The Debts And Dangers Of Inspiration

Hey, everyone!

I’d like to begin by addressing the relatively slow activity of my blog these past few months. I’ve been moving into my new house for university with my friends, learning how to use Maya and Unity, and have been generally absorbed by the inexorable, fumbling march of student life. If you’re dying to read every word I’ve ever published and/or worship my flawless character then you can keep up with my new footwear fashion blog, ‘Pedigogue‘ by clicking that link.

I did promise, however, that were a particularly motivating discursive thought to formalise within me vis-à-vis the usual subject matter, then I would be sure to return here and put pen to paper (finger to keyboard?). Today I read about something which absolutely stirred that line of exchanging thoughts within me, which I feel deserve some written comprehension.

I should warn you that I will assume all knowledge of the current situation with Filip Miucin, if that assumption is wrong then I suggest a quick google search of ‘Filip Miucin IGN’ (otherwise this post might not make much sense). This will not be in any way a history or timeline of the madness, expect no disquisition, ultimately this post is just a brief account of the thoughts and feelings that this situation has evoked in me personally.

What baffles me the most about Filip Miucin’s downfall as a games journalist is the sheer amount of blatantly plagiarised work that had gone unnoticed before he was ultimately called out. For me this brought to mind both the fact that plagiarists will almost always fester and thrive if unchallenged, but also the idea that the games criticism sphere is demonstrably large enough for such transgressions to go almost unnoticed. There is some silver lining there, in that this shows how much the industry and culture has flourished and how wide the circle has become.

The second most confusing thing about the situation, to me, is Miucin’s since-deleted response video which flippantly shrugs off these proofs of his wrongdoing as mere allegations. I’m searching for a description of Miucin’s approach here and it falls somewhere between audacity and mental instability. This spectacle for me, of a patently compulsive plagiarist deploying the feeblest circumlocutions unto the brandished pitchforks of the internet, utterly devoid of any apology, was uniquely boggling and I’m still unable to fully comprehend it.

It is hard for me to comprehend because, to speak frankly, I have also been guilty of plagiarism, and it is impossible for me to imagine myself responding as Miucin has to such damning evidences.

There are many, many un-pursued drafts stored away in the filing cabinets of this blog, the likes of which bear titles such as ‘On PewDiePie And Vanaman’, ‘Clickbait Culture’ and (the inspiration for this title now totally escapes me, rendering it accidentally hilarious) ‘My Gaming Wives’. One title of these drafts in particular sticks out to me though, ‘Blogging Confessions: I Plagiarise’. Evidently at one point I thought it something close to endearing to wear one’s flaws so shamelessly on one’s sleeve.

If you’ve been following this blog since I was 14, 15 or maybe even later, you may have noticed that you can’t find some of my older posts which were previously circling the web for a number of years. Some of these deletions are because I no longer believed the content to represent the blog, some were due to evolving taste, but a sizeable chunk have been made because I no longer considered the posts a product of my own imagination. After a while, I just felt that they didn’t belong to me.

There are crucial distinctions between what I believe to be my own plagiarism and Miucin’s blatant thievery. Of course, this blog is by nature amateur. I have never accepted nor been offered any any money or sponsorship deals on this blog, any schedule is self-imposed and the small circle of returning readers for this blog means that my postings are comparatively risk-free next to the postings of a cultural monolith such as IGN. The diametrical opposite is true of Miucin’s work. His transgressions had professional, monetary and cultural repercussions which have not fully caught up to him yet. The nature of the plagiarism is also different, and this is the crux of this post, really: there is such a thing as good-intentioned plagiarism.

Of course, this has nothing to do with Miucin and I would never, ever seek to excuse the man of his positively revolting character. I’m talking more about the kind of plagiarism that is detected more often than not by the creator of content themselves. The kind of plagiarism which we, as bloggers, sometimes succumb to in varying degrees, the plagiarism comes through encumbering your work with its inspirations. I’ve experienced this multiple times as a blogger over the years and it sometimes becomes apparent as I take on different creative processes at my university. If you’re a fellow blogger reading this, particularly a games blogger, you will probably share the same experience as me in that the inevitable first post, that ultimate decision to publicly talk (about games), did not randomly emerge in a conceptual vacuum. For me, I had my inspiring pundits.

