Crash Twinsanity – Lost Between Dimensions

Being released in 2004, Crash Twinsanity was the first departure from the established formula that had made Crash Bandicoot as popular as he is; some people loved it while others knew it only as a bug-riddled mess with gameplay that was, on the whole, ‘meh’. We are living in an age of remakes and remasters, and while the grandest portion of the Crash community is looking to the future to see what new ideas might spawn from the franchise’s rejuvenation, there remains that incredibly vocal group with their ceaseless chant: “finish Twinsanity”.

It is worth mentioning immediately that Twinsanity is one of my absolute favourite games. At about the age of eight or nine, I got caught up in this tragic cycle of beating The Evil Twins, being sent back to Cortex’s lab, and then going through the entire adventure again, and again, and again. At that point in my life I had never experienced a game that made me feel quite as free as this one. I could go anywhere, replay any boss, play through the entire game again if I wanted to without ever changing save slots (I’m sure you can imagine my reaction walking out of Skyrim’s Helgen for the first time, that was something else). What really sold Twinsanity to me, though, was the amount of energy held in every song on the soundtrack, every plot beat, every dialogue exchange and cutscene. See, Twinsanity wasn’t just a bundle of levels held together by a warp room, it was the first time that the characters in this iconic franchise were actually ever explored. Dingodile has a flamethrower and he shoots it, thanks Warped. In Twinsanity, we learn he likes to read, he’s good friends with Ripper Roo, and very nearly ended up on a date with Tawna Bandicoot before the scene was cut. The game is an exploration of the Crash universe, where almost every other game felt like just a game.

Whether we can even call Twinsanity a Crash game is up in the air: did you know that Crash himself doesn’t even have an associated voice actor? This one’s about Cortex. The Evil Twins, Madame Amberly, Uka Uka – all of their contempt is directed solely at the good doctor, and Crash just gets in the way. We see Cortex evolve over the course of the narrative, from this cross-dressing outcast thirsting for revenge, to a caring uncle, to a school child. Cortex transitions from being comic relief to being a powerful authoritative figure seamlessly in no small part due to Lex Lang’s mastery of the role. The reason people love Twinsanity is because it offers us the first unadulterated look into a villain we have only ever seen from one side – his rise, his fall, his redemption, and then right at the end we realise that as much as we may have come to love Dr Neo Cortex, some things never change.

So yes, I adore this mess of a game, but is it really deserving of a remake? The classic argument is that the game could have been maybe twice the size with the amount of content that was in development, but which was ultimately scrapped. 

 

“Come now, as we explore a new dimension! It should have been two dimensions, but we ran out of time…”

 

Time was definitely a contributing factor to why the game had to leave out as much as it did, and on the surface this does very much feel like a classic example of greedy publishers forcing developers to abandon their ideas so that the game can be released to a profitable schedule. But is that really what happened? I remember – again, at the age of eight or nine – seeing all this beautiful concept art, all of the animations and the storyboards and thinking “well obviously I need to get all of the collectibles to unlock the last level. Surely I can play as mecha bandicoot again, and what about the visa-versa-reversa-device?” There was an video that cropped up on reddit about a month ago featuring a livestream with the founder of Traveler’s Tales, and he paints a picture that is all the more tragically human. Wrath of Cortex was developed in twelve months, he says: Twinsanity was given two and a half years, and in that time it was still nowhere near ‘finished’. Problem was that the developers were constantly generating new ideas and features that they wanted to add to this massive project. Twinsanity lacked a focus, and when a project as freeform and open as this one lacks a focus, you could literally spend your entire life working on it and still not quite see the end. The publisher wasn’t just getting impatient, they were considering cancelling the game outright because it was just taking too long, and all of a sudden we can understand why the Crash Bandicoot franchise has so many titles that just didn’t make it to market: if the developers of one Crash game can get into this endless cycle of adding new content for one game, who’s to say history won’t repeat itself?

For the longest time, I wanted Twinsanity to be remade with all the content that was cut. Many people still do want that, but I think we all know that it’s just a frenzied fever dream at this point. “Just give them more time” works for a fan project, but not a game title that publishers have aspirations of making a profit on. The fact that we even have a Twinsanity is a blessing; I still enjoy listening to Spiralmouth’s acapella soundtrack; I still enjoy watching those beautifully pre-rendered cutscenes that wouldn’t look out of place in a modern title; I enjoy quoting the lines, thinking about the story, and dwelling in the peculiar state of emotion that seeing those credits roll always leaves me in. Thing is, knowing what I know about the development history, I’d be lying if I said that Twinsanity deserved anything more than a fond passing thought every once in a while. 

I’m sure you’ve noticed, but Crash Bandicoot is back. The N Sane Trilogy proved to the world that people still care about that weird fox-dog-thing that should have stayed in the nineties, while Nitro Fueled’s grand prixs promised new ideas and a willingness to take a chance: to not just recycle, but own the franchise. We don’t need Twinsanity, nor do I think we even really want it. What we want is a game that delivers that same experience; we want the dry humour, the journey, and the treatment of characters as more than just a physical appearance. It’s easy, I feel, for us as consumers to worry that a development team doesn’t really know what they’re doing with an intellectual property. Instead of letting them explore their own ideas, we call out for remakes and remasters, more content for the games we already have, and maybe a film adaptation because apparently some of you haven’t learned. We don’t get Twinsanity by remaking anything because Twinsanity was a new idea: it was a risk. Maybe Activision does decide to try something new and maybe it does suck, but who cares? At least they tried. The things we really love often come out of nowhere because they’re new and unexpected. A joke isn’t funny the second time around.

And hey, if for the next fifty years we get nothing but variations on Crash Bandicoot: Warped, at least we had a Twinsanity. That’s enough.

