#oneaday Day 879: Flying Away

Having gone off on one somewhat about the fetid pile of toss that is Rage of Bahamut yesterday, it's only fair for balance's sake to talk about a free-to-play game that is well-designed, player-friendly and actually rather fun.

I am referring to Pocket Planes, the newest game from Nimblebit, developers of the astronomically popular Tiny Tower, a game which made "tap, tap, tap" gamers out of even the most jaded hardcore members of the games industry.

Tiny Tower, as most people realised after varying amounts of time, was little more than a mindless busywork generator, as RedSwirl over the on Squadron of Shame Squawkbox puts it. You built floors, you attracted people, you stocked up your floors with stuff that made money, you went away, you waited for your phone to shout at you that something needed restocking, you tapped on it to restock it and repeated the entire process for more hours than you really should until you either keeled over dead or got bored.

Tiny Tower, then, had very little in the way of strategy and certainly wasn't a modern-day SimTower, as some referred to it on its original launch. It was an interesting little timewaster with an adorable pixel-art aesthetic, however, and crucially, it allowed the player to make progress without battering them over the head to invite friends, share achievements or purchase things with real money every five minutes. The game featured a premium "hard currency" that allowed you to do things quicker or rapidly acquire more cash, but it was handed out fairly generously just through play, so those who wanted to play for free could.

Pocket Planes builds on this formula and puts a more complex game atop it. There's still not a huge amount of depth there, but it's definitely more than simple busywork now.

In Pocket Planes, you run an airline company, and your goal is to own all the airports in the world. (This alone distinguishes the game from Tiny Tower, which had no long-term goal besides "build a fucking huge tower") You begin the game in one of several regions around the globe with a small fleet of rather crap planes and a desire to make money. Fortunately, there are plenty of jobs waiting for you that want to give you money, so getting started is a simple matter of loading up your planes with passengers, cargo or both (depending on what type of plane it is) and setting them on their merry way.

It's here that an element of very light strategy comes into play. Sending your planes off costs money, and you don't receive payments for flights until they're completed. To be efficient, you might want to try and hit several stops in a single run, but when doing so you need to note whether there's a big enough profit margin to make it worthwhile. Sometimes leaving passengers behind rather than fully loading is more profitable, and scoring a jackpot of customers who are all going to the same place nets a 25% bonus on the income attained.

That's it for the basics of gameplay. Beyond that, once you've earned enough money you can purchase new airports, which allow your flights to go further afield and also provide you with plane parts which can be subsequently assembled into new members of your fleet, assuming you have space for them. Old, crap planes can be retired to make room if you don't have the capital to expand your fleet's maximum size, or you can simply try to get as many aircraft in the air as possible. Plane parts and complete planes can also be purchased through the Market page, which restocks with a random selection of items every few minutes, and parts can also be traded with friends for a small fee.

Like Tiny Tower, a lot of these actions use the game's "hard currency", or "Bux" as they are known, but again like its predecessor, Pocket Planes is generous about handing these valuable commodities out through play. If anything, Pocket Planes is more generous than Tiny Tower, rewarding the player with Bux simply for completing certain jobs, levelling up and various other actions. Sometimes they even just float past the planes in flight, to be collected with a simple tap.

Pocket Planes also includes an interesting social mechanic in the form of its "Flight Crew" system. By simply typing in the same crew tag as other airline tycoons, players can team up in an attempt to complete as many jobs in special global events as possible, with flight crews ranked on a worldwide leaderboard and prizes awarded when the time expires. You can also see how you stack up to the rest of your crew and figure out who needs to pull their weight more — though those players who join your crew but aren't on your Game Center friends list simply show up as anonymous benefactors, which is a shame.

The interesting thing with Pocket Planes' social mechanics is that it assumes the player already knows how to socialise. There are no screen-filling exhortations to share achievements with friends; no "friend gating", where progress becomes impossible unless you have a certain number of friends playing; no demands that you "visit" friends and "help" them. In fact, the game's social mechanics are kept pleasingly minimalist — most screens offer the facility to tweet a screenshot using iOS 5's built-in Twitter functionality, but in the case of Flight Crews and the like, it's up to the player to encourage their friends and acquaintances to join in the fun however they see fit rather than spamming them in-game. This is a Good Thing.

Pocket Planes is, at heart, a simplistic game with very little substance, but it offers the same sort of idle satisfaction that Tiny Tower did with a bit more sense of structure. It will undoubtedly be another big success for Nimblebit and fair play to them for that — their recent games are proof that you can adopt a free-to-play business model without being jerks about it. The goodwill that builds will likely encourage many more people who wouldn't think to purchase virtual goods otherwise to dip into their pockets purely to show the developer their support.

Pocket Planes is out now for iOS. An Android version is following in the near future, but a release date hasn't been announced yet.

#oneaday Day 878: I'd Tap That for £70 of In-App Purchases

Despite my day job, which is reviewing mobile and social games for the fine folks over at Inside Network, I have to confess that the reason some of these games end up being quite so popular eludes me. Don't get me wrong, I'm trained to spot a free-to-play game that's going to be profitable a mile off… I just can't pin down the reason as to why some of these games resonate with people so much. And no-one seems to want to tell me, either.

