Gone Home, Stayed Home

I'm just going to assume that Popeye isn't asking
Bluto if he can borrow his chainsaw.

I know what I’m doing even as I start doing it. I look down and see my chubby little fingers plodding away, bashing out another snarky witticism and acting on behalf of my subconscious as it tries to hide some surprisingly heartfelt emotion behind a shallow mask of crude humour. Fortunately, I catch the plump wee bastards in the act and I muster up just enough self control to stop them dead in their tracks, temporarily at least, while I dial back my usual drool response. I lean back in my cheap mesh computer chair and accidentally bang my knee against my even cheaper writing desk, causing it to shake like a haunted shit house while I baste my bedroom walls with some of the saltiest language heard this side of a Samuel Leroy Jackson autograph signing session. I’m no longer in the mood for paying any sort of extravagant homage, the moment was well and truly shattered after my wayward leg went all muay thai versus plywood, so I holster my potential slow-clap and settle for an approving nod and a swig of cold hazelnut coffee. Yep, Gone Home was pretty dang good.

It’s funny sometimes how these things end up coming about. I read recently in a “Best Indie Game of 2013” write-up that Gone Home was a hidden gem, and I’ll be brutally honest, had it not been for the lavish praise that said article doled out, I probably wouldn’t have given this game a second glance. Frankly, if Gone Home was a dirty housewife advertising herself in the local classifieds, I’d be pissed off that I’d just wasted twenty seconds scanning over her notice. A first person interactive story adventure? So basically you mean I get to look at everything but I can only get down and dirty with the parts you want me to touch? Umm, okay, that’s kind of restrictive but I can dig it in a weird domineering sort of way. Hold on a sec, did I miss something? Oh I did but I’m free to go back and sample that fun any time I want? That’s awfully charitable of you, what’s the catch? It won’t make any difference to the ending, even if I miss a whole bunch of stuff I’ll still be paying for half a back rub and a hairy eyeball? Well at least you’re consistent.... and honest I guess. This whole concept stunk of Heavy Rain, and just in case I didn’t make myself clear in my last article, that is the sour tang of linearity mixed with a cloying odour where any gameplay should be. Still, the editorial I read was so liberal with its flattery that I almost felt like I’d be doing the author an injustice if I didn’t put his good word to the test. Well, that and the fact that the story of a young woman returning to her family home on a storm wracked night, to find the house empty and relatively unattended save for a trail of scattered notes, was framed with just enough mystery that my curiosity ended up getting the better of me.

Usually when I finish a game that inspires me to open Word 2007, I do so with a burst of quick-burning enthusiasm. I brainstorm up a scattering of ideas and then I leave the document alone for the next few weeks, just long enough so that most of my original fervour for writing the article has withered into irrational dread at the thought of actually having to write anything at all. Not this time though. I figured that if a game manages to illicit such a strong favourable reaction out of me in the meagre two and half hours that it takes me to download and finish – sandwich breaks included – then I can probably afford to free up the next few hours and delegate them to singing such a games praises. And sing I shall. Like a canary sent twittering into the gloom of a potentially poisoned mineshaft, I loaded up Gone Home with the heavy weight of trepidation slouching me into the most un-ergonomic of stances, and truth be told, my first thirty minutes or so did very little to dispel my apprehension. Initially I wandered around the foyer of the vacant home, rifling through draws and listening to voice messages wondering whether I could really be fucked. The setting had me more than a little confused you see. Stormy night, dark empty house, mysterious notes, all of these were indicative of a horror twist that well, never showed up. So I continued to rummage through cupboards and ransack the house, learning more inane information about the Greenbriar family – mainly Kaitlyn the protagonist and her younger sister Samantha – with the sort of wanton and aimless abandon that was sure to send me into an OCD induced panic sooner rather than later. As I read certain notes or messages, I would reach a story significant point where Samantha would recite a relevant passage from her diary. It didn’t seem like much at first, just a lot of general teenage angst directed at her lack of friends and a pair of archetypal overprotective parents. Over time though, the diary entries helped to create a connection between Samantha and her older sister, particularly as Sam would often reference her in stories and also write many of the entries so that they recounted events for Kaitlyn to later catch up on.

I couldn’t tell you exactly when it happened. Put a gun to my head or maybe just threaten me with an avocado and egg plant salad, and I’d probably say it was right around the point where Samantha started to write about the confusing feelings she was beginning to have for a senior girl at her highschool. That’s when my entire approach towards Gone Home suddenly changed. I went from being a slightly impassive burglar to filling the unfamiliar shoes of an older sibling torn between piqued interest and sisterly concern. All the filler about Terry Greenbriar and his unsuccessful series of novels, the Greenbriar mansion having been previously owned and occupied by a clinically insane uncle and hints about Kaitlyn’s tree-hugging hippy of a mother being involved in a potential affair, was no longer so frustratingly irrelevant. This information had managed to construct a living and breathing family unit out of bill payments, book reviews and steamy love letters. I needed to know these people so that I could understand what Samantha was complaining about in her next voiceover to Kaitlyn, and so I could relate to this being the type of family where the nerdy bookworm of a father was understandably pretty awkward upon meeting one of Sam’s new classmates. Again though, this was just the filler, the background framing for the main plot – a story which I feel pretty reluctant to try and summarise in my usual succinct fashion because I know I’ll fall well short of doing it justice. Gone Home is a love story folks. There I said it. It’s a coming of age tale that slowly unveils the details behind Samatha’s budding friendship with another girl called Lonnie. Yep, I know what you’re thinking, I’m going to struggle to insert any crude masculine humour into the rest of this article, and you may be right.

Yep, there were even a couple of magic eye posters to squint at. Sock rockingly cool.  

