1062: In Defense of Theatrhythm iOS

It's not often you'll read me defending a free-to-play title these days, what with their increasingly-obtrusive business models, but Square Enix's latest release Theatrhythm Final Fantasy for iOS is not a game that people should be attacking.

Why? Because it's not exploitative at all. You put as much money into it as you want, and then you stop paying and get to keep everything your money has bought. There's no consumable energy systems, no gambling to get rare cards, no time-limited premium items… but I'm getting ahead of myself. Allow me to back up and explain what the deal is for those who are not familiar with Theatrhythm and its new iOS incarnation.

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy was originally released as a Nintendo 3DS game — specifically, a full-price retail game on cartridge. It includes a variety of songs from all the Final Fantasy games from I-XIII (excluding the spin-off X-2 and XIII-2 titles) plus also offers some additional songs for download for a fee. It is a rhythm-based music game — you tap, swipe and hold the touchscreen in time with various pieces of music to trigger various visual effects inspired by past Final Fantasy games. It's a simple but fun game, as most rhythm games are.

The game itself has several modes, and an obvious sense of progression. You play through all the songs on the easiest difficulty, then on the harder difficulty, all the while collecting an in-game currency called "Rhythmia". When you've collected 10,000 Rhythmia, you've basically "finished" the game, though there's nothing stopping you going back and trying to beat your scores, taking on the various "Challenge" missions or indeed purchasing the additional content.

Now Theatrhythm Final Fantasy is also an iOS game. Only instead of doing a straight port, Square Enix instead decided to revamp the game completely for mobile play. This is wise, because people play games on their mobile phone very differently to how they play on a dedicated games system, whether it's a handheld or a TV-connected console.

Instead of the sense of progression, you're presented with all the songs you have available — two in the basic free download, with others available via in-app purchase. You can play any of the songs you own at any time in a one-off session — good for on the toilet — or you can take on the "Quest" mode, which challenges you to make it through a bunch of songs randomly selected from your collection with a single HP bar. Quest mode rewards you with collectible cards and other goodies, so there's plenty of replay value — meanwhile, those who have less time to spare can just fire it up for a single song, then quit.

The press surrounding the iOS version of Theatrhythm has been placing undue focus on the amount of downloadable content available for the game and how much it costs if you were to buy all of it. Now, I'll grant to you that if you were to buy all of the songs available for Theatrhythm right now it will cost you a lot of money, and that figure will only increase as Square Enix adds content. But here's the thing — no-one is saying that you have to buy all of that content. I have bought one pack of content (a bundle of music from Final Fantasy VIII) and I'm happy with that for now — when I tire of it, I can purchase more or put the game aside. There is no obligation for me to buy all of that content, because that's not how free-to-play works — or not how it's supposed to work anyway.

Put it this way — if you played Rock Band or Guitar Hero, did you feel obliged to purchase every single piece of DLC? Probably not; and here with Theatrhythm for iOS you don't have the cost of entry — you simply pay for what you want. (Granted, both Rock Band and Guitar Hero come with a wide selection of songs, but I know very few people who like all of those)

I'd argue that Theatrhythm is actually one of the least-obnoxious implementations of free-to-play I've seen for a long time — as I said earlier, there's no obligation to keep paying over and over again due to energy systems and consumable items — you simply put in as much money as you would like to spend, if any, and then you get to keep that content. The free version is limited in what it offers, but it's enough for you to tell whether or not you'd like to spend more time with the game — if you decide you don't like it, no problem, simply delete the app and you're not out of pocket; if you decide you do like it, however, you can spread out how much content you choose to purchase over time.

Basically, I think what I'm saying is that we should stop trying to see free-to-play as universally evil. There are good and bad implementations, and Theatrhythm is a good one. Don't believe me? Go play any of the interminable string of shitty card-battle games on the Mobage and GREE platforms to compare and contrast. Then you'll see.

1061: Hell from Week

Well, that's the particularly awful week done and dusted. Sort of. I still have more Shit to Do next week, but hopefully things should calm down a bit from here. We'll see. I am looking forward to a bit of time off at Christmas to just relax and, you know, chill out.

