Bad At Games III - Demo Disc-overy

Where was I? Oh yes, the wife and I had bought a second hand Playstation and she was busy jumping through tombs in the legendary Tomb Raider.

In these days before the consoles hooked themselves up to Skynet and could read your heartbeat from a room away, the only real way to discover (pardon the pun) what new games were coming out was to buy the magazine. If you were wise, you’d go for the Official Playstation Magazine and eagerly slam in the demo disc that was glued to the front of each issue. The demo disc held samples of around half a dozen games, just the first level usually, so that you could tell if the game was going to be worth your hard earned cash.

Some months it was a bit of a waste of time – a handful of rather bad games that were not worth the time or the energy. But once in a while, there was a gem on there that had you instantly hooked. A demo you kept reloading over and over again.

There were four demos that really stood out for me as being real high points in my gaming history. These are in no order really, just ones that come to mind.

MTV Sports: Snowboarding

The first was MTV Snowboarding. Yeah, I know. A snowboarding game. How could that be cool? Well, it had an awesome soundtrack. My first real exposure to Blink 182, and there were also cool tracks from Fear Factory and Ministry. The controls were simple, you could play two player, and although the demo only had two slopes we played it over and over and over again. Of course, when the game came out, we did eventually buy it, and blasted through it in about two hours… and then it was kinda over…

Hogs of War PS1 Game

The next of the demos that grabbed me by the face and kept me reloading the game was Hogs of War. A simple 3D version of Worms that had a comical Rik Mayall voiceover that you would eventually turn off after half an hour in the full game. You took it in turns, shooting bizarre weapons at each other as odd little racial stereotyped pigs in a WWII style setting. I don’t know what it was about this game, but I did rather enjoy it. Possibly too much. Of course, I played for the glory of the Soviet Union in most of my games.

Thirdly was Final Fantasy VII. The demo was a disc to itself, and took Cloud through to placing the bomb early on in the game. Playthrough of the demo took easily twenty five minutes to play, and it was just stunning. I think I only played the demo through a couple of times before I realised that I needed to buy the full game. And what a game it was. I loved FFVII. And it is, still, to date, the only Final Fantasy game I’ve actually completed to the end. 

Final Fantasy VII - Genius!

The final boss battle with Sephiroth took nearly three hours, and I only managed it thanks to getting the Knights of the Round Materia and the Mime Materia to copy its effects over and over. Man that was a hard fight. Sweaty palms, shaky hands and a weak bladder by the end of that, but FFVII is still a work of genius. At a time when I didn’t get to tabletop game very often (if at all) it filled a hole in my gaming life, and made me wonder why there wasn’t an official Final Fantasy tabletop RPG…

A special mention should also go for the demo disc that included the opening title sequence to FFVIII. Good lord that was amazing…

The original Grand Theft Auto game

Finally, and holding the record for the most times I reloaded the demo had to be one of the most unlikely and simplest games ever – one that would produce a series of amazing games – Grand Theft Auto. The original GTA was a top-down and incredibly basic game, with a little guy who was barely more than a dozen pixels jumping into cars and causing carnage. The whole of the city was open to you, and the complete game seemed to be there on the demo disc, but it cunningly timed the demo to switch off after five minutes. But every time you reloaded it you could do something different, explore a different part of the city, try some of the missions, cause more mayhem, try to jump that gap, steal that police car, and more.

I loved GTA, bought the game after almost wearing the disc out. I played GTA and FFVII so much we had the regular PS1 problem where you had to stand the console on its side or upside-down to get the discs to load. 

And then, Sony announced the PS2… it had to be done…

E3 Special II - "I Got Your Open World For You Right Here!!"

A bit of a follow up to this week’s earlier E3 post (“I got your backwards compatibility right here!”), I’ve been following the big announcements from E3 to see if there was anything that remotely made me excited for video games again. On the whole, it’s just been shooty-shooty-shooty.

There was the surprising announcement that Microsoft were launching a new Xbox360 and were dedicated to supporting the console for the next twelve months. Lots of new games coming out for it, but it’s really just putting off the inevitable – when the 360 has become a thing of the past and all my old games are redundant. Microsoft were not doing themselves any favours with their comments about the 360 being their product for people who don’t want to be connected to the internet all of the time, and Sony’s potential library of back catalogue being available may give us some hope that older games are going to be available to keep in some form or another (though probably not).

