I always make new year resolutions. I think it gives me focus, a target to work towards. I know I am not an individual possessed of huge amounts of willpower, and thus I try and set myself these targets to guide me.

Unfortunately, it is now June and I have broken one of my two big resolutions — and am likely to have broken the second by the end of July.

1) Complete a piece of artwork every month.

I did so well with this last year, I assumed I could keep it up. Sadly April was an icky month. I got a lot of teaching work, and I got a fair chunk of writing done, but I just couldn’t get inspired to paint.

I think I went through 3 actual paintings, none of which I finished, none of which I even really liked. I hope to get back into it with June’s painting, but I’ve left it a bit late and I’ve only just started.

2) Complete draft 1 of Chains of Time by the end of July

This is a self-imposed deadline, but its a deadline none the less. 150,000 words, roughly, in seven months shouldn’t have been that hard, but again I’ve got a lot of teaching days under my belt this year so I’m only really 55,000 words into this.

90,000 words in 5 weeks seems…unlikely…especially as the teaching will continue.

Summer holiday is coming up, but who knows how well I’ll be able to concentrate in the heat. Its already playing havoc with me.

When it boils down to it, I have no real excuse for breaking these two resolutions. I know work — actual paying work — has kept me busy, but I know authors and painters who manage to juggle both. I guess I blame my weakness for computer games. Again.

Anyway, I am aware of my faults in this, as in many other aspects of my life, so i will perservere in getting both of these back up to speed over the coming months. Hopefully I’ll have at least 12 paintings and a completed first draft by the end of the year…

*crosses fingers*

The Black and Whites

Here we have the B&W artworks from April, May and June. Colour version for June is in progress. April and May were started but abandoned. Will get back to them. Hopefully.

April – Demajen : Final Fantasy XIV version of my FFXI character, Demajen.

May – Rowan : Actually drawn in January, this is a style reference/concept for Rowan in Chains of Time

June – Lovers : two efreeti from Chains of War

While Easter weekend itself has come and gone, it’s still smack bang in the middle of the school Easter holidays, so I have at least another week of dossing about, trying to get some writing done, playing games, and salivating over the latest Final Fantasy XIV alpha details to be leaked by a community whose idea of a Non-Disclosure Agreement is “It only matters if we get caught.”

So let’s break this down into logical chunks in advance, so I don’t end up rambling and confused halfway through!

Writing

Chopping and changing. Thats how I’d sum up novel progress currently. Part 1 of Chains of Memory is still a mess, in my opinion. I’m trying to cut out as much world-building exposition as I can without confusing the reader, and it Just. Isn’t. Working.™ So I’ve decided to take a lot of the flashback material from chapters 1 through 5 and turn it into a proper Prologue. It won’t have QUITE the immediacy of my main character sneaking into a cave full of yetis and almost getting his ass kicked, but there’s another kind of urgency in the Prologue that I can play on. Plus, once we get to the actiony stuff, then it really can ramp up constantly without these odd little world-building flashbacks breaking the pace.

Dunno why I didn’t think of this before, actually. Or maybe I did and somebody said PROLOGUE? NO! HATE! Or something. *shrug*

This means I’m up to Draft Six. And to keep everything vaguely organised, I’ve actually started writing new bits in separate documents to go back and slot in later. It keeps synching my netbook and pc a lot simpler too, for when I decide to do a bit of writing on my lunchbreak at work.

Also, Chains of Time and Chains of War are progressing steadily as well, the third book especially now I have the skeletal plot laid out. Pieces begin to fall into place, which is an excellent feeling as a writer and creator.

Art

I must admit, I haven’t even started April’s art yet. I have some ideas about what I’d like to do, but my free time has mostly been wasted so far on the two topics below. Hopefully I’ll be able to get something down on paper this coming week, as then its back to work and that always scuppers any artistic endeavours.

Games

I have been playing a fair few games over the last couple of weeks. After I finished God of War III on Normal difficulty, I ordered the God of War Collection on the PS3, and have been steadily making my way through God of War II. I played the first one a bit too, but in comparison to GoWII ’tis a clunky beast. Still great games though, and it is particularly impressive to see them running in HD with updated textures.

I also finally got my hands on a copy of BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger and discovered just why I couldn’t ever find one in shops — it didn’t get an EU release till this last week. Duh! For those of you who don’t know, BB is a 2D fighting game vaguely reminiscent of the Street Fighter series, but based much more in the crazy Japanese world of Guilty Gear – no surprise as its made by the same people.

