Category: Personal and Opinion

1102: The Golden Age of Magazines

Page_1I really love re-reading old games and tech magazines, particularly those from the '80s and '90s. There's a rather wonderful sense of innocence about the monsters that video games and Internet culture would become, and an even more pleasant feeling of knowing that an article was written to be a lot more "permanent" than the somewhat disposable writing for websites we have today. I'm not saying that writing is inherently worse today, of course — on the whole I think it's a lot better for the most part — but that the sheer volume of it these days makes it more and more difficult to build up a portfolio of specific pieces you're really proud of rather than stuff that's just been churned out for the daily grind.

Taking video games magazines specifically, I particularly enjoy the completely different approach to games criticism seen in the mid- to late '90s. Because reviews came out on a magazine's street date rather than under the carefully-timed embargo of a PR department, you could generally feel pretty secure that the writers in question had spent a healthy proportion of the preceding month with the game, and that you knew they would have explored it inside out in most cases rather than rushing through. Consequently, we got a lot of reviews that were more like multi-page features, filled with big images, annotated screenshots, quotes from the developer and all manner of other things. Sometimes you even got reviews in a completely different format — PC Zone magazine, which I was loyal to initially because I liked it and later because my brother became the big boss man over there (also I wrote a number of articles for it), liked to experiment with short-form quick reviews for budget or crap games, and also held regular "Supertests", in which they took a variety of different games in the same genre (often flight sims of various descriptions) and compared them directly to each other to determine which one was "best".

You know what the absolute best thing was, though? No comments sections. I must confess that when reading a 1998 copy of PC Zone on the toilet the other day, I instinctively found myself glancing at the end of a somewhat contentious article (written by none other than Charlie Brooker, who used to be a regular for Zone, believe it or not) to see the ranty comments. I had already flipped the pages to the end of the piece before I realised I was holding a magazine in my hands, and that its content was static and non-interactive. It was probably for the best; Brooker's article was a candid exploration of "why girls don't like games" which was very, very amusing, very, very irreverent and would not have got within a mile of today's Misogyny Police before being torn to shreds — despite the fact that it had a wealth of valid points and was clearly intended to take the piss out of anyone who believed that games were solely "boys' toys". But I digress. The point was, there was no opportunity to respond immediately to an article and belch forth the first opinionated effluvia that came into your head; if you wanted to respond, you had to damn well write a letter (or, later — much later — an email) and hope it got published in the following issue. PC Zone engaged in what is surely one of the first acts of trolling their comments sections on a number of occasions, tasking Brooker with responding to the most offensive, rude and generally disrespectful messages on a special "Sick Notes" page. Hilarity inevitably ensued, usually at the expense of the person who had written in.

I kind of feel like there was a lot more character about the old magazines in general. I read PC Zone primarily because I enjoyed the writers' work and knew their tastes and senses of humour; I knew that David McCandless was obsessed with Doom and Quake (particularly multiplayer); I knew that Chris Anderson loved X-Com; I knew that you could count on Brooker for an irreverent, hilarious article — his Fade to Black preview written entirely as a short story about "Monsieur Conrad 'Art" in Franglais was a particularly memorable example.

Different magazines had their own distinctive personalities, too — I contributed walkthroughs and tips books to the Official UK Nintendo Magazine for a while and was obliged to write using a particularly loathsome house style that effectively required me to write like a chav. Lots of "ya"s and "yer"s, and Mario was perpetually referred to as "Mazza". It was a magazine primarily aimed at children, of course, so this style was understandable, of course — looking back on it, though, it's more than a little cringeworthy.

I sort of miss magazines, then — I know they're still around and all that, but the magic just isn't there any more when you can get access to high-quality writing for free at your fingertips thanks to the Internet. That's sort of sad, really; while you can take an iPad into the toilet with you and browse your favourite sites, it's still not quite the same as having a proper magazine to leaf through at your leisure.

1101: Just Finish the Damn Thing

Page_1I've lost count of the number of "make my own game" projects I've started and abandoned over the years. I've started a new one recently which, theoretically, should be relatively straightforward to finish, so I will keep you all updated on its progress occasionally via this blog.

I'm no programmer, so I tend to gravitate towards solutions that allow you to flex your creative muscles and create interactive entertainment without having to, well, code anything. My weapon of choice for the last few attempts has been the excellent RPG Maker VX Ace, which is an immensely powerful tool capable of doing some really great things while at the same time allowing pretty much anyone to churn out a fairly generic top-down JRPG without too much difficulty.

It's the "capable of doing some really great things" part that I often find myself struggling with. Y'see, the trouble with being presented with a wealth of possibilities is choosing which ones you want to pursue and which ones you want to ignore. The temptation is to incorporate as many of them as possible in an attempt to make something as awesome as possible, but inevitably if you do that — particularly if you're working alone — you'll hit a brick wall where something doesn't quite work properly with something else, get disheartened and probably give up.

I'm talking vaguely. Let me give some specific examples. The new game I've started making as a means of proving I can take a project through from start to finish is simply an adaptation of the quests from MB/Games Workshop's classic board game Hero Quest. Given that the structure and storyline of the Hero Quest board game is very much a generic sort of dungeon crawler, this shouldn't be too difficult once I've done what I always initially think of as "the annoying bit" — setting up the characters, statistics, skills and whatnot, and finding some appropriate graphics for their sprites. (I call it "the annoying bit" but if I sit down and get on with it, I actually find this part quite fun after a while.)

Anyway, I'm about halfway done with "the annoying bit" — its initial stages, anyway — and already I'm finding myself torn in several directions. Do I stick with RPG Maker's rather generic first-person battle interface? It doesn't evoke the feel of Hero Quest that much, but then trying to adapt a board game and sticking too religiously to its rules can often ruin the "computer gaminess" of it. All right then, I thought, I'll stick with this battle system, but I'll tweak it so things like damage formulae are a little closer to rolling the dice in the game. Except when I thought I'd done that, I discovered that my ineptitude with composing damage formulae to accurately simulate dice rolls created a number of monsters that were literally impossible to hurt. Not good. I replaced the formula with its original one, which deals with much higher numbers than your average tabletop game. Will that ruin the atmosphere? Is "Rogar does 96 damage" somehow less powerful than "Rogar does 4 damage"? Probably not. That's a stupid thing to think.

