Thursday 30 January 2014

Oi! Who're You Looking At?

Critics.  Hated by large swathes of the creative community, seen as jealous wannabes who want to tear down what they can't achieve or simply feared as the blade-wielding boogie men with the ability to slash a creative's hamstrings with the merest phrase.  Trashing what they despise while blindly lauding what they see as worthy – either way painted in the pejorative.  You know the way most of the adult population feels about Justin Bieber*.

It's safe to say critics can be described as maligned or fucking detested.  People just don't seem to take to them, even outside of the creative community.  If a critic or a reviewer says something a member of the public disagrees with, they become that whiny voice that you just want to put full stop of a slap on.  I admit there are some television reviewers I feel that way about.

I don't hate critics, far from it, I think they perform a necessary service.  They give guidance and help us pick our way through the whole 99% percent of bullshit swamp writing, films, television and games inevitably are.  A good critique or review** is like an enthusiastic sprite hopping ahead of you, showing you the safe path, a bit like Dungeon Master only less fucking insufferable.  You get a fine rewarding and fun experience when you take their advice.

Let's be honest, not all reviews are good, and this, I think, is where people get the wrong impression about critics and reviewers.  A negative review can be seen as a bad review and paranoia strikes, so you get situations like Kevin Smith having a big hissy fit because no one likes his films.  Just because critics are lambasting what you're creating doesn't mean there's some kind of conspiracy against you, maybe what you should be doing is stop being lazy and defensive and take on board what they're saying, like a grown up, ya big baby.  A good critique or review gives you that kind of feedback, except maybe the big baby bit.

People do tend to focus on hatchet jobs, though.  Yes, they are amusing in a mean-spirited way, but they don't often help very much.  I'm not saying every review of a piece of work should be handled like it's made of wafer-thin porcelain, that would be stupid, but in the midst of the chainsaw putdowns, maybe there should be some kind of rope thrown that hasn't been tied into a noose.  Being a colossal cunt to a film or a novel or game might be easy and a lot of fucking fun, particularly if it's a real piece of shit§ it ultimately hurts creative community as a whole.  It might seem that a lazy, sloppy mess of whatever deserves a whipping, and it does, but only up to a point.  The carrot needs to go along with a stick, and not just to insert into the orifices of the offending creator.

I think it basically comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the critic is – and that includes the critics themselves, sadly.  It seems that some critics think their reviews must only concentrate on one aspect of what they are reviewing, an accusation that can be most easily levelled at literary criticism with the funny, but scathingly mean Hatchet Job of the Year Award that feels like it's applauding bludgeoning dickheadery.  It feels like a race to see who can deliver the most withering verbal dagger possible, even seeing themselves as the final authority in all things within their sphere of knowledge.  Not terrible helpful or educational for anyone, despite the entertainment value§§.  So the creators kind of go to war on the critics, withholding things for review, or worse, paying tame critics to give glowing reviews to everything they put out, which is just as damaging and has become something of a standard, sadly.  Creators and the people financing them have to learn bad reviews happen and bulking the reviews for shit products with glowing reviews only results in a decline in quality§§§, and so money.

I think the ideal review, from the perspective of the consumer, would involve two or three different critics of wildly different tastes all reviewing the same thing.  At least then you'll know there's a chance one of them will share your taste in whatever.  Not practical, but I didn't say it would be.  The other alternative is not to rely on one reviewer and go looking around this wonderful internet thing you've probably been told about and find a bunch of reviews to gauge whether you want to put money down for whatever creative thing it is you want.

Ultimately creativity doesn't grow in a vacuum and releasing your darling creation into the world exposes it to a whole wilderness of opinions.  At that's all critics and reviewers are espousing – opinions.  Everybody needs to take a breath and recall that's what it is. It's just a load of opinions that you can take onboard or ignore.  Just like this post, really.

* Yes, flying close to the wind, there.  Risking the wrath of screeching mob of mid-pubescent girls.  Don't worry, nothing's going to happen.  People need to read the fucking blog first.  And if you hope something happens to me, fuck you, your name's on the the list.  As soon as I start my list.

** As in well-written, not positive, come on, keep up.

  See above.  I don't want to be accused of not being clear.  I might be accused of being shit at blogs, but I'll avoid being accused of lacking clarity.  In theory, at least.  I like those theories that make me look good.

Sometimes.

§ Like The Human Centipede.  Not offensive, just slow, badly made and virtually plotless.  What I would say to the maker of that travesty is perhaps having ideas like that as central to the film isn't a good idea, perhaps as something used in the background.

§§ Do I seem to be sending mixed messages.  Probably, but I can't deny a really well-written, witty, nasty barb can be funny.

§§§ Then there's the farcical situation of paid reviews on Amazon, which is just sad.  Stop trying to confuse people into buying your sub-par shit, you fuckers!


Will

Wednesday 29 January 2014

The Wii U: A Step Too Far?

Note: This article was written over a year ago, just before the Wii U skulked into the marketplace. Y’know, just so you don’t think I’ve gone fucking doolally, but I think a lot of what I’m saying still stands.

Do you hear that distant rumble? Already the plates in the cupboard are starting to rattle under the constant vibration. Can you discern the sound like millions of coin slots working in unison, putting money into the hands of tame journalists? And I know you can hear the voice with the abysmal, borderline offensive Italian accent slowly repeating, “Buy-a me, buy-a me,” over and over again.

