Shallow Depths

I'm slightly ashamed to admit to how much I enjoy games featuring mental asylums (and similar locations). I suppose it goes with the territory when you appreciate dark themes, uncertain layers of reality, and an ominous atmosphere.

Pervasive ideas about mentally ill meaning creepy, dangerous, subhuman and so on... those aren't so cool.  I know I'm treading through problematic territory on this one.  I suppose I find creepiness here which has more to do with how patients are treated than the patients themselves.

Barbaric treatments for mental conditions are some of my top nightmarish-fears, with the additional frightening element that 'barbaric' doesn't always mean 'in the past'. Not having asylums anymore doesn't mean everything's rosy.  So, I disturb myself by playing around in virtual asylums, then worry about the treatment of (and respect for) people with mental illnesses in the real word.

One of my favourite asylum-like locations is from Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines (spoilers ahead). For the unfamiliar, VtM includes a whole clan of insane vampires: The Malkavians. It's that well-worn idea of insanity as a two-edged gift, balancing madness with unique insight. Bloodlines eventually sends you to the mansion of Dr. Grout, the head Malkavian who has mysteriously disappeared.

Even in Grout's absence the influence of a powerful, disturbing vampire on the mansion is tangible. He was also kind enough to leave audio logs lying around, just to add to the atmosphere. It actually makes some sense for a change, as a scientist recording his thoughts and observations. Grout's insanity doesn't make him incomprehensible, he's articulate and focused (if twisted).

Another unfortunate casualty to tide of time: insane asylums. I lament their loss not only as brokerage houses for the breadth and depth of human psychosis, but also I shall mourn the disappearance of that peculiar environment present only in an insane asylum. That palpable atmosphere of blistered brains and churning bowels, the odiferous melange of freely flowing bodily humours, that gently rolling cacophony of distant sobs and screams, the muttered cursing of perceived enemies and the blissful gurgling of the lobotomized like a new-born babe discovering the sky. I shall still find test subjects as surely as I find bloody sustenance in the night, but this climate, I fear, will never be replicated.

Dr. Grout is a psychologist from an earlier time, twisted by vampirism and the Malkavian condition. He hasn't taken too kindly to the developments made in his field. Dismissive of the new-fangled ideas of Freud, he is bitter about phrenology's fall from grace and continues his more physical approach to psychology in private.

The mansion is populated by Grout's experiments, presumably former patients who have undergone crude brain surgery. The women sob quietly in corners, but quickly pull a knife if you fall for their deception. The men are more openly violent. I wonder if Grout performed different experiments on men and women, due to some old-fashioned sensibility. But maybe I'm being too generous to the game designers.

Grout sits in that awkward place between doctor and patient as he tries to make sense of his own condition. More recently, hidden segments of The Chronicle of Arkham in Batman: Arkham Asylum were used in a similar way to Grout's audio tapes. Both look back into history to describe barbaric treatment of mental patients. Both feature a doctor who has themselves turned to madness and violence.

Amadeus Arkham is more openly malicious, dealing exclusively with the criminally insane and treating them like animals. He's fueled by revenge. Grout, for all his love of screaming and crying patients, seems oddly detached. Chillingly unemotional. And yet, he's still motivated by love for his wife.

These are tragic stories for everyone involved, without any real concept of 'good'. Just beings in various states of inflicting and receiving suffering. My Bloodlines vampire is still a vampire, motivated most by self-preservation. Batman's a hero, but treads close to the line between hero and villain.

I'll avoid a longer discussion of the inmates of Arkham Asylum or I'll be here all night.  What actually prompted this post was recently playing through the 1998 adventure game Sanitarium.  It seemed like something I had to play sooner or later, combining my virtual asylum hopping with my point-and-click adventure habit.  Good Old Games calls Sanitarium "one of the most immersive and chilling psychological horror games ever created" and describes the story as "incredibly good and enthralling". Many people seem to have good memories of it.
Playing older games means putting up with a few things, in this case particularly the awkward path-finding and shoddy voice acting.  The main character's over-acted lines tend to make me laugh rather than give me the creeps: "Oh God, it's horrible".

I take these elements in stride.  What I wasn't quite expecting was just how batshit erratic Sanitarium is.  It opens with its best trick, sending you from the run-down asylum to a delusion-induced world full of creepy, deformed children. There are hidden bodies in the boarded up school-house, and everyone's afraid of the pumpkin patch. Thus far we have the kind of atmosphere I was expecting. But it's all downhill from there.

That supposedly "good and enthralling" story jumps between insects trying to take over the planet, battles between Aztec gods, an abandoned fairground and various other locations. Admittedly fairgrounds have spooky potential (nothing is scarier than clowns), but it's garish next to everything else, highlighting the inconsistency even more.

