2244: Pouring One Out for Conker

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Conker’s Bad Fur Day was one of my favourite games on the Nintendo 64 — if not my very favourite. It’s certainly my very favourite of all Rare’s mascot platformers — the Banjo series may have, objectively speaking, been better designed and more interesting, but Conker was just more likeable for the fact it didn’t give a shit what anyone thought and was, without shame, wildly offensive and absolutely hilarious.

The Xbox remake Conker: Live and Reloaded was one of the first ever “remasters” of a video game, and to date it remains one of the most impressive efforts, taking the original game and giving it more than just a hi-res upscale — it’s a game that still looks surprisingly impressive today, despite running in 4:3 aspect ratio and 640×480 resolution.

I’ve been looking to re-acquire a copy of Conker: Live and Reloaded for some time, since I traded my original copy in donkey’s years back and haven’t been able to find a replacement in recent years. By a stroke of good fortune, dropping into our friendly neighbourhood junk shop — which has a substantial retro gaming section — threw up a copy in good condition, so I dropped £12 on it and brought it home to revisit, partly in celebration of finding it, and partly to remember Conker’s glory days after Microsoft revealed this monstrosity the other day:

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That, if you’re not familiar with Conker, is supposed to be a young incarnation of Conker and is just wrong, wrong, wrong on so many levels. This is what Conker is supposed to look like:

That second picture is from the original Xbox, by the way — you know, the contemporary of the PlayStation 2 — while the first picture is from the Xbox One, two hardware generations later. How is it that they’ve managed to make him look so much worse?

Anyway, that aside, I’ve been keen to revisit Conker’s Bad Fur Day — which makes up half of the package of Conker: Live and Reloaded, the other being a surprisingly fleshed out multiplayer affair that sadly, with the death of OG Xbox Live, can no longer be played online — just for my own personal gratification. And, aside from a few frustrating sections — one of which I gave up on this evening just before writing this — it’s still an absolutely great game, and a reminder of a different time.

If you are, for some reason, unfamiliar with Conker’s original adventures, here’s the deal. Rare were a partner of Nintendo in the N64 era, and brought us such games as Banjo Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64 as well as GoldenEye and Perfect Dark. Conker’s Bad Fur Day initially looked to be a similar take on the Banjo Kazooie formula — family-friendly platforming fun featuring a strong mascot character of the small and furry variety.

At some point during development, Rare decided that enough was enough, and that the Nintendo 64 probably had enough family-friendly mascot platformers — no-one was going to outdo Super Mario 64 after all, and the only people who had come close were themselves with the excellent Banjo Kazooie games. So they decided to make a radical change in direction with Conker’s Bad Fur Day. While maintaining the cartoonish, anthropomorphised animal aesthetic, they ditched the “family friendly” part and instead made Conker’s Bad Fur Day into a platform game for adults.

The setup is Conker waking up with the mother of all hangovers and trying to find his way home to go to bed. Along the way he gets considerably sidetracked by the sort of bizarre tasks you always find yourself doing in mascot platformers, many of which, in this case, provide convenient excuses for parodies of movies such as Saving Private Ryan and The Matrix, which were both around at a similar time to the N64 original.

Conker’s Bad Fur Day eschews Rare’s normal collectathon formula in favour of being a more straightforward action adventure of sorts. Giving the appearance of being open-world and non-linear (but actually being pretty linear), the game is split into several distinct zones, each of which have a number of tasks to complete, with the reward being cash for Conker to stuff his pockets with. The cash is subsequently used as a means of gating certain areas in the game, though not, by any means, to the same degree as something like Super Mario 64’s star doors and the like.

What’s nice about Conker’s Bad Fur Day is that as well as featuring some distinctly adult (albeit immature) humour, it also treats the player like an adult. There are no on-screen objective markers, no checklists, no guide prompts — you have to explore the area yourself, listen to what the characters say and figure out what you’re supposed to do and how to do it. It isn’t always obvious, and that’s an entirely deliberate design choice: part of the challenge of Conker’s Bad Fur Day is assessing each situation and determining what the relevance, if anything, of everything in the area might be.

