I recently found myself with a moderate amount of time to kill and having been swayed by the tales my girlfriend had shared from her time in Stardew Valley I wanted to jump back in myself. I'd played a little at launch on PC (Although hadn't even finished a single year of gameplay) and hadn't tried the game after any of the many updates, so I picked up a second copy on Switch and started from scratch.

The second time around I chose a different farm layout (forest) which was great for getting extra resources (as it rewards foraging gameplay) but also carves off a chunk of your farmland in a way which you're unable to shape yourself; frustrating to someone who always enjoyed managing the aesthetic of the farmland. Still, I stuck with it/couldn't be bothered to start again, and I'm now halfway through my second year.

Hearing Dan talk about it on a recent Beastcast (as Abby has also recently started playing the game) I felt like my progression mirrored his; you start out grinding away with little money and weak tools that leave you fatigued early in the day and have little else to do. It's difficult to make friends before your first harvest as many of the villagers want gifts that aren't available until a later season. Once you've got a routine in place things start to balance out and as you become more efficient and as the farm becomes more manageable, you pivot from the monotony of endless watering to getting to know the villagers, fixing up the community center, and exploring the mine. As time goes on your farm becomes increasingly self-sufficient, to the extent that you can focus on crafting more artisanal goods, fishing, and exploring the new areas that are gradually unlocked.

I'm enjoying the "social" aspect of the game a lot more than last time, and a lot more than I expected - getting to know each of the single ladies, bringing people gifts and trying to fulfill their requests, locking down each routine so you know where find each person (not in a creepy way), and generally making friends. I always look forward to the cut-scenes and interactions you have with the other characters and it's rewarding when they open up to you. Having said that, I frequently find myself underwhelmed by the bland responses that each NPC will offer the vast majority of the time. I'm not expecting a lengthy monologue, but for a game which actively encourages and rewards you for seeking out and speaking with each of the villagers it doesn't meet you halfway by way of engaging dialogue. The consequence of this is the town feels more like Westworld than a living breathing community, and those conversations can sometimes feel like a grind, especially when you've just spent half a day trying to track down one specific individual only to be rewarded with the same two lines you've already heard dozens of times already; which is a real shame - as it would have been (and still is) an easy problem to solve with a little more variety in the responses of each character to really flesh them out.

Still, if you are willing to invest the time then there are several characters who are worth the effort. I'm really enjoying the arcs of some of the less immediately appealing characters - Abigail is fun, though apparently was written to be the perfect "gamer-girl" which seemed a little too easy, so my courtship has predominantly been focused on Haley (superficial, vapid) and Penny (shy, timid), while the friends I enjoy hanging out with the most have been George (cantankerous) and of course, Linus (perfect). It is a cause of endless frustration to me that I can't invite Linus to live on my farm in one of the many cabins that it's possible for me to build, but I guess he's up in that tent because he wants to be.

At this point in my game I've reached the bottom of the mine, unlocked the quarry, and I've built enough sprinklers that my farm takes care of itself, for the most part. There's still plenty of mysteries to solve (anyone know what this skull key does? I figured it unlocked the sewer but it doesn't seem to work), and I'd like to finish up the community center and upgrade my barn.

Stardew holds up, and I'm enjoying being able to passively play in handheld mode while listening to podcasts or killing time at home. It's not flawless by any means, but it's still interesting to explore, and refreshingly wholesome. Sometimes that's all you need.

Thanks For reading

Love Sweep

I used to love Call Of Duty. When I was a kid it was the first real PC shooter that ever hooked me - I never played Halo, and before my parents bought a decent PC my FPS games had all been on the N64. So Goldeneye, basically. I never grew up close enough to anyone I knew to get involved in any LAN parties so Call Of Duty, when it was released in 2003, was the first time I had ever played a real shooter with more than 3 other players, and it was the first time I had ever been actively involved in an online community. I was hooked - the setting felt incredibly real, the characters were fully voiced and would talk to one another throughout each mission - and the multiplayer especially was groundbreaking for a kid who grew up in the middle of nowhere and didn't have any friends living within walking/biking distance. I invested hundreds of hours with that game, and when I spoke to my friends at school I couldn't understand why they weren't playing it as well.

Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 has understandably evolved since then. The weapons have been upgraded, the gadgets have been introduced, and the general speed has become punishingly fast - not as fast or ridiculous as Black Ops 3, which has invisible ninjas wall-running with samurai swords - but fast enough that it makes me feel old. This speed, combined with an emphasis on smaller teams and maps, means the game feels a lot more frantic. There's less of the trench-warfare-esque back-n-forth from the original game, which would pit two sides against one another in a way which would allow the push and pull of a frontline to dictate the battle - this game is more focused on individual plays rather than an overwhelming team push, and that's enabled by the way the game channels people into the action: in Black Ops 4 people spawn everywhere, constantly, from every angle, and you'll frequently have people rushing at you from every side. The emphasis is often on tighter streets or corridors instead of rolling vistas, rewarding short-range weapons with faster fire-rates - balanced to make players even more agile and difficult to hit. The result is the multiplayer in Black Ops 4 is a ongoing panic-attack, where you're constantly barraged with lighting fast enemies from every side and are frequently killed by an enemy from a place which was definitely empty just a moment ago. On top of this, once a team takes the lead they are rewarded with increasingly powerful killstreaks, snowballing them further into the lead and preventing the losing side from spawning for more than a few seconds before being endlessly blown up by rockets and helicopters and airstrikes - the small map size meaning there's very few places to hide.

