Did they want me? Did I want them? Everyone else said how wonderful they were, and I of course agreed, but I was operating on unfound territory. I didn’t know. I had never… yeah.

And now, Dark Souls, and you hear stories about it, hear about the combat and the vast, bizarre lore, hear folk rant and rave about how brilliant it is

(And you’d hear stories about her, how she’d kissed some guy, how she spent all day mooning over Chris in History class, you’d see her sitting on someone’s lap or laughing at their jokes)

And you think, I can’t see this, I can’t have this. I can’t work out what the game wants me to do, but I want to do it, and I do it over and over, until the movements are rote and perfect, fast hitting the point where rather than learning from my mistakes I just mitigate them with other ones

(I don’t know what she wants from me, what’s wrong with me, what’s so different and unfuckable about me, and I want her, of course, I rehearse conversations with her until they are rote and fixed and crystalline and useless in my head, I am so blindly, stupidly focused that I misread, ignore everything, everyone else)

I want to play the game, despite itself. It lures me in; there’s always something there, always something further, another door to reach, an enemy to defeat, an obstacle to bypass, all of it shrouded away and hidden behind walls of no information, I read FAQ after FAQ, I explore, I learn about parries and item drop and humanity and levelling strategies

(I read sex tips in men’s mags because that is what you do, you figure these ridiculous convoluted manoeuvres are part and parcel of the thing rather than just sticking it in and moving up and down which has remained perennially interesting to many of us since the dawn of time, I am trying to run before I can walk, I am setting my sights absurdly high and growing angry when everything misfires every weekend)

And in all this, I don’t know why I’m playing. I can barely identify the Fun; there’s the enjoyment of making a mark on the world, of opening a door or discovering a new area or taking up a new weapon, of making it easier to traverse, but that’s apparently it, and these moments of control are all too few and far between

(And I feel impotent, in that I lack potency, in that I have no feedback from my actions so I assume they are inconsequential, and that is utterly defeating – to be reactive, not active, to peer at a strange and beautiful and terrifying world and come away marked and scarred, your brain building broken roads through itself like scratches on a record)

But I return. I load up the game every day and I try and sometimes, maybe, sometimes I get a little further but it is mostly just exploring and learning what I cannot do – I cannot defeat this monster, I cannot go to this area, I cannot fight properly, I cannot have the souls I collected because I fell off a cliff on the way to recover them and forty-five minutes of my time has been lost because I pushed the wrong button

(I learn not what to do, or rather, I do it so often that I give up trying entirely, which is a sort of learning – I burn bridge after bridge just trying to get enough light to see)

And, right now, I’m not playing Dark Souls. I don’t want to, or rather, I am thinking about playing it all the time but I am trying to convince myself not to. I know how angry it makes me; I nearly destroyed a controller after one death, heard the plastic creak under my hands, and still I didn’t stop playing

(I retreat, I withdraw, I give up except in my heart, except in front of the mirror, except when I’m drunk, except when I stop shouting at myself long enough to be heard)

And you start to hate the way the game makes you feel, like it – and every other player, and the lore, and the rules, and the numbers – are mocking you by their very presence, like you are some hilarious joke to them, the simpleton who couldn’t understand Dark Souls. They make you furious

(And fuck ‘em, right, who the fuck are they, who the fuck is she, how can she make you feel so wretched by just standing there, surely that’s somehow her fault too, this can’t just be your own toxic neuroses overloading and poisoning your head, fuck her)

Dark Souls is the girl everyone has kissed but me

It is embarrassingly early on in the game; I think it’s the second bonfire you reach after the tutorial ends. It is called “Undead Berg,” which is a terrible name for the place although undead live (unlive?) there so I guess it is at the very least accurate. It is mossy. Much of it is green. There is a castle within it which I have spent the last year and a half traversing every single time I load up the game.

Here is the progression of the Undead Berg level:

- Upon leaving the safety of your bonfire, you walk out onto a drawbridge where a skeleton shoots you in the chest while his friend runs up some stairs and tries to kill you. He is followed by two of his identical friends. In the distance, two skeletons with spears stand, but I have never successfully killed both of them so I don’t know what they’re guarding.

- While this is happening, three skeletons stood on top of a wooden platform try to set you on fire. To escape them, you run into a small room which contains three further skeletons, where you will often die. It is a good place to practice rolling out of the way of things, or into things, as I commonly do.

- Respite – a house! There is nothing in the house save a skeleton that means to do you harm and, in the pantry, another skeleton that you cannot see who generally hits you in the head with an axe. Normally you keep things like mustard or onions in the pantry, but when in Rome I guess.

