#oneaday Day 818: "So Fed Up With SOMEBODY..."

Passive aggression. It's an ugly business, for sure, but never has it been easier to participate in than in this age of social media. While the phenomenon has been around for many years in the form of bickering couples saying things like "SOMEBODY didn't do the washing up" or making other such pointed remarks either directly at each other or to other people within earshot of their partner, it wasn't until people gained the ability to broadcast their every waking thought to the entire world that it became the worldwide craze that it is today.

I'm not sure exactly what it achieves. I've indulged in it in the past — in my defence, there were extenuating circumstances at the time — and it didn't really make me feel any better, though it did have the effect I desired at the time: to get some validation and reassurance from friends, and to piss off, upset or otherwise get the attention of a specific person. I wasn't particularly proud of the result. I ended up feeling worse about the thing I was trying to get out of my system than before the passive-aggressive incident. So I try and avoid it in most cases these days. (Note: most. No-one is infallible. And I'm aware that not sharing the details of said incident above could be construed as a form of passive aggressiveness. But, well, shut up.)

Why has social media been a catalyst for the growth of passive-aggressiveness, though? Quite simply, it's because it gives people the ability to feel like they're being heard even when no-one is really listening. Post something along the lines of "SO PISSED OFF WITH SOMEONE RIGHT NOW!!!" on Facebook and within a matter of minutes you'll have at least one "Like" and one comment saying something along the lines of "u ok hun?". Since you're being passive-aggressive, though, you couldn't possibly say exactly what's up with you at the time, and as such you drop vague hints as to what is bothering you without actually saying it. Or, worse, you leave a comment to the "u ok hun?" commenter saying "I texted you", letting everyone else reading the comment thread know that you're telling someone all about what/who has pissed you off this week, encouraging a flurry of private messages and texts to said person asking "Do you know what's up with so-and-so?"

Eventually, of course, the whole sordid saga comes out because statistically, someone in your group of friends is likely to have loose lips. We know this from sitcoms where one member of a group of friends is forced to keep someone's secret but finds themselves increasingly tempted to reveal everything to someone else, whom it transpires actually knew it anyway. Or, to base ourselves back in reality, some people like telling others secrets because it gives them a feeling of power — "I know something you don't, but I'll tell you if you buy me a drink/buy me a pony/sleep with me" — and thus said secret gradually spreads and spreads until, inevitably, it gets back to the person it originated from, who traces it back to the person who they told in confidence and then posts another passive-aggressive status update about how they're, like, totally so pissed off with people who can't keep secrets.

You get the idea, anyway.

As human beings, we have a variety of means of communication at our disposal, and it's pretty clear to most of us that being upfront and honest about things often makes life a lot easier in the long run, even if it might be a bit like tearing off a plaster in the short term. But in the heat of the moment, it's all too easy to focus on that "short term" bit and take the easy option, which is to bottle up the things we're really feeling and simply spout vague bullshit into the ether in the hopes that someone — anyone — will reach out to us and give us someone to talk to.

We never learn our lesson, though — at least not if my Facebook news feed and Twitter timeline are anything to go by.

#oneaday Day 817: Countdown to a Non-Event

It's my 31st birthday on the 29th of this month, something which I am neither massively looking forward to or dreading — it's just happening. (That said, there is the distinct possibility of nerdtastic board game action in the name of celebration, so I guess I am sort of looking forward to it.)

Birthdays are one of those things that seem massively important when you're a kid but decline in relevance as you get older, with only the big "decade change" birthdays being a particularly big deal in most cases. My 30th was pretty awesome, as it happened, since not only did my awesome girlfriend take me to London for happy funtimes (on royal wedding day, as it happened, but that didn't make things as inconvenient as I expected it might) but I then got to hang out with a goodly proportion of my UK-based friends (and one US-based friend who happened to be in the country at the time!) and eat lots of curry. Which was nice.

Thinking back on it, though, I'm not sure I can remember that many birthdays from my past. I was never particularly big on the whole "party" thing even when I was little — I remember going to plenty of other kids' parties at the local village hall, eating cake and playing Pass The Parcel, though I don't have any traumatic clown experiences to have revelations about in therapy (unless they're particularly well-hidden and repressed) and I was rarely — if ever, I forget — the actual "host" or "guest of honour" of such an event.

I'm fine with this, as it happens, though it may have begun to carve my personality into the shape it is today. A big "party" full of people I don't really know very well all putting pressure on me to have a good time is not a situation I particularly want to put myself in, particularly as it's considered impolite and/or drama queen-ish to tell everyone that you've had enough and you'd just like them all to, you know, fuck off right now please.

I think the best birthday celebrations I've had were loosely-organised affairs where I maybe had the opportunity to hang out with a few friends, but there was no real pressure on anyone to be wild, wacky or drunk. Oftentimes there was all of the above, but rarely was it forced.

One particularly memorable occasion came during my first year at university, so I guess it must have been my 19th birthday. The halls of residence flat in which I lived had become a pretty close-knit group (most of us, anyway — there was one girl who perpetually did her own thing) and so we decided that we would go to local student hotspot and well-known grot spot Clowns, a "wine bar" that had an attached basement nightclub known as Jesters.

To call Clowns a "wine bar" was to polish a turd, really, since it was simply a "bar". Okay, it served wine, but the phrase "wine bar" implies a certain degree of classiness that Clowns most certainly did not possess. Rather, it was the sort of place in which you stuck to the floor if you stood still for too long, and its companion nightclub Jesters (which seemed to be perpetually open, even during the day) was the kind of place whose toilets regularly overflowed and coated the dance floor with a sloppy mess of urine, cigarette butts and all manner of other unpleasantness. The theory was that by the time you got into Jesters, you were usually so wasted that you didn't mind what you might be stepping in/on, so it was something of a moot point.

