Supraland!

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It's a game, alright?

I think the most succinct way of characterizing it is to call it an actionadventureplatformerpuzzlegame. It's kind of an open world, as much as it is a bunch of open areas between which you can travel freely through various means. The perspective is first person, and you have a sword...at first.

Let's get the least important bit out of the way from the get go: the story is extremely barebones, and hardly even there. But who the heck would play a game like this for the story? What, are you playing Super Mario 64 for the story?

It's like watching a porn movie for the lovely soundtrack; you're missing the point!

This game is all about the gameplay. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised that I don't hate it, because it's got first-person platforming, which sucks. Why does it suck? Because it's impossible to see exactly where you're standing. This game kind of makes that a little better by allowing you to see your body and your feet, but it's still virtually impossible to both see your feet and see where you're going at the same time.

The main reason why I think I don't mind the first-person platforming so much is that the game gives you an increasing ability to compensate for the flaws. I won't spoil what those are, but I'm sure you can guess a couple of them.

In fact, the game has a great sense of progression overall. It's a game that usually clocks in at between 15 and 20 hours, but unlike boring as shit games like Star Control Origins, where you play the game in the exact same way at the end as you did at the beginning, Supraland has you get new tools and skills throughout, and new ways to employ them. You'll be tackling challenges very differently at the end than you did at the beginning. 

I think this is what makes the game consistently fun for me. See, even if a game is really fun in itself, if it goes nowhere and just repeats itself it won't be fun for long. Supraland left me with a feeling of "Damn, that was a nice game!", because it hadn't bored me stiff by the time it ended.

Note; what I just wrote isn't just applicable to gameplay. A game like Mass Effect has the same gameplay throughout, but goes to new locales, meets new people, etc. That's simply another way of adding variation. The thing about Supraland is that it belongs to a genre that hinges entirely on gameplay, and that means you need variety of gameplay.

The graphics are nice, subscribing to the "Low complexity/high fidelity"-school of thought, where the models and environments are simple, but the graphics quality is surprisingly high.

All in all, really a game worth playing if you want great gameplay, no story to speak of, and puzzles that'll sometimes have you think hard to find solutions.

That's all for now, have a safe journey home, and don't panic.

Kingdoms of Amalamadingdong

*snores loudly*

*jolts awake* Fuck Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning!

Oh, it's you. Hi!

So, Kingdoms of Etc. It's an open world action RPG that's sort of a deformed hybrid of Fable 2 and Skyrim. And I've never finished it.

It's not because it's difficult, because it isn't. It's not because of a bad story, because the story is quite good.

It's because it bores me to death.

Or, rather, the game itself doesn't bore me to death by definition, it just vastly overstays its welcome, like if my father visited for any time whatsoever measurable by science.

Let me explain:

It is a pretty good RPG, if hugely generic. It's bog standard, but fairly competent. And it works.

For awhile.

The problem is that the game is very very long, suggestive tone of voice optional. The character I've played the most clocks in at 109 hours or so, and the end was nowhere in sight..

"Ah, but..." says the FBI agent monitoring my activities ever since "The Event" took place, "...you like long games; you've played Skyrim for yonks, and Fallout 4 for three yonks!".

True, I like long games. If they have the gameplay to warrant it.

Kingdoms of Avocado doesn't. It has exactly two activities; 1) Go talk to person B, and 2) Go to point B and kill everything. At times they spice nr. 2 up with you having to pick up something at point B, but I won't honour it by calling it a separate activity when the main instinct in an RPG besides murdering everything with a health bar is picking up anything that glitters!

Those two activities can't carry the game for over 100 hours. It just can't possibly do that.

It's no exactly improved by the fact that there is no roleplaying in this supposed "Roleplaying" game. Alright, that's not completely true, at times you get to choose between being a dick or being a good guy. As in, you get two conversation options and pick one. I can't really call it roleplaying though, because your character has no character whatsoever, ironically. NPCs speak, and you can click on certain topics to mention them, or in certain situations you can make the choice between dickish and goodish.

You can buy a home, but it's just a place where you can have different crafting stations gathered in one place. You can't decorate anything, you never eat or drink, and you can't even sit down by the fire.

At the end of it all, imagine if the game had been, faffing about included, 20 or 30 hours long. I'd be writing about it as a fun, if a bit repetitive, action RPG that had an interesting story.

Instead, I'm writing about how it is a dull slog that completely drowns out the story by its boredom alone.

Hope I'll have the strength to finish the damn thing...

Iteration time!

This is gonna be good...

I don't like Dark Souls.

It's true.

Now, half of humanity will be thinking "Yeah, he's too much of a n00b, and not 1337 enough to beat it!", and the other half will be thinking "What kind of magic is making pictures appear on this rectangle on my desk?!"

Frankly, I don't mind being too bad at a game to beat it. The list of those games is quite long. But that wasn't it. I have beaten plenty of games that were hard and that required lots of practice.

So, it eluded me for the longest time why in the world I didn't like Dark Souls. But after much brooding, I got it! That's right; iteration time!

Now you're either thinking "What is iteration time?" or "The box next to the rectangle is making noises, what witchcraft is this?!".

