ApoCaelypse Wow

Gold Coins – Super Mario Bros

You'd think gold coins would be a good, sensible, solid choice for a collectible. Coins are, by their very design, portable in large numbers and gold is an inherently valuable metal. Super Mario Bros manages to totally miss the point of coins by making coins as big a human being and utterly failing to let Mario exchange them for any good or services.

Look at that screen shot. LOOK AT IT! The coins are as big as Normal Mario is. Thanks to the wonders of mathematics and crappy movies, we can work out roughly how much one of them must weigh. A round coin is a squat cylinder. Mario is the height of one (late, great) Bob Hoskins, which Wikipedia tells us is 168cm, which gives us the diameter of the coin. Halving that gives us a radius of 84cm. Looking at the screen shot, I estimate the thickness of the coin as roughly one-eighth of the diameter, which gives our cylinder a height of 21cm. We calculate the volume of a cylinder as pi x r2 x h. Plugging our numbers into this formula gives a (rounded) volume of 465508cm3.

Some Googling gives us a weight of 19.32g per cm3 multiplying that by the volume gives us a grand total of 8994kg. Per coin. Which, according to some scrap gold site I found, is worth over three hundred and sixty million US dollars. Yes, I typed it out in words. I think it has more impact like that.

Final verdict? Gold coins are great in theory, but when they're impossible to carry and you have nothing to spend them on, not so much. Hearts – Legend of Zelda

Hearts are another classic video game collectible, but the Zelda series stands as the most notable example of their use. It seems pretty simple; you kill something, pick up the heart and get some health back, but let's stop and think about that for a minute.

I don't know about you, but the only heart I routinely carry around is in my chest. And the only conceivable way of getting any kind of health benefit from a heart, would be to consume it for nutrition.

Yep, that's right. Whenever you pick up a heart in a game, you are carving open some poor creatures chest and EATING ITS HEART! Link isn't such an innocent little kid any more, is he?

The thing is, it's not such a bad idea. Sure, eating food, contrary to popular video game belief, isn't going to miraculously heal stab wounds, but if you're going to butcher the fallen for sustenance, the heart isn't a bad place to start. In fact, internal organs are some of the best bits to eat, nutritionally speaking. Maybe Link should go for the liver and kidneys as well.

Hearts – Castlevania

Yes, this a second entry about hearts. Yes, it's entirely intentional. Why on Earth does Konami insist on using hearts for sub weapon use? It's against the laws of gaming! It makes no sense whatsoever!

Chowing down on the ticker of that dude you just killed may seem kinda gross, but at least there's some logic there. Can anyone explain how hearts, gathered from candles and other light sources, translate into more axes and daggers? The only possibility, as far as I'm concerned, is that the Belmont Clan and Chums conceal an army of tiny pixies within their clothes, pixies who produce an array of weaponry when fed on the still-warm hearts of the living.

Whatever the reason, Konami's stubborn insistence on being different to everyone else makes them the Walker's of the video game world. Castlevania's use of hearts for non-health reasons is a violation of the natural order akin to putting cheese and onion crisps into blue packets instead green and an affront to the gods themselves!

Gold Rings – Sonic the Hedgehog

We've already established that collecting large chunks of gold is pretty impractical, especially when you have nothing to exchange the gold for. Sonic's rings make a little bit more sense than Mario's coins, but only because they're actually smaller than he is and I'm sure he could lift one or two.

What makes the rings ridiculous is their properties. Usually, in Sonic's world, bumping into someone is immediately fatal. However, this can be avoided by having at least one gold ring in your pocket (or shoved into a glove, or in a sock, or...y'know, I really don't want to think about where a virtually-naked hedgehog keeps those rings. Let's move on.) So, instead of a the touch of everyone else meaning instant death, you're thrown back with a surprised expression on your face, spontaneously spewing gold rings everywhere, and then have to scramble around to pick them all up before they disappear.

Just imagine walking down a busy street under these conditions; people collapsing as they brush shoulders with each other. The lucky, ring-holding few surviving that first contact, but then having to desperately grab one of those sweet, life-saving rings before they all disappear.

The exchange of rings at a wedding? Hilarious! Medkits – DOOM

Let's forget about eating hearts and giant gold coins, we're going to finish this up with something a little more down to Earth, a little more realistic; the humble medkit. While medkits have appeared in hundreds of games, we're going to go to the father of the FPS, DOOM. (Pedants, I know what you're thinking; Wolfenstein 3D was around before DOOM. It's true. But DOOM really kicked things off. Wolfenstein is more like the grandfather of the FPS. Which I guess makes Duke Nukem 3D the weird uncle of the FPS, the one who seemed really cool when you were a kid, but now you're older he's just creepy and inappropriate, and you don't know who's changed, you or him.)

Medkits. Boxes of miscellaneous, usually unidentified medical supplies which restore your health. Seems sensible, right? WRONG! Firstly, there's the whole concept of your physical well-being reduced to a percentage. Forget having to treat different injuries, it's all the same thing! Gunshots, acid burns, your entrails having been dragged out and partially consumed by a demon; all a matter of numbers.

