#oneaday Day 712: Five Minutes to Midnight

It’s New Year’s Eve. I am writing on my phone. There are five minutes to go before the aforementioned New Year. At midnight I am going to press Submit regardless of whether or not I’ve finished a sentence.

Tonight we have celebrated the New Year by eating a shitload of puddings which everyone brought over to my friends Ben and Amy’s house. By about half ten, most of us had eaten at least eight puddings, with some going as far as ten. Shortly after midnight, the last arrival showed up with an amazing-smelling savoury pudding — lamb and mint in a big crusty lump of suet. Amazing.

As midnight approaches, I’m grateful to ring in 2012 with good friends, and curious as to why the iPhone keeps wanting to correct “2012” to “2013”.

The countdown has begun. Champagne is being poured. Celebrations are imminent.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

#oneaday Day 711: The Ancient Craft of Mining

Andie and I may have inadvertently spent pretty much the whole day playing Minecraft. I’ve spoken at length on the virtues of this game on several occasions on this blog, but every time I play it I find something new to appreciate, a new way to play or a new way to look at the game.

This, of course, is the central beauty of Minecraft as a game. No-one is telling you how to play it. The Achievements which were added a few updates ago give you a nudge in several possible directions — enough to get you started, anyway — but beyond that, it’s entirely up to you what to do.

On the Squadron of Shame SquadCast, we’ve had a number of discussions on the subject of games that plonk you down into the game world and simply invite you to “get on with it”. Traditional RPGs followed this format, though often had a questline to follow. Bethesda RPGs, too, follow this approach after a linear introductory sequence. But none do it quite like Minecraft, which is refreshingly old-school in its approach.

Minecraft doesn’t have a story. At least, not an explicit one. Nowhere is it made clear exactly why you’ve been thrown into this blocky landscape with nothing to your name but your wits. Nowhere is there an introduction describing how and why the monsters that plague the landscape after dark came to be. And not once are you told what your “goal” is.

In some senses, this is a return to gaming’s roots, when all the information you needed to know about the game’s plot and setting could be fit on the back of the box. Minecraft‘s retro aesthetic would certainly seem to fit with that theory, but the complexity, depth and freedom that the game offers is something that simply wouldn’t have been possible with older systems.

I do most of my playing on a small private multiplayer server which is in “survival” mode. This is fundamentally identical to the single player mode, where you’re tasked with surviving against the elements (or, indeed, monsters) with only your wits and what you can scavenge. You start playing in a very small area, gathering resources and building materials near where you started in an attempt to create a convincing shelter before the sun sets and the monsters come out to play. As time goes on, however, you spread your wings and start to explore the randomly-generated landscape. In single player, you’ll find yourself discovering a variety of different natural biomes — forests, swamps, mountains — but it’s in multiplayer that the world of Minecraft truly comes alive.

Round a corner of a mountain, you might find a mysterious door set into the hillside. Entering, you might find some chests containing tools, food and building materials — along with a sternly-worded sign informing you that this stuff is not yours.

The beauty of it, though, is that if you want to be a complete git about it, you could just take all that stuff and run. The facility to leave signs with your own custom wording on them, too, means that it’s not beyond the realm of possibility to, say, nick someone’s hoard of diamonds, bury them in a chest somewhere in the depths of the desert and leave them a trail of clues to reclaim them. I hasten to add that I haven’t done this, but it is enormously tempting to do so.

A multiplayer Minecraft server becomes something of a community. How active that community is depends largely on how many other players there are and how often they play. On a big, busy server, you’ll find impressive structures all over the place as players attempt to outdo each other with outlandish construction projects. On a small, private server such as ours, the world will change gradually, evolving piece by piece as each player stakes out their claim to their own piece of territory. It’s fascinating to watch — the fact that the world is persistent so can be changed by other players when you’re not online means that there’s often something new and player-made to take a look at when you next log in. It also means that eventually you’ll have to start either competing for the finite resources that there are, or travelling further afield to locate the items you’ll need to survive and/or complete your latest building project.

