Found a short piece on Morrowind I wrote on a forum in 2009:

I played a couple of hours of Morrowind last night in the back-bedroom on a tiny TV with the sound of the wind in the trees outside. It's immediately more fascinating than Oblivion*; the world-building is leagues more imaginative and actually fantastic. Creatures and Hell-gates apart, Oblivion seems to be collated from real-world natural and architectural influences, whereas Morrowind is a work of actual imagination. Some notes: I found a naked man covered in blue face-paint who seemed to speak in a Scottish accent. He requested my help in chasing a woman it seemed he was intent on seducing, although she was actually a witch who had stolen all his belongings. I declined and tried to attack him instead. My pathetic attempts to beat him up weren't working so I ran. He chased me and eventually punched me to death. It was quite humiliating.


I reloaded my save and headed in a different direction. A woman with some snazzy winged-boots needed escorting somewhere and offered the boots as payment. Wary of my last encounter, and covetous of her boots ('the boots of blinding speed', I think they were), I accepted. Not knowing my way around caused me to become lost and I ended up wandering along the coast. A beast suddenly attacked so again I ran. Unfortunately it was pitch-black, raining, and I had no clue as to where I was running. In my panic I ran straight off a cliff. It took a twenty-minute swim to reach a shallow enough bit of coast for me to climb up, even then I was quite far away from where I had so bravely legged it and left my companion to her fate, but I really wanted those boots so I set off back to where I thought she was. Instead, a huge mysterious ziggurat-style stone temple emerged from the fog. That is where I saved. Off to play again now.

Morrowind is always a game I think I will go back to. These notes were from when I first played the game on a second-hand Xbox I bought solely to play it. I wound up hating the Xbox control pad so much I bought an Xbox 360 to play it instead but got distracted by all the shiny new games I bought alongside it. That was all a few years ago and I no longer have the means to play Morrowind at all, yet I still have the game itself, ready for when I can give it the time it deserves.


*My many attempts at playing Oblivion often descended into farce; once, I was minding my own business, pottering through the forest on my trusty horse, when I was attacked by a couple of wolves. I dismounted and went to retaliate but the wolves were biting my horse, not me. The horse began to run. The wolves followed. I gave chase, but due to my heavy armour I was far too slow. I stripped naked and started after them but by this point I had fallen way behind and had no idea where the horse had got to. I realised I was simply a naked man running through a forest.

Another time I fell into the routine of bare-knuckle boxing a local barman and yielding just before he boxed me back. Unfortunately the effect of my punching him in the face was cumulative and he ended up dead, lain awkwardly across the bar. His wife (perhaps in terrific shock) failed to notice his lifeless body strewn right in front of her and went on talking to me as if I were a regular customer and not a manslaughtering buffoon.

From the pure white of a sun bleached title screen, glimpses of a daydream form. Bits and pieces swirl and wash-up on the shore. The reflection of a broken bridge towering across the horizon, a young boy chased by shadows. The voice of a young girl with a single word etched on her lips.

The increased resolution in the rerelease of Ico allows us to see many things that were unnoticeable or difficult to distinguish in its original release. This is mostly evident in the incredible animation of the two primary characters. It has often been asserted that Director Fumito Ueda's animation and visual arts background are responsible for the unique look and feel of his games. They are minimal, stripped of superfluity. They are prime, and all too rare, examples of design by subtraction. The sparseness of the ludo-narrative and the geometric simplicity of the environment allows the focus to be applied to character. When Ico and Yorda rest at a save point (an elegant solution, the save point is a stone sofa; when we take a break, so do they. Or vice versa) we see Ico's breathing is laboured, unlike Yorda's, whose subtle animation expresses her intrinsic calm. After a short period Ico starts to nap, his head falling towards Yorda as she mirrors him. Later, Yorda wakes and goes off exploring, independently of Ico. It is a delightful use of idle animation and one that's probably rarely seen. Another surprise is, as he is being attacked, Ico faces the Shadows. As they fly overhead, his head turns with them. Given that I believed this was a unique feature in the Wind Waker I am amazed at its appearance in one of the earliest PlayStation 2 games. I'm intrigued and unsure as to whether they were in the original game at all. I certainly can't remember them, but that in itself is inconclusive. It is to the eternal credit of the game that, even ten years on and after many playthroughs, one can still find subtleties that reveal just how thoughtful this simple game really is.

