Rob’s Terrible Tomb Of Tat

…and you will know me by the typing of the dead.

  • Double A Saves The Day (via Eurogamer)

    I have to be careful these days because reading Eurogamer can result in some terrible brain aches with just one click. Every now and then they still run a gem like the recent piece on ladders in videogames (I have not learned to love them, they are wicked things) but mainly, I’m likely to end up on someone business talking at me and it’s pretty awful to stumble upon.

    In “and not for the first time”, this time it’s Shawn Layden’s turn to suggest the solution to videogames woes is … erm … the return of the double A videogame. Good one Shawn, that will surely fix everything.

    The good thing about asking for the return of the double A videogame is that nobody knows exactly what these things are so diagnosing it as one solution can sound really good because people will think things like “yeah, I loved God Hand, I’d love more of that” or whatever their fave game from the crushed middle of videogames at a different period in time is.

    Quite rightly you should love God Hand too! It is the correct way to live.

    “Double-A is the tier of gaming below triple-A, and above the tier I’ve never heard anyone call “single-A” but refer to as “indie”. It’s the tier of game made by a team of fewer than, say, 70 people – it’s not clearly defined – and working within more apparent budgetary constraints. They’re games that can’t be everything to everyone, in other words, so they’re usually shorter and more focused, and arguably more fun.”

    Even Eurogamer themselves are wrestling with explaining what Double A is in the piece there … it’s not indie, it’s not the industry, it’s sort of just like an indie studio, making an indie game, but it also isn’t that, it’s something else. It’s a magical inbetween state where none of the current pressures that studios already trying to exist in this space have even exist. Or the studios for that matter. Which is lucky because it wouldn’t be much of a solution if they did exist, eh? You know, with the industry being a bit fucked and all that.

    So we just have to forget about the studios trapped in work for hire cycles, the exploitative publishers, the folks trying to chase up payments and work to keep the lights on, the ones who couldn’t manage that, the work conditions in a games industry that largely ran on crunching deadlines, the games that could never exist because of all this and more. The layoffs, the closures, the studios bought and sold. And that most of the games are long forgotten by most people with only a handful getting regular mentions in a rosy nostalgic glow. It was all good and if we just get back there…

    Shawn introduces his logic by reminding everyone that there are still people alive in twenty twenty and a six who subscribe to the “Videogames are at the exact same time, the dominant superior medium and also somehow subordinate to anything else they can think of … for reasons” school of thought.

    ”If you walk into Tesco right now, almost everybody in Tesco has a favorite song, but they won’t have a favorite game, so the impact of music is everywhere, the impact of toasters is everywhere, but gaming is still, we make a lot of money but in this very prescribed set of users.”

    Toasters? Bit desperate, mate. I don’t have a favourite toaster… to be honest, at the moment I don’t even have a toaster at all. I can’t say I’ve been seriously effected by this but sure, go off Shawn.

    So. Whilst I’m not going to complain if someone is going to route more funding into studios to enable them to make games, this is really only a fluffy way round saying you’re only interested in funding ‘triple I’ games, which also only exist in the same nebulous state of I know what it is when I see it, mate. It just has the bonus of fewer people looking at you a bit funny when you say ‘Double A’ out loud.

    The pressing material reality at hand is that there are already a lot of people working in this space currently. Some of them have been around a very long time (Rebellion spring to mind but mainly because I really love the stuff Rebellion manage to put out, even when it’s not entirely to my taste), some only cropped up in the past decade, but there are plenty of these costs plenty to make, aren’t AAA open world games, already out there.

    And yes, they are struggling to find funding just like everyone else so by all means, fund them! Just don’t expect this to somehow roll back the past forty odd years of crushing capitalism or even to put a dent into the problems the industry faces now.

    I worry more that this is one more thing where the folks who have lived and breathed the line go up forever times show how truly out of touch they have become and their only plans are “if we pretend it’s 2013 again, we are going to be fine” so back to the world of Double A when those pesky upstart indies weren’t the middle ground, that was taken up by … pesky upstart indie studios trying desperately to stay open instead, and exclusives and whatever else reminds people of 2013 and being A Capital G Gamer that springs to mind.

