Pandemic Scenarios, Ruined Friendships, and The Cones of Dunshire

Not a full post today, just a couple of links that I thought it was worth sharing together.

Harking back to my review of the fantastic Pandemic, I stumbled across a couple of 'scenarios', one of which is put together by the game's designer, Matt Leacock.

'Isolation' plays out with the West having tried to cut itself off from the infected rest of the world, limiting the movement of the players (and increasing the area focus of the infections, to an extent). 'Government Shutdown' reduces the number of actions available to each player until certain conditions are met which push the government to unfreeze vital funding. The latter, in particular, seems like it would add an additional sense of panic and doom, and I can't wait to try it out.

You can access them both here: http://zmangames.com/product-details.php?id=1246

This is an old article, but I enjoyed finding it again: Top 5 Board Games That Really Will Ruin Friendships: http://kotaku.com/the-top-5-board-games-that-really-will-ruin-friendships-1443867215

And, finally, for any Parks and Rec fans, a way-too-in-depth analysis of The Cones of Dunshire (sorta): http://www.vulture.com/2013/12/cones-of-dunshire-parks-and-recreation-game-oral-history.html

Top 5 Board Games for 'Normal People' to Play

'Normal people' is definitely a bit of a hook here; something convenient to fit the title. There's no such thing as a 'normal person', or, at least, I've never met one. What I have here instead is a list, in no particular order, of the five games I consider to be the best to play with people who are not traditionally gamers, games which are much, much better than the boardgames people tend to have encountered during their childhood. A common thread here is that none of these games tend to result in newer players getting shafted due to lack of experience, for different reasons in each case.

Most of these have been featured on Wil Wheaton's Tabletop at some point, so I've included the links below if you want to learn more about the games.

Zombie Dice

This one is as simple as they come. A press-your-luck dice game that fits in a small pot, with rules that can be explained in about thirty seconds. The major part of it is luck, but there is just enough depth to allow for some strategic decision making. It's carries with it the right mixture of the casual and the competitive, and is good for travel, the pub, or just as a nice, low-intensity game that still has the potential to entertain. As a bonus, it's short.

Buy it on Amazon

King of Tokyo

THE KING IS SAD (couscous salad not included)

This one can go both ways - I've had people love and it and not really warm to it - but I guess that applies to everything on this list, really. You each play as a kaiju monster, competing to tear up Tokyo. It's very quick to pick up, and doesn't take too long to play. I love the vibe of this game; it makes you feel like a giant smashy monster, even down to the slightly oversized dice. A different style of press-your-luck dice game, there's plenty to do and plenty of drama that is at the same time impossible to take seriously, a winning combination.

Buy it on Amazon

Ticket To Ride

(Image: Chunky Rice, cc by-sa 3.0)

Slightly further out on a limb for me, since I've not played this one in its true cardboard form, but I've played it plenty on the iPad (Google Play link), and have read and seen enough about it to be happy including it on the list.

Ticket To Ride puts you in the place of a railroad tycoon (not that Railroad Tycoon) trying to build train routes across the continent. The mechanics are fun, and it's competitive enough without being grounds for any fights. One of the big things for me here is that the competition is not based around warfare, the driving metaphor behind many boardgames, and an element I know turns some people off.

Buy it on Amazon

Tsuro - The Game of the Path

In Tsuro, you play as a majestic dragon, swooping around the board, trying to be the last one standing. You are dealt a series of tiles with 'paths' on them, and take turns to place these down before your dragon. Each player with a new 'path' before them moves along it as far as they can. You're eliminated if you collide with another dragon, or are swept off the edge of the board.

It's simple, has great pacing (nice slow start, building to an unpredictable and dramatic conclusion), is quick to play, and is visually stunning.

Buy it on Amazon

Forbidden Island

Forbidden Island is one of my favourite games. You are put in the role of a daring explorer, landing on an island to loot it for its ancient treasures. The island, though, has other ideas, and is gradually sinking into the sea, taking with it its treasures, and, if they are unlucky, any daring adventurers who happen to remain.

It's a cooperative game, which is a plus for some people who don't like competitive play as much. It's simple to learn, though optimal planning and tactics take a little longer to pick up - offset by the teamwork angle. It has a nice set of visually appealing components, second only to Tsuro on this list. Above all else, it's fun, with plenty of depth and replay value, without relying on confrontation or individual tactical mastery.

