GET THE FAILURES OUT OF THE WAY EARLY AM I RIGHT

I vastly overestimated the requirements that we had for our first tutorial and prepared a presentation. I'm not buggin', though! What an excuse to update a blog.

Masters Degree

After a couple of years loafing around and doing things that had a very casual connectedness to my general long term happiness, I decided to take the plunge and get a masters degree. I'm currently at Birmingham City University, in one of their little offshoot campus's in the city, study production and business for games.

I'm going to try and update this journal so I have something to read and hopefully laugh at.

We spent the first half of the morning just keeping house, basically, but on the second half we started looking at our first module and I found out the frankly cracking news that the buisness students would be making their own games primarily while the rest of the course grouped up. Not that I'm not expecting to work in teams, but boy does it take the pressure off if I can learn Unity when I'm only fucking up my own jam.

So it's basically a space invader's reskin, which is great. A lot of people (uh, everyone apart from me, whoops) launched into an idea and started planning right off the bat, but I wanted to sit on it a little knowing that all the work was on my back and that I can pretty quickly make decisions and cuts if I need to.

Chaucer's Filth Bucket, a medieval reskin where people are throwing their slops out of Tudor looming terraces. Shoot them down! if you don't shoot them, the slops will possibly splatter on the pavement. People might also possible comment.

Monster Tears. A massive monster is crying and it is your job to 'wipe' or BLAST away their tears. Their entire face takes up the back drop, poor dear.

It's Raining Men (and I Find That Uncomfortable). Oh, no, not again. It's raining men. Shoot them down before they land on you. I'm not even sure why they are doing this.

Panic Flapper. I might reverse this concept- every time a player blasts a note, it makes a dreadful noise. BUT YOU WANT TO WIN, DON'T YOU?

And that was pretty much the day. Tomorrow we'll be sitting in on the art class! I have to try not to be motherly.

New Years Resolution: Keep Using the Phrase 'If a guy can build a buttslap bot that feels fear, then I can ___'

My New Years resolutions are about the same as everyone elses; be tidier. Be a tidier person, keep a tidier house, think tidier thoughts. I am assuming we're all going to have the decency to not bring these up a month down the line when you catch me eating my fourth chocolate dipped doughnut in a row and crying because I can't remember the lyrics to Gaston's song Beauty and Beast (who bites and is burly and strong? Gaston, brain. GASTON.).

No, I'd like to play more videogames. The problem when you're broke is that every minute you're not doing something that tangibly relates to plans for making you not broke, you're feeling that oppressed wheeze of guilt. Obviously I'm not the Superman, that doesn't mean I then go put my nose down and grind out more incredible pitches to get rebuffed, what it means is instead of playing a wonderful video game that I could wind down or get inspired by or just laugh at, I sit and I feel bad.

I can see this attitude is a reflection fairly clearly of my upbringing; we were a house very much of indirect requests. At any time I learnt to expect a parent drifting in to ask what I was doing and how long I was planning on doing it for, or Legolas-level observations on what I was doing ('you're lying in bed!' 'you're drawing at night!'), a kind of lower-middle class nagging I'm fairly sure most lower-middle class kids are familiar with. Back then I'd build dens in the bathroom, the only room with a lock on the door, but now I'm 24 and there are no parents, no one in here except the voice that makes me feel guilty on my downtime, and there are no quilts and no bathrooms with enticing locks in my head.

Of course this could all be a part of being tidier; there's nothing tidier then fun unbridled by an edge of quilt, but I'm assuming it'll probably be easier to focus on making my bed every morning then tackling entrenched behavioral issues. What the hey, though, right? it's 2014! if some guy can make a butt robot that fears being slapped then I can probably power up that last Assassin's Creed I never got around to without thinking about the dishes.

Dear WarGirlGames

I am asking WarGirlGames a question about their planned release, My Little Dictator. Since KickStarter doesn't allow open comments on projects without pledging money, in case the creator chooses not to answer it publicly I'm also posting it here. I see Nazi imagery used so frequently in the games and comic industry and I'm just so tired of ignoring it, so, yes, I get angry. Who wouldn't?

Dear WarGirlGames,

I was wondering what possibly possessed you to think that this project could be okay.

So, Sims 4, am I right?

Right so I'm the type of Sims player where my guys are a high-end fish tank. I dress them up pretty, give them a home, pat them on the butt and send them on their way. I'll occasionally dip in and see what the haps are but for the most part it's just really making sure there aren't any inadvertent fires and that nobody is a vampire.

With that in mind, I'm still holding my breath with this new Sims 4 business. Death of the body mod sliders is cause for massive celebration, and the idea of favourites and preferences actually having any relevance is crazy ace, but I swear to goodness, EA, you touch my Create a Style and I will cut you up. You put that CAS back in there if you have to jam it in and ducktape it with code so sloppy even I can understand it's poor construction.

