My other half recently started playing Pokemon Sun and even more recently he stopped. He’s about three quarters through the game and was having a perfectly lovely time with it when he stopped playing. I asked him why he wasn’t playing it anymore and he insists that he is, but it’s been three weeks now and the DS is sitting under a growing pile of books and other miscellaneous bedside table detritus so I think it’s safe to assume that ship has probably sailed.

The reason I mention this is because it got me thinking about how many games people pay good money for but never actually finish. I’m a serial game abandoner, the list of games I’ve started and then stopped is probably longer than the list of games I actually saw through to the end if I cared to look (which I don’t, because I already feel guilty about a range of ridiculous things from not sorting out my water bill to buying a Spiraliser which I never use, so adding abandoned games to the list is one step closer to madness). I know I’m not the only one who does this, in fact I think there are people who are probably worse than me, but the question I ask myself is why?

With a few exceptions, most people who start a book or a film finish it, but games seem to be a different matter, for some reason they seem to be so much quicker to be discarded. The most obvious reasons I can think of are

1. You got about a third of the way in and the creeping realisation that this game you paid actual money for is a load of rubbish.
2. There’s a sudden massive ramping up of the difficulty curve and you grow bored and frustrated at bashing your head on the same brick wall over and over again.
3. You’re enjoying a game so much that subconsciously you don’t want the game to end so you stop playing before it does.

The first example is perhaps depressingly common with the influx of indie games available on Steam and whatever the console players use. But on the flip side, indie games are normally fairly cheap, so if you roll the dice and end up with a dud instead of a gem you don’t feel too cheated and move on with your life. Plus as the saying goes ‘if you want to make an omelette you’ve got to wade through a river of shit’ so discovering the truly amazing indie games out there is bound to come with a few misses along with the hits. Where it really pisses you off is when you’ve spent a lot of money on a big name title and it turns out to be a pile of wank (looking at you No Man’s Sky).

A game being too hard is probably less common these days, with access to the internet and difficulty settings that range from ‘making you cry’ to ‘tucking you in at night and giving you a kiss on the forehead’. But everyone’s got at least one game from their childhood that either relentlessly and mercilessly kicked their arse or alternatively puzzled them into a corner, running around the same area of the game world over and over again until you decided that this shit just isn’t worth it. It was about my 6th go round at Zelda: Ocarina Of Time before I finally got past the water temple and when I did I felt like a genius. But this was in the days before walkthroughs existed, and when games were expensive items received only on birthdays or at Christmas, so you played a game until you beat it or threw your controller out of the window in a blind rage. As an adult I have basically endless choice, and those pesky Steam sales make buying a game cheaper and easier than ever before so it’s all too easy to think ‘fuck it, I’m out’ and move on to something else.

As for loving a game so much that you kind of don’t want to finish it, I think this is harder to spot. Because these are the games you that you lie to yourself about. You don’t consciously think ‘I’m not going to play this’ or ‘I want to draw this out so I’ll finish this later.’ It’s just that you turn on your computer with the intention of completing the last few quests and think ‘actually, I’ll just play a bit of [insert your time-sink game of choice here]’ or maybe ‘I still haven’t played [whichever game you bought most recently in a Steam sale frenzy], I’ll give that a go’. Before you know it you’ve become invested in a whole new game, so the game you’ve just sunk 50, 100, 200 hours + into languishes unfinished in your library, giving you resentful looks every time your eye wanders over it.

I think most people who don’t finish games rarely decide that they’re bored. They might be, but it’s unusual to actually have those words pop up in your head. The last time it happened to me was about a quarter into the first Witcher game, at which point I decided I’d rather just watch a YouTube video of the story to get the background details than deal with anymore of the tedious gameplay. I think most people think to themselves ‘I fancy a change’ in as much as they think about it at all, and before you know it another unfinished game bites the dust.

Now I know I make this worse for myself. My problem is, if I do decide that actually I want to finish a game then I’ll load it up, look around and be instantly annoyed that I don’t know where I am, what I’m doing, what the controls are or where I should be going next. This leads me to re-starting the game, so that’s all my progress down the drain, coupled with the fact that I’m a bit of a neurotic 100 percenter which means that an average 100 hour game can take me the best part of 300 hours, and I still won’t have finished it.

But I’ve decided that this is wasteful approach. For all I know the final scenes in a load of games could just be a screenshot of the developers blowing raspberries at the camera, and I’ll never know it because I’ll never get that far. So I’ve decided to give myself a project. I have a year of maternity leave coming up which I’m sure will give me loads of spare time (this is where all the parents out there laugh in my stupid naive face) and in that time I’d like to challenge myself to actually finish some of these damn games I’ve put so much of my time and energy into. So I’m going to try and finish a couple of games. I’m not going to promise  myself I’ll do them all because that’s ridiculous and unrealistic, but I am going to try and at least finish one game before starting anything new. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I am a bookworm, a self confessed literature addict. I like reading books, I like having them around me, I’m even attempting to write one (although it turns out reading them is actually easier than writing them, who knew?) So as a lover of a good story, I implore anyone who doesn’t game but does read to change their position at the earliest opportunity.

Have you ever read Harry Potter and wanted to be a wizard? Or read Lord Of The Rings and wished you had Gandalf’s powers? Of course you have, anyone who says no is a liar and not to be trusted. What about looks? Ever wished you could change yours? Are you a slightly tubby, awkward teenager with a rash of acne? Or a middle-aged housewife who’s paranoid about the fine lines marching across her face? Well in a game you can be a mighty warrior capable of kicking the arse of everyone in the room with your trusty sword. Or a willowy elf, moving dexterously about enemies and taking them out with magic spells. Or how about becoming a gun-toting lunatic with a bright blue mo-hawk and a tattoo of a skull on their cheek. Pick the right game and the world is your mollusc.

