1132: Stop Calling it "Gen4"

The eighth generation of video games consoles is upon us — yes, despite the fact that EA desperately wants everyone to believe that it's the fourth generation it is, in fact, the eighth. Don't believe me? Allow me to prove it before proceeding further.

First generation: Magnavox Odyssey, Atari Tele-Games Pong, Coleco Telstar, Nintendo Color TV Game
Second generation: Magnavox Odyssey2, Intellivision, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, ColecoVision
Third generation: NES, Master System, Atari 7800
Fourth generation: TurboGrafx-16, Mega Drive, Super NES, Neo Geo
Fifth generation: 3DO, Jaguar, Sega Saturn, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo 64
Sixth Generation: Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Gamecube, Xbox
Seventh Generation: PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360
Eighth Generation: PlayStation 4, Wii U, something from Microsoft.

See? Proof. Thank you, Wikipedia.

Anyway. My point was not that people are getting the generation number wrong (I KNOW it's the "fourth generation of 3D consoles" but it's still stupid, so sod off) but that we are well and truly into the eighth generation now. One of the "big three" game console manufacturers has already released their new console (Nintendo with the Wii U) while a second has announced some skimpy details about what is to come (Sony with the PlayStation 4). We can doubtless expect something from Microsoft very soon.

It's going to be an interesting generation, I think, because the leaps hardware is taking forward with each subsequent generation are getting smaller. Graphics and performance still have room for improvement, sure, but there's actually been something of a backlash towards the striving for photorealism that has been the driving force behind most new game-related technological enhancements. Turns out people still like games that look like video games, which explains the popularity of heavily-pixelated titles like Fez as well as the heavily-stylized artwork of a lot of Japanese games. It also explains why people are so cynical about the "brownness" of Western games, though this is actually nothing new — I vividly recall my brother referring to the original Quake as "the brown game" before the turn of the century, so a drab colour palette is something we've been enduring for a while yet.

Because the leaps in hardware are getting smaller, though, that means each platform has to distinguish itself in different ways. Nintendo has fired the opening salvo with the use of its Gamepad for asymmetrical multiplayer in titles like Nintendo Land, and it works very well when used appropriately — we just need some more games that make creative use of this second screen. The lack of games isn't really cause for concern as yet, despite what professional industry doomsayers like Michael Pachter might say, because it also took developers a while to get their head around the two screens of Nintendo's last handheld the DS, and that ended up being the most popular handheld in the history of ever. There's no guarantee the Wii U will catch on in the same way, of course, but it's far too early to declare it a failed experiment as some have.

Besides, Nintendo are doing some other interesting things, too. The integration of the console's proprietary social network "MiiVerse" into a variety of different games is a really nice idea — complete a challenge in Nintendo Land, for example, and you can see drawings and messages from other people who are playing, and you can interact with these people. In games that are built for playing socially — think of the possibilities in something like Animal Crossing, for example — there's a lot of potential here, though from a personal perspective I really hope that it's not something that makes it into all games. Or if it does, I hope you can turn it off. Seeing silly messages after a go on Donkey Kong's Wild Ride or whatever the minigame in Nintendo Land is called? Fine. Seeing "lol i cant beet dis bossss lol xx" message while I'm playing an epic RPG? Not OK.

This "social" thing seems to be a big deal with the PlayStation 4 too, though I'm yet to review the information about the new console in any great detail. Apparently the controller has a "share" button right there, allowing players to do things like record brag clips and share them with their friends. Perhaps fun for someone 15 years my junior, but I personally don't really see the point for the most part — we'll see if it's used for anything interesting in the long run.

I'm a bit torn about the increased emphasis on "social" aspects of games consoles. On the one hand, it's quite fun to be able to see what other people are playing and talk to them about it. On the other hand, the vast majority of games that I enjoy are single-player experiences that I don't want interruptions from. I can't help feeling that my experience with, for example, the Halo series was tarnished somewhat by continually being frustrated by popup messages from friends inviting me to play multiplayer when all I wanted to do was see if the dreadful story was going anywhere. I could have just gone offline, of course, but it felt a bit "rude" to do that. Irrational and silly, I know. But it's the way I felt.

As for "sharing"? We're yet to find a really good balance of that. Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 allow you to share Achievements/Trophies to Facebook to brag about cool things you've accomplished, but neither are implemented particularly well. Part of the problem is the tendency for modern (younger) Internet denizens to "overshare" and make absolutely everything they do public, which diminishes the meaning of these "brags". This is a trend which is perpetuated by a large number of mobile and social games, many of which post crap all over social networks without you really wanting them to or, in worse cases, bribing you to do so. It's a means of marketing the game, yes, but more often than not — among my circle of friends anyway — it's a turn-off rather than something that makes people want to check out the game in question.

