marginalgloss

Looking forward to this podcast, though I don’t think I’ll have time to catch up with all those books and movies. I’m quite familiar with all the movies post-Azkaban, so perhaps I’ll re-read one or two of the later books in the middle of the series. I wouldn’t call myself a fan, but I’ve read and enjoyed them all, and I’ve never been the kind of reader to scorn their popularity. I think I first read the first two books together around 1999 or 2000, after the second one was released, so I would have been about 14 or 15. There was a sense that they were a cut above what we were used in terms of fiction aimed at kids, especially as ‘Young Adult’ fiction wasn’t nearly as well-established then as it is now. My youngest sister was the first to discover them, and they eventually became a regular presence in our house to the extent that one or two of them would always be taken around on family holidays and passed around for everyone to enjoy. At some point we owned hardback first editions of pretty much all of them, not to be collected but just because they were bought at the time. It’s depressing to think how much they would be worth if they were pristine and not so dog-eared and dropped in the bath or chewed up by the dog. I also played quite a lot of one of the early Harry Potter video games on the PC. I remember it being pretty bad, but it was a nice bonding opportunity for littlest sister (who could not play games but who loved Harry Potter) and me (who played too many games).

…reader, I bought the game. I’m having a lot of fun! It’s excellent, but you didn’t need me to tell you that. Given that I’m drawn to medics and support classes (and I’m a bit rusty at multiplayer shooters) I’ve been having a great time romping around with Lucio and Mercy. But since I figured out how to play as Zenyatta — staying at the back of the engagement and picking out friends/foes with orbs, while snatching the occasional kill with his (surprisingly potent) attacks — I think he might be my favourite character to so far. Symmetra, though, is totally confounding to me. Overwatch really has got that thing where I end up thinking about it endlessly while I should be doing other stuff. My next goal is to get good at another tank or offensive hero; I’ve played around a bit with Zarya, but her weapon is rather tricky to use. I didn't realise that you're supposed to use her shields to charge it up until I started reading up on the game online. I’m thinking perhaps I'll try…Winston? Or the porcine juice-quaffer? Or the nice robot lady - though everyone seems to want to be her, but nobody seems to know how. I saw a D.Va player firing endlessly across the map at long range last night. It was very strange. Mei is fun, too. There’s an article to be written there on how playing her is like living with social anxiety: just throw up a wall between you and your problems; turn into a glacier if anyone tries to talk to you, etc. Such a charming game.

This is probably the first game in years where I've been tempted to drop the full RRP of £55 on the PS4 digital edition - and I never spend that much on a single game. But this just looks so nice. On one hand, I had a really good time with the beta, and I don't doubt that I'd get that much value out of the game; but on the other, I just can't quell the squeamish feeling I get when spending over £30 or £40 on a digital product. And I've seen the disc for that price, but clearly this is a game I'll want to keep on my HDD for a while. It's interesting to me that I've seen very few reviews mention how few maps and modes there are for a full-price release. Without wishing to get into the whole 'price of content' debate, it feels like those complaints were a lot more prominent with the likes of Titanfall, Splatoon and Destiny. Perhaps Blizzard have done a better job of communicating expectations in terms of what this game is going to be in advance of release -- or maybe Overwatch just offers a lot more variety within what initially seems like a more limited framework?

I finished this on the way to work this morning. I suspect this one is going to prove divisive! It’s not quite my first experience with Helen Oyeyemi — I read her book ‘White is for Witching’ years ago, probably not long after its release in 2009. I was attracted by the promise of a decent modern ghost story, but I think it left me somewhat disappointed; the writing wasn’t without interest, and it was certainly imaginative, but it seemed to be lacking any firm hooks on which to hang its narrative* insight. I couldn’t write the vaguest summary now of what it was about. I think 'Mr Fox' is more successful, but it has some of the same problems. I felt lukewarm about this book while reading it at first, then I felt better as it went on; by the end I felt it had lost most of its momentum; but writing about it now, I’m starting to like it again. Flicking back through it again as I write this, I think it would certainly benefit from re-reading. * - ‘I find it disappointing that you so transparently view your every interaction as a narrative. It is cliche, if you’ll forgive me saying so.’

