Grand Theft Auto IV Review

This is the victory we fought for.

After playing through the entirety of the Grand Theft Auto 3D saga, it was only a matter of time before I moved onwards to the HD era of GTA games; an era so named for it's total transition of the very gamified PlayStation 2 era of Grand Theft Auto games to a much more grounded vision with a greater focus on nailing a convincing world simulation. Of course this would mean coming back to one game that I've held something of a stigma towards for many years now for being the dour and boring uncle of the Grand Theft Auto pantheon. Not quite a true sequel to the ambition of San Andreas, but not quite a spin-off title worth being pushed aside in this impromptu journey across the Grand Theft Auto franchise. And in refreshing my memory of Grand Theft Auto IV I was happy, although not entirely surprised, to find my concerns and prejudices to be somewhat overinflated and exaggerated. I'm glad to say I quite enjoyed my GTA IV playthrough.

But why was I so stand-offish on GTA IV from my first playthrough? (which I did back when it first launched) And why was that playthrough the only one I did? (I played the 'Episodes' spin-offs countless times more.) It was an impression I believe was born both from the drastic shift in tone that IV mounted in comparison to the last game, the just as strong shift in innovation priority which defied my natural expectation as a consumer who just wanted bigger and louder and the wave of pop culture diluting my own recollection into remembering GTA IV as much more boring than it really was. We've all seen the old memes about the hang-out system and Roman constantly bugging the player to go bowling, and somewhere along the line that impression of the package melded into my own.

I think the greatest offender for this light brain-washing was a contemporary of GTA IV that I was quite infatuated with. Saints Row 2. That was a game that embraced it's silly goofiness in order to differentiate what was initially a very derivate gangbanger franchise and become the zanier, more adrenaline fuelled cousin of boring old GTA. Most famously celebrated in a trailer that literally compared the most boring aspects of GTA IV (going bowling, watching TV etc.) to the silliest moments of Saints Row 2. (Setting yourself on fire on a buggy, spewing septic waste on passerbys.) It was a propaganda video, and intentionally very tongue-in-cheek; but it's ultimate legacy might have been more effective than the team were going for because when I think back to my childhood, the GTA they painted was the game I remembered; not the one I just played through right now.

Of course, none of that is to say that Grand Theft Auto IV wasn't in anyway a slow and sometimes tedious experience; in fact I think there are some considerable problems with pacing and narrative, as well as the frequency of certain activities, which bar me from considering this the Masterpiece that some of the community assert that it is. But when I take the game for all of it's successes and judge them up, I can certainly see the ground those people stand-on when they make their hill to die on. Grand Theft Auto IV is a worthy sequel to San Andreas, just not in the way I expected it to be when I first played the game all those years ago, and I very glad I took the time to relieve that experience and clear up those murky recollections once and for all.

Firstly, I want to talk about that tonal shift I keep alluding to which colours a lot of opinions about Grand Theft Auto. Before IV and even after, Grand Theft Auto had this aura of flamboyance about it's action and presentation that served in the creation of the satire-world that GTA inhabits. Whether that was with cartoony violence, thematically over-the-top UI script, or huge ridiculous spectacle; Grand Theft Auto leaned into the flashy and loud over the serious and contemplative. IV doesn't abandon these principles entirely, and the Rockstar flamboyance is still stretched over the skin of the world and some of the sillier characters and dialogues, but narrative weight is a new prime focus of development and you can feel that hanging off of every new system IV introduced. This time it was all about nailing the story of Niko Bellic. 

To this end the entire presentation of Grand Theft Auto IV was toned down significantly, to a degree that would come to be the style of that generation of games. (Thanks in no small part to this game.) The UI is minimalistic and dynamically fading, monochromatically coloured with a stark unembellished font. The general world palette was seeped into duller and more mundane characters, to some degree better fitting the entirely built-up environment of New York based-Liberty City, whilst to some degree taking the artistic direction even further than that. During nights in particular the colour seems to literally drain out of the world to the point where your screen is almost approaching grey-scale; indicative of a world that attempts to better explore the grim toil of a life drowned in shades of grey.

I think that the renewed focus on systems that have been characterised as 'mundane', such as managing friendships by keeping in touch with people, living in run-down apartments and never expanding to the mega mansion of late-game San Andreas and even being forced to slow down and pay your way through toll booths on a certain overpass; all contribute to that same vision. A vision of a world that is not quite as glamourous and glitzy, but rough and real and even grimey at times. I've bought this up before, but it's impossible to review Grand Theft Auto IV without addressing the phenomena where creating a world that feels bound by the constraints of the real world inherently makes it so that when the player breaks free of those constraints and does something wild, like get in a close-range shotgun fight with Italian mobsters or blow up a car in traffic with a rocket launcher, that juxtaposition heightens the impact of the excitement. Of course, this approach does have it's consequences too.

Some of the innovations that where tipped towards feeding this theme for GTA IV push over the line to being tedious for the sake of being tedious. Forcing players to walk around clothing stores to find the piece of clothing they want to wear and then trying it on to see if they like it and then buying it is just several steps too many to show off an interactive dynamic context window. Cutting back on the RPG elements and car customisation of San Andreas, on the otherhand, just feel like downgrades from their previous game, and yet I'll bet that at some point in development the team's refocusing away from expanding those sorts of features was justified with "Those ideas don't quite suit what we're going for this time around."

Additionally, I think this thematic shift tainted the team's approach to mission design in an overall negative fashion, particularly in the beginning opener levels. The first string of missions in GTA IV, forming the entire first act pretty much, are painfully slow as the game walks you through practically each new innovation that game has to offer barefaced and bald. As in, some of these missions are so rudimentary and bare faced that they literally exist only to introduce the new physics system, or the new Internet Café, or whatever new thing the game has to show you, and then immediately ends. Ideally you want tutorial missions to be woven into actual narrative progression so you're being taught whilst pushing forward the story, but early GTA IV has absolutely no interest in moving the plot along or even laying out the foundations of the plot beyond the bare basic. 

You're an immigrant who has little problem working with the mob. That's literally your only motivation for the entirety of the first act of the game. San Andreas may have offered very unspecific and soft edged motives, such as 'cleaning up the hood' or 'bringing back the Grove', but at least that was something to cling on to. Early Niko seems to stand for practically nothing and want seemingly nothing which makes it annoying to endure that snore-fest of an opening act until the later missions where general events start actually happening. Pretty much from the moment you're pushed into killing your first main character, the actual narrative picks up and begins to propel itself. (Which, incidentally, is also when you learn that your main character has motives! Something I actually forgot from when I first played the game; I'd wiped my mind of this game that thoroughly!)

The passive protagonist is a common problem of open world games and Grand Theft Auto games in particular, but for the majority of the time it's not a huge glaring problem because the storylines are just vehicles for causing carnage that aren't really supposed to make any real sense. GTA IV changes that expectation with a personally driven revenge plot, but does very little for fixing the passive protagonist problem beyond having Niko loudly exclaim about the people he's looking for every now and again. Not too much that it get's annoying, but rare enough that you can begin to forget exactly why you're stealing Heroin from the Triad for small-time Italian gangsters. One of the criticisms that Red Dead Redemption received when it first released (Which I heavily disagreed with at the time) was that the narrative spins its wheels as the player is constantly doing favours for pay-offs that never come. But for GTA IV getting stiffed out of your promised favour is like a core running theme; and it can start to make the story feel a little structureless after the fourth contact you've burnt with nothing to show for it.

But there is a formula which drives the plot, and it's a time honoured tradition of Grand Theft Auto spruced up with a constantly repeated, but effective, cap. You are ferried across three islands that are initially blocked off from you but get slowly opened up as you become more familiar with the city and the 'Six Degrees of Separation' start connecting you to all the filthy hives across the city. I actually really like how well this game does integrating you into the various walks of criminal life from street dealers to community pushers to organised gangsters; you really do touch every division of the underworld throughout your journey into the muck. And most of the contacts you make are capped off with a point at which you have to kill a named character you've worked with, cutting off that contact entirely. It's an effective stopgap which is recycled three of four times throughout the game and though it begins to become a bit predictable by the late game, I like how it reinforces that previously untouched moral of this new face for GTA: the wicked dig their own graves.

Morality stings at the heart of GTA IV in a way I don't think the franchise has every really addressed before, at least not with a totally straight face. The scars of the unspecified war which Niko waged are addressed frequently and the unspoken question of whether his quest to vindicate the dead is making him worse than his quarry touches at the edges of the narrative tapestry. There's not so much pathos of this theme, however, which can make it feel somewhat unfulfilled by the final credits; like a balloon blown up but never tied off. I suppose that sort of introspection is better suited for Rockstar's other franchises like L.A. Noire and Red Dead Redemption. I applaud them for even going that route, and think it serve the general emotion this game was going for well; I'm just unsure if that hollow empty note after the final monologue was played as effective as it could have been. A solid ending could have very easily been a poignant one with a little plot retooling and rewrites.

