Real Life Virtual Friends

Today I had the pleasure to showing two friends how far virtual reality headsets have come in the past 24 to 36 months. Both actually own slightly older VR systems, but it is a mark of how the technology has advanced rapidly watching their reactions. 

I've owned the Oculus Quest 2 since early 2021, and I love showing it to people who have never tried a VR system, or even play video games regularly. The shock and laughter of that first experience is already fun to see! Whether they're life long gamers that own a modern PC or the newest console but never had the chance to try VR before, or complete video game novices who's last experience with a game is on the Amiga, the reaction is always great! 

But showing the Quest to two friends who have played VR, and each own their own sets, but admit to not turning them on in over two years, it was really amazing how much they were surprised by this experience. 

The first thing was the freedom the Quest gives. As a self contained, all in one device, not having wires hanging off you of refreshing, and makes setting it up and getting into a game a snap. I could bring it over to my friends place, without needing anything extra, and share it with them in a long as it took me to sign into their WiFi. They were seriously impressed by that. Both lamented that one of the reasons their headsets are gathering dust is the effort it takes to get into a game, when they don't have a dedicated space to leave everything set up. 

Then there's the variety of play experiences. In the past two years, VR game development has lead to some truly astonishing experiences. I got to share a few rounds of mini golf, which is a wonderful introductory experience. People know how to play mini golf, so there is an absolute minimum amount of onboarding. It was so fun seeing my friends just losing themselves in a colourful, relaxing world for a while.

And then I turned on my newest purchase, Iron Man VR, and my friends were laughing and whopping with exhilaration! Flying through the skies, blasting drones is thrilling! But even that first time you suit up, setting the various armour pieces come forward you, instills such a childlike joy, that it's hard not to just laugh! 

In two short years, VR has changed so much, and the next two years look to be equally as huge! Eye tracking and face tracking are becoming standard. The new Quest Pro is just beginning to tease the possibilities of its full colour passthrough capabilities, a system that allows you to see the real world around you, while still playing a game. And the games themselves are just getting more and more imaginative! 

I can't wait to play with a friends headset in two years, and gasp at where things have progressed. 

On Friends And Friendship: Part 1: Pokémon Go

I started playing Pokémon Go back in the summer of 2016. I was one of those players not helping the server strain on launch by logging to a US store account and downloading it not my phone before it was officially released outside the US.

Everyone was playing. I’d go to the nearby big park and camp out in the grass beside a triangle of three PokéStops with friends and sit there for hours catching digital monsters on my phone. Dozens upon dozens of other players would be there, all in their little groups, all looking at their phones.

It was huge.

And there was absolutely no in game player interaction. The only benefit to being in a group was when someone on the far side of the grass screamed “DRAGONITE!!” and we all flocked to their location, like a herd of gallimimus.

Once the weather turned, the appeal of Pokémon Go wore off quickly. There was noticeably less people playing and with all the common Pokémon in my PokéDex, little to no reason to sit in the rain soaked mud. I stopped checking every day, slowly lost interest, eventually stopped playing and finally deleted it from my device.

Occasionally, over the next two years I’d see updates and articles about the game. It was still massively popular, with a huge player base. But I never felt the need to get back into it.

Then, this summer, some friends started playing again. One particularly sunny day, I had the kids at a splash park with two of my friends and they were playing. We talked about the new features, like friend lists, gifts and trading, and I started to think about it. Then they joked that Claire and I should just get the app again and log back in while we’re in Ireland just long enough to catch them some regional exclusive Pokémon.

And that did it. The lure of those first generation Pokémon I could never catch before was enough for me to crack. There and then, while sitting under the shade of a tree I downloaded Pokémon Go and logged back in.

I was immediately surrounded by new creatures I didn’t recognize. Everything I caught was a new Pokémon and it was thrilling and exciting again. With two whole new generations out now, 235 new Pokémon in the game, I had lots and lots to catch and it felt like the very first day all over again.

Only this time, I had friends.

And gifts.

And trading!

Oh my!!

Before we left the park I had texted Claire to tell her to download the game as well. She thought I was joking, but by the time she got home from work that evening, she was hooked too. It was fun discovering all the new features, systems, creatures and treasures the game had to offer together.

We travelled home to Ireland and brought back a bunch to trade. Suddenly, those annoying gaps in our PokéDex were within reach. Everyone had a few spares they could share around.

But we only knew of our few friends. Did anyone else in our neighbourhood play? How would we find them. I turned to the most evil thing I could think of, that vile tome of personal information, collected to sell to the highest bidder, the one place I was sure I’d find something, because it has seemingly everything.

I joined the local Facebook group. They were a big, active group that met up regularly and scheduled events together. One of the features added during my hiatus was raids. Raids are big fights in key locations that, at the higher levels, can only be completed with a group, and the rewards are rare and powerful Pokémon. I started to attend these organized raids, meeting other players in person and quickly became friends with some of the more active community members.

Pretty soon I was recognizing more and more people in my neighbourhood while out shopping or walking with the kids. People that were strangers to me a month before were waving at me on the street and exchanging pleasantries on a first name basis, or sometimes (okay, okay, more often than sometimes), Pokémon Go username.

And that’s how I made a couple dozen new friends in my neighbourhood after living here for almost eight years.

Today’s Pokémon Go is a whole different beast from what I played two years ago. Four months into my return, I’m still playing every day. Not as much as when I started in July, but then, I have all the common Pokémon again. But this time, it’s different. I’m not playing just hoping to catch that rare creature in the wild. I’m not even hunting very much anymore. Now I play for raids. I play to meet up with friends for a few minutes three or four times a week. I play for the events that happen regularly, where I meet more new friends out enjoying the game.

I play for the friends I have and the ones I yet to find in the wild.

Gotta Catch ‘Em All. 

Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes

"Right. I'm in a dark room. There's a clock reading 18:43, and a timer reading five minutes."

"Ignore the clock. That's the actual time. What's on the-"

"Cool! It uses the PC clock to have the real time in the game? Cool. That's-"

"We don't have time for this! What's on the bomb?"

"The timer reads 4:46. There's a space with wires, a button marked "Hold" and a thing with four buttons with weird symbols on them."

"Right, how many wires?"

"Er... Six vertical wires. Red, red, yellow, bl-"

"Horizontal."

"What?"

"They're horizontal. Vertical goes up and- we don't have time for this. Go on."

Later.

"The bar is white."

"Okay. Release the button when there's a 1 in any position on the countdown timer."

*BZZZZZZZT*

"I said 1!"

"I know! I did that. Wait. This time it's blue."

"Release on a 4."

*BZZZZZZZZT*

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!? I... Oh. Oh. You said a red button marked Hold... Just tap the button. Don't hold it at all."

"Okay. Done."

"Yeah... my bad."

"Last panel. Four buttons. Top left is a backwards C with a dot in the middle, beside that is a kind of balloon thing, below the C is a mountain with a road on it, and then Ha-"

"Wait. Stop. I've only gotten the C one so far. I have no idea what else you're talking about. What's the balloon?"

"It's like a circle on a pole. A quidditch goal."

"Oh. Got it. Next."

