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.

The Panama Cabal

If you aren't sure what the Panama Papers are, haven't heard the name Mossack Fonseca or aren't sure why David Cameron is being questioned a lot about his taxes in the last few days, then I might suggest putting this blog down for a minute and taking a gander at whatever news site you think appropriate.

Was anyone actually surprised that this was happening?

Did anyone truly not suspect, at all, that there were companies set up exclusively to ensure that very rich people could dodge taxes in quasi-legal ways?

Nobody should be surprised. Surprised that there is actual paperwork and evidence, yes - but unless you're a buffoon, then you can't think it's never happened.

Isn't that fact in itself a damning indictment of this entire farce?

Nobody wants to pay taxes. Everyone wants to benefit from what those taxes pay for, of course. Everyone wants to eat the lobster, nobody wants to foot the bill. That's just the nature of humanity. We're greedy creatures at heart, and in a society and system that determines success by possessing both Things and Way-To-Get-Things, any means of getting Things without losing Way-To-Get-Things is going to be exploited to the maximum.

There is a bottom rate at the cost of living in any given country. A pure minimum, which is the basest essentials. Anything above and beyond this particular rate, well, here come the taxes. You go shopping, you pay tax. You rent or own, you pay tax. You contribute directly to the welfare of the entirety of society. At least - that is how it is meant to work.
Those on benefits - the people commonly painted as the bad guys whenever the boys from Eton roll out their media machine - spend damn near everything they receive in ways that make it back to the government via tax or otherwise bolster the economy. If what they buy isn't taxed, then it is paid to a shop or corporation that is in itself taxed based on its income. In a way, benefits are an almost guaranteed investment made by a government to itself.

The wealthier you are, though, the more opportunities there are for you to not contribute at all. Churches don't after all. Some companies just choose not to, and when asked about it, offer an insulting paltry sum as a way of indicating they've read the papers and know that people don't like them. Offshore accounts exist. They've existed for a long, long time, and they exist so that the rich can make their money and then keep it to themselves.

Why should anyone else benefit from their hard-earned cash after all? I mean, they earned it all fair and square, right? They earned it working hard just like all of us did, and so they shouldn't have to pay any of it to anyone -

- except for the fact that everyone else pays. The person that shined your shoes this morning pays. The taxi driver pays. The waiter pays, tip or not. The little people in your life all pay. They pay for things that you use, like roads and police and infrastructure and education. They pay and you don't.

You put your money in some account in some foreign nation that by virtue of paperwork means you don't have to pay tax on it, and in doing so, you become the freeloader. Even by HMRC's most conservative estimate in 2012, tax avoidance cost the public four times more than benefit fraud. There are bad apples in both barrels, but the tax barrel is worth a lot more, and those apples stink to high heaven.

And here comes the Panama Papers. Unmasking legions of wealthy individuals twisting the system to further line pockets already stuffed full while the rest of us continue to scrape by. There's been resignations and fall-downs already. Iceland's PM suffered a very public tearing-down.

So now, in this time of austerity, in this time of belts being tightened and people being told to make do with what they have, in this time of us all being in it together, we find out that not only is the Prime Minister deeply implicated in tax avoidance, but several other members of the government could be as well, including the Chancellor, who actually has stakes in a business that in itself doesn't pay tax.

What happens here, you ask?

...nothing.

Nothing, because we're good calves, and we'll just keep eating the grass and getting nice and fat.

In another era, this would have been a powder keg. Protests would have become riots and streets would have burned, and perhaps, rightly so. The anger at the government for hurting all of us so very deeply and in such a hypocritical fashion...it would be a fire so hot the asphalt would melt.

But no. Today everyone shrugs and murmurs about things that don't matter and just go on with their lives. It's easier for us that way. We can absolve guilt with such incredible ease, all the tools have been handed to us for generations. Before the baby boomers even knew who they were, the language and theory behind apathy and denial had set in.

So those that contribute will be painted as leeches, and those that steal will be painted as heroes, and we will just keep on eating it up until we're happy as pigs in shit.

You know what happens to pigs?

The people that own them butcher them for profit.

Time and again, you have been fucking warned.

Forgive the anger, but it's been a bad year.

Chip Off The Old Block

Who here remembers Thatcher?

Now I can't say as I do, but my parents do - distinctly. They lived through that era. They saw what it did to the country. My mother was lucky enough to have an office job, while my dad saw jobs literally vanish.

Now - who here remembers Cameron?

Just the other night I was thinking, and I started to see more and more similarities between the two of them. Or at least, between their respective terms as Prime Minister. Let's take a look at a couple.

Both of them were tough on Europe, or at least tried to be; "No, No, No," the iron lady was famed for saying in 1988, and - until recently - Cameron has touted a staunchly cynical angle (which he backs off from anytime UKIP become too popular).

