WB5: Grappling with Failure: How I got let down by a Just Cause

Once upon a time, there was a young adult who had come into some money. Nothing major, but enough to buy a new videogame. This story unfolded in the prime of the PS3 era, not long after the release of Heavy Rain, which, indeed, was the very game that that young boy initially intended to spend his money on. But, in the game shop, something unexpected happened. Heavy Rain was on a shelf next to another game, Just Cause 2, and, somehow, the boy ended up buying that instead. Perhaps it was something about the contrast between the former game’s serious, sombre persona and the latter’s complete lack thereof. Perhaps it was a gut reaction from someone who had been turned off by a recent Grand Theft Auto game that had had a lot of the cartoonish fun sucked out of it in favour of a misguided attempt to tell a serious story about the American Dream through the medium of unfunny caricatures and shit satire. Well, that's a whole other story; whatever the cause, I got Just Cause, and I loved it. It’s a series that I’ve been playing ever since, for a given value of ever since, given that there had only been one additional game since then until December 2018, when a chance alignment of spheres gifted me with the unprecedented revelation that a new Just Cause game, Just Cause 4, had just snuck out onto the shelves out of nowhere. This was quite a moment for me!

If you’re not familiar with this series, then permit me a brief introduction. The Just Cause series is made by Avalanche Studios, a Swedish developer, and follows a US government operative by the name of Rico Rodriguez, a man who never met a red and white structure he couldn’t blow up or a government he couldn’t destabilise. In each game, he is (sometimes quite literally) dropped into an unstable country run by a tyrant or dictator, and proceeds to cause chaos and inspire uprisings so as to topple this regime, ostensibly in the name of FREEDOM but mostly because the shadowy agency that he works for has some personal stake in the country, or, usually, its resources. Rico has a very specific methodology for his process, which usually involves countless explosions, a lot of questionable physics, and much exploitation of his inability to just die. The following screenshot illustrates this process in action:

A brief overview of this picture’s contents: the massive explosion of a crashing helicopter, a second helicopter
 lining up for the same fate, and someone with a rocket attached to their face being carried away on a balloon.

Living in Rico’s world is a joyfully ridiculous endeavour. At least, it is as long as you’re Rico; the infinite echelons of enemy mooks and innocent civilians who get caught in the crossfire of this insanity might have a different perspective. But such is the curse of the NPC, to be subjected to the whims of the player, and Rico has the ability to make a lot of whims come to fruition via the interchange of his arsenal and grapple hook mechanics. In Just Cause 3 in particular, my entire household got a lot of mileage out of such shenanigans, especially my stepson, who threw himself into the infinite potential of the game’s physics fuckery with the macabre gusto of every five year old who’s ever discovered that they can get away with a lot more in video games than they can in real life, as long as it’s hilarious (my parenting manual will be out this winter). It was a sad day when it finally came time to admit that, while we might not yet have accomplished everything that was possible, we had indeed run out of the motivation required to continue, and so it was time to play a different game already.

And then I heard we’d been blessed with a Just Cause 4, and I was like

In the time that it’s taken you, dear reader, to process the above image, I find myself now at the end of my Just Cause 4 experience; indeed, potentially at the very end of the Just Cause experience as a whole. Though I never played the first game beyond a casual acquaintance, from the time I picked up 2 outta nowhere I’ve been a big fan. 3 was great, too; the introduction of the wingsuit mechanic was so beautifully complementary to Rico’s existing grapple and parachute grooves that simply going places in Just Cause 3 was one of my absolute favourite activities (and also, given that game’s affinity for excruciating loading times, often faster than fast travelling). But where Just Cause 3 expanded on the series in some areas, it also oddly contracted some others, a strange give-and-take scheme that I certainly noted, and was a bit annoyed with, but never put too much thought into… until Just Cause 4 came along, and did exactly the same thing, only more so, and made everything worse. At this point, I did start putting some thought into it, because it was starting to seem like the developers had no idea what their game was supposed to be, to the point that their incoherence was starting to turn their gameplay loops on themselves like some sort of self-immolating ouroboros. I could kind of understand a contraction in features between 2 and 3, given that their releases jumped a console generation, but the through line from 3 to 4 is three years of refinement on existing engines and technology. The expectation, then, is that 4 should be like 3, except even more so.

Ouroboros, by the way, was forever ruined for me as a word and a concept by this clown.

Sometimes, it is. One area in which this series has been continually expanding and delivering the goods is its environments. Panau in Just Cause 2 was a delightful, massive landscape with lots of different types of biomes to goof around in. Just Cause 3’s Medici was more limited, but looked fantastic. Just Cause 4 reintroduces a greater variance in landscape, its gargantuan map being divided fairly evenly between rainforest, plains, desert and mountains, with the added twist that it’s all very realistically presented; vast mountains rise and fall before the player as they fling Rico across the map in casual defiance of physics, and their ebb and flow is brutal, beautiful, and expansively… empty. Just Cause 2 had fancy desert towns and full temple settlements in its deserts and mountains, respectively; Just Cause 4 has cookie-cutter shanty Badlands towns and hardly any signs of civilisation at all among its mountain peaks. That makes sense, because that’s what it’s like in the real world, and, for me, this really helped with the immersion. But it’s a brave or foolish developer who deliberately makes a world like this, because not everybody likes empty space in videogames, especially when it’s in their way. It invites criticisms of lazy development, and fake longevity achieved through padding (hello there Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and your endless plains of brown populated with the exact same god damn copy pasted military fort on every fucking junction). But I don’t think that’s a fair criticism that can be levelled, because Just Cause 4’s world doesn’t feel empty. Its urban environments are pretty weak, but the landscapes are fantastic; even somewhere like a road that winds through a vast valley up into the mountains, a place that the game never forces you to go, feels like it has been intricately designed.

A criticism I can and will level at the environments, however, is that they look a bit shit. The plains and desert are alright, and the mountains are spectacular, but the rainforest looks shockingly like it was ported over from a PS2 game. It’s all the exact same shade of green and the trees pop up and spin to face you, hoping that you won’t notice that they load as sprites from afar and don’t always remember to be tangible by the time you fly into them. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen, but it ain’t great, and the fact that you start the game here, and are stuck here for some time unless you travel far away from the early missions, sure helps dent one’s opinion of the game in its opening hours. Things improve later on (i.e. once you leave the fucking rainforest), but even at its zenith (the mountains again; maybe I just really like mountains), Just Cause 4’s graphical presentation is blown out of the water by, of all things, its predecessor, which had some of the most beautiful water I’ve ever seen, uniquely designed, memorable urban environments, and that same sense of vast desolation that I’m clearly inclined towards (I just love exploring, and these games reward that, not always in actual gameplay related ways but with things like a beautiful view, or finding myself in a quiet grove of trees that someone clearly put some time into designing, taking a walk through it and finding a hidden cave at the back where a developer has left a shrine to their dearly departed pet).

Sometimes, dogs die

That, then, is the first area where Just Cause 4 fails to build on that which has come before. There are a lot more. This is that strange characteristic reductiveness of this franchise; every game is both a little more and a little less. Look at combat, for example. In Just Cause 2, Rico’s loadout had space for two one-handed weapons, which he could optionally dual wield, a larger two-handed weapon, and some grenades and plastic explosives. He also had sprint, dodge and crouch moves that provided a bit of battlefield dexterity. In Just Cause 3, though, Rico had only two weapon slots, one for a dual-wielded smaller weapon pair and one for a larger weapon. He did have infinite plastic explosives, which was a very nice touch that fed into the series’ standard gameplay loop of find stuff > blow stuff up > repeat. But all of the extra combat moves were gone, and they weren’t replaced by anything. Instead, Rico was buffed to the point where he could take ten million bullets without flinching, and upon receipt of the ten million and first, he could simply duck into cover for a second and let his massively improved auto-regen kick in before strolling out and carrying on. And this is still the same in 4 – in fact, it’s worse. I can and often did stand in the open for quite a few seconds, taking fire, turning around trying to figure out which direction it was coming from because for some reason that may have been my fault or may have been the games’s, I simply could not grok with the interface that told me which direction I was being hit from. So I’d stand there, spinning, taking lots of bullets, eventually locate the enemy, shoot them, and then regen my health. Now, I may not be savvy enough to fully understand the complexities of deep gameplay, but I know when I’m swimming in it and this game’s a fucking paddling pool.

