Live synergy between music and visuals is, of course, nothing new but these visuals triggered by those sounds: wow-wee. I need to get hold of the track that plays between 00:22 and 00:40 because moving the youtube slider back and forth every 20 seconds is giving me carpal tunnel.
Roguelikes are not games for children. The randomly-generated dungeon-crawler, first conceived when videogames were written in DOS, displayed in ASCII and measured in bytes, is one of gaming’s most cranky and unforgiving propositions.
Chances are you’ll start off all bright-eyed and confident, sword in hand and satchel stuffed with potions and hope. But fifty floors later, when you’ve exhausted all of your supplies to make it to the final boss, only to be punched in the neck by a fat goblin and unceremoniously kicked back to town, losing all of your items and money en route, you’re going to need some epic swears that are beyond the range of those of school age.
Roguelikes are not games for children. So dressing one up in bright, primary colours and making the protagonist a doe-eyed, kweh-ing custard-yellow chicken is a bit like asking Stephen Hawking to lecture a children’s party on theoretical physics while dressed as Bugs Bunny: one way or another, kids are going to end up in tears.
It’s not the first time Square-Enix has sent their cutesy mascot into a Dante-esque hellhole. This is, in fact, the third Roguelike Chocobo has starred in, the first two games released for the first PlayStation (only one of which made it to America and none of which came to Europe). This title follows the template and tone of the previous games, an unexpected resurrection for Square-Enix that, despite its mismatching of childish presentation with sadistic mechanics, provides a solid and engaging experience.
The story is told in full, florid Final Fantasy vernacular. You play as Chocobo, sidekick to the explorer Cid, and through the adventure you’ll meet white mages, moogles, Ifrit and Leviathan all the while Uemtasu’s arpeggio melodies play out on delicate music boxes. In contrast to the main series most of Chocobo’s Dungeon takes place in one central location, the town of Lostime. Its inhabitants are losing their memories, more slipping away each day with the toll of the town’s bell. Far from being concerned about the creeping amnesia, the townspeople embrace it, believing that their quality of life increases in step with their forgetfulness.
Your mission is to prove them wrong by literally entering the dungeons of their minds, travelling to the deepest floor and recovering their un-treasured memories. In mechanical terms this translates to a series of increasingly difficult, randomly generated dungeons (one per town’s citizen plus a host of optional extras). Complete a dungeon and you recover a memory; collect all of the memories and the town’s individual and collective identity will be restored. It’s a strong conceit and one that proves more compelling than the usual quest to save the world. The tight geography might reduce the breadth of the game, but it helps to focus the player’s mind on its depth. And Roguelikes are all about the depth.
Few pregnancies have been as painful and protracted as Mother 3’s. The follow up to Super Nintendo classic Earthbound, a game that won a dedicated following for its cute and funny modern-world styling of the Japanese RPG, was first announced twelve years ago.
Numerous false starts and broken promises later, lead designer Shigesato Itoi finally announced its imminent Japanese release for the Gameboy Advance on his blog in 2005.
As the latest installment to one of Japan’s most beloved RPG series, Mother 3 raced to the top of the preorder charts before enjoying considerable success at retail, a feat that still failed to secure it a Western release. Despite EarthBound’s status as a sacred cow amongst gaming’s cognoscenti, it sold poorly, a performance that scuppered this sequel’s chances for a Western release. Shigeru Miyamoto himself said of the game: “We had high hopes for EarthBound in the US, but it didn’t do well. You might not know this, but there was a ‘Please Make Mother 3′ petition and it got which received 30,000 signatures! After that, we thought, ‘Wow… Earthbound fans are really solid.’”
“Really solid” is understatement when it comes to Mother’s followers, whose dedication often beggars belief. So when Nintendo’s localization producer Nate Bihldorff, confirmed in an interview that the publisher had no plans to take Mother 3 outside of Japan, it was no surprise that a core group of amateur translators sprang into action. Extracting the text files from the Japanese GBA game, the team began the painstaking work of translating the game’s thousands of lines of dialogue before reinserting them using the Earthbound English language font. Finally, on October 17th, over two years after the group began its work, a fully translated ROM was released onto the Internet, freely available for anyone with a digital copy of the game to play via emulator.
