Clarence Road

“Is that you Ste?”

I looked up from my paper to see an unfamiliar face staring eagerly at me from across the bar. I hadn’t noticed him, or anyone else for that matter, coming in to the pub in the last while.

“Yeah…” I replied to the man with a hint more suspicion than I had originally intended. The man continued to look at me in anticipation. As if he was waiting for me come to some happy realisation. A couple of seconds passed before I replied, “Sorry mate, I’m not trying to be rude or anything, but I’m not recognising your face. How do I know you again?”

“It’s Stuart. Stuart Murphy. From yonks back. Like, back in the 70s. We used to knock around together as kids.”

I studied the man’s face. There was something there that I recognised. Stuart? Stuart Murphy? Did I know a Stuart Murphy? I remember a couple of girls from back in the day with the name Murphy, but Stuart?

“It’s not ringing a bell mate, sorry.”

The man looked a little hurt.

“Are you related to Sandra Murphy by any chance?”

With that, the man’s expression picked up a little.

“Yeah, she’s me cousin. On me dad’s side. She lived down New Brighton back then.”

Was Sandra Murphy from New Brighton? I wracked my brain, but whatever memories I had from back then were obscured by the passing of the years.

“Fucking hell, lad. I dunno. Maybe. Like, I’m just being honest, but, for the life of me, I don’t remember you at all.”

I folded up my paper and shoved it into my back jeans pocket, picked up my pint and jacket, and walked round the bar to where the man was standing. Not untypically for a Thursday afternoon, the pub was largely empty save for a few regulars sitting in their spots watching the horse racing on the telly. The cleaning lady was hoovering the function room out back while the barman—a young fella who had only been working there a couple of weeks—sad idly behind the bar watching the horse racing uninterestedly. He did not seem to have any interest in our conversation either. I pulled up a barstool next to the man and draped my jacket over it. He swivelled on his stool so that he was facing me from an angle.

“What you drinking? …Stuart was it?”

He nodded. “Ah, you’re very kind Steve, I’ll have whatever you’re having there. What is it? One of these fancy IPAs or something?”

 I called over to the barman and asked for the same again. He reluctantly put down his phone and pulled a pint glass from under the bar and filled it up lazily with the beer. He put it down in front of me and I gave him a fiver.

“Keep the change lad.”

He muttered a “Ta” before going back to his stool. I slid the pint to Stuart.

“So, Stu, you’re gonna have to give me some more details here. Were we mates at school or something? Do you have some older or younger brothers or something?”

“I wasn’t a big one for school to be honest with you, Ste. Those teachers…nasty buggers, they were.”

I nodded.

“But nah, we used to pal around on the streets. Playing football and stuff. It was always me, you, Damo and Craig. We were a proper little gang.”

“Damo and Craig. Fucking hell. I haven’t thought about them in years. Didn’t Damo go down south or something? I haven’t heard from Craig in Donkey’s.”

The man shrugged his shoulders, almost as if in apology.

“No idea to be honest with you Ste. We moved away after a bit of…well you know…”

His words trailed off.  I waited, but there was apparently no further elaboration coming.

“Oh right, maybe that’s why I don’t remember you. How old were you when you moved away? How old are you now?”

“Same as you, Ste. I’m 43. I moved away when I was 13. You seriously don’t remember? 1975.”

I tried to think back, but 1975 felt like a completely different world. A lot had happened in the meantime.

“That was when we lived off the Poulton Road, wasn’t it? Did you live on our road?”

“York Ave, I was. Just round the corner.”

“So, go on then, why did yas end up moving away? And where did you go?”

“Something happened on Clarence Road. Down the bottom of the road where…”

My phone’s ringtone blared out from my pocket. It was Nicky.

“One sec, Stu. I’ve gotta get this.”

I turned around and answered.

“Alright, love. I’m just down The Lion. I’ll be back in an hour, promise.”

“You need to pick up some spuds on your way back. And get some milk too will you?”

“Yeah, will do. You alright, love? What have you been up to today?”

There was a slight moment of tension before Nicky responded.

“Listen Ste, your Jamie knocked round. He can’t keep doing this. He scares me. “

This was getting ridiculous now. He was turning up every other day. I turned and gave a quick signal to Stuart that I had to pop out for a second. I walked to the doors and out onto the street. It was a typical drizzly day in Birkenhead. I wasn’t wearing my jacket so I stuck under the small roofed section just outside the pub entrance.

“I’m sorry Nick. I’ll have a word. He’s not a bad kid, honestly.”

“I know he’s not Steve, but it’s hard for me to say no to him when he comes asking for money. And we don’t have any money, Ste. I’m skint.”

It wasn’t just a meaningless platitude saying Jamie wasn’t a bad kid. He really was a gold-hearted and polite lad growing up. Nine years old, he would walk my mum—his nan—through the estate to the church for mass of an evening when none of the rest of us could be found anywhere near. And fiercely loyal too. There isn’t anyone he wouldn’t fight if he thought a family member of friend was in trouble. But, like so many other little kids on the estate, he was a silent victim to abuses. Abuses at the hands of the types of scummy adults who would get their comeuppance one way or another, one day. But for him, he sought an escape. An escape into other worlds. Other worlds offered to him by addictive chemical substances.

“I promise, I’ll go chat to our Lynn tomorrow.”

“She needs to sort something out Steve. He’s her son. He’s her responsibility. Not ours.”

“I promise. Anyway, listen love, I’ve bumped into some fella who says he used to knock round with me back in the day. Stuart Murphy he says his name is. But I swear to god, I can’t remember him for the life of me. At least… But, like he knows lads who I do remember. I just can’t remember him.”

“Weird. Maybe your Bern knows him? He’s only a couple of years older than you. He would’ve known some of the faces you were hanging round with.”

She had a point.

“Is he in the pub with you?”

“Who? This Stuart fella? Yeah, he’s at the bar. I just stepped out to answer your call. Look, I’m gonna go back in and make me excuses. I’ll be back soon, alright love? And don’t worry about our Jamie. Alright? Love you.”

“Don’t forget the spuds and milk.”

And with that she was gone.

I looked up the street which opened up onto Argyle Street. Dilapidated brick buildings, pot-hole filled roads and uneven pavements punctuated by miserable looking people along with buses, white vans and cars that had all, people and vehicle alike, clearly seen much better days.  It really was a dreary streetscape. They really needed to put some money into the area. I sighed and pushed back through the doors into the pub.

Stuart’s seat was empty, still angled slightly to face mine. His pint was untouched next to mine. He must’ve gone for a wizz, I thought. I sat down and took a sip of my beer. I took out my paper and resumed reading the sports pages.

A couple minutes passed. There was still no sign of him returning. I resolved I’d give him another five minutes before I had to hit the road.

After those five minutes were up, I downed the last of my pint and folded up my paper. I need a wizz myself anyway, so I’ll tell him I’m off while I’m in there. I walked across the pub, down the small hall and through the door into the men’s.

I was ready to bump into him as soon as I walked in, but to my surprise, the toilet seemed empty. Nobody was at the urinals and the cubicle door hung half open. The sounds of Argyle Street filtered in through the small open window above the sink.

“Where the fuck did he go?” I muttered to myself.

I relived myself at the urinal and washed my hands in the sink. The mirror was cracked and smeared with some unknown substance, obscuring a full view of my face. A vision of the small brick Victorian terraces of Poulton Road and the many streets off it floated into my mind’s eye. I hadn’t been up that way in at least twenty years. I shook the thought away and attempted to dry my hands with the air dryer, but, unsurprisingly, it wasn’t working. I flicked the water off my hands and walked back out into the bar area.

Still no Stuart. I popped my head into the function room, where the cleaning lady had been hoovering earlier, but the room was empty. The room smelled musty. I walked back into the bar.

“Sorry mate, you haven’t seen that fella I was sitting with, have ya?” I asked the barman, who was still sat on his stool, eyes fixed on the TV screen behind the bar.

“Wha?” came his simple response.

“That fella I was chatting with ten minutes ago. Did you see where he went?”

“No idea, lad.”

Nonplussed as to what to do with this cryptic response, I decided to leave him to it. I considered asking some of the other aul fellas dotted around the pub, but something told me that would be an equally fruitless route. I scanned the pub one last time, but this man called Stuart was nowhere to be found. I shrugged my shoulders, grabbed my jacket from the stool and headed back out the pub and onto the dreary rainy streets of Birkenhead.

***********

“Are you gonna have a word with your Lynn, then?” asked Nicky, finally breaching the subject after dinner. It wasn’t that I was avoiding talking about our Jamie, but I’d felt off since bumping into this Stuart fella.

“Yeah, look, I’ll give her a bell in a minute. I don’t know if there’s much she can do though. Jamie’s a grown lad, like. But it can’t help trying. I’ll have a word with him meself too if I bump into him.”

Nicky looked unconvinced, but didn’t pursue the conversation any further.

“So, you gonna chat with Bernie about this man then? You sure you’re just not forgetting about him or something? It seems weird that he could spot you after all these years and that he knew your mates and stuff, yet you couldn’t place him.”

“Honestly, love, I don’t know. There’s something not right there. Like, I didn’t feel it when we were chatting, but when I was on me way back home there was something bothering me. I just can’t put me finger on it. I’ll get on to Bernie now.”

“Lynn first, Steve.”

I nodded.

“Anyway, thanks for tea. It was lovely. Leave the dishes. I’ll wash up in a minute. You go put your feet up and watch some telly. I’ll make you a cup of tea and bring it into you when I’m done on the phone.”

Nicky got up from the kitchen table and went into the bedroom, probably to get into her pyjamas. I grabbed my mobile from the countertop and went out back into the yard. It was still drizzling.

I called Lynn, but it called out and went to her voice messages. I left a short message telling her what had happened and asked her to call me back. I said I’d be into her tomorrow too around dinnertime. Then I dialled Bernie.

“Hello.”

“Alright Bern, it’s me.”

“Alright Ste. Everything alright?”

“Yeah, look, I think so. Here, does the name Stuart Murphy mean anything to you?”

“Stuart Murphy?” There was a short silence. “I remember the Murphys from back in Seacombe. Didn’t our Lynn used to knock about with one of the girls? Sam or something? Is he one of their lot?”

“You mean Sandra?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. Yeah, I think they were pals for a while.”

Had our Lynn and Sandra known each other? Lynn was a couple of years younger than me, but in my head Sandra was my age. Or at least, she was in my year at school. God, why is everything so fuzzy from that period?