I’m going to come out and say it right now; on paper this story arc shouldn’t have captured me quite like it did. The Fullbright Company are dirty emotional shamans and they obviously realised that if they were going to minimalise gameplay in favour of slowly following a simple narrative, then they had to get a few things damn right. Gone Home features some of the most intuitive story progression I’ve ever experienced. As I learnt about Sam’s story, I’d unlock another area of the house and trudge there to investigate further. Along the way I’d read a lot of extra stuff concerning the Greenbriar family affairs but I stopped minding because it either provided some context for Sam’s messages or I just looked it over for the sake of being thorough. Sam narrates her diary entries in various states of fitting emotional distress or delight, all in some pretty solid voice acting I might add, and I even found cassette tapes in various rooms which I could then chuck on a convenient nearby stereo to provide a background cacophony of Sam or Lonnie’s favourite punk tunes. None of it was forced down my throat or monologued to me in a mid-game cut scene, everything I read and listened to, I did so under my own fruition because I wanted to and because frankly, I cared. 

The Greenbriar family feat. Terry's spectacular moustache

Now granted, this isn’t the sort of game that could have kept up such a stylised approach for much longer

than my prescribed two or three hours, but the story was paced brilliantly so that I knew when I was heading towards a climax well in advance of any possible tedium. And the story is, well, touching. I want to blow it, I really do. I want to come out and vent just because Gone Home put me through an emotional ringer, but that would be a horrible horrible injustice. It’s engrossing and vividly realistic and it’s probably the uncomfortably “close to home” and progressive nature of the subject matter which makes this game so strangely enthralling. You’re not going to play Gone Home for the Crytek quality graphics, or the orchestral score. There are no explosions, incredible staged sequences or Portal Gun puzzles. This is a game that chucked all of its eggs in one basket and decided to trust that some great voice actors, brilliant pacing and startlingly good writing would help keep people company on a bare-bones exploration of the Greenbriar house. So go and play the thing. Take the time out of your busy schedule to calm down and jam something other than COD: Ghosts. Make sure you shut your bedroom door first though, because you’d hate for anyone to hear you lose your shit after you accidentally attack your computer desk and you’d REALLY hate having to explain those sobs people might hear coming from your room after you finish Gone Home.

Interactive Erotic Movie

Can you imagine rolling around that thing with a belly full of cold
leek and spud? Sea-legs be damned...

I swear I’ll be late to my own funeral. I sure have a knack for missing the boat where everything else is

concerned. Game releases, yearly summaries, birthday congratulations, and buses, I am consistently and unerringly late for buses – those being my preferred form of transport over the afore mentioned boat. Call me what you like, as long as you don’t call me late for dinner. I genuinely admire the righteous intentions of that anecdote, it has its heart in the right place, that being conveniently off to the side of one’s oesophagus and the cold leek and cheese mash slithering past on the back of my lacking punctuality. You know what else I’m always late for? Those wonky quick-time event prompts that feature an arcing analogue-stick movement. Those things can fuck right off. As it happens, I was also late to have a crack at playing Heavy Rain, a game which seems to revel in its prompting of unintuitive finger movements. So I guess this entire introduction has threaded together with a Nolan-ish flare for storytelling misdirection. All I need now is a clever way of weaving leek mash and boats into the final twist. Jumping Jerusalem, I think I’ve got it. WORST FERRY CROSSING EVER!

So, I’m in two minds about this Heavy Rain business. This is a pretty big deal for me - a self confessed wizard of open minded media consumption. If I was a Pokemon then I’d be a water type, the sort of useless fish that you can capture with the old rod, and I’d have a special trait pertaining to my excessive consumption of kelp. My sole redeeming feature would be my move selection – “Harden”, “Leer”, “Growl” and “Tunnel Vision Game” – a technique which allows me to relentlessly binge on a videogame, going from zero to one hundred in the space of few days, driven by the almost primal desire to leave no stone unturned and no story unresolved. Even if the product has been generic, uninspired, mediocre or just plain Dynasty Warriors, then I usually find myself latching onto some marginally entertaining value – Cue Quake 4 and its unsettling alien lore or the hilarious machismo of Bulletstorm. And finally when all else fails, I can hopefully shrug, neck the last few disgustingly warm inches of my beer and  at least acknowledge that a lot of work probably went into making whatever the hell I just played. My point is that I’m not sure whether I actually like Heavy Rain and that’s a bloody big deal considering the verve with which I just delivered that last metaphor. 

Say what you will about Quake 4 and its plethora of bugs but that cutscene where you get diced up
and transformed into an alien is still one of the most unnerving and badass videogame sequences
that I've ever experienced.

For those that don’t know, Torrential Downpour is an interactive drama action-adventure video game created by French developer Quantic Dream exclusively for the PlayStation 3. Thank you for that laundry list of genres Wikipedia. In fact, while we’re on the topic, go and read the full Heavy Rain Wikipedia article, it’ll sum things up far better than I ever could. Too lazy? Righto then, I’ll make this easy for you idle bastards. 

• Thriller
• Four protagonists 
• Set in a banged up area of a Philadelphia-ish city in what I can only assume is the month of miserable.
• The city is being terrorised by a serial killer known as “The Origami Killer” on account of his penchant towards leaving small origami figures in the clenched hands of his drowned victims.
• Perhaps those fiddly little paper animals and the deft hand-eye coordination required to master the art of origami are symbolic representations of the dexterity involved in performing a flawless sequence of quick-time events using only a Sixaxis controller and my corn-chip greased hands. 
• On that note, I think it’s fair to assume that such allegory can also encompass the main injuries sustained from either form of recreation, namely paper-cuts and RSI.
• The quicker your time, the better the event. 

Working hard or hardly working, right boys?

