“Do you want a turn making milkshakes, daddy?” she asked in a cute manner.

“I will do it! I will do it for those that died at Normandy!” I cried.

And thus began my nightmarish decent into the maddening world of Burger Island.

Burger Island, I learned the hard way while simultaneously paying tribute to the ultimate sacrifice of others, is a lie.

The island in the title is not a gigantic delicious hamburger. It is not a Burger Island. The point of the game is not to gorge your stranded survivor on the island itself in the name of survival, slowly eating the very piece of juicy, flame-broiled land that also keeps you safe. You do not delicately balance the all-encompassing hunger of the main character against the need to stay afloat upon something, even if that something is food.

Burger Island is a lie.

I tell you this to warn you. Hope is a fickle beast capable of leaving you in the blink of an eye. One moment you sit upon your couch remembering all those who fought and died at Iwo Jima, the next you find yourself playing a game you didn’t want to play. Burger Island is not an economic simulation in the same vein of Tropico. It is not a middle-class land filled with artisans and craftsmen that you have to keep happy by building them Temples to their favorite types of shoes. Burger Island is a lie.

So what, then, is Burger Island? It is ridiculously monotonous and difficult for a cutesy Wii game. Ridiculous and monotonous is not a fun combination. It is a sadistic and vile survival horror game. Burger Island is not so much fun. You are a shipwrecked amnesiac who washes ashore on a random and nameless Pacific island. With no money, no identity and no future, you take a job in the food service industry making hamburgers, French fries and milk shakes for a bunch of impatient and needy assholes. At first, making these things is fun. Then, after the hundredth hamburger or so, you lose the love. Demanding jerks start ordering food faster and faster, unwilling to allow you even a moment to breathe.

Your main character falls into a deep sense of despair. Perhaps drowning at sea was a better fate than this. What kind of cruel god would allow a person to lose everything she has only to throw her into a life of ever-increasing stress making fast food for cheap jerk after cheap jerk? Existence becomes a race to make burger after burger after burger after burger so that one day this nightmare might end and Burger Island might be escaped. Nothing else matters beyond hamburgers, French fries, milkshakes and the tiny amounts of money they generate. Nothing that Bukowski has ever written comes close to matching the hollow sense of nothingness that comes with spending a few hours playing Burger Island.

Soon it becomes clear that Burger Island is some sick metaphor for Purgatory. You must have died on that boat when it sank. And though you can no longer remember it, you were apparently a sadistic rapist with a tendency towards animal cruelty in your previous life. Perhaps you were a serial killer who turned her victims into hamburger patties and milkshakes and then gave those hamburger patties and milkshakes to neighborhood children. To atone for these heinous crimes, you are sentenced to spend what seems like eternity on Burger Island. Every sin and awful act is repaid, one four-dollar burger at a time. But Burger Island does not pretend to even give you a somewhat fair shot at repentance and salvation. Nay, before even reaching the halfway mark on your long trek around the outside of Burger Island, you find yourself overwhelmed and incapable of pleasing the numerous customers who disdain and hate you while making so many demands upon you.

You are tasked with restoring order to an apathetic, uncaring universe. Simply making a hamburger is not good enough. Lettuce must go on it before tomatoes, and tomatoes must go on it before pickles. Any deviation from the norm is punished severely. Recipes are not guidelines on Burger Island, they are Commandments from the Lord Hisself. Experimentation and growth as a cook are not options. You have a recipe, follow it to the T or feel the wrath of Burger Island.

And those times you win, those few precious instances where you have satisfied enough hamburger-loving demons to appease a vengeful god, you still lose. For next is nothing but another round of more of the same, with more demanding and challenging recipes added into the mix to make things somehow even worse. Your path to redemption soon becomes nothing short of impossible.

You begin the game with five lives, a number high enough to bring hope that salvation is possible. Perhaps this judgmental god is more New Testament than Old. And as you absolutely steamroll the first few levels with the greatest of ease, your sense of inflated optimism grows. Success is possible! You can escape this. Then the game suddenly punishes you and you feebly watch those five failures melt away until you are trapped with but one last chance to make things right before you are condemned to Hell forever. Escape to a better place is nothing more than a delusion.

