Looking Back, Just Cause

It’s been a long time since Just Cause 2. Five years, in fact, which seems astonishing considering that it’s still probably the game I play most frequently. It’s just such a great go-to game; yes, the plot is silly, the third-person shooter element rough and unpolished, and the dialogue cheesy enough to attract mice, but none of that matters. Why? Because it’s just so much damn fun, that’s why.

Just Cause 2 opens as it means to go on, with a vaguely Latino gravity-wizard jumping out of a plane surrounded by explosions and baddies with accents best described as ‘not American’. You the player, as dashing CIA agent Rico Rodriguez, plummet to earth with only a backpack full of limitless parachutes to slow your descent, manoeuvring through gunfire and anti-aircraft bogies through sheer force of will to catch up with your recently deceased comrade. (He happens to be the only black character in the game, as far as I can remember, but I’m sure that’s neither here nor there.) In midair you pilfer his PDA from his corpse, probably make a one-liner or something, and streamline yourself so as to glide directly to your destination, an ineptly-guarded military base. You shoot your way through a few guards, do whatever it was you came to do and bugger off via the sky, somehow using your magic parachute to actually gain altitude. Then, once a safe distance away, you release your chute (which presumably flies endlessly upwards until it eventually lands on a distant planet and colonises it) and descend once more, ensuring that you land safely and without pain by… reeling yourself into the ground via grappling hook.

That’s right. You can stop yourself taking fall damage by presumably increasing your speed just as you hit. It’s amazing.

Notice that all of this sounds both generic and really dumb. I haven’t bothered trying to explain the plot, and there’s a simple reason for that; it’s not that there is no plot, or even that it’s particularly bad. The story, such as it is, just has so little relevance to your actual experience most of the time that you’ll only care about advancing the plot because it unlocks new and increasingly ridiculous missions, culminating in a fight with the president of the game’s island setting which takes place on a flying nuke. It’s stupid and insane and I love it.

The reason I’m taking this dive into the past, much as Rico takes astonishingly frequent dives from rooftops, planes, helicopters, Jeeps attached to planes via grappling hook – the picture, I think, becomes clear – is because Just Cause 3 is rapidly approaching. Whilst I won’t be able to play it for a bit because I’m still about 20 years behind everyone else hardware wise, I’ll probably be spending a fair bit of time around its release date wistfully blasting around Panau and wishing I was in whatever Just Cause 3’s open world is called. So I’m looking forward to the next generation of Rico, and looking back at the last. I’m nostalgic like that. It’s times like this that I like to think about what needs to stay, and what doesn’t, so let’s run it down.

Keep

Vehicles

Just Cause 2 has my favourite selection of vehicles in any game. It’s one of the reasons I keep going back to it: there’s just no other game I’ve found that has such satisfying simulated aircraft in particular, at least that isn’t purely a flight simulator. And who wants to play a flight simulator when you’ve got Just Cause 2? Do you know any flight simulators that let you link up a boat to your plane via cable, take off, jump on the roof of your accelerating jet, leap from there to the boat, shoot a few bitches from atop your boat, get in the boat and finally release the cable so you soar gracefully down, triggering a remote explosive so your plane explodes in an epic cloud of gloriousness as you fall to earth in your boat?

I didn’t think so.

Missions

There are a lot of missions in Just Cause 2. A lot. They might not be particularly varied, but there’s at least a wide enough selection of objectives in a large enough map that you can pretty much just stick a race or a base takeover in a slightly different location and it’ll feel fresh as a daisy. A daisy that you can blow up, for points.

Bolo Santosi’s accent

Nuff said.

Not keep

There’s actually very little I would scrap entirely from Just Cause 2. There are improvements to be made, for sure; the gunplay is sloppy, the map is confirmed to be far bigger than JC2’s already enormous world, and more grappling hook connection options can be nothing but a good thing.

At the end of the day, I just don’t want it to get rid of the fun. Just Cause was never really about anything other than over-the-top, stupid, cheesy fun. So really, scrap the lists. As long as I can still feel like the most ridiculous human in the entire universe, I’ll be happy.

NieR, FaR, WheReveR You ARe

Source: NieR, FaR, WheReveR You ARe

NieR, FaR, WheReveR You ARe

Let me preface this by stating clearly and unequivocally: I haven’t played beyond the opening sequence of NieR. I’m also going to call it just Nier, because I’m assuming the capitalised R is for Kool Stylez purposes and not some significant plot point.

Then again, Nier seems like the sort of game that could prove me wrong on that one.

