The Clinkening

Isometrics: 2016 in Review: Change, Upheaval and Do The Biggest Strifes Cause the Best Games?

2016-12-30T00:35:00.002+00:00

Welcome to Isometrics, where the literary look at computer and video games has kind of languished for several months, much of which will become clear. I questioned whether I could rightly do the usual end of year articles given I'd been absent all year. I will explain that further below, as well as what the Isometrics Awards will look like this year, however we need to talk about this year. Oh what a year it has been.

2016 has been a rough year, for many reasons and in many many respects. The deaths of so many incredible stars, artists and general big names has left a pall over the year, not just for the number (which in practise wasn't much bigger than any other year), but for the talent that has been lost, from the enigmatic creator of Omikron, David Bowie all the way through to the most recent deaths of bright lights such as George Michael and Carrie Fisher. Add to that the political strife throughout the world, most notably in the west, with Brexit and the US Presidential Election seemingly splitting the UK and America respectively down the middle in a way that had not been seen for generations. We are in a world which can feel like it is spiralling out of control, wild and violent. It leads to panic as we aren't sure whether this is anything new, some new media created or at least facilitated typhoon of aggression, fear, uncertainty and doubt, or whether this is simply a Hobbsian state of nature. The world can currently like it is controlled by Salvador Dali or Franz Kafka, and sometimes it can feel easier to seek escape, as dangerous and damaging the consequences can be.

I cannot say things aren't so bad, many things are and the evidence and heartbreaking consequences are a matter for public record. However, there are glimmers of hope, silver linings of positivity, and a sense that things can be better, things can be beaten if we all look after each other. I don't know how much this will matter, but to anyone who feels they are not listened to, that they are actively being attacked and told they do not belong, you are welcome here at Isometrics. Isometrics is about progression, it is about looking at the world through the odd, fascinating, askew yet recognisable viewpoint of video games, and this will not change. Ultimately, people should not be forced to endure and overcome based on their sex, their gender, their race, their colour, their creed, and while I wish I could do more, know that you are welcome, you are loved and you belong.

Anyway! Video games, that's why we're here right? And my has it been a doozy of a year, stacked to the rafters with a sheer weight of releases. A lot have been terrible, but they have been drowned out by some absolutely incredible games, to the point where I have had to extend by best of list (I've just about got it down to 15) and will be shrinking the worst list to the 5 most underwhelming and disappointing games (There are way more bad games, but none managed to really endure and cause too much pain). Gaming has progressed in an incredibly positive direction, possibly due to the strife in real life itself however it means we are seeing beautifully realised games, the pockets of positivity and progression have begun to flourish, with games with increasingly diverse and interesting casts, mainstream games covering issues that simply were outside the scope and seeming ability of AAA publishing. There seemed to be a maturing of the medium and realisation that designing games to convey particular ideas, explore sociological, philosophical and literary ideas and generally act like the works of literature I constantly champion them as would not take away games that are fun. This is something that becomes very clear once you read my list.

It's not all been good, with all matter of bile being slung, every little thing seemingly becoming a major twitter scandal for five minutes and there were still some appalling business practices added to games, particularly from the usual suspects such as Activision and EA. However there were less games that seemed to be truly hateful, and the ones that are seemed to avoid the mainstream for the most part. Censorship is something of a hot potato, although given that the biggest anti-censorship advocates seem to only care when it relates to anime characters flashing, things like Torrential Downpour seemed to have about as much effect as the old moral crusades of old, namely boosting success out of spite.

It's been a weird year, not least for me. I felt like things were going to change in a huge way by the time March rolled along. Things changed, but in a way that kept everything in my current situation the same, except increasingly burned out and less motivated by writing, the form I have the biggest passion for. I really regret how 2016 turned out creatively, and a lot of my plans and visions for the year basically vanished by April, and it took until August for me to even consider continuing any creative projects. It was not all bad, the work I did for Get Your Rock Out I love and I hope I can continue, and Pixel Herstory on Fanny Pack is probably the one column I wish I could write more of, because the more I research the more awesome fascinating things I discover. The biggest change of course has come that I have a new job as a writer, something I'd aimed to do by the end of this year and actually succeeded at.

I apologise that I've hijacked this gaming retrospective, but in practise this was my 2016, and video games were this year, more than any other an escape and a respite. I firmly believe, since change is actually happening that this will not be the case going forward. If it is of any consolation, the Isometric Awards will be as in depth as possible to make up for lost time. I will only commit to the best and worst for now, but I will try and do others if I can fit them into a very hectic January. It stands to reason that Isometrics will be on a planned hiatus other than the end of year stuff and come back in February, everything sorted and ready to go.

If you got this far thank you very much, and here's hoping your 2017 is full of hope, joy and love, because while war, strife and divide make for a lot of good games, as you will see, hope, joy and love make for some of the best games ever.

Isometrics Awards: Honourable and Dishonourable Mentions

2016-01-17T12:00:00.000+00:00

Welcome to the final Isometrics Awards article, looking at the various amazing (or amazingly awful) games that did not make either of the shortlists this year. Last year I planned to do a whole set of awards but due to factors beyond my control I simply didn't have the time to, but this time we're just going to look at the games that didn't quite make either list.

First of all, we'll look at the games not quite putrid enough to make my worst of list. There are probably worse games out there but I'm limiting it to games I'm at least aware of for the purpose of the list.

F1 2015 – Mentioned in the list itself, had Batman Arkham Knight actually improved after being recalled from Steam this hot mess of a racing game would have easily been 10th.

Godzilla – This atrocious, ugly, short mess of a PS4 exclusive was a shoe in early on this year but increasingly disastrous games eventually took the lustre away from this horror.

Steel Rivals – A monstrous fighting game that would have been laughed at by Tattoo Assassins and it's Mortal Kombat cash-in ilk. Sloppy, inconsistent control sets, generic poser models and awful optimisation sink the game before it really had a chance. Alas, other games either were much worse or much bigger disasters so it got lost in the shuffle.

Chariot Wars – A game that escaped the list purely by being so moronically expensive I wasn't going to stump up the cash to see if it was truly worse than some of Digital Homicide's fare. Footage I saw looked alarmingly bad though, with negligible frame rates and controls that seemed to have been soaked in concrete, as well as obvious missing textures and terrible gameplay.

Alone In the Dark: Illumination – So, a light-based co-operative third person shooter. So much for Alone in the Dark eh? It didn't help that the game is appalling tosh as well, and yet another example of Atari sinking further into irrelevance.

Raven's Cry – A game so bad it was re-released in the same year (As Vengeance of Raven's Cry, the epitome of truth in advertising) and somehow got worse, Raven's Cry escaped the clutches of the list by being too expensive to be worth bothering with once again.

Rollercoaster Tycoon World – Has this game even released yet? Being delayed weeks before release after a beta release showed a complete lack of content and issues with the building system, throwing the amazing Rollercoaster Tycoon name under a bus two years in a row. Can they make it a hat-trick in 2016?

Cities XXL – Advertising made it look like the phenomenal Cities Skylines. Playing the game showed it to be Cities XL but somehow bizarrely taking backwards leap.

Dead or Alive 5: Last Round – I actually like this game quite a bit (Ironically for the story, but it has a legitimately good fighting engine), but the PC port is appalling, but what put this over the edge was an embarrassing £55 DLC pack containing all manner of embarrassing costume types, which ended up completely undermining what I liked about the series. Not the most embarassing thing Tecmo Koei did this year though...

Coffin Dodgers – Was on the list at one point but ultimately this appallingly ill-conceived Mario Kart knock off, while completely unfun and lacking any form of wit, humour or interesting design, wasn't bad enough to make it on the list

Ultimately there were far more good games on my radar than bad, and so the honourable mentions are much much longer, which means I'll try to be as brief as I can with each game:

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Ultimately an incredible game that deserved a better player, it was on the list for the longest time before being shunted off in favour of Fallout 4. The sheer technical and literary achievement of CD Projekt Red's magnum opus cannot be understated though.

D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die – An amazingly quirky game from Swery65 that would have been on the list again had it not been so stacked. A far better realised effort than Deadly Premonition, but both are a must play for fans of games designed to throw you for a loop.

Chroma Squad – (Disclosure: I was a Kickstarter Backer) A fantastic turn based SRPG in a year filled with brilliant ones, this Power Rangers-em up was very much on the list for all of the year before being a victim of the influx of games so good they could not be ignored.

Oddworld New n Tasty – A marvellous reimagining of one of the most original games ever made, Oddworld New n Tasty has the amazing atmosphere and quirky possession-based puzzles without the clunky Another World style platforming of the original.

Hotline Miami 2 – A shoe in for the list, as were almost half a dozen other Devolver games but ultimately ended up missing out at the last minute.

Massive Chalice – Seemingly not to everyone's taste but I adored this procedurally generated Double Fine generational RPG, and yet another SRPG that was to be on this list.

Armikrog – The spiritual successor to the Neverhood isn't quite everything I wanted, but it is an astonishingly quirky game, irrespective of all the external baggage concerning its creator.

Titan Souls – Devolver's streamlined take on Shadow of the Colossus was a game that like many other Devolver names was ended up being bumped from this list.

Tales of Zestiria – The latest Tales game, and the first for PC is a fantastic action RPG in a year of great RPG

Invisible Inc – The former Incognita was the last SRPG that was a victim of being in a year stocked to the gills with brilliant games.

Final Fantasy Type-O HD – Technically updated enough to count for this list and by far the best and most interesting game to come out of the Final Fantasy XIII experiment. Sadly no FFXV demo for PC owners.

The Escapists – A return to form for Team 17, with a great little sandbox stealth game evoking all the fun I had watching Prison Break.

Kerbal Space Program(me) – Amazingly enough despite its long early access period the quirky space-em-up actually released in 2015. Unfortunately had it released last year it may have actually made the top ten.

Broken Age – Despite the controversy surrounding Double Fine and the nature of how some of the games ended up, this is a gorgeous and eternally charming adventure game.

Hand of Fate – Almost made it on the list by virtue of being a fantastically original concept, ultimately the individual elements just weren't as sharp as they needed to be in a year as stacked as this one.

Broforce – Oh hell yes, Broforce actually released this year as well. Sadly there was ultimately only room for one retro Devolver shooter, and Downwell proved more addictive.

Big Pharma – Almost made it on the list purely for evoking Theme Hospital, one of my most favourite games in history, this management puzzler managed to keep that quirky style although it lacked the sophistication and amazing sense of humour of the Bullfrog great.

Prison Architect – Possibly the best use of early access ever, Prison Architect finally released to deserved accolades and it's a shame that like Kerbal Space Programme it didn't release in a year so stacked with brilliant games.

The Talos Principle – Technically applies for both 2014 and 2015, given it's December 2014 release date and was in the top 10 for a long time until Dirt Rally was rude enough to leave Early Access last month.

SOMA – A gorgeous, unique concept for a horror game, and another example of a game of the year candidate that somehow missed the list. Did I mention 2015 was a brilliant year?

Read Only Memories – (Disclaimer: I backed this on kickstarter too) Interesting cyberpunk adventure with a positive attitude to gender and diversity that makes it a landmark for video games.

Android Android Cactus – Another game that so easily could have ended up on the list had it not been such a brilliant year. A fantastic, beautiful endlessly quirky twin stick shooter.

Volume – Thomas Was Alone creators making a VR stealth game? Hell yes!

Just Cause 3 – A game that could have been game of the year had the PC port not been quite as disasterous. Unlike F1 2015 and Batman Arkham Knight, they at least fixed the major issues, but the first few days before the major patches were enough in this most brilliant of years to bump it out of the running.

And there we have it. What a 2015! Thanks for reading and hopefully 2016 will be just as exciting.

Isometrics Awards: Best Game of 2015

2016-01-13T12:00:00.000+00:00

So 2015 has been a fantastic year for video games on the whole, with fantastic games of all shapes, sizes and ideas being available. This list has changed repeatedly, being unrecognisable from a list of predictions I made last year. The long list had over thirty games on it at one point and whittling it down to ten has meant several games that deserve to be on this list are not, most notably The Witcher 3, which is essentially the unofficial number 11 on this list. I've tried to cover as wide a variety of games as possible.

Are you sitting comfortably? Good, then let us begin.

10: The Beginner's Guide (Everything Unlimited Ltd., PC)

Depicted: The only spoiler-free screenshot I have.

A game by the makers of The Stanley Parable that is pretty much as difficult to describe without completely spoiling it, The Beginner's Guide is a game that will become more and more important as gaming spreads its literary wings and begins to move into mediums of metacommentary and creative criticism. It is at once a short playable experience but enters into much broader dimensions and ideas, asking some questions that are really profound and never asked before either in or about computer games. It will not be for everyone, as many of my recommendations are not, however this is a vitally important video game to understand other games, and absolutely worth the very short run-time. I will be covering the game in spoileriffic length in an Isometrics soon as well so play it before that... please?

9: Dirt Rally (Codemasters Racing, PC)

Depicted: Hot Note Reading Action!

Narrowly escaping the worst list was Codemasters' major release this year, the horribly buggy, limited in scope and incredibly disappointing F1 2015. Dirt Rally is basically the polar opposite. It appeared out of nowhere in staggering form for an Early Access game, blew pretty much every other racer this year away and was completed in December, thus guarenteeing itself a spot on this list. Dirt Rally is the opposite in many ways to Codemasters' increasing attempts to streamline and simplify their major franchises, with Grid Autosport and F1 2015 being the biggest victims of this. Dirt Rally does not; you get no tips, no aids and absolutely no mercy, and you will not place very well for a long time in the game, until you improve, build up your team and learn a lot about care and patience in order to maximise those sector times. Otherwise you will crash and see just how gorgeous and capable that damage engine is. The only fly on the ointment is how locked up most of the content is, with you stuck in a Mini Cooper until you get very good at the game but it makes progression so very rewarding. A massively fun experience if you're willing to sink your teeth deeply into a racing game.

8: Downwell (Mappin/Devolver Digital, PC)

Depicted: The only meaningful screencap I could take before being decimated by the game.

Now this is a shock. Technically a mobile port, Downwell is such an addicting little shooter game, with a twist that turns things literally on their head. A scrolling shooter in reverse, you play a young little blob thing wearing gunboots sending your bullets down the well, hunting for gems and trying not to die repeatedly. One of those things is kind of impossible, but that is the joy of games like Downwell, Spelunky and The Binding Of Isaac. You feel progression and forward progress, and the game rewards you for trying and failing. For the amount of fun you'll receive it's an absolute bargain.

7: Grow Home (Reflections/Ubisoft, PC)

Depicted: Welcome to Sunny Floating isle!

Ubisoft have a lot of issues and have made many many mistakes in the past but one of the things is their forays into art games. Last year provided the wonderful Child Of Light and Valient Hearts, and this year has the wonderful Grow Home. The basic premise is simply to grow a plant two kilometers high to reach your spaceship but the way to get there is equal parts Katamari-esque odd and complete charm, with a world growing upward and yet thanks to some delightful controls very easy to get around. It was a thoroughly relaxing game, and I have spent whole evenings gliding across the map trying to find one of the crystals or star seeds. Ubisoft have done better this year any way, but Grow Home will probably stand out as their best contribution to gaming this year.

6: Toren (Sword Tales/Versus Evil, PC)

Depicted: Drowning In Symbolism

Toren was part of a great influx of Brazillian games, which included the phenomenal Chroma Squad (a game bumped from this list at the last minute), and stands to be one of the most beautiful indie games made at least this year. You play Moonchild, a young girl who grows while climbing the titular Toren, a giant tower reaching to the sun, while exploring vivid worlds and enjoying an absolutely fascinating story without a single line of dialogue uttered. On a personal level, this game brought me back into doing Isometrics, as the first game of the year that truly felt like an incredible literary experience, swallowing you into its world tinged with mythology and metaphor. At times it feels like a 90's video game with an air of new-age surrealism, and the fact that a game can do that in 2015 gives me hope for the future.

5: Fallout 4 (Bethesda, PC/PS4/XB1)

Depicted: Low Hanging Fruit.

A late entry that completely messed up most of my rankings, I was going to leave Fallout 4 until the ultimate edition came out and the game was in a playable non-buggy state. Apparently I didn't need to wait too long because Fallout 4 was an incredible experience, improving pretty much every aspect that needed fixing, and adding a level of customisation I didn't realise I really wanted in gaming until I realised I could add a bayonet to a sniper rifle. Some have complained that it was too “streamlined” or “dumbed down” but most of those arguments appear to have been complaining about genuine improvements. Outside of the more limited dialogue options, almost none of the changes to Fallout 4 have been for the worse. Combat is better and feels more refined, VATS still has an element of threat to it, the settlement system is way more involved and delightful than it has any right to be, and you have a dog. What more is there to love?

4: Undertale (TobyFox, PC)

Depicted: A game after my own heart

Undertale is a game that completely blindsided everyone, and managed to create a huge cult overnight over what seemed from screenshots to be another retro-inspired RPG. Scratch the surface even slightly however and you have a beautiful, incredibly well-realised game about choice, authority, agency and font-named Skeletons. It is a world that is easy to be attached to with all the characters being rather unique in design, personality and witty dialogue, and that is as true for the random encounters as the main NPCs, which is where Undertale truly shines. Combat can be like a standard RPG if you want it to be, but there are options to not fight and still win, and it's as valid if not more so to spare an opponent as kill it. A spellbinding experience filled with wonder, humour and meta-commentary on gaming as a whole, and absolutely worth playing, then again, and again...