A more frightening and pessimistic game does not exist. Burger Island is somehow even worse than actually working in the fast food industry. I will carry the haunting scars of my experience on that tiny tropical slice of hell with me for the rest of my days.

My daughter does not yet understand, though, and I find her naivety and eternal sense of optimism charming. She thinks Burger Island is a lot of fun. Making milkshakes is her favorite part. Mine is pushing the power button and returning to a world that is somehow nicer and more forgiving than the one of Burger Island.

In my little world at least, Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles titles are always released with little in the way of fanfare, especially when compared to the main series of games, and often received a mixed reception. Even the Final Fantasy fans that I know don’t pay them much heed. It’s funny what a subtitle (or two) can do. I’ve only ever played the GameCube game and the DS Ring of Fates but I have a lot of love for them. The original Crystal Chronicles on the GameCube is now infamous for the expensive requirements needed for a full four player experience. Each player needed their own GBA and GBA-GC link cable and by extension a small mountain of batteries. For a small time I managed to corral two other players into playing this game and it was an absolute gem that was the source of a lot of laughter and sometimes sweat. The same is true of FF:CC:Ring of Fates except the demands for co-op experience only required extra DSes and copies of the game. The experience was much the same, still enjoyable and an approach to co-op play that Dragon Quest IX has clearly taken and run with. Because I haven’t finished either aforementioned game I didn’t pick up Echoes of Time and the scandalous DLC nonsense for My Life as a Dark Lord and My Life as a King prevented me from having a go at these. I remembered seeing the very early footage of Crystal Bearers when the Wii was announced but then for one reason or another the game dropped off my radar altogether.

It was watching the Nintendo Channel Wii Play campaign ads that prompted me to add it to my theoretical arm’s length ‘wishlist’ and last weekend I was fortunate enough to spot a relatively cheap new English language copy for sale in lands-a-foreign. Which explains the review here.

With very few expectations of any kind I was really pleasantly surprised by this game. My stalkers will note that I should really be eating my words because the week before I bought this I was whinging about how I will never finish an RPG in my life in my apology to Dragon Quest IX. I’m still sticking to this. Like those heavyweights RPGamers said in their 2/10 review for the game ‘This game is a mini-game collection masquerading as an epic adventure‘. Well I don’t know about mini-game collection but there isn’t four days worth of pissing around with statistics in between dungeons, which is what I think they mean by epic adventure. Yes, it is on the easy side. Yes, there isn’t much leveling to be done. Yes, there’s no teleporting back to town to sell all those rusty swords you picked up in the last five minutes. There’s no classes to speak of and sometimes your character can jump. This is not recognisable as an RPG and this is why I like, maybe, love this game.

First off, as you see from the screenshots throughout this post (and from this b-roll of filth) it is a pretty game. We don’t even use the word pretty very much to describe games but from the title screen it is just lovely. You can appreciate the prettiness especially well too because, for no other reason at any time you can pop into first person. Even better, you can take screenshots. Anywhere. There are only a handful of games that let you do this (Animal Crossing, Super Smash Brother Brawl and My Pokemon Ranch) but in the Crystal Bearers it really is seamless. In a cutscene, take a snapshot. Perving on the Selkie female sidekick, take a snapshot. Appreciating a beautiful vista in first person, snapshot. On a train, snapshot. Not only does this make reviewing this games a helluva lot easier but if you’re weird like me, you like to have an SD card full of various upskirt shots virtual postcards. It’s this kind of feature that I consider ‘next gen’. More of this please games. More of this.

