Well this is a good couple of years overdue, but I only just remembered this thing existed, so now's a good a time as any for me to announce that I've moved my blog (and my various other web-type activities) to my actual website: tombattey.com.
Go there, read some stuff, and let's hang out!
Dark Souls
(21/10/2011) By now, you will know that Dark Souls is hard. ‘Prepare
to die!’ screams the launch trailer, and die you shall, but though the game
takes every opportunity to kill you, death is not really the point. Like Demon’s
Souls before it, the core of the Dark
Souls experience lies in the meticulous balance between risk and
reward. The odds you must overcome,
which will at times feel almost unfairly stacked against you, make overcoming
them something of a euphoric experience for those with the stomach to
persevere.
 |
| This will kill you. |
Dark Souls is the
spiritual successor to Demon’s Souls,
one of my favourite games of this console generation and, indeed, ever. Everything that made Demon’s Souls great is reprised in its pseudo-sequel. I stand by everything I said in my review of Demon’s Souls, and everything there
applies equally to Dark Souls, so for
a comprehensive run-through of why these games are so good, I suggest you read
that.
Instead, I shall focus on how Dark Souls differs from its predecessor, and even surpasses it, for
there is little question that the this is the superior game. Dark
Souls is more than a spiritual sequel to Demon’s Souls; at times, it feels more like a re-imagining. Concepts and characters from the original
reappear here almost untouched; the fire-breathing gargoyle boss that spawns a
friend just as you think you’ve gained the upper hand, the sorcerer that clones
himself to surround you, the oppressive toxic swamp level and that one bastard
who promises you treasure and then kicks you into a hole. There’s much here that will be familiar to
veterans of the original, and will surely raise a smile.
The real difference here is that these elements are now tied
together into one great sprawling world.
This massive world is truly Dark
Souls’ greatest achievement, invoking a level of immersion unattained by its
predecessors’ mostly linear stages. The
level design in Demon’s Souls was
impeccable, but here it is a taken to a new level. The surprisingly varied environments are
woven together with a masterful hand, with shortcuts opening out into areas
previously visited and far-off caverns promising access to unexplored lands. The greatest praise I can offer to the game’s
design is that, vast and sprawling as it is, I never felt the need for a map;
the twisting tunnels of Lordran are firmly etched into my memory as if it were
a place I had personally explored, rather than a particular ingenious work of
level design.
 |
| This too. |
Dark Souls is,
contrary to the title, a much brighter game than Demon’s Souls, which entertained itself almost exclusively with
dark passages and oppressive abysses.
These are more than present here, don’t get me wrong; Dark Souls is more than happy so send you
treading through the tombs of giants in utter darkness, or venturing into a
boiling netherworld. But it is also
unafraid to send you through shimmering crystal caves or across the balustrades
of a sun-drenched palace; these moments of beauty belie the grim fiction of the
forsaken world you are swept up into.
It is also a much larger game than Demon’s Souls. I remember
finishing that game in something like forty hours; this one took me more than
sixty, and there are still areas I have yet to explore and bosses I have yet to
fight. Every time you think you are
pushing the boundaries of the game’s world, it opens up further, sending you
deeper down into its hellish interiors.
It is enough to say that Dark
Souls is a bigger, more open and more beautiful version of Demon’s
Souls. It feels as though this is the
game that From Software wanted to make in the first place; only with the budget
afforded from the success of the original were they able to realise their often
nightmarish but unquestionably brilliant vision.
 |
| And this. |
What faults there are are largely technical. Sections of the game suffer from some
seriously debilitating lag, occasionally causing me to wonder how this passed
through testing. Lag such as this would
be an issue in any game, but here, where the difference between life and death
can rest on a split-second reaction, death through technical fault is unacceptable.
The game’s peculiar yet inspired online system suffers too
from technical issues, though how much of this is down to my own broadband
connection I cannot say. Several times,
a player would attempt to invade me and fail, and the game would leave me
locked behind fog walls while it tried to reconcile connection issues with
XboxLIVE. This happened rarely, but when
it did my only solution was to quit the game and reload. I lost nothing but a few seconds of playtime,
but even so, this is an area that lacks the laudable polish of the rest of the
experience.