Nick's experiences with the HTC Vive made me wonder how developers are going to solve the lingering problem of 'what happens if I put my head through this thing?' Like: if I'm in an empty actual room with a virtual table in the middle of it, what happens if I kneel down and put my head where the table should be? Or even in a VR adaptation of an existing driving game, or FPS; what happens if I want to put my head through the dashboard, or through a solid door? Does the player's vision just start clipping madly through the world, or what? I can't seem to picture a graceful way to handle this... Also, it might be just me but the horrifying doppelganger/babywalling story seemed extremely reminiscent of the house endlessly on fire in Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York.

I remember Gunman Chronicles! I played it at the time, and I might even still have a physical copy at home. I think it was most notable for having some very cool customisable weapons. Like there was a gun where you could mix coloured chemicals in different quantities to achieve different levels of sticky/bouncy/explosive results. Lots of alt-fire modes and stuff like that. FPS games don't often do this kind of thing anymore, but at the time it seemed incredibly ambitious, especially for what was effectively a very polished Half Life mod. It's probably the first example I can think of of a mod gaining the support of a publisher and receiving a stand-alone release? Valve were, I think, still under the wing of Sierra at the time, but it's cool to see that they've continued this tradition with stuff like Half Life: Source and Alien Swarm - and, of course, Counterstrike...

Not sure if you’ve made it past the Gaping Dragon yet, but I have a good general tip for fighting him that has always served me well as a general rule for many big bad things in the Souls games: Don’t use the lock on. Sprint around the back of the thing and attack its back/haunches/tail. It’ll try to keep turning to face you, but as long as you aren’t locked on (i.e. you aren't strafing/side-rolling) it will make it a lot harder for its attacks to track you. A swiping weapon will help your attacks connect if you keep missing. Of course, when he does any of his AoE stuff, or when he flies up in the air and tries to crush you, just run like hell. The above actually works remarkably well as a general rule for many bosses and large enemies in the Souls games. For some reason, four-legged (and tall two-legged) creatures in these worlds are a lot less trouble if you get as close as possible and try to get ‘under’ their attacks. The key thing is that you won't be harmed by actually touching the monster if they aren't attacking.

So I've just started playing Xenoblade Chronicles -- the Wii original via eshop download, not the latest game -- on the Wii U. And it's very good, but there's this one (weird) issue that's bugging me with the gamepad controls: When I push the left analog stick all the way forward, my character starts running in the wrong direction, i.e. towards the camera, opposite to how it should be. I can't see any reason for this, and it hasn't done this with any other game so far. I can't tell if it's a system thing or if it's a problem specific to the game. So far I'm getting through it by just not pushing the left stick all the way to the end of its travel, which still seems to let me run at full speed forward, but it's really quite annoying. Has anyone else encountered anything like this?

I finished Until Dawn with my girlfriend, playing together in time-honoured 'pass the pad' fashion. We had a great time with it! It's very much a modern 3D adventure in the vein of David Cage's games or the recent Telltale productions, so if you like that kind of thing and you have a PS4, I'd highly recommend it. Probably the best thing I can say about it is that my gf (who normally hates violent horror movies and jump scares) ended up being totally enthralled, to the extent that she kept asking me if we could go back to it even while she was often too nervous to take the controls herself. The writing is exactly where you want it to be for this kind of genre piece, and the characters are just the right side of annoying. It really does throw jump scares at you like rice at a wedding early on, but they're the kind of thing you can easily chuckle about afterwards. It's horror as fun teen party time rather than the brooding existential dread I usually prefer, but that's fine with me. It's also a very good looking game on PS4, though there's very little about it which is genuinely dependent on that graphical fidelity; it could have been a great lost FMV game from the nineties, or a 2D side-scroller, or a fast-paced text adventure. But my goodness, Peter Stormare's face really is quite uncanny. It does cleave very closely, and deliberately, to the idea of imitating cinema. I've read some critics describing it as casting the player as the director of a movie, rather than as an actor within it, and I think that's quite accurate. The interactive elements are sparse; often you are given the chance to wander freely around small, restricted environments, but there are no puzzles to be solved, and there's not much to *do* other than inspect clues, make A/B choices through conversations, and pass or fail a great many QTE sequences. Like Life is Strange, the game leans heavily on the whole 'butterfly effect' thing, but here the actual outcome of your decisions is often unclear until long after the fact. Some might find this frustrating but I thought it was often quite cleverly implemented. There's one or two odd systems to help you make decisions: collectibles sometimes give you a glimpse of what might happen if you do a particular thing, for example, and each character even has a set of stat bars showing how they feel about every other character. The fact that both of these are divorced from any context is what makes them intriguing, and there was at least one time where I totally misinterpreted what those future glimpses were telling me, and the result was disastrous (and very funny). The only real bum note is that about three quarters of the way through, the plot takes a couple of sharp and predictable turns; this changes the pace, but it also somewhat spoils the tension. It's a little like the problem that was talked about on Idle Weekend a few weeks ago where once you know something about the antagonist in a horror game, it starts to seem a lot less scary. Still, despite a few tedious and over-long sequences in the final chapters, I think we both really enjoyed our time with this. I'm even considering a replay - if only to correct that one disastrous error I made in the final moments...