Second off, as you might be able to see from the screenshots, you can buy emblems for the back of your jacket. Items and money that occasionally drop from enemies or can be found in treasure chests can be used to create rings, earrings and belts which give you slight boosts in the range of your superpower or your ‘luck’. Alternatively, if you are a big ol’ gay like me you can invest them all in unlocking emblems for the back of your jacket. You can only ever use one emblem at a time. My two favourite ones are ones with sexy ladies on them. One of my favourite bits is when you go to the beach. Layle takes off his jacket but he still has the emblem on his T-shirt.

You play as Layle through the game who, unusually for a Final Fantasy protagonist is quite mouthy and a bit of a badass. Unusually for a game and doubly unusually for an RPG, the story isn’t complete gubbins all the way through. I haven’t played it all the way through yet but apparently it gets a bit fetch questy towards the end. I’m about 8 hours in and the game is still throwing new areas at me that are conveniently linked to older areas. Part of me wants to bemoan that the map is next to useless but then part of me really likes that if I want to go somewhere I have to walk or take a chocobo to get there. What is the point in sprawling environments if you see them once and then teleport through them later on. Basically, Layle is a crystal bearer who has the power to chuck stuff around like he can use the force or something. Imagine the love child of Nero from Devil May Cry 4 and one of the little dudes from Rodland and you’re about there. You can use the force to chuck objects at people, chuck people at people, chuck objects at monsters, monsters at monsters, monsters at objects…. you get the idea and that’s it. That’s your only power that will see you through the first battle all the way to the final one. Very simply, you can beat enemies by chucking other enemies or scenery at them or just by chucking them around. Unimaginatives insert your complaints about waggle controls here but they work just fine. Even then you can often employ some SHOCK HORROR real time skill to beat baddies quicker. Take for example, Final Fantasy staple enemies, Iron Giants. These appear in the game as huge sleeping machines which can be woken by spinning a giant gear on their back or by firing the electricity from a stunned Coeurl at one. The lumbering machine knight things then stomp about trying to splat you with one hit from their gigantic swords. They can be beaten by chucking stuff at them, chucking enemies at them or by closing their visor just as they are about to fire off a big eye laser. Little touches like that make for every encounter to be slightly different with an emphasis on playing around to see what you can do.

Weirdly, the game has achievements. Well an achievement system called ‘medals’. As with all achievements, the best ones make you appreciate the game more or draw your eye to things you may have missed. Highlights are medals for finding characters who have found their way from other Crystal Chronicles games, general messing around, and medals for experimenting with enemies like the Iron Giant I mentioned above. Lowlights are the medals awarded for collecting rare drops, medals that start off as bronze and change to silver and gold upon repetition and medals for progressing the story mode. When you unlock a new medal on the medal board, you are given hints for what you have to do for all adjacent medals. It’s quite a good system that doesn’t turn medal collecting into grinding but doesn’t leave you guessing as to how to collect those missing ones. Importantly, it is all optional, which goes for probably 80% of the game. At the 8 hour mark there’s no pressure to beat 20 of these or 40 of these to trigger the next story scene. The only reason you might spend half an hour trying to scale a big hill or fighting a mob of baddies is purely because you want to and this (have I laboured the point enough?) suits me down to the ground. I love Okami but every time I load it up I end up trying to get back into progression which is handed out bit by bit. With Crystal Bearers it really doesn’t matter.

The game hasn’t changed much in nine years, other than the size of the TV I played it on. I found an old memory card with everything unlocked so I could start right where I left off. However, I have changed a lot in the past nine years. I’ve grown up and my taste in games has improved. SSX Tricky is an obnoxious, childish, boring game that only an obnoxious boring child would enjoy.

SSX Tricky is the videogame form of everything wrong with popular entertainment. Layers and layers of production cover up a tiny core of actual substance that barely exists. Each character spits his or her own selection of face-palm awful one liners while dancing, posing, and wearing the douchiest clothing. Since the camera is positioned behind their heads they each put billboards all across each level so you are never without a view of their ridiculous faces. Their one liners and the announcer’s one liners construct the majority of the game’s soundtrack as some terrible Frankenstein of a procedural audio remix.