I've been somewhat out of the loop today due to the things I've been doing, but I did managed to catch the awful news out of the States today — for those who missed it, there's been a mass shooting at a school in Connecticut. I don't know all the details so I don't want to comment on it, but it's massively sucktastic. I feel somewhat distanced from it being over here in the UK as I am, but I know enough people in the US for it to carry some degree of resonance for me. Facebook and Twitter are full of messages of support and debates about gun control at the moment. The inevitable arguments are ensuing from the usual suspects. I don't really want to get involved, but it's pretty clear that something needs to be done.

Anyway, that sounds an awful lot like commenting on it, and many people have doubtless done so far more eloquently than I today, and will doubtless continue to do so over the next few days. (Fox News, of course, have been quick to blame video games, but fuck Fox News). So I will leave that there.

I am still ill. I drove for two hours after a full day of "civic duty" today and am now exhausted, battered and feeling like utter shite. Andie seems to think I'm a day "behind" her in this plague, however, so hopefully I should improve a bit from here. I hope so. Obviously I'm not comparing my own pitiful physical state to a tragedy which has unfolded in the US, but, well, this week has just been one of those ones that you get the impression the entire world would like to erase from existence.

I'd be fine with that. Also with a fast-forward button. The end of next week would be nice. KTHX.

1060: Magical Diary

Still feeling shitty, but you don't want to read entry after entry about how shitty I feel, so I'll talk about a game I've been playing instead. I've had it in my Steam library for probably well over a year now — possibly more — but have only just got around to it. And wouldn't you know it? It's great.

The game in question is Magical Diary. This game initially attracted my attention with its promise of combining dating sim-like mechanics with dungeon crawling and puzzle solving. Any combination of "dating sim and…" will immediately get my attention and has done ever since I played Persona 3 for the first time, and here it's particularly well-implemented.

Here's the setup: you're a 16 year old girl (yes you are!) who has recently been inducted into Iris Academy, a Hogwarts-like establishment in New Hampshire that trains witches and wizards in the ways of pentachromatic magic. During your time at the school, you'll be juggling your time between studying the five colours of magic, each of which unlocks various different types of spells; managing your stress levels (which, naturally, increase with too much studying); and getting to know your fellow students, some of whom are rather more odd than others.

The gameplay is something like ancient eroge (and particular favorite of mine) True Love — at the start of each week, you set up your schedule, choosing which classes to attend (if any) and then letting the week unfold. Depending on your whereabouts at various points in the week along with past choices, numerous events will unfold and you'll have the opportunity to do things like run for class president, shop for magical accessories (which, pleasingly, appear on your character avatar as well as affecting your various stats) and, of course, go on dates.

Every so often, the school will throw you an "exam", which involves tossing you into a dungeon and demanding that you find your way out using the spells you've managed to learn. Generally there are several ways to solve a dungeon — for example, in one early case, you're locked in an area with no apparent exits, so you can do several things: methodically search the walls for illusions, cast a spell to stir up the air and indicate where the way out might be, cast a spell to determine if any living creatures passed by recently and so on. As you level up your five colours of magic, you learn a variety of interesting-sounding spells — and this isn't your usual "fireball, ice bolt" and that sort of thing — no, here you're dealing with things like empathy spells, manipulating matter, fooling the senses and all sorts of other things. It's really quite something.

I'm not that far into it yet, but I'm liking what I've seen so far. The graphics are good, the music is catchy, the writing is witty and full of character and the gameplay is interesting. It also looks like being a game that will be well worth replaying several times to tackle situations in different ways — I'll be very interested to do so when the time comes.

Right. Time to dope myself up on drugs and try and get some sleep. Or possibly play some more Magical Diary. One or the other…

1059: High-Tech Hobo

I'm writing this lying on the floor of my now-empty bedroom, covered in a slightly-malodorous duvet and trying not to let the cold of an unfurnished house in to my Secret Kingdom of under-duvet warmth.

Yes, it's that peculiar part of moving house where it's not entirely clear where you're supposed to be sleeping or how, not helped by the fact that my "civic duty" responsibilities in Swindon are preventing me from actually moving in to my new place for the moment.

This is, I'm sure you'll appreciate, somewhat annoying, and it explains why I'm effectively sleeping rough in what is still technically "my" house. I feel like a tramp, albeit an Internet-connected tramp surrounded by technological gadgets and who doesn't have to beg for change from anyone passing by. I am getting memories of my university days, when I used to proudly brag that I could happily "sleep anywhere" and normally could, and frequently spent whole weeks sofa-surfing between several of my friends' houses rather than going home. (Apparently I've always had something of an issue with living too far away from my friends to be quite practical to varying degrees.)