(Naturally it probably goes without saying that these are my personal, not professional views. But I'll say it anyway. Oh, I already did.)

Let's take a title called Rage of Bahamut as a case study. Rage of Bahamut is a game for iOS and Android devices. Ostensibly it's a "card battling" game in which you collect (virtual) cards a la Magic: The Gathering and then use said cards to do battle, either against other people or "boss" monsters. There's also a large number of "quests" that you can take one of the characters represented on your cards on, the ability to organise players into "Orders" and cooperate, trade cards, help each other out on difficult fights and all manner of other stuff.

Sounds pretty good, right? Well, it's not. The game features one of the most dreadful user interfaces I've ever seen, with most of the game looking like a Web page from the early '90s, albeit without animated "Under Construction" GIF files. The "quest" feature consists entirely of tapping a button, watching a short animation of a monster dying and observing your stamina bar gradually decrease as your experience and "quest progress" bars increase. Battling another player involves selecting your cards in advance, pressing "Battle" and then doing absolutely nothing. Battling a boss involves selecting your cards in advance, pressing "Battle" and then doing absolutely nothing. Oh, and there's no sound, either. It wasn't deemed necessary, it seems. The game's sole slightly redeeming feature is that the anime-style artwork for the cards is quite nice, but that certainly doesn't make it any fun to play. At all. Go on, try it. (Android users, go here.)

Despite this crippling lack of entertainment value, somehow the game is presently the third top grossing game on the iPhone — and it has been at the top of that chart in the last few days, too. It's free to download, meaning that people are enjoying this hateful, monotonous, tedious pile of steaming un-fun crap enough to want to voluntarily hand over money.

Why?!

It's not the only game of this type which has enjoyed success, it's just the most recent. Various studies by research companies indicate that the majority of profitable apps on the various app stores of the Internet include in-app purchases in one form or another — and many of these titles are of the free-to-play variety. I have nothing against free-to-play as a concept or business model, but I do question the taste of some people when something as unbelievably lacking in virtue as Rage of Bahamut proves itself to be more profitable than lovingly-crafted paid apps which developers have poured large quantities of time and money into. This depressing tale from Joystiq springs to mind.

I can't help but feel that the press is partly to blame in all this. Titles like Rage of Bahamut often get great reviews from the press despite their lack of innovation, gameplay, interface design or anything even resembling entertainment, when in fact they should be summarily panned for providing an experience akin to scrolling through an Excel spreadsheet equipped with a macro that requires you to click "OK" every ten seconds.

But then I guess I've never seen the appeal of football management games, either…

(Incidentally, if you're looking for a card-battling game that's actually good, try Gamevil's Duel of Fate, Hothead's Kard Combat or Kyle Poole's Shadow Era.)

#oneaday Day 877: Far Away

It's not been a great week to be in my mind. You can't control how or when or for what reason depression will hit you, but it's been getting me down somewhat recently for a variety of reasons. The events I outlined yesterday are one contributing factor, but as I said there, they aren't directly affecting me and thus I have to think that the exaggerated feelings of disappointment and upset I have been feeling may be caused by, rather than be the cause of, depression. Or perhaps there's a whole mess of contributing factors.

I don't know. And thinking about it inevitably doesn't help.

One thing that is getting me down a bit at the moment is how far away I am feeling from all my friends. I live in the middle of nowhere a long way away from pretty much everyone I know, and thousands of miles away from the people I talk to literally every day — friends, coworkers, confidantes. I have Andie in my life, a fact which I am incredibly thankful for every day, but that unfortunately doesn't stop the occasional feelings of loneliness and disconnection.

It's partly my fault in some cases, of course. When you have disparate, unconnected friendship groups scattered around the globe, it's difficult to keep up with all of them. (Hell, it's difficult to keep up with disparate, unconnected friendship groups in the same city sometimes.) Some necessarily fall by the wayside as a sort of natural atrophy. In many cases, this gradual contraction of your worldwide friendship network is a sign that one or all of you have evolved and changed from the people you were when you first knew each other, and you're just going in directions too different to stay together. In others, yes, it can simply be laziness, but mental states play a role in all this, too, particularly if you struggle with social anxiety as I do — sometimes even the prospect of hanging out with a longtime friend can be terrifying if you haven't seen them for ages. What if you have nothing to talk about?

Mostly, though, my daily life, my work and my hobbies have led me to the position I am in now, where the vast majority (though not all) of the people that I would consider my closest friends live many thousands of miles away across the Atlantic Ocean, and in some cases even further afield than that. It's great that I can talk to these people every day thanks to various forms of social media and other online happy funtimes, but sometimes all you want to do is get some people together in the same room, play some couch co-op (or couch competition games like the rather wonderful Hidden in Plain Sight), play some board games, eat some pizza/curry/Chinese/other takeaway goodness and simply, you know chill out together. It happens all too rarely these days.

