CoxCon 2018: Part 2, which is Mostly Actually About Video Games

Even though CoxCon is a YouTube convention, it's also very much a gaming convention - and what would a gaming convention be without the opportunity to play some games? Luckily, CoxCon, as I've mentioned before, is very well organised; and they dedicate as much space and time to exhibitors, vendors, and free play games as they do to panels and meet & greets. It really did strike a great balance between watching your favourite YouTubers do their thing and giving you the opportunity to play around yourself.

Exhibition Hall

The convention featured an exhibition hall that was split 50/50 between merch vendors and game developers. I availed myself of some bracelets, a t-shirt, and some video game themed travel stickers, as well as some BioShock themed artwork (to adorn the walls of our increasingly BioShock themed house).

We had seen Prison Architect played on-stage during the panel and, though we never got an opportunity to play it ourselves, we were happy to see how popular it was proving amongst the attendees. Sadly there was no demo set up for The Unlikely Legend of Rusty Pup, the other awesome game that’s definitely on our watch-list after the Super Beard Bros. panel showed a trailer for it, but our eyes are peeled for opportunities to play it as soon as it becomes available.

It was good to see Monster Prom represented at CoxCon - hardly surprising, since Jesse is the game’s executive producer - since, as my blog over the past couple of months may have attested, I really love this game. I was a little disappointed that there was no merch for sale, since I’ll fly that flag everywhere if you let me; but we did get to see some players finally figure out the blood ritual ending, which was just a relief more than anything. (Hint: You need to buy the bloody tampon from the store, then go back to meet Vera in the bathroom on your next turn. It says so at the beginning of the quest but every single Let’s Player I’ve watched has forgotten the second part.)

A lot of the game demos were missing their music and sound effects, but luckily Just Shapes and Beats was loud enough to keep the whole exhibition hall entertained with dance music. It was also so popular I still have no idea what it is, since it was always surrounded by a huge crowd who seemed to be having a fantastic time with it. My partner played the demo of Wunderling, a puzzle platformer where you play as a classic puzzle platformer enemy; while I very much enjoyed the demo of Hamsterdam, a cutesy animal-themed brawling game for mobile devices with a stylish European feel that I’ll definitely be checking out once it’s released.

Hamsterdam is being developed by Muse Games. One of the designers explained to me that the cute, cartoonish Hamsterdam was the perfect antidote to all the steampunk artwork the team stare at all day when working on Guns of Icarus, the other game they were exhibiting. Of course, as soon as someone said “steampunk” my geekery went into overdrive, so I ambled over to check it out. I have to admit that my enthusiasm was initially diminished upon learning that it’s an online multiplayer FPS, which is not generally my jam. However, I’m extremely grateful to the booth operator who tricked me into playing by inviting me to take a seat and watch my partner play, only to then follow up with: “And I’ll just set you up as the mechanic while you’re here. You can operate the mortar guns!”

“But will it matter that I’ll be really bad?” I asked.

I was assured that it would not, and soon afterwards I was running around a zeppelin in mid-battle, keeping the engine running and hurling mortars into the enemy’s supply ships and strongholds. And It. Was. So. Liberating. I’m not someone who can pick up any game and play it well immediately, but after the half hour or so that we spent on Guns of Icarus I’d begun to get pretty good.

It was at that point I realised something pretty awful I’d internalised about myself: one of the reasons I’ve never wanted to play online multiplayer is not that I’m afraid of being harassed because I’m a woman (because, to put it bluntly, fuck those gatekeepers, I’d likely stay online just to ruin their day); but because I was afraid I’d be really bad and so tarnish the reputation of other women gamers, leading to increased harassment of women who really deserved to be there. Chronic anxiety mixed with social media fatigue can lead to some ugly thoughts, I guess, even if you consider yourself - and I do - as someone who doesn’t let other people’s bullying determine their choices.

But here I was - doing quite well, actually, at an online FPS I’d picked up for the first time maybe twenty minutes ago; that one teammate who always plays the healer or the mage, discovering how great it feels to go in as the gunner. It was reminiscent of the first time I unknowingly picked a tank character in a tabletop game and felt so much power. And I have to admit - while I didn’t run out and buy myself a copy of Guns of Icarus that very night, I have now assembled a small list of online multiplayer games that I’m looking in to buying, including that one. I’m going to play some, even though my gamertag explicitly marks my gender, because I fired that mortar at a moving enemy supply ship and saw it crumble in mid-air and I had fun doing it, and because this is a perfect example of how to challenge myself more.

