1276: Be Patient

Those who are "against" video games are always quick to mock how supposedly "brainless" and "useless" they are — the other day, for example, a writer for The Times displayed a staggering amount of ignorance on the issue, which resulted in this article.

But video games can teach us all manner of new skills and abilities. Besides the old favourite hand-eye co-ordination — everyone says it because it's true — games also help train our reflexes, develop the problem-solving parts of our brain, express our creativity, socialise with others and all manner of other things.

One of the things they've helped me with most over the years is the matter of patience. I have a significant amount of patience for irritating situations, which is something I was regularly complimented on back when I was a teacher. (Having patience to endure irritating situations is very much a benefit when you're dealing with a class of 30 misbehaving little scrotes.)

Actually, it's not just irritating situations I have patience for; it's the patience to keep beavering away at something until I'm successful (also file under: stubbornness); the patience to try and achieve something even if I don't know that I can do it; the patience to learn things that initially seem difficult.

A combination of video games and learning musical instruments growing up taught me this particular virtue. And it pays off.

My patience means that I have a lot more time for, say, games that take a while to get going; games that might not be the most accomplished technically, but which have their heart in the right place. My patience means that I am able to keep trying a particularly difficult part of a game until I'm successful at it; my patience means that I'm willing to explore beyond the superficial in games that have hidden depths.

This sense of patience has persisted over the years, too; replaying old first-person shooters such as Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold recently has revealed that they're a lot more difficult than I remember, and people with less in the way of patience would undoubtedly give up very quickly. But I've been persisting, and it's been an enjoyable experience to return to these games that I grew up with — while they may look dated, they're still extremely fun, so long as you can deal with the fact that these are games that make much more of an effort to actually kill the player than a lot of modern titles.

I'm weirdly proud of my sense of patience, because it means I can find a lot more things enjoyable than some other people. The games in which I've made use of my patience to look past flaws and problems have become some of my favourite games of all time, no exaggeration, and it's largely due to the fact that I know relatively few people have seen the things I have.

That may sound smug and superior and for that I apologise (a bit, anyway) — but I wouldn't have things any other way.

1275: Got Out

I successfully put my proposed plan from yesterday's post into action today. Now it is just a matter of sticking to it.

Walking isn't as inherently satisfying as running, because it's not as obviously tiring. But it's still a reasonably good workout — Runkeeper assured me that I had burned a significant number of calories by the time I got back home. In total, I was out for just over an hour, and walked about 3.5 miles in total.

I've always been something of an indoor person, but I do like just going for a walk sometimes. This is a surprise to me, because the idea of "going for a walk" was bewilderingly ridiculous when I was young. Why, I thought, would you ever just go out with the intention of not actually going anywhere? Why, I pondered, would you ever just go out without a final destination in mind?

Well, now I'm a little older, I can appreciate the answers to those questions a little more: the reason you would do those things is simply to appreciate the things that are around you, and perhaps discover some interesting new things in the process.

I'm not sure when my attitudes changed on this note, but I have a feeling it was when I was forced to move back home for a while after my marriage broke down. Staying in the house just made me feel exceedingly depressed all the time, so I welcomed any excuse to get out and do something, even if that "something" wasn't really anything in particular. I'd go out for a run around the area; I'd go out for a walk to the local woods; I'd walk out of the village by one road, all the way around its perimeter and re-enter from a completely different angle. In the process, I found myself exploring places that I'd either never been to before, or which I hadn't been to for a significant number of years.

When I go out for a walk, I enjoy it when I can find myself surrounded by nature. Again, I note that I've never really been an outdoor person, but I do feel something of a curious affinity for the greenery of forests and otherwise wooded areas. I enjoy being under a canopy of leaves, sunlight dappled on the ground through the few breaks in the green ceiling above me. I enjoy the crunch of twigs and dead leaves underfoot as I walk down a dirt path; I enjoy seeing peculiar, twisted, gnarled trees that have grown in peculiar directions for reasons known only to themselves.

I'm reasonably fortunate where I am now because I'm pretty close to Southampton Common, which has a lot of greenery. There's a lot of open space, too, what with it being a common and all, but there's also plenty of wooded areas with well-worn pathways to explore. There's also a creepy graveyard on the boundary which is interesting to wander through.