Leaving aside any problematic ideas here about what it means to be insane, the major issue is playing with different concepts of reality while making it very clear which parts are real and which are delusion. Throwing in the likes of aliens, comic book characters, and a goddamn giant squid boy will do that. When elements of reality creep in it tends to be obvious. I was hoping to be proven wrong: a twist at the end at least to make reality murky, perhaps, but it never happened.

Without that meaningful confusion what's left is a mess with no coherent vision. It's like a bunch of short adventure games strung together with a crude plot attempting to tack everything together. This isn't even B-grade material, which might not have surprised me except for some people's raving praise. I've played worse adventure games, mind, but there's really nothing special here. Sanitarium made me question my love of asylum games.
After my disappointment with Sanitarium I could at least find a more consistent asylum in Lylian Episode One: Paranoid Friendship. It's a side-scrolling platformer, featuring a girl beating things up with the untied arms of her straight jacket. It's not my best genre, and if it were I'd be complaining about uninspired combat, but it gets the atmosphere right. I gather episode two will be more puzzle-based, which would suit it much better.

Lylian fights her way through Hacklaster Hospital armed with her heavily starched sleeves and an over-active imagination. Exploring different versions of the world never feels wrong (or only in the way it should feel wrong). The creepy asylum and reality-shifting is quirky without degenerating into stupid. Lylian herself is disturbed enough to justify her odd reality.

In Lylian reality is suitably unknown. Lylian and the protagonist of Sanitarium both provide an imperfect viewpoint, but in Sanitarium's case our own sanity lets us see past his limitations. With Lylian we're stuck with her warped view of the world, and although we can assume a lot of what we're seeing isn't real it's impossible to determine what might have some basis in reality.

There might be conspiracies going on here, or just a whole lot of delusions. Episode one was too short to say too much more, but I will be looking out for future Lylian installments.

"Do not be concerned, life is hardly as precious as one might think" - Yurt, the Silent Chief, Demon's Souls

[Post includes spoilers for the early part of the game]

Returning to Demon's Souls after a long hiatus feels like falling back into the arms of an intense lover. Part of me regrets ever leaving, but it's hard to maintain so much passion and focus. From the outside this affair might seem unhealthy, but it's a willing submission to a fair master who always encourages the best from me.

In the past I've written about the difficulty in Demon's Souls being far less than many have suggested. I still feel that way, but it was also a knee-jerk reaction to difficulty dominating the conversation. My lover is not cruel. The first word I'd choose to describe Demon's Souls isn't brutal, punishing, or (gods forbid) hardcore. I'd call it 'coherent' – every element serves the overall dark fantasy vision.

Challenge is an important part of that creation, true, but it's easily over-emphasised. Still, my claim that Demon's Souls isn't ridiculously hard is about as inadequate as throwing around exaggeration from the other side ("The hardest RPG ever made, with some of the most unforgiving rules ever to be enforced on a player", honestly?).

Besides, I'm not trying to be elitist, I just want to see more sophisticated discussion of game challenges in general. If Demon's Souls is so difficult, I want to understand the nature of its challenge. Especially given personally I find, say, God of War harder. Not the most rational assessment, maybe, but not wholly without reason either. God of War has a faster pace, more complex combos, and if I get stuck I can't just try out another level instead.

Difficulty in Demon's Souls is usually described in mechanical terms. Combat is precise, and occurs in a more considered way than your average hack-and-slash. Rushing in or making small mistakes can cost you a lot. The relatively harsh penalty for death means constantly weighing up the risk of continuing, and potentially losing the chance to spend your collected souls.

However, the difficulty in Demon's Souls is, first and foremost, not about reflexes and control-mastery. It isn't even about gathering knowledge and using smarter strategies (although that helps immensely). No, in my opinion the primary reason Demon's Souls is difficult is because it challenges optimism.

Dark fantasy is usually a matter of aesthetic and thematic style, like the blood splatters and intrigues of Dragon Age. But here darkness permeates the experience more deeply, and wants you to feel despair.

The Demon's Souls tutorial teaches basic controls, then smacks you fatally with a giant axe. Even this fight can be won, but it isn't designed with your success in mind. Thus, the tutorial teaches you to feel hopeless. This is also the point where you discover soul form, and have your hit points capped at 50%. Objectively, this isn't any different to displaying a short-but-full hit point gauge, as is common when just starting out in action games. But the psychological impact of seeing your hit points reduced by half is huge.

Much of the best survival horror can make you feel powerless, but it's rarely the intention of other action or roleplaying games. We're surrounded by so many power fantasies an alternative can come as a shock.