People read fiction to escape reality, which we all need to do every now and then. What a lot of non-gamers don’t realise is that they can get the same impact from a game. To the casual observer glancing over at the enormous pile in the corner haphazardly labelled ‘video games’, there is little to no resemblance from the well crafted novels that they love, to the endlessly repeating shooting of Nazi stand-ins or scoring of goals in Call Of Duty or Fifa. A lot of non gamers only see the likes of a Mortal Combat or League Of Legends tournament and dismiss gaming out of hand. But look beyond gaming’s sometimes ugly front and you’ll find an amazing, still relatively young and fresh storytelling medium, that is only recently starting to be recognised as an art form as valid as film or literature.

As I may have mentioned before, my favourite games are the likes of Dragon Age, Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3. In the former two, you get to insert yourself, if that’s what you want to do, and design a character that looks exactly like you (or the you that you wish you were). In conversations with all of the other in-game characters you get to pick from a range of dialog options the one that most reflects how you would respond. Alternatively you can create a character that reflects nothing of your personality but you would be interested in how this person would react in a given situation, and see how the world around them responds. Either way, this creates an experience that is unique to you in a way a novel can’t be. We’ve all had moments when reading a book where we’ve been screaming in our heads at the protagonist to get a grip, or storm out, or kill everyone in the room. Well in a game you can do any of those things, and live with the consequences.

Even in a game like the Witcher 3, where you are always playing the same protagonist and his personality shines through regardless of the choices you make, you can still feel your influence subtly (and not so subtly) steering the story. Decisions you make have far reaching consequences, often in ways you could never have foreseen. It’s exciting and terrifying, this amazing drama is being played out and you are not just being taken along for the ride, you are steering the ship, and whilst a game will not allow you to run it completely off course, you may not always end up where you wanted to be.

Of course a story well told is only half the story as it were. A brilliant game will have to balance the other end of the seesaw with good gameplay. This is where non-gamers are put off, and understandably so. Having to work for your story is something unique to gaming, books don’t clamp shut if you don’t read them right, films don’t turn themselves off unless you master certain challenges. But the best story in the world could be hidden inside a game and it wouldn’t matter if you can’t get to grips with gameplay. This is where you and the developers must meet in the middle. An experienced gamer may want a challenge to complement his or her story, where a someone new to gaming will want to be able to work their way through a game without feeling intimidated or frustrated by the game-play.

Some developers do this better than others. If a player is choosing ‘hard’ or ‘nightmare’ difficulty then it is safe to assume that they know what they’re doing and can be left to happily fight the most difficult monsters. I think where the system falls down slightly is when players choose ‘easy’ or ‘story’ mode. If people are choosing these options then they are communicating that they are entirely unfamiliar or at least not confident with this genre of game, and therefore need their hands holding a lot more. Too many games will give players a quick run down of the basics before throwing them straight into an overwhelming situation, and I think this is where a lot of new players will simply walk away, and sadly miss out on an amazing experience. Of course there is a fine line between hand holding and ‘patronising’ that I won’t go into at the moment, but it’s definitely a stumbling block for games that needs to be overcome.

Regardless of experience with games as a narrative, a well crafted single player storytelling experience will combine multiple plot lines, decisions, possible out comes and endings in a way a novel doesn’t have to. And whilst it is true that it’s satisfying to read a book and discover the story the way the author would like it to be told, it’s just as fun to decide the outcome of the story yourself.

Do you know what I love about video games? It’s the story. My favourite games are like reading an amazing novel, but I actually get to be the main character, make the important decisions and bone whoever I like! But if there is one downside to the epic adventures that I love the most it’s this: time. Games like The Witcher, Fallout and Dragon Age franchises are not the kind of games that you mess around with for 20 minutes before bed. When you sit down in front of one of those bad boys you’re committing to at least an hour of adventuring, and that’s at an absolute minimum. Most of the time that’s just a warm up, you’re just settling into your groove and if you really want to have a good sesh on one of these you’re using up the best part of a Saturday.

The thing is, I have shit to do. As boring as it is, I have a job and a house and these pesky people that call themselves friends and family that for some reason actually want to see me in the evening, so I can’t just go home and veg the way god intended. On an average weekday evening, by the time I’ve sorted out my life I’ve got about 45 minutes of down time before I’ve got to go to bed. Weekends are almost as bad, because when you’re trying to cram your entire social life, other hobbies, DIY and craft projects into 48 hours it leaves little time for gaming. For a special treat, I will totally lie to people and tell them I’m busy or climbing Snowden or whatever, just so I can have a solid, uninterrupted weekend of RPG gaming.

But those days are few and far between, and like any addict I’ve got to feed my addiction somehow, so  how do I tide myself over during the long gaps between being able to indulge for a whole weekend? The answer is a pretty diverse range of games that I call ‘pick up and play.’ When I looked at the combined hours I’ve spent on these games I was genuinely astonished to find it was almost as long if not longer than the hours, days in fact that I’ve spent on my more serious epics. Because I normally play these games in burst of 10-30 minutes, and it’s amazing how that time adds up.

So I wanted to talk about my three favourites, the three I’ve lost more time to than any others, so that if ever you’ve got a bit of spare time on your hands and want to try something new that won’t break the bank you can give them a go. So without further ado…

Binding Of Isaac: Rebirth

£10.99 on Steam

This is a game for people with a pretty dark sense of humour, considering it’s about your insane mom chasing your character around a basement/dungeon with a load of monsters and apparently mutated siblings, all of which you have to kill by firing your tears at them. Oh and the final boss is at the heart of your mom’s womb. Don’t ask.