3: Rocket League (Psyonix, PC/PS4)

Depicted: True Sporting Joy

Here I am, and you're Rocket League! Possibly the best multiplayer game in recent memory, Rocket League is a concept so simple and so brilliant I'm shocked it hasn't become successful sooner. Effectively jet powered car football, where Rocket League shines is in the sheer controlled madness of everything. Anyone can pick it up and figure out the basics but there is a lot of hidden tricks and aspects to master that high level play looks very impressive and not entirely based on luck. It basically works in the same way other sports do, and tickles that bit of your brain that starts hollering, oohing, ahhing and whooping in delight as that shot curls perfectly past the other team's goalie and soars in, explosions and horns sounding off. Another game that came from seemingly nowhere and completely blew me away as a game that could have very easily been game of the year.

2: Life is Strange (Dontnod/Square Enix, PC/PS4)

Depicted: Meta-Hipster Irony

One more game that seemed to be a complete shock, Remember Me developers Dontnod's follow up, the episodic Life is Strange will stand as one of the best if not the best episodic game of all time, and for me personally the game that made me finally get how and why episodic games can work. The story of a backwater town in Washington state, the game follows Max Caulfield, a photography student who learns she has the power to turn back time after saving her best friend's life. The first episode, while very good and showcasing the beautiful hand-painted textures they used, was impressive but did not make this game the herald of great episodic gaming. However by the second episode myself and pretty much everyone I knew who played the game was absolutely hooked to the twists and turns in the story, with a story that moved people (read: me) to tears on several occasions. The genius of Life is Strange is the time travel mechanic, which adds weight to the choices you make and forces the player to live with decisions they could have changed had they chosen to. Where the story goes is incredible and I don't want to spoil it so this is another game I could not recommend highly enough. Tantalisingly close to game of the year as well.

1: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Kojima Productions/Konami, PC/PS4/XB1)

Depicted: Tactical Espionage Action! Also Dog.

Well, it was close, and at times I almost bumped it from the top spot, but ultimately Hideo Kojima's swansong for Konami had the top spot to lose. Much has been discussed, explored and described about the game and it's voyage into the deepest darkest patches of development hell, so I will stick with the fact that bizarrely enough, the narrative is one of the weakest aspects of the game. There is still some great strangeness and Kojima hallmarks but compared to MGS 4 there is definitely steps backwards in the way the story was told. The game feels like content was missing at times, odd for a game as long as The Phantom Pain is, and the DLC for the game literally includes Horse Armour, a gigantic in joke in gaming. All that aside though, MGSV is still a masterpiece, beautifully realised, brilliantly constructed and breathtaking in scope. Outside of the awful fee-to-pay FOB element, everything in the game is no worse than very good even with its flaws, which was ultimately why it ended up on the top spot despite my frustrations with a game that threw away the potential to be the best game of all time. Much of that can be ascribed to the bizarre business decisions made by Konami, and with their current mood swings about the future of the company, MGSV may well be the final swansong for them as well. For a game that has both the very best and very worst of 2015 in video gaming, MGSV encapsulates it all, and for that amongst many other reasons it gets the nod for Game of the Year.

One last thing to do is the Honourable Mentions, thanks for reading the Isometrics awards and feel free to let me know what you agree/disagree with.

Isometrics Awards: Worst Game of 2015

2016-01-12T12:00:00.000+00:00

Welcome to the Isometrics Awards for Worst Game of the Year, the Rancid Retrospective of the world of computer and video games. There was a huge influx of games, a lot of which were fantastic, unique or at least competent. With such a morass of games however, the inevitable hand of the greedy, the incompetent and the both ends up leading to quite a lot of crap. That said my longlist for worst games was far shorter than my longlist for game of the year, but my word what we have here plumbs new depths of terrible. So without further ado, we shall begin.

10: Batman Arkham Knight (WB Games/Rocksteady Studios: PS4/XB1/PC)

Pictured: The first mission of Arkham Knight

Let's start controversially shall we, by putting a game on this list I actually quite like. Batman Arkham Knight, the kinda-sorta swansong of the phenomenal Arkham series of bat-em-ups is actually a very good game. It's beautiful, features some interesting mechanics to add to the already excellent core gameplay elements of Arkham City and has enough intruigue and darkness to be worth your while. This would all be true if the game worked reliably. Even as of me writing this six months after launch there are problems with frame rate, the Batmobile (an otherwise fantastic mechanic) falling through the world and other random glitches that really hamper an overall experience, to the point that Rocksteady pulled the game, offering full refunds and only rereleasing it in November with much of the same issues.

If you're playing on a console that didn't suffer these problems quite as badly, feel free to replace this with F1 2015, another game which could have been fantastic but for lazy porting, terrible optimisation, inexcusable glitches and a basically unplayable multiplayer, although with less actual content and innovation over previous iterations to justify this. I gave the slight nod to Arkham Knight on the sheer scale of disaster of the launch, but honestly both could have been Number 10 on this list.

9: Godus (22Cans: PC)

Depicted: Abject Disappointment

So Peter Molyneux abandoned yet another project half finished and missing almost all the content claimed by the developer. Since Black and White he has been doing this and since Fable it has really affected the games, with them getting worse and worse up until this utter nadir of a life-simulation. Godus was a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2012 that had an early access launch in 2013, allegedly owing to problems with funding and complications that occurred during game development.

The rest of the story ends up getting very upsetting, the winner of an alternate reality mobile game ended up getting precisely nothing despite being promised real world revenue from a feature that was never put in the game. Many of the Backer's rewards (Read: The most important thing to give out when doing a Kickstarter campaign) were unfulfilled, leading to demands for refunds from irate gamers. Technically the game is still in early access but given the reduction to a skeleton crew as of February 2015 it's safe to say the game isn't being finished this side of ever.

What's in the game is fairly bad too, including terrible terrain deformation that seems designed to cause repetitive strain injury, a microtransaction model for the Android and iOS versions (The absence of which is touted a little too proudly in the PC beta), lots of annoying features borrowed from mobile gaming and an alarming lack of content. There is a potentially fun game here but the game causes too much pain both figuratively and literally to be worth more than derision.

8:Burgers (storm_sharks, PC)

The game may appear mildly exciting from still screenshots. They lie.

Well isn't this an odd curiosity of a game. Burgers is a Metal Slug clone of sorts with terrible controls, a fairly naff art style, a thoroughly baffling storyline and about an hour of content, and it only got that much due to some of the worst controls in a 2D action game I've seen for a while. It has a button for walking back which only made sense in a 2D shooter when the rest of the appalling controls were taken into account. The shooting is unsatisfying, the animation would have been laughed off of Newgrounds and the difficulty curve wobbles between absurdly easy to inexplicably difficult, while lacking much in the way of variety to justify it. The story, such as it is is so nonsensically absurd and riddled with spelling, logic and sanity errors that it's almost worth the incredibly low price of admission to see though, which is probably the highest praise it will get.

7: Battle Ranch (Playboom, PC)

Depicted: Veg vs Pigbies

Certain games are epoch-setting and blaze a trail that other games can but follow for years to come. Battle Ranch is not one of those games. A clone of Plants Vs Zombies whose derivation is only matched by sheer incompetence, Battle Ranch is the ever-so-original war between pigs and plants. Apparently that's a wacky original concept or something. Somehow despite being released in 2015 it looks like a game made with Visual Basic 6, with a frame rate that aspires for double digits and animations which aspire to actually animate at all. A game that would have been laughed off of Newgrounds.

6:Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 (Activision, PS4/XB1)

Thinking Of Your Own Captions is much more fun than Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5

There was a time, ever so long ago when Tony Hawk and his series of Pro Skater games were some of the most fun party games you could ever play, and the brand was a symbol of a great experience with a mix of brilliant gameplay and the perfect amount of sillyness. Pro Skater 5, released over a decade after Pro Skater 4 and eight years after the last good entry in the series, has regressed in a manner not seen since the execrable Flatout 3 in 2011. The game looks ugly as sin to start, with a graphical style so bad it was very quickly converted to a cel-shaded style in a failed attempt to deflect criticism (known as the “DS Gambit”). There's an alarming variety in pretty much every regard, with repetitive missions, limited tricks and a social element seemingly limited in practise to shoving other people over online. Worse than all of this however is the regression in gameplay, taking a formula that had evolved over a decade and somehow managing to mess up most of the core mechanics, either through streamlining or simple glitches. The game is monstrously unfun outside of watching those hilarious montages of the game glitching out uncontrollably. It's funny to watch but once you realise that is the whole experience, you'll have a bad time.

5:F-1 Chequered Flag (Turn6, PC)

Depicted: Bob Slayer's Dirty Little Secret

Speaking of Flatout 3, their developer Turn6 is back, releasing an F-1 game in 2015 which may go down as one of the flat out worst racing games in existence. Not having controller support may be forgivable in comparison to the more readily apparent sins of the game, such as the complete lack of competence in any technological respect. The graphics would be dated in 1995, something that is not hidden by terrible blurry visual effects. Every track feels the same and appears to be in the same environment and the only distinction between yourself and the other racers is what washed out colour you happen to be. The gameplay really sucks as well. One would assume you could not use the skidding mess that was the Glacier 3 engine in a formula one game, however Turn6 vehemently disagree adding terrible drifting and a destruction based boost mechanic to a discipline of driving intended to be about careful precision. An appalling, bargain basement excuse for a video game.

4:Temper Tantrum (Digital Homicide, PC)

Depicted: Baby Jesus Simulator 2015

So Digital Homicide are back, with their patented blend of bought, borrowed and stolen assets, mixed in with unbelievably pathetic gameplay. The sheer volume of crap they effused onto steam was so excessive I could have filled the top ten list with DH (and affiliated shell companies) games and had done with it. I was torn between this and the completely dysfunctional Galactic Hitman, and Temper Tantrum only won because of the sheer offence of it. It's a painful game to witness, partly because of the gaudiest textures ever sold via Unity, but also because of a bizarre framerate, unresponsive controls and a camera that seems obsessed with spinning. The one moment of respite was on my first attempt playing the game where I phased through a wall and ended up standing atop a swimming pool. When glitching your way out of playing a game is the best thing about it, you know you've reached a particularly rough level of bad.

3:Bloodbath Kavkaz (Dagestan Technology, PC)

Depicted: Race Relations. Also Depicted: A Repulsive Video Game

From mere technological failures to outright offensively awful messes, we have the Russian mockbuster take on Hotline Miami, Bloodbath Kavkaz. The steam page promises “all the horrors of russian [sic] modern culture” and it delivers in spades, providing a nonsensical experience seemingly made in MS Paint by a fourteen year old white supremacist. It is racism, terrible art and memes, and apparently there is no room for good gameplay, graphics that don't seriously harm people with photosensitive epilepsy and oddly enough for a Hotline Miami clone, a lack of difficulty for the most part. Beyond pathetic.

2:Gynophobia (Andrii Vintsevych, PC)

Depicted: An attempt to take a picture of the most repulsive part of the game, where the main character's dad is a massive homophobe.

Gynophobia literally denotes a fear of women, and the game takes this mildly intruiging concept with all the subtlty of a spider-shaped brick with breasts. The first issue is that the main conceit of the game is mostly a con, since two fifths of the game take place within another terribly generic zombie first person shooter, where you are wowed by awful controls, location damage limited to headshots, a grand total of three weapons (and I'm magnanimously including the knife in that as well), ugly store-bought enemies with AI completely limited to chasing the player and a level objective which consists of car maintenance. Once the actual misogynist parts of the game begin and you're shooting women-shaped store-bought zombies in the head, needless to say the game gets a little bit unhinged. The game is only an hour long as well, even taking into account the often unfair level design and lack of checkpoints, but by the end you'll have been so beaten over the head by this half-assed misogynist bollocks that killing a scorpion sorceress and the bizarre Oedipal aspects of the game are no longer even slightly amusing. A soul-destroying mess.

1:Hatred (Destructive Creations, PC/PS4)

Depicted: Deep Sociological Satire.

I didn't want this to be the winner in all honesty. I suspected there was a good chance this jaunt through the life of a spree killer was going to win the worst game award, but I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, brilliant games sometimes cover insanely dark themes, and providing there is a level of balance, enjoyment or some form of enlightenment a game can be entertaining. Hatred manages to get everything wrong that games Hatred is so desperate to emulate got right, games like Manhunt and especially Postal 2. Hatred is not the worst game of the year because of its appalling graphics, inexcusable framerate, iffy controls, generic mission objectives, its litany of bugs or its short lifespan. Not at all, the game is the worst game of this year, and indeed the worst of all time because of how much of a complete and utter waste it is. It wasted the Unreal Engine 4, providing a game that looks bad by late PS2 standards and has a framerate that aspires to reach double digits on a good day when nothing's on screen. It wasted a graphical style that sought to emulate dark age comic books but is a generic sludge of black and white nonsense that forces the player to rely on the “Killer's Sense” mapped to the right analogue stick to actually find enemies. Most importantly, it wasted what could have been a fascinating conceit, of a twisted disturbed spree killer far too psychotic and murderous to be an antihero, who kills for some purpose never said and possibly never known. It is a conceit succeeded in the disturbing Manhunt, the shamefully hilarious Postal 2 and even the controversial Super Columbine Massacre RPG, a free game made in 2005 about a real mass shooting. Hatred inspires complete apathy, a complete lack of care, effort or interest in the game they are making and trying to sell, trying to pass this lack of effort and talent as some slight against the politically correct world. It makes me furious that a game like this hoodwinked masses of people on Greenlight, Gabe Newell who stepped in to allow the game to be published after an initial ban, and myself into thinking this was a game with merit being a victim of censorship. Of the top three games, at least Bloodbath Kavkaz attempted and failed at being as satirical as Hotline Miami, and at least Gynophobia had attempted and failed to cover its subject matter. Hatred simply did not bother, and because of this complete antithesis of fun, enjoyment and meaning, Hatred gets the Isometrics Award for Worst Game of 2015.

Thank you very much for reading, and have a lovely 2016. Much better games and the honourable mentions are incoming.

Isometrics Awards 2015: A Panoply of Light, Fantasy and Interactivity

2016-01-10T12:00:00.000+00:00

Welcome one and all to the Isometrics Awards, the sidelong sneer at the best and worst of the literary world of computer and video games. The year has shot by so quickly hasn't it? I remember last year when I promised a regular schedule with lots of posts and gave my best games of 2014, and now I aim to promise it again, with a bit of a look back at the year as well as explaining the criteria I personally use to judge the best and worst games of the year of our game Two Thousand and Fifteen.

2015: A Panoply of Light, Fantasy and Interactivity

Two Thousand and Fifteen will probably go down as one of the best years for gaming of all time, in pretty much every regard that matters. From cultural shifts, to fantastic triple A titles, to complete out of nowhere smashes and some of the most wonderful explorations of a fantastically deep medium, it felt like the ethos of Literary Gaming was alive and well, and everything that is valued in an art form going through a veritable renaissance is visible here. My best of list has changed so extremely that my prospective list basically looks nothing like the list I will have settled on by the time the best of list comes out.

It was a year full of a ridiculous amount of games being made available, with Steam in particular swelling and buckling under the weight of releases at times. That is only a problem for a player who needs to play every major release though, and just means you are spoiled for choice for great games this year. It also means quite wonderfully that nearly everyone's GOTY list will be completely and utterly different.

The seemed to show a medium unafraid of itself and its fractured audience, which came to a head last year in tragic and ugly fashion. While elements of that still existed as they unfortunately always will, the general feeling about video games was far more focused on the creative, the positive and when critical, things that can be done to make games more for everyone (This is something we will definitely do an Isometrics on). The power balance between consumer and publisher seemed to shift in a far more positive way, albeit reluctantly, and following some of the most anti-consumer decisions and actions taken thus yet in the history of video games.

Pictured: Konami's Relationship with Hideo Kojima

In terms of major events outside of game launches, there were a few that spring to mind. The introduction of Steam Refunds was a great olive branch, finally holding developers to account for making PC ports that did not do the original game justice, and I have already seen cases of games where an appalling launch was rectified soon afterwards (and indeed some examples of that not happening where that is the direct reason they made my worst of list). There was the rather embarrassing fall of Atari into somewhat poor low-budget takes on some of their best franchises, as well as the half-hilarious, half-harrowing fall of (Fuc)Konami as a serious developer, the fallout of which still seems to be landing after all this time.

We also had the true power of crowd funding being released this year, though not always for the best. Along with the releases of some fantastic games we saw successful pitches from top tier talent for example for a new Banjo-Kazooie (Yooka-Laylee), a new Castlevania Symphony of the Night (Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night), Shenmue 3, Psychonauts 2 and I'm certain many others, along with other games from slightly smaller studios really stepping up, like the heart-stopping IndieGoGo for Indivisible. Along with this we did get some horror stories, like the cancelled Yogsadventures, some of the issues with the otherwise excellent Double Fine game Broken Age and the neverending launch window for Mighty No 9, a game that seems to go from problem to problem.