- You meet three more skeletons, one of which throws firebombs at you whilst the others attack you. This is the least fun. I don’t know why they seem to think that this is an acceptable and fun challenge for the second level of the game.

- After putting out the fire, you are immediately presented with three more firebomb-throwing skeletons, all of whom apparently have a limitless fucking supply of the things whilst your pockets top out at around two. If you stand back, they set you on fire. If you run in, they set you and themselves on fire. It’s win-win. You can try to attract their attention and wait until they climb down a ladder then cut off their legs, but this seems dishonourable.

- The next part of the level is my favourite because there is a tower with a circular staircase, and at the top of the tower is a skeleton archer, and his first shot always arcs harmlessly over your head. I always open with a light attack and then power through into a strong, killing him, and roll away back down the stairs. It is a brief second of control in a world not built for my enjoyment.

- Next up there are three skeletons with shields, one of whom has a spear, and spears hold a sort of terrifying reverence for me because I’ve got one but can’t use it because I’m not strong enough. He’s almost a mini-boss. I fight them on some stairs. Sometimes they hurt me and I have to run back up the spiral staircase to drink a healing potion and I think, gosh, how emergent of me.

- Finally, there is a staircase with a single skeleton on it who never fucking fails to hit me at least once because by this point in the level I am beginning to get cocky and think that I don’t have to hang back from every fight, and I am invariably wrong, and then a tower and then the boss.

- The boss is a Taurus Demon. Even though I have fought it around thirty times I have no clear idea what it looks like because I am always either a) running away from it or b) far too close to it as it kills me with a giant hammer. Or its legs. Sometimes it just walks into me and I die.

You are supposed to climb a tower to kill it, see, by leaping off the top of the tower and hitting it in the head. And yet. And yet. I have only ever been able to erode half of its health. Merely getting to it is a ten minute process that I barely survive. I hate the Taurus Demon. I hate it. It is a Bad Thing. I have never sworn at anything more than the Taurus Demon.

Fuck the Taurus Demon.

I am not bad at games, or at least, I didn’t think I was. I thought I knew how to play them. Apparently I was dramatically and hilariously incorrect. I keep getting the feeling that there’s some option somewhere in the Dark Souls menu that I’ve accidentally switched to Double-Hard Bastard mode, but I haven’t. It’s on normal. I have been on the same level for a year and a half.

It’s like some kind of joke, but it’s not. I am the joke and Dark Souls is laughing at me. I want to play the rest of the game. The rest of the game sounds fascinating. I want to find items other than the same fucking helmet I’ve already found eighteen times and fight enemies other than the same three skeletons, but I’m not allowed.

There used to be a Black Knight, somewhere on the level, I think. I have a Black Knight Sword in my inventory, which suggests I killed him, but I can’t use the sword anyway as it’s too heavy so it’s largely academic.

A year and a half. Look at these things that have happened since I started playing Dark Souls:

- Lost my job at FHM
- Built a career as a freelance journalist
- Got my first cover feature, first exclusive interview, first big review for a mainstream games mag
- Run livegames at Bristol IGFest, for 20th Century Fox, at the Science Museum
- Completed at least twenty other games
- Moved 10,000 miles away to live on the other side of the world
- Finally written an article for PC Gamer
- And many more!

All that and I am still level one. One and a half years and the only signs of progression is that my weapons are beginning to wear down. I am still playing this game. I have not traded it away, largely on account that I am riddled with shame that I cannot even defeat the first boss.

(I imagine that Dark Souls players, proper ones, will tell me it’s not actually even a boss and anyway he can be easily defeated with a magical sword you can get by spinning on your head and whistling Dixie three times in the starting area and WHO KNOWS THESE THINGS)

I haven’t given up. I keep going back, perhaps because I forget just how much I swear at the Taurus Demon and how whenever I try a new tactic against the skeletons I am simultaneously burned and stabbed to death. Maybe it’s because, I think to myself despite everything, that it’s good. Maybe it’s a good game. Maybe you like the challenge. It feels treacherous. A week, maybe, sure. A month, perhaps.

But to still play something after a year and a half of no new content other than the same skeletons, the same catching fire, the same Taurus Demon; there’s got to be something incredibly wrong with me. Or something incredibly right with the game. God knows which.

I haven’t played Street Fighter 2 in, what, ten years? It feels like that long since I slept. I have a big day ahead of me, after landing. I start to get The Fear. My stomach is trying to claw its way out of my abdomen. There are games on the in-flight entertainment system and one of them is Street Fighter 2. I load it up.

