#oneaday Day 699: Apples to Apples

Inspired by my good buddy AJ's recent post on this very subject, I thought I, too, would share why I'm so loyal to my Apple devices, particularly in the smartphone sphere.

In simple terms, it comes down to "it got to me first, so I've stuck with it." It's as straightforward as that. The first bona fide "smartphone" I ever had was my original iPhone, and since acquiring that I've been through a 3G, a 4 and now a 4S. I have no desire whatsoever to switch to Android because my iOS devices have done everything I needed them to. And it's not as if I'm a "casual" user — I know my stuff about tech, and my iPhone is in almost constant use nearly every day. And yet in all that time, I have never once banged my head against the supposed restrictiveness of the platform which supporters of Android do so love to point out.

Now, this isn't an anti-Android rant. I'm very aware that Android works as a platform for those who have chosen to be loyal to it. But I have never used an Android phone. Perhaps I'd like it if I did. Perhaps I'd change my opinion on iOS if I did. But the thing is, I don't feel like I need to. Because to me, personally, Android sounds like a giant pain in the arse. Homescreen widgets? Battery life management? Flashing ROMs? Rooting? No thanks. For me, all I need is a phone which neatly displays my apps on my homescreen, allows me to access my personal data, email, the Web, Twitter, Facebook, G+, WordPress and all that gubbins, and occasionally play games. I'm not sure what benefit I'd get from the openness that Android offers. Customisability? Perhaps — but again, not something I feel is necessary for the way I use the phone. A fancy homescreen is all very well, but the neat and ordered rows that iOS' Springboard offers mean that I can always quickly find what I'm looking for. My time isn't so precious that I need to see the weather at all times on the home screen — I'm quite happy to open up the Weather app.

You see, perhaps partly as a result of my upbringing, constantly surrounded by computers and technology, I've grown to take the attitude that as a user, I'm the one that can adapt to new platforms and new combinations of features. If something comes along and has a new feature, I learn how to use it. If something else comes along and has a different feature set, including some absences from the first device, I adapt, and find alternative ways to do things — or, in some cases, consider whether I really needed that functionality in the first place. For just one example: MIDI ringtones on old Nokias? Fun for a little while, until I realised that any time I was in public I would typically mute the phone anyway, making them largely redundant. I haven't missed them since entering the iPhone age. Likewise, when the iPhone drew criticism for not offering copy and paste functionality, I couldn't see what the fuss was about. Past phones that I had used featured limited copy and paste capabilities, but I rarely, if ever, used it. As such, it was another feature I didn't miss on the iPhone. Now it's there, I do occasionally use it, but I could certainly live without it if necessary.

This isn't making excuses for Apple — it's explaining the way I think. For some people, features the iPhone doesn't have are deal-breakers. And that's fine — Android's out there to give you what you're looking for, as is BlackBerry and any number of feature phones. But for me? I'm comfortable with iOS, and happy to stay where I am. It does what I need, it adds new features at a regular enough rate to keep things interesting and exciting, and I'm never short of something new to experiment with thanks to the popularity of the App Store.

#oneaday Day 698: Congratulations Mr and Mrs Burvill

It was the marriage of my two friends Simon and Jennie today, now to be known as Mr and Mrs Burvill. It was a great wedding and I wish them all the best for their life together ahead of them, especially given today's surprise announcement that a baby is on the way too. Congratulations to them both.

Attending weddings for me is a bit strange these days. Anyone who has been through the breakdown of a marriage will likely know what I'm talking about. On the one hand, you're super-happy for your friends making a bold and very public statement about their love for one another. But on the other, you can't help the odd bit of cynicism creeping into your mind.

Don't get me wrong, I have absolutely no doubts in my mind about Simon and Jennie's marriage. They're clearly made for each other, and they're going to make brilliant parents too. I just can't help making comparisons to my own failed marriage, now mostly a memory left in the past save for the actual legal bits — a process of healing helped immensely by the lovely lady I now live with. Thank you, Andie.

I know the things that went wrong. Blame lay on both sides, despite things I may have written at the time when it was all collapsing around me. But as with so many things, the dubious benefit of hindsight allows you to look a little more objectively at what happened and realise what went wrong. In some cases, it could have been fixed; in others, the end of it all was an inevitable, unavoidable eventuality.

In my own case, there were elements of both. I shan't get into specifics here, as that's not fair to Jane, who isn't here to say things for herself (obviously), and it's also not something I particularly wish to dwell on in this particular format. Suffice to say that despite the fact the experience of splitting up nearly destroyed me completely, it's probably for the best that we're no longer together.

