>>Nostalgia For Infinity

So! The project I have spent the last few months and especially January working on has gone live and the first content is beginning to appear. Check it out!

One thing the internet does not need is another gaming blog. So, here is another gaming blog!

We like to play games. We like to drink (most of us). We like to talk, or rant, or ramble. We slip through our days in ARCADIAN RHYTHM.

Mostly of interest to gamers, what with it being a group blog about gaming, but you may enjoy having a poke around regardless as some of our writers can be quite amusing. Plenty more content going online this week and we have regular updates scheduled for the next few months!

Forthcoming pieces from myself include a response to Jonathan McCalmont’s arguments around the idea of a videogame canon in Futurismic last year, a biographical piece examining the question “why game?”, reviews of indie titles Recettear, Flotilla and The Void, and contributions to group pieces – one arguing the toss about achievements, the other looking forward at what’s coming later in 2011. Plus some occasional fluffy pieces – like one about my naff Minecraft constructions or me bitching about how tough the last levels of Syndicate Wars were.

The peculiar USian shopping tradition of Black Friday (most famous in the UK for resulting in some poor Wal-Mart peon being trampled a few years back) has been leeching out into the wider world of digital distribution this year, and as a result I’ve acquired dirt-cheap copies of Aliens vs. Predator, Altitude, DogFight, Flotilla, Gratuitous Space Battles, Plain Sight, Galactic Civilizations I Ultimate, Machinarium, Doc Clock: The Toasted Sandwich of Time, Eufloria, Iron Grip: Warlord, VVVVVV, World of Goo (already owned; part of a bundle), Beat Hazard (already owned on 360), Audiosurf (a-o), Rhythm Zone, The Polynomial, Gish, Jolly Rover, Puzzle Agent, Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, And Yet It Moves, Batman: Arkham Asylum: GOTY, Deus Ex: Invisible War (already owned and sold on Xbox, but for £1 why not), Alpha Protocol, Sam & Max Season 3 complete, BRAINPIPE, GalCon Fusion, Gridrunner Revolution, ProtoGalaxy, and Quantz.

Astute readers will note that the majority of these are indie games, so yes, you can expect a bunch of indie reviews to appear as I dabble in them. I’m already enjoying GalCon Fusion (the best way to spend two minutes aside from a cup of Chai tea) and Recettear (the only time you will hear me utter the phrase Capitalism, Ho!).

(At some point I’ll join the rest of the internet in showing off my rubbish MineCraft constructions, too.)

Damn I love games, you guys. And I love digital distribution even more. All of the above probably cost about £30-40 all told, and there’s no annoying packaging or install discs at all. Just the costs of server hosting for the distributor/retailer, bandwidth for the both of us, and a little download and install time for me. The future is rad.

Check this out. Pretty tragic story, if true: a woman, recently widowed, neglects her young children and lets her pet dogs starve to death because she becomes utterly obsessed with a social network-based boardgame. It says a lot to me about loneliness and isolation and heartbreak and tragedy, and whilst that’s no excuse it’s saddening that this woman apparently had so little support from friends and family.

What’s chock full of fail, which will be obvious to most anyone who has ever played a videogame, is that the Daily Hate Mail have seen fit to include a screenshot of an entirely different game for their scaremongering. Apparently the cutesy graphics of the boardgame-style Small World weren’t enough so they’ve dropped in a screenshot from Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning instead. It has a scaaaaary ork warrior in it! They’ve even added a fake source URL to make it look more convincing.

This looks like deliberate obfuscation to me. Although I suspect the excuse will turn out to be that the screenshot was intended to illustrate, uh, some other addictive online fantasy games, but someone forgot to use the right caption, and the Photoshop guy just added the same URL to all the pictures, and damn man you can’t expect someone to keep these things organised when underpaid overworked journos are shitting out a dozen articles like this every morning.

I’m going to direct link to the image they use to see if they change or delete it any time soon. Mad skillz!

UPDATE: This gets even better. Apparently there is no online version of the Small World boardgame, and yesterday the same Mail article was reportedly accompanied by screenshots from this game – which as it’s also developed as a Facebook app seems much more likely to be the game in question. Of course, given that someone has retroactively altered the article so that it appears to be about two different games entirely, the truthfulness of the entire original story could be called into question.

UPDATE 2: Kieron Gillen at Rock, Paper, Shotgun has used his journalistic powers to investigate this issue and has pretty much gotten to the bottom of it, so head over to RPS if you would like to know more. I’m leaving my original post up, complete with my correct & incorrect assumptions (the original story was written by an agency and farmed out to the Mail rather than written by a Mail writer or contractor). Thanks to everyone who has linked over here, the resultant hit count has made a dull Monday morning marginally more exciting…

Oh yes, and the Mail have removed the image from their article at the request of Games Workshop’s legal team, although the image itself is still on their servers as indicated by its continued presence above. (If it gets replaced with a picture of a cock we’ll at least know that someone on the paper’s IT team has an internet-savvy sense of humour.)