I'm also ill, which is making me grumpy. I have some sort of bunged-up head thing and a nasty cough. My head feels constantly like I'm going to faint or something (I haven't — it's just stuffed up with crap) and every time I cough I feel like my intestines are going to fly out of my mouth. Trying to hold this in while fulfilling one's civic duty is not the easiest thing in the world. Much water has been consumed.

I tried to get to sleep a little while back, but at 10 past 9 in the evening, that's clearly not going to happen just yet. I wish it were possible to just hit a button and shut yourself down — that would be much, much easier than the annoying bollocks the human body normally has to do to get to sleep. I'm not even entirely sure how to make myself fall asleep, but I do know that some people can do it frustratingly easily. As in, you'll be having a conversation one moment, they'll be snoring away the next. I've known a number of people like this over the years, both male and female.

My head is throbbing so I'm going to leave that there for now. This is a rubbish post but right this second I don't really give a toss. I have to be up early tomorrow, then I have work to do in the afternoon with no desk. Which will be nice.

Still, I just have to keep an eye on the long-term goal. When all this is done and dusted I'll be living where I want to be and life will (hopefully) be good. I just wish there was a fast-forward button to jump through this annoying bit.

1058: Badvertising Revisited

[Preamble: I know I said comics would be back, but I realise this was a rather foolish promise to make given that I am in the process of moving house and my Mac (which holds the Comic Life software I use to produce them) is now packed up. So you can live without them for a little while, I'm sure — at least until the chaos of the next couple of weeks is resolved!]

As I grow older, I find myself less and less tolerant to the tactics of marketing people. I can't quite work out if this is simply my own intolerance building up as a result of my advancing years, or if adverts really are significantly more annoying than they were in the past. I have a feeling there's a touch of both, because there's a whole lot of new technology to make advertising more annoying these days.

Specifically, let's consider Internet-based advertising. Now, the vast majority of content on the Internet is available for free (connection charges notwithstanding) so it has to make its money somehow — and it just so happens that advertising is a reasonable way to do that. (Whether or not it's a "good" way is a matter of some debate, as traditional advertising models seem to be becoming less and less effective among savvy Internet users, many of whom use ad-blocking software to make their life considerably less intruded-upon by marketing people.)

I have no real problem with advertising being used as a means of keeping content free. I'll sit through a couple of pre-roll adverts when watching, say, 4OD on YouTube. I'd have to sit through adverts on TV, and there are actually fewer adverts on YouTube than when it's broadcast live on TV. No problem there.

What I do have an issue with is when adverts start to get too big for their boots and start engaging in any of the following behaviour:

Making noise without me telling them to
Monopolising my web browser and/or actively getting in the way of what I'm trying to do
Urging me to "interact" with them
Urging me to share them on Facebook.

All of these things are monumentally irritating, albeit for different reasons.

In the case of noisy adverts, they are a pain simply because they make noise and it's usually difficult to shut them off. And there tends to only be a couple of them available at once, meaning that it's entirely possible that several times in a session you'll hear that stupid woman from the air freshener advert whingeing about being "stuck in bad odours" or something. You can stay there, love.

Monopolising my web browser is something that really pisses me off because it ruins the experience of the site. The most recent example I've seen is on GameFAQs' mobile site, which occasionally gets completely taken over by a Samsung advert. You'll be looking at the page, trying to tap on a link when suddenly these stupid arrows appear, inviting you to "swipe". "Fuck off," you'll say — possibly out loud — until you realise that you can't do anything on this page until you do as it says, and then you're stuck in a stupid interactive "experience" about a phone you probably don't give a shit about. (Alternatively, you refresh the page until it goes away.)

This brings me on to another point: interactive adverts. Why? Why would I want to play your stupid game where I get to actually clean the grime off the filthy worktop? Why would I want to pick which one of your vapid Z-list celebrities tells me about your awful product? "Get ready to interact!" they'll say. "Get ready to fuck off!" I'll say, particularly if, as they so frequently are, are also browser-monopolising and noisy ads.

Finally is the seemingly-obligatory necessity to connect everything to Facebook and Twitter. I've lost count of the number of adverts I've seen recently that include hashtags, Facebook pages or even, in some cases, buttons to share the advert on Twitter or Facebook directly. Pro-Tip: if you click either of those buttons, you are a dickhead. And if you don't know why, well, I don't think I can help you.

