2016: What an Achievement

I was chatting with my friends earlier this evening about the matter of achievements and trophies in games. As long-term readers will know, my opinions on these metagame awards that were introduced with the last generation of games consoles have gone back and forth somewhat, but on the whole I feel I’m starting to come down on the side of liking them.

The reason for this is simple: after nearly 10 years of them being A Thing in gaming, a lot of developers are getting the hang of how to use them effectively — and the reasons for using them.

There are, in fact, several reasons for the existence of achievements. From a developer perspective, they provide feedback on just how much people are playing games and what they’re doing. This is why so many games have a “started the game” achievement — look at the rarity statistics on PSN and you’ll see that there are a surprising number of people who have booted a game up for long enough to add the trophy list to their profile, but not actually started to play it. I couldn’t even begin to contemplate what the reasons for doing this might be, but it happens; as an example, the wonderful shoot ’em up Astebreed gives you a trophy for completing the interactive prologue sequence — something you have to do before you can even access the game’s main menu — and yet only 91% of players have accomplished this, suggesting either that 9% of players simply turned the game off for some reason or other during the prologue, or were unable to complete it. And I’m not sure that last option is even possible.

From a player perspective, a well-designed trophy list provides a metagame to layer on top of the existing game structure. They can provide challenges for players to complete and encourage them to explore a game in full rather than simply making a beeline for the credits — and, again, those rarity statistics suggest that relatively few people who pick up any game, regardless of length and quality, make it to the end, which is kind of sad — or suggest new ways to play.

A good example from recent memory that I’m still engaged with is Compile Heart’s PS4 RPG Omega Quintet. I have gone for the Platinum trophy in most of Compile Heart’s games to date (largely the Neptunia games) because I have a keen awareness of how the developers probably use them for statistics, as mentioned above. I see attaining a Platinum trophy — which for those unfamiliar with PSN is the trophy you acquire when you have achieved all of the other trophies in a game — as a mark of support for the developer; a sign that someone out there cared enough about a game to play it to absolute death. (Omega Quintet’s Platinum trophy, incidentally, has a 1.1% rarity rating, which is not altogether surprising as going by my own experiences it’s something of a beast to attain.)

And in Omega Quintet’s case, that Platinum trophy really is a sign that you have explored everything the game has to offer, because it’s a good trophy list that runs the gamut from “deal 1 million points of damage in a single combination attack” (something that gets significantly easier the further in the game you go) via “complete all the quests” (something which you can miss in a single playthrough if you’re not fastidious about cleaning up quests before advancing the story) and “see the True Ending on Advanced difficulty” (having figured out the conditions to do so, of course — hint: get Aria and Otoha’s affection levels to 4 to guarantee this) to “defeat Double X” (a superboss who sits at the bottom level of the optional Training Facility dungeon and provides one of the stiffest challenges the entire game has to offer)

The interesting thing about Omega Quintet’s trophy list is that by the time I finished my second playthrough (during which I achieved the True Ending on Advanced difficulty) I had only accomplished about 50% of the available trophies. Deciding early on that I wanted to go for the Platinum, I jumped into the post-game (the ability to keep playing the game after you’ve beaten the final boss and seen the end of the story) to explore what these additional challenges might be.

Nearly 50 hours of gameplay later, I’m still playing, though the end is finally in sight. In those 50 hours, I’ve beaten the 13-floor Training Facility dungeon, pretty much mastered the game’s combat system — the extreme difficulty of the Training Facility encounters, including Double X, demands that you know what you are doing, otherwise you will get your ass kicked, even if you grind all the way up to the level cap of 999 — maxed out the affection values for all my party members, mastered all the weapon proficiencies with Kyouka and have come pretty close with a couple of the others, completed all the sidequests and recovered all the hidden archives. This latter one is particularly interesting, as the archives reveal an absolute ton of story context that isn’t made explicit in the main narrative, largely because it’s not directly relevant to the main cast’s personal stories, but instead provides some interesting background lore and worldbuilding context. You stumble across some of these as you simply explore the main game, but quite a few of them are hidden in post-game content.

In other words, without the trophies to give me a nudge in the direction of this additional content, I might not have gone looking for it. One might argue that the game not necessarily signposting this sort of thing is a problem, but if the trophy system is there — and it’s compulsory to use on both Xbox and PlayStation — it may as well be used to push people on to explore things further. Combine that with PSN’s “rarity” feature and there’s a really nice sense of… well, achievement when you know that you’re one of the 1.1% who has seen everything Omega Quintet has to offer.

