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. 

The Crux of the Problem (Part 1)

Gaming journalism - and also the look on my
Dad's face when I told him about my
proposed career.

Gaming journalism stinks like something that is just too good to be true. On one side of the table you have a medium which was created solely for the purpose of recreation and entertainment, while on the other side sits the smug form of journalism, grinning from ear to ear because it can’t quite believe its luck.  Writing the odd article and reviewing a few games seems like a small price to pay for being allowed to wallow away your days in front of a glowing LCD screen. My Dad always told me – “Don’t root your best friends missus’”, that and – “If it seems too good to be true then it probably is.” I am happy to say that I am still yet to perform the ultimate faux pas of friendship; unfortunately I think I am sorely deluded where gaming journalism is concerned. 

I read an article a while back that listed some of the generic skills needed to saunter successfully up the corporate ladder of journalism and gaming associates. This list could apparently help you dodge “Rejection”, the burly Fijian doorman whose skin is burnt an unsettling shade of beige from the time he spent serving as a soldier of fortune in Syria. Coincidentally, this is the same guy that is waiting to Rock-Bottom you the next time you try and feed that “It’s not the size of the boat, it’s the motion of the ocean” bullshit to your soon to be ex-girlfriend.

Enjoy this moment while it lasts because man I suck
at editing photos.

This same magic list will also oil you up with enthusiasm and slide you across the lobby foyer of “Hotel Success”. Your greasy trail conveniently obscures the tasteful flooring of Toledo tiles, which happen to be elegantly arranged in a mosaic to spell out the word “Practice”. Before you know it you’ve slithered straight through the open doors of the executive elevator, and that bad boy is an express route to Good-Time Offices. 

Try and excuse my cynicism, the article was actually pretty useful. There was just one line in particular that seemed tailor-made for souring my unrealistic outlook, “You have to enjoy writing about games more than you enjoy playing them.” I know right, time to blanch. That pill seems a little hard to swallow. As I stated earlier, Videogames are designed primarily as forms of entertainment and while writing and gaming can both be hobbies, there is a natural state of progression where gaming journalism and the meshing of those two hobbies are concerned. As a rule, you’ve gotta play the game to be able to write anything about it, and mustering up the motivation to play a videogame has – at least for me – never been a problem. But therein lies the crux of the problem. 

Yes skerrick is a word you cheeky bastards. 

Gaming journalism hinges on a sense of self control and professionalism that I am undoubtedly lacking. Gaming has long been one of my main hobbies, to the point where it has sometimes seemed like a choking weed in my garden of fun, causing all of my other pastimes to wither and die. I have committed a truly staggering amount of time to some videogames and as of so far, I have barely written a skerrick about any of them.

So here I am, poised on the precipice of validation, ready to justify the hundreds of hours that I have sunk into five pieces of particularly addictive media. These games, good or bad, are all at the heart of my gaming obsession. I am not here to debate their merits, but like a drunken conversation where I try to defend Nicolas Cages’ acting, I’ll probably end up doing just that. These are my ...

And yes I did mean to capitalise every word except gaming.....  fuck.

5.            Halo: Combat Evolved

Old Halo. The one and only. The infamous. Of all the games in this list, Halo is the one that makes me feel like I’ve just been caught re-enacting Shaggy’s “It wasn’t me” music video. I can already hear the scorn in your cynical voices as you reread your comments out loud, checking to make sure you haven’t screwed up the spelling in your homophobic insults. “How does someone sink a serious amount of time into an FPS lacking any online features? P.S you’re a fag.” Two reasons – Visuals and multiplayer. 

First up, Halo was fucking beautiful. I know the original graphics now look like hammered shit but bear with me here. Think back to a time where James Bond and Joanna Dark looked like they’d been clobbered by the ugly bat, warped and twisted faces courtesy of too many harsh interrogation sessions and Nintendo 64 graphics. Cue Halo and a technological revolution. Shimmering energy shields, blades of grass and Tool inspired lighting effects. You show me the gamer that wasn’t initially wowed by their first time driving a Warthog around Halo’s sprawling open environments and I’ll show you a soulless bastard. 

