Faster To Breaking Point

Accelerationism (Noun): The idea that either the prevailing system of capitalism, or certain technosocial processes that historically characterised it, should be expanded and accelerated in order to generate radical social change.

How many of you have heard of Accelerationism?

It's a thing that comes up every now and then in political or economic or sociological discussion. Nietzche and Marks both discussed it in their day, though perhaps without the very specific meaning that it seems to have today.

For a patented low-fi example of how this works...

Let's say you and your friends are all playing Risk.

You don't... want to be playing Risk, though.

Everyone else does. Everyone else is having a good time - they're making sound strategic plays, not over-extending themselves, defending their base lines and waiting for everyone else to make their mistakes. This game is going to drag out for a while, and they're all okay with this.

You want to play Monopoly, though - or at least you think it is going to be Monopoly. You didn't all really discuss what to do after Risk, but you know that at least one of the group has a Monopoly box, and you are REALLY good at Monopoly. You probably won't win Risk - you will almost certainly win Monopoly.

So you start playing a little less carefully.

You start over-extending yourself, practically inviting other players to try and break into your territory. You sally against hard targets, maybe throwing 10 into an opposing 10 without any hope of winning, just to whittle them down. You are making plays that are very suboptimal, very high risk with potentially slightly high reward.

It leads to instability. People start making cheap gains off you, or taking from the others who you have weakened. By your death throes - because you WILL lose at this rate - you make the game end a lot quicker. You accelerate the pace of the game, by removing the checks and measures implied and inherent, i.e. that players won't make dumb decisions.

You lost the game of Risk, but you won the game of playing something else.

Hopefully, that'll be Monopoly, right?

Right?

Put simply - it's the process of making a system run faster and harder, until it breaks. So you can access what is after that system.

Notably it's the right wing of the spectrum that leans heavily on Accelerationism. Not that there aren't left-wing adherents - numerous and sundry thinkers have espoused it - but it finds its core market in the place that is already most benefited by the system to be accelerated. That is, white nationalists and capital-fascists.

The system is already hurting the people they want to hurt, see. All those Risk pieces that get taken off the board as you make the fast plays, the stupid plays, the risky plays - they aren't what those kind of people like to think of AS "people".

All acceptable losses to get to what they think is next.

Books have been written about what is next. There's a lot of different perspectives. Paul Mason (author of a book called Postcapitalism from 2015) argued that the digital economy and people relying on co-operatives and mutual aid rather than going to their traditional capitalist benefactors would see the end of our current model and the rise of something more egalitarian and just.

Of course there's big steps to make that not happen. The undermining of every social justice programme, the sabotage of experiments into universal income and ignoring the experiments that work, the definition of everything that levels the playing field as being socialist and the definition of socialist as being inherently evil. Like, this is McCarthyism stuff, you hate to see it.

Nevertheless. Whenever you see a relaxation in trade rules to benefit the seller, or a removal of regulations between owner and profit, or a tax efficiency being exploited, or whatever Amazon is fucking doing next, remember: this is acceleration.

And those doing it really hope they can exploit what happens next.

Just like this guy.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Whamhalla Awaits

Can you hear this picture?

Yeeeesss.

Now as it is a certain time of year I bet a fair few of you have heard this song. Recently even. I bet that at least one of you have heard it today, even.

There is a certain amount of creep, when it comes to Christmas. It somewhat feels like the Christmas-branded guff comes out earlier and earlier every year, and the eagerness for people to start being their happy little elf-selves is palpable by the beginning of October. I've personally always held to the Halloween rule - after that, do what you want, the big holiday of the year is already over.

There is also a common link between how early Christmas decorations start being put up and generalised depression within a community, but yanno.

Perhaps a more visceral indication of the oncoming festivities is when the music starts playing on the radio and such - the first creeping out of your Wizzards and your Pogues and your Slades and such. Then you have your songs that have the word "Christmas" in them so they are automatically Christmassy, and songs that have bells in them so they are also Christmassy for no apperent reason, like East 17.

And then you have this little yuletide ditty, too - this little tune by pop lads Wham, from back in 1984. Last Christmas. A song and a video in combination that tell us of a man who is terrified of being alone but also can't let go of the girl that apparently randomly seduced him the Christmas before and then dumped him immediately.

The video doesn't seem to convey this angle. It more seems to be that the band and their friends all hang out in a ski lodge over Christmas, and that Andrew Ridgeley is now going out with George Michael's ex, but they still all hang out together anyway, a situation I would literally shoot myself in the foot to not have to deal with.

How do you deal with the unavoidable, inexorable Christmas creep? (No, not that guy in the office that you really should report to HR.)

You turn it into a game, of course.

Whamageddon. It's been running for years, now - the rules have been formalised. It begins at midnight, at the very beginning of December, and the goal is to make it to midnight Christmas Eve without hearing Last Christmas by Wham. If you hear it, and you recognise it, you have to declare it. You're out of the game, and consigned to Whamhalla. If you make it? You have achieved glory - feel free to blast the tune first thing on Christmas morning to celebrate (and wake up your neighbours).