Ah well. Not a lot I can do about it right now at 1am in the dark in Chippenham, is there? Someday I'll buy you all a drink. Just probably not all at the same time.

#oneaday Day 876: Gamers, Men, Everybody... Stop Being a Dick

I have mentioned these issues a couple of times over the past few days but I've come to the conclusion that they're actually making me feel a bit depressed. I know that there's little point in getting depressed or upset over "the way the world is" and there are far bigger problems in the world, etc. etc. but, I mean, wow. Something really needs to be done.

I am referring primarily to the treatment of Anita Sarkeesian, better known on the Interwebz as Feminist Frequency, the author of a number of feminist perspective critiques on popular culture. Sarkeesian recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund her newest piece of research and criticism, dubbed simply "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games". The proposed series of videos Sarkeesian is intending to produce will deconstruct the most commonly-seen female character tropes in video games, highlighting recurring patterns and discussing them rather than simply pointing the finger and going "LOOK! THIS IS BAD."

The response to Sarkeesian's campaign was both good and bad. On the positive side, the campaign was fully funded in the first 24 hours, and since that time a number of "stretch goals" have been smashed, allowing Sarkeesian to produce a much larger amount of content than initially proposed.

On the negative side, this happened. And this happened.

I really shouldn't be astonished by things that people say on the Internet any more, given that it is widely regarded as a wretched hive of &c &c despite all the lovely and intelligent people who also populate it. But these incidents really bothered me. They happened quickly and relentlessly… and they were clearly organised — likely by noted Internet cesspits 4chan and 9gag. This fabulous piece by Foz Meadows sums up the key aspect of the problem, I think: in attempting to defend themselves against accusations of sexism, misogyny and the promotion of a rape culture, those who deliberately and maliciously harassed Sarkeesian resorted to, you guessed it, sexism, misogyny and the promotion of a rape culture.

Sarkeesian's suffering isn't in any way the only time this has happened, of course, though it may have been the most high-profile one in recent weeks. The Hitman: Absolution trailer I mentioned a few posts ago stirred up plenty of controversy, and anyone speaking out against it tended to get shouted down by people who couldn't see the problem with it in the most abusive manner possible. Disagreements and differences in taste; threatening others and calling them abusive names because of those disagreements is not.

Even princess of geekdom Felicia Day wasn't immune to this bullshit. Her recent video "Gamer Girl, Country Boy", released as part of her entertaining "Flog" series on Geek & Sundry, attracted a swarm of completely unprovoked hateful comments. The hornets' nest had already been stirred up, so another target for their ire was just a happy bonus. Whatever you think of Day's past work, it should be clear to most people that there's clearly not a malevolent bone in her whole body, and the whole incident clearly upset her very much. I'm not "white knighting" here, it's a clear and simple fact. Who wouldn't be upset by an organised campaign to troll and flame something you'd worked hard on?

All of this is just a bit much to take. I've always been someone who likes to try and see the best in people — to a fault, really — but to see that some people hiding behind that ever-present veil of anonymity prove themselves to really be complete and utter cunts doesn't make me feel great. Obviously my own take on the matter pales in comparison to what Sarkeesian, Day and anyone else who has suffered at the hands of these trolls must be feeling about all this, but it's genuinely upsetting to know that there are people that vile and disgusting out there — people who supposedly share the same passions and hobbies as I do.

It needs to stop. That will only happen with concerted efforts from everyone involved, and it goes back to what school always told you about handling bullies. Be assertive, but not aggressive. Tell the bully that what they are doing is upsetting and unpleasant. And tell someone else. Don't be afraid to talk about it. Don't suffer in silence. Because while someone (or, indeed, a thrown-together Internet lynch mob) being a complete arsehole can utterly ruin your day, week, month, year, it's infinitely worse if you have no-one to turn to for support.

Let's stamp this odious attitude out. Freedom of speech is one thing; using said freedom to intimidate, harass and silence others is not its intention. I fully support and endorse Sarkeesian's Kickstarter campaign, and while I won't insist that you do so too, I would certainly like to encourage you all to stand up to bullying when (not if, sadly) you see it happening — even if it's not directly involving you. Good Samaritan and all that.

Above all, don't be a dick. And if it all gets a bit much, then pay this site a visit.

#oneaday Day 875: Kiryu Kazuma

I've been playing a lot of the Yakuza series recently — I'm intending on playing them all back-to-back, and at the time of writing am probably slightly less than halfway through Yakuza 2.

I'd specifically like to talk about Yakuza 2 because the first Yakuza game was covered in a suitably comprehensive level of detail by the Squadron of Shame in this podcast:

The original Yakuza was great. It was another fine example of a "kitchen sink" game — a type of game which incorporates a wide variety of other experiences to produce one surprisingly coherent whole. In the case of Yakuza, it blends JRPG, brawler, dating sim, scavenger hunt and open-world adventure into one of the finest experiences of the PS2 era, marred only by long-ass loading times, a sometimes-clunky fighting engine and the questionable decision to use American voice actors (including some surprisingly big names like Eliza Dushku, Mark Hamill and Michael Madsen) swearing more than your average Tarantino movie to depict the unique idiosyncracies of the Japanese criminal underworld.