 

Here’s a link to the video section mentioned in this article: https://youtu.be/iY_g12i0Bas?t=10078

The Fear of Missing Out

Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fuelled is adding microtransactions and, although no one should be particularly surprised, that doesn’t make it alright. This entire situation feels incredibly shady for a number of reasons; first off, Activision said in a public statement that microtransactions would not be coming to the title, which was a breath of fresh air considering the current state of the industry. The Fortnite-esque store design and tightly regulated distribution of in-game currency were, as people feared, preparations to set up a system that allowed players to ‘supplement’ their earnings by paying more money on top of the base game’s price tag. Doing this a month post-launch also means that CTR:NF has sidestepped all the critical reviews that released with the game, and is now free to implement whatever the hell they want because no one is going to keep updating their scores to comment on questionable business practices.

That isn’t entirely the point of this piece. Obviously it matters a great deal to me because this is Crash Bandicoot they’re milking, but more importantly I think is the Fear of Missing Out and what that phrase means. Time limited cosmetic items, monthly seasons, and I guess even yearly multiplayer game releases in the vein of Call of Duty all carry with them a social pressure that companies weaponize. In essence, humans feel immense discomfort when they perceive those around them to be doing something that they aren’t involved in. I’ve been watching Jim Sterling’s videos on the topic recently where I was introduced to a lecture called ‘Let’s go Whaling’ and it really opened my eyes to just how cognizant developers are of the psychological techniques they are using to manipulate the vulnerable into handing over their cash. When someone spends money for instance, you need to tell the players around that person that they are spending in order to make buying skins the norm. On the playground ‘default’ is an insult and that’s no accident; the drop in revenue if kids were going around bullying the ones who had the money to purchase cosmetics would be significant, and companies know this. If they make sure everyone has a skin that could have been bought (through loot boxes for example), everyone is going to want a skin of their own because otherwise they are going to feel left out, and being on the outside of a social circle feels absolutely appalling.

Videogames can generate this anxiety even without microtransactions and spending habits, and the whole ‘git gud, casual’ environment of some communities (or the stereotype, at least) is partly to blame. Not everyone has the time to practise a game until they’re unbeatable at PvP because they have jobs, families and other commitments that make it an unachievable feat. In the really hard games like Dark Souls, it can mean the difference between being good enough to defeat a boss and not being able to fully explore the product that you paid for. I’m still of the opinion that not every game needs an easy mode and that developers are entitled to create the type of experience they want because, if someone really cares, I do believe that they will make the time to get what they want out of a product. The issue comes from the communities and the peer pressuring, the trash talking and the spoilers. If you haven’t bought this game, reached this stage, done this arbitrary thing, you are locked out of the conversation until you have, by which point everyone has already moved on. 

The rise of social media represents just another facet of the Fear of Missing Out. Everywhere you go, someone will have their phone in their hand, checking for texts and internet posts because out there, somewhere, something is happening and they don’t want to be left out. I’ve had several nights out with good friends where there’s a slight lull in the conversation and, all of a sudden, everyone’s wielding their phone so close to their face you’d have thought they’d never seen one before. Our untamable interconnectivity has rendered us insatiable for more and unable to properly bare the mundane aspects of our everyday life. I really don’t like Reddit, for example, yet two or three times a day I will find myself trawling through inane posts about my favourite games and topics because I am sure that this time I will surely find that one piece of news, artwork or thread that will make it worthwhile. 

It isn’t something that has arisen out of nowhere though, it’s human nature; social media is the perfect platform for people to put out their best moments and accrue the social currency of attention (likes, comments, shares, you name it). A lot of our self-worth is tied to what we see because we naturally compare ourselves to our peers, but we compare what we know about ourselves with what other people present, and the disparity is unsurprisingly huge. People don’t openly admit to sick fantasies, bad habits, stupid mistakes or any of the negative aspects of the human experience: they don’t present it and we don’t see it, yet we are utterly aware of our own deeper selves and can’t help but question why we are so awful when everyone else is so great. When we see a post that said our friend has just flown out for a holiday in the Caribbean, a cocktail of thoughts rushes through our heads; “why wasn’t I invited?”; “why don’t I ever make the time to travel?”; “why am I sitting here scrolling through social media when everyone else is having fun?”. 

There is nothing fundamentally insidious about these concepts because they are so natural, but the way they are being manipulated to force consumers into spending feels absolutely egregious. Coming back to videogames, a common defense for microtransactions is that if they weren’t implemented, new content wouldn’t be produced. As long as it’s only cosmetics that are being monetised and not gameplay advantages that’s fine though, right? Stirling makes the point very concisely that for many people, cosmetics aren’t an option due to the peer pressure that is being foisted upon the playerbase, and if they don’t have the time to grind out their daily pittance of coins to buy the skin that’s only available for the next four hours, of course they are going to succumb to microtransactions, because it is in their psychological makeup to do so. Another argument is that, if you don’t like microtransactions, you just shouldn’t buy them, and for a very long time I have struggled to find an argument countering that sentiment. However, I have just been reading through a comment thread (because I am an addict, we have established) and one person made the point that unlocking cosmetics and seeing your character look more and more impressive over time was one of the main draws for some games in the past. Now that people can just buy the shiniest skins, that process and the joy of playing the game has become devalued. As one commenter says, why should microtransactions only be damaging when it suits you? If it’s all cosmetic and not pay-to-win, then that’s fine for everyone, right? That’s the only thing we care about and so people need to stop whining. In truth, cosmetics do matter to a very large group of people, otherwise game companies wouldn’t put so much time and effort into monetising skins and justifying it with the tagline of “it’s all optional”.

