Noted, Thanks!!

This is a blog. Blogs are for writing about stuff. Maybe I'll do that. MAYBE I WON'T

[zecrocodil]

This track just popped up again on iTunes and now I'm pretty sure Risk of Rain's final level should be every game's final level.

Mechanically the game tells you JUMP JUMP SHOOT KILL. Z, COOLDOWN, X, COOLDOWN, JUMP SHOOT JUMP V, COOLDOWN. Kill, kill, dodge, kill. Perfect timing, perfect training. You've survived everything and you'll survive this.

Musically it looks at you sadly, shakes its head and turns away. It knows what you've done, what you are. He was the Bulwark of the Weak. How could you?

[zecrocodil]

Rawr, finally finished 6-5, the only level I couldn't manage to solve the first time through. Apparently there's a third Hexcells game in development; I'll definitely be picking that up. The amount of time I spent in Minesweeper some years ago is pretty ridiculous, but this is like Minesweeper perfected. Bullshit guesswork replaced with clever, intricately designed boards; multiple, overlapping modes of information; crisp, clear visuals rather than tiny grey boxes, puzzles with enough elegance to stand alone without need of a time limit for pressure, and a calming ambient soundtrack to dissolve any possibility of frustration. Lovely stuff.

[zecrocodil]

Fuck "pretentious".

It gets my nomination for World’s Worst Word. Sure, there are a lot of obvious competitors; words people consider inherently offensive that get used pretty horribly all the time, but that's actually why this one wins: despite its more benign nature it beats out most others in the consistency of its horribleness.

I don't know. Maybe there's a whole society of much smarter people out there who use "pretentious" in somehow perfectly valid ways on a regular basis. But I don't think I've met them. My experience is that 98.65% of uses of the word pretentious are in fact incredibly pretentious, far more so than anything they could be talking about.

Because what are you doing when you call something pretentious? You're saying its creators (or fans, perhaps) are imbuing it with an importance it doesn't deserve - that they're being somehow disingenuous in their appreciation of this thing. I usually see it in reactionary responses to fairly niche products that most people don't like; the idea generally seems to be that because Bob doesn't see any appeal in the widget, Alice must have some ulterior motive for liking it. Often there's some accusation - implied or explicit - that Alice "just wants to look smart/edgy/cool". It couldn't possibly be that Alice simply has different tastes to Bob due to a different set of life experiences, and that both tastes are in fact valid. No, Bob has to imbue his opinion about Alice's motivations with such importance that it outweighs Alice's rebuttals, when one would think she should be the authority on herself. But Bob's opinion is a guess, it's unfounded, so it can't possibly deserve the importance he's giving it, and so he's making a pretentious statement, based on his imagined expertise at judging others/mindreading.

And I don't get it. Is it actually difficult to acknowledge that some people like things, some people don't like them and that's okay? You can have really interesting, human discussions about all the reasons why you each feel the way you do without resorting to nonsensical and insulting guesswork about each other's intentions. Give people the benefit of the doubt, internet.

[zecrocodil]

Spoiler warning etc

Okay, so I've reached the end of Transistor, Supergiant's follow-up to the superb Bastion. The game gives you a lot to think about, a lot of questions without clear answers, and while I very much enjoyed the journey - it has some really clever and beautiful ideas - I can't help but wish some more of the wonder of this post-game wondering had made in into the game world itself. As the end of an opening paragraph, that may sound like more of a complaint than it really is; I haven't figured that out yet.

The game begins in media res - and not even a menu asking you to click Start, a nice touch in itself - with the player character, a singer named Red, pulling the titular Transistor from the body of her apparent lover. The "sword" has physically killed him, but his consciousness has been absorbed into it and he serves as the game's voice. Red's voice, meanwhile, has been somehow "stolen" in the altercation that lead up to the game's beginning. Red and boyfriend/sword head out to find the Camerata, a secretive group responsible both for his "death", and the unleashing of something called the Process which has begun to take over the city.

For the first hour or so, the game didn't really grab me. The world had given up a few interesting tidbits, like that the citizens of Cloudbank - the city in which Transistor is set - can change even the weather and the colour of the sky through a democratic vote at terminals dotted across the city. But mostly I was just going through the motions; pressing E on every object the game automatically highlighted for me, and engaging in honestly pretty bland combat with the Process - start planning, get behind enemy, hit them three times, run away, repeat.

But the systems that drive the combat gain complexity fairly quickly, thanks to the fact that each ability ("function", in the game's terms) that you gain can be used in three different ways: an active attack, an upgrade for other abilities, or a passive boost. You only need to gather about five of them before the amount of combinations you have in front of you starts to hit a comfortable breadth, and there are sixteen in total. They can be rearranged, plugged into each other in different ways at regular locations which double as save points, and the game actively encourages you to try new combinations by rewarding you with bits of narrative.

Because actually, the functions are four things, not three: they're also characters, or the remnants of characters. You receive many of the functions (perhaps all of them, I don't quite remember) in much the same way as the opening scene plays out: a dead body will leave a "trace" of the person, and your boyfriend/sword can speak to them and absorb them into the Transistor. But this aspect of the game felt underplayed to me; in terms of both mechanics and narrative, the functions are less characters than files on characters. These files, gradually built up as you play, perform much the same function as audio diaries in Bioshock, just earned through exploration of ability combinations rather than exploration of the game world.

