What’s the most beautiful thing in the world?

Fire? Your first kiss? Or perhaps your last? A baby’s morning smile? Your tears at her wedding? Truth? Her tears at your funeral? Making love after a fight? Beckham’s match-winning free-kick? Yorda swinging on your fingertips?

London at sunrise or Christmas morning aged seven or Jordan or ‘cellar door’ or the Koh-i-Noor or peace or hope or Mona Lisa and love?

Listening to the orchestra under the silence?

Me? I think reconciliation is the most beautiful thing in the world. Something bad made good; a relationship fixed, a wrong moment in history suddenly turned right through resolution, compromise, humility, grace or forgiveness.

Suikoden V is a game all about reconciliation. Firstly, for your unnamed protagonist, the Prince of Falena, and his increasingly unstable mother, Queen Arshtat. Her name, from the ancient Persian Zoroastrian religion, has two meanings: Rectitude and Justice. One moment she’s the first – a loving, moral, caring and noble Queen. The next she’s the second, meting out skewed ethnic cleansing, heartlessly demanding those who look at her funny be wiped from the world’s face with fire, bleach and poisonous glare.

This is the story about you and her and how she comes to be made good again and how the world she has unwittingly broken comes to be fixed.

And secondly, this is a game looking to reconcile a faltering brand back to its increasingly estranged fans. Suikoden 4 was a horrible mess of an RPG, uncompromising in its mediocrity, calculatingly bland – a far, sad and lost cry from the series’ majestic debut that sees copies of the discontinued PSone title routinely change hands on eBay for double the exorbitance of a new 360 game.

This title goes back to its roots, sweeping aside recent mistakes, reclaiming strands of DNA almost lost to misguided evolution. Konami knows that this could be its last chance to make amends in the west and so we see a return of the six man squad, a re-emphasis on the collectable 108 characters (the star of destiny USP) and crucially, the enormous weight of a thinking plot and enjoyable story.

You can read the rest here

So, I wrote this before I wrote the FFXI review below otherwise, going on the comments section for that game thatI promised I wouldn’t look at but subsequently did, I would have bitterly done this in the style of a gamefaqs user piece with section headings like ‘Graphics’, ‘Sound’, ‘Controls’ and ‘Lastability’. In fact, I was considering doing that anyway but when I suggested that I’m probably not funny enough to pull it off to non-stuff’s Robert Howells he didn’t try to persuade me otherwise so I’ll probably leave it alone. Onwards!

That Tales of Phantasia should peek its head around the curtain of GBA gaming so late in the system’s life with scarcely a ripple of applause seems immensely unfair. Had this game been released three or fours years ago, the ovation would have lasted for weeks, the far-reaching repercussions from its release sending shivers down so many Super Nintendo developers’ now crooked backs.

This game is one of the SNES era’s Japanese RPG greats; a marvel of Mode 7 twizzling 2D/3D exuberance, a world bristling with super-deformed charm, stretching and reaching long narrative fingers over hours of delightful adventuring. Released late in the Super Nintendo’s life, this, the first Tales game, never got to travel further than its birthplace of Japan, forcing swathes of hungry importers to dust off Kanji dictionaries before nursing Aspirin-soaked translation headaches. As with other high-profile missing-in-translation Super Nintendo RPGs such as Secret of Mana 3, the game has since only been playable via emulation and a fan translation, left cobwebbed and untouched in a dark broom cupboard off videogaming’s bright halls of fame.

So think about what this means: One of the last great games of the RPG super-era now on a GBA in full, perfectly ported portable magnificence. Maybe we’re the only ones that care anymore. Maybe, with the Tales-branded games seemingly everywhere now and PSone conversions (and homebrew SNES emulators) showboating across PSP screens the world over, there’s little triumph in such technological marvel. Perhaps this has just come too late in the day, robbing such a move of any implication that we might see more of the greatest sprite-based RPGs ever created receive similar honour. Imagine: Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Bahamut Lagoon, Star Ocean or so many of those other games that make contemporary RPG storytelling sound like a primary school English class project on a GBA. To think that might not happen makes us want to cry a bit under our ever-so-slightly rose-tinted glasses.

