There came a point a few months back - about 75% of the way through the campaign - where I put down Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and never picked it up again. I did this, not because it was a bad game particularly, but because I felt fatigued. Fatigued at what aspect I wasn't sure, but I simply couldn't bring myself to navigate a single air vent more than I already had. The game was beating me down and any enjoyment I had felt towards the start had long since vanished. I closed the game and felt a surge of relief that it was all over.

It wasn't too long after this that I found myself staring at the 'Buy Now' button on the Final Fantasy XV page on the PlayStation Store. For those that know me or have read previous entries on this blog, you would understand that the release of a Final Fantasy game is a sacred day in my calendar. Despite not always loving the games themselves, I hadn't missed the release of a single main series entry since I bought Final Fantasy VII back in 1997. But this time, I wasn't sure. I just couldn't bring myself to part with my hard-earned pounds. With the game receiving generally favourable reviews, this reticence was something I struggled to understand. Wasn't this entry a return to the glory days of the series? Hadn't it made major strides towards combatting the problems of XIII and all its mind-numbing linearity? By all accounts it had and yet still my finger wouldn't make that final push. I gave it a few minutes and then, still no closer to making a decision, closed the store page and bought Nuclear Throne for the Vita instead (a much easier purchase at a much more friendly price point).

Later that day, me and my wife decided to sit down and watch J.C. Chandor's All Is Lost with Robert Redford, a film about one man's battle for survival as his solo-piloted yacht slowly sinks into the depths of the Indian Ocean. Despite clocking in at a little over two hours, nothing but a few incoherent mutterings are ever spoken by Bobby (the one and only actor) throughout the entire run-time of the film. And yet even with this distinct lack of dialogue, the story is coherent, the drama is taut, the character is fleshed out, and the emotional impact is strong. I know nothing about manning yachts, fixing holes in fibreglass hulls or fixing busted radios, yet I was able to understand immediately what was happening and follow Redford's plan to try and solve the issues at hand. I may (will) never desire to one-man a boat out into the middle of an ocean filled with sharks and stuff, but I was able to understand his sense of adventure and appreciate the tranquillity such a journey brought him. I'm not going to claim the film is perfect (you need only see the many angry sailors who have reviewed the film on IMDB to find out why), but it was a very entertaining and, as I came to realise, it entertained precisely for the very reasons why Deus Ex didn't and Final Fantasy XV probably wouldn't have.

You see, what All Is Lost taught me was that sometimes you didn't need a lot of words to tell a lot of story. The film's success (for me at least) was its ability to convey a great deal without ever resorting to exposition and deep and binding lore. In Deus-Ex, I was happy enough with the gameplay, but what I had dropped out on (pretty much from the start as it turned out) was its story and how it was told. Right from the get-go, the story is told to you through the medium of narrated cut-scenes, character monologues (masked as dialogue with Jensen) and page upon page of emails, text messages and e-books. Technological terms, government factions, non-government factions, names, places, grievances… all of them were thrown at me in the hope that over time some of them might stick and make me care enough about what was happening to keep playing. But the problem was, I had stopped caring before I had even taken control of Jensen. There was just too much story and background to get to know. I just have enough on my plate trying to keep up to date with real-world happenings to care about the Deus-Ex universe. The game may be trying to address real-world discrimination and terrorism by allegorising it into a tale of synths and humans, but frankly it all left me feeling a little flat.

Equally with Final Fantasy XV, the reason for my hesitation in buying the game was not because the game lacked on a technical/gameplay level (which apparently it doesn't), but because all those trailers I watched beforehand featured the same problem as Deus Ex…i.e. story being forced into you in massive chunks of dialogue and text. Being a supposed fan of Final Fantasy you might well rightly question what I expected given that is precisely what the series is known for, but I am also no longer a teenager and prepared to put up with such things.

If I think back to the games that I have enjoyed in recent years, many of them are wordless (or nearly wordless), and I think part of that is because they didn't insist on using a battering ram to impart narrative and purpose. Take Hyper Light Drifter, a game in which there is an explicit lack of words and in which story is told pretty much entirely via the visuals, art and music. I came out the other end of that game with the very real sense of "knowing" its world and its history. That "knowing" may be vague and hazy, but equally it was visceral in a way in which Deus Ex: Mankind Divided never was. This wasn't achieved in spite of the lack of words, but precisely because of it. I wasn't told the story, I was left to experience it.

Of course, I'm not saying that all games should be wordless, that would be ridiculous. But there is a happy medium which can be achieved. Naughty Dog are a great example of how to do this, with their games often striking that balance between dictated narrative and environmental storytelling. However, they are not alone. Valve are another one who have proven their ability to link in great writing with great gameplay. Be it the abandoned farmhouse in Half Life 2 with its walls smeared with warnings/laments in blood, or the hidden rooms beneath the facility of Portal that spoke to the seeming absence of others, these little touches added more to their worlds in one glance than ten minutes of contrived fictional political intrigue dialogue ever could.

Of course, this is all entirely subjective, and I understand that there are probably many out there that enjoy immersing themselves in these fictional worlds, but for me, I am tired of such tropes. I also do appreciate the irony that my writing is very much of the verbose persuasion and as such I am in no position to be telling others to write less not more, but hey I have a blog to write! I think ultimately, what I am looking for, is for game developers to place a little more trust in their audience. The best games have interesting worlds, not interesting stories. Let us live those worlds. Let us see the worlds you create rather than pushing us through them. Let us learn your story rather than telling it to us. As in all great works of fiction, it is intimacy that comes before engagement. If I don't feel I understand your world on a personal level, then I am much less likely to understand your story on a personal level.

I'm struggling to pinpoint exactly what it is I feel about No Man's Sky. I find the game hypnotic and immersive, but also frustratingly jarring. I love its scope and scale, but am also frequently disappointed by its lack of variety. I love the way it lets you build your own story, but I also wish there was more of a structured narrative to pull me through it.

You see, it's a game that is simultaneously all these things…a game that contradicts itself from start to last. It's a game that's not really a game until you have to manage your inventory or shoot laser beams at flowers to gain chemical elements, at which point it is the most game. It's a game that I wish had the balls to not be a game at all, but also a game in which I wish had more game to it.

(Okay I'll stop saying 'game' now)

When I initially thought about writing this piece, my brain was full of the wonderfully overwrought prose that I excel in, full of glowing descriptions of the planets I visited and the vistas I left behind. I wanted to tell the world (or more likely, the two people who actually read my blog – shout out to my wife and mum!) about what I'd seen, and beguile them with stories of my travels in deep space. But then I listened to some other people's experiences. I listened and realised that my tales were simply not that interesting. They were interesting to me because I lived them, but when stacked up against everybody else's they were entirely unremarkable. But then again, so were yours probably.

And you see, that's the thing… Everyone sees something completely unique, and therefore much of the thrill is lost. The ability to capture an audience with fanciful tales of humongous spider crabs chasing me down a mountain, forcing me to dive headfirst off the cliffs and into a vivid blue lake filled with avatar-eating fish is lost when every other man/woman and his/her dog has been chased/eaten/stomped on/shot by some other weirdly wonderful creature. When Europeans set off in the 15^th century to conquer, exploit and enslave the peoples and lands of the unexplored corners of the globe, they were able to capture the attention of the public precisely because they were small bands of intrepid explorers seeing and doing things that nobody else of their skin-colour persuasion had even thought possible. If everybody was setting sail for the southern continents then why would anybody care what Magellan or Drake had to say? Would Magellan and Drake even have waxed so lyrically about their buccaneering adventures if Juan Garcia next door had been stealing the gold from some other American tribe 100 miles down coast? They wouldn't… It's as simple as that.

