#oneaday Day 125: Don’t forget the text

I’m currently playing through the Silent Hill 2 remake and absolutely loving it. I was uneasy about the prospect of one of my favourite games of all time getting the remake treatment, but I’m pleased to confirm that Bloober Team absolutely, completely and definitely 100% understood the assignment, and have done a fabulous job.

I haven’t yet finished it, though, so I’m not going to write about it (likely on MoeGamer) until then. What I did want to comment on was a more general observation about modern games, of which Silent Hill 2 just happens to be the most recent example.

And that observation — more of a question, really — is this: what happened to descriptive text?

In the original Silent Hill 2, lest you’re unfamiliar, walking up to anything vaguely important-looking and pressing the “action” button would prompt a short text description, implied to be “thought” by the protagonist, at the bottom of the screen.

The most commonly seen couplet in all of Silent Hill 2 was “It looks like the lock is broken. I can’t open it,” close friend of its 32-bit predecessor “The lock is jammed. This door can’t be opened.” This occurred any time you attempted to open a door that would lead to a room which wasn’t relevant to the game — rather than waste time and dev resources on rendering rooms that had no relevance to what was going on, potentially confusing players in the process, we instead had about a zillion “broken locks”. It was silly, but at least it made things absolutely clear that this door was not going to open at any point in the game.

In the Silent Hill 2 remake, meanwhile, you open doors just by walking into them, as in most modern games that use realistic visuals. All well and good, until you reach either a locked or “broken lock” (irrelevant) door, at which point protagonist James just sort of bumps into it like he’s slightly drunk. No text on screen, and no indication as to whether you’re dealing with a “locked” or “broken” door until you look at the map.

Similarly, in the original Silent Hill games, you could examine inventory objects and get a short text description of them. Now, “investigating” them from the inventory screen simply cuts to a close up of James holding the thing in his hand, allowing you to rotate it approximately 10 degrees in either direction, but never actually saying anything. (The only exception to this are the various bits of paper and memos you pick up during the game, which thankfully you can re-read, and which are optionally presented in clearly legible typeface as well as the handwritten scrawl they are depicted as using. All this is standard practice for “adventure game-adjacent” games in the moderate to big-budget space these days.

Now, look. I get it. The idea behind this is to be “immersive”, and also to show off the fact that textures are so good now you can actually read the small print on a petrol canister you happen to find. The aim is to minimise interruptions to the gameplay, and waiting for someone to press X to clear a text box is somehow seen as more obtrusive than waiting for them to press O to put the inventory item away and return to the main play screen. I suspect it stems from the same mentality that writing more than one sentence at once will cause every TikTok addict in the room to immediately stop paying attention.

Thing is, I liked those text boxes. (Also fuck TikTok addicts. That site is a net negative for humanity. But I digress.) They added a little flavour to proceedings, allowing you to “hear the thoughts” of the main character on various topics. They also made it clear what you were looking at in situations where that might not be immediately obvious. And for all the graphical fidelity of today’s big budget games, there are still situations where you’ll encounter something and go “uh… what?”

Not only that, but these little textual interludes could also conceal fun little bonuses and Easter eggs. Who remembers the thing in Resident Evil 2 where if you examine that one desk enough times, you get a picture of Rebecca Chambers in a basketball uniform? If you do, you are a pervert and a dirty old man (like me!), but you know what I’m talking about. (The photo is still in the very good Resident Evil 2 remake from a few years back, but the process to acquire it is somewhat more convoluted and less… Easter eggy.)

I could go off on a big rant about accessibility here, but I can’t be bothered because other people have almost certainly done so better than I would ever be able to. I just miss the text boxes because they were a uniquely “video game” sort of thing that I always found it fun to engage with. I found it interesting to see which seemingly innocuous objects throughout the game world had been blessed with a bit of descriptive text, and often thought that it would be neat to have a game where the entire world was “examinable” and offered up little snippets like that. (I even started making a game in that ilk myself with RPG Maker VX Ace… one day I might finish it.)

Anyway, yeah. I guess my point is: don’t skimp on the text just because you have fancy-pants 4K graphics and super high resolution textures. Some of us actually like reading the words!

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

#oneaday Day 120: Don’t let completionism ruin your fun

There’s been a marked shift in people’s attitudes towards finishing games over the course of the last 20 years or so. Well, several, I think, brought about by a number of “innovations” (for want of a better word) that, in several instances, I’m not entirely sure are a positive thing.

There’s one group of people who never finish anything they start playing. I’ve talked about That One Guy In That Discord I’m In before, and the way he does things — installing (and, presumably, uninstalling) multiple huge games per day, playing them for seemingly about twenty minutes before starting something else — drives me absolutely nuts. It evidently works for him, though, and it’s not my place to tell him how to enjoy himself.

