The Abbott Sessions

To anyone from my side of the pond the name John Peel really needs very little introduction, he was a near universally loved fixture on BBC Radio, honest, intelligent, warm to audience and bands equally. For forty year he played a eclectic mix of whatever took his fancy, championing new and obscure artist and showing a rare genius for putting into words what everyone felt*.

There has long been a preoccupation in games criticism about finding a master critic to call its own, a Robert Ebert to bring a authoritatively voice to a highly contentious medium. I don't think the Brainy Gamer podcast's Michael Abbott is ever going to be that sort of figure, however he has showed signs that he shares some of the qualities that made Peel so important to the development British music.

I was never any good at skiping

“if dialogue can be skipped in games, then why not combat?”

I cant help but wonder if  perhaps another question should be asked, that if ANY element of a game can be skipped without effect then why is it in the game at all? 

When combat is totally meaningless wanting to skip it is not only fine, but the rational response.*

Any time I play a game and see a character hacked down in combat one minute, and up good as new spouting his life story the next, my heart sinks a little. It just seems sloppy devaluing both the gameplay and the story, and gets progressively more jarring more strictly delineated a game places these elements.

It just seems so limiting, I need to see more if I ever want this to stop skipping from being a rational choice for me. What about companion npc's who are in danger when I enter combat? or characters who expressed themselves through actions as well as words? Perhaps even combat paced to allow for moments of calm where dialogue can occur.

These don't seem like they should be unreasonable hopes, there are already great examples in both traditional narrative media (such as films and tv) and in games themselves.

Space Marine: A 40k fan's view

My half tonne genetically engineered superman rockets into the sky, two giant jet engines strapped to his back, and a hammer the size of a small truck gripped between his hands.

Reaching to top of my flight arc, I feel like doom incarnate a living personification of the Sword of Damocles. Hanging in the air for a moment, before plummeting towards a hapless victim.

There were times when I played Space Marine when just for a second everything just clicked into place. In those moments it was hard not to smile, the game made me feel like a unstoppable force of nature full of momentum and power. At its best it was a intoxicating and potent example of the sort of power fantasy that has increasingly fallen out of favour as games have begun to seek mainstream cultural acceptance.

My Personal Games of 2011: Part 3 The Winner

My Game of the Year: Bastion

At the very least I think Bastion was a brilliant example of what a smaller indie game developer can achieve if they give themselves a tightly defined design remit. It had virtually no missteps, by keeping its aims tight it accomplished everything it set out to do.

My Personal Games of 2011: Part 2

1^st Runner Up: Deus Ex Human Revolution

Riots, global recession, media manipulation, civil wars, and a growing disquiet at emerging influence of technology on society, that's the 2027 of DXHR, did you think I was talking about some other year?

My Personal Games of 2011: Part 1

So once again its list time. Time for everyone on the Internet to declare what their best games of the year were. I've always felt that the game of the year concept was a very arbitrary one.

So I've decided to do mine a little different this year. With my gaming habits now heavily weighted towards picking up titles in sales instead of at release,I find myself considering games in an environment of far less hype than I used to.

For me a game of the year has to be experienced which is very much of its time. A game that was not just released in 2012 but reflected it in some way.

I am obviously aware of the game with a three-year development cycle to never truly be a response to events in the year of its release, But I think I can content myself with games that reflect the the Zeitgeist without demanding them to actively create it.

So my choices will all be games that I feel I could not have got the same experience from if I'd played them in any year apart from 2011.

My experience of 2011 was the year to find the way an atmosphere of uncertainty, indecision, and confusion in popular life. Such slippery concepts have always been an anathema to the heavily emphasised rules an goals that form the backbone of most games, and they ascension to primer to place on the news agenda may explain why are some of the more straight forward and traditional games I have played haven't made my list.

Gaming Demons

So … Diablo 3 is going to sell pretend items for real money, I'm not entirely comfortable with this, but it's not what I'm writing about. What I'm writing about is people's reaction to this news.

I'll skip straight to the point, calling for a boycott is a bloody stupid idea.

Why? Remember when you were a teenager and somebody told you “don't do that!” and got the idea into their head that a half-hour lecture about whatever the evil of the day was just what you needed? Well I'm assuming that worked just about as well on everyone else as it worked on me, in other words not at all.

Like a lot of people I don't always react well to being told what I should and shouldn't do by others(especially when it comes to my free time), even if their intentions are good.

I often feel that the best way someone to get me to change my mind, is to put the situation where I have the time and opportunity to form my own insights.

There has been a good few high-profile “ boycotts” of various services and games in the last few years but rarely have they made any significant impact.

Or to rephrase a old saying: people need time to practice, not to be preached at.

What Dune 2 taught me about Gaming: Part 1

Its 1993 Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner are stinking up the screen and the charts, John Major (Aka Pantsman) is Prime Minister, there's a weird new football division called the Premier League, and I'm trying to persuade my friend Lee that Dune 2 on the Amiga is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

My Amiga was a thing of wonder to me,and as I sat there with my A500+ it would seem implausible to me that the company behind it was already in a slow decline. In December Doom was released on the PC in all its 3D glory, changing the face of gaming and driving another nail into the Amiga's coffin. By April 1994 the fight was over and Commodore would be bankrupt and the Amiga dead.