I'm probably overthinking it, I know, and should just get on with it. What I think I really need to do is just make the game with the default systems, and then tweak and fine-tune afterwards. Difficulty balancing and that sort of thing is an important part of testing, so I'll leave that until there's actually a game there to test — there's no point getting hung up on problems that don't actually exist yet.

So that's the plan. Over the next few days I will be taking some time to plug in Hero Quest's various spells and items into the game in a format that will work within RPG Maker's style of play, then I'll put the game itself together. Then I'll show it to some select friends — this project probably won't get a wide release, unless it actually ends up being surprisingly good — and then, flush with satisfaction at having actually carried something through to completion for once, I can embark on something a little more ambitious.

One step at a time.

1100: The One where Pete Watches 'Friends' for the First Time in Quite a While

Page_1I went through a phase a few years back of watching just two or three different TV series over and over again on a cycle. They were my passive-consumption "comfort food", if you will — things I turned to when I didn't really want to do anything, but didn't really want to fall into that pit of depressed ennui that normally ends up with staring at the wall for hours at a time. Those shows included Spaced and Black Books, which are two series I still own the DVDs for and will never get rid of, and Friends, which I have never owned a complete collection of but have had scattered home-recorded VHS tapes and a few purchased DVDs and videos over the years — also, for many years, it was on a constant cycle of repeats on E4 alongside Scrubs.

Friends is something that I've watched so many times now that I can pretty much recite it word for word along with any episode that's on. It kind of fell out of favour with the public in its latter stages as many people saw it as outstaying its welcome, but I enjoyed it consistently all the way through. As I say, it was comfort food; you knew what to expect with every episode. It was never anything adventurous, but the characters were both relatable and attractive, the situations they got into often personally relevant, and the quips and jokes memorable and, yes, genuinely amusing.

I started re-watching Friends again the other day having come into possession of a complete collection, only this time around I'm watching the "extended cuts" that came out a few years back. These aren't Lucasesque "special edition" versions, they're simply about 5 minutes longer per episode, with numerous scenes restored to their full length and, in many cases, adding a whole bunch of additional context and depth to the characters and setting that simply wasn't there before due to the constraints of the TV scheduling.

I'm really enjoying them so far. This extra footage means that watching the show again after a few years' break strikes a wonderful balance between the comfortably familiar and the brand-new — and, given how well I know the original versions, I can immediately recognise when something is new. In many cases, scenes that had rather awkward and obvious edits on TV now make much more sense, and in some cases there are scenes that I simply don't think were even there at all in the first place — Joey's first meeting with his colourful agent Estelle, for example.

More than the pleasure of getting some "new" Friends to watch, though, I'm overwhelmed with the feeling of comfortable nostalgia that watching this show always infuses in me. I've spent so much time with these characters inside my TV over the years that I feel like they're my friends, too — a fact helped by the fact that I still, to this day, tend to group people in my mind according to which one of the main cast they most remind me of. (Shh. Don't tell anyone.)

One thing I'd forgotten about is that the show appeared to coin the term "friend zone" back in its first season, where Joey uses it to describe Ross having waited too long to make his move on Rachel. I shan't get into any of that endless discussion over people who use the term "friend zone" today because it's inordinately tedious and frustrating, but I wonder how many people remember where it actually came from and its original context. A few years back, I would have deemed it unthinkable for someone to not have knowledge of Friends, but a lot of years have passed since then.

And yet, I struggle to think of a recent TV show I've been quite as attached to as Friends. I've enjoyed various American comedies that have come since — How I Met Your Mother was originally sold to me as something of a successor to Friends in many ways, and I have major soft spots for Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock — but for me, nothing will ever be quite the same as the time I spent with Monica, Phoebe, Rachel, Ross, Chandler and Joey. However well (or otherwise) you think it may well have aged, there's little denying that for many people of a similar age to me, Friends was and is a touchstone of popular culture that will always carry at least some degree of personal resonance.

1099: Nep-Nep-Nep-Nep

Page_1It's another Hyperdimension Neptunia post, I'm afraid. Normally I'd make an effort to try not to talk too much about the same thing several days in a row, but having started the sequel to Hyperdimension Neptunia (imaginatively titled Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2) this evening, I felt compelled to share some of my first impressions. (Besides, this is my blog, dammit.)

That first impression can largely be summed up by me nodding and smiling at developers Compile Heart and Idea Factory and going "Good job, guys."

You see, Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2 takes all the things that were good about its predecessor — an amusing but oddly well-realised world; some excellent, memorable characters; some lovely 2D art — and ditches all the things that were a bit rubbish. Consequently, out go the endless cookie-cutter dungeons, out go the PS1-era random encounters, out go the weirder aspects of the battle system (like the bizarre mid-combat "item crafting" system and the seeming necessity to skip animations to take full advantage of the "guard break" mechanic) and out go the sequences that served no purpose (waiting for landmasses to approach and then having to run an insultingly easy dungeon every time you wanted to travel anywhere).

In comes a game which is not just a dream come true for a Hyperdimension Neptunia fan, but a game which actually appears to be a very good JRPG generally. Okay, you're still controlling an all-female party of candy-coloured self-referential anime archetypes so if you're not on board with that you're never going to be on board with this series, but almost everything about the first game that sucked a bit has seemingly been rectified with this new game. It's still not perfect and it's still rough around the edges — the in-engine graphics are still a bit PS2-ish in quality, riddled with jaggies (can't remember the last time I wrote that word!) and the frame rate still blows, but just like the original managed to be entertaining despite its flaws and technical shortcomings, so too does its sequel. Only said sequel is, as I say, a much better game on the whole, too.

The biggest overhaul to the game's base can be seen in the battle system. It's still focused on making combos, but there's no longer the need to micromanage every possible combination of three different buttons pressed up to four times. I actually quite liked this aspect of the original, as it gave the game a fun puzzly mechanic as you attempted to make combos that flowed nicely in to one another, but it did make getting a new character a bit tiresome, as you had to spend a good 10-15 minutes setting up their button combinations — usually only to discover in a boss fight that you'd done something wrong somewhere. (Fortunately, it was possible to rejig combos in mid-fight, which was nice.)

