Here's your Remedy...

Let's start this post with a little disclaimer. I don't play a lot of video games anymore. I've just found that (a) I don't have enough time, and (b) I'm rather terrible at them. I do still love video games, and I was obsessed enough with some games to actually 100% them - LA Noire, I'm looking at you. Fond memories of trying to sit in every type of car in the game to get that last achievement. 

My problem is, I often get too involved in the story and empathise too much with the little character on the screen I'm controlling. I could just about handle Halo and its sequels, and the lead characters in games like GTA4 and 5 were not pleasant. The tension was there, but if they came to a horrible end it wasn't too traumatic. 

The most recent game I played and completed was Life is Strange - a perfect game of moral choices, hard decisions, and brilliant storytelling, but already that was edging too close to my empathising. I really felt for Max, and that's the genius of the game. Those decisions were hard, VERY hard, and any stealth parts had my palms sweating because I cared about the characters.

And that's the problem, especially when it comes to horror games. I can watch a horror film no problem, but when I'm actually controlling the protagonist in such dire and terrifying situations it often results in me throwing the controller to the ground with a resounding chorus of 'Nope!'

And that brings me to Alan Wake. Man, I loved Alan Wake. I saw the previews before the first game came out and I was immediately hooked. I mean, I'd played the first two Max Payne games and completed them, so when it came to Alan Wake I bought the collector's edition even if the Deerfest T-shirt was too small for me. I bought the guide with the cool artbook. I immersed myself in that game. It was everything that I loved - Stephen King, Twin Peaks, weirdness. Yes!

However, I never finished it. I got to a point, got stuck, and I just couldn't get past it. I'm just rubbish at games. Didn't stop me loving the game though. I watched gameplay videos and saw how it finished, and marvelled at it. 

And then Control happened. Again, amazing concept, super-weird, almost like they read my mind. I mean, secretive government agency looking at weird happenings? It was punching those X-Files buttons hard, and when you go into those early rooms at the FBC and there are people just hanging in mid-air, suspended by unseen forces, that's just an amazing visual.

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Why am I writing about all of this? Well, after many, many years, Remedy released Alan Wake 2. Unfortunately for me, it's only on what I'd call 'next gen consoles' (though they've been around long enough for everyone else to call them 'current generation'. Yeah, I'm still on an XBox One...).

I watched the trailers, got really excited, and while I've been unable to actually play it (and, let's face it, it's bloody scary and I'd be rubbish at it - throwing my controller down with a 'Nope!' at the first 'dead' screen or jumpscare) I've been avidly following the design, creation and actual play of the game. Once again, I've just been marvelling at the execution of the game. Remedy have a clear and definite vision (I'm not sure if this is just Sam Lake, or a team decision) but it's absolutely phenomenal and stunning. 

Again, tapping into all of the things I love in narrative fiction and games - FBI agents investigating weirdness in small towns, dreamlike realities that can be distorted and changed, strange cults, paranormal forces... it's everything I'd want from media, whether this is video games, tabletop gaming, or TV/movies.

Here's what really stood out to me as being particularly amazing:

1) Saga's Case Board

Half of Alan Wake 2 is following Alan Wake's attempts to escape the Dark Place, but the other half follows FBI Special Agent Saga Anderson as she investigates a ritual murder that may tie into similar cases that happened thirteen years ago. Yes, Bright Falls is ticking the Twin Peaks boxes for me, but the actual gameplay mechanic of Saga going into her 'mind place' to theorise about the cases is absolutely genius. There, acting like Sherlock's 'mind palace', you can look at clues, and (like Frank Black in Millennium) really put yourself into the minds of the suspects or witnesses and discover additional theories by questioning these imagined versions of the people you encounter.

And then there's the case board, where you take the clues, and revelations from your theories, and put them on a massive wall chart, pinned and connected with red string. As you discover clues, you add them to the wall, working out how things are connected. This is put to chilling effect towards the end of the game where Saga is trapped in her own mind place, the clues forming her own self-doubt and the player has to uncover evidence that Saga is capable and strong enough to escape.