Add to this the huge issues some major releases had, from the onslaught of microtransactional elements in full price releases, the trend of paid betas that triple A games seem to be doing a lot of, and the less said of that utterly bollocks “Augment Your Preorder” stuff for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided that was mercifully scrapped. There did seem to be some pushback though that actually did some good.

Kickstarter's influence led to an influx of amazing games.

For me personally it was a banner year, where I finally felt far more confident about my writing and recording, was in a job I like with the perfect blend of stability and an end date, so I had less anxiety about the madness swirling around me, and actually had enough money to buy major releases at or soon after launch. There's a lot of oddities, and indeed a lot of games I still need to catch up on, but I feel more in the loop than I ever have, and may this continue into 2016.

On the whole 2015 was far more good than bad, which does give me a bit of unease as how long this can roll on for. With the disparity between big budget games and the rest getting to ludicrous heights, it paints an uncertain future for this truly diversely brilliant time in gaming.

2016 looks like it'll be pretty good so far though.

The Isometrics Awards

Once again, it is time for the Isometrics Awards, which will take the form of The Isometrics Worst Game of 2015, and The Isometrics Game of the Year 2015. They'll be top ten lists, with some room for a shortlist of course, and if I have time I'll try and actually have a list of awards to go with it.

I use slightly odd criteria because I feel it's slightly fairer, so I'll try and explain it a little bit more succinctly this year.

For a game to qualify for the Isometrics Awards it must:

Have been released to stores in (Including online retailers, Steam and Bricks and Mortar shops) in Europe between 1^st December 2014 and 31^st December 2015. I give the extra month because I generally finalise my list in the middle of December so games released in December often get left out, which is a shame. Note: A game can only qualify for one year, so if I mentioned it last year it can't qualify this.
Be a completed game. Early Access, beta releases and the like do not qualify until they are done. Even if it's near complete or feature complete, it needs to “go gold” or it's out.
Be a full game. This is a grey area, but basically it means an expansion to a game that relies on the original does not qualify. Standalone expansions do however, if they are good enough to merit it.
Be a new game. No ports of very old games or remakes without substantial updates. Generally The Binding of Isaac Rebirth is the standard for what qualifies, so a new engine and new content. Exception: a port from a console to Steam can still qualify if it is within 12 months, just for timed exclusives or games which have a release cycle between systems.
Generally mobile and free to play games do not qualify, although there is no specific rule against them.

In terms of judging criteria, ultimately it comes down to some subjective aspects, however I will do my best explain my justification. General rules of thumb is that a game that is bad that many people played is worse than a bad game no-one played, and that an actively hostile bad game is worse than a merely incompetently made game. The reverse is also true, a game that actively demonstrates imagination, daring and a literary sensibility will win out over a game that merely demonstrates technical competence, and also a great game for most is better than a game that is as good for less people.

Hope this all makes sense, it will in practise, and expect another update with the Isometrics Worst Games of 2015!

Isometrics: With Armikrog, Can You Separate a Game From its Creator?

2015-08-01T14:00:00.000+01:00

Welcome to Isometrics, the clinically conflicted gander at the literary world of computer and video games. We are but a few days away from the release of Armikrog, the sequel in spirit to cult hit The Neverhood, a fascinating odyssey in plasticine from the creator of Earthworm Jim, and yet rather than unbridled joy, I'm completely conflicted with whether I should buy a game I know I will enjoy.

“Why?!” The dearest reader of this may well scream. “If you know you will enjoy it, why not buy it and support a game you love?”

The problem of course is the author is Doug TenNepal, creator of The Neverhood and Earthworm Jim, creating Armikrog after a very successful Kickstarter from pretty much everyone other than myself who played The Neverhood back in the day. See, I love Doug TenNepal the artist. My adoration for The Neverhood basically created my eternal love for FMV games, claymation, indie games, the surreal and weird obscure games few people seem to have heard of (although enough to crowd fund a sequel evidently).

For the uninitiated, The Neverhood was a 1996 point and click adventure in the clay eponymous world, where you play as Klayman and have to find the crown of the king Hoborg. This involved exploring the world of the Neverhood, solving silly yet creative puzzles, endlessly backtracking and collecting history disks, one of which was stored in the longest corridor ever, which told the history of the Neverhood universe in clay etchings and the slowest walk cycles ever. It's hard to tell sometimes whether some of the dafter design decisions were deliberate or simply the case of wanting to keep every frame of animation made over an agonising year-long production. It is a game that is hard not to see the love that went into it, and that adds a charm that forgives some of its more fundamental flaws. The game was packed in on an OEM bundle but even so it did not sell well, possibly being a bit too out there even for the unbridled creativity that was the mid 1990s gaming landscape.

Two years later, its sequel, Skullmonkeys, followed pretty much the same formula. Eschewing the point and click shenanigans for a full on side scrolling platformer, the game was equal parts barmy and beautiful, full of a lot of surreal, hilarious and innately charming moments. These hilarious moments, like the beans scene and the awesome Bonus Room song (basically the best reason to kill yourself on that one level to collect every Swirly Q) were of course tempered by some iffy game mechanics, and an absurdly high difficulty curve artificially exacerbated by the fact there were only passwords and no save system for a PS1 game in 1998. General consensus is that the Neverhood is a better game, and I'm not going to argue, however I suspect that some individual scenes in Skullmonkeys are so funny they do bring the whole game up, and make you want to play more to see the next bit of slapstick. I did love it.

So with that, and the obvious and inexplicably gigantic success of Earthworm Jim (seriously, only in 1995 could that game get a TV show), TenNapel naturally released a terrible fighting game and disappeared from video games to make comic books and flash cartoons based on Ape Escape (this actually happened). But hey, he returned with a massively successful Kickstarter in 2013, and Armikrog is set to be released at the start of August.

So why am I so hesitant, I hear you cry? Well, TenNapel has said some very interesting things in the interim period, things that certainly colour the opinion of a creator. Things of a “I'm not very fond of gay people” fashion. Now, several commentators have brought in his religious beliefs, being a Breibart-esque republican Christian, and while there is a connection between his opinions and those of the religious right, it seems somewhat hypocritical to tar all religious folk with the same brush as the people he is tarring. There is a fascinating article on the website Mostly Retro, which asks the question “But if you’re not a homophobic, sexist bigot and you still want to back Doug TenNapel, I have one question... [w]hat the fuck is wrong with you?”

James Eldred's article, which is a really good read posits that final support of a project made by someone with very questionable beliefs is a tacit approval of said beliefs. How far does that go however? Pencil Test Studios, the publisher and developer of Armikrog is more than just Doug himself, surely you can support the studio and not TenNapel personally? Perhaps technically, but that's not really the point. He's writer, creator and designer of the game, his name is tied directly to it and it is his creative vision. Even if that £20 (£25 for the deluxe edition) you pay for the game does not in fact go straight into his bank account to buy more bigotry, it does serve to define him as a creative asset, and every success justifies the use of his name and his talent.

Which leads to the ultimate question, how connected is an artist's beliefs and their art? The safe answer is that it clearly depends, between different artists, different works even. In some cases even different editions of the same work will receive edits to fit in with an artist's new beliefs, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein being a particular damaging example compared to the original work. We can think of many artists who made a “religious” album of course, but these err towards very general displays of worship, rather than particularly contentious issues of a faith. In gaming it is even more difficult to see, partly because of the long lead times and rather large teams working on gaming ensuring the most controversial aspects of a belief system are removed before release. TenNepal has never released a game which explicitly is transphobic or misogynist or homophobic, and it seems astonishingly unlikely that he would compromise or manipulate a concept to fit something so alienating in.

So far, we may not be able to separate a creator entirely from his game (although of course New Theorists will argue that point with me), is it possible that people can buy a game and support the studio, the publisher and the creative part of an author without endorsing these beliefs. I disagree with Mr Eldred on that aspect. You can enjoy John Lennon's music and not endorse the fact he beat his wife, an act he apologised and showed deep regret for before his death. You can enjoy Muse without buying into Matt Bellamy's conspiracy theories. You can even enjoy the game Shadow Complex, despite it being based loosely on a book written by a homophobe hiding behind his Mormon beliefs to justify his bigotry. In the end it is art, and whatever art you choose to enjoy is your business.

Just be aware that your favourite games may be made by your least favourite artists...

Isometrics: What Is Literary Gaming Anyway?

2015-07-22T16:00:00.000+01:00

After trying to get around to it for so long, It is time to actually explain what on earth it means to be “literary” about gaming...

Note: This Originally appeared on the website Geek Pride, and I will bring back a selection of my older articles and set up some form of archive. Most of my old articles are very much based on issues current at the time of writing, but this is really my statement of principles on what I feel Literary Gaming is. I will try and get a new article done by the weekend, this is just a stopgap because work has gotten busy the last few days. In the meantime, hope you enjoy!

Welcome to Isometrics, a magnanimous meta-commentary on the synapse-sparking literary world of computer and video games. I have been doing these Isometrics blogs for a while now, and the response has been really rather nice. I've had a little feedback, suggestions and probably a better proof-reading team than most politician, and most importantly to me got people to think about these issues and ideas in gaming that they hadn't before, and for all that I couldn't be more thankful.

Clearly bogus and overwrought pandering aside, there is a point to this, because I kind of have some unfinished business. You see, while I spent the last few weeks talking about Twitterfalls and Grand Theft Auto and games so bad they're brilliant while talking about the aliterative appeal of literary gaming, I've not actually explained what on earth I mean by that phrase.

“Literary Gaming”? Isn't that a contradiction in terms? You can't game with a book, after all. Or can you? I think it's time to settle once and for all what this blog is about – with some video game examples too!

I think the problem is that “Literature” outside of academic circles has a very concrete definition. It has to do with books, specifically, high culture high quality ones. For that matter, the subculture of gaming has a very ludocentric definition; it is the playing of games that matters and anything outside of that is considered ancillary. So by these definitions, “literary gaming” makes absolutely no sense, even less so then gaming literature.

It is at this point I end up going into dissertation mode and lose a lot of readers.

First of all, in the true literary critic spirit of being massively pedantic about everything, including definitions, the definition of literature is “written works”. This does not actually exclude video games, or indeed most art. I will spare you my long digressions into etymology (this time!), but suffice to say a written work can include a theatrical production, a film, a comic or even a video game.

Part of the reason for this is that all these works have written scripts of some kind, something that is doubled for a video game (a narrative script and the game code, itself a form of written script), but that's not entirely the reason. Writing is composition, it is an act of creation, of using a language for a particular purpose. There is nothing to say that this language may necessarily be a printed script, it may well be evocative drawings, vocal evocations, body language, framing, tone, timbre, musical composition, even a reliance on the audience filling in the blanks.

Gaming, despite the vernacular, isn't necessarily about playing a simple game, about interacting with a set of rules to reach a determined outcome. Gaming is about interaction, about experiencing a world, a universe, a story in a way personal (either in subtle or significant ways) to the individual player/reader. It can be about both rules and experience, and it can be about neither, such is the nature of video games. They are in theory all code but this code can be used to create very different effects, like a blank canvas on which anything from tax documents to works of abstract majestic art can be created.

The act of gaming, particularly in a game with a story is to fill in deliberately left blanks, like a version of mad-libs with a physics engine. Consider a game like Mass Effect for example, a great science fiction epic tale (one I've mentioned two weeks in a row!), that makes perfectly clear that you are interacting in the narrative, and that your actions within the game's universe have consequences, some more far reaching than even the game designers realised at first. These things are true of most games, to greater or lesser effect. Pong, for example allows your actions to affect the narrative of getting the score to 21 with the consequence being the end of the game.

And therein lies the way in which the two can coexist. If literature is just writing and gaming is just interaction, than both can easily coexist, given that by this level of abstraction the act of reading is gaming. This obviously is useless to us though, so a different tactic is needed. One that will tragically remove Pong from our venerable list of literary games.

For centuries Literature has concerned itself with the fundamental question of what it is, which has in itself created an incredibly vibrant array of different works, each addressing that question with different frameworks, levels of intensity and outcomes. This tradition has spread to video games, with a lot of games focused self-reflexively on the history of the medium, but also on evolution and progression. One of my favourite games last year was a little indie title called Evoland, which told the technical history of the RPG through the medium of an RPG, each treasure chest opened being a new feature that radically altered and added to the game's world. And of course on top of that you have games like the sensational Papers, Please, a game which demonstrates more powerfully than most the ways in which a game can craft a very unique literary experience. Many great works of fiction have been about dystopian areas and corruption, but Papers, Please took you through the experience of fear, and poverty and destitution and the inevitable corruption that follows is a choice of the player that is never actually made explicit. I won't talk any more about either of these games because I feel there is definitely enough to write full articles.

To point out, a game does not necessarily have to be literary to be of high or worthy quality in order to be good or enjoyable. Literary gaming as an idea, or a descriptor (for lack of a better word), isn't necessarily a barometer of quality. Many terrible books are still literature, and many terrible works are still art. What sets them apart is that literary games can be explored in frameworks similar to ones used in literature, and given the broad schools of thought within the literary world, far more games are included than excluded, and I focus on games with interesting points, not just games of high quality.

To sum up, literary gaming as a concept is an exploration of games as a unique medium for telling stories and presenting experiences, through combinations of narrative, interaction and art. It is a reaction to the increasing criticism among mechanics focused game players that games have to be games first, art second and literature never. It is a celebration of games that explore that particularly strange relationship that the reader and the writer have, unique to any other artistic medium in history. It is a particular focus and school of thought that does justice to an art form, a literary form that can provide experiences, tell stories and evoke theme, ideology and metaphor in a way never seen before.

It is a celebration of video games, video gaming and the great authorial figures behind it.

What is your take? Was my defence spirited or ludicrous? Are games literary? Was this entirely necessary and could I have talked about anything else this week? Drop me a line in the comments before, on the facebook group or on twitter, @HuggyDave. Using the hashtag #isometrics will do nothing, but make a kitten smile. See you next month for a very special Isometrics! Thanks for reading!

Isometrics: Does Violence Really Beget Violence? A Response to Michaël Samyn

2015-07-15T15:00:00.000+01:00

DISCLAIMER: This is very long, and really can be summed up with "This article is wrong", but I had a lot to say about this topic. This isn't the Isometrics article for the week, that will come on Friday and be significantly more optimistic in tone. In the meantime, enjoy me spending 3500 words arguing about a 600 word thinkpiece!

Hello, welcome to Isometrics, the oddly confrontational gaze at the literary world of computer and video games. My general philosophy of doing long form writing is that it is primarily about informing, explaining, introducing and expressing a love for the wider world of video games, hoping to try and make the reader think about the games they play. That way players will appreciate them more. I end up slipping into current affairs too, but usually as the framework for a literary idea, and I don't ordinarily respond to other writers. However, what Michaël Samyn, co-founder of independent games companyTale of Tales brings up very much merits serious discussion, and I feel a full response would not only stop a lot of the misconceptions of more controversial aspects of his article, but also very much keep in line with Isometrics' aims to focus on gaming as an art and literary form at the same level as older more established ones.

To offer the slightest scrap of context, Tale of Tales was a company that specialised in very unique games, generally short mood pieces where the key was peace, exploration and the experience and subtleties of the game being their own reward. Their 2009 game The Path was arguably the best example of this working well. There is a stated goal, follow the path, and if you do you will complete the game in about three minutes. However straying away from the path leads to a very interesting, disorienting, dark and melancholic piece. They also had moving experiences like The Graveyard, a very short game about an elderly woman walking through a graveyard to a bench.

That's the entire game.

The difference between the demo and the full version was whether the lady died or not, which sums up in a nutshell what Tale of Tales were trying to achieve. They wanted to create games that could not be summed up by two people the same way and were experienced and thought of differently depending on how willing a player was to operate and interact with the game not just via player input but inner thought. They were thought provoking, interesting as much in concept as in execution, unique for their time (while art games obviously existed before Tale of Tales, they did not quite attempt the same things) and surprisingly influential on the latest wave of literary game developers, such as The Astronauts (The Vanishing of Ethan Carter), The Fulbright Company (Gone Home) and thechineseroom (Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs).

What they were not was successful.

While their aspirations were laudable, they were ultimately missed by the wider gaming community. Their latest effort, the “Gamer-friendly” Sunset, sold 4000 copies, in part because the advertising was so terrible for it I did not hear about it until the day I decided to start this article. In the end though, while financial success is kind of needed to pay those bills that Kickstarter cannot fill, a game should not be judged on sales, and at some point I will hope to cover it.

In the meantime, Tale of Tales closed down and Samyn started a Patreon to create a blog about video games, which is certainly interesting from a designer's perspective, and the first major article to come out of this endeavour is entitled “Violence Begets Violence”. I apologise that this is generally regarded as bad form in academia, but the best way to cover this and not miss any points is to go paragraph by paragraph, so please click the link and read along will you?

The first paragraph is just setting his intentions to look at the “gigantic elephant in the tiny games room.” Now I am already in two minds about this. What he is referring to of course is the gigantic, medium altering, centre of academic gaming thought which is the issue of violence and gaming. He will get into more specific points later but the notion of this as a colossal entity dwarfing the gaming industry is a fitting metaphor in the sense that violence is an issue bigger than pretty much anything in life itself since it concerns the destruction of life, however we will see going forward that this is somewhat unintentional.

