Games of the Year 2014

After a short delay, another year, another list. As with last year, these are in no particular order and are a sampling of games I considered exceptional and had something to talk about in the last 12 months. The aim is to only talk about games first released this year, but rules can be bent when required.

Killzone: Shadow Fall (2013)

And this is why rules are made to be broken. This had only been out for weeks when the end of last year arrived and I was awaiting a good deal on getting a current gen console (and making sure it wasn't going to be another PS2 vs xbox/GC generation where the weakest platform gained traction and a lot of exclusives). But, on getting round to exploring this release shooter, I found far more than I expected.

Here you can find most of my thoughts on how this game seems created for PC shooter fans who have, over a decade after Halo provided playable joypad controls, become comfortable playing without a mouse when required. It's a varied (gameplay and visual) experience that rarely drops from being excellent and which can be taken as puzzle combat encounters (similar to F.E.A.R.) by those wishing to push the difficulty up. And it's currently sitting in bargain bins for anyone with a PS4 to pick up.

inFamous (Second Son & First Light)

This was the year where the most direct sequel to the PS3's inFamous games, mechanically, was an Xbox exclusive from the guys who made Ratchet & Clank. I guess that's not such a strange thing, being that we're talking about a series that grew out of grim-dark'ing the 3D platforming of Sly Raccoon. The interesting point is that inFamous, while jumping to a fictional Seattle, reinvented their super-mobile open world shooter design to no longer be about grinding rails on your electrified shoes.

The new game and standalone expansion steps away from Cole and crafts a thoroughly new space with mobility extended to holding a button and pointing where to go (a power that becomes more super as you upgrade it). With the compact story length (with enough to do to 100% the world without it ever feeling like a major distraction) of about 10 hours, this is an open world for people who may not have enough time to play open world epics. During that time you'll unlock four skill trees and power sets with their respective mobility boosts to develop, ensuring you can almost teleport around the map. You also, via completing secondary objectives in each area, get access to an actual fast-travel teleport but I didn't find it was something I used more than a few times when I wanted to jump between the two islands.

This isn't a completely different genre, in the same way you'd not expect an F.P.S. series to drop the weapons completely, but it has shaken things up. The main peashooter is completely different depending on the good/evil unlocks and which element you've switched to (with recharge points in the world acting as where you also switch your weapon set), as are anything more than the very basics of what most weapons do. You've usually got a grenade but they can be stasis grenades to freeze enemies for precision shots, or smokers to allow you to get up close for melee finishers, or a burst shock cone attack, or even not grenades at all but a cloaking ability. You usually get to pick the element you want to be running with for most encounters and the compact play time means you're constantly unlocking the latest element and the skill tree perks.

For the expansion the developers cut back to half of the city (with some minor tweaks to keep it fresh), fix you to a single powers set, remove the good/evil choices, and created a prequel campaign that lasts about half the length of the full game. The shocking thing is how they manage to redesign the Neon power set to feel completely fresh, while still somewhat similar to the power it turns into in the main game, and update the traversal mechanic with a "boost gate" system that makes getting around feel fresh again. The sparse use of cutscenes and length (along with mainly taking place in the same city) indicate the constrained budget, as does the addition of an (score attack) arena mode that locks some of the skill tree behind completing challenges. But the expansion stands on some new powers and secondary objectives as more than just more of the thing you've already played.

I've always enjoyed the simple, comic-book-used-as-disparaging-shorthand (which would once have probably been called pulp) stories told in the inFamous games and this one is no different. Don't expect anything beyond dirty halos and demons ripping justifications for their horns out their arses. The player choice (when employed) is saving or burning orphanages so it's best to consider it two stories rather than a choice each time you're asked to pick a side (the upgrade system reinforces this point). This isn't a Bioware RPG but rather a single story in which destiny will force both good and evil players to experience the same beats. I've enjoyed playing these games twice because of how they tell two stories with the same beats but this isn't the strongest in the series for that (which makes the loss in the expansion less of a downer). Going into the games with your eyes open about the quality of the story told, even with top notch mo-cap and presentation and some decent work on the actual lines of dialogue, avoids disappointment. Sucker Punch know what they want to say and they say it, even if that mainly involves well-worn characters and tropes. That said, it was a missed opportunity when they cast two Texans as the voices of the Seattle Native American Rowes.

How Do You Do It

While no one ever talks about it (item 3), people are starting to make games about it (and so talk about it). How Do You Do It is a free gamejam game that only takes a few minutes to play. It's a short, a statement, an offer to see the world through someone else's eyes for a few moments as they revisit their past. I played a lot of good, short games that took an introspective view of the author(s) and their past(s). This one stood out as a great example of what democratisation of a medium can provide, when this didn't require a man-year of work to be produced and spur discussions of SRE and childhood.

The Last of Us: Remastered (Left Behind)

The Last of Us didn't need any more content. It was a great game last year, but this year it got a 1080p treatment on PS4 (something us PC players just expect games to do over time for free as we upgrade our hardware - most of my PC games will be running in 4K in the next decade, if they don't already). It also got a new chapter, which worked out beautifully as an episode to introduce Ellie as a playable character long after we'd already been introduced.