This lumbering behemoth, my friends, isn’t the product of screen induced dementia on my part – it’s the monstrous Nintendo PR machine for the Wii U stomping across the landscape with its dozens of compound eyes fixed on your wallet. Probably squishing a load of civilians in the process. A couple of bloody feet on the stomping hype beast don’t matter as long as the company can turn a profit.

Yes, that’s right. As you’re probably aware the people at Nintendo are well into the inexorable process of pushing their latest console into your consciousness. Some of you might even find the whole thing as uncomfortable as I’ve described it and some of you might be as excited as puppies who’ve managed to eat a bag of coffee. No one who has any interest at all in gaming is going to be unaware of this product. Ads and features will soon rain down on your poor beleaguered gamer’s head in the coming weeks. Here’s a fun quiz: who will be the most inappropriate person will Nintendo approach to endorse it? I’m going to say Stephen King or Richard Dawkins. Or a hologram of Steve Jobs*.

I’m not a Nintendo denigrator, in fact I’ve owned and enjoyed a few Nintendo consoles over the years, going back to the good old NES, but there’s something off about the Wii U. I’m not the only one to notice it, either. There are a few people looking askance at this new bit of hardware and wondering just what Nintendo are playing at.

Innovation is something that Nintendo have always been pretty good at. The NES gave us the small and easy to use game pads as standard to replace Atari’s bulky joysticks. The Gameboy opened up a whole new world in which to annoy people on the train or bus and the potential to crash a whole plane – how cool. The Wii broke through and really pulled in the whole family to play games and to get fit and wreck your television. What we got were fairly chunky bits of innovation, but delivered in an accessible way.

With the Wii U’s blocky tablet-like controller (called the GamePad, with a depressing level of mundanity and grandiosity) we have something that they’re telling us, fix-grinned and sweating, is a whole new way of playing games. You can look at inventories and stuff on the small screen, while you play on the big screen! Solve puzzles while in mortal danger! Do stuff that we hope developers will work out for us!

It all sounds a bit duff. The GamePad screen sounds to me like a distraction. Nintendo looked at the success of the DS and thought they could scale it up. A neat idea, but one that falls down if you think about it in any sensible way. With the DS you have your two screens one on top of the other, about a finger width apart and you can take in the information from both with a minimum of fuss. What the Wii U invites is whiplash. You could describe the distance between the GamePad and your TV as fingerwidth if you were talking about the finger of the god-like ‘It’s you!’ being from the early days of the UK’s National Lottery. Otherwise what you have is an annoying device that calls for your attention while you’re doing something on your eighty-four inch LCD TV.

Speaking of which, what if someone else has the audacity to watch something on your titanic screened television?  Don’t worry, you can play your Wii U game just on the GamePad’s screen. That doesn’t defeat the purpose of having the huge screen with super HD at all, does it? All those pretty graphics squished down to coloured blobs on the screen that’s one hundred times smaller than the one they’re supposed to be viewed on, that won’t suck any of the fun out of games, no sir. What about those features that you need to look at your GamePad screen to use? Will you need an even smaller screen to get the full effect or will it – gasp! – do what every other game does and either have an HUD or get you to pause the game? Wouldn’t that kind of go against the effect they’re going for?

It’s not all bad, they’re keeping the system backwards compatible with the Wii controller. Which is a smart move. By all accounts the old Wii players will get to play with much prettier games since the Wii U makes the Wii look like one of those watch calculators by comparison. But will that be enough to give the Wii U an edge?

The last console I saw with anything like the screen on the controller was the ill-fated Dreamcast with its visual memory units. These VMUs had a tiny screen on them, something that would even make a Tamagotchi feel cramped, and the worst battery life imaginable. Six months was all you got out of them, then you have to scuttle off to get two (yes two) expensive new batteries for it. And you could count on one hand the number of developers who incorporated the tech into their games. The highest profile of the adopters was Sonic Adventure with the frustrating and weedy Chau subgames. There’s the feeling the GamePad screen will be left behind like the quiet kid on the school trip, lonely and forgotten and a bit dusty.

The problem is, of course, that gamers don’t really want extraneous stuff cluttering up their gaming experience. An extra little screen for widgets and whatnots will only annoy gamers. Some even see through the ruses the screen is there to create, like on quite high-profile game ZombiU. The oft-seen clip is of the player typing in a code for an in-game number pad on the GamePad while onscreen a zombie shuffles up wanting to gurgle sweet nothings in the player’s ear while chowing on their virtual brains. This doesn’t even look fun. It would be fun in a film or television programme, but all you risk with this is endless game-ending and players who throw their hands up and stop playing. Somehow I don’t think that’s what Nintendo is aiming for.

The GamePad is an interesting idea, I won’t argue that point at all. It’s just not a great idea. Nintendo’s best ideas are great and technically pretty out there, but they manage to make them accessible. The GamePad has every possibility of closing off that accessibility. Then again I could be proven wrong and it will go onto roaring success, I just hope I don’t get trampled by the roaring PR beast as passes through for questioning Nintendo’s wisdom**.

* Thus far, over a year later, they haven’t been going for celebrity endorsements. They’ve been pretty low-key generally about the Wii U.

** And it turns out people are starting to think Nintendo are fucking bonkers and self destructive. Feel that, it’s my sense of swelling vindication. Stay calm, don’t struggle.


Will

Saturday 25 January 2014

An Open Letter to Dean Koontz

Dear Mister Koontz,

You don't know me.  That should be obvious right from the start, eh?  I'm not an obsessive fan who thinks we should be best buds and go driving off a cliff Thelma and Louise style.  I am a concerned reader.  And concerned I most assuredly am.