“Why anyway?” said Bernie filling the silence I’d unwittingly left.

“I bumped into him—this Stuart fella—down the Lion this afternoon. He recognised me and started chatting, but honestly Bern, I don’t remember him. At least, I don’t think I do. But there’s something bugging me about the whole thing. I just don’t know what it is. He said they moved away after something happened when he was thirteen.”

“Oh right. What was it? Some beef with another family or something?”

“Yeah, I don’t know. He was gonna tell me what it was, but I had to take a call and when I got off the phone, he was gone. No idea where he went.”

“That’s weird. Look, leave it with me Steve, I’ll have a word with some of the old heads from back then. Maybe they’d know something.”

I thanked him and we wrapped up the conversation.

*********

I was walking down Poulton Road. The night sky hung heavy with low clouds and the thick fumes of the occasional passing car. The shops lining the road were all dark. They seemed closed for the evening. It was mainly hardware and soft furnishing type places. Their displays oddly bare. I thought there was a newsagents on the corner, but I couldn’t locate it.

The flats above the shops emitted faint glows of soft warm light from behind thick fabric and net curtains. I could catch the odd burst of canned laughter from TVs behind the windows. The pavements were illuminated periodically by the orange glow of sodium streetlamps, punctuated intermittently by the harsh white of the headlights on the passing cars, obscuring the view of the drivers through the windshield.

I felt the first sharp cold raindrop brush against the side of my cheek.

I was the only one out walking. I looked behind me, but there was nobody. Poulton Road stretched off into the distance, getting darker and darker the deeper I looked down it. I arrived at a junction. I looked up to the street sign on the outer wall of the brick shop on the corner. Clarence Road. I looked right, down Clarence Road. The road was flanked on either side with tatty looking brick built Victorian terraces. The road seemed to come to a dead end after about 150 yards or so, dead-ended by what looked like a wire fence bordering some industrial site. It was hard to tell as the streetlamps down the bottom end didn’t seem to be working properly, cutting out every few seconds before briefly whimpering back to life.

There was something about the scene which wasn’t sitting right with me. The view, looking down to the bottom of the road from Poulton Road, made me feel uneasy. A car passed behind me, causing me to turn away briefly. When I looked back, I caught a glimpse of movement down the end of terrace house on the right side of the road. As if someone was running into the side alley which led to the slightly wider alleyway running the length of the back yards of all the houses on the road.

I decided to walk down and take a look.

As I set off down the road, it struck me how dark it was. All the lights in all the houses were off. Well, all except one house. The house down the far end where I’d seen movement. From that house, I could just about see a dull orange glow emanating from one of the front bedroom windows. I suddenly felt a chill run down my spine. I felt a strong urge to turn around and run, but at the same time it felt like the I was being drawn down the road, through the blackness, towards the light of that window. As if my feet weren’t touching the ground and I was being, against my will, pushed slowly from behind, helpless to resist the forwards momentum. The sounds of the passing cars on Poulton Street and the faint noises of televisions from within the flats above the shops had now ceased. The only noise was the patter of raindrops forming into puddles on the pavement. My breath started to quicken as I moved, slowly but incessantly, down the road towards the house.

As I drew closer, I was able to see the shape of something in the upstairs window from which the light came. It was a person, seemingly standing directly in front of the window, face just in front of the window pane. But they were somehow in silhouette. I couldn’t discern any features. At least, not of the face. But, from the stature and what looked like long hair, it seemed to me as if it were a woman. Judging by the slightly hunched shoulders, an older woman perhaps. I felt myself transfixed by this dark shape. Something in me told me to look away, but my neck would not turn. The figure pulled me ever closer towards the house, until eventually I was standing directly in front of the house, on the pavement on the opposite side of the road, my gaze still tilted towards this shadowy shape in the window.

The next moment, a terrified scream pierced through the silence from my left, somewhere from within the industrial ground behind the wired fence, shocking me out of my stupor. I turned my head towards the source of the noise, scanning the distant darkness for some sign of movement. But there was nothing. Just empty ground, lit by a sole lamp attached to one of the buildings, the dim light reflecting off the puddles all around the pockmarked ground.

I turned back to the house and the window. My heart stopped. The light in the room was now off, but the figure was somehow illuminated in a kind of hard grey light. A face, a horrible horrible face, stared intently down at me. Piercing eyes, washed of colour, stabbed at me like daggers. A wicked, cruel grin started to form on the figure, widening ever more until they were baring teeth. Yellow teeth, tapered into fangs across the mouth. The mouth continued to widen, opening up into a pitch dark chasm.

I started to scream…

**********

 “Steve! Steve!”

I woke to darkness. My heartbeat was racing and tears were streaming down my face. My cheeks throbbed with heat. The sheets were damp with sweat.

“Shhh. Shhh. Steve, you’re alright. You were having a nightmare.”

It was Nicky. She placed her hand on my beating chest. I tried to say something, but no words would come.

“You were really screaming there. You gave me such a fright. Are you okay? Here, I’ll go get you a drink of water and a towel.”

 She got up out of bed and went out onto the landing. I saw the glow of the downstairs light come on. I looked at the clock on the bedside table. 01:36.

*********

Nicky was already up and gone to work before I got up the next morning. My shift wasn’t starting until this afternoon, so I didn’t feel particularly rushed to do anything. I made myself a cup of instant coffee and some toast and sat down at the kitchen table.

I decided that before I did anything, I had to call our Lynn. But I’d shower first. I was still sticky from all the sweating last night.

*********

“Look Ste, I’ll have a word with him, but he’s a grown man at this point. He’s as much likely to listen to you or our Bernie than he is me. He always liked you. Take him for a pint or something and just chat one on one. You’ll probably make better headway than I could.”

“Alright. Ask him to give me a call. But just make sure he doesn’t knock round without calling first.” I hesitated a moment. “Listen, Lynn, do you remember someone called Sandra Murphy?”

 “Sandra Murphy? From back when we were kids? Yeah, she lived in New Brighton didn’t she? We were mates in school, but I haven’t seen her since the 70s. I think the family all moved away all of a sudden. Or there was something like that anyway. I remember there was some drama. Why anyway?”

“I bumped into this fella called Stuart down the pub yesterday. He said he was her cousin. He recognised me, but, honestly Lynn, I’ve got no recollection of him. Do you remember him?”

“Wasn’t he one of your mates or something? I remember there was some little blonde lad called Stuart who used to kick about with you. I don’t know if he was related to Sandra or not though.”

There was a brief pause in which I heard Lynn almost gasp.

“Now that you say it Steve, didn’t something happen to Stuart? Like don’t take my word for it, but I think that’s why they moved away. There was something big.”

“Do you remember what?”

“Nah, but I remember all the grown ups on the road were really upset. Even mum and dad spoke about it. Look, I’ll try and get in touch with Sandra. I think Margie knows some of the Murphys. If anyone can find out where she is, Margie can. I’ll give you a bell later, alright?”

“Cheers Lynn. I appreciate it, honestly. And, look, sorry coming to you about Jamie. I’ll take him for a drink in the week. Ta-ra. Speak later.”

********

I arranged to meet with Sandra on the New Brighton waterfront. It was a couple of days since my first phone call with Lynn. I hadn’t had anymore nightmares, but I had developed a persistent uneasiness about being watched. I felt unseen eyes on me everywhere, even when completely alone. Lynn had sounded really upset, even scared, on the phone, but she wouldn’t tell me what the issue was. She just said that I had to talk to Sandra myself. This didn’t fill me with confidence.

The weather was miserable with a sharp wind cutting in across the Mersey. Heavy cloud cover muted the light and colours. I sipped on a takeaway coffee I’d picked up from the newly opened chain up the promenade while sitting on a bench in one of the old Victorian shelters. Seagulls danced noisily in the wind above. 

I hadn’t seen Sandra in thirty years. I had no idea if I’d be able to recognise her after all this time. Or she, me. I saw a few likely candidates walk up, but they all kept walking by. I checked my phone. No new messages. I still hadn’t heard from Jamie.

A woman called my name. I looked up. A woman, who I presumed to be Sandra was standing right in front of me.

“Sandra?” I asked.

“Yeah, long time no see. It was a bit weird to have your Lynn contact me out the blue like that. How you been?”

Before I had time to respond, she urged that we go for a walk along the beach. The tide was coming in, but we’d have a good thirty minutes before it’d be in close enough for us to have to get off. I zipped up my coat and we walked down a nearby ramp onto the cold windswept beach.

“Steve, Lynn said you spoke to our Stuart.”

“Yeah, I think so. He approached me down the Lion the other day. I didn’t recognise him, but he recognised me. I don’t even know if I remember him full stop. It’s all pretty hazy, honestly.”

“Steve, that couldn’t have been our Stuart. Stuart killed himself twenty years ago.”

The words struck me dead in my tracks. I had gone through the many possible scenarios of what she might say before we met, but none of them had been this. I searched into Sandra’s eyes, but I felt completely unmoored and struggled to ground myself.

“Then, who was that in the pub?” I finally managed to ask.

“I don’t know Steve, but I can tell you that whoever it was, it wasn’t our Stuart. Here, look, I’ve got a photo of him from a couple of months before he… Well, you know.” Sandra produced a single photograph from her pocket. The photograph blew noisily in the wind. We turned our bodies to shield it from the wind. The man in the photo was the man I’d seen in the pub, only he looked younger. But he also looked more haggard. More gaunt. More pale. “He wasn’t in a good way at the end,” said Sandra as if reading my thoughts. “He never really got over what happened to him back then.”

“Sandra, what did happen to him. Honestly, for the life of me, I don’t remember anything.”

Sandra’s face looked shocked. “But you were there Steve? How do you not remember?”

Again, I was left dumbstruck.

Sandra went on. “The house down the bottom of Clarence Road. The woman. That old bitch. She took Stuart and she did things to him. Steve. How do you not remember?”

As if a light had been turned on in some remote and long forgotten dark corner of my brain, it suddenly all came flooding back to me.

The house at the bottom of Clarence Road. When we were kids, there was a woman who lived there. She lived alone. She was never married. As kids, we always used to play football down that end of the street, using the wire fence marking the boundary of the industrial estate as the goal. The ball was always hitting off against her house and she used to scream at us from the upstairs bedroom window, claiming that she’d set the dogs on us if we didn’t stop. She never had dogs and we knew it. We thought she was mad. We used to taunt her, give her the two fingers…We even shoved dog shit in her letterbox a couple of times. A heat-like sensation starts to rise in my cheeks. I feel shame. But at the time, it just felt like a bit of fun. A kind of joke war with some miserable spinster who was determined to see us not have any fun.