Once again, Naughty Dog crafted a cinematic narrative onto which I projected the characters I knew (although Joel doesn't have much to do except lie in pain due to where this fits in the chronology) and was swept away by the stories this universe had to offer. As the chapter ends on two girls waiting to lose their minds together, this added chapter becomes an essential addition to the narrative, giving those words a punch they didn't have when originally used during the ending of the main game. Some of the games on this list are just great or fun, Left Behind is essential.

80 Days

A steampunk visual novel for the phone where some choices are timed so you can't dally thinking about what to do next and can lose time as seconds burn hours. You probably already think this is a terrible game that no one should play. But it turned out to be one of the best written pieces of fiction I read all year and far more of a game than the visual novel framing might suggest. While there are times when it is very much a visual novel and relies on excellent writing, there is also a range of play and direction as you choose how to go that makes this feel far closer to a Fighting Fantasy book, or a Persona game without the dungeons (if that's your reference point).

Hearthstone

Blizzard know how to make games, and they took what they learned from partnering for a collectible card game around World of Warcraft and created an online game that's not quite as exploitative as a CCG but not too far off.

The drafting game, called the Arena, is the main meat of the game for me. So far I've managed to avoid diving too deeply into the constructed decks but I'm constantly getting new cards via Arena play. You probably already know if you've got any interest playing something without the mechanics complexity of Magic: the Gathering but this certainly provides how you can streamline that sort of game to keep the pace fast (at the cost of some of the depth).

Jazzpunk

This game is funny. Properly, laugh out loud, funny. It has enough gags that not every one needs to hit and understands when it's time to wrap the game up and go home. Between the open and close, you'll rush around an almost nonsensical spy adventure in the future-past, unravelling a world that knows how to be absurd without being random. It's not perfect, but you're really missing out if you've not given this a shot.

Hitman Go

They took Hitman and extracted a lovely (clockwork) board game puzzler out of the elements of those more free-flowing, puzzle stealth, assassin simulation games. Then they managed to showcase the power of the mobile SoCs to render that board game to play on your tablet. There's not a lot to this, but it's one of the best things you could play on your mobile this year and I kept going back to crack a few more puzzle boards. More importantly, it wasn't just a short reskin of echochrome with some clean UI choices and it very much avoided being another Squidix attempt to exploit their IP on mobile. The team that made this game cared about Hitman and did a solid job making something perfect for mobile.

Jackbox Party Pack

You Don't Know Jack has always been good (but never as good as the one UK edition voiced by Paul Kaye) and this box of incredible value bundles the latest edition of that with takes on charades-derived stuff similar to games like Balderdash. The genius move is that all games are run via a web service so, rather than controllers, you just need a mobile device with a browser to join the game. Everyone draws their word on their device in Drawful and then everyone names the pictures to create a set of potential right answers from which everyone picks (so kinda Pictionary). Write down the missing word or question answer in Fibbage XL and then try to guess the real one from everyone's choices (so kinda Balderdash). It'll eventually run out of fresh questions and words in each of the games but it's a great bundle for having a bit of fun.

DriveClub

This game launched broken. The online crumbled and reminded us why always-on DRM is something to avoid, as those of us playing got to dive into a career mode and unlock cars while justifiably complaining that the leaderboards, challenges, and online weren't working. They eventually got all that stuff working and added in the changing weather conditions that make this the best looking console game released this year.

It's no Forza 4 but this is a solid racer that splits the difference between the soft-sim of console sim games (your TOCA series etc) and the sort of arcade game where the brake is more optional or engages the drifting mode. Beyond the entry tier cars you'll need to constantly be considering how far you can push the throttle, and braking is a matter of how strongly you can apply them without the scream of tyres indicating you came on too strong. But those brakes decelerate you far faster than they would in a soft-sim when applied correctly and this, combined with higher cornering speeds, gives the game a distinct feel you have to adapt to. Keep your soft-sim mentality, but compress those braking zones down.

Outside of the unusual driving model, the micro-challenges stuff that they layer onto the track sections is where this game finds new ground. As you're driving along, be that a race or a hot lap, the game will add in challenges on sections of track (as small as a single bend) and pick out a target that it thinks you can beat. Effectively every corner you're driving when online, you're putting up dynamic challenges for the game to pull from to challenge someone to beat your score. Average time, top speed, following the lines through the corners, getting a higher drive score, etc. Even if you've lost sight of the goals you're driving for (the campaign sets a series of goals for each event) and are just learning the track before you try again to get that top 3 finish or nail a lap time, the game will look for some suitable challenges to keep your drive fresh. There is also the standard race/lap/event leaderboards and you can send challenges to your friends to compete in, selecting from your recent races and drilling down to an achievement (eg hot lap time) for other to beat within the next X days. The lack of functional online for the opening month or two really harmed the areas where DriveClub stands out.

Beyond the antialiased 1080p rendering of five interesting locations with over ten tracks per location, the day-night cycle (which you can set to compress to an hour per minute raced) leads to races that don't feel like the same lap over and over, beyond the dynamic challenges. Add in snow and rain coming or going as you play and that illuminates where you can see the design intent of this game. Just because you started a race in the Sun, doesn't mean you're not looking through a storm of snowflakes, illuminated by your headlights, at night by the time you're finished. You can lock it down to give you something to learn precisely but the game excels at making sure every lap can feel a bit different to keep you on your toes.

