I should probably add at this point that I have not yet played the full version of Nighthawks — it is presently sitting on my PC ready to be started for the first time. But I did play a demo several months back (EDIT: nearly a year ago!) that looked like it would be pretty representative of the full experience, and I came away from that demo thinking "cor blimey, that game was a bit of all right and no mistake, onto the wishlist it goes". I have no reason to believe that things have taken a devastatingly shit turn between that time and now, particularly because Nighthawks has been in development for so long.

Eight years, to be exact; the project began its public-facing life on Kickstarter in 2018. I must confess I only became aware of it a little more recently — I think the aforementioned demo was the first time I'd really stumbled across it in any meaningful way — but like I say, that initial contact was enough for me to get thoroughly interested in the project and want to pick it up immediately on release day. Well, release day is here, and I have made good on my promise: I have bought it, and intend to spend the evening playing it, even though I haven't quite yet finished Ys VIII as I hoped I would have by this point. But no matter. I'm sure I can find a way of juggling these two games without agonising over the decision of which to play each evening. I'm good at that.

(beat)

Anyway, some of you may still be wondering what the fuck this Nighthawks thing actually is. Well, it's a vampire RPG, based around a similar concept to White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade franchise, only in this instance there is no Masquerade; the existence of vampires is no longer a secret. Still, the fact that you play a vampire, with all the interesting powers that comes with both your new undeath and your overall background, is a common factor — and with the disappointment that Bloodlines 2 apparently ended up being, there is definitely scope for a good vampire RPG in 2026.

Don't come into this expecting something along the lines of Bloodlines, though; this is primarily a text and dialogue-based game rather than a game where you have a little vampire man that runs around a city, bites people and occasionally indulges in some of the worst first- and/or third-person action ever committed to a gold master. That means it's a very character-centric game, with interactions between your character and the various inhabitants of the city playing a crucial role in how things unfold. To put it another way, its overall approach has a fair amount in common with games like Disco Elysium and Esoteric Ebb, where you are effectively working with the game, which acts as a virtual "game master", to build your story.

The game is written by Richard Cobbett of PC Gamer fame, whose other work actually on games includes titles such as Beyond a Steel Sky and Sunless Sea/Skies. It also features art by Ben Chandler, who has worked on some excellent adventure games in the last few years, and Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games has acted as producer. There are also some excellent voice actors in the game, including, among others, the inimitable Sally Beaumont (of Old Skies fame) in a "minor but memorable" role, apparently.

As I say, I'm yet to jump into the full game and see how things have turned out, as well as establish factors like how long the game is, but the demo version from a while back made me very excited about this game indeed. As such, I'm really looking forward to sinking my fangs into it after dinner, and I'm sure I'll have much more to say about it in the near future.

Right now, though, it's 7.30pm, I've had dinner, I've emptied and reloaded the dishwasher: it's time. The lights are down low. It's time to enter the nocturnal world of Nighthawks. Maybe you should, too.

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The post #oneaday Day 837: Nighthawks! appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

One of the things Big Walk continually impresses on you is the importance of communication, whether that's communicating over short to moderate distances in order to collaborate on puzzles, taking the time to just have a chat, or finding a means to get one another's attention from a long distance apart if you happen to find yourself separated.

I suspect every group will find their own ways of dealing with this particular challenge — and every group will have its own members that, for one reason or another, present additional challenges to everyone, including themselves — but it's something you will likely settle into fairly quickly in collaboration with your walking partners. I'd be interested to try it with other people and see how different the dynamic is between group members and group sizes — though I'm also conscious that once you've solved a lot of these puzzles once, it's a lot easier to play through the game, so I don't know how inherently replayable the whole thing is.

Anyway, the reason I mention this is because towards the end of the game, Big Walk takes away two very important things that you have likely been using for your communication up until this point: your visual identity — in other words, the colours you have chosen to represent your character, which you can "paint" onto each other in the introductory stage of the game — and your voice.

Yes, the finale sequence of Big Walk completely takes away the ability to voice chat with one another, meaning you will have to find ways of communicating not only each participant's part in a puzzle solution, but also determine between you what on Earth you are supposed to do in each puzzle.

Thankfully, Big Walk does have a fairly robust gesturing system that allows you a surprising amount of flexibility in terms of waggling your noodle arms around, but you still have to find a way to agree what each gesture means, having likely not had an opportunity to do so verbally beforehand — unless, of course, you had the foresight to do so "just in case" you were not able to communicate through voice. But why would you need to do that? Taking players' voices away in a game built around cooperative play and communication would just be mean, wouldn't it?

Well, yes, it would, but it also makes Big Walk's finale sequence incredibly memorable. There are, I think, seven puzzles you have to complete in the run up to the actual ending, and each challenges your group to think on their feet and find a way to get various messages across to one another without using words and without being able to visually identify who is whom. It really works extraordinarily well — I won't spoil the actual solutions for the puzzles here, for the sake of anyone who didn't heed my spoiler warning but is still intending to actually play Big Walk, but I'll just say that the "kettle puzzle" was my favourite for how gleefully silly it was.

Anyway, once you finish Big Walk, there is a "postgame" to play, too, which we're probably going to tackle in a subsequent session. There are a lot of puzzles on the map that we didn't solve in our various explorations, and we found a place where you have to put a whopping fifteen of the collectible thingies (we call them "Kongs" after their resemblance to a classic dog toy) in order to do… something? We don't know what yet ,though I have a suspicion. That's a job for another day though.

I'm impressed how substantial the game actually is. It took us three very long sessions to get through the entirety of the "main" game, and there's still a fair bit more for us to do. This is one of numerous reasons why I don't think it fits into the ill-defined "friendslop" category; to me, "friendslop" says games that you play with your friends that are over and done with in one session, and which "don't matter". Not in the sense that they're worthless, but in the sense that they don't have a long-term overarching goal; each session is self-contained, like an individual play of a board game, rather than part of a broader "campaign" in which you're working together to achieve something.

Anyway. I had fun! And aside from one of those finale puzzles, which I found very difficult to get my head around for some reason (as did everyone else, I think) I am relieved that Big Walk, despite whipping much of games media into a similar frenzy as we saw for Blue Prince last year, is a very different sort of experience. And for me, it's nice to actually be able to enjoy an indie darling for once, because on a significant number of past occasions, they have left me cold. This led me to doubt that Big Walk would actually be any good, but I'm glad I decided to give it a try. It was very much worth it.

Now it's nearly 1am and I need to sleep. But that was, indeed, a Big Walk.

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The post #oneaday Day 813: That sure was a big walk appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As my thoughts wandered during my little 2km circuit of the Common, I started to think about why I haven't really played it much since (checks dates on Achievements) 2020? No, I definitely played it well before that. Mid-2010s. They probably added Achievements later after some entitled little prick on Steam got pissy that they couldn't have their meaningless shinies. (checks blog) Ah. 2012. Fuck me.

Anyway, before I got distracted, what was my point? Oh, right, the reason why I haven't played this all that much since 2012… and a brief return in 2020, apparently. I think it's because A Valley Without Wind is one of those games that there is no real "end" to. You have a long-term objective to complete, yes — defeating an Overlord — but once you do that, the game continues. There is a never-ending stream of Overlords to defeat, of gradually increasing difficulty, but, as far as I am aware, no way to "win"; no way to "beat" the game completely.

As time has gone on, for one reason or another, I have drifted away from games like this, and I'm not entirely sure why, because it's certainly not because I don't enjoy them. Over the years, I've had a lot of fun with various types of "freeform" experience, ranging from Starflight on Atari ST through SimCity on SNES, SimCity 2000, SimCopter, The Sims, The Sims 2, The Sims 3 on PC, and, yes, A Valley Without Wind. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I absolutely adored A Valley Without Wind when I first started playing it.

There was just something about it that… resonated with me. It was probably a combination of things: the janky but creative gameplay; the sense of emergent narrative; the chiptune-esque music; the baffling aesthetic which looked like half the team wanted to make an Amiga game and the other half knew what "Super VGA" meant. I played that game a lot when I first got it, although Steam claims I've only played it for 10 hours. I'm pretty sure the bulk of my playtime was before Steam started recording how long you'd played something.

But yeah. I haven't gone back. And I think the reason is that knowledge that it doesn't end. There's no way to "finish" the game, and thus it feels like there's never a good time to start it. This is a silly way to think about it, of course; there are lots of really good games that never end, and if I thought this about all of them, I'd never play any of them!

Weeeelll… I kind of don't. Y'see, I find finishing games enormously satisfying, and I love seeing the variety of different ways that games handle a narrative and/or mechanical finale sequence. Given that my tastes tend to skew towards the narrative-centric RPG end of things, you can see how I might find it tricky to figure out how to fit in a game like A Valley Without Wind. It's easy to fall into a trap of feeling that these games have no "point"; that it's not worth starting them if you can't finish them.

And yet I'm conscious that I'm deliberately depriving myself of things that I know I enjoy. Focusing on one or two "Big Games" at a time is certainly a good way to get through your library and, over the long-term, have a range of experiences that are both broad and deep. But it certainly doesn't hurt to punctuate those Big Games that have a definitive beginning, middle and end with something that just… doesn't end.

I mean, I have no problem spending an evening playing arcade games. Some of those never end. Even the ones that do are built to be replayed. And so why am I holding myself back from playing games that I know I like?

Perhaps I just need to make more time for experiences like this, and stop worrying about whether or not it's ever the "right" time to play something in particular. If I'm in the mood to play something, just play the damn thing!

Aren't brains fun? We're talking about something that is supposed to be relaxing entertainment here, and here I am, agonising and stressing over it. I need to stop doing that and just do what feels right, fun and just plain nice in the moment.

I need to go and have a bath as I'm stinky and sweaty after walking 2km in what turned out to be an incredibly humid evening. But after that, y'know what? I might just fire up A Valley Without Wind for the first time in six years. And realise that I have almost certainly completely forgotten how to play it.

(Aside: you can finish A Valley Without Wind 2, and in many ways it's a better game, with a belter of a theme song. But there's something I've always just really, really liked about the first one.)

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The post #oneaday Day 811: Playing a game with no "point" appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Earth Must Die! casts you in the role of VValak Lizardtongue, third in line to the throne of the planet Tyryth and its empire, the Ascendancy. After tricking his two brothers into murdering one another, VValak ends up in charge, and inadvertently causes the Terranoid forces of Earth to invade. That's as far as I've got, but as the name suggests, one can expect that the remainder of the game will involve VValak finding a way to get revenge on the Terranoids and get his empire back. Or maybe not…?

It's an adventure game, but with a few interesting twists from the usual formula. You have direct control of your character's movement, and interacting with hotspots is done using a cursor that can be popped up. It's clearly designed to be played with a controller and works well like that, but can also be played with WSAD movement controls and a mouse cursor. I think I might have preferred a simple mouse-only interface for its non-controller implementation, but not enough to want to kick off about it or anything.

VValak, as an arrogant (wannabe) tyrant, refuses to touch anything himself because poor people might have touched it before him. Thus you have to solve all the situations in the game without VValak ever getting his own hands dirty. This sometimes involves using his companion robot and former nursemaid, Milky, to perform various actions, and sometimes involves convincing other characters in the scene that they should carry out your orders. It's an interesting mechanic that sidesteps the usual inventory puzzles.

Like I say, I'm not too far in the story as yet so I am hesitant to say too much more in that regard, but one thing I will highlight is the incredible voice cast, which includes numerous big names in British comedy such as Alex Horne, Tamsin Grieg, Matthew Holness, Alasdair Beckett-King, Don Warrington, Mike Wozniak and many more. Plus, of course, Ben Starr is in it, because Ben Starr is the Nolan North of the 2020s (complimentary). That cast might not mean much to anyone who isn't British, but you should know that this is a full-on celebrity cast of comedy royalty, and it's incredible to see them all coming together for a video game.

The net result is that the game sounds like a late-night Channel 4 comedy show (complimentary), and it has some really beautiful animated 2D art to go along with it. It's very much designed along the lines of games like Discworld II, with large, cartoonish sprites and plenty of close-up animations — and much of the humour will be familiar to those who enjoyed Terry Pratchett's work, too.

That's about all I want to say for now. It's an easy recommend if you enjoy silly games that will make you laugh, and is a seriously impressive project from Size Five in terms of scope. I'm looking forward to getting stuck in over the next few days, and, as I say, I will have a full report, likely on MoeGamer and YouTube, once I'm done with it!

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The post #oneaday Day 599: Earth Must Die! appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

LucasArts stuff was just better than Sierra stuff, at least in the early days. Early on, LucasArts' developers decided to take the things that annoyed people about Sierra games — chiefly the ability to die and get yourself into unwinnable situations — and throw them out of the window. Far from removing all challenge from the games as a result, this just made them much more fun to play — although it's interesting to note quite how short a lot of those games are by modern standards.

One thing to remember is that when we were playing stuff like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Internet access wasn't particularly widespread. Hell, GameFAQs wouldn't exist for another few years, even if you could get on the Internet; some resourceful folks were writing walkthroughs and posting them on places like CompuServe's GAMERS forum (a frequent online hangout for myself), but for the most part, when it came to solving a tricky game, you had two options: figure it out yourself, or wait for a magazine to print a walkthrough.

This meant that games that are maybe three or four hours long start to finish could actually take days, weeks or even months to complete. We had a lot more patience for that sort of thing back then — although I do recall finding it quite eye opening when I bought a brand new copy of Full Throttle, played it for two hours with my brother and we rolled credits on it.

Today, point and click adventures are still going strong. Press and public alike have enjoyed saying the genre is "dead" for many years, but in reality it's been nothing of the sort. What changed is the part of the market that point-and-click adventures occupied; while once a Sierra or LucasArts game would be considered a "big release" in a similar fashion to today's triple-A titles, after the turn of the millennium they became more niche interest affairs.

I'm not entirely sure why, either; they hadn't fundamentally changed what they were doing, or their core appeal elements. Although thinking about it, that's probably precisely why they became more niche interest affairs. From the late '90s onwards, the "upper" (for want of a better term) end of the market was going 3D, exclusively. And adventure games, up until this point, had been resolutely 2D affairs, tending to be showcases for beautiful rotoscoped or hand-drawn animation, painted backdrops and suchlike. In the age of PlayStation, that suddenly wasn't fashionable any more for a variety of reasons — and the few attempts to bring point-and-click adventures into the 3D realm had been met with a mixed response.

As with most niche interest things, an enthusiast community developed, with many of them rallying around a piece of software called Adventure Game Studio. Initially DOS-based, this was a tool that allowed anyone with a creative mind and the ability to produce basic graphics to put together a point-and-click adventure. It took effort, mind; this wasn't a "game generator", but a fully featured game engine, suitable for creating point-and-click games similar in style to Sierra, LucasArts and any number of other models.

Remarkably, Adventure Game Studio is still going to this day — and the enthusiast community is still using it. Only now, we see a lot more commercial releases from independent developers. And even more remarkably, the stuff being put out today by small outfits is pretty consistently better than anything from the genre's supposed "golden age" of the mid '90s.

There are more point-and-click adventure games that have been released in the last few years than there ever were back in the '90s. And they're really, really good. For just a few recommendations: the Kathy Rain series is an excellent series of investigative adventures; Old Skies by Wadjet Eye Games is an incredibly thoughtful narrative-centric game with a time travel hook; Lamplight City by Grundislav Games is what happens if you take Gabriel Knight and stick it in a steampunk setting; Brok the InvestiGator by CowCat Games is a brilliant, lengthy animated adventure with optional beat 'em up mechanics.

Even better, these games are a lot longer than their mid '90s counterparts. Old Skies took me a good 12 hours. The two Kathy Rain games are about 8 hours each. I'm 7 hours into Lamplight City so far and on the fourth chapter of five. I'm not sure how long Brok was but I have a feeling it was pushing 20 hours.

"Length of play" isn't the sole metric by which you should measure a game's worth, of course. But what a longer game means in the adventure game space is a more detailed, in-depth story to explore and enjoy. The difference between watching a movie and a whole season of a TV show. Both have their place, of course — I'm not averse to a short adventure game, still, and frequently go back to some '90s faves — but it's always nice when one of these modern games really gives you something to get your teeth into properly.

Best of all, though, is that there's loads of them. The ones I've mentioned above are just scratching the surface. As someone who has always loved this type of game, that excites me. And I've really been enjoying playing Lamplight City of late in particular. More on that over on MoeGamer when I've beaten it, though….

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The post #oneaday Day 594: Point. Click. appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

So Steam announced a bunch of new hardware, and some of it looks quite nice — though the fact that no prices have been mentioned as yet is a bit of a concern.

Of the items that have been announced, I find the "Steam Frame" probably the most interesting. This is a standalone VR headset that can either stream games from another computer, or run games installed on its own storage. It doesn't have to be VR games, either; you can play standard 2D games on a big "virtual screen" in VR.

There are a number of attractive things about this. Firstly is the fact that it looks like being a relatively lightweight, comfortable headset — certainly a far cry from the units of even just a few years ago. Secondly is, of course, the Steam compatibility; by running things from your Steam library just like a Steam Deck (or the newly announced Steam Machine), it has an immediate ready-made library of thousands of games to choose from without having to worry about whether the platform will be supported over the long term. Thirdly is the fact that it's a standalone headset that has nothing to do with Meta — since up until now, your only real option in that regard has been a Quest.

Now, of course, being tied to Valve and Steam has its own concerns. Steam's community features remain a rancid cesspit of the very worst examples of humanity, for example, as discussion forum after discussion forum is overrun by right-wing fuckheads crying about "DEI" and "woke" at the slightest hint of a female character in a leading role. That is something that the company probably should address, but it also feels like it's probably much too late for them to be able to do anything about at this point. We are very much in "lunatics running the asylum" territory at this point, since it's extremely rare anyone from Valve actually steps in to deal with a situation; mostly it's up to developer and publisher community managers to stem the tide of absolute sludge from the dickheads of the Internet — and I absolutely do not blame any of them who simply refuse to engage with a Steam discussion forum on principle.

Then, of course, there's the matter of several of Valve's games encouraging a form of gambling with their lootboxes and tradable items and whatnot. Add the exploitative (and easily exploited) trading card system to the mix and you have a whole mess of ethically questionable stuff going on, because this stuff probably makes Valve a lot of money.

And finally, of course, there's the fact that Steam is the one example of online-centric DRM that everyone has been sort of fine with for a long time. Sure, there are many games that can run without Steam being open, but it can be a bit of a pain to find out which games this applies to, and which require you to have a stable Internet connection. There's no good way to take your games "out" of Steam in the same way that GOG.com provides, either; no making your own physical copies or backups of Steam games.

There's also the fact that Steam was pretty much single-handedly responsible for completely destroying the collectible physical market for PC games — although I will be fair here: if you're going to be gaming on a standalone VR headset you probably don't want to be inserting discs into it while you're trying to get your game on.

I'll be interested to see what people think of these new machines once they're out in the wild. I have no particular need for a Steam Machine, as I have a perfectly competent "living room PC" that can run most games I'm interested in playing on PC rather than console — but, as I say, the Steam Frame is of at least moderate interest to me for gaming purposes. If I do end up getting one, I will almost certainly keep my living room PC up and running as it is, as I don't just game on it; it's also an entertainment centre, my video editing system and where I do just… general computery things. I'm not entirely ready to make the switch to Linux (which SteamOS is a flavour of) as yet, but I suspect that time will come at some point.

Anyway, I'm reserving judgement until I've seen prices and I've heard what people I trust think of these things. But there's definite potential for Valve to have something special here. I certainly think they're well-placed to fill the growing Xbox-shaped hole in the games industry with Microsoft's continual missteps in that regard.

We shall see!

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The post #oneaday Day 524: Steam powered appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've talked a bit recently about how the adventure game genre is probably in a better place than it's ever been — in fact, I think I'd even argue that now, it's better off than it was in its supposed heyday of LucasArts and Sierra in the early '90s.

The reason is games like Wadjet Eye's Old Skies, which I've played a good four hours of this evening. This is a masterfully put together adventure game in terms of involvement, emotional engagement and just being a plain compelling interactive narrative. While there are some who have criticised it for not having interesting "mechanics" — by that, what they really mean is that it doesn't have any puzzles they got stuck on — I think there's a strong argument to be made that the genre has moved beyond the necessity for being overtly and deliberately obtuse for the sake of inflating playtime.

Y'see, while Sierra and, to a lesser extent, LucasArts games put in deliberately complicated and sometimes baffling puzzles as a means of hiding the fact that their total runtimes were, in many cases, only one or two hours at most, today's adventure game developers have the resources, budget and ability to put together games that are much longer. As such, there's no real need for these games to artificially inflate their length through obtuse puzzles, because the core of what they offer — their narrative, and the player's involvement in it — is compelling enough to stand on its own merits.

This is definitely the case for Old Skies, which has a thoroughly interesting and enjoyable premise. You take on the role of Fia Quinn, a time-travelling agent who accompanies clients on recreational jaunts to the past in order to ensure that they don't get up to mischief or cause any paradoxes that are too significant. The nature of time travel means that there will always be a certain amount of impact on the future, reflected in the game world by flashes of purple light that signal a "Chrono-Shift", where something notable changes in the "present" due to interference in the past, but the Earth depicted in Old Skies also has sufficient technology to "Chrono-Lock" anything that is particularly important, protecting it from such instances.

Each main chapter of Old Skies focuses on one of Fia's jaunts to the past with her client. The first is a relatively short trip back to the New York of 2024 as a renowned scientist hopes to resolve some lingering regrets. Things… do not go entirely according to plan, setting what one would anticipate to be a template for the rest of the game. But interestingly, the second immediately subverts that expectation by being much longer, more involved and more complex, both mechanically and narratively. In this chapter, set in the "Gilded Age" of the late 19th Century, something still goes "wrong", but in an entirely different way, forcing both Fia and her client to work through a complex series of events in two closely related time periods (six months apart) in order to set things what is, to their best interpretation, "right".

The whole thing raises some interesting questions about the very ethics of something like time travel. How do you ensure someone's selfish actions don't make a real mess for everyone in the future? How, exactly, do you police such things? Who decides who and what is "important" to the coherence of the overall timeline — and how? Why were they given that opportunity?

I'm looking forward to seeing how the story evolves, and it also appears that this game is going to be pretty substantial by adventure game standards. At four hours to complete the first two chapters, and I believe at least seven in total, this is looking like a fairly beefy adventure, though its chapter-based structure also means that it feels nicely episodic, so you can leave it at a natural break and come back to it another day.

Thus far, I haven't really seen the problem that some reviewers argue is the game's "weak mechanics"; the game doesn't rely much on using inventory items on things in the game world to progress, but instead prompts you to think carefully about the pieces of information you gather, how they relate to one another and, in some cases, how closely related time periods might relate to one another, too. There are some particularly clever sequences in the second chapter, requiring you to jump back and forth to revisit the same locations six months apart and manipulate the information you find in order to secure an advantageous outcome for everyone involved… as much as is possible, given your own interference, anyway.

The game is beautifully presented, with some absolutely stellar voice acting and music, and some really nice animation on the main characters. It's also nice to see an adventure game breaking free from the seeming "obligation" that some developers feel to use '90s-style pixel art; Old Skies instead adopts a true high-definition look that feels like a true successor to the brief period of "Super VGA" adventures during the winding-down of the Sierra and LucasArts "golden age".

Anyway, I'm sure I'll have more to say in the coming days/weeks as I work my way through it on evenings where I feel like something a little more chilled out than Donkey Kong Bananza. In the meantime, if you're a point-and-click type, I can highly and confidently recommend Old Skies; it's another fantastic game from Wadjet Eye (developed by them this time, as opposed to the numerous other titles they've published in recent years) and well worth the £17 it costs. Take that, £75 video games!

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The post #oneaday Day 409: Beneath the Old Skies appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've spent the evening playing Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer. I played Kathy Rain: Director's Cut a few years back and apparently didn't write about it, but suffice to say I enjoyed it. As such, I was excited to see the sequel show up a few days back — one of several interesting-looking adventure games that have released recently.

I've played about 4 hours of it this evening and I'm not sure how far through I am — most estimates seem to place it around 7 hours in total — so I'm not going to give any conclusive thoughts just yet. I'll save those for MoeGamer and/or YouTube another time. I can give some first impressions, though, and those first impressions are very good indeed.

Like its predecessor, Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer is a point-and-click adventure presented in deliberately low resolution pixel art, albeit making use of modern widescreen resolutions and colour depth to provide a level of detail that wouldn't quite have been possible back in the classic VGA age. It is, I believe, an Adventure Game Studio affair, which accounts for its interface being rather similar to The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, another excellent modern adventure I played a little while back. That's no bad thing, though; Adventure Game Studio is a well-respected engine, used by a lot of modern adventure developers with good reason.

As with most modern adventure games, interactions in Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer are kept nicely simple. Click on things to either look at them or do something with them, click on inventory items to examine them, drag inventory items onto items in the scene or other inventory items to use them on things. Conversations unfold using a Gabriel Knight-style keyword system, where Kathy accumulates (and erases) keywords over the course of her investigation and can ask interactive characters about them, along with also being able to ask them about things in the scene or her inventory. It's a simple but effective conversation system that works well, and there are occasional traditional dialogue options that appear when Kathy has multiple things to ask about a situation.

Kathy's case this time around is that of a serial killer known as the Soothsayer. This individual has committed five murders over the course of the last few months, with the most recent being a local celebrity writer. As a rather down-on-her-luck private investigator, Kathy sees the $200,000 reward money and decides she'd like a bit of that action, so she proceeds to go about her investigation in her own mildly anarchic style. I say "mildly" because while she flouts a few rules and laws over the course of her investigation, she does draw the line at doing anything likely to get her thrown in prison — or, indeed, lose the confidence of her contact in the police force, who, as you might expect, is a helpful resource to draw upon, particularly as he very much wants to get into Kathy's pants.

Thus far in the 4 hours of play, I haven't felt like I've got "stuck" at all, which is good — and the game has kept up a decent pace as a result. The puzzles, while not super-easy, won't take long to solve for experienced adventure game veterans, but they are nonetheless satisfying. There's no moon logic on display here; everything makes logical sense, and those who really struggle can check out Kathy's notebook to get some hints on the objectives she needs to accomplish. The presence of the notebook and a list of objectives in the first place is a helpful addition not normally present in this type of game; it helps keep you focused without spoiling the sense of player agency or working things out for yourself.

I remember the original Kathy Rain getting a bit weird towards the end — and I didn't have a problem with that, I hasten to add — and I have a suspicion something similar is probably going to happen in this one, too. The "weird bit" of the first Kathy Rain led to some eye-opening revelations about the character, so I will be very surprised if something similar doesn't occur this time around, too. But we'll have to see, I guess.

Thus far, then, I've been thoroughly absorbed by this new investigation. The game looks great, has a wonderfully atmospheric soundtrack and decent voice acting, and it plays very well, too. Plus at what looks like it will be 7-10 hours in total, it's a decent length for this type of game, too — particularly when you consider most of the "golden age" adventures from Sierra and LucasArts could be beaten within an hour or two (or even less, in some cases) if you knew what you were doing.

I'm looking forward to seeing how things end up. At this rate, it's looking like I might beat it tomorrow. I will definitely pen some more substantial thoughts for MoeGamer and/or my YouTube channel when I've finished the whole thing. For now, though, it's an easy recommend for adventure game enthusiasts.

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The post #oneaday Day 355: Soothsayer appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

After seeing the glowing praise it's been getting recently, I decided to give the new indie darling Blue Prince a go. I've been suspicious of sudden indie darlings ever since I absolutely detested my time with Jonathan Blow's Braid, but everything I was hearing about this one made it sound thoroughly interesting. As such, I was more than happy to forego my usual suspicion and give it a go.

For the unfamiliar, Blue Prince positions you in the role of an heir to a rather curious mansion. Said mansion supposedly has 45 rooms… except it doesn't, and there's actually a super-secret hidden 46th room somewhere. Your dead uncle has challenged you from beyond the grave to find said 46th room. Succeed, and you inherit all his stuff; fail, and you're doomed to perpetual roguelike hell.

Yes, Blue Prince is a roguelike of sorts in that it's based around repeated runs of the same thing with a heavily randomised element. But it's not a combat-based game, nor a role-playing game; instead, its focus is purely on exploration. While the roguelike descriptor is apt, Blue Prince is perhaps better thought of as being akin to tabletop games such as Betrayal at House on the Hill.

The way it works is like this: each in-game day, you begin a new run with 50 "steps" of stamina available to you. Each time you cross the threshold from one room to another, whether you're making progress or backtracking, you use up a step. Your initial aim is to make it from the entrance hall in "rank 1" of the mansion to the antechamber in "rank 9"; things get a little more complex later, but I haven't got that far yet, so I can't talk about that side of things with any great authority as yet.

Each time you open a door in the mansion, you pull three room "cards" from the deck you have available and can pick one to draft. This room then attaches to the door you just opened, and you gradually build out the mansion map from there. Rooms are automatically oriented based on the direction the door you opened is facing, and in this way you can plan out your route to a certain extent; as time goes on, you'll familiarise yourself with the "deck" of room cards and know which ones work better where. For example, you might want to find a means of safely ditching "dead end" rooms as soon as possible so they don't come up later in your run, but various rooms have special effects (both positive and negative), too, so you'll need to bear those in mind.

As you progress through the mansion, you'll acquire various resources. Keys are used to open locked doors. Gems are used to draft certain particularly powerful or helpful rooms. Coins are used to purchase items in special "shop" rooms. Dice allow you to redraw three room cards if none of the ones you initially drew tickle your fancy. And then there are a variety of items that show up along the way, too; for example, the metal detector makes it easier for you to locate keys and coins, while the shovel allows you to dig in patches of dirt to find additional resources and items.

You'll run into puzzles of various types in the mansion. These appear to take two basic forms: firstly, there are self-contained puzzles that always show up in specific rooms, and these usually reward you with resources or items if you solve them correctly. Secondly, there's the overall meta-progression puzzles, which involve you figuring out the somewhat convoluted means through which you can actually move forward and, once you reach it, get into the Antechamber.

Blue Prince does have a few things that carry over from run to run, but the main thing is knowledge. Information you learn in one run can be used in the next; there's no not being able to do something because your character hasn't seen a particular piece of info in this particular run. As such, it pays to take notes and/or screenshots as you play, because as you discover new pieces of information, you'll eventually find a use for it. It might not be right away, but you'll get there in the end.

The game also isn't completely randomised. As previously noted, you can learn the deck so you can have a good idea of what rooms you should burn early on in order to draw more helpful ones as you get deeper into the mansion. Certain rooms will only show up in certain positions on the map, or display particular scenery elements if positioned in the right place. A "coat check" room allows you to stash an item in one run and pick it up in the next; under normal circumstances, you lose everything at the start of each new day, aside from the knowledge you, the player, have accumulated.

I've played for about three or four hours tonight and I'm starting to get a feel for it. It's a really interesting game. Some folks claim to have spent upwards of a hundred hours playing this and this intrigues me; the central gameplay mechanic is intriguing and enjoyable, but I am very much under the impression that "winning" the central challenge is just the beginning of what makes Blue Prince so interesting. Right now, everyone is being deliberately obtuse about things — partly at the developer's request, and partly just not to spoil it for everyone else — but I am definitely intrigued to see where things go.

My only concern is that I fear I may be too stupid to figure this game out by myself. But that's what talking about it with friends online is for, right?

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The post #oneaday Day 307: Blueprints to my brain appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I saw an interesting bit of discussion over on Bluesky earlier, and thought it might make for a blog post worth pondering, so here we are. The subject is video game modding, a matter for which I have feelings that are probably best described as "complicated" and "somewhat nuanced". I appreciate that these descriptors are generally best avoided on the Internet at large, but this is my blog, so I do what I want with it.

Anyway, the discussion stemmed from this post by John Linneman of Digital Foundry, quoting another user with whom he had been having a discussion about the raytraced modified version of Half-Life 2 which has been doing the rounds recently.

"Fumseck"'s argument was that RTX-ifying Half-Life 2 was compromising the creators' original artistic vision for the game by adding technology to it that wasn't possible on its original release, and adding in things like lighting effects that weren't present in the game's original incarnation.

Half-Life 2 is actually a rather complicated situation to ponder with regard to mods, because the game (or at least the Source engine) was built very much with modding in mind, and Half-Life 2 developer Valve have themselves gone back multiple times over the years to completely rebuild Half-Life 2 with more up-to-date features and tech. So surely RTX-ifying it is just a natural progression from this?

Thing is, I see Fumseck's argument. Not necessarily for Half-Life 2, which was already a game whose visuals were taking aim for something approaching "realism", and thus raytracing is a natural inclusion. But definitely for other games.

For example, a little while back, this video did the rounds:

It's about a modified version of Doom II which has raytracing. Now this, I'd argue, is a step too far for my personal tastes, because while the raytraced version of Doom II does indeed look very lovely and atmospheric and all that… it doesn't look like Doom II any more. It looks like a modern game that is inspired by Doom II and deliberately using features such as sprite-based enemies and items as a means of paying homage to Doom II. But it doesn't look or feel like Doom II.

In adding the raytracing, the modders have made it look nicer, but I feel they've compromised the distinctive look and feel of Doom II. Doom II was built with the technological limitations of the era in mind, and as such, everything it does, it does for a valid artistic reason. If you eliminate some of those limitations, you fundamentally change the way the game's aesthetic is designed, and that's when you're stepping into "compromising the artistic vision" territory, so far as I'm concerned. Half-Life 2, meanwhile, already had dynamic lighting and HDR; adding raytracing atop that is a natural fit because it doesn't fundamentally change the way Half-Life 2 looks.

Same with Minecraft. I actually rather like the way raytraced Minecraft looks, but I also feel playing it like that is compromising the artistic style of the game. Minecraft was very deliberately designed to look like an old game, but combine those aged aesthetics with things that wouldn't have been possible on older tech, such as its vast world, its completely destructible landscape and the player's ability to build anything, anywhere.

So I think when it comes to visual mods, my attitude is "if visual mods are enhancing what the game is already clearly trying to do, they're maybe fine, so long as they don't overdo it; if visual mods are fundamentally altering the core aesthetic and stylistic choices of the game, I don't like them."

So that's one aspect of modding covered. But modding is much more complicated than that. And, as a result, so are my feelings towards it.

As I've already noted, I'm fine with games that are built with modding in mind from the outset. My earliest contact with these was way back in the Atari 8-bit era, when numerous games shipped with a "Construction Set" or similar on disk, or sometimes available as a separate purchase. Mr Robot and His Robot Factory. Dandy. Boulder Dash. All these games, and numerous others, were designed in a way that they could be modular: the artistry was mostly in the combination of the game's aesthetics and the way its mechanics worked — though of course, some praise should be given to the built-in level designs, too. Just because you have access to the Boulder Dash Construction Set doesn't mean you can immediately make a good Boulder Dash level, after all.

A game that is built in this way can, in theory, be enjoyed indefinitely, because once you've mastered the built-in levels, you can make some new ones, or you can swap your creations with friends. With games like this, I do find myself thinking "well, I don't really want to be playing this game forever", but that's entirely a "me" problem; the way I play games is that I like to focus on one "big project" at a time, and if that "big project" turns out to be something that just has no end, I often end up not even starting it in the first place.

Looking further forward, games with modding support have always been a thing. It was easy to replace the map and graphics files in Wolfenstein 3-D, for example, though I don't think id Software themselves necessarily expected the modding scene to take off for that as much as they did. Hell, even I made two hundred dollars by making Wolfenstein levels!

They paid attention, though, and both Doom and Quake (and their numerous spinoffs and sequels) were very much built with modding in mind. Quake even gave direct access to the game's core mechanics and logic through its "Quake C" programming language, allowing you to completely change the fundamental way the game worked — see mods like Quake Rally, Quess and AirQuake.

The explicit, developer-approved "Construction Set" being a thing is somewhat rarer these days, but it still exists. Bethesda games often ship with creator tools of some description, for example, and the Neverwinter Nights series set the benchmark for role-playing games with user-generated material, so far as I'm concerned. Then of course there's games where "creation" is a core part of the overall package right from the outset, like the TrackMania series.

Of course, all these things are very much a PC thing for the most part; while I'm not sure I'd go as far as Linneman's point that they are a foundational aspect of gaming on PC, it's rare to see console players have the opportunity to tinker with their favourite games. Modding does happen, of course, but it's a much more niche interest thing when it comes to console games. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

Because here's what I think my fundamental feelings about modding are: Not every game needs to have mod support. Not every game needs to be modded. And if a game "needs" mods to be worth playing, it probably wasn't very good in the first place.

I'm fine with folks making new levels for Doom, Quake and their successors (and rereleases!). I'm fine with folks making new quests, characters, monsters, dungeons and whatnot for Bethesda games. I'm definitely fine with people making TrackMania tracks, Neverwinter Nights campaigns and Mr. Robot and His Robot Factory levels. (Although my digital Atari 8-bit library wishes some groups would maybe cool it a bit on the Boulder Dash levels.)

What I'm not fine with is people booting up something like UFO 50 and immediately thinking "wow, this needs mods", which I saw in the discussion pages around its launch. No. Absolutely not. That is an example of a game that has a very specific reason for existence, and that is as an interactive, creative work of art. Not only does modding it show the height of ungrateful entitlement — it implies it "doesn't have enough content", when it has 50 full games in it — it also completely compromises the whole reason for its existence. Modding something like UFO 50 is defacing it, vandalising it, so far as I'm concerned, and not something I'm okay with, regardless of what platform it's on.

Likewise, I'm not really OK with things like character mods for games. Sure, it can sometimes be funny to see a different character running around in a game they're not supposed to be in, or see a character running around with no clothes on or whatever, but for me, again, that's compromising the artistic vision of the work, defacing and vandalising it, for no real good reason other than "because I can" and "this is mine now, I can do what I want with it".

And sure, you can do whatever you want with the games you have. There are bajillions of excellent custom levels for Doom and Quake out there, amazing new cars and circuits for BeamNG.drive, wonderful new aircraft for Microsoft Flight Simulator, lots of amazing things. And if you want to make all the characters in a game you like naked, there's nothing I can do to stop you.

There's plenty of really interesting things being done in the fan translation and ROM hacking communities, too. But those are a bit different, I think. Fan translation in particular isn't about defacing someone else's work; it's about making it more accessible. ROM hacking is not an area I'm particularly interested in, but in most cases those projects are presented as their own self-contained things — whole new games built on the core of something that exists, rather than "hehe, I modded Super Mario World so his willy is out all the time". They're creative projects perhaps best looked on as something akin to using an off-the-shelf engine to build your game.

But I'm pretty steadfast in the beliefs I outlined above: not every game needs to have mod support, not every game needs to be modded, and if you recommend I install 300 mods before even starting to play a certain game, I'm probably… not going to play that game.

While PC is the platform on which modding is easiest and most widespread, I don't think modding is (or should be) a fundamental aspect of PC gaming for everyone.

For some, it is, and that's great; for many, a passion for modding has led to a career in game design and development.

But there are plenty of us with bulging Steam libraries that we have no intention of fucking with the contents of, and I think that's also a perfectly valid, acceptable viewpoint to have. I also think that certain games are sacrosanct, for which modding is simply defacement and vandalism; that's the part I suspect to get the most pushback on, but it's the core of my beliefs on this subject.

It's a topic for which you have to take things on a case-by-case basis, and for which I suspect most people will have their own nuanced viewpoints. To be clear, if you're someone who enjoys nude mods and breaking things like UFO 50, I'm not saying you shouldn't do that; I'm simply saying I don't like it personally, and I won't get involved with it. Ultimately I don't give a shit what you are doing with the games you've purchased, so long as you're not fucking with the games I've purchased, or telling me that I'm "wrong" or "missing out" for enjoying them as the creators originally designed them.

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The post #oneaday Day 281: Bedmods and Boomsticks appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I successfully did what I planned yesterday — for two nights in a row, even. Last night I spent some time with Smashing the Battle on Nintendo Switch, which I'll write a bit more about once I've spent some more time with it, and tonight I have seemingly spent nearly six hours playing The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, a point-and-click adventure by Cloak & Dagger Games, published by modern adventure game specialists Wadjet Eye Games.

It always does my soul good to see how not-dead the point-and-click adventure genre has been for quite some time now, because there was definitely a period in the mid 2000s and early 2010s where it felt like there weren't any being made. 3D tech was getting better and everything was suddenly all about cinematic action games — something that certainly hasn't gone away in more recent years — but, looking back, it's clear that adventure games never really went anywhere. And these days, I'd say they're thriving more than they ever have done, even in their supposed golden age. Because not only can we enjoy the established classics from that golden age, there's a host of new ones seemingly being made all the time.

I'll write more specifics about The Excavation of Hob's Barrow when I've fully completed it — I've pressed pause on it for this evening as it's a quarter to one and I should probably sleep. Suffice to say for now that it's very good, though.

In The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, you take on the role of Thomasina Bateman, an antiquarian who has made it her mission to document the various ancient burial mounds scattered around the English countryside. We join the story as she arrives in a remote Northern village, supposedly the home of the titular Hob's Barrow, but she's immediately confronted with mysteries as her contact is nowhere to be seen and no-one seems to want to talk about Hob's Barrow.

That's all I'll say on the plot for now. The interface uses a pretty standard two-button system, with left-clicking "doing" things and right-clicking "looking" at things, but there's plenty of thinking required. Thus far there has been no real "moon logic" to speak of, just a sequence of tasks to complete that provide a sense of relative freedom without overwhelming you with possibilities. In fact, the game is quite cleverly designed in that the "freedom" you feel is not really present at all; there's quite a fixed sequence of things to do with a chain reaction of dependencies, but the fact you discover the beginnings of all these various threads before you start figuring out which order you need to solve them in is what makes this game really work.

It's beautifully presented in low-res pixel art combined with modern graphical techniques and greater colour depth, which gives it a wonderfully distinctive aesthetic. The voice acting is very good, too, seemingly making use of native Northerners in many cases.

I'm intrigued to see where it goes, but not quite enough to pull an all-nighter on it. After all, GOG Galaxy says I've already spent 5 hours and 28 minutes on it this evening and I've only completed two of the in-game "days". I don't know how many there are in total, but it does feel as if the third one is going to be somewhat climactic, so I estimate I'm maybe a little over halfway to two-thirds through? We shall see, I guess.

Anyway, if you're jonesing for a modern point-and-click adventure, I can definitely recommend this one. It's kept me pretty enraptured for the whole evening and I'm looking forward to seeing how it all concludes.

For now, though, sleep. Sleep!

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The post #oneaday Day 259: Excavations appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I recorded some videos earlier. I really like doing adventure game playthroughs, so I decided to play through both King's Quest II (I've already done the first one) and Space Quest, the latter of which I've never played all the way through by myself, but which I've fallen asleep to Dan from Game Grumps playing on numerous occasions.

I was hoping to get The Dagger of Amon Ra done also, but it turns out playing and beating three adventure games in one day is just a little too ambitious, so I've settled for just the two mentioned. The Dagger of Amon Ra is still on the list, though; I found The Colonel's Bequest far too interesting to just leave Laura Bow hanging like that.

I mostly enjoyed the experience of these two games. King's Quest II is a game I have fond memories of playing as a kid, though I'm not sure I ever actually beat it when I was younger. Space Quest was mostly a pleasure, also, save for two truly awful and mandatory sequences you have to endure: a "skimmer" race where you have to dodge incoming rocks, and a slot machine sequence where you need to earn an obscene amount of money using a purely luck-based system. (If you're playing a later revision of the game, there is a cheat to bypass this sequence, but sadly, the ST version I was playing was not said later revision, so I had to do it "the hard way".)

I always find it fascinating to go back to adventure games, because when I was younger actually making it all the way through one seemed like a literal impossibility. Particularly if we're talking about Sierra games, which most certainly are not afraid to kill off the player regularly, or leave them in a situation where they forgot an item earlier in the game that is mandatory to progressing later. King's Quest is probably more notorious than Space Quest in this regard, but as it happens, of the two games I played today, King's Quest II was probably the gentler, fairer of the two, while Space Quest had several opportunities to miss important objects and completely screw your entire playthrough over.

But no. Those games that seemed impossibly huge and insurmountable as a child are almost laughable in their length today. Actually, no, I don't mean that; both King's Quest II and Space Quest (annoying bits aside) are just the right length to be satisfying, so far as I'm concerned, but I do feel like if a modern equivalent of both of these was released today, they would be quickly review-bombed by entitled Steam kiddies whinging about "lack of content" and "no updates, abandoned game".

For me, though, it's nice to be able to power through a game like this in the space of a couple of hours — possibly even quicker if you know exactly what to do and the best order to do it in. I certainly enjoyed recording these two videos today — and I'm looking forward to publishing them over on YouTube over the course of the next few days. Now, though, it's 1.15 in the morning and I should probably go to sleep. Adventure is calling, but an adventurer also needs his rest, to be sure!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 239: Two Quests in one day appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The rumours were true! Just ahead of the series' 25th anniversary, EA dropped rereleases of The Sims and The Sims 2 on their own storefront and Steam earlier today, for the eminently reasonable price of £34.99 for the both of them. Considering they both come with all the expansions (well, I think The Sims 2 might be missing the IKEA "stuff" pack, but that's about it), I'm perfectly happy to pay up for them both, particularly considering The Sims has never had a digital release, and The Sims 2 has been unavailable for a long time.

"But you can get them both for free!" the entitled corners of the Internet shout. "They're abandonware, and that means you can legally download them for free!" Well, firstly, one, no it doesn't, because abandonware isn't actually a thing, legally speaking, and two, it is important to support official rereleases of stuff like this, because it gives a thumbs up to companies making a commitment to actually preserving their history and making it available to everyone, even those who weren't there for it first time around. It's no good carrying on about "preservation" if you don't support actual attempts to do that. Piracy is all well and good if there is no other way, but official preservation efforts should be supported. Yes, even if they're by EA.

Both rereleases have been updated so that they work just peachy on Windows 10 and 11, and The Sims is able to run in much higher resolutions than it ever has before, and in widescreen. Okay, the game could arguably do with a UI scale option when playing at 1080p or higher, but it's not unplayable by any means, particularly if you're playing on a big TV as I have been.

I've spent a few hours revisiting The Sims this evening by making a rough recreation of my original "Hartley Family" save file, which featured me and the other members of my hall of residence flat at university struggling to survive. I am reminded that the original The Sims is actually surprisingly challenging compared to some of its follow-ups; thus far, keeping on top of six people's needs has been quite difficult, particularly with a lack of substantial income. Things will get easier once some of them start getting promoted and bring in a bit more money each day, but for the moment it's very much in "scraping by" territory.

Also one of them has died already after burning down the kitchen, but I managed to "Plead" with the Grim Reaper quickly enough for him to be able to return as a zombie. I have made a promise to myself that I'm not going to save scum at all, I'm just going to deal with the consequences of everything that goes on as it happens. Emergent narrative and all that.

I'm interested to spend a bit more time with the original The Sims, as back when it was current, I had a lot of the expansion packs, but not all of them. I don't think I had Superstar, Unleashed or Makin' Magic, and those are three that have some substantial additions to the gameplay — the pursuit of fame, pets and the ability to cast spells using appropriate components respectively.

At present, I've got one of the six Hartley family members equipped with a magic wand and (thus far) the ability to turn someone into a toad, and another who keeps slipping off to the "Studio Town" area to go and sing karaoke badly (earning a whopping 5 Simoleons per performance at present) but so far, it's a struggle to keep their mood high enough to be able to truly take advantage of those features. Much as with real life, getting a solid and stable income stream is important if you want to start doing anything out of the ordinary.

So that's that. The Sims and The Sims 2 are both available on Steam and EA's own storefront right now, either separately or in a bundle together. You also get a "free" copy of The Sims 4 with them, but since that went free-to-play a while back anyway it's probably best ignored unless you want to get into DLC hell. The rereleases of both The Sims and The Sims 2 are complete, meanwhile (aside from the aforementioned Ikea pack for The Sims 2) and should keep you busy for a very long time indeed.

I'll probably write more about one or the other or both at some point, but for now, I'm happy. It's been a nice bit of nostalgia to revisit The Sims — and a reminder that as cynical as people got about the series over the years (not without good reason), it's still just a damned fine game at heart, too.

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The post #oneaday Day 238: The Sims is still good appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Supposedly The Sims and The Sims 2 are getting the rerelease/remaster treatment at some time around the end of the month. It is the 25th anniversary of the series this year, and it appears that EA is actually listening to people for once and (supposedly) bringing back two of the most fondly regarded entries in the series, neither of which have been available for a very long time — and I don't believe the original The Sims has ever been available digitally, since it came from that dark and mysterious time where you had to go to a shop to buy PC games. (Yes, I miss it. I would be much more of a PC gamer if it was possible to have a physical PC game collection.)

I used to really enjoy The Sims. The original game came out at an absolutely perfect time for me: while I was at university. As someone who had previously enjoyed the SNES version of SimCity (aka the best version… apart from the bugs) and Sim City 2000, I was intrigued to see creator Will Wright doing something a little bit different. The idea of a "life simulator" was something that had captured my imagination from around the 16-bit age; Activision's Little Computer People existed, but I wondered what something with a bit more "game" to it might look like.

Something really enjoyable, as it happened. The Sims, just in its base form, was an absolute revelation. Not only did I have fun with it, but everyone in my flat at university enjoyed getting involved, too. I'd made virtual versions of all of us, and everyone liked to check in every so often to see how we were all getting along. Because I rather overdid the size of our house when I started playing, we all had to sleep in recliners in the large communal living area for a while, but as everyone got jobs and started bringing in the Simoleons, we were able to live a rather luxurious life.

The Sims is interesting to think back on, because it's from a time where you could release a "sandbox" game and it wasn't anything unusual. Moreover, these games didn't need anything like achievements, daily quests or other engagement-bait to get people to enjoy playing them. They were enjoyable just because… well, because they were good. I'm actually rather interested to revisit the original The Sims just to see how well it holds up today. Obviously the graphics will look a tad dated, but I bet the gameplay still has it where it counts.

The Sims 2 I remember owning, playing and enjoying, but I don't recall playing it quite as much as the original for one reason or another. It certainly wasn't because I didn't like it or anything — I recall picking up several of the expansions for it — but for some reason it doesn't stick in my mind quite as much as the original. I know it's an especially fondly regarded entry in the series, though, so it might be fun to have another look at.

I really enjoyed The Sims 3, even though that was really the point that EA started truly taking the piss with the number of expansions and "Stuff" packs — something which has been taken to a frankly obscene degree with The Sims 4, which I've never played. I had a lot of fun with the World Adventures expansion in particular; I really liked the "dungeon crawling" subgame that added to the mix, as it made you make use of the game's mechanics in a rather different way.

I'm normally loathe to give EA money, particularly as they seem all-in on the AI fad right now, but I might make an exception if they don't fuck up the ports of these games — which is, of course, a distinct possibility. But we'll see; sources seem to reckon we'll see them by the end of the month, and there ain't much left of the month. Further reports as events warrant!

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The post #oneaday Day 234: The return of The Sims? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Today, I played through all of the first Laura Bow game, The Colonel's Bequest. I enjoyed it a lot! You can read more about my thoughts on the subject right here, and a full Let's Play of the game will kick off on my YouTube channel from tomorrow. It's just three (long) episodes rather than a lot of 30-minute episodes like I did with The Case of the Serrated Scalpel last year, as I felt that fit the format of the game a bit better, and the overall structure of The Colonel's Bequest is… well, quite different from pretty much any adventure game I've played.

But enough of that. What's next? The Dagger of Amon Ra, of course! This is the follow-up to The Colonel's Bequest, and I'm going to do my best to play it through and record it tomorrow. I don't know if it's longer, shorter, easier, harder… the only thing I do know is that it uses point-and-click controls instead of The Colonel's Bequest's text parser, and it quizzes you on what happened at the end, so you need to make notes, just like Laura herself.

Then after that, I'll start having a look at The Crimson Diamond. Plus alongside all this, I might do something similar to what I did last year ("3 interesting DOS discoveries", "5 DOS games I always wanted to play" and "5 of the best early FPSes") if I can figure out what I might want to cover for videos in that style. I haven't started looking yet. Racing games is a possibility — a good excuse to bust out the Screamer series, perhaps? — or flight sims. Space combat sims? I don't know. I haven't decided yet. Looking at shareware stuff I used to like is also a distinct possibility, perhaps from the perspective of "shareware games I always wanted to try the Registered version of", since the only Registered shareware game I had back in the day was Wolfenstein 3-D, which I got for free after making some levels that were included in the official "Super Upgrades" expansion pack.

I've probably told this story at least once on this blog before, right? Well, regardless, I'll tell it again, 'cause you might be new around here. It's a story of delightfully happy coincidence.

Back at the time I was playing Wolfenstein 3-D on the family PC, I was involved with a local shareware library. I did a bit of part time work helping them out at local computer fairs, writing their catalogues and that sort of thing. I don't remember getting paid for this, but it was decent experience and I got lots of freebies from the shareware library, which was nice.

Among those disks that I got for free were numerous Wolfenstein 3-D editors, and they worked with the shareware version. So I made a bunch of levels.

I forget the exact circumstances of how the next bit came about, but I was browsing the GAMERS forum on CompuServe one day, when I found myself in contact with a gentleman called, as I recall, Carlton somethingorother. He was a representative from Apogee, and he was looking for new Wolfenstein 3-D levels to include in the upcoming data disk for the game. There was money on offer for anyone whose levels were included. After consulting with my parents — online safety and all that — I submitted my pack of ten levels to him, expecting never to hear from him ever again.

Imagine my surprise when a few months later, I got a package from the United States containing a cheque for $200, plus a registered copy of Wolfenstein 3-D and the new Super Upgrades pack, which included my levels, along with a bunch of other community contributions. So technically I'm a professional game designer.

But anyway. Yeah. That copy of Wolfenstein 3-D was the only Registered shareware game I had, because it was the early days of the Internet (in fact, via CompuServe, our "ISP" at the time, you couldn't even access the Web, and had to append "INTERNET:" to any email addresses you were sending messages to outside of the CompuServe service) and my parents weren't super-into the idea of sending $40 overseas in the hope of getting a video game back, and they absolutely weren't going to share their credit card information online. As such, I became intimately familiar with a lot of "Episode 1s" and not a lot else… so exploring the "Episode 2s" and beyond for some games I liked back in the day might be interesting, for sure.

I'll think of something. For now, I think it's time to just play something fun for a bit without thinking about how to turn it into an article or video. Come to me, Donut Dodo…!

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The post #oneaday Day 176: Take a Bow appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Err… quick! Video games! I bought Victory Heat Rally today. This is a game I've had my eye on for a while (though not as long as some other people have, from the sound of things) after I played its excellent demo a few Steam Next Fests ago. I'm going to do a full writeup and video on this at some point in the very near future, but suffice to say for now that it's very good.

It's a game that takes aim at Sega's "Super Scaler" racers in style, with Power Drift being a particular inspiration. It doesn't slavishly try to ape the retro style, mind — though there is a nice "pixelise" filter option for the visuals — and rather makes use of some nice pixel art for the characters, cars and some roadside objects, and low-poly environments. It moves along at a fair old clip even on my mini PC that doesn't have a graphics card, and it's a lot of fun to play.

Besides Power Drift, it also draws inspiration from Ridge Racer (drift-heavy handling, '90s rave soundtrack), Sega Rally (rally stages with exaggerated handling), Mario Kart (multiple tracks set in a limited number of environments) and probably some others that I can't think of right now because I'm tired. It takes all these elements and blends them together to make an immensely compelling game that I've played for about 5 hours this evening.

The first series of championship challenges is a bit easy, but the second ramps things up nicely to a good challenge level. There are also some truly infuriating bonus stages known as "Joker" levels where you have to race through checkpoints against the clock while performing some sort of precise driving task. The one I'm presently stuck on requires you to take full advantage of the "drift boost" mechanic the game has borrowed from Mario Kart and boost through various checkpoints. This is a lot harder than it sounds, particularly with the awkward placement of some of these checkpoints, and it has cause many expletives to belch forth from my mouth this evening.

While these levels are infuriatingly difficult, the rest of the game seems pitched at a pretty sensible difficulty level. The opening championship eases you into things nicely, then things ramp up from there. I suspect the third series of championships will be genuinely quite difficult, if the escalation in the second series is anything to go by.

But anyway. Half past midnight, like I said, so I should probably close everything down and go to sleep. There can (and probably will) be more racing tomorrow.

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The post #oneaday Day 118: I left this too late again appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

To be clear and completely transparent, around the time of Gamergate being active I may well have expressed some sentiments and concerns that might have got me lumped in with this crowd.

However, I made an effort to distance myself from the movement as a whole, because I could see it was something of a scarlet letter, regardless of whether or not an individual had legitimate, worthwhile concerns.

My issues were always to do with the games journalism side of things, with my particular focus being on reviews and articles that treated Japanese titles (particularly those which featured sexually provocative content) unfairly and from an ill-informed perspective. I steered well clear of any discussions where it was clear people were being full-on racist and sexist — i.e. objecting to a game because it had a woman in a leading role, or a non-white person appearing prominently. I was entirely concerned with how certain portions of games journalism were treating specific games — and the people who enjoyed them — like absolute shit: nothing more, nothing less.

To put it another way, I always thought the people who were objecting to "woke" content in games were being massive weirdoes, and I didn't want anything to do with them. Where games did feature obnoxiously over-the-top "look how progressive we are!" content, I tended to just steer clear of those — or perhaps comment on them in terms of alternatives that did the same thing, but better. To date, my favourite example of this is Read Only Memories and VA-11 HALL-A. Both of these games unfold in the same "world", with the latter being a spinoff of the former, developed by a completely different team. Read Only Memories is absolutely obnoxious about how it handles progressive themes; VA-11 HALL-A integrates them extremely well into the plot.

But I digress. I have zero time for people who object to games purely on the grounds that they contain "woke content". Particularly when the definition of "woke content", as defined by the Woke Content Detector group on Steam, is so broad. I invite you to take a look at their official spreadsheet of which games are and are not "woke" and have a good laugh at it, and we'll pick out some classics below.

Starfield

Here's a prime example of what this list is actually about: being sexist, racist, transphobic and homophobic. I'm not sure much more needs to be said about this definition, other than to clarify for those who are somehow unfamiliar with Starfield that it is an open-structure role-playing game set in space, in which you play a self-insert character. Therefore having the option to select your name, gender, ethnicity and appearance makes a lot of sense. The implication of "many important people are [people of colour]" is that in The Future, we will have moved beyond white dominance and oppression of non-white people, but this is a bridge too far for the anti-woke crowd.

Civilization VI

This one is particularly hilarious. A game about running a civilisation on our planet, and considering important matters that both occurred in history and which might occur in the future is "woke" for acknowledging things like climate change. I guess we add "climate change denier" to the "sexist, racist, transphobic and homophobic" list. Some racism and sexism on open display there, too.

BioShock Infinite

Another good one. The funny thing about this one is that they clearly got the point of BioShock, but then got offended by it.

Forza Horizon 5

I have to include this one just for how stupid it is. Forza Horizon 5, the game in which you spend your entire time in a car, is "woke" because it allows you to choose how the in-game characters refer to you. Because only big strong boys play car games, you know.