It's been a couple of years since I last read one of your books.  Why has it taken me so long to decide on this response?  I dunno, maybe I was so disappointed in it I couldn't bring myself to talk about it anymore or maybe it's because I had other things to do and couldn't be bothered putting my thoughts into a blog.  Who can tell?  Let's not dwell on it.

I've read a lot of your books.  By my count it's over fifty, most of which I read over a few years in the mid-nineties and then started getting hardbacks whenever they came out for a few years.  The list takes in Night Chills through to Velocity, with a detour into Shattered and Chase*.  No one can accuse you of not being prolific.  I enjoyed the majority of these books.  They were fun, they were weird and they kept me entertained.  They are also the novels that shaped me most as a writer, reading them is the inspirational foundation on which I write and they showed me one writer didn't need to be constrained by a single genre.

It was reading Dark Rivers of the Heart when something struck me**.  At the time I wasn't sure what niggled at me, but something bothered me about the book.  I now realise it was foreshadowing, something that happens often in your fiction – I'm not sure if this bit of literary flourish was intended.  Since the novel was mixed in with earlier works I finished it and went onto the next.

Some years later I was reading One Door Away from Heaven and I got that niggle again – a persistent itch I was starting to analyse and get a hold of.  It wasn't until The Taking that I realised what bothered me about the previous books: you were letting preachiness edge into your fiction.  At least in The Taking you didn't resort to an epilogue that rather pompously told the reader what to think, but it was preachy nonetheless, telling us hell was coming for all us sinners and we'd better repent or we're all going to be on the receiving end of a Lovecraftian tentacle up the unmentionables.  You obviously learned from Dark Rivers of the Heart and One Door Away from Heaven not to use a clumsy annotative epilogue to tell us your message.  Instead you went to the tool cupboard and found the biggest sledgehammer you could and started wailing on your poor unsuspecting reader's noggin with it.  Not cool, dude.  You have some opinions and beliefs I don't agree with, but your religious convictions shouldn't force me away from your stories, they should enrich the experience despite the fact I don't share them.

If that were the only issue I had with your work, this wouldn't be a worry, hey as long as the stories were interesting and seemed fresh...uh, Mister Koontz, we may have another problem.

All writers have little things they add to each story, whether consciously or unconsciously, forming a link through their work that marks it out as theirs.  Could be as simple as a particular turn of phrase or they have a character recur.  You have tropes.  When I read Watchers, the intelligent dog was great and using the dog as a protagonist in Dragon Tears was a cool idea.  The ancestors to these interesting characters have become warped, mutated, deus ex machinaed to the nines.  Magic dogs...no, wait, it's even more specific than that...magic golden retrievers.  What the hell?  You write yourself into a narrative corner and instead of thinking, "Hey, maybe this isn't working, I'll see where it went wrong," you think, "I know!  The dogs have super powers!" It's amazing what can destroy suspension of disbelief; in a novel with all kinds of scary alien strangeness a dog with super powers shouldn't feel out of place, but because the world your novel is essentially like ours dogs suddenly developing hitherto unobserved fantastical abilities makes you seem a bit desperate.  Yes, I am still referring to The Taking.  You've done it in other books and that's kind of the problem.  I know you love golden retrievers, but using them as crutches to stop rickety narratives falling over isn't fair.  Think of the animals, please.

And this brings me on to another creeping problem that's wandered into your writing since The Taking.  Your stories have felt...incomplete.  It's worst in The Taking, of course where I felt like a whole half of the story was missing and kept expecting it to switch to the husband's point of view, anything to stop him being more than a cardboard cut-out of character.  You disappointed me and you wrote a literary version of a life-size standee.  Velocity and Odd Hours also suffer from ropey stories.  They don't seem to go anywhere – there's lots of that foreshadowing, but not a great pay off.  The endings fall flat.  Since Odd Hours I haven't been able to face another one of your novels again, especially since so many of them sound like they're rehashing the same plot.  It feels like you're fatigued with writing, sick of the grind of churning out 120,000+-word thrillers every year§.  Maybe you should take a sabatical from the thrillers.  You're wealthy enough that not plopping out another hardback doorstop isn't going to break you and you seem to be writing kids books, so you won't be away from writing, just away from the stories that seem to be chomping away at your soul like a particularly ravenous Pac-Man.  I do have your welfare at heart, because I want to read and enjoy your books again.

So I'll wrap up on that note.  I would hate to see you dip into such a deep writing slump and never return.  Perhaps one day you'll find that spark again and I'll be brought back.  There's always hope.

* I even bought The Dean Koontz Companion.  How's that for going overboard?

** And it wasn't just your sudden weird aversion to swearing.  Anything stronger than 'bastard' and 'asshole' suddenly doesn't exist in your novels, which is frankly unsettling.  I'm avoiding swearing out of deference, in the laughably astronomical chance you'll read this.

Oh, man, this book has a lot to answer for.  I mean a whole damned lot.

I was going to mention your obsession with frankly dull everymen (and everywomen), but got so depressed thinking about the crimes you've committed in the name of golden retrievers, I couldn't go into it.

§ Some people have speculated you're farming out the work.  After seeing the repackaged first two Frankenstein books with the co-authors names swiped off the covers (oh, I have the earlier printings, though) I'm wondering if that's actually the case.