Here is a Hot Tip for DS3 players that someone mentioned on twitter, and which I would never have noticed otherwise: go into the Settings menu and switch the HUD setting to 'Auto'. It's a new feature which automatically fades out all the HUD elements when nothing's going on. It all comes back when you hold L1 to raise your shield, then it drops away again. I think it looks and works really well, at least for casual mooching through the world.

I've had this since Saturday on PS4, due to the happy vagaries of pre-order dispatch dates in the UK. It's very good. It's quite hard. It's Dark Souls! I haven't much more to add beyond that yet. I'm only a little way past the second boss. I had this exact problem yesterday - got summoned along with one other person into a world where we trounced everything, including a couple of invaders, only to be suddenly disconnected a few moments after the host traversed the fog door. Looks like it might be a consistent problem. I've picked up a few decent Strength-scaling weapons dropped from some of the enemies in the starting areas, so you could farm them if you felt like it. It feels like enemy drops in this game are slightly more attuned to what they are actually carrying, perhaps more so than in the previous game. In fact I feel like I've been getting loads of good drops, even though my Luck is only at 8. No doubt that'll change later on. A tiny not-really-a-spoiler hint on the same subject:

I've been fooling around Miitomo for the last week, and for the most part I'm quite impressed. In general I have very little interest in mobile games; even the best ones with no IAPs struggle to hold my attention simply because whenever I'm in a situation where I might use them I usually find myself reading a book or playing 3DS or reading something on my phone instead. But in many ways this is less like a conventional mobile game and more like a new kind of asymmetrical social media toy. It feels like they want it to be about casual, performative communication between friends/acquaintances without feelings of obligation or awkwardness. There's a gentle incentive to be funny or clever in your answers to the questions, but there are no wrong answers, and you can take it all as seriously as you want. I've realised that one mechanic it borrows from Nintendo's current stable is the idea of chatting with villagers in Animal Crossing, except that here the comments and letters are things other people have actually written, with a pleasant layer of goofy animation and some (very impressive) text to speech functionality. And the key to enjoying it, I think, is exactly the same as with Animal Crossing: as soon as you feel like you ought to be playing it instead of wanting to play it, put it down and do something else. The Miifoto functionality is probably the best part, and I'm surprised they've allowed such a massive range of animations and poses to be used free of charge - they could easily have charged coins to unlock that stuff. I like that I haven't once been asked for money, though the option is certainly there, and if you wanted to buy new clothing every day you would almost certainly have to spend something. I'd like to see more game-like features beyond Miitomo Drop, which is currently a rather depressing hit-and-miss pachinko affair. I suspect they will want to use it as a sort of mobile platform for pushing other games, but at the moment it's nice that I can quietly accumulate loyalty points just by signing in that have some worth in terms of eshop digital discounts. Adding people is a little strange at the moment. You can't just search for users or add someone by their NNID name. If you connect it to your twitter or facebook, I think you have to be mutual followers before they'll show up in your suggested friends list. And if you want to add a friend face-to-face, the process is really strange: you have to play a little mini-game which involves simultaneously selecting one of four symbols as they appear on screen. You don't actually enter any names because when you hit the symbol, both phones simultaneously phone home to Nintendo and compare their location data to find one another by GPS coordinates. (I know this because it failed the first time when one of our phones didn't have those permissions enabled.) What a weird thing! Lastly, it's astonishing to see that this is Nintendo-produced software with no blocks on obscene language – a first? I've already seen some astonishingly rude and NSFW things with the #Miifoto tag on twitter, so it'll be interesting to see if they choose to wield the banhammer on that stuff.