Then there's the time factor. I don't know what's supposed to be in those medkits, but not only do they deal with any injury, they do so instantaneously. And all you have to do is pick them up. Your average FPS has a military background, so we can assume that they've had basic first aid training, however I'm not convinced that covers self-treating a fireball to the spleen. If it does, I've definitely been to the wrong first aid classes.

Magical, insta-healing boxes which treat everything with no real medical training are a great idea on paper, but they would really ruin medical dramas.

Right, time to get the fantasy jargon, which Tyranny is surprisingly light on, out of the way. Kyros the Overlord is the Big Bad. Their most powerful servants are called Archons, who are way more powerful than your average mage, but not on the same level as Kyros. Tyranny casts you in the role of a Fatebinder, a sort of judge/adjudicator/trouble shooter in service of the Archon of Justice. An uprising has occurred in the Tiers and the two Archons who are supposed to be taking care of it are taking way too long. You've been dispatched to sort out whatever is causing the hold-up and get the war machine chugging along again.

Imagine Palpatine sending a hand-picked agent to ask Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin what the fuck they were playing at and why the Rebellion hadn't been crushed yet. And to smack Vader with a rolled-up newspaper whenever he got a bit too choke-happy. That's your job. You're competent and well-trained (you can even *gasp* READ!), but have no real power beyond the threat of who you work for, which makes your encounters with the Archons suitably tense. You feel like Theo Rossi in Luke Cage and it feels gooooood.

It's a great premise for an RPG, and consistently well-executed. Lean and focussed, every plot line and side quest feeds into this Evil Empire Middle Management fantasy. There's no bloat, which is remarkably refreshing at a time when it seems like every major RPG franchise has felt the need to strap on huge, bland and largely pointless open worlds. When I completed my first play through, I completed every quest given to me and thoroughly explored every area. None of it felt extraneous and there was none of the usual ludonarrative dissonance that comes with picking fifty flowers and fetching someone's laundry when the fate of the world is in your hands.

This tightness translates into a relatively slight completion time of around 24 hours. It's still a hefty time investment compared to most games, but it's considerably lighter than Bioware or CD Projekt's latest offerings. It's an RPG that you're going to be able to finish, which isn't just a boon for people who don't have the time or inclination to plough dozens of hours into a single game. The manageable length means that replaying the game isn't such a daunting task, and Tyranny is a game you're going to want to replay.

Tyranny's tight focus allows for a great deal of freedom of choice within your appointed role. Even before you've left character creation, you're making decisions that will effect your entire game in profound ways. Entire settlements change hands, fame and infamy are gained, characters you don't even know exist yet will come to love or despise you. This doesn't just result in small changes, but recontextualises entire quests.

One simple mission involves a guy called Gino who has witnessed some Disfavored soldiers being naughty. You talk to him, find the evidence that holds up his story and decide what to do from there. Typical RPG stuff. What changes is how you encounter him. If the Disfavored are controlling the town, which is based on a decision you make during character creation, Gino is in hiding because there's a bounty on his head for a crime he didn't commit and you're asked to bring him to justice. If you left the town in someone else's hands, the Disfavored don't have that authority, so they've spread vicious rumours instead, and Gino himself asks for your help getting to the bottom of the matter.

Giving the player a specific role, but great freedom within that role isn't new to RPGs, but Tyranny takes the concept further than its peers. It's comparable to Mass Effect allowing you to favour the Asari over your fellow humans, or to tell them all to go screw themselves and work for Saren instead. It's not afraid to thrust hard decisions on you and force you to live with the consequences, or to cut off certain options before you even know they're available. There was an entire region (out of four) that I wasn't able to visit during my first game. When Tyranny tells you “No!” it's always because of your actions and that makes all the times it says “Yes!” even better.

Under the hood is a robust reputation system that builds on the one Obsidian developed for Fallout: New Vegas. Your positive and negative reputation with every faction and major character is tracked separately. Do you inspire respect or hatred? Are your followers there out of loyalty or fear? You're not going to be able to make everyone love you, even the ones who are supposed to be on your side. If, like me, you tend to try for solutions that make everyone happy, you're going to be disappointed. Deliciously, delightfully disappointed.

While Tyranny is about being the bad guys, it's not the puppy-murdering, mustache-twirling pantomime villainy available to you in, say, Knights of the Old Republic. You're an agent of a colonial power who is just doing their job. Sure, there are depraved killers to be found, but there are also plenty of nice, likeable folks who are proudly bringing Kyros' Peace to the squabbling, uncivilised South. The epitome of this is the Archon Graven Ashe, a large, bearded general who genuinely loves and cares for his troops like family, while simultaneously endorsing scorched earth tactics and being really, really racist. He's manifest destiny personified and given a really big mace. The evil in Tyranny is rational and normalised and frequently mundane, which is why it's frighteningly, uncomfortably realistic, and indeed timely, in this trash fire of a year.