I’m finding it difficult to be really angry because such a shift in the way that games and content are marketed is just a natural progression, and it wouldn’t surprise me if three or four years down the line the levels of bull just get thicker. Everyone experiences the Fear of Missing Out and it is very easy to become entrenched in it; having just finished University I found myself thinking the other day “why is it that I’m the only one who doesn’t know what they’re doing?” I’m not the only one, and neither are you, nor anyone else. I think sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves is take a step back and really appreciate the here and now. It just takes a splash of logic to realise that we’re all in the same boat: next step is figuring out how to combat the parasites using human nature against us.

Teamfight Tactics Review

The people over at Riot Games recently released their all new game mode Teamfight Tactics, essentially a strategy board game that hinges on your ability to put together a good team equipped with useful items that allow you to stomp the competition. It’s a beta, meaning that the gamemode will likely change a lot up to the final release but so far I’m not impressed, and I don’t see them changing the core gameplay loop anywhere near enough that it can be called engaging.

TFT represents League of Legends’ entry into the auto-chess genre, a game where, once your team has been put together, you sit back and watch your pieces take pot-shots at each other. There is merit to the idea, certainly, because if I don’t want to play something that is mechanically or cognitively taxing, I can take half an hour out and just play this vaguely amusing spin-off. There’s no teamplay element, which means all that horrible toxicity associated with the main game is absent, as is the crushing feeling of defeat when you realise you wasted an hour of your time fighting a losing battle with a team that would rather strangle you with your own guts than pay you a single supportive word. That said, TFT, is frustrating in its own way that often feels completely undeserving due to the totally random element of character selection. Throughout the game a shop consisting of five characters rotates every turn, from which you must buy pieces to add to your team. Possessing three of the same character levels them up, and possessing three leveled-up characters levels them all up once again to make them even stronger. The random element of what the game chooses to give you can (and will) mean that buying a character and investing your resources on them is an absolute gamble because there is no guarantee you will ever be given the final piece needed to level them up fully. I found out in one of the tooltips at the start of the game that the shop is taken from a collective pool, meaning that you will see characters that your opponents aren’t buying: that’s great, you could have let me know prior to my last ten games, but doesn’t this mean that my enemies could also just screw me over by buying up the characters I’ve already invested in?

That’s my second problem with the game, it just isn’t transparent to its new players. It’s an offshoot from League of Legends so the people playing will know what the characters do, but there is so much more that is different here from the base game that a little instruction would have been nice. The ‘communal shop’ is just the first of facts the game should let players know, because items, gold generation and character synergies are all important mechanics that players need to learn through trial and error, or sometimes even just memorise. Kassadin is one character that I found particularly egregious; in League players grab a lot of items that increase the power of his abilities and his mana pool, but in TFT Kassadin doesn’t use any mana, nor does he use any attacks that benefit from ability power. Without any prior explanation or experience, it’s impossible to know that he behaves completely differently in one game mode compared to the other, and that’s either a result of poor design or poor attention to user experience. Said items are dropped during certain stages (again on a random basis, so don’t go planning out a build beforehand) and are combined with other items to create finished artifacts with special effects. That’s great, that’s how it works in the base game, except that there’s no guidance as to what items build together to make the final product. This would be fine, but actually combining items requires that they first be (permanently) equipped to a character, so if you’ve mis-remembered a recipe and just built a tank item on your mage, there’s not much you can do to fix the problem.

I honestly do wish I had something more positive to say about Teamfight Tactics. Yes, if you know what you’re doing you will definitely win more games than if you don’t, but the game is so reliant on chance that both victories and losses can feel unavoidable and outside of your control. I like the synergy aspect and seeing characters of the same faction work together in a coherent way, but if I didn’t already have so much appreciation for the IP I wouldn’t feel the same way. I think the biggest problem I have with TFT does revolve around the game’s narrative world because it feels like such a waste. Smaller event-driven game modes like Star Guardian, Odyssey or even Bilgewater ARAM are clunky and unpolished, but at the very least they feel like an extended view into the world that the people at Riot Games have spent the last few years developing and embellishing. Why on earth would I want to play a board game in knock-off Skylanders world when I can be reading through comics and stories, listening to adeptly crafted audio dramas, or even just playing as the characters I love on Summoner’s Rift? TFT represents a reluctance to take a chance on new ideas and instead follow the trend of modern gaming, and although it might come back with great success on a commercial level, it does nothing to capitalise on what makes League of Legends special.

Are we Having Fun Yet?

The video game industry has taken a rather nasty turn, the most recent signpost being EA’s controversial defence of loot boxes and child-targeted gambling as “surprise mechanics”. Although this is the most glaring problem with modern games, it acts more as the tip of an iceberg that I fear we are too far gone to melt.

As an industry, the main goal of any product will be to make money. It takes time, effort, and materials to develop any sizeable project, and it goes without saying that if people were to invest everything they had into these projects without pay, they would not have the capacity to survive (food, water and shelter rarely come for free). This means that if a developer needs to make a few decisions in order to maximise their profits, they are very likely to do so. Epic’s recent crusade in buying exclusive rights to certain games would not be so successful were it not for the greater percentage of revenue being promised to these developers than is promised by other platforms (namely Steam). In a world based on greed, why would you cut off your nose to spite your face if it meant a more comfortable lifestyle? But this is more prevalent in indie development teams, who are in desperate need of the support that their craft can garner, and the issue on the whole tends to come back to this idea of “games as a service”.

The concept is little more than a natural progression of how games are seen, with the interconnectedness of both us and our devices facilitating it. A digital purchase does indeed mean that you no longer need to fear accidentally scratching up your disc until it’s only useful as a Frisbee, but it also means that the thing you buy isn’t really yours. If you lose details to your account and can’t retrieve them, that’s it – you’ve lost your money and any time you already spent playing. Digital purchases aren’t just limited to games though, are they? Take League of Legends, Overwatch, or any other title that lets you spend money on cosmetic items for your characters. If you read through any of the fine print, it won’t take long before you reach the part about skins being more of a rental thing, and that even though you have paid maybe enough for a cup of coffee, you own absolutely nothing, and the developer is fully within their rights to suspend your account and run away with your cash. 