What’s impressive about this is that it’s pretty rare you’ll find yourself feeling stumped as to what to do next. Cutscenes might linger a little longer on something in the environment that you might need to investigate, or characters might point something out, but it never feels like the game is dictating what you should do: progression is very much led by the player, and it’s all the more satisfying for that.

And progression is rewarded with some highly entertaining setpieces, lampooning everything from the lobby shootout in The Matrix to Ripley fighting one of the titular Aliens. The game keeps things fresh and interesting by providing context-sensitive areas that provide you with the items you need in a particular location, so you’re never stuck carrying around an inventory of useless crap, trying everything on everything in the hope that you might find something that works. There are also several places in the game where getting drunk and pissing on something is the solution to all your problems; try putting that capability in an inventory screen.

I’m pleased at how well Conker’s Bad Fur Day holds up, and that it’s not just rose-tinted spectacles that cause me to look back on it so fondly. While there are a few annoyances by modern gaming standards — long load times, particularly when you get a “Game Over” (remember them?) are probably the most frustrating, though sluggish camera controls are a close second — the good far outweighs the bad, and the game as a whole acts as a potent reminder of a type of game we simply don’t seem to get any more, either from a characterisation and aesthetic perspective, or even from a mechanical perspective, with its combination of exploration, action, platforming and puzzling.

Long live King Conker. I fear we shall never see your likes again.

2155: On Dead or Alive Xtreme

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It will probably come as no surprise to you, dear reader, to learn that I enjoy the Dead or Alive Xtreme series — perhaps even more so than the fighting game series that they are a spin off of. Dead or Alive has always been the one fighting game series that I’ve actually felt like I sort of almost understood, though I’ve never been able to play it at anything approaching competitive level; however, the fact that I’ve always enjoyed it has, at least, meant that I know a lot of the characters reasonably well, and am a particular fan of several of them.

So when the original Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball came out on the original Xbox, of course I was all over it, but not only for the prospect of seeing Kasumi’s delicious curves in a swimsuit. No, the concept of the game actually sounded rather interesting to me; bear in mind that in the original Xbox generation, getting our hands on some of Japan’s quirkier games — particularly those that weren’t RPGs or fighting games — was a bit of a rarity, especially in Europe, and I had always been fascinated by the idea of non-violent games about relationships. Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, despite the name, is more a game about relationships than it is about volleyball — and this is a pattern that continued throughout subsequent installments.

Let’s back up a moment for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the Dead or Alive Xtreme series. The concept is simple and rather silly: Zack, a character from Dead or Alive who is noteworthy for having some of the more outlandish costumes among the male cast, lures a bevy of beauties to his own private island under the pretext that he’s holding a new round of the titular fighting tournament that forms the ultimately irrelevant backdrop to the plot of all the main installments in the series. When the girls arrive, they are momentarily shocked to discover that Zack lied to them, and instead has simply lured them to his island so they can take some time off from kicking each other in the tits and so he can enjoy the view. No-one involved appears to have a problem with any of this, and thus begins a virtual vacation in the extremely pleasant surroundings of Zack Island. Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 is based on the exact same concept, and almost certainly Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 will be too.

The gameplay involves you taking on the role of one of the girls and doing whatever you feel like on the island for two virtual weeks. On each day, you have the opportunity to hang out with characters, buy swimsuits and items, play volleyball, roll around in the sand provocatively, play a pool-hopping game and, in Dead or Alive Xtreme 2, go jetskiing and watersliding. It initially seems like a rather shallow, silly game — and it is — but there’s actually more going on than meets the eye.