I think I proved a point. Not necessarily the one I wanted, but something definitely got established none the less. Maybe it’s the time of night. Perhaps it’s because I burnt the top of my hand putting wood on the fire earlier. It could be that there’s no feasible reason as to why these factors should be contributing, but I’m going out of my way to set a new precedent for ramble in this dog. Woof. I mean Blog… and whoops. Either way, this doesn’t change the fact that I’m still strangely unfulfilled by David Cage’s film noir videogame. I wish I could pin it down to a fundamental flaw in Light Drizzle’s development, some interactive-film-to-videogame mechanic that failed to bridge the mediums, but fuck me dead, I just can’t. In that sense, I have to admit that it lived up to the blurbs quite well. 

I like the whole interactive movie approach, where the player gets dragged by a leash from one heavily scripted sequence to the next. Hell, that’s my favourite thing about each new COD instalment. I even like quick-time events. I think they’re a great mechanic when used to choreograph a particularly important moment of gameplay or story. Maybe it’s a question of mediation then. Too many cooks will spoil the broth, and too many flashing button prompts will put the hurt on any chance of immersion. I like where this self indulging monologue is going. Games like God of War and COD getaway with linear scripting and regular servings of quick-time pie because the regular gameplay is based on templates of tried and true entertainment, gratuitous violence and extravagant action scenes. So there’s no deviation from regular gameplay and no dramatic escalation of events occurring in Heavy Rain for those quick-time moments to feel like they’re actually significant moments of gameplay right? True, but that’s not a good enough reason to martyr Cage just yet, and that assessment makes me out to be an uncivilised specimen of modern jock-gaming. 

Unfortunately he's not about to pass me some petrol money from out of
that clenched fist...

Is it a matter of difficulty then? I mean, how hard can it be to bash a limited selection of buttons in singular

succession, it’s not like I’m trying to pull off a 20 hit combo in Mortal Kombat right? Well be that as it may, but Hefty Hail does have a rather relentless approach to action sequences. These bastard sections can happily pummel you for minutes on end, to the point where I honestly started to wonder whether I was going to lose through sheer mental attrition and brutal cramping in my sausage-like fingers... A piano player I am not... It’s simple and crudely effective. One entire chapter can revolve around something slow and relatively docile like investigating a crime scene or wandering aimlessly around an apartment, whereas the very next scene plants you in the unfortunate shoes of an FBI agent getting seven shades of shit kicked out of him courtesy of a burly, black criminal in thirteen rounds of bare-knuckle “you won’t learn that in the academy” boxing. The pacing is great and the fact that I’m so vested in the outcome of each character’s story-arc made the possibility of imminent failure all the more nerve-wracking, with the exception of the main female character that is, I swear her sole purpose in the game is to just flush out all of Philadelphia’s sexual perverts by way of bumbling vigilante investigations or as I like to call them – fuck ups.

Spoiler alert - Worst case scenario...

Whoa hold on a sec that sounded suspiciously like a backhanded compliment, so I better slam the brakes on this enthusiasm train before it rolls on through contradiction station. I’m man enough to admit that there are plenty of aspects that I enjoyed about Bulky Deluge, the gritty storyline, the bleak setting and the eerie musical score to name a few, but I think I came close to hitting the nail on the head when I discussed  the game’s difficulty. From the moment I picked up Heavy Rain’s case, I was informed via the most indiscreet of box-blurb warnings and menu prompts, that there would severely dire consequences for every one of my decisions and by extension, each time I failed to solve a puzzle or pass a time sensitive challenge, I would be drilling another hole in my waka, allowing nautical physics to run their course and rapidly flood my vessel full of shit-creek. This basically meant that despite the many possible endings that Quantic Dream had hinted at, I was compelled to succeed at every possible opportunity, to pass as many bullet-time events as possible and hopefully make it out of shit-creek smelling less like excrement and more like Hugo Boss. Quite frankly, anything else just strikes me as counter intuitive for a videogame, rendering a massive chunk of the game redundant as there was no way in hell I was going to stand for any disaster ending where I failed to capture the serial killer or allowed the main characters to kark it. The rogue-like saving system meant that every botched chapter would be permanent, but this wasn’t a movie where I was detached from the unpleasant ending, I knew that any unfavourable conclusions were all on me and that overwhelming sense of responsibility just left me feeling uncomfortable. If that’s what Quantic Dream were going for then shit damn -mission success, but if Ample Precipitation was supposed to immerse or create some semblance of common artistic medium between film and videogames then I think it was a good attempt that unfortunately curved a fair way off stump. To summarise, Heavy Rain was a hotchpotch DVD with plenty of deleted scenes that I have no intention of ever watching because I can’t stand the idea of sitting through another fifteen hours of party-time events. Maybe I’m just sour because I got the FBI agent killed... 

There were in-game instructions meant to help me craft the game cover into an origami masterpiece, but
just as I failed to save Norman Jayden's floundering FBI career, I also blundered horribly in my attempts
to become a paper folding wizard. 

Better Late Than Never

Okay I’m not going to try and sugar-coat this shit, but I will at least say that there was beer involved and a fair amount of Youtube crawling. As I meandered through my extensive list of favourites, my face pallid and oily in the eerie blue light of my laptop, all the while leeching off some poor saps unsecured network, I was struck down by a gut-wrenching burst of nostalgia. Reminiscence and beer, that’s my story, and I’m going to stick to it, especially seeing as after five years as a reformed man, I was once again stealing someone else’s precious internet bandwidth. I won’t burden you with my petty excuses but let’s just say this unpleasant business was proving to be a necessary evil, in the face of the sheer congestion being caused by too many computers and far too many avid online enthusiasts back at my flat. On second thoughts, nostalgia may not be the right term of endearment in this scenario. Maybe I meant stupid. Actually that has a nice ring to it. Fucking stupid - that’s going to be my leading line in every future article which at any point involves someone managing to go out of their way to disable their wireless password. Herp derp derp.

