That Place, with That Guy

Lilac Cape

2011-11-05T18:12:00.000-07:00

Oh hoh, I haven't forgotten about you yet my lovelies. I come bearing gifts; the fruits of my job application labours once more. Dudes wanted samples for advertising places, and lo and behold -

If your malformed flesh chassis is in dire need of a repair, head down to Mayfair to be serviced by expert osteologists at Claridge's Hotel, a five star luxury spa. Their arcane, other-worldly accountants have conjured the means to provide these services in the form of a ninety minute Thai massage at a mere 199 pounds, shaving a whole one hundred pounds of the regular cost. Their ways are as mysterious as the bar is sublime. The wizardry goes on not behind closed doors, however, as the arcane culinary conjurers run frequent master classes for the curious and the brave.

And again!

Do you have a burning, perverse lust for as many aquatic creatures a you can fit inside your person? Fish House in North London is equipped to satiate your needs. For the paltry sum of fifteen pounds, you will recieve thirty pounds' worth of food and drinks for two, allowing you to share your eternal ichthyological passion with the loved one of your choosing. Not only is this a bargain any filthy peon would be lucky to lay their meaty paws on, but the goods on offer are in fact in line with the ancient words layed down by the Marine Conservation Society, so while you are lining your bronchial passage with eldritch, forgotten sea beasts, you can rest easily knowing you are causing minimal harm to the environment.

Where Does The H Go

2011-10-26T08:38:00.000-07:00

Well then. The other day when I was out and about – when I was getting the kebab I mentioned in that cover letter, no less – I decided to bring my laptop. You'll recall the adventures I had in M&Ms World! recording precisely how awful it was. That was the most energetic I've felt about writing something in quite some time, and I really felt like trying my hand at that again. So I just whipped out the old laptop and sort of went for it. Results lie ahead.

Between a discount second hand bridal wear store and a miniscule pc repair tech dungeon/fireworks shop sits another kebab place. It's the same as all the rest, really. That's what you want in a kebab, after all; stoic, consistent, reliability that you'll be able to get a gob full of hot greasy meat with enough chili sauce to put hairs on your chest.

Still in a daze from another sleepless night spent wasting time watching bad science fiction serials, I stumble in feeling groggy. I've had the same wrinkled old tux on since the day before and I haven't shaved in too long, not to mention stinking of cigarillo smoke, so I fit in perfectly with the rest of the clientele.

The grizzled, intensely manly staff understand my needs entirely, and comply with commendable speed for men who clearly do not want to be there. Unfortunately for me, all of the seats are occupied. Dazed and ornery enough not to care about the consequences, I set off down the street for the first available surface I can see.

In moments, I spy a rickety old table leaning on top of a broken fan. It's standing, for a given value of stand, outside of an abandoned shop. There are clear signs of fire damage on the buildings, so possibly it's one of the few pieces left over from the riots that's yet to be cleaned up. In any case, I collapse right down on the table in a pile.

Everything is still for one perfect moment as my face is buried to my nose in grease. The world is quiet here. People walking past stare at the strange man masticating his meal like a starved walrus. If only they knew my bliss.

The deed is done, and with relish I wipe myself off with a half dozen serviettes. I pause briefly, to just sit for a while and stare at nothing in particular. The cool breeze on my face is liberating and refreshing – there truly is a sense of freedom in the air here, despite the burned down shop.

After a short while passes, it's time to get to work. I pull out the laptop and start typing out what you see before you. Life, while writing like this, feels right, like I'm doing something. I stop to light another cigarillo, and I look up to see a young Asian woman standing in front of me staring.

She looks young. Young enough not have any concerns at all about approaching a strange man sitting in a burned down shop typing on a laptop and smoking. Quizzically, she asks me what I'm doing. I stare at her with a mad toothy grin and reply “writing.”

Laughing, she sits down on the other side of the table and asks me why I'm writing here, of all places. It's a pretty reasonable question, all things considered, and it actually takes me a little while to think about an answer to it. The best that I can come up with to say is that it's like how sketch artists like sitting down in front of people and drawing their faces right there instead of just imagining a face.

Brushing her hair back, she introduces herself, Miss A. I smile. Today, I'm the man in the cream boots. I turn back to the laptop and begin typing again. We sit in silence for a time as she stares off into the same nothing that caught my eye earlier. Then she asks why it is I picked this particular spot. Well, why indeed.

There's a naked man sitting on a park bench with his friend. They're both drinking from bottles in crinkled brown paper bags. He's so hairy I question for a moment whether or not he's wearing a shag rug. As I walk past he looks at me like I'm an awful person for daring to even think to myself “why is that man naked right next to a school, and getting drunk at three in the afternoon?” This is South Tottenham, and these are the noble personage that reside within.

Even just going down the high street you can still see the ripples of destruction left over from the recent riots here. Broken windows, barricaded shops, abandoned buildings – although picking apart which of these are due to the riots and which are just the local colour shining through might take some time.

It's an area heaving with two factions; Jews and Jamaicans/Africans. Even just going out the door you'll see a legion several hundred thousand strong of men in frock coats and big hats, each with a larger family than the last. They all dress well, have good hygiene, are polite, and apparently have a good enough income to support a half a dozen offspring, so why they've resigned themselves to live in a somewhat less than sterling district remains somewhat of a mystery.

At the traffic lights an older Jewish man in his robes and hat turns to me with the same smile all dirty old men across the globe have and asks me if I like girls. With a toothy grin I tell him that yes, I do. He laughs a deeps belly laugh, slapping me on the back as he asks if I have girl. Enchanted by his way with words I respond in kind, saying no, I not have girl. At this point he winks and mumbles something. I can't tell if it was Yiddish or just the universal old man mumble, but he wandered off somewhere into the sunset, presumably to survey yet more citizens on their girl ownership status. God's speed, sir.

They have their own specialty shops, as most larger factions do. Jewish opticians seem in no short supply. Why that is, I couldn't say, but each of them seem to have a smiling man in a kippah. There are the kosher grocers, of course, each shelf with something more moist and disgusting than the last. Then there are the bakeries, another source of confusion for me. Is there something bad in normal bread? Is yeast not kosher? Or do they just have recipes from the old country that other places don't do too well? Whatever the case, they might know their way around dough well enough, but they can't make coffee for shit.

The people are polite, and more than happy to serve you, but there's always that distant, vague notion in the air of “you don't belong here.” A slight pause before they ask if they can help you, an ever so brief surreptitious glance at you before they smile, a slight cough when you ask a question... always visibly thinking “why are you here?” Maybe it's prudent, maybe they've got their reasons, hell, maybe they've had run ins with looters, rioters, and all the other undesirables you'd care to name, I don't know - but whatever it is, it's left a cloud of discomfort in the air, making it a difficult place to feel at ease.

On another ritual, directionless wander through town, I see a younger, scrawny Jewish lad struggling with a few boxes. He manages to lean them up against his car, but he can't move to open the boot. I rush up to help him, and he slides the boxes onto the ground and recoils like I've run at him with a gun. Once he realises what I was doing the relief visibly washes over him as he exhales and laughs nervously. Helping him pick it all up, I shake his hand before walking off and wondering to myself exactly what it was that happened to him in the past to make him like this.

Then there are the Jamaican/African aspects. Chicken shops dominate their streets, popping up anywhere there's space. There are thousands, some of them not two doors away from the next. They all have the same menus, too, and the same prices; it'd be optimistic to hope that they don't share suppliers, too. How they stay in business with each other I have no idea. Maybe there's just that much of a heaving desire for take away chicken in the area. There doesn't really seem to be any other eateries on these streets; no coffee shops, no restaurants, no fish and ship shops, just chicken, chicken, chicken.

There are, of course, their groceries as well. All with alien fruit collections out the front of varying colours and shapes. I'm not brave enough to venture in further, but it looks like there's always a bestubbled creature clad in old jeans leaning on the counter laughing with the shopkeep in each one. Possibly there exists some kind of bestubbled network of comrades, hiring members out to each grocers in an attempt to appear more amiable. In short; unsuccessful.

Gay Cowboy Boots

2011-10-25T17:33:00.000-07:00

It's been bothering me lately that I've slipped into lazy habbits here lately, and pondering why that was I reasoned that it's been a lack of writing. However, it's just struck me that, really, that's untrue - I've been writing quite a bit here and there, it's just been job applications. Taking into account the dreary nature of such a thing, you can no doubt see quite clearly why I didn't consciously consider it writing, no? In any case, here's the latest, dear reader, should you be interested. It's perhaps not of great narative merit, but it's something, certainly.

It's rapidly approaching two thirty in the am, and I've spent the last hour or so lying naked on the floor smoking a cigar and listening to bad Japanese pop songs. It's been one of those days. I woke up at about a half past noon in the suit I'd been wearing the night before. Lighting a cigarillo for breakfast, I stumbled out to the couch and flicked around on the TV until I found Top Gear to watch until I felt awake enough to venture out into the streets. By that point, I noticed that I was hungry enough to eat the couch, so streetward it was.

Eventually I found one of those kebab places. I don't even know why there are so many around; they're all exactly the goddamn same. They all have the same pictures in the window, the same prices, the same menu, the same slightly bored, brutally casual staff - how does something like that get carbon copied so many times over? Anyway, I just got something with lamb drowning in an ocean of chili sauce. There wasn't anywhere to sit myself down, and I was a bit too ornery at that point to care much, so I just turned the corner and saw a closed down shop front with a dilapidated table out the front. I collapsed on the thing and hunched over in one glorious, timeless moment, grease dripping on my chin, burying my face in cheap meat and bad salad.

Really, it's amazing what something like that can do for a man's morale. Spiritually refreshed from my King's Feast, I felt ready to start handing out CVs again. It's a depressing business, it really is. Then again, I assume you already know that - presumably you must've thrown out at least a few in your time, eh? Even so, it's a bleak process. People pretend like they're doing me a close personal favour by even deigning to talk to me. Why is that, I wonder? I mean, these aren't prestigious vocations I'm applying for, here. I'm just going into florists, clothes shops, book stores, housewares places; retail jobs, you know?

Well, that takes it out of you something chronic, so after another unsuccessful day I dragged my feet home again and played bad video games drinking an ancient bottle of coke until we come back to the jolly old start of our bed time story here with me naked on the floor. What's my point with all this? I'm looking for work. I've had a lot of shit jobs, I really have. I've worked in a solar pannel factory stacking crates throughout the night, I've worked in kitchens where I had to unclog dead cooked rats from the bottom of the deep friers, I've worked in new age hippie crystal shops serving self-styled druids and warlocks. I did phone surveys and door to door sales, two jobs which both paid me to take abuse eight hours a day. Hell, I worked night shift at a pancake place where almost every other member of staff was constantly high.

What's my point here? I graduated univeristy at the start of this year with my bachelors in Professional Writing. Talk about limited job options, huh? Look, I know I can write. I can write damn well. Writing is the one thing I do that makes me feel like I'm not wasting my life doing nothing. All those shit jobs, I'd come home feeling dejected and lonely and pathetic, and I'd write. Writing can be about anything! Truth, beauty, humanity, inhumanity, nobility; tender care, mad desperation; anything. It's humbling, thinking about that.

I want to write. That's it. Just write. That doesn't sound like a lot, put like that, but all these job applications don't seem to want that. They want me to answer questions like "what three words would your closest friends use to describe you?" "could you rate your need to succeed from one to ten?" and, my personal favourite so far, "which of the following colours would you say you most associate yourself with and why?" I don't want to jump through hoops of pop psychology bullshit. Every time I fill one of those out I feel like sitting down and staring at the wall for a very long time.

So that's the long and short of it. I really want a job where I can just be me, where I can just write. If you have any vacancies, I'd be delighted if you could rescue me from this circus of banalities. We could sit on the roof drinking tea in the rain. Doesn't that sound nice? Or even if you aren't hiring any writers at the moment, maybe you know somebody who is? Really, at this point, I'd take any lifeline. I hate this pit of misery that is job searching.

Help a guy out?

- M. Stone

I want to go Home

2011-10-08T08:25:00.000-07:00

I can't breathe. Not a metre into this place, and I can't breathe. The smog here is so suffocating that in under a minute I feel nauseous, I have minor stomach pains, and a slight headache. It's so dense, so heavy with the sweaty stench of expired chocolate and new plastic that you could carve up the air and sell it as military ration packs.

It's honestly difficult for me to pin down exactly what I should call this place. The colossal signage without suggests that the proper nomenclature is “M&M's World!” which raises an interesting point, but the precise nature of this world remains ambiguous.

The walls are all covered in antiquated pictures from marketing campaigns and various assorted logos, each with a date underneath as if this is some kind of fucking museum, as if the production of bland confectionery somehow justifies historical records. As if we should somehow be awed at the notion of chocolate, and take or grandchildren to go and see this place as some kind of cultural education.

This bizarre world stretches five stories deep, each level more baffling than the last. And the place is bustling with activity – even at ten pm on a friday night. Apparently this is a major tourist attraction. People travel half way across the world, to London, of all towns, to see this monstrosity. Forget the globe theatre, pay no attention to St Paul's cathedral or portobello road. Ignore Foyles bookshop completely, sirs and madams, and don't spend a single day sitting in one of the thousands of parks on a sunday afternoon watching the ducks swim past, no no. When your family and friends ask you what you did in London town, M&M's World! Should be the focal point of your sojourn.

Just imagine that, please try. I am still encountering issues with this mental picture. In envisioning a world where people flock to a place like this in a city with so much to see as London, I hit a complete mental block; and yet, sitting here on the offensively neon steps of the place, these very same people swarm around me, defying what I had previously thought to be a rational outlook on life.

Just ahead of me is a man standing next to a statue of one of the M&M men so a woman can take a photograph, forever etching this revolutionary, monumentous occasion in their memories. I couldn't say which of the two looks less animated – the statue or the man. Both have empty eyes, devoid of thought or feeling. Each of them bear the same hollow, almost comically pathetic smile which speaks nothing of happiness. Neither of them seem, to my mind, like they could exist elsewhere other than right here, in this disgusting world.

Lest I forget the music, dare I call it music. These are songs in the same sense that – well – in the same sense that a chocolate is something deserving a five story building to celebrate it. You've heard all of these songs before, and so have I, but even if I wanted to I couldn't tell you a single piece of information about any of them. They're the same relentlessly, disgustingly upbeat tunes you hear in all of these temples of banal commercialism. The kind of white noise that's presumably designed to put you at ease and make you happy, but with so little substance, so little meaning that they become exactly that – white noise.

Of course, in a building designed to bay homage to a chocolate, there is no shortage of opportunities to throw away your money. There are rows and rows of shelves bulging with the chocolates themselves, all in reviling packaging. That isn't where the merchandise ends though, oh dear me no. There is practically every item you can imagine emblazoned with the M&M imagery. Teapots, doormats, lamps, posters, bathrobes – fucking bathrobes – it doesn't end. And neckties, oh the neckties. If this was a fair and just world then the designers of funny neckties would be subject to the worst punishments our judicial system can subject them to. This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a funny necktie.

I've been sitting here for thirty minutes now and I still don't know what this ridiculous, offensively stupid construction is. There are things for sale, but it doesn't feel like a shop. There has been an attempt made at historical records, but it damn well isn't a museum. Tourists dominate every level, but if this is considered a tourist attraction, I don't want to live on this planet anymore. Statues and monuments have been erected hither and thither as though this is some kind of historical site, like the Roman ruins dotted around the city.

No, this place resembles none of these things. As I enter the portal to this uninviting plane, I feel only like I am standing on one planet and peering into another; as though I have somehow gotten lost and found my feet on entirely alien soil. This is not a place where people should be, not humans. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. All that lies within is misery, plastic, and photos of men with dead eyes and empty souls.

Random Sniper Time

2011-09-11T08:36:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I watched a lot of movies. I still do, if not quite so excitedly. We used to have an old tape of Wind in the Willows that gone played so often it actually wore out. By that point I was grunting along with Badger every time he was on screen. Even then I latched onto characters I identified with wherever I found them. Badger was old, tired and grumpy, and he never really hung around the other characters much, but when something went wrong, when something happened that people couldn’t explain, when people really needed help... enter Badger, stage left.

My mother was the one who sat and watched most of these with my brother and I. Which was fine. I was just happy to be getting lost in another story. It’s not that my father didn’t care; quite the opposite. He was just incredibly busy with work at the time. Selling wine, I think. It doesn’t matter.

What does matter is the contrast it created. Mum watched a lot with us – a mini tv series about Merlin that she taped one late night that had the scene with a dragon attack missing because she accidentally pushed the wrong button, a dinky BBC version of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe with wonky puppets and bad prosthetics, the only two episodes of Tintin that the Blockbuster down the road had on the shelves which we must have rented almost weekly – the list goes on.

There was one thing that wasn’t Mum’s, though. Science Fiction (or SyFy, if you were unfortunately lacking in certain specific mental developments in your early years) was special. That was Dad’s job, and boy did he love it. The big one was Doctor Who. Come Sunday morning, the couch was cleared, the tv was claimed in the name of Boy Time, and for the next few hours it was just us and The Doctor off on another amazing adventure.

Watching some of the old Tom Baker episodes now, seeing him threaten to kill people with a Deadly Jelly Baby, well. It’s somewhat less grandiose than it seemed in my dim memories of aliens made out of green bubble wrap and chicken wire, but if I tilt my head just a little, then it sparks to life again. It’s daggy, don’t get me wrong, but it was never supposed to be cool. It isn’t about making better looking monsters than that other show, or having a really long laser gun battle. It’s about The Doctor going off and getting into trouble, meeting people along the way, and trying to help them however he can. That was the bottom line. Saving the day. Showing up in the tardis at the last second and stopping the bad guys.

There were others aside from The Doctor. Star Trek TNG was an exception to bed time, and I struggled to stay awake every time it was on, especially if it was a Data heavy episode. Then there was Star Wars, of course. Han Solo is still one of Dad’s favourites. I try to watch them every year or two now, and they still make me smile. There’s a little timeless bubble that opens up when those movies start, and even something as tiny as the noise the laser blasters made can open up a thousand memories of the times when sci fi was a lot simpler; all you needed was a hero. Somebody who could fix everything and make it better, no matter how bad it looked, every time, no matter what.

All you needed was a Badger.

Movies about space adventures weren’t the only trick up old dad’s sleeve, though. Back then, spare change had a very different meaning to me than it does now. There was an impossibly big jar that he’d drop his coins into after he got home with a big smile, because we both knew what the change jar meant. That was the savings he’d tuck away each and every year for something that can’t possibly be as great as I remember it. The Royal Melbourne Show.

If you go there now, then it’s pathetic. I can tell you that first hand. The last time I went it was barely shambling along, not even a quarter as lively as it used to be. Frankly, I wouldn’t even bother these days. If you look it up somewhere in a booklet though, it’ll tell you that it’s an agricultural show celebrating livestock or farmyard animals or something equally as underwhelming. Which in’t incorrect, really. Amongst my favourite memories of that place was dragging my brother along to see the turkeys lined up in their enclosures, because they absolutely terrified him, and what self respecting little brother doesn’t get a good laugh out of that?

There were woodchop events, too, where big burly men would pulverise a log of wood in less than a second for anybody who cared to watch. There may have been horse races at some point during the proceedings, but I couldn’t say. I seem to remember us always getting too tired before we got there. In any case, it would indeed be true, in a certain light, to say that all those animal and rural farmish bits were part of the proceedings – there were even a few sciency, educational bits here and there if memory serves – but they damn sure weren’t the main spectacle of the even.

No, back then, if there was one thing I lived for, it was showbags. All year every year, I was looking forward ot the showbags. That was were the spare change tin came into the equation. My brother and I were both allowed to pick a couple. I can’t remember if it was that we could only pick X dollars worth, or Y bags in total, but rarely did my eyes go as wide as they did when we hit the showbag pavillion.

Those bags were filled with anything your boyhood wonder could imagine. Giant inflatable hammers, horribly sticky fluro bars of what may as well have been molten sugar, whoopie cushions, sheets and sheets of stickers, expired bubble gum, kazoos, bags of rainbow popcorn, water pistols; the things dreams used to be made of.

Of course, under all that, there were comic books. Not good ones. Not by a long shot. You’d be hard pressed to find anything even resembling Batman or Wolverine there, good god no. The best you could ever get your hands on was something like The Phantom, and when the coolest guy in question is a man in purple spandex with no super powers who dies maybe twelve times throughout the series, what do you suppose the rest of the lineup looks like?

You know what bad comic books were like back then. Presumably still today. Some of them weren’t even in English, some were missing pages, most of them you’d never heard about before and would never see again, and not a single one of them made any sense at all.