I digress. This particular birthday celebration was one of those "unstructured" sort of occasions. Clowns was running some sort of summer special whereby they'd provide you with a four-pint jug of its signature "Juicy Lucy" cocktail for about four quid, and as such most people there were clutching said jugs like giant tankards, pouring the luminescent green concoction down their throats with gay abandon.

I remember relatively little about what we were actually doing at the pub — drinking, probably — but for some reason I have oddly lucid memories of what happened upon our return to the flat. My flatmate Chris, for one, decided that the thing to do would be to sit in the corner of my bedroom with a pair of my (clean) underpants on his head. (I believe he was later sick on his door and subsequently refused to come out of his room for the rest of the evening, though this may have been another occasion.) My friend Simon, who did not live in the same halls of residence as us, fell asleep on my bed. All I really wanted to do at this time was fall asleep, too, so I opened up my wardrobe, rested my head on the bin-bag full of laundry that was in there (surprisingly comfortable) and drifted off for a little while.

I awoke a couple of hours later to find Simon just rousing from his slumber, too.

"I'm just going to run my head under the tap and then leave," he said blearily. He stood up, and from my low vantage point I heard him go into the kitchen, run the tap as he suggested, and a few moments later, the front door banged to indicate that he had indeed left.

This occasion was clearly a silly situation in which almost nothing of any note whatsoever occurred, but for some reason it has stuck in my memory for many, many years. I can only wonder what strange memories future celebrations may burn onto my brain.

#oneaday Day 816: Half-Past One, AM

It's 1:30 in the morning, because I've spent the last little while putting together my first article for ages on Bitmob/GamesBeat. It's about the three "Operation Rainfall" RPGs — Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story and Pandora's Tower. You can find it here. Please give it some love. I was tempted to recreate the whole thing here and call that today's post, but I thought I'd at least make an effort to do something different. For some reason. I don't know why. I'm kind of tapped out on creativity, but I have no doubt that just typing and typing in my usual stream of consciousness manner will cause at least something to flow out.

Whether or not it'll be interesting does, of course, at the time of writing this sentence, remain to be seen.

This week has been one of those ones that has simultaneously zipped by at a breakneck pace and also appeared to be exhaustingly busy. I don't think I've been doing anything particularly out of the ordinary — though we have been to the gym a few times after a few weeks of poor motivation — but things have felt more chaotic than usual. I've been working as usual (this week's iOS app recommendations: Skylanders Cloud Patrol and Saturday Morning RPG with an honourable mention for Burnout Crash even though I have a suspicion it might be a bit rubbish) and hanging out on Twitter. I also sat in our back garden for the first time ever. I read a bit of a book on my Kindle. It was nice, and I've apparently got over my fear of deckchairs.

I also ordered an Android tablet. Don't get me wrong, I'm still a total Apple fanboy (I'm typing this on one of two iMacs that adorn my desk, and my iPhone and iPad are within easy reach) but 1) I'm curious about what Android has to offer and 2) it will be useful for my work. Also, 3) Android tabs — particularly the Motorola Xoom, which is the one I've ordered — are great for emulation and retro gaming. A Twitter friend regularly evangelises about how great it is to have a portable device which merrily plays the entire back catalogue from systems such as the SNES, Mega Drive, NES, Master System and numerous other platforms, and I won't lie, that possibility is immensely appealing. Imagine how cool it would be to roll up to a friend's house with a single device and be able to play things like Street Fighter II and Mario Kart without having to faff around behind their TV? Awesome. (Hopefully. I'm yet to see it in action. But I'm confident.)

In a few moments I will be going to bed, and then it will be the weekend. Technically it is already the weekend, I suppose, but it's not really the weekend until you wake up on Saturday morning after sleeping and then eat bacon and sausages and eggs and smother them in brown sauce. (Yes, brown sauce is the correct sauce to put on a full English.)

Oh, I give up. My brain is dry and so I cut my losses and say goodbye. (Hey, that rhymes.) Good night!

#oneaday Day 815: Pandora's Tower -- Some First Impressions

So, the third of the three "Operation Rainfall" titles is finally upon us here in the UK (well, technically tomorrow, but Amazon were good enough to ship it to me a day early), completing the Holy Trinity of Wii-based Japanese role-playing games that many are lauding as the real last hurrah of Nintendo's system. (I've actually lost count of how many times people have referred to Wii games as the system's "last hurrah" or similar, but with Wii U on the relatively near horizon, it might actually be true this time.)

Like its predecessors Xenoblade Chronicles by MonolithSoft and The Last Story by Mistwalker, Ganbarion's Pandora's Tower is far from what you'd call a conventional JRPG. In fact, of the three titles, Pandora's Tower is the least traditionally RPG-ish and will likely prove to be the most divisive due to its curious mix of game styles. That's not to say it's bad — far from it, in fact — but those coming in and expecting a traditional globetrotting adventure with a cast of loveable misfits will find themselves surprised by what they discover.