We can take this insidious topic a step further and talk about this loot box plague. It’s not enough to just take your money for things they don’t really give you, they’re going to lock everything up inside little mystery eggs and let you keep rolling the dice until you land on the item you want, worst case scenario an item that’ll give you an advantage over other people. The comparison with kinder eggs and the like makes sense on a superficial level, but the thing is that a kinder egg doesn’t cost me anywhere in the region of forty to a hundred pounds for the base product. These companies target those vulnerable individuals who either don’t know better or are psychologically wired to give into these gambling mechanics far more easily. Games as a service means that the thing you bought is going to do its damned best to get you to spend more, using all those marketing tricks companies have been exploiting for decades. Inciting scarcity is the one I really want to talk about here, because Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled has proved to me that you don’t need microtransactions to kill fun.

Recently a whole heap of new content dropped for Nitro Fueled in such a way that incentivizes players to keep playing even when they’re no longer enjoying the time that they’re spending. Daily, weekly and monthly challenges make the game a grind that you need to come back to consistently if you want to unlock everything before it disappears for an undisclosed amount of time, maybe forever. A rotating shop instead of a catalogue means that players need to come back every time it rerolls – on the daily – to see if there’s anything they want, buy items they don’t care about in order to reroll manually, and grind for a pittance just in case they suddenly don’t have enough for something they wanted that’ll flood back into the aether in nineteen hours, thirty two minutes and seven seconds. The tragedy here is that Crash Team Racing is such a tight, entertaining waste of time that can be enjoyed by anyone, yet I’m sitting here listening to podcasts and not even caring if I’m winning, because at the very least I got three hundred coins and enough Grand Prix points to unlock a new paint-job. There are no microtransactions – yet – but the game’s cosmetic progression is set up almost as though there were, with all the fun-sucking design choices built in.

The problem isn’t the fact that the publishers and the developers are begging for money, because we all expected that anyway. The problem is how it impacts potentially brilliant projects that are tainted by the same tricks of the trade that the monetary vampires have mastered, and are selling books about for the low low price of ninety-nine ninety-nine. Just take a look at Skyrim, The Witcher or Bloodborne; these are my absolute favourite games, and they all feature additional paid content. Difference being that when I pay for this extra slice of the pizza that I already bought, I’m actually enjoying something that brings depth to the experience I already had. I don’t feel like I’ve just been robbed because I can tell that a great deal of time and effort was put into the landscape of Solstheim or the story and character development of Hearts of Stone.

When I look at many of the games that are popular nowadays, the Fortnites and the Leagues, I have to wonder how much of the playerbase is there out of genuine enjoyment, and how many have been psychologically encaptivated and held hostage without their knowing. My mum has always and still will always tell me that same old thing when she hears me getting angry or frustrated either playing or talking about certain games as I am now: “if you’re not having fun, turn it off”. It’s a simple rule to live buy, but by no means easy, and companies will do their absolute best to make you think that you really are enjoying the time you’re spending on their product, and that you really would like to throw some money their way to help with the development costs. 

They don’t need your money and they don’t care about you, and you’re probably not thinking straight because they know how to manipulate your thoughts (it’s easy, I studied psychology, trust me). People have run into serious problems as a result of the current model of mainstream gaming; they get themselves into debt; parental negligence charges due to excessive play; inability to look after themselves or function as they otherwise could in the world; and obviously mental health takes a hit too. It’s mostly if not exclusively big companies that utilise these damaging strategies, but considering that they are always in the focus, should we not hold them accountable and look to them as shining examples of what video games can be? Because this right here almost makes me ashamed to admit that I play video games at all.

I’ve Never Moved so Fast in 8th Place

Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled came out about two days ago now, and I haven’t really stopped playing it since it arrived on my doorstep. I can’t remember the last time I was so disgustingly excited for a videogame release, and Beenox have done a great job at replicating what I felt to be important about the original, even surpassing it in many key areas. Think of this less as a review and more as just a walkthrough of my experience with this absolute gem.

The addition of a ‘hard’ setting to the adventure mode made that my first port of call. I’ve been playing Crash Team Racing for as long as I’ve been able to hold a controller, and it seemed as though I was finally being given an opportunity to test my skills on the race track.

What I learned is that hard mode is really, really hard. 

Crash Cove, the first track, is an absolute slap in the face as an introduction. There are no real shortcuts, no exploits you can use, it’s just a ring around the island, and I was stuck on that race for a good twenty minutes in a constant mental battle with myself not to just restart on classic mode. Characters will ignore the stat sheets and tear round the track like demons, making you wonder if you were ever really that good to begin with. You start panicking, a tear wells up in your eye as you overtake Polar and are immediately missiled four or five times in a row. “But I’m good,” I whimpered, coming in sixth place once again.

And then something clicked. I don’t know whether I improved or just got lucky but I finally won that race, and experienced the same horror again, and again, and again. Rather ironically, the boss races don’t provide nearly as much difficulty – the key is to get ahead before they can deluge you in TNTs, or land a well timed item to take a permenant lead. Pinstripe was particularly satisfying as I rammed him early with a bubble and sailed to an easy victory on my first attempt. Komodo Joe, likewise, would have been so much more challenging if he hadn’t slammed straight into the same wall I was just recovering from, but it still resulted in a photo finish. That’s the thing, I think; Crash Team Racing hinges so much on your skill when racing other players, but on hard mode you need to wait for – and then capitalise on – NPC mistakes rather than just zip ahead, because unless you can put enough distance between you and them, you will get decked by at least two cannonballs and an invincible Cortex shouting “trophy’s mine!”

