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.

2077: Narrative Media

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Since I've become particularly interested in Japanese popular media, I've often found myself pondering which particular aspect is my favourite — in other words, what do I feel is the "best" means of enjoying a story that, in many cases, spreads its tendrils across a number of different forms of media with varying degrees of success?

There's not really an easy answer to that, but I feel my own personal attitude towards it is inclined towards whatever the original version of the work was composed in, where available. This isn't a hard and fast rule, by any means — on balance, I think I slightly prefer the anime of High School DxD to the manga, for example, and there are a number of interesting spin-off games that tell a completely different story to an anime or manga series, making them worthwhile in their own right — but I do tend to find myself preferring to experience a story as originally intended.

Part of the reason for this is enjoying a story in its original medium means that you don't "miss out" on anything. In theory, anyway; that theory runs that a creative work is composed for a specific medium, and then adapted to other media at a later date. The adaptation process often involves editing, changing and even cutting content from the original, usually as a means of ensuring that the important beats of the story fit into what may be a more restrictive format. Consider an indefinitely running manga series that is adapted into 20-minute anime episodes, for example; you're going to lose some detail, like it or not, unless you want the pace of the show to slow to a crawl. (Some long-running shows do indeed take this rather leisurely pace to their ongoing storyline, but for the most part, manga-to-anime adaptations tend to try and get through a significant amount of printed content over the course of 12-13 episodes.)

That said, different media are more or less appropriate for different ways of exploring material. Anime, as the most visually flexible of these media, allows you to outright depict things happening without having a narrator explain things (as in a visual novel, manga or light novel) and take a more subtle approach, implying things rather than making them explicit. At the other end of the spectrum, a novel relies almost entirely on the reader's imagination, perhaps stimulated a little by illustrations here and there. The nature of text means that the inner thoughts and feelings of characters can be explored in much more detail than in an anime, and even from multiple perspectives.

Visual novels, meanwhile, tend to unfold from a single first-person narrative perspective. This allows for in-depth exploration of a specific character and their responses, feelings and attitudes towards various situations — as if you "were" that character. It's not quite the same as a full-on game where you take full control of a character, mind; most visual novels give you relatively limited choices as to how they proceed, and the protagonist otherwise has a mind of their own: you're just along for the ride. Some visual novels do experiment with multiple perspectives — The Fruit of Grisaia's various routes each feature a sequence where the main heroine of that route narrates an important event in their lives, be it to the reader or to protagonist Yuuji; Deus Machina Demonbane, meanwhile, features a first-person protagonist narrator, but occasionally slips into third-person to depict things happening elsewhere when appropriate. For the most part, though, when you come to the end of a visual novel, the character you almost certainly understand the best is the protagonist.

Video game adaptations — i.e. those that aren't visual novels — present their own challenges by allowing the player to control iconic characters and perhaps make them behave in ways that aren't necessarily in keeping with their character as depicted in other media. This is partly a matter of attitude, though; someone who is already particularly engaged with a series and comes to a video game adaptation after reading the manga/visual novel/light novel or watching the anime may well find themselves "method acting" as the character they find themselves in full control of, even if the game mechanics do provide the opportunity for them to do unexpected and strange things.

In other words, I don't really have a concrete answer for the question. At the moment, I'm particularly enjoying reading The Fruit of Grisaia's visual novel, and after hearing how the anime adaptation packs the VN's many hours of narrative and interesting happenings into just a single season, I feel that the VN is probably the best means of experiencing this story in full detail. At the same time, I'm enjoying the video game of Sword Art Online, the manga of Monster Musume, the anime of Himouto! Umaru-chan — there really isn't a straightforward answer as to which one is "best".

It sometimes pays to explore a single work in different media, though; the unwritten rules that "the book is usually better than the film" and "video game adaptations are universally terrible" don't always apply!

2045: Pondering Localisations and Translations

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There was a bit of salt being spilled earlier today on the subject of translations and localisations. It's clearly a topic that people feel very strongly about so I'm not going to give a "judgement" one way or the other on it, simply share my own thoughts.

The discussion surrounding this issue came about as a result of Gaijinworks' recent release of Class of Heroes 2 on PSP. Gaijinworks is a company that specialises in localisations of Japanese games, and is made up of, among other people, former Working Designs staffers. Working Designs was a company from the PS1 era who also specialised in localising Japanese games.