There are so many ways to play Minecraft, and the situations I’ve described here barely scratch the surface. It’s whatever you want it to be, and it’s for that reason that I believe that outlets “reviewing” the game when it finally reached Version 1.0 is an utterly futile gesture. For one, everyone’s experience with the game is somewhat different — some are switched off by the lack of direction and give up in frustration; some “powergame” by building the bare minimum they need to survive and progress, attempting to reach the newly-added endgame; some take their time to build impressive structures; some roleplay in their mind, casting themselves in the role of a town planner, laying out buildings and imagining what each might be used for; some do everything they can to make life hell for other players. Not one of those ways to play is “wrong” — even the griefer — and that’s why the game is such a work of genius, despite its glitches and flaws, of which there are still many.

Minecraft will continue to develop over time, though now it’s emerged from beta and its creators are working on other projects, new versions will be released at a slower rate. There’s still an enormous amount of potential there, though, and it’s exciting to imagine what might come next. By putting the creation of the game world and its character in the players’ hands, the team at Mojang have created one (or indeed many) of the most compelling game worlds ever seen in interactive entertainment. There really is nothing like strolling down a street you’ve built yourself, defending it from monsters who want nothing more to 1) kill you and 2) blast big holes in your hard work.

If you’re yet to try Minecraft, then get yourself over here and join the 4.3 million people — yes, wow — that have bought the game to date.

#oneaday Day 710: On the Brink

I got a copy of Pandemic and its expansion On The Brink for Christmas. I’ve played Pandemic a few times with my semi-regular board game buddies, but I’ve never owned my own copy until now. (Obviously. Otherwise it’d be a fairly poor choice of gift.) As such, I’ve been taking advantage of actually owning it by playing it a good few times. We had a three player game on Christmas Day, I tried a solo game (me controlling two characters) last night, and Andie and I played (and won!) a two player game this evening.

“But whoa there, hold up, soldier,” I hear you say. “What the hell is this game and why should I care?”

Well, I believe I’ve mentioned it before on this very blog, but I don’t expect you to go digging back through over 700 posts to find it, so allow me to explain. Those of you who already know the game, shush for a minute.

Pandemic is a cooperative game based on, as you may have gathered from the title, attempting to cure a series of particularly nasty diseases which are attacking the world. (The game never gives the diseases names beyond “blue”, “red”, “black” and “yellow” but players inevitably come up with their own interpretation of what each colour represents.) There are four diseases which players must cure in the base game, and the expansion adds a couple of optional scenarios which can introduce a fifth “purple” disease into the mix via various means.

Players win if they cure all four (or five) diseases. This is achieved by collecting cards — the base mechanic is that collecting five cards of the same colour and using them at a research centre allows you to discover a cure of that colour. Cards are acquired either by trading with other players — a somewhat difficult process due to the requirement for both traders to be in the city depicted on the card which is being traded — or drawn at the end of each turn.

Simple enough so far. A twist is added by the fact that each player has a “role” which gives them some form of special ability. The Scientist player, for example, only has to collect four cards of a colour to discover a cure, while the Researcher is able to give any card to a player they share a space with, not just the card depicting the city they’re in.

Alongside this, each turn the diseases spread. The board starts with nine different cities being infected to varying degrees, represented by coloured cubes. Each turn, a number of different cards, also depicting cities, are drawn, and a cube is added to each pictured location. Should a location “overflow” by adding a cube beyond the maximum of three, an “Outbreak” occurs, spreading the disease to all surrounding cities, adding a cube to all of these as well. This can cause chain reactions if players are not careful, so an important part of the game’s strategy is knowing when to focus on getting cards to whoever is working on the cures, and when to travel around the globe treating the most pestilent areas. When players are drawing cards to take into their hands, there’s also the possibility of an Epidemic occurring, meaning one city immediately gets blasted with three cubes’ worth of infection (potentially causing an Outbreak if it’s already infected) as well as reshuffling all of the previously-used Infection cards back together and placing them on top of the unused cards — meaning that previously-infected areas will see the disease spreading again, rapidly spiralling out of control if steps aren’t taken to contain the contagion.

The Outbreaks are an important factor to consider, since if eight of them occur in a game, everyone immediately loses. Everyone also immediately loses if there aren’t enough cubes of a particular colour left in the supply to put on the board (representing the fact that the disease is so out of control it will never be cured) or if the “draw deck”, from which players pull two cards each turn, runs out of cards (representing the team taking too long over their objective). Conversely, the only way to win is to discover all four (or five) cures, though it’s not also necessary to wipe the board clean of cubes. That said, curing then wiping out (or “eradicating”) a disease has a big benefit for players — an eradicated disease never comes back, not even in an Epidemic. (There’s a variant in the On The Brink expansion which allows a disease to come back after being eradicated if it’s been selected as the Virulent Strain, but I haven’t tried this yet.)