(Just two more trophies left to go: kill 10,000 enemies and get 1 billion approval rating points. I sense that the challenging DLC dungeons and bosses — including the fearsome Banana Demon pictured above — will be my main means of achieving this!)

1939: Ah, So That’s What PlayStation Plus is For

Up until now, I’ve been a bit resistant to PlayStation Plus, the subscription service that Sony provides for its PlayStation platforms.

Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t been outright against it or anything; it’s more that I’ve never really seen the need for it in my life.

A bit of context for those less familiar with it, then: PlayStation Plus is required for you to play online multiplayer games on PlayStation 4. (It is not required to play online with PlayStation 3 and Vita.) This aspect of it I can take or leave, since I don’t play a lot of online games — Final Fantasy XIV is the only one I play with any regularity, in fact, and I play that on PC.

PlayStation Plus also allows you to upload save games to “the cloud” so that you can easily, say, transfer them between different devices or delete a game and restore your progress later on. Again, I haven’t had much need for this; the one and only time I wished I had it was when I had a downloadable review copy of Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection on Vita, subsequently got a physical copy (because I like physical copies) and discovered that it was impossible to delete the downloadable version without also deleting its save data due to Vita’s somewhat restrictive file system. If I’d had PlayStation Plus, I would have been able to back up my save, delete the downloadable version then bring it back in to play with the physical version.

PlayStation Plus also provides you with discounts on games from the PlayStation Store each month. These are often quite significant discounts, but you do have to bear in mind that you’re paying the subscription fee each month, so you’re perhaps not saving quite as much as you think you are.

And finally, PlayStation Plus provides you with “free” games each month. I put the term “free” in quotation marks because you don’t own them in the same way as you would if you’d actually bought them outright, either in physical or downloadable form. Rather, you have unlimited access to them for as long as you continue to subscribe to PlayStation Plus; they’re effectively extended rentals, if you like.

Now, this latter aspect had been the part I’d probably been most “against”, because I like to own my games, preferably in physical format, and PlayStation Plus didn’t seem especially compatible with that mindset. What I hadn’t counted on, as I’ve discovered since I signed up for my trial period on my new PS4, was the fact that PlayStation Plus actually provides you with a risk-free means of trying out some things you’d perhaps found interesting, but didn’t really want to hand over the money for in case they weren’t all that good.

This month, for example, one of the “free” games on PS4 (and PS3 and Vita, for that matter) is a title called Race the Sun. This is an independently developed game in which you fly a low-polygon spaceship across a randomly generated low-polygon world that changes every real-time day, attempt not to crash into anything and usually fail. It starts extremely simple, almost insultingly so — I nearly put the game down a few moments after starting it because it seemed so bare-bones and simplistic — but gradually grows in depth and complexity as you complete objectives and “level up”, with new mechanics gradually unlocking as you progress through the levels. Now I’m about halfway through the unlocks and finding it an addictive little affair; the somewhat Star Fox-esque aesthetic is appealing, the music is good, the gameplay is frustrating but addictive and it has a somewhat more satisfying feel than your average mobile phone endless runner — which, let’s face it, is basically what it is, with a few extra knobs on.

Would I have spent money on Race the Sun? Well, I certainly wrote about it a bit when I was still working at USgamer, as I thought it looked interesting. It had never quite looked interesting enough for me to actually want to hand over the cash for it, though, and as such it initially passed me by, though I still contemplated it every time I saw it in a Steam sale.

Here’s the power of PlayStation Plus, then; it allows me to investigate these games that I’ve found interesting but, for one reason or another, never bought my own copy of. There’s no risk in me doing this, and I get a decent selection to choose from each month. It’s more effective than a demo because you get the whole game. And it’s less morally questionable than piracy because you’re still paying for the game and the devs are getting a cut — it’s just getting to them via different means.

And if I end up actually really liking something I’ve got through PlayStation Plus? There’s nothing stopping me actually buying a copy to keep permanently in my collection even if I let my subscription lapse.

So okay, I admit it; I should have probably checked PlayStation Plus out sooner. But better late than never, huh?

1273: You Have Earned a Trophy

I can feel my attitudes towards achievements and trophies mellowing somewhat. While I still think people who play games just to get the trophies/achievements are big pillocks — and people who refuse to buy a PS3 game if it doesn’t have a Platinum trophy are even bigger pillocks — I have started to think about them a bit differently, particularly with regard to PSN’s implementation of them.