“A Peaceful Oasis” begins the first part, and covers the concept of Tale of Tales' first game, The Endless Forest. TEF was a MMO game where you played as a deer with a human face and explored a forest while interacting non-verbally with other players, identified via pictogram. At one's most generous, it could be described as a deconstruction of the goal-orientated, text heavy, chat heavy complicated MMORPGs which would begin to peak in 2005 with the first few expansion packs of World of Warcraft. As Samya recalls “[t]o avoid behavior (sic) that wouldn’t fit our fantasy we decided not to include combat, competition or even chat. As a result The Endless Forest offers a relaxing experience of friendly contact between complete strangers.” The intent was for it to be a living virtual piece of performance art but there was too much stripped out to make that particularly special.

It continues to claim that the community of the game is a “haven for all.” The issue with this halcyon vision of course is there has been situations where neither the game nor the actions of Samya and Auriea Harvey lived up to the peaceful ambitions. When members of the SomethingAwful forums started playing the game (and bleating forever), this led to one of the most bizarre conflicts between an army of deer who wouldn't shut up and the rulers of this virtual dominion, who destroyed everything and managed to end the Endless Forest, at least temporarily. This entirely baffling scenario does undermine the claim that TEF did not contain “violent interactions” and the atmosphere of friendliness did involve calling other players “penis fawns” and wishing their deer had machine guns so they could kill said phallic baby deer.

There is a point to this reminiscence about a ten year old MMO about nothing, and problems begin to emerge in their argumentation in what is appropriately enough called “A rough environment”. They explain TEF as a reactionary game against the bullying and harassment redolent in gaming communities, which is interesting given that the TEF community and Samya themselves are guilty of this. This then leads to first an implication of the connection between violent games and violent actions which lead to direct accusations of said connection. I will try to avoid belabouring the point about hypocrisy, and instead discuss the question of whether all trolls play Hatred and Call of Duty and all manner of MurderDeathKill-em-ups (except of course MDK 1 and 2. The swines!) that is clearly the thrust of their argument. One would suggest the burden of evidence is on the writer to prove that gaming trolls and bullies all even play those kinds of games before we even get to the point of discussing cultivation theory!

There is also, and admittedly this will sound like nitpicking but is a valid point, not a terribly clear definition of what violence they object to and where they draw the line. Their objection is stated as “antagonistic, aggressively competitive glorifications of violence and gore” which is mildly more helpful, however by this logic Super Meat Boy counts. Think about it, it's aggressively competitive, if you're trying to beat a friend's time it's antagonistic and it glorifies violence and gore by making it really cute! Often you can get away without important distinctions because the nature of the discussion makes it obvious. As much as I disagreed with the Target Australia view of Grand Theft Auto V, they at least made it clear the issues they had with the game, and why they felt it had to be removed from store shelves.

Now we have had some discussions, minor implications and explorations of alternative ways to make games, regardless of the result of said experiments. However paragraph five is basically where any cogent arguments are lost entirely. “We don’t need theories about the correlation between violent games and violent behavior.” Samya cries defiantly from within a homemade sand bunker.

Um, not to nitpick, but the claim you just made is in fact a theory.

Lexical nitpicking aside, there are several theories that have been applied to violent video games. The initial appeal of cultivation theory (the idea that behaviours learned from consistent and lengthy exposure to depictions of said behaviours mean children will internalise them, generally used to explore the issue of Power Rangers and it's “violence is always the answer” attitude early on) was that it provided a way to look at gaming as it related to its influences. These days there are more refined theories based around active viewing and catharsis which suggest that violent gaming has no or a positive reaction on player's behaviour. (http://gamepolitics.com/2014/06/27/research-bad-behavior-games-can-lead-pro-social-behavior-real-life#.VZ8IxvmZJYo) (http://gamepolitics.com/2015/04/16/university-missouri-researchers-find-violent-video-games-do-not-cause-aggression-adults-a) (http://gamepolitics.com/2014/11/05/research-no-correlation-between-violent-media-consumption-and-societal-violence). While there isn't a complete consensus yet to acquit violent media (in part because no research body seems to have found a consensus for doing such a test), to dismiss all of that so bullishly is the pseudoacademic equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming that you can't hear anything. Except more arrogant.

The paragraph of course doubles down on this and argues that not only is the issue of whether violent games influence or violent people flock to violent games is irrelevant, but that “[a]nyone who has ever been attacked by a gamer lynch party knows that a certain number of people who play antagonistic and violent games are aggressive, intolerant, reactionary, misogynist, and so on.” I have many problems with this, but what tops the bill must be that classic weaselly appeal to common knowledge to support a rhetoric that in practice means nothing. It's very much true that a “certain number” of people who play violent games are all those nasty things, but at the same time, a “certain number” of said aggressive, intolerant reactionary misogynist hamburger eating monsters do pretty much anything on earth, because a “certain number” is a completely meaningless term. They could be breathing, listening to indie folk, working in an office, playing games where they play as creepy deer then threaten to shoot people who moo. It's the worst, most dangerous kind of rhetoric, because it presents something completely normal as a shocking, horrible thing caused by one specific thing. It's the literary equivalent of those “CONTAINS VITAMINS AND CALCIUM” stickers you see on health bars.

Lynch mobs suck, especially on the internet, since the fear is of how far it will infect and corrode the rest of your life. The people who've been forced to travel with full security teams to engagements because of bomb, gas and other threats on their lives are utterly utterly abominable. It is also fair to say they do not represent all, or even a large amount of video game players. Even so, perhaps this is just a call to avoid overt glorification. Some games like the mildly reprehensible Hatred toe the line between satirically violent and meaning everything they say, and the outcry, while ultimately going too far in getting the game banned, did open a debate about the exact concern people have with violence in gaming and when it moves beyond red pixels animating over a polygonal model that looks like a person and into behaviour that is more concerning. There is a debate to be had and maybe it is ironically enough a passionate plea for diversity in game design that errs too aggressively.

I thought this right up until I read the next paragraph.

“Hypocritical industry” begins by accusing the game industry of creating the horrible violence obsessed players for profit. In pretty much those words:

“The game industry actively breeds a group of belligerent hooligans for profit.”

There is so much to unpackage in that single sentence that it is to a degree absurd. First of all, this goes beyond cultivation theory, this accuses mainstream Triple A developers of brainwashing and creating actively hostile, negative groups of gamers to make money. There are plenty of horrible things the industry has done, including the removal of a sexual relationship for Nilin in Dontnod's fascinating flop Remember Me because it would allegedly scare male gamers to play a sexually active woman. There was also the removal of Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite boxes because the manly man's cover apparently focus tested better. Also, lest we forget the utterly appalling things said by the project manager of the 2013 remake of Tomb Raider, including that Lara would be nearly raped and that the game is designed to make the player want to coddle and protect her. At the same time however, it is one thing to accuse the game of pandering to a particular audience and quite another to say they breed a particularly hostile one. He goes on to say that it creates a vicious cycle of only violent games selling and being made, a claim that is only credible if you take a very loose definition of violence in games. Would Mario Kart 8 for example, a cutesely fun Kart Racer where you can throw turtle shells at mushrooms be violent for example? Or Hearthstone, an incredibly popular and successful (albeit free to play) game? What about games where the intent is to avoid violence like Thief? Even if we focus on multiplayer games where would the Squid/Kid-based Ink-em-up Splatoon fit? How about Elite Dangerous, a game where you can choose to be completely pacifist? The point is that this is a gigantic claim that hasn't been quantified so we don't even know if it is true.

This isn't helped by the next paragraph which accuses the game industry of hypocrisy if game devs “produce and support entertainment where the killing or wounding of others is central to the amusement.” In a situation like this, where would a game which uses violent action to completely deconstruct the narrative of violent war games fit in this? Because some games do indeed use graphic violence to make particular points such as Spec Ops: The Line, one of the greatest examples of storytelling in video games. Speaking of great literary adaptations, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream was an intensely gory, horrid, disturbing game, but it used every element of its nightmarish atmosphere and events to make particularly interesting points about the human condition, particularly the human condition in crisis. I would not necessarily describe them as “entertainment where the killing or wounding of others is central to the amusement (emphasis mine).” per se, however they are absolutely vital to the narrative, themes and metaphors being expressed. To remove the violence in those games would remove the entire central point of those games. And yet, despite that, these games read as distinctly pacifist, or at least discretionary in terms of violent content. They are art pieces that use violence as a vital element of their subject matter and to argue these games are creating a culture of culturally-shut out violent sociopaths is completely missing the point and advocating for an incredibly dangerous precedent of censorship: one I would not expect from the developer of The Path.

Samyn does at least note that this probably is not meant to be malicious, despite the particularly hostile wording of the initial claim, however, comparing violent media to weaponry is such false equivalence it is difficult to come up with an appropriate comparison to make. It is like comparing reading a cookbook to eating lunch, in that it is at best tangentially related to any given violent act. Violent media does depict violence, that is a kind of truism, but there are so many steps that go in between a particularly abstract depiction of a violent act and committing a violent act oneself. Samyn follows the standard Thompsonian/Whitehousian argument that a violent game is worse than a violent film because you actually take part in the violence yourself, but at the same time I'd argue the opposite, because the violence would enacts in video games requires inputs far removed from video games.

The final part “We can do better” is difficult to comment on without getting very angry at its patronising, reductionist assumptions about video gamers. However, it is hard to argue about introducing more gamers to games that showcase a beauty in life, a beauty of interaction, of the world, of relationships, of peace. That is very true, and the best start to this sort of dialogue is not to make the assumption your audience is sociopathic. The second step is to make good games with these regards in mind.

The problem with a lot of Tale of Tales games was that they were intentionally niche in design, which mean they were often inpenetrable and difficult to play conventionally on purpose. This includes Sunset, their self proclaimed “gamer friendly” game, which wasn't the easiest thing. I can think of many great games that are both fun to play and present interesting messages about peace, tolerance, respect and other positive themes. Nintendo seems to be very good about creating these sorts of games with interesting ideas, although generally they don't aim for particularly deep meaningful things. There is also the incredibly gorgeous Toren, although that does have sword play at times. We are in the midst of a Kickstarter-powered adventure game boom, Minecraft is still one of the most successful games of all time and that provides so many messages about the importance of observation, the beauty of simplicity and punching trees to collect wood. A bit more of an obscure example, Soleil teaches tolerance and respect, through a deconstruction of the hero's journey.

There are certain loaded terms that cannot be used in the gaming community without ridicule, and one of them is “Murder Simulator.” It is a phrase that has a lot of baggage, needless to say, and I don't recall being used unironically for almost a decade by this point. For younger gamers and those without memories that long, Murder Simulator was a catchphrase used by disbarred Florida lawyer, anti-games advocate and one time GamerGate supporter Jack Thompson, basically implying that games actively teach people to kill. It was hilarious, partly because it was an idea that only made sense if you didn't think about it at all, partly because Jack Thompson was such a cartoon villain of gaming culture but mostly because anyone who has played a “simulator” game knows that they generally aren't programmed well enough to be realistic. We also have a problem once again with criteria, which was Thompson's issue as well. Thompson's targets were typically limited to whichever Rockstar game was out that particular month however Samyn doesn't seem to be very clear with which games are objectionable.

The problem with a lot of this article is that it reads like sour grapes. It is arguably better documented that Sunset was a failure than the game was even advertised, and due to the strong pacifist tones of many of Tale of Tales' games, it is easy to scapegoat their failure as a hunger for violent media brought upon by those eeeeevil major developers and their money and enjoyable games. I do believe it is completely petty and untoward to accuse game developers of criminal negligence vis á vis wrongful death by choosing to make violent media.

It is one thing to find a game like Hatred problematic due to its somewhat questionable depiction of an anti-heroic spree killer, or GTA V's torture scene to be unnecessary in context despite the establishment of your protagonist as a sadistic psychopath. An open debate showcases that there are many ways to create games and how it can progress in all sorts of directions to be even more fun and explore ever deeper themes, and how games can tackle difficult subjects in tactful emotive ways.

It is quite sad reading this, seeing someone with interesting though not perfect ideas be so bitter and blinded by purpose, unaware that the issues surrounding gaming's culture are not merely found within but outside of the games we play. Samyn is absolutely right in that we can be better, and honestly reading this made me feel like I do need to keep writing Isometrics, to showcase a gaming world where this is indeed the case, albeit not always to major critical or commercial success.

I just hope Mr Samyn also opts to channel this apprehension positively as well.

Isometrics: Is There Such a Thing as a Gaming Auteur?

2015-07-08T18:00:00.000+01:00

Auteurs: the great powerful entities of the cinematic world, and a theory about how the authorship of a work goes beyond the written word. But does this idea of great artists uniting a team under a singular vision gel with the technical nature of video games? David Rose investigates...

Welcome to Isometrics, the long-dormant look at the literary world of computer and video games. Currently we're in a fairly interesting world of gaming, with lots of interesting news, but right now I want to talk about the Auteur theory. So while there's plenty to talk about with regards to commercial ethics, Steam Refunds, major releases being so buggy on launch they were recalled from entire platforms and the next wave of great Kickstarter games, for now we are going to discuss something that closely approximates literary criticism.

The Auteur Theory, commonly attributed to François Truffaut and the writers of the French periodical Cahiers du Cinéma (Literally translating to “Notebooks on Cinema”), primarily concerns itself with the notion of creation or authorship in a film. Unlike a work of fiction or even a scripted theatrical piece, where there is a clear author and often therefore a person (or small group of people) to ascribe particular stylistic, narrative, metaphorical and other literary quirks to, a film is usually a massive undertaking with a team of dozens, sometimes hundreds working to bring a project to fruition. In that sheer sea of humanity, who is the author? And given the multiple forms the language of cinema takes (photography, performance, framing along with the narrative content of the script), what does it mean to be the creator? This is simplifying, but the Auteur in cinema is the driving creative force, which in many cases is a role the director shoulders. A good director, so it is argued by proponents, unifies the creative process, and ultimately creates a film which has the particular fingerprint of that director.

Segue into the world of film aside, what does this have to do with video games that have evolved from the FMV watchathons of the 1990s? Well video games, much like films fall into that difficult critical territory of being designed by a large swathes of very creative people, and so can any one person really claim to be the captain of a creative vessel, steering the concept through his vision? Besides, given that the main artistic disciplines are so diverse and multi-stranded (A single author must ensure that gameplay, art assets, narrative, music and enough technical capabilities to put them all together work to create a unified whole).

Now before we go any further, I'm not necessarily talking about one man projects, or even projects with teams you can count on one hand, since the author of a one man project is pretty self-evident. The main interrogative thread is that, given the spate of incredibly successful kickstarters by famous video game developers, what the meaning is, if any, of a by-line in a video game. Is it simple marketing, or is there something to be said for the ability of a single artist who can bring these assets together? The best place to start is probably the most obvious.

Hideo Kojima is a name that either you are familiar with, or you haven't played enough games. The ace game designer at Konami and a man who revolutionised gaming in countless ways through game of the year after game of the year after game of the century. He's probably one of the easiest examples of gaming auteur to show in many ways, in part because his style owes at least a little to fellow auteur Quentin Tarrentino. His works are unashamedly postmodern: built on medium bending, genre manipulation and using that fragile nature of the game's reality as a powerful tool. There is a distinct style to his work, and that is what makes a game instantly recognisable as his, despite massive differences in game engines, technical sophistication, gameplay genre, setting, mood, atmosphere and even intent. Pretty much every game he's been involved him has some kind of fingerprint, from the metafictional construct of PT, through the bizarre and highly innovative solutions redolent in games like Snatcher to the delightfully literal solution to the insular nature of gaming found in Boktai.

Kojima is a very obvious case, and were the accusation that he desires to make films more than games actually to come to pass, he would probably be considered an auteur in that as well. But gaming doesn't quite play as simple a game as that, and a designer/director/project lead can show his/her influence in other ways. Roberta Williams' uncompromising attitude manifests very clearly not merely in the brutal and often sadistic levels of death her poor players suffer when playing any given King's Quest, but through a diverse legacy of adventure games that pushed the genre to new heights commercially, creatively and technologically.

On a similar note, Shigeru Miyamoto's fervered belief in “kyokan” (literally “feel-one” but generally refers to empathetic research based around emotional connections) is the emotional heart that Nintendo built its empire around and shows in an astoundingly diverse body of work and his influence will likely live forever in developers he has influenced.

The ever-controversial Peter Molyneux certainly counts as well, with his particular focus being the interaction between the player and the world in which they interact, which manifests in his god games (Populous, Black and White, Godus), his devil games (Dungeon Keeper), is paid particular focus in the Fable series with somewhat mixed results, and even his odd management sims like Theme Hospital. His incredible habit of overpromising on his games sheds even further light into this particular theme.

Finally, there is Kenji Eno, the force behind WARP software, and as interesting as he was when I covered all his US-released games. His distinct desire to not play by the standard rules and conventions of video games and his theories about the future of virtual media led to concepts like the virtual actor, games trying to be films to the point that they have a film-like length, games with invisible monsters and basically every single bizarre thing about D2 that wasn't a direct homage to Hideo Kojima.