So beer, stupidity and traces of maudlin conspired to get me reflecting about the year just gone. Being the terminal nerd that I am, I managed to punctuate the long periods of student stress and bone-idleness with a few mentionable gaming moments. So here they are, well some of them at least, in no particular order of appearance. Sure it’s over four months into the new year and I’ve theoretically missed the boat on any 2012 summary articles, but maybe I’ve just been too busy enjoying myself to waste all that energy on agonising over the last twelve months of my sorry existence. Or perhaps I’ve just been using too much of my neighbours bandwidth. Somebody really needs to let their ISP know…

1. Two Weeks of War

I was strangely unsettled by some of the images
I found after Googling "caveman"...

A story should always start at the beginning and back in the early reaches of January 2012; I came sauntering through the door of my new flat, only to be confronted by the unfortunate revelations that my new home had desolately cold wooden flooring and I was meant to have organised the internet plan. As the house was only going to be occupied by a few of the future tenants over the course of first month, I had only really succeeded in inconveniencing myself and my good friend Rory. What followed next was a brutal fourteen days that served mainly to remind us of how little we appreciated something until it was suddenly gone. In an attempt to stave off the pangs of our various online addictions, we binged on Archer and Adventure Time, trawled through a shared archive of obscure manga, and stoically prepared for frostbitten toes by shopping for cheap yet tasteful slippers. 

A symbolic representation of me dismembering Rory's hopes and dreams

Our LAN and console options were disgustingly underwhelming up until the day when I noticed a Dawn of War game box laying dust-covered and forgotten on Rory’s Anime shelf. Somewhere in amidst the next forty minutes of strategic discussion, Space Marine impressions and a mutual loathing directed towards The Imperial Guard, nostalgia turned into bragging before finally souring into the sort of dick measuring contest which would inevitably culminate in an official challenge. Plenty of DirectX errors and CD swapping later, and my filthy Necron warrior rush was joyfully ransacking Rory’s horribly unprepared Tau base. Such a momentous occasion certainly deserved some form of pomp and ceremony, I settled for recording our match history on the kitchen notice board. In stubborn denial of the fact that my master’s league StarCraft 2 division probably suggested an inherent RTS prowess, Rory pummelled me with Dawn of War challenges. Over two blood-thirsty weeks we traded in Eldar blood and armoured wreckage. Beer rounds and household chores were decided in misty Ork infested swamplands and shattered Necron ruins, and I capered around the flat like a tyrannical lord. 

When our internet was finally enabled, Rory uninstalled Warhammer and Frisbeed the discs under his bed. The score stood at 14 – 1. That one loss haunts me to this very day. In a moment of strategic madness, I launched an Orkish assault across a river against Rory’s heavily fortified Space Marine defence. It was like a horrible green and guttural parody of The Charge of the Light Brigade. Turns out that bastard had a hankering for some pretty expensive whiskey the very same night…

2. Brown Souls

Try and say that name 3 times in a row with a
mouthful of crunchy peanut butter.

Brown Souls is the razor-sharp nickname that my friend Casey and I use when referring to Dark Souls. If you haven’t had the pleasure of being put through that meat grinder, then you’re missing out. Dark Souls is an RPG released in 2011 and developed by Bandai, the same twisted company that was responsible for the creation of Demon’s Souls. Dark Souls is famous for its beautiful visuals and bleak storyline. It’s also notorious for having the sort of learning “curve” that makes descending Everest seem like a drunken stumble off your back porch. The dungeon crawling will wear through the fabric on the edge of your seat, the enemies will have you necking pure ethanol out of the bathroom cabinet and the boss battles will undoubtedly be your failed defence when you’re dragged in front of a judge for your umpteenth charge of domestic abuse. 

Stomping the yard

I first played Dark Souls back in the summer of 2011 when Bethesda made a dogs breakfast of patching Skyrim on the PS3. I’d like to say it was love at first play, but they don’t call me “Honest Jim” solely because my intimidating physical stature demands a prestigious moniker. Truth be told, I fucking hated it. I was stuck in the second area for the better part of two days and I came within a hairs-breadth of throwing in the towel. Dying and having all of the enemies respawn truly is a devilishly unforgiving feature, and the undisputed bane of hack-and-slash progress. What was this brutal combat style that required me to think and dodge and time all of my attacks with absolute precision? “Surely I can pause and plan my next move then? What?! No pause?!! You expect me to make all of those clutch calls in real-time?! Did I mention that this boss is at least three hundred feet tall?!!! No breaks? No breaks…” So I manned up and stepped up, thanks in no small part to many hours spent trawling the Dark Souls Wiki. I fell in love with the beautiful and diverse environments, the grim setting and the enormous sense of achievement that I would feel after having overcome each neck-craning hurdle. It must be noted however, that I played the entire game offline so it wasn’t until almost a year later that I experienced the blessings and the curse of Dark Souls online features. 

That’s where Casey comes in. He’d tried Dark Souls and it had broken his spirit. On a miserable winter night, he and I made the sleep-deprived decision to try and attempt a play-through of Dark Souls in tandem. Hilarity ensued. Sure the bosses became easier, and if not, then our mistakes became comedic gold. Dungeon crawling transformed into a slap-stick fiasco as we steam rolled our way through each area, living in fear of every Black Knight encounter or the dreaded Curse Toads. Had the unthinkable just occurred? Was Dark Souls actually easy?! Not a fucking chance. We were simply experiencing the calm before the proverbial storm. Two swords or in this case – two Pyromancy Flames – must always be better than one, but while we had doubled our efficiency when it came to dungeon crawling, another more insidious threat had increased exponentially. Basically we’d packed the PvE, but we’d left the PvP home alone, and this time McCauly was Asian, in his mid twenties, running low on cheeto’s and just generally pissed off. 