Even so, I couldn’t have cared less about any of that at the time. In one of the showbags somewhere along the line, I’d gotten my grubby little hands on some trashy sci fi comic. For the first time ever, I’d found something science fiction on my own, and I was blurting out a million words a second when I was telling Dad about those exciting adventures. Suddenly the situation was reversed, and instead of him showing me all these shows and movies about space heroes, it was me doing that to him.

After that, every year I looked for the showbag with that comic in it so I could try to start collecting them, but, well, it’s hardly a structured sort of deal. Some years I found some, and some years I didn’t, but I was still amassing quite a pile. Of course they were all out of order and almost none of them were sequentially connected, but what mattered was that a fire awoke in me that’s still burning to this day.

Alas, I’m sure you know what happens to old comics, especially when you’re a kid. They get rammed in your school bag under your lunchbox until they’re nice and scrunched up, or dropped in a puddle, or lost somewhere in your room underneath something else. They just sort of faded over the ineffable edge of memory somewhere along the years, until I’d entirely dropped them out of my mind somehow.

I still had a love for science fiction, and I was working my way through whatever I could find, but, then other things got in the way. High school was harder than it should have been, then there was work, then university, then more work, and all the other little problems that life has close at hand.

Unfortunately for me, science fiction was changing from what I’d grown to love as a kid. Now there were movies like Battlefield Earth, Cypher, Aeon Flux, and the abysmal Star Wars prequels. The few times where I did go out on a limb and try to get back into some of them all they did was disappoint me.

Until one day when I walked out of another movie feeling dejected and downtrodden when something in my head lit up. “Lascott Baines wouldn’t have done that,” spoke the ghostly voice of that kid with a redskin perpetually in his mouth. “Lascott Baines wasn’t about who looked the coolest when they were shooting space guns. Lascott Baines was about saving the day when nobody else could.”

My mind was racing. Suddenly all the pages of those old comics I’d loved came blazing back in triumph. I was seeing it all again for the first time, and remembering why I’d become so smitten with this genre in the first place.

As soon as I was in control of my senses again, I phoned up Dad straight away and said I was coming over. I hopped on the next train, and in an instant there I was rummaging through an old shoe box in my room, filled with hidden relics of times long gone by.

I was missing most of the comics, and the ones I did have were not only out of order, but some of the pages were ruined entirely, with a giant sticky lolly wedged between the pages here, a corner torn off there, or even just text that faded away many years ago, just as my memories had.

Right then, sitting on the floor in a puddle of nostalgia, I knew what I had to do. I don’t know if this is what actually happened to Lascott Baines. I don’t even know if anybody else ever read the damn things except for me. All I know is this is how it went in my head when I was a kid, and I hope it’s even half as amazing to you as it was to me back then. The world needs more heroes, more characters who save the day.

We need more Badgers, and Baines is always going to be one of the best.

Bald, Sweaty Ships

2011-08-28T22:12:00.000-07:00

There’s an endless cavalcade of games where your goal is to accomplish heroic and courageous deeds. Rescuing the princess, stopping the terrorists, turning back the tide of battle, saving the universe, killing the evil wizard, wiping out alien scum, shooting the underworld drug lord in the face; the list goes on. Just stop and think for a moment, though. When was the last time you actually felt genuinely brave while playing a game? What was the last decision you made that really took balls? The last moment where you were honest to god frightened of what might happen if you fucked up?

There’s a very large discrepancy between the two there. I didn’t feel particularly heroic in Mass Effect 2 at any of the many heroic points in the game. Nothing I did in KOTOR made me feel like that. Hell, picking up the triforce of courage in any of the Zelda games, an item which exists solely to make one feel courageous, was a rather bland and meaningless gesture to me which amounted to little more than “you got item x, move to the next level.”

Master of Orion 2 has been amongst my favourite games since I first played it, if only because there are just so many different situations you can get yourself into. It’s got so many interlocking pieces, and when they fit together it’s just magic. It has problems, certainly, but time and time again it makes me smile when so many other games make me sigh, and I’m more than happy to endure a clunky combat system and a spying mechanic that barely makes sense for that.

I started a new game the other night, and the planets were so aligned that my home system was directly next to one of the computer players, so I was essentially sandwiched into a corner of the map. Because I couldn’t expand, I put most of my efforts into research.

Now the Bulrathi (pig men), who were the people sandwiching me in, were fairly chummy, so we sat back with trade agreements and all that quietly working away. The Klackons (ant men), on the other hand, were spreading around the galaxy pretty densely, and soon enough there wasn’t any room left to expand – and it’s pretty easy to see what that spells.

In Master of Orion II, there’s a sort of voting system at work. Every so often, all of the races in the game come together, and they all vote on a titular Master of Orion. You each get an amount of votes based on how much population you have, and you get to pick between two candidates or abstaining. If any race gets a two thirds majority vote, then they become the Master. As a player, you do have the choice of disagreeing with the council’s ruling and refuse to accept that race as Master, in which case you immediately go to war with every race that did, but unless anybody does that then the game’s over.

In any case, I’d researched fairly long range scanners, and I could clearly see that the Klackons were amassing quite a large fleet. Now, I hadn’t really done anything militaristic yet, what with the only neighbour of mine being so chummy, so that fleet was looking worse every turn. Then their diplomat approached me, and they demanded that I vote for them at the next meeting.

Well, they had big ships and big guns, but I thought maybe they were bluffing, so when it came round I just abstained. They were pretty miffed, but nothing was declared, so I chalked it up as a win. With that military threat in mind, I was trying to come up with a solution. The system my home planet was in had three gas giants in it. Gas giants are usually impossible to colonise, but I’d just found the option to research the means to set up a base on them. With an extra three planets at work, I could easily throw up enough defence to hold anybody off indefinitely.

At the same time, the Klackons had been raiding planets all over the system because nobody was voting for them. Eventually it was just them, me and the Bulrathi left. Then, the denouement. In the same turn as I finished that research, the Klackons destroyed that Bulrathi system that was blocking me into the corner. It was just the two of us, and they demanded that I give them the gas giant research I’d just finished.

Now, they were already pissed off with me. If I refused, they were obviously going to declare war on me. And I hadn’t yet started my defences yet, so I had next to no protection at all. It was crunch time right there. They were barbaric villains who got everything they wanted by killing, so what do I do? Suffer inevitable death, or just give them what they want? This was a decision that actually called for courage.

Eventually I just thought, no, screw those guys. We were just one tiny swamp planet up against ant men who controlled the rest of the entire galaxy, almost nothing to our name, but we stood up and said no. We got wiped out in one single turn, but that was okay. I actually felt brave. That isn’t something that happens often at all.

Moreover, in a technical sense I lost the game. All my guys died and it was game over – but it felt satisfying. It wasn’t just “oh no you fell in the lava and that was your last life bl bro”. It was a death that had meaning, a loss that was substantial. There was a choice to make and death was a consequence of that choice, and that’s okay! Games don’t have to pander to you to make sure you’re enjoying yourself. If you remove the consequences from your actions within a game’s world, then those actions become meaningless and winning feels just as hollow as losing. This loss here, this death, felt a lot more satisfying than the thousands of times I’ve won by rescuing the princess or saving the kingdom. It made me smile, and it made me feel a certain way. I wish that was something that happened more.

Ranger Three

2011-08-16T08:28:00.000-07:00

Ho hum. Tried starting on a piece that's been floating around for a while. Had a lot of fun with that cover letter for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and I've been meaning to do some more with Baines for some time. It isn't much, but it's a start, at least.

Lascott Baines bent down and lit yet another cigar off the still smouldering plasma that had only moments prior been another highly trained elite soldier. Well, a soldier, at any rate. More along the lines of just one more sap with a gun that was between point A and point B. That was how the story went every time, really, and who was he to disagree? Baines took a heavy drag from his cigar and peered out at the surrounding area. The craggy red mountainside extended forwards for a while, looming overhead. The planet was in its night cycle for another two standard earth months, thus the plateau, and everything else was under the veil of darkness; just how Baines liked it.

Grimacing, he ambled over to one of the larger walls of stone and sat himself down, back against the rock. It had been a long night – thirty nights long, to be precise – and it hadn’t even really started yet. With a sigh, Baines closed his eyes and let loose a cloud of smoke big enough to cover his head. It lingered in the air for quite some time. The oxygen here was lighter than it should be, or some such. He hadn’t really been paying attention when the intel types had gone over it all. None of it really mattered when it came down to it. They pointed at something they wanted him to get rid of, and off he went, trigger finger itching at his blaster. Atmospheric density and oxygen composition were secondary priorities to staring down a cocked barrel in your face. That seemed to be the case with so many things in life.

Baines slowly opened his eyes, looking up at the few dim, lonely stars spotted around.

Should be more soon enough, assuming I don't start hating it immediately. HMMMMM

We'll call it The Good Book

2011-07-26T06:22:00.000-07:00

RTS is a genre that's never sat quite right with me. While I do think it has some inherent flaws, which I've touched on in the past, there's also the factor that it just isn't my genre. I don't belong there, nothing about it really says "yes, this is home." I've been getting back into some 4X games lately, though, and I only now realised one of the reasons this is.

Diplomacy's not really a thing in your stock standard Command & Conquers, Age of Empires or Total Wars. The extent of the diplomacy is whether you're killing those guys or ignoring them. Which is fine, really, because that's not really what it's supposed to be about, so that'd just be dead weight. RTS is about ordering, managing and using soldiers, not diplomats.

I bought Civ V recently, on the other hand, and at a certain point I realised that I was probably spending more time sitting in the diplomacy screen thinking about what to do than I was telling my guys to get the other guys. The combat in this, for me, is just a very mechanical reaction to what occurs after diplomacy goes down.

You can really get hit by some surprisingly big decisions. For example, in one game, I was playing with England, America, Germany, and China. I was getting chummy with England, but more or less ignoring everybody else. China is the big player in the match with all the soldiers, everybody else paled in comparison. I was trying to go for a culture victory myself.

Anyway, China declares war on Germany and America soon enough. Germany asks me for help, but, well, I've got no soldiers to spare, do I? And I'm no especially friendly with them. So, I felt a little bad, but I wasn't ready to remove my sole garrisoned units to help them fight a losing war. Shortly afterwards, they got wiped out, which was a little worrying.

Then America asks me for help, too. They have about as many troops as Germany used to, so things weren't looing great, and the result was staring me in the face: help them or ignore genocide. China hasn't noticed me yet, though. They don't feel strongly about me one way or the other. So, do I risk angering them by helping America, and have them declare war on me? Or do I send aid anyway, despite the risk? I made a bit of a compromise; I sent them some resources. A bit of gold and steel, so they could build a bit more military strength up. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough, and they fell too.

After that came the apex of the match. China approached me directly and asked me to declare war on England and team up to destroy them. That really had me thinking. This was a big call to make. England was my bro, but do I stand tall and say no, or do I face probable destruction by angering the Chinese? It was a really telling point. Am I a coward? Do I have to win, or are the ethics of the situation important to me?

I did end up deciding not to betray the crown. England and I stood together and died together, but the conclusion here wasn't really the important part. What was important was the lengthy period of time I was staring the Chinese leader down wondering what on earth I was going to do. That struck a chord with me quite a lot more than whatever white wash scripted "moral choice" events I hit in Dragon Age. It also hit me much heavier than any RTS I've played. Don't get me wrong, I've whittled away quite a few hours in Tibeian Sun, Emperor: Battle for Dune and Age of Empires, but all of that was the combat. This sort of diplomatic scenario gave me a backdrop for the ensuing combat engagement. I had reasoning, I had motivation; there was an emotional investment that simply isn't present in RTS most of the time. This would be like if you ignored the entire film V for Vendetta, but skipped to the end to see the explosions. If you like explosions, and want to see them, then I've no intention of impeding your progress. I'm just the sort of audience that needs a context, a connection to enjoy something - and a lot of the time I find myself questioning the complete lack of that.

It's Real Dickens

2011-07-18T08:06:00.000-07:00

The new lass broke down at work tonight. Really happens more often than you might think in this industry. Gordon Ramsey's pretty much not all that when it comes to angry chefs; dime a dozen. It's the pressure that does them in. Before service gets started everybody'll be laughing like no tomorrow and having a grand old time swearing at each other and making bad dirty jokes, but when those orders come in, something just clicks and it's a whole different place. Damn shame, really. Most of the time it isn't anything personal, it's all contained there in that mystical plane between planes, but, well, sometimes it's not most of the time.

Six months pregnant, too, poor gal - at nineteen, no less. At nineteen I was just starting that writing course at uni. Somehow, having a creature growing inside of your person manages to overshadow that somewhat. God knows how anybody copes with that at such an age.

In any case, when the chef ducked out for a fag, it was once again my turn to swoop in on hug patrol. I'd like to say that this was the first instance, or even the last, that I held somebody next to a deep frier as they quietly wept into a grease stain on my apron, but past experience suggests that my tour of duty has more than a few days left.

Red Copper Wire

2011-07-16T23:11:00.000-07:00

Nimbus might have passed you by, with the avalanche of Steam sales blotting out the sun. It describes itself as a unique combination of racing and puzzling, which is technically not a lie, but it’s more like sitting down by yourself with a Rubik’s cube, timing how long it takes you to solve it, then looking up the world record on the internet to see how you did.

Essentially, you play a small rocket that's constantly falling downwards. You can only control which direction you're going in, and you can slow down, but you have no way to directly increase your velocity. You can only do so by either falling further, or using one of the assorted speed pads, squares, and other various elements.

The thing is, there aren’t any opponents. When you finish each level, it gives you a ranking, and shows how quickly other people beat it, so in a very loose sense you could imagine you’re competing against people, but they have no physical presence within the game’s world. Any choices you make or actions you perform have no direct consequence on what they’re doing. Take Mario Kart. Yes, I’m still trying to end up with a better time than everybody else, but they’re also right there next to me. Not only is there the visual motivation of “oh no bowser’s right behind me what do” but because they have a presence, what I’m doing effects what they’re doing. I can throw a turtle shell at that guy, I can ram that guy off the road, I can drive in front of this guy so he can’t get past; I have a thousand more verbs at my disposal.

Those verbs are important to the core of a racing game. I don’t think I’ve ever played a single match of any of them where both me and my opponent have just driven forwards in a straight line and never interacted with one another in any way at all. Even with computer players, there’s still a distinct degree of interaction.

So as a racing game, Nimbus falls down hard. I think I would have been interested to see how it would have been different if they had have dropped that pretence and focused entirely on the puzzle aspect, because the mechanic here is a good one. The constant falling is interesting, if nothing we haven’t seen before in smaller doses.

A lot of the puzzles are clever, and the game does use the mechanics in interesting ways. Eventually you have to push balls around, teleporters come into play, and some other fun props, but it still doesn’t sit quite right with me. For one, you can die. Death is very hard to work into a puzzle game properly. Say there’s a puzzle that takes about six minutes to complete. Well, if there’s a pitfall at the very end, then I might end up having to play through the first five and a half minutes over and over again for, really, no reason at all. I’ve already done that, I’ve already figured out what I’m supposed to do, and making me do it repeatedly isn’t good design.

Take SpaceChem. SpaceChem is brilliant. I’ve been playing it like mad. It’s a game where you get certain elements appearing on the left of the screen, and you have to manipulate them to result in different combinations of those elements on the right side of the screen. Which is interesting enough on its own, but where it gets brilliant is that a lot of the maps have chains. Each of those screens links directly to the next, so what you’re putting out of screen one gets put into screen two and so on. Of course, because your solutions are so long and horribly messy, you end up making your own problems half of the time and the mountain of shit you’re dealing with at screen six is almost certainly going to be entirely different to another player.

If, at the end of one of my solutions in SpaceChem, I suddenly died, and the game erased all of my progress and threw me right back to the start of the level, well, that’d hardly be satisfying, would it? So why is it a-okay in something like Nimbus to do more or less the same thing? What does death achieve in this game? What is it telling me as a player? It’s telling me I did something wrong, that I failed. Failure is fine. In a puzzle solving game, the whole point is finding an answer to a problem, so it’s necessary to tell me when I haven’t done that, but is death the only way to achieve this?

Honestly, shouldn’t it be self evident whether or not I’ve solved a puzzle? If the problem is getting from point A to point B in a specific way, then once I’m at point B isn’t that communicating it effectively already? Again, take SpaceChem. The puzzle is getting elements X and Y and combining them into XY, so once I’ve figured out how to do that, isn’t that enough? Why should the execution of that solution have a possibility of failure – let alone invalidate all of my previous efforts?

I’m not saying death should be entirely done away with in every game forever; obviously that would be ridiculous, but sometimes it just doesn’t fit in properly. Not to mention that the whole tone of Nimbus is a very relaxing, soothing one. The smooth visuals, the pleasant sounds, the flowing motions of your ship, it’s all very calm and tranquil. Then, of course, once you’ve died twenty times in a row on that one goddamn spiky bit, all that hard work put into generating that tone gets chucked right out the window.

I think it was about two or three dollars when I picked it up and it was certainly worth the price. As I said, there really are some genuinely clever puzzles, and the mechanics are interesting, but it definitely falls short of the mark in more than a few places.

Midday Sword Fights

2011-07-12T07:42:00.000-07:00

I've been playing more and more Realm of the Mad God (henceforth ROTMG) lately, and it's really starting to grow on me. I jumped in back when it first launched, but I didn't care for it much at the time. Couldn't tell you why; maybe there was a deal breaking difference, although I suspect it's more likely that I just didn't give it a fair enough go. I'm glad I went back to it, because it's definitely one of the more peculiar MMOs I've taken out for a spin, and that list is longer than I'd care to admit in polite conversation.

It really captures a wonderful arcadey feeling. Not in the current marketing sense of the word, which appears to mean "it has bright colours, possibly a high score function, and is over reasonably quickly." What it does is simulate the arcade experience for me.

All those hours I spent wasting money on extra lives instead of attending lectures were very precious. Take Time Crisis 2. You'd be standing there shooting terrorists in the nads having a terrific time trying not to giggle, and then some other fag sidles along to the adjacent screen, snatches the other gun, and suddenly shit gets real. Maybe there'd be a sly grin, or a nod, or even just nothing at all. The point being, the game just changed dramatically. Now you have a bro. Maybe you're going to pick off the sneaky bastards in the perfect position to attack him, or maybe you're going to totally ignore his net percentage of the mooks and just take care of yourself. No matter what you're doing, though, you've got a big new factor in your head to play with.

That's exactly what ROMTG has in spades, and I can't get enough of it. You'll be off questing like the gallant knight or ne-er do well villainous rogue you are, and then bam, two wizards and a priest strut their stuff onto the scene. Now you've got a whole pocket full of new tactics and ideas. You might be looking for the first chance you can get to stab them all in the back by letting them die and stealing their shit. Maybe you're just going to ignore all that unsightly killing and stick to looting everything you can as soon as it hits the floor. Or you could be boring and actually help out, who knows.

The immediacy really helps that feeling. World of Warcraft, to take the perennial example, is incredibly drawn out in comparison. WOW is all about playing the long game, getting to 85, making it to the raids, getting that epic gear, moving up in the guild ranks. It's much more about investment. ROMTG is all about the quick snap decisions, the right here and the right now. When they remove those harrowing constraints of the hundreds of hours you pour into hitting the level cap and all the rest, your mind is a lot more focused on exactly what's in front of you, as opposed to everything you've already done, and everything you wanted to do next.

As far as the arguable stagnation of the MMO genre goes, this is certainly up there in my head along Planetside and City of Villains with my more memorable experiences.

Lacking in the Social Graces

2011-07-10T08:17:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a while since I've cracked out the calligraphy inks, hasn't it? This is only verse one of a two verse piece. Expect the second to be forthcoming; perhaps at an hour other than half one in the morning.

South Melbourne Dim Sims

2011-07-08T20:43:00.000-07:00

So I finally chucked in that application. Now we play the waiting game. In the meantime, I suppose you might like to see the pieces I decided not to go with?

Carth had a lot more going on than he gets credit for. He was pretty easily overshadowed by the other party members in KOTOR, mostly because he was the stern, stoic, pokerfaced husk of the group, but there was more to him than that. Quite a few people complain that he’s a very whiney addition to the group, moaning about what you’re doing, and generally being a pouty little nancy no fun.

That mindset never made much sense to me. Yes, he’s quick to disagree with what you’re doing, but shouldn’t that be fantastic, not awful? Take one small scene near the start of the game. Generic alien tentacle face is getting rocks thrown at him by kids, and you’re given a dull and clichéd moral choice to help him or ignore him. Where it gets interesting is when you say you don’t care. At first, Carth mildly admonishes you, saying that you should probably step in and do something, but if you persist, then he actually steps in himself.