Just wanted to echo SignorSuperdouche's point about Affordable Space Adventures - it's a really impressive little game that could only exist in its current form on the Wii U. I would also make a case for Pikmin 3 being one of the most underrated games of recent years. Everything about it is just delightful. There's all kinds of reasons why that console hasn't done as well as anyone could have hoped. Much as people on the internet might complain about it, I suspect the lower-than-expected hardware specs were mostly irrelevant. I'm sure they might have made it harder for some devs to get software on the platform, but if the audience had been there from early on, it could still have been worth the the time taken to optimise in order to reach that player base. I guess the main problem is that Nintendo have done a really poor job of explaining to the world what the Wii U does, and who it is for. In general, brand awareness of the Wii and DS families still seems to be strong, but I feel like a lot of people just didn't realise that the Wii U was a totally new console which offered new and unique experiences. That original idea of having a discrete, moderately-priced box in your living room that plays Nintendo games from every era, either for the whole family or for one person tucked up in a chair with a gamepad - isn't that a wonderful dream? There are so many current games that'd be enlivened by the control options the console offers. It's sad that we'll probably never see games like Sunless Sea or X-Com 2 on the gamepad with touch controls, or Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, or that weird Keita Takahashi game with the controller with 16 buttons. All of those would be perfect for Wii U! But on the other hand, those extra possibilities offered by the tension between the gamepad and the TV create their own problems: if you want to dedicate yourself to mechanics based around that (like ZombiU or Splatoon or Affordable Space Adventures) you effectively rule out one of the other core features of the console, which is playing solely on the gamepad. It's a tricky thing.

Oh god, I can’t stand mice. There’s something about the sense of unstoppable incursion they engender which fills me with anxiety. I had a problem in my kitchen a month or so ago and getting rid of them required stopping up all the possible entry points with steel wool, the liberal deployment of those old fashioned snap traps, and finally the loan of my mother’s cat for a few weeks. But they’re gone now! I think! I hope! (Of course my kitchen is still full of loaded mouse traps.) Anyway, I bought a copy of that Jesper Juul book. I’d actually been looking for a copy of it for a while, since I read somewhere that somebody else said it was exceptionally good, but I thought it was out of print. I shall now wait patiently for six to twelve weeks for the cheapest possible international shipping option to arrive. I don’t think I ever expected to hear an explanation of the Chuckle Brothers on this podcast but I’m really glad I did.

I watched the first three or four episodes of the DF documentary after they started posting them on YouTube. I’m glad the backers felt it was a worthwhile project – I thought it was really interesting and well produced, though I don’t think I’ll ever get the time to finish it. The fact that you sort of need the context it provides to understand Broken Age made me think of certain postmodern novels where the reader needs to delve into the footnotes or an accompanying commentary in order to get the most out of the work itself. I’ve nothing against that approach – I mean, Pale Fire is one of my favourite novels of all time – but I can see why some people wouldn’t be into it if you believe a work of art should stand or fail entirely alone on its own merits. Maybe the logical end point of this would be to create a 'critical edition' of Broken Age which somehow integrates clips of the documentary seamlessly into the game itself, so the player can call them up at appropriate moments – a bit like an interactive footnote. Something like that would certainly help for posterity. Imagine explaining to a young person in twenty years’ time that in order to understand this old video game, they should first watch twenty episodes of a documentary and perhaps play one or two ancient Lucasarts games on the side. They might think you’re crazy – or alternatively, by then they’ll be so used to everything being a meta-thing derived from every other thing that they’ll understand all these connections even before the words have left your mouth. Anyway, I can’t wait to get fired back into Day of the Tentacle. It’s a game which left such a strong impression on me as a youngster, and I’m curious to see how much of it I can remember. Something about fake barf, a hamster, a bottle of wine and a cherry tree...?

