I am wary of indie games, as a rule. Well, I speak as if I have rules about videogames; I am dimly wary of games with low production values in our age. Of course, the current font of burbling freeware that is imaginative, witty and, most importantly, low-cost is something we should celebrate as a truly democratic process; the power is back in the hands of the people, and, surprisingly, there are lots of people that aren't creative plugholes.
However, as with any relatively new art-form, videogames seem to be going through a vacuous renaissance of abstraction; books and art had Dadaism, films had that Hungarian bloke who liked plasticine, and now we have a slew of indie videogames that posit that art is meaningless, and therefore that their art, their games, have no meaning, or objective, either.
This works somewhat more successfully for other mediums. Books and films are, by definition, not interactive; apart from maybe the books where you choose your story, and you hurriedly check behind you every five minutes to make sure that no-one saw you trace your steps back from page 38 when you were eaten by the demon chimichanga. They require witness, thought, opinion; they interact with you in your opinions. Videogames require some sort of interface; call me old-fashioned, as this certainly seems to be a view that is taking a beating currently. It is your control, in a world with set boundaries, that creates a videogames existence space. But a lot of indie games take the platforming, 2D spectre, or the mouse's hurried, all-clicking stratagems, and tack something that is beautiful, but stupid, onto it.



This is not always a bad thing; the above example, The Endless Forest, is a free-to-play, small-download wanderer, with no discernable objectives other than to graze and discover mysterious ruins, it's beauty, thoughfulness and creativity make it worthwhile. It is when these games are charged for that we find it a little off-putting.

Even though it does not fall into the above category, Bookworm Adventures, the full game, comes with a pretty hefty price tag, at £15. It is not an overly pretty thing, and the main game mechanic is so close to Scrabble as to be indiscernable. The RPG stylings are remarkably superfluous to the pure objectives of the game; you spell words to kill things. Bigger words make more hurty ow ow. But, there is a free-play version, and I am enjoying it immensely.

I first learnt of it from Penny Arcade, and I like to think I share the main character's verbosity and verbophilia; in fact, maybe it's just 'v' words. But I am English, I do an English degree and perhaps I feel a fatherly duty, a nascent alpha-male protective urge, towards my language, dismaying and biting my nails as I see it beaten, smeared in defecate, and forgotten every day on our fair Internet. I like long words. I studied Latin until I was sixteen. Laugh if you want. Language got roots, yo. And I know all about them. Or, I like to think so.

Bookworm Adventures succeeds in making you feel extremely stupid. You are given a set of tiles, which change with every enemy. Enemies have the ability to destroy some of your tiles, destroying your spectrum of high-scoring conjunctions. I imagine the game should be played like any other; find the high-scoring letters, link them into the longest, most damaging word possible, and move on to the next mythological bad-ass. I can't play it like this. I can't play to win. I play for satisfaction. I want to see a forgotten Hellenism, a relevant yet succinct and beautiful adjective that only describes one aspect of one species of bat in one cave in Lombardy, smack the opposition down like a librarian jackhammer. I want them to see my private education in their broken teeth. But I am at a loss. It seems I don't know many good words.



I just freeze up. The first few enemies, though weak, took me a lot longer to kill than it should have. I kept coming up with clever words, only to be missing one or two letters. It was as if the game saw my pretention, and decided to have a leisurely piss on it. "Fecundity" became "fcndity", I struggled to remember a good word with both an 'x' and a 'qu' in it, and I even resorted to "us" once.

However, as my confidence improved, so did my letter count. I upgraded to "tailor", "croupier", "quean" (a type of whore) and "fane". I took a cyclops out in two hits with a zesty combination of "zygote", followed by the suckerpunch of "aqua". See, the Latin was useful!

Then there was this boar. And the board hated me. I had very little health left, it was late at night, and the porcine cumbag was goring me more times than a Pamplona pinata. I needed a long word, one that combined the "Silver Letter" rating of 's' and 'm', with some of the vowels that were cluttering my board.

I tried every combination, but one kept reoccurring; an archaic but extremely offensive racial slur, one that I had only ever heard my grandfather use in common parlance, but that I was ashamed to even think of. My white man's guilt stepped up, and I continued to search. But, like an inevitable Damoclean n-word joke, I entered the word, and killed the boar. My race's shame had helped me get one step closer to the kidnapped princess. I had killed my enemy with ignorance.

