The Zombie Outbreak guide to NaNoWriMo

As you may well know, November, as well as being the month of Movember (In which Matt is participating, so go give some money already! http://uk.movember.com/mospace/528720), is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. Because I am clearly wrong in the head, I signed up to participate for the second year running. If you’re crazy like me, you probably need some pointers or tips to get through the month. Coming up with that 1667 words per day is a lot harder than it looks.



Well, look no further kids! In order to help out my fellow Wrimos and geeks, let me present to you the Zombie Outbreak guide to NaNoWriMo.

Getting started

Ok, it might be a bit late for this this year, but still, its useful information. Sometimes you sign up all ‘YEAH LET’S WRITE A NOVEL YO IT’S GONNA BE SWEET’, and then when you sit down in front of your word processing program, you find you’ve got nothing. Nada. Zilch.

It’s a horrible feeling, but fear not! There is a solution! What you need to do is think about your favourite genre, and then find an existing work you can steal mercilessly from. Into sci fi? Why not nick from Firefly or Star Trek? Horror? Rob a monster from Silent Hill! Adventure? Borrow Nathan Drake’s handsome chops!



I’m not saying write yourself a rip off of Fallout 3 or anything, but if you can borrow some plot elements from your favourite franchises, you’ll find you can build a new story around them. Handy!

Characters

Characters are hard. It is scientific fact. Sometimes you can be writing away, but you feel as if your main character is nothing more than a cardboard cut out that you’re projecting yourself onto (oh wait, haven’t I just described that bint out of Twilight?). What do?



Well, I find the best way to build a character is again, by stealing. This time, steal from your friends. Do you have a friend who organises his dice by colour and type? Put that in your character. Do you know someone who can’t play drums on Rock Band without smashing her foot down on the bass pedal and breaking it? Put it in. If you can gather the right blend of traits and idiosyncrasies, your character will be much better fleshed out and believable.

Plot

Sometimes it’s very easy to get bogged down in character descriptions, and have lengthy conversations between people in your story that don’t go anywhere. When this happens, you need to start thinking about plot and pacing.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, think of it like a DnD or table top roleplaying game campaign. If you went through the whole game going into room after room, finding more and more demons to slay, after a while you’d get bored out of your tiny skull and start throwing dice at the GM (or is that just me? Erm, sorry Rich...).



However, if that campaign were to include different elements, such as devious traps, fiendish puzzles, or simply getting a wizard drunk in the tavern (which we did once), then it gets exciting. Apply this to your novel, and mix it up a bit. Bring in a tidal wave. Send your characters on a quest, even if it is just to Tescos. Put a dragon in the basement. It’s your book, do what you want!

And finally...



Honestly? Don’t worry too hard about what you’re writing. I had a moment last week where I thought ‘OH GOD THIS IS ALL CRAP I’LL HAVE TO START OVER’, but I’ve soldiered on regardless. You’ll have that moment too, if you haven’t already, I promise you. And when you do, the best advice I can give is, DON’T GIVE UP. At all. Ever. You might think its crap now, but it’s only a rough first draft. You can fix all the plot holes and glaring inconsistencies later. For now, just have fun with it.

And watch out for that dragon in the basement.

'ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?' 'Not today, thanks'

If you’re reading this I’m guessing that at least once in your life, you’ve had a crack at a rhythm action music game. I’d like you to remember the first time you held that dinky little plastic guitar in your hands, and wailed on it to the computer generated crowd. You felt good, didn’t you? You felt like a mother effing rock star, and you showed them exactly how it was done on the easiest setting.

What I want to ask today is, where did that feeling go?



You know what I mean. Remember the excitement when Rock Band came out? I ventured out the day after my birthday, with a HORRIFIC hangover, to procure that box of delights. I NEEDED it. It not only had the guitars, but a drum kit and a microphone too! You knew what this meant, don’t you? KAREOKE PARTY!

Ahem.

Anyway, round our way the night wasn’t complete without a late night wail along to Don’t Stop Believin’ (before Glee ruined it forever) and the like. We maaaay have had a few complaints from the neighbours. Ah well. I’d hazard a guess that for a while, this happened in your neck of the woods too. Controllers were swapped, drum pedals were snapped, and songs were fought over. But have you got your kit out lately?

Thought not.



The whole rhythm action genre seems to have taken a huge nose dive as of late. Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock and Rock Band 3 came out last year and they sold poorly. Plastic guitars everywhere are gathering dust and it seems like no one cares anymore. What’s happening? Well, I have a few theories.

One, there seems to be a dearth of original, good tunes available on the recent titles. Back in the days of Guitar Heroes 1 and 2, they were jammed full of rock and metal classics, like I Love Rock and Roll and Killer Queen. They were instantly recognisable and ridiculously fun to play.