I don't have much interest in the promise of streaming games to PS4 via Gaikai because 1) my experiences to date with game streaming via OnLive haven't always been optimal, 2) I like to own my games and 3) I'd rather the quality of experience I get from my games not be reliant on my Internet connection, thank you very much. I hope Sony includes some form of backwards compatibility in the PS4 through a means other than Gaikai, but I won't be surprised if they don't. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have all made it clear that backwards compatibility is not a particular priority for them, and this is a trend I expect to see continue in the next generation. Consequently, I don't see myself getting rid of my 360 and my PS3 (or my PS2, for that matter) when the PS4 hits.

In short, I'm yet to be totally won over by the PS4, but yet to be dissuaded entirely either. A number of developers that I like have reportedly pledged their support to the new console, so that's something, but I'll have to wait and see if there's anything I want to play before I'm convinced to pick one up. Triple-A just doesn't cut it for me any more; I need something that appeals to my specific and peculiar tastes, and if it ain't there, it ain't getting my support.

1131: Lavatorial Subconscious

It is, as I have noted a number of times previously on these very pages, during the hours of the morning between waking up for the first time and actually waking up enough to be able to get out of bed that your subconscious works the hardest to show you the most fucked-up shit possible to get you wondering what the hell someone was injecting into you while you slept. These "morning dreams" are also the ones that tend to stick in your memory a lot more than the things your brain dreams up in the main part of your sleep cycle, too.

As you will recall if you've been following this blog for a while, I have recounted these peculiar and surreal experiences in the past. And I thought I'd do that today, largely to resist the temptation to write about Ar Tonelico yet again.

This morning's weird dream was once again somewhat lavatorial in nature, at least in part, so for that I apologise.

I forget the specific circumstances which brought me to the situation, but something had caused me to arrive at a building which looked somewhat like Kazuma's orphanage from the video game Yakuza 3. There were a few differences, though. For some reason, inside the wooden building there was a large room with windows all around its walls, except for one completely wooden wall, which had a toilet on it.

I had arrived at the building to see someone I knew — I think they were a teacher, but I don't recall seeing their face clearly. Their class were with them, but ignored me until I stepped into the bizarre "toilet room" and started having a piss, at which point some kid pointed out the fact that I was clearly having a piss, and that everyone should watch closely. Naturally, once I had started, I couldn't stop — you know how it is when you really need a piss and you release that valve — but I was also very conscious of everyone standing around outside this room, with me on display.

Somehow, I managed to find a way of standing where I knew that no-one would be able to see my knob or the seemingly never-ending stream of piss erupting from me, but the crowd began to become more rowdy. At first it was shouting and laughing, but then it changed to singing — a few scattered voices at first, which eventually became as one, singing a driving, dramatic song that inexplicably developed an orchestral backing after a while despite the fact there was clearly not an orchestra present — at least not one which I could see. As the music built in intensity, volume and tempo, I became aware that I was losing control of my, uh, "flow" and it was going everywhere, and that everyone could see this.

Suddenly the music stopped, and I was done. I flushed, and went to wash my hands at the sink that I'm sure wasn't there beforehand. The sink was full of paint and the draining board next to it looked rusty and dirty, but clean water came out of the taps, at least. I washed up and left the room, trying to get far away from my "audience", who thankfully didn't follow me. I'm not sure how long I ran or to where, but eventually I found myself in a room with Emma Watson, who grabbed me and kissed me rather forcefully.

And then I woke up, disappointingly. Well thank you, subconscious, for keeping me asleep during the bizarre, slightly traumatic part and waking me up just as things were getting interesting.

1130: Pour One Out for 1up.com

The "digital age" brings with it many benefits — most of which relate somehow to the concept of "convenience" — but an unfortunate side-effect of it is that things aren't as permanent as they once were. Sites grow, change and relaunch, and occasionally die altogether.

Today it emerged that Ziff Davis, former owners of 1up.com until it was sold to IGN, and now the company that owns IGN (and consequently 1up.com again… yes, it's confusing) would be shuttering three sites, including 1up.com.

This is immensely sad news for a number of reasons. Today I will primarily be outlining my own personal feelings about that site; I'm sure a number of people reading this will have their own opinions and thoughts about the site and the changes it's gone through over the years, so feel free to share them in the comments.

I first became aware of 1up.com while my brother was working at Ziff Davis on Electronic Gaming Monthly and the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine (I think I've got that chronology right). He played an important role in shaping the site and its content, and it became a regular hangout for me not just because of me supporting my bro, but also because I really liked what it was doing. It was my first real contact with what was to become "social networking", and I found myself really enjoying making use of all the site features — the ability to blog, the forums, the ability for users to create clubs and communities as part of the main site. My 1up blog was one of the first places where I wrote about games regularly, primarily for myself but also in an attempt to keep myself in "practice" should I ever find myself in a situation where I'd be able to do so professionally.