So where does that leave the game and my experiences with it? Does my experience suddenly become devoid of value and wonder simply because it's just another log-entry in the preposterously large book of weird things thrown up by NMS's complicated mathematical algorithms? Well no of course it doesn't. But it means that I have had to approach the game slightly differently. Eschewing the conventional NMS wisdom that the fun is to be had at the centre of the galaxy, I have, quite naturally, found myself spending inordinate amounts of time just flying around and becoming intimate with my home system(s). Beyond keeping my ship and life support systems topped up, or occasionally chancing upon an upgrade of some kind, I have interacted little with the world around me. Like an intergalactic William Wordsworth, I have strolled the lushest of plains, scaled the highest of mountains, rambled across the craggiest of landscapes, swam in the most tranquil of lakes; all simply in the name of being there and enjoying the view. 10 hours in, and I have visited five planets and a couple of space stations across two systems. That may sound like a lot, but when I hear reports of people mainlining the game in little over 30 hours, I can't help but feel my pace is a little more relaxed than the average.

It's a weird beast is No Man's Sky. I have gone from the most hype, to the least hype, and seen my interest peak and trough more times than I can remember with any other game. I started in awe of the size of the thing but have since moved to an appreciation of its understated beauty. It's a game that while occasionally frustrating is full of charm.

When I come across an alien outpost and am welcomed in with simple yet elegant Asimov-esque prose I wish there was more to it narratively. I wish there were occasional planets with hidden entrances in the ground leading to bustling subterranean cities and entire populations of aliens to converse with and learn from. I wish these things, but that is not what No Man's Sky is about. The Euclid galaxy (the outer rims at least) is largely devoid of civilisation and that is just the way it is. There was once something there, but those societies are now dead. Perhaps this is just Sean Murray preparing us for the realities of inter-galactic travel, where even if we were suddenly able to dance our merry-way around star-systems, the chances of encountering galactic civilisations is extraordinarily low. Who knows?

Either way, No Man's Sky is a compelling experience and one that manages to shine despite its flaws. I think the talk around it meeting, or not meeting, people's expectations needs to be put to bed because it is tiresome to listen to. This is the game that we have and people should try to enjoy it on its own terms. What the tiny team at Hello Games have produced is a remarkable achievement and deserves better than the conversation that’s existed around it these few weeks.

Is it the last game you'll ever need? Of course it isn't. But it is a wondrous and often stunningly beautiful thing! Hats off to Sean Murray and Hello Games! You guys should go take a break!

A couple of weeks back I became acutely aware of something about myself…something which, in the grand scheme of things, is pretty minor stuff, but within the confines of my own ego deeply troubling. What I realised was that… I am just not very good at videogames. I am not very good, and slightly more worrying I seem to be getting worse.

This startling moment of realisation came when playing Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. The scene in question, a hair-raising car chase down a hill strewn with shanty towns and market stalls, was something that, one would have to imagine, had been streamlined to within an inch of its life so that even the most casual of players could enjoy the "POWER OF THE PLAYSTATION"™ at its brash and brawny best. Yet, by the time I reached the final climactic part and triggered the cut-scene (which was awesome by the way) I think my death tally was up to four or five. What was meant to be an exhilarating rollercoaster ride had turned, for me, into a bit of a slog. Honestly, I was relieved when it was finally all over.

Now, I could easily put this down to simple tiredness given that I was playing this scene around midnight on the Friday of a relatively long week, but I would only be kidding myself in doing so. The honest truth is, I have found myself dying an inordinate amount of times during my playthrough of Uncharted 4 and there has been little to no correlation between my death statistics and levels of tiredness during gameplay. When I found myself stuck in the middle of no man's land being blasted in the face by an armoured goon with a shotgun, it was not because I had been mowing the lawn that afternoon, it was because I was engaging in bad practice. When I was spotted for the umpteenth time by the enemy as I hung off the crumbling ledge of a medieval monastic ruin and subsequently sent to an early grave, it was not because I had spent the day translating Japanese legal contracts, it was because my instincts of when to move from cover had been wrong.

At first, I was defiant…after all I had completed Uncharted 2 on Crushing once before. Sure, it had been a frustrating experience and one involving many, many deaths, but I had proven that I was able to deal with third person cover mechanics in a large 3D space. But as the deaths in Uncharted 4 began to accumulate with a decidedly alarming regularity, I had little choice but to concede defeat. As it turns out, I am simply not up to being the bad-ass swashbuckler that Naughty Dog wanted me to be.

And with that grudging acceptance, I have started to look back over my history with games and question whether I have ever really excelled at any one title...to look to whether I had ever been able to claim that I was up there in the top five percentile of people playing. And you know what I found? Nothing…

For example, I always felt like I could beat anybody at a game of Pro Evo or FIFA on my day, but if I'm being brutally honest with myself I have almost certainly lost more than I have won. I remember the day that I brought back home FIFA 10 (my second FIFA) from the shop and challenged a strictly Pro-Evo loving friend to a match, only to find myself at the end of the 90minutes on the wrong end of a 2-0 drubbing. As was ever the case, I dismissed the loss as me falling foul to exploits within the game, but the truth was that even when I used those same exploits in subsequent rematches I still tended, more often than not, to finish on the losing side. The exploits may have been a factor in my losses, but it was my own relative lack of ability that was the real reason I failed to win.

Even if I think back to playthroughs of single player games like Mass Effect, GTA or the Batman Arkham series, I was still no stranger to the death screen. Perhaps not to quite the same level as with Uncharted 4, but still the fact remains that I have rarely found these games to be completely plain-sailing. In fact, thinking back, I cannot remember any one game in the past twenty or so years where I have managed to make my entire way through the game without dying at least once.

An element of despondency is probably at play here in me suddenly feeling so inept at the entertainment medium that I love above all else, but there is nothing quite so humiliating as facing the prospect of dropping down a difficulty level in a mainstream release, just so I can get through the game without tearing my hair out. I mean, we're not talking about Dark Souls here… These games are marketed to the mainstream and it is expected that anybody with any level of competency at games would be comfortably able to complete them on the default setting.

I console myself slightly in the fact that I am spectacularly solid at Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac, but even there am I really able to make those claims when I have only completed Spelunky once in a little over a 1000 attempts (albeit with the caveat that my past few hundred attempts have been with the sole aim of reaching and clearing Hell)? The truth is probably not…

I started writing this piece with the express intention of uncovering some sub-conscious reasoning behind my recent struggles with Uncharted, but the more I wrote, the more I realised that this was something that reaches back much further into my gaming history. All excuses put aside, there is little choice for me but to accept that I kinda suck at games.

But you know what? Who cares? I am just not that competitive a person and I am probably not alone in this (oh god, please don't tell me I'm alone in this!!). It may sting a little when a friend mocks my attempts with derision, or when some random unknown on a message board tells me how I'm the worst player they've ever come across, but ultimately I am able to shrug off these criticisms and still enjoy all of these games in the spirit in which they were meant. Everybody has their own strengths and weaknesses and it would be ridiculous of me to get hung up on the fact that I keep dying in games (even though I put more time and effort into gaming than I do pretty much anything else).

And so, with that in mind, I will plough on with Uncharted and finish the blasted thing before the week is out. Come hell or high water, I will see the end to Drake's story and I will write some prosaical review of my thoughts about it and I will post it here! The Uncharted games have played a pivotal role in getting me back interested in gaming, and I will be dammed if I'm going to let the last entry get the better of me like this! You may call me an amateur…you may laugh at my many failed attempts to finish a glorified FMV sequence…you may even think me an idiot for not simply lowering the difficulty, but you most certainly may not call me a quitter!

*I'd just like to start here by saying this piece is a bit meandering and far from my finest piece of writing, but it was something on my mind and I just felt like I had to get it out! Cheers!

P.S. Sorry about the title too!

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A recent change in my situation has granted me, for the first time in nigh on 20 years, access to a PC capable of running games that demand slightly more horsepower than stock windows solitaire and minesweeper. We are not talking about hardware like a GTX Titan here… No, what I have access to is something entirely more modest (a GTX 670 if you must know…). There are specs that I could list, but the truth is that I wouldn't entirely understand what they all mean. And plus, they do not make for particularly interesting reading. But either way, it's a PC that is able to comfortably run pretty much anything at high to ultra levels that was released prior to 2012 and that is good enough for me.

So, with all this "power" now suddenly at my fingertips, you may think that I would open myself up to the world of modern PC gaming and enjoy all those recent classics that I have either missed or played at sub-standard PS3 levels… games such as…well you know… Euro Truck Simulator 2 (??), Anno 2070… (or god forbid Dota 2!!) . But alas, no!