Still, marvellously you could be completely oblivious to all this history, significance and nostalgia and still have a good time with Tales of Phantasia. Let’s start with the positive as it always makes us chirpy when Namco and Nintendo go out on a date.

You can read the rest here

UPDATE: So, sadly, after an hour or so of running with the original text, EG’s editor decided to cut the intro and outro and put a score on the end of this to avoid score bitching in the comments thread. It’s sad as I’d just spent 1500 words explaining how rating MMORPGs is a vastly pointless exercise but still, I understand the logic. Annoyingly a lot of the photograph references now make no sense so here’s the original text below for anyone interested.

Also, possibly the most infuriating thing in videogame writing these days is the out-of-hand dismissal by teenage Internet boys that your writing is simply rubbish NGJ (New Games Journalism). Like, I have no idea how this piece of writing can be considered NGJ (if the definition of that now darkest of pigeon-holes is still “Travel Writing from Imaginary Places”). This is a standard piece of feature/ critical writing and just because it uses a few helpful metaphors doesn’t make it some god-awful fanfiction. Deep breath.

You rarely defend the things you love.

Nobody pulls a worn picture of their wife or boyfriend or baby daughter from a wallet before proceeding to argue about the supremacy of that loved one. To do so would be ridiculous and embarrassing, perhaps even a little suspicious.

Rather, they show you the picture and simply give you the opportunity to see what they see.

A shrug of the shoulders if it’s not your thing, their concrete, immovable, unfathomable wonder and devotion left untouched by the swing of your validation.

MMORPGs are comfortably the most hated of games for a reviewer to critique. This is partly because, even if you do spend one whole month of your life playing solely this game (during which time you can earn no money from other work to feed yourself or your family) everybody that is currently playing the game moans and bitches that you haven’t played it enough yet and it’s only 600 days in when your ninja character with thief sub-job reaches level 75 and completes his set of AF armour that the game really begins to make sense.

But it’s mainly because, unlike offline games, online RPGs are not self-contained blocks of gameplay and narrative with a start, a middle and an end. Rather, they are infinitely shifting, enormous structural playpens that exist primarily to breed and facilitate human relationships; the life and love that traditionally surrounds games rather than inhabits them. The game only really begins to make sense 600 days in when your ninja character with thief sub-job reaches level 75 and completes his set of AF armour because it’s only when you get that far in that you realise that the fun you’ve had hasn’t really had much to do with the game at all.

Street Fighter 2 amazed because there was community gathered around the arcade cabinet. We all jeered or revered each other while watching and learning new techniques together: a group of humans bound and strengthened by a communal gaming focus. The experts helped the newbies until the newbies beat the experts and the circle of strife completed.

We all have known that feeling of kinship through shared interactive addiction and affection, whatever the game in whatever the space in time.

MMORPGs are the same except moreso a hundred times over: their community is perpetually bred from within.

One could write for hours about what a wonderful place Sweden is to live: the sights and sites and sounds and pros and cons of its society’s structures. You could wax lyrical about how the laws are so very well thought out and the town planning and education and health and police and transport mechanics are perfectly implemented. But really, your quality of experience in Sweden is only partly influenced by these things. What really makes it a good place to live in are the people you encounter while there; that interplay of human relationship that makes life what it is.

And so that is why MMORPGS are impossible games to review within the traditional critical framing question of: “How much fun will I have here?”

How much fun you will have there is only partially dictated by what the game’s creators put in place. The rest is down to the life that fills that framework.

So, all one can really do is pull out a photograph of Final Fantasy XI for you to look at and, in doing so, simply give you the opportunity to see what those who love her see.