Just Cause 4 also took away the infinite explosives, which is another symptom of the massive existential crisis that unfolds across the breath of the game as the unwary consumer plays it. Since time immemorial, Rico’s whole thing has been that he infiltrates a region and makes things explode, acquiring levels of ‘chaos’, which is basically the exact same type of videogame points that Mario and Pac Man have been chasing since the first sucker loaded a 10p into their arcade box. Chaos leads to progress, and therefore explosions are a vital part of the gameplay loop. But as of Just Cause 4, that isn’t really the case anymore. Things do still bear the signature red-and-white insert-explosion-here colour pallet, but the reductions to Rico’s arsenal mean that it’s rarely worth the time it now takes to do so. Rico can now bear two weapons of any type (although pistols seem to have gone extinct, so in actuality he gets to choose between two interchangeably bland assault rifles), but his explosive output is limited to their ammo-exclusive secondary fire, a restriction that leaves the player constantly endeavouring to restock, rarely in possession of enough explosive rounds that using them is worth the trouble. Combat doesn’t suffer this loss too much, because additional mods to Rico’s grapple ability make it easy to set up an output so overpowered that even guns become redundant, but it seems so, so strange to twist so far away from a fundamental dynamic of the series, and even weirder when considered atop the complimentary backslide of Rico becoming somehow more powerful yet less capable with every passing game.

He's going to be just fine, only lamp posts can slay him.

This progression problem extends beyond combat and into other mechanics. In a weird contrast to the chopping and changing of Rico’s capability in other areas between games, the wingsuit mechanics have been consistently developing since the original Just Cause. It was great to be able to start 4 and still have all of the quality of life boosts that I’d unlocked in 3, but ultimately that meant that my wingsuiting experience remained unchanged throughout the entire game - not much of a problem when it’s so well done anyway, but still noticeable, and a strange design choice. What development is available in 4 goes towards the unlocking of mods for Rico’s three special grapple abilities, two are which aren’t even new mechanics, and none of which are at all relevant to actually progressing through the game. The old mechanics, the grapple-pull and a new type of remote bomb - the reason why Rico no longer has his old, infinite supply - are so heavily nerfed that they’re barely worth using; taking thirty seconds to attach the maximum amount of tethers to a big oil tank, only for the resulting explosion to not even destroy the damn thing, is hardly my idea of fun, and further removes any incentive towards causing the chaos that was once this franchise’s trademark and which Rico’s army in this game is literally fucking named after.

Everywhere I look, I find missing bits. There seems to have been a recession in the side mission economy, as Just Cause 3’s expansive and often challenging quests, which were intricately tied to the acquisition of new abilities and rewarded progress towards the next unlock with respect to how well you did, have been downgraded to ‘drive through this ring fast’ challenges that rewards a preset, tiny amount of points and have been scattered around the map in their literal hundreds. You only have to complete a fraction of them to unlock all of the grapple mods, and the mods themselves add so little to the game anyway that a strong case can be made for ignoring these missions altogether. Then there’s the supply drop mechanic, which slinks in after a few storyline missions as if it’s ashamed to be here, and well it should be, because it’s been dramatically simplified in a way that somehow manages to make it unnecessarily complicated. Rico now has multiple pilots that he can call on, with more unlocked with the increase of his chaos level, which is, as previously noted, a grind of the type that developers seem irritatingly keen on putting into videogames of late (looking at you again and your 99 levels, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey). Unfortunately all these pilots must all be flying fucking microlights or something because they only ever have the space to drop one thing, whether it’s a single assault rifle or a gigantic stone head. So, if you want to grab a vehicle and also replenish your poor, depleted reserves of explosives, you get to spend twice as much time in the menu, fighting with an unintuitive interface that hates you so much that it maliciously switches up what each button does on every damn screen. I’m not sure what sassy developer thought more menu time was what this fun-packed thrill-ride of an action game needed, but whoever they are, they’re an idiot. I gave up on the idea of resupplying from the skies early on, which meant I had less resources with which to blow stuff up, and therefore struggled to grind up dat chaos and unlock more supply drop pilots. I’m pretty sure that’s the exact opposite of how gameplay loops are supposed to work.

Me, myself, and the question of whether the Triangle button is going to take me forwards or backwards on the next screen

Another thing that saw me spending a lot of time in menus in Just Cause 4 is the territory expansion system, another questionable addition that took up valuable development time that could otherwise have been spent adding pistols, a third dimension to rainforest trees, and supply helicopters with room to carry supplies. In basic, as that chaos bar grinds incrementally upwards, and also through the completion of missions and sometimes seemingly out of absolutely nowhere, Rico acquires troop units. These troops can then be used to push the war-scorched, constantly embattled frontline of the rebellion’s territory forwards, a mechanic that is necessary for progressing through the game because main story missions are only unlocked when Rico owns all of the territory that they take place in. It sounds interesting, but all of the fun parts of this actually happen offscreen. That endless battle on the frontlines is something that Rico swoops right on over; his contribution is to go do his own thing at a nearby base and them move a line on the map, sweeping all those warring and dying NPCs along with him like Yossarian trying to avoid Bologna.

It pains me to keep saying this, but I have to because it keeps continuing to be true: Just Cause 3 did it better. In its climactic missions for each region, Rico would swoop around supporting the attacking troops in various skirmishes before making for the main base to put it out of commission. Given how many small territories 4 has, I probably wouldn’t want to have to do something like that every time, but I do want to do something. But unless you choose without provocation to hang out on the frontlines yourself, Rico never directly interacts with the rebellion that he’s spearheading. Instead, the net sum of this entire mechanic is yet more time spent doing stuff in menus rather than playing the game.

I think I'm gonna get a lot of mileage out of this one

The sad thing is that this absence of action is part of a greater sense of diminishing returns that the franchise has been suffering from for some time. Just Cause 2 had some moments of pure spectacle, not the least of which was its final missions, which began as an assault on the enemy dictator’s main stronghold, progressed to a showdown on a nuclear submarine, and ended with Rico and the antagonist surfing on nuclear missiles. It was ridiculous but thoroughly entertaining. Just Cause 3 started similarly strong, throwing the player into the action and featuring an exciting scene where Rico attaches himself to a rocket in order to blow it up before it can leave the atmosphere, but then failed to match that spectacle for the rest of its runtime. Just Cause 4, meanwhile, has plenty of things that sound like spectacle, given that a significant amount of the plot is centred around crazy sci-fi weather control contraptions, but there’s a slight barricade to the player’s enjoyment of this spectacle in that they don’t get to actually play it. When I heard that Rico planned to dive down through the eye of a tornado in order to reach and dismantle the weather control device at its core, I was hyped to get through the setup missions and pull that off. But what I actually ended up doing was shooting a bunch of dudes on the tops of skyscrapers, and then Rico did the dive in a cutscene. The final ‘boss’ was just a roomful of the same mooks I’d been tethering to fulton balloons for the game’s entire runtime thus far, plus a few helicopters thrown in; the actual showdown with the antagonist, a wacky scene that involved Rico repurposing one of those weather control UFOs into a missile and surfing it into the fleeing adversary’s private jet, happened without any input from me, and that honestly made me care a hell of a lot less. Why is a series that seemingly prides itself on the infinite possibilities of its engine and mechanics so intent on not letting me actually play it? What, in the end, even is this series any more?

No-one comes to these games for the plot, even though the cutscenes are generally fun when they aren’t happening at the expense of player agency. Funnily enough, the narratives do often have a surprisingly large amount of backstory and lore, and occasionally excel in environmental storytelling (largely due to the strengths of said environments). Given that Just Cause 3 was presented as Rico’s homecoming, as the nation he was liberating was his own, 4 has to go to some lengths to justify him coming out of retirement, throwing out some new backstory about Rico’s father and endeavouring to position the new antagonist, Oscar Espinosa, as Rico’s ultimate foe in a way that is very reminiscent of the way that S.P.E.C.T.R.E. tried to retroactively justify Blofeld as the big bad for Daniel Craig’s entire run as James Bond (i.e. it’s terrible). But nobody really cares, and the game seems to know it, given that Espinosa disappears almost entirely in the long stretch between the game’s opening and the final mission, wherein he is, again, dispatched without player input. It’s almost as if the developers suddenly realised that they’d hit the requisite 20 hours of plot content, decided to take an early lunch, and never came back, leaving some poor intern to wildly pull a conclusion from the sky and mail it over to the design department to animate. GG everyone.

