Analogue: A Hate Story

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Jack McNamee

Analogue: A Hate Story is another terribly-named visual novel from renowned internet word-lady Christine Love. Coming as a sequel to her début hit Digital, it’s also another tragic, clever love story that understands how games work.

It starts out slow. Sent to investigate a ruined ship, you plug into the main computer and are forced to hack through a primitive text-adventure interface in order to infiltrate the memory storage. When you get in, you’re greeted with a game made out of Deus Ex-style datalogs. For twenty minutes you sift through the emails and memos left by a bunch of dead Koreans who seemed to spend most of their time writing long messages about their lives to no-one in particular. Just when you’ve totally lost track of the Korean names comes a shocking twist: the game turns out to be actually good.

The following story rides through reactor meltdowns, mass murder and arranged marriage, and it’s twice as effective for the grounding the opening gives it. A hard game to review, then, because almost everything about it counts as a spoiler. Add that together with the 15$ price tag, and I can’t see anyone who doesn’t love Christine seeing it through to the conclusion. Stick with me, though, and I’ll see if I can’t convince you to try the demo without spoiling a drop.

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Desu Desu Desu, or how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Yoshitaka Amano.

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Ravencrowneversmile


When the majority of brooding gamers are spending most of their time complaining that they “Can’t hold dem feels” and absurdly worship posters of their new waifu, you tend to forget there are more important things to devote the eye of the perspicacious too. One of those things is the newest installment in, arguably, the greatest role-playing franchise of all time.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 is nearly upon the Western world, and thinking back on it’s Mothership release, it’s easy to feel that Enix have a lot to reconcile with the fanbase. Criticisms ranged from the lack of RPG elements, such as towns and the ability to re-visit areas in a more open-world fashion, to the fact the player’s experience was as rigid and straight as the average Anon’s phallus when they see Rin Tezuka.

Well, after maps were released for the area modules comprising the new game world, I think it’s safe to say Enix registered your complaints, loyal fans.

Tree of Seraphim? Final Fantasy is an Angelic as it gets.

Pictured Here; Actual comparison of game paths.

God-tier map design, or more needless complexity than the controls for Beatmania?
It’s obvious that the developers are moving away from the FF formula of past. The most noticeable aspect in this area is the introduction of Dialogue Trees and Multiple Endings.

It’s most likely people paid as much attention to Yoichi Wada’s statement about taken Western Approaches to RPGs as they do to my constant sarcasm and Katawa Shoujo jokes, but that doesn’t make it any less existent. Some time ago, the Enix CEO admitted he had considered the possibility of laying off hundred of Japanese employees and exporting development of future titles to other countries – All because he fancies the current climate of Western RPGs.

It’s become apparent through various sources that the studio have been working with overseas influences to help recompense for the weaknesses of XIII. Toriyama, the director for the project, and Kitase, the producer, revealed in interviews with various Japanese game media that they especially took in opinions from other countries, after having exported some of the testing overseas, to help refine the Western edge that Enix’s CEO aimed for. Taking all this into consideration, it may just be spiteful conjecture, but I’m not shelling out money for a JRPG title to end up playing another Bioware game.

The prospect of rolling in the hay with an Asari suddenly became more favourable.

Topping it off is a plot that is seemingly able to develop in multiple ways. Jumping from world to world and time plane to time plane, exploring various instances of Pulse and Cocoon, the story could be extrapolated in almost a non-linear fashion as a marathon of Haruhi after injecting the mescaline directly into your testicles. The games conclusion is reliant upon the  choices made when jumping world to world, with what seem like drastic consequences.

Even with a return to the Random Encounter battle system of old, the changes can be chalked up and the record shows just how much it deviates from the formula that most Final Fantasy fans have come to appreciate. First week sales of XII-2 barely made it to half the count of it’s predecessor for Japan’s first day haul, and if these statistics are anything to speculate on, the fandom may be met with an unexpected disappointment. Or all the fun of watching Haruhi after falling through the portal to the world of Anime girls. The fruits of Enix’s labour will be seen in due time.

(Unless you know moonspeak, in which case, fuck you and your early release.)

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Invisible Embrace.

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Miles


When one man dies it’s a tragedy, when a million men die it is a statistic. When a million grizzled and scarred veterans from the gloomy bowels of the internet dive into a downwards spiral of emotions it should shake worlds. This is better known as recent visual novel Katawa Shoujo.

