I’ve been going to the library quite a lot lately. I used to go to study, as I’ve recently moved towns, and into a busier house back with my family and getting any work done from home was difficult. I get terribly distracted at the best of times and overhearing loud conversations, having the latest Rihanna album pumping in the next room or even just having my ten year old sister come and interrupt me and enquire about what I’m up to, then interrupt me again while I explain what I’m doing, and then tell me about whichever friend she’s fallen out with this week for hours. Not actual hours, but whatever measure of time these conversations last it is removing hours from my life. I’ll die younger because of that craic.
I know this is first world problems; I’m not really complaining. I’m just giving some context to why I like to remove myself from this situation.

But I don’t need to study anymore as my next module doesn’t start until February next year, but I still go to read or do some writing with a bit of peace. People are noisy and obnoxious, and I have a very small attention span so it helps me be a bit more productive.

Well, that’s the idea, but unfortunately that ideal of the quiet library doesn’t seem to exist for me now. The main area where most of the books are displayed doesn’t have any seating and at the back of the room is a busy section with thirty or so computers, and there is another section down a long hall which does have a large table and chairs is right next to one of the entrances and a helpdesk, so there are people coming, going and enquiring all the time, which also distracts me.
The only option I have left is a large room on the second floor called The Sanctuary. Perfect. A sanctuary; I like the sound of that, it’s exactly what I’m looking for.
Essentially it’s a large room with a number of sofas at the back and four tables scattered around the room, along with six computers lining the sides, three on each side.



Unfortunately, the environment is ruined by people. There are two women in their early to mid twenties on the sofa, huddled over a mobile phone talking loudly about some happenings on Facebook; there is some guy on a PC in a white t-shirt watching Tupac videos and spitting some rhymes along with him, and there is an elderly bloke across from me with his woolly socks over his trousers, proudly and regularly burping and farting like he’s doing us all a favour. And it’s at this moment I find this library exactly like Xbox Live.

I don’t have an Xbox 360 anymore (RIP) so it was here that I was reminded why I don’t play online so much anymore. People having conversations with the mic un-muted with someone else in the room; someone playing their music over the mic, and others being absolutely quiet until they let out an earpiece-shattering belch. It just ruins my enjoyment.
I sound like a grumpy bastard, I know. I never used to be and it’s kind of new to me and I’m not sure how to express it properly. Being close to 30 and dealing with this kind of grumpy-ness is like being 14 and dealing with unwanted erections.
But I digress.

But other then reminding me people are dicks, it also reminded me that, well, people are dicks. Online gaming, and more specifically Xbox Live, has come to develop a reputation that we are all aware of. You know, all the racist, sexist, homophobic comments and general dickery that I pointed out above. If I spoke out against any of those people in the library, like if I told the old bloke to be a bit less anti-social and ease those farts out, you know, work that sphincter a bit, I’m sure I would have been called something really offensive if I wasn’t a straight, white male; if they didn’t say something I suspect they would have thought it, and with the protection of anonymity that comes with XBL it would make those thoughts more likely to leak out.



What I’m trying to get at is why is Xbox Live singled out for the worst part of human nature when even a particular day at the library can bring out the rude? As I pointed at before, anonymity can exacerbate social situations but they’re not the root cause.

I dunno. Maybe XBL does attract a slightly higher proportion of wankers, but that didn’t seem to be the case when I first joined back in 2006. I met loads of great people playing Gears of War, and some I still speak to. I’d jump into a game and speak to pretty much anyone and usually got a fairly positive response but as the reputation of the XBL gamer became more and more infamous I stopped turning my mic on for online sessions unless I was with someone I’d previously met, because of dicks I heard about on the internet and didn’t come across first hand very often.
It just makes me wonder if the XBL gamer stereotype is a self-fulfilling prophecy. People who aren’t arseholes are jumping in games with their mics off and not communicating with each other, and the mouths ruling; they’re winning. Maybe if I stopped thinking of myself as above the community I could rediscover a love for online gaming by just turning that mic on again because online gaming in 2006 was brilliant.
I may not have a 360 anymore but I may just wipe the dust off my PS3 mic and see if there are any cool folks out there.