I'm about to hit my first prestige in the multiplayer - I've played predominantly objective-based game modes like Hardpoint, Control, and Search and Destroy, using a variety of different gun types - and (despite the impressions I may have given in the previous paragraph) I'm actually enjoying it quite a lot. After months of endlessly playing PUBG (a game where each life is fragile, and caution is always advised) a game like Black Ops 4 (which rewards repeatedly and enthusiastically throwing yourself into the fray) has been very refreshing. My aim has improved, and not having to deal with the endless bugs and desync of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds has also been very satisfying. The main issue I have with Black Ops 4 is that it feels fucking mindless.

Black Ops 4 multiplayer feels like a very reaction-based game - where you're relying on twitch reflexes rather than planning and forethought. Maybe FPS games have always been like that, but in Black Ops 4 it's especially pronounced; This game seems to reward independent play (while some specialist abilities may benefit the team, they seldom compliment one another without high levels of communication, which there is seldom time for) rather than the team-based pressure of something like Overwatch. Imagine if every player in Overwatch always picked Hanzo; that's Black Ops 4. It's about being the fastest and the most accurate - players can immediately heal to full health inbetween all but the most drawn-out of firefights, so it essentially comes down to your ability to kill stuff as efficiently as possible - the physical toll on the player is that it's all happening so fast you're barely engaging with it. It feels good to win, and it's satisfying to murder your opponent before they can murder you, but the game rarely feels that binary; The quirky overpowered abilities and killstreaks, combined with the randomness of the enemy spawns and limited lines of sight, often means you're placed in an unwinnable situation and reaction times/skill/knowledge all become redundant.

Essentially the multiplayer in Black Ops 4 feels very one-note. It's polished, and it's fun, but I can play for 3 hours and not be able to call back a single significant thing that happened - it just feels like a blur of running and frantically clicking at anything that moves. It's been refreshing to check in with the FPS multiplayer genre, but I think I'm at the point where I need something more from my shooting games.

Blackout however, is a whole different ballgame. I'll have some thoughts on that coming soon, once I've spent a bit more time with it.

Thanks For Reading

Love Sweep

Having escaped the clutches of both the Dota 2 and Hearthstone, two games which have collectively soaked up thousands of hours of my life, not to mention hundreds of dollars from my bank vault, the news that Valve was making a card game that seemed similar to Hearthstone but using the dota 2 characters and aesthetic was something that I was vaguely interested in but determined to ignore.

A couple of days ago however, gamesindustry.biz released this insightful interview with Jeep Barnett and Richard Garfield, the game's lead programmer and designer respectively, and I couldn't help but take a peek. I'm going to summarise a lot of the key points they make if you can't be bothered to read it, and highlight some things which deserve to be talked about. Some of them are... worrying.

First and foremost, each developer goes to great pains to separate Artifact from Hearthstone, though without any real explanation as to what the differences in gameplay are. To anyone who's ever read an interview with a developer attempting to hype up their game, it's standard PR stuff;

"When Artifact was announced, the obvious and most immediate comparison many made was to Hearthstone. At absolute surface-level, it's a fair one. After all, Hearthstone's popularity both as a casual game and a competitive title have been thus far unmatched by anything else in the genre, so any up and coming online card game will naturally be compared to it. However, as I found out from demoing the game, the simple fact that both are games you play with cards is about where the similarities end. Barnett and Garfield seem to agree with that separation."

Fine. Stay tuned, I guess. What came next was pretty surprising though:

Beyond the actual gameplay, Artifact has something else that makes it incredibly unique: its monetization style. The game will cost $20 at launch, which will get players two starter decks (everyone gets the same ones) and ten packs of random cards. From that, there is absolutely no way for players to earn more packs by playing the game. Everything more must either be bought with real money, or traded for on the game's market

The heavy dependence on microtransactions, and the fact that in order to compete at a high level required you to spend hundreds of dollars per expansion, was the main reason I quit Hearthstone, even with it's ingame currency and ability to craft, recycle and unlock new cards organically. The fact that Artifact aims to skip this and jump straight to a purely microtransaction-based card economy is, for me at least, an instant red-flag; I'm not interested in supporting that business model. Beyond that, it seems extremely shortsighted to disregard the relatively recent backlash consumers have had over microtransactions and loot crates in other games. I guess this is going to come down to the pricing strategy of packs, and drop rate of the best cards - however taking into account the way that valve has monetized content in Dota 2, I fully expect this to be aggressive. The article even goes as far as to say:

