C o D EDestroying the stereotype. Pixel by pixel.

Live Action Role Playing: A closer look.

Exploring Skyrim’s landscape.

Looting the internet for tat.

Alternative journalism.

ISSUE 0120/12/2012

O L L Y M O S S / J A Y P E E / S K Y R I M / M A S S E F F E C T 3 / Z E R O P U N C T U A T I O N /C O U N T E R C H A R T S / l a r p i n g i n l e e d s / R A N D O M L O O T / P U L L I N G P I X E L S / i l l u s t r a t i o n / C R A P C O N S O L E S / N E R D S / L I F E S T Y L E / V I R T U A L G E O G R A P H I C / W I R E L E S S R E A L I T Y / S O F T W A R S / n e r d o l o g y / G A M I N G

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People give Bubsy a lot of crap for his stupid one-liners, but my theory is that they’re supposed to be stupid. With lines like, “Is the writers’ strike over yet?”, it’s obvious they were using him to make a statement

on the 90s-animal-mascots-with-‘tude trend. Or maybe they just realised how poorly structured the game was. Artwork by No Marios, print is available to buy from his tumblr site, with many other characters.

2/ /3

RETRO CHARACTERS - BUBSY

WHAT TO EXPECTIn this issue we have:

Dara O’Briain says ‘relax’Comedian Dara on BAFTA’s, violence and Olly Murs. As well as appearing as an advocate for gaming unintentionally, he shares some of his favourite games.

Welcome to Code. Everything from in game environments, art, illustration, ridiculous products and even interviews from some of the coolest individuals who share their years of experience. “But print is dead, especially with all recent content being online” we hear you scream at the page. Well we want to change that. A compact, easy to transport gaming rag, with features you won’t find immediately, unless you trawl the net for them. Instead we have compiled the latest, most interesting news and compiled it into a comprehensive, contemporary publication that wants everyone to read it. We challenge our identity, and try to provide you with the other side of video gaming culture and the fastest growing industry. EVER.

Random LootA review of some of the absurdities and the downright weird products and games available. This time we look at a game aimed at molestation as a form of recreation. Yes it’s Japanese.

Virtual GeographicA feature from the tumblr site of the same name, this issue focuses on the breathtaking, barren and beautiful land of Skyrim.

Gallery 1988We interview pop culture poster prince, Olly Moss on his exhibition at the gallery and feature some past exhibition work.

Soft WarsWe let two staff members fight out their differences between first person shooters Battlefield 3 and Modern Warefare 3.

Extra PunctuationGuest writer, wizard, gamer and elequent wordsmith Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw outlines what themes make games so pleasing to play.

Wireless GameplayOur look into the weird, wonderful and often misunderstood world of Live Action Role Playing. We interview several people from Leeds’ society of LARPers to determine how it has gathered in popularity

Welcome to Code. Everything from in game environments, art, illustration, ridiculous products and even interviews from some of the coolest individuals who share their years of experience. “But print is dead, especially with all recent content being online” we hear you scream at the page. Well we want to change that. A compact, easy to transport gaming rag, with features you won’t find immediately, unless you trawl the net for them. Instead we have compiled the latest, most interesting news and compiled it into a comprehensive, contemporary publication that wants everyone to read it.

We challenge our identity, and try to provide you with the other side of video gaming culture and the fastest growing industry. EVER.

4/ /5

DARA o’briainIt’s obvious you have a real history with games. What role have they played in your life?

Well they’ve been constantly buzzing round as a ready form of entertainment. On a holiday to England once, I caught my father coming out of Argos with an Atari 5200, or 2600, I struggle to remember. He was discreetly trying to buy it as a Christmas present. I was about 10 or 11. That went all through my early teens. And then in late teens and early 20s that kind of disappeared, so I missed Sonic and I missed Mario. Then when I was a kids’ TV presenter, I rediscovered it all because I bagged a PlayStation from Sony.

