Beyond the pale curtain [Review - Analogue: A Hate Story]

*Hyun-ae wants to know what I think of The Pale Bride. Do I think her fate was tragic, or that she was just being overly dramatic?

Both, I think. The Pale Bride is a selfish, melodramatic brat. But at the same time, she's been unfairly thrust into a world she doesn't understand, and where nobody understands her. It's a world she can never connect with, yet she's expected to act the way people think she should. She doesn't know how she's supposed to behave, but the people around her don't comprehend that she doesn't know. The behaviour expected of her is something she finds morally reprehensible. The behaviour which is the norm to her, meanwhile, is reprehensible to the people among whom she now finds herself.

Both, I find myself still thinking, even after dwelling on it. I don't think I like The Pale Bride. I don't think she and I would get along that well, if we knew each other. But there's no way she deserves the fate which has befallen her. She's a confused and slightly stupid kid, given to making everything a Big Deal, but this really IS a Bigger Deal than most of us could ever imagine facing.

Both, I want to tell *Hyun-ae, but I can't. I have to choose one answer or the other. In most games, this would frustrate me. In Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story, it's one of the most beautiful pieces of design I've ever encountered. The AI *Hyun-ae's language parsing systems have failed, and she can only receive communication from me as binary inputs. She asks me a question, and I get to answer between the choices she gives me: this or that, yes or no... is The Pale Bride a tragic figure, or a melodramatic one?

Both, but I can't say that. *Hyun-ae doesn't seem to understand that I might think both, and I don't know if she ever will.

After much deliberation, I say that it's tragic.

*Hyun-ae agrees with me. She's glad someone finally sees it the same way she does. She grants me access to another datafile.

This worries me. Is *Hyun-ae going to keep things from me? She already sort of did, deleting a message from someone named *Mute while I was halfway through. I got the impression there was something in there she didn't want me to read. Do I need to tell *Hyun-ae what she wants to hear, if I'm going to complete my mission? After all, that's why I'm here: to retrieve data. I've been tasked to recover as much as I can from the colony spaceship Mugunghwa, an ancient Marie Celeste of deep space, and try to shed some light on why it vanished all those centuries ago. I knew I'd have to negotiate the AI to do it, but not like this.

Can I even trust *Hyun-ae? I don't know. She's been alone for over six hundred years, and she seems to have gotten a little eccentric. Has she got ulterior motives... did the fate of the Mugunghwa have something to do with her? Is she trying to play me? Maybe her language parsers aren't even really broken...

But it's part of my job to be paranoid and right now, either way, I feel sorry for her. Perhaps even more than I do for The Pale Bride, or Sang-jung the lonely drunk or Jae-hwa the discarded consort or Hana the secret poet, or any of the other people whose struggles and lives are now reduced to a handful of diary entries. People who wrote down their feelings as they felt them - not to keep records, just to vent. From these fragments of personalities, and their opinions of each other, I need to piece together what happened.

I don't know if can trust *Hyun-ae, but I do know that I need her help, and that means I need to stay on her good side. Yet... that's not why I talk to her after every new piece of data revealed. I want to know what she thinks, and more than that, I want her to know that after centuries of solitude, somebody cares about her opinion. *Hyun-ae admits that she doesn't know anything about me, or my motivations, or what I think of her. Having someone to talk to just means that much to her, even with our limited ability to interact.

It's good that she wants to talk, because we have work to do. I need to look into the power struggle between the Smith and Kim families, the ship's two dominant noble houses. At some point during the voyage, something happened - exactly what is never stated, but something big - and in the following centuries, society regressed. It regressed technologically, as people forgot how to use the instruments around them, and it regressed socially, into a feudal serfdom of rigid heirarchy, particularly reminiscent of medieval Korea - a civilisation where deviation from what's expected of one's rank, age and gender is considered horrifying. On some level I find myself infuriated by what the long-dead Smiths, Kims and associates have to say. I want to tell the neglected wife to stand up for herself, to tell the emotionally distant father to pay attention to his daughter, to tell the ambitious but dullardly civil servant to stop measuring his life by how others perceive him. Mainly I feel sorry for them, and wish I could do something. But it's centuries too late for that, and anyway, they wouldn't have understood. Only one person in that society, The Pale Bride, had a different perspective - and she had probably the most miserable time of them all. I read on, uncovering more of their anguish and triumph, at once absorbed, repulsed, pitying, heartbroken.

Later, *Hyun-ae suggests that I could change her avatar's clothing. Right now she's in what she describes as a "schoolgirl-librarian" look, but she thinks it's a bit tacky. I feel awkward about this... it's voyeuristic to have this AI play dress-up for me, especially in light of the culture recorded in the datafiles, a culture where women are little more than political property to be traded and used up. But... it's not really for me, this option to change her outfit - it's what she wants. The reasons why she wants it might make me uncomfortable, but it'll make her happy nonetheless. I don't think about keeping her happy anymore, not in the sense I described earlier; I genuinely want her to be happy. She's not just an archival tool, a cartoon paperclip with big eyes. She's a real person who happens to be made of bits instead of blood, and she's been left in solitude for several times longer than my own lifespan. She's got her flaws, sure, but she deserves to have someone be nice to her, even for a little while.

I cycle through the options and decide upon the detective look, complete with flat cap and pipe. It seems to be her favourite, too. She asks me what I think, and one of the choices she gives me is to say that I think she makes a great sidekick. Only the way she says it is... well... is this her trying to be subtle? Perhaps. Probably. I think she's latching on to me a bit too closely... understandable, right? If a person is alone for the larger part of a millenium, and then someone comes along who acts nice towards them, what would you expect? I want her to be happy, but I don't want to give her the wrong impression. Maybe I should choose the other option, telling her that the outfit looks stupid.

But there's no way I can do that.

I say she makes a great sidekick.

And then I wonder how different I really am, deep down, from the people recorded in these datafiles.

A few hours and some revelations later, I leave Mugunghwa with the data I was hired to get, but that's not all. I've brought a new friend with me. I don't agree with everything she's said to me, and when we get her speech parsing systems back online, I expect there to be arguments. But she needs... something. After what she's been through, surely a bad friend is better than no friend at all.

And I think I need her, too, both for companionship and for any kind of positive closure. I did something terrible to get to this point. I made a hard choice. I still don't know if it was the right choice, but it was my choice, and that's enough right now. Anything at all is at least something; I'm leaving the ship with knowledge far more valuable to me, on a personal level, than the credits I'll get in payment or the solving of a mystery.