I rarely sell my games. Console games I can part with more easily. My lack of attachment is loosely related to sitting further away from the screen, and not spending my free time modding them, talking about them or slowly licking them like the remnants of tiramisu.
PC games, though, I hold onto. Even the bad ones; perhaps its a vaguely collectivist desire to stand for all wanna-be culture gamers who think that a library of games is the same as a library of books, DVDs, or stuffed chaffinch.



I have been very poor recently, the combination of massive food bills caused by comfort eating during exam period, as well as game purchases to alleviate my boredom, and so have turned to my stacks for quick Ebay relief. I really do own some stinkers. Mercenaries 2, some shitty Tomb Raiders (the middle ones, as I believe they are known) as well as a few flight simulators, FPSes and JRPGs that I bought with that enthusiasm, that bounce that is only found in a gamer lolloping home with a new game, only to play for a few hours before that horrific sinking feeling kicks in, the one that feels like a turd that you should have ejected before taking a long haul flight creeps up your duodendum.

And it wasn't because of ignorance. I considered myself a balanced consumer. I don't tend to rush out and make purchases willy-nilly, based on nothing more than how much I fancy the main character or how many guns inexplicably sprout out of the final boss' forehead. I read around. Though many people hate Metacritic for its dilution of product into easy reviews, I find the professional reviews very useful. I try and know something about what I am paying my wages/bank loan for. But sometimes, sometimes there is a product that you can't resist. You have read about it for months, the excitement is palpable in your mouth, fifteen seperate publications are screaming its praises, saying how great it will be. You buy it, and it sucks. It totally sucks. And then a month later, as the review/publication dates catch up, the publications tell you how crap it is, with no mention of their earlier praise, or perhaps only a faint, huffy admission of being disappointed. Well, the money is spent, now. But that isn't the real problem. The problem is being promised so much, and having all that being nothing more than fairy gold.



Of course, much of this blame falls at the door of the developers. Promising features that are never implemented, playing up mechanics that are repetitive or boring on play. The above screenshot illustrates a recent example, Too Human. The gaming press lauded it as the reinvention of the RPG on the 360, a deep and original franchise. I was enthusiastic, even though it sounded like a fucking ridiculous premise. And the reviews came, everyone was disappointed, all the things promised didn't work as planned, but that didn't stop lots of people buying it first, on the recommendation of the press.

It's stupid to call people sheep; with such a massive daily influx of purchasable leisure products, some form of organisation is necessary to stop us making ridiculous decisions. Listening to gaming mags isn't pointless, or cliched, in itself; these guys tend to know what they are talking about. But I feel like, sometimes, a few months before a game is released, their visits to game developers to demo the game must go one of two ways;

1) The game developers live in some corporate Castle Greyskull, gigantic dread-guards ready to eviscerate anyone who speaks ill of 'The Product'.
2) They are all tired, worked to the bone, nearly crying and shitting themselves with hope and love for their bastard, retarded 'darling', that is displayed, braying like a goat, to the increasingly awkward reporters.

Come on, guys. Every so often, you will point out flaws in the development, but mostly there is only praise for unreleased games. We do not live in a world where you have to be nice to everyone. Don't be dicks, obviously, but point out shortcomings, show flaws, and celebrate pros to create a balanced whole. You can't be so short-sighted that a incredibly positive preview a month before release can turn into a damning review, the tone of which is usually, entirely undeservedly, "we could have told you so."

Of course a damning preview can be damaging to a game that has a few flaws but is essentially going to work well. But this is not what I am advocating. I am advocating balanced previews, that do not worry about hurting people's feelings or pre-empting failure, to present mature viewpoints that don't just consist of "we are very excited." We can see how pretty it is. We are excited too. But disappointment is rife within the industry, and it is something we need to accept, and not assume (and tell everyone) that every new game is going to be great. It probably isn't. Very few are. Start acting like it. Of course, the media operates a certain way. But, hey, this a blog, I can pretend my view will change the world, can't I? Can't I?