OK - serious part over, let’s rewind a bit and finish off this section with a quick talk about tabletop games. As I mentioned briefly above, I’m a tabletop gamer as well as a video gamer, and my eclectic preferences as to genres and play styles hold true in both mediums. Quite a few vendors were selling them, and we availed ourselves of a few of the rarer titles on sale. The only tabletop publisher exhibiting there themselves (if memory serves) was Big Potato, who specialise in the sort of dinner party games that you need in your life now that everyone can recite every single card from Cards Against Humanity. I bought myself a copy of Weird Things Humans Search For, a trivia guessing-game built using the autocomplete function on internet search engines, which I very much look forward to breaking out next time we’ve got people over. The Big Potato guys were very cool and played a few rounds with us, and also mentioned that they also have a service where they host board game evenings at your house with their products (in the style of an Ann Summers party, I was told, though presumably somewhat different). It’s a new idea on me and one that I can see becoming popular among my friends who want something alternative for a stag/hen party or similar. I mention this here in case it may assist someone in the future. Now onto the next part!

Down to the old arcade

It was a weekend of firsts, and I can now hold my head high and say that I have played classic arcade games on real, honest-to-goodness arcade machines for the first time! I was born in 1990 and grew up in a small English village, so it was neither the time nor the place to get access to video game arcades. CoxCon hosted an arcade room with upwards of a dozen machines in various states of refurbishment, all of them set to free play. (I have no idea who owns these machines or how exactly they return on what must have been a considerable investment by operating this way, but thank you!). I didn’t even make a start in the arcade until 6pm on Sunday, but I managed to get some time in with four of the games:

1. Dig Dug - which I gravitated towards first of all because it’s rumoured to be the inspiration for Doug, my favourite character from Thimbleweed Park. Diggin’!!
2. 1942 - not a fan of WWII games but I got into this one. The opportunity to power up 4 missiles and say “Let’s show Gerry what for!” in a silly posh voice was too good.
3. Donkey Kong - the classic, featuring the first appearance of Mario… er… “Jump Man”. He doesn’t always jump so good. This game’s hard! I’d have spent a fortune.
4. Gyruss - a tricky sci-fi themed circular fixed shooter and, weirdly, the one I did best at. Man, that was empowering.

It would have been nice to get some time in with Ms. Pac-Man (sometimes cited as the first video game aimed at women players), but that machine was solidly in use the entire time I spent in the arcade. Good to see she retains her popularity. My only real regret, though, is that The Simpsons arcade game was powered down by the time I arrived, because I’ve seen some game play videos that indicated that it is batshit insane and I wanted to find out if half of the rumours were true. (Lisa’s in-game catchphrase is apparently “Embrace nothingness!”) Hopefully it’ll be there again next year - I’m sure I will.

CoxCon 2018: Part 1, which is Mostly Fangirling

😁 pic.twitter.com/CRArh79cVb

— Rebecca Jones (@TheGreenLady17) 21 July 2018

Last weekend was exhausting, but also one of the best experiences of my life - I went to my first ever gaming convention! CoxCon 2018 was held at Telford International Centre on July 21-22, the fourth time the convention has been held there. I’d been aware of CoxCon in the past, having followed Jesse Cox’s channel for two years; but since he and his collaborators are almost all based in Los Angeles, it never occurred to me that CoxCon could be held anywhere else - like a random UK Midlands town an hour’s drive from my house, for example. I remember watching the videos from the 2017 con with a mixture of amazement and horror, because it was happening right now and so close by and I was missing it. So six months ago, for our anniversary, my partner bought us both tickets; and last weekend, we finally got to exchange those e-tickets for our fancy lanyards and attendee passes. It was a weekend of twelve hour days, and we weren’t bored for a minute. Here’s a rundown of the highlights.

Meet & greets

One of the main attractions of visiting any convention is getting to meet your favourite creators, and I was fortunate enough at CoxCon to get to meet, at various points, all four members of Scary Game Squad, one of my favourite internet shows. I don’t want to get too caught up in starstruck ramblings here but I will confirm that they are all really lovely guys who take the time to chat with their fans even when they must be dying of jetlag. You genuinely get the sense that, even though you’re there as their fan, you’re also all there together as fans of the video games you all play. I found that there’s a lot more to talk about when you’re meeting YouTube presenters who are as passionate on their subject as you are than, say, an actor from a sci-fi show you love who doesn’t really like the genre but needed the work. (No shade on the amazing job done by those actors, but as a recovering shy person I appreciated having some shared interests to keep the conversation going!)