During the past six months I've been living in self-imposed isolation from games, playing only Ikaruga and Ketsui with any sort of constancy. At a time in life where I have begun to take stock and work-out what is important to me, where I go from here, I realise gaming has been a massive personal investment over the past ten years, both in time and money, and I've come to realise I've been getting increasingly diminished returns. Gaming is perhaps bigger today than ever, more money, more exposure. There are more avenues for people to experience gaming than there have ever been. Yet, I find myself increasingly disinterested at the state of it all. I have a stack of games from this generation I am wary to even start for fear of being struck with overwhelmingly apathy. They are notably few and far between, the games I have enjoyed in the past few years, ones I have written about here and elsewhere: Nier, Gears of War, Red Dead Redemption, and Vanquish.

I find myself looking forward to re-mastered editions of games I have played before: Ico, Metal Gear Solid 3, the Ocarina of Time. Nothing excites me about the state of modern gaming. I have boxed up the current consoles and simply left a PlayStation 2 in their stead.

Ah, the PlayStation 2.

The PlayStation 2 is where gaming mattered most to me, and that it was abandoned in suspended animation at the height of its maturation by the onslaught of new technology is a real shame. In its twilight years it played host to some of the finest games ever made. Games with a sense of purpose and pride. And its these games I keep coming back to, in my mind, which said mostly everything about gaming that I wanted to hear. The three most notable being Shadow of the Colossus, Dragon Quest VIII, and Final Fantasy XII.

These three games are individual pieces of work I would hold up, alongside Radiohead's Kid A, Stars of the Lid's Refinement of the Decline, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths, as works that helped define my character, that made me who I am. That you could play those three games and understand things about me that I have never articulated. Those three games managed to scale a peak which has, for me, not been reached again (Red Dead Redemption has come closest but, being based on our world, it loses most of the magic of these earlier games).

They presented me with open worlds - entirely imaginary worlds - and allowed me to wander in them, explore them, make them my own. They come closest to exemplifying my interpretation of the Shigeru Miyamoto quote at the top of this page, that games should be playgrounds, they should be worlds for you to fully exist in while you are playing them, and thinking of them.

Games today are simply so expensive to make that decisions of implicit artistic conscience have to be ignored in order for the money to be spent on the graphics so they are of a standard that won't simply be torn apart once the game is revealed to the gaming public. Everything else seems to fall by the wayside. Note a recent comment seen on a review of White Knight Chronicles II: "the graphics look like they are from 2007". And there it is: a snarky one-line comment dismissing thousands of hours' work. Whatever else the game has to offer is not important, the graphics look old. And this is repeated, over and over again, on countless reviews, YouTube videos, blogs. Thus more money is spent on how the game looks, and expensive graphics mean there is little money left to be spent on making the world breathe.

Famously, during the development of Final Fantasy XIII, it was stated that the game wouldn't feature any towns because for a next-gen game they would simply cost too much to create and build. Left on its own this statement tells you everything negative about the spiraling cost of games development at the end of the first decade of the Twenty-First Century. Features are left out games, not for creative or functional reasons, but for economic ones. And this from one of the world's most successful gaming houses. In their flagship title, no less. No towns. Too expensive. Things are getting out of control.