The first level is arguably the hardest level to face. Certainly not in terms of the layout or enemies themselves, or even the time it takes to find better equipment, but because you've just been smacked in the nose. And because you can't level your character until you've beaten the first boss. This makes the first level the most rogue-like (in the sense of losing character progress with death, although items are still retained). It's an achievable goal, but the set-up is bound to make you feel under-powered.

Beating the first demon Phalanx is a sweet moment of success. It unlocks the ability to level up, and you earn your body back so that hit-point cap disappears. (You also do less damage in body form, which is one of several reasons I often character-suicide after a boss fight, but people are less likely to mention that bit). You're a successful demon hunter now, and continue into the next part of the level with a new sense of achievement.

Success is likely to be short-lived. Clear a room, and continue on towards the castle. This is the point where many of those who haven't been forewarned will die to a red dragon, who torches them unexpectedly from the sky. If not the dragon, it will probably be something else. Your body is unceremoniously snatched away, and you begin the slow process of level mastery all over again. Swiftly taking away a reward as though to punish anyone who became too happy or complacent. Demon's Souls isn't going to let you forget that power has to be earnt.

In an information sense, Demon's Souls is very restrained, both with its story/characters and mechanics. Story is filled in by imagination. Mechanics are learnt through experience, which requires experimentation (and looking up guides, which I consider valid). Lack of information in general can make you feel inexperienced and vulnerable.

The community discussion surrounding Demon's Souls has also increased its infamy, and feeds the perception of challenge. For example, the statement "the game can get harder if you die too much." is technically correct, but gives a misleading impression without more detailed discussion of the world tendency system, especially if playing online. Word tendency is too involved to fully explain here (see the Wiki if needed), but the idea of a game that gets harder every time you die has coloured a lot of ill-informed discussion, even sometimes among those who have played the game.

Perceptions going into Demon's Souls are likely to be harsh.

The not-so-well-kept secret is that Demon's Souls' challenge can be overcome, and success feels all the sweeter for it. But tackling the difficulty curve is always an emotional challenge before anything else. That might not be comfortable thought, but to me it's what makes the difficulty most worth discussing. And perhaps why I'll persist here, while I avoid most games with a challenging reputation.

Nier was one of the cult hits of 2010: clearly not a game for everyone, but still deserving of a place among my favourites.  Several things make Nier special, but right now I want to talk about how its towns and cities feel (to me, at least).

The unnamed village Nier calls home is a somewhat idealised rural setting.  Green fields extend to the north and south, and the marketplace is active, if not exactly bustling.  The background music in the village is tinged with sadness, but always manages to feel like coming home.  The waterwheel turns, the farmers fatten their stock, and residents share a drink at the local tavern.

Many have talked about how they felt the first time they loaded up Ocarina of Time and experienced the wonder of a green, three-dimensional landscape laid out in front of them for the first time.  I don't share those memories, so was a little surprised to see so many comparisons between Zelda and Nier, but I suppose I understand the familiarity of an idyllic, rural setting more generally.

As it turns out, this is one of many places Nier makes the most of its unoriginality.  Bucolic doesn't really do it justice.

If I pay more attention to what's going on in the lives of these villagers, the above description is quite misleading.  Life is rough for these people.  They fear the increasing attacks by shades (the game's major enemies), and start to suffer food shortages as their fields become unsafe.  The children are restless, the traders are going broke, and the tavern becomes a retreat for the desperate.

People genuinely worry about their future, and their hardships are expressed to the player frequently.  But no matter how many villagers complain about safety on the roads or struggling to feed a large family, the idyllic atmosphere of Nier's village is never threatened.  The grass is still green, the river is clean and full of fish, and the market stays open.

In other words, the villagers' difficulties are understood rather than felt.  I don't know if this was intended, but it has some interesting side-effects.

For one thing, it further emphasises that even though Nier lives in this village, he's also an outsider.  He's not well enough integrated with his community to completely share in its suffering.  Nier is welcome here: he receives expressions of sympathy and help looking after his daughter.  But he's frequently away from home, and (more importantly) not really respected.  It's easy to look down on the man who gratefully snaps up demeaning work, and throws himself into a seemingly hopeless quest for years on end.  It sets up a permanent barrier between him and the rest of the village.

Another result of being disconnected from local suffering is creating a place with layers.  One way of looking at it is  a feeling of secrets or hidden darkness.  The truth hiding behind the false perfect surface.  Personally, though, I prefer to think of it as multiple layers of reality existing simultaneously.  Each layer is a valid truth, able to co-exist here.  Without giving too much away, the mixed message is highly appropriate to Nier's premise and undercurrents.

