1174: The Second Tower

I beat Ar Tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica this evening. Or, more accurately, I saw one of its four endings. Two of the other endings won't be particularly difficult to obtain with the tactical saves I made on the way to the finale, but the last remaining one will require playing about 80% of the game again, albeit with a completely different second "phase". I'll probably take care of that last ending alongside a new game, which will either be Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory or the third Ar Tonelico game, both of which I anticipate I will be enthusing about considerably on these pages in the very near future if previous instalments in their respective franchises are anything to go by.

Anyway, Ar Tonelico II. It's… well, fantastic. I must confess to having not been as immediately smitten with it as I was the first game, as the conflicting art styles between the field and battle sprites (and between the field sprites of the first game and the second game) were initially a little jarring. (Seriously, everyone has really, really big hands and massive feet on the field maps and it's very disconcerting to begin with.) But after not very long at all, I found myself looking past this rather superficial consideration and immersing myself in what turned out to be a very pleasingly deep and meaningful story packed with good characterisation and questionable translation from the original Japanese. (On that note, though, the translation was at least understandable despite a few errors, and certainly no worse than some visual novels I've played.)

Spoilarz Ahead

Ar Tonelico II stands on its own, but also fits into the current "trilogy" as the sort of "dark middle episode". Whereas the first Ar Tonelico was rather bright and breezy most of the way through, the land of Ar Tonelico II is a bit bleaker. The people are struggling, there isn't enough land for everyone and everyone is clinging to the seemingly hopeless desire that the land's Holy Maiden will be able to create "Metafalica" — a verdant green land summoned through the use of Reyvateil Song Magic. Plenty of political machinations and backstabbings threaten to fuck everything up completely (and pretty much do on several occasions over the course of the entire narrative) but, this being a JRPG, our plucky band of heroes are there to wander the lands, right wrongs and eventually figure out how in the world they are going to help everyone find hope for the future.

Ar Tonelico II's story is nice in that it isn't quite the clichéd "Big Bad wants to destroy the world" business. Sure, there's world-threatening stuff going on and the eventual aim of the game is to save the world from an unpleasant fate, but it's not quite what you might expect. For starters, you spend most of the game not being quite sure who the "good" and "bad" guys are. There's no sign of a single easily-identifiable antagonist who is fucking shit up and needs a good Omnislash to the face; no white-haired pretty boy accompanied by tubular bells and organ music every time he appears. In fact, over the course of the narrative, none of these characters are presented as one-dimensional — most of them go through some sort of change and/or growth as the story progresses.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Ar Tonelico II in this regard is the fact that the final boss "Mir" from the first game is actually a party member in the second — though you don't know this when you first meet her, and in fact it's entirely possible to go through pretty much the whole game without noticing this or figuring it out, depending on the choices you make and the optional events you witness. Not having played the first game won't affect your enjoyment of the second, but if you have played the first game, the moment where you find yourself going "Wait… OH. Mir?!" is a "big reveal" on a par with Darth Revan in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic or SHODAN's first appearance in System Shock 2.

Herein lies one of the interesting things about the first two Ar Tonelico games in general: "good" and "evil" aren't absolute. In Ar Tonelico, we get some insight into why Mir is the way she is and why she is so angry about everything — and it's easy to find yourself sympathising with her rather than just wanting to kick her ass. In Ar Tonelico II, by spending some time with her as a (relatively) normal person, we get to find out a whole lot more about her — what happened to her in the distant past, what led her to her actions in the first game, and how she feels about what has happened to her then and since. If you follow her "route" through to its complete conclusion in Ar Tonelico II, it's a really wonderful story arc for one of the most interesting, troubled characters I've encountered in a very long time. I don't yet know if she shows up in Ar Tonelico Qoga, the third game, but I'll be very happy to see her again if she does.

The overriding theme of the Ar Tonelico series is that of bonds between people, and this is particularly apparent in the second game. The main theme of Ar Tonelico II's story is that the more intense a relationship between two or more people, the more painful it is. The more people you surround yourself with, the more "alive" you feel from being part of something bigger than yourself, but the more pain you suffer when you lose those precious people. The world-ending chaos at the end of Ar Tonelico II is not brought about by a desire for dominance or a display of power, but instead out of a simple desire to not feel that sharp pain of loss any longer. If everyone was able to abandon their physical bodies and live on purely as an individual spiritual entity, the primary antagonist's theory goes, no-one would have any need for other people, no-one would feel the pain of loss, and everyone would be happy in their complete and total individuality. But, responds the protagonist, no-one would be truly alive then. Life would not have meaning drawn from the people around you and the hardships you work together to overcome. You'd be little more than data.

It's an interesting and somewhat bittersweet message, but it works hugely well in the context of both the overarching plot and the smaller, individual character-led stories that unfold over the course of the whole game. I'm all for exploring deep and thought-provoking themes through interactive entertainment, and Ar Tonelico II successfully achieves that without sacrificing the "spectacular" side of its overall experience. It's still recognisably a JRPG with all the over-the-top pyrotechnics and anime-style special attacks that entails, but at the same time it's a complex and emotional tale far beyond the "Evil Guy Is Over There, Go Stab Him" trope that people (largely incorrectly) assume still characterises the genre.

In other words, just go play it, all right?

1173: Am I Missing Something?

Yesterday, game-centric social network Raptr reported that in the month of March, its members played more of King's Candy Crush Saga than StarCraft II, World of Tanks and Halo: Reach (all historically very popular games) combined.

This is significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, it shows that Raptr is getting some pretty wide usage by more casual gamers as well as those who care about achievements, hour counts and whatnot — demonstrating (arguably) that a lot of people playing Candy Crush Saga are "serious" enough about their gaming to sign up for a game-centric social network and tracking service.