Now I've nothing in particular against audio diaries, so that's not really a criticism in itself - they're there to both paint a backdrop of Cloudbank as a vital, diverse city and to dripfeed you important nuggets of exposition, and they do that. My problem, I guess, is that they weren't enough. I wanted to know these characters better than three paragraphs of backstory allows. I wanted to know Cloudbank better than that allows. The game is very much about tragedy and perhaps there is real tragedy in this not getting to know more, but only if I know enough to care first, and I never really felt that I did. The gradual "destruction" ("overwriting") of Cloudbank by the white plague of the Process should be wonderfully horrific, or at least sad (sad would probably be more tonally consistent with the rest of the game, I guess). But the Cloudbank I knew never felt like a living city, it felt like an empty series of alleyways and rooftops populated with unfeeling robots for me to dutifully smash. The game took so long getting around to telling me (not showing me, perhaps importantly - as much as I generally dislike that mantra) about the city and its inhabitants that I didn't have time to feel a sense of loss because the game was already over.

So Cloudbank, for me, wasn't an interesting city. It is an interesting mystery though. The most straightforward mystery is whether the city is "real" - the game throws a pretty long list of indicators at you that it is in fact "virtual" in some sense. The name Cloudbank itself evokes some kind of online storage, and the names of other places, like the club where Red sings, The Empty Set, as well as various mentions of Ports and Channels (and of course, the Transistor and the Process, Functions, etc), add up to a feeling of more-than-coincidence - these don't seem to be "just" a bit of cyberpunk wordplay.

There's also the notion of the city as the extent of the world. You hear a news story about the uncontrolled and incredibly fast spread of the Process, and your companion worries about the fate of "this town". Nobody mentions the fate of the world, even though the Process don't look like stopping. Why not worry about that, unless there is no broader world? Similarly, "going to the Country" is used repeatedly as what sounds like some kind of euphemism for death (or perhaps "going offline" or something similar, I'm less interested in that) - which carries an inherent acknowledgement that not existing, in whatever sense, is the only alternative to being in the city. This aspect recalls the Thief series, where to its inhabitants, the city is so all-encompassing and all-providing that it doesn't even have another name, it's just The City. I still can't decide whether it was a mistake for Thief 2 to take you beyond The City in that submarine level - whether it would have been better to uphold the mythology.

I don't mean to sound like these are major, unique insights (or even "correct" perspectives). As I said this is one of the simpler mysteries of the game; I'm well aware plenty of people are spending a lot of time discussing every little detail and building grand theories about the nature of the Transistor, Cloudbank, the Process, even the game's Recursion mode (New Game+). I just mean to highlight how much I appreciate the care with which the game was clearly put together, down to little linguistic cues, and to point out what seems an oddity: that in many ways this is a game that's more interesting to me in retrospect than during play. While I was playing, the narrative didn't really grip me - I wanted to love Cloudbank, but I didn't; I wanted to be horrified/disgusted/saddened by the advance of the Process, but I wasn't. And yet, with the game over, it's occupied a lot of my thoughts since, mulling over motivations, possibilities, connections I didn't make at the time because I was too busy being funneled along a robot-filled path (not that I didn't enjoy killing robots in 42000 different ways!).

The soundtrack is predictably excellent, bridging the gap between the electronic mechanics of Red's encounters with the Process, and the softer noir undertones of the city. I especially loved the "hum" button, which does exactly what it says, letting you take some downtime to have Red stop and layer her own version of the game's melodies over the existing music. I love this appreciation of "non-gameplay" gameplay. Things that exist for no mechanical reason, and not really any strict narrative reason, but they nonetheless bring an important degree of humanity to the game world.

On the less humane front, the core gameplay is basically a series of semi-turnbased battles with a variety of Process creatures, and with all the complexity allowed you, it's very solid by the end of the game. You can fashion a huge range of playstyles from the various function combinations; some of my favourites were:

a passive ability that spawns an explosive "packet" every ten seconds, coupled with a bouncing main attack that will set them off whenever they appear,

adding a "splitting" function to the conversion function, letting me run around converting multiple enemies to my side and having them kill each other,

take a dash move, add a slowing, damage-over-time bolt, and that same "splitting" function, and you can dash around the battlefield dropping electric balls in your path and slowing groups you land near

and for laughs, adding the summoning function to the previous multiple conversion tactic summons a huge amount of tiny annoying drones to your side. Mass distraction, little damage, graphics overload.

For endgame battles, I settled on an uninspiring-but-effective technique of lowering an enemy group's defences three times, running behind them and unleashing a large, powerful area attack; this killed pretty much anything instantly. Potential balance concerns aside though, one problem I had by endgame was that the "semi-turnbased" nature of the battles had been evaporating over the course of the game. When my "pause and take your turn" ability was recharging I felt close to useless, and increasingly relied on the dash, conversion and invisibility moves to basically wait out this period...at which point I may as well be playing an actual turn-based game, right?

To be fair, there are doubtless skill setups that work better in the realtime aspect - there's a health regen function which only works when it's not your turn, and a function that can upgrade any other skill to be faster and usable while your turn is recovering. I'd be concerned I'd feel like I was missing the point then, but maybe I'll give it a try when I "Recurse" through the game again.

The Process creatures that you face gradually learn new tricks as you progress, and are all pretty well-defined with their own roles that often complement each other well - chasers that can turn invisible, artillery that leave a slowing trail when you chase them yourself. But generally speaking I had very little trouble fighting anything on my first run through the game. There are special "challenges" available which are a bit more puzzly though, which insert a bit more thought into the whole affair.