No, the reason people come to these games is because it’s ridiculous arcade fun, powered by how Rico’s grapple laughs in the face of physics. Some, like me, stay for the world, and for the joy of traversing it via the top-notch wingsuit mechanics. But people play these games because they want to quote Yahtzee, tethering a bunch of dudes to helicopter blades so that when asked why they can say juuuuuuust ‘cause! And you know what, that’s fine, but you have to build a decent baseline into your worlds for that to work out, and it feels like Just Cause 4 is the result of what happens when the series’s developers mine away so much of the basic platform on which the game runs in favour of adding instead more foolishly exploitable mechanics that are fun but essentially meaningless; by tilting towards that demographic at the expense of core gameplay, you end up with a world of possibility where it’s too much trouble to do anything, a world where the absence of depth is barely concealed behind too many menus, inconsistently incomplete mechanics and baby’s first combat system. All that’s left is a man, flying wildly in defiance of physics over a beautiful, intricately crafted world, landing occasionally to hold R2 until everything is dead. The journeying is fantastic, and crafted with care, but somebody forgot to implement the destination, and that’s a damn shame.

And yet, even despite all this, I had a really good time with Just Cause 4. These games have always had their flaws, which they’ve bashfully asked the player to excuse in favour of the parts that they do do so well. The ask has never been quite as big as it was here, but to me, an old fan and a forgiving individual, we just about got there. But for anyone else, anyone piqued by this piece into considering having a dabble with this franchise, you’d be much better served by the purchase of Just Cause 3 instead, which ultimately does everything that 4 does, usually significantly better. That’s not the direction that time's supposed to work, but here in the Wayback Machine, it seems it is our fate to travel back in time and help others avoid wasting their time on misguided sequels. Let my tale be a warning of what happens when you believe in a Just Cause.

Ah, we were doing so well...

WB4: Hello Neighbor, or, I wish I could go way back and not buy this game

If you don’t have a child aged somewhere between five and ten years, then you probably haven’t heard of Hello Neighbor. I know that’s the only reason I know anything about it; this game is literally all over the channels of the various ‘kid-friendly’ YouTubers that my stepson somehow inexorably finds himself attracted to. So, for those who don’t know, Hello Neighbor is, or rather was, a relatively low-profile in-development indie game that somehow found itself getting featured and played on such famous channels as DanTDM and FGTeeV (don’t Google that last one, your life is worth more than that), at which point it seems to have rather exploded in popularity, to the point that when the final release came out in December 2017, there was, indeed, much hype. Against my better judgement, I even found myself somewhat interested, for two reasons: a) kids are really good at talking about things in a stream of conscious style that lodges into your brain in a way not dissimilar to the familiar feeling of having a song stuck in your head, and b) conceptually, this game is actually pretty interesting.

Hello Neighbor presents itself as a stealth survival horror game, with the objective of sneaking into your neighbour’s house to find out what sort of shady business he’s been up to – specifically, what he’s got in his basement. Getting into said basement involves solving a sequence of puzzles in the various rooms of the neighbour’s insane Escheresque acid trip of a house while avoiding the neighbour himself, who will be hunting you every step of the way. The neighbour is equipped with a smart AI that, in theory, learns from and attunes itself to your play style so as to better ruin your efforts with his implacable man nature. Conceptually, then, this game is a hybrid of the original Resident Evil and Nemesis - the one where Jill got chased around Raccoon City by a terrifying invincible monster - as novelised by R.L. Stine:

Stay Out of the Basement was the second book in the original run of Goosebumps books,
and was adapted into a two-part story for the first season of the Goosebumps TV show,
which is on Netflix in its entirety and much worse than you remember.

So, after a few months of constant updates about where you could find the wrench in Alpha 3 vs. Alpha 4 and other things that I didn’t care about but couldn’t avoid learning about, I finally caved and bought the game, hoping to stop my stepson’s complaining about how the free demo we’d gotten from Steam was a total trainwreck that crashed every five minutes and wasn’t sufficiently scratching his all-consuming itch to play this damn game. Maybe, experienced without the ear-raping context of the kind of YouTuber that appeals to a five year old, the game might be worth our time? If nothing else, we can play it together and have our own anecdotes, and maybe he’ll tell those instead of singing about dodos non-stop…

Unfortunately, it turns out that the best this game has to offer is a perfect parable for why you shouldn’t let yourself get tricked into thinking that just because something is popular, it’s good, because Hello Neighbor is a hot mess clusterfuck and one of the worst damn games that I’ve ever played. There are plenty of reasons for this – the ubiquity of reasons to declare this game terrible is, in itself, a reason to do so – but the most notable of them is that, as it turns out, the game’s whole concept is untenable. Yes, it turns out that an AI antagonist in constant pursuit is completely anathema to a game that has slow, complicated, unintuitive puzzles. The puzzles in Hello Neighbor don’t have any flow between them; it’s incredibly difficult to try and puzzle out how one event will flow into another, to brainstorm and test if a sequence of actions will lead to your goal. These ‘brainteasers’ have more in common with old point-and-click adventure games like Broken Sword, where standard progression involved taking an inventory item and bashing it against every interactive part of the local environment until said random flailing accidentally results in microscopic progress. Now, in those games, that wasn’t so bad, because you could take this process at your own pace, and really think it out as you did. In Hello Neighbor, you have to try and do this while constantly evading the neighbour, and it just doesn’t work; imagine that, after being stuck for 20 minutes, you come up with a new idea about how to use an inventory item in a certain room, only to spend another 20 minutes trying to get to the room because somehow the neighbour is in the wrong place every time and you have extremely limited means of evading and/or sneaking past him. And then when you get there, it turns out that your idea was a bust, so you get to start the process over again.

Yes, it turns out that the neighbour’s super clever AI actually translates into the ability to home in on you from any point in the house without provocation. He also possesses the combined hearing ability of a thousand bats, such that the tinkle of broken glass will summon him into your shadow in the time it takes for you to climb through the window you just caved in. And yet, you can sprint along behind him and he’ll take as much notice as if you were sneaking, in a manner reminiscent of stupid guards in basically every Assassin’s Creed game ever. There is, indeed, very little stealth to this game; 90% of progress mostly consists of heading towards a location and hoping that the neighbour isn’t there. Add to this the fact that the neighbour’s ‘learning’ mostly consists of putting bear traps and security cameras in places you pass through frequently, and we have a marriage of failed aspirations that is breathtaking only in how incredibly fucking underwhelming it is.

Actually, the bear traps are pretty potent, but only because they play into the hands of another thing that is terrible about this game; the controls. It shouldn’t be difficult to jump over the bear traps, but in practise, it’s almost impossible, because when you try the PC invariably catches himself on and bounces off a nearby bit of scenery, which sends him straight back to the floor and into the trap. The slippery, unresponsive controls turn every single bit of platforming in this game into a trial and error chore, no matter how difficult what you’re being asked to do actually is. In one memorable instance, I needed to jump onto the top of a moving tram as it passed underneath me. A conceptually simple task became a highly frustrating wrestling match given that once launched into the air the playable character takes on all the key aspects of a dead bird, and that everything in this game seems to be made out of rubber, given that anything other than a perfect landing - within an invisible hitbox that rarely correlates to what the player can actually see - will result in your being bounced off into oblivion. Oh well, better luck next time. Enjoy getting past the neighbour, working your way back up here and waiting for the tram to come back around; I do so love to have my fake difficulty paired up with my fake longevity.

I’m not even finished. Not only is there no stealth in this stealth survival horror game, there’s no survival horror either. Getting caught by the neighbour has no repercussions other than sending you back to your house across the street and changing the time of day. Your inventory remains intact, as well as your puzzle progress. Once you’ve progressed far enough to open a few doors, it becomes trivial to sprint right back to where you were and carry on with what you were doing. I lost track of the amount of times that I would, upon getting caught, immediately sprint forward, enter the neighbour’s house through the front door, run towards the back and climb a particular ladder to reach a safe space that he rarely went to; the AI’s learned response to this scenario not to, say, start going to that place; instead, he spent his time putting up more security cameras along this path, which served to make absolutely no difference against the ones that were already there. Behold how he learns from my actions and forces me to adapt!