Also falling into a similar category are the Oh, That Game’s On Game Pass crowd, who will maybe try something for twenty minutes because it’s “free” (no it’s not, you’re renting it with that subscription fee you’re paying) and then never beat it. These people also drive me nuts, and I am less forgiving of them, since I firmly believe Game Pass is a net negative for the games industry.

Then, at the absolute other end of the spectrum are the people who don’t believe they’ve “finished” a game until they’ve “Platinumed” or “100%ed” it. These are the people I’m specifically pondering today.

Among these people are those who will specifically seek out games that are “easy Platinums” to bolster their stats, which no-one actually gives a shit about. I have dabbled in that direction before, particularly around the Vita era, when I liked to take aim for a game’s Platinum trophy as a means of showing my appreciation to the people who made it. Developers do use achievements and trophies as metrics, after all, so seeing that someone had taken the time to do everything in their game would presumably count for something.

But playing like that is two things. One: it’s incredibly time consuming. Two: it’s quite tedious. Because while there are some interesting and creative uses of achievements and trophies out there, the vast majority of them involve either simply making progress in a game, or completing some sort of task that takes a long while and, more often than not, involves a significant amount of repetition.

So I’ve stopped. I no longer aim to Platinum games I play on PlayStation, and I don’t give much of a toss about achievements on other platforms. Moreover, I actively prefer playing on platforms that don’t have achievement functionality at all, like the Switch and anything pre-Xbox 360/PS3.

Right now, as you’ll know if you’ve been paying attention, I am playing through the .hack series on PlayStation 2. This set of four games clock in at about 15 hours each, but you can spend quite a bit more time on each entry grinding out various things. Optional things; things that you don’t need to do in order to beat the game or even to have a satisfying experience with it.

I pondered taking the time to try and “100%” the first entry, .hack//INFECTION, before I moved on to the second episode, .hack//MUTATION. I’d beaten the main story and had the opportunity to go back into the game world to clean up some optional tasks before transferring my data to the next game. I started looking into the possibility of what I might need to do to achieve that, and the answer was, effectively “grind”.

“Fuck that,” I thought, saving my game and reaching for the next game’s case. Now I’ve moved on, and I’m perfectly happy about that. I’ve been enjoying the game nicely in my way, and I’ve been trying to avoid looking up too much information, because I, like a lot of us, I suspect, have got into the habit of looking at walkthroughs and other information about games as I play to “make sure I don’t miss anything”.

Well, I got thinking. When I was playing games back in the PS2 era, I didn’t really care if I “missed anything”. Sure, it was nice to know if there were some secrets and cool things I could find, but I didn’t go out of my way to do anything that sounded like it might be boring, annoying or overly time-consuming. And my gaming experience certainly didn’t suffer for that attitude. So I’m trying to get my head back in that space now, in 2024, while I play through these 20 year old action RPGs. It doesn’t matter that I can’t get first place in the Grunty race on Theta server, because it’s an optional side activity that not everyone is expected to complete. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t traded with every single NPC possible to get the books that give me an extra stat point in all my stats, because while a single stat point does make a difference in .hack, there’s also lots of shiny equipment that boosts your stats, too.

Checklists, achievements, wikis and all manner of other things have the potential to really suck the fun out of games at times. These things are supposed to be fun and enjoyable, not work. So I’m making a specific effort to try not to care about “whether I missed anything”, and just do the things that I happen to stumble across as I play until I’ve completed them to my satisfaction.

I’ll add to all this that I am a firm believer in completing games, particularly when we’re talking narrative-centric games like RPGs. I cannot abide leaving a story half-finished, regardless of medium, so I still make an effort to finish the games I start. It’s the stuff that isn’t directly related to that central story aspect that I’m doing my best to let go of. Not as a general rule or anything, but more from a perspective of not deliberately going out of my way to make a game un-fun.

Because these days, the temptation to make a game un-fun is everywhere. Look at a walkthrough and you’d think there was only one possible way to beat every game, because some guy on the Internet says so. No. There are many ways to beat many games, and the best thing to do is to find what works for you. If that means 100%ing it, more power to you; you are the reason all those optional side activities exist. But if you find yourself getting annoyed or frustrated with those same optional side activities, no-one — not even the developers — is going to judge you for saying “fuck this, I just want to see how the story ends”.

That said, I’ve spent two hours searching for Grunty food in .hack//MUTATION this evening. But it was my choice to do so. Besides, I had fun levelling Kite, BlackRose and Mistral in the process anyway, so it’s not as if it was wasted effort or anything.