My main reason for thinking so fondly of 1up.com is the Squadron of Shame. I've told this story before, but it doesn't hurt to tell it again.

The Squadron of Shame was a group of people who came together as the result of a fairly throwaway feature on one of 1up's podcasts. The podcast participants had got talking about their "Pile of Shame" — all the games they owned but had never got around to finishing (or even playing in some cases) — and discussion had turned to Tim Schafer's cult classic Psychonauts. The intention was for the Pile of Shame to become a regular feature on the podcast as the participants played through the games together and gave their thoughts on more obscure titles that people might have missed out on.

It was a short-lived feature, and quickly abandoned on the show — but a bunch of people on the 1up forums really liked the idea and thus decided to come together and finish the job they'd started. We checked out Psychonauts and had a blast playing through it together. Then we started talking about other games that people might have missed — System Shock 2, Psi Ops, Odin Sphere and all manner of other titles. For each one, we made a thread on the forums for discussion, played through it together and got to know each other a bit better in the process. It was a fantastic experience, and I made a lot of very good friends in the process — friends who I still "talk" to on a daily basis even today.

Trouble was on the horizon, though. The once-sprawling 1up.com forums, which used to be split into a wide variety of distinct sections, were merged into simple "Games" and "Not Games" categories. The Squadron of Shame's threads used to call the "1up Radio" forum home — this forum primarily related to the site's podcasts and the features therein, and was generally a home of more mature, respectful discussion than other parts of the forums as a whole. Suddenly, though, our thoughtful threads — which often included long posts with members writing mini-essays on their experiences with the games we were playing — were lumped in with all the "wot iz ur favorit wepon in halo" threads from the hoi polloi of the site. Consequently, on at least one occasion we found ourselves being rather unpleasantly trolled by users who, for some inexplicable reason, took great umbrage to our writing of posts that included more than five words, knew how to use paragraphs and punctuated properly, and discussion wasn't quite so easy any more.

Around that time, the "club" pages on 1up got an overhaul; there used to be a "communal blog" where individual members could post in a linear fashion, but this was replaced by a dedicated forum just for that club. We made use of that for a while, but further trouble was on the horizon with the event which became known as the Great Upheaval, when a huge proportion of the talent from the site was laid off as part of the transition to new owners UGO. The site wasn't the same after that, so a lot of people drifted away from the community, mostly to places such as Twitter.

It was around this time that we started producing the Squadron of Shame SquadCast, an irregularly-occurring podcast that continues the Squad's original mission in earnest. To this day, we still have a small but dedicated following keen to tune in and hear our thoughtful, mature (and lengthy!) discussions on obscure games and gaming-related topics. It's something I'm really happy to be a part of, and something that still feels me with great pride any time I hear someone from outside my core friendship group talking about — people like Garnett Lee, one of the original 1up podcasters who gave us the idea in the first place.

Today, the Squad primarily lives on Google+, which seems to be a good home for our discussions. You can check out and join our community here. Prior to that, a healthy amount of discussion also took place on the "Squawkbox", a WordPress site we set up to emulate the old-school "club journal" format from the original 1up.com club, but which is now primarily used as a site linking to the SquadCast's archives. There have been plans on and off to make a "proper" Squad site for many years now (including a nice-looking mockup), but they're yet to come to fruition. One day…?

Anyway, I'm drifting off the point somewhat. The main thing I wanted to say is that none of this would have happened without 1up.com. Without 1up.com, I never would have met this disparate group of people from all over the world and made a group of friends with whom I really feel that I can be "myself". Without 1up.com, I wouldn't have as solid a "support network" as I feel I do today. Without 1up.com, there's every chance that I'd be a lot more lonely than I am today. I feel privileged and honoured to have met everyone who came together as a result of the Squad, and am glad that we're still attracting new members a few at a time every so often, many of whom are fast becoming just as good friends as those who I have known since those early days of the group. I now have a solid group of international friends that I trust and depend on, and without 1up.com I simply wouldn't have that. (Of course, there's every chance that I would have made a similar group of friends on a different website, but, you know.)

So it's for this reason I'm sorry to see 1up.com go. The loss of the articles and writing talent on the site is sad too, of course, but for me it will always be the community side of things that captured my heart and imagination, and showed me that my passion for video games was not something to be embarrassed or ashamed about, but instead celebrated and explored.

So thanks for the memories, 1up. You'll be sorely missed.

1129: Disc of Memories

For the longest time, I've kept a specific CD-R hanging around. Somehow it's survived all the different house moves I've gone through since leaving home and is still intact. I'm more impressed that I haven't lost it or accidentally thrown it out than by the fact it still works, but I guess that's pretty cool, too. (Edit from 2026: I have now lost it. I found the case but there was nothing in it. I am sad.)