Advertising serves a purpose, and if it keeps out of my way I'm happy to let it sit there to help pay the bills for a particular site — I don't use an ad-blocker and will probably keep it that way for the moment. But the moment advertising starts actively obstructing what I'm trying to do, that's when I start thinking about installing one. And that's not going to make me think positively about your product; it means I'm not going to see it at all.

1057: The Week from Hell

Page_1 This week… I have been both looking forward to and dreading this upcoming week, as I believe I've already mentioned a couple of times. There are a number of reasons for this.

I'm looking forward to it because we now have the keys to our new apartment, which means we will soon be living in our new apartment. Our new apartment, I believe I mentioned, is in Southampton, which is a place I've been trying to get back to for the last couple of years ever since Bad Things happened and caused me to have to leave.

I am dreading it because the moving process involves 1) packing all my shit up and 2) moving all my shit. To be fair, Andie has done the vast majority of the packing, meaning there's actually relatively little left to do. But that last bit of packing is always the worst bit, involving, as it does, picking up all those stray bits of rubbish you've been inexplicably hoarding for the last few years, and which have moved house with you several times for no discernible reason. It involves finding all those bits of paper that you think "might be important" and deciding not to throw them out "just in case you need them." You never need them. I have a (now-broken) expanding file full of such pieces of paper, which I'm strongly considering just whizzing instead of dragging it with me yet again. Obviously I will remove important pieces of paper like my driving licence, insurance documentation and that printout of my friends and I from the Leonardo da Vinci machine in Sega World before I throw it away. Or perhaps I will just take it with me yet again.

I am also dreading this week because of the fact I'm on some very inconveniently-timed jury service. Obviously as this is going on at the time of writing I am unable to say anything about this, so you'll just have to take my word for it that it is very inconveniently timed and I could really do without it right now. (It's a shame, because if I weren't in the middle of moving house, I'd probably find the whole experience quite interesting — I have a mild fascination with the workings of the law, perhaps sparked by my love of the Ace Attorney series of DS games.)

Still. Despite all the chaos surrounding me, somehow I have been organised enough to complete almost all of my week's work in the space of a day and a half, with only a few bits and pieces to clean up as the week progresses.

It's all going to be fine. It's all going to be fine. By the time Christmas is here, I'll be living back where I want to be with a person I want to be with, and everything will be fine and dandy. Hopefully.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go and lie face-down on my bed and scream into my pillow for a bit.

1056: More Things I Thought Were True, But Aren't

[I have written twelve articles of between 500 and 1,000 words each today so I am too tired to do a comic strip. They'll be back tomorrow.]

A long while back, while I was in my faintly delirious "holy shit my life has just fallen apart, I need to distract myself in any way possible" phase, I composed a series of fever-dream blog posts that I have a feeling might have actually been relatively amusing. (Or at least I found them amusing. Your mileage may, as always, vary.) One of these posts was Things I Thought Were True, But Aren't, in which I explored a selection of things that I had ingrained into my brain for various reasons — either I'd overheard my family or friends say them and gullibly believed them, or I'd simply never seen anything to prove my opinion wrong.

So, in the spirit of that original post from way back when, here are some more Things I Thought Were True, But Aren't.

1. Taking a drink into the bathroom is forbidden.

You just can't do it. You shouldn't do it. I never questioned why this was — I believe the somewhat vague explanation of it being "unhygienic" may have been bandied around at some point — but over time I just sort of gradually grew to make up reasons why people didn't take drinks into the bathroom, unless they were attending a house party, in which case everyone must take their drinks into the bathroom.

My favourite explanation of why you shouldn't take drinks into the bathroom is because of all the "poo particles" floating around in the air as a result of whoever last had a dump or did a really big fart. If you take a drink — particularly a hot one — into the bathroom, then all the poo particles are naturally attracted to the drink and infect it with poo. So when you start drinking your drink that you took into the bathroom, you'll then be drinking poo. And no-one wants to drink poo. So don't do it.

2. You can make yourself dream about a thing by thinking about it really hard before you go to sleep.

I'm actually in two minds as to whether or not this one is actually true. Because certainly when you do something intense (get those thoughts out of your mind, hentai) before going to sleep, you'll often dream about it. See: playing too much Tetris/Klax/Dr. Mario before bed and consequent surreal dreams. (My favourite was the one where I met the lady who said "Klax Wave!" before every level and "Ooh!" every time you got a 4-tile Klax in Klax on the Atari Lynx, and she was like totally fit and into me and we… wait, what was I talking about again?)