Yakuza 2, still on the PS2, fixes almost everything that was flawed about its predecessor. It's still riddled with loading breaks, but they're much shorter than in the first game. The American voice acting has been replaced by a much more authentic Japanese voice track — though the subtitles are well-localised and entertainingly written rather than being a literal translation. The fight sequences have been refined to be much more fluid, incorporating far fewer instances of protagonist Kazuma facing the wrong direction and unleashing a devastating combo onto thin air and far more situations where it's possible to make use of the brutal (and darkly amusing) "heat" actions — smashing people's faces into walls, battering them over the head with street furniture, sticking a beer crate on their head and then punching them repeatedly in the stomach to name just three.

For the uninitiated, the Yakuza series' game flow is much more akin to a traditional JRPG than something like Grand Theft Auto, to which it got rather unfairly compared on its first appearance in the West. Kazuma wanders around the extremely well-realised fictional district of Kamurocho (based on Kabukicho in Tokyo) in an attempt to get to the bottom of whatever disaster is befalling him and his buddies in the organised crime world this time. Along the way, he'll encounter a wide variety of non-essential activities to distract him, many of which are deep, involved quests in their own right, and the pursuit of which causes a game which can be completed in about 12 hours to balloon up to well over 40 hours in length.

By far the best thing about Yakuza is the sheer variety of things to do. It's an evolution of the Shenmue series' anal attention to detail, though rather than providing players with the ability to open every drawer in every house for no apparent reason, Yakuza provides players with a well-realised city district in which they can romance hostesses, get into street fights, collect lost locker keys, gamble at an illegal casino, get a "massage" of questionable morality, play slot machines, play a crane game and play baseball. Yakuza 2 adds even more to the mix, including a lengthy sequence where you have to run your own hostess club; another lengthy sequence where Kazuma becomes a host at a club in an attempt to unmask the manipulative, abusive owner; a full Mahjong simulation; a first-person fighting game; golf; "video booths" where Kazuma sometimes learns new abilities; and some other stuff I doubtless haven't discovered yet. Oh, and Yakuza 2 also includes a whole other district almost as large as Kamurocho again, also packed full of things to do.

None of this stuff really feels like "filler" though, because it is clearly optional — the experience point rewards for completing any of these activities are generally laughable, though sometimes you get some cool items. Rather, the inclusion of all these activities helps the world of Yakuza to feel far more alive than almost any other game world I've ever encountered. Not only that, but it gives the player an incredibly strong understanding of Japanese culture, with a particular focus on the seedy underbelly of it — the side that Japan doesn't like to talk about. It's a game that draws you in with its interesting story and then encourages you to stay for the hostess bars, gambling dens and men with "FART" written on the back of their hoodies.

Of course, the great thing about the series is that if you do want to rush through them and just see the story, you're not penalised for doing this in the slightest. I'd already played the first Yakuza back when we recorded the aforementioned podcast, but I just wanted to remind myself of what happened, so I raced through without doing any of the side missions and still had a satisfying experience. (In fact, one could argue that the story is a little more coherent if the game is played in this way, but I wouldn't trade all the other stuff for anything.)

Yakuza 2, so far, then, is proving to be every bit as good as its predecessor and then some. I have no idea how long it's going to take me to beat, but I'm enjoying taking my time with it so far. And once it's done, I get to move into the HD age with Yakuza 3 and 4… and possibly the utterly bizarre Dead Souls after that. It's quite a ride.

#oneaday Day 874: 21 Hours Left to Get Indie Game Music Bundle 3

As I type this, Indie Game Music Bundle 3 has just 21 hours left on the clock. The package aims to give your ears a good rogering with the soundtracks to Terraria, Plants vs. Zombies, Dustforce, Ilomilo and Frozen Synapse, and is a cheap date, too — it's available under the fashionable "pay what you want" scheme.

There's a caveat, though — break the $10 barrier and you get a bunch of extra soundtracks, too. Specifically, you get the following additional albums on top of the already-awesome package detailed above:

Offspring Fling Original Soundtrack — Alec Holowka
Mubla Evol Ution: NoituLove 1&2 and More — Joakim Sandberg
Cardinal Quest Original Soundtrack — Whitaker Blackall
InMomentum Original Soundtrack — Gareth Coker
Impeccable Micro — _ensnare_
Bluescreen Chiptune/Jazz — Protodome
Beautiful Lifestyle — George & Jonathan
Rise of the Obsidian Interstellar — Disasterpeace
Deorbit — Disasterpeace
Gungirl 2 Original Soundtrack — Josh Whelchel
Astroman Original Soundtrack — Jeff Ball
The Blocks Cometh Original Soundtrack — Hyperduck Soundworks
Fittest Original Soundtrack — Zircon
Songs for the Cure '11 — Various Artists
Songs for the Cure '10 — Various Artists

You may not be familiar with any or all of the above artists, but rest assured that this is a fantastic bundle to pleasure your lugholes with for 19 and a half hours, covering a wide range of different musical styles. To be honest, it's worth your money for the fantastic Frozen Synapse soundtrack alone, which is aural sex.