If all this sounds complicated, don’t fear. The people I’ve played this with to date have all picked up the mechanics very quickly. It’s actually very straightforward to play and features a nice blend of theme, strategy and luck. There are times when the deck is stacked against you, leading to seemingly unwinnable situations, but the lovely thing about the game is that everything can turn at a moment’s notice. Victory can be snatched from the jaws of defeat — and vice versa. And because everyone’s in it together — this is a cooperative game — it’s a wonderful moment when victory finally comes.

In short, then, if you’re getting in to the world of board games beyond Monopoly, Pandemic is one you should definitely check out. From what I’ve seen so far, the expansion adds a significant amount of good content to the game — the base game can simply be enhanced by the addition of a number of new roles if you’re not feeling confident enough to take on the Virulent Strain, Mutation or Bio-Terrorist challenges — but the basic package will provide you with many hours of fun, whether you’re playing with friends or solo. (Don’t be fooled by that “2-4 players” on the box — you most certainly can play with one or five people, especially with the expansion, but be warned; adding more players to the mix actually makes the game somewhat more difficult.)

Want to know more? The ever-helpful BoardGameGeek has more information than you could ever want.

#oneaday Day 709: Reasonable Hour

I’m thinking this through this time, writing my entry for today before getting involved in anything which I might want to continue doing until the wee small hours of the morning, as has happened for the last two nights straight. Oddly enough, despite waking relatively “early” (for the holiday season, anyway) I didn’t feel too bad as the world came back into focus after only a few hours’ sleep.

I have a curious relationship with sleep. I like sleeping, but I also find it an enormous waste of time. I suffer from some degree of insomnia for the vast majority of the time, meaning I often find it very difficult to actually drift off to sleep once I’m lying in bed with my head on the pillow. It’s not anything specific keeping me awake, generally — I can and will always nod off eventually, even if there’s someone drilling a hole in the road outside or snoring thunderously in the same room as me. But sleep is one of those things that the harder you try to grab hold of, the more elusive it is. The more aware you are of the fact that you “should” be going to sleep, the less likely you are to actually fall asleep.

I say “you”. I mean “me”, because I know not everyone is like this. Several people I know have the uncanny ability to close their eyes, rest their head and be in the land of Nod (not the Command & Conquer variety) almost immediately, whatever happens to be going on around them. In the case of some friends, it became something of a “party trick”, albeit a usually involuntary one. Mercifully, however, my friends have never been the type to deface a sleeping person by shaving off eyebrows or beards — or indeed adding any adornments with marker pens. The closest we have come to defiling a sleeping figure came at my friend Ben’s Halloween party when he fell asleep rather early in the evening, still in most of his wizard costume (sans beard, sadly). Other friends Woody (dressed as Death) and Mike (dressed as Gay Satan) posed with the recumbent Ben for some photographs that remain, to date, some of my favourite “visual memories” of that particular group of friends.

But I digress. I find it very difficult to get to sleep, particularly if I get into bed at what your parents call a “reasonable hour”. I find my mind wandering — not necessarily in an anxious way, though if I am anxious about anything, lying in the dark trying to get to sleep is inevitably the time that every anxiety and neurosis comes out to play — and this makes it terribly difficult to clear out all those extraneous, unnecessary thoughts which it’s impossible to act on while lying in bed. While your brain is full of such garbage, it’s a challenge to convince your body that now is the time for rest. Inevitably, I’ll find myself attempting to do something distracting. It could be playing with my phone, it could be reading a book by the light of my phone, or in extreme cases, getting up altogether and doing something other than lying staring at the inside of my eyelids.

One thing I’ve noticed since I was younger is that it’s more difficult to “focus” at the time when I’m trying to get to sleep than it used to be. When I was younger, I found it very easy to slip into imaginative fantasy, half dreaming, half actively imagining and directing my thoughts, picturing myself on grand adventures. Frequently, these mental excursions would lead to slumber and some colourful dreams, so I often found it a good way to see myself through the night.

I’ve tried doing the same thing in recent years, however, and I find it enormously difficult to concentrate on the sense of “narrative” inherent in these brain-fuelled adventures. I don’t generally have a problem concentrating while I’m awake — I’m quite happy to sit staring at something I’m working on or playing with for hours at a time, but as soon as it comes to trying to concentrate on getting to sleep? My brain seems to release the floodgates of all the thoughts that I’ve been storing in my own internal “deal with later” pile.

