Finally got around to firing up the rather grandiosely titled Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart today, and I’m pleased to report that thus far it appears to be excellent.
For the unfamiliar, Hyperdevotion Noire is another installment in my perennial favourite game series Hyperdimension Neptunia, or more accurately, it’s one of several “spinoff” games that have broken free of the main continuity… not that Neptunia has ever been a series particularly concerned with internal continuity. In other words, it stands by itself as its own self-contained story, though naturally you’ll probably get more out of it if you’re already familiar with the characters and concepts involved.
Unlike most of the Neptunia games, Hyperdevotion Noire puts, oddly enough, PlayStation personification Noire in the leading role. Unfolding in a separate, parallel setting to the main Neptunia games (the land of “Gamarket” instead of “Gamindustri”), Hyperdevotion Noire opens with Noire dominating much of the world with her superior military might, army of generals (each of whom represents a well-known game series, such as the Metal Gear-inspired girl named “Lid” seen in the screenshot below) and overwhelming support from the people. Unfortunately, her position as top dog isn’t to last; after being tricked into releasing the power of her “Shares” — the source of a Goddess’ power in the Neptunia universe — monsters run amok in her city, people disappear and her once-trusted generals start fighting among themselves. It’s up to Noire — along with the rest of the Neptunia gang, who show up pretty near the beginning of the whole affair — to sort out the mess she had a part in creating, find out who the mysterious woman “Eno” who set these events in motion is (hint: she looks uncannily like recurring series villain Arfoire) and ultimately unite Gamarket.
It’s up to you, meanwhile, to take care of Noire and help her out as she goes about her business. Yes, like fellow spinoff Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection, Hyperdevotion Noire puts the player in the game as a first-person protagonist rather than simply telling the story of the main cast. Recruited as Noire’s secretary shortly after meeting her, you’re tasked with managing the party, strategising in battle, renovating and decorating Noire’s headquarters and helping her make appropriate policy decisions as the citizens of Lastation come to her with requests.
The meat of the game comes in the battle sequences. Rather than being a dungeon-crawling, item-gathering/crafting RPG as the mainline Neptunia installments are, Hyperdevotion Noire is a strategy RPG, developed by Sting (of Gungnir, Knights in the Nightmare and Yggdra Union fame). Mainline Neptunia games have always had a slight element of tactics to their battle sequences thanks to positional bonuses, cleaving attacks and formation skills, but battles in those games are generally pretty short; punctuation to dungeon crawling. In Hyperdevotion Noire, a single battle represents a complete encounter and provides you with specific objectives: sometimes you’ll simply have to defeat all enemies; sometimes you’ll have to defeat a specific enemy; sometimes you’ll have to complete objectives before a specific number of turns pass.
The game does a good job of introducing concepts to you gradually, and there’s a bunch of interesting systems at play. Core to the game is the “Lily Boost” system, whereby characters can power up their relationship values with other characters, earn “Lily Points” and reduce the cost of their special moves by triggering their skills when adjacent to other characters, which causes the supporting characters to give the acting character an adorable little peck on the cheek. Chu! Although cheeky and flirtatious, the system adds an interesting dynamic to battles: you have to think very carefully about both turn order and formation when setting up attacks, especially when you’re dealing with enemies who can hit several tiles at once. It’s no good getting all set up for a four-way snog if an enemy with a massive cleave is just going to kill all of you at once when it comes to their turn, after all.
That’s not all to think about, though. Battle maps include treasure chests in awkward-to-reach locations, which you’ll need to acquire before completing your objectives if you want the goodies therein. A Final Fantasy X-style “Overkill” bonus rewards you with rare drops if you defeat an enemy with far more damage than you need to. Maps have variable elevation and environmental hazards — both of which can be conveniently bypassed if you switch the goddess characters into their flying “HDD” forms, but in order to do this you’ll need to build up the Lily Points gauge first, and then it only lasts for three turns, so you need to make the most of it. Setting a specific character as the “leader” of the squad confers special bonuses (and, sometimes, penalties) on the group as a whole. Characters each have their own array of “challenges” to complete, each of which rewards them with significant stat bonuses.
There is a hell of a lot of game here. This is nothing new for a Neptunia game — I’ve easily spent over 100 hours on the last few installments in an attempt to get the Platinum trophies and hidden goodies — but considering this is a “spinoff” game and not technically part of the main series, it’s impressive. I’m only a short way in to the overall plot so far, but I’m already enjoying both the narrative and gameplay sides; it’s shaping up to be a fine installment in a favourite series, and all the more noteworthy for doing something a little bit different.
Having finished Criminal Girls, I was all set to make a start on Hyperdevotion Noire, a game that I’ve been very excited to play for quite some time. But I didn’t; I decided I should try and clear out some of the games I’ve left half-finished first, the main one being Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus.
Shinovi Versus is an underappreciated little diamond in the Vita library. It’s an enjoyably over-the-top 3D action game vaguely in the vein of Dynasty Warriors (in that in a number of levels you hack and slash your way through hundreds of enemies, and your combo count frequently reaches the thousands) but also providing a fun take on fighting in 3D.
There are two… well, maybe three core appeal elements when we’re talking about Senran Kagura, and Shinovi Versus in particular. The first is, of course, the fanservice element; let’s not beat around the bush here, it’s the reason the series exists in the first place. The girls are pretty, their boobs are jiggly, the costumes are sexy and as you fight, they get ripped. Despite the girls technically being ninjas and using a variety of rather painful-looking implements to battle one another, no-one ever seems to really get hurt or killed; the main damage anyone suffers is to their pride, since a well-timed Ninja Art at the conclusion of a bout can cheerfully whip off the underwear of your opponent, leaving them in no doubt as to who is the winner.