Spider-Man: Miles Morales

This one is brilliant, because it's criticising the fact that the protagonist named in the game's title is "overshadowing" the character who is explicitly not the protagonist. Because he's black. Let's not beat around the bush here: this is racism. Again.

Disco Elysium

I'll take "I played Disco Elysium and didn't understand any of the big words" for 2,000, Alex. If you played Disco Elysium and didn't understand whether it was pro or anti communism, you don't deserve to be playing video games that have words in.

Final Fantasy VII

And I have to include this one just for the giggles. Final Fantasy VII features "subtly pro-climate action messaging". Yeah, Final Fantasy VII is real subtle about its environmental message, guys. Real subtle.

I'm utterly amazed at how committed these people are to being pathetic and weird. Because that is exactly what they're being. There are 386 entries on their "Recommended" (i.e. "not woke") list, while there are 746 "Not Recommended" ("WOKE!!!") titles and 299 "Informational" ("A BIT WOKE!!!") titles.

That's a thousand and forty-five games that these people will refuse to consider because they might be exposed to a black person, a gay person or, heaven forbid, a woman. There's no way you can look at that and not think it's utterly pathetic.

Unless you're one of them. In which case fuck off. I don't want to know you.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 93: The Truly Tragic Tale of the "Woke Content Detector" appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is a very good game, although it's also a game for a very specific type of person. Despite having console versions, it is very much a game for those who grew up with PC gaming in what old men like me tend to vaguely refer to as its "golden age" — around the turn of the century, approximately. No, I'll be a bit more specific; it's for people who grew up with text adventures and subsequently found themselves particularly enjoying CRPGs on PC in the late '90s/early '00s.

The reason I say this is because Disco Elysium has a significant text component. All of it is voice acted — and for the most part voice acted very well, I have to say — but at its heart, it is a role-playing game in which the majority of its major happenings are conveyed almost entirely through text rather than flashy graphics or even animations. It takes some strong cues from the legendary Planescape: Torment in this regard, but it also successfully distinguishes itself as something that builds on what that game was doing, rather than simply aping it.

For the unfamiliar, the big Thing with Disco Elysium is that it's a role-playing game that focuses almost entirely on non-combat situations. I'm not even sure there's a combat system at all — after playing for (checks GOG Galaxy) 8 hours so far, there has not been a single fight. Instead, everything has occurred through a combination of exploration and text-based interactions.

This isn't to say that Disco Elysium is a kinetic novel, either. Not only do you have a lot of choices in terms of dialogue options in most conversations and interactions, but the wide array of skills your player character has play a significant role in almost everything that happens in the game. And, unusually, this isn't just the form of "SUCCESS/FAILURE" rolls to perform particular actions based on your skills — although those do feature at various points — but rather the various facets of your personality actually "speaking" to you, offering suggestions and commentary on what is going on.

For example, if you've put points into the Empathy skill, at various points in conversations your Empathy trait will actually chime in to "conversations", giving you greater insight into how the person you're talking to is feeling, or how you might be able to get through to them. Your Perception skill will "speak" to you and notice little habits people have. Your Drama skill will flamboyantly point out opportunities where you might be able to express yourself. And there are tons more besides these examples, suggesting that playing Disco Elysium with a different "build" of skills and stats will end up being a markedly different experience; it'll still cover the same basic plot beats and events, but doubtless you'll end up resolving various situations in different ways.

This is really cool, and it feels very much like a natural evolution of interactive fiction. While you don't have quite as much freedom as in a traditional "text adventure" style piece of interactive fiction by virtue of not having a text parser to type in whatever you want, there's a really strong feeling that you're seeing the world through the eyes of the character that you have designed. And, interestingly, that character is designed not as an "ideal", but as an absolute wreck of a human being.

Amnesia is an overdone trope, particularly in role-playing games, but having your player character waking up with a raging hangover and no memory of what got him into the situation he starts the game in is a great means of bringing the player into the game almost in medias res. You, the player, are discovering things about the game world and the story as the protagonist character is (re)discovering them, and you have a lot of scope as to how you want to play that protagonist, who is canonically a policeman.

Do you play things by the book and attempt to impress your partner with how you get your life back together and work hard on solving the investigation that has brought you together? Do you lean into the "weird" and start freaking people out with how you behave around them? Do you start spouting particularly extreme political ideologies at every opportunity? You have the option to do all of these things in Disco Elysium, right up to deciding that you're the one who is going to bring Communism to the people, becoming a massive racist or turning into someone whose sense of self-worth flew out of the window along with his shoe prior to us joining the narrative at the start of the game.

A lot of it is smoke and mirrors, I'm sure, but I can't remember the last time I felt like I was so completely being invited to inhabit the role of a game's main character. The way Disco Elysium works strikes a great balance between having some things that are canonical fact about the protagonist, and allowing you to mould them as you see fit.

I'm not sure it would have quite the same impact if you had a completely freeform self-insert protagonist, because the temptation there is always to go down the "idealised" route, and a significant part of Disco Elysium involves how one deals with one's own flaws — whether that be accepting them, attempting to overcome them, ignoring them in the hope they don't mess things up further for you, or leaning hard into them. By forcing us to inhabit this absolute disaster of a human being, we're put in a position where we can explore how we might get out of a situation that is pretty much rock bottom. Will we rise to the challenges life has thrown at us — at least some of which are our own fault? Or will we crumble under the pressure?

It's a game that I feel could have only been made these days. I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops — and if my take on the protagonist manages to survive to the end of proceedings.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 57: The evolution of interactive fiction appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

For the unfamiliar, Hypnospace Outlaw is an adventure game of sorts, but rather than controlling a character you're manipulating a computer from a fictional 1999 as it navigates around the "Web" of sorts. Technically "Hypnospace" is a Web-equivalent that people browse in their sleep through a special headband, but so far that doesn't seem to have mattered all that much.

The fact it's set in 1999 does matter, however, because most of your interaction involves using a delightful parody of the early(ish) Web — a land of personal Geocities pages, primarily. Hypnospace is a managed service rather than a completely open free-for-all, and divides user pages into specific "Zones" according to their subject matter. As you progress through the game, you're given access to more Zones and thus more pages to browse.

Honestly, just browsing through the wealth of information that has been composed for these fake Web pages is a lot of fun in itself. The world of Hypnospace Outlaw has clearly been thought about in great detail, and even though it is, by necessity, considerably smaller than the "real" Internet — even as it existed in 1999 — there's a sense that you really are exploring a community, but through your computer screen, rather than on foot.

The actual "gameplay" part of Hypnospace Outlaw places you in the role of a volunteer "Enforcer" for Hypnospace's manufacturer MerchantSoft. This affords you special privileges — among them the ability to wield a literal banhammer — but also effectively stops you from "existing" online for the duration of your contract. Your job as an Enforcer is to seek out violations of MerchantSoft's "laws", which include copyright infringement, harassment, illegal (disturbing or offensive) content, distribution of malicious software and commercial activities carried out via non-approved channels.

This starts pretty simple with you wielding your banhammer on some obviously copyright-infringing pages, though the game makes sure you're aware of the consequences of your actions through the way the page's owners update their sites as the game progresses. In subsequent cases you'll have to track down cases of cyberbullying via "hidden" pages, only accessible via certain means, and infiltrate rebellious groups by effectively using social engineering techniques to glean sensitive security information.

So far — I estimate I'm about halfway through the game — no real "judgement" has been placed on the player character for the things they do, though only the most hard-hearted won't respond to the anguished frustration expressed by those who feel they had the rules applied to them unfairly. It's satisfying to find your way into what the creators of a page clearly thought was a safe, hidden inner sanctum and then effectively wreck it by blasting its most important components for rule violations — but it's also hard not to feel a little uncomfortable about it. That, I suspect, is kind of the point.

I'm intrigued to see where the story ends up going, as it's definitely been intriguing so far — even though it's mostly been little threads you can tug at as much or as little as you want up until the point I'm at. I suspect some sort of "big plot" will reveal itself before the end, though, and I'm looking forward to investigating it further. I'll post some more in-depth thoughts about it over on MoeGamer once I've finished it.

For now, then, a thumbs up, particularly if you lived through this era of the Web. While it's very much a parody rather than a completely loving recreation, a lot of it is bang on for how things really were back then — and it blends this nicely with a thoroughly modern tale about controlling the flow of information, censorship and self-expression. Good stuff.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 31: Hypnospace appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I was pleasantly surprised earlier today to see GOG.com release an elderly Origin (old-school Origin the software company, not Origin the unnecessary piece of EA bloatware) title called Space Rogue.

I was particularly surprised to see Space Rogue on GOG.com, primarily because they had already released a game of the same name that had no relation to it — although in retrospect, given that a considerable amount of discussion around the newer game was along the lines of "hey, remember that old Origin game called Space Rogue?" I should have perhaps seen this coming. Still, it's a pleasant surprise regardless.

I have very fond memories of Space Rogue. It was a game from the 16-bit computer era with everything that entailed, which usually meant a box packed with stuff other than the game disks. In Space Rogue's case, there was a wonderful "in-character" manual for the spaceship you pilot in the game, complete with sarcastic notes scrawled "by hand" in the margins. I really miss this kind of thing; the only place we tend to get "feelies" like this any more is in limited edition releases of games, and those tend to be considerably more expensive than standard editions.

But I digress. Space Rogue was an interesting game for its blend of genres — part space sim, part RPG. Origin proved themselves to be masters of both over the years — with their most well-known series including Wing Commander (space sim) and Ultima (RPG) — but Space Rogue was an early example of mashing the two together, which makes it, to date, still pretty distinctive in its respective genres. Sure, titles like Star Citizen, No Man's Sky and Elite have all taken a few tentative strides in the direction of allowing you to get out of your ship and do stuff other than fly around, but none yet have captured what Space Rogue did, which was include a fully-featured "walking around" mode as well as its 3D polygonal space flight sequences.

Details of the plot of Space Rogue elude me, though there are odd bits that I still remember. Of particular note was a lengthy sequence that I was thoroughly enamoured with as a youngster in which you play messenger boy between two sisters living on different space stations. The sequence culminates with one of the sisters throwing her arms around you and thanking you for all your hard work. I found this to be a satisfying conclusion to the episode, even presented purely in text as it was.

I also remember the space stations having various different designs, and greatly enjoying the experience of landing on the one that looked like an aircraft carrier in space. Elite Dangerous does very good space station docking sequences, but 20 years ago, Space Rogue was my favourite.

I also remember the spaceflight sequences having a peculiar "Newtonian" movement option, in which rather than adopt the usual space sim convention of always thrusting forwards and simply turning the direction you're moving, you could spin your ship around and face one direction while moving in another, allowing you to, say, shoot enemies who were on your tail while running away from them.

Due to technological limitations of the time, not all of the space flight sequences took place from the 3D cockpit view. Long-range navigation unfolded from a top-down map that clearly used the same engine as the on-foot segments. While relatively primitive in comparison to the 3D graphics, it gave the game a good feeling of "context" and of moving across vast distances.

I have no idea if Space Rogue is still a good game, but I'm interested to try it again anyway. While it's not a game that ever went down in any Great Gaming History books or whatever, it's nonetheless a game I consider to be a defining experience in my youth, and as such even if it plays like a dog in 2016, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for it.

The post 2494: Space Rogue appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Shadowrun Hong Kong continues to be an excellent game. The best thing about it, I think, is quite how varied the different missions are — and how the game is structured, allowing you to accept multiple missions at a time, but forcing you to focus on a single one at a time once it begins. This approach helps prevent the problem a lot of Western RPGs have, where you get completely bombarded with quests and have no idea where to go and which order it is "best" to do them in, leading to an unfocused, meandering experience.

Shadowrun Hong Kong, meanwhile, features missions that take maybe 30-60 minutes to complete, tops, each of which has its own set of objectives and mini storyline to follow through. And they're not all a matter of "go somewhere, have a fight, get out again".

Over the course of last night and tonight, I've completed a variety of missions and no two have been alike. In one, I had to infiltrate a museum and steal the most valuable artifacts possible without tripping the alarms. In another, I had to solve a serial murder case — this had the option of concluding without combat were I to let the culprit go free. In another still, I had to disrupt the qi flow in the offices of a company that took great pride in its geomancy.

What it kind of feels like — which is fitting, given Shadowrun's background — is a tabletop role-playing session, with discrete adventures linked together to form a campaign, each of which features its own story, evocative narration and interesting characters. Where Shadowrun differs from other games that have attempted to evoke the feeling of tabletop roleplaying sessions, however, is that it keeps things focused and trims the fat.

It doesn't have Baldur's Gate's problem of pretty much everything being lootable, only for you to discover to your dismay that 95% of the containers in the game house identical rubbish shortswords and suits of leather armour. It doesn't have The Elder Scrolls' problem of everyfuckingthing being pick-upable, making it extremely difficult to distinguish meaningful, helpful items from pointless window dressing, particularly if, God forbid, you drop a key item in the room where you've been storing all the thousands of wheels of cheese you've been hoarding "just in case". And it doesn't have the older Dungeons & Dragons games' problem of sticking a little too rigidly to the tabletop ruleset and consequently not really taking full advantage of the benefits of playing on a computer.

The combat in Shadowrun takes this approach, too. It doesn't overwhelm you with tactical options, but it does allow you to do things like take cover and use your weapons in a variety of different ways according to your proficiency with them. Not everyone in the party is necessarily a "combat" character, either — my protagonist, for example, is a Decker, which means she's more suited to marking targets using her knowledge of technology than actually firing a gun or going toe to toe with opponents — though I must admit, this didn't stop me from outfitting her with retractable cybernetic claws for close combat should the need ever arise. Who doesn't want to be Cyber-Wolverine?

All in all, Shadowrun Hong Kong has been a pleasure to play so far. It's telling an interesting story and its mechanics are really solid. Its graphics are nothing special but, having grown up on Baldur's Gate and Fallout, this really doesn't bother me all that much — and, like those old classics, Shadowrun's visual shortcomings are more than made up for by its spectacularly good sound design, with excellent music complemented by ambient sound that shifts in volume and position according to where your character is standing on the map. It's incredibly atmospheric and does a great job of immersing you in the setting despite unfolding from the typically rather impersonal-feeling isometric viewpoint.

A winner, then. And cheap in GOG.com's current sale! Grab yourself a copy now and you won't be disappointed.

The post 2484: Further Adventures in Hong Kong appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

GOG.com has a sale going on right now; it's really rather good. Like their previous sales, they have a tiered reward system where if you complete various arbitrary tasks on the website and/or buy a couple of games, you'll get some freebies, no questions asked. This seemed like an ideal opportunity to acquire a few titles I've wanted to grab for a while, even if I didn't want to play them immediately.

Among the titles I nabbed in the sale today were two of the new Shadowrun games: Shadowrun Hong Kong and Shadowrun Dragonfall. I've spent a bit of time with the former this evening and come away very impressed — and a little surprised.

I'm not particularly familiar with the Shadowrun setting, but it's a concept I like: combining hacking, grime-and-neon cyberpunk with orcs, elves and magic fantasy brings together two of my very favourite things, so Shadowrun was always something I was interested in. I'd just never gotten around to checking it out.

I went in expecting something along the lines of the old Infinity Engine role-playing games — that is to say, largely functional graphics, excellent writing, deep character and party building and a non-linear storyline in which you were free to pursue all manner of different sidequests at your leisure before deciding that yes, now was the right time to go and confront The Big Bad, whoever it was this time around.

What I got from Shadowrun Hong Kong was… almost that, but with enough differences to the standard formula to give it a very distinct identity.

I'll back up a moment and give you some background. In Shadowrun Hong Kong, you play a player character of your own design, who can be male or female and any of the main races found in the setting: human, ork, elf, dwarf or troll. You can then either pick a starting class or build your own by spending "Karma", the game's skill point equivalent. There are no traditional experience points or levels in Shadowrun; you simply gain Karma in varying degrees for accomplishing various tasks. Consequently, you can build some interesting characters without having to "grind" as such.

The opening of Shadowrun Hong Kong sees you contacted by your onetime foster father Raymond Black, who urges you to come to Hong Kong to discuss something very important. When you arrive there, you're met by your adoptive sibling Duncan, an ork man that you grew up with but subsequently became estranged from following an unfortunate run-in with corporate security in your past. Your reunion is far from joyful, since Duncan doesn't quite know what to make of you having spent so much time apart from you, and before long it becomes clear that something very bad indeed is going on. A group of mercenaries that Black hired to escort you are murdered along with Duncan's superior officer Carter, and all of a sudden you're on the run, thrust into Hong Kong's seedy underbelly to wipe your old identities clean and take up the mantle of Shadowrunners: individuals who work on the fringes of society, often doing illicit deeds for whoever will pay the most. Your eventual aim is to determine what has become of Black, and perhaps to make sense of some mysterious dreams you start having shortly after the story begins.

So far so RPG. Where Shadowrun Hong Kong diverges from what I expected is in its structure: rather than unfolding in a large open world that you can explore at will a la Baldur's Gate or the first two Fallout games, Shadowrun Hong Kong is instead mission-based. There's a "hub" area from which you can interact with NPCs, purchase equipment and accept new missions, but each of these missions are self-contained areas that combine a variety of different gameplay styles, each telling their own mini-story along the way, ultimately — I presume, anyway — combining to tell the entire narrative.

The missions are pretty varied; none of them appear to be simple "get to point X" or "kill Y". Rather, you're often given a fairly vague objective — perhaps with some optional additional tasks along the way — and then left up to your own devices to decide how to handle it according to how you've built your character and the party you've brought with you.

One of the first missions in the game, for example, sees you having to deliver a message from the local crime lord Kindly "Auntie" Cheng to one of her underlings, who has started to take things into his own hands a little too much. In order to get to the recipient, you can fight your way in through the guards that block the entrance (in which case you'll fail the optional "don't kill anyone" objective), or you can sneak across the rooftops, or you can hack the electronic locking system in the basement, or you can learn the keycode to another "secret" entrance. Along the way, you'll encounter a number of side objectives, including assisting a young woman who is researching qi flow in the area and retrieving a stolen credit stick from an old man who is mugged by one of your target's henchmen. Most of these side objectives can be resolved in multiple ways, too; for example, when attempting to recover the credit stick, you can fight the guy and take it by force, attempt to smooth-talk your way through the situation or use your knowledge of criminal culture (assuming you have it) to appeal to his sense of "honour among thieves".

If and when combat does erupt, the action switches to mechanics straight out of the more recent XCOM games. Each character has a number of "action points" per round, and these can be used on moving, using items or performing various attacks with their weapons. More powerful techniques, spells or items tend to take multiple action points to perform, and some also have a "cooldown" of a number of rounds before they can be used again. There's a simple cover-and-flanking system in play, allowing you and your enemies to gain tactical advantages over one another through careful movement, and as your characters grow stronger they have more and more different abilities available to use.

Hacking, meanwhile, results in a gloriously abstract minigame straight out of a 1990s RPG whereby you control an "avatar" of yourself in cyberspace, attempting to avoid the various security measures or brute-forcing your way through using "combat" programs if necessary. Reach your eventual destination — be it a valuable piece of data or simply the method to unlock an electronic door — and you'll have another minigame within the minigame, whereby you'll have to remember numerical combinations and then decrypt a sequence of glyphs before time runs out. And, in true cyberpunk tradition, fucking up hacking can damage your physical body, so you have to be careful.

The whole thing is tied together by a wonderfully evocative script written by people who actually know how to write, combining vibrant, descriptive narration with believable dialogue. In many ways, it's as much a piece of interactive text-based fiction as it is an RPG or tactical strategy game; whatever it is, I really like it so far, and am looking forward to playing some more as a much-needed break from all the Palace of the Dead in FFXIV!

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Been soloing a bunch of Palace of the Dead in Final Fantasy XIV over the last few days, so I thought I'd assemble some tips for those who are looking to challenge it.

General tips

• Take your time on the early floors. You want to equal or exceed the boss' level when you reach it, so clear each floor thoroughly rather than rushing through. You can safely avoid enemies once you hit level 60.
• Stay aware of your surroundings at all times. Most floors have patrolling monsters; keep an eye out for these and engage them in the corridors between rooms before pulling the monsters in the rooms themselves.
• When fighting on the normal floors, DPS as hard as you can. Summoners, use Garuda-Egi. Tanks, use your DPS stance. The quicker things die, the easier a time you'll have. In most cases you'll probably want to concentrate on one enemy at a time — pull from a distance whenever possible.
• When fighting bosses, the priority is on doing mechanics rather than DPSing as hard as possible. Summoners, get Titan-Egi to tank for you. Tanks, use your tank stance.
• Drink potions whenever you can if you're not at full health. The last thing you want is to die to a landmine or exploding chest.
• Save Pomanders of Serenity for floors where Auto-Heal is disabled. Most of the other floor effects aren't really anything to worry about, but Auto-Heal not working can really fuck you up.
• Don't use Pomanders of Safety and Pomanders of Sight on the same floor because they're redundant. Safety removes all traps on the floor, and Sight allows you to see traps and thus avoid them. There's no need to use both.
• Pomanders of Alteration are a gamble best used before you hit 60. If they spawn Mandragora-type enemies on the next floor, that's free EXP. If they spawn Mimics, however, you're in for a miserable time.
• When using one of the transformation Pomanders, remember that you're not invincible. The Manticore may be able to kill everything in a single hit (assuming Knockback isn't disabled by a floor effect) but its HP and defense are the same as yours in your regular form.
• Transformations are immune to Toad traps, and Pacification/Silence doesn't affect the transformation's ability. Landmines are still very dangerous, however, particularly as you can't drink a potion to heal yourself while transformed.
• Save Pomanders of Resolution for the floor 100 boss. You'll need all three during the fight.

Enemies to watch out for

• Hornets, found in the 1-10 block, have Final Sting, which will do a shitload of damage if you let it go off. You can actually run away from it and avoid the damage if you get far enough away, but it's best to try and kill the hornet before this happens.
• Slimes, found in the 11-20 block, cast Rapture if you take too long killing them. This will almost certainly kill you, so kill them as quickly as you can.
• Gaze attacks — marked by a very obvious glowing purple eye over the enemy model while they're casting it — can be avoided completely by simply turning your back to the enemy. It's particularly important to do this when dealing with Palace Cobras (petrification), Palace Deepeyes (powerful paralysis) and Palace Pots (Mysterious Light, which causes heavy damage and Blind).
• Morbols will show up in the 11-20 block towards the end, complete with Bad Breath attack. Run towards them for the easiest path to avoid the large cone AoE.
• Wraiths have a huge AoE attack that causes Terror. If you can stun it, do so. Otherwise, run for dear life as soon as you see the marker appear.
• Palace Skatenes will cause Sleep on you shortly after they cast Chirp. This isn't a huge issue, however, since you'll wake up immediately upon taking a hit.

Boss tips

Floor 10: Palace Deathgaze

Pretty easy, and if you've fought basic Deathgaze-type enemies in the game you'll know what to expect. It has a heavy attack called Whipcrack that will do a chunk of damage, so pop a potion after it does this. Stormwind (a large cone AoE) and Bombination (circular AoE) can both be avoided. Aerial Blast covers the whole arena and causes Windburn (damage over time for a few seconds). It will cycle through these abilities until one or the other of you are dead.

Floor 20: Spurge

The Easy Way: Level to 35 or 36, pop a Pomander of Strength and a Pomander of Lust and then just go ham on Spurge and you'll probably kill it before it summons its first set of Hornets if your gear is up to snuff.

The Proper Way: There are two main phases to this fight, and they simply cycle around and around. In the first, Spurge will twat you for a chunk of damage with Bloody Caress, then fling two circle AoE attacks at you — one around itself and one aimed at you. During this time, keep your HP topped up and wail on Spurge as much as you can. The second phase starts when Spurge moves to the side of the arena. At this point, two Hornets will spawn, and Spurge will stay in place, occasionally shooting a large linear AoE attack called Rotten Stench. Avoid Rotten Stench while knocking the Hornets down as quickly as possible — otherwise they will use Final Sting on you — before returning to the punishment on Spurge.

Floor 30: Definitely-Not-Hydra

Pretty easy. When it hits you with Ball of Fire or Ball of Ice, immediately move to avoid the effect of the circular area the attack causes — damage over time for Ball of Fire and slowed movement for Ball of Ice. Keep hitting it while this is going on, and try not to bait any Balls of Fire or Ice into the very middle of the arena. When Definitely-Not-Hydra moves to the centre of the arena and starts casting Fear Itself, stand inside its hitbox to avoid the attack completely. Then repeat the process.

Floor 40: Ixtab

Ixtab will spew void crap over the ground every so often — move out of this to avoid damage. He will then summon two Bhoots which you should kill as quickly as possible to avoid being caught in their attacks. He also has an arena-wide attack that causes Terror, often causing you to stumble into the Bhoots' area of effect if they're still up. Aside from this, not a lot else to say.

Floor 50: Edda Blackbosom

Pay close attention to what Edda is doing. If she uses Cold Feet, turn away to avoid its Terror effect. If she uses In Health, you'll either need to get well away from her or stand right on top of her — react quickly to the AoE marker, but you have plenty of time to get from one extreme to the other if the cast goes off. If you get hit by In Health, one of the letters on the floor will light up. The more of these lit up when she casts Black Honeymoon, the more damage you'll take. Aside from this, she's pretty straightforward. Watch out for In Sickness, which causes Disease and slowed movement; cleanse this off yourself if you can.

Floor 60: The Black Rider

A few things to watch out for here. Firstly, keep out of the large purple circles he drops on the ground at all cost — they cause Bleed, which deals heavy damage while you're in them. Secondly, watch out for the aether sprites he summons around the outside of the arena and don't get caught in their blasts, as these deal extreme damage. Their appearance will often coincide with his charge attack, a linear AoE marker that follows you around. While this is casting, make sure your back is to a "safe spot" away from the aether sprites to avoid being knocked into their blast radius.

Floor 70: Big Snake Thing

I can't remember Big Snake Thing's name, but it's a big snake thing. The most important thing to do in this fight is move Big Snake Thing out of the watery patches it drops on the ground when it casts Douse. While it is in these areas, it gains Haste, which makes it nigh-impossible to avoid Electrogenesis when it casts. Aside from this, Big Snake Thing should cause you no real difficulty.

Floor 80: Definitely-Not-King-Behemoth

This is a daunting fight, but fairly straightforward if you know how to handle all the mechanics. Firstly, when DNKB casts Charybdis, move well away from the AoE marker because it will drop a tornado. Said tornadoes inflict a heavy damage over time debuff if you get sucked into one, and periodically they will suck in everything around them — there'll be a very brief AoE marker to show the effective range of this when it happens, so to be safe don't be anywhere near the tornadoes. Next, when DNKB walks away from you, follow him, because he's about to use Trounce, a massive conal AoE attack that is much easier to avoid if you're right next to him. Thirdly, at around 10% HP remaining, he will begin channelling Ecliptic Meteor, and unlike the other times in the game where this happens, there's nothing to hide behind. Try and kill him before it hits, but don't worry too much if it does — it hits for about 80% of your HP, so if you're topped up before it happens, you'll be safe and free to finish him off after the attack.

Floor 90: The Godmother

This is a bit like the final boss of Pharos Sirius (Hard). Attack The Godmother until a red bomb spawns, at which point you should stun its Blast ability if you can and kill it as quickly as possible while avoiding the AoE markers from the untargetable smaller bombs that spawn around it. When it's down, return to wailing on The Godmother. When a blue-grey bomb spawns, hit it with an instant ability while facing The Godmother to knock it towards her. You want the blue-grey bomb's Hydrothermal Combustion ability to hit The Godmother and interrupt her ultimate attack. From here, simply repeat these two processes until The Godmother is down.

Floor 100: Nybeth Obdilord

Try to make sure you have three Pomanders of Resolution by the time you reach floor 100 — block 91-100 seems to throw them at you, but save them up from earlier blocks to be safe if necessary. Nybeth himself isn't too much of a threat if you take care to avoid his AoEs, particularly the large cone-shaped Doom attack. The important mechanic in this fight is the adds that he spawns at roughly 90%, 70% and 30% of his HP remaining. As soon as they appear, pop a Pomander of Resolution and use Kuribu's attack to firstly kill the enemies, and then use the ability again on their corpses to remove them permanently from the fight. Click off the transformation before you turn your attention back to Nybeth. Repeat two more times and you're home free.

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One of the things that had me most interested in patch 3.45 for Final Fantasy XIV was the ranking system for the Palace of the Dead dungeon I talked about yesterday. This tallies a score for you whenever you play with a fixed party (be it solo or up to four players) and thus allows you to compare your progress against other players from around the world.

Alongside the introduction of this ranking system came a few rebalancing changes to make soloing Palace of the Dead a lot more practical than it was when it was first introduced; previously, anything above about floor 20 at a push was very difficult if you were by yourself, but now, you can theoretically go up to floor 100 and beyond if you've upgraded your gear enough and your skills are up to snuff.

One of the things I've appreciated about Palace of the Dead since its launch was the fact that since it's largely impossible to "outgear" it — your regular gear has no meaning inside, only your Aetherpool upgrade levels, and even those are capped and synced if they're too high for the floor you're on and the level you are — you had to actually play properly. That means no cheesing mechanics, no standing in AoEs because you have enough HP to just soak them up, and swift punishment if you don't know how to play your job properly and effectively, sometimes in an unconventional party lineup.

Today, I made it to floor 60 solo, initially using Arcanist to go as far as floor 50 (my Arcanist hadn't yet reached level 30 and thus couldn't be upgraded into Scholar or Summoner, but the experience point rewards from completing these floors were enough to get me from 23 to 30 without too much difficulty) and subsequently as Summoner.

Arcanist/Scholar/Summoner aren't classes I've played much in the past, though I found Palace of the Dead's accelerated levelling to be quite a good way to learn how they work. In particular, levelling Arcanist to 60 without Summoner's extra Job abilities was a solid way to learn the basics of how the class worked, then upgrading to Summoner built on that foundation. I am now regretting the fact that I haven't levelled Summoner prior to today, because goddamn, that class is fun.

The reason I picked Arcanist and Summoner to run solo is that they seemed the most naturally geared towards soloing in that they have the option of summoning a tank pet that can maintain the enemies' attention while you cover them in festering boils and fling magic at them. The tank pet doesn't get a lot of use in party play — largely because you normally have an actual human-controlled tank there that can perform the role better than an AI routine — but in Palace of the Dead, Topaz Carbuncle (Arcanist) and Titan-Egi (Summoner) have both proven invaluable, particularly when it comes to the bosses.

And speaking of the bosses, soloing floors 1-60 today has given me a new appreciation of these fights. When tackled in a party of four, they're mostly rather easy (with the possible exception of floor 80's boss, which has been the source of many a party wipe so far), though from floor 60 onwards they do start to have some more interesting mechanics. Solo, however, they all present a pretty formidable challenge as you have to dodge their mechanics, chug potions to keep your health topped up (assuming you're not a healer) and somehow in the middle of all that find time to fling a few damaging abilities in their direction. I'm sure you can already see how helpful a tanking pet would be in this situation!

Thus far the secret to successful soloing seems to be having decently levelled gear — currently mine is around the +64 mark, which has seen me safely to floor 60 so far, and from this point onwards the upgrades from the silver chests are less likely to fail, too, so repeated runs will eventually push it up towards +99, which I suspect will be strongly recommended to tackle floor 80 and onwards.

According to the leaderboards on The Lodestone, no-one on Primal data centre has made it to floor 100 solo yet. I have little doubt that will probably change by tomorrow — I think someone on Reddit from another data centre had done it already — but for now it's fun taking aim for the top spot. And if I don't attain that top spot, well, at least I'll be able to say I've done it.

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For the benefit of my Twitter friend @FinalMacstorm, who is contemplating returning to Final Fantasy XIV once he's done with Final Fantasy XV, here is everything you might want to know about Palace of the Dead, one of Final Fantasy XIV's newest pieces of content.

What is it?

A 200-floor dungeon with randomly generated layouts. The first 100 floors are its "story mode"; the second 200 floors are intended to be very challenging 4-player content, and as such can only be attempted with a preformed party.

How is it structured?

When Palace of the Dead first launched, there were 50 floors, which you tackled in blocks of 10 at a time. Every 10th floor, there is a boss. Beat the boss and your progress is saved, allowing you to pick up from the following floor either immediately or the next time you want to challenge Palace of the Dead. On floor 50, there's a final boss — a familiar face who has been well and truly put through the wringer since you first encountered them.

Floors 51-100 of Palace of the Dead were added today and are known as the "Hellsward" floors. They work in mostly the same way. Once you've cleared floor 50 once, you can start at floor 51 instead of floor 1 any time you reset your save data. Floor 100, again, has a final boss — this time it's Nybeth Obdilord from Tactics Ogre.

Floors 101-200 of Palace of the Dead were also added today. They can only be entered if you start from floor 51 with a preformed, fixed party and clear all the way to floor 100 without any full-party wipes.

What are the bosses like?

The bosses gradually ramp up in complexity as you go deeper into the dungeon. The first boss is very simple — essentially fighting a normal Death Gaze that has a few more HP than usual. The second is a heavily simplified version of the Raskovnik fight from Sohm Al, which in turn was a simplified version of the Rafflesia fight from The Second Coil of Bahamut. The third is a slightly simplified version of the Hydra fight. Later bosses incorporate mechanics from Odin, Anchag from Amdapor Keep (Hard) and King Behemoth from Labyrinth of the Ancients. Floor 80's boss — the aforementioned King Behemoth-inspired fight — features a pretty brutal DPS check against a slowly casting, insta-wipe ultimate ability. This is arguably the most difficult boss in the first 100 floors; Nybeth is a relative walkover by comparison, though his fight does require the DPS to be on their toes to deal with frequently spawning adds.

Is it endgame content?

While the main rewards for Palace of the Dead are level 60 weapons — item level 235 weapons that can subsequently be upgraded to item level 255 — you can actually start it as soon as level 17. It's best to wait at least until you've reached level 50 and have cleared the sidequest dungeon Tam-Tara Deepcroft (Hard), though, because Palace of the Dead's storyline follows directly on from that dungeon's narrative.

How does it work?

Your level inside Palace of the Dead is different to your level outside. Upon entering for the first time, you're reset to level 1, but the experience required to level up within Palace of the Dead is considerably less than in the main game. You can reach the level cap of 60 by about floor 40 if you're reasonably diligent about killing enemies on the lower floors. Each block of floors takes about 20-30 minutes to complete depending on how quick you are.

Your level inside Palace of the Dead can exceed your level outside Palace of the Dead, so it's a good way to "preview" how classes play once they reach level 60. Starting at floor 51 will immediately boost you to level 60 in the class you entered on while you're inside.

When you clear a block of 10 floors, you receive experience points for your level outside Palace of the Dead, making it quite an efficient way to level classes. If you're already level 60, you will instead receive Allagan Tomestones of Poetics, Lore and Scripture, the endgame currencies used to purchase high-end equipment and quest items. If you're level 50-59, you will receive Allagan Tomestones of Poetics and experience points.

What about gear?

Normal gear is irrelevant in Palace of the Dead. Instead, you have an aetherpool weapon and armour, which can be upgraded by collecting silver chests scattered throughout the dungeon. The maximum the gear can be upgraded to is +99, though on the lower floors there is a cap and level sync on upgrades to prevent you being too overpowered.

When your weapon and armour both reach +30 upgrades, you can "spend" these points to acquire an item level 235, level 60 weapon that you can use elsewhere in the game. When your weapon and armour both reach +60 upgrades, you can "spend" these points to upgrade the item level 235 weapon to an item level 255 weapon. If you allow your weapon and armour to upgrade to +90, this means you can get the i235 weapon and immediately upgrade it to i255.

Do I have to play in a party?

No. There are several ways to play. Firstly, entering with a matched party uses Duty Finder to seek out other people who are on the same block of floors as you and put you all together. Note that Palace of the Dead does not adhere to the usual party construction in the rest of the game, meaning it's entirely possible you may have runs with no healers, no tanks or all DPS classes. Each block is clearable with such a lineup, but you will need to make use of items as well as your abilities.

Alternatively, you can play with a fixed party, which simply takes the party lineup you choose to start with — from going solo to a full light party of four — and registers that as your group on your save data. To continue progressing, you must take the same group of people with you on the same classes, though if you need to disband you can convert fixed party save data to matched party save data at any time.

If you play solo, when you wipe you'll be presented with a score calculated as a combination of the highest floor you reached and the number of kills you got along with some other bits and pieces behind the scenes. Your high scores are recorded for each class, and you can also record a high score for a fixed party, too. Personal high scores can be reviewed in the game, while global high scores will be available on the Lodestone website from tomorrow.

What items can I use?

You can access your inventory in Palace of the Dead, so you can use any potions, elixirs and ethers that you might have collected, though note that there is a cooldown on these so you can't just chug them repeatedly. It's a good idea to hotbar your best potions as well as status-curing formulae.

Besides these items, golden chests inside Palace of the Dead drop single-use items called pomanders, which are collected in a shared party inventory. These have a variety of different functions. Some provide buffs for individual players, others benefit the whole party by revealing the whole map, removing traps on the current floor and others still allow party members to transform into various monsters with unique special abilities.

If you're playing with a matched party, your pomanders are lost when you clear each block of 10 floors. If you're playing with a fixed party, however, your pomander inventory is saved along with the rest of the data and will be waiting for you when you challenge the next block of 10 floors.

What do I get out of it?

Besides the weapons, there are hidden treasures called Accursed Hoards scattered throughout the dungeon. These can either be uncovered by chance by standing in the right place, or located using a pomander of intuition. You don't know what Accursed Hoards are until you appraise them back in Quarrymill, at which point they will be "drawn" and revealed to be whatever they are. Common items available through Accursed Hoards include fireworks and Grade IV materia. Rarer items include Grade V materia and glamour items. Super-rare items include a hairstyle and housing decorations.

The post 2478: All About Palace of the Dead appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's Halloween, the perfect time to play a scary game! As such, I played through Outlast today, a game which I've been meaning to try for ages, and which my wife was kind enough to gift me a copy of. (It was 75% off for Halloween, too, so she didn't really need any convincing.)

Outlast is a first-person horror adventure game in which you have no combat capabilities. The only thing you're armed with is a camcorder, which can be used to film events (which triggers the protagonist taking notes on them) and, more importantly, see in the dark. Your camcorder has infinite battery unless you're using the night-vision, in which case it drains at an alarming rate, meaning you need to ration its use as much as possible. There are, however, batteries scattered around the game world to replenish your charge.

In Outlast, you play the role of a journalist who received a tip-off as to mysterious, strange and downright horrible goings on at a mental asylum, once closed down but subsequently reopened by a private corporation. As these things tend to go, said private corporation puts up a charitable facade when really they're into some horrible shit, and it's your job to investigate exactly what they've been up to. I shan't spoil any more of the story specifics here, as the game is well worth playing.

In terms of gameplay, Outlast is largely exploration-based. You don't have a map of any description, so you have to rely on your own sense of direction and the subtle environmental clues the game places around — doors left open a crack, realistic signs on walls, that sort of thing. Most of the game consists of you trying to figure out how to get through your current environment, though occasionally you are beset by sometimes naked psychopaths (seriously, there were many more cocks in this game than I was expecting) who want nothing more than to see what you look like inside-out. When the game shifts tempo in this way, it turns into something of a stealth game where you have to outwit your foes. You can't kill or even incapacitate your foes in any way, so the closest Outlast comes to "combat" is running away until you manage to get out of sight of your pursuers long enough for them to give up the chase.

A lot of Outlast is spent crawling around in the dark, as you might expect, but the game does mix things up a bit with its environments. One particularly memorable sequence towards the end of the game sees you fumbling around outside in the dark and rain, meaning even your camera's night vision isn't a lot of help — you have to firstly figure out where you're supposed to go, and then how to get there.

As a horror game, Outlast is pretty effective, with a menacing atmosphere throughout and jump scares used sparingly for maximum impact when they do happen. I didn't find it as outright disturbing as something like Silent Hill because it doesn't have as much of the psychological metaphor stuff going on as Konami's classics, but it's pretty creepy, and the feeling of panic when you're running away from enemies reminded me of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, which likewise eschewed combat in favour of making you run away dramatically.

The plot is a bit weird and it kind of felt a bit like they weren't sure whether to do a supernatural-themed story or a Resident Evil-style "big evil corporation" story, so ultimately it ended up as a bit of a mishmash of both. It worked, however, and had a suitably satisfying conclusions — and, although I'm yet to play it, most people seem to think that the DLC Whistleblower, which unfolds from the perspective of the character who sends an email to the main game's protagonist, is a superior experience with a better sense of closure. I'll have to check that out soon.

Overall, then, I enjoyed Outlast. At only about 5 hours from start to finish, it's a game you can easily beat in a single sitting, and doing so feels like the way the game was intended to be experienced. It's a relatively unusual take on the horror genre by lacking in combat –though this style has grown in popularity in the last few years thanks to titles like Amnesia, Until Dawn and the aforementioned Silent Hill: Shattered Memories — but the lack of an attack button doesn't mean it lacks any sort of gameplay depth. Rather, it does what it does extremely well, and was a fine way to spend Halloween, so far as I'm concerned.

The post 2477: Outlast appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

There seems to be a perpetual struggle in the world of video game enthusiasts to define exactly what is and is not a game.

At the head of this nontroversy is Fullbright Studios' Gone Home, a first-person interactive story where you walk around a house sans its inhabitants, piecing together a number of different plot threads scattered around the place, some of which are more explicit than others — and some of which are handled better than others. I liked Gone Home, but I felt like its "main" story — the one that lets you "finish" the game when you reach its ultimately rather mundane conclusion, despite what it has built you up to expect — was by far its weakest aspect, with much more interesting things going on through the "unspoken" stories: the bottle of whiskey hidden on top of a bookcase; the condoms in a drawer; the documents lying around the place.

To some people, Gone Home isn't a game, much as similar games in the genre that has become semi-derisively known as "walking simulator" aren't considered games either. Dear Esther, The Stanley Parable, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and others like them: all too many people are far too hung up on the rather dull question of whether or not they are actually a game rather than unpacking the dense, interesting narratives that each of these experiences feature.

For some reason, visual novels appear to largely escape this sort of discussion, despite being less interactive than a walking simulator. In your average visual novel, you click through reams of text for hours and hours and hours and occasionally make a choice. In a particular subset of the visual novel called the kinetic novel, you don't even make any choices: you just read and read and read, and then it's over with you not having actually done anything.

Even these almost entirely non-interactive affairs don't seem to get lambasted in the same way as Gone Home and its ilk, though, despite arguably being less of a "game" than something that has a 3D engine, WSAD movement controls and mouselook. In fact, even some of the most well-regarded games in the genre — The Fruit of Grisaia is the most prominent that springs to mind — only have maybe one or two meaningful choices to make in the whole game, with each acting as a fairly transparent means of setting a flag as to which character's route you're going to follow, and whether your get their Good or Bad ending.

I wonder why this is? Is it subject matter? No, I don't think so, because while, say, Gone Home has its narrow-minded detractors for being "progressive" — I think the statute of limitations is probably up on it by now and we can say its main story is actually about a young lesbian couple running away together — there are certainly plenty of well-regarded visual novels out there that deal sensitively with homosexuality, both male-male and female-female.

Is it about artistic intent and the overall "honesty" of the work? Perhaps. Titles such as Everybody's Gone to the Rapture often draw ire for being "pretentious" and, while I enjoyed all of the titles I've mentioned thus far, it's kind of hard to argue with that label. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture in particular feels very much like a case of "let's make this as arty and confusing as possible" before kind of running out of steam in its final moments and getting just a bit too silly and implausible. Dear Esther suffers from a similar problem, deliberately mixing a number of different narratives together — with some randomisation in the mix, too — to try and obfuscate what the whole damn thing is actually about for as long as possible. The Stanley Parable, meanwhile, completely runs with this and knows exactly what it is doing, laughing along with the player at every opportunity, too.

Contrast with a visual novel, such as the one I'm currently reading/playing: Supipara, by minori. Supipara is a kinetic novel: there are no choices whatsoever. Yet it's charming, compelling and addictive purely by virtue of its beautiful presentation, likeable and mysterious characters and intriguing premise that blends the mundanity of a slice-of-life tale with elements of the supernatural.

At no point does Supipara let any part of itself run away or overwhelm the rest of it. Its supernatural elements are incorporated honestly and without attempts to obfuscate or explain them away as quickly as possible, hoping we won't notice — Life is Strange, I'm looking at you. It just is what it is, and it invites you to judge it on that basis. There's no need to critically analyse it just to understand what the fuck happened in it — though this isn't to say there isn't value in applying some literary theory to unpack the various subtexts and themes in it — and thus it can be enjoyed on a number of different levels without Dear Esther's implicit suggestion that "you must be this smart to enjoy this ride".

I don't have an answer to the question "is [x] actually a game?" because your definition of "game" will doubtless be different from mine. Ultimately it doesn't really matter, anyway; the only thing you should be asking yourself when engaging with a piece of interactive entertainment — regardless of how interactive — is, quite simply, "is this a good use of my time?" If yes, great. If no, maybe put it down and try something else instead, while acknowledging the fact that some people might enjoy it more than you. There's really no need for the bitter arguments that have ensued since technology has allowed developers to get a bit more "artsy" with their creations.

Supipara is great, by the way. I'm going to do a full write-up on MoeGamer in the near future once I've read the whole thing, but for now I'll say it's one of the most beautifully presented visual novels I've ever seen, has a compelling, if low-key story, and some grade-A waifus. And what more, really, do you need to have a good time of an evening?

The post 2470: The Not-Games appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm going to do a more detailed write-up on this over on MoeGamer when I've read and thoroughly digested everything in this massive tome, but I thought I'd give some initial thoughts here.

Encylopaedia Eorzea is here! Yes, for a long time the Final Fantasy XIV team had been suggesting that a lore book might be on the cards, and at FanFest last week, it was finally revealed. It was put up for sale at the start of this week and seemed to develop a waiting list very quickly; fortunately, I managed to get in early and snag a copy.

£34.99 gets you a formidable hard-backed book over 300 pages in length, printed on gorgeous thick, parchmenty paper and presented in full colour. The book is heavy enough that it would probably do some damage if you smacked someone with it — and you all laughed at Arcanist, Summoner and Scholar's auto-attack!

The tome as a whole is split into eight different "books", each dealing with a different aspect of Eorzean lore.

The first, and shortest, concerns "the basics" of the planet Hydaelyn and what makes Her tick, including geography, the relationship between Hydaelyn's light and Zodiark's darkness, the Twelve gods in the Eorzean pantheon, and the basics of "aetherology" — the underlying (fictional) science of how the elements interact with one another to create life, magic and other effects.

The second, and one of the longest, concerns Hydaelyn's history, reflecting on the world's cycle of Astral and Umbral eras, with the latter's arrival being heralded by a Calamity of some description — each elementally themed in the case of the first six, and the seventh (used as the initial story catalyst for A Realm Reborn) covering all elements in the sheer magnitude of its disaster. This book is particularly interesting because it gives some background reading on the mysterious ancient civilisations of the Amdapori, the Mhachi and the Allagans, all of whom are explored to a certain degree in the game itself. It also provides a good primer of the storyline for Final Fantasy XIV 1.0, which is no longer playable, but which is concluded through A Realm Reborn's cycle of raid dungeons, The Binding Coil of Bahamut, The Second Coil of Bahamut and The Final Coil of Bahamut.

The third book provides a primer on the different people of Eorzea and where they came from. It only explores the playable races of Hyur, Elezen, Lalafell, Miqo'te, Roegadyn and Au Ra — those hoping for some information about the Padjali or a hint as to whether or not we'll ever see Viera in the game will have to keep theorycrafting.

The fourth book is the longest and concerns the geography of Eorzea, including all the zones from A Realm Reborn and Heavensward as well as short look at Ala Mhigo (subject of the upcoming expansion Stormblood) and the Garlean Empire (recurring villains).

The fifth book concerns Hydaelyn's "servants", and explores the various characters that you come into contact with throughout the game, right from the main "protagonists" the Scions of the Seventh Dawn to the recently introduced Warriors of Darkness. This section also includes information about groups involved in sidequests in the game, too, such as Hildibrand's Agents of Inquiry, the organisation NOAH who spearheaded the investigation into the Crystal Tower and a section entirely devoted to more minor NPCs such as those who served as the face of the Relic quests, and poor old Edda, who has had a rough ol' time of it both during life and in death.

The sixth book looks at Hydaelyn's "disciplines" — in other words, the playable classes in the game. Interestingly, the book makes no mention of the base classes on which the more familiar "Jobs" are based; the focus is entirely on the higher-level incarnations of the Jobs.

The seventh book concerns Hydaelyn's "burdens" — the various beast tribes of the realm, and the Primals associated with each of them. This section also looks a little at as-yet underexplored groups such as the gigants, as well as the eikons of the Warring Triad, which we're halfway through the story for in the game at the time of writing.

The eighth and final book is a bestiary of monsters from around the realm, divided into the various "-kin" categories. It also incluides a look at voidsent, elementals and chimeras.

There is a lot of information in this book, and it's presented in a clear, enjoyable to read manner. The thing I've found most beneficial about it is that it provides a good summary of the various storylines that have unfolded during the game since its launch; this is several years ago now, so it's not surprising that some details may have slipped many players' memories! The lore book acts as a good reference guide for those who may have forgotten some of the finer details.

Above all, though, Encyclopaedia Eorzea is clear evidence that the team behind Final Fantasy XIV have built more than just a game. They've truly built a world for people to inhabit, which has its own history leading up to today, as well as many more stories yet to tell. And if you flip through it's pages, you'll understand just why so many people still like to call Eorzea home.

The post 2467: Encylopaedia Eorzea appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Final Fantasy XIV's patch 3.45 is coming in early November, and bringing with it an additional 150 floors to the game's current Deep Dungeon, The Palace of the Dead. I am excited.

Palace of the Dead is a great piece of content that I'm pleased has remained popular since its launch. It flips most of the conventions of MMOs on their head and provides something different for people to do, with meaningful rewards and a decent shot of experience points for those levelling alt classes.

Palace of the Dead, in case you're unfamiliar, is a 50-floor dungeon that you tackle in blocks of 10 floors at a time, with a boss on each 10th floor. Each floor consists of a number of rooms arranged in a randomised layout, with an exit portal in one room and a resurrection gizmo in another for if things happen to go south and you don't have a healer. Both of these things are inactive at the start of a floor, so you have to kill enough enemies to turn them on before they can be used.

Some rooms have treasure chests and occasionally monsters drop them too. These come in three different varieties: bronze chests hold consumable items such as Phoenix Downs to resurrect fallen comrades and potions to heal HP; silver chests have a chance to upgrade either your weapon or armour (with the chance getting smaller as they get more powerful) up to a maximum of +30; gold chests reward you with "Pomanders", which are items that have immediate beneficial effects such as increasing your damage, turning all enemies in the nearby vicinity into chickens or frogs, temporarily transforming you into a manticore or removing all the hidden traps on the current floor.

In the last major patch, the Accursed Hoard was also added to Palace of the Dead; these are hidden treasures that have a chance of spawning on each floor. Standing on a spot where a Hoard is hidden reveals it, and if you successfully clear the block of 10 floors, you get one sack per Hoard you found, each of which contains a randomly drawn item from what seems like quite a large selection, ranging from the useless (fireworks) to the very useful (grade V materia) via formerly expensive glamour items.

The thing I like about Palace of the Dead is it takes almost everything the rest of Final Fantasy XIV established in terms of gameplay and throws it out of the window. Item level doesn't matter, stats don't matter and even conventional party composition (one tank, one healer, two damage-dealers) doesn't matter. There's some variation in individual performance according to the upgrade level of your aetherpool gear (which you can only use in Palace of the Dead until it reaches its fully upgraded level of +30, at which point it can be exchanged for a level 60, item level 235 weapon that you can use in the rest of the game) and your character level in Palace of the Dead (which is different to your character level in the rest of the game; you level up at a considerably accelerated rate in the dungeon, but have to reset to 1 every time you restart from floor 1) but otherwise, how well you do in there is entirely down to how well you know how to play your class.

It's interesting to see people realising this for the first time. You can't just ignore mechanics in Palace of the Dead because it's literally impossible to outgear it. You can't stand in area-effect attacks and soak the damage because, again, you can't outgear it. And you can't pull 30 enemies at once and hope to survive because, you guessed it, you can't outgear them. It's all about careful use of your abilities, consumable items and the Pomanders; you have to be constantly aware of the situation of both yourself and your party members, as an unfortunate mistake could lead to a wipe — and if you wipe in Palace of the Dead, you fail that set of floors immediately and have to start again from the last "checkpoint" you reached. (This is particularly heartbreaking if you reach the final boss on floor 50 with 5 Accursed Hoards in your pocket and then wipe because you forgot to pay attention to mechanics.)

The reason I'm looking forward to Patch 3.45 is that it promises not just more of Palace of the Dead, but that its last 100 floors in particular will be very difficult. And not "very difficult" in the sense that the current Savage raids are very difficult — i.e. they get quite a bit easier if you take the time to buff up your gear level — straight up difficult in that you'll have to pay attention, dodge shit and play your class effectively, perhaps in an unconventional party formation.

I'm interested to see quite how they're going to make it difficult. People have been clamouring for difficult ("Savage") four-player content for quite some time now, and Yoshi-P and the team specifically said during the last Live Letter that the lower 100 floors of Palace of the Dead were designed to be just that. What I find particularly interesting is that this is (hopefully) super-difficult content that you don't need to have spent ages preparing to be ready for, because your gear level when you go in doesn't matter; everyone in the entire game, assuming they have Palace of the Dead unlocked (which they can do as early as level 17 rather than having to reach the current cap of 60), has the potential to be a "world first" clear, which is something that has never happened before. Previous "world firsts" in the game were by raiders who were at the absolute top of their game with the best possible gear available, so in most cases it was fairly predictable who the acclaim would go to. With this, however, the title is anyone's.

I'm also intrigued by the proposed ranking system and how it works, since that hasn't been explained in much detail before. We know that there will be rankings for both individuals and parties, and that rankings are stratified by class/job, but we don't know exactly what causes you to score the "points" that determine your place on the rankings. Progress through the floors is a given — the mockup leaderboards we saw during the Live Letter displayed both the floor the characters had got to and their score — but what else will contribute to it? Clear time? Damage done? Kills? Accursed Hoard finds? Treasure chests looted? All of the above?

If they handle this properly, Palace of the Dead has the potential to become an enormously compelling metagame in its own right within the wider context of Final Fantasy XIV, not to mention a great way to learn and level alt classes that you perhaps haven't used much before. I'm very much looking forward to challenging the lower floors of this Deep Dungeon, and hope that it provides a suitable alternative to raiding for those who seek a challenge but perhaps don't have a group, have difficulty getting everyone together at the same time, or simply aren't geared enough.

I guess we'll see soon enough! (Also, I really want to see what happens when you sit on that bench…)

The post 2464: The Palace of the Dead (Savage) appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

"You can't win them all" is one of those platitudes we hear numerous times throughout our lives. In childhood, it's used as a means of attempting to stop the inevitable crying after we lose a game against a sibling or fail to achieve something we really wanted to achieve. And in adulthood, it's used in circumstances ranging from the loss of a job to the end of a relationship.

And yet I feel it's a saying that a lot of people these days seem to have forgotten.

Today I've been playing a game called Delicious! Pretty Girls Mahjong Solitaire which, as I said in my writeup on MoeGamer earlier, is exactly what it sounds like. I've been having a lot of fun with it; mahjong solitaire is one of those simple-but-challenging things that I find enormously addictive, and Delicious! certainly likes to slap you around a bit with its various tile layouts. But that's all part of the fun, as is the case with pretty much any non-free-to-play-garbage puzzle game produced since the dawn of computing: the fact that victory always seems attainable, yet is often just beyond your grasp is what makes these experiences so enjoyable, exciting and addictive.

And yet, glancing at the Steam reviews and discussion pages, the most common complaint people seem to have about the game is that "it's too hard". The timer's too quick. The game gives you too many "unwinnable" layouts. In other words, it doesn't let you win every time. (A similar swathe of criticism was levelled at Frontwing's excellent ecchi puzzler Purino Party.)

"Victory" is something that people the world over seem to think they have become entitled to, with the fact that whenever you're doing anything competitive, the possibility of losing is what makes it competitive in the first place. You see it everywhere: in the Delicious! forums, where players complain that they have to keep trying levels until they get it right; in Final Fantasy XIV, where people vote to abandon a duty after the first party wipe rather than helping newcomers or people who aren't as familiar with the fights; in Overwatch, where someone will rant and rave at their team if they lose, completely ignoring the fact that there's always the possibility that you are, you know, simply outmatched.

It's hard to say exactly where this attitude comes from, but it seems firmly ingrained in society now, and repeatedly reinforced by lots of things that we do, particularly online with the growth of "gamification". "Well done!" everything seems to say, showering you with points, levels and achievements and inevitably begging you to "share" everything on social media. "You used this thing for the thing it was designed to do!"

People often joke about school sports days that don't have winners any more, but I've seen it happen: kids getting "participation trophies" even if they did the bare minimum. I've also seen "Celebration Assemblies", in which children get certificates for everything from getting 100% on a spelling test to — I'm not joking about this — sitting still in their chair for a whole lesson. This continues into adult life, too; at work Christmas parties, there's the inevitable cringeworthy "awards" ceremony, where whatever "lol, so random" douchebag who organised the whole debacle dishes out a series of completely arbitrary awards to ensure that everyone gets recognised for something, even if that thing is "drinking lots of coffee" or "being able to spell".

Failure is what makes experiences like games fun and exciting. If you win every time, you devalue the concept of winning until it is completely meaningless, and nothing feels worthwhile any more, which means you start to crave — or expect — more and more positive reinforcement with every passing day, and get annoyed or upset when your every whim isn't catered to, or things don't go the way you expect them to.

Me, I've had my fair share of failure, but every time I get a TIME'S UP or NO MORE PICK [sic] I just hit the Retry button, give it my best shot and eventually I might actually succeed.

Now, if only it were that easy to pick yourself up and start again after a repeated series of failures in life as well as games.

The post 2463: You Can't Win Them All appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's been particularly interesting to come to this series so soon after playing through Life is Strange's disappointing conclusion, because although they are technically inferior, the Blackwell games' scripts are light-years ahead of Life is Strange's relatively mediocre writing. A true case of substance over style if ever there was one, with Blackwell's simple pixel-art graphics thoroughly winning out over Life is Strange's beautiful stylised visuals.

The two aren't directly comparable, of course, dealing with rather different subject matter, so that's the last comparison I'm going to draw; I simply wanted to make the point that you don't necessarily need a big budget to showcase some excellent writing.

I'm going to refrain from spoiling the plots of the Blackwell games here because I thoroughly believe that any adventure game enthusiast worth their salt should play through all five of them. I will, however, talk about the series as a whole, and how it is constructed.

Blackwell isn't marketed as an episodic game, but it effectively is one. However, each of its five installments is completely self-contained in its own right — you simply get more out of the whole thing if you've played them in order, particularly in the case of Blackwell Deception, which features numerous callbacks to all the previous installments.