One of the days we had been playing, one of our gang, I can’t remember who…it might have even been me, kicked the football up and hard and it had gone right through her sitting room window. We all legged it immediately down the alleyway of the house opposite hers, hiding round back. There was a loud wailed scream and the sound of the front door opening. We giggled childishly. There were no more sounds.

After a couple of minutes, we emerged from the alley to find the woman’s door left gaping open. We could see through the door into the house. The hallway within was deep in shadow. There were no lights on within. The woman must have gone looking for us up the road or something. I don’t know why, but we volunteered Stuart to go in and get the ball. He was reluctant, but we must the peer pressure must have been too much. We told him we’d keep watch.

Stuart walked hesitantly in through the front door and disappeared into the shadow of the hall. As soon as he was out of sight, a swift shapeless movement disturbed the shadowy hallway and the front door slammed shut. A second later there was a loud terrified scream. It was Stuart.

We ran. We ran all the way up Clarence Road and round the corner onto Poulton Road and up to my mum and dad’s house.

What happened next exactly, I honestly don’t know. My mum and dad, and probably a couple of the other grown ups on the road seemingly went down to the house and…well, I don’t know. We were waiting anxiously on the pavement outside our house for their return. It started to rain but we refused to go indoors. After about half an hour, we saw the adults return, Stuart in the arms of his dad, blood pouring down his legs, running freely in the rain down his dad’s jeans. We tried to run up and speak to Stuart but my dad held us back and ushered us inside, telling us to give me them some space. We watched from the window as Stuart was placed in the back of his dad’s car and taken to the hospital. For days after, I tried asking my mum and dad what had happened, but they just kept fobbing me off, refusing to give any more detail, seemingly incandescent with anger. An anger that felt directed at me. But, I was told time and time again from then on, that I was never to go down Clarence Road ever again, not phrased so much as an order as much as it was a warning.

We never saw Stuart again. There wasn’t a big announcement or anything. He just stopped coming out to play. We’d knock round, but he mum would just tell us, rather coldly, that he wasn’t feeling well and slam the door in our faces. And then one day, the family wasn’t in their house anymore. A new family moved in. And things moved on. We got older and the memories of what had happened faded into the background and eventually into nothing. A few years later, our family moved away from Poulton Road to a completely different part of the Wirral, starting a new chapter in our lives.

“Steve, I don’t know who you saw in that pub, but it wasn’t our Stuart. If there’s someone going round pretending to be him, they’re a sick bastard. If you bump into them again, can you give me a call? I’ll give you my number now.”

**************

It was getting on a bit, but I decided to walk the couple of miles from New Brighton down to Poulton Road. I didn’t have any particular plan in mind, but I needed some time and space to process things. There was a text from Nicky asking how the meeting with Sandra had gone. I texted back to tell her that I’d let her know later tonight. I just needed to go for a walk.

Poulton Road felt much the same as it always had. A mix of housing, flats and shops opened out onto a narrow but busy road. The shops themselves and the cars driving down the road had changed, but otherwise it could have been the same streetscape as that from my childhood. I walked past our old house and looked up at what used to be mine and Bernie’s old room. There was an Everton flag up in the window. The house looked unremarkable. The same as every other house on the road. I walked on.

 A minute or two later, I was standing at the turn onto Clarence Road. The light was beginning to fade and the streetlamps had started to come on. I turned and looked directly down the road. Again, it looked unremarkable. There were more cars parked along the road than there had been back when we were kids, but it otherwise was no different to how it had always been, at least in so much as I could remember. There was no sign of life on the street itself, but lights from people’s sitting rooms bled out onto the street, indicating activity within. The only difference that I could tell was that the wire fence at the bottom of the road that separated it from the industrial park had now been replaced by a brick wall. You could still see the same industrial buildings behind it, although they now seemed abandoned. My eyes drifted towards the house. It was hard to tell anything from this angle, so I crossed over the road to get a better look. The house was dark.

I pushed through the resistance my body and mild felt, telling me not to go any further, and began walking, slowly but surely, down the road towards the house. As I drew closer, I could see that the house was actually boarded up. Sheets of MDF had been placed over the downstairs windows and the front door. The upstairs windows were not covered, but were broken, probably by bored local kids. I arrived in front of the house and stared up at the bedroom window. There was nothing to see but the shadowy darkness of an old house left to ruin. I crossed the road. I tried the MDF board over the window to see if I could get a glimpse inside the sitting room, but it was fastened tight. I looked up the street, concerned that my presence might be taken as suspicious by some, but there was nobody out.

I heard a creak from my left and turned to see the front door slightly ajar, pushed briefly open in a breeze. The door wasn’t locked. The local kids must have forced it open or something. Or maybe some of the lads on the smack? An abandoned house would definitely be a tempting target for people looking for somewhere private to escape too in relative safety.

I checked once again that there was nobody watching from the street, opened the door and stepped through into the hallway. I tried the light switch on the wall immediately to my right, but unsurprisingly, it wasn’t working. It was hard to see clearly in the dim light, but the hall was strewn with beer cans, cigarette butts and other bits of litter and debris. I picked up a bin bag left on the floor to use to hold the front door open and let in some outside light. I dropped the bag in panic as a family of what looked like rats jumped out of a hole in the bottom of the bag, scurrying deeper into the house. I gathered my composure and used the bag to wedge the front door open. The smell from all the dumped rubbish was foul.

I pushed through the hallway. The hall opened out into a small kitchen at the end of the corridor. The door to the sitting room was to my right. With the window boarded up, it was practically pitch black inside the sitting room. I pulled out my phone and woke it up. The pale light from the green screen was so diffuse as to barely penetrate the darkness at all. I gave myself a bit of time to acclimatise. As I shuffled awkwardly in the dark, my feet kept brushing up against rubbish on the floor and I suddenly became hyper aware of the danger of there being discarded needles on the floor. As my eyes slowly became used to the dark conditions, I spotted something in the corner of the room, in the alcove next to where a gas stove used to be installed. I carefully walked over to the object and picked it up to examine it. It was a football. Albeit, completely flat with all the air long gone out of it. It looked old. The thought struck my mind as to whether it was our old football.

There was a loud creak above my head and a few motes of dust fell onto my head from the ceiling above. I froze. One second, two seconds passed. I held my breath. Then, there was the unmistakable sound of a footstep overhead. This was followed by silence. My hands gripped tightly onto the flat ball in one and the phone in my other. I waited another second, calculating how I was going to make a run for it. Suddenly, my phone burst into life, the midi sounds of the default ringtones slicing through the silence like a hot knife through butter. Instinctively, I glanced at the screen. It was Lynn. I quickly pressed the reject button. Whoever was above started across the upstairs room at a run. My heart jumped into my throat and I burst across the sitting room and out into the relative light of the hall, turning left and towards the front door. I stopped dead in my tracks. Just outside of the front door stood Stuart, or at least the person claiming to be him. The last thing I saw as the front door slammed shut was a sick and twisted smile curling up from the corners of his mouth. And then I was in complete pitch blackness. I turned. The footsteps upstairs arrived on the landing at the top of the stairs. I could feel a heaviness in the atmosphere. It pulled at me. I felt tears stinging my eyes. Then, the woman—I knew in my body it was her—started running down the stairs at some sickly impossible speed. I fell to my knees in the darkness and vomited uncontrollably. The woman stood right above me. I looked up. A dim grey light illuminated the woman’s face. The same horrible and wicked smile as in my nightmare, the same as that on Stuart’s face not three metres away. She gripped my face with her cold and icy hands and my mind too succumbed to the icy and desolate blackness.

*************

“Alright Ste. It’s Jamie. I’m just borrowing me mum’s phone. She said you wanted to go out for a pint? Do you reckon you can lend me a tenner till next week when I get me giro? I’ll pop round later, alright? See you later, Ste. Ta-ra.”

You say it best, when you say nothing at all

There came a point a few months back – about 75% of the way through the campaign – where I put down Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and never picked it up again. I did this, not because it was a bad game particularly, but because I felt fatigued. Fatigued at what aspect I wasn’t sure, but I simply couldn’t bring myself to navigate a single air vent more than I already had. The game was beating me down and any enjoyment I had felt towards the start had long since vanished. I closed the game and felt a surge of relief that it was all over.

It wasn’t too long after this that I found myself staring at the ‘Buy Now’ button on the Final Fantasy XV page on the PlayStation Store. For those that know me or have read previous entries on this blog, you would understand that the release of a Final Fantasy game is a sacred day in my calendar. Despite not always loving the games themselves, I hadn’t missed the release of a single main series entry since I bought Final Fantasy VII back in 1997. But this time, I wasn’t sure. I just couldn’t bring myself to part with my hard-earned pounds. With the game receiving generally favourable reviews, this reticence was something I struggled to understand. Wasn’t this entry a return to the glory days of the series? Hadn’t it made major strides towards combatting the problems of XIII and all its mind-numbing linearity? By all accounts it had and yet still my finger wouldn’t make that final push.  I gave it a few minutes and then, still no closer to making a decision, closed the store page and bought Nuclear Throne for the Vita instead (a much easier purchase at a much more friendly price point).

Later that day, me and my wife decided to sit down and watch J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost with Robert Redford, a film about one man’s battle for survival as his solo-piloted yacht slowly sinks into the depths of the Indian Ocean. Despite clocking in at a little over two hours, nothing but a few incoherent mutterings are ever spoken by Bobby (the one and only actor) throughout the entire run-time of the film. And yet even with this distinct lack of dialogue, the story is coherent, the drama is taut, the character is fleshed out, and the emotional impact is strong. I know nothing about manning yachts, fixing holes in fibreglass hulls or fixing busted radios, yet I was able to understand immediately what was happening and follow Redford’s plan to try and solve the issues at hand. I may (will) never desire to one-man a boat out into the middle of an ocean filled with sharks and stuff, but I was able to understand his sense of adventure and appreciate the tranquillity such a journey brought him. I’m not going to claim the film is perfect (you need only see the many angry sailors who have reviewed the film on IMDB to find out why), but it was a very entertaining and, as I came to realise, it entertained precisely for the very reasons why Deus Ex didn’t and Final Fantasy XV probably wouldn’t have.

