Massive Chalice and the future of Crowdfunding

With yesterday’s announcement of a new Double Fine Kickstarter, I couldn’t help but wince.

I’ve not seen any derogative press nor has anyone I know expressed discontent for this venture, everyone seems really pleased and excited about the new project.

So why does this bother me?

Crowd-funding is loved by consumers and developers everywhere, it provides an easy and cheap platform for creators to cut out the middle man and get funded directly by their fans or people who support their idea and wish them to succeed. This means that small developers and people with otherwise no chance can make their dream projects and people who fill those niche markets can experience the product while also knowing they helped make it happen.

Obviously it has also had a fair amount of criticism, by moving the generating of the revenue to the consumers this means that they now assume all of the responsibility that a publisher previously had and the creators aren’t being held fully accountable for the success of their projects, meaning they can exploit backers by making off with the money.

At the moment I’ve noticed that publishers haven’t spoken out against Kickstarter, but I think this will soon change.

Crowdfunding was never meant to take business away from publishers, it was always for projects that probably wouldn’t get backed anyway, hence Double Fine’s Adventure game “Broken Age” which broke Kickstarter records back in February last year.

But due to successes like these, more and more game developers have taken to start crowdfunding their own games.

We’ve probably all heard about Zach Braff’s controversial Kickstarter project.

Is this something we should be concerned about?

Pier Solar HD was crowdfunded on Kickstarter, one of the tiers included a Dreamcast version of the game.

No.

Does it really matter? It’s still giving a consumer what they want, which is the purpose regardless of its production, backers should be thinking about these things when they decide to pledge money.

If we are going to act like publishers, we must think like one. Ask yourself questions like;

Does this project need my money? Do I care?

Do they deserve my money?

Am I gaining more than if I just waited for this to come out either through traditional means or after the funding ends?

Yes.

It’s not the obvious manipulation of fans despite his already having funding, it’s that by Braff’s presence on Kickstarter he is robbing indies of their last bastion of support.

Backers have a duty to elevate the future of crowd-funding and indies above their own fleeting desire to see their favourite celebrity or show back for more.

The independence of crowdfunding allows for unique products to come into the market, leading to widespread innovation and new, more interesting products on a market for a more diverse range of people.

Basically it’s the guilty carnivore effect. You think that in general people should eat less meat so we don’t have to kill millions of cute lambs every year, then five minutes later you eat a kebab.

Thus what we did with indie record stores, then comic book stores and now the indies themselves with crowdfunding.

If you don’t crowdfund this lamb, we will slaughter and eat it. Whole.

This isn’t the only problem concerning these “big fish” entering the pond, they could easily shoot themselves in the foot. Being totally dependable on fans, in the rare case the fans grow a conscience and the funding doesn’t go through, it would become even more difficult to get greenlit by publishers, possibly resulting in them not succeeding in getting their project made.

Who would want to put their money behind a project that not even these backers funded?

When corporations take over, which they eventually will at this rate, what then?

Using the same surgical skill as they do everything else, the large businesses will trampede all over crowdfunding, further exploiting backers and nostalgia fans, and instead of leading to an inevitable downfall like you might expect, they’ll also do what they usually do in other areas of commerce and resuscitate the flat-lining corpse of crowd-funding, keeping it in a perpetual status quo of shit.

But there’s hope on the horizon. I hope.

While surfing Kickstarter, I noticed a trend of backers pledging for lots of projects, like some kind of compulsive crowd-funders. The blossom of a culture that is.

If crowd-funding spawns a community, the love that drove backers to pledge for their dream board game or videogame could easily be directed at a love for crowdfunding in general, garnering a kind of “Crowd-funding spirit” where indies can still thrive and backers can still own their souls.

Sir You Are Being Hunted was my first backing on Kickstarter.

Widespread crowd-funding might be able to bring some of the passion for the funding of projects to mainstream business practices, influencing the way AAA films and games of the future are developed. This also can work the other way, some of the better features of conventional business might be able to rub off on crowd-funding, starting with true accountability and quality control.

Crowd-funding is still beneficial for the modern business environment, it offers direct access to the end users, the size of the market and how much money the demographic is willing to spend.

Which is a lot better than a bloody voxpop.

Far from a big-wig company, Double Fine still haven’t reaped the sales rewards from their first Kickstarter campaign, they are still a small company with turn-around rotas leaving some staff with no work to do. I can’t honestly fault them for still not having the means to get a game funded elsewhere?

Can I condemn a company that has decided it prefers to work closer with its fans and wants to reward their loyalty?

Well no, but after Broken Age comes out they WILL be a bigger and more influential company (if not arguably so at the moment) and I’m still not certain that the success of the Kickstarter alone hasn’t made them bankable to publishers. Despite the (ahem!) financial based rewards for their fans loyalty, this is still shouldering responsibility onto their fans for their project. Also with Broken Age not finished we can’t fully appraise the success and viability of such big-name, big-fund projects to start backing this one.

But I guess that’s for bigger fans than I to decide.

Massive Chalice and the future of Crowdfunding

Heinlein's Methuselah's Children and Orphans of the Sky

I haven’t been the kindest critic of Robert A. Heinlein.

The first attempt at reading Starship Troopers resulted in a concession from me, I was unable to finish it and left the rest of the book hanging until I could stand to stomach the un-situationally ironic right-wing aggression.

So being ever the saint, I’ve given him another go, another chance to prove that he can write a good Science-fiction story that doesn’t offend almost everything I believe in and even some things I wasn’t aware I thought.

We have two short novels by him, both of which are part of his “Future History” continuity, which as I understand it, really push the definition of the term “continuous”.

Methuselah’s Children

This novel is a tidy 175 pages and the name comes from Methuselah, who is a figure in the Hebrew Bible said to be the oldest man to ever live.

The story initially follows Mary Sperling, a member of the Howard Families, a secret group which has spent the past couple of centuries breeding together people whose descendants have a higher than average longevity, thus enabling their children to live longer than normal people, usually with an average life expectancy of 150.

Now this is just misleading.

Mary is 183 years old and therefore in charge, and begins a discussion with some of the key members of the Howard Families in order to inform them of the changes in the situation with normal human beings, who are slowly beginning to find out about the existence of the Howard Families.

In comes LAZARUS LONG, who has lived even LONGer and is 213. In the short introduction where he talks to Mary he manages to put down Mary in a really casual way, provide nothing to the discussion AND steal the narrative for the rest of the novel. Way to go Heinlein, just as I thought that you’d grown out of casual sexism.

The characters are as always dull, boring and appear to lack any real drive to accomplish anything. Everyone and everything is dispassionate, as if nothing spectacular is happening at any given point. This would be acceptable with a little annotation about the characters feeling that way, possibly as a result of their huge lifespans and how the world starts to feel insignificant. But when you’ve been round this tree before in Starship Troopers, you know it’s really because Heinlein is a lazy git.

The story appears to change direction at any opportunity and by that I mean not in the attempt to take you by surprise, but more like Heinlein got bored with his own story some way into writing it, well either that or he just really had nowhere else to go after “Ooh! Lifespans!”

One of the things I found most confusing about this novel is that I wasn’t entirely sure who I was meant to be rooting for at any point. Everyone’s a twat and in the most coquettish and unpleasing way. The humans are ignorant and sloppy, while the Howard Families are insufferably trusting and mild mannered. If that’s what a long lifespan does to you, it’s probably best to buy a wolf jumper and endless McAfees in advance.

Overall the novel feels a little amateur, whether it’s the pacing, the poor development of characters or the unbelievable alien life, because that happens in this book for some reason, there’s something that lets it down, especially the ending, which was essentially whizzed through in one short chapter with a spacey equivalent of “And they all lived happily ever after” tacked at the end.