You know when it’s not difficult to get to sleep, though? In the morning. On many occasions I’ve been woken up by my alarm (or indeed by Andie getting out of bed to go to work) and have promptly fallen back asleep almost immediately — for hours at a time on many occasions. The interesting thing about these morning “extra” sleeps is that they almost always feature incredibly vivid dreams, and since they occur during short sleeps just before I get up and switch my brain into “daytime” gear, I can usually remember at least a few details from them for most of the rest of the day. It’s during morning slumbers I’ve had bizarre and diverse imaginary encounters such as being utterly convinced that it would be impossible to have sex with someone if I didn’t have the right sheet music with me; or finding myself in my parents’ dining room with a male voice choir literally singing for my supper.

Sleep, then, is good — some might call it necessary. I just wish it was more a case of flipping a “standby” switch rather than spending all that time and effort trying to power down for the evening — time which I would rather spend doing something much more fun!

#oneaday Day 708: Stupid O’ Clock

It’s, once again, stupid o’ clock in the morning, but this time The Old Republic isn’t to blame. At least, not directly — no, instead, this evening/morning’s lateness is due to the long-awaited return of the Squadron of Shame SquadCast.

The Squaddies are some of my most long-standing friends, and people I speak to in some capacity pretty much every day. I’d even go so far as to say that they’re probably the best friends I have, despite the fact that we’re several thousand miles apart and see each other face to face rarely — and in some cases, we still haven’t met in person.

From humble beginnings as a loose community on 1up.com’s message boards to a more organised “club” on the site and, eventually, cutting loose into the big wide world by ourselves, we’ve stuck together through thick and thin, through life’s big moments and its little pleasures. And between us, we’ve built friendships that have endured, remained strong through various adversities, and grown stronger over the years.

This, people, is the power of the social Web. It’s not about building a “voice for your brand”. It’s not about “engaging with your audience”. It’s not about “leveraging somethingorother”. And it’s certainly not about “monetization strategies”. It’s about socalisation, society, people. It’s easy to forget that with the amount of information we’re voluntarily bombarded with on a daily basis. We willingly subject ourselves to a barrage of stimuli from a diverse array of sources — some of which are real people acting with real honesty; others of which are real people holding up a façade in an attempt to be someone they’re not; others still of which are people acting as the voice of a brand, attempting to bring a face to the faceless corporate world.

Events which transpired today showed the potentially disastrous consequences of acting as the voice of a brand, not of an individual. Ocean Market(t)ing [sic] president Paul Christoforo descended into childish insults and poorly-spelled, poorly-articulated attempts to assert his authority and regain his credibility when confronted with an irate customer. The email exchange has, thanks to its posting on Penny Arcade earlier today, gone viral, and Christoforo has become the object of ridicule. It isn’t the first time this has happened, and I fear very strongly for Christoforo’s future job prospects after this debacle, particularly as so many employers are now taking social media “output” into account when considering applicants for positions. Don’t get me wrong, Christoforo was a dick, but is it really fair to potentially jeopardise his whole future over things that clearly happened in the heat of the moment.

Somewhere along the line, I believe we’ve lost our way with the social Web. We made the critical mistake of letting the marketers and businessmen take charge of something which should bring people together. Rather than situations like that which brought me and the Squaddies to each other, we get popular brands asking facile questions and the eager hordes responding in all-lowercase, thereby indirectly promoting the brand in question. We get people carefully guarding the way the represent themselves online so as to protect their personal brand. We get situations spiralling out of control, such as that seen with Christoforo and his customer earlier today.

It’s not all doom and gloom, of course; to imply that the world is going to hell in a handcart purely because of the presence of marketers is foolish. But it would do many people well to, once in a while, remember what the “social” bit of “social media” really means. Does it mean telling the faceless drone behind the The Sims Facebook account that your favourite colour is indeed green? Or does it mean striking up conversation, getting together, finding new people that you want to spend time with?

I’d opt for the latter every time. And now I need to go to bed before I pass out.

#oneaday Day 707: Holy Balls, How Did It Get to 3AM?