But on the whole, besides a couple of interesting exceptions to the rule, the whole of E3 was about carrying a gun, and shooting someone. Or carrying a sword and stabbing them. Or maybe just punching them in the face.

I’m not the only one bored by it all. 

Variety reported an interesting panel at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where the biggest names in cinema – George Lucas and Steven Spielberg – discussed the future of movies and video games. Lucas said, “the games industry can and will create empathic characters, but it hasn’t so far because it’s been driven by hard-core gamers who enjoy onscreen violence.”

I’ll come back to that panel in a future blog post to discuss Lucas’ theory of entertainment taking to controlling your dreams.

However, in amongst all of the bloodshed, shooting, fast cars and the inevitable zombie plagues, there was one phrase that kept being repeated over and over again.

Open World Environment.

They’re taking it to mean that you can go anywhere, and do anything you like. 

The first one I really remember being like this was Grand Theft Auto, though (in my opinion) this was truly perfected in Red Dead Redemption. But let’s stick to GTA shall we? 

GTA IV - Gorgeous looking isn't it?

Before I start, let’s just get this clear – I LOVE GTA. GTA IV, and Red Dead Redemption are possibly my favourite video games ever. Sure, you could say they’re the usual men-shooting-each-other games, but certainly in Red Dead’s case, the shooting was done reluctantly, and there was an emotional plot that would but many blockbuster movies to shame. 

Grand Theft Auto IV is another work of genius. The “open world environment” is huge, the whole of Liberty City (though this is tiny compared to the open plains of Red Dead). Once the plot had opened up all of the islands of Liberty City, you could drive around everywhere. Get in a boat and go out in the sea, or take a helicopter around the city. Fantastic. You could do lots of cool and crazy stuff, like jump out of helicopters, drive cars off of rooftops or through the subway system, or just take in the sights. Go to the bar, have a few drinks. Go to the golf driving range, play darts, or just cause mayhem and wait for the police to take you down.

Seems pretty open world doesn’t it?

Let's look at this...

It’s an image of the game, looking at a borough of Liberty City. Fantastic isn’t it? The detail, the size of it all. 

However, can you go in the buildings? Well, you can, but only a select few. You can go into the shops, the bars, the houses that you own, and ones that are either locations of prearranged action scenes and missions, or the houses of the filthy crims you’re working for. But that's it. The rest are just blocks that have graphic images of fake windows and doors.

Suddenly, your open world isn’t quite so open.

You can drive into the airport, but you can’t book a flight on a plane. You can steal a helicopter, but you can’t leave Liberty City. You can hijack a boat, but you can’t sail off into the sunset. 

Your open world is a snowglobe, filled with fake plastic buildings with fake doors that don’t open.

This is not a criticism against Rockstar Games. As I’ve said, I love GTA, I love them all with a passion, and I still play GTA IV now, many years after it came out. I can’t wait for GTAV, though I get the feeling that I’m going to be rubbish at it (because, as I discuss elsewhere on this blog, I’m bad at video games). No, this is the limitation of the console, of the computing power, and what it can do.

My wife is brilliant. I’m not just saying it because she’s my wife, but she has this knack – this ability to think outside of the box. She loves video games too – she plays a lot more than I do. She’s actually finished Assassin’s Creed (all of them), the new Tomb Raider, and all of the Halo games (I still haven't finished 4 yet). But while she’s playing video games, you can see the frustration there. She doesn’t want to run into the next area to start shooting at the next wave of pre-destined goons. She wants to have a look around, see the scenery, look for any little areas she may have missed, look for secret passageways, and find the cool stuff.

This may come from the first couple of Tomb Raider games where you could take your time, find new ways around, find secret areas and investigate. But this seems to be lost with modern games and their “run in blasting and don’t look at the surroundings” mentality.

If she was playing GTA, she’d be off wondering why she couldn’t go into the neighbour’s building, go into that shop, climb to that roof… all of the things you can’t do. 

In order to be able to go into every house, to leave the city, to talk to random people, to go off on new adventures that are spontaneous you'd need a computer the size of a college dorm, or to get into MMORPGs.

But you know what does have a truly open world environment?

Tabletop roleplaying games.