The release occupies a grey legal area, dipping its toes into murky litigious water, but the fan localizers’ motives are transparently pure. At start up a message urges players to support Mother 3 by importing official merchandise and, should the game ever receive a Western release, purchasing a legitimate copy at that time.
Of course, motives alone don’t maketh the translation. The process of translating a JRPG is time-consuming, a labour that’s all too often handled poorly by the professionals, so that a group of fans should produce a script of such wit and vim is startling. It’s also something they simply had to get right if they were to do this game, of all titles, justice. You see, Mother 3 is a game that fits the term ‘interactive story’ more comfortably than most. It’s a game made by a storyteller, one who’s chosen to use the vocabulary and tropes of the JRPG to bring his tale to an audience.
As such, the gameplay’s not so much a set of lines to link the drama as a clutch of dots, short interactive hops from cutscene to cutscene, employing what appears to be the most basic form and function of its chosen genre. So that the translation (and indeed the original Japanese dialogue) is of such a high quality is no small mercy. What initially appears to be a straightforward tale told in primary colours soon demonstrates a breadth and depth of quality that few titles many times its budget achieve. Its childlike sprites (unusually Western in appearance for such a Japanese game) communicate comedy and tragedy with unexpected impact, the simple story drawing readers in with a nod and wink before turning on a dime to deliver some of the most affecting scenes yet seen in an RPG.
To begin with you’ll name each member of the central protagonist’s family, from the father down to the dog. It’s a mammoth undertaking if you’re anything like us in thinking that there’s a right and a wrong answer for stuff like this. If that weren’t enough, you then answer a series of questions, the answers to which are then incorporated into the story. These take the form of: “What is your favourite food?” (we put ‘Kedgeree’ because we’re a middle class fisherman) and “What is your favourite thing?” (we put ‘Peace’ because we are also a smug, smug hippy). It’s the simplest of tricks, an obvious way for a game to tailor itself to its player, but it’s still effective so that, when tragedy and triumph befalls your characters later in the game, the customization only serves to heighten emotions.
Recently a friend mentioned that, when a novel grips him to the point that its world is the last thing he visits at night and the first thing he looks for in the morning, there needs to cooling off period when it’s finished.
This break acts as a kind of unwinding; a time to let the pressure and intensity of living in two different places at once dissipate, a time during which the thought of starting a new book is nauseating.
Climb into a story and the first thing you must do is acclimatise to its setting, tone, characters and rules. As such it’s only natural that when you eventually leave its boundaries there needs to be decompression.
This need for space between stories is something common to videogames. In games not only does a player (usually) have to get acclimatised to setting, tone, plot and ideas but also to a slew of invisible systems, those rules that govern the player’s engagement with the world.
Sink any amount of time into a videogame and you’re learning skills not only in the abstract space of your mind but also motor skills to link muscle inputs to on-screen outputs. You build an interactive vocabulary. Move too quickly from one game to the next and you’ll trip up, like a multilinguist moving too fast from one country to another, mixing-up their vocabularies in transit.
It’s something I’ve felt this weekend when moving from Fable 2 to Fallout 3. I completed the former at the start of the weekend and moved from Albion straight into Fallout’s post-apocalyptic America. The switch of setting from pastoral, fantasy land to barren, rubble strewn nuclear wasteland was jarring but that was nothing to the jolt of having to settle into to different ways of interacting with the world.
Two hours later I was back in Albion, a place where I was literally a king, mopping up post-completion bonus missions happy in comfortable, familiar interactive surroundings where the Y-button draws a rifle, not a jump, and the B-button summons a spell, not a Pip-boy.
As Raph Koster has long argued, what makes videogames so engaging is the human mind’s love of learning and mastering new systems. So the problem wasn’t that I’m averse to moving into new worlds and learning their rules, just that I hadn’t properly decompressed from one before moving into the next.
I’m forbidden from saying anything about Fallout 3 (I’ve been reviewing games for a few years now and I’ve never had such a stringent NDA in place this close to a game’s release) but it wouldn’t be crossing a line to say that the game’s a million miles away from a stinker. Still, if you’re knee deep in Fable 2 and planning to pick up Fallout this coming Friday then my advice is to play something palate-cleansing in between, something far, far away from role-playing in all its various contemporary forms, something a bit like /Karoshi Suicide Salaryman perhaps.