Essentially, at its core, Dead or Alive Xtreme is a game about collecting things. There’s not really a set way to “beat” the game, but most players would probably agree that this is achieved when you’ve successfully filled every character’s inventory with every single possible swimsuit and every single collectible item. This takes a very long time indeed, since it’s not a simple case of just grinding out enough money to buy all the items; many of the swimsuits in particular can only be put in a girl’s inventory by successfully giving them to her as a gift — and in order for her to accept them as a gift, she has to like both you and the gift itself, and in order for that to happen, you have to hang out with her, partner up with her, play volleyball with her and all manner of other things. Manipulating the relationship system in order to further your collection is the main point of the game once you get into it.

There’s another reason I like Dead or Alive Xtreme, though, besides the relationship gameplay and the boobs. It’s the fact that each game in the series is, without question, one of the most unashamedly happy, cheerful and genuinely summery-feeling games I’ve ever played. This is achieved through a combination of brightly coloured, highly saturated visuals, beautiful character models and animations, an airy, lightweight tone to everything that happens, and some simply wonderful soundtracks that feature some of the most horrendously cheesy summer pop hits you’ll ever hear. We’re talking Baha Men, B*witched, Hilary Duff and all manner of other goodness. It’s quite something, and even if you don’t particularly like listening to the songs on the soundtrack in isolation, it’s hard not to have a broad grin on your face when they’re used in context in the game to add to the overall atmosphere.

In short, it saddens me that there’s so much negativity surrounding Dead or Alive Xtreme, largely from people who have never played it, because it’s a wonderfully positive, happy, uplifting and enjoyable series of games in which you can just switch off your brain and enjoy a virtual holiday alongside beautiful people. And, in a world increasingly filled with cynicism, bitterness and snark, something so unabashedly honest about its intentions — to make the player happy — is refreshing and enjoyable.

So yes. I will be importing Dead or Alive Xtreme 3‘s Asian English version when it releases. And I’m far from the only one; import specialist PlayAsia has had so many preorders following the announcement that it would not be officially localised that they’ve even dropped the price today.

So much for people not wanting this game on Western shores, huh.

2016: What an Achievement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1110: The Collector

Reading this post from Matt Mason earlier made me think somewhat about my own game buying and playing habits and how they have evolved over time. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m becoming something of a “collector”, particularly when it comes to more obscure games that almost inevitably become hard to find if you don’t snag them immediately upon release.

This doesn’t mean that I pay over the odds to get “Collector’s Editions” of games, though, because I tend to think that for the most part those are a waste of time — or perhaps it’s just that I’ve never really had a Collector’s Edition for a game that I felt particularly passionately about. Had I known how much I was going to love Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, for example, I might have seriously considered spending a bit more and picking up the swanky limited edition that came with a soundtrack CD, an art book and some playing cards. (Yeah, I know the cards are a bit lame, but I love soundtrack CDs.)

More often than not, though, the super-expensive limited edition versions are for games I have no interest in, like Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed and Skyrim. For sure, these limited editions are often cool, but there’s only so many gigantic statuettes that you can scatter around your house before people start asking questions. (Particularly if one of those statuettes is a gory female torso… but let’s not open that can of worms again.)

I’m actually fine with this, though, because I’ve been tending to find that the games I’m most interested in playing are the ones that maintain their value the best — simply because they’re often not put out in particularly large quantities and thus often become quite hard to find after a little while. As such, I’ve come to accept that taking a chance on a new game like this often involves an outlay of at least £20 and may, in a few isolated cases, require payment of a price considerably inflated from what it would have cost when the game was first released. (I ordered a copy of Fire Emblem for Gamecube recently, for example… I’m pretty sure that’s not what it cost when it first came out.) The fact that I’ve had to hunt for these games and occasionally pay a bit more for them than something of an equivalent age that had a wider release makes them feel somehow more “valuable”, and makes me feel like my growing collection is something that I can be proud of. I know they’re “just” games, but they represent a hobby that I truly love and which inspires me to do other things.