Nier opens with the words ‘Weiss, you dumbass’, and let me reassure you that the only way is up from that one. To understand why that opening salvo of ass-itude comes as a bit of a surprise, one need only look at the box art. While we’re careering off topic with all the direction of Wile-E-Coyote on one of those minecart things, I may as well point out that this is not going to be a standard review. I’ve already come out and admitted that I’ve barely played the game, and now I’m taking ‘start from the beginning’ to a whole new level: the box the game came in.

But we can go back further than that.

I bought Nier based on the fact that it crops up in a lot of TV Tropes articles. Frequent perusers of TV Tropes will know that potential spoilers are greyed out when casually browsing, and like any of EL James’ novels, Nier was giving me nothing but pages of grey. That’s a bit frustrating, to say the least, and thus I found myself on eBay looking for a copy of Nier for the simple reason that I didn’t like not knowing why it was notable enough to maintain a decent presence on such an upstanding and well-cited website as TV Tropes. I could have just revealed the spoilers, of course, but where’s the fun in that?

While I waited for my copy of Nier to arrive – from China, as it turned out; I’m not good at reading item descriptions, but hey, it was cheap – I checked out a couple of reviews. They were characteristically mediocre, tending towards the top end of middlingly fun. High praise indeed, I thought – a fairly standard Internet’s eye view of modern JRPGs, at any rate. There was nothing really to suggest that the game would be anything other than the usual Squeenix fare in a post FFXII-world, apart from a vague mention of multiple endings, and when my little Chinese parcel arrived and I took a look at the box I felt a reaction I can only describe as extremely mild intrigue. What is this game, I wondered, that spawned such interest that somebody would take the time to go on the Internet and write about it? (Side note: people on the Internet will write about anything. You only need look as far as some of my past blogs for proof of that.) The box art was generic as all hell: a big-lettered logo (turns out Nier is also the name of the main character, by the way, in case this game wasn’t seeming generic enough) floating dramatically over the head of a white-haired, eyepatched, asymetrically shoulder-pauldroned man.

JRPG, I thought.

So I put the disc in, had a quick glance at the back cover, which said something about a disease and a daughter and included some lovely screenshots of what appeared to be a browngrey version of any Final Fantasy overworld ever, and loaded up the game. And that’s when things got a bit weird.

‘Weiss, you dumbass!’ said somebody.

‘Huh,’ said I.

The opening sequence of the game puts you in control of Nier, as you might expect. Thing is, Nier seems to live in that time period I like to call the GLF, or Generic Leather Future. You know the one: not many people about, aluminium buildings, trenchcoats so long they could be tucked into socks. With little explanation, we begin an epic fight scene. As far as I can tell, it’s one of those Assassin’s Creed-style openings TV Tropes refers to as a taste of power: Generic Leather Nier has seemingly every ability he could ever possibly need, from magic shadowy hands to magic shadowy lances. I’m pretty sure I managed to get a magic shadowy shield at one point, but who needs a shield when you’ve got a magic shadowy chainsaw? (I’m not sure that’s actually something you can get, but it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility.) Combos and screen-shredding area-of-effect attacks rain down upon Nier’s magic shadowy enemies, destroying them with ease. It’s pretty fun, if a little long-winded. I mean, I’m sure if I’d continued to play the game I would eventually have unlocked all these abilities for myself, and I’m sure that at that point I would have remembered my first taste of power and thought something to the effect of ‘Ah, sweet’. I’m easily impressed.

The fight continues for some time. I’m fairly sure either my 360 or my copy of the game had a bit of a crisis, because there was a portion of the battle where enemies kept glitching around the screen and respawning for about 40 minutes, so it probably doesn’t usually take that long – but it’s a fairly lengthy grind nonetheless. At the end of it all, the player – and Nier – is rewarded with…

… a time-skip (or possibly a dimension-skip? I have no idea whatsoever) into the browngrey Generic Fantasy Overworld we were so convincingly promised by the game’s marketing. Then you get asked to go and find some sheep or something. I don’t know, I gave up at that point. There was a bridge, and a plant, and everything was just so big – which isn’t usually a problem, but I tend to navigate with memorable landmarks and I just didn’t see any worth mentioning. There was a sheep, but it was unhelpfully mobile.

All of which is to say: I like the opening of Nier. I actually like it quite a bit. It’s a fun fight, it promises much, and it got me excited to play the rest of the game. I wanted to know who Nier is, why he fights, what he fights. And that’s an effective opening, by my standards. The problem I had with Nier was neither with the opening nor what came after, but the dissonance between the two. I would be absolutely fine with playing as a Generic Fantasy Tradesman-cum-Father of the Year, as I would with playing as a Generic Future Leather Badass. The bait-and-switch, though, the promise of one only to be unceremoniously presented with the other, that was what turned me off.

