Life & Games

This page just explains a few things in reply to some questions i get asked about my LP channel and about my 'philosophy' of  the gaming hobby in general. I will also add posts about why i play the games i feature, the answer to which is blowing in my pants.....no, i mean......damn it! The answer to which is deep rooted in a bit of psychology ( Ooer! ) My opinions are my own, though I know through correspondence that those opinions are upheld by many gamers, but will not necessarily be agreed with by casual gamers, console jockeys, sheep who follow trends, or those with limited attention spans. Be warned: It's all a bit hard core!

So, Why do i favour indie games and rogue likes?

Long answer follows:

I played games in arcades and on Atari, BBC, ZX Spectrum and Commodore machines.
Then came the PC, although they were prohibitively expensive for people of average means i learned through electronics magazines that i could build my own using cheaper imported parts obtained from computer fairs. These were like car boot or 'bric-a-brac' sales, only the sellers sold computer bits from the back of their cars!

In those days, computers used the DOS operating system and you had to write auto exec.bat ( batch ) files in the DOS language to get software to run ( especially games ). If i attempted to talk to people about my 'hobby' in conversation they would have no idea what the fuck i was talking about. Years later, when PC's had become priced to the average home and people realised that they were here to stay for better or for worse ( that's another story )  these same people suddenly wanted my advice. I had gone from 'Geek' to agony aunt for people i worked with who had bought a computer  'so the kid could do his homework' - Yeah right you hypocritical twats! ( In those days it was still considered childish for an adult to be interested in PC games so the plebs didn't admit to it until they felt 'safe' a few years later, because everyone else was now doing it.)  I also started to build PC's for half the retail price for anyone who enquired and made a tidy bit of pocket money doing so. Today, electronics are so cheap that the only reason i now build a PC is about one every two years for my own use and the satisfaction of doing so. I still 'fix' and upgrade other peoples though.


So, many years later and here we are with games. I played them all ( those worth playing ) and i have been witness to the way that consumerism and the games industry has changed over the years from DOS to Windows 8 and MAC OS.

Steve Jobs was a hero? No! He was part of the machine that successfully persuaded un-educated and gullible people ( most of the worlds population then! ) that they needed his product. Bill Gates didn't even bother persuading us: His approach was to stitch up the operating system that shipped with the majority of home and office PC's so that he was the only viable software provider! The long term goal? To capture the multi-media entertainment market and in shifting it away from the desktop, the inevitable price has been paid in terms of product quality.' Dumbed Down' is the term that is often used, so that the limitations of the console, tablet and i-fone technologies can cope with the software.
A great irony then that these 'Apps' and repetitive hack and slash or shooter games are developed on the PC (lol).

So here's a tech-head who has even worked as a programmer and built computer systems and loved to escape into games like people describe their feelings about escaping into a good book. Then, it all dried up! Nooooooooo! There is only Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Dragon Age Origins, Oblivion and the Witcher and these games have taken years to make and are still riddled with bugs! Then the odd strategy game on the PC.......then the odd space flight sim. I can count on on my fingers the number of games that i still play from the modern mainstream games industry and there are no more on the horizon in the foreseeable future!  The sequels to these games: Yes, we live in the age of the safe sequel, are evidence of the dumbing down process so i offer them as proof! Mass Effect and The Witcher 2 are good examples of games that have increased commercial sales by moving to the consoles with the inevitable lowering of quality in terms of game play.

So, there are loads of games being released to the new mass audience of games players all sat drooling down their chins as they 'twitch' game their way through the latest repetitive shooter, or grind on line for unlocks and bonuses to give them the edge over people they absolutely have no respect for anyway. But where are the games that reward a player for hard work, with endless replay value, with challenge and variety or that exercise the powers of reasoning? All gone with the exception of a few dwindling titles. By the time another commercial game is released with the qualities i describe i might be dead! Even Diablo 3 has been destroyed by DRM paranoia and in-game commercialism with a push to move it to 'on-line' only :(

When i discovered the indie scene a few years back it was as if i was re-living the pleasure of trying to beat a game and failing, but constantly coming back to it because it had....shock horror!.....tons of game play and features and often open ended game play and made me want to complete it. Then i realised that these games had never gone away. They just fell out of fashion and i had inexcusably overlooked them!  So there you go. A long winded answer but the way i feel about the current state of play and judging by the amount of people who play classic games on emulators and the growing popularity of the indie scene - I am not alone.

Come on PC gamers, RECLAIM YOUR GAME and leave the twitch gaming, dumbed down console market to the commercial corporates who produce games from a spreadsheet.