Yes, he acts like a human being, quelle surprise. He actually takes a course of action not only independent of the player, but distinctly opposed to your wishes. Isn’t that brilliant? The actual example of “oh no that alien is being bullied” is a bit trite, but the result is a very interesting one. One of your party members legitimately goes against the player.

Take a recent example from Dragon Age, in the mage’s tower. You come across Wynne, a pleasant old wizard lass, and if you have Morrigan in your party, she wants you to kill Wynne because she’s fundamentally opposed to people being pleasant. If you say no, Morrigan just pouts, sits back, and loses a boatload of magical friendship points – 19, from memory.

Nineteen, when the scale only goes between plus and minus twenty! That’s almost somebody going from the love of your life to a complete stranger. You’d think that a fully developed person would do something in such a situation where they disagree to such a strong, passionate extent like that. I’m not saying that it’s silly for her to care about something like that so much. Quite the opposite, it’s always intriguing to see a character show some raw energy about an issue they really feel personally affronted by. I’d just like to see a reaction that’s actually bordering on emotionally appropriate.

Most of the games with ethical choice systems fall prey to this. The easy excuse that the developers put in is that if you hit a low enough score on the friendship meter, then party member x decides to bail out. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a good mechanic, but it’s a passive one. They’re not really reacting to a specific event, and even then, they won’t directly challenge the player, and intervene of their own accord. It just feels hollow, and it strips away meaning from an action that could actually end up being a very dramatic, memorable stand for their personal beliefs.

I liked the tone in this one, it had a bit more humour going for it - which seems to be a mainstay of the rps diet - but it felt a little less focused than the piece I went with. Still good, and it was a close call, but, the other piece just felt like it was stronger.

Classes in role playing games are one of the most important decisions, if not the defining choice of your character, and games should try to reflect that choice. If you go ahead and pick a wizard, then you should feel like you’re playing a wizard – seems pretty straightforward, yes? It doesn’t need to be a gigantic change, making the entire game completely different; small attempts can work just as well.

In Deus Ex, there is nearly always about a half a dozen different ways to approach each obstacle. If you’re playing a shifty hacker, you can sneak past that guard, disable the security cameras, and reprogram all of the turrets to shoot at everything. Or maybe you feel like crawling through some air vents. Maybe you want to be a silent ninja assassin, and pick off every guard one at a time, dragging their bodies into the shadows. Maybe you just want to blow everything up with a big rocket launcher.

The point is that the game reinforced your choices. They felt validated. Not only that, but they were distinct. Each way to approach a problem had its own sense of identity about it. Unfortunately, this seems to be weeding its way out of rpgs of late, and in lieu of these choices, we have delegated player roles.

By that I mean the current set up of healer, dps, tank – the guy that heals damage, the guy that deals damage, and the guy that takes damage. When you spell it out like that, it already looks pretty flat and dull, doesn’t it? Think about World of Warcraft. The game rarely, if ever, reinforces your choice of class, just your designated role.

Take the rogue class. Pick a roguish character from something. Han Solo, maybe. He’s a pretty well defined character. He’s a sneaky smuggler guy who shoots firsts and doesn’t bother with questions afterwards. He’s smarmy, kind of arrogant, dabbles in pretty much any illegal activity that comes his way; whatever it takes to make a quick buck, really.

Has anybody ever felt anything even approaching that while playing a rogue in World of Warcraft? The game world doesn’t react to your choice at all. You’re not a rogue, you’re just a dps. More or less interchangeable for any other dps class. Some of your attacks might have slightly different effects, and your abilities are somewhat different, but that’s a very shallow sort of sense of identity there.

If people could get out of this mindset of this three role system, then some really interesting mechanics might emerge. Take Gandalf. Was he just a ranged dps guy with a cool stick? Did he spend most of his time dealing damage, or reading books, talking to people, protecting his friends, trying to actually figure out what was going on? Something as prolific as a wizard shouldn’t be hard to express within a game at all, but instead we’re stuck with these player roles that restrict a lot of freedon. I’d be very intrigued to see what somebody might come up with if we got rid of them.

Now this was just... a huge mess. Again, I picked a topic that was too big for five hundred words. I did that a few times here, and I just ended up trying to fit too much into too little space. I'll probably come back to this at some point without constraints in mind and just let it go for as long as it feels like it ought to be, but for the purposes of this exercise, it was a pretty poor piece.

The other Remote Control

2011-07-08T06:38:00.000-07:00

I've been having some difficulty producing this sample piece, but I've at least knocked out four. Now I just need to tidy them up a bit and see which one comes out on top. For a bit of a break I let myself write out a ludicrous cover letter - something you know I thoroughly enjoy, kind reader - and it ended up being something I'll probably even end up using for the application. Why not?

The name’s Baines, Lascott Baines – but all you need to know is that I’m trouble with a capital T. The type who rolls into town with a blaster carbine in his hands and bad news on his heels. I was discharged from Star Zeta Academy after yet another incident caused by my arrogant, anti-authoritarian streak. The old fool of a captain who was heading the ship I was assigned to drifted us right into the middle of an asteroid cluster without even realising it. He was too spineless to turn off the computer navigation system, so I knocked him out cold and took the helm myself, engaging the manual controls.

That decision saved all our asses, and none of those thirty eight crewmen would be alive today if I’d stood idly by. The Academy didn’t approve of my headstrong methods, and now I’m flying from space station to space station in an old bucket of rust taking whatever backwater jobs I can find. The kind of jobs where they don’t care if you shoot first, and don’t even bother asking questions after.

Now I’m looking for somewhere that’ll let me engage my self-destructive tendencies on a grander scale. I’m signing on for a suicide mission, to head a crew of the dregs of society to infiltrate the Marktar central planet and assassinate Emperor Grabn’ol sitting right there in his Astro Palace. You’re going to give me the job because I’m the only sorry son of a bitch who’s up to it. I know it’s a one way ticket, and that’s exactly how I like it. So long as you’ve got a squad of guns I can count on, then just point me in the right direction, and stay out of the way. I’ll get the job done, and that’s all you need to worry your pretty little head about.

I hope that Something better

2011-07-01T06:29:00.001-07:00

Less than a week after I decide for certain that I want to move to London, Rock, Paper, Shotgun announces that they're after a new writer for their pack. I don't know if that's a coincidence or not, but it certainly made me smile, and that's something that happens far too rarely these days. I'm not too sure if I have much of a chance here. On one hand, there's my constant self deprication, but on the other, a few pieces I did in the past managed to make it to their Sunday Papers, so the possibility exists that I've been doing something right.

I mean, somebody giving me legal tender to write about video games. That's what I do for fun. This is a very alien concept to me, and it's giving me the shivers, let me tell you. I can't remember being this nervous about something in quite some time. I just... this is something I can really see myself doing, you know? This could be me. Me being happy. It's a tall order, to say the least.

I am struggling slightly with producing a sample piece, though. It's supposed to be five hundred words long, which seems rather an odd length. It's just long enough to breach the tip of an issue or concept, but just as I've finished introducing something, I find myself already at the limit. One hundred words I could knock out easily, just a few pithy sentences here and there - and on the flipside, something longer, like, say, one thousand words, would be just as ideal. Knock out a few key paragraphs, and I'm done before I know it, but this is a strange place between the two.

I don't know how many samples I'm going to do up before I pick which one stands up the best. At this point I'm thinking four, but who knows, I might end up really going to town on it and doing an even five. I just hope I don't fuck this up. There are probably a thousand people out there applying, each more qualified and more appropriate for the position than me, but, I just, I don't know. There's a tiny little fragment of hope in me under all the layers of cynical world weary bullshit wondering if just this once, this could be something that works out maybe.

God would this be brilliant, dear oh dear.

Farewell, Traveller

2011-06-09T07:01:00.000-07:00

New fellow started at work this week. Head Chef at another cafe - and at 32! Dear me. Anyway, we got to trading war stories eventually, as is always the case. I weaved a few tales about my times doing the phone surveys, of which you are well acquainted with, kind reader, some of my warehouse days, and a brief janitorial stint. Unfortunately, or fortunately as the case may be, the man topped me quite easily. He used to work in an abattoir, of all places. Not only that, but his official position was in "The Blood Pits™". That's not a whacky slang name, either, that's the legal term right there. The drain was improperly installed back when they built the place, and it didn't account for the blood congealing. His sole task there was, with the aid of a large metal pole, to poke half solidifed blood down a small hole. For six hours, with a thirty minutes break.

Yes, I am comfortable in this case to declare a flawless victory in his favour. I mean, come on.

Eldritch Blast

2011-06-04T23:09:00.001-07:00

Well look at that, I dug up an old assignment from uni. The first one I did for introduction to creative writing, even. A dusty relic, to be sure. Although given that it was the first piece I ever wrote in the second person perspective, and the first piece I ever tried to do at a professional level, well. Certainly interesting, looking back.

The thick scent of plastic, sweat, and sugar gently wafts into your lungs as you approach the arcade. Warm, glowing lights greet your face, and beckon you closer as if with a wink and a smile. A child stands agog at the concept of getting things, tangible objects, for playing games. His vacant eyes and gaping chasm of a mouth state that your passing by is not registered on any level. His face speaks to you of dollars hard-earned from tedious chores that can now be exchanged for something much, much grander: tickets. If life was meant to be lived, it was most certainly meant to be done so with novelty cigarette lighters, broken spud guns, and slightly used harmonicas.

Vaguely familiar tunes fill your ears as you leave the child behind, and continue down, further into the depths. You notice two young bucks competing in the ring. Their complete inebriation radiates around them, clearly stating that this is indeed a competition, not a game. A naive onlooker stares off into space, thrilled with the thoughts of how many seconds of adoration a dollar could buy. You slowly place a coin on top of the cabinet. All around observe your careful movements, your deliberate placing. This is your throwing down the gauntlet; you are next to fight. Tentatively, you stand in line, shuffling your fingers in-between themselves. The absolute concentration is too much pressure. The challenger fumbles. One clumsy slip and his place on the pedestal is lost for today. He is to return shamefully to his village with no boar for the feast. Of course, he has created his own problem by stepping up in the first place. He moves aside, tail tucked between his legs. You grip the joystick like an old friend’s hand. You cautiously touch the damaged buttons, ravaged in moments of fury. They relax a little.

A booming anthem bursts forth from the machine, announcing your arrival. Your faceless rival remains hidden on the other side of the screen for now. Bystanders watch in awe of your audacity. The other has been pitched in battle for an hour on the same coin. A commendable feat, there is no doubt, but neither of you are here to win. You meet to observe, to know the other player, to understand their every action. You feel the rush, the giddying high as you both dance to the rhythm of the fight. Each subtle move and counter brings you both closer together than small-talk or bagels. People watch, but they do not see. Their eyes stay fixed on the end result: who gets the applause? By this point, victory and defeat have become irrelevant. You have already found all there is to find. The match is over. You shift to the side, and come face to face with your competitor. Both of you know each other well enough now to smile, and appreciate that at least one other person is here for the right reason.

Tingles run down your fingers and light thoughts fill your mind as you get up to leave. Somebody taps you on the shoulder. You turn around, and see the other player from the fight. A fist is extended. It is subsequently bumped. His eyes lights up, and his expression tells you many tales of past battle fought, mighty foes felled, and times of great loss. You smile, and flick a coin to him as if to say “Next one’s on me.” He nods and heads back to the ring with a confident stride. Without looking back, you exit. The hard pavement meets your feet, and the cold air hits you in the face like a hard right-hook. The only noise is strangers walking away, and the only spectacle is watching the trees roll past on the dull train home.

Noble Enough

2011-06-01T06:40:00.000-07:00

Dear oh dear, whatever happened there, kind reader? We were doing quite well, I thought. Certainly we had the odd dip here and there, the ever present bouts of silence, but there was undeniably a sense of consistency, of regularity. Why, for the better part of a year we were, if memory serves, in contact with no longer than a week's absence. Quite the sticky wicket, eh?

Damnedest thing, I've not been able to sit myself down for any prose. Of course, that should hardly come as any surprise, I imagine you're rather too familiar with my modus operandi regarding that. Although, of note, whilst giving a few tips and pointers to a dear old lass struggling somewhat with a similar set of mental hurdles in regards to this whole writing ordeal I found myself more than comfortable hammering out a few paragraphs here and there. Hardly a moment passed and there I had several hundred words down that I didn't despise - quite the achievement given the time frame for me. This being her story, obviously, not mine; so perhaps it's just my ubiquitous sense of self worth getting in the way of anything of my own creation. It wouldn't be the first time, I suppose.

Almost two months, I think, since my last missive, awfully inexcusable. I find myself with a great many things bearing on my mind. It's been a rather... vulnerable time, of late, for me. I am sure that were you to tromp through these petty archives here you would more than likely find an example of my confiding into you such information in the past. Why not now? Well, I'm not entirely certain I have an answer for you. Vulnerability saps the deductive powers and reasoning facilities in a most powerful manner, I have observed in my extensive experience in the matter.

Perhaps, kind reader, you are amongst that sad and sorry crew foolish enough to anchor themselves in some way with my tedious presence in their lives. It is also entirely possible that, were that true, you have been left by the wayside by this recent incommunicado. If these suppositions hit home, then you might wish to be aware that alienation has not been my intention. Merely an inner rally to await convalescence, of a sort. If that anchoring presence is some how comforting, kind reader, and you have no desire to be rid of said burden, then I'm afraid I have nothing to offer you but the old and worn out assurance I have thrown about many a time before that the storm will pass.

Look at me, being mister optimist, ahah. Quite droll, eh?

I will miss Our Conversations

2011-04-20T03:12:00.001-07:00

Let me tell you, dear reader, about the baddest little bomber I ever had in Advance Wars.

Advance Wars was a deceptively simple game. It wasn't shallow, it just didn't have much width. It was focused, with all the crap cut out of the picture. For me it was a lot closer to Dawn of War's goals than Dawn of War was; tactical strategic combat without the base building, just the action. Although, thanks to being turn based, Advance Wars had a lot more in common with Warhammer than Dawn of War did.

I don't mean to mispeak here, I enjoyed Dawn of War. The campaign was fun, the squad dynamic was good, the levling up and getting loot scratched all the right places, yes - but not once while I was playing did I think "oh boy this feels like Warhammer." Maybe that was purposeful on their part? Certainly, the nature of any tabletop game where you paint little men is ostracising to a degree, which obviously isn't conducive to sales. In any case, there was very little strategy. Which, funnily enough, is almost always the case with rts games.

Time is not your pal. Time is Fernand Mondego. He'll get you sent to prison while he marries your fiance, and then laugh about it. Time is, to steal a line, never time at all, and that is utterly insufficient in the sort of game where you're supposed to be making tactical decisions. Take Starcraft. That's got about as much to do with strategy as Duke Nukem has to do with portraying positive female roles in media. It isn't about strategy at all. It's about who can press buttons the fastest. Chess is strategic. Imagine how well a zerg rush would do in chess. Take as little time with each turn as possible and just run all those pawns forward as fast as you can.

No, a real time game mode is, in fact, an obstacle to strategic thinking. Time means pressure. Time means snap decisions. Time means less thinking. I don't know about you, but I'm not Nero Wolfe, despite what my gut might tell you. I can't marshall my facts in an instant, every instant, and make an instantaneous decison thereupon. That is beyond the scope of my mental capacity. Which is why I relish in the opportunity to consider the facts, to weigh my options, to deliberate upon any given situation.

Now I don't mean to say that rts as a genre is entirely bankrupt of anything worthwhile. Obviously that would be ridiculous. Tiberian Sun is on a high pedestal in my heart, as are Age of Empires II, Dungeon Keeper, Emperor Battle for Dune, and quite a few others. I'm just trying to question a few core values of the genre. I know that after the base building, unit selection, research, army composition, and everything else, my tactics usually amount to "okay, find the other guy, then just select everybody and tell them to go smash shit up over there."

I assume I'm not alone there. The real time construct doesn't allow much room for delicate positioning, perfectly timed flanking charges, tactical withdrawls, blocking troops a with troops b, or many other things I find myself making great use of in a turn based system. One of the many reasons I love Age of Wonders II so much is that combat isn't definite. If I take one NOD light infantry up against twelve GDI light infantry, I'm going to lose, guaranteed, every time. Does that seem right to you? That I literally don't have any chance at all? I mean, what are some of your favourite action scenes from movies?

Take the last few scenes in Serenity. Wash, the goofy guy with the funny lines, gets impaled by a gigantic spike. In that moment, your fear is brought to a high point - the least dramatic, most comical character has been killed, getting across the point that shit just got real. So the rest of the characters all hole up while Captain Manly has to go and take care of some other business. The reason this scene is so filled with tension is not only because we care about these characters so much, but because we don't know what's going to happen. We don't know who's going to live and who's going to die; but, thanks to Wash getting killed off, it's been established that pretty much anybody else is fair game at this point. Anything could go down.

Now, obviously I'm not expecting any rts game to build up as much of an emotional connection with LIGHT INFANTRY UNIT 13B as I did with the Captain in Serenity, that would be ridiculous. The essence there, though, the uncertainty of the situation, simply doesn't exist most of the time in any rts game. Like I said before, twelve GDI light infantry versus one NOD infantry, NOD is going to lose every single time, no matter what, and that's complete bullshit.

In Age of Wonders II, not so. Some of the most thrilling battles I've had within the strategy domain have been when I've had one archer unit be ambushed by a full team of all manner of horrible beasts, but won anyway. There was uncertainty in the mixture. I'm not trying to say I need to win to enjoy myself. Dwarf Fortress is one of my favourite games, and nobody ever wins that. The losing isn't what bothers me, just the definite article. Give me a chance. Even if it isn't a big one. Give me the same chance that the Milenium Falcon had to get through the asteroid belt. Give me the same chance Indiana Jones had to beat the nazis. The same chance that Captain Algran and Katsumoto had in The Last Samurai. Yes, they lost that one, but it wasn't certain until it happened. It was not a predetermined event.

That's what makes turn based strategy so amazing, so tense, so weighted. Skill becomes a more important factor. I'm not attempting to assert that rts takes no skill - Jae Dong would very obviously destroy me in a matter of seconds - but strategic skill, truer to the heart of what these games should be about, takes a role more center stage when time is no longer your enemy.

Something very singular happened to me while playing Master of Orion II, one of the most dauntingly expansive games I've ever played. It's incredibly dense, and I still struggle to think how they managed to fit everything in there. One of the most interesting features to me was one of the victory conditions. You can get voted as Raddest Dude™ in the galaxy, which makes you king of everything. Although if somebody else gets voted in as Raddest Dude™ then you don't have to take it lying down. You can vote no, and the game doesn't just say "lolnope gameover for you."

Of course, at this point, everybody else has bowed down to the king of everything, so you become the rebel insurgency. Yes, you get to be the Browncoats. Every other planet in the system turns hostile to you, and you're almost guaranteed to get your ass handed to you. Almost, but not quite. There's that tiny little spark, that indefinite article that's so very important here. If you play your cards right, if you manage to do exactly the right things and exactly the right times, then just maybe you make it through this. Just maybe.

You also get random leaders throughout the game. Not Warcraft 3 style heroes who can destroy suns by blinking to hard. You get civic leaders who provide bonuses to things like scientific output and population growth, and you get the military leaders, who provide bonuses more like increased firepower and quicker movement. You have to assign the military leaders to specific ships for most of their abilities to take effect, so they're not just sitting back at HQ, they're actually in danger out there. They get experience and level up, so you get attached to them.

That's another problem I have with rts games. I never get attached to my units. I'm aware I just said above I don't expect to be as emotionally involved with my troopers as I am with Captain Mal, but I don't care about them at all. There's no time to care about them. Their life expectancy isn't much at all. Dawn of War side stepped this a bit with the squad system, in that I was still following the same units, but that was only in the campaign, not in anything else. In Age of Wonders II, that one little archer who single handedly fended off an entire invasion had an identity. I had a shared past with him. He became "that guy who did that thing" as opposed to just ARCHER UNIT 13B.

One of the military leaders I had in a game of Master of Orion II was much the same. I'd colonised a planet, and found him stranded there, so he joined me, almost at the start of the game. For a long time he was the only military ship I had; it was early days, and I didn't really have any reason to be paying the upkeep for extra ships. So, pretty much every time I wanted to protect a colony ship, had to try and repel pirates, or wanted to play some hit and run tactics, he was my go-to guy. Naturally, because he was my only ship, I was constantly fixing him up with any new technology I researched. The ship kept getting bigger and better, with more and more weapons, until eventually it was a Titan class ship, dominating the vanguard of my force.

