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THE DIGITISER FRIDAY LETTERS PAGE

3/8/2018

16 Comments

 
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So, next weekend - the 11th and 12th of August - sees Play Expo come to London. Pretty much everyone who's anyone in the retro gaming community will be there. With one exception.

Unfortunately, I've had to cancel my scheduled appearance. Suffice to say, I'm more than a bit gutted, but it is, sadly, unavoidable. I'm especially sorry to everyone who was hoping to see me there, and disappointed that I'm not able to hang out with everyone. That said, the rest of the Digitiser The Show hosts will be in attendance. See if you can get a selfie with them.

​In other news, this - right here - is the penultimate Friday Letters Page. After next Friday I'll be taking a couple of weeks off to try and recuperate from what has been an unusually busy year, before launching into a busy - but Digi-centric - autumn. There are some jolly exciting things on the way... 


If you'd like to appear here, or you've something you'd like me to give some attention to in our occasional Plug Zone, please send your filthy emails to this place here: 
digitiser2000@gmail.com
GAMING MILL'S PLUG
I think this needs to be brought to the attention of not only the nation but to the entire planet: Why isn't Stoke on Trent featured on the BBC Weather website map?

This is a travesty and an injustice. Worksop and Grimsby are on there so why no Stoke?

Why am I so concerned with this? I don't live there. I think I went to university there once though, but I can't really remember much about those days because I was too busy playing guitar, drinking gin and having adult shenanigans with the ladies (specifically, the ones that also like gin and a lead guitarist).

I am getting fitter and that is all,
Gaming Mill

PS. If anyone is interested (which most people aren't these days) I'm now releasing two videos a week on my increasingly unpopular YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/gamingmill It'd be nice for people to look and subscribe and all that sort of thing. Oh, at 5:30pm (BST) on Wednesdays and Fridays.
Don't be too sad, Gaming Mill. You've still got more subscribers than the Digitiser2000 YouTube channel. 
PRETTY GOOD JOKE
Thank you for your recent list of excellent point and click adventures, they all look very nice. However, I must complain nevertheless! I pointed at these adventures and not one of them clicked! I am very disappointed.

Yours faithfully,
Zoë
Huh. That's a pretty good joke.
ZEALOTTOMAN EMPIRE
Afternoon. Zealot-64 here. 

I was only joking about reviewing Chameleon Twist in my last letter, but then I thought what if millions of N64 fans are waiting for it? Don’t worry: I turn it into a brilliant question at the end. 

Chameleon Twist. Generic 3D platformer that makes the same mistakes as all the generic 3D platformers, but has a chameleon with an analogue controlled tongue. At least it’s short, the game not the tongue. Bad. 

Chameleon Twist 2. Improves on all the mistakes of the first game by a tiny amount, but somehow makes the tongue bit worse. Bad 1/2. 

Mario 64 was good though wasn’t it? It was pretty much the first 3D platformer and everything it tried it got right. Why did so many other 3D platformers fail to steal the things that made it work?

Is the demise of the 3D platformer because nobody could improve on Mario 64? Even Nintendo has never tried replicate the exact formula, or were they merely a passing fad and now we all like Call of Duty instead?

The best 3D platformers are the ones with the least platforms. Discuss.

Love
Grembot
I dunno if 3D platformers have gone away. Isn't Assassin's Creed basically a platform game? And what about Super Mario Odyssey? I think it's more that this sort of game has fallen out of fashion, rather than because 
REST IN PEACE
In response to the latest Found Footage Update: IF YOU NEED REST, PLEASE GET REST.

Oh, and if have to mention something videogamey, ever since that article about games with fire, the Burning Rangers song has been looping through my head. I'm not even mad.

And, something, something Party of Five.

Sorry. I've not done one of these in a while!

Take it Easy
El Greenio Screenio
Yes, yes. Thank you for your concern. I'm going to have a relatively relaxed August, if my day job actually ever allows it. That will mean a couple of Digi-less weeks in the middle of the month, but this autumn will be given over to all things Digitiser-related. Which means finishing the Found Footage DVDs, editing Digitiser The Show, and completing filming of Digitiser The Show. I'm very much looking forward to it all.
BOOK REVIEW
Dear Mr Bifocal,

Ages ago (before Found Footage) you floated the idea of getting crowd funding to write a book based on the Games of my Years articles. Given your somewhat mental workload do you think it'll ever happen? I have set aside several crisp five pound notes to donate to the cause. However, if it's some way off I can use them to pay the window cleaner. 

Merry Christmas.
Treacle Truffle
We have compiled my Games of my Years articles into a sort of book form, but whenever I think about tackling it... I hesitate. It's a few things. Firstly, the notion of writing something autobiographical and publishing it as a book feels weirdly narcissistic to me. I don't believe I'm important or famous enough to justify it. Secondly, because of this I don't know if it's worth the time and effort it'd take to flesh it out into book form. Thirdly, a book interests me far less than making TV show-type things. 

So, never say never... but it's not on the cards for any time in the near future.

SWORD'S LAW
How Do!