Yuji Horii, the creator and director of the Dragon Quest series, once declared that all he needed to make the games he wanted to make was the power of a Super Nintendo. This simple idea of allowing the story and wisdom in the design to be the hook you hang everything else on is exemplified in the Dragon Quest remakes for the Nintendo DS. All have more detailed graphics than the Super Nintendo originals, to be sure, but each, released only in the past two years, look incredibly simple visually. They are still fine, fine games. And, while I believe what Horii stated was absolutely true in terms of what he was trying to achieve at the time, the PlayStation 2 installment, Dragon Quest VIII: the Journey of the Cursed King is the absolute zenith of the series in terms of scale and verisimilitude. I also believe that a current generation Dragon Quest, using the increased power of the PlayStation 3 would surpass even VIII in terms of open world exploration and feeling, it would be anomalous in today's gaming landscape. It simply wouldn't be made (and isn't being, the next installment is being prepared for the Wii, or perhaps the Wii's successor). Besides, Dragon Quest is anachronistic anyway, strip away the graphics of VIII and you are left with a game which could run on the Super Nintendo, which is probably Horii's point all along.

I have recently restarted playing Final Fantasy XII, and the simple feeling of just how well put-together it all is allows me to simply relax into it. Nothing, to my mind, has been made like it since. It's a real shame. No doubt, this was an incredibly expensive game to develop in the year 2006, and that the games I hold aloft are from large, terrificly successful companies (Square Enix and Sony Computer Entertainment). What I yearn for, though, is a present where the idea of making a Final Fantasy XII is available to most developers due to the falling costs of that technology (creative talent aside). Imagine that a modest-sized development house could make a game in 2011 using the technological specifications of the PlayStation, and for that to be a viable financial decision. It's unthinkable. Instead, the tide of progress marches on and the costs never fall because we are continually looking for the next thing, and the smaller developers, those making modest, niche games, have to close their doors, unable to compete financially. More colour drains from the gaming landscape. And the only voices we hear become narrower and louder.

I think I shall keep gaming, most probably in the form of re-playing an ever decreasing circle of games: Chrono Trigger, the Final Fantasys, the Dragon Quests, Cave shooters, Ikaruga, and whatever Treasure makes next, in an effort to really understand what it is about games that I love, and to further recognise what it is I require from them should I regain enough interest to keep up with them once again.

Little Touches

The snap and pop of combat in Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Smart-bomb aftertouch in Mushihimesama Futari

Hero's sword glinting in the sun in Dragon Quest VIII

After playing through the demo of Vanquish a few times I felt quite ready to start the game proper on Hard mode. I was quite wrong. The first boss, the boss from the demo, readily demolished me time after time. Over twenty times, in fact. This was in the first quarter of an hour of game time. Shamefully, but with a strong desire to actually see the rest of the game I had just bought, I quit to the title menu and lowered the difficulty to Normal, vowing to return to Hard mode (not to mention God Hard mode) later, after I had learned how the game worked. 7 hours later the credits were rolling, the grin had not left my face.

Last night I began Vanquish again, notching it up to Hard mode. This time on the first boss, while still no walk-over, I didn't lose a life. Its laser did not touch me. Now I was at the opposite side of the arena slow-motion firing at its limb joints while its heat-beam was directed at a position I had been at mere milliseconds before. He fell much quicker this time. It is a satisfying feeling, that of actually becoming better at a game, not merely using power-ups or leveling to overcome its trials. The higher difficulties are about using the games' minimal skill-set to navigate the level more elegantly, to punish the enemies more swiftly and with infinitely more style. Level design is elegantly post-Gears. It has a satisfying tightness to it which means that each bite-size stage, once dispensed with, feels like a scoring a Tetris. The assault up the face of the monstrous concrete elevation feels like Gears' Mansion staircase exploded in just about every direction.

Vanquish is about moments: being sat in cover as an army of enemy robots fire upon you from across a makeshift battlefield, and plotting your boost trajectory from one enemy to the next, flipping behind cover to launch a slow motion rocket at a lumbering mini-boss, switching weapons without missing a beat to pummel it while it is weak. Watching hundreds of explosives and their smoke-arcs crossing the screen reminded me of Bangai-O. And that's it: Vanquish is a game I imagine Treasure might have made, which happens to be the highest compliment I can give any game. Vanquish is sharp. It is modern cover-shooter and old-fashioned score attack. It is one moment. The moment you decide to do what needs to be done. It feels almost breathless, and is a moment that happens over and over again.