What this “collector’s” attitude has meant in practical terms is that I’m now much more inclined to pick up interesting-sounding titles as soon as I become aware of them, rather than when I know I have time for them. This inevitably leads to an ever-growing backlog, of course, but it also means that I have things to look forward to. It’s also an approach which works for my personal circumstances at present. In other words, I don’t spend a lot of money on other “vices” — I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t buy DVDs (with the exception of anime that can’t be found for streaming online), I don’t tend to travel a lot and, by the end of this month, I won’t have any car expenses either (apart from any contributions I make to help Andie out with hers). This means that I tend to have a fair bit of disposable income that I don’t feel guilty about splurging on my collection, and still have plenty left over for living expenses and to do nice things for Andie.

I like having physical things that I collect. My bulging Steam library also counts as part of my collection, but somehow that big list of games inevitably acquired for a couple of quid during a holiday sale isn’t quite as satisfying as seeing that big shelf full of cases. Downloadable games feel more “disposable” somehow, like they won’t last; I often find myself worrying what will happen to all these games when, say, Steam or PSN or Xbox Live don’t exist any more. How will future generations be able to play awesome stuff like Flower, or Journey, or any of the other titles which everyone raves about now but which are only available via download? (I got around this issue with some of the visual novels I own by burning a copy to disc and printing my own inlay for the DVD case. Sad? Perhaps. But it means I can add them to my shelf with some degree of pride.)

The unfortunate side-effect of collecting physical things, of course, is that you have to find space for all of them, and if you get into full-on “hoarding” mode, where you don’t want to trade anything in, ever, then you need more and more space as time goes on. I’ve currently still got a few shelves free on the other bookcase, but it’s starting to get a little bit tight… and then what? Creative packing time.

If you’re curious, here’s my game shelf as it stands right now. (The fairy lights were Andie’s idea, but they are pretty sweet.) If you click to embiggen and zoom in on the image, you might even be able to see individual titles of at least some of the games. I haven’t played all of these, not by a long shot, but they each — even the array of PS2 SingStar titles — represent something with genuine meaning to me. And that’s pretty neat to think about.

#oneaday Day 835: I Finished Nier

As the heading says, I have indeed finished Nier… once, anyway. I’m going to hold off on doing a “review” as such for the moment, however, for several reasons. Firstly, a full understanding of the game is only attained following several playthroughs. And secondly, Nier is a fine example of how the “reviewing” system we use most of the time is, at times, flawed.

Nier enjoyed mediocre review scores on its original release, netting a Metacritic average of 68. As people who care about such things will tell you, 68 is not “bad” if you’re taking 50 to be “average”, but unfortunately no-one does. The assumption is made by most people that anything under 80 is not really worth bothering with, and anything 90 or higher is an essential purchase.

But in my experience, it’s often in these slightly lower areas that you get the most interesting games. They may be rough around the edges, they may not be perfect, but by golly they have soul.

If you were judging Nier purely mechanically, it’s easy to see why it attained the mediocre review scores it did. There are a very limited number of environments to explore which you spend a lot of time backtracking through. The environments are pleasant enough, but not that interesting. The enemies are repetitive. Combat can be a bit clunky. Most of the magic spells are fairly useless. The AI partners you pick up over the course of the game are completely useless. Most of the game’s quests involve either killing things or fetching things. Choices you make don’t matter. And the “real-time” mechanic for growing crops is just ridiculous.

The thing is, though, play Nier and become invested in its story, and absolutely all of these factors cease to matter completely. Nier tells an interesting, mature, emotional tale, and it tells it well with a small cast of well-defined, unique (and bizarre) characters — and a much larger supporting cast who make the bleak, far-future world of the game seem all the more believable. It piles on the darkness but knows how to lighten the mood with a pithy comment or two at just the right moment. It constantly does things you don’t expect — with the story, with the characters, with the style of gameplay, even with the camera angles. It encourages the player to get inside the head of this unyielding, determined protagonist and almost “method act” their way through the game as he toils and struggles to save his daughter.