The era that I decided to dive headfirst into was that weird period between 1999 and 2005… a period in which I had kind of fallen out of love with gaming. Sure, I had a PS2 and I played a good few of the major releases at the time (Devil May Cry, GTA III, Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy X etc.), but in all honesty my engagement with gaming was largely confined to sessions of Pro Evolution after university. This wasn't down to anything as profound as me realizing the futility of gaming or suddenly appreciating how poor much of the writing in these games was… it was simply that I was at university and doing other things with my life.

So when I finally did emerge from my cocoon around 2007 with my purchase of the PS3 and suddenly discovered that gaming coverage on the internet had become, in some cases, actually pretty good, I started to hear about all these much loved and highly regarded game franchises that had completely passed me by. "System Shock you say? Hmmm, isn't that some kind of Doom clone? Civilization? Can't I just play Theme Park?"… I'm obviously exaggerating my ignorance for comical effect here, but you take my point. There was this huge catalogue of games that had built up that I simply had no level of engagement with.

I thought about looking into playing some of these games, but this was a period in which talk of graphics cards and GPU clock speeds had started to become more prevalent on gaming message boards and the whole thing just went right over my head. I wouldn't say I was intimidated by it all, but it just seemed unnecessarily complicated. Why would I bother going to all that trouble when I could just buy a PS3 or 360 and sit down and go? And that way, I wouldn't have to bother with playing with a mouse and keyboard as well… The choice was obvious.

But then fastforward to 2016 and here I am, sitting in front of an ageing but capable Alienware machine with access to a catalogue of tens of thousands of games through Steam. I felt excited… I could sense that I was on the verge of going on some fantastical trip through a kind of lost world. A world in which many of the genre tropes, kinks and pitfalls that we see today were still being worked out. A world in which character models had a distinctly square character and nobody cared. The uncanny valley was still a good few miles down the road yet… I was super happy that I was going to be able to experience it all first hand… Happy, but also slightly apprehensive. Was this lost era of gaming going to be ruined for me by a combination of high expectations and being slightly spoiled by having grown accustomed to the graphical fidelity we have nowadays? Was I going to be able to deal with a mouse and keyboard? Well there was only one way to find out…

The first game I bought was Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition. Bought in one of those fabled Steam sales for a couple of quid, I immediately felt like I was winning. Sure, you might say 2 quid for a game released 16 years ago is a fair price, but having only really experienced the PSN model of pricing, it felt like a steal to me.

* By the way, I should preface this by stating that I played and loved Deus Ex: Human Revolution on the PS3, and also that stealth games are kinda my jam, so the game itself was not completely alien to me. But I was keen to see where the series started regardless.

So, anyway I start up the game and am happy to see that I can run the game on the highest settings! Oh, the "power"! But now that the game is up and running in all its vanilla, mod-less, year 2000 glory, I have to deal with that other big bug bearer of mine… that pesky mouse and keyboard thing.

It may seem a silly thing to be hung up on, but after having played with a controller for over two decades, the idea that I could easily adapt back to WASD seemed almost farcical to me. I genuinely believed it would be a major struggle and that I would, at best, only learn to cope with the control system at a bare minimum level... Five minutes later and the tutorial over, it was like I'd rediscovered my right hand. Movement was so natural that, before I had even reached the foot of the Statue of Liberty, I had stopped having to even think about it. One of the major things that had been keeping me from even attempting to engage with PC games had been swept away before I'd even shot a guy… Ridiculous!

All these stupid qualms about PC gaming now put aside, you may ask how was my overall experience with Deus Ex? It was…good. Of course I was unlikely to be blown away having spent the best part of a decade playing games with much more refined gameplay and graphics, but there was certainly a compelling flow to the game as I went on sneaking missions through air vents and up behind two-bit subway gangsters. I imagine that 16 year old me would have loved the whole section in the neon wonderland of Hong Kong, but as a 32 year old I found it interesting, but ultimately unremarkable.

In fact, without meaning to take anything away from the game, I would go as far as to say that very sentiment sums up my general feelings towards the game overall. I can see how liberating it must have been back in the day to allow the player the freedom to choose their own path of approach, but this is not necessarily something special nowadays. Games like Dishonored and even Deus Ex: HR have done the same thing, and done it better. But that is just a natural form of progress and it shouldn't diminish Deus Ex's status as an all time classic. And that is part of the joy of going on this journey… I am able to appreciate these things without necessarily having to love them.

Now, when I first started writing this piece I seriously considered detailing my thoughts on each of the games I have played on the PC in these past few months. I wanted to share with you my experience in going back to a period with which I had no affinity and talking about what I discovered. However, after a few failed drafts, I found that my experiences largely followed the same basic pattern. It was only with game genres that I had zero experience with that I found I was able to have any real fun beyond a basic level of curiosity (see blog posts on Civilization and Gunpoint). Again, that is not to diminish those games' achievements, it is simply that I have now played more refined versions of those some basic mechanics and that often means that once the curiosity is satiated there is little left to sink your teeth into.

But even if my magical mystery tour into the early 2000s was a bit more flat than I was hoping for, it has certainly taught me that PC gaming is nothing to be scared of. In fact, I can very clearly see how in many ways it is the superior way to play many types of game. I do not plan on chucking the PS4 in the bin any time soon, but I can definitely see myself one day in the future, when the grass is greener and the bank account more flush, buying a proper PC that can run whatever is thrown at it. You may think that dream is pitifully small, but trust me, compared to where I was only six months ago the change in attitude is huge…

My First 4X Game: Civilization III

Perhaps it says something more telling about me personally, but when I found myself heading towards the year 2050, my coffers filled to the very brim with gold, I felt fairly confident of hitting a WIN screen. So when the ending screen showed up in what was my first playthrough of Sid Meier’s Civilization III (indeed my first playthrough of any Civ game), I was rather upset to find all the other leaders laughing and pointing at my puny nation and our feeble efforts. Here was me, Queen Elizabeth I of England, conqueror of the Spanish Armada and ruler over our nation’s golden age, smugly watching the gold pour in and the universities and libraries spring up across our lands, fully expecting the rest of the world to fawn over me in awe when really I was nothing more than a laughing stock. Suffice to say, my delusions of grandeur were quickly shot down as I found myself and my country relegated to rock bottom in pretty much every league table of note. No, I was not part of the old-hat money or culturally venerated elite, I was just another Liam Gallagher moving into a prestigious west London suburb and chucking a TV out the top floor stained glass window. The title of my saved game, “England the Glorious” would seem almost amusingly self-deprecating had it not been meant in all earnestness at the time.

There are two things to take away from this cautionary tale. One is perhaps that it might prove useful to read the game manual before beginning a new game in a genre with which you have zero experience. The second is that, in Sid Meier’s Civilization series, just as in the real world, money may bring power, but it does not guarantee success. You see, this is the thing I did not realise. In Civ III, the goal is not to stockpile money, but to, as the title of the game suggests, civilise the globe.

What exactly defines the term “civilising” can vary depending on your approach, but I have now found that in subsequent playthroughs (and redos) my style is to build a cultural hub and to then colonise uninhabited, resource rich lands in fits and spurts with a heavy leaning towards the sceinces. As I now enter into the middle ages with my oracles close to sussing out the ways of Physics and Invention, I feel quietly confident that these humble shores of England will produce the world’s first astronaut before celebrate the dawn of the 1600s. And Her Royal Majesty, Queen Elizabeth I of England, choses to do this and the other things, not because they are easy, but because I have set the game to Chieftain and AI aggression to low and therefore face little in the way of opposition. Only time will tell whether I will hit the stars in time for the great bard Billy Shakes to be one of the first passengers on board, but I’ve got to think I’m in with a shot. (Did I learn nothing from my previous brush with unbridled arrogant self-belief?)