The way I’ve started thinking of them now is as another means of showing my appreciation for a quality (or at least enjoyable) piece of entertainment to the people who make it. Trophy data is public and synced online, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that developers and publishers are looking at the proportion of people who achieve particular milestones in their games. Thinking of it in that way, I’m happy to put in a bit of extra effort to attain a Platinum trophy in a game I especially enjoyed, as it shows that I liked the game enough to want to see everything it had to offer. That enjoyment is then recorded permanently — or as permanent as my PSN profile is, anyway — for all to see.

I’ve achieved Platinum trophies — or 100% completion, where a game doesn’t have a Platinum — in relatively few games to date. One was Thatgamecompany’s Flower, which remains one of the most beautiful, moving interactive experiences I’ve ever had — and yes, I think it’s better than Journey. The second was Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, which ended up being way better than I thought it would be; the third was Ar Tonelico Qoga, which was the climax to a series of games that now ranks among my favourites of all time. At my present rate, the fourth will be Time and Eternity, which I want to give some recognition and love to purely because it’s been so thoroughly (and slightly unfairly, in my opinion) panned by a lot of critics, and completely ignored by others. In the case of all these trophies, attaining the Platinum represented a good balance between being able to enjoy the game normally, and going out of my way to make a bit of effort; I wouldn’t have bothered if achieving it required too much in the way of unenjoyable grindy bollocks. (On Xbox, incidentally, the only games I’ve achieved 100% of the, uh, achievements on are Oblivion and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. In the case of Oblivion, chasing the achievements actually spoiled the experience significantly for me because it directed what should have been a freeform experience far too much, and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX had insultingly easy achievements that really didn’t reflect whether or not you were actually good at the game.)

I think much more fondly of PSN trophies than I do of Xbox or Steam achievements for some reason. I think it’s because the “value” of PSN trophies is more immediately obvious. Sure, Xbox achievements have Gamerscore values, but Gamerscore is fairly meaningless, particularly as it’s applied inconsistently between games and, well, doesn’t do anything. Trophies, meanwhile, have instantly recognisable values; bronze ones are “fodder” for the most part; silver ones require a little more effort; gold ones are generally either challenging or time-consuming; and platinum ones show true dedication to a game. To say you have “Platinumed” a game is a much simpler, more elegant way of saying that you’ve done everything on that game’s arbitrary checklist than “I got all the achievements”.

Also, the PSN “You have earned a trophy” noise is infinitely better than the Xbox’s “plink”, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong. The Xbox noise is the same sound as when someone comes online, for heaven’s sake; the PSN one sounds like you’ve picked up a powerup in a retro game. See? BETTER.

#oneaday Day 778: Corpse Party: A (Spoiler-Free) Scoreless Review

I’m glad this game exists. It’s a pleasing piece of evidence to point to when people start talking about subject matter which would “never get greenlit by a publisher”. It exists. It was greenlit by someone. It’s freely available to download to your PSP or Vita via PSN. It’s horrific. And it’s brilliant.

Corpse Party tells the story of a hapless group of schoolkids who botch an attempt to commune with the spirit world and find themselves trapped in a long-abandoned elementary school populated with rather unfriendly ghosts. It’s then up to the player to help the group (who quickly become separated in true horror movie fashion) to understand the truth behind what’s going on and return them to safety. It all gets very Japanese horror very quickly — if you’ve seen anything like Ju-on: The Grudge or played Fatal Frame you’ll know the sort of thing to expect.

Unfolding like a cross between a visual novel and a top-down 16-bit RPG, Corpse Party manages to keep the player feeling involved in the action while keeping the story flowing at a good pace. Oftentimes the player’s only contribution between important events will be moving the current player character (for there are several) to a new location, but that simple act, along with the ability to examine items in the environment such as creepy notices on the walls and corpses of previous unwitting visitors to Heavenly Host Elementary School, makes the game feel far more interactive than many visual novel titles, which typically involve tapping the “continue” button lots of times. There’s plenty of that, too, sure, but mild exploration and puzzle elements make this feel much more like a “game” to those who care about that sort of thing.

It’s worth noting at this point that far from taking the relatively “straight line to the finish” approach that many visual novels take, Corpse Party gets increasingly easy to balls up completely as you proceed. Rather than simply immediately ending with a “Game Over” screen for making a bad choice, however, sometimes the butterfly effect of actions you take doesn’t become apparent until an hour or two later. This is a double-edged sword; it turns “making a mistake” into an “alternative ending”, even going so far as to credit the player with this ending in the menu screens, but it also means having to replay previous events, figure out what you did wrong and then do something differently. And God help you if you didn’t make full use of the five available save slots per chapter. Fortunately, though, each of the game’s five chapters is relatively short, with the final one being the longest at around three hours, meaning that replaying a whole chapter is not as much of a chore as it could be — though the game could really do with that mainstay of traditional visual novel interfaces: the “skip” button.