2) Dream Logic

The Dark Place in which Alan Wake finds himself trapped is a weird version of New York, his apartment building, a nearby movie theatre, the TV studios of the mysterious Mr. Door, and the streets in between, but these bleed through into Saga's reality as she explores Bright Falls and the Cauldron Lake area in places called Overlaps. 

There are some amazingly creepy scenes of walking around the same corridors over and over again (a trick that those familiar with Max Payne will recognise) following a dream logic – trapped in a loop (or is it a spiral?) where things change ever so slightly each time you loop. I wonder if Max Payne's nightmarish return to his home inspired the legendary experience that was PT – the teaser for the unmade 'Silent Hills'?

But there's an even more fluid element of dream logic in the Dark Place, as Alan can rewrite the scenario and experience a location in a very different way, depending upon whether he's seeing the location as part of a cult-investigation story, a murder case, or something else. Alan's version of the case board is a writer's plot board, and he can change the story, drastically changing his surroundings with the strange echoes of typewriter keys being struck. Brilliant.

A few of the playthroughs I've watched I've seen a bit of confusion about changing the environment with the plot board as well as using the light switch. Must admit, I got a little lost in places following what they needed to do, but that may just be me. But hey, that's a kinda realistic depiction of dream logic. 

3) Herald of Darkness

I couldn't write about Alan Wake 2 without mentioning that level. Let's start this with another disclaimer – I'm not a fan of musicals. In my head, Buffy was perfect, and nothing can come close, but there's a chapter in Alan Wake 2 where Alan is trapped in Mr Door's chat show and it turns into the most bizarre musical number – all, while you're running around the studio and scenes from the video above play on gigantic screens, and the shadowy entities are attacking, reliving some events of the first game. 

Heck, it's glorious. I loved the soundtrack to both games, and a real highlight of both (besides the excellent inclusion of tracks by Poe) is the in-game fictional band, Old Gods of Asgard. In reality, Poets of the Fall, their music has appeared in other Remedy games (I'm looking at you Control), but the music is great, and bloody infectious. I've had Herald of Darkness going around my head for weeks, so much so that my lovely wife bought me the Old Gods of Asgard album (Rebirth) for Christmas. The Poet and the Muse from Alan Wake 1 is brilliant, and I heartily recommend checking out their music. 

This culminated in the recent Game Awards where the band played live, complete with the actors from the game (and voice talent) joining in. The last moments when Remedy director and writer Sam Lake is on stage, as his character Alex Casey, dancing the same routines as in the game, the look on his face is of someone who is loving every moment of it, and it's a level of job enjoyment and achievement that, let's face it, we all strive and hope for. 

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Part of me could go on about the seamless integration between live-action and video game, the perfectly crafted story, the realistic moment when Alan is pursued by the dark entity and is running through corridors looking over his shoulder shouting 'f*** off!', or the genius move of adding more connections to Control and developing the story by playing it through again – after all, it's not a loop, it is a spiral. But that would make this post incredibly long. It's already strange that I've become this enamoured and slightly obsessed with a game I haven't even played. 

However, it is somewhat inspiring to see the game exist – sure it's a sequel, but in a world where I watch the big game presentations of what's coming out and just sit there saying 'shooter', 'shooter', over and over again, to see something with such a narrative, and a focus on investigation, it's refreshing and inspiring.

And this inspiration is something I'm hoping to look at in the new year, on how video games can inspire tabletop game design.

In the meantime, stay safe, stay creative, and stay in the light.

Go Play Your Video Game (Part 2)

 A couple of weeks ago I did little piece about the first video game that really made an impact on me. Since then, I've had real trouble trying to work out what would come next? I mean, I played a LOT of video games in my youth. 

The arcades on the seafront took up a lot of my time, with the addition to games like Galaga, Defender, Tempest, and Missile Command getting my full attention. My brother-in-law was just as hooked to some of these, especially Galaga and Phoenix. But when Gauntlet happened, my D&D group were particularly obsessed. The evenings seemed to be spent watching the D&D group play Gauntlet in Pastimes amusements, with the dulcet tones of 'Elf shot the food' echoing around the place. 