Buy it on Amazon

Honourable Mention: Pandemic

It feels wrong not to include Pandemic on here. The only reason I didn't is because it is so very similar to Forbidden Island, and I didn't want to have both on here side-by-side. The mechanics are very similar, the play style is broadly analogous, and it is almost equally as fun.

Forbidden Island edged it out for me because a) it's slightly cheaper, b) it's a lot smaller to transport and easier to set up (fitting into a handy tin), and c) I find it slightly easier to sell people on the metaphor ('you are an intrepid adventurer' sounds better than 'you work for the Center for Disease Control'). Not that Pandemic isn't fantastic in every way.

Buy it on Amazon

A Screen of Empty Chairs

I have to admit something. This is something that people either react to with near hostility, or with hushed confessions that they feel the same way. Here goes: I hate the cinema.

Not film, no! I love film, along with most of its media brethren. I just hate going to the cinema. People are generally quick to jump to its defence, pointing to its fantastic immersion and escapism. I don't disagree. In fact, escapism is one of my favourite things. Glossing over whatever that may say about me psychologically, I just don't have to go to the cinema to do it; if escape into myth is my goal, there are many more available and enjoyable ways to do it.

This also conflicts with the other common line of defence, "it's a great social activity". No. NO. No it isn't. Watching a film with friends is a great social activity. Spending endless hours gushing over or dissecting (n.b. I hope never to use the words 'gush' and 'dissect' in the same sentence again) what you've just seen is simply fantastic. It's another one of my favourite things. But the cinema is not the place to do that. If I wanted to sit in silence and darkness with a group of people I like, I'd... well, I don't have any analogy for that that isn't creepy. Anyway, you'd have far more fun doing so in someone's home, somewhere with an actual atmosphere. And if you're discussing the film you're watching in the cinema, well, you're too far gone to be saved anyway.

Representation of the cinema social experience

When you go to the cinema, you get the genuine experience of having your spleen gouged out with a spoon. You pay a small fortune for tickets, and then more again for some of the worst food known to mankind - ersatz sustenance which is either entirely devoid of any kind of nutritional contents whatsoever (like popcorn), or which you wish was devoid of any (like dog spleen in a bun covered with choleric paste). Now, I'm no stranger to trash food, and, honestly, the expense of tickets and reconstituted proteins does not inherently bother me all that much. But I at least want to feel that I'm getting something close to what I'm paying for.

Instead, what I see in a lot of cinemas is this horrible class system for their customers. You get in and try to find a seat with something resembling a decent view, somewhere where you can sit for 2 or more hours without developing neck-strain. 'Ooh,' you say, 'those two rows there are perfect, just the right distance from the screen. And yet no-one's sitting in them already! What a lucky chap I am!'. Then you get closer and see that, no, these are 'special' seats for 'VIP guests'. 'Wow,' you think, 'I didn't know the Croydon TelePlex had so many visiting high-profile actors that they needed permanent VIP seats.' But, no, they are, of course, for those that are willing to pay their way. Sorry, pay more of their way.

Again, I have no actual problem with a business charging more for a thing. The problem is, in every cinema I've ever been in with these, those rows are always empty, or near enough. Which means that they're blocking out the best seating in each screen for very little benefit to anyone, with the added bonus that you make the more curmudgeonly and reluctant cinema-goer (i.e. me) feel even less happy about spending £10 on a ticket and still not being able to sit where they like, when I can buy a film for less than that and enjoy a vastly better experience in my own home.

Isn't it galling when the screen is full apart from the VIP rows, and they still run that ad about piracy destroying the cinema? (Image: Dennis Gerbeckx, cc-nc-2.0)

As I said, despite my deep dislike of 'movie theatres', I very much value the film industry, for all the flaws that it too has, and those two are as inextricably intertwined as a pair of ouroboristic sex snakes. The mainstream film industry is reportedly struggling. This page has a concise summary of some of the key reasons, which should serve as a reminder to you next time you groan at the announcement of the latest sequel or reboot.

But are cinemas struggling in the same way? It sounds like a lot of the smaller, independent cinemas or franchises are, partly as a top-down result of how the studios themselves are struggling. But the big chains don't seem to be doing too badly. Cinemark Holdings and Regal Entertainment, two of the biggest US chainholders, have seen a steady upward trend in their stock prices over the last five years, as has Cineworld Group in the UK (they appear to have made about £20m after tax last year). I'm not going to claim that stock price is a total benchmark of success, but it does represent something pretty substantive about the companies.