A marketplace on its own may create the potential for an interesting in-game economy, but it sounds as though Artifact all but requires a constant cash flow from its participants. At launch, there is no way to earn packs through play, and in fact there is no single-player campaign, ranking system, or really anything to Artifact other than playing the game with someone else for fun. "It's not pay to win," Garfield said. "It's pay to participate. Any hobby you have, you have to invest something. If you play tennis, you buy a racket. So here, we've got a model where you can put in a very modest amount and be competitive. We can control that in the sense that common cards in this game are very powerful. We expect top-tier play to include a lot of common cards. We also make sure that rare cards that are there are not so rare they drag prices up.

The next highlight is also concerning, though for different reasons:

The game will also feature live chat that allows players to communicate with one another during a match - even strangers. I asked how that chat and the community in general would be moderated to discourage bad behavior, but neither Barnett nor Garfield could offer any specific idea of tools that would help someone avoid a random internet stranger hurling insults at them during an Artifact match.

At this point I had to briefly stop reading for a while. The words "shortsighted" and "naive" pirouetted across my mind as I blinked at the wall.

"Psychologically, we find that people misbehave when there is somebody else to observe them misbehaving," Barnett said. "When it's a one-on-one game, what is my motivation for saying something awful? But when you're in a game with a bunch of other people and you say something, a bunch of other people laugh at you, so something happened. We tend to see people behave very differently in one-on-one situations."

Haha! Oh wait, they're serious. Hmm. Well, I know a lot of people look back with a fondness for the original Uno release on Xbox 360 and it's live webcam interactions (I specifically remember Jeff talking about his match against a room full of dudes racking up lines of cocaine as they played Uno, which is pretty intense), but as someone who has spent many years on the internet, and interacting with other human beings on a daily basis in the real world, not to mention the 7+ years I've spent moderating this website, and taking into account the current level of openly vitriolic lawlessness both on the Steam forums and within the communities of existing steam games (I'm looking at you, Dota), the idea that people will play nicely among themselves simply because they're not playing for an audience (unless they're streaming I suppose, but that'll never catch on, right?) is the icing on the "we're completely out of touch" cake that Valve seems to be baking.

More importantly though. it's irresponsible; these developers are essentially opening up another avenue for people to be harassed, and for the people that seek to harass to do so without punishment. As white men they may not be as sensitive to the kind of casual offhand abuse that women/LGBT+/non cis/non-white people have to deal with on a daily basis, but it's bizarrely insouciant of them not to acknowledge that harassment and trolling is a common 21st century problem, that game communities are often plagued by casual sexism, homophobia and racism, and that others might not have the same painless experience as they themselves did on their internal test server; Maybe I'm just a cynical bastard, but to not pre-emptively have a system in place to deal with that inevitability seems either extremely negligent or extremely sheltered.

EDIT: I initially misinterpreted the article and assumed this "live chat" would be in video form, though upon review that was apparently a hallucination on my part. While a regular text chat certainly limits the potential for misuse, it's still remarkably naive of Valve to assume that no moderation would be required and, as such, I stand by my original criticisms but have removed my dumb joke about unsolicited solitaire dicks. Thanks.

Anyway, I'm sure you can disable the live chat, and I'm sure you can mute or disable all chat completely (as per Hearthstone) but if you're going to include those things even as an option then you can't simply leave it unmoderated; I'm fed up with developers creating platforms for abuse and then not taking responsibility for the behavior of the players who use them. Valve in particular has a terrible track record when it comes to moderation (readers of my blog will know that their terrible automated moderation system is one of the reasons I stopped playing Dota), and this interview gives the impression that they not only have no interest in addressing it, but don't even consider it an issue worthy of their attention.

I appreciate it's still early, and there's no sense in writing a game off long before its release, but it's hard to stay optimistic in light of this information. I'm sure there are people out there who have more patience than I do and/or find those random online interactions entertaining, but personally it's not worth the risk.

Thanks For Reading

Love Sweep

Be warned, there are brief Bioshock Infinite spoilers ahead.

After discussing Bioshock Infinite with a friend, a game I haven't played since it was first released in 2013, I wanted to revisit some of the criticism that shrouded the game after it's launch and see how well they held up. Browsing through articles and reviews, I noticed that a lot of people seemed to have an issue with the characters in the game, specifically DeWitt.

We hear DeWitt repeatedly emphasise that there is no difference whatsoever between Comstock and Fitzroy, which is an astoundingly asinine assertion. Criticising a bloody uprising is fair enough, but to tar racism and revolution with the same brush and then dismiss the entire topic? That isn't just oversimplification, that's verging on cowardice.

Which started me down a path, considering whether it's OK for the protagonist in a game to be unpleasant, or imperfect. In some instances, such as with Kratos or Vegeta, we're happy to accept and even enjoy their moral corruption. So what is it that causes that inconsistency?