A number of memories came to mind when I heard that TotalBiscuit had tragically died in hospital. As well as a quite unfortunate blog post I made (yep, one of the deleted ones) about him blocking me on Twitter before I stupidly asked his wife to get him to unblock me (a request that she unfortunately saw, and responded to less curtly than she had to (I was like 15, okay?)), I also remembered, quite vividly, the inception of this blog in November 2014. That first post, that geniously titled ‘The Good, The Bad And The Ubi’ owes a debt to TotalBiscuit’s ‘Let’s not play: Assassins Creed: Unity yet’. There was something charming and strangely motivating about his polemical authority that, more than anything, attracted me to his vocation let alone his channel. There’s a lot of his voice which I tried to replicate in that initial, terrifically cringeworthy post.

Of course, the best art and by extension artists are inimitable. Any writer would be hard-pressed to try and exact the nuance and majesty of Proust, any film student would probably be snickered at if they tried to assert that their shitty films somehow owed a debt to Kubrick. The artistry of those like Proust and Kubrick, for example, exists in a special echelon of quality and execution which in fact makes it hard to reproduce even if we were to try. But, there is such a thing as borrowing too much of the art’s components. This goes hand in hand with the fact that we can only, in the creative process, take from within our ken. Anything that I’m writing now is pouring forth as a stream of converging unconscious memories, that manifest in involuntary appearances as I think discursively about what to write. Crucially though, every word of this is one which I have already read, deployed or uttered at least once. I can only show what has already been shown unto me.

TotalBiscuit was one of many pundits who I began to look up to in the beginning. Amongst others were (and are) George Weidman, Chris Franklin, Noah Caldwell-Gervais, Ian Danskin and Satchell Drakes. I would watch these individuals’ videos religiously. Their acuity and passion was more than endearing to me, it was astounding. It opened up the world a gaming for me, a world which I thought I had known so well, and it even opened up career pathways for me. For the first couple years running my blog, I would tell friends and family (probably to their dismay) that I intended to be a journalist, wanting to (but lacking the courage to) actually state my intention of becoming a games journalist. I even did a couple weeks’ work experience in publication companies with this goal in mind (to this day this is probably the biggest waste of time in my life, bar ever dating my ex).

Looking up to these figures so much, I confused correctly digesting and being like my inspirations with just being my inspirations. Imitation is the highest form of flattery, I guess. Perhaps still lurking on this site are blatant rewordings of Weidman’s work in particular. In retrospect, I understand why I did this. I wasn’t a wide reader back in those days, I fancied myself a writer who didn’t need to read to excel. My sphere of influence was incredibly small but also incredibly motivating, which is a dangerous combination. To be clear: there is nothing wrong with having inspirations and idols. But, if you blog on here or take anything else up at an amateur level, it is most likely that you are the sole arbiter of when you’re borrowing too much.

I’ll just end by bullet-pointing a few tips that have helped me in this journey when it comes to having a healthy relationship between you and your influences.

• Abandon the idea that your work is completely your own. Ideas can be original, but the processes which are required to convey these involve using an almost entirely borrowed set of creative instruments. In this, everyone owes debts.
• It is not always good to be like your influences. Your work can have passion and lustre but without identity it is lost.
• Read more. If you’re a filmmaker, watch more films. A blogger who reads one blog is always in danger. Keeping your circle of influences wide is the best way of avoiding the danger of replication.
• It’s okay if you catch yourself in too much debt to other artists. Just start again, and if it never ends up feeling like your own, your heart’s not in the right place.
• Pride is a great barometer. The pieces on here which I am the most proud of are unequivocally my own, which I know owe no debts and began in my mind alone. The pieces which I am the least proud of, which I have deleted, are those which I know do not belong to me.