My girlfriend and I finished Broken Age last night. We played it couch co-op style on PS4, swapping the controller back and forth. It was mostly a lovely and enjoyable thing. On paper, it’s hard to fault: the art is beautiful, it’s funny, the voice acting and music are great. I would even say it’s one of the best-looking 2D games I’ve seen on the PS4, and it runs flawlessly on that platform. But oh my gosh, the second act felt like such a slog compared to the first. I know this is old news now, but those puzzles are something else. To be fair, some of them I really enjoyed. Untying the knot, guiding the service robot, and even fixing the wiring the first time — all of that stuff was quite fun and satisfying in isolation. But getting to the point where I understood how I should even get started was constantly infuriating. And there was very rarely any significant reward for completing a puzzle: the whole second act is founded on both characters getting the story moving again, and by the time they do, it’s pretty much over. There’s nothing which builds upon the themes of the first act, which were so memorably and wittily expressed. And I know, I know — the puzzles are supposed to be hard and obscure because that’s what point and click games in the 90s were like. I know! I love(d) those games too! But isn’t it bizarre that I should have to come to Broken Age with this outside knowledge in order to appreciate what it’s trying to do? It’s almost as though the meta-experience of what it is, who made it and how it got made has to be taken alongside the game itself to get a complete picture of it. All of which is kind of a fascinating idea even if I don’t feel in my heart of hearts that it is actually a good thing. Anyway now I have to convince my gf that we need to play the remastered Day of the Tentacle next. Or perhaps we'll play something less stressful...I've still got Until Dawn waiting around somewhere...

After a slow start, I generally enjoyed this, though I agree with Greg’s point that it was sometimes insipid. I'm not sure whether the author’s MFA experience was specifically to blame; often books like this feel to me less like writing by committee and more like the product of what is generally felt to be a style appropriate to ‘adult contemporary’ literary fiction. And who knows whether that's taught or unconsciously absorbed by aspiring authors or a combination of all that and more. To me it’s a book which feels compromised by the expectations of a potential audience. There’s all kinds of interesting themes going on here, but the book seems reluctant to really engage with them. It’s like it wants to have racism and feminism in the mix, but it doesn’t want to be seen to be ‘about’ those things, so the form and style are given over to something accessible to a general audience. And so it becomes a kind of mystery novel when actually there is nothing especially mysterious about it. Certainly the characters don’t develop much. The cast is small, and in each case you could sum them up their role in the book in a single sentence. Still, I don’t think that kind of limited scope is a bad thing in itself: the thing I liked best about the book is its narrow, intense focus on a particular story in the life of one family. And it does get a lot of good stuff out of those characters, even though they tend towards the trope-like. There’s one particular scene, early on, which I couldn’t stop thinking about when I first read it. It’s when we learn that Lydia used to pretend to be on the phone in order to carry across the idea that she had friends at school. At first I thought this was a totally implausible kind of charade, but the more I dwelt on it, the more I realised that this was exactly the kind of thing I used to do when I was younger. I wonder if anyone else has any examples of things they’ve done to maintain a similar pretence? For example: I never had to pretend I was sociable (thankfully I have never been burdened with that expectation) but when I was at school, I would often only finish the first page of my homework because I knew that some teachers wouldn’t check beyond that. Also I have texted goodnight to so many people over the years in the knowledge that I would not actually be going to bed but would be staying up very late playing video games. About the ending:

Allow me to be the inevitable jerk who butts in to the conversation to add '...but they already made a 2D Dark Souls, and it was called Symphony of the Night!' I watched a bit of footage of this and, as a fan of those From Software games, I'm certainly intrigued. But to call it a 'loving homage' would be generous. They even went as far as to replicate the little screen rumble you get when you do the fat roll. You've got to admire the gumption if nothing else. I'm really interested to see what people make of this. I've got some pretty mixed feelings about the art style. I like that it has a certain ramshackle papercraft punk DIY album art aesthetic, but I'm not sure it entirely fits with the feel of the games it's clearly trying to imitate. It's a bit like going to see a tribute band and they end up playing the radio edit of your favourite song rather than the album version and it leaves you wondering whether they really understood what was great about it in the first place. I'll probably play it at some point, but at the moment I've still got the Bloodborne DLC to play, and I really want to play to Scholar of the First Sin at some point. But if they get the Vita version running nicely, that might totally destroy me. A portable Souls-em-up would be perfect for my commute.