Pandora's Tower tells the story of a pair of young star-crossed lovers named Aeron and Elena. Aeron, the player character, doesn't say much besides the odd grunt and "yes" but is clearly devoted to Elena. Elena, meanwhile, has a bit of a problem; she's cursed. And, as curses go, this one's a doozy — she's slowly turning into a slobbering monster with icky skin and tentacles wriggling out of her shoulder. Discovering the nature of the curse at a harvest festival, Aeron and Elena flee into the wilderness accompanied by a strange old crone named Mavda who inexplicably carries a jar on her back containing an enormous skeletal man who occasionally babbles indecipherable gibberish. Madva reveals that there is one way to break the curse — for Elena to eat the flesh of twelve "masters" who reside in twelve towers that make up an imposing-looking fortress hovering over a terrifying-looking abyss known as The Scar.

As you have probably surmised, this is where the player comes in. Elena, being rather delicate and demure when she's not slobbering and betentacled, isn't exactly equipped to go monster hunting, so it's up to Aeron to take his improbably large sword, magic chain (provided by Mavda) and floppy hair (model's own) into the aforementioned towers to defeat the masters, rip out their "master flesh" and feed it to Elena (who was, at least until this whole mess started, a vegetarian for religious reasons) in order to save her from a hideous fate. Simple, right? All in a day's work for an almost-mute hero.

Gameplay evolves in several discrete sections, and it's the combination of these factors that makes Pandora's Tower such an original, distinctive experience. If you were to boil it down to video game math, then the following equation would probably cover most of what I've experienced so far:

(Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Patrick Stewart) + Ico + Shadow of the Colossus * Zelda + dating sim = Pandora's Tower

There are two main components to gameplay: dungeoneering and downtime. During downtime, the player may, as Aeron, hang out with Elena in their makeshift hideout, ask her about the lore of the world, shower her with gifts, feed her various meaty treats and throw her untranslated texts so she can make herself useful. Aeron may also call up Mavda, who appears to perpetually live outside the back door of the hideout, and buy things from her, get her to craft and repair items, get her to upgrade equipment and offload excess meat. She'll also pay Aeron for any texts he's found — including newly-translated ones from Elena — which provides the player with a decent income stream if they take the time to explore and discover things. That completionist's nightmare — the "percentage completed" gauge — makes an appearance in the game's menu so those who want to make sure they get the full experience can see at a glance how close they are.

All this downtime activity isn't just for show — most of the Elena-related activity affects the couple's relationship, and providing certain gifts also causes her to spruce up the hideout with her own personal touches. The game's ending is supposedly determined by the relationship value between the two by the time the story comes to an end, so it's in players' interests to ensure that they keep their lady sweet.

Upon leaving the hideout and heading for one of the dungeons, however, gameplay takes a decidedly different turn. It becomes a combination of third-person combat and environmental puzzle solving. Aeron may attack beasties with his sword and unleash combos, but it's the chain that provides the most interesting gameplay possibilities. By aiming the chain with the Wii Remote's pointer (or the right analogue stick on the Classic Controller) and attaching it to enemies, environmental structures and all manner of other things, Aeron is able to cause all kinds of mischief. And there's plenty of scope for creative silliness, too — try attaching one end of the chain to one enemy's legs and the other to another enemy's face, for example.

Aeron's goal in each dungeon is, like a Zelda game, to unlock the boss chamber and then defeat said boss. Rather than relying on a huge inventory of items, however, the majority of the game's puzzle solving comes from creative use of the chain. Sometimes you'll be pulling levers with it, sometimes you'll be throwing chunks of ore into soft walls to use as hooks to grapple on to, sometimes you'll be tying sentient plants to pillars and chopping them to bits before they burrow into the ground. And you'll often be using the chain to rip out gobs of flesh and other crafting ingredients from fallen enemies, because Elena's curse isn't waiting for you.

No, indeed — a timer in the corner of the screen shows the progress of Elena's transformation. It can be reset by grabbing some tasty meat and taking it back to her, but this requires you to make your way back through the dungeon you've just battled your way through, then delve back into it once you've given her her treats. Fortunately, the dungeons are designed in such a way that progressing further in them allows you to set up various shortcuts, and knowing the layout of them a bit better also allows you to romp through them fairly quickly. Progress doesn't reset upon leaving the dungeon, so it's perfectly feasible to unlock the boss room, go back, feed Elena and then go kick some boss ass.

It becomes an exercise in time management — can you make it through the boss fight before Elena goes all tentacly? (Should she find herself going all tentacly, this does, as you may expect, have an adverse effect on the couple's relationship.) Or should you play it safe and head back with a bag full of meaty treats? This constant weighing up of pros and cons is further exacerbated by the fact that Aeron can only carry so much crap in his bag at once, necessitating a return to the hideout every so often to offload junk or craft it into useful items. This does, however, provide an opportunity for Aeron and Elena to spend some time together and improve their relationship, so it's not a wasted trip — though the traipsing back and forth may annoy some.

There's a lot to do, but the dungeons (at least the two I've completed so far) are well-designed and satisfying to figure out. A real sense of urgency is provided by the curse timer ticking away in the corner of the screen, and I can only imagine how the intensity of this will increase as the dungeons grow in complexity. The story is told in a less "in your face" manner than a lot of other games, with a strong focus on the relationship between Aeron and Elena, and a lot of environmental storytelling through discarded notes and architectural design. It's an intimate sort of game, by turns lonely and daunting in the dungeoneering segments and heartwarming when the couple is together. At its heart is the tale of a relationship between two people and the lengths people will go to for love — an experience that, so far at least, is altogether unlike any other Japanese role-playing game or action adventure that I've played in recent memory.