I was both impressed and pleasantly surprised to find the game has multiple endings, and though they wrap up in very similar fashions to one another, their distinctly different consequences are intriguing and unavoidable. (Rather unlike GTA V's somewhat cop-out 'Choice C' ending.) On a curious note, it really struck me, at the crossroads moment where you choose one path or another, how strikingly similar this last choice was to the finale of Red Dead Redemption 2's main narrative. Only Red Dead Redemption 2 did such a good job tackling the concept of morality and corruption that I think even that very easy and obvious choice between the 'right' and 'wrong' path evoked somewhat guttural emotional decisions. I know I was practically vehement when I made my choice at the end of RDR2; whereas in GTA IV I really just picked the option which I thought would be more satisfying narratively. (Only to find out that in the other ending, Niko gives a much better final speech. Bugger.)

There is no possible way to talk about GTA IV without at least mentioning the three-way narrative, and how cleverly that was pulled off. For those that don't know, GTA IV is actually the most substantial chunk of a trilogy of games that all tell concurrent narratives which cross over with each other here and there. The crossover is mostly on the diamond plotline, which is more important for the other two narratives than it is for Niko, but the deft with which the team managed to weave these other characters in and out of the story (both obviously and in the background) is applause worthy. At the very least it makes it a necessity for anyone playing through the mainline GTA games to also put up with Episodes From Liberty City. No great chore, those snippets of game are great as far as I remember. (We'll see when I review both if they live up to memory.)

Functionally, GTA IV was another step-up in terms of gameplay into basic cover based shooting mechanics which, whilst not exactly competitive in today's landscape, worked well enough to make combat more exciting than painful. (I still get GTA 3 nightmares for it's awful combat.) I really like the sound design on every weapon that wasn't a pistol. The rifles and shotguns all sounded brutish yet muted in that realism-style, whereas the basic pistol just sounded pathetic and the combat pistol lacked the whack that it's actual bullets landed with. Driving too is heavily improved to make cars weighty and heavy, so as to be less prone to rolling over quite so easily; which brings the driving up to the stellar standard that Rockstar has solely maintained over the vast majority of the open world gaming landscape. Only Sleeping Dogs really has driving controls that are anywhere near as good as what GTA has rocked throughout it's HD era.

In Conclusion, Grand Theft Auto IV is an unfairly maligned entry that dared to go against the grain of what Grand Theft Auto had come to stand for in order to stand out for the new generation. It pushed innovation to create a realism-based sandbox and maybe pushed a little hard into monotony is some small areas. It's narrative is ambitious and grander than it's scope at times, but paints refreshingly life-like characters in an impressively deep recreation of GTA's oldest haunting grounds: Liberty City. Playing it again after all these years proved enough to get me hooked and slapping a recommendation for lovers of open world and stories with a gentle sprinkle of grit and grunge, is an automatic act. As for the arbitrary score... that evades me. On one hand the game is timeless for what it does well, on the other the first act drags so much it makes me wonder if I could even stand another play through in the near future. Balancing everything together, then throwing it away and going with my gut instinct, (as is my typical MO) leaves me with a respectable B+ Grade to slot into my scale of game scores. Stroking greatness on account of it's own ambition and falling just a hair short for that same hubris. But I'll take a game that tries over one that plays it safe absolutely any day of the week. 

There's too many marketplaces!

 Who get's our money?

Playing through Grand Theft Auto IV recently gave me the taste for grounded and muted action and the heightened sense of impact and believable consequence that they encourage, which sent me off searching for Watch_Dogs 1 again. Okay, to be fair I also had Watch_Dogs on the mind and wanted to see if the game set in my home town, Leigon, was finally a reasonable price; only to find the game was never released on Steam. Thus I checked my Steam Library and... it wasn't there. Odd, I thought; because though I played the game for the first time on Xbox, I had definitely done a PC playthrough at some point. I remembered combing through the game files to activate that one option which people said made the game as graphically impressive as the E3 demo. (It didn't.) So I looked on my Epic games collection instead, thinking it must have been one of the free games there. It wasn't. So was there a free weekend or something? Where was this stupid game? I even got desperate and checked Ubisoft Plus and- wait, there it is! Specifically listed- Watch_Dogs on Xbox and PC! But Ubisoft Plus acted like I didn't own the thing, tried to sell it to me again. Was it a free trial or... oh wait, I had to bring up, and then download, Ubisoft Connect in order to play the game I owned. What a rabbit hole...

It's back and forth chases like this which make me pull at my hair and rue the very day that multiple marketplaces descended upon the PC gaming world. Unfortunately, that day does predate my experience with PC gaming so I can only legitimately get so upset. But it's a total head ache and a half to try and balance the endless number of different marketplaces that we have to spread our game's library across just to enjoy games! Some services exist, like GOG Galaxy, to try and visualize our entire libraries for peace of mind, but that still requires the user to search down and turn in every errant marketplace they've ever bought a poxxy game on, because most of them require a stupid launcher in order to use. And what happens if that marketplace should ever shut down? Well we try not to think about the eventuality, but I'd imagine something similar to the death of Stadia awaits us all. So why do we put up with marketplace exclusivity anyway? 

Well firstly, we put up with it because diversity and competition is healthy for any ecosystem. If one company ruled completely unopposed it would be an open invitation for innovation to fall off, for developer and market rates to become exploitative and for a monopoly to grow into a dictatorship. Having competitors biting at your heel eager to take over the second you drop off is the driving force for many industries and one of the key founding principles of our brand of capitalism. And it works, a lot of the time. Morality is a false concept that withers in the face of hard economics, but competition has a way of forcing ideals that resemble morality in a bid to stay on the good side of consumers. Epic Games and it's ilk work in tandem to keep Steam in check, and that's the way we all like it.

Unfortunately, storefronts and game launchers are becoming far too easy to set up for any publisher with a little bit of a catalogue behind them. Epic Games want to make something of themselves, sure; and CDPR have a real philosophy behind their store front; but EA Origin? (Soon to change it's name into the EA app.) What about Ubisoft Connect? Bethesda.Net? Minecraft? Blizzard? Does every bloody game need it's own separate launcher and marketplace where you need to buy the game from? All tied to separate servers at the whims of companies who, sometimes, aren't quite prepared for the bandwidth challenges of running a launcher. (Thank you, Bethesda.Net for letting me down consistently.) We become inundated with all of these errant pieces of software that all feel the need to force launch themselves on the computer start-up, sucking up resources like bloody viruses. I truly hate the oversaturation of these storefronts!

Although, going back to the competitive balancing act of capitalism- having competitive pricing can work out into some great deals for consumers. As these various companies try to take pot-shots at one another to score a bit of sales buzz, their discount wars are usually a net positive for the little man who benefits as Epic chucks free games at people and the Humble Bundle wraps every CRPG masterpiece of the last twenty years and shoves it in a 20$ price bag. Only if those games aren't exclusives, that is. For some reason exclusivity seems to translate to these greedy wastrels as full written consent to try and bleed their consumers dry. Seventy dollar games might not be exclusive to first party games anymore, but exclusivity and a perceived since of premium ownership has certainly inflated the worth of some undeserving titles over the years.

And speaking of inflated worth; someone needs to impart upon all these publishers that just because they put a launcher together does not mean it's not an absolute train wreck to use. Lacking any standard of production, most all of these launchers not funded by a dedicated development team who have been working exclusively on this for years on end can end up being either lack lustre or downright horrifying. Anybody who was forced to use EA Origin back in the day is probably familiar with the shockingly regular issue in which the bottom right-hand side of your desktop screen would become unclickable because Origin decided to hold it hostage. This is the kind of trash implementation that this wild west of game launchers empowers; and it's an embarrassment to everybody. 

But, and this is a big one; publishers are better off in an ecosystem with multiple storefronts because that choice allows them to haggle over percentage cuts on certain platforms. Steam is big enough to strong-arm it's way into not being competitive over sales cuts, but any platform smaller than Steam has to be equitable and fair with companies that want to sell through else risk getting undercut by the wave; which means that developers and publishers are entitled to a greater part of the money they generate. And personally, I want as much of my money to touch the creator's as possible, the less that the middle man takes, the better for everybody in my humble opinion. So I'm going to call this another win for a diverse marketplace.

Ultimately, there's no real sensible way to whittle down every storefront into a narrow selection that doesn't destroy the careful balancing act of the industry. Although with how the spread of launchers and marketplaces currently stands, there's too many half-hearted publishers trying to ride high on their own personal launchers into to weasel out 100% cuts on sales without putting in any of the work to make the user's side of the experience equitable. I think there's needs to be a degree of separation between publishers' and purchasers which is best reached through third party marketplace launchers who commit themselves to the marketplace experience and not in pushing their own in-house developed games. Yes, I think first party launchers should be soundly abolished; for the health of the PC ecosystem

Gaming kills kids?