Orphans of Sky

At 128 pages and feeling considerably shorter than the previous book, Orphans is one of the few books that has made me want rewrite it myself, it was such a waste of opportunity.

Citizens on board the Ship believe it is all that exists, their only world. Legends of the “Captain” and his crew are passed down and diluted to regressed minds, until one boy finds a room and discovers the stars.

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Yes, I thought that too.

I suppose what I really wanted (unfortunately as it is) is an adventurous tale of one hero against his people with a vision bigger than anything they could imagine. One where he toils at convincing them that there is more out there than the ship they live on, ending in their unfaltering belief and hope for their race to advance and explore the universe with truth as a forefront to their philosophy. A kind of Science versus Religion thing like most Sci-Fi TV shows do.

Top Left confused and wondering head:
Sterling Archer
Top Right charming manly head:
Bruce Campbell
Man with strangely placed arms and look of angry concentration:
John Wayne

Instead what we got is this belligerent prat who literally falls into enemy hands when he is bonked on the head and is delivered to the control room from which he is explained the truth, while that doesn’t sound to bad, when you add in that the captor is a two headed mutant man and the hero is some sort of space choir boy, things like “realism” go a bit AWOL.

After this the boy returns to his people who have a religion and political system that’s incongruously based on the running of the ship and various mission logs and science textbooks, in order to explain the truth so that the people can continue the journey meant for them by their predecessors, it’s here where he is promptly met with another bonk on the head and throwing into a gaol for being a bit nutty.

Without going into too much detail, not a single member of the colony is convinced through any virtuous means, nor is the end resolved without most of the crew dying in a pointless civil war.

This novel is so short that all you really expect is a fun and interesting plot, which in a strange kind of way it does deliver, however at the expense of Heinlein’s credibility as a hard science writer.

Both books suffer from the exact same thing, which is odd tempo and rushed ends, probably as result of having been serialised instead of being a normal novel.
If like a bit of Larry Niven or cheesy 50s Sci-Fi, then you should probably get some better taste. Failing that, then go right ahead.

Heinlein's Methuselah's Children and Orphans of the Sky

The Innovation of Metal Gear Solid

Back in 1999 in an Official Playstation magazine, was a demo disc with Metal Gear Solid on it.

I bought that mag and played the demo, yet was never able to get past the elevator right at the beginning of the game without dying a number, let alone getting past the helipad section which succeeds it.

In the years following I went at it a few times, when Metal Gear Solid 2 came out on the PS2 and when I got hold of the remake of the first game, known as Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes on the Gamecube, I had a good crack at it then, alas, it would still be a few years more til I was finally able to complete the original game on the Playstation 1 and even then I did it in two large chunks, many months apart.

Metal Gear Solid is a stealth game featuring various kinds of gameplay throughout thanks to Hideo Kojima, the famed creator of the Metal Gear franchise’s dynamic approach to storytelling and game design. It has since become known for its unusual plot, cheesy character dialogue and in-game references and Easter eggs.

Solid Snake is a specialist soldier who has been sent to a facility in Alaska called “Shadow Moses” where he must stop a special forces unit that have gone a bit “Heart of Darkness” and are threatening to nuke America.

This game appears on most lists of the best games of all time and so there isn’t much to say that’s not been said and much better than by me already, I’ve seen this game played through about 5/6 times, it just took me 14 years to complete it myself.

So I’ll give a short review.

It plays rather clunky but this appears to be the aim, the story is well told albeit through extensive cut-scenes which have become the series’ main vice as quoted by most gamers, this particular installment lacks most of the functions of its latter parts and gameplay certainly improves with each addition, however the first game is still considered the best by most opinions as the huge story gets a bit “Star Warsed” (see how “arsed” is in there) and soon nano-machines begin to play an eerily similar role as the midochlorians from the new Star Wars trilogy, that of a general scapegoat whenever a plot point becomes too silly to explain in any meaningful way.

Overall the characters are much better written and don’t over act and the story rounds itself off well without getting too convoluted and self-worshipping.

There is great use of in-game camera angles that can help and hinder your view when hiding.

Now to get on with the real point in this review, which is to explore what it is that I really like about Metal Gear Solid, which is “attention to detail”.

From the start of the game it becomes pretty obvious that this wasn’t meant to be experienced like any other, there are credits.

This isn’t so unusual in films and that’s the point. As soon as you start the game up, Kojima is already letting you know that this game is heavily inspired by movies and he wants you to experience it a bit like one. Hell, you can guess this even before the game if you look around the menu and find the prologue videos, which show Snake being debriefed and short explanations of the NES and MSX games that nobody in the west played.

The innovation that Hideo Kojima brought us has never been seen before or since.

Bosses can be beaten with all kinds of different tactics and you can avoid attacks in some odd ways like the infamous controller switch during the Psycho Mantis fight. Both Sniper Wolf and Vulcan’s second fights you can beat them without direct confrontation, by using bombs and the Stinger missile launcher.

Kojima likes to add in small 4th wall breaking dialogue, one thing I remember seeing for the first time in a game and being properly stumped by, was Meryl’s codec key which you are told to “look on the CD” for. Which is exactly what it meant, look on the back of the game’s box.

In the skits between characters via Snake’s in-ear piece, everytime you save, Mei Ling the save-game operator cheers you on or offers you advice in the form of Chinese proverbs.

Most of which are useless, but that’s what makes them so incredible, why add in useless dialogue? To flesh out the game and characters!

Twin Snakes features enhanced graphics and thanks to David Hayter’s (Snake’s voice actor and writer of XMen 2) efforts, the return of the cast of voice actors.

There’s not always a gameplay element or driving reason why there are these kinds of additions to Kojima’s games, letting you know that how much effort has gone into them and also it means you keep on your toes, looking out for more aspects of the game, it really makes you pay attention and in turn appreciate the game more.

Kojima tries to get players’ sense of touch involved in his game by having parts where you have to repeatedly press the button for quite a long time, which can really hurt your arm, then Naomi calls and tells you to put the controller on your arm and sets the rumble feature off, that one’s a little bit creepy though.

But this isn’t the first time he’s tried to implement a mechanic which involves more than the usual amount of senses.

I also mentioned here that Kojima once looked into trying to get the players sense of smell involved in the game by making a chemical that would give off a blood-like odour when heated for his game Snatcher which was made before Metal Gear Solid. Why isn’t he working in Virtual Reality research?!

Overall the inventiveness of the game is what I miss most in other games, it’s strange that despite the success of the Metal Gear series, nobody attempts to replicate any of the features that make it stand out.

I really enjoyed Metal Gear Solid and thankfully the detail and effort that goes into the first game is carried on throughout the series, even if the final product isn’t quite what you hoped.

The Innovation of Metal Gear Solid

In case of Emergency

Everyone loves poetry don’t they?

After chocolate and puppies, people think of poetry as the next thing they couldn’t possibly live without. I used to write a lot of poetry before this piece of obsidian began blocking the flow of blood. Thanks in part to a Mr Croshaw and Mr Sterling I have decided it’s pretty safe to emerge with some of my dignity intact. Behold!

“Trust me, you’ll need it,
In case of emergency.
What if you fall or have a fit?
Get lost or taken by some man?
You’ll wish you listened to me.
Maybe then, you’d understand”

To be honest I don’t really care,
I’ve been just fine, without this fare,
You’re a parent – so you see,
You’d pay for it, surely, if you dare.

 

But then the years came and went,
I’ve aged much and moved on,
Had some time to lament,
Not listening to everyone’s advice.
So instead, I’ll just play the cynic,
To ignore my own vice.