No, getting caught by the neighbour isn’t anything other than vaguely annoying, a feeling that gets swallowed up among all the other things about this game that are already annoying. There’s no conservation of resources to worry about, either, given that the game features no health system and that we’ve established that your inventory is always safe, so I can only assume that this game’s developers are working off some new definition of ‘survival horror’ where ‘survival’ means ‘just get caught, it doesn’t matter’, and ‘horror’ means this:

The only thing that is horrifying about this game’s aesthetic is that the suburban pastels and cartoony feel are a major part of what attracts kids to it. When I was young, I learned that not everything that is colourful is for kids when I went on a mission to cross a department store because something shiny had caught my eye, and it turned out to be a pack of rubber gloves. This game would have been a far more brutal way to learn that lesson.

This game isn’t for kids. It isn’t for anybody. It isn’t even finished, judging by the way items would disappear from my inventory, or how when I would attempt to run past an item on the floor the physics engine would kick in and knock me across the room, or how one of my thoughtful attempts to get past a closing door trigger puzzle ended up locking me out of said puzzle, which then proceeded to somehow solve itself rather than reset itself when I restarted the instance to try and undo this. Whenever I thought of a strange solution to a puzzle that worked out, or whenever I did a crazy jump across the rooftops to get to a place I hadn’t been yet, I could never be sure if I was doing what the game wanted me to do or if I was just cheesing past by breaking it. There were at least three times in the game’s third act where I know solved a puzzle because of physics and game errors and accidental exploits rather than by just, y’know, solving it. Now, I know a lot of games are buggy on launch, but I’m playing this three months after the fact, and remember also that this game went through countless alphas. So my question is, how the fuck is it still so broken? How did it get released in this state? Because it’s colourful and popular enough on YouTube that kids don’t care, and so why should the developers? That would at least explain why the upcoming Switch port will inexplicably cost more money for the same amount of bugs and hair-tearing incoherence.

Pictured: the head developer of Hello Neighbor, who has successfully
fleeced enough unsuspecting families that he can now move to a new
neighbourhood and not have any dirty proletariat brats try to sneak into his basement.

Stay away from this fucking game. Hello Neighbor is a monument to wasted time and potential, built in a shitty engine, with shitty controls, lacking any sense of narrative, intuitive progress, depth, or literally any of the other things that make good games good. It reaches heights of mediocrity that most bad games can only aspire to, sitting atop a throne of shittiness without any of the comedic or memetic features that make us look fondly on games like Big Rigs or Superman 64. Hello Neighbor stands alone, a monument to failure, and if your kids are bugging you to buy it then you need to sit them down and show them some good games, because no-one deserves to grow up thinking that this pile of excrement is anywhere in the vicinity of what a video game can be.

Digital Neigh-Saying: Horses in Gaming, and other unabashed puns

Generally speaking, I'm a fan of horses. I mean, not the actual, real-life bug-eyed gargantuan monster that is 'the horse', because even having lived in close proximity to my mother's horse for fifteen years, I still find them to be slightly freakish animals. Horses in video games, however, are another story. They give us new ways to engage with available space. They provide lore-friendly means of faster travel around the commonly open worlds in which they are found. Most importantly, they both have and add character to the game. Once you're on your horse, whether it be in Skyrim, Afghanistan, World War I or Hyrule, you're not really controlling your designated PC any more: no, that puppet-person meatbag that you can twist and throw all around the world with ridiculous precision and disregard has been downgraded to passenger on this new, tenacious, fearsome beast that is far less likely to put up with you trying to ride down mountains, or jump fences after approaching at less than a perfect right angle. Video game horses command respect: you play by their rules, or you get bucked off. And if you don't wanna, well, then, enjoy walking.

Of course, their general aptitude depends on how well they've been programmed in, and certainly, over the years, developers have had some interesting ideas about how to attach these sentient rockets to their worlds. Sometimes - rarely, I have to say - horses are sublime joys to ride. Sometimes, they have so much character that their flaws are rendered irrelevant. Sometimes, their programmed flaws end up looking like aspects of their character, and the results can be hilarious. And sometimes, getting on a horse is a really great way to become dead through no fault of your own. One's own patience for any given horse is generally informed by how much patience and good feeling one has towards a given game, and, since I'm generally a very patient and gentle gamer unless I'm playing Pokemon, I've met a bunch of good horses over my time, and would like to pay my respects.

That's right, this post is a listicle! Gotcha!

1. Epona (The Legend of Zelda)

Hey listen!

Epona gets to go first because she is the proto-horse. She might not have been the first rideable horse in a videogame ever, but within my arbitrarily narrow category of 'horses used to navigate open worlds' she's certainly up there. At the very least, she was the first horse I ever rode. Unlike many, she has to be earned, also; it's quite possible that a goal-oriented player of Ocarina of Time might never visit Lon Lon Ranch, and therefore miss both ends of the neat time travel arc that culminates in Link basically stealing his first horse (idea for a future post: Link the criminal). It's hard to have affection for Epona that isn't borne out of nostalgia, however, because she doesn't have much in the way of personality; her only distinguishing feature is her hatred of fences. In later games, she's become a bit of a mystical figure like Link and Zelda, reincarnating to give Link a lift when he needs her, but I like to think she's actually on her own extensive multi-dimensional adventure that keeps coinciding with Link's. I think the same thing about the various Dogmeats in Fallout.

2. Agro (Shadow of the Colossus)

The one on the right

In Shadow of the Colossus, the world is massive, and pretty empty. Throughout the entire game the only things that stir are the twelve colossi, the main character, his horse Agro, and ten thousand lizards. It's a lonely experience, jetting around that world, hunting down magnificent monsters that were just minding their own business until this schmuck with the magic sword came to ruin their day, so it's nice to have some company. Indeed, Argo's constant companionship is equalled only by how he's more than willing to get stuck in and help Wanderer out for some of the battles. In a world where most videogame horses are terrified of slight slopes and errant trees, it's not hard to come out looking comparatively badass, but even so Argo is an impressive dude. He even, completely inexplicably, survives a several-hundred foot drop in the game's climax - I've personally always thought it would have been more emotionally satisfying if his sacrificial moment stuck, but damn if I'm not glad to see him every time he nonchalantly strolls back in during the ending.

3. Horse (Skyrim)

This is fine.

The horses of Skyrim are hardy and strong, and make up for in endurance what they lack in speed. - Skyrim Loading Screen

The main reason that I don't always agree with horses in videogames is because they're not always worth the effort. I'm the sort of open-world explorer who isn't happy until he's uncovered every inch and every secret, and that can be hard to do on a horse: whenever you climb aboard, you have to acknowledge that you're trading the thorough control you have over your character for the far more temperamental control you have over a horse, with the benefit of increased speed. In Skyrim, horses don't go that fast. They also charge headlong into battle against any and all enemies, and usually end up dead, or else find a different way to die by accidentally jumping too far when I'm trying to explore on them, a touch that is remarkably over-realistic for what is such a wildly fantastical game. They are, in summary, more trouble than they're worth.

But that's okay, because they have such a hilarious disregard for physics, as demonstrated above, that I can't help but love them anyway. A combination of side-hops and jump spam is sufficient to climb most of the mountains in Skyrim that you're not supposed to be able to, but if you ever can't make it, come back with a horse, and ride straight up vertical slopes with aplomb. Meme-makers, one and all.

4. Lightning (Breath of the Wild)

CHEEESE

Breath of the Wild is quite remarkable for a Zelda game in that it doesn't have Epona in it. It makes sense, in a way; the Link of this game is actually from a hundred years in the past, so even if he had an Epona, she wouldn't be around anymore. Unless she is a time traveller, which, you know, could be, because it is possible to get her if you have the Amiibo that opens the relevant wormhole. But for all us lowly people who don't have the disposable income to spend on cool but worthless figurines, Link has to choose a horse from one of the many that live in the wilds of Hyrule. I spent much of this game riding around on my decidedly average horse James Baxter, seeking the holy grail of a horse that had 5 stars in each of its three stats. If you're still out there trying that for yourself, let it go. They don't exist. Be like me and find one with maximum speed, then dye its hair purple and give it the monster saddle so that it can embrace the punk life like this joker.