In short, it's a fitting dénouement to the "Operation Rainfall" trio of titles — and to the Wii's catalogue in general. It's actually pretty remarkable that three of the best "core" games of the generation are on a system that many people denounce as being "kiddy", "casual" or a waste of time — or dismiss outright for not being HD. Deprive yourself of these three games simply on the grounds that they don't look as good as, say, Mass Effect 3 and you're depriving yourself of three distinctive, bold and original titles that are the perfect antithesis to the "cookie-cutter" approach of triple-A development and publishing. I hope beyond hope that their small but loyal fanbases will be enough for these studios to be able to keep doing what they do.

Further thoughts on Pandora's Tower will follow when I've beaten it. In the meantime, if you're American, go pick up a copy of Xenoblade Chronicles before it becomes impossible to find, and be sure to support Xseed's release of The Last Story — and whoever picks up Pandora's Tower — when they show up later this year.

[Edit: Apologies — I misread some recent news that made it look as if Xseed was bringing Pandora's Tower to the US later in the year. It seems the status of that title's US release is still somewhat up in the air — but we can hope!]

#oneaday Day 814: Myself, Myself and Myself

Watched The Apprentice tonight. Out of the interminable string of asinine reality shows that the idiot-box forces into our collective consciousness, Lord Sugar's ouevre is the one that offends me the least. It still offends me, of course, though not for the same reasons that, say, Britain's Got Talent does. No, Britain's Got Talent makes me feel stupid for watching it. (So I don't.) The Apprentice, meanwhile, finds me infuriated at the people depicted therein — the fact that the show itself typically shows them up to look like the bunch of chancers they are takes the edge off, however.

One of the worst things these people do is talk. No, seriously. Every time they open their mouths it's a veritable string of business cliches, one after another. One of the most prolific, egregious examples is the incorrect use of the word "myself". Everyone on that show seems to think that using the word "myself" instead of "me" or "I" makes them sound more "formal" or "polite".

"Who was responsible for this?" yells Lord Sugar.

"That was myself," pipes up someone with impossibly blue eyes.

"And who worked in the production side of things?"

"Myself was working in production, along with Randolph, Bellend and Fuckwhistle," comes the reply from the blonde one with the annoying attitude. (I can't remember their real names.)

You get the idea.

The same principle is also, it seems, applied to the word "yourself", which has apparently become an acceptable substitute for the word "you" somewhere along the line.

"I think the team working on this should be yourself, myself and Craptwat," says Fuckwhistle.

I can't work out where this faux-formality that makes people talk incorrectly (or, to be less prescriptive about it, "faux-formality that makes people complicate their speech unnecessarily") has come from. Perhaps it's a modern-day variant of the archaic "thou art/you are" distinction, which everyone uses incorrectly these days anyway. (And with good reason, obviously — it's archaic, duh.) Whatever it is, it needs to die, for the same reason that people who use words like "trendy" and "funky" just need to stop right now. Words like that are ones which lose all their meaning and become the opposite of what they're supposed to be as soon as they come out of someone's mouth. The same is also true for anyone who says Internet memes out loud or — God forbid — says "LOL" in earnestness.

But I digress.

Language is constantly changing and evolving, usually for the better. We have a veritable shit-ton more words than we used to (and plenty more, like "shit-ton", that you won't find in the OED) and the English language has never been more complex, more expressive and more descriptive than it is now. It doesn't need to be overcomplicated with misplaced formality. There are already pretty good systems in place for indicating that you're speaking formally — lose the contractions, cut the slang, actually bother to pronounce the letter "t" — so stop making up rules. And while we're on, grab a dictionary and look up what "literally" means. It's not an intensifier. It means something actually happened. Stop using it wrong or I will literally jam this pencil into an orifice of yours that it's not usually supposed to find itself in.

And yes, I mean literally.

#oneaday Day 813: Fitocrat

I last wrote about up-and-coming "fitness social game" Fitocracy back in… [checks] Ooh. October of last year. I thought it was more recently. I feel less guilty about writing about it tonight, in that case.

For the uninitiated, Fitocracy is a site which gamifies your exercise regime. Completing exercises rewards you with points. Points mean level ups. Level ups mean… well, nothing actually, but they provide you with bragging rights plus also give you a rough idea of how much cumulative exercise you've done since you started tracking it (and, in theory, "got serious" about it).

Tracking exercises can be done in two ways: manually logging them or linking to a Runkeeper account. The former is necessary for exercises which can't be automatically tracked such as resistance machines, free weights and bodyweight exercises. The latter is the easiest way to track cardiovascular workouts — particularly those where you've actually, you know, gone outside — but you can also track CV stuff directly within Fitocracy if you don't want to plaster your information over yet another site. (Runkeeper is a pretty cool app, though, so if you're serious about your fitness, enjoy attempting to draw GPS penises via your exercise route and have a smartphone, it's worth a download.)

If Fitocracy was just an exercise-tracking system with a levelling system, it'd be pretty decent. But the team behind it has gone the extra mile and included a bunch of other stuff, too. There are Achievements for a variety of things ranging from engaging with the site's social features to performing challenging exercises. There is a Quest system that provides specific, one-off missions for you to undertake — a good means of setting yourself long-term goals if you can't think of any of your own. You can save your favourite routines so you can easily recall and record them. There's a solid Groups system whereby you and your friends can work together and even set up mini-challenges to see who can earn the most points in a set time period. And the whole thing is wrapped in a straightforward, conventional but effective and highly-polished social interface that encourages interaction and encouragement between "players".