One of the things that is interesting about the series is how it has expanded in scope and ambition as time has gone on. First game The Blackwell Legacy was relatively low-key, with only a few environments to explore, and all of them represented in rather simplistic graphics. Then as the series progressed, the scale of the stories being told expanded to more diverse locations, rendered in greater detail, though still maintaining the old VGA-resolution pixel art look.

Alongside the growing production values for each episode, a real effort has been made to make them feel distinct from one another. Most notably, the passage of time between the episodes is handled extremely well, acknowledging advances in technology over the time period of the setting. In the first game, for example, Rosa only uses her computer for word processing. In the third (the second is set in the '60s and stars Rosa's aunt rather than Rosa herself) she can use it to check her email (and other people's email!), search the Internet and browse her perpetually "under construction" homepage. By the fourth game, she has a smartphone that can do Internet and email without having to return to her apartment.

What's nice about this is that it has a gameplay impact as well as making the setting feel convincingly "alive". It's noticeably more convenient to do everything through Rosa's smartphone in the fourth game, compared to the combination of her notebook and apartment-bound computer in the previous installments. And in the second episode, set in the past, you have to think about things in terms of how you would have gone about them in the '60s, without the conveniences of the modern age.

Each of the stories — and the overall "super-narrative" that they contribute to — is excellent, with Rosa and her perpetual ghostly companion Joey growing as characters significantly over the course of the games, and their relationship with one another deepening. Both of them are still masters of spitting acid at one another by the end, of course, but by then it's done with affection rather than the combination of distrust, curiosity and fear seen in the first episode.

The games also manage to spin convincing supernatural tales without going overboard. They're believable, well-crafted and clearly have had plenty of thought put into them, with explanations for the strange goings-on trickled tantalisingly through the various stories while still maintaining some mysteries for the grand finale. And a clear effort has been made to ensure the series as a whole has a consistent mythology and setting: characters from previous games show up in subsequent ones — or perhaps their descendants in some cases — and the attentive will notice a lot of the same company names cropping up over time. Not everything is explicitly told to the player, either; many of these connections are left for the player to infer and interpret, making it all the more satisfying.

As you can tell, I'm thoroughly enamoured by the Blackwell series, and very much looking forward to playing through the final installment in the very near future. If you're a fan of classic adventure games, I can highly recommend picking them all up. They're well worth your time and money, and Wadjet Eye Games should be commended for keeping the point-and-click adventure flag flying high and proud.

The post 2460: The Continuing Adventures of Rosangela Blackwell appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Having finished Shadow Warrior yesterday, I was considering picking up its sequel, which released today. Then someone said some magic words that stopped all consideration and caused me to hit the "buy" button immediately.

But let's rewind a moment to yesterday evening, while I was playing through the rest of the first game.

Shadow Warrior has a skill system whereby double-tapping a direction and using either the left or right mouse button will perform different special moves. There's a powerful thrust attack, a "sword beam" type affair, a spin attack, a crowd-controlling stun, a healing spell and a protection spell. Because they're mapped to controls you're already using for movement and attacking, weaving them in while you're avoiding and attacking enemies is pretty straightforward.

Hmm, I thought to myself while I was playing, contemplating the fact that Shadow Warrior had a rudimentary levelling system in place, whereby you could upgrade passive and active skills as well as your weapons by expending various currencies that you acquire through play. I wonder if a first-person Diablo would work?

Some of you may, at this point, wish to raise Borderlands as evidence that yes, a first-person Diablo would indeed work, but I was thinking more focused on the melee angle, since that was a key part of Shadow Warrior's appeal.

Oh well, I thought. I doubt it'll ever happen, even if it would probably be really good.

This morning, I Googled Shadow Warrior 2 to see what press and public alike thought of it. One of the first things I saw was "Shadow Warrior 2 is first-person Diablo."

Magic words. Bought. (And with a nice discount for owning some of developer Flying Wild Hog's other work!)

It's not an exaggeration to call Shadow Warrior 2 first-person Diablo, either. It has loot, colour-coded by rarity. It has a variety of different weapons. It has clear ways to "build" your character. It has skill trees that you can beef up as you gain levels. It has quests. It has four-player co-op. It even has a small amount of procedural generation, but it wisely limits this to just parts of levels, so there's still very much a hand-crafted feel to the whole experience.

So far, I actually think I like it better than Borderlands, for one very simple reason: all your level does is provide you with skill points that you can pump into your various active and passive skills. Enemies don't level up, and your stats don't scale with your level, either. This helps prevent the ridiculous situation you sometimes find yourself in in Borderlands where you fire a rocket into someone's face and it does a miniscule amount of damage. It also prevents "overlevelling", where you find yourself in a situation where enemies are providing you with so little XP that it's barely worth killing them.

I'm undecided as to whether I like it more than the first new Shadow Warrior as yet. I'm pretty sure I do. I certainly like it very much indeed — to the degree that if I don't see it on some Game of the Year lists at year's end I'll be very disappointed — but it has quite a different structure that takes a little adjusting to coming from the previous game's tightly designed "explore, monster arena, repeat" loop, and I can see this being a bit jarring to staunch fans of the original. The levels are sprawling, open affairs more akin to something like a Deus Ex zone, with plenty to explore — and plenty of incentive to wander around even once you've completed your mission objective. This means that the pacing is a bit more variable and less controlled by design than in the previous game, though with all that said, there's still a feeling that you're moving from encounter to encounter with pressure-free time to explore in between, so that's good.

There's also a new hub area with a couple of shops and some questgivers around, giving you a feeling of "coming home" back to base after a successful mission. There are also plenty of sidequests as well as the main story missions, so I get the impression there's a whole lot to do here.

The game promises 70 weapons, which is more than enough, but each can be further customised by inserting up to three upgrades into them. These have many and varied effects ranging from simply increasing damage to providing elemental affinities to your shots. This is fortunate, as in true Diablo tradition, you'll often come across Superior and Elite versions of enemies throughout the levels, many of whom have specific strengths and weaknesses with regard to elemental affinities. You can equip up to eight weapons at a time, and there's nothing stopping you having eight different swords for different purposes if you want to play that way.

Besides the weapons, you can "build" your character through attaching upgrades to your armour and powers, too. These might provide specific buffs to particular types of damage, or increased effectiveness of skills. Pleasingly for the co-op enthusiasts, there's even a multiplayer-specific equipment slot whose occupants generally buff you and your teammates with an "aura" emanating from your position. These auras can be damage increases, healing over time or defensive in nature, meaning if you really want to get into it, you can build yourself a well-balanced team that minimises its weaknesses — or simply pump as much damage as possible into each other to obliterate enemies in a matter of seconds.

Like the first game, the weapons are solid and satisfying to use, and most of them can be used in dual-wield "akimbo" fashion with the use of an upgrade. They make good noises and they rip through enemies in satisfying fashion; of particular note here are the chainsaws and chainswords, clearly inspired by Warhammer 40,000 — they cut into enemies with such precision it feels like you could carve your name into their guts.

Lo Wang's wit is present and correct, too, and in the same way as the previous game his jokes occasionally fall flat, and the character he has "riding along with him", much like in the first game, has some good chemistry with him, making for some amusing bickering. Plus all the usual "wang" jokes are present and correct.

Shadow Warrior 2 is very good indeed. If you've been considering picking it up, stop. Buy it. Play it. Love it. Who wanta some Wang?

The post 2459: Double Wang appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I finished the recent reboot of Shadow Warrior this evening, and I'm pretty astonished by quite how good that game was.

I really liked the original Shadow Warrior. A contemporary of Duke Nukem 3D and running on the same engine, it followed the mould for first-person shooters of the time by having varied levels, lots of enemies, a formidable difficulty level and a 3D engine that wasn't quite up to what the designers wanted to do at times. And, of course, a protagonist that spouted silly one liners at every opportunity.

The new Shadow Warrior is an interesting blend of old and new. There's clearly some old-school level design DNA in there, because the levels are all far from being Call of Duty-style linear corridors. The main route through each level is usually pretty obvious (and if it isn't, the game makes the next door you should go through glow) but, unusually for a modern shooter, there are plenty of opportunities to explore, leaving the main path of the level to "go and see what's over there". The game is packed with secrets of this type and is immensely rewarding for those who like to explore. There are even a number of "retro" secret areas that make use of the low-res textures from the original Shadow Warrior and flat lighting — not only do these provide pleasant fanservice for fans of the original, they also allow you to see immediately how far we've come in terms of graphics.

And boy, new Shadow Warrior is one hell of a looker. It's absolutely gorgeous from start to finish, with beautiful lighting, excellent texture work, interesting level designs and a variety of different environments. Plus it pays homage to the original Shadow Warrior and its other Build-engine contemporaries by setting the majority of its action in "realistic", relatable locations like city streets and parks, much as Shadow Warrior, Duke Nukem 3D and Blood all did.

The biggest surprise to me was how much I became invested in the story. In the original Shadow Warrior, again like its contemporaries, the story was largely throwaway, delivered mostly through the game's help text and short ending sequences at the conclusion of each episode. New Shadow Warrior, meanwhile, not only spins some convincing original Japanese-style mythology, it also converts protagonist Lo Wang from the admittedly amusing dirty old man he was in the original to a convincing (and younger) hero who has a genuine journey of development and self-discovery over the course of the narrative. He still spouts cheesy one-liners at every opportunity, but he does so with a certain degree of self-awareness, even giving up halfway through one at one point in the game and choosing instead to just say "fuck your mother" to the demon hordes he is attempting to dispatch at that moment.

Gameplay-wise, new Shadow Warrior is solid, too. Here it diverges a little from old-school Shadow Warrior's formula in that you don't encounter a trickle of enemies constantly as you explore the level. Rather, new Shadow Warrior adopts a somewhat Painkiller-esque approach, splitting each level into discrete encounters that sometimes consist of several waves of enemies in succession. They're monster arenas, basically, but the level design ensures that this structure doesn't become overly tiresome; it's pretty rare you'll just be dumped in a big room with a bunch of monsters. Instead, there will usually be plenty of cover to dodge around, destructible objects with which you can do additional damage and perhaps even some secret hidey-holes where you can get an advantageous position.

New Shadow Warrior's combat is exemplary for the genre. It doesn't overburden the player with a ton of possible weapons that all do basically the same thing (hi, Call of Duty) — instead, much like its old-school inspiration, it gradually introduces each weapon to the player one at a time over the course of several levels, until by the end of the game you're the sort of walking arsenal you were in '90s shooters, with each and every weapon having a situation in which it is useful. And the weapons feel great, to use; the shotgun is a particular highlight, having not only a satisfyingly loud noise, but the potential to blast pretty much anything into a fine paste.

Also worthy of note is the melee combat, which plays quite a central role for much of the game. First-person melee combat is often a bit crap, consisting of flailing wildly until someone falls over — indeed, the original Shadow Warrior's swordplay was rather like this. New Shadow Warrior, meanwhile, has a convincing feel of impact to its melee combat. When fighting melee-capable enemies, they'll block and parry your attacks convincingly, forcing you to outwit them. And with the game's various skill trees that you can unlock as you progress through the game, a double tap in a direction followed by holding one of the mouse buttons will unleash one of a number of different special attacks ranging from a simple powerful sword thrust to magic-like abilities that can control crowds, heal you, send out shockwaves or protect you from damage.

The reason the "monster arena" structure works is that it gives you time to appreciate the game's wonderful scenery and excellent level design in between fights. If the action was relentless, you wouldn't have much of an opportunity to do this, and developer Flying Wild Hog clearly knows that they've made a very pretty game. Not only that, but keeping the action to predictable "spikes" allows the player to take their time over combing the level for secrets without worrying about being attacked and potentially losing a ton of progress.

On the whole, I'm really impressed with new Shadow Warrior. It's one of the very best single-player first-person shooters (perhaps I should say first-person action game, due to the strong focus on melee combat) I've played recently — possibly one of the best I've ever had the pleasure of playing. And in a world where the bigger budget FPS titles are increasingly bland and dull, Shadow Warrior is a breath of fresh air.

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I finally got around to finishing the last episode of Life is Strange yesterday. My final feelings about the whole thing were… overall positive, but a little mixed in a number of areas. Personally speaking, I didn't feel it was the utter masterpiece most critics made it out to be; in fact, there were a number of aspects in the final episode that I found fundamentally unsatisfying and downright awkward. More on those in a moment; let's talk more generally.

SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS FOR LIFE IS STRANGE AHEAD. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

For the unfamiliar, Life is Strange is a five-part episodic adventure game series developed by French developer Dontnod and published by Square Enix. The story concerns a teenage girl named Max, who discovers that she has the ability to rewind time and, as a result, change the outcome of events that unfold around her. Her discovery of this power comes during a particularly traumatic moment: she witnesses the murder of another young woman named Chloe, who was her best friend growing up, but from whom she had grown estranged over the last few years.

Max saves Chloe using her power to warn her of the imminent attack before it happens, and thus the story proper begins, concerning Max and Chloe rekindling their friendship with one another and subsequently investigating the disappearance of a local girl named Rachel Amber. Along the way, Max has the opportunity to make numerous decisions (and make them again if she's not happy with the immediate consequences, though after she's left the immediate area she's no longer able to reverse time) that ultimately affect the way each episode plays out, though the underlying story is relatively "fixed" in nature.

Later in the narrative, Max gains the ability to manipulate time in a more profound way by focusing on photographs, allowing herself to "relive" an earlier moment in time — by years in some cases — and change the way things unfolded. The most significant example of this is when she travels back to her childhood with Chloe and prevents Chloe's father from leaving the house on the day when, in the "prime" timeline, he would have ended up dying in a car accident. It transpires that this single change has a significant impact on the future, with Chloe turning from the rebellious young teenager with blue hair into a tired young woman paralysed from the neck down thanks to her getting in a car accident of her own. Max ultimately reverses her meddling in this instance, reverting the timeline back to how it was before.

The idea of choice and consequence is a key one in Life is Strange, and indeed the choices you make can have significant repercussions. Particularly important choices are presented rather dramatically by the action freezing and some throbbing, tense music playing as you're forced to select between two options, neither of which are obviously "the good one". The game uses these dramatic choices sparingly, ensuring that they have plenty of impact when they do come up; throughout the story, more minor choices affect the fates of secondary characters in various ways, though these can still be significant, with many of them ending up as matters of life and death.

The biggest beef I have with Life is Strange is that despite all this buildup of choice and consequence being super-important, the game utterly wimps out in its final episode by implying that the right thing to do from the outset would have been… nothing at all. From the beginning of the game, Max is troubled by nightmares about a devastating tornado coming to wreck her hometown of Arcadia Bay, and in the final episode it finally happens for real, with Max suddenly being absolutely convinced (for no apparent reason, and with no real evidence) that it's her fault for meddling with time more than she should have. However, the game makes no attempt to explain quite how Max fiddling around with the lives of Arcadia Bay's residents results in a supernatural-appearing tornado that looks set to kill everyone; it mumbles something about "chaos theory" but doesn't attempt to elaborate on this in the slightest.

Worse, the game doesn't even make any attempt to explain how Max came to have her time manipulation powers in the first place. Here, it doesn't even mumble something sotto voce, it simply doesn't address it. At all. I guess this leaves things a little open to interpretation at the end; one possible interpretation of it all could be that the whole series is one big "what if?" scenario in Max's head, with her going over the traumatic events of witnessing Chloe's murder and conjecturing what might have happened if she had intervened. This theory is undermined, however, by the fact that you're given a choice at the end of the game to either revert things back to how they were before Max saved Chloe, thereby preventing all the tornado nonsense, or to do the opposite and save Chloe at the expense of the entire town. Assuming this option is "real", we're presumably meant to accept that the events we witnessed were, in fact, real, and not all taking place in Max's mind.

I have a few smaller beefs with the game, too, chief of which is with Chloe herself. Max sets up Chloe to be this sort of wonderful person that she's delighted to reconnect with after a long time, but Chloe's depiction in the game is as a thoroughly obnoxious, deeply dislikeable young woman who is rebelling more for the sake of rebellion than anything else. She's not set up to be sympathetic at all, and more than once I found myself wondering why Max was being so patient and understanding with her; they just didn't seem to be a good "fit" for one another at all. It's a little more understandable when we see Chloe and Max in their younger days — or in the parallel timeline where Chloe is paralysed and doesn't go through a rebellious phase — but in what we are presumably supposed to assume is the "prime" timeline, Chloe is a character I found hard to feel anything positive for, and Max's repeated attempts to "save" her just became frustrating after a while.

Elsewhere in the writing, we have some cliched high school drama, which isn't bad in and of itself — aside from it being the usual, predictable "rich girls dislike nerdy/intelligent/arty girls" stuff we've been seeing since Clueless and Mean Girls — and some ham-fisted attempts at social commentary, usually through graffiti you find scrawled around various places. "Max is a feminazi" is the one that bugged me the most: at no point throughout the narrative do you ever get the impression that Max is an active feminist or indeed activist of any kind — she's a pretty easygoing, friendly sort of person, even to people who are shitheads towards her; the inclusion of this particular piece of graffiti felt more like an attempt to demonstrate the sort of things "bad people" in general say, using the Internet as a reference point. It was jarring and, like many things in the series as a whole, didn't seem to quite fit.

I think probably the strangest thing was the "reveal" of who the real villain is. Throughout the story, we're set up to believe that Nathan Prescott, son of the local property tycoon and generally a little shit, is the "big bad". Indeed, the fact that him shooting Chloe in the first episode sets the whole chain of events into motion seems to confirm this. However, at the end of the fourth episode, the real villain is revealed to be Max's photography teacher Mr Jefferson, who prior to this point has demonstrated no real villainous tendencies — a fact which the writers apparently knew, as they shoehorn in an awkward "you should have seen this right from the beginning, I was dropping all the hints" conversation in the final episode that sadly doesn't actually offer any convincing evidence that yes, we should have seen this coming.

Jefferson doesn't appear to have any particularly clear motivations for what he does, either, aside from "he wants to do bad things to young women", presumably Just Because He's a White Man. He's revealed to have been "manipulating" Nathan, but it's not explained how or why; presumably we're supposed to infer that it's something to do with Nathan's powerful family connections, though why Jefferson, a successful and celebrated artist, needs the assistance of a local property tycoon is anyone's guess. Furthermore, it's never quite explained whether the "Dark Room", in which Jefferson (and possibly Nathan?) tortured, photographed and killed young women — including Rachel Amber, the girl Max and Chloe were on the trail of — belongs to the Prescotts or to Jefferson himself, or why it's there in the first place.

Ultimately the whole thing fell a bit flat for me in this final episode with so many unresolved plot threads, and the fact that the "right" thing to do as the last decision in the game was strongly implied to be "undo everything you've been doing for the last five episodes because Chaos Theory or something" felt like a bit of a slap in the face, particularly after the emphatic message at the start of every episode that Your Choices Have Meaningful Consequences.

I'm aware that this all sounds quite negative, but on the whole, I'm glad I played Life is Strange and I certainly don't think it was bad. It was well shot and directed, nicely stylised and had some genuinely emotional moments throughout, but there were far too many holes and inconsistencies in it by the end for me to walk away feeling like it was an emotional, narrative masterpiece on the same level as something like The Fruit of Grisaia. It was a mid-tier narrative-centric adventure for me at best: worth playing, but with significant room for improvement, and outdone in almost every regard by quite a lot of other narrative-centric games and visual novels I could mention.

I sincerely hope Dontnod learn from the things they could have done better with this work and wow us all with something a bit more coherent-feeling in the future; there's a firm foundation to work from here — the raggedy edges just need tidying up a bit.

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I finally got around to starting the Blackwell miniseries of adventure games this evening. These are some games that I've had in my GOG.com library for quite a while now, but have never gotten around to playing before.

So far as I'm concerned, the Blackwell games have a good pedigree, as they come from Dave Gilbert's Wadjet Eye Games, who produced the subject of the very first Squadron of Shame SquadCast, The Shivah. While The Shivah was a little lacking in production values (as, too, is Blackwell — at least, its first episode is, anyway; I can't yet speak for the subsequent ones) it told an interesting story and was a good adventure game to boot.

The Blackwell series centres around protagonist Rosangela Blackwell, last of her family line. Both her aunt and her grandmother succumbed to a mysterious mental illness, and Rosa discovers that she may be at risk too. What the psychiatrists didn't know, however, is that the Blackwell family has a legacy: a ghost named Joey, who has been stuck in between this life and the next for the last forty years, and who has found himself "attached" to each generation of Blackwell women to fulfil some sort of greater purpose. Rosa is the latest to discover the existence of Joey, and is determined to get to the bottom of who he is and why he has been haunting her family.

The Blackwell Legacy, the first installment in the series, is largely concerned with establishing the characters and the setting. Joey isn't present until a good halfway through the storyline; prior to that, we simply see life through Rosa's eyes as she learns what little there is to know of her family's mysterious apparent mental illness. Once Joey shows up, however, the story becomes much more supernatural in nature: he and Rosa team up to help restless spirits move on to the next world.

The Blackwell Legacy opens with Rosa investigating the suicide of an NYU student. It gradually comes to light that she and two of her friends had been meddling in the occult — did these people not pay any attention to horror movies? — and consequently, two out of the group of three had ended up dead. The girl Rosa was originally sent to investigate passed on with no regrets, it seems, but one of her friends finds herself stuck between realities, unable to accept that she is dead, while the third attempted suicide and failed, ending up in the same psychiatric hospital where Rosa's aunt spent her twilight years.

The story strikes a good balance between "real world" investigation and the supernatural; in order to help the restless spirit move on, Rosa has to research the people involved and what they were up to. The game features a cool "clues" system where Rosa makes notes of important people, places and things in her notebook, and these can then all be brought up as topics of conversation when questioning witnesses. There's also an Ace Attorney Investigations-style system whereby Rosa can "connect" pairs of these clues to produce a third clue based on her conclusion, and indeed most of the puzzles in the game revolve around doing this, then asking someone about it.

The Blackwell Legacy was a short but enjoyable adventure that I enjoyed a lot — it certainly made me curious to see where the story goes in its subsequent installments. Its low-res pixel art with jerky scrolling brings to mind the old LucasArts games, it had some good, atmospheric music throughout and the voice acting was decent — albeit done with poor equipment and software, a criticism which could also be levelled at The Shivah. Joey is particularly prone to shouting into the mic and performing with particularly plosive plosives, for example, while other voiceovers have a great deal of background noise, presumably as a result of boosting quieter voices up in volume a bit too much.

The game was also a bit prone to crashing to desktop — I'm not sure what it is about adventure games that make them some of the most crashy games on the planet, but I swear, of all the games that have crashed on my PC in the last few years, most of them have been adventure games — but fortunately there's an autosave system that prevents losing too much progress.

Overall, I enjoyed The Blackwell Legacy a lot and I'm looking forward to playing its sequels. If you're a fan of classic late '90s-era point-and-clickers, you could do far worse than check it out.

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There are few things in this world that are simultaneously quite as amazing and quite as shit as Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto Online.

Every few months, I boot it up to see what's been added, and there's always been some pretty significant new content bolted on for free since I last tried. I get excited to try it, maybe even actually get to try it… and then before long I remember why I'm not playing Grand Theft Auto Online all day every day.

The most recent additions to the game — or new to me, anyway — are the Stunt races and the Motorcycle Clubs. The former provides a series of TrackMania-esque building blocks for track designers to construct physically improbable/impossible tracks using the game world as a backdrop, while the latter offers a new means of progression for small groups of up to eight players.

I haven't yet raised enough money to purchase a hideout for a Motorcycle Club yet, which is why I was doing the Stunt Races — conveniently, there's a trigger point for one right outside my in-game apartment. And I've been having an absolute blast participating in these races, which make the best of Grand Theft Auto's exaggerated vehicle physics with lots of jumps, switchbacks, corkscrews and all manner of other funtimes — plus, of course, the inevitable playing dirty that tends to come with the territory.

This was all absolutely great until the "host" of the session either went away from their keyboard or crashed, leaving their game logged in but not responding. Not only did this mean that we had to wait a long time between every event because the host wasn't there to manually press the "start event" button, but it also meant that at the end of one session in particular, everyone was left stuck as the results screen with no means of leaving the event or quitting back to the free-roaming mode short of completely quitting the game altogether then logging back in again. And with Grand Theft Auto V's astronomical initial load time, this is not a particularly appealing prospect.

I've run into this problem before, and I'm surprised it hasn't been fixed. Actually, no I'm not, because Grand Theft Auto Online is still missing a variety of features that a lot of other online games have had for a very long time.

Chief among the missing features is a "party" system whereby you and other players can form a group that sticks together, regardless of whether you're doing events or free-roam stuff. The game does keep people from the same event together if they vote to continue on to a new map, but if anyone chooses to exit to free-roam mode, they're immediately separated from all of the people they were just playing with.

Couple this with the fact that setting up a "friends only" game is a faff and a half, involving booting up Grand Theft Auto V's single-player game, then entering Grand Theft Auto Online from there — there's no means of starting a "friends only" session once you're already in Grand Theft Auto Online — and you have an online experience that is a real mess, particularly if you want to play with friends. And for those who think what I just described isn't a particular faff, you obviously haven't endured GTAV's load times.

It's kind of baffling how these features simply haven't been added to the game since it was launched, because I can't be the only one keenly feeling their absence. And it's frustrating, because the activities on offer in Grand Theft Auto Online are many, varied and a whole lot of fun. It's just such a monumental pain to get it working properly that I often give up out of sheer exasperation rather than wanting to stick with it.

GTA Online should be an absolute masterpiece. And it has the potential to be just that. But short of a fundamental revamp of how the whole online functionality works, it's doomed to remain an admirably fun and varied, yet ultimately frustrating and irritating experience that, for my money at least, often ends up feeling like more trouble than it's worth.

The post 2451: GTA Online: Simultaneously Amazing and Shit appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I respond very strongly to music that I enjoy — so much so that any time I think about hanging up my Eorzean adventurer's shoes for good, it's pretty much always the music that gets me coming back time after time. Or, if it's not the only reason, then it's certainly a leading reason as to why I keep coming back.

So let's look at some great tracks from the game.

"Patch 3.4 boss theme"

I don't know if anyone knows the actual name for this theme yet, but it's an excellent one. It seemingly became tradition with A Realm Reborn that the last couple of patches in a cycle would use different boss music from the ones we had been enjoying previously, and Heavensward is continuing — or, perhaps more accurately, confirming — this tradition.

This boss theme mixes two important themes from the game as a whole: Heroes, which we'll come to in a moment, and Penitus, which we'll also come to in a moment. To put it another way, it mashes together one of the most recognisable musical motifs from Heavensward with one of the most recognisable musical motifs from A Realm Reborn to produce a track that very much feels like a "reward" for people who have at least been playing since 2.0.

Heroes

This theme, played during vanilla Heavensward's final boss fight against King Thordan and Knights of the Round, brought the already exciting story of FFXIV's first expansion to a climactic head. While the fight was a bit easy even when it first launched, people still enjoy running it today just to enjoy this music and the spectacular graphical effects throughout the battle.

Penitus

I was already thoroughly wrapped around this game's little finger by the time I got to level 50 and was faced with the two 8-player story dungeons that wrap up vanilla A Realm Reborn's storyline, but getting into Praetorium and hearing this wonderful piece of music — snatches of which had been heard in a variety of different styles right the way through from level 1 all the way to 50 — got me absolutely hyped to see the story through to the end.

Ultima

And then the game goes and throws this incredible track on you for the Absolutely Definitely Last Boss, Yessirree (Not). I'll let this one speak for itself.

Thunderer

Ultima is followed by this little wonder featuring one of the best key changes ever. Sadly the first time you hear it, it doesn't last anywhere near long enough because everyone absolutely obliterates the Real Final Boss, Definitely Totally For Real This Time in a matter of seconds these days.

Thankfully, Square Enix clearly knew they were on to a good thing with Thunderer, as it was reused in a couple of places — most notably in the Chrysalis trial which was added in one of the content patches, and, for many people, its most iconic appearance in Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut, in which you fought the dread dragon Twintania, and which in the game's vanilla release acted as the "true" final boss. (Of course, this later all changed with Second and Final Coil, but still.)

Footsteps in the Snow

Shiva was one of my favourite Trials to be added to the game almost entirely because of this excellent piece of music that opened the fight and ran until the phase change. This music was first heard in the trailer for patch 2.4, Dreams of Ice, and got everyone well and truly hyped.

From the Ashes

Raid dungeon The Final Coil of Bahamut was, for many players, a highlight of the game due to its fascinating story — which, unlike the narrative of A Realm Reborn itself, which span off in a different direction, followed up on how Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 ended. Turn 12, the penultimate turn, is often cited as a particular favourite by many players simply due to this unique music, which was a highly dramatic, spine-tingling take on A Realm Reborn's main theme song Answers. The whole of The Binding Coil of Bahamut had featured music based on Answers, and this track felt like it was bringing everything to a dramatic conclusion.

Answers

And, having mentioned Turn 12, it would be remiss of me not to mention the way Answers was used in Turn 13, the absolutely definitely positively totally final boss of the game, or at least of the raids. I present it here in context, including battle sound effects, to show how it is used in the fight itself. The incredible crescendo during Teraflare is made of goosebumps.

I'm yet to do the new Alexander raid — my item level isn't quite high enough yet — but I understand the grand finale is suitably spectacular. T13 is going to take some topping, though.

The post 2445: The Best Music of Final Fantasy XIV appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Spent a bit more time with the non-story aspects of FFXIV's 3.4 patch Soul Surrender today, so here's a few thoughts with that in mind.

First up, I finished my first Wondrous Tails journal, albeit rather poorly, so I have a good handle of what that's all about now.

Wondrous Tails is a new weekly quest where you acquire a journal from the adorable young Miqo'te Khloe Aliapoh. Khloe wants to hear all about your adventures, so you agree to help her out by filling in her journal with tales of some of your exploits. You are then presented with 16 different challenges for the week, nine of which you need to clear to complete the journal.

On the opposite page to the challenges you are to face is a 4×4 grid of blank spaces for stickers. You acquire these stickers by completing the challenges — one per challenge, though you don't get to choose which sticker you get. Fill a line in the journal and there's a reward separate from the one for completing 9 challenges. Fill two lines and there's another reward. Fill three and there's another still. These rewards are significant, at higher tiers consisting of Allagan Tomestones of Scripture, the current "top end" endgame currency, and even item level 250 armour which, while not the best in the game at the moment, is certainly pretty good.

They are not, however, easy to accomplish, as I've discovered this week. It's not completely random chance as to whether or not you fill some lines — by helping new players complete duties for the first time, you earn "Second Chance" points, which can be used in one of two ways: firstly, to mark a completed challenge as incomplete while marking an incomplete one as complete. This effectively allows you to do something again while removing the need to do something you don't want to do. You can choose the complete challenge to make incomplete, but not the incomplete challenge to make complete. Alternatively, you can spend two Second Chance points to shuffle the entire board of seals (including the ones you've already placed) in the hope that you will get a more advantageous arrangement. In order to make three lines with nine seals, you need their placement to be absolutely perfect — a horizontal, a vertical and a diagonal. As such, it's a bit of a gamble that you can't necessarily rely on.

I gambled and failed, ending up with no lines at all by the time I had nine seals — you can only use the shuffle option when you have between three and seven seals, so you can't just shuffle a completed board around. Still, I at least got the reward for completing the journal for the week, which is meaningful in itself, and there's always next week to try again.

Next up, I jumped in to the randomly generated Palace of the Dead in an attempt to finish my Aetherpool weapon and get something to take the place of my outdated i210 Anima weapon until I can finish the upgrade process. New to Palace of the Dead in this patch is the addition of the Accursed Hoard, a series of hidden treasures that can only be located by using Pomanders of Intuition, which last until you unearth a piece of the Accursed Hoard. Your party banks the pieces of the Hoard until you complete the tier of the Palace that you're on, and like everything else, if you party wipes you lose them.

Assuming you successfully completed a tier, each piece of the Hoard the party acquired will reward you with a sealed sack which must be taken to a new NPC in Quarrymill to appraise. There then follows a gacha-style appraisal sequence, during which you can anticipate how good the item you're about to get is via the animation that plays (or not!) during the appraisal sequence. There are some decent items available through this system — in my first batch of three sacks, I got a paissa minion, the expensive Thavnairian Bustier top and a firework. In the seven other sacks I acquired throughout the evening, I got more fireworks. It seems fireworks are the default "normal" draw, at least from the common bronze sacks, but there seems to be an above-zero chance of getting rare items from this, too, making Palace of the Dead a worthwhile activity for reasons other than acquiring the weapon.

There's obviously a lot of RNG in both of these systems that I've described, and some people don't like that, preferring a predictable goal that you can take aim for and always see your progress towards. Final Fantasy XIV has always been heavily RNG-driven, however, and so these two systems, while having the potential for enormous frustration, are firmly in keeping with what we've come to expect from the game to date!

The post 2444: Wondrous Tails and the Accursed Hoard appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Final Fantasy XIV patch day has come and gone, so I thought I'd share a few thoughts. I'm going to mostly talk about the Main Scenario quests in this post, so I'll put in a Read More link for those browsing the front page who don't want to accidentally see spoilers.

MAIN STORY SPOILERS AHEAD!

In numerous ways, I think Soul Surrender is the best content patch Final Fantasy XIV has had to date. Not only does it add numerous new gameplay systems — Wondrous Tails and Adventurer Squadrons mix up the action a bit, even if the latter is fairly bare-bones at the moment — but it has, I think, one of the best sets of Main Scenario quests the game has seen for a long time.

Soul Surrender unfolds after the events of Heavensward and its first three content patches came to an end, which is to say that the Dragonsong War is over, and the former Holy See of Ishgard has undergone a revolution and become a republic, with longtime Warrior of Light buddy Ser Aymeric in charge of keeping order. All has seemed peaceful for a while now that the Ishgardians and the dragons have successfully laid down their arms and starting the long healing process from their centuries-long conflict.

Right on cue, then, unrest stirs elsewhere in Eorzea, as rumours once again surface of the Warrior of Darkness and his companions. Their motivations aren't immediately apparent, but the end result of the chaos that they sow is that the realm's various beast tribes have been thrown into despair, leading them to once again, out of desperation, attempt to summon their Primal gods.

The Warrior of Light initially thwarts their scheme in the Ixali homeland of Xelphatol, just as the Ixal head honcho is in the process of finalising the process of re-summoning windy madam Garuda for the fifth(?) time since Final Fantasy XIV version 1.0. The battle at the end of Xelphatol is pretty spectacular and chaotic, with the boss actually using Summon Garuda as a move several times throughout the fight, forcing you to deal with some of Garuda's distinctive mechanics and area of effect attacks while simultaneously pummeling another boss altogether.

Following this, rumours abound that something similarly suspicious is going on with the kobolds near O'Ghomoro in Upper La Noscea on the isle of Vylbrand. The Warrior of Light and the Scions go to investigate only to discover a Maelstrom camp mildly inflicted with chaos by the apparent presence of a kobold intruder. The Warrior of Light eventually chases this interloper down, and it turns out to be a child kobold that recognises his elders are preparing to summon Titan once again, and that this is a very bad idea indeed, particularly as numerous adult kobolds — including his parents — have been taken away, never to be seen again. The Warrior of Light and the Scions conjecture that these missing kobolds may have been killed and their remains used for ritualistic purposes in summoning Titan, but resolve to investigate rather than jumping to any conclusions.

The Warrior of Light arrives, with the young kobold in tow, at The Navel, deep within O'Ghomoro. The ritual for summoning Titan is reaching its final stages, but has not yet been completed, but things are thrown into chaos when the young kobold spies the bodies of his parents lying motionless next to the head of his tribe and his henchmen, apparently having been used as the latest sacrifices to appease the Lord of Crags. The young kobold, completely grief-stricken and filled with absolute despair at the loss of his only family, screams out in pain, and the sound of his anguish awakens Titan once more.

In gameplay terms, this then provided an opportunity for the game to reuse the Titan Hard Mode level 50 fight, but a severe emotional gutpunch is delivered during the battle when you see that Titan's lines — usually of the "Bow down, overdweller!" variety — have all been changed to the young kobold's various screams of anguish, with Titan's ultimate ability coinciding with the kobold screeching "WAKE UP!!!", at a complete loss as to how he can possibly handle the devastation his life has just suffered.

The young kobold is left in the care of the Maelstrom soldiers, who promise to take care of him rather than put him to the sword, as is usually the approach taken to those "lost" to the Primals' influence. At the last moment, the young kobold regains his voice, still full of pain and grief, but starting to show that his tribe's god doesn't quite have a hold of him just yet.

In the meantime, the Warrior of Light and the Scions are called away to Little Ala Mhigo in South Thanalan, where they hear rumours of further unrest — specifically, a suspiciously large shipment of crystals which makes the group think that another Primal summoning is imminent. Indeed, when they encounter a mysterious figure known as "The Griffin", who appears to have become a prominent individual among the Ala Mhigan refugees, and who promises that his countrymen have a "great power" hidden within them, it seems all but certain that something is amiss.

However, the Warrior of Light and the Scions uncover the truth in short order: the shipment of crystals was not for the Ala Mhigans to attempt to summon a Primal in an ill-advised attempt to retake their homeland from the Garlean Empire. Instead, it was used as a trade with the local Amal'jaa, who apparently wanted to use it to summon their Primal Ifrit once again.

Upon arriving at the Bowl of Embers, hoping to stop the summoning ritual, The Warrior of Light and her companions discover that the Amal'jaa have, in fact, been decimated ahead of their arrival, and waiting for them in the Bowl of Embers is not the fiery Primal Ifrit, but the Warrior of Darkness and his party of companions.

A grand battle ensues, with both sides competing to channel their aether into one of their number who can best handle it, and eventually strike the other down. The Warrior of Darkness and his companions fight for their very lives, for they believe they are fighting to save their world — a parallel world to Hydaelyn, and one which runs the risk of being consumed not by Darkness, but by a surfeit of Light. They seek to redress the balance between the worlds, all of which are shards of what was once a greater reality, and they even gave up their corporeal lives and very souls in order to be able to travel between the worlds by means of crystals, much as the Ascians do.

Utterly defeated by the Warrior of Light, however, both sides of the conflict are drawn into the mysterious space between worlds where Hydaelyn has previously addressed the Warrior of Light alone through the Echo. Minfilia, revealed a while back to have transcended her mortal existence and become the Voice of the Mother, speaking for Hydaelyn herself, agrees to journey back to the Warrior of Darkness' ruined world and take into herself the excess of light in an attempt to stave off the cataclysm that threatens to turn it into the antithesis of the Void, itself another of these parallel worlds that was previously consumed by Darkness.

We're left with a number of questions. Chief among them is the matter of what The Griffin is really up to. It transpires that The Griffin the Warrior of Light and her companions met was merely a figurehead; the real Griffin is much more hesitant to show his face, but clearly has plans to retake Ala Mhigo, perhaps with the assistance of the Ascians, who never do anything for free.

And then in the final scene we see Nero tol Scaeva, last seen after our adventures in the Crystal Tower and the World of Darkness, stumbling across some ominous-looking Allagan ruins. He claims to have finally found something. But what? The smart money is on Omega Weapon, which could well spell disaster for all of Eorzea and beyond if true. We'll have to wait and see what happens next in the final content patch for Heavensward in three months' time, at which point we should have some information about what we can expect from the new expansion.

Exciting times for the Realm, indeed. And this is just the main story! I'm pretty certain that for me, this has been one of the best "episodes" of the game to date, and I can't wait to see how it continues.

I haven't even touched the grand finale of Alexander, yet, and I still have plenty of other adventures to catch up on, too. There'll be plenty of time for those tomorrow, though… for now, probably time for bed for this particular Warrior of Light!

The post 2443: Soul Surrender appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's Patch 3.4 for Final Fantasy XIV tomorrow, so naturally any players of the game have been poring over the patch notes, which were released in their entirety today.

Different people have different priorities when it comes to MMO patches. Here's what I intend to get up to:

Main scenario

Whenever a new patch comes out, I always do the main scenario quests first, because these usually 1) unlock at least some of the new content and 2) mean that I can't be hit with inadvertent spoilers from loose lips.

In the case of Patch 3.4, it's an exciting time for the game, since we not only get to find out a bit more about the mysterious "Warrior of Darkness" — seemingly our dark counterparts, and possibly even something to do with the character used in all the game's CG cutscenes — but we also start the run-up to the next expansion, which is set to be revealed in the not too distant future.

The smart money is on us finally heading to Ala Mhigo in the next expansion, as it's a place that has been frequently referenced in the game lore, and which is of particular importance to Raubahn, who has been a major character in the entire storyline so far. Our visit to the Ixali region of Xelphatol in 3.4 would seem to indicate our overall "journey" heading in that direction, too, but ultimately the truth remains to be seen.

Dungeons

Since I'm probably going to romp through the main scenario stuff first, I'll probably complete Xelphatol first, with The Great Gubal Library (Hard) coming afterwards, since it's just a sidequest.

I enjoy Final Fantasy XIV's dungeons, but they're always a bit too easy for my liking. This is almost certainly deliberate, as a means to make them friendly to casual players rather than hardcore raiders, but it would be nice to have some new dungeons that the majority of the playerbase don't vastly outgear the moment they step inside.

At least if nothing else the new dungeons will provide some gear to help people "catch up" to the cutting-edge item level, and dungeon boss fights are always memorable experiences. I can't honestly say I'm hugely excited about either of the dungeons coming up in this patch, but I will reserve judgement until I see them for myself!

Sophia, the Goddess

A new Trial is always enjoyable, because although they're just single boss fights, they tend to be absolutely spectacular, with some of the best music and graphical effects in the game. The preview footage for the battle with Sophia looks to be no exception to this; hopefully it won't become another Sephirot, where people moan and complain every time it comes up in Trials roulette mere days after it being released. (I actually quite liked the Sephirot fight!)

Alexander

I've been underwhelmed by Alexander throughout the 3.x patch cycle, but then, I wasn't anticipating it to be particularly up my alley from the moment it was first announced. I'm not a big fan of steampunk and the comic relief that the Goblins generally provide in Final Fantasy XIV doesn't lend itself well to the sort of epic conflict that raids, for me, need to be truly exciting. Also the music in Alexander up until now is awful (although admittedly in keeping with the Goblin theme) and I hope to God we at least get some suitably epic music for the final battle.

All that said, I'm particularly interested to see how the Alexander cycle ends. We were promised some sort of interesting encounter involving time manipulation, so I'm very interested to see where that goes. Beyond that, I hope the team have learned some valuable lessons from Alexander's development and the lukewarm to poor reception it has had from the player base.

Squadrons

This content caught my eye when it was first announced, and it's probably going to be little more than glorified Retainer Ventures — i.e. wind up a minion, send them on their way to do something off-screen for 18 hours, then check the results when they get back — but I like the idea, nonetheless, plus there's potential for it to be expanded in the future. In fact, the developers have specifically said they'd like to make it so that players' Squadron members can be taken into dungeons, so that will immediately make this stuff worthwhile.

Wondrous Tails

I'm intrigued by this: a randomly selected series of weekly objectives with some significant rewards on offer for completing them. What I'm most interested in is exactly what content is going to be involved with this. Are we going to see something that expects us to do Extreme difficulty trials and The Binding Coil of Bahamut at its original difficulty level? (Or, at least, not unsynced with level 60 gear and stats)?

Mechanically speaking, Wondrous Tails sounds like a way to make old content relevant again, something which has historically been accomplished with the Relic weapon quests. Wondrous Tails is divorced from all other aspects of progression, however, so it can be tackled alongside whatever route you want to go with, be it raiding, Relic or a combination thereof.

Palace of the Dead

I like Palace of the Dead a lot, and it's getting some tweaks in 3.4, the exact details of which haven't been given. What I'm most looking forward to is it being extended to the full 200 floors in patch 3.45, with floor 100 being the end of its "story mode" and floors 101-200 being effectively a "hard mode". Palace of the Dead already offers some worthwhile rewards in the form of weapons; I'm interested to see what the deeper floors will offer.

Apartments

Since they're set to sell for just 500,000 gil, I'll likely finally get my own piece of personal housing in the form of an apartment. It's a pity you can't do gardening in them, since gardening is one of the key benefits of having either a personal or a Free Company house, but I'll enjoy having a space to call my own that I can fiddle around with and decorate.

The onward grind

I'm making decent progress on my Dark Knight Anima weapon, and will continue to do this throughout 3.4; hopefully the new additions to the game will make this process more varied and interesting.

Beyond that, I've been levelling White Mage and enjoying it, so I might try my hand at a bit more healing than I have been doing in the past, though naturally gearing WHM up will have to be balanced with gearing DRK, which is still my main.

Overall, I'm really interested to see where 3.4 takes the game, and especially interested to hear the first details of the new expansion when they finally arrive. Hopefully it won't be too much of a tease when it's revealed!

The post 2442: Planning for Patch Day appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The more I play The Crew, the more I like it, and the more I'm surprised that it only got middling reviews which, consequently, led to it being one of Ubisoft's lesser-known, less popular games. (Actually, I'm not at all surprised about middling reviews, because we all know how (in)accurate reviews are these days, and how meaningless scores are.)

Fortunately, Ubisoft doesn't appear to have taken these middling reviews to heart and neither does the player base, as there always seem to be plenty of people online when I boot up The Crew, and its second expansion Calling All Units is due to hit in November.

The Crew is pretty much everything I've come to want from a racing game over the years, and very few games have successfully provided for these wants so comprehensively. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that The Crew is probably the only racing game I've played that ticks pretty much every single one of the boxes in my imaginary checklist for my "dream racing game".

First up, let's talk about the open world. I've been fascinated with the idea of open world driving games ever since I played Test Drive II on the Atari ST and wished that I could go off the predefined routes to explore. I never got to play it, but I was particularly enamoured with the idea of Test Drive III's move to open environments, as primitive as they were with their early untextured 3D polygons. Then open world racing games actually became a thing with the Midnight Club and Need for Speed Underground series — the latter of which set in place a formula for the series that it hasn't deviated from ever since.

The Club takes the concept of an open world racing game to an extreme level, offering a world that represents the entire United States. Unlike a full-on simulator, this depiction isn't entirely true to life and is scaled down somewhat — you can drive from Key West to Miami in two minutes — but this makes sense for the purposes of fun. Real driving isn't fun, largely because it still takes a very long time to get anywhere; video game driving, however, needs to be fun to keep people interested, and to this end The Crew provides an open world that is manageable in size but packed with enough hidden bits and pieces to make it well worth exploring rather than just proceeding from mission to mission.

The best thing about The Crew's use of a miniaturised United States as its open-world setting is that it allows for a hugely diverse landscape. There's the wasteland of Arizona. There's the swampland of the Deep South. There's the twisting, turning, tree-clad mountain roads of the central mountain states. And, of course, there are the various cities, each of which have numerous landmarks present and correct. It's a delight to drive around and a pleasure to explore in search of data uplinks and hidden car parts.

So open-world driving is one box that The Crew ticks. What else do I want from a racing game? Well, as much as I've tried to enjoy the Gran Turismos and Forza Motorsports over the years, I came to the conclusion a while back that I'm just not a driving sim kinda guy. My taste lies with arcade-style handling a la Ridge Racer, in which it's possible to slide sideways around a corner with just a hint of a tap on the brakes.

The Crew very much delivers in this department, and with some variety, too. Each car you get in the game can be specced out with different "classes" ranging from full stock (the basic model, no modifications) through "street" (tuned for street racing), "dirt" (more suited for rallying), "perf" (high-performance, particularly suited for street and circuit racing) and "raid" (super-strong and eminently suitable for complete offroading). Each of these specs feels very different to drive, too. The perf spec cars are fast and can pull off some impressive drifts, but don't get much air if you fly off a jump and do not do at all well if you leave the tarmac. The raid cars sit high off the ground but provide an enjoyably bumpy ride as you ignore all the roads on the map and just leap over hills at every opportunity. The dirt cars get convincingly filthy and throw up dust clouds as you power them around unpaved roads, sliding sideways around corners like a pro.

It's not at all realistic, in other words, but at no point is it trying to be. It wants to be fun, and by God it succeeds at that. I love driving in The Crew. It's just fun to drive around the map, even without a mission. Throw in the fact that the missions are accompanied by dialogue and dramatic, cinematic-style music and you have an absolutely thrilling game.

Which brings us on to the story aspect. The Crew's storyline is cheesy and stupid, just like The Fast and the Furious, but it's entertaining and does its job. It has some good characters including some loathsome villains, and the protagonist (played by the ever-popular Troy Baker) does a good job of deadpanning his way through some genuinely amusing lines.

I've been hungry for a "driving game with a plot" ever since I learned of the existence of Racing Lagoon on the PS1, and endured the subsequent disappointment that it never got localised. (I understand that it was supposedly not that good in the first place, but I would have liked the opportunity to judge for myself.) Various games over the years have toyed with adding a plot — most notably EA's Need for Speed series — but they always seem incredibly half-hearted, all but abandoning any attempt at storytelling once the game gets going.

The Crew is different, though. It keeps its plot flowing at a good pace, and you feel like you're taking part in a Fast and Furious movie. As I say, it's dumb and stupid, but it's good dumb and stupid — the sort of summer blockbuster fare that would get you munching on your popcorn as if your life depended on it. It draws you in and makes you interested, and rewards progress through the game with satisfying (and impressively realistic) cutscenes.

Finally, there's the "RPG" aspect of the game. The one thing I always liked about Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo was the part where you earned money and bolted bits on to your car to make it better. Where that part fell down for me was in the tuning aspect, where the game expected you to understand how cars worked in order to fine-tune all the settings to their optimal levels. Fine for true petrolheads; less good for people like me who just want to power around a course and feel cool while doing it.

The Crew adopts an almost Diablo-esque loot system in which every event you complete in the game, big or small, rewards you with a part that you can either stock or equip on the car you're currently driving. Parts come in bronze, silver and gold variants, with the gold versions naturally being considerably better than the bronze.

You don't need to know what a "differential" is in order to enjoy this system, though, much as you don't need to know exactly what the purpose of each piece of armour is in a loot-whoring RPG. Instead, each part simply affects one of your car's core performance stats — acceleration, top speed, braking and grip — and contributes to an overall "level" for the car. The higher your car's level, the better it is — and you can leave it at that if you so desire, or you can further customise and specialise your car by mixing and matching parts in order to emphasise a particular stat if you so desire. It's a simple but effective system that allows even non-mechanically minded people to enjoy a feeling of progress and advancement without ever having to touch a gear ratio menu.

The Crew is marketed as an MMO but I must confess I haven't dipped my toes into the multiplayer at all as yet. The story is enjoyable enough in single player — and feels like it's been designed with single player in mind, with the possible exception of the "takedown" events, which would doubtless be much easier with four people — but it looks as if there will be more than enough things left to do in multiplayer once you reach the end of the story. It has its own "endgame", if you will, which I can't comment on with any authority just yet, but I'm interested to explore, particularly the "Summit" events that were introduced with the Wild Run expansion.

If you haven't yet grabbed your free copy of The Crew from Ubisoft, you've got until October 11 to do so — head on over here to do so. What have you got to lose? And if you are already playing, do feel free to add me as a friend via UPlay — my tag there is "AngryJedi" — and send me a message if you want to try any aspect of the game's multiplayer; I'm keen to give it a go!

The post 2441: That Racing Game I Always Wanted appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Eager for a short palate-cleanser after polishing off Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force last night, I sought the counsel of my online friends. Mr Alex Connolly was first to answer the call, suggesting Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, a game which I recall had everyone very excited a few years back, and a game which someone — possibly Mr Connolly himself — had provided me with a gift copy of at some point in the recent past.

I have no experience with the Call of Juarez series as a whole, or with Westerns in general, but I was willing to give it a shot (no pun intended) as it had been so well-received on its original release — particularly for the amount of content it offered for its budget-tier price.

I liked it enough to play through the whole thing today, but I was left with mixed feelings. There were some things I really, really liked about it, and a couple of things I absolutely detested.

Let's start with the positives, chief among which is the story and the way it is handled. Presented as the recollections of ageing bounty hunter Silas Greaves, the game unfolds over the course of a series of levels punctuated by attractive cutscenes featuring the Silas of today and the companions in the saloon that he is telling his tall tale to. During gameplay, Old Silas narrates the action — with his descriptions reflecting what you're doing and the choices that you make along the way — as well as performs most of the dialogue on the cast's behalf.

Gunslinger particularly plays with the "unreliable narrator" trope through Silas presenting alternative explanations of what happened — sometimes saying "well, I could have done this…" at which point you have to play through the hypothetical situation before it rewinds to what actually happened. Silas also posits that much of the history of the Old West as told by "dime novels" isn't quite what happened, and in fact he just happened to be present for some of the most notorious events in the region alongside the most notorious outlaws of the period. Indeed, in the game you run into everyone from Jesse James to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, though with Silas' flair for the dramatic, you can never quite be sure if he was telling the truth all the way through his story.

Gameplay-wise, Gunslinger adopts a somewhat arcadey mould by featuring a combo system and points being awarded for kills. Kill bad guys in rapid succession and your multiplier climbs; dispatch them in ways other than just filling their torsos full of lead and you get additional base points multiplied by the multiplier. This isn't much of an issue in the story mode — though points convert directly to XP, which can unlock various passive skills that make Silas' journey a bit easier — but is brought to the forefront in the Arcade mode, where you're tasked with attaining high scores in short, narrative-free levels.

Gunslinger's style initially appears at odds with its gameplay mechanics, because you're using Old West weaponry — six-shooters and rifles that are painfully slow to reload, breaking the "flow" of combat somewhat. Unlock a few skills, however, and you'll find things become much more fast-paced and frantic, particularly once you obtain the ability to repeatedly hammer the reload button to reload more quickly. By the end of the game there's a nice rhythm to the combat for the most part, and the story provides sufficient incentive to continue exploring.

There are two real things I didn't like at all about Gunslinger, however. First of these was the prompt "You're straying too far from the story…" that pops up if you walk more than three feet in the "wrong" direction during a level. This is simply bad game design; the levels should be designed in such a way that the player is confined to the "story area" without feeling like they're confined. If there's open space, let them use it! This became a particular issue in the final level as the Sundance Kid bore down on Silas with a shotgun; it was impossible to get more than a few feet away from him to hide without this annoying message popping up, which also happened to break Silas out of a sprint any time it appeared, too.

The other thing I didn't like was the dueling system, although it was stylistically appropriate for the genre. In duels, you have to move Silas' hand back and forth with the A and D keys so that it's hovering over his holster, ready for a quick draw, while simultaneously manoeuvring an erratic, drunken mouse pointer over the enemy you're facing off against. Once the enemy draws, you have a split-second to click the mouse button to draw your pistol and shoot them dead before they do the same to you. Trouble is, even with high "speed"and "focus" ratings obtained by performing the aforementioned manipulations, it often seemed to be a matter of luck as to whether Silas actually drew his gun as you expected and managed to get off a shot. Supposedly you're able to dodge the bullets that come at you in this mode, but I don't think I ever successfully achieved this; all my duels were won by what felt like dumb luck and perseverance. Perhaps there's more to it than that, but I didn't like their execution at all.

Aside from these issues, I enjoyed Gunslinger a lot. Its story was presented in an unusual, effective manner and its levels were well designed with plenty of variety rather than all being set in drab, brown "Old West" type settings. I'm not sure whether I liked it enough to play through it again on the harder difficulties, but I'll probably check the Arcade mode out, at least. As for the mode where you can voluntarily subject yourself to more Duels? I think I'll pass!

The post 2438: Gunslinger appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I finished Read Only Memories earlier. I liked it a lot! I posted a review on Steam, but I thought I'd post it here too because I'm feeling lazy.

Read Only Memories is an adventure game in the '90s mould, seeming to draw specific inspiration from titles like Snatcher and Rise of the Dragon, and set in the same world as the (later, and wonderful) VA-11 HALL-A.

On the whole, it's a great experience. The pixel art aesthetic really works for the game and has clearly been designed by people who know what good pixel art looks like. Everything about the interface, including the font, is well-designed to look like a retro adventure game, and the FM-synthesis soundtrack complements it nicely.

Puzzles are relatively thin on the ground but in a couple of cases are more interesting than "use the thing on the thing", which is worthy of note, though the final puzzle in the game seems to play by some inconsistent rules that can lead to failure seemingly by no fault of your own.

The story is well-written and filled with interesting characters, plus deserves note for having a number of possible solutions to various situations, though not all will lead to the "best" ending. The game encourages you to consider the consequences of your actions and the things that you choose to say, even though those consequences may not become apparent until much later. I very much liked that your behaviour over the course of the whole game affected some later events rather than choices having an immediate impact on what was going on.

The overall plot is one of tolerance and understanding, and strikes a good balance between casting the player (whom you can name and gender as you desire, since you never see them) as an "everyman" sort of character prone to putting their foot in their mouth when confronted by groups they don't quite understand, and presenting a solid message about acceptance, learning to trust one another and personal growth.

The only real criticism I'd level at the game is that its handling of gay and transgender characters feels a little ham-fisted, with their presence and the "reveals" of their identity seemingly being calculated to go "SURPRISE!" rather than simply blending them into the setting. Big burly, manly bartender dude? SURPRISE! Next time you meet him, he has another big hairy dude all over him calling him "hon" at every opportunity (though that said, I couldn't help but like Gus). Meet an eccentric, long-haired, bearded TV producer? SURPRISE! They're a lady! That and the presence of a non gender-specific character demonstrates just how awkward using singular "they" as a pronoun is in dialogue.

Ultimately it doesn't hurt the overall plot at all, but these instances stick out like sore thumbs when they happen as they just don't quite feel like they're in keeping with the tone: the implication elsewhere in the plot is that society has moved beyond discrimination by gender and sexuality, and instead onto discrimination against those who are "augmented" in some way, either through cybernetics or genetic hybridisation. To specifically draw attention to gay and transgender characters in this way as the game does feels counter to this implication, which is otherwise well handled.

This game's spiritual successor VA-11 HALL-A handles gay characters much more elegantly by them simply… just being there, no big deal, no big fuss about who they are, no sense that the game is holding you down and urging you to admire how progressive its views are.

I played this game before the big update that adds voice acting, and if you're interested in this game, I'd encourage you to do the same. The few parts of the game that do already have voice acting (just the intro and epilogue at present) are immensely jarring with the rest of the game's presentation, and the delightful beepityboopityboop noise that dialogue makes throughout the rest of the game is a much more powerful stimulus to the imagination than a voice actor whose interpretation of the character may not match the one you have in your head after reading the text.

Overall, Read Only Memories is a game I give a solid thumbs up. The issues I mentioned above are minor in the grand scheme of things, but hopefully the team will learn from them — and from the things VA-11 HALL-A did better, despite being produced by a different team — and produce even greater works in the future.

The post 2435: Memories: Read appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've been spending some time with Ubisoft's The Crew for the last few days. I actually picked it up shortly after release but didn't play it all that much. With the recent announcement that the base game would be free throughout September (you can still claim a copy here at the time of writing) I thought I'd give it another go.

What is The Crew? Allow me to elaborate in video form, because I can.

I'm left wondering why I didn't play The Crew more when it first released, because it occurs to me that it's what I wanted from a driving game for quite some time: the elusive ideal of the "caRPG", or an RPG with cars if you prefer less clumsy portmanteaus.