I've had similar discussions with people before about The Name Of The Wind. The protagonist, Kvothe, is frequently arrogant, sexist, and demonstrates a plethora of unhealthy attitudes towards women which made me think, in spite of what the story apparently wants you to believe, that he's a bit of a twat. This is offset by the fact that an adult version of Kvothe is dictating his story from memory, the implication being that the story has been romanticized and exaggerated in equal measure depending on the current level of self-loathing Kvothe himself is experiencing at that exact point in time; clearly bitter and filled with regret over his actions it's difficult to tell if he's deliberately making his younger self seem obnoxious because he feels that he deserves the disdain of his audience, or if that's completely unintentional and the author, Patrick Rothfuss, genuinely thinks these are admirable and heroic characteristics. As I've said before, he's either a very good author or a very bad one. From the interviews with the author that followed I'd lean towards the latter, though he does seem to be making an effort to improve.

Ready Player One (the book, let's not talk about the film) is similarly subject to criticism - not only because the protagonist Wade Watts is a complete bellend, but because the author has repeatedly demonstrated in interviews that he is oblivious to this fact. The other characters glorify Wade's problematic behavior with starry eyes, making the entire novel deeply uncomfortable.

So does writing a "bad" character mean the book is automatically bad? For a story to succeed is a protagonist obligated to be virtuous and embody our most desirable ideals? And when they do not should we blame the character or the writer?

The Death Of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave is a good counter example. The protagonist, Bunny Munro, is deliberately designed to be a culmination of detestable ideals; He's a cheater, a rapist, a pervert, a fat greedy moron who doesn't care about anyone but himself. His 10 year old son, also called Bunny Munro, adores him - a sweet friendly boy who thinks the world of his father and will do whatever he can to please him - the central dynamic of the book being that you know one of them is going to die, you just don't know which one.

It's an excellent book, despite the fact that the protagonist as about as deplorable a human being as you could hope to write. I think it proves quite succinctly that a character who is morally corrupt does not automatically equal a bad story. You can have great stories about bad characters. So why do some characters sour an entire experience and not others?

In games we frequently play horrible characters.

Violent men and women, murderers, assassins, thieves, monsters, and in one case an extremely vexed raccoon. One of my favourite games is The Last Of Us, the protagonist Joel essentially hired muscle. It's made clear repeatedly that he's done some pretty horrible fucking things to survive, and you yourself continue to do some messed up shit as you're guiding him through the game. He still resonates with me as a good character, however. By contrast the character of DeWitt seems like a dick, to the extent that it almost spoiled the game for me. Perhaps it's because of the way that the games other inhabitants seem immune to his bullshit, the way he is hero-worshipped by Elizabeth regardless. It feels undeserved? That undeserved-ness feels like the opinions of the writers themselves shining through, that this is what they think people should aspire to. We're OK to play and enjoy asshole protagonists as long as the other characters, the world, the writer, are in on the joke. That self awareness is important, and it's awkward when we don't get a sense of it.

The new Kratos has been praised repeatedly, but nobody is going to vote him father of the year, especially not himself.

It's obviously difficult to write good characters, because creating a personality which everyone feels the same way about is always going to be problematic. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who thought DeWitt was badass and have no idea what I'm talking about right now. I'm sure a lot of people think the way Kvothe objectifies and treats women is cool too. I think the mark of a good writer should be the potential they leave for doubt, though; The potential for opposing opinions on a character's behavior is what gives them depth and makes them human - to be imperfect and to have those imperfections acknowledged and even celebrated.

So while hearing DeWitt preach nonsense isn't inherently bad, the fact that nobody questions him in the game is what causes us to do so in our criticisms of it. If DeWitt was an alcoholic womaniser and the other characters in the game treated him like as a useless scumbag then I think I'd like him more. It's weird how that works, huh?

Thanks For Reading,

Love Sweep

I was cautiously optimistic about Sea Of Thieves. Having watched some reputable streamers play the beta (admittedly with the cynicism that Microsoft had paid for them to do so) it looked like a fun, albeit repetitive sandbox. The full game boasted a larger range of quests and incentives to play, and after a friend suggested I sign up for the two week Microsoft Game Pass Trial I was able to take to the seas without spending a single dollar. The rest of my PUGB squad already had the game preordered, so it was a fairly easy transition, and we've spent the last week sailing about, shivering timbers, and other nautical verbs like that.

It's been less than a week and half my crew has already uninstalled the game.

There's a lot to appreciate about Sea Of Thieves. The game looks gorgeous, and as a longtime fan of both Eve Online and Guns Of Icarus Online this, on paper, was everything I'd ever wanted. A ship shared between multiple players with open world PVP. Awesome.

After a lengthy debate over which side of the boat was port and which was starboard (left and right respectively, thank you), we got going. There are three NPC guilds/alliances to align with, though we were told that it's better to level all three without prejudice as you're required to hit the cap with each to participate in the endgame content. Each of them had quests that were entertaining at first. Until we handed them in, and were given an identical set of replacements. 5 days later, we're still getting the same quests. Fetch quests.