Currently playing: King's Field IV.

number108 tim rogers

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@TomorrowsEnd King's Field IV is "Demon's Souls underwater".

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Over the past couple of evenings I've been playing Killzone 2. And, despite the juvenile title (I can't imagine having to ask for the game out-loud, in a shop or something), I'm enjoying my time with it. I know nothing of the first game, nothing of the story, or the characters, and I don't actually think it's important. 'Move-from-here-to-here-and-shoot-everything-with-red-eyes-before-they-shoot-you' is all you need to know. It's simply a chunky shooter (That should be a genre).

One of the ways the developers tried to set the game apart from other First-Person Shooters was with the weight of the character. And it's immediately noticeable; the movement feels like that of a huge meathead with a tonne of armour on. It's nice. It feels different, and it gives you a satisfying presence in the world.

The cover system is interesting and Gears-like, and while it makes little sense (if I can see over the obstacle whilst supposedly in cover, doesn't that leave my poor meaty-head dangerously exposed?), it feels nice to utilise. The tight, claustrophobic level-design is built around its use yet, on the default difficulty level, its not strictly necessary.

I think I'm going to start again from the beginning. Play it on a higher difficulty. See what's what.

Since recently finishing Final Fantasy XIII, I've had the urge to finally tackle Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions for the PSP. It has been a game I've been a little wary of since its PSP release in 2007. Its density and complexity at once repel and draw me in; the promise of its Shakespearean plot clashing with its notorious difficulty. Trying the game in the past led only to taking up something a little smoother like Disgaea instead, replacing Tactics on the shelf with the understanding to try again on one of those rainy days that never comes. I was afraid of when the game was going to bite.

I try to think back to 3 years ago. Am I more intelligent than I was then? That's a question. Am I a different person now? My sensibilities have changed, definitely. And I suppose it's this where this sudden feeling comes from. A feeling of not wanting, anymore, to try a little everything and end up being left with nothing, but thoroughly experiencing only the best and wholly inhabiting it as I do. Be it games, films, novels, anything.

Unfortunately, being that my PSP is currently 1500 miles away on a small Greek island, this feeling will have to be sustained until late August. To do so I am replaying another Yasumi Matsuno's game in the so-called Ivalice Alliance, Final Fantasy XII. My initial uncompleted save-file, dating from the European release, is over 50 hours long. Playing through the first 5 hours again this week I realise I barely remember any of the story events. The hospital dream sequence, the bare-knuckle prison brawl; each came as if by surprise. This delights me no-end, it means experiencing the story anew, with fresh eyes. I'm also relieved that the game still has the power to excite me on the second play-through: the feeling of the (almost) wide-open expanses, the intricacies of the gambit system/license board, the characters (Balthier's entrance!). Separated from any pressure, I can now allow the story to breathe, allow myself to relax in to the experience and enjoy the flow. When August comes (or the intriguing September release of War of the Lions on the iPod touch) I shall be suitably versed to tackle the epic tale of a Kingdom divided.

Final Fantasy's reception is often that of extremes. You have the people who love it over here, and the people who hate it over there. More vocal, perhaps, than both of those groups are the people who love to hate it and those that hate themselves for loving it. And they're everywhere.

Despite the importance of a sense of 'world' in all Final Fantasy games, the way they present themselves couldn't be more different. Here we are with Final Fantasy XIII and it, too, carries the weight of expectation which has surrounded the release of every Final Fantasy since VII; XIII's unique controversy is that the developers have taken a knife to almost everything recognisable of Final Fantasy in the classic sense, leaving a streamlined, minimalist adventure heavily indebted, so say the creators, to western games. Modern Warfare inparticular. This new approach is particurlarly evident in the game-world itself. The events of XIII take place on the planet of Pulse and its satellite, Cocoon. The initial 25 hours of game-time take place in Cocoon, the entirety of which is spent running a linear path. Narratively, this makes sense, being that you are a band of escapees deemed necessary of exile by the government. Therefore, you are on the run. There are no towns, no world map, nowhere to hide. There is no-place to stop and drink in the atmosphere, you are constantly moving forward. As such, you never get to feel the sense of ownership of the world that comes, in the previous games in the series, from traversing the game-world, slowly becoming stronger, and taking the game (and often, the narrative) at your own pace. In XIII, you feel on the clock. No doubt about it, Final Fantasy XIII is a game about running.