I'm going to try and get in the habit of going for a walk every morning if possible. It worked out quite well today — I got up early, went out, walked for an hour, got back, had breakfast, had time to chill out for half an hour, then started work, and I didn't feel like I'd "wasted" any time. Whether or not I feel "better" is a matter of some debate, but I can't really expect to feel significantly different after just one day, can I?

Well. Let's stick with it and see what happens, anyway.

1274: Get Out

As I mentioned a few days ago, I'm feeling a little low. Whether this is a symptom of some sort of summer-related Seasonal Affective Disorder or if it's just a symptom of my ongoing depression I don't know, but I am feeling a little low.

One of the reasons I'm feeling low is because I feel fat and gross. I always feel fat and gross, to be fair, because I am fat and gross, but there have been times when I didn't feel quite as bad about myself as I do right now. Those times had one common factor: I was indulging in a regular exercise routine, either at the gym and pool, or out on the roads running.

I haven't done any real exercise for quite some time for various reasons — mostly a lack of motivation related to depression, which just feeds the cycle and makes it worse, I know, but also just recently the blazing hot weather we've been having every day hasn't been helping either. The last thing I feel like doing when it feels like a greenhouse outside is picking up my pace to anything more than my usual walk, let alone persisting at that pace for 30-45 minutes at a time.

Consequently, most of the good work I've done on running in the past has been largely undone, and I'm a mess with regard to fitness. I don't really know what to do about it, either; I just feel completely unmotivated and have absolutely no desire whatsoever to go out and "better myself", but at the same time know that if I don't I'm going to continue along in this funk not really wanting to do anything.

This Oatmeal comic got me thinking somewhat, because I recognised a lot of the things he was talking about therein. It's almost — almost — inspired me to get up and go out this evening, but I'm not really feeling it right now. I may make a start on some sort of regime tomorrow, however.

What I'm thinking I might do is rather than jump straight back into the demoralising experience of being a fat guy trying to run, I'll just try and do a long walk each day. That's something that feels "doable" and "achievable," and from there I can always work my way up to doing something a bit more strenuous. I'm not talking about a casual amble, just to be clear; I'm talking about a brisk walk for a significant distance for somewhere in the region of 45 minutes to an hour. I live right near Southampton Common, which is the ideal venue for such perambulations, so I may just start taking advantage of that fact.

Here's my plan, then, which it remains to be seen whether or not I'll be able to stick to: I'm going to try and get up reasonably early-ish — i.e. considerably more than half an hour before I'm supposed to start doing work — and head out for a walk in the morning before it gets too unbearably hot. Then I will come home, have breakfast, relax, chill out and start work. Hopefully that small change will have some sort of impact, if not on my body then at least on my mental state.

I'm making no promises as to whether or not this is actually going to do anything, but having good intentions is a first step at least. Let's see if they lead anywhere.

1273: You Have Earned a Trophy

I can feel my attitudes towards achievements and trophies mellowing somewhat. While I still think people who play games just to get the trophies/achievements are big pillocks — and people who refuse to buy a PS3 game if it doesn't have a Platinum trophy are even bigger pillocks — I have started to think about them a bit differently, particularly with regard to PSN's implementation of them.

The way I've started thinking of them now is as another means of showing my appreciation for a quality (or at least enjoyable) piece of entertainment to the people who make it. Trophy data is public and synced online, so it's not unreasonable to assume that developers and publishers are looking at the proportion of people who achieve particular milestones in their games. Thinking of it in that way, I'm happy to put in a bit of extra effort to attain a Platinum trophy in a game I especially enjoyed, as it shows that I liked the game enough to want to see everything it had to offer. That enjoyment is then recorded permanently — or as permanent as my PSN profile is, anyway — for all to see.