What I would really have liked to see would be a bit more activity other than combat. The Transistor is quite literally the key to the city - it can change anything up to and including the colour of the sky at whim. But for plot reasons it's just a weapon for 98% of the game, and the "functions" absorbed into it, seemingly the "essence" or even consciousness of living people, just end up being shooty beams or bombs or stat debuffs. I started just briefly into a second playthrough and was reminded that very close to the start there's a small "puzzle" where you have to use the time-stop feature to plug the Transistor into two switches simultaneously to open a bridge. This is literally the one game mechanic that never occurs ever again in the game, and as such it feels really odd now, like this sort of puzzle aspect was intended to be part of the game and then abandoned. Combined with the lategame scenes where the Process aren't hostile, just doing their "work" or even staring at your poster, showing that there is perhaps space in this world for "NPCs" of some variety, I'd have loved to see what the devs could have come up with in a game that wasn't entirely filled with fighting. They say it's not fair to judge games for what they're not, so I should reiterate that Transistor was excellent and I'm glad I bought it, but I would have loved to have seen that Cloudbank.

[zecrocodil]

This world is a machine. A machine for pigs. Fit only for the slaughtering of pigs.

I was basically sold on Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs from the moment The Chinese Room and Frictional Games put out the first teasers. The initial announcement was basically just some concept art, the game's title, and a quote, and that's all it took to know I'd like it. It was an astonishingly ugly title, but for this game that wasn't a bad thing, it was a promise - an almost gleeful promise (I expect Dan Pinchbeck did a fair bit of grinning after deciding upon "A Machine For Pigs") to show us the grotesque, the macabre, the insane and the bizarre. Having just completed it [this post was an old draft I'm just now getting back to] I think it succeeded wonderfully.

There's a lot (and I mean a lot) of complaints flying around about this game. The "it's not scary!" is not really worth engaging with: that happens with every game that even vaguely markets itself as a horror title, even if yes, there are less monsters here. The more notable attitude is "They've ruined Amnesia!", or, more calmly if not that much more rationally, "It would have been a good game if it wasn't called Amnesia". These refer to the admittedly quite significant changes made from the original game - AMFP features no inventory, no health meter, no sanity meter. You won't scavenge for lantern fuel - it never runs out - and will consequently spend a lot less time opening drawers and cupboards. As should probably have been expected from the developers of Dear Esther, this is a much less mechanical game than A Dark Descent.

Fundamentally I don't understand the objection, really. Nobody promised that sequels must be the same as their predecessors - indeed, if you wanted to play the same game again...why spend any money at all? Even the word "sequel" almost seems wrong; AMFP has never been marketed as "Amnesia 2" - it began as a very short side project, basically an officially endorsed fan mission, and just happened to inspire enough ideas in the developers to let them build it into a "full-size" game.

Sure, okay, people buying Amnesia expect Amnesia. If you suddenly made it a game about running a bakery with your grandmother and a talking frog named Pierre, that would be stretching it too far. But firstly, well, this isn't that. it's still a game about wandering carefully through creepy, dimly lit environments, avoiding monsters and discovering clues about what's going on; making claims that it's somehow unrecognisable seems pretty hyperbolic to me. Okay, the line being drawn here is entirely subjective, but that just brings me to my second point: the subjective nature of that line should tell people that they have to do their homework or accept the risk involved in not doing it.

I see this in a lot of the many (oh god so many...so, so many) over-the-top or outright irrational complaints about Early Access, too. What's so often asked for (in a more roundabout way) is zero risk - developers being obligated to deliver X features in Y timeframe equalling Z amount of fun, with red flags going up at any sign of uncertainty or deviation. Now, I've spent way too much time on forums attempting to demonstrate the dumb impracticality (indeed impossibility) of this class of demand, but it's kind of low-hanging fruit. What's more interesting to me is not the way that it's dumb, but the way that it's scary.

Because what it comes down to is consumers demanding the ability - no, the right - to throw money at anything and have it turn out okay. And while on some level I can see the utopian dream in there, any kind of world where we aren't all just one big interconnected mind keeps it an impossibility. Which means that these demands end up being the active advocacy of completely uncritical zombie consumerism. "Buy before you think" is the world people want to live in? There's your horror story.

[zecrocodil]

look I did it I can post things that have nothing to do with videogames

LIAR THAT'S DOOM 2 RIGHT THERE

shut up

[zecrocodil]

Last post December 2012, you say.

People might tell you chemistry is about electrons or equations or other such nonsense. Don't listen to them. It's about boiling all the things.

Uni's done for another semester, and one of the assignments for my subject Skills for the Professional Chemist was a "Science Reflective Journal"; a place where we were to reflect on our learning experiences past and present, on specific questions, and on anything else we thought was appropriate for useful reflection. I haven't got the final mark back but the intermediate feedback was 85% so I expect I'll be okay. I don't know if writing three and a half pages about SpaceChem and the ways it relates to science and learning will be considered appropriate at all, but no way was I going to risk going through an entire science degree without mentioning the world's best fake-chemistry game in an assessment task.

Anyway, point is it involved a lot of writing, and did a little to break me out of only writing in the form of forum responses. I get trapped in that mode of thought - only expressing ideas when prompted by someone else's thoughts - far too easily, and it becomes kind of toxic after too long. Initiative is not my strong suit at the best of times, but keeping everything internalised ends up spreading beyond just writing habits. So now that I have a few more weeks free I'm going to see about reviving this blog. I say that in the knowledge that I attempt to revive whereever it is I'm "currently writing" every couple of years with not a whole lot of success in maintaining it, but hey, a short run is better than no run at all.