It would be easy for Tyranny to fall into the trap of trying to be deep while being full of horrible bigoted fantasy tropes, however Obsidian have deftly avoided this. There's no guff about whiter-than-white elves being discriminated against and no reliance on fantasy races or nations being stand-ins for real world oppressed groups. While visual character customisation is limited, the skin tones and portraits available are nicely diverse and there's even a small selection of body types, although more variety here would have been appreciated. NPCs are similarly diverse, with the egalitarian North and kinda-matriarchal South coming across with plenty of women in positions of power and martial prowess. I didn't spot any trans characters, however other LGB folks are well-represented and homosexual relationships and marriage are clearly no big deal in the setting.

While my usual caveat of being white and thus not exactly qualified to speak on matters of race stands, I feel that Obsidian have done a sterling job on the representation front. Instead of avoiding these issues by defaulting to straight, white and patriarchal, Tyranny allows players to be themselves and see themselves without having to deal with discrimination. As a queer woman, this is what I feel the standard approach to fantasy settings should be.

Combat is where Tyranny lets itself down. It's routine, there's too much of it and it's entirely unavoidable. It's far from the worst example of Baldur's Gate-style real-time-with-pause combat and I'm quite taken with the underlying mechanics, which it shares with Pillars of Eternity. Even the worst-paced dungeon sections in the game don't come close to the interminably slog of Dragon Age's Deep Roads. However, after playing Age of Decadence (which I couldn't help but think about during the game, thanks to the similar Roman-esque setting) and revelling in being able to talk or sneak my way through the entire game, it all feels rather forced and unnecessary.

It's also kinda dull. I'm no fan of this kind of RPG combat, preferring the extremes of turn-based or full on action, and tend to play games in this style on the easiest difficulty in order to speed through them. I still found myself turning up the difficulty to normal early on in order to avoid boredom, and if I'd been particularly wanting a challenge, I would have had to crank it up again towards the end of the game. While I'd like to have seen better non-combat options, it certainly isn't a deal breaker, and the pacing of fights, puzzles and NPC encounters are generally good enough to avoid boredom, even on repeat play throughs. In spite of these flaws, Tyranny is an incredibly well-crafted game. While early Obsidian titles had troubled developments and a not-entirely-undeserved reputation for being buggy and unfinished, Tyranny and its brighter, more conventional sibling Pillars of Eternity ooze experience and craftsmanship. As much as I love the scope and flash of RPGs developed by the likes of Bioware and Bethesda, they're very much weighed down by the expectations of AAA game development and I'm glad that Obsidian have the freedom to create such a thought-provoking and engrossing game without having to worry about budgeting for all those fully-voiced and animated conversations.

It saddens me to say, then, that I'm left feeling Tyranny is destined to become an overlooked gem. Even the majority of RPG aficionados I speak to have barely heard of the game. I foresee many “You haven't played Tyranny? You really need to play Tyranny!” conversations happening in my future. Please don't be one of the people I have that conversation with. Tyranny is by far the best RPG I've played this year and totally deserving of your time and money.

In all seriousness, it has been helpful having another perspective on Legion. As the sixth (yes, I had to count on my fingers) expansion to a game celebrating its twelfth year, it's damn near impossible for me to wrap my head around what it's like for new players. I'm not going to bother with a run down of the new stuff, you can read that on the official site. Instead, I'm letting you know what it's like to actually play now that I've had a couple of months with the expansion. The short version is that Legion is a really good expansion and a lot of fun for both veterans and newbies.

Legion succeeds because it has a solid, entertaining and accessible adventuring experience at its core. MMORPGs are supposed to be about having adventures with your mates, but the RPG systems they're built around often get in the way. Straight out of the box, Legion gives you a free boost to level 100, the starting point for the expansion's content. It's crude, but effective, and well-implemented with an introductory experience to teach you the basics of your new class. There's no waiting for new or returning players who want to jump into the action with their better-prepared friends. There's also the fact that Blizzard have made levelling sort of irrelevant.

It looks like business as usual, but it's deceptive. Sure, you can now reach the dizzying heights of level 110, but there aren't any new abilities to gain on the way. All but one of the five new zones scale with you, as do their associated dungeons. While there a few bits and pieces that suddenly become available when you hit the level cap, most of the interesting content is unlocked through quest progress. Crafting skills follow the same model. Other than a sort of rewarding for maxing out the skill, the actual number is meaningless. Instead of banging out five hundred identical vendor trash swords, you go off to study under a master blacksmith. It's still the same core gameplay loop,  but the set dressing is so much more engaging. Some may dismiss this as irrelevant, but if you're going to do that, you may as well admit that a FPS is just clicking on polygons until they disappear.

The result of all this is that levelling becomes a background concern. If you've played enough WoW to become numb to that familiar DING, you may well find yourself levelling up without realising. It frees you up to engage with the game on your own terms. There is a guided, story-focussed experience there, but if you just want to explore, or PvP, or run dungeons, you're just as catered for, with nothing keeping you from playing with friends.