I’ll probably go back and play through Nier at some point. I’ll probably enjoy the story, the gameplay – it’ll most likely turn out to be right up my street. But I think my first experience with it goes to show the power of not just a good opening, but a tonally consistent one. I can’t knock the classic technique of the differentiated opening, which works so well in many places. I can’t even deny that it’s important to vary the chapters of a narrative for various effects. But Nier just didn’t do it in a way that sat right with me.

I suppose I can deal with games (and this goes for other media too) that use their openings wisely, however they choose to do that. In a lot of cases, that will mean variance between the prologue and the body of the work. What I essentially couldn’t be bothered to deal with on this occasion was being presented with a mysterious, dark, intriguing world that I wanted to learn more about before being ungratifyingly plunged into an enormous field. There are no mysteries in an enormous field.

Why U Should Get A Wii U

The Wii U is much maligned compared to its closest contemporaries, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Like its predecessor, it has a bit of a reputation for being the most casual, least powerful and generally least worth owning console of its generation. And I’m not sure that’s deserved.

Full disclosure: this is coming from someone who owns neither a PS4 nor an XBOne. And if I did, I’d probably be raving about Bloodborne and MGSV or… whatever the XBOne has going for it. But I do have a Wii U.

Points in favour:

It’s got, for my money, the best first-party (is that a term? Think not third-party) library of games going. I mean, we’re talking about Nintendo here. No matter how often you use the term ‘rekt’, no matter your Fifa world ranking (I assume such a thing exists) – hell, even if you’re the kind of person who finds yourself mildly aroused every time you think about zerg rushes, I outright refuse to believe you’ve never enjoyed anything Nintendo’s ever done.

It’s easily the most fun of the three main eighth-gen consoles, in the sense that I firmly believe that everything’s more fun if there are other people around also having fun. Just get four friends – they don’t even need to be people who’ve played video games before, in their lives, ever. Get your nan, her dog, your six-year-old cousin and his teddy, and I bet everyone will be able to play at least functionally, if not competently. But wait, I hear you say. Doesn’t that make five people, including my MLG self? Yes. Yes, it does. Because the Wii U supports four simultaneous Wiimote players, plus the Gamepad.

Let’s talk about the Gamepad, while we’re at it. The Gamepad is flipping fantastic. It’s way more comfortable to hold than it looks, with a decent-sized screen and an intuitive, if slightly different, control layout. It also functions better than the 3DS’ take on the second screen concept – you’ve got a large, functional and portable touch screen with the ability to display a second instance of what’s on your TV (which also means you can play on the Gamepad without even turning the TV on, in some cases), something supplementary to what’s on your TV, or even something completely different. Take Nintendo Land, a surprisingly heartwarming collection of minigames, in which the Gamepad is put to its full use. In one minigame, four players take the role of ghost hunters while the fifth is… well, the ghost. The ghost is invisible to the Wiimote-using players, who of course can only see the TV, which makes for some hilarious moments when the ghost sneaks up on an unsuspecting victim. I haven’t yet made use of the Wii U’s ability to connect to a 3DS, but I imagine that opens up even more possibilities.

Bayonetta 2. Enough said.

Points against:

Okay, so the Wii U is legitimately a far more casual system than its contemporaries. Its third-party library is probably an order of magnitude smaller, but I can’t hold that against it when it has Smash Bros, Mario Kart 8, ZombiU – even ports of Arhkam Origins and Assassin’s Creed to beef out its third-party cred. It’s also presumably less powerful, but it’s still got solid enough hardware to display two – potentially completely different – screens simultaneously, and hooked up via HDMI looks plenty good enough for all but the most ardent of pixel-counters.

I’ll also admit that, of my top ten favourite games, maybe two or three are available on Wii U. It’s not exactly designed to be a sole console for serious gamers, so you’d better have some backup if you’re planning to spend a lot of time on ‘serious’ games, which is basically to say single-player ones.

At the end of the day, though, the Wii U is basically just fun. We could all use a little more of that. And yes, I will continue to think deep and pretentious stuff about game theory that nobody wants to hear about, and yes, I will continue to play the heck out of Dark Souls. But sometimes, you just want to have fun. And Wii U can’t do much better than the Wii U.