Nope, what we have now is a much more streamlined system — triangle button does multi-hit attacks, square button does powerful attacks, cross button does attacks that prioritise damage to the enemies' "guard gauge". Like before, each attack costs a certain number of Ability Points (AP) to perform. An initial attack is of a fixed type, but from that point on, you can customise the specific "move" (and AP cost) that is assigned to each of the three buttons depending on if it is the second, third or fourth attack in a combo. Characters unlock "EX" attacks as they level up, requiring that the player use both a specific button combination and expend a particular number of AP during a combo before triggering a more powerful special move. Each character has their own suite of "skills" outside the attacks, too, which cost a combination of AP and Skill Points (SP, which charge up through attacking enemies) to perform. These vary from special attacks to support buffs and healing skills, and mean there's no longer the reliance on random chance when attempting to keep your party at full health.

Combat now allows characters to move, too, giving the whole thing a light strategic feel, as all attacks cover a particular area, and characters clustered together can all feel the brunt of one enemy's attack if you're not careful. The whole thing is way more fast-paced than the previous game — a feeling helped even more by the fact that the load times between field and battle screens are lightning-fast.

I'm not far into the story yet, but it's been enjoyable so far, despite what essentially amounted to an extremely mild tentacle scene approximately five minutes into the experience. (Said "tentacles" — actually cables — weren't doing any more than just holding the previous game's "CPU" goddesses prisoner, but it's very clear that it was a reference to… well, you know.) New protagonist Nepgear (hah) is appealing and endearing, and successfully distinguishes herself from her ditzy sister — the previous game's protagonist — by basically being the exact opposite in terms of personality. Where Neptune was loud, brash, confident and, let's not beat around the bush, endearingly stupid at times, Nepgear is much more reserved, rational, intelligent and innocent. There's a lot of scope for her to grow as a character — particularly when accompanied by the increasingly world-weary IF (rapidly becoming my favourite character in the series) and the ever-optimistic Compa — so I'll be interested to see how she develops as her journey progresses.

There's still a heavy focus on non-linear and repeated sidequesting in the new game, but it actually explains what effect doing quests has right from the beginning this time instead of, you know, not at all. Yes, the "shares" system from the previous game is back again, but it's integrated into the story this time, representing the world's level of belief in the "good" goddesses and the evil forces of "Arfoire" — the previous game's villain and a thinly-veiled reference to the popular Nintendo DS storage device that was often used for piracy. Essentially, doing quests now wrests back "control" of particular areas from Arfoire's followers, allowing you to strengthen an area's belief in the goddesses and ultimately turn things around for the world, which has seemingly gone to shit in the intervening time between the end of the first game and the start of the second. Manipulating the shares is also key to unlocking certain events.

Oh, and there's a whole relationship system between Nepgear and her party members now, rather charmingly called "Lily Rank". (For those who don't get why it's called this, the Japanese word for "lily" is "yuri", which is a word also often used to refer to same-sex romantic and/or sexual relationships between women — rather appropriate for describing the relationships between members of an all-female party, particularly as within the first three hours Nepgear has already been kissed by one of them, ostensibly to shock her into transforming into her "goddess candidate" form for the first time since escaping captivity in the intro.) Characters with a better Lily Rank between them provide bonuses to one another in combat, and can be paired up to do various joint special abilities. Naturally, a better relationship between them also results in more scenes between them, too.

Also the music's much better by about a thousand percent.

Also it's just great. I like it a lot. Actually, I liked the first one a lot, despite its flaws. I can see myself really loving the second one. And the third one's coming in March! Yay!

I'll shut up now.

1098: Nepgagaga Complete!

Page_1I finished Hyperdimension Neptunia tonight, thereby proving beyond a doubt that review scores are now completely and utterly useless to me. I kind of suspected this already, but the fact that I devoured and loved a game that Eurogamer gave a 2/10 speaks volumes about how far my tastes have drifted from the mainstream.

With that in mind, some people have been expressing curiosity about this game after hearing me talk about it, so I am going to use this post in an attempt to share some facts about it that may help you reach a decision as to whether or not you would find it an enjoyable experience. Not everyone will like it, and that's fine — I really enjoyed it, but I recognise its flaws.

So here we go then.

It's roughly 50% visual novel. Story scenes in Hyperdimension Neptunia are selected from a menu rather than occurring naturally during exploring a town or something, and are all presented in a head-and-shoulders visual novel style. In a twist on the usual way in which VNs are presented, however, the portraits are animated — they breathe, change expressions, have lipsyncing and move their heads. It's not quite the same as a fully-animated anime scene (or indeed in-engine cutscenes) but it looks very nice and the art is lovely.

The other 50% is old-school JRPG dungeon crawler. You'll spend your non-story time in Hyperdimension Neptunia wandering through a variety of rather samey dungeons. There are a very limited number of environments, and only a set number of layouts to explore. Objectives are generally either "reach the exit" or "kill the boss", with occasional "collect [x] of [y]". Structurally, it's nothing special, and the "collect [x] of [y]" or "kill [x] of [monster]" objectives are largely dependent on luck, which some may find frustrating. The game is non-linear all the way through, however, meaning if you're struggling on one dungeon (or even the final boss!) you can simply shoot off and do something else for a bit.

There are random encounters. A hangover from the old days of JRPGs, random encounters are the bane of some RPG fans' existence. They are present and correct in Hyperdimension Neptunia. Whether or not you get irritated by random encounters will play a big part in determining whether or not you will have an enjoyable time.

This girl is the PlayStation personified. I'm not even joking.The combat system is GREAT. To counter the potential annoyance of random encounters, the combat system is hugely enjoyable. Taking its cues from Xenogears, each character has a set number of Action Points to spend per turn. Three of the PS3 controller's face buttons are assigned to different attacks (each costing a particular number of AP) by default, and as each character levels up they learn new moves. These moves must then be manually assigned to individual button presses in any of the possible combinations of four buttons that make up a combo. Different moves have different "end bonuses" if placed in the fourth slot of the combo — some allow the combo to continue registering after the fourth button press, others allow the party member to "switch" with one in the back row, effectively granting the player a free turn, and some characters have the magical girl-esque ability to transform. It's great fun setting up and naming your own combos, and there's a pleasing almost puzzle-like element to working out which ones will flow nicely into other ones while still leaving you with enough AP to be effective.

You can customize a whole ton of stuff in combat. You can rename button combos and apply your own images to certain special attacks. Other special attacks that you find throughout the course of the game are all based on old Sega games, allowing you to do things like summon the dude from Altered Beast or Alex Kidd to lay the smack down on your enemies.