The excellent B3ta-Male links us to a tech demo for ‘The Unfinished Swan’.
The game’s core conceit is to remove all textures from the 3D objects and walls in the environment, presenting players with nothing more than an infinite and foreboding whiteness.
By shooting paint balls at the invisible walls and objects around you start to add definition and boundary to the world you stand in, blindness dissipating and corridors revealing with each satisfying splat.
It’s a neat idea that’s been beautifully executed but I’m not sure quite where the game can go from what’s been shown in the tech demo.
Essentially it’s presenting an invisible assault course, one that can easily be negotiated once you’ve fired off a few revealing rounds of paint. From that single system alone it’s difficult to conceive of how a designer might introduce meaningful threat to a methodical player, save for limiting the amount of paint the player carries, perhaps.
Still, I’m sure the developer’s smarter than I and I’m excited to see if they can find a mechanical elegance to match its aesthetic.
According to the game’s official site it’s being developed in XNA so, if all goes according to plan, expect an XBLA release at some point.
My first purchase was the drinks stall on the middle of the Bowerstone town bridge.
Truth be told, I could have afforded something a bit grander – the ironmongers just off the market square, for example – but I got caught up in the romance of my narrative.
No, this is where I’ll start my empire, I thought. Then, when I’m old and grizzled (and dressed in a corset made from solid gold, riding a diamond unicorn about town) I’ll come back to this spot with my descendants in reluctant tow and say: “This, my children, this is where it all began.”
Fable 2 has turned me into Donald Trump. While I’m supposed to be off freeing slaves or avenging my sister’s death all I can think about is how much profit I can make on this carrot. Buy items low and sell them high and you can swell your coffers, which in turn means you can buy property at a faster rate.
Every house, home and business in the game can be purchased, moved into or rented out and will then automatically earn you money every five minutes. The more property you own, the less time you have to spend playing the deliberately dull and repetitive blacksmith minigames for money.
The game employs that neat idea first seen in Square-Enix’s DS title, The World Ends With You, in which you earn even when you aren’t playing. In Fable 2 all of your shops, stores, pubs, windmills, and rented out apartments continue to net money while the game is switched off (at a rate of one payout an hour compared to one every five minutes while playing). It’s an ingenious mechanic to bring players back into the game every day: log back into the game, collect your lump sum payout, invest in a couple more houses and then switch off again.
GameSetWatch writer Chris Remo admits to leaving his console on through the night just so he can earn money at the faster rate, something I stopped just short of last night because, y’know, paying actual money in electricity bills just to earn fake money in a single player RPG is the definition of crazy.
The option to set rates on both your tenants and customers (price gouging by up to 100% over items’ basic value or underpricing in order to win purity points) adds some depth and consequence to what is supposedly only a sideshow to the game’s main gameplay attractions.
But for me the quest to buy up the world of Albion (purchase a high enough percentage of the land and you’ll actually be crowned King or Queen) is, for now, my primary objective. It’s testament to Lionhead’s abundance of ideas that real estate management is something of a minigame (the excellent Christian Donlan didn’t even get around to mentioning it in his Eurogamer review yesterday) when it’s a concept and execution that would likely have been promoted to core conceit in a lesser title.
Fable 2 or Fallout 3 though? Which way are you going?
When Mrs Chewing Pixels showed me this Japanese My Neighbour Totoro-themed book on ebay I presumed it was a craft-guide for building a doll’s house replica of the family home that features in the movie.
Not so.
Scroll down the ebay page and you can view various scans that reveal detailed architectural floor plans for how one might go about building the Kusakabe’s house IRL, onsen bath and all.
With beautiful double page spread photographs of the house it’s clear that someone, somewhere in Japan went ahead with the build, painstakingly creating fixtures and fittings to match those found in the seminal Studio Ghibli animation.
In fact, google reveals that the house was created for the 2005 Aichi Japan expo, where vistors were able to “freely explore the house, looking inside closets and chests and touching things, just like the heroines Satsuki and Mei did when they first arrived at the house”.