Do Nier’s occasionally-clunky mechanics and sometimes-repetitive gameplay make it a “bad” title? Absolutely not. They may, however, put off the less patient players out there — and that’s fine. Those who stick with it will find themselves enjoying a surprisingly creative adventure, while those who chose to forgo the game’s hidden charms and depths for whatever reason doubtless have plenty of other things they’d like to spend their time playing.

The sad thing, though, is that the mediocre review scores were probably enough to put a lot of people off even trying the game in the first place. Why bother buying and playing a “68” when you could play a “90”? This problem becomes compounded when you take into account the fact that a lot of publishers make strategic decisions about what franchises they want to explore further — and in extreme cases, which development studios get to keep taking home their paycheques — based on Metacritic scores. Do you think we’ll ever get another Nier (or at least a game like it)? Probably not. Why? Because it’s too risky. Nier has its fans, sure, but they number relatively few, and aren’t necessarily going to be enough to let the game make a profit.

I’m glad Nier exists, though. It’s evidence that all hope is not lost for creativity, maturity and a desire to do something a little bit different, even in these days of budgets spiralling out of control and a growing desire to create games that are “services” rather than “creative works”.

Nier most certainly is a creative work, a labour of love, and it should be applauded for that.

#oneaday Day 833: Some Further Thoughts on Nier

I haven’t yet finished Nier, but I thought I’d take a moment to write a little more about it since I’ve been playing it quite a bit over the course of the last week or so.

Nier is a game that rewards patience and perseverance. The game’s enormous number of completely optional sidequests is testament to this fact. These sidequests tend to fall into one of several categories — gathering materials, killing things or delivering things. There are a couple of outliers (one of which I’ll discuss later) but for the most part they are mechanically very simple, and usually simply involve beating up a bunch of monsters or running from one place to another.

In gameplay terms, they’re very boring, and this is one of the reasons why Nier received rather mediocre reviews on its original release. But thematically, they are entirely appropriate. Nier himself is known among his peers as “that guy who will do anything” and so is regularly called upon by various villagers to do things for them. Some are respectful and kind about this, others less so.

The key thing about the gruelling experience that is attempting to 100% the sidequests in Nier is that it reflects Nier’s own struggles. Life in his world is hard, and everyone has to pull together in order to survive. This sometimes means knuckling down and doing things you don’t really want to do, or things that are time-consuming, or things that are expensive. By completing these quests you may not be directly making Nier himself any stronger, but you as the player come to understand his strength of character and his resolve to do the right thing. Couple this with Grimoire Weiss’ sarcastic comments about the inane nature of the tasks his companion is asked to complete (which reflects what the player might be feeling about taking on such seemingly meaningless missions) and you have a very clever piece of characterisation and storytelling that would only really be possible in the medium of video games.

Some aspects are just ridiculous, however, the most notorious of this being the farming minigame, where Nier is able to grow various crops outside his house and then harvest them, hopefully for profit. The thing is, these crops grow over the course of a day or so of real time, meaning that anyone getting serious at farming is going to have to do one of two things: play Nier for weeks at a time, or take the path of least resistance (which I don’t know anyone who has played the game that hasn’t done) and start messing around with your console’s clock. I can’t speak for the process on PS3 as I haven’t tried it, but on Xbox this is an unnecessarily cumbersome experience that involves quitting the game entirely, turning off the Internet connection (to stop the clock being automatically set), resetting the time and then reloading the game. It works, though, and allows for a considerable amount of harvesting in a very short period of time.

One quest in the game (and a related achievement/trophy) practically requires that you do this. It involves cross-breeding various colours of flowers in order to produce rare breeds. The trouble is, the game doesn’t explain how this works anywhere, and debate still seems to rage on the Internet at large as to what is actually necessary in order to perform this task in the most efficient manner possible. In some senses, this could be argued to be another aspect of the game inviting the player into Nier’s shoes and tasking them with finding out how this flower cross-breeding works, then applying that knowledge in the game — because it sure as hell isn’t going to tell you.