But whilst the background and setting are cool (if a little twisted) what really makes this game so addictive comes down to three things; how frequently you die (very) how many different room and power up combinations there are (lots) and the fact that every game is randomly generated. You’re likely to die with stunning regularity, but because the game is different every time you play it you don’t mind because you’re thrown back in instantly with a new map to explore. On your previous turn you might have found a power-up or a trinket you love, or one you loathe, but as there are so many of them that you’ll find something else that’s fun to mess around with very quickly, and this negates the frustration of dying at all. Oh and because you die so often this is an excellent game to play for 10 minutes whilst waiting for your squad to assemble for a game of Dota, or if you want a quick gaming fix before bed. Plus there is a truly massive library of achievements to unlock, and additional characters and challenges. The only downside to this game is that because it is so moreish, you think you’ll play for 5 minutes and find you’ve been playing for 2 hours, hence how I’ve managed to clock up over 100 hours on a game I play in between more serious gaming sessions.

This is pretty much pure skill, the decision making comes down to whether you want to beat your mutant siblings to death with acid tears or if you want to switch to a butcher knife, so if you’re up for a bit of mindless violence this is one for you.

FTL: Faster Than Light

£6.99 on Steam

Here’s one for the micro-managers amongst us, of which I unashamedly count myself. This is a game of patience, planning and head-set snapping frustration, and teaches valuable lessons such as ‘life isn’t fair’ and ‘sometimes it’s better to be a dick’. You are the commander of a spaceship piloted by members of the Space Federation, bravely making their way across the galaxy in an attempt to get vital information to command central and stop the dastardly rebels who are stirring up trouble and trying to seize control. Yes that’s right, plot twist! For once the government are actually the good guys and it’s the rebels that are arseholes.

On your way you’ll encounter pirates, aliens and rogue rebel scouts, all whilst being pursued by the rebel fleet. You’ll need to collect scrap, upgrade your ship and recruit new crew members by getting into fights, trading and through random encounters.

I’ll be honest, this game is pretty brutal. You can slowly and patiently create a lean, mean, fighting machine staffed by a crew of crack-shot fighter pilots and have it all come falling down around your ears in two warp jumps because the game can be monstrously unfair. But that’s deep space adventuring for you! It’s a dangerous place!

But, because the game is hard and because it can throw you so many curve balls you get a real sense of satisfaction when you progress that little bit further, and when you finally beat it it’s freakin’ sweet. There are also a whole load of challenges and unlockables, some hidden and some not, for you to work towards, letting you try out new ships with new races and pushing you towards a new game play style.

If you walk away then the game picks up exactly where you left off, and it’s the kind of game you can mess around with for a couple of turns before you do something else. You can pause during the firefights, and carefully consider your next move before you jump, so it’s a slower paced game but it does have some action, and you may find it all starts to move a bit too fast when half your ship is on fire and the crew are rapidly running out of oxygen.

Also, this game is available on iPads, I haven’t bought it (yet) but even if it’s a watered down version I still think it would be pretty cool to be able to play it on the go.

The Consuming Shadow

£6.99 on Steam

A game made by Ben ‘Yhatzee’ Crowshaw of Zero Punctuation fame (check it out) this is a horror game and a roguelike. You start off playing as a mysterious scholar, desperately roaming around the English countryside trying to collect clues that will allow you to identify and defeat an evil god, who’s minions are wreaking havoc upon the earth.

You have to make your way through dungeons where you will find either clues or equipment, but also monsters that are to be avoided or defeated, as failure to do so will bring down your health or sanity meters. A fully depleted health bar will mean game over, where as a fully depleted sanity bar brings about a range of fun and interesting sanity effects, such as monsters that are not really there and menu options switching randomly to ‘kill myself’, clicking on which leads to a little suicide mini-game.

The dungeons, equipment and monsters are all randomly generated, as are the three gods that are in play. There is always an invading god, the invading gods ally and the invading gods enemy but the identity of the three changes with each play through. There are also random events and encounters, some good and some bad, which will keep you on your toes.

Playing until winning or death will grant experience, which allows you to add buffs to your character, but also unlocks the more difficult monsters so the game remains a challenge no matter how many times you play. I’ve got to stress, this isn’t the kind of game you play through once and then win the first time, this game, perhaps more so than either of the other two I’ve talked about, expects you to fail and builds it’s gameplay accordingly. The fact that the game wants you to die means that a single play through will normally last about 20 minutes, which is perfect for busy people, but you can easily waste a couple of hours with this game perfecting a certain style until you finally get the ‘good’ ending.  

Gameplay wise this is probably the best balanced between action and puzzle. The dungeons have plenty of combat, but the rest of the game is about making decisions and figuring out clues, all within a time limit (you only have 60 in game hours to defeat the evil). Plus the unlockable characters come with their own bonuses, such as a melee focused character and a character that get a bonus from using guns, so it’s easy to find a style that suits most tastes.

You will have noticed that all three of these games are randomly generated, which is how they keep fresh with each play through. The beauty of them all is that they’re hard. These aren’t meant to be a hand holding, easy peasy experience that you play through once and then discard, these games hate you, want to kick your ass and for you to come back for more. You’re meant to beat your head against a brick wall multiple times with these games, because when you do finally beat them it’s all the more satisfying, and then they come back and say ‘Ok, what else you got?’ If you’re not into that kind of abusive relationship with your entertainment then I’m not sure I can help you. But of you are, then definitely give at least one of these a try, because they’re all awesome.

So first off I should clarify, I’m not a multiplayer gamer. I’m what is known as an antisocial introvert when it comes to games, and I’m convinced that everyone playing online games is some sort of lunatic that’s going to threaten to murder my family, or at least be unkind to me. What I’m trying to say is that from the word go, Paladin’s isn’t the kind of game that would appeal to me. However, I do have lots of chums that are partial to a bit of Dota 2 and CS GO, and as Paladins is free to play they talked me into downloading it and playing a few rounds with them.