All in all, it's an excellent motivational tool. Everything combined together forms a powerful system that makes you feel like you're being "rewarded" for bettering yourself when, in fact, you're simply making a variable go a bit higher each time or occasionally unlocking intangible shiny things. The thing is, though, you are actually rewarding yourself. You're bettering yourself. You're getting fit. You're learning how to self-motivate. And, assuming you've managed to badger some friends into joining up too, you're also being rewarded by positive encouragement and reinforcement from other people who are going through the same thing. It's a social network for people who are serious about their fitness — or who want to get serious about their fitness. And it does its job extremely well.

Fitocracy was in closed beta for a pretty long time, and during that period it was only possible to use the service if you had an invite. Now, though, the whole thing is open to the public and is completely free to use — though power users have the option of shelling out $4.99 a month to become a "hero" and get early access to new features. The service has had a fresh new coat of purple paint, its site looks great and the new iPhone app is a pleasure to use with its simple, intuitive and attractive interface.

So why not give it a try? Here's my profile. I'll be your friend! NOW GET MOVING, MAGGOT!

#oneaday Day 812: Perspective (And Retro Filters), People, Please

It was announced today that Facebook has acquired the popular mobile photo sharing and hipster filtering app Instagram, which has been available for some time on iOS and recently launched for Android phones. The deal was sealed for somewhere in the region of $1 billion in cash and Facebook stock, which is an excessively large amount of money by anyone's standards.

I shan't go into the ins and outs of the business side of things here (check my colleague's posts over on Inside Facebook for more details as well as a bit about what FB and Instagram have been up to together) but what I did want to talk about a little was the public reaction to the news.

In short, the reaction has not been overly positive, at least among the people I follow on FB and Twitter and their friends. I have seen numerous comments today that are simply along the lines of "oh, fuck" without any real explanation — basing their negative reaction simply on the widespread assumption that Facebook Is Evil.

As it happens, some of these people may be right to be a little concerned for the future of Instagram. Facebook has gobbled up several other social services over the course of the last few years, and the result has often been that said services disappeared without a trace. Location-sharing Foursquare rival Gowalla, for example, shut down its service a short while ago as its founders and key team members were reassigned to work on Facebook's own location service. Meanwhile, group messaging service Beluga was also swallowed up around this time last year, and eventually disappeared off the face of the Earth, only to be replaced by the Facebook Messenger mobile app.

Mark Zuckerberg has taken great pains to attempt to assuage the fears surrounding Instagram, however, noting that a key part of the service is its connectivity with non-Facebook networks such as Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Flickr and Posterous. If Facebook is truly planning on keeping Instagram as its own independent entity to begin with, it wouldn't make sense to remove the facility to post to these other networks. What is probably more likely to happen is that Instagram's popular photo-filtering features will make their way into the official Facebook apps, making it even easier for people to take faux-retro pictures at every opportunity.

Perhaps Facebook will dissolve Instagram eventually, and that will be a bit of a pain for those who have Instagram but not Facebook accounts — but it won't be the end of the world as some people seem to be suggesting. There are plenty of other "hipster photo filter" apps available — Streamzoo and Lightbox appear to be two popular suggestions — and, in my purely anecdotal experience, the apparent majority of people who use Instagram use at least one other social service alongside it anyway, even if it's not Facebook, meaning they can simply direct followers to their Twitter/Tumblr/whatevr if and when they start using another service.

So Instagram being taken over by Facebook isn't cause for sadness, anger or irritation. It was a completely free service, after all, meaning in practice it had no real obligations to remain the way it was forever. Instead, we should be celebrating the fact that a small team succeeded in living the dream — to create something simple, fun and popular, and subsequently to make an absolute fucking butt-ton of money out of it. It's a success story of the modern age, made all the more notable when you compare it to the $35 million Yahoo! paid for Flickr back in 2007.

So if Facebook taking over Instagram bothers you, simply use something else — there's plenty of alternatives, as outlined above. In the meantime, the two companies can work on better integration of Instagram's popular features into what is, like it or not, the world's biggest social network. If you had paid money to use Instagram then you may well have a slightly stronger case for being pissed off; as it is, what we have here is a small company who offered its services to the public for free taking a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity — and, more to the point, no real evidence that Facebook's involvement will in any way compromise what the service is now.

As with so many things on the Internet, perhaps it's best to wait and see what happens before getting irrationally angry or sad about this. Otherwise all that jerking's going to put your knee right out of joint. So to speak.

#oneaday Day 811: Some Handy Tips for Those of You who Wisely Picked Up Xenoblade Chronicles This Weekend

Bought a copy of Xenoblade Chronicles? Firstly, well done. Secondly, it's rather good, isn't it? Thirdly, you've probably noticed that it's a massive, sprawling, deep game with lots of things to think about.

Being a grizzled old veteran who has played the game to death already, I thought I'd share a few tips to help you along the way. I'll try and remain spoiler-free in the process, and I won't be giving plot walkthroughs or anything like that — just general tips. Bulleted tips, even. Here we go.

(Note: If you're not playing Xenoblade Chronicles, this will all mean nothing to you. I'll be back in the normal world tomorrow.)