I am now the proud owner of an autograph book signed by Alex Faciane, Jirard Khalil, and Michael Davis; and with this very special dedication from Jesse Cox:

Thank you @JesseCox - you win at autograph books. 😆 pic.twitter.com/0owDckt93o

— Rebecca Jones (@TheGreenLady17) 22 July 2018

My favourite anecdote of the con, however, might be Davis’s reaction to Jesse’s comment on my book - “You can touch my hand too if you like. I just put vaseline on it, so it’s really soft” - which is simultaneously the sweetest and creepiest thing a celebrity has ever said to me. Thanks, Scary Game Squad, for making my day.

Panels

What is a convention without panels? (Answer: EM-Con 2017, or at least that was my experience of it.) In our intensely packed weekend we managed to make it to all six panels we were interested in, which is a testament to how well the organisers had planned things: no overlaps, minimal over-running, and built-in breaks between panels made the whole weekend run very smoothly.

The opening ceremony wasn’t a competition, but nevertheless was definitely won by Davis, who almost missed the entire thing and arrived just in time to run across the hall, across the stage, and out the other door in perfect time with his intro video reaching the moment in Resident Evil 7 where he accidentally coined his catchphrase (“I’M A FUCKIN’ MAAAAAN!”). You could not choreograph a moment like that. In an inspired move, the ceremony was rounded off with a reverse Q&A, where Alex Faciane was invited to pose some of his questions about England to the audience, mostly composed of actual British people, in the hope that he would stop bothering all the other Americans with them. We learned so much about ourselves that morning.

Next up on Saturday was a pretty cool live episode of Super Beard Bros., who were playing Conker’s Bad Fur Day with two guests who were members of the original development team. In addition to learning some interesting history behind the game’s development, and hearing one of the original voice actors sing along with his character’s big musical number, we were treated to the trailer for an upcoming game, The Unlikely Legend of Rusty Pup. This is a steampunk-y platformer starring an adorable doggo that one of the Conker devs is working on now and which looks very cool. Visually it’s quite reminiscent of Little Nightmares or Inside - dark, threatening, and spooky. We only saw a brief trailer, but I’m hyped.

😁😁 #CoxCon2018 #ScaryGameSquad pic.twitter.com/pGSqhT2kgg

— Rebecca Jones (@TheGreenLady17) 21 July 2018

Saturday night was, for us, the main event: Scary Game Squad Live, which we’d happily have paid the full ticket price just to see (making everything else, I suppose, a delightful freebie from our point of view).

The main thing I learned about SGS from their live show? Davis really does look terrified when they’re playing. That’s not acting you’re hearing. When I went to get autographs the next day I genuinely felt the need to ask the poor guy if he was feeling OK.

The Squad played three games:

• Inflicted, a heavily P.T.-inspired demo for an upcoming game, with the drawback that it didn’t give much information about the game itself - about half an hour long, pretty cool, and perfect for a live show.
• The Theater - a Creepypasta inspired horror game that delivered one perfect jump scare (during which I swear I pulled a muscle in my back) but honestly didn’t do much after that. A little research the following morning (which we were lucky enough to share with the Squad later that day) revealed that we probably didn’t miss much by not seeing it completed, though it was great to watch them play it for an hour.
• Faith II - another demo, this one a sequel to the very cool retro 8-bit game Faith that the Squad played late last year. It still amazes me that anything this heavily pixelated can be so genuinely creepy - I can’t wait to see SGS play the full thing.

Episodes of Scary Game Squad Live are being uploaded onto Jesse’s channel now, so you can watch it knowing that one of those laughing and occasionally screaming audience members is me - putting my back out and, at one point, being accidentally punched by my partner, who was flailing in alarm. Very good times indeed!

On the Sunday we attended the only promotional panel of the convention, for Prison Architect: Escape Mode DLC. This was one of the games at the exhibition that we didn’t get a chance to play, so it was great to see it being demonstrated on the big screen as part of a competition between the developers and the players. There’s some potentially dangerous crossover with The Escapists here, but with the USP that you get to design the prison as well as break out of it; and I personally thought the Meeple-inspired character art was adorable.

On Sunday afternoon we attended the Picto Party panel, with the SGS guys getting to do something slightly less stressful for an hour (as long as you consider playing online Pictionary in front of a thousand people with the WiFi occasionally cutting out as “relaxing”). This served as a nice preamble to the final panel of the convention, JackBox Party, which featured every guest who had attended the con (or aimed to feature them all - a few had already left and one self-deprecatingly sat in the audience for half the panel before realising he was meant to be onstage). The JackBox Party was memorable for the level of audience participation it allowed for - upwards of 600 audience members, mostly in the room but some who were watching the live stream on Twitch, were observing and chipping in using our smartphones. I’d played several JackBox Party games before, but never on anything like this scale, and I hadn’t ever used the 2017 edition, JackBox Party Pack 4. Three of the four games played - Fibbage 3, Civic Doodle, and Bracketeering - allowed active audience participation through a voting system; while Monster Seeking Monster, though not interactive for spectators, was still a very entertaining just to sit back and watch. So I can honestly say that I’ve played a bunch of games with the Scary Game Squad, plus a bunch of other very cool people! I’m quite satisfied to be able to boast of that.