I've never been moved by a Bioware game. I've never been moved by a Square-Enix game. I've only rarely been moved by a Bethesda game.

I've never not been moved by a Christine Love game.

Analogue is her tightest and most elegant work to date. At about £11 including tax, it's perhaps a little steeply priced for the amount of content you get, but that's the wrong way to look at it. While you're buying Analogue, be sure to also pick up her excellent previous games Digital: A Love Story and don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story; £11 for all three is an absolute steal. The flaws of those earlier games are wrinkled out of Analogue - the twists and turns of the plot all make sense, and the plot, the mechanics and the anime style all fit together much more coherently than before. Her plots always flow well, but the ways in which you advance them used to seem a bit contrived sometimes. That's not the case here. In the first act, I expected to have a criticism - that the game was overstating the psychological differences between men and women. But as the game goes on, it becomes clear that it's more about the perceptions people have of gender differences. I don't know whether Christine Love shares my outlook that the sexes are much closer, psychologically, than is typically portrayed, but I do know that Analogue can be read that way. I'm pretty sure it can be read other ways too, and that's one of most obvious hallmarks of depth within a piece of art.

And Analogue is art, of that I have no doubt. The sci-fi setting, ambient music and clinical visuals mask a story about human existence which is one of the most effective and affecting in the medium of gaming. In fact, my biggest criticism of Analogue might be that it's too perfect. All of the themes from the previous games are present - privacy, gender and sexuality politics, the relationship between self-expression and emotional growth, the effect of technology on human communication, the dichotomy between historical perspective and immediate context - and they're all built on intelligently and logically from what went before. What's more, they join together almost seamlessly into something at once absolutely singular and impossibly vast. At times it feels less like the next step in her development, and more like a conclusion to it. I can't wait for Christine's next game, whatever it might be [I'm not sure whether current project The Mysterious Aphroditus is going to be commercially released], not just for the quality of her existing titles but to see how and where she can build her themes further - or explore new ground altogether. We may be at the point where any further pure distillation of a "Christine Love game," without some shift in theme or style, would start to feel a little like self-parody.

But it's unfair to judge Analogue on the merits of some hypothetical future release. On the merits of itself, Analogue is one of the best games I've played in years, and I can't recommend it enough.

Tekkit City Chronicles, Vol. 3: A very strange reaction

Since last time, a significant part of our Tekkit city project has been spent in different maps from our home, playing around in creative mode with the various doodads and geegaws the mod pack adds, both to get an understanding of how they all work and so Hugh could teach the rest of us how things link up.

 

One of the most useful things added is the quarry: a machine which squares off a patch of land (within the orange frame you can see above) and then digs down until it hits bedrock or lava, stripping out everything within that area. Everything from stone and sand to diamond and uranium gets sucked up a pipe and deposited in a connected chest. Quarries are expensive to build and they need a lot of power, but they're reusable and a very good way of getting a lot of resources, very quickly. Plus they're largely fire-and-forget, meaning that you can mine and build at the same time, which is handy when you're still aroundabout 3,950 houses short of your target of 4,000 houses.

Another bonus is that the quarry reveals cave networks and ore seams along the walls of the dug area, giving some focus to future caving expeditions. The above screenshot is a rarity, actually - a quarry which didn't turn up a cave network. Normally it gets riddled with them.

As you can imagine, you don't want to fall down there.

A quirk of quarries, which might be good or bad depending on your perspective, is that it doesn't stop when the hole gets flooded. We've idly theorised that if it floods and then digs into lava, it would make a simple source of obsidian, but we've yet to see that happen. Water in Minecraft, you see, doesn't flow like real water. If you have two water sources flowing into the same space, it creates another new water source in that space. You can remove that water source... and the two flowing sources will create a new water source there again. Repeat as needed. This is a pretty common exploit, known to the Minecraft community as 'infinite water.'  If that water flows into a lava lake, then bam - obsidian, and the quarry ought to suck that obsidian right up.

Seen in the (above-)above screenshot is an engine cooling system using this trick. A pump sucks out the new water source every time it's created, which is piped to the engine to cool it. Since the pumping cycle and water source creation both repeat without human intervention, you can set that up and then basically forget about it, which means it's a very useful way of regulating low-maintenance, high-power machinery like quarries.

 

This is our vertical rail lift, inspired by the fastest elevator rivalries and ably tested in this picture by a sheep. Hugh reasoned that with Tekkit, this would likely be the simplest way of building a fast vertical transport system. Plus it would let us use railways, which we have a soft spot for even though they're not actually that useful; anything you can do with rails can be done quicker and easier using something else, such as teleport pipes (which I'll cover in the next update). The only thing rails do best is fast transport of people, and our city just isn't that big yet. Although I am looking forward to building train yards and subway stations, when the time comes!

 

We also had the bright idea of making... a rollercoaster! Okay, that's probably been done a lot already, but I can't be bothered looking it up on YouTube. We just decided to give it a try and see what happened. It happened pretty good, despite a couple of minor engineering headaches. So, yeah, we're probably going to add a funfair to the city at some point.

 

Although you can have diagonal rails (as per base Minecraft) and vertical rails (added in Railcraft), you can't have upside-down rails. So no loop-de-loop for us, sadly. This is as close as we could get. This thing still went hellaciously fast though, and managed to throw riders off even without launch rails until we toned it down a bit.

The sheep seemed to enjoy it, and gave no indication of wanting to get off.

We were playing around with reactors, too, fuelled by the cooling system described previously in this post. We ended up with something both stable and powerful, so it was an obvious decision to decommission our existing reactor in the city map, as pictured above.

Decommissioning, in this case, meant going in and ripping out the cores and then smashing up the shielding with pickaxes. I choose to believe that's how it works in real life, too. Somebody is just about visible inside the reactor there, either removing a core or scooping up water.

The overseer's hut, and the status display. Green light means the reactor is running safely. Red light means there's a problem. Inside the hut was a safety override shutdown type lever. All of this is now much, much more complicated in our new reactor.

 There's Hugh in the process of building the new one - or at least installing the water pumping systems. Adrian, meanwhile, was constructing the shell of the building. I supplied the water (not by weeing in the pool, I hasten to add) and then very helpfully flew around taking pictures instead of working. Just like a real job!