Like Sweden, FFXI’s society and scenery is built from hundreds of tiny building blocks. It has races and racism, transport systems and ticket offices, vocations and money, smoking cities and gleaming landscapes, savage monsters and dark dangers, sparkling oceans and swimming skies and hope and death and fishermen and swords and mayors and farming and furry thongs and enough of the paraphernalia of life to persuade you to emigrate from atomic reality to pixel virtuality.

Indeed, when you pick the game’s box from the shelf at your local retailer or add it you your basket online, know this: you’re not so much holding a videogame as a passport. Your new identity, new home, new face written in zeros and ones and burned to a disk with which you can trade life in this world for life in that world.

In your hands you hold the rabbit hole to wonderland; the wardrobe to Narnia; the trunk of the faraway tree, the cyclone to Oz, the gate leading away from the hobbit’s shire.

The red pill.

What price life? £29.99 and £8.99 monthly rent.

Let’s imagine for a moment that when you get to this world there’s no one else there – the muddying critical modifiers of emotionally charged relationships wiped away. Let’s purely and simply chart your first lonesome week in Vana ‘Diel. Your first few hours will be spent tentatively stepping out of your adopted home city’s gates (Bastok, San d’Oria, Windurst, or Jeuno), before battling a few low level monsters in an effort to level up your chosen job as quickly as possible while earning a little money to buy some armour. Battles are built on invisible dice rolls so there’s seemingly little skill involved at first – simply a battle of your stats versus his.

Initially, you’re weak and useless and you won’t be able to travel very far without dying and subsequently lying hopelessly on the floor crying out in coloured text for a passing mage to revive you. If no one comes to your aid it’s a case of respawning back at town, losing a percentage of your experience and starting the process over.

Inside your city various basic quests are available to you, all of which earn a small amount of money to spend at the shops or at the player run auction houses and enable you to take your first baby steps into the overarching plot. Other players cannot see your interactions with NPCs so everybody plays out their own personal stories silently next to one another. When you have built up enough strength you can venture a little further outside of your city and, if you’re lucky or can find an escort, you might make it to the next town along.

This is essentially how the game continues to work for the next 50 years. You get a little stronger so you travel a little furthur and beat the next slightly harder monsters. You get a little richer doing so and buy some better weapons and armour in order beat the next slightly harder monsters. All the while questing, advancing the story and making new friends draws you from capital letter to full stop.

And it’s this final element on which the universe lives or dies. The game positively encourages interaction with other people, many quests only becoming feasible when working in a team. So you must make friends and join a linkshell (a clan whose online members you can speak to at any time no matter where you are). You might decide to meet up at 8:00 GMT to help someone else in the linkshell complete a quest they’ve been struggling with or you might choose to meet up in Brighton next Saturday for a pint. Lives converge in Vana Diel and suddenly; the potholed roads and crusty levelling fade from view. The game becomes simply a backdrop to existence: a means to an end.

And, sadly, that end isn’t always friendship. There are tricksters in Final Fantasy XI – virtual criminals out to win confidence before stealing other player’s in-game items or money. There are scammers at the player-operated casinos and rogue beastmasters who would look to deliberately set powerful monsters upon weaker players for sport (Monster Player Killers). Every community is subject to those who would violate it’s terms and laws and Final Fantasy XI is no different.

Likewise, its framework is frequently flawed – full of tiny mistakes and design sins that the developer gods should never have infected their world with. Should you fail to meet the right people and form those crucial linkshell relationships then these flaws eventually shatter your play experience. Devoid of community this is essentially just a crusty four-year-old PS2 game (albeit complete with the two new expansions and the 360’s HD capability), as hurtful as its jagged polygons.

Crucially, the game retains much of the Final Fantasy DNA – Moogles and Chocobos and airships and jobs and Cid and orphans and any number of the unifying threads the series enjoys running through its coded veins. So for the Final Fantasy fan, this is the live in dream. But, these trappings of Square-Enix’s most treasured IP will do little to compel the friendless player to push on sixty hours down the line – and sixty hours will be just the beginning of your commitment if you wish to see this through to the end.