All the rage, now they’re all about,
Countless times their owners pout,
Endlessly talking, limitless obsession,
I guess I could kindly do without.

 

And here I have my collection of games,
my array of films and my stacks of books,
Socialising and sharing really isn’t the same,
Where everyone holds each other dear,
“I’ll like your status, but retweet mine!”
It’s probably my worst ever fear.

Walking slowly, Turning round,
With heads bowed down,
Taking up my pavement,
I think, sneer, then frown.

 

Now they’re bloody everywhere,
With all these great games being released,
My own judgement is now mine to bear,
So now it begins to hold my interest,
I only worry now,
Am I allowed to be impressed?

The customers are consuming,
And the next one is looming,
I’ve not even got the last one!
I tell myself, fuming.

 

Lo! The angel smiles and blessed is her gaze!
In her hand she gives to me,
The long denied item of the cellular craze,
How can I accept this? I snatch hungrily,
But, I guess, I will NEED it,
In case of Emergency.

In case of Emergency

2010: Odyssey Two

What is the point in making a sequel to a film largely regarded as one of the best ever made?

Why would you make a novel as a sequel to a film you’ve already written a novel of?

2001: A Space Odyssey was the labour born from Kubrick’s question to Arthur C. Clarke in 1964 concerning his ideas for the proverbial good science fiction film. Something that we’re consistently reminded of every time I read any thing from Clarke.

Kubrick and Clarke’s answer was 2001, based on The Sentinel, a short story that Clarke had written and published a few years earlier. They decided to create their projects concurrently, Clarke would write a novel and Kubrick, a film, swapping ideas as they went. As it turns out the novel was released after the film in 1968 and is not nearly so famous, however each are perfectly suited to their respective mediums and equally enjoyable.

Enter 2010: Odyssey Two, Arthur C. Clarke was asked to write a sequel to 2001, “for posterity”. Surely the best thing “for posterity” would be to leave it alone?

Anyway, instead of writing a sequel to the novel 2001, Clarke instead wrote a sequel to the film.

How bizarre, it really just makes it look like some kind of cash-in.

2010 was published in 1982, some 14 years after the first book and is set 9 years later.

The book follows the events succeeding Discovery’s mission to Jupiter in order to investigate the monolith. The original novel’s monolith is located near Saturn, however this book’s one is near Jupiter like in the film. This was because the film’s effects supervisor, Douglas Trumball was unable to make the ice rings around Saturn convincing enough.

One of the main reasons for the book being a sequel to the film, is probably because aspects of the film’s plot make the events easier to write, such as Jupiter’s moons being more suitable for life.

Dr. Heywood Floyd was one of the men that investigated the monolith on the moon and feels responsible for the ill fate of the Discovery, he lives with his wife and son in a comfortable house when he is asked to do one last mission on the ship Leonov, to investigate the Discovery and possibly return in to Earth space.

Floyd is in his mid 50′s and his wife begs him not to go, but obviously he does anyway, because it’s space.

He joins the primarily Russian crew along with Hal’s creator Dr Chandra and a loudmouthed American to go on the Leonov’s mission, he will be in cold sleep for the majority of the journey, however he is soon awoken when a Chinese Space station strapped on some thrusters and zoomed all the way past them towards the Discovery.

Starring Roy Scheider, a film was released two years later in 1984.

What can you expect to see in 2010?

As the crew is journeying to the Discovery, we can expect to see Hal again.

The book employs the same detailed flow as the first book, completely dissimilar to the film which opts for a enigmatic approach. It continues to divulge the facts surrounding Hal’s crazy antics from a decade ago with Dr. Chandra being on board to ensure that the crew is safe and hopefully fix the forsaken computer.

Dave Bowman was last seen as the Star-child after having been transported through the interplanetary hub of space by our mysterious alien benefactors, we do in fact see a return of Bowman in typical Clarke fashion, with “sufficiently advanced technology”.

Despite some attempts at honest characterisation, the personalities of most on board come across as a little wooden and forced, leading me to remember that unlike in films where an actor is bad at a role, he only affects his character, when an author screws up character development, it’s going to affect everyone. Dr Floyd continually mentions his relationship with the others around him, however his tone in conversation appears to contradict most of his own admissions, this might be because he retains a harsh relationship with others in order to exert superiority, but it’s most likely poor characterisation since he appears quite loving in nature.

There is a great difference in the way this book was tackled, the original was segmented whereas this is one long story with some tangents focusing on Bowman. The individual segments each represented small themes, like our approach to technology and government dealings, but also they represent part of a greater whole, examining the theme of human nature, origins and future and also the exploration of first contact with aliens. This book seems to retread many of the themes from before, but not nearly so tactfully and any new themes like the dreams of space exploration in comparison to homely ones are pretty derivative and uninspired to say the least.

Hal’s return is a bit of an anti-climax.

After painting a picture of a novel with little to say and varying entertainment value, it has to be said that this isn’t what I or anyone would equate for the final picture you get of this book.

At the end of the day, 2001 was a sci-fi masterpiece, both literally and cinematically.

Any sequel was bound to be held to unrealistic expectations. But this is a good book, just not the perfect book.

What Clarke does do impeccably, was pave the correct and ONLY route people should go when making sequels, which is to not try embarrassingly hard, in that many writers or filmmakers often recognise the expectations and attempt to surpass them. Bad idea. You obviously can’t help but notice the success and feel compelled to deliver, but don’t do get Star Wars syndrome and get caught up in yourself, cross referencing all your own material, jacking up everything to 11 and worst of all trying to make everything deep and way more important than it conceivably be.

2010 manages to feel as though Clarke is aware of the film’s success but pulled down the blinds on the wowing audience in order to focus on the project at hand, crafting another good Space exploration novel. And in that, he succeeded.

2010: Odyssey Two

Xbox One Announcement

So the Xbox One has been announced, following the Playstation 4 announcement a couple of months ago. The rumours of “Infinity” have turned out to be false, Microsoft instead opting for the potential confusion of Xbox “One” instead. It’s like their business discussions have failed to raise the obvious concern over their failed push for the Original Xbox to be called as such and now we’re going to see the hilarious result of less pliant-minded individuals become perpetually muddled by the first and most recent renditions, probably culminating in a general concensus that the new Xbox isn’t really new at all and in fact is probably just the Xbox 360, a bit like what happened with Nintendo’s Wii-U.

What we’re looking at here is essentially a Bose styled record player from the 70′s but we’re told it has 8gb of RAM and all sorts of other wonderful numbers. It’s going to play games, watch TV and watch you playing games and watching TV. After having gawped at gamers from all over the world eating crisps and declaring “Xbox on” for the past couple of years, Microsoft have rounded up all of the datas and stasticals and are now able to render fully motional characters in games! Oh wait…

The new movement will make the online experience a lot more smooth, because Microsoft “know that the inches and angles are important”. Eh, what?

After the not-so-revolutionary changes to TV on your console, which appeared to consist of a TV guide and a favourites list, but alarmingly advertised as if nobody who watches television knew what they were watching at any given time and might have trouble knowing what programs they like, we were then treated to a dreadfully dull, and to a non-sporty type, confusing presentation of the Xbox being able to intrude upon a game of Football with your Fantasy Football information. Now that’s some niche marketing.

Forza 5 motorsport is having a drastic gameplay change where you will not be able to see the road in front of you and the camera will be focused on the car the whole time. According to the footage we saw earlier today.

Skip about 10 minutes of EA sports stuff and we get a declaration of exclusive EA content for the Xbox One which met a room of silence and bewilderment.

Quick! Rush out Forza!