You see, what All Is Lost taught me was that sometimes you didn’t need a lot of words to tell a lot of story. The film’s success (for me at least) was its ability to convey a great deal without ever resorting to exposition and deep and binding lore. In Deus-Ex, I was happy enough with the gameplay, but what I had dropped out on (pretty much from the start as it turned out) was its story and how it was told. Right from the get-go, the story is told to you through the medium of narrated cut-scenes, character monologues (masked as dialogue with Jensen) and page upon page of emails, text messages and e-books. Technological terms, government factions, non-government factions, names, places, grievances… all of them were thrown at me in the hope that over time some of them might stick and make me care enough about what was happening to keep playing. But the problem was, I had stopped caring before I had even taken control of Jensen. There was just too much story and background to get to know. I just have enough on my plate trying to keep up to date with real-world happenings to care about the Deus-Ex universe. The game may be trying to address real-world discrimination and terrorism by allegorising it into a tale of synths and humans, but frankly it all left me feeling a little flat.

Equally with Final Fantasy XV, the reason for my hesitation in buying the game was not because the game lacked on a technical/gameplay level (which apparently it doesn’t), but because all those trailers I watched beforehand featured the same problem as Deus Ex…i.e. story being forced into you in massive chunks of dialogue and text. Being a supposed fan of Final Fantasy you might well rightly question what I expected given that is precisely what the series is known for, but I am also no longer a teenager and prepared to put up with such things.

If I think back to the games that I have enjoyed in recent years, many of them are wordless (or nearly wordless), and I think part of that is because they didn’t insist on using a battering ram to impart narrative and purpose.  Take Hyper Light Drifter, a game in which there is an explicit lack of words and in which story is told pretty much entirely via the visuals, art and music. I came out the other end of that game with the very real sense of “knowing” its world and its history. That “knowing” may be vague and hazy, but equally it was visceral in a way in which Deus Ex: Mankind Divided never was.  This wasn’t achieved in spite of the lack of words, but precisely because of it. I wasn’t told the story, I was left to experience it.

Of course, I’m not saying that all games should be wordless, that would be ridiculous. But there is a happy medium which can be achieved. Naughty Dog are a great example of how to do this, with their games often striking that balance between dictated narrative and environmental storytelling. However, they are not alone. Valve are another one who have proven their ability to link in great writing with great gameplay. Be it the abandoned farmhouse in Half Life 2 with its walls smeared with warnings/laments in blood, or the hidden rooms beneath the facility of Portal that spoke to the seeming absence of others, these little touches added more to their worlds in one glance than ten minutes of contrived fictional political intrigue dialogue ever could.

Of course, this is all entirely subjective, and I understand that there are probably many out there that enjoy immersing themselves in these fictional worlds, but for me, I am tired of such tropes. I also do appreciate the irony that my writing is very much of the verbose persuasion and as such I am in no position to be telling others to write less not more, but hey I have a blog to write! I think ultimately, what I am looking for, is for game developers to place a little more trust in their audience. The best games have interesting worlds, not interesting stories. Let us live those worlds. Let us see the worlds you create rather than pushing us through them. Let us learn your story rather than telling it to us. As in all great works of fiction, it is intimacy that comes before engagement. If I don’t feel I understand your world on a personal level, then I am much less likely to understand your story on a personal level.

A Walk Across an Alien Field

I’m struggling to pinpoint exactly what it is I feel about No Man’s Sky. I find the game hypnotic and immersive, but also frustratingly jarring. I love its scope and scale, but am also frequently disappointed by its lack of variety. I love the way it lets you build your own story, but I also wish there was more of a structured narrative to pull me through it.

You see, it’s a game that is simultaneously all these things…a game that contradicts itself from start to last. It’s a game that’s not really a game until you have to manage your inventory or shoot laser beams at flowers to gain chemical elements, at which point it is the most game. It’s a game that I wish had the balls to not be a game at all, but also a game in which I wish had more game to it.

(Okay I’ll stop saying ‘game’ now)

When I initially thought about writing this piece, my brain was full of the wonderfully overwrought prose that I excel in, full of glowing descriptions of the planets I visited and the vistas I left behind. I wanted to tell the world (or more likely, the two people who actually read my blog – shout out to my wife and mum!) about what I’d seen, and beguile them with stories of my travels in deep space. But then I listened to some other people’s experiences. I listened and realised that my tales were simply not that interesting. They were interesting to me because I lived them, but when stacked up against everybody else’s they were entirely unremarkable. But then again, so were yours probably.

And you see, that’s the thing… Everyone sees something completely unique, and therefore much of the thrill is lost. The ability to capture an audience with fanciful tales of humongous spider crabs chasing me down a mountain, forcing me to dive headfirst off the cliffs and into a vivid blue lake filled with avatar-eating fish is lost when every other man/woman and his/her dog has been chased/eaten/stomped on/shot by some other weirdly wonderful creature. When Europeans set off in the 15^th century to conquer, exploit and enslave the peoples and lands of the unexplored corners of the globe, they were able to capture the attention of the public precisely because they were small bands of intrepid explorers seeing and doing things that nobody else of their skin-colour persuasion had even thought possible. If everybody was setting sail for the southern continents then why would anybody care what Magellan or Drake had to say? Would Magellan and Drake even have waxed so lyrically about their buccaneering adventures if Juan Garcia next door had been stealing the gold from some other American tribe 100 miles down coast? They wouldn’t… It’s as simple as that.

So where does that leave the game and my experiences with it? Does my experience suddenly become devoid of value and wonder simply because it’s just another log-entry in the preposterously large book of weird things thrown up by NMS’s complicated mathematical algorithms? Well no of course it doesn’t. But it means that I have had to approach the game slightly differently. Eschewing the conventional NMS wisdom that the fun is to be had at the centre of the galaxy, I have, quite naturally, found myself spending inordinate amounts of time just flying around and becoming intimate with my home system(s). Beyond keeping my ship and life support systems topped up, or occasionally chancing upon an upgrade of some kind, I have interacted little with the world around me. Like an intergalactic William Wordsworth, I have strolled the lushest of plains, scaled the highest of mountains, rambled across the craggiest of landscapes, swam in the most tranquil of lakes; all simply in the name of being there and enjoying the view. 10 hours in, and I have visited five planets and a couple of space stations across two systems. That may sound like a lot, but when I hear reports of people mainlining the game in little over 30 hours, I can’t help but feel my pace is a little more relaxed than the average.

It’s a weird beast is No Man’s Sky. I have gone from the most hype, to the least hype, and seen my interest peak and trough more times than I can remember with any other game. I started in awe of the size of the thing but have since moved to an appreciation of its understated beauty. It’s a game that while occasionally frustrating is full of charm.

When I come across an alien outpost and am welcomed in with simple yet elegant Asimov-esque prose I wish there was more to it narratively. I wish there were occasional planets with hidden entrances in the ground leading to bustling subterranean cities and entire populations of aliens to converse with and learn from. I wish these things, but that is not what No Man’s Sky is about. The Euclid galaxy (the outer rims at least) is largely devoid of civilisation and that is just the way it is. There was once something there, but those societies are now dead. Perhaps this is just Sean Murray preparing us for the realities of inter-galactic travel, where even if we were suddenly able to dance our merry-way around star-systems, the chances of encountering galactic civilisations is extraordinarily low. Who knows?

Either way, No Man’s Sky is a compelling experience and one that manages to shine despite its flaws. I think the talk around it meeting, or not meeting, people’s expectations needs to be put to bed because it is tiresome to listen to. This is the game that we have and people should try to enjoy it on its own terms. What the tiny team at Hello Games have produced is a remarkable achievement and deserves better than the conversation that’s existed around it these few weeks.

Is it the last game you’ll ever need? Of course it isn’t. But it is a wondrous and often stunningly beautiful thing! Hats off to Sean Murray and Hello Games! You guys should go take a break!

Being Bad at Games

A couple of weeks back I became acutely aware of something about myself…something which, in the grand scheme of things, is pretty minor stuff, but within the confines of my own ego deeply troubling. What I realised was that… I am just not very good at videogames. I am not very good, and slightly more worrying I seem to be getting worse.

This startling moment of realisation came when playing Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. The scene in question, a hair-raising car chase down a hill strewn with shanty towns and market stalls, was something that, one would have to imagine, had been streamlined to within an inch of its life so that even the most casual of players could enjoy the “POWER OF THE PLAYSTATION”™ at its brash and brawny best. Yet, by the time I reached the final climactic part and triggered the cut-scene (which was awesome by the way) I think my death tally was up to four or five. What was meant to be an exhilarating rollercoaster ride had turned, for me, into a bit of a slog. Honestly, I was relieved when it was finally all over.

Now, I could easily put this down to simple tiredness given that I was playing this scene around midnight on the Friday of a relatively long week, but I would only be kidding myself in doing so. The honest truth is, I have found myself dying an inordinate amount of times during my playthrough of Uncharted 4 and there has been little to no correlation between my death statistics and levels of tiredness during gameplay. When I found myself stuck in the middle of no man’s land being blasted in the face by an armoured goon with a shotgun, it was not because I had been mowing the lawn that afternoon, it was because I was engaging in bad practice. When I was spotted for the umpteenth time by the enemy as I hung off the crumbling ledge of a medieval monastic ruin and subsequently sent to an early grave, it was not because I had spent the day translating Japanese legal contracts, it was because my instincts of when to move from cover had been wrong.

At first, I was defiant…after all I had completed Uncharted 2 on Crushing once before. Sure, it had been a frustrating experience and one involving many, many deaths, but I had proven that I was able to deal with third person cover mechanics in a large 3D space. But as the deaths in Uncharted 4 began to accumulate with a decidedly alarming regularity, I had little choice but to concede defeat. As it turns out, I am simply not up to being the bad-ass swashbuckler that Naughty Dog wanted me to be.

And with that grudging acceptance, I have started to look back over my history with games and question whether I have ever really excelled at any one title…to look to whether I had ever been able to claim that I was up there in the top five percentile of people playing. And you know what I found? Nothing…

For example, I always felt like I could beat anybody at a game of Pro Evo or FIFA on my day, but if I’m being brutally honest with myself I have almost certainly lost more than I have won. I remember the day that I brought back home FIFA 10 (my second FIFA) from the shop and challenged a strictly Pro-Evo loving friend to a match, only to find myself at the end of the 90minutes on the wrong end of a 2-0 drubbing. As was ever the case, I dismissed the loss as me falling foul to exploits within the game, but the truth was that even when I used those same exploits in subsequent rematches I still tended, more often than not, to finish on the losing side. The exploits may have been a factor in my losses, but it was my own relative lack of ability that was the real reason I failed to win.