But video games were the big thing, and it was only a matter of time before you could take these games home. A few of my friends had Atari VCS machines (Atari 2600), with their iconic 'fake wood' bit at the front, and the joystick controller with a single red button. I got one later thanks to my parents, and soon I was blasting those space invaders at home on the b/w TV in the 'front room'. 

My cartridge of choice in those days was Berzerk, with the little robots running around the maze, but the one that really amazed me was Warlords. Such a simple little game which is basically four-way Breakout. Each player had a 'castle' which was just a few rows of coloured bricks around a 'crown' and you had a shield you could move around like the Breakout bat. You bounced a ball back at the other castles, to knock down their walls and hit their warlord. Really simple game that you used a paddle controller, but it was the first game I played with four players (even before those Gauntlet days), and it was just really cool. 

Sorry, wasn't a very exciting post this time... 

Go Play Your Video Game (Part 1)

Remember Covid? Jeez, everyone seems to be acting like it's all over now, but looking back on my blog it was a great motivator for writing blog posts. To stop myself from going a little mad during lockdown I took it upon myself to blog about everything I could imagine...

The 20 albums that shaped me...

The 7 TTRPGs that shaped me...

The 10 TV Shows that shaped me... (surprised I managed to limit myself to 10)

The 14 Comics that shaped me...

The 24 Movies that made me...

and the 10 Books that hooked me...

It was fun, and kept my mind occupied during the dark times, and got me back into the habit of writing when I was just really wanting to sit in a corner and hide. And I really want to get back into the habit of blogging - though with a dayjob that is sitting on the computer all day looking at words it can be hard to be motivated to write about other stuff.

So what to write about? I pondered this for a long time, and I had a sudden moment of realisation. I was using blogging as something to do while my wife is hogging the TV playing The Witcher 3, and I realised, I hadn't looked at video games. 

Video games were a HUGE part of my life until a couple of years ago when I realised (a) I was rubbish at them, and (b) I don't really have too much time to sink into playing them. But maybe, just maybe, doing a retrospective of video games that had some sort of impact on me will get me motivated not only into writing the blog, but also possibly picking up a controller once again and playing a game...

So here goes:

Go Play Your Video Game (Part 1) - Invaders from Space

I grew up in a seaside town in Yorkshire. It's weird, I spent the first twenty-odd years of my life thinking it was tiny and boring, and I was desperate to leave (while simultaneously being terrified of going anywhere else). Now, after thirty years away, all I really want to do is move back to that quiet, to the seaside, to the familiarity and safety. 

Anyway, being at the seaside in the seventies there were the usual seaside attractions. There was a helter-skelter, some little cars that went around on a wooden track like a giant Scalextric, a boating pool, and a couple of amusement arcades. Of course, in the seventies they were mostly those penny-drop machines like that Tipping Point quiz, one-armed bandits, fruit machines, and those things that read your palm and printed out your fortune.

I have a very weird recollection about some buzz at school that there was a new type of game in the amusements, and discovering the little huddle of kids standing around the now iconic cabinet, and the resonating *thump* *thump* noise as the little aliens advanced on the city below...

Space Invaders was revolutionary at the time, and so many 10ps were pumped into that machine. Weird thing is, while it was possibly my first video game I'd played, I was never a huge fan. I just already had a bit of an addiction to video games. 

Before I ever got a home console, I had the Grandstand Invaders from Space game, a little (I say little, it was huge) electronic game that tried hard to simulate the Space Invaders experience with its tiny, tiny, tiny display...

And then, along came the Atari VCS and its Space Invaders cartridge with it 112 game variants (including invisible aliens if I remember correctly)... 

I played the heck out of that (not the invisible one, that was reeeeaaally hard). 

Anyway, that was the first video game I remember playing, all those many, many years ago. I'm going to have to ponder really hard about what the next one will be!

Until next time, stay safe and stay multiclassy. 

Staying up late to catch a Fantastic Beast

Last Thursday night we did the crazy and exhausting thing that every true fan does, and we went to the midnight opening first screening of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them at the IMAX. We'd already seen the first ten minutes thanks to attending the amazing Fan Event last month, but the movie continues to be a delight for fans of JK Rowling's Wizarding World.