Keep those prunes to yourself, that name is laxative enough...

Through the use of certain magical items, Dark Souls allows malicious gamers to invade the game world of other less spiteful players. And invade they did. What Dark Souls now lacked in creature-intimidation, it more than made up for in relentless human ambushes. Casey and I were sorely, grossly, horribly outclassed when it came to PvP. Our items were a lot crappier, our skill sets were dreadfully inappropriate and we just generally sucked when it came to duelling other players. We were cattle, just waiting to be farmed for our humanity, and subsequently our progress ground to a halt. We found two areas to be of particular concern – The Catacombs and Blight (Brown) Town. Both of these areas are tailor-made for guerrilla warfare, due to the tiered level design and the limited amount of places for which Casey and I could retreat too. It would only be a matter of time before we saw the malevolent red glow of an invading spirit swarming towards the precarious ledge upon which we were foolishly trying to make our last stand. Brown Souls was back, and with a vengeance. All the lip-chewing, hair-raising, pants-BROWNING tension had returned in droves. Now if I still need to explain the staggering wit behind our nickname then frankly, I’ve failed miserably in life, and I’m off to buy another pack of adult diapers.

3. League of lagers

At least I can say that I tried to put up a fight. For weeks moving into months, I stubbornly remained loyal to StarCraft 2 despite the mass exodus of people I knew who were jumping the fence to frolic in greener pastures. The Battlenet became an even lonelier place, those cold metallic menu screens seeming to highlight the desolate “0” that hovered above my friends list. I consigned myself to a solitary existence of grinding my way up the 1v1 ladder, just as the isolation ground away at my soul. It was only a matter of time before I eventually caved under the badgering pressure of my friends and flatmates, but while it may have been time to move house, I had packed nothing but scepticism and sour grapes. 

Twenty minutes down the gurgler any time he rears his
ugly head on the summoners rift

Well father fuck me. Over a year has passed and I’m man enough to admit that I was wrong. League of Legends is an excellent MOBA game. The different champions are fun and diverse, the items are relatively balanced and the strategic gameplay has been well developed to promote and reward effective team-based tactics. Okay fair enough, I’ll get my nose out of Riot’s ass. Some of the champions are pretty underpowered or situational, such as Heimerdinger – a squat little afro-haired mechanic, who specializes in throwing spanners and peppering the ground in automated turrets. Other characters like Darius – an axe wielding death machine with a permanent scowl, most likely due to his rapidly receding hairline – are horrendously powerful and downright game-breaking if played right. The LoL Meta-game also dictates a very rigid team composition and any deviation from the recommended strategic line-up of Tanks, DPS carries and junglers will usually result in a guaranteed defeat, assuming you’re matched against a team of reasonably similar skill. But therein lies the greatest problem. 

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind...

LoL is to date, a staggeringly popular game with an enormously active player base. Unfortunately, and I’m going to be as blunt as possible here, a depressingly large chunk of that player base is made up of Grade- A assholes. In this case, the definition of asshole can be used to encompass any number of negative gaming traits. Seriously, this shit is next level - Trolls, flamers, racists, alleged rapists and a staggering number of people who claim to have slept with my mother. By all accounts, the lovely Mrs MacTaggart has really done the rounds… I’ve lost track of the amount of keyboards that I’ve left broken and stamped with an imprint of my groaning face. This game really does bring out the worst in people. Everyone’s an expert, or a critic or an ignorant idiot who thinks it’s a stellar idea to try and jungle Kassadin. Okay, maybe not everyone. Maybe not even the majority, but I’ve still had more than enough bad experiences to convince me that LoL has the worst online gaming community that I’ve ever climbed through my bedroom window to find banging my girlfriend/sister/mum/dad… yep… even my dad.

Bad taste...

I will grudgingly admit that it kind of makes sense though. This isn’t an FPS team deathmatch where one prodigal player can potentially carry the entire the team, this is an un-oiled machine attempting to grind away on five chipped, rusty and different shaped cogs. LoL demands a basic level of cohesion. Failing that, or at least appearing to be the reason that others are failing, will usually earn you the ire of your teammates and the mockery of your opponents. And damn it sucks having up to nine people haranguing you while you try to play. Seriously, there’s only so much abuse that your online anonymity can buffer you from before you just stop enjoying yourself.

One clever blogger might even compare the experience to a night out on the town, where it takes a fair alcoholic basting before I’m socially lubricated enough to Parkinson’s my way around a dance floor. Well that was easy enough then. Introduce a dash of liqueur and some suitably harsh consequences for any game related screw-ups and the rest of the hilarity pretty much writes itself. Predictably enough, the screw ups and hilarity would increase at an exponential rate as more chemical debauchery took place, which was all well and good as long as we kept reminding ourselves that it was the social sauce responsible for the match history plastered with 1 kill – 12 death, jungle Yi games… League of lagers was like an oasis for five parched, jaded and disillusioned men. An oasis admittedly consisting of bad ideas, terrible plays and even worse dubstep. All of that aside, lagers came at an important junction in all of our LoL playing hobbies, breathing interest, laughter and fun back into a game that we sorely wanted to love playing, but we just couldn’t for the life of us remember the fuck how to do that. 

Time to Make a Difference

Batman seems to be my go-to-guy for moodiness. I suppose I liken
myself to a surly vigilante... Well at least as far as the temperament
and externally worn underwear are concerned.