Yes, we’re back to that argument again. Want to go into the neighbour’s house? No problem. Talk to the neighbours and ask if there have been any strange happenings recently? Maybe the neighbours have been having a problem being hassled by a cruel and manipulative landlord in an unexpected plot that the gamemaster is making up on the spot. A plot that’ll lead to a whole new adventure going off on a tangent that’ll last weeks. Who knows?

That’s one of the wonders of tabletop gaming. No limitations. Sure, the GM may have put a lot of work into an adventure or setting, but the option is certainly there for the player characters to do something different, leave the area, and find something new to discover.

Not only is wifey brilliant at questioning the logic of games (not only video games, but also roleplaying games – certainly keeps me on my toes when game designing) but she’s great at doing the unexpected. I remember we’d been playing Kult quite intensely, and I’d just purchased the epic and gorgeously designed Judas Grail adventure for it. I set the game up, tweak a couple of the characters so it fits with our current storyline, and start the game… only to have her lead the entire group to a completely different location, and end up in a nightclub full of vampires. 

But it didn't matter. The game was still awesome, and everything that came out of it was just as unexpected and cool for me as the GM as it was for the players. And that's something video games cannot do. At least not yet. Not for a long while.

Speaking of game designing though, I should get back to that. WILD isn’t going to write itself.

Until next time, stay multi-classy.

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.

Bad at Games (1)

I’ve decided I may be too old for video games. 

There, I’ve said it. With the announcement for the new Xbox One and the PS4, both new and exciting consoles that can do everything bigger, faster and with more amazing graphics than ever, I looked at what was planned with a feeling a disappointment and boredom. I’m sorry. I’m just not excited by the prospect.

When I started this blog I was going to do a few reviews, discuss gaming stuff about roleplaying games, and reflect upon my life as a roleplayer. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that it’s been gaming as a whole that’s been following me over the years. And it’s videogaming that I’m disappointed with at the moment.

I grew up in a seaside town which meant something major when it comes to anyone my age – arcades. We had a few in our little town… not as many as the neighbouring seaside towns, but we had a healthy selection of arcades that would suck up every spare 10p I had. Starting with Space Invaders, and the revelation that was Galaxians, we used to hang around at the arcade and play the lot. 

Many of them were pretty basic, especially by today’s standards, and probably the most gaming time would be spent either on Gauntlet (let’s face it, it was trying to be a video game version of D&D – they certainly saw us coming didn’t they), or trying to master the elaborate controls of Defender.

Warlords on the Atari VCS (1981)

Then home gaming came. Coop and I both had the old Atari VCS, where we’d play the Space Invaders cartridge for hours. The best Atari experience had to be from the simplest of games – Warlords. It was basically “breakout” but four players used the breakout paddles to control a little defence thing that span around a castle in each corner, and we’d hurl little pixelated blobs at each other.


We progressed into computer gaming after my parents bought me a Sinclair ZX Spectrum (48K) one Christmas with the hopes that I’d become a wiz-computer programmer and make my fortunes in the growing computer industry. However, Sinclair BASIC was not the language of choice in most cases, and my A-Level Computer Science project that was printed out on that heat-sensitive Sinclair Printer “silver toilet roll” may not have put me in good stead to become the next Steve Jobs. 

But we played them all – Jet Set Willy, Horace Goes Skiing, Atic Atac, and of course Elite. Even upgrading to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128, and playing what would be the pinnacle of Spectrum gaming for me – Starglider (which took around 30minutes to load from cassette).

Aliens - The Computer Game (1986)

Even then, I could see one of the major problems I’d have with video gaming. It started with Aliens, the computer game. Published by Electric Dreams, this was possibly one of the most basic forerunners to a first person shooter. You controlled a squad of six, running around the installation on LV-426, with basic graphics, and just the constant heartbeat noise of the motion-tracker for company. You’d run through many identical rooms, encountering the odd facehugger that would leap out at you, before you ventured into the scary hive, and the warriors would take your squad out one by one. I never got very far, never saw the queen. All I’d see would be teeth, and six flatlining monitors as my squad all became either eaten or impregnated.