But anyway. The two main things I wanted to talk about were the narrative and the mechanics. The narrative I’ve already talked about in past posts: considering the game is regarded by outsiders as little more than gratuitous fanservice, if you’re unfamiliar with it you may be surprised to note that the series features some excellent characterisation, including characters with genuine development and growth over the course of their stories. It’s a game that’s not afraid to juxtapose the serious and the absurd, either; while the main storylines for each of the four “schools” involved in the overall plot are fairly serious in tone, the girls’ individual stories are more light-hearted in nature, leading to some ridiculous situations. It effectively allows us to see the cast “at work” and “at play”, and it gives us a pretty good picture of who they all are as people.
Mechanically, the game is a delight. The control scheme is simple to understand, but the depth comes from the wide variety of characters and how very differently from one another they all handle. Some are friendly to simple button-mashing — Asuka is a good example, particularly once she unlocks her spinny death tornado move — while others demand mobility, observation, timing and sometimes unconventional tactics. By the end of your time with the game, you’ll have at least one “favourite” character, both in narrative terms and mechanically, too.
It’s a game bursting with content. There are four separate “episodes” to the story, each focusing on a different main cast, and each has a different tone. The scenes involving characters returning from Senran Kagura Burst on the 3DS are heartwarming, while the scenes involving new characters give us a good idea of what makes the newcomers tick. Depending on which order you choose to play the stories, you’ll meet all the characters from several different perspectives, and between all these angles — and side missions like the girls’ individual stories — you’ll get a solid understanding of who everyone is and how they all relate to one another.
Not bad for a fanservice-heavy hack and slash. I’m pleased to be rediscovering it now that Criminal Girls is done and dusted, and looking forward to spending some time with the characters I don’t know all that well yet.
Been playing a bit more Criminal Girls this week, and I’m enjoying it a lot, despite its flaws. (Said flaws, if you were wondering, include somewhat repetitive dungeon design, an encounter rate that is a little too high to be comfortable, battles that take a little too long/move too slowly/both and the strong necessity for grinding that will be required to unlock all the girls’ abilities.)
The absolute best thing about it is its atmosphere. Although the in-game visuals are PSP-level pixel art (sharply contrasting with the high-resolution character portraits, battle graphics and other visuals), they’re evocative and distinctive, and the individual sprites have a lot of character about them, particularly in idle animations. When combined with the music and background sound, the game has a wonderfully palpable sense of menace about it — entirely appropriate for a game set in the depths of Hell.
In fact, the atmosphere and presentation bring to mind another game: Corpse Party. Criminal Girls is a (relatively) traditional RPG compared to Corpse Party’s visual-novel-that-looks-like-an-RPG nature, of course, but in terms of atmosphere the two are quite similar. There’s a sense that something unpleasant could happen at any moment, and a lovely juxtaposition between the often light-hearted banter between characters and the unpleasant things that are going on around them.
The characters keep things interesting, too. At the beginning of the game, you don’t know anything about them, aside from their personalities. Initially, there’s Kisaragi, who is seemingly full of rage and obsessed with materialism; there’s the shy, childish Alice, who is one of the most adorable characters I’ve ever had in my party in any game ever; there’s the determined, tomboyish Sako; and there’s the obviously older, man-hating Ran. As the game progresses, additional girls join the group, and they each have their own distinct personalities — and, presumably, dark pasts — to discover.
The setup is immediately intriguing. Why are these girls in Hell? Why are they getting a chance to redeem themselves? Why have you been brought in to lead and “motivate” them? What do you get out of the whole situation? (Aside from being able to perv at the girls in a variety of costumes while you spank, electrocute and do various other S&M-ish things to the “temptations” that infest their bodies, of course, which is probably reward enough in itself for many people.)
I don’t know the answers to any of these questions yet, but I’m enjoying the process of discovery. And this is one thing Criminal Girls does well. The dungeons may be somewhat blandly designed, but it’s satisfying and fun to explore them and find their hidden treasures. Discovering how new skills work after a successful “motivation” session is enjoyable and interesting — particularly with the game’s idiosyncratic battle system, in which you simply take suggestions from the girls rather than micromanaging them. And discovering more about what is shaping up to be a very interesting cast of characters is providing plenty of incentive for me to want to push onwards and find out the truth.
I’m enjoying it a lot, then. It’s keeping me entertained enough that I now have copies of both Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth2 and Hyperdevotion Noire — both highly, highly anticipated games for me — and haven’t yet popped them in my Vita for even a quick look yet. And I fully intend to see it through to the end before I indulge myself in more Neptunia than I know what to do with!
I’ve had a copy of Akiba’s Trip: Undead and Undressed loitering in my backlog pretty much ever since it released over here, but I’ve never gotten around to playing it until recently. I’m not sure what convinced me to give it a go, but I decided that it was time, so I booted it up the other day.
Akiba’s Trip is a game that proved to be notorious for two reasons: one, that supposedly, it was a game about beating up girls and pulling their clothes off; and two, it features the transphobic slur “trap” used for its intended purpose, i.e. to insult a transgender person.
Both of these things are accurate; however, as is usually the case with this sort of thing, the fact that they were focused on by loudmouthed critics almost to the exclusion of everything else about the game obscured the fact that the other 99% of Akiba’s Trip is a very interesting, ambitious experience indeed, and a game very much worth playing. Not to mention the fact that both of the heavily criticised elements can be fully justified through the game’s narrative context.