It must be that time again, time to make a difference. I don’t mean that in the vague hypothetical sense, or as the opening line to a lofty and righteously awesome facebook campaign dedicated towards raising enough money to replace all my threadbare underwear. And between you, me and the gate post, that’s something that seriously needs to get done. Nope, believe it or not, I’m actually being serious. The clock has struck midnight, the wee hours are advancing and only the grimmest of men remain to hold them at bay. Its not until the day is gone that I ever seem to reflect on how I should have spent it. This is the time of the difference maker.

Who the hell needs Marmite?

Or maybe it’s the time of the guilt ridden graduate? That burly, recently youthful, dubiously motivated budding journalist who has wandered out into the kitchen for another few slices of Vogel’s and happens to glance through the shutters and out into the inky darkness. He pauses and scowls, crinkling his brow into a familiarly furrowed expression, the sort that he is guaranteed to regret later in his not so golden years when he his face looks like a football pitch after match day. The darkness speaks volumes and it reeks of another day wasted on League of Legends and reddit, two media items of pervasively unparalleled addiction. Its pitch black out there, darker than the coal that he was once forced to analyse in a backwater laboratory  and thicker than the Promite he was about to lather across his now cold toast. He’s wracked with guilt, or maybe that’s just hunger. It’s been so long since his last few slices of toast after all. He shakes his head, and mans-up with the sort of masculine, no nonsense resolve which has tricked him into growing horrendously unkempt facial hair all too often in the past. Him and I know the score. Tomorrow will be different. There's gonna be some serious changes. And just like that we delude ourselves with the same self indulging bullshit that justifies everyday that gets spent wandering in a zombie trance through the Fields of Justice. Maybe a list will be the reminder we need... 

• Write more. If that means smaller blogs and less rambling, then that'll have to do. The small part, not so much the rambling. 
• Write more. Consign oneself to playing indie games and reviewing them instead of shelling out an entire weekly food allowance on a recent big title release. That's not such a big compromise. Hell, beggars can’t be choosers/Vogel’s connoisseurs.
• On that note, play indie games. Play any games other than League of Legends! There's nothing wrong with binging on a game when there will be an eventual conclusion to the narrative or skill rewarding pay off, but LoL is just an online form of masochism, hidden behind the clever guise of a MOBA. It's a love hate relationship in every sense of the term.  
• Write more. Harry Potter fan fiction is really popular right? Make sure you feature plenty of homoerotic tension between Harry and Ron. 
• Run more. A lot of people hate working out, but running is fun. The loneliness of the long distance runner and all of that carry on.

So yeah, run for fun, write more stuff, and disregard bitches - acquire Vogel’s. I know, I know... Stick to the gaming editorials and the fan fiction Jim…

The Crux of the Problem (Part 3)

The Two Big Culprits

2. StarCraft 2

Before you ask, I'm actually promoting the ice.

I’ve never been big on the competitive, online side of videogaming. Mostly because I’ve never really had access, truth be told. Sure I’ve done my obligatory stretch on Xbox Live getting screamed at by angry Americans because I couldn’t help but notice how brutally effective the grenade launcher is, but an evening spent sinking a few Millers and firing off my “noobtube” isn’t quite in the same realm of dedication as a 10^th Prestige COD player or a level 90 Night Elf Druid. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the company of fellow gamers, it’s more that Army of Two or Resident Evil 5 have the sort of multiplayer experiences that can best be enjoyed and finished in a single evening or two, assuming that the Millers to gaming ratio doesn’t slur too heavily in favour of the Millers.

If I had to psychoanalyse this chink in my gaming armour a little further, I guess I’d admit that I don’t really enjoy losing, and that aversion sure isn’t helped by some high-pitched little bastard calling me a “big fat sweaty nerd” while he whoops my ass like I’m a runaway slave. My exception to this rule happens to be none other than StarCraft 2. Not because I don’t get called names, that still happens frequently, (assclown and fucktard being my personal favourites) but rather because I don’t lose all the goddamn time. Let’s cut straight to the point, StarCraft 2 is the only game for which I have ever trained or practiced. Why do I have this dedication towards SC2 and such a dislike towards other online games? Maybe it’s the fact that I started playing on and off right from the release date so I never found myself too far behind the metagame. Maybe it’s the fast-paced, intuitive gameplay that rewards good unit control and proper resource management. Perhaps it’s the Casters, those charismatic and informative members of the SC2 community who regularly post replays and strategy guides. Or possibly it’s the professional E-Sports scene which has validated and glorified the competitive gaming lifestyle. In truth, it’s a combination of all these elements and I’m a clichéd prick for not just saying that in the first place.

Great forcefields, not that I'd know anything about that..

I have a friend who gets his knickers in a twist every time I vent a bit of rage and frustration at my computer screen. I tend to avoid being a bad-mannered asshole when I play online(unless I’m playing LoL where being bad mannered seems to be a requirement for registering an account), so for the most part my outbursts are usually just me kicking myself at an act of outrageous stupidity. This apparent friend of mine feeds me bullshit one-liner after bullshit one-liner like some sort of gaming spiritual advisor who has taken it upon himself to save my videogaming soul. “Calm down”, “just have fun”, “It’s not like you’re getting paid”- He rolls these things off like a fucking conveyor belt. Well you know what Ghandi? I say phooey to all that nonsense. I don’t play a competitive online game to just saunter around with a bottle of lube and a well-stretched rectum, I play it to win. I enjoy the cleansing satisfaction of scratching out a narrow victory after a forty minute macro game just as much as the thrill of smashing someone in an intense seven minute micro-fest. Sure there are custom games, team leagues and the gratification that comes from being promoted and improving your skills but at the end of the day I play StarCraft 2 because I’m in the business of kicking ass, and business is good.

A proud moment for me. Not so much for my parents or my University tutors.

1. Heroes of Might and Magic 4

Look at that P.I.M.P in the purple cape. Seriously. Mid battle,
dragons, genies and fucking titans, and I can't
take my eyes off that baller purple cape.   