Upon firing it up I was invited to play through the tutorial, so I did. This consists of you learning about one character and his abilities, and tells you how to help your team win a match by capturing the objective. In layman’s terms, this means you stand around in a big circle psychotically shooting at anything that comes near you for what the game deems long enough, then a big wagon appears and moves painfully slowly in a random direction. You have to walk around the wagon making sure your enemies don’t push it back. Once it arrives at its destination the wagon apparently improves the general effort, and you win the game, hurrah!

Having learnt the basics, my friends were keen for me to join them in proper game so I gave it a go. I think at this point it needs to be stressed that I had literally no idea what I was doing. I’m entirely unfamiliar with lobbies and joining matches, so after working my way through the tutorial I was pretty at sea. Luckily, a large button appeared on the screen asking me to join my friends, and upon clicking it I was invited to choose my character.

“Whoa whoa whoa” said I, or I would have done if I had been on the mic at this point. The tutorial only showed me how to play a handsomely grizzled man with an enormous chin, and he was immediately taken by another player, leaving me to choose from a range of alternatives none of which I had any idea what they did. But tick tock, the timer is counting down so choose someone quick! Look game, I’m the sort of person that takes 2 hours in a single character creation screen and agonises over where to place every single experience point, so having to pick an unknown character on the fly is not helping with my anxiety. I end up with some sort of gremlin in a wooden mech suit, which I’m assured by my husband is a good choice because it’s a tank.

So into the fray I am launched, and luckily my Gremlin’s controls are not too dissimilar from the Grizzled Chin, so I can at least shoot at things and use a shield. I wandered off to go and find the big circle I’m supposed to park myself in when I find that I’m all on my own, and everyone else seems to be having a jolly murderous time on the other side of the map. You see it turns out we’re in a Death Match, a mode of play I hitherto didn’t know existed in this game, although at least the goal was clearer than protect the wagon, namely ‘kill everything that glows red’. So I spent a frantic 3 minutes trying to shoot everything that moved and attempting to remember what my ultimate power was and why I should care, and just as I was getting a handle on it the match ended with victory achieved for our side.

I honestly don’t know what contribution I made (I’m guessing very little) and I didn’t really have a chance to find out as by the time I’d navigated round the end of match screen and deciphered my score it was time to play again, and to pick a new character as now both Gremlin and Grizzled Chin had been taken.

All in all I gave it about 3 matches, each time with a new character and each round more clueless than the last. But honestly, whilst it was fun to watch my friends wind each other up about kill stealing (apparently a grave misdemeanour), ultimately it just wasn’t doing anything for me. I had to give it up and go play Faster Than Light for an hour to calm down.

It’s not that I dislike multiplayer with friends, or a chaotic game. In fact some of the best times I’ve had as a gamer has been playing games like Overcooked, Human Fall Flat or Viscera Cleanup Detail, all with mates. It’s not even that I don’t like the competitive element, give me a bit of Age Of Empires 2 or Mario Kart any day. I think it’s probably that there’s nothing to sink your teeth into. The matches are over in a couple of minutes and the winning and losing seems to be completely arbitrary. Maybe if I practised, got used to the characters and became a crack shot with the weird flower gun one of my Champions was using, I’d go and play online against people who are actually skilled and feel like I’d achieved something. But I’m not that bothered, I’ll just stay in my antisocial corner for now and only come out after 4 gins to insist everyone plays Overcooked with me.

 

Forgive me straying from my stated field of topics so early in my development, but I feel the need to get something off my chest, and as it’s a pretty all consuming part of my life at the moment I am going to indulge myself on my blog.  

So I’m pregnant, in case the title didn’t give it away. Before I got pregnant, I always wanted to feel what it was like to be pregnant at least once, just for the experience of it. I’d heard accounts of feeling motherly, spiritual, “glowing” and being able to marvel at the way my body would change as I embraced my beautiful fertility. I knew that there were downsides, morning sickness, tiredness, feeling more awkward as my bump got bigger. But I was keen to experience it all, I thought it would be interesting, a unique experience that only women who had been through it could appreciate.

Well, I’m 6 months in now and what I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt is that pregnancy is boring. Very very very very boring.

First of all, there’s the biggest elephant in the room and that’s alcohol. Or lack thereof. I love alcohol. Wine, gin, beer, whisky. It all makes me happy. And I miss it like crazy. And whilst it’s true that the longer I’ve had to go without it the easier it is, it’s also true that the longer I go without it the more resentful I am of people who don’t have to. Before I was pregnant I would happily abstain all week, then enjoy a couple of drinks on a Friday and Saturday night. I rarely drank to excess, because I’ve reached a point where hangovers literally make me think I’m dying, but I’d be able to relax. Be jolly. Maybe even tipsy. And that was enough. But right now, I can have one drink, one measly drink that only makes me want another one and that comes with a huge side order of guilt. I know people say one won’t hurt, I know I don’t need to feel guilty, but whoever said human beings are rational.

And so I look at people, sitting there casually enjoying their second or third wine or beer of the evening and I hate them. Truly I do. The only reason I don’t hate my husband for having a few beers on a Friday is because I love him and I the logical part of me says that it’s not fair to deprive him just because I can’t do the same. But it’s a conscious effort. Honestly, at this point I’m more looking forward to the glasses of Champagne I’m going to be having at Christmas once this baby is born more than the baby itself. And that’s not because I care more about alcohol than my child, it’s just that I’ve never had a baby before, and although people tell me it’s great and I’m sure it will be, I still don’t know what it feels like, where as I know exactly what being half way through a bottle of wine feels like and that’s just dandy, thank you very much.

Then there’s my body, or rather the weird alien body I’m currently being forced to inhabit, which is like my body but gone wrong. Look, I was never a supermodel, and I never will be. But I was slim enough. I felt nice. I felt reasonably confident that I could throw on most outfits and look ok. And here’s the thing, I, like all other women in the western world, have been trained from the age of about 10 years old that to be thin is to have value, and that training doesn’t just vanish purely because you’re pregnant. It gets worse, because you hate your changing, fat new body and feel guilty about hating it.