With that in mind, I feel much less bad about not supporting them, and feel less guilty for inciting others to do so. Vote with your pocket book. Demand a better class of service; if at all possible, support your local, smaller cinemas (even Picturehouse, now opened by Cineworld anyway - show them how much better this model is within their empire. Beer in your (comfy) seat, fewer disease-ridden Pick N Mix sweets). Demand Better.

Approximate depiction of the small cinema experience (source: elitehts.com)

Nor do I quite buy that not going to the cinema is the thing hurting the film studios. I haven't been able to find a specific citation for what percentage of a film's takings tends to come from the box office. The most specific source (and I don't think it's a great one) indicated that, at least until recently, DVD sales were expected to account for about 50 percent of a film's revenue (search on page for 'fifty percent'). The same source indicated there was a pretty big decline in this, though, driven by the change in the way film is consumed (and not uninfluenced by piracy, I'm sure, though the tendency is always to vastly over-estimate the impact this has).

So, at that time, the box office would account for up to (but presumably less than) 50 percent of the takings. Now, it's possible that, in the wake of the decline in DVD sales, the portion of the takings the box office accounts for has decreased, but that seems unlikely, as significant new streams of revenue have not emerged (the video on demand services that have edged out the DVDs don't seem to be as good a source of revenue for the studios). So, I expect that the box office is now more critical to the studios than it has been for decades. If I were in the studios' position, I'd be doing all I could to encourage cinemas to keep retention high and grow their audience (rather than squeezing every possible penny out of them on the cheap). Personally, I'm not seeing that, and I think the rise in 'movie franchise recycling' (between sequels, reboots and adaptations), while designed to pander to an established audience, is actually having the opposite effect, and is introducing a wider movie malaise into the general public, which is bad for everyone.

I couldn't find a CC licence image that conveyed 'video on demand', so here is a picture of a bear (image: hectoriz, cc by-nc-sa 2.0)

Not strictly relevant, but I thought I'd throw it in here: I was pretty appalled to read about some of the tricksy accounting practices the film industry has adopted towards paying its contributors. I honestly don't know if this sort of thing still happens or how widespread it is, but it doesn't exactly cover the movie industry in glory (and, admittedly, I keep talking about the 'movie industry' as if it's some cohesive whole; like it's just one guy with a camera).

Maybe I'm just a curmudgeonly idealist, but there you go. Bottom line: demand more bang for your cinemagoing buck to tempt you out of your dwelling and into the open. Alternatively, if you disagree with me, disregard what I have said and go about your cinemagoing business.

What do you think? Is this just me, or do other people feel the same way? Do cinemas just have it locked up, and people are always going to keep on coming back to see the big hitters there first, no matter what? Are they reacting the right way to a changing media landscape? Am I just straight-up wrong? What do you love/hate about the cinema? Let's hear it in the comments.

Top 5 Worst Board Games

Games are, at least in principle, a true joy, something which I have argued before is fundamental to human nature. It's generally a healthy and enriching pastime. But that's not universally true, and there is nothing quite as frustrating as being stuck playing a bad game. So here are my top 5 worst games. It should go without saying that, as with any list like this, this is all ill-informed and fully-biased opinion, and while I've tried to justify my selection in each case, your mileage may vary.

Trivial Pursuit

Okay, I'll admit, this one is a bit of a stretch. I've not got that much against Trivial Pursuit per se, and I do enjoy playing it. The problem is, I feel that quiz-based tabletop games are flawed, and this happens to be the most prominent example. Two of the most obvious flaws are limited replay value, as people get to know the questions over time, and the way in which the questions become dated (though that is a great way to release and sell new versions of your game every year! It's as if Hasbro know what they're about). 

Above all, though, my problem is that this type of game depends entirely on what you bring to the table. While all games to an extent reward learning and repeat play, I think quiz games are not learned activity in and of themselves, nor, really, is there much strategy. It's based on what you have in your head combined with the luck of the questions; there's no room for development within the game itself.