There is no doubt Robert Florence opened a can of worms with his Table of Doritos article over at Eurogamer. Most of us know about the article. It was about the relationship between the games press and PR. I won’t go into the contents in detail as you can read it here.

Now I’d rather be here writing about how awesome Persona 3 is or what I think the direction horror games should go in, but considering what has gone on this week in regards to the gaming press I feel I have to address it.



It has been a disappointing week for someone on the outside, as a reader of the games press; as a member of the audience. I feel let down. I feel that in certain sections of the press there is a lack of respect for its readers. So a number of those readers don’t deserve that respect with them being the types of people quick to insult a reviewer if you don’t hit the right score, but many, many others silently take on board what has been said in your work. You are trusted. “I’ll wait for the reviews” is something we all hear and read, time and time again.

So when one games journalist practically advertises a game on a personal account to win a PS3 and follows it up with a tweet genuinely not seeing a problem with the practice then we clearly have a trust problem. I’m amazed that this journalist couldn’t see a problem. Even if you plan to donate this PS3 to someone else so you don’t really get any gain, you still advertised something; not a personal endorsement of something you love, even if it is, as doing so through this kind of stunt looks dishonest. It shows a complete lack of respect to those who follow you on Twitter through liking your work.

This lack of respect also reared its head over at Kotaku where Stephen Totilo rather shamefully talked down to a concerned gamer; the whole situation bringing back memories of when certain newspapers and proper journalists weren’t acknowledging the corruption the rest of the population could see during the Leveson enquiry and continued to peddle long lens shots of Suri Cruise or whatever. And here, showing all the bits in a limited edition Xbox 360 was more important than something many readers are currently quite concerned about.



Looking at what I’ve already written I can see that I may be preaching from a high horse, sneering down like a king at a pauper but I do understand how the lines can become blurred in an entertainment press and PR relationship. We’re hits on some counter, we’re Likes on Facebook, and we’re bullies with bad grammar on Twitter. We’re statistics.
We are not the personalities you have to deal with day to day and we’re not the people you generally have to maintain some kind of relationship with. And games PR are probably as passionate a gamer than anyone, I mean who else wants to work in the games industry at that level other than a gamer, so having something you both care about in common will likely end up in friendship. This is a persistent relationship that you just won’t have the majority of your readers, so I can see how a relationship with PR can become quite strong, and I totally believe it to be unintentional; people with the same interests connect.

I know this comes across as a buzz kill as some may say it’s only video games, we shouldn’t be taking them so seriously, but some of us do really care about them. Some of us may look up to some of you as thinkers. The ones whose career it is to think about games and pass those thoughts to the rest of us who perhaps don’t have the time to analyse for ourselves due to pesky day-jobs but one of those thoughts may strike us and makes us realise something we never noticed before in a particular game. Then we apply this theory, whatever it is, to other games and start to demand better.

It’s through good criticism you can potentially help make better games, but your readers need to trust you or it’s all for nothing.

From the outside it looks like there is a lack of self-awareness in the gaming press with their relationship with industry PR and all I'm asking is to just take a step back every-now and then and consider if you're closer to the industry than you are your readers.

I’ll just say it up front now; when you’re talking about Resident Evil 6 it’s hard to not to mention Resident Evil 4. It’s especially hard for me; as to me, RE4 is a game I judge many action shoot-y type games against. I think it’s a true benchmark game and after playing the RE6 demo it shows that Capcom are having trouble living up to it.