The hero (heroine too; I'm modern) walks: there's a distant dripping, a ghost-squeal of car tires. Their torch, or lantern, or genetically modified enzyme glow, lances out into the mote-filled blackness. There is no sound. There is only the water, or shit, or alien blood at their feet, rumours of broiling sky above, and the rusting, silent totality in front of them.


Do you know how hard it is to find screenshots of empty rooms in videogames?

Games developers must live pleasantly. Suburban homes, maybe a spot of TivO after dinner, Buffy on re-runs, meat-loaf in the fridge. A seperate little room where Daddy can play with his expensive plastic toys and draw concept art of the most depressing, dust-blown corners of humanity's habitance. Is this why they do it? Are their lives so wonderful, so full of pleasantness, that they have to detach sometimes, maybe in bed with their lovely, non-judgmental wives asleep beside them, and drift off to where the common currency is not kindness, but a nailboard in the septum, and your only friend is the condom you are wearing so that microbes in the sewage you are trawling through, lifting your automatic rifle above your head, do not swim up your man-slit?



Games are absolutely rife with these sorts of environments. The edges of the city. Nowhere have I been more aware of this than in the first FEAR game; riding in a helicopter, bathed in a heady glow from the instrument readouts, I peer into the plastic, cloth-swathed faces of my assigned team and then out, across the sound of this unnamed city, to where lights wink at me invitingly. There are families there. Happy men and women watching television. I don't care if I am a super-soldier. I am cold in this helicopter. The seat is hard. And I don't want to investigate a missing recon team who have quite obviously been used as supernatural floss by the Littlest Emo ever. DO NOT TICKLE HER.

But we still do it. We descend into Hell. The paint peels, the mundanity and awfulness of everyday human life saturates us; a discarded bottle, a pair of shoes, a pin-up calendar is frozen in our lamplight, and we remember that, once, people existed here, out in the cold, out on the edge. Warehouses where conveniently-placed fork-lifts contain a pair of gloves left there after the last shift. Even in the day these places must be grim, as many of you will know if you have ever been on an industrial estate. But at night... no-one is supposed to be there. It is supposed to be left to the ghosts and the cold.

And sometimes we go even further, down to where only people with hard hats and a clasp on their wedding ring go; sewers, power lines, runways, abandoned buildings. We creak and cross these, in rare moments where we aren't hitting tramps, or escaped aliens, or Russian drug addicts, and sometimes we listen. Most don't - our bright HUD, the only real interface with the game (the rest being window-dressing), winks objectives and goals. But, sometimes, stop. When you are playing Max Payne, or any of the Dooms, or FEAR, or most FPSs' and Survival Horrors from the last ten years, just stop.

Though they are a cliché, and reviled in games by most, they are real places. These places exist. And they are terrifying.

Your liquid stare...

This is a book that is gaining some neat media parceling at the moment, and so I thought I would wedge myself in with some ship's biscuit and Tizer before the inevitable smug re-releases and populist nonsense that accompanies such things begin to blow like a foul wind. I need to tell you, despite being about apocalypse, loss, cannibalism, rape and murder, how heart-achingly beautiful this book is. It is a story where America has been seared by bubbling heat, and left to crumble into anonymous and cloying ash, but it is the most nascent, human thing I have read all year. And for the most part, there are only two humans in it. No names, there isn't any need. They are just The Man, and The Boy. This is what the spectrum of humanity has been reduced to. A wasted, depleted set of ruins, crawling towards a dead sea.



When asked where his ideas for this book had come from, McCarthy, author of the Border Trilogy and the similarly austere, bleak No Country For Old Men, simply said that he had been visiting El Paso in Texas and imagined it on fire. He had been with his son, and perhaps in some subconcious ache of fatherhood he dedicated the book to him. This dedication leaks from the book at every page. The Boy is the fragile, terrified heart of this book, and though much of the action and exposition comes from the mind and mouth of The Man, so much of its focus, its drive, comes from the youth himself. The Boy is the conclusion, the goal and the only care for The Man, and every action, every thought, is tautened by his concern for and protection of his son. Even in the wasteland that they traverse, we are entirely sucked into their story, and will them on to whatever pointless objective they seek.