Will

Wednesday 22 January 2014

Some Minor Points

There are loads of ways to improve our gaming experience. I’m sure there are more than a few out there who’ve happily guzzled some mind-altering drugs and freaked when they came across their first feral ghoul in Fallout 3. You’ve also got those people who like to immerse themselves in the game: from the people screaming sexist and racist insults over headsets while playing [insert FPS of your choice here] to the people who spend mortgage-sized chunks of money to bring their MechWarrior fantasies almost to sweaty life. That’s not forgetting the bunch of mates who get together, have a few drinks and gradually get more sullen with each other over Need for Speed or FIFA 2012*.

Just like any art form it’s as much about what we bring to the table that determines our level of enjoyment. I mean, studying a Matisse for colour and technique in a gallery is just as valid as sitting in your underwear of a night, playing Modern Warfare 3 and eating Doritos from your navel. It’s all about what makes you happy. The medium is there to form a framework on which you hang whatever experience you want to create. It depends on what that framework is and what you want it to do for you.

Of course that doesn’t divorce developers, creators and publishers from giving us, the average gamer, the framework and experience on which we base our leisure time. If they could get away with it publishers would release ‘games’ like The Life of Sticky the Stick in which the whole game is moving the eponymous character from one side of the screen for two thousand levels. No variation, other than which side of the screen you started on, for hours of mind-numbing fun. And they’ll charge you fifty or one hundred of whatever currency you use for the pleasure of doing it. If you don’t think this is true your cynicism is woefully underdeveloped and I suggest you go and read some comments sections and some forums. Once you’ve wept the first time things get so much easier.

Fortunately we don’t live in that alterna-world where consumer rights are so flagrantly disregarded, and we don’t have to suffer through games in which we convey simple shapes from left to right, right to left, endlessly and forever. It would make game pad design that wee bit simpler, mind you, only having left and right buttons. We live in a world of glorious complexity in which control pads consist of arrays of buttons, D-pads and analogue sticks promising to take us through adulthood with carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis. The games we play demand this level of hand-crippling controller design in order to deftly or, as is often the case, not so deftly negotiate the games of the 21st century.

Humanity, however, has this habit of not being completely satisfied with anything. There had to be a few people who looked at Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and said, “Whoa! Do we really need to see that?” or thought that the Mona Lisa looked a little on the podgy side. Then again we have to thank the guy who looked at those early cars trundling out of the Ford factories and considered them a bit boxy. Without a bit of critical thinking nothing in the world would ever improve. We wouldn’t have dazzling games like Uncharted, Batman: Arkham City or the constant stream of indie games that challenge those who want to go looking for them.

With this in mind, I would like to offer some of my humble thoughts on what could be tweaked in order to make our mainstream games that little bit more enjoyable. Now, there are well-worn paths in this kind of thing: story, blah blah blah; mechanics, yada yada yada; and offensiveness, um, wibble, wibble, wibble. These are THE BIG ISSUESTM and I think I’ll avoid them as much as possible, because, frankly, they activate all kinds of crazy. I don’t want to get crushed under that particular juggernaut, thank you very much. My wife would be pissed at me, I’d never hear the end of it and I’m not a courageous man. What I’m going to suggest here are some minor(ish) things to perhaps make things better in just small ways.

Number one: Bigger, clearer text. Start with something small, shall we. Or something I perceive as small. We don’t all have wall-sized screens that show reality-altering vistas from the dimensions of sight, you know. Some of us semi-luddites still possess CRT televisions** that were once considered big. I’ve come to accept that sometimes not seeing a character because my TV doesn’t have the chops is going to happen. But the least developers could do is give us the option of larger text for those prompts or important bits of information that make the game go easier. My ambitions in this really are quite humble.

Number two: Let’s split off the hardcore gamers from the casual gamers. Yes, I’m using some quite fascist language there, just to get your attention. I love getting trophies on my PS3. I’m not afraid to admit that. It stabs at the poor, twitching OCD part of my brain when I can’t get all the trophies for one game. Batting all the arguments about challenge and playing games for fun aside, I feel somewhat downhearted when I see a trophy for something that I clearly will never have the skill to do pop up on the list. I’m not going to sit for hours or days vainly trying to perfect my skills in this area to get the trophy, even though I want to complete the collection sooooo much.

It’s crazy and is aimed at really good, often dedicated, gamers. My proposal is an alluring one for publishers: have two tiers of trophy, one of which you pay extra for. When you buy and install your game, you get a basic set of trophies or achievements to collect that are straightforward (but can still be weird and time-consuming) to do. If you feel you want more of a challenge spend a little bit more, something like a dollar or a pound or a euro to get those tougher trophies. People with the same head-sickness as me can sleep easy and the dedicated gamers can still have their prizes for having skills I can only dream about.

Number three: Graphics aren’t everything. Okay, thinking about it, I may be wrong, this does encroach on THE BIG ISSUESTM, I think. But does every game need to have such insane work done on the graphics? Realism doesn’t always improve a game. Take L.A. Noire, for example, it was an okay game with a lot of ambition. You can’t fault what they were trying to do with the facial motion capture business. It didn’t quite work. Trying to read the expressions in an interrogation turned into an excruciating exercise that makes you question just how far along the autism spectrum you are.

