fan of this style of thing, so I have no problem with this, but I'm also conscious of the fact that some people don't like it quite so much.

Where Clannad differs from your usual slice-of-life business is in its atmosphere. On the surface, it's the usual sort of high-energy, high-intensity chaos that this type of show is known for, but there's a very peculiar atmosphere overlaid on the top of it all. Specifically, despite the show's initial impression of being colourful, vibrant and full of energy, there's a very clear sense of melancholy about it, too; a feeling of loneliness.

This is partly personified by the character Nagisa, a lonely girl whom the protagonist comes to befriend. Exactly what Nagisa's deal is hasn't quite been revealed yet, but it's clear that she's a sickly girl — she missed a year of school and had to repeat, and in one early episode she just collapses in the rain without explanation. I have the distinct feeling that Things are going to Happen with Nagisa at some point in the series, though exactly what I don't know just yet — and I'm avoiding spoilers like the plague for the moment.

Nagisa isn't the only source of this loneliness, though; occasionally, the show cuts to a seemingly completely incongruous sequence where a young girl lives alone at the end of the world, and ends up building herself a mechanical friend out of junk. I have no idea of the relevance of all this, yet, whether it's real, dream, metaphor or all three, but it's certainly got my attention.

There's not a lot more I can really say about the show as yet, save for the following opinions: 1) The art and animation is gorgeous. 2) Its visual novel roots are obvious, what with the protagonist's recurring encounters with the female leads. 3) It has the most irritatingly catchy ending song ever. (Dango, dango, dango, dango, dango daikazoku!)

More to almost inevitably follow once I've watched a bit more.

1330: Closed Book

Andie (and some of you, I'm sure) will undoubtedly be delighted to hear that I finished Corpse Party: Book of Shadows last night, which means I will no longer be sitting in the dark before going to sleep with the sounds of Japanese schoolgirls screaming emanating from my headphones.

So what of Book of Shadows as a whole? Well, I enjoyed it — as much as it is possible to "enjoy" a Corpse Party game, anyway — and, as I noted the other day, I particularly appreciated its unconventional narrative structure. For those who didn't read that post the other day and are too lazy to click on that link, Book of Shadows essentially acts as a collection of "deleted scenes" and alternate endings to the original Corpse Party for the most part, with each chapter focusing on a different group of characters and either exploring "what if?" scenarios if things had gone differently in the original game, or acting as a means of expanding on and exploring the stories of a number of incidental characters who were either already dead by the time the first Corpse Party's story unfolded, or who showed up in the game's "Extra" chapters after you'd finished it.

One of the strengths of the original Corpse Party was how well-realised all of the characters were, and this continues in Book of Shadows, even in the chapters that explore characters other than the main cast of the first game. Each character is an interesting person to spend time with, and the fact the game is structured as more of a visual novel than the original game was means that there's a lot more in the way of narration from each chapter's protagonist than there was in the original. This lets you get inside the head of these characters to a much greater degree than previously, and this, coupled with the again fantastic Japanese voice acting, makes for an experience where you really get a strong sense of who these characters are, what they're like and how they're handling the horrific situation in which they find themselves. And, as I noted in my previous post, there's not usually a happy ending, since by the time the cast of the first Corpse Party arrive at Heavenly Host Elementary School, most of the people they come across are dead.

Once you've worked your way through all the main chapters of Book of Shadows, you unlock a hidden final chapter called Blood Drive. (If you've finished the game and haven't unlocked this, you either need save data from the original Corpse Party on your memory card or to see all of the Wrong Ends from all the previous chapters before it will unlock.)

Blood Drive is the "true" sequel to the original Corpse Party, following on directly from where the previous game left off. Unfortunately, the chapter Blood Drive is but a preview for the game Blood Drive, which is not yet even out in Japan, meaning that the game ends on one hell of a cliffhanger that won't be getting resolved in the immediate future. Still, the amount of "oh NO!" I felt as the credits rolled for the last time is testament to how engaging I found the game as a whole — I liked these characters, enjoyed spending time with them and felt bad for them when they suffered, and I really, really want to see how the story continues (or ends?) in Blood Drive.