For what it's worth, I'm sorry to Jane for my part in the breakdown of our marriage, and I forgive her for her part in it. It's both our faults, and it's no-one's fault at the same time. It's just something that Wasn't Meant to Be, and I think in the long run we're both likely in much better situations than we were in together.

Enough maudlin musing on the past. I have a future to look forward to. While it's not the rosiest it's ever been at the moment, things could certainly be much, much worse.

To those who have helped me through difficult times, whether or not you realise it, I thank you.

#oneaday Day 697: The Sims FreePlay

I was harsh on EA the other day, and I stand by most of my comments. Theme Park is a disgrace to the memory of Bullfrog's classic, the handling of Tetris was ridiculous, Origin is still a load of old wank and the company's insistence on using it rather than established networks like Game Center and OpenFeint is just plain arrogant.

However, they have got one thing right recently, and that's their latest iOS release: newest entry in the The Sims family The Sims FreePlay.

The Sims has been undergoing quite a few changes over recent years. First The Sims 3 brought open-world gameplay to the series. Then the World Adventures expansion gave the game a (very light) sense of narrative and some dungeon-crawling, puzzle-solving gameplay. Then Ambitions allowed us to follow our Sims to work for the first time in quite a while. Late Night brought new social interactions, Generations fleshed out the gameplay of various underused life stages and Pets brought, err, pets.

Meanwhile The Sims Social launched on Facebook and proved enormously popular despite not actually being that good. The Farmville-esque mechanics of "get your friends to help" seemed somehow more appropriate in the setting of The Sims, however, and there was a very, very mild hint of asynchronous multiplayer as you occasionally saw what your friends had done while they visited you the last time they were playing. I saw many people who didn't typically try Facebook games giving The Sims Social more of a chance than they would normally. Ultimately, though, it was an exercise in extracting as much money from you as possible, with a wide variety of in-game items only purchasable through the premium hard currency of SimCash. It also uses the immensely irritating (but profitable) "pay to play" system of slowly-recharging "Energy", only allowing you to perform a certain number of actions in a set time period.

Yesterday, The Sims FreePlay launched for iOS devices. There have been several previous The Sims 3-branded iOS games, but none of them have been that good, somehow missing out on the magic of the PC originals, much like The Sims Social. The Sims FreePlay takes a radically different approach to the whole series, however, and one which fits ideally with an iOS player's lifestyle.

There's one simple, fundamental change which has occurred to make this possible: make it real-time.

The Sims has typically operated with vastly accelerated time, so we can witness their birth, growth, life and death over the course of a few days rather than a lifetime. And in gameplay terms, this has fit the series well — part of the appeal of The Sims 3 in particular is building a dynasty of Sims who have grown to dominate the town in which they live. If you had to live out their lives in real-time, this would lead to a lot of downtime.

However, think about when you pick up your phone. You do it during a lull in conversation, when you're on the toilet, when you're bored, while you're watching a TV programme that you're not really interested in but your significant other wants to watch. The Sims FreePlay is designed for these situations. Pick it up and there'll be something to do for a few minutes, whether that's collecting money from your Sims, sending them to work, forcing them into a party situation or gathering them all together for a collaborative gardening effort. Once they're busy doing whatever you've told them to, you can leave them to it — for hours at a time, in many cases.

The game experience is tied to a social game-style levelling system, but this isn't a social game. There's no visiting neighbours, no helping friends with quests (which begs the question why it requires an Internet connection to play, but we'll leave that aside for the moment), no Energy system — just you and your Sims. Or, specifically, when you start, your Sim. Singular.

When you start the game, your town will be empty aside from the Sim you created. As you complete tasks and get your little person to engage in activities, however, you gain XP. The longer an action takes, the more XP you get. As you level up, you unlock the right to have more Sims in your town — though bringing them in either costs Simoleons (money) to build the house, or Lifestyle Points (earned through completing goals, reaching "relationship milestones" and numerous other criteria) to build a prefabricated "theme" home. Both of these currencies can be purchased with real money if you desire, but, crucially, you're not nagged to do so (unlike in Theme Park, which gives you a quest teaching you how to purchase premium currency — shameless much?) and you can earn both through normal play if you're patient enough. If you're determined to play for free, you're going to have to think carefully about your time management and what you want your slowly-expanding army of Sims to accomplish, because once they start a task, it can't be stopped except by expending your finite supply of Lifestyle Points to "rush" finishing it.