The use of "localisation" rather than "translation" is important there, because the two terms refer to two distinctly different schools of thought on what to do when bringing non-English material into English-speaking territories. A translation is exactly what it sounds like: it's taking the original text and, as literally as possible, reproducing it in another language. A localisation, meanwhile, takes the essence of the original text but takes varying degrees of artistic license with it in order to make it more accessible to people outside of its original audience.

The furore over Gaijinworks' localisation of Class of Heroes 2 largely stems from the fact that, in the eyes of many people who prefer more literal translations, the team had taken unnecessary liberties with the original text, even going so far as to put in completely incongruous ability names for certain character classes — the most egregious being the Samurai class' use of "Pimp Slap" and "Hammer Time". The whole thing would have probably died down a bit quicker were it not for whoever runs Gaijinworks' Twitter account turning on the snark and speaking to disappointed customers in a tone that… wasn't entirely appropriate, shall we say. Consequently, the company has done a bit of damage to its reputation among fans of Japanese games; on the one hand, both Working Designs and Gaijinworks are known for their talent in localisation rather than translations, so people should have perhaps expected something like this to happen; on the other hand, however, responding to criticism with snark and the suggestion that people learn the original language (sure! It's just that easy!) isn't the best way to recover an unfortunate situation.

But I don't want to dwell on that too much, because I'm sure there's still plenty more arguing to do there — and anyway, to be perfectly honest, localisation that takes some liberties doesn't really bother me all that much, so long as the essence of the original text and characters is left intact.

A good example is the Ace Attorney series by Capcom. In Japan, these are set in Japan, known as Gyakuten Saiban (Turnabout Trial) and star a character called Naruhodou Ryuuichi. In the West, they are set in the USA (albeit a version of the USA where there are traditional Japanese villages randomly scattered around the place) and their protagonist is called Phoenix Wright. There are all manner of other changes around the place — and the games aren't any weaker for it. In fact, Westernising it made it a lot more accessible to a much wider audience — so much so that it's widely renowned as one of the best mainstream adventure game/visual novel series in recent years.

The reason a lot of companies choose to localise rather than translate is to do with things that… well, simply don't translate. In the cast of Ace Attorney, the protagonist's name "Naruhodou" is based on the Japanese word "I see" — something that your average, non-Japanese-literate Westerner wouldn't know. Making his surname "Wright", though, opens up all sorts of potential for punning fun — potential that the games seize at every opportunity. Right, Wright? Or should I call you Phoenix Wrong?

Then there's things like the fact that Japanese puns work in a completely different way to English ones; take Squid Girl, for example. In the Japanese original, Squid Girl ends all her sentences with the words "de geso" instead of the more common "desu" (roughly, "it is"), the former being a bastardisation of "desu" that incorporates the Japanese word for "squid legs". Likewise, all the episode titles are expressed as questions, only using the word "ika" (squid) at the end of the sentence rather than the particle "ka" which denotes a question. Because both of these puns rely on Japanese grammar and particles, which are very different to English, it's simply not possible to translate these things directly. So instead we get a localisation, where Squid Girl speaking in English instead takes the English approach to punning, shoehorning in references to squids and ink at every opportunity. Squidn't that ink-redible?

Ahem. Anyway. The point is, in some circumstances, localisation works well and helps to expand the audience of something beyond what it would have if it remained more true to the original. This is particularly true when it comes to cultures that are very different from one another — such as, say, Japanese and American or English cultures. People like to be comforted by the familiar, and making something more comfortable is a sure way of getting people who might not have otherwise given a particular game a chance to actually try it out for themselves.

On the flip side, localisation loses some "authenticity", and consequently isn't entirely appropriate in all circumstances. Take the Persona series, for example; its third and fourth installments in particular are heavily based on Japanese culture, particularly surrounding teenage and high school life. While there are similarities between Japanese and Western high-schoolers, there are enough differences — particularly with regards to things like how people address one another — to make it worthwhile using a more literal translation. Not only does it make the experience more authentic for those who wish to use it as a means of immersing themselves in a culture they find fascinating, it also provides a very effective means of learning about that other culture from scratch.