The raggedy inlay lists a few bits and pieces on the front, but gives relatively little indication to its contents. "PETE'S STUFF" it proudly announces in green felt-tip pen. "\PIERRE\ (GENERAL), \KNP\ (KLIK GAMES), \FFCOLLECTION\ (FINAL FANT.)" it elaborates, also in green felt-tip pen. The last entry is simply a collection of emulators and ROM files for all the Final Fantasy games up until VI, including a translated Japanese ROM for the NES original version of III. But it's the other two that are more interesting.

The "Pierre" folder is from my first PC, which was a mighty Pentium 133 that could run Doom and Quake like nobody's business. It had both a DVD-ROM drive and a CD rewriter, and I also eventually installed a Sound Blaster Audigy into it, which took up another drive bay with a ridiculous front-panel audio interface that looked pretty cool. Said folder contained a wide variety of almost-organised bits and pieces, consisting almost entirely of MIDI files downloaded from CompuServe and the Internet at large — mostly music from Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger, with a brief break into Wild Arms, Xenogears and Zelda territory — as well as saved walkthroughs from an early incarnation of GameFAQs. This was the age of dial-up networking, you see, and thus it wasn't possible to simply "quickly" hop onto GameFAQs to check a walkthrough; it was much more efficient to save it. (If you're wondering, my saved guides included Alundra, Bust-a-Groove, Rival Schools, Wild Arms and Xenogears.)

Also in this folder is an early form of a tabletop roleplaying game system called "The Returners," based on Final Fantasy, along with original text files for some of my earliest pieces of freelance writing work — a two-part guide to Final Fantasy VII for PC Zone, a 3,000 word Discworld II guide, a Lands of Lore II guide that was an absolute nightmare to put together, and a walkthrough to Turok 2 using the Official Nintendo Magazine's curious internal system of markup to include special characters and other layout bits and pieces.

Pleasingly, one thing that I have found among all this crap is a folder containing a bunch of half-finished creative writing works from a long time ago. There's a sci-fi epic I started working on that was loosely based on Sierra's excellent spacefaring strategy game Alien Legacy (kudos if you remember that, it was awesome) along with a piece I wrote for my A-Level English Language coursework. I liked it so much when I wrote it that I extended it somewhat. It's also probably my earliest example of writing creative prose in "stream of consciousness" style — we'd not long covered Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea in English Lit class, and the curiously disjointed method of writing had proven to be quite appealing to me, so I experimented with it. It paid off with a good mark, as I recall, though I'm not sure it holds up quite so well to further inspection some fifteen years later. Still, it's nice to have it.

(Oh, also, there's a subfolder in the "Pierre" folder just labelled "ANNA KOURNIKOVA IS FIT", which I think is fairly self-explanatory.)

The "KNP" folder is an interesting one, as it contains a selection of half-finished (yes, I have a habit of half-finishing things) games made with Clickteam's excellent software Klik and Play, later superseded by The Games Factory and Multimedia Fusion. This folder contains the earliest ever incarnation of the story "Dreamwalker", which I still fully intend to get out of my head and into some form of creative medium before I die. The original version of Dreamwalker was more an experiment to see if it was possible to make a Zelda-style action-adventure using the rather limited Klik and Play tools, and indeed it was, with a bit of creativity. Once I'd started making it, though, I found myself getting quite attached to the characters involved, even if I'd borrowed the basic concept (if not the setting and characters) from Alundra on PS1, which I'd played around the same time. I also actually composed some music for Dreamwalker, which I still have the MIDI files for, and which are in dire need of mixing properly. Perhaps that can be a project sometime — the tunes themselves are actually pretty solid, in my humble opinion.

The KNP folder also includes the original version of Pie Eater's Destiny, one of the only four complete video games that I have ever made. (The other three are London Taxi Chase, London Taxi Chase II and… a remake of Pie Eater's Destiny) Pie Eater's Destiny holds a fond place in my heart because it was a collaborative project between me and my two best buds in the late stages of school, and it's a running joke among us that one day we'll make a sequel. We've started several times, but somehow, well over ten years later, we're yet to get anywhere. Pleasingly, the data files for Pie Eater's Destiny also include the original .WAV file recordings of us doing voice acting for the game, including the outtakes which we saved. There are also .WAV files of us experimenting with pitch shifting and other special effects, including several alarmingly-convincing "Jabba the Hutt doing things he was never supposed to be depicted doing" files. JABBAWNK.WAV, indeed.

Anyway, I was happy to rediscover some of the useless crap on this disc when I opened it up on a whim today. It's missing a few things that I hoped I'd find on there, but I'm glad I found the other stuff. Perhaps when I can be bothered I might share some of it here. Those voice acting outtakes are crying out to be edited into some sort of YouTube clip.

1128: Suddenly Silenced

While I don't particularly relish the circumstances under which I left Twitter recently — which I won't go into now as it's all still a bit "raw" and upsetting, to be honest — it's sort of been nice to not have the omniscient little blue bird hovering over my shoulder all the time.