As this is (when in a racing event) more of a racing game than a driving game, the A.I. is important. There is a bit of push and pull there, and you see some A.I. ahead making a mistake and losing traction as they drop two wheels onto the edge of the track here and there. They're 'boisterous', if you're going much slower than them then they will try going through you or push you too fast for the next corner. They might give you a gentle nudge as they complete an overtake, but not often. They're basically 99% less annoying for your day than human opponents but anyone who has seen an A.I. get totally out of their depth doing an overtake attempt and spin their car will recognise this isn't the classic on-rails design (despite what some reviews said). They just don't really care about rear-ending you if you slow down too much, which is reinforced by the driving model that only penalises really blatant "braking by impact" (with a specific penalty that locks you in 1st gear for a few seconds when you get caught).

The game passes the family fun test, with the dynamic challenges always looking to give even the slowest players something they can beat and a handling model slightly more forgiving than Forza, all while showing off what this current generation of consoles can render as you rush round diverse, ever-changing tracks.

Goat Simulator

Probably the silliest game on this list. This is a joke that, unlike Jazzpunk, can go on a bit too long. But, as an open world with very little flagged as actual mission content, this is something to wander around and enjoy the absurdity of, until you've caught a few Easter eggs and then shut it down. After the game exploded, the devs have added new modes, new whole open worlds to explore, and so on that have bulked out the offering so you're not going to get bored in the first hour. That expanded content, for free, is what pushes this from an amusing hour-long joke into a game worth mentioning in the same year as the sublime Jazzpunk.

Honourable Mentions

This was the year I put 60+ hours into Planetary Annihilation, the game that took up the massive battles and rate-based economy RTS mantle of TA. Played on spheres, with great area-selection and UI tools to refine that formula closer to where it really needs to be for a contemporary game, this should have been a shoo-in for the list. But the game balance fell short, the A.I. fell short (crucially in what could have been a very interesting roguelike-like repeatable campaign mode), and the KickStarter talk of DRM-free that turned into a post-release patch to remove the always-on server connection requirements felt like the developer was abusing the label, not embracing the idea. It's still the best rate-based economy RTS to play and something every TA fan should pick up (in the $5 or less sales that it now regularly dives into on Steam) but it's not a GotY contender.

Speaking of gaming dynasties, Forza Horizon 2 feels more devoid of life than the original, certainly a weaker sequel (to a game I didn't put on my list in 2012 but this year was more scarce for good cockpit driving games) based on a few hours of play. Any more and I'd need to buy my own Xbox to play it on and I certainly don't like it enough to pay for another console when the one I got came with 50% more GPU, widely the same game selection, and basically the same sticker price.

This year also produced some great demos, a couple that were seemingly totally unconnected to the games they are advertising. You should look out for good things in 2015 from a host of titles in early access or on partial episodic release right now, and if you've not played P.T. this year then you missed out.

Goitees 2014

The annual Game of the Year post is being delayed into 2015 due to ethics in games journalism. [Update: it is now up, enjoy.]

Pile of Shame - Killzone: Shadow Fall

The current generation of console has now completed the transition from being referred to as the "next gen". While PC games have been showing off "FullHD" 1080p and beyond for a while, consoles have now caught up, at least sometimes. Hardware prices have dropped from £430 and £350 at launch (which in the UK meant the Xbox One, due to exchange rate differences since 2006, released at a higher sticker price than the PlayStation 3) to sales around £300 with one or two free retail games a year after the PS4 released. 12 months of PlayStation Plus for those who own a PS3 and/or Vita have pumped up the number of titles you can play for free on the PS4 and is now extending to retail games as part of the Instant Game Collection. At the same time, used and sale prices on games mean you can pick up retail titles that cost no more than the previous generation (this is a UK thing, our SRPs for games are sky high but after the first year of a console's lifespan the retailers fights for volume and no one charges the SRP; older stock is shifted at heavy discounts). Even as a primarily PC user (playing games on that platform since the '80s), it's an ok time to follow the early adopters and check out some of the console exclusives. The first title I've found something to say about is Killzone: Shadow Fall.

You open up with the weakness of the (otherwise great) tech on display. The game has a slight issue with pacing of dialogue so sometimes actors will stall between sentences and you get a beat too much silence. The opening level is full of it, although later there are some longer pauses, much worse than the open. David Harewood is doing an outstanding job (and the facial capture isn't the best you've ever seen but is about where you expect for near-photorealism - desperately trying to get out of that uncanny valley) so it's a bit of a shame the game adds a rather extended *beat* between sentences here and there for no good reason.

For that first level it's a kid walking simulator and the game does an ok job of giving you a guided tour of how the game controls and introducing the pivotal event for the player and the world. Years before the main story, you see the rain-soaked world about to be split in two, with the blue palette you'll later associate with the faction you fight for. Tutorials that double as world-setting are pretty standard but it certainly beats a movie telling you what happened.

The story gets more heavy-handed as it goes on (and it doesn't start off the most subtle as it kills your father in front of you) but it's a story of military espionage between civilizations on the brink of war two decades after a massive conflict. You know what to expect with "maybe we are the monster" and "war is bad for everyone". The voice work is consistently good, even when the lines aren't always. But it's better than most military shooter game plots and limits the "Hooah!" chanting to bad guys & their pawns following blind nationalism to it's genocidal conclusions. By the end everyone is fucked and everything is broken but you've been to lots of places to get there.