The Crew ticks all the boxes that I wanted. For one, it has a plot that is reasonably interesting and features some characters that, while a bit cliched, occasionally have some entertaining things to say — the protagonist offhandedly complaining to his FBI handler that he really wanted a shower because he'd been in his damn car for days was a nice bit of self-reference to the fact that The Crew doesn't have any on-foot missions. The plot itself may be Fast and Furious-level nonsense, but it works in context.

Secondly, it has a levelling system that is actually meaningful. Unlike games such as Forza Motorsport, which largely seem to have a levelling system just to show how long you've been playing, The Crew's levelling system actually works like one in a more conventional RPG — some gear is level-locked, your cars get more powerful as you level up and there's an MMO-style "endgame" once you reach the cap, further improving your abilities by getting better and better loot.

Which brings us on to the third point. The Crew is also a loot-whoring game, which is something I never thought I'd say about a racing game, but it's true. Any activity you complete rewards you with loot, with better results giving you better gear. You get immediate feedback on whether the gear is better or worse than your current setup by means of an "item level"-like system for each of your cars, and events have recommended vehicle levels so you never tackle anything that is going to be way too difficult for you.

In case you're still not quite convinced about The Crew secretly being an RPG, well, there are different classes of cars, too. Fullstock cars are exactly as they came out of the garage. Street cars are modified street-legal cars for road races. Dirt cars are suitable for offroading and stunts. Raid cars are powerhouses that can take a beating and dish one out too. Perf cars are extremely fast. And there's plenty more where that came from — even more with the Wild Run expansion, which adds several "extreme" specs to the list, too.

And then there's the multiplayer, which to be honest I haven't tried all that much yet. There's a sort of passive multiplayer a la Test Drive Unlimited as you zip around the open world, occasionally passing other players by. You can queue up for PvP-specific missions. You can recruit people to help you out with story missions, which then have to be played fully cooperatively — race missions, for example, mean that your teammates just have to make sure that you win by fair means or foul, whereas missions where you have to wreck a fleeing vehicle are likely to be much easier with company.

And on top of all that, The Crew makes driving around its vast open world interesting by 1) having some lovely scenery and 2) scattering Project Gotham-style skill challenges around the roads, tasking you with everything from slaloming around markers to simply getting as far away from your start point as possible. Each of these reward you with loot and experience, making them the equivalent of "trash" enemies in a more conventional RPG.

I'm enjoying the game a lot. Handling is enjoyably slidey and arcadey, just how I like it, and there's a ton of stuff to do, yet enough structure to ensure that you never get overwhelmed with too many options at any one time. And it feels like the best use of Ubisoft's open-world formula to date, with plenty of hidden things to find that reward you with experience, loot and even hidden cars to uncover.

The Crew is free for the rest of the month on PC. Be sure to claim your copy here.

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I played my ten placement matches for season 2 of Overwatch's Competitive mode earlier. Nine out of those ten games featured at least one salty asshole quitting the game early because their team lost a round — both on the team I was on and on the opposing team on different occasions — and in Competitive mode, the game doesn't backfill positions with people queued up to play like it does in Quick Play; when you queue for a Competitive game, you're put into a game from the very beginning rather than immediately joining one in progress if a space is available.

This was mildly annoying the first time it happened, but with each subsequent time it got more and more irritating. It's not only bad sportsmanship to strop off in a sulk if you're losing, it's also a major pain in the ass to the rest of your team. It would be akin to Wayne Rooney suddenly deciding that he doesn't feel like playing any more and wandering off the pitch in the middle of a football match. Except in Overwatch, the teams are only six people, so the loss of just one person is keenly and immediately felt.

The trouble that these early leavers have is that they can't handle losing. They're unwilling to accept the possibility that the team who just "lost" could enjoy a comeback in the subsequent round — this can and frequently does happen in Overwatch, which is mostly very well balanced like that — and instead ditch the match altogether, leaving their team a man or more down and on the way to what is now pretty much a guaranteed loss rather than something that could be fought back from.

What's particularly dumb about early leavers is that when they leave a game, the match is counted as a "loss" in their records anyway, so they're taking the worse option — a 100% chance of getting a loss versus a less-than-100% chance of getting a loss by staying and trying to help the rest of the team to a comeback.

I sort of understand. It can be demoralising to feel like you were steamrollered by another team who perhaps genuinely were more skilled than you. But it's the very height of special snowflake syndrome to believe that you are entitled to win every game you play — perhaps these players were the kids who grew up in schools that had sports days with "participation trophies" rather than actual winners. And clawing your way to a victory when the jaws of defeat were closing on you is immensely satisfying — my favourite games of Overwatch are the ones that end up being really close, not the ones where my team smashes our opponents into the ground.

Blizzard have penalties in place for those who leave matches early, but they're clearly not severe enough. For the Competitive scene in Overwatch to succeed, early leavers need to be actively discouraged through harsh punishments. I hope that the Overwatch team are paying attention to this problem and that it gets resolved in the next season of Competitive play.

In the meantime, if you're an online player, do the decent thing and see your matches through to conclusion, even if they don't seem to be going all that well. As I say, you keep playing, you have a less than 100% chance of getting a loss recorded on your all-important statistics. Leave early, however, and you absolutely definitely will get that loss. So stop being selfish pricks and play your damn matches to completion.

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Titan Quest Anniversary Edition is currently just £5 on Steam, and it's completely free if you own any other Titan Quest products already. You should go buy it and play it, because I have spent most of the evening doing so and I like it a whole lot.

Titan Quest Anniversary Edition combines the original Titan Quest and its expansion Immortal Throne into one package, cleans the whole shebang up for modern computers — the original came out in 2006, hence the "anniversary" thing — and unleashes it on the world for existing fans and newcomers alike to enjoy.

Having never played Titan Quest, I fell into the latter category. It had just never quite appealed to me for some reason, despite it being the sort of hack and slash loot-whoring game I enjoy coupled with Greek mythology, which I was in love with as a child — and despite the game often being discussed in hushed, reverential whispers any time anyone brought it up.

£5 for a remastered version of the game and its expansion in one complete edition was too good an offer to turn down, though, so I took the plunge and gave it a go, partly to sate my own curiosity and partly to have something to play online with my friend Chris, who had also been going back and forth about whether or not he wanted it.

If you, like me, have never played Titan Quest, here's the deal. You play a male or female Greek person who initially has no character class. You save a farmer's horse from being eaten by satyrs, then you embark on a journey to cleanse the land of evil seemingly for no other reason than "because why not". Your character is given precisely no backstory and no real motivation to do their thing, but in this sort of game that's probably a good thing. While the lore in the Diablo games is substantial and interesting, its execution in-game leaves a lot to be desired, and in latest installment Diablo III in particular, by far the most enjoyable way to play the game is in "Adventure Mode", which dispenses with the narrative and linear structure altogether in favour of giving you freedom to go anywhere at any time to chase down various objectives.

Titan Quest doesn't quite go that far in abandoning the traditional narrative structure — you still progress from "unknown Greek person" to "hero of legend" over the course of the game — but the plot is very much de-emphasised in favour of the excellent mechanics.

At level 2, you unlock a "specialism" — essentially a character class with its own skill tree plus a mastery meter you need to pump skill points into in order to unlock the next "tiers" of skills. (Said meter isn't entirely useless; each point you put into it gives you a substantial increase to your base stats.) Then at level 8, you unlock another specialism and can start pumping skill points into that as well, allowing you to effectively mix and match skills from two entirely different classes to create your own custom build.

And these classes aren't your usual warrior-thief-mage trinity, either — they're all interesting, and all present interesting combinations when combined together. All together, there is a caster type that specialises in cold and electricity; another caster that specialises in fire and earth; a close-range physical attacking type person; a highly defensive physical attacker (who can apparently do some tremendous things with shields later in the game); a tree-hugging hippy that can summon wolves, heal things and infect enemies with plague; a hunter type that is good with bows and spears; and a backstabby thiefy rogue type deal that is good at inflicting pain but not so good at taking it.

The great thing about this system is that you can make a variety of different character types — all together, there are 36 different combinations, each of which has its own unique name. You can combine the Defense and Warfare masteries to create Conqueror, for example, which is a tank that also hits incredibly hard. Or you could combine the Earth and Nature masteries to create Summoner, a character that is able to summon a variety of different minions to do their bidding, including an earth golem, some wolves and a nymph, and be able to sit back, pelt the enemies from a distance and heal their minions as needed.

The combat itself is fundamentally satisfying. Humanoid enemies are thrown around with satisfying ragdoll animation; birds explode in a shower of feathers; skeletons shatter into pieces. The variety of skills mean that there are a lot of different ways you can protect yourself or go on the offensive, too, and so far I haven't felt like there's a "bad" combination; with two different masteries, you can either cover the weaknesses of the first with the second, or enhance the first's strong points with the second.

Then, of course, there's just something wonderfully enjoyable about hacking and slashing through recognisable creatures from mythology. The game appears to act as pretty much an Ancient Greece's Greatest Hits, promising confrontations with Medusa, the Hydra and numerous others over the course of the adventure — and I believe you also take a trip to ancient Egypt and China later, too, which opens up possibilities for all manner of interesting confrontations.

I hadn't expected to like the game quite as much as I did when I booted it up for the first time. But, well, the 5 hours of playtime Steam has already recorded for me — I bought it earlier this evening — probably speaks for itself.

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There's a sale running on Steam right now, centred around shoot 'em ups in the classic mould. You can see the full list here, but here are a few selections that I can personally recommend:

ESCHATOS

The follow-up to Judgement Silversword (which is also worth a go, and available in a bundle with ESCHATOS) is a Raiden-style shoot 'em up (i.e. non-bullet hell) that unfolds over the course of several stages, taking you from an Earth-like planet, into space and finally into the bowels of an alien world. It's a spectacular, thrilling journey, presented in uncomplicated but nonetheless impressive 3D polygonal visuals but playing from a top-down perspective.

ESCHATOS has a couple of ways to play depending on how complex you like your shmups. For my money, the simpler mode is actually a more enjoyable way to play — this doesn't involve any powering up of your weapons and simply requires that you defeat complete waves of enemies without missing any to build up your score multiplier. The higher the difficulty you play on, the higher the multiplier can go (and the faster it rises), so for the highest scores you need to take on the toughest challenges the game offers.

ESCHATOS has a fantastic soundtrack, fluid graphics with some wonderful setpieces, and gameplay to die for. If you're a shmup fan, this should without question be a part of your collection.

Deathsmiles

Regarded as one of Cave's more accessible bullet-hell shooters, Deathsmiles is a horizontally scrolling affair for one or two players where you take on the role of one (or two) of several different goth loli chicks, each of whom handle slightly differently. You can shoot in both directions using either a rapid-fire shot, a charged beam or a lock-on laser, and advanced players will need to learn which attack should be used for which enemy, since the scores and collectible items they yield vary according to how they were dispatched. If you're a shmup beginner, mind, you can ignore this aspect of the game completely and just try to get through the game, because that's challenging enough in itself.

Deathsmiles has a gorgeous Gothic rock soundtrack a la Castlevania, some varied levels and some brilliant boss fights, culminating in a battle against the spectacularly named "Tyrannosatan" accompanied by Bach's famous Toccata and Fugue. There's a lot of hidden depth to the scoring system once you get your head around the bullet patterns, and variable difficulty settings that you can change on the fly between levels help give it some longevity. It's one of Cave's finest games, and well worth a look.

Savant Ascent

Based around the music of electronica artist Savant, Savant Ascent casts you in the role of a masked alchemist who has to make his way up a tower to defeat the weird… thing that has manifested at the top. It's a twin-stick shooter with a twist — in each of the game's battlefields, the character can only stand in preset places, with pushing directions on the stick moving him from one to the other either by rolling or jumping between them.

The "Story" mode in the game lasts about five minutes and is easily beaten, but the meat of the game comes in the modes that unlock afterwards. Time Attack throws you into a horde of enemies and challenges you to 1) survive and 2) complete the game as quickly as possible. Endless, meanwhile, simply tasks you with surviving for as long as possible.

Longevity in the game comes through score attack and collectible CDs of Savant tracks, each of which unlocks a new gameplay element. What initially appears to be a very simple twin-stick shooter gradually unlocks new depths as you collect more of the CDs and progress further. It's a beautifully presented game, too, with lovely graphics and a thumping soundtrack courtesy of Savant, obviously.

Horizon Shift

An interesting twist on the genre, Horizon Shift is presented in a minimalist Geometry Wars fashion, with simple controls and visuals, a thumping soundtrack and immensely challenging gameplay.

Your job in Horizon Shift is to protect your "horizon", a line dividing the screen into two halves. Your ship can face either up or down, and you can use this ability to dodge bullets, since only bullets on the same side as your ship can destroy you. Your ship can also jump and double-jump, providing another means for avoiding projectiles on the occasions when the "horizon" disappears and requires you to face in one direction only.

Enemies in Horizon Shift are a combination of kamikaze types that destroy part of your horizon when they hit it — meaning you'll have to jump the gaps or die — and enemies that spew bullets at you. Blasting any type of enemy builds up a chain bonus, and unleashing a smart bomb (which must also be charged by killing enemies) allows you to "bank" this chain bonus; conversely, dying loses the chain bonus altogether.

Horizon Shift has a cool aesthetic, with simplistic visuals in the foreground and a busy but low-brightness backgrounds that evolves as you play through the game. Particularly cool (and cheesy) is the giant laughing "skull" face that dominates the background any time you're fighting a boss.

Shmups Skill Test

Blend WarioWare with a shoot 'em up and you have Shmups Skill Test, a short, quick-fire game that challenges you to complete several minigames in succession, then humiliates you about your lack of skill afterwards.

Minigames vary from the delightfully named "TANK TANK TANK TANK TANK" — in which there are lots of tanks to shoot — to one where you have to precisely shoot timebombs off the side of a rocket without blowing the rocket up, and all of them are very challenging indeed, with the possible exception of the one where you have to shoot tin cans (in space) into a giant waste-paper basket (in space) to "save the earth".

After you're finished, you're given a breakdown of your skills, a comparison to the online average rating and your "gamer age" is calculated a la Brain Age on the Nintendo DS — the lower the better.

This game is hard, but it has a lot of staying power thanks to a variety of minigames, online leaderboards and support for up to four-player competitive play. Plus, as its name suggests, it's actually good training for the various skills modern shmups demand of you.

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The first MMO I really got into was Final Fantasy XI. This was after a few previous aborted attempts including EverQuest and Ultima Online (over dial-up — not recommended, particularly EverQuest, which crashed every time I zoned) as well as slightly lesser-known titles like Dark Age of Camelot.

I never stuck with the earlier games because they never quite resonated with me for one reason or another — perhaps it was their clunky interfaces or their painfully slow progression. All I know is that Final Fantasy XI, despite also having a clunky interface and painfully slow progression, managed to capture my attention for a decent period of time before I finally moved on to something else — Final Fantasy X-2, as I recall — and never went back.

Just recently, some Final Fantasy XIV friends and I have been getting nostalgic for XI, so I thought I'd go check it out, given that it's been a number of years and several expansion packs since I last tried it. And while the game is still recognisable as what it once was — a steadfastly traditional MMO more in the EverQuest mould than the now more fashionable WoW mould — it's been considerably streamlined to make the experience much more friendly to new players and solo players. On top of that, players now have a hefty amount of options to choose from when they log in and want to decide what to do next. This is not something Final Fantasy XI was ever lacking in, but the additions and refinements that have been added to the formula over the years benefit both new players and grizzled veterans.

Take the Fields of Valour and Records of Eminence systems, for example.

The former sees you examining "field manuals" in each zone and taking on a training regime of your choice. Completing said regime rewards you with experience, gil and a currency called tabs that can be traded in for various benefits ranging from teleporting back to your home city — a godsend if you've been grinding several zones away, since fast travel isn't anywhere near as accessible as it is in XIV — to having temporary buffs cast on yourself.

The latter, meanwhile, is accessed through your Quests menu and allows you to assign yourself up to 30 objectives at a time from an extremely comprehensive list of possible challenges that range from "defeat 100 enemies" to "deal 100,000 points of damage in total" via "loot 10 wind crystals from enemies". Most of these objectives are repeatable, and all reward you with experience points upon completion.

Just the addition of these two systems, which support the existing style of play FFXI veterans will be used to, makes levelling a considerably less painful, time-consuming process. What once took weeks of grinding can now be done in a few hours — to put it in context, I played for about 2 or 3 hours earlier and made it to level 16. First time I played this took me several weeks to achieve; in several months of play I never got any further than level 30.

It's a bit of an adjustment to go back to XI after the tightly structured gameplay of XIV. XI, by contrast, is much more freeform; there is a main storyline to follow, but it's of considerable benefit to players to go out and level up a bit first before even thinking about tackling these missions. The story can even be ignored completely if you'd rather just go out hacking and slashing monsters, unlike in XIV, where it was an integral part of overall progression by gradually unlocking game features and challenges as you went through.

One of the best additions to XI in recent years is the Trust system, which allows you to recruit "alter-ego" versions of various NPCs from around the game world after meeting the requirements to unlock them. Once unlocked, these "alter-egos" can be summoned at any time in the field for you to party up with, effectively allowing you the ability to take on considerably stronger monsters than you would otherwise be able to tackle solo, and all but eliminating the need for standing in Valkurm Dunes for hours at a time shouting "RDM LFG" in the hope that someone would pick you up to go and kill lots of crabs with.

One might say that the Trust system takes away from one of the key defining aspects of FFXI as a massively multiplayer online game, but in practice it's simply more convenient for many players. You still have the option to party up with other people, of course — and chances are they'll play their roles much better than the relatively limited AI of the Trust companions — but for those who prefer to play solo, Trust NPCs can form a formidable party with you once you've unlocked a few of them.

The other interesting contrast between FFXI and FFXIV is how it handles combat. XI's combat is relatively simple in the early levels, relying mostly on your auto-attack and occasional use of Weaponskills when your TP bar hits 1000 or greater. XIV, meanwhile, is much more active, demanding that you both dodge enemy attacks with telegraphed areas of effect and keep performing your class's combo or rotations as efficiently as possible, preferably without stopping. Both are considerably slower paced than true real-time combat, striking a good balance between a turn-based feel and actually allowing the player to feel like they are in full control of their character, but XI is even slower than XIV, providing you with plenty of time to pick abilities in advance from its traditional FF-style menu system rather than XIV's hotbars.

I've enjoyed returning to Vana'Diel so far; the experience contrasts well enough from XIV that the two games can sit quite comfortably beside one another in a gamer's collection, and the state they're both in in 2016 means that you can sit down for either a long or a short session with either and feel like you've achieved something.

Mostly I'm wanting to play through Final Fantasy XI to see its main story content, which is supposed to be good, but the sheer amount of stuff to do in the game — it's got over ten years on A Realm Reborn, after all — is more than likely to prove a bit distracting!

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With it being Final Fantasy XIV's third anniversary it's only fitting that I take a look back at the reason I've been playing it since its closed beta — and why, even though on several occasions I've felt like I might be "done" with the game, I keep on coming back, time after time.

These memories are presented in no particular order, but it makes the most sense to start with this one.

Knowing FFXIV was going to be something special

I jumped into Final Fantasy XIV's closed beta after a casual discussion with a Twitter friend about Final Fantasy XI and how much I liked it despite never really getting all that far with it. Eventually I found myself with an invite to the testing period of the game, and I was immediately smitten with it. Everything about it felt Final Fantasy. The look, the feel, the music, the controls, the battles, the monsters — and yet, it had enough of its own unique identity to make it feel like far more than just series fanservice.

Specifically, Final Fantasy XIV adopts a somewhat "dark fantasy" tone throughout, clearly heavily inspired by works such as Game of Thrones and The Witcher in places. Sure, there are still moogles and chocobos, but there are also complicated political machinations, betrayal, murder and, technically, just prior to the start of 2.0's story, apocalyptic catastrophes.

I was immediately drawn into the world in a way that World of Warcraft never quite managed to enrapture me. NPC dialogue, although localised with more than a few liberties taken from the original Japanese, much to the chagrin of people who play with Japanese voiceovers, was beautifully written with an almost Shakespearean tone in places, blending old- and middle-English words and phrases with modern spellings to make it actually comprehensible.

The fact that Final Fantasy XIV placed any emphasis on its main story at all — let alone to the degree that it has ended up doing so — was a unique feeling for me. Even its predecessor Final Fantasy XI's main story had felt like a side activity you did when you had done enough level grinding to be able to take on the next mission; here, the main story was tightly tied in with your character's progression: you advanced through the levels and became more powerful both in terms of mechanics and narrative, until you eventually reached level 50 and took on your most terrifying challenges yet.

During the closed beta, I only played up to about level 20 or so, but that was enough to know that I wanted to keep playing — and to know that I wouldn't mind when the servers were wiped post-beta to prepare for the start of live service.

Making some great friends

My friend who had urged me to try out FFXIV was all set to assemble a Free Company — FFXIV's take on guilds — as soon as the facility became available, and many members of that free company, centred around the Giant Bomb video games website, became great friends. I even took a trip to PAX East to hang out with a bunch of them and had an absolute blast. And while I recently left said Free Company in favour of a smaller group who are more local to where my wife and I are, FFXIV's various ways of keeping in touch — as well as extra-game means of communication like Discord — mean that I'll never be far away from this band of loveable rogues.

Castrum and Prae keeping me up until 5am

When I reached level 50, I was proud. The only other MMO I'd ever reached the level cap in prior to that day was World of Warcraft, and I'd stopped playing shortly afterwards, as my lack of friends playing had made that game a rather lonely experience at high level — this was the days before its current Dungeon Finder system, itself inspired by FFXIV's Duty Finder.

I'd heard the final two story dungeons, intended to be done pretty much as soon as you hit 50, were quite an experience, and so I asked the Free Company very nicely to accompany me on my first run through them. This was — and still is — the best way to run these dungeons, since they're both full of cutscenes, and running with a completely preformed party means no risk of other people running ahead and starting boss fights while you're still watching dramatic scenes.

The experience of running Castrum Meridianum and Praetorium left such an impact on me that I immediately wrote about it on USgamer. It remains one of my fondest gaming memories to date, and it makes me a bit sad that people coming to it now will more than likely be partied up with a group of people who outgear it to such a degree that every boss fight is a complete steamrollering. Pro-tip, then — if you're just hitting 50 for the first time and you have 7 friends handy, queue up for Castrium then Prae and check the "minimum item level" option in Duty Finder in order to experience these two dungeons at their original difficulty level from shortly after launch.

Entering the Coil

I happened to be up and about one night when some Free Company-mates were heading into the endgame raid dungeon The Binding Coil of Bahamut. At this point, the raid had been "unlocked" because better gear than it offered was already available, and so it was there for people to run just for the experience of the unique story it offered, as well as unlocking subsequent chapters.

Coil was a whole other level of the game for me. The encounters were much more complex, they demanded much more coordination and awareness of what was going on, and the unique story, music and enemies you fought in there made it feel like a truly "special" experience.

Forming LoCoBomb and tackling Coil proper

Loose Cannons, or LoCo, were Giant Bomb's neighbours in the Limsa Lominsa housing district of Mist, and they're now my new Free Company. LoCo is a tiny little group compared to the hundreds of members of Giant Bomb (many of whom are inactive players, but still) but we struck up a mutual friendship with one another, even going so far as to put together a rather casual, slapdash static for tackling The Binding Coil of Bahamut, a little later than much of the rest of the player base, but tackling it nonetheless.

Raiding together was a great way for us to get to know one another better, and we had a lot of fun times working out way through the first four Turns until we hit our first real barrier: Turn 5.

Toppling Twintania

Turn 5 of Coil was originally the hardest fight in the entire game, facing a party of 8 players off against the rather angry dragon Twintania. Accompanied by the fantastic piece of music Thunderer, this was a genuinely terrifying confrontation in which you really felt like you were battling against insurmountable odds.

Twintania was our first real encounter with having to properly coordinate raid tactics thanks to now-notorious mechanics such as Divebombs and Twisters. Taking her down for the first time was an incredible feeling, only to be matched by the time we finally bested the final boss of the Second Coil of Bahamut.

Nailing Nael

Turn 9 of Coil — or Turn 4 of Second Coil, if you prefer — quickly took over from Turn 5 as being the hardest fight in the game, mostly due to how unforgiving it was. The fight featured a wide variety of tasty instant death mechanics and even a few sections where careless play could wipe the rest of the raid without too much difficulty.

After a long slog through Second Coil — Turn 6 gave us a lot of grief, though the subsequent two went a little smoother — LoCoBomb persevered and were eventually victorious, however, and we still weren't sick of the two incredible boss themes Tempest and Rise of the White Raven.

This encounter remains, to date, my favourite boss fight of all time in any game ever. Ten character levels, over a hundred item levels and one expansion later and it's still not particularly easy to clear.

Phoenix from the Flames

A lot of people will note that Turn 12 — Turn 3 of Final Coil — is as memorable an encounter as the grand finale Turn 13, and I'd certainly agree with that. Resolving a large number of questions surrounding what really happened at the end of Final Fantasy XIV 1.0, Turn 12 sees the party facing off against the iconic Phoenix, accompanied by this magnificent arrangement of the game's main theme Answers. I still get shivers every time I hear it. And the recent The Rising event in the game now brought it out at the perfect moment to genuinely give me goosebumps all over my body.

The Final Witness

The final battle in Final Coil is appropriately spectacular. It wasn't horrendously difficult by the time we got to it — each subsequent patch had increased the amount of bonus HP and damage you'd be blessed with when you went in, theoretically allowing more and more people of lesser skill and/or gear to enjoy all of Coil's story — but it was still an immensely worthy absolutely, positively, definitely final boss. And it made incredible use of Answers.

An in-game marriage and a real-life proposal

(if the embed doesn't work, go here to embarrass me)

January 3, 2015: Amarysse Jerhynsson married W'khebica Qimi (now Wuckle Bunny, because no-one can spell authentic Mi'qote names properly). During this process, the player behind Amarysse Jerhynsson — yours truly — made a rather lengthy virtual speech that culminated in him proposing to the player behind W'khebica Qimi, who was sitting in her study upstairs from him at the time.

We married in June 2015. And who says computer games are antisocial?

Heavensward and beyond

The first full expansion for Final Fantasy XIV was an exciting moment, as it would take us to brand new areas, see us tackling brand new dungeons and battling fierce new foes. It was everything most people hoped for, with an excellent story — to some, better even than A Realm Reborn's at times meandering narrative — and one hell of a final boss fight.

While the long lull between Heavensward's release and the first major content patch finally arrived with us was, I feel, largely responsible for the fact that my former Free Company are no longer quite as obviously "active" (at least in public channels) as they used to be, Heavensward has, on the whole, been a great evolution of A Realm Reborn's base, even introducing a number of brand new types of content to the mix, with my favourite being the new randomly generated Deep Dungeon.

Heavensward's raid scene hasn't appealed that much — I'm not really a fan of steampunk in general, and the narrative set up around Alexander was feeble and unmemorable compared to the majesty of Coil — but there's still been plenty of stuff to do, and as we saw with the Live Letter yesterday, there will continue to be more and more stuff to do as we start the buildup to the second full expansion, set to be revealed for the first time in October.

It's not many games you can play almost continually for three years and still look upon fondly, but I guess anything you spend that much time in the company of eventually becomes something you really, truly can't ever let go of.

It's hard to get this across to people who haven't been on the journey I've been on, and it probably won't be quite the same for someone who starts right now, but I stand by my nomination of Final Fantasy XIV as my Game of the Year for 2013 over on USgamer, and given the number of hours I've played, it's probably my GotY for 2014, 2015 and 2016 too.

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Talking to some of my Final Fantasy XIV friends today, I realised quite what an impact XIV's predecessor Final Fantasy XI had on me, even though I never really got that far with it in the long term.

As with many other things throughout my life, the thing that has stayed with me for the longest ever since I played it for the first time is the music. (Incidentally, the music is, more than anything, the reason why I find I can't stay away from Final Fantasy XIV for long, even when, as I did recently, I think I'm "over it".)

Final Fantasy XI's music is not as well known as many of the other soundtracks in the series, primarily because XI itself is not as well known as the other Final Fantasy games that have been released over the years. It's not as technically accomplished as XIV's diverse soundtrack, and it's not the work of series veteran Nobuo Uematsu (who hasn't been quite as involved with the series in more recent years) but it is nonetheless made up of a selection of rather lovely pieces of music.

Here are a few that make me feel suitably nostalgic every time I hear them.

This music, simply called Ronfaure after the area in which it plays, is one of my favourite pieces from Final Fantasy XIV, because it pretty much sums up the overall atmosphere of the game: vaguely melancholic and rather traditional.

Final Fantasy XI is — at least, from what I remember — one of the more traditionally-set Final Fantasy games, with an emphasis on good old swords, shields, magic, orcs and goblins. Its soundtrack reflects this, and is a contrast to XIV's diverse track listing, which reflects the diversity of XIV's world itself.

The first character I played in Final Fantasy XI — and the only one that ever got anywhere to date — hailed from the Federation of Windurst, and thus his starting area was Sarutabaruta, which featured this wonderfully calming piece of music to accompany your exploration.

Sarutabaruta was a land of grassy meadows and sunshine; a thoroughly pleasant place to have a stroll, were it not for the monsters wandering here and there, of course.

One of the things I liked most about Final Fantasy XI, even after I played World of Warcraft for the first time, was the fact that it had a battle theme. Well, actually it had several according to your progress and whether or not you were in a party, but this one was likely to be the first one you heard as you stepped out of the gates of your starting city for the first time and prepared to have the shit kicked out of you by a small bumblebee. (FFXI was an MMO designed in the EverQuest mould, in comparison to FFXIV's rough adherence to the World of Warcraft formula, and consequently was brutally difficult, particularly at low levels.)

I always particularly liked that the battle theme for FFXI actually sounded like a Final Fantasy battle theme.

Final Fantasy XI's character creator was simple compared to those that came in later years, but one of the things I always liked about it was that each of the several races you could play as in the game had their own "theme tune" and even had their own signature animations to show you what they were all about while you were deciding. The Mithra, FFXI's take on the catgirl, were exactly how you would expect them to be from a game designed by Japanese people, and their music reflected that nicely.

Final Fantasy XI's group content was structured rather differently to XIV. It wouldn't be until about level 25 or so that you'd encounter your first real "boss", marked by a "Burning Circle" that you had to enter with a party of companions you'd previously gathered — no Duty Finder for you here.

Confronting said boss was A Big Deal, in other words, which is why I can remember it vividly: battling a dragon and his Ahriman companion, accompanied by this stirring soundtrack.

I never got far enough into the story to get properly into the expansion packs for FFXI, but I did visit some of the areas, because they were good for level-grinding.

I think, for once, YouTube comments sum up what I feel on hearing this piece of music better than anything I could say here:

"And here I am, 8 or 9 years later laying in bed listening to this music, wondering what ever happened to the people I considered my closest friends. Time is cruel, and one by one we each took a break from the game and never returned. If youre in a guild/ls/free company now, these will be the days that you someday look back on Dont let your friendships disappear, get on Facebook/Discord/Guildwork and keep in touch with them."

"Makes me tear up… I miss my old ls. r.i.p. Saints"

"comments like these make me wanna cry ;-; chemistry like this is so hard to find now. social life is so fast now"

Quite. For all their faults, for all the assholes who play them and all the whining that inevitably goes on around them, MMOs are, at heart, about people finding and connecting with one another, then sharing unforgettable experiences together.

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I last played World of Warcraft in the Wrath of the Lich King era. I played it off and on ever since launch, to be honest, but it was Wrath of the Lich King that saw me finally get to the level cap, although looking back on my time with the game through the eyes of an experienced Final Fantasy XIV endgame player, I now realise that I barely scratched the surface of what WoW had to offer.

World of Warcraft is one of those games that I consider to be part of the ill-defined, amorphous "gaming canon" — it's a game that I thoroughly believe everyone should play for at least a short time to understand what an impact it's had on the games industry as a whole: its importance to popular game design, the influence it's had on other games, and the aspects that it's drawn from its successors back into itself to evolve and adapt.

Like most MMOs, it's fascinating to chart how WoW has changed over the years because it's virtually unrecognisable from when it first hit the market. This most recent time I've been taking a look at it represents probably the biggest change I've seen to the overall game structure and experience, and among other things it's put certain aspects of my Final Fantasy XIV experience into a broader context.

My time with Wrath of the Lich King was spent primarily playing PvE (Player vs Environment) in the game's open world. This is still an entirely viable way to play World of Warcraft right the way through until level cap, unlike something like Final Fantasy XIV, which gates significant portions of the main story behind group content, albeit only of the most casual, straightforward variety right up until you reach the original level cap of 50.

The pacing of WoW is also very different to Final Fantasy XIV. While Final Fantasy XIV is relatively slow-paced with an almost turn-based feel thanks to its long "global cooldown" — the period of time between which you can use most of your abilities — WoW is relatively fast-paced and frantic. This comes at a slight cost, though: whereas Final Fantasy XIV's encounters are, for my money, much more interesting thanks to their strong emphasis on dodging and being in the right place at the right time — a distinctly Japanese approach to encounter design — World of Warcraft appears to be, to my limited experience, much more about gearing up and overpowering your enemies as much as possible. There's still an element of "don't stand in the shit" at times, but not to anywhere near the same degree as Final Fantasy XIV.

The two approaches are both valid, although the fact that it's possible to WoW-style overpower some of what used to be Final Fantasy XIV's most formidable encounters leads to a certain feeling of dissonance at times; there's always that feeling of conflict between the beautifully paced and choreographed encounter that the designers of Final Fantasy XIV put together, and the players' desire to bulldoze their way through it as quickly as possible. It's sort of a shame to see what a mockery modern groups make of fights like Garuda Extreme, although when you take this in the context of Final Fantasy XIV being a JRPG at core, it could simply be likened to the experience of level-grinding to a ridiculous degree, then steamrollering everything that once gave you grief into oblivion.

WoW also feels a lot more "free" than Final Fantasy XIV thanks to its diminished focus on storytelling — something which I always used to regard as a bit of a drawback to Blizzard's game, but which with more seasoned eyes I can see allows it to feel much more explicitly "game-like" than Final Fantasy XIV. This may sound odd, but it's true: FFXIV very much likes to put everything in some sort of narrative context, necessitating unlocking everything manually by completing various quests, whereas modern WoW simply unlocks things automatically and organically as you level up; you can jump into a dungeon as soon as you hit level 15 without having made prerequisite progress through a questline, whereas Final Fantasy XIV brings you to your first dungeon as part of its main scenario.

Modern WoW also features something I like very much, but which further contributes to its "game-like" feel: the Adventure Guide. This screen can be popped up at any time after level 10 and gives you suggestions of what to do next, allowing you to automatically start questlines without having to manually go to the location first, jump into dungeon queues the moment you've unlocked them, and even review strategy guides for dungeon bosses to save the tedious cries of "go watch a youtube video, noob" when a more inexperienced player enters group content for the first time.

WoW also seems to have taken some inspiration from Final Fantasy XIV's FATE (Full Active Time Event) system in the form of its pre-expansion Invasions. These are events that occur in the open world and require the cooperation of multiple players (albeit not in an organised manner) to accomplish various challenges. WoW's Invasions are much larger in scale than FFXIV's FATEs, however; an Invasion typically encompasses an entire zone, with objectives scattered around the place, whereas FFXIV's FATEs are constrained to a smaller area.

WoW also makes use of an incredibly elegant scaling system for these Invasions, where the monsters that appear as part of the event appear at different levels according to each player's own level. For example, I was participating in one earlier tonight as a level 12 character, so the enemies were appearing as level 12 with appropriate amounts of health and damage. Meanwhile, my friend Cat came to join me on her level 100 character, and the enemies appeared to her as level 100, with appropriately inflated amounts of health and outgoing damage. The higher-level characters still have an advantage due to better gear and a wider selection of available abilities, but it's nice that it's so simple for people of different levels to be able to cooperate on something and get meaningful rewards from it — it's a bit more elegant than FFXIV's slightly clunky Level Sync system in that you're not artifically gimping yourself to participate; the encounter gimps itself to lower-level players.

One thing where I've felt WoW has always had the edge over Final Fantasy XIV is in terms of gear. FFXIV has a strictly vertical gear progression system, with very little in the way of variety within each tier of equipment. As you're levelling, you get a new set of gear roughly every 5 levels or so until you reach level 50, at which point a few dungeon runs will allow you to purchase gear that will take you to about level 58 before you need to replace it. Once you hit 60, there are generally two or three "tiers" of gear that are "relevant" at any one time — one that is available with the endgame currency that has no weekly cap on it, one that is available with the endgame currency that does have a weekly cap on it, and, depending on what stage in the patch cycle the game is at, one or more tiers of raid gear from either the 24-player "casual" raid or the 8-player super-difficult "Savage" raid. In other words, everyone at an equivalent gear level in FFXIV will be wearing the exact same stuff as other people playing that class, though the last set to be introduced did at least encourage the insertion of Materia for limited customisation of secondary stats.

WoW, meanwhile, has a huge variety of gear right from the get-go. Shitty grey gear, poor white gear, slightly more exciting green gear, very exciting blue gear, mega-exciting purple gear and OMG I GOT IT Legendary gear. (And possibly some more tiers besides.) WoW throws a lot more loot at the player than FFXIV, particularly during dungeon runs, with green gear in particular taking an almost Diablo-esque approach to itemisation with prefixes and suffixes denoting variations on a particular item level's gear.

FFXIV does have an item "rarity" system along these lines — there are white, pink, green, blue and purple items — but in practice, getting a blue item simply means that you've acquired some level-cap gear, and purple items are, so far as I know, exclusively for the grind-tastic Relic and Anima weapons at levels 50 and 60 respectively. The only items that have any real variety to them are the pink items you find in dungeons while levelling up; these have standardised basic stats for the item level, but randomised secondary stats. In practice, though, it never really feels like the secondary stats make that much difference; perhaps this will change at higher item levels, but at the moment, adding 5 points of Determination on to your armour doesn't feel like it has a big impact on how powerful you are, and this is, I feel, a real weakness of FFXIV that should be addressed in future expansions.

Do I like one better than the other? No, I actually like them both for different reasons, and can quite feasibly see myself playing both, since they're both enjoyable and distinct experiences from one another. Oddly enough, spending a few hours playing WoW and getting to level 20 has made me appreciate the things that FFXIV does better, and also given me a certain amount of understanding as to why some players are the way they are. That doesn't excuse their behaviour at times, of course, but if you look at how they play in the context of having had previous experience with how WoW does things, certain behaviours like the desire for speedruns or overpowering encounters start to make a little more sense.

All in all, it's been a positive experience — and if you're a lapsed WoW player who has been thinking about checking out what the game looks like in 2016, I'd encourage you to do so. The experience for new players has been made a whole lot smoother, and the whole package is significantly slicker than it once was. Plus, regardless of whether or not you bought any of the previous expansions, all WoW players now get all the expansions up to Warlords of Draenor completely free, with only the impending Legion requiring you to spend any additional money. The game as a whole seems much more friendly to short, casual sessions than it used to be, and that can only be a good thing — though naturally once you hit endgame, it doubtless won't be long before the desire to raid kicks in… and that's when things get a bit time-consuming!

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Upon realising that the Spike Chunsoft enhanced remake of One Way Heroics was, in fact, coming out in just three weeks' time, I decided to revisit the original game, which has long been one of my favourite takes on the roguelike genre thanks to it being quite unlike pretty much any other game I've ever played.

For the unfamiliar, One Way Heroics places you in a randomly generated world map that continuously scrolls, like those old Super Mario World levels that everyone hated. This being a turn-based roguelike, however, One Way Heroics only scrolls when you take an action, be this moving, attacking or fiddling around with something in your inventory.

The aim of the game is ostensibly to defeat the Demon Lord and save the remaining part of the world from being consumed by the mysterious darkness that is just out of shot on the left side of the screen. More often than not, you will fail in your task, either by yourself being caught in said mysterious darkness by miscalculating how many turns it would take you to cross the mountain range you found yourself stuck in the middle of, by dying embarrassingly to a nearby feral dog who gave you a nasty nip right in your most sensitive areas, or by forgetting you had a bag full of highly flammable (and explosive) items and then going toe-to-toe with a fire-breathing imp.

It's not an insurmountable challenge, though. In fact, defeating the Demon Lord is more a matter of persistence than anything else; she (yes, spoiler, she's a she) appears at regular intervals throughout your journey, sticks around for a few in-game hours during which you can either attempt to do some damage or run away from her, then she disappears again for a bit. Damage you deal persists from encounter to encounter, though she does have the chance to heal a few HP and erect a few magical barriers in between your various clashes. As such, so long as you can keep yourself alive, you can eventually wear her down bit by bit rather than having to defeat her all in one go.

Except, if you look a bit deeper into the game, defeating the Demon Lord isn't the only way to finish the game. In fact, it's arguably the easiest way to clear the game, since the other endings mostly require all manner of convoluted requirements and lucky rolls on the ol' random number generator. That said, the game's "Dimensional Vault" system does at least allow you to carry useful items over from playthrough to playthrough, so you can effectively prepare for the more complex conclusions a bit at a time, much like preparing to fight the Demon Lord, only over the course of several playthroughs instead of just one.

The other ways to beat the game vary from defeating the Darkness itself (which requires a Holy weapon, a very rare find indeed) to reaching the End of the World at the 2000km mark. The subsequently released One Way Heroics Plus expansion also added a number of other ways to clear the game, including finding your way into a whole other dimension to discover who or what is really behind this whole creeping darkness thing, and then either surviving until the end of that dimension or defeating said ne'er do well once and for all.

On top of all that, there are character-specific endings, too. During each playthrough, you have a chance of encountering a number of different non-player characters who, assuming you meet the prerequisite requirements to recruit them (usually some combination of cash and charisma levels) can join your party. As they fight alongside you and you meet various conditions (different for each character), they gain affection for you, and after having had three separate conversations with them, revealing their backstory and the truth about themselves — including, in many cases, why there appears to be a version of them in each and every dimension out there, more than aware of what you're up to — clearing the game gives you their unique ending on top of whichever particular finale you went for.

These little stories that are attached to the party members are one of the most interesting things about One Way Heroics, because they elevate it above being a simple mechanics-based roguelike and give it a touch of narrative. Not enough to be obtrusive — the emphasis is still very much on preparing your character to clear the game in whichever way you deem most appropriate — but enough to give you a real feel for who these people are and what their place in the entire mystery of One Way Heroics is.

One particularly interesting thing about them is that you can go a very long time without encountering any of them at all, and thus assume that One Way Heroics is entirely mechanics-based. Another is that their storylines are all pretty dark in tone right up until the end, which is all the more effective due to the fairly breezy tone the rest of the game has going on. I defy anyone not to shed a tear at Queen Frieda's ending in particular, though I shan't spoil it here.

Replaying One Way Heroics over the last few days has reminded me quite how much I like this quirky little game, and I'm extremely excited to see how the new version pans out in comparison. From the looks of things, it takes the basic mechanics of the original and gives it a fresh coat of paint along with a new setting and storyline, plus a number of guest characters from other games including Danganronpa and Shiren the Wanderer.

All being well, I'm probably going to devote next month on MoeGamer to this game, its expansion and its new version, which will be out partway through the month. It's an underappreciated gem, for sure, and one which everyone the slightest bit interested in the more unusual side of RPGs owes it to themselves to check out.

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Back in the '90s, MicroProse, a software company that already produced a number of the most complex computer games on the market thanks to their near-exclusive focus on military simulators, launched a spin-off label called "MicroStyle". MicroStyle's "thing" was that they produced "games for adults". This did not mean "adult" as in "porn"; rather, it meant games about things that — supposedly, anyway — older gamers would be interested in. No cutesy platformers with rainbow colours here; MicroStyle was all about motorbikes, fast cars and, err, Rick Dangerous, the latter of which perhaps erred a little more towards the side of cutesy platformers than its stablemates.

The reason this largely pointless piece of gaming history trivia is at the forefront of my mind right now is due to the recently released No Man's Sky, and the bafflingly negative reaction it has received from many online commentators. I had been asking myself why there was so very much whining going on about this game, when it occurred to me, partly after a bit of reflection on my own part and partly after a discussion with my friend Chris.

No Man's Sky is a game for grown-ups. And some people don't know how to deal with that.

The reason I say this is that there's a very obvious dichotomy when it comes to this game between those who have sat down and spent time with it — and then, crucially, reflected on the experience — and those who take it at face value, judge it against the frankly unreasonable expectations they set for it in their head and consequently respond rather negatively towards it.

There are two particularly good pieces on the subject of No Man's Sky that I invite you to read right now before we go any further.

The first, from The Guardian's Keith Stuart, explores the game from the perspective of someone who grew up playing the original Elite on 8-bit computers. Stuart describes how invested he was in the virtual galaxy that Elite allowed him to explore; how he went so far as to buy a particular joystick to play it with because it looked suitably futuristic, and to make copious notes about profitable trading routes and sectors to avoid. His prose reminded me of my own youth with computer games, when I'd actually go so far as to dress up in a bomber jacket, home-made "oxygen mask" (made from a bit of cardboard and an old vacuum cleaner hose) and balaclava (the closest I could get to an actual crash helmet at the time) when playing games like F-15 Strike Eagle II and F-19 Stealth Fighter on the Atari ST. The use of imagination was key; these games were thrilling not because they presented the most impressive visual spectacles on screen, but because they truly allowed you to become someone else for a short time. The idea that you could sit down in front of your computer monitor and become a space traveller or fighter pilot was intoxicating, and even though at the time I was far too young to really understand those games properly, those experiences still stuck with me.

Stuart describes No Man's Sky as an Elite for the modern age. He also notes that we already have an Elite for the modern age in the form of Elite: Dangerous, but makes the crucial distinction that Elite: Dangerous has gone heavily down the path of complex simulation, while No Man's Sky eschews some of the more "unnecessary" aspects of realism in favour of providing an experience that stokes the fires of the imagination.

Stuart's piece is complemented nicely by this piece in Rolling Stone/Glixel from Star Wars novel author Chuck Wendig. Wendig describes No Man's Sky as "boring", but notes that this isn't actually a bad thing.

"We often play games for the destination," says Wendig, "but I don't think that's why we play No Man's Sky. We play it for the journey. There is an eerie calm to this game. A utopian serenity. A pleasant, alluring boredom that draws you along the journey – but not too fast. This is sci-fi that doesn't ask you to kill, kill, kill. It asks you only to wander. To discover. To catalog your findings and sell your wares and move onto the next moon, the next space station, the next world, the next star system. All in pursuit of whatever it is you wish to pursue."

He's absolutely right. While there is combat in No Man's Sky, it's a rare occurrence — rare enough to make every time you switch your multi-tool from mining laser to boltcaster mode feel significant. The emphasis instead is on exploration, discovery and, above all, imagination. You're given very little context or explanation for the things you are seeing in No Man's Sky, and I have a strange feeling that even if you "finish" it by reaching the end of one of the narrative paths and/or the centre of the galaxy, it still won't answer all the questions you might have.

My friend Chris also describes it as "a game for people who like books: you have to have a bit of imagination, and have your sense of wonder still intact, and understand that there are breeds of sci-fi that aren't about action." I can't help but feel that the fact the whole game looks like an Asimov cover is entirely intentional.

The trouble is that this style of play is the exact opposite of what a lot of younger gamers expect from their games these days. They don't expect their space sims to be quiet, contemplative, artistic affairs that minimise action in the name of cataloguing flora and fauna on diverse alien worlds. They expect their space sims to be more along the lines of the Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare trailer we saw at E3: all action, all explosions, all bodies floating off into space. And No Man's Sky isn't about that.

I can't help but feel that the loudest complaint of all — the fact that the game isn't the synchronous massively multiplayer title that a lot of people had come to assume it would be — also ties in with this. Fundamentally, No Man's Sky is a game about being alone in a vast galaxy, and occasionally coming across traces of evidence that other people have been there before you — whether it's long-forgotten ruins, from which you can learn snippets of the various alien languages in the game, or star systems, planets and species of flora and fauna named by other players. The fact that you can't see other players flying around is entirely intentional; the game hasn't been designed in that way at all, and "true" multiplayer would add absolutely nothing to the experience other than the opportunity to be griefed by players who fancied a career in virtual space piracy.

No Man's Sky is a game for grown-ups. Specifically, it's a game for grown-ups who grew up with games in the '80s and '90s; it realises the dream of being able to freely fly a spaceship around a vast universe, land on planets and explore them at our leisure; it gives us enough fuel to stoke the fires of our imagination, and withholds enough to allow us to let those flames flare up as much as we want; it's a game that is the exact opposite of something like Mass Effect's grand space opera, in which nothing is left to the imagination. (This isn't to put Mass Effect down, mind you; there's a place for both the quiet contemplation of No Man's Sky and the dramatic bombast of Mass Effect in this world.)

Perhaps most tellingly, all the most interesting, thoughtful and sensible commentary on No Man's Sky has been by people over the age of 30. And the negative comments very much come across as being written by much younger people. (I obviously can't say for certain how old many of the naysayers are, but their words certainly come across as being less… seasoned, shall we say.)

If all you can do is rant and rave about how Hello Games' Sean Murray "lied" to you about the game being multiplayer… well, then you're missing the point. Spectacularly. And you should probably go and play something else. Something with more guns in it.

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I've been playing a bit more of No Man's Sky this evening and I still like it a lot. It's a wonderfully dreamy, ethereal experience to play — helped partly by the wonderful electronic soundtrack that accompanies everything you do — but also because it seems to have been designed to be an experience that is pure relaxation rather than the more typical goal-driven affair that most games tend to be.

There is no goal in No Man's Sky. Well, all right, there's one: get to the centre of the galaxy, but that's so vague as to be almost meaningless, and the important thing about playing No Man's Sky is not a desperate attempt to achieve that goal as quickly or efficiently as possible, but rather to enjoy the journey exactly as you see fit.

Any other goals in the game are entirely of your own making and will depend entirely on how you like to play. One person's goal might be to fully scan all the planets in a system to receive the hefty payouts you get for "completing" a planetary analysis. Another's might be to produce as many warp cells as possible as quickly as possible so they can make a large number of jumps rapidly. Another's still might be to upgrade their ship, or their suit, or their multitool… it really is up to you what you want to do, and No Man's Sky offers just enough in the way of structure and mechanics to allow you to make these goals for yourself without it ever feeling like you're following a linear, prescribed path.

It struck me while I was playing tonight that this is what the game is all about. You don't play No Man's Sky if you're a powergamer, seeking the "best" or "most efficient" way to "clear" something. You play No Man's Sky during a period of downtime, in which you want to just sit back, relax and take part in something that doesn't demand anything of you, but which has enough in the way of interactivity and structure to distinguish itself from more passive art forms.

In many ways, it can perhaps be regarded as the natural evolution of the "walking simulator", the subgenre of first-person adventure games that focus not on puzzle solving or other aspects of "gameplay", but on storytelling and experiencing a world as if you were there. No Man's Sky differs in some substantial ways, however, the lack of a linear main narrative being the main one, but the "immersive sim" aspect of the "walking simulator" is present and correct. If you are the sort of person who enjoyed Gone Home not for the '90s teenage lesbian angst but instead for the interesting experience that was just poking around that little world the developers had created, then you might get something out of No Man's Sky, because the whole game is poking around worlds of various descriptions.

That lack of concrete story might be an issue for some, admittedly, but for those who still have a working imagination, No Man's Sky puts it to good use by allowing you to interpret what you're seeing as you see fit. Is that abandoned outpost that's full of weird slimy gooey tentacly things a sign that something awful happened there, or is it simply a natural product of the passage of time? Are the Gek a race of entreprenurial merchants, or do they hide a darker secret, hoping to enslave the universe to their bidding? How did that planet get those curiously man-made looking pillars of rock everywhere?

One of the most interesting questions No Man's Sky asks the player is who are you? You never see yourself in the game, and the fact that the game doesn't have multiplayer (boy, you wouldn't believe the whining that's been going on by people who apparently expected this to be an MMO) means that you don't see others like you, either. Even if you could see other players, though, there's no guarantee that they'd be exactly the same as you. Are you human? Are you Gek? Are you a construct of the mysterious Atlas? Are you something else altogether? The game doesn't answer this — at least, it hasn't in the 10 hours I've spent with it so far — and so leaves this rather important question up to the player's interpretation.

In other words, No Man's Sky is what you make of it. If you go in expecting some sort of grand space opera with a clearly constructed story, villains to defeat and great evils to stand against, you may well be disappointed. If, however, you go in expecting a game that allows you to pretend to be a spaceman for a few hours at a time, and can extract a certain degree of joy from that simple experience, then you'll have a wonderful time.

It's a game to relax and unwind with, not a game to "git gud" at. And I appreciate it a great deal for that. That doesn't mean that I want to play it all day every day, but it does mean that I can open it up at any time, fly around and explore a bit, and feel like I've had my money's worth. And with the tantalising possibility of future updates adding more and more interesting mechanics to the game as a whole, I can see it being a game I'll dip in and out of for a very long time indeed.

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The phrase "roguelike" has been overused to such a degree in recent memory that it's become all but meaningless as a descriptor of what a game is actually like to play, but if nothing else it acts as a suitable starting point for a discussion about how a game is constructed, what the player is expected to do in it and where its longevity comes from.

The reason why "roguelike" itself as a term isn't particularly meaningful any more is that it's diverged into a number of discrete but related bloodlines over the years, with each offering their own particular take on being inspired by the dungeon-crawling classic. And, just as with most things, not getting on with one particular roguelike absolutely doesn't preclude you from enjoying others. In fact, this is one of the main reasons "roguelike" as a descriptor isn't useful any more, because it doesn't reflect the sheer diversity that is part of this subgenre in 2016.

Let's take a look at the different branches.

The traditional roguelike

A traditional roguelike builds on the foundations of the original Rogue in a number of ways. It presents the player with a seemingly simple task to complete (usually "find the x of y" or "kill the z") and a means through which to accomplish this task, usually a multi-level dungeon that is randomly generated with each playthrough, but which has the final objective down on the bottom floor.

Traditional roguelikes don't have to be presented as ASCII text characters, but many deliberately choose to, as a key part of these games is the fact they occupy a curious middle ground between tabletop roleplaying and standard computer-based hack and slash role-playing games, and as such a key part of enjoying them is having an active imagination with which to conjure up images of what your character is up to, the strange and terrifying dangers they're having to deal with and the horrible effects that potion you probably shouldn't have drunk is having on you.

A key aspect of traditional roguelikes is permadeath: in other words, your character dies, your save file is wiped and you have to start again. This mechanic can sometimes be circumnavigated by doing unspeakable things to your save game files, but doing so is generally — and quite rightly — regarded as cheating. In other words, if you're going to play a traditional roguelike properly, you can't just charge in with little regard for the consequences like modern hack-and-slash games, where the consequence for dying is usually little more than a portion of your gold and having to run back to where your corpse was.

Some traditional roguelikes try and tell an unfolding story by complementing the procedurally generated content with pre-composed quests, conversations, characters and lore items. More often than not, though, a more old-school, back-of-the-tape-box approach is taken, with narrative very much taking a back seat to exploration and character development in the mechanical sense.

One aspect where traditional roguelikes are heavily inspired by tabletop roleplaying is in the amount of freedom you're given right from character creation. You can generally pick from different races, genders and classes as well as tinker with your base stats to construct the perfect (or entertainingly flawed) character of your dreams. But that freedom often carries over into the game itself, too; many traditional roguelikes, for example, allow you to dig into the walls of the dungeon to change its layout or construct shortcuts, and the mechanics often afford the opportunity to be a little creative with your solutions to problems. A good example is the time I played Angband and ran out of torches several levels down in the dungeon, necessitating me "feeling" my way along the walls of the dungeon (by bumping into them, which reveals them on the map) until I could get back to the stairway up. This mechanic wasn't hard-coded into the game, but I was able to do it successfully thanks to the systems that are in place.

Good examples of traditional roguelikes in my experience include the original Rogue, which is rather simple by today's standards; Nethack, which is a good entry point if you can learn to decipher the ASCII interface; Angband, which initially seems extremely complicated but gradually becomes more and more understandable once you learn a few useful keyboard commands; Tales of Maj'Eyal (formerly Tales of Middle Earth), which is a highly polished, very flexible roguelike that strikes a good balance between storytelling and dungeon crawling; and Caves of Qud, which is unusual for the genre in that it has a sci-fi theme rather than Tolkien-inspired fantasy.

The modern Western roguelike

Modern Western roguelikes tend to take the basic structure of the traditional roguelike and present it in a manner that has more immediacy and accessibility. Perhaps the very best example of this is the wonderful Dungeons of Dredmor, which is as brutal as any traditional roguelike but has charming 16-bit era pixel art-style graphics, a quirky soundtrack and an entertaining sense of humour. Dungeons of Dredmor does the whole permadeath thing and allows you the freedom to build custom characters with a variety of skills — some of which are very bizarre indeed — but doesn't quite offer the full freedom of a completely traditional roguelike thanks to the constraints placed on it by being presented graphically rather than abstractly.

Sword of the Stars: The Pit is another title worth checking out. While its visuals are shockingly bad, it's an atmospheric game that, like Caves of Qud in the traditional corner, eschews the standard fantasy setting in favour of sci-fi. There's an interesting selection of character classes and skills to play with, and some enjoyable mechanics to explore and discover as you play.

The modern Eastern roguelike

Japan latched on to the roguelike structure at some point in the last few console generations, and Eastern developers have produced some great games that have a distinctly Japanese flavour to them while still retaining a number of the key aspects of traditional roguelikes.

One important difference with Japanese roguelikes, however, is that they usually contain some form of persistence rather than permadeath. Death is still an inconvenience, but it rarely, if ever, necessitates going all the way back to the beginning of the game to start all over again.

Exactly how death is handled varies from game to game. In Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon for Wii, for example, dying causes you to lose all your non-banked gold and every item you were carrying except key items for the story and the equipment you had equipped at the time. You keep your experience levels and Job levels, so you can gradually "creep" forward in terms of progress, getting a bit more experience and power each time, until you can eventually just steamroller your way through by outlevelling the challenges — although a number of the bonus dungeons feature a "level sync" mechanic whereby if you're over a particular level, you're pushed back down to the maximum for that dungeon and sometimes given additional non-standard "rules" to folow.

In ZHP for PSP, meanwhile, your character resets to level 1 each time you enter a new dungeon, regardless of whether or not you cleared the last one successfully. The twist is, any time you exit a dungeon, be it through death or successfully clearing it, your character's base level and stats increase, meaning that a "level 1" late in the game will be considerably more powerful than a "level 1" at the start of the game, particularly when you throw equipment into the mix. You still lose all the stuff you were carrying if you die, though, and to add further insult to injury your character develops a phobia of whatever killed him, causing various penalties when encountering them again until they "get over it" by successfully overcoming said challenge several times.

One Way Heroics for PC takes another approach again. Here, there's a traditional permadeath system in effect, though you can retry the same game map by entering a specific seed on starting the game each time. There's an element of player persistence, though, depending on how well you performed, and this was subsequently expanded with the Plus version of the game. You can unlock new classes, carry items over to a subsequent playthrough and upgrade the castle where every game starts (and by extension unlock a number of different quests besides the standard one). There are also a number of named characters you'll encounter in your quests if you get far enough; once you've met them once, they'll be revealed and give you tips on the post-game score screen rather than appearing as shadowy figures. There's also a substantial meta-game in place where there's a "true" ending that can only be unlocked through some extremely convoluted processes. It's a Japanese game, for sure.