Anyway, yeah. If you’ve ever found yourself contemplating something you were playing and thinking “gosh, I wish there was less to do in this game”, you are the one in the position of power. You are the one holding the controller. Unless the game is specifically requiring you to do each and every little thing it offers, you are the one with the power to say “fuck this” and just get on with what you deem to be “the fun bit”.

So exercise that power!

#oneaday Day 116: Should you finish a game before talking about it?

I’ve seen some discussion about the above topic recently, largely as a result of some idiotic blowhard on the dying, burning remains of Twitter making the bizarre assertion that all games journalists should be obliged to upload full, unedited footage of them playing every game they cover to “prove” that they played it properly and to demonstrate their “authentic” reactions.

This is, of course, absolutely unworkable today, particularly for those working in the more “mainstream” end of gaming, where sprawling games that want to be your one and only game forever (or at least until their next annualised installment comes out) have been creeping towards being the norm for a while now. But it’s also unworkable for those working in niche spaces, be that esports, visual novels, role-playing games or any other sectors you might care to mention. There simply isn’t time.

Now, I have mixed feelings about this, because back when my brother was in charge of Electronic Gaming Monthly and The Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine at Ziff-Davis, I vaguely recall him saying that he expected his writers to finish everything they wrote about — and this was, in the case of EGM, a publication where each reviewer had to write approximately 50-100 words at most, given the way their reviews were handled.

The reason I recall this is that one time when my parents and I were visiting him in the States, I was able to spend the day with him in his office (and I have oddly vivid memories of someone’s computer in the office having something saying “Lucky sonuvabitch” every time they got an email) and he tasked me with playing through Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (now available on Evercade, don’tchaknow!). I forget exactly why, but I suspect it was so he could make effective use of my time while I was there, get my thoughts on it, and then use my experiences playing the game to give him a head start on writing something. Possibly. Maybe. Anyway, regardless of the circumstances, I have a memory in my head that I’m fairly convinced is real that says “my brother once expected all of his staff to beat every game before they reviewed it”.

In the PS1 era, this was probably practical. RPGs were a thing, sure, but they came out relatively infrequently in English (even more infrequently if you were unfortunate enough to be European) and often long after their Japanese releases, so there was plenty of advance notice to get these done. And other games were significantly shorter, tending to be somewhere between 2 and 10 hours on average, with the odd exception in both directions. (Ridge Racer? 20 minutes. Dragon Quest VII? Yes, I know it’s an RPG, but 150+ hours.)

We also had a lot more in the way of “arcade style” games that were split into short levels or missions, or games that were highly replayable — Ridge Racer may be 20 minutes, but it’s 20 minutes you’ll be happy to spend again and again. Thus it seems perfectly reasonable to expect a games journo to play through everything they might be writing about.

These days? Absolutely definitely not, although there is still something to be said for allowing a writer to provide a full, in-depth discussion of a game after completing all of it. After all, it’s kind of absurd to suggest that it’s possible to “review” a visual novel without reading all of it, as the whole point of the damn thing is the story. Sure, you can probably give a wiffly-waffly “buyer’s guide”-type review saying what you think of the graphics, sound and interface, but if you want to actually discuss and critique it, you need to have played all of it.

I think the distinction between “review as buyer’s guide” (which is basically what a lot of people online want) and “review as quasi-academic critique” (which is what a lot of writers want, but rarely get the time to indulge in) is an important one here. The former can be done after just an hour or two of play at most. The latter requires more in-depth research. The former can be shat out for an embargo date. The latter is something best served for well after launch.

Unfortunately, the modern Internet doesn’t tend to really reward the latter approach at all until well after the fact — and then only if a game ends up commonly agreed to be some sort of “hidden gem” or “best game that no-one played” or whatever. It increasingly leads me to the conclusion that the very best approach to games writing if all you’re concerned about is the quality of the writing is to say “fuck it” to anything that is brand new, and instead focus on games that came out ages ago. Perhaps even generations ago. In-depth explorations of those games are the pieces people are still going to be reading for years to come — and it’s what I’ve always striven for with the stuff I’ve done on MoeGamer, because it’s what I like to read.

I don’t give a shit if the latest Assassin’s Creed is the same or a bit different from the last one. I do care if some obscure PS2 RPG from 20 years ago is actually the best thing ever and still kind of cheap because no-one bought it or knows its name.

Ah, who am I kidding. RPGs are never cheap.