Okay. I think we can say with some certainty that The Old Republic is A Bit Good, judging by the fact that I uttered that very statement above while playing with my good buddy Jeff “Feenwager” Parsons tonight. This morning. Whatever.

As I said the other day, while the game does suffer from a few of the genre’s perpetual annoyances (having to traipse all the way back to a trainer to learn new skills is something MMOs should really move beyond, for one thing) it does a lot of things right. It’s balanced nicely for those players who want to play solo and just happen to “live” in the same world as other players. There are specifically-designed areas known as “Heroic Areas” which are light on story and heavy on fighting, ideal for pick-up groups. There are more lengthy multiplayer story-heavy missions known as Flashpoints. There is PvP. And pretty much everything can be played cooperatively if you so desire.

Some have argued that the writing perhaps isn’t up to BioWare’s usual tip-top standards, but when you consider the amount of content in this game even at launch, it’s perhaps not surprising. That said, the “dark side” options in dialogue (which can usually be interpreted as “snarky”) are often amusing. I’ll be interested to see if playing a dark-inclined Jedi will have any significant effect on the plot. It’s provoked some NPC comments so far, but I’m very early into my playthrough with said dark-inclined Jedi, so a lot remains to be seen.

Perhaps the most notable thing about the game is the fact that it’s encouraging people who aren’t huge fans of MMOs to give it a shot. Jeff, whom I mentioned above, is one. My buddy Edd, aka Roth, whom I used to play Final Fantasy XI with for a short period, is another. A good indicator of The Old Republic getting things “right” for me will be if these two stick around beyond the free month — and if other friends who typically shy away from the genre sign up, too. I hope they do, as these games are always more fun with friends.

The community I’ve encountered so far has been very friendly. With my “main” character on the European servers, I plumped for an RP (Roleplaying) server as this generally is populated with more pleasant types. I haven’t been disappointed so far — when asking for advice, people are usually happy to give it rather than inviting you to “Google it”. This is nice. Quite how long it will last, I don’t know — the game is still new, after all — but for now I’ll enjoy it.

The only thing I can see putting people off trying The Old Republic is the price. With so many free MMOs out there now, it’s hard to justify spending “full price” on a new one, plus a monthly subscription after the first month. But it’s effectively several BioWare games in one, along with a potential WoW-beater. And if that isn’t value for money, I’m not sure what is.

#oneaday Day 706: Merry Christmas!

It’s Christmas! Well, actually, where I am, it stopped being Christmas Day about 38 minutes ago, but we’ll let that slide for the moment.

I hope you all had a pleasant day out there and there weren’t any family arguments around the Monopoly board. (You should all know by now that Monopoly is rubbish and you should never play it, not when there are so many good board games out there.) Much food and drink was doubtless consumed by all, and most of you (in European timezones, at least) will, if you have any sense, be tucked up in bed, thoroughly stuffed full of meat and, err, stuffing.

Some of you may, of course, be playing with whatever presents Santa decided to grace you with this year. And this is, of course, a perfectly acceptable way to spend the end of Christmas Day as Boxing Day comes along.

I had a good haul this year, which was pleasing. As I noted a few days ago, this was my first Christmas away from my own family for some time (disregarding the one I spent completely alone, tucked up in bed, ill) and so it was both nice and interesting to do things according to a “new” schedule. My family typically get up early, maybe have some breakfast and then get straight to opening presents, then have lunch and generally then spend at least part of the afternoon down at the home of local friend and Deep Purple keyboardist Don Airey. Meanwhile, Andie’s family get up, have breakfast, maybe watch some TV, then have lunch and only then open presents. It didn’t take as much adjusting to as I thought, and it made the anticipation of said presents rather pleasing — helped along by the opening of “stocking” presents the night before, which seems to generally involve a large bag full of food and silly little things. We now have enough Jaffa Cakes in our house to feed a small army.

As for the presents themselves, I had a rather good haul. I had a selection of board games, including the full four-player version of Blokus; cooperative and nightmarishly difficult disease-curing game Pandemic and its expansion On The Brink; and zombie-bashin’ B-movie-inspired adventure Last Night on Earth (one of the only games I know that comes with a soundtrack CD). I also got a copy of Ready Player One, which I’ve been wanting to read for a while. And there was a Minecraft creeper T-shirt, so I can now publicly endorse Mojang’s creation while out and about. There were other bits and pieces, too, including an iTunes voucher which I’m looking forward to spending, and a number of digital gifts from a variety of sources, which I shall enjoy investigating when I can tear myself away from both Minecraft and The Old Republic, both of which are proving enormously entertaining at the moment.