There's a really weird item system. Rather than a conventional item system, Hyperdimension Neptunia makes use of a strange "crafting" system in combat to handle healing and the like — you can't heal outside battle, except by leaving or completing a dungeon. There are four crafting materials that you collect and/or purchase, and different combinations of these are required to activate each character's unique "item skills", each of which has a time when it occurs, a trigger condition and a target. For example, a basic healing item skill might be "When damaged and HP is 50% or less, heal 30% of HP in exchange for 5 of one item and 5 of another." The twist is that each character only has a limited number of "item skill points" which can be funneled into any of their item skills — one point equates to a 1% chance that when the condition is fulfilled at the appropriate time, the skill will trigger. For example, the character IF has a skill that will resurrect any fallen party members with 50% HP at the end of her turn, but this is only absolutely guaranteed to happen if you put 100 points into that skill. You can shift these points around at will — even during combat, except in the middle of a combo — and it adds an interesting degree of strategy to an otherwise attack-focused combat system, but it's bizarre, only sort-of works as a concept and will almost certainly piss some people off. I quite liked it by the end of the game, but it takes some adjustment to get your head around.

There's a "skip animation" button in combat. If you're starting to find the endless fighting rather dull, you can simply tap the L2 button to skip any animation, whether it's a regular attack by you or the enemies or a lengthy piece of JRPG "final attack" showboating. This means that you can romp through combats super-quickly if you're not too concerned about watching animations.

There's a bunch of grinding later in the game if you want to get the best ending. There are three endings to the game that are dependent on whether or not you recruit three characters in the story — a "bad" one if you don't recruit any of them, a "good" one if you recruit one or two of them and a "true" one if you recruit all three of them. Getting all three of them involves manipulating a mechanic which is never explicitly explained in the game, and requires replaying a lot of dungeons that are, by that point, far too low-level for you and thus almost insultingly easy. Fortunately, you can make use of the aforementioned "skip animation" button to rip through most of these dungeons in a minute or less.

The in-engine graphics aren't great. While the hi-res visual novel scenes look lovely, the in-game graphics look distinctly PS2ish and suffer from a fairly poor frame rate when compared to their mediocre quality. This is, apparently, fairly common practice for the developers Compile Heart and Idea Factory, and doesn't affect the enjoyment at all, but those who appreciate super-pretty graphics will only find functional visuals here. That said, the animations are nice and the characters all have plenty of personality about them.

The music is annoyingly catchy, but limited. There aren't many different music tracks in the game, which means by the end you may well be tiring of some of them. That said, they are catchy, recognisable themes that you may well find yourself humming along with, and there are multiple battle themes rather than the same one all the way through the game.

The game offers both Japanese and English voiceovers. Both have their merits, though some parts haven't been dubbed into English, meaning they're just text. On the whole, the Japanese voice track is superior in terms of acting quality (though beware the high-pitched voices if that sort of thing bugs you), but it's nice to hear the American voice actor who plays Yukari in Persona 3 again on the English track.

The game is genuinely amusing… if you're a fan of Japanese media and video games. The game prides itself on affectionate lampshading of anime and video game tropes, with the characters regularly breaking the fourth wall to talk about their role in the game. There are also plenty of optional scenes with references to various video games and anime, though some feel a little forced. If you don't like things being very obviously referenced, the humour in this game may not be for you. See also:

The game is stuffed full of innuendo and fanservice. The party in Hyperdimension Neptunia is exclusively female, and male characters throughout are very limited, mostly represented as silhouetted portraits alongside the huge, animated head-and-shoulders shots of the girls. There's a lot of boob-related humour, particularly surrounding the discrepancy in size between several party members' breasts, and a number of comic misunderstandings that initially appear to be somewhat sexual in nature but later turn out to be something far more innocuous. There's also a clearly-underage openly-lesbian character (though it's implied that most of the characters have at least a slight inclination in this direction), you'll see a lot of pantsu-flashing and suggestive positions (see below) over the course of the game, most of the girls wear incredibly impractical outfits (see below), and their boobies bounce on the special "event" pictures that normally accompany a character's first appearance (see below!). It's all fairly harmless and there's nothing outright pornographic; it feels cheeky and light-hearted rather than malicious or exploitative and is certainly no worse than anything seen in popular anime, but some may object to it or find it embarrassing.

This is how you first encounter IF, Iffy, I-chan.There's a bunch of DLC, 90% of which is completely unnecessary. For the true Hyperdimension Neptunia fan, the game carries a wide selection of downloadable content, most of which takes the form of free additional quests that can be added into the game. Most players who download these will be very surprised to discover that a lot of them have recommended levels well into the hundreds, while the level cap in the game is just 99. You can, however, purchase extensions to the level cap to take it right up to 999, along with "boosters" to increase the various characters' stats if you're really struggling. None of these are essential, and these high-level dungeons provide the exact same experience as the rest of the game, so they're really not worth downloading. (If you do want to grind to 999, it will take you roughly the length of the rest of the game put together doing the same dungeon over and over and over again. Methinks someone was having a laugh with this DLC.)

The other 10% of the DLC should probably have been in the game in the first place. There are four pieces of DLC that are worth buying — two "battle tickets" that allow the use of otherwise non-playable party members in combat, and two additional characters who have their own sequence of event scenes. Again, none of these are essential — the additional characters' plotlines tend to be kept fairly separate to the main core of the party, and you get plenty of characters over the course of the main game to fill up your party — but it's curious that these weren't just included on the game disc. (They're not on-disc DLC, either — each is a 100MB+ download.) Given that you can find a copy of the game for not-very-much-money fairly easily these days, I didn't really object to paying a couple of extra quid to see what I might be missing out on — as it happens, they were a nice addition, but I'm not sure I would have missed them if I chose to forgo the DLC.

The characters are memorable and adorable. For all the game's flaws, the thing that kept me coming back over and over again until the very end was the cast. While most of them are recognisable anime archetypes, the self-aware nature of much of the game's humour means that they're not above calling each other out when they're behaving in a particularly stereotypical fashion. The central cast of the ditzy, airheaded Neptune, the pink and fluffy cries-at-the-slightest-provocation girly-girl Compa and the rational, sensible but somewhat tsundere IF complement each other perfectly, and poor old IF, as the "straight man" (well, woman) of the ensemble usually ends up having to deal with the aftermath of all the other characters' idiosyncracies. She's by far the most sympathetic character by the end of the game, but there's something eminently likeable about all the rest of them, too.

So there you go. A list of facts about Hyperdimension Neptunia. Don't go into it thinking it's going to be the best thing ever because you will almost inevitably be disappointed. If you have a lot of patience for what is essentially a combination of an old-school, combat-heavy JRPG and a visual novel, however, there's a highly enjoyable experience with some very memorable characters and some endearingly self-referential humour to be had here. If that sounds like your sort of thing, give it a shot.