Secondly, it shows something we all know: the vast numbers of people playing Facebook and mobile games far outstrips those who have perhaps grown up with the industry and who play what one might call "traditional" video games — players whom mobile and social gaming companies euphemistically refer to as "core" gamers.

The second point isn't all that surprising; how many people do you know who don't have a Facebook account? While we're not yet in a world where every single person is permanently jacked in to the social network via a transmitter in their spinal column, I'm willing to bet that regardless of your age, there's probably a large proportion of the people you know who have Facebook accounts, and of those people most of them have probably tried playing some games at least once. The exact same situation is true when we consider smartphone ownership these days — of those who have acquired a new mobile phone recently, it's highly likely that it was one of the two most well-supported platforms out there: iOS and Android. And of those who haven't acquired a new mobile phone recently, a lot of people are investigating tablets as a home computer solution — pretty much all of which run, you guessed it, iOS and Android.

It's the first point that surprises me, though. Raptr is the sort of service that is historically only of interest to those "core" gamers we mentioned earlier, as your average soccer mom who only plays games on Facebook has no real need or desire to keep up with industry happenings or the latest stupid thing that a Microsoft employee has said on social media — let alone how their number of hours played stacks up against their friends. So what does it mean when the number of hours racked up on Candy Crush Saga outstrips some of Raptr's most heavily-tracked, popular titles?

Well, it could mean one of a couple of things. Firstly, it could mean that Facebook and/or mobile gamers are more serious about tracking their playtime and achievements in the games they play than most people thought. I find this rather difficult to believe, to be honest, as the sort of people who only play Facebook and mobile games are typically playing them as a means to fill a spare few minutes rather than as an engaging form of entertainment that they feel particularly passionate about.

Secondly, it could mean that those "core" gamers out there are playing Facebook and mobile games as well as (apparently, more than) "traditional" computer and console games that are aimed specifically at them? Judging by the notifications that pop up on the Raptr client that runs on my PC, this is much more likely; there are several people on my friends list whom I would describe as "core" gamers by that definition, but who are regularly seen playing everything from FarmVille to Marvel Avengers Alliance and Candy Crush Saga.

One question, though: why?

No, seriously, why?

If you're a "core" gamer by the popular definition, you're serious about your interactive entertainment. You might play games instead of (or as much as) watching movies and TV shows. Your exact reasons for playing may vary — those who enjoy Call of Duty play it much like a competitive team sport, while people like me prefer narrative-centric experiences that stimulate similar parts of the brain to movies and TV shows — but the fact is, you're highly likely to make time for your gaming rather than indulge in it as an idle diversion. You'll sit down, you'll play a game for a not-inconsiderable amount of time, then you'll switch off and do something else. Or pass out with the controller in your sweaty mitts.

So if you're investing time and probably money into what is, after all, a hobby rather than a mindless pastime, why, dear "core" gamers, aren't you playing anything better? Don't get me wrong, Candy Crush Saga has performed so well because it's a polished product that is pretty accessible even to those who haven't played many games before, but 1) it's a Bejeweled ripoff, and Bejeweled 3 (or just Bejeweled as it is called on mobile) is a better game with more variety; 2) it's rammed to the gills with obnoxious enforced "social" features that don't actually promote social interaction at all (ask for lives! ask friends to unlock levels! brag about your score!); 3) it's rammed to its other gills with obnoxious monetization — aside from the fact that every so often you'll run into a wall where it literally just stops you from playing unless you either wait for several hours or pay money, there's one powerup in the game that costs £35 and can be used once per level. Thirty-five pounds. Bejeweled 3, which, as previously mentioned, is an infinitely superior game that doesn't bug you every five fucking seconds to insert coins or invite friends, costs £14.99 — less than half the price of that one powerup in Candy Crush Saga — on Steam (and is regularly reduced in price in sales), and sixty-nine pence on mobile phones.

"But Candy Crush Saga is free to download!" I hear you cry. "Surely people aren't dimwitted enough to repeatedly spend money on this when they could just buy a copy of Bejeweled outright and then never have to pay again!" Wrong. Candy Crush Saga is, as I write this, the number 1 Top Grossing app on the App Store. Note: "app" not "game". (It is also the number 1 Top Grossing game, but that shouldn't be surprising given its other position.)

Let me reiterate that. Candy Crush Saga, which is free to download, is making more money than apps that cost money. By a significant margin. It is making more money than high-quality productivity apps for professionals, which typically carry a relatively hefty price tag. It is making more money than high-quality "pay once, play forever" games. It is making more money than Bejeweled, which is basically the same fucking game for the price of a packet of Chewits. It is making more money than anything else on the App Store.

It is at this point I throw my hands up and say I absolutely do not understand why this is the case. It absolutely boggles my mind, because I can see why I wouldn't want to repeatedly and indefinitely churn money into a game that isn't noticeably better than another game I've already paid for once (Bejeweled), so why can't these hundreds, thousands, millions of other people? It does not make any sense whatsoever. And this isn't even considering the question above of why on Earth "core" gamers are apparently playing this game so much when there is so much other good stuff out there — too much for one games enthusiast to ever hope to fit into one lifetime, even if they became hikikomori in order to try and do so.

I am so, so torn about this sort of thing, and have been for a while now. On the one hand, it's great that more and more people are embracing video games as a pastime, form of entertainment or even hobby. On the other, the swathes of people who are coming to gaming as a result of free-to-play mobile and social games are perpetuating a business model that, while immensely profitable, is not particularly friendly to the consumer and is actually quite unsafe to people who don't keep a tight rein on their finances. More people playing games? Good. Sending the message that charging £35 for one powerup is okay? Very, very bad.