Star of the show for the day, I believe, though, was a Kindle from Andie. I’ve been pondering whether or not I want one of these for quite a while, as I also want an iPad. The Kindle is, however, 1) cheaper and 2) considerably smaller and lighter than an iPad, so it has its own benefits — not least of which is a well-established infrastructure in the form of the Kindle Store. Having used it a little bit today, I can confirm that it is a very nice device, with a lovely readable screen — the only real downside to it compared to an iPad (when looking at it purely as an e-reader, obviously) is its lack of backlight, meaning you can’t read it in the dark. However, this is counterbalanced by the fact that it’s much easier to read in bright light than the iPad or iPhone is. I’ve already bought my first book on it — Wil Wheaton’s Just a Geek, which seems to be highly entertaining and thought-provoking at the same time, much like the man himself. I shall look forward to doing a lot more reading now I have a device specifically designed for it and no longer having to rearrange the bookshelves to fit new acquisitions on.

In summary, then, I hope you all had a fabulous Christmas. I certainly did. Here’s to 2012 being a year of great things.

#oneaday Day 705: Jingle All the Way

Having just endured the annual musical ordeal that is Top of the Pops 2, I feel it would be remiss of me to not mention the phenomenon of the Christmas single.

They’re… Well, they’re not very good, really, are they? Even the well known ones. In fact, especially the well known ones.

Or perhaps they aren’t. After all, everybody knows the offerings from Slade, Wizzard, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, The Pogues and Mariah Carey. The songs are certainly memorable. But does that make them “good”?

I’m not sure it’s possible to really judge any more. Modern TV and radio exposes us to these songs on such a regular basis every year around the holiday period that it’s difficult not to feel jaded by hearing them so often. And it’s not as if they’re the only Christmas songs around, either; in recent years we’ve had a spectacularly depressing offering from Coldplay; a monstrous collaboration between Mariah Carey and Justin Bieber; and an actually quite good (if self-consciously ridiculous) piece by The Darkness. So why don’t we hear these other ones more often?

I’m not sure I have a definitive answer, save for the fact that it’s a vicious cycle. Slade, Wizzard, Lennon, Carey et al are all regarded as the canonical “classic” Christmas songs, so they’re the ones that get trotted out every year. In some cases, of course, these songs have been around for years, so they have something of a head start on more recent offerings.

This means it’s entirely possible that in twenty years’ time we’ll be hearing nothing but Chris Martin’s maudlin caterwauling and Carey and Bieber’s horrifyingly creepy collaboration at work Christmas dos.

That’s a frightening thought. Perhaps the dull droning of Christian hymns and carols isn’t so bad after all.

Merry Christmas everybody. 🙂

#oneaday Day 704: Old Republican

I caved and picked up the new Star Wars MMO The Old Republic this week. This despite never having really been that into Star Wars (certainly nowhere near as much as my brother and his kids, anyway) and rarely having the patience to see MMOs through to their endgame.

You know what, though? The Old Republic does one hell of a lot of things right, and might just be the big shakeup that the stale, overcrowded genre needs.

By far the best addition to the whole experience is the fact that plot is delivered with some degree of effort, rather than through static text boxes. One of the things which always bugged me about World of Warcraft was that there was this huge, epic storyline going on, but you wouldn’t have known it. Text boxes do not make for good interactive storytelling. Interactive cutscenes with dialogue choices, however, do — particularly given the innovative implementation of “multiplayer conversations”, where each “response” is rolled on by all party members to see who gets the chance to say their piece. It sounds odd, but works really well in practice, and is certainly a far more elegant solution than what Guild Wars did by only having the party leader visible in cutscenes.

It helps that it looks like being an interesting story (or, indeed, stories) too — I’ve only played as a Jedi Knight so far, but already the things I’ve been doing could have been straight out of a new single player Knights of the Old Republic game. This is very much a Good Thing, and the fact that you can have a completely different experience and story by playing with one of the other classes is also a Very Good Thing.