It was terrifying. I used to get sweaty palms, and have to stop playing. Sad really…

Eventually, I sold my Spectrum to a colleague at the Archaeology Unit where I worked, and I turned my back on video games for a bit…  That was until I met my future wife, played an intense six-hour session of Doom and she was introduced to Lara Croft on the PS1…

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There is a point to this story, but it’s a long story. Too long for one blog post. A tale of epic quests, midnight launches, heartbreaks and halos. Of Master Chief and world tours. Of bank heists and riding into the sunset, before it all starts to go horribly, horribly wrong…

Roll Your Own Life (18) - As One Door Closes

I mentioned a couple of “Roll Your Own Life” entries ago that I used to publish comics. I had my own company, set up by The Prince’s Youth Business Trust, and the couple of titles I did (Missing and D’Israeli’s “Consequences”) were shipped internationally. But all was not great with the comics. 

Mostly, because my main comic (Missing) was a bit rough in the artwork, though I still liked the story, but when your main distributor says you’re just not worth carrying, it’s time to close the business. So I did. I officially shut the business down and gave up. But before I finally flick that switch, let’s rewind a little to before I moved to the south coast and ended up in the cinema.

The local video rental store was only a five minute walk away (well, ten coming back, it was a bloody steep hill) and we rented a lot of movies. This was before the wonders of the streaming interwebs and stuff. As we’d frequented the place a lot, we got chatty with Jason, the guy who used to work in the video store. We’d chat when we went in, and we discovered we had very similar interests, and became good friends. We even went to his wedding last year. [We seem to have this knack of becoming friends with people we meet in shops – the manager of our friendly local comic store became such good friends he was actually best man at our wedding!]

Cover for the 1st Edition
Conspiracy X

Anyway, Jason at the video store knew I was a huge X-Files fan, and knowing I was a roleplayer said that I should check out a roleplaying game called Conspiracy X. I’d not really heard of it, but he loaned me the core rules and I was hooked. Loved the game, thought the game setting was possibly one of the coolest things I’d ever read. It was so well designed and tapped into real events that the whole thing could have been a government leak to spread disinformation, or to prepare the public for the revelation of their dealings with aliens.

I was still publishing comics, so I did some internet research and discovered that Conspiracy X was now published by Eden Studios (rather than New Millennium Entertainment as the edition I borrowed had been) and I thought I’d drop them a line about doing a comic based on the game. Nothing big budget, just a little black and white indie like I normally published, but following the adventures of a Cell as they encountered the weird, the alien and the corrupted.

The Eden guys were as positive and supportive as you could expect, but before I knew it I was relocating to the other side of the country, closing the comics business down and I didn’t really give it much more thought. 

While there, I picked up All Flesh Must Be Eaten and WitchCraft, not really twigging that it was all Eden Studios again until I looked at the adverts in the back of the book. Then, we relocated back this side of the country, Debs taking a new and different job in graphic design, and I looked around desperate for work. I was sat at home while Debs was working, with no comics business and nothing to do except look for a job, when I thought about Eden Studios and my old dream of writing roleplaying games. 

I didn’t have a gaming group, but I was still buying games. I read rulebooks like there was no tomorrow, but Unisystem just seemed to be what I wanted from a game system. I thought I’d drop the guys at Eden a line to see if they were looking for writers, reminding them who I was, how I’d talked to them before about comics and stuff. 

All Flesh Must Be Eaten (2nd Edition)

Rather than the expected response of “Thanks, but no thanks,” they suggested that I wrote something for them to prove I could write a game book, show that I knew the system, and to give them an idea of my writing style (if I even have one). I saw this as a “Hell yes!” and promptly started work on writing my first book for Eden.

I don’t think they were really expecting a supplement – I think they were just expecting a few thousand words, but I just didn’t know how to take a hint. I wrote a supplement for All Flesh Must Be Eaten that allowed you to play the game as survival horror, but without the zombies – to take the game out of the zombie genre, and into the realm of the slasher movie, under the working title of "Summercamp Stalkers and Unstoppable Evil". 

Rightly so, it wouldn’t see print. A lot of it represented rules from WitchCraft for ghosts and spirits, and writing a rules supplement for a game about zombies that didn’t have zombies in it was about as stupid as writing a supplement for Star Wars that was about being clerical workers on the Death Star doing mundane work and never getting involved in any fighting. But, I liked slasher films, and thought it would be interesting to have some of the zombie traits applied to a single enemy, and create a few more.

