Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon is a recent, fairly obscure, unusual and very Japanese Wii game, developed by Tri-crescendo, who most famously made Eternal Sonata for Xbox 360 a few years ago, but first caught my attention with their Gamecube card-RPG Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean. Eternal Sonata, despite the interesting premise of being set entirely inside the death-bed dreams of the 19th-Century composer Frederic Chopin, was too JRPG cliché for me, so I gave it a miss. Baten Kaitos had some beautiful pre-rendered scenery, a compelling story and characters and an unusual battle-system involving the real-time chaining of randomly presented cards to multiply attack-damage. It remains the only JRPG I’ve actually enjoyed playing, even after slogging my way through Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Trigger.

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Videogames present entirely arbitrary challenges, brought to a whole new level of meta-arbitrariness with Xbox 360 achievements. Sports do to an extent too: manoeuvre this ball to this place, cross this certain distance in the fastest time possible. Good videogames, and sports, make the player forget the arbitrariness of their tasks by motivating the player either through competitive elements, self-improvement or narrative rewards. Well, the last one only really applies to videogames, with the possible exception of spectator-driven sports were the completion of pre-determined routines is the goal.

I’ll give some examples from games I’ve recently played. Games with competitive elements are the ones that emphasise player versus player action, such fighting games like Street Fighter, shooting games like Modern Warfare 2 and racing games such as Forza Motorsport. I don’t think I’m generally a very competitive person (a few exceptions notwithstanding), and these aren’t my favourite sort of games, or at least not in their multiplayer aspect. Games that emphasise self-improvement are those that encourage beating personal high scores or lap-times. There’s a competitive element to these as well, but they’re more about personal bests. Tetris would fall into this category, as well as racing games and more recent ‘lifestyle software’ such as the Brain Training series.

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There’s some things you own that you’re particularly proud of, objects that give pleasure just from being in your possession. Usually these objects are uncommon, collectors’ items, or they hold sentimental significance, or they just say something about you. I’m considering doing a series of posts on some of my favourite possessions, but I will start with a fairly recent acquisition of mine: Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.

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I enjoy writing these Videogame Diaries. It’s a chance to write some quick, funny pulp, and parody the games I like. In the first VGD I talked about the reasons and ideas behind writing these. I’m certainly not attacking these games, well, not the good ones. Far Cry 2 and Resident Evil 3 are fantastic games. Alone in the Dark, not so much. But no matter how good the game, no matter how grandiose or well-written the story, the narrative can always be undermined by the fact that a player has control, or that lines of code are used to generate the onscreen action, or that a game must first-and-foremost be a compelling interactive experience and tell a story only as a secondary priority.

Take Mass Effect, for example, one of my favourite games of all time. You play as Commander Shepherd, the first human spectre, a smooth-talking all-action hero on a quest to save the galaxy. You’re Captain Kirk and James Bond in one badass package. You can charm or intimidate people into telling you everything you need, and yet you can still leave the conversation, turn around, get stuck on a bit of scenery, and spend several seconds running against a wall. And that’s in a good, well thought-out game.

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Read Part 1…

Back to motion control. Apparently Sony like motion control too. They’ve created the ‘Move’ which is a Wii remote with a gently glowing mood-ball stuck on the end. It uses the same technology as Wii, as far as I’m aware, but also used a camera, like Kinect, to follow the wand (or whatever it’s called) for added accuracy. This was demonstrated by a dude playing Tiger Woods, and another dude playing the single most generic fantasy wizard game I have ever seen. It seemed to work pretty well. I mean, maybe when it comes out some people who were thinking about buying a Wii for £170 might think “hmm, for just another £130 I could get a slightly more accurate version of this, with higher fidelity graphics that sit much more firmly in the uncanny valley. Oh, sweet, and I could a blu-ray player with it too, then I can watch blu-rays on my CRT television, sweet.” And maybe some bros will think “I love twitch-gaming my way through Killzone 2 sat on my couch, but wouldn’t it be great if for Killzone 3 I could stand up and hold two controllers out in front of me for the whole time.”

Am I defending the Wii? It sounds like it. The Nintendo press conference certainly reminded me why I love Nintendo. But no, I think I’m being realistic. The Wii, in terms of sales, is the dominant system of the three, but it’s certainly not the most technologically superior by a long way. What it is is the Sinclair Spectrum, the Microsoft personal computer, the Model-T Ford. These were not the ‘best’ products of their time, these were the most affordable. Nintendo made a product for the mass market. Maybe they didn’t know it at the time, maybe they were surprised by the Wii’s success, but they did. Microsoft and Sony made products for the gamer, and Sony particularly made a product for a certain kind of tech-savvy gamer, who needs high-specs whatever the cost. Surely, the people who bought PS3s and 360s don’t want Wii Sports, and the people who want Wii Sports buy Wiis.

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E3 2010, or the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or the biggest annual event on the videogaming calendar, had just finished, and I thought I’d share a few thoughts on this year’s show.

