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I went to London and I destroyed it.

I took a very last-minute, unplanned journey to the centre of the universe at the behest of my significant other, who had to travel down there for work. I also wanted to go and gawp at the Beowulf manuscript in the British Library, which I did. History doesn’t do a great deal for me, but staring at the ornate handwriting did make me feel something. Maybe it was indigestion; I’d just had a large burger.

It was a good weekend, and a good holiday, which I have yet to recover from. I spent much of my train journey playing Half-Minute Hero and not doing enough homework. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable trinket, one which I covet entirely to myself, despite not owning the PSP which I play it on. It makes me wonder about the definition of the “hardcore” gamer. I don’t think I’m particularly hardcore. I certainly don’t find any joy in spending weeks or months honing my ability to have Ryu kick someone in the face with a fireball or dodging bullet hell armies of laser death in a tiny spaceship; but I’m not sure how much enjoyment one can get from this title if one is not fully educated in the tropes and idioms of the JRPG genre that Half-Minute Hero lovingly mocks. Still. It’s very cute.

In London I raped and pillaged and drank my fill. I went to some awful places with some great people, and some middling places with them too. We talked of times past, and of the future, people we’ve lost, people we’ve met, and a lot about sodomy and cocksucking. We would manage to get home around five in the morning, because London is a big place, and the buses aren’t very regular at three when the clubs chuck out. Highlights included: Meeting new people, reforging old friendships, and watching Log drunkenly fall asleep on a picnic table outside The Griffin, one arm propping his head up in a mockery of consciousness.

When I came back from London my copy of Borderlands was there to greet me, as well as a friend who had stayed at my house playing Mario Kart and Prince of Persia and eating all my noodles. Sadly, I don’t have any time for games this week. Apart from maybe some more Princess 30 on Half-Minute Hero before sleep. I’m almost ready to unlock the first secret mode. It doesn’t count if you’re already in bed, right?

It’s Friday. I’m trying to take stock of the things I need to do. I’m not even dressed yet. I’ve had two espressos and a bowl of cereal, and I’ve made a list. The list looks like this:

• Syntax up to chapter six.
• Sociolinguistics reading and rough draft of response.
• Old English Exercises.
• Rote learning of noun, verb and adjective paradigms.

Nowhere on this list is writing a blog post, or any actual creativity at all. I suppose the rough draft for my sociolinguistics response could involve some, but this process has been curtailed by my having no idea where to find the readings. It may involve a library trip. I ought to get dressed.

I made a promise to myself to limit my gaming until I was on top of my coursework. Unfortunately I obtained Half-Minute Hero and I cannot stop playing it.

1. Study
2. Job
3. Creative endeavours
4. Socialising
5. Videogames and fucking about on the Internet

This is the order in which I should be doing things every day. However, currently my ordering tends to thus:

1. Videogames and fucking about on the Internet
2. Socialising
3. Job
4. Study
5. Creative endeavours

Somewhat of an inversion. Creative endeavours don’t even get a look in right now.

I blame the perversity of the human condition. That which improves us, we ignore. That which is important to us, we leave until last. Please note, this is my own human condition. Yours may vary. Perhaps you had a better upbringing or a trauma that makes you a better person than I, I’m in no position to know, understand or judge.

I’m going to have another coffee now, before I finish doing the washing, and vacuum the house. Perhaps I should amend my list.

1. Videogames and fucking about on the Internet
2. Tidying
3. Laundry
4. Socialising
5. &c.

This is more accurate.

I almost feel envious of people who have a job to go to. Not that I have anything but contempt for having to wake up to an alarm, but imposed structure does offer some solace to the terminally lazy. How else will I finish my teen vampire fiction for the 9-13 and depressed housewives demographic?

Ugh.

This is a very good mod for this.

Apparently Halo: ODST is out or is coming out soon or something.

You can probably gauge my reaction to the game by the previous statement.

I’m sure it’s a very solid, polished and well-produced piece of merchandise. I’ll probably pick it up when I’m not so poverty-stricken and when I’ve worked out just how much I can slack off this year (so far the outlook seems bleak). I try to approach videogames with as much neutrality as possible, but it’s nigh-on impossible not to allow one’s experiences to inform one’s expectations.