Having read Alec Meer’s preview of the 2011 X-COM revamp, I am unspeakably excited. It sounds like it could be a genuinely thrilling re-imagining of the license; in his words, “it’s someone throwing money at the concept, not leaving it stranded at the pointless poles of fan-exploitation or slavish re-creation.”

The preview appears over at Gamesradar but appears to have been removed. Fortunately Google have the four pages cached here, here, here and here.

This is not another election post – actually, my friend Kerry Turner has had her Flash game Enough reviewed by prestigious Brit videogaming mag Edge. In her words, “My short, slightly pretentious game got a short, slightly pretentious review.”

Enough is the work of Brighton-based Flash developer Kerry Turner, and there’s something gloriously terminal about it. You’re a bunny stuck on a miserable clump of rock that is set against a vast darkness, and you’ve been given a limited ability to scamper around and jump. Crows – or maybe they’re bats – descend in tight little clumps to give you a hard time, and while you can leap about to avoid them, every hit you take brings up a new phrase at the top of the screen suggesting that, really, maybe you shouldn’t be bothering. Please stop. I’m so tired. I don’t want to go on.

Read the rest here, and play the game here. My thoughts? It’s sparse, charming, simple, and conceptually interesting. Would that I could produce something so good in a weekend.

Some radspiffy news over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

Some indie games make a lot of money. Most don’t. Worse, many never even get off the ground because they have no funding. The freshly-announced Indie Fund means to change that – it’s an angel investment group set up by some of independent gaming’s greatest current luminaries (the likes of 2D Boy, Jon Blow, Flashbang…) and intended to help the next generation of indie devs get started on making wonderful toys for us lot to play with. I.e. more Worlds of Goo, more Braids, more Audiosurfs, more Solium Infernums…

PC indie gaming has been experiencing something of a renaissance over the past couple of years, with games like World of Goo, Braid, VVVVVV, Kudos 2 and Solium Infernum garnering significant attention (and, in some cases, the sales to match). However, there are still a lot of games that don’t make it to release or that disappear due to limited / poor promotion. Hopefully grants from this fund will help alleviate this problem and allow more wonderfully inventive independent projects reach fruition.

I did say that I wasn’t going to review this, but unusually I’ve polished it off in under a week and a half. This in itself speaks well of the game. I’m not going to review it so much as geek out about its strengths, its flaws, areas that interest me, plus some speculation for the next game. Apparently I’m not yet so cynical that I can’t yet get excited about a work of fiction with a shitload of money behind it. Master, I’m ready to suck that corporate cock now…

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It was going to be a bit of a Holy Roar week, but it’s actually turned out to be a bit of a quiet week. That’ll be work keeping me busy plus the lethargy of self-inflicted exhaustion. Reviews of Throats and Antares should go up sometime soonish.

My pre-order copy of Mass Effect 2 arrived yesterday, so I spent the evening in the company of its occasionally plastic-faced charms. I enjoyed the first game a great deal despite its flaws, and am happy to find that thus far the sequel has addressed most of these – although it has introduced its own foibles in so doing.

I probably won’t bother writing a review since it’ll be several weeks before I’m in a position to do so, and by that time what would be the point? But here’s an excitable little account of a gripping experience from last evening, which I shared with some friends this morning:

I experienced a genuinely affecting moment in ‘Mass Effect 2′ last night, where I thought an earlier action I had taken – not murdering a thug in cold blood in order to disable some military hardware – had later resulted in the death of a comrade I was very fond of. He was torn to fucking pieces. I was actually horrified that I might have been responsible.

As it turned out, he survived – but his face was half torn off and he’s permanently scarred. For the rest of his life.

I was relieved when he didn’t hate me. It was a gamble – when I met him after he was patched up I risked making a joke – a sort of macho camaraderie thing – and when he laughed it was just, wow. Thank fuck. And yet I still felt so sorry for him. I wondered if the game would let me tell him that I could have spared him that tragedy. Would I tell him if I could? Should I tell him if I could?

I can only hope the game is full of more moments like this: moments when you come face to face with the unintended consequences of actions you chose to take, moments where regret or horror or shame are the emotional responses not demanded of you, but drawn out of you. But I’m already impressed that the game made me care enough about one of its characters to make me feel this. That is special, particularly in a medium where a derisive blasé attitude is more than most titles’ stories and characters deserve.

I’ve been ill and housebound for two days. As per usual this has meant I’ve been playing quite a few videogames. It would have been nice to read, but my house lacks nice places for sitting and reading. Oh to have an armchair in my room. Also, focusing on a game seemed to result in less sneezing.

Anyway, I’m feeling better now, and am able to inflict my opinions upon you once again. So here’s what I played.

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My review of charming Ninty DS JRPG Dragon Quest IV: The Chapters of the Chosen has, as promised, gone live over at the Den.

Since writing that review I’ve picked up a cheap copy of Lost Odyssey, probably the strongest and most universally appealing JRPG available for the Xbox 360. Thus far I’m finding it an entertaining experience. I’m glad to have found this and the DC series fun, as Final Fantasy XII, the Blue Dragon demo and the mediocre Enchanted Arms had left me quite jaded with the formula (to be fair, the combat system in Enchanted Arms is its saving grace).