Unfortunately, I'll be waiting a while yet. Still, it's not as if I'm short of other things to play right now — not least of which is Idea Factory's Sweet Fuse, which I've been looking forward to for a while.

Sachiko-san, onegaishimasu. Sachiko-san, onegaishimasu. Sachik– shit, how many times was I supposed to chant it again?

1329: Day After

It was the wedding of my good friend James to his good wife Charlotte yesterday — an event which, apparently, had been a very long time coming. (I've only known James for a relatively short period of time and only met Charlotte once or twice, so it felt like a perfectly reasonable amount of time to me, but judging by the jokes in the speeches, it was, as I say, apparently a long time coming.)

In stark contrast to my friends George and Mitu's wedding the other week, which was a vibrant, multicultural affair that must have cost a fucking fortune to put on, James and Charlotte's wedding was a much more traditional British affair: church service, followed by retiring to a stately home for afternoon tea (including an astonishing variety of finger sandwiches and cakes), barn-dancing, a selection of meats (beef, lamb and pork — with crackling) and, of course, various types of booze on tap.

I must confess to having had a little too much to drink yesterday. I don't drink a lot these days, you see — Andie doesn't drink, and I normally join her on that, since the last few times I've drunk I haven't really enjoyed it all that much, and I don't tend to "go out" to occasions that involve imbibing vast quantities of alcohol very often, either. As such, my tolerance is considerably less than it was when I was at university and drinking fairly heavily on a regular basis. This makes me a cheap date, of course, but also means that I have to be somewhat… careful, particularly when strong drinks are involved.

The reception began with some Pimm's, which was flowing pretty freely and getting regularly topped up by some ninja waiters and waitresses — the moment your glass was less than half-full, someone would appear as if from nowhere with a jug and refill it. Pimm's is delicious, too, of course, and so it's perfectly natural to just keep drinking it if it keeps coming.

Then there was champagne during the toasts and speeches. I'm not all that fond of champagne these days, to be honest — not that fond of wine in general, in fact. I had a bit of a "wine phase" at one point, but have since gone off it somewhat so I was rather underwhelmed by the champagne, even though I can probably safely assume — judging by the rest of the day, anyway — that it was probably quite expensive.

Later in the evening came the real killer, though — there were two different types of scrumpy, one of which just looked like orange squash, and the other of which was called "Bee Sting" and looked a bit like elderflower cordial. I tried some of the latter and it's some of the nicest scrumpy I've ever tasted — very sweet, not at all "alcoholic-tasting" — but by golly it had a kick and a half, and you didn't really notice until it was too late. In my case, it was looking up at the stars outside the venue and staggering unsteadily around that made me realise that yes, I was, in fact, a bit pissed. Not overly so — certainly not enough to make me want to take to the dance floor or do anything particularly outrageous — but enough to affect my balance somewhat. I felt all right, though.

That is, until about 2:30 in the morning, when I woke up to an unpleasant feeling and an accompanying mental image of an army advancing on my position. As the army got closer, I started to feel worse, and attempting to distract myself from the encroaching horde only made me pay more attention to it. Eventually, as the sound of marching boots was bearing down on me and mental pikemen started clashing with mental knights, I felt that there was only one real explanation for the battlefield in my head and stomach, and there was probably also only going to be one resolution to, it, too.

I was correct. Afterwards, however, I felt considerably better and have remained pleasantly hangover-free, too. Which is nice.

1328: Saturday Morning Ramblings

Look, I managed to blog in the morning rather than last thing in the evening! This is probably a mistake, as we're supposed to be heading out to a wedding in about half an hour and I still need to have a shower and get dressed, but I have coffee to drink and I shower quickly. Yes, I bloody well do. So there.

In lieu of anything particularly massively exciting happening in the intervening hours since last night and this morning (largely sleeping) I thought I'd mention a peculiar dream I had. It is one of those ones that was very vivid but didn't really make much sense, so as such I found it quite intriguing.