Then I noticed something. I hadn't been paying much attention to really building up my planets, or colonising new ones, so while I'd been playing soldiers and building up money, one of the computer players had been pouring all of their efforts into population, which gave them a lot more voting power. So, they won the vote, and became the Raddest Dude™.

Obviously, I didn't want to just throw in the towel. I had a chance, after all, so I refused to join the super space alliance, and immediately got pounded by a dozen forces. Now, while my leader and his ship were pretty powerful, it just wasn't feasible to take on that many enemies. In the first turn, every other ship in my fleet got destroyed, and it was just him against everybody else. Dismayed, but still clinging to hope, I took my turn. He managed to take down a fair few of them, but there was still a throng there. Next turn, they managed to take out most of his weapon systems and half of his movement. It was at that point where I said, no more, and just flicked on the auto-combat, admitting defeat, and the loss of that leader I'd had for so long.

The auto-combat did a very peculiar thing. It sat there doing nothing for a little while, then ran the ship directly next to everybody, and set off the self destruct. Because it was such a big ship, the explosion was equally large, and it took out every single enemy. In one fell swoop, it ended the fight right there, letting my planets live for another day. A few turns later my colonies got obliterated, of course, what with me not having any forces left at all, but how strange is it that the auto-combat did such a thing? I never would have considered blowing him up. I liked him too much.

Nothing even approaching that has ever happened to me in any rts game. The stakes are never that high, because I never really care about anything. Instead of "FUCK, NO, THAT WAS CAPTAIN TERRAN, HE'S BEEN SAVING OUR ASS SINCE DAY ONE" it's just "well damn there goes my war elephant, guess I better build another one. Oh well."

Now, he was a unique unit, in that he was a leader, and not just a rank and file, but I don't think that's a terribly important factor. I had a similar experience in Advance Wars 2 with one of my bomber units, mechanically no more unique than any other.

It was the last mission in the campaign, and I was controlling 3 different forces teaming up against the bad guy. Soon enough, things took a sour turn, and I thought I was more or less done for. I still had a bit of money, though, and instead of thinking about which unit would be most useful I just thought "balls to this, I'm going to die anyway, might as well just blow it all on one bomber."

Which turned out to be a very good decision after all. At that point, most of the rest of my army had been taken out, so it was just him and the dregs left. Surprisingly, he managed to take out a few key targets that had been pummeling me, and from there, I managed to secure a foothold and start mounting a defensive operation to get myself out of the hole.

Eventually, we pushed them back, and started to mount the offensive, with that bomber at the head. This being a rather long map, and me favouring tactics of attrition, I was locked in battle for quite some time, and that bomber unit kept zooming around the map, taking out the big guys wherever he could, then rushing back to base to heal up.

I was growing pretty fond of him. After all, it was pretty much entirely thanks to him that I was still alive, so he wasn't just some shitty plane, he was that awesome bomber that drove back the red menace when duty called.

So then we came to the crux of the matter. The aim of the mission was to take out some pipe. I think it was a supply line, or a power cord, or something like that. Anyway, to make things more exciting, they'd gone and hidden its health, so I couldn't see how much damage my units were doing to it. We attacked it a few times, then fell back, but then came the last volley.

My bomber was in range to take another stab at it, but at the same time, they had a few long range anti air units close enough to strike back. I didn't have anybody close enough to take them out, so it was either bomb the power line and maybe get killed, or retreat and try to rally some forces to try again, maybe getting overwhelmed in the process.

I couldn't decide what to do. I must have sat there for a good twenty minutes making up my mind. It was the figurehead of my forces, it was a tough call to make. Live a coward? Die a hero? Possibly survive and win everything? I was at a loss.

Eventually I did send him to bomb the power line, and it did destroy it, ending the game there with a win, but, again, the only reasons that this was such a tense situation were that I cared about that unit, and I didn't know what was going to happen. You don't get a scenario like that in rts games, and that's a damn shame.

Hell, these situations don't even have to be dramatic, they can be comical too. A friend of mine was playing X-COM for the first time and forgot to arm his troops, or armed them badly or something, and he ended up with everybody brandishing stun sticks or some such, except for one or two guys with a rifle.

They went to repel some aliens, and when they got out of their ship, the ufo was right there with two aliens in it. Instantly, they killed the only troops with guns, so he swarmed them with soldiers wielding gigantic purple batons, and beat them to death. The image of these two hyper advanced space aliens getting taken out by a horde of angry guys with poles was brilliant, and ridiculous things like that happen all the time in X-COM. Again, though, just compare this with Tiberian Sun. If I had one or two dozen light infanty up against a mammoth tank, I might as well just give up right there, because I already know what the outcome is going to be.

Indefinite articles inject excitement into games. How many times were you thrilled, frightened, and completely immersed in Fallout's combat, because you had no idea what the fuck was going to happen next? Like I said earlier, my intention is not to rag on every rts game ever made and say they're all worthless. I just think that they still have a lot to learn from turn based games.

Baldness was his Weapon

2011-04-15T22:27:00.000-07:00

Thunder boomed through the dilapidated castle as Cyril leapt up the stair well, his golden locks dancing in the howling winds. It was nearing midnight, and he knew that by then, it would be too late. The foundations of the castle were shaking violently, threatening to throw the whole thing down the cliffside. Snarling at the thought of what would happen to the nearby village if he failed, Cyril pounded up the stairs with renewed vigour.

Finally, he reached the epicentre of the tower. The roof had collapsed, and covered the floor in rubble. There were two wide staircases arching up to a balcony that hugged the wall, and the gloved hands grasping the banister like stygian claws belonged to none other than Count Aquillas. Cackling like a madman, he threw his head back, his fangs glinting in the moonlight. “So kind of you to join us, Cyril. And just on time, too.” The beast’s voice was dry and ancient, like a brief pocket of air escaping a corpse’s mouth.

Torch in one hand and rapier in the other, he advanced slowly over the rubble. The Count wasn’t the sort to stand alone in an open room without a few tricks up his jagged sleeves. “I haven’t come to talk,” he said, venom in his words, “I wouldn’t want to waste my words. You’re nothing but a rabid animal. All I’m here to do is put you down.”

Cyril was still inching forwards as The Count mirthlessly cackled again. “Well, Cyril my dear friend, I think it would be much more dramatically satisfying if you had an audience for your triumphant victory, don’t you?” The floor erupted as bony hands clawed their way to the surface. Skeletons. Cyril snarled as they advanced on him in a pack.

An axe came speeding down at him, but he lithely stepped to the side and stabbed at its ribcage. Much to his surprise, it had quite an effect. These things were old and brittle, not like the strong, huge guards he dealt with at the gate. That meant The Count was running out of soldiers. The bulk of his force must have been tied up elsewhere. Maybe if he played his cards right, he could get out of this unscathed.

Another one swang at him, interrupting his thoughts. Cyril rolled under its reach, narrowly avoiding the attack. Turning back to them, he realised he had backed into a corner. Looking around for anything to use, all he saw were the wide windows, looking out at the enormous drop down the cliff and into the ocean. Thinking quickly, he smiled, and snatched the flask of oil he had on his belt for the torch. He bit the lid off, and then threw the flask at the middle of the pack, quickly followed by the torch as well.

In an instant, the room lit up with the roaring flames. Several of them caught fire, falling in pieces to the ground. The rest, either slower or smarter, were hanging behind the blaze. Cyril looked around again. The fire was burning from one wall to the other. He hadn’t left himself with any room to safely move out of the way. Cursing, his eyes darted around, looking for anything he could use to help. There was nothing for it.

Cyril made the sign of the cross, took a few steps back, and then launched himself screaming through the flames. He landed on top of one of the skeletons, knocking it to the ground. It started trying to claw at his face. Cyril leaned back, and grabbed its head between his hands, pounding it into the floor over and over again until it stopped moving. He heard another approaching behind him. He launched himself at its legs, knocking it backwards, out the window it was standing in front of.

Getting up, Cyril realised that he’d dropped his rapier as he was leaping through the flames. There was one more skeleton still standing, and it ran at him, blade in the air. Just as it started to swing, he darted to the side, and braced himself. Summoning all of his strength, Cyril punched its head clean off its shoulders. Shaking his hand in pain, he reached down and reclaimed his rapier. The Count had been watching events unfold with an air of amusement, but now, now he had a grin on his face devoid of anything even approaching amusement.

“Well,” said The Count, spitting out the word, “you certainly are a tenacious one, aren’t you.” The sound of metal on metal echoed around the room as he drew his blade from the inside of his cape with surprising speed. “I suppose,” he smiled, “that this is where it ends then, no?” Cyril snarled, and clenched his fist. “You’re not getting away this time, Aquillas. You’re going to pay for what you’ve done.”

With silent fury, Cyril sped up the stairs as quickly as he could, running straight for The Count. Cackling, he leapt high up in the air, and Cyril barely had time to turn around before he was behind him. They met in a flash of steel, as the flames climbed higher below, casting their shadows on the wall as they clashed together. Thrust after thrust, slash after slash, they fiercely pushed one another up and down the stairs until finally Cyril landed a lucky blow, and sent The Count’s sword flying across the room. He kicked him down onto his back, and pressed his rapier against his neck. “It’s over Aquillas. Time to die.”

Cyril woke up in a pile of vomit with a horrible pounding in his head. There was a dense stink of beer in the air, and his body ached all over. Groggily, he looked down at his hands. Leathered, wrinkled and old again. He was dazed and confused. Looking around, he realised he was in a ditch on the side of the road. It was wet and cold. Seeing a puddle, he looked down and saw his face looking back up at him. It was all too familiar. Wispy grey hair, waxy skin, olive spots, a crooked nose, and dark, baggy eyes greeted him once again. Sighing wearily, he sat down in the mud with his head in his hands, and wondered what was next.

God is in the Rain

2011-04-14T10:56:00.000-07:00

Hahah, forgive me, dear friend, for my sporadic loquacity, but when the mood strikes, I would be a fool to decline. For the first time in what feels like the longest time, I managed to knock out a tiny bit of prose. A touch more on our old chum Anton.

The knocked up old Ute sped down the highway, Lars’ mad cackle trailing along behind it. Anton hated that cackle. Well, he hated a lot of things, so specific items on the list sometimes got muddled, but that ungodly, manic, chattering laughter was up there, if only because it sent off a little warning light in his brain. That meant that Lars was having fun. Not something to process without due caution. Fun in this context being less family picnic and more throwing bottles at the police.

Sighing, Anton propped himself up against the oil drum, then summoned a twisted little cigarette from whatever pocket dimension he managed to keep them in. It took a very specific set of life skills to keep a match lit with winds roaring past in every direction.

The goat was looking at him with eyes that Anton knew too well. They said quite firmly “I have no idea what’s going on, and I don’t think I care.” In a rare gesture of solidarity, Anton procured another misshapen, stubby cigarette and popped it in the goat’s mouth. While some might hesitate to describe him as magnanimous, it was certainly a heartfelt action. They sat there for a moment, staring at each other. It was the most meaningful conversation Anton had had in quite a long time.

Oaken Finish

2011-04-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

I suppose I may as well put this up here. You may recall the culmination of my clumsy ravings re children's games was the opportunity to write a game myself. Well, here are the relevant musings.

First Day

Daniel, protagonist. Tax agent for the government. Mix between collection officer, bureaucrat, law enforcement. Feared/disliked by public in general. Lives in apartment owned by Nora, older lady. Other tenants? Discussions ensue, window into the public eye? Others don’t know he works for the government. Candid opinions thrown back and forth about pros/cons ala taxation etc.

Daniel heads to main tax station place. Meets captain Eva, head of tax agents. Firm woman, strict, professional, but friendly, not cold. Short, slightly plump. Important to not be Lara Croft style woman. No ridiculous sex appeal. Possibly make slightly unattractive. Takes Daniel aside, small room, one on one. Daniel’s partner, Lewis, killed in incident by people who refused to pay. Eva clearly upset over death of an agent. She consoles, offers time off, counselling etc. Daniel refuses – wasn’t close with him (player won’t care too much about character they haven’t met, protagonist shouldn’t really do so either.)

Tax agents always work in pairs, too dangerous to work alone. People can get violent. Daniel gets assigned new partner, Byron. Youngish, naive, open, trusting. A follower. Handsome, longish Fabio hair. Newish at job. Two of them get assigned to make some collections in poorer district. Visual contrast between middle/working class districts, and slum type city limits.

Go to collect taxes from a house. They don’t have the money, have to get taken in and jailed. Byron slightly concerned, unsure what to think. Looks to Daniel for guidance? Choice to provide either reinforcement, okay/not okay? Possibly first dialogue chess sequence? Two different objectives to convince Byron whether good or bad? Byron easily swayed, so appropriate for introduction to mechanics?

Take the people back to station, lock up. See Lemuel in another cell. Gaunt, tall, stubbly man. Appears sickly, possibly pale. Older. Scoffs, sarcastic quip about the poor people being master criminals. Establish as roguish type character.

Approached by group of other agents. They want to go get a drink, honour Lewis. Eva turns a blind eye, aware of circumstances. Has to stay, shuffle papers on desk etc. Go down to pub. Start discussing Lewis, and population in general. Several people, different opinions on what’s going down in city, whether people are happy/unhappy, whether tax is good/bad, etc etc. Daniel gets to see several different thoughts on the current state of things, player is presented with some facts, begin to form own opinions.

Telegram arrives. One of the richer, more powerful families being assaulted in home, mob of people. Good contrast with upper class being more important to the city than the lower. Eva already en route with other agents. Possibly give choice as to convince others in pub to head back to avoid danger? Maybe next dialogue chess? Or too many? Need to be used more sparsely?

Daniel et al head to destination. On arrival, some of thug group already detained. Their leader has family’s daughter, Tara, taken hostage. Youngish, weedy. Eva tells you to negotiate. Next dialogue chess sequence? Convince thug leader to let her go?

Family very grateful, offers Eva compensation. She turns down, bribes illegal etc, more establishment as a by the books character. Eva and other agents leave, to round up rest of thugs, take back to station. Daniel and Byron remain, reassess situation. Family reprimand Tara, spending too much time with the poorer people. Family leave, Tara gives Daniel calling card. Runs general goods store. Asks Daniel to drop by some time. Maybe take pains to establish not a romantic visit. No waifu shit.

Maybe have Daniel return home again? Hear more discussion from other tenants/Nora on public state of city before turning in for the night?

Second Day

Morning, possibly more banter from tenants. Telegram from Eva, wants you down at station. Maybe not force player there, choice to go look up Tara instead?

At station, Eva tells Daniel somebody has been syphoning power from the city. Daniel confused as to why it’s their jurisdiction, Eva more or less says not to ask questions. Asks him to investigate. Gives him details on Doctor Beckett, says he’s done some work with the city’s power, may know something. Also mentions that Francisco, one of the men who had helped with Tara, had asked to see him. Byron shows up, rejoins Daniel. (Do we want that? I understand if we want the player to be alone. I’m easy either way.)

Again, maybe player doesn’t want to? Francisco is an enforcer, one of the heavier officers. Tax agents more like detectives, enforcers more like riot police. Short hair, small beard. Squarish face. Stocky, but not super muscle bound arnie space marine. Francisco says you handled yourself well, wants your help with something. Has pinpointed specific area in city where most of the people who refuse to pay the taxes congregate – not people who can’t pay, people who actively refuse. Thinks you’re a sharp guy, wants you to check it out. Says that that’s the area where he tracked down Lemuel to, maybe he can help.

Tara says she was impressed with how well you convinced thugs, asks if you can lend a hand. One of her suppliers threatening to stop selling to her, wants more money. Asks Daniel to convince them otherwise – dialogue chess?

If player talks to Lemuel, learns he refuses to help unless let out of jail. Maybe player to convince guard that he’s allowed to temporarily come out and aid? More dialogue chess?

Doctor Beckett, old man. Pince nez glasses, wrinkled, leathery face. Long time in past, did extensive repairs on water system – knows all about the happiness tax, emotion as power etc. Is currently building flying machine in secret. He’s the one who’s been syphoning the power. He knows how the system works, and he needs the power to build his machine.

Obviously, Beckett highly nervous about tax agent visit. Daniel asks for information, Beckett insists he knows very little. Gives Daniel name of man who doesn’t exist, Robert Corcoran. Says he knows more.

Tara impressed again with Daniel. Goes into detail about things. Her family said earlier she spends too much time with the poor. She’s been giving people money to pay for the happiness taxes. Now her plan is to get enough people and businesses together to form a guild/union/group big enough to be able to help all of the poor pay for their happiness. Wants you to help her convince other shop keepers/businesses/philanthropists/whoever to join the cause.

Lemuel takes Daniel/Byron to a bar in the area Francisco mentioned, says it’s a good place to start looking. Patrons unhappy – government agents don’t get great hospitality in places filled with people who break the law. Barman recognises Lemuel, spits and says he isn’t welcome here, asks you all to leave. Dialogue chess to stay/press the barman for info? Tells you about a meeting going on later that night, group of rebels. Daniel takes Lemuel back to the station, put back in cell. Little argument from Lemuel, very defeatist attitude.

Francisco asks if you found anything out, tell him about meeting. Looks excited, vehement about catching them. Tells you to play along for now, get more info. Talk to Byron, decide on rendezvous point before both go to rebel meeting. Eva asks for an update on the power situation. Daniel says Beckett told him to look up Robert Corcoran. She suggests looking through their documents, see if the name crops up. Finds a name and an address. Go there, place is locked and barred up. Need to get in. Maybe convince Lemuel to come out and pick lock, or Francisco to come and tear down the door, or have Byron do something, or somebody else etc. Dialogue chess to convince.

Go inside, house is long abandoned, no signs of life. Head back to Doctor Beckett, door is wide open, nobody inside. No real clues inside. Can ask around, nobody knows anything. Tell Eva, she says she’ll get some people on it.

Return home again, more banter from tenants, go to bed.

Second Night

Wake up later that night for meeting. Go to point, join up with Byron. Head to meeting. Watching what’s going on. Crowd of people talking. See several of the tenants from apartment, some of the other people from around town, maybe one or two of the tax agents/enforcers from the station. One man stands up above the rest, Pierius. Long beard, curled hair. Muscular. Maybe a scarf, something long and flowing. Head of the rebels. Starts talking about what’s going on the city. Very passionately against the tax. Speaks out about morals. Says they need to take action. Byron clearly moved by his words, slowly starts agreeing more and more as Pierius goes on. Eventually Byron wants to come out of hiding, walk up to the group, join them. Dialogue chess to convince him not to, or maybe Daniel goes with?

If convince Byron to stay, both sit back in hiding. Overhear their talk. Pierius says they need to take a stand and fight back. Says they should burn down the pub, where Daniel and the rest of the agents went for a drink on first day. It’s a place frequented by the tax agents, wants to send a message. Overhear the details, then bail out before the group breaks up and leaves. Go home again?

If decide to come out, mob angry, but Pierius calm. Says it’s good that government types are here, good to have inside men. Same as before, says burn down the pub. Tells Daniel that one of his people is going to make a distraction at a specific time and place, and that he should tie up as many agents and enforcers there as possible. Meeting more or less over, group breaks up, go home?

Third Day

Banter from tenants. The ones who were at the rebel meeting last night are missing.

Head to station. Meet up with Byron. If didn’t join rebels, tell Francisco about meeting, and their plans to burn down pub. Francisco ecstatic, says he’ll send some people to make sure the place is empty, then go down there himself with some more men and set an ambush. Tells you to go down with him.

Rebels show up, get caught and subdued easily. Tied up, on knees. Francisco orders men to kill them. Dialogue chess to stop. If fail, Byron throws up, runs away. Francisco soffs, tells men to clean it up. If succeed, Francisco stops, leaves bar in a huff. Get men to take rebels back to station. Head back yourself, Francisco nowhere to be found. Tell Eva about what he did, she tells you that you’ll find him at the graveyard, gives you directions.

Go there, find Francisco standing over his little sister’s grave. The rebels killed her, because he was working for the government. Hence his vehemence. Apologises for leaving earlier, felt like he had to be alone. Puts his hand on Daniel’s shoulder, says that all of the rebels are going to hang.

If did join rebels, tell Francisco about the diversion, say that he should send as many people there as he can. He runs off with a whole bunch of agents/enforcers. Daniel and Byron head to pub. Place is in flames, people running around everywhere, nearby buildings catching fire.

You wouldn't believe how much I learned from so little. It's a bit like poetry to me, in a way. I always took the prose rules and mindsets, applied them to poetry, and got frustrated when they didn't work. Likewise, this context of game writing is a whole new world with its own modus operandi. Liberating, daunting, exciting all at once. I daresay I figured out more with this than what I did in about six months at uni.