Twitter was a big part of my life for a very long time. According to my Twitter archive — which I downloaded before I closed my account — I first posted a tweet on May 8 of 2008, but didn't really do anything with it until the end of June of that year. It's fair to say that I — like many other people — didn't really "get" what it was all about to begin with, largely because it was so ill-defined and hadn't pervaded popular culture quite as much as it has today. "It's like Facebook statuses," I'd say to people when trying to explain it, "but without all the other crap."

It sort of is like Facebook statuses without all the other crap — those early tweets of mine very much followed the "Pete is… [doing something]" format — but it quickly became a lot more than that. It became one of my primary means of communication with my international friends.

As many of you reading this may know, I have a lot of friends, but disappointingly few of them live in the same place as me. I have at least rectified that a little by moving back to Southampton to be near my university and board game buddies, but many of my other friends are still scattered the world over, all the way from America to Japan and lots of places in between. It's sort of awesome to have such a global group of friends, though it naturally means that I've never actually met an awful lot of them and possibly never will in some cases. It also meant that I needed a good, simple, reliable means of staying in touch with them; Facebook was all right, but as it gradually became more and more cluttered with crap, fewer and fewer people were using it as a serious means of communication. Today, it's a bloated mess that it's very difficult to be "heard" on, but it still has a place.

Twitter, meanwhile, was simple, pure and to the point. It was like exchanging text messages with friends, only on a global scale. I made a lot of new friends through Twitter and got to know some a bit better. I got through some tough times, too; the immediacy of the service meant that it was a good outlet for me to talk about the way I was feeling when I was going through my "difficult period" a few years back, and I appreciated the support I got from my friends — and sometimes strangers — during that dark period.

Twitter is addictive, though. It becomes a compulsion. Install it on your phone and you'll find yourself idly opening the app to see if anyone has said anything interesting in the last two minutes, even if you just stepped away from your computer where you were staring at a Twitter client. You'll find yourself wanting to step into (or start) conversations at silly hours in the morning, and get relatively little sleep as a result. It'll worm its way into your life, in short, and start to take over.

Not that that's necessarily a bad thing — as I've already outlined above, it proved to be a good means of communication for me, and a good means of meeting new people. It allowed me to put myself out there a lot more than I feel comfortable doing in the "real world", and in many ways helped me to build confidence. And let's also not forget that I met Andie through Twitter, so that's pretty cool.

The recent things that happened to me, though, brought the service's public nature into sharp focus. Sure you can be free to be open and honest about your feelings, your likes and dislikes, but that also means that you can be open to attack, too, without provocation. And once you're in the sights of one of these obnoxious groups, it's very difficult to get yourself out of them. Twitter the company aren't much help, either — after several support messages keeping them apprised of everything that was going on, the only thing I've heard from them is a request for a clarification on something. They take great pains in their terms and conditions to say that they don't mediate personal disputes — though I feel there's a strong case for what happened to me to be considered a criminal offence, and as such I reported it to the police and intend to keep hounding Twitter until they do something about it.

In some ways, I feel sickened and angry that I was forced off a service that has been a prominent and important part of my life for a long time now. In other ways, it's actually quite relieving to know that I don't need to read that feed of inanities any longer, or get frustrated at people trying to have in-depth discussions on tricky issues in 140 characters when what they should really do is pen a 3,000-word blog post. I'm not ruling out a return in the future when the scumbags who drove me away give up and do something else, but for the moment I can certainly live without it — and there's no way I'm going back to a service which I don't feel safe using.

1127: The Stench of Manure

There are a few games that our gaming group plays on a regular rotation. One of them is Days of Wonder's Ticket to Ride, which is a fantastically accessible game that pretty much anyone can pick up and enjoy. The other is Z-Man Games' Agricola, which is still relatively easy to understand, but which I find immensely difficult. (And, judging by a few comments I received on Facebook earlier, I'm not alone in that!)

Agricola, for the uninitiated, is a game based on the thrilling world of 16th century German farming. As experienced board gamers will know, however, fairly tedious-sounding themes like this are actually ideal for adaptation into a board game. You have a variety of different tasks to perform and inevitably not quite enough time in which to perform them. You have the opportunity for expansion and building. And you need to think ahead in order to enjoy success.

My trouble with Agricola has always been that I get overwhelmed by all the possible courses of action and end up picking just one, following it to the exclusion of all else. While this is a valid strategy if no-one else is doing the same thing as you, the second someone takes an action that you were planning to do, your whole plan falls apart, since in the cutthroat world of 16th century German farming, only one person may plough a field at any one time.

Such was the difficulty I've had with Agricola in the past that I had convinced myself that I don't like it very much, and found myself generally resisting requests to play it in our group. (I like to play something I can win every so often!) However, in an attempt to better myself and also allow my friends to play the games they want to play a bit more often, I picked up my own copy of Agricola recently in the hopes of getting in a bit of practice and improving my own skills.