This actually adds an interesting degree of light strategy to the gameplay. If one of your Sims has a large variety of garden plots that could potentially prove profitable, you're going to need to enlist the other Sims in the neighbourhood to help out, because one Sim can only plant and tend one plot at a time, and needs to be present for the entire period of the seed's growth — up to 24 real hours in some cases. This means if you have a garden with, say, five plots, you'll need five Sims to be able to take full advantage of it — and while they're doing that, they can't be doing anything else. It becomes an exercise in weighing up whether it's worth committing a Sim to a lengthy and potentially profitable project, or whether you'd rather take a more active role in their life and guide them through a number of smaller tasks. Do you send them to work for six hours, thereby guaranteeing a nice paycheck, prospects for promotion (leading to more money in the future) and the ever-important XP? Or do you leave them behind looking after their house?

This shift in focus away from managing the needs of an individual Sim (or family) to overseeing the entire community works well for the series. It's a markedly different experience from, say, The Sims 3 — but we already have The Sims 3 so why reinvent the wheel? What we have in The Sims FreePlay is a game you can pick up for a couple of minutes at a time, set your little people off doing something and then safely forget about until a Push notification pops up reminding you that Pete Davison has finished his bath. In this sense, it's a bit like Nimblebit's Tiny Tower, a simple but effective game which has proven enormously popular, even among those who typically decry this style of simplified sim (no pun intended) as being "rubbish" — myself included.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about The Sims FreePlay in the context of EA's recent actions is that the company appears to be experimenting. It's undergone a considerable period of expansion in recent years, gobbling up a large variety of studios from all sectors of the "games industry" at large — ranging from triple-A developers to social game specialists. The different approaches taken by its most recent titles make it very clear that the company is trying to find the "best" (i.e. most profitable) approach to move forward. We have the subscription model (Tetris — not the first game I would have picked to try that model on), the "gouging whales" model (Theme Park and its $70+ rides) and the "patient people play for free" approach of The Sims FreePlay.

It's fair to say the publisher pissed off a lot of people — including me — with Tetris and Theme Park in particular. But, as they say, we learn from our mistakes — if there's any justice, The Sims FreePlay will prove the most popular of EA's recent titles and show them that this is the way to treat iOS and casual players: with respect, not expecting them to pay to play, but offering them the chance to if they do happen to appreciate the game in question.

EA's still got a long way to go to prove to me that they're not money-grubbing bastards who care more about their bottom line than the goodwill of their player base(s). But The Sims FreePlay is a good start.

#oneaday Day 696: Exclusive Preview!

I love making games — the main thing that stops me from doing it more often is the fact that I can't get my head around programming. Perhaps it's the fact that I didn't enjoy maths that much at school; perhaps it's the fact I have trouble relating the abstract code to what happens on screen; perhaps I'm just too lazy to learn properly. (I'm still badass at Atari BASIC.)

Regardless of all that, though, if an app comes along and offers me the tools I need to realise my visions, even partially, I'm all over it like a rash — and I'm normally able to push the boundaries of such applications to do unconventional things a little outside of their normal "comfort zone". Such was the case with Clickteam's excellent Klik and Play series, and such was the case with RPG Maker 2000, which I originally came across a good few years ago and decided that the best way to learn would be to put together a game using the built-in tools and resources.

Thus, The Adventures of Dave Thunder was born. Dave Thunder was the hero of the piece, named after a guy whose name we found in a person's lost phone at university. We were all a bit drunk at the time, so one of my flatmates decided it would be a good idea to phone Dave Thunder and tell him what an awesome name he had. He was at "The Golden Arches". A legend was born.

But I digress. The Adventures of Dave Thunder was quite popular among my friends because it was deliberately built as a big in-joke. I'm not sure if it would have appealed to anyone outside my immediate circle of friends had it ever been finished, but it was a lot of fun to make, and I still have fond memories of Sweary Link, tired of his life as a silent protagonist and revealing that he's a bit of a stroppy git underneath.

Sadly, The Adventures of Dave Thunder is lost to the mists of time and a failed hard drive. I'm a bit upset about this, as it had quite a lot of work put into it. Okay, I didn't make any of the graphics or music for it, but the writing was all mine, and I found it quite funny at least. What other RPG can you play where the healer in your party is Harold Bishop from Neighbours, who became an actual bishop after his wife Madge turned into a vampire?

I digress again. I acquired a copy of RPG Maker VX a while back and just recently have something of a hankerin' to make something new. Referring back to what I said yesterday, too, I have some ready-made characters to draw on, too, so I figured why not give them their very own game?