In Akiba’s Trip, you play you, assuming you’re a floppy-haired male anime protagonist. (After clearing the game once, you unlock the ability to play as other character models, so from that point onwards you can play as a lady if you so desire; canonically, however, the hero is male.) After answering a seriously sketchy-sounding job ad about taking part in a drug test in exchange for as many rare anime figures and other merchandise as you can handle, you find yourself turned into a Synthister, a man-made vampire with superhuman strength and the ability to absorb “life energy” from people around you. While Synthisters aren’t vulnerable to crosses and garlic like “real” vampires, they are still extremely sensitive to sunlight, however, with something of a propensity for exploding into a cloud of dust if too much of their bare skin is exposed to the elements.
I’m sure you see where this is going.
In short order, you’re rescued from your precarious situation by another Synthister called Shizuku, and you make your way back to your group of plucky gamer buddies who hang out in a cool bar run by an old dude everyone calls “Pops”. From here, you’re tasked with investigating the Synthister threat as well as helping out the locals of Akihabara, primarily by either finding things in the district or by beating up people until you can pull their trousers off: the game’s combat system is primarily about damaging clothing until it’s in a state where you can whip it off, rather than whittling down a more conventional health bar. In order to defeat most enemies, you need to remove their headgear along with their top and bottom clothing. Interestingly, in contrast to something like Senran Kagura, a game which also has a heavy emphasis on clothing damage, the “strip” mechanic in Akiba’s Trip is unsexualised; it’s simply part of combat, and is, frankly, hilarious. (Not only that, but you’ll find yourself stripping men as well as women; I believe my session earlier is the first time ever in gaming that I have defeated a man in full motorcycle leathers by diving head-first into his crotch, grabbing his helmet and flinging it away, then whipping his trousers off and tearing his jacket from his chest.)
Stripping aside, the big hook in Akiba’s Trip is that it features a lovingly detailed rendition of the real-world Akihabara district of Tokyo in Japan — a Mecca for otaku of all descriptions for sure. Featuring recreations of real-life shops, some excellently authentic-sounding ambient sound and a pleasingly diverse array of random people wandering the streets, it’s an enormously atmospheric game that it’s a pleasure to just wander around and explore — particularly when you start to notice interesting things happening without any intervention from you.
I was searching for some street thugs with Shizuku at one point, for example, and I decided to try and ask a suspicious-looking man in the street for directions. He responded that he “wasn’t into dudes” and refused to talk to me. As I pondered what to do next, he then started to hit on Shizuku, who stood there patiently while he said his piece and then, marvellously, wound up one hell of a punch and socked him right in the face, flattening him. He then ran away crying. It was a beautiful moment that just happened to occur due to me being in the right place at the right time.
If there’s one game that Akiba’s Trip reminds me of so far, it’s Yakuza. The lovingly crafted real-world environment; the blend of JRPG-style mechanics with action game brawling; the fact the game acknowledges the more unpleasant, seedier side of humanity without judgement. (The aforementioned “trap” comment, for example, comes in the context of a forum thread you read on your phone; said forum thread was clearly localised by someone who has spent a lot of time on real-world forums, since the text-based “dialogue” is some of the most convincing and realistic I’ve seen in an English localisation for a very long time — right down to the use, or lack thereof, of punctuation, and the way that anonymous people online are quite frequently complete shitheads to one another.) That and the endless stream of sidequests to complete that have nothing to do with the main story but provide a pleasing sense of “place” and “context” to the overall setting; the NPCs who are delighted to relieve you of your money through various scams; the strong characterisation.
I’ve only played a couple of hours so far, but already I like it a lot. I’m playing the Vita version, which has a few technological limitations, but is proving enjoyable regardless; I can imagine that the PlayStation 4 version would be a most enjoyable experience indeed, particularly with its additional features and enhancements.
It was Sony’s PlayStation Experience keynote presentation today. I haven’t yet caught up on all the bits of news that came out of it, but the snippets I have heard so far all confirm something that I’ve been thinking for quite a while now: in the new generation of gaming hardware (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Wii U) Sony is going to be the one to beat. And the other two (well, one; we’ve established Nintendo likes doing its own thing and bugger what the other two are up to) are going to have their work cut out for them.
Sony’s got a pretty comprehensive-looking gaming package at present, and one that covers a number of different markets. Speaking as someone who has not yet jumped into the next generation of hardware wholeheartedly — though I do own a Wii U — the PlayStation 4 is an infinitely more enticing prospect than the Xbox One. It’s still not quite enough to make me want to rush out and buy one just yet — I’m still waiting for that absolute must-have game that I can’t get anywhere else, and bear in mind my definition of “must-have” is somewhat different from the mainstream — but I’m getting closer and closer with every new announcement that comes out of Sony.
Speaking more objectively, though, the PlayStation 4 has a solid lineup of titles. Many of them are available on Xbox One as well, of course, but the PS4 versions are, in most cases, technically superior, running at better resolutions in many cases. As for exclusives, Sony has this pretty much stitched up. The Xbox One lineup of exclusives is a moribund array of unimaginative titles that tend to fit into the neat triple-A pigeonholes of “killing things”, “driving things” or “doing sports with things” — there are a few exceptions, of course, such as SWERY’s intriguing new project — whereas the PS4’s lineup is vibrant, interesting and, importantly, worldwide, with Japanese developers rapidly jumping on board Sony’s train even as they continue to eye Microsoft warily after the Redmond giant’s two abject failures in the Far East.
The PS4 has the mainstream market pretty well stitched up, then, it seems — although with titles like Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory II and its ilk coming to the platform, it looks set to follow in the PS3’s footsteps and provide a great home for more niche titles, too, not to mention the array of excellent independent titles that are making the jump from PC to PS4, too.