The reason this show is so important is that it is the time each year when Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony announce all the biggest upcoming games for their platforms in an attempt to get their stockholders excited. Every year there is an informal competition between the three over who can put on the best show with the best and most exciting products.

Microsoft’s press conference was the only one I managed to stream live and with friends, but this turned out to be the most disappointing. It was abysmal, a shadow of previous conferences. They opened with Call of Duty: Black Ops, a game by Treyarch which is trying to be a game by Infinity Ward (who made Modern Warfare one and two), to the point where the levels they demoed mimicked almost exactly the pacing and style of Infinity Wards original E3 demo for Modern Warfare 1 three years ago and Modern Warfare 2 last year.
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Read Chapter 1…

“Nice work,” Sarah exclaimed, having recovered enough to come out from her hiding place. “how’d you do this?”

Edward’s grizzled, scarred face contorted into puzzlement.

“Not sure,” he said, “it’s like some sort of buried instinct. It’s primal.”

“Something connected to your amnesia?”

“It’s not just that,” Edward said, thinking aloud, “maybe Crowley’s right, there’s something inside me, something dark and violent. I know I’ve done fucked up things in the past. I can feel it. Something to do with the stone, I… I don’t know, maybe I’m doing the wrong thing here. All I’ve got to go on us Paddington’s word, and I don’t even remember who the hell he is.”

“Screw Crowley, and maybe you can’t trust Paddington, or even yourself,” Sarah exclaimed, almost passionately, “but you can trust me and for what it’s worth, I think you’re doing the right thing. This path of light or whatever, we need to try and solve this mess.”

“Let’s hope you’re right.”

They stared into each other’s tired eyes for a moment, and then began walking through the flesh and blood under the bridge.

“The museum is quite close now,” Sarah said, suddenly cheerful and enthusiastic, “room 943 awaits us!”

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Previously on Alone in the Dark… Edward Carnby woke up in a collapsing building near Central Park, New York, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. As he was escaping from the building he met a woman called Sarah Flores. He escaped with her and reached central park, which had been devastated by huge scars tearing apart the ground and is now full of ‘humanz’, people corrupted by the evil power that is creating the scars. It turned out that Edward is part of a prophecy that revolves around a great evil buried beneath Central Park, though it is unclear what part he plays in the prophecy. During a fight with some of the ‘humanz’ he was injured. Luckily, Sarah spotted an ambulance. Inside the ambulance the pair met Dr. Hartford, who pulled up Edward’s medical file on his ambulance’s computer. Skimming over his file Edward read “professor Edward Carnby… researcher, paranormal investigator… disappeared in 1938”…

Episode 4 – Fight Back and Loss

Sarah looked at Edward in astonishement. “But that means you’re…” She trailed off.

“Like a hundred years old!” Edward finished in his deep, gruff voice.

“There must be some kind of mistake,” said Dr. Hartford.

“Waking up tonight was a fucking mistake,” Edward growled, his back to his two companions.

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Morning, it’s far too early to do much else and I’m waiting for a Dreamcast game to burn so I can see if my new DC will play burned discs. It’s taking ages though, so here I am updating my blog. Today’s beginning was rather too abrupt for me. I had a dream this morning that I was at work (which I was last night) but it was slightly different. And we were trying to close up the shop but people kept coming in because we hadn’t had chance to lock the door or something, then we finally got everyone out and I left. It was light outside, even though I’m sure it was night, and the roads were quiet. I decided to try cycling a different way home, so I set off up the road rather than down it. I went up this road that I thought would lead to my house, but it was a dead end, I think it just led to some locked-up garages, so I turned around and tried the next turn-off. This was like a lumber-yard, and another dead end, but further away. What was strange about this place was that it had flickering flourescent lights on metal posts, about head-height. As I passed them on my bike I noticed that in my hands, resting on the handlebars, I was holding several sheets of paper with dark grey squares on them. Every time the lights flickered, it lit up the squares somehow and they were printouts of CCTV footage from the shop, just of me and the guy I worked with standing around.

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Every now and then I get an impulse to create something or do something new with computers/technology/the internet, usually in the summer when I don’t have any uni work to keep me occupied. I always think this creative urge could be put towards writing, but it always seems to manifest itself as a desire to learn how to write computer code. I always think it would be really cool if I could write games or applications or other things, but I have no idea where to start, or what I definitely want to do, so  I usually spend a couple of days reading about programming languages then give up, since I don’t have the resources or inclination to follow through.

My general philosophy is that life’s too short to learn how to program, because even learning how to do fairly simple things with code takes ages. Two summers ago I did start this site though, and during short bursts over the next several months I taught myself enough HTML and CSS to make it look and work like it does now. I doubt you have any idea how long it took me to work out how to do a front page that displayed the latest post and a random post in a nice rounded border, but was separate to a page containing my last ten blog posts. It took a long time. Sure, I probably could have done it much more quickly with Dreamweaver or some equivalent, but I did it the old-fashioned step-by-step way so I could learn how it worked. I still know next-to-nothing about web-programming though.

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