 Ready for Jack Thompson's newest crusade?

Back in March, The Verge did the work of bored journalists with nothing else on their plate and reached out to 70 year old attorney Jack Thompson, a man who cut his teeth on frivolous campaigns against the violence of the video game industry drawing paper-thin parallels between fictional violence and real violence based on studies he either misinterpreted or failed to vet. He was essentially a stubborn troll so wrapped up in his self delusions that no amount of real world stimuli could shake him out of the fantasy world in which he lived. (Ironic given the man's obsession.) And if you're wondering about the effects that time has had on the man, whether or not time bought that promised wisdom upon his aging head- no, he still considers video games a major factor contributing to the rise of crime in New York; because Take-Two is based in Manhattan. (Apparently my man thinks that gaming companies, in themselves, radiate a corrupting aura to those around them. Yes, he's just as, if not more so, stupid today than he was in his prime.) 

The reason I bother mention that degenerate is because his absolute bad-faith attack on a medium he didn't like, whether because of fanciful delusion or scapegoating for more tangible issues he was trying to defend, tainted a lot of the discourse around the real world consequences of gaming. Addiction, deterioration of social skills, eye-sight damage; all of these conversations were stunted because their validity got unfairly lumped in next to Jack's frivolous campaign to pin the degradation of 'values' as a consequence of gaming media, often through straight lies about what those games even depicted. (And what values was he defending to being with? I couldn't say, but I'm willing to bet that a candid conversation with the man would uncover a lot of socially backwards viewpoints that account for his near radio-silent presence in the modern day world.)

Such has his rot infected the real world and it's lessons, that when I see headlines detailing the actual risk for death that some children face playing video games, my inherent gut is suspicious as to the articles' believability rather than concern about what is being uncovered. And to be fair, most every headline on the topic is rather intentionally Click-baity, but I get the game: just look at my headline- it's how the world works nowadays. But I wonder at how seriously potentially serious issues like this will be taken in a post-Jack world.  A world where all it takes is the corrupted moral values of one rotten-egg attorney who cared more about spingboarding his own image and clout over bettering the world around him, like Saul Goodman without that ultimate seed of morality that won out in the end, to taint the wellbeing of real world children. Do you think Jack is proud of himself? People like that are usually drunk on their 'pride'.

The real threat facing gaming children according to these reports is undiagnosed heart issues, which indeed is always a threat in any situation, but I think what these articles are trying to highlight is that adrenaline evoking activities such as gaming might trigger such heart issues to disastrous consequence. The scientists in question seemed to pick on Call of Duty Multiplayer as being the most effective in triggering blackouts and other warning signs, probably because they don't know enough games to put together a real list of adrenaline pumpers. (I'd bet a Dark Souls playthrough would be even more dangerous to at-risk-kids.) But despite the sensationalist angle that this story is being fed across the media, with even accusations of recorded fatalities, (without specifics, implying they mean 'fatalities for those with heart issues' rather than 'video game fatalities'.) there is a common sense heart to why this research was conducted in the first place.

Children with heart conditions are often times barred from playing real world sports throughout their lives for risk that the incurred adrenaline might pose a risk for the children. Apparently some believed that video games could act as a surrogate, only to find that- surprise, surprise- it turns out having your blood pressure raised by video games is the same as having your blood pressure raised by other means. Yes, I'm as astounded to learn this as you are. To be fair, I guess scientists didn't expect video games to be capable of evoking a similar biological response out of children, but that's pretty much what any competitive action is going to do, isn't it? Set someone up in a competitive reading showdown and tensions are going to be raised, that's just the nature of the game. At the end of the day, however, proposing the obvious and empirically proving it are two sides of the same equation. They both compliment one another.

But, of course, this is the sort of fuel that is absolutely going to be weaponised the second someone needs a scapegoat for literally anything that goes wrong in the world. Are oil prices still high? It's those damn child-killing video games! Is the cost of living soaring? Blame those damn video games and their inflation pushing prices. My wife left me? Must be the video games, I watched them kill my wife and sleep with my dog; they left me the recording of it on my Ipad. The actual details of what this study was discovering and it's results don't actually matter, more the conversation they'll spark up when cited in the middle of a heated argument. I can affirm that with such certainty because that's the way every study into the effects of gaming on the real world has been weaponised. It's pretty much tradition at this point.  

What I'm personally interested in is the extent of the danger and how that might be mitigated. Are lower intensity games less of a risk, such as Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley? Is it the heat of competition that flares the heart up, or the engagement with interactive media? Are adults less susceptible to danger because of their typically reduced amount of emotional engagement, or does their natural body chemistry disadvantages from actually being older mitigate that disassociation. Is there any sort of treatment that those with heart conditions can take so that they can enjoy gaming? Because with accessibility becoming a bigger focus in gaming, I think it's important to encourage tools that help as many people play as possible. The more gamers the better, as I say.

Let's just ensure that whatever Tool ends up twisting this study get's themselves soundly shouted down before they turn this into a media frenzy. You know, like those idiots who claimed Watch_Dogs promoted real world hacking or that GTA IV simulated the murder of kids and animals. Sexy lies spread so much faster than the dull virgin truth, it's a well known factor of life that people in regularly targeted hobbies get in touch with often. Such as the whole 'Dayquil' cooking trend which was literally a single errant Tiktok video that media itself pushed into being a trend with an inordinate amount of fear mongering coverage. Questioning the validity of what you see plastered in front of you as fact is a daily necessity of the modern age, much as it annoys us all to have to deal with.

The rise of Fire Emblem

 Finally in the big leagues.

I can't say there was ever a point in time when Fire Emblem was a tiny unknown little tadpole wading around in a pool of big boys, even though naturally there must have been a time when that was the actual case; anyone who has floated around the extended Nintendo community has heard of Fire Emblem. It's popularity has certainly shot up to apocalyptic levels in recent years to the point where just about everyone and their deceased great ancestors has heard of the game's now, and after years in that hovering middle-state of popularity, the series was catapulted into the main stream such to the extent where the latest game announcement was the show closer of a recent Nintendo livestream. And it wasn't even a dud of an announcement either! The Internet has welcomed Fire Emblem so heartily that the public were happy a new game graced their screens.

All of that success seems almost insane to behold when you consider the fact that Fire Emblem was never originally designed to be a commercial game, but rather a passion project between college friends. The game ended up hitting some commercial success anyway, and that soon led to sequels being developed and prospects becoming heightened. The games themselves were Famicon exclusives back in their original form, which meant they were developed and localised exclusively for a Japanese audience who would embrace them. It was until two big protagonists from previous Fire Emblem games, Marth and Roy, were introduced to the widely popular rooster of Super Smash Bros. Melee that the team began to see the potential of their brand on a western audience. Couple that with the success of Advance Wars in the West and there was a clear market for turn-based strategy games just waiting to be fed.

Localisation was sporadic throughout the life of Fire Emblem, which some took to blame for the slow adoption rate of the franchise in the West. Whereas most other Nintendo properties had become household names, Fire Emblem remained a specialised title only for the Hardcore audience to really engross themselves within. Not to mention the fact that during the big rose of Nintendo home entertainment, the release of the Wii, only Radiant Dawn would see a release on Wii, alongside some ports of old titles to the virtual console. That's perhaps the most successful and widespread Nintendo console of recent years, practically untouched by a franchise just bleeding titles every other year. No wonder it was beginning to feel like fans of the franchise were going increasingly unheard and discarded; especially when Fire Emblem had a formula Western fans would absolutely love. 

Hardline turn-based strategy mixed with inter-mission melodrama that allowed players to become involved with character's personalities and backstories before having the balance of their lives put in the player's hands. Complex strengths and weakenesses equations that would even put a strain to the most practised XCom veteran. Epic sweeping narratives that would be told over the course of years and, sometimes, generations. Fire Emblem had mastered it's niche over the course of years and if only people had their chance to play the damn thing they'd be able to enjoy all of that innovation. But then the franchise found itself relegated to the absolute graveyard of Nintendo franchises; Fire Emblem become a DS series.

Now to be clear, the Nintendo DS was a hugely popular handheld device held in the backpockets of teens across all the Western world wherever they went like freakin' pocket pacemakers. You couldn't separate these kids from their DS'. But it was also a handheld absolutely inundated with a deluge of every single game that anybody with an above average concept of coding could create. Standing out in a monsoon of small titles was impossible unless you were already a household name like Mario, so even though Fire Emblem got above average representation in the West on the DS, that did little to really explode their prospect in the Western world. Their popularity grew, no doubt; but not as tremendously as it should have down thanks to a Market absolutely drowned dead in saturation. (They were fighting for store-page space against literal Mobile ports; it was a sorry state of affairs.)