I'll be starting the sequel tomorrow, and I understand that's a superior experience. I'll be interested to see quite how different it is.

1097: Five Reasons Kotaku Made Yakuza Fans Angry Today

Page_1Fan of Sega's long-running modern-day JRPG series Yakuza? Then you may want to give Kotaku a wide berth today, as they published an article (FreezePage link so as not to direct traffic to the piece in question; petty, I know, but I know a few people who won't click Kotaku links on principle) which has incited the ire of an angry mob of Yakuza fans. And since Yakuza is a fairly niche game with a dedicated core of fans keen to see Sega continue to bring it to the West, they're pretty passionate about the series that they love.

The main issue with the article is that it is clearly written by someone who has very little knowledge of the Yakuza series at all — the author even states this up-front, noting that prior to taking Yakuza 5 for a spin they had played nothing more than the demos of Yakuza 3, 4 and Dead Souls and hadn't felt inspired to purchase or try the full games. Leaving aside the fact that he was coming in at the fifth installment to a series that is very strict about its chronology — each subsequent game follows on directly from the previous one — the bigger question is why on Earth this writer was picked to write an "Import Preview" for this game when his familiarity with the series is questionable by his own admission?

Of course, there is merit in judging the accessibility of a long-running series to newcomers, but just as certain series of books, movies and TV shows expect you to start from the very beginning and work your way along, so too are there series of games that demand the same of their audience. Yakuza is one of these, though it does give a cursory nod to newcomers in each game by allowing them a sequence where the protagonist "reminisces" about the events of the previous installment. These are primarily intended for series veterans who have endured a significant wait between games, however, and are designed to remind them of the key events rather than the actual experience of playing through a Yakuza game. They are not really designed to tell the entire story of a whole game in 30 minutes of cutscenes. You want to know what happened in, say, Yakuza 2? Go play it — it's still out there and (relatively) readily available.

I won't go through and address all of Eisenbeis' five points in the article one at a time as that just seems somewhat petty, but it's abundantly clear from the things he says that he is unfamiliar with the series and its conventions, and has also not spent a significant amount of time with it to discover its hidden depths. Pleasingly, the comments from Yakuza fans beneath the article have mostly been relatively respectful (if incredulous) and systematically point out how most of his arguments are flawed or, in some cases, completely incorrect.

I will address one point specifically, however, and that is the matter of "unskippable conversations". This is a particular bugbear for me. Yakuza is notorious for being a story-heavy, character-focused game in which the moments when you're kicking back in a hostess club attempting to woo your lady of the hour are just as important as the times when you're punching goons in the face and smashing traffic cones over their heads. If anything, they're more important, as they're where the characters get to demonstrate their hidden depths — far from being generic, silent protagonists, the playable characters in the Yakuza series are all very complex people with interesting motivations and outlooks on life. More interestingly, they're all grown-ups.

Brief aside: a friend and I were discussing this recently, and we thought it would be very interesting if there was a Japanese-style role-playing game that instead of featuring your usual band of Plucky, Idealistic Teens Who Are Always Right getting to save the world from Some Great Evil, put the spotlight on a group of older, more jaded and cynical adults who maybe had more complex motives for embarking on whatever the game's "quest" happened to be. The Yakuza series provides just that sort of experience, with characters who age and evolve as the series progresses, giving the complete franchise a truly remarkable feeling of coherence and changing with the times. At the same time, however, certain things remain constant — Kazuma will always care for his adoptive sort-of-"daughter" Haruka; Kamuro-cho will always be by turns beautiful and terrifying; Majima's sanity will always be somewhat questionable.

Anyway, my point with all that was that the very essence of Yakuza is in the story, so why would you skip it? I'll allow you the answer "because I died on a boss fight and I've already seen this bit", but anything beyond that — such as the reason Eisenbeis gives in his article — is very much missing the point. "I started to dread playing through the plot, knowing that the game's pace would be about to grind to a halt," he writes. Good grief, man. The point is the plot. If you were hoping for a brawler or character action game — or even a Grand Theft Auto-alike — there are plenty of other titles that will better fit your needs.

One thing I will say at this point is that I'm not attempting to convert anyone to the Yakuza fold who isn't already there. As has probably been made clear by the fact I'm writing this at all, you're either "in" or you aren't, and getting "in" these days involves playing four (possibly five if you count Dead Souls) games of between 10-40+ hours that straddle the generation gap between PS2 and PS3. From the second game onwards, you also have to be able to deal with the fact that there's no English dub, either — it's all subtitled with Japanese speech (and is an infinitely better experience as a result, I might add). It's a worthwhile experience, but equally it's one I'd understand people forgoing as the perceived barrier of entry gets higher.

Consequently, I'm not denying that some of the criticisms Eisenbeis makes of Yakuza in his article are valid; many of them are, and yes, they're offputting to series newcomers. However, this article really didn't need to be written, and in the worst-case scenario, it may have done some damage to the already-tenuous chances of Sega bringing this latest installment to the West. The piece's content essentially boils down to "Guy Who Doesn't Like Yakuza Doesn't Like Latest Yakuza", which is a matter for a personal blog, not for one of the world's most heavily-trafficked video games websites. Fans of the Yakuza series who see the "Import Preview" header would likely have been hoping for some insights on the ways in which the new game has evolved its systems and what has happened to the characters in the intervening time since Yakuza 4 and Dead Souls; instead, what they get is a poorly-researched opinion piece that does nothing but frustrate the people who are most likely to read it.

I'm sorry that Eisenbeis didn't enjoy his time with Yakuza 5, but it's his prerogative to dislike it if he pleases. He should clearly not, however, have been given the opportunity to write about it in the way that he did, as it does a great disservice to both the game and its fans who were hoping for some genuine new information. I hope that Kotaku will think much more carefully about who they assign preview articles to in the future, but I won't hold my breath.

1096: Colourspace

Page_1I wrote a thing about veteran independent game developer Jeff Minter the other day for Games Are Evil — you should go read it, then go buy all the iOS games I listed in that article, as they're all fab.

For me, though, some of Jeff Minter's most memorable creations weren't games at all — they were what he called "light synthesisers". The first of these was Psychedelia for the 8-bit computers of the time, superceded the following year by Colourspace, which is where I first became aware of… whatever lightsynths actually are.