Covers are okay. Remixes are okay. They aren't the original song, so by definition, they don't count. A lot of folks who like this song but play Whamageddon anyhow stave off  "Wham Cravings" by this method. It isn't illegal to sabotage your friends - adding it to a community playlist, sneaking it into the youtube queue at a party, literally walking up to people while playing it on your phone - but it is considered a serious breach of etiquette and a total dick move.

I lost Whamageddon this year at the work Christmas party, which is probably true for most people. I was out early. I don't know if anyone else that I know is still in, at this point. Maybe. We live in hope.

It's this kind of little game - this constant social game that other people know about and participate in - that can make life a little better. Like injokes with your friends (37!), or like The Game (which you just lost), or THIS nonsense, before insecure racists turned it into their little feel-better symbol (assholes).

I hope you have your own little games to play this Christmas - your own little things to do, ways to stay sane.

Look after yourselves.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Monopolised

This is gonna be a short one, but bear with me.

So on her birthday, the girlfriend and myself were playing Monopoly - it was a computerised version, so we had a couple of computer players to roll against. If you've ever tried to play two-player Monopoly, I am sure you will understand why.

She crushed me at it, but that's beside the point.

So the computer players were, as you might imagine, not ideal. They weren't great at playing the game in general. They were a touch too willing to accept offers for properties. One of them went bankrupt real early on, not so much through fault of their own, just the way the dice rolled.

The other computer player, though - they consistently have a significant lump of cash in their wallet but... not a lot of properties. Like four at most at any point during the game. Part of that was probably bad luck but another part was bad decision-making on the CPU's part. I ended up glomping a few territories from him, and so did the girlfriend, and he didn't seem to mind much.

So it comes to the stage that he's got literally two properties. Both on the same block.

So I put in an offer for one of them, to see if it will take.

It does.

Well now.

I put in an offer for the next one the next turn. By this point I am pretty convinced that the computer has no idea precisely how badly this will screw it over. Still I am a little surprised that this one gets accepted too.

So there he is. More money than both the GF and I put together but no properties, and only like... two on the board that haven't been bought already.

We keep playing, and that's when the epiphany rolls in.

He's beaten already. He's done. This dude is out of the game. All he is doing is orbiting, pouring money into either my pocket or hers, until eventually he runs out. All we have to do, is not sell him anything. Not let him in on the position of making that money. Keep him out of that loop, because everyone has to PAY - just not everyone gets to PROFIT.

And I am claiming that, my sadness over how stark this poor computer player's situation was - how much it runs over into the real world, and the gulf between classes that exist - is why the GF pummelled me so badly at the game.

Definitely not cos she's better at it than me.

Nope.

(She's definitely better at it than me.)

Full length next time folks. Stay tuned.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

The Best Of The SNES (Mana From Heaven)

Warning: nostalgia ahead.

So when I was still in school life was pretty simple. It didn't look that way but hey, I know better now. All the stuff I thought was important - well, it was important to me at the time, but in the grand scheme of things, wouldn't add up to much.

I have a lot of fond memories. Very few of them are school related. Perhaps fully half of them involve video games. I was that kind of kid. I personally had a Sega Megadrive, for a time; but as much as I may have defended it, the games that I really enjoyed were on the Super Nintendo.

Like, don't get me wrong. I got untold hours of fun out of the various Sonic games (hey, remember when the WORST one was the FIRST one?), the two Shining Force tactical RPGs, Gunstar Heroes, Rocket Knight and its sequel Sparkster, Soliel, Landstalker - it had a solid roster of titles to keep me busy.

The thing is, there were a specific set of games it didn't have; some of the best games ever made.

Like yeah, Mario Kart was groundbreaking. Super Mario World was exceptional. Super Metroid was one of the coolest games I ever played.

Really, though - mean the RPGs.

On one system, at around about the same time, you had Final Fantasy 6 (or 3), potentially one of the best Final Fantasy games ever made. Chrono Trigger, a triumph for game and narrative design and writing. Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past, one of my favourite Zelda games, and maybe still my favourite - I haven't played Breath Of The Wild yet. (I know, bad show, John.) As well as these three titans, you had the third of Square's trio of classic RPGs, and one of the most fondly remembered games of the era:

Secret Of Mana.

Where my people at.

The game itself is a masterclass. It looks amazing - it pops off the screen, the colour choice and pixel art so very well done, and the addition of the Mode 7 rotating semi-3D map just made it feel like it was above and beyond. The combat was tactical but fast-moving, and rewarded good reflexes as much as forethought and planning.

It was more accessible than Final Fantasy, for a beginner. The ability to get the hell out of the way when the enemy swings for you is a godsend. The plot, likewise, is less twisty. That's a good way to put it, I think. Twisty. Only having three characters to worry about made it seem simpler, too, even if managing all three of them at once was probably harder than - say - Chrono Trigger's system.