From there in on, it’s kind of been buzzing around constantly. I describe myself as “hardcore/casual”, which is that I have the heart of a hardcore gamer, but I don’t have the skills or the time. So I can get as far as a couple of boss battles and then I baulk at it. I just like the virtual worlds. I play lots and lots of games now. Now, I host a lot of awards. In March I’m hosting about seven different awards - including the Money Marketing awards. I don’t pay anywhere near as much attention to that as I do to video games. I’m hosting the Mothercare awards, and I’m not looking at different types of nappy in quite the avid way I’m playing Bad Company 2.

You’ve talked about games ‘blocking’ less accomplished players from experiencing what they’ve paid for. Although that seems to be happening a little less now, which the hardcore aren’t great fans of...

Of course they’re not! It’s so funny,

when that routine [about Dara being unable to beat a Gears boss] came out - which was a celebration of gaming - there were a load of people sneering: “He’s obviously rubbish at games.” That was kind of the whole point of it. It’s a very common thing. There was a phrase from Caitlin Moran in The Times - we were talking about anonymous commentary on things - and she said: “You never forget the first time your work is taken apart by SirWankalot27.”

It’s one of those things. Haters gonna hate. You’re always going to get people on YouTube saying how lame something is. But if my nagging has had anything to do with that phenomenon of players being ‘blocked’ from content [dying down], then great. I’d love that. Just a button saying: “You’re not getting this. Why don’t we just let you pass. We’ll stick it in a section called ‘uncompleted bits’ and you can drop back in later. Because this is getting ridiculous.”

I read an interview with you where you discussed Bill Hicks. Although you said you respected him, you also suggested he opened the door for some less witty, less driven comedians, who were merely offensive for offensiveness’s sake. Do you think games have a similar problem? That you have to have headshots, knives in necks, multiple grisly death scenes, or you’re not considered ‘edgy’ enough?

Yeah. I thought The Onion nailed it with that ‘Headshot 2’ spoof. You press the space bar and just get headshots. There’s a horse at one stage and you pop one in his head. That sort of thing reminds me of Bad Company - but then you just have to

admit that there’s something about looking down the scope of a lens and just [makes dampened gunshot noise, complete with hand gestures].

I like the way we’re both silently dismissing other anti-social behaviour in games, by the way - like stealing a car. That’s just a common storytelling point, right? It’s almost like it drags on: “Oh, for f*ck’s sake. I’m pulling someone out of another car.” If anything, I think this year has been an interesting move for games, because they have “grown up” to a certain extent. Look at Heavy Rain - the fact that you could have long periods of pause and there were very few ‘killings’. Compare it to movies in the 1980s, where you’d rent Terminator or what have you and there’s been countless bodies getting gruesomely murdered. Both movies and games have had this [fascination], games just came to it later. I think the gaming industry is developing more mature content, but also has the thing unique where older gamers don’t look down their noses at Mario. Even people who like FPS and headshots don’t look at Mario

and sneer. The gaming industry is happy to accommodate Angry Birds and Call Of Duty together.

You’re obviously passionate about the games industry - and have been for a number of years...

It’s true - I am. But I never saw myself becoming an advocate like I have. I remember one games awards show, when an ex-children’s TV presenter bounded on stage and patronisingly shouted: “Hello gamers!!” The likes of Ian Livingstone, Charles Cecil, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft’s UK managing directors were all there. The room fell silent.

God. The perception of the strength of the relative entertainment industries should be something for gamers to be quietly happy with that I think, rather than just chasing after [a mainstream audience]. I don’t think the games industry has any need to chase after anything.

It’s like when people say: “Hey! How do we get young people to

vote?” You kind of think, “fuck ‘em”. If they’re not sufficiently engaged to know that there’s an election on, then they don’t deserve a say in who runs the country. A mad chase is not necessarily.

I’d make the same comparison with [gaming] and ‘popular science’ too. Which is: “How can we make it appeal to the cool kids?”

Sorry, again, fuck ‘em. Concentrate on the people who get it - who actually want to do this. If you just go after the pretty people in the class, they’ll go: “What, really? Is the universe a little bit funnily shaped?” Then go back to Glee or Gossip Girl or whatever.