This engagement with Civlization III has been part of my recent on-going attempt to familiarise myself with games and genres that I had, in years gone-by, given short shrift to. In my defence, this dismissal of the 4X genre was mainly down to me simply not having a PC capable of running games (at least that’s what I thought), but if I’m honest it was at least in part also down to the perhaps misguided perception that these games were overly-complicated and for people with unlimited time to sink into them. While it is certainly true that this game is a HUGE time-sink (did I really just spend my entire evening playing that??), the idea that it is too complex to be easily understood is clearly wrong. Sure, I recognise that I am probably still getting a lot of the game’s fundamentals wrong and that there are clearly levels of depth that I haven’t even touched yet, but I think I am basically there when it comes to understanding the game’s appeal and flow. I doubt I would have got there without the help of a couple of my work-colleagues pointing out where I was going wrong, but once that initial hurdle was overcome it was all relatively plain-sailing. I even learned to love menu-browsing and learning about all the different technology paths open to you (hence my desire to achieve space travel).

This is a game that I am truly glad I chose to spend the time getting to know. Whether this will lead on to me trying many of the other highly-regarded series in the 4X genre, I cannot say for sure, but I am certainly not scared of at least trying them anymore. In fact, my only fear would be that I get drawn in too-deeply. I have a house to fix-up, blogs to write and a mortgage to pay, and so the idea of losing myself in a game such as Civ III is just a little too appealing. A rogue-lite-like (my other recent genre of choice) at least allows me to put down my device at the end of a run, but the problem with Civilization III is that I become too invested in what I have built. I simply cannot bear the idea of not seeing out the path that fate has dealt my brave and bold nation.

So will my new science-led focus bring me the fawning adulation that I so desperately desire from my global friends and foes? Probably not, but I bet you I will learn another valuable lesson in how to play this game. And that is perhaps what I love about it the most. It is not a game that holds your hand. It is a game that gives you the freedom to experiment and to learn from your mistakes. And if that’s not a lesson for adult-hood and life, then what is?

When the sun finally does set on my empire (because inevitably it always does), I will hopefully be just a little bit wiser than I am now and hopefully more prepared to deal with my next challenge in the getting-to-know PC games thing that I have suddenly decided to make into a series of blog posts… Cities: Skylines. If I can build a nation and an empire, then surely a city will be child’s play, right?

PLEASE NOTE THIS BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS ABOUT THE HANDMAID'S TALE AND GEORGE ORWELL'S NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR

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It has been a couple of days since I finished Margret Atwood’s much referenced and much lauded book, The Handmaid’s Tale and I think I have a lot of thoughts about it. At least, I definitely find myself thinking about it a lot of the time. Not necessarily in that way you get when you put down a book that has taken you on some fantastic journey through lives and worlds previously unfathomable to you yet now known to you in the most intimate of levels, but in the way in which you know you have read something that has hit a nerve somewhere. Yet, try as I might, I have been unable to come to any conclusions as to what I actually feel about the book.

Did I like the book? Sure, it was pretty good. Not the best book I’ve ever read, nor the most beautiful prose, but it was enjoyable enough for me to come away from it open to reading more Margret Atwood. Certain elements of the backstory were left frustrating opaque, but I guess this, in part, could be explained away by the censored world that the protagonist, Offred, inhabits. Some characters felt under-explored or perhaps a little one-dimensional, but again Offred lives in a society which encourages faith over thought, and so it is perhaps not that surprising that she would probe so little behind the masks of her oppressors. In a world in which an ill-judged utterance or opinion could lead to your death, it is only natural that you would reserve your thoughts for only the most deserving. But these quibbles aside, The Handmaid’s Tale was largely a good read.

The reason why I am spending such an inordinate amount of time thinking about this book though is that I came away from it feeling slightly unnerved. It is not that I necessarily buy-in wholesale to the premise of a world in which women have moved so swiftly from a state of near-total objectification (pre-Gilead) to one of complete subjugation (early to mid-Gilead), but I don’t think that is what Margret Atwood was asking us to do. Yes, this is a book of speculative-fiction, but the extreme logical ends to which she takes the Gilead philosophy are, to me at least, simply a mirror to reflect our fears of people with loud and dogmatic voices, something as relevant today as it was 30 years ago or even 80 years ago. In this case, it was women who were the ones to be sacrificed in the name of the survivability of the human race, but it could easily have been a story about any other group or minority. Indeed, without meaning to draw crass and shallow comparisons, it is hard to believe that there was not some intent behind Atwood’s decision to title the novel’s willingly-subservient class of women as the “Aunts” given their obvious similarities to the “Uncle Tom” role assumed by certain black people during the slavery-era (or even beyond). Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but it was something that struck me early on and stayed with me throughout.

You do not have to dig particularly deep into this book to also see the obvious similarities with another famous piece of speculative-fiction, namely George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. Both books show you the world through the eyes of characters granted a certain level of status (as dictated by their oppressors) within their societies who are both flirting with ideas of thought and moral treason. Both books are dominated by mistrust and paranoia, and both, at times, leave you the reader feeling helpless. The thing that perhaps separates the two is that, in the end, The Handmaid’s Tale shows you that there was an eventual “out” for the oppressed people of Gilead, and so is perhaps the more hopeful of the two. Whereas Nineteen Eighty Four ends with our protagonist beaten down, broken and accepting of his fate, The Handmaid’s Tale explicitly tells us that not only did Offred escape, but that eventually Gilead society itself crumbled. Just as how the story of the formation of the Republic of Gilead is left obscured, so too is the story of its downfall, and that is undoubtedly a little frustrating. But, still, the more optimistic view of humanity is there. Yes, we may at times dig ourselves into desperate situations, but we also have the capability to dig ourselves out.

But then again, do we? The changed world from which these final revelations about Gilead are revealed is, for all its progress in terms of multi-cultural make up, still seemingly a patriarchal one. While nothing explicit is mentioned about its own time and morals, every speaker mentioned in the epilogue is a male. How are we to know the role women play at that time? The lecturer may talk in a way that suggests he does not necessarily agree with the morality imposed by the Gilead Republic on its people, but no insight is offered as to how things have changed in the years following the republic’s downfall. This could be no different to us wagging a disapproving finger at the Victorians and their seemingly-backwards views, when still today women in our very own western cultures (and many others) are oppressed in a number of different, and at times more insidious, ways.

I think ultimately, what Margret Atwood is asking us to do, or at least this is what I took away from the book, is to not be coerced by charismatic (or otherwise) people into definitive answers on how a “good” and “just” society should be. Like it or not, we all share a tiny planet together with a limited amount of space and resources, and it is up to us to work out a way to live together peacefully and respectful of each other. Everybody’s opinion matters, but on some issues, some people’s opinions will be (rightly) weighted more heavily. As a white male, I feel that of course my opinion matters when it comes to issues such as sexism, racism, xenophobia etc., but at the same time I accept that it is not my place to tell women, or black people or whoever else what they can and can’t be offended by and what should be important to them. I mean, it’s not even that there is a single consensus among any one group as to where our issues and problems lie. And you know why? Because that is the nature of being human. We disagree with each other, regardless of sex, race, religion or political leaning. When it comes to progress (and I think ultimately we are moving in the right direction) the most important thing is to listen and to try and understand. If everybody just “tells” others what they think and ends the conversation there, then we are doomed to failure. While The Handmaid’s Tale may take things to almost illogical and unlikely extremes, the message is clear… We should be listening more to each other.

So yes, that is where my time with The Handmaid’s Tale took me and it has been cathartic to write about it in this way. This is not a review of the book, nor is it (intentionally at least) a manifesto with which to beat people over the head with. Perhaps nobody will read it and I am simply speaking (or typing) to an empty auditorium, but for once that is not really the reason for me writing this blog post. This time, I write simply to bring some calmness to a confused and busy mind.

Okay, so this is actually something I have done for my company's blog, but I thought I would share it here too. Please support these guys by visiting their page (and our blog too if you're feeling generous), and help them gain some exposure!

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We met up recently with two of the founding members of the three-person Playful Panda Studio for a quick chat about their game, Eternal Spirits, the local scene and the industry in general. Here is some of what we discussed…

So, how about you introduce yourselves and tell us a little of your history?

(JC) Sure, my name is Joe Chu. I was born in Hong Kong, but live in Dublin. I have completed a Masters Degree in Digital Games, as well as a four year course in animation. I’m one of the main founders of Playful Panda Studios.