I don’t know what to say. Four borderless days were spent behind the flickering monitor as it slowly stirred my mind like a broth of tar; resisting, loosing then as the week weathered on, turning me around from my desk to see a large print of Rin Tezuka on my wall.

For somebody who studies games, I spend an unimaginable amount of time sitting in limbo and accomplishing nothing other than considering the roof of my bedroom and merging my eternal form with the internet. When I discovered Katawa Shoujo, I was in a house full of drunk companions participating in a conversation about the philosophy of martial arts, and the collection of knives I’ve hoarded for reasons both sane and agreeable, but somewhere in between the dubious festivities, I decided to bore a hole through the evening and subject myself to what seemed like a thought exercise, to see if I could still fucking feel.
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Katawa Shoujo eats your heart out

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Jack McNamee

I’m blogging, and something beautiful is happening at 4Chan. Rare.

Katawa Shoujo was released ten days ago. It’s a choose-your-own adventure game where your main task is to decide which of five disabled girls you want to have sex with. 4chan responded to the game like this.

Those words link to the most honest man on the internet, and he’s not alone. I’m not normally a 4chan man, but I’ve been following the Katawa Shoujo threads with fascination. Go to /a/ or /v/ now and you might be quick enough to find one of these downpours of emotion. Confessions, tears, hearfelt promises to start exercising. All coming in meme-laced english from people who booted the game up looking for masturbation material. “I was prepared to fap, 4chan,” sobs one poster, “BUT I WASN’T PREPARED TO FEEL.”

This is the most amazing reaction to a game I’ve ever seen. It’s even more incredible because I’m certain this game is terrible.

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Posted in NPC's I have loved | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Pulp World Lives!

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Jack McNamee

I have completed Pulp World – my ridiculous globe-spanning Call of Cthulhu sandbox based on heroic pulpy adventures in a world where the monsters have won.  Not only that, but I’ve uploaded it in its entirety here, for your edification. Just click on that title image above to get a bite-sized file containing everything I’ve made. (Or here if that somehow fails.)

I haven’t done enough cleaning, so some parts of this might be vague or obscure. For clarity, here’s what you’re getting if you download this file.

A. An A3 map of the world cut up into hexes, with terrain types, railways, major cities and rivers all marked out.

B. A PDF version of the map, with sticky notes placed on pertinent locations detailing the following information:

1.Nine random encounter tables: one  for each type of terrain. Each has roughly 50 entries, 10 of which are fights. Possible encounters include:

94:Miles and miles of land covered waist-deep in tiny animal bones.

8: Skinwood. Skin flaps hanging from branches. 2D6 detach and float after party discreetly. 2 HP, 45% bind=suffocation. Anyone killed in this manner becomes one. Will retreat if party cuts themselves.

28: Gigantic multi-layered cake in the middle of the forest. Unattended. Delicious.

2. Massive amounts of plot-hooks, locations and possible adventures strewn liberally across every location on the map.  Includes priceless gems such as “Paul Bunyan Lumberjack cult temple.”

3. Tables with general helpful info, including:

-Travel times per hex for every mode of transport from feet to bi-planes, along with the cost of fuel per hex.

-Exchange rates – worldwide currencies converted to american dollars, and 1920′s american dollars converted to modern currency

-Lack-of-sleep and Encumbrance rules

-Famous people, locations and mythical items listed and numbered for quick quest-gen

-A shameful amount of material stolen from Zak Smith, including the Wavecrawl kit and the first part of the quick quest-gen mentioned above.

C. My love.

If you’re thinking of actually using this stuff, here’s some things- good and bad- I discovered from running this sandbox myself.

The bad: Continents are big. Crossing them with anything slower than a car will take a long, long time. By foot, across America, 70 days at minimum. My players actually decided to travel from Chicago to Las Vegas on a mule, which meant facing 60 encounters. Luckily enough, the second encounter was a couple in a car. They were able to kill them, steal the car, and drive off at the much better rate of 1 day per hex. I’ve since populated the inside of america more densely, but the lesson remains: be aware of what the travel distances really mean. I’d advise giving the PC’s easy access to a car or train at first. Keep in mind that with travel times like these,  a better vehicle is the best reward you can give. Transport will honestly be the biggest problem your PC’s face.