First up? I dunno, the Steam sale just finished, so I have some new games to play. That's an appropriately predictable topic; we wouldn't want to pull a muscle writing anything too interesting. Related: I have to at some point deal with the part of my brain that insists I only ever write about videogamey things, because hey, big world out there etc etc.

[zecrocodil]

What do we call these games? The kind that demand exceptional dexterity and perseverance, are completely unforgiving of mistakes, and yet so goddamn fair in their challenges and so quick to put you back on your feet that you can't help but smile every time you lose? In my head I was going to say "challenge games" but that's woefully nonspecific.

Nonetheless, I haven't played one this good since Super Meat Boy. Okay, so I haven't played many at all, but I'm not going to say nonetheless again. Super Hexagon doesn't share Super Meat Boy's sadistic streak though (I don't feel like the levels are actively out to get me), instead it's just a pure arcade skill test. A pretty trippy one, at that.

I love the way games like this break you down and build you back up, and how it feels to observe this happening in yourself. You go into the game as you go into anything - with your full repertoire of mental and physical skills at the ready. But if you pay attention to your play, it's amazing how many mistakes are easily traced back to one cause: "I'm still thinking. I need to stop that."

Super Hexagon presents you with what's initially something of a sensory overload - the visuals are an almost mesmerising lo-fi vortex, there's no safe, "slow" place to move to or even look, there's no downtime once you press space to start (and restart, and restart, and restart), and the soundtrack pounding in your ears isn't there to help you contemplate your next move. To play, to survive past five seconds, you have to drop your focus, see the whole screen at once and let your brain fall back to low-level pattern recognition.

And then it all speeds up and you realise that's not good enough; you are actually going to need to think after all, but you needed to learn not to first.

And after all that, I love how you can feel how much better you've become. The challenge in a game is a kind of resistance you feel pushing back against you as you play, and when you've spent a while dealing with the challenges of something like Super Hexagon or Super Meat Boy, going back to have another look at an earlier level is like coming in from a storm. It's calm, and clear, and everything seems to work neatly and quietly compared to the noise outside. Games don't have to have this kind of relentless pace to feel this effect (I felt it in something like Spacechem even, as splitting up puzzles into smaller subroutines became more automatic), but so many games blow so light a breeze at you that you don't get to feel it at all (for example, I'm playing Dragon Age 1 & 2 again at the moment - very breezy). Which is not a fault, at all, it's just refreshing to be out in the OKAY ENOUGH WITH THE WEATHER METAPHOR

[zecrocodil]

Games of the whenever - A Roguelike...

I wrote this post a long time ago, and intended to follow it with "...and a Roguelikelike", a post about Ed Mcmillen's lovely and horrible The Binding of Isaac. But I never wrote the second piece, so here's to doing things by halves.

I've never been big into roguelikes. A lot of the individual ideas are things that often work for me in games - heavily randomised levels, character building, a pace slow enough to plan and deep gameplay systems that reward doing so - but at least with traditional representatives of the genre, the presentation has always put me off. Whatever it says about me and how terribly shallow I am ("gameplay over graphics, dude!"), I have a hard time empathising with a @ or a & or whatever it is represents me in each particular game, and I don't want to fiddle around importing tilesets just to get some remotely tolerable representation happening. I'm sure I'm missing some very deep and engaging experiences, but honestly there are too many games to play already for that to matter.

Dungeons of Dredmor, then, is a roguelike for people like me. It follows the basic genre formula of a randomised, turn-based, unforgiving dungeon crawl, but it chooses to be far more approachable about the whole thing - well, as much as the "unforgiving" part of that allows.

Here's how the game goes: you create your character by picking a few of several dozen available skills, which you'll develop as you play. Once you're satisfied with, say, a sword-wielding, potion-brewing, vegan mathemagician, you step into dungeon level one. You see some diggles - cute, waddling drill-beaked creatures. You attack the diggles. There are too many diggles. Before you know it, the game pops up the message "Congratulations! You died".

You make a new character.

That congratulatory death message is as much a joke as it is an astute observation of the genre. Character death in roguelikes is a horrible tragedy, because you were doing so well! But at the same time...it's completely inconsequential; a normal and expected end of the vast majority of dungeoneering attempts, which only serves to renew your spirit, maybe even try things differently this time. You know how far you got, you know you can do better, and a few seconds of grief is quickly replaced by intense, earnest planning of your next adventure.

That's probably made easier by the fact that Dredmor doesn't have a serious bone in its body. Well, except the murder bone, of course. But other than that one, everything else is pretty silly. You'll get an ingot press to transform ore into metal you can smith a new sword out of, and you'll notice you can also just put cheese and bread in to make a toasted sandwich. You'll summon Moustache Golems. You'll study Emomancy to project your existential angst onto enemies. You'll pray to Inconsequentia, the Goddess of Pointless Sidequests. It could be that in a lesser game the endless jokes and pop-culture references would get tiresome, but Dredmor escapes that by not relying solely on jokes to define itself (and/or because it's genuinely clever, of course, but I'm actually less interested in whether that's true). It isn't a generic game with WHOA, HOW WACKY! silliness tacked on to get more sales, it's a really well designed game that just happens to be built by maniacs.