Go to this island. Dig up some treasure/kill a skeleton/capture a chicken. Sail back. Slowly.

But we're fucking pirates though, we all agreed, and we're not going to do the manual labour when there's a whole server full of peons for us to have at. So we started sailing between outposts instead, looking for other players to fight. Unfortunately most other players seemed to have the same idea, and while ship-to-ship combat is fun, it would usually end in one of us being sunk and neither of us having anything to show for it.

For all its beauty, there are some bizarre gameplay decisions in Sea Of Thieves.

The assorted user interfaces are clunky and awkward, and the layout of the galleon is simply frustrating. Players can only carry 5 musketballs for each of their guns (two max) but apparently are able to simultaneously haul around 10 cannonballs? The result is you're frequently running below deck to refill your guns, as the ammo crate is frustratingly tucked away among the cosmetic/vanity items in the hold. However even a fully loaded weapon is problematic to wield, as there's no crosshairs and the bullet drop on long range weapons is bizarrely unpredictable. The sensitivity options of the controls are also minimal, with one slider for everything, and the sensitivity of the sniper is far too low relative to the default view. As a result almost everyone carries the blunderbuss shotgun and the sword, and the main tactic right now seems to be to get as close to the enemy as possible and then flail wildly. It's effective, but it feels sloppy, and fights seem more dependent on luck than skill.

Respawns are slow and tedious. If a ship sinks it will (usually) immediately materialise only a single island away with absolutely no penatly, which clearly benefits the attacking players rather than the ones defending; an attacker with nothing to lose can endlessly throw empty ships at their target with zero repercussions, while a treasure-laden defender is forced to tirelessly hold off their attacks or sail away.

The core gameplay loops in Sea Of Thieves simply aren't fun.

You can spend hours sailing around feeling like you've achieved nothing meaningful - you can complete dozens of quests, amass a stack of gold, but the only things you can spend it on are cosmetics, the most extravagant of which are ridiculously expensive and would require weeks of monotonous playtime to unlock. The suggestion that I farm fetch quests for 10 hours in order to unlock a new coat does not sound particularly appealing. You can make your character look like more of a badass, but as there's no stats or weapons to upgrade and the combat is so shallow, you seldom feel like one.

The positive experiences we've had with the game usually take place despite its design, rather than because of it.

The skull forts, waves of increasingly difficult enemies, are a welcome change to the usual gameplay, and are one of the few elements of the game where you're rewarded proportionately for the amount of effort put in - when these events begin a giant glowing skull appears in the clouds and players from all around will sail towards it to take part. This often will result in some great clashes as players fight either to control the island, or to seize the majority of the treasure after completing the event.

The sandbox elements of the game encourage experimentation, and sneaking aboard an enemy ship with a barrel of gunpowder only to stealthily detonate it in the hold and sink their ship while they're off looting an island left me laughing maniacally for about ten minutes. There's moments in Sea Of Thieves which allow a fantastic array of natural set-pieces, and there's moments of brilliance where you can see and appreciate the potential of this game. The majority of the time though itstill feels like a beta, a game lacking in structure and purpose and inadequately rewarding the players who take the time to invest in it. The emphasis on cosmetics makes me wonder if some iteration of the game was heavily dependent on microtransactions, and I can't help but feel like the only reason there are no loot crates in this game is due to the recent public backlash. Either that or because there's simply not enough content to justify it. I can understand why several of my friends are so bitter about their purchases.

I appreciate there's an echo of EVE online in Sea Of Thieves; you need to be proactive about the elements of the game you find entertaining. If you only want to mine asteroids in high-sec then you can't complain that the game is dull - you need to go out and camp warp gates, or join a corp of players who are more PVP focused. And it's possible to treat this game as an opportunity to simply goof around - even if you're achieving little in a gameplay sense, there's value to be had in a sandbox where you can sail around with your friends. I do sometimes feel though that even if you start playing with this attitude, the game doesn't do enough to meet you halfway by providing you a good range of things to do together. You can fight enemy ships, sure, but the game rarely gives sufficient reason to do so other than the combat itself which, as we've already mentioned, is average at best.

There's obvious changes that could be made, meaningful ones, that would improve this game dramatically.

Any player you ask can probably suggest a couple; Use the brig to capture attacking players? Alter the layout of the galleon to encourage different types of combat? Let players carry more ammo so they can take part in combat for longer when off-ship? Increase the amount of weapon types and let players upgrade individual parts (scopes, stocks, grips)? Increase the variety of equipment to encourage certain types of gameplay and allow players to specialise? Hire a fucking gameplay designer to come up with some quests that aren't completely mind-numbing? Etc.