I've never been as attached to a horse as I have to this one. She hit all of the sweet spots of being beautiful to control, ridiculously fast and efficient, and full of character. She also came to my aid in the final battle against Ganon, so she even has Agro checked. Breath of the Wild is considered excellent in many ways, but I give it the most props for really nailing down this whole horse thing.

And yet, there's one more...

5. Roach (The Witcher III: Wild Hunt)

X gonna give it to ya

This is why we're here, why I'm writing this piece. Meet Roach, the biggest troll in The Witcher III, a game that has literal trolls. Roach is, quite simply, the worst horse of all time. She is but the latest in what is implied to be a long line of legacy horses that main character Geralt has owned and given this same oddly uncomplimentary name, but this particular Roach seems particularly eager to put her mark on history, and yeah, she's succeeding. Just look at the meme!

Never in horsing history has there been such a severe disconnect in control between player character and character's horse. Geralt isn't the most spry of PCs - he doesn't have the skills to Skyrim Hop his way up mountains and into places he shouldn't be, although that's not for the lack of my trying - but he does, for the most part, move in the way that I want him to. On Roach, however, things get a little more interesting, because whatever complex algorithms the developers used to connect her to the world seem to have only a very tenuous grasp on, well, the world. Roach loves nothing more than to divert from the game's paths by means of unexpected 90 degree turns into the woods or off cliffs. I would wager the problem is in her autopilot, an excellent feature that first turned up in Red Dead Redemption and then disappeared until this game and Breath of the Wild. When on a path, Roach will automatically follow its various turns without any controller input. That's the theory, at least. But whereas RDR and BotW are games that contain a vast amount of open space, the world of W3 is much denser, with paths that wind their way through forests, closely blocked in on both sides by trees. That's a lot more potential obstacles to mess with Roach's pathfinding, no matter how good it might be. That might almost sound like I'm trying to give credit, but it's the kind of credit that goes 'this thing could potentially be very good if it weren't for all of the things that make it bad'. I mean, she screeches to a halt every time I try to ride her over a bridge for goodness's sakes.

Luckily - and this is a personal opinion, as I'm sure there are many people on the internet who are legitimately angry with Roach - I find that the sheer slapstick nonsense of this horse's ineptitude blows right past 'frustrating' and loops back around to being hilarious. To me, Roach is, in-universe, just a shit. I imagine her rolling her eyes every time Geralt gets on her, and debating as she runs the best places coming up where she can try to buck him off. That'll teach that bastard to keep strapping the decomposing heads of monsters to her and expecting her to deal.

----

There we have it: the assembled horse avengers. And what a superhero team they would make! Agro would be designated hero Captain America. Epona would be the reliable if slightly bland sidekick, so Thor, the Skyrim horses are obviously Spider-Man, Lightning is the bantermeister Iron Man, and I guess Roach would have to be token evil teammate Loki who spends most of her time fucking with everyone, and you know what, this post has gotten silly so I'm going to stop writing it.

Daniel vs. The 2017 General Election

A post about the 2017 Election, originally posted on voting day.

So I guess it's time for my annual political message. Before we start, here's a quick recap of the election campaign so far.

1. Labour's poll position swings upwards as soon as election rules require a balance in coverage and so people start to see that actually, Corbyn is a good'un, and that maybe he'd make a pretty decent statesman and negotiator given how he's come through all the shit that's been thrown at him over the last two years
2. May meanwhile begins to look more and more like a slightly malfunctioning robot
3. Blue tabloid media becomes oddly concerned about how Corbyn talked to the IRA decades ago in effort to make peace, says little about how May went to Saudi Arabia two months ago to sell weapons
4. Conservative manifesto introduces hugely unpopular dementia tax which lasts for about as long as it takes to become disliked i.e. one day
5. Conservatives attempted to idiomise 'magic money tree' in the face of Labour's fully-costed manifesto, despite the fact that their own contains no numbers at all
6. The prime minister refuses to engage in democracy by debating with her opposition, seeding doubt about her negotiating skill in the immediate run up to the most important negotiations in a generation
7. The Guardian attempts to steal May's crown of 'Best Election Campaign U-turn 2017' by remembering it's supposed to be a liberal newspaper and deciding to support the man it's been shitting on for two years
8. Blue tabloid media screams itself hoarse with hatred because there's a chance that the party who gives its' owners tax breaks might not steamroll this after all, non-rich people are expected to read it and think yes I agree, please tax me more instead
9. Terrorist attacks lead people to wonder where all the police have gone, but the Home Secretary who got rid of them all is unavailable for comment because she's too busy 'thinking about Brexit' and pulling hilariously memetic faces
10. Prominent horrible conservatives mysteriously disappear because they're not exactly vote-winners, and it wouldn't be right to show the country what they're voting for (seriously, where are Gove the backstabber, Hunt the NHS Judas, and Fox the all-round twit?)
11. Conservatives call out Labour MP for having the gall to similarly disappear on legitimate grounds of ill health, because no-one in blue wants legitimacy to come anywhere near this election
12. Conservative placards start to appear solely around all of the nearby mansions. Labour placards start to appear in the windows of houses on my street.
13. Corbyn speaks to crowds of thousands, May' s events are full of cardboard people cut-outs.
14. Blue tabloid media abandons all illusions of sanity and starts calling Corbyn a terrorist and calling for the abolishment of YouTube (no seriously, that's The Sun today)

I gotta say, it's been a real wild ride, and that's only the cliff notes version. You can probably guess which way I'm leaning given how kind the above notes are(n't) to the Tories, but do you know why, and why I urge anyone thinking of voting Blue to go Red, or whichever candidate in your constituency can beat Blue? It's because, for the first time since ever that I can recall, we're faced with an election that isn't about the lesser of two evils. There's a definite evil, the one that has been running our country - into the ground - for the last seven years, turning it into a nastier, poorer place to live, the one that called this election out of hubris and is now running around like a maniac hoping to not come out of it looking like twats (too late, idiots). And then there's the side led by a man who is that rarest of things, a politician who people actually like, and who wants to enact genuine change, and who has lit a fire under the young in an unprecedented manner.

Last year, I urged my elders to listen to the young, and the need for you to do so has only gotten more pressing since then. No matter what Bob Geldof might think, this isn't just a Brexit election: there's a chance to bring some hope back to Britain, to start realigning this country as a positive force, a place I for one can be proud to be a part of again. And while part of me wants to enjoy the schadenfreude of watching the Conservatives deal with the Brexit beast they unleashed, the greater part of me fears what lies ahead, and worries a lot about facing another five years of Blue insanity. So yeah, I'm voting Labour, and I hope you are too. I don't even mind that we may not win: the cat is out of the bag, now, and unless the Conservatives absolutely nail Brexit, which, based on this campaign, they won't, then, come 2022, there will be a reckoning. I'd just rather not wait that long to be heard.

Nonsense Copy

To sell the unsellable: the greatest challenge of the copywriter. Of course for the most part we find ourselves putting words to the task of reasonable projects, items and services, so it's just a matter of selecting good words and putting them together in a complementary manner. But, well, that's pretty straightforward, and I fancied a challenge to dust off my skills with, so I asked the good folks of Facebook to suggest some highly unlikely and nonsensical products for me to write about. Naturally, they delivered. So without further ado welcome to the online store for stuff you are very likely to never need!

Disclaimer: do not attempt to purchase any of the following items.

1. Invisible ninja suit that is also delicious

Invisible: for perfect stealth.

Delicious: for any situation.

TECMO’s ninja suits have been the leading world standard for fifteen years, and we’re proud to serve the needs of the discerning modern ninja. But we also know that it’s a tough world for ninjas out there these days. So we’re proud to present out first hybrid ninja suit, which combines the best features of our Stealth and Tasty models: the Sneak’n’Eat suit.

No longer will you be detected by sharp-eyed minions. No longer will you find your stomach rumbling on a lengthy stake-out. The Sneak’n’Eat runs on advanced rice paper technology that makes it completely unremarkable to the naked eye, but we’ve also dipped that rice paper in vats of leading nutrients, infusing it with a deliciousness that can’t be compared.

The TECMO Sneak’n’Eat: because we care about ninjas.