"The mountain... er... it looks like... um..."

"Does it look like an A and a T stuck together?"

"Yes! That's it!"

"Okay. And the last one?"

"HalfLife 3 confirmed."

"Got it. Balloon, mountain, HalfLife 3, C."

"Done!! We did it. 43 seconds left on the clock! Easy peesy. Lets do the next one."

And everyone died because no one could read Morse Code.

The story you just read is mostly true, although it's various beats occured over a few seperate games, with a variety of clueless bomb disposal teams, rather than one entirely incompetent one.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes has been the cause of the most laughing I've done while playing a game with my friends in months, if not years. It's simply a laugh a minute, chaos simulator that will often end with the bomb exploding, but will always end with smiles.

One player can see the bomb and has to describe the various components to the other player or players, who can't see the bomb, but who have the manual and can talk the first player through disarming each component.

Keep Talking is so simple and fun that anyone can play with a minimum of explaination. In fact, I've had great fun just handing someone the controller, explaining the four controls (Left stick to move between highlighted components, right stick to rotate, A to select, B to cancel) and letting them go with little to no further instruction. It's fun listening to them come up with their own way of describing the various elements, especially if you get what their talking about but can resist the urge to suggest your own "better" desciption.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is available on Steam and developed by Steel Crate Games, a Canadian indy developer, and I just cannot recommend it highly enough. It's for two to as many people as you can fit in a room, and is hilarious from opening tutorial to the final explosion and beyond.

 

Join Me On The Couch

Some of my best childhood memories are playing video games with friends and family, all sitting in the same room, within shouting, and hitting, distance. From the time my cousin yanked the SNES controller clean out of the console rounding a corner in Mario Kart, to the time my brother and I stayed up past midnight with two Garda recruits playing four-player GoldenEye deathmatch on the N64 with proximity mines, knowing the recruits had an exam the next morning[1].

But, for a while, the concept of couch multiplay was replaced almost entirely with on-line access, gaming against annoymous users half a world away. Games stopped offering split-screen competitive modes, and sometimes even split-screen co-operative modes.

Thankfully, the couch is coming back into fashion.

I first played SpeedRunners at PAX Prime 2013, and bought it that evening from my hotel room. It a fantastically frantic game of heroes racing around a circular course, jumping, sliding and dodging obstacles along the way. As players fall behind the group, they get eliminated, and the screen slowly shrinks down to just a tiny box with everyone laughing riotously at the chaos.

SpeedRunners is the perfect couch multiplayer game, as eliminated players start to pick alligences among the remaining runners, but rounds are over fast, so the player you were cheering for one minute might become your closest rival the next.

I've had many great hours filled with laughter playing this game. With races generally over pretty quick too, more than four players can enjoy the experience, taking turns on the controls. A real party favourite.

If you're looking for a longer experience, Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator is an amazing co-operative game where up to six players can work together as the crew of a starship in hostile space. Each player takes on the role of a member of the bridge crew, either Communications, Science, Engineering, Weapons, Helm or Captain. Apart from the Captain, everyone has their own personnal screen for their role, with the accompanying console on the screen. The Captain has the main screen, which everyone can see, and uses the information the other players gives her to guide her crew around the available space and defend outpossts or attack threats.

Artemis has been around for a while, but until recently, getting six computers in the same room all running the game on a LAN is very, very difficult. But now the game is available on tablets and smart phones, so we have the server running through Steam on my PC, while the seperate consoles run smoothly on the iPads. A neat bonus is that the touch interface makes it feel very Star Trek!

The game as it's presented is very much a sandbox experience with a minimum of deep interaction. There's no story, just a series of missions to play. But the missions are just a map, and you fly around reacting to distress calls. It kinda gets boring.

Thank goodness for the mission editor. You can create your own missions, or, as we did, you can find a forum that posts completed ones, and play theirs. One guy has a forty episode series that you can play through!! With events, and villains, and surprises, and really clever use of mechanics. They really make the game an actual game. Also, because the story and events are revealed through the Communications officer, it greatly improves that role.

If you decide to try out Artemis with a bunch of friends, then check out the missions. You'll enjoy it a lot more.

I've been having a blast playing couch multiplayer with friends thanks to its resurgence from indy developers. Every one offers a different experience, but every one of them results in fits of laughter and high-fives.

Get some friends together. Grab a bunch of snacks. Clean off the couch. Enjoy a great afternoon making wonderful memories. Together.

And I haven't even mentioned my most recent acquisition yet. That one deserves an entire post all to itself. But I shouldn't Keep Talking. More soon.

[1] - They passed the exam, thankfully. I have great memories of gaming with Basil and Brendan while they stayed with us for a few months. I would love to know they're still doing well, but we lost contact long ago.

Mini Games

I've been enjoying playing a couple of cerebral puzzle games on my tablet recently, mostly on my way to or from work on the bus.

I grabbed a cool shadow manipulation game called Shadowmatic, which I played a lot of until I got completely stumped. It was frustrating when I could see the shape I was supposed to make, but just hadn't twisted the objects to just the right degree. Still loads of fun, and absolutely beautiful to look at.

Rop is another puzzle game about positioning nodes and attached ropes to create set shapes. It starts off very easy, but gets difficult after a while. Or, it did for me. Claire is more spacially aware than me, and cruised through the whole thing.

And finally, the madness that is AlphaBear. This is a game where you're given a bunch of letters and you have to form words out of them, sometimes under a time limit, building bears as you go along. It's cute, fast and I'm terrible at spelling. It's free to play, with some microtransactions, but so far, all that has meant is that I'm forced to play in small bursts and let my credits recharge over time, which actually suits me well.

These make up the vast, vast majority of my gaming recently. Perfect in short bursts, or in one hand while entertaining a baby with the other.

Let's Play

Whelp! It's been a while! What?!? I've been busy... Mostly.

Claire got me a powerful PC for Christmas, and I started recording my games and uploading them to YouTube, which was a lot of fun while I was playing games, and then not so much when I started back into board games in a big way. I was only ever doing the YouTube thing as a hobby, so once I started spending my time on another, more social hobby, that fell to the sidelines.

Still, I had a blast making YouTube videos. I did a bunch of short plays, mostly showcasing opening areas, while I collectively called "Couch Projections". These were a lot of fun, and usually involved minimal editing, as they were straight plays of what I experienced. Some, like the fantastic OctoDad: Dadliest Catch ended up being too long, with too much of me feeling lost and not knowing what to do, so I editted those down to tight, short plays, highlighting the best parts. Others, like FLT: Faster Than Light seemed to be paced perfectly for what I intended the Couch Projections series to be. Either way, they were a lot of fun!

The only extended series I did was a full run on XCOM: Enemy Within, including all the DLC. The whole squad was named after friends and family, and they bravely fought aliens and died to protect humanity. I had an absolute blast recording this, and it was my first time ever finishing a full playthrough of XCOM, which I had originally owned on the Xbox 360 since launch.

As of this post, the final mission is not yet online. That's because, once I got to it and played it, it was kind of boring. It's a straight run through a linear base, with an alien voice explaining away any questions you had about the creatures you've been battling with for months. I struggled to edit and narrrate an engaging version of the mission, adding in fluff story details like I had been doing, but nothing was coming together. I'll really make an effort to go back to it and finish it just for the saake of completion, but it's not going to be a great ending.