Cut to years after the first level, the child is now a soldier. You walk out into an open, broad, forested area filled with a massive dam and crawling with outposts, patrols, and lots of chances to use stealth and your dynamic zip-line traversal to get to lower locations. It almost feels like they should have added in a prone mode to crawl around, making sure not to get caught out by patrols or roaming snipers. The objectives are mostly linear but your path certainly doesn't have to be and the entire map can have enemies arriving into it with dropships when an enemy manages to reach an alarm station. Take on a group of three foes and two hold you down while the 3rd runs. Now you've got to find a terminal to babysit as your drone hacks the alarm off to stop reinforcements coming in.

It's a developed system of alarms that have to be switched off to avoid being totally overrun if you're found, stealth movement, and an "ear to the ground" scanner to track patrols (and see if someone's waiting the other side of that door when you're inside). In the same way that Gears of War put a minigame into reloads, Killzone offers the pulse scanner as an ever expanding sphere that will overload if you hold it down too long. Every scan is a judgement of how far away you want to be given second sight vs holding it down too long and alerting everyone in the vicinity to your exact location.

Some of this game is a corridor F.P.S. but mainly when you end up fighting in more enclosed spaces, I get memories of F.E.A.R. from the way fights develop around blocking lines and small loops in combat arenas given the veneer of believable structures. The whiteboxes for several arenas in most levels have clearly been tuned to give a challenge at the Hard difficulty level before being converted into an interesting setting to look at once you're done shooting.

The actual moment to moment combat is good. The weapon selection is varied with weapons having alt modes to give you a bit more range in what you're carrying than just the two slots, because that lightning sniper rifle is also an assault rifle in the other mode. Push the sensitivity up to 70% and you can actually turn round decently while those DS4 sticks show off how good they are, you move so precisely when you push them slightly - they're certainly more than the equal of 360 sticks for shooters. When you need to fight it feels good. The FoV is too narrow for my preference but you get used to it after a while. That's probably a rather PC-centric thing to complain about as it's no worse than other console shooters, but I'd love a slider to give it a bit of a nudge out.

The third mission finds you launched into space, so you're now in quiet Dead Space environments. This is where I got the F.E.A.R. starting to creep into the feel of the gunplay and encounter design. Lots of down-time between combat where you're alone interspersed with combat arenas. Early on you get taught that moving through the ship is facilitated by putting your gun down and carrying power rods to turn on or off stuff as the place it coming apart. They could have done more with that, especially as it gets introduced by a rather boring jump-puzzle around a reactor you're spinning up (causing bits of it to literally spin and so force you to time your jumps), but this creates some alternative paths through the space station for emergent storytelling and existential dread between the combat encounters.

The forth mission starts with the big explosion they showed in the pre-release trailers. After the plot progression you get some combat where you learn that walls can be things to put bullets through and then follow with your body (taught with glass walls). The level goes on, via some less than great train dodging and shooting, to a hostage rescue situation where you're making an assault (where you pick the entry point) on a well-fortified civilian penthouse using a shotgun that goes through the drywall. That Rainbow Six game looks more impressive, but this is good stuff. The pulse scanner that allows you to see enemies through walls makes this level a joy, showing how the core tools get reused throughout different encounters as the game keeps on offering fresh ideas rather than an endless chain of mans to shoot.

Each mission is a fresh look, from blue Vekta rising up to the white and oranges of the rooftop penthouses to the green forests to the red of New Helghan. The gameplay variety is what you'd expect from a team who have learnt the lessons of Half-Life 2, so they mix up the look and what you're doing with enough tools to keep that from being just static set-piece content. Sometimes the variety is a bit "CoD gimmick gameplay" in places but it generally falls on the right side of that divide. The least exciting activity was an Aaaaaa! section, but it did teach me that my preference for inverted sticks doesn't extend to that activity. The wingsuits and the shooting both kept my console standard for inverted (thinking about the stick as the neck of the protagonist to manipulate) but give me a drop and I go back to my uninverted mouse preference of a virtual cursor (stick as eyes to lead). At least the game made it painless to switch controls on the fly for the few drop sections over the hours of varied mission.

I'm no console shooter expert but the variety in the chapters and engagement of the combat arenas held my attention and encouraged me to play through on Hard. This does mean the game desperately lacks a Legendary because Hard is as much as I can possibly handle but people better than me need to be challenged with less health & enemies being more of a sponge. Each mission is divided into sections; each section counts death as falling to the ground with no health (with adrenaline packs in your inventory you can recover from this and get back up so you don't necessarily have to go back to the nearest, well-spaced, checkpoint) and this is tallied in the chapter select screen. This opens up a difficulty option to play the game on a "no deaths" Hard run, which enforces mastery of each combat arena. To succeed in this mode, adrenaline packs should be popped before you fall to the ground to trigger a slo-mo last stand (more memories of F.E.A.R. emerge) that doesn't count as a death but if you take more damage you will go back to a checkpoint (with a death on your counter) rather than being recovered. You can only carry limited packs but the levels are reasonably happy to hand them out every few arena blocks.