I've played it... who knows how many times. Always on a borrowed Super Nintendo, until I discovered what ROMs were... and then, years after it came out, I made a rather startling discovery.

It turned out that Secret of Mana wasn't an original - or at least, not an individual outside of an existing franchise. No, it was part of an ongoing series of games, the first of which had come out two years previously. It was the Seiken Densetsu series, but the first one had been called - get this - Final Fantasy Adventure. It was officially a spin-off of Final Fantasy, coming out the same year as Final Fantasy 4 (aka Final Fantasy 2 in the US, yep, this gets confusing). Seiken Densetsu 1 even includes various staples of the Final Fantasy series, using sprites taken directly from the original Final Fantasy game (Mystic Quest Legend here), and featuring a chocobo that one has to ride at various points.

Here's the thing. Not only was I shocked to discover the existence of a prequel for the game I adored...

I found out it had a sequel.

This sequel was called Seiken Densetsu 3, and I coveted it so desperately that I - at one point - endeavoured to learn Japanese and travel to Japan to buy a copy. Because it didn't exist outside of Japan. This was at the point wherein local copies of Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 had just absolutely spiked in price because of lack of accessibility, let alone this game, a game that had never left Japanese shores.

One day I discovered it had been codified as a game ROM. So, lacking any other way of playing this game that I desired so badly, I downloaded it on my buddy Matt's computer - and had to use a piece of software to split the ROM across three floppy discs, because this was before the days of affordable CD-writers or portable hard drives. Our entire lives were contained in 1.44 megabyte sized chunks.

I got it home. I fired it up.

I couldn't understand a damn thing because it was literally totally untranslated.

I played it anyway, and I loved it.

Two years separated these two games, take a look...

Look at the difference. It's astounding.

With six characters, each selectable as a main character and backup characters, and such an immense graphical overhaul, it was a huge improvement. The sound, too, was tweaked. The combat system was already pretty fantastic so that needed precious little adjustment, but the game included an actual day-night cycle, wherein enemies and NPCs would act differently depending on what time of day it was. There was even a day system, each day corresponding to a type of magic or element, strengthening that element on that day.

Hell, one of your main characters was a werewolf who was deadly at night.

Halfway through the nineties, here was this game, this pinnacle of the art of 2D pixel RPGs. Final Fantasy 7 was out two years later, as the Final Fantasy series took its step into 3D; Ocarina Of Time took the Zelda series the same way a year after that. It isn't a very controversial statement to imply that there wasn't a better 2D RPG released - not perhaps until the comeback of the genre currently occurring.

Access, though; access was the problem. As Super Nintendos got rarer, the games themselves became harder to find. As mentioned the prices had already spiked. I remember hearing at one point that a copy of Final Fantasy 6 was in CB Games on Union Street (callback) for about £80 - and that was in the nineties, given inflation that's almost £150 now.

That was for games that came out over here. Seiken Densetsu 3 was one of the ones that didn't. It became a unicorn - I could pine for Chrono Trigger, could dream of the day when I could by a cartridge and an old SNES to play Mario Kart again, but the Mana sequel was gone.

Throughout the years, though - the old games started coming back. Before people started shutting down the ROM sharing sites that were prolific among folks my age that grew up with 16 bit consoles, Final Fantasy 6 was released on the Playstation in 1999. A Link To The Past came to the Nintendo virtual console in the Wii era. A hard-to-get version of Chrono Trigger came out for the Playstation in 1999, but was circulated more widely for the DS in 2009, and was ported over to many mobile devices and PCs later. A mobile port of Secret Of Mana itself came out in 2009.

Seiken Densetsu 3 remained a unicorn, but spoiled with legal access to all the old RPGs that we had loved so much - and the release of the Mini Super Nintendo containing most of them - eased the swallowing of that bitter pill.

Until earlier this year I heard a rumour that someone had copyrighted the term Collection Of Mana.

Trying not to brick myself in sheer excitement, I casually ignored most of E3 2019 - I kind of hate it as a convention - but kept my ear to the ground for even a whisper of news about the unicorn maybe finally reaching our shores.

It was a week later that I got the news.

Isn't it gorgeous.

The collection of characters to the right is your three from Secret Of Mana - Randi, Primm and Popoi - and above the seed is Sumo and Fuji from Final Fantasy Adventure...and to the left, the six main characters from Seiken Densetsu 3. Angela the princess, Duran the swordsman, Hawkeye the thief, Riesz the amazon, Kevin the werewolf and Charlotte the priestess.

This means that not only does this collection contain Final Fantasy Adventure, the game that takes some Final Fantasy tropes and smashes them into a Zelda world overlay. Not only does this collection include the non-remastered non-3D Secret Of Mana - but it also includes Trials of Mana. Seiken Densetsu 3 itself. Translated and localised.

It happened. The unicorn arrived.

And that's the sad story about why a grown man saw an advert for a Switch game and had to stop himself from crying.