Game music is traditionally a "love it or hate it" sort of thing, though in recent years we've started to see a huge shift in attitudes towards it. Whereas game soundtracks were once bleepy-bloopy loops made to fit into the amount of memory it takes to write a single sentence in a Microsoft Word document these days, today they're impressive affairs that are frequently on par with movies.

In fact, big-budget triple-A video games (particularly those from the West) try a little too hard to be movies, with sweeping orchestral scores composed by the likes of Hans Zimmer. In some respects, these modern soundtracks, while impressive, have lost a lot of the character that game music used to have — by working around the technological limitations of the era, old-school game musicians came up with catchy earworms that you'd remember for years afterwards. This happens much less these days because composers can pretty much run free with whatever they want to do. As an exercise, hum the Super Mario Bros. theme to yourself now. Then hum the Modern Warfare 3 theme. You probably can't do the latter. (Though you probably can hum the Halo theme, showing that some composers still "get it".)

Anyway, my point is that soundtrack composers for independently-developed titles such as these tend to "get" what made game soundtracks of the past so memorable much better than those composing for big-budget titles, and these indie composers are then able to apply this knowledge to modern compositional techniques and technology in order to create some truly excellent pieces of music. Some deliberately make use of chiptune sounds; others have their own distinctive aural aesthetic. All are unique. All are most definitely worth your $10.

Grab a copy of the Bundle here.

#oneaday Day 873: Cardinal Quest is Out on iOS, and You Should Probably Buy It

There's a surprising dearth of good roguelikes on mobile platforms. While I wouldn't wish to shoehorn the ridiculous number of key commands from something like Angband onto a buttonless phone, the basic concept is a good fit. Explore randomly-generated dungeon, kill monsters, get treasure. The basic controls you need to make a roguelike work — directions and inventory, mostly — are pretty workable on a touchscreen, and the turn-based nature of the genre means that the frustration factor of trying to be accurate with non-physical controls is simply not there.

This isn't to say there aren't good roguelikes out there, however. On iOS, there's 100 Rogues, Sword of Fargoal and several others I haven't tried. On Android, the pickings are a bit more slim, though there are a few out there for the taking.

Today, iOS added Cardinal Quest to its lineup, a rather wonderful little roguelike with a pleasing retro aesthetic, streamlined gameplay and the kind of addictive nature that is perfect for mobile games.

Cardinal Quest isn't a new title, however; it's been available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux machines for quite a while now, and there's a free demo you can play over on Kongregate. But its release on iOS today marks its first jump onto portable devices.

For the uninitiated, Cardinal Quest is a simplistic dungeon-crawler that cites Gauntlet, Golden Axe and red-box Dungeons & Dragons games as its key inspirations. Taking on the role of one of three different pixelated heroes, the player descends into the randomly-generated dungeons to seek their fortune and hopefully defeat the evil minotaur lurking in the depths. Along the way they'll discover treasure and a variety of different spells to make their journey easier.

Cardinal Quest adds a few nice little twists on the conventional roguelike formula. Walking over an item of equipment, for example, causes your character to automatically decide whether it's better than what he already has or not, and replace it if necessary. There's no faffing around with comparing stats, it simply takes care of it for you. This might irk purists a bit, but it keeps things nice and pacy.

Similarly, special abilities aren't learned, but are instead found as treasure. Five can be equipped at once, while others are stored in the inventory. Instead of using a magic points system, each skill has a cooldown determined by one of the character's stats, making some inherently more suitable for certain classes than others — though, so far as I can tell from my brief time with the game so far, any class can use any spell.

Also, while the game does feature permadeath as all good roguelikes should, there's a bit of a safety net in place in the form of a "lives" system that lets the player walk away from a couple of fatal encounters before succumbing to oblivion. It makes the experience a little more friendly to newbies while still remaining brutal enough to provide genre veterans with a decent challenge.

Wrap the whole thing in pleasingly blocky pixel-art, retro sound effects and chiptune music and you've got Cardinal Quest in a nutshell. Grab it here for $1.99.

#oneaday Day 872: Haters Gonna Inspire Worldwide-Trending YouTube Videos

I really love it when someone I know achieves success with something. That's why it was so utterly delightful to see something that a friend from university worked on gradually spread around the world today.

I am talking, of course, about this video, which if you haven't watched yet… well, you just should. (Probably NSFW.)

I don't know Isabel Fay (the lead performer) directly, but I do know one Mr Tom Hopgood, who co-produced the piece and has worked very hard with Isabel and the rest of the team at Clever Pie TV to produce some high-quality comedy skits over the last few years. Today, it seems, all that hard work really paid off.

I watched it happen over the course of the day. Another university friend shared the video. I expected this. But then someone who, to my knowledge, had no direct connection to Tom or Isabel shared the video, which surprised me. Then I shared it after watching it and finding it hilarious.