These days, the games are rammed full of songs that are lesser known, to put it nicely, and the (whisper it) foreign language titles. I’m not going to argue that the games are a brilliant way of giving up and coming artists a break, but we’ve got to remember that they’re mainly there to be fun. Fun? Remember that? Half the appeal of Guitar Hero and Rock Band was pretending you were Jimi Hendrix playing Woodstock, not an unknown face toiling away in an underground bar. Plus, no one can sing along to the foreign stuff if they don’t speak the language. I’m just saying.



While we’re talking about the tracklists, I need to cover the issue of overlap. There wasn’t a problem when Guitar Hero ruled the roost, because there were only a couple of titles and there was plenty of music to go around. Now though, with multiple titles and reams of downloadable tracks, the games are pretty much interchangeable. Yawn.

Another problem is the hardware issue. At first the games came with guitar controllers. That was fine, it was new and exciting, so we coughed up and rocked out in our living rooms. Then Rock Band came out, and we bought the overpriced box o’ plastic because, well, a whole band? Count us in! Then there was DJ Hero with its decks, and Rock Band 3 with the keyboard... nah, count us out, thanks. No one wants to keep shelling out with big lumps of plastic that’ll just end up taking up space in their homes.



Well, there’s the few problems I’ve got space for. If the genre wants to survive, I think it’ll have to scale back production for a while to give us all a breather. Obviously the industry saw we liked it, so went ‘HERE! HAVE MORE! LOTS MORE! GIVE US MONEY!’ And now, ladies and gents, we’re suffering from overkill.

Rock Band party tonight? Thought not.

Get over it, Professor Gamer

Ok, confession time: Even though I spend nearly every Friday here banging on about how much I love video games, the sad, sad truth is that I suck at them. A lot.

I’ve always sucked. I’ve only been playing games since the original Playstation era (so, since about 1997 for me. That’s still around 14 years though. Wow, I’m getting old), but even back then I sucked. It took me 10 years to even finish the original Tomb Raider. Bah. Back then though, we didn’t have the internet at home, and so I didn’t have the wealth of walkthroughs, tips and tricks that are now available to me. Without them, half of my games would have been unfinished and I’d have probably given up on gaming altogether as it would have been too frustrating.



Here’s the worst confession: I even had to use walkthroughs on Portal 2. Please, try to hold onto your monocles, I know you’re shocked but it would be terrible if you dropped them into your sherry glasses.

Yes, I got stuck traversing Aperture Science, a problem that no one else seemed to have had, according to the Steam forums. I’m not a member, but I enjoy perusing them for the latest bonkers theories. (Chell is an android! The Ratman used the portal gun to escape to the moon!). While I’ve been trawling the forums for crazy, I’ve spotted several threads complaining that Portal 2 just didn’t match up to the challenge of the original Portal. The complaint has even cropped up in Yahtzee’s review of the game in Zero Punctuation yesterday.



Ok, they may have a point. The people who were chomping at the bit for Portal 2 were those who’d played Portal, replayed it, played the custom levels, spent four years yelling ‘The cake is a lie!’ at each other, replayed it again, written terrible fan fiction, then replayed it again for luck. They knew what they were doing. They didn’t need to be shown the mechanics again, they just wanted to run in, start shooting portals everywhere and discover a whole new challenge.

Problem is, you can’t aim your game solely at the crazy rabid fans. You need to appeal to the newcomers too, the ones who’ve never heard of the Weighted Companion Cube. Those players will need a bit of hand holding, or the game will just be an indecipherable mess to them.



When I think about it, 2 was probably a bit easier than 1, but not by much. So why is there so much whining about it? And it’s not just the Valve fans. Wherever you turn on the internet, there’s people arguing that gaming has been dumbed down for today’s market and now anyone could finish Mr Brown’s Shooty Punch Adventure without even breaking a sweat! How could this be allowed?

Is that really a bad thing though? We have to remember that there needs to be a line drawn between ‘challenging’ and ‘just stupidly difficult’. Portal was challenging, ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’ on Guitar Hero 3 is just a case of arthritis waiting to happen.

It also depends on what kind of game you’re playing. On Guitar Hero or Rock Band, if you can complete the hardest songs on the ‘Expert’ setting then you are clearly some kind of mutant that finds joy in racking up high scores and making everyone around you feel inferior (or Sunday Matt). In a story driven game like Portal 2 though, you can’t make your player do the same bit over and over until they figure out the exact solution. It breaks the narrative flow, frustrates the player and if it happens long enough, they’ll give up and trade the thing in for something that won’t make them hurl their controllers at the screen.



I don’t hurl controllers anymore, by the way. They’re expensive now.

The point I was making was, the games aren’t being dumbed down now, their difficulty is just being tailored to suit the gameplay. If you’re so desperate to prove yourself as a ‘hardcore’ gamer, go five star ‘Psychobilly Freakout’ or something.