In terms of gameplay, there’s not a whole lot to say. You snowboard down a mountain and do tricks off jumps. The “tricks” are stupidly easy to do. All you need to do is press a couple of buttons and suddenly your character is magically spinning his snowboard around his head like a helicopter. The only way you can get better at the game is time your jumps and tricks a little bit better so you can do more tricks off of each jump. Each trick is just a different shade of the same silly, so what’s the point?

Keep pushing buttons and watch the flashy feedback, that’s how SSX Tricky is played. The game bombards your senses with tasteless visuals and audio and only stops when it’s turned off. The screen never stops moving, ever. There is always scenery blazing past or a douche doing his douche dance in the middle of the frame. It’s like a horrible music video or a TV commercial that feeds off of the viewer’s ever-increasing ADD tendencies.

I get a headache playing SSX Tricky now. Actually, I think I’m physically sick to my stomach. I can’t subject myself to it any further. The gameplay is empty. Every action screams “EXTREME” loud enough you can hear its voice crack. The graphics consist of douches and billboards of douches, and snow. Are billboards supposed to seem awesome, instead of disgusting like they are in real life? I guess idiot kids think so. What’s the point of playing this game? What kind of skills do you gain from it? What do you learn from it? There is nothing of any worth buried under its surface. There’s no substance at all. SSX Tricky is anti-thought and anti-art.

Up until yesterday, players only got two pre-set rune pages to choose from in a match. This is quite limiting, as many runes are only useful on certain archetypes: for example, mage oriented ability power runes vs. melee oriented armor penetration runes—and some runes are completely invalid on some characters: mana runes on a mana-less character, for example. Since you might not be sure what character you want to play in a game, particularly if you’re not with a pre-set team, you might not always have the optimal rune setup accessible with only two pages. Also worth noting is you cannot choose runes in the champion selection process before a game: you can only pick which of your rune pages you’ll use. As a result of all of these issues, the addition of new rune pages had evolved from a “nice to have” to a “need to have.”

Yesterday rolls around, and the community is given a surprise: additional rune pages are here, but they will cost you. Approximately $4 worth of Riot Points a page, or $20 for a bundle of 7, OR a prohibitive amount of Influence Points—equivalent to what you’d spend unlocking a top tier champion. Predictably, the community is in an uproar, since Riot is essentially charging for UI improvements. Historically, Riot has always made things that are “need to have” (champions, runes) purchasable with their free currency, Influence Points. “Nice to have” has been skins, which are purchasable only through real money, but ultimately are fluff. This is an acceptable model, but it has been blown apart in the Runegate debacle.

I get that Riot needs to make money. I’ve probably spent $200 on skins and heroes and the like. It is a “free” game, but at the same time, they are backed by A-list venture capital (First Mark Capital and Benchmark Capital) that demand an aggressive business plan. And often the refrain of fanboys and Riot is “it’s a free game, so stop whining.” But the fact is for many people, it’s not a free game. They’ve spent money on it. So to get nickel and dimed (the micro transaction model, by design) over fundamental UI improvements is insulting to all players, paying or free.

But what this mostly smacks of is poor marketing and poor executive decision making. The outcry would have been easily remediated by giving everyone one or two free pages, and then charging for the rest. Although it would have resulted in reduced sales, it would have built a great deal of good will while offering a feature that probably should have been in the game at launch: more rune pages.

What I’m curious about is if this was planned—did they always mean to sell rune pages? Was the delay the sales UI? Or was this new? Are there other fundamental UI-for-pay features coming? I postulated in my review of Season One that Riot is aiming for a Blizzard/Activision level of screwing their clients hard and relying on the brand, game quality and fanboy-ism to see them through. Looks like they’re acting on that business plan sooner than I thought.

Unsurprisingly, Season One is mostly more of the same. On the cosmetic side, both the website and the game’s launcher UI received new snazzy themes and sound track. For the game itself, beyond the usual patch changes of balance tweaks and a new hero, a draft mode was implemented for competitive play. This mode includes alternating bans of 4 champions, 2 for each team, followed by a staggered draft. Unlike normal games, champions also must be unique, meaning that opposing teams cannot select the same champion. This introduces an important strategic element, and also gives Riot a useful tool for determining balance, as the most commonly banned heroes indicate the desires and irritants of the player base.