All that would change with the release of 'Fire Emblem: Three Houses', which Nintendo would drop as a flagship title for their new smash hit console, the Switch. Now the Switch was not starved for games by any stretch of the imagination, but the truly AAA first party exclusive games were all intelligently spaced out so that Nintendo fans would jump from big release to big release playing across Nintendo's vast library. From Super Mario Odyssey to Animal Crossing to, inevitably, Fire Emblem. Typical Nintendo stans were fed into the Fire Emblem engine like it was part of the typical Nintendo high succeeding pantheon. And to their surprise; the game really landed with this new audience. I mean really landed with them!

Since then the Fire Emblem train hasn't slowed down one bit with the musou style warriors alternate history retelling of Three Houses called 'Three Hopes', and now we're wrapping back around to a full blown new entry that is bringing all these new fans back around to the original canon. Personally I'm someone who grew up hearing about Fire Emblem second-hand and never biting the bullet until Three Houses, (Which I thoroughly enjoyed) so I'm a little bit dubious of leaving behind the universe I came to love to go back to the well trodden Universe that old Fire Emblem canon resides in, but I can see the appeal of throwing us newbies into one of the several main canons for ourselves. I just don't know how I'm going to cope in a Fire Emblem game without spending all my time between fights trying to coax Bernie out of her room with sweet treats.

The Fire Emblem of today is not a match for the biggest Nintendo franchises out there, your Mario's and your Pokemon's; and it likely never will be. The inherently hardline stance of the turn-based strategy gameplay wherein character permadeath is the accepted way to play makes it prohibitively tough for casual gamers which make up the majority of Nintendo's playerbase. But even a lesser star in the main line-up of Nintendo's franchises is a soaring success with a wide reach, and I'm so glad that more Japanese titles are being opened up to the sorts of opportunities that such success can afford them. A full blown large budget Fire Emblem game might very well push this franchise forward as much as the Kiwami games did for the 'Like a Dragon' franchise, at least in terms of raw presentation. This could just be the beginning of the ongoing rise of Fire Emblem.

Torturing myself in Terraria

Someone end my suffering

I recently beat the entirety of Terraria the other day, which you think would mark me as something of an expert in the game mechanics. Afterall I started playing all the way in 2013; how could a guy with that sort of history with Terraria still be a scrub? Well, throw in about 6 years worth of truancy and by the time I got around to stabbing the Moon Lord in his weak points I was barely anything more than a bare basic rookie with the knowledge of a semi intelligent foetus. I could just about guide another player through the process of beating the game, but that doesn't make me a master of the game mechanics at all. Which is why it would be the utmost of folly, the height of moronic intuition, to decide that with the bare basic knowledge of how this game would be played, I would go on to then play the single most difficult challenge that this game has to offer. What kind of absolute moron would I have to be in order to come to that sort of conclusion? The type you see before you today, it would seem, because indeed I have done exactly that and it has been a tortuous experience.

If you don't know exactly what I mean by the most difficult challenge the game has to offer; allow me to elucidate. With the release of 1.4.4 of Terraria, the team have marked their move away from development of that game so they can move onto their next, presumably Terraria 2. (Yes, seems I unintentionally picked the perfect moment to finally wrap up my affair with this game.) But the developers didn't want to leave their old game behind without slapping a little something special on the box, and that's exactly what they ended up doing with their Special Seed. Now world Seeds are little codes you can punch into the world generation when making the map in order to tell the game to generate the land in a very specific way. Secret seeds are special seeds added by the developer which apply special rules that render the final generated world as functioning differently to a standard Terraria world.

Perhaps you would end up typing the 'For the Worthy' seed, which automatically scales up the world difficulty by one notch, (so if you choose 'normal', the world would be on 'expert' difficulty.) alongside throwing in a bunch of surprise traps and Boss tweaks to make the game more painful. Maybe you would enter in the Don't Starve crossover seed, which adds in a hunger system (a painful addition for a game that doesn't exactly have a robust food acquisition process) and a deathly entity in the dark that slays anyone who remains in there too long. Or perhaps you'd try the 'don't dig up' seed which flips the world totally on it's head so it starts in the underworld and progresses upwards towards a nearly inhospitable version of the overworld. Or maybe you'd try the brand new 'Everything Seed' which basically takes the most painful elements of all those seeds I just mentioned and a bunch more and slaps them altogether in a horrifying amalgam of torment. And maybe you'd also set the difficulty of that world to 'Master', which is unofficially known in the community as 'Legendary mode'. Maybe that's what I did to myself.

Why did I decide that I wanted to stick my neck into Terraria's Legendary difficulty? Because I'm an idiot, evidently. And maybe some degree of hubris in acknowledgement of some of the absolutely painfully idiotic things I've already endured to get as far as I did in normal Terraria. For example, once in an attempt to grind The Wall of Flesh so that I could make the Avenger Emblem (something I waited to do until pre-Moon Lord, greatly hurting my chances of spawning the requisite mob with his Voodoo doll summoning item) I got bored of averaging one boss fight every thirty minutes or so to get a 25% chance on an item. So I looked it up and ended up downloading a 'For the Worthy' seed world after learning that one of the world changes it did was switch all demon spawns to Voodoo demons. (Without studying any of the other changes.) So can you guess what happened? Allow me to lay out the scenario for you.

I dig all the way down into the underworld and then glide my way across the lava lands ripping through Underworld huts and stocking up on useful items. And then I explode. Hindsight tells me I must have broken a pot, which in 'For the Worthy' has a chance of dropping a bomb on your head; leading me to a predicament. You see, I had literally just spawned in that world and dug down without preparing anything. Meaning, I didn't set up a base, bring any back-up gear, or literally place anything down to make a recovery journey plausible. And I was playing in Mediumcore, so I had dropped all my items. Now I could have either given up and gone back to my world (which would have cost me dearly, but not impossibly) or spend the next 5 hours trying to get to my gear in the most hostile environment this pre-hardmode 'For the Worthy' world had to offer. That was five hours painfully spent dying a simply unreal amount of times and giving up hope countless times. But I got my items back, and I delighted in deleting that world the second afterwards. What pain could that Legendary seed throw at me that I hadn't already suffered?

Oh god; I never realised how painful Terraria is without cobblestone! You literally can't do anything without it- can't make armour, can't make furniture; and the 'Everything Seed' made getting it a herculean task. Every enemy can, at the very least, two shot you. Trees sometimes drop bombs when you try to harvest them. The ash ground you spawn on is affected by a brand new, and very temperamental, cave-in system so you can't dig under the enemies or you'll get squashed. Ghosts spawn on the underground layer for some inane reason, circumventing any walls and barriers you set up. The Wall of Flesh might suddenly summon itself randomly for some reason. (I have no idea what that was about.) I was unlucky enough to spawn under an ice biome, meaning that even if I dug all the way to the surface, I wouldn't get any cobble- forcing me to go spelunking far out from spawn. And I hate the food system.

I wouldn't call Terraria itself a painfully difficult game, in fact there are mods created specifically to try and make Terraria into that style of rage game with awfully balanced bosses and ridiculous upgrade paths that extend the game into twice it's natural length. But the 'Everything Seed' does a damn good job of providing that experience sans mods. Even a semi-literate Terraria player who knows all the ins and outs of the game would grind their teeth working through that pain-in-the-ass of a world, and I'm nowhere near that level; so what in the hell was I thinking? I was thinking it would be fun, and I was thinking that I deserve the anguish. And you know what? For starting this I absolutely do. I deserve all the pain I meet upon myself. Because those who play with fire must, for their own sake, be burnt.

Will I continue with the world? Maybe. Looking up some other playthroughs have reminded me that, idiot I am, there's no need for me to plant my base on the ashy death-lands if I don't want it there. So maybe I'll give it another shot, or maybe I'll nuke everything and start again with an easycore character because I not sure if I'm even having fun struggling through a game I barely even understand as I currently am. Then again I am a masochist; and will I even be able to appreciate the game if it isn't peeling back my eyelids so it can snuff out a lit cigarette bud in my pupils? I don't know. It wouldn't be the first horribly unfair challenge I ended up throwing the towel on. But that Xcom Iron man playthrough does haunt me every waking day... (Maybe going back to that would be a cop-out I can live with.) 

Talking about video game movies...

 But the reality is...

Recently I spoke about the terrifying future of a video game industry spoiled rotten by the apparent 'success story' of their movie adaptations; to the point where it would actually impact the quality of the games themselves as they kowtow to a more profitable master: the movie going public. But we're a bit away from that grim reality and currently still reside in a world where video games are beholden only to our own grubby whims. Not least of all because all of the propositions for a video game movie that are currently coming out, bar the Mario movie, are just plain terrible and doomed to failure. What could there possibly be to worry about when rights purchasers are too hairbrained to snatch adaptation licences that anyone in the breathing world still remembers; let alone will actually pay money to go and see. Their stupidity is their downfall; and I'm happy to laugh at them for it.