And then there’s the Vita. Sony still doesn’t make a big deal about the Vita at events like this, which annoys some people, but really, a big keynote speech isn’t the place to shout about how great the Vita is. The reason? Vita has carved out a rather wonderful little niche for itself as arguably the best place to go for… well, niche games. Highly creative indie titles? Check. Fanservicey Japanese games? Check. Non-fanservicey Japanese games? Check. Access to a staggering back catalogue of brilliant games from the PS1 and PSP eras? Check.
Developers and publishers alike are really starting to get a handle on what makes the Vita tick, and what those who own one like doing with their time. Rather than attempting to continue pushing the frankly dumb “triple-A in your pocket!” angle — the whole point of triple-A is that it’s spectacular, and consequently built for the big screen — Vita devs and publishers are now embracing the fact that Vita is a handheld device whose players like the freedom to play either for a short session over lunch, or for more protracted periods of free time. The best Vita games are built with this in mind: FuturLab’s Velocity 2X, for example, features lightning-fast, short levels that encourage you to replay for the best times and scores; even Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1 which I’ve been playing recently is eminently handheld-friendly thanks to its short and snappy dungeons punctuated by clearly signposted event scenes that you move onto when you’re good and ready rather than when you least expect it.
And let’s not forget the PS3 in all this, still managing to remain relevant despite its successor having been on the market for a year now. Today we learned that Sega is bringing the much-requested Yakuza 5 to the West next year, and the new installment in the Persona series is coming to PS3 as well as PS4. On top of that, publishers like NIS America, Xseed Games, Aksys Games and their ilk are continuing to localise a wealth of interesting (and occasionally outlandish) Japanese titles for the Western market, so while those continue to flow in my PS3 won’t be getting put away any time soon.
All this may sound rather fanboyish and perhaps it is, but the fact is, Microsoft has consistently failed to make me want to pay any attention to the Xbox One whatsoever — the first thing that still springs to mind when I think of the Xbox One is the stupid “Snap” functionality, which is something I don’t think I’ve ever felt I wanted from a console — while Sony continually intrigues and excites me with each new announcement they make.
All it’ll take is one great game to get me to grab an Xbox One, though, but at the moment I see that happening on PS4 first, by quite a considerably margin.
The PlayStation is celebrating its 20th birthday in Europe today. What better way of celebrating than with a rather lovely picture of Hyperdimension Neptunia’s Noire, personification of the PlayStation brand and platform, dressed up to the nines and clearly in slightly awkward party spirit?
Hnng, I’m sure you will agree.
Lovely Noire aside, the PlayStation’s 20th anniversary feels like a suitable occasion to share some fond memories of my time with Sony’s platforms over the years, and what PlayStation has meant to me. I realise that by doing this I am, of course, falling into Sony’s cunning marketing trap, but since I’m not a professional games journalist any more I can say whatever the fuck I want, not to mention post pictures such as that seen above.
Anyway.
My first memory of PlayStation is much like my first memory of many consoles from the SNES and Mega Drive era onwards: a unit came home with my brother, courtesy of his work on games magazines, accompanied by a few games, and thus I had the opportunity to try it out well before any of my friends ever did — though I would find myself biting my lip and never being sure whether or not five minutes after the poor chap had arrived was too soon to go rifling through his bags in search of technology and game cases.
The first three games I ever played on PlayStation were Ridge Racer, a pre-release version of Tekken (which had a bug or two here and there) and Raiden Project. Ridge Racer was, of course, absolutely gobsmacking at the time (though I still find it amusing that it upstaged itself with its fourth installment coming bundled with a remake of the original that ran at twice the resolution and twice the framerate) and Tekken was one of the most “physical”-feeling fighting games I’d ever encountered. (That cracking sound Paul Phoenix makes when he throws someone still makes me wince.) Conversely, I was initially unimpressed by Raiden Project owing to the fact that its 2D sprite-based graphics looked like the sort of thing the SNES and Mega Drive had been offering us for years by this point. (I later realised that I was being somewhat blinded by the then-revolutionary 3D graphics of the former two games, and came to enjoy Raiden Project a whole lot.)
Ridge Racer and Tekken were both noteworthy for incorporating something that I haven’t really seen since: games to play while you waited for the main game to load. Ridge Racer offered Galaxian — and unlocked bonuses if you managed to complete it before the main game loaded — while Tekken offered Galaga. Both were impressive, arcade-perfect ports that ran flawlessly while the game loaded in the background, and I’m sad that this concept didn’t take off more, perhaps due to Namco remaining somewhat tight-fisted with the technology. These days the best we get is an interactive loading screen that lets us practice our moves or something, but these tend to only come up once the game has already loaded, not the moment you put the disc in.
Eventually, for some reason, I came into possession of that same (Japanese) PlayStation that had originally come home with my brother. I forget the exact circumstances — I imagine it was due to him getting an official local model — but I was certainly extremely grateful for it. Unfortunately, as still happens with many console games today, the PlayStation was region-locked, meaning that it would only run Japanese games straight out of the box; running European games required you to either install a mod chip (which also enabled piracy, since it effectively bypassed the console’s internal copy-and-region-protection systems) or make use of a somewhat questionable trick involving a piece of Blu-Tac, a pen lid, a Japanese game disc and the European game disc you were actually trying to play.
Oh yes, the disc swap trick: most PlayStation owners of the late ’90s at least tried it at one point or another. Essentially the trick involved allowing the console to read the copy protection and region info from a disc it would normally accept, then quickly swap this disc out for the game you were actually trying to run. It was a somewhat perilous process that required you leave the lid of the console open at all times (propped open by the pen lid, which was also pressing down the button that told the console the lid was closed) and then whip out the first disc the moment it stopped spinning quickly. It often took a few attempts to get right, but my gosh, the first time I got Final Fantasy VII running in this way was an exciting day indeed.