It meant that you could basically run Friday 13th, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or even Scream, as adventures. I’d even worked out how to do Phantasm (one of my faves), but the problem was that the players needed to be “in on the fun” and willing to split up, and do stupid things. And above all, they should not get too annoyed when their character is killed off half way through the adventure. This is why I added the spirit rules from WitchCraft so even dead characters could try to assist in a “use the Force” way when there were very few player characters left alive. Probably would work as convention games, when the max length of the game would be about an hour, but a whole evening spent sitting around after your character went and investigated the noise in the basement? Not fun for that player.

Terra Primate Core Rulebook

There was a scenario in the book too, set in an old cinema based on the creepy and abandoned bits of the Odeon where I used to work, as a cursed film inspired a supernatural killer to attack the few people invited to an exclusive screening. 

You never know, something may come of it one day. Maybe I’ll strip it down to a 32 page PDF as a freebie or something. But, it proved to Eden that I could write, and before you know it I was asked to work on their new single book RPG – Terra Primate.

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Conspiracy X 2nd Edition

DW:AITAS 2nd Ed

The rest, as they say, is history.

I’ve helped out on more Eden titles than I can remember, before finally returning to that game that really got me back into game writing – Conspiracy X. And, since then, I’ve gone on to write for other people and design and develop the game system (and write a lot of the core book) for the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space RPG for Cubicle 7.

Which kinda brings me up to date. As I'm writing for these companies, I'm not going to go into any great detail - you don't want to know all the secrets of the universe do you? However, it won't be my final "Roll Your Own Life" retrospective, I've plenty of gaps to fill in and I'll look at specific classic games from my youth as well as my first convention experiences and more.

Anyway, I shouldn't be writing this! I've a game to write! 

Until next time, stay multi-classy!

What's so WILD about it? (part 2)

I'd been having some problems writing WILD, my RPG of dreamsharing. I have the system, I know how to write the slightly different take on character generation, and I had the way the game works written, but I'd come to a grinding halt when it came to the second chapter. The Setting.

I knew what I wanted for the setting, and the events that created the dreamshare device that is used in the game (after all, that was all written as a short novel for NaNoWriMo last year). It was really how to put the information across to the players of the game.

The world isn't so different to begin with. Think Inception.

Still from Inception (c) Warner Bros

The dreamshare device was created by a big tech company whose "Steve Jobs / Bill Gates" had a family tragedy that lead to the device's creation.

I had a couple of ways of approaching it. I could do a normal history, starting with the beginning of dream research, through Freud and Jung, to the discovery of REM sleep, adding in fictionalised bits about Soviet psi-research during the Cold War, how the tech went onto the black market, and so on.

Or, I could do it as a journal of the device's creation, presenting chunks of the fiction I'd written before from his point of view. But that lead to another problem - the guy was the designer of so much new tech, developer of computer Apps, that having him write a physical journal with notes and drawings would be tricky.

I was so hung up with this chapter, I'd come to a grinding halt. Stupid, I know...

But last week, I had an epiphany. A moment of clarity. I suddenly knew how to do chapter two. It just needed to introduce the players to the concept of dreamshare and how the tech worked. The history behind it can be revealed later for the GM.

And that was it. I was writing again. The chapter is done in its new style. Neither normal history or fictionalised fluff. It's something very different... that's all I can say.

Now, I'm back on Chapter Three. The character generation chapter. It's about half done, so I'd best get on with it while I'm on a roll.

Proper blogpost to come soon!!!

Expecto Extremis

Well, it's been a while since my last post - the last three weeks have been intense to say the least...

Mid-April marks not only my birthday, but also my wife's birthday and our wedding anniversary, so we always try to get a week off together to celebrate. This year was no exception, and we did lots of cool stuff...

On my birthday we went to see Trance, the most recent film by Danny Boyle. I must admit, I'm not a huge Boyle fan, but the trailer intrigued me and the talk of it being the new Inception really made me keen to see it.

We were not disappointed. It's one of those movies that (a) you really want to watch again to see the first half knowing what happens at the end, and (b) you can't really talk about without spoiling the whole film. But, you get the gist of it from the trailer. James McAvoy's character helps Vincent Cassel's gang to steal a painting, suffers a head injury and can't remember where he's hidden the painting. They hire a hypnotherapist (Rosario Dawson) to help him remember, but there's always going to be more to it than that. His memories have been altered, and we recap events as he slowly uncovers what actually happened, each time filling more and more detail.