You probably know what the story is by now - Newt Scamander, magizoologist, arrives in New York by ship (thinking about it, you can only apparate so far without risk, and portkeys have a nasty habit of making you sick... maybe a portkey would have affected the animals in the case too). He has a TARDIS-like suitcase storing many fantastic beasts, and some escape when his case gets muddled with budding baker/muggle, sorry - no-maj, Jacob Kowalski. The chase is on to recapture the beasts before they are harmed.

Simple huh?

Minor Spoilers follow... so shhhhhh...

No. Not simple at all. Behind this is not only the underlying threat of Gellert Grindelwald, the dark wizard that fought to undo the International Statute of Secrecy protecting the wizarding world from muggles (and vice-versa), but also the threat of a different kind of "beast" that is terrorising New York.

As expected, I loved the film. Great stuff, though very, very different from what you could have expected. It really does feel like the start of a much longer story (which will be told over the next four movies) and it doesn't follow the predictable Hollywood structure. Things happen because they have to, not because it follows a three act structure or "set pieces". It's a little jarring at first, but refreshing in the end.

At first I was unsure about the casting of Eddie Redmayne, especially as it felt in the trailers that he was going to be mumbling a lot through the film, but when you actually watch it it all makes perfect sense. He's quiet, introspective, shy, and (much like someone who spends all of his time with animals) rarely makes eye contact. He's determined to save lives, both the creatures he's protecting, and everyone around him - even the villain(s) of the piece.

It has some seriously dark moments too. With the major monster of the movie being the way humans treat things they don't understand, you can expect some dark turns. Not only that, MACUSA (the US equivalent of the Ministry of Magic) is super-paranoid about creatures, and exposure to the muggles. A bit of a comment about gun registration with the need for wizards to have a license to carry a wand. Hmmm... But also, a nasty bit about capital punishment as well, with MACUSA's equivalent of the gas chamber, where wizards are executed in a "death cell" - but it's okay, because they'll take your nice memories out of your head and put them in the pool that'll kill you and you'll be happy to go and see all those nice memories again. As I said... DARK!

We're already planning a second trip to see it, so we can take in the extra details that we missed the first time around (mostly due to it being the early hours of the morning).

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On top of that, the few free moments I've had recently have been spent playing a little free app (available on Android and iOS) called Fantastic Beasts Cases from the Wizarding World. A new game approved by JK Rowling where you play an investigator for the Ministry of Magic's Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.

You partner with Mathilda Grimblehawk and go around locations trying to solve mysteries that involve beasts. It's a basic "find the object" game, with timers, mirrored levels, spot the difference, and more. It's horribly addictive.

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What with that, and the announcement of a new Harry Potter Miniatures game coming next year from Knight Models...

Looks like I should brush off that pitch for a Harry Potter RPG again...  one day... one day...

E3 Special: "I Got Your Backwards Compatibility Right Here!"

It’s E3 again this week, and this has to be the first year when I really don’t care what they announce. As I started covering in my “Bad at Games” features, I used to love video games. There was a time when I did little else except watch little pixels fly about the screen. My childhood was filled with video games, playing in my little room, headphones on, listening to music because the bleeps of the game didn’t really matter - well, they certainly didn't when you had a ZX Spectrum. 

All that changed over the last couple of years when I realised what I was doing. The big releases were all the same – run into a room, shoot everything, move onto the next room. The only thing I found interesting to play was Rock Band, and that time has passed for most of the world.

Then along comes the new console releases from the big-boys – the Playstation 4, and the XBox One. And you know what? I don’t really care at all. New hardware that isn’t compatible with anything I have – what a great idea. All those games I’ve kept because I love them – GTAIV, Red Dead Redemption, and even Halo. Can’t play them on the new console thanks to a new operating system.

And the hardware I’ve bought. Rock Band guitars, drums, microphones, drum-stools, mic-stands – every incarnation of Rock Band… The Kinect sensor, the Lips mics, the Scene It buzzers… all hunks of useless plastic when the new XBox comes out. They’ll all be worth about £2.50 when you try to trade them in as well, because no one will want them. The hardcore shoot-em-up gamer will have bought the new consoles without thinking and they’ll have no need for these peripherals anyway.