I’ve played the Guilty Gear games before, and I like them for 2 reasons. 1) The character designs are outlandish, crazy, and their individual fighting styles are always impressive. 2) The music. Guilty Gear games have always had outstanding J-Rock soundtracks. Calamity Trigger, as a kind of spiritual successor, does not disappoint in either of these areas.

Although GOD KNOWS what the plot is about….

Final Fantasy XIV

And finally, the FFXIValpha began yesterday, and a huge wad of new media has surface on the web via people ignoring the NDA entirely. Sadly I have not yet got into Alpha or Beta testing (Give me the alpha/beta key, Square! … please?) so I had to make do with this leaked information and what I could glean from it. My anticipation for the game was already quite high, but having seen poorly-streamed or recorded video of it in action, I’d very much like to get a go and do some testing of my own.

Now I’ve seen what it looks like, I’m very happy with the quality. Now I’ve heard some of the music, I’m happy that that is going to be awesome too. Now I want to get hands on experience, see what works, what doesn’t work, use knowledge and experience garnered from alpha/betas of previously released MMOs to truly turn FFXIV into a game that could finally sever the ties I have to its online predecessor, as well as drag me away from that thrice-bedamned World of Warcraft.

Guess I’ll just have to wait until Square-Enix feels fit to provide me with access to the testing client. Patience is a virtue, after all.

Of course, this assumes I’m very virtuous…..

19th March 2010 was one of those dates for which I purchased a Playstation 3. In my lowly opinion, consoles are best suited to certain types of game, and the God of War-style action game is one of those ‘genres’. Having played God of War and God of War 2 on the PS2, I was very excited for the finale to the Kratos Trilogy. However, I tried to go in with an open mind and a healthy degree of scepticism. After all, I knew what would happen if I got my hopes up…

Unfortunately, it seems that even with lowered expectations, God of War 3 could not fully live up to the standards I would have it set.

Length and Replayability

Now, this is certainly not to say that GoW3 is a bad game. It isn’t. But neither is it (currently) particularly good value for money. I completed the game in about 9 ½ hours.  Add to that an extra hour of going back to previous saves to collect stuff for trophies, and a couple of hours to do the challenge mode, and you can round it up to about a 15-hour long experience. For £40.

If you remember my previous Value4Money model — take the price of a game, halve it, convert the figure into hours — you’ll see that GoW3 comes up at least 5 or so hours short of being a V4M experience. In fact, the only reason it will end up being V4M is because I’ve completed all but one of the trophies — and that last trophy requires me to finish the game on the Titan difficulty. Even so, this is an artificial lengthening of the experience, so I only barely count it, no matter how much fun the game is.

In terms of replayability, GoW3 is a fairly mixed bag. Going through the game you can find Godly Possessions, which can be used in a new playthrough to unlock special powers such as collecting 10x red orbs or shaving a third off the damage you take. These would be cool if you could then blast through the hard difficulties as a reward for seeking these things out, but sadly you can only use them on a difficulty setting you’ve already played through, and activating even one of them locks you out of collecting trophies for the entirety of that playthrough.

Nor is there a New Game + option where you can carry over maxed out weapons or the like.

In short, pretty disappointing.

Gameplay

God of War 3 is still fun. Very bloody, very slick, with just the right mix of puzzle solving and visceral combat. Weapon switching on the fly is a nice improvement, as is tying magic to a particular weapon, but I often found the controls a bit poorly laid out at times. Maybe it is just the way I hold the controller, but trying to parry attacks and then launch into a Triangle + L2 blast from Helios’ Head was tricky to pull off.

Also, Kratos once and for all proves that white men (covered in ash) cannot jump. I died maybe 30 times in my playthrough on Normal mode, and at least half of those deaths were to do with the atrocious jumping mechanic. Its so bad that I wonder why they even had a normal jump move in there at all. There isn’t a single gap in the game that you can hop over with a normal jump. Even the tiniest of distances require you to double tap X for the gliding jump, otherwise you’ll fall to your doom for another instant death Restart from Last Checkpoint screen.

The way Items have their own separate meter to use up (which recharges fast) is a welcome addition to the game: it meant I could quite happily spam fiery arrows from Apollo’s Bow when I wanted to, or blind enemies with Helios’ Head. I can’t say I got as much use out of Hermes’ Sandals as I’d like, though I did use the air dodge a fair bit in the challenge mode to lure charging minotaurs off the edge of the arena platform…

In short, God of War 3 plays just like you would expect, albeit for a shorter experience than my previously-reviewed Dante’s Inferno.