QUIZ: Am I Running a Foundry?

I try to avoid getting political on this blog, but over the past few weeks a particular issue has become very close to my heart: UK maximum workplace temperatures.

You see, despite regular TUC recommendations that UK workplaces introduce maximum legal working temperatures alongside the pre-existing legal minimum, objections have been raised and the legislation is repeatedly blocked. Among the concerns have been that such a law might make it functionally illegal to run workplaces where high-temperature machines and processes are used, such as foundries.

Exemptions already exist in the minimum temperature law for workers engaged in "considerable physical activity", which is clearly worded and easily quantifiable; but how do you know if you're doing something less easy to measure - like whether you're running an office or maybe it's actually a foundry? Take this quiz to find out!

1) What qualifications do you look for in prospective employees?

a) A Levels at a minimum, usually a Bachelor's degree, preferably in communicative subjects such as English or History.
b) Level 3 NVQ Diploma in Fabrication & Welding.

2) Where and how do your employees usually carry out their roles?

a) Sitting at a desk in front of a computer monitor.

b) Standing at a crucible filled with molten metal.

3) What deliverables do your employees produce?

a) Digital marketing materials.

b) Anchors.

4) What is the legal minimum temperature for your place of work?

a) 16°C, the baseline for UK workplaces.

b) 13°C, the legally binding exceptional temperature for UK workplaces whose employees engage in considerable physical activity, such as foundries.

5) When people ask you where you work, you say:

a) An office.

b) A foundry.

Mostly As: Congratulations! You're running an office. From here, it should be simple to adhere to recommended maximum temperatures, since there's no business reason for it to ever exceed the recommended 24°C.

Mostly Bs: Congratulations! You're running a foundry. A sensible maximum temperature for your workplace might be difficult for you to calculate. Luckily, your workforce is made up of people who know a lot about these machines and might be able to advise you.

I hope this quiz has been helpful to you! Please keep an eye out for the increasingly hysterical follow-ups I'm bound to keep writing as my brain melts in this heat tsunami*!

*It's been over a month, we should be way past calling it a "heatwave" at this point.

Review: "The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit"

One of the most pleasant surprises at last month’s E3 convention was the announcement of The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit: a prequel to the upcoming Life is Strange 2 that was released for the major platforms (PlayStation, XBOX, PC) on June 26th. In keeping with the current trend for playable teasers that are also stand-alone gaming experiences, Captain Spirit is a 2-3 hour story about one of the new characters from LiS2. Also, because it’s technically a trailer, it’s completely free to play.

(Please beware story spoilers from here on in, but nothing about the major secrets or the ending.)

We meet our hero, Chris, on a snowy Saturday morning in the winter of 2016. Chris is a ten-year-old boy who loves superhero comics, dinosaur toys, and video games starring popular cartoon characters. He loves to draw, and still sleeps with his favourite teddy bear. All of this is immediately apparent, as the game begins with Chris playing in his bedroom, waiting for his father to make him breakfast.

If you’re familiar with the original Life is Strange or its prequel, Before the Storm, you’re probably already braced by this point for a story that will hit you right in the feels. The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit does not disappoint: the world outside of the idyllic fantasy Chris creates in his bedroom has not been kind of late. His mother, we learn, was killed in a hit-and-run two years earlier; his father, after spending most of his money in a futile attempt to track down the driver of the car, has moved with his son to a small, run-down home on the outskirts of town.

On this particular Saturday morning, Chris’s father drinks three beers with his breakfast, before settling down in front of the TV and opening a bottle of whiskey. The dishes are unwashed; laundry moulders in the basket; the pilot light in the boiler has gone out. Chris has a large bruise on his forearm, which his father hopes he has remembered to hide from his teachers and neighbours. But what’s utterly tragic is not the sudden bursts of anger Chris’s father directs at him, but the equally random moments of friendship: briefly joining in with his games, sincerely thanking him for taking care of a chore, trying to assure him that his grief is normal. Chris’s dad is handling their situation terribly, but he’s not a monster so much as a painfully realistic depiction of an adult who has entirely lost control.