Indeed, the MMORPG is a genre for people with few commitments. When you take one on you take on a new life: one that makes almost as many demands of you to succeed as this one. The key difference between its reality and ours is that if you follow the game’s guidebooks and fansites and tirelessly chip away at life in the game, you will slowly but surely succeed – at least in the traditional western ‘get-more-powerful, have-more-things, be-able-to-beat-bigger-monsters’ type way.

Real life isn’t so simple and perhaps therein lies the appeal. For teenagers or reclusive twenty somethings and northwards, the MMORPG provides an escape; A preferable world where the other players largely share the same interests as you and where the rules and boundaries are clearly defined and easy to work within – providing you have the time. Perhaps then the MMORPG genre is best suited for the young – those yet to fully find their place and purpose in real life – or the old – where the game allows a fresh start and challenge from the bottom of the social ladder when all your cards in this life have already been played.

In this world there are faults deep and as wide corrupting the framework but, unmistakeably, there’s the potential for glory, wonder and passion to be woven into the tapestry of your play experience; unscripted flashes of soul tugging brilliance as your team slays that dastardly notorious monster after an hour of intense strategising or when a high level white mage brings you back to life when you thought all hope was lost as you lay unconscious in the belly of that mythril mine. Those are the moments that are unique to you. Again: in creating an MMORPG, the developer doesn’t script create amazing gameplay moments for you like in most games – they simply create the place for them.

Attributing a numerical value to this world is about as ridiculous as giving London four out of ten because it needs a good wash down. Sure, remove the other people and the resultant empty shell is clearly showing it’s age. There’s potential for lonely nights of wandering aimless and lost, grinding against the game’s antiquated cogs and mechanisms for scant little reward: An ageing face, furrowed brow, grey hair and an awkward gait. Two out of ten.

But overlay the living, breathing, bustling society that inhabits this land and mix in Final Fantasy’s still compelling mythologies and there’s no denying the potential for life-affirming, memorable and wonderful adventures filled with glimpses of real life truth, beauty and awe: A mature, life-chiselled face full of the confidence of having lived and won and worked out its place in life. Ten out of ten.

There’s the photograph: What do you see?

You can read the rest here

Radiohead’s How I Made My Millions came on random play this morning and reminded me of this short film I made a couple of years ago.

I’m not sure how or why I stumbled across Florida State Prison’s website but once there it was hard to leave. The prison keeps an inmate database on its website where, as well as the regular prisoners, you can read a list of everyone awaiting execution on death row.

There’s nothing particularly extraordinary about that in itself but included on the site is also the list of offences that resulted in each inmate being there and, remarkably, a photograph of each convict awaiting execution. Suddenly the names and statistics have wrinkle lines of history, faces that tell ten thousand days and eyes you can touch souls in.

At the time there were 365 people awaiting execution. One for each day of the year.

I thought about creating a rapid-fire flick between all 365 faces but, in the end, I just picked a handful out to look at for a few seconds each. It seemed more affecting like that.

Today there are 371 people on the list. I don’t know if any of the people featured in the film are still alive, although, looking at the execution list on the site, only three men have been executed since 2004 at the prison so they have likely just been moved on.

The film makes its point heavy-handedly but I still find it moving. I’ll never forget these faces. I didn’t make it for any reason in particular; perhaps just because I felt guilty having poked around in their lives so I felt I should give something in response, wrongly or rightly.

The Ghandi quotation at the end is obvious but no less poignant through its repetition.

In Levitical law the “Eye for an Eye” text was actually a commandment to limit the scope of punishment the Jewish judges could mete out for any crime. In other words, if a man was caught stealing he couldn’t be sentenced to death as this would be a punishment that far outweighed his crime. Here, an eye is the maximum penalty to be sought for the taking of an eye – an indication of legislative limitation rather than a legislative commandment.

However, men through the centuries have taken the text as commandment rather than constraint; a fulfilment that must be simply met through common sense justice.