1172: Mage Knight

It was a board games evening tonight, and since we were down one member from our usual troupe to play Descent: Second Edition we decided to crack open a new acquisition and give it a shot: Mage Knight.

None of us really knew anything about Mage Knight prior to going in save for the fact it was supposed to be good, so it was always going to be something of a learning experience. Due to the relative complexity of the rules — or at least, the relative complexity of introducing the rules to everyone — we didn't manage to finish a complete game, but at least now we have a good understanding of the basic mechanics and will probably be able to romp through the introductory scenario without too much difficulty.

Mage Knight, if you're unfamiliar, is a rather interesting game with elements of role-playing, strategy and deck-building card games. You play a single character who begins with a deck of basic abilities — one of which is unique to each character, the rest of which are the same for everyone — and then work your way towards the objective of the scenario you're playing. Scenarios vary from cooperative ones where you work together as a group to competitive ones, where whoever gets the most points after the end condition is fulfilled wins, to "very competitive" ones, where whoever fulfils the victory condition first wins.

Play is split into rounds, which represent either day or night-time, and each round can and will go on for several circuits of the table. On each turn within a round, you can play some cards from your hand, some of which award you with movement, combat or influence points, and can then use those points to do various things. For example, moving requires a particular number of points according to the type of terrain you're moving over, and influence is used in settlements and other friendly locations to do things like make use of services or acquire troops. Some cards have special abilities, too, and most have two possible functions — one simple one that can be used for "free", and a more powerful one that generally requires a specific colour of mana to activate. Mana can be acquired through cards, through crystals you've stocked up on through various means, or most frequently through the dice that represent the "Source" — the mana naturally flowing through the world.

Through moving and attacking, you'll reveal more and more areas of the map, each of which include various things to do. In villages, you can recruit new troops, get healing or pillage them. Come across a fortress and you can assault it in an attempt to take it over for yourself. Discover a wizard's tower and you'll have the opportunity to get some powerful spells. Most actions affect your "fame" level — which acts as a combined score and "experience" system, allowing the player to grow stronger in various ways every so often — and your reputation in the area, which provides bonuses or penalties to the amount of influence points required to do "friendly" actions. Defeating marauding monsters improves your reputation; attacking fortresses unprovoked has a negative impact. There's a nice feeling of "consequence" to your actions.

We didn't play far enough to finish the first scenario, but we learned enough to be able to make it through the next time we try it. We learned about the simple but elegant combat system, which requires you to make careful use of your cards to defeat your enemies, and about the various ways you can acquire the more powerful abilities and items. There's clearly a lot to this game, and the really nice thing about it is that it's one of those games that, like Descent, scratches both the strategic Eurogame and theme-heavy Ameritrash itches simultaneously. Consequently, I can see it hitting the table reasonably often — though the only downside for our group is that it only supports up to four players, whereas our full complement is typically five people.

I'm looking forward to trying it again, anyway. It looks like a great game and the components are gorgeous — lovely linen-backed cards, pre-painted miniatures and high-quality tokens and other bits and pieces. It takes a while to set up but once you're up and running it's a game that continues to look good in the middle of a session rather than devolving into a chaotic mess. Combine that with the host of scenarios and variants provided in the rulebook and here's a game with the potential to be pretty different each time you play it. I can see why it's so well-regarded.

1171: Easy Listening, Part 2

As promised, I'm continuing yesterday's post with another game music fest to introduce you to the joys of some soundtracks you might not be familiar with.

Today, it's Cavia/Square Enix's strange, wonderful and rather depressing action-JRPG Nier.

Nier

Nier wasn't particularly well-received by critics upon its release due to a variety of factors. Having played it (and adored it, I might add), I can see why it was criticised, but equally I feel it was treated a little too harshly. Not only was it doing some fascinating things with the way it told its story and what its story was about — I'll leave the spoilers out of the discussion for now — but it was also doing some really interesting things with its gameplay, too. What initially appeared to be a relatively conventional third-person character action game/RPG subsequently revealed itself to have elements of visual novels, text adventures, farming sims, 2D platform games, isometric-perspective dungeon crawlers, bullet hell shooters and numerous other genres. It really was a massively interesting game in almost every way.

And then there was its soundtrack, which even if you don't like the game is indisputably amazing. Let's look at some standout tracks.

This track, known as Hills of Radiant Wind, is one of the tracks you'll hear most frequently in the game, since it typically accompanies your jaunts across the countryside surrounding the small settlement where the title character Nier and his daughter Yonah live. This track is hugely memorable both for having a catchy melody and capturing the atmosphere of the game world beautifully. The pounding drums at the bottom of the mix give a sense of adventure and driving forwards, while the vocal line atop the relatively simple accompaniment gives a suitable air of melancholy to the experience. Nier is not a happy game, and this track, while one of the more "upbeat" ones from the soundtrack, reflects that nicely.

This song, simply called Grandma, is beautiful, and is, to me, probably the most representative piece of music that illustrates what the Nier experience is all about. A simple accompaniment accompanied by a mournful voice provides a massively atmospheric backdrop to some of the most emotional story moments in the game.

And then we move on to a few tracks that use the "leitmotiv" technique I'm so fond of, where a number of different pieces make use of similar melodic or harmonic sequences to reflect various things happening to different characters and/or places.

Let's start with Emil, who, without spoiling anything, gets fairly consistently screwed over throughout the course of the whole game, through no fault of his own. Poor kid.

Anyway, here's Emil's "Sacrifice" theme, which accompanies some heartbreaking, sad moments:

And by contrast, here's his "Karma" theme, which comes shortly after a heartbreaking, sad moment when you're venting some aggression on the perpetrators:

The addition of the pounding drums and the urgent piano line in this one always gives me shivers, particularly when I remember how it was used in context.