I played through each mission on Hard to get a feel for the level and master each encounter using the plentiful checkpoints and possibly falling to the ground but taking an instant recovery when I had adrenaline packs to spare. Then I went back to any sections I hadn't completed with no death to do them again, chasing that no death Hard run. Lots of learning a section using my drone to distract the enemies, refining how to go through it and where I actually should start combat, and finally getting the plan right to execute perfectly. Anyone who tried the CoD achievement Mile High Club knows how this can feel to know the exact plan and then pull it off. Killzone never got that hard, but I refer to my previous statement on my lack of top tier skills and how this game really needs a higher difficulty for those better than me, but that's not an issue for my enjoyment as Hard was just the challenge I wanted. Good level design and reactive AI & enemy waves/events make you want to repeatedly refine your play in those arenas so it's not repetitive - it's the game if you decide to opt into this difficulty.

The combination of developed stealth mechanics and rewarding combat ensure each arena is rather more varied as you decide where to first be seen compared to typical F.E.A.R. encounters where your choice of initiating was somewhat more limited. When you're learning there are so many tools to let you avoid redoing content you've already perfected (revival consumables, good checkpointing) and then you move onto doing the no deaths run and even the reload chapter load time is really short if you mess up a run. The chapter select made this all very painless to know what you've got to do and what you've already completed. Fans of Hardcore modes might try a second playthrough of the game doing it as one "continuous no death" run but I've not got the skills to pull that off.

As the missions continue, the palettes keep on shifting both visually and in gameplay terms. Some of these opening mission styles are revisited over the ten levels but you'll also find yourself skulking around inhabited areas; crossing the great divide between the city; and taking on the role of spotter, sniper, massive bot killer, and interloper. I find it hard to reconcile the launch reviews with what I played. The one exception to my enjoyment would be a boss on the ninth level that was tricky to work out how to beat without reaching for a revival item on Hard. I'd figured out a style that almost consistently worked except for when it killed me by what seemed like bad luck. It's under a 5 minute fight if my method actually worked but it took a while to figure out how to pull it off and then 20 minutes before I got a run that actually worked. With revives then it's easy enough on Hard once you've figure out what to do and what specials you've got to nullify but, when trying to do it without revives for a no death run, all that falls away. It was the one point I considered giving up on this extra difficulty constraint but at least the chapter markers meant it could be done in isolation.

Killzone: Shadow Fall burns a bit of variety towards the end but is perfectly even in the serviceable story to bring you to the close (no big twist, you can easily speculate on how it ends by about a third through the game but it does dodge some potentially really clichéd endings in favour of something that crystallises the message of the writers). That's not to say it lacks variety in the later stages, this is a child of Half-Life 2 (in quite a few ways really) and that includes mixing things up on both scales (section to section and level to level both keep you engaged by never leaving you doing one task over and over). It's not a corridor shooter as it does stealth mechanics with alerts (guard a point for some seconds to turn the alarm off otherwise infinite reinforcements will plague your day for letting an AI run to an alarm button - the thing you also use to turn it off) and there's more F.E.A.R. arena blocks than corridors but some of it does narrow down a bit for stretches of combat on some levels.

If PS4 owners (who like a bit of stealth shooting) are still on the fence about this, I'd say go track down one of those cheap copies now out there. It doesn't hurt that this is a very decent looker, especially in places as you jump around a world of endless reflections and bright lighting reflected off painted walls to shade each area. It's certainly pushing hard to match what you'd expect from a good PC and with some nice direction behind the technical achievement and the realisation of a variety in visuals goes will with varied gameplay. It's probably 7-10 hours of good HL2-derived shooting; or you can opt for 9-12 hours of FEAR-quality encounters by going to Hard; or 12-30 hours of iteration, refinement, and achievement if you try no death Hard (you can probably work out if you're into the gameplay enough to try this by starting out just playing on Hard).

I pinged the trophies for Hard Completed, (hidden) Last Level Completed, No Deaths, & (hidden) Final Level Total Stealth as I completed it for the first time. I note there is also a (hidden) trophy for killing 20 guards in the final level that is really rare, 1.5%, vs 8% who get Total Stealth and 23% who complete the game (3% on Hard, 0.5% No Deaths). So the quarter of people who get to the end of the game seem to be significantly more likely to be stealth rather than bloody for this final (stealth) mission. They have understood what this game is offering, and it's not a mindless shooter that some reviewers may have gone into the game expecting.

Pile of Shame - Beyond: Two Souls

Busy times lead to a lack of posts (finally missing that monthly schedule that had built up recently). I've got some longer form stuff drafted but not the time to spin it all into a cohesive whole and publish. But I just finished Beyond: Two Souls and spat out a few quick thoughts so why not post them here. I played the front half last month but got busy and ended up not having the time to do the back half until now.

This game benefits from being able to play large chunks of it at once due to a narrative that jumps through time for seemingly very little point beyond a desire to somewhat poke at what the player knows - it certainly doesn't help it being a game about consequences, and I suspect it means that a lot of the time the scenes don't actually have any beyond tweaking some dialogue in chronologically later episodes that you also play later on: ie this presentation prevents even such minor consequences for those events played out of sequence. Each scene isn't enough for a chapter and often they combine into an arc but not necessarily for sequential play and that involves a bit of memory use. You'll miss out on the (Cage quality so not stellar) story beats if you're not able to recall what happened in previous sequences when you arrive at subsequent once.