You will likely find yourself wanting Chris to do the sensible thing and confide in someone: the grandparents who write to his father asking to see him, the neighbour who comes to check in on him, the social worker he’s been referred to by his school. But Chris is still a little kid, and has a child’s determination to stay with his one remaining parent no matter what. He knows that his father needs help, but sees himself as capable of providing that help single-handedly; only an adult can see how impossible and unfair a task that is for an isolated ten-year-old. One of the great tragedies of this game is how much you’ll want to help Chris, but the game limits you to the only method of self-help that children instinctively practice: retreating into fantasy.

This is a Life is Strange game, which returning players will know means a healthy serving of kids with superpowers along with your dose of devastating emotional realism. Chris’s self-created alter-ego is the Captain Spirit of the title: a classic superhero on the Superman/Captain America end of the scale, whose powers include electricity, flight, telekinesis, and anything else Chris decides in the moment, because he’s more concerned with having fun than with narrative consistency. Chris draws Captain Spirit comics, and spends much of his Saturday morning cobbling together a Captain Spirit costume from items he finds lying around the house. The games he plays while in character are telling: cars from his toy-box are cast as dangerous, mindlessly cruel characters; the villains in Chris’s personal super-pantheon have sympathetic backstories of personal pain and family loyalty; Captain Spirit shows a particular disdain for bullies, but is torn over whether to forgive them or fight back.

On several occasions, the game makes clever use of camera angles to fool you into believing that Chris may be using his superhero fantasy to explore his own developing super-powers… only to deliver a cheeky rug-pull as the method behind each trick is revealed. (There is, however, a hint that Chris might have some real powers by the time of Life is Strange 2.)

For the main section of the game, your goals are represented in an eight-panel comic titled “Chris’s List of Awesome Things to Do”. These are all the games that Chris wants to play on his Saturday morning, most of which revolve around his Captain Spirit fantasy in some way. You can finish the game without completing them all (I accidentally triggered the end-game with two goals left to go on my first play-through); but whatever you choose to do or not do in your game, you need to see the conclusion to the “Captain Spirit’s Treasure” goal. I teared up more in that moment than I did at any point in the original game, and I was in love with Chloe by the end of LiS1, so I don’t say this lightly.

If you like games that provoke a strong emotional reaction, and that give very realistic depictions of mental health issues in both adults and children, you’ll like The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit. This game takes place in-universe with the first Life is Strange, and there is a small tie-in with hints of a crossover to come; but you don’t need to know the first thing about that game to play and appreciate this one. Also, this game is free, so if you’re looking to jump in to the Life is Strange franchise, it’s an excellent starting point.

My Gaming Diary: June 2018

Game of the Month: Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator

Following on from last month’s new obsession, Monster Prom (which I am also still playing about once a week, have now played with friends outside of my household, and I’m happy to say the experience encouraged some of them to buy their own copies), I decided to try another dating simulator. Dream Daddy has been on my radar since it was released nearly a year ago, and now that I’ve played it, I can’t for the life of me remember why I waited for so long, because I was never not going to love this game.

Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator (DDADDS for short) is a more traditional example of the dating sim genre than Monster Prom, in that its mechanics are more straightforward: it’s a single-player visual novel experience, in which the player meets seven eligible partners, goes on dates with them, and chooses which to ultimately pursue in the long-term. The twist here is that the player’s character (or “Dadsona”) and his potential love interests are all gay, bisexual, and/or trans men, and (with one exception) are all divorced, widowed, or otherwise single fathers. (The one outlier is very closeted and still married to the mother of his children, an unhappy relationship that is taking a toll on both of them.) Despite the increase in LGBT “options” in video games in recent years, same-sex romance in dating sims is still a rarity - there’s Monster Prom, of course, in which every character is pansexual; and Steam sells one other M/M dating sim called Coming Out On Top; but that’s basically your list. (F/F romance in dating sims is still apparently relegated to one-off “secret paths” in outwardly hetero-oriented games, it would seem.) The groundbreaking focus on queer relationships would be enough to make Dream Daddy stand out, but fact that all of the characters look and act middle-aged, and have kids in tow from previous relationships, might actually be more revolutionary.

Dream Daddy is a relatively short game, but you can scale it up or down to an extent, determined by how many dates you choose to go on before committing to one partner for the end game. I played for about 13 hours in total and went on 14 of the 15 dates that are possible in a single run, so I think my play-time is probably representative of the upper end of the scale. You can date each of the seven potential love interests twice in one run, but a third date with any one of them will lead to the end game. It’s possible, however, to pick who you want to go for from the outset and just do all three dates associated with that character, which would probably make the game playable in a single sitting.