Take Scribblenauts for example. Perhaps if the entire internet hadn’t jerked off all over its cute wee gimmick – the concept of being able to make any object one can think of appear for use – perhaps it might have seemed more novel. But novel enough to distract from the appalling controls? Novel enough to overshadow the fact that the DS just isn’t powerful enough to pull off what the game engine is straining to do? Such thoughts are lost to another time, and another world that I can never know. But I digress.

If the Halo franchise has given me one expectation for any game in the series it is thus: A Halo game will have a banal, sci-fi-lite narrative in which nothing interesting happens, ever. Does it really have to be this way? Does even the story have to pander to the lowest common denominator? Well, I suppose it does, since that is who they are selling it to. But FPSes don’t all have to be macho pig swill. I’ve been playing some Half Life 2 mods in which one does not just fucking shoot up the room full of aliens. Some of them don’t even have any aliens at all! I know! Fucking madness. I hadn’t really touched the mod scene at all until last week, for the same reasons I wouldn’t bother touching a game like Little Big Planet: I don’t want to trawl through an ocean of faeces to search for those possible hidden diamonds. My time is a precious commodity, even more precious than diamonds and pearls and rubies, and I can’t spill a second second of it upon stony ground. So I was quite pleased when people whose opinion tends to closely match my own were able to recommend some little pieces of joy for me to play with.  Here, I’ll tell you about one of them.

Dear Esther: A thoroughly interesting experiment by some chaps (and possibly even chappettes) over at the University of Portsmouth. Can be summed up by the following review, taken from the linked page:

THIS LOOKS REALLY WELL DONE THE ONE PROBLEM IS THAT THERE SEEMS TO BE NO ACTION.

Indeed. You don’t even get a gun. Doubleyou-tee-eff is up with that shit? Instead, the game relies on building atmosphere as you traverse a strange, deserted island. A narrator speaks from nowhere. What does he represent? Why are you here? The questions immediately draw you in, and although the graphics are pretty basic Half Life 2 mod fare, the quality of the script and the polished voice-acting gently varnish over the low-res textures.

More to come when I, you know, play them.

Rab Florence has caused me distress with his latest work. I thought I was over the whole “playing with miniatures” schtick. My life has progressed. I have grown. But Rab’s enthusiasm infected me, a merciless virus, and I found myself pining for a big heaving box of plastic spruces and hefty A4 manuals and cardboard corridors.

Thankfully this was a limited edition run and it is no longer available. My greed has been curtailed. For now. I am still lusting after some box set or other, but soon the fires will dim and I will be able to get on with my life.

For someone who plays a lot of games, I always find pointless material possessions to be depressing. Illogical, I know.

3D Dot Game Heroes. I’m conflicted. I really like the aesthetic; more than I ought to, by any rights. But at the same time it looks kinda shitty. The water effects, the attack animations – these ruin the suspension of disbelief for me. They’re so jarringly rubbish. I suppose in the case of the animation, it may be argued that such a thing would be expected in a NES-era game, and to continue aping the format is to further complete the parody. But it looks shitty.

Do you know what is selling me on the PS3? The BBC iPlayer. Our Virgin cable box has built-in iPlayer functionality. However, it is safe so say the execution on this device is so goddamned terrible that I’ve used it twice before throwing the remote away in disgust. I don’t watch much television, so perhaps it is time to revise my cable plans and buy a PS3 instead. It’s probably a more sound financial plan than to keep paying for a service that this household has barely bothered to touch. Plus I’ll be able to play 3D Dot Game Heroes, the only exclusive I’ve seen on the console that didn’t cause my eyes to roll full circle in their sockets.

Photo courtesy Chris Scott.