Presentation and Sound

God of War 3 is a very pretty game. It runs at 720p with nary a hint of slowdown. The lighting effects are top notch, and there’s little in the way of blockiness or sheared polygons. The use of colour is injected nicely into aspects of the game — I particularly like the purple glow of Hades’ Claws — and the texture work is incredibly good. I still prefer Final Fantasy XIII, however, for sheer graphical power. The only place GoW3 has that beat is, in my opinion, the opening section of the game where you ride on the back of the titan, Gaia, as she scales Mount Olympus. The sense of scale and sheer massiveness of the locale, rendered in real time, is ludicrously impressive, and something that FFXIII hasn’t beaten.

The sound in GoW3 is impressive enough. The voice-acting is solid, though nothing special. I have to admit I found the music barely noticable until I hit the end credits and was able to sit back and actually enjoy it. Then I was really impressed with the pieces played. I don’t yet have a copy of the OST that came with the Ultimate Edition of the game, but once I manage to get my hands on one, I may add an addendum to this Thoughts post. For the most part I can say that the sound design did exactly what it needed to in order to accompany the action.

Trophy-Whoring

Okay, so I’ve already mentioned that without Trophies this game would have a very short lifespan indeed. I found most of the trophies really easy to get on my first playthrough, but I’m the kind of player who explores those hidden nooks and crannies, scans every surface for secrets, and likes to upgrade his arsenal as early and quickly as possible. I got all the Gorgon Eyes, Minotaur Horns and Phoenix Feathers well before the final section of the game. I also maxed out all my weapons and had about 10,000 red orbs spare. I also managed (possibly through sheer luck) to find all the Godly Possessions on my first playthrough. In some ways I’m quite disappointed I didn’t have to use a guide and a second playthrough to find all this stuff. In this area, Dante’s Inferno actually has GoW3 beaten hands down — especially as DI has a New Game + mode.

There were literally about 5 or 6 trophies that I didn’t have from just a normal playthrough: Set 100 enemies on fire, Blind 100 enemies, Complete the Labyrinth without dying, Complete Challenge Mode, Complete the game on Titan difficulty. That was it. The first three took me about half an hour total to get, thanks to having a save point near the infinitely respawning hellhounds bit, and another save at the start of the Labyrinth. Challenge mode was not so much challenging as just pissy and frustrating thanks to the — at times — dodgy controls. So I’m now left with the Titan Mode ‘challenge’ to round out the experience and get my Platinum. I’m sure I’ll get it done, but there are a couple of pissy fights in the game that, to be honest, I’m not sure I can even be bothered with. The side-scroller one with Zeus near the end springs to mind.

Even so, for anybody not as thorough or naturally inclined to seek out secrets as I am, the trophies should easily all be unlocked on a couple of plays through.

Final Thoughts

Pretty much every gaming site that’s reviewed GoW3 has given it a score greater than they’ve given FFXIII, and to be honest I simply don’t think that is the case. FFXIII is just as pretty, much longer, has a better soundtrack and a better-woven story. Hell, even its battle system is almost as good and fast-paced as GoW3‘s.

This isn’t to say GoW3 is a disappointment, though. Far from it. It was a good, solid game with a really exceptional sense of scale that, sadly, is let down by some pretty dodgy storytelling, some unecessarily frustrating controls, and an overall sense that its just not very long.

It has, however, inspired me to pick up the God of War Collection, which has 1 & 2 in the series re-rendered at high def to play through. At that point, I’ll write a comparison between the PS2 originals and the PS3 successor, and I’m fairly certain God of War 2 will come out on top. We shall see.

The Verdict

So in the end, I’m going to have to give God of War 3 an 8/10. Its fun, but its no more fun than Dante’s Inferno is.

Let me make one thing apparent from the start: Final Fantasy XIII rocked my socks in many good ways. But I have not yet ‘finished’ it. While I have completed the main storyline, a whole host of post-credits play options are enabled in FF13 that will take many more hours to complete. I shall mostly be keeping this thoughts post free of spoilers.

Here’s how I play a typical FF game. I go through the initial motions, exploring the areas the game tells me to go to for the story, perhaps getting sidetracked by side missions, until at some point the game gives you an airship or something that lets you travel around the world map more freely. At this point, I forget the story for a bit and go all out power levelly, farming in huge amounts of XP, or farming AP for weapons, or mastering the Junction system, or working my way around the Sphere Grid, or unlocking everything on the License Board or…well, you get the picture. The reason I did this for FF12 was truly because you had to. The game kept jumping unevenly in difficulty throughout, and this in fact contributed to the main drawback of my of these games. It gets to the point where I massively overlevelled the content and, unless the game had secret bosses to complete, I mostly ended up hitting the end boss with a fully powered up party, and whupping their ass into oblivion. While the end sequences in any FF game are almost always epic, this trivialisation of the final fight often dampens the worth of the achievement.