How anyone was expected to do that without a strategy guide to hand is anyone’s guess. Still, even when simply following instructions on how to do it (with something along the lines of a 10% chance of success each time) it’s strangely satisfying when it does all come together.

I’m about 77% of the way through the sidequests in the game now, meaning that shortly I’ll be able to pursue the rest of the game’s main plot, which has been both interesting and unconventional for a Japanese game so far. I’ll talk more about that when I come to do more of a “review” of the entire experience, however. The game also supposedly encourages repeat playthroughs (minus the sidequests, thankfully) to get to several different endings, but how this actually works I haven’t found out yet.

In fact, I’ve managed to remain completely spoiler-free for the entire game so far, meaning I’ve been able to appreciate all the game’s unexpected and bizarre things as they happen. This has been a big part in why I have come to regard the game so fondly; though the characters, writing and music are all excellent too. Again, though, further thoughts on these when I’ve actually beaten the whole thing.

For now, I have some white moonflowers to harvest, if you’ll excuse me.

#oneaday, Day 7: Video Games: A Primer

A lot of my fellow One A Day bloggers are avid video gamers. Many of them even write words about them on a professional basis. But there are others, like Pete Fraser, who are understandably bewildered by the whole thing. Sure enough, it’s a fast-moving, exciting medium which many believe is difficult to penetrate if you haven’t been along for the whole ride.

To that I say: pish, pfaugh and nonsense. There’s never been an easier time to get into video games and find out more about them. Let me explain why.

It’s unfortunate that the early days of gaming were plagued with stereotypes (which some people, see the delightful Jeff Minter, pictured to the right, are still more than happy to live up to) and this put a lot of people off getting into the hobby. It wasn’t a “cool” thing to do. It was the thing that “nerds” did, and the sort of thing that could potentially get you beaten up at school if you were in a particularly rough and less-enlightened place.

The thing is, though, at least some of the stereotypes had partial basis in fact. Early gaming demanded many things. Patience. An understanding that you were dealing with a brand new technology that wasn’t particularly refined yet. In many cases, a mathematical mind. A willingness to practice things until you got better. Early games were frequently simple affairs that artificially inflated their playtime by being ludicrously difficult. This made the hardcore gamers very happy when they were able to finally beat a particularly difficult level, but for people who might be interested in passing? They didn’t want to spend that much time in front of a TV listening to the whining and squeaking of a cassette deck loading games.

Over time, though, games have become more and more sophisticated, family-friendly and accessible. A big part of this movement has come via games consoles, which have actually been around almost as long as home computers. Games consoles are made to be hooked up to “the big television” of the house and, in the early days at least, were often filled with experiences made to be shared—indeed, the very first gaming machines were primitive multiplayer “tennis” affairs. Later, we got many arcade conversions, and TV advertising, particularly the cringeworthy efforts from Atari, encouraged family participation and friendly competition.

As consoles became more and more sophisticated, developers started experimenting with a greater focus on developing narratives throughout their games. We saw titles such as the ambitious Final Fantasy series telling surprisingly mature, sophisticated (if now clichéd) stories through the SNES and PlayStation 1 periods having graduated from their primitive roots on the original NES. Graphics improved at a rapidly-increasing rate, giving us games that wanted more and more to be like the movies. But still they were tied to arbitrary control schemes that required practice; there was still a barrier of entry: “you must be this skilful to enjoy this medium”.

Until we get to this generation. This generation of gaming has exploded. We’re at a stage now where gaming is accessible to pretty much anyone. We’re at a stage where gaming is no longer confined to one specific demographic. We’re at a stage where you don’t even need a controller to work your Xbox if that’s the route you want to take.