Iteration time is the time between you cocking things up and you being back in action to cock things up again. For instance, in Super Meat Boy, the iteration time is extremely short. When you die, you reappear instantly at the start of the screen to try again.

This is something that all developers must take into account. How long iteration time do you want, and how will it be managed? Way back when, the most common way of all was having lives, which gave you a number of tries with short iteration time, but a long one if you failed more times than that. See Super Mario Bros. and the likes thereof.

In the g(l)ory days of PC gaming in the 90's, basically all games managed it by letting you save whenever you wanted, allowing you to have as long, or indeed as short, iteration time as you'd like.

Nowadays, everybody, their uncle, their uncle's dog, and their uncle's dog's favorite chew toy uses autosaves of one kind or another. Usually it's simply pre-determined checkpoints in the game, where the game saves automatically, and you have little or no control over when it saves.

Dark Souls uses campfires as checkpoints. When you die, you are returned to the last campfire you activated, and all your souls are dropped on the ground where you died. What this means in practice is that if you die fighting a boss, you can face a fun little romp of 15 minutes to get back to the boss every single time you die. And this is in a game whose tagline is basically "You'll die lots of time trying to kill bosses!".

D'you know what feeling that invokes in me? The same feeling that you get if you've played a game for two hours without saving, and your computer crashes. Despair, sadness, frustration, fury.

That's idiotic game design.

Having to trudge back for a quarter of an hour every single one of the eight times you die on a boss isn't fun, challenging, your engaging. It is a waste of time. There is nothing gained from it whatsoever.

Except for padding out the runtime of the game, of course.

Funny thing, Darksiders 3, a really poor knockoff of Dark Souls, that I will be ripping into furiously in the near future, does that one thing better. It always has checkpoints, in this case summoning points for a demon named Vulgrim, right before bosses, minimizing iteration time.

When what amounts to little more than the third rate porn parody of your game gets a crucial part of gameplay right more than you do, you've fucked up.

Fuck Dark Souls.

And fuck Darksiders 3!

From DOOM to DIABLO!

Doom!

DOOOOOOOM!

Being found out

In his second autobiography, The Fry Chronicles, Stephen Fry expands upon the fact that he experienced rather a peculiar thing when he first came to the University of Cambridge, where he attended Queens' College. Namely, the defeating feeling that he would, at any time, be "found out".

This, he explains, had no relation to any fear of people realizing that he was homosexual, nor that he had a history of crime and imprisonment. Neither of those seemed to bother him as much as the real fear; that he would be "found out", and I realize the use of quotation marks will at some point begin to annoy, as being a big, fat, pretentious fraud. Surely, at some point, people would come up to him and question him about his knowledge of the great minds of the world, or theories of which he had never heard, and he'd be exposed. It would turn out that it had all been a mistake, he wasn't supposed to be there at all.

Although he never attributes this to his cyclothymia, that is the particular flavour of bipolar, or manic depressive, disorder from which he suffers, I cannot help but feel it is an odd coincidence.

There I go again, being melodramatic. Oh, how well his words suit my life, 'tis as if he was writing about me!

Bollocks, the lot of it. I might just as well have an emo haircut and listen to The Cure. In fact, if I were you, I'd stop reading right this instant. Go head, leave me to my arrogant wallowing.

Is he gone? Good, I hate that guy.

So anyway, I do not mean to say that his situation is directly applicable to mine. I only wish it to serve as a means of introducing the concept of this fear, which I do indeed share.

It might be at work, where I languish in fear that everyone will realize that I'm simply not good enough at what I do. I bring nothing to the table, so why am I even there? Someone more suitable would do it better!

In private, I cannot shake the feeling that people think I'm an arsehole. An annoying, self-centered twat. They'd rather not see me at all.

To be honest, my fear actually has less to do with a sincere beliefs that people holds these views of me, than that they should. 'tis oh so easy to dismiss the views of others. "Oh, they're just jealous because I'm so amazing!", or "They're simply arseholes themselves!". It's much harder to dismiss your own views. My friends don't say they don't like being around me, I tell myself that they should.

I can hardly imagine that anyone has scrapped more recordings of music they've made because they suck. Alright, I may be able to imagine it, but don't let that disrupt my hyperbole, please.

And they're not good enough because I'm not good enough, or at least that's what my head is telling me.

I'm not saying this to garner sympathy. Not that a single person will believe that, but I'm more interested in getting people to understand depression.

In vino veritas

Last night, the missus and I went to a strange place nextdoor to one of those old men's fellowships that dot the city of Örebro, and attended a wine and cheese tasting.

It was far less pretentious than I had feared it would be, and something has to be said of a sommele...somi...wine expert who manages to talk about the qualities of fine wine without making you want to punch him very hard in the face.

Unfortunately, it was entirely impossible to avoid the fact that the topic of the whole affair was wine. In fact, it was all that the cheese could do to reduce the flavourly impact of precisely those qualities in wine for which I care the very least.

I can not with any honesty say that this event in any way caused an epiphany in me, or for that matter impacted my view or preference with regards to wine in any way, shape, or form.

Indeed, give me a box of Barefoot White Zinfandel Rosé, and I'm as happy a camper as can be.

Good night.