Ah, Final Fantasy VII. I’ve waxed lyrical about this game many times on this blog, so I won’t reiterate that here, but I will say that at the time it was hyped up to me as “a game that will actually make you cry” and it did not disappoint. It introduced me to the wonderful world of roleplaying games, and gave my friends and I many, many hours of entertainment, since we all finished it several times over. In retrospect, I have no idea how we had the time to do this, but I do know that to date, I have played Final Fantasy VII from start to finish at least ten times over.
Even in those early days, I was someone who enjoyed investigating interesting-looking and strange games, particularly those of Japanese origin. I recall spending a whole lot of time playing the wonderful dance-off game Bust-a-Groove as well as cracking RPGs such as Breath of Fire III, Star Ocean: The Second Story and, of course, subsequent installments in the Final Fantasy series. Visiting my brother over in the States also saw me picking up a number of games that, for whatever reason, never made it to the UK’s shores: titles like Brave Fencer Musashi, Parasite Eve, Xenogears and Lunar: Silver Star Story.
Have another Noire to break things up a bit.
I was well into university by the time I joined the PlayStation 2 generation. I wasn’t an early adopter, but I was intrigued by this new console and the supposedly immense power it had. But once again when I picked one up, it was not to grab the latest and greatest new titles — the game I chose to purchase my console with was a little-known adventure by Konami known as Shadow of Memories, to date one of the most interesting narrative-based games I think I’ve ever played.
For the uninitiated, Shadow of Memories casts you in the role of Eike, a man who keeps getting murdered and then having the opportunity to go back in time and save himself. The solutions to the situations become increasingly convoluted as you progress through the story, occasionally involving travelling back hundreds of years in order to, say, prevent a tree from being planted and, by extension, removing the place your assailant was hiding. I’d encountered strong stories in games before — particularly through the aforementioned Final Fantasy VII and adventure games on PC — but Shadow of Memories was noteworthy for me in that it was a console game that had taken the bold step of having neither attack nor jump buttons — it was simply about exploring, enjoying the story and working your way to the truth. (To date, I still haven’t seen the game’s true ending; I should probably rectify that at some point.)
Shadow of Memories aside, it took me a while to come around to the PlayStation 2, largely due to the fact that for a little while, there didn’t seem to be that many role-playing games available for it. I later discovered that this was an inaccurate assessment, of course — and in fact am still discovering great RPGs on the platform today, two hardware generations later — but it took me a little while to warm up to it.
Outside of RPGs, though, the PlayStation 2 did play host to some wonderfully memorable games. The Timesplitters series provided some of the best local multiplayer shooting since GoldenEye — largely due to being developed by the same people — while many a drunken evening was spent with my friend Sam post-Poundstretcher (the regular “everything is really, really cheap” evening at the Student Union) playing various incarnations of the Grand Theft Auto series. And some strange things from that era have remained in our collective vernacular ever since; if we’d never played State of Emergency (not Rockstar’s finest hour, but actually a surprisingly fun game) we’d never have come across the phrase “[do something] for BOOOONUS SCOOOOORE!”, which is frequently still used among our friendship group whether we’re cooking, playing a video game or gathered around the tabletop for a board game.
Have some more Noire. And yes, that brooch is supposed to look like the old Sony Computer Entertainment logo.
I’ve had an interesting relationship with the PlayStation 3. Initially, I didn’t quite see the point of it — in fact, I vividly recall doing some podcasts with my friends Edd and Woody where we were fairly merciless about that big ol’ lump of black shiny plastic, but then we were all fairly obnoxious Xbox 360 fanboys at that point, too.
I forget what caused me to pick up one in the first place. I think it was simply a pretty good deal — the console and three games for an eminently reasonable price. The games were Ghostbusters, Fight Night and something else I’ve forgotten. I played about ten minutes of Ghostbusters, booted up Fight Night once and didn’t play it, then quickly found that downloadable games like Flower were much more interesting than many of the retail titles available at the time. My Xbox 360 still got considerably more use — primarily due to the fact that multiplatform titles were often better on 360, and that my friends would typically play multiplayer on 360 — but I always held on to the PS3.
These days, the situation is a complete reversal. I haven’t turned on my Xbox 360 for a very long time now — I don’t think it’s been a whole year, but it’s certainly been a good few months — whereas my PS3 still gets regular use, largely due to the fact that, as has been the PlayStation platform’s wont ever since its inception, it’s still the best place to go for Japanese role-playing games, including titles like the Neptunia series which have since become some of my favourite games of all time. (Yes, really.)
And this isn’t even getting into Sony’s portable platforms the PSP and the Vita, both of which are criminally underrated platforms full to absolute bursting with top-quality entertainment to cater to all tastes and play styles. My Vita is getting more use than any of the other gaming platforms I own right now thanks to games like Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1 and Senran Kagura Shinovi Versus, and there’s plenty more queued up beyond those two titles, on both PS3 and Vita.
As for the now year-old PlayStation 4? Well, I still don’t have one yet, but frankly, with new Neptunia and Senran Kagura games both on the horizon for the new platform, it’s clearly only a matter of time before I cave and grab one, isn’t it? It just remains to be seen how long I can hold out. I’ve been doing all right so far, but it only takes one game — perhaps something unexpected — that I really have to play right now for me to take that plunge. Soon. But perhaps not just yet.
Anyway. Happy birthday, PlayStation. You — and let’s not forget the myriad developers behind all the games I’ve talked about today and more — have brought my life great joy over the years, and you continue to fill my free time with fun and frolics even now, 20 years later. Long may it continue — for another 20 years and beyond, maybe?