Oxide, the final boss, is another beast entirely. Getting that pivotal early lead isn’t easy when he has a natural head start, so the best strategy I could find was to just wait. Triple missile is a Godsend if you get it early enough for Oxide to still be in view. Shoot off all three in quick succession and, if you do it right, it’ll break through the nitro crates he drops and give you just enough time to slip past. After that it’s just a case of keeping in front, which’ll definitely be a testament to your knowledge of the track and ability to sustain a boost. It’s exhilarating, it’s terrifying, and there is absolutely no better feeling than winning that race and seeing that 0.2% of other players have managed it. I was going to do the rest of the game on hard too but, after I had a quick look, I saw that I only had a minute to collect all the crystals on Skull Rock, and my response was n o p e.

After completing hard mode, the next logical step was to unlock Dr Nefarious Tropy, right? And to be honest, after the shitshow I’d just witnessed it was a joy to race through these tracks and best the self-titled master of time with little real effort. The Tropy ghosts are a weird one. I ended up listening to Salem’s Lot by Stephen King while doing them, because I was consistently coming in much faster than most of his times, and the fact that you need to first unlock the ghosts and then beat them again made it feel more like busy work than anything else. Deep Sea Driving stands out in particular; this run wasn’t going too well, I was on the second lap I think and I ran into one of the blades near the end. “This is fine” I thought, as Dingodile slowly tried to reclimb the pipe and was quickly spun out again. I spent, honest to God, ten seconds desperately trying to get free, only to find that Tropy was sitting next to me having similar troubles. This isn’t your best time Tropy, why are you here? Other races though, I was floored. Oxide station and Nitro Kart’s Tiny Temple took two or three tries each, because the lanky blue Doctor Who wannabe flew through those tracks like he’d just decided he wasn’t really feeling friction today.

I know there have been some complaints about some shortcuts and the blatant prep for microtransactions in the store, but Nitro Fueled fully encapsulates the speed and the nostalgia the original game still holds to this day. It looks sublime and holds a hell of a lot of replay value owing to the online, unlockable cosmetics, and the upcoming Grand Prix events. If you haven’t got it, get it. It’s like Mario Kart but with kangaroos in straitjackets – what’s not to like?

PlayStation’s Virtual Reality

PlayStation released their virtual reality headset all the way back in 2016, with me eventually biting the bullet and picking it up last year. Since then, I’ve probably only set it all up around thirty times at the absolute most, but I’m gonna recommend it to you anyway, because VR is an absolute blast.

It’s a heavy investment, don’t get me wrong, and up until recently there haven’t been all that many games I’ve been genuinely excited for. Setting up the PSVR means grabbing my tripod, clearing my floor, calibrating the camera, re-calibrating the camera, updating software I haven’t touched in a month, and then getting angry because there isn’t enough space in my stupidly narrow bedroom. The other – very significant – problem I have with PlayStation’s hardware is the tracking. Having not tried other VR platforms I don’t know if this is just a Sony thing or what, but the PSVR functions by capturing with a single camera and utilising the same Move controllers that came out in 2010. It makes sense to recycle old hardware, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t help but think we would benefit from at least having an analogue stick installed at some point. The main problems I’ve had with VR come down to these controllers: firstly, the fact that we’re only tracking with a single camera means that obscuring that massive lolly stick for even a second will send your hand either into a spasm or shooting off into the horizon. I was trying to coax my hand in SUPERHOT back onto my wrist for a good five minutes as I watched it pirouette around the room. Second is movement, and I feel like this is likely a problem with VR on the whole at the moment. Teleporting is unimmersive, as is pointing my controller in the direction I want to go – I can’t retreat from giant spiders and shield from them at the same time, because one of my hands needs to fly over my head just to reverse.

But when the stars align, you find the right game, everything tracks perfectly, the environment doesn’t look like an undergraduate Unity project, you will have the best time of your life. SUPERHOT is, incidentally, one of those games to a point; when it works you feel like an absolute God, but I know I can chalk most of my deaths up to not being able to reach guns that are situated outside of the play area. In terms of environment my favourite title was probably Kismet, a little game that reads your tarot cards and daily horoscope. Sitting in a gypsy cottage one minute and playing Egyptian checkers surrounded by sand dunes the next isn’t necessarily the most fun you can have, but it’s certainly intriguing enough when introducing family members to the platform. If I’m being honest though, my favourite thing about PSVR is the horror, and I have three or four games that I essentially can’t play because of how utterly terrifying they are. Terror is absolutely the word for it, especially in something like Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted, because there is no way of describing the disgusting sense of dread I felt when the robots disappeared from the cameras and started walking down the hallway. Likewise when I first started up Resident Evil: VII, it took me a good hour to work up the courage to even enter the house because of its effectively paralysing design. I still haven’t really played it, partly because I can’t be bothered to reinstall it, and partly because a walkthrough told me another chase sequence was coming up, and absolutely fuck that.

If you don’t fancy being scared senseless, your could do far worse than by picking up a copy of Skyrim or Doom: VFR; granted these are essentially ports and look nowhere near as good as you would like, but they are both pretty solid games that you can definitely extract a few more exhilarating hours from. It sure would have been nice to have the whole Doom campaign on there (God damn you Bethesda) but hey, maybe we’ll get VR support with Doom Eternal if we cross our fingers really, really hard. Blood and Truth is a pretty recent release I bought the other day which has similarly shown to be very good. I won’t say anything more here because I haven’t finished it, but a thoroughly immersive story-driven action title like this is practically destined for glowing reviews provided it’s a decent length and not lousy with bugs.