In Christianity this religious sticking to the letter of the Jewish law led to Jesus’ rebuke through the sermon on the mount: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” (Matthew 5:38-39 NRSV). Doing so breaks the chain of revenge, opening the hearts of both the wronged and wrongdoer to the wider possibility of reconciliation and change.

Ghandi’s observation that ‘An eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth makes the whole world go blind’ follows the same argument – following our ‘natural’ sense of retributive justice (revenge) only leads to wholesale destruction. If every wrong doing was punished in kind then it turns humanity’s eyes from the sight of life’s true healers and restorers: grace, forgiveness and restoration.

Even if you disagree with the Jesus/ Ghandi take on justice it is still hard to defend ‘life for a life’ when common sense justice is handed out by fallible humans.

The quotation that plays at the start of the movie is Rolando Cruz (pictured above).

Cruz served on death row in Illinois for 12 years after he was twice convicted and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicario. He was set free after four county police officers and three prosecutors were indicted for allegedly lying and concealing evidence in the case. Another man, a convicted child killer, later confessed to the crime.

“I know my path in life leads to straighten out this judicial system, I have to,” said Cruz. “I am who I am today because of what they did to me.”

It’s obvious to champion Cruz as a potent argument against the death penalty. But, truth be told, this is a flawed offense as what he really represents is the fact that human law is inescapably fallible be it due to corruption, prejudice or plain incomplete evidence.

Besides, the truth is that each of these faces doesn’t hide a Shawshank Redemption-esque story of injustice and wrongful accusation however romantic the notion. Broken lives, shattered families and someone else’s death hang around most of these necks.

But retributive punishment, whatever the crime inflicted upon you or those you love, doesn’t change or remove the memory of those things, nor does it make life better or easier or in anyway healed. Anyone who has lived and is honest will tell you as much.

You can watch the film here.

(Top image is of Johnny Cash playing at Fulsom prison in 1969.)

People play RPGs for two reasons: Firstly, the design: those stock gameplay mechanics that have been tweaked and streamlined with time’s relentless tides. The typical Japanese developer picks each gameplay facet from a drop down list of options that have gone before and, by stringing them together, builds a distinct framework into which to squeeze their game.

This is the choice of battle mechanics, the way the levelling up system works, how play elements daisy chain together and what the world that frames the drama looks like. It’s the choice of colour palette; the way this tree sways in the breeze under the patterns that smoke carves as it rises lazily from those chimneys; all the visual delights that urge you to push on to the next scene after the random battles hit tedium and traipsing across lonely fields becomes a forced march rather than a bracing scenic tour. What makes this good or bad is the implementation and a successfully balanced gameplay framework will shepherd a player through the game effortlessly and painlessly from start to finish.

The second reason players play is for the story: the onion layers of colour and character and drama piped into that framework. It’s the developer’s ability to craft loveable protagonists you secretly hate and detestable antagonists you secretly love; characters that urge you into caring enough to tirelessly reveal their statistical potential and transform wearisome number crunching into heart-felt genuine nurture.

It’s the enjoyment of watching a beautiful or harrowing story uncurl, and in doing so being compelled to trace the lines that link the drama. It’s the perfectly pitched narrative arc that prevents you from wishing that the demi-God currently threatening the world would just call Ragnarok and bring the whole sorry universe to stuttering crash already.

Tales of Eternia does the former brilliantly and the latter with mediocrity. As a result the reason why you like to play RPGs becomes a primary concern in determining whether you’ll rate this game the runaway success everyone else says it is.

You can read the rest here

Carr’s lawyers wrote again to The Sunday Telegraph on 20 February saying: “My client has noted that the owners of your paper have sought fit to institute criminal liable [sic] proceedings in France against another newspaper; my client will accordingly take advice as to similar proceedings against your paper, for the cruel liable [sic] which has been inflicted upon him.”

More evidence of the growing and worrying trend for press in the UK to be sued through French courts where libel laws are apparently stricter.

But, more to the point, if it were me looking to take this course of action, I would think twice about employing a lawyer that can’t spell libel to fight my corner in a libel case, let alone lawyers in the plural…