And it is pointless. The entire book and plot is pointless. At every turn we see that America, and perhaps the whole world, is devoid of life. The ubiquitous and never-ending ash coats everything, poisons the water and soil, and masks the sky. The bitter cold and their hunger permeates everything they do, and a hushed blanket is settled on the landscape. Every noise that they do not make is treated with caution. And well it should be; almost every other human on the earth seems to have devolved, losing their grip on love and basic humanity and their own minds until we see them, Orcish and hunched, thumping their way along the Road, the only landscape worth mentioning, dragging their pregnant women like great sows, children and mothers brought for sex and food. At one point the two main characters descend into an old manor to find a larder of pale, emaciated humans, struggling to the light, trying to escape a fate that will never let them go. It is these unspeakable horrifics that pepper the book and point to the utter mind-boggling brutality of this new world, one that The Man and The Boy run from with every last atom of strength.



McCarthy's language and style, here, its sparseness and its beauty, are allowed to move freely with the two travellers. It is at times desperately clinical, as if the actions, the everyday medium of survival, can only be shown what it is, and at others slipping into a fevered heartland of blackness, myth and guilt, The Man remembering fragments of the world that went before him, his dead wife, and the beauty that existed. These snippets, sometimes preceded by a building Dreamtime as night settles and The Boy falls asleep, at others sneaking up as he surveys a crashed car, a corpse in a bed, or a can of beans, remove us suddenly from the world of silent survival and into the true world of literature, that of introspection and true poetry. The Man says these things because they are true, not because they are pretty.

And so it goes. The two travel the Road, and we share their miniscule triumphs, a cache of clean water, a can of beans, a comb, a freezing bath in the ruined ribs of a house. The Road, the title, the goal of the book, the coast that The Man speaks of, is irrelevant, as he knows it is - there will be nothing there, just sky, and sea, and more ash. This is a character study, the last two people that matter on Earth. This is The Man, and The Boy. It is a truly beautiful, awful story.

As any of you who know me will no doubt sigh heavily and admit too, I fucking love the Elder Scrolls games. I won £400 worth of top-end graphics card from PC Gamer UK because I sucked it off so much.
Bethesda, for some a monolithic, malevolent octopus of a corporation, for others a bunch of friendly nerds that may have sticky fingers but you wouldn't mind hugging on their birthday, and for me a subtle and fruity mix of the two, has pretty much gone ahead and announced a new Elder Scrolls game in 2010.



The crowds rejoice!



And then... the inevitable rumblings... the seismic thrashing of the collective Internet begins, and a Leviathane, serpent-collective emergeth.

Angry young men. Ecstatic young men. Wishlists. Arguments. Discussion. Debate. Most of these are the basis of Platonic, democratic society. The Internet facilitates this. Even the word 'forum' has its origins in the noblest of govermental processes.

However, even a cursory rock thrown into the scrying pool of the Tubes dredges up horrific amounts of hate, bile, anger and rage against what, if we are excruciatingly honest, is either a fantastic and exciting announcement, or something that doesn't really affect you in the slightest.

Here are a few choice musings.

Dragons (one for each element)

Would like the feature of online

Giga-wolves

OK, the last one was made up, and I'm not entirely sure what would qualify a wolf as 'giga', but these, and many worse that I couldn't be arsed to find again, characterise the furore that occurs when an established series that is known for being something of a 'flawed genius' opens its development doors again.

I am a massive Elder Scrolls fan. All of them. Every one. They are all fucking amazing. Trying to change my mind with rational thought and argument will only cause me to wave my naked buttocks at my monitor. I can, however, admit that there was a lot wrong with them. This is not inversely proportional to brilliance. Oblivion, especially, while deep, beautiful, rich and unique, sometimes handled like a magpie with multiple sclerosis.

I feel, therefore, that I am entitled to have my say. And what better place than a blog? Some people may disagree with me on some of these, and others may say they are exactly the same as thousands of other complaints, but...

...shut up. That's all. Nothing witty. Shut up.

Dear Santa, for Last Quarter 2010 I would like...

DO NOT LOSE THE CONSTRUCTION SET.
I realise that it is about as likely as the sun farting pigeons that they would drop this user support tool, but I really cannot iterate enough how important this is to the Elder Scrolls' survival. User-generated content. Oodles of it. For those of us playing them on PC, this avenue of modulation has created thousands of game hours of extra content, all for free. I have seen model and texture work that would rival that of professional game designers, and some of the quests are so bat-shit brilliant I cannot understand why Bethesda does not descend like some greedy, leathery vulture and snap these geniuses up. Keep the Construction Set. It is the reason I still play your games.