2. Edible washing up liquid for cleaning chocolate teapots

Edichocpotcleanse is favoured by 90% of hungry chocolate teapot cleansers.

Complicated pot-cleansing technology removes 95% of stray chemicals from chocolate teapots: other leading brands top out at 85%.

Flavour infusion makes our washing up liquid the tastiest around. Our ever-expanding range of flavours covers every conceivable taste, from bananas to sesame oil to cat farts.

Edichocpotcleanse: it cleans your teapots, and tastes great. What more do you need?

3. Fosters with bubbles

Since 1889, the Fosters family have taken immeasurable pride in refreshment. Our signature beer is famous worldwide, and while we could have stopped there, we haven’t. We’re always looking out for new ways to improve our brew, and so are proud to announce our latest innovation: bubbles!

Very soon, in a bar near you, you’ll be able to enjoy the enhanced taste of the all-new Fosters, purposefully infused with quality carbonation by leading brewing technicians. If you enjoy our signature utterly flat taste, you’ll love this – and if you’ve not enjoyed a cold, crisp pint of Fosters lager before, then there’s no better time than now.

Effervescence: for epic refreshment.

4. Editing Skulls

Typos: we all make them. In this age of mischievous autocorrect, it's nothing to be afraid of, but it sure is inconvenient. But never fear! - we at Yorick and Boni LTD are proud to present our new Editing Skulls.

Place one of our unique skulls on your mantle, and it's ethereal eyes will burrow into your brain and follow your every manoeuvre online, converting your words from the hilarious sequence of typographical errors that is real life into the sequence of sleek grammatical wisdom that no-one real ever speaks with. Friends, colleagues and strangers alike will be amazed at your lexical dexterity and the faint demonic glow that exudes from you!

So if you're looking to get ahead in the world of words, cast your eyes on a Yorik and Boni Editing Skull, and soon you'll be saying 'alas! Poor typos! I knew them, [insert name of relevant conversational partner here]'.

5. Jun

Picture the scene: it's a bright, beautiful sunny day, but you're at home, alone, sitting in the shade, feeling bored and unfulfilled. Sound familiar? It should. Our extensive studies show that approximately 100% of the population is like this 93% of the time.

Because they don't have Jun.

Guaranteed to make your life 5632% more interesting and nonsensical, Jun brings highly unique charm and insanity to all situations with his unique breed of imaginative mania. Soon you'll go from sitting at home to sitting atop the wings of success, flying through a series of increasingly unlikely scenarios as Jun takes you on a journey to the inside of your mind. Beyond that, the world is truly and forever your oyster, or other preferred item of seafood or alternative cuisine.

Don't be dumb. Invest in Jun.

6. A instrument with cpr type qualities that takes a normal piece of steak and renovates the meat back to a cow.

In times of political and geophysical crisis, when even imported vegetables are a finite resource, no budding restaurateur wishes to find themselves paying through the nose for overpriced steak. Well, no more! With the M-00 Cowcannon, a single shot is sufficient to renovate a piece of meat back into a fully grown cow, which can then be personally slaughtered for fresh, pleasant consumption. Enjoy the luxury of infinite meat twinned with the boost of masculinity that comes with playing God and slaughtering innocent creatures, all for the a-moo-zingly low price of £500,000!

Now 90% less likely to completely annihilate the global market!

7. A ladder for moths to escape from the bath.

Jun Alex Prince Cheung was having what he assumed was a perfectly normal day: he'd just got home after a long hard slog at the office, and was looking forward to a nice relaxing bath. But it was not to be, because, upon arrival in the bathroom, horror of horrors, moths in the bath!

Permit us, if you will, to science. See, a bath is commonly wet, and when the wing of a moth comes into contact with wet, a remarkable chemical reaction takes place that renders it unable to fly. So if a moth should land in your bath... there'll be trouble afoot, as poor Jun discovered.

But no more! Because now, Jun has a moth ladder! Easy to install and easy to use, the moth ladder is the world's leading mechanism for allowing wet moths to escape from baths with their personal integrity intact. 90% of moths agree.

Here's what Jun himself had to say after we gave him a free sample moth ladder:

'Yeah it's decent.'

Doctor Who: Wibbly Wobbly I hate this make it stop

Welcome back to the Wayback Machine, folks. Come on in and settle down, because today I need to tell you about a difficult time in my life: being a fan of Doctor Who in the 2000’s.

Where were you when Doctor Who came back to television? I know where I was – somewhere else. Although I was aware of this incoming potentially interesting show, I nonetheless managed to space and miss the first episode. The first episode of Doctor Who that I ever watched was the second episode, The End of the World, which you knew was set in the future because Britney Spears was considered to be classic Earth literature and the main adversary (spoilers for something that aired 12 years ago) was a piece of sentient skin. And you know what, I’m pretty sure that at the time I enjoyed that. It very quickly became apparent that this was a show that was unabashedly, unreservedly goofy, running on a level of camp that was about as far from hard science fiction as it’s possible to get – which is, it turns out, the sort of area where a significant two-part episode in your first season is about farting aliens taking over the world, by which I of course mean London, and by which I of course mean dodgy CGI and Cardiff interiors standing in for London.

And you know what, at the time, that was okay. We didn’t know any better! I know there’s a fanboy forum explosion’s worth of debate as to whether Doctor Who’s original showrunner, Russell T. Davies, ran a better show than his successor Stephen Moffat, but in my eyes there’s a definite upswing of quality right from the very first season through to the current one, one that exists independent of concerns like who’s actually in charge. the Doctor Who of 2005 had no idea what it was doing; it’s been fairly well documented by Davies himself that the production crew of that first season were making it up as they went along, with no idea if their revival of a show that had been cancelled in the 1980’s would prove in anyway tenable. The Doctor Who of 2010, by contrast, was a show that had found its feet and was confident enough in its science fiction credentials to start really digging into the conventions of its genre. The Doctor Who of 2015 was a worldwide hit, and the juggernaut shows no signs of slowing down. But there’s a problem with this seemingly consistent curve of improvement, and it is thus; the further away we get from those early seasons, the worse they become. Here’s where I have to admit to a slight bit of misdirection, because the great dilemma at the heart of this post isn’t about being a fan of Doctor Who in the 2000’s. No, it’s about being a fan of 2000’s era Doctor Who…. in 2017.

WIBBLY WOBBLY TIMEY WIMEY

The reason this is all up in my head right now is because me and my partner have been rewatching these early seasons after I got her hooked on the current season by means of cunningly watching it while she was around. Unfortunately I had to accompany her on her delve back into history with cautionary messages about how it wasn’t gonna be that good, a warning that the show was remarkably quick to prove apt. Yet, despite that, we came out of the first season with a generally favourable impression. There are, I think, a few reasons for this: first, there’s Christopher Eccleston, who is a master of making shitty material somehow seem not so shitty. Secondly, given that this entire season was constructed knowing that it was the only one in which he would be playing the Doctor, his incarnation of the character has perhaps the most clearly drawn arc of all those who have come before or since: from suffering survivor and damnable destroyer of friend and foe alike through to believing in himself and being worthy of his own title again, justly rewarded with a heroic death. Third, we only watched the second half of the season because my partner remembered watching the rest previously, so perhaps we hadn’t had enough time to get sick of the show or Rose.

Because rest assured, we are sick of Rose now.  My partner in particular had some particularly choice and generally unprintable thoughts when I asked her for her opinion as I was writing this. We’ve always been of the opinion that the new Doctor’s main companion is a bit hateable, mostly in terms of how she treats poor innocent left-behind sort-of ex-boyfriend Mickey (although Mickey certainly doesn’t help himself in that regard). But it was okay, in the first season. It’s not until the second season that the show really develops a Rose problem. The character demonstrates a staggering amount of self-obsession, or perhaps obsession with the Doctor and the relationship they share, which moves much closer to an outright romantic liaison now that she’s paired up with David Tennant’s fresh-faced, open and more approachable incarnation of the character. I by no means intend to disparage Tennant’s work in the role: I know for a fact that in seasons to come he does some really outstanding stuff with the material he’s given, and my general opinion on his tenure is that he’s a solid Doctor, but in this season, well… Watching it now, I do not like the Doctor.

You knew this was coming.