Scrabble

This one definitely comes from personal bias. I've never liked Scrabble, as much as I love messing around with words. However clear the guidelines, I find this is a game that does little more than spark endless small disputes, which take up a disproportionate amount of game time to resolve. A 'casual' game should not require a 674-page book to play effectively! Again though, a good way to sell more stuff (Hasbro again...).

The draft of the next Scrabble Dictionary.
Photo credit: Jacob Bøtter, Licensed under Creative Commons

Cluedo

Ah, now we get to the juicy stuff, where I get to start stomping on people's beloved childhood games. I know this is a game for kids, really, and that it's supposed to teach deductive reasoning, but it's just so dull. It has relatively little interactivity, player elimination (which in games that can run for longer than an hour is generally a bad thing), and builds to a usually unsatisfying conclusion.

Ultimately, it's a game where you could guess randomly on your first turn and still stand a chance of winning. If you don't do that, it essentially becomes a giant game of Guess Who, with no real lines of play or satisfying strategy. It's a game that I think you could play on your own with almost no loss in quality and tension, treating it as a logic puzzle, which begs the question, why spend your valuable time with friends and loved ones playing this when there are many finer choices?

Also, can we talk about the terrible theme/mechanics matchup is here? You're walking round a house filled with potential murder weapons with an actual murderer, essentially walking round pointing at people, asking 'was it you?', rather than worrying about the fact that there is a murderer in this spooky house with you. What's more, if your character is the murderer, you still win the game by accusing and outing yourself as the killer. In what world does that make sense?

Risk
This will be a divisive one, I'm sure, much like the game itself. I personally dislike Risk, but accept that there are those that enjoy it. The main reason I'm including it on this list is because the length of play is disproportionate to the depth of the game. Even if you enjoy Risk, there are other games out there which can give you an similar-but-better experience and play in about the same time. Game of Thrones springs to mind, whether you're into the setting or not. Heck, even Twilight Imperium would be better if you have 10 hours to spare (and if you were thinking of playing Risk, you had better!). 

Pictured: Actual Risk players.
Photo credit: Tambako The Jaguar, Licensed under Creative Commons

Those who know me well know that I have no problem with long games (hell, they're usually the ones that I enjoy the most), but I just think if you're going to invest that much time in a game, you want to have enough depth to match, and Risk is a little too one-dimensional and swingy for me, but maybe that's just down to personal preference. Also, for that length of game, I prefer I different approach to player elimination. While in games like Game of Thrones and Twilight Imperium, it is perfectly possible to eliminate other players, doing so is not necessary for the game to end, and doesn't seem to happen all that often. This means that there is more sustained interactivity for everyone who is putting the time in.

This is weirdly apt for the time, but should also 

be the fate of all Risk players everywhere.

Monopoly

This is it. The big one. 

I know I'm not alone in my hatred of Monopoly. It's another one that people often seem to love as a holdover from their childhood. But no, it's a horrible game in just about every way. If I weren't making this list, I could still write a whole post on everything that's wrong with Monopoly and feel like it was time well spent. If you are a parent, or close relative of young kids, please please please don't play Monopoly with them. There is a vast number of more worthy, rewarding, and educational games out there.

Where to start? First, the simple one; as with Risk, the playtime is waaaaay out of whack with the depth of the game. Speaking of depth, here we have Monopoly's big flaw - playing it is absolutely no fun. If you play it 'optimally', it is stagnant - almost entirely non-interactive. You buy every property you land on, do not, under any circumstances, sell them, and only trade them if it's significantly beneficial for you. If everyone's playing that way, it's quite hard to get anywhere. Outside of your turn, there is little or nothing for you to do, leaving you with lots of downtime.

What about strategy? Well, if I told you that the orange properties were the ones which were landed on most often (thanks to their placement in relation to the Jail area), what would you do with that information? Well, nothing really, since you can't control where you land, and you should be buying every property you can anyway. The game is totally lacking in meaningful decision points, which makes it, if you'll pardon the pun, 'strategically bankrupt'.

So say we all...

Then there's the little things. So many variant house rules for this game seem to exist, putting fine money under Free Parking being the most prevalent. Though here's the thing - while that seems like a cool thing to do, making a generally dead space on the board more meaningful, it just makes the game run longer by increasing the amount of money in circulation among the players, and can either bring someone back from a losing position (prolonging the game even further) or further polarise the game by increasing someone's leading position. Way to make a bad game even worse.