The text and, um, ‘instructions’ in the book are all in Japanese but the building looks sort of feasible.
If anyone’s feeling flush and has some disused land near a forest inhabited by a giant cuddly flying mammal god then I say go for it: you’ll almost certainly get featured on Grand Designs (although I don’t think the dust bunnies are included ).
One of the grandchildren is browsing my achievement points. It’s a record filled with tens of thousands of entries, an indelible, almost embarrassing testimony to a life spent in games.
She looks round. “Grandpa, what’s your favourite videogame of all time?”
It’s always been an awkward question but these days it’s near impossible to answer truthfully. She might as well have asked about my favourite meal. Who can possibly remember every plate of food they ever sat down to? You know that you ate most days and you know that you must have been nourished to some extent or other, but the details of what was on the menu, how it felt in the mouth, what it smelled and looked like are all lost to time.
After a while games lose their definition in memory too. You know that you played most days and that you must have been nourished to some extent or other, but the details… A few stand out, for sure, but most slip forgotten.
It’s been six weeks since I was told that I’m dying.
The problem with death, for the lifelong gamer, is its supreme familiarity. There aren’t hairs on my head to measure the virtual lives I’ve lost over a lifetime of play. So when you’re told you’ve three months at best, it’s easy to be flippant.
In my time I’ve fallen foul of countless mis-timed jumps, stray bullets, car crashes and drug deals gone wrong; I’ve flown fighter jets into solid ground at 300 miles per hour, fallen under the heavy tread of a London bus and watched incredulous as my space ship dissolved in the mute explosion of a sun. The blocks reached the top of the screen time after time.
Playing a videogame is to enter into a state of inescapable impending doom: they are the moments between leaping from the clifftop and hitting the rocks below. Games only become games when you’ve a Game Over screen to avoid. Lives, profoundly perhaps, only gain value when they can be lost.
In a way then, videogames are the ultimate preparation for life’s ultimate event: through them you’ve died a million times.
Yes. Death should be easy: it’s virtually all I’ve ever known.
Except no, of course. There’s no such thing as one life left in videogames. If you’ve got another quarter, you’ve got another chance. There’s always another go, another opportunity to perfect your technique and claw closer to the final prize. There’s always another chance.
Not so for this world, for this body, for these cells. Not so for this man.
I think I’m one of the first generation to have lived their whole life with videogames. From cradle to deathbed, my life breaks down into legion roles, ghost lives led in pixel dimensions. You could write ten thousand obituaries of my life and every one of them would be as true as it is distinct.
A crack sniper who served his country with skill and determination through the Second World War; six times winner of the Le Mans 24 hour; he scored the winning goal in no less than twenty World Cup finals. This giant yellow vegan was relentlessly chased through life by his ghosts. Simon was the finest plumber in all the Mushroom kingdom. A loving father.
But while the lines of identity between virtual and real world experiences have blurred, there’s only one obituary for me that could really be written: gamer till the end. I never served in Dresden; I can’t drive, or kick a football where I want it to go. I’ve never eaten a ghost and I couldn’t fix a dripping tap, let alone rescue a flirtatious princess.
No. I sat and precision twitched in front of screens. I moved light from A to B and back again and played make believe forever.
They say our actions in this life echo through eternity. But what of those actions outplayed in videogame lives? Or does the very fact we acted in virtual worlds and neglected this one echo through the years; save game files a history of mis-spent time, energy and resources. How did my virtual choices shape tomorrow’s reality? Did I simply deplete our resources all the faster, escapism that fueled Armageddon’s engines?
It’s something we rarely speak of: gamer’s guilt. The generations that came before us feared our hobby, its intrusion into our lives, the distraction it brought. Indeed, their damnations made us all experts in defending any and every accusation aimed at gaming.
Now those older generations are all dead their mistrust is gone with them. Everybody plays games and, with nobody left to justify our hobby to, the protestations we learned rote echo as loud as they do pointless.
Did I waste my time? It’s a question you can only truly ask when you’ve no time left to give, no time left to justify. Play is the first step to knowledge and development, for sure, but as you streak into adulthood haven’t all the lessons game mechanics could teach been learned a thousand times over?