I think we all know who you'd rather take home for Christmas.

So take the sort of visuals that left me staring starry eyed and slack jawed at my best friends 14inch…… television, and then chuck in co-op mode for the campaign, 4 player split screen and LAN support for up to 16 people. Halo singlehandedly made me an advocate for any future game featuring a co-operative campaign. If driving a Warthog was fun on your own then having a friend ride shotgun and scream “Get to da choppa!!” over and over again was a rare kind of joy.  Colour me sold from that moment onwards – ‘The more the merrier’ became a mantra of mine for any situation outside of the bedroom, because while I may be a red-blooded man, I’m also very realistic about my abilities when it comes to doing the horizontal mambo. 

This was the game that spawned a console LAN craze for the first and probably only time in history. Ah those were the days. LAN parties and  Capture the Flag on Sidewinder - which always started with the best of intentions - until several hours later the game gradually ground out to an exhausted stalemate and those stoic players still left standing inevitably turned to slaughtering their allies for entertainment. This is also the only videogame to date which I have played with any of my friends’ father’s. Jim Mckelvie – The Ghost Recon specialist and designated getaway driver in any and all escape situations. As long as he didn’t have to exit the vehicle for any reason we were fine. There’s twitchy trigger fingers and then there was Jim, who aimed a charged up plasma pistol like a terrified Parkinson’s patient trying to defuse a bomb in the midst of a Siberian blizzard. Damn, he was a surgeon with the shotgun though. 

The Graveyard Shift

Yorick the Gravedigger, so yes it does have some relevance here.

What the hell is it about staying up late? It’s a habit that I can’t seem to shift. Now before someone decides to dedicate their life to finding me and wearing my colon around their ankle for asking such an inane question, hold up a sec. I’m reasonably good at rationalizing my problems, at least to the extent where I don’t just sit in a pile of my own faecal matter, scratching my head in complete ignorance. I know that a combination of studying and too much free time contributes pretty heavily. Boil that rationale down a bit further, and the truth is that without a job I don’t have any seriously pressing constraints on my sleeping habits. The 3am to 3pm shift isn’t a scheduled thing, if I feel like I need to mix that sucker up with I don’t know, let’s say a Back to the Future marathon, then hell yeah I can do just that. 

This is the point where people start shaking their head and turning off the main power switch because I could obviously do with a little bit less time welded to my computer chair. I get that, I’m sure most gamers do, but there’s something inherently addictive about videogames and the internet. For starters, videogames are developed as a means of entertainment, their sole purpose being to unashamedly engage, immerse and capture the undivided attention of their audience. The recreational and informative side of the World Wide Web attempts to do the very same, and unfortunately for my sleeping habits, neither of these mediums ever turn off. We live in an age of accessibility; technology can deliver fun, facts and food straight into my living room, assuming that I’m comfortable with letting the Pizza delivery guy through the front door. I can’t blame the medium’s, they’re doing their job perfectly. 

If I look through Geralt of Rivia’s journal I’m pretty sure I won’t find a quest titled “Keep Jim awake until he hears his flatmates getting up for work and has to sneak back into his bedroom before anyone can ask him an awkward question about bandwidth consumption” So it’s an issue of self control then? Switch off the PS3, pour the coffee down the drain and go the fuck to bed. What if it’s not that simple? Videogames have a nasty habit of engaging my brain and giving me a rush of energy far more effectively than a movie or a book ever could. You know that moment, when the words begin to blur under your nose or the couch cushion gradually starts looking more attractive than Kate Beckinsale does on-screen. Try pulling that same nodding-off bullshit mid way through defusing a bomb on CounterStrike, sound farfetched? That’s because it never happens. I’m not some sort of burlier Edward Cullen though, I don’t want to be a vampire and I sure as hell don’t sparkle in the sunlight. Existing that far outside of regular sleeping hours just feels weird, like I’m a rebel without a cause, railing against the bars of social convention by napping into the late afternoon and scaring schoolchildren with my skin-tight underwear and freshly-woken scowl.

Definitely not what I look like when I
wake up and another reason to hide
my blog from your dad...

