Offcuts: Amnesia: The Dark Descent

17 Jan

A.K.A. My PC Is Undergoing Repairs So I’m Busting Out Some Quick Blog Posts To Pass The Time, Episode 1

A.K.A. “Hey, You Can’t Just Review A Game After Only Playing Two And A Half Hours!” Fucking Watch Me, Episode 1

Generally, I’ve considered people who greatly enjoy the horror genre (in its many forms) to have something fundamentally wrong with them. Like, did you not evolve correctly, man? Humans aren’t meant to enjoy being scared! It’s scary! Toddlers don’t crawl across their bedrooms floors to gleefully yank their soothing nightlight from its socket, quietly muttering “Hee hee, this is gonna be sick”!

Nevertheless, I had to at least try Amnesia. There were two main justifications for this foray into the incredibly brown unknown: first was the marvellous Nightmare House 2, which boasted not just a compelling urgency (and a surprising amount of polish for a mod), but just enough glimpses of hope amongst the bleakness to make me doubt my own blanket dismissal of horror as a miserable, anti-fun category. Second was…well, it was a gift from my housemates. Two of them are on Steam. If I couldn’t even try to stomach it, they’d know. Plus, I’d be tossing aside a gift. Even history’s worst murderers, despots and dictators probably wouldn’t do that. Even if most of them had Steam accounts.

After consulting a wiki or two, I’d say I’m about a quarter to a third in, and finding things to love has been…difficult. It repeatedly uses a level design structure I’ve hated for years – a ‘hub’ area, with little to interact with except the door to the next area, which in turn can only be opened by venturing into four or five neighbouring doors to pull a distant lever or collect some mundane, inanimate object. Said objects can then be combined, with a series of highly tense and not at all tedious mouse clicks and turns, to create that particular area’s McGuffin Key. Guys, this isn’t puzzle solving, this is making pancakes on a larger scale.

Still, the atmosphere is undeniably top-notch, with musical cues playing a big part. There’s a gorgeous moment where you ascend a mouldy staircase into the relatively serene atrium above, while twinkling piano notes seem to echo off the lofty walls. Conversely, the brutal orchestral screeches that accompany an alerted mutant-servant manage to be far more unsettling than the terminally astigmatic, absurdly warped creatures themselves.

In terms of scares, the trippy screen blur that signifies a nasty bout of temporary (as in, lasting under a minute) insanity is more irritating than terrifying, but the potential is there. I’d happily never have to deal with the invisible water-dwelling demon that kills in two hits, can sprint like the wind and boasts the loudest, most maniacal audio theme in the game thus far again, but it’s clear Amnesia doesn’t have nearly enough concern for my mental well-being for that to be the case. So, yeah, Frictional Games, you can have this one.

I’m hoping that, once the story picks up and starts being about more than scribbles on paper scraps, the inane item-gathering will make way for some more meaningful exploration. Frankly, there’s still little fun to be had sobbing inside a cupboard, but it would be nice – if nothing else – to be proved wrong about the wider entertainment value of horror for the second time running.

Maybe I should write something about 2011?

25 Dec

I’ve never bossed around a Third World country while wearing a hat, so I haven’t had the worst of years. I’ll try to break up the incoming thought deluge into categories, and without too many distracting links, so that you may spend Christmas Eve having the most enjoyable time reading half-assed blogs instead of talking to visiting family members possible.

Personal

So the relationship I was in for five years blew up in my face. I’ve stopped blaming myself, which annoyingly precludes the whole thing as a learning experience, but with a handful of essays, a new writing opportunity and the annual November games glut, I’ve been lucky enough to take my mind off it. For the most part. It’s difficult to imagine going that far with something without thinking about the future, even if the current situation makes that future seem unlikely or unclear, and though I’d never want to be with someone who wasn’t happy as such, it’s hard to watch as that future gets taken away barely a week after everything seems to be fine.

Other than losing my best friend, things haven’t been so bad. Communal deathmatch sessions are a semi-regular feature in the house I joined in September, and our pub quiz team has been performing far better than we have any right to, even with the Diet Coke-marinated brain of a hairy Journalism student on side.

Games

See Gaming Daily for my Games o’ t’Year – in hindsight I possibly could have added ‘current judgement-clouding infatuation’ to the reasons Skyrim isn’t there. I didn’t get it until the third week of November, and I’ve played over 90 hours – to give an admittedly flawed comparison, that’s only 10 less than my time spent in Killing Floor, and that’s two years old.