I've achieved Platinum trophies — or 100% completion, where a game doesn't have a Platinum — in relatively few games to date. One was Thatgamecompany's Flower, which remains one of the most beautiful, moving interactive experiences I've ever had — and yes, I think it's better than Journey. The second was Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, which ended up being way better than I thought it would be; the third was Ar Tonelico Qoga, which was the climax to a series of games that now ranks among my favourites of all time. At my present rate, the fourth will be Time and Eternity, which I want to give some recognition and love to purely because it's been so thoroughly (and slightly unfairly, in my opinion) panned by a lot of critics, and completely ignored by others. In the case of all these trophies, attaining the Platinum represented a good balance between being able to enjoy the game normally, and going out of my way to make a bit of effort; I wouldn't have bothered if achieving it required too much in the way of unenjoyable grindy bollocks. (On Xbox, incidentally, the only games I've achieved 100% of the, uh, achievements on are Oblivion and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. In the case of Oblivion, chasing the achievements actually spoiled the experience significantly for me because it directed what should have been a freeform experience far too much, and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX had insultingly easy achievements that really didn't reflect whether or not you were actually good at the game.)

I think much more fondly of PSN trophies than I do of Xbox or Steam achievements for some reason. I think it's because the "value" of PSN trophies is more immediately obvious. Sure, Xbox achievements have Gamerscore values, but Gamerscore is fairly meaningless, particularly as it's applied inconsistently between games and, well, doesn't do anything. Trophies, meanwhile, have instantly recognisable values; bronze ones are "fodder" for the most part; silver ones require a little more effort; gold ones are generally either challenging or time-consuming; and platinum ones show true dedication to a game. To say you have "Platinumed" a game is a much simpler, more elegant way of saying that you've done everything on that game's arbitrary checklist than "I got all the achievements".

Also, the PSN "You have earned a trophy" noise is infinitely better than the Xbox's "plink", and anyone who says otherwise is wrong. The Xbox noise is the same sound as when someone comes online, for heaven's sake; the PSN one sounds like you've picked up a powerup in a retro game. See? BETTER.

1272: The Worst Headache in the World

I went to see Akira at the cinema this evening. I recall around the period anime first got fashionable in the UK that there was a considerable degree of snobbery about this movie, with people saying "oh, you have to see it on the big screen" and whatnot whenever it came on TV.

You know what, though? Having now seen it both on TV and on the big screen… yeah, the snobs were right. It's spectacular.

The reason I was seeing Akira at all this evening was because my good friends George and Mitu, whose marriage we are attending later in the year, happened to be in the area and had booked tickets. George popped up on Steam earlier and asked me if I fancied coming out at short notice for a 10.30pm showing, and because I'm never really doing anything of note, I accepted. (If anyone else is in the area and wants to do something fun… try me. I'm usually available.) So thanks, George and Mitu, for getting me out of the house on a Saturday evening and seeing a film I don't think I've seen for at least 15 years or so.

I first saw Akira when it came on Channel 4 late at night one evening. Well, to be more precise, I taped it, because it was on at some ungodly hour in the morning. Eventually I sat down and watched it, though, and was thoroughly bewildered by almost everything about it. I hadn't really watched many foreign-language films before, so watching something with subtitles was new, and I also hadn't really had much contact with anime before, either, so the concept of an "adult" animation (not that kind of "adult," though there is one pair of visible boobs, albeit not in an even slightly titillating context) was also something new to me.

I think it's probably fair to say that I didn't really "get" Akira the first time I saw it. Those who have seen Akira will know that not "getting" it is part of the point, really; again, this was a concept that was somewhat new to me at the time I first saw it. I was used to things being much more literal, and indeed even today I do sometimes find it difficult to latch on to stuff that is being too deliberately obtuse.

Seeing it today, though, I feel I appreciated it a lot more than when I first saw it. It's a real spectacle, all the more remarkable for the fact it came out in 1988 and thus would have been largely hand-animated. As George pointed out when we came out, a lot of things blow up, shatter and collapse in Akira, and someone had to animate each and every one of those bits of rock, glass and other miscellaneous bits of debris by hand. Quite a feat.

Akira's also interesting for having quite a distinctive style. While recognizable Japanese in appearance, it doesn't look like modern anime, nor does it look like stuff that came a little later in the '90s. I'm mostly familiar with more recent anime, but '90s stuff in particular has a very distinctive look that is a bit different from today, and Akira is different again.

One thing I thought that was quite interesting about the film's look is that all the characters actually look like Japanese people, whereas from '90s anime onwards, we tended to see a lot more in the way of the heavily-stylised, big-eyed look that typifies the medium today. The characters are also relatively subdued in their defining characteristics, and realistic in their appearance. Of the three female characters who put in an appearance in the movie, not one of them is intended to be "the hot one" or "the cute one" or anything like that — they're just women. (Well, okay, one of them is a weird, wrinkled, old-looking child with blue skin, but eh.) Very progressive, particularly for 1988.