I like people. I like my flatmates. I don’t particularly like seeing them for a measly five hours before they go to bed and leave me to my YouTube trawling lonesome. Or maybe I don’t like people. People just interrupt when you’re trying to stream Jack Conte’s new single, or they barge into your room with a platter of warm muffins, distracting you with the smell of pumpkin and chocolate and causing you to look away just long enough for the Titanite Demon to land its power attack and send you screaming back into the abyss for the umpteenth time. Most likely, I’ve just got a mild sleeping disorder. Hell, it’s not all bad. Let’s just say that poor old Mr Jiang across the street has been having serious problems with his weekend paper delivery, that being the Sunday Star Times, the one that doesn’t arrive around 5.18am every Sunday morning.           

Escape from Blogging Bay (Part 2)

A Riddickulous Realization

One hour from midnight and I’m sitting at the kitchen table, the fire needs wood and I should probably turn some lights on but I’m too busy looming over my laptop with a sheen of sweat across my forehead as Riddick stalks his way through a gloomy vent. I’m lost as shit and the in-game map is cruder than bathroom graffiti. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, my journal is still loaded with random side quests but I have a sinking feeling that my current route is leading me further down the main storyline. It’s that infamous one-way street, no U-turns and no more detours. I’m sour as hell and you could rock climb up the furrows in my brow. What would Riddick do? The realization hits me like a Stone Cold Stunner. Riddick would haul ass the hell out of Butcher Bay. He would stop dicking around with side quests and shiv every jumped up inmate who insisted on trying to pressgang him into smuggling drugs or picking up their dry cleaning. All of sudden it made perfect sense to be lost. Butcher Bay is for all intensive purposes - a shithole. Venturing down into the mines, lurking through cramped crawlspace after cramped crawlspace, corridors and rooms set out like a filthy rat warren. Pluck me from the main track and its conveniently unlocked doors and I’d go missing in no time. Butcher Bay is an architectural nightmare and if Riddick can barely scrape out a half assed escape route then how the hell am I supposed to know where I should be? For me Butcher Bay exemplifies two staple ingredients needed in any successful Sci-fi/survival horror goulash –

1. Claustrophobic environments which are all too easy to get lost in and
2. Intuitive level design which will keep players moving even when they barely have the faintest inkling as to whether they’re on the right track.

Ever since I played that steaming pile of disappointment called Rage, the very thought of sidequests in a survival horror/FPS game has left me feeling a bit queasy. Butcher Bay was sure its diversions fit into the main story context and that every move Riddick made on and off the beaten path was for a damn good reason. As long as the game kept flowing under the pretence of a man fighting for his freedom through any means necessary, then my mate immersion and I weren’t going anywhere.

Don't let your homophobic father catch you reading my blog now...

And therein lies the root of the issue. Grinding for experience or being assigned fetch quest after fetch quest is the natural enemy of immersion. Some game genres suit that style and it is an unfortunate staple of many RPG designs but that doesn’t necessarily make it a good thing. Its robotic, it’s boring and it creates the sort of OCD moments of madness that I mentioned earlier. Butcher Bay didn’t do that, I did. I panicked and briefly misinterpreted a small section of side missions as a harbinger of terrible RPG game elements to come. In hindsight, all it really did was pad the game out and give you an effective taste of Butcher Bay’s prison atmosphere by coercing you through sections of depressingly gritty level design and great voice acting. After I left that strange psychological barrier in my dust, Butcher Bay really came into its own. “Who the fuck designs a prison this poorly-lit, bleak and maze-like?” I don’t know because I’m a bloodthirsty escaped convict, not an engineer. “Whoops! I just missed a pile of shot gun ammo, maybe I should go back and pick it up?” Screw that, I’ve got places to go and people to butcher, and frankly bullets kill too slow. I’ll happily reiterate the fact that Butcher Bay is a great game but I don’t think all the immersion comes courtesy of Starbreeze Studios. I’ve naturally got a lot in common with Richard B. Riddick. Escaped convict and mass murderer? Ahhh not so much. Tall, well-built, handsome and bald? Well I don’t mean to brag, but let’s just say that if I shaved my head, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Diesel and I were separated at birth. 