The level scaling sits nicely next to the new world quest system. Once you've fulfilled certain requirements at the level cap, you gain access to dozens of quests spread across Legion's five zones. Individually, they're not terribly exciting, mostly being rehashes of earlier “go kill ten goblins” quests with the story text stripped out, but there are loads of them, they refresh every few hours and the rewards are worthwhile. What makes them such a great addition is that they prevent you from outgrowing the content. Instead of levelling through a zone and never setting foot there again, you're always going back for world quests. While you're there, you can help out a friend, or finish off a quest chain you'd left or scour the area for every last hidden treasure chest. As someone who has blasted through MMO expansion after MMO expansion, getting bored when I realise that the only thing left to do is raid and quitting, I can't overstate how much of a difference it makes to not be funnelled into a narrow selection of endgame content.

Of course this only works if the game is fun to play. Blizzard have tinkered with WoW's classes a great deal over the years, with varying degrees of success. Complexity and depth have frequently been confused, resulting in overstuffed, finger-twisting hot bars full of barely-differentiated abilities, or whole classes feeling pretty much the same as each other. This time around, they've nailed it. Each specialisation within each class feels unique. Playing a protection warrior is different to playing a protection paladin, despite them both being sword and board-wielding tanks. Informing these changes, along with many of the expansion's spangly new features, such as order halls and artefact weapons, is the idea of class fantasy. Blizzard is asking questions like “What is a paladin like?” and “How does a mage operate?” and is giving the answers in terms of the world and narrative, not in numbers and MMO jargon.

The hunter class is a great example. Hunters have always been ranged damage dealers with pets. There hasn't been much to differentiate the three specialisations for years. Sure, they had slightly different skills and strengths and weaknesses, but they all did pretty much the same thing. Legion has shaken things up. Beast masters are now, well, beast masters, with most of their abilities focused on their pets and summoning additional creatures to help. Marksmen can ditch the pets entirely, becoming long-range snipers. Survival hunters aren't a ranged class anymore, using spears and the like to fight in melee.

Another contributing factor is the games I play. Most of the multi-player games I play are MMORPGs and I hang around on role-play servers. I can't give you any hard numbers, but every guild I've been in for years has been led by a woman and every time I've outed myself as trans, I find at least one other trans woman.

While I'm very aware of online harassment and abuse, when it does happen to me, it still shocks. Especially when it's sexual harassment directed at me because of my gender. So, being subjected to one of the creepiest incidents of harassment I've ever faced within half an hour of venturing out of the Elite: Dangerous tutorial left me rather rattled.

This is going to need some game mechanic explanation for context. In Elite, you traverse long distances within a star system (from one planet to another, for example) by engaging supercruise. This has you bombing along at faster-than-light speeds, but not as fast as you go jumping between systems. Supercruise is about figuring out where you're going, pointing your ship at it, then managing acceleration and deceleration so you get there as quickly as possible without overshooting your target. Doing the spaceship equivalent of missing your turn-off and having to find somewhere to turn around wastes resources, leaves you vulnerable and, most importantly, is deeply uncool.

You can see other players zipping about in supercruise, but for the most part, you can't interact with them. The exception is if you stick an upgrade in your ship that allows you to interdict other ships, latching onto them with a tractor beam and dragging them out of supercruise with you. If you succeed, you're free to demand they hand over their goods, or just start shooting. Obviously this is an important part of piracy, bounty hunting and the like.

Cut back to me, space noob, fresh out of training and with one embarrassing death at the hands of a really obvious trap already under my belt. I have fond memories of playing Frontier on my Amiga, so I've a vague notion of what to do, but I'm still struggling to get to grips with the gorgeous and incredibly clever UI. Supercruising along, my craft shudders, alarms go off and I'm told that I'm being interdicted. I vainly attempt to escape, but to no avail and I'm yanked down into sub-light speeds. I prepare to be blown up.

It involved four containers of gold just floating in space. Apparently, I am that gullible.

That's when I notice the messages. The Interdickter speaks.

In my panicked attempt at flight, I missed the direct messages that had popped up in the corner of my screen. Unfamiliar with the UI, remember? “Wow, ur a girl?”

My gender is pretty obvious from my username in-game.

“Do u kno what is happening to you?”

“It's okay, I'm friendly.”

“Just a friendly wrestle.”

At this point, something in my brain screams “RUN THE FUCK AWAY!” so I start powering up my drive to jump back into supercruise and fumble around the chat interface for the block button. Thankfully, chat interfaces are pretty standardised these days. A few moments later, I've jumped away again. I don't stop until I'm safely docked at a friendly station.

Then it hits me how gross the whole situation is. This guy, upon realising that I'm a woman, decides to perform an action that only exists in game to kill or rob people, so that he can have a “friendly” chat. He didn't have to do that. If he'd just wanted to talk to me, he could have just sent me a message. Instead, he decides that he's so entitled to my time and attention that he can pull me out of what I'm doing so that I can't help but concentrate on him.