I know you can push against what might have been a fixed narrative (so the game is only better in this respect than 98% of other games where the narrative arc is a movie you have absolutely no choice in*), because for one of the story beats I had no interest in pursuing it and the story was quite insistent that it wanted it to happen (came up in 4 scenes), which was somewhat jarring but still kinda worked. The player character should feel like this jerk needs to get lost, but the dialogue wasn't quite on target so it felt like it was trying to lead to a path that I was hutting down and the scenes were slightly off due to it.

Talking of the dialogue, they still need to get a writer at Quantic Dream but with good acting (Dafoe ham is always good ham in my book; Page didn't phone it in even if maybe a few more takes would have been nice - but that could be the curse of Cage more than anything else) and a cast that doesn't sound like French Canada invaded the USA it feels a lot less bad than in Heavy Rain. It's a shame as I cared more and was more interested in the entire path of Heavy Rain than Beyond but going back will be harder now I've played a game where they spent some money on the VO to actually sell the dodgy script. About half of Beyond was stuff I didn't feel grabbed me (could be related to lack of consequences), lacked enough skill in the writing to actually pull off the intent, or was just barely enough of a scene to justify not being a cutscene. Heavy Rain felt like a game about consequences (even when it kinda wasn't if you played a second time to get a better feel for the actual limits of what could change), Beyond is a game about choices (what do you want to happen in this scene, who should get their way from the conflicting desires) and it doesn't even have all that many choices as some paths seem far more the 'right' way that the scene was intended to run (in so much as to not do it means the scene ends early without any development). If they keep this level of V.O. work up, move to PS4 to get out of the aliased 720p render quality issues, and HIRE A DAMN WRITER then the next game could be really special.

One of the few points of consequence is the ending, and I think the game got lucky in winning me over when I picked the sensible options for my Jodie and so got the cool ending (Zoey). While I knew what I wanted for the character and so was picking the ending I wanted, I didn't realise (at the time I was choosing) that I was going to get the Terminator (mixed with inFamous and Dollhouse) final sting after the conclusion. So that was a note of unexpected awesome to run credits on and possibly saved me from saying the Quantic Dream games are a series of titles whose stories get worse and worse while their acting and production get better and better. Possibly saved me, maybe I'll revert to thinking that with time when I've forgotten squeeing about Jodie & Zoey saving the world after the fall.

Definitely only a game for fans of the genre (big budget interactive drama with the Cage taint) but not bad going - anyone who enjoyed Heavy Rain probably needs to find a cheap copy of this. And Quantic Dream doesn't even need to pretend to be a small indie to get the press to go easy on their games and forgive the technical shitshow and unengaging mechanics that often come with the genre (QD as a studio is the same size as Telltale Games - try and find one writer who treats their output in any way similarly).

Oh, and Boyhood may have won hearts for being filmed over 12 years but a PS3 has shown what a crappy parlour trick that is when CGI allows people to act as someone else. Ok it's creepy, still climbing out of uncanny valley people who can't really touch anything because soft-body physics doesn't really work in games (especially as most don't even try) but there's still a full cast who age 15 years throughout this game (including a kid) and it's no biggie.

That said, when is Dafoe (the actual person) not ever so slightly in the uncanny valley?


* ie games where a lot of the narrative that is developed as unique (because the interactive nature of games means we can do some things, the controller is more than a custom crank for a film projector) is technically headcannon; see my views on the Last of Us with Joel not using guns while Ellie was an expert sniper - that's how I played the games but during any cutscenes that was pure headcannon, it's just headcannon that coloured how I interpreted the fixed narrative of that story and could be expressed during gameplay. We become mixed into the characters we play as because any character where this is not true is a NPC, by definition.

Infinite Shelves with Consumer Protection

For the duration of this post I am going to be riffing on this discussion with the assumption you have at least read the direct link, if not the wider context of the hundreds of videos, blogs, and news articles around it, not to mention the thousands of tweets.

.@mode7games Correct, being a benefit of that decision. Infinite shelf space means curation is a surfacing issue, not a stocking decision.
— Jess Birch (@Shivoa) October 30, 2013

I believe that the current concerns around lack of curation of digital stores (specifically meaning the demand for removal from sale of any item that fails to hit a subjective quality bar and the reinforcement of blocks on adding products to digital shelves like Greenlight) is stupid. Luckily quite a few people agree, including the previously linked to Chris. It's always good to not be in a minority of one. So I'm not going to repeat what he said, in which I'm broadly in agreement, but I want to talk more about why consumers should already be very protected and not concerned about being 'tricked' into paying for something they don't want.

Specifically, I'm going to talk about what Americans (and specifically Chris) call the Truth in Advertising laws, what constituted broken, and EULA restrictions creating as-is sales. I'm going to talk about this as a European and with links to UK law, which is mainly implementing the pan-European directives which give us a standardised market in which to sell goods. I'm also going to preface this with the IanaL disclaimer and go even further: I am talking about what is right and what the law should protect. There are edge cases and special considerations added here and there that limit consumer rights due to heavy lobbying from special interests. We are only going to ask what we think would be a reasonable global foundation for the right way to operate a digital games store (explicitly considering games as goods which are sold rather than services which are provided - digital sales come with but are not services, an example of a service they come with is a login to provide you with downloads of the data you now own a right to duplicate for personal use/to allow you to use the thing you own), using UK law as a grounding point.