Forza 5 had some pretty spiffy footage of a Maclaren P1 roving about, prompting some questions about the lack of gameplay in the footage and not too few reminiscences of Gran Turismo on the PS2′s opening video and its likeness. It’s going to be a launch title, so you’d think they’d have a bit more to show.

Then we get a wonderful demoonstration of Xbox’s answer to David Cage and his recent endeavours with the announcement of Quantum Break, some sort of… game or more “interactive entertainment” which is about some live action girl who can make shit happen when she touches people’s faces, apparently. I’m just saying what I saw here. Trying to keep myself open for the “emotions” and polygons and Microsoft’s “inches and angles”.

Supposedly the earlier TV stuff didn’t work its charm as well as it ought and so Microsoft decide to bombard us with another round of that.

Women. Two of them, it’s almost like they’re there to one-up Sony. Halo TV series is announced and it’s going to have Spielberg’s co-operation, although we weren’t told in what fashion. Bearing in mind his earlier TV works Taken and Band of Brothers, it would be great if Halo was a mix of the two and I really think this could be a fantastic show.

Each Xbox One will ship with a box containing a single strand from the head of Steven Spielberg, because games.

And that was the end of the announcement. It started off rubbish, but things picked up a little towards the end, although it remained pretty conservative to say the least. More news can be expected at E3 but for now we know the Xbox One is coming out later this year and appears to have a lot of games being developed, the most at one time apparently, of which 15 are exclusives and 8 are new IP’s.

I think that with the strong backing of major franchises, the understated announcement and the PC welcome environment the game industry has slowly drifted towards, the new Microsoft console will be the most successful by quite a margin. The biggest IP’s have all been catered for an the new IP’s will make the One a centrepiece of the water cooler, IF it gets the games right, so hopefully we can see some change in the industry and finally get something worth loving games for.

Oh and Call of Duty: Ghosts is coming out with exclusive content.

Xbox One Announcement

Another Code: Two Memories

The DS is a games system perfect for two things; Real Time Strategies and Point and Click Adventures.

Fortunately for Another Code: Two Memories, it is the first point and click on the DS and released early in the console’s span back in 2005.

Released by the Japanese Cing, a now bankrupt company who later released another point and click on the DS called Hotel Dusk and a strategy type game called Little King’s Story on the Wii.

There is a sequel to the game set a couple of years later and released on the Wii called Another Code: R – A Journey into Lost Memories, an unintentional spoiler that at very least Ashley survives the unperilous events of the first game. Unusually Another Code R was only released in Japan and Europe, another one of the many games that Nintendo of Europe so kindly decided to publish for us.

The game follows Ashley, a young girl who has been summoned to “Blood Edward Island” by her long estranged father, she has been given a “DAS” which is actually just a DS with odd pretensions of being otherwise. Upon reaching the island her father soon spirits himself away to a mansion where she must go in order to find him and discover her more about her mother’s death and the reason for her father’s absence from her the past ten years, working on “Memory research”.

As with any point and click the main gameplay is navigating screens discovering items, solving puzzles and unlocking routes to progress, however unlike most other adventure games, this is on the DS so the top screen is the room and the bottom is a top down 3D view, which is how you move Ashley around, when an area can be “searched” the top screen’s image moves down onto the bottom screen so you can use the stylus to move around and “point and click”, which ends more as “point and poke” but I think “click” is more family friendly. The majority of the game can be played without using the stylus and touchscreen for those that prefer minimal usage of them, but the touchscreen controls are ergonomical and intuitive so it’d be counterproductive and cumbersome to avoid using them religiously.

Well this is all sounding a little tame for a Japanese game isn’t it? Hardly the usual craziness and oddities, oh wait, she befriends a ghost who helps her on her quest through the mansion which houses the secret to his own twisted past.

Like Ashley, the ghost “D” is about 14 years old (well, was) and used to live in the house before it became the residence of her father. D is unable to recall his own mysterious and death and so works together with Ashley to discover the secrets of the mansion.

Another character which goes missing pretty early on is Jessica, Ashley’s aunt who has been looking after her since her father’s abandonment. You’d really have to be a bit of a fool to not realise that Jessica knows a lot more than she’s letting on. Her disappearance makes a convenient macguffin for Ashley’s not discovering more about the situation earlier.

The DS functions are utilised well within the context of the game, making for some fluid gameplay and interesting puzzles. An in-game camera function means you can take a picture of a room or object and then compare against another image or area, and you can manipulate the images such as moving a picture over another so that they overlap in order to figure out a puzzle.

Not only are the touchscreen controls handy in the game, but the dual screen, the hinge and the microphone all become pulled in for some of the puzzles, ensuring that even the hardened point and click gamer will have to think outside the box (and the realms of the game) in order to complete some of the puzzles. One such puzzle was rather difficult for me in particular, the puzzle required the screens to be pushed closer together to reflect an image from the top screen onto the bottom screen, the overlayed image forming a letter and a number. Unfortunately I am unable to properly see different depths so couldn’t make out what the answer was.

Clocking in a little over 5 hours, the game is incredibly short and you can really feel it as you play. The rooms are not set up to extract a great amount of time and you often feel like you’re leaving as soon as you’ve arrived.

Pick up items! Return them to their owners! FUN!

The story doesn’t progress much in depth and feels a little convoluted in comparison to the little amount that’s really happening, the progression is fast paced and there’s not much development or discussion between the characters of Ashley and D outside the realm of the current situation and their two pasts.

Much of the puzzles is fetching fluff, often an item that clearly is going to come in handy is not picked up until the item’s use has become abundantly clear and objects that are obviously part of a puzzle are treated as if it’s just another part of the room, not even commenting on the odd nature of the item, for example there being a painting on the wall and a mark next to it where another painting used to be, the character would completely neglect to acknowledge the bare wall.

The game is not particularly difficult and with the story, characters and the odd dialogue, it seems like the game is aimed at younger players, possibly with the intent of introducing the genre to them. In this respect the game achieves what it set out to do, but it will leave the majority of gamers a little unsatisfied, particularly if the novelty of owning a DS has already worn off.

A great game to chill out and spend some time doing between Ace Attorney releases and other better adventure games or if you’re just a really unconfident gamer that likes a cheap sense of achievement.

Another Code: Two Memories

Meeting Gamers' Standards

I’ve always upheld that games are the peak of media entertainment and the boon of modern intellectualism. They are able to have all of the visual and musical aspects of a film, with the length and depth of a novel with something that neither can do, allow the participant to interact.

Following my previous post on changes within the game industry lately and how some of these will herald the good to come, some of the changes have been a lot more problematic and before we can start issuing celebrations, there are going to be some serious reformations made.

The games industry for a long time has represented only some of the interests of the small group of people that enjoyed games. Science fiction and fantasy were common genres in videogames as the respective gamers were interested in these things.

As the people began to flock to videogames during with Playstation 2′s domination, more genres were introduced to a greater extent and in wider circulation, and not just literary genres, but game genres too.

Game genres of all types were selling; horror, sports, shooters, RPGs, adventures, sims etc.

But games were rigidly confined within their own gameplay styles.

There were exceptions, but most games stuck to their predefined genres. Shooters had no RPG elements, RPGs weren’t very action-oriented and Real-time strategies did not turn shooter.

But as the hardware jumped dramatically in power and capability, so did the software and development costs.

Each game costing now millions more than the generation previous, publishers were forced to think very carefully about how they marketed their games and what games they wanted to back financially.

The increase in videogame consumers, most of them irregular gamers, meant that the companies had a greater variety of people to please and so, tried to please all of them.

Games were hybridised to include aspects of all genres.