I think I've got most of my bile for this game out of my system, for now, so I'll leave you with this gem. According to Hasbro, the longest game of Monopoly every played lasted 1,680 hours. That is two and a third months, or approximately 210 games of Twilight Imperium. Just remember that next time someone invites you to play.

What would you put on this list? Which of these games do you still love? Why do you hate Monopoly? Sound off in the comments.

What I'm excited about from E3 2014

Edit: I blatantly missed one of the big ones
Evolve

How this one slipped me by yesterday, I don't know, especially since I had been following all the news. The newest title from the team behind Left 4 Dead, Evolve looks pretty interesting. It's a 4 v 1 multiplayer game with a team of hunters versus some giant, hulking monster, with the added bonus that the planet's flora and fauna also seem to be trying to kill you. This looks genuinely exciting, but I feel it will have the caveat that most of these games have - the ceiling for fun will be strictly reserved for when you can fire this up with 4 friends, and I don't think that that will be quite often enough. It might also get repetitive, but Left 4 Dead generally managed to overcome that.

Rise of the Tomb Raider (2015)

Scant few details on this yet, but I'm pretty stoked. I found Tomb Raider (2013) to be unexpectedly brilliant, and it held up magnificently when I replayed it a few weeks ago. Plenty of room for screw ups, I guess, but I have high hopes, bolstered by the fact that, as I infer from Twitter, at any rate, Rhianna Pratchett will be returning to write it.

Alien: Isolation

I haven't been following this one too closely, but we're about due for another decent Alien game. Seriously, it's such a great IP, it's difficult to imagine how any competent studio couldn't produce at least a passable game from it if given half a chance (*cough* cheap shot *cough*). It looks innovative enough it it's approach it will at least be interesting to watch as it develops.

Batman Arkham Knight

No colons here. This is an easy win for me. I've loved every instalment in the series so far, including Arkham Origins, produced by a different studio. At worst, if they just clone the gameplay from any of the previous ones, I'll still be happy, so don't necessarily trust my opinion here. The gameplay teaser trailer was interesting, though the (admittedly extremely narrow) snapshot of the writing and voice acting sounded a little off to me. Still, can't go too far wrong. Let's just hope it doesn't live up to my recent pedigree regarding delayed games.

Mass Effect 4

Again, the details are basically non-existent, but I have almost total faith in Bioware, assuming EA don't get their grubby paws too far into the honey-filled genie bottle.

Grand Theft Auto V

...on PC. Most of the news outlets have been focussing on the 'on PS4' angle, but I'm a PC purist when it comes to GTA. One of my greatest regrets about Rockstar is that they may never publish the unparalleled Red Dead Redemption on PC.

Grim Fandango Remastered

I never got to play the original, but any case where old LucasArts games are being remade is an automatic win, as far as I'm concerned.

What's Wrong with Watch Dogs

Okay, so I made a mistake. I let myself get excited by a game. I told myself I wouldn't, not again, the pain just wasn't worth it. But nothing quite compares with that siren-song lure of flashy marketing blandishments designed specifically to appeal to my geek brain. What better time to be reminded of this than during E3?

So, a couple of weeks ago, my mental train became the rhythmic judder of 'WatchDogsWatchDogsWatchDogs'. I pre-ordered it, I took a day off work so I could play it at launch, and went to some lengths to pre-load it so it was set to go on release.

Launch Day Expectation

There were two things that should have set off alarm bells from the start. Firstly, the review embargo - the date before which journalists are barred from publishing their reviews - wasn't until launch day. That bothered me. The obvious deduction from this is that the game publishers have concerns about how it is going to be received and are running damage limitation on their day-one sales and pre-orders. But this isn't a universal warning sign - there are plenty of great games which have held their reviews until launch day. So, hope against hope, I wasn't too put off.

Launch Day Reality

Much has already been written about the second alarm bell (which, in retrospect, was more of a biohazard containment failure warning klaxon), which was that the game would be delivered digitally, on PC at least, through UPlay, Ubisoft's carbuncle of a games platform. Needless to say, to the surprise of literally no-one, there were many, many problems extending from launch day into the rest of that week (some of which are still issues for me - read on). You can read plenty about this elsewhere, but needless to say, f&#! DRM and its criminalisation of legitimate users.