Then we have Popola and Devola, two characters who are extremely important to the overall narrative in ways I won't spoil right now. When we encounter them, we hear various versions of the "Song of the Ancients" theme, beginning with this acoustic guitar-centric version:

…and moving on to this… I'm not sure how to describe this, really. Plinky-plonky version?

Well, if you're going to do two different versions based on the two characters who sing it, you might as well do a third version where they sing it together, mightn't you? Yes, obviously. This, along with Devola's theme above, are some of the only examples of diegetic music in the game — the rest is there to evoke a mood rather than actually be "present" in the world.

And, hell, if you're going to do that, you may as well go the whole hog and have a battle theme based on their (by now) iconic song, right? Of course.

The latter one, like Emil's "Karma" theme, still gives me shivers because I can remember it in context. Gobsmacking.

Then we come to Kainé, possibly one of the most fascinating characters in any game ever for a whole host of reasons, many of which aren't made entirely explicit in the game. Kainé has two main versions of her theme: a slow one, which goes like this…

…and a fast one, which goes like this.

Those who know their Nier lore will be familiar with the fact that Kainé is intersex. If you weren't familiar with your Nier lore, now you know too — don't worry, this isn't technically a spoiler in terms of the game's overall plot, and in fact knowing it beforehand brings a whole host of hidden meanings to a bunch of sequences in the game to the fore. I like to think that the markedly different character of these two pieces reflects Kainé's "masculine" and "feminine" sides, because she is most definitely in possession of both. She is, it's fair to say, a very angry person — and with good reason — but not afraid to express her feminine side in some rather… flamboyant ways.

One of the most interesting things about the vocal-heavy tracks in Nier are that they don't use a language from this world. Instead, vocalist Emi Evans was encouraged to make up words in a "futuristic language" — Nier is set in the far, far future — and used elements of Scottish Gaelic, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, English and Japanese to create something with a very distinctive sound, but which doesn't "mean" anything in and of itself. Instead, the vocal sounds are simply intended, for the most part, to evoke the overall feeling of sadness that pervades the whole game without distracting the player with recognisable words.

So that's Nier. Easily one of my favourite game soundtracks of all time, and a score which adds a huge amount of emotion to what is already a game rammed to the rafters with heartbreak.

1170: Easy Listening, Part 1

I am, as you probably know, a big fan of video game soundtracks. They've come on a very long way since the bleep-bleep-bloop of yore, and in many cases these days are eminently worth listening to in their own right.

Over the next few posts I'd like to take a mildly self-indulgent tour around some of my favourite tracks from some of my favourite soundtrack albums. YouTube-heavy post ahead… you have been warned.

Trauma Team

Let's start with something that's fresh in my memory. The Trauma Center series as a whole has pretty consistently great soundtracks, largely composed by Atlus mainstays Shoji Meguro and Atsushi Kitajoh. Both of them have a very distinctive (and quite similar) sound to their compositions, and this is very much in evidence throughout the Trauma Team soundtrack.

What's most striking about the Trauma Team soundtrack, though, is how well the various pieces of music reflect the different characters. For example, for the cool "ice maiden" that is forensic investigator Dr Naomi Kimishima, we have this wonderfully chilled-out number called, appropriately enough, Cool Beauty:

Dr Naomi's segments, as it happens, have some of the best music in the game. For the uninitiated (or those of you who haven't read my enthusing at length about this wonderful game), Dr Naomi's levels are adventure game-style puzzles in which you must unravel the mystery of what happened to one or more corpses using various forensic investigation techniques. As you progress through them, the truth gradually gets closer and closer until finally everything clicks into place and you understand exactly what happened to the poor person lying on the slab in your examination room.

That gradual uncovering of the truth is something beautifully captured by this piece, imaginatively titled Uncover the Truth, which starts out simple and gradually builds up in complexity as it progresses through. Accompanying this piece on screen is Dr Naomi piecing together all the case's various pieces — with a little help from you, of course — and coming to a firm conclusion about what happened. It's pretty great — and surprisingly powerful in context:

Dr Naomi is just one of six different doctors who star in Trauma Team, however, and each of them has their own distinctive "sound" throughout. For example, nameless surgeon "CR-S01"'s pieces are all rather electronic-rock in nature and wouldn't sound out of place in a Shin Megami Tensei game — unsurprising, considering the composers:

Meanwhile, Dr Hank Freebird's pieces focus a lot more on gradually-building tension, such as this piece, which in-game builds itself up as your "combo" of moves made without mistakes (or taking a break) grows:

Dr Cunningham the diagnostician, meanwhile, is a much more laid-back sort of dude for the most part:

Except when things get serious, of course.

Trauma Team's story is split into two distinct segments. The first half sees the six doctors working largely independently from one another, following their own parallel storylines that do nonetheless make a coherent narrative if played in the correct order. However, the really interesting stuff starts happening in the second half, which is completely linear, and follows the entire team's attempts to battle against a disease known as the Rosalia virus.

This part of the game makes use of one of my favourite compositional techniques for soundtracks, which is to take one theme and gradually evolve and adapt it over the course of the story. Rosalia's theme goes through a number of changes throughout the second half of Trauma Team, culminating in something pretty spectacular.

Here we have Spread of Rosalia, a piece that plays during the endoscopy sequences of the game while battling against the Rosalia virus. The recognisable chord sequence and strings backing of the Rosalia theme is present and correct here, with a nervous, tense, slow-moving melody overlaid over the top of it. Treating Rosalia is something that requires care, precision and nerves of steel; this piece of music reflects that rather nicely.