Just read that point-n-click article you did -  which was a Feargal good read by the way - and by coincidence I have been mostly playing Broken Sword 5 on my PS4. It's great. There should be more Point-n-Click games.

When Broken Sword gets too difficult I go on GT-Sport, when that gets too difficult I go to bed.

Kind Regards,
Jim Leighton (Future World Darts Champion) x
They've not really gone away though have they? You've got the games from Telltale which are essentially point-and-click adventures. As is pretty much anything from David Cage. Even story-led action games such as the Uncharted series share some of the same DNA. 
CROISSED WIRES
I’ve not written for a while, and this is partly because I am somewhat vexed. I can not, for the life of me, find somewhere which does a decent croissant.

​Costa, Pret A Manger, all the usual suspects you find in a town high street are just not doing the French pastry any justice. Either served up cold, room temperature, has a texture like a slice of bread. Or, in the case of Costa, charging an extra 45p for butter. All seem to be a bit too chewy for comfort.

Annoying, eh?

All the best,
Paul Dunning
What even is the big deal about croissants? They're just flaky bread, like a leprotic bun.
MR SOFTEE
With all the hoo-haa in the gaming news about the portable Spectrum thing, I thought I'd express my puzzlement at people's continued love of old 8-bit micro games. 

I was brought up with an Acorn Electron and then a C64.  My overarching memory of these systems is waiting ages for them to load, even on disk, only for half the games to crash when a new area was loading or something. 

When playing on my friend's Amstrad I mostly remember having to play games using keyboard controls,  because the particular game we were playing didn't support their particular joystick. And although I do have fond memories of playing the Spectrum +3, with its nifty little disk drive and decent graphics, the older Spectrum games made my eyes hurt with their flickering.

All the time I was playing on these systems I dreamed of one day having a console with its instant loading game cards, joypads and excellent graphics. In the late 80s my dad borrowed a Master System from his friend, just for a week. It was like being visited by a sophisticated time travelling gaming machine. I was actually very sad when it had to go back.

I guess what I'm saying is, I understand the importance of the UK's micro computer history, but I'm not eager to ever revisit it.

Looking forward to the show.
​Chris Hard
I do know what you mean. I have absolutely no interest in loading games by cassette, or even floppy, on the original hardware. And, as I'm sure I've said many times, while there were some gems in there, the vast majority of 8-bit home computer games are horrible to play now. But... it's all about nostalgia innit? You know: like how old people can get wistful when talking about rationing.
50 Q's OF WHYTE
1) ​What is your game-of-the-year so far? I would say God of War.

2) In your opinion, is re-playability (not a word, I know) more important now than in the past, or less so? Some games e.g. online games make me think it's more important, but the rise of Indie games-as-experiences makes me think it is less important than it once was.

3) Can you think of a game, or a section of one, that captures the frustration of everyday life as well as 'Geralt Goes to the Bank' in The Witcher 3?
John Whyte
1) Mine definitely isn't God of War. It might be Far Cry 5, or maybe something indie, like Yoku's Island Express.

2) It's all in the eye of the beholder really. I've never been big into replaying games. I like them as finite experiences. It's rare that I'll even download extra levels and that, once I've completed the core experience. 

3) Hmm. Yeah. Which Grand Theft Auto game was it where you got fat if you ate too many hamburgers, and had to go to the gym to burn off the calories. San Andreas? Surely the most unnecessary and unwanted feature ever in an action game.
16 Comments
Col. Asdasd
3/8/2018 09:15:00 am

You could argue that Banjo Kazooie improved on Mario 64 within a couple of years of it. The secret? You could hold down a button to run faster. In Mario you have to long jump everywhere. WOOHOO WOOHOO HEEHEE YAHOO.

They could have made the faster run speed the default, but somehow holding down the button makes you feel like you're doing more, as though you're playing more skilfully or exerting more agency. It's ridiculous but it works.

Reply
Grembot
3/8/2018 09:38:43 am

I felt Banjo ran out of steam by forcing you into too high of a collection percentage to see everything, and then the quiz near the end! Mario 64 just let you lark about more and felt free. Also Rare’s N64 output always fell short for me due to the emphasis on graphics at the cost of frame rate, this is why Diddy Kong Racing isn’t better than Mario Kart 64. FACT.

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Col. Asdasd
3/8/2018 11:02:48 am

An N64 fan who doesn't like the Rare games! That's a first. I would agree with you about completion gating if you were talking about DK64 or JFG or even maybe Banjo 2, but this didn't happen for me with the first. Maybe it was because it was my first real 3D collectathon platformer (second if you count Mario).

And let's be honest, the system wasn't a frame rate lover's utopia even if you only played first party games. Like VR today, the draw was was more about getting to witness the medium breach new frontiers than offering polished experiences - movement and exploration in proper 3D spaces, analogue sticks, voice acting, rumble. It was a generation where if you got a stable 20fps you considered yourself lucky!

RichardM
3/8/2018 11:37:12 am

I only remember the framerate stuttering a few times in Banjo-Kazooie, in the overworld near the lava you had to walk round to get to Mad Monster Mansion. I assumed it had something to do with unloading and loading all the new textures for MMM unused elsewhere: but I know nothing!