It was an excellent movie, and I'd highly recommend seeing it if you get chance. We'll certainly be picking up the BluRay when it comes out. The soundtrack is fantastic too, an excellent bit of background music to write to!

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The huge model of Hogwarts at the WB Studio Tour

To celebrate my wife's birthday (and our wedding anniversary) we did what all dedicated Harry Potter fans should do - we went to the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio Tour at Leavesden. The actual studios where they filmed the Harry Potter movies have been turned into an exhibition where you can walk around the sets, see the actual props from the movies, and experience the movie magic first-hand.

From the amazing entry to the Great Hall in Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, through the massive studio tour, to the vast and dangerous shop, the whole experience is absolutely amazing. They tell you on the website that you can expect the tour to last about three hours, but after five and a half hours of looking around we still felt like we could have spent longer.

Okay, so it helps if you're massive Harry Potter fans like we are (I must admit, I thought more people would have dressed up for it, but my wife and our friend Alix seemed to be the only ones in Hogwarts school uniform on the day) but I honestly can't recommend the experience enough.

Me about to go into the Headmaster's Office.

Debs (left) and Alix (right) at Honeydukes!

Diagon Alley! So amazing!

The model of Hogwarts. Those are people in the front! It's HUGE!

When we finally left, we all decided we had to go back. We're already planning a return trip it was THAT cool. 

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The day after that excitement, we returned to London to attend the preview screening of Iron Man 3 at the Odeon Leicester Square. The preview screening was introduced by the writer/director (Shane Black) and co-writer (Drew Pearce), who were keen to see their two years' worth of hard work to finally get shown on the big screen in front of an eager audience. 

Of course, as expected, the film was excellent. You can read my reviews both for Forces of Geek and for the UK's SyFy Channel site. 

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And then, after all that, it was back to the day-job for a lovely 10-day stretch... 

Tomorrow is my first day off for a bit, so I'm going to sleep, recover, and then get back on the horse. I've been so slack with the writing recently, so distracted by the little things, I'm determined to get back to it. 

Anyway, I'm going to hit the sack. It's research for the game, honest!

Until next time, stay multi-classy!

Then "WALLOP!" Our Turn To Do Some Wiping Out!

As part of my birthday prezzies this week from my lovely wife, I was treated to an evening of Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of The Worlds. Something I've always been intrigued with seeing as a live production but we've never managed to make it to any of the actual concerts.

Thanks to the recent trend in showing theatre productions in cinemas, last year we managed to see the rather cool production of Frankenstein with the legendary casting of both Sherlocks, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller. An amazing bit of acting by all involved (when we saw it, Cumberbatch was Victor, Miller was the creature), and I'm stunned it hasn't been released on DVD yet.

After the success of seeing that in the cinema, we were intrigued to see that they were showing a recording of Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds in cinemas.

Jeff Wayne conducts War of the Worlds live on stage

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I'd always loved that album. I have distinct memories of the record, dating right back to primary school. It was part of the school's routine that each class had to host and sometimes "perform" the school assemblies. I remember distinctly that we hosted one demonstrating basic first aid and after the assembly I had to fake passing out in the crowd to see if the rest of the children had taken in the information... they just really ignored me...

Anyway, I have a memory of standing in assembly and one of the other classes was putting on their presentation and while we were waiting for the talking to start and for all of the classes to arrive, they were playing The Eve of the War. I'd never heard anything like it before, and I was fascinated. I asked the others in my class what it was, and one of my friends (though I use the term lightly as he did make part of my school life miserable) identified the record as he had it.

The "Dead London" image from the LP booklet. Always held a
morbid fascination with me as a kid.

It was immediately on my birthday requests. I think it was the only thing I asked for that year, and was my main birthday present. Two glorious LPs worth of it, with a book with all of the lyrics and pages of awesome artwork. Mum didn't understand why I would want such a thing, she couldn't see why I'd want a record of someone telling me the story of War of the Worlds. Of course, the moment she heard it, she realised - it became one of her favourite albums ever.

I had a poster magazine as well. Remember those? I still have loads of poster magazines (probably worth nothing now as the posters took their turns decorating my bedroom walls) from various movies, from the first Star Wars, through Tron, Indiana Jones, and Ghostbusters... But I remember I had the second issue of the War of the Worlds poster magazine. I loved that magazine, as it had blueprints for the Fighting Machine. Typically, I took it to school one day, and it was gone.