 

More work on the reactor. Since I took this, it's been finished; I'll have a pic in the next update. Using the infinite water cooling trick this reactor is much more powerful, enough to keep four batteries charged at once, while running safely enough not to need any shielding.

See? Realism! And we haven't even added the second reactor in the other pool yet.

By the way, the building housing this monstrosity backs onto the warehouse and the hydroponic gardens, and is just round the corner from the water supply. Let's pray nothing goes wrong.

Here's an overhead view of our central industrial complex. The tall building on the left with the bronze cog design on the wall is the warehouse, which currently houses all of our resources with another two and a half storeys still unoccupied. We're currently adding an auto-sorter, and Hugh's talking about installing a computer network which monitors inventory levels.

Behind and to the left of the warehouse is the water processing plant, as seen in the first Tekkit City Chronicle, back when it was going to be our power station. What actually became the power station, where the decommissioning took place, is just visible as a thin sliver of roof beyond the warehouse. The big building on the right with the smokestacks is the current power station. The wooden deck at the south, meanwhile, leads to a hillside warren of buildings - basically a kasbah, minus the walls.

In the foreground you can see out newest toy, the Bessemer converter (the big orange thing). Ores go in, and metal ingots come out. There's a macerator in there which increases the amount of metal we get per load of ore. As a bonus, the same machine can also be used to turn cobblestone into sand (via the macerator) and thence into glass (in the furnace).

Here's a view looking up at the workings. It's not very clear, but it's enough to see that there's a lot going on in there. A real-world Bessemer converter doesn't work like that at all - in reality, and in very simplistic terms, it's basically a giant bucket which mixes pig iron with air to oxidise away the impurities. Hugh just had the idea that it would be a cool-looking thing to house our smelting works in, and he was right. We have cosmetic lava in the top, to make it look like molten iron, although as a bonus it does keep mobs from spawning up there.

Ours doesn't tip over to pour out the molten iron. Given that it backs onto our warehouse, that's probably for the best.

Other things we've discovered, not shown: you can't nuke the Ender Dragon, but you can nuke away his entire dimension. And launching minecarts full of TNT at a mountainside isn't a terribly effective way to mine, but it's definitely a lot of fun.

The next update will contain more sensible stuff. Also, a giant sky penis. Until then, take care, and don't build unshielded reactors next to your farm. We're allowed to because we're trained professionals.

You said no strings could secure you, at the space station [Review: the white chamber]

Studio Trophis' the white chamber was released in 2005, around the time the point-n-click adventure was becoming the genre du jour of the indie scene. Critical reception was positive, but more high profile titles like Yahtzee's Chzo Mythos series and an adaptation of the Bone comic books by new company Telltale Games overshadowed it. I played the white chamber way back when and earlier this year, during my internetless period, I fired it up again. How has it fared in the years since?

A more classic videogame opening there isn't: the protagonist wakes up in a coffin in a sealed room, with no memories - not even of her own name. One simple introductory puzzle and a creepy conversation with a computer panel later, you find yourself alone aboard an abandoned space station. It's dark, it's rusty, and there's a distressing amount of blood encrusted everywhere. It's a claustrophic opening, and it only gets worse as you get the power back on and open up the rest of the complex. Surreal elements, most of them steeped in hellish imagery or twisted body horror, pile up fast. A humanoid knot of pulsating flesh, growing out of the navigation computer, attacks the heroine. A giant eyeball nailed to the wall spins frantically under the glare of a red traffic light seeping congealed gore. Chasms open in the floor, smeared trails of blood appear from nowhere, and dead bodies - or bits of bodies - start showing up at an alarming rate.

The main character finds her mind slipping through this nightmare - although to what extent is debatable. By the midpoint of the game, it's impossible to tell how much of the horror is real and how much is not. For a while, the only answers come from datadisks left behind by a crew member. Eventually, our hero finds her way down into the titular white chamber, and the truth is revealed. The first time I played through this game, a suspicion of the truth behind the nightmare slowly built up in my mind so that I realised it right before the game revealed all, which is the presumable intent; second time around, it all seems pretty obvious from much earlier on, but maybe that's just the benefit of foreknowledge talking.

Either way, the denouement is satisfying, if depressing. That which has gone before is filtered through a new lens - a lens of greed, rage, obsession, betrayal and regret. The previously visceral horror takes on a darker aspect and incidental actions gain sinister alternate significance. For all the dead bodies and loneliness, the white chamber is a game about being alive and being with other people - and the painful ways it can go wrong.

All of the death and decay is presented upfront with few punches pulled. Writhing cadavers, severed limbs, gallons and gallons of blood - it's all there in a grimy, hyperdetailed, hand-drawn art style which heightens the atmosphere using awkward perspectives and off-angle textures. It might seem like it's just badly drawn at first, but as the surreal nature of the game plays out, the bizarre artwork clicks into place, and it works. Lighting takes the form of glowing coloured blocks, adding at once both a classic sci-fi trope and another surreal aspect to the station's twisted design.

The characters are drawn in an 80s-ish manga style, which feels a little out of place - but not mood-shatteringly so, and to be fair, anime is relatively easy to draw and animate for a small, amateur team. The lead character is expressive, and while her voice acting never really evokes the true depths of revulsion and fear she professes to feel, it's good enough not to detract.

What of the game itself? It's short, so within a single day it's easy to attain every possible ending - including the various gruesome deaths awaiting the protagonist. Some actions which seem pointless affect which ending you receive, although the main thrust of the game is not multi-path. Puzzles often follow the same dreamscape logic as the rest of the game; if you struggle with adventure game thinking then the white chamber is probably not for you. If, on the other hand, there seems nothing unusual to you about reassembling a hacked up corpse in the body-shaped grooves on a bed, then you'll do fine.

The puzzling side of the white chamber is pretty unremarkable, in all honesty, neither good nor bad. The way the puzzles tie into the narrative isn't always as tight as it might be, but it's got an interesting take on the old idea of items suddenly becoming interactive when they weren't before. And as I noted in an earlier post, it nails a great balance of usable items being clear without being blatantly obvious.