Enter FF13, who — as I’m sure you may have read — is an entirely linear beast until a good chunk of the way through the game. This features is being criticised left, right, and centre. Here are some of the more common criticism of the game, in fact:–

1) It’s too linear. The maps are all just corridors you run down and fight enemies.

2) You only get to control one party member. The other two fight on their own AI.

3) You can’t change your party leader until much later in the game.

4) You can’t assemble your own party until much later in the game.

5) The battle system doesn’t have depth.

6) The game just doesn’t look as good as other modern titles.

I’ll stop there. Let me address some of these points.

Yes, the game is linear. I won’t lie here. Up until the 29 hour mark I spent almost the entire game running down very very pretty corridors, watching a story unfold, swapping between the points of view of various characters, seeing everything come together, learning the intricacies of the Paradigm system, and expanding my abilities along the Crystarium, 13‘s version of the Sphere Grid.

Character progression is blocked by certain story points, to prevent completely overlevelling content and blasting through the later stages of the game with no challenge. In my mind, this is a good thing, but FF traditionalists will undoubtedly say this makes it not worthy of the FF name.

All shopping is done at save stations. There are no shops to visit, no real towns to explore. Again, people have criticised this and said ‘It’s not real FF if it doesn’t have a gazillion sidequests in these stupid little hidden towns everywhere’. Most of these people haven’t reached Chapter 11 where the Ci’eth Marks (similar to FF12′s mark hunting) comes into play, the world opens up drastically, and you get much more freedom before you get funnelled into the final areas of the game.

I’ve read of people complaining about linearity and giving up 5 hours into the game. Five hours into FF8, which I shall use as an example simply because I got it on the PSP the other day and played a bit of it before FF13 was released, and I’m still in the starting section of the game. I’m doing my first SeeD mission, in Dollet. I’ve just fought Elvoret at the top of the tower and had silly conversation with Biggs and Wedge. There’s almost nothing you can do in the game 5 hours in, so to give up on a FF game after such a short time is daft.

Sure, fifteen, even twenty hours in, you could justify this position, but hopefully you’ll have been swept away in the story by this point.

And what a story it is. I can honestly say that it has one of the better FF storylines. The world has a lovely deep mythology, and because I spent so much time being forced to experience everything from different characters’ points of view, I had a better understanding of the world, and cared a great deal more for its characters. Sure I spent the last twenty hours of the storyline with my main trio of Lightning, Fang and Hope, but I had a lot of fun with Sazh and Vanille too. Snow’s a dick. A well-intentioned dick, but still a dick. Sorry Snow fans.

Most of the points in the above list are addressed by about halfway through the storyline. About twenty to twenty five hours in I could change and make up my party however I want, in preference to my playstyle. I could also experiment with the Paradigm system to make plenty of combinations of classes to switch to on the fly. FF13‘s battle system does not lack depth. It requires forethought, planning, and a fair chunk of strategy. I admit, it can get a little repetetive, and a good couple of the major boss fights stretch on for a little too long, but then I remember spending 30 minutes fighting Sephiroth because he kept repeating his Limit Break move thing and the animation too 4 minutes to play out. Or I had quad-Knights of the Round, which you couldn’t skip the animation for either.

One criticism I will make of FF13 is the Eidolons. Each character has its own specific ‘summon’, and these are woefully underused in the game. I think I actually summoned Odin three times in the entire game. This isn’t going to stop me changing my party leader in post-credits play to see what all the others are like in action, though, as while they may not be as useful as Rydia’s summons in FF4, they’re damned impressive Transformer-like things. Also, one of the later CGI cutscenes in the game features all the characters and their Eidolons and its simply gorgeous. I actually made sure I had a unique save point for that, as I will be going back to watch that one again and again.