It’s raining again today. It doesn’t seem so long ago that Edinburgh had blue skies and streets flooded with cherry blossoms. Now Autumn is setting in, an inevitable twilight. I can see the raindrops balancing on the leaves of the plants in the front garden,  they’re really bright and clear and unmoving; the bushes to the left of the window keep twitching, the large drops accumulating on the top of the window arch fall and slap the tiny green leaves on their way; The cold, rain-smelling air drifts in through the open window, and I think: Today is a good day to play a nice warm videogame.

Here is a bullet point list of some trailers I have noticed.

• The trailer for Resonance of Fate’s gameplay has transformed my guarded enthusiasm for the title to vague confusion; just what the fudge is going on there? I can’t tell. All I know is that it looks pretty unexciting, despite the dramatic camera angles and workmanlike graphics.
• A Boy and his Blob is made to look like a wholesome eighties animated movie in its latest trailer. It’s quite nice. Still don’t care about the game though.
• Oh look, more horror on the Wii. Complete with a “tribute” to Tubular Bells.
• No More Heroes 2 has a very charming vignette, but the game itself appears to be no different to the first, aside from some cute NES-style mini-games. That I’ll be purchasing it probably says some vaguely awful things about me.
• The exciting cinematic teaser action for The Secret World is all very well and good, but until we get some actual fucking gameplay details I am going to continue to posit that they are going to horribly disappoint with a generic MMO of some kind. Please destroy all my expectations.

I put paid to The Joker last night in Batman: Arkham Asylum. It certainly took me long enough. It’s been a while since I played through a game and avoided the endgame sequence, just so I could wander about and enjoy the atmosphere, but Batman certainly dredged that inclination back up. I clearly remember getting to North Crater in Final Fantasy VII and feeling an ache: knowing that soon all this would be over, consigned to the depths of memory. Batman was never that bad, but even so. It stands as an excellent game,  despite flaws with the control system and a slight lack of variety. BUY IT NOW. It’s fucking Batman.

I’m no-one… and EVERYONE.

There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle over the alleged collaboration of Orson Scott Card on Shadow Complex, due to his ridiculous Mormon gay-hate bullshit. However, if Card was really on board, I’d hope that such a well-established author would have fucking excised that god-awful bit of dialogue quoted above. I mean, fucking hell. It doesn’t sound any less retarded in context, because even then it has no context. Some people are not buying this game due to this dickbag’s association with the product, a protest which has since proven to be ineffectual.

The game itself, separate from the caustic political discourse, has absolutely nothing to say about homosexuality, unless you think the lack of dialogue on the subject is a damning indictment. It has a lot to say about how a 2.5D Metroid game might play: Incredibly well, aside from some niggling control issues. The only real issue is that there is little here that you haven’t seen before. It is pretty much Metroid through and through, with an added experience system that doesn’t seem to do much. It’s also thoroughly short. A playthrough on hard mode can be done in about eight hours with one hundred percent items and map completion, on your first run through. There’s little to bring you back either, other than to enjoy the experience again: Once it’s done, it feels pretty much done. It’s a wholesome sense of completion, so there’s little to complain about. Especially at that price.

The plot is pretty much bobbins, and can happily be ignored. The shocking twist at the end can pretty much be seen from about ten seconds into the game. Good thing we have lots of shiny graphics and explosions and upgrading to make up for it.

Verdict is: Buy it already, but you already have.

I have something of a predilection for horror games. Everyone loves some stark terror, don’t they? It gets the blood pumping, delicious endorphins flooding our frail systems. Perhaps surprisingly, the Wii seems to be host to some of the more interesting forays into the world of survival horror. Like opening up a child’s toybox to find a severed head. Your own severed head.

Project Zero/Fatal Frame 4 is not coming out in the US or Europe, which is fucking rude. Perhaps releasing games on the Wii in the west which aren’t Pippa Fucking Funnell’s God Damned Stupid Horse Bullshit Adventure is not a financially viable endeavour. Perhaps they are just sparing us from a terrible game. Whatever. I don’t care. GIVE IT.