Developing Narrative Through Music

I got to thinking about diegetic music in games today. Diegesis, by the way, is (at least in terms of sound in film) what you get when the background music, for example, is actually playing in-scene. Take, for example, most musicals, or a scene in which a character plays the piano within the narrative. In these cases, the music of the song or the piano piece is diegetic in that it belongs within the narrative space. (Conversely, non-diegetic music is far more common and includes the majority of most films’ scores. As a general rule of thumb, if the characters can’t hear the music then it’s non-diegetic.) I feel as if diegesis has massive potential for artistic, emotional and narrative impact in games particularly because of the interactive element, but it seems to have gone underused.

I should probably point out that I’m not going to be talking about Guitar Hero or its like, in which almost the entirety of the in-game music is diegetically produced by the player him-or-herself. There’s an interesting case to be made for rhythm and music games forming both their entire narrative structures and the essence of their ludology (that is, the gameplay aspects) around diegetic sound, but that’s not really what I’m interested in here. I’m thinking more about the role of music within an existing narrative, and the first thing I thought of when this interesting topic came to me as I urinated between lectures today was Bastion.

Bastion is fairly well regarded for a few things, among them its art style, smooth-voiced narrator and well-developed plot. For a short to mid-length indie game, Bastion, set in a post-apocalyptic world following ‘The Calamity’, does a hell of a job at fitting in a deep backstory for its locations and characters, and its music is a great help with this. It’s probably worth noting that Bastion has won quite a few awards in varied fields and been nominated for even more – see its Wikipedia page for more information on this, but basically a fair few different organisations have praised Bastion as an innovative game with great music, for a couple of songs in particular.

Darren Korb’s soundtrack to Bastion is just all-around great, by the way, before we get into its interaction with the narrative. He describes it as ‘acoustic frontier trip-hop’, which sounds about right: a blend of American old-style Western picked guitars and multi-layered synth beats shouldn’t work as well as it does. The entire soundtrack is really worth picking up; that said, why not just play the game? Just go and play the game. Anyway, the main example of a diegetic track in Bastion is a song called ‘Build That Wall (Zia’s Theme)‘. It’s a song that plays as you make your way through a certain level, which culminates in your discovery of a survivor of the Calamity. Until this point, it seems that the player character The Kid and the narrator Rucks are the only remaining living humans post-Calamity, but this level introduces a third in the form of ‘The Singer’, Zia.
A quick note on Zia and her importance to the plot: we are told, or can infer, from the narration in the game that Caelondia – the city in which the game takes place – was at war with a race called the Ura. In defence, the Caelondians built a great Wall, which the Kid formerly manned and which could not save them from the Calamity. Zia (along with a second survivor introduced later) is of the Ura people, and as such is constitutionally at war with the Caelondian Kid and Rucks, even now that Caelondia is little more than a post-Calamity wasteland.
When the level begins, the usual frenetic soundtrack is unexpectedly replaced with a slow, gentle guitar piece. This is odd enough in itself, but as the Kid progresses through the level a voice becomes increasingly louder: the first human voice heard in the game besides Rucks or the occasional sound-effect grunt of pain or effort. As the Kid approaches the end of the level, it becomes gradually more apparent that the song’s lyrics have something to do with the Wall:

I dig my hole, you build a wall
One day that wall is gonna fall

Gonna build that city on a hill
Someday those tears are gonna spill

So build that wall and build it strong
‘Cause we’ll be there before too long

Gonna build that wall up to the sky
Someday your bird is gonna fly

Gonna build that wall until it’s done
But now you’ve got nowhere to run

So build that wall and build it strong
‘Cause we’ll be there before too long

(Note that the first line of each of these besides ‘So build that wall..’ repeats twice, so I’ve cut out the repeats.)

It was unclear to me as a first-time player what the significance of this was. I was suitably emotional when I reached the end of the level and discovered that the singer was actually present, revealing the song to be diegetic, but it took me a while to realise what the song meant.
Remember, Zia is an Ura, so her people are at war with the Caelondians. The Caelondians built a wall to defend themselves from the Ura.
Now look at those lyrics again.

‘Build That Wall’ is a battle hymn. Someday your wall is gonna fall, the Ura sing to the Caelondians: someday we will come for you, so you’d better hope you’ve built that wall of yours well.

Zia, it turns out, is thankfully lacking in militant patriotism, and proves a welcome addition to the group of survivors, but it’s nevertheless quite something to hear her singing a hymn of destruction. I’m sure there are other games (as well as other media) featuring warring cultures with their own battle cries and songs, but I’ve never seen it presented in such an effective way. ‘Build That Wall’ tells us an awful lot about the Ura, removing the need for lines of spoken and explicit exposition. It’s a beautiful song in the version we hear, although one imagines that the Ura probably don’t sing it quite as sweetly when they’re marching to war.