What a bloody strange game to score the number 1 slot right? It should by all rights have been claimed by World of Warcraft or League of Legends or University of Canterbury or some other abominable game which demands a colossal commitment of time. But nope, its good old Heroes, 3DO’s underappreciated masterpiece, so how do I do this game the justice it deserves? I’m torn between three factors, gameplay, novelty value and nostalgia. I’ll brush over the first section quickly, 2D visuals, detailed maps, great musical score, wide range of different skills and creatures to pick from, unbalanced as hell and AI that is as thick as bricks. So a bit of a mix there, a rough diamond, an unpolished gem and a fair bit of blood because squeezing that unbiased assessment out of me was like torturing Joanna Dark for classified Intel(refer to section 1). 

Heroes also employed turn-based gameplay and combat, the same grubby mechanic which meant that Rome: Total War and Civilization 4 only narrowly missed out on the opportunity to monopolise my top 5 time sinks with turn based strategy games. Let’s be brutally honest here, for the overwhelming majority of people strategy games revolve around the most crude of tactics – Turtling. Turtling refers to the wartime practice of sitting inside a heavily fortified base, slowly and methodically massing up a doomsday army, usually tanks or some similarly extravagant form of mech, before rolling across the map in a wave of inefficient genocide. This pathological form of gaming cowardice is one of the main reasons why RTS campaigns take days to complete and why most gamers shit the bed when they reach one of those missions where they’re given an objective to complete under the constraints of a time-limit, limited resources or a finite supply of troops. Try exacerbating this time sink by chucking in a turn-based mechanic with its careful consideration of movement points, build orders and resource accumulation and what’ve you got? Definitely not the sort of game where you decide to have “one more turn” while the taxi is sitting outside with its horn honking and its metre running, that’s for fucking sure. 

The desert and the jungle, in all its eleven year old glory.

My second factor was novelty value. I feel like I’m trying to cover my ass with this one because the feature it’s referring to isn’t exactly common practice these days. I’ll just come right out and say it – Hot Seat Multiplayer. That’s right, Hot Seat. Basically split screen mode for computers, except without any actual splitting of the screen because Heroes is a turn based game remember. Hot Seat was the arrogant assumption by 3DO that there would be gamers crazy enough to crowd around a single computer, struggling for space at the desk as they waited patiently for a measly two minute turn and the inevitable ten minute delay that followed. It’s like chess for up to six people, except your pieces are limited to moving only a few squares each turn and the board is over eighty spaces in length and width, so for the first few dozen turns all anyone can do is brag and bluster. With that being said, why anyone would play a turn based strategy game over LAN or the internet is beyond me. Sure Hot Seat didn’t change the fact that you still had plenty of downtown to twiddle your thumbs in-between your turns, but at least it meant you had friends sitting around to help you with the twiddling…. cough. 

Spazz Maticus in the Winds Of War cinematic.
Look at the state of that bonkers bastard.

My third factor was nostalgia, and this one comes with a heavy lashing of honesty. Heroes was one of the first PC games that I had a chance to play regularly. I fell in love with the sheer amount of chaos and clutter on each map, the vividly bright visuals and the wailing Opera singers that blasted through my crackling PC speaker every time I clicked into the town menu. The Hot Seat mode was hilariously fun but I’ll be the first to admit that more was certainly not merrier as more people meant longer downtimes and the rapid onset of boredom. The different teams are disgustingly imbalanced and the cinematic's are so bad they still give me a chuckle to this very day. All of this considered, Heroes has remained consistently installed on my computer for years. It has a timeless appeal that will be forever buffered by my corny sentiments and shameless bias. 

Let me take you on a journey back nine years into the middle of my highschool experience, the peak of all my nerdy social awkwardness and well before I realized how ruggedly handsome I am with a full beard. Through the miracle of teenage courtship, that amazing process that somehow converts shady glances and stuttering compliments into youthful infatuation, I managed to get my first girlfriend – a beautiful blonde American student named Emily. Fast forward a few weeks down the track and I’m spending the afternoon at a friend’s house playing computer games. I get a phone call from Emily informing me in the most sultry and suggestive of manners that her parents aren’t home and I should come over for a visit. I’m happy to tell you that I had my priorities locked down tight. What started out as a pretty great day, culminated in one of the best afternoons of my young life when I finally managed to smash my friend on Zanfas’ Challenge, a notoriously huge Heroes map. I know what you’re thinking; how the hell would I have managed to do that from Emily’s house?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I could swear that's the same purple cloaked playa in the bottom left.

The Crux of the Problem (Part 2)

Role-Playing-Gumption

4. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

I guess I was looking for someone gorgeous and
gormless but I couldn't find a decent photo
of your sister.

Any gamer worth their salt will have at some point been shanghaied by a free-roaming RPG. Whether its Dark Souls with its ball-busting difficulty curve, Baldur’s Gate and its peerless narrative or for the masochistic – Gothic and its stun-locking wolves. As gamers, we gather around the heels of developers, baying for more intuitive gameplay and less linear storylines. We chant for freedom, that ethereal creature with her cheerful skip and her glowing smile. She looks like everything we want in a game unfettered from the patriarchal power regime of media corporations and their insatiable need to sow constraint. Look a little closer though, and you’ll see that her trailing foot drags behind her, not so much a skip as it is a listless stagger, a product of idleness and a mass of undirected free time. A tendril of drool seeps slowly out of the corner of her mouth, her eyes are impassive orbs. All she sees are the distant mountaintops of Skyrim and a double life spent stealing pottery, running from imperial guards, finding a fence to ditch her stolen goods and then using the profit to pay off her bounty. It’s a vicious cycle and she’s not exactly trading in a hot commodity. 