But I mean, if this crystalline moment of childhood happiness was condensed into a software form, and for over 24 years you couldn't have it because of ephermeral reasons - and then all of a sudden, it gets gently placed within your grasp... maybe you'd shed a tear, too.

I mean, it just goes to show, too - you give people access to a thing at a reasonable price, and even if they'd pirated or copied it previously, they will buy it.

After all, Game of Thrones still made money, right?

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

And The Pearl Became The World

The title of this blog comes from a Jonathan Coulton song, called Always The Moon, which you can listen to right here.

I think we can all agree that, whatever we think of Lord Of The Rings, Tolkien did a pretty admirable job in terms of world creation. (I also think it's the law that whenever you talk about world creation, you have to mention him. At least once.)

I mean - yes, it does end up being kinda racist, and it's got elements that are pretty problematic, but just as we find the flaws in it, we also have to accept that it had depth that was beyond a lot of its contemporaries. It helped to spawn entire genres and subgenres, and prompted a metric ton of tropes - not all of them great, but hey, we're talking volume rather than quality - that survive to this day, mostly unquestioned.

Without it, the world of RPGs that we live in today - wherein there are multiple super-popular D&D-related streams and youtube channels, and RPGs themselves have a far deeper cultural penetration - would have been very different, even if Gary Gygax himself went on record as not being terribly impressed with Tolkien's work. (I personally agree with him.)

So when I do my own work - writing, preparing for RPG campaigns which I am running - I feel like I have to do a reasonable job in putting together the world, unless it's already been made for me.

Everyone does this part differently. I'm sure there's lots of different approaches, some of which I would find utterly perplexing, some of which I would find absolutely fascinating. Several of the books I have on writing talk about world building, and they address it in several different ways.

My methodology is a little more slapdash.

Gareth L Powell, in his book About Writing, addresses one of the questions that people who write get asked all the time:

Where do you get your ideas from?

Short of having several funny responses (Neil Gaiman used to trot out "I get them from the little ideas shop in Bognor Regis"), the real response is: everywhere. You get ideas from everywhere. From experiences you've had, thoughts you've had in passing, a scene that plays out in your head from a song, a turn of phrase, a feeling you want to evoke. The most important thing is, you don't start with just one idea. You collate the ideas, clump them together, and form something out of the mass that is more than the sum of its parts.

Like a pearl.

That's why it's a good idea to collect as many ideas and notions as you possibly can. Write it down. You never know when it will come in useful.

For example. A setting I put together for several Pathfinder games I ran included a bunch of ideas and notions that had occurred to me over the space of years. One village was basically a smashing-together of the home village in Monster Hunter 3 and all the parts of Lilo & Stitch that I really liked, splashed with some heavy inspiration from Nation by the great Sir Terry Pratchett.. Another came about from an idea I had when I was reading the Pathfinder core book and wondered: what if there was a city, dedicated to the god of cities? In its centre was a statue that I rescued from a writing project I started (and never finished) back in 2002, a huge angelic figure with a pair of swords - one pointed at the courthouse, another at the library, the two most important parts of the city.

Having imagery like that is important. Even in a simply descriptive narrative, if I describe that statue to the people who played in that game, they'd probably be able to remember the city of Kayde. Likewise, if I describe the people with the tattoos that glow in firelight and the harpoons they craft while singing to themselves, they'd think about Haku, the village of leviathan hunters.

There's another direction to approach this from, though. The content of your world can inspire moments - can inspire situations. Sometimes it goes the other way. Sometimes situations inspire the world and the content in it. Sometimes there is something you need to have happen, a scene that plays out in your head or a few lines of dialogue that you need to use, and it is then on you to make the world a place that supports that happening.

My current writing project involves mecha.

This picture is the life-size Gundam statue that was outside of Diver City in Tokyo. The chap looking up at it in the foreground gives you a good idea of scale. It's a big machine.

Mine are, too. At least, they are going to be. The Gundam RX-78-2 here (aka the Grandpa Gundam) is 18.5 meters tall, that's just over sixty feet in old money. Mine are slightly shorter - fifteen meters as an average. Still, I require that sense of scale to be impressed upon people. I need there to be several scenes in which mechs and people work together, or at least, close to each other - just to demonstrate the difference. So that when I describe the main character feeling like some kind of goddess every time she plugs into her mech, one understands what I am talking about.

After all, it requires creating a world in which mecha exist in the first place, right?

A scene I envisage involves the main character defending a group of civilians. A group that know who she is, and who are rooting for her every step of the way. Someone - I don't know who - yelling at her from the ground to get up, to get back into the fight. (This scene flew together after listening to this song by Against The Current and watching this scene from Spider-Man Homecoming, by the way.) I need to make my setting work, so that they can know her name, they can know who she is and who she is fighting against, and the fight can be brought to an area that this can happen.

That necessitates a setting in which militarism exists, in which a society can know of war and know it happens. It necessitates a specific culture around mech piloting, around pilot elitism, and it requires specifics within the war that might lead to people seeing more than just a soldier in a cockpit - maybe instead of just a soldier, they see a saviour.