In terms of not-PC, I ended up selling both my PSP and my DSi. A phone upgrade made the multimedia benefits of the PSP chunkily obsolete, and there’s no denying I only ever wanted to play Pokemon Heart Gold on that little dual-screened thing – evidently I don’t mind paying over £100 for nostalgia. The proceeds went towards a PS3, primarily with a view for Guitar Hero parties but ultimately becoming a mere conduit for Uncharted 3. Loved it regardless, but how the hell am I not broke?

‘Work’

Ha. If I said I’d try for paid work this time last year, it was never recorded so at least I have plausible deniability when someone accuses me of failing. That said, there are two notable things that happened this year with regards to my pathetic non-career: firstly, I joined BeefJack – capitalise the J, that shit’s important – as a news writer. I only cover Tuesdays at the moment, but I’m glad to be doing something a little outside my comfort zone. Doing news badly is one of the worst things you can do, but there’s no way of learning like doing, so it’s worth the constant sense of ‘Christ, what if I fuck this up?’ that only sometimes plagues my reviews/feature-writing process. Thanks to editor/big boss man Lewis for showing me the ropes.

Secondly, I got Sunday Paper’d! The appearance of Gaming Daily in Rock, Paper Shotgun’s weekly links roundup is a semi-regular occurrence, and it’s always nice to see the sudden spike in traffic, but this is the first time thousands of people have been simultaneously pointed at something of mine. I don’t want to imbue RPS with some kind of godlike quality, capable of controlling the entire flow of PC gaming enthusiasts on the internet, but getting a ‘Yeah, this is worth reading I suppose’ from the pros makes me a wee bit proud. And scared of reading the comments.

Music

I bought just two albums this year – one was comedy rap, the other was Foo Fighter’s excellent Wasting Light. Recorded, on tape, in Dave Grohl’s garage, this is such a perfect blend of the personal and the ferociously rocky that (unlike every other album they’ve made) I actually like more than three songs on it. Well done, Foos, now tour the UK again.

So, most of my new music this year has come in sub-five-minute chunks. BEHOLD the excitable poppy brilliance of this song about Mass Effect’s lead character! GAZE upon Corridor Digital’s gorgeously shot Dubstep Guns short, which is not just The Best Video On YouTube (No Complaining), but actually made me enjoy a couple of dubstep songs! GET KIND OF PLEASANTLY CONFUSED by how enjoyable this Zebrahead cover of a Spice Girls hit can be!

Overall

A year of dizzying highs and thoroughly sucky lows, 2011 would be lucky to get a 6/10. I’m going into 2012 a lot more uncertain of particular things, and time is absolutely running out for me to turn words into even a little bit of cash. Still, I have my health, a bond less than three weeks from maturing, and a fair collection of folks who’ve been nothing but nice to me since January. I don’t have a calculator to hand, but that seems like a net positive.

Hasbro write the best job opening adverts ever

15 Dec

“And much like our core cast of ponies bond together in friendship and have magical adventures together, you will partner with internal and external resources and develop and execute integrated marketing initiatives”.

How To Make Games For People With Shitty Eyes

3 Dec

Start by never, ever using the colour green to connote ‘good/friendly’ in conjunction with the colour red to connote ‘bad/wants to shoot you’.

As far as spectrum-ruining goes, I got off pretty lucky – I only ‘suffer’ from deuteranomaly, a very weak form of red/green colourblindness. Still, while it’s not exactly causing me to violently misinterpret traffic lights, in the world of games it’s caused more than a few headaches.

Worst among these was probably Bioshock 2. Hacking – an essential skill used for opening doors and conning vending machines – involved hitting E (I think) to stop a swinging needle on a green section, while avoiding landing it on the red sections. Not the most involving hacking experience, sure, but remarkably easy if you were paying even the slightest bit of attention. And if you had two perfectly functioning eyes. For guys like me, all we saw was a thick strip of dull hue. Squint all you like, chump, you better hope your random keytap lands the stupid fucking needle on a green bit or you’ll suffer the same fate as anyone else who tries to cheat this medkit dispenser out of a small discount: painful electrocution.

(To be fair, some hacks included a tiny sliver of blue; scoring a hit would net some free goodies from whatever was being wrangled. Out of concern for my character’s health just as strong as the desire for freebies, I trained myself to get pretty damn good at hitting the blues.)

More recently, Bethesda decided to not bother with the majority of Skyrim’s potential compass functions, so no markers for allied or neutral NPCs would appear (there’s no way to tell if a distant figure is friend or foe until you’ve sent an arrow flying into their spine, either starting a pointless fight or coldly extinguishing the life of an innocent bystander, one who may have even been interested in purchasing your butterfly wing collection) nor would the colour used for enemy markers be as clear as the bright, searing red of Fallout 3′s equivalent. Instead, it’s a colour that could be best described as indescribable to anyone with similarly inadequate eyes to mine. Does it stop being a problem after a couple of hours, when you realise that nothing other than aggro’d enemies appear on the compass, despite that being useless for anything other than clumsy stealth mishaps? Pretty much. Would the entire problem have been easily avoided if they’d just used a slightly brighter shade of red? I hear there are, in fact, quite a few available.