By the time I reached Pulse, I felt exhausted. Luckily, Pulse is the polar-opposite to your previous experiences. Whereas Cocoon was as set of intricate pathways through a stunningly detailed science fiction world of hard-plastic and metal, Pulse is organic, green, beautiful. A literal breath of fresh air. Your first steps open into a vast plain, alive with skulking creatures the size of houses, the sun beating down through the bluest of skies. The contrast couldn't be more explicit. Pulse allows you to slow right down and re-evaluate the preceding events, it gives you the open-world to make your own, finally.

It would have been interesting to let visions of Pulse be informed entirely by the game itself. Unfortunately, pre-release information tended to focus on Pulse, almost as an apology, or at least an explanation, for the games' initial linearity (an advert for the game had Leona Lewis dabbling about in Pulse, an experience divorced entirely from the previous 30 hours of the game, even). This had the unfortunate effect of ruining part of the games message; that of exposing government propaganda and disinformation. Throughout the game our only impressions of Pulse are devastating, that it is "a hell on Earth" and that we are to fear our inevitable deportation. The government of Cocoon plants seeds of false-truths within the populace which infects the people with a violent mistrust of anything Pulse-related (as seen when Snow and Hope endeavour to escape PalumPolum and are angrily besieged) and, in-turn, keeps the people in check. Our knowledge of Pulse from outside the game's world skew the government's actions and actually undermine their propaganda; we know that Pulse is not a fiery hell on Earth because we've already seen it in the adverts on television and the internet. It leads to a strange disconnect which actually could have been a postmodern masterstroke if only it was in any way intended and capitalised upon.

The consensus as to why XIII is disliked is that it is linear. That it is empty. That there is nothing to do in the world. I understand this. I do. On the contrary, though, its minimalist philosophy appeals to me on a personal level; I don't like stuff, I dislike clutter. Final Fantasy XIII cleared the deck, wiped away everything superfluous. It is stark. It is minimalist. It is ambient gaming. Gaming for Airports. I used to put the game on and do other things, read books, tidy the house. It conforms to Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno's (woah, Wikipedia) concept of ambient music. I wanted the games' atmosphere to fill the space I inhabited. But Masashi Hamauza's delicate score possessed incredible depths, depths I didn't fully appreciate until listening to the soundtrack through headphones. I do this a lot, these days. Now, the game is a memory. A journey I once took. I listen to a carefully considered selection of its soundtrack to remind myself while running on the treadmill. The view of the trees and the railway bridge out of the gym window gradually giving way as the light outside darkens and all I can see are the reflections of myself and others, all running. For some reason or other.

Little Touches

Scoring a perfectly timed reload in Gears of War.

The subtle foot-taps as you run along a crane-arm in Canabalt.

The real-time clock on the dashboard in Gran Turismo PSP.

Late at night I often find myself digging out my GameCube and loading up Twilight Princess, or if that is too much of a stretch I plug my GameCube controller into the Wii and play it that way. I find it's like calling up an old friend I haven't seen in a while who always has a story to tell.

I find Link at the crossed waterways above Lake Hylia, surrounded by the crashing sounds of the bloated river and the delicate chiming of insects. It is possibly my favourite location in the game. There are options here; a sedate spot of fishing, a thrilling white-water boatride to the lake itself, or a pathway to the open field and the continuation of the adventure. How ever many times I load the game I never save over it. The date reads 27/01/2007. The day I thought I was finished with the game.