Roguelites

This term was, I believe, coined for Rogue Legacy, and is used to describe games that draw inspiration from traditional roguelikes but which tend to fall into markedly different genres and playstyles to the traditional turn-based top-down RPG that roguelikes usually are.

The aforementioned Rogue Legacy was an interesting affair, with Metroidvania-style platform action RPG action coupled with persistent progression between sessions by upgrading your castle and unlocking new abilities as a result. Each character was also regarded as a descendant of the previous one, too, meaning that there was the possibility certain genetic markers could be passed on. These could affect the gameplay — the hereditary ability to jump high or do more damage is very useful, for example — while others were largely there for humour and characterisation. A colour-blind character, for example, had to do their playthrough in black and white.

The Binding of Isaac is another well-known modern roguelite, this time combining the presentation of the original Legend of Zelda's dungeons with some dark, disgusting visual humour and Gauntlet-style shoot 'em up mechanics. While Isaac didn't have persistent progression in quite the same way as Rogue Legacy, you did unlock new items as you progressed through the game, which subsequently gave them a chance of appearing in future playthroughs rather than guaranteeing you'd have them. Collecting all these items provided a substantial metagame for Isaac, let alone the sheer challenge of actually getting to the end of the game.

Finally for now, one of the most recent roguelites can be found in the form of Enter the Gungeon. This is a straight-up action game with randomly generated levels, but its main appeal comes from the many varied and bizarre weapons you'll pick up on each playthrough. There's also an element of persistent progression as you unlock new features using currency you earn in each playthrough; like Isaac, there's a substantial metagame in unlocking everything, though in this case, your unlocks will likely make subsequent playthroughs a bit easier to make it through.

It's pretty fascinating how a simple title from the dawn of gaming has spawned such a diverse range of titles inspired by it to one degree or another. How many other games from those days can boast such a feat? Not that many.

The post 2398: The Many Faces of the Roguelike appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

After feeling somewhat lukewarm to the idea of it for a while — the relentless hype train hasn't helped — I've come around to the idea of No Man's Sky, so much so that I'm now actually looking forward to it releasing on PC on Friday so I can get started on some grand space adventures.

I'm very interested to see how it's turned out, though I am tempering my expectations accordingly as well as intending on paying attention to the evolution of the game over its lifespan; this is a game that, several months down the line, may be very different to what it is on launch day, and that prospect is both exciting and a bit of a reflection on the modern games biz.

The reason why I'm interested to see how No Man's Sky ends up is that the concept reminds me of some of my favourite underrated games of yesteryear, and a genre which we don't really "do" any more, and that is the Star Trek-style space sim. Star Wars-style (i.e. combat-heavy) space sims have been enjoying a bit of a resurgence in the indie space in recent years, but the more sedate pace of Star Trek-style (i.e. exploration-heavy) sims is something still largely consigned to the past, with the exception of a few 2D affairs like Starbound and Interstellaria, neither of which, I feel, particularly capture the real feeling of space travel and exploration.

The specific games I'm thinking of when I ponder Star Trek-style space sims are the two Starflight games by Electronic Arts back in the 16-bit era. These were games where you were given a starship and pretty much told to just get on with it at the outset; there was an overarching plot to follow, but the main attraction of Starflight was the ability to just pootle around known (and unknown) space exploring solar systems and planets, then bringing goodies of various types back to home base for analysis and filthy lucre.

No Man's Sky isn't quite the same thing as Starflight in that you appear to be piloting a single-seater ship rather than a big-ass starship, but the philosophy behind the game seems to be similar in that the emphasis is on discovery, and the main means through which you profit, progress and flourish is through exploring and finding exciting things rather than blasting anything that dares to pass through your crosshairs into a smooth pâté.

To continue the comparison, both Starflight and No Man's Sky had/have significant planetside components in which you explore, find useful things and perhaps uncover a few mysteries along the way. I can't speak for No Man's Sky yet, but I have some fond memories of landing on planets in Starflight, then sending my all-terrain vehicle out into the wasteland to track down valuable minerals, artifacts and, if I was lucky, some specimens of life, too. Starflight's primitive graphics were enriched by some enjoyable descriptive text whenever your ground crew ran into trouble, and naturally it would be up to the crewmember you'd assigned as your medical officer to patch people up when they got back onto your ship.

Starflight was interesting, exciting and compelling even when you weren't in mortal peril, though, and indeed a lot of the time you weren't. There was a simple joy in entering a new system for the first time only to discover that it had an abundance of planets and moons, each of which could be landed on, explored and stripped of as many valuable minerals as you could fit in your ship's cargo holds. It sounds as if this is the sort of experience No Man's Sky offers, too, and if that's the case then I'm pretty excited for it.

Like Starflight, No Man's Sky appears to have an overarching narrative pushing you towards a "conclusion" of some sort at the centre of the galaxy, but also like its distant predecessor, you're free to just do your own thing as you see fit for the most part.

I'll be particularly interested to see how things like encounters with alien NPCs and suchlike go in No Man's Sky, as some of these interactions were a real highlight of Starflight. Judging by this screenshot, though, it looks like I don't have much to worry about.

Anyway. Just a couple of days to go until I can find out for sure whether No Man's Sky is actually the space sim I've been wanting to play since I didn't have a spare floppy disk to hand to save my game in Starflight on the Atari ST, so had to start again each and every time I played. No such woes await with No Man's Sky — hopefully, anyway, though doubtless day-one server issues will be A Thing — and so I'm looking forward to jumping into my Roger Dean/Asimov-inspired space odyssey and, frankly, seeing if Hello Games have managed to make an interesting game out of 18 quintillion planets or however many are supposed to be in the damn thing.

The post 2395: Adventures in Space appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Finished The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine this evening. Spoilers follow!

While I think, on the whole, Hearts of Stone was my favourite part of the complete opus that is The Witcher 3, Blood and Wine's main story comes a close second.

Blood and Wine's effectiveness comes from its exceptional use of juxtaposition. The bright and vibrant colours of the France-inspired region of Toussaint contrast strongly with the rather dark main storyline, and likewise does the duchy's self-professed love of "virtuousness", pomp and circumstance clash rather a lot with how things really are.

On a more macro scale, Blood and Wine is effective because it is so different to the rest of The Witcher 3. The lands that you're exploring aren't dirty, poverty-stricken regions in which everyone except the very richest is fighting for survival. The narrative you're following isn't something of earth-shattering importance. And the overall tone outside of the main narrative is filled with plenty of levity and even a few in-jokes here and there, though none so obtrusive as to spoil the overall atmosphere that CD Projekt Red has spent three games crafting so masterfully in the series.

I particularly liked Blood and Wine's narrative for being a vampire-centric plot, since I'm a sucker for that sort of storyline, particularly those that humanise vampires and make them complex characters. Villain Dettlaff in Blood and Wine is most certainly a complicated character and, to be sure, he commits some truly reprehensible acts, but at the end of it all there are some very difficult decisions to make as to who is really to blame for everything that transpired, and whether things could have been done any differently.

Blood and Wine's take on vampiric mythology reminded me quite a bit of White Wolf's classic series of role-playing games Vampire: The Masquerade (or, perhaps more accurately in The Witcher's case, Vampire: The Dark Age). We have "higher vampires" treated almost as the aristocracy of the monster world thanks to their intelligence and ability to make rational — albeit often rather emotional — decisions. Said vampires are split into clans that scattered around the world. Said vampires tend to show a more monstrous side when driven into a frenzy or provoked, and at this point display numerous supernatural abilities. And, of course, it's nowhere near as easy to get rid of a vampire as having some garlic hanging around your neck then sticking a stake through their heart.

So effective was Blood and Wine's take on vampire mythology that I'd love to see CD Projekt Red take on the Vampire: The Masquerade franchise at some point. I have no idea whether or not that will ever happen, given that the last Vampire game that was supposed to show up — based on the World of Darkness at large, not just Vampire — became vaporware at some point a few years back, and thus the status of the license is perhaps questionable. Even without the license, though, I'd love to see CD Projekt Red tackle at the very least a Vampire-esque title.

What might that look like? Well, I envisage something along the lines of the wonderful Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, only with a more well-realised setting thanks to the improved technology since that classic came out in 2004. I have great faith in their vision for a futuristic dystopia city in Cyberpunk 2077, but I'd love to see their take on the undead underbelly of a modern city, too. It doesn't necessarily need to be fully open-world a la Grand Theft Auto — in fact, the past few entries on this site have probably made clear I'd rather it wasn't — but there should be plenty of opportunities for The Witcher-style plot branches and decision-making, since the tabletop version of Vampire was always about shades of grey in morality and trying to balance your own dwindling Humanity against the influence the Beast had over you — as, indeed, was Bloodlines.

Seeing Regis and Dettlaff in action in one of the climactic scenes of Blood and Wine made me very much want to play a game with their superhuman abilities — and, let's face it, even though I wasn't a big fan of The Witcher 3's combat, anything is better than the wild flailing of the original Bloodlines.

More importantly, though, good games of Vampire are often about avoiding conflict rather than seeking out trouble; indeed, a number of the clans you are able to represent in the game have rather poor martial skills, their abilities instead lying in the ability to persuade, sweet-talk, seduce, bribe, intimidate, sneak, hack and all manner of other alternatives to baring fang and claw. And with the whole The Witcher series, CD Projekt Red has proven beyond all doubt that it is excellent at developing interesting, compelling, well-written stories in which often simply talking your way out of a perilous situation is an option on the table. That strength of the developer as a whole would lend itself well to a Vampire (or Vampire-inspired) game; perhaps one day, in my dreams, it will happen.

For now, I think my time with The Witcher 3 has come to a close; just shy of 100 hours for the main story and both expansions, I feel I've very much got my money's worth, plus there's a whole host of things I can go back and do if I ever feel like playing it again. I'm very much glad I played it through to completion, but right now, I think it's time for a palate cleanser. C'mon down, Gal*Gun…

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I've been playing a fair bit of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt recently, and while it is certainly a very good game indeed, there are two issues with it where I feel the experience as a whole would have been better served if they… well, if they weren't there.

As it happens, they're two rather major aspects of the game's design as a whole, but thankfully the things that the game gets right more than outweigh the annoyances that these two particular aspects present me with. (Your mileage may, as ever, vary.)

All right, let's jump right in then.

1. The Witcher 3 didn't need to be an open-world game

Here's how I play open-world games:

• Spend first hour or so looking around, wowed in all the usual ways (wow, much draw distance, very mountain in the distance can go there, so pretty) and deliberately taking "the long way" to get to my specified destination.
• After first hour or so, start using faster means of transportation. (Geralt's magical teleporting horse Roach, in the case of The Witcher 3)
• After another few hours, start using fast travel points.
• 50+ hours in, start very much resenting the fact that there are approximately 300 miles of identical-looking forest/hills/mountains between me and where I actually want to be, and naturally I haven't yet unlocked a fast travel point where I want to be yet.
• See destination is on other side of mountain. Attempt to climb mountain. Fail. Swear. Get annoyed. Go around mountain. Discover that there was passageway not marked on map that would have saved me about half an hour of virtual travel time. Swear again.

The fact that The Witcher 3 is an open-world game does have a few benefits, primarily that it gives you a good sense of both the geography of the various regions in which you find yourself and the scale of said regions. However, the fact remains that as with most other open-world games, there are far too many vast tracts of nothingness, and the few interesting things that are there out in the open world are throwaway distractions that become mind-numbing chores after a while.

The Witcher 3 could have been a much tighter game with a better focus had it taken a similar approach to its two predecessors: set the action in large and interesting but self-contained and more carefully designed zones that don't have any unnecessary fluff in them. As it stands, there's a whole lot of game world in The Witcher 3 that just isn't very interesting and really doesn't need to be there.

2. The Witcher 3 didn't need to be a role-playing game

I'm serious! Despite the game revolving around a man with swords chopping monsters' heads off, I really don't think The Witcher 3 benefits from its RPG mechanics at all. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that they are, by far, its weakest aspect. Combat is boring and formulaic (slash, slash, slash, dodge, Igni/Aard for fire elementals, repeat has gotten me through the whole game so far), the perks you acquire when levelling up don't seem to have particularly noticeable effects, and you spend most of the game fighting the same monsters anyway, only with gradually increasing numbers next to their names, and occasionally with a few extra spikes on their backs.

Then there's the whole dissonance thing in that protagonist Geralt is supposed to be some sort of monster-slaying badass, having survived the considerable trials of two previous games, but here he starts at level 1 again, barely able to hold his own against a drowner until he starts wearing some proper armour.

Chuck out all the RPG elements (including equipment, since once you get one of the sets of Witcher gear you pretty much make everything else in the game completely irrelevant), I say, keep the combat if you absolutely must (for, indeed, the world of The Witcher is a violent place, and fights are inevitable at times) but make it an action game rather than an RPG.

What The Witcher 3 gets right

I mentioned at the start that despite these two pretty major issues I have with the game, it still manages to be an enjoyable, compelling experience. And that's because the more adventure game-type aspects of it — the dialogue, the puzzle-solving, the detective work — are outstanding. I would have been more than happy to have nothing but the main plot of Wild Hunt and maybe a couple of the Witcher Contracts, presented more as a sort of adventure game with combat. Keep the player on a tighter leash when traversing the world, remove the extraneous and unnecessary fluff, and I think it would have been a much better game.

Ultimately all this is moot because The Witcher 3 is still an astoundingly good game that is well worth your time if you have a computer or console capable of running it, but I can't help feeling that some of that time and effort CD Projekt Red expended in making sure that there were just the right amount of trees in the south-west corner of Velen could have been better used for other purposes.

Let's hope they learn some lessons from this game with their upcoming Cyberpunk title, which I'm very excited for, particularly as, believe it or not, there's a throwaway teaser for it in The Witcher 3's main plot.

I've now beaten Wild Hunt's main storyline and I'm feeling like I'm probably just going to make a beeline for the two expansion main storylines without distractions along the way. I'm already at the recommended level to start the second expansion and I've only just started the first, so I feel this may end up actually being the optimal way to experience the game anyway, leaving all the side content available if I feel like just jumping back into the world at a later date to hunt some monsters.

The post 2388: Two Things The Witcher 3 Didn't Need to Be appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I quit Final Fantasy XIV today.

I am sad about this. Really, genuinely sad. The game has been an important part of my life for quite some time now, and will always be special to me — hell, it's where I proposed to my wife.

But I think I'm gone for good this time. I've just had enough.

Not of the game, mind you; the game itself remains one of my favourites, with an enjoyably rhythmic combat system, plenty of distinction between classes and some truly memorable encounters — not to mention an incredible soundtrack and a great story.

No, I've had enough of the people who infest it.

The community's slide into unpleasantness has been a gradual but noticeable process. Whereas I described FFXIV's player base in my USgamer review (circa 2.0-era A Realm Reborn) as one of the most helpful, supportive and friendly communities in gaming, these days I regrettably can't say the same — though I find myself pondering whether or not it's because at the time I wrote that review, I'd only been playing endgame content for a short period.

Let me talk a bit about the incident that drove me over the edge today, then I'll talk a bit in more general terms about what I feel has gone wrong.

A short while back — like, earlier this week — FFXIV introduced a new type of content called Deep Dungeon. This was a completely new way to play the game, and involved descending into a 50-floor dungeon with up to three companions and clearing it out, one randomly generated floor at a time. The rewards on offer include tokens called "potsherds", which can be exchanged for various valuable items, and if you fully upgrade the weapon and armour you use in the Deep Dungeon — these are separate from those which you use in the main game — you get a high-level weapon for a level 60 character that is not quite the very best in the game, but certainly very respectable and suitable for all levels of content.

Upgrading the weapon and armour requires that you find silver treasure chests in the Deep Dungeon. Opening one of these will do one of three things: upgrade your weapon, upgrade your armour or explode, dealing damage to you and anyone unfortunate enough to be standing nearby. The deeper you go into the dungeon, the more likely it seems you are to come across trapped chests, and your weapon's upgrade level is also capped by your character's level within the deep dungeon — also measured independently of progress in the main game. To put it another way: your weapon and armour can go up to level +30, and in order to upgrade them to this level your character must reach level 60 in the Deep Dungeon, though thankfully levelling up is considerably quicker than in the main game.

After completing all 50 floors once, it's likely that your weapon and armour will be around the +10 to +15 mark, depending on how lucky you've been. This means you then have to challenge the dungeon again from floor 1 but with your upgraded gear, hoping you'll get luckier on the deeper floors this time. As incentive to run it again, however, every 10 floors gives you a generous shot of gil as well as Allagan Tomestones of Poetics, Esoterics and Lore, all of which are used to purchase the best level 50 or 60 gear available, so it's not as if running the upper floors again is a useless waste of time. Alternatively, if you enter the Deep Dungeon on a class you don't yet have to level 60 in the main game, completing 10 floors awards you with a large chunk of XP for your character's level in the main game, so it's also a good means of levelling alternative classes.

You may have surmised from that description that this structure puts a lot of pressure on Floors 41-50 to get players up to the magical +30/+30 needed to take away a shiny new weapon into the main game. And indeed, this is where the problems arise, with players doing everything from skipping fights with monsters that they don't feel the party "needs" to fight (despite some players not having reached level 60 at this point, and some enemies dropping treasure chests) to outright Vote Abandon-ing the whole dungeon if they don't feel they got "enough" silver chests in the first couple of floors.

I ran into one of these people today: a white mage, which is to say, a healer, and so an important, useful part of any group. Deep Dungeon, unlike everything else in the game, doesn't matchmake you into a party made up of one tank, one healer and two DPS, so it's entirely possible you'll find yourself running in a group with no healer at times, and as such having a healer in your group is something to be celebrated.

Unless it was this guy. Right from the very start of Floor 41, he ran off in completely the opposite direction to the rest of the party, leaving the remaining three of us to fight off monsters and get afflicted with various status effects that could have easily been cleansed if he had been there. But no; he had places to be, apparently, and finding those silver chests was more important than actually helping the other three people in there.

"Will you PLEASE stop running off?" piped up one of my companions halfway through Floor 42, obviously getting as impatient as I was with this git's shenanigans.

"I'm skipping mobs," replied our friend.

I then pointed out that not everyone in our party was level 60 yet — one was 56, one was 58 — and thus it would be in everyone's interest to kill as many monsters as possible, particularly as it's also necessary to kill a certain number to open the exit to the next floor anyway. He then complained about us being "slow" and "inefficient", and took great umbrage at several of us accusing him of "speedrunning".

Speedrunning is a bit of an issue in Final Fantasy XIV as a whole, particularly in dungeons, most of which are tuned more to the "casual" end of the difficulty spectrum, but nonetheless remain a good source of income for those valuable Tomestones. With a well-geared, confident party that knows what it is doing, most dungeons can be cleared in about 10 minutes or so, but this relies on everyone being both well-geared and confident in the speedrunning process, which usually involves the tank pulling as many enemies as possible at the same time, the healer working overtime to keep their HP topped up and the DPS doing area-effect attacks as much as possible.

It's quick, sure. It's also boring, because more often than not fighting like this means that you use maybe two or three of your complete suite of abilities, and fighting the monsters just becomes a case of standing in place hitting the same buttons over and over for ten minutes. Not interesting, and certainly not doing justice to the impressive encounters the Final Fantasy XIV team have created throughout the game. But no, at some point between 2.0 and 3.35, where we are now, someone somewhere decided that the de facto way to run dungeons was as quickly — sorry, "efficiently" — as possible, and woe betide anyone who slows it down for any reason, even if, say, the tank or healer say they don't feel confident or geared enough to do it.

Now, the thing with Deep Dungeon is that speedrunning is largely pointless, because monsters respawn, everyone needs to level up, you need to kill a certain number of monsters to open the exit to the next floor and, as with any good role-playing game, if you split the party you're probably asking for a bad time. With the levels being randomly generated, too, there's no set route through each floor, either, so you can't even work out a route that lets you avoid certain encounters as in certain fixed dungeons in the game, so it's really more trouble than it's worth.

That didn't stop this obnoxious White Mage from arguing his case increasingly aggressively though, eventually descending to insults about his perception of the rest of the party's skill levels. Hilariously, he even had a go at me on the grounds that I "wouldn't last five minutes in Expert Roulette" (the current two highest difficulty level 60 dungeons, neither of which are very tough) — I chose not to engage with him by explaining that actually, I had been playing the game since its open beta and as such knew it pretty fucking well by this point. Instead, I just voted to dismiss him from the party; my companions silently agreed, and thankfully he was booted shortly afterwards, to be replaced by a much friendlier person who unfortunately wasn't a healer.

This White Mage's attitude is representative of a considerable proportion of Final Fantasy XIV's player base as it stands today: the game, for these people, is about the relentless pursuit of "efficiency" so that they can acquire all the best gear, get all the achievements — achieve whatever they want to achieve, in other words — as quickly as possible then, in all likelihood, go on the official forums and Reddit to complain that three months is too long between content patches and that there's "nothing to do", despite smaller patches with additional features (such as Deep Dungeon, which was a significant addition) being added on a monthly basis.

I also saw this among a number of active Final Fantasy XIV players I used to follow on Twitter. There was a marked shift in their attitude over time; one person in particular that I started following as a result of attending an in-game "funeral" for a player who had sadly passed away in real life began as a very pleasant person to talk about the game with. But gradually over time he started caring more and more about parser figures — a parser being an external program you can run to see how much damage per second (DPS) everyone in the party is doing, a common means of harassing other players for "not pulling their weight" and technically against the game's Terms of Service, though I don't know of anyone who has been punished for it. He'd complain about parties he'd come across in Duty Finder; he'd post images of the parser figures; he'd shame people for not playing "well enough" or being "lazy". That relentless pursuit of "efficiency"; your DPS must be this high to ride.

I just can't stand it any more. It's ruined the game for me. Dungeons that I used to love running, like A Realm Reborn's final storyline dungeons Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium, lose all their drama by people skipping all cutscenes — and yelling at people who don't — and speedrunning their way through as quickly as possible, even if someone in the group hasn't seen this part of the story before. (Not coincidentally, those two dungeons were also the last to have lengthy cutscenes in the middle of the dungeon run.) If I decide I want a leisurely run through a dungeon rather than a stressful but boring speedrun, I get yelled at. If someone in the party makes a mistake and there's a single death, everyone gets yelled at. And apparently not going fast enough in Deep Dungeon is now a cardinal sin, too.

Fuck all that. Fuck everyone who has ruined one of my favourite games of the last few years. And fuck this shitty behaviour being considered "normal" in all games, not just Final Fantasy XIV — indeed, I'm under no illusions, and am well aware that this sort of thing is a problem in all MMOs.

I just thought Final Fantasy XIV's community was better than that. It certainly was once — at least, I think it was. But no longer. The buildup of this crappy behaviour and how not-fun this makes the game for me has led me to both cancel my subscription and uninstall the game completely for the first time ever since open beta. And I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.

The post 2378: People Ruin Everything: FFXIV Edition appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I touched on this the other day, but it bears mentioning again, I think: the community surrounding the RPG Maker series of software packages is one of the most interesting, diverse and helpful communities I've had the pleasure of coming across in all of gaming.

Gaming communities can be a variable bunch. Communities that surround online multiplayer games tend to err somewhat on the side of aggressively arguing that their opinions are the "right" ones and that everyone else is wrong — sometimes even putting players at loggerheads with the developers. Retro-gaming communities are keen to celebrate old games but have an often unspoken code of honour about not sharing pirated versions of software — even though this is sadly the only means of getting to play some older or rarer titles these days. And the Steam forums are just… well, no. Nothing good comes of sticking your head in there.

The RPG Maker community, though, they're some of the most cooperative people I've seen ever. Sure, there's an element of the usual supercilious "Search is your friend!" obnoxiousness on the forums when someone asks a question that might have been answered before six years ago, but this is true for pretty much any Internet community out there, and the help and support the community generally offers for the program is second to none.

It helps that RPG Maker has always been extensible — initially just through graphics and sound in the earlier incarnations, but with more recent installments through Ruby scripts and JavaScript plugins to extend and customise the functionality of the basic engine far beyond what it was originally intended for. Many creators provide these additional bits and pieces either under a completely royalty-free license, or under some variation of Creative Commons, which allows people to use them freely so long as they credit the original creator and, in some cases, don't fiddle around with it and pass it off as their own.

This is extraordinarily generous, and it has always amazed me quite how far people are willing to go to help out the community as a whole — though I'm pleased to see with the rise of Patreon that some of these creators are now able to make a bit of money off their creations through pledges from grateful users, something which was very hit-and-miss when going through PayPal as in the pre-Patreon days.

I know that I'm massively grateful to the RPG Maker community as a whole for providing me with all manner of excellent content to extend the functionality of the program — and helping me feel like I can make the best possible game with the resources I have, rather than having to settle for doing something within limitations. While my silly little game that I'm working on at the moment will doubtless never be anything big or exciting — as I've mentioned before, the very reason for its existence is mostly an in-joke that perhaps only four or five people in the world will understand — I am very happy with how it's looking so far, and how unlike the generic, out-of-the-box RPG Maker engine it looks, just with a few simple changes to the basic mechanics and functionality.

I'm thinking I may well spend next month on MoeGamer covering RPG Maker MV, since it's still relatively new, so watch out for that. In the meantime, I've got games to make!

The post 2374: In Praise of the RPG Maker Community appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I love RPG Maker. I've loved it long before I first used it and was extremely jealous of the American PS1 owners who got to use it on console, and I was thrilled when I first discovered the legendary unofficial localisation of RPG Maker 2000 by Don Miguel. The game I made with moral support from my friends at university, The Adventures of Dave Thunder, was shaping up to be a lot of silly fun — albeit probably far too full of in-jokes to be appreciated by anyone outside my circle of friends — but it was unfortunately lost when my computer at the time suffered a catastrophic system failure. I've never quite forgiven myself for not backing it up.

But I've maintained an interest in RPG Maker ever since, and have fiddled around with numerous incarnations over the years. Most recently, I snagged a copy of RPG Maker MV, the latest version, in the recent Steam sale, and I've been having a play with it. It seems like a lot of fun so far, and a good evolution even from VX Ace, the previous edition.

The basic toolset is almost identical. There's a simple tile-based map editor for you to draw your various locations using tilesets — either those included or those you create yourself in an external art program. On top of that is the Event system, which allows you to place objects and triggers on your map and, constructing pseudo-code through a menu-driven interface, make them do all manner of different things, ranging from being a random NPC wandering around spouting bollocks to a lengthy cutscene event that changes depending on your previous actions in the game.

The basic Event system is very powerful and flexible, but for the last few versions of RPG Maker it's also been supported by the ability to use scripting — actual coding — alongside the pseudo-code created in the Event editor. Previously, RPG Maker used a variation on Ruby for its scripting language; in MV, it's made the change to straight JavaScript, arguably a much more widespread (and easier to learn?) language.

What's particularly nice about MV's scripting support is that it's organised in a completely different way to previous incarnations. Instead of having a huge, daunting Script Editor window where it's possible to completely break your whole game with just one little typo, RPG Maker MV works by using JavaScript plugins. Drop these in the appropriate subfolder of your project, activate them within RPG Maker, configure them as appropriate, then off you go.

It's a simple change, but a very effective one. The fact that each plugin is treated as its own module with its own settings means that plugin creators can create a simple list of parameters that less code-savvy RPG makers can tweak and change without having to even look at any JavaScript whatsoever. Many plugins also have "friendly", easily readable Plugin Commands to trigger various functionality, too — no more "this.enemyType(math.random(floor.bollocks));" or whatever, although you still can perform direct script calls if you so desire.

Best of all, the localisers Degica have embraced the most active members of the RPG Maker community over the years and brought them on board to help out with making RPG Maker MV an excellent package. Legendary RPG Maker scripter Yanfly, for example, has produced a huge number of plugins for MV already, and other well-known contributors to the community such as Archeia have played an important and active role in making RPG Maker MV what looks like the definitive version of RPG Maker… until the next one comes out, of course.

I'm just farting around with it at the moment with no real grand plan in mind; I'm putting together a relatively straightforward game using mostly standard assets as a means of getting my "eye" back in as well as learning MV's new features. It's not going to be anything amazing or revolutionary — going by previous experience, it probably won't be finished, either — but it's providing something fun to do when I want to keep my mind occupied.

The post 2363: EmVee appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've been enjoying The Witcher 3 so far. It's a lovely looking game with an interesting plot, some great characters and a shitload of things to do.

To a certain extent, I almost wish it was an adventure game rather than an RPG.

The reason I say this is that The Witcher 3, much like its predecessors, is at its absolute finest when presenting protagonist Geralt with quests that are much more complex than "go to x and kill y". Which, to be fair, is most of them, since The Witcher has never really done the whole "bring me 15 squirrel ears" thing, thankfully. However, the real highlights of the game are the quests that involve a lengthy investigation of something strange that has been happening.

These quests, of which there are numerous, play out in a similar manner to something like the enormously underrated Murdered: Soul Suspect, requiring you to comb crime scenes for information (perhaps using Geralt's heightened Witcher Senses) and come to some conclusions of your own as to what happened. Many of these quests have branching paths and different consequences for how you choose to proceed in them, too, making for an interesting experience where you never feel like you've made the "wrong" choice.

Since the world of The Witcher is one of dark fantasy, a lot of the things Geralt ends up investigating are pretty gruesome and horrifying. But, as with most people who deal with the unpleasant on a daily basis, Geralt has both a strong stomach and a wry sense of very black humour.

Herein lies one of the biggest strengths of the whole Witcher series when compared to the interminable tedium of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series: personality. Despite the fact you can build Geralt's abilities how you see fit as he levels up, he is a strongly written character in his own right. Sure, there's a certain degree of leeway in how much of an asshole you can be to people throughout, mostly in order to allow for various different conclusions to narrative threads, but even with these options available, Geralt is still a well-defined character who maintains a consistent personality throughout the whole game. Whole series, in fact; he's grown and changed over the course of the three games he's been in to date, but he's still recognisably Geralt.

I'm intrigued to see how well-paced the whole game is. It's entirely possible to avoid the story-based quests altogether and just go hooning around the countryside on horseback looking for "points of interest" to clear, which usually involve killing monsters or bandits, but this gets a bit tiresome after a while. Instead, the best way to play, it seems, is to focus on a quest and where it takes you, pick up any other quests you might find on your way between key locations, and perhaps drop in on any points of interest that come up on your journey if they're not too far out of your way. Attempting to "grind" your way through each of the game's maps by methodically clearing out all the points of interest is clearly a way to drive yourself to insanity, and indeed it's precisely because I did this in Oblivion that I grew to hate the Elder Scrolls games. (Well, that coupled with their complete lack of personality and atrocious storytelling, anyway.) Thankfully, it's not necessary; it takes only a thousand experience points to gain each and every level, and completing quests is by far the most efficient means of getting said experience points, so in many ways the game is actively pushing you towards its most interesting things to do, which is absolutely fine by me.

Been playing for 18 hours so far and Geralt hasn't shagged anyone yet, though; wonder if I'm doing something wrong…

The post 2362: Geralt's Private Dicking appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I took a chance on a peculiar-looking game on Steam the other day. It wasn't a completely blind purchase, since the developer Front Wing were the creators of The Fruit of Grisaia, my favourite visual novel to date, but this looked like an altogether different sort of affair.

Purino Party is a puzzle game with a lightweight visual novel plot, loosely based on Front Wing's Japan-only straightforward visual novels Pure Girl and Innocent Girl. (Indeed, Purino Party reuses a number of event images from both Pure Girl and Innocent Girl, much to the chagrin of those who have read said works, but as someone unfamiliar with them but very much in love with the work of artist Nanaka Mai — who also designed Grisaia's characters — I didn't mind at all.)

The plot is lightweight, stupid fluff straight out of a nukige, which is unsurprising given the source material. You come to a town for a vacation, but are quickly accosted by mysterious local landlord Kei, who decides that your clearly godlike puzzle game skills make you an ideal person to help the girls in her charge realise their potential. (And shag them.) Thus begins a series of eight short stories, each focusing on one of the girls — first the four Pure Girl heroines, then the four Innocent Girl cast members — punctuated with increasingly difficult puzzle game challenges, with your reward being the advancement of the story and a picture to add to your gallery, most of which are lewd. (Most of which are very lewd if you install the optional X-rated patch, which Front Wing have been ballsy enough to link to on their Steam Store page.)

The puzzle gameplay may initially seem to be straightforward Bejeweled-style match three, but it's actually more akin to popular mobile game Puzzle and Dragons in that you can grab a piece and then slide it around the grid as much as you like, displacing other pieces along the way to shift them into advantageous positions, until a 10-second timer expires, at which point you're forced to drop it if you haven't already. Each level gives you a point target that increases with each episode of each girl's story, and a limited number of moves in which to accomplish this score. Later episodes also present you with a time limit, though this isn't normally too much of an issue.

The puzzles are really fun. The way in which you can move pieces around allows you to set up enormous chain-reactions of pieces, and indeed to meet most of the point targets in the game and progress, you'll need to do so. The fact you have ten seconds to move the piece around and displace the rest of the board as you see fit allows you to be strategic and methodical about arranging the pieces to your advantage rather than it simply being a challenge of spotting matches as quickly as possible. There's a touch of randomness that can sometimes screw you over a bit — if you start a round with a bad board layout, there's not a lot you can do — but you can usually mitigate this to a certain extent by taking advantage of the few special mechanics. Firstly, each girl has a "favourite" type of piece that loosely corresponds to their personality or interests, and you get more points for matching or chaining these pieces. Secondly, matching three or more "heart" symbols puts you into Fever mode, accompanied by some thumping cheesy J-pop. During this time, the points you gain are considerably increased; combined with the favourite piece bonus, this is generally the best way to score a lot of points quickly.

Meanwhile, the story is also entertaining. Don't go in expecting an emotional rollercoaster on the level of Grisaia, but each of the characters are endearing and appealing in their own way, and they all have their own personalities and stories to tell. A lot of it tends to descend into sex humour, particularly given that a number of the girls are total perverts, but amid the smuttiness (which, it has to be said, is amusing and curiously charming rather than weird) there are some genuinely funny jokes and some really likeable characters; it's just a shame we don't get to spend much time with them. Though I guess there's always Pure Girl and Innocent Girl to see more of them after the fact — assuming you speak Japanese or can find a suitable translation patch.

Purino Party isn't an amazing game or an amazing visual novel, but it does what it does well. It's lightweight, enjoyable fluff, not meant to be taken seriously in the slightest, and its bright colours, cheery music and immensely endearing characters make it just the sort of thing you can relax with for half an hour when you don't want to do anything too strenuous.

Kanae best girl. And not (just) because she looks a bit like Amane from Grisaia.

The post 2359: Purupurupurino appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've played the first two episodes of Dontnod's adventure game Life is Strange, and I'm enjoying it so far. It remains to be seen whether the whole thing is the life-changing masterpiece some people I know have made it out to be, but it's certainly solid and interesting so far.

It didn't start brilliantly, though this was partly my own fault for deciding to read through all of protagonist Max's diary before actually doing anything. Max's blathering on about how amazing it was to be in a "diverse" school and other such witterings made me recoil at the prospect of an obnoxiously self-righteous heroine, but thankfully the game nipped that in the bud pretty quickly, and Max actually comes across as a likeable individual — a little shy and withdrawn as well as more than a bit nerdy, so eminently relatable to me. Whew. Bullet dodged.

I'm less enamoured with her friend Chloe, who is built up in Max's diary to be some sort of amazing super-friend, and comes across as a spoiled, unnecessarily rebellious jerk when we finally meet her. It's been years since Max and Chloe have seen each other, and Chloe has been through some changes that are perhaps best exemplified by the fact her hair is now blue. Her rebelliousness is at least a little understandable, though; she's dealt with the death of her father and her mother marrying someone else, who so far has been depicted as a bit of a twat — and an abusive, angry twat at that. Unfortunately, Chloe's way of dealing with things just makes her, too, come across as a twat, and I find myself questioning why Max fawns over her at every opportunity, since they are so very different. Still, I guess we'll find out more about Chloe as the series progresses, so I will reserve final judgement on her until we see where this all ends up.

Outside of the Chloe-Max interactions, which are clearly intended to be a centrepiece of the narrative, Life is Strange is solid and enjoyable, being effectively an interactive high school drama, with all the usual frictions and cliquiness that signifies. There are the bitchy cool girls, who Max takes great pleasure in successfully humiliating in the first episode. There's the hot teacher that all the girls fawn over. There's the weird janitor. There's the overly religious, abstinence-preaching girl who stands up for what she believes in even as she gets relentlessly abused by those around her. And like in most good high school drama movies, Max is a relatively inoffensive, pleasant sort of individual who manages to get along with most people if she tries.

Where things get interesting is in Life is Strange's main twist: Max's discovery that she has time-shifting powers. In other words, she is able to rewind time and make use of this fact to her advantage: perhaps she can learn some information, then rewind back before a conversation and use that information when talking to someone. Perhaps she can see the consequences of an action, then rewind and reconsider. Perhaps she can use her powers to save people's lives. The mechanic itself is simple and well executed, and it's used creatively in a variety of places, both to allow you to reconsider your actions, and to resolve various situations.

Being an adventure game of the Telltale-esque mould, Life is Strange is riddled with decision points, some of which are more important than others. Particularly significant decisions tend to be binary in nature, and Max always has something to ponder after making one of these choices. Interestingly, the game's script always manages to make it seem as if the other choice was the "right" one, so there's no real sense that there's a path down which the writers feel like you "should" continue; often, there are no real good choices in particularly difficult situations, so it's a case of deciding how to handle it in the moment.

Life is Strange's setting is presented really nicely. Deliberately eschewing photorealism in favour of a somewhat watercolour-esque aesthetic, there's a lovely vignetting effect on the screen that blurs the edges, and scenery and set dressing is heavily stylised rather than realistic. The characters have a touch of "plastic doll" about them, but this is in keeping with the rest of the aesthetic; a kind of slightly otherworldly appearance, like things just aren't quite right, but where it's hard to put your finger on what is actually wrong.

The writing is good, too. Conversations are believable, riddled with modern slang and authentic modern cultural references. Like Deadly Premonition, the last game I can remember that did this, Life is Strange isn't afraid to namecheck real things — celebrities, movies, books, authors, artists — and does so without feeling like they've been included just to show off how cultured the writers are. Instead, it all feels very natural, and adds to the authentic feeling of the setting as a result.

I'm intrigued to see where the overarching narrative goes. There's clearly something very odd going on with Max, whose power appears to take a physical toll on her, and she also keeps seeing visions of her town being destroyed by an enormous tornado, which presumably will show up (or not?) in the final episode. But alongside this, there are numerous other well-crafted subplots that intertwine with one another nicely, so it will be interesting to see how all these fit together by the end. Aside from a few hitches in the script here and there where you'll figure really obvious things out long before Max does — a common problem in adventure games — the whole thing seems like a very well-crafted narrative experience, and I'm intrigued to see where it ends up, though I kind of hope it doesn't involve Chloe quite as much as I feel like it's probably going to.

The post 2357: Life is Strange appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm a big fan of emulating old systems. There's no substitute for playing on original hardware and having original packaging, of course, but emulation is a relatively straightforward and cost-effective means of enjoying older games without having to brave eBay, thrift stores or exorbitant "collector's" prices.

The legality of emulation is something that has been discussed to death online, so I will sidestep that particular issue for the moment and instead bring your attention to a wonderful tool I've started using recently.

One of the biggest pains with emulation of older systems, particularly if you have a lot of ROM files, is managing and organising all these files, and indeed even knowing what you have available to play. This is a particular issue with old computers, whose disk images tend to contain multiple titles much like the pirated disks "computer clubs" would exchange freely in the '80s and '90s, but given the sheer number of games that have been released for various console platforms over the years, it can be an issue finding what you're looking for even on systems that use media that only contains a single title.

Enter LaunchBox, then, a thoroughly pleasant and well put together front-end for all your emulation… well, no, all your PC-based gaming needs, with a particular emphasis on the emulation of old platforms and operating systems.

Launchbox is, at its heart, a database designed to be filled with records of games with related media files — including ROMs and disk images — attached. It organises software by platform and allows the automatic launching of a particular emulator when selecting a game.

Perhaps its best feature, though, is its online connectivity, which allows it to connect to various online services, including its own online database, Wikipedia and Emumovies, and download all manner of supporting media for each game, where available. This supporting media ranges from simple box art and PDFs of the original manuals to music, movies and fanart of the games. By importing all your ROM files into LaunchBox, you can quickly and easily build up a full gaming database and automatically populate it with relevant information about pretty much any game you'd care to name; any game that doesn't get automatically populated with information can either be corrected yourself or manually searched in case it was stored online under different details.

This makes LaunchBox an excellent resource both for organising your collection and learning about titles you might not be familiar with — particularly those from other territories. The brief blurb LaunchBox provides for supported titles gives a good synopsis of what the game is all about and what to expect from it, and from there it's a simple matter to double-click the game in your collection and be playing it in a suitable emulator almost immediately. LaunchBox even recommends and provides download links to emulators for the most popular platforms and can automatically set them up for you; it also comes bundled with the wonderful DOSBox, which enables you to play old DOS-based games on modern Windows computers.

While I'd still prefer to have a wall full of original packaging and games playable on their original systems, that's not an especially cost-effective thing for me to do right now. So LaunchBox is very much scratching my "collector's" itch until I'm in a position to put together an actual physical collection. And in the meantime, it's turned my PC into pretty much the ultimate games console ever.

The post 2356: Packing a LaunchBox appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

To my surprise, the game I'm enjoying most out of the Neo Geo collection I got recently is Neo Turf Masters, a golf game. Now, I'm not averse to a good golf game at the best of times, but I'm really surprised and impressed with how well Neo Turf Masters adapts the standard golf game format to a (relatively) fast-paced, challenging arcade format. It really works!

Neo Turf Masters is pretty simple and straightforward as far as golf games go. You don't have to worry about things like elevation when driving your way up the fairway, just smack the ball in the right direction and make sure it doesn't land in places it shouldn't. When it's on the green, line up with the hole and hit the button when your power meter is around the same point as the handy mark showing where you should hit it. Repeat.

It's refreshingly simple, even as the more cartoony golf games (such as Sony's Everybody's Golf series) adopt more complex mechanics, and it works really well for a quick game of golf. Despite the simplicity of the basic mechanics, the game instead provides most of its challenge through some surprisingly fiendish course designs and an extremely unforgiving structure designed to keep you pumping coins into the arcade original version. (Of course, on the port you can simply continue as many times as you like, but this isn't really in the spirit of playing arcade games.)

No, Neo Turf Masters' biggest challenge comes from its unusual "lives" system. You begin the game with 3 lives or "holes" and spend one of these lives any time you get a Par. (For the non golfing-literate, this means putting the ball in the hole in the exact number of shots the hole's Par says.) If you get a Bogey (one more shot than the Par) you spend an extra hole on top of this. But if you get a Birdie (one fewer shot than the Par) you not only don't lose the hole, you get an extra one to add to your stock. I haven't seen what happens if you do worse than a Bogey or better than a Birdie because my skills at Neo Turf Masters are thoroughly average.

I really like this system, though. It has the arcadey addictive quality of wanting to "1cc" (1 Credit Clear) it without using the Continue function, but considering I can only make it to about hole 4 or so before getting a Game Over, I feel it may be a while before I can manage a full round yet. Still, this is a game designed very much in the old-school mould, where you couldn't just plough through it from start to finish — you had to get good at it. And that's fine! If you could just hammer straight through it would be back on the shelf in less than a couple of hours; with only four courses on offer, there's not a lot of "content" (as modern gamers like to say) here, but it will sure as hell take you a while to master the game and its courses enough to be able to clear each of them.

Easy to pick up, difficult to master, then; something of a mantra for retro games, arcade games in particular, and I can see that the Neo Geo library, regardless of genre, very much seems to be designed around this particular philosophy. And I like it!

The post 2349: Arcade Golf...? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I beat Ys Seven tonight. That leaves just one more Ys game to play through before I've beaten every one of the currently available games in the series, making me eminently ready for Ys VIII, whenever that makes its way West, because it almost certainly (hopefully) will.

Ys Seven is an interesting change after the three games built on the Ys VI engine — Ys VI, Oath in Felghana and Ys Origin. I kind of miss some of the defining aspects of those three games — most notably the platforming elements, which are completely absent from Seven — but Seven very much does its own thing and takes ownership of it, creating an experience that is satisfying in its own right, even if it's a slightly jarring change of pace initially.

The first thing to note about Ys Seven is that it's at least twice the length of previous Ys games. This still puts it at well under the average length of a typical JRPG these days — it took me 24 hours to beat on Normal — but makes it feel significantly longer than the previous titles. This isn't a bad thing, though; along with the greater length comes greater scope: Ys Seven's narrative feels more ambitious and, for want of a better word, epic than its predecessors; while past Ys games felt very much like you were taking care of business in a small, localised area, Ys Seven does a good job of making you feel like the fate of a whole country is at stake. There's a sprawling overworld to explore, and several villages, each with their own unique aesthetic.

This rather more sprawling scale comes at a slight cost: while past Ys games' small geographical area meant that pretty much every character in the game had a name and a story to tell, Ys Seven's NPCs, for the most part, feel quite a bit more generic. This is partly due to the fact that none of them have names, instead being called things like "Obliging Maid" and suchlike — with the curious exception of questgivers, who all have very Western names like "Kevin Lassiter" — but I suppose it does help keep the focus on the main cast, which, in keeping with the rest of the experience, is significantly bigger than previous Ys games.

Even your party is bigger. Adol is no longer alone, bringing up to two companions in tow this time, and there's a reason for this: enemies now have various resistances, meaning you need a balanced party that can cover all types of damage, otherwise you simply won't be able to kill some enemies. For most of the game, there's little reason to switch out from the default party of Adol, longtime companion (but first time playable) Dogi and whoever fills the third slot at that point in the party, but upon reaching the final boss the reason for the total squad size being seven members becomes clear. Be sure to keep everyone's equipment up to date — thankfully, inactive characters gain experience at the same rate as the front line, so there's no need to go out of your way to grind too much.

One aspect of the game that feels very different comes when you're fighting a boss. Whereas in past Ys games boss fights were almost puzzles and dexterity challenges, where you'd have to dodge incoming attacks and take advantage of openings, Ys Seven's bosses are often damage sponges that, at least on Normal difficulty, feel like they can be beaten more through brute force than anything. On the harder difficulty levels I can see them being stiffer challenges, because you're more limited in the healing items you can carry, but certainly on Normal, I could get through most bosses without too much difficulty by just making sure I had enough potions on hand. It wasn't until the final boss, which has significantly more complex mechanics than any of the other fights in the game, that I found myself having to be a bit more careful with what I was doing.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing; Ys Seven's boss fights are enjoyably hard work and feel like you're struggling against a powerful opponent. Like a lot of other things in the game, though, coming straight off Oath in Felghana, Origin and Ark of Napishtim, it's a bit of an adjustment for sure.

Above all, though, Ys Seven keeps the heart of Ys firmly intact. It's wonderfully sincere about everything, but isn't afraid to show a sense of humour now and again. That said, it's overall considerably darker than any of the previous installments, particularly around the middle of the story, giving it a distinctive feel. It's not overly grimdark or anything — it's still a bright, colourful, earnest quest featuring a silent protagonist who quite literally lives for adventure — but it was a little surprising to see things like a shirtless Adol getting tortured in a jail cell after a particularly dramatic revelation partway through.

I enjoyed it a lot, in other words. Now I just have Memories of Celceta to go and I'm up to date. And then I will have to physically restrain myself from going back to the beginning and doing a Nightmare run, I feel…

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I've been playing a bunch of VA-11 HALL-A over the last couple of days, and I adore it. You can see some random screenshots and thoughts over on my Pile of Shame microblog.

I also wrote a review on Steam for it earlier, so I figured rather than spending time thinking of a different way to write the same enthusiastic words, I'd simply share it here, too.

I've been waiting to play the full version of this for quite some time now, ever since the very early demo enraptured me with its snappy writing, strong characterisation and wonderfully distinctive take on the dystopian future setting. And I'm delighted that the full version has, so far, surpassed all my expectations and hopes.

VA-11 Hall-A is kind of hard to pin down. At heart, it's basically a visual novel, but rather than making binary choices that filter you off down one of several discrete routes, the choices you make as protagonist Jill when going about her daily life at home and at work affect what happens next in the story, including the characters you encounter, how Jill gets along with her clients and co-workers and how everyone reacts to the events unfolding in the backdrop.

Interestingly, VA-11 Hall-A presents its overarching narrative almost entirely from the perspective of Jill behind the bar and in her apartment. Significant things happen in the world, but you don't see them directly; instead, you tend to see the people involved immediately before and/or after the events, or read about them on the news web pages and forums the morning after. Sometimes whether or not you dosed them up with alcohol before the event in which they were involved has an effect, too; prepare to feel guilty if that happens!

To give too many examples would be to spoil the experience, so I'll leave it at this: VA-11 Hall-A does a much better job of almost any visual novel I can name at making its world feel "alive" and like the actions you take actually matter, rather than simply picking a route through the story. There's nothing wrong with the latter approach, of course, but this way of doing things helps keep the people who expect a bit more in the way of traditional "gameplay" happy as well as those of us who are along for the ride primarily from a narrative perspective.

To sum up: great writing, wonderful characterisation, superb music and a glorious, beautiful PC-88 style aesthetic (with perfect pixel aspect ratio even scaled up to 1920×1080) makes for an absolutely lovely, unconventional and entirely memorable game.

I adore VA-11 Hall-A and pray with all my heart that it sees the success it deserves, both here on Steam and elsewhere on the Internet.

I haven't yet finished a playthrough, but you better believe when I do there will be some detailed thoughts and feelings about the whole thing going up either here or over on MoeGamer (from which my previous article on the game's demo is quoted on the Steam store page! Awesome!) — so watch out for those.

This is exactly the sort of highly creative, wonderfully inventive, beautifully presented and sharply written stuff I love to see from the indie scene. And I hope it becomes the sensation it sincerely deserves to be.

Find out more about the game and buy it — please, please, please buy it — on the official site.

The post 2346: Please Buy VA-11 HALL-A appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I went over to my friend Tim's house this evening for our semi-regular games and food event that we at least attempt to have on a fortnightly basis. Tonight it was just three out of our usual five members, so we spent the evening playing VR games on Tim's HTC Vive.

The most interesting experience we had was with a game called Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, which I've been curious to try for a while. This is a game that doesn't actually need VR to play, but keeping one player quasi-isolated with a VR headset adds a great deal to the experience and makes it considerably more fun. It'll be even better when full support for the Vive controllers is added; at present, the room-scale movement works, but you have to interact with it using a standard gamepad.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a party puzzle game in the Spaceteam mould in that it's asymmetrical in terms of player roles and requires good communication in order to be successful. The player with the VR headset on is faced with a bomb consisting of a number of discrete modules, while all the other players (which can be literally as many as you want) are "experts" telling the VR player what to do. The twist? The "experts" can't see the bomb, so the VR player has to describe what they see in the hope that the experts can decipher the rather garbled instruction manual and make the correct decisions.

The bombs start off simple with modules such as collections of wires, which require you to read a sequence of logical statements and cut the appropriate wire according to which one is true. There are also buttons that require you to first of all determine a specific condition and then, in some cases, press and release the button with appropriate timing. These are pretty easy to work out and execute.

The more complicated modules range from a memory test that requires you to push buttons according to one of four logical statements, some of which refer to things you did in previous steps, to working out a five-letter password using the available letters in each position to determine what it's most likely to be from a list of possibilities. Then there's a more advanced wire-cutting exercise that requires deciphering a ridiculous Venn diagram according to the colour of the wire and whether or not lights and stars are lit up, and a maze that the VR player has to navigate without being able to see where the walls are.

After a little while, it's possible to "learn" how all these modules work, so at this point the game starts introducing distractions. Initially these are simple: the lights occasionally go off, meaning that you can't see the bomb (but can still interact with it if you remember what you're doing), or an alarm clock starts bleeping obtrusively. Later there are so-called "needy modules" on the bomb which can't be disabled and keep doing inconvenient things during your defusing attempts, so you have to divide your time between taking care of these persistent pests and making progress on the actual disposal effort.

I really liked it as a game. It's simple and intuitive to play, surprisingly immersive as both the "experts" and as the VR player, and has a real, genuine sense of tension to it all. Some of the modules are pretty difficult to work with — the Morse code one being the worst by far — but what's a game without challenge?

I'm glad we gave it a go, and I'm looking forward to playing it again sometime soon. If you're lucky enough to have a VR headset and at least one friend, I recommend grabbing a copy. Even if you don't have a VR headset, for that matter, it's worth a play — just make sure your "expert" players can't see your screen!

The post 2345: Keep Talking appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It occurred to me a few days ago that I had a go in Virtual Reality recently and didn't write about it. Let's rectify that right now.

My friends Tim and Tom both grabbed the HTC Vive pretty much as soon as it became available, because both of them have disposable income and a gaming-related gadget fetish. Last week, I finally had the opportunity to give Tim's setup a go. And I came away rather more impressed with the whole thing than I was expecting to be.

The Vive headset itself is surprisingly comfortable and not ridiculously bulky like the Virtuality headsets of the '90s, which were my only previous experience with VR. The picture quality was reasonably good, too — certainly a far cry from the Virtuality screens, which felt like holding two Atari Lynxes up to your face — but I did find it a little tricky to position the headset absolutely perfectly so that everything on the display was in focus; I found stuff around the edges (particularly the lower edge) was difficult to remove the blurriness from, but I adjusted to it after a little while.

The first thing I tried was the Vive "training" setup, which gives you some examples of how to interact with virtual worlds using the headset and the two Vive controllers. It introduces you to the idea of "room scale" play — the ability to actually physically move around and have your body movements accurately reflected in your virtual viewpoint — and how the Vive controllers offer 1:1 motion tracking that is so accurate, even though you can't see your own hands while you have the headset on, you can still reach out, grab the controllers and press the buttons without any difficulty.

I think the most immediately striking thing about the Vive's VR is the room scale thing, which is, after all, that particular setup's unique gimmick. I was very surprised how natural it felt; there was no kind of input lag when moving my head around, nor when I moved my body; I could tell I wasn't actually in the location I was looking at, due to the lack of tactile feedback in the environment, but I could move around and interact with things as easily as I could in the real world. Particularly impressive in the training demo was the part where you inflate balloons using the controllers, and can then hit them around the room as if they were right there. Again, there was no tactile feedback, but the accuracy of the motion tracking was such that I could intuitively reach out to hit them with a controller, and they would react appropriately. Impressive.

The next thing I tried was Space Pirate Trainer, which is one of the first games to come out on the platform. It's a very simple affair that sees you standing on a platform wielding two pistols and having to shoot down waves of drones that pop up from all sides. The pistols can be switched to various different fire modes, and you can physically dodge the incoming laser bolts from the drones to avoid being hit.

This latter aspect was the thing I found most unusual and surprising to adjust to. I've played games that involve physical movement before — primarily on the Wii, but a couple of EyeToy and Kinect games, too — but I've never played a game where you can see a bullet flying at your face and actually lean out of the way of it. I mean, sometimes I instinctively do it when playing Overwatch (I can't help it!) but in Space Pirate Trainer you actually have to do it in order to survive. And it's not a Time Crisis-style situation where you can either be "hiding" or "shooting" — you can position yourself how you please. You can kneel down to crouch under the shots. You can sidestep them. You could probably even jump over them if you tried. It's kind of amazing, although the game itself is fairly bare-bones, to say the least.

Next up I tried Google's VR art package Tiltbrush. This is actually one of the things I was most interested to try, despite it being utterly "directionless" — it is what you make of it, in other words.

Essentially, Tiltbrush allows you to paint in 3D using various materials. The left Vive controller acts as an artist's palette with several sides, and the right Vive controller acts as your paintbrush and cursor to pick things from the palette. You can then paint with light, colour, fire and various other substances, then the truly impressive part is that you can physically walk around your creation in 3D to admire it from all angles. By extension, this also means that you can create 3D sculptures rather than just flat paintings, and indeed many of the example materials produced by both Google and the community are designed with this in mind. What's really nice about them, too, is that loading them up allows you to watch a recording of the exact strokes and steps they took to create the finished product; it can be fascinating to watch and, moreover, give you some ideas of your own on how to make some interesting designs.

Last of all, I tried Audioshield, a game by the developer of the excellent Audiosurf, and a game designed in the same mould: create levels from your own music tracks or those pulled from Soundcloud, then play through them. In the case of Audioshield, you wield two different coloured shields, one in each hand, and have to block incoming coloured balls that reach you in time with the beats and sounds in the music. While there's less moving around than something like Space Pirate Trainer — the balls only come from one side, though you will have to look up and down — it's probably the most "physical"-feeling of the games I played, in that there was a very strong urge to "punch" the balls (hurr) as they arrived, rather than just blocking them. Indeed, the game rewards you for actually doing this, as well as moving around more than is necessary ("dancing", in the loosest possible sense of the word, in that convulsing like a spastic having an epileptic fit while in anaphylactic shock will also get you credit)  to actually block the incoming beats.

By the time I took the Vive headset off, I was actually sweating. The various games — particularly Audioshield — proved to be a surprisingly intense workout, although the foam thing on the headset that goes around your eye area also seems to just naturally get a bit sweaty. (That and Tim's flat is usually the temperature of the Sun.) I'd had a great time, and I came away much more convinced that VR is something that is going to be really cool in the near future than I had previously been. I'm still not necessarily convinced it's the future of gaming as some seem to think, but I'm certainly completely on board for experiences like Tiltbrush and its ilk.

I'm very interested to see how the launch of PlayStation VR in October of this year affects the VR landscape in general. I have a strong suspicion that it will help drive the technology into the "mainstream", and we'll start seeing a lot more interesting products than the current swathe of what are effectively tech demos that we have now. Very impressive, fun tech demos, admittedly — tech demos that make me kinda want a Vive of my own — but tech demos nonetheless.

So yes. VR looks like it's going to be around for a while yet; we finally have the technology that allows us to have fairly convincing experiences in our own home, which is considerably more than can be said for the last time VR tried to be a thing back in the '90s.

The post 2342: A Belated Account of My First VR Experience appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I remember when GOG.com — or Good Old Games, as it was originally known — first launched. It was an exciting moment, because it promised to be a storefront absolutely filled with PC games from my childhood. PC games that it had previously been near-impossible to 1) acquire in the modern era and 2) get running on modern computers. (Okay, 2 was less of an issue because DOSBox was already a thing by then, but 1 was a problem, at least, and not everyone knew how to set up DOSBox properly.)

I've kept my GOG.com account since launch, and just recently I find myself starting to drift more and more towards them and away from Steam. I'm not going to abandon my Steam account, obviously, since there are several hundred games in there, but GOG is starting to prove itself to be a real contender in the online digital storefront battlefield.

The GOG.com of today is a little different from when it launched, as its change in name will attest. Rather than focusing entirely on retro PC games, GOG.com now provides a mix of both retro and modern titles, and has recently even started doing "Early Access"-style games, though not to the same degree as Steam.