There's good times to be had with sea of thieves, but they are few and far between, and having spent a week with the game already I see little incentive to keep going. I feel like I've already seen everything the game has to offer and while the best of it is good, the worst of it is fucking dull. There are better, more consistent games out there for us to play.

It feels like Sea Of Thieves is constantly promising something better; there's going to be patches with new content. There's more exciting quests locked once you hit the level cap. There's cool cosmetics to purchase once you level up enough to buy them. There's more coming, eventually! The problem is the gameplay isn't interesting enough to keep playing, so I doubt most players will ever see it.

Thanks for reading,

Love Sweep

While researching games to play on my flight home after visiting family over the 2017 holidays, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 caught my eye. Having spent enough time with both Mario and Zelda and needing an alternative, it seemed like the obvious choice. The metascore was decent, but I noticed a trend when actually reading the reviews; they were all, almost unanimously, a list of criticisms and complaints about the game that had ultimately been dismissed because the author was a fan of the JRPG genre. Quietly disheartened, having abandoned the JRPG genre many years ago for being more trouble than it's worth, but with few alternatives (the Switch library still being in its infancy) I figured I would take it for a spin and form my own conclusions.

I'm really glad I did.

If you've spent any time with JRPG games or Anime in general then a lot of the setup will feel immediately familiar: Teenage boy stumbles across a great power, forms team of adventurers who pledge to save the world. Or I suppose in this case, worlds, as each continent is a Discworld-esque titan, floating on an endless sea of clouds and carrying their respective civilisations atop their backs. Our heroes (each of whom can be controlled by the player as the protagonist, a nice touch) are each in possession of Blades - essentially magical weapons that come with a walking, talking, physical manifestation. In the case of Rex, the boy whom the story revolves around, the anthropomorphic personification of his sword turns out to be a scantily clad young woman by the name of Pyra. What are the odds, eh?

As the party of Drivers grows ("Driver" being the term for a character in possession of a Blade), so does the range of Blades themselves, each with their own elemental affinities which can be combined in combat to create devastating combos. There's a heap of generic "common" blades which contribute very little (both aesthetically and practically), but there's also a whole stack of "rare" blades, each with full character art and unique side-quests and full voice acting (in two languages, no less). The way you interact with the NPC's inhabiting the games many cities and towns will occasionally vary depending on who you have in your party, and there are plenty of secrets and alternate routes that only become available if you're equipped with specific combinations as you explore. Because acquiring the majority of these blades is handled by a gashapon (RNG) system, it's rare that any two players will have the same team, giving each adventure an element of uniqueness, which was also appreciated as I made my way through Alrest. This was especially true during combat, as finding a composition of Blades that felt comfortable (as each have their own weapon styles and movesets) became an art rather than a science.

I'm not going to go further into the combat because I feel like it, rather unfairly, seems to already hold the majority of the attention surrounding the game on account of it's complexity. I will merely say that while convoluted; it works, and it's extremely satisfying once you've figured out your Blade composition and you can reliably pull off an extensive series of combos.

As already mentioned, the game comes with full audio for two languages, English and Japanese, and while I was tempted to play through in Japanese I found the range of English-speaking accents refreshing enough to stick with the default. The game employs Mancunian, Welsh, Scottish, Australian, and even Cockney accents, mercifully portrayed by locals and not American approximations. With the exception of the Nopon (the game's race of spherical birdlike inhabitants) I found myself invested in each of the expansive cast, and the game rewards this investment by fleshing out each character arc quite satisfactorily. I even found myself cheering on certain blades as their personalities were given substance. One such example is the Xenomorph-inspired Wulfric, a terrifying nightmare blade with a heart of gold.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the boundless optimism and wholesomeness the game deals out at every turn. Despite featuring themes such as death, war, murder, violence, and heavily implying that it's possible to have sex with the human embodiment of your sword, the world is charming, colourful, and the protagonists are drowning in enthusiasm and positivity. At one point Rex shouts "We'll beat them with the power of friendship!" without a trace of irony and I couldn't help but roll my eyes, but in general the game is good, not just in terms of it being a game, but in terms of it's outlook. Which was a nice change of pace from the endless hours of PUBG that have otherwise been occupying my time.

Perhaps one of the strongest pulls of this game, that kept me coming back for dozens upon dozens of consecutive hours, is it's artistic creativity. The world bustles, each Titan scattered with increasingly surreal animals and monsters, teeming with flora and fauna in the bright oversaturated colours that Nintendo favours. It's a joy to explore, which is fortunate because each area seems to stretch on far further than it might initially appear. Even after sixty hours I'm still finding new areas to explore in the first city, both the smallest and the most compact of the games many metropolis. As you continue through the game these cities can be "developed", evolving to provide you with new quests, characters, shops and opportunities, so that you can return to each through the game and almost always find something new to do there. This contributes to the sense that the world is alive and not just some finite stagnant pool that, once drained, will not refill.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is not a perfect game. However, the game can accommodate it's flaws purely by merit of it's scope; not just with it's scale but with its range - it's many systems layered carefully on top of one another. Some of them might not be the most intuitive, but it all works, and it's built on a foundation of charm and easygoing optimism that's hard to fault. In the games own words:

No Rex. It's not weird at all.