Sega is a pretty big source for a lot of these stories. After getting a literal hail-mary with the Sonic movie, which quite honestly only was a success because the Internet straight bullied the VFX team into fixing their honestly awful design; that victory has gone to Sega's head a little. They've sniffed a little bit of the forbidden profits fruit and it's made them punch-crazy; now these idiots have mistaken luck for potential and believe their brand alone spells box office gold. Just to be clear; it was Sonic, who made the Sonic movie work, not the brand of Sega behind him. In fact, the Sonic movie bears quite honestly no resemblance to the Sonic brand as it has existed under Sega throughout their lifetime, save in visual design and a vague half-remembered shadow of his personality quirks. (Movie Sonic is a lot more co-dependent that the mouthy rebel who sells the game and comic franchise.) But Sega don't realise that; which is probably why they're apparently feeling out for a Comix Zone movie.

Now I know that sounds like the literal most 90's straight to DVD thing of all time; but that's only because this franchise is exactly that level of quality. Comix Zone is a ludicrously underserved Sega franchise about the kind of guy that only a delusional comic book artist from the 90's would think resembles 'cool', with his blonde ponytail cut-off vest and shorts and beady jazz-man glasses, who just happens to be a comic maker themselves. (Isn't that a funny coincidence.) Diet-Rohan Kishibe here, who just happens to also be a 'freelance Rock musician' too, (what the hell is a 'freelance musician'? Do they mean 'Session guitarist'?) gets trapped inside of his own alien-invasion comic thanks to handwavy magic thunderstorms and is forced to travel across comic book panels in a crazy zany adventure that breaks the fourth wall and makes references all over the place.

I'm not going to lie; for the late eighties or early nineteens that would have been a banger of a movie. I'm not kidding; this would have been the sort of cheesy shlock that gets filled away in the 'guilty classics' draw alongside 'He Man and the Masters of the Universe' and 'Jingle All The Way'; but can you really see a modern movie making that kind of cheese work? The moment for movies like this has just largely passed through pop-culture, I think; and any attempt to recapture it, even for a silly comedy romp, will just end up looking sad. I can't see any serious studio picking this up and expecting to make a buck off of it, so if Sega really are looking to offload this movie and get it made no matter the cost; I can offer them... £40 for the rights. I'll need to borrow some of that, though; let me make some calls..

The other stellar banger-to-be that has been kicking around the Sega studios is a little game called Space Channel 5 which I knew nothing about when I first saw it. Apparently the game was a rhythm action 'music video game' that got lost to the wastes of time over the years and that doesn't look like any great loss according to a lot of the preview screens I'm seeing on the game. Channel 5, is the sanitised rename that Sega's movie pitch is going with, and it is said to follow a fast food worker who is transported into the future to save the world from an alien invasion (Another one? Does some exec at Sega have a very particular fetish?) with the power of virtual dancing moves. That one honestly doesn't even sound like a nineties movie to me; it sounds like the sort of thing that would get you lit on fire and chucked out of the window of a pitch meeting.

But give me a second to see if I can't salvage something from that absolute dumpster fire of a plot layout. What if... we scrap the time travel and make this about a fast food worker who is already from some horribly dystopian (but in an over-the-top, not-so-depressing fashion) Cyberpunk-eques future, who signs up for this dance competition that all the world takes obnoxiously seriously as it's the only way to escape their dour reality and have a shot at making it big and living in the clouds or something. (Elysium rip-off perhaps, but the concept wasn't exactly novel when they coined it either.) Only for it to be discovered in the late-game that this upper crust of society that all the world aspires to is a fabrication, a carrot dangled by a race of advanced aliens who secretly conquered Earth long ago and keeps them around as an amusing bauble, like a snow globe or reality show. Then, the competition plotline to save the protagonist shifts into a plot to wake the world up to the confines of the cages they've been raised to accept and... You know I was thinking this would end in a world-wide dance party but it's really sounding like I'm leading to a violent intergalactic revolution the likes of which is reminiscent of XCOM 2... meh, the concept could use some refining. I literally came up with it as I wrote it, and I still think it's more interesting than Sega's crappy elevator pitch. Hire me to make a more interesting write up Sega, my rates are... hell, I don't have rates; I just want to make this idea less sucky.

And these are the ideas on the docket just over at Sega; you've got to bet there are people all over the industry feverishly flicking through their pocket-book of IPs weighing up which one can be whored off for mass market appeal. Point-in-case: Ubisoft. Did you know they're saving up for another Assassin's Creed adaptation? There's little news on it so I can't say whether or not it's a movie or a TV show but come on... didn't they learn their lesson the last time around? That movie was the biggest mess of context-dumping drowning out potential story beats I've seen from a movie. Like someone at Ubisoft got the bright idea of trying to dump the entire Assassin's Creed wikipedia into the movie's script and the director was too blazed out of his mind on the mountain of cocaine that Ubisoft presumably paid him in to care.

These are the video game movies of the immediate future. Brainless, futureless journeys into mediocrity that pose a threat only to the balance books of whoever's unfortunate enough to be financing these disasters. At this point, fearing about the take over of Hollywood in gaming is like trading rumours about the real world rise of Skynet. Sure, it's conceptually feasible in the case of some sort of unpredictable revolution, but on the otherhand Elon Musk's recently revealed Robot is more rudimentary than a modern day hat stand. I don't think we're going to be training guard dogs and loading up on plasma rifles anytime soon. And as for video game movies; maybe we can let a decent one or two movies release first before switching alerts to def con 1.

Are video game movies the next big trend?

A looming portent on the horizon. 

In 2008 the movie Iron Man released on an unsuspecting public with a decently favourable splash among those who had seen lukewarm superhero movie adaptations for most of their lives. Sure there were the gems among the garbage, such as the Spiderman movie series, but most adaptations tended to forgo what made the character special in favour of seizing the property and iconography in order to make the movie that they wanted to make, instead of what the character needed to star in. Daredevil, The Punisher, Spawn; those are examples of movies that were along the right track, but fell short of really encapsulating the character and adapting that adequately, and thus failed to translate what made those characters special to that wider movie going audience. Ironman ended with a stinger after the story wrapped up, hinting at more movies and a wider Avengers story down the line. Of course, this wasn't the first movie to promise such and I'll bet that most who saw this just assumed that it was idle wishful hoping for a sequel that would ultimately build up into nothing like those before it.

Nearly fifteen years of Marvel Movies later, with that becoming the most profitable movie franchise ever made, (through sheer attrition and number of movies) such pessimism seems almost silly. As does the expectation that any adaptation upcoming would be happy just sticking to the property it was working on; not when it can be strung along into a shallow attempt to mimic Marvel's success and become the next billion-breaking franchise. Universal unsuccessfully tried to launch their Dark Universe; DC is desperate to push their own out of the door, and now it looks like the onus has fallen on video games to try their hand at a craft they are notoriously ill-fitted for. As though countless years of failures were just teething troubles, now we've got the optimistic spur of an interconnect Nintendo franchise universe lapping at our heels and, horribly, it's looking like a more plausible vision by the day.

Marvel's success has not come without it's detriment to the comic books it drained from. Before the movie franchise, comics were their own entity spurred by their own fanbases and focusing on their own stories and characters. They were beholden only to themselves, unless they were part of a bigger franchise but even then; diversity and flexibility of audiences and themes mattered. But when the MCU started making millions, the focus shifted. If you look at Marvel today and ask what it's central and most important market is, they will tell you it's the movies. This comic book company now produces comic books as a secondary market far eclipsed by the more important and more popular movies. Now the comics need to fit the style of the movies, the characters have to look like their actor counter-parts, the audience and themes need to be synchronous. It will only be a matter of time before comic lines that run contrary to where the movies are going (despite the fact that these movies are several decades behind where the comics were before they started popping off) are going to be canned for fear of 'confusing the wider demographic'. The comics lost their prominence, and consequently their power.

If you think there's no chance of that happening for the video game landscape, just look at the two of the biggest adaptations for this year; Halo and The Last of Us. Both properties pride themselves on the fact that they don't care for the video games that made those names household-worthy in the first place; they'd rather piggyback off the concept, branding and designs to mount their own version. Why do they feel so gallant about bragging how they ignored the source material? Because traditional media feels themselves inherently superior to younger alternatives. TV show makers and movie producers look at video games as an inferior art form, not worthy of their attention or their respect. But they're popular, they draw in a crowd, so those same detractors are more than happy to step on the back of games to try and make their buck. Just don't ask them to pay the most basic amount of respect and at least play the thing so they're familiar with the sort of experience they're supposed to be adapting. 