For anyone not familiar with what Watch Dogs is, you play as Aiden Pearce, hacker extraordinaire, blasting his way around a hyper-connected Chicago with pretty predictable, revenge-based motivations, unsurprisingly rooted in the death of one or more close friends or loved ones.

Snark aside, I had high hopes for the story. It struck me that a game about a morally-grey hacker going toe-to-toe with the seedy immoral underside of a hyper-connected, near-future Chicago, backed by a major studio ploughing AAA-level dollars into a game for which they've been driving the hype train for months sounded like it would be anything but boring.

Yeah, about that...

Early on, I was lulled into a false sense of security by a pretty engaging if slow-paced start. I was hoping this would be a nice slow build into something increasingly pacey and far-reaching, much like the 'classic' generation of 3D GTA games (461 words before the inevitable GTA comparison). What I got was something that slowly devolved into an increasingly formless mush.

For reasons that I shall explain below, I can't actually comment on the story in its entirety, but the 60% or so that I made it through was punctuated with weird tangents that didn't really go anywhere or mean anything on their own. There was a sort of meandering feel to the missions where none of them were that interesting in isolation, and I found myself waiting for a payoff that never really came.

The worst example that I played was at the climax of the first act. For reasons that don't entirely merit going into, Aiden decides that he needs to sneak into a prison to intimidate a potential witness into keeping his identity a secret, citing fears of risk to his family.

Partway through the mission, the situation changes when another group drag off the witness in question, ostensibly to kill him. Aiden reacts roughly along the lines of 'oh no, I have to get to him before they kill him'. I may just be a heartless bastard, but this made absolutely no sense to me.

You can play Aiden as a freedom-fighter style hacktivist, or a self-interested criminal - that's an intentional-if-meaningless choice the developers have given you. Here, his reaction didn't quite jibe right with either. While Aiden might feel a genuine sense of horror that this street thug is about to get killed (notwithstanding the scores of people Aiden himself kills throughout the game with far less provocation), he didn't exactly sneak into a prison to save him. What's more, if the thug does die, it solves Aiden's problem anyway.

I say 'solves the problem', but it actually doesn't. Nor does Aiden's 'Tryhard of the Year' intimidation attempt. Because by this point, there is already a clear threat to Aiden's family, and throughout the game Aiden's real identity as the vigilante hacker is repeatedly advertised on the radio with a repetitiveness seemingly designed to make me intentionally slam my car into a wall. What you are left with is a mission which does not advance the main plot, does not make an interesting climax for the first act, and which is ultimately pointless. This is one example, and a particularly egregious one, but it's not alone.

The story is best summed up as 'filler', something on which to hang the gameplay, which left me waiting for the real beat to drop and the pace and tension to ratchet up. I'm still waiting.

While, for me, the story is what usually makes or breaks a game, I accept that this is far from the only thing that matters, and games are many things to many people. I can forgive a weak story where there is excellent gameplay that carries the experience, particularly in an open-world environment which lets you to inject your own narratives.

My overwhelming reaction to Watch Dogs' gameplay was - it's fun. It was consistently enjoyable for the 23 hours I've somehow rack up so far. That said, it's nothing groundbreaking, which in itself, is fine - not everything can be truly new and exciting, except that, in the case of Watch Dogs, that's precisely what was being hyped as.

Hacking is the obvious 'innovation' here, and it makes you feel empowered in exercising control over the environment. For the most part, though, it is just hitting buttons at the right time, and when driving, it often doesn't work quite as responsively as it needs to. There's also a pretty limited range of things you can hack. In close-quarter encounters, it generally didn't feel all that impactful compared with using your guns.

I actually found the gunplay more satisfying than the hacking. It's very well implemented, and one of the stronger sides of the gameplay. The obvious problem with that is that the game is meant to be all about hacking. Shootouts are all too often unavoidable, and there generally isn't enough incentive to use your phone over your guns.

Beyond the main storyline, the map is packed with other things to do. And I mean packed, like a rush-hour tube full of sardine tins, to the extent that the icons on the map seem to be trying to crowd each other out.

Many of these side-quests and activities were very diverting, and I sunk a lot of time into them, with the attitude of 'just one more' again and again (and again). But given the choice between a better-developed story, one that grips me at my very core and leaves me trembling at the knees and coming back again and again (I'm looking at you, Bioshock Infinite), versus crawling around a map from location to location completing yet another flavour of 'find the thing', I think it's pretty clear which I'd choose. One of these I will happily experience over and over, repetitiveness be damned, while the other, well, I'd be unlikely to do it even once. Watch Dogs, sadly, falls firmly into the latter camp.