Graphics take up a huge amount of space that could be used for interesting game mechanics and more content. Squeezing in more realism doesn’t instantly make a more enjoyable game. It doesn’t even always guarantee greater immersion. Using L.A. Noire again, it could have been done with simpler, stylised cartoony graphics. I can’t imagine it would have taken more work than the hours of filming actors and then mapping their faces. Just imagine how huge and immersive games could be if developers had water thrown over them when they get too excited about the pretty, pretty visuals.

So there you go: three minor (or two minor and one not so minor) suggestions to make the world of gaming smoother for everyone – or perhaps just me. Perhaps these thoughts will become moot as the games industry evolves. Though that just means we’ll find different ways in which it can be further improved. And that’ll be nice.

* It kinda looks like I’ve got it in for these games, but I don’t really. Although, strictly speaking, I wrote this article first.

** Since upgraded to a big LCD, but the argument still stands.


Will

Wednesday 15 January 2014

So, Your Favourite Feature's Gone...

There are some ways in which I envy developers: the money, the fame, the adulation. Mostly the money, though. However having the power to create worlds in which players can get lost for hours is a tempting prospect. Being a writer affords you a little of that, but there’s something mesmerising about how a good game can worm its way into your mind and you find yourself thinking about it at odd times*. A funeral somewhere has to have been inappropriately interrupted by some derp shouting, “Shit! That’s how you kill Crawmerax!”

Developers hold the keys to our gaming experience. You can see them as benevolent overlords, handing out nuggets of golden gameplay to while away your hours, with a beatific smile and generosity of heart. Or you can see them as cackling bastards, sitting atop their piles of shimmering experiences, demanding body parts for the privilege of just a few moments of rapturous joy and then peeing on our shoes and asking for a kidney when we want to extend the game**.

Whatever your view of developers, they are the ones who control the content of the games that we see on the shelves. If they so chose they could fill their game chock-full of whoopee cushions that every time you did anything in the game you made a fart noise. Actually, I think I’ve just created gaming perfection, go me! Just imagine it: the climactic fight between you and the Great Murder Soul Hellstomper and with every move the hilarious sound of a violent evacuation of gas from the backside. Thinking about it, it might be a bit crap.

We have to believe that the people who put together the games we buy have the best interests of enjoyment at heart (you know, outside of the fame and money) – though sometimes it’s hard to see it that way. When the developers look at a mechanic or option they have to make a decision about whether it’s right for the enjoyment and feel of the game. They are human and sometimes they make mistakes, after all there are lots of considerations to putting together a game, even with armies of people working on it, but they also quite often, through study and experience, get the decision right on the button, and we as gamers do a little happy dance – well I do anyway, don’t you judge me. Then there are the other times, the instances where you look at the choice that’s been made and you think, “Someone should have sobered up before they stuck that in.”

This is more of a problem, I suspect in sport simulation games. I read about people muttering about the loss of a mechanic from FIFA 12 or the latest Need for Speed. I don’t know much about that kind of thing, since sports games aren’t really my bag. Football’s never been of much interest to me and driving just bores the hell out of me – except maybe Chase HQ, I was crap at it, but it was fun. Having said that these games aren’t the only ones to suffer or gain from feature shuffling.

Games franchises where the basic gameplay elements never really change can live or die on what’s added and what’s subtracted. Up to a point for a lot of games it’s mostly about what’s added that makes them better and better games. Take Assassin’s Creed as an example. The first game in that franchise was okay, for about half an hour, and then the boredom set in. And what boredom it was. The same pattern of climb, do viewpoint then go to a dull mission, repeat. In Assassin’s Creed II (along with Brotherhood and Revelations) the addition of more flavourful and enjoyable missions made for a more interesting game. Yes, they maintained the same basic gameplay, but it was made more fun with the variety of what you got to do with the character. For me they did go a step too far in a desperate attempt to cash-in on the multiplayer market, but I seem to be the only one in the world who thinks multiplayer Brotherhood and Revelations are both as much fun to play as cornering a rabid rat.

Features are, of course, a hotly contested element of the super-money-spinning industry of FPS, whose multiplayer elements bring out some of the best and worst of the feature shuffle. You can see that these guys watch each other very closely and, quite often, you can see that they’re gleefully lifting ideas from their contemporaries. It sort of looks like they’re walking up to each other in the street, saying hello and then taking that packet of M&Ms right from the other’s pocket and grabbing a handful. That kind of handsiness makes me worry about ever meeting them – it could get awkward.

Arguably the most controversial feature in the recent Call of Duty games has to be the ‘quick scoping’ ability. This, for anyone who doesn’t know, is something that apparently predates Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but these games have run with it. In a nutshell it’s the ability for snipers to run around and shoot people at close range with a minimum of aiming. Since most sniper rifles in the Modern Warfare games are one-hit kills, you can see that some people can get a bit frustrated with it. I have to admit, it frustrates me too, even more so when I experimented and discovered how easy it is – I got a lot of kills and I’m a middling player at best. As you can imagine there are a lot of people who detest this feature’s very existence. So, when Call of Duty: Black Ops came out Treyarch decided to ditch the ability. Can you guess what happened next? Yes, in a fit of ‘oh dear, human nature’ there was an outcry; a huge vocal group started angrily asking what happened to their favourite annoying feature. And, like that, in Modern Warfare 3 quick scoping was back to test just how far a game can increase my blood pressure.