To the south is a seafront town, which is a larger and more populous than the village but shares a similar vibe, dominated by expanses of blue sea and sky.  Instead, I'm going to move northwest, to another small settlement known as The Aerie.  It's structurally very impressive, consisting of a series of small houses and walkways built high over a deep chasm.  Breathtaking, certainly, but it feels exposed and usually looks deserted.  Aurally, it hits me with a wall of haunting choir voices.  Add dull colours and sometimes fog effects, and we're in an oppressive and unsettling environment rather than an open and airy one.

My initial reaction to The Aerie was that its people must be rather eccentric.  It would require some very determined engineering at this level of technology just to keep the place stable.  But it's highly defensible, in a short-sighted way: there's one path in, and cutting off that walkway will isolate them completely.

The Aerie residents are usually shut up in their houses, and yell at me to go away if I try to coax them out.  My main understanding of the place comes from snippets of conversation overhead through the walls.  Dealing with them means overcoming fear and prejudice.  We're not only an outsider here, but also a potential enemy.

Over time The Aerie becomes progressively more crazed, as fear gives way to other emotions.  At the extremes, people become shades themselves and are forced to turn on each other.  At one particularly memorable point, I overheard a child's voice as I passed by their house, begging their mother to stop hurting them.  I froze for a few seconds to let the wave of horror wash over me.  If I could have broken down the door I would have.

The Aerie does not set up mixed messages: it's very clear about what it is.  Its self-destructive path also gives a clearer view of some of the layers present in the village, which suffers from its own insularity, prejudice, and even child neglect.  Zelda this is not.

I would like, now, to travel to the desert-city of Facade.  But that requires a long journey, and a large cultural shift.  It's enough of a departure to tell a separate story, which may belong to another day.

'Roleplaying Game' is one of those awkward genre labels meaning different things to different people.  I don't have a good personal definition, but one element I consider to be at the core of RPGs is questing.

It's a little contrived, but somehow I love being bossed around and completing tasks for people.  Preferably something more involved than being asked to kill ten wolves, but World of Warcraft is the only game I've played where grinding quests were quite so ridiculously blatant and over-used.  Usually quests are a bit more interesting, and reveal pieces of the world and its inhabitants I wouldn't see otherwise.

I'll usually happily do whatever characters ask, even when it gets silly.  I'm supposed to be on a critical mission, but apparently still have time to rescue someone's cat, or run an errand.  I don't usually question it much.  There's a time to question game conventions and motivations, and a time to just be satisfied that I'm enjoying myself.

Honestly, the core stories of many RPGs are generic and silly anyway.  I adore Baldur's Gate, but I don't remember much about the main story.  I do remember meeting mad wizards in the forest, reuniting lovers, the personalities of my companions, and a lot of other small moments.  I find the real stories tucked away in sidequests and hidden corners of the game.

It is very unusual for me to find a quest and decide not to complete it, but it has happened.  The main example I can think of was from Mass Effect 1.

The quest is known as Family Matter, and involves a couple found arguing on the Citadel streets.  A pregnant woman is concerned about the risks involved in obtaining gene therapy for her unborn child, while her brother-in-law argues for how important that therapy is to avoid a possible genetic heart defect which had recently killed the baby's father.  There is no clear advantage or disadvantage to taking one side over the other – the game itself is neutral with regard to right and wrong on this issue.

I'm prepared to accept that my Shepard is an unusually influential person.  I'm not controlling just any old peon here.  I am happy to believe she could say something about choices and genetics, and actually have it taken to heart.  But that doesn't necessarily mean she would.

As Shepard I made life and death decisions constantly.  The fate of entire species was regularly in my hands, and I was willing to take on that responsibility.  I helped shaped the beliefs of my crew in addition to earning their respect.

But when faced with this particular choice I recoiled, and gaped at the choice in front of me. Advancements in genetic technology do come with more than their share of ethical questions, and weighting up benefits and disadvantages.  I'm happy to see that tackled in a science fiction game, but not in such a throw-away scenario.  I would never tell someone how to make a decision like that.  I wouldn't advise a close friend, let alone a stranger on the street.  It's not my place, and it's not my Shepard's place.

I went with the only other option available to me.  Shepard threw her hands in the air, said 'To hell with this' and left them to it.  In the process I knowingly sacrificed some easy Paragon or Renegade points, but there is no way I was willing to make that call.

 My latest review is for Rainblood Town of Death.  It's a cool little game, but explaining that proved more challenging than I expected.

I've been working a lot on my approach to reviewing recently, so I feel a bit mixed about my previous reviews going live.  I notice things I didn't at the time.  Game People are always happy to change things when I ask, but there's a point where I just need to let go and put it down to experience.