I got a bit annoyed earlier, prompted primarily by a tweet from Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo depicting a “neglected” (his words) Vita stand in Sony’s booth at E3. Indeed, in his photograph, no-one was playing the Vitas in the picture — one of which was proudly displaying the excellent upcoming rhythm game Hatsune Miku Project Diva f 2nd — but that’s not really the point: the point is that his wasn’t the only tweet I saw like this today, and all of them had something in common.
None of them appeared to be making any effort to rectify the situation.
Vita has been a self-fulfilling prophecy for some time now so far as the games press is concerned. It’s an astonishingly good games system with backwards compatibility for PSP titles — enhanced backwards compatibility, more to the point, due to the fact you can map the right stick and touchscreen to PSP functions, allowing you more control flexibility than the original games offered — as well as a ton of its own interesting exclusives, ranging from the engaging and unusual 3D action-adventure Gravity Rush to the fantastic cartoonish golf game Everybody’s Golf (aka Hot Shots Golf in the States) and a ton of Japanese role-playing games like Demon Gaze, Conception II, Persona 4 Golden and numerous others. On top of all that, it’s rapidly becoming the de facto handheld for independent developers to deploy handheld versions of their games, so we’re starting to see portable versions of indie classics previously confined to PC and TV-connected console: titles like Spelunky, Fez, Thomas Was Alone and, again, numerous others.
Still it goes without coverage. Still the narrative continues that Vita is “doomed” — or, in some cases, the system is ignored altogether. Is it any surprise that it’s not selling particularly well if none of the tastemakers in the industry — and, like it or not, games journos, that’s what you are — are celebrating the things it’s doing well, or even acknowledging its existence in some cases?
Sony could be doing a better job, of course. Vita didn’t get a lot of stage time at the company’s E3 press conference, Japan’s Vita TV has been rebranded PlayStation TV for the West and it’s rare to see the Vita in promotional artwork by itself — it’s more commonly depicted as a GamePad-like accessory for the PlayStation 4 — but at least they’re trying, and representatives such as Shahid Ahmad are doing their best to keep the profile of the system high and solicit regular feedback from the people who do own it.
But I place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the press here, who initially set unrealistic expectations for the platform — do you really want to play a triple-A experience on a small, handheld device? I certainly don’t — and then followed this up with the aforementioned dismissal or lack of acknowledgement mentioned above. It’s a sorry state of affairs, to be sure, made all the more tragic by the fact that Vita has a genuinely great library of games.
The situation mirrors Nintendo’s struggles with Wii U somewhat, where the narrative has again been that the system is “dying” which has, in turn, made people more hesitant to pick it up. There’s a slight difference with Wii U this time around, however, because Nintendo wisely chose to focus on Wii U with its E3 presentation. This year, 3DS — a system which is doing just fine — was hardly touched on in Nintendo’s main presentation, while the bulk of the company’s livestream was focused on Wii U and its upcoming games. It was a successful decision; people came away from Nintendo’s presentation excited about the future of Wii U, even though a significant number of the games shown wouldn’t be with us until next year.
I don’t know what the answer is for Vita, or even if there is one. But what I would like to see, as my days in the games press draw to a close, is journalists taking a stab at not following the herd, at not perpetuating the established narrative, and instead attempting to explore what makes this wonderful little machine tick — and why it makes people like me so happy.
Will it happen? No idea. Regardless of whether people start giving Vita a fair chance, I’m extremely happy with it — and if you’re at all interested in any of the types of games I mentioned above, I strongly recommend grabbing one as soon as you can.
It was a day of press conferences at Gamescom in Germany today — always a long, tiring day, so forgive me if tiredness gets the better of me and I either start making ridiculous typos or fall asleep on my keyboard.
Out of the three conferences we saw today (or heard about second-hand in the case of Microsoft, who weren’t streaming their event), for my money, Sony’s was clearly the best. For my particular tastes, anyway.
What’s kind of cool, though, is that in each of the three cases — Microsoft, EA, Sony — there were clear target audiences, and while sometimes they overlapped, for most of the time they were very distinct from one another. This is good. This makes things exciting and interesting, and means we don’t keep seeing the same things over and over again.
The big divide seen today came largely between Sony versus Microsoft and EA. The latter put out huge, dubstep-fuelled trailers featuring lots of shooting and sports and other manly pursuits. The former opened the show with Shuhei Yoshida quietly playing with the console live on stage, closely followed by one of its least exciting games (Gran Turismo) accompanied not by dubstep, but with some rather stirring orchestral/choral music.
Microsoft and EA have their audiences — the people who enjoy their triple-A blockbuster experiences; the people who enjoy playing sports games; the people who are happy to play nothing but games with Battlefield in their title — and that’s cool. But it was even cooler to see Sony catering to its own niche rather than trying to emulate Microsoft. Some gorgeous looking independent titles; some solid support for the Vita; some intriguing looking exclusives — good stuff, and it got me far more excited than Microsoft and EA’s stuff. And that’s fine — I’ve long thought that various companies should specialise their output a little more rather than attempting to, as Jim Sterling so frequently mocks, “appeal to a wider audience”.
Interestingly, opinions have been a little split today. For the most part, my Twitter feed was enthusiastic about Sony’s conference while it was happening, but I’ve seen a few people expressing disappointment. Those who were particularly disappointed were either 1) in Microsoft and EA’s target audience, which is understandable because Sony very obviously aimed in the opposite direction, or 2) fans of Japanese games, of which there weren’t any on display. Still, there’s always TGS for the latter, at least, so it’s a little premature to worry about the PS4 — and I remain convinced that Sony platforms will remain the place to be for Japanese titles, especially if their publishing partners teased back when the PS4 was first announced are anything to go by.
Anyway. My eyelids are drooping so I’m off to sleep.