Encounter Rosalia during Maria's First Response missions, meanwhile, and you get treated to this wonderfully intense number that really gets the pulse pounding. Just the thing you need while you're running back and forth between five different patients trying not to let any of them die, huh?

This piece of music, meanwhile, plays during Dr Hank Freebird's orthopaedic surgery missions where he comes across Rosalia. Hank's missions aren't as time-sensitive as many of the other operations throughout Trauma Team, but the high level of accuracy required in them makes them some of the most tense, most physically-exhausting levels you'll be challenged with:

This track, on the other hand, plays while discussing Rosalia and how best to treat it. It's less intense than the other Rosalia pieces, but has a certain air of desperation about it, while at the same time offering a sense of hope… before exploding in intensity towards the end.

Finally, spoilers I guess, our final showdown with Rosalia comes pre-packed with this rockin' piece of music — beautifully fitting for an intense surgical battle against a thoroughly unpleasant illness. Will our heroes make it through…? Well, that's up to you, really…

More tomorrow.

1169: Suffering Fools

The Internet has ruined April Fools' Day.

That's the sentiment that seems to have been prevalent on social media for most of today. And to be fair, it has. Between Operation Rainfall's teasing of games that will never exist (Catherine 2, The Last Story II, Theatrhythm Deus Ex) to the utterly cringeworthy press release I received earlier claiming that Doodle Jump is becoming a Broadway show (seriously, guys, 1) Doodle Jump hasn't been relevant for several years now, and 2) try harder) it's been a thoroughly irritating day to be online. Thankfully, a significant proportion of the press seems to have grown up a bit and is refusing to play along with these shenanigans, but there's just as many reputable publications putting out exceedingly lame "jokes" that they really should know better than to post. The Guardian producing special liberal glasses that block Richard Littlejohn columns? Hilarious. The New Statesman rebranding entirely in Comic Sans? Oh, help me, Doctor Tendo, for my sides have split.

Thinking about it, though, I'm not sure April Fools' Day has ever been particularly… well, fun. Sure, the stuff Google comes up with is often mildly amusing, but for the most part it seems to be a day where people think that lying as much as possible is an adequate substitute for being genuinely entertaining. That's sort of mean when you think about it, really.

I'm trying to think back to a time before the Internet (yes, young 'uns, we did live in such dark times once) and whether or not April Fools' Day was fun then. I have a peculiar feeling that it wasn't. I recall a time at school when everyone suddenly and inexplicably learned the word "gullible" simultaneously for some dark purpose, and it was a hellish few weeks of people making up outlandish stories and then jeering "HAAHAHHAAH GULLIBLE" and running away if you even looked like you were about to say "really?" April Fools' Day is just like that, really. An opportunity for unfunny twats to be particularly unfunny twats and think they're being Comedy Gods.

I know it's all a bit of fun and I shouldn't be so grumpypants about it. But as with so many things on the Internet, oversaturation leads to cynicism and active dislike. And over the last few years, we've seen so many painfully obvious April Fools' Day jokes that it's just a bit old now. By far the most laughable example was the Doodle Jump press release I mentioned earlier — that actually really made me quite cross, though I restrained myself from rebuking the sender with a tersely-worded response — but that's far from an isolated example.

To quote my former editor Mr Jason Wilson: "Journalism isn't about jokes. No one for a journalistic site should be making up shit. No one at a PR agency should be, either. Send me that BS and you go straight into my 'you suck at PR' folder."

Quite. The news is enough of a disorganised mess in which it's a nightmare for some stories to get noticed anyway; quit cluttering these channels up with your made-up crap. It's not big, it's not clever and it's not funny.

This has been your Grouch for the day. Tomorrow I will write about something nice.

1168: Dev Diary

I've been working a bit on my game over the weekend. And just to prove I'm not just all talk, I present to you two world exclusive screenshots.

oneyearlater — "The Strip", the main shopping street in the capital city of Acathlata. That's the department store Don Lewis on the left, and on the right is the Green Boar Inn. Further to the right out of shot are the Fighters' and Mages' Guilds and the pub The Tail of the Dog.

oneyearlater2 — Protagonist Amarysse (left) and her erstwhile companion Feena (right) shoot the breeze in The Tail of the Dog.

"Boy," you're probably thinking. "That sure looks like an RPG Maker game." And, of course, you'd be absolutely right. The relatively generic appearance and use of stock assets is deliberate for several reasons, though: firstly, it allows me to concentrate on what I feel is the important part of the game, which is the writing and overall structure, and secondly, if you read my vaguely spoilerish post from a few days ago you'll doubtless be familiar with why I've chosen to stick with the "default" aesthetic for the moment.

What these screenshots perhaps don't clearly show is that I've built a little on the stock assets with some additional material from the RPG Maker community and beyond. The portraits you see in the second image, for example, were created by RPG Maker community members Archeia and Scinaya, who took the time to make some "emote" variations on the stock characters' portraits. This means that I no longer have to have characters smiling even while they were being angry or upset, which was a little disconcerting.

What you really can't tell from the screenshots is the fact that I've found some great royalty-free music to use for the game's soundtrack. While I would absolutely love to compose the entire score to the whole game, again that's something that would distract from the important part of things, which is actually writing and implementing the game's story and structure. I'm not ruling out the possibility of composing a custom soundtrack in the near future, but for now I'm very happy with the high-quality stuff I'm presently using, as it suits the atmosphere I'm going for quite nicely.