You have to be careful not to patron-ise the fuck out of the very people you’ve already attracted, your biggest fans.

Is it tough coming up with new jokes about games?

Because we know we’re all on the same page at the BAFTAs, it should

just be, “Hey, what about this bit, or what about this level.” My favourite joke last year was about [X-Factor contestant] Olly Murs. Is that right? Olly Murs?

Yep. That’s the one.

He came on and said: “I’m a big fan of games.” He presented an award to Infinity Ward. They came on and said: “And we’re big fans of yours as well, Olly.” Then they sat down again. I went up and said: “That actually sounded like a joke, but it’s true - Infinity Ward are huge fans of Olly’s. In fact, they use one of his songs as the background music in the airport level.”It got a big laugh, and it was so nice because it’s so specific a joke. Infinity Ward’s table kind of collectively went: “Errrrr.” And I said: “If you don’t like that content, you may opt out.”

You can go to that level of nerdy. I hope sometimes I don’t go too nerdy and end up having played more games than the suits have. But you can actually have in-jokes at the BAFTAs, which isn’t difficult because there’s a whole year [of game-playing] to use. Trust me, material for the Money Marketing Awards will be much more difficult to come up with.

Are you interested in voicing a char-acter in a video game?

I know one of the years we did BAFTA, Jonathan Ross and Danny Wallace were at the awards with me, both of whom that night were invited to be in games.

They were going: “Oh my God! I’m in the next Assassin’s Creed!” and “I’m in Fable III!” - whilst I got nothing.

I was joking recently about which character I’d like to voice, and I said the Panda in Tekken, which would surprisingly then in a cut-scene have an Irish accent. I think it would be striking.

There are very few Irish characters. I don’t know which game would best suit the soft voice of a mumbling

The game could only ever have been made in Japan. It consists of the usual gun-on-lead of many shoot-em-ups but the gun is a fist with one finger sticking out. Then there is the legs and posterior built into the game, into which you poke the finger.

The harder you poke, the more the face on the console screen grimaces. No, seriously, we’re not making this up. You can select a variety of characters from ex-girlfriend to prostitute to gangster to mother-in-law or, most disturbingly, child molestor.

The idea is that the game will be used by city dwellers to relieve their stress. At least that’s what we ascertain from the writing on the side of the game which says: “What the heck..!! It’s just waiting for the stress of city life. Give a shot. Have a fun!! Enjoy.”At the end of the game, it prints out a card regarding the player’s “sexual behavior”.When we saw this, we were sure it couldn’t be true.

Boong ga boong ga

If even a duct tape wallet doesn’t seem geeky enough for your tastes then I have to admit it might be time to seek some professional help. But in the meantime even the most hardcore of geeks would be proud to carry around this Dot Matrix wallet made from Tyvek. The design of course comes from the continuous feed paper typically used in dot matrix printers back in the day complete with spoke holes on the sides (the non-removable type, nice) and the alternating color stripes. And the best part is the numbers printed on the wallet are actually the first 3,000 digits of pi.

The ultimate addition to any zombie lover’s wardrobe, this custom hoodie is on thinkgeek.com with an acceptable pricetag of $40. The detail on the hood is a brain btw.

It was only a matter of time until someone released ephemera that can be applied to your walls to one of the most iconic publishers in gaming history.With choices ranging from the 8 bit era to the next gen look of mario galaxy, these wall stickers are the perfect addition in every room. Why not slap some up in the bathroom to make your visits more enjoyable? Or perhaps grab some to plaster on your mate’s wall before he wakes up?

Buy this at thinkgeek.com

tyvek wallet zombie hoodie

Nintendo wall graphics

6/ /7

R A N D O M L O O Tgames, items and manifestations from the deepest dungeons.

2/ /3

M A S S E F F E C T 3 r e v i e w b y G r i f f

I don’t want to spoil anything about Mass Effect 3 for you, so all you really need to know is this: Yes. Yes, you should

get it. Yes, it lives up to the hype. Yes, it’s the ending the series deserves. Yes, it’s an incredible adventure that will terrify you, make you laugh, and more than likely move you to tears more than once. And yes, that character you care about comes back.