There’s another song performed diegetically by an Ura character late in the game: Zulf, another survivor who briefly turns betrayer on the Kid’s group, sings his own funeral song towards the denouement of the story. It’s another emotional moment, since again this is the first time an actual human voice has been heard since Zia or Rucks, and the player hears it whilst battling through hordes of warriors to save Zulf (or leave him for dead, it’s their choice). The two Ura songs, ‘Mother, I’m Home’ and ‘Build That Wall’, are combined in the credits to form ‘Setting Sail, Coming Home’, and whilst that’s not diegetic as such it’s still a great example of the Ura backstory and culture being shown off via music rather than a clumsy text dump or something.

It’s debatable as to whether the game’s narration can be considered diegetic, since the Kid doesn’t show any signs of being able to hear it, but Rucks briefly hums ‘Build That Wall’ in one line of narration, in a moment that brilliantly demonstrates how the song integrates with the narrative. Rucks also has a song as a bonus track on the official soundtrack album, in which he sings about the wrath of the pantheon of Caelondian gods. It’s a great song that effectively tells us a lot about the Caelondian’s beliefs, even if the track didn’t make it into the actual game.

There are other games in which there are moments of musical diegesis: notably, in BioShock Infinite, in which protagonists Booker and Elizabeth briefly perform ‘Will the Circle be Unbroken?’ on a guitar that just happens to be lying around. It’s an unusually tender moment in an otherwise often brutal game, and a nice bit of character development; the fact that Booker and Elizabeth are able to perform says a lot about their characters, and the song’s lyrics neatly foreshadow a lot of the themes of the game’s narrative. On a less serious note, there’s also the dubstep gun in Saint’s Row IV, which both adds to the world of the game through sheer ridiculousness and is just hella fun. Yes, the dubstep gun is part of the narrative: the Saint’s Row universe is utterly balls-out insane, and everything in its game world is designed to be consistent with that.

In short, we shouldn’t overlook non-overt aspects of a game’s narrative. This happens in other media as well; television and film are better known than games for making use of the soundtrack to add some artistic, thematic or narrative quality. The soundtrack isn’t the only important thing, by the way: it may be the only thing I’ve talked about here, but let us not forget that gameplay is an intrinsic part of the gaming experience (in fact, it’s a uniquely necessary part of gaming as compared to anything else) and can also be used to further the narrative in a way I may talk about at some point. It’s important to remember that a constructed world is more than what we’re overtly told or shown, and the music can play a big part in developing that.

The Power of Teamwork

Remember Twitch Plays Pokémon? Well, it’s over now, or at least that particular game is. How can it be over, you might intelligently ask? Well, here’s the absolutely phenomenally astonishing thing: A group of up to a hundred thousand people, some of whom were deliberately trying to derail the attempt and all of whom were trying to deal with the effects of lag and the varied ways of accomplishing different tasks, actually managed to complete Pokémon Red. Yup, they beat the Elite Four, beat the Champion, got in the Hall of Fame. What a time to be alive.

They’ve now started up (they’re around two hours in as I write) on the second generation of games with Crystal, which will probably be almost impossible due to the precision-requiring nature of the ice puzzles and so on, but then I really didn’t think the first generation with its caves and fiddly HM puzzles would be possible to solve in such a notoriously imprecise way either. It’s absolutely incredible that this has been able to happen, although some might just point to the conclusion that all it means is that the game is actually incredibly easy. The more impressive thing, though, is the society which has arisen from this chaos.

I said I’d talk about a few of the details, so here we go. I can’t possibly begin to cover everything that happened over sixteen days of nonstop play, even if most of that was aimless walking in circles, but let’s give it a go. This may well end up looking like a historical account and analysis, but this stuff needs to be on record!