Anyway. I enjoyed myself. It was good to revisit a movie I hadn't seen for a long time, and it was good to see friends I hadn't seen for a long time, albeit in a situation where we couldn't really talk a lot! Now it is 1:30 in the morning so I had probably better get some sleep.

1271: Don't Read the... You Know

Popular gaming site IGN has decided to crack down on shitty comments. Given that a single IGN article attracts thousands of comments — the post describing the proposed changes currently has 2,309 and it was only posted a few hours ago — this is very much a good thing.

I've never really read IGN all that much. I had a couple of pieces posted there a few years ago — here and here (I was not responsible for the dreadful headline on that one, by the way) — but I've never really felt the need to engage with the community. There's a few good writers there — a couple of whom I know personally — but it's not, on the whole, a site I check regularly. And, by extension, it's not a site I tend to look at the comments form.

My God.

Yeah. They need this crackdown. The comments section is a mess. Just on that one post linked above, there's a surprising amount of negativity ranging from people insulting the writers (and their names… yes, his name is Steve Butts; grow the fuck up) to perpetuating stupid fanboy platform wars. The few positive comments that are there are quickly drowned out or reacted to with further abuse, and the "upvote/downvote" system the site has in place courtesy of popular third-party comment solution Disqus is completely abused; "good quality" comments aren't upvoted, but dumb comments from "popular" posters are. Meanwhile, people advocating reason and praising the site's changes are downvoted. Ridiculous.

I have to question how on Earth it got like that in the first place, and I can only assume it was a matter of complacency — of assuming that problems would sort themselves out after a while. But, since a lot of Internet commenters on sites like IGN are seemingly children and teenagers (or at least act that way), they'll try and push the boundaries. If they encounter no resistance, they'll continue to push further. It's exactly the same as in teaching; if you don't set expectations up front, you are only making life difficult for yourself down the road.

I've been fortunate with this blog that I only get a few commenters, all of whom are very welcome, and pretty much all of whom I'd call friends. Meanwhile, over at my new professional home USgamer, we're already building a strong community of intelligent, articulate commenters who have plenty of value to add to the conversation. The quality of our content and the way in which we have written it — to provoke and inspire discussion — has helped set those initial expectations in place, so hopefully things will continue in a positive direction. I have no doubt we'll have to deal with troublemakers before long — we've already had one charming chap call Kat Bailey a "bitch" for not liking Project X Zone as much as he did, and we swiftly and positively dealt with it — but for now, I'm very much liking the rather mature, erudite community we appear to have attracted for the most part so far.

Internet comments are both a blessing and a curse, as the cliché goes. On the one hand, it's great to be able to have discussions around things that writers have posted on the Web; on the other hand, there's little value in them if they always descend into trolling, name-calling and insulting. Fortunately, a lot of sites seem keen to put a stop to the bullshit; it remains to be seen if, in the long term, anything good will happen.

1270: Black Cloud

Been struggling a bit with depression again recently. It is my own fault for not proactively doing anything about it, but once it sets in there's really not a lot you can do about it save for just riding it out and hoping it passes.

Some people describe their experiences with depression as being strangely comforting; those negative feelings acting as a sort of blanket that surrounds them and cuts them off from the outside world. I can sort of empathise with that, but at the same time it's frustrating.

Here's what dealing with depression is like for me.

I'll wake up in the morning, usually after a semi-to-very vivid dream that leaves itself half-finished. At this point I have a choice; go back to sleep and finish the dream, or get up and start the day. If I choose the former option, I'll find it very hard to get up for several hours, regardless of how many alarms I set. If I choose the latter option — which is often quite difficult to do — I'll generally start the day in a more positive manner.