I knew from very early on which character I was going to be dating: lovely goth dad Damien was always going to be the only one for me. But I played the first two dates with five of the other characters: charming lit geek Hugo, hipster barista Mat, super buff Craig, ultra competitive Brian, and closeted youth minister Joseph. I also did the first date with “bad dad” Robert, and failed so hard with my lack of cool, earning the lowest possible “D” rank score, that I didn’t bother with his second date. I wanted to get the most out of the game, and I’m happy I did: even knowing which ending I was going for, playing the other paths as far as possible gave me the opportunity to learn a lot more about the characters, and enjoy the humour and kindness, as well as some of the darker emotions, that run through the game.

Alongside however many of the romantic plots the player chooses to pursue, there’s a plot thread common to every play through of the game: your character’s relationship with his daughter, Amanda. One of the most charming things about this game is that, despite pre-release expectations that it would be somewhat smutty and fetishistic, it’s actually a very sweet and wholesome story about the characters trying to forge new relationships while still prioritising the wellbeing of their children. Amanda is a great character: an eighteen-year-old about to go off to college, she’s clearly her widowed father’s best friend and biggest cheerleader, relentless in her support of him making friends and beginning a new relationship. However, there are familiar teen anxieties in her life around friends, dating, school, and her approaching independence that the player will want to help her deal with, despite her resistance to share some of the deeper concerns with him. Amanda’s dialogue is always witty as she patiently attempts to explain some aspect of millennial culture to her Generation X father. Even her rare mood swings are relatable - there’s no overblown drama, just those regular high school intrigues that seem like the end of the world at the time. Amanda has most definitely joined Clementine from The Walking Dead on my limited list of video game kids who I found myself really caring about.

While it’s unusual for a dating simulator to put a non-romantic relationship at the centre of its plot, there is still romance aplenty in Dream Daddy. Depending on your preference you can go for a fairly traditional warm-fuzzies romance when you choose Damien, Hugo, or Mat; a more bantering and acerbic, but still affectionate, courtship with Brian or Craig; or an excitingly doomed love story if you go for Joseph or Robert. While I’m usually Team Banter all the way, the cute design of the game (and also the loveliness of lovely goth dad Damien, which I believe I may have mentioned) definitely put me on Team Warm-Fuzzies on this occasion. Damien’s story certainly does not disappoint in that regard: I had to pause after about every third line of his dialogue to squeal gleefully to the person next to me about how cute he was and how well our dates were going. The writers of this game definitely knew what they were doing: presenting the player with such a wide variety of characters that they are bound to be interested in at least one, and then doubling down on the fanservice based on that preference.

Unlike many other dating simulators, Dream Daddy doesn’t take itself particularly seriously. Much like a middle-aged dad who finds himself back in the dating world, there’s a wry self-consciousness hidden under a mask of silly humour: from the Pokémon-derived mini-game where you and another father battle for the greatest boast about your children’s achievements, to the eggplant emojis that pop up when you score big points with one of the love interests, Dream Daddy aims to appeal to pop-culture-savvy fans who are not particularly the core audience for traditional dating sims. The as-yet-unconfirmed rumour of a super-secret “nightmare” ending is another enticement to prospective players who may still be on the fence due to feeling that the romance genre isn’t really for them (ah, yes, but what if that love story also featured a run-in with Cthulhu, hmmmm?).

If you play this game - and I highly recommend it - my one final piece of advice would be to get your friends to play it too. Even though it’s a single-player experience, comparing notes with people you know well can be illuminating. Out of three other people I know who’ve played it, none made any decisions remotely like mine, and their reasoning was always unique: one couldn’t resist Mat’s dad music puns; another was simply intrigued by “bad dad” Robert’s whole deal; the third thought that Joseph was just too handsome. As for me - it turns out I’m a sucker for lovely goths with flowing hair and a shy demeanour. I think I knew that anyway, but it’s nice to get a reminder now and then.

Heavy Rain: Heavy Spoilers

Last month I started playing Heavy Rain, the David Cage classic I’m determined to finish before I play this year’s Detroit: Become Human (I had wanted to play Beyond: Two Souls as well, but having looked at my list of games I’d like to complete by the end of the year, this might have been a touch ambitious). I reached roughly the halfway point by the end of June (Chapter 24 of 53), which is far through enough now to have developed some opinions. Because this play-through is definitely going to take me through to July’s diary, what I want to focus on this month is the characters.

I should start by saying that I went into Heavy Rain already knowing the major spoiler: the identity of the Origami Killer. This is almost inevitable when playing a game that’s nearly a decade old, especially when you watch as many YouTube gaming videos as I do. Fortunately, I don’t feel that my experience of Heavy Rain has been ruined by knowing who the killer is from the start (and I am going to start naming said killer from here on in, so I’d invite anyone reading who wants to avoid my fate to skip to the next section). However, it has left me with some curious feelings towards the characters.