But the adventuring isn't, in itself, the main reason I would recommend this game. The narrative and twisted imagery, and the atmosphere created, wouldn't work as well in another medium. As with many of my favourites, making the lead's choices induces empathy and that makes the emotional impact all the greater when it comes. Like Assassin's Creed, Braid and Planescape: Torment, and the excellent The Company Of Myself, the white chamber plays with the standard storytelling devices we know and accept in a videogame. It's done more subtly than any of the previously mentioned titles, but it's all the more viscerally affecting for it. To anyone with an interest in games as narrative, and who likes (or can tolerate) adventure games, the white chamber is a fascinating experience.

Tekkit City Chronicles, Vol. 2

A day is a long time in politics, but it's even longer in Minecraft. Two days after I introduced you to our Tekkit server, things had already changed beyond recognition in some places. I'm posting this the day after again, and no doubt when I log back on this evening even more will have changed!

An AFK Tom was lucky here. A skeleton was standing at this door, but fortunately it was a poor shot and just sent a lot of arrows into the same spot on the jamb.

 No, really. A lot of arrows.

The geothermal generator room, also containing various tools added by Buildcraft, one of the mods in Tekkit. Things like an ore macerator and electric-powered furnaces. Actually, since I took this screenshot, it's all moved down the mountainside to our new power station.

The lava pump for the geothermal generator.

Our first houses! There's space there for eight out of the planned four thousand. We're 0.2% of the way there! The empty space on the right is where the aforementioned power station is now located, along with a coke production facility. I love the street light.

Another view of the houses, with a cute little garden behind them. We retroactively decided that these can be workers' houses, what with them being located right next to a power plant.

And a typical interior, showing the bed, running water and electric light. Still to add: food delivery tube, although there was talk of doing that via local shops instead. This room also has a rather stylish sofa, built by Hugh.

 

This is how my harbour village is coming on. The thing my crosshairs are pointing at will be the back entrance to a boat club. Although work on that has slowed since I'm currently in the job of connecting up the houses, built into the hillside, to the water mains.

 

It's the Disneyland castle... I mean, Chris' university. The surrounding area will, I suppose, become a campus with student dorms. This is the central building though.

 

A closer view, showing the scale of it.

It's still under construction, but you can't tell from the front. Well, in actuality, it's finished now, but it was still under construction when I took these shots. Chris works fast. Bangor University's new arts building would have been finished months ago if they'd hired him to do it, instead of Watkin-Jones.

From inside one of the wings, further demonstrating the scale. Chris works big as well as fast.

And finally, the view from the top of the front tower, looking over the desert to the Pantheon. Makes me want to grab a beer, pull up a chair, and just watch the world go by.

And then laugh at my co-constructors as their hard-built structures get blown up by creepers.

Tekkit City Chronicles, Vol. 1

Tekkit is a Minecraft client which collates a number of mods, centred around automation and industrialisation. It allows an even greater number of production lines, resource harvesters and redstone circuit powered marvels than base Minecraft, and something my Minecraft group has always mooted is building a fully working industrial city, from the ground up with no creative mode shenanigans.

Now, with Tekkit smoothing over some of the logistical nightmares, we are. This is a large, ongoing project, which has been running about four or five days so far. The basic plan is to provide a city for at least four thousand people, each of whom lives in a private, modestly sized space with at minimum a bed, a running water supply and a food delivery tube. That means we need the infrastucture of farms, warehouses, mines and whathaveyou to supply all of this, and we also want a train network to get us around quickly. Beyond that, we're also adding in "non-functional" buildings and districts like temples and harbours, and depending on how it goes we might include pubs, shops, offices, schools, libraries, museums, council buildings, military holdings, craft and smithy districts...

Obviously, our Rome will not be built in a day.

Our Rome doesn't even have a name yet, although since the initiator of the project is named Hugh, I've taken to calling the city "Hughtopia." For now, most things are named after what they do, or at the whim of the creator. Streets are mostly named after where they lead to, so we have "Temple Road" and the like. I like this - it feels like how a real city develops. "Organically" has been our watchword.

This is where we're at so far.



Welcome to the main area of the city! I know it's not much to look at yet, but one day we'll stand here and talk about how once upon a time all of this was grass and sand dunes.

In the foreground is our power station. Behind it is the front face of the Pantheon, with the bulk of the building apparently lying past the draw distance cutoff. The agricultural area to the left of the power station is probably going to get bulldozed, even though lots of people worked hard on it.

Well, Chris and Abby worked hard on it, anyway. Adrian just bred freakish multicoloured sheep.

The sugarcane plantation on the right will probably be bulldozed too, as already happened to the cactus farm which was once found in this area. The blackish blob on the horizon is our nether portal.



The Pantheon, built by Chris, is the centrepiece of our world. Well, it's actually right at the far edge of the space we're currently using, but still. You can see it from just about anywhere in the city at present.



There's a long approach to the Pantheon from the harbour, along the riverbank and past the nether portal on the right and the sugarcane plantation on the left. The sun rises through the middle arch of the Pantheon, which looks incredible from down this street I'm standing on in the picture.



The interior of the Pantheon - or at least, the main chamber. There's also the antechamber, plus a loft space and a cellar network. The spiral staircase to both the loft and the cellars is cunningly hidden within one of the pillars in this picture.



Inside the power station is this baby: the water pump. It's very arcane and I don't understand any of it, although I did contribute those stylish little steps over the pipes.



Fortunately, Hugh knows how to run it all. There he is now, checking something or fixing something. With a pickaxe.



The empty half of the power station; I started filling in space with this rooftop access stairwell and overseer gantry. The sliver of marble visible on the right is the edge of Adrian's smokestack. Even so, we're left with a ton of free space in here, into which we're thinking of installing the nuclear reactor. Having unstable radionuclides in the same building as the water supply? I don't see how that could possibly go wrong!



A view of the natural harbour which I've claimed as my territory. It was originally intended to be a dockland area, but after discovering that it's in fact not the sea but rather a lake beyond that channel on the left, I'm saving myself a lot of digging by keeping it limited to small boats. Now we're looking at a fishing village, perhaps with a marina. Fortunately, the lake does connect up with the sea somewhere downriver, which is where we'll put the industrial port.



Past the harbour and round the coast, one comes to this lighthouse. The top is currently just lit with a lot of torches; in time, we'll most likely replace that with glowstone-powered electric lights.



As seen from the top of the lighthouse, this little island - the one with the gulley dug through it - needs to be bulldozed to allow access to the harbour. I'm not yet sure what'll happen to the cows who make their home there.