I enjoy the Bombcast and Beastcast, and though I rarely have the time to watch many of the Giant Bomb quicklooks, I just wanted to say I thought the Stardew Valley one was great fun. Dan's relentless enthusiasm was quite charming, and it's that rare case of a video which changed my opinion of the game from 'oh, it's one of those?' to 'no I think I really need to play this now'. Especially good was the part at the end where I'm glad nobody was around to see me laughing. I'm crossing all available extremities for a Wii U, Vita, or 3DS version at some point. Even if it came out on New 3DS only, I'd be extremely tempted to upgrade just for that.

I'm still pressing on with this, though I'm really starting to wish they had separated out 'minimal UI' and 'having low health and doing high damage' as difficulty concepts. As it is, Ranger mode combines them both, and even on what the game calls Ranger Normal, it's possible to die incredibly quickly to just about anything. And because the variety of the encounters is sometimes very limited, I'm not convinced that the game is built to support the high level of 'realistic' damage that this difficulty suggests. The main effect is to make me feel incredibly fragile and vulnerable at all times, which is sometimes nice in a Far Cry 2 sort of way. It's quite satisfying to sneak around human encampments, popping off human soldiers with my pneumatic rifle and then absolutely bricking it when I get seen; but the combat against the monsters just feels like a horrible slog that I can only survive by standing in a certain place and praying that my companion gets between me and their spawn point. Which, to be fair, is probably how that would feel in real life.

Jake's point about the relationship between Myst and text-based adventure games got me wondering if any of the Thumbs ever played Return to Zork because it's a perfect example of exactly this thing. Released in 1993 (a little before Myst!) it was the first in that series to go from being a text game to using pre-rendered 3D graphics, FMV, and CD-quality sound, and to underline the importance of this generational leap, - 'You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.' - before seguing nicely into an animation of exactly that landscape. As well as the simple compass-based navigation, the game also had some other mechanics in common with the earlier Zork text games. There was an array of verbs you could use, a bit like in the LucasArts point and click games, and some of the puzzles had multiple solutions. There was a camera and tape recorder for making in-game recordings. You could use pretty much any item on anything else, and sometimes something interesting or amusing (or really bad) would happen. You could get a knife and kill any character in the game, and sometimes this would make it impossible to continue. And you could die in all kinds of stupid ways and each time you'd be presented with a unique (and somewhat disturbing) game over image. I'm not sure it was a great game, but it certainly left an impression on me. Probably I was a little too young to be playing it because at times it left me quite terrified. The world they created was a light-hearted fantasy, but it also had a strong character of weirdness and forboding about it. In retrospect, it certainly feels like Twin Peaks was a big influence on both the characters and the ambience of the thing. But in spite of the dodgy FMV acting and the grainy graphics, there was something totally captivating about its aesthetic and its ambition. And I still regret giving away my old 'big box' CD-ROM copy because it came with some amazing feelies, including a bound copy of the Encyclopedia Frobozzica. I used to take it to school with me because I was extremely cool. (Also, oh my god, this 'Quit game?' screen.)