And then there are the baffling omissions. As annoying and unfair as quick scoping can be you can understand why it was put back in place. Insomniac Games, going a little crazy, did something that almost beggars belief. In Resistance 2, a game that a lot of people were lukewarm about, there was included a multiplayer co-operative mode. This was a huge amount of fun, if a tiny bit repetitive, with groups of players working together to complete missions of varying difficulty. It included three classes that could, in fine RPG style, be boosted the more you played. I sure, correct me if I’m wrong, this game managed to boost the life of a game that otherwise would have disappeared into dim memory by perhaps a year. I waited in patient hope when Resistance 3 was announced to see if they would update and expand this mode. When I got my copy and discovered there wasn’t anything like it available on the disc, there was a tear in my eye. Yes, they vastly improved the single-player experience, but they gave us a clunky and buggy multiplayer that was like everything else out there – don’t even get me started on the disheartening swarm mode, blech. Discovering, the other week, that Insomniac Games were finished with the Resistance universe I fell to my knees and bellowed at the heavens. They’ve moved on to the Ratchet and Clank games leaving no possibility of replicating that wonderful gaming experience from Resistance 2.

Developing games is clearly a juggling act, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, why don’t you take to the comments and give an airing to the game features that you love, lament, mourn the passing of or would happily dance the grave of?

* Fuck that was prophetic, considering what I did last year.

** Or they’re a bit trollish and like to take this piss and frustrate players. They still giggle like the nasty cunts they are.

Turns out Insomniac yoinked it for Fuse and kinda screwed up the experience by making it a deeply mediocre game.


Will

Saturday 11 January 2014

Staring at the Puzzle Cube (It is A Cube, Right?)

Alan Moore and Grant Morrison are a strange pair. They’ve got that thing about magic. Well, Alan Moore is a practitioner of Magic, while Grant Morrison is a man who goes in for Chaos Magick (pronounced Mage-ick, if my sketchy sources are to be believed, don’t put too much stock in it). I won’t go into what either of these things actually mean, because I don’t fucking know and I don’t have time to rummage around to find out. Actually, their interest in these similar-sounding esoteric pastimes is really the only strange thing about either of them.

Not being friends with either man and not even being acquainted with one, I can’t give any insights into their thought processes. You know, that whole having only a shallow exposure to them, so anything I were to say about what’s going on in their weirdly oppositely-haired domes is going to speculative at absolute best and spurious at worst. I hate spurious.

Fucking hell this is starting to sound serious. Lemme give some disclosure, I’m not an academic* or a journalist. Anybody who claims so is up to something and should probably be hunted down and forced to do something unpleasant, like watch nothing but Eastenders and River City for a week. Yes, I am a terrible man.

Anyway.

I find they both sound even-tempered and reasonable when they speak. The only anger I’ve ever encountered (in my limited experience, mind you, I have to stress that again for those gimps picking and choosing words to use against me) is from Grant Morrison when he talks about Mark Millar. A whooooooole different kettle of bile, there, and something I will never touch on again. Intelligence is the lasting impression from Morrison and Moore.

They are both also highly successful and influential comic story tellers with a background in artwork. Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell are some of the seminal comics works Alan Moore has graced the world with. Grant Morrison spent five years telling the story of The Invisibles. Both have done much, much more than I’ve listed and you have to whole internet right there to find out, you lazy fuck. They’ve both got something of a pedigree, in case you aren’t familiar.

There is also THE FEUD. Alan Moore doesn’t like Grant Morrison. At least that was the impression given for a long time and the best you could say was Moore wasn’t a fan. Then an interview with Pádraig Ó Méalóid, claiming to be Moore’s last, swatted the internet in the buttocks a few days ago. And my, my did it get a squealy reaction. Moore hates, hates, hates, hates, HATES, HATES, FUCKIN’ HATES Grant Morrison. With a side order of hate**.

My understanding is that Grant Morrison, again, until recently wasn’t entirely in love with Alan Moore either. Again, this changed with an interview at the end of 2012 conducted by Laura Sneddon in which he showed some consternation and confusion about the tension between himself and Alan Moore, as well as the timeline and events.

The comics internet was shaken to its core and turned a lot of people into fuckin’ Twilight fans – turning into Team Moore and Team Morrison with all the ridiculously juvenile and noxious bullshit that entails. Seriously I’m embarrassed for the comics community (and some of the industry) for the way this whole business has been treated. Them and us isn’t a healthy attitude in relation to a personal conflict like this, no matter if the participants want you to do it. It’s human nature to leap on a flaw of someone you aren’t enamoured with§, but I do wish more people, people who oughtta know better would take a step back and use the mushy grey stuff in their skulls. Oh, and engage the empathy bone. Essentially a lot of Forest Whitaker eye going on – and there was enough of that anyway.

So, it’s turned into a complete fucking mess with people making arseholes of themselves on either side of the argument. Though there have been some islands of sanity and sense in this lake of bubbling vitriol.

I was going to compare and possibly contrast their accounts of Morrison’s and Moore’s ongoing relationship, because relationship is what it is, one based on verbal swipes through intermediaries. It’s not a pleasant relationship, but there is a connection and it’s something they need to work out between them, without the braying peanut gallery of the internet inciting more from them, something that’s been absent from historical literary feuds. Looking at the two interviews (the Morrison one being a weirdly editorial affair with him adding changes in red and everything) it seems so tangled and twisted I’d just find myself in knots about them. It invites another one of those Can-Can moments, I’m afraid.