I actually have plans for another XCOM series I'd love to do. There is a fan-made mod for the PC game called The Long War that dramatically changes many of the game elements, including skills tree, which are now much more in-depth, the terror tracks on nations, research, weapons and upgrades, and basically the whole feel of the game. I've been really excited about trying it out, so this is something I'm interested in doing. So keep an eye on my YouTube for that!

And if you want to volunteer to protect humanity, leave a comment on this post and you might see yourself drafted! Remember, service guarantees citizenship!

PAX Prime 2013

This was the third trip to PAX for Claire and myself, first in 2008 on our Epic Holiday[TM], and again in 2011 after arriving in Vancouver and getting settled in. But this year was special, as two friends and my brother joined us in Seattle for the first four-day PAX ever, and it was fantastic

Mike had arrived in Vancouver a few days early, and we all travelled south to Seattle by train on Thursday evening, meeting up with friends I had made on the last visit to PAX at the station in Vancouver. It certainly helped pass the time on the five hour trip to have friends to chat to.

In Seattle we met up with JP and my brother Stephen. They had been in Seattle for a day already, and had gotten a jump on us by attending a Microsoft event and playing the Xbox One! Thursday night was pretty much a crash, as we wanted to be up super early Friday morning to get into the hall for a full day of PAX.

The whole weekend was amazing! I got so much free swag, mostly in the form of t-shirts, and spent a not inconsiderable amount of cash on merchandise, again, mostly in the form of t-shirts. We all had a blast trying out and seeing upcoming games, and managed to spend time doing our own thing without getting separated for too long, or at least being able to meet up later without difficulty. It helped a lot that the convention centre wifi stayed working under the strain of thousands of nerds on mobile devices for the majority of the time. We could email and tweet at each other with plans from where ever we were at.

Once again, I didn't do much by way of panels. Stephen and JP came in early some mornings to get into interesting presentations without having to queue for too long, which was the best way to do it, in my opinion. I don't see much point in queuing for five hours to play a 15 minute demo of a game I'm already sold on buying when it's released a month down the line. We did go to the Gearbox Software panel together in the Paramount Theatre, which was hilarious and awesome, and then we got to meet the team after at their signing! Very cool!

But my big lesson from this year at PAX was that I'm becoming less and less interested in the triple-A titles on display and more and more involved with the indy games. I found myself in the indy games section at least once every day, trying out games I've never heard of, from companies that might not even have existed in 2011. My favourite games at PAX this year were all from the indy's, from the colourful and frantic four-player chaos of Speed Runners to the beautiful and hilarious Monster Loves You, both of which I got after the convention on Steam. The only triple-A title I spent any time queuing for was Nintendo's HD remake of Wind Waker, and only then for the free t-shirt. I've already played the game one my GameCube.

Two companies of particular note that I got to speak to this year are Vancouver's own Klei Entertainment, creators of Mark of the Ninja, Don't Starve and the currently on Early Access release Incognita, and the team behind my game of 2013, Gunpoint. I fanboyed out bigtime meeting Tom, John and Ryan at their PAX 10 booth. They were a pleasure to meet, and I'm delighted to have been supporting them since launch, buying my copy of Gunpoint before I even had my own Steam account, and before it became the massive success it is. I've been following Gunpoint since November 2011, and I'll be following this team onto their next big project too, whatever that may be.

And it wasn't just the indy companies that caught my attention. JP, Mike, Stephen and myself spend an hour in the DigiPen section, an area showcasing the best games from the DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington. The games were creative, clever, beautiful and masterfully crafted with love and care, and we spent longer there as a group than at any of the big name booths.

It was interesting to note that more of the Indy games we saw were supporting couch co-op or couch competition. I have many happy memories of playing Mario Kart or Bomberman on the SNES with my cousins, or GoldenEye on the N64 with the garda recruits that stayed with us, each sharing one TV, and having those immediate and intimate reactions only possible when sharing a couch with your opponents. Even from the Xbox 360 era, two of my favourite memories are playing split-screen with a friend. I'd love to see a resurgence in that social gaming with friends in the coming years, and I think indy games might be at the forefront of that.

I hope that the organizers of PAX 2013 noted the heavy foot traffic in the indy section this year and give them a greater space next year. I realize they can't cough up the same amount as the big studios, but they deserve the support and recognition.

PAX was a fun time with fun friends, and I've enjoyed it every year we've been, but Mike "Gabe" Krahulik's recent comments on transgenders and the whole recurring Dickwolves fiasco has definitely soured our interest in ever going again. At the start of September I said we'd probably never return to PAX, but that's a bit premature. I'm not willing to accept Gabe's apologies, as at this point it's clear he either doesn't really mean it, or he isn't learning from his previous mistakes. But I would like to come back to a safer, more accepting, open PAX with my future children and share with them the joy of being a gamer geek.

So never is a long time. But not next year.

 

Amassing An Effective Experience

One of my favourite video game franchises is the sci-fi role-playing epic, Mass Effect, by Canadian developer BioWare. I've been excited about it since before I even got my Xbox, as evidenced by a blog post that is over five years old!

So when the third game was released at the start of March, I couldn't wait to finish the story I started way back on December 9th, 2007. There was so much to look forward to. I had brought Ryan Shepard and his crew through many adventures across the galaxy, saving it from certain doom twice! And now, I was going to end the threat once and for all. No longer was I content to simply "hold the line", but my team and I would wipe their smug alien grins off the face of the cosmos.

The first thing that went wrong was when I tried to import my Shepard from my previous games. An error told me that the facial code was not recognised. Instead of the character I have had for five years, I was given something that looked like he'd been dropped as a child. Repeatedly. After checking online and confirming it as a known bug, I tried to recreate Ryan in Mass Effect 3. But he didn't look right. No matter what I did, it wasn't Ryan.

Figuring that a patch was on the way, I decided to start the campaign anyway, as I couldn't wait to experience the thrilling tale. I would play for a day or two, clock up a few short hours and then restart when the patch went live.

Two weeks later and no patch. I haven't even touched the single player since the Thursday after release, some twelve days ago at it stands. I'm having to avoid half the websites I normally read due to spoilers, and I can't even discuss anything about the game with friends, leaving me out of a lot of excited conversations that I've enjoyed from playing other games in parallel in the past.

But I'm not angry. And here's why.

When Bioware finally confirmed all the rumours that were circulating about the possibility of including multiplayer in the third Mass Effect, I was... less than enthusiastic. I didn't see the need for any extraneous flash added to my deep and engaging story. When they elaborated and told us it was going to be a co-operative experience, I was a little more interested, as I'm a huge fan of the Gears of War series Horde Mode.

With no single player experience to enjoy, I jumped into the multiplayer to try it out. And got hooked.