Due to the release of the Wii in early December, the GameCube version was delayed a couple of weeks. My first play-through of the game was therefore on the Wii. It lasted thirty hours, the game unfinished. I spent those thirty hours pining for the GameCube's chunky controller. When the GameCube version was released, I spent another thirty hours retreading the same environments (albeit, mirrored), fighting the same battles, and 're-solving' the same puzzles. Yet, I enjoyed it far more. Whether it was due to the pact I made that Twilight Princess would be the last GameCube game I would play (Wind Waker being the very first) before packing the old fellow up for good. Maybe it was just the infinitely more comfortable GameCube controller. Perhaps it was simply the vague feeling that this was how it was meant to be.

Do you ever feel a strange sadness as dusk falls?

An unshakeable air of sadness permeates the game. The introductory scene sees Link and his stable-mate colleague, Rusl, resting beside a three-tiered watering hole near Ordon Village as the sunlight is fading. The conversation holds a melancholy tone. It seems to delicately invoke the Japanese idea of 'Mono no aware', the sadness of things passing. Rusl explains to Link how the hour of twilight allows the real world to intersect with the spirit world and that the regrets of the dead can be felt by those still living. It's only a short scene, but it colours the entire adventure. Straight away the game feels different, more mature, more grown-up. It has concerns of work, toil, longing and regret.

Although, if pushed, I would have always said that the Wind Waker was my favourite of the two games, it's Twilight Princess which lingers in my mind even now. Wind Waker, for all its charm, doesn't really lend itself to projection. Link is a happy-go-lucky child with the world at his feet and adventure in his heart. Twilight Princess' Link is a young adult who, although well-liked, lives alone, away from the other villagers. In a tree-house at that. He is seemingly troubled. His life is the not the angsty catalyst of a thousand adventures or even the child-like wonder of a world unexplored. It is more a quiet life of order and mundanity. Taking pleasure in the little things. Many have said that Twilight Princess plays like a remake of Ocarina of Time with varying mechanics. A wolf in sheep's clothes, perhaps. However, ever so slowly the differences become apparent. The main important difference being that of the character of Link himself. Shigeru Miyamoto's, Ocarina of Time's, Link is a special boy, a boy with a destiny to be fulfilled. Eiji Aonuma's, Twilight Princess', Link is an ordinary young man, likable, but nothing special. Miyamoto's Link is born into adventure. Aonuma's Link falls into it. As a favour. To someone else. He is asked to deliver a sword to Hyrule town which he uses as the only thing available to defend himself when he is attacked by a horde of goblins. He becomes hero of time by accident.

It turns out Twilight Princess is not really a game about good versus evil. It's about identity, a sense of place and the importance of belonging. Your ultimate goal is to stop the fusion of Hyrule and the Twilight Realm. As such, it's the details that are important: the picture of Epona hanging above Link's bed, the score-lines in the turf the ranch gate has carved over many years of toil, and the instantly recognisable music of Lake Hyrule fading back in as you remove the Iron boots at the entrance to the lake temple on the lakebed and slowly surface. When you finally get to take on Ganondorf it's not in a gigantic Gothic hall, not an abstract temple designed only to house him, it isn't somewhere you've never seen before. It's right there in the middle of Hyrule field. A one-on-one battle for the fate of the very world you are stood in. The trees. The river. The grass. The rocks.

And, for me, it's a battle for running through town before the shops close after a day of working in a job you hate, hoping they still have the GameCube version in stock. The welcoming feel of the GameCube controller and the orange glow of a space heater from playing the game in the dead of winter, two o'clock in the morning and the sound of the wind in the trees outside.

So, Demon's Souls. Demon's Souls. Demon's Souls. Coming out of nowhere to grace gamers' best of year lists despite being released in the US only a couple of months ago and still with no sign of a European release.

You are dumped in the fallen Kingdom of Boletaria, a once powerful city driven to ruin by a power-mad King. Tasked with the retrieval of the Kingdom from the rule of some almighty demons, you set out into hell. It is made clear you are only the next in a long-line of would-be saviours. Previous combatants lay all around the Nexus, dead or dying.

The sense of desperation is palpable.