So, as I’ve written this, with an eye for looking at the affair, I find myself being distracted and disheartened by something that’s bothered me about the comics community for a long time: the vocal minority of arseholes it engenders. The unwelcoming trolls and ogres who have set themselves up at the gates of the community judging who is worthy, grovelling at the feet of people in the industry while preparing knives to hamstring and hack apart those same individuals. Seeing industry figures jumping in on this behaviour just makes me stand back in confusion and go, “Huh.”

There’s an ingrained aggression in the comics community. Nothing wrong with aggression, it creates energy and drives artistic expression. It’s when this aggression gets redirected at inappropriate sources like women, gays, creators and each other it’s done with all the grisly violence of a troop of chimps taking a baby, and it’s about as brutal and upsetting as that image conjures. It’s what taints the medium for people outside of it. And there’s a lot of writing on this behaviour, particularly the shameful treatment of women (and in the last year, incidentally, of women in the games industry), and I’m not the best source for it.

So what do we do about this handsy uncle no one talks about part of the comics community? Well we start talking about it, we engage it; see if we can change something about it. Not an easy task for the spittle-chinned glaring bastard, threatening us with death and rape, but in this case robust discussion needs to take place. Because (clumsily switching metaphors) cancer doesn’t go away by ignoring it. Treatment, that’s the thing.

It might not be so bad if the industry side of the didn’t foment it and encourage it. Pandering to the lowest members of a rich community is not the way to keep it alive–

Stop acting like cocks, is what I’m saying.

Fucking hell, that’s all it boils down to: stop acting like cocks. Think about what you’re going to say before you launch into a venomous tirade or write yet another story objectifying women and consider, perhaps there’s another way. Being a cock gets you attention but it fucks up the whole place for everyone else. This doesn’t mean disagreements aren’t going to happen, but perhaps it will create discourse a bit better than, “Youre a fucking fagot fucktard,” and it means we can have industry characters who aren’t misogynistic, homophobic narcissists.

Of course, yes, I’ll do the obligatory it’s only a minority of the community who behaves that way. And I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true, however it would be nicer if it were a dwindling minority. Let them be as vocal as they want, too, then we know who they are and point out to those who don’t know, that’s not the way to behave.

So, what was going to be a sticking my oar in to an argument I have nothing to do with (albeit, I was doing it dispassionately, with a hint of humour§§ and adopting the middle ground) has turned into a small attempt at weakening the hold on the comics community of the sweaty arsehole element. I think that’s in the territory of ‘win’, don’t you?

Now I’ll shut up for a few days.

* Y’know despite this little nugget of internet obscurity having an academic bent. Or it was.

** He’s no fan of Laura Sneddon, either, but that’s for someone else to blether about.

The Alan Moore interview can be found here: Last Alan Moore Interview? this is a long article. The Grant Morrison interview can be found here: The Strange Case of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, as Told by Grant Morrison. I so wish these interviews had happened closer together. No doubt by next week there’ll be a new Morrison one.

Which Alan Moore does and it disappointed me. Perhaps it was point-making hyperbole, but it’s so easy to misunderstand. And people did, wilfully and enthusiastically.

§ I’m guilty of it myself and it drives my wife nuts. Doesn’t mean I condone it.

§§ “Y’whut?” I hear you cry. Cunts.


Will

Friday 10 January 2014

Retro Money's Still Money, Boys.

I own a PS3.  Nothing remarkable there – that’s me and about sixty-four million other people, then.  When I’m not being terrible on some online game or another, I like to go browsing through the Playstation Store.  Like most people I do a little rooting around for new DLC and perhaps some new game that might be good to have a look at.  This can make my poor hard drive unhappy and my struggling bank account look nervous.  Seriously, my bank account is a worried entity, constantly sweating and sending me pathetically worded letters pleading for me to stop spending money.

Much of the time I don’t buy anything, but come away with some ideas for games I might want to buy in the future and be awful at.  Sometimes, though, I feel a tiny bit disappointed.  I get the feeling that there are games that should be in the Playstation Store, but don’t make an appearance for one reason or another.  Old games.  Though, not that old – my first computer was a ZX Spectrum +2 and just about any game I might want from that era is easy to get through emulators and such.  The old games I’m talking about are ones that I played on the PS One and Saturn back in the heady days when I wasn’t crippled by poverty.

They do have some PS One (and PS2) games in the store and my wife was very pleased to get a hold of Theme Hospital a while back.  She got hours of fun out of that; it was great.  Something bugged me, though.  I’ve got Resident Evil: The Director’s Cut, though it seems that the Saturn version of the game has been expunged from the history books.  There were lots of titles that maybe should have been present, but there was no sign of them.  Like someone had been blindfolded, spun around in a room full of game titles and those they stumbled on were the games chosen for the store.

I remember getting quite excited when I saw that Golden Axe was available for purchase and then almost cry-vomited when I discovered it was the crummy Mega Drive version.  I wanted the arcade version I remember sucking my ten pences up like some kind of ten pence devourer when I was ten or eleven or twelve!  What’s wrong with that?  Why can’t we get similar stuff to what’s on XBox Live Arcade, I cried through the few, errant, chunks of eye-corn.  I haven’t bought Golden Axe, but I still felt cheated.  How dare they stop me in the desperate and intricate attempt to recreate my childhood?  No, I’m not going to buy an XBox for that one thing, didn’t you read the first paragraph – I’m poor; it’s a fucking miracle I have a PS3.