I've been playing it exclusively since Thursday, at times with my friends in Ireland, and at other times with my Canadian friends. I'm currently ranked 8th in Ireland on the leaderboards, which amuses me greatly! The game is fantastic fun, engaging, thrilling and hilarious. Every session is different, depending on the class and race I play, as well as the team I'm with, and even the build I choose this time to try out. I love the idea that there are only 20 Levels to gain before you get the choice to reset to 1 in exchange for a bonus to the single player experience, as it encourages players to try out new builds, new ideas and new mixes, knowing that if they don't like it, they can throw it out and try again quickly.

Experience and credits earned are entirely shared evenly, regardless of how much or how little you killed during the session. Everyone gets the same amount. There is a medal and points system that ranks the team on the final score screen, but it's only for bragging rights within that one game. It doesn't get remembered once you exit that screen. The entire experience is built around rewarding co-operative play and not punishing players for not being as good at killing as other team members.

Credits earned through completing challenges can be spent in the ingame store to buy random booster packs containing cards that award items, abilities and more. The random element makes opening every pack a thrill, and finding that rare weapon or much sought-after character a huge joy, much more than if it was just a straight up "Earn this much to buy this weapon".

So when my friends and I played a few games this evening and discovered that none of our experience or credits had been counted for the last three games, we were a little more than disgusted. This is just another problem to add to the growing list of issues we've been having with the game. Game crashing freezes, enemies getting stuck in mid-air, invulnerable to damage, an infuriating choice by the developers to map Take Cover and Revive Teammate to the same button, and now lost experience and credits all sour the fun we've been having.

It is impossible that no-one at BioWare was aware of the character import bug prior to launch. To assume such would be to assume that no-one on the team, or in their testing department tried to import their character over, and that's madness. It's one of the core mechanics and selling points of the series! Since the game's launch, BioWare are saying that a patch is on the way.

But here's the rub: In response to other issues related to the game, franchise executive producer and director Casey Hudson said "When we finish a game, we finish it many months before it actually hits the shelves..." So in those "many months", we are lead to believe that they didn't notice anything wrong, thinking they had a functional game on their hands. In those "many months", nobody thought to polish the game up and at least have a day-one patch ready at launch, as other games have done, fixing the worst of the issues.

Or maybe they knew they didn't have to. They knew it was going to be one of the biggest games of the year, selling millions of copies globally. It was already a success before it even went on sale. Why bother fixing something people have already paid for? Now I'm being really cynical, but I don't think I'm being entirely untruthful.

And that's just not how you should treat your fans.

Dear Xbox Three-Sixty

You have suffered much in my hands.

Oh, sure. It started out all sunshine and roses, an easy life, living day to day with just a small handful of games, sharing my attention with the Wii. Life was easy. You were new and shiny, young and invincible.

But all that would change. I would taste the sweet nectar of Live. One free weekend for all Silver Members. So much changed in those few hours. I became addicted, needing more. I bought a One Year Gold subscription and dusted off my old games. I had never played the multiplayer stuff before, now it was all I yearned for. Like any good narcotic (or so I'm told), the more I played, the more I wanted.

But it was Burnout Paradise that got you all hot and bothered, and left me in the cold. At first, I thought it was a random glitch in the matrix, a graphical error that caused a console freeze. But I quickly learned the truth. You were dying inside. It was only a matter of time.

I sent you away. They told me they would make you better, return you to me as if it had never happened. And they did. I remember the day I got that phonecall that you were home. I opened the package to see you lying there. It was you, not a replacement. I could tell by your serial number.

We've had some great times since then. You were always good to me. You soldiered through long nights of Rock Band with friends, twelve hour marathon sessions of the newest release or hours upon hours of watching TV shows and movies. We reached over 30,000 Gamerscore together, just you and me, dozens of games, an internet connection, Xbox Live Gold, days and weeks of playtime... ok. Maybe a bit more than just you and me, but all through you.

I even brought you to Canada. After all those years, I could never dream of leaving you behind.

For a while, you sat there waiting. Waiting. Wondering when I would show you the same attention you had been used to. Then September 20th arrived and it was just like old times. I was running you through your paces again, every evening when I got home, long, intense sessions at the weekends, not only running the game, but sometimes hosting, Party chatting and downloading all at once.

It was to be expected, really. The first time I saw those two red segments light up your face, I paused. I refused to see the truth. I told myself that you just needed dusting. It didn't help. I moved you to a new, brighter location. It didn't help.

Now I have you sitting on my sill, beside an open window. You remain cool and comfortable, sucking in the Vancouver November air. For now.

But I know it's coming. I know our time runs short. Now I cherish every moment. I don't want to start playing a new game in case that will be the one that finishes it.

I just don't want it to end yet.

Your owner forever,

Denis.

Score One For Games

Classical orchestral pieces have long been acknowledged as stunning examples of music, capable of taking the listener through ranges of emotions, all while really only interacting with a single sense.

Movie scores have shred some of that appreciation during the last few decades. Star Wars, Batman and Tron all have easily identifiable scores that have become classics in their own right. The names John Williams or Danny Elfman can be held up as modern equals to the greats of Beethoven or Mozart. Indeed, the work of John Williams has been a regular favourite of many great orchestras, especially the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

However, despite events such as Video Games Live or the very recently released CD from the London Philharmonic, The Greatest Video Game Music, there still isn't the same level of appreciation for video game scores, and it's a crying shame.

While cut-scenes play out like moments from a movie, unlike movies, video games include incidental music which can be presented as a dynamic addition to the scene or level, shifting tempo and volume according to the actions of the player. This reaction to the events onscreen can deeply effect the level of player immersion into the world. As the music swells in a tense moment, I can feel my pulse quicken, knowing that something is nearby, about to strike.

I'd love to start seeing video game sound tracks get more and more recognition. It's starting to happen now, as major composers are working on games and digital and CD sales of video game score continue to rise.

Several years ago, Claire and I once suggested to a friend that worked on a radio music program for Irish classical music station Lyric FM that they should do a special around video game scores, but we were informed that no-one in the entire station had access to any, so it wasn't going to happen. 

Hopefully some day it will happen. Hopefully some day soon.

Digital Mortality

The general rule of video games seems to be that characters never ages. No matter how many adventures they have, their features remain frozen, ageless avatars, immune to the ravages of time. While their polygon count might rise and their appearances get updated, characters like Gears of War's Marcus and company, Mass Effect's Shepard and crew, even Mario and friends don't really grow old. In Lara Croft's case, the newest, upcoming release has her actually getting younger!

But rules were made to be broken, and Ubisoft decided to shatter them. After all, in video games, nothing is true, everything is permitted.

I have experienced so much of the life of Ezio Auditore da Firenze. Over the course of three games, I have been there for his birth and I have watched him grow from a carefree youth into a responsible adult. I shared the pain of his lose when his father and brothers were taken from him, and experienced the key moments in a life spanning decades as he sought his revenge. I was with him when he romanced Christina, and also when he accepted that the life he lead would keep them apart. I watched him build up a brotherhood of assassins, defending the people when no-one else would.

And now I bear witness to the closing act of his life. His hair is grey, his face covered in the marks and folds of a long life. In his actions, I can see the wisdom of decades; in his movements, the fatigue that those same years have brought. He is no longer the young man of previous games.