As the game begins, the Reapers have made Earth the first stop on their harvesting tour of the galaxy. Their arrival signals not just the end of the world, but the end of every world as they set out to destroy all organic life. Your experience with the Reapers makes you the best choice to fight them, and the Alliance is willing to let bygones be bygones - and give you back your ship - if you lead the charge against the Reaper armada. Your mission in Mass Effect 3 echoes that of Mass Effect 2: Then, you were gathering resources and personnel in hopes of increasing your chances of surviving a suicide mission. Now, you’re doing much the same thing in the hopes of increasing your chances in a face-off against the Reapers ... which is also probably a suicide mission.

You don’t have to have played through either of the first two Mass Effects in order to enjoy Mass Effect 3, as the game does a pretty good job on catching you up on the important people and events from its predecessors without dropping huge walls of text on your head. Saving the Earth is also a pretty easy concept to grasp, so even

complete newcomers to the story should have no trouble embracing the adventure. Even though you can jump in just fine, there’s no question that your experience will be greatly enriched if you played through the first two games. Mass Effect 3 does a masterful job of calling back to the first two games, their DLC, and even the Mass Effect novels, referencing practically every encounter you had or decision you made. The world of Mass Effect 3 feels lived in and worn out, and that effect just isn’t quite the same if you don’t understand the full weight of the experiences that have made these characters who they are. You can understand the basics about Maelon’s genophage research with just a few lines of dialog, but his work takes on a whole new timbre when you’ve seen its effects first-hand.

One of Mass Effect’s core strengths has been its story, which is particularly well crafted in Mass Effect 3, in part because it gets to tie up so many loose ends. Rather than leaving options open for a sequel, the game makes the most of the chance to take the sum of your decisions and show you the outcome. What did you do with the Rachni queen? What did you tell Conrad? Did you dance? It almost all comes back, one way

or another, but never in a way that feels forced. Everything you experience in Mass Effect 3 feels like the natural, organic culmination of your actions - whether you can live with the repercussions or not. Mass Effect 3’s combat kicks things up a notch or twelve, as well, a change that’s not always entirely welcome. The new enemies are daunting (and at times terrifying), but while you could get through Mass Effect 2

with minimal attention to cross-disciplinary styles, Mass Effect 3 seems to really, really want you to coordinate your attacks with your squadmates. Perhaps that’s because it’s easier to do so now that you can use voice commands to control your team (assuming you have a Kinect), but the combat can be frustratingly difficult at times. Your squadmates can be shockingly stupid sometimes, apparently forgetting that they’re supposed to be backing you up in a fight.

The game’s cover mechanic is equally hit and miss, at times letting you roll from point to point with split-second accuracy, and at other times leaving you wide open to assault as you try in vain to take cover behind a wall. The voice controls work fairly well - though there were times that the Kinect seemed to misunderstand

me - but it felt odd to be barking orders at my companions one minute, then listening to Jennifer Hale chat them up back on the Normandy. Using the Kinect is fun from a gameplay perspective, but it doesn’t mesh well with the story elements.

“During one particularly brutal encounter, I discovered that my two companions had never followed me into the room and instead were crouching behind some furniture in the hallway.”

s k y w a r d s w o r d r e v i e w b y T o b y C r a v e n

You know, a chap could start to feel unappreciated after the

usual response I tend to get from honestly reviewing first-party Nintendo titles. They really do feel like games that it’s utterly pointless to criticise, because the moment I utter anything short of gushing hagiographical praise, Zelda’s army of self-appointed nannies fight each other to put little sticking plasters on the boo-boo.

One complaint that usually gets directed at me at this juncture is that pointing out how samey the games are has become a tired argument. I fucking agree, it certainly has, and yet, the problem hasn’t gone anywhere, so I’m going to keep using it. You wouldn’t tell those Occupy Wall Street to sod off because their complaints are getting repetitive. Yes, I did just compare the Occupy movement’s courageous opposition to corporate injustice to me saying Zelda games are a bit shit.