I think everyone knows the problems with RE6. We’ll start with Leon’s section of the demo. Capcom is reported to have wanted to go back to the series’ roots with Leon’s section of the game. Perhaps even harking back to RE2 where intimidating atmosphere and survival horror are the focus of the experience but you don’t really get that, but what you do get is the worst of both RE2’s and RE4’s worlds. You get simple corridor environments with not a lot going on. I know it’s hard to build up the required tense atmosphere within the contexts of a demo but with Leon and Helena’s abilities I doubt it would ever get as tense as it needs to be to remain engaging. During the section where you are locked in one particular corridor, waiting for a door to open and hordes of zombies burst through the windows to attack it’s supposed to be a desperate fight until you can escape, much like on the original Left 4 Dead while waiting for an elevator to come on No Mercy. But since Leon and Helena have such strong melee attacks then you’re never that tense or scared. I’m actually pretty sure Leon could single-handedly deal with all of the zombies with a simple kick to the face then smash their squishy heads with the Diamond Cutter while staggered. Taking the RE4 Leon, then making him more powerful, then putting him into an even more linear game does not make for much fun.



Then, we move onto Chris’s section of the game, which is basically Gears of Resident Evil. But you know what? If it was good I would have been fine with that. Imagine Gears of War but with a lot more eccentric monsters. It’s already kind of there with the stretchy arm guy that pulls you out of cover. Imagine if they removed enemies with guns and just had mutated freaks with weird abilities. Imagine if Shinji Mikami was still on board of the Resident Evil ship. I’d be so on board with that even if it isn’t anything like a traditional Resident Evil game.
But it isn’t any of that. What we have is Gears of War but with none of the intuitivism. I can’t get over the game’s cover system. It’s shambolic. What is it you do again? Go next to a chest high wall? Hold the “point gun” button? Then press X/A to toggle (yes, toggle) between taking cover and popping up to shoot. I’m not one to want uniform controls over all games in the same genre but that just feels unnatural… maybe you’d get used to it, but it’s a needless obstacle.
And of course you have the enemy AI, which on multiple occasions on my play through the gun toting zombies jumped out of cover and lurched across the environments like a duck on a carnival shooting range and let me effortlessly take them out. It’s a disaster.

I’m not even going to go into Jakes part. It’s basically somewhere in the middle of the other two characters play styles and has all the same problems accept it’s also really fucking dark. I can’t decide whether that makes it better or worse, not being able to see the tragedy

But you know what? None of that is the worst thing.

I sometimes struggle to articulate why I’m not a big fan of Resident Evil 5 (though since RE6, it has gone up in my estimation). I usually just point at the compulsory co-op ruining the horror for me and leaving it at that. The game is, at times, as interestingly designed as RE4 with regards to the environments at least, so why is it that I don’t think that highly of it?
Playing RE6 and watching some of the trailers made me see what’s missing from RE6 and RE5.



It’s not funny anymore.

I think Resident Evil 4’s humour is a bigger part of what makes it what it is, and what makes it so special to people, even if they don’t realise it. RE4 has a humour that doesn’t diminish the horror, it compliments it. It’s incredibly Sam Raimi in tone. RE4 jumps from being chased around a claustrophobic and remote village by a chainsaw wielding bastard to being chased around a castle by monks in elaborate gowns with a ball and chain. In another moment you’re running away from the animated statue of a power hungry midget then panicking in the dark, narrow corridors, figuring out how to deal with the chilling and seemingly indestructible Regenerators. RE4 makes you laugh as much as it gets under your skin, and RE5 didn’t do that. RE6 certainly doesn’t.

Some of the same elements are there in RE5 and 6, such as the silly melee finishers but there isn’t the tonal shift. It’s just all mixed or ill thought out, such as in RE5 with the African guys in grass skirts, or Diamond Cutters where the game wants you to take it more seriously. Ultimately, that’s that problem. RE6 wants you to take it seriously if the cut-scenes are anything to go by; all the shouting and drama, but not the unbounded imagination that its predecessor had.

And I do believe that is the problem with the series now. If it was funny; if it had the Raimi style, the creepy, funny, oddly endearing tone to it I think I would still have liked Resident Evil 6, despite its awful controls and nose dive in the quality of level design. I think I would of still held a candle for it if it stayed funny.