While it’s relatively easy to get on to a “bad ending” path, particularly later in the game, this actually isn’t something to get too frustrated about, for some of the most intense, morbidly fascinating and emotional scenes come about as a result of these “Wrong Ends”, as the game calls them. Sometimes these are subtle changes to events in the supposed “true” ending for each chapter that mean hope turns to tragedy. Sometimes these endings result in horrible deaths for one of more of the main characters. Sometimes they result in revelations about the characters that you wouldn’t find out about otherwise. Pretty much all bar a couple of “you were caught by a Bad Thing, you die” incidents are worthwhile and substantial narrative events in their own right, making discovering all of the story’s possible endings — good and bad — something of a metagame in itself.

The game’s story and the emotional power behind it is helped by a fantastic translation from the Japanese coupled with some truly excellent, emotionally charged Japanese-language voice acting. Even if you don’t speak Japanese, you’ll want to let the fully-voiced dialogue run its course, as it’s packed with convincing expressions of emotion. (Oh, and you’ll want to wear headphones while playing. The game features some of the most unsettling use of stereo effects I’ve ever encountered, along with a kickass soundtrack.) Characters laugh, cry, scream in terror and generally act in an incredibly realistic manner given the situation they find themselves in. Certain incidents which occur also show that being in a horrific, seemingly inescapable situation doesn’t make the cast immune to things like your body letting you down at the worst possible moment, or your own feelings towards another person. Despite its supernatural core, Corpse Party’s tale is a very human one, examining the relationships between all the members of its main cast and leaving the player feeling like they know most of them very well by the end of the story.

But that doesn’t mean that the horror side of things is toned down. Far from it. Despite its retro-style presentation, this is likely one of the most disturbing, unsettling games you’ll ever play. It doesn’t hold back. This game puts its characters through some of the most unimaginable suffering possible in the name of evoking an emotional response from players, and it’s all the better for it. Story is conflict, and through conflict people grow and change — sometimes for the better, sometimes worse. The fact that the characters are children drives home the fact that tragedy can happen to anyone, and the way in which we react to horrific situations can make a big difference to what happens to us next. It’s a powerful tale, for sure, and even the most strong-stomached will struggle not to wince at some of the acts described throughout the course of the game’s narrative.

Note that I say “described” and not “seen”, for Corpse Party understands that most fundamental tenet of horror — the most terrifying things are not the most spectacularly gory things presented to the viewer on a plate, but the things in their imagination. As such, many of the game’s strongest, most disturbing scenes are depicted entirely through text, colour flashes and sound effects. The understated manner in which various unpleasant incidents are coolly relayed to the player makes them all the more powerful, for it’s at these moments that the imagination comes into play, filling in the blanks about what is not described as much as picturing what is described. It’s a potent demonstration of the huge difference that having people who know what they are doing work on a game’s script makes.

Corpse Party isn’t a long game, and it won’t take you long to beat all five chapters. There’s plenty of incentive to replay, though, including discovering all the possible endings — good and bad — as well as a series of smaller “extra chapters” that fill in other events which are occurring alongside the main plot. There’s also a bunch of student ID tags to collect throughout the course of the game, providing details on previous visitors to Heavenly Host who weren’t so lucky, including how they died. It’s a diverting little side mission which is integrated nicely into the theme of the game rather than feeling like a gratuitous addition. Since the PSP doesn’t have a Trophy system, it’s clear that these tags haven’t just been added to fill out the Trophy list; they’re instead present to provide context and atmosphere to an already creepy and impactful game.

So should you play Corpse Party? If you’re a fan of story-based games and Japanese horror, then yes, you most certainly should. There’s more than enough content to get your £11.99 worth in this game, and despite a couple of niggling flaws (the lack of a “skip” button when replaying scenes being the most disappointing oversight) it’s a memorable, emotional experience that will stay with you long after it’s finished.

#oneaday Day 775: Having a Corpse Party

Looking for something terrifying? Own a PSP? Then quit whatever you’re doing and go download Corpse Party from PSN for a very reasonable £11.99.

I’ve mentioned this briefly a couple of times over the last few days but it’s worthy of some more in-depth enthusing, so here goes.