Anyway, I guess my answer to the question in the title is “no, if you’re reviewing something current in a buyer’s guide style”, but “yes, if you’re aiming for quasi-academic critique or analysis”. And even then, there’s wiggle room. Even recently, I wrote about a couple of the games in UFO 50 before I’d technically “beaten” them, because I’d gained enough knowledge of how they worked to be able to comment on them authoritatively. (I then promptly beat them shortly after writing about them, much to my satisfaction!)

So no. Games journos should not be expected to upload full, unedited gameplay footage of them playing through (and reacting to) a game for review. That’s absolutely absurd. But I do feel like we should strive for better in our games criticism and analysis. Those “buyer’s guide” reviews do not stand the test of time very well, whereas articles that take the time to really get to know a game and find out what makes it tick are what insufferable SEO types like to call “evergreen content”. And, as much as I hate to agree with anyone who enjoys SEO, it’s those articles that people are going to come back to years after a game’s release to find out all about it.

#oneaday Day 114: dotHack and Slash

I’ve been playing .hack//Infection for the last couple of days on PlayStation 2. I’ve had the full set of four games on my shelf for a very long time and been meaning to properly run through them all, but have somehow never gotten around to it. I have previously completed Infection a very long time ago, but I’ve never gone through all four games and seen how it all ends — nor have I been spoiled on any of it. I also own a copy of the .hack//G.U. remasters on PlayStation 4, so I’ll have to get to those at some point, too, but I wanted to knock out the PS2 games first.

For the unfamiliar, .hack was one of the first (possibly the first) “MMO gone mad, if you die in the game you die for real” series. Unusually, it was designed from the outset as a fully transmedia production: not only were there four PS2 games in the series, each of these games also came with a DVD featuring an episode of a specially made anime known as .hack//Liminality which tells a “real world” story that unfolds concurrently with the events of the game, and there was a completely separate anime series known as .hack//Sign. Since that time, there have apparently been several other anime and manga series, along with the aforementioned .hack//G.U. trilogy of games, which originated on PS2 but which were ported to PS4 in 2017.

That may all sound terribly complicated, but be at ease: you can have a satisfying .hack experience if you just play the games. .hack//Infection, the first of the original set of four games, tells the story of “you”, an 8th grader who has just signed up for the hottest new MMO, The World, at the recommendation of your friend Yasuhiko, a veteran player. You join up and in that inimitable “early 2000s MMO” sort of way, you party up with Yasuhiko, or “Orca” as he’s known in the game, who destroys absolutely everything before you can even get a hit in by virtue of him being 50 levels higher than you.

But something goes horribly wrong. After an encounter with a mysterious young girl who is seemingly being chased by a bizarre creature carrying a red wand, Orca is entrusted with a strange book and shortly afterwards, his character is “Data Drained”, leaving the real Yasuhiko comatose. You end up taking possession of the book, which manifests itself as a strange bracelet that equips you with the power to Data Drain enemies in the game, and it’s then up to you to investigate the strange happenings in The World and determine if there’s any truth to the game seemingly having an impact on the real world.

The cool thing about .hack//Infection is that the entire PS2 game is diegetic, intended to represent you using your computer to check your mail, read the news and log in to The World. You never see the actual real world yourself in the game — hence the inclusion of the Liminality DVDs — but instead all your investigation is online. This unfolds through a combination of you checking and replying to mails (with predefined responses) and browsing through the official message boards for The World, looking for clues.

Canonically, .hack//Infection is supposed to be unfolding in 2010, but obviously in 2002 developers CyberConnect2 had to make something of a best guess as to what that near-future setting might look like. They actually got a fair few things right, such as high-speed, always-on Internet access being pretty much universal and fibre-optic cables being the main means of this infrastructure being implemented — though here in the real world, fibre broadband is a little more recent than 2010.

What’s quite interesting is the design of The World itself, because it could quite plausibly work as an online RPG — though perhaps not in the way that western players understood “MMOs” at the time. For context, World of Warcraft came out in 2004, two years after .hack//Infection, so “MMO” up until that point in the west meant either EverQuest or Ultima Online.

The World is closer in execution to something like Sega’s Phantasy Star Online from 2000 in that there are small, shared communal areas (known as “Root Towns”) where you can hang out with other players, but your actual fighting and questing takes place in discrete areas that you teleport to rather than exploring a coherent world. It’s not quite the same as the “instanced” areas seen in World of Warcraft and, later, Final Fantasy XIV, as you can meet up with other players who happen to be visiting the same area, but the nature of how The World is structured means that you’re relatively unlikely to stumble across someone at random.