Season One is quite the culmination of achievement for a relatively new game. In an era of MMOs and FPS with online components, LoL stands in a unique place, both as a free game that isn’t text based or mature and a new entrant. It is a pity that Riot will not release usage numbers, as it is quite possible that the LoL is setting a variety of records, particularly in the realm of “free to play games”. Which brings up an important point: even in a perfect world, Season One is somewhat uncharted territory and ultimately a beta for future seasons to come.

Accordingly, things haven’t been perfect, but for the most part, they’ve gone well. One speed bump was a nasty bug on the first day that left players unable to select their champions, leading to disqualification and a loss. Riot did not announce this bug to the public, despite a slew of threads in the bug forum, but they did confirm its existence to me and its subsequent hot fixing the same evening as launch. There were, however, no efforts made to remediate losses from it. While minor in the scheme of things, losing because of a bug was not how people (myself included) wanted to start their competitive experience, — in fact, I suffered said bug from my first game.

Additionally, server lag has often been quite poor, although it has improved recently. This is a bit of a shock, as LoL prides itself on server side connections and typically strong performance. With usage numbers likely at an all time high – finding games takes half to a fourth of the time it did prior to Season 1 – a certain amount of lag could be anticipated as part of the launch. However, beyond some glib comments from various Riot employees on the forums, the company has not acknowledged the problem formally, nor given its causes. Anecdotally, it appears to have improved over the first few weeks, but whether this is from additional server capacity or reduced usage is unknown.

Riot has been more open and aggressive in improving other issues around the launch. They’ve identified certain bugs that remain and made them clear to the community. They’ve also been very aggressive in curbing negative player behavior, at least to the extent this is possible on the internet. A publicized campaign of banning players who enjoy being asshats, be it intentionally poor game performance or asinine behavior, has been executed, resulting in suspensions and bans of hundreds of accounts.

Another item of note is that Riot has been willing to aggressively alter Season One’s structure to support game quality. Initially, players from level 20-30 (30 is the current level cap) were allowed to participate in Season One. However, data revealed that players 20-29 were dramatically more likely to quit on games, so Riot moved within the first week to bring the cutoff to 30 to increase game quality. They are, however, considering lowering the cap for arranged teams, so that people can more easily play with their friends, under the premise friends are less likely to quit on each other. This sort of firm and decisive action, backed by hard data, is indicative of a developer that has a handle on their community.

Overall, Season One of LoL is an impressive achievement that will likely set the stage for the game’s continued reign over DOTA and its clones and carve a out a niche among the gaming industry as a whole. The launch has also served to provide significant insight into Riot as a company. On the strong side, as previously mentioned, the company is very clearly composed of gamers who understand the community and the game itself at a practical level. There is a strong community presence – from community relations employees to programmers – that reflects a work place that is creative and “gets it.”

On the weak side, Riot exhibits some of the same traits we see from larger companies: a willingness to ignore certain noticeable errors and failures, even in the face of their existence (bugs, lag), with the (presumed) hope that the overall strength of the game will carry the day. Another example: the elusive Mac client. An earlier press release indicated that it would arrive in time for Mac users to play in Season One. Although the release did not explicitly indicate perfect overlap with Season One, there has been no word of the Mac client lately. Where did it go?

LoL is well worth any gamers’ time, especially since it comes at the low price of “free.” The bigger question, which perhaps is only relevant to postulating bloggers and game reviewers, is if Riot is interested in doing business in an open manner, or if they will follow the tried and true Blizzard business model of “awesome product, and the rest doesn’t matter.” In this day and age, it probably doesn’t matter: gamers who can walk away with a good game should be happy, because even that is a rarity. And League of Legends is absolutely a good, if not great, game.