I’m not so sure about Ju-On: The Grudge and its ideas about scoring. After decades of gaming, I don’t think I can flinch any more. It would take something really disturbing to kick me from my slack-jawed reverie. The bullet-point extolling the virtues of hearing real sounds, really recorded from real life: Isn’t that how they’re supposed to do it? Perhaps these are sounds so terrifying that no earthly soundbank would dare host them; sounds so eldritch and visceral in their exquisite abhorrence that the wiimote will fly from my quaking hands, but I have doubts.

I’m also cautiously optimistic about the latest Silent Hill game, Shattered Memories. Videos of it, while not showing a graphical powerhouse of visceral abomination, at least show an dark engine whose whirring machinations are capable of producing atmosphere. The first four Silent Hill games would be considered amongst the gameartfags (such as I or me) as being somewhat “important”, though the last two outsourced outings have been less than stellar A-grade terrorfests. What makes the Team Silent games so good is the combination of obfuscated storytelling, diffused through the various media types afforded; cut scenes, fractured writings scattered through the game, and our own actions within the world come together in our tiny heads like a reverse prism. And that dark rainbow, cast from the infinite shadow of Team Silent’s shrieking hivemind, recombines into a story of the protagonist’s personal hell that we’re leading them through. Hopefully they won’t just make it another fucking shitty survival horror game like Origins was. Climax haven’t given too much away of the particulars, other than that there is no combat and the game will play YOU. So I’m cautiously optimistic. It’s a fair jump away from most Silent Hill staples, but as long as it is good, who cares? So I’m cautiously optimistic: The last two games stuck fairly rigidly to the series’ clichés, but if they overreach themselves too far, we’re in for another Alone in the Dark.

Speaking of the devil, I am also somewhat concerned that Alan Wake looks exactly like that wretched abortion. I won’t say anything about the developer babble since I’m sure it’s in his best interest to wank off his product for all to see, but if games can be art then this is a Stephen King novella.

The PS3 Slim has caught my interest; a more reasonable pricetag and slightly less ugly, gargantuan casing has pushed my interest level from minus to almost plus. Now all they need to do is release a game I want to play for it and I might actually think about buying one! Of course, when I upgrade to an HDTV I suppose I’ll need a blu-ray mechanism. The device seems somewhat pared-down; a decortication which has been steadily going on from the PS3’s first appearance. First the PS2 compatibility, and now Linux. Hopefully Playstation Home is next.

Shadow Complex came out yesterday! The reviews of this metroidvania portmanteaumania have been favourable, and my five minutes of playtime before work revealed a game that is lubricious, adroit and shiny. Though I can hear Joe bitching about some particulars of the game’s design right now, behind me, as I attempt to work. Expect more impressions at some point, soon.

Looking like the sexy lovebaby of Bioshock and Gears of War, the Batman: Arkham Asylum has arrived today, like the whispered promise of an angel’s kiss. I have played it twice now; once, to scrutinise fiercely, twice, for the mere enjoyment of the experience. It is a slick but slim production, a thin slice of glossy, dark gateaux. And while it definitely allows one to get to grips with the fluidity of the controls, the scope of the game is still swathed in shadow. Like a bat. Whether it comes equipped with a utility belt filled with joyous trinkets or just flaps around uselessly in the night remains to be seen. I am catiously optimistic, even if the script appears to have been written by the Gears of War 2 understudies.

Oliver and I have been attempting a joint playthrough of Xenosaga Episode III: Also Spracht Zarathustra, and ten hours in I could not tell you what compels us onward. Perhaps it’s like watching a train derail in slow motion in front of one’s eyes. The very spectacle of every horror displayed to you in detail. It’s intoxicating. Certainly there is very little to like. The leaden dialogue, heavy with symbolism so clumsy it could knock your tits off, trudges from the mouths of people who really can’t quite work up the effort to get into it. It really is quite something: You’ll believe that the brightest minds of the far future really are a bunch of thick fucks.

I’ll leave you with my first impressions of Star Ocean: The Last Hope. How the fuck did these people get into the bridge crew of a starship? In fact, how did they manage to survive the vagaries of space high school? God I hate them. Also: How does a game manage to be both quite pretty and kind of ugly at the same time? Masterful. More later, when I grow venomous.