It’s hard to find screenshots that accurately depict the devastating effects of a finesse shot against your goal, so I plumped for this instead.

Even if I think back to playthroughs of single player games like Mass Effect, GTA or the Batman Arkham series, I was still no stranger to the death screen. Perhaps not to quite the same level as with Uncharted 4, but still the fact remains that I have rarely found these games to be completely plain-sailing. In fact, thinking back, I cannot remember any one game in the past twenty or so years where I have managed to make my entire way through the game without dying at least once.

An element of despondency is probably at play here in me suddenly feeling so inept at the entertainment medium that I love above all else, but there is nothing quite so humiliating as facing the prospect of dropping down a difficulty level in a mainstream release, just so I can get through the game without tearing my hair out. I mean, we’re not talking about Dark Souls here… These games are marketed to the mainstream and it is expected that anybody with any level of competency at games would be comfortably able to complete them on the default setting.

I console myself slightly in the fact that I am spectacularly solid at Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac, but even there am I really able to make those claims when I have only completed Spelunky once in a little over a 1000 attempts (albeit with the caveat that my past few hundred attempts have been with the sole aim of reaching and clearing Hell)?  The truth is probably not…

I started writing this piece with the express intention of uncovering some sub-conscious reasoning behind my recent struggles with Uncharted, but the more I wrote, the more I realised that this was something that reaches back much further into my gaming history. All excuses put aside, there is little choice for me but to accept that I kinda suck at games.

But you know what? Who cares? I am just not that competitive a person and I am probably not alone in this (oh god, please don’t tell me I’m alone in this!!). It may sting a little when a friend mocks my attempts with derision, or when some random unknown on a message board tells me how I’m the worst player they’ve ever come across, but ultimately I am able to shrug off these criticisms and still enjoy all of these games in the spirit in which they were meant. Everybody has their own strengths and weaknesses and it would be ridiculous of me to get hung up on the fact that I keep dying in games (even though I put more time and effort into gaming than I do pretty much anything else).

And so, with that in mind, I will plough on with Uncharted and finish the blasted thing before the week is out. Come hell or high water, I will see the end to Drake’s story and I will write some prosaical review of my thoughts about it and I will post it here! The Uncharted games have played a pivotal role in getting me back interested in gaming, and I will be dammed if I’m going to let the last entry get the better of me like this! You may call me an amateur…you may laugh at my many failed attempts to finish a glorified FMV sequence…you may even think me an idiot for not simply lowering the difficulty, but you most certainly may not call me a quitter!

 

That PC Gaming…

*I’d just like to start here by saying this piece is a bit meandering and far from my finest piece of writing, but it was something on my mind and I just felt like I had to get it out! Cheers!

P.S. Sorry about the title too!

************************************************************************************************************

A recent change in my situation has granted me, for the first time in nigh on 20 years, access to a PC capable of running games that demand slightly more horsepower than stock windows solitaire and minesweeper. We are not talking about hardware like a GTX Titan here… No, what I have access to is something entirely more modest (a GTX 670 if you must know…). There are specs that I could list, but the truth is that I wouldn’t entirely understand what they all mean. And plus, they do not make for particularly interesting reading. But either way, it’s a PC that is able to comfortably run pretty much anything at high to ultra levels that was released prior to 2012 and that is good enough for me.

So, with all this “power” now suddenly at my fingertips, you may think that I would open myself up to the world of modern PC gaming and enjoy all those recent classics that I have either missed or played at sub-standard PS3 levels… games such as…well you know… Euro Truck Simulator 2 (??), Anno 2070… (or god forbid Dota 2!!) . But alas, no!

The era that I decided to dive headfirst into was that weird period between 1999 and 2005… a period in which I had kind of fallen out of love with gaming. Sure, I had a PS2 and I played a good few of the major releases at the time (Devil May Cry, GTA III, Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy X etc.), but in all honesty my engagement with gaming was largely confined to sessions of Pro Evolution after university. This wasn’t down to anything as profound as me realizing the futility of gaming or suddenly appreciating how poor much of the writing in these games was… it was simply that I was at university and doing other things with my life.

So when I finally did emerge from my cocoon around 2007 with my purchase of the PS3 and suddenly discovered that gaming coverage on the internet had become, in some cases, actually pretty good, I started to hear about all these much loved and highly regarded game franchises that had completely passed me by. “System Shock you say? Hmmm, isn’t that some kind of Doom clone? Civilization? Can’t I just play Theme Park?“… I’m obviously exaggerating my ignorance for comical effect here, but you take my point. There was this huge catalogue of games that had built up that I simply had no level of engagement with.

I thought about looking into playing some of these games, but this was a period in which talk of graphics cards and GPU clock speeds had started to become more prevalent on gaming message boards and the whole thing just went right over my head. I wouldn’t say I was intimidated by it all, but it just seemed unnecessarily complicated. Why would I bother going to all that trouble when I could just buy a PS3 or 360 and sit down and go? And that way, I wouldn’t have to bother with playing with a mouse and keyboard as well… The choice was obvious.

But then fastforward to 2016 and here I am, sitting in front of an ageing but capable Alienware machine with access to a catalogue of tens of thousands of games through Steam. I felt excited… I could sense that I was on the verge of going on some fantastical trip through a kind of lost world. A world in which many of the genre tropes, kinks and pitfalls that we see today were still being worked out. A world in which character models had a distinctly square character and nobody cared. The uncanny valley was still a good few miles down the road yet… I was super happy that I was going to be able to experience it all first hand… Happy, but also slightly apprehensive. Was this lost era of gaming going to be ruined for me by a combination of high expectations and being slightly spoiled by having grown accustomed to the graphical fidelity we have nowadays? Was I going to be able to deal with a mouse and keyboard? Well there was only one way to find out…

The first game I bought was Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition. Bought in one of those fabled Steam sales for a couple of quid, I immediately felt like I was winning. Sure, you might say 2 quid for a game released 16 years ago is a fair price, but having only really experienced the PSN model of pricing, it felt like a steal to me.

* By the way, I should preface this by stating that I played and loved Deus Ex: Human Revolution on the PS3, and also that stealth games are kinda my jam, so the game itself was not completely alien to me. But I was keen to see where the series started regardless.

So, anyway I start up the game and am happy to see that I can run the game on the highest settings! Oh, the “power”! But now that the game is up and running in all its vanilla, mod-less, year 2000 glory, I have to deal with that other big bug bearer of mine… that pesky mouse and keyboard thing.

It may seem a silly thing to be hung up on, but after having played with a controller for over two decades, the idea that I could easily adapt back to WASD seemed almost farcical to me. I genuinely believed it would be a major struggle and that I would, at best, only learn to cope with the control system at a bare minimum level… Five minutes later and the tutorial over, it was like I’d rediscovered my right hand. Movement was so natural that, before I had even reached the foot of the Statue of Liberty, I had stopped having to even think about it. One of the major things that had been keeping me from even attempting to engage with PC games had been swept away before I’d even shot a guy… Ridiculous!

All these stupid qualms about PC gaming now put aside, you may ask how was my overall experience with Deus Ex? It was…good. Of course I was unlikely to be blown away having spent the best part of a decade playing games with much more refined gameplay and graphics, but there was certainly a compelling flow to the game as I went on sneaking missions through air vents and up behind two-bit subway gangsters. I imagine that 16 year old me would have loved the whole section in the neon wonderland of Hong Kong, but as a 32 year old I found it interesting, but ultimately unremarkable.

In fact, without meaning to take anything away from the game, I would go as far as to say that very sentiment sums up my general feelings towards the game overall. I can see how liberating it must have been back in the day to allow the player the freedom to choose their own path of approach, but this is not necessarily something special nowadays. Games like Dishonored and even Deus Ex: HR have done the same thing, and done it better. But that is just a natural form of progress and it shouldn’t diminish Deus Ex’s status as an all time classic. And that is part of the joy of going on this journey… I am able to appreciate these things without necessarily having to love them.

Now, when I first started writing this piece I seriously considered detailing my thoughts on each of the games I have played on the PC in these past few months. I wanted to share with you my experience in going back to a period with which I had no affinity and talking about what I discovered. However, after a few failed drafts, I found that my experiences largely followed the same basic pattern. It was only with game genres that I had zero experience with that I found I was able to have any real fun beyond a basic level of curiosity (see blog posts on Civilization and Gunpoint). Again, that is not to diminish those games’ achievements, it is simply that I have now played more refined versions of those some basic mechanics and that often means that once the curiosity is satiated there is little left to sink your teeth into.

But even if my magical mystery tour into the early 2000s was a bit more flat than I was hoping for, it has certainly taught me that PC gaming is nothing to be scared of. In fact, I can very clearly see how in many ways it is the superior way to play many types of game. I do not plan on chucking the PS4 in the bin any time soon, but I can definitely see myself one day in the future, when the grass is greener and the bank account more flush, buying a proper PC that can run whatever is thrown at it. You may think that dream is pitifully small, but trust me, compared to where I was only six months ago the change in attitude is huge…

My First 4X: Civilization III

Perhaps it says something more telling about me personally, but when I found myself heading towards the year 2050, my coffers filled to the very brim with gold, I felt fairly confident of hitting a WIN screen. So when the ending screen showed up in what was my first playthrough of Sid Meier’s Civilization III (indeed my first playthrough of any Civ game), I was rather upset to find all the other leaders laughing and pointing at my puny nation and our feeble efforts. Here was me, Queen Elizabeth I of England, conqueror of the Spanish Armada and ruler over our nation’s golden age, smugly watching the gold pour in and the universities and libraries spring up across our lands, fully expecting the rest of the world to fawn over me in awe when really I was nothing more than a laughing stock. Suffice to say, my delusions of grandeur were quickly shot down as I found myself and my country relegated to rock bottom in pretty much every league table of note. No, I was not part of the old-hat money or culturally venerated elite, I was just another Liam Gallagher moving into a prestigious west London suburb and chucking a TV out the top floor stained glass window. The title of my saved game, “England the Glorious” would seem almost amusingly self-deprecating had it not been meant in all earnestness at the time.