Oh, and speaking of outfits, I had probably a couple hundred of them, when you take all the different clothing combinations into account. Now I have 10. 10 outfits, all of which do nothing to stop me looking like I’m the size of a house. If anything they emphasise it.

I used to jog. I used to be able to dance around, and go on bouncy castles. And be limber and flexible and slightly less clumsy (I am extremely clumsy at the best of times). I can’t do any of that now. I can go for walks and I can do pregnancy yoga which is like yoga for pussies, and I’m not allowed to do anything fun at all. When you’re pregnant you can watch other people have a nice time, usually doing something awesome like laser quest or go-karting or mountain biking and probably whilst slightly inebriated, and you get to hold the coats and drive. It puts you in a very sour mood and basically makes you pretty withdrawn, because what kind of weirdo wants to watch people have fun and not be able to join in? Basically, I’m feeling pretty resentful over here and I’m looking forward to having my body and my life back. This kid better be worth what is basically a solid year of this BS.

Here’s another thing I didn’t realise, you don’t actually get told what’s going on by any of the medical authorities. Thank god for the internet or I wouldn’t have a bloody clue. I’m 6 months in and still have absolutely no idea what happens at the end. Did you know where are three stages to labour? I didn’t! Had to google that one myself to find out! Maybe the doctors operate on a ‘need to know’ basis and think, you don’t need to know about this until it’s pretty much happening, but you’d think they’d at least give you a leaflet.

Your body does weird things. And you tell the midwife about them and she just nods and goes ‘oh yeah that’s normal’. Well then why the hell didn’t you mention them beforehand, instead of letting me think I was a freak or dying? It hurts when I sneeze. That’s a thing that happens to you. Heartburn? I’d never had it before, turns out it fucking sucks and it’s basically constant whilst your pregnant. Cramp? Again, I’d never had it before, but now I wake up with it in my calves. How the hell do you get cramp whilst lying perfectly still and sleeping? Also speaking of sneezing, I better brace myself because if I don’t it’s 50/50 as to whether I pee a little bit.

I know I’m whining, I know there’s millions of women in the world that would kill to be able to be pregnant. But nevertheless, I maintain that anyone who says being pregnant is the best time of their lives either had the most dull life in the world up until this point or is a bare-faced liar. So when a pregnant woman is giving you filthy looks for complaining about your hangover, or snarls contemptuously about how you overdid it at the gym last night maybe take the conversation outside, least you be knocked out with an oversized nursing bra thrown with deadly precision.

Lord Of the Rings or Star Wars? The Discworld or The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy? Game Of Thrones or Star Trek? Whether it’s films, books, TV series or games the debate of which is the better genre rages ever on, with seemingly no end in site. Well worry not, dear readers, for I am here to settle this question once and for all, having key elements of both genres go head to head and then making a series of completely arbitrary decisions to conclude the winner. The loser must have all mention of that genre purged from history. Or you know, just get called nerds and stuff. Onwards!

Round One – Location

Fantasy

So your basic fantasy setting comes in three flavors which are forests, castles, and peasant villages/towns. If you’re lucky you might get a dwarven mine that doubles as a convenient mountain location thrown in as a bonus. Now I’m not saying that there aren’t variations, sometimes the forest is haunted and spooky, sometimes is beautiful and tranquil and full of elves. Equally sometimes the castles are grim and despotic or sometimes they’re beautiful palaces full of treasure, with pesky guards between you it, that you have to take out silently with that one move that you learnt in the first act and haven’t used since. But ultimately, you’re still going to end up stamping round a good few hundred forests on your way to the next village full of filthy peasants talking at you in a variety of regional English accents.

Score: 3/5 – Random villager number 87 “Narp”

Sci-Fi

We’re talking space here, and depending on which franchise you’re invested in that usually comes with literally infinite possibilities. Yes, from the interior of your cockpit it does all look like so much black with twinkly bits, but when you beam down that’s when things really start to get interesting. For some never really adequately explained reason, planets in sci-fi often seem to be dedicated to one thing, with almost psychotic single mindedness. You have the lava planet, the cyborg planet, the industrial planet, the water planet, the planet dedicated to nothing but eating jelly. But because the universe is infinite then sci-fi can go wherever it wants with this. You can have a planet made entirely out of rhubarb and custard, with a deep seated hatred between the Rhubarbions and the Custardites where a bitter war for Mount Crumble has been waging for millennia.

Score 5/5 – For the possibility of having a planet made entirely of brie

Round Two – People

Fantasy

We all know what to expect from any media that dares to call itself a fantasy these days, and that’s Humans, Elves and Dwarfs. Furthermore, Humans have got to be racist dicks, Elves have got to be spiritual forest dwellers and Dwarfs have got to be tough and hardy and brilliant with metalwork. Sorry, that’s just how it has to be. Which is why it blows our minds when this trope is subverted. The Discworld books make Elves  psychotic murdering bastards, Game Of Thrones has Dwarfs in it that *gasp* aren’t living in mountains and wielding axes! They’re just people! And humans are still racist dicks! Add to this a HUGE number of other races that you can mix and match at your leisure, Orcs, Goblins, Dragons, Gnomes, Vampires, Witches, Halflings. You have a ready made cast that everyone knows about sitting right there for you and for extra fun just make orcs the sex symbols.

Score 4/5 – Seriously, can humans ever not be racist dicks?