The good: My PC’s crashed the car they stole and – horribly mangled – summoned the god of portals to take them to Vegas. They messed up the summoning, though, so I rolled on the locations table and found out that they’d been deposited in Venice.

A sandbox of this scale means that you can just say “You’re in Venice now,” and because these are all real places, the PC’s will know what that means. You can drag your PC’s halfway around the world and get them making plans with the minimum of explanation. “We’re close to Germany, let’s go kill Hitler.” one suggested. “No, let’s go to London, no-one here knows English.”

Globetrot! Put a portal god in your game, and make him totally unreliable. Send the PC’s to Africa on a whim. Have the party track a villain across countries. Make the most of the space you’ve got to stretch.

So. It’s massive, it’s ludicrous, it’s yours. Take it with my blessing, internet dweller. If you have any questions, post a comment or just give me a ring- my number is on the top right of your screen.
Posted in Actually making something, Dungeon Master Adventures | 1 Comment

Gamification in Tales from the Thousand and One Nights

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Jack McNamee

Here’s a story. Once, many games were made out of wheels within wheels, tasks within tasks. Their power came from constantly achieving these small, looping goals that fed into larger goals: Getting wood to get a pickaxe to get some rock to get a better pickaxe to get iron, to get this, to get that. These wheels kept constantly turning and spawning new wheels in such a way that there was never a clear end point where someone could stop playing. Just five more minutes and you could get a this, and then you’d be able to mine that, and then meanwhile you should be growing this so you can get 50% extra efficiency on your that.

The Man and his Suits, growing jealous of the power of these games, stole these mechanics for their own and remade them into machines designed to take money. Across the land, many fell to the addictive turning of the compelling loops of these wheels within wheels.

Here’s a better story: Princess Shahrazad finds herself married to King Shahriyar, who takes one bride every night and cuts their heads off in the morning. Thinking quickly, she invents Gamification, doing in one night what would take the rest of the world thousands of years to rediscover. 1001 Arabian Nights – the collection of stories she tells to the king keep herself alive – is made of wheels within wheels. Instead of tasks, though, it’s wheels are made of stories.

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Posted in Game Design, More games should do these things | 7 Comments

Update:

Posted on October 22, 2011 by Jack McNamee

Everything is Jake! is coming along. It’s due this friday, so I’ll definitely post it then – although god knows if it’ll be any good.

Edit: Ok, have some more.

Posted in Actually making something, Everything Is Jake | 2 Comments

What Fisher Diver gets right

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Jack McNamee

Fisher Diver is a neat little game about diving into the sea to kill monsters. Here’s the clever part:

All good games show your progress clearly. In some games you travel to the left, and that feels right. In some games you travel upwards, and that feels perfect. But in some games, you travel down.

It’s stuck in your brain, in the corner behind the sex drive: Up is good, Down is bad. When you ascend you’re getting closer to God, to Space, to enlightenment. In games like Winterbells – where falling is just a temporary setback – the pull of gravity feels like something pulling you home. No matter what giddy heights you reach, the place you started from is only ever a short drop away.

When you go down, you go to Satan, and you don’t come back. Gravity just pulls you closer and closer to the heart of the earth, making it harder and harder to get home. The monsters get bigger, the locations darker. Every step takes you farther away from your home and further down into a place that isn’t designed to support you. It’s a Heart of Darkness thing: Even if you find what you’re searching for, it seems less and less likely that you’ll ever get home.

You can see that in everything from Spelunky to Diablo to The Blinding of Isaac. Diablo gets extra credit because it’s leading you down to the actual devil, and Minecraft gets some itself because going into the center of the earth feels like a stupid decision you’ve made personally.

The trophy goes to Fisher Diver, though, because the Deep Sea is just about the perfect expression of that concept. Down in the depths your oxygen runs out, the sea is black, the monsters are abominations - the only thing missing is a pressure gauge with the glass slowly cracking. As your oxygen gets low you actually start blacking out,  the screen going dark for an instant before fading back in.

You’re going to die down here, and only the monsters will mourn you.

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Would you like a random Orient Express Murder Mystery table?

