Twenny Twelve

Blog! I sometimes write you!

I'm doing this more out of necessity rather than want, as it's less than six hours till 2013 and I feel I should attempt to put a lid on this year, gaming wise. So here we are. I actually thought about doing a top ten list until I realised I haven't even played ten games that came out this year. So in lieu of that, here's something else.

Insert hilarious caption here.

Epic Loot

Oh god. I'm so sick. Bluuur.

Right, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but whatever. I WAS very sick, but now I am feeling much better. SO that's good.

Not had a huge amount of time for gaming recently, and not a huge amount of time in the future, to be honest. I've had a few assignments from uni on my mind, which means I haven't really been able to give much time to the important things. If I WERE to talk about video games, it'd just be me bitching about how unfair the Fire Temple in Ocarina of Time Master Quest is.

Videogames?

VIDEOGAMES!

Wahey. Jokes. But more on that later.

Borderlands 2 is still taking up most of my gaming time, which is to say, I am still enjoying it. Me and Harriet drifted apart level-wise, so we both started new Mechromancer characters together. There's something wonderfully cathartic about watching a pair of  giant floating robot torsos tear into a nearby pack of marauders. I really should at least finish the game once at some point, since I'm told the ending is worth seeing.

Another thing I have been playing is this;

This is sort of like Mario's private island.
With its own chalet and... giant statue of the owner

Diamond Ponies and Double Barrels

Right. Hard talk here for a second.

Tediore is the obvious choice for shotguns on Pandora. The super fast reload, combined with the explosive damage caused when you do, makes them an absolute winner. Hyperion weapons get more accurate over time, which is useless for a gun with only four shots and a spread projectile pattern. Dahl weapons have burst fire, which is moot. Maliwan weapons have the elemental edge but reload pretty slowly. And Torgue weapons make it IMPOSSIBLE to hit anything. So clearly, Tediore. It's the way forward.

Ahh. Good to get that knot of geekery off my chest. On to the game at hand.

You're god damn right it is

One Choice is No Choice; How TellTale Did Morality Right

Here's a weird admission. Up until recently, the most effective and difficult moral choice I've ever had to make in a game was in Fable III. At the beginning, the king offers you a choice of who to kill; some villagers or your childhood sweetheart. If you take too long, the king suddenly starts counting down from ten, at which point he will have both parties executed.

It's almost the perfect example of what a moral choice can be. Often in games, when presented with moral choices, we play tactically. We don't go with our gut, we try and "game" the system and play tactically. The moral decisions in BioShock, for example, aren't really about ethics, they're about whether or not you want upgrades now or later.

Sticking the time limit on a moral choice that doesn't immediately offer any advantages either way is a fantastic way of giving a moral choice weight. It worked in that first bit of Fable III and by god does it work in The Walking Dead game.

Point and Click and Meet and Greet

Well, what a world, aye? One minute you're talking about a game dev and how much you love his games about ghosts on your blog, and the next you're meeting him and another (BAFTA winning) adventure game dev in a pub full of indies.

AS ONE DOES.

But anyway, I leap ahead of myself. Video games I have been playing...

...are mostly members of the point and click adventure genre. Mostly, in fact, of the Broken Sword genre.

Nothing witty, just a reminder that Broken Sword is really pretty.

Ghosts and Guns: Blackwell and Borderlands

Well it's been well over a month since I last wrote anything g so HERE WE GOOOOOO

What's my favourite genre of game, I hear you ask? You didn't? Well, shut up I'm telling you anyway. It's point and click adventure games. As of recently though, nothing has managed to encaptivate (that's a word right?) quite like the halycon days of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango. I mean granted, that's because there's never really been anything quite like Monkey Island or Grim Fandango, but you see the point.
All of the TellTale games have never quite sat right, being enjoyable but not particularly memorable. Machinarium, made by the irrepressible and often incomprehensible Amanita Design, was beautiful to look at but felt very modular in its puzzle format.

Enter Wadjet Eye Games, run by Dave Gilbert (who I like to imagine as an adventure game creator amalgamation of Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman) and his ongoing AGS series of Blackwell Games. It's about ghosts and solving ghost crime, sort of, and if that's not enough to get you playing it, then I don't know what else to do.

VIDEOGAME VACATION

The astute of you might notice I haven't blogged for a while. In fact, I haven't done anything for two months.

Actually, no, I've done plenty. Final exams, moving home, Mass Effect, summer job, exam results, more job, job training, starting job, graduation, Mass Effect 2 and then remembering about my blog. There we go. The last two months nicely summed up.

So yeah, I graduated. That was fun. Look, here I am wearing a funny hat! I'm the one on the left. I think.

I'm going back in September to do a Masters in Science, Communication and Society. Won't that be fun?

Yes, hopefully.

SO MASS EFFECT 2 IS A THING AS WELL

To Boldly Re-Go

Blog post times! I'm currently at home for a couple of days, after finishing my dissertation and such. I'm having a well earned break (hah) before going back to Canterbury for a month or two to revise like some kind of manic revision demon for my final final exams. I'm making the most of my time back home and playing a game that came out in 2007.

In my original blog post about Mass Effect, I complained about the combat being poor, and I stand by that statement. The combat isn't great. The enemy AI often runs around in a mad panic, confusing both themselves, your team-mates and me. However, I'm playing as an Infiltrator this time around, rather than a Vanguard, which means I have access to a bunch of tech-based powers, the use of all which result my enemies exploding. I had planned to use the sniper rifle as my primary weapon, but I am next to useless with the damn thing. Until I invest a few more points into sniper rifles, I'm having to rely on my pistol most of the time. It has poisonous bullets. I think my Shepard should nicknamed "The Viper" or something.