And on the subject of graphics. I read not half an hour ago a review saying that FF13 simply cannot compare to other current next gen titles. I have two words for that. Bull and shit. Uncharted 2 is an absolutely gorgeous game, of this I have no doubt. God of War 3‘s demo from 6+ months ago was also visually stunning, so I look forwards to seeing what it is like when it is released end of next week. But FF13 is right up there with them. There’s not a trace of slowdown in FF13, even when everybody is tossing off Thundaga and Firaga spells in the centre of a mass melee. In fact, the spell effects are utterly spectacular in FF13. Brilliant purple lightning crackles across your weapons after casting Enthunder. Loose shards of ice slide across the floor and melt after Hope unleashes a Blizzaga spell. Bodies disintagrate into black specs after devastating the area with a Firaga explosion. I found myself thinking several times that if FFXIV had these kind of spell graphics, then I would be an extremely happy MMOer. Of course, reality would dictate that this is unlikely to be possible in an MMO, but I can dream.

So now what? Well, I’m looking at the Trophies list for FF13, and it seems I have a long way to go before unlocking that Platinum. I’m not even sure I will. I estimate it’s going to take somewhere in the region of 40+ hours of post-storyline play to complete all the missions, unlock all the upgraded weapons and accessories, visit all the unexplored areas, figure out how to ride chocobos, and master all the characters. One of the silver trophies requires that you max out all six classes for all six characters. That’s somewhere in the region of 20+ million CP I need to get. And then I’ll almost certainly have to check out a guide for the weapons and accessory upgrading…

I have a fairly simple system for assessing whether a game is value for money. I take the price of a game in pounds, then halve it, and that is the number of hours I find just about acceptable for it to play out. Mass Effect 2 was excellent value for money. I paid £40. I’ve got (so far) 60 hours of gameplay out of it. Dante’s Inferno I paid £45 for and got 20 hours out of, so not so good. Final Fantasy XIII I paid £60 for the collector’s edition of (and I really need to find somewhere to stick my l’Cie decals) and have got 46 hours worth of gameplay out of so far. Was it worth it?

Hell yes.

I am a long time fan of the Final Fantasy series of videogames. I, like so many others, was introduced to the franchise through Squaresoft’s seminal Final Fantasy VII in 199…7? Ish. I think. However, I didn’t finish it until probably 4 years later. I thought it was too cliché, and the already rampant fanboyism about the game’s main villain was very offputting. In fact, the game that really dragged me into the series was Final Fantasy VIII which, in 1999 when I was just starting out at Lancaster University, was the game I spent many late nights playing to combat my initial shock at a complete change of location.

I can also credit FF8 as being the game that first inspired me to write. Sure, its storyline makes about as much sense as the guy who goes into a board meeting and introduces the Chocolate Teapot Deluxe as this century’s next big innovation. But the setting, style, and unique magic system hooked me, and after some research, I soon found my way into the various other worlds that the Final Fantasy games have invented. Some of them I’ve only played once. 1 and 2, for example, are now so old-fashioned and out-dated that even I struggle to revisit them. Others, like FF4 and FF6 are, in my opinion, triumphs of storytelling and game design, and I’ve played through each thrice (counting the Nintendo DS remake of FF4 in that tally).

To date, then, I have played every single numbered Final Fantasy title. (The ‘numbered’ is important, as there are several spinoff games and series I have never played, nor ever intend to. Sorry Crystal Bearers…you held much promise but your reviews were frankly terrible.)

But while I have indeed played them all, I am ashamed to admit that I cannot claim to have completed them all. In truth, this isn’t actually as bad as it sounds. I’m only missing a checkmark against one game: Final Fantasy XII.

Now, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with FF12. The soundtrack is awesome. The CGI is as impressive as ever. And the characters of Fran and Balthier are inspired pieces of character design. I really like the battle/gambits system, too, and the open-endedness of the License Board system. But, try as I might, I simply can’t get into it. The story itself just doesn’t inspire me at all, which is strange, as it isn’t actually that bad of a story either. It certainly isn’t any worse that FF7‘s.

With FF13 out this Tuesday, I decided today that I really should finish FF12, so I dug out the PS2 and — after borrowing my brother’s PS2 controller as mine seems to have gone walkies — cranked up the game. Immediately I found myself humming away to the music I know so well after listening to the soundtrack god knows how many time. But, after not having played for 6 months or whatever it has been since the last time I tried to finish it, I once again found myself at that “Now, what the hell was I supposed to be doing…” stage of the game.

It took me a good 10 minutes of running round, looking through menus, talking to NPCs, trying desperately to recall what I was up to, before I pulled up the world map with SELECT and discovered the helpful hint at the bottom of the screen reminding me what to do. D’oh.

So anyways, I got myself to the right location, even pulled out the official strategy guide I bought last time to try and at least finish it… and promptly played for maybe 45 minutes before my attention waned and I got bored, saved, and turned the console off.