Of the four player characters, there is a definite hierarchy in my affections now that I’ve been playing long enough to get to know them all properly. My clear favourite is Norman Jayden (forever referred to in my house as “Nahhh-mun”), the FBI agent with the Micha Collins face and the Agent Cooper quirkiness. Heavy Rain may not be darker than Twin Peaks, but it certainly embraces its darkness from much earlier on; so Norman’s “quirkiness” extends beyond his unconventional investigative methods, to an addiction to the fictional substance Triptocaine which the player must do their best to manage while performing his role in the investigation. Not really understanding what was going on (innocent that I am), I may have accidentally started snorting “Tripto” as soon as I was given the option, in the mistaken belief that it was an inhaler. Oops. I hope my best boy doesn’t die at the end because of that.

Madison takes the bottom spot, seeing as so far she’s been nothing but a sexist stereotype straight out of the nineties: you’re meant to know she’s tough because she’s a journalist and rides a motorcycle, but so far her only role in the story has been to literally play nurse and patch Ethan up, which she apparently knows how to do because “she has brothers”. I can’t even begin to unpack everything that’s wrong with that last sentence. Added to this is the fact that she stumbles into the story by chance, while all three male leads have an actual connection to the main plot; that I have so far seen two chapters where the main event is her being attacked and sexually assaulted; and, most damningly of all, that she’s clearly falling for Ethan despite her open suspicion - completely justified based on the evidence she currently possesses - that he’s the child-murdering Origami Killer. I’m not someone who’s going to outright condemn a game for containing badly-written female characters, but let’s be honest: it’s not Heavy Rain’s most endearing quality.

Ethan, let’s be fair to him, cannot be accused of being a badly written female character. My issue with Ethan stems from the fact that he has dumb protagonist syndrome: there have been so many occasions when I made an in-game choice because I thought I understood what my options were, only to have Ethan veer off into a wild tangent, or worse, fail to take a glaringly obvious step to protect himself. The portrayal of him as a character steeped in grief and mental suffering is marred by the fact that he operated on moon logic from the outset. He is immediately willing to accept, without question and with no basis but vague circumstantial evidence and wild theorising, that he has a secret other personality that is the Origami Killer, and then makes all subsequent decisions based on that idea. But, unlike the stress and discomfort of helping Madison evade her sex-crazed and heavily armed attackers for the Xth time, playing as Ethan is never not entertaining, now that I think about it, even if he is barely any less problematic as a character.

Which leads us, finally, to Scott Shelby, a.k.a. “The one I know, and have always known, to be the Origami Killer”. It is a testament to how wonderfully messed up these characters are that, even possessing that heavy spoiler going in, he’s still my second favourite among the playable character line-up. It’s so easy to ignore that spoiler and enjoy his gruff-but-caring ageing PI character, because literally nothing he’s done up to this point has been any more suspicious than Ethan or Norman’s actions.

If this all sounds negative, don’t misunderstand me: I am really enjoying this game, it just lacks the deep emotional realism I’m used to getting from other games with branching storylines, like the Telltale games in particular. I truly can’t wait to see what’s coming up in the second half. Especially for Nahh-mun.

June’s miscellaneous gaming moments

Following its surprise release during E3, I have been captivated by the new Prey: Mooncrash DLC. It’s a puzzle-box of a game that encourages tactical thinking as well as creative combat, featuring an awesome array of new characters in a cool new location, giving a different take on the events of the main game with a totally different gameplay style. I go into it in-depth in my E3 blogs.

Having some alone time with the PlayStation 3 this month, I spent a bit of time trophy hunting on LEGO Marvel Superheroes and The Testament of Sherlock Holmes. I don’t think I actually popped a single trophy on either, but progress was made and, most importantly, fun was had.

After remembering how much I like The Sims 4 last month, I did the classic thing of starting to recreate characters from all of my current obsessions. So my Monster Prom Sims now have neighbours drawn from Dream Daddy (of course), Welcome to Night Vale, and Until Dawn. And this is still the vanilla base game: at some point I hope to invest in some Expansion/Game Packs, at which point I hope to start actually playing with my Sims instead of just lovingly creating them (but there is a 90% chance I will just go even crazier on the customisation options).

I went on holiday for a week, sans any gaming devices save for my mobile phone. I’m proud to say I didn’t feel deprived (so not an actual addict yet!) and didn’t spend much time on my phone. That being said, during my break I did finally get through a level of my favourite mobile game - Lara Croft: Relic Run - that I’d been stuck on for over a month, which I like to think is a testament to what you can overcome if you let yourself properly relax and unwind.