The difference between you and me is that I remember when this looked good.

I'm sure a lot of people will read this and think “What is she on about?” or “He didn't do anything wrong!” or “She didn't lose her ship, why is she complaining?” or just something derogatory about feminists or SJWs or some bollocks like that. To be completely fair, some people genuinely will not get it, but I can almost guarantee that those people are men.

The behaviour displayed by the Interdickter in Elite, his attitude, his entitlement was exactly the same as that displayed by men who harass women in the street. They don't just call out, they get in your face, they follow you, they persistently ask questions without even waiting for a reply. They violate social contracts, but don't seem to think they're doing anything wrong. I'm not going to go into any more detail, because thousands of words have been written on street harassment by women far smarter than me. Suffice to say, it's creepy, gross and renders women as objects that exist only for male pleasure.

The Interdickter's actions evoked memories of a particular incident that ranks amongst the most terrifying of my life. I was yanked back to that moment, that mindset, without realising what was going on. That's why my panicked flight reflex was so strong. This is why it's so important to crack down on harassment and abuse in online games. It might not be real, but the people involved and their reactions are. We play games for recreation, for relaxation. No-one should be forced to be reminded of unpleasant and traumatic experiences while playing a bloody video game.

The characters are so important to me. They're a kickass lesbian couple and Sera is a trans woman of colour. WITH POWERS! That last bit is vital. Relegating minority characters to the friends of actual heroes sucks. Sorry, Alysia. With Marvel's Secret Wars shenanigans happening this year, the Hevenly ladies have gone through three different books in a short amount of time. Angela, Asgard's Assassin pre-Secret Wars, 1602: Witch Hunter Angela during the event and now Angela, Queen of Hel.

It's this latest title that has a bit of an issue.

Here's Sera as she appeared in Asgard's Assassin.

And here she is in Queen of Hel.

While Sera's ethnicity hasn't been made explicit, and there's always the question of how applicable that would be as she's an alien, she's always been dark skinned. She was dark skinned in Asgard's Assassin, in Witch Hunter and even on Stephanie Hans' cover and substory pages in Queen of Hel. It's not a subtle shift either.

I'm not for a moment suggesting that it's a deliberate action on the part of anyone involved, but it looks bad. Not only because it looks horribly racist, but because it's a huge error that's managed to slip through for two consecutive issues. How does it happen? How does the colourist, Israel Silva, manage to colour two issues without realising his work on Sera looks significantly different to previous artists'? And not just in terms of different styles. How does Marvel editorial let two books go to print like this? If someone had coloured the Hulk bright pink for two issues, would they have been released? Quite honestly, I don't know enough about the production of comic books to answer those questions, but I'm sorely tempted to do some real journalism and find out.

On a separate note, I want to draw attention to something. My copy of Queen of Hel #2 wasn't in reach when I went to check the names of the people involved, so rather than get up, I was lazy and looked it up on Marvel's site. Guess what? The information wasn't there. Look at this screen grab.

Three names. There are sixteen people credited in the book. Admittedly, about half a dozen of them are senior editorial and publishing types, but to not include the colourist, letterer or editor on there is disgraceful. Sort it out, Marvel!

The good news is, that the mistake has been acknowledged and it's going to be corrected in future issues and in the trade.

What are my qualifications for answering this question? Please allow me to present my credentials in the form of this screenshot of my most played games on Steam.

Happy? Good, I shall continue.

Bethesda RPGs, and by that I mean The Elder Scrolls series and the Fallouts from 3 onwards, are incredibly polarising. Either you love what they do and can forgive a lengthy list of flaws, or you hate it and just can't understand why people go ga-ga over those sprawling, boring worlds with crappy writing and shitty combat.

For the most part, they're valid criticisms. They've certainly been getting better in those regards in recent years. Skyrim managed “perfectly serviceable,” especially with a few combat mods and Fallout 4 even hits “actually pretty good” straight out of the box. It's not world-class in either area, but it holds its own.

Thing is, I actually like the combat in Bethesda games. I adore RPGs, but in the vast majority of them I play, I tolerate the combat. I blame Bioware for this. Ever since Baldur's Gate, it's been decided that real-time-with-pause is the One True Way of RPGs. I hate it. I love turn-based games. I love real-time action games. I absolutely despise real-time-with-pause. I've played every Dragon Age game on the easiest difficulty setting just so I can power through that dross as quickly as possible. Remember that Bioware writer who got loads of crap for suggesting that maybe they could make combat optional? I'm totally on her team. Dragon Age is about fantasy lesbian smoochy times and hanging with my GBFF Dorian, not really fucking boring darkspawn murderising.