The day will then proceed as normal, so long as I keep myself occupied with something or other that stimulates my brain — whether that's work, watching something on TV or playing a game. If I stop doing things, I'll find myself staring into space, and that same feeling I have when I'm trying to get up sets in; I just don't want to move. I feel myself being tugged in different directions: the depression wants me to just stare into space and feel sorry for myself, dwelling on all the things that I don't want to dwell on, or that are completely unnecessary to dwell on; the rational part of my brain tells me that I'd feel better if I just reached over and grabbed the PS3 controller, or stood up and got a glass of juice, or put my shoes on and went outside for a bit. Sometimes the depression wins; sometimes the rational part of my brain wins. The rational part usually wins the war, as I am still able to function and do the things I need to do each day, but depression often scores a few victories in skirmishes along the way.

By the end of the day, I'm often left feeling mentally exhausted from having to keep the depression at bay. Sometimes, despite feeling tired, I don't feel I can go to bed until an ungodly hour because I know I'll just spend hours unable to sleep, my mind awhirl with conflicting emotions and anxieties. Sometimes, I'll try and exhaust myself before collapsing into bed; other times, I'll just pray for the best, lie down and hope that sleep claims me before too long.

Being depressed is frustrating, because there is often no particular cause for it. "What's wrong?" people will ask. "Nothing in particular," I'll reply, because it's true; there is nothing wrong, but that just feeds into the whole cycle. I start to feel guilty about feeling down about, well, nothing at all, and then I feel bad about feeling guilty; if you've been there, you know what it's like.

I'll get over it. I always do. Just needed to vent a little today.

1269: In Sickness and In Health

So, now I've written my review for USgamer, I can talk a little about Time and Eternity, the game I've been playing recently.

For those too lazy to click through and read my review, the gist: Time and Eternity is an anime-inspired JRPG that makes use of hand-drawn, hand-animated anime cels instead of polygonal characters. Its story is based around two people — one of whom is actually two different people in a single body, so it's actually three people, I guess — who are trying to get married but find their wedding interrupted by assassins. Naturally, the thing to do when this happens is to travel back in time and get to the bottom of what is going on.

I won't go on too much about the game itself, because my review covers that territory in more detail. What I did want to talk about is how much I appreciate the fact this game exists, and how it highlights some issues with conventional criticism.

Time and Eternity has been mostly panned since its release, leading to severely negative preconceptions about it, even among the hardcore JRPG-lovin' community. I personally enjoyed it a lot — I've finished it once, and am contemplating going back for a New Game Plus run to get the "special ending" — but at the same time acknowledge the fact that it most certainly isn't a game that has universal appeal.

However, just because it doesn't have universal appeal is not to say that it doesn't have any appeal whatsoever. This is the thing that a lot of reviews I've seen seem to be missing to a certain extent; this is a game aimed at a specific, niche audience, which means by definition that it won't appeal to everyone. Should it be punished for this fact? Absolutely not; in fact, it should be celebrated.

To qualify that statement, let me explain. One of the most common criticisms of modern gaming — modern mainstream gaming, I should say — is the dumbing down of popular franchises to appeal to a mass market. The idea that a new entry in a popular series needs to sell literally millions of copies to have been worth making in the first place. All too many times recently, we've seen high-quality games fail to reach the overambitious expectations set by their publishers and be declared a failure, despite the fact that something like Time and Eternity would kill for those numbers.

Meanwhile, however, titles like Time and Eternity from niche-focused publishers like NIS America bob along under the radar, only to be occasionally noticed by reviewers who aren't really into the niche they're aiming for, and thus get woefully, woefully misunderstood. Consequently, they get treated unnecessarily harshly.

This isn't me being defensive about a game I enjoyed that everyone else didn't; this is something that I feel is going to become a bigger issue as time goes on. Not every critic bears in mind the potential target audience for something; very few outlets have the "specialists" on staff to be able to handle all titles in an appropriate manner, and I've mentioned before how frustrating it is to read a criticism of something from someone who obviously hasn't given it the amount of time it deserves, or who isn't "well-read" enough in the genre to be able to make informed comments. I am under no illusions that I am able to handle every type of game out there, but I know what I'm interested in, and I know the things that I know well. I wouldn't take on a review project for a genre I didn't know well or didn't have experience of; it wouldn't happen in any other medium.

So anyway. If you've read my Time and Eternity review you'll know that I quite liked it, but wouldn't recommend it to everyone. There are only a select few people in my circle of friends that I would specifically recommend it to, in fact, but I have a feeling those people would enjoy it. Everyone else will probably not. And that's fine. Not every game is for everyone, and the sooner we figure that out the better.