This is the kind of game that I am constantly drawn back to, primarily thanks to the incredible amount of possible character types to try out. Thanks to a few expansion packs (one of which consisted entirely of fan-made content), there are now 51 skill trees from which to compose your seven-skilled character, and that's only if you're choosing not to use mods, which are now helpfully integrated into Steam's Workshop feature. I do end up making characters more than playing them - because half the fun is thinking up new combinations - so I have a roster of ready-made heroes waiting to descend to their doom, from the crossbow-wielding paranormal investigator to the communist, vampire tourist.

Or should I start a pirate warlock trained in magical law....or a viking berserker/archeologist? A shape-shifting Werediggle burglar? Maybe a necronomiconimist banker...

[zecrocodil]

So somebody made a forum thread about "essential games", which was actually not about essential games but a sort of "games that defined your taste" kind of thing. Or something. And I really wanted to reply, but there'd be a lot of writing just to list the relevant games, but nobody wants to just read some list, so I'd have to write about each one, which is fine barring the whole length thing again. But I'd also end up leaving things out, and I hate leaving things out, especially if you're trying to do something like illustrate your taste even though that's a completely impractical endeavour in the first place so nobody would really be expecting perfection but but and and and and

so anyway, the point is I decided to write some more posts about games I like here, since it's been a dead blog for most of the year. Actually no, I don't really care that it's been a dead blog, I care that I haven't been writing anything that isn't part of the call-response loop of forum posts and news site comment threads (not to denigrate my wonderful work in comment threads, stalkers know I'm the best at that; I'm telling people off in comment threads for the local paper for the town I don't live in anymore, woo!)

[zecrocodil]

Dear Esther

So Dear Esther was released. And I played it. And it was good.

As someone who loved the original mod, it was I suppose expected that some things didn't hit me as hard as they did then. Because except for the redesigned caves, I knew basically what was up ahead at all times, in some cases I knew which topics the "narrator" (for lack of a better word) would be getting to soon, and I knew how it all ended. That kind of prior experience is going to at least partially dull the emotional impact of pretty much any work, and this was no exception. So after wandering through the first chapter being amazingly impressed but not entirely engaged, it was actually something of a surprise was when things slid into place and the game gripped me as it had done the first time.

It was a sleeping bag that did it. After a slow climb away from a small bay and the wreckage of a container ship, I came to a little two-room bothy on top of the hill. Flashlight turns on as I peer inside; on the table is a pile of books, a few cans and other bits of junk around the floor. Stepping into the next room, I turn to my right and see the sleeping bag laid out, either on the floor or on a small raised bed. There may also have been a suitcase or clothes in the room, I don't remember, and it doesn't matter. Because the thought in my head was now "yes, you could actually camp here - this could be a real place and I could stop here for the night, and really, stay as long as I wanted". It wasn't even the first sign of human life on the island - I started at a lighthouse, I'd found empty paint cans, lines drawn in the sand of the beach, books laid by standing stones, markings on cave walls. But the sleeping bag was a sign of inhabitation, and part of me took it as an invitation to see this world as inhabitable.

So - and I find this quite fascinating - I found myself quickly looking up at the ceiling of this virtual dwelling, checking for leaks in case of rain. I stepped back out into the doorway and looked over the surrounding area. In some small corner of my mind, I noted that you might not be able to secure the outer doors, but would probably be able to stay fairly warm inside regardless; and also that an outer wall was damaged, but it was on a separate section and that the two main rooms were sound. In short, I made the mental checks that one might really make were they to stumble across an abandoned shack in the wilderness. Why? I don't know. I wasn't going to sleep there, obviously, and I certainly wasn't concerned about getting cold or wet. None of these thoughts, none of this behaviour was relevant to any particular goal presented by the game, and beyond "huh, someone stayed here", wasn't relevant to any part of the "story" or whatever it is that Dear Esther presents on that front. And yet this was me, acting in the world on my own impulses, impulses that were triggered by some culmination of all the game had delivered up to that point - the experience of walking, alone, across some cold, windswept Hebridean island.

A player acting in the game world based on feedback received from the the game could generally be called gameplay. As much as I dislike that word for the mechanical focus it usually implies, I nonetheless feel it's important to stress that while Dear Esther is absolutely an experiment in stripping back first-person gameplay to a minimum, gameplay still very much exists here. It's in the simple acts of walking and looking, which are usually taken for granted, but I think this game shows just what powerful tools they can be. Others might see Dear Esther's experiment as being like stripping back a supporting rope to a few thin strands, but to me it's more like an orchestra holding their instruments still while a soloist plays. The gameplay here isn't weaker, it's just...less noisy.

I stress that because there's a lot of people out there declaring that this is "not a game", and I don't think it's helpful. I'm less concerned with the people who don't like the game and are looking for ways to dismiss it - those people exist for every game and generally people aren't going to listen to them unless they already agree. My concern is more with people who actually do like Esther, or at least respect it, and yet would rather it were not seen as a "real" game, instead being shoved off into some corner like "interactive fiction" where nobody ever has to see it. Some of these people are only trying to help manage the expectations of those who might otherwise go in hoping to see Myst-like puzzles or something, but still, I think it's bad for gaming as a whole if people start to actively exclude things on the basis that they're not about killing monsters, solving the mystery, getting the girl, winning and losing.

Games are so often maximalist affairs - fill every corner, explain every detail, occupy every moment. And, you know, that's fine. But Dear Esther, on the other hand, is an exercise in ambiguity and incompleteness, and I think those ideals, along with all the potential for engaging the player in a more quiet, reflective, internal way, could be of incredible value were more developers to think about making use of them.