I'd take shoddy first person action combat over that crap any day. Some bits of combat in these games are actually really good. Shields in Skyrim, for example. I like shields. I mean for realsies. I have Viking steel combat experience and  I'm all about what is known as active shield use. Shoving people around with your shield is ace. Skyrim is one of the few action games that lets me do that. Charging into a group of bandits, stunning one with a shield bash, taking a blow on my shield and then cutting them down with my axe? Great fun. Sure, it's no Dark Souls, but what is? Same goes with sniping in Fallout: New Vegas. The joy of sniping is in the planning and positioning. Most games just don't let you do that, with open world shooters like Far Cry and MGS5 being the rare exceptions.

The other thing that always comes up is the bugs. Yeah, Bethesda release some seriously shonky games. As a fan, I'd love it if they didn't. It's irritating, although I've never had huge issues with any of them. The main reason I tolerate it is simple: this is my favourite kind of game and no-one else is making them. Yeah, I know enough about game development to understand why Fallout 4 is much more glitchy than, say, the latest CoD, but that doesn't matter. They are, excuse the pun, the only game in town.

So why are they my favourite games?

Think of a game as a conversation with the player. In the majority of cases, the game does all the heavy lifting. In a first-person shooter, the player's part in the conversation is simply how the enemies are going to be shot. Even in narrative-focussed RPG, you're just assuming the mantle the game hands you. Dragon Age: Inquisition goes as far as having big open areas, but it's always going to be a game about the Inquisitor and how they handle the plot the game presents them with.

It's possible to play Bethesda games like this. You can play Skyrim strictly as the story of the Dragonborn and passively nod along as the game does all the talking. The beauty of these games is that you don't have to. Once you're out of the opening sequence, you can completely ignore the main plot line and do something else. Want to become a master wizard and spend all your time exploring old ruins in search of mystical artefacts? You can! Want to be a hunter, living off the land and going into town to trade and have a few mugs in the tavern? Go for it. How about stealing everyone's shoes? Weird, but okay. Not only are these options available, but they're supported. If you attempted this in most games, you'd swiftly run out of things to do. Or everything would be locked up because you weren't the right level, or hadn't gotten to the pre-ordained point in the main story. This simply isn't the case in Bethesda games. Pretty much everything you do will improve your skills or give you experience. There are ways to make money and get new gear no matter what path you take. They've gotten even better at this of late, with procedurally generated quests. If you want to just join the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 4 and do Brotherhood of Steel stuff, forever, it's totally viable. The procedural quests are simple in nature, but they're appropriate to the faction and will, eventually, take you all over the world.

What's happening is that the player is a much more active participant in the conversation. Some people don't like that. I have a friend who is a pen 'n' paper role-player and a LARPer and he hates open-world games. For him, videogames are all about being handed an exciting experience. That's totally cool and, fortunately for him, the vast majority of games on the market cater to his tastes. I like to get more involved. I'm quite happy to put my ideas and creativity into the game I'm playing. I like coming up with characters and deciding how they'd act in these worlds Bethesda create.

I've heard the criticism that it's silly a single character in an Elder Scrolls game can become the archmage AND the master thief AND the head of the warrior's guild. The simple answer to this is “ don't do it.” It's the same with quests. If you're playing an honourable knight who despises magic, then don't join the mages guild. Don't take that quest to beat up some rando for money. There's plenty of other things to do and you can always start a new character. It's taking a more active role in that conversation again. I don't need the game to tell me not to do something because it's evil and my character is a shiny good guy, I can put on my big girl pants and make that decision myself.

That still doesn't touch the meat of these games, which is exploration. Exploration is often overlooked as an important gameplay element, because it doesn't involve a clear mechanical challenge. Many players perceive games almost entirely in terms of obstacles to be overcome. The focus is on what you're fighting, not where you're fighting them. Much of the time, it doesn't matter anyway. Even open-world games miss out on how satisfying and involving the thrill of discovery is. It's why franchises like Far Cry and Assassin's Creed can be become tedious. The process of revealing a bunch of new icons by climbing to the top of a tall building removes the joy of just roaming around and seeing the sights. Even when those icons have been revealed, you know they're just going to contain one of several mission types. There's nothing new.

When you play Skyrim or Fallout 4, you know that every icon on your map is going to be something new. Even if it's a familiar tile set with enemies you've seen before, Bethesda take great pains in making every “dungeon” unique. There's always a story to piece together from the environment, from notes on corpses, journal entries and terminals. Some are funny, some are sad, some are downright creepy, but you never know what you're going to encounter.

All of this is possible with just the base game. The icing on the cake is all the extra goodness coming from the mod community. It's just over a fortnight since Fallout 4 was released, the creation kit isn't even out yet, and there are already over 2000 files on popular mod hub Nexus Mods. The Skyrim page has over 42000. That's a staggering amount of extra content. The range is huge, from tiny tweaks to huge chunks of fully-voiced new content.

The real joy here is in taking an already personal experience and adjusting it even further. No matter what you like doing in Bethesda's games, you'll be able to find mods to enhance the experience. New weapons and armour ranging from historical pieces to anime monstrosities are de rigueur. Combat tweaks, magic expansions, gear customisation and nude mods. Oh so many, many nude mods. Skyrim even has a cold weather mod that allows you to turn it into a fully-featured survival sim. It becomes another conversation, but this time between the community and the developers. With each new game, you can see how Bethesda add or expand features that are popularly modded into their previous game. I'm excited to see how modders expand on the improvements in Fallout 4.