So a gaming auteur (what's even the word? A Gáuteur?) can come from many different disciplines and bring a style in different ways. The key to each of these examples, as well as the other (Yu Suzuki, Suda51, Swery65) gaming auteurs out there is that they bring a style, a distinct vision and their own quirks that for better and worse identify them as the driving force behind a particular game. I could probably write a somewhat hefty book if I tried to cover every single gáuteur out there, but here's a small taster of how the Auteur theory applies to gaming, something we will cover in greater detail once I start showcasing the more literary examples mentioned here, along with a bunch of other crazy theories.

This doesn't mean of course that the rest of the team don't matter. Far from it, team management ultimately is the most important weapon in any auteur's arsenal, and it is even more important in gaming with the incredible amount of dependent artistic and technological parts to games. To answer the question more directly if the fact I'm trying to come up with pretentious words doesn't provide enough clarity: Yes, there absolutely is such a thing as a gaming auteur, and the fact that these authorial developers are influential, important and design incredible games in most if not every genre is a rather large smoking gun in any argument that games are a thriving art form.

All the people who bought Metal Gear Solid can't be wrong...

Hello there. Many thanks for reading Isometrics. It's been months since I've had the time and the opportunity to really get back into writing articles about something I love so much in an academic manner. The plan is to do an article a week at first, being put up on a Wednesday, though that may increase if I have time, and I may do some special articles concerning particular issues. The plan is not to cover as many current events and instead focus on gaming's place in wider literary debates. Hope you enjoy, and if you have questions, thoughts or names of Auteurs I missed (I didn't even name ten, and didn't even mention Geoff Crammond or Will Wright), feel free to drop me a line on Twitter @HuggyDave, in a comment below or on Facebook (look up David Rose – Writer).

Isometrics Game of the Year: The Top Eight Games this Year

2015-01-01T12:00:00.000+00:00

2014 was a rather interesting year of near misses and near brilliance, ruined by inexperience with new hardware or incompetence with porting. However despite this there were some truly brilliant games, and so I had to trim my shortlist a lot to get to my top eight best games this year.

Again, as with the worst games list, the games had to be released between 1^st December 2013 and 31^st December 2014, cannot be freemium games, and remakes are allowed if they change enough stuff to almost be considered a game distinct from the original. The first release of a game in English also applies here. No beta or early access games here, which basically wiped off a good chunk of my shortlist.

In the end though, this is my shortlist, and I'll do my best to explain where the rankings come from.

Here goes!

8: Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (Konami: PC/PS3/PS4/X360/XONE)

This was a game I really hoped they wouldn't screw up, but in a few ways it did so let me get the bad parts of the game out of the way first. The game is ridiculously short for its original price tag (£30!), clocking up at about an hour and a half for the main mission, though of course it contained a few side missions. There is only one map, and of course the story can't really get going, although we do get a lot of disgusting imagery which I won't get into which is a bit unsettling since none of the previous six or seven MGS games got anywhere near as visceral. It very nearly ended up on the end of the worst games list because of its length, and I'm not even kidding.

All that out of the way, the game was utterly magnificient. The control system, vastly improved from MGS4 onwards was absolutely joyeous to use. Graphically the game was spellbinding, using light and shade in a way I'd never seen in a next gen game, with some great details and amazing character designs. The AI is vastly improved and a legitimate part of the challenge, since they will call for help and go into alert if something logically untowards is discovered, reminding me a lot of the Hitman games in that regard. The story, such as there was, is evocative, expertly directed and brilliantly performed, particularly with regards to mental trauma and harm, obviously this will become a far greater part of The Phantom Pain. There are a lot of ways to handle each mission and a ton of weapons to collect to, so it is a case that if you enjoy the game there are plenty of reasons to replay.

Added to this is the phenomenal PC port, one of the best from a Japanese developer (and one of the most optimised Next-Gen games released on PC this year) and you have a brilliant game that only slightly disappointed.

7: Toybox Turbos (Codemasters: PC)

I agonised whether I was going to put this or BlazeRush on my list, and eventually it boiled down to a straight choice. While Blazerush was an amazingly fun game which really surprised me from a developer who hadn't made a game that good before, Toybox Turbos is simply a better game. It is a modern day Micro Machines, which is probably the greatest compliment you can give a party racing game.

The graphics are superb, there are plenty of cars and tracks to play and an excellent online mode. However the main star is the gameplay, which is as perfect as you can make a party racing game. Overall it is a little short in single player (3 hours, but the game was £11 new and of course there is the multiplayer) but get a few friends playing and you have a great party game.

6: Cloudbuilt (Coilworks: PC)

On the one hand, it's incredibly tough. On the other it's an absolutely gorgeous, fantastically designed joy to play. Coilworks' debut is amazing to play, basically getting to the core of what 3D platforming should be. Armed with a hover, a dash and the ability to run up walls, Demi can go basically anywhere, but the limits to all three of those abilities mean the game ends up becoming one of careful strategy and risk, particularly since there are so many routes you can take through levels, some unforgiving tough but very quick. Add to that an interesting story about journeying through trauma and a lot of interesting levels and you have one of the sleeper hits of the year.

5: Murdered: Soul Suspect (Square-Enix: PC/XONE/PS4/X360/PS3)

A game which scores a lot of its points with an interesting premise and an excellent adventuring mechanic. The best way to describe the game is Ghost Trick meets LA Noire, where you play a cop who has to solve his own murder in order to get into heaven. At times the game is complete nonsense but the game really does a good job of painting the ghost world as different from the real world. Add to that the interesting clue gathering and piecing together mechanics from LA Noire and you have a very good adventure game. The stealth sections, combat and the sheer amount of combat there is later in the game probably could have done with some balencing though.

4: South Park the Stick of Truth (Ubisoft: PC/X360/PS3)

Don't say I never give Ubisoft credit when it's due. For all the AAA problems they've had this year, they also released the touching Valient Hearts, the stylish Child of Light and The Stick of Truth, the single best licensed game released this year, and up on the list for being the best licensed game of all time.

Where it works is in the details. It looks like the show, and few games ever manage that. The writing is by the show's writers, the voice acting is by Matt Stone and Trey Parker and it is as hilarious, demented and absolutely brilliant as the show has become. The gameplay is akin to Paper Mario, right down to having patches, badges and extra abilities and may well be the most refined game Obsedian have made as well.

3: One Way Heroics (AGM Playism: PC)

There were a lot of RPGs in my shortlist, and again I was torn between the sublime Legends of Heroes, Trails in the Sky and this, and really both deserve to be on this list. One Way Heroics succeeds in having an excellent array of mechanics, a great pace to the game, lots of choices and customisation and really managing to do something new with the roguelike. The balance between getting experience and looking for items, as well as the potential for strategy is done excellently, along with one of the best soundtracks this year (in fact the only two soundtracks better than it are at #2 and #1 on this list). A sleeper hit in every regard.

2: The Binding of Isaac Rebirth (Nicalis and Edmund McMillan: PC/PS4)

I love the Binding of Isaac, but there were a lot of slight technical problems with the original game which meant I never really got the fullest out of it. If it didn't do quite as many improvements, modifications, engine changes and the like to the game it might have been disqualified for being a rerelease, but because all those changes improve and change the gameplay experience so thoroughly, it has to be here. Since I bought it a month and a bit ago I have sunk 75 hours into it, and it has become the go-to game I play when I'm doing other things. The amount of content in the game is staggering, almost as much as how much that affects the game, with good and bad loadouts really meaning the difference between a tricky game and an incredibly hard one. Despite this you never feel the game has made it impossible for you, and it manages that great rogue-lite sense of risk and reward perfectly. Add to that a great mix between adorable and abject imagery and an incredible soundtrack and you have one of the best games this year.

1: Transistor (Supergiant Games: PC/PS4)

The game world this year has been characterised by games that promise a lot and simply do not deliver. Many games I thought would be spectacular at the start of this year have by its end either been forgotten or are not quite as great. Transistor however is not one of them.

I went into 2014 thinking this would be my game of the year, perhaps having to battle MGSV and Watchdogs for the top sport. But it simply did not disappoint. If anything, the game was better than I had anticipated, with all its functions and form coming together wonderfully with an amazing aesthetic. I love cyberpunk, and this mix of cyberpunk and art deco made for an arresting hauntingly beautiful atmosphere, particularly as the work of the Process serves to swallow it up.

The soundtrack is one of the best of all time, a mix of genres along with some sensational vocals creates that tragic out of time sense for the game, which just works perfectly for every scenario. The game is short but with a New Game Plus option and a heartbreaking story.

There were many good games this year. A few great ones, but it turns out only one of them managed to do everything right this year and that was indeed Transistor.

The Isometrics Worst Games of the Year: The Top Eight Worst Games of The Year

2014-12-31T12:00:00.000+00:00

So after a long contentious year, there stands a stack of terrible games, some giftedly bad, others a sheer affront to the gaming Zeitgeist. However they got onto this list, they are games that really made a dent in arguments that video games are artistic statements.

Right, I covered the rules in a post last week, but just to clarify everything. I'll do a quick summery:

It has to be a full game released between 1^st December 2013 and 31^st December 2014, that is not a beta or in early access. Episodic games count from the release of the first episode, so long as the intent was to be episodic and not to sell a beta release. Freemium games are exempt except in particularly egregious circumstances. Remakes, ports and expanded rereleases can count either if they are the first version of a game released in English or are expanded to a sufficient degree that they could be considered a sequel.

In the end these are all subjective rankings, and I will show my working as much as possible in the process of writing the list.

Now, with that out of the way here is the bottom eight games of the year!

8: Watch Dogs (Ubisoft: PC/X360/XONE/PS3/PS4)

Speaking of subjectivity, this is a game I suspect might ruffle a few feathers, because on the face of it it's not a terrible game, with mostly functional mechanics and a few occasionally interesting twists on the Ubisoft Open World formula. This is on the list for three relatively minor things that in combination ruin the experience. The first is the simplification of basically every aspect, with the hacking on the go mechanic that is meant to differentiate it from other open world games almost never coming into play except in the most situational of circumstances. This spreads to the graphics, gorgeous in trailers but fairly mediocre and choppy in game. Speaking of mediocre and choppy, the PC port is particularly awful, with low framerates, poor textures and stuttering abounding and serving to ruin the experience further.

It is the most classic, and frustrating case of a game with a great idea that falls flat on the fundementals and simply ends up as a lifeless, dull and largely unlikable game. A crying shame.

7: Duck Dynasty The Game (Activision: PC/ X360/PS3)

Probably on a lot of people's top spot for worst game this year, Activision's take on the beardiest family in america caused a lot of eyebrows to roll. How would a game based on a reality (using the word under advisement of course) TV series pan out? The answer is generically. Outside of the baffling and occasionally unintentionally hilarious storyline (Any cutscene before a stealth section really speaks for itself), the game is a set of rather shallow minigames in a rather shallow open world. It's pretty low on this list in part because it at least works completely, though the fact that it is above a game that was almost completely broken on it's PC release speaks volumes about the quality within. Whatever you think about the Robertsons and the Duck Commander, this game commands you to throw it in the bin.

6: Takedown: Red Sabre (505 Games: PC)

This at first seemed like an excellent idea for a game. Bring back classic tactical shooting in the vein of the sublime Rainbow Six 3, even calling on a former developer of the title for support. Sadly the game was astoundingly bugged and even when it wasn't constantly crashing to desktop or sucking wind on fairly powerful PCs the actual content of the game was ferociously limited, with multiplayer being as unplayable a mess as possible. It is a crying shame that this game failed to live up to expectations and served, along with several other Kickstarter disappointments to really dent confidence in the crowdfund as a medium for distributing games, which is the primary reason why it makes it on this list.

5: Rambo: The Video Game (Teyon: PC/X360/PS3)

Oh dear. This is the first of many games on this list that are both utterly dreadful and utterly deceptive. The Steam page of the game suggests that your hard earned thirty pounds will garner you a crazy yet rather alright looking FPS based on the most manly man in the history of 80s manliness, John Rambo. However upon purchase the game turns out to be an on-rails light gun game. You may have noticed that there aren't any common light guns available for PC. The graphics, while passable in screenshots are terrible in motion, not helped by the fact that each of the stages has exactly one enemy type. Other mechanics such as perks and the rage bar seem tacked on and other than making the obligatory quick time sequences even less necessary don't serve to make the game suck any less. On top of all this, the dialogue is literally ripped from a blu-ray of Rambo, right down to sound artefacts in the background. Lovely.

4: Guise of the Wolf (FUN Creations: PC)

Oh dear. This isn't a game that people likely remember, but the sheer abject terror that is Guise of the Wolf can't be understated. Featuring appalling character design, questionable cel shading effects, an appalling mix of the most boring generic time consuming puzzles and awful combat, and a profound sense of obtuseness surrounding pretty much every other aspect. It is no combination of fun, challenging or rewarding, but an experience to be suffered through incredibly slowly.

3: Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric

Just as we thought Sonic had managed to escape the throes of terrible gaming, sadly Big Red Button productions drags the blue blur back into the fold. The television show and indeed the 3DS game are at least debatable in quality, however the Wii U release Rise of Lyric has a budget game rip-off feel last seen with the reprehensible Ride to Hell: Retribution. Sonic's trademark speed is limited to brief on-rails segments, the beat-em-up mechanics are tedious, as indeed is the different platforming sections for your four playable characters, every single one of which seemingly having a fetish for Boost Rings that moves into concerning by the end of the game. Add to that a co-op mode that slows the game to a crawl, random slowdown anyway and a pause glitch that allows you to jump infinitely off the edge of the world, and you have a recipe for a disaster worthy of comparison to the execrable Sonic 2006.

2: The Slaughtering Grounds (Digital Homicide Studios LLC: PC)

2014 was a year in which Steam opened the floodgates, allowing pretty much anything willing to pay their cut to release a game on Steam. This lead to some abominable atrocities, zillions of straight up ports and rereleases and a flurry of awful unfinished games so huge that Steam altered its curation system to mitigate the damage. Then came the Slaughtering Grounds, a game that brought back the dark old days of shareware, with hideous graphics, a useless interface, controls designed for someone with at least three thumbs and some of the worst FPS gameplay seen on Steam. As far as attempts to co-opt the success of Killing Floor go, this is possibly the most atrocious example, and there is very little fun to be had.

Of course the creators of the game seemed to disagree and created a series of potentially libellous videos mocking critic Jim Sterling, who voiced what can only be described as the truth. Bashing the critics for skewing your work has never ever succeeded in doing anything but making you look bitter, insecure and unable to admit your product has serious flaws.

1: Air Control (Killjoy Games: No Longer Available: PC)

The other major trend of 2014 was the idea of Youtube Fodder: deliberately bad games that would be made fun of by major content creators in a bid to artificially create buzz and sales. Games like Goat Simulator really towed this line, splitting the critics as much as it split sides, while other games like Surgeon Simulator AE and I Am Bread managed to succeed far more as games. At best this allowed silly concepts to be released and generate a lot of interest, but at worst it was an excuse to sell utterly broken unplayable games. Guess which one Air Control is?

Air Control, by the rather appropriately named Killjoy games is just atrociously bad in every important respect. It's difficult to decide where to begin, be it with the assets stolen from other games and other game engine assets, the repeated ripoffs of Flappy Bird, the controls that don't work and even have “Lock Mouse” buttons to further cripple them, the fact that the game has a two part casual mode which means nothing and crashes the game if you try to switch between the modes, the litany of other game bugs, most of which are game breaking, the questionable censorship of criticism by Killjoy themselves, the accusations that critics simply have computer that cannot run the game despite it looking like an 11 year old's first attempt with Pie in the Sky, deleting criticism of the game as well as requests for refunds and the sheer audacity of trying to charge money for a game like this.

Some have argued that this is all a satire of Youtube fodder and Steam's curation policy or lack thereof but none of that stops it from being the worst, most absolutely rancid and toxic game of the year, and better yet because the game is no longer available for sale I'm not enabling this kind of irresponsible behaviour among game developers.

After that lark, come back to the Clinkening tomorrow for a far more positive look on the year, and look out for the Isometrics Awards and New Years Resolution post later this week.

Thanks for Reading!

An Isometric 2014: On Transition, Change and Challenge

2014-12-23T09:30:00.000+00:00

The year 2014 has been a year of flux as a whole, and the gaming world has been shaped in part by that flux. Compared to the amazing artistic swansong that was 2013, it may be easy to see 2014 as somewhat of a disappointment, critically, creatively and culturally, however peel away the dank cynicism and there is a lot more hope for the future than one might imagine.

The biggest thing of the year is of course the release of the next generation of consoles, with the Playstation 4 and Xbox One being part of a somewhat acrimonious console war. Many of the news stories, trade events and interviews featured more than a few potshots and particularly tactical marketing decisions intended as much to put the enemy down rather than big up the system itself. Things like the rather bitter tit-for-tat exclusivity deals (“You got Titanfall and Rise of the Tomb Raider? Well we'll get Street Fighter V!”) and the increasingly secretive marketing deals and relationships between giant companies and the larger web-based gaming media was something that would have massive echoing effects throughout the year.