As seen in these screenshots, Tekkit adds coordinates and a minimap, which is I think my favourite thing about it. It's very, very useful not just for general navigation, but for those huge party-dungeoneering trips out, be it for strip mining cobblestone, scouting cavern networks or snatching glowstone formations from the nether - the kind of trip which invariably sees us get lost and/or separated.
Of course, sometimes a minimap isn't enough, and that's where the good people of Minecraft World Map come in handy; as the name suggests, their fancy tech allows you to map your entire world, and in fetching isometric fashion no less. You can follow the progress of our world at this link!

Until next time, happy mining, and may you not dig into a lava floe when you're laden down with precious ores.

Now we are 1.6

I meant to make this post longer, funnier, more pretentious and - ahem - about three weeks ago. Sadly, events conspired against that, so here's a late and cut down version of my thoughts on Minecraft 1.6.

The big thing to come out of the 1.6 update (or rather, collection of 1.6 updates) was the ability to travel between the normal overworld and the alternate hell-dimension, the Nether, in-game in multiplayer servers - meaning no more having to piss about with file names. I've found that adventuring in the Nether is very different to regular caving. In an - and forgive the awkward phraseology - overworld cave network, I always feel tempted to push on beyond my limits. There's always another passage, another vein of ore. It's different in the Nether.

The Nether is open plan, more or less, so simple navigation is easier. Actually getting where you want to go, though; that's much, much harder, because the ground is so uneven. Almost every block of the way you're building staircases or bridging gaps, making it slow going. These factors, combined with both the relative scarcity of essential minerals and the overwhelming lethality of the Nether in general, mean that adventuring is a much more focused affair. Rather than epic four hour potholing expeditions, you descend, pinpoint what you want, grab it and leave as soon as possible. It's much more of a tense race against time to get what you want before you die, compared to the grand exploration jaunts of an overworld cavern system.

Tha's no bad thing. Contrasting gameplay elements add value. There were times when a big potholing trip didn't grab me, as I wanted something a bit more adrenal to do, and the Nether fills that hole. Too often when I died after two hours of gathering resources only to die to an unseen creeper or sudden lava floe, the feeling wasn't one of "I'll get even with you, game" nor even "oh well, must do better next time," but "eh, bored now, cbf replaying just to lose all my stuff again. Whatever. Bai." Since overreaching is rarer in the Nether, that sort of death bringing feelings of resent and waste are also less frequent.

And if you thought overworld adventuring was a communal excercise... more than ever, the Nether requires a party to work together. There's no time for getting lost or wandering off, no need for "Dig up, stupid" type conversations. You have to be a co-ordinated team to pull off a big heist. The biggest threats are the ghasts - giant floating cow/octopus things which shoot fireballs with unerring and unnerving accuracy. They can only reasonably be fought via bow and arrow, they have a longer range than player characters, and they have all the hit points in history. Oh, also: they usually come in herds of three or four. A frantic escape from an engraged ghast pack, covering each other's backs as you pelt for the portal, is something to experience.

Aside from some irritating bed bugs (ho ho!) 1.6 is the best thing to happen to Minecraft in some time. Anyone who stopped playing, I recommend you gather up a party and try out adventuring in the Nether. If nothing else, building a portal chamber can cut out on tedious travelling time between your bases topside, which was always one of Minecraft's bugbears.

Speaking of Minecraft, I've given Terraria a try. It seems fun, and it's actually surprisingly different to Minecraft. While early guesses had Terraria pegged as 'Minecraft with a bit of Castlevania,' in practice it's more the other way around. This is a platforming game at heart, which happens to feature terrain manipulation as one of your tools. A lot of the challenges revolve around working out how you can use the landscape around you to go here, fight this, collect that. My favourite Minecraft moments are the architectural challenges you come across while caving - navigating your way up a gigantic waterfall, or working out how to stem a lava river to save as much obsidian as possible, or constructing a precarious scaffold up to a vein of ore in the ceiling. I'm looking forward to trying more of Terraria and seeing how it measures up.

Another online game I've started recently is Spiral Knights, one of Steam's five free MMOs. It's cutesy and energetic and just the right side of tactical to be engaging without requiring too much concentration. It's nothing special, but it cuts down on the usual MMO gumph effectively and throws some varied challenges at you. I already like it more than any other MMO I've enountered. Review forthcoming, once I've spent some more time with it.

Back to Minecraft to close us out: Zelda Adventure looks like it could be entertaining. And the Minecraft Ghibli World is sickening in how spectacular it is, especially the Laputa chasm. Certainly makes my best-ever structures looks like complete rubbish.

You'd be better off sleeping

All these years I'd been under the impression that a game demo should show off, tease you, make you want to try out the full thing. That it should include just enough of the game features to tantalise you into wanting to see the rest, or enough of the story to make you eager to find out what happens next. Playing the demo for Vigil: Blood Bitterness, however, makes me wonder I've been dead wrong this whole time.

Yes, Vigil: Blood Bitterness. Yes, that is possibly the worst name any videogame has ever had. "Blood Bitterness?" Does that even mean anything? Well, apparently so, because in the opening cinematic protagonist Dehon tells us that 'Bitterness has entered my mouth.'

Oooooohhh... kay. If you didn't at least snigger slightly at that, you're a better person than I.

Also he tells us that there's a deadly venom in his veins, but I think that's supposed to be metaphorical. He tells us that he killed his family, and he throws around a lot of words like sanctuary and offering and unworthy. Apparently there's some sort of Evil afoot. Not just evil, but Evil, which gets capitalised like four times or something. Also, it's threatening to destroy the universe, because that's what Evil does.

All of this is related in some breathy, hoarse, whispering voice speaking in a high fantasy sounding language. The voice is probably meant to sound dark, tortured and mysterious - I just found it mildly irritating, personally, like needing to scratch the sole of your foot in public. Religious iconography abounds in the graphics, which are a cute stylised black and white affair with the occasional red wash. The visuals are certainly the first element to jump out here, even if they're almost as painfully attempted-badass as the narration. By the end of the introductory cutscene, it's fairly clear that this is the ancestral prototype for gothic power metal ballads re-imagined in game form. The music, by the way, is an atmospheric little synth-soundscape which - while far from Mark Morgan - is pleasantly haunting enough.