Sci-Fi

With infinite planets comes infinite possibilities of people to inhabit them, so it’s kind of disappointing that sci-fi runs the theme of ‘one planet = one theme’ to their characters to. So let’s see now, you’ve come across a new, undiscovered planet with a mysterious alien race on it, let’s beam down and take a look. What’s the betting that they’ll be

1. Hostile and warmongering
2. Cold and logical
3. Tranquil and enlightened
4. Weak and powerless and possibly fluffy

Where’s the subtlety? Where’s the complexity? Where’s the deep seated love of smooth jazz? They may be blue, or green or have six eyes but they’re still going to have one dimensional personalities.

Score 2/5 – “veS qamuSHa’”

Round Three – Transport

Fantasy

So if you’re a standard mud shovelling peasant in your standard mud-exporting village you’re most common transport is going to be your own two legs, maybe a donkey if you’re a bit ‘la-di-da.’ Then it’s just various upgrades of horses from raggedy, cart-pulling nag to King grade war stallion. BUT that’s just for the humans. Look a bit further afield and things start to get interesting. How about a griffin, or a giant eagle, or a dragon? Or forget the unreliable mythical animal industry altogether and just go straight for zooming across the landscape via magical teleportation. Or walking, talking, friendly tree? There’s plenty of options available for the enterprising traveller on a budget.

Score 3/5 – It still does all kinda boil down to horses though

Sci-Fi

From your big Jupiter Mining Ships to your nippy little X-Wings, there will always be a ship to suit your needs. There are ships the size of cites, ships for one man crews, ships on the backs of giant space wales, ships powered entirely by the numbers on a waiters bill pad, ships that can travel across galaxies in the blink of an eye. And they’re a combination of your home, your defence system and your transport. But what if spaceships just aren’t for you? Well fear not weary traveller, because Sci-Fi boasts the best in cutting edge teleportation technology. A galaxy need never be far far away for you, when you can head on down to Super Savers Spaceship Emporium and pick up your new vehicle today.

Score 4/5 – Give me a big skip with thrusters.

Round Four – Weapons

Fantasy

Thanks to the heavy influence of the Middle Ages, fantasy has a broad range of pointy, bludgeony, flaily and fiery weapons to kill your fellow sentient beings in a variety of interesting ways. Combine that with magic and you’ve got weapons that are twice as deadly and 100% more sparkly. Take your standard, perfectly balanced broadsword. Throw a rune of lightning on that bad boy and give it a Curse Of the Black Tomb and suddenly you have Shadow Bolt The Destroyer, the Blighted Blade of the Wastes. But what about the busy warlord that needs to lay waste to his enemies en masse? Of course an atom bomb can vaporise the entire landscape in an instant but it will never create the same sense of dread as a giant flaming trebuchet being pushed towards the castle gates by two angry war hippos. Alternatively you can summon your mighty sorceresses that can freeze enemies in their tracks, make the blood boil in their veins or summon an undead horde (provided their mana doesn’t run out).   

Score 5/5 – Because when it comes to raining down fire upon your enemies, there’s nothing quite like raining down fire upon your enemies.

Sci-Fi

At first glance, sci-fi looks to be a heavily beam weapon focused genre. I mean, you think sci-fi gun, you’re thinking laser beams. And you’d be right. BUT, there’s so much more! Technological advancements that made deep space travel and teleportation possible obviously extended to humanities enthusiasm for destroying anything and everything that looks at it funny. So as well as your classic, ‘slice you into ribbons’ laser beams you also have freeze beams, portal guns and anti-gravity guns for when you need to kill your target in a slightly more comical way. Or how about shrinking rays for lovers of the unconventional kill? But what if you need a little more oomph? With the likes of a Death Star in your back pocket  you can destroy a planet at the touch of a button. And you need never risk your own men as you can have a robot army marching across the plains, mowing down innocent civilians to your hearts delight.

Score 4/5 – Just make sure your robot army doesn’t gain sentience and turn against you, it always makes a terrible mess.

Final Scores

So, after careful consideration of what each genre has to offer let look at our final scores. So in the Fantasy corner we have an impressive 15/20, and in the Sci-Fi corner we have a very respectable, 15/20. Everyone’s a winner! So go and get your copies of Lord Of The Rings and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, tear out all of the pages and use them to throw yourself a parade for having such excellent taste.  

I recently badgered a friend of mine into getting a Steam account. She’s heavily into geek culture, quite happily watches her boyfriend play games for hours on end and most importantly of all, she’s a big reader so; (my logic went) the perfect audience for some of the more epic RPG’s out there.

Her boyfriend kindly mashed together a gaming PC for her out of spare parts, plonked her in front of her mouse and keyboard and stuck a headset over her ears. I was super excited, eagerly looking forward to rambling conversations about the real power behind the Institute in Fallout 4 and how someone can finally agree with me that Geralt Of Rivia is the sexiest man to have never walked the earth. I eagerly ask her what she wants to play first, keen to offer advice and be the sage voice of experience and she responds with

“Well, my boyfriend thinks I should start off with Stardew Valley.”

And that’s when it hits me. Witcher 3? Fallout 4? Dragon Age? What was I thinking? She’s never played anything more complicated than Solitaire before. Any of these games are going to be completely out of her depth.

To a brand new fresh out of the box newbie like her, these big name titles are going to be annoying, confusing, and ultimately boring because there’s so much to do that there’s no direction. If the most complicated instructions that you’re used to are ‘Here are the pigs, fire the birds at them’ dumping a new player in Fallout, or Witcher 3, or any of the really cool RPG’s is going to be completely overwhelming. The gooey alone will be enough to turn off a casual gamer, let alone all of the other aspects of your character that you have to manage. 

 

There’s so much that gamers take for granted, it’s hard to even see past it any more. There’s our awesome cool lingo; RPG, FPS, NPC, say these collections of letters to an outsider and they just stare blankly at you. Building up your characters skills is another one, newbies have to learn the hard way. When you’re 20 hours into a game is not the best time to discover that throwing all of your XP into lock-picking and cooking skills isn’t going to save you from the wild marauders wielding machetes.  