Anyway, let’s not get bogged down too much in details as I’ll probably want to write about this on MoeGamer once I’m finished. Suffice to say for now that .hack//Infection and its subsequent parts unfold as a combination of you just flat-out playing The World to get treasure, gear and helpful items, and gradually working your way through the core mystery at the heart of everything. At most points in the game, you can put the main plot on hold and just go dungeon-crawling to your heart’s content — and it’s probably advisable to, since you’ll need to level both your own character and the various companions you can recruit to your cause.

.hack//Infection is somewhat clunky by more recent action RPG standards, but once you get a feel for it and an understanding of its mechanics, it’s enjoyable. There’s a variety of enemies to deal with, and their different strengths and weaknesses will often require you to think about various strategies to deal with them. And, since the game is supposed to be simulating an MMO, you can pretty much concentrate on your own play; any companions you bring with you will usually do a pretty good job of fighting alongside you, though you can issue various orders to them if you need them to, say, heal or unleash their most powerful abilities. You can also micromanage their equipment to a certain degree, and since equipment has skills attached, by doing this you can try and optimise them for the challenges you’re about to face.

I can completely understand the criticisms of .hack from back in the day. It is repetitive. The dungeons are very obviously constructed from pre-built blocks with different textures put atop them, and there’s not a lot of variation to them. And yet there’s something about .hack that I’ve always found fascinating and compelling. I think it’s the oddly menacing atmosphere the whole thing has; The World, as a game, is designed to be cheerful and colourful, but it’s very obvious that there are dark things going on beneath the surface, and that the players of the game are clearly being used for some nefarious purpose.

I’m in no rush to plough through all four games, but I’ve enjoyed making a start on .hack//Infection this weekend, and as a long term project I’m looking forward to seeing how it all comes together in the end. And there will, of course, be in-depth articles on MoeGamer (and possibly videos) to go along with it.

#oneaday Day 106: Best laid plans

Well, I streamed for a bit! But I didn’t do UFO 50 in the end. I wasn’t satisfied with how it was performing while running at the same time as OBS, so rather than faff around attempting to optimise stuff, I decided to stream some Evercade stuff instead — specifically Thalamus Collection 1.

I enjoyed the stream. I kept things simple and just played some games. A few people showed up, including some real people as well as some bots (who were swiftly blocked) and we all had a good time. I’m keen to do some more.

I haven’t yet decided how this is going to fit in with everything else I do, but I think I might want to try and do something at least semi-regular. If I can set aside an evening in the week as “stream night” I think that might be good — streaming in the evening means that I should be able to get people from multiple time zones. I have viewers on YouTube from both sides of the pond, so that’s always been a consideration.

Right now, Tuesday nights are out because that’s Slimming World night, and Wednesday should probably be kept free because I often go into the office on Wednesdays and get back late.

Thursday might be good. It’s midweek, and it’s not an obvious night when people want to go out and do stuff like on a Friday. So I think I might try and make a go of it on Thursdays, focusing on retro stuff.

We’ll see. Next week is a busy one as I’m heading to the office for one of those aforementioned trips, but I think it might be fun to get this sort of thing started.

And getting started is one of the hardest bits, I guess!

2459: Double Wang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2456: Miku in the Clouds

I’ve been playing some of Hatsune Miku Project Diva X recently. I opted for the Vita version because I enjoyed the previous installments in this series the most in handheld form, and when I tried the PS4 demo version, the timing calibration was so far off that it was borderline impossible to play.

So far I’ve been enjoying it a great deal. It’s an interesting new structure compared to previous installments in the series in that it… well, has a structure. Previous games in the Project Diva series were all business, presenting you with a list of songs and a selection of difficulty levels to try them on, gradually unlocking new songs as you completed previous ones but never really having a sense of overall “coherence” — they were pure arcade rhythm action experiences, in other words.

Project Diva X, meanwhile, takes a much more formal structure from the outset, in effect acting as an interactive tutorial to concepts important to the game as a whole and locking off things that the player isn’t “ready” for yet. Series veterans may find this a bit frustrating — though the Free Play option unlocks quite early — but newcomers to the series in particular will doubtless find it a lot more accessible, plus there’s a rather charming story to tie it all together, giving the whole experience a significant injection of personality between the songs. (During the songs, one can never say that Project Diva lacked personality; in between them, however, was another matter.)

The basic structure for Project Diva X’s early game sees you (as “you”) collaborating with Miku in an attempt to restore power to the various “clouds” and consequently enable Miku and her friends to remember how to perform. It’s lightweight fluff, of course, but it does a good job of tying things together, and also has the added benefit of grouping songs into categories according to their overall character.