Since I just started playing the redux edition of Metro 2033 I thought I'd post about it here, as it doesn't seem to have a thread of its own. (Hope that's ok!) So because I had heard that Ranger Mode was the most immersive and 'proper' way to play this game, I've chosen that for my first playthrough. Basically this turns off all the health, ammo and objective UI, and leaves you with only the in-world situational indicators to figure out how you're doing: so you look at the light indicator on your watch, the needle on your compass, the objective on your clipboard; you see the fog on your mask, you hear the sound of your breathing, you count the rounds left in your transparent magazine. It's all intensely detailed and really cool. Turns out that Ranger Mode is more difficult than I had anticipated, but not for the reasons you'd think. The game actually strips out ALL the user interface icons and ALL tutorial and mission prompts, not just hints and your ammo indicator. On a basic level, not only is there no 'loot glint', there's no button prompt at all when you're looking at an object that can be picked up or interacted with - so I've just been nosing through every corner and mashing the square button at everything that looks like it might not be nailed down in the hope of getting ammo and medkits. And I don't know what any of that stuff actually looks like. There's also a bunch of essential actions that you really need to know about that Ranger mode won't tell you about! You've got to change the filter on your gas masks, pump up your pneumatic guns, recharge the little battery that powers your flashlight - and I wouldn't have known how to do any of this if I hadn't looked it up on the internet. I don't mean to suggest the experience was bad; it's actually kind of fascinating. It feels much like when I tried to play something like System Shock as a kid without any kind of manual or reference to explain the arcane interface to me. It's really made me think about how much information modern video games cram into UI and tutorial pop-ups, and how we never expect to research how to play a game before we jump into it. And a lot of that stuff is awful clutter but a lot of it is good and useful and, on balance, probably not worth giving up. I really don't feel that losing the button prompt to pick up stuff helps with the immersion much. But on the other hand - in a side tunnel, early on in the game, I found a cool new gun. And there was nothing at all to tell me what it was or how to use it or how much damage it would do until I found something to shoot. And it was wonderful.

That first mission in the original Mafia must surely be one of the hardest first missions in any game ever. In fact, the game as a whole was unbelievably hard, even back then. It wasn’t just that there was no quicksave or regenerating health, or that the guns were extremely deadly, or that your AI companions would always get themselves killed; it was also that the cars were modelled to be accurate to period vehicles, and almost the first thing you had to do in the game is escape rival mobsters while driving a taxi that handles like a barge. I’m sure a lot of players never even got past that opening sequence. Still, I think I must have played that game to completion at least two or three times back in the day. They really did have some insanely ambitious set piece mission design for an open world game. Even now the sound of Django Reinhardt sends me into a daydream about it… Which brings me back to Rob’s point about those moments of grand coherence in games, which are probably my softest spot too. As with his example from GTA IV, it’s something that occurs as a seamless confluence of music and visuals and plot and systems – everything that makes video games a unique medium. My most recent example of this is one particular moment in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture where -- well, it sounds like nothing much when I write it like this, but -- you go into a new area . If you've played it, you might know what I'm talking about. There was something about the sudden juxtaposition of sound and movement and music and light and setting that just completely destroyed me, and I had to put the controller down until the song was over because I couldn't see what I was doing any more. I am not sure I 'learned' anything from that experience except that video games are sometimes very good.

I do like a bit of history in games, even when it only serves as a wrapper for the usual goofy nonsense. Speaking of Assassin's Creed, I recently finished my first game in that series (Black Flag), and even though from a historian’s point of view that game is probably total garbage, the attention to recreating period detail lends that game a great deal of character that it wouldn't otherwise have. I wonder if it’s possible to think of examples where a good game has been made worse by excessive attention to historical authenticity. I can’t think of any right now. I think it’s always nice to see that work in there, even if the results aren’t obvious. I really like the efforts made to recreate the city in L.A. Noire, for example, even though the game never really asks you to engage with the historical setting and it’s something many players will never notice or think too much about. (Not like this gentleman, anyway.) It’s sad to think that I can’t see Rockstar making such a lavishly detailed period setting again. Also, Doug Dug sounds really good and I think I’m going to play it. If anyone is interested in other side-scrolling games about digging, I’d recommend Steamworld Dig – it has that same thing of accumulating loot and upgrades through near-endless downwards mining, but it also has some nice light puzzling and a Super Metroid-ish vibe to the exploration. There's even a bit of environmental storytelling, too. It’s not on iOS or Android, but it is on pretty much every other platform now.

I guess the lack of cross-buy for SNES games on New 3DS is disappointing, but it's also entirely consistent with their Virtual Console policy on NES games for Wii U and 3DS. You can't buy Super Mario Bros 3 or Balloon Fight on both devices for one price, for example, so it would be weird for them to allow that for a handful of SNES games but not for every other cross-platform VC game. It feels to me more like they're just playing out the consequences of a business decision that was made a long time ago. Still, I do hope the NX and their new account system will signal a change in direction in this area...