(AD) Hi, I’m Audrey Dooley and I’m also one of the main founders of Playful Panda Studios. I did the same animation course as Joe, which is where we met. It’s also where we met our coder, Sean.

Where did you complete your courses?

(JC) I did my Masters at D.I.T.

(AD) Yeah, and our animation course was done at IADT in Dun Laoghaire.

And was it during this time that you decided to form Playful Panda Studios?

(JC) Not quite. We used to get the same bus back together after college. We would talk about different ideas for animation shorts and different things related to the course, but we also had a friend who was focusing more on videogame animation and that got us talking about our own ideas for games.

(AD) Yeah, because normally when you are in the final year of the animation course you would have to make a film, but our friend had decided that he was going to make a videogame and we would obviously talk to him about that.

(JC) So then, I had a game that I had submitted for my final project in my Masters, and I was thinking it would be cool to take those ideas and develop them further once I graduated. I asked Audrey and Sean if they were interested in working on them with me, and they said yes. That was pretty much how we started as a studio.

So, tell us a little about your game, Eternal Spirits.

(JC) Well Eternal Spirits is basically a metroidvania action platformer. You have four different elements which you unlock as you play through the game, each of which have different platforming and combat abilities associated with them. We didn’t want to simply copy the flow that you get in a typical modern Castlevania game in which, once you reach a certain point, you just become a complete powerhouse. So instead we decided to make it so that each of the special abilities require you to be in a specific form to perform them.

(AD) Yeah so this means a lot of switching between forms. So say for example you want to double jump and then stick to the wall, you need to change form in between those two actions.

(JC) Exactly. So it’s different to other metroidvania style games in the sense that it requires you to be constantly thinking on your feet. You have to figure out which form you need in each specific moment in order to pass through an area.

(AD) This applies to the combat as well. For each element there will be a different category of weapon.

(JC) Basically this will be that Earth has a hammer, Fire has a sword, Wind has a bow and Water has a spear. And since the Fire form has the lowest platforming agility, we have balanced it so that the sword then does the most damage out of all the elements. On the other hand, the Wind form has the highest movement agility and therefore conducts the least amount of damage. This ensures that the player can’t just stay in the one form all the time, as if they do they won’t be able to make it through certain areas of the game.

How do you make changing forms into something fun for the player rather than something frustrating and fiddly?

(JC) Controls are very important. At the moment we have it so that the four forms are mapped to the four face buttons on the controller, with jump on one of the triggers.

(AD) That triggered a lot of debates during playtesting…

(JC) Yeah, definitely. Some people really wanted it so that jump would be on the A or X button and the form switching to be put on the triggers, but this presents its own problems as well. Right now, for the purposes of playtesting we are keeping the forms on the face buttons, but the controls are very important to ensure the game isn’t frustrating so we might consider customisable controls in future.

(AD) We did surveys with the playtest and to be fair most people were of the opinion that while it was frustrating at first, it was something they could get used to. But like Joe says, it’s really hard to find the right balance sometimes.

Were you always planning on making a metroidvania style game?

(JC) Yeah, for me it was always going to be a metroidvania. I’m majorly influenced by older games and I’d been wanting to make this style of game for a long time. And while I appreciate that many designers want to innovate, I prefer to give people what they want more than anything.

And what are some of these influences?

(JC) Well the Castlevania series is obviously a major one. Anything from the real old school ones to Symphony of the Night or the GBA (Game Boy Advance ) titles. Even some of the ones that never came to Ireland like Rondo of Blood. Aside from the Castlevania games then we were heavily influenced by the Mega Man series, Shantae and of course the Metroid games.

(AD) More recently, I’ve been playing a lot of Outland and Ori and the Blind Forest. They’ve been really great for getting ideas about gameplay and art design. Also, we are all big into anime so that’s been a huge influence over the visual style of the game.

What are the major design difficulties you faced?

(JC) The map!

(AD) Haha.

(JC) The map, for sure. It’s the biggest part of any metroidvania game. You find power-up A to gain access to door A. You find power-up B to access door B. It involves a lot of backtracking, and finding a way to stop that backtracking from becoming monotonous is really tough. You need to have interesting mechanics and you need a strong art design.

(AD) Yeah, it’s important to find a balance between being interesting and having the right level of difficulty. We both come from animation backgrounds and that can be massively different to games. In standard animation you would design each background and animation like it’s a still shot, whereas in games, there’s a lot more movement and interaction between assets. And they all have to be designed individually. In backgrounds for example, you don’t just have a single background, but lots of different pieces that all have to be able to move at different times. It can be really challenging to figure all that stuff out. Ori and the Blind Forest is a really great example of how to do backgrounds well. It’s almost like a scene from a Studio Ghibli film, but with individual parts that actually move. Like the grass in the foreground…it’s so subtle that you probably wouldn’t even notice it if you weren’t looking specifically for it, but you definitely “feel” it when you’re playing.

(JC) Yeah, the visuals are really important to these types of game. Look at Symphony of the Night for example. In that game, every background is unique and interesting. So when you do backtrack you have a sense of movement and place.

Is any of Eternal Spirits hand drawn?

(AD) Yeah, it’s all hand drawn digitally and in 2D, made using a program called Toon Boom.

(JC) No 3D at all. Everything has been drawn by hand.

Wow, I imagine that must be a lot of work…

(JC) Yeah, it was tough at times. I mean, it wasn’t so much a struggle because we know what we’re doing, but we’re old school and prefer 2D artwork. So drawing every frame of every animation and background in this way is extremely time-consuming.

(AD) But you know, we were taught animation at college with real paper and real desks. So really, we’re just applying the old-school mentality we learned there into digital.

Do you share responsibilities or do you each have a set role?

(AD) Although we do share responsibility and check up on each other, we like to focus on our strengths also. For example, I would be good at roughing out things like characters or animations, whereas Joe is very good at being precise.

(JC) Yeah, I’ll finalise the clean ups and make sure things look smooth. It’s mainly me and Audrey on the art side of things, whereas Sean is pretty much solely on code. We have just fixed up my apartment as well and have all three of our computers set up there, so that lets us get together more frequently to work together on the game.

How do you approach tasks like bug testing and balancing?

(JC) Playtesting by other people is extremely important when making a game. Because, as much as you are making a game that you yourself will enjoy, you really want other people to enjoy it as well. It’s so easy to become stuck in a “everything seems fine” attitude when you play your own work, but when third parties play through it they will often have issues with the gameplay or encounter bugs that you would never find or think of by yourself. I even remember Audrey coming across a bug when she was playing through an early version of the game that I would never have found. It only appeared after she pressed this almost random combination of button inputs and it would cause the character to become stuck on an animation frame.

(AD) Ha ha, yeah! It had to be such a precise set of inputs to make the bug appear as well!

(JC) Once we found out how the bug occurred then we were able to fix it, but it just shows the importance of getting other people to playtest your work. Another thing you can take from having your game tested is, like we were saying before, you can use the experience of the player to determine where the game needs balancing. The more experienced players will very quickly work out the optimal path through certain areas and show us exploits we weren’t aware of. This is definitely one of the most helpful aspects of playtesting for us. And also, ultimately, you will have people tell you whether they actually like your game or not and where they think it needs improving. So you really need to be able to take on board advice in good conscience.

Switching topics slightly, what’s the local game development scene like at the moment? From the outside, it seems to be quite small…

(JC) It is small, but at the same time there’s a lot of really ambitious people here as well. There’s so much going on and everybody is trying to do something unique and cool. And being so small it means that there’s lot of opportunity, through meetups and stuff, to really get some proper insight and feedback from other people in the scene.

(AD) Yeah, like we’ve put our game out there at gaming and anime conventions in the past for other developers to test and got some really great feedback -, both good and bad. And then as well, we would test their game and let them know what we think about their project.

(JC) Yeah, people in general have just been really lovely and willing to lend their insight as much as possible.

Do you feel like the scene receives sufficient support from the government and other agencies?