Escape from Blogging Bay (Part 1)

So I'm writing this on my first semester break, unnervingly far away from the internet and any subsequent online addictions e.g. Reddit, Redtube and League of Legends/Lagers. Just like my summer holidays, this tends to result in me catching up on a few sorely missed hours of singleplayer gaming. I transform into the epitome of an antisocial, curtain closing, beard-farming, stinking assed slob. The fact that I live a hop and a skip away from a river and a beach, and I’ve still managed to cultivate a healthy/unhealthy beer belly is testament to just how slobbish I am capable of becoming. I’m also a media whore. You’re gonna hear that from me a lot. When Hollywood makes a movie, I watch it. When Ubisoft releases a game, I chew the disc into a fine powder and then rub the dust into my eyes because that’s just how fucking fast I want to absorb all of that gaming magic. So by that token, when Starbreeze Studios develop a spin-off game based on Vin Diesel’s “Riddick” movie character, you can bet your ass that I’ll eventually get around to playing it at least five to seven years after the release date. And damn if I won’t enjoy it.

That last part wasn’t a joke, just in case you still can’t tell that when Sally Sarcasm says no she actually means no. When I describe myself as a media whore, I simply mean to suggest that I’m prepared to give the overwhelming majority of media products a fighting chance. To be fair, I also have a habit of dredging up whatever redeeming qualities I possibly can from the dross that I often subject myself to. On that note, I’m not here to argue semantics, but I bloody enjoyed the two Riddick movies – Pitch Black and Chronicles. Credibility be fucking damned! I’m a firm believer that movies and games are made to entertain, and frankly, I found Riddick to be the incarnation of bad ass. The modern Rambo if you will – less brood and more cheesy dry wit – less misunderstood good guy and more sociopathic antihero. Not that Butcher Bay needs me to spew excuses and stammer out some sort of half assed validation. I’ll bleach these muddy waters right here and now, it’s a damn good game.

Less rant and more write. I started enjoying Butcher Bay right out of the gate. It definitely helped that I’m one heavy night on whiskey away from getting Vin’s shiny bald head tattooed on my back, but the fact remains that he has just the sort of speak-when-your-spoken-to, wise-cracking type of charisma that is perfect for a modern FPS protagonist. The game kind of saunters through the first few sections on Riddick’s reputation alone, assuming that we won’t take his radiating ass-kickery for granted. I could mention the combat and star-studded voice acting, the unnervingly bare-bones stealth mechanics that seem as startling and unpredictable as shit, but these aren’t what really stood out to me. The realization that I was really enjoying myself hit me like a hammer to my unkempt head, when I noticed that I didn’t mind being lost. I know right, what the hell does that even mean? Well bear with me here for a few moments. You know that feeling that you get when you’re playing an RPG and you’ve just entered a new town and all of sudden you find yourself getting mobbed by all the local NPC’s, pounding you with fetch quests and kill orders like you’re some sort of hitman who moonlights as a courier. It starts to get pretty overwhelming and you begin vetoing the main questline, giving pride of place to Joe Nobody and his psychotic desire for seventeen Ogre scalps. Alright Joe, you crazy bastard, I’ll get you your Ogre Scalps, but if you don’t reward me with a sack full of loot and Jimi Hendrix’s re-strung guitar then I’ll be keeping the scalps and a chunk of your ass jammed on the end of my boot. 

Lucky for me they didn't make left handed guitars back then.

Your progress grinds to a screeching halt as you’re stuck in the same bloody area. You’re too scared to move on in case you lose a few worthless reputation points or Joe really does pull through with Jimi's restored git-fiddle. You check your journal every five minutes, agonizing over the workload like it’s some sort of urgent school assignment. Every monster, farm animal, tree and shrub which you rape for quest items, gradually turns the surrounding landscape into a desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland. Its scorched earth on a scale unheard of since the Kraut’s levelled half of Finland. But that’s alright, because you won’t have missed any important story content or quest rewards. You’re worse than a headless chicken. At least that poor bastard gets to die when all the running around is done.