Setting details can lend a lot of credence to your particular flavour of military scifi.

After all, we all know who this guy is.

My work will pop up sometimes on my Patreon, and on my DeviantArt account. If you're interested in this current project, we can totally talk about it.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

5 of 7 - Space Ming For Fun And Profit

(For the 5th of our 7-day blogathon, we look at a game I have returned to after a decade - Eve Online!)

What is Eve Online?

It's an MMO, set in a fictional chunk of space, in which you play a "capsuleer" - a dedicated starship pilot who has been thrust into a world of politics, war and industry. Your goal? Well, you choose. Assist one of the many factions, make as much money as you can, hunt other players - it's all valid.

I've played multiple MMOs in the past, WoW being my first. If one was to count Planetside 2 then I've tried out a good half dozen. None of them have really drawn me back, though; and I think the only reason Eve has is because it doesn't feel like an MMO.

When I say that I know that logically it has a great number of players and it is online. But you aren't special. You're just a capsuleer. There's thousands more like you. There's no destiny, no demonslaying, none of the things that are sprinkled through WoW to make one feel special despite the fact that thousands of people have done it once already. All you are here for is war and profit, and it makes no bones about that.

Another thing that draws me is the economy. It is player-driven in just about every way. The production of damn near everything is handled by other players, so all the money that changes hands goes between players. On occasion people run scams, and that is legal - you just have to not get caught. Corporations (the equivalent of Guilds, which make a lot more sense) are formed just to dodge taxes, or sharded off other Corps to declare war on rivals without dragging the main Corp into trouble.

Piracy is real. If you're in the wrong sector of space you stand a good chance of being warp scrambled and destroyed for whatever is in your hold.

It appeals to me because the system of doing things relies on thinking right before thinking fast. Like the fitting of one's ship and knowing how to use it far outweighs the ability to click rapidly. Preparation and tactical acumen is rewarded far more than reflexes. This applies to the industrial field as well as warfare; maximising one's margins, producing for just slightly cheaper and selling for just slightly more, these are the ways to high profit.

A game that combines tycoon sim and mega-starship command? What larks. And some of the starships get VERY big. A ship I can actually pilot right now can ship two Eiffel Towers stacked end-to-end, room to spare.

Daily I can swap from lengthy mining expeditions turfing out thousands upon thousands of tons of ore an hour, to exploring spacial deviations that contain precious materials and hostiles, to running missions in a swift destroyer packing banks of missiles, even going so far as defending my corporation mates with a battleship with railguns capable of firing over 100km accurately. Mining and construction are my primary passions though - nabbing blueprints for cheap, harvesting my own materials, buying the last few rare parts and selling the results on the open market for a big-ass profit.

It's not all fun and games. There's some scumbags in the community - signing into Mining chat is a bad idea at any point of the day - but you can find some really cool people with a little patience, and eventually find a corporation that you fit with. My corporation (Quantum Mining) is a good bunch, industrialists primarily, all independent though we all have skills that help each other.

Soon it is becoming somewhat free-to-play; a tiered system, wherein those that don't pay have significantly less freedom of development than those that do. It's worth it though. My skills have only recently gone beyond those that would be allowed by the "Alpha Clones" as they will be called. There's still a lot of game to be played there.

So if I ever say I am mining - that is what I mean!

Dirty Casual, Filthy Tryhard

Remember when we used to play games for fun?

I'm not saying games aren't fun. They are. Well, some of them. Everyone finds fun in different places after all. It shows in how the games market has - in the past thirty years - broadened itself massively, and crept into every single aspect of life in some small way or other.

Remember when you could play Beehive Bedlam on your Sky box? Hell, maybe you still can. I burned literally hours on that game at my mate Josh's house. Imagine - I had my very own PC at home, a Sega Megadrive and - after a point - a Sony Playstation; and yet, we still ended up playing Beehive Bedlam.

I'm not sure how or if that ties into the point I am going on to make. It's just a memory I wanted to evoke. What it shows is this: games were already available in all sorts of places, in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Never has that been more true than today, this very moment.

There's the very obvious Triple A market, with its third-person adventure-action style games and first-person shooter shennanigans. There's the race-driving market, the RPG market, and the strategy market, both of which are vaguely niche, both of which are absolutely huge and possess incredible amounts of variety in and of themselves. Then there's the smaller games, the more indie titles that run the gamut from fairly-short-visual-novel to lovingly-crafted-farm-simulator. Looking at games specifically for mobile phones, there's subgenres a-plenty. There's crossovers all over the place.

No wonder, then, that as a community - as gamers - we are internally divided.

I'm not very good at video games. There, I said it. I'm not. I am usually surrounded by people who are better than me. I mean, I have my talents; I like a good turtle in a strategy game, and I'm fairly convinced that my unholy lust for sniping has led to some practice (as a self-deprecating and yet vaguely honorific nickname I sometimes refer to myself as Sniper X, usually just before I miss three body shots in a row).