It occurs to me that I don’t think I’ve written my own personal thoughts on E3 and the stuff therein yet. Allow me to rectify that.
Let’s start with the Xbox One. While it would be tempting to just write “HAHAHAHAHAHA” and leave it at that, Microsoft’s strategy, if you can call it that, bears some examination.
The Xbox One was received very negatively when it was first announced, thanks to the reveal’s focus on the box’s TV aspect. Things didn’t get much better when Microsoft revealed an FAQ document detailing the fact that yes, the things everyone had been fearing — the console needs to “phone home” once every 24 hours via the Internet; publishers may choose to restrict the resale and/or trading in of games if desired; you can “pause” Kinect but you can’t turn it off — were all true.
The company’s E3 presentation was reasonable, but didn’t show anything that particularly blew me away. We had Call of Duty: Roman Wars, sorry, I mean Ryse: Son of Rome and a host of other stuff so uninspiring that I can’t remember a goodly proportion of it. The few things that were genuinely interesting and outside the “norm” were glossed over; Below, a new title from Sworcery and that weird Might & Magic puzzle RPG that was actually really good developer Capybara was given a minute-long trailer with no explanation, for example.
However, as I wrote over on USgamer the other day, these press conferences aren’t designed for people like me — they’re designed for people who, for want of a better term, don’t know any better. They’re designed for the more casual gameplaying public and shareholders, in other words, and consequently need to show off the biggest, the best, the most exciting-looking. It’s unfortunate that a significant proportion of the “core” gamer population is growing increasingly weary of the biggest, the best, the most exciting-looking, particularly as their favourite studios regularly suffer rounds of layoffs when, say, their five million-selling game “isn’t performing to expectations” or some such nonsense.
All in all, I was left underwhelmed by Xbox One. I didn’t see a single title that sold the system to me, and Microsoft’s determination to make the platform even more closed off and irritating than it already is is just baffling. It’s like they’re looking at feedback and then doing the exact opposite. That can’t be good business, surely.
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As for the PS4, I was impressed. I can live without all the social nonsense, though I can see that being a bit of fun on occasion — so long as you can turn it off. The fact that Sony simply said “we’re doing things the way we do now” and they got a round of applause says it all, really, though; it’s not a case of people being “set in their ways”, it’s a case of people actively wanting to resist the suspiciously anti-consumer practices that Microsoft are trying to put in place.
Let me go off on a tangent to explain for a moment.
I like owning my games as physical copies, particularly on console. I feel less strongly about this on PC for a reason I haven’t quite worked out, but given the option between getting a physical copy and a digital download on console, I will always, without fail, go for the disc.
The primary reason for this is that I want to always be able to play this game, even if, say, PSN no longer exists one day in the distant future. A secondary reason is that I enjoy displaying my collection the way a movie buff displays their DVDs, a music lover displays their CDs and/or records, and a book lover displays their books. There’s a growing movement to “declutter” our lives from all this stuff we’ve collected over the years, and I really dislike it, because it encourages us to think of things as impermanent. While it can be a pain to store and move all this stuff, I know that if I got rid of any of it, I’d regret it. Sure, once I’m done with, say, Ar Tonelico Qoga it’s unlikely that I’ll go back to it in the immediate future, but what about five years down the line when I hear a snipped of EXEC_COSMOFLIPS and think I’d really like to relive Aoto’s adventures?
I’m saying all this for a reason: PS4 fills me with more confidence than Microsoft does in this regard. Xbox One will have disc-based games, sure, but it’s abundantly clear that Microsoft mean business on the whole “you are licensing this piece of software, you don’t own it” thing that everyone ignores in EULAs these days. We still don’t have a straight answer in place for them on what happens when Xbox Live goes down, or when you don’t have Internet access, or when your account gets banned or hacked… or years into the future when the Xbox One is a “retro” console and Xbox Live doesn’t exist in the same form, or perhaps at all. Can you still play your games? Or does the lack of authentication render them completely useless?
Video games are the only art form where I see this discussion happening, and we’re drifting in the wrong direction. As modern games get more and more advanced, they become more and more worthy of preservation as genuine works of art. And yet with each passing console generation seemingly determined to get more and more restrictive and based around connectivity, it’s a real concern to me that some of these titles will one day be lost forever.
Anyway. It remains to be seen whether Sony does anything stupid between now and the PS4 coming out — because this is Sony, let’s not rule it out — but at present, I’m feeling much more confident about them than Microsoft.
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As for Nintendo, well, they’re Nintendo. Nintendo has always been happy bumbling along doing its own thing… and I’m absolutely fine with that. I have no need for them to try and compete with PS4 and Xbox One or try to become yet another Call of Duty machine. I have no issue with the third-party support that people were whingeing about all the way through the Wii’s lifespan but which didn’t hurt its profitability at all.
What Nintendo machines do are provide “pure games” — experiences which tend not to have any aspirations to be considered “art”, but which provide excellent examples of simply entertaining and fun things to do. For this reason, I’m actually relatively excited to see things like Wii Party U, as Nintendo Land is a big favourite any time friends come over; having something with even more games to play together will be even better.
Anyway, I’m not sure if anyone “won” E3 for me, because I didn’t really come away from the show thinking “I MUST BUY THIS GAME THE SECOND IT COMES OUT” with regard to anything, but it was certainly an interesting show. The coming console generation is going to be an intriguing one to watch, and I have a feeling that Microsoft is going to get its nose bloodied more than once in the process. Whether that will take them down completely or just relegate them to the position Sony spent most of this generation in remains to be seen, but it’s going to be a hell of a fight to watch.