MY MAGNUM OPUS

Greetings, loyal readers. I am glad to see that in my absence there has been no attempts at mutiny.

So, a lot of you know that I’m studying a degree called Interactive Media which somewhat encompasses game development. This is what I’ve been working on for the past couple months or so and I thought I’d publish it on itch.io.

You can download it here by clicking this link.

It’s coded from scratch in Java using a platform called Processing so excuse the minimalist functionality of it. When coding from scratch there will always be a gulf between intent and execution but overall I’m pretty happy with it.

It’s a really short game (although I guess you could call it interactive fiction) and I’d appreciate it if you checked it out. I’m hoping to work with Unity and Autodesk Maya for my next project and I’m really excited about that.

Lots of love,

VV xoxo

Where I’ve Been, Where I Am And Where I’m Going

Hello all, this is just a little update from me about my posting schedule.

It doesn’t escape my knowledge that it’s been a number of months since I’ve posted anything and I should say that this is mostly because of university.

I’m no less passionate about games or about writing in general but the truth is that priorities are a cumulative thing, none cease to exist but they do get overtaken and I’m very busy with my life at university as I study game development and digital culture.

As you know from my previous posts, dead blogs make me sad and I’d never think of giving this up, it’s just that I have much less time to write my pieces on here atop coursework and academic essays. When I have an idea for a more colloquial piece or a review or a short story I’ll be sure to post it on here, though.

If you want to make sure I’m not dead then you can follow me on Twitter if I feel I know you personally (I know you’re all DYING for my hideous face reveal) but you don’t need to worry about that anyway because I perform daily sacrifice rituals and am thus immortal on every spiritual realm.

Hope you’re all doing well and keep posting,

VV xx

What Does It Mean To Create For Children?

There’s always been a niggling little part of me that might reflexively sniff in derision whenever I see a Minecraft YouTuber over the age of thirty appear in my suggested videos feed, or might do the same when I see a university student claim to be writing their dissertation on The Very Hungry Caterpillar (as I did on an open day at Exeter University last year). Until recently I had never cared so much as to inspect this little part of me as I’m not one to really encounter children’s material all that often. Those who know me will know that I am a very pretentious pillock who will read some verbose and unwieldy tomes for the sake of accomplishment rather than enjoyment. I am indeed a literary sadist, and the realm of children’s literature has always seemed a little bit too soggy next to the kind of books I can see myself wanting to read.

But luckily I was recently handed an opportunity to get outside my comfort zone: a loved one recently lent me a collection of poems by A.A. Milne, the mind behind British cultural staple and my personal doppelganger Winnie-the-Pooh. The collection contained two books of poetry: When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six.

Reading through these two books completely flipped my notions about the sheer difficulty that writing for children entails. I used to hark back to the days of yore, when playing with Lego was more socially acceptable, and I think of how easily entertained I was. My imagination gland was constantly in overdrive, you could have given me an action figure of the blue power ranger and a Scalextric’s pickup truck and in thirty minutes and a square metre of carpet space I could have produced a drama more moving than anything in Shakespeare’s canon; kids are absolutely bloody mental, it’s as if they’re either on extreme caffeine or mild shrooms around the clock.

This is the notion that I always held in tandem with the idea of writing for children, this was my simple and ignorant syllogism:

a) Kids are easily entertained
b) Writing is a form of entertainment

Therefore:
c) Writing for kids is easy

Of course, looking into it a bit more, and after reading Milne’s poems, I discovered that this is obviously a false argument. Of course, a child’s capacity to enjoy something is often inimitable as an adult. It’s why we sometimes call passionate people like cosplayers or gamers ‘childish’, but kids are sincerely not easy to entertain at all. Firstly, the selection of topics or abstracts which might entertain a child are completely different to what might entertain an adult. A child’s scope of importance is entirely incompatible with a normal person’s. For example, children do not have a grasp on and are often intimidated by the idea of relationships, and right there you’ve wiped out about half of the contenders in the literary canon as even mildly entertaining stuff… when you write for a child you’re not writing an adult story with reduced or diluted language, you have to elect to write in a different language entirely.