Some games take this idea of education and really run with it. Visual novel Steins;Gate, for example, includes an in-game glossary that explains everything from otaku terminology to Japanese cultural norms as you work your way through it — the first instance of a non-English term or reference is highlighted, providing the player with the opportunity to look it up, and from that point on, it simply uses the term as it would be used in Japanese. In this way, you familiarise yourself with everything from elements of Japanese popular culture to ways in which people address one another — and again, it's a fascinating way of learning something while you enjoy the story.

And then there are situations where either approach could work. A good example would be something like the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, whose English scripts over the years (initially by NIS America, now by Idea Factory International) have had a somewhat mixed reception from longstanding fans — particularly those familiar with the original scripts. There are some changes that just seem to have been put in for the sake of a quick pun that wasn't present in the original — the English version's use of "CPU" (Console Patron Unit) instead of the Japanese version's "megami" ("goddess"), for example, as well as Neptune's use of distinctly Western-style slang. Personally speaking, this sort of thing doesn't bother me too much — it works as a pun, although arguably it's making a bigger deal of the whole "look! all these girls are games consoles!" thing than the original Japanese script did — but there are some people who get pretty upset about this sort of thing.

I guess what we can conclude from all this is that, unfortunately, there is no one single optimal way to handle these things. Localise things too much and you risk alienating the purists who want something that is as true as possible to the original text. Conversely, translate something too literally and you either get something that reads very awkwardly in English, or something that isn't entirely accessible to someone who isn't already familiar with various aspects of Japanese culture. The ideal situation would appear to be somewhere in the middle, but very few people seem to get that balance absolutely right, and doubtless we'll continue to see salt being spilled any time things tip a bit too far in one direction or another.

Me? I really don't mind either way. I relish the opportunity to learn more about a culture I find fascinating through more literally translated works, but equally I very much enjoy a good localisation that remains reasonably true to the tone and intention of the original; in the latter case, it might perhaps help to think of it as a "remake" of sorts rather than a translation. Or it might not, in which case you can feel free to rant and rave about it as much as you like on social media. More often than not, though, I'm simply happy to have these games (and anime series, and manga series, and visual novels…) brought to the West in my native language so that I can enjoy them in some form, even if it's not always quite the exact same as the original.

2011: Let's Talk!

A little while ago, I wrote about chat app Discord and how I thought it was a jolly fine piece of software that had all but replaced Skype and various other solutions for, among other things, in-game voice chat.

Besides high-quality voice chat, Discord is also pretty great for creating text chat servers with custom channels (each of which can have their own permissions set if you so desire) and various other bits and pieces here and there. The app is clearly largely designed with the Final Fantasy XIV community in mind, given its built-in commands to search sites like XIVDB and Gamerescape, but it's also a flexible, lightweight, easy-to-use and cross-platform chat app that is super-easy to get signed up for and really easy to use.

So I'd like to invite you along to come and chat! I created a server named after my other website MoeGamer, along with a bunch of channels. The server is primarily intended for people to talk about Japanese video games, anime, manga and the like, but there are a selection of other channels for people to talk about what they might be interested in. I've had a few people sign up over the course of the day, but not really much participation as yet; understandable, really, since no-one wants to be the first person to say something!

A request, then, dear reader. If you'd like to have a chat with me and hopefully some other like-minded individuals, please do two things for me.

Firstly, join the server here. (You can use Discord via the Web, but I recommend downloading the standalone app for the best and most flexible experience.)

Secondly, participate! Jump into a channel you like the sound of — the invite link I've provided will take you to a "welcome" channel that gives you a summary of what all the other channels are all about — and start talking. Even if no-one seems to be saying much to begin with, people who join the server and channels will see the conversation history when they come along for the first time, so if there are some comments, thoughts and even pictures for people to respond to when they sign up, new members will be more inclined to start participating themselves.

I'd love to build this server into a nice little community where we can chat, share stories, share pics and share our thoughts on all things anime, gaming, manga and whatnot. Discord is a great means of doing just that, and I'd love to see more people making use of it and supporting the great work the developers are doing — it's currently only in alpha, and is already a really well put together piece of software. And who knows? You might even make a few new friends or discover a few new interests in the process.

See you there!

1926: In My Restless Dreams, I See That Town

I adore the Silent Hill series. Like most people, my absolute favourite is Silent Hill 2 — I still vividly recall my friends coming to visit me at university with a copy in tow, and me beating it in an evening as they gradually got drunk and passed out in my lounge surrounded by takeaway trays — but I've also enjoyed the other installments in the series, even when they erred a bit on the side of "culty" rather than the intense, bewildering, horrifying and upsetting psychological drama that was Silent Hill 2.