Nothing left to burn

2011-04-14T06:29:00.001-07:00

Dear me, dear me, it's been a miserable sort of month so far. That being a relative term in context, hahah.

You know how job appliations go, I assume, kind reader. I really can't be any more honest than when I say each one feels like I die a little more on the inside. Like a little spark of me is being clinially extracted and banished to another plane, never to be seen again. How many sparks left I wonder.

Everybody keeps telling me that Hemmingway said that all you have to do is write one true sentence. That's always irritated me, in the same sort of way that a militant christian is irritating by slinging broad, gaping statements around like buckshot. True sentence? No. Very few people have that. Writing truth is like setting out to go on a moon expedition with nothing but a fish bowl for a helmet. Sure, there's a sort of sense there, if you tilt your head and squint a bit, but ultimately, all you're going to end up doing is getting your head stuck. No, it's not about writing a true sentence. It's just about writing an honest one.

It's not complicated. Sitting down with the daunting idea of a "true sentence" in your mind, that's complicated. This isn't math. You can't quantify words. Certainly some arrangements are truer than others. "Smoothies are dreadful" is going to raise a few eyebrows. "Doughnuts are not an appropriate breakfast" belongs in a dungeon somewhere. "I'm fine" holds as much meaning as a leaky bucket.

An honest sentence, though, that's simple. Not easy, dear me no, but not complex. Pas example. I desperately, desperately need help that I will never get; even if it were readily present itself, something which will in all likelihood not occur, I wouldn't accept it. Lately I've been spending all the money I make each week on things I don't need in a hollow attempt to make myself feel less dreadful about life. I doubt that I'm ever going to be in a relationship.

Simple. Effective. But try committing yourself in words like that. Words aren't just squiggles. They're physical representations of thoughts. If you've got that down on paper, then there it is, for the whole world to see. Out in the public domain. Try standing in the middle of a busy inner city street and yelling out as loud as you can "I'M LONELY AS HELL AND I'M SCARED I'M INCAPABLE OF MAINTAINING A SINCERE EMOTIONAL CONNECTION WITH ANOTHER PERSON."

That's writing. Writing is clinically extracting a little spark of your very self and shooting it out to the world. Writing is the embodiment of who you are. The distilled identity, without the padding. No small talk, no pretense, no lies, no games, no tricks, nothing. Just you, as vulnerable as you'll ever be.

Every time you write a dishonest sentence, you're a coward, and nothing more.

Staring into Space

2011-04-04T19:12:00.000-07:00

I think I've isolated exactly what it is that attracts me to Flash Gordon, Fu Manchu, Godzilla, and all the rest of that pulp sort of media. It's the contrast between percieved shallowness and hidden depth. I mean, by osmosis alone, you know Godzilla is about a big dinosaur thing that rips shit up in Tokyo city - and you assume that's where it stops, but, really, that's just the launching point, isn't it? It's about more than ripping shit up. It's about fear, it's about hope, it's about the unknown - and, indeed, the unknowable - it's about insurmountable odds, the changing nature of relationships, the way people treat themselves and each other; it's about people. The depth takes on a whole lot more meaning in a piece like that, because to get to it you have to pierce that superficial, shallow level of stupid pop culture, and just when you think there isn't anything else, a whole other world opens up. And it feels more rewarding for it.

Could not see

2011-04-03T19:44:00.000-07:00

Been talking with a few writers over on the penny arcade forums. Not, you know, the sort of person that introduces themselves by saying "HI I'M WRITING A NOVEL PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO ME", actual writers. One of them has been writing a thousand words a day, every day, for the past three years. That struck me as quite a feat. Apparently, his work lies in tricking his mind. He doesn't set out to write a thousand words, just one hundred. Sit down with some tea, whack out a hundred words, get back to something else. Rinse and repeat ten times. Seems a much less daunting task. Something I am inclined to attempt myself. Don't hold your breath, but I suppose you'll be the first to hear how it turns out, dear reader.

All the little Angels rise Up

2011-03-26T08:34:00.000-07:00

Yet more dwarven cooking.

Beef Jerky.

Choose your cut of beef. The leaner, the better, you want as little fat as possible. Slice it very thinly, about one eighth of an inch, give or take. Then place the slices into an airtight container, and coat them with your prefered marinade - anything will do. Leave it overnight in the fridge.

Put your oven onto its lowest setting. Line some trays with grease paper, then place a cooling rack on top of the paper, and place your meat on top. Spread it out evenly so that no two slices are touching. Depending on how much marinade you used, it will take longer to dry out, but after around six hours you should start checking up on it. They should be dry enough to break without too much effort, but not so brittle that they shatter.

The room was drenched in darkness, despite the candle Monom had lit. It wasn't that kind of darkness. She would have been more than happy to sit without the light. After all, she had been doing that very often indeed, lately. But darkness did not lend itself to reading.

Not that she really needed the light, anymore. She couldn't say how many times she'd read the letters now, but she knew them by heart. For a while, she closed her eyes, and just sat there, her fingers on the seal. D. If you were touching it, then it was almost like it was real.

After a few moments went by, Monom slowly opened her eys again, and gently opened one of them up. The words were the same as they always were. Words from days gone by. She scanned the lines, already knowing how they went. "Exciting prospects... new town... business venture..."

Daring to open a few more of the letters again, she read along, pretending it might be different this time. "Sales booming... sending back lots... visit soon... in my thoughts..." And then another, time pressing on. "Rapid growth... new responsibilities... bound by duty... gave my word..."

Trembling, Monom forced herself on. There was still more to go. "Lovely town... open community... met a friendly lass..." The words sat there, glaring at her like an angry child, piercing into her very core.

Quietly, she began to weep. It was a gradual movement, starting as a sort of contortion in the shoulders, to an uncontrolable mess. That had been enough for now. She knew in her heart how each letter ended anyway, and the words arranged themselves in her head before she could stop them.

"Here's another jar of some of the jerky. I saved the best cuts for you. As always, they'll last as long as my love."

Automatically, her tear filled eyes darted over to the kitchen shelf. Each and every one of the jars was still stacked neatly, each unopened. Monom started weeping again. The room was filling with more darkness every day.

Pick Me up and throw Me down

2011-03-25T18:49:00.000-07:00

This is more for my benefit than yours, I'm afraid, but I felt like entombing some more thoughts for accompanying vignettes for this cookbook before they fade away forever.

- kid bakes with grandparent as kids are wont to do. Grandparent takes ill, not going to recover. Family grieving. Kid bakes by themselves, takes to grandparent. Sit next to bed singing.

- wild boar chase. Great warrior. Maybe brother/father died to it? Brings back, hailed as hero. Feast ensues.

- military expedition. Far away from mountain. New recruit, first time away from home. Low morale. Captain pulls out little wooden spice box, gathers rations, fixes up good, traditional home style meal. Start talking about family.

- soldier has a wife. Every time he goes out on patrol, she make "wife soup" for when he returns. Big expedition coming up, has to go away for long time. Wife says no, soldier says honour/duty bound, no going back. Captain realises situation. Discharges soldier so he can stay. Wife gets out of bed, tear filled eyes, soldier is sitting in kitchen with poorly made soup, smiles clumisily, says "husband soup".

- two brothers, sons of king. Brother x murders king in secret, brother y sees him. Brother x holds enormous banquet in king's honour. Brother y slips very sweet poison into his sauce. Tells him as he dies that his thirst for power, and his gluttony were his downfall.

- human ambassador/diplomat visiting. Big feast. Kitchen fucks up main dish, need to call in the artisan chef. See first kitchen scene from Eat, Drink, Man, Woman.

- baker seen being friendly to elves. Community gets slightly upset, begin questioning. Baker gets into big moral discussion about how they're being close minded. They leave. Baker goes in back, down into basement. Opens locked chest. Removes delicious wild berries, eats one. Realise she's not being friendly to elves because it's the right thing to do, just doing it to get good berries.

- could do something with Stu (pudding 4 am)

- beatnick dwarves?

Just as My Solitude was closing in

2011-03-25T06:49:00.001-07:00

Why, you didn't think I'd forgotten about that idea for the dwarven cookbook I'd had so long ago, did you dear reader? Would I ever do such a thing to one as precious as you?

2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter
3/4 brown sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup molasses
2/3 cup hot water

Preheat your oven to 170°C. Sift together the flour, baking soda, ginger, cloves, cinnamon, and salt in a large bowl, and sit it aside. Cream the butter and brown sugar. Add the eggs 1 at a time, beating as you go, and then the molasses as well. Gradually add your other mixture, then the water, mixing until you've got a smooth batter.

Cut into shapes, and place them on a baking tray lined with grease paper, or buttered. Bake for around ten minutes, and cool for about another ten.

Light burst through the window as the snapping of the curtains being pulled back jolted Urist awake. Blinking a few times, she realised she’d fallen asleep at her desk, again. There was a mess of paper all around her.

Looking up with baggy eyes, she saw the lad Cartan was opening shop. After some of the mental smog of the morning cleared, the reasoning as to why she’d fallen asleep here in the first place came crashing down, as did her head, back onto the desk with a groan.

Nothing had been easy since she left home behind. Not that she’d been expecting everything to be a breeze, but still, here she was, right in the middle of the biggest human city this side of the mountain. It was supposed to be a thriving metropolis, ripe with a thousand different opportunities for the right minded entrepreneur.

Not to mention that it wasn’t exactly a tricky sale, on paper. She payed the normal rate for some goods from home, then added “Dwarven Made” and jacked the price up accordingly. People loved dwarven things. They equated the word with quality, for whatever reason. You tack it on the front of battle axe, and suddenly people are willing to pay twice as much.

It didn’t really seem to be much help though. She hadn’t been doing especially well. It was still early days; she’d only been here for about two, three seasons, so maybe it was just the wrong time of year. Whatever it was, the fact remained that things were not great.

Urist sighed as she looked up at Cartan again. He was a good kid, he really was. A lot of the people here were prone to look down on the recent influx of dwarves. It was a little hard not to, but that just made her feel even more like she didn’t belong here. As if she was stranded out at sea, but too embarrassed about causing a fuss to yell out.

Yes, that was what she’d been told when she was a wee gal. You keep your head down, and you push forwards. Well, it was time for a push alright, but her heart felt like it was a backwards one.

Slumping off of the desk, she lurched her way unsteadily over to Cartan, who was dutifully sweeping up. “We should talk,” she said, each word fighting not to come out.

It was over quickly, at least. She showed him the papers, explained all of the numbers, and said she didn’t have a choice. The lad tried to keep a brave face, but she could tell he wasn’t going to be okay. He was the first employee she’d ever had, and it really was killing her to let him go like this. It wasn’t fair. To either of them.

Shoulders drooping, and all gaiety gone from his usual jig, Cartan pushed open the door, before turning back and mumbling that the mail was here. Urist was wincing as he left. She couldn’t even watch him go.

After she was sure he was gone, she inched her way to the door, head hung in shame. Things probably weren’t going to work out and what then? Go back home, ashamed and defeated by the world? Move back in with her family, and constantly remind them of her failure? It had probably been a bad idea to come out here in the first place. It’s not like she knew anything about business. Or humans, for that matter.

There was a poorly wrapped little box at the door, held together with a vast network of old string. Sighing, she picked it up and went back inside. She plonked it down on her desk, and sat there staring at the thing for a while, before managing to move her now leaden hands enough to open it.

The smell hit her long before her eyes took notice of anything, and by then, she was already somewhere else entirely. Gingerbread biscuits. Automatically, her hands picked up the accompanying letter, and when she had regained her senses, she opened it up.

“For our dearest Urist. Everybody’s so proud of our brilliant young daughter who’s making her own way in the world already. We always knew you were headed for great things. We love you very much.”

For a long time, Urist sat there staring at nothing in particular, letting the smell take her back to much earlier days.

Maybe things would be okay after all.

Games that made Me want to be a Better Person: Planescape: Torment

2011-03-22T09:13:00.001-07:00

Planescape: Torment is a monumental game, in every way. I wish that was a literal sentence. In a perfect world, there would be a small bakery on every single street corner, everybody would wear a beret all the time (all the time), background jazz would constantly play in public, and there would be a monument to Planescape.

Criminally, I had largely ignored the game until about a year ago. This, more than anything, was the one game people would talk my ear off about. Once, at my brother's engagement party, his best man spoke at me for a good three hours about it. Now, I don't know about you, but I usually find that the quality of any given piece of media is usually inversely proportional to how good people tell me it is. For example, a lot of people told me Anchorman was the greatest film they'd seen in a long time. Then I watched it and wondered why they would lie to me.

Yes, it is certainly a game with a reputation - and you know what? It's the only game I've ever played that's lived up to the hype for me. That creep who ranted at me for three hours couldn't have been more right. Rarely do I find myself breaking out of my inured world weariness to really take something to heart, but I'll be damned if Planescape wasn't everything I was told it was going to be and more.

It isn't without its flaws. Nothing ever is. The mechanics are clunky. It feels like Baldur's Gate, except without the pause function. That is, to say, you know it's a turn based game at heart, but it's going through a phase, and it's wearing black shirts, doc martens, listening to Cradle of Filth, and sticking it's fingers in it's ears shouting "la la la la I can't hear you I'm a real time action rpg la la la."

Then there are the character stats. Charisma, intelligence, and wisdom all have a direct effect on conversation options. Which is great, in a way. When you're playing a character with a high intelligence, and you actually feel like the game is reinforcing that choice, that's good. What's bad is that, mechanically, a lot of that dialogue isn't useful.

Oh, it helps the odd side quest here and there, but, really, there are quite a few times where it isn't an option. So it's very possible that you're going to end up with an awful character, all because you were interested to see more of the dialogue - one of the game's better points.

Now, I get that there's a distinction between a social character and an action man. Fallout 1 executed that brilliantly. It's possible to get by on dialogue, without being hindered too badly. Sure, it's tricky. Probably harder than just putting all of your points into "hit things better", but every choice was viable. You could still operate effectively.

In Planescape, not so much. You can still soldier on, certainly. I played a fighter who had much more points in intelligence, wisdom and charisma than in strength, consitution or dexterity. So, essentially, I was a fighter who was pretty awful at fighting.

I almost felt like the game was punishing me for wanting to see more of the dialogue. Which is a bit of a shame, really. I'd be lying if I said I hungrily lapped up every word the game had to offer, but you compare the writing here to Dragon Age, and a bit of confusion sets in as to all of the praise Bioware gets there.

That's the attraction of the game. The narrative, the characters, the setting, the dialogue, the concepts at work... all of it is so well polished, so very clearly handled with love. For me, that made up for any of the flaws, tenfold. Not often at all do I play a game that's utterly unique, but I've never played anything else quite like it. Planescape is just wholly in its own category, doing its own thing, and I couldn't be happier about it. I think that this and Morrowind are about the only two games I've played that I sincerely think of as completely bizarre.

Personally, the one thing that made the whole game was Morte. Morte is the best companion style character I have ever encountered. Your character, The Nameless one, wakes up in a morgue type structure, with Morte right by your side. He's a floating skull. Right off the bat, he tells you that he's your friend, and he reads you a tattoo on your back, telling you to find a man called Pharod.

Now, initially, I hated Morte. I really did. I was honestly looking for the button to kick him out of my party. The two of you stroll around the morgue, and he expresses an overt fondness for the zombie laydays.

One of the things I hate about rpgs is how clumsily they treat relationships. People are complicated, by their nature. That's how they work. It's really, really hard to condense a person down into something small enough to fit into a game, I understand that. But take Dragon Age.

Morrigan is a witch. She was raised in the woods by a crazy old witch lady, so, she's supposed to be pretty socially retarded. That's good. That's interesting. It's a bit different, and it leaves a lot of room for development.

What's not great is that they devolve your relationship with her into a point system. Point systems don't work. At all. It's the same reason ethical systems are horrendous. You can't simplify something this complex into a black and white good points bad points set up. It doen't work. At best, it feels slightly awkward, at worst, it feels insulting, and ruins any emotional investment.

So, even though she's supposed to be rather socially malformed, and you're the first friend she's ever had in her entire life, and you don't really share enough time to build up something approaching an honest intimate relationship, you get to bang her. I don't know how long it translates to in the game, but it can't be many hours at all in real time.

It just never felt natural to me. I mean, I can feel an emotional investment in characters. I really felt connected to Pay'j in Beyond Good and Evil. Hell, you never speak a single word to him, but I had a sincere emotional attachment to your friend in Another World. But bangin some chick just because I think she's a bro? Sorry. Maybe I'm just not as much of a huge slut as Bioware expects me to be, but that's jumping the gun a bit, I think.

With that poisoning in mind, I expected much the same out of Morte. I assumed his character was going to be the "lolsexjokes" comic relief. How wrong I was. It didn't help matters that the start of the game is infuriatingly slow. I actually dropped the game, to be honest. It was so onerous that I just dusted my hands and called it quits.

The shame is buried deep in my heart. I wince at the thought of what I could have missed.

It moves at a glacial sort of speed. It tricks you into thinking it isn't going anywhere anytime soon, but then you turn your back on it, and it's built up enough momentum to crush you into dust.

Things pick up after you meet Pharod, the man referred to by your tattoo. He sends you to find a magical macguffin, and off you go on your generic adventure into the catacombs. One of the halls inside contains inscriptions on the walls. A lot of messages, left by yourself, in a past life.

Yes, your character is immortal, but every time he dies, he loses his memory. Reincarnation, but not. Brilliant, spectacular concept, and it's the only instance, alongside Kotor, where I've found myself able to excuse amnesia as a character trait. Then there was Kotor II. Oh dear. But that's a whole other story.

Among the inscriptions is one matching your tattoo, except with an extra line at the bottom; "don't trust the skull." That point, right there, was when I knew shit got real. There was no going back. This game was going to be big. You can confront him about it, but you don't really get a whole lot more information. He essentially asks you to trust him anyay.

Later on, you end up getting the full story out of him. You travel to the pillar of skulls, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's on one of the planes of hell, and it's where especially naughty boys and girls wind up. You go there for information, and you end up learning more about Morte.

In one of your past lives, you previously visited the pillar. Morte was a skull trapped in it, and he begged you to take him with you. So, being the shitbag you were at that point in time, you made him swear an oath to serve you forever. He agreed, and you became besties.

Then you died, though. So what happened to Morte? You lose your memories each time, he could have easily run off, which would have been consistent with his character. Why did he stick around?

Because he felt sorry for you. He saw all the pain you went through each time, trying to figure things out, and having to start all over again. All that effort, all that energy, all for nothing. Sympathy. Not because you had x good points. Because of an emotional state.

He says you didn't always come back the same, either. Sometimes you were angry as hell, all the time. Sometimes crazy. He even admits to being scared by some of them, and yet, he's still there, still sticking by you.

How honest is that? It's raw emotion. A complicated relationship that grows into a genuine friendship over the course of the game. The character that I thought was going to be nothing but sex jokes ended up moving me at my very core. It hit me full-force, like a knife in the gut when he explained himself. It felt like a real moment of togetherness when we had that conversation. It trumps every line of dialogue I saw while playing Mass Effect or Dragon Age.

Morte taught me quite a lot about the nature of relationships, about sympathy, and pity. I know I would have fewer people in my life as of now had I not played the game. It moved me with his character in such a strong way, and I don't think another game has managed to do that in the same way for me.

Not only that, but the main narrative of the game taught me something as well. The main notion of the game is "what can change the nature of a man?" and it does the best thing a game can do; it doesn't designate one answer as the correct one. It leaves it up to you to decide.

Yes, that managed to leave a mark on me too. I learned that I personally value love over the rest, and that that was what can change a man. It might not have been your answer, but like I said, there isn't a designated correct one. Just your one.

Planescape is bohemian, in every way possible. It is the last word in rpgs, and I can't believe I almost didn't play it. A friend of mine said he enjoyed Baldur's Gate II more. I can't really fault his decision. It certainly worked a lot better mechanically, but I still smiled a sly smile to myself. Baldur's Gate II might be a more fun game to kill orcs in, but it certainly didn't change me.

My House is not a Home

2011-03-20T05:29:00.001-07:00

I lost my house in Minecraft. Not as in, I lost it in a flash flood, or a bush fire, but as in, I physically lost it. The location is no longer known to me. And you know what? I didn't care at all.

The place might as well have burned to ashes for all that it mattered. I'd built a portal, to see what happened, got bored relatively quickly with the nether realm, and then tried to come back. Little did I know, the game shirked me back to an alternate portal. That is to say, it threw me back into the world, but in unfamiliar territory.

At first, my reaction was "oh no, all my stuff is gone", but after a moment or two's consideration, I thought to myself "well, it's just stuff. It didn't take that long to make, and it's not like I can't do it again." That was the problem for me right there.