There are eight characters to choose from. I choose Ken because he is five percent more interesting than Ryu.

DUBAI IS STRANGE

I always mispronounce Ryu. I don’t know how to pronounce it properly. I just know that whatever I say is wrong. Ken flies from the USA to Japan, which is confusingly in the centre of the world map. This is nonsense. Everyone knows Britain is slap bang in the centre of the map. Centre of the world.

(I am flying to Australia to go and try to find work for a year; I’ve never been there before. Ken wears blue pyjamas. He always wore red in my version on the Mega Drive, brought alongside the special six-button controller which was specifically built to play it. I push every available button on the character select screen but blue it is)

The game takes a full minute to load, but that sort of thing pales into insignificance when you are on a fourteen hour flight, itself taking place after a six hour transfer to Dubai. Dubai is strange; every other country I’ve been in ever has green as the default palette colour, but it’s a dusty yellow-brown in Dubai. It looked like the textures weren’t fully loaded in yet. Even the sky was the wrong colour; brown and distant and featureless like some 32-bit era fog cloud obscuring the Middle East’s shoddy draw distance.

In Dubai, I have a cigarette in an airport smoking lounge. This is a new experience for me; the smoking lounge bit, not the cigarette. I smoke those all the time.

It is awful. It is like spending an entire night in a nightclub circa 2003 but sped up to a ten-minute period. I am feeling high off the ambient smoke before I even spark my lighter. When I leave, I stink, and the prospect of the next sixteen cigarette-free hours becomes increasingly easy to deal with.

URGENT BUSINESS

Street Fighter 2 is played using the entertainment system remote turned upside down – there is a keyboard on the rear, flanked by a d-pad, four face buttons, two shoulder buttons. The gang’s all here. I am fighting E Honda, sumo supreme. I celebrate the presence of the shoulder buttons by performing a heavy kick as a matter of urgent business. It looks good. Ken’s sprite spins on his left foot, his right swung out at head height.

I leap towards E Honda and heavy kick again, very much up in his grill, as the kids say. The fat man recoils from the impact. I feel powerful right up until the point when he shoots forward like a cannonball and knocks me to the floor, then leaps into the air and drops arse-first on me. I struggle to my feet. Fuck, but this game is harder than I remember.

The old rituals to summon special moves do not come easily. I spin up a hadoken, the satisfying mimicry of quarter-circle-towards-punch translating through Ken’s arms gathering power and blazing it across the steam baths where we are, for some reason, fighting. The first one works; after that, it’s every other, Ken ducking and shuffling forward and and middle-punching the air rather than ripping blue fire out of the roiling elemental power in his soul.

UNIRONIC PUBESCENT

I do a combo; air light punch to point-blank heavy fireball. It feels good. Not good enough to defeat him by a long shot. He performs the Hundred Hand Slap. I die. Street Fighter 2 has many moves like this – Blanka’s electricity, the multikick powered by Chun Li’s impossibly powerful thighs (which were the subject of perhaps more than one unironic pubescent fantasy). Moves where you hammer a button to attack a whole bunch of times. Cheap shit. Moves to give newbies a way of beating other newbies, to channel a knockback into a juggle if you time it right.

Ken doesn’t have that kind of move. Ken has the dragon punch and the hurricane kick, both of which require the user to input frankly unintuitive button combinations to pull them off. I have no idea what you’re supposed to do with the buttons are the for the hurricane kick, and while I’ve got a pretty good concept of what you need to do to pull off a dragon punch, I wouldn’t testify on it in a court of law.

(I remember buying the game long ago and coming home with a friend and looking through the manual at the list of special moves, selecting a pair of characters each in turn and trying them out for weight. Even under stress-free conditions, we could perform maybe one third of all the special moves. There is still something so elementally complex and unsolvable about Zangief’s spinning suplex drop that I feel to eventually achieve it in the heat of battle would be a major life achievement)

THIRTY-SEVEN HOURS

The second round lasts a little longer, because I remember that blocking is a thing. I absorb his attacks and fire fireball after fireball downrange, my only tool being a hammer and all my problems looking very much like nails. It fails to work.

I die. The fighting games I play these days are all double-tap-towards-and-kick or hold-a-direction-and-push-an-attack-button, and that can ruin you. You can feel too powerful. Too much in control. Street Fighter 2 is a hard lesson in how little a shit the world gives about you. You don’t deserve to get past level one without proficiency. This is not a learn-as-you-go experience, a gentle curve to surmount. This is a trial.