He has aged. Time has passed for him. He's not just the immortal avatar of a video game, but someone who has lead a full life, one that I know has to eventually, inevitably end in death, even if we don't see it onscreen in the game.

Ubisoft has crafted a story and a character spanning over three decades. It pains me that Revelations will be the final chapter in Ezio's story. But I love that it is. It has been a unique experience, one that I was honored to be a part of.

Addendum: At the time of writing this, I couldn't think of other examples of characters growing old over the course of a series of games, even though I knew there had to be others. Thanks to some friends, Solid Snake and Sam Fisher share that trait, suggesting that the stealth assassin industry is detrimental to you ability to remain youthful! Though not out yet, Max Payne appears to have aged also in his upcoming release.

I Got Nothing

Ack. Oh well. I've been trying to do this whole November daily blogging thing, and I hoped that by not actually mentioning it or making a big deal of it I'd kind of sneak through the whole month without getting myself stressed about having to post every single day!

I've been kind of cheating anyway. For one, I had built up somewhat of a buffer, writing a few related posts together but saving the extra for the following week. I'm not too upset about that as I still had to write the posts.

My other sneaky method had only just paid off. I have my blogs date and time still set to GMT. I just never got around to updating it. So I've been able to post late in the evening Pacific time and have it appear as early the next day on my blog. This gave me a small amount of leeway in case I couldn't or forgot to post something. I could post the following Vancouver evening and justify to myself that I still managed a post per date, if not day.

Unfortunately, I missed Saturday both in Ireland and Vancouver. You see, I spent it entirely playing Assassin's Creed: Revelations. Well, almost entirely. I got up at 10am, played until about 3pm, took a walk and got some fresh fruit for a snack, played a short bit of Gears of War 3, went out for dinner with the lovely Claire, and then back to the world of Ezio Auditore da Firenze.

So here we are. An excuse post. I hate it as much as you. It's so late Claire is gone to bed, I've probably made a dozen typos I'll see in the morning and I'm too tired to even add relevant links.

But I have altered the date so that this appears to have been posted on Saturday. I'm still awake. My day hasn't ended yet. It counts, right?

EDIT: Fixed some typos. 

What Might Have Been

Spoiler Warning! ArrOOga, arrOOga! Spoiler Warning!

The body of this post discusses major plot points from Gears of War 3, in particular a characters fate toward the end of the game. Don't read the rest unless you have finished the game. You have been warned.

Previous posts in this series:
The Coalitions Finest
User, Why?
Brothers To At Least Act Three 

Click To Read More

Brothers To At Least Act Three

In my first post, in what has become a series related to the Gears of War franchise, I mentioned that my first experience of the games was through Horde Mode in Gears 2, and that I had ignored the story for some time even after I purchased it thinking I'd hate it. On the surface, it looked like everything I disliked about testosterone fueled war games turned up to eleven.

Turns out I was wrong, and right, in that order.

Make no mistake, the universe of Gears of War is a truly nightmarish place overpopulated with males who sport enormous muscles and necks that resemble tree-trunks, a thriving steroid manufacturing and distribution industry, and tech level beyond our own, while simultaneously never spotting the vast race of cave dwelling monsters that lived below their feet until they burst to the surface. There is so much wrong with the world of Sera that I find it hard to understand how it got past the design process.

I was right in thinking that I'd dislike that kind of game, I was just wrong in thinking that I already disliked the Gears series because of it.

You see for some reason, in this case, it works. It still has all those things I dislike about war games, but by turning them up to eleven, Epic managed to make them entertaining, poking fun at the absurdity of the tropes on display. It's an over-the-top universe of action and adventure, epic battles and heartbreaking personal moments. It has, in my opinion, some great incidental dialogue that characters shout in the heat of battle, fantastic characterizations, and an awesome array of enemies. 

I ended up playing both the first and second games through with friends, both through the couch-sharing, split-screen mode and the Xbox Live full-screen version. In fact, now that I think about it, I don't think I've ever played any Gears of War story by myself, and I've finished the first game at least three times, and the second game more than that!

Through Horde Mode, my wonderful wife joined me on the world of Sera, at first watching me play through the story, enjoying the story together, before playing the game herself. She never got around to finishing her own run through, but she put in hours of combat training killing Locust in Horde. 

On the release of Gears 3, I knew I wanted to experience the story together with Claire this time. We sat down and played through the entire campaign together over several nights. Our first run-though was even on Hardcore! The campaign allows for 4-player co-op, so we had two bots running and gunning along with us. In practice, this meant that they raced forward, took a tonne of fire, one went down, the other picked his fallen friend up, rinse, repeat, and Claire and I sat back picking everything off at a safe distance.

With our run-though complete, Claire and I joined Bob and Jp on Arcade Mode and played through it a second time in quick succession.

All in all, I can't say that I didn't enjoy the game. There were some spectacular scenes, loads of genuinely funny moments, fantastic dialogue, nice nods to the earlier games and some great easter eggs scattered throughout. The story moved along at a good pace, and while it clocked in at easily the longest in the series, it never once felt like that. The ending almost came too soon.

Playing it on Insane in the Arcade four-player co-op was tough. Instantly dieing instead of the usual safety net of Down But Not Out was at first frustrating, but once you adjusted to it, it simply made some scenes even more tense and nerve wracking. Adding Mutators, fun game changers such as infinite ammo, or bonus weapon damage, certainly made things more enjoyable, shifting the tone of combat from a defensive stance spending the majority of time behind cover regaining health, to a more proactive offensive ideology. There were still a number of really, really difficult-to-finish areas, but the ones we were dreading the most often proved to be the quickest to complete!

I have to say, I was well proud of our little band of heroes when we nailed the final boss without too much trouble. I want to say that we didn't even wipe out once, but I think we may have had to restart once or twice early on. But it was far less painful that certain earlier levels (I'm looking at you, Formers!). In the end, it was some awesome teamwork, combined with a sprint around the tower a few times while the three dead teammates rejoined the fight, that won the day!

Visually, the game is beautiful. The environments have a massive amount of variety, from battling in dark tunnels to stunning, sun drenched walkways. Even the darker sections of the game are brighter than most apocalyptic games, filled with torches, dynamic lighting effects and clever tricks to avoid having to play through an area with my screen brightness maxed out. The character models are crisp and incredibly detailed, with everything moving realistically, whether it's the faces as they talk and react or the solid plates on the armour.

It's also refreshing to see a game with several strong female characters, and even more refreshing to see them wearing much the same amour as the guys, instead of skimpy chainmail bikinis or a body armour that inexplicably leaves the midrift exposed! The girls are just as bad-ass as the guys here, and everything they do, say and wear reinforces that they are not just onscreen to look pretty and kiss the men on the way to battle, but could easily hold their own in any fight. The only thing I'm upset we never get to see is an all female chapter, where the girls have to defend or attack a key location while the boys are busy elsewhere. Admittedly, the main game only has three named female COG characters, so maybe I can suggest that idea for future DLC!

Story-wise, I was bitterly disappointed in some of the major choices made, especially towards the end. I'm not going to go into it here, as I'm going to leave my thoughts and ideas on that subject for another post, but suffice it to say, I still think Gears of War 2 is the stronger story, or at least the stronger resolution.