I was keen to check out P.T. then, since I'm now the proud owner of a PlayStation 4. P.T. was originally released under something of an air of mystery and it wasn't until people cleared it that their suspicions were confirmed and it was revealed to be a teaser for an upcoming "next-gen" Silent Hill game, developed as a collaboration between the dream team of Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro.

I was especially keen to check out P.T. right now, because owing to Kojima's apparent departure from series publisher Konami and the seeming cancellation of Silent Hills — there are still some people who believe this might be an elaborate troll by Kojima, mind — it had been suggested that P.T. would no longer be available on the PlayStation Store after today, meaning that anyone who was interested to check it out would no longer be able to do so if they hadn't already downloaded a copy. If, indeed, Konami has cancelled Silent Hills — and, sadly, it looks as if that is the case — then there's no sense from a business perspective for having a teaser demo available, even if said teaser demo is both baffling and creative.

P.T. doesn't tell you anything. You wake up in a room with a cockroach scuttling away from you. You exit the room and find yourself in a house that has seen better days; it looks like the apparently absent residents have had some fairly major issues with drinking, drugs and violence — something which appears to be confirmed by the radio broadcast you hear shortly after entering the house, which speaks of the horrific murder of a whole family.

You wander through the house, eventually coming to an open door that seems to lead down to a cellar. Upon passing through it, you come to another door, only to find yourself back in the hallway you just left. From there, things start to get more and more weird as they go along — I shan't spoil the specifics, but suffice to say there's evidence of Metal Gear Solid-era Kojima mindfuckery at play here; the game appears to crash and reset at one point, for example, only to then continue on its way if you persevere rather than closing it in disgust, and the final puzzle requires you to wait for the clock to strike midnight, walk exactly ten paces forward, stop, wait for scary noises and then utter the name "Jarith" into your PlayStation microphone. (Yes, really, that is the actual solution; I just did it.)

While the "puzzles" throughout P.T. — if you can call them that — are brain-fryingly obtuse, even by adventure game standards (my eternal respect to the dudes who figured out the solution to that last puzzle), the experience as a whole is spectacularly terrifying, recreating a type of experience I hadn't realised I'd been missing for quite some time.

There aren't many modern games that are genuinely scary, you see. I'm talking a combination of lurking horror and occasional jump scares; Silent Hill has always been particularly good at the former, while the latter has usually been the territory of Resident Evil (which isn't what it used to be, but let's not jump down that rabbit-hole just yet). P.T. provides both, and it wasn't until I played it through this evening that I realised it's been quite a long time since a modern game made me feel genuinely uneasy, made me jump or made me actually cry out in surprise. (Yes, I did all of those things. I am a wuss.)

As a result, not only am I sad that we're seemingly not going to get a new Silent Hill game, I'm also sad that an increasingly rare example of proper horror gaming has been canned.

I'm glad I had the chance to experience P.T., though; it's quite something.

1874: PAX East, Day Two

Day two of PAX East today, and I'm getting much the same feeling as I had last time I came: the feeling that I'm among "my people", and that everyone here is having a good time, whether they're fat bearded nerds wandering around ogling the latest excitingness in gaming or computer parts, or some of the staggeringly beautiful cosplayers who have been gracing the show floor.

Today we caught the Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward panel, which gave some details about the upcoming expansion pack for the reason we're all here. It's releasing on June 23rd, so that's some time to get caught up — though it's also just before our wedding, so… well. Honeymoon in Eorzea it is… or, rather, honeymoon in Ishgard, I should say.

One thing that's struck me during this visit is quite what an all-encompassing medium video games is. People here are passionate about their hobby. In the Final Fantasy XIV panel, for example, people gave director/producer Naoki Yoshida two standing ovations (aside: how many other game makers can truly boast a fanbase that passionate?) Elsewhere, there's beautiful artwork based on video games, live music performances based on classic video game tracks, incredible, distinctive T-shirt designs and all manner of other goodness. It's a pleasure to be a part of.