I turn off the game; our flight time has been extended by an hour and the lights switched off to calm us, just after I necked two cups of coffee in an attempt to be high enough to get through immigration and baggage claim with a smile on my face. I am wide-eyed, staring at the bright screen of the word processor app in the darkness, getting ready to crash for the fourth time since I woke up.

I have not slept in thirty-seven hours.

I had forgotten how much I loved the British Museum; it was the first thing I saw of this city, when I visited almost four years ago. The entrance foyer is my favourite place in London, maybe in the whole world – grand and welcoming, an echoing hall of noise and soft light. I catch my breath whenever I walk though. I am taken aback by the scale of it. It was here every day if I wanted it and I’ve been here ten times in two years and now I’ll not be able to come back whenever I need to.

There are things you don’t realise you’ll miss until you think about it. things you take for granted. The taste of good beer. The messy destruction of a chicken burger sat cross-legged on the floor at 3am. Bottles shared. The wet smell of Norwich station and the road that leads into the city. Walks by the river, any river, all the rivers. Cut grass. My friends holding on to me in some swamp-hot nightclub, screaming at the top of our lungs. Names. Faces. Places that I recognise. All gone away.

And we leave in half an hour and this has become terrifyingly real, pushed over the edge from hypothetical to actual. This is happening. I have said my goodbyes. I have said too many goodbyes; four or five to some people, each time hurting more and more. There are no more goodbyes left inside me. I am fleeing, now. I am leaving my life behind. Sometimes it feels exciting, and sometimes it feels as though my heart will beat itself to pulp and fall out of my chest and leave me hollow. I am only an internet away from everything I’ve tied myself to over the last eight years, a succession of masts in a succession of storms, but it still feels too far.

I love you, London, Norwich, England. I love you but we are breaking up and I cannot take that in. I am going far away to sleep under strange stars and I will miss you more than I can say.

There are also butt-tons of them (around 12); I’d only heard of one, Tales of Symphonia, on the Gamecube, because my wife plays it once every two years or so as part of the intricate rituals that let her tolerate being married to me. It’s charming, for sure, but it’s very much yer standard pattern boy-in-a-scarf-and-too-many-collars fights to save the world. There’s a woman in hot pants, I believe. A guy with long blonde hair and a nice coat. And a small irritating child. I’m pretty sure there’s a checkbox they have to fill before they can ship the games out of the country.

PINK ARGYLL SOCKS

Tales of Xillia is the upcoming title, and Namco Bandai are just now putting the finishing touches on the localisation efforts, and I almost couldn’t care less. I write “Tales of SILLIER more like” in my notebook and laugh to myself, underline it a couple of times and think about how I could use that in an article. And then Baba-san appears.

Baba-san wears pink argyll socks. He has the sort of beard which looks like he puts serious effort into growing it every morning. He wears a nice jacket and jeans and colourful trainers and, crucially, he is carrying a sort of plush thing. He grins throughout his presentation. All of the other Japanese guys are either very polite and self-effacing or perpetually nervous and holding their energy in like a man trying to sit on too many springs, but he’s got this sort of boisterous, bubbling energy coming from within him. I want to take him out for a drink and see what happens.

He says hello, and then holds up the plush thing and shakes it and says hello again but in a daft voice. He talks about Tales of Xillia and I don’t know how you could manufacture the giveafuck to stay interested in this stuff. I can’t latch on to the way that JRPGs refuse to follow on from one another, and instead of recurring characters or storylines they have recurring airships or powers or elemental energies or some nonsense like that. Something inside of me worries at JRPGS like a loose tooth, looking for the underlying storyline behind all the serieses. Maybe there’s room for a Doctor Who/Final Fantasy crossover where Christopher Eccleston or whoever it is these days flips between the different universes and recruits spiky-haired androgynes to fight the Daleks, or something.

When he talks, Baba-San uses a sort of mellifluous Japanese staccato, and when he listens he goes “Mm!” every few seconds, like he’s really enjoying every single one of a packet of salt and vinegar crisps or struggling to get comfortable in a bus seat. I’m told this is a fairly common this with Japanese people. It doesn’t seem rude. It just seems like he’s so incredibly interested in whatever his translator is saying that he has to let them know all the time.

This is the view from my hotel room in New York where we had the interview, if that’s the sort of thing that interests you

ABRIDGED VERSION

During the presentation, he starts to wax lyrical about JRPGS. I mean, I assume he’s waxing lyrical, because his translator seems to be giving the abridged version; he’ll talk for a minute and we’ll get fifteen seconds of English. It’s frustrating, because I know there’s something incredible there. There’s an article there. The lead producer on Tales Of talks JRPG design theory. I love it. I’d read it, and I hate JRPGs, for God’s sake.