Watch Dogs is an open-world, third person shooter, with hacking and action based gameplay. As one of 2013′s most anticipated games, will it live up to the hype?

There are many upsides to this; games that had no other way of existing were made, like Valkyria Chronicles, gamers that were very limited in the type of games they played were introduced to new types of game and gameplay elements and good implementation of different ideas leads to genre-wide innovation.

Unfortunately there are also many down sides, games are ostracising the gamers that made them what they are by not appealing to the former fans of that genre, introducing lots of gameplay elements can stifle the overall experience and the numerous “hybrid” games can oversaturate the market.

These kinds of games have still managed to sell because the majority of people who buy games now, are just not fussy enough to care, nor play enough games to get sick of them.

But for the regular gamers this can be incredibly frustrating. I for one have become increasingly disheartened with every update on “Thief” since its announcement.

Developers are ignoring the most simple and key business trick of all: Supply and demand.

There is room in the industry for hybrid games, but not at the expense of ALL of the other genres, which offer rich and varied experiences in their own right. Nobody wants the market to be full of indistinguishable games pushing us ever closer to the looming threat of another industry collapse.

I want Videogame genre reform and whilst we’re at it, more respect for loyal gamers in general.

I am tired of all of the poor treatment to the most loyal fans of games, IP’s, consoles and yes, even companies.

It’s not the irregular gamers that lose out whenever a company wants to cut expense, it’s always the regular gamers, who love this industry that lose out.

It’s your loyal fans that; buy your DLC and season passes, preorder your games or buy them at launch, buy all of the games in the series and spread their love for your product to everyone they know as soon as they complete your latest game.

The irregular gamers don’t.

The enduring loyalty of fans has long been underestimated by many of the industry’s biggest companies and is rarely rewarded with anything worthwhile. Playstation Plus is a good idea. Nintendo’s loyalty star program is another. But both of these schemes are exactly that, schemes. Further financial exploits for the gamer, not a pure gift in recognition.

Gearbox were commissioned to develop Aliens Colonial Marines, but when the game was released there was a huge outcry among fans that the game’s advertisements held incorrect and unrepresentative footage, amidst the controversy there are also rumours that Gearbox used the time and resources meant for the Aliens game on their own Borderlands 2 to increase its quality.

But it’s not the console developers that are our biggest worry, it’s the software developers, who manipulate the expectations of gamers to their own benefits, providing false information and gameplay videos, who make shop exclusive preorder bonuses so divisive that I know longer wish to purchase new games, for fear of buying the “wrong” version, knowing it already has a 31 meg patch and on-disc DLC I am meant to purchase to unlock and goodness what extra down the line.

I remember hearing someone liken it to buying a house and being told you’d need to pay extra to be given the key to basement. But this could be applied to most of the standards in the industry we’ve come to accept.

If any other industry had pulled a Colonial Marines, there would have been a bigger lawsuit a lot faster than the one we’ve got now, Gearbox would be dismantled and sold off for spare parts to EA, Randy Pitchford would be queuing at a soup kitchen and we’d all be laughing at how we all fell for “Marine-gate” whilst playing another, better Aliens game.

But instead we’ve got a Metacritic with some low numbers and a few too many tweets about how great the game is from Pitchford’s Twitter feed.

It’s such a shame we’re not even treated to the sweet irony of his name being “Pitchfork”.

The industry has been shifting a lot recently and has now entered a state of flux, with Nintendo opting to block fan’s monetization of Let’s Plays on Youtube and rumours of Microsoft using “Always online”, it won’t take long before the dissent of gamers begins to reach the ears of prominent publishers and companies, it’s just a shame that it has to hit their pockets first.

Meeting Gamers' Standards

The Fountainhead

Written by Ayn Rand in 1943, this novel was the precursor to her philosophy of Objectivism which was expanded upon in her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, for which she is most famous.

The novel starts in 1922 and centres predominantly on Howard Roark, a stubborn, yet free-spirited young man who is expelled from an Architecture degree at Stanton college. Fellow student Peter Keating is the best at the college and follows the Architectural style of Neoclassicism as opposed to Roark’s self taught Modernism. The book follows these two hopefuls as they both take on and progress through their careers, each with a different personal philosophy toward their art.

Being set mostly during the middle years of the 1930′s, it spans the age of the depression in New York and also some of the second World War. Despite the vast ideas, there is not much address to these two important events as the book is very character focused, as such I will focus mostly on characters for this review.

The personalities and goals of the individual characters form the premise and their relationships with one another drive the plot, starting with Keating, who has an admiring and resentful attitude to Roark, who he perceives to be superior to him but cannot understand why. Roark is indifferent to the people of the world and their ideas and all of the subsequent characters are inexplicably tied to him, through their ideas or Architecture.

Architecture and the theme of Individualism are entwined and almost analagous. The idea of a city and a building’s role within it are shown to be the same with people and individual.

A person can be identified with their fellow man, but each and every one is also separate, capable of acting and thinking on their own and should be treated as such. The novel explores this in contrast with collectivism, vanguarded by the arguable antagonist that is Ellsworth Toohey.

Ellsworth Toohey is an Architecture critic by profession and a humanist by extension and design. He uses his Machiavellian wits to acquire people to join his socialistic ideals. He is an antagonist by virtue of being a negative force to Roark, more akin to a political rival for the souls of the people.

Unlike most opposing characters, he is very complex and, until the end, is rather relatable, if not arguably good. Basically most baddies are always clearly baddies and not at all sane or normal or even highly intelligent, they usually use false logic, lies and deceit to meander their way through stories and often come off quite cheesy as a result. But Toohey is not, he could just as well have been a good guy, the main character even.

A scene in the book depicts a party which the attendants wore the buildings they had designed. But this picture is the real deal.

It’s known that the book was never meant to have political precepts, but it’s hard not to wonder if Toohey was created as a riposte to Communism and thus, if Roark is supposed to epitomise America, as its dream and virtue in the rights of its individuals. If not what does Roark represent? The author? What the author wants to be? What we should be?

Another important character is Dominique Francon, a beautiful and stately woman who is the daughter of a renowned name in Architecture, it’s her boredom and tiredness with the people around her that brings her to Keating and Roark. She is a character of contention in the novel as a particular scene in which she is depicted as being raped caused a scandal upon publication.

Dominique has a unique and complex relationship with Roark, that of a perpetual struggle between minds, the rape scene merely shows the extension of their relationship into the realm of sexuality.

However the perception of women and sexuality is still a major part of the book, to me at least.

This is a book written by a woman and the first to feel like it wasn’t, it’s very masculine in the manner that it treats women, is Dominique objectified throughout the novel even by Roark? She lives her life for him, she doesn’t nor has ever followed any dream of her own, so isn’t her existence a betrayal to Roark’s and her ideals?

Dominique is a strange character that wields power, but is often powerless against some of her male counterparts, it’s this dynamic that makes her an interesting character, possibly the result  of women being made useless or perhaps as an antithesis to the useless and the powerful, representing a human, in all of their ugly glory.

The final subcharacter is introduced late into the book, Gail Wynand, the owner of a large enterprise of industries and businesses, the most notable of which is the Banner, a yellow newspaper and the heart of New York City.

Wynand is a self-made millionaire whose every step was made to enable him to have the power he wishes to wield.  As the embodiment of a capitalist he is the last person we would expect to even get along with Roark, let alone be the mirror of him that he is.

He represents one of the many possibilities of a mind like Roark’s but fails to become what he wanted to be. He is the example that no matter who you are or what you do, you can always be an individualist.

The 1949 film of the Fountainhead.