The most notable thing to emerge out of the experiment is almost undoubtedly its religion. Whilst I doubt that anyone genuinely holds a heartfelt belief that the Helix Fossil has legitimate holy power in the real world, I don’t think that prevents us referring to Helixism as an actual religion or belief system. (Is it even called Helixism? I suddenly realise I have no idea whether there’s an official name for it, but let’s go with Helixism.) The fact is that it emerged within a developing society as a way of explaining the world or attributing some sort of divine authority to the ‘right’ actions, which is a pretty good if oversimplified account of how real-world religions often begin. As such, I’m happy to apply terms like ‘society’, ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ to the weirdly semi-fictitious – by which I mean it’s made up of real people acting within a virtual space, making the community itself unreal whilst having real members – community of TPP players.
Helixism arose because players would often find themselves accidentally examining the Helix Fossil or trying to use it in all kinds of situations, since it was at the top of their item list and navigating to a specific item proved phenomenally difficult for an anarchic civilisation. As such, people started attributing a character to the Fossil based around the idea that it possessed some sort of supernatural guiding power, reinforced by the fact that success often reared its rare and shiny head soon after a session of helical examination. This quickly developed into a fully fledged monotheistic religion in which the Helix Fossil was God. Soon after this development we saw the introduction of the anarchy-democracy system (for an explanation see my previously linked post, or a quick Google search will undoubtedly yield a far better explanation than the one I provided); those for anarchy latched onto the Fossil’s powers of authority by claiming that anarchy was the true, Helix-endorsed way. This is where things get really interesting as far as societal development is concerned, because it’s here that we start to see a split into two opposing political parties, for lack of a better word.
The anarchy faction argued that anarchy was the original way, the way the game was meant to be played, and that the Helix Fossil was on their side. Those for democracy believed that anarchy wasn’t viable as a means to actually progress through the game, and so we saw the advent of a continued system of revolts. Following the introduction of the system whereby voting for anarchy or democracy could alter which system was in place (some argue that this suggests leanings towards democracy and is therefore unholy in and of itself), the metagame became a constant overthrowing of one party by the other. Much like in reality, the votes were swayed one way or the other depending on which system could bring the most to the present situation, although many stuck staunchly to one party or the other.
At some point not long after all this, a new member of the Helixism pantheon appeared: Flareon, the False Prophet. Nobody really wanted Flareon, but that’s what they ended up with anyway. Flareon therefore fell in with the Helix Fossil’s opposite, the Dome Fossil, and a whole new religion started up. This one’s kind of odd because virtually nobody actually supported the Dome religion in the way that people latched on to the Helix one, but it nevertheless maintained a presence if only as the corresponding ‘evil’ that all ‘good’ systems often need. So we now had two opposing systems of government both intrinsically tied to the religion: the anarchist faction might have been the one generally held to be Helix-blessed, but the democrats also argued that theirs was the true way.
Meanwhile, Pidgeot was continually proving itself the most useful ‘mon in the group, and before too long became known as Bird Jesus (or Abba Jesus, since it had been nicknamed ‘aaabaaajss’). Later, the group’s Zapdos (‘AA-j’) entered the mythology as the Archangel of Justice – or, rather more hilariously, John the Zaptist.

If all this is sounding confusing, that’s because it is. Bear with me, though: there are a couple more events in the history of Helixism that I think are developmentally notable.
After a fairly significant length of time spent clinging to the Helix Fossil in perpetual fear that it be accidentally discarded, the hive mind finally made the decision to try to bring it to life. This was, astonishingly, successful, and Our Lord And Saviour Omanyte joined the party. As the terminology of Helixism makes apparent (Bird Jesus, John the Zaptist, False Prophet and so on), it’s a religion that sticks fairly close to existing religious paradigms, particularly those of Christianity. The revival of Godmanyte was no exception, as we now had a Holy Trinity of sorts: Omanyte the Father, Bird Jesus the Son and the Holy Helix Spirit. This is all phenomenally confusing, what with Omanyte being the same entity as the Helix Fossil and all, but in that way too I suppose it’s similar to the mind-boggling ‘three in one and one is three but the three are three and also one’ rhetoric inevitably deployed in explanation of the Christian Trinity.
Finally (I promise this is the last point for now) we can see evidence of retroactive assimilation in Helixism. Early in the game, Abby (or ‘ABBBBBBK(‘, the group’s treasured Charmeleon) and Jay Leno (‘JLVWNNOOOO’, a Rattata that had proven it’s worth on many an occasion) were accidentally released. This happened whilst the culture was still developing and before Helixism took its memetic hold over the group at large, but the religion nevertheless assimilated these martyred figures into its tradition in much the same way as modern religions have absorbed holidays, saintly figures and so on from their predecessors in order to appear more appealing and viable to those against change.

This has gone on far longer than I thought, so consider this an essay on that one aspect of the TPP experience. Rather than try to sum it all up in one post I’ll try to follow this one up soon with more fascinating (you may or may not agree) thoughts on the whole thing.
Praise Helix!

YES! YES! … wait NO! NO! NO!