I was blown away the first time I tried my PSVR, and I’m still enthralled whenever I pick up a new title. When No Man’s Sky releases VR support, you know exactly what I’ll be doing (I need to at least try to get my money’s worth out of that one, right?) At the same time, the rigmarole of setting everything up, getting it all synced and ensuring my controllers are fully charged always leaves me a little reluctant, but that could just be a problem with me. If you have a PlayStation sitting around and don’t have the money to build a VR-ready computer, definitely get a headset, because if nothing else the experience you will have is unparalleled. It doesn’t warrant buying a new console just for the sake of the VR, but considering I bought mine just to play Bloodborne, I reckon I’m not really one to talk here.

What Belongs in Crash Team Racing?

With Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fuelled being so close, I figured I may as well write a little something on the upcoming release, because there’s something that I think is worth addressing.

First off the game looks great on the surface, and if it plays like the original we’re looking at the best mascot racing games to come out ever, bar none, objectively, you can’t change my mind. I’ve played my fair share of Mario Kart and although it’s functional, it lacks the kind of freedom that CTR affords. I guess the best way to make the point is by using actual cars; when you steer a go-kart, the turn is immediate, and it allows the driver to maneuver around tight turns that would be impossible for a real car to do without that awful three point turn. CTR tracks feature turns of almost 180 degrees which the player is able to pull off (with some practise, mind you) in moments. Steering in Mario Kart is slow, and the car doesn’t move anywhere near as comfortably around the track. In a way this comes back to my previous article and my note on what I call “freedom of movement”, because although the cars behave a lot more like cars on a road, they also feel incredibly restrictive and less natural (for me, at least) to control. There is also no way you can tell me green Mario is a more interesting character than the dingo-crocodile hybrid toting a flamethrower.

The amount of content packed into this title is also pretty astounding, featuring characters and tracks not only from the original game, but from Crash Nitro Kart too, on top of more customisation options than I will ever be able to exhaust. Every track is packed with details that the original hardware simply couldn’t afford, meaning that like the Spyro the Dragon remakes, most of the first few runs through any area will be a sight-seeing tour more than anything else. This does come with a few caveats though, and the topic itself is one that I’m really struggling to nail down my feelings on. At the end of every race in the original title, one of four bandicoot ladies would present the trophy depending on which character came in first. I didn’t think much of it when I was a child, because who does? They take up screen space, deliver a little flavour to an otherwise bland victory ceremony and we carry on to the next race. I know people will disagree with me, but having that extra detail, having the screen feel a little more populated really made those victories feel special. So when gameplay of Nitro Fuelled’s adventure mode released recently (because CTR had a story mode, keep up Mario) with a jarring absence of those trophy girls, I didn’t really know how to react.

Customary friendly reminder, I stay out of politics as best I can, but I’m going to address a (relatively) recent controversy revolving around actual racing and what are affectionately known as ‘grid girls’. Essentially, Formula 1 banned them from appearing for reasons that I just can’t get behind whatever way it’s presented. There is the argument that such a profession is demeaning, objectifying or providing a bad example, but if these women really did feel that way, would they really still be doing it instead of finding a quote/unquote real job? I read in an article that the grid girls would be replaced with children in order to get younger fans into racing, because nothing makes me want to support really fast moving death machines more than toddlers. The ban isn’t to the benefit of women, because women have lost their jobs – what kind of self-righteous bigot believes that cutting people down is the quickest way to showing them their salvation? Religious malpractice comes to mind.

There is of course the argument that oversexualisation is in itself objectification, and I would support that view. However at least in the case of Formula 1, women were dressed with a certain glamour, civility even. These aren’t half-naked sex slaves, these were representatives, people pleasers and minglers; they would meet fans, have photos taken, and be interactive where the racers (according to one interview) were only focused on winning the race. From what I can see, most if not all of them loved their jobs, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have started in the first place. There’s the other argument that having women on the sidelines does nothing to encourage new girls from taking up the wheel and racing for themselves. It doesn’t seem to occur to these people that girls have a mind of their own, and if they really did want to get into racing, or football, or – you know – start a company, they would be doing it. A cursory Google search will tell you that women have been in racing for well over a century: this wasn’t an empowering or liberating move, it was meant to cut people down.

So back to Crash Team Racing; yes, the girls were heavily sexualised looking back, and if they were to make a return, it would likely mean a redesign in the vein of Tawna Bandicoot, another character who was originally only there for titillation. Her new introduction sees her play a far more active, independent role at least during cutscenes, so choosing not to do the same with these other characters seems more like laziness in all honesty. Before you jump down my throat, no I don’t think that the developers have been lazy, a lot of work has been put into this game and it shows. But it is so much easier to just remove something than make it suitable for a modern audience, and for a feature that was so in-your-face and unique to the original title, omission here is less of an oversight and more of an effort to sweep that particular part of CTR’s history under the rug.

As I have previously expressed, developers are well within their right to create an experience of their choosing, and it’s incredibly entitled for an audience to throw their toys out the pram when things are either included or not included: if it matters so much to you, go and make it yourself, with blackjack, and hookers. My concern here is that the issue isn’t one of personal decision, but the kind of pandering to a very vocal minority who don’t have the slightest clue what they’re talking about. You know, like me.

I’ll leave a few examples of the stuff I’ve been reading because at its core, this issue represents some of the backwards thinking that seems to plague modern sensibilities, and in my view anything that restricts people like this better have a damn good reason for doing so.

We’re made out to be so vulnerable, we’re not,’ says former F1 ‘grid girl

Ecclestone criticises decision to drop grid girls

Also before you go, I’ve just opened up a Ko-Fi account because my writing isn’t regular enough to warrant Patreon. If you like my stuff, please do consider supporting me, it’d mean the world – Buy me a coffee?

The Textorcist Review

I don’t often give out positive reviews, but this game was particularly good. If you enjoy being challenged with mechanics that require you to develop completely new skills, I’d say this one would probably be up your street.