It wasn't my home. Not really. It looked like a home. It had a bed. There were some paintings. A window. Some doors. A few plants out back. If you took a picture book and flipped to a random page of a house, say, Goldilocks, then you would have the same thing. It was a meaningless husk. Just a building. If you asked a robot to draw a house, this is what you would have.

Bitch, let me tell you about Balmora. Do you remember Balmora? I sure do. Fondly. It was the first town in Morrowind. Well, the first proper town. You start off in Seyda Neen, but that place was such a podunk hole in the ground that I don't think it counts much.

Although, to be fair, it did help in creating a nice contrast, and really punching you in the dick with just how much more city there was in Balmora. You got off your prison ship, you wandered around the dinky little swamp town, a fat guy in roman armour gives you papers and tells you to go and see some old guy in another place. Nothing too exciting.

Then you see the silt strider. That was the point when you knew shit was about to get real. It was just so strage. That's Morrowind in one word. Strange. I mean, just take the tiny one mechanic there, mounted travel between towns, and compare it to, say, World of Warcraft. It's got griffins. Because it's fantasy! And griffins are fantasy too!

So you hop off the giant bug, and as soon as you're back in the game, they did something very clever. The silt strider is at the top of a tall flight of stairs. At first glance, that's not a big deal, but when you put it into context, well. It's a tall flight of stairs, at the entrance to a city, and this is in all probability, the first time you're looking at the city. Immediately, you get hit with the whole picture. You've got a perfectly angled view to see as much of the city as possible, while still getting the feeling that you're in the city, as opposed to above it.

Balmora had a lot of levels, physically. It was always sloping up and down. At the highest point, the top of the tallest buildings hugging the surrounding mountains. At the lowest point, strategically placed in the middle, a venetian canal. Lots of ramps and stairways everywhere, a few bridges. Not to mention that there were quite a few buildings that were deceptively close together - meaning that if you'd invested in the acrobatics skill, much of the rooftops of the city became available to you. Again, this being the first real town, that was important. It left a mark on you. Running away from the guards, and then dramatically leaping from roof to roof and losing them alltogether. Beautiful.

Then there were the people. Yes, people, not npcs. They felt like people because a lot of them moved around. There was a Nord lass with a big booming voice who always shouted something brash when we crossed paths, then kept on stomping down the road. There was a shady Orc fellow I always seemed to find skulking around in various back alleys who always turned to look at me, but very rarely vocally acknowledged me.

One of the key things about Morrowind, to me, was that everybody hated you. Just because you were a human. Or a lizard fish man. Or a furry. It didn't really matter. They just hated you, because.

That was really interesting. Most games pander you. Hold your hand the whole time. Make sure everything is perfect and just how you like it. Which is great, if you're Cypher, and you like Matrix steak. That's the crux of the matter right there. It's good when everything works out for you exactly how you want it to. But it certainly isn't real, at all. Things aren't perfect. Things are flawed. Innately. Flawlessness is an exceedingly rare quality, and when games dish everything out with an obsequious smile, trying to pander to your every whim, it's dull as hell, and ultimately unfulfulling.

Morrowind didn't shy away from that. People openly hated you. If you didn't have social skills, people would overtly voice disgust at you as you walked past. If they hated you enough, they wouldn't even talk to you. You want to buy a sword from that guy? Too bad, he doesn't like you enough. Deal with it.

Which leads to a whole big bag full of interesting developments. One of which, for me, was some lass in the thieves guild. She was smiling. I think she was the first person I met in the game that wasn't frowning, or yelling at me, or calling me a disgusting filthy criminal. And you know what?

I didn't talk to her. Not ever. I figured maybe if I started talking to her, she'd stop smiling, and realise that yes, I was indeed a disgusting filthy criminal. I valued the fact that there was one person in this place that maybe didn't immediately hate me, and I didn't want to risk losing that.

How amazing is it that the game affected me like that? If everybody had have been your usual happy townsfolk with one line of dialogue and a health potion on the table to steal, then the entire experience would have been meaningless.

Then there was returning to town, hoh yes. So many times I'd get lost in the world. I'm bad at that sort of thing. I'd have fought off a horde of cliff racers, have no usable weapons or armour left, no potions, no food, nothing at all. I'd be on the verge of death, crawling over the next hill, and then, the music kicked in, that triumphant, spectacular theme, and I'd see the tips of some of the buildings poking over some mountains... those were moments to remember.

Balmora felt like a town. In every way a town should feel like a town. It felt like it existed in its own right. As if it somehow kept going when I wasn't there. It existed independantly of me, because there was more than just me. My house in Minecraft? That's less of a house, and more of an enlarged closet. It's where I keep my things. That's it. It doesn't exist without me. It's dependant on me being there. There's nothing to care about.

Home is where the heart is, and, for me, at least, there was very little heart present in any abode in Minecraft. It was just where I hung my hat. Nothing more.

Not like This

2011-03-17T01:17:00.000-07:00

I've been kind of quiet lately, haven't I? Work's certainly been hectic lately, but, hah, you know full well I was writing here much more frequently back when things were considerably busier.

No, I've just been feeling jaded lately. I haven't done any prose in what feels like a very long time. I was getting stuck into more of the game analysis/critique/thoughts and feelings, but I ran out of steam a little there. Writing about Grim Fandango was an intimidating concept. It's my favourite game, after all, and it's left quite a large mark on me. I didn't want to fuck it up. Which... I sort of did. It shifted gears rather abruptly near the end. Hell, I got lazy.

Jumping from that, the next thing I had in mind was writing about Planescape. I know I've jotted down a few notes here from time to time, but I've not done anything at length. Again, it's an intimidating concept. It's a pretty colossal game. There's a lot to consider. I'm not even sure if I've finished processing it yet. Or maybe that's just my pathetic self esteem talking - I have my thoughts, but are they the right thoughts? Obviously there isn't a right thought. The notion is fundamentally flawed. But here I am trying to apply rational constructs to an irrational train of thought.

It's a bit of a cliche, but it's right; you really do meet everybody when you're working in kitchens. I met a cook the other day I used to work with a few years ago. One of the few male cooks I've worked with, actually. It's always a point of interest for me that everybody keeps making these large, sweeping claims about how the hospitality industry is still largely misogynist, but about ninety percent of the people I've worked with in kitchens have been of the female persuasion.

I digress. The man was from a whole other chapter in my life. Back from my engineering days. He'd always called me rocket scientist, with the famous kitchen wit. Seeing him again, though, interacting with him, seeing the things he talked to me about, how he treated me, just having this harbinger of yore present impacted me at an astonishing level. In so few years, things have certainly changed. Quite a bit. It's easy to get bogged down in a wave of crushing pessimism and lugubrity, but, well, there was living proof in my face. I am quite a different man now from who I was then.

Yonder Castle

2011-03-10T20:23:00.000-08:00

I guess we've got a new header. I should tool around with pixels more often.

Pass out on the Floor

2011-03-09T05:41:00.001-08:00

Bowling has always been a harrowing experience for me. It's just all so regimented. Everybody files in, and sits around a machine telling them all what to do and when to do it. You have to do the shoe thing, which never sat well with me. Then you're either sitting and waiting patiently, or you're actually clumsily working the ball down the lane. Everybody is staring, there's pressure, there are loud noises suffocating you, there are people everywhere... wow.

I don't drink, so maybe that's where my problem is in regards to finding this an enjoyable way to spend time. Even so, why don't we have beatnik bowling alleys? You can wear whatever shoes you want to. Or no shoes at all. Instead of getting a pair of shoes on entry, you get a beret. Everybody calls each other man. There aren't any machines. People take as many or as few turns as they like. There isn't any loud, annoying pop music playing. There's a heavy smog from all the bad cigarettes. You can get coffee and scones instead of coke and burgers. There's a stray cat constantly lounging around. The lanes aren't defined, it's just one big open area with pins dotted around here and there. You don't have to pay if you write a killer poem about how your game went. Instead of hard, uncomfortable plastic chairs, beanbags everywhere.

Yes, I could definitely go for beatnik bowling.

For Shame

2011-03-08T05:42:00.001-08:00

What do you think of when somebody says children’s book? Maurice Sendak, J. M. Barrie, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, E. B. White, A. A. Milne, C. S. Lewis... the list goes on. There are so many amazing, spectacularly creative, really important children’s books out there. So where are the children’s games? Well?

We've got Bratz: Girls Really Rock. Pony Friends. Dora the Explorer: Dora's Big Birthday Adventure. Fuck Dora the Explorer. Nobody is going to remember Dora the Explorer. Can you imagine a world without The BFG? Think of how many children that have been touched by that single book alone. Who feels an emotional attachment to Dora the Goddamn Explorer?

Is anybody else terrified by this? Am I the only one who thinks that this is absolutely pathetic? Because it is. It's woefully, unacceptably, utterly inadequate. It's inexcusable - and you know who's fault it is? It's our fault. We let this happen. We got lazy, guys. Important children's games don't exist because nobody cares enough to take the risk.

Which, again, is absolutely pathetic. Games are an industry, sure. If nobody's making any money, nothing is going to work at all - but risks are how great things happen. If nobody's taking risks, then nobody's innovating, nothing new happens, and everything stagnates. People just stick with what's a safe, definite sale.

Children aren't a quick buck. At least, they shouldn't be. Children's media need to be more polished than adult media if they want to be any good. Writing for children takes much more effort. You need to have a lot more focus, you need to be a lot clearer, you don't have any room to pad things out with filler. Everything needs to be as concise and simple as possible, all the while trying not to be pretentious, and talking down. It's not easy. It takes a different skill set than writing for an adult audience.

So why isn't anybody trying? Why isn't there a single brilliant children's game? There are games that children can play, certainly. You could have a child play Minecraft just fine, but Minecraft isn't important. At least, not in the same way that, say, Peter Pan is. Minecraft isn't a timeless classic. It's just lego blocks.

Obviously, I over simplify. It's a good game, yes, but you see my point. It's just fun. That's it. There's a spatial reasoning aspect, sure, which is important in cognitive development and all that, but this isn't a story. There's no narrative. Children playing Minecraft aren't bettering themselves. They're just dicking around for funsies. Building tree forts. Making castles. Exploring.

Which by no means are bad things. It's good that children can build tree forts, make castles and explore - but there are so many more important things that children's games could be doing. They could be playing games that teach them about life, love, growing up, anything at all. There could be children's games that are as timelessly perfect as The Moomin books. Instead we've got fucking SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature From the Krusty Krab. That's deplorable. I feel like screaming until my lungs explode. Like setting things on fire until there's nothing left to burn. Does nobody else thing this is so unbelievably awful? So disgustingly dreadful?

Games can be more than just a fun, stupid party game for a kid to waste a few hours on. You know that, I know that, we all know that. We all know how many things games can be. Just like we all know Roger Ebert is a close minded fool. I myself have been writing recently on some of the games I've played, and why they were important to me. Beyond Good & Evil made me care, Majora's Mask made me sad, Planescape: Torment made me think, Grim Fandango made me hope, and each of them made me cry. Not that we need a running total of how much of a blubbering heap of emotion I am.

All of those games were important, but they aren't children's games in any way. I remember playing Grim Fandango when it first came out. I was just a kid, and it was on a display computer in a department store. I messed around with some of the controls, and I didn't like it at all. I was confused, frustrated, and bored. I thought it was terrible, and yet, here we are.

Giving a child something like Planescape is like giving them Bleak House, or Heart of Darkness. It's an important work, definitely. It has a clear, unambiguous place in the history of its medium, yes, but it isn't going to work. Children aren't going to care about the portraits that Dickens painstakingly paints of people in Bleak House. Because it wasn't written for them. Obviously it doesn't make them any less important. They just aren't going to understand or enjoy it at all.

Just stop for a moment and think. We live in a world where the game of the movie of Where the Wild Things are, Motherfucking Where the Wild Things are, was a fucking cash-grab. This was a game based of Maurice Sendak. This should have been teeming with imagination. This should have been infinitely creative, a wonderful adventure inspiring generations of children. What is it, instead? It's a boring platformer. That's it. Just a generic, ordinary platformer. Are we okay with that? Are we okay with living in a world where a game based on a Maurice Sendak book is anything less than breathtaking, let alone underwhelming? I'm sure as hell not.

What is wrong with the world when it's okay that children don't have spectacular games to play? What is wrong with us? Why are things this way? Why can't we have a Tintin of games? Or an Asterix & Obelix? Where is the Jules Verne of video games?

There are very few things that I can do well, but one of them is writing. I can write. I went to university. I have written poems, prose, short stories, longer stories, fiction, non fiction, stupid articles about video games, journalistic interviews, you name it - and lately, I've been trying to write children's stories. You know what I would love to do now? What would be my dream job? Writing a children's game.

Maybe you're an artist. Maybe you're a programmer? Possible a game designer. Maybe you're a mystical shaman versed in the arts I am told are called rendering. Whatever your skill set is, maybe you and I can come together on this one. Consider this an open letter. Maybe you're a big shot in video games. Maybe you work with two guys for a tiny indy company. Maybe you're a neckbeard at your keyboard in your bedroom inbetween shifts at the dish pit, just like me. Whoever you are, and whatever you do, listen.

Stand with me, dear reader, and take my hand. Let's do something important. That actually matters. Let's make something beautiful. Something magical, something wonderful, something classic. Let's make something worth remembering.

Dear reader, let's make memories. Let's change a child's life forever.

Let's make a game.

Driving Games and Me

2011-03-06T00:39:00.000-08:00

I don't care for racing games. At all. There isn't anything important here for me to do. Just go fast. Gotta go fast. Faster than the other guy. Then you win. Which is good? I want to win? For... reasons?

Anyway, they're not for me. Maybe they're for you? Maybe you wake up in the morning with a boner thinking about exactly how much faster you were going than that other guy. I'm not here to judge. Your shame is safe with me.

Point being, I was musing somewhat over exactly what it would take for me to really, sincerely appreciate a game like Gran Turismo or Need for Speed, where all you do is drive cars around, and here's what I ended up with.

I want to play as Jasper. Who's Jasper? He's an accountant in a small suburb. He works at a small firm that mainly covers families and a few small businesses on the side. It's not very difficult work, but he doesn't really enjoy it, either. It's just comfortable and easy, like everything else in his life that he's too afraid to change.

Bernadette, his wife, has always had his best interests at heart. Wanting him to be better, do more, push forwards, climb higher in life - even if it wasn't want he wanted. Then again, she knows better than he does. She thinks he just needs direction in his life. Somebody pointing him down the right path, telling him where to go. So that he can maximise his potential.

Jasper doesn't get up to much these days. He prefers to keep to himself, so he doesn't really know many people. Back in his college days, he used to be in a band. He played bass guitar. It came pretty naturally to him. Numbers always made sense to him, so he had a good feel for the rythm, and he enoyjed doing something with his hands.

The creative aspect to it wasn't overly important to him, but he enjoyed making sense of things. This note beloned there, so he put it there, and things were a little more organised. It was that same warm sort of feeling people get from stacking their books properly on the shelf, or folding the laundry. Knowing the world is a little bit more under control now.

That was then. Bernadette didn't like his playing the guitar. She thought it was distracting him from important things. They wanted to have a good life together, didn't they? They weren't going to get there playing music. No, it was going to take work, dedication. They both needed to be pulling their weight, not slinking off to the pub to strum on the guitar every other night.

For at least four months or so now, Jasper's been drinking most nights. He made up an account, and told Bernadette they needed to work on it during the evenings. She seemed more glad than anything else - more work was good. It got them a bit closer to the end goal.

Jasper didn't even particularly like the stuff. He just needed to do something. Needed to take a stand, to take control, to convince himself that he could still make choices. Convince himself that he was as free as the next guy to do what he wanted. Convince himself that he was happy. Or at least, was going to be happy. At some point. Later down the track.

Bernadette didn't notice. She was throwing herself into her work, too. She was a legal secretary, so she worked all sorts of hours. They never ended up spending much time together. Even when they did on the weekends, all she ever did was talk at him about finances, about work, about what he should be doing and how he should be doing it.

A few months later, and Jasper cracks. He can't keep it up. It isn't worth it anymore. He leaves work early in the morning and heads straight for the bar. He downs half a bottle of gin, then jumps right back in the car. Bernadette has the day off, so he drives straight home with a blank, dead look on his face.

She appears confused, and a little frustrated, immediately questioning why he's not at work. Jasper's eye starts twitching violently. Bernadette seems taken aback, and starts inching away slowly, asking him if he's okay.

Jasper takes control back. He beats her, savagely, again and again and again. She's screaming. He's crying. For a moment, he looks away, and Bernadette manages to kick him off. She jumps up, snatches the phone, and locks herself in the bathroom.

Still crying, Jasper runs back to the car. He downs the rest of the bottle of gin, then drives. He doesn't know where he's going. He doesn't care. It's just come to the point where he needs to go far, far away, for a long, long time.

In his drunken haze, he crashes the car into a primary school, brutally killing himself, and a teacher. Bernadette becomes agoraphobic, and has a psychiatrist come to the house each week for the next four years.

Enjoy is not, I think, the correct term to use here. I would play more driving games if they involved more alcoholism, more domestic abuse, and more pedestrian collisions. Is there a market for that?

Games that made Me want to be a Better Person: Grim Fandango

2011-03-04T17:18:00.000-08:00

My heart belongs to Grim Fandango, and no other. I’ve played and loved a huge number of games over the years, but this gentle giant stands head and shoulders above the rest. No matter how many jrpgs about a spiky haired androgynous teenager get released every year, how many times Call of Duty gets made, how many conversations I hear on the train about how Halo is The Best™, how many uninspired Tolkien knock offs sell a million copies, how many WoW killers come out, how often I meet people who sincerely think Gears of War is a good game, I can still say that there does exist something that makes it all worth it to me.

Yes, as long as I have Grim Fandango, I can sit here secure in the knowledge that Roger Ebert has absolutely no idea at all. It’s not just a game. It’s the game. It’s my game. The one that changed everything. The one that made me sit back and think that, yes, this is how games are supposed to be. This is what I want. This is special.

It isn’t perfect. Far from it. Many consider it the last nail in the coffin of adventure gaming as a genre. I would have difficulty arguing against that. The inventory system was woeful. The controls were clunky, uncomfortable, and onerous. A lot of the puzzles were ridiculously obtuse. There were some vehicle sections which were just pathetically handled.

I couldn’t care less. I love this game. I love it to bits. It affected me like nothing else did. Its charm is inescapable. If you made me pick one game out of all of them, then this is it. It is the most important game in the world to me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

People like noir characters. You can file that away with the other truths in your archives. Dragons steal princesses, your mother is always going to call you stupid names, smoothies are good, and people like noir.

It isn’t because of the lingo. It isn’t because of the coats. Nor is it because of the hats, the cigarettes, the detective work, the wise cracks, or any of the rest. It’s because of the characters. The characters in noir works nearly always have interesting juxtapositions in their personality. There’s almost always a contrast between strength and vulnerability, something I touched on briefly before with Beyond Good and Evil. Likewise, there’s usually a contrast between morality and immorality, cynicism and naiveté, courage and cowardice, levity and solemnity, trustworthiness and untrustworthiness... I could go on.

Take Vimes from the Discworld books. It’s a completely different setting to your usual pulp crime fiction. No prohibition era 30s gangsters with all that goes in hand with that. Vimes is a great character. Right from the start, one of the first traits we learn about his is that he has a powerful conscience, despite the horrible rut he’s in.

He’s the captain of the pathetic city guard in a mock Dickensian metropolis. The government introduced a guild for the thieves – literal organised crime – so the city guard have very little to do, and they’re essentially a bad joke. They get a new good cop recruit who does things by the book ,and through a lengthy series of events, they get back on top of things.

At one point early on, the new good cop recruit goes into a tavern and decides to arrest everybody forever, which they aren’t really overly excited about, so fisticuffs ensue. Vimes runs up with the other two shambling husks of the guard, and they stand outside unsure how to progress. We get a lot about his character right here. This is supposed to be one of the most violent taverns in the city, the generic hive of scum and villainy, and their force consists of three fat, unfit, poorly trained cowardly drunkards who haven’t seen combat in years.

Even so, Vimes hears a voice in his head – the voice of a younger Vimes that he’s been trying to drown with alcohol – saying something along the lines of “that’s one of your men in there. Alone.” So they slowly head in, to further assess the situation.

Point being, this is really good development for his character. We learn that he’s a realist, in that he thought it was stupid to fight a fight he didn’t think they could win. We learn that he’s changed over the years, in that his younger self was braver, and more naive than his current self, so something has happened to ingrain some cynicism into him. We learn that he’s ashamed of himself, because he’s trying to drown out his problems with alcohol; we also learn from this that he has moments of cowardice. Instead of facing his problems head on, he tries to ignore them and convince himself he’s doing fine.