I want to thank Polygon. I want to thank them for clearing my eyes. After watching the trailer to their documentary which left me blinking deliriously I have just now opened my eyes to what I should be doing in my blogs, and that’s changing people’s perception.

And I know I’m the only person who can do this, now. When I was 10 years old we learned of the Vikings and how they came to Britain and purged the existing settlements from Northumbria to East Anglia; burning fire and bleeding death was all there was. When asked to describe and colour in a Saxon village I took my red felt tip pen and painted the ground a violent red, to symbolise the blazes and the running blood that were sure to spread, as history dictates.
All my classmates drew green grass; their perception narrow, literal and uniform.
My teacher, also confused, shouted at me for colouring in wrong, but I knew my perception was right and beyond his comprehension even at a young age.

I continued to challenge people’s perceptions when I used to draw comics as a teenager, where I would take a man and who is an angry by nature and give him blue skin. Not red skin, the colour of anger, passion and warning, but blue. This, I feel, would challenge you because… of opposites… and… stuff.
I must admit, even after studying The Simpsons’ skin colour for over 10 years I dunno what’s going on there.

Finally, as I stand in the kitchen, thinking about what to write, getting a drink, I realise even I still get my perceptions challenged. In my hand is a glass of cream soda, but it’s not ordinary cream soda; it is green; bright green, like the green of a traffic light. Not clear in colour like all the other cream sodas, but green.
You take a drink and you go “mmm, tastes like normal, clear cream soda” and then you look at the glass and its fucking green!



So the point I’m trying to make is I want my blog to be a bottle of green cream soda, and I will endeavour to this. When I think about games now, I do so in the kitchen with a glass of green cream soda, looking out the window with my eyes crossed and really challenging perception. I have to do this for the three people who read my blogs, and if I don’t then who will? All the green grass colour in-ers?

No. I don’t think so.

My kitchen floor could do with a clean, but like Polygon made me see there are many eyes to clean first. There are other eyes to massage and challenge, and I believe only I can do that.

It’s easy to feel betrayed when a game series you like changes direction, or appears to reboot itself to a new crowed by reassessing its personality and getting a new hairstyle. It’s also very easy to accept this new persona if you weren’t aware of it before, or perhaps even fond of, and can’t quite grasp why those that knew it before are so critical of the new personality and how it just isn’t who it appears to be.

I’ve recently found myself on both sides of the argument and it’s confusing; very confusing.



The game I’m pouting my lip and stamping my foot over is the reboot of Tomb Raider. Essentially, what has been shown so far is an Uncharted style third-person shooter starring a Lara Croft who is bashed around, felt up and sets men on fire while thrusting a knife in the neck of a straggler. It’s grim stuff. And to think it was only a few years a go in the fantastic Tomb Raider Underworld I was mostly exploring coral reefs, and the jungles of Thailand, amongst other things. Crystal Dynamics stated themselves that the game had 80% exploring and 20% combat, and they weren’t lying. For that it was a breath of fresh air. It was like they learned a combat heavy game isn’t quite right from Tomb Raider Legends and made two great follow ups in Tomb Raider Anniversary and Underworld; games that celebrated themselves as puzzle/platformers.

To see such a series conform to the type of third-person shooter gameplay that is just like a number of other existing series’ is ultimately disappointing.
I may still try it. It may not be as it’s getting marketed, and I trust Crystal Dynamics to put together a decent game.

But still.



The game where I take moral high ground, looking down at the gaping mouths of crying fans is with Ninja Theory’s Devil May Cry or DmC as they like to call it, those cool cats.
I’ve always liked the Devil May Cry games but Dante and DMC’s style was never the draw. I liked it purely for the gameplay. The game’s stories and characters were never something I cared a great deal about as it just came across as a little overly kitsch to me, or at least kitsch in a way that didn’t appeal and I never identified with it. Just the context of running around a castle and fighting monsters with a tight combat system was where I found the entertainment. I’d play it pretending it was a good 3D Castlevania game to be honest.

I’d watch the cutscenes in old DMC where he’d exchange corny trash talk with the demons and I’d sigh and say “Aye, alright, Dante.”