This got me thinking. I have, of course, kept myself abreast of the incoming reviews for FF13, and one of the big beefs people seem to have is linearity in the game’s opening 30 hours of gameplay. Now, I’m 37 hours into FF12 according to the save screen, and I can’t help but wonder if I would have been more engaged, or less, if the opening 30 hours of FF12 had been more linear.

It has been said that Square-Enix have tried to make the opening sections of FF13 into an engaging, cinematic experience, like playing a movie, relating to characters, et cetera. It has also been said that ff13′s plot isn’t all that good, but I realised a long time ago that what the general public’s opinion of good storytelling in games is, and what mine is, are often completely different. (Though, as an addendum, I like to think I know a bit about good storytelling in general.)

Is linearity necessarily a bad thing these days? Mass Effect 2 is critically acclaimed, but its linearity is only thinly veiled. Games like Bioshock 2 and Dante’s Inferno are by their nature linear beasts. So why is FF13 being so heavily criticised for its opening being linear? I read one forum post today saying that a kid had played 16 hours into the game and given up because it is too linear. 16 hours. How did he not figure out he didn’t like it sooner? Did he not read the very internet site he had posted on about how the game opens up into more of the free world we are used to about 30 hours in?

Are people looking back at previous games with rose-tinted spectacles? It took an incredibly long time in most of the previous Final Fantasy games for the player to have free reign over where they went and how they got there. Hell, it wasn’t until the fourth of four discs in FF8 that players finally gained the ability to freely explore every nook and cranny of the world map. Maybe the linearity of those games was better hidden with sidequests, I don’t know. Nor do I know exactly how much FF13 has thrown out of the window either, so take everything I currently say with a grain of salt. Maybe by this time next week, I will have a very different blog written.

But back to my confession. I really really want to finish FF12. Not because I care about its plot or characters anymore, but simply so I can return to saying I’ve completed every numbered Final Fantasy game. I find this quite sad.

The reimagining of Battlestar Galactica by Ronald D. Moore is one of my favourite science fiction shows, mostly due to how unscience-fictiony it is. The tie-ins to Greek mythology, prophecy, and how low-tech the setting is really attracted me, and the long story archs really gave me opportunity to invest in the characters and narrative, leading to some moments in the final season where I was literally shocked at events that took place. I don’t get to experience many “I can’t believe they just did that…” moments in today’s television, so BSG really upped the ante in that respect.

Of course, with BSG running a set four seasons, and its commercial and critical success, a spinoff on networked television was perhaps inevitable. I try really hard to have nothing against spinoffs. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is, for me, a fine example of how spinoffs should not be stereotyped — although I must admit that movie/videogame spinoffs quite often have a lot to answer for.

Caprica is set 58 years before the events of BSG, and I was initially very sceptical of the show. The pilot episode is an hour and a half long and I must admit, the slow buildup is both a blessing and a curse. You see, my longest lingering memories of the end of BSG involve a lot of fast-paced, climactic events, with characters I’ve grown attached to. To go back into the same universe and have to begin to attach to new characters is quite difficult, it seems, and it took a good 45 minutes before I was getting into the narrative.

Mind you, it didn’t seem like 45 minutes — I thought I was maybe half an hour in — so this may actually work in the story’s favour.

I’m not going to go into story details or anything like that. Tonally the story is dark, gritty, and full of excess — continuing the parallels Moore creates between the cultures of Caprica and our contemporary society. The actors do a really good job in portraying a wide variety of emotions, from passion, to lust, to desire, to secrecy, and I hope that they are given the opportunities to really allow their roles to flourish.

There was only really one thing that niggled me about the pilot episode: I had to google the female ‘school-kid’ actresses to make sure they weren’t really as young as they were made up to be. The almost overt sexualisation of actual school-going teenagers would have felt a bit icky. Fortunately, they’re all 18+. Plus I guess that’s what they were going for here: reminding us that, today, school students really are young adults, breaking rules, exploring boundaries; sometimes even having the courtesy to do it behind our backs.

So I shall continue to watch Caprica. Hopefully it will provoke as much critical thought from me as BSG did a couple of years ago.

Okay, so I don’t normally do portraits. Not in the traditional sense, anyways. But it’s my friend Eli’s birthday on the 7th March, and I’ve been promising her I’d do a painting of her for moooooonths now. So I finally got round to doing it.