MAKE IT MMORPG AND LOSE YOUR COLLECTIVE KNEECAPS
I thought that it was just me who was not caught up in the warped cult of MSN with pointy ears, but apparently there are many others who agree with me. I hate fantasy MMOs. The graphics are usually quite bad in order to be scaleable to 13 year-old Jimmy's glorified calculator, it is mostly inhabited by griefing wankrockets, and, most importantly, you don't feel important. Irony. The point of a fantasy RPG, I feel, is to escape the fact you are overweight, a fan of My Chemical Romance, and have a skin disease. My forays into WoW and Guild Wars made me feel like one of those kids that follows superheroes around in comics, dressing like them and generally getting in the way - I was inexperienced, looked ridiculous, and wasn't riding a mammoth to compensate. In single-player games, the world revolves around you. The Elder Scrolls games are a great example of this - total freedom deciding how you interact and shape the world. Have a mammoth! Have everyone cheering and showering you with crisps and tiramisu as you ride your mammoth! I love the power and importance. The Elder Scrolls are single-player, and it wouldn't be innovative to make it an MMO: it would be shameless, soulless and remove a lot of character and style from the game. Don't make me be a wankrocket. Please.

A Fighting System That Doesn't Make Me Feel Like A Rock-'em Sock'em Fucking Robot
The fighting system has improved. Yes. I will admit this. Morrowind, though brilliant, shall not be spoken of in this respect. But when I draw my sword I want to feel like a titan, broiled lightly in the bath of combat; I want to jump off things, slice things, use some fucking physical combat. I don't want to look like a Monty Python extra, hitting my enemies with a soggy baguette. Fallout 3 was guilty of this as well; pistols are cool, but I feel like the Crown Prince with his little sailor suit and his withered arm when I lope across the wastes, hugging my blast-stick to me like it's my sodding infant. Yes, it will take extra work, animation and manpower. Yes, not everyone plays as a hitty-hitty-hurty man. But it is one of the most common complaints about Morrowind, and Oblivion, and a visceral, mobile fighting system will add so much to your game. Please. I am serious about this one.

A Script That Sounds Like You Give A Shit
OK, that sounded a bit harsh. And it is. The scripts aren't that bad. And Morrowind's was a lot better, probably because it didn't all have to be voiced by Joe America. But make a decision. Voice-acting does bring a lot to a game, (see my previous blog) but commit to it. Produce a script that is deep, over-arching, sometimes controversial and strange, makes people laugh. I am being harsh with this one. There were lots of amazing touches, particularly in the side quests, and Shivering Isles (having everyone be huffing-paint insane certainly helps), but I sometimes felt like effort was lacking. The main part of any RPG is the story. Tell it well.

Set It Somewhere In Your Fantasy World That Isn't Dull. Or Germany.
The Elder Scrolls has a heritage. It has a history, religious wars, Acts of God, crevices and nooks where everything can and will happen. But Oblivion made a boo-boo. Instead of choosing a beautifully characterised, eldritch scenario, they chose the province that was most like home. It looks like Oblivion out my bedroom window. Which is lovely. It is lovely. But I could reel off any number of RPG that uses such an environment. I can get lost completely in Oblivion's world. But not very often did I turn a corner and go "Wow, I was not expecting that". I remember stepping off the boat in Morrowind and feeling slightly scared and out of my depth. This is exactly what you want from a player. Oblivion feels like Kent. Not the moon. I would rather behead rats on the moon.

I'm not going to be greedy, and ask for anymore. And I don't think that I succeeded in remain fanboydom-free. But fanboys, at their most basic, are what a game needs. Diehard fans, who follow the games and knows them in and out, and can offer advice on where to go next.

But no. Instead we have this. This is the fanboy. Facepalm indeed.