Essentially, a lightsynth — as it existed back then, anyway — is a piece of software that allows you to play with colours and shapes as you see fit. In the case of the Atari 8-bit version of Colourspace, which is where I first encountered it, you used the joystick to move a cursor around the screen, then held the fire button and moved around to make shapes, colours and swirly patterns. The exact behaviour of the program could be tweaked in various ways, too, allowing for colour-cycling, variable pixel sizes — something the Atari was good at due to a nifty little feature called Display List Interrupts — and for the colours and shapes to flow over or under static on-screen graphics such as logos. Minter notes on his website that for a long time, this was his "performance lightsynth" of choice, and he often showed it off as a means of demonstrating both what he and the hardware of the time were capable of. (He also claims he sold a copy to Paul Daniels and was subsequently rude to him when he phoned up for technical support.)

The 16-bit era saw a new version of Colourspace released for the Atari ST. The shift to a platform that is much closer to what we understand as being a "PC" today meant that Minter could take advantage of things like mouse control for more fluid movement of the shapes, colours and patterns, and the relatively large amount of memory in the ST (512K or a whopping 1MB!) meant that performers could load a selection of images and switch between them at will to help supplement their dancing swirly patterns. Minter himself performed using Colourspace for the ST on a number of occasions, including hiring out the London Planetarium for a laser-and-Colourspace extravaganza to celebrate the new version's launch.

Following Colourspace came Trip-A-Tron, an evolution of the formula that still allowed for simple real-time swirly patterns, but also featured its own scripting language allowing clever people (cleverer than I was at that tender age) to remotely control other computers running Trip-A-Tron via the MIDI port, triggering various animations, rendering scenes in 2D and 3D and all manner of other exciting things. I never really got deep into Trip-A-Tron because the thickness of the manual was somewhat disconcerting for a youngster like I was then — Minter notes it took him longer to write that manual than it did to write some of his earlier lightsynths!

One thing that does stick in my mind from Trip-A-Tron, however, is a peculiar artistic project Minter undertook with a musician named Adrian Wagner known as Merak. Merak was a wordless, abstract story about the adventures of an android in space, and it was a spectacular combination of psychedelic visuals and memorable music that I can still remember today. Disappointingly, there don't appear to be any clips from Merak anywhere on YouTube, but Wagner did rerelease the video on DVD more recently — I'm quite tempted to pick up a copy, but worried that my memories of this remarkable work won't match up to the reality.

The really interesting thing about this whole "lightsynth" concept of Minter's is that it was one of the first real examples of computers being used for pure creativity and self-expression. It was entirely what you made of it, and it was fuel for the imagination. I remember vividly spending hours at a time playing with the Atari ST version of Colourspace, which allowed you to render starfields and came with a preset background that looked like the bridge of a spaceship. I'd imagine a grand space opera, rendering the abstract shapes and spectacular light shows of this vessel flying into combat, putting up a brave fight and being eventually destroyed. I'd swirl the mouse around to create abstract shapes and trails, adjust the colour-cycling patterns to change the atmosphere and eventually fill the screen with an explosion of colourful particles as the ship, in my mind, blew to pieces.

Minter's latest lightsynth is known as Neon, and a version of it comes built in to every Xbox 360 console as the music visualiser. The sad thing is that the frustrations Minter expressed in the article I linked to above mean that it's unlikely we'll see a new lightsynth from this eccentric genius any time soon. His tweets on the subject pretty much speak for themselves.

The end of an era, to be sure. Unless anyone's up for crowdfunding a new Colourspace?

1095: Czerny's School of Repetitive Strain Injury

Page_1I did some actual honest-to-goodness piano practice today. It's been some time since I practiced "properly" and I'll admit that it wasn't for a particularly long session today — I had work to do — but it's a start at least.

I started learning the piano when I was about five years old and have been playing ever since. Since leaving university — and particularly since leaving the teaching profession — it's fallen a little by the wayside, though, for various reasons. You never really "lose it" if you've been doing it for as long as I have, though — sometimes it just takes a little concerted effort to get yourself back to where you were before.

Why did I let it slide? Difficult to say, really. Poor self-discipline, mostly, but I also attribute it at least partly to feelings of anxiety and depression. If I get depressed, there's really very little that I find myself actively wanting to do. Many is the time where I've spent hours at a time literally just staring at a wall feeling sorry for myself, even though I know how stupid that is, and that I'd probably feel better if I actually did something. As those who have suffered feelings like this will know, though, it's not always that easy to get up and do something.

Music is a good outlet for such feelings, however, because by its very nature it is able to express a wide variety of complex concepts and emotions without the necessity for any words whatsoever. People more talented at improvisation than I am can just sit down at a keyboard and make something up to reflect the way they're feeling — as a classically trained pianist first and foremost, however, I find this somewhat difficult and thus tend to rely mostly on music that has been composed for me.

This isn't a lesser form of expression by any means — it may be slightly less creative, but you can certainly channel those emotions into a piece of music composed by someone else and put your own interpretation on it very easily. Particularly if the piece of music in question is from an era of music where the composers made a point of writing pieces that were particularly expressive and/or open to interpretation. It's for this reason I've always gravitated more towards the Romantic and early 20th century periods than anything else — Baroque music still leaves me cold with its much stronger focus on technical expertise rather than expression, though some Classical period works for me.

Rather than jumping in to something I can't quite play today, though, I decided to get out the books of technical exercises I got a while back but have underexplored somewhat. I can still run through all the scales back to back (though my accuracy when playing at speed needs some work) but sometimes (all right, most of the time) it's nice to practice your skills with something that sounds a bit more like an actual piece of music.

I have a few books of technical exercises from composers with difficult to spell and pronounce names like Dohnanyi, Pischna and Czerny — it was the latter's "Art of Finger Dexterity" books I went for today, starting from the first exercise in the first book. Its position at the front of the book doesn't mean it's a particularly "easy" one, mind; it involves rattling up and down scales at high speed in one hand while playing block chords with the other, then later shifting to parallel and contrary motion perpetually-moving semiquaver passages. It is exhausting, but oddly satisfying to play, particularly when you actually get it right. I was expecting my finger dexterity to be much worse than it was having had so much time off from a concerted effort to practice, but I was pleasantly surprised to find myself whipping up and down these passages without too much difficulty. Which is nice.