The main gist of it all was that I was using a computer of some description. For some reason, the casing for the computer (which seemed to be some sort of strange hybrid between a desktop and a laptop system) was open, and I could see into it. I dropped a piece of chocolate (I don't know) onto a vent on part of the casing that was still covered, and I could see it was seeping in, so I wanted to do something about it. I opened the case further and saw that there was, for some reason, a screwdriver that had been left inside the machine. Against all of the advice people give you when you're learning about computers, I reached inside to grab it, when…

ZZap!

I felt a slight electric shock, and the display on the screen went what can only be described as "wrong". If you've ever seen what a graphics card with a loose connection does, it was that. Wrong colouring, fuzzy bits, pixels where they shouldn't be. I hastily switched off the computer, removed the screwdriver, gave it a moment and then turned it back on again.

Instead of booting up normally, the computer switched to a second display that invited me to fix the problem with the main screen by drawing straight lines across photographs of walls. Except after I completed the first one, I somehow found myself actually drawing paint lines across a real wall with my big toe. I couldn't make it all the way across one of the walls, so I gave up, turned the computer off and back on again. It went back to having broken graphics, and then I saw a leaflet on the desk explaining the wall-painting thing — it was a piece of software you could install to randomly pop up the wall-painting game randomly whenever you turned your computer on. It had no discernible benefit whatsoever, and certainly couldn't fix a fried graphics card.

I have no idea what all that means. It's probably some sort of metaphor for some sort of dee-seated anxiety or neurosis. But I don't really have time to think about it now. Coffee. Shower. Wedding. Later!

1327: Friday Night Ramblings

Blergh. End of another week and my brain has just pretty much switched off altogether, so you'll forgive me if I indulge in little more than a stream of consciousness for the evening.

Today's been another week that feels like it's dragged a bit. Not sure why, really, because nothing especially out of the ordinary has happened — though that might, in itself, be the cause of the week dragging somewhat. Very little of note has happened, really, though I did my tax return earlier. Tax returns are shit. I am looking forward to not having to do them any more, though I will have to do one more next year to cover the last two months of payment from when I was self-employed. How irritating.

Anyway, you don't want to hear about that. What do you want to hear about? Oh, you can't respond. Never mind, then.

I was idly musing during a quiet moment earlier and had an interesting idea for what I might do for my not-NaNoWriMo month of creative writing this coming November. I'm actually quite pleased with the idea, but as with many of my ideas I find myself wondering if I'll be able to spin it out into a complete story. We'll see. I'm not going to share anything about it for now, but I might actually make a note of it. There are few things more frustrating for a creative type than having a really amazing idea (or at least an interesting idea) and then forgetting to make a note of it anywhere, so that by the time you actually have the time to do something about it, you've completely forgotten the cool thing you were going to do.

Fortunately, over the years I've discovered that I have a pretty good memory for fairly useless crap, including a host of half-finished stories — many of which I've been carrying around in my head since school. I really should actually make an effort and get some of them written; in fact, I have started writing some of them several times — one of them in particular — but often find myself getting a little hung up on the middle bit.

This may sound like a strange thing to get hung up on — surely the beginning and ending are more important? — but it's something that tends to bug me. Often I know where characters are going to start and what the finale is going to be; the difficulty is in determining how they are going to get from one place to the other, because those two places are often very different from one another. Obviously. (Or perhaps not, I don't know.)

Anyway, as you can probably tell, my mind is continually drifting at the moment so I think I'm going to call it a night for now. Andie and I are off to a wedding tomorrow so I almost certainly will be tired out by the evening, which means you can probably expect something similarly stimulating from tomorrow's post, unless I remember to write something in the morning which is, let's face it, based on previous experience, fairly unlikely. (I wish I would remember to write a bit earlier, though; it's nice to be able to wind down for the evening and not have to worry about writing this… though at the same time writing this forms a nice "end point" to the day where I can collect my thoughts before going to sleep.)

Anyway. Yeah. Whatever. Have a good weekend. Good night.