And I didn't even get around to talking about the caves. I don't really feel like it's necessary to sit here and pile on praise about the levels being pretty, and the soundtrack wonderful, and the voice acting good etc etc. I did that in my last post about the game after all :) But I kind of want to mention that while the first two chapters have their own kind of beauty (indeed there's something painterly about the water on those rocky coastlines that I adored), the final two are stunning, especially the caves. It's not just a pretty level. It's gut-wrenchingly beautiful, and for me at least, travelling through them was just about a palpable physical experience, one that works so well because you then come out of it. You've gone through this untouchable, fantastical real/unreal tunnel, and have been turned back out onto the cold, wet beach. Same as where you left off, but darker. Enlightened? Resigned? Hard to say. Dear Esther plays its cards differently for everyone anyway, but it's definitely an experience worth having.

[zecrocodil]

The original release of Dear Esther, a Source mod released in 2009, was beautiful. Lead by Dan Pinchbeck of the University of Portsmouth, it was intended as an experiment in paring back "gameplay" to the bare essentials - you move, look, and listen. But it was also a haunting, moving journey through a mind lost in grief, clinging to fading, muddled memories and scrambling for explanation. The only thing that could be said to have let it down was the levels themselves; often quite primitively realised, with not always enough direction, some clipping issues, sound trigger overlaps, the occasional unexpected kill trigger jarring the experience. These were fairly obvious flaws, but everything else was so strong that they became at worst minor quibbles.

Still, they'll be quibbles no longer. The remake, at the hands of former DICE environment artist Robert Briscoe, has transformed Dear Esther into something that, in places, hardly even looks like it could be possible in Source (those caves!). With Nigel Carrington's voicework being expanded upon too, and Jessica Curry's amazing soundtrack being re-recorded, this is really going to be something special.

[zecrocodil]

Mysteries

This scene (and I suppose some threads leading up to it) shows that Bioware have, you know, writers. Mordin feeling regretful, and conflicted about his work was a wonderful moment of quiet reflection. It was genuine, heartfelt, moving and...important. It validated the cinematic approach the game took as being more than just impressive for Transformers-style explosionfests. It's one of the best scenes in an RPG in recent years.

But every single scene remotely involving this guy:

...is utter nonsense, and seemingly demonstrates that Bioware's writers are locked up in the back room and forbidden from working on the central "main quest" narrative. Instead, I'm informed, some guy called Bob does those, after he's cleaned the cafeteria. Who makes these decisions, you ask? Bob does that too.

Please, Bioware. I understand you like Bob, he's a nice guy, I know. But he's pretty easily pleased, and I'm sure he'd still be happy if he only got to script a few Volus on a minor space station somewhere. I'm just asking you to switch it around a bit for Mass Effect 3 - give Bob a sidequest or two and bring the writers back out for the main parts - and see how it goes.

[zecrocodil]

Gussing it up, SPUF edition.

Reposted from the Steam forums, re a suggestion proposing the introduction of achievement scoring (ala Xbox Live), possibly even the awarding of free games for getting your score high enough.

The current system lets people see what their friends have actually done. That's great. If individuals want to invent their own metrics on top of that, whatever, that's their business. But Steam shouldn't be involved in promoting the fantasy that an imposed valuation of achievements could be an objective assessment, or could in any way accurately reflect the realities involved in getting them. Comparing by a score involves making arbitrary decisions about the "worth" of individual achievements. That's so subjective that the system as a whole cannot end up being anything other than meaningless. And people crave this meaningless comparison? They want to be able to look at the twenty points they have, and say they're "beating" the fifteen points their friend has, even though those scores were decided on by different developers and required entirely different skill sets to attain? Why? Is competition so important you have to do it even when the competitors aren't even following the same rules as each other? I mean it's not like Steam is short on ways for you to compete with your friends for score, is it? Generally we call those "games", there are a whole variety of different ones to try. I have wondered if we'd eventually see requests for another layer - meta-achievements for earning a gamerscore for earning achievements for playing games. But it seems the idea is that after gamerscore, you jump straight into getting actual games. And I know you only put it forward as a possibility, OP, but...wow. People actually want material reward for being entertained? I mean yeah, I'd love that too, if someone gave me free stuff for enjoying myself in my free time that would be fantastic...but it's a bit mad to seriously ask anyone to do that for you, surely. It's just weird, this whole thing. I'm not some achievement-hating traditionalist arguing for the status quo - I think achievements have good uses and are at the very least a cheap way for a developer to add some more goals to keep some people interested. But Gamerscore is a bad idea. It says to people, quite falsely, that vastly different experiences can and should be reasonably reduced to a simple numeric value, and that comparing those values against your friends says...anything at all. It's utter nonsense, and it shouldn't be encouraged. It's bad enough that so much of the gaming press still insists on hundred-point scoring systems, leaving a whole generation of gamers that seriously think there's a difference between a 94 game and a 95 game. Fake objectivity and number-worship have done enough damage already, let's not make it worse.

Easy target of course, this is kind of preaching to the converted on a PC gaming site; and it's not like there's any indication Valve intends to implement this kind of thing, so moral outrage is slightly unnecessary. Still, "gamerscore" (and the like) is something I think it'd be a real shame to see spread further than it has.