One of the things I've felt over the years with the piano is "I'll never be able to play that" — either because it looks technically demanding, or it's fast, or it's in a difficult key, or whatever. With some persistent, consistent and regular exercise, though, I have faith I'll be able to build my skills up somewhat and perhaps tackle some more adventurous pieces than I have done in the past.

Eventually, anyway. In the meantime, I shall continue to enjoy playing Final Fantasy and Persona themes for fun!

1094: Today: The Walkthrough

Page_1January 16

This is quite an easy day to get through — all you have to do is make sure you get all the tasks done by the end of the day and you're good to go. As always, save your game as the day begins in case you make a mistake, and use any free time you have to go secret-hunting. See the SECRETS section for more details.

Morning

You have three main objectives in the morning: wake up, have breakfast and complete your work. All can be easily achieved quite quickly if you focus on the task at hand and save item-hunting for later.

You'll start the day with "tired" status, which makes it more difficult than usual to wake up. After the cutscene where Andie leaves for work, repeatedly tap the Triangle button to force yourself out of bed. Don't worry if you fail, though — it's actually pretty challenging to succeed in this. You can try again, but you'll take a hit to your HP each time you do so, so you might find it easier to just fall asleep again and wake up once the "tired" status has evaporated — there's no real benefit to the early start beyond having more time available.

Once you're up, walk to the bathroom and press X to start the morning routine. Skip the animation if you want — you've probably seen it plenty of times by now. Once you re-emerge, walk to the kitchen and press X in front of the bread bin to examine it. Pick up the BREAD and make sure you examine it in your inventory rather than just eating it — it's mouldy, so use it on the bin unless you want to find yourself with a rather inconvenient toilet-focused status effect lasting the rest of the day.

Pick up the BREADSTICK instead, then open the fridge and pick up the EGGS. Open the drawer next to the fridge and take the SMALL PAN. Use the pan on the cooker, then use the cooker again to turn it on. You can stand and wait — there's some amusing comments if you keep examining it — but it's a better use of your time to walk over to the other side of the room and use the coffee machine. Pick a CAPSULE according to how much EP you have — if you've been following this walkthrough exactly so far, a green one will probably suffice. Use the capsule on the machine, then open the cupboard across the room from the machine to take a CUP. Use the cup on the machine, then use the machine. Voila! One coffee. Drink it immediately — coffee provides a nice boost to EP, but isn't nearly as effective if you allow it to cool.

By now the pan should be starting to boil, so use the eggs on the pan, then use your phone in your inventory to automatically set the timer. You have four minutes in which to wander around the house and its environs before the eggs are ready. A good use of your time is to empty the bin — walk up to the bin and use it to take the BINBAG out, then use the bag to pick it up. You won't be able to open your menu or access your inventory while carrying the bag, though you can put it down if you need to.

Open the front door while carrying the bag, run down the stairs and out of the front door. Use the binbag on the green bin, NOT the blue one, then run back into the building, up the stairs and back into your flat. You should be back just in time for the timer to expire and your eggs to be ready — use the cooker to automatically take them out and prepare them; use the breadstick on the resulting plate to finish preparing your meal; use the finished meal to trigger a cutscene.

When you regain control, you'll be in the study in front of the computer. Three battles will ensue as you attempt to get your work done, but you can pause to regain lost HP/EP between each one.

Battle 1: Blitz (HP 50,000)

This is an easy one. Kick off with a Comparison, follow it up with Context, Quip and finally Verdict.

Battle 2: Cross (HP 60,000)

This one's a little tougher. Kick off with a Comparison again, but use your phone in the second round for additional damage. Follow with Praise, Quip, Question and finally Verdict.

Battle 3: Snapper (HP 70,000)

Despite the higher HP, this is the easiest one of all. Quip, Question and Verdict is all you need to do here.

Afternoon

The main objective in the afternoon is to pick up the missing package, but it'll help you out to pick up some supplies at the same time. Fortunately, we can do both things in one expedition.

Pick up the CARD from the desk in the study. Then go to the living room and open the drawer to pick up the DRIVING LICENSE. It's very important you get both of these items!

Pick up your COAT and equip it — it'll be on the back of the chair as usual. Pick up your SHOES and equip them — they'll be in the hallway. Then open the front door and use your keys on it to lock it. You don't have to do this — burglaries are triggered by random chance, so you won't always suffer one if you don't lock the door — but it's best to be safe.

Run down the stairs and out of the building's front door. There's no need to use your keys on the building's main door — this one doesn't affect the odds of burglary.

Now we have a fair old trek ahead of us. You can trigger a time challenge now if you want to — the rewards are pretty worthwhile, so we might as well do so. Run around the back of the building to the  car park and look behind your car — you should see the icon there. Use it to start the clock.

Head out of the car park and on to the main road. Keep an eye out for cars and cross if it looks clear, but remember they don't stop for you! If you're worried about safety, you can use the crossing, but you'll find attaining the best rank on the time challenge difficult if you do so.

Follow the road west for quite some time. When you come to some more traffic lights, turn right and start heading north-west. You'll see there's a shop here, but we're not going to use that just yet — priorities!

Continue north-west up the road, and cross the road when you come to McDonald's — it's not a true crossing, but the small island in the middle of the road means you can keep safe if the traffic gets heavy. Continue north-west on this side of the road, taking care to avoid the hoodie-wearing enemies. They won't bother you if you don't bump into them, so keep a wide berth as much as possible.

Don't worry about finding the post office — you'll get a cutscene when you reach it. When you regain control at the counter, use the card then use your driving license to identify yourself. Pick up the package but don't open it yet.

If you were quick enough, an S-rank on the time challenge should be yours. Enjoy the reward in the gallery.

Now retrace your steps south-east back to the shop we saw earlier. Purchase some BREAD and some items of your choice to restore the HP and EP you've used up today. Then continue back east to return home. Run into the building, up the stairs and use your keys on your door to enter. Use any of the food items you bought in the kitchen if you need to.

Open the package when you're ready to trigger a cutscene. Oh my!

Evening

There's not much you need to do in the evening, so spend some time restoring your HP by playing with the rats in the living room. When Andie returns, you'll get a cutscene; after it finishes, talk to her again, then go to the kitchen, pick up the JUICE, open the fridge, pick up the WATER and use them both on a GLASS from the cupboard. Pick up the resultant DRINK and take it to Andie for a reward.

When you're ready to start the final events of the day, go to the study and use the computer. A battle will ensue as usual.