Corpse Party is a horror adventure game that uses a combination of Chrono Trigger-style top-down visuals and beautifully-drawn anime-style stills to tell its tale. And what a gruesome, horrifying tale it is.

Following a botched attempt to cast a friendship charm as one of a group of friends is set to leave her school, eight Japanese high schoolers and their teacher find themselves trapped in an unpleasant situation: a ruined, abandoned, creepy old school that is not their own, populated by malevolent ghosts and a wide variety of mutilated dead bodies — obviously previous victims of whatever curse brought them there. It’s up to the player to get to the bottom of what’s going on, and attempt to get the kids home. I haven’t finished it yet, so I don’t know if they’re successful.

Corpse Party initially puts across the impression of being just another light-hearted anime adventure. But things quickly take a turn for the dark as the corpses start piling up and the numerous mysteries surrounding the ruined school start to reveal themselves. Gameplay is limited to wandering around, exploring and making occasional choices, so the game is perhaps best compared to a visual novel rather than an adventure game or survival horror, but it manages to be one of the most affecting, evocative games I’ve ever played using the bare minimum of tricks and gimmicks.

It achieves this in a variety of ways. First up is the excellent writing and localisation. Not only is the tale told one filled with unexpected twists and turns, but it’s also one populated with believable, “human” characters who are far from being “video game heroic”. They’re kids. They talk like kids, they swear like kids, they make inappropriate comments like kids and they react like kids would in horrific situations like the ones in the game — by screaming, crying and running away.

The game doesn’t hold back in its writing, preferring instead to depict its characters’ behaviour in a realistic manner rather than the sanitised view of life we get in many other video games. For example, in one flashback scene depicting one of the characters’ lives before the events of the game, we see a big sister (one of the main cast) and her little brother in the bathroom together. Both are nude. Big sister, who is somewhat outspoken and borderline brash at times, teases her little brother for being ashamed of his nakedness and hiding his penis from her, tackles him to the ground and tickles him, behaving as siblings do. There’s no inappropriate eroticism in the scene despite the characters’ nudity, just a believable depiction of two very “human” characters enjoying a mundane moment together.

A lot of the power of Corpse Party’s writing comes from this clash between the mundane and the uncanny. Chapters will often open with a flashback of the “good old days” before the botched charm made everything go wrong for these kids, and it makes the anguish and terror they go through all the more profoundly affecting having seen what they’re like in situations that they’re comfortable with.

The writing is wonderfully descriptive without being overly explicit, either. Some of the most toe-curling, unpleasant scenes in the game come from a blank screen accompanied only by text and minimal sound effects. And yet somehow the manage to be far more horrific than anything I’ve seen on a next-gen console. The imagination is truly a powerful thing.

Imagination is all very well, but it can be helped along in a few ways. Firstly, there’s the visual side of things, which is kept relatively simple for the most part — old-school pixel art RPG-style graphics punctuated with occasional hand-drawn closeups to emphasise particular scenes.

Star of the show is the game’s sound design, though. Best experienced on headphones, Corpse Party’s soundtrack combines a variety of atmospheric, dramatic and memorable musical themes with subtle use of sound effects and some truly fantastic Japanese-language voice acting. The delivery is packed with emotion, making the kids’ screams of terror all the more harrowing as you find yourself really believing what’s going on. And the use of stereo makes for an impressively unnerving experience.

While some may object to a game which features quite so much violence against children, I for one have so far found the mature treatment of the player to be refreshing. The game doesn’t pull any punches at any point, meaning that you’re just as likely to meet an agonising and drawn-out demise when playing as a little girl as you are when playing the “tough” guy. Far from feeling “wrong”, however, the knowledge that the game’s characters are in very real danger throughout provides a strong emotional impetus for the player to get to the bottom of what’s going on and try to save them.

The only criticism of the game I have is the fact that if you find yourself down one of the “bad ending” paths and meeting a sticky end, you can sometimes lose a bit of progress if you haven’t been saving fastidiously at the game’s sparsely-scattered save points. With no means to quickly skip through scenes you’ve already seen once, this can be a little frustrating for the impatient (or those who can’t work out what they’re doing wrong — though it’s usually obvious).

This little issue far from ruins the experience, however. In fact, those who want to “100%” the game will actually need to see all of these unpleasant endings as well as the “proper” ends to each of the game’s five chapters, meaning that an unpleasant death for one of the cast isn’t necessarily wasted play time.

Above all, Corpse Party is a rewarding, affecting, remarkable experience that treats the player as an adult throughout. It’s refreshing to play through something which doesn’t feel sanitised or dumbed down in the slightest, and I’m both surprised and delighted that a game like this made it on to the Western PSN store.