For a long time, though, I was utterly convinced that lying there with your eyes shut trying to picture something really vividly would influence your dreams. Of course, it doesn't; your brain occupies itself too much with trying to picture something really vividly rather than actually attempting to shut off and get to sleep, making the whole exercise a fruitless endeavour. I've also found that as I've got older, my concentration span for lying awake trying to think of things has lessened considerably than it was when I was a teenager. This is perhaps a side-effect of the build-up of depression and anxiety over the years.

3. The first time you see something is the first time it ever happened/existed.

I genuinely believed this as a kid. The first time I got a copy of Fast Forward magazine, I thought it was the first issue. The first time I saw things on television, I thought it was the first time they'd been broadcast. Kind of silly, now that I think back on it.

This attitude did sort of perpetuate itself even after I left home, though. When a friend referred to baseball cap and tracksuit-wearing white trash as "chavs", it was the first time I'd heard that word and I thus assumed that it had originated in our social group. Of course, it transpires that the word "chav" is very much in common usage to mean exactly what we thought it meant. It must have spread around the country somehow. I wonder where it originated? I'm pretty sure it didn't originate from my friend Cat on the No. 11 bus heading to Safeway in Portswood, Southampton.

4. If you fart when you're not ready, you'll shit yourself.

I have no doubt that in certain circumstances, this may be true, but for the most part, the act of farting and the act of shitting are two distinct motions — unless, of course, you're attempting to force out the fart, which carries a significant risk of following through. Let it come naturally and you'll be safe. Probably. Right? OH GOD NOW I NEVER WANT TO FART AGAIN.

5. If you sleep on your back, you'll…

To date, I'm not entirely sure if this actually happened or if I dreamed it at some point, but I am absolutely convinced that for a sex education class at secondary school, all the boys were taken to the library while all the girls went off to talk about periods, and we watched a video of a 1950s-style very British man explaining how if you slept on your back, you'd probably spunk your pants in your sleep. He obviously didn't use that exact terminology — I forget the exact words he used, probably "nocturnal emissions" or something — but I vividly remember it. At the same time, though, I also have the strongest feeling that I might have made it up. Because it just doesn't seem very likely.

That said, I used to have a recurring dream where I was going to have sex with someone on the London Underground, but couldn't go through with it because I didn't have the sheet music for it, so… wait a minute, that doesn't really help at all.

I'm off to bed now. To sleep on my side. I have a hellish week coming up. See you on the other side, and apologies in advance for any day's entries that are just "AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHH".

1055: Tim's Wedding Day

My friends Tim and Sophie got married today, and I'm sure they'll be delighted I'm marking the occasion with a blog post hastily composed on my phone because the Wi-Fi at this hotel doesn't seem to work properly.

It was a very nice wedding, all told. I know people always say that weddings are at least "nice" if not "beautiful" and "wonderful" and so on, but it really was. Taking place at Cain Manor, an old big house (remarkably similar to the one Tim grew up in) near Farnham in Surrey, the whole affair was pleasingly compact in nature — the ceremony started at 4, was over by 4.30 and after not too much milling around we were sat down waiting for dinner. An electrical mishap delayed the food a bit but even with that delay, it didn't feel like there was too much standing around doing nothing, which was a blessed relief.

Tim and Sophie also decided not to have an official photographer either, which meant there was no standing around waiting for all that shenanigans either. I was relieved about that — one of my least favourite things about other people's weddings is standing around in the cold while waiting for some person with a camera to finish shouting "Friends! University friends! Obscure cousins neither the bride nor the groom recognise!" Don't get me wrong, wedding photographers do a great job and I know several people who make a good living from it, but man, that waiting around is dull. I can only imagine what it must be like for the bride and groom, having to pull increasingly-false smiles as their fingertips slowly succumb to frostbite and they're surrounded by relatives they don't know the names of.

Andie and I are back at the hotel we're staying at now. It's about 4 miles away from the wedding venue, and is called The Devil's Punchbowl after the nearby park. It seems like a pleasant enough place, though it would be nice if we couldn't hear all the drunkards in the pub part of the hotel doing karaoke, and it would also be nice if the Wi-Fi worked properly. The room also smells like a dental surgery for some reason, but that's all right.