Last night saw one of the most mixed reactions I think I’ve ever had to anything. (The lovely Hanzord will, I think, agree with me on this.) See, last night was WWE’s Elimination Chamber pay-per-view, which is meant to set up the storylines heading into uncontested Big Event of the Year Wrestlemania, and a lot of people (myself included) were having our doubts before the show had even started.

The biggest fear most fans had leading up to the Chamber was that Randy Orton would retain his WWE World Heavyweight Championship title, for a couple of reasons:

1. That means it’ll be him vs. Batista in the main event of Wrestlemania.

2. It means Daniel Bryan got overlooked for a title AGAIN despite being easily the single most adored figure currently in WWE.

3. Nobody likes the guy anyway.

Anyway, these fears were proved to be founded when Orton did indeed defeat Daniel Bryan (via cheap interference from both the Wyatt Family and Kane, with the latter being vastly more infuriating) and kept the title, which means it’s going to be Orton vs. Batista in what ought to be the biggest match of the year and is instead likely to be underwhelming, boring and likely punctuated by rousing audience chants of ‘Bootista’, ‘This is awful’, ‘Daniel Bryan’ and so on. Basically, if it does indeed play out as it seems, NOBODY is going to be happy about the main event of Wrestlemania 30. There is the possibility that some sort of twist will change that, and the fact that the cameras took the time to focus on the faces of the distraught fans after the chamber match might suggest that the WWE creative team is in fact finally about to stop ignoring the collective wishes of its entire fanbase. For the time being, though, a really good match in which Bryan looked set to win at times ended pretty crushingly. I almost thought Hanzord was going to cry at Bryan’s defeat, but luckily it was four in the morning when the match ended so sleep overcame that.

In better news, most of the Elimination Chamber PPV was actually pretty darn awesome. The Shield vs. the Wyatt Family was so good that the crowd were actually cheering ‘this is awesome’ before the match had even started, which is saying something given how quick they’ve been to voice their displeasure elsewhere. Plus the actual chamber match was better than expected until the end, and it’s safe to say everyone in that match pulled out a great performance.
Sure, there were matches like Batista vs. Alberto Del Rio, which was both pointless and somewhat dull, or AJ Lee vs. Cameron, which didn’t nearly show off enough of the genuine skills the Diva division has. (Female wrestlers have been criminally underused as of late, to the point that AJ’s record of ‘longest-running Diva’s champion ever’ is largely down to the fact that in the 250 or so days she’s held the title it’s been on the line a total of eight times, which is pretty much nothing compared to how often the other championships face the possibility of trading hands.) But you know what, I don’t care. I was more excited than I’ve been for a long time about pretty much anything, even if the end did bring me down massively.

This is awesome, indeed.

Just… don’t let it go on the way it ended, okay?

Please?

All hail the Helix Fossil

At this very moment, there are around 70 thousand people simultaneously playing the same game of Pokémon. How, you ask?

Well, for the last – as of the time of writing – six days and fifteen hours, Twitch Plays Pokémon has been a thing. (I notice they’ve now also started up a game of the original Final Fantasy.) What exactly Twitch Plays Pokémon is can be kind of hard to explain, but here’s a bash: a whole load of people are in a chat room. They can type any of the commands available on the Game Boy (so up, right, a, b, start and so on) and the chat room has been programmed to recognize these and input them to the game. The result is that every person in that room can affect what happens in the game almost instantly, and it is absolute chaos.

It may well still be going as you read this, in which case I don’t really recommend you check it out as it can be rather dull to watch play out. Bearing in mind that each person can facilitate a button press, and a single button press can make a lot of difference, it does take them rather a while to get anything done.
However, the truly amazing thing is this: They actually are getting stuff done. As I write this, they’re arbitrarily flicking through the settings menu (this happens a lot, since all it takes is one clever sod pressing start), but they’ve actually managed to clear four gyms, which is no mean feat. It’s taken them six days, true, but progress is genuinely being made somehow, which is frankly astounding bearing in mind that each person may well accidentally cause a screw-up that could cost hours of progress, as well as the fact that there are, as in all things, quite a lot of people along for the ride for the sole purpose of ballsing it up for everyone else.