I’m certainly not complaining, though. In fact, I’d like to see a lot more titles like this in the future.

#oneaday Day 116: Hacked Off

So, Sony fucked up. Pretty bigstyle. And yet I find myself less angry at them and their incompetent handling of the situation and more angry at the fact this situation even arose in the first place.

I’m talking, of course, about hackers. Hacking, despite people not really knowing what it is outside of representations that they’ve seen in movies, is one of the things people are most paranoid about in the online age — and with Sony’s PR disaster in full swing at the minute, it’s easy to see why, as people frantically cancel their credit cards and change all their passwords on the offchance that some bearded, smelly loser (not me) may pick their personal details to commit fraud with.

In practice, it seems that a lot of hacks are committed to make a point rather than cause damage as such, whatever Introversion Software’s excellent Uplink might have you believe. But for a service as inoffensive as PSN, it just seems spiteful to attack it. Anonymous had its high-profile throwing-toys-out-of-a-pram moment a week or two ago but they claim they’re not responsible for this latest incident as they’re supposedly “on the side of the consumer”. That and everyone was yelling at them for fucking up PSN when people just wanted to get online, play stuff and buy stuff.

I guess it’s just like any other crime — crime shouldn’t happen, but it does, whether it’s in the real or virtual world. However nice it’d be to imagine a Star Trek-esque future where crime and war between humans is a thing of the past, it’s not going to happen — or at least, not for a long time. As long as there are people out there who feel a misplaced sense of “entitlement” — whether it’s to get their hands on software they haven’t paid for, to steal people’s personal information or just to fuck everyone else’s enjoyment up — then we can never feel completely “safe” and confident.

Which is a shame, really, isn’t it? So much of new technology is genuinely awesome when used properly. Were the threat of hacking and other technology crime not present, the capabilities of devices could be even more awesome. But as it is, so much time and money has to be spent on installing cutting-edge security into every single device we own that things are probably held back from where they could be if security wasn’t such an issue.

Oh, I know. It’s nice to want things, and some sort of Utopia would supposedly get boring quite quickly, but I’d certainly like to enjoy it, if only for a while. But it’s never going to happen — the world is full of just enough arseholes to make life less enjoyable for the majority, non-arsehole population out there.

So, arseholes, a big fuck you, and I hope your cock falls off. Into a fire. Which someone then douses with acid, mistaking it for water. And then feeds you the remains. And then jams a really sharp spike right up your bum-hole.

Yeah.

#oneaday Day 75: Yar-Har Fiddle-De-Dee

Piracy is a crime. Most people are aware of this by now, but it still goes on. And as much as I’m not a fan of piracy per se, it’s becoming increasingly understandable why people resort to less-than-legal means to get hold of digital content. Sometimes it’s because said content isn’t available where they live without paying exorbitant amounts of money to import things. Sometimes it’s to get a different version of some content they enjoy. And sometimes it’s because the legal versions of the content don’t work in the first place.

Let’s take YouTube as an example here. YouTube launched a service in the UK last year called YouTube Shows, which carries content from Channel 4, Channel 5 and various other sources, allowing viewers to catch up on programmes they’ve missed, rather like iPlayer. This is a great service, particularly considering it’s available for free, thanks to the fact it’s supported by advertising.

At least, it’s great in theory. Until the advertising service breaks, rendering the content completely inaccessible. Because there’s no failsafe to skip a broken ad, no means of reloading with different ads if they cause the video to fail and no means to report broken content, if YouTube decides that you’re not going to watch something, you’re not going to watch it.

This is obviously a Bad Thing, but of course it’s not YouTube’s fault directly. Computers fuck up, that’s part of What They Do. But when the fact that Computers Fuck Up That’s What They Do means that a service becomes unusable, that’s when alternative means start to get 1) sought and 2) provided.

Take the various means of digital rights management that many PC games come bundled with these days, too. Several of Ubisoft’s games won’t run at all if you’re not connected to the Internet constantly while you’re playing, so if you have a dodgy wireless signal in your home, good luck playing Assassin’s Creed on the PC, since it’ll kick you from the game every time your connection drops. And now some console games are starting to take the same approach, too, with Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 on PSN being one of the first. Modern consoles are very much geared towards “always-on” connections these days, of course, but with the number of times my PS3 logs itself out of PSN with no warning every day, playing a game that depended on Internet connectivity would quickly become very frustrating.