[zecrocodil]

Games of the Year - Serious Sam 3: BFE

This series of posts is not a "top 3" or "top 10" or whatever, it's just "games I liked this year". I'm not sure how many there are yet, I've got about a dozen listed but I might come up with more. Anyway, to begin:

If you looked through my screenshots folder you'd be forgiven for thinking Serious Sam 3 is a game about a casual stroll through the desert, rather than one about mowing down hordes of alien invaders. It isn't that the game is actually empty; rather that I've yet to master the skill of reaching over to press F12 while simultaneously dodging a swarm of galloping, razor-clawed skeletons. So I'm just going to link to Devolver Digital CFO Fork Parker's own trailer and go back to posting mayhem-light shots.

Okay! I kinda covered everything else already - Serious Sam 3 is a game about mowing down hordes of alien invaders. That’s it. So…uhhh…hm.

Alright, well I was a big fan of the earlier Serious Sam games, The First Encounter and The Second Encounter. They gave you, as Sam, an impressive array of weapons, little to no story to bother with (the evil Mental is invading the blah blah blah), and threw you into huge levels that ranged from vast open valleys to cramped dungeons and towers. Inside, you'd cautiously dodge traps and deal with close-range ambushes; outside, you’d contend with entire armies of werebulls, headless kamikazes, giant biomechanoid walkers, and relentless Kleer skeletons.

Serious Sam 3 brings all of that - well, most of that - up to today's standards. There are a few gameplay additions like a sprint button, but mostly it's, you know, Serious Same. It's a sequel in the most mundane way, but also the most impressive way because it would have been so easy to capitulate on many of the things that separate this series from the modern corridor shooter. There's no cover system, no regenerating health, you can carry all your weapons instead of just two, and the levels - well, the game is still entirely linear, but it's less a series of shooting galleries and more a series of artillery ranges. The monsters still come thick and fast, and with more destructible environments this time around, prolonged fights can be quite spectacular, as rocket fire from distant enemies reduces the ancient ruins around you to rubble.

The larger battles are truly exhilarating experiences. Although these fights take place on open fields, you'll quickly learn that simple circle-strafing will get you killed, especially when that next wave of monsters appears and you have to adapt your tactics. It's hectic, but you learn. You learn each creature's movement pattern, and you learn to read the audio cues of everything around you at once - the degree to which reading the soundscape is possible (and required) has always been one of the best elements of this series. When you've got it all together, it's not too big a stretch to say there's something balletic in the crescent arcs carved by your dodging and weaving across the field. Sidestep here, curve back this way, cut forward through the opening in that group, shotgun, shotgun, shotgun. A waltz has less explosions and screaming, generally, but with aliens invading, you take what you can get.

It's not all like that. I said earlier that Serious Sam 3 brings back most of what the earlier games did well - it does leave a few things behind. The game begins with you getting shot down in a grey, ruined Cairo, and there's definitely a bit of parody going on as you wander through Middle Eastern streets having orders barked at you over the radio. But whatever the justification, the first two or three levels can be little un-Samlike, with you running through city streets dealing with a few enemies at a time. The second level is particularly boring, and I wouldn't be surprised if it turned some people off the game.

The underground sections lack much of the silly charm of previous games, where they were filled with crushing stone pillars, spiked pits and a variety of other dangers. Here, you're forced to use your flashlight to see, and so far each of these tunnel areas have been very bland, straightforward and slow. In fact a lot of the environments could use an injection of silliness, with too many uneventful secrets, and on the whole not that much visual variety.

Having said that, the game comes with an impressive amount of options - if you feel the game is lacking in colour, for instance, you can go in and turn the saturation way up. If the red blood gets a bit much (and when is starts splashing over your view, it certainly can), you can do as I always have in Serious Sam, and set the game to Hippie Mode, where bloodstains are replaced by floral patterns and chunks of flesh by carrots and pumpkins. If you hate running out of ammo you can play with it set to unlimited. If a friend comes over, you can play splitscreen, which is an option so rare on PC that it should be applauded loudly. Cooperative play has always been a big deal in Serious Sam, and here up to 16 people can play through the campaign at once, which is bound to be a little insane.

I haven't finished the game yet. I don't know how nuts the final few levels get. I don't know if the final boss is fun. I don't know if there's enough ammo pickups in truly huge battles, or if the psychic witch-brides become too annoying, or or or or. What I do know is that I'm very, very glad to see Sam back and in such good form.

[zecrocodil]

No no, the other beta. No, the other other one.

There seem to be a lot of big beta tests underway at the moment. The main ones I've been focusing on news for are Diablo 3 and Dota 2, but there's also The Old Republic, there's Tribes Ascend, and the new Counterstrike is starting one up soon I think. Probably more if I was to actually look.

One that I've been following and just got a key for is Path of Exile, a Diablo-style Action-RPG that is, I believe, the first game from New Zealand studio Grinding Gear Games. And it's something of an ambitious first game - at least, with Diablo 3 and Torchlight 2 around the corner, I wouldn't want to be the guy trying to sell a competitor. So I guess it makes all the more sense that they won't be selling it, then; instead they're going free-to-play.

Free-to-play actually suits this genre really well, I think. I've been playing some of the ressurected Hellgate this year, which is also now supported by microtransactions, and it's clear that there's a lot of possibilities for things to sell on the side without pissing everyone off. The most benign is obviously cosmetics, then there's things like inventory expanders, experience boosters, character respec tokens, various item customisation thingies...Hellgate actually does get into directly selling power (you can buy up to 10 extra skill points), but in a majority PvE game even that doesn't matter a hell of a lot. Grinding Gear intend to offer custom leagues, so instead of your character choosing between standard and hardcore or whatever, you can customise your own ruleset for you and your friends. Which is an interesting idea.