At age 11 such things didn't register with me, nor would they have really mattered to me because at that moment all that mattered to me was I had a new game. Games typically cost around £30 which since I got £1.10 pocket money meant they were a huge investment for me. I spent months scanning issues of Amiga Power before making a decision on a which one i was going to buy next. I typically got 2-3 games a year and the wait was unbearable, though I soon realized that if I didn't spend my lunch money It virtually doubled my spending power. I mean whats a bit of food compared to a new game?

Who have i forgotten?

After the death of Harvey Pekar  and the sadness and tributes which have flowed (and rightly so) to him from the comics community it has made me wondering if gaming has any such unsung heroes.

The medium is so young that few practitioners have been active more than a decade or so and much of the specialist medias coverage focuses on commercial successful designers.

It feels the legacy of people like Miyamoto is assured, his contribution to gaming remembered every time Mario appears.
Its good to see now that far greater efforts are being made to catalog and preserve the source code of games and the hardware they have been played on but much of the progress made here seem to be undermined by commercial interests.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and its sequel could turn out to have been breakthrough titles in terms of cultural and commercial success, but with the fallout of the Infinity Ward's mass staff exodus it feels unlikely that much information concerning its production will ever see the light of day. This secrecy seems to affect small studios just as badly as big ones certainly compared to other media .

I have some anxiety that we too early in the mediums growth to have scholars who can speak with the necessary authority to highlight and bring to prominence those who would slip between the cracks of mainstream gaming media's coverage.

So who have i forgotten?

Well the problem is i'm in no position to know, and until the game industry operates with greater transparency the number of people who might be able to shed some light on the question will remain low.

The World needs more Death cats

I've haven't seen anything as gloriously chaotic as death cat for a long while.

Courtesy of Tom Francis of PC Gamer :

People make maps in Team Fortress 2 specifically for grinding achievements. Bleak, joyless rooms of endlessly spawning bots and resupply crates, where people don’t play the game, they game it. But in one of these, achievement_all_v4, the author’s added a surprise. A violent, horrific, hilarious surprise of biblical proportions

Regardless of the intent it been seized upon as a hugely entertaining way of dealing with a practice that much of the TF2 community disproves of. Why make a angry forum post when you can unleash a cat with laser beam eyes.

Just watching it makes me wonder if admin's & dev's couldn't use more interactive and visible ways of dealing with unintended player behaviour.

Repeat after me : You are in a game

Games more than any other medium are constantly asking people to suspend their disbelief, constantly signaling to the player 'you are in a game'.

This is probably just part of the baggage which comes along with being a interactive medium. As long as games need to convey visually none visual information addressing the audience directly will always be a necessary part of it.

Some of the most prominent designers in this generation of games seem to have reacted by either trying to maintain immersion and keeping as minimal user interface (UI) as possible, or going to the other extreme and speaking directly to the audience and constantly knowingly making references to games and pop culture.

The Metal Gear series is often picked out as one of the games which most employs the most sophisticated post modern approach but sadly the fact I've never owned a Playstation which mean I can't really comment on that series, instead the example which pops to my mind most obviously is Blizzard's insanely successful Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft (WoW).

WoW is overt about both its nature as a game and it's place in a wider cultural context.

Firmly Behind The Zeitgeist

Finally got around to watching the final episode of lost, all things considered they did a commendable job of tying everything up.

Alot of people gave up on the 2nd series, I won't claim I had any foresight that those midpoint seasons were just a blip.
It was nothing more than simple habit which kept me watching, the show had become a weekly tradition with me & my then girlfriend. We didn't see each other that often and so little things which added some routine became rituals for us.
And although that relationship came to a end and many of the things we shared ultimately became tainted by the bitterness of our breakup i kept watching Lost not out of the habit which had defined my early exposure to it, but because it was just damn good.

All in all its a great example of what can happen if creators are allowed to make mistakes and then shown faith that they can learn from them.

Deep Stress: My Experience's with Neptunes Pride

Neptune's pride is a very strange game. A pure game. A exhausting game.
And one I certainly wouldn't describe as a fun game. But it is a game worth playing (at least once)

Developed by Iron Helmet games a company formed by former Irrational Games employees. NP's is a web based 4x strategy game.

To quote them:
"Neptune's Pride is multiplayer game of Strategy, Intrigue and Galactic Conquest!The game is a real-time game played over several weeks. You can log in at any time of the day to check the progress of your fleets, view the results of battles and issue new orders. Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate!"
The game's rule set is very strict, cold hard numbers determine the outcome of combat with no tactical elements and nothing left to chance the game is purely strategic.

Quentin smith put it well in his excellent write up for GameSetWatch when he said:
"If I have 30 ships defending against your 45, I will lose the fight. If my empire of 20 star systems is invaded by your empire of 30 star systems, I will slowly but surely lose territory to you"

This very no nonsense combat system plus and a equally harsh and unforgiving diplomacy system provides a perfect catalyst for human drama. Both Rock Paper Shotgun and PC Gamer have produced engrossing play diary's of a UK games journo battle royal with the game. Just as no plan ever survives contact with the enemy the plaudits Neptune's Pride initially received has slowly waned as more people have got their hands on the games beta, and slowly that old cliched question 'but is it fun?' has reared its ugly head.

Well to cut a long story short, no its not. To give a longer and more relevant answer, it's not but the reason why it isn't fun is interesting in itself.