There are two things to take away from this cautionary tale. One is perhaps that it might prove useful to read the game manual before beginning a new game in a genre with which you have zero experience. The second is that, in Sid Meier’s Civilization series, just as in the real world, money may bring power, but it does not guarantee success. You see, this is the thing I did not realise. In Civ III, the goal is not to stockpile money, but to, as the title of the game suggests, civilise the globe.

What exactly defines the term “civilising” can vary depending on your approach, but I have now found that in subsequent playthroughs (and redos) my style is to build a cultural hub and to then colonise uninhabited, resource rich lands in fits and spurts with a heavy leaning towards the sceinces. As I now enter into the middle ages with my oracles close to sussing out the ways of Physics and Invention, I feel quietly confident that these humble shores of England will produce the world’s first astronaut before celebrate the dawn of the 1600s. And Her Royal Majesty, Queen Elizabeth I of England, choses to do this and the other things, not because they are easy, but because I have set the game to Chieftain and AI aggression to low and therefore face little in the way of opposition. Only time will tell whether I will hit the stars in time for the great bard Billy Shakes to be one of the first passengers on board, but I’ve got to think I’m in with a shot. (Did I learn nothing from my previous brush with unbridled arrogant self-belief?)

This engagement with Civlization III has been part of my recent on-going attempt to familiarise myself with games and genres that I had, in years gone-by, given short shrift to. In my defence, this dismissal of the 4X genre was mainly down to me simply not having a PC capable of running games (at least that’s what I thought), but if I’m honest it was at least in part also down to the perhaps misguided perception that these games were overly-complicated and for people with unlimited time to sink into them. While it is certainly true that this game is a HUGE time-sink (did I really just spend my entire evening playing that??), the idea that it is too complex to be easily understood is clearly wrong. Sure, I recognise that I am probably still getting a lot of the game’s fundamentals wrong and that there are clearly levels of depth that I haven’t even touched yet, but I think I am basically there when it comes to understanding the game’s appeal and flow. I doubt I would have got there without the help of a couple of my work-colleagues pointing out where I was going wrong, but once that initial hurdle was overcome it was all relatively plain-sailing. I even learned to love menu-browsing and learning about all the different technology paths open to you (hence my desire to achieve space travel).

This is a game that I am truly glad I chose to spend the time getting to know. Whether this will lead on to me trying many of the other highly-regarded series in the 4X genre, I cannot say for sure, but I am certainly not scared of at least trying them anymore. In fact, my only fear would be that I get drawn in too-deeply. I have a house to fix-up, blogs to write and a mortgage to pay, and so the idea of losing myself in a game such as Civ III is just a little too appealing. A rogue-lite-like (my other recent genre of choice) at least allows me to put down my device at the end of a run, but the problem with Civilization III is that I become too invested in what I have built. I simply cannot bear the idea of not seeing out the path that fate has dealt my brave and bold nation.

So will my new science-led focus bring me the fawning adulation that I so desperately desire from my global friends and foes? Probably not, but I bet you I will learn another valuable lesson in how to play this game. And that is perhaps what I love about it the most. It is not a game that holds your hand. It is a game that gives you the freedom to experiment and to learn from your mistakes. And if that’s not a lesson for adult-hood and life, then what is?

When the sun finally does set on my empire (because inevitably it always does), I will hopefully be just a little bit wiser than I am now and hopefully more prepared to deal with my next challenge in the getting-to-know PC games thing that I have suddenly decided to make into a series of blog posts… Cities: Skylines. If I can build a nation and an empire, then surely a city will be child’s play, right?

 

 

Thoughts on Margret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”

PLEASE NOTE THIS BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS ABOUT THE HANDMAID’S TALE AND GEORGE ORWELL’S NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR

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It has been a couple of days since I finished Margret Atwood’s much referenced and much lauded book, The Handmaid’s Tale and I think I have a lot of thoughts about it. At least, I definitely find myself thinking about it a lot of the time. Not necessarily in that way you get when you put down a book that has taken you on some fantastic journey through lives and worlds previously unfathomable to you yet now known to you in the most intimate of levels, but in the way in which you know you have read something that has hit a nerve somewhere. Yet, try as I might, I have been unable to come to any conclusions as to what I actually feel about the book.

Did I like the book? Sure, it was pretty good. Not the best book I’ve ever read, nor the most beautiful prose, but it was enjoyable enough for me to come away from it open to reading more Margret Atwood. Certain elements of the backstory were left frustrating opaque, but I guess this, in part, could be explained away by the censored world that the protagonist, Offred, inhabits. Some characters felt under-explored or perhaps a little one-dimensional, but again Offred lives in a society which encourages faith over thought, and so it is perhaps not that surprising that she would probe so little behind the masks of her oppressors. In a world in which an ill-judged utterance or opinion could lead to your death, it is only natural that you would reserve your thoughts for only the most deserving. But these quibbles aside, The Handmaid’s Tale was largely a good read.

The reason why I am spending such an inordinate amount of time thinking about this book though is that I came away from it feeling slightly unnerved. It is not that I necessarily buy-in wholesale to the premise of a world in which women have moved so swiftly from a state of near-total objectification (pre-Gilead) to one of complete subjugation (early to mid-Gilead), but I don’t think that is what Margret Atwood was asking us to do. Yes, this is a book of speculative-fiction, but the extreme logical ends to which she takes the Gilead philosophy are, to me at least, simply a mirror to reflect our fears of people with loud and dogmatic voices, something as relevant today as it was 30 years ago or even 80 years ago. In this case, it was women who were the ones to be sacrificed in the name of the survivability of the human race, but it could easily have been a story about any other group or minority. Indeed, without meaning to draw crass and shallow comparisons, it is hard to believe that there was not some intent behind Atwood’s decision to title the novel’s willingly-subservient class of women as the “Aunts” given their obvious similarities to the “Uncle Tom” role assumed by certain black people during the slavery-era (or even beyond). Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but it was something that struck me early on and stayed with me throughout.

You do not have to dig particularly deep into this book to also see the obvious similarities with another famous piece of speculative-fiction, namely George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. Both books show you the world through the eyes of characters granted a certain level of status (as dictated by their oppressors) within their societies who are both flirting with ideas of thought and moral treason. Both books are dominated by mistrust and paranoia, and both, at times, leave you the reader feeling helpless. The thing that perhaps separates the two is that, in the end, The Handmaid’s Tale shows you that there was an eventual “out” for the oppressed people of Gilead, and so is perhaps the more hopeful of the two. Whereas Nineteen Eighty Four ends with our protagonist beaten down, broken and accepting of his fate, The Handmaid’s Tale explicitly tells us that not only did Offred escape, but that eventually Gilead society itself crumbled. Just as how the story of the formation of the Republic of Gilead is left obscured, so too is the story of its downfall, and that is undoubtedly a little frustrating. But, still, the more optimistic view of humanity is there. Yes, we may at times dig ourselves into desperate situations, but we also have the capability to dig ourselves out.

But then again, do we? The changed world from which these final revelations about Gilead are revealed is, for all its progress in terms of multi-cultural make up, still seemingly a patriarchal one. While nothing explicit is mentioned about its own time and morals, every speaker mentioned in the epilogue is a male. How are we to know the role women play at that time? The lecturer may talk in a way that suggests he does not necessarily agree with the morality imposed by the Gilead Republic on its people, but no insight is offered as to how things have changed in the years following the republic’s downfall. This could be no different to us wagging a disapproving finger at the Victorians and their seemingly-backwards views, when still today women in our very own western cultures (and many others) are oppressed in a number of different, and at times more insidious, ways.

I think ultimately, what Margret Atwood is asking us to do, or at least this is what I took away from the book, is to not be coerced by charismatic (or otherwise) people into definitive answers on how a “good” and “just” society should be. Like it or not, we all share a tiny planet together with a limited amount of space and resources, and it is up to us to work out a way to live together peacefully and respectful of each other. Everybody’s opinion matters, but on some issues, some people’s opinions will be (rightly) weighted more heavily. As a white male, I feel that of course my opinion matters when it comes to issues such as sexism, racism, xenophobia etc., but at the same time I accept that it is not my place to tell women, or black people or whoever else what they can and can’t be offended by and what should be important to them. I mean, it’s not even that there is a single consensus among any one group as to where our issues and problems lie. And you know why? Because that is the nature of being human. We disagree with each other, regardless of sex, race, religion or political leaning. When it comes to progress (and I think ultimately we are moving in the right direction) the most important thing is to listen and to try and understand. If everybody just “tells” others what they think and ends the conversation there, then we are doomed to failure. While The Handmaid’s Tale may take things to almost illogical and unlikely extremes, the message is clear… We should be listening more to each other.

So yes, that is where my time with The Handmaid’s Tale took me and it has been cathartic to write about it in this way. This is not a review of the book, nor is it (intentionally at least) a manifesto with which to beat people over the head with. Perhaps nobody will read it and I am simply speaking (or typing) to an empty auditorium, but for once that is not really the reason for me writing this blog post. This time, I write simply to bring some calmness to a confused and busy mind.

Gunpoint Review

It’s great when a plan comes together. But as it so it often goes, the best laid plans of mice and men go awry. In my recent playthrough of Tom Francis’ Gunpoint, my study into the art of stealth and infiltration was impeccable. Unfortunately, my execution was not.

Gunpoint, released by Tom Francis for PC, Mac and Linux back in 2013, is a stealth puzzle platformer in which you are tasked with retrieving various items from within the confines of often heavily guarded and fortified buildings for a variety of different people. The items are, in most cases, located behind a barrier of locked doors or on floors accessible only through isolated stairwells or lifts. As you would expect, finding a way to break or pass through these obstacles and reach your goal requires a level of Mission Impossible-like ingenuity and craft that, while at first appearing daunting, soon becomes an enjoyable exercise in logic as the matrix of interconnecting systems opens itself up to you.

The story, relayed to you over IM is delivered with tongue firmly in cheek, and is a fun little thing to role play your way through. The game begins with you retrieving CCTV footage that placed you at the scene of a murder that you did not commit, but quickly diverts into tales of corporate espionage, counter-espionage and other murderous sub-plots. You are given a certain level of freedom in how you respond to your employers, but with only one play through, I cannot be sure how much these effect the overall progression. There is a point in the game at which you are presented with a clear A/B choice of how to proceed, but this was rare in being so explicit.