Secondly, the attention span of a child is comparable to that of a goldfish or a gnat. On a biological level a child requires much much more sleep than an adult. Tonight I will probably stay up until around the midnight mark reading The Elements of Style before I attempt my first officially marked essay, but the idea that anything might interrupt a toddler’s sleep schedule is unfathomable. Toddlers need constant recharging: after a big cry they need to sleep, after a big meal they need to sleep, after a big sleep they need to sleep… so the sheer minutes that belong to their waking consciousness are ever more precious. They can’t waste their time reading something that is either too boring or too long or too ‘too’, they have things to do and sleep to sleep. I remember being around 8 or 9 and feeling astounded that I’d stayed up to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows past my bedtime. It was the first time I had made a sacrifice to my biological schedule for the sake of art, and I have been gradually crucifying myself in similar ways ever since.

Michael Rosen, who served as the children’s laureate from 2007 to 2009 says this about writing for children:

You have to go back to when you were a child and think about what kind of things you liked… I mean, I sometimes think that I write for the child I was and then mix that with the children I meet

And as simple as this sounds, the process of ‘going back to when you were a child’ is actually really hard. Using your adult mind and adult vocabulary in order to transport yourself to a place where you knew nothing that you know now, literally saw the world from a different angle and saw your own inevitable adult existence only as a series of swirling possibilities… it’s about as simple or as complicated as asking someone: ‘forget your first love’.

Milne’s poems have taught me to look at creating for children in a different light. He had an amazing ability for communicating with children, and also for transporting adults to that fleeting frame of mind as well.

It only makes me wonder about the possibilities for interactive narratives. I think about what the separate philosophies of design are for adult and child interactive storytelling. I for one am very happy that I grew up on things like Pokemon and Rayman, but they were handed down to me from an older sibling. I wonder if something like Mario is already a game to have a place in the ludic canon as something that adults and children both revere?

If Videogames Are Art, Must They Have Artistic Generations?

For the past month or so now I have been very, very slowly getting through Jack Kerouac’s most famous novel On The Road and I have ultimately come to the realisation that it is not very good.

I’m just over 100 pages in and I’m yet to come across a point of quality or apparent profundity in this novel that would warrant actual genius Bob Dylan’s lauding quote “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s”. Considering the novel’s basis in Kerouac’s own personal reality (despite his awkward decision to identify as an Italian American protagonist called Sal?… who at some stage is inclined to write: “They thought I was a Mexican, of course; and in a way I am”) I found myself trudging through this canonised roman-à-clef and thinking what an awful time I would have were I to have any kind of conversation with a 1950s Kerouac if were he alive today. Despite the fact that I would probably find the conversation printed in one of his novels years later, I simply wouldn’t know how to correctly engage with a man who writes sentences, actual sentences about women, like:

“Her breasts stuck out straight and true; her little flanks looked delicious; her hair was long and lustrous black; and her eyes were great big blue things with timidities inside […] I dropped right opposite her and began scheming right off” p73 Penguin Modern Classics

Many people find (or rather found) his rambunctiousness, alcoholic mirth and libertine lifestyle to be endearing, but unfortunately I do not, and I don’t find those kind of people to be endearing either. I only curse my habit of needing to finish a book once I’ve started it. But, for all the venom I can spit at the book I can at least say that it truly belonged to the Beat Generation. Even though I don’t think the best work to come out of that generation stands the test of time… at all… man, at least it was kind of cool. All the top authors of that generation were socially connected, they travelled together, went to the same universities, influenced each others’ creations, and everyone was having sex with each other (single audience member cheers).

Generations seem to be a cornerstone of most artisitc media, they can be found in classical art, cinema, television and music, and reading about On The Road makes me conversely wonder if gaming generations are only limited by contemporary technologies rather than the fashion of design.