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Jack McNamee
Well, here’s one anyway.
Roll up identities, secret identities and goals for about 6 passengers, then put them in a list and give each a relationship with the passenger below them. Finally, roll to see which one is killed 1D4 days into the voyage, and again to see who did it. You may also, if you wish, roll for a mystery gimmick.
IDENTITY:
1. Fat Russian royalty, always laughing
2. Twins from Austria, beautiful, talk between themselves in made-up language
3. Nikola Tesla equivalent, old and broke
4. Old french artist, makes depressing speeches, no-one listens
5. African Indiana Jones equivalent
6. Italian preacher, nervous and clumsy, takes instant dislike to one of the PC’s
7. Jazz singer with 12-person Big Band from London, constantly drunk and celebrating
8. German, tall and reserved, obsessively collects [insert something the PC's own]
9. The Mum of one of the PC’s. Here on holiday.
10. Scottish author, stays in cabin writing book for entire journey, yells at intruders with unintelligible accent
11. Young english kid travelling alone, bitter beyond years
12. Excitable Australian inventor, working on fantastic cure that could be misused as a horrible weapon
13. Swiss couple with identical sets of scars all across bodies, consider themselves the same person
14. Frail, sick-looking Russian with massive amounts of kids that swarm everywhere
15. Haruspex, has small menagerie of animals, cheerfully foretells dire omens from their organs
16. Masked plague doctor from Venice, speaks with mechanical rasp,
17. Turkish Magician, Hypnotist and master of illusion, will obsessively try to divine the trick behind any real magic they see
18. Shakespearean actor, alternates between overblown speeches and tired self-consciousness
19. Hard-nosed railway brass, making sure the journey goes smoothly
20. Prize german boxer, with daughter. Super aggressive except in sight of kid.
SECRET IDENTITY:
1. Utterly disgusting slithering wet black thing, mind-controlling passengers and PC’s to like/love it
2. Anarchist rebel, concealing bombs
3. Actually mute idiot controlled by ventriloquist shadow
4. Exactly what they seem to be
5. Keeps fridge full of virgins, will begin to shrivel into skeleton if they don’t bathe in their blood for 3 days
6. Bank robber, getting away after successful haul
7. Secret agent of Coldsnap, communist-nazi spy organization
8. Keeps heart in cage in room. If heart is released, will grow legs, escape, and sabotage train.
9. Secretly a large group of clones, each takes turns to act as them
10. Time-traveler Future PC in heavy disguise
11. Spy for [powerful faction], left hand detaches with a bunch of rope to act as grappling hook
12. Insect, burns if exposed to true darkness
13. The president of the United States
14. Cuts a piece of themselves off each night, making tiny doll with them
15. Heir to throne in hell
16. Ice robot from another dimension
17. Powerless volcano god from a forgotten old religion, desperate for worshippers
18. All servants/followers/acquaintances are zombies. Hates them, but owes them debt; they stick with them to make sure it’s paid.
19. Minor character previously encountered, obsessively in love with PC’s, on train to stalk them.
20. Cultist servant of [Nearest Cthulhoid monster]
RELATIONSHIPS:
1. In servitude to
2. Having secret affair with
3. Conspiring with
4. Has power over
5. Killed personal friend of
6. Secretly related
7. Married to
8. Signed dark pact with
9. In reverential awe of
10. Sworn to destroy
11. Secretly buying weapons from
12. Knows secret identity of
13. Stealing from
14. Prostitute of
16. Student of
17. Challenges to duel over perceived slight
18. Taking care of
19. Good friends with
20. In debt to
GOAL:
1. Sell a weapon in Venice
2. Meet leaders in Moscow
3. Rob train
4. Destroy train before it reaches [next stop]
5. Claim inheritance in Paris
6. Escape police from [previous stop]
7. Hunt down their enemies in Venice
8. Stop Berlin from going to war
9. Go to China to die
10. Seek Wisdom in Himalayas
OPTIONAL GIMMICKS:
1. An invisible train car is secretly attached to the end of the train. Horrible things are inside.
2. 2D4 Highway robbers attack train 1D10+2 days into journey
3. Train is sentient, evil, coal must be constantly sacrificed to it to appease it
4. Train driver is chained demon, will offer anything for freedom
5. Everyone committed the murder
6. The murder victim is still alive
7. The Jade Cage, absurdly valuable ancient artifact with space-warping powers, is aboard.
8. A Nuke is on board
9. An axle breaks 1D10+2 days into the journey. Looks like sabotage.
10. Train misses stop and keeps going at high speed – drivers cabin is locked tight
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

No, listen, I can totally do this

Posted on October 16, 2011 by Jack McNamee

4 days into the Cthulhu sandbox expedition. Morale and Cheetos are running low. I’ve hit a second snag; Call of Cthulhu’s level up system. Specifically, there isn’t one.