Insofar as the story and scripting is going, it's going slowly but well. I'm almost finished with the interactive introductory sequence, which is probably one of the more complicated parts of the game, as it will branch off into more linear "paths" shortly after all that concludes. I've been taking care to incorporate hooks for my intended game structure, which will help encourage people to replay with variations on scenes and alternative ways for events to unfold according to the player's past actions and decisions. I've implemented these in such a way as to make them hopefully seem pretty "seamless" when playing the game for the first time, but those with a keen eye playing through again will notice the places where it diverges slightly. I believe doing this sort of thing is quite important, as no-one really wants to read through the exact same material several times just to see the whole game. Plus there are other rewards and incentives in place to explore all your available options, too, but I'll refrain from discussing that side of things too much for now.

Perhaps most importantly, I've figured out my ending, or more accurately, my "true ending". Again, no spoilers for now, but the structure of the game will be such that you'll need to play through all the "normal" paths and meet a couple of other conditions (which I'm debating whether or not I should make explicit) in order to see the definitive conclusion to the game's narrative. I can see how the ending will unfold in my mind's eye, and it's a good 'un — in my humble opinion, anyway. I actively want to get the story to that point, to bring the characters to that finale. I'm half-tempted to make the finale events now while they're fresh in my mind then go back and fill in the middle part of the game, in fact. But we'll see.

So far as writing the rest of it goes, I have a vague idea of how each path is going to go, but not the specifics as yet. I have a firm idea of who all these characters "are" in my mind, though, which will make it easier to write scenes with them as I progress onwards. I like the characters, too, which is important, and the introductory scenes I've created so far hopefully help to establish their personalities and other character traits. The challenge from here is, of course, ensuring they remain believable and consistent as the rest of the story progresses, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Anyway. In summary, things are going slowly but well. I'm enjoying myself. And hopefully at some point in the next fifteen years I'll have something more to show those of you who are interested.

1167: How NimbleBit Finally Nailed It

If you own a modern mobile phone or tablet, chances are you've encountered NimbleBit's games at least once, most likely in the form of their runaway success Tiny Tower.

Lest you're one of the few people out there who never played Tiny Tower, let me explain: you run a tower block, presented in Commodore 64-style low-resolution pixel art. In order to progress in the game, you must continue to purchase and build new floors onto your tower, which can be assigned as residential or commercial properties. Residential properties hold, well, residents, while commercial properties must be staffed with residents and can then generate money for you even when you're not actively playing the game. However, there's a limit to how much money they can make, since each commercial establishment only has a limited amount of stock for each of the three items they sell, and when it runs out, you need to manually restock it by tapping on it.

Essentially, that was pretty much all there was to the gameplay. You booted it up, you tapped on a few things, you marvelled at how much money you'd "earned," you felt a bit depressed that the amount you'd earned was less than a tenth of what the next floor costs, you closed the app only to repeat the process a few hours later. In terms of complexity it was little more than FarmVille, and the early comparisons to SimTower it attracted were most certainly not justified in the slightest.

Tiny Tower was a free-to-play game. That means it was free to download but you could purchase things with real money. For the most part, this took the form of "Bux", a premium currency that allowed you to bypass anything in the game that would normally take a long period of non-interactive real time to complete, such as building a new floor. The game was fairly generous about giving out Bux for free, but it was still essentially a "pay to win" experience, whereby the more money you paid in, the faster progress you made. Exactly the same was true for Tiny Tower's follow-up Pocket Planes, which adopted the exact same faux-retro aesthetic and was just as devoid of meaningful decision-making as Tiny Tower was.

NimbleBit are back with a new game. It's still self-consciously retro in terms of both gameplay and presentation, but in terms of being a quality experience it's a huge jump over the company's past work. Nimble Quest is a curious combination of Snake and Gauntlet, it's free-to-play, and it's fabulous.

In Nimble Quest, you select one of a number of unlockable heroes to start the game and then proceed to use that hero's style of attacking to defeat enemies. Different heroes have different styles of attacking — some are melee, some are ranged, and within those groupings there are variations, too: some ranged heroes fire fast-moving arrows straight forwards, others throw short-range bombs at anything nearby and deal splash damage, for example. As you progress through the game, certain enemies will release additional heroes whom you can "collect" — these are then added to your "snake", tagging along behind your lead hero and performing their own individual attacks when appropriate. Heroes other than the lead can be defeated without penalty (besides losing them, obviously) while if the lead hero either runs out of health or ploughs into a wall or enemy they die immediately and the game is over.

To progress through the game, you have to defeat a particular number of enemies on each level. This number increases with each subsequent level, but so too do the number of enemies on screen at once and the different types of assailant you'll have to deal with. The further you manage to get in one playthrough, the more types of hero you'll unlock and the longer your maximum "snake" length becomes in all subsequent games. Heroes also gain experience when they're used as the lead, and level up through three distinct levels. They can also be levelled up early by paying with the gems you find scattered around the levels.

The "free to play" bit primarily comes in the form of "Tokens", which are Nimble Quest's equivalent of "Bux" from Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes. Here, though, they're not used to bypass inconveniences; instead, they're used for actually useful things. They can be spent on buffs before each level starts. They can be spent on continuing after death — and pleasingly, this prevents itself from becoming a "pay to win" scenario by forcing you to restart the level you're on with your score and team as it was then rather than simply magically resurrecting without penalty — and they may also be spent on competing in the social "Arena" leaderboards in cooperation with friends. Like Bux, they're awarded at a healthy rate through normal play, so there's absolutely no obligation to pay for them unless you're a bit spend-happy with them. Crucially, though, the game never stops you from playing if you don't have any tokens — it never forces you to sit through long wait times or anything like that; it just means you need to earn some more before you can use what effectively amount to very slight "cheats".