(JC) I wouldn’t necessarily be that knowledgeable about that side of things, but you do get the sense that Ireland isn’t really looked upon as a country for making games. A lot of people end up leaving the country to go form a studio in England, or to get a job in Germany or somewhere else in Europe, because the support they need to succeed just isn’t there. But making and funding a game is a massive gamble so you can understand it to some extent. As a small developer though, it can be hard when you probably also have a full-time or part-time job and you know there is little chance of securing funding.

(AD) Wasn’t there funding from some small government groups a few years ago? I don’t think the games worked out though…

(JC) Yeah, I think so. I know some people indirectly who were part of NDRC (National Digital Research Centre) and who funded the production of a few games locally. I think they put up quite a bit of money too! But in the end, like Audrey said, I don’t think the games turned out that successful money-wise, and it scared off other groups from further investment. But saying that, I heard that there is an Irish game that’s coming to the Xbox One so people are obviously excited for that…

(AD) The Little Acre game?

(JC) Yeah, that’s the one. So for sure, there is definitely hope for the Irish scene to become something bigger than it is now.

You can definitely see there is push to promote the local scene though in terms of education. It is hard to miss the adverts for the BCFE (Ballyfermot College of Further Education) for example…

(JC) Oh yeah, I think Ireland is properly embracing that side of things a bit more now. When I was doing my Masters, my course was focused on videogame coding and that was all pretty much all there was. But now, you have proper courses dedicated to game design like the four year course at Pulse (Pulse College, Dublin). All of a sudden there’s a lot more access available to actual teaching resources and knowledgeable people to teach the subject.

(AD) I think the skills linking to animation and games really cross over a lot as well, and this allows you to work in so many different fields. Like now, if you know animation you can work in the gaming industry. If you know code you can work in the gaming industry or work with websites for example. Ten years ago these might all have been separate skills, but now they’re all converging.

Over the course of the previous and current console generations, and in particular over the last couple of years, Sony and Microsoft have made big efforts to push the presence of indie games onto their online stores. Do you feel like this has opened up opportunities for smaller teams like yourselves that may not have been there previously?

(JC) Not for us per se, but I’d say it definitely has for some. Just look at games like Shovel Knight or Outland or Dust… There’s so many indie games coming to console nowadays. I don’t think anybody from Ireland has managed to get their games onto PSN yet, but like I said before The Little Acre is coming to the Xbox One so that’s definitely a positive sign for Ireland and smaller developers like ourselves.

(AD) It definitely seems like it’s working for developers in other countries.

(JC) Yeah, but I guess it just depends on whether you can come up with a game that is going to be a big hit or not.

(AD) And you just never know which games are going to be popular or not. So much of it is dependent on marketing. Sometimes, the actual quality of the game has very little to do with how successful a game will be. You see some really bad games do well, and equally games that deserve better do poorly. So marketing is really important.

Do you prefer a curated storefront like that of Sony or Microsoft? Or do you think the slightly more democratic approach favoured by Steam is the future?

(JC) Once you get through the popularity vote that is Greenlight then Steam is definitely the easier place to get your game on. And I’m not saying it’s open to just anybody, but you definitely see a lot of bad stuff make it through as well, like countless Android ports or shoddy private server MMORPGs. So it works both ways. A lot of bad stuff may get through, but it also allows developers like us to get our stuff out there and hopefully start making a little bit of money. Plus, it allows you to officially say you have your game on Steam which is obviously cool.

(AD) Yeah, and that gives you more control as an indie developer who is looking to make a smaller game.

Is that something important to you? If you had the option, would you move to a larger studio to further your career or would you prefer to keep your integrity as a small studio?

(JC) Well I cannot speak for Audrey or Sean, but personally, as one of the founders of Playful Panda Studios, I would prefer to stay together as a team.

(AD) Yeah, because the way we are going now gives us complete creative control and that’s extremely important.

So do you still see yourselves remaining as a team together in ten years from now?

(JC) Yeah I think so, and hopefully by then we will have a bigger team and will be making a lot more games. I guess that’s everybody’s goal ultimately.

Do you already have ideas for your next games?

(AD) Actually, Eternal Spirits is supposed to be a trilogy…

(JC) Well the plan was that if the game does well then it would be part of a three-parter. But we have some other ideas as well. Like, I’m the primary platforming fan in the team, but the genre that we all share in common is RPG games. So, in future and if we were to be successful, then we would all like to make a JRPG style game…

(AD) With really good cinematics…

(JC) Yeah, well if budget was no issue then of course!

You talked about ideas for a mobile game…What are the major differences involved in making a game specifically for a mobile platform?

(JC) It’s mainly the same as for any other platform, but the general rule of thumb is to get a working build onto the device as quickly as possible. When you’re playing on a phone with a touch screen, controls are really important so it’s vital to get an idea early on of how well they work. You can do early playtesting on a PC, but sooner rather than later you are going to want to get the game working on the target device. In terms of game design though, I guess in general the idea for a mobile game is to make it playable in five or ten minute chunks. That’s not to say people won’t play them for longer periods than that, but as a rule you want a mobile game to be quick and easy. And playable with just one hand while standing up as well.

(AD) Yeah this is where games on phones are so different to those on PCs.

(JC) But, it all depends on the region you are aiming for as well. The Asian market for example will tend to prefer games with grinding and gachapon style aspects, whereas in the west the focus is more on building and waiting for it that building to be completed.

(AD) Just like in Clash of Clans where you have to wait a day for stuff to be built…

(JC) Wait or pay to speed up the process…

How do you feel about VR?

(JC) I think VR will be a great thing in the future, but my worry at the moment is that it might fall the way of certain other platforms in which not enough good games come to it and people lose interest. If you look at the PSVR as well…it looks cool, but at the same time I don’t know if the PS4 itself if powerful enough to really deliver. Like the fidelity of the image has to be reduced to make it work. Sony are going to have to make a whole new machine to get it up to the standard of the other headsets and people aren’t going to be too happy if a new console is released so soon after the PS4. Also, while I do think the tech is great and can be a lot of fun, I think in the end people will always come back to a controller once the uniqueness of the experience wears off. I guess I’m just worried that it might be a little…gimmicky…

(AD) But at the same time, that’s what everybody said during the early days of videogames as a whole. And then look at machines like the Wii and how commercially successful that was for Nintendo.

So, to wrap up, what changes have you seen in the local game development scene and how would you like to see it change in future?

(JC) Well, like we were saying before, I think the popularity of college courses is a big change compared to even when we were coming through. There’s a lot more people taking animation courses nowadays and the scores for getting into them are a lot higher than where they were before.

(AD) Yeah, it’s definitely harder to get in now. There’s a lot more people are applying. When we started college the options for things like game design just weren’t there.

(JC) Now, we have proper teachers and lecturers and a really passionate and like-minded local community for giving advice and feedback. If I had to change something though going forward though, then I suppose it would be for more gambling on funding for the local developers. I know some games have failed in the past, but that doesn’t mean that the scene won’t produce something great in the future.

Playful Panda Studio are a three person game development studio based in Dublin, Ireland. They can be found at the following locations where a downloadable demo of their game, Eternal Spirits, is also available:

Email: playfulpandastudio@gmail.com

Facebook: Eternal Spirits

Twitter: @DublinPanda

Tumblr: playful-pandas

Christmas 1997 – The Year my World Shifted

To this day I still look back to the Christmas of 1997 with a certain degree of envy. It was over that festive season that I went from being an avid, yet fairly typical, fan of videogames to something of an obsessive. It was the point at which I realised what videogames could be and how, in a manner not matched by any other medium of fictional storytelling, they could draw you into their worlds. It was a time in which I genuinely felt my world shift a little. Unfortunately, it was also the point at which I became something of a cynic.

It was Christmas Eve and, like every year up to that point in my thirteen short years on this planet, I was spending it with the rest of my family at my auntie’s house. With supper over, I decided to leave the adults to their wine and jazz music and headed upstairs to the study room. It was, I knew then, to be a monumental night… my last ever with my SNES.

Having pestered my mum with countless coercive notes and some not so subtle hints for over six months, I knew what laid ahead of me the next morning. I knew because I’d rummaged through the entire house looking for the thing two weeks prior… I was getting a Sony Playstation.