If you do particularly well at some skill in Call of Cthulhu, the DM might tell you to give yourself an experience check – which means that you can roll to see if you learnt anything, then roll a second dice to see how much your skill increases by. You have to convince the DM and the Dice that you deserve an upgrade – it’s totally out of your personal control. Even that is just a straight stat upgrade – you don’t get a cool new tool to use after playing well.

The effect of this is that there’s no real reward for tracking down and defeating horrible monsters, only insanity and death. Which means that either the DM needs to force the players into conflict at every turn, or the players have to almost conspire against their characters to get into the reason they’re playing the game- conflict with horrible monsters. Because it’s horror, you have to constantly remind them how bad an idea this all is and how they’re all going to die and how easy it would be to turn back, too.

Now, I can see how these things make total sense in a story-based campaign. But if I’m giving these guys free rein, what possible reason would they have to go out and attack horrible monsters? Only the fact that it’s the point of the game. If I want to encourage my players to fly across the world busting ass, I’m going to need some kind of Experience system.

There is one really nice system for getting cool new tools, bound to your player character; getting magic from Horrible Monsters. My players quickly realized this was the best way to become powerful, and started sacrificing everything they could find to Glimmering Jim. Buying magic allows you to have some agency in choosing improvements that only you can use, but it’s still dangerous and uncertain – you can’t know how it’ll turn out for sure. As is Right; you should never just buy magic from a shop. I’d like all magic systems to be more like that, but I need something more solid and certain.

My solution: An international spy agency.

THE KEPLER CLUB

To do:
-Establish bases
-Rescue and Recruit specialists
-Stop the Great Depression
-Defeat horrible monsters
-Save world
When they enter the world, their old friend Wolf Abrams is going to find them, looking more grizzled and hard-worn than ever. He’s been working underground, trying to form an organized resistance against Cthulhu. He’s got plans. If we do this, and if we’re smart, he says, we could literally no joke save the entire goddamn world.
He’s got a tech guy and maybe a transport guy living out of his basement. I’ve been investigating Cthulhu Sweat lately, sez the techie, if you bring me a jar-full I could probably make some kind of ray-gun for you. If only we had a base established in Mexico, goes the transport guy, I could ferry you across the pacific ocean. Wolf Abrams himself has a list of people that’d be mighty helpful to the movement if they were recruited. Henry Ford, Nikola Tesla, Dagny Taggart. Frank Roosevelt. Rescuing each of them gives you cool new items, helpful abilities, spells. After you rescue them they’re in your base, and you can call them in for help on missions or get them to make you cool things. Find Amelia Earhart and you’ve got the best pilot around; Marie Laveau could help you out with Voodoo Secrets. As you recruit more people and establish more bases the organization would slowly grow to become an international team of honed veterans.
This way, I’m internalizing the EXP system into the games fiction, and making it revolve around the access to tools and items the players have, instead of their abilities. I have to make the organization totally weak, mind you. The PC’s will be able to contact them by phone, which means that they’ll have no backup whenever they go into the wilderness (Thank god it’s the 1930′s. I’ve got no idea how anyone makes a CoC adventure with mobile phones). The massive travel times mean the PC’s will have to bring people along if they really want backup, and anyone they bring along with them won’t be making cool shit for them at home.
And, of course, there’ll be a rival organization. I’m thinking Agents of Coldsnap, a devilish russian-german organization devoted to ensuring nazi-communist superiority through occult means. They recruit their agents by kidnapping them off the streets, force-feeding them vodka and exposing them to cthulonian horrors. Their main occult strike team will, of course, be composed of evil reflections of the PC’s. The world will be entirely static – if there’s a monster in Mexico then it’s going to stay in Mexico forever until the PC’s show up – but Coldsnap will be constantly active and growing in power, forcing the PC’s to consider travel times and where they go next carefully. If they don’t get to that monster in england fast enough, Coldsnap may get there first.
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