Pick a good, complementary party, but don't be afraid to experiment. You can make most combos work — and in fact to max out Party Affinity you'll probably have to — but a safe option is to have a tank (Reyn or Riki), damage dealer (Shulk, Dunban or Melia) and healer (Sharla or, to a lesser extent, Melia). Note that you don't need to have Shulk in the party, but it's easier to deal with visions if he is.
Don't forget to level up your Arts. You gain AP with every successful combat and these can be used to power up each character's Arts — the special abilities that they are able to use in combat. Don't forget to drop into the menu regularly to spend these AP — which each character has their own individual bank of — on improving their abilities, because the game sure won't remind you. On that subject…
Pick Arts that complement each other. Depending on your party lineup, ensure that you have Arts picked that work well together. Don't worry about changing around Shulk's Arts, since he has a fixed arsenal. But depending on who else is there and what they're capable of, pick ones that work well together. A good combo is to ensure that between all three members, you have the ability to Break, Topple and Daze an opponent. By doing this to an enemy that isn't immune, you buy yourself a good few seconds of uninterrupted beatdown time, which is very helpful on baddies with high HP. Note that most — but not all — bosses and Unique Monsters tend to be immune to Break and Topple.
In Chain Attacks, colour is everything. The other thing you should consider when preparing your party's Arts is to make sure that you have appropriate colours covered to unleash a decent Chain. The colours typically correspond to what the Art does — red ones tend to deal direct damage, pink ones tend to inflict Break, green ones tend to Topple and blue ones tend to be restorative or supportive — so a good thing to do is to ensure your whole party has at least one red Art equipped in order to do a damaging Chain Attack. When you start the Chain, choose a red Art to kick off, then when it switches to the next character, choose one of their red Arts and so on. Bear in mind that according to both random chance and Party Affinity, you may have the opportunity to continue the chain after everyone has had one go, so it's worth having more than one of the same colour if you can spare the slots.
Skills aren't as complicated as they look. The tutorial for the Skill system makes it sound bewildering, but think of Skills as passive bonuses and you'll be fine. Picking a character trait to focus on provides a bonus to a particular stat, then all SP earned (also after combat) will be applied to that particular skill branch. When sufficient SP have been earned, that bonus or passive ability starts to take effect automatically. Note that each character starts with three Skill paths, but has the opportunity to unlock up to two more through quests.
Skill Links let characters use each others' Skills. This is the complicated bit. You've probably seen that killing bosses nets you Affinity Coins. These are used to let characters "borrow" each others' Skills, thereby enabling them to get passive abilities they wouldn't normally have access to. For example, if Reyn has learned the skill to equip heavy armour, another character who is normally limited to light armour can Skill Link with Reyn in order to also be able to equip heavy armour. The number of skills characters can borrow from each other is determined by the number of Affinity Coins you have and the Affinity between the characters attempting the Link. Speaking of which…
Build up Party Affinity as much as you can. Your characters fight better alongside each other if they actually like each other. They also say different things in battle or when they jump in to conversations. There are lots of ways to improve this. Firstly, put the characters you're trying to develop the relationship between in your active party. Make the character you want to see the most gains the leader, since when party members jump into conversations, it improves Affinity with this person. Hit as many Burst Affinity button prompts in battle as you can. Encourage characters who are suffering from low Tension in battle (they'll have a purple cloud behind their face in the interface — run up to them and press "b" to whisper some sweet nothings at them). Don't forget to go and do Heart to Hearts when you have sufficient Affinity between two characters — these provide massive Affinity boosts even if you balls them up. And don't forget that you can gift Collectibles to characters via the Inventory menu — the game forgets to mention how to do this. Select an item, choose a character to gift it to and you'll see the affinity gain (or loss) it generates. For hints on what might be good items to give different characters, check the Achievements menu or think about the characters' personalities.
When hunting, use the reload trick. Saving your game then immediately loading it causes the monsters in a zone to refresh, so if you've run out of mobs you need to bash over the head for a quest, save and reload to respawn them. If you're hunting a Unique Monster and there's no sign of it in the place where it's supposed to be, do the same thing for a chance of respawning it.
If looking for specific weather, use the clock. Advance time from day to night (or vice versa) until you get the weather conditions you're after. Note that "thunderstorm" is a different weather condition to "raining".
Talk to everyone with a name. Speaking to a named NPC adds them to your Affinity Chart and sometimes improves your Area Affinity. When your Area Affinity levels up (it doesn't tell you when this happens, so check the Affinity Chart regularly), new quests become available, and named NPCs also get new items to trade with you. It's possible for every single person on the entire Affinity Chart to be joined to at least one other person by the end of the game, so consider that a challenge if you're a completionist.
Collect collect collect! Collect every sparkly blue blob you see. Not only will it help you fill the Collectopaedia, there's usually a questgiver somewhere nearby who will pay you good money for them. Or you can always gift them to characters.
Trading is usually a quicker way to fill the Collectopaedia. If you're struggling to find a specific collectible item in the field — and some are considerably rarer than others — then try trading with named NPCs instead of talking to them. When trading, offer them goodies that are considerably higher in value than the thing you're looking to grab — double is usually a safe bet — and they'll often throw in an extra free gift, too. Note that NPCs' inventories expand as Area Affinity improves. Their tradable items always come from the zone in which they are found.
Don't forget about Gems! Equipping gems in slotted items can make the difference between triumphant victory and crushing defeat. Note that bonuses to stats have a cap — if the bonus turns green in the menu, equipping further gems won't have any effect. Pick gems that help strengthen a character's particular specialisms rather than compensate for weaknesses — e.g. apply Muscle Up gems to Reyn to increase his physical defense to make him a better tank, add Strength Up gems to Shulk to make him deal more damage. Remember that Unique items (the ones with "U" on their icon instead of "S") have preset gems that cannot be removed.
Explore everywhere. Discovering new Locations, Landmarks and Secret Areas is a good non-combat way to gain experience points, plus it has the positive side-effect of filling in your map and providing you with places to fast-travel to. You might also be surprised where questgivers are hiding.
Do every quest you can. It may be time-consuming, but questing builds up Area Affinity and provides you with some good rewards that often negate the need to go equipment shopping. The stock "Monster", "Collection", "Search", "Material" and "Challenge" quests you get in every zone also provide a good way to get to know an area. Be sure to talk to the questgiver for these questlines several times as you can normally pick them all up at once — and you don't have to return to them to complete them. Never sell quest items — they'll be marked in the menu — or items you've seen in visions. You can get them back, but it'll be a waste of time, particularly if they end up being rare items. For quests with multiple outcomes, there are no "bad" consequences, just differing rewards.
Backtrack! When the story advances, that's usually a good cue to wander around the areas you've already visited and see if any new quests have popped up — some appear based on story progress rather than Area Affinity. Fortunately, the skip travel feature makes this a painless process. If you're not sure who to talk to, try looking for people on the Affinity Chart who don't have any links yet. There are some quests you can miss — these are marked with a stopwatch in the quest log. There's generally a pretty obvious mini "point of no return" before these expire, however, so be sure you've cleaned up your quest log before you answer "yes" to any important-sounding questions.
Don't rush. Xenoblade Chronicles is a big-ass game and there's a lot to see and do. Playing as a moderate completionist, it took me 101 hours to beat on my first playthrough, and I could have easily spent a lot longer. While it may be tempting to rush forward into the next plot beat, bear in mind that the quests, exploration and incidental combat is all there to provide a painless means to ensure you're strong enough to tackle the challenges the story quests provide you with. You'll be around the level 80 mark by the time you're on the home straight if you're doing it right — you'll hit a wall and be forced to grind (or backtrack and do all the stuff you missed!) for a little while if you haven't. That said…
Don't feel you have to get everything. Beat the game and you can do a New Game+ with all your levels, equipment and Party Affinity intact, but quests, Area Affinity and everything else reset to normal. Now you can rampage through the world with impunity and concentrate on picking up as many quests and entries on the Affinity Chart as you can rather than running away from red monsters.