The first thing to recognise is that you cannot sign away your statutory rights. The EULA is a red herring. It simply doesn't matter if someone wants to sell something as-is and 3 days later it destroys the buyer's house or ceases to function. A contract of sale was made; the purchaser cannot waive their rights and the seller cannot void them.

Originally sales were usually made in person, an item that could be fully inspected was present with both the buyer & seller and the sale could be made. Then mail order arrived and after that internet shopping came along and made sure regulations were required to deal with a sales experience where the item was not present. The standard way this is handled is for the item to be described, there to be a right to cancel that lasts beyond the delivery of the item to the buyer, and a failure to describe or inaccurate description modifies that period where the contract can be cancelled (which is distinct from a return - it is as if there never was a sale and there are no limitation on reasons for desire for a cancellation). Basically, once you buy something on a digital store you then have 7 working days (when an accurate description exists) to change your mind and get a full refund. Without an accurate description then you've got three months. "No quibbles".

So you've got some time to kick the tyres and work out what it is you've purchased. You've not been tricked because you're legally protected to cancel the purchase of this new product for any reason you like once it arrives. But what happens if the product looked good on the surface and the cancel period expired but it turns out to not be as described, fit for purpose, or degrades over time? Those are the three broad categories you'll be considering for claiming the product was defective.

Was the description given accurate? Even if provided with a sample (which we would call a demo for digital games - although not all sales made after a sample is available are a sale by sample, only ones made explicit as a sale based on previous sample. There may be cases where a 'buy now' link in a demo could be considered a sale by sample) then it is not sufficient that the product be similar to the sample (there is no "buyer beware" because a bug not described on the sales page was also in the free demo), it must also be as described. This is probably why you see clear descriptions for games that don't work well with Windows 7 or only work with XP on Steam: this is the description of the item so after that initial cancellation period you can't claim the item is defective by being not as described. The requirements section would be where a seller defends that the product wasn't defective if you can't run it. If your machine does not meet the requirements or your console fails to have the optional hard drive is says is required on the box then the description was quite clear that your expectation should not have reasonably been for functional software.

What about this fit for purpose thing? This is far less blindly pro-consumer. The regulations start out by saying that you can't assume that whatever you purchased is defective just because it isn't perfect for whatever you want. If you buy a pen and it can't keep your milk refrigerated then it may well not be fit for your desired purpose but that's not a reasonable expectation of a pen so the seller should not be required to deal with you requesting a refund (although you would have still had the right to cancel due to distance selling regulations if you purchased it online). Goods are meant to be satisfactory quality with that defined as what a reasonable person would expect; it is "fit for all the purposes for which goods of the kind in question are commonly supplied" and "free from minor defects, safe, and durable". If a seller specifically draws your attention to a defect, it's not unsatisfactory when you observe that defect in the product. In the case of a sale by sample it's not unsatisfactory when you observe a defect which was apparent on a reasonable examination of the sample. So there is plenty of space here for arguing that a product is defective and so you should get a refund. Certainly for anything that is being shouted about as being thrown off Steam, the reasonable person would be arguing for the defective nature of the product. So there should be no impairment from the legal refund request.

Finally we should talk about time and how quickly all this has to happen. We've covered the first 7 working days and the right of cancellation. What if the product defect was hidden and you're using the right to a refund/repair/replacement we outlined above? Within the first six months of purchase, a product deemed to be defective by the buyer on the grounds given above is assumed to have been shipped defective so there is no issue of claiming it has outlived the expected lifespan of the product. The burden of proof is on the seller to explain why the product is not defective. It's rather explicit: "goods which do not conform to the contract of sale at any time within the period of six months starting with the date on which the goods were delivered to the buyer must be taken not to have so conformed at that date." After this date it is not assumed by default that a defect found today was always there (luckily for software we can create quite an easy argument to 'prove' our case based on software patch history and reports of a defect on gaming forums) but you do have a full six years to conclude your dispute about the purchase. Software should function as described (if you exceed minimum requirements then you can run it and not be unreasonably hit with minor defects or so on detailed above) for quite some time due to the lack of much bit rot and the perfect digital duplication of the actual information. So you've probably got a good case for arguing the product as defective most of the way up to this six year barrier.

All of this is why we need to ensure our irrevocable statutory rights are not trampled by digital stores who wish to break the law or question the edge cases and language of how our protections were designed to work to create consumer confidence in distance selling. These protections are just as much about protecting them from the consumer fear (we see in claims that curation needs to be about policing the quality of items on the shelf) as protecting the consumer from buying products of unacceptable quality and rewarding the creator of goods of unsatisfactory quality. With digital stores then shelves are infinitely large and we can stock everything (just like Amazon does) and that makes curation about how we surface the goods we think each consumer is most likely to be delighted by purchasing.

Taking a Cut of Digital & Megacorps Saying NO

This is Re: Comixology (now an Amazon company and now only letting people read their comics on iOS, the in-app purchase (IAP) is missing so you have to buy stuff on the web to add it to your library).