I've already started designing (well, scripting) what I want this game to be and I'm quite pleased with the direction I think it will take. I'm going to try and avoid cliche wherever possible and put together something that is amusing, entertaining and (mostly) unconventional. Sure, there'll still be standard RPG mechanics in there — I don't know enough about VX's scripting language to deviate too much from the standard engine, after all. That said, I'm using one excellent plugin to take a less-frequently seen approach to exploration, inspired by some recent titles I've been playing — more details on that once I have a prototype up and running. (No, it's not a roguelike — I haven't yet found a good script for that.)

So hopefully over the course of the next few weeks, months, years, I'll be able to share occasional progress updates on The Official RPG of Pete's Blog Stickmen, or whatever I end up calling it. For now, suffice to say that it is a thing that exists, and I will be using it as a Big Creative Project to do when I'm feeling bored or uninspired. The long-term intention is to put together the whole thing single-handedly with deliberately crude graphics (they're stickmen, after all) and a soundtrack composed by me. Whether all that will actually happen will remain to be seen, but it'll be an interesting experiment if nothing else. I'll be concentrating on getting the game right first, then adding polish like an original soundtrack afterwards if I feel it's worth it.

So there you are.World-first exclusive reveal and all that. BE EXCITED.

#oneaday Day 695: Where Are They?

Longtime viewers of this blog are probably wondering where my cast of stickmen characters has got to (besides the top of the page and the sidebar, obviously). Newer visitors are probably wondering why on Earth there is a parade of stickmen at the top of the page and in the sidebar.

You'll be pleased (or disappointed) to know that I will be resurrecting the stickmen images for posts starting in the New Year. I haven't yet decided if I'll do a comic every day or only on certain days, or if I'll simply use individual images. I've tried both over the course of the last while, and both have their pros and cons.

I'm not going to make any excuses as to why I'm not doing them at the moment — they may not look like very much, but those images and comic strips take a surprising amount of time to put together, and since getting a lot busier I just didn't have the energy to keep up with doing them and a blog post every day, to be frank. To put it in a simpler, arguably more honest way, I couldn't be arsed.

Now, however, I'm twiddling my thumbs in anticipation of potential new work which may be coming my way from several sources from the New Year onwards. As such, it's got me thinking about flexing my creative muscles a bit more. I've already mentioned that half-finished novel sitting in Google Docs waiting for me to 1) figure out where it's going and 2) finish it. And indeed I've been doing sporadic bits of work on that — though haven't yet got into the "habit" of working on it regularly. Alongside this, I've been experimenting with making YouTube videos of bullet hell shooters — fun, though I anticipate my audience being somewhat limited! And, since I invested a fair amount of my own time, effort and soul into those silly little characters you see at the top of the page, I figured it's time to bring them back.

Creating characters is an odd experience. When you create a character, whether it's a comic book stick figure, a character in a novel, a roleplaying character in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign or any other persona, you can't help thinking of them as your own "children" in a way. You become attached to them — though not necessarily to the degree that you want them to always succeed, particularly in the case of novel characters prone to attracting disastrous situations — and you feel like you "know" them.

Such is the case with the stick figures. There's obviously me, though my abstract representation resembles me in the most superficial manner possible my emphasising what I consider to be my most prominent characteristic — my beard. And from there the others sort of took on a life of their own.

Alex didn't originally have a name and existed purely because I wanted to put a redhead in there. She's often there to provide a splash of colour to an otherwise monochrome scene. Her name came from me asking on Twitter what I should call her, and a (male) friend named Alex politely requesting she be named after him. Alex is relatively normal, though the character trait that she only reads Grazia, not books, was set relatively early in the characters' lifespan as "speaking parts".

Lucy, first seen in this post, originally had black hair, but her overexcitable nature was present and correct. She didn't show up with her blonde hair until considerably later. (I think. I admit I didn't look that hard. But after a cursory glance, that appeared to be the first time Blonde Lucy showed up.) From this we could arguably deduce that one of those is not her natural hair colour. That or I simply decided she'd look better as a blonde, particularly as her dizziness as a character conforms to the "blonde stereotype". (Note: I don't actually believe the blonde stereotype. But Lucy does, and is happy to conform to it.)

Phillipe (don't you dare call him Philippe or he'll hurt you) was an odd one. His distinctive, fixed facial expression came about from how my buddy Edd and I used to draw stickman characters shouting, screaming or generally being noisy back when we were at secondary school. The idea to have him permanently stuck like that coupled with a predilection for getting his knob out at every opportunity was alarmingly quick to occur to me. He's generally used to say things that are a bit closer to the bone (no pun intended) than the other characters might. His name is the result of another Twitter poll, and privately amusing because his personality is pretty much the exact opposite of the person he's named after.