Love them or hate them, several things have done a huge amount to make gaming more accessible to the masses. The Wii and the variety of plastic-instrument music games such as Rock Band brought family-friendly, “lifestyle” and party gaming back, reminding people how much fun it was to get together with friends and play in the same room. Kinect for the Xbox provides entertaining, active games that kids and adults alike can enjoy without having to remember which button does what. Facebook games like Farmville, while shallow to people who have been playing games for years, provide bored office drones and soccer moms with fun things to do on the Internet. Call of Duty lets the frat boys (and girl-equivalents) of the world blow seven shades of shit out of each other whilst shouting racial epithets at one another. And the blossoming independent development scene sees digital artists and creative minds pushing the boundaries of what “interactive entertainment” really means.

Games may or may not be art—that’s an interminable question that may never be answered conclusively. But one thing games aren’t? Just for teenage boys. Give ’em a shot. You might surprise yourself.

#oneaday, Day 320: Achievement Locked

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#oneaday, Day 64: Act Your Age, Fanboys

Why does the phenomenon of fanboyism still exist? And more to the point, why does it exist amongst men (and it pretty much is always men) who are old enough to know better?

The simple and easy answer is, of course, that it’s always been around. I remember growing up as an Atari-based family and all of the Atari magazines at the time belittling the competition with stupid names like Spectrash (Spectrum) and Crappydore (Commodore 64). Then came the schoolyard arguments – SEGA vs Nintendo. Sonic vs Mario. “We’ve got Street Fighter II! Hah! …Oh wait, now you have, too.” It got pretty silly.

Once the Dreamcast came out, it was hard to justify fanboyism because, certainly once SEGA’s wondermachine came out, it was so far ahead of its competition – the 64-bit Nintendo 64 and the 32-bit PlayStation – that half-hearted attempts to call it things like “Dreampants” always came across as more than a little desperate.

Things then kicked off again with Sony vs Microsoft, with Nintendo kind of relegated to “background observer” by this point. The PS2 and the original Xbox both had fiercely loyal supporters when, in fact, you’d have a far better experience if you bought both systems, played the relevant exclusives on their respective platforms and played multiplatform titles on the Xbox. That’s what I did, and I never felt the need to slag off any of the systems.

And it still goes on today, despite each of the consoles arguably offering a more distinct and unique experience from each other than ever before. The Xbox 360 offers its legendary ease of online play, the PS3 is home to a variety of unusual and interesting games (like Flower, flOw, Linger in Shadows, the Pixeljunk games) and the Wii is the family-friendly bundle of fun.

Still the hating goes on, though.

But nowhere is it more apparent than in the world of smartphones, particularly between the owners of iPhones, BlackBerries (let’s pluralise it properly, please) and Android-based phones. iPhone owners are either Apple fanboys who bang on about how great Apple is all the time or jailbreakers who bang on about which ludicrously-named hack they’re installing this week – and, of course, which apps they could get for free rather than paying for them on the App Store. BlackBerry owners seem to be updating their OS every night. And Android owners seem to be particularly sore about the iPhone for some inexplicable reason.

The question is: why? When it came to the early console wars, slagging off the systems your friends had was just schoolyard banter. You didn’t really think that the systems were inferior, otherwise you wouldn’t have gone around to their houses and played those games with them. The fact that this juvenile banter has grown up with people who have been using gaming and other consumer electronics for years is utterly baffling. Even people who started gaming at the same time as me – or before – are still bitching and moaning about how much better their handset is that [x]’s handset, and blahblahblah open source, blahblahblah build quality, blahblahblah BlackBerry Messenger, blahblahblah… You get the picture.

Am I alone in thinking that all of this stuff, without exception, is seven degrees of awesome and we should appreciate the brilliant things we have? Yes, some of them have more features. Yes, some of them are objectively “better” in terms of capabilities, power and technical specifications. But is that really any reason to act like 5-year olds telling each other that their respective Mums smell of wee?

No, it’s not. So why does it still go on?