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Tag: 2016

  • Wheels of Aurelia (Santa Ragione, 2016)

    Wheels of Aurelia (Santa Ragione, 2016)

    Developed/Published by: Santa Ragione
    Released: 20/09/2016
    Completed: 16/07/25
    Completion: Completed seven endings and unlocked every checkpoint.

    Wheels of Aurelia is being delisted from the App Store on July 25th because of Apple’s anti-art App Store requirements, and as it’s been made free by the developer in response, I thought I should pick it up and play it through. While Wheels of Aurelia will be available on other platforms–and if you’re reading this after it’s been delisted, you can pick it up there–it’s not exactly a preservation issue, it really does speak to the complete devaluation of creative work in our tech industry-led culture. Companies like Apple expect apps to be updated regularly, but of course, a game can just be… what it is (never mind the fact that a lot of apps don’t really need to be updated or changed much, if at all, either.) And let’s not forget the cultural vandalism of binning off everything from the old 32-bit App Store rather than working to keep them accessible.

    Apple are cunts, basically. And I think this matters in the case of Wheels of Aurelia for the same reason I wrote about Despelote in the context of our AI slopscape: Wheels of Aurelia is a genuine attempt to make a human work, but one that is still, specifically, a video game.

    Set in Italy in the 1970s, the player is cast as Lella, a woman taking a road trip to France for mysterious reasons, accompanied by Olga, who she met only the night before and has her own reasons for taking the trip. In some respects, the game could be described as a visual novel, but I think that’s a little reductive–I’d call it a “car conversation simulator”, because it captures the feel of something any driver will know well–when you’re engaged in a conversation while driving and are able to split your attention seamlessly between the conversation and the road.

    Here it’s cleverly provided by making the driving as simple as possible. You head forward automatically and can switch lanes to overtake and speed up (a bit) by swiping but that’s really it. While you’re driving, the conversation flows, and you can choose between a few different responses each time you’re prompted. So as you drive, you’re mostly listening, or thinking about what you’re going to say next, only occasionally making a point of taking active control of the car.

    I really have to emphasise that this is the ideal video game interpretation of the car conversation. If the driving was literally any more complicated, I’d have to think about it, and when I’m driving, I don’t think about it. I’m just… driving!

    Something else I appreciate about this is that it doesn’t tell one long narrative. It actually does the one thing I always want games to do–make it impossible to see it all in one playthrough, make each playthrough short, but make each playthrough tell a whole story. Wheels of Aurelia, if you play it once, is very short–less than twenty minutes. But as you play, you can pick up hitchhikers. You can change your travelling companion. You can choose which town to head to next. And you can always choose to say something different.

    I thought I’d be done with one playthrough, honestly, but through the dialogue the game doesn’t just progress a narrative, but paints a portrait of Italy in the late 70s. Like Ecuador in the early 2000s, it’s nowhere I know anything in particular about, and the game (cleverly, I think) gives you encyclopedia entries (sourced from Wikipedia–now that’s some savvy effort-saving) to fill out anything in detail that you like–though I was happy to let it just flow, to feel immersed in my lack of perfect context.

    The thing I would say surprised me most is that I actually wished it was a little longer per playthrough! I appreciate that the game doesn’t shy away from serious, adult topics, but the endings feel a little sudden, like you haven’t spent quite enough time with the characters to get totally comfortable with them. While you draw more of them out each playthrough, it feels like you’re just capturing a snapshot of someone’s life–and the endings imply a little too much by comparison. It can feel unearned. And if you’re a completionist, I suspect that trying to see every ending here will get pretty repetitive–better to just play it until you’ve had your fill and leave some things unknown.

    Sometimes there are just games that just… do what they’re trying to do. Wheels of Aurelia is one of them. There’s no “update” that they could make that would be worth it to make Apple happy: it deserves to exist, and be played, as it is.