So I guess I’ve been well and truly XBoned. 

Backwards Compatibility

You know what IS backwards compatible though?

This…

Okay, so there are always new versions of games coming out. The market leader of the roleplaying game hobby is previewing its Fifth Edition at GenCon this year. But still, five editions (well, more than that if you count revisions an 0.5’s) in forty years is pretty good. The other biggies like Vampire has revised once or twice (if you count the recent nWoD update), and sometimes game systems change altogether – I’m one of the biggest culprits of this both in my GMing and professionally (after all, I was behind the massive change to the game system of Conspiracy X, stripping out the old game system and plugging in Unisystem). 

But you know what? You’re not forced into the changes. Because the game’s operating system is the most powerful one on the planet – your brain. If you were a hardcore Conspiracy X player and didn’t like Unisystem, but wanted the updates to the setting – you buy the new books and keep playing with the old system. Nothing is stopping you. 

You want to play D&D but prefer 1^st Edition to 4^th, but quite like the adventures and the settings of the newer games? You keep using 1^st Edition rules, and with a little tweaking by the Dungeon Master, the new information can be plugged right in. 

Campaign Length

One of the regular gripes about roleplaying games is the price. It’s an odd one, really when you think about it. Let’s look at a couple of examples (and excuse the UK pricing).

The core set for the 11^th Doctor edition of Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space is £39.99. Sure, that’s a lot, but it’s the same price as BattleCall of Halo 4. Let’s look at one of the heavy hitters of the games industry of the last few months – Bioshock Infinite. There main game itself takes around 10-15 hours to complete, so that’s already double most of the shooters out there (your average Halo / Call of Duty campaign is around 6-8). And then what?

GTA Multiplayer lobby.
To quote Nine Inch Nails - "Where is everybody?"

It’s kinda over. Most of the shooters have the online multiplayer that’ll give you hours and hours of the same rooms, and repetitive gunfire, or watching the screen while you wait to respawn if you’re as good at FPSs as I am. And if you find a game that you really love, there’s a good chance that the rest of the world may give up on it and leave you behind. My favourite multiplayer video game? Grand Theft Auto IV, especially GTA Race. Sure people still play it now, but I have to sit in a lobby for ten-twenty minutes until the few people around the globe who still play the game decide to log on. 

Once that wait becomes too much, or if they retire multiplayer servers for that game, it’s over. You can play the campaign again, but the villains appear at the same moments, you know what’s coming and it’s all a bit linear.

Tabletop gaming however, going back to the Doctor Who core set, you’re given a main adventure to get you going that’ll take about three or four sessions to play (so you’re looking around 9-12 hours for the basic adventure). Then you have a couple of smaller adventures that you can run, or expand into something bigger. There’s 6-12 hours there on top. And in addition to of all that, there’s a host of little story ideas that you can turn into adventures that’ll last you another… oh, I dunno… you could run a 4-6 hour game a week and still have a year’s worth of gaming there. 

Then, when you run out, you can just make up your own! Go onto one of the many fan sites and download some free adventures, and you don’t need to buy anything else!

You can stop playing for a year, put it on the shelf, and if you fancy a game with some friends, you can dust the game off and play any time you like. The servers for it aren’t going to be shut down from lack of use. You won’t have to go onto a new system or download countless updates. You can just play.

On that subject…

Downloadable Content.

DLC seems to be a big part of the video games industry. The big companies have realised that you don’t need to give everything to the gamer in one package. You can hold some of it back and release it for more money later.

Sure, this happens in RPGs too, but in most cases the additional material is being held back purely because of the cost of producing the game. Imagine if Doctor Who was all in one game – every possible creature from 50 years of Doctor Who… the game would be massive. And cost so much that you wouldn’t want to buy it. Or be able to carry it...

It’s another thing when video games companies put the content on the disk and just not let you access it until you’ve coughed up some extra cash. That’s just not on.