Then there’s the classic tropes, like questing. Veteran gamers are so used to being loaded down with quests that they know to ignore old side quests for which they are way over-levelled (unless you’re a mad 100 percenter like me, a serious condition which I take a special medicine for). Newbies don’t have that experience and so are spending hours grinding their way through killing 35 Snarkle-Kitties for the Herbalist in the opening village and wondering why anybody would think that this is fun.

I get that there’s a learning curve with everything, and video games are no exception. But it wasn’t until the I was faced with introducing a complete noob to the wide world of gaming that I realised just how inaccessible, and intimidating, gaming is for the uninitiated.

Do I think that video games should treat everyone like they’ve only just discovered the internet? Do I think they should tediously explain;

“This is a gun, it’s used for hitting things far away. This is a plank with a nail in it, it’s used for hitting things close to you”? No I do not. But I don’t think it hurts any of us to remember that not everyone was raised on a diet of Mario and Tomb Raider, and if someone wants to step into the unknown and try something new then the gaming community should try and be as patient and welcoming as possible, because there are a lot of skills in gaming, and like any other skills they have to be learnt through practice. Maybe keep this in mind next time you’re screaming into your mic at the stupid moron that doesn’t know how to Support.

I don’t know about you but I love playing tabletop games. For those of you not hip with the lingo man, tabletop games include board games, card games, basically anything where you and your chums will sit down round a flat surface such as a “table” and engage in a fun and competitive activity known as a “game”. Most people will have heard of the big old boys out there such as Monopoly, Scrabble, Pictionary, and the more adventurous amongst you may of even played a round of Articulate or two.

But I’m not here to teach you to suck eggs or beat your brother at Cluedo. I have amassed a collection of approximately 50 tabletop games and that collection is still growing, so I wanted to discuss some of the lesser known ones with you. Specifically, the best games for people like me who have the attention span of a 2 year old on a Smarties high. I don’t have time for any of your 50 page rule books man, I just want to play! So without further ado, here’s my top 5 recommendations for quick, snappy games you can pick up in about 5 minutes.

Timeline

Number of players: 2-8

Time: 15 minutes

Price: £14.99

Timeline is the best game for all the history geeks in the room to show off their “incredibly useful” knowledge and then be smug about it. The game consists of a whole bunch of teeny weeny adorable cards, all with an event from history on one side and the date that event took place on the other. Players each get dealt at least three events each and then take turns putting them in order on the table to form a Timeline (d’you gettit?). The game is easy to play but can be tricky to master as the periods of time to place events gets narrower.

“Yes Mildred, obviously the Appearance of Bees was before the Domestication of Cattle but how you not know that the Invention of the  Pneumatic Drill was 4 years before Alice in Wonderland was published?! Go and sit in the bin and think about what you’ve done”.

You can smash out a game of Timeline in about 5 minutes, provided nobody’s lingering too long over the placement of their cards (looking at you Steve), and it has huge replayability value. Other pro’s are that the game comes in a variety of different flavours, from General Knowledge to Science and Discoveries to Star Wars which you can mix and match at your leisure. The game is also educational and the cards have pictures on which can give you a clue so it’s a great game for kids.

You can pick up Timeline from Amazon

 

Dobble

Number of players: 2-8

Time: 15 minutes

Price: £12.99

The beauty of this game is in its versatility, it’s good for so many situations. You can pull it out to entertain your niece, to pass the time waiting for a train, or when you’re drunk and want to slap your mates but you need a good excuse. 

You get a whole bunch of circular cards and each of them has a load of symbols on it. Every single card will have at least one symbol on it that appears on every other card. So for example, if you had a card with a pencil, a car, a cat, a ying yang and some lips on it, at least one of those symbols will appear on any other card. You deal out all the cards except for the middle one and the players aim to spot a matching symbol, call it out and replace the middle card with their card as quickly as possible. The first one to ditch all of their cards wins! There are a few different varieties, such as having all the cards in the middle to start with and the player with the most cards at the end wins, but the principle remains the same.

One round can be played in about a minute which is great for settling disputes (or causing them) and it’s a wonderful exercise in panic and frustration! The is probably the easiest game on the list to pick up, as tried and tested by myself after pulling it out after a whole afternoon at a beer festival, and has the all of the fun of Irish Snap (google it) with less of the bruises.

Don’t let the cartoon graphics put you off, Dobble is amazing fun for both kids and grown ups, in fact it comes in a specifically kid friendly version for the little ones and a Hipster version (seriously) for the wankers. It’s also contained within a handy and robust little tin, which is perfect for bludgeoning your enemies to death with, as well as easily fitting into a bag or pocket so you can take a game to a party without feeling like the massive Dork-a-saurus who lugged the entire Game Of Thrones game to Chris’s casual BBQ.

Dobble is available in quite a lot of the big retailers now, or you can find it here

Sopio

Number of players: 2+

Time: 15 minutes +

Price: £10.00

Hey, do you like puns? That was a trick question, if you don’t like puns you’re obviously not a human and not the kind of creature I want hanging around my website. But for the rest of you, allow me to introduce Sopio! I’ll be honest with you here, this is a game about dicking over your mates. As long as you can get fully on board with that premise, we’re all in for a great time. Plus, it has pictures! Of the stick variety!

The aim of the game is to get to 1000 points. The first player to reach 1000 points wins, everyone else is the loser and has to buy the winner drinks. ‘How do you get 1000 points?’ I would here you ask if you were in the room with me and you weren’t reading this in the future. That’s where it gets complicated.

The base game comes with 68 games cards, 2 rules cards and 2 blank cards (for drawing your own cards). A big part of the fun comes from the ridiculous stick-figure drawings on the cards and the equally ridiculous descriptions. Drawings like a peanut being punched in the face with a description of ‘Assaulted Peanut’ (-400 points!). The cards will either have a plus points value, a minus points value or an instruction, like ‘choose a player at random at take all the cards they have left in their hand.’ Cards can be played on yourself or other players, and your points pile is left in front of you for all to see.