If a game is too hard, it will take something very special to make me come back to it time and again. Because of this, a lot of games that are classically considered hard - Binding of Isaac, Dark Souls - don't draw me in at all. I'll give them a run, find them very unforgiving, not have much fun, and put them down again. Also, my attention span isn't great; I'll often find myself playing three or four different games of an afternoon, unless I really sink my teeth into one of them.

I think that makes me a casual gamer - but then, honestly...where's the shame in that?

Then there's the tryhards. Oh yes. The tryhards. I have tryharded myself, more than once; often playing something I consider myself quite good at, let's say Supreme Commander or Civ. Running at the higher difficulties, throwing in additional challenges because something something challenge, discarding fun strategies for efficiency and lethality.

...but where's the shame in that?

Honestly it seems to come down to a damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don't scenario. It's not like both echelons of gamer aren't catered to, in the wide world of video games.

You want to talk about division, though - what's your favourite shooting game?

I can predict some of the camps for this one. If I had to set up several different camping fields at FPS-Fest 2016, they'd probably be BattleField, CODField, HaloField, DoomQuakeUnrealField, OtherField and I Don't Play Shooters (parking only).

The savagery of the rivalry there is something to behold, which I think is summed up quite succinctly by this remarkable bit of roasting in regard to the COD Infinity / Battlefield One trailer piss-off. (In terms of the roast, this is actually fucking art. Like even if I was a COD fan I'd have to appreciate it.)

MOBA? DOTA? LOL? SM...ite? MMORPG? WOW? FFXIV? ESO?

Boundaries everywhere, but...here's the thing. The way I see it, it works the same way with metal fans.

Now I'm not a HUGE Pantera fan. Nor am I massively enamoured with Megadeth. If I can't read the name of the band in the logo then I may make a noise through my teeth before giving them a listen. I'm no fan of Cradle Of Filth, Marilyn Manson post-Mechanical Animals leaves me cold, and I may get shot for this but I don't think Iron Maiden will ever top Flight Of Icarus.

However. If I see someone in the street wearing a Megadeth shirt, I know that - in one regard at least - we are on a level. We like different flavours of sonic apocalypse, but we like the apocalypse nonetheless.

Got a Green Lantern shirt on? I'm a Marvel man myself but - ay. We COMIC people. So you're more into Gundam SEED than, well, any OTHER Gundam. That's fine, cos we're Gundamaniacs or whatever the term is for us. Vampire the Masquerade? Roleplayer. Bard? Adventurer. Sebastian Vettel? F1.

I see you, Decepticon fans. I see you, Trekkies who are more into Voyager and Enterprise than DS9. I see you, Lexx lovers. I see you, folks who prefer Scotch to Bourbon. I see you, anyone who would pick a Pokemon that ISN'T Psyduck.

I see you, gamers.

There's a saying that I picked up an age ago. Nobody Beats Up My Brother But Me. I think it holds true. Like I'll lightly grill anyone that swears down that Call Of Duty is the pinnacle of gaming (and that you should only ever play it on a PS4), but I'll stand phalanx-fashion with them the moment the anti-gaming brigade roll out their lawsuits.

All too often we focus on that which makes us different. We dismiss people because we like to feel superior, we like to feel that the thing we are part of is exclusive, and that is a weakness; it's a hollow satisfaction that we gain from putting others down.

So the me that spent an entire afternoon playing Bee Bedlam rather than studying for his A-levels isn't that different to the me that was once called a "good shield guy" for sterling turtle play on SupCom, and the Terran in me isn't so different to the Protoss and Zerg in my buddies Tom and Chris. We're gamers. Different flavours, but gamers nonetheless - and if everybody looked the same, we'd get tired of looking at each other.

...now if only we could get the industry to be more inclusive in and of itself...but that's for another blog.

Quantum Flake

What the hell has happened with modern games?

Stepping away from my previous blog about Ubisoft not finishing games before they are released, so often, we find that the games aren't so much unfinished as...crap. Like crap in ways that it would be easy to not be crap in.

 Take the hotly-tipped premium triple-A title from Remedy Entertainment, Quantum Break.

Now I must admit that I haven't played more than two hours of this game. I freely admit this, so take everything I say with a pinch of salt, but...wow. It is absolute trash.

The writing. Oh lord, the writing. The story is garbage. I've seen better attempts to touch on time travel and manipulation in the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror. I might forgive that if any of the lines explaining aforementioned time travel shennanigans sounded halfway convincing - which they don't. At the very beginning of the game, literally three minutes in, we are expected to believe that the main character's old college roomie has made a machine that traps a micro black hole and uses it to bend time? And creates a LITERAL Time Tunnel? Yes, like that old cartoon which shows in the background in Twelve Monkies? Like the old TV series? A Time Tunnel.