The most important thing we learn here is that despite all of his problems, he still knows right and wrong, he still knows who he is, he still has a sense of duty, and underneath everything he’s still a good man. He braves up to go in, even though he’s almost certain it’s not going to end well for him.

That’s powerful characterisation, and it’s pretty typical of these sorts of characters. They often engage in immoral behaviour, but they’re not necessarily immoral people. They have their good qualities, and they have their bad qualities. Too often it’s one or the other, but when you contrast the two together, your characters feel stronger, more vivid, more interesting, and more real.

Even Mal from Firefly is built up very similarly to this. He’s more of a cowboy than anything else, sure, but he definitely wouldn’t be out of place at all in a noir piece. There’s one episode, Out of Gas, where we get an excellent moment for his character.

In the episode the ship runs out of air, a whole bunch of shit goes down, which ultimately leads up to Mal being abandoned on the broken ship, getting shot, and having to fix it by himself. He passes out, but when he comes to, he’s in the medical bay, getting patched up, with the whole crew waiting around.

Everybody has their little moment with him, smiles and all that, but as he’s about to fall back under, just before he goes to sleep, his eyes snap open and he asks in an almost weak little voice if everybody’s going to be there when he wakes up again.

This was just a brilliant scene. That after everything that’s happened to him, especially after he’s been built up as, most of the time, being a bitter misanthrope, all he cares about is whether or not the people in his life are going to be around when he comes to is beautiful. He’s reaching out to the people he cares because they’re important to him. He so desperately wants to be a hardened, cynical, callous robot, and at a lot of times in his past he had to be, but this shows that even though he’s been through that much, he’s still soft. He isn’t a monster. He just cares about these people, and wants to know that they care about him too.

This is why the noir characters, typical and atypical, are always so strong. They’re relatable. They’re good people in a bad way, and we like that. They’ve got morals, but they’re not beating you over the head with insipid parables. They treat concepts of right and wrong with the complexity they deserve. There’s no banal game morality system bile floating around, no “stealing is bad so you get bad points” bullshit. They’re open ended situations, with ambiguous and contemplative conclusions.

That’s what Grim Fandango has in spades. If Majora’s Mask was a series of vignettes, then Grim Fandango is a straight up character study. They ram Manny’s character in your face at every single opportunity they get. Almost every single line of dialogue gives us new information about him. The game is just bursting at the seams with Manny, and it’s great. In about two seconds, you learn almost everything you need to know about him.

Manny’s a loser. He’s a travel agent, a bad one, and he’s in a rut. He’s depressed, and he’s sarcastic, which we get when the receptionist tells him the boss wants him to stay late – Manny makes a quip about how he’s not going anywhere.

Then, we have the opening gag. Manny wears stilts to work to intimidate his clients. This sets up the tone of the game really effectively. There’s going to be jokes, sure. How ridiculous is wearing stilts to work? However, that’s not all it does. We find out that there’s more to Manny. How cynical must he be if he thinks people are going to treat him differently based on his height? Or is it just that he has absolutely no self confidence, and that he’s unhappy with who he is, and how he looks? It’s actually pretty disheartening that he feels the need to do this. I mean, again, how ridiculous is it that he wears stilts to work? And how ridiculous is it that he’s taking this seriously?

So it does two things. It tells us that, yes, this is going to be a comedic game, but it also tells us that Manny is both going to be the butt of some of the jokes, and that he’s more than he at first appears to be. He has depth.

He’s the loser, sure, but think of, say, any of the characters from The Big Bang Theory. They’re all loser characters. Geeky. Socially awkward. Obsessive. Introverted. Interested in math and science. See, they’re boring already. I’m bored, you’re bored, we’re all bored. These aren’t good characters. At all. They’re as derivative and clichéd as you can get. They’re dull stereotypes with no personality past “lol I’m a nerd.” It’s pathetic.

Manny’s a loser, through and through, but he’s nothing like that. He’s sarcastic. He has a particular way with words – always quick with a suave, clever line. He’s observant. He’s unhappy. He has no social life at all, but he isn’t socially awkward. He likes nice suits, bad cigarettes, and good alcohol. He has a clear conscience. He isn’t afraid to stand up to people. He has a poetic side to him. He’s unpretentious.

They did so much with his character, when in essence; he’s just a working shmo. He has a bad job that he doesn’t like, and his boss hates him. That’s about as average of a set up as you can get, but because he’s go so much more going on for him, it works. He doesn’t stray into The Big Bang Theory territory where you can summarise everybody as lol geeky, or Scrubs territory where every character has exactly one dimension; he’s the angry one, he’s the quirky one, she’s the yuppie one, he’s the stupid one.

Otherwise pointless actions almost always tell us something about Manny. When you examine your scythe, he says he likes to keep it close to where his heart used to be. Just like the stilts gag, it’s amusing, and it sheds light on him. The tool of his trade is important to him. It has sentimental value. He has an emotional attachment to these sorts of things. What could have just been “it’s my scythe lol I use it to slice shit up?” became a whole lot more. Or when you examine the door to your office, he says something to the effect of “not so long ago, that door read ‘Janitor’s Closet.’”

The initial jolt of the game is that Manny wants a really good client – so that he gets a really good commission. Enter Domino, stage left. Domino’s the douche co-worker. He’s working out of Manny’s old, and much bigger, office. If you’ve watched Futurama, think about the episode where Fry goes to the support group for people who were cryogenically frozen, and he meets the super powered business executive from the 80s. Domino is essentially a toned down version of that.

The plan is, since Domino’s doing so well, he must be getting great clients, so Manny steals one of them. Enter Meche, stage right. She’s the love interest, and, in one or two ways, the femme fatale. Through a series of events, Manny can’t sell her any good travel packages, and she ends up with the same one that all of his terrible clients got. Then we find out that the company has been actively trying to make Manny get all of the worst clients, and unable to sell any decent travel packages.

The crux of the narrative is that where he works, The Department of Death, guide souls through the underworld. Depending on how good of a person they were in life, the journey is easier or harder. The scummy people have to go on foot, a several year hike through all the dangers of hell, while the saintly types get to ride on the luxury express train, The Number Nine, which only takes a few minutes to whiz past everything.

You uncover a conspiracy by a mafia chief who’s been stealing the tickets and selling them to the scummy types at a premium cost. Hence why Domino’s been getting the good clients – they’re giving him a cut of the profit for the tickets. All the while they knew Manny wouldn’t go for it, so that’s why he’s been doing so poorly.

However, Manny’s motivation in all of this is that Meche has to go through hell on foot when she should be on The Number Nine, and he thinks it’s all his fault. It’s a fantastic, incredibly honest reason, and I wish more games had something like this. It isn’t destiny chosen one rescue princess save kingdom aliens invading protect America shoot terrorists justice duty freedom morals good person naive youth coming of age quest whatever. Manny fucked up. Plain and simple. He fucked up, and he wants to fix it.

Which, again, is brilliant development for his character. We know he’s in a bad place. Shit at his job, boss hates him, co-workers are better than him, no social life, no friends, not much money, and pretty unhappy with his life in general. Despite that, and despite his general cynicism and world weariness, life hasn’t turned him into a bad person. He’s still able to identify that he’s done wrong by this woman, and his conscience is still telling him that he needs to make it right. At heart, he’s still a good man.

The rest of the characters are all colourful in their own way. Eva, the snappy receptionist who moonlights as a political revolutionary. Glottis, your driver, a literal speed demon who runs away with you. Salvador, the dashing head of the Lost Souls Alliance, the revolutionary movement. Olivia, the slut bag proprietor of a beatnik club. The list goes on.

This game taught me a lot about life. Maybe that plain lass at work who doesn’t seem to have any hobbies or interests actually leads a whole other secret life. Maybe the weird fat guy in the basement that won’t shut up about cars could actually end up being the best friend you’ve ever had. Maybe that dinky weird lass who wears a strange hat might end up being a fantastic, loyal employee.

More than that, it taught me about hope, in a way no other game has managed to do. It taught me that things can get better. To steal a line from Billy Corgan, that life can change, that you’re not stuck in vain. You might have been stuck in an awful job for years, you might be poor, you might have no friends and you might be pretty unhappy – but things can grow.

You might have to work your ass off, it might take four years from your life, but if you want it bad enough, if you throw everything you’ve got at it, it can happen. Things can change. You can run that casino. You can be the captain of that ship. You can get the girl. You can have a better, happier life. So long as you’re strong enough, so long as you’re brave enough to keep going, and doing the right thing, then you can have the life you want. You’re probably going to get kicked in the teeth a few times along the way, but if you keep at it, no matter what, then you don’t have to be so unhappy anymore.

Grim Fandango is the most beautiful game I’ve ever played, and I am a much, much stronger person for having experienced it. It changed my life, in the same way that The Count of Monte Cristo did. It is the game I hold dearest, and I don’t think any other will get closer to my heart.

He did His own Nose

2011-03-01T07:37:00.000-08:00

Hahah are you tired of stupid calligraphy yet, kind reader?

He was Edmond Dantes

2011-02-27T16:23:00.000-08:00

Major spoilers aho; fairly warned be ye.

Gemini Rue, as it turns out, didn't have a whole lot more to it than those few hours I mentioned, but that's okay. I've played longer games that weren't even half as good. I played through most of Fallout 2, and I couldn't even finish the damn thing. Length doesn't mean a whole lot. Most of my favourite games over the past few years have just been tiny experimental no-budget games from one guy in his basement anyway.

So, anyway, I really liked it. Quite a lot. The writing was, well. The writing. It's not the best, but it's hardly bad, either. The plot is essentially Blade Runner, mixed in with a bit of amnesiac prisoner in a shady government institution. The place wipes the memory of criminals and undesirables, then builds them new memories, and sends them back out into the universe to be productive members of society.

Which touches on a few interesting concepts as it goes. Personality is determined, at least in part, by your memories, your experiences, environmental factors and all that, so who are you without it? Unfortunately, it got a bit ham handed at some points. This sort of underlying theme could have worked really well with a soft, subtle touch. It's a contemplative sort of thing, so it'd match up well with contemplative sort of characters.

Not to say it felt ham handed all over. The ending, in particular, was perfect. They bring up questions, re who you are without memories, but they don't answer them. That's the best thing a game can do, without a doubt. The questions are there for me to answer, not the game.

I mean, just look at morality in games. Take Fable. You can be Jesus, or you can be Satan. Not only that, but the game tells you when you've dome something bad, or good. Morals aren't universal. By their very definition, they cannot be. Even then, different perceptions of different situations lead to different conclusions. You can't ever effectively wrap this sort of thing up in a neat and tidy two option bundle.

To take one example - Twinblade. You have to go to a bandit camp and fight your way to the boss, because destiny save kingdom rescue sister defeat evil chosen hero. So you get there, and he's not exactly disposed to recieving guests, so he attacks you. I'm not sure if the game expected me to be surprised that the evil bandit lord was not in fact an awesome guy, but whatever. You get him down to x health, and then he's kneeling on the ground defeated. He says something to the effect of "I've lost all respect I had from the boys. If you let me live, what kind of a life is this?"

Which could have been a really interesting decision. Maybe I'm feeling vengeful because he tried to kill me, so I'll let him live on in suffering? Maybe I'll let him go so he can build a better life? Maybe I'll let him live because I don't care? Because too much blood has been shed on his behalf already? Take him to the local guards, possibly? Or I could kill him because it's the just thing to do. Execute him for his crimes. Although, I'm not a judge. Is it really my responsibility to decide who lives and who dies, and why? Or is it my duty as an upstanding citizen of this society to uphold the values that this society deems as important, no matter the cost? Although, is imposing my own moral system on other people inherently immoral?

Oh, sorry, this is fable. Killing is bad, so you get bad points. Letting him live is good, so you get good points. Sorry, I was actually getting interested in things there. I have to remember that this is a game about hitting bad guys with your sword and getting orbs of xp.

I have my own morals. Everybody does. I'm in favour of abortion. Maybe you think it's murder. I'd disagree, of course, but there isn't really a definitive answer to this sort of thing. There's no x+x=y. Which is why these moral systems don't work. They always have to slot a y in there. My y is not going to be the game's y. Yours probably won't be, either. Because there's not just the y, there's the reasoning behing y. Look at all that about Twinblade. There was only two conclusions, live or die, but just see how many thoughts I had. Then Fable just decided KILLING IS BAD. So, yeah.

Leaving questions unanswered is perfect. Just look at Planescape. What can change the nature of a man? If there had have been a "right" answer in the game, the entire thing would have been ruined. Because there isn't a right answer. Just your answer. What was my answer? Love can change a man. That was what I took away from the game, and I felt richer for it, because it was my answer. I came to this conclusion, not the game. The game presented me with x+x=? and I filled in y.

Which isn't to say that Gemini Rue was inconclusive. It was a satisfying ending, and they got it just right. The characters were, well, it occurs to me that I've yet to explain the characters.

So, there's two playable characters. Well, sort of, but I'll get to that later. You've got your noir future cop in neo-metropolis. Which, I might add, has a brilliant setting. It's on a planet that's constantly raining. Come on, that's brilliant, I was smiling like a loon when they said that.

Anyway, he's gritty and hardboiled and all that. He's dropped in from unspecified "off world" to track down an old war buddy. I alway enjoy ex-army characters. It's a good way to immediately build up a little bit of interest. Why did they sign up? Were they conscritped? Did they try to run away? Why did they leave? Did they lose? Were they discharged? What went down? In one little line or two, they've pretty much got me invested in this character as a person.

Then you've got your amnesiac patient in the shady government facility. Stock standard stuff, really. Scientist types talking to you over loudspeakers. Weird tests. White, sterile chambers. Although, I was glad that you weren't the only patient. I was expecting the dull, tired "something went wrong with each of the patinets except you! I guess you're special, or some shit? Let's find out why!" trope. There being other patients around led to a lot of really interesting developments. Being alone doesn't really work very well in most games, unless they're all about the whole isolation thing. Minecraft sort of pulled that off, if you squinted a bit.

It's pretty average stuff at this point. Walk around talking to people, collecting information, breaking and entering, you know. The usual. Which is great, really. This sort of thing works well. This isn't a part of the game that needs anything changed.

Which isn't to say that the game didn't pull out any aces when it came to mechanics. The action scenes were intense. It wasn't USE GUN ON MAN. It was real time cover-based combat. I know that that's pretty much about as special as a cd player in a car these days, but this is an adventure game, not a third person shooter. Can you imagine real time gun fights in, say, Grim Fandango? Or The Dig? Yeah. Exactly.

I mean, those sections are just keyboard control. Left and right to duck out of cover either way. W to change target, space to shoot. Nothing that's going to innovate games forever, but it was a really effective touch that made things a lot more intense than they would have been otherwise.

There's also some similar mechanics with crates in the game. You can drag them left and right and then climb on them to reach stuff. Again, really simple mechanic, but not one you expect in this sort of game. It's a really small kind of thing, yeah. Moving crates isn't really a big deal. I get that. We were moving crates twenty years ago - but, just like the real time gun fights, it's not the sort of thing you expect in a point and click adventure game. It's a very welcome mechanic.

At one point in the game, you can switch between both the noir cop and the amnesiac at will. Up until this point, it was more along the lines of make progress in the game, then you switch to the other guy. This was fantastic. I loved this feature. If I got stuck with one guy, I could just start playing as the other one. The part about adventure games that I don't like is the part where sometimes, I'm just sitting there thinking. It's not the thinking I dislike, it's that I'm doing nothing in the game. My character's just standing dead still, and I'm going "wait what if I pull this lever first... oh, no, shit, I need to get here first, and if I go there I can't get back here..."

I like that part of adventure games. It's what sets them apart from regular old puzzle games. Take Portal. I didn't like portal. I played it, I beat it, I didn't like it. It was all about one mechanic, which I dislike. Would you rather eat a bag of flour, or a cake? You see what I mean. I prefer games that combine different elements and come up with something special. Portal was a puzzle game where you have a hundred puzzles and one solution. I would much prefer a game with one puzzle and a hundred solutions.

That's my point there. The difficulty in Portal usually isn't figuring out what to do, it's executing the solution. Which seems counter-intuitive, to me. The enjoyment factor in an adventure game is "oh! Hey! I figured out what to do! All on my own! I'm awesome. I am the best at everything forever." It's a good feeling, and I like solving these things. I like it that the game hasn't already given me the answer.

In games like Portal, I've already figured out what I have to do. I need to shoot a portal here, and a portal there. The difficulty, for me, was in actually getting through both the portals. I'd already solved the puzzle. I already knew exactly how it works, and exactly what to do, but I wasn't done yet. The game wanted to dick me around with stupid physics crap. So my enjoyment from figuring out the puzzle is completely nullified by the fact that I'm still flailing through the room, wildly leaping from one portal to another. That's not enjoyable for me. That is the opposite. The game is detracting from my enjoyment by forcing me to endure jump puzzles.

So I like the thinking about the puzzles. I like that I don't know what to do. If I don't know what to do, then that's my fault, not the game's. If I know what to do and I can't do it properly because of ambiguous game mechanics, then that's the game's fault.

I don't like the standing around and doing nothing, though. The switching between characters fixed that for me. If I don't know what to do in room x with noir cop, then I can start fooling around in room y with amnesiac - but a small part of my head is still in room x with noir cop. I'm still thinking about how I can pull that lever up there, but still be over here. The only difference is that noir cop isn't standing still staring at nothing. Instead, amnesiac patient is wandering the halls, talking to the other patient.

That wasn't the only reason I loved the character switching, though. Hoho, no. This was clever. This was very, very clever. From about the first ten minutes of the game, it's pretty obvious that noir cop is himself actually a rehabilitated criminal type. That was pretty easy to sleuth. Combined with the, perhaps, a touch derivative setting, I thought I had it all figured out. "Yep, I know all your secrets, game. I'm onto you."

How wrong I was. As it turns out, amnesiac patient and noir cop are the same person at different times. According to noir cop, amnesiac patient was his brother. You later figure out that that was just a fabricated memory implanted at the shady government facility. I was sincerely shocked. Very rarely do games surprise me these days. Combine my healthy streak of cynicism with the fact that I thought I'd already figured the game out, and I was more or less walking across the road with my eyes closed.

Then you throw into the mix the character switching. Because you're switching between the two of them in real time, that kind of throws your mind into thinking that this is the present for both characters. People don't inherently expect crazy time shenanigans, obviously. Especially not when it's reinforced by the game itself that everything is happening at the same time.

Very clever. Mechanically, as I explained above, multiple fronts are an advantage with puzzles. Thematically, that's a perfect diversion. That right there, that it's both mechanically and thematically perfect, is what's important. Usually there's a disconnect between the two in some way. In Fallout 3, I have to go save Dad. Mechanically, because the game wants to give me an excuse to go and do stuff. Thematically, because... I care about Dad? Maybe?

No. I don't, and neither did you. Or anybody. He was just a guy with a beard. So there's a disconnect between the two. It feels a little off. This is what games are about right here. Combinations. They have the power, more than any other medium, to combine a lot of different elements to make something amazing. Yet another reason why I find games like Portal, where they focus on the one mechanic, infinitely disappointing.

It's pretty much game over once you find that out. There's some wrapping the plot up afterwards, but you're close to the end. As amnesiac patient, you try to escape the facility with two of your buddies. One of them gets killed, and you get captured - and you get your memory wiped, again. Your other buddy gets out, and, ends up on the same planet you do as noir cop, and you end up helping each other.

So then you take her with you as you head to the facility to save your non-extant brother. You have with you some pilot guy who you've apparently been working with for about a year, and your ex-army buddy. Of course, what with your memories being fabricated, he isn't your ex-army buddy at all. He's another patient with a grudge against you for melting his face off. I'm not sure if they sent him out to kill you, or to make sure you made it back to the shady facility in one piece, but either way, there he is.

When you manage to get back to shady facility, you end up getting captured. Noir cop gets his memory erased, again. So he pretty much loses his memory of the events of the entire game. Now you take control of noir cop's buddy, that escaped from the facility. Sayuri, I think. You bust out of your cell, and you free the pilot guy too.

Through a series of events, ex-army grudge bearing guy gets taken out by noir cop, noir cop and pilot guy head back to their ship, and Sayuri goes off trying to find the computer database. Apparently the facility keeps a backup of all of the patient's memories. That seemed sort of... unecessary to me. The whole point of this place is to wipe these people clean, make them better. Why keep bad memories on file? It's not like they were going to use them for anything. It's implied that the director went a bit crazy, so I guess that's as good of an excuse as any.