P.S. I should point out that i own two consoles and have played many console games. I am currently playing Skyrim on the PS3. I play these games on my reclining sofa chair with a bottle of whiskey, a packet of 20 lights or a spliff and i play them with one hand while i stroke my cock with the other during the boring bits 'cos these games are that easy to play, and the only redeeming thing about Skyrim is it's story lines. When I've played it, ill trade it!

 Why don't i release videos quicker?

A question i often get asked about through my LP channel on the tube. The answer is quite simple this time though. I have never, even as a child, liked the concept of 'time'. I am a creature who is totally given over to spontaneity and who is at his most miserable when being told what to do and when to do it. There is something insidious and perverse to me to have to...hang on...the Spin Doctors describe this in a song!

'All his possessions surround him in his house,
lying beside him, his companion and spouse,
and in the morning, he wakes and goes to hell,
all activated by a little timer bell.'

In 50 years i have only ever had one job that i enjoyed but it was low paid. The man, he tell me to do this at that time, i do what the man says to support my family and pay my bills. 'We're invited to a party on Thursday night at 20:00 hrs'....... today, my answer is likely to be, 'i'm not going'. I have learned my lesson about time: about things that are pre-arranged. 'I'm going for a walk to the beach and i might get fish & chips', 'But it's raining!' So? I feel like a walk! I guess i just learned to live for the moment even as a child.

So, it's even more important to be spontaneous when you do something for 'fun' as a hobby. Leisure time is not something you put on a clock like a dentists appointment or your job. Should i do another DF LP today? Nah! I'll see if i feel like it tomorrow. Right now i want to play Planescape Torment.

Why don't you play games quicker?

Never been a twitch gamer and i like to enjoy and explore all aspects of a game with a considered approach. Although i don't usually have any long term 'plans' when i play an individual game: I prefer to allow the game to unfold of it's own accord, which may explain why i tend to gravitate towards the types of games i play. I do like to take my time with games though, to enjoy the stories, locations and characters. It's just a personal approach to my gaming but i could never understand people who speed run games and ignore all the incidental detail a good game has to offer.

What's your 'beef' with modern games graphics?

A lot of which i explain above, but this is more about content than marketing cynicism. So let's talk 'Realism' in graphics and behaviours. Why the fuck would i want to play anything that markets itself as being 'realistic'? I live in the real world. I want to play a game that opens up extraordinary possibilities in logic, game play and environment. It's a 'Game' ( Doh! ) not a life simulator! An escape from: not an acknowledgement of reality! It's like reading a fantasy novel only you get to decide what's on the next page.

Then there are graphics. Graphics are 'art' as i'm sure you designers and artists out there will agree. The balance between form, aesthetics and function is one of the hardest things for any illustrative artist to achieve and there used to be many unique graphical styles and possibilities in computer games. Today though, the over emphasis on graphics hardware technology and texture realism has narrowed this variety. As an example, Skyrim is quite 'pretty', for a while. Then it all becomes bland and boring when the novelty of the water effects wears off. Imagination is being supplanted by factual representation. Yes, i know there are dragons in Skyrim, but look at it another way. I'm on holiday in Scandinavia trekking through the woods when a dragon appears. I piss myself, oh no, wait, it's only a game. They were just trying to convince me the environment was realistic. So what the fuck is a dragon doing here then? So now i am playing a game. It's called Planescape Torment and i'm pretty sure i've never seen a tree like that in the countryside but the 'artwork' is superb at firing my imagination and therefore it is superior.

At what point does a game cease to be a narrative and become a 'simulator' ?  At least i have to concede that the place for realism is just there. In the flight simulator, the space simulator and the driving simulator, but for god's sake get out of my fantasy and sci-fi games!
   

Why no 1080p vids? ( On my You Tube channel )

Well, file sizes are nearly twice as large for not that much increase in definition and the videos would take longer to encode and process. Also people like to download videos to a variety of media and 720p is a good all round standard for HD quality vs. file size and streaming bandwidth. I have a core i7 with 8 GB Ram and spangly grafix card but it means nothing when English broadband providers charge top rates for third world standard service. It's not called 'Rip Off Britain' for nothing! : In short, when i try to watch a 1080p video through a buffered broadband connection at certain times of the day it's nigh on impossible. I usually get round this by downloading the video to a memory stick and watching it through a media player on the big TV. I appreciate that it is actually only a small minority of PC owners who have the latest technology and even 720p HD is often hard to stream to some peoples kit. Add to that the large number of viewers who watch You Tube vids on their iphones/pads, mobiles or tablet PC's and 1080p is pushing it a bit for the average users level of tech. Nuff said.