Then I went and did some work. As the day progressed, I saw the video start appearing in various tweets along with Facebook and Google+ posts.

Then Stephen Fry shared it, which is pretty much a guarantee that you're going to be a sudden global sensation, at least temporarily. Sure enough, a lot of the YouTube comments indicated that Stephen Fry sent them.

As it gets close to bedtime, I see more and more people still sharing it, including other unrelated Twitter followers. It truly is something which has spread worldwide and has enjoyed universal appeal among everyone I know online. This is delightful to see.

It's especially delightful to see as it was absolutely perfectly timed. I have a feeling it was just a happy coincidence that it happened to appear on everyone's radar today, but after reading this depressing post over on Feminist Frequency regarding the harassment, misogyny and silencing tactics the author had endured after promoting her upcoming research and video series, it just seemed perfectly, perfectly apt. Perhaps the fact that hateful comments on the Internet are very much at the forefront of people's minds right now meant that it resonated more than it might have done otherwise.

Or, you know, perhaps it's just a great piece with an infuriatingly catchy melody.

Whatever the reasons were for the video enjoying the success it has done so far (and still is — Twitter mentions of it are still flowing in even as I type this) don't really matter, though. I'm absolutely stoked for Isabel, Tom and the rest of the Clever Pie gang, and though I haven't seen Tom for a large number of years now I'm very proud to say that I have both known and worked with him. I have photos to prove it and everything.

I hope this is the beginning of something really big for Clever Pie. If they can continue to tap into relevant topics like this, then they've got it made. "Thank You Hater!" manages to be both topical and timeless at the same time — Internet trolls are always going to be an issue, but they're particularly prominent in people's minds right now for various reasons.

Enough gushing. Time for the weekend. Have a good one, everyone.

#oneaday Day 871: A Change of Heart

It's not easy to change your own opinions, for any reason. It's even harder to change it when someone else makes a convincing argument as to why you are wrong and therefore a big dumb-dumb poopy-head. But sometimes it's something you have to do in order to move with the times.

I have two very different issues in mind for which I've encountered the above concept. I'll tackle them in order of difficulty to comment on.

First up is mobile gaming.

Last year, I wrote this post. In it, I described how I thought the supposed pressure from Nintendo's investors for the Japanese giant to start developing for smartphones rather than its own proprietary hardware might not actually be a terrible idea. I actually still don't think it's an awful idea, but after a year of reflection, observation and immersion in the mobile gaming industry, it's clear that what I describe and suggest in that post isn't going to happen.

For all some iOS developers' attempts to take the iPhone and iPad seriously for gaming purposes, there are at least ten times as many developers churning out free-to-play or quick-hit casual games. For every developer who is up front about the cost of their app and refuses to nickel-and-dime the player with additional in-app purchases, at least ten times as many incorporate some sort of means of endless monetization, be it an "energy" system, a means for players to buy in-game currency without earning it or the facility to unlock content without having to progress naturally through the game.

I don't begrudge these developers their income, of course — games cost money to make, and every developer wants to make it big with their titles. But, unfortunately, the prevalence of such business models in the mobile gaming space makes it all but impossible for the "core" gaming community to take it seriously. As much as many of us moan about grinding for levels or money in games, a lot of us secretly quite enjoy it — it provides us with "war stories" about how we played Mahjong for six hours straight in Yakuza 2 in order to be able to afford a fancy dress to give to a girl, or how we accumulated fifteen bajillion souls in Demon's Souls only to die and then die again on the way back to retrieving them, losing them all forever.

In short, the effort and personal sacrifice involved in accomplishing feats in some of these games is rendered meaningless if someone can just come along and pay ten quid to bypass all the pain and suffering. Sure, it's convenient, but it renders achievements meaningless — particularly if the game's monetization strategy features "pay to win" items, whereby players can pay real money in order to gain a significant in-game advantage, be it the ability to "continue" after death without score penalty or simply acquiring powerful new equipment.

What this means is that "core" gamers as a community don't take mobile gaming seriously, which means that when developers do come along wanting to do something serious and non-exploitative, they often get ignored — particularly if their game is seen as "expensive" compared to the myriad free and 69p apps out there. If you want a recent example of this in action, just consider the Kickstarter campaign for Republique that I wrote about here. Despite starting as an effort to get "triple-A" games on iOS, the team behind the project gradually had to accept that this mission statement wasn't going to get them the funding that they wanted, and eventually had to expand and promise PC and Mac versions. Even then, it looked for a long time like they weren't going to make it.

Anyway. I was wrong. I accept that. Mobile gaming is its own thing, and that's cool. I will continue to appreciate it when a developer treats me as a player rather than a customer (or worse, cash cow) and provides me with deep, meaningful, worthwhile experiences on iOS, but I'm no longer holding my breath for it to be the next big thing in portable gaming — at least not for the "core" audience. There is still a place for dedicated handhelds.