The main source of enjoyment to be derived from Gunpoint though is, as I alluded to earlier, in pulling off the most intricate of infiltrations. When a well thought out setup of cross wiring (Cross-Link) and perfectly timed jumps leaves you with a clear path to your goal, it is enormously satisfying. Even if initial plans are rendered askew, the systems are flexible enough to allow you to create alternate routes on the fly. Of course, for those people who will only be satisfied at the cleanest of executions then the ability to restart the mission is there, but for those like me who appreciate the odd bit of chaos mixed in with their stealth, the game is more than adequate.

Having picked up the game for less than €5 in a recent Steam sale, I have to say I feel more than satisfied with my purchase. Even at full price (€7), I would still heartily recommend the game to anybody interested at all in what they have read or seen about the game. Its relatively short length may put some people off, but ultimately value in something subjective and I personally had no problem with the fact that I was able to complete the game in a single session.

So, if you, like me, enjoy a bit of stealth action puzzling, mixed in with a quirky bit of self-aware storytelling, complimented by a cool little soundtrack then Gunpoint is almost certainly the game for you!

Interview with Playful Panda Studios, Dublin

We met up recently with two of the founding members of the three-person Playful Panda Studio for a quick chat about their game, Eternal Spirits, the local scene and the industry in general. Here is some of what we discussed…

 

So, how about you introduce yourselves and tell us a little of your history?

(JC) Sure, my name is Joe Chu. I was born in Hong Kong, but live in Dublin. I have completed a Masters Degree in Digital Games, as well as a four year course in animation. I’m one of the main founders of Playful Panda Studios.

 (AD) Hi, I’m Audrey Dooley and I’m also one of the main founders of Playful Panda Studios. I did the same animation course as Joe, which is where we met. It’s also where we met our coder, Sean.

 Where did you complete your courses?

(JC) I did my Masters at D.I.T.

(AD) Yeah, and our animation course was done at IADT in Dun Laoghaire.

 And was it during this time that you decided to form Playful Panda Studios?

(JC) Not quite. We used to get the same bus back together after college. We would talk about different ideas for animation shorts and different things related to the course, but we also had a friend who was focusing more on videogame animation and that got us talking about our own ideas for games.

 (AD) Yeah, because normally when you are in the final year of the animation course you would have to make a film, but our friend had decided that he was going to make a videogame and we would obviously talk to him about that.

(JC) So then, I had a game that I had submitted for my final project in my Masters, and I was thinking it would be cool to take those ideas and develop them further once I graduated. I asked Audrey and Sean if they were interested in working on them with me, and they said yes. That was pretty much how we started as a studio.

 So, tell us a little about your game, Eternal Spirits.

(JC) Well Eternal Spirits is basically a metroidvania action platformer. You have four different elements which you unlock as you play through the game, each of which have different platforming and combat abilities associated with them. We didn’t want to simply copy the flow that you get in a typical modern Castlevania game in which, once you reach a certain point, you just become a complete powerhouse. So instead we decided to make it so that each of the special abilities require you to be in a specific form to perform them.

 (AD) Yeah so this means a lot of switching between forms. So say for example you want to double jump and then stick to the wall, you need to change form in between those two actions.

 (JC) Exactly. So it’s different to other metroidvania style games in the sense that it requires you to be constantly thinking on your feet. You have to figure out which form you need in each specific moment in order to pass through an area.

 (AD) This applies to the combat as well. For each element there will be a different category of weapon.

 (JC) Basically this will be that Earth has a hammer, Fire has a sword, Wind has a bow and Water has a spear. And since the Fire form has the lowest platforming agility, we have balanced it so that the sword then does the most damage out of all the elements. On the other hand, the Wind form has the highest movement agility and therefore conducts the least amount of damage. This ensures that the player can’t just stay in the one form all the time, as if they do they won’t be able to make it through certain areas of the game.

 How do you make changing forms into something fun for the player rather than something frustrating and fiddly?

(JC) Controls are very important. At the moment we have it so that the four forms are mapped to the four face buttons on the controller, with jump on one of the triggers.

 (AD) That triggered a lot of debates during playtesting…

 (JC) Yeah, definitely. Some people really wanted it so that jump would be on the A or X button and the form switching to be put on the triggers, but this presents its own problems as well. Right now, for the purposes of playtesting we are keeping the forms on the face buttons, but the controls are very important to ensure the game isn’t frustrating so we might consider customisable controls in future.

 (AD) We did surveys with the playtest and to be fair most people were of the opinion that while it was frustrating at first, it was something they could get used to. But like Joe says, it’s really hard to find the right balance sometimes.

 Were you always planning on making a metroidvania style game?

(JC) Yeah, for me it was always going to be a metroidvania. I’m majorly influenced by older games and I’d been wanting to make this style of game for a long time. And while I appreciate that many designers want to innovate, I prefer to give people what they want more than anything.

 And what are some of these influences?

(JC) Well the Castlevania series is obviously a major one. Anything from the real old school ones to Symphony of the Night or the GBA (Game Boy Advance ) titles. Even some of the ones that never came to Ireland like Rondo of Blood. Aside from the Castlevania games then we were heavily influenced by the Mega Man series, Shantae and of course the Metroid games.

 (AD) More recently, I’ve been playing a lot of Outland and Ori and the Blind Forest. They’ve been really great for getting ideas about gameplay and art design. Also, we are all big into anime so that’s been a huge influence over the visual style of the game.

                                      

 What are the major design difficulties you faced?

(JC) The map!

 (AD) Haha.

 (JC) The map, for sure. It’s the biggest part of any metroidvania game. You find power-up A to gain access to door A. You find power-up B to access door B. It involves a lot of backtracking, and finding a way to stop that backtracking from becoming monotonous is really tough. You need to have interesting mechanics and you need a strong art design.

 (AD) Yeah, it’s important to find a balance between being interesting and having the right level of difficulty. We both come from animation backgrounds and that can be massively different to games. In standard animation you would design each background and animation like it’s a still shot, whereas in games, there’s a lot more movement and interaction between assets. And they all have to be designed individually. In backgrounds for example, you don’t just have a single background, but lots of different pieces that all have to be able to move at different times. It can be really challenging to figure all that stuff out. Ori and the Blind Forest is a really great example of how to do backgrounds well. It’s almost like a scene from a Studio Ghibli film, but with individual parts that actually move. Like the grass in the foreground…it’s so subtle that you probably wouldn’t even notice it if you weren’t looking specifically for it, but you definitely “feel” it when you’re playing.

 (JC) Yeah, the visuals are really important to these types of game. Look at Symphony of the Night for example. In that game, every background is unique and interesting. So when you do backtrack you have a sense of movement and place.

 Is any of Eternal Spirits hand drawn?

(AD) Yeah, it’s all hand drawn digitally and in 2D, made using a program called Toon Boom.

 (JC) No 3D at all. Everything has been drawn by hand.

 Wow, I imagine that must be a lot of work…

(JC) Yeah, it was tough at times. I mean, it wasn’t so much a struggle because we know what we’re doing, but we’re old school and prefer 2D artwork. So drawing every frame of every animation and background in this way is extremely time-consuming.

 (AD) But you know, we were taught animation at college with real paper and real desks. So really, we’re just applying the old-school mentality we learned there into digital.

 Do you share responsibilities or do you each have a set role?

(AD) Although we do share responsibility and check up on each other, we like to focus on our strengths also. For example, I would be good at roughing out things like characters or animations, whereas Joe is very good at being precise.

 (JC) Yeah, I’ll finalise the clean ups and make sure things look smooth. It’s mainly me and Audrey on the art side of things, whereas Sean is pretty much solely on code. We have just fixed up my apartment as well and have all three of our computers set up there, so that lets us get together more frequently to work together on the game.

 How do you approach tasks like bug testing and balancing?

(JC) Playtesting by other people is extremely important when making a game. Because, as much as you are making a game that you yourself will enjoy, you really want other people to enjoy it as well. It’s so easy to become stuck in a “everything seems fine” attitude when you play your own work, but when third parties play through it they will often have issues with the gameplay or encounter bugs that you would never find or think of by yourself. I even remember Audrey coming across a bug when she was playing through an early version of the game that I would never have found. It only appeared after she pressed this almost random combination of button inputs and it would cause the character to become stuck on an animation frame.

 (AD) Ha ha, yeah! It had to be such a precise set of inputs to make the bug appear as well!

 (JC) Once we found out how the bug occurred then we were able to fix it, but it just shows the importance of getting other people to playtest your work. Another thing you can take from having your game tested is, like we were saying before, you can use the experience of the player to determine where the game needs balancing. The more experienced players will very quickly work out the optimal path through certain areas and show us exploits we weren’t aware of. This is definitely one of the most helpful aspects of playtesting for us. And also, ultimately, you will have people tell you whether they actually like your game or not and where they think it needs improving. So you really need to be able to take on board advice in good conscience.

 Switching topics slightly, what’s the local game development scene like at the moment? From the outside, it seems to be quite small…

(JC) It is small, but at the same time there’s a lot of really ambitious people here as well. There’s so much going on and everybody is trying to do something unique and cool. And being so small it means that there’s lot of opportunity, through meetups and stuff, to really get some proper insight and feedback from other people in the scene.

 (AD) Yeah, like we’ve put our game out there at gaming and anime conventions in the past for other developers to test and got some really great feedback -, both good and bad. And then as well, we would test their game and let them know what we think about their project.

 (JC) Yeah, people in general have just been really lovely and willing to lend their insight as much as possible.

 Do you feel like the scene receives sufficient support from the government and other agencies?

(JC) I wouldn’t necessarily be that knowledgeable about that side of things, but you do get the sense that Ireland isn’t really looked upon as a country for making games. A lot of people end up leaving the country to go form a studio in England, or to get a job in Germany or somewhere else in Europe, because the support they need to succeed just isn’t there. But making and funding a game is a massive gamble so you can understand it to some extent. As a small developer though, it can be hard when you probably also have a full-time or part-time job and you know there is little chance of securing funding.

 (AD) Wasn’t there funding from some small government groups a few years ago? I don’t think the games worked out though…

 (JC) Yeah, I think so. I know some people indirectly who were part of NDRC (National Digital Research Centre) and who funded the production of a few games locally. I think they put up quite a bit of money too! But in the end, like Audrey said, I don’t think the games turned out that successful money-wise, and it scared off other groups from further investment. But saying that, I heard that there is an Irish game that’s coming to the Xbox One so people are obviously excited for that…

 (AD) The Little Acre game?