They both had a habit of helping the wealthiest echelons of society, as well. Thatcher was a strong proponent of trickle-down policies - Reaganomics - that doubled the share of England's income for the top 1% of earners (7% to 14%), and the most recent round of tax breaks and economic legerdemain has helped the rich out a lot more than the poor in Cameron's government.

Wars; Syria and Falklands. Executed differently, approached differently, but equally distant. Equally draining and pointless to us, too. Posturing. Sabre-rattling. Like a reality TV star claiming they've slept with someone famous just to stay relevant in a world that doesn't need or want them.

Both of them studied at Oxford - Thatcher left with a bachelors in Chemistry, and Cameron with Philosophy, Politics and Economics (which was for some reason upgraded to a Masters for no apparent reason).

Their differences, however; they are interesting in and of themselves.

Cameron's only ever had one Chancellor, and that is George Osborne - a man with less economics education than your average twelve-year-old. (As a twelve-year-old I had precious little money of my own so I had to learn to save, a problem that Georgie Porgie has never had, probably.) Meanwhile, two of Thatcher's three Chancellors had educational backgrounds in economics, and one actually worked with money in the banking sector. That's right. John Major was boring because he knew a LOT about money.

Another key difference is that while we are reminded daily of the apparent threat of terrorism, it was Thatcher who was actually targetted by a terrorist attack. Five people died in the Brighton hotel bombing in 1984. Yet more laws are passed today than in 1984 curtailing people's freedoms in the name of fighting said terrorism than ever were under the hostilities of the IRA.

Where does this lead me, I hear you ask?

Both of them sold out our industry.

We all know the old story of the miner's strike. It was cheaper for Thatcher to import German coal than it was for us to produce it ourselves, so - rather than bite the bullet and do right by the workers of the country - things went due south, very fast. So while the financial sector was enjoying something of a boom, your average person was seeing their real earnings vanish - if they had a job at all.

Right now the same thing is happening with our steel. It's easier and cheaper to let it go, and to let the workers bear the brunt, in an economy whose growth is a fart in the breeze. Even despite the increase in minimum wage, even despite the reduction in taxes for most - the cost of living is on the increase, and isn't getting any better.

What does this mean? Probably that it's still going to get worse before it gets better, people. If Cameron's little mob intends on following in the Iron Lady's foosteps, then it's us lower ninety per cent of earners that are going to suffer the most. Some folks just never learned the lessons from the past, and unfortunately, those folks are currently dictating economic policy.

Bet you won't vote for this same shower of bastards NEXT time.

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.

One Hell Of A Woman

I remember a story my aunt told me once, though she wasn't actually my aunt by blood.

She used to live in London, way back when; her mother was a hairdresser, ran a very succesful hairdressing salon. Renee learned everything about cutting hair from her mum. She was a bloody good hairdresser, too.

Well. Once upon a time, a long time ago - Renee wasn't really old enough to do anything but sweep the floor while the rest of the hairdressers did the work. They were keeping the place going, and they were never shy of the glamour girls of the East End sashaying in and paying for the latest styles.

One day this guy walks in, and asks for Renee by name. He goes over, and there she is, holding the broom and looking up at him, this bloke in this razor-sharp suit with a jet-black head of hair and a concerned look on his face.

" 'Ere, Renee," he says. "I 'eard your mum is 'avin a bit of a time of it."

"She's ill, mister," she replies.

"You give that to 'er," he says, as he hands her an envelope. "Tell 'er we wish 'er well."

Then the guy picks up two of the girls who were having their hair done, and he leaves. Renee takes the envelope dutifully up to her mum, never once asking what was in it or who the guy was.

Turns out there was about a thousand pounds in that envelope, which in the fifties was a hell of a lot of money; and when Renee asked who the man was, her mum told him his name was Reggie.

Yes. Reggie Kray.

Renee has pretty much been a grandmother to me ever since I first met her. She's more family to me than a lot of people I share blood with (on one side - I've not had the pleasure of meeting most of the Lebanese side of my heritage, though I'd like to change that). She's been there, for years, throughout the hardest times of my life. I always knew I could count on her particular brand of wisdom, always knowing more than I thought she could about every little thing.

She's been very ill, recently. Very ill. Not the kind of ill one suspects they will get better from. Renee always knew how it would turn out - and I didn't know it at the time, but everything she did was to make it easier for my mother and I to cope with when push came to shove.

The world could do with an army of her, but we were only blessed with one; and I was lucky enough to be part of that life.

Genuinely not sure what we're going to do without you.

Not Born To Pay Bills

It is sometimes a hard thing to deal with depression as a vaguely nihilistic person.