Of course, when given an example of an early Super Mario iteration, the average person would recognise the image as belonging to a certain generation, but if that generation can be classed as simply ‘the 90s’ rather than anything more design-oriented then can we call that generation artistic?

Artistic generations are not part of a quota for a medium to be classified as art, more than anything they are social movements, but the prospect of the medium being used for such a movement remains exciting to me and, who knows, maybe we’re on the road towards that point already.

Observer And The Real-Time Mystery

If you’re unlucky enough to be a regular reader of mine, you’ll know that I’m quite a sizeable wuss when it comes to the horror genre.

Being as neurotic as I am erotic, acute terror has simply become a staple of my everyday life. This is why I have never really been drawn to the Horror genre across all forms of media: paying for this experience would be totally unnecessary next to the natural cascade of bollock-churning horror I experience every single day for free. I see your F.E.A.R, I see your Aliens and Predators and Dead Spaces and I raise you the perspiring dread of giving an older relative a phone call, of extended eye contact with strangers on an underground train (what are they thinking?), of walking on the same side of the street with a dog that might be a rottweiler, although not being 100% sure…

My life is already an emporium of horror and spleen-rumbling terror so it is not often that I deign to experience relatively tame ‘horror’ games for a hefty monetary toll, however, having enjoyed my time with Layers of Fear, I decided to check out Bloober Team’s latest I.P Observer and found it rather tantalising.

The year is 2084. Angela Merkel’s preserved neural tissue is beginning its 19th term as Chancellor of Germany. Woody Allen’s movies are gradually being less critically favoured. Arsène Wenger signs another contract at Arsenal following another FA Cup win, keeping him at the club until 2086. But, none of this matters to our Cracovian detective Daniel Lazarski, a gruff-voiced potty-mouthed cyborg with

ＦＡＭＩＬＹ
ＩＳＳＵＥＳ.

Like Fullbright’s recent title Tacoma, which I believe is even set in the same envisioned decade, Bloober Team have not only created a competent psychological-horror game, they also intertwine this experience with their own position of what a dystopian future might look like. Much like Tacoma, the future that we glean from this experience is one of a corpotocracy, with megacorporations and their loyals being designated first class citizens whilst the rest of society struggles in the lower echelons. Both as a dystopian sci-fi narrative and as a psychological horror game, the title is very successful, but what I really took away from the game is an idea that transcends the boundaries of its own narrative.

What I found most interesting about the game is that it manages to suspend a mystery throughout the whole experience whilst being told in real interaction time. I remember when Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) came out, the media was amazed by the fact that the entire feature was shot in almost real-time with very few cinematic cuts, giving a “One Take” appearance. And until I played Observer it had never really occurred to me that most games in which interaction is the main drive of narrative execute this feat that would otherwise be apparently article-worthy.

What makes Observer unique in this, however, is that the narrative is a real-time mystery. With other forms of media, detective narratives often chop, arrange and rearrange time so as to maintain intrigue throughout the duration of the witnessed experience, you do not take up the mantle as a kind of secondary or tertiary detective who follows along in the events with the actual characters, to do that would entail hours between interesting revelations manifesting in throwing tennis balls at an office wall adorned with a cluttered cork board, saying ‘hmmmm’ a lot whilst sipping police station coffee. Instead, in books, film and television you are a witness to the most interesting, most well paced narrative the creators can arrange. Of course, even in a real-time narrative like Observer and Birdman the story is creatively arranged, but crucially the internal chronology isn’t, and to face up to the task of a real-time mystery must therefore be incredibly difficult.

Even in the most exciting detective stories, like The Usual Suspects or True Detective, five minutes in the actual present narrative might be incredibly boring. While our detective hero might be in his house, connecting two pieces of information that was right under their nose (and your nose! *boop*) the whole time!, they might race outside the house to their Fiat Punto to travel back to the office and tell the whole team, but find that they’re on only a quarter tank. They’ll stop for gas and think about getting a bag of peanut M&Ms at the cashier’s desk. Then they’ll fart when paying for it and they’ll shuffle awkwardly and maybe look around as if someone else did it. They’ll wonder if the cashier smells it but is too polite to say. But THEN, they’ll RACE down the freeway! Burning with a newfound sense of… You get what I mean.