Blueprints of the Fighting Machine from the poster magazine.

Wherever you are, I'd like it back (even though it's almost 30 years later...)

Anyway, that album was always one of my prized possessions. Not worth anything except sentimental value, I do still have that double album. I have it on CD now as well, and still listen to it. It's still fantastic.

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The production we saw was the "Next Generation", with slightly more drums and new artists. Liam Neeson showed that even as a hologram he has immense stage presence. Jason Donovan was absolutely amazing as the Parson Nathaniel, and Ricky Wilson did a great job as the Artilleryman, recapturing part of the David Essex-ness about it while still making the role his own.

The whole stage production was rather excellent, and is due to be released on DVD/BluRay in November.

Diceni

Sunday 7th April saw a new event in Norwich aimed mostly at gamers in the region - Diceni.

Just a handful of the many gaming tables at Diceni 2013 in Norwich

Hosted at The Forum in Norwich, the event has been in planning for months with the sole purpose of spreading the word of gaming and hoping to recruit some new players to the hobbies.

From what I could see, the only downside to the event was that it took place while I was at work! Damn-it! However, there was a brief opportunity to have a look around just as the event was starting, and even just twenty minutes after opening the event was already humming with activity, gaming and excitement.

Sentinel head! And more courtesy of the Artyfakes stand!

I managed to get a few photos taken before I had to head off to work, which I've posted here, but on the whole it was an excellent first convention. Not only were there plenty of stands for traders, and tables for gaming, there were cosplayers, tanks, a Dalek and lots of other activities going on.

Lots of cool stuff from Warlord Games too!

Just have to say it's fantastic to get some gaming stuff like this going on in Norwich, and I really hope that next year Diceni returns. My only suggestions for building upon the convention would be (a) more roleplaying (but, as an RPG designer, I guess I'm a little biased), and (b) maybe aim for the Saturday a week earlier in the year... you never know, that may collide with the second International TableTop Day and Diceni would be able to tie in!

Above all, I'd just like to offer my congratulations to the team behind Diceni. A fantastic event, that should hopefully grow and grow. May there be many, many more.

Check out Diceni on Facebook here, or on their homepage, to see more pics of the event and hear about future conventions.

"They're all going to laugh at you..."

[This blog-post was originally written to feature a promotion for the remake of Stephen King's Carrie. Since the promotional videos are no longer online, these have been cut to get straight to the story of how I first started reading Stephen King, to meeting the legend himself...]

I’ve always been a big fan of Stephen King. This really does go back to my youth. In the past, before the internet and the masses of video games out there, there wasn’t really a lot to do except watch TV, go to the cinema, and in my case, play Dungeons & Dragons. I used to read, but my reading really consisted of my weekly subscription at the local newsagents to a comic (which started with Look-In, progressed onto the UK Spider-man reprints “Super Spider-man and the Titans” and then onto the comic that everyone had to read every week – 2000AD). 

When it came to books, I really didn’t read an awful lot as a kid. I used to get the novelisations of movies I’d been to see, so that I could relive the movie again and again. I could skip to the cool part, and while I was reading Lucas’ novelisation of Star Wars, I could picture the X-Wings over the surface of the Death Star, and the extra stuff about Biggs was like the deleted scenes of the Eighties…

Even then, I didn’t have much time for reading. That was until most of the gaming group vanished off to University and I found myself bored and unemployed, trying to write scenarios for Ghostbusters.

We didn’t have a great bookshop in my hometown. It used to be part corner shop, part card shop, and part bookshop all crammed into a room about the size of Harry Potter’s cupboard under the stairs. But they also sold vinyl records (yes, LPs and 12” singles) so I used to pop in there when there was something I was after, and they’d order it for me. But there was one book in there that unnerved me. It used to taunt me while the old lady that used to run the place rummaged through the delivery for whatever obscure Mike Oldfield or Jean Michel Jarre album I’d asked them to get in for me. The cover was of a drain with a pair of inhuman eyes staring out of the darkness. In the water, a lone paper boat drifted towards the void, while a red balloon floated to one side.