You see a lot of motivational posts all over social media. A lot of these posts talk about purpose, meaning, so on, so forth.

It's great that people can find things like that helpful or soothing or actually motivational, you know? It's nice that the things can actually prove to be useful to folks, because everyone copes differently and everyone needs a different way forwards.

For me, all the motivational stuff makes me feel a little nauseous.

Like...I am sure some of them (if not most, if not all) are made by people who don't necessarily need the motivation they provide. They always strike me as hollow platitudes. Like there is something inherently mindlessly optimistic about it all, like someone that's never lost a limb telling me how it will feel, or someone who isn't drowning smiling calmly and telling me that it'll be okay, just picture the oxygen entering my lungs.

More than that, though - more than that is the notion that there's something beyond, and if only I believe in it, then it'll give me the strength to do the next thing. Which I can't do. Because if the recovery is built on the belief in something that can't be proven, then there's nothing to keep it all from falling down when you have that moment of doubt. All that can hold it together is your belief, your unshakeable belief...

...and you are better off devoting that to yourself.

"You were not born to just pay bills and die," one of them says. That's true. In truth? You weren't born for anything at all. You were born because of point A leading to point B, and the cell separation at point C, and the birth at point D. You're not here FOR anything. You're here BECAUSE you were conceived.

My function is to keep going. I wasn't put here with a purpose. Happiness is the one thing that should be pursued without question - though not at the cost of other people's. What else is there? All life demands is sufferance. We owe it to ourselves to make that as easy on us as possible.

Something my dad used to say, when he was very, very sick. "All I want is a peaceful life." I think that is what all people want, in a way. More than to be wildly succesful, more than to be vastly wealthy or permanently entertaining; we want to be able to breathe, to take time and to have that time to ourselves.

We spend a significant proportion of our lives doing things to try and achieve that peace. The average citizen of the UK works 1,677 hours a year. We go through school, we try and normalise, we go through everything that is expected of us just so we can get to a point where we have warmth and shelter and a lack of hunger. Then we have to keep it up - we run on the spot to keep that place. We put ourselves through daily experiences that lead to heart conditions and buildups of stress just so we have somewhere to go and sit and not be stressful anymore.

That's the life we have, the cards we are dealt. All we can do is try and change it to something better, and find our peace and our happiness as best we are able.

That's something to believe in.

War Isn't Over

The three-way split between working class, middle class and upper class is something that has typified much of British history. Who doesn't remember this particular classic comedy sketch?

 The imagery associated with classism is something that is inseperable from the global image of the United Kingdom. Just think of how we are presented in films originating from other countries. (Dick Van Dyke, I am looking at you.)

The thing is, of course, such class warfare doesn't exist anymore. ...right?

...well, wrong. It just looks different.

I wrote this blog post over a year ago about - amongst other things - elite panic and the widening gap between the rich and the poor. Sure, the entire notion of breeding and familial obligation doesn't really come into the upper class any more - these days, it's wealth and power, pure and simple. Perhaps, in days of yore when the upper class were held to certain rules and expectations (that they still broke regardless but anyway), things might have been a touch...fairer.

Today, though, the gap between the top and bottom of the scale continues to grow. The gulf is vast and increases every year. The top end tax rate has dropped by 15% in the past 30 years, whereas the income share of the top 1% of earners has doubled from 6% to 12% in the same amount of time, according to the OECD. The average income of the lowest 10% of earners has actually reduced, in real terms, compared to the cost of living.

Wealth changes your view of the world - your perspectives on things. Almost everyone takes some things for granted, and those things differ depending on circumstance.  Perhaps that doesn't create the rigid First World War-like expectations of class divide, but it does create boundaries - and those boundaries create shared self-interest.

When you get down to it - that is what class is. A social group within a divisive stratified system. It's a system that is not only designed to create such divisions, but also to expand the gap between them. That is how it defines itself - its measures for success are also its lines of demarcation.

No longer are our classes dictated by the colour of our collars (or if we wear them at all). Nor are there only three - if I wanted to try and divide them up I'd have to do some real study, though as a starting model I might use the results of this study here.

How does this affect you and I? Well...that's not strictly for me to say, aside from perhaps drawing attention to who makes the decisions regarding the rules and regulations of this country. The people that suffer the most from the decisions are almost always those diametrically opposed to those making those decisions. More and more, we low earners are encouraged to look at each other with suspicion, or to look down on those below us, or to enviously stare up at the heady heights we can't access - because then we won't realise how rigged the game is.

After all, it's an old trick to get all your junior execs to work twice as hard. Tell fifty of them that if they work their guts out, and if they do that, they will get to be a senior exec and earn five times as much. That way you only (eventually) have to pay one of them the extra, for all that added effort.

...just a thought, mind. Just a thought.