The nice thing about Agricola is that it's eminently suitable for solo play. Sure, it takes a bit of time to set up and it has a tendency to sprawl across the entire table, but as a solitaire game it's relatively quick and straightforward to play, and the nature of its mechanics mean that there aren't too many difficult-to-remember rules adaptations for solo players. Consequently, it's an experience fairly similar to playing with others, only without people getting in your way — and as such, it's a good means of trying out a few different strategies.

I've played a couple of solitaire games so far, and my score improved between the two of them. I'm not sure if I was actually playing better or if I simply had better "luck" the second time around, but I did feel a bit more confident and comfortable with my choice of actions in the second game. Rather than feeling like I was "wasting" certain turns, as I was in my first solo game, I felt like each turn achieved something. In an attempt to study my own way of playing, I even made a note of how each turn unfolded — what I did and how it affected my score. I'm not sure how helpful those notes will be, though I will say that writing things down as I played actually helped me to think a bit harder about what I was doing. It's not always easy to organise complex, abstract mechanics in your head — let alone plan several moves ahead and take into account the fact that anyone might scupper your plans at any minute.

The net result of me playing a few solo games of Agricola, though — plus introducing Andie to it earlier (she liked it! Yay!) — is that I feel a bit better about the prospect of playing it again in the future. I have no doubt my score will still be demolished by my companions, who have all played it much more than I have and thus know the good strategies and cards to look out for, but at least I'll feel like I have a bit more of a fighting chance.

We'll see, I guess. To the farm!

1126: Ah! Tonelico

I've been continuing to play through Ar Tonelico, and it's certainly pushing all my buttons in all the right ways. I've stopped noticing the "subpar" (compared to its contemporaries) graphics and accepted them as quaint and charming, and have found myself able to concentrate on the story and characters, both of which are great stuff.

The highlight of the game by a long shot is still the Dive system, which I believe I mentioned in a previous post on the subject. Just in case I didn't, though (I'm tired and can't be bothered to go back and check, all right?) let me explain once again.

One of the key plot concepts in the Ar Tonelico universe is the relationship between humans and the Reyvateil, the latter of whom are the only ones able to make use of "Song Magic". A Reyvateil and her partner, known as an Oracle, share a close personal bond — so close, in fact, that it's possible for her Oracle to "Dive" into her mind and explore the worlds inside her imagination, known as her Cosmosphere.

Note that I said "worlds," not "world" — each Reyvateil has multiple similar but not identical worlds inside her head, each of which reflect a particular facet of her personality, something she has had to deal with (or repress) and struggles she is yet to overcome. As the Oracle delves deeper into her mind, the worlds become increasingly strange and twisted, and the problems that the Reyvateil must overcome more deep-seated and difficult to resolve.

Inside the Cosmosphere, the player character Lyner comes across numerous different incarnations of the Reyvateil he's diving into. On one level, she might be a shrine maiden who wants to protect people, but who is anxious about being able to do so. On another, she might be a schoolgirl with no faith in her abilities, who believes she'll never be able to live up to her peers. On another, she might be sexually aggressive and dominant. Sometimes incarnations from other levels put in an appearance, too, and their interactions reflect the Reyvateil's inner struggles between clashing emotions and ideals.

Alongside the incarnations of the Reyvateil, Lyner also encounters characters whom he (and the Reyvateil) know in the real world. But there's often something a bit "off" about these characters, something not quite right. It transpires that these projections of familiar characters reflect how the Reyvateil sees them, not necessarily how they actually are. This provides yet another interesting perspective on the Reyvateil's personality — not only do we see her internal struggles, but also her own attempts to deal with how she thinks other people see her.

I love this kind of thing. It's one of the reasons I adore Persona 3 and particularly 4 so much. Games are a brilliant medium through which the inner workings of a character's mind can be explored, and games that do just that are among my most fondly-remembered titles — stretching right back to The Adventures of Alundra on PS1 and its "nightmare dungeons". Ar Tonelico is certainly scratching that itch very nicely — and it helps massively that the characters involved are entertaining and fun to be around. Plus it seems there's a very obvious "split" just after the halfway point, so after I've finished it once I can go back and focus on the other Reyvateil to see what her subconscious has to say about herself. Looking forward to it.

I haven't touched on the series' endearing use of innuendo, which is seemingly the main thing it's known for, but I'll save that discussion for another day — perhaps when I've played the apparently increasingly-shameless sequels!

(Comics back tomorrow.)

1125: Low Ebb

After the events of the last few days, which I won't go into right now, I feel compelled to write a few words about bullying in general. I've already written a considerable number of words on the time I suffered workplace bullying towards the end of my time working at an Apple Store (check it out here) but I wanted to talk a little more about the subject in general.