The game doesn’t break completely with established MMO conventions, however. We still have a hotbar filled with abilities with cooldowns. We still have clearly defined party roles. We still have vendor trash, skill trainers, flight paths, rested XP, Elite mobs and all the other shenanigans we’ve come to associate with the genre. And while it would be nice to see a little more originality in some of these aspects, what we haven’t seen before is the combination of these game mechanics with strong storytelling. And, unlike most MMOs, where the mechanics are very much at the forefront, here — at least early in the game — the story is very much front and centre, making you feel, as the marketing says, like you’re in the middle of your own personal Star Wars saga.

It’s ironic, really, that out of all the recent “new” Star Wars material, it’s not the movies that were the most worthwhile things. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the Episode I-III movies were some of the worst things to happen to the franchise. Conversely, the Old Republic series has been one of the best things to happen to the saga, plot holes relating to the fact that the galaxy has been using the exact same technology for thousands of years notwithstanding. And the new game certainly has the potential to create an enormous expanded universe over the course of its lifetime. Will it ever eclipse the movies themselves, though? Probably not; the movies have a considerable head start on the game, after all. But there’s so much potential here for BioWare and LucasArts to explore, and I for one am actually quite excited to see how it all develops. It’s a very strong game now — where will it be in ten years’ time? You only have to look at how far World of Warcraft has come since its 2004 release to see how much one game can evolve. And if The Old Republic is starting from such a strong beginning, I can’t wait to see what the future holds.

This likely isn’t any consolation to players of Star Wars Galaxies, which shut down earlier this week. But despite the fact that The Old Republic is far more focused on the heroic side of things rather than, say, being a dancer in a cantina, it’s an authentic-feeling Star Wars experience that makes good use of both its multiplayer mechanics and BioWare’s considerable chops in the storytelling department.

In short, if you’ve been considering trying it for yourself, then don’t hesitate. Give it a try; you won’t be disappointed.

#oneaday Day 703: Ding, Dong

I think there’s something to be said for “ceremony” and “ritual”. Not in the creepy hooded robe “I’m going to sacrifice you to Mara the penis monster” sense, but particularly with regard to Christmas.

I say this upon some reflection on my own lack of enthusiasm for the festive period which I’ve been suffering for the past few years. At least some of this general sense of ambivalence towards the holiday season can be attributed to my depression, I’m sure, but perhaps it goes deeper than that. Perhaps it’s the fact that for the last [x] years, I just haven’t really “celebrated” Christmas as I used to when I was younger. I rarely bother with cards, considering them something of a waste of time and money; I don’t go out carol singing; I don’t write letters to Santa; though I must confess I do enjoy giving presents.

Perhaps I should re-adopt some of these pre-Christmas rituals to get me into the spirit. For example, I fondly recall the whole Christmas cards thing from my schooldays. It was a time to quite literally take stock of how many friends you had — and back in those days we didn’t have Facebook to make this process easier. No; you had to sit there with a notepad and a Tesco pack of 5 bajillion cards, writing each of them by hand and saving the “best” ones for the people you quite fancied. The following day at school, you’d give them out to people in person or, for those people you didn’t really care about that much (harsh, but true) you’d put them in the school’s “post box” system for some poor year 7s to come and collect and distribute later in the day. Following this, you’d eagerly grab every card you received, inevitably reading far too much into the fact that the girls you quite fancied put “love” in their cards while conveniently ignoring the fact that they’d put “love” in their cards to everyone, not just you.

And the whole Santa thing, too. The whole process of writing a letter listing all the things you’d like for Christmas, ending it with “I HAVE BEEN GOOD” while trying not to think about the thing you got told off for last week, leaving it by the chimney, eagerly awaiting a reply and then leaving a mince pie and glass of sherry by the fireplace on Christmas Eve; all that gave the whole experience a degree of magic that just isn’t there as an adult. I’m not saying we should all start believing in Santa Claus (or perhaps we should?) but I am saying that Christmas as a kid was clearly better.

It was, though, wasn’t it? You could always think of awesome things you’d like to get as presents. There’d be a “big present” to unwrap, possibly with smaller presents providing clues as to its identity. And you’d sit there smugly, thinking that you’d got the “best” gifts. (If TV is to be believed, you’d also have burst into tears if anyone had bought you a Soda Stream, but possibly not for the reasons the advert implies.)

So how to recapture that magic? I don’t know. I’m spending my first Christmas with the girlfriend’s family this year, and they have their own set of interesting rituals and ceremonies to take on. Will it be fun? I’m sure it will, but I doubt that magic of Christmas as a kid will ever be there again.

We’ll see!