It ends up as a vicious cycle, however. The pirates determine more and more inventive ways to circumvent the more and more inventive protective systems that publishers put in place to deter the pirates from circumventing their protective systems. And it never ends. At the moment, particularly when it comes to PC gaming, cracked versions often offer a more convenient, “better” experience than legitimate copies. And when it comes to DVDs, not having to sit through several minutes of unskippable bullshit every time you want to watch a 20-minute episode of How I Met Your Mother is always going to be a mark in favour of downloading the episodes rather than buying the DVDs.

Piracy is a crime. But buying a product isn’t, and nor is tolerating advertising to make use of a free service. So how about the legitimate consumers stop getting treated like dirt, huh?

#oneaday, Day 320: Achievement Locked

I’ve just done something I haven’t done for a while. I’ve beaten a game with no Achievements. No, I don’t mean that I played the game so terribly that I didn’t get any Achievements (I don’t think there’s a single Achievement-supporting game out there that will allow you to do that)—I mean I started, played, enjoyed and beat a game which did not support Achievements of any kind, be they Steam Achievements, Xbox Achievements, PSN Trophies or a built-in Achievement-like system.

Said game was Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, which I enthused about at some length a few days ago. I beat it tonight, but there’s a load of stuff after the ending, too, so this isn’t the end of my time with the game. I am, however, glad that there were no Achievements along the way.

Achievements are generally considered to be a good thing. And for some games, they are. Freeform games like Crackdown use Achievements to encourage players to try crazy things that they might not have thought to do otherwise. Skill-based games like Geometry Wars use Achievements to display player skill. But when you get into the territory of “Fire your gun 500 times”, you know it’s getting a bit silly.

I played Oblivion a while back and greatly enjoyed it. I got all 1250 Achievement points in it. The thing is, though, that wasn’t the whole game. There are tons of sidequests in Oblivion which don’t have associated Achievements. How many people do you think bothered to do them? Not many, I’d wager.

Achievements often direct your experience and encourage you to play in a specific way. For some types of game, that is good. In others, it’s not. Part of the joy of Recettear is the discovery of how different things in the game work. Over time, you naturally figure out which customers you can get away with charging a bit more to, which ones will come in at what times of the day, which products appeal to which people and all manner of other things. Even the adventurer characters you can take into the dungeons have their own individual quirks for you to learn. As soon as you add Achievements like “Sell 20 Baked Yams” to that mix, you start playing differently in order to get that Achievement. You start focusing on becoming the best damn Baked Yams supplier there ever was, to the exclusion of more profitable things like treasure and adventuring equipment.

Achievements are, on balance, a good idea, I think. They provide an additional reward mechanic above and beyond that which the game should be offering anyway. But it’s when they start to take over, to become the most important reward mechanic—more than the inherent rewards built into the game itself—that things aren’t quite right with the world. It’s a fine line, and I don’t think making the support of Achievements mandatory is the correct way to be. Or if there’s no way around that, let’s see more games like DEADLY PREMONITION, which simply has an Achievement for beating each chapter, one for each difficulty level and one for 100%ing the game. Nothing more. Nothing more needed. Even then, I’m pretty sure there will be at least one person out there who will go back and replay the whole game just to get all three difficulty level Achievements. That shouldn’t be why you replay DEADLY PREMONITION. You should replay it because it’s awesome.

So, anyway. Don’t be afraid to pick up a game with no Achievements. You might be surprised. Games can be fun without having to tell you how awesome you are every ten minutes.

#oneaday, Day 219: I Like ‘Em Chunky

I’ve been playing Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game recently. Besides being an excellently fun game that hearkens back to the golden days of the brawler, it also has some of the most adorable graphics you’ll ever see. By deliberately rendering things in low-res pixel art, it somehow manages to have approximately three thousand times more charm than the shiny brownness that is Gears of War. Granted, Gears isn’t a cartoony game, so it’s probably not an apt comparison. But even 3D-rendered “cartoony” or light-hearted games pale in comparison to some good old-fashioned pixel art.

It’s been a curious transition for art styles over the last few years. As 3D technology got better and better, the pressure was on developers to produce something that looked more and more real. The expression “if graphics don’t get any better than this, I’ll be happy” was trotted out with every new console generation. People spent hours looking down at the floor in Halo marvelling at how realistic the grass texture was. (Just me? All right then.) Putting things in higher and higher resolution was seen as the gold standard; something for everyone to strive for. Getting something running at 60 frames per second in 1080p? The Holy Grail.