To be abundantly clear, I don’t consider these passing annoyances to be a problem in the same leagues as those affecting gamers with serious disabilities (fixed key bindings, lack of subtitles etc.). But it’s still an easy fix. Modern Warfare 3 added an excellent colourblind mode to multiplayer, changing the colours of both minimap icons and the names that float over each player’s head from red and green to orange and pale blue. On at least one occasion I had casually strolled past a teammate, only for them to suddenly and fatally spray me with gunfire – they were never an ally, I just saw their username as being vaguely greenish. That may sound famously stupid, but MW3 online is no afternoon walk in the Nordic tundra – pausing for ten milliseconds to take in the pretty colours or even the faction uniform of an approaching player is usually a big enough hesitation to give away the edge in a fight.

So, here’s how to make games for people with shitty eyes: don’t use red and green (or blue and purple, for that matter) to represent opposite meanings. If you do, make them brighter than the goddamn sun. It’s an absurdly simple workaround to something that negatively affects millions of people, from the near-blind to barely-affected whiners like myself, and as such, probably generates a lot more goodwill than you might think.

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He doesn’t even know I murdered his best friend

12 Nov

Faced with a sheer wall of casual swearing and roughly eight references to genitalia per minute, it would be easy to get turned off Bro Team Pill‘s series of reviews before the first one ends. Regardless, the sheer speed, conviction and arbitrary agression with which they reference the insertion of one or more phalluses into things which can’t really be described as orifices is exactly why it’s my new guilty pleasure.

The YouTube channel itself is only a few weeks old, so it feels even more new and exciting than when I first discovered Zero Punctuation or Epic Meal Time months after they hit their stride. For brevity’s sake I’ll only embed a couple of episodes, but practically all of them have at least one moment of growly offbeat hilarity, and some are great from start to finish – their most recent offering, a “review” of Modern Warfare “3″, is incredibly cheeky, and the Terraria episode is a fantastically anarchic take on the New Games Journalism style.

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Worthy Of My Vast Intellect

10 Nov

I appear to have started a freelance stint at BeefJack, the full-spectrum games site run entirely by writers and journalists, at the precise moment in which I need to start work on two dense essays, rank up in two first-person shooters, play the fifteen million indie games I got in a pay-what-you-want bundle and catch up on some feminism books* I’m meant to have read. Great job, James. Maybe you can volunteer for the TA during January exams.

The reason I bring this up is, let’s be honest, to plug myself. But wait! I do have a genuine interest in people reading and commenting on the stuff I’m doing on BeefJack, because that stuff is news. I haven’t even writing news in a training capacity in over a year, so I’m basically throwing myself into the fire and seeing if I can get out with most of my eyebrows. If I can, great – maybe I am cut out for this stuff after all. Only a few bits and bobs in my name are up at the moment – ignore that fact that I moronically put my Steam handle as my username, branding it permanently in that URL, and let me know what you think. Sometimes good journalism starts with being told you’re inept.

Ooh! I also reviewed Payday: The Heist for Gaming Daily. It’s alright.

 

*This probably sounds unduly dismissive of the subject matter, but I’m actually really liking my Media and Gender module; Nastasha Walter has one of the most effortlessly readable styles of any writer and genre I’ve ever seen.

As Seen In Print

19 Oct

Look guys, something I typed got put through a big machine that puts ink on bits of dead tree! It’s about journalism, how industry regulation hasn’t worked, why government regulation won’t either, and how we might be able to make everything better.

Click for make picture embiggen!

There are a couple of editorial choices I would have, given the chance, challenged – chiefly the headline, which boldly poses a question I didn’t actually ask anywhere in the body copy. More damningly, in hindsight there’s a tad too much opinion in there for a feature article, a possible side effect of my upbringing in the editorial-blanketed tundra of Games Journalism, and even I know the concluding argument is so optimistic I’m surprised no-one’s asked if I wrote it during an ill-advised diazepam trip. Still, I’m reasonably happy with it, especially knowing I got a relatively large piece, about journalism, in a newspaper owned and operated by a Univerity known for quality journalism tuition. Uneccessary opination or otherwise, I’m choosing to believe that counts for something.

Ideally it would take pride of place in my portfolio, but the printer/scanner combo I own isn’t quite big enough to cover a whole page using Gair Rhydd’s broadloid dimensions. I have little reason to tell you all about this excrutiatingly First World problem, except that according to WordPress, very few people seem to take a look at it.

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