But still, my SNES was near and dear to me, and I wanted to honour the occasion by booting up one of the first games I ever owned on the system. Nope not one of the classics like Super Mario World or Mario Kart, but my much loved, FIFA International Soccer. Let’s see out the SNES with a bang I thought as I steered Brazil to a 15-0 win over Canada.

Not but 20 minutes had passed when my older (and by older I mean he was a grown-up!) cousin arrived at the door telling me to turn the thing off because he wanted to play something. Being the little brat that I was, I quickly told him where to go, but then I saw what was in his hands… Ohhh he’d only gone and brought up his very own Playstation… The SNES was unceremoniously ripped out from the back of the TV quicker than you can say “Whatgamesyagot?” and I sat their barely able to contain my excitement… CDs??? WOW! BLACK CDs???? OMG!!!!

But then what my cousin decided to play confused me beyond words. I sat there decidedly bummed out while he proceeded to play some game full of text and weird blocky characters. “Final Fantasy VII”, he said. “Oh”, I replied as I slumped down into my armchair in a sulk. I just couldn’t wrap my head around what I was looking at. Having never been exposed to the JRPG before (my 13 year old self was not even aware that there was such a thing) I had nothing with which to compare it.

A few minutes later there appeared a large red dragon type thing on the screen. “Neo Bahamut”, my cousin said. “Oh”, I replied. Well that seemed pretty cool. I was still utterly confused as to what was happening, but my interest was a piqued a little.

My cousin kept playing for a while before then deciding that he had probably better go back downstairs and socialise with the adults. He contemplated leaving the Playstation hooked up (so he could no doubt play some more later once I had gone to bed), but upon deciding that I was not to be trusted (rightly-so) he pulled out the cables and took the console away. Still in somewhat of a daze I hooked back up the SNES and booted up Super Mario All-Stars. But something wasn’t quite right. It all just felt a bit childish somehow. After five minutes I gave up. My confidence in my ability to enjoy this new breed of adult videogames was shot. Dare I say it, I even felt a little scared to receive my Playstation the next day. I went to bed and slept a fretful night.

Suffice to say, I opened my present in the morning and was immediately back in my comfort zone having also received the football management sim, Player Manager. That odd text-heavy game from the previous night now nothing more than some distant fever dream. Confidence was restored.

So it was then a couple of days later when I was out in town looking to spend my Christmas money on a shiny new game for my console that I came back into contact with it. The cover art so simple and uncluttered, the CD case double tiered and solid looking (it comes on THREE CDs??) and the name so obtuse and beguiling. I stood there for a good thirty minutes just reading the same blurb on the back of the box, entirely unsure as to what to do. Tomb Raider seemed the obvious choice here, but that strangely named blocky game kept pulling me back. After much deliberation I plucked up the courage and took the double tiered case to the counter and parted with forty of my Christmas pounds.

It would be easy for me to sit here and list off all my favourite moments from Final Fantasy VII and tell you how I think it’s the best game ever blah blah blah, but knowing how many articles there are already out there doing just that, I won’t. To my thirteen year old self, it truly was the greatest thing ever and I held that conviction for many years to come (backed up by a number of good friends who tended to agree with me), but I am now able to look back with more objective eyes and judge the game on its own merits and failings.

What is undeniable about my experience with Final Fantasy VII though, is that it set the early benchmark for what I demand in terms of narrative engagement from games. For many of its failings, the game is entirely successful in creating a world which you grow to care about. The atmosphere is viscous and all-encompassing, the characters varied and charismatic. These many elements come together to form an eccentric yet cohesive whole that not many other games are able to match. Devoid of the blandness or mono-cultural focus of many mainstream games, Final Fantasy VII was able to flourish in its mash up of quirky and dystopian themes.

That is not to say that it actually is the best game of all time (neither objectively nor using my own subjective view point), as it has very much been surpassed in the years following its release (and by other games the preceded it). Other games have told better stories, have had more interesting worlds, have created more engaging characters and have delivered more impactful moments, but few have been able to draw me in to their clutches at quite the same level. It would be easy to dismiss this as simply a combination of nostalgia for the game and a youthful naivety on my part for not knowing that there was more skillfully created work out there, but I don’t think that is fair. Final Fantasy VII is lauded as being a landmark title and in my view justly so.

It is then something of a shame that its shadow still looms so large over my experience of videogames. As much as I try to enter into a new game entirely bias-free, I always end up making the same comparison - Do I love this game as much as my thirteen year old self loved Final Fantasy VII? But how could I? In 1997 I was young, naïve and primed to fall in love. In 2016, I am older, more haggard and a whole lot more cynical. In 1997 I was able to look past Final Fantasy VII’s failings and embrace its whole. In 2016 I am often unable to get past the slightest contradiction in a game’s narrative. In 1997 Final Fantasy VII set the bar unattainably high and then made the initial playing field decidedly uneven.

But if you ask me would I delete my memory of playing that game back in 1997, then the answer would have to be a very definite “no”. My world shifted a little back then and I remember my first adventure through those three black discs as acutely as if I were actually there. I feel the heat of Nibelheim in flame, I shiver in awe and trepidation as Sapphire Weapon approaches Junon and I shout in despair as Cloud hands the Black Materia to Sephiroth.

These are memories that will stay with me for the rest of my life and they are the reason why Final Fantasy VII will remain my most pivotal point in gaming. It may not be the best or even my favourite game of all time, but it is definitely my most cherished.

Firewatch and a Struggle for Identity

As the credits on Firewatch rolled and Etta James’ soulful tones whisked me up and out of Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest, I could not help but give the slightest of shrugs.

Was Etta telling me to reproach myself for turning a blind eye to the suffering of Julia? Was she singing a wistful contemplation on my ultimately curtailed relationship with the Other Woman, Delilah? Or were her lyrics symbolising my wilful regression back into my guilt-ridden self? With this natural refuge now a blazing inferno of rapidly carbonising trees, self-imposed jail cells, homework copy books and the skeleton of a young child, my guess is that she was doing any, or all, three of them.

I feel like I was predisposed to like Firewatch. I don’t just have a patience for this new breed of narrative driven “walking simulators”, I actually like them. I would even go as far as to say that they have been some of my favourite experiences of this current generation (see previous post on The Chinese Room’s Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture for more on that). So, it is then somewhat surprising that I walked away from Firewatch with such a feeling of ambivalence.

There is a lot to like about Firewatch. In fact, it starts on the exact right foot. The introduction skilfully and sensitively sets up your (Henry’s) backstory and motive. You are lost and you are desperately seeking validation. And in the shadow of your partner’s rapid decline into Alzheimer’s disease, and your actions around that heart-breaking situation, who wouldn’t be? I’ve never had to deal with such an issue in my own life, and I can only imagine how incredibly hard it must be to do so, but Firewatch was able to elicit a genuine emotional response in me that not many games have done so before. By the time I arrived at my tower and got my first look out over the jumble of peaks, troughs and interconnecting pathways of the Shoshone National Forest, I felt the scene was just right for a journey deep into my guilt and insecurities. (Surprise! I enjoy pretentious games!)

Delilah, my mirror, my validation, my partner in crime, my tormentor, welcomed me through the gates into this world of purgatory in the only way she knows how… by being inappropriately forward in her tone and questioning. Ten minutes in and I was setting myself up for a real slog through the rest of the game as I was forced to deal with this inane woman on the other end of the radio. However, being the generally polite creature that I am when in unfamiliar surroundings, I tried to respond as amicably as possible. This was hardly the time to cast off the weighted shackles with which I ascended up to the tower, but equally I could not simply dismiss this other person who is just trying to say hello. Thankfully, her chatter was brief and I was soon able to go to bed. It had been a long fourteen years and I just needed a little time to process things.

A couple of hours later, and contrary to my expectations, I actually found myself missing Delilah’s voice when it wasn’t there. The world felt muted without it. Perhaps that is the nature of being deep in a forested northern wilderness like Shoshone where silence is the norm (a jungle city of wildlife it is not), but as time moved on I increasingly found myself contacting her on the merest of pretences (yes, I wish to report an abandoned outhouse, please… Now give me another wise crack to take my mind off the crushing guilt of it all). Delilah was both the person to interrupt my descent into mental self-flagellation and also the one to facilitate it, depending on my willingness to divulge, and I quickly came to rely on her. As questionable as some of her own decisions that summer were, and as socially awkward as she could be, Delilah was the lifeline with which I dragged myself over to and out the other side. I could not imagine Firewatch without her.