The other, more common argument I hear at these times is that I’m just automatically biased against the entire franchise, or Nintendo in general. Nothing, I say, could be further from the truth. If I’m biased against anything, I’m biased against games that aren’t fun. Games that I spend thirty hours of my week ploughing through looking for entertainment value and cultural relevance, after which I realise I would have been better off spending the time eating chocolate biscuits and watching The Ascent Of Man.

Yes, I’m biased against motion controls, but that’s just a sub-heading of the broader overall bias against games that aren’t fun. I’ve been trying to figure out a quick, pithy, all-encompassing way to express my reasons for thinking that motion controls are poisonous to gaming, so I can bring my opinion across in conversation without having to rant for ten minutes, and I think I’ve come up with something I like: Motion controls are a system wherein a game can fail you for something that completely wasn’t your fault. Like smacking an electrified sword because it was horizontal half a second ago and the game only just registered your horizontal swipe. There ya go.

But what infuriates me about these bumblefucks dismissing my Skyward Sword video with the argument that I’m just biased against Zelda is that in the very same video I reiterated that I really liked Zelda Wind Waker on the Gamecube. This does admittedly put me in a minority, apparently, since most of what it did right has been stubbornly ignored by every console Zelda since. Alright, locking a capable-seeming Princess Zelda in a basement for the last half of the game wasn’t doing much for gender relations but the fighting engine worked well, there was an epic free-roaming world to explore and the cartoony visuals will ensure that it never ages poorly. Link was actually able to express emotion and have a visual personality. The first time I saw Link in Skyward Sword I had to stifle a horrified laugh because his exposed nostrils and swollen lips look like he let a swarm of bees practise amateur plastic surgery.

I even liked Twilight Princess quite a lot, although bear

in mind I again played the Gamecube, non-motion-controlly version. It had a slow start and was structurally rather similar to Ocarina of Time, but again the game world felt expansive and detailed with lots of lovely varied locations and dungeons. Even if it wasn’t a revolutionary take on the concept it was at least an elevation, which is apparently the most anyone expects of Zelda games. The support character, Midna, actually had an interesting arc. I could only think of her with soppy nostalgia as I barely tolerated the monotone creepy-eyed dullard that follows you around in Skyward Sword, endlessly popping out to remind me that my health was critically low while I was busy trying to circle strafe something nasty. And that excruciating is-this-the-emotion-you-call-happiness dialogue in the ending scene made me want to projectile vomit all my innards like a giant party streamer. I mean, at least Navi was enthusiastic, y’know?

So while never quite being what you’d traditionally call a sandbox game, Zelda at its best certainly leans in that direction. Closer to the ‘open world’ model one associates with Metroidvania, I suppose, exploring new areas once you’ve unlocked the ability to go there. And what disappointed me about Skyward Sword is that there was a fairly massive downplaying of that exploration element. The game world felt small with just the three questing locations and rather rigid separations between gameplay areas. There didn’t seem to be as many opportunities as there usually are to go to places in the open world you’d seen before and can only explore now you’ve acquired a certain tool, to find optional treasures and all that. I can’t even remember any

points when you use the whip item in anything except a mandatory story context.

And then there’s the padding. They make you revisit the paltry handful of locations so many times just to get a decent gameplay length out of all this that it starts getting ridiculous. Some dragon can only help you once you’ve brought him a magical healing fruit that can only be found across the map and which not one entity tries to stop you from acquiring. It’s just a fetch quest for no reason. Busywork.

How many times should a hero reasonably have to ‘prove their worth’ before you start to question the local hiring policies?

There were times playing Skyward Sword when I actually laughed. Not in an amused way. I was laughing like how that one lady in the movie Necronomicon started laughing while the monsters were sawing all her arms and legs off. Laughing because it’d all just gotten too absurd for my head. Just as I’m about to run out hookshot blazing, that fucking support character jumps out, stands in my path and reveals as slowly and tortuously as possible that there’s a big monster smashing up the ship in case I hadn’t realised and we were probably going to have to fight it. I laugh because I’m not sure I believe this is happening in reality anymore.