It's this "monetising without inconveniencing the player" thing that makes me look very favourably upon Nimble Quest. At no point do I feel like I'm being punished for not purchasing currency — in fact, the game has more longevity if you don't pay, because it'll take you longer to level up all your heroes and get good enough at the game to survive the very challenging later levels. Nothing in the game feels like "pay to win" — even the continue feature is well-implemented so as to allow you the opportunity to correct a mistake while still running the risk of actually doing worse than you did on your previous attempt.

Most important, though, is the fact that Nimble Quest is actually a good game. No-one really wanted to admit that Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes just weren't very interesting or fun once you got over the aesthetic and humour in them, but Nimble Quest has been designed as a fun game first and foremost rather than a monetisation vehicle, and it really shows. It's a top-quality mobile game, and one which every iOS owner should have on their device. This is how you do free-to-play right… and this is how you do mobile gaming right, too. Please download and support it to send the right message to NimbleBit. More of this and less tap-tap-tap-snore nonsense, please.

1166: The Invader Comes from the Bottom of the Sea!

It's been a while since I talked anime here, so I'm going to talk anime. Oh yes indeedy. Specifically, I'd like to talk about a bizarre little show I've just started watching called Squid Girl, also known as Ika Musume.

Squid Girl is a rather peculiar show in a number of ways. Firstly, it's not quite "episodic" in the same manner as other anime series, though there is a sense of progression throughout. Instead of being a sequence of 20-minute episodes, each "episode" of Squid Girl is instead made up of three short self-contained mini-stories that tend not to have a great deal to do with each other besides having the same core cast. However, the whole thing does have a clear chronology, since characters, concepts and settings introduced in earlier episodes tend to show up again later rather than being "one-shots". I haven't watched far enough to know exactly how it all ties together — if at all — yet, but already in the four full episodes I have watched we've seen the introduction of certain characters and their subsequent return — and I'm sure there'll be more to come.

Secondly is the concept, which anime pros probably won't bat an eyelid at, but which those used to more… "conventional" Western entertainment might find a little bizarre. As you might expect from a show called Squid Girl, the main character is a girl who shares a number of characteristics with squid. Specifically, her blue hair is actually a set of ten tentacles which she can manipulate independently at will, her hat causes the shape of her head to resemble that of a squid (and removing it will apparently kill her) and she is able to spew squid ink from her mouth. She also has the abilities of various different types of squid, including luminescence, the ability to change her weight at will and flapping the… flappy bits on her hat. The English subtitles and dub also see her making frequent squid- and tentacle-themed puns in her dialogue, while in Japanese she tends to end her sentences with "de geso" (translated literally, something to do with squid legs) similar to how super-cute moe characters often deliberately overuse or exaggerate the "desu" or "desu no" final particle (see Compa and Gust from Hyperdimension Neptunia for good examples), and she also tends to emphasise the syllables "ika" ("squid") in her speech whenever they come up, regardless of whether or not doing so would really make sense. (Aside: I love finding out about the equivalent of puns and the like in other languages, as I do often find myself wondering how non-English languages deal with jokes, slang, dialect and puns like this. It's fascinating to learn this stuff through things I enjoy.)

The basic premise of the show sees Squid Girl coming ashore ostensibly to subjugate all of humanity in revenge for the shitty way they've treated the ocean, but she instead finds herself forced into working as a waitress at a beachfront restaurant when an outburst and demonstration of her "power" ends up smashing through the wall. The various mini-stories that make up the episodes depict Squid Girl learning more about human society and what a "normal" life is, and much of the humour comes from her complete unawareness of how to behave like a human despite resembling one for the most part. There's also a huge amount of comedy value inherent in her interactions with the owners of the beachfront restaurant she damaged, who seem completely unperturbed by the fact that she is obviously not human and each have their own distinct characters and means of dealing with the girl-shaped hurricane that is Squid Girl. Eiko is slightly weary and a little tsundere but tolerates Squid Girl for the most part. Her sister Chizuru, meanwhile, initially appears to be the stereotypical quiet, demure and kind "older sister" type, but reveals herself very early on to have a distinctly dark side that utterly terrifies poor old Squid Girl. In actual fact, this "dark side" is not truly threatening or unpleasant — it's simply the ability to perform a "withering look" that is the Holy Grail for parents and teachers alike, but which is often depicted as a horrifying dark aura from Squid Girl's perspective. Even as Squid Girl tries to convince herself that she's still going to subjugate humanity, she quickly learns not to step out of line when Chizuru is around.

For the most part, Squid Girl is thoroughly silly fun, and I frankly wasn't expecting much more than something fairly throwaway to watch while I had breakfast and then forget about shortly afterwards. However, one of the mini-stories I watched earlier well and truly changed my mind and convinced me that this is actually a show doing some surprisingly clever things. I shan't spoil it completely for those who are planning on watching the show, but I'll just say that the "mini-Squid Girl" vignette — which was depicted almost completely wordlessly — was surprisingly heartfelt and touching, and I was very surprised to realise that even after just a few episodes, I already cared very much about these characters.

I shouldn't have been surprised, really; one of the things that continually strikes me about Japanese media the more of it I consume — be it video game, anime or manga — is the deft skill with which creators are often able to weave their magic to create compelling characters and make you care about them remarkably quickly. Squid Girl, as ridiculous as it sounds on paper, is certainly no exception to that, and I look forward to seeing the rest of this surprisingly captivating nonsense.

1165: Endless Infinite Discussion

Around this time of year in 2011, one Mr Tom Ohle, a fine upstanding gentleman at the forefront of promoting games you might not have heard of quite so much as the games you have heard of a lot, wrote this post, named The Case of the Great Game Nobody Saw.