Those four are the main cast who have been present in pretty much every crude drawing on this blog in one form or another. Other recurring characters such as the Money-Bot (originally introduced as a pun on the term "monetization") and Des (whose existence is explained in great detail here) have come and gone and, like the "core four", have taken on something of a life of their own.

So yes, they will be back. As I slowly piece my brain back into some semblance of order — not particularly helped by recent setbacks relating to employment — these facets of my personality (because that's what they are, let's face it) will be making a resurgence. Because for all the pain in the arse it is to draw them every day, having them there is oddly comforting; creating them strangely cathartic.

#oneaday Day 694: BUNNNNNNDLE

There's been some discussion recently over whether or not superdeals like the Humble Indie Bundle and IndieRoyale are beneficial or detrimental to the industry at large — particularly the independent developers whose work is featured in the packages.

For consumers, it's pretty much an unquestionable win. To be able to pick up substantial packages of games for a fraction of their normal cost (the latest Humble Bundle offers 7 titles, a value of approximately $100) is brilliant, and in both cases, those who want to pay more can if they desire. Likewise, those on a budget can pay the minimum without guilt. The Humble Bundle also has the added karmic bonus of an optional charity donation, too, so you can justify filling your Steam library with stuff you might not get around to for a few months on the grounds of it being "for the children".

For developers, though, you can see how it might be something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, these bundles often take on a higher public profile than the individual component games themselves. This exposes a variety of quality, unknown titles to the world, encouraging consumers to step out of the comfort zone of triple-A titles to explore the wider world of gaming. Sick of hearing about Call of Duty all the time? Don't play it — check out the rapidly-expanding indie market and you'll never need to even think about Activision ever again.

On the other hand, all the time these bundles are selling games for a fraction of their normal price, developers are losing out on those sweet, sweet monies. And unlike publishing behemoths like EA and Activision, these developers are often counting on the income from their creations to ensure their continued existence as studios. In the case of some developers, your buying their game might even be helping to put food on their table.

You might be feeling a bit guilty for putting in that bare minimum donation now. However, you probably shouldn't — many developers, including Robert Boyd of Cthulhu Saves the World developer Zeboyd Games, report that strong sales actually continue for some time after a Steam sale or bundle deal — and the cheapest sale isn't necessarily the one where a title will sell the most. It's all about visibility — during Steam's Halloween sale, during which Zeboyd's titles were 33% off, the developer sold more copies than during the larger Thanksgiving sale, where they were 66% off. The difference? The Halloween sale was small enough that customers could see all of the titles on offer, while the Thanksgiving offering was a traditionally huge Steam sale, with a huge variety of content on offer for a fraction of its usual price.

Valve have often reported that sales of titles like Team Fortress 2 (before it went free to play, obviously) and Left 4 Dead took an upward turn after a sale in which they had been reduced by a considerable margin. The most likely explanation for this is related to the "visibility" issue that Boyd mentioned — once a sale is over and done with, players are going to be trying out all these weird and wonderful games that they took a chance on, and Steam being an inherently social platform, their friends are going to see what they're up to. Cue a number of conversations about "what on earth is that you're playing?" coupled with enthusiastic gibbering about how awesome Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is and you can see how this "word of mouth" effect could have a powerful impact on sales, even after special offers are long gone.

So in summary, no, I don't think these indie bundles are bad for the industry. I'm happy they exist because they've certainly introduced me to a variety of wonderful games over the years — and proven that even if you find the way the triple-A sector does business to be somewhat distasteful, there's always something to play.

So if you haven't already, go pick up a copy of the latest Humble and IndieRoyale bundles now — links at the top of this post.

#oneaday Day 693: Endings

I finished L.A. Noire tonight. MILD SPOILER: It's somewhat bittersweet. I liked it, because it was entirely in keeping with the genre in question.

Endings are a tricky business, though, whatever medium you're working in. The temptation to have a happy ending where everything resolves itself nicely is always strong, because everyone likes things to be "resolved" and for characters they've spent a hefty amount of time with to have some degree of "closure". Leaving things hanging either leaves an author open to accusations of planning a sequel, or leaving the audience unsatisfied.