By now, you're probably either nodding furiously in agreement or bored to tears. That makes this piece a pretty good summary of these games, if I do say so myself. There are few things I enjoy reading more than someone simply writing about something they're passionate about. I'm passionate about Bethesda RPGs, I hope you've enjoyed reading about them.

Heathen is a book I'd recommend to anyone. Creator Natasha Alterici has produced a gorgeous work that is smart, funny, and effortlessly manages to be simultaneously classic and familiar, and modern and relevant. It's clear from the first page that this isn't going to be a historically accurate tale; Viking women did not wear little leather bikinis, yet it also swiftly establishes an authenticity in its tone. Anyone with an ounce of historical knowledge of the period will recognise that costume, dates, the precise roles of various gods don't add up (although there is a magnificent crack at horned helmets) but it's also readily apparent that Alterici knows this and doesn't care. This is camp fire mythologising. The details don't matter, the truth of the tale does.

On the surface, it's a story we've all heard before. Young warrior is cast out from the safety of her home to find her way in the world. The difference is that she is, well, a she and a lesbian at that. We've heard stories open this way a thousand times, but they're usually about men. Occasionally, they're about women. Very, very occasionally they're about gay women, but that is strictly confined to subtext because we can't actually acknowledge the existence of lesbians in mainstream media. Yeah, Xena, I'm looking at you. Still looking. Staring, perhaps. Ahem.

Where was I? Ahh, yes.

This right here is why representation is important. These stories of heroes going on epic quests are classics for a reason, yet seeing them countless times without featuring people like you is disheartening. It's another example of how the further you get away from the cishet white male default, the more you're expected to survive on scraps. “Here,” they say “these stories are universal, so they've got to be about straight dudes. You can have another exploitative tragedy where the precious queer girls die.”

Fuck that. Seriously, fuck that with a dane axe.

I don't want a doomed romance where myself, my partner or even both of us die at the end. I want to fight and hunt and rescue valkyries and make out with hot goddesses. I want to do all the stuff that we see straight boys doing in fiction all the time. Seeing Heathen's heroine get to do all that makes me whoop with joy, because if she can do it, I can do it too.

If that's important to me as a reasonably rational adult who is fully clued-up on structural misogyny and all that jazz, think how much more vital it is for young women and girls who don't have that knowledge. I can call society on its bullshit. I can surround myself with like-minded folks. I can seek out art that speaks to me. Others don't necessarily have the tools to do that. They need to see women like them being awesome. A while back, I tweeted that it felt like Heathen was written just for me. Natasha replied that it was. It's true. Heathen is for all the Lesbian Viking Warriors.

The first three issues of Heathen can be purchased from Comixology.

12hrs holds the honour of being one of only two games I've had to stop playing because they were too good. The other one was Papers, Please, which I also highly recommend. It may seem counter-intuitive to stop playing a good game, but when a game is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable because of difficult subject matter, I reckon it means it's doing a damn fine job.

For the naughty children in the class who didn't play it before reading, 12hrs is about trying to survive a night as a homeless woman. It's a free-form Twine game that has you wandering the city streets, attempting to make it to the morning in one piece. One of the options available to you is begging for change so that you can indulge in extravagant luxuries like awful, greasy burgers and cheap coffee.

Beg for money, get money, buy stuff. Sounds simple, right? Replace “beg” with “slaughter goblins” and it could be any old game, right? Nah, 12hrs is much cleverer than that. 12hrs doesn't really deal in money, it deals in change. There is no single total of how much cash you've accumulated. Instead, you're looking at quarters, nickels, dimes and pennies. In order to figure out how much you've actually got, you've got to add it up yourself. You, the player, has got to do actual maths. Once you think you've got enough for whatever it is you want to buy, you have to do it all over again, carefully counting out the individual coins before handing them over and hoping that you've got it right.

To some, this may seem like an unnecessary complication, but that'd be ignoring a fundamental aspect of game design, which is that what the game makes the player do is just as important as what the game does itself. When you play a Mario platformer, you're not just pressing a button to make Mario jump. You're absorbing the audiovisual feedback from the game, using your prior knowledge of how far, how fast, how high Mario jumps, calculating whether or not the jump is possible and then deciding on the precise time to press the button and make him jump.