That’s a bit of a problem. I wish I could say it was intentional on the show’s behalf, and indeed, in odd, fleeting moments during this season, there does seem to be a nugget of a coherent theme about how the Doctor and Rose bring out the worst in each other. But it never seems to snap into focus, and instead I find myself watching two arrogant time-travellers get lost in their own hubris as the lives of the innocent people they meet are torn apart in the background. This is most apparent in the second episode, Tooth and Claw, where the Doctor and Rose are dancing around squeeing about encountering a werewolf literally seconds after a supporting character sacrifices himself so that they can escape from said werewolf. The fact that Queen Victoria, who is a supporting character in this episode because shut up, takes quite appropriate umbrage with this and ends up founding the organisation whose actions will eventually tear the Doctor and Rose apart, is a nice touch, and perhaps the most overt indication that there was a deliberate arc in play here. But in the stretch between these events, we have eleven episodes of the Doctor and Rose being awful, and never getting called out on it. Of particular note are the times when the Doctor goes full god-complex, declaring himself the highest available authority in a stunning display of arrogance that 16 year old me thought incredible cool but which 28 year old me thinks makes him kind of a dick. The season actually leads with this, having him declare himself such in the very first episode when he thinks something has happened to Rose, and that has the unfortunate effect of colouring all the following times when he leans on his genius. He is the Doctor that Rose made him, and unfortunately, that doesn’t make him a very nice guy.

It’s worth pointing out at this point that I love Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, who is often very much not a nice guy. I don’t have a problem with the Doctor being a dick, as long as the show is willing to call him out on it, and that era of the show is: indeed, one of the hallmarks of Stephen Moffat’s time in charge of Doctor Who is his interest in deconstructing the Doctor. Is he a positive or negative force in the universe? Moffat’s seasons 6 and 8 were basically all about that, and for their flaws, they were at least interesting. Season 2, by contrast, has no such focus. The one episode that does seem like it might be interested in exploring this, Love and Monsters, is so weighed down by how it’s universally terrible in every single way that an episode of a television show could ever possibly be that it never has a chance of even coming into the vicinity of sticking the landing, and so opts for a blowjob joke instead. This leaves us with is a long, long stretch of two people being generally terrible, and that is hard to swallow (phrasing). It’s quite telling that the standout episodes of this season, The Girl in the Fireplace and the The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit two-parter, feature the Doctor and Rose separated from each other for significant stretches. That said, I am quite looking forward to the concluding Army of Ghosts and Doomsday, but at this point I’m not sure if it’s out of a genuine hope that my memory of them being pretty good episodes is accurate, or if I’m just looking forward to the schadenfreude of the Doctor and Rose getting what they deserve.

Until this happens, of course.

I wish I could say that I’m hopeful for things to get better, once Rose is gone. In a way, I am, because I know that they do, but in a way, I also know that the next companion is going to spend her entire season living in Rose’s shadow. I also know that the next season is going to end with Last of the Time Lords.

Even 16 year old me had trouble swallowing that one. What will 28 year old me think?

This is proving to be an infinitely useful video.

The Witcher III: PCs, Plots and Immutable Interfaces

Welcome, oh lovely travellers, to the Wayback Machine, a time travel device made entirely out of toilet roll tubes and unlikeliness. Through the whims of this stalwart mechanism I’ll be moving back and forth along the scales of pop culture, investigating and reviewing current and ancient entertainment alike, because we all know it’s vitally important to have a threadbare fictional explanation for why we’re inclined to write reviews and articles about things that are no longer current. The real reason is because there’s a lot of interesting things about there that I haven’t had chance to write about in a while, and it’s about time I got caught up. And, if a perspective enhanced by time lends itself to a different consideration to what you might have previously read on the subject, then well ain’t that a lucky coincidence!

Our first trip back in time is a short one, back to play The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, the biggest game of two years ago. Or at least, one assumes, given that the version I picked up was handily marked ‘Game of the Year edition’. But then again, what does that mean? There’s no supreme justice of gaming who decides what the very best game of any year was, probably simply because no-one deserves the amount of internet grief that said arbiter would receive when it inevitably made a controversial choice.¹ Indeed, so many publications throw out similar awards – everyone loves a good ‘best of the year’ list every December – that the moniker is essentially meaningless. And that’s probably why we all read ‘Game of the Year edition’ as ‘Game + DLC’ without paying attention to what the words actually say, and I guess the moral of the story then is that developers ought to be a bit more modest.

Seriously, take it easy heroes.

That’s not to say that The Witcher III isn’t great, because it is. But it’s a very odd kind of great. Conceptually, for example, the world is open for free roam, but the various areas of the world are divided into map cells, and though you can see them from the start, access to more cells only comes along at various points in the story, with each cell also having a general sense of level requirement guided by the relative level of the quests that get you there. There is a very definite structure to this open world; progression is tied to story in a way that initially, I found rather rankling. But there’s a chance I’m coming at this from a position of bias, given that the last four games I’ve played have been Fallout 4, Skyrim, Just Cause 3 and Breath of the Wild i.e. four of the most open and navigable sandboxes of the current generation. Part of what I loved about the former two games especially was being able to, from the start, go to places I shouldn’t probably be able to get through yet, and finding inventive new ways to bumble my way to a highly unlikely victory (have you ever tried to take on the mage boss at the end of Skyrim’s Dawnbreaker quest at a low level? ‘Highly unlikely’ hardly begins to cover it). Those games never railroaded me in a particular direction; if I saw something on the horizon and liked the look of it, then I could go there.

That last point is especially true of Breath of the Wild and Just Cause 3, whose navigational mechanics are among the most joyous things I’ve ever experienced in videogames. I could fly around on JC3’s wingsuit for hours, and that alone would be satisfactory; that particular game was unique in that it had a fast travel system whose convenience was outweighed by how fun it was to just travel to a place manually. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never ever thought that about a game ever before, and I highly doubt I will again. The problem with open worlds, especially in this generation, is that they’re massive, and great as that is, no-one wants to spend their time trekking back and forth across familiar parts. Fallout 4’s fast-travel disabling survival mode sounds excellent in terms of realism, but horrible in terms of fun.

So, with all that in mind, I found The Witcher III’s structure to be, well, pretty jarring. Even quests have a particular level requirement, and early on the game seems to find a particularly vindictive pleasure in giving you the starting keys for quests that are far above the player’s ability. My quest log is teeming with all sorts of things – mostly monster hunts – that I’d love to have a crack at, but I just know will destroy me over and over again. I can have a go at them – indeed, there’s more than a couple of quests that I have muddled my way through against the advice of the numbers, but whereas triumphing against the odds in a game like Skyrim was a great feeling, in W3, there is no such tangible sense of victory; even when I’m on the cusp of victory over that group of level 23 dwarves that have been tearing holes in my level 15 character, the only sensation I get is that the game is tutting at me for daring to be so bold!

Not pictured: the likelihood of this ending well.

The reason for this is intricately tied to the game’s combat system, which is at best awkward, and at worst god damn it Geralt why are you trying to swing your sword at the enemy on the other side of the field when three other guys are right next to you stabbing a spear into your gut. The seams of transition from general control to combat control are incredibly obstinate and difficult to predict, mostly because it’s an automatic process that triggers a change in stance when hostiles get close enough. What exactly constitutes ‘close enough’ is a great mystery for the ages, as I’ve on occasion found myself alternating between screaming at Geralt to get into combat so I can block the swarm of ghouls bearing down on me, and randomly pulling my sword while in the wilderness and turning to face an enemy that isn’t even there. Lock-on and target selection is tied to the right control stick, but the limited movement of Geralt’s combat stance and his tendency to auto-home on nearby enemies regardless makes actually using that system more trouble than it’s worth, especially when I’ve been trained by years of videogames to use the right stick to steer the camera to keep my enemies in sight; try to do that here, and you end up transferring your lock on to the aforementioned enemy on the other side of the field while his friend twats you in back of the head.

Ultimately, though, none of this really matters, because if you’re fighting enemies that are appropriate to your level, then combat is pretty easy. The game throws an overwhelming amount of combat options at you very early on, but doesn’t seem to require you to use any of them consistently in order to do well. I get by mostly by means of swinging swords around - dodging, blocking, parrying – and liberal use of two of the five magic sign abilities. That leaves the other three magic signs, the crossbow, bombs, and the game’s vast variety of alchemical concoctions that I’m just not doing anything with. And for all that the game seems to support a pick-and-choose system, given that the number of character upgrade slots is so small and slow to unlock that you’ll have to choose between maximising efficiency in two or three fields or being a tiny bit better at everything for the vast majority of the game, the sheer abundance of stuff begins to feel like so much wasted memory.