There’s no R-Type, either.  A game I possessed on the Spectrum and then, some years later, when I had a PS One for a short time.  I’m not very good at it, but it’s a fun little shooter and can whittle a few minutes of boredom.  And it’s not an unpopular game.  There are screeds of fond gamer memories about the little blue starfighter that could.  Yet it’s not there.  Sure, there could be rights problems, but given the money Sony could make by making the game available that’s something that could be recouped.

Then there’s the little game, Dark Cloud, that I spent too many hours playing in even more recent times.  I don’t think it would kill them to give this an airing on Playstation Store.  If only just to salve my hurting nostalgia bone.

A game that might be less likely to turn up is Exhumed, an FPS in which you’re pitted against aliens that formed the basis of ancient Egyptian mythology.  There was a PS One version of this and I’m sure it would be seen as a retro treat.  Though, I have to admit, I had the Saturn version of the game that was considered far superior.  What do you reckon the chances are of that one appearing on Sony’s shop front?  A clue: non-existent.  That’s one I imagine trying to overcome licensing wrangles wouldn’t be worth the effort.  It’s nice to dream though.

And, really that’s all this is, in the end, dream upon dream.  There is money to be made in dusting down these retro gems and many more on top of that, but it’s whether Sony, or anyone else thinks the reward is enough that will determine if they are unearthed again.


Will

Wednesday 8 January 2014

Hurrrk! Uuurrk! Urrrr!

This isn't another outpouring of my witty musings.  I can't just pull those fucking things out of the air, you know.  It takes all of an hour an hour to craft my postings for this.

No, this is a heads up for stuff coming next week – or the end of this week if I get bored.

Some background first.  You might remember, in one of my last blogs, I was talking about doing articles for a computer games website.  A wee while after that, and a few published articles, the people running the website stopped answering my emails and some time after that the site seemed to vanish.

A couple of months passed and my woefully slow mental processes pinged me an idea: since the articles weren't there any more why not repost the articles on your blog as a way of reinvigorating it?  Fantastic fucking idea, there, brain, only three months late, but never mind.  So, as due diligence I went back to make sure the site was, indeed out of commission, and what do my disbelieving eyes see*?  Well the site's there again, but this time every single fucking one of the articles on the site are credited to the one guy.  Naturally I was a bit confused by this, but I kept my cool and sent an email explaining how I wasn't pleased my articles were in someone else's name.

I bet there's a few people who can guess what my answer to the email was.  Fuck fucking all.  A shifty silence bounced back at me via the miracle of internet-particles.  And you know what, I couldn't even get angry about it, I'd given the stuff away without any kind of contract, so I grumbled for a while and consigned the articles to the Deceased Pile**.

Until last week, that is, when I decided to see if the thieving cunt of a website was still there.  And lo!  The address takes you to a completely different site!  I rummaged through the Deceased Pile and found the articles.  I'm probably going to go over them, but these are the blogs I'm going to post starting next week (or Friday, whatever).  And that's not all, I've got at least one that hasn't seen the light of day, so you should feel really special.

Now, off you go and sit in the limbo of non-existence that everyone I talk to on the internet I presume goes into when I'm not talking to them.

* And my bubblingly furious brain perceived.  Does it feel like these footnotes are becoming a thing.  It feels like a thing, but their so fucking addictive!

** Created because of this fiasco and pretty much unused since.


Will

Tuesday 7 January 2014

I Return (Again!) and I'll Probably Vanish for Months (Again!).

Yeah, so been a while.  It's all part of my hobby of intermittently neglecting my blog*.  Let's do a bit of a catch up, once again.

Okay so in the year or so since I last published a post, I've...not actually done much.  That's astonishingly embarrassing to be honest.

I'll start with an update on my last foray into self-publishing.  Fuckin' disaster.  Absolutely, shamingly, crushingly failed.  I think about eight of them sold, and those were to friends and family.  When Amazon started hassling me for tax information** I decided to not bother and they took it off sale.  Kind of wish I hadn't bothered with it now.

Pfah to regrets, I say!  PFAH!!

Onto something a bit more positive: I started and finished another novel.  My first sojourn into the world of full-length crime fiction, hopefully with a twist only I could give it.  It's a story I've wanted to do for a long time and finally pinned down a plot I liked.  It sits, awaiting a final edit to be submitted to...er...somewhere.  I'm at a loss.  We'll see what happens once I've gone through it.  Suggestions would be gratefully accepted.

This brings me onto something even cooler – I was almost published.  My ridiculous action novel got a bit of interest from a digital-only publisher, and received some good feedback, but they passed.  At least I think they did.  Anyway this feedback was the best and most detailed I've ever had in tightening up a manuscript.  I still don't have a fucking clue what I'm doing when I'm 'editing', but I feel like I have I'm not an inept macaque with broken fingers.  I was working on that manuscript...

...Until the most shameful thing happened.  I got distracted.  Irrevocably so – okay, not irrevocably, that's an exaggeration, fiiiiiiine.  Bloody addictive computer games§.  So yeah, from about July onwards is a bit neglected.

But now I'm back, for a wee while at least, and I'll have something to say about that in my next post.  Isn't that exciting?

Ah fuck you, blank-eyed shits§§.

* One thing I'm clearly very good at.

** Really should have read the terms and conditions.  Lesson for you there, kids.

Or even if it doesn't make you fall asleep and vomit at the same time, would be good.

Last year, as you might have noticed, was a year of uncertainty in a few key areas.

§ I'm looking at you, Borderlands 2, you time-sucking bastard.

§§ Unless, y'know you offer some advice in the comments.  G'wan!  My gratitude is more valuable than...whatever.


Will