I also wrote this before the 'Microcosm Gamer' angle was really pinned down, so that stuff feels a bit tacked on.  Or maybe it's just because those bits are not quite my words.

The phrase "pushed all those buttons for me" really stands out because I have almost certainly never said/written that.  I have fairly extreme reactions to clichés.  My partner reminded me they can be shortcuts to understanding, and I probably don't need to have quite such a violent reaction to them.

I realise avoiding clichés is good writing advice.  But recently I've added in a few deliberately here and there as an experiment.  Just trying to get a bit more perspective on them before I go back to avoiding them.  I guess I have a strange approach to understanding writing.

I am documenting my learning process here, so I can point and laugh at some of the things I am trying to do better.  I'll always be my own worst (best?) critic, and little details really stood out on my Rainblood review.

The first paragraph has Rainblood as two words, for one thing.  That part wasn't mine, but it's still partly my lack of observation letting things slip through.

My own bad habits really bite on the second paragraph.  I begin with genre labelling, which is lazy and I'm training myself out of it.  Game genres are pretty unhelpful anyway.  On this blog I currently have the tags "action", "action-adventure", and "action-rpg".  Which are messy, but damned if I know how to fix them.

Roleplaying game is a particularly fuzzy concept (let alone whatever a "Role Play Game" is).  Maybe if I'd specified roleplaying in the sense of old-school console roleplaying games, like classic Final Fantasy, it would have meant something to someone.  But even that wouldn't be a very promising beginning.

To me, the only vaguely important ideas in that sentence were that it was indie, Chinese, and recently translated.  Indie was edited out at some point without me noticing, and suddenly I'm describing a popular game instead of a popular indie game, which is a pretty big difference.  Popular is a subjective term, but potentially sitting Rainblood next to World of Warcraft makes me a tad uncomfortable.

So, I start off with a fuzzy and slightly misleading sentence.  Good job, Cha.

If I can get past my fixation with that particular sentence there is still a lot here I found interesting.  Particularly what it takes for game violence to retain its emotional impact.  I was only touching on the edge of that topic, but it's a big one.

With a large pile of unfinished games spoilers are always a potential issue.  I am pretty far along the spoiler-hating spectrum.  I avoid trailers, and sometimes even refuse to read book blurbs.  I realise that's pretty extreme, and I don't actually expect anyone to be that considerate.  I've had to learn to make allowances, but I am still reasonably choosy about the information I read.

If I care strongly about a particular game I'll prioritise playing it, and be careful about what I read online.  Normally this works out fine.

Mass Effect 2 is something I would normally prioritise, partly because a lot of my friends play it.  But I held off this time, and decided to finish Dragon Age: Origins first.  This plan didn't work out very well.  I started to get really bored with the monotonous Deep Roads (old Dwarven tunnels).  Then the weather started to get colder, making console gaming by the heater a more attractive option than the PC in my freezing bedroom.

So, of course Mass Effect 2 has been coming up in conversation at just about every social event I attend.  I have talkative friends who are not easily put off once they start telling anecdotes.  One or two of these conversations I could have handled, but after the third or fourth I rapidly hit my spoiler threshold and started acting like a brat about it.

And it really is being brat.  Maybe if it came out last week I'd have something to complain about.  As is, it's a pretty minor thing and I brought it on myself.  I could do to get more perspective sometimes.

What actually interested me most about this situation was the difference of opinion about what constitutes a spoiler.  Once everyone knows someone listening hasn't played a game (and intends to) there are certain things they will hold back, and other things they continue to discuss without any concern.

We are probably all in agreement about any pivotal plot twists being spoilers.  But after that it gets messier.

In the case of Bioware games, I normally expect very little from the overarching plot.  The first Mass Effect really interested me at first, with the worlds and characters it had created.  By by the end it had devolved into sickening patriotism, with humanity as the last hope for the universe.  I rapidly went from loving to hating it.  My major wish for the series is that we all get bitten in the arse for our arrogance.  Which may well happen, but I still don't really trust them to fix the things I have big problems with.

So, I haven't been too concerned about the larger-scale stuff in Mass Effect 2.  I am much more interested in the smaller stories and character interactions.  Those are also the things my friends have been less guarded about, and after so many conversations I've heard about quite a lot of them.  They are spoilers to me, but clearly I have opposite ideas about which topics are most important to avoid.

I've been thinking a lot about spoilers in my writing, and how to handle them.  As usual the answer is just to use my best judgement, and keep working on improving my writing.  As well as hoping people will forgive me when I do cross a line.

My latest Game People review is for The Witcher.

I've been intending to say more about The Witcher than just about the sex. A lot of it went into that review, which I really enjoyed writing. It's really more analysis than review, even by my usual standards.