Gears of War 3 feels like the appropriate ending in the story for control of an entire planet. Unfortunately, it just seems to push itself over the thin line between "epic action adventure" into the field of "ridiculous nonsense" as it gets towards the end. There were several times I found myself close to screaming "WHY?!?" at the Xbox, and at least once when I did. Despite this, I enjoyed it then and still enjoy it now. I've played it through once on Hardcore and once on Insane in four-player co-op, yet I still enjoy joining friends games and playing through a few chapters when I have the time. There are some amazing climax moments, none better than the start of Act 3 where you have to defend a fort against a tidal wave of seemingly unending enemies. The dialogue and character interactions are funny and enjoyable, and once again the Baird/Cole buddy team-up steals the show for me.

A flawed but enjoyable masterpiece, the story of Gears 3 was enough for me to enjoy playing at least twice. While it won't keep me coming back like Horde mode does, it wasn't something I felt I could put off playing, as I had done in Gears 2. In fact, more than anything, playing the Gears 3 campaign has made me want to go back and play the story in Gears 2 again, and relive how an emotional moment in a game is done properly.

Previous posts in this series:
The Coalitions Finest
User, Why?
Still to come:
How I would have written things if I was in control (But with a much snappier title)

User, Why?

If the internal workings of a computer are anything like in Reboot, my Xbox is developing a lasting hatred of me right now.

Gears of War 3 has a plethora of unlockables that you earn for completing set tasks, such as being awarded X number of one particular ribbon, getting X number of kills with a weapon, or playing X number of matches in each multiplayer game mode.

It's this last one that has caused me to start leaving my Xbox turned on for hours while I did other things. In order to unlock a particular character skin you need to play 300 matches of each of the six modes in competitive multiplayer. As I have no interest in actually doing any such thing, I have taken to setting up the game to play match after match after match against bots while my chosen character simply stands there and dies, hopefully as quickly as possible so that I can get through another match. This has been a slow process, but as I'm not actually playing, it doesn't effect me, apart from destroying my Win/Loss Ratio.

However, there is one game mode where this system has an unfortunate outcome for someone else. Wingman is all about teamwork. There are four teams of two, and the objective is to be the last man or team standing while scoring ten kills before another team does. Because of this, I have a fully active bot teammate with me during my attempt to clock up those 300 matches.

A fully active bot teammate who hates me.

Most of the time I'm not even paying attention to the screen while it runs through the matches. However, now and then, I do catch a glimpse of what's going on. Let me give you just two examples from the 300 matches that he helped me through.

In one game our team spawned in a nice open area with lots of nearby cover. My teammate, whom I lovingly nicknamed Private Bottington The 3rd, took cover at a nearby low wall, and watched as I was taken down by some dastardly villain. Bottington raced over, providing covering fire, picked me up and dashed back into cover. No sooner had he done so when I was dropped again. Like the true hero that he is, Bottington came to my rescue once again, and once again made it safely back into cover. From the safety behind the wall he turned to look at me. He silently implored me to move, to run, to hide behind something, anything. He watched in dismay as the bullets ripped through my armour one last time, dropping me, ragdoll-like to the ground. This time, there was no reviving me. In a fit of rage, Bottington went on to hunt down and execute my assailant, his teammate and two other bots, single-handedly scoring the highest point total that round.

Just a short few matches later, Bottington and I spawned in a nice, sunny area. Bottington ran about looking for the other teams, but always stayed relatively close by. A firefight broke out around me, and Bottington valiantly attempted to defend me. He raced across in front of me and had just left my field of vision when I saw his indicator change to the Down By Not Out circle. A moment later Bottington crawled back in from right of screen, a trail of blood smearing the dusty ground behind him. He dragged himself over to my feet, pleading to be picked up. I stood there, my only movements the involuntary flinches caused by stray bullet impacts. Bottington begged for help. I did not give it. An enemy rolled into view behind my teammate and stomped his head into the ground, before turning on me and blowing me into several gooey little pieces.

Long after I get my unlock, long after I have given up grinding out match after match for something that means so little, I will remember Bottington and his heroic actions.

And every time I play on a match where the opposing team has one bot to fill out their numbers, and that bot hunts me down and kills me, a little tear will well up in the corner of my eye, and I'll think to myself "Well played, Bottington, well played..."

I Have Blistas On My Fingas!

Moving to Vancouver was always going to be tough. We left so much behind; family, friends, comics, books, boxes and boxes of action figures. But one of the things knew I'd miss most long before we set out on this great adventure was hanging out with friends.

Specifically, hanging out with friends playing Rock Band!

Yesterday I had the joy of playing a massive twelve song setlist with two friends from back home thanks to the glory of Xbox Live. Normally I play guitar or base, but as those were both claimed before I joined, I jumped onto drums for the first time in a long, long time. It was either that or vocals, and I didn't think either of the others had done anything to deserve hearing that while we played!

Twelve songs was not only the longest run I've had in Rock Band in some time, but also shattered any drum session length record I had previously set. I stayed on Easy, testing the waters of Normal for about 30 seconds at the start of the fifth track before I beat a hasty retreat back to the safety of Easy.

Playing Rock Band again with friends reminded me of all the great nights and afternoons we had back in Ireland, rocking out on plastic instruments, handing around the microphone to blast out our favourite tunes. I've brought my set to a wedding and several house parties, and every time it's been a huge hit.

I still buy new tracks that I like, but it's not the same playing by myself. Rock Band was never even really about playing the game. It was about relaxing in good company, chatting and enjoying a few snacks while listening to and interacting with some great music. Of course, it was also about jumping about and making somewhat of a fool of yourself in front of friends, acting out all those dreams of wanting to be on stage in front of a crowd of thousands of adoring fans. Playing it on a projector with surround sound certainly added to the experience.

I miss those days. I miss my friends.

I'm going to go and console myself with a few tracks on Rock Band. Guitar this time. That ring finger needs time to recover.

The Coalitions Finest

Gears of War 3 has taken up residence in my Xbox almost exclusively since it's launch in September. Apart from hacking and slashing my way through the dungeons of Torchlight and rocking out to the Coldplay pack for Rock Band 3, I've been investing an extraordinary amount of time in the third game in Epic Games' console flagship series.

My first experience of Gears of War was via the second installment. Aidan and Rob had bought the steroid abusing sci-fi action shooter and invited me to try out this new game mode called Horde.

From Wave one, I was hooked. Team based co-operative multiplayer with no competitive element! Wave after wave of inhuman enemies in steadily increasing numbers and difficulty, this was pure survival gameplay balancing edge-of-your-seat tension with frantic and cinematic firefights.

My love of Horde was so great in fact that I pointedly ignored what I thought was surely a terrible, machismo, testosterone filled, steroidal, brain dead campaign. By the time I did get around to playing it, I knew how to defeat every enemy it threw at me, apart from the bosses. This somewhat robbed me of experiencing the terror of the bullet absorbing Sires, as I already knew to simply walk around the area with my chainsaw permanently revved up!