So that’s probably why I welcome a new take on the series, especially when the credits rolled on DMC4 and I remember thinking to myself “Yep, that was fun but unless there is a change I don’t think I’ll be getting DMC5.”
So now the change is actually happening and it was after seeing one trailer in particular I realised it could be more interesting than I was ever expecting.

DmC seems to draw from an interesting idea that existed in the Devil May Cry anime. I remember seeing one episode where Dante comes across a biker gang where something seems to be encouraging them to ride as fast as they can and appear to cause there own death.
Basically, in the anime the demons are physical manifestations of human traits. This speeding demon is a manifestation of that desire to push yourself to the limit. Now, old DMC the game didn’t really have this, or at least I never picked up on it, where as DmC does.

In this trailer for DmC the in-game media personify NuDante in much the same way the sillier real life media like to personify the young underclass in the UK and Ninja Theory seem to be looking at what’s immediately around them and lampooning it. It does seem to be a commentary on the manipulative media and how they portray the youth cultures that don’t get heard.

Basically, this sort of take on the series reminds me quite a bit of Killer7. I think DmC is actually quite Suda-esque going by what has been shown. The Persona games also deal with this kind of symbolism in a similar way. Dare I say the story is more Japanese than the original?
But I’ve been told it’s just not Devil May Cry regardless of whether it turns out to be good or not. It’s “wrong” for the series. If Mario’s next adventure on WiiU was a gritty post-apocalyptic game everyone would be complaining. I guess that would be terrible.



Hang on. No.

This situation is the same as that at all. You can’t look at these two Devil May Cry games and see them as different as the exaggerated as the Mario scenario. Taking a step back and looking at things in the bigger context shows they aren’t as different as that. But what would be similar is say if Naughty Dog were drafted in to make a Mario game, and they go in a Pixar style direction, perhaps not making a platformer as tight as traditional Mario games (maybe plays like Jak & Daxter) but flesh out the universe in their own way with charming cinematics and what not. I wouldn’t be against that at all, and that’s what DmC is like to me.

There is a fear of change which I believe we need to get over. I need to get over it too with Tomb Raider (though Tomb Raider is still CD developed). When a new studio makes a game for an existing series it’s like a cover version. What’s the point of a cover of a song that just sounds like the original? What if Soft Cell didn’t change a thing when they covered Gloria Jones’ Tainted Love? What if Scissor Sisters didn’t turn Pink Floyd’s classic rock anthem Comfortably Numb into a melancholic, 4am disco track? It’s just not as interesting. It’s just not as creative.

What I’m trying to say is we shouldn’t be setting the rules of what a series is in stone. DmC could have been a new IP, but like a cover version drawing new experiences or meaning out of an established work is, or can be, an interesting thing in itself.

It took me a long time to finally get around to playing Demon’s Souls. I suppose the reason why it took so long is an incredibly shallow reason: it’s how it looks. There is something about the type of fantasy set in middle ages Europe that I find incredibly uninspiring. It’s also the reason I’ve never seen Game of Thrones, the reason why I couldn’t find any drive to play Dragon Age and the very reason I dismissed Skyrim the very moment I saw it. All of it reminds me of the plague, and they always look as appealing as contracting the plague.



But with Demon’s Souls being something of a phenomenon within the gaming community how could I continue to ignore it? A lot of games are like over bearing parents these days living in a safe, green suburb, making sure you have everything you need and going over the directions with you incessantly to the point of tedium, and even when you’ve set off on your bike you’ll catch a glimpse of them running along behind you clasping the underside of the seat to keep you steady.
How refreshing it is to have a game that parents you like a pair of selfish, alcoholics would, by making you fend for yourself and have you excavate in the putrid pantry for sustenance to survive. We’re gamers. We don’t need the nanny-ing, Mother, will you stop tucking my shirt in! What! I’m not fidgeting! I’m an adult. I’m a gamer.