There are times too, especially towards the end of the game,
where it threatens to tip the fine balance of its difficulty towards
frustration. Forcing you to retread trying
gauntlets to re-engage with a seemingly impossible boss is Dark Souls’ bread and butter, but the triumph of this design lies
in artful balancing of risk and reward, and certain late game sections begin to
feel vindictive in what they ask of the player.
The same could be said of parts of Demon’s
Souls, but in a game so much bigger and so much broader, the thrill of the
challenge occasionally – and only occasionally – threatens to become muddied by
frustration.
 |
| This will also kill you. |
None of this truly detracts from the triumph of design that Dark Souls represents. This is a videogame wholly unique from its
contemporaries, a starkly pure vision of what a game can be. It will certainly not be to everyone’s
tastes, and isn’t as immediately playable as the myriad blockbusters released
this fall, but to those who can appreciate this sort of games, Dark Souls is one of the finest
videogames you will likely play in a long while.
107,429
(04/10/2011) And then there was a second draft. Yes, it's time for one of my ever-so-infrequent updates on the progress of my novel. And while it's much harder to call this second draft 'done' than it was the first (where I just wrote until I ran out of story, and which point I stopped), this concludes the first stage of editing required.
What this means in hard maths is that a story that was once 119,651 words long is now 107,429. That's a difference of 12,222 words, or about 4 chapters. There are now 29 chapters where there were 33, with very little change to the overarching story, which says something about the flabbiness of my first attempt. Draft 2 is leaner, sexier and more muscular than the first, and while it's still short (or, in actually, long) of my goal of a sub-100k word count, such an objective is now looking achievable by the third go round.
Another key improvement is that the central story caveat is now set in stone. This is obviously something I should have done sometime before I started writing, but, at the end of the first revision, I now actually know what's going on in my own story.
This alone is going to make the next editing session much more enjoyable, and much more productive. With a really solid knowledge of what's going to happen, I can now work on seeding these events earlier on, and cut out anything that isn't relevant to the end goal. Before, I had a vague idea of what was going on, and kind of wrote towards that, often changing ideas or adding new caveats whenever it suited me, effectively writing off huge swathes of story that I'd written previously. It is a lot of fun to play with different ideas, but when experimenting with an idea involves abandoning tens of thousands of words worth of work, it's far from productive.
The next step, now that the ideas are set and the story reads correctly from start to finish, is to go back and polish these ideas, enmesh the technology I've designed more completely with the story. This is the fun part, the bit I like doing most. I get to separate the story into individual strands for each character, and treat each one as if it were its own novella. This way I get to establish the characters and their voices more completely, but I also get to add in and polish lots of little details that I may have overlooked when writing the broad story arcs, the fun little clever bits that make a science fiction story enjoyable to write.
To use an analogy I know very little about, the body of the building is now complete, and it's not going to fall down. The next step is to add the facade, the adornment that makes it stand out from all those other buildings.
Gears of War 3
(03/10/2011) For me, the first Gears
of War was the game that justified my purchase of a spangly new
high-definition games console. It was
the first game that didn’t seem like a polished-up PS2 title, that felt like a
genuine generation leap forward. All
that much-lauded ‘next generation’ tech was finally being used for something. And it
was great.
Five years later, we have Gears of War 3. The end of
the trilogy, arriving in the impending twilight years of the Xbox 360. The technology that once seemed so promising
and powerful now feels everyday, even a little dated. People are looking towards the future,
towards the next Xbox. And Gears
of War is still great.
 |
| New baddies keep things fresh. |
There’s little to say about Gears 3 that you won’t already know, other than that it’s Gears of War at its finest. The formula that made the first game seem
such a revelation was so close to perfect in its first iteration that only the
tiniest of tweaks have been made over the course of its two sequels. Gears 3
will not change any minds; if you loved the first two, you’ll love this
equally. If you’ve never liked Gears, there’s nothing here that’s going
to change your mind in the slightest.
 |
| Some areas are surprisingly pretty. |
This is probably the best Gears campaign yet, and that’s largely down to the pacing. After working on three games, Epic have got
the formula down to a fine art. They
know where to place choke points, where to allow downtime and when to break it,
when to throw in a turret section; it’s something Gears has always done better than many of its contemporaries, but
this is the tightest iteration yet.