Despite the plaintive cries of the PC faithful who claim they had all the power of the new systems years ago (Full Disclosure: I built a gaming rig this year), the systems were genuinely more powerful and brought the potential for newer and bigger gaming experiences. Sadly, those experiences weren't entirely realised within the bigger budget games, and my top ten lists will reflect the fact that there wasn't a AAA title around that didn't come without the sting of disappointment. The ambition and attempts at new ideas and new intellectual properties shouldn't be understated however, even if the chequered reception to Titanfall and the rather poor release of Watch Dogs didn't seem to foster much in the way of confidence. Generally the biggest two bugbears of the past, overhyped and undercooked releases, ended up having a greater effect than ever, with Assassin's Creed Unity being the inevitably bad result.

This was the first year to see some major broken promises in the case of crowd-funding platforms as well, with Double Fine's fall from grace being a particularly dark indicator of the importance of really planning for every possible eventuality when asking people for money to fund your project. That said, despite some major issues, the majority of successful Kickstarters are still trucking, which if all goes to plan will lead to a 2015 stocked to the brim with amazing unique ideas.

Culturally the video game community saw its biggest shifts to date. Youtube as a gaming media platform really hit the spotlight this year, first being treated as a threat through the ContentID shenanigans at the start of the year that received no limit of coverage, to the giftedly bad games seemingly designed to be let's played, to the increasingly questionable issues of payola, reaching a zenith with Yogsdiscovery, a scheme that at least was a pretty blunt statement of intentions. Youtubers making careers on the platform is a relatively new thing and so certain basic things like disclosure and the trust between content provider and the audience was broken on more than one occasion over the year, and the less said about the insane tribalistic mess that was the entire Gamergate story the better, as prominent people both for and against seemingly different interpretations of the core ideologies climbed over themselves to yell obscenities at each other in a way that served to leave people caught in the middle feeling more than a little isolated. This coupled with the market censorship of a few controversial titles adds further questions to where gaming stands on the cultural front between toy and transcendental art.

In the end though, there is the sense that deep within all this pain, harassment and epithets is a discussion that needs to be had, about the relationship between developers, the gaming press in its nebulous state and gamers themselves, as well as the identity of a gaming culture faced with its own adolescence. What is gaming and what are gamers going into 2015? That answer is something every gamer will have to face themselves but having written Isometrics on and off this year on top of news and reviews for two sites now, the answer for me personally is a web of fear and doubt over where gaming will move to over the next few years, but like all good adventures a sense of wonder comes directly from this. 2015 looks promising, and looking forward rather than back, 2014 looks pretty good too.

With the amazing promise of last year it was going to fall below our expectations, but it is possible that the progress of last year might be discolouring the achievements and great games of 2014. Even with me playing catch up on 2013's releases I still had more good games than bad in my shortlists, and there were some fantastic games that lived up to their promise. With the recent release of new consoles a sense of conservatism was inevitable, with the market dominated with updated re-releases and HD ports. However, a year sandwiched between the artistic accomplishments of the past and the great expectations of the future to not be branded a total write-off is a good achievement indeed.

Happy Christmas, hope 2014 wasn't too brutal, and I hope you stick around for the Isometrics Awards

Isometrics: On New Beginnings and the Isometrics Awards

2014-12-16T20:52:00.002+00:00

Welcome to Isometrics, the Belated Bellevue of the literary world of computer and video games. It has been an amazingly long time since the last Isometrics, for various reasons I won't go into here, but suffice to say many of those concerns are no longer a factor in my life and thus Isometrics lives again. I figure the best time to come back would be December because it means I can discuss the gaming year and will have more than one post a week.

There's a little bit of caretaking and cobweb dusting to do first before we leap back into the fray, so I apologise in advance for a bit of a cluttered article. Currently all my old Isometrics posts are on Geek Pride (Link to a little library of them here), but as far as I know in the immediate future they will be on The Clinkening, which is my old blog of sorts (there's plenty of my old stuff here but don't look, it's terrible!). That will be the home of Isometrics until I either create a new site or someone decides that they'd like to see these articles on their website and I somehow pitch it successfully.

In any case, the time has come for the Isometrics Awards, which is a set of five articles that will be released over the Christmas period. This didn't happen last year because they would have been my first Isometrics articles and it didn't seem right to discuss a year I'd not written about in some way.

The first will be a review of the year “On Gaming in the Year 2014”, where I discuss how gaming changed, progressed and changed in the year 2014, and my oh my is there a lot to talk about. That will be up either this week or next, depending on how everything falls into place in terms of my life. That should be up on Friday all going well

Next week there is the crowning of the Worst and Best games of 2014. I've wanted to do a list like this for so long, where I chronicle the crowning achievements and the deepest lows of video games in 2014, from the most evocative epics to the most repulsive ideas. There are ground rules I hold, which I'm not sure are the same for every games media person doing a list like this, but mine are as follows:

To qualify, the game must have received a full release in one of the three major territories (Japan, USA and Europe) between 1^st December 2013 and 31^st December 2014. A release in this definition is a retail release of a full game, or in the case of freeware games that may make the list, the release of a 1.0 and a sourced report that the game is no longer a beta. The reason for the date overlap is that while this list is based on a full year, it will by definition be released before the start of the next, so to ensure that games that may have been ignored in the lull after cyber monday are not ignored, they are eligible for next year's list as well.

Games released in a paid beta programme or Steam's Early Access are not eligible until they receive a full release, to encourage the speedy development and release of said games. Episodic games are eligible, providing their first episode was released within the window of release, so long as the game's intention was to be episodic, as opposed to an attempt to buy more development time (This is known as the Broken Age Rule).

Freemium games (aka “Free to Play”, “Free to Start” and “Confidence Tricks”) are not eligible due to the inherent issues with the format. Exceptions will be made for particularly egregiously terrible examples that defy the standard issues that plague Free to Play games. Note that I have not mentioned any ways Freemium games could enter the Best Games list. A particularly excellent example may well qualify, but it is difficult to explain the conditions that would lead to it, and will likely be decided on a case by case basis.

There is a thorny issue of remakes, ports and expanded rereleases. Generally as a rule straight ports of a game are not allowed as a means to get around the release date limit. This would for example, disqualify Valkyria Chronicles from the 2014 lists (For the record, it would have been very high up the Best of list, had it been allowed.). HD Rereleases, expanded ports and remakes are disallowed unless they have enough content and gameplay alterations to differentiate themselves from the original game, which may well be up to me to justify. An example of this in action is that Resident Evil would qualify for 1996 for being an original game. Resident Evil for Gamecube (the REmake) would also qualify for 2002 for being significantly different from the original game (new enemies, new enemy types, story differentiation, new modes), while the 2015 HD rerelease of that would not qualify because it is not different enough. It is a rule that makes more sense in practise.

Regarding games with inferior ports, generally I will go with whatever version I've played (Almost entirely the PC this year), as opposed to treating different ports as different games. It just gets confusing that way especially with games like GTA V, which would in theory be eligible for three years in a row.

Finally, while all my reasons and justifications will be explained in my review, they are in the end subjective, at least based on what I have and have not played. I will only be including games I have played myself this year, which may discount a lot of AAA games. My judging criteria is based on active joy and active malice, so the game that gave me the most amount of joy and did the most amount of amazing things with the medium will win Game of the Year, and the opposite is true for the Worst Game of the Year. In the end these are all basically opinions I explain and elaborate, so don't take it to heart if a game you really like is not in my list.

I've been looking forward to this all year, and my list has changed in so many ways since my predictions at the start of the year.

Then there is the Isometrics Awards, the big list of miscellaneous awards based around the world of literary gaming, from the ridiculously serious to the seriously ridiculous. Basically as much of the craziness, joy, splendour and stupidity of video games and game culture will be brought to the fore.

After all that, there is the Isometric New Year's Resolutions, which will be five predictions/hopes/pleas to the gaming zeitgeist for things to change in 2015. I had a blast writing the resolutions last year and so I'll definitely have a ton to say this year.

With everything else I want to say to everyone who read Isometrics (or pretty much anything else I posted), thank you ever so much. It meant a lot that people read my works. I had some great discussions with friends about the things I had written and the feedback I received was nice. I'm also really sorry that other articles and work commitments got in the way of new articles, but with a new beginning for 2015, there will be a greater endeavour to continue writing what I love rather than what I need to.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and all the rest!

On the Enjoyment of Critical Analysis of Video Games: A Tomb Raider (2013) (Xbox 360) Review Part 2

2013-04-06T15:39:00.001+01:00

So, after just shy of 1600 words of a preamble, we might be ready to see what this game has to offer. Now I've completed the game once, though not 100% (I saw the challenges I had left and decided I needed some time to gather my thoughts) so I think I can give a fairly comprehensive account. If there's some hidden documents or lore you get for a 100% completion drop a line to the usual addresses.

The first thing is that the game dumps you in very quickly, from selecting your difficulty to the first instance of what will be a long, almost aristocrats joke level of pain is less than 30 seconds, as the Endurance is racked by storms and ripped apart, Lara almost drowning before being thrown off the ship, waking up tied up in a sack. From here is a series of limited gameplay bits, where you first set the sack alight, and fall on the only spike on the ground. From there is a mini tutorial of sorts, as you move and solve different little puzzles to get a hang of the controls, or face a small quick-time event. Both of which have the same conclusion, some sort of painful endeavour, before you finally make it out into the Coastal Forest: the first proper area of the game, though still mostly a tutorial, the goal merely to find the means to survive, which means a source of fire and food.

And it's here that I can get the actual gameplay aspects out of the way, so if you're after a review of this as a game, rather than an interactive story, I'll signpost the actual gameplay review parts. The graphics are absolutely incredible. The character animations are smooth, the textures are amazing, the character models manage to avoid the uncanny valley effect by being both stylised and relatable enough to reality and are really beautifully done and the attention to detail is just staggering. The actual locations you explore are open world and relatively small but the amount they manage to pack into the areas is fantastic, full of little nooks and crannies and secrets that I think I trebled the gameplay time just having fun looking for them. The fire effects look amazing, and it's clearly something that was a priority for the development team, given the large amount of puzzles and set pieces that require the use of fire to solve. The platforming is a heavily refined variant of the Underworld system, being essentially jump, drop and move around on different bits of the scenery. Unlike Underworld though, the climbing controls when not on a straight ledge are far more responsive, so you don't often feel like you should be able to climb to a nook that you can't. The controls are very responsive, something that again wasn't in Underworld due to a slightly dodgy animation engine.

The gameplay structures itself as a pseudo-open world with different areas that you can explore at will, full of secrets and different things, inspired more by Assassin's Creed this time than Prince of Persia. Helping in this regard is Eagle vi- sorry, Instin- damn it! Survival Instinct, the latest incarnation of the very useful indicator system. Hitting the left bumper makes a pulse hit and turns the screen grey scale to identify all the useful things you need to know on the screen in different colours. Enemies in Red, climbable stuff in white, where you need to go as a shining beacon and so on. Basically if you didn't like it in Assassin's Creed or Hitman Absolution, it's not exactly necessary to complete the game but it does very much help, particularly since in this very dense jungle there are far more things to catch you out, like rope traps that send you upside down.

The final part of the tutorial of sorts requires you to collect a bow from a poor former explorer and hunt a deer, and people who like hunting a bit too much will be pleased to know that both head shots and heart shots are one shot kills.

It's this kind of attention to detail that you must value in review you know!

This allows Lara to get back to the camp, enjoy some deer and watch some videos her best friend Sam was to put on youtube. Yes, there's a found footage aesthetic in the game where Lara and her surprisingly large supporting cast (for comparison, in the early games you had maybe three characters total including the butler, and even in the Crystal Dynamics games you only had three sidekicks, also including the butler) interact and try desperately to break the stock character types they've clearly been assigned. Joining Lara on this intrepid adventurer is the Geeky one, the Spineless one, the Ripley, the best friend with awful luck, the native american, the old captain and the Northern Bastard.

The main issue is it's a large cast for a survival game, particularly when for massive portions of the game you only get to interact with one of them over the radio, 'Northern Bastard' Roth. Each of them does get a character moment, typically when they die, but the interesting part in the discussion is generally Lara, not the other character, which in itself is interesting since in most of these games you have the exact opposite issue: A great supporting cast carrying a deliberately underdeveloped protagonist.

One of the things I think that is fixed right from the start of this is that unlike the trailer, Lara is given some stellar voice work, and her writing and vocal mannerisms capture a lot of different disparate effects in a small amount of words, proving that some of Prachett's father's influence rubbed off. The dialogue Lara has with other characters, and more fundamentally with herself is very well told, and because for large stretches of the game Tomb Raider is a one-woman show, she is naturally the one who develops the most and in the most interesting ways.

And speaking of which, it's probably time to get into the scene that caused so much controversy in June, to see if context aids the uncomfortable imagery, as Rhianna Prachett argues.

The scene in question comes surprisingly quickly, barely an hour into the game, at the end of the second chamber, Lara and Spineless (sorry, his name's Whitman but for almost the entirety of the game he's one dimensionally pathetic, occasionally adding elements of prissyness) get captured by a group of Russian-esque mercenaries or scavengers, who rough up the captives, including backhand slapping Lara to the ground. This leads to an interesting stealth section with your hands tied behind your back where you end up in the situation in the trailer, caught in the middle of a tiny hole in a structure, forced at gun point out and trapped as the guard attempts to touch her in a rather uncomfortable quick time event. There's only two (maybe three) vaguely sexual parts to the scene until it becomes a struggle for the gun the scavenger is carrying until the inevitable shot. Now, in the trailer it kind of cuts away here, but the scene afterwards justifies the ordeal, as Lara breaks down and swears that she's just killed someone, before picking up the gun and attempting her escape.

Now, it's clear that there is no actual threat of rape in the code, if you mess up the quicktime button press Lara gets strangled: an awfully visceral death but not sexual in the least. The issue I have is that they make the vague pass at having the attack sexualised but don't do anything to justify it or to imply it has consequences, as if it was only there to make the man in question look like a sadistic idiot. A lot of people feel better about it but I still maintain that adding a sexualised element to it in any way was unnecessary, since any kind of sexual abuse, assault or even harsh language about women (I think “fucking bitch” might get said once throughout the game) isn't ever mentioned or hinted at again. It's a gripe, but it's a gripe that is more than forgiven by the following fifteen minute section of the game where Lara escapes the abandoned village where she was brought to, having to shoot scavengers that fire at her, which is probably one of the most effective, tense and emotional fifteen minutes of pure gameplay I've played in years. Part of this is the excellent gunplay and cover systems. Gunplay is standard, LT to aim, RT to fire with Lara automatically hiding behind cover, but the viscerality of it is emphasised, and it makes you feel a thick cocktail of emotions. It's not like Spec Ops: The Line, which made the gunplay adequate but not fun, to add to the narrative's message on the horrors of war, since it is still enjoyable in its own right, but the scene before it, the first taking of a human life then the desperate cries as Lara guns down people, asking them to leave her alone as she blows their brains out is oddly effective, and makes me believe Rosenberg missed a trick. I didn't feel like I wanted to protect Lara, particularly not in that very patronising “I wish to protect you because you're a cute girl” way he was implying, but there was parts to the initial gunplay where the player and Lara's pain matched, at least to a certain degree, which like in The Line, can only be a positive thing regarding the effectiveness of the narrative. This is probably the emotional high point, the big change where Lara stops being a headstrong fastidious intelligent student and becomes a survivor and an adventurer.

That makes this a bildungsroman. I don't care what you lit snobs think!

There is actually a significant amount of weight to this being a bildungsroman, which to non-pretentious northern bastards like Roth and not like me, is a novel of development, where a child struggles to become an adult and find his place in society. Think something like Great Expectations. The key to a bildungsroman is indeed the struggle and I suspect that's what the developers were going for, in a rather hamfisted way. The idea is you feel all this pain and horror and mangled emotions first, and then, like Lara, build yourself back up through force of will. It's surprisingly effective, and probably is why the majority of the game looks less and less like the first hour and a half. The game, as part of its development from a survival horror (indeed, the bit in the mountain village feels like a very truncated version of I Spit on Your Grave, albeit without the particularly grotesque, gruesome and uncomfortably exploititive parts of that premise), but the next few scenes feel less and less so. Sure, survival is still a vital part of the game, with the game very tepidly promoting stealth in a few areas (this isn't MGS3 though, don't expect to pull off a no-alert pacifist run here), but ammo is plentiful, the controls are good and you get greater rewards for fighting, although of course you run the risk of death, which refreshingly unlike most games is something that is actually quite likely on normal mode, even if you adapt to the cover system quickly. Survival becomes less a matter of concern and more a matter of getting more experience points which you can spend at base camp.