Of course, me being me, I wanted it to be a bit of a surprise. So I didn’t tell her I was doing it, nor did I ask her for any extra reference. Which means I had to make do with the somewhat small and badly compressed JPEGs that Facebook uses. Fortunately she’s incredibly photogenic, so there were plenty of nice photos to choose from. I ended up going with one of the original photos I ever saw of her, simply because in my head, that’s what she’s like.

And I didn’t change much at all. I coloured up her hair ever so slightly, and I played with the lighting a tiny bit, but otherwise, I tried to be as faithful as I could to the original photo. Of course, I fell afoul in a couple of places to that old painting maxim: sometimes, real life just doesn’t look realistic. So I styled it up a little bit too.

In fact, one of the reasons I managed to complete it so quickly was simply because I was painting from the photo. I had all the lighting, colour schemes, etc already played out. Was quite shocking for me to be finished after about 7 or 8 hours, when I’m used to spending 25+ hours on one of my more elaborate paintings. But hey, it means you get two pieces of art this month instead

Without further adieu:

Created in Painter, finished in Photoshop. Isn't she pretty!

Just a quickie here today.

Thanks to some creative wordpress plugin…ing, http://www.demajen.co.uk will now display much better on your iPhone screens (and Android/Blackberry/Palm Pre too).

You’ll (hopefully) get just the posts, and none of the fancy banners and backgrounds that eat up your precious download allowances; and it also means the site should load super fast, even over archaic EDGE connections.

Win!

PS. I haven’t tested it fully yet, but it should be working fine straight out of the gate, so we’ll see. If it is screwed, drop me a line and I’ll fix what I can.

I got into MMO gaming through Final Fantasy XI. I still have an active account, even though I rarely log in anymore. The game is coming up to its 8 year aniversary this year, and I’ve been playing it for a good percentage of that. Or rather, I’ve had an active account for much of that. Either way, the game still has a special place in my heart, and thus even while I don’t play, I’m always interested in what direction SquareEnix is going to take the game next.

VanaFest 2010 is SE’s annual event for all FFXI-related announcements. Sure, they do quarterly game updates, but the VF announcements always tend to be bigger. So what did we get this year?

Well, for starters, SE is finally raising the level cap from 75 (as it has been for what, 6 years now?) to 99. An extra 24 levels. The release will be staggered, with the first increase coming in June, a second in September, and then finally the 99 maximum hit in December. From a marketing standpoint, this makes sense. FFXI has a very devoted fanbase, and SE wants to keep them paying and playing, even after FFXIV is released some time later this year.

It isn’t enough to get me back into the game though. Hitting 75 on my Dark Knight was a great achievement for me, but it took altogether far too much of my life to do it, and I’d rather not have to go through the tedium again.

New missions and new areas to explore come in the form of 3 mini-expansions throughout 2010. Priced at £7.99 each, these are again a nice way for SE to keep the revenue coming in. It’s a pretty much guaranteed extra £8 a quarter for them from its players, though how effective it will be in the face of the newer, shinier FFXIV is anybody’s guess at this point.

I admire the fact that the FFXI development team are still plodding away, however. They seem to have at least another 12 months of content already being worked on. I was a bit disappointed to see that Pandemonium, the server that my FFXI characters are on, has fallen on hard times and is now classed as a low population server. I would have considered playing FFXI a bit more while waiting for the FFXIV beta to start, but the news that Pandy is going to be merged into the Asura server really just cements the fact that my time with the game is at an end. I simply can’t imagine logging onto FFXI and seeing “World: Asura” instead of “World: Pandemonium”.

Good news, everyone!

But as surprised as I was by the FFXI news, this wasn’t what I was most interested in for VF2010. We all knew there was going to be some kind of announcement about Final Fantasy XIV at the even. Myself and Dr Jones were almost certain it would be about the closed beta start date, and we were correct. Although things seem to be moving faster than we had anticipated. Email invites to the beta will be going out tomorrow, and the closed beta itself will start on the 11th March (2 days after FFXIII is released over here in the EU).

Here is the news from the VF website:

With the eagerly anticipated FINAL FANTASY XIV drawing ever nearer its beta test phase, we are excited to announce that we will be conducting a closed alpha test—exclusive to our loyal FINAL FANTASY XI users!

Those who have been selected as beta testers can expect to receive further information starting from Monday, March 1.

* The tester website is scheduled to go live on Thursday, March 11.

Those who were not selected in this drawing, fear not, for there will be other opportunities to come. Be sure to stay tuned!