It’s also not as if I can’t look past a game’s aesthetics and enjoy it purely for the gameplay. I don’t like modern warfare type games but I love the Battlefield series because of their emphasis on teamwork and the variety of play styles; not because I get a giddy feeling over the sight of an Apache gunship. So the same could happen for Demon’s Souls, right?

So Demon’s Souls drops through my letter box and I slot it in my PS3 to finally see what this new sensation is all about. To finally experience the game that left so many people dishevelled and screaming the Lord’s name in the dead of the night.
After initially being unimpressed with the character creation system because no matter what I did my guy looked like a grimy mannequin found in a skip round the back of a fancy dress shop, I actually started to warm to the game. It encouraged a considered pace which I actually found relaxing but just difficult enough to find engaging. Both relaxing and engaging, like a conversation with Stephen Fry (I imagine). That’s a hard combination to get right but Demon’s Souls does it effortlessly.



Managing crowds, putting extreme importance on position and timing makes the combat in Demon’s Souls a unique experience. Traps are inventive, and the level design is consistently of a high standard. I started to think that this game is definitely something special. What an idiot I was for putting it off so long. But then the cracks started to show, and I started feeling like I should have stayed with my gut instinct.

You died.

If there is one thing I hate in games its repetition, and you do that a lot in Demon’s Souls because when you die it’s back to the beginning of the level with the souls you’ve accumulated stripped from you. I get why it’s like that. Making death a genuine punishment gives the game its foreboding atmosphere and makes you play at that pace I was so fond of but to me the enjoyment crumbles away like old masonry when it comes to the bosses.

You died.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking; you’re thinking I just suck weeping gangrene at this game and maybe that’s true but that’s not what’s putting me off. I enjoy a challenging game but when I walked into the fort where the colossal Tower Knight stood and all it took was two mighty and guard breaking swings of his lance and I was left a plastic-y corpse propped up against the wall. It took me five or six attempts to finally slay the iron clad giant; each death also included another tiresome battle to the fort once again, fighting the same grunts, just so I could try out a new tactic.
I’m just not for this kind of game design. It’s dull.

You died.

When I struck Tower Knight down for the final time with my axe I was expecting a genuine sense of victory. Finally he’s down and I can continue my adventure, but it never came. The sensation I did get was the same one I’d get from my time working in customer service. You’d get certain customers who were demanding and unreasonable. They would treat you like the enemy when you were just trying to help, while also balancing loyalty to company policy. After you successfully dealt with one of those customers your brain isn’t swimming in endorphins as you punch the air, you would just do a big sigh and wearily put the phone down, hoping to never have to go through it again.
That’s how it also feels defeating a boss in Demon’s Souls.



To me, God Hand is the king of infamously difficult games and since I just finished that this year it’s always in the back of my mind as I play Demon’s Souls. God Hand is unrelenting fun and also incredibly challenging, but it doesn’t feel the need to threaten you with repetition if you die. Each area is an individual challenge and has quite frequent checkpoints so you’re free to play; free to experiment with your customisable combos while also maintaining the same sense of dread that comes with the fact a common grunt can end you, much like Demon’s Souls.
And the bosses don’t kill you instantly, you have time to figure them out, but the challenge comes in executing that plan, not by catching you with your breeches down.

I guess there is something about this type of game design that was quite common in older games that I’m actually happy to see the back of and to see it return and be heralded as the best games this generation confounds me slightly.
The only way I understand it is that it is a poke in the eye to hand holding that is depressingly common in today’s games, but I just can’t shake the feeling Demon’s Souls is not the true answer.
Playing Demon’s Souls can be like trying to scoff down a vindaloo which is so hot the restaurant calls the local press round whenever someone tackles it and King Crimson are playing some freestyle jazz to accompany the eating. It’s certainly a challenge, but it’s not fine dining. God Hand is fine dining.

Still, these thoughts are from someone who’s just put ten hours in the game so far, but I put the phone down mid argument on the leech boss after stomping on the Armoured Spider. Maybe my opinion can be changed.