I may just have played too much D&D, but neutrality is actually a personally important concept to me.

What I want to mention briefly is a mistake I made. In that review I use "who" to refer to monsters. I do consider it a mistake, but as errors go it's kind of perfect. After all, it's really the whole point. The scariest monsters are not external to humanity -- they are created from it.

The other game I indulged in over the ANCAC Day long weekend was Nier.  I doubt it's going to be a widely popular game, but I like it.

The game begins in a decaying city in the year 2049.  Our protagonist is desperately trying to defend his sick daughter.  It felt rather poignant to me, and I found myself caring about their plight.  Wielding a length of pipe and fighting wave after wave of monsters in the snow, I felt a bit like I was experiencing a cross between Silent Hill and God of War.

Nier is a bit of an odd fish, and seems unwilling to let me get too comfortable.  So, naturally the next thing that happened was jumping 1,300 years into the future, where the game-proper begins.  I guessed this was a case of reincarnation and history repeating itself, though it could be time travel for all I currently know.  I expect things will be revealed in time.  I have to say, I was a little bit disappointed at this point.  I found the earlier setting significantly more compelling than the village we were transported to.  But I was prepared to run with it.

We are soon introduced to Grimoire Wiess, a magical floating book who should hold the key to curing Nier's sick daughter of the mysterious and fatal "black scrawl".  The book practically drips sarcasm, and is wonderfully voiced.  The banter between Neir and Weiss is one of the game's highlights.  The soundtrack is also excellent, and adds a great deal of atmosphere.

Nier is a sort of post-modern game mash-up.  Though the core is formed from RPG and action-adventure, it includes sections of (or homages to) many other genres, including 2D platforming, survival horror, rail shooter, and even text adventure.  This tends to get it accused of being a jack of all trades, and master of none.  I have to admit though, I hadn't really noticed those shortcomings.  Perhaps because I've been more focused on the overall vibe, and themes.

Occasionally, a story will touch upon something very relevant to me, and that increases its impact.  One of the minor themes that has come up a few times involves the choice between promoting an unpleasant truth and a happy lie.  That hits very close to home for me, for reasons too personal even for Personal Gamer.  Suffice to say seeing people kept in the dark for their own good really bothers me, and I'll always give people the right to their own pain.

There are other themes I've found interesting, but I'm not delving too far into spoiler territory for a newly released game.

I find this a difficult game to comment on, because it already seems to comment on itself so thoroughly.  I'm a side-quest completist, and I have been prompted to question my behaviour because the game seems to be openly mocking me for it.  Errands which may have seemed reasonable when playing a 14-year-old in other games suddenly seem demeaning as a man in his 40s.  And Weiss is quick to point out how pathetic it is.

It's true that side-quests are where the grind is found, and this may be a more exciting game by ignoring those in favour of the main story.  Also, there is fishing.  Fishing mini-games really are one of my pet hates in gaming.  I probably deserve to feel mocked for doing the fishing quests even though I know it isn't something I enjoy.

Really, there is a large element of choice here about how you prefer to play these kinds of experiences -- quick and action-heavy, or broken up with some fishing, gardening and fetch quests?  The difficulty seems forgiving enough that grinding is not really required.

"Hardcore" is another one of those terms thrown around a lot in relation to gaming, even though the definition is pretty fuzzy. Ditto "casual" on the other end of that supposed spectrum.

I don't own an XBox 360, rarely play FPS games, and don't usually enjoy competitive multiplayer. That rules me out of most of the stereotypes that pop into my head when someone uses the phrase "hardcore gamer". Also, although I find games fun and interesting I've never considered myself particularly skilled at them (though I have improved a lot in recent years).

I don't think that makes me a casual gamer, either (although the fun I've been having recently with Endless Ocean 2 may beg to differ). I'm pretty happy with my average-skilled, variable-genre approach to gaming.

Interestingly, some of the games I love do often get labelled as hardcore. Give me a standard FPS, or a God of War, and I'll worry about whether I can get through on normal difficulty. But give me a "hardcore" game that many people are not brave enough to touch, and I may actually be closer to my comfort zone.

A relatively recent example of a "game-I-like-that-may-be-considered-hardcore" is Demon's Souls (PS3). I still have a long way to go in this game, but to be honest I'm not finding it as challenging as many people have suggested. It does require a couple of important things. One is a willingness to go through a learning process. Another is to accept that you are probably going to die quite a bit in the pursuit of the knowledge and experience you require. Given that, the ability to study the deaths of other players by touching their bloodstains can sometimes come in very handy. Messages left on the ground by other players are also usually helpful rather than misleading.

While there are some reflex requirements, a large part of actually progressing in Demon's Souls comes from learning the level layouts (such as where to expect ambushes), and the best strategies for various enemies.