“How many times should a hero reasonably have to ‘prove their worth’ before you start to question the local hiring policies?”

Illustrations by Eva Eskelin

olly moss GALLERY 1988

“paper cuts”

Back in May the very talented young graphic designer/artist/illustrator Olly Moss created a huge number of wonderful silhouettes for his first solo

show opening at Gallery1988. Check out Olly’s ‘Paper Cuts’ blog page for images of more, but not all, the silhouettes in the show.

Moss: When I was first coming up with ideas for the show I had about six different ideas and I looked at them all and I thought, well, to start I was going to do about 60 of these and a bunch of other stuff. And I started drawing them and I thought this is enough for a whole show. There’s so many things I can do with it and kind of set all the expectations, twist them, like I did with the Where’s Waldo and Die Hard with the broken glass and stuff. I thought there’s totally a whole show in this idea so I’d do that. So it’s probably about 5, 6 months ago, maybe, so it’s been a long time in the works.

The thing with it was, I would like to do previews but obviously if I showed one piece it would have totally given the whole thing away and I wanted people to come in and be surprised and have that fun of going around and spotting the characters that they like, because some of them are hard to get and that’s why we kind of did the quotes and tried to not make them too obvious. Kind of like the joy of recognizing something that you connect with.

My favorite piece is Bill Murray. The Peter Venkman Ghostbusters one. I really like him. The ones I’m keeping for myself, I’m keeping all the Blade Runner pieces except Dekkard. All the Replicants I guess, unless he’s a Replicant, who knows? That’s my favorite movie so I’m keeping the owl and Replicants.

Well I felt it would be cheesy to make doubles for

myself. I almost kept the Grim Fandango, Bill Murray and a couple others but I just thought if I don’t have to give them away then I don’t feel right charging people.

It’s totally bizarre to me, but also really cool that people care enough about the stuff that I do. And it’s fine, like I understand that these people, a lot of them, are obviously interested in stuff that I do, but are really interested in just the kind of themes that I work with more than that. But it’s awesome. I’m just such a big fan of the themes that I work with. The movies, the video games, the books. I hope that kind of shows thought my art and I hope people connect with that. It’s awesome.

Absolutely. I have no interest in doing anything else. And I know sometimes I get people accusing me of doing popular art just to sell but it’s not that at all. I’m just such a massive fan of this stuff and I really hope that comes through in the art itself. That the love of it is obvious and people don’t see it as transparent to sell pieces.

Trying to do different stuff. The thing I did with the Star Wars posters and Evil Dead poster is like try and take the concept that people really liked about the more minimalist stuff and make it more illustrative and complicated and sort of excessive and

striking. With this stuff I just wanted to do something different. I’ve used Victorian silhouettes in my work a lot before. I remember I did this sort of stupid, Penguin video game book cover for The Sims and it had a big wall of these things and I’ve always really liked the aesthetic. So I thought ‘Oh I can do a whole gallery show like this.’ You’ve just got to keep it different. I’ve got a bunch of other ideas and doing something like this where you’re given a space to transform, is totally new. I just want to keep trying new stuff and new media.

“You’ve just got to keep it different. I’ve got a bunch of other ideas and doing something like this where you’re given a space to transform,is totally new.”

Shouldn’t need too much explanation; it’s the simple matter of beating the high score, killing your way through the entire horde, or getting 100% completion in Pokemon for the sake of getting 100% alone, you crazy, crazy bugger. It’s on the extreme end of the Challenge category that you find most retro and arcade games, the sort of thing that only nudges the realms of Context with the lightest of touches, such as ‘aliens are invading, shoot them’.