Pieces of fiction in which the internal narrative chronology and the time taken to tell that story perfectly overlap are considered great pieces of art. Jame’s Joyce’s Ulysses, which when read in precisely 24 hours perfectly elapses 24 hours, is considered one of the greatest novels written in the English language. Similarly, Iñárritu’s Birdman is lauded for its illusion of being a live experience, and I think it would be remiss of me not to praise Bloober Team for creating a story that meticulously maintains intrigue so that for every minute played, no narrative intensity is lost at all.

Size Does Matter

With this post’s obligatory dick joke now being over and done with, I should start by mentioning that last weekend I spent a very long and very hard time in front of my TV screen doing absolutely nothing.

You see, to my delight the Xbox digital marketplace was teeming with some rather tasty deals and I managed to nab both Titanfall 2 and The Bioshock Collection for half the usual asking prices, and seeing as it is now only days until I assume the mantle of ‘University Student’, I thought it best that I exercise the last few impulse purchases I am allowed to make before I’m eating instant noodles every day for 3 years. So, with fingers trembling in anticipation, I clicked to buy and then, soul flowing with excitement and mind racing with ludic possibility, sat in front of my television and stared at the installation screen for about forty hours.

The process of purchase, for me, was profoundly anticlimactic, the pathos of the long, drawn out waiting period no doubt compounded by the circumstances: parents? Away for the weekend. House? To myself! Girlfriend? Away until September. Friends? On holiday or busy. All of them? All of them…

That two day period must have been, for me, the first time in my life where I have experienced pure, utter isolation from the life and civilisation I am so used to. My actions for that two day period included: waiting, waiting, waiting. Sleeping, washing up, waiting. Going to the shops, and then waiting. Waiting. Are you free this weekend? Waiting. Sorry bud, I’m in a completely different country. Waiting. Waiting. What is my purpose in this life? Waiting. Rock back. Rock forth. Waiting. Twitching. Waiting…

I had to wait for the entire time I was alone to myself to finally play that mammoth videogame, and the experience therein I think was more edifying than the game itself was afterwards. The sheer man-hours I put into maintaining my patience throughout that time, the mental labour I endured, it all caused a kind of reflective sadness that ultimately made me mourn the loss of the readily available videogame.

I know that mine was an irksome experience that will not apply to the majority of the people reading this seeing as both Titanfall 2 is an arguably unreasonably large game and my WiFi is certainly unreasonably slow, atop the fact that I downloaded it entirely from the internet where it’s also available as a blu-ray disc okay okay OKAY…

But it would be remiss of me not to talk of the decidedly consumer-unfriendly direction that modern games are taking when it comes to just being able to play the product you buy. I can only think of how simple it was not a few years ago when blu-ray discs and laser disc DVDs could achieve content parity across consoles, rendering the blu-ray disc the optimal format of a videogame disc rather than the necessary one.

Nowadays, however, with AAA games being more graphically sophisticated and generally more expansive, Microsoft’s Xbox One has had to switch the format of their disc to keep up with the demands of AAA content and remain a solid competitor against Sony’s hardware. In principle this just sounds like the standard evolutionary trend of a company that vies to stay on the electronic world stage, but there remains a problem in that, while over the past few years the hardwares, softwares and general industry of console gaming has become more sophisticated, the average internet speeds of the people playing these games hasn’t, even between console generations.

The size of Titanfall 2 ended up being over 60 gigabytes, contested only on my external hard drive by Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V which, between updates and updates and updates how now reached 70. Amongst local installations off of blu-ray discs and downloading of day 1 patches and updates that have launched since a game’s initial release, it might take someone hours of waiting time just before they’re able to see if they enjoy the game they’ve bought or not.