Above all, enjoy. This is one of the best RPGs of all time, and it's wonderful to see so many people on my Twitter feed are playing and loving this at the moment. Stick it out to the end — it's a long road, but it's very much worth it.

#oneaday Day 810: Fancy Dress

I love dressing up. Perhaps it's just part of my own inherent immaturity which I continue to cling desperately to as my 31st birthday approaches, but I love putting on a stupid costume that will get some laughs and playing a role. Oddly enough, it often actually makes me feel more confident than I do usually, perhaps because I'm kind of stepping out of my own skin for a little while and pretending to be someone else. Or perhaps it's because I associate it with acting, something I enjoy a great deal but haven't had the opportunity to do since university. (God, that was a depressingly long time ago now. Fuck.)

[Editor's note: It took some persuading to get Pete out of his sulk after coming to that realisation.]

My apologies. I was just… OH GOD

[Editor's note: And again.]

I'm fine. I'm fine.

ANYWAY.

Fancy dress. It's fun. And, on past occasions where it's been part of the social engagement I was attending, it is usually associated with a thoroughly silly, funny night out. I don't remember doing it much as a kid, but I certainly remember doing it a hell of a lot at university. The local charity shops tended to do a roaring trade around "social season" at the student union and local bars.

The earliest one I remember was a 70s night at our university hall of residence bar. Our flat was pretty good at socialising with one another, but we'd been consistently frustrated with the fact that none of the rest of the building seemed interested in going out or getting to know each other. (We discovered this within the first couple of weeks living there, when we attempted to organise a pub crawl and ended up being the only attendees.) We figured that the fun and frolics of a dressing-up opportunity would encourage a few people to make it out and make an effort.

We were, sadly, a bit wrong. People came out, all right, but when we got to the bar, we were pretty much the only people there who were in costume. I don't regret a thing, because it was around this point I discovered that moustaches are fun despite the fact that I was, at the time, incapable of growing my own. (If you have seen my face recently, you will doubt there was ever a time when I was incapable of growing facial hair, but it is, in fact, true; the most I could summon up at the age of 18 was a small, lop-sided patch on my chin.) As such, I found myself wearing an awesome stick-on moustache combined with a velvet jacket, frilled shirt and, uh, a pair of jeans. (The charity shops didn't have any suitable flares or, to digress for a moment, "bell-end trousers" as they were memorably referred to on Just A Minute the other day.)

Said moustache found its way all the way around our social group after we'd had a few of the hall bar's notorious cocktails (Juicy Lucy: 1 shot vodka, 1 shot blue curaçao, 2 shots Taboo, top up the rest of a pint glass with equal parts orange juice and lemonade, looks like water with Fairy Liquid in it and turns your poo green if you have too many; Passion Wagon: 1 bottle Reef, 1 shot Passoa, possibly the laziest cocktail of all time) and eventually alighted delicately back on my face rotated a full 180 degrees from its intended position, making me look more like a shitfaced Hercule Poirot than a 70s porn star. I don't remember much of what happened after that.

Or there was the Halloween party where I dressed up in the Scream costume. It was about the time Scary Movie had hit the cinema, so there was a lot of "WAAAZAAAAAAPPP"-ing from behind the mask. Coincidentally, wearing a full black robe and covering my face entirely, I felt incredibly confident. Perhaps I should become a ninja. Or some sort of cultist. Or a Sith.