Full review here: https://www.gamegrin.com/reviews/the-textorcist-the-story-of-ray-bibbia-review/

What Makes a Character Fun to Play?

This is a topic I’ve been thinking about off and on since around November 2017, when my favourite League of Legends character was reworked. I mean, Twisted Fate has and always will be my favourite thematically, but pre-rework Evelynn was so versatile and just so much fun that I quickly learned to dominate in any game I played. When she was changed, that same spark disappeared despite me enjoying her visuals a lot more, so what happened?

I think to answer the question, it’s worth looking to other genres and how characters tend to control. If I want to enjoy tight combat that rewards my skill, I’ll probably play Dark Souls or Bloodborne for a little bit. Pinning down what makes these games so compelling to a very wide audience is hard because everyone enjoys things for different reasons, but I don’t think it’s just the renowned difficulty alone that makes these games so fun. When I equip a sword and shield in Dark Souls, I can block, parry and swing. It’s basic, and it’s intuitive. I find myself far less drawn to the boss weapons and gimmicks like Priscilla’s dagger; the animations are beautiful, and I’m sure they’re very useful at a high skill level, but dancing around in that manner doesn’t feel right in the hand, and I’m probably just going to go back to my silver knight straight sword. On the other hand, look at Bloodborne’s Rakuyo, a close second favourite to my Beasthunter Saif. The Rakuyo is a complicated weapon in it’s transformed state, but still feels natural to fight with. One button slashes, one jabs and another swings both blades at the same time. It’s no less dancy that Priscilla’s dagger, but the animations are fluid and close enough to how the hunter fights with any other weapon that it both plays and looks like a coherent part of the player’s arsenal. The sheer range of individual animations for every weapon also helps sell this idea that the hunter is a master of his art (if you haven’t played Bloodborne, go play Bloodborne, for God’s sake).

I think I want to call this effect freedom of movement. When I attack with a weapon, it needs to make sense to me. When I press a button, I don’t want to wind up with a backflip, because all I want to do is kill the hollow running at my face with the sword I have in my hand. This same effect is probably why underwater levels in games like Spyro the Dragon produce so much anxiety in me, because the character’s controls are all of a sudden made so much more unwieldy, my fire breath is extinguished and I have to spend even more time battling the camera than I do on dry land. What’s really peculiar then, is my fondness for The Witcher 3; if the attacks with Priscilla’s dagger felt unnecessary, how on earth could I derive any sense of immersion from Geralt’s pirouettes? Because I do think Wild Hunt has one of the tightest combat systems going despite lacking the simplicity offered by Dark Souls. Every single attack throws me into a ballet move that climaxes with a sword strike rather than opening with one, but rather than feeling as though the character is unresponsive or unnecessarily hindered by a ridiculous fighting style, it makes me feel much closer to the action.

The key, I think, is that word immersion, and it’s a very easy word to misinterpret. Immersion doesn’t refer to how closely a game mimics real life, but more how it represents the world it is supposedly trying to. When I’m playing as Geralt, I’m thinking about the witcher described in the books, the man who twirls and spins around monsters with inhuman agility, who stands out from the banal martial arts of the common man, and Wild Hunt pulls this off perfectly. The dodge, or hop, is what really sells how this game plays, as it allows the player to reposition, cancel errant swings and literally dance around enemies before landing a blow – in short, you feel like a witcher. But we can take this to an even simpler place with Crash Bandicoot: he jumps and he spins, but that’s about it. Thing is, he doesn’t need any other powers because he is just an animal. Crash can do what the player expects him to, and although you can unlock rocket launchers and double jumps later on down the line, it still feels natural because the game has introduced him to the player with that standard template.

So coming back to League of Legends, with somewhere close to 150 characters at this point, where can these ideas apply? Twisted Fate is a very good example, boasting a whopping two abilities, a passive that has no impact on how he plays mechanically, and a final ability that is just a teleport. The Card Master can throw cards, that’s what his basic attack is, that’s what his Q ability is, and that’s what his W ability is. He is very simple to play, but every one of his abilities is coherent to his wiry design and person displayed in the stories. Gangplank also stands out as a very compelling character due to his Q – he whips out a pistol and shoots you with it. But he also carries a sword, and if he gets close enough he’ll slash you with it. This provides that same base Crash has, and means that when he starts throwing around barrels of gunpowder and firing cannons, sure it might feel a little weird, but at his core everything you expect the character to be able to do, he can.

But Evelynn lacks this feeling for a number of reasons. She’s a melee range champion, but if you start relying on your basic attacks, you’re doing something wrong. Those massive claws she has really only tickle, and with none of her abilities scaling with attack damage items, investing in them will leave you high and dry. Evelynn also has two tendrils erupting from her shoulders that do ‘apparently’ interact with her Q and E, but I’ll be damned if it feels like that. Q’s main function is to generate spikes that spawn out of nowhere, with the tendril actually just being a small skillshot. The only time the tendrils actually appear functional is during her final ability, where she will slash everyone in a cone and be forced backwards. The key here is that Evelynn has these appendages, but no way of actually just attacking people with them even though if you were to meet her in person, that’s probably what she’d use to tear your face off. My biggest problem with reworked Evelynn, though, is her E, a point and click dash to a target that ends in a quick backflip and Eve lashing out with her tendrils. So she has a dash; she can move quickly; but God damn if she can use it when she feels like it. The dash must only be used when within a certain range, and only to an enemy. This is why when Evelynn released, people who played the old rendition were outraged, or at least it’s why I was. The character has these abilities in her lore, but none of it is reflected in how she plays in game.