    It won’t work but hey, it might buy us a few more years of not facing up to the shitshow that is today, whatever day you’re reading this.

  • The Only Cybermat I Do Like

    Cybermats! Tiny little chums of the Cybermen! And, frankly, mainly a bit rubbish after their first two appearances. And and and, with the second appearance being a step down from the first anyway.

    The metal eel of Revenge Of The Cybermen held the title for worst Cybermats ever for a fairly long time! I’m sorry, as much as I do enjoy the whole Nerva Beacon sequence, the sight of actors holding a tin eel to their necks, pretending to be bitten, has always thrown me right off. Which probably says more about me than it does the model, right? Me? I am absolutely fine with a Taran Woodbeast. Tin eels? Not so much.

    (Yeah, that is definitely a me problem. Do they have therapy for this sort of thing? I’ll ask.)

    So in the absence of the actually quite funky ones that were to be in Silver Nemesis not making it to broadcast (which I do actually like — unlike Silver Nemesis itself), that leaves the Tomb Of The Cybermen incarnation as officially, the only Cybermat design I really like.

    Now, you might be thinking “Rob! Rob. But what about the ones from the newer stories?” and I’m sorry but no. Cybermen (and Cybermats) have seen the worst redesigns of Who monsters outside of the Silurians pretty much until the Chibnall reworks and we especially do not speak of the toothy Cybermats because oh for Molyneux’s sake. Just no.

    Whoever takes over the show next has a pretty easy win on their hands for me then. If we’re gonna do Cybermen, Chibnall finally got the designs on track and the Cybermasters are fully comic book funny too so, erm, yeah, just try and work from there and I won’t have to hate everything that shows up on the screen as being of Cyberman origin.

    Because obviously, catering to my super weird taste is going to be top of anyone’s and everyone’s list. There would be no higher priority in television. Trufax.

  • Death Ray Manta and … OST?

    Death Ray Manta: A Fish Like No Other

    Perhaps surprisingly, I have few regrets from my time in videogames over the years. Sure there’s the odd bit of me behaving like a nob here and there that were I to do over, I would try not to be such a nob and there’s a few choices every now and then but nothing spectacular or noteworthy.

    With the exception of precisely one thing! The soundtrack to DRM 2 having to lie abandoned for the most part.

    It’s a long story of how and why but in a nutshell, it’s “this was the part my life started going into free fall” and so Death Ray Manta 2 has never happened. I’m not so sad about not getting the game done and out there, I think after a while in games you kind of get used to not being able to finish some things. No, instead, it’s that had I managed to get the game out, even if the game turned out tremendously awful, it would have had one of the best soundtracks in videogames by a long chalk.

    It really is an absolutely tremendous piece of work! There’s a small sample on the trailer for the Switch release of DRM:SE.

    Now, maybe one day my life will be comfortable enough again to consider revisiting the game (that time seems a fair way off at the moment, admittedly) or maybe one day Andy at Thalamus can convince someone who isn’t me to make their own DRM2 (I would love to see what someone else could come up with!) but in the meantime I’m so glad that Thalamus Digital have rescued the OST from the darkest depths of internet obscurity and rereleased it on Itch.

    I may have failed to write the arena shooter you can sing along to in the end, but you can still play any arena shooter you fancy and sing along to Oh Stevie’s incredible tunes and give Mike and Jenny some money for their songs.

    Death Ray Manta: The Original Version

    With huge thanks to Thalamus Digital, the original – not SE – version of Death Ray Manta is available again on Itch.

    It’s kind of a halfway point between SYNSO 2 and DRM:SE, it’s a little bit different looking and plays a little differently to the SE version also. To be honest, it’s been so long now I couldn’t possibly give you an authoritative list of differences (I’ve slept since then), I’m just glad to see it’s back out there somehow.

    With the caveat that it is a game from 2013 so you may run into compatibility problems. It definitely works on Window 10 tho. I think most of the real trouble would come from trying to get anything pre-Windows 8 of mine running these days.

    This was also the version that my good chum Jeff used to make an iPod (kids, ask your grandad) version from! You know, back when you could sell videogames without people showing you graphs every ten minutes on social media. And it were all fields too.