I wrestled with this particular conundrum throughout the course of the month-long piece of fiction I wrote over the course of November. In fact, for the final post, I rewrote the ending several times. I eventually plumped for a "happy" ending because I felt it was in keeping with the personal journey my protagonist had been on — to smack him down after everything he'd been through would be a bit harsh.

Well, yes, it would — but equally, a harsh ending isn't necessarily a bad one. In fact, a bittersweet ending where not everyone leaves feeling satisfied can actually be very effective and memorable. I'm not going to spoil L.A. Noire's ending here in case there are people reading who haven't played it yet, but instead I'm going to talk about the first game I remember to have a strikingly "bad" ending — and I'm not talking "bad" in the sense of "poor".

Rare's Conker's Bad Fur Day was a peculiar game. Starting out as one of the cutesy platformers that typified a lot of the N64's catalogue, it eventually morphed into something completely unexpected: a "mature" title. Now, by maintaining the game's original cartoony visuals, there was an element of immaturity about it, too, particularly when combined with the not-very-well bleeped out swearing, the grotesquely excessive violence and the crude situations (a bee cheating on his wife by humping a large-breasted sunflower (off-screen, but very audible) being a particularly memorable example). But there was an undercurrent of maturity about the whole thing, too — the game treated the player as an adult who enjoyed puerile humour but was capable of understanding pathos and an impressively wide range of references to movies and popular culture.

Most notably, though, it had a brilliant ending that not only spoofed Alien fantastically, it also managed to provide a genuine "What the fu–" moment in a game that prided itself on its ridiculousness throughout. By providing a sobering, heartbreaking ending after the hours of cartoonish insanity which had preceded it, the game was giving the player a very marked wake-up call. It was marking the end of your time in this brightly coloured world filled with chocolate, poo monsters and cogs which told you to fuck off. It was time to wise up and start being a grown-up again. It also mirrored Conker's own journey throughout the course of the game — the basic premise of his whole adventure was him attempting to get home and recover from the mother of all hangovers. The most sobering experience he could have was the loss of the one he loved.

This isn't to say that good endings aren't satisfying — who doesn't like to see the Death Star blowing up? But a well-made "bad" ending can be just as — if not more so — effective at tugging at the heartstrings and provoking an emotional response. To date, my favourite game endings include the aforementioned Conker along with Silent Hill 2, surely one of the most depressing interactive experiences you could ever sit through — but all the better for it. Heavy Rain, for all its plot holes and flaws, also had a great "bad" ending. Several, in fact.

So what makes an effective ending? For me, it's a sense of "closure", that this is most definitely and unequivocally "the end" — whether that's because everyone is dead, because the planet is saved or simply because our lead characters are closing one chapter in their lives and starting a new one. Get me invested in your characters and I'll care what happens to them — so make sure whatever shenanigans they're involved in reaches some sort of satisfying conclusion — even if you're planning a sequel.

#oneaday Day 692: Trailer Park

It was the Spike TV VGAs last night, supposedly one of the biggest nights of the year in gaming. As usual, the awards themselves took a back seat to misogyny, a lack of respect for what gaming has become and all manner of other nonsense, but that's not what I'm going to write about today — plenty of other people have already been commenting on the matter having actually endured the whole thing, so are in a better position to comment on the event itself than I am.

Instead, I thought I'd comment on the concept of trailers, and why the fact that some people will happily fill their pants over a trailer is such a mystery to me.

This fact was really hammered home to me as the Star Wars: The Old Republic hype train got into motion earlier this year. We saw some CG trailers with absolutely zero gameplay, and yet people were getting excited about the game. It was patently obvious that the game would not be anything like those trailers suggested, making them almost entirely useless as a "preview" of what is to come, and yet they still mustered up excitement. When gameplay footage for The Old Republic did eventually emerge, it turned out that it looked suspiciously like a World of Warcraft-style MMORPG with Mass Effect's conversation system. This is less exciting.

The same also occurred with Dead Island. Dead Island introduced itself to the world with a genuinely harrowing trailer that was beautifully shot and scored with the perfect soundtrack. But again, there was no gameplay in evidence, and it was depressingly obvious that the game would be nothing like the intimate, "personal" experience that the trailer appeared to promise. And when the game did eventually appear in the form of a first-person action RPG, it was a bit of a disappointment. Sure, it's not a bad game, but I've got all the "battering zombies around the head" excitement I need with Left 4 Dead and Borderlands' Zombie Island of Dr. Ned expansion pack.

A big part of the reason people watch the VGAs is for the trailers, judging by Twitter and a lot of the discussion which has followed. But should we be demanding more from our trailers? As it is, the games industry is following the template set out by movies — but they're two fundamentally different media. Games are interactive, movies are passive. So why are we advertising games in the same way as movies?