New to Project Diva X is a gear system, where you can equip Miku or one of the other Vocaloids in various costumes and accessories, with a suitably coordinated outfit gracing you with an “aura bonus” and consequent increase to the “voltage” (score) you generate during a song. New gear is unlocked in several ways: accessories can be gained after a song if you filled the voltage bar at least once, while “modules” (full-on costumes) are acquired by successfully completing the “Chance Time” section of a song — this is accompanied by a satisfying magical girl-style transformation sequence.

This gear system is, I imagine, what will give Project Diva X a lot of its longevity along with the addictive high-score chasing of previous installments. There’s something very satisfying about unlocking new items and producing new ensembles for Miku and the gang, and there’s an element of loot-whoring gameplay about the whole thing thanks to varying degrees of rarity on the items.

On top of all this, there’s a relationship-building metagame with Miku and the other Vocaloids where you can provide them with gifts and build up your affinity with each of them. This is a bit pared back from previous Project Diva games, in which you effectively hung out with the characters in their rooms and triggered various events according to what you put where, but there are still numerous special events to discover by providing the right gifts to the right Vocaloids.

Overall, I’ve been enjoying Project Diva X a lot. It remains to be seen if it has the same “legs” as its enormously addictive predecessors — whether it has a decent “endgame”, in other words — but so far it’s been a blast, and I can confidently recommend it to any fans of rhythm action games.

2442: Planning for Patch Day

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

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

Main scenario

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

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

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

Dungeons

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

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

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

Sophia, the Goddess

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

Alexander

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

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

Squadrons

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

Wondrous Tails

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

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

Palace of the Dead

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

Apartments

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

The onward grind

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

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

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

2424: This Month in Old Gaming Magazines, 1988 Edition

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Since I’ve spent the last two days downloading approximately 40GB of old magazine scans comprising near-complete collections of ACE, Atari User, Page 6, Antic and Analog, I thought I’d look back at a few of them to see what was going on this month in the dim and distant past.

Chosen entirely arbitrarily by seeing which issue of ACE had “September” on it first, I thought we’d have a look at 1988 today.

“Games Without Frontiers”, ACE issue 12

“Once upon a time it was just you against the Galaxians,” writes Andy Wilton in issue 12 of ACE. “But revolutions in communications technology are going to bring about tremendous changes in the way we play — and who we play against.”

This should be interesting.

The article begins with a discussion of PBM (Play-By-Mail) games — as in, games you played through the postal service — which, as ridiculous as it sounds today, was once a viable means of playing multiplayer games. Obviously this style of multiplayer lends itself primarily to turn-based strategy experiences, and indeed the first example Wilton mentions is legendarily cynical backstab-o-rama Diplomacy.

Wilton’s designs for PBM are somewhat grander, though; he goes on to conjecture that “if the Royal Mail lets you run a game that’s inconveniently large for a living room, why not set up a game you couldn’t possibly fit in a house?” Why indeed.

Wilton then goes on to discuss play-by-email games; indeed, this remained a viable way to play games as modern as Civilization IV until relatively recently, since the format of the email messages could be made in such a way that the computer program could decode it without any external input required. Clever, but largely irrelevant to today’s constantly connected world.

“Far more exciting things are afoot than postal or pseudo-postal games,” continues Wilton. “For some time now there’s been the technology to get a whole load of people playing the same computer game by means of networking.” He then goes on to describe what we now know as server-based play, or taken to its natural extension, massively multiplayer online games. He does not, however, predict that one day we will have network setups specifically for games, or indeed the Internet: “for a networked game to really catch on,” he writes, “the network it runs on must already be in use for other purposes. Hardware’s the important factor here: setting up several machines, close together, connected with special cables, is a lot more effort than most people will go to for a game.”

Interestingly, Wilton then goes on to discuss distributed processing — the kind of thing Microsoft promised with its “Xbox Cloud” nonsense and has never quite managed to show any real evidence of. While there are noteworthy examples of distributed processing being successful — Folding@Home is a well-known example — it’s yet to be leveraged for gaming.

The article then concludes with the conjecture that the new frontier in multiplayer gaming will be using satellites. Well, plausible — a number of Japanese companies in particular experimented with satellite distribution of games — but again, it never really caught on, because the Internet became a thing.

An interesting article through modern eyes.

“Very Clever System”, Atari User Vol. 4 No. 5

Two issues before it was consumed by its longtime rival Page 6, Atari User took the bizarre step of kicking off a series of deep-dive articles exploring not the Atari 8-Bit, nor the Atari ST… but the by then 9-year old VCS/2600 console.

Actually, it’s not quite as unusual as you might think; the 2600 actually enjoyed a lifespan that the PS3 and Xbox 360 would be proud of; indeed, article author Neil Fawcett notes that an estimated one million 2600 systems were sold in 1987, with more than a hundred thousand of those in the UK.