Now that the more intense parts of the review are out of the way I can finally get into the last major part of the gameplay system: Base Camp. Base camp is effectively the fires in Dark Souls, a kind of save point, but also the place where you can upgrade yourself (with skill points you get from XP you get from killing enemies, finding hidden items and raiding optional tombs) and each of the four (well five, if you count the axe you use to pry open doors and boxes) weapons you get (through finding salvage, the other collectable). Both are fairly expansive, though if you go off the beaten track even a tiny bit you'll probably get enough experience to get all the extra skills, and most if not all of the weapon components which get you the best versions of each weapon. If it sounds like I'm not selling it much, all I need to tell you about it is that you can get a shotgun that lights people on fire. It's awesome, though I think it does reflect a problem with video game narratives a bit, particularly ones which deal with the theme of killing, since it tells you this is bad and you should try not to end up like the monsters you fight and have the abyss stare back at you, yet at the same time the more you play with the weapon customisation and skill sets the more fun the gunplay is, particularly when you unlock the weapon finishers, special moves you can do up close when you hit the Y button after knocking someone over. It's not a big deal, since the game does have moments where you do feel that guilt the game is trying to make you, mostly early on, and by the end it's part of the bloodthirsty nature of the character people didn't like when she wiped out entire species of tiger in the early games.

Speaking of the early games, the primary challenge of the bildungsroman is to connect the scary survival stuff with the supernatural tomb raiding of every other game in the series, which is done through the Island itself. Yamatai, in the Dragon's Triangle (the Japanese equivalent to the Bermuda triangle) is an island racked by freak storms, most of which, in true Resident Evil fashion, destroy your only means off the island, over and over again. Seriously, at least three planes and helicopters get demolished in the game that you try to escape on. The idea is there is no escape, caused by the mysterious Queen Himiko, a sort of Boadicea-like figure known also as the Sun Queen. The game's thematic through-line is the nature of myth as a reflection of some kind of truth. In game this refers to the question of how real the myths of Himiko are, but you could take a metafictional reading here and claim that it's a comment on the Myth of Lara Croft herself, and how much of the 'reality' of the character was seen in the earlier games, or more recently how much of the game itself was really seen from the myth of the trailer. It's an interesting theme, and part of what justifies some of the later interactions with the characters is their inability to see the connections between myth and reality. Lara Croft in particular is a well suited protagonist to a game suiting this theme, as she herself is haunted by the ghosts of her pasts, of her late father who she early on in the game condemned for believing in myth, her feelings changing as she realises there was more truth than she could first see, and that change, that acceptance of her heritage and her family is also a symbolic acceptance of the heritage and the tone of the older games, although whether it's an acceptance of the shorts I think is a mystery that won't be solved until the inevitable sequel.

The game itself runs about 8-20 hours, depending on just how much of a completionist you are, and of course not counting DLC, which I didn't get any of with my copy. The pacing regardless is superb throughout and there aren't really many deadspots even if you're hunting for collectibles given survival instinct and the beacons systems. There are optional tombs to raid, although these are more like simple physics puzzles rather than the huge multi-level environments of old. Still a ton of fun though and I suspect what most of the DLC will consist of. There are a few glitches with the game, particularly with regard to the physics engine and how the game deals with Lara being out of the physical bounds. Once I managed to make a box push Lara through the geometry and out of the game world, which took me out of the experience a little bit. Mercifully it only happened a few times and a quick reload checkpoint thing meant I only lost about two or three minutes of progress total. It's a very enjoyable ride from start to finish, with only a few little lumps and bumps in between and tiny gripes, and seemed to simultaneously enrapture me in its awe and wonder and gave me enough to ensure that a critical reading of the game and its story was positive.

The final question on everyone's lips is whether this is a good feminist game and it certainly tries to be, the little gripe with the trailer notwithstanding. Lara is a character of deep layers and hidden strengths and with each challenge another veil is parted to show another strength. I get the complaints with the character in the past, that she seemed to barely exist in the world where the challenges exist. She knew the answer before it was asked and barely seemed to be in any danger. They say legends are born from tragedy and triumph, and with the new Tomb Raider, the balance is struck between the two, and hopefully in the same vein, there is something really empowering about Lara's tragedy and triumph here, that felt organic, rather than either a cardboard character or the subject of a feminist thesis.

Verdict: Just buy it already, I can't recommend it more.

On the Enjoyment of Critical Analysis of Video Games: A Tomb Raider (2013) (Xbox 360) Review Part 1

2013-04-05T22:03:00.000+01:00

Hey there, I've just completed (though not 100%ed) the New Tomb Raider game and thought I should provide a somewhat lengthy review of it, not just as a game or a gaming experience, but through the feminist critique people threw at it during those initial trailers. Because the complete experience of the game is vital to most readings of this game in particular, there'll inevitably be spoilers, even though you've already figured out how the game will turn out. Also, while I'll try to be academic about it, large chunks of it will have to do with my own personal experience of the game. So yeah. Have fun!

Preamble: Things Left Behind

You figured it would happen eventually.

Last year I posted the first part of an aborted analysis I was going to do on the issues of gender equality in video games, particularly in the protagonist archetype. Effectively the nub of my analysis is how the gaming heroine experience changed, from barely existing, to distaff counterpart, to the mixed blessing of the 'Girl Power' era, where action girls were created that amazingly missed the point, before moving to a worrying trend where, far from being equal, female characters would be lightening rods for serious abuse in a misguided attempt to be 'serious' or 'edgy', while male characters seemed to be the same bulletproof action hero fantasy figures they always were, just with even massiver muscles. I stopped that, mainly because I didn't feel I'd researched enough feminist theory to really do it justice, but it is something I maintain is the case.

The first game I planned to talk about was Metroid Other M, a painfully misguided game which tried to make a character who never speak never shut up. The biggest problem wasn't that though; it was the rampant misogyny, shown mainly the strange patriarchal complex Samus developed at the start of the game, obsessing over the 'perfect military mind' Adam, doing everything he told her to despite having no reason or incentive to do so, and not daring to touch the equipment she has unless Adam says its okay, and being so obsessed she runs through a volcanic area, burning herself alive until Adam lets her turn on the Varia Suit she already had! Then there was the bloody maternal metaphor, which including such things as Samus being drawn by a distress signal called a “baby's cry”, which was hamfistedly monologued about for a good five minutes. It read like the developer shockingly realised Samus was a woman and was like “Oh no! What do women do? Have Babies? Alright, there's our central metaphor, we are aware of gender issues!” And then there was the Ridley fight, where she developed a PTSD that seemed to serve no purpose but act as a trigger for abuse sufferers and I could go on for an eternity about it. It was living proof that a bad story badly told can ruin what was otherwise a very fun game.

The other game was the then-upcoming Tomb Raider, and I'm glad I waited until I put the controller before I touched it. The main dilemma with the game is obvious. The game is pitted as a reimagining of not only the series' gameplay, but primarily the series' protagonist, the unflappable Lara Croft. She's always been a polarising figure in feminist debate, considered possibly the greatest emblem of the 'Girl Power' era; she kicked mountains of ass, was a smart, interesting character and was in the business of tomb raiding entirely for herself, however that was offset by her image, which was cheesecake and increasingly exploited to drum up sales (a running gag went for a while in the 90s about just how big Lara's breasts would get, given they got bigger each game). Sexualisation in video games was hardly a new thing in video games; even Metroid had it if you beat the game fast and complete enough, but it was one of the most prolific and successful examples. It was difficult to really condemn or celebrate her as a feminist figure without coming to complications about representation, she was too strong to be sexy and too sexy to be strong, apparently.

As an eight year old struggling with the complicated all weapons code and accidentally making Lara blow up in Tomb Raider II, all of this went way over my head, as did most of the sexualisation stuff. It was something you heard about and giggled about like you did about anything adult when you were that age; I was too young to understand it enough to be affected either way. Regardless, I loved Tomb Raider, and tried really hard to beat it and let her get the Dagger of Xian.

After reminiscing, I kind of want to play it again, regardless of the fact Lara is a tank in a tank top in that game. The gameplay was fun and the writing slightly better than one could expect from that era.

I was also too young to realise certain problems with the action girl era. I just thought they were cool and wondered why there weren't more of them, then shrugged and went on to play Mario.

I really got into the later three games before this latest reboot (Legend, Anniversary and Underworld), coded by Crystal Dynamics (who completely incidentally designed the Gex series of games, which were far too awesome to fade away). The pacing was quicker, clearly inspired by the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time series and their flowing parkour style of platforming (Incidentally, the last game Core Design, the original makers of Tomb Raider made was called Free Running and somehow was stodgier than the Tank-like Tomb Raider games they made previously). Lara's wit also quickened and sharpened too, the return of series creator Toby Gard probably having an effect on the direction of the series. They were fast fun, full of secrets and cool things and had enough of a plot to string together the more impressive physics puzzles and set pieces.

There is a point to this preamble, I assure you.

After the allegedly disappointing sales of Underworld in 2009 (It sold 2.6 million copies, so take what you will from the 'allegedly'), there was much speculation as to the matter of why it didn't sell, and in the end they put the blame on the alleged bulletproofing of the character, internally dubbing her “Teflon Lara”. She never felt in any peril, or at least in any believable peril and despite no parkour platformer ever having serious peril and threat as a part of it (Prince of Persia in particular making it near impossible to lose with various timeshifting and magic powers), the decision was to reboot Lara Croft as a younger, more vulnerable figure who it was hoped you'd care for more than a climbing running avatar.

The result of this is already clear to people who saw the reactions to the trailer for “Tomb Raider” (named pretentiously as such like all reboots to imply the earlier game never happened. See Also: Prince of Persia). What was meant to be an attempt to portray Lara as less badass and more fragile was taken out of proportion by pretty much everyone (including me). The trailer had over 50 screams and grunts of pain, there seemed to be a bizarrely fetishistic amount of pain, and most covered in the press there was an unfathomably uncomfortable scene with overtones of sexual assault and sexualised violence. None of this was helped by Ron Rosenberg actually saying they 'try to rape her' in an interview shortly afterwards, and various other things that caused a majority of feminists to want to lynch the bastard (including me). It is a shame he positioned the story as because it meant a large amount of the other things shown in the trailer were ignored, such as the new gunplay system, hunting, and some more traditional platforming parts.

Blaming all this on a misunderstanding of the project he was in charge of is a bit of a fools gambit and doesn't justify anything he said or implied, but there was a lot of it. His comments about how Lara becomes like a wounded animal in a flight or fight scenario or how the player desires to protect Lara probably sounded innocuous in what he understood of the game, failing to realise that pretty much everything he said exuded an unfortunately putrid misogyny, effectively implying to an unknowing crowd that we are both playing the damsel in distress and her knight in shining armour. In short, the way he worded it made it sound like some kind of male power fantasy that somehow leapt out of the TV and into your lap. Couple this with the Hitman Absolution trailer and it doesn't surprise anyone other than the team at Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics that there was a huge debate about misogyny in video games (including me, well, partly).

The thing is, what the project designer says is one thing, and the complete opposite reaction by Rhianna Prachett, the lead writer is quite another, but in the end it is down to the finished product and the way the game is played to reveal something about the video game Zeitgeist and whether it's still as hostile to women as was perceived back in June.

New content

2013-04-05T03:21:00.003+01:00

Hey guys. So much for one update a week at least eh? Well hopefully I can make up for it with a big review I will post in two parts tomorrow on one of the hot topic games at the moment: Tomb Raider. I've a hell of a lot to say (in fact i spent the last two and a half hours writing a journal article's length review on the bloody thing) but I hope you'll enjoy it.

From the Ark: Disconnect the Head review

2013-02-13T18:42:00.001+00:00

Hello there, since this week is where I'm at my most busy, It's time once again to link you to something I did for The Ark Preston. Hope you enjoy

http://www.thearkpreston.com/2013-02/stephen-james-buckley-disconnect-the-head/

From the Ark: Rock Story Part Six

2013-02-05T20:28:00.000+00:00

More updates to the Clinkening are forthcoming, but in the meantime I've been making content for the Ark Preston as ever. This time it's the fearsome sixth part of Rock Story, where Dave and the Project Unicorn boys face their oddest test yet, available here.

Also, since I didn't properly link the previous Elohymn review, well, here you go you lovely people.

Once my proposals and research is sorted out, updates will still be regular but there'll be more Clinkening content along with the Ark content.

Stay safe and always hug it out.

HuggyDave

New Review for the Ark

2013-01-29T02:50:00.001+00:00

Well, here is a new review from me on the Ark Preston, about a cool Prog Rock album, regular updates coming up this week.

http://www.thearkpreston.com/2013-01/elohymn-pale-blue-dot/

Birchillgate: Or the irony of the Oppressed Oppressing the Oppressed

2013-01-19T23:41:00.004+00:00

Screenshot from Dys4ia, an autobiographical game about gender reassignment surgery

I should start with a bit of a set up for this, since it's a bit out there as far as a Clinkening topic (although I’ve touched on gender politics before). I originally wanted to write this for the Clinkening last week, but thanks to my phenomenally stupid time management skills, I was two busy fighting the two headed viper of essay deadlines and sleep deprivation to really be able to do it justice.

And I suspect I'll have to to get away with this one.

My attention was drawn during one of my all-too-frequent breaks from my essays to an article by bastion of tact Julie Birchill and her article “Transsexuals Should Cut it Out” (now removed from Comment is Free, so reference will be to the “We've got some clowns...” archived version of it), in which she throws out every trans slur possible in the name of explaining how a “bunch of dicks in chicks' clothing” have no right to contribute to the feminist agenda, and that apparently their issues aren't important enough to discuss.

I originally was a bit wary of entering a debate where, as not a woman, nor a transsexual outside of maybe Baudrillard's definition (where we all are), but since this is as much a debate on excluding voices as it is on the feminist Zeitgeist, I figured it'd be ironic enough for me to get away with it. So let's be balanced about it, let Birchill get her day in court.

The purpose of the article was as a response to criticism of lauded (and controversial: infamous feminist critic Germaine Greer famously describing her: “hair birds-nested all over the place, f***-me shoes and three inches of fat cleavage”) feminist writer Suzanne Moore, who posted an extract from her latest book Red: The Waterstones Anthology about the power of female anger. For the most part the piece was Marxist-inspired discussion of the seeming reversal in gender equality in the last five years, its causes and the warning to the powers that be that women wouldn't be put down and pulled down anymore by identity politics and tokenism. However, in what she calls a “throwaway line”, she comments on the subject of image and gender politics:

The cliché is that female anger is always turned inwards rather than outwards into despair. We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual.

The “Brazilian transsexual” line was a moment of pretty phallic stupidity to be quite honest, a point where Moore lost the point of her argument and relied on pretty lurid stereotypes. Unless she was talking in a kind of Baudrillardian sense – that the body has become an “artifice” that is crafted and constructed to the point where it is no longer sexually attractive in a physiological sense but in the sense of its image, it's constructed image – then perhaps I can see where Moore was going with that. But as she later admitted it was a throwaway line meant to spice it up, transsexual commenters, writers and the like were justifiably upset, as were actual Brazilian transsexuals, given Brazil's appalling record on trans crime, despite it's Carnival reputation. Moore's responses weren't entirely convincing, mainly because she didn't offer a true act of contrition for it (she has apologised for it though, that should be pointed out), more asking for perspective on the 'real issues' and the real enemies.

Yeah, denigrating trans issues is TOTALLY going to make them feel united and that they are part of a universal struggle for equality.

So yeah, there was a lot of classic “Feminism is Middle Aged White Women” issues with Moore's article, and that arrogant lack of self-awareness that broke down the Women's Liberation Movement by the early eighties (Women's liberation being the name for the largest fragment of second wave feminism), but on the whole its focus was elsewhere, and the issue the trans community seemed to have with it was as much about flippancy as it was about actual offence.

Birchill on the other hand...

Right, I'd better get this out of the way; I have a lot of bile built up from reading the piece repeatedly so I'd better get it out of the way. The article was pretty close to fucking abuse, and it's fairly fucking ironic that she in the tagline harps on that “it's never a good idea for those who feel oppressed to start bullying others in turn” as she spends the entire article denigrating, belittling and attempting to silence trans people, ending with an outright threat:

“Shims, shemales, whatever you're calling yourselves these days – don't threaten or bully us lowly natural-born women, I warn you. We may not have as many lovely big swinging Phds as you, but we've experienced a lifetime of PMT and sexual harassment and many of us are now staring HRT and the menopause straight in the face – and still not flinching. Trust me, you ain't seen nothing yet. You really won't like us when we're angry.”

Yes Ms Birchill, it really isn't a good idea to bully others because you feel oppressed, is it?

Right, with that out of the way, my vitriol back to safe levels, it's time to try and break down Birchill's argument, such that it is. What is Birchill trying to say, other than “chicks with dicks” need to stop haressing her friend because they have the foolish right to believe that they can be accepted as women, who they mentally have always been but physiology has betrayed? Because, if one line sums up Birchill's argument is, funnily enough, a quote from Moore herself “'People can just fuck off really. Cut their dicks off and be more feminist than me. Good for them.'” There is the notion that there is some kind of competition between M to F transsexuals and born women, as if only one of these groups represents “true” feminism, and more tellingly that there is somehow a conspiracy that men undergo gender reassignment therapy (a series of painful, intrusive, long term procedures) purely, as Birchill eloquently puts it “to have your cock cut off and then plead special privileges as women”. Actually, she summed it up much better here in a piece simply entitled 'Gender Bending':

Transsexualism is, basically, just another, more drastic twist on the male menopause, which in turn is just another excuse for men to do as they please.