Aren’t games, as we defended against time after time after time, simply a colossal waste of time, a leisure pursuit as meaningless as a stack of blank Sudoku? Aren’t they little more than a comfortable distraction of consciousness from the grim realities of this world, realities we would have been better off running toward, not from.
And if all videogames could ever aspire to was being big, dumb, blockbusting escapism, does that even matter? Hasn’t every generation that ever lived created make-believe worlds to climb into and take refuge?
I don’t know. I don’t know. I just wish we’d asked each other the questions a bit more fifty years ago.
Back to her question, the one being asked now. I look deep into young eyes, the eyes of a life with all of its cards left to deal.
‘Tetris,’ I murmer. ‘It was my first’.
[Simon Parkin does not, in fact, have any grandchildren and, while he rarely feels it, he’s still in his twenties. Just.]
It’s a warm and muggy Saturday night in Southern Spain, which is pretty much the only kind of Saturday night there ever is in Southern Spain.
Stomachs full of Tapas and red wine we stroll the streets, avoiding eye contact with other British holidaymakers (acknowledge each other and any continental authenticity to the scene is shattered).
Everybody’s out tonight so we get to admire the local octogenarians with their hunched shuffles, flaking cigars and twinkling eyes as well as the slicked-back hair twenty-somethings with their buzzing scooters and curvaceous, pillion-riding girlfriends.
A gaggle of teenage girls round the corner ahead of us. They’re decked out in full señorita dress, tight, hugging floral material giving way to a waterfall of skirt ruffles at the waistline. Red flowers in permed hair, they’re quintessentially Spanish, as if popped from the pages of a tourist guide, enjoying every lingering glance of attention they draw.
But they’re seventeen and something doesn’t quite sit right with the scene. After all, this is downtown Costa del Sol, not a remote farming village high in the mountain-tops. These girls are on their way to the discotheque, not an evening’s Flamenco in the cow shed, right?
“Um. Do you think they’re being ironic?,” I ask Mrs Chewing Pixels.
“Probably,” she answers. “Just like when the kids back home dress up like Beefeaters before a night out.”
(Btw: younger gamers mightn’t have heard of OMM. If that’s you go read this and then head on through the archives. This was eight years ago! Cripes.)
Oh, also I have an idea for something. Did anyone watch the vice presidential, um, “debate”? (if not head here and take a look in super-awesome Web two-point-oh-o-vision.)
The non-partisan site factcheck.org went through the entirety of event and has collated each candidate’s lies and half-truths into a useful article.
Useful except for the fact it’s kinda long and stuff. Does anyone fancy translating the piece into a neat set of graphs and statistics so we can see which of the two told the most lies, the biggest lies and the whitest lies?
If you have time it’d also be good to do some neat percentage statistics on how far the figures each candidate quoted were from the truth. I’ve searched around bit, as far as I can see, nobody’s bothered doing any stat-crunching from the debate yet. So, someone should do that! It’ll get a hundred thousand diggs for sure and probably swing a bunch of (lazy) votes one way or another.
Roguelikes are not games for children. The randomly-generated dungeon-crawler, first conceived when videogames were written in DOS, displayed in ASCII and measured in bytes, is one of gaming’s most cranky and unforgiving propositions. 
Few pregnancies have been as painful and protracted as Mother 3’s. The follow up to Super Nintendo classic Earthbound, a game that won a dedicated following for its cute and funny modern-world styling of the Japanese RPG, was first announced twelve years ago. 
Recently a friend mentioned that, when a novel grips him to the point that its world is the last thing he visits at night and the first thing he looks for in the morning, there needs to cooling off period when it’s finished.
My first purchase was the drinks stall on the middle of the Bowerstone town bridge. 
When Mrs Chewing Pixels showed me this Japanese 
). 
One of the grandchildren is browsing my achievement points. It’s a record filled with tens of thousands of entries, an indelible, almost embarrassing testimony to a life spent in games.
It’s a warm and muggy Saturday night in Southern Spain, which is pretty much the only kind of Saturday night there ever is in Southern Spain. 
Chewing Pixels is closed for a week as we go hunt the sun. 