Somewhere along the way during this process, pixel art spent some time being undesirable. I remember emulating Final Fantasy VI on my PC back when I first discovered emulation, and finding the huge pixels made incredibly clear on the PC monitor to be very offputting. I felt like I couldn’t see the detail. This wasn’t taking into account the fact that by the very nature of pixel art, some detail has to be omitted.

Today, though, I find myself playing PS1 sprite-art based games on my PS3 with all the filters turned off so that I can see those sharp edges. And Scott Pilgrim handles this in the same way. All the artwork is rendered in a deliciously unfiltered manner, which means you can see the “stepping” on diagonal lines, the black outlines around the character sprites and the necessary omission of detail. No-one has a nose, for example.

But you know what? It’s beautiful. It’s gorgeous. And I’d take a hundred games drawn in this way over another Unreal Engine 3 game. Perhaps it’s just oversaturation or “next-gen fatigue” and I’d eventually get sick of pixel art again. But certainly right now, I find it to be an incredibly attractive art style that I’m really glad to see a resurgence of. And my favourite use of HD graphics is, ironically, to render low-resolution pixel art in all its sharp-edged glory.

So you can keep your next-gen sweaty-faced protagonists. (Except Nathan Drake and Elena. They may live.) Give me a good old-fashioned big-eyed protagonist with giant fists and no nose any day of the week. KPOW!

Retro or “Inspired By”?

turtles-in-time-reshelled-screenshot-now-only-10-dollars

Tolkoto’s recent Exploding Barrel rant about reviewers’ reactions to the recent Turtles in Time remake on Xbox Live got me thinking. What is it that gets people so excited about some “retro” games and not others? I agree with him, in fact – reviewers’ reactions to Turtles in Time was somewhat harsh, particularly considering it’s only 800 space dollars. Criticising the gameplay of the original by measuring it against modern yardsticks clearly isn’t acceptable… or is it? It’s difficult to say. After all, this may be some gamers’ first encounter with an early-90s brawler (although XBLA has hosted the previous Turtles arcade game along with the magnificent Streets of Rage 2 and the diabolical Double Dragon) – what gives? And how come Castle Crashers – fundamentally the same game in many respects – gets smothered in adoration?

A common criticism of the brawler genre is that it’s “too simple”. But let’s take a look at another genre in the form of the PSN’s recent brick-breaker Shatter, which has garnered almost universal praise since its release a couple of weeks ago. Shatter is, let’s not kid around here, Arkanoid. Okay, you have a “suck” button. And a “blow” button. (Stop sniggering at the back.) But fundamentally, it’s still Arkanoid. You’re a bat-shaped spaceship hitting a ball into bricks that are floating in space with some flimsy justification laughably called a “plot” buried somewhere in the Help menus. There are powerups, including one where you can just shoot down the bricks. Pretty much the sole point of the game is to achieve as high a score as possible – and high scores are something the game does well. It’s a simple game. Everyone loved it for this fact.

So in terms of gameplay, Shatter adds little to the Arkanoid formula save a few fancy bits of physics, some HD art and a kickass soundtrack that I love and Feenwager hates. So why is this game awesome and Turtles in Time a bit steaming turd to reviewers? God knows.

The important thing is, of course, what the player thinks of all this. Those who enjoy the brawler genre or have fond memories of playing Turtles in Time on the SNES will have an absolute blast with the new XBLA remake. Similarly, those who enjoy bouncing things around and smashing walls will love Shatter. But are people more predisposed to like Shatter as it was designed from the ground-up to be a new game rather than a “re-imagining” of Arkanoid? Arkanoid LIVE on the 360 released to mixed reviews and has, it seems, been mostly forgotten already. Shatter, on the other hand, gives me the impression that people will perhaps be more inclined to give it a go, particularly given its very generous price point ($7.99 in the US store, £4.79 over here) as a result of the few things it does a little bit differently.

This pattern follows us around a great deal. LittleBigPlanet for PS3 is a 2D platformer, and unashamedly so. Yet plonk someone down in front of that, then down in front of, say, Rolo to the Rescue and see which they prefer. Actually, that’s perhaps not strictly accurate. Plonk someone down in front of an HD version of Rolo to the Rescue sold for $10 on XBLA or PSN and ask them which they prefer. Would the answer still be LBP? Judging by what has happened with Turtles in Time here, it may well be, though many players, particularly those who have played and loved both, may feel a bit differently.

This has been yet another rant without any real point but do feel free to comment if you have any feelings. I’m planning a new music post very soon – those take a bit more preparation though. 🙂