It's been nice to get away for the day. There's a super-stressful week coming up for both of us — I have jury duty and we're moving house. I also have to squeeze my usual work in somewhere! Still, I'm not thinking about that right now. Just going to have a nice rest and return to stressing out tomorrow!

1054: Death Means Nothing in Miami

Page_1 So, after being repeatedly bugged by almost everyone I know to try Hotline Miami, I tried Hotline Miami. Actually, to be more accurate, I sat down to play some Hotline Miami several hours ago and somehow here I am at 1am having completed it. What happened there?

I had been warned of the strange time-distorting properties of this curious little game by those who had played it, but having experienced it myself this evening… yes, there's something very odd going on there. A genuine feeling of, for want of a better word, "addiction" — of not wanting to stop until you've seen it through, even if the level you're on is ridiculously difficult. My "Die 1,000 times" achievement attests to the fact that I apparently did spend quite some time on it this evening.

But allow me to back up for a moment for those who are unfamiliar with Hotline Miami and its dubious charms.

Hotline Miami is basically that game the Daily Mail have been worried about for years. It's a straight-up game about murdering people with a variety of implements. It's gory, it's gross… and after about five or ten minutes of playing, it completely desensitises you to the acts of wanton violence you're committing. It then shows its true (neon) colours — despite its hyper-violence, it's actually a sort of puzzle game, a sort of lightning-fast strategy game, a sort of… I don't know. I don't like throwing this word around as it's rarely true, but I have a suspicious feeling that it's *whisper* unique.

The setup of Hotline Miami is that you, the faceless, nameless protagonist, repeatedly receive strange phone calls from a variety of sources. The phone calls themselves seem relatively innocuous, but when you get to the location you were told to go to, you apparently feel a strange urge to don an animal mask and then slaughter everyone who is there. Which is sort of convenient, because everyone there also wants to slaughter you.

You work your way through the levels by killing all the enemies. You have to scavenge weapons from dead enemies or the environment, and guns only have a small amount of ammunition in them when you do find them. Melee kills are silent, whereas attacking with a gun will often bring enemies running. When enemies are unaware of your presence, they follow very simple, predictable patterns. All you have to do is complete each stage of each chapter by killing all the enemies, at which point you'll receive a score breakdown showing how you did. The better you score, the better your grade and the more stuff you unlock.

Unlockable stuff includes weapons, which show up randomly in the levels, and masks, which you can equip before the level starts. Each mask has a special ability — one provides larger amounts of ammunition in guns, for example, while another makes your bare-handed attack (which normally just knocks enemies down, necessitating a ground attack to finish them off) a fatal strike. After unlocking the latter, I found that I didn't really use the others all that much. Perhaps I'm just unimaginative.

There is a plot that gradually unfolds as you progress through the levels. Like the swirly, pixelated, colourful visuals, it is rather vague and dream-like, and the end leaves a large number of questions. There are a few nice twists and turns, but it's not really the star of the show here — it simply provides a loose justification for the various top-down locations in which you visit and kill everything.

Hotline Miami is tough. There are levels that will repeatedly kill you over and over and over again — a thousand times or more, apparently — but somehow it will keep you playing in that same, inescapably compulsive way that Super Meat Boy encourages "just one more go". The fact that respawning after death is completely instantaneous helps this somewhat — there's no real feeling of being "penalised" for dying, it's simply part of the learning experience for each level. Death ceases to become something that makes you want to throw your controller out of the window, and instead becomes an exhortation from the game to try again and do better. It's still frustrating — I called the game (or possibly myself) "dickhead" a good few times while playing — but the important thing to note about it is that when you die, it's usually your own fault rather than that of the game. This is the sign of a well-designed difficult game — one where you accept that you'll make mistakes and learn from them, rather than where dying repeatedly simply makes you want to switch off and play something that repeatedly massages your ego, gives you a cuddle and tells you everything is going to be all right.

Anyway. That's Hotline Miami. If you have no issue with your games being borderline abusive in terms of difficulty, hyper-violent with little to no remorse, and leave you feeling like you've had some sort of drug-fuelled experience for several hours, then you should probably check it out. Conveniently, it's 50% off on Steam this weekend. How about that.

You should also check out this "two-headed review" over at Games Are Evil.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to sleep… and probably have some very peculiar dreams.