Now, this can be read a couple of ways. Firstly it mentions both an alpha and beta test. The beta testing site is opening on the 11th March. Beta-testing info is going out starting tomorrow. But what about this alpha testing stuff. Are the loyal FFXI players the ones who turned up to VanaFest (99% of whom were Japanese, it being in Japan and all)? It isn’t particularly clear. Maybe I’m just reading too much into it. *shrug*

Either way, it is an exciting time. As much love as I have for World of Warcraft, there is — in my mind — nothing comparable to FFXI’s job system, where you could really get attached to your character because you could change their roles over the course of the game’s lifetime without having to reroll a new character. FFXIV’s armory system seems to emulate the success of the job system. While I will undoubtedly make multiple characters there until I find one to settle on, it is the very fact that I can settle on one and play what I want when I want to that really appeals to me.

So, let’s hope I hear something in the e-mail soon! *happy*

It bothers me when people post about how they are “bored” on Facebook. It really narks me that these people have time to be bored. Even during half term or school holidays, I am never bored. Frustrated, yeah, quite often. Pissed off, even more so. But I never want for things to do.

When people ask me what I do and I reply with “I’m a writer!” there are invariably two responses:-

The first is the nonchalant “Oh, that’s cool! What’s your book called/about?”

The second is the “Writing’s a hobby, not a real job. Why don’t you get a real job?”

Now here’s the thing. I have a real job. Hell, I had a full-time real job at one point and it was so utterly stupid that it sent me spiralling into stress-related breakdowns that have left my long-term memory shattered. But I don’t want this to turn into a negative rant. In fact, I want to draw comparisons between my previous “real” job, and my current “not real” one.

People have preconceptions about just about every profession on the planet. This is natural; this is human. Preconceptions are off course built on stereotypes, especially those found in the media, and it is here that my ‘troubles’ start.

You see, as both a writer and teacher, I double dip the classic stereotypes with precocious ease. Writers, with their cigarettes and smoking jackets, who sit in cafés all day and drink coffee while typing on their run-down laptops; and teachers, who get more days off than they get hot dinners, who go on holiday half the year, and who are never doing a good enough job. I find that, in actual fact, people do not understand either profession.

At the core of both professions, I believe, is a deep desire to connect to human beings on many fundamental levels. Teachers do this by means of education. Writers do this by means of creativity.  What I don’t think Joe Public realises is that it is very difficult for — and actually, I should stop generalising here… let’s go first person — me to turn off. I posted a Facebook status yesterday that I had been writing all morning and my brother, bless his heart, commented that what I’d meant to post was that I’d been playing World of Warcraft all morning.

Y’see, what I find is that nobody considers the work that comes around what they see. Students, for example, only see the lessons you teach them, not the gazillion hours you put into marking their books, planning their lessons, getting the facts straight in your head on your evenings or weekends off. Likewise, my family rarely sees me actually writing. When they do they usually put on their best mocking expressions and tell me, shocked, that I’m “actually working”. They don’t, of course, see my piles of notes, the concept sketches that I draw, the restless nights I have when I keep waking up and writing down details on the Notes app on my iPhone. They don’t see the twenty or so files on my PC with ideas in them, or the half dozen maps of London I’ve got subtly altered, or the deckplans for the Valhalla, or whatever…

And I take their mockery with a pinch of salt, because I know that they too have hard jobs. They spend most of their time working, and because my work is — I suppose — less ‘obvious’, it is difficult for them to relate their experience of what work is with my own. Some days I think they understand. Other days, somebody comments that I should maybe try teaching full time again. It is about that time that I cackle madly and walk away from the conversation.

So it is confession time. I am finding writing very hard work at the moment. I’m dispirited about the whole thing. I know I want to get this book published, but I don’t believe it is good enough. Nor, probably, will I ever. The trouble is, I’m having a hard time getting past that psychological hurdle. I know I should print the damned manuscript out and send it to an agent/agency or three. But then I read all these advice columns where they say “Make your book as good as you think it can be before you send it to anyone.” And I’m not good at that.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks working on scenes from novels 2 and 3 and avoiding novel 1. I just can’t get inspired to look at it again. I am, I think, bored of it. And my stupid brain translates this to “Well, your book must be boring then!” which naturally puts me back at psychological square one.

Anyway, moping aside, I am actually really psyched for people to read my books. I honestly think people who are fans of the fantasy genre will get a kick out of them. I’ve looked at a lot of really cool artwork this week and said to myself, “Yeah, I’ll probably never be able to paint like that… But I can write, and I bloody well will write!”