Anyway, back to the point. If you want to download a new map for Call of Duty, that’s fine. It adds a bit more multiplayer. In some cases, there are expansions to the single player campaign – and in some rare cases this expansion is huge and fantastic (I’m looking at you GTAIV – Lost and the Damned, and The Ballad of Gay Tony showing you how DLC should be done).

The same can be done with tabletop RPGs. Expansions, with new rules and settings are common, as well as extensive campaigns and adventures. But you know what’s controversial? You don’t have to buy the expansion for the game you’re playing.

I know, it’s a surreal concept. But imagine you’re playing World of Darkness and fancy something a bit different. You could buy a Call of Cthulhu supplement, or adventure, and run that with it with just a few system tweaks. I own many supplements for games that I don’t have the core set for. It’s a bit like downloading a map pack for Halo and being able to use them in Call of Duty.

Radical, huh?

Anyway, the first big seminars from E3 are about to start, and I'll be watching - hoping to be surprised. I'm not saying roleplaying games are better than video games, or vice versa. But when you're frustrated by the new announcements from E3 or from the new console launches, just remember tabletop gaming. It gets your brain working, it's social without just being a mass of insults on headsets, and it survives the tests of time.

Until next time, stay multiclassy!

Bad at Games (2) - PS, I Loved You...

(Continuing my story of a gaming life, this time through video games...)

It was a time without games. I'd sold my ZX Spectrum, and the Atari VCS, and had no video gaming outlet really at all. My time was dominated with sitting in my room and writing on that old electric typewriter, desperately trying to get West End Games to notice me and commission a Ghostbusters RPG adventure or three.

Then came college, and art and writing still dominated every free moment. And movies. The local Dixons wasn't part of the real Dixons chain, and rented videos as a sideline to selling TVs. Each movie would be 50p for the weekend, so it wasn't unheard of to hire eight at a time to see me through.

An attempt at a social life (for a socially redundant nerd like me) meant that video gaming was on hold most of the time.

Doom, on the PC in 1993

There were a couple of moments of gaming. After relocating for art college I have distinct memories of visiting another student house and encountering Sonic the Hedgehog for the first time (and being rubbish at it). However, a trip back to my hometown exposed both me and my future wife to a couple of games that would become real classics.

Visiting a couple of "the Eight", my old RPGers, while I was back in town we experienced the first real networked multiplayer game - Doom. Mole, one of "the Eight", had a couple of PCs in his house for work, but had them networked. This was like magic in those days. Computers that talked to each other? What witchcraft is this? However, Mole knew we were coming to visit and hooked up a third computer for the evening and loaded up a little game called Doom.

We spent the evening running around shooting nasty demons, and often each other, while Mole's cat took it in turns falling asleep on our crossed legs. About five hours later, we staggered home and I suffered from real motion sickness from a video game for the first time. I wasn't used to it. Hours of just moving around on a little monitor, the hypnotic swaying of the gun and the inability to look up and down.

A little later we visited Coop. Another of the Eight, he'd invested in Sony's little grey whizzing box - the Playstation. Coop had kept playing games when I'd given them up, progressing onto Amigas and then the Playstation. We tried the mindblowing experience that was Wipeout, but the real game-changer was seeing Tomb Raider for the first time.

Tomb Raider (original) - The Lost Valley level
encountering the T-Rex (1996)

Considering the games I was used to, the fairly basic affairs that I'd played for years on the Spectrum, Tomb Raider was amazing. Coop showed us just part of the St Francis' Folly level, and witnessed the sheer size of just one level of the game. The gameplay was simple, easy, and gripping. You targeted automatically, you could shoot while doing midair flips, and you could do insane stuff. It was a cooler Indiana Jones, and I could see the glint of an addiction forming in the wife's eyes.

We saved up, and purchased a Playstation (second hand) and Tomb Raider, and we both worked our way through the huge campaign (wife first, of course). We were stunned by the scale of the game, and the first encounter with dinosaurs had us both shouting at the TV in excitement. And then, when the plot went off and revealed the existence of Atlanteans and the final levels in the pulsating, weird corridors, we were just amazed.

We were hooked. The Playstation had us.