1053: Kira Kira, Sparkle Sparkle

Page_1 Having completely and utterly 100%-ly finished classic visual novel Kana Little Sister, which you can read all about here (and in the book I'm still fully intending on writing and have already written just under 3,000 words of), naturally I immediately started on a new project, and one of a markedly different tone.

Kira Kira (which, apparently, is Japanese onomatopoeia for "sparkle sparkle") is a game about a bunch of high school kids (natch) who decide to put together a band. I haven't got far enough to know whether or not their band is particularly successful, but given the intro sequence showed them well and truly rocking out with suitably ridiculous hairstyles and outfits, I can only assume that they enjoy at least a small degree of success. Given that there is also a sort of sequel called Kira Kira Curtain Call, too, it's probably a fair assumption.

The reason I'm playing Kira Kira now is actually because of a completely different game I picked up a while back called Deardrops. Deardrops is also about a bunch of high school kids who decide to put together a band — I think, anyway, as I haven't played that one at all yet — but a fellow (and considerably more experienced) VN enthusiast on Twitter recommended that I play Kira Kira first, because some of the characters have cameo appearances in Deardrops. Got all that? Good.

I like this sort of "crossover" idea, and apparently it's not all that uncommon — I understand that the story of Kana Little Sister is depicted as a movie in another game by the same developer called Crescendo, which is also in my growing pile of shame. (I have a sub-pile purely devoted to VNs, but given that the damn things are so time-consuming yet enjoyable, I'm not getting to anything outside it at the moment! That's… fine by me, to be perfectly honest. But I digress.)

Anyway. Kira Kira. As I say, I'm not all that far into it yet so I'm hesitant to say too much right now, but so far early impressions are very positive. Coming off the back of Kana Little Sister's 640×480 visuals and distinctly synthesized music — both of which are great, I hasten to add, just obviously dated — the super-sharp, crisp visuals, glorious digital music, quality voice acting and wonderfully atmospheric ambient sounds of Kira Kira make it obvious that this is a much more recent production. It's a much more multi-sensory, "multimedia" sort of experience, and it makes a massive difference. Kana immerses the player with its compelling story and interesting characters despite its relatively simplistic aesthetics; Kira Kira has, so far, immersed me with its presentation — it's a bit early for me to comment on the characters and plot so far, but they seem to be an interesting enough bunch.

Kira Kira isn't just interesting from an audio-visual presentation perspective, however. No, the way it's written and the way the text is presented is quite interesting, too, adopting a full-screen "novel" style similar to that seen in Kana Little Sister rather than the more common "adventure" (smaller text box, larger, unblocked image) interface seen in many other titles.

In terms of the way it's written, it seems to be quite wordy so far, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It allows the player to understand the thoughts of the protagonist quite deeply, and the narration is presented almost as if the protagonist is talking to the player at times — not quite breaking the fourth wall, but certainly testing its structural integrity. Maejima-kun, it seems, thinks about things a lot, including his feelings about people, the things he's seen and where his life is going. His introspective nature makes the beginning of the game seem rather slow paced — it's a good hour or two before the OP video plays — but, as I say, I have no issue with this personally; he seems like an interesting character thus far, so I'm happy to have the opportunity to get to know him. Plus on subsequent playthroughs, the "Skip" button is right there if I want to fast-forward through all his exposition.

What's really interesting about the writing, though, is that it provides a uniquely Japanese take on something that is peculiar to the Western hemisphere — rock music. The setup of the game is that the school's "Second Literature Club", which Our Hero is a member of having quit the tennis club some time back, are struggling to think of something to do for the upcoming cultural festival. Naturally, after Our Hero and the resident squeaky-voiced, faintly annoying ditzy girl Kirari attend a live show by local legends "STAR GENERATION" (the capital letters are important), they decide that forming a band is The Right Thing To Do, despite the fact that none of them play an instrument or indeed know anything about music whatsoever. Enter Our Hero's friend, a fan of punk music that hasn't been to any live shows himself, who decides to educate the club with an informative video about The Sex Pistols and the punk movement. The club are understandably rather bewildered about all this, having hilariously little understanding of culture outside of Japan ("R&B? Isn't that music for black people?") but decide that yes, they'll give it a shot.

That's as far as I've got so far, but it's an intriguing setup with potential for plenty of hijinks — yes, hijinks — along the way. I'm looking forward to seeing how it progresses — and to hearing more of the excellent soundtrack.