I suppose the "hardcore" label here comes from the fact that dying is quite easy to do. But the consequences for death are not as extreme as they could be. The level and all its enemies do reset after every death, forcing you to start over. But your character level and equipment continue to get stronger. Combine increasing character strength, with the knowledge you are gathering about the levels each time, and things really do get progressively easier.

After your first death, you continue to play in "soul form", which limits you to half-health (there is a ring in the first level to make that 70% instead of 50%). You will also do slightly more damage in soul form, so it isn't all bad. Getting your body back requires you to use a semi-rare item or defeat a boss. Alternately, you can invade another player's world as a Black Phantom and try to kill them, or as a Blue Phantom and co-operate to help them defeat a boss.

All this "soul form" thing really means is that you get used to being dead most of the time. Rather than feeling nerfed, you start to feel enhanced at the times when you do possess a proper physical body.

Besides, if I settle for soul form no one is going to invade my world to try and attack me :) That scared the crap out of me the first time it happened. I was a new player tentatively exploring an area that was slightly high-level for me. I hadn't considered the possibility of being ganked by a Black Phantom of much higher level. I felt a bit like a mouse being hunted by a bird of prey, but there were no good hiding-places to run to. The Black Phantom had much more to gain out of that situation than I had to lose, though, so in the end I didn't really mind. Later invasions by Black Phantoms were thankfully more evenly matched.

I've only played through enough Demon's Souls to defeat about six bosses so far. But, based partly on observations of my partner playing through to the end, there doesn't seem to be much of a difficulty curve. The game sets a relatively punishing difficulty from the start, and then stays that way.

I think overall these game design decisions lead to the perception the game is difficult and everything is against you. But the reality isn't quite as harsh as it may appear. When it's perfectly feasible to overcome something that initially appeared cruelly difficult, that's quite a powerful, confidence-boosting hook for gamers. Provided they can get over that first hurdle.

I'm not saying Demon's Souls is an easy game, by any stretch. I do find it really encouraging that there is still a market for challenging games. I think of this as a "love it or hate it" kind of experience, so I was really surprised to see an 89 on Metacritic. I really should get back to finishing it on of these days...

My favourite current-generation RPG so far is The Witcher, and I'm really looking forward to the sequel.

Unfortunately, Geralt's sexual exploits got rather more attention than the rest of the game.  It's not really the part I'm most interested in.  But I'm getting it out of the way first with this post, since it seems to come up whenever this game is discussed.

Geralt is infertile and immune to disease, but his promiscuity remains potentially quite emotionally reckless.  And I will admit it's pretty tacky to reduce sexual intimacy to a series of collectable playing cards.  It was widely labelled as yet another game trying to call itself mature, while including sex in a gratuitous, sexist, and immature way. I have a slightly different take on this.

I don't think casual sex is particularly terrible or sexist in itself -- provided everyone is adult, consenting, honest, and engaging in safe behaviours, of course.  It is important to note that women in The Witcher are not mindless or passive in the whole affair.  It's not quite as simple as one man jumping into bed with every woman he meets.  The game is staying true to what is a morally grey world with no real innocents.  Few people, regardless of gender, are going to come off looking good in that world.  The protagonist is a product of a society full of corrupt politics, sexism, and racism against non-humans.  He is not designed to be completely likeable, and participating in his story does not require me to condone everything he does.

Does the card collecting mini-game risk sending the message that women are nothing but sexual conquests?  Maybe, but if so the reactions I've seen online certainly were not happy to play along.  Most people saw it as childish and misogynistic... and I personally think that was the intended reaction.  If it made you uncomfortable maybe that's a good thing.

Our Witcher, for all his bravery and combat skill, is seriously lacking when it comes to emotional development.  When faced with relationships beyond the physical -- the possibility of love, family and commitment -- he doesn't handle it well.  He doesn't see himself as capable of those emotions, or he simply doesn't consider it compatible with his violent, lone-wolf lifestyle.

When he can't be flippant about sex Geralt suddenly becomes rather lost, and is a pitiable character in this context.  I found that an interesting situation to contemplate, and it's one where the player can clearly separate themselves from the character they are controlling.  Put simply, he makes some bad choices that we can avoid.

Speaking as someone who identifies as polyamorous I do think it's unfortunate you are more likely to encounter an orgy in a game than a multiple-relationship situation.  It's possible to handle multiple partners in a responsible way without falling back on the old standard of monogamous and committed = good, every other sexual lifestyle = bad.  There are other ways to be responsible about sex and relationships, though there is currently a serious lack of good examples from games and other fictional spaces.  Not to mention a scarcity of good real-life role-models.