Battle: Inspiration (HP 109,400)

Whew, these battles are starting to get pretty tough now, huh? Charge up a bit by using Focus three times, then Ponder. This should give you the Inspired buff, which is when you should trigger your Tortured Metaphor ability. While this is active, simply repeatedly attack Inspiration and it'll all be over before you know it.

1093: 'Problematic' is This Year's 'Entitled'

Page_1Remember last year when everyone was busily calling each other "entitled" for complaining about stuff like the Mass Effect 3 ending and Capcom's absurd DLC-on-disc policies? Ah, good times. They were fun, weren't they? Particularly when members of the press who should really know better starting insulting their audience. But let's leave that aside for now, because now it's 2013, and we have bigger fish to fry.

Now, you see, the fashionable thing to do is to declare something "problematic". I can't quite work out what irks me so about this word — in all likelihood it's simply its overuse — but it really does bug me.

The declaration of something as "problematic" usually ties in with the growing trend of guilt-ridden white straight cis men to want to champion the poor downtrodden parts of society — the women, the transsexuals, the homosexuals, the people of non-white ethnic backgrounds — and show themselves to be enlightened enough to stand up to the privileged of the world. Trouble is, a white straight cis man standing up for these groups only helps to reinforce that perceived "weakness" in many ways — and in worst-case scenarios, it starts to look a bit like bandwagon-jumping.

Such is the case with many of these things that have been declared "problematic" in recent months. A while back we had that beyond-stupid Hitman: Absolution trailer, more recently we had CD Projekt Red's actually quite excellent Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, and today we had the announcement of Dead Island Riptide's ridiculous "Zombie Bait" special edition. Leaving aside Cyberpunk 2077 for a moment, which is something of a different issue, both Hitman: Absolution and Dead Island Riptide are obviously incredibly stupid marketing ploys designed for shock value, little more. I find it honestly hard to believe that either Square Enix or Deep Silver genuinely want to condone violence against women or misogyny in general, but that is what they're being accused of with these "problematic" marketing materials — in the case of Dead Island, within minutes of the images hitting the Interwebs.

The thing is, all the shouting about how "problematic" these things are actually just plays right into the marketers' hands. For every table-thumping opinion piece that decries these things as the most awful thing ever dreamed up by a game's marketing team, there will be at least a few readers who will think "well hang on, actually I'm quite interested in that now," whether or not they actually admit to it in public. The amount of "OMG THIS IS AWFUL" stuff floating around about Dead Island Riptide's bloody torso is only really serving to make people more aware of the game's striking, gross (and Europe/Australia-exclusive) special edition; the hoo-hah over the Hitman: Absolution trailer likely helped raise awareness of the game in the run-up to its release to a considerable degree, and it had been all but forgotten by most people by the time the game actually came out.

In short, they're stupid and in poor taste, but all they are are marketing ploys, little more. And they're doing their job admirably — both games now have considerably higher visibility than they once had. As they say, all publicity is good publicity. If you really want to punish them, don't provide them with any coverage whatsoever.

The Cyberpunk 2077 trailer is a little more complex to discuss. Taken out of context, it could be seen as a representation of brutality against a sex worker — until it pans out and she reveals her MASSIVE FUCKING ROBOT SCYTHE BLADES, that is — but taken in the context of the original Cyberpunk 2077 source material from the '80s, it is, to my knowledge anyway, entirely in keeping with the aesthetic and atmosphere of that which it is based on. I observed some lengthy discussions about this on both Facebook and Google+ recently, and now that I know the context, it's clear that this trailer is entirely appropriate for the setting. One may argue that the use of a scantily-clad woman is somewhat unnecessary, and you might be right about that, but that doesn't mean that this is suddenly a huge violence against women issue. It's a stylistic choice; little more — a subversion of audience expectations. "A woman being abused by the police… oh wait, no, she's actually some sort of hideous mechanical monster with very little humanity remaining." (Spoilers.)

You could also argue that the requirement to be familiar with the source material before being able to recognise the trailer for what it is is something of a failing of the marketing, but then Cyberpunk 2077 was always likely to appeal to a very specific, niche audience — those who remembered the original tabletop RPG — anyway, so is there really anything wrong in catering to that specific, niche audience rather than attempting to make something bland, unremarkable and mainstream?

My point, essentially, is that by shouting and screaming about how "problematic" these things are, you're fuelling the fire. You're helping the things that you hate. You're making people aware of them, and not in the way you probably intend. It's a catch-22, really. If you say nothing, you might feel as if you're tacitly condoning things that you don't agree with; if you say something, you actually end up bringing it to a much wider audience, many of whom may become defensive when confronted with your viewpoints that counter their feelings.

The key thing, I think, is moderation. The trouble with the number of things that have been declared "problematic" recently is that it's losing its impact. We're apparently supposed to find so much stuff "offensive" these days that it's getting difficult to keep track — and who are the people who get to say what is and isn't offensive, anyway? Following the release of the Dead Island Riptide pictures today, for example, I saw a variety of comments from female gamers (as in, gamers who just happen to be female, not girls who make a big deal out of the fact they play games or specifically identify as "girl gamers") along the lines that it really didn't bother them and that they just found this sort of thing rather childish and amusing.

That, to me, is a more healthy attitude to take. All of the outrage I've seen today has been from men — always the same men, too, so much so that any time something like this comes up it's incredibly predictable who will be the first to jump on their virtual soapbox. It's easy to play the "champion of feminism" from behind a computer keyboard, but I have to question how many of these self-appointed arbiters of taste and decency have actually done anything beyond pen an angry blog post (yes, just like this one, I know) to help make life better for these groups they're supposedly standing up for.

Dead Island's bloody tits are a horrid thing you probably wouldn't want on your mantlepiece. Hitman: Absolution's nuns trailer was an exercise in how ridiculous a trailer they could get away with. I'm not defending either of them, because they're both shit, let's not beat around the bush. But I really don't believe they're symptomatic of anything more than marketing departments that are highly adept at taking advantage of "shock value". And attempting to make these into anything more than that will achieve little more than starting arguments that have little value to the real concerns, which are a much more complex set of sociological issues.

I like women and have never, ever thought of a woman as someone "inferior" to me. The thought of perpetrating violence against a woman in reality is, to me, abhorrent, but then the thought of perpetrating violence against a man is also, to me, abhorrent. But then I liked the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, too. Does that make me an awful, hideous misogynist?

No, of course it doesn't. But what do I know? I like Hyperdimension Neptunia.