As I’m sure you can tell, I very much enjoyed this aspect of my time with Firewatch. The game managed to confound my early misgivings and create, in a very short space of time, a solid sense of friendship with this dismembered voice at the other end of a virtual radio, and for that it deserves a lot of praise. However, it is also the point at which my enjoyment of the game begins to waiver.

I tried not to read or listen to too much about this game before playing it, but one of the few comments I did hear being floated around was that it had something of the air of a 70s thriller. And sure enough, it did contain many of the elements you would expect to find in such films, riffing hard on the intrigue and conspiracy leanings of movies such as The Conversation (only this time YOU are the one being listened to). Towards the opening half of the game, this is the element that dominates, and the atmosphere is neatly wrapped in a blanket of unease and tension. However, as you move further forward and the in-game calendar gathers momentum, you begin to learn more and more about the story of Ned and Brian, a sad and ultimately tragic tale of a slightly unhinged father and his young son.

While Ned and Brian’s story was an interesting and moving one on its own (albeit slightly tempered by the underwhelming reveal in which you discover the fate of Brian), it was disappointing for me to discover that, in the end, the two narrative threads tied together so definitively. Of course, the lack of an actual conspiracy to transcended the obsessions of yet another guilt-ridden male hiding out in the woods may actually lend the game a greater sense of realism than it would have had should it have ran with the government meddling plot device employed earlier, but personally I was in it for the wilder and more fantastical trip and what I was served was not what I had ordered.

This is a tough point for me to argue, as I am sure there are many people out there who prefer the direction the story took, but I can only speak about how I felt after the game and what I felt was just a little underwhelmed. After such a strong opening narratively speaking, the latter half of the game, to me at least, simply whimpered away into a bit of an anti-climax. I wanted the tension ratcheted up to unbearable levels, but what I actually got was a bit of a soggy bottom.

My hesitations in wholeheartedly recommending this game also stretch to other areas of the game (both in terms of execution and design).

While having such a strong and real-time through-narrative was a wholly welcome change of pace for the “walking-sim” genre, it did also have the perhaps undesired effect of stopping me from fully exploring my environment (and therefore uncovering some of the subtler aspects of the environmental storytelling). Compelled to press on in the interests of maintaining narrative momentum, I often found myself at pains to not leave the main path and explore the map in all its minute detail. However, saying that, I do not know to what extent this would even be possible should I have given in to this impulse to explore, as on the few occasions that I did find myself wondering off into the bush (more often than not as a result of being lost), I found myself either blocked by an obstacle to which I did not have the tools with which to pass, or alternatively urged by Delilah to stick to my objective. Given that I have talked in the past about the momentum killing effects of open exploration on narrative driven games (see post on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt) I am aware of sounding churlish here, but ultimately it is something I came away from the game feeling very acutely.

Even putting all these narrative-based concerns aside, there are still the enormous performance issues that plague the PS4 version to contend with. I am not typically somebody who would be too hung up on drops in frame-rate and pop-in etc. (I have no problems enjoying Fallout 4 for example), but the constant stuttering I encountered during my playthrough of FireWatch was enough to drive me to distraction and to even consider leaving the game alone until patched. I stuck with it in hope that I would simply acclimatise, but from start to finish the game was a mess in terms of final execution. I could perhaps understand if I was looking at something breathtakingly beautiful, but while looking pretty, Firewatch is far from stunning. I like the art, and I like the world Campo Santo made, but performance issues like those I encountered left me with a definite bitter taste in my mouth when I finally put the controller down. Maybe what Etta was actually getting at was for me to close my eyes and experience the game solely on the audiosphere? Hmmmm…..

Firewatch was a confusing experience for me. I enjoyed my time with the game in a lot of ways, but that time was also tinged with a few elements that simply did not sit particularly well with me. Most of these elements are probably more down to my own sensibilities than through objective failings in the game’s design (and in truth I have enjoyed the game more in hindsight now that I have had the time to process it), but whereas I came into it expecting to love it, I left it in something of a huff (yeah, cheers for ditching me Delilah!).

The emotions run deep in Shoshone and the writers deserve a lot of credit for the way they introduced such a sobering and mature, yet subtly delivered conversation in a medium that generally struggles to produce more thoughtful narratives without becoming overblown and overly saccharine. It is just a shame for me that the final narrative hook that pulls you over the finishing line was so blunt.

Over the course of the past year it would not be an exaggeration to say that over 75% of my gaming time has been taken up by just two games. Made available on PS+ within a couple of months of each other, these two games have even changed my primary means of gaming. Instead of taking up valuable TV real estate with my PS4, I now find myself nightly curled up in a corner of the couch absorbed in the OLED screen of my Vita. Both games share many elements in terms of gameplay and challenge, and for those who have yet to be initiated into their club, probably appear simplistic to the point of banality. Yet, both also have huge cult followings, and also have rapidly become two of my favourite games of all time.

If you haven’t worked it out already, these two games are Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl’s The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and Derek Yu’s Spelunky.

Now, if this sounds like old news then it’s because it is, and that is pretty much what I want to talk about. In regards gaming, just as with numerous other types of media, I all too often find myself late to the zeitgeist. This can, at least in part, be put down to the fact that I am one of those despicable individuals who cannot take a recommendation in the spirit in which it was meant. Even just the notion that somebody else found something cool before me is genuinely enough to put me off playing/watching/listening to said recommendation for many years to come, with recent examples including the Souls series, Destiny, The Martian, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead.

* At this point I feel it is important to separate this phenomenon from that of hyped up products not meeting expectations (Interstellar I’m talking about you here!), which is an entirely different thing all together.

Anyway, this is a personality fault of mine, and I can only blame myself if I end up missing out on something great as a result. But you know what? There is sometimes a bit of an upside to this. By putting some time and distance between myself and the furore surrounding a new release, I am often able to come into a game without the burden of expectation, and as a result avoid the fatigue that results from over-exposure.

This is exactly what happened for me with Spelunky. By the time I began playing, Patrick Klepek’s Spelunkin’ with Scoops series had long since ceased, weekly Giant Bomb chat about the game had dried up and spoiler-filled message board posts were few and far between. I had ridden out the frenzied storm and was free to feel excited about the game all about myself.

When I stumbled accidentally upon the Black Market (without the key) it genuinely felt like my own discovery. Similar to the sensation you get from discovering an obscure little easter egg in some far flung reach of a giant open world map, I was almost able to fool myself into thinking that I had found something completely unknown to the rest of the Spelunky community. Despite knowing that of course this could not possibly be the case, I still could not help but feel somewhat disappointed when I found out that it was actually a commonly known location. I guess one of the advantages of playing a game at launch in that you could, in theory, be the first to discover such a thing, but I imagine that the chances are you are more likely to hear about it through a forum post than you are to discover it organically. I prefer the isolation of being divorced from the community when discovering a feature/mechanic/location rich game like Spelunky.

Similar things happened in the Binding of Isaac: Rebirth when I was first transported into the I AM ERROR room. I again knew that I could not possibly be the first to see that screen, but the fun of thinking that I COULD BE, was huge.

And this is the joy of being late to the video gaming party. Exposure and expectations are removed, and therefore the gaming experience is more pure. Do any of you have experience in coming to a game way after the zeitgeist has passed? If so, what were your experiences? Do you feel you got more out of the game as a result of that, or am I just overthinking it?

Anyway, I am now finding that my time with Spelunky and Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is coming to an end. I am still yet to even complete Spelunky or even see the hell stage (I succumbed to temptation and watched a Patrick Klepek run), but I am starting to tire of the game loop and am now looking for something else to sink my teeth into. Does anybody have any suggestions in regards great games that I may have missed? Galak-Z seems like it would be a lot of fun if I could play it on my Vita, but I don’t know if I will be able to get into it the same way if I have to play it on the big screen. What would be your suggestions?