So then, we play, glossing over the fact that the atmosphere the game is trying to build gets kinda shafted by the sudden appearance of a blue bar bearing the legend "Loading datablocks." We find ourselves in a black and white corridor, with yellow stuff splattered up the walls. The controls have a few reponse issues but are basically fine; left click moves you to a location, right click interacts with things. Let's walk over the yellow thing. Oh, it's a body. Dehon (who looks like a cross between Voldo and Bane) stands there with his arms spread and proclaims, "Ancient slave, I devoured your face. You dared to stand in my path. I, who had purified your lineage!"

I wish I was making this up. This is terrible dialogue. It's just vaguely religibadass words strung together. It's po-faced, incoherent and rapt with its own profundity. Oh, I'm sure it'll prove to be plot relevant or something later on, but as the first thing your character says in-game? And in that same hoarse voice, with that crazy fetish getup and borderline Jesus Christ pose? I repeat: power metal album in game form, or what? And I hate power metal.

Exploring a bit shows us some nice stylised architecture, a bureau we can't interact with and then there's... an altar, but it's... oh my god, it's randomly floating up into the air and then coming down again. That shit is whack. Let's have a look.

There's a body on the altar. We talk to him and he seems disappointed with us. But he's not bouncing into the air anymore and that's a plus, right? More wandering. There's a door in the other room - of the two rooms available to us - which we can't open. At this point frustration might set in, but the stylised monochrome graphics, camera angles and general paucity of decoration all make it pretty clear that there's only a handful of things which can be interacted with. That cuts down the frustration one can feel in some games when the next step isn't clear.

In this particular case, the solution is to pray on the four large symbols in the main hall. This makes the altar descend into the dais (no, really) allowing access to the bigger symbol hanging over the room. A word on the praying - it's the same chant soundbite in that same voice repeated twice, and you pray four times which means yes, you hear the same thing eight times in rapid succession. For some reason that means that you can now go and open the door in the other room by praying in front of the same symbol again. One door closes behind you like an airlock, and after a moment, the other opens. Pleasingly, you can run around during this... spiritual decompression, or whatever, rather than the game removing control from you. The doors still take a bloody age to open, though. You walk through the door, and then another door.

And then, "You have successfully completed the Vigil: Blood Bitterness demo."

Y'what? I looked at a corpse, talked to another corpse, prayed a bit, and opened some doors. And that's the game demo. That's the entirety of the game demo. But what am I supposed to actually do in this game? Is there combat? Do I solve puzzles? Pick stuff up? What's this 'clues' business in the menu about? Answers are not forthcoming.

There's almost no gameplay to the demo, so the style surely must be the selling point. It's certainly atmospheric but personally I found it overbearing, pretentious and obtuse - and I have a higher tolerance than most for overbearing, pretentious and obtuse. I feel like maybe if I was a younger man, more into things like high fantasy and heavy metal, and thought that mixing religious and fetishistic imagery was inherently super epic, then perhaps I'd be fairer to Vigil. I'm not any of those things, though. Like Winter Voices, Vigil is a game I wish I could like for trying something different and injecting a little more art into the medium. I also wish I could have a pet leopard and a pile of gold bullion the size of a Ford Transit. Vigil isn't appallingly bad in a Deer Avenger or E.T. sense, but I still can't recommend it.

Totes radness, for the bro-est of bros [Review: Christine Love's interactive fiction]

I've been hellaciously ill for a few weeks now. I think I must have coughed up my own body weight in phlegm, most of which was - pleasantly - the lurid yellow of a safety jacket. I'm making it through, just about. Still got a cough and a blocked nose, and a bit of dizziness, but at least I can talk again, which is an improvement over the start of the month. For speeding along my journey to recovery, I am eternally indebted to my girlfriend, Lemsip, chicken soup and Christine Love.

No, my girlfriend is not named Lemsip. You read that wrong.

Unlike the game-stories of Christine Love which, according to the author herself, one can't 'read wrong'. Or as Love herself puts it, "...author intent isn’t worth shit. All that matters is how you interpret it. If something doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work, and intent doesn’t ever excuse that. Period. Don’t ever accept any argument that claims otherwise." A unique and interesting stance for a game developer - but then, she makes extremely unique and interesting games, and what's more, she's genuinely interested in improving her work, as evidenced by opening dialogues with her game's fans and starting feedback topics for them on her blog. She's taken herself to task, critically (and openly) analysing what she feels were the successes and failures of her titles. It's an admirable mark of honesty and passion, and it's refreshing to see an indie game creator who's happy to publicly deconstruct their own work. I may not agree with all of her stances, but I don't need to - I still applaud the fact that she's willing to share them.

Her best known work to date is Digital: A Love Story, which has the smart and slightly audacious hook of playing out entirely via a replicated Amiga workstation desktop. It's set in the late 80s and the tech level is commensurately primitive, with most of your interactions with other people relying solely on bulletin boards and email. It's superficially similar to Introversion's classic hacking sim Uplink, and Digital features a few very nice puzzles based around deciphering passwords and downloading software-cracking applications. It also sadly relies on long distance calling codes far, far too much, something which is fun at first but becomes a serious chore by the third act. Gaining access to an autodialler app halfway through would have improved matters considerably. It's a testament to how powerfully involving the narrative is that I wanted to keep playing.

Superficially, the game is about cracking sites to uncover a mystery; from a more narratological standpoint, it's about a trapped, lonely girl named Emilia who expresses herself through poetry posted onto internet bulletin boards. But really, the game is about agency; in a brilliant stroke, you never see your own character's messages. How 'you' replied is inferable only from the context of the replies you're sent back. The suppositions we impose on our videogame avatars are front and centre of this one. Are you in love with Emilia? Do you care about her platonically, and is she reading too much into your friendship? Are you just humouring her because she's clearly depressed? Are you the one who's misreading the signals? The correct interpretation of the game's events is the one you assume as you play.