The book taunted me. It looked horrific. It was huge – longer than Lord of the Rings (which I’d tried to read when I was thirteen and gave up on – don’t worry, I’ve read it and loved it since, but that’s another story that involves Babylon 5). But something compelled me to get it. In the same way that the cover of Kult lured me into purchasing that game many, many years later.

That book, of course, was Stephen King’s “IT”.

I’d never read anything that long before, but there was something about the writing style that just pulled me in. It had everything I could ever imagine in a book. The lead characters – the Losers Club – appealed to me instantly, being one of those kids who wasn’t popular, suffered a little from bullying, and ended up with a group of like minded “nerds”. A group that formed bonds that would stay with us the rest of our lives. 

The villain of the piece, the IT of the title, appeared as the things these kids were afraid of. Bloody clowns. I hate clowns. What’s the point of them? And that mind-blowing ending that could never be captured on film, it just amazed me. A book that looked like a camp horror novel was far from it. It was brilliantly written, with characters you cared about. I was hooked. I couldn’t get enough of them. My record buying habit was replaced as I purchased most of Stephen King’s work up to that point. I blasted through Carrie in a week, faced heartbreak and returning evil in Pet Sematary, lapped up every moment in Christine, and survived Captain Trips in The Stand.

I watched the movies as well, bought the soundtracks of a couple, but as with all things, real life gets in the way. I got a job, which lead to art college, and moving away from home.

Luckily, my future wife was a big fan of Stephen King as well, and when we both ended up working at the same huge bookstore, Ottakar’s, we rekindled our love of King’s work. We caught up with his works and devoured the titles of his second renaissance – Insomnia, and Rose Madder especially, before Debs convinced me to give The Dark Tower a try and loaned me The Gunslinger.

When Lisey’s Story was about to be published in 2006, the publishers hosted an evening talk in London in association with one of the major newspapers, and we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to hear him talk in person. But as an added bonus, booksellers from around the country were invited to a private book launch in an old masonic temple behind the Strand in London the following day. We, of course, leapt at the chance.

King takes to the stage to sing with
Alabama 3. (Sorry about the
grainy photo)

The publishers of King in the UK have always been incredibly good to us, and our regular sales rep from Hodder came over to see us in the strange environment. There were complimentary drinks, nibbles and copies of the book, while Alabama 3 played on a strange stage to the rear of the building. The rep explained that Stephen King had been signing all day at some supermarket somewhere, and was exhausted and may not make much of an appearance, but he insisted that he’d try to get us to meet the man himself somehow. Then to make the evening even more surreal, Stephen King appeared in the venue, and took to the stage, joining Alabama 3 and singing along to a couple of songs. 

He apologised that he was worn out from a gruelling signing session and couldn’t stay, but the ever-wonderful rep from Hodder ushered us to where King would be exiting the building for the briefest of encounters. 

It’s at those moments that you realise that you don’t really know what to say.

What can you say to him? Do you ask how he is? Ask how he’s enjoying the UK? Something banal like that?

Or do you explain to him that he is really the reason I started reading books for pleasure? Without picking up that copy of IT I may never have ended up working in a bookstore (I still cite working for Ottakar’s as being one of the best “day job” experiences of my life).

The rep stopped King and his entourage briefly as they were making their way out of the building, and said that he just wanted him to meet some of the booksellers from Ottakar’s who were selling his books so enthusiastically. Stephen King stopped, and despite looking exhausted by the insanely long day he’d had, he shook our hands and said hello. 

Words were lost completely. It was as if I’d lost all power to communicate. I may have just made a meeping noise, but that’s about all I remember. Debs managed to thank him for all the hours of enjoyment we’d had from his books, though she always cringes at the thought as she opened her one line to Stephen King by calling him “dude”. 

I really don’t see that as a bad thing. He is a dude. The dude. He’s as Dude as Lebowski. He’s the grand dude of horror and suspense.

I like to think that in that brief moment, before he was whisked away (with the chocolate that Debs gave him) to rest and recover before yet another intense signing period, that just the smallest amount of particles from the hand of Stephen King himself remained on our shaken hands. And that somewhere, hidden at an atomic level, the smallest part of King’s writing ability has transferred itself to me. If it has, it is laying dormant somewhere, waiting to be activated, because I’m still churning out the same old crap as I ever was.

Blimey.

That was a bit more than I was expecting. Amazing how many memories just one trailer can conjure up. I guess, that’s the power of Stephen King. More power to you, dude.