Sopio starts off friendly enough, but watch how quickly players get dog piled on as soon as they get anywhere near the 1000 mark. So the game requires cunning and luck in equal measure. Because the rules are so easy to pick up it’s a good short attention span game but I will admit that it can drag on if people get caught up in a cycle of revenge. But Sopio was one of the first ‘non mainstream’ card games I ever picked up, and remains a firm favourite in our house (as long as we don’t talk about the Christmas Day Incident).

There are now a huge number of decks, booster decks and box sets to choose from all with their own unique cards. If you want to give the game a go I’d recommend picking up the Starter Deck for £10 but be warned, that shit’s like Pokemon yo, you gotta catch em all. The website is the best place to go for this game, which (if you missed it the first time) can be found here.

Exploding Kittens

 

Number of players: 2-5

Time: 15 minutes

Price: £17.99

There are kittens, and they explode. You kinda need a dark sense of humour to appreciate the subtle nuances of that joke. This is a great little game to pull out in the pub, as it only takes a couple of minutes to teach people the premise and then you get to sit back and watch them become furious with each other. You do need to pay attention to what’s going on but only for short periods of time which should be the perfect amount of time between rounds of drinks.  

To win Exploding Kittens you need to be the only player left in the game that hasn’t exploded. Each player is dealt 4 cards at random and 1 Defuse card (the most important card in the game), and then the exploding cards are shuffled into the deck. Players take turns playing cards  and drawing from the draw pile until someone reaches an Exploding Kitten card and either plays a Defuse card and puts the Exploding Kitten card back wherever they want to or gets exploded and is out of the game, whereby all of the other players have to point and laugh. So the Defuse card basically acts like an extra life. The other cards are ways for you to save yourself and screw over other players, such as ‘Skip’ to miss your turn, ‘Attack’ to force other players into picking up more cards or ‘See The Future’ to peek at the deck.

One of the things I like about this game is that as more players explode, the chances of you drawing an Exploding Kitten card increase, which builds the tension for the last two players left in the game. The game encourages you to be a dick, and there’s nothing more satisfying than watching a player fall for your carefully laid trap. Also the cards all have awesome and hilarious pictures on them.

There are a few versions available now, we have the NSFW version (which realllly means it), but you can get a family friendly version (if you don’t mind scarring your kids for life) a party pack version for more players and an expansion pack. Again this one has become available at some of the big retailers but here’s a link to the game makers website where you can pick up your copy.

Cockroach Poker

Number of players: 2-6

Time: 20 minutes

Price: £13.99

Have you ever looked at your nearest and dearest and wondered to yourself ‘which one of you is a filthy compulsive liar?’. No? Well now’s your chance!

Cockroach Poker (also known as Kakerlakenpoker) is as skin-crawly as it sounds, with the added bonus of making you have deep seated resentment towards your friends and family. To master this game you have to be a good liar, think on your feet and be able to read people so it’s an excellent game for politicians. I am terrible at all of those things but luckily I am also extremely erratic so at least I’m in with a fighting chance. The beauty/cruelty of this game is that there is only one loser, one dunce that gets to feel belittled and annoyed whilst everyone else gets to gloat. I’m sure this all sounds terribly appealing, so allow me to explain.

The game bears about as much resemblance to real poker as GTA bears to actual car theft. The deck consists of 64 cards, with 8 copies of 8 different creatures, all of which are the kind of thing you’d find in any self respecting witches cauldron, so cockroaches, stink bugs, rats, flies, toads etc. It’s a reverse set collection game, where instead of trying to collect sets of the delightfully disgusting creatures on the cards you’re trying to force other people to.

All the players are dealt out the all of the cards and then go about trying to palm them off to other players. You select one of your cards and slide it face down across the table towards another player. You then tell the player what the card is. You can lie, or you can tell the truth and it’s up to your victim to call you out correctly. If you successfully fooled the other player then they keep the card face up in front of them and it’s now their turn. If they called out your BS then you get stuck with the card in front of you and you have to try again. The first person to either end up with 4 of the same kind of creature in front of them or with no cards to pass on to other players is the loser and the game ends.

If you’re an open book with an honest demeanour and terribly trusting, I’m sorry but the other players are going to jump on you like a sumo wrestler. The only way to get by in this harsh world of ours is to be a paranoid, deceitful scumbag who no one ever knows what they’re going to do next. This is definitely the most vicious of all the games on this list and the one most likely to bring someone to tears, so there entertainment right there!

This is another good one to crack out at parties or any other social gathering where you’re very nearly bored to tears, as it takes about a minute to teach to people. You can also play this one with kids if you feel there ready to learn some pretty brutal lessons about how the world is not fair and that liars get ahead. Get your copy here!

 

Hopefully something on this little run down will have tickled your fancy. They’re all pretty affordable, great fun to play and most importantly of all, quick quick quick because time is money! That’s it from me, thanks for reading!

Take off your cloak, warm your boots by the fire and grab an tankard of Mulberry Mead, and settle down for some tasty discussions fresh out of the oven.

We’ll go on a journey of discovery, you and I, to see where all of this is actually going, but I can promise you that I’ll be aiming to update this site once a week, with a combination of observations, reviews, articles and stories, all fresh out of my magnificent brain and vaguely strung together under the theme of gaming and general nerdiness.

This is my first serious venture into the world of blogging, so if you could kindly bear with me whilst I work through awkwardly getting to grips with it all like a student faced with their first gas bill then eventually I’m sure I’ll have something actually worth reading.

Now, it’s taken me about 4 hours to write one post so I’m calling that a successful first day and I hope to see you again soon.