Only it wasn't meant to be the main character you play (Woodplank 1) who was meant to be helping here. It was meant to be main character's brother (Woodplank 2), who is lamentably depicted by Dominic Monaghan, an otherwise thoroughly competent actor. You know it's a bad idea but you have to go along with it, because the guy who wants to continue with his self-admitted highly illegal and utterly FUCKING BATSHIT science experiment (Woodplank 3) wants you to, and that's how you progress in the game.

You get your time-manipulation powers because the dingus that contains a micro black hole breaks and sprays time everywhere. You will get used to hearing the word time. It keeps getting thrown around in case you forget where the powers come from - though honestly they are so generic and forgettable that perhaps the word's repetition is actually necessary.

Okay so terrible story aside - let's focus on gameplay.

It's a third person shooting/action game with cover mechanics. Now, what happens with a game with cover mechanics? You find waist-high walls all over the place and take cover behind them. It's the done thing. Walk up to cover, hit the button, and -

Wait, there's no button? You just walk close enough and hope your character realises he has to duck. The character that went to college with a man that (while seemingly entirely lacking any personality) possesses the kind of genius that can build a miniature black hole in a college laboratory, sometimes fails to duck when being shot at.

What is cover? That is an interesting ask. Well, that wall over there is. These shelves, maybe. Dunno about that thing. You find out by walking up and hoping. If you're low on health, and it turns out that your chosen bit of scenery doesn't tick the mystical Cover box, then you're pretty much boned. Absolutely inexcusable.

The gunplay itself feels...sloppy. Hard to tell where you are shooting, if you're scoring hits - aside from the instant slowmo you get when you clear the last dude from a room. Yes, every time. Yes, it becomes grating after the third time. No, you can't stop it.

This, by the way, is how you play the game. There's some puzzly parts, which involve the use of your time powers.

Ah yes. The time powers. Basically take the generic abilities of any third-person character and slap the word "time" in front, and there you have it - which is basically also how they came up with the plot. The amount of times in the first half hour that you are told that time is going to break, or time is breaking, or time is ending - the word literally starts to lose any sort of meaning. It becomes a drinking game. Every time you hear the word time - take a shot. You'll be fucked up before you even meet Woodplank 4.

All of this...I could perhaps bear. I could perhaps forgive, and play for longer, to see if the issues evened themselves out...

...if it weren't for the "episodes".

The game is arranged into different acts and parts, much like a Shakespeare play. In between each act, the player receives the dubious honour of deciding the main antagonist's course of action - an example being how the standard evil company (like a substandard version of Umbrella) should handle its most recent escapade in time travel related bollocks. Should it spin some kind of PR story to make Woodplank 1 out to be a criminal, and be nice to the students who witnessed their literal breaking of the law? Or should it murder them, and...something something hand wave?

You pick one...and then you get to sit through twenty minutes of the most tedious television you can imagine, detailing the consequences of your decision (vaguely) through the medium of half a dozen characters you simply don't care about. Several of those involved in this are accomplished and talented individuals - so one has to assume that the woodenness and staleness comes from the scriptwriting and direction.

So it's an early-2000 era PS2 game with shonky controls that forces you to watch a bad Netflix series in between each chunk, from the middle.

That's the excuse for a triple A game.

For the amount I paid for it, I bought Enter The Gungeon, Hyper Light Drifter and Factorio. Each of those has held my interest for significantly longer. Each of them is actually fun to play. Hyper Light Drifter has better characters, despite none of them being able to speak, and a better story, despite it all being conveyed to you through weird feverish visions. Enter The Gungeon is a top-down Isaac-style shooter that has better cover mechanics than Quantum Break. How does this happen?

Easy. Spend more on advertising than development.

Don't buy this game. It's rancid dog shit.

Finished Product

When was the last time Ubisoft released a game that was properly finished?

Like, you boot it up, play it, and there's no performance issues or graphical glitches or hilarious gameplay bugs of any kind. Just a nice, neat, finished game that has been properly bug tested and just works straight away.

The Division has been interesting thus far. Perhaps a little grindy, in an attempt to push one toward playing in a team, or just to artificially extend the lifespan of the game. I luckily didn't attempt to play it before the chortle-worthy laptop bug was fixed, but I have experienced a significant amount of other issues. None of them have made the game unplayable. They've just been a bit of a snide chuckle as I think about how much money I spent on it, and how long it was in development.

But then it is a Ubisoft game, isn't it? This isn't a new thing. The face-ripping graphical bugs in Assassin's Creed: Now We're In France, the frankly disappointing Watch_Dogs; Ubisoft as a company are very, very good at putting out a product that isn't quite done yet.

The thing is, this is surely their bread and butter. Like they make games for a living. Right? That's what they do. It's how they earn their money. If a bridge-building firm consistently made bridges that kept falling the fuck over (or at least were a bit wobbly) you'd think the governments of the world would stop giving them money.

I suppose that is how we differ as gamers.

Of course the game isn't going to be finished. They never are. And of course, if you want the best out of it, you're going to want the season pass - a fantastic evolution of paid DLC that means that you can essentially charge double for a game on release day, with the promise that some DLC may be coming out that will be worth it. Borderlands 2 totally over-delivered on that particular score. Other games, well... I'm not so sure.