And I’m not even talking about my own experience here… as someone who plans to go into making videogames I understand that this is something I’ll naturally have to deal with, but for the guy who has a job and a wife and kids and just wants to play some Battlefield with his coworkers after a hard day, he will have to endure the experience of walking into GameStop, purchasing a game so that it exists in his hand but then also knowing that he does not yet fully own the item in that hand and maybe won’t for a number of hours.

The age of bliss in which I could, happy as a little lamb on methamphetamines, wake up on Christmas day, open each of the Modern Warfare PS3 franchise titles placed under the tree by Jingo-Santa and just play away the campaigns into the night, is well and truly over. Now, in truth, a large part of my Christmas day is just spent staring at an installation screen waiting for the latest FIFA to update, and as my eyes wander over to the section of the TV shelf where those Modern Warfare titles used to be, I wonder what I’ll be waiting to receive next year, once the presents are already unwrapped.

Bayonetta Is Batshit And Hey, That’s Pretty Cool

Before the 2009 title landed in the monthly Games with Gold catalogue, I had only known the name Bayonetta to be thrown around as the object of feminist debate in Kotaku forums. ‘This is a sexist, ogling depiction of well-endowed women’ says Motherof5ArmyWife, to which AnimeGlands retorts ‘breasts are the only reason I wake up and I want this gigantic woman to step on my dick and kill me’ et cetera et cetera.

I have to admit, I never thought I’d be picking up Bayonetta at all. Being myself a babbling racist, I’ve never really clicked with the top triple-A Japanese games of the modern generation. Mate, don’t get me wrong… when I first got my Nintendo Wii I was wholly enamoured of it, and I was determined to do nothing but rise through the ranks of the Wii Sports universes and achieve celebrity status at least in each one. Baseball, bowling, tennis, boxing… I made it pro. Then I started the Wii steroids… started cheating on my Mii girlfriend with a better, curvier Mii. I lost control.

Since then, I haven’t had much luck with Japanese titles. I desperately, desperately wanted to become one of those people who can speak the Dark Souls parlance, but… (cowering away) it was just too hard. Okay? Okay?! I said it. I will forever wear the shirt of shame: (creds: http://bit.ly/2uY83pp)

My taste in games has veered away from the combat arcade-style that’s essential to the Japanese game development culture. I still have a soft spot in my heart for the cinematic tomes of the Metal Gear series, but at least in my mind, that franchise ended many many years ago when Hideo Kojima himself lost the ardour for it. So, it was certainly a stroke of luck that Bayonetta ended up in my games library for free, otherwise I would have invariably turned my nose up at it before spending a minimum £300 on FIFA points and Jelly Babies.

But, I’m very glad that I did end up having a go because my, my… WHAT a… THING this is! This… this… THING!!!

Between the mile-a-minute visuals, the Amazonian protagonist with legs for days, the obvious token characters and the INSANE Japanese music blasting throughout all the action in the first 10 minutes of the game, I think I may have found the first game, nay, the first piece of media I’ve ever consumed, where I do not have time to stop and register about what I’m doing or seeing. It’s the ludic equivalent of an ocular migraine, its combat a time-lapse of a cocaine-fuelled orgy. Bayonetta is the epileptic version of the last 30 minutes of any Marvel film, it’s action packed, visually incomprehensible madness that I think has helped me discover my inner goddess.

Perhaps due to the lack of protagonists like Bayonetta, or perhaps because of her inimitable swagger, never before had I experienced that gynephoria of being a pistol-wielding mammary powerhouse of pain, crushing anything in my path. I am a callipygian crusher of angels! I am become Beth, destroyer of worlds!

My time with Bayonetta this morning has been a blast. Platinum Games, you have earned this badge of honour.