Of course, you're not consciously thinking about all that, any more than you consciously think about the individual movements you make when you walk, so most people just think of it as playing the game. A slightly more explicit, but still often overlooked, example would be the environmental awareness required of the player in Dark Souls. There is no automatic detection of traps or ambushes in Dark Souls. You can't just toggle “detect traps” on and wait for a section of floor to be highlighted. Yet every single trap and ambush in Dark Souls is avoidable, or least able to be prepared for. It just shifts the burden of responsibility from the character to the player. You have to look carefully at your surroundings. You have to move more slowly so you have time to take it all in. You have to make the decision to forgo a shield in favour of a torch. It's not always employed successfully, but done well, it's an elegant technique for drawing the player into the experience. The beauty of forcing the player to take a more active role in the game is that it makes for a more varied, personal experience. I came to 12hrs from a privileged position. It's written in my native language, I'm good at maths and the setting has a similar culture to my own. However, I still struggled somewhat with the unfamiliar denominations. I only know what nickels and dimes are from consuming American media. The value of a quarter can be inferred, but there is no direct equivalent in British currency, as we have twenty pence coins instead of twenty five cent ones. It was easy to adjust to, but I still had to think about what I was doing. But what if 12hrs was set in a different country? What if the denominations were completely unfamiliar to me? What if they language people were speaking and their cultural rules were alien to me? What if I hadn't been fortunate enough to have received the education in mathematics that I have? I would have struggled. As homeless people for whom those things are a reality have to struggle.

This is always difficult, simply because people have different tolerances for different things. As a trans woman, I might find something totally inappropriate and disgusting and harmful, while another trans woman might be fine with it. Confusingly, both of our opinions could be equally valid. I say “could be” because I feel there is a big difference between saying something is offensive and being able to articulate why it’s harmful. I talk about this a bit more here.

Reviews make it even harder, because you’re trying to give a concise overview, while avoiding spoilers. Heck, I agonised over a brief mention of something that happens during the opening sequence. My rule of thumb is that if I think something needs calling out specifically, I’ll do it because nasty surprises are bad. Otherwise, I’ll give it a passing mention. If it’s particularly praiseworthy, but spoilery, I’ll vaguely reference it. It’ll never be perfect. Someone has already taken issue with my review because they thought I was making light of ableism. In actuality, I only mentioned it briefly because the only thing that jumped out at me was the continued use of “psycho” as an enemy type and the name of one of the chems. To me, that fell into the “passing mention” category. Others may disagree. That’s fine.

I just read Batgirl #45 and, I'm sure this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but it left me cold. As a trans lesbian, I find nothing about Alysia to be even the slightest bit relatable. She's this cute, petite, perfectly passing idealised version of a trans woman. That's not me. That's not ever going to be me. That's not something anything other than a tiny minority of trans women could ever hope to aspire to. 

And some of it is certainly down to the foibles of the medium. I wouldn't have a clue how I'd want an artist to draw a trans woman so she was both relatable and not a caricatured stereotype. It's great that she's there and trans characters don't need a big flashing arrow pointing to their heads labelled "TRANS PERSON," but is it really representation when anyone picking up the book without prior knowledge of Alysia being trans will have no idea that she isn't cis? 

Contrast this with Sera in the Angela books, or Braga from Rat Queens, both of whom have back stories that are BIG OBVIOUS TRANS METAPHORS without either of them becoming nasty, exploitative stereotypes. Additionally, they're both kickass hero types, which I know was part of Gail Simone's plan for Alysia, but it makes a huge difference. Braga and Sera are characters I can point to in the sort of comic I like reading and say "Look, there are women like me here!" Though Braga is a little too into dudes for my tastes, but no-one's perfect. 

You can't move quickly in Expand. Your pink box navigates the mostly monochrome maze at the brisk, yet unhurried pace of someone who knows where they're going and will get their in their own damn time. It lends a peculiar sense of inevitability to your failures, as you have plenty of time to see them coming. There's rarely an opportunity to adjust course and evade the moving bit of wall that's about to squash you. You just have to figure out what you did wrong and try again.

And you will try again, because Expand is utterly compulsive. You move through screen after screen of whirling circular pathways, avoiding the insta-death touch of the red bits (Note to self: write “Is Expand about dangers of communism?” thinkpiece) and being squished by moving black bits. That's it. There are no surprises, no Frog Fractions-esque genre-bending. Expand is simple, yes, but beautiful and elegant in that simplicity. Static screenshots can't do it justice, so take a minute to watch the launch trailer.

Expand is also rather fiendish. The challenge of the labyrinth gradually ramps up, the sweeping, interlocking passages constantly teasing you and keeping you on your toes. There's a sense of purpose in how the labyrinth moves, albeit one that is totally abstract and inscrutable. It's like being trapped inside the mind of  an alien god. The labyrinth never feels malevolent, just indifferent.

Even in it's trickier moments, it's a consistently chilled-out, meditative experience. Expand totally occupies parts of your brain with its twisting corridors, while leaving the higher parts to drift free. It's reminiscent of the instinctual, reactive trance you can fall into while playing a good shmup, but without the need for the reflexes of a caffeine-addled teenager. Chris Larkin's wonderful score is a huge contributor to this and I strongly urge you to heed the game's directions and play with good-quality headphones. The music lifts an already lovely game to new heights and adds a surprising amount of emotion to a game about moving a square through a maze. The final sections of the game are particularly notable as feeling more climactic than any heavily-scripted, fully voice acted AAA console game you care to mention.