So, a good way into the plot, I found myself a pretty deflated. Not wholly disappointed, but disillusioned about so many 'almost good' things in the game that hadn't quite come to fruition. So now, we come to the big roadblock, rising from the ground in front of us as if guided by some unseen hacker; the giant red rubber stamp over my whole experience with the game.

My Watch Dogs experience. Sadly, I'm the car in this scenario.

While playing the online mode where you invade another player's game (where the game comes closest to brilliance), I died, and came back to my own game world, finding myself with...nothing. None of my unlocked weapons, skills, nothing. This was distressing, to say the least. Apparently, I was not alone. While everything remained tangibly unlocked in the games menu, it effectively blocked me from doing very much, and certainly from continuing with the main story. Astoundingly, this still appears not to be fixed, more than two weeks on. This from a game that was delayed for more than six months to get it right.

This was the defining test of the game for me. With no easy fix in sight, I was faced with starting over if I wanted to continue the story in the near future, and, confronted by that prospect, I discovered that I just wasn't excited enough to do so. Up to that point, I had been enjoying an admittedly flawed game, but this brush with a near-enough game-breaking bug was jarring enough to remove the last of the gloss, and I've barely been back to it. Disappointingly, I haven't even found myself craving to fire it back up, instead burying myself in tried-and-true alternatives, and that realisation was pretty disappointing.

The bottom line? Watch Dogs is a fun game, but it could, and should, have been so much more. The prospect of a fun game alone would not have been a good enough to draw to get me to content with UPlay and launch-day disasters, but that's just a testament to the power and success of the game's marketing engine (if you want an idea of how hyped this game was, when the delay was originally announced, Ubisoft shares dropped 26%). Would I still recommend it? Just. But only if you find it at a significant discount and, ideally, if you can somehow avoid using UPlay at all. Just wait for the bugs to get fixed first.

The Real Watch Dog

Context Is Everything

It's amazing the difference a small piece of contextual information can make. I'm not sure precisely what reminded me of this this morning (when I get up early, my mind tends to jump around between things with no particular direction. There's just no stopping it.), but this is something that struck me with one of the books I read towards the end of last year, Neuromancer, by William Gibson.

I had it in my head that Neuromancer was one of the classics of science fiction, the book that dragged cyberpunk kicking and screaming into the light, biofeedback wires still attached and throbbing. As I started, I checked the published date via Amazon (since they provided the esteemed vehicle through which I would be reading it). 2011. Huh. I guess I must have been thinking of some other seminal piece of future-looking fiction.

So I read it, and it was fine. Good, but not the amazing book I had been led (or, perhaps, had led myself) to expect.The style was oddly confusing, and a lot of the concepts seemed stale, or poorly handled. Then I reached the end, and found the actual copyright notice. 1984. Well, that makes more sense. The concepts seemed overused because they have been aped by just about every instance of the cyberpunk genre in every medium since. The style and aesthetic felt a little jumbled because it wasn't projecting technological advances of the next 20 years, it was preempting those of the last 20.

Now, that didn't make me enjoy the book more in retrospect, as such, but it did provide an important piece of missing information which made me re-evaluate how I viewed the book. To put it another way, divorcing a book from its context can fundamentally change how we experience it (as does adding our own contexts), which, now that I say it, seems bleedin' obvious. But Neuromancer was one of the places where I've been able to observe this specifically, rather than continuing to bask in contextual ignorance after the fact.

What pieces of information have radically changed the way you view things? Not just limited to books, but to all media; I think music is a particularly good one for this.

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Now for some general updates. Clearly, I haven't been blogging much on here, to the surprise of no-one. As ever, busy busy. I have been reading a respectable-enough amount, though understandably not at the rate I did last year. I'm still working on a spidering number of writing projects, though, I seem to have been for a while without producing anything finished. I'm in a bit of a 'sprint' right now with a bunch of first drafts, and them am going to endeavor to turn out something shareable in the near future. Blogging shall continue, as far as is practical!


Above image taken from Wikipedia; using book covers to illustrate a piece about the work should constitute Fair Use.