Well, apparently, because it works. Activision pay for high-profile slots during giant sporting events to promote Call of Duty. People jizz their keks over CG The Old Republic trailers that have nothing to do with the game. People hail Dead Island as "one to watch" based on an (admittedly excellent) trailer that, again, has nothing to do with the game itself.

Is this a bad thing, though? Will the fact that The Old Republic actually revolves around fairly traditional MMO play rather than the high-octane excitement implied by the trailers cause some people to cry foul? Did Dead Island warrant the amount of attention lavished on it by the press following the striking nature of its trailer? Should we be so quick to judge upcoming games as looking "great" or "crap" based purely on short snippets we see at awards ceremonies which otherwise insult our intelligence?

I don't have an easy answer for that, but I can tell you what I think personally: I don't give a crap about trailers. Give me a demo, an early version or even just some simple commentated footage of someone playing the game and I'll be much more excited. Don't insult my intelligence by showing me something which I know very well won't represent what the game is really about. Take a leaf out of indie developers' books and provide an interesting, well-cut trailer that shows what the game is and why I should be excited about it. Good quality work should speak for itself.

What do you think? Trailer buff or cynic?

#oneaday Day 691: Satisfactory is Unacceptable

It's been a while since I had a teaching-related rant, but this article helpfully reminded me why I'm in no hurry to go back, despite being currently out of a job.

Any profession where it's considered unacceptable to be graded "satisfactory" is not a profession I want to work in. And I'd argue it's a profession that's in need of a good shakeup.

Where do these rankings come from? OfSTED, or the Office for Standards in Education if you're unfamiliar and/or foreign. Every so often, a school gets a bunch of inspectors descend upon the place to nose around everything it's up to. As part of this process, inspectors drop in to a number of lessons for 15-20 minutes and then assign an arbitrary grade to the lesson, branding it anywhere between "Inadequate" (4) and "Outstanding" (1). These grades are also applied to other areas in the school, such as behaviour, "value for money" (i.e. how well the school is budgeting and spending what money it gets from the local authority) and numerous other factors.

Fine. I get the need to inspect places and ensure they're doing their job. What I don't get is the inconsistency in OfSTED's approach. 15-20 minutes observation of one lesson is not enough to understand how well a teacher teaches. That teacher might have the worst class in the world, and may have scored a major victory on that day simply by having them sat down and listening for once. But if the children aren't deemed to be "learning anything", then BAM! That's an "inadequate" mark right there.

Or it might not be — it may well be a "satisfactory" grade, depending on what else happens.

Now, the word "satisfactory" carries certain assumptions with it. Namely, it implies that the person declaring something to be "satisfactory" is somehow satisfied with the thing in question. While something that is "satisfactory" is not the best thing in the world, it's certainly acceptable and does what it is supposed to.

Not in teaching. "Satisfactory" is somehow seen as a bad thing, despite the standards for branding lessons as "good" or "outstanding" being 1) completely arbitrary and largely down to the opinion of the inspector rather than specific, measurable criteria and 2) extremely difficult to attain, even for the most talented teachers. And if you're in a difficult school teaching a difficult class, God help you.

New head of OfSTED Sir Michael Wilshaw is aiming to do away with the "satisfactory" branding and replacing it with "grade 3". Not only that, he's proposing that automatic pay rises for teachers whose work is considered "satisfactory" should cease, instead being reserved for those graded "good" or better.

This would be fine if the grading of a teacher was based on more than a short, not necessarily representative observation of part of a lesson. Actually, would it? If you're doing your job, wouldn't you expect a pay rise every so often? It's been that way in teaching for some time now, with yearly pay rises for your first few years on the job before you have to go through a procedure known as "Threshold" to get on to the upper pay scale. The demands for meeting Threshold are pretty stringent, so some teachers won't get through anyway — surely that's enough control on pay rises?

(Note: I haven't been teaching for a while, so pay systems may have changed since then. The above is how I understood it when I was employed by the system.)

Perhaps most obnoxious, however, is Sir Michael's quote where he noted that "if anyone says to you that ‘staff morale is at an all-time low’ you will know you are doing something right."

Sorry, Sir Michael, but this is where you lost any credibility with me whatsoever. You should not be actively trying to sap morale — an OfSTED inspection is already an incredibly stressful experience. I know — I've been through two, including one whose result caused the school to go in to Special Measures (essentially meaning that it gets re-inspected on a much more regular basis than normal, and is at serious risk of closure). They weren't pleasant experiences, so to imply that your staff should be encouraging a lack of morale among struggling teachers is pretty shameful.