I've managed to pick up a couple of PSone games that I used to own, too; there's quite a few "retro" game stores around the show floor, so I've managed to pick up copies of Parasite Eve, which I played back in the day, and Chrono Cross, which never released in Europe and which I've always been curious to play. I don't know if I'll play them immediately, but I'm happy to have them on my shelf.

Tomorrow I'm not sure what the plan is, but hopefully we'll have the opportunity to get our hands on a few games. There's a few interesting indie games that I'm hoping to have a play around with, ranging from the entertaining-sounding party game Move or Die to some Japanese PC doujin goodness from Playism.

For now, we're probably going to play a maid-themed RPG then head to bed. I'm exhausted, but I'm having a great time.

1715: Twintania Downed, Again (and Again)

This evening it was my great pleasure to be a part of the inaugural Giant Bomb/Loose Cannons (aka GBomb/LoCo) raid party in Final Fantasy XIV — what I hope will be the first of many joint adventures that take place on a UK timezone-friendly schedule.

Since a couple of members of LoCo hadn't yet cleared The Binding Coil of Bahamut, Turn 5 — something of a "benchmark" for how well groups work together — we had decided that, come hell or high water, we were going to get a group of some description together and attempt it.

We'd tried this once before, filling out the extra spots in the party using Final Fantasy XIV's matchmaking Duty Finder system, but the downside of this is that you never know who you're going to get — even in challenging content like Turn 5, there's always a possibility you'll get someone who is just looking for a quick and easy clear with no fuss, and who might not have patience to deal with people who are hoping to learn the fight and practice it. Indeed, this happened to us; the first time we got to

[Editor's note: At this point, Pete was called away for another hasty attempt at Turn 5, this time with Andie in tow. It was a successful attempt, as was, I'm sure you've already guessed, the one about to be discussed.]

Ahem. Sorry. Anyway. As I was saying, the first time we got to try it together, we were lumbered with one of these people, who got all huffy when someone got hit by Twintania's notorious "divebomb" mechanic — one of the more difficult attacks in the game to dodge and otherwise deal with. Eventually, when Huffy McHuffypants left in a huff, we had to abandon our attempt as, since Turn 5 is fairly old content now, it can sometimes be difficult to get people in there unless you pre-form a group before you start.

But anyway. Tonight we assembled a crack team of GBomb and LoCo types, including a couple who had never cleared it before and a few — including me — who had. Then we jumped in.

Our first attempt went reasonably well. Twintania's companions, the three Scourges of Meracydia, all fell to our onslaught pretty quickly, and we handled Twintania's barrage of fireballs and conflagrations without breaking a sweat, since we were all, by now, pretty familiar with how this part of the fight worked. When Twintania swept off into the inky blackness high above the right hand of Bahamut, we dove into the nearby ditch between the fallen god's fingertips and waited for the angry dragon to show her face again.

Dive, and dodge; dive, and dodge; dive, and dodge; the first set of Divebombs passed without incident, and Twintania's snake-like guardians Hygieia and Asclepius showed up. We dealt some damage to the two Hygieia and then focused our attention on Asclepius again; then it was time for another set of Divebombs.

Dive, and dodge; dive, and dodge; dive, and dodge; the second set passed without worry, and one of our two paladins dragged the annoyed Asclepius and Hygieia across the right hand of Bahamut to join their two companions that had just showed up.

I used the party's collected energy to unleash my Limit Break, calling down a shower of meteors onto the heads of the snakes, killing two of them outright and seriously wounding the rest of them. As the Hygieia died, they increased Asclepius' vulnerability bit by bit, until we were all eventually dealing about twice the normal damage we usually did. It wasn't long before Asclepius fell to that onslaught, at which point we dove into one of Twintania's dropped Neurolinks, the collars that the ancient Allagans had used to control her, and which had gradually been falling from her neck one by one as the fight progressed.

At this point, things fell apart somewhat. Twintania summoned her deadly Dreadknights, and it wasn't long before they ripped through several of our number; the rest fell to her powerful Twisters attack. But not to be deterred, we picked ourselves up and tried again.

Once again, the Scourges fell, and we set to work on Twintania. The fireballs and conflagrations proved little challenge for us, and we deftly avoided the first set of Divebombs. We got a little too enthusiastic on the Hygieia this time around, however; one died before we got out of the ditch and the other was nearly shuffling off the mortal coil as we pulled them together for another Starstorm summoned by my command over black magic.