Is where you engage the player’s sympathies with the protagonists by establishing who they are and why they’re doing it, encouraging the player to push forward with the game to see what happens to them next and see plot arcs get resolved. Pure context gives us things like the Japanese-style visual novel or occasionally something weird and arty like Silent Hill Shattered Memories. But don’t consider context to be solely about cutscenes and dialogue; context can also apply to aesthetics. It can be something as simple as making the enemy look like a scaley growly monster with a pointy face, so you know it must be purged from existence. All games have a degree of visual context except Pong. And maybe Bad Company 2 since I can’t see through the dust clouds.

Is that magical land that lies outside the two kingdoms above. It’s the aspect of a game that speaks directly to the animal part of your brain. It’s about the pure visceral fun one has entirely outside of both context and challenge. This, friends, is where you have your Saints Row 3 big floppy dildo passer-by combat. There’s no challenge ‘cos passers-by don’t fight back and like many things in the game there’s certainly no context for it, but by golly is it fun. This is also the category where you’ll find my lengthy sessions of Spider-Man 2 spent web-swinging randomly around the city, with no intention to enter any missions or further the story.

“I used to think that at the most basic level every game had to consist of two distinct but essential elements - gameplay and story. Without one of those you either might as well be a film or might as well be a piece of dangling string for a cat to play with. Only with a balance of both do we reach gaming’s true potential as a creative medium, emotional involvement in a story and visceral pursuit of betterment propping each other up shoulder-to-shoulder.”

But recently I’ve had cause to update this imaginary model of mine from a two-man arm-in-arm arrangement to a more sort of three-man ring-a-rosie affair. “Gameplay” was too broad a concept, I realized. How does one differentiate, say, getting all 150 Pokemon (or however many there are now) from smacking passers-by to death with a giant floppy dildo? People can’t possibly be finding the same kind of enjoyment in both those activities. So here’s my updated recipe for a big fluffy video game cake: the three categories into which all a game’s features fall are Context, Challenge and Gratification.

If this were XKCD this would probably be the point where I draw a big triangle with the three points labelled as such, then place crosses on the triangle indicating where certain specific games and game experiences lie. But this isn’t XKCD so you’re just going to have to imagine it.

EXTRA PUNCTUATION challenge

context

gratification

CONtext, challenge& GRATIFICATION

DISCUSSES

While thinking this over I tried to come up with an example that sits right in the middle of the three, and came up with the slightly odd example of the surprisingly good ending sequence of Halo Reach. When you’re abandoned alone on the occupied planet and the ending only comes after you die, leaving you to hold out for as long as you can within gameplay as a final melancholy challenge. Also gratifying in a sort of heroic tragedy kind of way (and in the killing of the aliens if you’re some kind of massive racist) and of course it would be nothing without context.

I hope you’re still picturing that XKCD-style triangle chart because now I want you to imagine Saints Row 2 being pretty much in the middle, and that’s why I liked it. It had challenge, it was certainly very gratifying, and the context of your customised character clawing his (or her or its) gang up to the dizzy heights made it involving. Saints Row 3 you have to imagine being nudged a little too far from the Context point and a little too close to Gratification. So while it is still fun in a ragdolls to the wind kind of way - there’s hours of fun to be had just in running around doing sprinting takedowns, especially the one that ends with your character doing a cheeky swimsuit pose and smile for the camera - it’s no longer fun on the same number of levels. And even if there’s still enjoyment in it, a sequel should always be admonished if it turns out to be less than its predecessor. Because that is a series that is not moving in a forward-style direction.

You know, I have a long-standing grudge against the concept of awarding review scores to games, because I think it represents everything that’s wrong about videogame reporting by treating every given game like some kind of kitchen appliance whose chopping blades have been slightly rearranged since the last generation and are now therefore precisely 1 point more efficient at dicing sweet potatoes. But if I did finally knuckle under to those bean counters at Metacritic, this is exactly how I’d give scores to games. Three separate marks out of ten for Context, Challenge and Gratification. None of this buggering about with graphics or sound or anything else as consequential as the color of the wallpaper in an operating theatre. Of course what I would definitely not do then is combine the three scores into some kind of “overall” value, because that’s totally fucking meaningless. That’d be like having a meal where the main course was tasty but the dessert was disgusting, so you give it a final