In fact, "not to the same degree as Steam" is a running pattern when it comes to GOG, and the platform is benefiting from it. While Steam is presently suffering from a deluge of low-quality titles released on a seemingly daily basis — the mobile app store problem, now for your home computer! — GOG.com's marketplace is considerably more curated than Steam, and the few Early Access titles that are up on GOG are already decent quality rather than shovelware thrown out with an Early Access tag in an attempt to excuse shittiness.

In other words, discovering new games on GOG.com is a lot less of an issue than on the Steam of 2016 because you don't have to pick through pages and pages of shitty Eastern European games with "Simulator" in the title, or perpetually Early Access Minecraft knockoffs, or games by people who don't understand what the fundamentally appealing elements of pixel art are, or… you get the idea. This isn't to say that there isn't some shit on GOG, of course, but it's far from the flood of effluent that Steam has been suffering from for a while.

And then there's GOG's new client, Galaxy. While still lacking a few features to put it on parity with Steam's well-established client — most notably an in-game overlay for chat, achievements and web browsing — it's a very good start, offering a well organised, nicely presented game library and features like playtime recording and a datestamp for the last time you played a particular title. Perhaps most notably — and most understandably, given GOG.com's original pledge, which still holds true today, to remain a DRM-free digital storefront — is the opportunity to both automatically install games through the client a la steam and download DRM-free standalone installers for each and every game on the platform for backing up onto physical media or other hard drives. Coupled with the fact that GOG games often come with a variety of digital extras including manuals, soundtracks, artwork and all manner of other goodies, this is the next best thing to a physical copy — and if you feel strongly enough, you can even burn these installers to a CD or DVD and make your own physical copy using the materials provided. (I'm probably going to do this for the Ys games; I like them enough to want them on my actual shelves.)

GOG's summer sale has also been excellent, with deep, generous discounts on a variety of games as well as a fun metagame that was very generous with its prizes. Rather than providing useless shit like emojis, profile backgrounds and trading cards like Steam, GOG's summer sale metagame sees you earning experience points with each purchase and action performed on the site, with three free games on offer at various XP milestones. And they're good games, too — specifically, Spelunky, Gabriel Knight Anniversary Edition and Dreamfall Chapters.

I anticipate I'm going to be using GOG.com a lot more in the near future; there's still work to be done — some games promise achievements but they haven't been implemented yet, for example — but the future looks bright for this growing storefront that refuses to compromise its principles.

Keep it up, GOG; you've got a loyal customer in me.

The post 2340: The Rise of GOG appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I finished Ys: The Oath in Felghana tonight, after a bit less swearing at the initially unassailable-seeming final boss than I anticipated.

That was an absolutely brilliant game. Well-paced, enjoyable to play, challenging but never insurmountable and certainly didn't outstay its welcome; my game clock read just over 12 hours at the end, although GOG Galaxy claims I actually played it for 24 hours, which can probably be accounted for with a number of boss fights that took a significant number of attempts to clear.

Make no mistake, Oath was a difficult game, but it never felt overly punishing. Indeed, any time that I found myself staring at a Game Over screen, I always knew that it was my fault. Specifically, it was usually the result of overconfidence: charging headlong into a group of powerful enemies, hoping to obliterate them all quickly and gain a ton of XP, but instead getting torn to shreds. Or, in the case of boss fights, it was a matter of learning the attack patterns and then being able to execute suitable countermeasures.

The boss fights were a particular highlight, because they featured an absolute ton of variety and mechanics to pay attention to. The first couple of bosses were very much about dodging and timing, while others were about inventive use of your skills to avoid damage. What I particularly liked were the several encounters that initially seemed absolutely impossible to complete, but which after a bit of practice and careful observation proved to be somewhat less of a problem than I initially believed they would be.

Oath is old-school in its sensibilities in that failure is part of the experience. When you first encounter a boss, you pretty much need to fail in order to understand what it's doing and how it affects you. I've said this before, but in many ways it reminds me of fighting fast-paced versions of Final Fantasy XIV bosses: all mechanics can be countered and dealt with in some way, whether that's through dodging, skill use or various ways of protecting yourself. There are always clear visual and auditory cues as to what's about to happen, allowing you to prepare yourself appropriately, and in situations where you're expected to perform more complex actions such as switching between skills in the heat of battle, the encounters are designed in such a way that you always have time to perform the actions you need to rather than suffering under a relentless assault. Indeed, it's certainly possible to defeat the final boss without taking any damage because there's an Achievement for doing so, and I imagine most of the others can also be handled in such a manner.

I also enjoyed the plot a great deal. While I missed the presence of Feena and Reah from Ys I, II and Origin, the new characters were well-defined and interesting. The villains in particular had some interesting plot arcs, and the game threw up several unexpected curveballs towards its conclusion.

Character highlights for me included series recurring character Dogi, who despite being big enough to crush walls comes across as one of the nicest people in the world, and this game's vaguely implied romantic interest Elena, who was both adorably cute and a genuinely likeable character. I felt a bit bad leaving her behind at the end of the game, but I'm getting the impression protagonist Adol is a bit of a player; I'm anticipating a variety of other cute girls over the course of the games in the series that I'm yet to play.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again; I'm sorry that I haven't checked out this series sooner. I'm having an absolute blast with it, and I'm very much looking forward to the upcoming Ys VIII, which I'll be very surprised if we don't see come West courtesy of Xseed Games in the near future. Given how much I've enjoyed the series so far, I feel fairly confident saying that I'll probably be there day one when it finally comes out.

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I started Ys: The Oath in Felghana today after finishing the main story of Ys Origin. (I do intend to go back and replay Origin on the harder difficulties as well as grind through its extra modes and unlockables, but that will be a gradual process!) So far I've played about two hours or so into the main story, beaten four bosses and yelled more curse words at a game than I can remember doing for a very long time.

Oath in Felghana is hard. Really hard. Like, really really hard. I did not know this going in, so feeling quite confident off the back of clearing Ys Origin (which was challenging, but not mega-hard) I thought I'd start Oath on Hard rather than Normal.

I started to think that I had maybe made the wrong decision when the first boss took me a good ten attempts. When the second one took me probably twenty or thirty tries — including having to stop after a few attempts because I was getting pretty wound up by the whole thing — I seriously considered restarting on Normal or Easy, but my pride prevented me from doing so.

Then I beat that boss, and I remembered what I had discovered during my first runthrough of Ys Origin. Ys games, so far as I can tell, are not games intended to be breezed through without any resistance whatsoever. They're short, yes, but whenever their diminutive length is quoted, it isn't taking into account all the times you'll have to retry the difficult bits. Because you'll have to retry the difficult bits a lot. In other words, Ys Origin and Oath in Felghana may well be "10 hours long", but that figure assumes that you'll beat all the bosses first time and won't make any stupid mistakes while exploring lava-covered ruins. And I can assure you that you won't beat all the bosses first time, and you most certainly will make stupid mistakes while exploring lava-covered ruins.

This difficulty makes it all the more satisfying, though. There's a feeling of genuine "release" when you finally overcome a difficult challenge, and much like Ys Origin, I've found that while the bosses in particular are difficult, you'll almost certainly find yourself getting a little bit further each and every time you try, rather than stagnating with absolutely no idea whatsoever what to do. Oath, like Origin, is so well designed that it manages to "train" you how to beat its bosses without giving you any explicit instructions. The animation and sound cues, the attack patterns, the overall "rhythm" of the encounters — all of them are carefully tuned to make each encounter surprisingly intuitive, and while many of them aren't especially complicated in terms of mechanics, you'll need to practice in order to perform what the game is asking of you flawlessly. And you will need to be as close to flawless as possible, because Oath in particular is very unforgiving.

It's funny. The Souls series kicking my ass and forcing me to learn encounters is one of the things that ended up putting me off it, but I'm really enjoying it in the Ys series. This leads me to believe that it's perhaps not this actual style of game that puts me off, but the aesthetic; Ys is colourful, cheerful and energetic, while Souls is dark, dreary and depressing. While there's a time and place for dark, dreary and depressing, I tend to prefer that sort of thing in my survival horrors and adventure games; when I'm RPGing, I want to be heroic in a colourful fantasy land filled with pretty girls. And Oath in Felghana is certainly delivering on all fronts so far.

The post 2336: From the Shores of Felghana appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I finished Ys Origin's true route this evening, and if the first two games hadn't already convinced me this is a series that will stay with me a long time, that ending would have certainly done it. The way it establishes the backstory of things that are just a matter of course in Ys I and II is beautiful, and it brings a whole new layer of meaning to the overarching storyline and mythology of the series. I'm looking forward to seeing how — if? — this mythology fits into the games I'm yet to play.

The thing that's struck me most from these three games in the series that I've played so far is how beautifully the goddesses Reah and Feena are handled. It's hard to tell whether this is the work of the original Japanese script or Xseed's excellent localisation, but either way, they're wonderfully depicted characters that act as an important centrepiece to these three episodes of the overall storyline.

The most striking thing about them is how overwhelmingly nice they are. And I don't mean in a bland, uninteresting way; both Reah and Feena are convincingly friendly, approachable characters despite being divine beings, and there's a decent amount of the backstory in Ys Origin in particular that deals with their loneliness and desire to have friends among the humans rather than being revered as the powerful beings they are. Indeed, even in Ys I where series protagonist Adol Christin encounters an apparently amnesiac Feena, she seems keen to cling on to him and develop a close personal relationship.

They're a study in contrasts, too, despite being similar in appearance and bearing. Feena is kind and gentle — the sort of person it would probably be nice to have a hug from. Reah, meanwhile, is more willful and stubborn, but counterbalances this with a similarly graceful demeanour and a desire to always be hospitable to those who have the confidence to approach and address her. They make a good pair, and while we don't see a huge amount of either of them in the first two Ys games, this is more than made up for in Ys Origin, where we get to spend quite a bit of time with both of them.

Perhaps the nicest thing about them is the feeling that the Ysian religion, based on following the teachings of the Six Priests and worshipping Feena and Reah, is both plausible as a belief system and comforting. It's not infallible, by any means, either — indeed, Toal comments to the goddesses in Ys Origin that they are "barely even half perfect", and it's partly everything the goddesses and their helpers put in place that led to the apocalyptic situation that greets you from the outset of Ys Origin — but it's obvious that the goddesses, both as people and as mythological figures, bring great comfort to the populace. In a world where JRPGs in particular often take rather ruthless aim at religion as part of their narratives, highlighting the negative aspects rather than the positives, the Ysian approach to belief systems is almost refreshing.

I think that sums up the tone of the series quite nicely, too. While there's plenty of darkness, evil and unpleasantness going on — arguably more so in Ys Origin than in I and II — there's an overall warm feeling to the series that brings to mind comforting childhood stories like fairy tales and fables. I anticipate that this feeling will become stronger as I spend more time with regular series protagonist Adol in the subsequent games, but the three distinct stories in Ys Origin unfolded in a compelling, interesting manner, too; they presented a convincing back story to what unfolds 700 years later in Ys I and II, and I'm left with an almost overwhelming desire to immediately go back and play I and II again having seen what Origins' story had to offer.

I'll save that for now, though; I've still got Oath in Felghana, Ys VI, Ys Seven and Memories of Celceta to get through. And I'm looking forward to all of them.

The post 2335: Goddesses appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Patch day for Final Fantasy XIV today, and it seems like a good one so far. I haven't yet delved into absolutely everything on offer — partly because I went out for the evening — but what I've seen so far is pretty great.

Of particular note is The Final Steps of Faith, the big new Trial for this patch. This sees players taking on the mighty Nidhogg in a battle to the death as he brings the full force of his rage down on Ishgard and those he believes to have betrayed him.

The Final Steps of Faith is a cool fight, because — at the moment, anyway — it's genuinely challenging, even in its story mode incarnation. It's not excessively difficult by any means — the challenge factor comes from the fact that you actually have to pay attention to mechanics and can't just cheese your way through it. I'm all for this; while there's a certain amount of pleasure in being able to overpower old content with top-end gear, it's always a bit of a disappointment when fights that were once challenging, exciting and dramatic become a matter of simply soaking up all the damage being thrown at you and repeatedly smacking the enemy in the teeth.

I'm sure this situation won't last with The Final Steps of Faith, but for now it's nice to have an important storyline fight carry the appropriate amount of drama for the context.

This got me thinking back to the reasonably hefty amount of time I spent playing World of Warcraft, and how that game never quite got me feeling excited about combat. Things got a little better when I went a bit crazy modding the game's UI and added a "Jukebox" mod that allowed you to play music in combat, but it still never felt quite the same as an exciting encounter in a single-player RPG.

Final Fantasy XIV, meanwhile, absolutely nails the drama aspect. While the movement-heavy nature of combat means that it's not able to include the sort of cinematic camera work that people have associated with Final Fantasy since VII hit PS1s all those years ago, the combination of amazing music, gorgeously spectacular visual effects and a genuine feeling that you're struggling against a foe of unimaginable power help make the game's most important fights shine as some of the most memorable things I've ever done in a game — and certainly in an online game.

I've now finished the main story (and the enjoyable, optional "post-story" quest, which had a really heartwarming ending) so I find myself pondering what's next for Heavensward. While this patch brings the Dragonsong War plot arc to a close, there are still some unresolved threads that are clearly going to be tugged at further in the next couple of patches, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing how the stakes will be raised towards some sort of dramatic showdown that will inevitably lead into the next full expansion pack.

And in the meantime, I hear those bloody Moogles need some help with their crafting…

The post 2331: Revenge of the Horde appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I finished my first playthrough of Ys Origin earlier. I chose to play through for the first time with Yunica Tovah, who apparently handles most like Adol in the subsequent 3D Ys games, but now I'm going through it again with Hugo Fact, who plays impressively differently.

One thing that struck me with Ys II in particular, and it appears to be a pattern that continues with Origin and its ilk, is how much shoot 'em up DNA is in this series. Numerous bosses have distinctly "bullet hell"-style attacks requiring intricate dodging and pattern recognition, for example, but this connection is most obvious when playing Origin as Hugo, since even his basic attack involves firing bullets. Hell, he even has two "options" (sorry, "The Eyes of Fact") floating either side of him to fire additional bullets, which double in number when he uses Boost mode.

It's interesting quite how different a feel this contrasting playstyle provides, since you're otherwise going through pretty much the same levels and boss fights as in Yunica's story, albeit with different cutscenes and a few minor changes here and there. Boss fights in particular are a very different affair when playing as Hugo, since rather than it being necessary to get in melee range as with Yunica, as Hugo you have to play a lot more defensively, attacking from range in suitable openings and taking great care to avoid attacks, since Hugo is considerably squishier than Yunica is. Not only that, but Hugo's individual attacks do quite a bit less damage than Yunica's axe and sword swings, though he makes up for this by being able to attack 1) from a distance and 2) much more rapidly than Yunica.

I'm also playing this second runthrough on Hard difficulty; I'm not quite brave enough for the series' signature Nightmare difficulty yet, but I thought I'd step things up for Hugo, since I felt pretty confident with Yunica by the end of my first playthrough. It's noticeably harder, particularly when it comes to boss fights. I'm not entirely sure if this is down to enemies' boosted stats or simply the different way Hugo plays that I haven't quite gotten used to yet, but I'm finding myself having to retry boss fights more times than I did on Normal with Yunica.

One of the things I like about Ys Origin so far is that although the boss fights are very difficult, I don't think there's been a single encounter in the game where I felt like I was beating my head against a wall. In other words, although I might fail a boss fight several times in succession, I'd make noticeable progress each time, chipping away a little further at the enemy life bar each time until I was eventually successful. It's a matter of practice and skill rather than luck; in some ways, it reminds me quite a bit of Final Fantasy XIV raid bosses, where you need to know what's going to happen in the fight before you can even think about being successful; flailing wildly isn't going to work, at all.

Anyway. I'm keen to get through Ys Origin for a second time with Hugo, and then polish it off a third time with the "secret" third character, whose story is quite a bit different from Yunica and Hugo's, from what I understand. By playing all three stories, you get the full narrative; this is an approach that some people find tiresome — particularly if they have to play through the same levels again with a different character, as you do here — but it's something I always enjoy. I really enjoy seeing stories from multiple perspectives, and while Ys is fairly conventional fantasy in many ways, it's well-written, well-localised and features some entertaining, endearing characters, so I'm more than happy to plough through it to see everything it has to offer.

Then after that, there's Time Attack, Boss Rush and Arena Mode, of course, which I'm curious to at least try… so much for being a short game!

The post 2329: Another Trip Up Darm Tower appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm really enjoying Overwatch. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I think it's the first competitive multiplayer game that I've actually wanted to "git gud" at enough to be truly competitive in the online sphere. I don't know if I actually have the skills or the talent to be able to do that, of course, but I've been performing reasonably well in the current "Quick Play" mode — effectively a "pre-season" warm-up — and getting a good feel for characters. So much so that when the proper Ranked Play mode makes an appearance in the near future, I feel confident stepping in and attempting to prove my worth.

Overwatch is also helping me to understand the appeal of e-sports. I'm still not entirely sure I would ever want to sit and watch a game of Dota 2 or something (as opposed to actually getting stuck in and playing it) but, playing Overwatch, I certainly feel something while I'm playing. It's particularly thrilling to claw back victory from the very jaws of defeat, and all of Overwatch's various game modes are well constructed to always make this a distinct possibility, meaning it's pretty rare to feel like you're being completely dominated unless your team is particularly incompetent.

It's quite entertaining to see the varying reactions of people you play against. Competitive gaming culture has, for the most part, instilled the impulse to type "gg" (Good Game) after a match has concluded — the online equivalent of a friendly handshake after a sports match — and more often than not you'll see this shorthand pleasantry being exchanged once the victor has been decided. (It's occasionally accompanied by "wp", which means "Well Played").

But there are some people out there who don't like losing. Some people like the guy who responded "no" to my "gg" after one match because he lost, and he didn't like losing. People like the guy who, in all caps, told his entire team to uninstall the game and that they were a "useless fucking team" after losing; he didn't like losing, either. And people like the guy who judged everyone on which character they picked, with sniper Widowmaker obviously being "for noobs".

Then, of course, there was the Chuckle Brothers my friend James and I encountered earlier, who starting sniping at each other in chat during the match and gradually escalated to threats to "wreck" each other. I may have prodded the fire a bit, but it was too hilarious not to troll a little bit; by the end of the match they'd both made themselves look like complete douchebags to the other participants, and one in particular (who was on the opposing team, who lost against me and my comrades) seemed to think that the fact he'd killed my character several times somehow made him superior than me and the rest of my team.

Me, I don't mind if I win or lose, because games of Overwatch are good fun, and the game is balanced well enough that I've only had one or two matches that I felt were completely imbalanced, and that was largely because the opposing side was using unconventional tactics that none of us knew how to counter. (Six Torbjorns is a force to be reckoned with… until you figure out Roadhog and Pharah.) It's a competitive game, after all, so by its very nature there has to be a winner and a loser in each and every match. If you want to win more, you practice and get better, just like anything — just like real sports. There's no sense getting angry and throwing a tantrum over it, because, more likely than not, that's just going to alienate you and make you less likely to be able to put a coherent team together — and coherent teams with good communication will always perform better at this sort of game.

I'm very interested to see how Blizzard plans to implement the ranked system into Overwatch; while I've never played Starcraft 2, I understand its online ranking system is pretty comprehensive and gives you a good idea of where you stand in relation to the rest of the community, so I'm expecting something similar here. I'm also expecting the game to have a good, long lifespan; Blizzard has a good track record of continuing to support its games over time — particularly those with multiplayer components — and with Overwatch proving as popular as it apparently has been so far (the amount of fan art out there already is insane!) I think we'll be seeing Overwatch tournaments and leagues for a good few years yet. And, for the first time, I want to be part of them.

The post 2328: Play of the Game appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This advice is true for many different class-based games, be they massively multiplayer online RPGs like Final Fantasy XIV or competitive games like Dota 2 or, indeed, Overwatch. (Yes, it's another Overwatch post, for which I make no apologies.)

Overwatch is an interesting case study, though, in that unlike the other examples I gave above, you can change your character and indeed your complete role in the team at any time — either immediately after dying or if you're back in your base. This leads to a whole new interesting metagame where your team isn't bound by the principles of the "holy trinity" of tank, healer and damage-dealer (or, in Overwatch's case, the holy quartet of tank, support, offense and defense) and can instead evolve and change as a match progresses according to the team's needs.

Because this is such A Thing in Overwatch, you absolutely shouldn't pick a single character and "main" them like in other character-based games like competitive one-on-one fighters. At the bare minimum, you should be familiar with a hero in each of the four roles, and ideally you should at least know what every hero is capable of, even if you're not particularly skilled in playing as them.

You can read guides about this, but the best way I've found to learn which hero is good against which opponent is simply to experiment and see what happens. That way, you'll naturally figure out which heroes you enjoy playing and who they're effective against.

I have a number of heroes that I've started gravitating naturally towards so far. I intend to expand my repertoire over time, but for the moment here are my favourites.

In the offense role, I'm a fan of Tracer. Her rapid fire guns immediately hit their target when you fire them, so there's no need to lead targets in the same way as you need to with those who shoot more obvious projectiles — you still need at least a reasonable degree of precision, though. Her absolute best features are her special abilities, though. Her Blink ability lets her teleport a short distance up to three times in succession, letting her quickly dart across doorways and passages that are covered by dangerous sentry types such as Bastion or Widowmaker. And her Recall ability is great for confusing an enemy, as well as providing a means of self-healing by not only rewinding her location, but also the value her health was at a few seconds ago.

For defense, I like Mei. Her Ice Wall ability is great for blocking off specific routes and funneling the opposing team down a route you can cover more easily. Her weapon also has a great deal of flexibility; the short-range "ice thrower" acts a bit like a flamethrower only, you know, colder, and also has the added benefit of freezing enemies, initially slowing them and eventually freezing them completely for a brief moment. Her alt-fire, meanwhile, fires an immensely accurate icicle bolt that proves devastating to snipers such as Widowmaker, dealing a huge chunk of damage in a single hit at medium to long range. Combine this with her ability to freeze herself, making her temporary invulnerable while self-healing, and her Ultimate, which causes a freeze and damage effect over a decent-sized area, and you have a great defensive hero who is more than capable of going toe-to-toe with dangerous, occasionally insurmountable-seeming threats like Reinhardt.

In the tank role, I enjoy D.Va. D.Va is interesting to me in that she's not necessarily designed to soak up a huge amount of damage in the same way as some of the other tank characters, but is instead a rather mobile unit that can put out a good amount of close-range damage while having much better survivability behind enemy lines than the Offense heroes. Her absolute best thing, though, is her Ultimate, which self-destructs her mech suit, taking anyone in a significant radius with it, including herself if she doesn't get out of the way. What's fun about this ability is that you can combine it with her mech suit's jump jets ability, effectively "throwing" the self-destructing mech at the enemy team from a distance while she skips off happily into the distance. Also she's adorable.

Finally, in the support role, I've had most success with Lucio. A speedy character with a passive "aura" effect rather than a more active healer like Mercy, Lucio is an excellent support character who is very capable of putting out a decent amount of damage in his own right. His decent mobility thanks to his high speed and Wallride ability allows him to move unpredictably and avoid damage, while the relatively short cooldowns on his abilities let him provide either speed boosts or decent healing to nearby companions on a pretty consistent basis. Not only that, but the fact his buffs and healing work as an aura mean that he can concentrate on wrecking some fools while he's benefiting the team, meaning he can help out in several ways at once.

I'm sure I'll discover new favourites in the near future, but for now these are the ones I've had the most success — and fun — with.

The post 2320: Never Pick One Main appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Overwatch is still excellent.

I'm tempted to leave it at that, but I should perhaps qualify my statement.

It's difficult to pin down a single, truly appealing element of it because there are so many, and that's perhaps it's biggest strength: there's something in there that will appeal to most people who are at least vaguely receptive to the idea of competitive first-person shooters.

For me, the absolute best thing about it is its accessibility. There's a wide variety of different heroes, some of which are more difficult to use, but all of which are rewarding. Plus some absolutely wonderful balancing has clearly gone into the game's development, since each hero has a clear "counter" that is eminently suitable for dealing with them when they start giving you grief.

It's a game with accessibility for casual players, in other words, but one which has sufficient depth to keep competitive players interested in the long term. It will be interesting to see how the community as a whole takes to the ranked competitive games when they launch soon, and whether the game as a whole takes off as an e-sport.

It's rather enjoyable to be in at the very beginning of what is clearly going to be a thriving game with the longevity of Valve's classic Team Fortress 2, a game to which Overwatch is often compared, and not unreasonably so. However, where I found Team Fortress 2 to be completely intimidating (due to the fact that by the time I had a computer and Internet connection that could handle running it, everyone else who had been playing for years was infinitely better than me, and it felt impossible to get any better), with Overwatch I'm finding it easy to contribute to a team effort, pick the right heroes for the right situation and help get the job done.

What seems nice about the community as a whole — at least on PC, I can't speak for the console versions — is that the player base isn't afraid to have a bit of fun. Earlier tonight, for example, I had a game where the opposing team started out by posting three Winstons (a giant Tesla cannon-wielding gorilla with a rather refined voice and attitude) outside our base, and gradually, as the match progressed, everyone else participating switched to Winston too, until by the end of things we had an absolutely chaotic melee made up of twelve mutant gorillas all going all HULK SMASH on one another at once. The results of that game really didn't matter in the end, because everyone involved had such a great time, and of course it was followed up with a couple of other matches in which everyone picked the same character again. Six Reinhardts bearing down on you is certainly a sight to behold, though this situation helped me realise Pharah's value in that she can leap high into the air and rain rocket death down on Reinhardt from above while staying well out of range of his big-ass hammer.

Overwatch is a game that hasn't forgotten a core reason we play games is, well, to play. It's a consistently joyful, smile-inducing experience that the vast majority of the community seem to play well and with a good attitude; you get the occasional ragequitter yelling "uninstall the game now" when their team loses, but they are relatively few and far between in my experience so far, and when this happens most people just shrug and move on. Overwatch's excellent matchmaking coupled with the significant player base means that their team slot will be filled in a matter of seconds anyway, so it's no great loss to the other players if that person wants to ragequit.

Assuming Blizzard keeps supporting Overwatch as much as it claims it will — we're promised free new heroes and maps on a fairly regular basis; the only "premium" paid content is the ability to purchase the Loot Boxes containing skins and other customisation items that you acquire for free every time your account levels up anyway — I can see myself playing it for a long time. And it's a nice feeling to find a multiplayer experience like that: it's one I can easily share with friends, since there's none of the MMO issue of you "outlevelling" each other, getting to different stages and being unable to play together due to the disparity in your characters' power levels, and its 5-10 minute matches make it eminently friendly to the more busy people I know who perhaps only have half an hour here and there to play some games together.

So yes. Overwatch. If you've been on the fence about grabbing it but you like the sound of it, stop hesitating and grab it. Then we can go and shoot some fools together.

Cheers luv.

The post 2319: Pass into the Iris appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Well, it's here: the only multiplayer-only first-person shooter I think I've ever actually been genuinely excited to play and be on board with from day one: Blizzard's Overwatch.

The servers went live at a little after midnight my time, and aside from one incident where I lost connection from a game, everything seems to be running extremely smoothly. I am happy about this.

Here is a list of reasons why I like Overwatch when I typically haven't got into other competitive first-person shooters:

• It has characters. Call of Duty is boring to me because soldiers are boring. Overwatch has a wide variety of characters that includes cute girls. So that's a win.
• There's no complicated metagame. No challenges to unlock weapons, no perks to worry about, no loadouts, no higher-level people dominating you through use of higher-level unlocks: everyone is on an equal playing field.
• The "you must be this skillful to play" barrier is lower than a lot of other shooters. The thing that puts me off a lot of competitive shooters is the fact that it's extremely difficult to learn how to play them effectively when some 10-year old can snipe you from halfway across the map before you've even got anywhere near the objective. Overwatch's characters cater to a wide variety of skill and confidence levels, and most don't require pinpoint accuracy to have a good time with.
• The objectives are simple to understand but challenging to complete. The game modes may be straight out of Team Fortress, but they work. The Overtime mechanic makes for some genuinely exciting last-second turnarounds, too.
• The weapons are satisfying. Each character only has one or two weapons at most, and they're all great fun to use. They make good noises and feel powerful.
• The game gives excellent feedback. Through the use of sound and HUD elements, Overwatch keeps you nicely informed on what's going on. If you're getting shot in the back, a nearby character will tell you. If you're successfully hitting an enemy from a distance but can't see it very well, a sound effect lets you know that your shots are on target. And most characters' HUDs are designed so that you don't have to take your eyes off the action to know important information.
• The abilities give characters unique identities. Not only that, but you need to know the best ways to avoid and/or counter these abilities. That keeps things interesting.
• The support characters are more than just healbots. Most of them are more than capable of putting out respectable damage, too, and some even have other interesting abilities to support the team.
• D.Va. Say no more.

Now I'd better go to bed before I get tempted to stay up all night blasting fools… doubtless there will be a lot more of this over the next little while, though!

If you're playing Overwatch on PC, feel free to add AngryJedi#2260 as a friend. If you do so, let me know if it's on the North American or European servers, because Blizzard inexplicably region-locks its friends lists rather than having one global one.

The post 2316: Overwatch is Out, and It's Awesome appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

A controversial statement, perhaps — and I make no apologies for a third post about Ys in a row — but one that I feel confident in making, even having only finished the first game and made it about halfway (I estimate?) through the second. (Aside: given how much I've enjoyed the first two games so far, you can count on a month of Ys over on MoeGamer at some point in the near future.)

Ys speaks to me in a way that Zelda never has. This isn't to say that I don't like Zelda, mind you — I count A Link to the Past, Link's Awakening and Majora's Mask among some of my favourite games of all time — but there's something just… kind of magical about Ys that I've been delighted to discover over the past few days, and a little disappointed in myself that I never took the plunge and explored this series earlier.

Let me try to explain what I mean.

I think the thing that sticks out to me most of all is how Ys provides a much more coherent and continuous feeling in its narrative than Zelda does. The fact that Zelda games up until Link's Awakening still referred to the various dungeons as "levels" made it pretty clear that despite the sprawling overworld in each instance, these were basically games designed on the same linear principles as more traditional action/arcade adventures. This very much gives Zelda games a feeling that persists today: a sharp demarcation between the overworld and the dungeons. This is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it particularly unusual; many RPGs make this distinction, and massively multiplayer games in particular have an even more stark divide between the two types of content, with dungeons tending to be cooperative multiplayer affairs, while overworld action tends to be (for the most part) solo or social in nature.

But with Ys, there's no such demarcation. The world is continuous and coherent, and consequently far more believable. You're not pausing your exploration to get through the mysteriously puzzle-filled castle that happens to stand between you and your objective; you're continuing your journey, exploring the world, fulfilling the promises you made to the people who believe in you. It's a continuous, flowing process and narrative, rather than one that is heavily punctuated. Exploration flows into conversation flows into combat flows into more exploration; the only real punctuation comes in the form of the boss fights, which don't necessarily come at as predictable points as in Zelda games.

This coherent feeling is particularly apparent in Ys II, which expands on the excellent worldbuilding of its predecessor. Characters move around as the story progresses, and they make reference to the places you find yourself travelling to. Sometimes you run across them on your travels as they get up to things independently of you; sometimes you'll return from an adventure to find them acknowledging your deeds when you speak to them. Contrast with Zelda's worlds, which tend to be rather static in nature; populated with weird and quirky characters in many cases, sure, but there's not a lot of feeling of things going on while you're not there, with the exception of Majora's Mask, of course, where this sort of thing was the whole game's central design tenet.

My friend Chris also points out that Ys makes him feel powerful, and he's absolutely right. This is a big contrast between Ys and Zelda, and it's partly due to the nature of the protagonist character. While both games sport a visually distinctive but mute self-insert character for the player to inhabit and play as they see fit, Zelda's hero is a child, while Ys' hero is a young adult. There's always been an element of childish clumsiness to Zelda's combat; even once the series moved into 3D with Ocarina of Time and started having more complex combat mechanics than a single attack button that always did the same thing, Link always felt… not incapable or incompetent as such, but like he perhaps wasn't quite as comfortable holding a sword and shield as he perhaps should be. Which is understandable in several of the games, where he has the whole "Hero" thing kind of thrust upon him suddenly.

In the case of Ys, meanwhile, there's a strong feeling that, when played well, you are overwhelming your enemy with superior skill and power. This is depicted differently in both Ys I and Ys II, despite both being based on the same fundamental "bump" system, which allows for button-free attacking and a style of gameplay where you never really have to stop moving.

In Ys I, the feeling of overwhelming power is brought about by the rather brief levelling curve: with a level cap of just 10, each one of those 10 levels is a significant jump in power for protagonist Adol. If you keep pace with where you're "supposed" to be as you proceed through the story, you'll take down most enemies in a single hit. It's not until the very latter stages of the game, when you've been level 10 for a while, that you'll come across enemies that need multiple hits to fell, and even then, no more than one or two extra hits.

In Ys II, meanwhile, the combat is rejigged so that individual hits do less damage, but you can inflict them incredibly quickly, particularly while attacking diagonally. You also push enemies backwards while attacking them, giving the combat a feel somewhat akin to the sport of fencing, where dominating your opponent and forcing them to move how you want them to move is key. In Ys II, careful, tactical movement of enemies — not shoving them into a large group of their friends, for example, nor pushing them into a corner behind a rock that makes it difficult for you to keep up the assault — is absolutely key, and getting it right is an immensely satisfying feeling completely unlike any other action RPG I've played.

Then you have things like the items. In Zelda, the items you unlock as you proceed through the game are predictable and are used based on clear, recognisable visual cues that stay the same throughout the game. In Ys, meanwhile, you might use each item only once or twice throughout the game in circumstances where it makes narrative sense to do so, not because it would make a good puzzle or dexterity challenge. This gives the game much more of a traditional "adventure game" feel to it, and I like that very much about it. In Ys II, there are also a number of items you can use in unconventional ways, too, and the game rewards experimentation with, for example, giving healing items as gifts to NPCs, or using the "Alter" magic to turn yourself into a Roo and talk to monsters. While very few of these things are necessary to complete the game, they, like so much else in these games, provide a lovely sense of a world that has been well thought out and beautifully crafted, particularly in these revamped Chronicles+ versions that I'm playing on PC.

This is all my opinion, of course, and doubtless there are some die-hard Zelda fans out there who would feel the complete opposite to me — and doubtless some other people out there who would gleefully point out that Ys and Zelda aren't really directly comparable at all — but so far, I don't feel it's premature to say that I'm already in love with this series, and intend to devour as much of it as I can in short order. Count on further enthusing as and when that happens.

The post 2312: After 1.5 Games, I Already Like Ys More Than Any Zelda I've Played appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's something of a novelty these games to start and beat a game over the course of a couple of days — particularly an RPG — but with Dungeon Travelers 2 being considerable in both length and difficulty, I felt that a palate cleanser of some sort was in order before I tackled the remaining 15+ floors of that game's final dungeon. I considered picking up the new Doom, but I couldn't quite bring myself to spend that much on it, so instead, as I noted yesterday, I turned to the Ys series.

This evening, I beat Ys I. Here are some things I thought about it.

Things I liked

• That music! The PC version I was playing has three mixes of the soundtrack available: the original FM version, a remastered MIDI version from a later incarnation and a full-on rock the fuck out version from Falcom's in-house band. I must confess I didn't try the two earlier versions, as Falcom's band is pretty damn amazing. Wailing guitars and pounding drumbeats complemented the action perfectly, and brought a pleasantly nostalgic feeling over me, making me think of both Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (which had plenty of widdly-diddly guitars) and my brother (who was always very good at widdly-diddly guitars when I was growing up).
• Levelling up is meaningful. There are ten experience levels in Ys I. Each one is a significant jump in power. From level 1 to level 2 is the difference between taking 4 or 5 hits to kill an enemy and being able to splatter it in a single hit. Your power continues to increase hugely as the game progresses.
• You have an HP bar that gets bigger. I don't know why I like this, I just do. I liked it in Metal Gear Solid, I liked it in Kingdom Hearts and I like it here. It's a satisfying visual representation of your growth in power.
• Your HP bar shows how much damage the last hit you took chipped off. This is really nice. Similar to how fighting game health gauges work, your HP bar in Ys highlights the amount of damage the last hit gave you in a brighter shade of red so you can estimate roughly how many more individual hits you can take before needing to worry about healing.
• Tactical health regeneration. Healing items are few and far between in Ys I, so it's fortunate that you regenerate health by standing still… though only when you're in a place where you can see the sky. Later in the game, you acquire a healing ring that allows you to regenerate in dungeons, too, but for the majority of the time, finding an open-air "clearing" in a dungeon makes a nice checkpoint.
• Cute girls. My goodness. I want to cuddle Feena forever.
• The sense of place and character. I mentioned this yesterday, but Ys I's world feels remarkably coherent, even with its relatively tiny size compared to some other RPGs. By the end of the game, you recognise every character, and the character notebook feature in the game suggests that the writers thought long and hard about each and every NPC in the game, regardless of their importance (or lack thereof) to the plot.
• The interesting structure. Ys I is broadly split into two parts: the first half sees you charging around the overworld completing various quests, and this will probably bring you up to the level cap of 10. Once you've done everything out in the world, you then enter the 25-floor final dungeon Darm Tower, where you'll need to use everything you've learned (and a few other things besides) to make it to the top and kick the last boss' face in.
• The last boss is the hardest thing in the game. I've lost count of the number of RPGs I've played where the final boss is an underwhelming battle thanks to the ability to overlevel yourself for it by doing all manner of side activities beforehand. In narrative terms, the final boss should really be your most significant challenge, so it's always a little disappointing when you can mash it in a couple of turns. Not so in Ys I; this asshole puts up a fight.

Things I liked a little less

• The bosses are a bit primitive. This is perhaps understandable, given the game's heritage — despite this being a modern remake, the original Ys I came out in 1987 and the bosses in particular make this abundantly clear, with very simple attack patterns that have no "intelligence" whatsoever — simply either randomised or predictable path-based movement.
• The last boss is the hardest thing in the game… but for all the wrong reasons. The final boss is all kinds of bullshit. He bounces around the screen, frequently going out of reach. When you hit him, the floor falls away underneath where he was, and this can either kill you instantly or trap you in a corner if you're not careful. He shoots fireballs that split into so many bullets it's literally impossible to dodge them all. Fighting him is more a matter of being able to inflict enough damage on him before he kills you than any real skill at recognising and dealing with his patterns.
• Inconsistent item behaviour is a little unfair. You can't use items or change your equipment in boss battles. This means you can't use that healing potion you've been saving, or the magic mirror to freeze your opponent in place. Worse, the various rings you acquire throughout the game — which vary in effect from doubling your damage dealt to halving your damage taken via allowing you to slowly regenerate when standing still — have no effect whatsoever in boss battles, either.
• There are a number of instances where the game kind of forgets to tell you what to do next. This happens for the first time right at the very beginning of the game, where no-one tells you that in order to trigger an important event you first have to speak to each and every NPC in the starting town. There are a number of other such incidents later in the game, too, but again, this is perhaps a remnant of the game's 1987 heritage, when games were a lot less hand-holdy.

Ultimately, none of the things I liked a bit less about Ys I distracted me from playing it through from start to finish and really enjoying the experience. I'm not sure whether I'll go back and play it on the notorious Nightmare difficulty — I'm not sure I can face some of those bosses again! — but it's a definite possibility. For the immediate "now", though, I think I'm going to move straight on to Ys II to see how Adol's adventure continues.

Yep. I'm 100% on board with this series, and I look forward to exploring the rest of it.

The post 2311: I Finished My First Ys appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've been meaning to check out the Ys series for quite some time — my Steam library informs me that I have owned a number of the PC versions for several years, and I also have a number of the PSP versions loaded on my Vita, too. For some reason, though, I've never got around to it.

I decided that it was time to change all that, so I booted up Ys I to start at the beginning. And, well, I kind of wish I'd done this sooner.

Ys is a series I've been dimly aware of for many years. I remember some seriously random things from my childhood, and one of the things that is still stored in my memory for some inexplicable reason was seeing a review of Ys III: Wanderers from Ys in the SNES magazine my brother's girlfriend at the time was working on, Control. Something struck me as very interesting about this side-scrolling hack and slash adventure, and I often found myself wondering what it would be like to play. For one reason or another, though, I never did check it out, but the Ys series had always been at the back of my mind ever since.

Ys I is a rather different affair from Ys III, which took a distinctly Zelda II-esque approach of attempting to reinvent the series as a side-scrolling platform action RPG rather than the more traditional top-down perspective of other installments. But Ys I isn't like any other RPG I've played, either. It's not like Zelda because of its use of the rather peculiar (but fun and satisfying) "bump" combat, wherein you attack enemies just by walking into them, and whether or not they do damage to you depends on the angle you hit them at. It's not like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest because it's not a turn-based RPG, nor is it a globetrotting adventure. Instead, it's something that very much has its own identity.

Ys I — and, indeed, most of the subsequent Ys games — casts you in the role of one Adol Christin, a redheaded adventurer lad who washes up on the shores of the land of Esteria against all odds after surviving a strange phenomenon surrounding the island called the Stormwall. After a brief convalescence — and specifically against the recommendations of his doctor and nurse — he heads out into the world to explore and figure out what is going on, and before long, oh, wouldn't you know it, he's some sort of Chosen One at the centre of all sorts of mystical happenings that appear to converge on Darm Tower, a hulking, sinister structure on Esteria that seems to be the source of everyone's troubles and woes.

Where Ys shines is in its small scale. In this sense, it's rather similar to the only other Falcom game I've played to date, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. Trails in the Sky featured a fairly hefty journey for its main cast, but its real appeal was in how much character and personality it gave each and every party member, shopkeeper, NPC on the streets and distinct region of the world. Ys I is the same, only in more concentrated form; the island is a very small place that you quickly learn to find your way around, even with the game's total lack of any sort of map function, and it's not long before you feel like you've got to know pretty much all of the 88 characters who are scattered around the game world, some of whom have something interesting to say, others of whom are simply background colour.

What's fascinating about Ys is that even the incidental, "useless" NPCs are full of personality and have clearly been written with a greater context in mind. They each have their own little stories to tell, and over the course of Adol's adventure, the things they say change subtly, giving you a good feeling of the sort of person they are and what they think about everything that's been going on. And the game sometimes surprises you by making what appeared to be an incidental character rather more important than they first appeared.

Couple all this with some really lovely pixel art in the field, some gorgeous visual novel-style illustrations when speaking with the more important characters, and an absolutely rockin' soundtrack, and, well, you have a game that is really rather good: unconventional, memorable, interesting and, most of all, fun.

If Ys I, the oldest and most primitive title in the series, is this appealing to me, I can only imagine how enjoyable the most well-regarded entries like Oath in Felghana and its ilk are. I'm looking forward to investigating the rest of the series in detail, and anticipate that I may well become a bit of a Falcom fanboy by the time I'm done with them.

The post 2310: My First Ys appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I know I wrote about Overwatch the other day, but having been, well, present on the Internet for the past few days I think it's fairly safe to declare that Blizzard has an honest-to-goodness phenomenon on its hands.

Overwatch's open beta (read: free demo — the best marketing tool they could have possibly used) ended at the start of this week, but people haven't stopped talking about it since. They also haven't stopped producing fan art, incorporating Overwatch characters into memes and cartoon strips, discussing strategies, taking the piss out of people who play nothing but Bastion and admiring Tracer's admittedly fine posterior.

It's kind of remarkable, really, because it seems to have come out of nowhere and evolved organically without a trace of interference from the marketing or PR machines. A few weeks ago, I knew very little about Overwatch and had little interest in it; after a couple of days with the beta on both PS4 and PC, I'm well and truly sold and am happily enjoying the wealth of fan-made content that's been produced seemingly in just the last few days.

Blizzard has always been a somewhat unconventional developer-publisher, producing wildly popular games that eschew popular conventions — mechanically, aesthetically and even functionally. Their insistence on using their own proprietary client Battle.Net to distribute, update and even sell their latest games initially drew criticism — particularly in the case of Diablo III — but as the world has become more and more comfortable with the idea of being always online and multiplayer-centric titles, these complaints have started to fade into the background until now, Blizzard's ecosystem allows it to have extremely successful titles without having to rely on the more established distribution channels such as Steam.

Overwatch's stealth marketing is another example of this. While there have been TV spots, video ads and site takeovers for the game, it has never felt like an aggressive marketing push in the same way that a Call of Duty or a Battlefield sees. Instead, Blizzard chose to rely on the most powerful marketing tool in the world these days: word of mouth. Putting their absolute confidence in their game and releasing it to the public for free for a few days achieved more than any multi-million dollar marketing campaign ever would; it allowed people to try the game for themselves and either confirm that yes, they did want to play it, or, in many cases, sate their curiosity as to what it was all about. In more than one case, the satiation of that curiosity has led to additional sales.

So why is Overwatch such a phenomenon? Well, a lot of it has to do with its striking visual design — it's immediately recognisable — but I think the biggest contributing factor is its wildly varied selection of playable characters. There's something for everyone in Overwatch's cast, whether you're into moody, dark types; big, stompy robots; hot girls; cute girls; frightening muscle-bound girls who probably have a Tumblr page; Westerns; sci-fi… there's a bit of everything. And somehow despite this massive variety in its cast, Overwatch feels coherent and none of its characters feel like token inclusions.

This, naturally, leads to people picking favourites — never underestimate the power of the waifus! — which, in turn, leads to people producing fan-created content based on their favourite characters. And, from there, other fans can enjoy this content and express how much they like their favourite character through sharing these fan-made productions or engaging with the artists. Over time, a whole meta-community outside of the game builds up, even bringing in people who don't actually play the game but just like watching it, or appreciate the art direction, or like the look of the characters.

In short, Blizzard would have to do something absolutely spectacular right now to fuck up Overwatch. I'm really looking forward to giving the full version a go at the end of the month, and if you're up for a multiplayer rumble in its wonderfully colourful world, be sure to hit me up.

The post 2304: Blizzard's New Phenomenon appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I decided to give the game everyone seems to be talking about — Blizzard's new first-person shooter Overwatch — a bit of a go this weekend. They were running an open beta, after all, so there was no risk whatsoever involved in downloading it and giving it a shot.

And what do you know — it's actually pretty good. I'm not sure if I'm sold enough on it to want to pick up a copy when it comes out later in the month, but I certainly enjoyed the time I spent with it over the last couple of days.

For those who have perhaps heard of Overwatch but not found out any more information about it, it is, in many ways, similar to Valve's classic Team Fortress 2 in that two teams made up of various different characters with different capabilities face off against one another in order to complete an objective of some description. In the game as it stands at the moment, the objectives on offer include a "king of the hill" type affair, where over the best of three rounds, each team has to control a particular area on the map for a certain amount of time; an "attack and defend" situation, where one team has to defend a point against assault from the other team; an "assault" variant, where the attacking team has to escort a slow-moving "payload" vehicle from one end of the map to the other while the other team stops them; and a mode that mixes the "attack and defend" and "assault" objectives together.

Like Team Fortress 2, the different characters have different roles on the team. Offensive characters are nimble but fragile, with their weapons and abilities concentrating on inflicting damage efficiently. Defensive characters have the ability to do things like lay down turrets or, in the case of one particular character, turn themselves into a turret. Tank characters have a huge pool of health points so are designed to act as a distraction for the other team. And support characters generally have some sort of useful ability to help the team out — usually some form of healing, buffing or both.

Where Team Fortress 2 only had one character of each archetype, though, Overwatch has several, each of whom has a unique weapon and loadout of special abilities. Weapons have clips of ammo and have to be reloaded when empty, but you have infinite clips, so there's no hunting around for ammo or any punishment for spray-and-pray gunplay. You can restore your health by returning to your home base, similar to how Blizzard's MOBA Heroes of the Storm works. And if you find a hero isn't working out for you, you can switch either when you die or when you're in your base.

Overwatch strikes an excellent balance between simplicity and tactical depth. The characters are all easy to learn in terms of mechanics, but applying their weapons and skills to situations throughout a match is the real challenge. That and not blowing yourself up in some instances; my favourite character so far, D.Va, has the ability to self-destruct her mech suit, killing anyone nearby, which is an absolutely devastating skill, but also very likely to take you with it if you don't immediately run away.

There's also a fun metagame that doesn't fall into the Call of Duty trap of excessive challenges and skill levels: you simply have an experience level, which gives you a "loot box" every time you level up, and the items in the loot box are randomly selected skins, animations, spray paint logos and voice clips for the various characters in the game. None of these have any effect on the characters' abilities — they're just there as cool collectibles as an incentive for players to keep playing. The choice to make Overwatch a full-price game rather than a free-to-play affair also seems quite sensible, too; while some may balk at paying full whack for a multiplayer-only game, there's a substantial amount of content in here, both heroes and maps, and Blizzard claim that they're going to support the game post-launch with new, free add-on content rather than paid DLC. A round of applause for them, then; doubly so since their parent company is Activision, who loves milking the annual Call of Duty installments dry.

The other nice side-effect of it being a full-price game is that everyone has access to everything from day one. Everyone can pick a favourite character and get to grips with them without having to wait for them to come around in a free-to-play rotation; everyone is, in other words, on a level playing field to begin with, with no advantage given to someone who has paid up for characters, boosters or whatever.

As I say, I'm not yet sure if I'm convinced enough by the beta to hand over 50 quid for the full game when it releases later in the month, but I will say it's the most fun I've had in a first-person shooter for a very long time indeed, and I generally don't go in for competitive first-person shooters. The beta seems to have had some positive attention, too, so hopefully it will enjoy a solid community for some time — long enough for it to be worthwhile for Blizzard to keep adding new content.

If you want to give it a go for yourself, I believe you have until Monday morning to try it out. Better hurry!

The post 2301: Overwatch appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Back in the Good Old Days, my Dad played a whole lot of Flight Simulator, both in its SubLOGIC days and subsequently when it became a Microsoft product. (He still does, though perhaps not quite as much as he used to.)

One recurring joke we had in our family was taunting my Dad by saying that Flight Simulator was a game (which it is), which he would inevitably respond to by vociferously declaring that "it is not a game", because he didn't play games. (He has relaxed this policy in recent years, largely due to the advent of iOS.)

While I didn't agree with his assessment of what a game was, I did, however, understand where his argument came from. Proper noun Flight Simulator was a cut above even other lower-case flight simulators in terms of realism and depth, and noteworthy at the time for being one of the only civil aviation flight sims. It was also noteworthy for being one of the first ever open-world sandbox games, in that there were no goals whatsoever besides those that you set for yourself; there wasn't even really a "fail" state, since if you crashed, you could just respawn and start again.

By far the most noteworthy thing about Flight Simulator was the fact that it did exactly what its title suggested: it provided an accurate simulation of what it was actually like to fly a plane. That means no simplified controls; that means no throwing your plane around the sky; that means the need for at least a basic understanding of physics (including lift, thrust and drag) in order to even get off the ground. And even outside of the more obvious realism aspects such as the flight model, even navigation was simulated accurately; you had to tune navigation radios, follow the needle and so forth. Many real-life honest-to-goodness pilots actually trained to fly on instruments using Flight Simulator, such was its level of realism and detail when it came to this side of things, even if the graphics weren't particularly impressive in the early days.

As a result of all this, I came to associate the word "simulator" with… well, simulations. Virtual depictions of something real — and a depiction that errs more on the side of realism than providing a thrilling gaming experience.

This morning I received an unsolicited Steam invite to a group promoting an upcoming game called Pregnancy with Your Mom Simulator 2016. This is what Pregnancy with Your Mom Simulator 2016 looks like.

If you have never encountered the modern use of the word "simulator", Pregnancy with Your Mom Simulator 2016 pretty much sums it up. These days, although Flight Simulator still exists, the word "simulator" is much more frequently used in a "hilariously" ironic manner to describe something ridiculous, obviously unrealistic and filled with puerile humour.

I generally have nothing against puerile humour for the most part, but the use of the word "simulator" for this kind of thing is just getting a bit beyond a joke now. In just the last few years we've had Surgeon Simulator, Goat Simulator, Shower with Your Dad Simulator, Zombie Training Simulator, Corporate Lifestyle Simulator, Domestic Dog Simulator… and, well, literally hundreds of others. While there are a few genuine simulators in among the dross — the most noteworthy being titles like Euro Truck Simulator and its ilk, which follow the Flight Simulator mould of actually providing a realistic simulation of a real-life activity — the vast majority of these games are designed to be stupid visual jokes for YouTubers and streamers to whoop and holler over on videos with headlines like "CRAZY game from HELL?! SHOWER with YOUR MOM!!"

More than anything, I find it a bit frustrating to see the word "simulator" thrown around so casually these days because sometimes you just want to actually indulge in a genuine simulation of something — you want to see what it's like to drive a truck, use heavy construction machinery, fly a plane, launch a rocket, whatever — and this nonsense's use of the word completely devalues the word "simulator" to such a degree that it's now meaningless. Moreover, it's actively difficult to find real simulators — which, in the past, have had pretty functional, self-explanatory titles, such as Flight Simulator — among all this shit.

Ultimately this sort of thing is just another side-effect of the attention deficit disorder that the Internet seems to collectively suffer from. The population of the Internet staggers drunkenly from meme to meme, desperately searching for the next joke they can milk until it becomes the opposite of funny, then all the people who only use Facebook can start posting about it and it officially becomes dead, at which point a new meme shall rise and everyone shall become sick of it once more.

Perhaps I'm just old and cynical. Or perhaps I'm just tired of Steam and the mobile app stores getting flooded with "joke" games like Pregnancy with Your Mom Simulator 2016. People complained about the Wii being laden with shovelware, but that was nothing compared to the shit we see on Steam and mobile in 2016 — shit that distracts attention away from stuff that is actually noteworthy and interesting.

The post 2296: Games Called "Simulator" That Aren't Simulators: A Joke That's Run its Course appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

JAST USA recently released Aselia the Eternal on Steam. The game's been around for a good few years now — its original Japanese version for even longer — but its release on Steam will doubtless allow a whole new audience to (hopefully) enjoy it. I will now attempt to explain why it is worth giving it a go.

Aselia the Eternal is a combination of a visual novel and a strategy game. The overall balance is very much in favour of the story side of things — it's a good six hours of reading before you get to the game's first strategy battle sequence — but when you do get to the strategic aspect, it's a game that puts up a good fight.

The narrative concerns the player-protagonist Yuuto, who finds himself drawn into another world populated by people who speak a completely different language to him. Unable to find his way home, he gradually learns to communicate with these people — the ones with whom he's staying known as "Spirits" — and finds himself recruited into the army as an "Etranger", a wielder of a powerful, sentient sword that regularly threatens to eat his soul.

Gradually, as Yuuto becomes more and more involved in the lives of the Spirits, he starts to worry less and less about trying to find his way back home and more about helping to resolve the conflict that threatens to tear this fantasy world apart. As such, the narrative becomes very much a high fantasy sort of affair — war on a grand scale, magic and mayhem around every corner, transcendence of humanity not at all out of the question — and builds to a thoroughly exciting conclusion that I won't spoil here.

The story is compelling, interesting, well-written and well-translated, but it's the gameplay part that is perhaps the most interesting thing about it, since it's one of the most original takes on strategic RPG-style combat I've seen. Virtually eliminating all luck from the equation, combat in Aselia the Eternal is actually about putting units together in small squads to perform most effectively according to what type of unit they are — and by doing this correctly you can effectively guarantee that you'll win a conflict before you reach it. The tricky part is in finding those suitable combinations in the first place.

The basic rules of engagement have each of your squads made up of three ranks — a frontline fighter, a mid-range tank and a support fighter bringing up the rear. Each of the different types of Spirits perform best in a particular slot: Blue Spirits (such as the eponymous heroine) do their best work as speedy damage dealers in the front row; Green Spirits tend to have the highest defense and HP, so sit in the middle; Red Spirits often have support abilities that can damage an entire enemy squad or provide suitable benefits to your own, so sit at the back. You're not limited to this arrangement — and indeed, with Yuuto in the mix, who is none of those things, you'll have at least one squad with an unconventional lineup — but there are clearly optimal ways to do things, making each of the battles in the game as much of a puzzle as a strategic RPG experience.

Aselia the Eternal comes together so nicely because everything it does is in service to its narrative and worldbuilding. Despite not having an open world you can freely explore, its excellent storytelling and descriptive narration builds a wonderfully convincing setting that gives the strategic sequences genuine meaning and drama. And, as a result of that worldbuilding, your units in the strategic sequences become more than just sets of stats and abilities; they become people. People who you don't want to see die, because yes, this game has permadeath.

The question of being "more than just a soldier" is one of the main narrative themes explored in the game, and it's a rather wonderful moment when you realise that you, the player, are having the same epiphany that the characters in the game are. There are some wonderfully touching sequences with Yuuto and the Spirits as they get to know one another, and you're right there with them. And, as the narrative ramps up and you bring more and more allies with you, the tension becomes palpable as you take them into battles that you really don't want to see them lose.

I don't want to say too much more because part of the wonder of Aselia the Eternal is exploring the experience for yourself and discovering everything this remarkable work has to offer. Suffice to say if you enjoy in-depth storytelling — and lots of if — and aren't averse to a bit of red-hot strategy action, you should most certainly check it out. And then strongly consider supporting JAST's recent release of the sequel Seinarukana, which I'll be investigating for myself in the near future!

The post 2295: You Should Play Aselia the Eternal appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I got burnt out on Final Fantasy XIV a little while back and haven't felt particularly tempted to go back since — especially since my Free Company had been less than conversational for the last few months, making even the social aspect of the game less worth logging in for than it had been.

At PAX East this week, Square Enix announced an exciting new plan for some future content that has me clamouring to get back to the game once it releases: a new type of activity called Deep Dungeon, which will be familiar to fans of both Final Fantasy Tactics' Midlight's Deep optional dungeon and Final Fantasy XI's Nyzul Isle.

It sounds as if Deep Dungeon is going to be a discrete type of activity for players to participate in, with the eventual plan presumably being to have a number of different dungeons for players to challenge. Initially, there will be just one, called Palace of the Dead.

The reason this excites me so much is because it shakes up the established formula of Final Fantasy XIV — which, don't get me wrong, I like very much, but just needed a break from, thanks to the necessity of grinding the same content week after week in order to obtain the next incremental upgrade. Unlike the current substantial array of static content available in the game, Deep Dungeon has a strong random element, plus a great deal more flexibility than the rest of the game's reliance on the MMO "Holy Trinity" of tank, healer and DPS.

Deep Dungeon sees you and up to three friends tackling a randomly generated dungeon. It also has its own progression system separate from the main game's experience and item levels, mitigating the issue the game currently has of a significant proportion of players outgearing the majority of the current content. The in-game reasons for this are that the dungeon saps your character's strength, and in order to power back up again you'll have to make use of items you find within the dungeon itself, progressing and regaining your strength as you proceed.

If it's anything like Final Fantasy XI's Nyzul Isle — which FFXI veterans inform me, it sounds very much like — then each floor of the dungeon will not only be randomly generated, but it will also have various objectives to complete, as well as challenging boss fights every so often. It sounds like a lot of fun — and I really like the fact that it's seemingly flexible enough to cater to any party makeup from 1-4 players, hopefully leading to some interesting combinations of classes exploring the depths. All-tank runs? Bring it on!