I liked Banjo-Kazooie more than Mario 64, but am not entirely sure why. I think Rare’s humour and the environments were just a bit better. I never struggled with collecting enough stuff in them. Banjo-Tooie, DK64, etc, though: yikes. No thanks.

All 3D platformers seemed to go the same way, with open courses a la Mario 64 and (slightly less) BK to increasingly set-piece levels which changed from goal to goal. I’d like a platformer with one massive, persistent world and only like... 100 things to collect. And boss battles and stuff. But I’m old and not the target demographic any more!

Grembot
3/8/2018 11:36:52 am

This is going to get confusing, I’ve run out of reply buttons. I do like the Rare games honest guv, I just find them secondary to anything you can directly compare to a Nintendo effort. I don’t care how low the frame rate is and I wouldn’t notice the difference between 30/60 as some liars say. What I do care about is consistent frame rate an far too often Rare’s games chugged along. The important thing is we’re talking about the N64 and all agree it’s the best console ever!

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Chris
3/8/2018 10:28:27 am

Because....?

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Mr Biffo
3/8/2018 11:37:57 am

...Because?

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Diddly diddly doop de doop
3/8/2018 12:55:40 pm

Because of the wonderful things he does!

Neptunium
3/8/2018 12:11:39 pm

I am from Stoke-on-Trent and am not outraged about us not being on the weather map. We show on the Midlands Today one sometimes.

I actually like being from Stoke-on-Trent. Talk to any outsiders or read the media and you'd get the impression it's a cursed piece of earth with only society's cast offs desperate enough to live amongst the filth and extreme poverty, where people voted for Brexit because they were too backwards to be able to read the ballot. Yet come here and you'll realise it's just full of normal folk doing normal stuff like playing games, eating crisps and drinking absurdly priced coffee from drive thru coffee shops, like anywhere else in Britain.

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Col. Asdasd
3/8/2018 12:49:17 pm

TRUE FACT: the only boss I've ever liked came from Stoke on Trent. SECOND FACT: he was a graduate in meteorology and once confided to me that he would have loved to have been a storm chaser.

I think Stoke's problem is in its name. It is very evocative of a place of industry ('stoke'-ing boilers or furnaces, also rhymes with smoke), which we have been trained by the media to think of as a) environmentally unfriendly b) hopelessly outdated and irrelevant (Britain's future prosperity can ONLY lie in finance, services and sexy tech) and c) the last refuge of the working class, who as we all know are a stupid, feckless and racist horde.

The 'on' seems extraneous and out of place in any name, like a pothole in a road or a wasp in a sandwich, and 'Trent' is a ghastly name, especially for a river - rivers being elegant, natural, meandering things, while trent is a harsh monosyllabic bark that you almost have to snarl up your face just to pronounce. Go on, try it. Don't you feel your nose wrinkling?

So yeah. Nominative determinism at work if you ask me. Deeply unfair but then the UK is rife with such prejudices.

Reply
Neptunium
3/8/2018 02:29:57 pm

I think Stoke's problems are the same as any traditional working class area that's not a major city - we're ignored by the right-wing because we'd never vote for them, and we're used for votes by the left-wing who then renege on their promises to make things happen because they know we'll continue to vote the same way next time. Hence decades of disinvestment by central government and crazy get rich quick schemes by local government that amount to nothing but empty buildings, wasteland and lost hope.

Despite that the spirit of the locals is strong and things are happening in the arts, engineering and technology. You also can't beat a sausage and cheese oatcake to cure your hangover blues.

Mrtankthreat
3/8/2018 02:32:11 pm

That reminds me of the episode of QI where they were discussing how changing the names of towns could make us happier because the current names are so ugly. Some of the suggestions included renaming Slough "Yippee", Staines "Whoohoo" and Hull "Hot Diggity".

Stephen Fry pointed out that it could backfire if a disaster happens in the town and then the news headlines are like "200 dead in Hot Diggity". It would lose a bit of gravitas. This reminded Phil Jupitus of the mine disaster in Zimbabwe where 400 people died at the Wankie Colliery and he couldn't stop laughing.

DEAN
3/8/2018 12:52:42 pm

Stoke is like a religious site to me:

iiii]; )'

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MENTALIST
3/8/2018 02:28:04 pm

"Can you think of a game, or a section of one, that captures the frustration of everyday life as well as 'Geralt Goes to the Bank' in The Witcher 3?"

I haven't played The Witcher 3. But the game "Postal 2" is ENTIRELY composed of such mundane everyday tasks. One of the early ones is exactly that, going to the bank, including waiting in a frustratingly slow moving queue.

The idea is that the players themselves get frustrated or bored, and go on a crazy rampage of their own accord.

I've always though that was a remarkably clever idea, although a bit under-served by the otherwise kind of ropey game in question.

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Adam
3/8/2018 02:39:38 pm

You know there's 10% off everything on Ebay today (Friday), right? Only until 8pm though. You might find some bargains for future filming...

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Lummox60N
6/8/2018 08:20:00 pm

Hold on..."penultimate"?
As in, "penultimate, EVER?".
I really ought to get a letter in next week. I assume there'll be medals?

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