This time, the furious Twintania didn't faze us. While our lead paladin kept the attention of the giant dragon, the other made sure the Dreadknights didn't reach their destination, battering them repeatedly with their shield while I pelted them with freezing ice, which slowed their movements when they weren't stunned. A Dreadknight would fall, then we would move as one to sidestep Twintania's next Twisters; then another Dreadknight would fall, and we'd once again hop neatly out of the way of Twisters.

Finally, the weakening Twintania resorted to the same attacks her Scourges had used on us at the start of the fight; spitting huge gobs of flaming matter all over the battlefield, creating a Liquid Hell. We'd run to avoid these, but by this point our victory was all but assured; sure enough, not long after that, the beast fell to our relentless assault, and we were triumphant.

I love this fight. It's no longer the most difficult thing in the game, but it's a demanding battle that ensures everyone involved is on their toes and sets expectations appropriately high for the Second Coil of Bahamut (and the Third Coil of Bahamut, which is coming soon). It also bodes well for the group of us who are planning to tackle some of this content on a regular basis; clearing Turn 5 on a second attempt is good going by anyone's standards, and we repeated the situation almost exactly when a few hours later Andie wanted to give it a go with us, too. We seemingly work well as a team — even without using voice chat to coordinate what we were doing — and our own individual skill levels were apparently well up to the challenge Twintania offered.

So what's next? That remains to be seen; all being well, we'll be giving the first Turn of Second Coil a go this week. I've tried this battle once before and it appears to be somewhat demanding in the same way as Turn 5 is; you need to pay close attention to what is going on, and react quickly and calmly to the things that are happening around you. One mistake can leave you lying dead on the floor at a moment's notice — and potentially kill off the entire party. I have faith that we can rise to this challenge, though, and I'm looking forward to giving it a shot.

#oneaday Day 887: Things I Don't Understand

Herein follows an updated (though not comprehensive) list of Things I Really Don't Get, in no particular order.

Football. (Soccer for the Americans.) Those who have known me for a long time will be well-familiar with my aversion to the supposed "beautiful game" by now, and its popularity continues to elude me even as I'm supposed to be feeling patriotic and English while Euro 2012 is going on. I just couldn't give a toss, though. Related: I also don't understand why those who like football complain about ITV's coverage of it and then don't protest about it in a form any stronger than passive-aggressive tweets. Don't watch it if it bothers you that much. Crashing viewing figures would get their attention. (One response I received to this tonight was that they had "no choice" but to watch. This attitude is unfathomable to me when the vehement, often expletive-ridden criticisms of ITV's coverage is taken into account.)
Carly Rae Jepsen. Who the fuck is this person and why is their song Call Me Maybe so inexplicably popular at present? I listened to it out of curiosity on Spotify the other day and discovered a bland, predictable if marginally catchy pop song — certainly nothing remarkable to elevate it above similar offerings from other cheeseballs artists such as Ke$ha et al.
Rage of Bahamut. Discussed in greater detail here.
People who park in the pick-up area at supermarkets. Is your time so valuable to you that you need to park in an area that isn't a parking space, Mr BMW driver? (Because it inevitably is a male driver, usually in an expensive German car) There are free spaces over there. I'm sure it won't hurt you to get out and walk for an additional five seconds.
People who comment on brand pages on Facebook. Discussed somewhat here. It seems that for some people, the "like" and "comment" buttons have some sort of irresistible magnetic force that makes these people unable to leave an inane post by a brand alone before they've posted "lol" or some equally asinine comment. I follow J-List on Facebook because (1) I like the pictures (2) I find the posts about Japan interesting
Radio 1 giving an on-air guided tour of a festival ground when nothing was happening there. Radio 1 had/are having (I don't care enough to check) some sort of festival, and the other day they devoted a good ten minutes or so to someone walking around the (unoccupied) festival grounds explaining where everything was going to be. The impact was somewhat lost by radio's inherent lack of pictures.
Jedward. Come on. Are we not over this supposed "joke" yet?
Beauty products. Women must all be fucking scientists to understand all that crap they sell in Boots. I certainly wouldn't know when to buy a "serum" and when to buy "body butter".
The enduring popularity of shit TV. I don't think Take Me Out is on at the moment, but the sheer number of otherwise normal-ish people I follow on Twitter who voluntarily subjected themselves to this televisual carcrash is astonishing. Most claim they only did so in order to bitch about it on Twitter, but I can think of far less infuriating ways to spend an evening.
Instapaper, Read It Later et al. I've never used one of these services so I don't really understand what they do and can't really fathom out how they work from their descriptions. I'm something of a traditionalist in the way I read stuff on the Internet — I go to the site, I read it. If I don't have Internet access at the time, I don't read it. If you're lucky I'll subscribe to your blog by email but that's about it – I don't use Google Reader or anything either.
How you can play the same (non-MMORPG) multiplayer game for over 100 hours and not get bored. I got bored of the one time I tried Call of Duty multiplayer after about two or three hours tops. I got sort of into it for a little while but then realised that I wasn't really having as much fun as I thought I should be having and that I didn't feel like I was getting any better, either, so I stopped. The prospect of playing a multiplayer shooter enough to contemplate voluntarily paying a subscription fee for it is unfathomable to me.
How Microsoft Word still doesn't work properly yet. Word first came out in 1983, yet here in 2012 I am still getting frustrated by the fact it occasionally and unpredictably changes fonts for no apparent reason, decides to format my entire document in bullet points when I tell it to undo my last action and is just generally a big buggy mess. Surely it can't be that hard to get right? It's not as if I'm even doing anything advanced; this is basic text editing that still encounters these glaring flaws on a regular (but unpredictable) basis.
How it's possible to have a "collector's edition" of a game that is only available via digital download. Special edition, fine. Premium edition, fine. But "collector's edition"? No.
Why all car parks don't take cards. I never have any cash on me because I rarely need it, so I can imagine there are plenty of other people who live their lives in a similar fashion. Payment cards are so ubiquitous now; why can't you pay for your parking with a credit or debit card in 95% of British car parks? (I made that statistic up. But it's certainly a lot of them.)
Fruit tea. It smells so good; it tastes so much like dirty bath water. Why must Nature be so cruel?