The atmosphere is relentless, cloying. The first castle feels how you would imagine a medieval castle to feel. It's weighty and imposing. Exactly as it would be. It is a curious feeling in a videogame; realising the environments are not built around you. That the castle is designed to keep you out, to disorient you. It is a functional building. The hallways are labyrinthine, barely the width of a human; they are built for defense, not attack. This makes advancing an effort. You have to think about combat, lure enemies into the relative open to create whatever advantage you can, however small. Becoming surrounded is incredibly dangerous. You will die often. But that is okay. The game expects it, is designed around it, even. One of the central mechanics of the game is the difference between being a 'body' and being a 'soul'. Once you die in a level you return as a 'soul'. As a soul you have slightly less health but your attack power is increased. The currency of the game is souls, received after every kill. Souls can be traded for new weapons and equipment or used to level-up personal attributes. As such, they are important to progress. The counter is right there on the screen. The number growing and growing as you advance deeper.

Therein lies the dread.

Each time you die you leave a bloodstain in the level, marking the spot where you were slain. And with it, every soul you have collected so far. To retrieve the souls, you must return to the same spot and touch your bloodstain. Dying again before reaching the spot means the souls are gone for good. The game becomes about hedging your bets, gambling upon how far you can make it into a stage before losing your nerve and returning to cash in your collected souls, knowing that the next time you will be stronger, better prepared, a little braver even.

Shadows dancing in torchlight, hay scattered about the floor. Hidden alleys simply obscured by the angle of a wall. It is an incredible analogue to the real-world. You can almost touch it, smell it, feel it.

For the past week or so, I have been reading Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, a speculative essay concerning the disappearance of human beings from the planet and the routes nature will take to re-establish itself as the primary influence on the topography of the Earth. Weisman suggests that, sooner than we could imagine, the Earth would revert to an entirely green landscape, the immense infrastructure of our cities being undermined and overrun by a combination of water, weather, plant-life and animals. The only thing to betray our existence - a 6 million ton swirling mass of discarded plastic in the North Pacific. Every piece ever made since the 1950's still in existence.

Since I began reading, impermanence haunts my waking hours. As I sleep, imperceptible droplets of water leak between the minute gaps between roof tiles, bloating wooden struts and forming a blackened map of spores in the corners of the bedroom; little by little weakening the entire structure of my house. When I dream, I dream of cracks in plaster, blistering and exposing wounds through which I can see the clearest blue-sky, the same sky that will bear witness to the fall of our buildings, our cities. Us.

In a way I find it reassuring. Geologically speaking, the whole of human history is but a speck within a speck, let alone the life of a single human. Mortgages, jobs, people; everything is transient. The life-cycle of a tree continues year after year, leaves fall, leaves grow, that's all there is. That's all there needs to be. In the same way, buildings are erected, buildings fall. Nothing is important. Everything vanishes.

Except nature.

Nature endures.

I shall keep reading; the future looks interesting, whether anyone is here to see it or not.

La Tour

Dans un Reve

- A Metroidvania set in the long fields of Southern France in the 1970's. A hundred-storey tower looms on the horizon. The lower floors of the tower had been used as offices at one time but left to ruin. As the character ascends the design becomes more and more archaic. His motivation to reach the final floor is simply to see the view from the top of the tower.

Imaginez la vue de la-haut. Pour regarder la terre comme un oiseau.

Viendrez-vous avec moi?

A Beginning and an Ending. (september 2006)

Nearing the close of university things began piling up.

Upon graduating, I cleaned the page. Deleted all work from my hard drive, destroyed paintings, drawings and hid diaries away.

I was just to take photographs from now.

Photographs of the sky.

As it was the photographs were never just sky. There was always a blurred obstruction in the foreground, obscuring the view.

A pylon or tree. Telegraph pole or distant hill.

As the amount of photographs built up the sky became harder to look at.

There was just too much in the way.

I was also playing Resident Evil at this time.

Events during the first few hours of that game made me think a lot.

So much that i never progressed-in game terms-past them.

I didn't progress past them emotionally either.

I would begin to think about the wider world the mansion was situated in.

What was happening outside. if this an isolated event.