 (JC) Yeah, that’s the one. So for sure, there is definitely hope for the Irish scene to become something bigger than it is now.

 You can definitely see there is push to promote the local scene though in terms of education. It is hard to miss the adverts for the BCFE (Ballyfermot College of Further Education) for example…

(JC) Oh yeah, I think Ireland is properly embracing that side of things a bit more now. When I was doing my Masters, my course was focused on videogame coding and that was all pretty much all there was. But now, you have proper courses dedicated to game design like the four year course at Pulse (Pulse College, Dublin). All of a sudden there’s a lot more access available to actual teaching resources and knowledgeable people to teach the subject.

 (AD) I think the skills linking to animation and games really cross over a lot as well, and this allows you to work in so many different fields. Like now, if you know animation you can work in the gaming industry. If you know code you can work in the gaming industry or work with websites for example. Ten years ago these might all have been separate skills, but now they’re all converging.

 Over the course of the previous and current console generations, and in particular over the last couple of years, Sony and Microsoft have made big efforts to push the presence of indie games onto their online stores. Do you feel like this has opened up opportunities for smaller teams like yourselves that may not have been there previously?

(JC) Not for us per se, but I’d say it definitely has for some. Just look at games like Shovel Knight or Outland or Dust… There’s so many indie games coming to console nowadays. I don’t think anybody from Ireland has managed to get their games onto PSN yet, but like I said before The Little Acre is coming to the Xbox One so that’s definitely a positive sign for Ireland and smaller developers like ourselves.

 (AD) It definitely seems like it’s working for developers in other countries.

 (JC) Yeah, but I guess it just depends on whether you can come up with a game that is going to be a big hit or not.

 (AD) And you just never know which games are going to be popular or not. So much of it is dependent on marketing. Sometimes, the actual quality of the game has very little to do with how successful a game will be. You see some really bad games do well, and equally games that deserve better do poorly. So marketing is really important.

 Do you prefer a curated storefront like that of Sony or Microsoft? Or do you think the slightly more democratic approach favoured by Steam is the future?

(JC) Once you get through the popularity vote that is Greenlight then Steam is definitely the easier place to get your game on. And I’m not saying it’s open to just anybody, but you definitely see a lot of bad stuff make it through as well, like countless Android ports or shoddy private server MMORPGs. So it works both ways. A lot of bad stuff may get through, but it also allows developers like us to get our stuff out there and hopefully start making a little bit of money. Plus, it allows you to officially say you have your game on Steam which is obviously cool.

 (AD) Yeah, and that gives you more control as an indie developer who is looking to make a smaller game.

 Is that something important to you? If you had the option, would you move to a larger studio to further your career or would you prefer to keep your integrity as a small studio?

(JC) Well I cannot speak for Audrey or Sean, but personally, as one of the founders of Playful Panda Studios, I would prefer to stay together as a team.

 (AD) Yeah, because the way we are going now gives us complete creative control and that’s extremely important.

 So do you still see yourselves remaining as a team together in ten years from now?

(JC) Yeah I think so, and hopefully by then we will have a bigger team and will be making a lot more games. I guess that’s everybody’s goal ultimately.

 Do you already have ideas for your next games?

(AD) Actually, Eternal Spirits is supposed to be a trilogy…

 (JC) Well the plan was that if the game does well then it would be part of a three-parter. But we have some other ideas as well. Like, I’m the primary platforming fan in the team, but the genre that we all share in common is RPG games. So, in future and if we were to be successful, then we would all like to make a JRPG style game…

 (AD) With really good cinematics…

 (JC) Yeah, well if budget was no issue then of course!

 

 

You talked about ideas for a mobile game…What are the major differences involved in making a game specifically for a mobile platform?

(JC) It’s mainly the same as for any other platform, but the general rule of thumb is to get a working build onto the device as quickly as possible. When you’re playing on a phone with a touch screen, controls are really important so it’s vital to get an idea early on of how well they work. You can do early playtesting on a PC, but sooner rather than later you are going to want to get the game working on the target device. In terms of game design though, I guess in general the idea for a mobile game is to make it playable in five or ten minute chunks. That’s not to say people won’t play them for longer periods than that, but as a rule you want a mobile game to be quick and easy. And playable with just one hand while standing up as well.

 (AD) Yeah this is where games on phones are so different to those on PCs.

 (JC) But, it all depends on the region you are aiming for as well. The Asian market for example will tend to prefer games with grinding and gachapon style aspects, whereas in the west the focus is more on building and waiting for it that building to be completed.

 (AD) Just like in Clash of Clans where you have to wait a day for stuff to be built…

 (JC) Wait or pay to speed up the process…

 How do you feel about VR?

(JC) I think VR will be a great thing in the future, but my worry at the moment is that it might fall the way of certain other platforms in which not enough good games come to it and people lose interest. If you look at the PSVR as well…it looks cool, but at the same time I don’t know if the PS4 itself if powerful enough to really deliver. Like the fidelity of the image has to be reduced to make it work. Sony are going to have to make a whole new machine to get it up to the standard of the other headsets and people aren’t going to be too happy if a new console is released so soon after the PS4. Also, while I do think the tech is great and can be a lot of fun, I think in the end people will always come back to a controller once the uniqueness of the experience wears off. I guess I’m just worried that it might be a little…gimmicky…

 (AD) But at the same time, that’s what everybody said during the early days of videogames as a whole. And then look at machines like the Wii and how commercially successful that was for Nintendo.

 So, to wrap up, what changes have you seen in the local game development scene and how would you like to see it change in future?

(JC) Well, like we were saying before, I think the popularity of college courses is a big change compared to even when we were coming through. There’s a lot more people taking animation courses nowadays and the scores for getting into them are a lot higher than where they were before.

 (AD) Yeah, it’s definitely harder to get in now. There’s a lot more people are applying. When we started college the options for things like game design just weren’t there.

 (JC) Now, we have proper teachers and lecturers and a really passionate and like-minded local community for giving advice and feedback. If I had to change something though going forward though, then I suppose it would be for more gambling on funding for the local developers. I know some games have failed in the past, but that doesn’t mean that the scene won’t produce something great in the future.

 Playful Panda Studio are a three person game development studio based in Dublin, Ireland. They can be found at the following locations where a downloadable demo of their game, Eternal Spirits, is also available:

Email: playfulpandastudio@gmail.com  

Facebook: Eternal Spirits

Twitter: @DublinPanda

Tumblr: playful-pandas

Looking Forward to No Man’s Sky

Looking Forward to No Man’s Sky

It was a sheepish Sean Murray, founder of Hello Games, who was tasked with explaining to an excited E3 crowd back in 2014 what exactly No Man’s Sky is to be. A science fiction game based on the worlds of the battered book covers of Asimov and Clarke of his youth… A procedurally generated game in which every player will begin on a different planet and experience something entirely unique to their playthrough… The type of world he always wanted to escape to, but never could… These were the terms Murray used to describe No Man’s Sky, and I think it would be fair to say that he judged the pulse of the crowd, both at the conference and those watching at home, just right because from that moment on he was launched very much into the indie stratosphere.

The truth is I feel a bit sorry for Murray. Because while his company Hello Games were no doubt given an opportunity by Sony that they could not reasonably turn down, he seems almost reluctant to embrace the limelight that this opportunity has thrust upon him. After all, No Man’s Sky is clearly a passion piece for him, and while it would have been foolish for Hello Games to not take Sony up on their deal (whatever that deal may be), it has meant that the game is being viewed with a level of scrutiny that it would never have been had it remained just another GOG or Steam release.

But 2014 was a long time ago, and with the game’s release currently scheduled for 22^nd June in the EU (although a further delay would not be a huge surprise), it is still not entirely clear what No Man’s Sky actually is. Murray has given numerous interviews in which he has detailed the game’s crafting and trading systems and the broadly outlined goal of heading towards the centre of the galaxy, but the nagging doubt as to what happens on a moment to moment basis refuses to disappear from the comments of pretty much every forum post and comments section for this game. This criticism is a little unfair as A) the game is still in production and certain elements of it may still be in flux, and B) why does the game even need to follow such traditional structures as having task-orientated gameplay in the first place? This argument as to what constitutes a game in the modern era can be left for another blog post at another time, but, to paraphrase Giant Bomb’s Austin Walker, in the absence of clear information, people will let their imagination (and by imagination read “expectation”), fill in the blanks. This is probably a tough pill for Sean Murray to swallow as realistically why should he feel any pressure at all to explain his vision while he is still deep into its formation? But the truth is that by not divulging more detailed information, people’s expectations are rocketing. And when they rocket that high they almost always come hurtling back to Earth with an almighty crash and a bang. Or alternatively (and perhaps even more disastrously) people begin to lose interest. I have seen this happening already over the past 9 months or so since the last E3 showing, and it is something Sony will no doubt be aware of.

The reality is probably somewhere in the middle-ground between what we have been shown thus far and what the public’s expectation has imagined it to be. In a recent interview with Brad Shoemaker, Murray went into a little more detail as regards some of the in-game systems, including an alien language to decipher and the existence of NPCs to interact with, and with that added a few more broad strokes to the overall picture. But as he talks about in the interview, showing off the game has been a challenge for him. The truth is that the game moves at a slower pace than your usual E3 headliner, and that does not always translate well to a two minute trailer or a five minute gameplay demo. How indeed are you to make a trade of silica for a new hyper drive an exciting press conference teaser trailer?

This is not to say that the game will be boring. Nor is it to say that the game will be everything you want it to be, nor the biggest disappointment of the decade. The fact of the matter is that we simply do not know. Until the finished game is in the hands of the public (and to a certain extent the media) we will never know exactly what it is we are to get with No Man’s Sky. Sony have made a rod for their own back by putting the game at the forefront of their indie showcase push for the Playstation 4 and explaining so little about it, but ultimately I expect the game’s quality to shine through come its eventual release.

Again, I feel for Sean Murray. He seems the most reluctant of celebrities (and within this small, specialised sphere of ours he very much is a celebrity), and just looks like he wants to be left alone to work on his game. So, here’s hoping that No Man’s Sky proves to be the success everybody wants it to be, and that Sean and the rest of the small Hello Games team can take a well-earned long break to recharge their batteries.