Lest you're too lazy to follow the link, allow me to summarise: Tom works in PR for video games. The titles his company Evolve PR has represented over the years include things like CD Projekt Red's The Witcher series, the deep strategy games of Paradox Interactive, TimeGate Studios' Section 8 series, the Anomaly series and numerous others. As all good PR people should, Tom believes in the games he's paid to promote — some more than others. Sometimes games come along that are genuinely excellent — games that, in Tom's words, are "magical, revolutionary, disruptive or otherwise worthy of consumers' awareness" — and, as you'd expect, Tom and co. would very much like to see these titles succeed, and they do their utmost to try and convince various outlets that these games are worthy of coverage and promotion. When these games don't get the coverage they deserve — either because of "bigger" games monopolising the front page or simply through being rejected outright — it's enormously disheartening, not only for Tom and co. but also for the makers of these games.

"At its core, this is an issue that pervades entertainment and consumerism as a whole," writes Tom. "People stick with brands they know. Everyone craps all over themselves (myself included) when a new Rockstar game is announced. That's fine; they make great games. But in an industry that so often complains about derivative sequels, soulless big-budget productions and a lack of risk-taking, isn't it about time we started focusing on quality? Shouldn't those companies looking to push the boundaries of the medium begin to reap the rewards? If things keep going the way they are, we'll never shed the $60 price point, we'll get sequels to major franchises every year, and we'll all keep complaining and wishing things were different."

Almost two whole years have passed since Tom wrote that post, and I don't think things have improved at all since then. If anything, I think they've got worse. For all Polygon's posturing about reinventing games journalism and for all Kotaku's posting of random bullshit only tangentially related to games, we're still in a situation where an alien visiting the games industry would believe there were only a few interesting games released every year, and that they're often entries in the same series. Call of Duty. Battlefield. Assassin's Creed. And so on.

Most recently, I've been becoming somewhat frustrated with Bioshock Infinite. I have no doubt whatsoever that it's a fantastic game, and everything I've heard seems to indicate that it is, in the words of a friend of mine, "intelligent Hollywood… a 'The Matrix of gaming'" and that is, on the whole, a good thing. We need creators like Ken Levine in the mainstream of the industry to push things forward and prove that there's a market for intelligent experiences as well as Mildly-Racist Brown Michael Bay Manshoot #327. I am glad that Bioshock Infinite exists, that it is apparently living up to the hype and that, I imagine, it is probably selling quite well as a result of all that hype.

What I'm less thrilled about is the fact that it's not really solving the problem Tom was talking about in his post. Bioshock Infinite may be "intelligent Hollywood", but it's still Hollywood. It's still a single game from a high-profile creator monopolising press coverage and social media, completely dwarfing smaller-scale experiences that — shhh — might actually be more interesting. Do we need videos explaining "why you should play Bioshock Infinite on Hard mode", articles about its ending, articles about why Ken Levine doesn't believe in Utopias, articles about how to edit the INI files, tips articles, articles about why having it spoiled didn't matter, articles about… have I made my point yet? This is a disproportionately large amount of coverage for one game — one very good game, admittedly, and one which has a lot of expectations to live up to, yes, but still just one game, and one game that people were already very much aware of in the run-up to its release. I'm already absolutely fucking sick of hearing about it, and the more I hear about it, the smaller the already-miniscule chance I will ever play it becomes — a phenomenon I discussed in this post.

The standard response to this is, of course, that this is what the greater audience is hungry for. Millions of people are going to buy, play and love Bioshock Infinite, and they should be catered to, as those millions of people are probably also going to want to read lots of things about Bioshock Infinite.

However, here's my (slightly selfish) question. What about me? What about people like me? What about all of the people out there — I'm sure I'm not the only one in the world — who didn't really like the first Bioshock all that much (I played System Shock 2 almost immediately beforehand, which just made the fact that Bioshock wasn't System Shock 3 all the more painful and frustrating) and consequently are not all that interested in this new one? What about the people who are more interested in other types of games? Don't we deserve some quality and wide-ranging coverage of the things that we're interested in? (Where's my "Tips for playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory" post, hmmm?) We have fan communities and enthusiast blogs, sure, but where's our high-profile professional outlet covering this stuff that's a bit off the well-worn path? (Besides Games Are Evil, of course, which I'm not going to pretend is anywhere near as big as I would love it to be!)

The gaming medium has grown up enormously in the last few years. With constantly improving software and hardware technology providing more and more flexibility for interactive artists to realise their digital dreams, and the rise of the indie space and Kickstarter allowing game makers to break free of the shackles of corporate culture, we're most definitely undergoing the "Cambrian explosion of possibilities" that SimCity, The Sims and Spore creator Will Wright talked about back in 2008. It's a great time to be someone who enjoys playing games.

But the games press has not evolved alongside the medium as a whole. The medium as a whole is now, as I've said numerous times in the past, far too broad for one outlet to be able to do justice to all of. And yet pretty much all of the big outlets choose to focus on the same part of this massively diverse medium. It's the part with the biggest audience, the biggest budgets and the biggest amount of money involved in it, yes, but it's still just one part of a whole. Read the news pages of one big site and you've read them all. Read the reviews section of one site and you've read them all. The sheer volume of things on display at events like PAX East and GDC help a little, but more often than not you still just hear about the same things from slightly different perspectives. Or you hear about Battlefield 4.

Why haven't we got to a stage where big outlets can feel confident enough to distinguish themselves from one another yet? Don't give me a reason to stick with one outlet, give me a reason to read all of them because of their completely different content. (Right now, I don't read any of them with any degree of loyalty, because very few of them provide coverage of the sort of thing I'm interested in any more!)

It's massively frustrating, and I don't even work in PR. I can bang my drum all I like about the types of game I'm interested in and want to experience more of… but is anyone really listening?