I hate Sky. Not only do they ask you to spend yet more pictures of the Queen for the over-awing privilege of watching their programs in more than one room of your house, but their internet inexplicably breaks. The router is fine. Everyone their end says it is fine. A week later, after needing the Tubes for my dissertation and resorting to constructing a RSS feed out of pipe cleaners and pigeon feathers, it creeps back, brazen and unashamed. So I have been reading, mostly, this week. Late spring is fucking lovely here in Kent, and I have mostly been outside working my way through the short stories of Philip K. Dick.


Interesting fact, the K is for Kindred. NOT, as I thought, Kla'Thanatos.

This is the dirty grandfather of speculative fiction, a man who brought his own personal and psychological problems to the big shiny metal table with rocket jets, throwing them and the dark ideas they embodied down like an oil slick. Along with other pioneers such as Asimov and Zelazny, this quiet, unassuming, poor Joe from Chicago was writing about nuclear wastelands before it was fashionable or in 3D, and debating the ethics of robotics and android morality and empowerment half a century before it was relevant or in that funny little film. He wove religion and philosophy into a genre that, at the time, had none of the mainstream backing that it does today.



Most people know his work, criminally, not through his literary ability, but through the film adaptations of his films. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? became Blade Runner, a little story called We Can Remember It For You Wholesale became the Schwarznegger vehicle Total Recall, and The Minority Report dropped the prefix and became a head-scratching blockbuster. While these, and his thirty-odd other novels, are the main body of his work commercially, most of his literary life was spent in the Dante-esque environs of the magazine publishing world, with submissions constantly sent out to pulp magazines such as If, among others. He had around 120 published short stories in his lifetime, and now, collected and voraciously devoured by a science-fiction-loving public, we can see these for what they really were; his best work.



The reason for this is quite simple; Dick was nowhere near the best of writers. By this, I mean to look at his style; he was far from flamboyant, and though he dallied with the occasional poetic turn of phrase (Stars, caught in pools of water, glittered everywhere - Upon The Dull Earth), he could be, at turns, stilted, artificial and clumsy with his language. Several critics have pointed this out, but perhaps this is missing the point. While many will argue that the actual writing, the expression of the piece, is the most important thing, I would disagree. In any case, while perhaps, for such a popular writer, there are numerous examples of his lack of rhetorical skill, his ideas, the barest parts of the stories themselves, were what Dick really excelled at. Creating a world and characterising it as different and exotic almost immediately. While his novels such as Electric Sheep? are fine works of fiction, his short stories really show the man's incredible breadth of imagination, and this collection, The Father Thing, is no exception.



The stories here are deeply set in the science and speculative fiction tradition. So many of them ask - "what if?" What if mutants didn't want to fight for mankind, as so many comics of the time popularized them? What if they were just superior animals, the next step on an indifferent evolutionary scale? These are the questions that "The Golden Man" poses, characterizing them in the leonine, god-like Cris. Mentioned earlier, "Upon The Dull Earth" brings a theology that remained close to Dick's heart throughout his life. The concept of multiple worlds, angels, the bastardisation of the Eucharist; what begins as a very secular, alienating experience becomes totally religious, a substantive attempt at figuring an entire belief structure. Of course, this is where Dick sucker-punches you, drawing you in and then creating a fantastic closing scene.

My favourite story in the entire collection is "The Turning Wheel", a figurative look at a post apocalyptic world inhabited by an inverted society entirely based around reincarnation. Dick draws in his considerable popular knowledge here, bringing elements of the I-Ching, the Buddhist Dharmas, and an inverse race theory to, in very few pages, completely populate a world that we are entirely removed from. I will not spoil it, but it is an excellent story, and the ending made me produce a noise like a horse dying.

I won't do any more S.H.A.F.T's about Dick. I love him too much, and I have said so much already. But why I love his books can be summed up thus; when I was a kid, I had a fake tourist guide to the Galaxy, produced in the Sixties, with technical specs of ships, planetary data, and all sorts. I loved it. All apart from one picture; it was a dark moon, the surface dead and pocked, and a rusting, decrepit spaceship marked 'Hermes' crawling and limping through its orbit. There were very few stars. It terrified me. It showed me that space is cold, horrid, not full of Dan Dare, and, importantly, for adults.

P.S. This review has a scoring system.
+1 for every homoerotic reference to shafts, dicks, or my love thereof.
+1 for every giggle you make, much like a gibbon.
-1 for every e-comment you make about it.