Fawcett kicks off his article with an examination of how the 2600 differs from the Atari 8-Bit range of home computers. In other words, he defines what a games console is.

“It’s basically a dedicated box of electronics to be attached to your television to play games plugged into it,” he writes. “You can’t attach a disc drive or tape deck, nor can you type in the listings which appear in Atari User.”

On that latter point, one interesting thing about the computer magazines of the time was that in lieu of the downloadable demos or cover-mounted discs we take for granted these days, many magazines simply filled their paged with program listings that you could copy into your computer, save to floppy disk or tape and then run at your leisure. Free software — if you were willing to put the time in to type them in, of course. (Side note: I attribute my speed and accuracy of typing today to the sheer number of these listings I typed in as a kid.)

A little disappointingly, Fawcett’s article doesn’t delve deep into how the 2600 itself works, though he does include an annotated diagram of its guts, for all the good that does to someone who doesn’t know how electronics work. Instead, he reviews both old and then-new 2600 titles, in this case California Games from Epyx (“nice graphics and neat sound effects add a wonderful feeling of reality to each game”), Ghostbusters from Activision (“considering the 2600 is only a games system, the standard of Ghostbusters is superb”), Kung Fu Master from Activision (“The 2600 version may not be as graphically good as the arcade version, but it has the atmosphere and playability of the original”) and H.E.R.O. from, again, Activision (“the best conversion of a home computer game I have seen for the VCS”).

“Adventure!”, Page 6 issue 34

Page 6 often had themed issues or at the very least cover features, and this edition was very much focused on adventure games — the kind we now tend to describe as “interactive fiction” rather than the more recognisable point and click adventures we see more of today.

There were several type-in listings of adventure games in the issue, but the real attraction for adventure game fans was the in-depth interview with Level 9, a British software company that specialised in these games.

When I say in-depth, I mean it; the interview goes on for seven full pages with very few images; a far cry from the obnoxious “too long; didn’t read” mentality of many modern readers.

Level 9’s Pete Austin described his company’s formation as being born from a love of Dungeons & Dragons. “The form of D&D that we played is very unlike that played elsewhere,” he admits. “We played political D&D where, frankly, if you had to fight your way out of a situation then you had done something wrong. The basic idea was to bluff and blackmail people in the game and use political intrigue and spy techniques, that sort of thing.” It’s clear to see how this approach to tabletop gaming would naturally transplant itself to creating narrative-centric, text-heavy experiences that were entirely turn-based.

The interview goes on to describe how the team at Level 9 went on to produce their own programming language called A-Code to create their games, in effect creating one of the earliest examples of a game engine, albeit a text-based one. It also describes how Level 9 had people asking for clue sheets for their games even before they were released, showing that even back in 1988, some people still wanted to get through games by fair means or foul. This is perhaps more understandable for narrative-based games such as text adventures, however.

CES ’88, Analog no. 64

In his editorial introducing the September 1988 issue of American Atari magazine Analog, Lee Pappas notes that his 14th Consumer Electronics Show (CES — a show that still goes on today) was one of mixed emotions, in that he had “nothing to report on the 8-bit news front”.

Instead, what he discovered was a world where “the big names in software now read Nintendo or Nintendo compatible. Even Apple Mac and PC supporters were missing.”

The trouble Atari was having at the time was that its peculiar computer-console hybrid the XE Game System didn’t really know what it wanted to be, and being based on already dated technology — the 16-bit computers such as the Amiga and the ST were already available by this time — it struggled to secure releases that were 1) technically impressive and 2) good.

“Most of the games are starving for state-of-the-art graphics and just don’t have the imagination that is clearly evident in the Nintendo and newer Sega products,” writes Pappas. “Face it, the Nintendo and Sega don’t have keyboards. In the Nintendo’s case the unit is plain and boring in appearance and the controls are simple. What those have, however, are spectacular, well-thought-out programs, many of which go far beyond the shoot ’em up concept.”

True indeed. And while the Atari 8-Bit computers certainly weren’t short of imaginative titles in their heyday, by this point we were well into the age of consoles — an age that we would never look back from, with one exception; PC games eventually found a way to thrive alongside their console brethren. But the dedicated, proprietary-format computer was well on the way out.

2292: Thirty-Five

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It was my birthday today; I am now thirty-five years of age, which means on some forms I’m officially in the next age bracket. If ever there were a more obvious marker of our respective mutual creeping towards the grave, it is surely moving down through the age ranges on official forms. I’m not sure if this means I count as “middle-aged” or not yet and honestly I don’t really care all that much; age has always just been a number to me, and, for better or worse, I’ve always preferred to act the age I feel rather than the age I am.