Teaching is the most stressful job I've ever had. It drove me to a nervous breakdown, such was the stress of everything I had to think about at once coupled with torrents of abuse from hormonal, uncooperative teenagers. Sometimes you can use all the "strategies" in the book and nothing works with a difficult class or a particularly uncooperative child. Sometimes the behaviour of a pupil does disrupt the flow of a lesson. Should that be blamed on the teacher if the teacher in question does everything they're allowed to do to prevent the situation from escalating further? If the teacher in question is having difficulty dealing with particular pupils, should that teacher be supported or vilified?

I think you know the answer to that one.

So in short, then, I'm not sorry I left teaching. And if this is the way that the regulatory body for teaching is going, then I want absolutely no part of it whatsoever. Teaching should be about inspiring children to do great things; to teach them about the world; to encourage them to try new things, and to expand their knowledge of the things they know. It shouldn't be about meeting arbitrary criteria and being judged by people with no sense of context. And it certainly shouldn't be about being deliberately demoralised by the people supposedly regulating the profession.

Good luck to anyone entering the educational system at the moment. You're going to need it, from the sound of things.

#oneaday Day 690: Tickets, Please!

RememberTheme Park? That awesome sim from Peter Molyneux's pre-Lionhead studio Bullfrog? Good, wasn't it? Not only did it have bags of charm and character, but its attractive presentation (albeit with a few grammatical errors — "charity begin's at home" anyone?) masked an incredibly deep, immensely satisfying business sim.

And the things you could tweak and spy on! You could find out what an individual little person wandering around was thinking. You could adjust the amount of salt on the chips and inflate the prices of the conveniently adjacent drinks stand. There were tons of rides on offer. Even building your queues was a strategic challenge — how do you make them look shorter than they actually are? And when you had a badass park, you could sit back and watch the money roll in, satisfied with the knowledge of a job well done.

Fast forward to this week, and Theme Park has been released on iOS. "Yay!" you may be thinking, eager to sink your teeth into something with more depth than the ubiquitous Tiny Tower. "Finally, a true classic of PC gaming resurrected for the smartphone era!"

It's not an unreasonable thing to be excited about. Theme Park's mouse-driven interface would be ideally suited to a touchscreen, particularly a nice big one like an iPad, and the original game itself still holds up well today.

As you may already know, however, the version of Theme Park which has hit iOS is not the original Bullfrog classic. Very far from it, in fact. It's a brand new game.

No bad thing, you might be thinking. RollerCoaster Tycoon picked up the park management reins a while back and has been doing well since, so why not incorporate some advances in the genre?

Why not indeed. Instead, EA in their infinite wisdom have decided to turn Theme Park into a freemium social game with quite the most outrageously priced premium items I've ever seen.

Let's take the social game angle first. Aesthetically, many social games resemble the isometric 3D strategy games of the late 90s in terms of visual presentation, but that's where the resemblance ends. Gameplay is generally pretty free of any strategy, instead involving buying the most expensive/best item you can afford/have unlocked, and then clicking on everything you've built every few minutes to collect cash and experience points. As you level up, you unlock different items. Occasionally there are incredibly patronising quests to complete. The whole thing is one big Skinner box, designed to get you hooked enough to want to spend money.

Real money can be spent on the acquisition of "Super Tickets", which can themselves be spent on either speeding up lengthy build times, unlocking rides early or, and here's the kicker, purchasing some "premium" rides which can only be bought with Tickets. If you've played The Sims Social, it's just like the items that can only be purchased with premium currency SimCash.

So far, so freemium, you might think. But the real kick in the teeth is the price of some of these items. The most expensive rides cost in the region of £35 to purchase. £35. For one virtual item in one not very good game. That's £35 you could spend on an actual game in a shop. Or a large selection of actual full games on the App Store. You could even purchase several Square Enix titles from the App Store for that, which just goes to show how insanely priced it is.

Fortunately, App Store reviewers, usually imbecilic morons but for once seeing the Emperor in all his nudey glory, have been rightly panning the game for this. Unfortunately, it only takes one "whale" to buy even one of those premium items to make the whole thing worthwhile for EA.

So in short, I'm disappointed. I'm disappointed that such a beloved game franchise is tarnished with this nonsense. And I'm disappointed at the shameless money-grubbing that this title represents.

But am I surprised? Of course I'm not, and that's perhaps the saddest thing of all.