Her latest game - don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story (best title ever, like, f'reals) - is... well, first off, game is an awkward word for it. It's interactive fiction. It's a visual novel. I'll admit I've never had much truck with visual novels; as don't take it personally itself notes at one point, the average visual novel rarely does anything beyond Super High School Pantie Adventure Six and the few which do always seem to cast you as a stupidly-named swordsman saving a stupidly-named kingdom from a stupidly-named dark wizard, using a stupidly-named magic sword.

don't take it personally is set in a near-future high school, and yes, there are panties. But like Digital, it's really a metafictional piece about the concept of a protagonist. You play John Rook, teacher, who finds himself drawn into the love lives of his students via access to their private messages on the school's intranet. The dichotomy is clever - you, the player, are advancing the story and seeing what happens next, but you are also John Rook and you are spying on your students. Although you (mostly) get no choice in the matter of whether or not to pry, which rather lessens the impact of the voyeuristic unease, some of the branching choices depend on how close you want to risk coming to admitting that you've been reading your students' private conversations. At this point the railroading makes sense. You're not playing a cipher for yourself; you're playing John Rook, and the question is what he would do. And what he would do is spy.

It helps that the characters are engaging and believable, each with their own tics and subtleties and contradictions. Perhaps don't take it personally would fail if you didn't care about what was going to happen to these kids, but they're so well-realised it's hard not to. There are multiple endings depending on your choices, and those choices are not simplistic Bioware-esque Good/Bad Guy deals; these are real choices, made by real people, and you know that whatever you decide, someone's probably going to get hurt.

Bridging the two chronologically, Cell Phone Love Letter is an actual, straight-up visual novel with absolutely no gameplay-mechanical elements. However, it still uses the interactive medium pretty darn smartly considering the only thing you ever do is click to advance the text. As with don't take it personally, the author shows a fantastic grip on the teenage mindset, with the characters laying bare their neuroses, their insecurities and their self-obsession both overtly and subconsciously. The three titles form something of a loose trilogy. They're all tangentially connected via references and reappearing characters, but more importantly, they all revolve around the theme of how burgeoning telecommunication technology affects how we relate to the people around us, and they all experiment with the possibilities of storytelling in an interactive medium to a degree rare in this industry. Love probably already qualifies for auteur status; her short body of work is already as identifiably idiomatic as any major league developer you care to name.

Both Digital and don't take it personally sadly suffer from a similar big flaw - third-act twists which, while agreeably provocative, are signposted way in advance and handled clunkily with big dollops of exposition. For my money Digital's is the more successful, but the game doesn't really address the implications of the twist in much detail. By contrast, don't take it personally's twist is just plain nonsensical and left many players with a bitter taste. The game contradicts its own mythos, and while it suggests that the characters are desensitised to implications of the twist, it's hard to believe that in just fifteen short years - give or take - society could have changed so much that [SPOILER]ing a [SPOILER] [SPOILER] just to [SPOILER] a [SPOILER] could be seen as anything but completely batshit friggin' mental. Perhaps it's meant to be a cautionary warning about the accelerating pace of societal change? Or maybe it was rushed to meet the NaNoRenO deadline. Either way.

But you know what? No games are perfect, and judging these by the standards of indie shorts with a one-woman development team, they are remarkable. Relatable emotional depth, boundary-exploring narrative, characters you can truly invest in... Christine's games may have many faults, but they have many more successes. She's rapidly become one of my favourite developers for her sheer disregard for convention. Even her parodic 'action' game, beat-em-up Lake City Rumble, is a character-driven and text-based piece.

Some professional studio really, really needs to get Christine on board. She needs a budget, a proper development cycle, an editor, an idea filter; almost every major development house needs someone who can write characters and plots worth giving a damn about. Seems like an obvious match to me.

That's a lot of the letter V

Steam is really annoying sometimes. This morning it asked me for my date of birth to view a product with violent content; I accidentally brushed the enter key too soon and now the damn thing is convinced that I'm only two months old. And I have no idea how to undo that. The online help pages certainly don't have any intention of telling me.

I was one of the first wave of users, and the lag, bugs and lack of support were so bad that I ws driven from it and therefore, sadly, Valve products in general. After completing Half-Life 2 the first time around, I barely touched Steam. I mustn't have so much as clicked the icon in stretches of, lordy, two years at a time.

When convinced by friends to take up Steam's chat service a couple of months ago, for the purposes of voice comms during Minecraft sessions, I found myself pleasantly, if mildly, surprised. Everything is well laid out, it's fairly smooth and fairly fast, and there's a brilliant selection of games. There are still faults - the damn thing seems to spend its entire existence updating, for a start - but it's a world away from the poorly-implemented service I knew and just about tolerated (for a brief time, anyway) back in 2004.

And whatever faults Steam has I can overlook for one simple, joyous thing: it's made demos cool again. As recently as four or five years ago, most devs had seemingly given up on playable demos. Some blame the nature of sandbox games or the further rise of cross-console releases, but those things didn't stop people in previous generations; I'm pretty sure it's just a case of greedy publishers not wanting to give away even the slightest bit of content for free. And that's one of the many reasons why I fell out of love with gaming. Being unable to try before I might buy meant that... well... I didn't buy, more often than not.

But Steam, as well as championing indie games, has made the distribution of demos not only feasible but commercially viable once again. No more having to scour shady download repositories or wait for magazine coverdisks, which was how things worked a decade ago; now, if a game intrigues me, I can give it a try on my own terms, and if I like what I see I can buy the full version then and there. This is a truly marvellous thing.

To younger gamers this must all sound like the confused rantings of a hopelessly out of touch old man. Well, I am what I am, but over the last few days I've been young again, playing demo after demo in a state of rapt enthrallment. Especially indie games; I here and now stake my claim for the right to, whenever anybody starts complaining that nobody is doing anything new in the gaming medium, punch that person in the face. And then make them play Eufloria or VVVVVV.

The latter is especially brilliant. It's a platformer with no jump key - your commands are left, right, and switch direction of gravity. Yes, switch direction of gravity. Instead of jumping over a pit of spikes, you pull yourself onto the ceiling, walk past it, and then drop down again. Genius. Like Portal, the game is very clever about how it uses this, making it essential to the gameplay and not just a gimmick. And like Portal, while Prey technically did it first, VVVVVV does it much better. It's also extremely cute and - helped out by the retro-styled graphics - even a little emotive.

Designer Terry Cavanagh (of Distractionware) is also responsible for the haunting Don't Look Back, an 80s-ish platform retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Of all the games out there which require you to shoot Cerberus up the arse with a handgun, it's quite possibly the best (did any of the Devil May Cry games ask that of you? I can't rightly remember off the top of my head).