This sense of over-complication infuses the entire game: the very first map is a prolonged tutorial, essentially introducing you to the game’s various elements, and you can choose between powering through it and having information spammed into your eyes, or taking your time, visiting the various map markers, powering yourself up and forgetting the things that you’ve already been told. I opted for the slow path, and still found myself spamming past tutorial screens when they popped up because there’s only so much of that I can handle before I begin to lose interest. But once you’re past that, you still have to deal with the overwhelming deluge of stat comparison that comes with deciding whether to swap your old piece of gear with slightly more armour out for this new piece that has less armour but a potentially beneficial secondary effect, as well as the overwhelming amount of raw materials that you need to collect in order to craft weapons, armour and alchemical ingredients. I’m not necessarily opposed to any of this; indeed, when I get into it, I really enjoy this rather old-school style of raiding and dungeon-crawl-esque gear-getting. But in this game, you have to fight with the incredibly clunky interface to get it done, and that’s where it all falls apart. Here’s an example of how that goes down: on the crafting screen, it’s possible to buy individual ingredients that you might be missing in order to complete a piece without having to navigate to the shopkeeper’s inventory. But when you go to a herbalist, you’ll discover that for absolutely no discernible reason, you can’t do that for alchemy ingredients. All you can do instead is mark an individual recipe, move over to the shop screen, drag the cursor past the mountain of stuff in your inventory and the vendor’s in order to find the highlighted ingredients, buy them, and then go back to the alchemy screen to oh my god I’ve gone cross-eyed. You can only mark one recipe at a time as well, so if you’ve got a lot of things that you want to make, prepare to do lots of tabbing back and forth!

I actually need about 10% of those items on the left. I have no idea which 10%.

The same problem is evident on the quests and map screens. You can’t mark multiple quests at once, and, even more damningly, every time you complete a quest, the game automatically picks a new quest to track for you, usually whichever main quest it thinks you should be doing. In my experience, the quest it chose was almost never the one I wanted it to. At the point I’m at right now, halfway through the game’s second act, it keeps triggering the opening quest of the third act. Back in the first act, when I had two concurrent main quests, it kept picking up the one that required me to travel a significant distance, rather than the one that was happening in the area where I was. The upshot of this was that I spent far too much time dragging myself into the quest screen, reminding myself what I was wanting to do, reselecting the relevant quests, tabbing to the map to orient myself, and then setting off. The game doesn’t track statistics like ‘time spent in menus’, but I reckon it’s got my ‘time spent playing’ stat looking over its shoulder worriedly.

If I were to hazard a guess as to why the game is built like this, I’d pin it on developer intent. This is a PC game, ported to consoles without thought as to how that might change the experience. Or at least, that’s certainly true of the previous Witcher games, which began their lives on the PC and were ported to home consoles later in their life cycle. But this game was developed for concurrent release, which means either the developers didn’t playtest the game on console thoroughly enough, or they refused to compromise for the console market. Perhaps Projekt Red feared the cries of ‘dumbing down’ that Skyrim suffered from (not that it did suffer, since the only people angry about that were the PC gamers who were free to mod it to their liking anyway, and that game’s interface is one that as a primarily console player I find simple and effective, come at me master race). Is it too much to ask that developers design their games to be as effective as possible for every console? That’s the question at the heart of this, and it’s a difficult one to answer. My heart says no, but my head is under no such delusions, and offers a vehement yes. I had a great idea for a re-imagining of this game’s menu system that draws on the potential of the PS4 controller’s touchpad, but that kind of thing couldn’t be implemented on the Xbox One controller: why spend time on individual incarnations built to take advantage of specific consoles when instead you can build a version that basically functions on every system, and call it a day? As much as we might like them to cater to our whims, and believe that as consumers we should be able to possess the best version of a thing possible, developers have limited resources, and honestly, they don’t have to listen to us. In the end, we can’t always get what we want, but that doesn’t mean that we deserve what we get. And it’s a pretty long fucking step from there to ‘game of the year’ isn’t it? It’s a good job words mean nothing, else my poor broken thumbs might have something to say about this.

With all of that in mind, then, I cannot conclude that The Witcher III is not a flawed game. But, as you might recall, I did say earlier that it is a great game, and I’m gonna stand by that. All of the various flaws and fiddles that I’ve just listed are definite problems, and aren’t diminished by the parts of the game that I do really like. But when this game is good, it’s really good. I went into it with no knowledge from either of the preceding games, aside of a basic backstory primer and whatever I’ve since picked out from the game’s built-in encyclopaedia, and while that’s still creating occasional moments of confusion when the characters talk about past events or someone turns up who I’m clearly supposed to recognise but obviously don’t, I accept that that’s my problem, not the game’s, and move past it. But even with that hampering my comprehension, I still find myself utterly absorbed in this world. The world-building, tone and general atmosphere all take great pains to point out how much life would suck in such a setting, with misery, mayhem and death standard procedure for most of the people born with the grave misfortune of irrelevance to the overall plot. It’s the classic A Song of Ice and Fire realist fantasy, except that it also embraces magic and the fantastic in a way that that series refuses to, and that makes it much more attractive to someone like me who generally enjoys ASOIAF but also often finds it to be a miserable slog and wishes everyone would lighten the fuck up once in a while. As a result, this world feels much more real, and interesting, and the quest chains and character arcs that play out under my control make this feel very much like the sum of what George R.R. Martin’s world might have been if it had been specifically designed to my more optimistic interests. And also if it didn’t have such endlessly lavish depictions of food and feasts, for goodness’ sake George go and make a sandwich already.

THIS IS AN ARTICLE THAT EXISTS

Another thing that intrigues me is the curious duality of the main character, Geralt of Rivia. As a ‘witcher’, a highly-trained and mutated monster hunter, he plays up to the in-universe meme that his people are emotionless zombies who only care about the dollah, and thus tips his hat to the classic videogame everyman/silent protagonist/player stand-in archetype. But he’s not emotionless, as is on occasion noted by the people he meets; he might sound like Solid Snake with a grudge against personal pronouns, but he does have feelings that go deeper than his default tone of exasperation at the ridiculous world and all the ridiculous people with their ridiculous problems (a feeling I often share after the twentieth time I arrive at a quest objective only for the game to move the goalposts, which honestly happens far too often). His character informs his own story, while keeping him an obstinately neutral interloper in the lives that he touches, and it’s left to the player to make up the difference. When I write it out like this, it really doesn’t seem like it should work, but somehow, it more or less does, and it makes the story-based progression all the easier to swallow; by the time I’d finished the main questline of the first act’s area, I was emotionally satisfied by the arcs of the characters I had dealt with, and ready to move on. Usually, in a ‘regular’ open world, that won’t happen until I’ve scoured every single rock and cave in a region and grabbed absolutely everything that I can from it, but in this game’s weird structure, I’m okay with it.

I don’t know, in the end, if all of this works out from a purely gamer’s perspective. In fact, I strongly suspect that in a different setting the over-complications and unavoidable flaws of this game would have led me to walk away from it by now. But in the end, fantasy is my jam, and the world of The Witcher III is a really interesting, complicated and often subversive fantasy that I find fascinating both from an entertainment and a literary perspective, and that’s what’s really keeping me in the game. At this point, I’m only halfway through, if that – this story-based progression makes it hard to tell, and also I think the game might be hiding some maps from me, so it remains to be seen whether this precarious balance will ultimately land in the game’s favour. But I’m willing to see it through, so I guess we’ll find out.

I’ll let you know! Until now, dear traveller, it’s time to step out of the Wayback Machine. Next time, I’ll be talking about the Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who, specifically David Tennant’s first season in the title role, since I’ve finally convinced the missus that it’s entertainment that is worth her time, only to become unsure myself if it actually is.

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^{1.The closest thing to such an institution would be the World Video Game Hall of Fame in NY, who you might have heard about recently; their 2017 inductees included Halo: Combat Evolved and Pokemon Red and Green. Naturally, the internet exploded, although personally I think there’s a strong case for recognising both of those.↩}