I have questions that will hopefully be answered in the coming months: firstly, what will the point of Deep Dungeon be? Will it be another means of acquiring progression currency, or will it be a completely separate activity? My main concern with it is that it ends up being a Diadem, which sounded awesome in concept but turned out to be a bit toss when it was actually released. Part of this was down to player attitudes, admittedly, rather than any real fault with the content itself, but hopefully the smaller scale of Deep Dungeon will mitigate this risk somewhat.

To be honest, if Deep Dungeon proves to be a significant enough challenge with enough variation on each run, I can see it becoming one of my main activities in Final Fantasy XIV, particularly if I have the option of running it either solo or with friends. And with the promise of score rankings coming in a future update, there's the distinct possibility of some friendly competition, too.

The first Deep Dungeon, Palace of the Dead, is due to arrive in the game as part of Patch 3.35. I'm planning on jumping back into the game around Patch 3.3 to find out what happens next in the main scenario quest — the story is getting very interesting — but if Deep Dungeon lives up to its potential, 3.35 will see me getting back into things in a big way.

Please don't mess it up, Yoshi-P and co. I have faith in you!

The post 2287: Deep Dungeon is Exactly What FFXIV Needs appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I downloaded the Doom beta on PS4 earlier out of curiosity. I hadn't heard particularly positive things about it — though admittedly, this was mostly from disgruntled PC players who were whining about the lack of mod support and how it was "obviously built for consoles" — but as someone who actually used to really like Doom, I was interested to take a look.

I booted up Doom, fiddled around in the options a bit, took note of the entertaining options to weather, dirty up and scuff your armour in character customisation — not to mention painting it lurid shades of pink and purple — and then jumped into the multiplayer playlist.

Then, I waited.

And waited some more.

And then a bit more.

Well, okay, this perhaps makes it sound a bit longer than it actually was: it was probably less than five minutes in total, all told. But that was five minutes utterly wasted in which I wasn't doing anything apart from staring at the screen and perhaps rotating my character model a bit.

My mind was cast back to a comment someone I follow on Twitter made a while back, whose sentiment was along the lines of "rather than wasting your time with endless, pointless matchmaking games, throw yourself into enjoying games with stories; games with clear beginnings, middles and ends". At the time, I thought it a slightly extreme viewpoint, since I have enjoyed multiplayer matchmaking games in the past, but on reflection, he was absolutely right: for me, right now, matchmaking multiplayer games are a total waste of time and energy for what I find to be a subpar, unsatisfying experience compared to something that is either a bit more structured or something that has immediacy.

Doom isn't the only game where I've encountered the tedium of waiting for matchmaking queues. Playing a damage-dealing class on Final Fantasy XIV often leads to long queues for dungeons — although at least in that game, you can do other stuff in the open world while queueing, though there are a few limitations on your activities to prevent your queue popping and you being unavailable. Grand Theft Auto Online is particularly unpleasant to try and find a matchmaking session in, since it's riddled with people who pop into a lobby, then quit out again after five seconds if it's not already full. And I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, too.

So, I think I've had enough. I've felt a slight temptation to check out things like Doom and even the more recent Call of Duty games in the recent past, but on reflection, I feel they'll only frustrate me: time spent "waiting for players…" is time not spent enjoying a story in a single-player game, or trying to beat a high score in an arcade game, or chasing trophies in a game I've reached the post-game for.

This isn't to say I'm not going to play multiplayer at all, mind you: TrackMania Turbo has an excellent multiplayer where you can just jump in and out of player-made rooms at will, with no waiting around for there to be "enough" people to play. And I have a lot of fun playing Grand Theft Auto Online with my local friends. Those represent two different ways of having a fun online experience without getting matchmaking systems involved.

Strangers who are beyond that great wall of matchmaking, then? Fuck 'em; I've got better things to do than wait for them to show up to my party.

The post 2279: Matchmaking: A Great Way to Waste Time appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As I wrote in a few posts recently, I've been checking out the new Atari Vault compilation on Steam. Rather than talking about a specific game today, I wanted to talk a little bit about the value of the compilation as a whole, and why I'm enjoying exploring it.

Atari Vault is a compilation of somewhere in the region of 100 Atari games from the '80s. The bulk of the compilation consists of VCS 2600 games, but there are some arcade games in there too, including the likes of Crystal Castles, Missile Command, Major Havoc and Liberator.

I've owned a number of previous similar compilations in the past, and have typically gravitated towards the arcade games, since they seem more "palatable" from a modern perspective than the extremely primitive-looking 2600 games. I recall growing up with the Atari 8-bit home computers, and in comparison to those, 2600 games looked primitive even back at that time when it was relatively current, and as such, I've always found them a little offputting. I've made a specific effort to explore them a bit more this time around, though, and I've been pleased to discover some really interesting games.

Take Haunted House, for example. This is a fairly straightforward top-down "find all the things" game with an intriguing twist: you're in the dark. With your character represented as nothing more than a pair of eyes, you navigate around by either bumping into walls or lighting matches to illuminate the area immediately around you. A single game of Haunted House requires that you find all the pieces of a… thing… an urn? And you have to do so while using as few matches as possible and losing as few lives as possible, for this being a haunted house, it has a number of unpleasant beasties lurking around just waiting to nibble on you.

Or take Save Mary, a prototype game that never saw commercial release, but which presented an interesting twist on vaguely Tetris-ish block puzzles. The eponymous Mary is trapped at the bottom of a pit which is slowly filling with water. You control a crane and have to drop blocks into the well for Mary to climb up. You need to get her high enough to be able to grab her with the crane and save her. Once you've done this, you have to do it again, only with significantly more awkward-shaped blocks. The peculiar variation on the typical block puzzle formula is the fact that Mary has a mind of her own (albeit a predictable one) and you have to be careful not to squish her with the blocks you drop as she wanders back and forth trying to get to high ground.

Or how about Atari Video Cube, a really simple but surprisingly compelling puzzle game loosely based on Rubik's Cube? Controlling a weird little man (who has a name and a backstory and everything, though I can't remember it offhand), it's your job to pick up coloured squares from each of the 3×3 faces of the cube and lay them down so that each side is a solid colour. To make this more difficult, to pick up a coloured tile, you have to swap it with the one you're holding, and to make it even more difficult, you can't walk through tiles that are the same colour as the tile you're holding, even if they're on a different face of the cube.

The 2600 back catalogue appears to be filled with these sorts of interesting little games that we'd probably find laughable if released as full-scale, full-price commercial releases today, but as part of this compilation, they provide a surprising amount of entertainment value — and, in some cases, represent types of games that are very much deserving of a modern remake.

My only issue with them from a modern viewpoint is the fact that 2600 games tend to end rather abruptly, regardless of whether you "win" or "lose", and this can sometimes make victories over a particularly difficult level feel a bit less than satisfying. Still, this was from an age where gaming was quite a social pursuit — many of the 2600 games are very much designed to be played together with a partner — and so, I feel, a key part of the fun back then must have been making your own fun with the games to a certain extent; similar to how a tabletop game doesn't automatically set off fireworks as soon as you win, neither does a 2600 game. The celebrations and victory rewards are entirely up to you; I recommend betting each other a slice of pizza or a big lump of cake on a game of Combat and see how much you like each other by the end of the evening!

The post 2276: Video Computer System appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Have you been playing HunieCam Studio? If not, you should; it's great.

If you have, you've probably discovered that it's quite challenging, at least for your first few playthroughs. Here, then, are a few tips that I've figured out in my first three playthroughs, the last of which resulted in a lovely gold dick trophy.

The first few days on the job

While your overall goal in HunieCam Studio is to have as many fans as possible by the end of the 21st day, don't sweat fans at all to begin with, since you only have one girl and you need money.

It doesn't really matter which of the three starter girls you pick, since they all have identical stats and none of them are addicted to drink or cigarettes. Choose whoever you like the most, though take note of the fetishes they cater to, as these will be more important later in the game.

Immediately send your starter girl to do a few cam shows one after the other. This will give you enough money to spend on a few upgrades. You'll want to prioritise both the staffing upgrade that increases the number of girls you can hire, and the inventory upgrade that allows girls to carry accessories.

Once you've upgraded your staffing, send your girl to the model agency to find some hot new talent. Pick someone who won't break the bank with her hourly rate, because you don't have a lot of income yet. Once you've got your second girl up and running, you can start branching out a bit.

Getting into the rhythm

Now you can start building your fanbase a bit. Remember that when a girl does a photoshoot, she gains fans of some or all of the fetishes she caters to, so it's actually quite helpful to hire girls with overlapping fetishes. You can force overlaps with the accessories that unlock new fetishes, too; if every girl has a butt plug, for example, they'll all earn fans of Anal when they do a photoshoot, which will give you a fanbase that will apply to all of them when they do a cam show — which means more money.

Consider upgrading one of your girls' abilities with the strip club and the shopping mall, but keep a steady flow of income coming in; remember that you have to pay your girls by midnight every day, and if you get into debt and don't get back out again by midnight of the next day, the game is over! Don't over-upgrade, either, since your money will still be fairly limited until you have more girls with better skills.

Thrusting forwards

From your third girl onwards, don't be afraid to hire a drinker or a smoker, though perhaps steer clear of those who are heavily addicted. Drinkers and/or smokers build up stress more slowly so long as they have a supply of their particular vice(s), so they can perform more actions before you need to send them to the Day Spa to recover.

Once you do hire a drinker and/or a smoker, be sure to either use one of your unupgraded starter girls — or, if you've upgraded them both, a new hire with skills at the base level to save costs — to become your errand girl, doing nothing but running to the shops to get drink and cigarettes. You can make her considerably more efficient by acquiring a Shopping Basket from the Adult Shop, which doubles the yield of both shops, and you can make her even more efficient by dosing her up with coke each day, which makes her complete her activities at double speed. If you find yourself with a considerable surplus of drink and cigarettes, use the opportunity to send her to the Adult Shop whenever you can, as accessories are always useful. Grab condoms and antibiotics when you see them, as these are handy during financial emergencies.

Oh, God, yes

One of the most useful accessories is the Subscribe pillow. This allows a girl to earn fans when she does a cam show — it's not quite as quick as when she does a photoshoot, but it gives you a trickle of fan income, which will gradually increase your financial income and final score, too. Equip all your main camgirls with the best skills with one as soon as possible, and fill their remaining inventory slots with fetish accessories, as these increase the amount of fans they earn as well as allow them to cater to specific fetishes.

As you progress, don't forget about upgrades, particularly those that allow you to collect more money and fans with each click on the cam and photo studios. Time you're spending collecting resources is time you're not spending micromanaging your army of sex workers, so being able to collect it more efficiently is a godsend. Also be sure to invest in at least a couple of levels of the Automation upgrade, since this allows you to passively collect resources even when you're doing other things.

Uhhhhuhhhhggghhhhnnnngh

Money troubles? No worries. Whore out your girls at the Sleazy Motel and you'll earn all the money they'd earn from a camshow in a fraction of the time. There is, however, the risk of them catching an STD from this, and STDs range from mildly inconvenient and curable to completely incapacitating and incurable. If a girl gets AIDS, immediately hire another one to take her place, since AIDS victims are unable to do anything.

To prevent STDs, give the girl you're sending to the Motel — your highest earner, obviously — a condom, and you won't have to worry. If the worst does happen, however, dose her up with antibiotics and she'll be better in three days. Alternatively, you can give her a shot of steroids to negate the effects of the STD temporarily, though this is not an ideal solution.

Aaaaaahhh

Once you've got a good lineup of well-skilled girls and you're making good money, make sure you start investing in advertising, since this simply allows you to exchange money for fans. If your cashflow is a little limited, prioritise the ads that cater to fetishes you have on staff, since this will make those girls more profitable. If money is no object, buy all the ads you can, and upgrade your advertising to be able to purchase more — and better — ads each day. Note that this upgrade isn't retroactive, though; it takes effect from the following day, so it's useless if you forget about it until day 21.

Also, it is very much worth your while to upgrade your web hosting and photo equipment, as these significantly increase the cash you get from camshows and the fans you get from photoshoots respectively. They're expensive upgrades, but they pay for themselves before long.

Finishing off

In your last few days, ditch any "useful" accessories you've been using such as the Piggy Bank, Nicotine Patch or Wine Box, and make sure each girl has three fetish-catering items, increasing her fan yield. Rotate your girls between camming and photoshooting to keep both money and fans coming in, and be sure to buy ads each day. Keep your errand girl active, too; if you don't need drink and cigarettes, keep her shopping at the Adult Shop for condoms and antibiotics.

Most importantly for the whole game, make sure no girl is wasting time: everyone should always be doing something, even if that something is just resting at the Day Spa. If a girl finishes an activity and you're in the middle of collecting a resource, stop and assign her to something new before you resume collection, otherwise she's dead weight for those few moments, and if you want a huge fan count and that big, spunking platinum dick trophy, every second counts.

The post 2270: HunieCam Studio: A Few Tips appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Remember "time management" games? Diner Dash and the like? They were a large part of what constituted "casual games" before free-to-play mobile shit entered the marketplace and ruined everyone's fun with microtransactions, throttling and "fun pain".

HuniePot, developer of HuniePop and now HunieCam Studio, clearly remembers the good old days of casual games before free-to-play. Not only have they made an excellent puzzle game in the form of HuniePop — a game that successfully puts an interesting twist on match-3 and doesn't just clone Bejeweled — but now they've made an enjoyable and surprisingly addictive time management game in the form of HunieCam Studio.

HunieCam Studio describes itself as a management/tycoon game, but set aside any thoughts of the complex '90s/'00s-era tycoon games here: this is a game that is extremely simple to pick up — thanks in part to an amusingly well-written (and skippable) tutorial starring Kyu, the perverted fairy from HuniePop — but challenging to master. And it's a game that's designed to be replayed and experimented with, too; both to beat your own high score and to tackle some of the challenging achievements on offer.

But what is HunieCam Studio? Well, let me rewind a bit and give some context. HunieCam Studio's predecessor HuniePop was a Kickstarter success story, promising a Western-style dating sim with anime-style graphics but a distinctly foul-mouthed Western comedy approach. It changed a little from its original brief, but maintained its core formula of using its puzzle mechanics to represent how well your dates with the game's various lovely ladies were going, and incorporated some resource management as you upgraded your character's abilities and bought the girls gifts.

HunieCam Studio takes much of HuniePop's cast along with some newcomers and puts them in a new context: the seedy underbelly of the Internet, specifically the "camgirl" industry. For those far too innocent to know what a camgirl is, you can probably work it out; just in case you really have led a sheltered life, though, a camgirl is an online sex worker, putting on shows from her bedroom (or studio) for the gratification of horny people who want to watch some live porn. Camgirls make their money through a combination of tips from the audience (delivered electronically) and particularly amorous punters who pay for some private one-on-one time with the girl.

In many ways, camgirl work is the "acceptable" face of the sex work industry, if such a thing exists, since many camgirls work independently for themselves, and the natural barrier that the Internet puts between them and their audience means that it's a lot easier for them to stay safe from dangers such as STDs and punters who get a little… overenthusiastic.

Ideal video game fodder, wouldn't you say? No? Well then, you'd be wrong.

HunieCam Studio's gameplay takes place on a static town map. Beginning with just one girl in your camgirl empire — HunieCam Studio's take on camgirls has you working for Kyu, who in turn wants nothing more than to roll in big piles of money obtained through the sleaziest means possible — you assign your charges to various tasks, each of which takes a varying amount of time, but which can be sped up by clicking or holding the mouse button down on it. This has led many people to arguably erroneously describe HunieCam Studio as a "clicker" game, but it differentiates itself from popular clickers such as Clicker Heroes by having a clearer structure and goals in place rather than just playing endlessly for the sake of it.

The tasks the girls can take on include putting on cam shows (which earns money), doing photo shoots (which earns fans, which equal more money when doing cam shows), training their talent (which improves the money they make per fan during cam shows) and style (which improves the number of fans they acquire per photo shoot), shopping for booze and cigarettes (both of which cause those with varying degrees of addiction to either or both to remain somewhat more stress-free than their clean counterparts), fucking punters in a sleazy motel (which makes money more quickly than cam shows, but which carries a risk of the girl catching one of several STDs, each of which has its own negative effects that restrict her actions), shopping for accessories (which carry passive bonuses) or resting at the day spa (which alleviates stress built up through all of the above activities).

Meanwhile, as Kyu's assistant, it's your job to manage the girls' time effectively and upgrade the overall operation using the money they earn. As you progress, you can unlock more slots to hire more girls and consequently perform more simultaneous actions, and you can also improve the pace at which clicking on things speeds things along as well as automating the collection of the resources actions produce. This becomes particularly important later when the girls start earning large amounts of money and fans with each action; clicking over a thousand times to collect all your ill-gotten gains isn't going to work.

You also have to manage the overall budget. The girls have an hourly rate of pay that increases as their talent and style levels increase, and at midnight each day you have to pay them. If this puts you in debt and you're not back out of debt by midnight on the next day, you lose. There are no other consequences to getting into debt, however, so sometimes it can be tactically advantageous to quickly blow all your money to get your operation in a good position, then spend part of the next day recouping the deficit you're left with after paying the girls.

The overall aim of HunieCam Studio is to have as many fans as possible by the end of a 21-day period. Once this time period is up, your final fan total is totted up and you're awarded a trophy according to how well you did. This, in turn, provides you with coins that can be spent on unlocking new hairstyles and costumes for the girls, with a mildly lewd picture on offer as a reward for each girl if you unlock all her variations. (Interestingly, during the game itself there's no explicitly lewd content whatsoever; everything is implied or mentioned in text. This is not a game to fap to.)

HunieCam Studio appears simple, but there are some interesting things going on under the (clitoral) hood, particularly with how the "fans" system works. Each girl starts catering to two specific fetishes, usually relating to their physical appearance — "MILF", "Teen", "Latina" and suchlike. Fans you acquire have specific tastes, meaning that girls who have a greater share of your total fanbase will make more money doing cam shows, and more money means faster upgrades. Ideally, you'll have multiple girls with overlapping fetishes, and this can be partially manipulated by purchasing accessories from the shop — buying butt plugs and giving them to a girl allows her to cater to fans who enjoy bum fun, for example, but this won't do you much good until you attract some fans of bum fun in the first place through photoshoots or paying for advertising to a particular audience.

As the game progresses and you get more girls in your little harem, things get surprisingly hectic if you want to keep things running as efficiently as possible, and STDs can throw a real spanner in the works, particularly if they're one of the serious, incurable ones — AIDS, for example, prevents a girl from doing anything at all because she's so depressed about the situation, making her completely useless to your operation. There is, sadly, little time to feel sorry for her, though; not if you want to make money and attract fans, anyway. Such is the way of a capitalist society.

I enjoy HunieCam Studio a lot more than I was expecting to. Its controversial new art direction — taking a distinctly more "Western cartoon" approach than the anime-inspired art of HuniePop — actually looks pretty good in the context of the game, and it's enjoyable to play. A full 21-day game only takes about an hour and a half tops, too, so it's easily replayable, and for those with little free time, you can save and come back at another time. You can also continue playing the game in "endless" mode after the 21 days are up, but you can't achieve the better trophies in this way — you'll need to start again for that.

A lot of people describe the people making consciously "arty" indie games as the punk movement of the games industry, but I have to say, I feel a bit differently; while I have nothing against the art-games movement and indeed encourage it in many cases, it's a very cliquey little part of the industry that has very specific ideas about what is and isn't "acceptable" or "good", particularly with regard to controversial and/or progressive themes.

HuniePot, meanwhile, don't give a shit what people think of them and deliberately set out with their games to be as provocative and offensive to those with delicate sensibilities as possible — while taking care to ensure that what they produce is also actually technically proficient and enjoyable to play. That sounds pretty punk to me — and they've set out to achieve what they wanted to twice now. I hope we see more from them in the future.

The post 2267: HunieCam Studio: Private Time Management appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Continuing my exploration of Atari Vault on Steam — and partly in honour of the fact that for some inexplicable (but welcome!) reason, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell followed me on Twitter earlier today — I thought I'd take a look at another game I was previously unfamiliar with: Major Havoc.

Major Havoc is one of those games from the early '80s that eschewed sprites, bitmaps and pixels in favour of vector graphics, giving it a very distinctive, recognisable look that stands alongside other vector games such as Asteroids, Battlezone, Red Baron, Tempest and Star Wars. In keeping with the inventiveness of video gaming's youth, Major Havoc is a rather peculiar game with some ambitious concepts, and quite possibly one of the first attempts at cross-genre gaming.

Major Havoc is split into several phases. First of all there's a quasi-3D shoot 'em up section, where you control Major Havoc's spaceship at the bottom of the screen and shoot incoming enemies as they come towards you. The interesting thing about this part is that it's not just straight Space Invaders-style waves of enemies: the first level features enemies that turn into a different form and home in on you when you hit them; the second features Galaxians-style swooping enemies, and the third starts with swirling, spiral enemies that draw lines on the screen, which subsequently become a maze you have to navigate your ship through as you approach your destination. (I can't get past this one, so I can't speak to what comes later!)

Following this, you have a Lunar Lander-lite section where you have to land Major Havoc's ship on a flashing white platform atop the target you were approaching in the first phase. Then Major Havoc gets out of the ship and you're seamlessly taken into a side-on platformer with weird gravity (hold the jump button down and you keep rising; let go and you'll fall) where you have to find a reactor, set it to explode and then get back out to your ship before you blow up with it. After that, the process repeats with a different wave of enemies, different platform to land on and different maze to negotiate.

It's a really cool game that tries some things I certainly haven't seen before, and the blend of space shooter and platforming hasn't really been attempted again (to my knowledge, anyway) until FuturLab's very recent Velocity 2x on PlayStation 4 and Vita.

It's also a stark reminder and interesting reminder that differences between Eastern and Western games have always been very apparent, though not always in quite the same way as today — Atari's games of the early '80s capitalised on the popularity of futuristic sci-fi thanks to Star Wars and made effective use of technologies such as vector graphics to create that aesthetic, while Japanese games of a similar era were often based around pixel art with cute aesthetics and more mascot-like characters.

Major Havoc, then: pretty neat, and another nice discovery from the Atari Vault. Looking forward to discovering more. (Also, hi, Mr Bushnell, if you're reading, which you probably aren't. Thank you for following.)

The post 2262: Have You Played Major Havoc Today? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I like retro compilations, not just for the ability to play games from my youth on modern hardware, but also to discover some classics that, for whatever reason, I missed out on when they were first released.

Such has been the case after just a few minutes with Atari Vault, a new release on Steam that packages together about a hundred Atari 2600 and arcade games from the late '70s and early '80s — including a few previously unreleased prototypes, which is kinda cool.

One such discovery I made today was an interesting (and surprisingly impressive for the time) game called Liberator, a quasi-sequel to Missile Command that flipped the concept of the original Cold War-inspired game on its head by putting you in the role of the aggressors, attacking enemy bases on planets in order to liberate the population from the villains.

Liberator, I've discovered, was quite a rare game even on its original release, which might explain why I've never come across it before. According to Gaming History, the original arcade machine sold for a whopping $2,000 and did not prove particularly popular, with only somewhere in the region of 760 cabinets actually being made — all this despite it being a game absolutely made for cross-promotion with Atari's "Atari Force" comic series. The curse of old-school Atari constantly and consistently failing at marketing strikes once again, I guess.

Anyway. The game plays quite a bit like Missile Command in that it's a somewhat different take on the shoot 'em up. Rather than firing directly at things, you fire at a crosshair on screen, and your missiles detonate when they reach the point you fired at. Thus, to destroy things, you have to cause explosions at locations where the enemies will be when your missiles arrive — usually meaning you have to fire ahead of them carefully, anticipating their movements.

Much like Missile Command, you can fire from several different places on screen, and these missile launchers — here depicted as starships orbiting an enemy planet — can be independently destroyed, acting as your "lives" for the game session. The game, then, becomes a matter of balancing your offense on the planet surface, which requires you to destroy enemy missile bases on the rotating globe ahead of you, and defending yourself against incoming missiles and other attacks. Not every attack is guaranteed to hit you, either, so you also need to spot which things you need to prioritise destroying and which you can safely ignore.

It's an interesting game; very simple, but undoubtedly addictive in the same way that Missile Command is. It's a good-looking game for the time period (1982), as well, with some decent pixel art for "Commander Champion", who briefs you on your mission, and a well-done 3D rotating globe effect for the planets you're orbiting. Sound effects, meanwhile, are the same bleeps, burbles and booms from Missile Command — nothing special, but certainly iconic of this particular period in gaming.

There's a lot more to explore in Atari Vault, but I anticipate that Liberator will be one I keep coming back to!

The post 2260: Have You Played Liberator Today? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've been back and forth on whether or not I should continue playing Final Fantasy XIV for a while now. I do love the game and all it offers, but the long period of time between the release of expansion pack Heavensward and its first major content patch caused me to get significant burnout, and while I did get temporarily enthused around the start of the patch 3.2 cycle, I'm once again feeling that I don't really want to do the endgame grind, nor do I want to raid.

Those who have been following my blog for a while will know that I've been one of the loudest, most enthusiastic people about Final Fantasy XIV ever since the beta of A Realm Reborn. So why the change of heart? Well, a number of reasons, really.

First up is the aforementioned endgame grind. This has always been present in the game — it is an MMO, after all — but first time around it somehow didn't feel so bad, perhaps because I never got "ahead of the curve" and made content irrelevant by outgearing it within a day or two of it releasing. In other words, taking on challenges was always exciting and there was always something to aim for; that aspect is still there, but if anything, I think there's now too much to grind on for what feels like relatively little reward.

Take the Anima weapons, for example — Heavensward's version of the Relic weapons from A Realm Reborn. The first step of this process either requires you to give up a fully upgraded level 50 relic (which a lot of people had at least one of by this point) or to repeatedly run FATEs around the Heavensward areas until you got Atma-like drops at a very low chance. The second step requires you to run ten dungeons that, at the level you're constructing the Anima weapon at, are completely irrelevant to you unless you're collecting gear for alt classes. The final step requires you to collect 20 each of four different items and then do some other bits and pieces.

The first step either takes seconds or hours of boring FATE grinding, though you can at least attempt to get the items from FATEs while levelling another class. The second step is just plain tedious, though it is presumably there as an attempt to keep older dungeons populated for those who are coming up through the 50s. And the third and final step is an absolutely brutal grind that either takes weeks of daily quests or repeated running of dungeons and/or the first (now largely irrelevant) part of the Alexander raid dungeon. Oddly, the jump in item level and power for this final step is significantly smaller than that for the second step, despite the final step being by far the most significant undertaking.

I currently have 8 out of the 60 items required to upgrade my Relic to its (currently) final form, and the next step of the process is coming soon. I just don't feel any inclination to do this alongside grinding daily quest reputation, Tomestones to purchase gear, XP for classes that haven't reached 60 yet, not to mention crafting and gathering, both of which are one of the few reliable ways to make a decent amount of money in the game.

The trouble, then, is not that there's nothing to do as such — it's that there's too much to do, but that too much is based on doing the same things over and over again for weeks or even months. The worst of both worlds, if you will — for me, anyway. There are plenty of people still playing who seem to be quite happy indulging in this grind. Some are even already working on their second or third Anima weapons.

I don't begrudge anyone how they spend their time, but having been playing a bunch of other stuff recently, I just don't want to commit the amount of time necessary to progress at a meaningful pace in Heavensward, because it means that I won't have time to enjoy other games like Senran Kagura Estival Versus, Dungeon Travelers 2, the upcoming Trillion God of Destruction and the many, many RPGs that are still on my game shelves, as yet unplayed. I've tried finding that magic balance between FFXIV and other games, and it just doesn't really exist for me — I always end up going in an "all or nothing" direction, and right now I'm feeling like I would rather play other things.

I'm not hanging up my Eorzean adventuring shoes completely; I fully intend to continue dropping in on the game to see how the plot develops with each new content patch, but I no longer have any desire to stay "current" with content progression, raids or Extreme-level Primal fights. In a way, I'm a bit sad that I feel this way, as FFXIV has been such a significant part of my life for so long — and my wife now plays more than I do — but ultimately, if you're not happy or having fun doing something that is supposed to be enjoyable, then there's really no point carrying on with it.

Alongside all this is the social matter: our Free Company has become very quiet over the last few months. I'm not entirely sure what's caused this and I don't really want to investigate for fear of dredging up any drama that might be involved. But playing the game isn't the same social activity it once was, with Free Company chat a lively place filled with people having fun, joking around and enjoying themselves. Many of the regular faces are still there, but remain quiet in "public", instead preferring to converse in small, private Linkshells rather than the main guild channel. It's made for an atmosphere that isn't anywhere near as welcoming and fun as it once was.

And alongside this is the matter of the overall game community and how it has declined somewhat over the last few months. MMOs always have a problem with elitism at their top end, but Final Fantasy XIV always used to feel like it was one of the more positive, friendly communities out there. Now, though, it's a place where you get yelled at if you don't speedrun dungeons, where newcomers to fights are sometimes kicked out of groups, and where players bitch about people they perceive to be "inferior" to them both in-game and on social media. The rise in popularity of DPS parsers also means that the particularly elitist players have data to hold over the heads of people they think are underperforming, and rather than offering feedback on how to improve, many of these people think that simply quoting them their DPS figure is enough to make them want to "git gud".

This is a generalisation, of course; I've still had plenty of positive experiences in the game in recent months, and I always made a point to be the change I wanted to see in the community by being friendly and conversational when playing with others, offering advice without berating when necessary. But it's just got to a point where this side of things has become exhausting and even stressful at times, and that's not conducive to having fun.

So I'm stepping away. For how long, I don't know, though as I say, I'm pretty sure I'll be back in for the next patch, at least to see how the main scenario storyline develops. Raiding, though? Nope. Sephirot EX? No thank you. Anima grind? No, thank you.

Now, I'm 86 hours deep in Dungeon Travelers 2 and I have grinding to do… he said, without a trace of irony.

The post 2259: Back to Solo Play appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I knew after just a couple of minutes of playing TrackMania Turbo's demo that I needed the full game in my life, so it wasn't long before I was in my local game emporium picking up a physical copy. (Discs rule. Yes they do.) And I've been spending some time with the full version. Here are some things you might like to know about it.

It's an arcade racer with gloriously old-school handling

That means tapping the brakes to suddenly find yourself going sideways, powersliding around corners, releasing the accelerator to slow down only when you absolutely have to, and all that good stuff. It's not realistic in the slightest, but TrackMania has always been about having fun that just happens to be in cars; it's never been trying to be realistic, and it's always been all the better for it.

There are four distinct environments, each with a very different feel

Earlier TrackMania titles incorporated multiple environments, each of which had its own unique vehicle with its own unique handling. TrackMania 2 bucked this trend by releasing each environment as a separate game — Canyon, Valley and Stadium. It was a controversial move that some saw as new publisher Ubisoft trying to make a bit more money off the game and perhaps it was — but each of these environments was very well fleshed out with plenty of variety. Plus each individual game was a fraction of the price of a brand-new triple-A game.

TrackMania Turbo incorporates revamped versions of the Canyon, Valley and Stadium environments from TrackMania 2 and adds its own Lagoon environment to the mix. Lagoon is somewhat similar to the Island environment from TrackMania United, but with a few additions — most notably magnetic rollercoaster tracks that your car sticks to, allowing for corkscrewing, loop-the-looping and all manner of other acrobatics with zero risk of your car flying off into the sunset or plummeting from a great height into shark-infested waters.

Pleasingly, each environment feels very different. The Canyon cars are extremely drifty — we're talking Ridge Racer territory here. The Valley cars, meanwhile, are a little more twitchy, plus the wider variety of road (and off-road) surfaces means that you have to adapt to several different ways of throwing your car around. The Lagoon cars are the most sensitive and grippy of all, able to get around very tight corners without having to drift (or even slow down, in some cases), and the Stadium cars are much like their counterparts from the previous games: heavy but grippy, with the ability to throw them into a drift with judicious application of the brakes.

There's a 200-level campaign

Yep, 200 races for you to complete. You can't just challenge them in any order, though; you have to start with the "White"-level Canyon tracks, then attain enough medals to unlock the "White" Valley tracks, then the "White" Lagoon tracks and finally the "White" Stadium tracks — only then will you be able to move up to the next tier. The top two tiers of difficulty require silver and gold medals respectively, while the first three only require bronze medals.

This structure is a bit more restrictive than past TrackMania games in that you can't jump back and forth between each environment's mini-campaign if you get fed up with a particular track, but ultimately it gives the game a good sense of progression.

There's a bunch of ways to play multiplayer

TrackMania has always been an incredibly overlooked local multiplayer party game, and hopefully its jump to consoles will help fix that. Turbo incorporates a number of different ways to play together.

Split-Screen is self-explanatory: everyone races together, first over the line wins, and the overall winner is determined by a best of three. This is noteworthy for being one of the only four-player split-screen games I've seen on the last two generations of consoles.

Arcade mode is a flexible mode where you can pick a track and then attempt to set a time using three "credits". The top ten times are recorded on a high score table, so you can challenge your friends to beat your best times that you've previously set — or have a mini-tournament there and then.

Hotseat mode is most similar to the previous games' multiplayer option. Up to 16 players can play in turn, each of whom is given a full tank of gas. Each player then attempts to set a time on the course; if the current leader is beaten, they then have to try and beat their challenger. The process repeats until everyone has run out of gas, and whoever is top of the leaderboard at that point is the winner.

All these local multiplayer modes can be played using any of the 200 campaign tracks (all of which are unlocked from the outset — no need to play single-player to open them up for multiplayer), any tracks you've built using the game's track editor, or a randomly generated track that the game builds for you. This latter option is fun, but a little time-consuming: you can watch the game building the track piece-by-piece, then it has to spend a few moments calculating shadows for the objects it's added. (Pro-Tip: choose "Fast" rather than "Nice" for lighting quality unless you want to wait a good 3 or 4 minutes before you can play the track.)

It's built for console

TrackMania has always felt like a PC game. And I don't necessarily mean that as a positive thing. Past installments have been highly customisable and expandable, but this came at a price: a clunky, inconsistent interface and an online component that required you know about (and are able to set up) dedicated servers and suchlike. The game was considerably expanded by a worldwide community of modders, in other words.

TrackMania Turbo doesn't support mods, nor does it do dedicated servers — at least not in the same way as the earlier PC games. This, naturally, has made the PC crowd get furious as they are wont to do, but really for the average player it's a change for the better. Multiplayer is now a case of just creating a room or joining an existing one. The interface is consistent and controller-friendly. You don't need to worry about having the right mods installed just to make other people's cars show up, or spend time tweaking settings to optimise performance. It is an overused phrase, but TrackMania Turbo just works, and thank God for that.

It's the best arcade racer for years

While many of the more "arcadey" racing games have gone in the open-world direction over the last few years, making for sprawling, unfocused experiences where you dribble from one type of activity to another, TrackMania remains so true to its arcade inspirations that on its title screen it prompts you to "insert coin or press X", followed by the sound of a coin clunking into an arcade machine when the main menu appears.

It's presented well, with a clear, uncluttered interface, wonderful handling and a pick-up-and-play nature that is accessible (but challenging) to all ages, and with the combination of the track editor, the ability to download other players' tracks and the random track generator, has potentially limitless replayability.

So if you like arcade racing — or the technical, puzzle-like stunt racing of titles like Ubisoft stablemate Trials — then you absolutely, definitely should pick up a copy of TrackMania Turbo as soon as possible.

The post 2258: TrackMania Turbo: Impressions from the Full Version appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Those who know me well will know that I've been a huge fan of the TrackMania series since the original release of TrackMania United, and have spent many hours on the various updates to United and the eventual follow-ups TrackMania 2 Canyon, Valley and Stadium. So it was with some excitement that I realised that the next official sequel, TrackMania Turbo, was releasing this week, though I was torn on whether to pick it up for console (PS4, in my case) or PC, which has traditionally been the home of TrackMania.

After playing the PS4 demo for a bit this evening, I think I'm going to grab the PS4 version. I'm very impressed with how at home it feels on console — much of the clunkiness of the PC versions, particularly in the menus, has been tidied up considerably, making it much more controller-friendly, and the addition of a variety of local multiplayer modes makes it eminently suitable for console play. It, so far, seems to be a highly polished product, which addresses what has always been my main criticism of the series as a whole: the fact that in terms of gameplay, it is wonderful, but in terms of interface and user-friendliness, it has traditionally been a ridiculous mess, only made worse by the gazillions of mods server operators apply to their custom dedicated servers, making the game screen more complicated than your average MMO come raid time.

PC players on Steam seem to be a bit salty that TrackMania Turbo has stripped out a number of features they've come to take for granted: specifically, the ability for players to run their own dedicated servers and install gajillions of mods that make players' screens look more complicated than your average MMO come raid time. And while this is a bit of a shame from the perspective of the game's flexibility — something that TrackMania has always prided itself on — I don't think it's going to hurt the complete package, and in fact it may well be good for the series as a whole. TrackMania Turbo will serve as the friendly face of TrackMania, in other words, while the truly hardcore still have United and TrackMania 2 to play and mod to their heart's content. Both of those games are still a hell of a lot of fun to play, after all — and surprisingly good looking, to boot, especially considering their age.

But what of TrackMania Turbo then? How does it shape up compared to its illustrious, if clunky, predecessors? Judging from the five tracks available in the demo, extremely favourably. In fact, if the whole game handles in the way those early tracks do, I'm confident that it will become a new favourite arcade racer.

The thing I like the most is the unabashedly arcadey handling. We're talking Ridge Racer-tier drifting here: release the accelerator, steer around a corner and slam the gas back on and you're going sideways. Hit the brakes and you'll find yourself in an even tighter drift, allowing you to get around even the most ridiculous of corners without losing anywhere near as much speed as if you'd have to drive "properly" like in boring driving sims.

The game screen, sans custom mod clutter, is clean, clear and offers ample feedback on your performance as you play, including split times, worldwide and regional rankings, and fun little extras like arcade-style counters showing how far you've jumped or drifted for — a nice addition that gives the game a very "Sega" feel.

I was debating whether or not I wanted to grab the game today. Playing those five tracks in the demo has made me quite happy to pick it up, though; I can see it being a whole lot of fun, and I hope it's a big success, helping to show console players the joy of this wonderfully silly but skillful and creative series.

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Some friends and I have managed to spend most of today playing Grand Theft Auto Online, the sprawling multiplayer mode for Grand Theft Auto V on… well, everything, but we were playing on PC, because we all have excellent gaming rigs and like it looking lovely and running at 60+ frames per second.

Anyway. Regular readers will know that my reaction to Grand Theft Auto Online has been somewhat lukewarm in the past, but today we had a ton of genuine fun, both in the free-roaming mode and in the more structured activities. I think it's finally won me over as something I want to play more of — I'm still unconvinced that I want to play it with strangers, as popular triple-A game multiplayer modes tend to attract the very worst kind of person, but I definitely want to do a lot more with friends.

It has problems, though; fairly significant ones for an online game. Mostly the issues relate to the overall clunkiness of setting up and managing online sessions. There's no party system, for instance, which makes sticking together with the same group of players when moving from activity to activity a little troublesome at times, though the addition of the "Remain Host" option alleviates this somewhat by ensuring whoever initiates an activity remains in control of the session's options after it's over.

The problems with the party system are further compounded by Rockstar's insistence on using its own proprietary login system for online IDs — the Rockstar Social Club. I can understand why they've done this — there's some nice detailed stat-tracking and suchlike on the Social Club website — but it's a shame it doesn't integrate with something like Steam. On consoles it integrates perfectly with Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, making it straightforward to find and invite people, whereas the addition of an extra layer of user IDs and accounts on the PC version makes it a bit of a faff to get set up to play with friends. Social Club is also a bit of a temperamental beast; we spent nearly an hour at the start of our session earlier with one of our friends steadfastly appearing offline despite him being logged in to GTA Online; turned out the solution was just to open the Social Club interface in game, and then he magically appeared online. Dumb. Broken.

Fortunately, once it works, it seems to stay working for the most part, and while there are a few aspects of the experience you miss out on when playing in small, private sessions rather than in large public games, we certainly didn't feel like we were being deprived of anything to do. Pleasingly, there are a lot of activities tuned for 4 players, which is typically the number of people we manage to have available at any one time, so there were plenty of options for us.

Over time, Grand Theft Auto Online has expanded with a veritable fuckton of new game modes and ways to play, too; open-world activities in Free Mode might challenge you to capture and control an area on the map; "adversary" modes give you unconventional and sometimes asymmetrical ways to compete against each other; missions provide relatively freeform objectives for you to complete as a group. And then, of course, there are the Heists, which we are yet to see one through to its conclusion, but which promise to be a ton of fun.

Particular highlights for us today included the "Hasta la Vista" adversary mode, in which the four participants are split into two teams: two on pedal bicycles, two in big rig truck cabs. The players on the bikes have to reach the finish line. The players in the trucks have to stop them by flattening them. The huge difference in weight, size and manoeuvreability between the two teams makes for a really fun, silly experience that is much more interesting than a straightforward race.

We also had great fun with the air races. In our first race, which gave us free reign to choose our aircraft, I ill-advisedly attempted to fly a small passenger jet and failed miserably to complete the course. In the second, we all flew small, nimble aerobatic planes, and — particularly when played in first-person — it was thrilling and terrifying.

Even just straight deathmatches are fun. The realistic city environments in which the game takes place make for great places to play cat-and-mouse (with shotguns), and it's immensely satisfying to battle your friends for ultimate supremacy, or at least bragging rights.

Grand Theft Auto Online feels like what Grand Theft Auto has always wanted to be: a realistic-looking but chaotic, silly, cartoonishly violent and darkly humorous playground for people to let loose in using a variety of methods: driving, flying, boating, skydiving, cycling, shooting, bombing, robbing, running, climbing, jumping… while I don't think anyone will ever make the argument that it's great art, it's not trying to be; it's a stark contrast from the single-player mode, which does tell a good story and tell it well. Rather, it's a game where the stories are, for the most part, emergent; the stories are the things you reminisce about with the friends you've been playing with, and most of them start with "do you remember that time when…?"

So yeah. Grand Theft Auto Online, your interface sucks and you need to hire people who understand how multiplayer games work. But despite all that, you've won me over. I'm greatly looking forward to the next time I can flatten my friends in a dump truck and blow them up with a rocket launcher.

The post 2251: GTA Online: More Fun Than I Originally Gave it Credit For appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I upgraded the processor on my PC yesterday. It was the last bit that needed upgrading to make it decently up-to-date, and I'd been meaning to do it for a while. It was also a good excuse to wipe everything, reinstall Windows and have a nice fresh, clean system that wasn't clogged up with all manner of crap. For a little while, anyway.

PC gaming, for many people, is the relentless pursuit of ever more impressive frame rates, preferably at ever more impressive resolutions. I've never felt particularly strongly about either, given that my PC is hooked up to my TV and thus is limited to a maximum of 60 frames per second at 1920×1080 resolution; in other words, anything above 60 simply wouldn't benefit what was on screen at all, and in fact would often result in unsightly "screen tearing", where different parts of the screen update at different times. Consequently, I habitually play everything with VSync on, which limits the frame rates to 60 and completely eliminates any tearing. It's kind of deliberately hobbling performance to look better.

That said, even with a theoretical maximum frame rate of 60, my old processor couldn't quite keep up with some of the more modern games. I have a decent graphics card, so nothing was actually unplayable, but I knew that I could probably get more out of said graphics card with better base hardware. Final Fantasy XIV, for example, ran perfectly well at anywhere between about 30 and 60 frames per second depending on how much was going on at the time — it would be pretty damn smooth in the relative peace and quiet of instanced dungeons, while the frame rate would drop a fair bit in densely populated areas or busy battle scenes with lots of players. I'm not someone that these frame rate disparities bothered a great deal, but they were noticeable.

So with some degree of curiosity, after assembling the new bits and pieces and putting my computer back together, I fired up Final Fantasy XIV to investigate if the performance was any better. After a little fiddling with settings — previously, it ran better in "borderless windowed" mode, while now it runs better in dedicated full-screen mode — I was very pleased to discover that it was now running at an absolutely rock-solid 60 frames per second, constantly, regardless of what was happening on the screen at the time. It didn't make a massive difference to the visual fidelity of the game, but it was nice.

Then I jumped into a dungeon, and the true nature of the improvements better hardware brought on became apparent. While the graphics had never really struggled much in dungeons — except with the bizarre bug in the old DirectX 9 version of the game where facing certain directions would cause your frame rate to tank, presumably because the game was trying to render more "out of sight" stuff at once — what really became obvious as I was running with my new hardware was how much more responsive everything was. While the background graphics never really struggled much on my old rig, you could occasionally see things like the interface elements juddering a bit, particularly the damage numbers and status messages that scroll up and down the screen during combat, keeping you informed of what's happening.

Now, those messages are just as smooth as the animations and effects. More importantly, the controls are significantly more responsive, because there aren't any "dead frames", for want of a better word, where the game doesn't register a button input for whatever reason. It was a minor issue before; now it's completely absent, which is lovely. I hadn't anticipated quite how lovely it would be, but it really is; knowing that my performance can no longer be hampered by the complexity of the visuals on screen or how much is happening at the same time around me is a thoroughly pleasant feeling, and, surprisingly, makes the game more enjoyable.

So okay, I'll admit it; frame rate does make a difference. Sometimes. I maintain that "cinematic"-style experiences such as adventure games and their ilk don't particularly benefit from 60fps visuals — they can look nice, but if you're going with realistic imagery, 30fps can sometimes look more "natural" as it's closer to the frame rate of film and TV — but in games where precision and split-second timing are important — fighting games, shoot 'em ups, arcade games, MMOs such as Final Fantasy XIV — smoother hardware performance leads to smoother player performance. Which is kinda cool.

Oh, and no, I haven't tried Crysis yet.

The post 2237: The Insufferable Frame-Rate Obsessives May Have a Point appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Tonight, we cleared the last area of the new raid dungeon in Final Fantasy XIV… in its "normal" incarnation, anyway. Savage is likely to prove a somewhat stiffer challenge, but regular ol' vanilla had plenty of hurdles to overcome, too.

Now that we've been through all four of the new raids, I thought I'd ponder how I felt about them, and about Alexander as a whole compared to The Binding Coil of Bahamut.

The first thing to note about Alexander is that the overall tone of the whole thing is very different to Coil. Coil represented one of the most serious, dramatic parts of Final Fantasy XIV's story, and over its entirety revealed some very significant background lore about the Allagans and the Meracydians, both of whom we'd seen mentioned (and occasionally explored the relics of) but never encountered, mostly due to them both being long dead.

Alexander, meanwhile, largely concerns the goblins, and much like their Final Fantasy XI counterparts, goblins in Final Fantasy XIV are rather silly, afflicted with distinctive speech patterns and, for the most part, there for comic relief. They're not very threatening, in other words, so for them to be introduced as the main villains of the new raid cycle was… interesting, to say the least.

The overall aesthetic of Alexander is very different to Coil, too. Coil began as an expedition into the bowels of the earth and gradually gave way into a combination of fantastic, otherworldly scenery and pure sci-fi, futuristic environments, many of which were absolutely breathtaking in their scale. Alexander, conversely, has a pretty consistent "steampunk" look throughout its entirety, though Midas does a somewhat better job than Gordias in terms of presenting a bit of variety in the way things look.

This difference in aesthetic extends to the main attraction of the raids, too: the bosses. In Coil, you fought a wide variety of foes, ranging from a giant genetically modified snake to a fearsome dragon god via technologically advanced defence systems, a bioengineered lamia, a robot treant and, of course, the reincarnation of Final Fantasy XIV 1.0's main villain, Nael van Darnus, now going by Nael deus Darnus having apparently changed gender and gone a bit, well, dragonish.

Alexander, conversely, sees you fighting a lot of things in a similar mould: in Gordias, you fight a large steampunk robot thing, followed by a swarm of goblins and large steampunk robot things, followed by a squishy Pepsiman wannabe in what appears to be a sewage outlet, concluding with a battle against The Manipulator, which is a large steampunk robot thing. Midas is a bit better: first you fight a mad scientist goblin who keeps drinking his own concoctions and growing to Hulk-like proportions, then you fight a series of four large steampunk robot things, then you fight the main villain of the plot arc (and his cat), then finally you fight five large steampunk robot things — four of which you fought earlier in the raid — that then combine to make one enormous steampunk robot thing.

While I still like Alexander less than Coil in terms of its aesthetic and enemy designs, Midas is a big step in a better direction. Everything about it is better, from the variety between the four areas to the background plot that is revealed as you progress, which was rather lacking and forgettable in Gordias. It still lacks some of the outright drama that Coil had — the final boss of this particular cycle is an intense fight, but it's more chaotically humorous than terrifying like Twintania, Nael and Bahamut were — but things are improving a lot.

Of particular note is the boss music for the final boss, which I present with some pleasure for you below, in all its '70s anime glory:

Happy with how things have turned out with 3.2. I was getting concerned the game was losing its magic, but it's well and truly back on target.

The post 2231: Initial Impressions on Alexander: Midas appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Been taking my time getting through the new Alexander raid (just the normal version) in Final Fantasy XIV over the last couple of evenings, and thought I'd write down a walkthrough for the first two floors, largely to refresh my own memory and perhaps to provide a convenient service to anyone passing by who wants to know such things.

As with Alexander: Gordias, Alexander: Midas is split into four areas, each of which allows you to get one piece of loot per week. These pieces of loot are tokens that can be exchanged for gear in Idyllshire in the same place you turn in Allagan Tomestones of Esoterics and Lore; like the gear from Gordias, you need varying numbers of tokens for different pieces of gear. Accessories require one bolt, so are the easiest to get, but are also often the smallest upgrade.

The Fist of the Son

Available loot: Bolt (1 needed for accessory), chain (1 needed for belt), pedal (2 needed for boots)

Run through the first area, and use the steam vents to jump up to the top of the room. Pass through the doorway and you'll be confronted with not one but two Fausts. They're much easier to handle than the one in The Fist of the Father, though; one tank take each, keep them together, focus down one at a time.

It's not over, though! After the second Faust drops, a pulsing AoE marker will appear on the floor. Get away from it, as Hummelfaust is going to drop down, dealing more damage the closer you are to its drop spot.

One tank should take Hummelfaust, the other should switch to DPSing and simply batter him down as quickly as possible. Much like OG Faust, this is designed as a DPS check to ensure that your group is going to be up to the job of toppling the subsequent bosses.

Once Hummelfaust is down, hop onto the conveyor belt to reach the boss room.

BOSS: Ratfinx Twinkledinks

This fight initially seems utterly bewildering, but it's actually fairly straightforward. You need to pay close attention to what is happening at all times, though; you might find it helpful to Focus Target Ratfinx to help keep an eye on what he's up to in case you need to target something else.

Before you start, mark the back-left corner of the room as A and the front-right corner as B. You'll be tanking Ratfinx at A, while B is set aside as a no-go area for a later mechanic.

Start the fight. Ratfinx will be reluctant to move as the battle begins, so take the opportunity to establish solid aggro if you're a tank. Once he transforms into his giant form, then you can move him over to A.

Ratfinx will proceed to pummel the main tank about the head, inflicting stacks of Headache, which increases damage taken. When Headache reaches 4 stacks, it becomes Concussion, which stuns you completely. When this happens, you'll see Ratfinx wind up for a big punch much like the one Sephirot does; at this point, the off-tank should immediately use Provoke and hit Ratfinx to take aggro from the original tank, and take the imminent big hit, which is slightly less big if you don't have Headache or Concussion.

Throughout the fight, Ratfinx will cast Bomb's Away, which brings one or more large bombs into the arena. When this happens, someone near the centre of the room should stand in the purple circle to activate the machinery, then at least one person should run to the red pool that forms to the side of the arena. Stepping in this turns you into a gorilla with just two abilities, the first of which allows you to punch bombs away with ease, and the second of which allows you to transform back into your normal form. Punch the bombs to B to keep them safely away from everyone, then change back and return to your normal role.

At various points throughout the battle, Ratfinx will mark a player and cast Glubgloop (or something similar). The marked player should get well out of the way of A, B and where the pools form under the syringes; after the AoE marker appears, a persistent puddle of goop will drop on the floor and stick around for a little while, so keep it out of the way, probably in one of the unmarked corners.

From his second giant transformation onwards, Ratfinx will start casting Boost. When he does this, a player needs to activate the machine in the middle and all players (including the tank) need to rush to the purple puddle to turn into a bird. By flying, you avoid his devastating ground-pound attack; once he's finished doing this, you can use Apothecary to change back into your normal form once again.

Repeat the process, with tanks keeping a careful eye out for Concussion and everyone else watching for Bomb's Away and Boost, and it won't be long before he's down. There are a few additional beasties that show up throughout the fight, but the off-tank can pick these up easily and they don't present much of a threat.

The Cuff of the Son

Available loot: Bolt (1 needed for accessory), pedal (2 needed for boots), lens (2 needed for headpiece)

Run forwards and engage the initial group of enemies. To take a bit of pressure off the main tank, the off-tank may want to take one of the two Gobwalkers. Burn down the enemies as quickly as possible and proceed down the corridor, where you'll be accosted by a number of Goblin Gliders. Tank and spank these, then jump down the passageway on the right of the corridor to be flung into the boss room, where you'll fight four bosses in succession. Don't worry; if you take one down, it stays down.

BOSS: Blaster

Blaster has two main attacks. The first is to drop mines in the arena. These will show AoE markers where they drop, and will continue to pulse afterwards. Do not stand on them, as they deal heavy damage and inflict various status effects in an area.

Blaster's second attack is to mark players; after a moment, he'll drop a Mirage version of himself on them, and after another moment or so, these will charge across the arena in the direction they're facing. Don't be in their way.

DPS down Blaster while avoiding these two mechanics and he'll fall easily.

BOSS: Brawler

Brawler has three attacks that don't have cast bars: you have to rely entirely on visual cues. These cues are related to the fists he holds up when he charges himself with energy; after the blue flash of light around both hands you'll see him have either a red fist, a blue fist or both fists, and you'll have a couple of seconds to handle the mechanic appropriately.

If he raises the red fist, a random player is going to get targeted and damaged. Everyone move away from the boss to minimise this damage; it declines with distance.

If he raises the blue fist, the off-tank should use Provoke to take aggro from the main tank, while the main tank gets behind the boss. Shortly after, the new main tank will take a big hit, but not as massive as the one the original tank would have taken with the Vulnerability debuff Brawler applies!

If he raises both fists, the current tank should turn Brawler around to face the rest of the party; he'll fire a massive dual laser whose damage is split between everyone it hits.

Best way to handle this is to have everyone stacked or lined up directly behind Brawler as the main tank tanks him, then move according to the mechanics. After a mechanic is finished, get back into position and continue.

BOSS: Swindler

This is a weird one that requires you to be observant, but it's not that complicated.

The main mechanic here is Swindlers High and Low Mathematicks debuffs that he applies to various players. High Mathematicks is a purple-coloured debuff icon, while Low Mathematicks is a red-coloured debuff icon. When you receive one of these, stand on a floor tile according to your debuff: if you have Low Mathematicks (red), stand on a red, elevated tile; if you have High Mathematicks, stand on a grey, normal tile. Note that the arrangement of the tiles will shift several times during the battle.

The only other mechanic for this fight sees a player marked with a circle around themselves and a number of orbs above their head. A number of people matching the number of orbs need to be in the circle to prevent horrible messy death.

Dance around according to the debuffs and you'll be good for the final battle.

BOSS: Vortexer

Vortexer will inflict a stacking Vulnerability debuff on whoever is tanking it; the off-tank should use Provoke and take aggro when this reaches two stacks.

Circle AoEs indicate that pools of fiery sludge (similar to Bahamut's attack in Turn 13) will be dropping in these places. Stay out of them, and don't run through them, as they debuff you while you're in them. Also make sure you don't have your back to one.

Super Cyclone is a massive knockback on everyone, centred on the boss. Position yourself so you won't get knocked back into a pool of sludge.

When a player gets marked, they'll drop a waterspout after a few moments. Position this somewhere near-ish and behind the boss.

Several players will get Shiva-style blizzard markers on and around them. At least one person needs to drop this with its circle over the waterspout to freeze it into a block of ice. These will leave a patch of Frostbite-inflicting ice on the ground for a short period, but these will dissipate after a few moments.

When Vortexer starts casting Ultra Flash, everyone (including the tank) needs to hide behind the frozen waterspout and break line-of-sight with Vortexer to avoid being instakilled. After this, the ice block will shatter and the process repeats. Once Vortexer is down, you're done!

The post 2229: The Fist of the Son and The Cuff of the Son appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Final Fantasy XIV's new patch came out today, bringing with it some new dungeons and a spectacular new boss fight against Sephirot, The Fiend, one of the Warring Triad previously seen in Final Fantasy VI.

Unlike most of the other Trials that have been in the game so far, the Sephirot battle is separate from the main questline, and having a pop at it earlier revealed why: it's surprisingly tough! Once you know what you're doing, though, it's pretty straightforward. As such, I thought I'd share my observations from a couple of goes today in the hope of helping out anyone struggling with it.

Note that this isn't intended to be a particularly comprehensive guide and I can't remember the exact names of many abilities, but given that the Sephirot fight is largely dependent on observing animations and visual cues rather than cast bars, ability names aren't actually terribly helpful here.

So then. Here's how it works. I think.

Phase 1: That's Not Sephiroth

First phase is pretty straightforward. Main tank should pull Sephirot and turn him away from the rest of the group as normal and proceed to wail on him. Apply DoTs and AoE DoTs as appropriate.

Sephirot has a few different attacks in this phase. He has a conal AoE in front of him called Triple Trial, so this is the main reason the tank faces him away from the group. It doesn't do a lot of damage, but you'll want to keep the MT's HP as high as possible. MT should save cooldowns for the moment though.

Next is a jumping attack away from the MT onto a random player, after which he returns to the MT. Again, the damage isn't horrific, but keep on top of things. Priority after the jump should be topping off and shielding the MT for what comes next.

Sephirot will pull his left arm back ready to deliver a powerful punch. (Note that if you are tanking him, his left arm will be on the right of your screen, as you're facing him.) When this happens, MT should blow a suitable defensive cooldown (Shadow Skin or Rampart is enough) and Convalescence if you want to help out your healers a bit. When the animation completes, the big punch Sephirot was winding up for will deliver a powerful tankbuster in the region of 16-17k or so, though this can be reduced with cooldowns and shields.

Other than this, Sephirot has a large AoE that he blasts out towards a non-tank member of the group, which should be healed through.

At around 60%, Sephirot will become untargetable and spawn a bunch of adds. Both tanks should pick them up and pull them all together for DPS to AoE them. Prioritise the larger adds first, as they hit a bit harder and have more HP. As one set gets close to being killed a second set will spawn, so be ready to pick them up and bring them to the group.

When the adds are down, Sephirot will do his ultimate. You have quite a long time to prepare for this, so make the best use of the time. Sephirot will fall backwards off the platform and nothing will happen for a few seconds. Use the time to heal everyone up, then when you see Sephirot's newly giant hand grab the platform to pull himself up, drop Sacred Soil or other suitable defences ready for the incoming damage.