Or the "Gangster Night" where I decided that the thing to do would be to dress up like 70s Guy again, complete with afro wig, stick-on moustache and hideous shirt. The band we had at university to pass our "Ensemble 1" unit — The Coconut Scratch Orchestra — was also performing, so I also had to negotiate a saxophone around my furry top lip and excessive amount of head hair.

I think one of my favourite dress-up occasions, however, was the time a group of ex-university musicians were playing in the band for a local pantomime and we made an executive decision to do the second half of one performance in full costume. I dressed up as a fairy. I looked beautiful, I'll have you know. And in fact, my costume was so good that when I took it off, it was mistaken for an actual costume from the show and pinched while I was socialising. When I returned to retrieve it, it was long gone, never to be seen again. I was very disappointed. I spent quite a lot of money on it and had rather enjoyed having long blonde hair for a little while. My only physical memento of the occasion was a saxophone reed forever stained with slutty red lipstick, though there are also photographs of my magical magnificence located somewhere on the Internet. You'll have to track those down yourself, though.

I've never crossed the line from "fancy dress" into "cosplay", however. I guess technically the Scream outfit was sort of cosplay, but not really. No, I'm talking about being such a fan of a particular character that I really, really want to dress up as them.

Part of the reason for this is that many of my favourite characters are simply incompatible with any or all of the following: my body shape, my age or my genitals. The facial hair is also an issue. Much as I would love to put on a frilly cravat and do a Miles Edgeworth, shaving my beard off after it having such a long-term residence on my face would just be weird. Which also puts any sort of cross-dressing scenario out of the window, too, which most people will likely be delighted to hear. (That said, my fairy costume saw me sporting a beard, so…) With the type of guy I am, the best possible outcome would probably be from some sort of "big dude in armour" type of arrangement, though I'm not sure there are that many big dudes in armour that I'm particularly fond of. Reyn from Xenoblade, perhaps. Though then we're back to the beard problem again. What a bunch of jokers.

I'm also never quite sure if there's a stigma attached to cosplaying at all. It's certainly a sign that you're taking your fandom of a particular thing over a very well-marked line, but does it make you into a hardcore "nerd"? It certainly broadcasts loud and clear that you're interested in something, and could well be a good conversation starter at conventions and the like. (Obviously I'm not suggesting walking down the street dressed like Cloud Strife or anything) For women, there's the "perving men" angle to consider, too, but at the same time you might argue that by dressing up in a distinctive costume you want people to notice you (just not probably quite like "that").

Anyway. I'm rambling, largely because it's 1:25 and my concentration is lapsing somewhat. So I'll leave that there.

Do me a favour, though; next party you throw, make it a fancy dress one. (And invite me, obviously.) I haven't been to one for ages.

#oneaday Day 809: PAX Pact

Disclaimer: I'm aware that I wrote almost exactly the same post as you're about to read at this time last year, and for that I make absolutely no apologies.

It's PAX East time! Yay! I'm not there! Boooo.

I've not been to many conventions or big shows like that over the years, so I have very fond memories of those I have been able to attend. My decision to attend PAX East in 2010 was very much a spur of the moment thing — I'd decided I wanted to leave my primary school teaching job because I'd given it a chance and determined it wasn't for me, I was trying as hard as I could to pursue a career in the Writing Words About Games industry, and I was feeling a bit miserable and lonely. So, with a little financial help, I flew across the pond to Boston and went to my first big show in America.

It was an exciting time for a number of reasons. I'd just started working for Kombo.com which, while it didn't pay particularly well, provided me with a position where I could legitimately say I was a professional member of the games press. I knew that a large number of my buddies from communities such as Bitmob and The Squadron of Shame would be in attendance, so I'd have the opportunity to meet some people face to face. And I always love the opportunity to visit the States. I'd never been to Boston before, and while I was under no illusions that I'd be seeing much of the city while I was there, I was looking forward to being Somewhere New.

It was also terrifying. As a sufferer of social anixety at the best of times, the prospect of meeting people I'd only ever talked to on the Internet in the past was a scary one. What if we didn't get on? What if it was a massive disaster and it destroyed the carefully-cultivated relationships we'd built up with one another? What if I had nothing to say? What if I got lost and it was actually because they wanted to lose me? All these thoughts whirled around my head as I was on the plane, but I was very happy to discover that PAX was, in fact, a happy, inclusive and wonderful place for geeks of all descriptions to call home — whether they were someone who just liked video games or was also into collectible card games, role-playing games, board games, cosplay, the history of technology… anything like that.

That word — "home" — is an important one. Because it felt good to be there. It felt like a world which I wanted to belong to, surrounded by people that I wanted to be with. It was a world that accepted and embraced each other's differences and brought people from many different walks of life together in the name of common interests. Perhaps most importantly, it made friendships real. It's all very well chatting to people online on a regular basis, but once you've spent time with those people in person — seen them, heard them, hugged them, tickled their beards in a homoerotic manner where applicable — your friendship is on a different level. I haven't seen some of those people I met at PAX East 2010 in person since that weekend two years ago, but in many ways I feel closer, more connected to them than many of my — for want of a better word — "real" friends. Perhaps it's because they're also "Internet friends" that I speak to most days via Twitter, Facebook and G+.

Whatever the reason, knowing that lots of people I know are at PAX East right now and undoubtedly having a great time (and/or queueing for hours) makes me a bit sad — not that they're there, obviously, but that I'm not there with them.

I propose a pact, then, faraway friends: PAX East 2013. Be there. You have a year to prepare. Get cracking.