It’s also bigger, bolder and brighter than its predecessors. Fittingly, this final chapter contains more grand set-pieces and large-scale battles than ever before. The maturation of Unreal Engine 3 shows in the number and variation of the locations you visit; a far cry from the almost monochrome palette of the original. Gears 3 is, throughout, a surprisingly varied and colourful journey.
 |
| Plus, there are girls in it now. |
There’s also a stronger story focus this time around, with
the plot established over the last two games finally reaching its long-awaited
conclusion. It may finish rather
abruptly, and doesn’t answer as many of the series’ long-standing questions as
I would have liked, but in truth, I don’t really care. Gears
of War is not about accomplished science-fiction; it’s about shredding
grubs with a chainsaw bayonet, diving into cover amidst a storm of bullets and
tearing through the horde with a sawn-off shotgun, and it does all of these
things impeccably.
It’s enough to simply say the Gears of War 3 is Gears of
War 3. It’s exactly what you’d
expect from the conclusion to one of the most well-respected series of recent
years. Perhaps now Epic are looking to
the future, working on a game that will come to define the next generation of
console in the way that Gears did
this one. Whatever the case, they’ve
crafted a fitting end to the Gears
saga; grand, violent and bombastic, Gears
3 stands confidently amongst the finest of modern shooters. As if anyone expected it would be otherwise.
Ode to a PlayStation 2
 |
| Dark Chronicle |
 |
| God Hand |
The PS2 era was something of a halcyon time in my gaming history. It was the gaming era that dominated in my
formative years, and coincided with me owning my own money for the first
time. I could go out and buy games
indiscriminately, to start building up a library, free from the old ‘one for Christmas
and one for your birthday’ constraint.
Not having to buy food, clothes, petrol or second homes for MPs meant
that pretty much all my money went towards games, and not having a job or a
social life meant that all my not-at-school time was devoted to gaming.
 |
| Okami |
So I played a lot of PS2 games. A lot of them were rubbish, but a few of them
were great. Properly, lastingly great,
in a way the very few games of this console generation have been. I’m inclined to agree with the people who
suggest that the PS2 era represented the peak of console videogaming; where technology
and creativity could perfectly intersect. Consoles were finally powerful enough to render humans that
looked like humans, with recognisable facial expressions and distinct
clothing. We could do audio that sounded
proper, and have characters that actually spoke. But at the same time, development costs weren’t
so enormous as to restrict depth and creativity.
 |
| Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater |
Modern technology can certainly render object with a
fidelity that makes the PS2 look laughable, but it does so at the expense of
the deeper experience. Modern versions
of older franchises are by necessity more linear and less interactive that their
forbears; look at the original Deus Ex
compared with the recent Human Revolution,
or Final Fantasy XII next to Final Fantasy XIII. And who could afford to take a risk like God Hand or Ico on a modern platform?
 |
| Dragon Quest VIII |
None of this is to say that modern games are worse than
those of the previous generation; they’re just different. Games are moving away from broad, deep
experiences and towards more controlled, cinematic ones. This is fine.
And it’s worth noting that while I hold up the PS2 as the pinnacle of
the videogaming experience, there will be people ten years my senior who would
offer an equally informed opinion of why the Super Nintendo era featured the
best games we are ever likely to see.
 |
| Persona 4 |
But, as we run full-force towards the always-online,
digitally distributed and publisher controlled future, stamping gleefully on
the shiny round plastic of our past, it is worth stopping occasionally and dusting
off a trusty old companion. It’s worth
recalling a time with no installs, no firmware, no DLC or DRM, no online passes
or pre-order exclusives. It’s worth
recalling, if only to remind ourselves that things haven’t always been this way,
and to appreciate those games that have defined our tastes, and, by doing so,
which define the impact we have on the future of our medium.
Now with that out of the way, back to Gears Of
War 3.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)