The eighth generation of video games consoles is upon us — yes, despite the fact that EA desperately wants everyone to believe that it’s the fourth generation it is, in fact, the eighth. Don’t believe me? Allow me to prove it before proceeding further.
First generation: Magnavox Odyssey, Atari Tele-Games Pong, Coleco Telstar, Nintendo Color TV Game
Second generation: Magnavox Odyssey2, Intellivision, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, ColecoVision
Third generation: NES, Master System, Atari 7800
Fourth generation: TurboGrafx-16, Mega Drive, Super NES, Neo Geo
Fifth generation: 3DO, Jaguar, Sega Saturn, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo 64
Sixth Generation: Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Gamecube, Xbox
Seventh Generation: PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360
Eighth Generation: PlayStation 4, Wii U, something from Microsoft.
See? Proof. Thank you, Wikipedia.
Anyway. My point was not that people are getting the generation number wrong (I KNOW it’s the “fourth generation of 3D consoles” but it’s still stupid, so sod off) but that we are well and truly into the eighth generation now. One of the “big three” game console manufacturers has already released their new console (Nintendo with the Wii U) while a second has announced some skimpy details about what is to come (Sony with the PlayStation 4). We can doubtless expect something from Microsoft very soon.
It’s going to be an interesting generation, I think, because the leaps hardware is taking forward with each subsequent generation are getting smaller. Graphics and performance still have room for improvement, sure, but there’s actually been something of a backlash towards the striving for photorealism that has been the driving force behind most new game-related technological enhancements. Turns out people still like games that look like video games, which explains the popularity of heavily-pixelated titles like Fez as well as the heavily-stylized artwork of a lot of Japanese games. It also explains why people are so cynical about the “brownness” of Western games, though this is actually nothing new — I vividly recall my brother referring to the original Quake as “the brown game” before the turn of the century, so a drab colour palette is something we’ve been enduring for a while yet.
Because the leaps in hardware are getting smaller, though, that means each platform has to distinguish itself in different ways. Nintendo has fired the opening salvo with the use of its Gamepad for asymmetrical multiplayer in titles like Nintendo Land, and it works very well when used appropriately — we just need some more games that make creative use of this second screen. The lack of games isn’t really cause for concern as yet, despite what professional industry doomsayers like Michael Pachter might say, because it also took developers a while to get their head around the two screens of Nintendo’s last handheld the DS, and that ended up being the most popular handheld in the history of ever. There’s no guarantee the Wii U will catch on in the same way, of course, but it’s far too early to declare it a failed experiment as some have.
Besides, Nintendo are doing some other interesting things, too. The integration of the console’s proprietary social network “MiiVerse” into a variety of different games is a really nice idea — complete a challenge in Nintendo Land, for example, and you can see drawings and messages from other people who are playing, and you can interact with these people. In games that are built for playing socially — think of the possibilities in something like Animal Crossing, for example — there’s a lot of potential here, though from a personal perspective I really hope that it’s not something that makes it into all games. Or if it does, I hope you can turn it off. Seeing silly messages after a go on Donkey Kong’s Wild Ride or whatever the minigame in Nintendo Land is called? Fine. Seeing “lol i cant beet dis bossss lol xx” message while I’m playing an epic RPG? Not OK.
This “social” thing seems to be a big deal with the PlayStation 4 too, though I’m yet to review the information about the new console in any great detail. Apparently the controller has a “share” button right there, allowing players to do things like record brag clips and share them with their friends. Perhaps fun for someone 15 years my junior, but I personally don’t really see the point for the most part — we’ll see if it’s used for anything interesting in the long run.
I’m a bit torn about the increased emphasis on “social” aspects of games consoles. On the one hand, it’s quite fun to be able to see what other people are playing and talk to them about it. On the other hand, the vast majority of games that I enjoy are single-player experiences that I don’t want interruptions from. I can’t help feeling that my experience with, for example, the Halo series was tarnished somewhat by continually being frustrated by popup messages from friends inviting me to play multiplayer when all I wanted to do was see if the dreadful story was going anywhere. I could have just gone offline, of course, but it felt a bit “rude” to do that. Irrational and silly, I know. But it’s the way I felt.
As for “sharing”? We’re yet to find a really good balance of that. Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 allow you to share Achievements/Trophies to Facebook to brag about cool things you’ve accomplished, but neither are implemented particularly well. Part of the problem is the tendency for modern (younger) Internet denizens to “overshare” and make absolutely everything they do public, which diminishes the meaning of these “brags”. This is a trend which is perpetuated by a large number of mobile and social games, many of which post crap all over social networks without you really wanting them to or, in worse cases, bribing you to do so. It’s a means of marketing the game, yes, but more often than not — among my circle of friends anyway — it’s a turn-off rather than something that makes people want to check out the game in question.
I don’t have much interest in the promise of streaming games to PS4 via Gaikai because 1) my experiences to date with game streaming via OnLive haven’t always been optimal, 2) I like to own my games and 3) I’d rather the quality of experience I get from my games not be reliant on my Internet connection, thank you very much. I hope Sony includes some form of backwards compatibility in the PS4 through a means other than Gaikai, but I won’t be surprised if they don’t. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have all made it clear that backwards compatibility is not a particular priority for them, and this is a trend I expect to see continue in the next generation. Consequently, I don’t see myself getting rid of my 360 and my PS3 (or my PS2, for that matter) when the PS4 hits.
In short, I’m yet to be totally won over by the PS4, but yet to be dissuaded entirely either. A number of developers that I like have reportedly pledged their support to the new console, so that’s something, but I’ll have to wait and see if there’s anything I want to play before I’m convinced to pick one up. Triple-A just doesn’t cut it for me any more; I need something that appeals to my specific and peculiar tastes, and if it ain’t there, it ain’t getting my support.