The word "bullying" is an incredibly loaded one that brings to mind images of schoolkids taking the piss out of each other for the most ridiculous reasons. When I was a young child at primary school, it was my ears. They stuck out and looked quite large, so naturally I was picked on and ridiculed for that — not just occasionally, but pretty much daily. The experience left me with mental scars that are yet to heal, and which manifest themselves in my cripplingly low sense of self-esteem.

But bullying isn't just something that children suffer from. Adults can suffer bullying, too, in a variety of forms. It could be workplace bullying such as that described in my previous post, where those in a position of "power" or "authority" use their influence to negative, unfair ends; it could be one group of people taking an irrational dislike to another group and expressing that dislike through verbal or physical abuse; it could be organised campaigns of hatred using the Internet.

The latter is an option that didn't exist when I was a youngster. The Internet wasn't a widespread thing until I was well into my teenage years, and social media certainly was nowhere to be seen. As such, any instances of bullying tended to confine themselves to the "real world" where they could normally be dealt with relatively easily, since there was usually an identifiable perpetrator to pin the blame on. It wasn't always easy for the victim to come forward and report the perpetrator, of course, for fear of reprisals — that "knowing them in real life" thing worked both ways — but if they could muster up the courage to do so, then the situation could often be dealt with.

With online bullying, though, it's a much more difficult proposition. There isn't always a visible perpetrator, because they often choose to hide behind a veil of anonymity. Some particularly arrogant online bullies do so under their real name because they've also taken steps to ensure that they will never get caught, and herein lies part of the problem: the very nature of online crime makes it extremely difficult to police, meaning that more often than not the groups responsible for making some people feel really, really shitty go completely unpunished and thus receive the message loud and clear that what they are doing is Okay.

The worst thing about bullying in all its forms is the degree of self-doubt it can instill in its victim. Am I worthless? they'll think. Do I deserve this? Are those things they're saying actually true? Do people really think that about me? Is that how other people see me? These are, of course, all things that I've found myself thinking at various points in my life.

It's useless and irrational to think that way, of course, but sadly, often the sort of people who are affected the worst by the actions of bullies are those who, like me, turn irrational when they have to deal with a difficult situation like this. Because it's not easy to stay rational in the face of totally irrational, unprovoked hatred, either, for in many cases these instances of bullying are born from little more than boredom rather than feeling particularly strongly about the person or group in question. It becomes a sport for the bullies, more about the chase and the observation of the victim's behaviour than specifically trying to hurt a person. This is particularly apparent when it comes to online bullying, where it's very easy to conveniently forget that the target of your vitriol is actually a real person with real feelings, and that any hurtful things you send off into the ether after you click that "Send" button may have a very real impact on that person's emotional, mental and, in some cases, physical wellbeing.

There's no easy solution, either. And that's sad. What's even more sad is the fact that we seem to have got to a stage as a society where we just accept that this sort of thing happens, and we don't do anything about it. I don't have any suggestions or solutions, either, mind you, but surely by the year 2013 you'd think humanity might have gotten over irrational hatred by now.

But apparently not.

(Sorry for the lack of comic today. I'm emotionally exhausted and there's no real way I can make all this shit funny.)

1124: Bovril

(with apologies to Spaced.)

I actually intended to write this post yesterday, but instead became embroiled in the unpleasantness I describe in yesterday's post. If you would like to read yesterday's post, which you have probably noticed is password-protected now, please contact me via some other means than this website so I know who you are and I will happily furnish you with it assuming I am happy that I actually know who you are.

Regardless, here is a blog post about Bovril.

For those who are unaware — which is probably most of you who aren't from the United Kingdom or the Antipodean lands — Bovril is a thick, sticky, black-brown substance that looks like you could probably use it to tar roads with. It comes in small, distinctively-shaped jars with red lids, and is sometimes grouped in the same category as Marmite, which comes in the same shape of jar but with a yellow lid. The key difference between Marmite and Bovril — which are fairly similar in many ways — is that Marmite is made of yeast extract, while Bovril is something to do with beef. (I've never asked exactly what to do with beef it is, as I figured given how little it seems to taste of beef, I'm probably better off not knowing.)

There is another key difference between Marmite and Bovril, however, and that is the fact that you can make Bovril into a drink. Yes indeed; plop a dollop of the black goop into a cup, add boiling water, stir until it turns as black as a moonless midnight sky and then enjoy a… weirdly salty, not particularly pleasant hot beverage that certainly doesn't really taste of beef. (Besides, as I memorably once commented to my former housemate Claire — so memorably that she actually made a note of it, as I recall — "any drink that is beef is just wrong".)

I actually don't know whether or not it's possible to make Marmite into a drink. I guess technically there's no reason why it shouldn't work, but if any drink that is beef is just wrong then surely any drink that is yeast is just even wronger. Except for various alcoholic beverages. Although those tend not to be made of nothing but yeast. Anyway, fuck Marmite. (Not literally.)