Immersion, as usual, is a huge component to what makes a character really satisfying to play as. I have a gun, I have a sword, and I can use both of them because I have them, and that’s how my character is designed. When you take this away, lock the controls behind strange conditions or give abilities weird after effects that just feel unnecessary, playing as them makes less and less sense. Unless you are willing to overlook how untrue the mechanics are to the design, it’ll produce this effect that’s highly comparable to cognitive dissonance. I’ve tried over and over again to enjoy how they changed the character because she has a really strong design; but I can’t because, I have tendrils and a dash, but not the power to use them. It’s like having no mouth and desperately needing to scream.

Politics in Gaming

I’ve been playing back and forth in my mind as to whether I actually wanted to write this and what it would probably end up saying about me, but I’ve decided it’s important if only to figure out how I feel.

The other day I found out that there was going to be a sequel to Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, a title that quickly became one of my favourite all-time games, but also that this one was going to be very political. Now that’s not necessarily a problem, vampire politics in The World of Darkness absolutely fascinates me: but then I remembered the recent controversy over the Brujah clan. For those of you that aren’t aware, these are vampires who are a lot more outspoken than their brethren, they’re more likely to attach themselves to extremist movements and be generally rebellious. In the updated manual for the tabletop version, I believe I heard that they are also quoted as being the most likely to join Neo-Nazist groups what with the perceived resurgence of real world fascism. Obviously, I try my damndest to stay out of politics so there’s probably a lot more that I’m not aware of; it’s a topic with far too much baggage that I’m just not willing to engage in with anything other than devil’s advocacy and mockery.

That said, everything nowadays seems to contain some overt message about acceptance being good and anything resembling an undesirable opinion needing to be snuffed out. I hate it; I hate the fact that art cannot simply be left to be art, for the creator to design what’s in their heart and for the consumer to perceive it in their own unique way (I’m pretty sure this comes back to my article on ‘The Death of the Author’). As far as I’m concerned, to call anything evil or wrong is short-sighted as there is always some part of the counter argument you don’t have the experience to comprehend. The reason I disagree with much of what I’ve seen of social justice is because it is more often than not used as a tool to push agenda and shut down conversation: “you can’t dislike this thing because it’s not for you, because the message we’re leaving is far more important than how good the product is”. And that right there is my fear, that agenda will become the focus instead of developing a thematically coherent world.

Moral ambiguity is so much more compelling than the preachy “good/evil” paths of games like Shadow the Hedgehog. Let’s look at The Witcher, and beware for spoilers; during one quest we have the option of destroying a demon or setting it free. The former option saves an enslaved woman from turning into a monster and puts a family back together. The latter saves a similarly enslaved group of around five children from being eaten by witches, with the husband of the newly-turned water hag eventually resorting to suicide. Neither of these options is pleasant to watch, nor does the game ever for a moment condemn the choice you made, and all of a sudden that choice is given a hell of a lot more impact. Bloodlines never went to such lengths, but I do remember there being instances such as handing Jeanette the necklace where consequences weren’t felt until way after the player could do anything to stop them. Humanity was and probably will be an indicator of whether your choices are good or evil, and it’s troubling. Murder of course will degrade your humanity, but it concerns me that there may well be opportunities where killing will be seen as a good thing instead. A child molester or an outspoken Trump supporter, go kill them and regain some humanity; I lose the ability to roleplay as a true neutral because all of a sudden my character is judging his actions based on the developer’s political agenda. Also this ‘pronoun’ thing has got my back up a little bit. I’m not opposed to transgender characters, the more flexibility a player has to make who they want, the better. But, it really isn’t going to make sense if you’re playing a Smiling Jack look alike and every character immediately knowing that you go by ‘she’; or are they going to completely break any dialogue flow by having the character quickly educate each and every npc that misgenders them? It isn’t a problem until it starts breaking immersion – then it’s a problem.

But, I can see why it would make sense for certain decisions to be made based on a social justice perspective. The World of Darkness isn’t separate from our reality and the characters, to be believable, likewise need to mirror current sensibilities. Imagine for a second that Nazi Brujah all of a sudden having a much harder time getting by because of how people perceive that demographic of people. If social justice really is as dominant in the real world as the internet seems to think it is, then you’re damn right I want to see it. But I want to see it as a gameplay element, not a theme; if we become saturated in this political rigmarole, it’ll be impossible to ever see anything outside of our firmly branded beliefs, and that’s far more terrifying than any amount of thin-bloods.

While I’m here, I may as well take a jab at the subject of Malkavians too. Malks always have some kind of mental illness, whether that’s mild depression, schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, you name it. Now, I remember also reading that Bloodlines 2 was going to tackle the theme of mental illness along with everything else, and I’m only just realising why (because I’m stupid and don’t think about Malkavians very often). Bloodlines had this weird relationship with the clan in that for the most part, these crazy characters were treated as comic relief – on the surface. Then we have characters like Jeanette, whose story and affliction are painted with the kind of dark and lamenting tone one would expect. It’s a topic that I really do want to see again from a different perspective because of how attitudes are nowadays; will they still be treated by fellow kindred as liabilities and “good fun”, or will they be pitied, or just made out to be like everyone else? Honestly the latter sounds the most boring, because here we have the opportunity to really parody how people regard the insane in a modern context; with quiet revulsion? Reluctant acceptance? Again, this is something that I don’t want to just be glossed over with fear of offending people, vampires are supposed to be transgressive, so challenge me.

I do feel really torn here because I want this sequel to be perfect, I want it to completely encapsulate what it is I love about the original Bloodlines and excel at making me feel immersed in this vampire world. What I don’t want is to be told what’s good and bad, that certain groups of people are morally reprehensible, nor do I want to be rewarded for doing bad things regardless of the political motive or end goal. I think I just want to exist as an outside entity, to flit about on the sidelines not really taking a stance, but appreciating everything that this universe and its inhabitants has to offer; I’m a Toreador, what can I say?