Thanks for reading

Love Sweep

Right from the start, the animation in this film is absolutely staggering. There's shots where a whole street of people are mingling together and the level of coordination for that shit is insane. I've spent years learning how to do that with a computer so the idea of a team of people doing it by hand blows my mind a little bit.

I have to admit my appreciation for this film was heavily dependent on having seen The Kingdom Of Dreams And Madness immediately beforehand, because The Wind Rises is actually quite a dull story, and without the context that Miyazaki provides in the documentary surrounding it's production a lot of the nuance would have been missed. It's also a very weird subject to glorify with such a bright and colourful film; despite its strong anti-war sentiment it's still technically a celebration of the invention of Japanese war planes that were used against the allies, which made me feel slightly uncomfortable when portrayed through the ghibli aesthetic.

From a technical/biographical standpoint I loved it. At face value though, it's somewhat lacking. I'm glad I watched it, though I probably wouldn't recommend to anyone who wasn't a die-hard Ghibli fan or who had a strong appreciation for traditional animation principles.

[This review was posted elsewhere on the forums but I wanted a copy here that I could refer back to. x]

This started out as a series of indignant tweets but I needed some room to really spread out. Alright, let's do this.

Microtransactions are everywhere.

Every fuckin' game has them these days. There's "free to play" and "not free to play but you can pay for optional cosmetics and then we'll release DLC free" or in some cases even "not free to play and we'll charge you for everything, all cosmetics and DLC because fuck you, you're idiots and we know you'll pay for it" models. Can't move for 'em.

Seriously, we're knee deep right now.

For the most part, I'm OK with it. I'm lucky enough to have a chunk of disposable income that I'm happy to spend on cosmetic junk for games in which I intend to invest a relative amount of time. New hats? Sure, why not. They make my PUBG lady look cool while she jumps out the aeroplane. Who doesn't like hats?

Now I'm going to shelve that line of thought and jump back ten years to World Of Warcraft. Those were the days, huh? When you spent hours and days grinding out the gear you'd need to complete your raid at the end of the week? And then when you successfully completed that raid and you got a cool new mount or helmet or... whatever it is Priests have. Staves? Sure. The point is that you earned it and you got to walk around with it and people would throw you jealous/admiring glances as you strutted through Orgrimmar. I assume they were admiring glances.. it's hard to tell. The models were pretty low-poly back in the day.

Anyway the point was that there was a sense of pride associated with the gear you owned. Every piece came with a story. This helmet came from the Firelands! These boots came from Ulduar! They were a physical manifestation of your achievements, and they weren't just cosmetic, there was a sentimentality attached to each piece. They gave your character character.

Fast forward back to Now

This helmet? I got it in a loot crate. I had to buy 16 of them to get it.

This isn't a rant about spending money because, as has already been proved multiple times, I will willingly and enthusiastically spend moneys on stupid virtual cosmetics without complaint. This is an issue of game design principles, and giving players an emotional attachment to your game that is dependent on an investment other than money. By making everything in a game available for purchase through external currency you undermine any sense of pride a player might have from earning it ingame. A system in which you can simply buy the same content that is otherwise earned trivialises the achievement of the player who invested the time to get it. So why should they bother? I think this is why so many online communities attempting to promote the loot crate model have so much difficulty retaining their fanbase; without that emotional attachment, loyalty will only last so long. Where's the pride in just being able to throw money at a game until you get what you want?

Why should anyone give a fuck that you've got a cool hat if they know you didn't even need to kill anything in order to get it?

Ultimately it seems in the best interests of publishers to lock the best content behind ingame achievement. Part of me suspects this is why Destiny was so wildly successful despite being so bloated. Sure, have microtransactions, but don't only have microtransactions. Maybe don't overcharge for redundant DLC packs either (Destiny i'm still looking at you, you bastard) but there's a balance in there which rewards everyone and keeps people coming back for more.

That's why the real indicator of commitment in Hearthstone is in the golden hero powers, not the cards you own, or that one time you made legend with a dumb pirate warrior deck.

Right. Good. Glad we all agree.

Thanks for reading,

Love Sweep

Like everyone else, I've been pretty obsessed with Playerunknowns Battlegrounds over the past few months. It's the game that I never knew I even wanted. Every match feels fresh, and I can't remember feeling so hyped about being able to play any game for a long while. Which is weird, when you think about it, because Playerunknowns Battlegrounds is a buggy mess.

The servers are inconsistent, frequently laggy, preventing you from connecting, or even sporadically crashing the game. The animations often freak out, launching characters or vehicles high into the air, or randomly glitching them through doors or out of buildings. Doors open, and then close again, and when you try to open them a second time it turns out they were open after all, so they close. Bullets ping off invisible walls, occasionally houses levitate 20 feet off the ground, and one time a car drove through a wall into a building I was looting. Twice.