In a slight change to my original playthrough, I'm actually playing as a female Shepard (or FemShep, if you must). I can honestly say there's really not a vast amount of difference between playing with or without a Y chromosome. Conrad Verner's fandom takes a slightly weirder note, but apart from that, it's pretty much the same. I've never really like either of the voice actors for Shepard, so really, it's just a cosmetic change, with the plot rattling along as ever. Not that I'm really doing anything plot related. In fact, I'm making an effort to ignore it. I missed quite a few of the side quests in my first playthrough, so I'm not going to let that happen this time. Scanning planets and doing side quests has raised me to level 21 without going near Virmire, Feros, Noveria, or the other one.

And also, more Mako sections, because
fuck anyone who didn't like the Mako

To Hell And Back Again, Again

I'm not dead, honest. Just busy. Busy busy busy.

Back when I started this blog, I was a fresh-faced young seventeen year old, heading into his final year of A-Levels. It was 2009. Things were cool. I'm now a grizzled twenty year old, made cynical by my years of work on an unforgiving Biology degree, facing my final year of university. I'm also doing my dissertation. Part of that is writing a blog about science, which you can read here, if you are so inclined. Anyway, onto games.

I was back at home last weekend, which meant it was time to have a go on the Xbox again. Also pay attention to my family or something, but mostly Xbox. I JEST. It was Mother's Day. Always remember to thank your mum once a year for being your mum. It's a hard job, totally non-optional and the pension options are bullshit. What was I talking about? VIDEO GAMES. That's it.

Specifically, this video game.

Yes, I'm talking about Dante's Inferno again.
Yes, I know I'm the only one who liked it.

Livin' in America

I'm back. Turns out that bout of depression was a cold, and I'm a drama queen.

So you've probably heard the news by now. Assassin's Creed 3 is happening. And if you didn't...

There's so much awesome about this, I have nothing
to add but this self-referential statement

Adventures in Funding

Unless you had your head under a rock for the past week, you might have noticed that Double Fine made a little stir in the gaming community by using Kickstarter to fund a brand new point and click adventure game. They needed $400,000. They raised it in about eight hours. They then hit a million dollars in under 24 hours, and broke Kickstarter records. Four days from when they started, and they are currently sitting at $1.6 million, four times the initial amount. By the time their Kickstarter page closes in a months time, I wouldn't be surprised if they hit $2 million. Basically, Double Fine did something amazing.

A lot of people were commenting about how this might affect the industry. Some suggested that it might be the end of publishers. Others came back stating that the Kickstarter approach only really works for studios with an established studio such as Double Fine, which is true. But I think what is important about what DF have done is more the idea behind it.

Finally Fantasized

I always worry about writing too much on a single genre, because I fear it alienates my audience. Then I remember that this audience is almost entirely fictional, so it's all good again. Despite this, allow me to reassure you that this'll be my last post about Final Fantasy for a while. Maybe. I don't know, stop judging me.

NINE! IX! Yeah, it's going pretty well. My chocobo can fly now. Took basically forever, because the only way to get your golden chocobo is through a dumb-luck mini-game that is more than a tad frustrating. But hey, doesn't matter now, cause MY CHOCOBO CAN FLY! Getting to the stage where you have free roam of the map is something I've only really achieved in the original Final Fantasy, so I was super excited to be able to go everywhere.

Unfortunately, it turns out once you've got that far in the game, there's really shit all to do around the map. Yeah you can go to a flooded library, but there's not a huge amount to do there. It's fun to go back and explore old locales but it doesn't really add much to the game. I guess it's just that freedom of choice to be able to go anywhere you want. I just wished there was something to do when I got there.

Aliens, Raccoons and Modification

Despite never having played the XCom games before, I followed the announcement of the new FPS game with quite some interest. Nice art style, interesting era of history that is not normally explored, a potentially incredible deep tactical command/RPG system. Take a look. I personally thought that 2K Marin had really nailed a good balance between first person and strategy.

The internet, as it is wont to do, got rather angry. How dare they make a FPS game out of a beloved turn-based game? That will never work! People were angry, it seemed, because it wasn't the XCom they'd played 18 years ago. To which I say; "Of course it isn't." Sad as you may find it, turn-based games aren't as big as they used to be. There's less of a market for them these days (which makes the recently announced XCom Enemy Unknown reboot even more of a surprise). If it were me, I'd be quick excited to play a new spin on my favourite franchise. That said, I do sort of understand the outrage. If they announced a Grim Fandango reboot that was an FPS, there'd be blood.

The tagline would probably be
"They're dead... Now make 'em deader."

East Versus West: The Role-Playing Conundrum

There's a lot of ways to divide up role-playing games. Fantasy or sci-fi? First person or third person? Turn-based or action? It's hard to talk about RPGs, however, before one division rears its head; Western or Japanese?

There's certain expectation attached to either genre. The Western RPG, or WRPG, is associated with more action adventure stryle gameplay, usually involving you running about in a wide open world, taking quests and levelling up specific skills as you do. The Japanese RPG, or JRPG, is more linked to turn based battles, featuring a range of characters in a vast, and often complex story.

Since I'm currently flip-flopping between an example of both genres, Skyrim and Final Fantasy IX, I figured I might take a whack at comparing and contrasting the two. I will admit to having a limited experience of JRPGs, so please forgive any ridiculously inaccurate sweeping statements. Let's get to it.

For a start, there are a lot fewer of these guys in WRPGs