Going into Gears 3, I promised myself that I'd get the campaign finished before trying out Horde 2.0 or the new mode, Beast. Once the surprises of the story were out of the way, I was eager to jump into my favourite gameplay mode in it's newest incarnation.

Horde has seen a vast and sweeping overhaul since it's appearance in the second game. Now you earn cash for kills, and can buy fortifications, ammo boxes or weapons across the map space. Way back when this was first announced I was a little apprehensive that they had messed with a good thing. Horde was great because it was so clean. Just you and up to four friends versus 50 waves of Locust creatures looking to decorate their fireplaces with your skulls. Nothing else.

But the new additions not only work, they work spectacularly. Earlier I called Horde Mode "pure survival gameplay balancing edge-of-your-seat tension with frantic and cinematic firefights". Horde 2.0 adds heart pounding building, repairing and upgrading of all too often meager defenses to help you survive the rising flood of enemies. The fortifications further encourage team-work, as people co-ordinate to maximise the work done in the short time they have between Waves. Players can even share cash with each other if they wish to, although while I have seen this used occasionally in private games with friends, I have yet to witness it during a random match-up over Xbox Live.

One of the best additions to Horde 2.0 however has to be the Wave 10 Bosses. Horde is still played as 50 Waves broken into five 10 Wave sets. In the first version, this meant that the number and difficulty of the enemies per Wave steadily increased up to Wave 10, where we were terrified of Bloodmounts, before resetting to the enemies of Wave 1 again for Wave 11, but making them tougher. Horde 2.0 makes that 10th Wave even more fun by giving it a random Boss, from a choice of about seven or eight. The bosses are usually bigger and badder than anything else in the mode, and standard tactics for almost every one of them is to take out all the regular enemies while avoiding the Boss characters until they are the only things left, and then combatting them. Standard tactics usually result in death. Non-standard tactics however, focusing fire on the Boss characters first and then the little guys, just results in additional iterations of the Boss character appearing. If there is anything worse than dealing with a Burmak, it's seeing its twin brother step out from the smoke of the exploding first one.

Horde kept me playing Gears of War 2 much longer than I have played any other shooter to date. Through it I made some great friends over Xbox Live, and enjoyed many frantic and hilarious moments of both victory and defeat. Horde 2.0 has successfully improved on the original design, and I know I'll be playing it for months, if not years, to come.

Mr Ryan Goes To PAX 2011

Last weekend my wonderful wife and I took a bus south across the border to the city of Seattle for the best gaming convention in he world, Penny Arcade eXpo, or PAX. We headed down on Thursday and met up with some friends, one of whom lives in Seattle now and the other two traveled up from New Mexico for the convention as well! Our charming company was a welcome bonus!

This was our second time at PAX, the first being in 2008 at the end of our Epic Holiday[TM]. I never did get around to a write-up of that stop, but you can safely assume that it was incredible, and we couldn't wait to get back. This year I decided to step things up a bit by going in costume. Thanks to my amazing mum, I was able to get my Rocketeer helmet brought over from Ireland, and I already had the jacket with me. And so, for most of Friday and Saturday at PAX 2011, I could be seen wandering the many areas, slowly sweating to death in a heavy leather jacket, carrying a heavy, metal helmet[1].

A lot of the guests and exhibitors fist bump rather than shaking hands in order to avoid picking up nasty infections. This year I even saw the more extreme version, elbow bump, used by many. It certainly worked for me. I have not come down with any PAX crud as of yet, apart from being utterly exhausted for a few days after!

The whole event was awesome. We met so many incredibly nice people, and I got to talk to people I never expected, about interests I never expected to share with them. I got to meet AJ LoCascio, the voice of Marty McFly in the TellTale Games episodic Back to the Future video game! Not only was he probably the most down-to-earth, nice, honest-to-goodness coolest guy I met at PAX, but he's also a huge Rocketeer fan[2]! He was able to recognize that I was holding a Disney Master Replicas version of the helmet from across the booth, and he recognized the Wested jacket as well! If you can imagine how blown away I was by that much, I almost collapsed when he told me that he made his own Rocketeer helmet from fiberglass. We spent about ten minutes geeking out about the movie, the props and the awesomeness of the Replica Prop Forum.

The weekend was just chock full of amazing stories, though rather like Empire Strikes Back, I feel I opened on the best of them. My costume was a huge success, and I got stopped everywhere I went by other attendees, exhibitors and even a VIP or two as they gushed over the character and took photos. It was heart warming to see so many fans of Dave Stevens creation in attendance. For me, one of the things I enjoyed most was watching peoples eyes widen as I let them hold the helmet and even try it on. Unlike the more accurate fiberglass versions available, the metal Master Replica I have is far from fragile. It was nice to be a part of fullfilling a small number of peoples dreams to hold or wear such an iconic piece from a much loved classic.

Even queuing was a fun experience. Apart from playing games on iPads, Enforcers (the PAX volunteer force that help make everything run smoothly) were handing out bits and pieces to help us pass the time. While queuing for the Saturday night concert, we all got given brightly coloured pipe cleaners and instructions to "Be creative". This resulted in hats, flowers, Portal-themed wrist bracelets, stick figures fighting, a sniper with gun, and even a helicopter with rotating blades! From pipe cleaners, people!

But of course, PAX is ultimately all about the games. And we got to try loads of them!

Welcome to Serra.
Gears of War 3 is due for release on September 20th, and it had a large presence in the Xbox area. I expected longer lines, but compared to others games on display, the Gears line was tiny. I got to try out the updated Horde 2.0 on Friday and the brand new to the franchise Beast Mode on Saturday.

Horde: My biggest worry about Horde 2.0 was that they had gone and messed with a good thing. Horde is still the best of the endless-wave styles of game modes because it is so clean and simple. It threw out customization in favour of accessibility. Horde 2.0 adds to the basics by bringing in a cash-for-kills system for that can be used to buy stuff during a small window between waves, from ammo to laser defenses and beyond. And it works fantastically! It's fast, fun and doesn't stop the games flow. We got to play waves 8 to 10 allowing us a peek at what surprises the tenth waves hold. I'm not going to spoil it, but after the terrifying horror of seeing your first bloodmount in Gears 2, they've really outdone themselves for Gears 3. It's awesome!

Beast: This is a whole other kettle of fish. Trying Horde, I knew the basics. Waves of alien monsters that I need to kill before they kill me. Beast is a set number of COGs per level and you have a very tight time limit. You start with one minute on the clock and get more for every kill. You can play as a variety of Locust, starting as low as tickers or wretches, and going up from there. I'm not going to tell you what I saw or played as, but you can assume it was fun! The gameplay is very different, and I sucked during my quick trial. This is not Reverse Horde, it requires a totally new set of skills.

The Boardgame: Not on display at the Xbox booth, this was instead being demoed on a different floor, but I've included it here for completions sake. This looked very nice. Fantasy Flight Games were running demos all weekend long and the whole thing looked impressive. I didn't play myself, but I heard lots of good things from people that were trying it out. As expected from an FFG game, the production quality was through the roof. Cards, tokens and figure pieces were beautiful. The figure pieces were especially impressive, and looked like they should be a lot of fun to paint up.