Geralt is certainly no role-model, and his emotional flaws are highly visible.  But, coming from my own non-puritanical point of view, it was interesting to consider where exactly he goes wrong.

The interviews I've seen for the Witcher 2 suggest the game will continue to include Geralt's womanising aspects, but the collectable cards are disappearing.

From The Witcher Vault:

We definitely retain the 'womanizing' part. After all, Sapkowski himself created Geralt this way, and there's a lot of "that stuff" in the books. But even though we plan to retain sexuality, a lot has changed regarding the presentation. For one, we completely forgo the card collecting aspect. No more sex for roses or gloves. We are more interested in a cinematic type of approach here, less of 'another feather in the cap' and more of a relationship/emotionally warranted displays of affection. Possibly quite like in some of the modern games, like "Heavy Rain" – we want to make it so that the plot and characters' personalities logically conclude in them being together. This will definitely be closer to an "R-rated movie" than a card-collecting game. After all, we're not making the game for the hormone-driven 14 year-olds, but for mature players.

I'm not sure if Heavy Rain was the most appropriate game to refer to here.  But this does suggest some intent for the sexual aspects to mature a little.  I suspect there will still be a lot of complaints, but I at least will be interested to see how they handle it this time around.

I love character creation. I can happily fiddle with sliders for hours trying to create something I'm happy with (and get a sense of their personality while I'm at it). Dragon Age is a good place to look for customisation, though I gather some other games have recently done an even better job.

We have the usual starting point: male or female? I've recently been spoilt by Demon's Souls which has a slider bar for gender, allowing you to be androgynous or anywhere you like along a spectrum. I thought that was pretty awesome, and I sighed a little at returning to the binary choice here. It was expected, though.

Choosing a female character, I was told that women and men are considered by most people to be of equal skill. Since then, my character has been subjected to a lot of talk about how pretty she is but that she's proving difficult to marry off. Every second character I've spoken to has commented on the fact that I'm female, and that it's highly unusual for women to join the Fellowship Spectres Grey Wardens. I've also had a lot of dialogue options say things like "Oh stop whining! I'm braver than you and I'm [just] a woman!".

I don't actually mind if a fictional world is presented as equal opportunity or not, because I think they can be a useful space for exploring issues. A strong female character in a society that doesn't always recognise it isn't automatically a terrible story. But you can't really have it both ways. I think this may be the result of them trying a bit too hard to prove they have catered dialogue to different kinds of characters.

Moving along, and we come to deciding between being a human, dwarf or elf. Sadly, the elves and dwarves really just look like differently-proportioned humans, and I much prefer my different races to look, well, different. When the elves in game have a hairstyle that covers their ears I often can't actually tell them apart from the humans. This is a large part of why I really like games that let me play more unusual races like orcs or lizardmen. It actually forces the designers to create something.

The male dwarves don't look too bad, and I think beards might help slightly to hide how plastic and expressionless these characters can be in the cut-scenes (Mass Effect wins slightly here over Dragon Age for at least allowing your character to speak). But my partner is going with the dwarf option, so I decided to stick with human.

Dragon Age made a big deal out of its character backgrounds, and getting to play through a short origin section. As a human rogue my only option was, of course, to come from a noble family (um... sure). I chose to ignore this when I was customising my character's appearance, and created the rangery character I actually wanted to play. She has relatively dark skin and hair, with facial henna tattoos and almost tribal-looking hair. I was then plonked into my mediaeval castle with my very pale English-looking parents discussing arranged marriages and such. I imagined I must be the product of an affair, which everyone pretends to ignore despite her different heritage being plainly visible. I don't think adoption is much of an option when everyone is going on about the age and importance of our family line.

So, I got some amusement out of all of that, but it really was not ideal. There will, I'm sure, be plenty of good points to this game now that I can settle into it properly and stop laughing at the ridiculousness of my starting point.

The gameplay leaves a bit to be desired, but that isn't always Bioware's strong point. The camera angles and cooldown management were done better in WoW, while the full-party management was better back in the Baldur's Gate days, or in Final Fantasy XII where the AI settings (gambits/tactics) were more intuitive and sophisticated. Dragon Age feels like it has tried to lump all of these games together, with mixed success. I can at least see the potential in what they tried to do, but I hope they work on it more for future games.

The story is incredibly generic so far, but that's what I knowingly signed up for, and most other games lack worlds and character interactions as complex and interesting, sadly (Demon's Souls, for example, has fantastic gameplay, but it doesn't even try to include a story worth a damn). I dream of Bioware one day making something that isn't playing things quite so safe, but in the meantime I guess I'll be busy trying to build an army for an epic battle against Sauron the Darkspawn.