I think that'll do for now. Feel free to share your own Things You Don't Understand in the comments.

#oneaday Day 556: One Direction, Unless It's That One

I have an uncanny sense of direction. I'm quite pleased that I've developed this over the years, because it's an incredibly useful thing to have. It gives me confidence when going to a new place because I know that I can 1) generally find my way around pretty quickly and 2) won't panic if I do happen to get lost. In fact, when visiting a new place, I tend to find getting lost is actually a good thing because it forces you to find your way around, spot landmarks and, occasionally, yell at your navigator. (I've never yelled at my navigator. Largely because my navigator is usually Google Maps, which doesn't respond well — or indeed at all — to constructive criticism)

I'm not entirely sure where this special ability has come from, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's something to do with video games — particularly, in my formative years, old-school first person shooters and more recently, open-world sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto.

Modern first-person shooters wouldn't help, of course, being mostly linear in nature. If you want to get a good feeling of being lost and having to learn an environment, go play Doom or Duke Nukem 3D and marvel at how useless their 2D maps for 3D-ish environments. If you really want to get lost, have a go at Wolfenstein 3D or Catacomb Abyss, where all the textures fit on a single 1.44MB floppy disk.

The more I think about this, the more I feel it's probably where it came from. If I think of Bully, which I played through recently, I'd happily be able to navigate you around the map without having to refer to, well, the map. Want to go to the carnival? Sure. (Leave the school, turn left, go over the bridge, follow the seafront and go through the tunnel.) Looking for the town hall? Got you covered. (Leave the school, turn right, go over the bridge then keep going straight ahead until the end of the street.) Want to find your way to the mental asylum? No problem! (Leave the school, turn right, over the bridge, turn immediately right, go under the underpass, follow the road around as it bends left, then right, then right again, then around the end of the building, over the bridge, through the docks to the end and through the tunnel.)

The best thing about having a good sense of direction is not having to be a slave to satnav. When driving at night these days, pretty much every car cockpit you see seems to be lit up with some kind of satnav device. I actually very rarely use satnav, despite having a good app on my phone for it (CoPilot Live — cheap and has a sexy voice) and tend to use Google Maps if I need to see where I am.

So, then, if you need someone to guide you home after a big night out? I'm your man. You can drop me down in the middle of an unfamiliar city in the middle of the night (possibly drunk) and I'll get you home. Eventually. And there may be a stop for a kebab on the way. But I'll get you home.