Now, the director. He wasn't great. For one, I think he's wearing a monocle. I mean, really? Seriously? Who thought that was a good idea? Do you want to give him a villain moustache while you're at it? Come on.

I get that a character like this is going to be hard to write, no matter what you do. His only role in the game is pretty much to spout exposition every so often. So, obviously, it wasn't going to be easy to make him anything but a big bag of cliches. Which they... came close to doing. In the intro, noir cop is sitting in the memory wipe machine with the director and two other scientist guys doing stuff to him. The director was getting frustrated. That's good! He was showing emotion! Quelle surprise. He kept getting angry at his two scientist buddies for doing their jobs badly. Hardly huge emotional character development, but it was something approaching a personality, which was fantastic.

Most of the heavy handed dialogue was lumped on the director's shoulders. Which, again, is unfortunate, but I mean, he's Mister Exposition. If anybody had to be a stupid character, at least it was him.

The ending, as I said before, was perfect. Noir cop has had his memory wiped, again, so he doesn't know anything. Pilot guy and Sayuri are talking to one another, and pilot guy poses the question that noir cop isn't noir cop anymore, so why should Sayuri care about him? Who are we without our memories?

Instead of pulling the bullshit card out and answering the question for me, Sayuri did the most fitting thing she could. She said it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter who we are without our memories. It doesn't matter if he's the same man he was. All he has is who he is now, for better or for worse, and that's all anybody has. Who they are now.

That's perfect. It's an open ended question, in every way possible. Open ended questions don't lend themselves to Fable style "KILLING PEOPLE IS BAD SO YOU GET BAD POINTS." I am so glad that they didn't supply a definitive answer. That would have more or less ruined a lot of the game for me.

The whole game, then, is about identity. Which is really helped a lot by the fact that there isn't really a protangonist. You keep switching between characters; noir cop, amnesiac, then Sayuri and pilot guy. The game is reinforcing the identity theme by not really giving you a clear character to say "yep, that dude's the hero." Even when you find out noir cop and amnesiac are the same guy, he gets his memory wiped, so that adds even more ambiguity in the mix.

It wasn't perfect. There were a few moments of bullshit. At one point, amnesiac patient is tied up to a pipe, about to be tortured by ex-army buddy - who, at this point, is just another patient. So it's your generic adventure game puzzle. You're tied up, find a way to get out. Your actions in the game are nouns, really. You don't have "use", you have "hand". You don't have "look", you have "eye", and so on with foot and mouth. So, in this situation, I tried using my mouth on the ropes. My hand were tied right next to my head, so I thought "hey, I can bite through those easy." Alas, the game responded by telling me that I didn't need to talk to the ropes.

I would have been okay with the game saying "I tried to bite through them but it didn't work." That would have been fine, but if you're set on giving me "mouth" as an action instead of just "talk", then why assume I'm always going to mean talk when I use it?

The actual solution to this puzzle was that there was a tiny, obscured little shard on the ground that I had to kick over with my foot, then pick up with my hands. That's some stupid crap right there. This wasn't something that was tricky to figure out. Instead of asking me what x+x equals, they just gave me x+x=y except the whole equation was hidden underneath a book. The enjoyment from solving a puzzle isn't there. This wasn't satisfying. It was just frustrating that instead of coming up with a creative solution, they just hid a small, stupid sharp object somewhere on the screen. It was cheap, ineffective, and annoying. Everything a puzzle in an adventure game shouldn't be.

All in all, this was one of the best games I've played in a long time. It raised interesting concepts, it combined game mechanics in an interesting way, and it fell into very few potholes along the way. I really, really enjoyed it, and the disk is going to have a special place on my shelf, and in my mind.

I almost forgot to mention. Noir cop's name? Azriel Odin.

I'm not even joking.

That's not even My Dog

2011-02-26T06:20:00.000-08:00

Whoops, more stupid calligraphy. Hah, just a little something I did up for a job I am soon to part ways with. Always good to leave on a high point - better chance of keeping connections.

Jeeps Everywhere

2011-02-25T17:25:00.001-08:00

At work last night, it came up that one of the waiters hadn't ever seen The Wizard of Oz. Everybody got pretty fired up about that - people were saying "wow, that's sad", "how did you miss that?", "what's wrong with you?" and all the rest. This struck me as a point of interest. It's a motion picture classic, sure. I agree that people should watch it. It's an important movie; but why don't we have this with games? If somebody hasn't played Morrowind, or Doom II, or Baldur's Gate, or Age of Empires, why don't people get fired up about that? If I said that was sad, everybody would laugh.

That's what's sad here.

Whatever Uniform You wear

2011-02-25T06:16:00.000-08:00

Gemini Rue got to me today. I've played for a few hours, and goddamn, I am digging on this. Maybe it's just because I have a huge boner for point and click adventure games, but this is the most fun I've had with a game in a long time. There have been some down right intense action scenes so far, and one part where I was held at gun point that had me freaked right to the core. This is fantastic stuff. I'm enjoying it more than Full Throttle, more than The Dig, jesus, and this was just a student project, not a big budget commerical release. I was glued to the screen. I am so glad I shelled out the extra few bucks for the physical cd - I'm going to love having this on the shelf.

Games that made Me want to be a Better Person: Beyond Good and Evil

2011-02-24T04:11:00.000-08:00

Beyond Good and Evil is a tricky game. Not in that it's difficult. In that it tricked me. It tricked me into caring. I cared about this little world. I cared about Jade, I cared about the lighthouse, I cared about my little flock of orphans, my uncle, my buddy from the rebellion... all of it.

The lighthouse is an interesting place. It's like a mission hub, but not. I think you're only required to go there maybe two or three times after you leave for the first time, so it isn't really that central to the game mechanically, but dammit, every single time I made even an iota of progress, I rushed straight back. I wanted to check up on my home. I wanted to wander around, see how the kids were doing, play with the dog, look at photos on the wall, or even just stand next to a tree and look out at the waves.

Compare the lighthouse to your dinky home island in Wind Waker. It didn't feel like a home. It didn't feel like anything. It was just a generic starting point. There were a few bland villagers there who were more than happy the teach me about game controls, which did an excellent job of making me completely apathetic towards them. It felt like a tutorial. Tutorials are awful. They work in very, very few games. I can understand the need for a tutorial in something like Microsoft Flight Simulator X 4000; you're sort of going to want to know straight off the bat what each and every one of those hundreds of glowing buttons and switches in front of you do.

In a game like Wind Waker, though, a tutorial is sending me the message that this is not the game proper. This isn't important. This doesn't matter. I think to myself "oh, this is just the tutorial. Guess I don't care, since nothing is going to happen." I don't need to know how to execute each of the half a dozen sword swings - and you know what? There's no difference between the forward stab and the vertical slash. They both do the same thing. Tactical combat isn't a big thing, here. I'm not playing Mount and Blade, or Nidhogg, where the combat mechanics are pretty complex. I'm just blocking until there's an opening, and then flailing on the attack button for a bit.

So straight off the bat, I'm inclined to not care. Then there's your grandmother. She has about as much personality, and importance, as a doormat - which is essentially how Link treats her, anyway. Her only role in the game is as a plot device; your sister goes missing, and grandma says go fetch. Oh, and she makes porridge for you later on, which is like a health potion. I don't care, grandma. I really don't. She's about as important to me as the townsfolk were in Castle of the Winds. Which, considering that they were basically non existant, is pretty impressive.

The very first thing that happens in Beyond Good and Evil is and alien invasion breaking up a meditation session. Meteor/drop pods bombard my happy little lighthouse, and start abducting the kids. Jade tries to start the shield generator, but we're too poor to pay the power bills. The kids start screaming my name, and I have to pick up a burning stick and beat the aliens until they back off.

What's the very first thing that happens in Wind Waker? After an obnoxiously long, dry, unskippable cutscene, I wake up after over sleeping - because in any rpg worth it's salt, you're a lazy youth. Kids relate to that right? Then it's my birthday, so, that's cool, I guess? I have to go and talk to grandma, then I have to go back to my kid sister, and... yeah. You get the picture.

Right away, I know these kids have some relation to me. Not because of a stupid cutscene that says I'm the hero of destiny and it's my sworn duty to protect them and the kingdom and stupid fantasy trash buzzword xyz. Because they're screaming my name. Oh hey! I guess that means they know me, and because it's a bit creepy for kids to have adult friends, I guess I'm either a relative or a close family friend.

Then, also right away, I have to protect them. Not because destiny, because they're kids, and they're screaming for help. I mean, come on. So we see Jade as a strong character immediately. Then, to contrast that, as soon as you repel the aliens, a giant tentacle thing entagles Jade and drags her underground. You're trapped, and pretty much helpless. Right after we've seen her as a strong character, we see her at a weak point. She's not Rambo, or Master Chief. She's strong, certainly, but not perfect. Vulnerabilty is touched on so rarely in games, even rarer still immediately after a moment of strength.

Enter, stage left, Pey'J. A humanoid pig jumps through a window at least two stories above ground, falls down the hole ontop of the alien tentacle, throws you a staff and tells you he's going to distract it so you can free yourself. Talk about an entrance. In about two seconds, we've learned a hell of a lot about Pey'J. We know he cares about Jade a lot, to the point where he puts himself in harm's way. We know he's brave, we know he's athletic, and that he's resourceful.

So, boss battle ensues, and you both team up to kill the beast. It drops some kind of pearl, and Pey'J is clearly pretty excited about that. He says something along the lines of how you could use it to pay for repairs, once again getting across the notion that you guys don't have much money to spare.

Then the two of you get back up to the surface, and there's a news reporter there. He sets up the scene very well. He tells "the viewers" that they're on the scene of an orphanage, which two devoted citizens have set up a place of safety for children who's parents have died in the war. Then Pay'J shows his contempt for them doing nothing for the citizens, hammering home the concept that the government here is maybe lazy, incompetent, corrupt or some combination thereof.

After his little outburst, Jade passes out. She wakes up to a warming scene inside the lighthouse, with Pay'J and all of the orphans watching over her in bed, clearly very worried. All of this happens in less than ten minutes. In the first ten minutes of Wind Waker, I haven't even finished doing pointless fetch quests for grandma yet.

The intro for Beyond Good and Evil is just brilliant, it's probably my favourite opening to any game. It doesn't jerk you around with stupid stuff you don't care about, it sets everything up concisely, and it blends cutscenes together with gameplay expertly.

The lighthouse really endeared itself to me. It felt like a home, in the same way that Serenity felt like a home in Firefly. It's the little details. The kids are sitting down listening to the radio reports, walking around, playing outside, sitting next to a tree, lying in bed... doing what kids do. There's a bean bag in the corner, there are the porthole windows, there's a fighter plane hanging from the roof; signs of life.

In the kid's room, there are bunk beds, blankets, all that. What stood out to me above the rest though, was the pictures on the walls. There were tiny scribbles here and there. A crude drawing of Jade, of Pay'J, a flower, some of the kids, and whatever else. This is just one miniscule detail, completely unimportant in the grander scheme of things, but it so easily conveys the visual message that this is somewhere that kids live. Poetry in motion - a single fragment of an idea that conveys a whole lot more.

The warm, soft visual style, the soothing beautiful musical score, the surrounding ocean, the small garden; all of it combined together made for a really special place. In every way possible, this felt like an important place. It felt like somewhere I would want to live. There was heart here, and that's what the whole game has, from start to finish. Heart.

You get caugh up in a rebellion movement, through a series of events, and eventually you're doing espionage missions for this group, trying to uncover government conspiracies. It sounds a little trite worded like that, but it was a natural progression for the game, and at no point did I feel like I was watching a bad 80s spy movie.

On one of your missions to rescue a captured resistance member, you get seperated from Pay'J. I was honestly distraught. It wasn't just the generic "oh no party member x has been captured what do." That was my uncle. He cares about me, and I care about him.

They build up your relationship really well. After some encounters, the two of you share dialogue. He brags about not feeling as old as he is, and you make fun of him for it. He even makes a fart joke. Usually, that would get me thinking a whole lot less of the game, but it worked here. I was thinking "wow, that was really stupid and immature. Great job on the writing, guys." Then I stopped. This wasn't poor writing. This was good characterisation. It was a stupid, bad line, sure, but it was supposed to be. That's who Pay'J is. He's your immature uncle who makes stupid jokes, and says things that are ridiculously immature. He knows it's not funny, and so does Jade, but that doesn't stop them both from laughing.

So when Pay'J got taken away by governmental thugs, I was really, sincerely worried about him. I didn't want him to die. He was my friend. He wasn't my stupid grandma who sat at home making porridge and had two lines of dialogue for the whole game. He was my goofy uncle who made bad fart jokes, cared about me a lot, and put himself in danger to keep me out of trouble.

Then, in a deceptively brilliant move, they introduced my next party member - Double H - the resistance guy I came here to rescue in the first place. There wasn't a whole lot of time bewteen Pay'J getting carted off and meeting this new guy, so I was still processing things in my head. I'm worring about my uncle that I've built up a relationship with, and now the game is trying to shove a new character in my face.

I intensely disliked him to begin with. His introduction was not a likable one. There was slapstick humour, and more goofy dialogue, so my reaction was "wow, this guy's an idiot. I don't like him at all. I hope I get Pay'J back soon." That, and he kept quoting a military handbook, with meaningless lines, which just frustrated me.

He has some kind of alien virus in him, and you have to rush him back to le resistance HQ before he dies or gets infected or whatever it is that happens when you have an alien virus in you. So you do that, and they manage to cure him. They tell you he's going to be back on his feet in a couple of weeks, so, for the first time in the game, you're confronting the idea that you're alone. It all comes cashing down here that yes, Pay'j is gone, and yes, you don't have anybody to help you anymore.

Then comes the brilliant part. As soon as you walk out the door, you look back, and Double H is standing there looking at you. He quotes one of the lines from his handbook again; "WWTAO, we work together as one."

This is the point where Double H starts to become interesting. That line has a lot of weight. He's several weeks away from recovery, but he believes in what you're doing strongly enough that he wants to help anyway. Much as before, we're contrasting weakness and strength at the same time.

Not only that, but you've just found common ground with Double H. He's still reeling from injury, but he's trying his best to press on despite that. You're still reeling from losing Pay'J, and you're trying just as hard. The two of you are both dealing with adversity in the same way. With courage.

The once meaningless quote from his military handbook has grown, too. He's telling you that he's there, no matter what. He's just had a crazy alien brain sucker removed mere moments ago, but he still wants to help you. He knows how difficult things are for you, and he doesn't want you to be alone. Then theres the idea of expressing himself through the military lines. How heavily has he been programmed by the army if this is how he conveys complex emotions? If he has been that heavily programmed, and that dedicated, then what's he doing in a resistance movement, against the established government? What has he found that he believes in even more, despite how clearly he's mentally attached to the army?

Again, in only a few minutes, much like Pay'J, we've learned a whole lot about Double H. He's evolved from a silly whacky comic relief guy into a serious, interesting character, with more depth than immediately apparent.

There are a few other moments where they build up Double H's character even more - one after a thrillingly intense chase scene over the rooftops of a town, and one where Jade has an emotional breakdown - and he remains one of the most interesting characters I've seen in a game.

As soon as I beat the game, I sat back, mouth agog, processing for a few minutes, then I started again. Right away. I wasn't ready to let go yet. I had that much investment in this world, in these characters, that I just wanted to experience more.

I love almost everything about this game. I love the soundtrack, I love the characters, I love the fluid combat, the exploration factor, the scavenger hunt of taking photos of animals, the visuals, the locations, the voice acting... I even like the menu screen. It taught me about how relationships change, about how people care for one another, about people. It showed me different kinds of strength, different kinds of courage, and different kinds of weakness. It showed me you don't have to be Bill Gates or Superman to make a difference. You can just be a chick with a camera and a big stick. It taught me about what's important; these people don't have money, or much at all, really. What they do have is safety, happiness, family, and a life. They have each other. And it didn't beat me over the head with a single stupid parable. It was subtle, charming, spectacular, and beautiful. It will forever be one of my favourites.

You met Me at a very strange Time in My Life

2011-02-21T04:42:00.001-08:00

So, kind reader, I played Pathos earlier today. I sincerely regret having done so. I thoroughly, thoroughly disliked the experience. The game was made in only 48 hours, I am aware, but guess what? I don't give a shit. There's an easy solution to that whole 48 hour thing. Spend more time on it. Maybe it was for a contest? Maybe they were just challenging themselves to see what they could do in that time? I don't know, but again, I don't care. It's either bad, or incomplete. Or both.

I get what they were trying to do here. At least, I believe I do. They were trying to challenge the preconceptions of your actions in a game. Trying to get you to realise "oh wow, I should have just closed the game and walked away, but instead I kept going, and did horrible things to a little boy just to progress in the game! I guess I'm a bad person. That sure was interesting."

It didn't work. As soon as your little boy sees the light under his desk, my immediate reaction was to leave the room, to go and find the mother. Alas! They were too lazy to put such an option in, or even a reason as to why I couldn't do so. Maybe some text from the little boy that says "I don't want to wake her." Something within the frame of the game that tells me I can't do that, without breaking my suspension of disbelief.

You may recall some things I wrote about Gothic not so long ago. I got the shit beaten out of me by a pack of dudes, which challenged a preconception I had about the game's world, while also teaching me some lessons; trusting people may very well bite me in the ass, don't assume something without a good reason, and the society here is a bad one.

Like I said, this worked because it's a reflection of the game. Theme and mechanics came together. In Pathos, it has no thematic explanation. Mechanically, I can't walk left. Thematically, because the designer said no. Right there, my assumption is "wow, this guy was pretty lazy." Again, I understand the time constraint, but again, I don't think that's a valid excuse. If you want to make something good, you spend time on it. That's sort of how it works.

Then the game tells me to "force him (the little boy) forwards." This is similar to The Path; it tells you to do something, but really, you shouldn't be doing it. Which is an interesting concept. It's good that it has an interesting concept. What's not good, is that I have no choice in the matter. Like before, where I wanted to fetch the boy's mother. Nope, sorry, can't do that.

Possibly the intention here was meta - they perhaps thought my recourse is exiting the game. Interesting, but again, I'm calling bullshit. I think that's lazy. My recourse should be within the game. That's like saying you always have a choice to walk out of a cinema half way through, or decide to not read the last chapter of a book, because Dumbledore dies. Guess what? Dumbelor still fucking dies.

My experience is within the game, wholly. Interactions outside of the game, within the physical world can sometimes be an interesting aside - like what the wii tried, and ultimately failed, to do. You're physically using the controller, but mentally it's not a big white dildo with LEDs on the end. It's a lightsaber, a gun, a sword and shield or any number of things. However, that's still linked to the game. Exiting the game before it's finished is like turning your NES off just before Mario falls down a hole.

It's lazy. If you take me out of the game, then you've done exactly that, taken me out of the game. It's no longer part of my game experience. If the phone rings while I'm in the middle of a raid, that doesn't suddenly become part of the raid content. Exiting Pathos before you do these things to the boy isn't representative of anything. That's representative of closing your eyes when the girl gets slashed across the face in a bad horror movie.

Then, there's the description of the game, which is glorious.

"You’ll discover something about his world and about yourself by the end of the game."

That's a direct quote there. They actually had the gall to tell me that this game is so brilliant that it's going to teach me about myself, and be a defining experience for me. The pretentiousness here is astounding. You can't make a universally appealing, enlightening game. You can't make a game that is objectively going to teach every single person about themselves. Art doesn't speak to everybody. I was moved by Majora's Mask, as you already know. You may not have been. Which is fine. Both of our takes on the game, positive, negative, or ambivalent, are equally valid. You may have thought every single word I wrote was rubbish, you may have thought it was just a game about block puzzles and hitting dudes with swords. Clearly, I would disagree with you, but that doesn't invalidate your point.

I think games can be art. I would personally consider Majora's Mask art, as well as Grim Fandango. You might consider Doom II art. Maybe Doom II made you learn something about yourself. If it did, that's brilliant. I am glad that it did. It's a good thing when people find something that speaks to them. I adore Starry Night. Every time I look at it, I get a feeling of joy, and beauty. Maybe you think it's hideous.

To say "this game is going to teach you about yourself" is ridiculous. It's pretentious, close minded, ignorant and down right factually incorrect. The game may teach you about yourself. It may be a magical, fantastic experience for you, a defining moment in your life, but it won't be for everyobdy, and it cannot be for everybody.

This game is a step in the wrong direction in regards to games being art. It's part of the problem, not part of the solution. Games like this are why people scoff and think about vapid, shallow, stupid hipsters when they hear the words "indie game."