Now for the second issue. I kind of don't want to talk about this much because there's been a lot of angry table-thumping surrounding it in recent weeks. There are, too, a lot of very vocal commentators on the subject and I really don't want to attract their ire — firstly, because that is by no means my intention, and secondly, because I've seen people really get laid into as a result of such arguments.

I am, of course, talking about gender issues and the question of whether or not the video games industry constitutes a rape culture.

Some context, first. Apologies to those whom the following offends, but it's necessary to include it for context. (NSFW, duh.)

This trailer for the upcoming game Hitman Absolution made a lot of people very angry, for various reasons. The ridiculous nun disguises covering impractical porn-star dominatrix outfits. The question of how exactly a nun conceals a rocket-launcher inside her habit. The fact that this really didn't look like the Hitman series people knew and loved.

By far the biggest concern, though, was the violence towards women depicted in the trailer.

I am not going to get into the broader discussion of whether or not this is indicative of a rape culture here as, to be frank and honest with you, I do not know enough about the subject and therefore feel ill-qualified to comment on it.

What I can discuss, however, is how my own thought processes went.

My initial reaction to the trailer was simply "WTF". This was shortly followed by "that's clearly sexist and unnecessary", and I commented as such on Twitter around the time it was emerging. My opinion was that the trailer was the result of a horny marketing department making deliberately sexually-provocative promotional material in order to get people talking about the game. On that note, it certainly worked.

I thought little more of it for a while, until articles like this one started to appear, claiming that the trailer was indicative of a larger problem — the trailer was, to paraphrase Brendan's piece, not simply sexist, but evidence of a culture that normalised violence against women, and specifically sexual violence. In short, a rape culture by its very definition.

I had no idea what "rape culture" meant when I saw the initial discussions surrounding this trailer. My initial reaction, like many others, was to assume that "rape culture" in fact meant "directly endorsing rape". Despite being conscious of the fact that I had publicly spoken out against the trailer, the accusations flying around and the increasing anger of commenters on the subject — on both sides — made me feel deeply uncomfortable and, yes, defensive. No-one likes to be told that something they care deeply about has such an odious undercurrent, after all.

But I stepped back for a moment and considered what was going on. This was clearly a hot-button issue for a lot of people, and one that I knew wading into with ill-informed opinions would be desperately, desperately unwise. I'd already seen a few weeks previously that a friend who had inadvertently ventured into a similar discussion got very publicly torn a new one (a little unfairly, I feel — though that's an altogether different story) as he attempted to discuss the matter.

So here's what I did: I stepped away. I read through the various angry tweets, blog posts and articles with a degree of detachment, attempting to understand where these people were coming from and why those who were saying "it's no problem, what's the big deal?" were pissing them off so much. I read up a little on what "rape culture" as a term actually meant.

And I came out of it feeling differently to the defensiveness I felt before. I already knew there was a problem with sexism in the industry, but now I felt I had an increased (though by no means comprehensive) understanding of the issue. I am aware that there are still things I do not understand about issues of feminism, gender, sexuality, rape culture and cultural norms — people spend years studying these things, after all — but I am willing to at least learn about these subjects before sticking my oar into a debate I am currently ill-qualified to have. I am also aware that many of the commenters who feel so passionately about this issue are not, as might first appear, condemning the entire industry and everyone involved in it as sexist, misogynist perpetuators of a rape culture, because gross generalisations are never helpful.

Let's get off the specifics because, as I've said several times, I don't want to get into that particular discussion right now.

The key issue is that a little consideration and reflection goes a long way. Knee-jerk, immediate, passionate, emotional and ill-informed reactions might feel good in the short term, but often they leave you looking like a jackass. I'm glad that I stepped back and considered the way I felt about the discussion surrounding this issue — and why — before even thinking about jumping in and potentially making a twat of myself.

It pays to have flexible opinions, a willingness to educate yourself and, yes, the ability to admit you were wrong (and understand why), in short. That's not to say that you should blindly follow the herd — quite the opposite, in fact. You should take the time to explore an issue, find out as much as possible and gather sufficient information for you to be able to accurately decide whether or not your initial reaction was, in fact, correct.

If it was — in your opinion, anyway — then you'll be well-equipped to argue your case. And if it wasn't, it's important to be humble enough to admit it.

#oneaday Day 870: On the Exploration of Space Via the Medium of Video Games [UPDATED]

[Now updated with some titles I meant to include in the first place but forgot because it was late when I wrote this and I was tired and WHARGGGHHH. Or something.]

Space, they say, is big. Really big. There's a whole universe of infinite possibilities out there, and being boring old humans we're (mostly) stuck on this planet, unable to explore the great black beyond. We can, of course, observe it and take exciting pictures and footage, such as what we've seen from the recent Venus transit. But for the everyday person, exploration of space is the stuff of pure science fiction.

Video games are a great way to immerse yourself in that sense of exploring the great unknown. Plenty of games are set in space, obviously, but it's a smaller subset that actively deals with exploration and discovery rather than simply blowing shit up. Star Trek as opposed to Star Wars, if you will, though I'm aware that's a gross oversimplification of and a great injustice to both series. But never mind.