It was a pleasantly quiet day today — something much-needed for both my wife Andie and me after numerous recent stressors. We had a lazy morning, Andie made a “mug cake” in the microwave for me (delicious), and then we went out to our local Japanese eatery Zen for some sushi and deep-fried goods (also delicious). The remainder of the day has been spent writing an article about Senran Kagura’s art and soundtrack, playing Final Fantasy X HD and, as a lazy post-dinner activity, a spot of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3.

I’m probably supposed to reflect on where I’ve come from and where I’m going on such a momentous occasion as my age going up by one. Right now that’s a fairly depressing prospect, though, to be honest, so I’m going to refrain from going too much into that. Let’s just say that things haven’t been great, but plans are in motion to make life a little better, even if it takes a while to bring them to fruition.

For now, I’m pursuing home-based work so I can be with my wife while she’s off work with her chronic pain condition; hopefully this will provide enough of an income to at least survive on, if not live a particularly exciting life, but then I never really lived much of an exciting life anyway, with the most exciting things I tend to buy being either video or board games. With that in mind, please do get in touch if you have any (paying!) writing work that I might be able to do from home — or if you’d like to support me directly, please consider making a pledge to my Patreon, which was set up with a mind to making my work on MoeGamer a bit more regular and in-depth.

You may ponder why I don’t pursue writing gigs in the games press any more. To be honest, I wouldn’t mind that, though the way I’ve been treated in the past has somewhat soured me on the business as a whole — plus there’s the fact that the mainstream games press (i.e. the ones that pay) all still have the “feminism” stick firmly jammed up their collective asses which, far from promoting the amorphous concept of “diversity” as they’d like to think, actually just stifles criticism from a variety of perspectives, not to mention thoughtful, meaningful exploration of games on the more provocative end of the spectrum. And as my good friend Chris was kind enough to say the other day, I’m better at writing about games than 1,200 word reviews talking about how nice the graphics are and whether or not there’s any screen tearing, or 500-word news pieces on industry Twitter spats and inevitably fake rumours about new Nintendo hardware.

MoeGamer, as it stands, is an experiment in sustained long-form writing on very specific topics in games, and if this proves to be worthwhile I’ll consider expanding the project into perhaps putting together a book or two. That would be exciting. As longstanding readers well know, I firmly believe that there’s an absolute ton of scope for thoughtful, interesting, meaningful analysis of games beyond what the current clickbait model of games journalism focuses on, and longform articles not beholden to advertisers or honest-to-goodness books are clearly the way to go for this sort of thing.

Other people out there are already doing this sort of thing; Boss Fight Books is a particularly interesting project, though it takes a somewhat scattershot approach to which games are noteworthy for one reason or another, and many (though not all, thankfully) of the authors involved are members of “the clique” of games writers and developers that has made viewpoints that deviate from the standard (and fallacious) “everything is sexist and gamers are awful people” rather unwelcome. In other words, I don’t see them publishing a book exploring the satire of Hyperdimension Neptunia or the meaning carried in the sexual content of The Fruit of Grisaia any time soon.

Basically, now I’ve made the decision to, at least for the immediate future, stay at home for work, I can start looking at ways to 1) pin down a reasonably secure monthly income and 2) start pursuing passion projects in earnest. Because for all the noble intentions in the world, the last thing you want to do after coming home from a 9-5 is sit down at the computer and do something else that feels like it’s “productive”, even if it’s something you do genuinely really want to do. I’m going to have to make some decisions on how to proceed from here — do I keep attempting to promote my Patreon, or look into something like Kickstarter to fund a book series? Do I look into monetising MoeGamer’s content somehow, or share it across some other channels such as video? (I kind of hate video for anything other than TV shows and the occasional Zero Punctuation; give me some nice words any day, millennials’ attention spans be damned.) Do I attempt to pitch some articles to mainstream games press sites? (Probably not.)

There are lots of things to think about and it’s both exciting and scary. I want everything to be all right, as it emphatically isn’t right now, but at least I have options to explore, so everything isn’t hopeless quite yet. I hope, anyway.

Now, I’m off to bed to hopefully sleep soundly, and then I’m going away for the Bank Holiday weekend to play some board games with friends and probably get attacked by a dog. I sincerely hope this coming weekend is as relaxing as I need it to be, as the last few… weeks, months, I lose track… have been pretty hellish stress-wise, and I’d rather have just one weekend where I can just enjoy myself without having to worry about anything.

Thankfully, I don’t see anything standing in the way of that happening, so expect suitably enthusiastic reports throughout the weekend, and be prepared to commiserate with me on my inevitable losses at games that involve any sort of strategic thinking.