You really do become the thing you hate don't you? Also, I'm glad thirteen years of thought has led you to the same tired conclusion Ms Birchill.

So, to summate, she's a hateful writer who apparently twists an agenda initially based on the fight for equality to turn it against people she considers “no true Sco- I mean Women!” and in doing so undermines her cause, the cause for feminism (by proving a lot of crtics of feminism absolutely right) and damaged the credibility of The Observer, the newspaper this hateful polemic initially appeared in. This has sent ripples throughthe intelligentsia, most of which siding against Birchill if not for her toxic views than at least for the way she said it and has led to the removal of the article (for breaking large swathes of the code of conduct, namely the bit about using language offensive to various groups) and really in the end proving her own immaturity while doing so.

I'd say that Julie Birchill should cut it out, but I don't think the choice is in her hands now that the PCC is involved...

It's a pretty incendiary debate, so comments are welcome, but try to keep them civil.

Stay safe and always hug it out, no matter who you are

Huggy Dave

The Ark Presents: Rock Story

2013-01-18T17:09:00.005+00:00

Hey, just a quick update to say that Rock Story Part Five is up on The Ark Preston. There may be another post before I go off to gig tonight. Full Disclosure part one should be uploaded sometime this weekend, when I can stomach listening to the full discography of the artist I'm doing.

Stay safe and hug it out

HuggyDave

Previous parts:

New Year New Clinkening?

2013-01-09T00:46:00.001+00:00

Hello there, empty space. It's been quite a while since I last updated, and I suppose some of the people who would be there if there wasn't anyone there would probably be asking whether there is actually a point of returning to the site after a four month hiatus, particularly since the blog didn't really have a focus to begin with. That is an interesting question, though one I don't think I'll actually end up answering tonight.

Instead I will start with a question quite literally noone is asking! What happened to the updates? Why were you away so long? The answer to that is simply being too busy to work on the site, most of the abandonment came when I went back to start my MA, and was dealing with the workload, commitments and issues that stem from that and with various side projects on top of that (My Band, stuff with the Ark Preston I'll discuss below, newspaper stuff when that ran), time became the enemy. Really I suppose the entire point of a blog is to comment on your world and what matters to you but I've always struggled with blogging about issues centralised to me personally. I struggle a bit more to wrangle humour out of that kind of stuff and I guess at the time I saw that as a problem rather than a challenge. I also wanted to prepare for NaNoWriMo, which went about as well as a demented chicken trying to swim breaststroke (Cue groan), and with that I felt my creative juices were expended and decided to cut my losses and write the rest of the year off to find my muse as it were, and see if I can use the Clinkening, the tabula rasa that it is, to help me find my muse and have some kind of semi-permanent place for my thoughts as they float down the stream of consciousness.

I guess I did kind of answer my question after all.

So what does this mean for the site? Well, I'm aiming (this is my new years resolution so don't hold out too much hope) to have at least one update posted a week, but most likely it'll be between two and four, most of them little mini updates or signposts to stuff I do on other sites (Yes I contribute to other places! Clearly they didn't read the warning signs), but some being more substantial. The substantial things will include comments on current events that matter to me of course, reviews of various media (I have been meaning to do more strange Rock/Metal reviews for RocSoc, and the thought constantly strikes me to continue a certain segment from another blog...). I also have a few more features in mind for the site that will probably rotate on a semi-frequent basis. I've not finalised the other potential ones, but the first will be 'Full Disclosure', a challenge of sorts for me based on the judgemental, blindly critical sorts on the internet who I seem to argue with on music on a frequent basis, believing somehow that Led Zep are representative of music in the 70s and Justin Bieber of music of the 2010s. I seek to find one question in that “Is such and such really that bad?”, and hopefully, given the strain of essay deadlines that will be the other update this week. I might also do some more top ten lists based on strange criteria, since the one I did on baffling pop singles seemed to go over quite well. The final stuff really will be artsy stuff, writing mostly, maybe a little art, things I'm ordinarily not brave enough to showcase on 'the net', as well as things and comments and overspill relating to my work on other sites. Oh and Cat in A Hammock will surely continue, if only because I'm sure I'll need to chill out and look at cute cat pictures.

Well, that sums up pretty much everything I wanted to say. I made the mistake of not signposting my other work but most of my stuff can be read on The Ark Preston (www.thearkpreston.com) where I do song reviews and a regular feature about the trials and tribulations of my band Project Unicorn (at the moment annoyingly called 'Rock Story'; I'll get that changed), and if I end up providing content for any other websites I will keep you all updated.

Until then, stay safe, and always hug it out

HuggyDave (@huggydave on Twitter)

The Avatar for Dicklessness: A Follow Up

2012-09-27T01:57:00.000+01:00

Screenshot from Clegg's Upcoming film "When the Dickless was a Dick"

I don't tend to follow up on articles I've done before, mainly because the kind of issue I talk about tends to just vanish into zeitgeist several days before I discuss it, given my flaky writing schedule. But, given that Nick Clegg, the Avatar of Dicklessness that he is has recorded a Youtube video apologising for betraying the British public at large,[insert link to Clegg apology] I suspect I may need to discuss him for probably the last time before his resignation and suicide.

So, Nick Clegg, what can really be said about him other than he has about as much political credibility as Vanilla Ice? He was the imagination catching young pragmatic leader of the Lib Dems who won people over with promises he immediately capitulated on within weeks of forming a coalition government with David Cameron's conservatives and since then has an YouGov approval rating so low he's often beaten by the woodworms in the Speaker's chair, all the while surrendering what little compromises he aimed to get, only to be shafted for the benefits he clamoured for. Alternative Voting went the way of the dodo and Lord's Reform was such an abject embarrassment that talking about the proposal is grounds for <REDACTED>.

But past his utter incompetence, deer-in-headlights demeanour and the biggest betrayal to students since Sky1 stole the rights to Blockbusters, I've always struggled to really hate him. He's too pathetic and his actions to inane to really do anything but pity the whipped compromised little sod.

Well, you know what they say about buses...

Last Wednesday, the LibDem Youtube channel posted 'No easy way to say this...': Nick Clegg's 'apology' for the Night of the Long Fees. You'll notice 'apology' is in inverted commas, since simply saying sorry does not an apology make, and he made it a point that he wasn't sorry for lying to the British public, or for breaking a signed pledge he was photographed with and could probably be fairly considered a big reason he's in the cushy chair in the Rose Garden he's in now. Instead, he's apologising for making the promise to begin with. For hoodwinking the British public, lying to his voter base (who will likely never vote yellow or blue again as long as they remember) and generally dragging himself and his party through the mud like an obedient lap dog, not even needing a bone, but the mere potential of getting a bone to do anything good Master Cameron asks. It was pretty embarrassing stuff, and it didn't need to be. If he'd actually been honest, and both admitted his wrongdoing and begun to criticise policies he was complicit in but couldn't in clear conscience believe in, maybe some progress could be made, the bridges torched by the napalmic fallout of tuition fees could begin to be designed by more competent architects and Nick Clegg might have had a chance of keeping a job coming into 2015. Instead we get more platitudes that confirm that Clegg not only will continue this pointless rightward trend, but firmly believes it's the morally correct thing.

In essence he apologises for deceiving you into voting for him.

Now, I was going to finish and post this and have done with it, but of course, the LibDem conference had just been, and with that came another hilariously misguided speech by Mr Clegg, who seems to believe everything he's doing is actually in some way effectual. Typically, a keynote speech halfway or so into a parliamentary term usually reflects on the hurdles crossed and the challenges left to go, all the while showing why this party is doing the right thing. Bereft of any political ground to actually make a speech like that, given their abject failure to keep any of their election promises, pledges or parts of their manifesto and become the pussy party of the rich, Clegg goes for the one thing that he has left to put front and centre of his election plans: Taxation. Carefully ignoring the fact that this is once again a thing he capitulated on by allowing the highest rate of tax to be reduced by a twentieth (doesn't sound like much but remind me, what is a twentieth of a hundred billion pounds again?), with no progress being made towards a means for stopping tax havens. Well, there is the mansion tax, and that was front and centre of half the speeches, but as a top tip for all you budding politicians out there, if the coalition partner laughs off your cute plan to tax the rich within hours of you announcing it, you're kind of dead in the water.

Oh, and if you have people in your party who believe a 'classic' (aka the reason voters identify your party) party line, don't insult them by calling them dinosaurs and telling them the party they love is gone and won't be coming back. Furthermore, if you must tell them that the old party line is gone, don't quote Peter Mandleson's endlessly mocked “Stop the world I want to get off” slice of hypocrisy while you do it.

So, after three and a half years of avoiding both of the Clegg bandwagons (love him or loathe him), where am I left, other than voting Green again? Well I consider Clegg at best an idiot at this point, and at worst a mendacious loathsome toadying cad who has prostituted himself, his party and his reputation for a power grab that got him literally nowhere. He may think longingly of the Rose Garden days, but I think he will very rudely and very quickly learn that every rose has its thorn.The Avatar for Dicklessness: A Follow Up

HuggyDave

Cat In a Hammock: Because I Think We Need It

2012-08-31T01:57:00.001+01:00

Welcome Philosocats, and muse with me as we take another well earned break and reflect on the world within ourselves, our own personal issues and dreams and hopes and future. Join me will you on this journey of self-enlightenment will you as we explore what the last week has held for us? And what the future holds as well?

Of course, this being a written post that you can't contribute to until it's the end, for the most part this will be me just talking about personal news and news on the site, since I'm not terribly good at the personal part of this 'personal' blog. In fact let's talk about this...

Because the last week had the first post on the site that wasn't mine, and I'm rather glad of the reception that got. Bit of backstory behind it; I was asked to put it on by Heather, the writer of the article, because she wanted it out there and didn't really have a blog of her own to put it. I was a bit worried at first since it was a very serious subject being placed in between me overanalysing pop culture, attacking politicians and cracking wise, so I didn't want the importance of what she'd written to be undermined by my usual content. Most of the people that got in touch with me about it (Shameless Plug time! Twitter's @HuggyDave, I respond to everything or leave a comment down below) were very supportive though, which helped, and it's also why I've subtly changed the tagline and might change it further, since it's not really a 'personal blog' but more a collation of views, because I'm pretty terrible at writing about my own life, it feels too much like I'm bragging or trying to elicit some kind of sympathy when I try.

That said, I probably should put more individually creative fare up here, like short stories or whatever, show I'm more than just a grumpy ranting lunatic. Expect the content to hopefully get a bit more esoteric. Also, I need to really finish the next part of 'Girl Depowered'. That should hopefully be a bit more analytical and actually provide some clear scope of what i'm trying to accomplish.

I don't think there's any other site news, so I guess I've got to go into my personal life don't I? Well, I suppose I should explain what I do when I'm not writing this stuff. My main stuff outside of my post-graduate study and the endless sleepless nights and uncertainty applying for funding and loans provides includes the band I'm the lead singer of, a metal outfit out of Lancaster called Project: Unicorn (Look us up, we actually exist) and already we've got some pretty exciting gigs coming up in Lancaster, so if you're around Lancaster in the next four months, might be worth a look. We even got reviews calling us “pleasantly surprising”!

There's a reason I'm hardly a marketer.

There's also the writing/editing gig I have with local student newspaper The Whistleblower, which takes up quite a bit of my time, but on the plus side means I actually have relevant job experience working for a newspaper! On top of that there's my other personal writing projects I have, projects I really need to work far more on than I have over summer. I've gotten lazy apparently.

Well, this was short compared to most of my posts, but I personally feel better for doing this. See ya next week when I will have the need to do this again! Or otherwise feel the urge to cleave through things with a giant axe.

Keep musing, Philosocats!

Quick Round Of Important News Events

2012-08-30T00:46:00.003+01:00

Right, since I’ve been frantically hurrying with applications for this and that regarding my upcoming M.A (along with a budding addiction to Tales of Symphonia), I've been a little behind with the really important (and somewhat relevent to my ongoing projects) news stories that have come in, so rather than get even further behind, I'll quickly talk about them here

The first two, joyeously (and totally without gallons of sarcasm dripping from my every pore as I say it) is about sexism and sexual crimes. I suppose I should start with the utter farce that is the Julian Assange affair, an utter comedy of errors that ensures that noone actually gets justice. To those of you living in a box and unaware of the story, I'll condense it as much as possible. Julian Assange is the head of Wikileaks who is wanted by the Swedish authorities under allegations of sexual assault which are under Swedish law considered to be rape. A lot of people will note the pointedness of my description there, but I want to avoid any accusations of partisanship, with this, because I genuinely want both sides to get what they want. Julian Assange fears he will be extradited in secret to the US (there's a precedent for it in Sweden which even the UK hasn't stooped to – yet) and since it is within the powers of both the UK and Sweden to assure him that he will not be extradited to a third party where he faces execution and/or torture, it surely should not be too much of a stretch to offer him safety while he is being questioned. The UK after all is the same country that allowed asylum for a former despot who killed tens of thousands and raped or ordered the rape of thousands. On the opposite side, you do have two women who are currently being accused of being a honey trap but on that same note they deserve their chance to be heard out and this saga in their lives to be drawn to a close. I suspect at the end of it, most people, regardless of whether they, like all of these ludicrous forced dichotomies, side with one or the other being pulled by misinformation on both sides, all want Julian Assange to not be extradited to the US to be tortured and killed (potentially, there is a precedent for this), while on that same note wanting justice to be meted by and to all involved parties.

Nevertheless there have been some crazies around to fuck that up.

In an update to the story which helpfully links me to the next part of this, George “I Was in Big Brother Once” Galloway made an ass of himself by claiming that Assange is at worst guilty of “bad sexual etiquette, and arguing that once you're in bed and have had sex people assume they are “In the sex game” and thus he's not guilty. I'm not going to accuse him of being a rapist cheerleader or a horrible misogynist brute of a man, but he absolutely is an idiot. Not getting past the initial “it's illegal in Sweden” thing, it should be noted that this logical path is pretty dangerous. Essentially he's saying that once consent is given that's it, the people involved have carte blanche to do whatever they want with each other. There have been many legal precedents that have shown this to be wrong in UK legislation (Most notably DPP vs Morgan [1974], where consent was not given but recklessly assumed) and of course R vs R [1991], which showed that marriage (the ultimate consent into 'the sex game' in some circles) did not imply consent. There are others, where the terms of consent change but essentially UK law proves Mr Galloway wrong, let alone Swedish law, where sex while sleeping (having given consent before) and sex without protection are sexual offences that can constitute rape. The issue is that while Galloway is a fool and is rightly pilloried for this, he's far from the only one thinking this, and believing in a very specific type of rape, the worst examples of such come from over the pond...

Ah, the American right wing, making Richard III seem increasingly pleasant with each passing day! The order of the day, once again is women's health, being oddly perversely interested in women's biology, which I assume is old white politician's idea of porn or something, since actual porn is not only sinful but found too often on pastor's computers for them to take the risk. So yeah, it's more abortion talk, with two sides to it, both as despicable and disgusting as each other. Do you pick Todd Akin, whose beliefs on women's biology must go back to the Dark Ages? He believes that somehow in cases of 'legitimate rape' (quite what makes non-consentual sexual assault 'legitimate' was never explained) a woman's body can shut itself down and thus stop conception. It's scary how people this balls-out insane can hold positions of power, but even he was pilloried for his position. Or do you pick Mitt “I lied about pretty much everything except my silly name” Romney's running mate Paul Ryan, who is one of the worst kind of bible bashing politicians, believing that abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape (and presumably that the rapist father deserves visitation rights). The last time such horribly misogynistic legislation was considered, they at least paid 60 silver shekles (well, their family was, fucking Leviticus)! I could go on and on about this, but really it would essentially degenerate into permutations of “WHY?! Holy fuck why?!” and I don't think anyone needs to see that.

In other, less horrible news (I stress the qualifier 'less'), the sad saga of Nick Clegg continues, as his wealth tax idea (basically rich people pay money to the country too! What a bizarre concept!) is ignored, not even put on the fridge in the Liberal Democrat canteen. It wasn't an especially good idea, but I suspect was never going to appeal to the Tory base (I.e. Horrible horrible rich bastards). Kudos for trying though.

Finally for this little catch up thing we have the Paralympics. After I outed myself as a giggling pathetic Olympic fanboy/nationalist the last time we talked about it, I will be a bit more reserved this time. The Opening Ceremony is absolutely worth a look, if only to see Stephen Hawking, and Ian McKellen playing John Geilgood's Prospero. That said, there is a dark undercurrent with both of the Games involving their sponsors. People have mocked how Coca Cola and McDonald's both sponsored the games despite their large contribution to the ill health of the whole world, as well as BP for polluting and killing the rest of it, but ATOS is the big stickler for me. While the former three harm a large amount of people and thus would ruin potential athletes, ATOS sponsors an event that is celebrating the ability and triumph of disabled people over their various adversities and yet at the same time is not supporting disabled people to the point thatpeople are starting to die despite being determined 'fit for work' byATOS.Which is pretty literally like shaking your hand with one hand and plunging the knife in your back with the other. Something needs to happen when 32 people are dying a week under this new regime.

Now, under that delightful note, pleasant dreams.