*****

On a side note, I got in! I got my acceptance from the University of York to study Interactive Media (which has elective options of game development in Unity). I’m really excited to start next month, and especially to do the module on Firewatch! Just a little update from me ok cya x

The Happiness Tag

Dear reader, if you’ve found yourself doing a double take or have simply fallen on the ground after being met with that title I’d assure you not to be worried. I too never thought I’d ever use the horrible term ‘happiness’ as a titular item in any of my posts, much less feel any emotion at all throughout the duration of my life, but here we are in 2017. Donald Trump is president (bad), Neymar Jr is playing in Paris (bad?) and I, the first blogger to be entirely without emotion on any scale thus making me the only 100% objective writer on the planet, am writing a post about “hap-ee-ness” (emotional void).

How did I get into this situation? Fellow blogger Rei must have read my material and wrongly inferred that I was a blogger that makes her ‘happy’, as it says in her tag. I certainly don’t understand this emotion, but I can assure you that the correct emotional response to anything I write, say or create is ‘unhappiness’ and ‘frustration’. At least, that’s what I’m constantly told by lovers and subway-goers.

On a real note tho, thanks so much to Rei for the tag, it really means a lot when someone says they enjoy my stuff online and rest assured you’d be a nomination if you hadn’t already tagged me! Be sure to check out her blog with the links above! She does a monthly ‘Games to Revisit’ series which has introduced me to some great titles.

The rules for this tag

• List five things that makes you happy
• Share five songs that makes you happy
• Tag at least five bloggers that makes you happy

5 Things that make me happy

1. Funny People

I don’t think I can say that I have a friend who is not a funny person. I really take very few things seriously in life and I’d much rather laugh than brood over something if laughter is ever an option. I’m beginning to notice that this sounds a bit like a Tinder bio you wouldn’t swipe right on but, it’s true. If ever a friendship wouldn’t work out in my life it’s probably because that person couldn’t make me laugh if they tried, or if I couldn’t make them laugh.

2. Handwritten Things

Odd one I know… but I really like the personal touch of something being handwritten. There is so much personality in the way someone writes, whether they use a certain nib or if they use Disney Ds, it’s just interesting to learn about people through the way they write. Although writing notes and letters is much more of a chore than other methods of communication, it’s still something that makes me really happy to send or to receive.

3. Finishing an Online Post

Making something like a YouTube video or a blog post or some artwork is a sometimes long but always gratifying process, and the final apotheosis of being finished- actually finished- is always such a relief, because it’s the point where I’ve said to myself: this is good enough to be at home online. Naturally, I might look back 2 or 3 years later and think: this definitely isn’t good enough to be at home online, and of course both the moment I’m driven to do something and the process of actually doing that task is also great, but there’s something special in the actual publication.

4. Reading a Good Book

I’d like to say that I’m a voracious m̶a̶s̶t̶u̶r̶b̶a̶t̶o̶r̶ reader but I can’t help but picture that guy at the party who says “Yeah, I’m thinking about going veggie” but means ‘I’m open to a jacket potato’ at the same time. I do read a lot, especially this year, but my problem is that I have a backlog that is always being appended to and I can never catch up! If I’m stuck on a book I’m not crazy about, I can’t just give up, I have to finish it out of habit but I’ll take aeons to do so before I get onto a book I will just eat right up. But, when that time comes, I don’t want to do anything else and I’m a veritable turkey. Gobble gobble gobble.

5. Finding That Game

The people who have convinced me to join the games industry, and to work, really really work on my coding and my criticism and wholly focus my attention on this vocation I mostly do not know. I know them only through their work and their creations, and when I find a game or a written piece that really really reminds me why I’m here on this website, with these posters on my bedroom walls, it’s invariably an experience I’ll always remember.

5 Songs That Make Me Happy

These 5 are songs that will never wear off on me!

And the Ultimate…

5 Bloggers That Make Me Happy

I Played The Game!

Falcon509

LightningEllen

Extra Life

The Cinema Crunch 

 

Yet More Music

Hello chums,

The other day I found a Cort 12 string at my local guitar shop for an absolute steal of a price. I’ve always wanted a 12 string so it was great to get my hands on this!

Been messing around with a scale and came up with this thang. Might use it in a Twine game this Summer when I get round to making one!

I’ll be back with a non-fluff post soon!