It's our expectations that are the problem, in my opinion We're very forgiving. We keep pouring money into the same shitpits in the hope that the gold at the bottom will rise to the top, which encourages the companies to keep bulking out the pit with more shit. It makes money. How can it be the wrong thing to do?

I bought The Division and Stardew Valley at the same kind of time. Stardew Valley was a quarter of the price and I have put almost sixty hours into it. The Division has struggled to hold my attention for more than two hours.

Stardew Valley is, simply put, a better game.

Perhaps that is the SNES gamer in me speaking, the man who thinks that three of the best RPGs of all time were released on that console. Perhaps I am too casual for The Division to really grab me by the balls. One thing that can't be argued is that Stardew doesn't fall into a great many of the modern gaming traps that The Division does - and despite the game being coded, developed and essentially made by hand by one single individual (one Eric Barone, aka Concerned Ape), it feels finished. It feels like it is complete when you pick it up. Yes, there will be more - you feel it will be EXPANDED upon - but that is the difference, isn't it? Stardew Valley will get bigger, and you probably won't have to pay the game's cost again in order to experience it.

So how come Ubisoft can't finish a game but one guy can?

And why will we (me included) still end up paying for the unfinished product?

Sometimes I think the only reason the Triple A game industry hasn't been rocked to the core is because we're too busy just hovering up the next release to actually stop and ask questions.

One question you SHOULDN'T ask is if you should be playing Stardew Valley.

Yes. You should.

Two Zero One Six

So what specifically will this year hold?

Well, at the very least I want to finish writing a book. ANY BOOK. Though one of the current projects (either the serious scifi or the rather silly fantasy) would be nice. Just having one done by the end of 2016 would be wonderful.

My major writing project is a scifi - the main character used to be an intelligence agent, who was signed off the job after losing three of her four limbs to a MYSTERIOUS INCIDENT. Due to an odd medical condition, the cybernetic replacements she wears cause her constant pain. She's pissed off with this whole thing - until she's offered a place on a program to develop new power armour, which may be able to use her medical condition as an asset...

It bounces back and forth between the present (the research program, the military side of power armour development, recovery) and the past (military intelligence, tracking a terrorist). That is going to be a challenge - and a whole heap of fun.

What else, what else...?

Gaming. Far more gaming. We deserve games, don't we? Things to make us think more, play more, do more? Yes. Gaming. This will happen.

I have a few games I haven't yet tested. Card games like Aye, Dark Overlord and Boss Monster. RPGs like Microscope, Tom's Shadowrun and James' Star Wars. I think all of these need a good run at the table. In terms of video games, too - well, we'll see.

You know one of the things I am looking forward to the MOST?

One day this year - early this year, before the end of March - myself and a bunch of like-minded psychopaths will be paying a visit to the Prince Charles cinema in Leicester Square, to catch their monthly crowd-participation showing of...

The Room.

SPOONS!!!!!

...and sure I'd like to be healthier and stuff but there's fuck all I can do about that really. That's up to my body.

So what about you? What are your plans, your hopes, your dreams?

Lessons Learned, Pages Turned

Herein is the latest installation of my series about learning lessons from various media. If you're playing the home game, drink if you agree. This is a sequel to my previous posts on this topic - Part 1 and Part 2.

Wreck-It Ralph taught me that I need to stay in my lane. Don't try and be better or anything other than what you are - the moment you try, you've fucked it. ...that's a double-edged sword.

Say Anything taught me that music can convey just about anything better than regular old words can. Especially when delivered personally. Via nineties-era boom-box.

Dog Day Afternoon taught me that love can drive people to extraordinary lengths. And body counts.

Gremlins taught me that stairlifts are very, very dangerous.

Civilization V taught me that as long as you are charismatic enough, anyone will help you, unless you CURSE YOU GHANDIIIIIIII

Die Hard taught me a great way to deal with jet alg and various other minor discomforts and maladies. Seriously, try the grabbing-the-floor thing. It genuinely works.

Inception taught me that I should ignore all of those ridiculous motivational posters telling me to Follow Your Dreams.

Pokemon: The First Movie taught me that all it takes for people to realise that conflict is wrong is to notice the effect it has on two people.

Gone In Sixty Seconds taught me that there is literally no car on earth sexier than a 1967 Mustang with a V8 engine.

The Great Dictator taught me that it's not the people that talk a lot that really deserve listening to - it's the ones that talk so rarely that you know they have something to say.

The Star Wars Prequels taught me that you should just watch the original trilogy. Also that it's far more okay to murder Sand People babies than non-Sand People kids.

Mad Max: Fury Road taught me who killed the world. It also taught me that being witnessed can be very important.

Terminator 2 taught me that even carrying a minigun won't make a white man seem as threatening as an unarmed black man to the authorities.

Pixels taught me to never trust Adam Sandler, and also to just watch Wreck-It Ralph again.

Yet again...more will follow in the future.