Phase 2: He Got Big

Tanking Sephirot is less important here, since he stays in one place and fires out mechanics at random players rather than whoever has aggro. Tanks should feel free to switch to DPS stance and wail on him as much as possible.

Note that Sephirot's hitbox is huge and you don't need to be standing anywhere near his model to actually hit him. Target him and stand on the edge of the circle on the ground and you'll hit him no problem; this is important for one of his main abilities in the phase.

At intervals throughout Phase 2, Sephirot will drop blue puddles on the ground. After these have sat there for a moment, he'll slam his fist down on the puddle, knocking everyone backwards. To counter this, stand near (not in) the puddle with your back to the side of the arena furthest away from you — think the final boss of Neverreap. He'll do this three times, so run back into position after being knocked back: first one is always directly in front of himself, then on the left, then on the right.

For Sephirot's other attacks, you once again need to watch his animations rather than cast bars. When he lowers himself down so his head is level with the platform, he's preparing to do a huge raid-wide knockback, so stand in front of him with plenty of space behind you to avoid falling off.

Immediately after the knockback, three adds will spawn: two that you've seen before and one tornadoey whirlwind thing. DPS down the tornadoey whirlwind thing as quickly as possible and it will drop a (harmless) tornado marker on the ground: this will be important in a moment. Then kill the other two adds. Shortly after you've done this, a big flashing arrow marker will appear over the tornado marker, so get in it. Sephirot will probably do a small knockback on you while you're getting into position, so make sure you immediately move back into the tornado: the reason you do this is so that the tornado blows you up in the air to avoid Sephirot's devastating arm-sweep attack, which is an instant KO if you get hit by it.

When Sephirot seems to charge energy into his chest, everyone should spread out because people are about to get hit by energy blasts with splash damage. Simple enough to avoid.

When two players are marked with shining silver markers — the same as in Turn 13 if you've done that — these two players should move to the sides of the arena to bait Sephirot's Earthshaker line AoE move away from the rest of the group. (Yes, this is indeed the exact same Earthshaker that Bahamut Prime does.)

When Sephirot holds two orbs out in front of him… I must confess I'm not entirely 100% on what this mechanic does, but it appears to be something similar to the Angra Mainyu fight in World of Darkness in that the arena is split into two different coloured sections, and you need to stand in the correct one. Perhaps someone can clarify in the comments if you have a better idea.

Shortly before or after the two orbs, Sephirot will summon two towers similar to those seen in later stages of Turn 13. Like those towers, you need to stand in them to minimise raid-wide Bad Stuff happening. Only one person needs to stand in each tower.

After that, these mechanics just repeat, though Sephirot will be flinging small circle AoEs around the place while all this is going on too, but these are easy enough to dodge.

Congratulations, you've toppled The Fiend!

The post 2226: Sephirot, The Fiend appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Been playing a bit of Elite Dangerous: Horizons this evening and realising the "dream" of something I've wanted to do since I started playing: hop in a ship, point it in a particular direction and just go see what's out there.

I haven't got that far yet, to be honest — I'm still in populated space, albeit getting down to the dregs of the tiny factions rather than the warring empires of the PowerPlay system — but I can see interesting things on the galactic horizon, and I fully intend to check them out and see what's there.

The nice thing about Elite is that you can do this and it's a viable way to play the game. Its exceedingly freeform nature — more freeform than pretty much any other game I think I've played outside of Minecraft — allows you to play how you see fit, and enjoy it how you want. If you want fast-action combat dogfighting, it's there. If you want to run courier missions, that's there. If you want to collaborate with other players to strategically expand the influence of one of the major powers in the galaxy, that's there, too. Or, as previously mentioned, if you just want to hop in a ship, point it in a particular direction and just go see what's out there… well, you can do that too, because the galaxy is one hell of a big place.

Exploration gameplay is relatively straightforward. Equip a ship with the appropriate scanners — basic versions of which come as standard — and when you hyperspace into a new system, you can scan for astronomical objects. Once you've located some, either via your scanners or visually, targeting them and flying close-ish to them allows you to run a detailed scan of them and record the information in your ship's computer. You can then sell this information when you get to a suitable space station or colony that is at least 20 light years away from where you acquired the data — it's assumed that most areas are familiar with the region immediately around them — and profit accordingly. It's a valid career path with its own progression and the opportunity to make your own distinctive mark on the game universe: whenever someone visits something that you were the first one to discover, they'll see your name there, proudly recorded for all time as the first person to find that thing, whether it's a big burning ball of fiery sun, an unremarkable lump of rock or a spectacular planetary system.

I haven't travelled far enough to be one of these pioneers as yet, I don't think, but I'm already getting into a region of space that is less populated, both with the computer-controlled factions and players. The station my ship is currently parked at as I type this has seen just 12 player-controlled ships pass through in the last 24 hours, compared to the hundreds or thousands the more "core" stations in the centre of the populated area see every day.

I find the exploration aspect inherently satisfying for some reason, despite the fact that objectively speaking it's quite boring and repetitive — although I did get interdicted by an unpleasant NPC called "Starquake" earlier, who battered my ship about a bit before I was able to activate my Frame-Shift Drive and jump away from him — but mostly I'm curious to see what's out there, if anything. The original Elite had some strange things going on in the far reaches of the galaxy — most notably the spectacularly irritating Thargoids, who had a habit of pulling you out of hyperspace and killing you horribly — so I'm curious to see if there's anything interesting hidden in the furthest reaches of the galaxy.

There are a bunch of places I'm just curious to see, too. The "Coalsack" area looks most intriguing, what with its ominous black cloudiness, and, of course, the immense density of the galactic core is surely worth trying to see. Of these places, the Coalsack is probably reachable relatively easily; the galactic core perhaps less so, but I'm interested to see how far I can go. Theoretically, my current ship has infinite range thanks to its Fuel Scoop hardware, which allows me to refuel by harvesting the gases of appropriate stars, so as long as I don't get stranded in a region with crap stars and/or blown up by pirates or aliens who are hiding deep in "unpopulated" space, I should be good to go for quite some time. And think of the money I'll make when I eventually get back to human space to sell all this exploration data.

Oh, God, I have to fly back as well, don't I… Maybe I shouldn't go too far…

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I spent a chunk of today trying out Elite Dangerous: Horizons. This was actually pretty much my first experience with Elite: Dangerous generally, aside from giving the tutorials a go yesterday, but I felt I was long overdue to try it out, particularly as I had bemoaned the lack of a good Star Trek game the other day. Elite is not a good Star Trek game, but it is one hell of a space sim. And, for once, that "sim" part seems apt; this certainly isn't an arcade-style dogfighting game, as evidenced by the fact that in several hours of play today, I didn't fire a single shot.

I used to really enjoy space games back in the 16-bit era — particularly those of a more free-form nature such as Paul Woakes' Mercenary series, Rainbird's Starglider series (particularly the enormously ambitious second installment) and, indeed, the original Elite. I say that — Elite is actually one that I never quite managed to get my head around when I was young, because there was a lot of things to think about while you were playing, and pages full of numbers that confused and bewildered me. Also docking with those spinning space stations was fucking impossible, so every time I tried I usually ended up quitting in disgust after smashing my ship to smithereens on the space station you start near.

I made the mistake of reading a few Steam reviews of Elite: Dangerous before giving it a go; while there are a few fair criticisms there, there's also a whole lot of whining about 1) not knowing what to do and 2) Frontier's business model for the game which, if you're unfamiliar, sees them essentially re-releasing the game at full price each year with the promise of a year's worth of major updates to the game systems. It's perhaps better to think of it as a yearly subscription fee, particularly as the game has a significant massively multiplayer element for those who care to engage with it.

Anyway. Discarding the Steam reviews and jumping in to try things out for myself, I was quickly enraptured by the feeling of flying my Sidewinder. I even unplugged the 360 controller and plugged in my 11-button joystick; it's no full HOTAS (Hands On Throttle And Stick) setup, admittedly, but it feels great when used in a game like this, particularly with the lovely visual feedback the game gives you with regard to movement: unlike the original Elite, whose cockpit was a static bitmap with a viewport into the flat-shaded 3D polygonal universe outside (I was playing the Atari ST version, so it had colours!), Elite: Dangerous' cockpit is set up to feel like you're actually sitting in it. Handling the controls causes your viewpoint to shift slightly according to how you're moving; it tilts when you roll, pulls forward and back when you speed up and slow down, and pulls up and down when you pitch. Given the game has been designed for virtual reality headsets from the get-go, it's understandable that the game would model head movement pretty well, but I'm glad to see that even when playing on a flat (admittedly large) TV screen it still looks very convincing.

What I've found most satisfying about the game so far is the moment-to-moment simulation of flying your ship. Everything you do is just satisfying to pull off, just for the sake of doing it. Especially fun is taking off and landing from various structures and space stations — and, in Horizons, you can now land on planets, too, either at settlements with dedicated landing facilities or just on the ground if you find a suitably smooth patch of terrain to set down. The handling of the ship is beautiful; pulling the stick around feels like you're wrenching a big, slightly unwieldy lump of metal around in zero- or low-gravity, and the sound design, where you hear your thrusters firing and your engines throbbing according to whatever you're doing, is absolutely impeccable. There's even a wonderful crescendo of your engines reverberating off the ground and surroundings as you set down for landing; it is, I think, the most convincing depiction of plausible pure sci-fi space travel I've seen for a very long time, perhaps ever.

The most common criticism of Elite: Dangerous is that it's "a mile wide and an inch deep", and I can kind of see where that's coming from: interactions with NPCs are rather sterile and menu driven, though later updates look set to put "faces" to significant characters in the universe. There's no prescribed narrative, either; you can get involved in the PowerPlay mechanic to swear allegiance to one of the various factions attempting to control the universe, which actually has a significant effect of the game for all players, but there's no "story" to follow as such besides that which you make for yourself.

In many ways, I think I sort of prefer that for Elite, though; while I do love a bit of story in my space games a la Wing Commander and the like, when playing something as freeform as Elite a story can kind of get in the way a bit, making you feel obliged to go and do certain things rather than exploring the galaxy at your own pace, making a name for yourself however you see fit.

I'll be interested to see if Elite holds my attention, but for now, it certainly feels like the space game I've wanted to play since I was a kid.

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I took a look at Arcen Games' latest today. I've followed this interesting developer for a few games now, most notably A Valley Without Wind and its sequel: two games that fused, oddly enough, turn-based strategy with Metroidvania-esque platform shooting. Arcen's latest game Starward Rogue continues the dev's tradition of fusing disparate genres together, in this case arcade shooters and roguelikes.

I say "disparate"; Starward Rogue isn't the first game to combine roguelike elements with a shoot 'em up core, but it is the first I recall seeing designed around the principles of Japanese-style arcade shooters, particularly those of the "bullet hell" variety. That means intense, complex bullet patterns that you need to navigate through as well as enemies to defeat, and it makes for an exciting, very interesting take on a genre that all too often coasts along without any real innovation.

Starward Rogue casts you in the role of a severed head in a mech as you attempt to rescue someone called Rodney from the depths of a dungeon called the Megalith. I believe these two elements are a reference to one of Arcen's other games, but it's one I'm not familiar with at this time. Fortunately, no real knowledge of whatever the other game it's referring to is required; it's simply a bit of fanservice for those who have played the game's spiritual predecessor. Rodney is an entertaining character in his own right, though my only direct contact with him so far has been in the tutorial sequence.

Starward Rogue's gameplay is balanced nicely between exploration and action. Each level of the Megalith is split into discrete rooms, each of which has to be cleared of enemies before you can move on to the next one. Unlike similar games such as The Binding of Isaac, though, Starward Rogue's rooms are often more than a screen wide and tall, and there are a number of unique designs and layouts that you'll encounter over the course of the game, which are then combined with various enemy and trap waves — the latter tending to be non-destroyable obstacles or gun turrets that will spew out hot fiery death as you try and take down the enemies, then deactivate when you've cleared the room.

Levelling up is a simple process: no stat allocation here, simply pick one of three randomly selected perks. These vary from increased damage to having a full map available from the start of the floor — and even being able to skip the rest of the floor you're on. Alongside these passive bonuses you get from levelling, you can also equip and upgrade your infinite-ammo main gun, your recharging Energy-based weapon (which recharges when you enter a new room) and your limited-ammo Missile weapon. There are also various other passive upgrades you can collect, and one-shot consumable items that generally have some sort of "smart bomb" effect.

Much like the aforementioned The Binding of Isaac, Starward Rogue is a game intended to be replayed and rechallenged. There are a number of different mechs with which to play the game, and there's a checklist of enemies and items you've found over the course of all your runs. There are also five difficulty levels to choose from, with Very Easy all but guaranteeing a full clear run unless you are the very worst kind of incompetent moron, and the highest difficulty claiming to offer difficulty on a par with the legendary Touhou series. And on top of that there are a bunch of achievements to earn, too, so it's very much a game that will keep you busy for a long time if you get it — though it's accessible enough to be able to pick up every so often for a quick blast even if you've left it alone for a while.

I completed a Very Easy run earlier — there's no shame in starting either a roguelike or a shoot 'em up on the lowest difficulty, and this game is both! — and am already looking forward to giving it another shot soon. If you're a fan of The Binding of Isaac and its ilk — "roguelites", to use the popular term — then you could do far worse than give Starward Rogue a look.

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I played through the second episode of the new King's Quest game today. It's a lot shorter than the first one, so I was able to get through it in a single sitting. Despite being fairly short, though, it's an interesting contrast from the previous episode; rather than being a relatively large (for an adventure game) open world with a non-linear series of puzzles for you to tackle at your leisure, Rubble Without a Cause, as the second episode is known, takes place in a much more confined environment, and largely focuses around one big puzzle: how to free everyone from captivity at the hands of the goblins.

Yes, instead of throwing us back into Daventry, Rubble Without a Cause puts us underground in a goblin prison complex. Graham is dismayed to discover that most of the major characters from the town of Daventry appear to have also been abducted, along with the eccentric merchant's "unicorn" Mr. Fancycakes. Thus begins a quest to find a way out of this predicament.

There's a twist, though: unlike most adventure games, you don't have all the time in the world with which to achieve your goals. Unfolding over the course of several days, the adventure sees the health of all of the prison's occupants — with the exception of Graham — decline as the days pass. Thus you're presented with some difficult, mutually exclusive choices throughout as you determine who it is best to give medicine and food to as they require it. And once you start getting closer to escaping, you need to determine which potential companion is going to provide you with the best chance of succeeding, and ensure that they are in good health for when you make your attempt.

The small scale of the episode initially felt a little disappointing, but on reflection after finishing it, I very much liked the concept of it being based around one central problem for you to solve, and felt this was a good use of the episodic format to provide a short-form but complete-feeling experience. You can solve it in a number of different ways, too — it is, I believe, even possible to complete the episode without anyone running out of health and being carried away by the goblins, but I most certainly did not succeed in that particular endeavour today.

In many ways, the King's Quest episodes we've seen so far are a great example of "gaming short stories" — quite literally, since they are presented as stories narrated by the ageing King Graham (whom I'll be very surprised to see survive the fifth episode) to his grandchildren. This presentation of the narrative as a participant narrator looking back on his past actions is an interesting twist on how old Sierra games such as the original King's Quests used to work, with a strong contrast between the omniscient, non-participant narrator and the in-character dialogue between characters. King's Quest, as a series, maintained this style of presentation until its seventh installment, and it's good to see new developers The Odd Gentlemen returning very much to the "feel" of the classic Sierra adventures.

So was Rubble Without a Cause worth playing, given its short length? Well, if it was a standalone game by itself, I'd perhaps feel a little short-changed at its small scale and short length. In the context of the whole series, though, it makes a good, nicely contrasting follow-up to the excellent first episode, and has me once again hungering to know what happens next!

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It's been a while since I delved into a full-on proper roguelike — and by "proper" I mean none of that "roguelite" nonsense — so I was excited to give Caves of Qud a go after picking it up in the Steam sale a while back.

So far I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of this game — largely because it's very fond of killing players off even in its introductory quests — but I like it a whole lot already, simply for the sheer amount of depth there is to it, while simultaneously remaining pretty much as accessible as it's possible to be for an almost-ASCII roguelike.

Caves of Qud is a far-future roguelike in which you play the part of Some Dude/Gal who shows up in a small settlement one day and… well, there's no real initial goal beyond finding out what interesting things there are in the mysterious and far-off region of Qud up in the top-right corner of the map. The inhabitants of the first village are more than happy to present you with a few quests, however, and it's these that will provide the motivation for your initial explorations.

Caves of Qud gets interesting before the game proper starts, though. Being set in the far future, we're not in a land of elves, orcs and goblins here; we're in a land where horribly mutated individuals are the norm, and indeed it's entirely possible for you to play the game as a four-armed furry narcoleptic esper who is good at butchery and first aid, and perhaps beneficial to do so. For those who prefer slightly more "conventional" characters, you also have the option of playing as a "True Kin", who start the game with better attributes, but less customisation, and as such are, in theory, better for beginners.

The mutations are pretty interesting, since many of them have attached game effects, not all of which are directly related to dealing or soaking damage. A character that is able to spit slime, for example, doesn't do so to damage enemies — instead, slime causes anyone who steps on it to have a chance of slipping, including yourself. In this way, it can be used as a defensive measure when gobbed out between you and the enemy while you're attempting to sprint away and heal the wounds you've taken.

That's not to say the more conventional aspects aren't interesting, though. The game has an intriguing twist on the usual roguelike formula of having unidentified items: as you progress, you'll occasionally come across "artifacts", which you can use your character's intelligence to attempt to make some sense of by examining them. Sometimes these artifacts are useful pieces of equipment; at other times, they're a folding chair. You can, however, use this knowledge to your advantage by offloading the aforementioned folding chair to a character that isn't all that bright on the grounds that it's a Mysterious and Wonderful Artifact From the Old World. There are lots of wonderfully subtle touches that the game doesn't explicitly tell you about, too. Little graphical effects may look like glitches until you realise that they're raindrops, or water splashing as something moves beneath the surface; characters, enemies and monsters can get splattered with blood during combat; and not every enemy is worth engaging "just because it's there". Stumble across a Slumberling in a dungeon, for example, and you'll discover that poking it with your sword is a very bad idea indeed; take a moment to examine it before poking it, however, and you'll discover that these are creatures that spend most of their time in a deep hibernation, completely oblivious to their surroundings — and that they really don't like being disturbed.

As I say, I feel I've barely scratched the surface of all the possibilities this interesting game offers so far, but it keeps me coming back for more despite its high level of difficulty — rather than easing you in and then spiking after an initial "tutorial" area, Caves of Qud starts hard and stays hard — and one day I might actually get beyond that first dungeon… until that time, however, I shall enjoy building new characters with increasingly outlandish combinations of mutations and watching them die at the hands of a swarm of snapjaws as they bleed to death after tripping over a thorny plant in the floor having been terrified by a nearby piece of Dreadroot.

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I've noticed something annoying about technology, particularly entertainment technology: the moment you want to revisit something you haven't played/watched/listened to for a while, the technology that makes doing so possible is almost certainly going to fail somehow.

This has happened to me on numerous occasions ever since I was a youngling. From games that refused to boot on our old Atari 8-bit to… well, today, games that refuse to boot on my Windows PC, it's an inordinately frustrating experience.

It's more frustrating than something just normally not working, because the fact that you haven't indulged in the thing in question for a while means that you build up a certain degree of anticipation in your mind for the first time revisiting it in weeks, months, perhaps even years. As such, it's extremely disappointing when you find yourself unable to satisfy your hunger for the thing you were craving.

Today, I had an extremely strong desire to play Bizarre Creations' swansong Blur, one of my favourite racing games of all time. I own both the Xbox 360 and PC versions of this game — the PC version being something that I'm actually seemingly rather lucky to own, since it has been pulled from the Steam store at some point in the last few years — but I was keen to play the PC version, since it runs at a superior framerate and resolution to the 360 version. Plus I'd been having idle thoughts about doing a "racing games supertest" series of videos, and Blur was one of the games I particularly wanted to highlight.

Blur has run fine on my machine before and I don't think I've made any significant changes to it since the last time I ran it. I've perhaps replaced the graphics card in that period — which may be the issue, though I don't see why — but that's about it. But no; I was to be denied. I fired up Blur via Steam, saw the familiar noisy Activision logo followed by the now somewhat forlorn-seeming Bizarre Creations logo… and then the menu music started.

And then nothing happened. No spinny thing in the corner saying the game was loading. No main menu. No prompt to login. Just the menu music, and a Steam popup with the CD key that I was unable to dismiss.

I tried again on the offchance it was a random crash; no luck. I took to Google in an attempt to find the cause of the problem, or indeed if anyone else had had it — note to game developers: if you name your game a single word, please don't name it after a common graphical setting, because it really makes situations like this a lot more difficult than they need to be — but I was ultimately disappointed, since this was, inevitably, one of those situations where lots of people in the last five years have had this problem, but none of them have come up with an adequate solution.

I tried the few solutions that were offered, and swore silently at Yahoo! Answers commenters making inane, generic comments about Windows updates and checking video drivers, but none seemed to work. As I type this, I'm restarting my PC — a rare treat for that machine, which tends to stay on most of the time — in a last-ditch attempt to see whether or not that works. If it doesn't, I guess I'll have to be satisfied with the 360 version; no great loss, since that's the version I originally "discovered" the game with, but it would be nice to run it at 60fps and 1080p.

Oh well. It's getting late now, anyway, so probably no Blur for me this evening. Fingers crossed I can get it working eventually though…

EDIT: Restarted computer. Game now works. Maybe those Yahoo! Answers idiots weren't such idiots after all.

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My good friend Mr Alex Connolly was kind enough to donate me a copy of Nail'd on Steam over the Christmas period. This is a game he's mentioned to me before, but I'd never gotten around to trying it. Now I'm regretting not checking it out sooner!

Nail'd is an offroad racing game from Techland and Deep Silver, the developer-publisher combo perhaps best known in recent years for the Dead Island series and its not-really-but-sort-of follow-up Dying Light. It's an unshamed arcade racer experience, with no pretensions towards having a plot or any reason for existing beyond simply being fun — nor, it must be said, is it making any attempt whatsoever to be the slightest bit realistic.

Nail'd is ridiculous. There's no other word for it, really. From the moment you squeeze the accelerator and you immediately ramp up to approximately three thousand miles per hour in less than a tenth of a second, it's clear that this is not a game intended to be taken seriously. This feeling is further cemented when you take your first jump and spend a good ten seconds airborne before landing with no ill effects, and set in diamond when you crash for the first time and your quad-bike explodes into fragments, while your driver goes spinning off into the distance with exaggerated ragdoll physics.

Taking part in a race in Nail'd is a rollercoaster ride. There's dips and undulations, huge jumps, banked corners, environmental hazards, narrow gaps to traverse and stunts to perform. Pleasingly, there are multiple routes through each track, too, bringing the races a feel somewhat akin to EA's classic SSX series back in its heyday, particularly as many of Nail'd's races are downhill point-to-point affairs rather than circuit races.

I hadn't previously been particularly interested in motocross or ATV racing games before, and I don't know how many of them are like Nail'd. But I do feel I've been missing out on some crazy offroad fun with this game, at least; it's an absolute pleasure to play, it's a challenge while keeping its mechanics extremely simple, and it's one of the most thrilling, exciting racers I've come across, ever. It's just a pity that the multiplayer servers are no longer active, so it's not currently possible to share the ridiculousness of a Nail'd race with other people, except by doing some jiggery-pokery with the LAN mode and external software.

My arcade racing renaissance continues, then; Nail'd has been a delight to discover, and it's inspiring me to check out some other racers I haven't spent all that much time with — or haven't tried at all — with a mind to doing a full roundup at some point in the future, either here on the blog or in video format, or perhaps even both!

Now I think I'll go hurl myself off a few cliffs before bedtime…

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I've tried on several occasions to get into the Souls series from From Software, and have never quite succeeded, despite liking the overall atmosphere of the whole thing. This time around, though, I feel I'm finally starting to Get It. Kind of.

I'm playing Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, the rejigged and enhanced version of Dark Souls II that was released for PC and next-gen platforms a while back. It was a Steam sale acquisition; for its low price, I was willing to give it another chance, so I jumped in on the understanding that Dark Souls II is, on the whole, perhaps a little easier to get into than the other games of the series. I'm not sure if I believe that yet, but I feel like I'm starting to get a feel for it all.

There are several things to get into your mind when you start playing Dark Souls. Firstly, it's a good idea to think of it a bit like a "single-player raid". You need to learn things: develop a strategy and execute it, preferably flawlessly. This is particularly apparent when fighting the game's bosses, but it also applies to regular enemies: most of the time they spawn in the same places, so you can prepare for ambushes where they got the jump on you the first time you went down that particular corridor, and instead slice them to ribbons before they can even touch you.

On a related note, Dark Souls' combat, while initially appearing to be relatively straightforward, is very "Japanese" in nature in that it has a heavy reliance on pattern recognition. When fighting everything from the most lowly of crap enemy to the biggest of bosses, you need to recognise the patterns of their attacks and counter them accordingly: dodge them to avoid taking damage, and take advantage of an opening to attack, while simultaneously being aware of your own stamina so you leave a bit left over to dodge out of the way when the next attack comes.

Yes, Dark Souls is not a game where you can flail wildly and hope for success. My early encounters with the Souls series saw me hating that Stamina bar and how quickly it gets used up, but this time around, again, I feel like I'm getting more of a feel for it. You can almost relate it to a turn-based sort of system in a strange sort of way — or perhaps it would be more accurate to compare it to the "cooldown" system used by most MMO combat systems. In other words, you can't just spam the attack button and hope an enemy is dumb enough to walk into your swing; most attacks are slow and ponderous enough to leave openings wide enough for enemies to hit you, even while you're mid-attack. As such, timing is crucial.

So far, I'm playing a mage-type character, since it allows me to deliver some decent damage from afar, which in turn helps me to develop my confidence to fight the more difficult opponents a bit more. I'm getting a feel for the hand-to-hand combat too, though; I can now pretty confidently dispatch lowly opponents with a dagger rather than a couple of spells to the face, though it remains to be seen if my overall play style will change too dramatically by the time I get to the end of the game… if I get to the end, of course.

So, then, I think I finally sort of "get it". I'm not sure I love it quite as much as some people do yet — I don't think I'm far enough in to feel that way — but I'm interested enough to keep going and find out more. Which is, you know, nice.

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One of my acquisitions in this year's Steam sale was Codemasters racing game GRID 2. I already owned the previous GRID game and had enjoyed what I played of its multi-discipline racing, but hadn't delved into it in depth. The price that GRID 2 and its more recent sequel GRID Autosport were going for was too much to resist, however, so I snagged copies of both and have been putting the former through its paces over the last few days.

GRID 2 was a bit of a controversial release when it originally came out, since it's a distinctly more "arcadey" affair than its predecessor. That's not to say that the original GRID was particularly sim-like in the first place, but the true petrolheads of the Internet appreciated things like its lavishly detailed first-person cockpits and semi-realistic handling. In contrast, GRID 2's emphasis on drift-heavy driving and the removal of the cockpit view led to a bit of an uproar among the racing enthusiast community, who saw it as a step backwards from its well-regarded predecessor.

Me, though, I love it; GRID 2's slidey handling is exactly the sort of thing I love in a racing game, and to be honest, while I love the way a cockpit view looks, I find it extremely difficult to race from that perspective, since visibility is so limited in most cases, and you don't have the peripheral vision you'd have in reality. Consequently, I much prefer racing from a bumper or bonnet cam (preferably the latter) since I find it much easier to judge my own position and have a feeling of spatial awareness during a race.

I also appreciate GRID 2 for its attempt to spin a story throughout its single-player game. All too often, racing games are rather dry affairs in which you navigate boring-looking menus to get to the actual racing, and there's often very little in the way of personality. GRID 2 doesn't go so far as to be Wing Commander with cars — although man, I would so play that game — but it does feature voiceovers and a sense of narrative progression as you play through the game. It's not a complex narrative — you're an up-and-coming driver headhunted by an eccentric rich dude who has decided he really wants to set up a new worldwide multi-discipline racing league, and your efforts as the face of the series allow you to build up the fanbase required for the WSR to become a success — but it works well in context, and it's punctuated nicely with infrequent cutscenes, including authentic-looking TV broadcasts featuring full-motion video rather than in-engine characters.

This sense of narrative progression and personality carries over into the actual racing gameplay, too. You're constantly getting advice and feedback over your radio while you race, and most race series highlight a named rival for you to try and beat. While the personalities of these rivals aren't developed all that much outside of text messages and social media posts in the menu screens, it's a nice touch that gives you more of an incentive to do your best than simply trying to get into first place.

The game also makes minimal but cinematic use of music: most races don't have background music, instead featuring some impressive sound effects that allow you to hear not only the roar of the car's engine, but the rumbling of the tyres on different surfaces, the sound of the crowds as you whizz past them, and other environmental sounds according to where you're racing today. There's an exception to this, though: when you get into the final races of each season, the final lap or sector of each race is accompanied by some electro-orchestral music that lends a real sense of drama to proceedings, making some already butthole-puckeringly tense finishes even more exciting. Good job there.

There's a good variety of events, too, with both circuit races and point to point races — a subject that I was talking about wanting to see more of just a few weeks ago — as well as time attacks, overtaking challenges, endurance races and all manner of other disciplines. The aforementioned petrolheads don't seem to like the fact that the game's career mode insists that you participate in all the disciplines, since most seem to prefer picking and choosing their favourites, but I really like the amount of variety this brings to the campaign: it, again, gives a good sense of progression as each new season presents you with new disciplines to conquer and new types of car to get to grips with. By the time you reach the end of the career mode, you'll most likely be a well-rounded driver able to turn your hand to all manner of different events — ideal for jumping online and taking on all-comers.

So I like it a lot so far, then. I'd go so far as to say that it's shaping up to be one of my favourite arcadey racers for quite some time, and I'm very interested to explore it in more detail over the coming weeks.

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I am a fan of what I described to my friend Alex yesterday as "the vulgar side of racing games". This is a pretentious way of saying that I'm a fan of arcade racers more than more realistic fare, but it kind of goes a little deeper than that: I'm a fan of racing games that firmly put an emphasis on fun and spectacle as opposed to providing a faintly plausible virtual driving experience.

Codemasters' Dirt Showdown, which I picked up in the Steam Halloween sale, pushes all of my buttons in this regard.

Dirt Showdown is the very essence of vulgar racing. It's loud, it's brash, it's very American (despite the Codies being British), it's full of scrappy-looking cars that you'd expect to find burnt out in a council estate in Croydon… and it's a ton of fun.

A lot of Dirt Showdown's fun factor comes from its hyperactive nature — and this is true both within single events, all of which are chaotic and specifically set up to encourage full-contact racing, and within the game structure as a whole. The single-player campaign sees you flip-flopping from one discipline to another — one minute you'll be racing, the next you'll be smashing your way around a course made up of barriers, the one after that you'll be trying to knock all of your opponents off a raised platform — and multiplayer is much the same, with the added chaos of some rather "sport-like" competitive games modelled on Capture the Flag and Halo's Oddball mode.

You're never stuck doing the same thing for very long, in other words, and this is what keeps the game interesting. Of course, there's nothing stopping you setting the multiplayer mode to do nothing but races, but where's the fun in that? The beauty of Dirt Showdown is that it encourages you to master flinging your car around with a variety of different goals in mind, be it dispatching opponents as quickly as possible, or simply beating them to the finish line.

The big appeal element in Dirt Showdown for me, though, is the fact that it's an honest-to-goodness arcade racer. This is not a game intended to be taken seriously or be regarded as a sim; it's not a game where you can admire lovingly detailed cockpit views; it's a game about taking a hunk of junk (or, indeed, a few licensed rally cars) and then hurling it at a bunch of other hunks of junk and seeing who comes out on top. It's a game about tapping the handbrake rather than using the actual brake to go around corners; it's a game that features races specifically designed to encourage pileups. I approve of all of this.

Plus it's super-cheap in the currently running Steam sale. So if you haven't given it a shot yet — assuming you're a racing game person — be sure to check it out.

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I made a difficult decision today: to quit Final Fantasy XIV. Temporarily, at least.

This is a decision I've been mulling over for quite some time, I must admit, since following the initial excitement over the expansion pack Heavensward, the new content that's shown up since was 1) very, very late indeed and 2) not great. The one thing that had kept me clinging on was the good friends I've made while playing it, but I've come to the conclusion that with the state of endgame as it is now, it's just not fun enough to warrant the endless grind.

Before we go any further, I would like to point out that Final Fantasy XIV is still an excellent game, and its storyline through A Realm Reborn and Heavensward is one of the best Final Fantasies I've had the pleasure of playing over the years. Its battle system is great, its graphics are wonderful, its music is without peer and it has numerous memorable setpieces and boss fights that will doubtless stay with me for years afterwards.

The issue comes with endgame — what you do when you get to level 60, have no more experience points to gain, and hit the ceiling of available content. At this point most people do one of two things: level another class, or get on the gear treadmill to equip their "main" class as well as possible, either simply for the satisfaction of doing it, or with a mind to taking on the game's most challenging content such as raids.

The main trouble with Heavensward endgame as it exists today is that it's not all that different from A Realm Reborn's endgame, only with a fraction of the level cap content that A Realm Reborn had by the end of its cycle of patches. This may be an unfair comparison, but given that most people who played through Heavensward spent months or more at level 50 in A Realm Reborn, the shift back to having a very limited selection of meaningful content to play was somewhat jarring — particularly as people raced through Heavensward's main scenario and initial levelling process to 60 way quicker than they beat A Realm Reborn, despite them being comparable in length.

So what do you do in endgame? As previously mentioned, you gear up. This is primarily accomplished by collecting "tomestones" from running dungeons, daily roulettes and a couple of other sources. There's a weekly cap on one of the types of tomestones — the one that gets you some of the best equipment in the game currently — which means that it unavoidably takes several weeks, even months, to put together a complete armour and weaponry set for just one class, let alone multiple.

There are other means of acquiring gear, of course; the newly added Void Ark raid is designed to get people into better gear without grinding for tomestones by allowing them one piece of gear per week of comparable level to an unupgraded Tomestone piece. And The Diadem, the home to the exploration missions, can drop some seriously good equipment, though in that case it's very much left up to random chance.

Part of the problem with Heavensward's endgame right now is that the high-level raid — the most difficult thing in the game, and source of some of the best equipment — just isn't very interesting. A Realm Reborn's The Binding Coil of Bahamut was spectacular: it told its own story, had unique bosses and music, and was extremely rewarding to play through, particularly once its entire saga was completed and gave you an opportunity to fight A Realm Reborn's "true" final boss.

Alexander, the current level 60 raid, meanwhile, suffers for a number of reasons: firstly, its Normal mode incarnation, designed so those who aren't up to the challenges of raiding could enjoy its story, is far too easy and quite dull. And secondly, said story is not interesting at all, building on one of the more ridiculous side stories from A Realm Reborn rather than the world-shaking drama that Coil offered. For many people, clearing Coil wasn't about gear; it was about seeing a cool story through to its conclusion. And while Alexander has a story, it's not a patch on Coil's.

There's also the fact that Normal mode removes that incentive to progress that Coil had. The only way to see Coil's story was to beat Coil, whether you did that when it was fresh, new and extremely difficult, or when it got considerably nerfed (but was still a stiff challenge) months down the line. With Alexander, you can beat its Normal mode rather easily, even if you have no experience with raiding, and by then you've seen its whole story, meaning its Savage incarnation becomes little more than a more difficult version of exactly the same thing.

This is my main problem, but there's a number of other issues that have been bugging me for a little while too. I was really looking forward to the exploration missions, since they sounded like something new and interesting, but they turned out to be glorified Hunts, and Hunts are rubbish, since all they are is 300 people dogpiling a monster designed to be fought by 8 people, closely followed by at least 150 more people whining in /shout about someone "pulling early". Diadem at least limits the chaos to 72 players at once, but there's no "exploration" going on; within hours of it appearing for the first time, people had already figured out the most "efficient" way of getting the best rewards, which involves standing in one place and fighting the same damage sponge enemies over and over again until some slightly stronger damage sponge enemies show up and hopefully drop some slightly better loot. There was a "loot whore" angle to Diadem that showed promise, but in practice, with the way Final Fantasy XIV is designed in terms of stats, it's not really a concept that works within the game's overall framework.

Perhaps the thing I've found most offputting, though, is the changing attitudes of a lot of the playerbase. I recall complimenting Final Fantasy XIV's community when it first launched for being incredibly friendly and helpful to one another, sharing information and tips with newcomers and cooperating to make the virtual world of Eorzea a better place for everyone. Over time, this appears to have dissipated somewhat, to be replaced with a bevy of whiny players who insult you if you don't speedrun a dungeon, and people who constantly run damage parsers in the background just so they can post screenshots on Twitter and bitch about how awful the Bard they just ran Brayflox with was. The unfortunate elitist attitude of a lot of these players drives off newcomers and makes them afraid to make mistakes, which in turn puts people off trying more difficult content, which ultimately only hurts the high-level players, who can often be found in Party Finder bitching about not having anyone to clear Alexander Savage with.

I'm not sure why this shift in attitude happened, or if it's always been there and I just hadn't been aware of it. I know that a lot of Final Fantasy XIV players that I follow on Twitter seem to have changed for the worse, though, preferring to post screenshots of bad parses and arguments in party chat rather than celebrating their victories.

There's part of the trouble, though, I think; there's not that many victories to celebrate for veteran players any more. Even victory over a floor of Alexander Savage feels somewhat hollow, because everyone doing Savage will have already beaten all those bosses in Normal mode. "I beat The Manipulator" doesn't have the same gravitas to it as "I killed Bahamut!", after all.

With the lack of new victories to celebrate, it's understandable that people might get jaded and want to complain about things. It's understandable that those who want to be challenged with new content would get frustrated and start to take it out on people who haven't been running Savage for several months, or who don't know how to beat Ravana Extreme. It's not particularly okay that these people do this, but it is at least understandable.

And I don't want to be one of those people, continuing to play a game that feels like work and complaining about it endlessly when I could, instead, be doing something more fun — exploring new worlds in other RPGs, or catching up on my backlog, or enjoying some retro classics for the nth time.

Final Fantasy XIV will always be special to me. It's a virtual world that I've spent a good proportion of the last few years in. I made some great friends while playing, all of whom I sincerely hope will continue to be friends outside the game — something I'm confident about, since we all hung out together at PAX and didn't kill each other. And it was the setting for my proposal to my wife. So although my criticisms above may sound harsh, they're entirely personal, and I certainly do not and never will hate the game at all. It's simply time to take a break from it — perhaps indefinitely, or perhaps just temporarily.

Either way, thanks, Eorzea, Square Enix and Yoshi-P; it's been a wild and magical ride for the last few years, and I'm never going to forget it.

The post 2158: Farewell, Eorzea... For Now appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

On something of a whim, I decided to fire up XCOM: Enemy Unknown this evening: a game that I have owned since 2013 and never even installed, let alone played. (Damn Steam sales.)

Regular readers will know that I'm quite a fan of the board game of this, with its interesting blend of cooperative action and real-time strategising overseen by an app that acts as both timer and gamemaster. The original video game it's based on is a somewhat different experience, but having finally played it a bit today, it's clear that the board game very accurately captures the atmosphere and overall "feel" of the source material.

For those unfamiliar, XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a remake of a much older PC game called UFO: Enemy Unknown, in which the player was tasked with overseeing the top-secret XCOM organisation in its attempts to repel an alien invasion of Earth. Rather than being a linear story-based affair, both UFO: Enemy Unknown and XCOM: Enemy Unknown are somewhat more freeform strategic affairs in which you're tasked with making the tough decisions as you go along — and dealing with the consequences of those decisions.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is immediately more accessible than its much earlier counterpart, however. Since it was designed to be playable on console with a controller as well as with mouse and keyboard, the interface is simple, intuitive and easy to use with either control scheme. It also kicks off your first game with a selection of cutscenes and story missions introducing you to the various aspects of gameplay, which is a good way to ease you into what you should be doing. Over time, the game gradually stops holding your hand until you're running the whole operation, prioritising tasks as you see fit until Earth is either overrun by the aliens, or you successfully complete the final mission and humanity lives to survive another day.

Despite its new-found accessibility, XCOM: Enemy Unknown remains remarkably true to the formula set by its predecessor. You survey the world — initially a small area, but your coverage expands as you send more satellites into orbit — and respond to alien activity, be it UFO sightings, abductions or news of important people who might be able to help your war effort. Should a situation come up that requires the direct intervention of XCOM, the game switches to a tactical turn-based strategy game, in which you take a small squad of soldiers into battle against the alien menace.

Being a Firaxis game — they're the folks who made Civilization, for those who don't know their strategy classics — XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a game that expands in scope as you progress. Your squad members level up and learn new skills, allowing you to specialise them into various roles. Your research branches off in a number of different directions, allowing you to produce new equipment and items. You build up your base with new facilities to boost your overall capabilities. And along the way you need to make sure to keep the mysterious "Council" happy along with ensuring that the various regions of the world don't fall into panic.

The game is set up in such a way that you can't do everything. When alien abductions are reported, inevitably they're in several places at once, and you can only make it to one of the sites in time. The region you assist will reward you; the regions you leave to suffer will start to panic more at the horrible things happening to them.

The board game reflects all this really well with its inherent scarcity of resources. You never quite have enough soldiers or Interceptors to deal with all the shit that is happening in the world at once, so inevitably as you play through the game, various regions will start to panic more and more. It's essential to manage that as best you can; you can't prevent panic from mounting, but you can do your best to try and control it, and to prioritise tasks that will help you keep everything under control.

I'm interested to continue playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown, though. I'm playing on the Easy difficulty at the moment because I'm generally absolute crap at strategy games — particularly those by Firaxis — but I'm open to the idea of another playthrough on a harder difficulty if I make it to the end. So far it seems like an exciting and challenging but accessible strategy game, and I'm keen to check it out some more in the very near future.

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One of the things I really like about Final Fantasy XIV is how easy it is to switch jobs to one of the other classes. Swap out your weapon (and, more than likely, armour) and bam: you're another class, with no need to create a new character.

This system encourages people to try out more than the class they start with, and provides a great opportunity for players to learn about not just the role they choose to "main", but also other types of character they might run into in cooperative content.

It's actually really interesting to run the same thing as each of the three main types of character — tank, healer, DPS — because the experience is often significantly different for each. And it's not always just a case of "tank stands in front of monsters, DPS stand behind, healer makes sure no-one dies" — one of Final Fantasy XIV's biggest strengths is that its encounters are often designed to keep things interesting for everyone in the party, with tanks, healers and DPS alike being expected to deal with mechanics and take care of themselves as much as possible.

Take something like the fourth floor of the Alexander raid, for example. As a tank, your job is relatively straightforward: stand at the front repeatedly hacking away at The Manipulator's legs until it falls over; try and mitigate as much of the incoming damage as possible. Straightforward, that is, unless you're the off-tank, in which case you'll be frequently sucked into a side "Quarantine" room with a DPS and expected to defeat a not-particularly-tough add before being returned to your party. DPS, meanwhile, are expected to pop exploding orbs that appear around the room, try and position themselves so tanks can intercept damage from laser attacks, defeat additional enemies as quickly as possible and, above all, try not to die. And the healers, aside from keeping everyone standing, have to deal with a unique mechanic in the last phase where they need to keep apart from each other and the rest of the party, lest everyone keel over dead.

It's not always this complex, of course, but even so, walking a few miles in each of the three roles' shoes gives you a better overall understanding of how the game as a whole works, and that's really important when playing cooperatively — if only to know exactly what all those buffs the healers are throwing on you mean, and that you shouldn't Stun enemies when the Dark Knight has Blood Price up!

That and it's just kind of fun to see how the different classes play, because even in ostensibly similar classes (Paladin, Dark Knight, Warrior, for example — all are tanks) there's plenty of variation in play style and overall "feel". You might even find yourself liking a new class more than what you originally considered to be your "main" — it's happened to me twice to date!

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Finally cleared Ravana Extreme in Final Fantasy XIV this evening, bringing me up to date on absolutely everything in the game so far with the exception of Alexander Savage, which I'm not in a particular hurry to rush through at the moment.

Ravana, though, was a lot of fun. I'd held off even trying that fight for a while for some reason — I'd got it into my head that it would be "scary", and I didn't want to be a burden on any group who took me along with them. In some ways, this was quite a nostalgic feeling; when I first started playing Final Fantasy XIV, the prospect of pretty much any group content was absolutely terrifying, and playing a role with responsibilities more than "dodge shit, do damage" (both important, to be fair) was simply out of the question. Now, of course, my best-levelled, best-geared classes are both tanks, and I have a healer on the way to the higher levels, too, while I haven't really touched my Black Mage — the class I started with — for quite some time.

Anyway. Ravana EX is a challenging fight, to be sure, even with decent gear. There's a lot of damage, and a lot of reliance on party members knowing and understanding mechanics together. But, for me, this sort of fight is the most satisfying kind of battle in Final Fantasy XIV; it's a really fun experience to see eight people working together, moving as a team and doing their best to overcome a stiff challenge. A couple of years ago when I first decided to check out Final Fantasy XIV more out of curiosity — and some fond memories of the 20 levels of Final Fantasy XI I played a few years back — I couldn't have imagined I'd be challenging difficult battles like this, but now I'm happy to be not exactly at the top tier of players in our Free Company, but certainly someone who can be relied on to jump in and try their best at whatever the game has to offer.

I like Ravana EX because there's a nice combination of learnable mechanics with a little bit of randomness thrown in to make things interesting. Ravana does the same moves in the same order for the most part, and the way in which you deal with them is the same. However, things like positioning and who is initially targeted for his most powerful attacks vary with each attempt, so you have to be on your toes. As a tank, there's also some fun mechanics, most notably dodging his frontal cone "Tapasya" (sp?) attack and sharing the damage from his devastating Blinding Blade tankbuster with the offtank; it's certainly a lot more than "stand there and get hit while doing as much damage as you can". Which is nice.

Now that I'm up to date on everything, I'm very keen to see what patch 3.1, which is out in a couple of days, has to offer. A few days ago I commented on the things I'm particularly looking forward to; mostly, I'm excited about the fact that the new content is likely to bring a bunch of people who maybe haven't played for a little while back to the game; they're tricking in already, but there will doubtless be a big surge once the patch is actually available, the main scenario storyline continues and the more impressive new content is ready to be challenged.

In the meantime, since my Dark Knight sword failed to drop in three successful clears of Ravana, it looks like I have a bit of farming in my immediate future if I want to have a decent weapon ahead of the new Relic's arrival in 3.15…

The post 2119: Squishing a Bug appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

A new release on Steam caught my eye earlier today: one Mini Metro, an abstract puzzle game based around the idea of subway systems. Feeling like taking a punt on something unusual, I downloaded it and was delighted to discover a simple to understand but tricky to master puzzle game with some highly original, interesting mechanics and a gorgeous, clean aesthetic.

Mini Metro places you in charge of the subway system of one of several cities around the world. The city itself doesn't make a huge amount of difference save for the map on which the gameplay is based: most of them have some sort of body of water which will require you to construct tunnels or bridges to traverse, and you only have a limited number of these to use.

The mechanics are simple: stations appear across the map, represented as large shapes. At each station, small shapes appear to represent commuters. The shape of the commuter represents the station they want to get to. They're not fussy about which one of several identical stations they get to, but they most certainly do want to get to, say, a "triangle" station. In order to fulfil their requests, you need to draw coloured subway lines between the stations in order to set up efficient routes. You begin with just a couple of available colours, but as each in-game "week" passes, you have the option of adding more lines to your network — though you have to be careful, as if you don't have an actual train to put on the line, it's not much good to anyone!

As the game progresses, more and more stations appear and the map zooms out to expand the available playing area. Certain stations may be replaced by unique symbols such as stars or pentagons, too, forcing you to ensure that these stations have good access from all lines, or at least a relatively straightforward route of interchanges to use. In order to manage with the growing requirements of your city's commuters, each "week" you get a new locomotive to add to your network, as well as the choice between either a new colour of line to add or an extra carriage to add to one of your trains, improving its capacity. Using these upgrades effectively is key to success just as much as laying out your lines carefully.

There's a few different ways to play, too: the standard mode simply ends when one of your stations becomes overcrowded, the endless mode keeps playing regardless of overcrowding, and the Extreme mode forces you to live with your mistakes, as unlike the normal mode you are unable to edit your lines or trains once you've put them down. There's also a Daily Challenge mode, where everyone gets the same level to play on a given day, and competes for the best ranking on leaderboards.

I've only played about an hour of Mini Metro so far, but I anticipate it being one of those games I dip into every so often when I have a few spare minutes to while away. It's an understated, fun little game with some excellent mechanics and a lovely aesthetic, and if you're a fan of more abstract games it's well worth a look.

The post 2118: Mini Metro appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The preliminary patch notes for the long-awaited Version 3.1 of Final Fantasy XIV were released earlier today, and there's a lot to take in!

Main Scenario

Heavensward's main scenario was satisfyingly complete, with a wonderful final boss fight. But, in the best tradition of Final Fantasy XIV to date, it teased a coming storm, specifically involving a "Warrior of Darkness", who is presumably intended to be some sort of dark counterpart to our own player characters, the Warrior of Light.

Yoshi-P spoke in a Japanese language interview recently in a bit more detail about 3.1 and what to expect from the main scenario. It seems like the game will be moving away from the completely linear main scenario quest it's had to date, and will instead have a number of concurrent storylines. The reason for this is partly practical — parallel storylines afford the opportunity for the devs to unlock group content a bit more quickly rather than relying on linear main story progress — and partly to allow the story to develop in a few different directions simultaneously. It should also — hopefully, anyway — discourage people from skipping the (actually really good, well-written) main scenario quests just so they can get at the new dungeons/trials/whatevers.

Anyway. I'm not yet sure where the main scenario will be taking us, but it's clear we'll be seeing more of the shadowy Ascians, who are the Recurring Bad Guys You Never Actually Defeat that you always need in an MMO. We'll also be seeing the Warrior of Darkness, presumably, and perhaps visiting some strange and wonderful locales. Given that Heavensward appears to be heavily inspired by Final Fantasy IV, it's entirely possible we'll be taking a trip to the moon at some point, though exactly how that will be implemented remains to be seen, particularly as there's still a whole lot of Hydaelyn left to explore.

Dungeons

As I've previously noted, the fact that there are only two new dungeons in 3.1 was initially disappointing to me, but hopefully they should be good fun. The Arboretum dungeon in particular sounds like it has the potential to be interesting and challenging, and Pharos Sirius (Hard) apparently has a bunch of surprises in store; it's not just a run from the top of the lighthouse down to the bottom, as its appearance in the recent trailer seemed to indicate.

On the raid front, the Void Ark 24-man raid dungeon will doubtless be a highlight. It looks like it will have a suitably menacing atmosphere that's a bit different from other dungeons we've seen to date. It also sounds as if there will be some sort of diverging path mechanic, where the three 8-man parties will split off in different directions to do different things at the same time. Whether this is similar to the Atomos fight in Labyrinth of the Ancients, which simply involved three groups doing the same thing in different places at the same time, or something more ambitious remains to be seen. Either way, I'm looking forward to it a great deal — particularly as we're making a big effort to try and get a full 24-person Free Company run going the weekend after the patch.

Trials

Thordan Extreme, or rather The Minstrel's Ballad: Thordan's Reign is the big highlight here. A reprise of the formula from The Minstrel's Ballad: Ultima's Bane, Thordan's Reign is a more difficult version of Heavensward's spectacular but disappointingly easy final boss fight. Supposedly its difficulty is tuned somewhere between the current Extreme primals Bismarck and Ravana, and the current "Savage" raid dungeon Alexander, though it was also compared to the notorious Turn 9, still regarded as one of the most difficult fights in the game, even when playing with unsynced item and character levels.

Thordan's Reign will apparently be a ten-phase fight, making it sound as if it will be one of the most complicated fights in the game to learn, depending on how complex each individual phase is. To put this in context, the previous most difficult fights in the game had considerably fewer phases: Turn 5 had five, Turn 9 had four, Turn 13 had four, though each of these phases had a number of different mechanics that had to be dealt with appropriately. It's entirely possible that each "phase" of Thordan's Reign will have just one or two different mechanics at a time, but we shall see!

The Diadem

This is the bit I'm most interested in: the Exploration Missions, in which you fly off in an airship (either borrowed from Ishgard or belonging to your Free Company) to explore floating islands in the sky. Once there, you have 90 minutes to piss about with up to 71 other people, killing monsters, finding treasure, gathering goodies and completing objectives. The rewards are worthwhile, too; Tomestones of Esoterics will be awarded for completing objectives, and treasure chests dropped by monsters will contain item level 210 equipment, which is theoretically among some of the best in the game, though their randomised secondary stats will make them either amazing or useless for anything other than spiritbonding.

The reason I'm most excited about The Diadem is that it's probably the most significant shakeup to Final Fantasy XIV's structure since the launch of A Realm Reborn. Up until now, the game has followed a fairly standard formula: solo content in the open world, group content in linear instances, occasional group open world activities such as FATEs and Hunts. The Diadem occupies a curious space somewhere between an instanced dungeon and open world content; the area you're in is instanced and time-limited like a dungeon or trial, but there may be other players in there at the same time as you and your friends, and the structure is inherently more open-ended than the extremely linearly designed dungeons and trials. In other words, a trip to The Diadem will not be something you can "learn" and then perform by rote like the current dungeons and trials — not that there's anything wrong with that format! — but rather, hopefully anyway, will provide a degree of randomness that will make things interesting to revisit time and time again.

Relic

The new Relic — known as an Anima weapon — isn't launching with 3.1, but is instead coming a month later in 3.15. The previous Relic quest was one of the most notoriously time-consuming activities in the game, intended to be an alternative route to getting one of the best weapons in the game for those who didn't want to — or weren't able to — raid. We know next to nothing about what the new Relic questline will involve as yet, but you can probably count on it involving grinding, revisiting old content, completing objectives and a shared sense of camaraderie with your companions as you're gradually driven mad by what initially appears to be a completely unreasonable, unmanageable set of expectations.

Despite being at times irritating and demoralising, the original Relic quest was ultimately extremely satisfying, as it's the most convincing "build your own lightsaber" moment I've experienced in any game. This was a single weapon that you kept hold of for a long time, gradually improving bit by bit until it was a force to be reckoned with… and eventually transformed into something even more impressive. Doubtless the new weapon will be a similar situation — and those who made the effort to get a Relic weapon all the way to its final "Zeta" form will be rewarded with being able to skip about 10 hours' worth of grinding, apparently, so that's nice. (Of course, it took quite a bit more than 10 hours to make said Zeta, but any bonus is better than no bonus in this instance!)

Gold Saucer

The new addition to the Manderville Gold Saucer is the interesting-looking real-time strategy game Lord of Verminion. This appears to be a surprisingly well fleshed out game in which there's finally a use for all the collectable minions everyone has been racking up over time. Each minion has its own element, stats and abilities, and they're thrown into virtual combat against either the CPU or another player as you attempt to smash up your opponent's structures before they do the same to you. It will be really interesting to see if the player base takes to this, or if it ultimately becomes little more than an idle distraction.

Gold Saucer is also finally being added to the Challenge Log, allowing a much easier means of acquiring MGP for the Gold Saucer's exclusive rewards, most of which are primarily intended for vanity purposes. Simply adding things like the minigames to the Challenge Log will hopefully encourage people to party in the Gold Saucer once again, as when it launched, it was a whole lot of fun, but these days it seems a little bit dead, since people have mostly moved on.

—

Patch 3.1 is out next Tuesday. I'm looking forward to it a lot, and I'm also looking forward to the inevitable surge of people coming back to the game to check it out, too; hopefully I'll see some people I haven't had the chance to play with for a while. Doubtless I shall be gushing further thoughts on 3.1 over these pages once I've had the chance to play around with it a bit, so Please Look Forward To It.

The post 2117: Preparing for the Coming Darkness appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Had a go at a game that's been loitering in my Steam library for a while today: eXceed 3rd Jade Penetrate Black Package. This curiously named game is the third in a series of Japanese indie "bullet hell" shoot 'em ups that I grabbed in some Steam sale or other and have never really explored all that much. The first two games are rather Touhou-ish, while the third, developed by a different team and having a plot that seemingly has absolutely nothing to do with the first two, draws favourable comparisons to Cave's Mushihimesama series — that, coincidentally, is coming to Steam tomorrow.

Anyway. This being a Japanese game there is a plot where you perhaps wouldn't normally expect to find one, involving some sort of "to the death" tournament between what appear to be dragon girls aiming to rule over Pandemonium. As you might expect, angst and melodrama ensues and while none of it really matters to the actual game as such, the character designs are cute, the voice acting is decent and it infuses the game with a certain degree of personality that it might not otherwise have had.

The thing I like about eXceed 3rd is that it's not the kind of bullet hell game that immediately slams your face into a desk and then flushes your head down the toilet. It's accessible and easy to understand, though to get the highest scores you'll need to be a little more technical. There's just two modes of fire — a standard spread shot and a focused attack, which also doubles as a "precise movement" mode — along with the usual bombs, plus a super-powerful special attack. This charges up over time, but can also be charged by grazing bullets, collecting items and various other means.

Boss fights are split into clear and obvious phases, each with memorable names that assist with the learning process that is so important to this kind of game. In many ways, the boss battles are very much the focal point of the game, with the popcorn enemies during the main part of the level being more "filler" than anything else — though there are still some interesting bullet patterns to navigate through before you can challenge the stage's boss.

As is so often the case with Japanese indie games, eXceed 3rd runs at an incredibly low resolution — 640×480 — which means it will display on pretty much any screen and run at 60fps without too much difficulty. And as is so often the case with Japanese indie games, because eXceed 3rd has been specifically designed for this low resolution, it still manages to look good despite being technically inferior to pretty much everything else in the modern PC gaming market. The attractive, fluid visuals combine with an absolutely rockin' soundtrack to produce a shmup that really gets the pulse racing — exactly as it should be.

I don't feel I've played the game enough to comment in any more detail on it just yet, but I enjoyed the little I played earlier, and am looking forward to investigating it further. Pewpewpew!

The post 2115: Jade Penetrate appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Level 58 on Dark Knight in Final Fantasy XIV now… almost there! I'm still really enjoying the class, and I'm looking forward to having my full suite of abilities to play with. I feel like I have a good handle on how it all works, now; Dark Knight seems to be a pretty flexible sort of tank, able to mitigate a decent amount of damage Paladin-style as well as heal themselves to a certain degree through abilities like Souleater and a cross-classed Bloodbath.

And the damage. Oh the damage. I haven't played Warrior enough to know what sort of numbers they put out on the road to 60, but Dark Knight is miles ahead of Paladin in terms of killing efficiency. Paladin isn't built for killing, of course, being a mitigation tank, but Dark Knight seems to strike a nice balance between being able to take some hits and put out some impressive damage numbers. It helps, of course, that I'm wearing almost entirely Strength-boosting accessories rather than the HP-boosting Vitality accessories, but I haven't had a problem with having too few HP at any point yet, so I intend to stick with that particular course of action for the immediate future until something comes along that twats me for more than I can take in a single hit.