Anyway, that's more an aside. GGG haven't announced anything much about that side of things, and it's not why I'm interested in the game. This is why I'm interested in the game:

That's the passive skill tree. Well, about one-third of it, as much as I could fit on the screen fully zoomed out. It seems clearly influenced by Final Fantasy X's Sphere Grid, which is fine with me, since I really liked that particular system. The Final Fantasy parallels don't stop there either. Rather than gain active skills by choosing between pre-set paths on a skill tree as in most games of this genre, Path of Exile doles them out in the form of skill gems - either found as loot or given as quest rewards - that you need to slot into your equipment to access the skill. The gems then gain experience as you do, and so grow in power. On top of that, some gem sockets are linked together, and special support gems can then be used to alter a skill, letting you add, for instance, multiple projectiles, increase area of effect, or a chance to stun. Yes hello, materia. :)

There are to be six classes, of which five are currently in the game, and they differ only in starting stats and their starting position on the passive skill tree. Combined with the skills-as-loot concept, the game sits in a middle ground between class-based and classless gameplay. Class identity is reinforced not by the absence of outside options, but by the fact that it's generally easier/more efficient to pick up things closer to you - a ranger starts near lots of boosts to bow damage, for instance, whereas if you wanted to boost your energy shield it could take you thirty points just to get there from your side of the grid.

I haven't played all that far yet, but I'm very interested to see the extent to which this system allows and supports varied and unorthodox character builds, because that's really one of the things that gives this kind of game lasting appeal. My Templar is using four active skills - a shield charge, a ground slam, an ice nova, and a heavy swing that makes enemies explode into fireballs. And on the passive tree, I'm constantly torn between heading toward more armour, or spell damage, or energy shield, or blocking, or mace accuracy, etc etc. There's a lot of potential here, though I haven't yet seen how viable anything is at high levels, and the game does need more active skills just so not everyone of a particular class is kitted out with the same abilities. But the devs are working on that; the game is very much still in active development.

Art's currently a bit muddy (not helped by the amount of mud depicted in the first act, I guess), music's in need of variety, animation's a little clunky, but that stuff can keep getting worked on too, and it isn't what will make or break this game anyway...or so the optimist in me likes to think. There are a lot of interesting ideas here (two other things I like are the recharging potions, and the lack of any basic "gold" currency - you barter for goods with magic scrolls and a variety of item-transforming orbs). If the developers keep refining what they have, this could be a great addition to what's looking like a bumper year (or two) for the genre.

[zecrocodil]

Limbo

Okay, so Limbo was good, but I did kind of want to punch the developer in the face for the ending. I mean I don't want a sappy "find the girl, escape limbo, everything is wonderful" resolution by any means, but geez, it would have worked better for me without that final scene that fades back in after the credits.

I was fine with the abrupt cut-off before that, it left a lot of questions and gave a few subtle hints, which is fantastic because it preserves the dark sense of wonder that the game set up early on. No, I was more than fine with that as the end - I really liked that as the end. But to lead players to ask "What? What happens now?", and then immediately turn around and answer that question in a very simple way...it feels like a bit of a slap in the face for playing at all, and a bit too forced, like the developer personally reaching in to manipulate you. I get that it's a grim world and things clearly don't always work out well for anyone, but...nope, doesn't work for me.

Other than that, I can definitely see why it got so much praise. For starters it's amazingly beautiful, in both the visual scenery and the quality of the animation - much of that "guaranteed" to feel natural through physics simulation. That animation melds perfectly with the controls, so things like jumping onto a rope and watching it ripple and sway just felt right, and the "nope, I'm not quite in the right spot to climb this box, let's try now..." bother that often arises in this kind of game was almost completely absent. The slow pace does help, too - not once did I run off a ledge without jumping - but nonetheless it's a success in intuitive gameplay. Indeed the lack of a HUD or hint displays of any kind was incredibly refreshing.

Unfortunately intuition becomes a bit of a casualty in another way - the game gets more "gamey" in the latter half when you start encountering machinery of various kinds. While I thought the majority of the puzzles were well constructed (I was stumped quite often, but always found the answer soon after that, which is about how this sort of game should be working optimally), I ended up missing the simple boy-journeys-through-an-uncaring-world feel of the earlier parts. The spider, for instance, provided its own sort of mini-narrative, and once past that and into an area of pumps and elevators and buzzsaws, it was never really replaced by anything. I loved the first moment I first saw a chimney and silhouetted roof tiles and realised I was on someone's house, and I loved the first time I pulled a switch and the whole world rotated, but beyond that,I really did lose connection to the fiction. It's the difference between jumping across an electrified neon sign that's rusted and collapsing, and jumping over an electrified floor that only exists to be an electrified floor. Gravity fields were probably the worst offender in the "why is this in the world?" category, and even if the game would have had to end earlier, I think it would have been better off removing a few elements.

That probably sounds like more of a complaint than it is. Like I said, the puzzles were (mostly) well designed, with some being very inventive, and there's a nice constant flow to your actions throughout the game - make it rain in one area, then use rainwater to fill a pool, then close a floodgate, then float higher etc etc. The game looks and plays beautifully, and even if the mood falters in parts, what is there works really well. It just reaches a bit too far, and so isn't quite cohesive enough to really stick in my mind as a personal classic. But hey, there are far worse things to say about a game than "it's got too many good ideas in it", and I'm looking forward to seeing what these guys do next.