Unfortunately all the persuasive techniques used to sell us individuality is soon turned to nought as there is no example of working class citizens here, what is a normal office employee meant to make of this exactly? Throughout the book we are constantly looking at the rich and the middle ground, there’s hardly any mention of the poor and when they are, it’s in relation to a rich person’s former state.

Not everybody can create a huge business, there has to be some lackeys!

There’s not much more to fault though, the characters are perfectly created with each feeling disturbingly real and the ideas in the book do not distract from the narrative to such an extent for disagreements with them to matter.

A complex and thought-provoking novel, it blends a modern moral philosophy perfectly with elegant prose to forge a solid and lasting story to last this century and the next.
I am very much looking forward to reading Atlas Shrugged.

The Fountainhead

Tales from the Half Life Pt.10

This is the end of our journey through Half Life, it’s been a good one.

Yet more labs where some Junkmouths and baddies can effectively eliminate one another while I pick off the stragglers, a somewhat apt role for a peabody like Freeman.

Soon we meet a nice laser which we use to break down a wall and that I swiftly discovered has a lethal capability.

Probably the world’s fattest laser.

Then we’re outside and have to navigate around a Crabclaw and various soldiers in order to get under some more sewers which lead to the side of a cliff, there are some rather awkward jump manouevers to go through whilst also dodging various painful projectiles.

Why couldn’t Gordon Freeman have majored in avionics?

Here’s where I skipped a bunch of pictures as it’s mostly just moving past various groups of soldiers in different small buildings until we reach an air missile hub where we learn that the enemy has decided that Freeman isn’t worth the hassle and it’s much easier to just air strike the place, after a short bit of bombing my own entrance to the Lambda Core, where we are met with another valve puzzle and a plethora of time consuming portals which we navigate til we find some scientists.

The “Large Alien Collider”.

Turns out there’s some kind of Mega alien that’s allowing the two worlds to remain linked and we have to kill this mother. After a brief encounter with some flying aliens the portal is charged up and we jump through to find Zen, the alien planet.

It’s a good thing Zen is one of the 1% of planets within the survivable zone of a planet’s trajectory and that it also has the perfect ratio of oxygen to nitrogen in the air while also having a similar mass and size as that of Earth, otherwise Freeman would be fucked.

Zen isn’t really a planet, so much as a collection of rocks and irritating enemies. There is a large sac-like thing that you have to shoot and follow a lot and then some winding about on platforms.

The scenery here looks a lot like Alien and the sound effects are like the noise of the Monolith from 2001.

Then we meet the final boss, which basically a large baby with tentacles coming out it’s arse.

This was a terrible boss. The method for defeating it was ridiculous and in the end I had to look it up. You have to shoot some crystals, get transported to some rooms then you have to shoot the baby’s head a lot until it opens, then shoot inside its head.

What a dick.

Pretty uninspired.

When you defeat the boss his head has lots of green lasers coming out and the room turns into a disco hall for about 20 seconds. I wasn’t sure what was happening so I just kept shooting.

The weirdest contract I ever agreed to.

Then you are transported in front of that bloke we’ve been seeing all throughout the game and he starts talking about how amazing Freeman is for killing everything while also making teleporting us all over what I presume are the unfinished Zen levels. I thought that Zen seemed a bit small.

He gives me a choose to join or die.
So I join.

The End.

Tales from the Half Life Pt.10

How not to sell games

I said it last generation and I’m still saying it now.

The videogame industry is the only industry that has fans waiting to give it money and it won’t let them.

The videogame sector of retail is the fastest growing in recent years and with the onset of the recession in 2008, games were one of the only things not seriously affected.

This is due to a lot of reasons, but the main one is that people see games as a good value for money in relative comparison to the entertainment they receive from them, thanks to large completion times, replay value and the pre-owned market.

It’s no wonder then that the increased attention in the popular media and culture at large has caused the industry to do a certain amount of “growing up”, which is just a more derogative and conscience-dodging way of saying “commercialising”.

The recent spat of lawsuits, the stories of violent children and studies thereof and even the extensive sponsorships and controversies surrounding them are all symptoms of the industry’s exposure to the laserbeam that is the public eye.

But not all of the transition is going to be terrible and I look forward to some of the changes I’ve wanted made to start happening now.

TRANSLATION, LOCALISATION & IP HOGGING

If there’s ever one time I’ve tried throwing money at a publisher it’s when it’s involving a game I want localised. Being an avid supporter of a series, only to be let down by a publisher not releasing an instalment is heartrending and even more upsetting when you know it’s owned by a large company that won’t sell the license for others to bring to us.

Zero 4 is co-directed by Goichi Suda better known as Suda 51 of Killer 7, No More Heroes and most recently, Killer is Dead fame.

This happened with Zero 4 on the Wii bringing an already low number of horror games on the console even lower in the west and Miles Edgeworth 2 on the DS, which was not released due to the sales of the first Miles Edgeworth Investigations game being low, most likely due to the fact that they only made a handful of copies.

The initial projected sales for Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney were lower than the end sales of Miles Edgeworth, showing that Capcom are able to make the game and make money, but choose not to.

Whatever the reasons, it shows bad business that the product isn’t hitting shelves, troubles of companies shouldn’t become troubles of consumers.

Releasing a game that will only make even a marginal profit is worth it to a company because:

• Continued releases of games keeps a company and their other games in consumer’s minds.


• As a series is released it garners new fans, steadily building a following and eventually a loyal fanbase, securing future releases of the same series’ success.


• Due to games like Smash Bros, releasing a game you wouldn’t usually release can possibly mean the difference between a consumer buying your mash-up game or not.


• 
  The more IP’s you release the more identity your brand has.

These are the reasons why despite Nintendo’s problems in recent years they have still been able to sell games and consoles. They have fans built from recognising some of their niche games like Fire Emblem, which is a great example of an unknown game series that has now become a viable Nintendo IP worth investing in in the west.

Unfortunately Nintendo are also prone to ignore outcry for some of their games like Mother and the afore mentioned Zero 4.

These games should be sold cheaply to a western publisher for release if the Japanese publisher is unwilling to do it themselves, then at least they would be making SOME money even if it’s only a minute amount. To not release a game that has such popular demand is irresponsible, lazy and a waste of money!

Masamune Shirow did the artwork for Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon on the DS.
He also did some erotic manga called Galgrease after he did Ghost in the Shell.

The good news about all this?

Digital distribution.

I may not like it, but I certainly prefer it to not getting the game at all.

With the new and fast ways of releasing games on the digital market, developers and publishers can work closely, quickly and cheaply with translators and coders to get these games released with hardly any potential repurcussions.

It’s not just big companies or Japanese games that can make use of this opportunity but small developers, especially from countries that wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach our shores.

Digital Distribution will widen the scope for games development and bring a wealth of content to us gamers.

DIVERSITY, MORALITY & ETHICS

The more videogames reach the general public, the more likely it is that new demographics will become financially marketable.

This means that games will be more representative of diversity and different cultures, and just like I mention above, digital distribution means there are no longer borders to mind when delivering games. People from all over the world will be making and playing games more.

This also means that more people will have more games that speak to them, regardless of their sex, race, age or sexual orientation.

The games industry will become more like the movies industry, where each demographic will be catered for and hopefully our knowledge of problems in the film industry like celebrity culture and ballooned costs can be avoided, while also encompassing some of the better aspects like adopting accountability for product and refined production.

Some of these points I will go into more detail in my follow up to this piece, but I think that in the near future, particularly this coming generation of consoles, we’ll be seeing a lot of change, a lot of it I haven’t been best pleased about but I also see a lot of good that can come from this.

How not to sell games

A strawberry scented death

Another week and another book by Yahtzee Croshaw who we might remember from my previous review of the Mogworld Audiobook and certainly not from Zero Punctuation.