Interactivity is increadibly important to the gaming medium and the emotions invoked by a player who has their hands on the controls is unique and special to video games. You can't get the gist of how protective you're supposed to be over Elizabeth from Bioshock without actually playing the game and feeling the synchronous relationship between you and her. You can't infer that sense of boundless wonder of staring upon the looping strip of your first Halo ring by just reading about it on paper. Video games are designed to be experienced, and tweaked to adjust for levels of skills, disability and difficulty. Because at the end of the day; living the game and it's gameplay is what you need to do to understand video game properties. Why else do you think both Hitman movies totally missed the mark on what the franchise is even about? Because they read the synopsis and thought "Bald super assassin who never misses his mark? That'll be an action movie, right?" If you don't respect the game, you can't expect to adapt it well.

But we may just have the movie which is destined to act as our Iron Man moment. The game to break the dam and usher in a new age of video game movies; and that might just be the Super Mario Bros movie. Because all of these failures and half hearted attempts aren't going to shift the balance of the industry, no it's going to take one massive billion-dollar crossing success story; and Mario has the brand recognition and, potentially, the quality to pull it off. Everyone who watched that trailer knows, bar Chris Pratt's question conviction, the level of talent on display looks incredible. The animation is top notch, the designs are impeccable; this resembles the Mario we all love and doesn't look like the disappointment that most of the world expected. And that's probably due very much to Nintendo themselves.

The live action travesty-edition of Super Mario Bros the movie was a huge embarrassment for Nintendo, such that they wrote off any attempts to adapt their franchises for decades after the fact. More likely than not, whoever is working on this movie has Shigeru Miyamoto hanging over his chair with a pair of stomping shoes ready to make sure they don't go a hair out of line; and that seems to be the trick we need to get a video game adaptation that nails the look and feel that the games we're going for. Sonic may be a decent movie, but not because it really nailed who Sonic of the games were, but because the direction they took the franchise was decent enough. Mario could very well be the very first time the world is shown how video game adaptations can be faithful and successful. And that just might spell doom for a lot of video game franchises as it did for the comic-book world.

To be fair, I think the gaming industry currently is much bigger than comics ever were, so the dominance of Hollywood isn't going to totally drown out the voices of the developers and publishers no matter how big this adaptation trend grows. But this could hurt the slow rise of general validity that the gaming industry has been struggling to cement in the hearts of the public for decades; as a medium with the potential to be taken seriously. Comics had to fight for that right, and now have lost it in a world where they're seen as companion pieces to big budget movies; video games could very well end up going the exact same way. At the very least, if this is a trend that ends up picking traction; it will lead to the birth of an entire industry of knock-off film makers who buy up the most obscure licence rights to make their crappy D-grade adaptation. Gex the Gecko; you are getting your movie!

'Gotham Knights Harley Quinn'

 'Is a very interesting case study'

Revolving around the types of circles that I do on the Internet, it's inevitable that the same stories are going to float your way every now and then. But the wide and vast world of entertainment is so ever changing that I never really let it annoy me, because I know that story is just a spark on the stove shimmering for a little longer than it's peers. In basic: It'll be gone before I have a chance to care about it. But thanks maybe to Youtube Shorts, or the fact that the Internet seems eager to push this on me, I've seen again and again that snippet from the developers of Gotham Knights trying to big-up their own design team work to the point where's it's actually become something of a headache. How many times do I have to hear the words ''Gotham Knight's Harley Quinn is a very interesting case study in..." before I lose my mind and explode? Turns out that threshold has already been reached because that's what I'm talking about today.

So Gotham Knights is already a game I have a bias against thanks to the nakedly misleading marketing in it's naming convention as well as the game not really being what I want out of a Batman game. If it's your jam that is entirely fine, I don't think there's anything inherently distasteful about the game they're making, it's just not my ideal Batfamily scenario. But it's because of this that when I first saw and was introduced to their new reimaging of Harley Quinn, alongside the various other villains, I squashed my gut grimace and did my best to try and accept these new iterations. It's not that I have an aversion to reimaginings, I think the Arkham series has consistently pulled off increadibly cool reimaginings time and time again. it's just that what Gotham Knights has feels... dull and not very creative. Mr Freeze has robot limbs now? Okay. Not sure what that really adds to his character but sure...

But Harley Quinn in particular is the one that the team is trying to push the hardest, probably due to the popularity of the character and their staunch belief that this is the magnum opus of their 'taking a character you know well and reworking them' ethos. Afterall, they're so insistent about how 'interesting' this 'case study' of a character design is, why shouldn't they shout their creative successes to the rooftops so that all the world can become bored by them presently? They need you as the viewer to agree about how clever their decisions were and why this Harley is definitely not a dull cookie-cutter fan edit, and they're willing to start fights to prove their point. But you know what? The more I see of her, the more I find myself underwhelmed by a new look that seems about as creatively vibrant as a photoshop colour swap.

Okay, I'm being a bit melodramatic there; it's not quite that basic; but the Harley Quinn redesign for Gotham Knights seems focus on three central points that I feel are mostly all underexplored. First, they wanted to show off what Harley looks in post her love-affair with the Joker, commenting about how we've seen her go from that world to an independent confidant of heroes, what would we see if she had instead leaned the other direction and became a villain? Secondly, they want to highlight the 'independence' angle of that split. Losing the Joker as a source of influence has allowed Harleen to blossom as a villain in her own right with her own motifs exemplifying what she brings to the table as a super villain. And finally, they wanted to depict an older Harley Quinn who wears those years of experience on her as a confirmation of talent and resourcefulness. Which basically means no more pig-tails; after a certain age that's just sad.

So let's take a look at the 'Harley after the Joker' side of this equation. Harley Quinn was invented to be a foil for the Joker to play off during his scenes in the animated series, a reoccurring thug with a bit of a personality around her that evolved into something of a sensation. We've seen in other stories what it looks like when she breaks free from the Joker and in all of those stories she is still, fundamentally, the same person only without the crushing pressure of being obsessed with pleasing a megalomaniacal sociopath. She's pretty much still the over-the-top garish person even without the predilection to cause harm upon innocents, but the Gotham Knights team seems to believe that isn't the case. I think justifying a radical shift in personality is really going to come down to the method by which Quinn split from the Joker. Unless it was a really shocking affair, such as his violent death at the hands of a lethargic Batman or something, the drastic change is going to come across as forced and inorganic.

Then there's the independence angle. They wanted Harley to be her own villain, finally free to do her own brand of evil. Now how that actually shapes up in the whole 'evil schemes' category is yet to be seen until we get our hands on the game, but we can see this philosophy painted over her face. Literally. The team's idea to symbolise how distinct Harley now is to her abusive Clown Prince is to keep the white face paint and just put a Club over her face. As in, the playing card Club. Umm... wasn't the playing card aesthetic literally the basis of the Joker? I know there's the court jester interpretation, but he was never far away from playing cards either. That was his calling card once or twice. I get the idea of showing her past on her new form, but the way they've gone makes it look like Harley has become so drowned in that past that it's washed away all her individuality and left her looking like a generic Joker henchman. She doesn't even standout in colour or style to her new crew, she looks oddly uniform.

Which brings us back around to that final point; depicting her older age. This one I can actually see very abundantly and justifiably within their redesign. Harley has put away the provocative fancy dress and a more lean power-suit that demonstrates a shift from what I can assume were her carefree twenties to her responsible thirties. Maybe mid to late thirties. The duller suit, toned down hair and generally monochromatic colour scheme depicting the distinct drain of personality and vibrancy that hits all as they sink deeper into adulthood and lose touch with that light of happiness. Life becomes monotonous, they become monotonous. Or at least... that's what I got from their redesign. Was that what they were going for? Kind of a morose direction for a superhero character to evolve in but, you do you Gotham Knights.

I'm not going to tell you that Gotham Knights Harley is bad... just that she seems far enough removed from her source material that without a name tag you'd probably be forgiven for mistaking her for a low-effort replacement character thought up over a weekend. And I'm imagine the original Harley was conjured up as just as much of an afterthought, but I think it's clear the minds working on that show were a damn bit more expressive and fun than that dour heads knocking about on this upcoming game.  And I don't want to sit here dissecting the dull muscle man that Red Hood has been turned into, or the equally generic faces of Barbara and Nightwing, partially because I think their blandness is due to engine limitations but partially because I don't care about design when the whole package should come together to sell it. I just can't have another week of IGN trying to gaslight me into how 'interesting' and 'inspired' this deviant art-level redrawn of an iconic character is. Miss me with that crap.

Terraria 1.4 Review

 Finishing what I started.