I'm psyched for the up-coming year, really, like I am everytime a new Sims pops out the oven. A year's a suitably long enough time for us to all get computers that can actually run the game, and hopefully in a couple of months we'll start seeing our first pudding-face simbabies.

I review Dragon Age: Origins and battle my on-going games related trust issues

Now let's talk about promises, Bioware.

I don't know if this was written first and then the game happened
or if they wrote the game then went
'oh, shit'

I don't really know what to say. I should've expected it, because nobody explicitly goes out of their way to deny anything unless there's a real good reason why people would think something. 

Sten and me are still pals though because he
actually is questioning his understanding of gender roles

What's frustrating is that in playing a game set in Medieval-esque times, I don't expect equality, really. Yes, I would like it, very, very much, especially when it's an Elves-and-Dwarves Magicathon. I'm even excited when games like the Elder Scrolls don't go out of their way to make me feel like I have defend my decision to have my ugly little sasquash dwarf throw her cheap ass sword around. In a world where physical strength can come from magic as well as muscle I don't really get the big deal of just letting me have my escapism, but whatever. Apparently that is a thing people like, having sexism in a game, so I'll just leave it alone when nobody pretends it isn't there.

would you like a story, Warden
would you like it to be about how 50% of the population suck

Don't get my hopes up. That's what makes me mad. That's what makes me hate your game where I'd have probably liked it in the way you do when you've played something for 10 hours and can't really not complete it anymore. I would have pretty happily chuntered along hearing about how I shouldn't have been forcibly recruited into this stupid blood death cult by a dude who tricked me when I was at my lowest by being nice to me in a world otherwise filled with suffering. I'll just hand in my sword, then. Oh wait, I can't. The game doesn't let me do that either.

there was no response option for 'THIS WASN'T WHAT THE CHARACTER 

CREATOR PROMISED ME'

Where was I?

you are right they technically didn't make me, they cultivated a bond of trust

that persuaded me to volunteer that they then shattered via death poison I was forced to drink

Right, right, betrayal. I guess I just don't really see what you thought you were doing when you lied to me like that, since in other games where there's covert sexism, like in the gender ratio that you don't really notice unless you're used to dissecting media, could probably get away with it, your game is so raging with it. 

where did that kid hear this from that he then repeated later
i am going to punch your fictional non existent NPC parents so hard kid

so hard

From every corner, and every race. Every dude comments on my characters beauty and near everyone has a sass to make about my having both tits and a greatsword. This isn't little bits here and there that come from someone at the fringes of society. This is a deeply imbued sexism that reflects our society. 

this was my first taste of Bioware equality

I CAN EVEN CHOOSE MY CHARACTER TO PROPAGATE IT. Which just makes me sad, you know? And I don't know if I should be even sadder, because this is what you think an equal society looks like. That even when men and women are considered equal, it's still just a 'fact' that women are weaker, more cowardly then men? 

Morrigan Explains It All

Whatever. I'm hooked, and I'm still playing Dragon Age: Origins. Your game, like Duncan, has given me minor Stockholm syndrome. 20 hours in and I will probably finish this game, eventually, if just for my dumb stupid brilliant wardog Beans and our shared character histories. 

Papers, Please

Papers, Please is a treasure, do you hear me. Fuck impartiality in games reviews. Papers, Please is a treasure and you should go and play it. I mean, all right, things went a little bit tits up and I may have ended up getting me killed and my family killed and the country going to shit but honestly when you give a humble boarder crossing guard that kind of responsibility you have to expect a little bit of rough sailing before the smooth, gentle seas of submitting yourself to totalitarian repression.

I'm probably moving too fast here for the guys not in the loop in regards to the latest indie simulator hit. Papers, Please, is a game by Luca Pope, also creator of 6 Degrees of Sabotage and the Republica Times. You play as a boarder inspector for the newly reopened Arstotzka Grenin gates and do keep up, because you are quickly going to have to learn on the fly, checking documentations and passports and being absolutely, concrete sure you're letting the right guys in lest you and your family pay the price.

As with all of Pope's games you play a fairly unimportant little man in a very important position. You have a lot of power, tenuoisly, and will inevitably turn somewhat into a monster as your family start to starve because you tried to do a one fingered salute to the system. There's big plot, and there's little plot. You have a lot of agency to play how you want providing you're prepared to deal with the consequences; sure, play the countries hero. Or you could actually make sure your son doesn't starve to death by earning the daily bread.

Right, facts. Lucas Pope does everything, and he should be applauded because this game is beautiful. There's been somewhat of a spate of games that are too dreary for my tastes, but Pope has a hard enough grasp of colour that while soviet greens, greys and sludges are the ruling class it serves to make the few splashes of vibrancy pop.

Papers, Please, £6.99 available on steam, GOG.com and Lucas Pope's personal website where also a class act demo can be found for the people that'll want to give it a bash before they commit.