But Gears was only a tiny area in a huge, multilevel convention. I got to see and play games that are coming out as soon as this month and as late as next year.

The Gunstringer is the first retail game from Twisted Pixel, the company behind Comic Jumper and 'Splosion Man. It's a Kinect game that makes clevel use of the technology and, more importantly, it's a load of fun to play. I don't own a Kinect. Yet. There was no reason to before I went to PAX. Now I'm tempted. I might even get one for this alone.

I got up on stage with three others and had a four-player dance-off in front of a large crowd playing Dance Central 2, also for Kinect. I found that it had very good motion tracking, more impressive for being able to track four uncoordinated male players gyrating wildly. I came first, despite never playing any of the dance games before, though that probably says more about how bad the others were than how good I was.

From the ridiculous length of the line all weekend long, it was clear that there was a lot of interest in the latest game in the Elder Scrolls series, Skyrim, but I could not have cared less. Not that I have anything against it, I'm just not interested in fantasy games. One of our friends stood in line for 3.5 hours to play the 15 minute demo and got a fuzzy hat for her troubles[3]. At one point while I was talking to her in the line, I looked up at a clip of a dragon in the trailer and jokingly said "Oh. Nice graphics. What's this game?" and 40 angry nerd heads swiveled in my direction.

Last, but by no means least, one of the booths that immediately caught my attention was the TellTale Games Jurassic Park area. Not only did they have a nice small-scale replica of the entrance gates into the park, and fencing with little flashing lights on top, but they had a fan-made reproduction of one of the park jeeps! I was a child all over again standing beside it. Instead of just reading my thoughts on this however, take a break from the text and look at a video blog TellTale Games staff did during the convention. Check out the eejit at the 1:25 mark, and again at the 2:30 mark. Yeesh. Fanboys. They were everywhere at PAX.




PAX wouldn't be PAX without free stuff. We came home with tonnes and tonnes of swag. I think I got 8 t-shirts, of which I only paid for one. Baseball hats, avatar items, lanyards, pins, even a very high quality hoodie! The whole weekend paid for itself in free stuff. Claire and our friends even got themselves free OnLive consoles! FREE. CONSOLES!!![4] Insane.

If we're still here next year we'll be going again, so I'll let people know in case anyone is interested in joining us for a crazy weekend of video games, boardgames, demos, t-shirts, freebies, music, costumes, celebrities and more in 2012! I honestly cannot recommend it enough. It's the best, friendliest, most community orientated convention I've ever been to.

Hopefully you can join us and share in the love that is PAX 2012.

[1]- On Saturday morning I woke up complains of an unusual pain in my right arm. I put it down to sleeping badly in the hotel bed, as I had no recollection of having injured it the day before. It wasn't until later that same day that I realised that the weight of the helmet was causing strain on my arm muscles! I didn't feel it while I was enjoying the convention. It was only once I relaxed that it all hit me!
[2]- The earlier part of this sentence should probably be noted as biased based on the latter part. But even then, AJ was very, very cool.
[3]- She did also get to meet and have her photo taken with Todd Howard while in the queue, which she excitedly told me later in the day. She was much distraught when I shrugged and told her I had no idea who that was. Still, that first 3.5 hours at PAX in a queue was pretty much the high point of her convention, I'm led to believe. 
[4]- The catch of course is that OnLive is a subscription based service, so they're happy to give you the console for free to let you try out the service and hopefully sign up.

Silence Is Golden

Video gaming is a hobby that relies heavily on a combination of a number of key factors to produce a holistic experience that few other hobbies can match. In the modern era we have the visual graphics, the music, dialog and sound effects for our ears and even the tactile response of rumbling controllers in our hands. All these together pull us into the world that has been built within the game.

In the past, I've considered that a game should only be played when all those factors are present, with the possible exception of the force-feedback controllers. Image and sound go together to produce a complete package, and even as far back as Space Invaders and Pac-Man, the music and effects were important to the final product.

My gaming history has moved from the basic stereo sounds of a television set to a simple 2.1 sound system with an impressive bass speaker to a full 5.1 surround sound system that allows me to pinpoint the location of enemies breathing from anywhere in the room! Sound has been vital to my own personal experiences. I love the music of games, but even more so, I love the sound effects produced to compliment my actions.

The roar of an engine as your muscle car sprints off the mark. The crunch of leaves and twigs underfoot as you explore the ruined temple. The deep, throbbing hum of an enormous city-sized starship blasting through the void. The gentle whistle of air rushing by as you glide through the skies. And there are few things more gratifying in a computer game than revving a chainsaw and running screaming at an alien enemy, sawing him in half as blade meets muscle and bone, squealing and spluttering.

So when I first got the Xbox set up here in Vancouver, you can understand how anxious I was about playing it at first before I managed to organize a working sound system. As I had brought my VGA cable with me, I was able to plug the machine into Claires shiny PC monitor. Unfortunately, unlike TVs which have built-in sound systems, the monitor was silent. Claire had gotten a simple sound system for her PC, but the jack was incompatible with the current wiring connected to the Xbox.

Regardless, I still wanted to play my beloved games. I yearned to get all stabby-stabby in Assassins Creed: Brotherhood. I wanted to kick tiny villagers in World of Keflings. I wanted to play the latest tracks that I liked in Rock Band. How bad could it be. I'd give it a go.

And you know what, they weren't bad. I had played Brotherhood a lot at home, and I was only playing the multiplayer anyway, which doesn't have exposition dialog or anything. All the sound effects I needed were of the gurgling last rasps of your character as someone shoves a hidden blade through your spleen, and I could mimic them myself pretty well. The Keflings got kicked in silence. Rock Band wasn't attempted. That would just have been ridiculous, and I wasn't that desperate. Really. Honestly...

On the other hand, I had bought Bulletstorm shortly after arriving in Vancouver to guarantee my access into the Gears of War 3 Beta, so I thought I'd give it a go. I lasted all of one chapter in the first Act, and even then it was a struggle. The game is a first person shooter that relies heavily on dialog and sound effects to build the atmosphere of the setting, and I was missing all of that. It just wasn't fun.

All of this brings me to one last game, Split/Second: Velocity, a racing game from Disney. Its gimmick is that, along with racing, you can cause massive explosions that destroy the tack and wreck the opposition in your quest for victory. When it comes to cars and fast driving, they kind of all sound the same. I was able to hear the growl of the engine and the squeal of tires in my own head, and an explosion is an explosion, so I could imagine the booming chaos whenever I triggered a Course Change. It was great! The game was fun and the sound effects I imagined suited the onscreen carnage. Super.

Eventually, I did get sound. I kicked Keflings, and heard the little chirps of surprise. I fired up Rock Band and had some friends over for my first Plastic Instruments Appreciation session in Vancouver. I went back and played BulletStorm, a much more enjoyable experience with the added sound. I tried out Split/Second for the first time with the games original effects playing in my ears...

And I was disappointed. The explosions weren't as loud, or as meaty as I had imagined them. The cars didn't growl the way they did in my head. The commentator between seasons was annoying. I played a few tracks and put it to one side. I'm not sure if I'll go back.

Or, if I do, maybe I'll leave the sound off next time.