You know what is a far better use of Bovril than turning it into a weirdly salty, not particularly pleasant hot beverage that certainly doesn't really taste of beef? Spreading it lavishly on toast. That way you end up with toast that would stick to a wall if you threw it at a wall (but then you wouldn't be able to eat it), and which tastes of something weirdly salty, peculiarly spicy and not at all beefy. It's worth noting at this juncture that amateurs should take care when spreading Bovril on toast because the application of too much Bovril to a single slice of toast when inadequately prepared will lead to that curious feeling where you feel like you don't have a roof on your mouth any more. Once you eat it, obviously. Just spreading too much Bovril onto a piece of toast doesn't magically strip off the roof of your mouth. That'd be weird.

You know what is an even better use of Bovril than turning it into a weirdly salty, not particularly pleasant hot beverage that certainly doesn't taste of beef, or spreading it lavishly on toast and ending up with something that tastes weirdly salty, peculiarly spicy and not at all beefy that would stick to a wall if you threw it at a wall (but then you wouldn't be able to eat it)? Spreading it lavishly on toast and then dipping said black goo-encrusted toast into a piping hot bowl of Heinz cream of tomato soup. (It has to be Heinz, otherwise the magic doesn't work.) What you end up with is a piece of toast that tastes weirdly salty, peculiarly spicy and not at all beefy covered in tomato soup, which makes everything involved in that equation taste approximately 4,000% better through reasons only known to the Food Wizards.

So anyway. That's Bovril. It's weird but sort of awesome, but like Marmite, you will either, as they say, love it or hate it. Try the tomato soup thing before you declare your feelings one way or another, however.

1123: Assholes with Nothing Better to Do

I don't know if any of you reading this have ever been properly trolled by someone who really knows what they're doing, but I have. Twice.

The first was during my GamePro days, and I believe I've mentioned it on this blog before. Basically there was this dude who frequented the GamePro Facebook page and was a bit of a nutcase, to put it mildly. He'd often come along and comment on updates, talking about how debit cards were somehow evil and various other ravings. He seemed mostly harmless, however, so he was tolerated, left alone and largely ignored by other members of the community.

That is, until I posted a news story about Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab's interactive JRPG-style exploration of queer issues, A Closed World. Suddenly, nutjob went on the offensive, posting raving comment after raving comment and directly attacking me, accusing me of being a paedophile and all manner of other slurs. Apparently he was a big fat homophobe as well as a crazy person, it seems, so he got summarily blocked from the GamePro Facebook page, reported to Facebook and also blocked from the main GamePro site despite his best efforts to continue harassing me. This rapid response (largely from me, I might add, without engaging with him) meant that he went away pretty quickly, thankfully, but it was still a somewhat unpleasant experience to go through, even though I knew that none of the things he was saying were true.

Something very similar happened today. Yesterday, I received a bizarre tweet from a complete stranger that wasn't a reply to anything which I had said, but which simply called me a "sick, sick man." I took a brief look at this person's profile and they appeared to be… not the sort of person you'd really want to associate yourselves with, let's say, so I immediately blocked them and thought nothing more of it.

Today I received an email from Rob, the owner of Games Are Evil, informing me that he'd received a voicemail from someone — someone who neither he or I knew, I might add. Apparently they'd made some rather unpleasant allegations about me and had supposedly contacted the authorities. Much like the previous time I was attacked without provocation, my heart almost stopped, even though I knew there was absolutely no truth to these allegations whatsoever. It took me quite some time to calm myself down.

Calm myself down I did, though, and I did a little digging, as I was suspicious about a few things. So firstly I went back and looked at the Twitter account that had sent me the strange message last night. The location on it matched the location the caller was supposedly from, and the first name on the account also matched the Twitter account. Things were starting to fall into place.

I checked the WHOIS records for Games Are Evil and discovered that, as I suspected, Rob's phone number and contact details were recorded alongside the site's other information, which explained how this person was able to contact him by phone when the only information on the site itself is a selection of email addresses. The only question left was why someone would do all this.

And the best answer I can come up with is "because they had nothing better to do." My attacker is, according to his Twitter profile, a member of an anti-blogger group with a spectacularly offensive name whom I'd never heard of prior to today, and it seems they have something of a habit of attacking people in this manner for reasons best known unto themselves. It seems that today, I was just unlucky enough to be the one in the firing line. I'm now not all that worried about this ridiculous turn of events, because frankly I don't really see the "authorities" — if they were contacted at all, which I seriously doubt — trusting the word of someone who voluntarily chooses to associate themselves with a group called… well, this. (Wikipedia link, offensive name. You have been warned.)

Still, it sucks that there are people out there malicious enough to pull shit like this against complete strangers. May they all fall off a cliff and land arse-first on a sharp spike. Cunts.

So yeah. Happy Valentine's Day and all that.