I remember first hearing about Terraria a long time ago through the same sort of grapevines through which Minecraft became known to me; which meant that for better or for worse I was going to forever equate the two games as shadows of one another. Hindsight obviously dispels that coincidence once we actually become familiar with each game; Minecraft is a game that revolves around empowering creativity first and providing gameplay content second whereas Terraria prides itself on gameplay improvements before coming around to pumping up building tools; but there's an obvious overlap in style and substance. (Even if one is 3d and technically infinite whilst the other is 2d and shaped around loot collection.) I remember once considering Terraria as a version of Minecraft that already comes pre-modded, which is a funny way of looking at it and a perspective I still think back on during some of the crazier moments of Terraria's endgame. (It certainly does feel as manic and unrestrained as you'd expect a modder to get.)

I first played Terraria back when it was ported to the consoles of the time, Xbox 360 and PS3; and that was a version of the game I considered to be largely friendly to the new comer. Whilst being feature-limited and supported at a much reduced rate to the PC version, the game had numerous quality of life improvements that made the early game more accessible to those who did not have the wiki open. Crafting trees specified craft-ables the moment you owned a single item in a recipe and displayed the missing materials you needed to collect to incentivise creativity; there was an entire in-built tutorial world that guided your hand all the way up to your first boss fight and the general world was a whole lot more hospitable towards the experimental gamers out there. In all the improvements that the modern Terraria has, I think some of that accessibility has become lost and could be a font of refocus before the team move onto their next project, whatever that ends up being.

 To the uninitiated; Terraria is a 2D survival crafting game (without food meters unless you play 2 secret map seeds) in which the focus of the game is gathering steadily improved equipment and weaponry to battle steadily more powerful monsters and bosses in a slow creep towards ultimate power. World generation is randomised but not infinitely expanding, biomes dictate the sort of wild enemies that will spawn, RNG decides a lot of the non-craftable equipment you'll be able to pick up, chance might dictate a few of the bosses you'll have available to you depending on the nature of the world you create and progression is tied to killing your way down a list of bosses, some of which contain literal keys to unlock the next state of the wider world. Essentially making the process of 'beating' Terraria a lot more functionally linear than Minecraft, whilst still being flexible to the players' play style. All of this is to say, Terraria isn't really Minecraft at all, they just share a similar aesthetic.

Much as you might find if you look on the wiki, I think assessing modern Terraria requires breaking down the play experience into the early game, mid game and endgame; comparing and contrasting the complications and vindications of each stage of the game. Every update is littered with improvements up and down that chain, so it's important to note that this review is made specifically in the wake of the 'Labour of Love' update for Terraria, because the game as it exists in the future could feel entirely different from where it's at today. The full game may have been out for a few years now, but until the Re-Logic team are dragged away from this code by force they'll never stop tweaking and adding things here and there to pimp up the weaker elements of the game.

The early game of Terraria is, go figure, the most simple if you've ever played a crafting game before. You are set off in a basic world where you mine and harvest materials and come to understand how the world around you works and functions. A lot of this is pretty intuitive and natural to the fresh player; you'll mine-up ore and the deeper it is the better quality of what you'll make with it. The evil Corruption biome (or Crimson, depending on the world generation) will flay you alive the first time you go there, indicating how conquering that place is probably the starter goal from the word 'go'. And the really observant might even start to identify the ways in which Terraria, even in the early game, resembles a looter-experience. There's flavour text indicating quality, DPS tally equipment and set bonuses. The early problems do start to flare up, however.

I think crafting is a big early game issue, from the fact that unlike it's peers, Terraria will only tell you what you can craft when you have the right amount materials and are standing in front of the correct workbench; essentially requiring you to know exactly what it is you're going to craft before you even approach it in the first place. Now nothing in the early game necessitates blind recipe-guessing, but this does introduce the idea that if you want to get to that upper echelon of enjoying the game it's almost necessary to have the wikia open to check what you're doing. I think that any game which necessitates out-of-game interaction sacrifices accessibility for unrestrained complexity and hiding secrets and Easter eggs is not the same as refusing to even hint at how key pieces of early game furniture are made such as freaking beds! (Without a bed handy, Blood Moon nights get real boring, real fast!)

By the mid game stages of Terraria, the player has come to understand the loop of unlocking new tiers of play and crafting better gear for those better damage numbers. This will also be around about the time that enough equipment starts arriving for the player to understand the different classes they can adopt. Warrior, Ranger, Summoner and Mage are all unofficial class-types that players can adopt, all of which possess accessories and tools that synergise to make playing towards a specific class advantageous. Warriors get in the face of enemies with melee weapons, Rangers use bows and guns, mages use weapons that drain on their magic meter and summoners call forth minions who keep enemies at bay for them. Playing as a mix of all is very possible and actually how I beat Terraria for my first time, but for those that really want to engage in set bonuses and all those stat improvements, picking a specific field to specialise in is the way to go. And entirely unofficial.

It really is surprising how little hand-holding Terraria does for the player, partially out of a trust for the faculties of their audience and partially, I believe, out of an insulation within their community that numbs the developers to the struggles of new adopters trying to understand the game they're approaching. The wikia is the only place that you can find strategy guides telling you how to approach certain styles of play when even games like Rimworld and Kenshi offer bare basics so that fresh players can get started on the road to becoming skilled. It's very possible for a non-internet browsing Terraria player to hit a wall with no idea what to do and just become stuck there. The achievement system provides a bare basic idea of where the next milestone is, but a lot of the time it's not really enough to go on. ('Beat the Lunatic Cultist!' That's great- Where is he?)

Those that push forward onto the endgame of Terraria have probably heavily integrated themselves in the tools of the community in order to do so and have developed a fairly rudimentary understanding of the systems at hand. The players of Terraria are a great resource for understanding the bigger strategies of the game and the tools necessary for fighting her greatest challenges. Unfortunately, this also becomes the point at which a lot of the early game content becomes utterly trivialised and thus inconsequential, which is both a weakness of this style of game and a ego boost for those that blast by it. There's going to be a point in looter games where the content they engage in is funnelled specifically to whatever it is that can still offer a challenge; and when that style of world is an open one, rather than a specifically guided linear world like Borderlands, it becomes easy to miss pockets of content when they're relevant and thus miss out on the fun of enjoying that challenge. I only managed to grind the pirate invasion after crafting The Zenith. As any who knows what that means can imagine, that event was short lived.

On the otherhand, there's not really a common-sense solution to that problem. Games that utilise a 'challenge scaling' feature tend to run into a trivialisation of the power wall, which makes players feel like everything they've earned is useless because they never get better at handling their enemies. At least with ignoring that scaling, Terraria can throw increadibly brutal content that provides that rush of adrenaline once the player pushes through. After the endgame, Terraria does sort of lack reasons to keep playing beyond building cool creations, and since that was never really the gameplay focus to start with I'd imagine most players will find little reason to keep playing beyond beating the final boss. Minecraft doesn't have that problem because the gameplay cycle it focuses on doesn't really have that end-point, whilst Terraria inherently does. Of course, whether you see that as a problem, or a boon because this game actually as a goal you can reach and feel accomplished for beating; is a matter of personal preference.

Personally I think the loot-based progression system of any game is only as good as quality of the loot itself. How that loot feels to play around with and how diverse it all is. The Labour of Love update specifically brought big improvements here, as every weapon aside from the bare basic beginning tools features some unique visual flair or complexity to use that makes them worth collecting and having fun with. With how many pieces of loot there are in the game, that level on intricacy is something of an incredible achievement for the team that I find really quite engaging. Those that do stick around with the game long enough for a replay can really find their early game experience transformed into something that feels completely different to the last time purely because of some RNG chest loot which reshapes the gameplay. Having focused the game so long on the loot, it's no incredible surprise that it's currently this good to play about with, but you can take that as evidence this team succeeds where they strive to.

The second half of cool loot is, of course, cool Bosses to use that loot against, and Terraria does have some pretty creative and imaginative bosses that get somewhat wild in the second half of the game. I was somewhat disappointed with the absolute endgame bosses, however, in that they were really just an 'avoid the projectile and shoot back' affair. I thought the endgame might be a point at which to introduce mechanics beyond out-damaging the enemy or playing cut and mouse with projectiles. But if you're not looking for mechanics-based brawls than Terraria scales itself about as well as you can hope for up to it's endgame. It's just... I don't usually sat this but the final boss felt a little lacklustre after everything that came before. Perhaps that was a lack of any really transformative second stages apart from the split-off body parts. Maybe that's Dark Souls style bosses spoiling me, but Plantera and even the early pre-hardmode bosses all had gameplay-shifting second forms. The final boss felt strangely static by comparison. 

Visually Terraria rocks an iconic pixel art visual style that is immediately indicative towards it's own brand. At times the size of the pixels prohibits artistic creativity and there's a hard-to-mistake blocky functionality to the world that limits it's natural beauty, even with the dynamically shifting block sprites. But Terraria is not an ugly or even bad looking game at any point; and actually some of the endgame specific visualisations are cool enough to make me wish we'd seen more of the game with those sorts of motifs present. I'm not quite as big a fan of the music tracks the game has. They're all, again, iconic and inseparable from Terraria, but some of the peppier and happier tracks have a direct link towards my nausea gland. I know it's my own fault for overplaying the game back in the day, but nowadays I literally can't play the game with my headphones on or a I get lightheaded and can't play the game for the next twelve hours. Again, not the composer's fault; but a personal gripe of mine. (The cave and boss tracks are fine for me; I'm not sure why.)