This time round though we’re straying from the videogame roots and instead focusing on a more internet society theme, where an entirely unexpected type of apocalypse happens, where altruists are forced to adapt and zombie-apocalypse opportunists have to deal with a less noble kind of survivalism.

One day Brisbane wakes up, covered in Jam. Specifically Strawberry Jam. Carnivorous Strawberry Jam. It’s about 3 foot deep all over and is rather hungry for all things organic, including humans.

The protagonist, for lack of a better word, is Travis an unemployed man in his late 20′s whose lack of direction is his only unfaltering aspect of his personality, who lives in a flat with two other flatmates the day the Jam hits. After losing Frank, Tim the other flatmate takes up the leader mantle as he gets stuck in to the current situation, seeing it rather as an opportunity than a tragedy.

Soon the duo are making rounds of the building, gathering supplies and knowledge about the jam in order to brave the future when they meet Angela, a starbucks waitress-turned-journalist, who decides it would be a fabulous idea to tag along and document the whole thing. A further addition of a videogame designer and a pair of not-so-secret-agents join the gang and begin to scout for signs of human civilisation, which turns out to be a lot less civilised than they hoped.

The book’s told in a first-person style like Mogworld, but instead of making the main character an exaggerated version of himself, Travis is drastically different, being someone who tends to follow and make more helpful observations and an active interest in the welfare of his peers, than constantly cracking sarcy jokes and lacking any real drive. Although not wholly as interesting, it does make the book overall feel a lot less depressing and it suits the narrative style more. I feel when using first person writing, it’s best to let situations and other characters do the legwork of providing exposition and development, using the main character as someone to view these through. This also means that the writer has a better opportunity at proving that they can create and direct characters.

Jam is written with a careful balance of the defiance of clichés and stereotypes and the adoption of them.

The other characters, although not as interesting as those in Mogworld, seem more real and believable, and in the context of the book, fits a lot better.

Basically what I’m trying to say is this book is better. The story premise seems a little weak at first. A quirky idea like an unusual apocalypse happening, poking fun at all those people who thought they had the best idea for survival could only go so far right? Well, without resorting to utter ridiculousness it all flows and progresses well, turning into more than survival, but also an amusing commentary on internet culture and modern group bonding, which as we all know just doesn’t represent what we see in shows like the Walking Dead and such. Well not in England anyway.

The jam itself hardly remains the sole focus of the novel, not having the near-sentience of The Blob, that’s a good thing, as there really isn’t much that can be done new with the concept. The jam doesn’t eat anything made from non-natural resources, making it navigable by boat and other devices, it also reflexively oozes towards people when catching their scent, it doesn’t follow without direct cause.

The same acerbic and distinctly English humour is retained in this novel, but I feel is a lot more developed and less overwhelming than in Mogworld, I can’t say that Yahtzee fans would like either of his novels as they encompass a wider range of popular and geek culture, mixed with what seems like a genuine passion for the literature medium, something that a lot of videogame fans aren’t too keen on.

Not recommended for Diabetics

Overall the writing level is much better, but not without complaints.

I’m not sure if this was the case with Mogworld, as I read (listened to? What’s the bloody term here?) an audiobook, but the spelling of “multi-coloured” was American, which I find disturbing.

The female characters were a bit drippy and the end felt rather rushed through. Usually I would issue a spoiler alert right here, but I think that pointing out clichés shouldn’t warrant one to be frank.

A lot apocalypse-themed entertainment tend to suffer from frail and unfulfilling endings, but I suppose it’s because people in general are still wholly accustomed to try and make either Disney style “good” endings, which obviously don’t work when you’ve got more dead team members than living ones and then there’s the Harlan Ellison “bad” ending, something Ira Levin also specialises in, where they don’t even try to reconcile and just damn everyone to premature and miserable deaths without even showing us the gory details, what apocalypse endings usually end up like is a bastard amalgamation of the two, half-arse sickly sweetness between a pair of young lovers and the loose conviction of killing off the more interesting characters.

But we’re all here for the ride anyway and it manages to deliver a fun and “jam-packed” (Yeah, go on, tut, raise your eyebrow. YOU try writing a 1000 words on a novel called Jam with killer Jam and not make a single pun all the way though) adventure in Brisbane, a city I know pretty much nothing about. Except that Croshaw obviously lives there. It was interesting to make use of an apocalypse in an unlikely place, we’re too used to backwater & cityscape America and boring old London.

This was a great read and was quite addictive, I think that the plot was a lot more memorable than Mogworld, which seemed to have an ABC style direction to it. It’s a must for fans of Mogworld and a definite try for fans of Zero Punctuation and a cheeky go on then for Apocalypse enthusiasts.

If only the apocalypse were made out of cheese pasta bake, I would be more than happy to sacrifice myself to a crusty grave.

A strawberry scented death

The Death of Stop motion

Today special effects genius Ray Harryhausen has sadly died aged 92.

He was most famous for the stop motion animation in Jason & the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans but he also did Mysterious Island, One Million Years BC and the Sinbad films.

Growing up I used to love watching the Sinbad films and Clash of the Titans over and over again, I suppose the only reason I ever got into Greek Mythology was due to my love of the gods and creatures in Clash.

The visual effects really speak for themselves and it’s because of their startling realism that I have always praised animatronics, puppetry, stop motion and prosthetics. I want to see something real, that’s right in front of you.

Harryhausen always created new and interesting creatures, with such high level detail, the animation was created without any real guideline, there wasn’t rotoscoping back in those days, so the feel of the movement was all done by hand and instinct.

With Harryhausen’s passing, the world is a much sadder place, he not only represented his own work, the films they influenced, the people they inspired and the childhoods of the millions that were touched by the sense of wonder and adventure that only traditional and stop motion visual effects can achieve.

We’re another step away from the fantastical and another closer to the rudimentary.

The Death of Stop motion

Thief: Gold

Back in the day, well 1998, Eidos wasn’t owned by Square Enix and they released a game called Thief: The Dark Project, it was developed by Looking Glass Studio a year before they made System Shock 2.

Thief is a stealth game and was released the same year as Metal Gear Solid, except it is a first-person style melée and is exclusive to PC. It was the first ever game to use light as part of the stealth mechanic.

You play as Garrett a hardened thief that was trained by a master. He uses his talent to earn money by stealing from the local crime syndicate, the neutral Keeper faction and 2 religious orders called the Pagans and the Hammerites.

The game is level based, when the level is completed the stats for that level are shown and you are able to buy items before going to the next level, being a PC game you can save whenever, which is handy for when you wish to attempt something risky.

Using sound, lights and your enemies positions the aim of every level is to complete all of your mission objectives, which usually comprise of retrieving an artifact.

Combat is difficult, making it easier to avoid enemies than take them on. You have a sword and a bow at your disposal, but you can also knock enemies out with the blackjack, a large club, when the enemy is not alerted to your presence. You can also steal items that appear on enemies’ belts if you are sneaky enough or you could just nick ‘em when they’re unconscious.

There is also a large variety of items, including different kinds of arrows, such as the rope arrow which allows you to shoot at a ceiling and attach a rope in order to climb, there are also water and fire arrows for extinguishing and setting alight light sources and the moss arrow which plants a soft bedding on the floor to dampen noise, there are also normal bombs and gas bombs which can knock out enemies in a radius and there are also health and speed potions.

The level design is usually based around a building, or some sort of navigation (usually caverns) to an area, where you will need to pilfer the mission objective, the platforming and puzzles reminded me a little of early Tomb Raider games and the missions themselves of Goldeneye.

You can block, but there’s not much point.