Thoughts on E3 (Part 4): And Another Thing

So I took a much-merited break and I’ve had a chance to reflect a little more on E3. I’ve decided there’s a couple of other thoughts I want to share, even though they didn’t really fit into any of my earlier categories:

The Last of Us 2, and why Ellie’s sexuality matters

I start this section with the disclaimer that I’ve not played The Last of Us and, to be honest, it’s not high on my list of games to seek out in the future. Even the most dedicated gamer can’t play everything and, for whatever reason, The Last of Us has never particularly appealed to me.

That being said, I get that it was very well received and has a huge fanbase who are quite rightly excited for the sequel. (I’m not one of those people who has to call for the cancellation of a series just because they don’t follow it themselves.) I am very pro the existence of The Last of Us 2.

I’m also very much not one of those people who “couldn’t care less” that Ellie, one of the series protagonists, has been shown to have a romantic interest in women. This is important to me for so many reasons.

It is important because a well-received, well-written character can represent the LGBT community - and video games are still about a decade behind movies, which are themselves about two decades behind TV, which are themselves about three decades behind books in that regard. LGBT people exist. We play games. We make games. We deserve to be acknowledged as a part of the human race. Fiction that aims for emotional realism is incomplete without us.

(Side note: It is also important because Shannon Woodward, who plays Ellie’s girlfriend in the new trailer - and whose character in Westworld is another badass queer lady - is awesome.)

It is important because Ellie’s sexuality was established in the DLC for the first game (seriously, I haven’t even played it and I knew this already, I have no idea why so many fans were shocked at the new trailer) and continuity in storytelling matters to me, dammit.

It is important because it is going to prevent one of the cringiest, laziest tropes in fiction writing from killing The Last of Us. I have seen it happen so many times: older man takes younger woman under his wing in a stressful, high-stakes situation. He feels paternal towards her, but as she grows older she begins to view him romantically - he’s probably been one of the few male presences in her life as an outcast/damaged-yet-strong survivor/post-apocalyptic babe in the woods. He’s shocked at first because he never thought of her as anything but his daughter, but gradually her youth and loveliness win him over. They get together. It is gross. I’m not saying this has ever been the intention among the writers of The Last of Us, but there’s a lot that can happen in media development - changeover of the writing team, executive meddling, the list goes on. By establishing Ellie and Joel as incompatible romantically even now that she’s all grown up, the writers have ensured that the focus stays on their relationship the way it was meant to be received, and prevents a BioShock Infinite style misunderstanding among fans (many of whom imagined romantic tension between Booker and Elizabeth because they were so used to seeing this exact older man/younger woman trope in fiction.)

I don’t mean to imply that a plot demand is somehow needed to justify the presence of LGBT characters in fiction (see my comments above). The plot might require Ellie to have a love interest in order to develop some aspects of her character, but the gender of that love interest is probably not going to have an impact on how the story plays out; so if you’re not acting on the deeply flawed assumption that every character should default to straight then her partner could be a woman, a man, or someone with another gender identity entirely depending on the feelings of the writer. But at the same time, every fictional world has a writer or writers in control of it, and you can make your themes richer with the way you choose to tell the story; and if Ellie having a girlfriend can keep the relationship between Joel and Ellie more firmly on track than Ellie having a boyfriend would, then surely that is an advancement of the plot?

Red Dead Redemption 2 and Rockstar no-shows

I was surprised that Red Dead Redemption 2 wasn’t represented at E3, considering that it’s one of the most hotly anticipated games of this year (and last year, if we’re being honest). I later learned that Rockstar almost never attend E3, and the chatter had it that some new RDR2 screenshots would be released by the end of June in lieu of an E3 presentation. Rockstar, I was told (by an admittedly biased fan board), are too cool to attend the biggest trade expo in their industry.

Now, please, do not misunderstand me here. Rockstar are very cool; I love their games and I have a great deal of respect for the way they’ve built their brand and produced some excellent entertainment out of it. But honestly: not showing up to the biggest trade expo in your industry because you’re too cool; and instead promising to give your fans a far less in-depth look, at a later date, at a game that’s already been delayed for almost a year? To me, this seems less like a mark of cool and more a sign of disorganisation.

Admittedly I myself am nowhere near being a rock star. My studio would be called something like "Deeply Geeky Games", and there would be grovelling, apologetic updates every time we inevitably had to delay our releases. But we would show up to conventions with whatever we had to show so far, and interact with our fans, and respect their time and investment; even if that did make us seem less cool to some of them.

But you do you Rockstar - I respect that you're the professionals here. Especially if the real reason you missed E3 was not to play off your cool image, but to channel your energies into getting RDR2 to hit that next release date, because I know several people who are going to curl up and weep if you don't.