The overall challenge of Terraria is a point worth considering in a review given how much more geared this game is towards boss fights and gear collection. I've already addressed the problem with scaling and gear collecting, but when your facing the right challenge at the right time there is a level of challenge that might scare off the casual player. You need solid reaction times and finger skills in order to avoid attacks and survive long enough to retort, and even if you want to go the Dark Souls route and grind yourself above the challenge before you get there; you'll hit brick wall limits because a lot of the time world progression is tied to boss progression. Plus, in mediumcore (the default difficulty where you drop your gear when you die) It's quite feasible to softlock yourself out of progression by losing the wrong piece of gear. Maybe you lock yourself out of dungeon that can only be broken into with a Pickaxe that is only dropped by the boss inside that dungeon. (I had to learn a wall glitch trick to worm my way out of that snafu.) There's a tough face worn by Terraria, and it can be somewhat brutal if you're not prepared for what you're facing. But it's never eye-wateringly painful. (At least, not until you start getting into Master difficulty; but at that point you're really getting exactly what you signed up for.)  

In conclusion, Terraria is a deep and versatile looter-style builder game with some problems when it comes to approachability and accessibility. There's a definite barrier to entry for people who don't have the time to invest in a title like this, or the resources available to really enjoy this game without resorting to banging their head against the wall. I think that in it's current state Terraria offers a great spread of content and even some replayability potential, all of which demonstrates the professional sheen of a game refined feverishly over the past eleven years. It's a difficult one to really score, and I'll have a very subjective score when I consider all the factor's I've discussed to reach this point, but I'm decently happy giving Terraria a B Grade in my arbitrary rating board. Along with a slapped on recommendation for lovers of looter games and power creep gameplay loops, with a much more moderated recommendation for those who are fans of building, and even then only if you're a pixel artist. I did really enjoy my time with Terraria and would certainly be eager for any follow up game the team creates if, indeed, they ever actually make a follow-up.

Adapting the SCP Universe

 I know it's a multiverse; leave me alone

Recently I spoke a little bit about the SCP presence within the world of indie games and mentioned how I thought it made for a ripe ground to grow from. Though the very nature of the internet horror story collection is open source, there's a huge and expansive universe of cryptids and curses with wildly imaginative hearts beating in them, just waiting to be adapted either into film or game, held back only by the non-profit clause of the SCP universe. Still for those of us too cowardly or talentless to make profit out of our work (like moi) there's a definite world of inspiration to be drawn from the world of the Secure Contain Protect foundation and I want to touch on just a few ideas I feel like could be explored in standalone game projects, either of an Indie level or slightly bigger.  And this is by no means exhaustive, I might add; the quality of SCP stories just lays out too many great story ideas to be covered over one blog. Perhaps even too many to be covered over a Hundred! 

First off is a SCP that has actually appeared in a game before, Containment Breach, but I think could be capable of so much if focused on for a standalone game. I'm talking about SCP-096; the creature known as 'Shy Guy'. The lanky, pale skinned monster with garishly oversized claws. It's quirk is that the creature hides it's face, and if anyone should break it's privacy and look at it, the creature will hunt them down and kill them. But when I say 'Hunt' I mean it in the fullest sense of the word. No manner of containment procedure can get in between 096 and a target, it's can slice through any metal, survive any damage done to it's body and obtains a supernatural knowledge of where the person who saw it's face is at all times. Whatsmore, you don't even have to look upon 096's face directly; doing so through satellite or even a picture is enough to doom you, so you can see the potential for a terrifying chase, based game here; right?

If there were a game adaptation I would probably make a few changes to the lore, such as the supernatural positioning. Perhaps if it had the sense of the general location of it's target the gameplay could become more of a cat and mouse affair, because just constantly running away from a creature that can break down any barrier would get very old fast. What I really forsee as being fun would be the amount of ways you could get creative trying to kill the thing, only to see it shrug everything off; very similar to the original terminator. That could be the objectives during the gameplay: get him trapped underneath a car, cause him to slip of a rainy rooftop during a chase, create a makeshift pipe-bomb and blow him up, and of course, melt him down in a steel-factory. (That last one might be a bit on-the-nose.) Only to learn, once all the chaos and attention inevitably brings the heel of law enforcement down upon and you're bought into the station to be booked, that nothing can stop the Shy-Guy from killing it's privacy back.

My next concept would be a much more ambitious idea, spurred by my fascination with Post-Apocalyptic style games that don't just adapt the typical 'Nuclear War' premise but do something interesting with it. (Like The Last of Us, Horizon or, specifically to this idea, 'I Am Alive'.) One of the most famous of the very many adaptations of SCP 001 is known as 'When Day Breaks', and tells of an alternate earth where some sort of anomalous change to the solar System's sun suddenly renders it's gaze fatal to all organics on the planet. Although 'Fatal' might not be the right world for it. The Sun develops the ability to melt down all those who bare it's brunt into a gelatinous blob of somehow sentient, and still very much alive, flesh that yearns to hunt down those who survived the event and drag them into the light so that their bodies can be fused into that grotesque Cronenberg-style whole. (Lovely, eh?)

What I see coming out of this is a Survival-style game, where exposure to the Sun is the big no-no threat of daily living. I don't mean an open-world survival game with thirst and hunger bars either, but a more directed story based survival game in the vein of Bioshock; where you have to scavenge for the bullets and tools to survive. Interactions with the 001-B mush people will be kept at a minimum for really intense horror moments and set pieces, with the bulk being other survivors gearing up to survive a world in the shadows. I could see a really intense, almost Last of Us esque tale about preserving in a world without hope. A place already destroyed. With Resident Evil style boss fights against ugly deformed metabolised monster men. A fairly straightforward premise but one with some legs to grown and expand on it, I think.

That very classic SCP-173 could make it's own standalone game work too. Although I bet many out there would rightly argue that early Containment Breach concepts already were the 173 standalone! 173, for those that don't know, is the weeping angel style SCP that existed before that Doctor Who episode was made. Garish statures that cannot move when looked at, but travel at superfast speeds whenever you look away or blink. If they ever touch a human, that victim's neck is immediately broken sending a shock to their nervous system and killing them instantly. The only weakness I can think of is that SCP-173 cannot operate doors nor pass through walls; meaning that simply locking them in a room by themselves is good enough containment.

A standalone version of an SCP game would probably share many similarities to Containment Breach, with an interactive blinking system to gameify sneaking around a creature that attacks the sightless. What I would like is a more linear and focused experience that can take advantage of extreme encounters. I have less of a concept for this one and more a general idea, but when I consider the potential of a 173 standalone game my mind is immediately drawn to one of the stand-out moments of 'Joy of Creation'. (A moment which Security Breach might have shamelessly ripped off.) I'm talking about a moment wherein a room full of creatures who act very similarly to 173 are placed between the player and their destination, requiring the player to manage looking at multiple statues at once whilst stealing away a glance to work on opening a door at the same time. A tense trade-off of safety versus progression that places the tools of fear at the hands of the player. 173 could definitely rock a set piece like that.

Finally I want to propose something out of left field: What if there was an SCP TV show? Yes, there's certainly enough cryptids and monsters to contain an exploratory series going into the various discovered SCP's throughout the years and how they could be maintained, but what about the basic framing device for the entire show? Well I think I have just that. SCP-963 tells of a jewel that carries the soul of a slain personnel member called 'Doctor Bright' that has obtained a tenuous immortality by way of stealing the bodies of others who wear the neckless. That sounds to me like a perfectly interesting lead character in a series that revolves around the discovery and exploration of that version of SCP-001 which is the book that creates other SCPs everytime that it's read. Essentially an origin point for the entire SCP franchise in that every page creates a new anomaly. The mystery of unravelling the truth behind that tools power whilst containing the anomalies all across the world, perhaps told over the course of a century as the Foundation evolves into the international secretive unit it is in modern lore. I think that'd be a sick show.

Those are just some mild musings I've had on what can be done with some of the cool stories told in the SCP world, but there's of course endless applications for this innumerable and versatile tales. I just learnt that three new SCP-001 entries were just 'declassified' the other month, demonstrating just how endless a font of inspiration the SCP world can be if only someone has the skills and tools to go at it. Which is why I very much encourage the creatively inclined to take a look at some of the stories of SCP for inspiration and ideas for where their own dreams might take them; there's no telling what strange new worlds they can envision with these cool stories as a starting point. And if you're not a creative person; read the SCP entries anyway. They're super fun.