1268: Printing Press

Print media is very much on the way out, particularly in the games industry, but I enjoy keeping some around for old times' sake.

Specifically, as I've probably mentioned a few times before, I have several back issues of the now defunct PC Zone magazine on my shelf, each of which contains a single article that I wrote on a freelance basis — mostly game walkthroughs, because no-one likes writing those.

Occasionally I like to have a flip through those old magazines. It's nice to look back on what the games industry looked like nearly 20 years ago (jeez) and see what people were excited about. It's also interesting to ponder which grand plans came to fruition and which didn't; which supposedly "big games" ended up being massive successes, and which were big wet farts.

One of the most interesting things about reading an old magazine in 2013, though, is realising what an impact the Internet has had on our brains. More than once I caught myself reading something in one of these old Zones and habitually looking to the end of the article for the comments section. Of course, being a magazine, there is no comments section (unless you scribble on the page yourself) and thus this is a stupid thing to do, but I found it interesting that the way The Internet works is now so firmly ingrained into my brain that I just do things like that on reflex.

The letters pages are also interesting to look at. One of the most fascinating things I rediscovered recently is that people have been whingeing about tacked-on multiplayer modes ever since 1997 — one chap got a Letter of the Month award for complaining about how X-Wing vs Tie Fighter wasn't as good as either X-Wing or Tie Fighter because it didn't have the story-driven campaigns of its predecessors. (He had a point.)

The other one that raised a bit of a smile was a selection of gentlemen defending the fact that they found Lara Croft attractive — yes, the low-poly, big-lipped, pyramid-breasted Lara from 1997, not the gritty one from the recent reboot. Of all things, it brought to mind the popular otaku discussion of whether "2D" or "3D" is better. (Inevitably, to most otaku, the answer is "2D", but that's a topic for another day, I think.) "Lara is a collection of pixels," runs the slightly flawed argument, "and Pamela Anderson is just a collection of pixels or ink on a page, because none of us are ever likely to actually meet her." Well, true, I guess, but… oh, let's not get into that now.

Anyway. If you happen to have any old magazines lying around, think twice before you throw them out; they make interesting cultural artifacts to look back on, as they take a snapshot of how people thought and felt at a particular point in time. They're also something to do on the toilet on the off-chance all the electronic devices in your house are out of battery.

1266: Hotness

It's still massively warm, but at least our Internet is back. (It came back briefly shortly after I wrote last night's post, actually, but by then it was too late.)

Our flat is like a fricking oven at the moment. All the hot air in the whole building rises, making our place on the top floor unbearably warm, even with all the windows open and fans running. You can feel it as you come up the stairs; pass by our first floor neighbours and ascend the stairs to the second floor (third if you're American) and you can feel yourself pass through a wall of heat. It's really quite unpleasant.

It's times like this that I wish air conditioning — or indeed any form of cooling — was more commonplace here in the UK. Heating is fine — the heaters in our flat are great when it's cold — but when it gets too warm? There's really very little that you can do save for sit around in your pants and drink lots of cold drinks. We have been plying the poor rats with bowls of iced water, which they seem to appreciate; Lara, our slightly older rat, particularly seems to be suffering somewhat in the heat. Poor girl.

I'm heading down to Brighton tomorrow to work in the Eurogamer office for a change. It's nice to have the option to work in an actual office with other people — this is something I've not had the luxury of doing in previous games writing gigs, so I intend to take advantage of it every so often, if only to break the monotony of working from home. (Also, hopefully the EG offices have air conditioning, which will save me gasping for breath in this oven of a flat. Also, I owe Chris Donlan a sandwich.)

One thing I'm actually quite looking forward to about the trip to Brighton is having a commute where I don't have to drive. Finally — finally — I have a commute long enough to play some handheld games on. There will be some Animal Crossing, Velocity Ultra and possibly some Persona 4.

For now, though, there will be a large glass of something cold and wet in an attempt to cool off a bit, then sleep. Or, alternatively and more likely, very little sleep and instead a lot of sweaty tossing and turning as I attempt to get comfortable in an environment which is not in the slightest bit comfortable.

Moan moan moan, I know. At least Andy Murray won the tennis earlier. Supposedly that's important or something.