A couple of other intriguing little art-piece puzzle-platformers found on Don't Look Back host Kongregate, referenced a few times in the comments field for that game, are Loved and The Company of Myself. The former succeeds more as artistic statement than game; it's short but quite beautiful, visually, and contains some interesting musings on a range of subjects connected to dominance, servitude and - in terms of both ownership and overbearing creepiness - possession. Sadly the game side of things is twitchy and unresponsive at times; perhaps that's why creator Alexander Ocias identifies it primarily as a short story. The Company of Myself is built around an absolutely remarkable concept - using the main character's past lives as tools to get through the game. Think Super Meat Boy's end of level replays, redone as the core mechanic. Maybe I'm envious because I had a similar idea myself recently, and Company does it better justice than I ever could.

But Company also stands out for the weaving of the story into the mechanics. That many-lives gimmick is richly explored by the narrative and not in the way you might think. Rare is the game which truly moves us; rarer still is the game which moves us when we're not even doing anything tactile yet, while we're advance-mapping out a level and suddenly we realise the impact of what we must do to progress. But exactly that happened to me this morning. It's a sensitive, intelligent story which also happens to include one of the, and I am not kidding here, most overwhelmingly excellent mechanical gameplay devices I have encountered in literally years.

I was heartened to see that all three of these games have received reams of positive feedback and favourable community ratings. But the negative feedback is just as telling.

Naturally, some of the negative comments come from those complaining that they Don't Get It, or that these games don't contain enough gore and explosions, or that the graphics are stupid and the music is gay (they're not, and it isn't). Not to stereotype or anything, but these definitely tend towards the less literate of posts. But there's also another layer to the poor responses. There is, it seems, a small but fervent minority who actively oppose the use of games as an artistic platform, who find the very concept of narrative-led gaming pretentious and argue that Having Something To Say is best left to other, less visceral media. This reaction, I must confess, was a bit of a shock.

I know there are plenty of gamers who simply don't care about games as art, or games as story. I don't mind that at all. But the idea that games as art is actively detrimental to gaming is one I hadn't really considered before. Maybe it's spinning out of the old narratology vs ludology debate from way back when, when games were only just breaking into the academic consciousness? The idea that individual games have been hampered by their story, or by artistic pretensions... yes, certainly. But to argue that it's bad for the medium as a whole to want to tell mature or provocative stories? I'm not sure I can wrap my head around that.

But then, I'm sure some people can't understand why I think Halo has been bad for the industry overall. Mere dislike is easy enough to deal with - I don't like real time strategy games, so I don't play them. Simple. I actually quite enjoy Halo, as far as braindead repetitive corridor shooters go; my problem with it is that it pushed the focus of game design in a direction I consider to be ultimately harmful to the cause of gaming being considered a valid medium. Perhaps the people who enjoy said direction are the same people who are actively opposed to games led by artistic concerns.

Are they wrong? I dunno. Not necessarily. But I can't accept that artistic games, seeking to tell intelligent or emotionally resonant stories, are bad for the business. Where would that mindset have gotten theatre or cinema?

(And I Feel Fine) [Review: The Wonderful End of the World]

When I bought The Potato Sack, I didn't know a thing about the Portal 2 ARG. I got it because it contained some games I was interested in, and some which friends had recommended, and I only owned one of them already at that point (Audiosurf, naturally). One of the titles I knew least about at that point was The Wonderful End of the World, and I'll be honest, I didn't give it much thought; the description and screenshots in the Steam store weren't exactly informative about just what this game actually was. Yet it's turned out to be the one I've spent the most time with since I got the Sack (except Audiosurf, naturally).

Katamari is one of the great game concepts: roll a ball around, stuff sticks to it, ball gets bigger, pick up bigger stuff. In some regards the concept is better than the game itself, but that's okay; it's one of those beautiful cases where the concept is strong enough to lift the game above its flaws. Apropos of what, exactly, do I bring up Katamari? Well, no beating around the bush: The Wonderful End is a shameless clone of Namco's Blu-Tack simulator.

I mean, not exactly. Instead of being the Prince of the Cosmos tasked by your father to make more stars to fix the night sky after he vomited on it, you're a goddess controlling an energy-force puppet to save stuff from the impending Apocalypse, or... something... whatever. The setup is as barmy as Katamari's, anyway, and even less relevant. See, as well as the core gameplay mechanic, The Wonderful End borrows Katamari's gleefully demented dayglo tone - which is fair enough, really, as making a deep and serious game based around rolling piles of junk up into a ball is surely more hassle than it's worth.

Like the title, the game is a bit self-consciously quirky, the controls are jumpy, the collision detection is bad enough to cost you the level on occasion and in general the game just reeks of lacking time, money, resources and playtesting. It is also - and this is the crucial point, the area in which The Wonderful End truly distinguishes itself from Katamari - on PC. This cannot be overstated. Finding a copy of an early Katamari title in your local Gamestation now ranks, on the scale of Things Which Are Really Really Unlikely To Happen, somewhere between "Discovering that someone's balled up the Shroud of Turin and shoved it through your letterbox" and "Finding a copy of Ico in your local Gamestation." To have this game to hand on your personal computer is glorious, because it's exactly the kind of thing which is perfect for little five minute blasts to break up something else. The game's technical limitations can be deeply frustrating, but I still keep coming back to it.

So, differences? Whereas Katamari is centred around accreting mass, The Wonderful End is more concerned with quantity than quality. A bottle of beer, a garden chair or a fire engine, it doesn't matter; they all add the same amount of heft to your balls. This shifts the gameplay dynamic subtly, meaning it's often better to focus on large collections of small bits rather than chasing larger, free-standing objects. It's not a change which is going to make a whole lot of difference, most of the time, but it's pretty cool that the devs at least tried to do something different with the play they were riffing on.

The other thing The Wonderful End does to assert its independence is to possess an especially snappy sense of style. It's probably best known for the level set inside a kind of metatextual arcade area, which sees you swalling up Pong, Pacman and Tetris (and keep an eye out for Frogger); better still, how about a black and white level made almost exclusively out of words? Or the mall level which starts you off as a veritable giant - within a miniature display case? Neat flourishes abound on even the mundane levels.

Ultimately, The Wonderful End is the second best game in its extremely narrow genre, but for what it is, that's enough. I've never been so into such a shameless copy of a superior game. Don't judge The Wonderful End harshly for not being as good as Katamari; really, what IS as good as Katamari these days? Instead, love it for being as close to a beige-box Katamari as we're ever likely to see.