@atfmb @retroremakes Apple using their walled garden to extort a 30% cut of sales they don't make. Creators are served by big guy saying NO.
— Jess Birch (@Shivoa) April 28, 2014

I wonder if iOS users would be happier if their apps with stores hiked prices 30% to pay "Apple tax" rather than using own payment system?
— Jess Birch (@Shivoa) April 28, 2014

To start, let me be clear: digital purchases should be DRM-free to preserve the rights of the user/consumer. Comixology is not a good platform because it does not respect this right of purchase. When I think about both buying and selling content, this platform does not sound like it gets it; it seems like a rental service and I can't see the Netflix style subscription button (which can exist, see Marvel Unlimited - now with an app that isn't totally useless on Android). But companies like Image are really making a hash out of their pledge to do DRM-free (why can I buy Phonogram on Kindle or Comixology but it gets not a mention in the DRM-free Image store?) so comic fans often don't have a choice if they want to support content creators' work digitally and commercially.

You should probably not buy anything from Comixology because DRM is defective by design. Make use of their free selection to enhance the medium's discoverability/sample content (ie read the issue #1s, which should really always be a free digital sample for growing the user base/customers for all comics that have more than six issues already out) and then get bummed out when you find out there is no legal way to purchase the rest of that story digitally and DRM-free. There are signs of change, not only is discoverability coming from handing out the $2 first issues to let people know what it is they might want to buy hundreds of weekly $2 issues of for a story, but we're starting to see DRM-free sales that almost give away the first volume of a story to hook you onto buying volumes #2 onwards (to a conclusion in vol#5 or maybe it keeps going past vol#20?) at $10 each; that's good discoverability and good business. At some point they'll need to realise you have to offer occasional sales and decreasing prices over time on the older volumes and discounts on collections of volumes to generate a long tail and more of the area under the demand curve from a broad audience but it's a start. Outside of the US, 2000AD have been selling this stuff DRM-free for years.

Back to Amazon and Apple: what if we suppress our uneasiness over the Comixology platform or they announced their entire catalogue was to be sold DRM-free and their apps would just be an easy place to browse, buy, and download content you owned on any device?

The why of the change is very simple: if you have a store in your app and sell something then Apple enforces that you give them 30% of the sale. This is Apple ransoming the users based on the fact that they have yet to sell a single iOS device. You lease an iOS device and they restrict who can and cannot sell code that runs on 'your' device, including code that accesses content you already own (like digital comics). This is even for sales that have nothing to do with Apple, aren't done through their payment processing, aren't browsed on their store; if it was done in an app running on iOS then it is IAP so gets the Apple tax. Because the user does not own the device then it is not the user who has control of who they can commission to give them more stuff for it, everything goes through Apple.

Image sourced from this rather relevant article about a different kind of ransom.

Amazon have a payments processing company (called Amazon Payments, you can use them too if you want) and are building their own store inside the apps so it is crazy for them to pay Apple a 30% cut of sales when they can do the processing in-house and the store is something they built into their app, not something that uses the Apple App Store. The Apple App Store is just the conduit for their slim reader and store app, adding value to the people with iOS devices by letting them access and buy more content for them. They also do various self-publishing deals (on things like Kindle) where they take a 30% cut and the creator gets the rest. You obviously can't do such a deal if you run a store which gives Apple a 30% cut, you'd end up getting nothing for providing the store, payment processing, bandwidth for downloads (and user tracking to enable them to redownload in the future), and so on. So you either need to price everything on the iOS version of the platform at 30% above the price elsewhere (or let the content creators eat the loss by giving them per-platform pricing controls) or strip the store from your app and make it a reader app which tells people to use a browser or a different device to buy stuff to expand their collection.

Yes, it sucks for users and UX goes down by removing an easy to use button to buy stuff in the app but this was forced by Apple ransoming their user base, which is enabled by making iOS a closed platform that is defective by design. Painting Amazon as the bad guy is insane. They're an evil company but they also work quite hard to reduce the margins (often at the cost of their employees - definitely evil), to make the experience closer to a direct customer-creator relationship where they take their cut as the enabler and make it the best experience for the consumer with the smallest cut (that's how they get their market dominance).

If MS started to charge Valve 30% for every Steam game sale that came through Steam running on Windows then what do you think would happen? The mere threat of this (with the Windows 8 Store) is why Valve are making SteamOS/pushing Linux. It's insane to praise or excuse Apple and tell store creators to just live with the 70% cut when they have no need for Apple as a middleman, except that Apple are screwing over consumers who they pretend to sell devices to. Just as it will be insane to complain when the creators go totally direct and give you a better deal by cutting out the store entirely and managing their own distribution system if they want and can do it for cheaper than the ~30% cut most digital stores implement.

The final step in Amazon's plan may be to build the best self-service store creator and web platform (on AWS) to run it on. To put themselves out of business as the (fat) middleman and act as the (thin) middleman to enable creators to meet their consumers as directly as possible. That is already the plan at Valve for revolutionising Steam. That is the natural conclusion to middlemen getting more and more lean. That future does not include Apple pretending to sell devices and then slyly taking a 30% cut of everything because the people who pay them aren't really buying anything and can be ransomed to the people building their own stores to sell to the consumers direct.