As you make your way around levels you will find doors that are locked, which can be unlocked by finding the key or sometimes they are able to be picked using the lockpicks. This is done by approaching the door and equipping one of the two lockpicks and using it on the door, if the door is being picked then it shakes and the handle moves and if not, you have to try the other lockpick. Some doors need to be half picked by one then switch over to the other to finish the job.

You can also find items some of which are useful for the inventory and others which are worth money. In every level there is a finite amount of stuff to steal which adds to your purse for buying items for the next level, however the gold you obtain doesn’t seem to carry over beyond the next mission, so it’s always worth spending all of the gold you can for missions.

The game is set in a medieval looking world which also uses steam technology, magic and electricity, you are able to read a little bit about the world from various notes that are found around levels, a bit like in Elder Scrolls.

The enemies are what really make this game, it is lauded for its advanced AI for the time and you can see why, the enemies have fairly advanced patrol patterns and somewhat interact with one another and can become alerted if they spot one of their colleagues dead or lying knocked out, meaning you have to hide the bodies. Sometimes when you approach a set of enemies you can listen into their conversation which is sometimes helpful for your mission and other times can just be great background information for the world or even just be rather amusing banter between two terrible voice actors.

When enemies are patrolling you have to be very careful about the environment to make sure that you don’t arouse their suspicion. When a guard is looking for the source of a sound or if they spot you, they can call other guards and it can take a while for them to go back to patrol mode, when they do, they don’t go back to where they were, instead just operating in a new area, acting different to before. This can make the game quite unpredictable and is a great example of early emergent gameplay.

A good example of a working bridge, something I didn’t get to see in my game. Also there are two talismans in this version as it’s not Gold.

Changing the difficulty makes the AI harder and also adds more mission objectives such as finding extra artefacts, requiring you to not harm the innocents, get spotted or just collect more loot.

The game is extremely advanced for its time, but not everything is peachy, the game was extremely glitchy on the Steam version of Thief:Gold, crouching would make Garrett unable to run and sometimes the game would be forever locked walking forwards, which in a game where you have to be quiet and still. is rather distracting.

In the end I had to play a GOG.com version which has slightly enhanced graphics and better control mapping, however, this still isn’t entirely perfect as drawbridges don’t seem to work and also it’s impossible to take pictures of me playing the game as there isn’t a client and the print screen function doesn’t work in-game, hence these shoddy pictures.

The level design is really complex and almost constitutes as an adventure by the size of the maps alone, once I got the controls working properly they were really tight and the story and world is intriguing and well executed, overall most of the game is nicely rounded with only the pacing of the extra Thief: Gold levels letting it down.

This is one of the best stealth games ever made and a good bit of fun if you’re a fan of old PC games.
It can be rather frustrating but it’s worth it in the end, even if you end up doing your first ever level skip in a game due to a bloody bug.

Thief: Gold

The demonisation of Japanese games

Why are Japanese games, particularly RPGs subjected to such vitriolic hatred?

I recently came across a particularly upsetting video which attempted to state that people shouldn’t buy Final Fantasy XIII from Square Enix because Deus Ex is better. Anyone who does is basically a terrible human being.

I was horrified by the attack of fans and illogical defence of the company.

First and foremost, why should ANY gamer be penalised for liking a game?

I am happy to say that I think that the Final Fantasy side of Square died, leaving a dry ashy husk in the JRPG market. But I think that to specifically name Final Fantasy as the root of all evil interactive is hardly the answer, especially when the fans never enable anything that Squenix do that could be considered exploitative or damaging to the videogame industry. Those being the only reason I could think to dislike a fan.

When the Final Fantasy: All The Bravest IOS game was released, FF fans all over the interwebs decried the ploy as the money-making scheme that it was.

Final Fantasy XIII sold a lot of copies, but that wasn’t through any ILLICIT means. There was enough of a fanbase after the release to warrant not one, but TWO sequels. You or I might not have liked it, but it pleased a lot of people.

To be honest I think it goes a lot deeper, this opinion is just another part of a larger picture that includes the systemic exclusion of gamers who enjoy Japanese games.

Not too dissimilar from the console wars that I have talked of before, except that this seems to be something that I haven’t heard talked about quite as much in internet communities. But it’s something I know a few people around me have talked about and agreed with.

There is a large rivalry between Japanese games and Western games, understandably as the industry was created by the west and pioneered by the east.

The games from the respective corners reflect different values and needs of their demographics.

“Phoenix Wright has curly eyebrows, therefore I’m not going to play this game” – Some idiot

However, this doesn’t make much difference in the mainstream gaming media (by which I mean western, as I live in the UK and read English speaking websites) to just write off the value of Japanese games and their respective fans. Strangely I’ve found that Kotaku are wont to anti-Japanese criticism in some of their reviews but not editorials.

The most obvious and prevalent of the criticisms is the expression that “Japanese games need to be more Western”.

No. They don’t.

Japanese games cater perfectly to their market, especially in their home country. They sell. They don’t (often) harm anyone. So why change?

To meet western expectations? To better suit a western audience?

I can understand this to a certain extent.

The Ace Attorney series had many references that your average westerner would not understand culturally. So there were many changes made to make it more suitable. This I find acceptable. Even as someone with interest in other cultures it still would have been lost on me as we just don’t have the same reference points, context or content (such as Tokusastsu shows) over here.

I think it’s completely wrong however to just assume that all Japanese games need westernisation as there is already a fanbase (although rather small) here. I would even understand if they thought that some changes would vastly increase the appeal, as a larger return would encourage more to be localised, even if they’re altered. Japanese games, especially RPGs have already embraced western elements and incorporated them into their games, but sometimes these can isolate both of the demographics when not implemented properly. Other times it can be incredible, like Dark Souls.

Reminds me of a Sandworm of Dune

It’s so easy to pick on certain things and the nonchalant attitude that seems to be synonymous with the gaming experience often means that minorities are easily excluded.

I know many people who have been ashamed to bring up that their favourite game is Final Fantasy VII or other famous JRPGs as they know that in all likelihood, they will be ridiculed for it and they often opt to say “less Japanese” titles to avoid it.

I know that Final Fantasy VII, particularly in its heyday, sported some particularly rabid fans that made a thorough job of putting people off the game and the series, but it’s been over 15 years! You can’t let fans influence your enjoyment of game, it’s not only ignorant, but damning for yourself.

Some of the complaints I hear about Japanese games are that the characters are silly and pathetic or that they lack innovation. “I don’t want to play as an angsty teen with big hair” etc.

Nobody’s asking you to. There’s still Final Fantasy VI, the Dragon Quest series, Skies of Arcadia, Shin Megami Tensei and Persona series around, offering a Japanese experience without the above.

Not like when I play games with those types of characters in, it stops me from playing and enjoying a good game. But it’s not simply the dismissal of the games that is annoying, it’s the dismissal of fans and their opinions after the slightest display of the “weakness” that is liking a JRPG.

Well that background is a completely unrealistic shade of green, better return this.

Scarce innovation is one of the major complaints for JRPGs and even Japanese developers (Atsushi Inaba & Keiji Inafune) lament the staleness of the market lately, but sometimes a formula just works. Mario & Zelda have been making minor alterations to the same formula for a while now and have had much success, so why can’t this be accepted with other kinds of games?

I love my Japanese and western games so I don’t understand why we can’t just enjoy both, along with all the pitfalls and pleasures of each, just because something is different or you don’t like it, doesn’t make it automatically bad.
I don’t play sports games but you wouldn’t find me wandering into a Fifa forum demanding more swords and magic. Even though that sounds like it would make a fantastic game.

The demonisation of Japanese games