Here are some of my favourite space games.

Star Control II

What a fantastic game this is, well deserving of its classic status. Star Control II casts the player in the role of a human captain returning to Earth after a long stint on a faroff colony only to discover that our homeworld has been captured and enslaved by the evil Ur-Quan. Thus begins a galaxy-spanning adventure of diplomacy, combat and collecting lots of minerals.

Star Control II is one of those games that blends lots of different play styles together to create a distinctive whole. You have Asteroids-style combat incorporating ideas from one-on-one fighting games — each ship has its own "special moves" and is well-matched against certain other vessels. You have space exploration — the game tells you very little about where to find things, and God help you if you don't note down the offhand mentions of alien species that some characters make. You have resource management in the form of keeping an eye on your ship's crew, fuel and cargo space. You have RPG-style upgrading as you turn your ship into an unstoppable behemoth and recruit various escort vessels to accompany you. And you have adventure-game style dialogue trees as you make contact with the weird and wonderful races of the galaxy in an attempt to recruit them to your cause.

Best of all, you can grab the enhanced port of the 3DO version for modern computers here, or pick up the original version and its prequel from GOG.com.

Star Trek Online

Star Trek Online is an excellent Star Trek game, although it may be a little too heavy on the combat to be completely true to its source material. The game does successfully capture the feeling of piloting a huge vessel around the galaxy to seek out new life and new civilisations and all that jazz, though, and the fact that the game has a strong focus on user-generated content ranging from player-constructed alien races to full mission sequences makes it a great deal of fun. It's not as polished as it could be and PvP is broken as hell, but it's a free-to-play title that doesn't gouge you for in-game purchases at every opportunity.

Find out more here.

Endless Space

I wrote a little about the upcoming 4X space strategy title Endless Space a little while back. The game is now in beta testing as it gets closer to release. I haven't tried it yet but am planning to give it a go over the weekend.

Endless Space is less "personal" than other titles due to the fact that you're not controlling your own individual vessel, you're overseeing a whole empire. That doesn't stop it from being full of the joy of discovery and exploration, however — finding a star system with planets rich in valuable resources is immensely satisfying, and successfully defending it against incurstion from your opponents is even more satisfying.

X: Beyond the Frontier

I haven't played this game for ages, nor have I played its sequels and expansions. But the original game struck me as an impressive experience that truly made you feel like an insignificant speck in a massive galaxy that would most certainly go on with its own business without you. Over time, in true space opera style, you could make a name for yourself and work your way up to being an immensely powerful individual, but the journey was a long, slow, tough one — rewarding, though.

Grab it from Steam.

Spore

Having returned to playing this recently I had forgotten quite how excellent the space section of this game was — it's certainly the most well fleshed out component.

After designing your custom race's custom spaceship, you then take to the randomly-generated stars to colonise new planets, trade with other spacefaring races, toy with the natural order of things on developing worlds, discover lost relics, complete missions, mine for valuable resources, paint planets and carve obscenities into the ground using rivers. It's very freeform in how the player can tackle it, which gives each game the potential to be completely unique.

Will you seek peaceful solutions to conflict? Will you only expand your empire to planets already capable of supporting life, or will you terraform barren rocks into new Edens? Will you go to war with rival empires or attempt to buy them out? And will you satisfy yourself with building out your empire, or will you embark on a quest to get to the centre of the galaxy and uncover the mysteries of the universe?

Grab it from Steam or Origin.

Starflight

I played this game on the Atari ST. It was brilliant. It was a relatively early title from Electronic Arts, and was immensely freeform in its gameplay. Taking on the role of a starship captain, the player was simply tasked with exploring the galaxy. This involved flying to new star systems, descending to planets, exploring in a "rover" vehicle, engaging in diplomacy between alien races and battling enemies. There was supposedly an overarching plot, but I never got that far when playing it as a youngster — I simply enjoyed flying around and exploring space. It may well be one to revisit with the eyes of an adult.

Space Rogue

A space sim from Origin (as in the software company, not the digital distribution platform) that cast the player in the usual role of a "privateer", Space Rogue was interesting for the fact it wasn't just about flying around shooting things and hauling goods from planet to planet. Landing at a base launched a top-down roleplaying component during which you could explore, talk to people, engage in combat against enemies and take part in a galaxy-spanning plot that, again, I can remember very little about besides a series of fetch quests that involved you ferrying messages back and forth between two sisters called Cebak and Tiwa. There were text-based adventure sections, too.

Space Rogue, then, was something of a precursor to the next game I'm going to mention.

Space Rangers 2

An utterly bizarre yet lovable game from Russia, Space Rangers 2 takes players on a wild ride across the galaxy, taking in turn-based strategy, real-time strategy, third-person shooter combat, text-based adventures, trading, RPG-style levelling up and all manner of other crap along the way. It's an absolute Frankenstein's Monster of a game and all the better for it. It's almost futile to describe the experience of playing it, particularly when you can check it out for yourself for super-cheap thanks to GOG.com.