    Will I ever play it again? There are many endings I haven’t seen. Ironically, this is kind of a perfect iOS game–I can imagine picking it up and giving it a run through to get an ending I hadn’t seen at some point in the future while I’m in a waiting room or something.

    Final Thought: I was interested to read that one major inspiration for this was the Italian film Il Sorpasso, as the movie it immediately put me in mind of was the Italian film Rabid Dogs. Though that is tonally incredibly different…

  • FIFA 17 (EA, 2016)

    FIFA 17 (EA, 2016)

    Developed/Published by: EA Vancouver, EA Romania / EA
    Released: 27/09/2016
    Completed: 29/08/2020
    Completion: Finished a season with Partick Thistle winning everything, Scotland won the World Cup, and completed Alex Hunter’s Journey.
    Trophies / Achievements: 

    Yes, I was still playing FIFA 17 in 2020. There’s a reason, though!

    It’s a bit melancholy, really. I was moving out of my lovely wee apartment and leaving the city I’d called my home for a couple of years in a time of tremendous upheaval, and FIFA 17 was the first game I played when I moved in. I was deep in world cup fever and I fancied playing a FIFA, and at the time I was like “oh yeah, there’s that story mode they just started with FIFA 17, I’ll try that. Plus it’s like $8 now.”

    Of course, at the time I didn’t even try the Journey mode. I just played all the other modes and I have such nice memories of sitting in my wee home, sweaty in the height of a heatwave, banging in goal after goal because it was too easy on Semi-Pro and too hard on Pro (lol).

    Anyway, I knocked through the story mode, “The Journey” in my last couple of weeks in the flat to sort of say goodbye the way I said hello, and what a strange experience. To play a mixed-race Black kid from London while protests continued and in fact the NBA itself went on a wildcat strike right in the middle of it. I kept thinking about how Alex Hunter would have experienced race, of all the awful ways that Black football players and other players of colour have been treated on and off the pitch and I thought–ridiculously, I guess, for a yearly franchise and an instalment from three years prior [”Michael Brown was killed in 2014″–Ed.]–”I wish they could deal with this.”

    Instead what you get, obviously, is cut-scenes here and there (far fewer than I expected!) a terrible meaningless Mass Effect-me-do conversation system and endless training sessions which you can’t skip because for some fucking reason Alex Hunter will pretty much always get Ds and Fs (but I still should have skipped them.) It feels like you maybe have a lot of opportunity to make the story go different directions but apparently you get game overs if you fuck anything up too badly, so you probably can’t. In fact you definitely can’t because even though I was able to keep Alex Hunter in the first team consistently Hunter’s social media is like “Alex Hunter should be in the starting eleven” so it definitely barely pays attention to what you’re doing. It’s your basic “struggle to the top” story where you suffer a setback and your pal turns out to be a prick that you have to defeat anyway.

    FIFA is pretty fun though. I mean it’s no Sensible Soccer (too many fucking buttons) but it was a laugh for a while.

    Will I ever play it again? Good question would be “Would you play FIFA 18 to continue Alex Hunter’s story?” Well, probably no for two reasons: 1) if you have to succeed when you’re playing in the England squad fuck that, because I’ll just turn around and pump in as many own goals as possible. 2) Apparently it’s still full of training mode shite. Maybe it’s easier to skip though.

    Final Thought: As you might be able to tell I couldn’t give a fuck about English football, which made picking a team for Alex Hunter challenging. I went with Sunderland for two reasons: it was the most northern squad I could get and it said right on the selection screen they’re called the black cats and of course I bloody love black cats (even if they’ve only got three legs, like mine.) This definitely led to a hilarious sequence where Sunderland were somehow facing Middlesborough for the FA Cup.

    It would be a couple of days later when I’d discover just how bloody hilarious that was by watching Sunderland Till I Die on Netflix, the weirdly entertaining docuseries following the club’s absolute implosion in the 2017-2018 season from mismanagement and having a disinterested arsehole billionaire as an owner. The lesson is that capitalism must be destroyed. The lesson is always that capitalism must be destroyed.