Even more fantastical are the nonsensical bugs for which there is no obvious explanation, such as the cluster of buildings north of Yasnaya in which you're unable to lean left and right when aiming, or the last 5 seconds of each parachute drop in which you yoyo up and down until the game releases you at an unknown height.

These are bugs which are known, accepted and, beyond that, celebrated. Players will spend several times longer attempting to crouch-jump through unboken panes of glass than it would have taken them to walk down the stairs and through the open door. I remember crashing a buggy into a static tree only for my buggy to catch fire and immediately explode, roasting both myself and my passenger who, instead of raging, jeered at our random demise. Sorry, Ryan :P

Cars flipping out into the atmosphere are applauded, and the many ways in which the game breaks are subject to youtube compilations which rack up thousands of views. People consider these flaws endearing.

Contrast this with the reception of, for example, Mass Effect Andromeda.

There's obvious differences between the two, but the one common factor is that: both were made available for purchase loaded with bugs. And before people hit me with the "but PUBG is technically still in alpha" - would you have felt better about the MEA bugs if they'd slapped an "alpha" sticker on the box? The term "alpha" may explain bugs but it doesn't excuse them, especially in the year 2017 when the lines have been blurred between Early Access and Commercial Release.

Also, let's be real, the notion that all the current bugs in PUBG will have been fixed by the time the game is made available on consoles is laughable.

The point is that for almost everyone those bugs aren't a big deal. We're happy to accept them and play anyway. Which seems very inconsistent. I've been trying to wrap my head around it and here's what I've come up with:

• Our expectations are lower because we paid less, and it's a smaller development team
• As an indie game there was no advertising hype and, through word of mouth, people arrived at the game already expecting it's flaws
• The developers have been so vocal and active in acknowledging bugs and attempting to fix them, even if the majority of the bugs are still present
• The short-burst nature of gameplay means each match is essentially disposable and if something breaks it's no great loss of time
• Because there is no narrative component to the game there is less danger of immersion being broken
• People like to hate on Mass Effect?
• Watching bugs happen to other people is infinitely more entertaining than when they happen to you
• Some combination of All Of The Above.

Beyond all that, we seem to have collectively decided that we don't care that PUBG is broke as hell. Perhaps there's some "fun" threshold which we've crossed, and which invalidates all complaints? Perhaps because there's no pretense with the game, that it's not trying to be a cinematic masterpiece or high art?

I dunno, man. It's weird.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

Love Sweep

There's something invigorating about being caught up in the zeitgeist of a videogame. Being able to compare notes and impressions, swapping stories and sharing discoveries, is part of why videogame communities like this one are such vibrant and interesting places. Being included in a sub-community of enthusiasts during a launch window is what drives people to pre-order and rework their whole lives so they have as much time to play as possible. That's a potent factor surrounding the hype and enthusiasm for videogames in general; It's about inclusivity, and solidarity, and it's important.

It's also why I have so little sympathy for companies that push out rushed videogames and then apologetically attempt to make good with proposed patches and updates.

Aaryn Flynn, general manager of Bioware, has announced that, fair cop, the quality of Andromeda is somewhat lacking in certain areas of the game. Bioware acknowledges these issues and, now they have your money, they're committed to fixing those problems with a series of increasingly convoluted patches. One of which is Fixing Ryder’s movements when running in a zig zag pattern. Cool?

No, not really.

I didn't buy Andromeda, after being put off by multiple reviews, so I'm indifferent towards what exactly is being fixed. What irritates me more is that this is slowly becoming an acceptable form of doing business; games are swapped for money and then, if people complain loud enough, the developer grudgingly agrees to deliver the level of quality which was expected in the first place. In the case of some, such as Bioware, those expectations are the result of a company pedigree. Others seem a little more deceitful. I'm looking at you, No Man's Sky (though I wish I wasn't, because you look bad).

And this sucks, because the zeitgeist is important! People want to be caught up in the opening-weekend excitement, and by relying on a series of ongoing patches you deny them that experience. Not to mention the fact that most people, having struggled through your broken-ass game once already, will be reluctant to do so again in a month regardless of what you add in a patch.

Not to bang the same drum, but pre-orders deserve some of this blame once again. I'd like to think that no developer is deliberately trying to push out a shitty videogame, but they have little incentive to make improvements if hordes of fans are already locked in to buy it regardless of launch quality. But let's look at the silver linings here:

• Doing something is better than doing nothing. At the very least they're acknowledging the problems and trying to fix them. For the sake of people who brought the game, I hope those changes are meaningful.
• The review scores aren't going to be changed regardless of patches. A lot of studios measure their success in meta-critic ratings, so this fuckup is now on Biowares permanent record. Hopefully they learn from this and we see improvements next time.
• Maybe less people will buy into this preorder bullshit now they've been repeatedly burned. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...

Thanks for reading

Love Sweep