Jesus I need to tone these metaphors down. That was my long-winded way of saying we’ve all been there, free-roaming RPG’s are developed almost exclusively with immense play-times and replay-ability in mind. Huge environments to explore, reams of text and dialogue to sift through, myriads of different skills, classes, races and character types to choose from/agonise over. Morrowind was my biggest poison. It popped my RPG cherry and then it came back to haunt me years later when all I had was my Dad’s laptop to entertain me one summer. I use the term “laptop” rather loosely as that suggests I played on some sort of streamlined device manufactured especially for its portability. That was far from the case. Think of a sandwich press; now make sure you visualize that sandwich press loaded with a serious megashit inducing, Frankenstein of a sandwich. We’re talking three tins of tuna, a can of sweet corn, half a block of cheese and a squirt of Worcestershire sauce all squeezed between two whole begets. You’re gonna have to back your car over the press just to close the dirty thing. Now imagine you repeat that abomination in another sandwich press before duct-taping the two machines on top of each other. There you have it, a reasonably accurate, model representation of my Dad’s old laptop. As an added feature, you can plug the two presses in and over time they’ll also manage a passable re-enactment of how well Morrowind ran on said computer. 

Mathematics

Despite the odd framerate related hitch, Morrowind welded me to the keyboard. I loved the inhospitable and bleak environments, swamps, ash-storms and volcanoes oh my. The architecture and the lore were unlike anything I’d encountered before with familiar hints of traditional fantasy mixed seamlessly with alien races and architecture. It was the unique elements of Elder Scrolls lore and the haunting landscape that made Morrowind such a joy to explore. Combine this inherent desire to waste time with the sort of game design which had no intention of babysitting the player around its world – no map markers, no quick travel and a notoriously unorganised journal – and while I may have wintered in the Riviera, I definitely spent that summer in Morrowind. 

Just in case a combination of my emotive
prose and Megan Fox's tight ass was
making you sentimental, here's a
reality check. 

3. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup    

I’ve always had a hard time describing DCSS to my friends/family/women at bars after a few too many [insert any form of alcohol based drink here], and my initial Vin Diesel related pick-up lines have failed. I’m going to cut out the middleman and pre-empt any long-winded metaphor which may or may not have tried to explain DCSS with the clever inclusion of a joke about your mums milk-silo’s and how I recently spent my Saturday night. Reference ahoy!

“Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a free rougelike game of exploration and treasure-hunting in dungeons filled with dangerous and unfriendly monsters in a quest for the mystifyingly fabulous Orb of Zot.”(http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/about)

And for the uninitiated –

“The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by level randomization, permanent death, and turn-based movement”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike)

There’s something refreshingly cleansing about playing an indie game. You know, supporting a small development team and appreciating a low-budget game for its quality design creativity rather than slamming it for a lack of Blockbuster visuals. We’ve all been there – Dwarf Fortress, Legend of Grimlock, Bastion – and if you haven’t, then stop reading my fucking blog right now finish reading my blog and donate to my future projects, after which time I insist that you place the name of every indie game mentioned in this section into a hat or an ice cream container(preferably an empty one you jackass), and then draw out the name of the only computer game that you’ll be playing for the next 3 months. Any follow up questions? Hold on, hold on, let me nip a few of those possible queries in the bud. There’s no multiplayer, no plot and the visuals usually vary between ACIS coding, a graphical system which literally uses numbers, symbols and alphabetical characters in place of graphics or tile based graphics which for all intensive purposes, resemble a straight port from the Sega Master system.

Apparently there's an ogre somewhere in amongst that and he's having a rough time of it.

Alternatively you can use the Tiles set which allows you to behold Saint Roka in all his terrifying
glory and he's not here to fuck spiders. 

This leaves just one serious whooper of a question then – what the shit is left? Well for starters, gameplay. Dungeon Crawl employs a number of deceptively complex game mechanics to help pad-out your RPG adventure. These include but are not limited to, magic systems, different weapon types, religion, mutations and special abilities. Add in the traditional RPG character creation combo of race and class plus a levelling system which allows the gamer to designate experience to over 30 different skills and I’ve just paraphrased the brainstorming process for the next Elder Scrolls game. Unfortunately, DCSS looks more like Alex the Kid than it does Skyrim, so it takes a devil in the details to make DCSS worthy of my number 3 slot. Dungeon Crawl is an exercise in selective simplicity. The core idea is pretty damn straightforward – choose a race and a class, start on the first floor of a dungeon complex and make your way down through 27 other levels to retrieve a magic artefact. Other than the odd shop and extremely odd friendly minion, the game will consist of you fighting an assortment of different creatures on each floor. That’s pretty much it. You’ll fight, and fight and run and run and eventually learn to pick which scraps you shouldn’t even bother starting in the first place. Buts that’s where those details rear their beautiful heads. 

While the overarching concept is simple, the sheer degree of customisability on each character, the variety of loot, the terrifying hotchpotch of different monsters and the many ways in which you can fight each desperate battle is truly staggering. And those fights will be desperate. There’s some something intrinsically nerve-wracking about playing an RPG where every fresh game spawns a completely new dungeon and there’s no way to save your character when they die. And mine did. Time after time, I enthusiastically sunk days into a character, only to end up one heart breaking click away from a turn where poison damage finished off my last few hit-points, or Boris the Lich blasted me into oblivion with a purple ball of energy. I would understandably sulk for a week or two before eventually mustering up the minerals to venture back into the dungeon. Inspiring stuff, I know. It also made for some hilarious stories. The sort of stories that were so mind-blowingly comical that I could only ever tell them to one other nerdy and close friend of mine. We laughed and we cried, we learnt and we lost and if we ever made love then I was always the pitcher.

Boris and I have a score to settle, but if I was a betting man I'd still put all my money on him.