Twitch Plays Pokémon can be described as a few things. It’s an online game as well as a livestream of a game played by other people – so in some sense it’s kind of a Let’s Play of a sort too – but it’s probably the first instance of a crowd-sourced effort to complete a single-player game. I almost want to call it massively multiplayer, but that seems inaccurate given that it’s thousands of people collectively controlling a single character. It’s also a hell of a social experiment, seeing what sort of situations arise. For example, so far an entire religion has formed around the Helix Fossil, an item those crazy sods keep trying to use in any and all inappropriate situations because it’s so easy to accidentally navigate to. There’s even a ‘false prophet’ in the Flareon that not a single person wanted to get but somehow the hive mind ended up getting.
There’s also the fact that there have already been several revolts against the system. When the programmer behind the whole thing (who has thus far remained anonymous) tried to implement a voting system so that the button with the most presses in a given time period would be the one that got used – presumably in an attempt to facilitate better and more consistent progress – an unhappy populace collectively started voting ‘start9’. Start9, by the way, basically involves just pressing start over and over. It’s not gonna get anyone anywhere, but it did get the people what they wanted: there’s now an ‘anarchy-democracy’ system whereby players can vote to use the old ‘every button counts’ system or the new ‘majority vote’ system. It’s evolved into a multi-layered event, in which the players are simultaneously playing Pokémon together and, on a meta level, competing against each other to see their preferred system instated. It’s super crazy.

This whole event has become almost a society now, and I’m imagining that sociologists are going to be using it as a model for something or other for a while after it’s over (assuming it ever ends, but that might have to involve beating the Elite Four and I’m not sure anyone’s convinced that’s ever going to happen). Similar to how the Corrupted Blood incident in World of Warcraft has been used by real-world epidemiologists as a model of what would happen in a similar real-life situation, Twitch Plays Pokémon is presenting one of the most bizarre incidences of an emerging society the internet’s ever seen.

It’s really insane, and I’ll probably feel like writing up some of the major events that transpire once it’s over. Or possibly before, we’ll see. At any rate, I’m not sure the world’s ever seen anything like this before.

Why You Should Love Wrestling

You know what’s a really great form of entertainment? Professional wrestling. It’s kind of weird how there are enough WWE fans to fill an entire stadium at least twice a week, but I know almost nobody who openly admits to liking it. That might just be a British problem, since pro wrestling is a fantastically American sort of thing: overblown, ridiculous, hammy and generally balls-out scream-at-the-ceiling good old fun. Either way, wrestling is underappreciated as far as I’m concerned, and here are a few reasons you should get the hell into wrestling.

1. It’s actually genuinely interesting for the storylines. I mean, at the end of the day it’s pretty much a manly-ass glorified soap opera of sorts, with all these complicated relationships and feuds between characters – and yes, they’re playing characters, and no, that doesn’t take away from the entertainment value. But anyway. Imagine the longest-running TV series you can think of. I don’t even know what that would be so this may not even be relevant or work at all, but basically it’s probably got a lot of characters and some of them have been around a long time and some are new but they all have distinct personalities and relationships to each other that provide the basis for the events each episode, right? That’s pretty much what happens in wrestling, with personalities who’ve been on the block for decades starting new feuds with new faces all the time, and just to make it that bit more awesome they come in to thumping rock music every time they want to say something.

2. The storylines might be scripted, but the actual fights are still impressive as hell. There’s probably a few choreographed moments in there somewhere, but who watches Enter the Dragon or House of Flying Daggers and complains that the fights are choreographed? Nobody, cos they’re all sat with their mouths open in sheer amazement at how bloody awesome it is anyway. Wanna see a guy kick another guy in the head then jump over an elasticated rope ten feet off the ground, do a backflip and then get up and yell ‘YES! YES! YES’ while the entire crowd goes mad joining in? Then wrestling is the thing for you.

3. The diversity of the roster. Sadly, the female wrestlers tend to get increasingly less exposure, which is a real shame given that they’re obviously still just as good at kicking butt as anyone, but among the male wrestlers there’s a whole gamut of personalities, from the savagely ruthless to the eccentric to Bray Wyatt, who I can’t be bothered to describe.

4. It’s just exciting. The amazing, beautiful Hanzord, who I’m still amazed ever even agreed to go out with me, has been into wrestling a lot longer than me, but we can both attest to how blooming awesome – I keep using that word, but it’s pretty much the most applicable word whenever you’re talking about wrestling – it is to see a favourite wrestler pull off that awesome finisher, get an unexpected win or make a surprise appearance.

Basically, next time WWE or TNA, or any other wrestling promotion for that matter, comes on your telly, give it a watch. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Welp.

It’s been a while since I’ve been here, and I think I’ve come to terms with the fact that promising to post something every single day is a bit over-optimistic. Revision for exams, time out at home, endless procrastination and so on combine to make it just a little bit impractical to do, but I think the main factor is probably more just that I don’t really have that much to say.

So here’s a new promise.

From now on, I will blog when I’ve got an idea that I actually think is worth talking about.

K?

K.

See ya when I’ve got something.