I couldn’t play much longer through thinking these things over.

In the room under the stairs along with a welcome typewriter and a petrol canister was a written note from a fleeing survivor.

This, along with the comforting ambient coda signifying safety, meant I didn't want to leave .

The words ‘to those of you who still have the will to live...’

It is where my save file ends Jill /07/ Mans. E.Stairs.

I think of her as safe there.

It is a comforting thought, like re-reading a book passage, though I don't think I can go back.

I also finished Final Fantasy VII recently. Having meant to since I borrowed it from a friend a couple of years after its release--the same copy I recently completed.

I wasn’t right for it then.

I played for fifteen minutes and did not understand.

I am quite glad of this. It would have taken from me the experience I had.

As I said, I was not right for it then.

I did not know why the battles had to be turn-based, I did not know why the backdrops looked so elegant and the character models looked so rough, I did not know a thing of the six preceding games, I did not know that they were entirely different stories in different universes but with subtle similarities and I did not understand why the game came on three discs.

A year or so ago I watched as my older brother travelled the game. Every night for a long while. Tho I wasn't witness to him finishing it the constant melody of -highwind takes to the skies- as the game was in its closing chapter, holds sort of a special significance.

The part with weapon at Junon particularly held my attention.

It reminds me of the section in Katsuhiro Otomo’s Memories, the whole city and all its residents existing purely to fire huge weapons at unknown enemies.

When we were younger games were played like this all the time.

He as the oldest used to finish the games as we watched.

I imagine it was the same sort of thing a hundred years ago.

The youngest would bait the hook and the eldest would catch the fish.

Now he would play and we would get to read through guides in Super Play.

Anyway, this felt a lot like that. Watching him now felt a lot like watching him then.

It was something that had been lost.

and although its gone again now, it was nice to have that play as a reminder.

Final Fantasy VII even then felt a little alien to me, even though I now knew of its significance. How important it was.

I had finished Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, Shenmue and Tales of Symphonia--all important games to me--but i still didn't feel qualified to play it.

It was only after having played Dragon Quest VIII for nearly thirty hours I felt an urge, I felt ready.

So I played it. And I finished it. And it affected me.

That night I went to sleep listening to the soundtrack playing through my dreams. I thought for a long time about what the game had told me, what it was all about.

There were moments that I will remember.

Not just Aeris’ death but the battle directly afterwards against a Jenova form as her melancholy theme replaces the regular up-tempo battle music, reminding you just how important it is that you are playing and what you are fighting for.

Clouds subsequent Mako sickness, the fracturing of his psyche along with his loss of self-control echoed as we leave him wheel-chair bound and have to take control of relatively unfamiliar characters to continue the story.

It reminded me a lot of Haruki Murakamis ‘Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World’, they share a lot in common, sense of belonging, loss,the ideas of split consciousness and the true nature of self. All themes are common to both.

Along with the constant war of technology and the individuals place in society.

In parallel I also started that book a few years ago and finished it only recently.

I felt good remembering the world. And it was a world I would miss.

Now I am back playing Dragon Quest, 37 hours in.

I think it may take me a couple of months to see it to the end; I play only at night, a few hours before I go to bed.

It is one of only a few games as I look back that I have played for the pure benefit of being in that world.

The truth is I do not even really think of finishing it.

It is relaxing and dreamlike and makes me feel tired sometimes.

For an rpg it really is quite soothing. Mostly while playing them I feel quite tense; fearing I haven't levelled-up enough, but Dragon Quest is different.

Even though the most unassuming enemy can destroy your party seemingly at will.

It feels nice to go for a long walk through the forest.

Read a sign seemingly written by a contrary slime

warning that you mustn’t go any further,

and keep walking...

Intricate, hand-drawn map from Chair Entertainment's Shadow Complex, which almost makes me want to buy an Xbox 360 (along with Gears of War and Lost Odyssey, amongst others). Though the idea of a modern, high-definition game inspired by Super Metroid probably appeals to me more than the reality. In which case, looking at this drawing and daydreaming will perhaps suffice.