He talks about anime being very important to people in Japan, much like Hollywood is important to Americans, and how those inform the design choices made behind games. But which design choices, Baba-San, aside from the obvious? I need you to tell me and I need to write it down so someone will pay me money. He continually teeters around the rim of insight, but never delivers. I guess it’s all lost in the translation. I just sort of listen to him talk and zone out watching the colourful characters backflip and emote onscreen. He is adorable. I could probably kiss him. Maybe. It’s a really nice jacket. He’s Head Producer, too, so he’d probably take me out somewhere nice before or afterwards or during or whatever.

“Of course, the biggest addition to this game as opposed to previous titles is that the camera now moves,” says the translator. “This is you, just walkin’ around a basic field.” Baba-san spins the camera and I write down “MOVEABLE CAMERA” in my notebook and, God, they’re just getting that now? This is a bust. I start scribbling questions for tomorrow morning’s interview session.

HEIGHT OF RUDENESS

A night happens, and then a morning, and a bleary breakfast burrito in the sort of diner where the waitresses chew gum and look down their noses at everyone no matter what they order, and then the interviews. We sit down on the sofa in the interview room, and it turns out that was where Baba-San was supposed to be sitting because there’s a Tales of Xillia backdrop there, so rather than ask us to move he grins and simply rearranges the whole room so he’s sitting on an armchair in front of the backdrop by the window. He has the little plush character with him again, tucked beside him on the chair.

The guy I’m in the interview session with has to ask his first question three times, making it simpler every time. Baba-san’s translator is not very good. He gets an answer and I can tell he’s kind of disappointed in it, and I take a stab myself: “The tales of games are a cornerstone of – a very important part of – the JRPG genre. What do you think defines a JRPG? What design principles do you use to uphold that?” The translator doesn’t stand a chance. “I’m really sorry,” I say, automatically correcting myself, cutting down the question to a manageable size. “What do you think defines a JRPG?”

“By, um, “defines,” you mean…”

“Makes.”

This is me in Central Park, later that day. Baba-san wouldn’t come out with me, which I feel is his loss

JAY-ARR-PEE-GEE

I’ve never interviewed anyone through a translator before, unless you count the Dark Souls 2 guy half an hour previous to this which was essentially fine, but I’m not doing very well. She translates my question and I hear the occasional “Jay-Arr-Pee-Gee” in her speech, and he responds.

“I believe that character and story are the most important keywords in JRPGS,” she says on his behalf, “so we portray these two elements in a different way from the Western RPG.” He rattles away. He’s changed his shirt from yesterday. He still looks nice. Maybe I’m just far away from home, but there’s something comforting about him.

He notices that the little plush character has fallen over in the seat, so he sits it up and pats it on the head while she speaks.

“So, the main characteristic of JRPGs is that every character as a very detailed character in various aspects,” she continues, “and – what he said is very difficult to translate – but, um, when you begin playing the game, you can see some hints of the story, and when you reach the ending, you can say – oh, okay, that event that happened in the past chapter leads on to something. This is the most important thing about JRPGs.”

I smile and nod. This is useless. Maybe I’m asking questions that are too broad to be hammered through two languages. I wait my turn and go again.

“What do you think Western gamers can learn from JPRGs?”

“I think it’s very a interesting question,” she says after he speaks, “and personally I think that Western gamers can learn Japanese culture from JRPGs. So I mean that in terms of the visual approach, the way of expression in graphic is very manga and anime style, and this is very different from the Western games. So I think that Western fans can feel how and what the Japanese consider a fantasy world, because the fantasy world we are creating and the Western fantasy world are very different.

“So for example I think that when the Western gamers thinks of fantasy, it’s probably a Wizardly world.” I love the use of “Wizardly.” That’s a gorgeous word. It hangs in her mouth like smoke. She gets ten bonus points, despite everything, for that.

“When Japanese people consider a fantasy world, they tend to translate their own culture into the fantasy world to realise it. So the way of thinking between way of thinking between Western people and Japanese people is different; when you hear the world “castle,” you might think it’s a very beautiful, middle-ages castle. But Japanese people can imagine a Samurai-style castle.”

Smile. Nod. Useless.

Baba-san, here, holding the plush creature. It’s in the game, I’m assured.

SEEMINGLESS

Grasping at straws, I stick to my script: “Are there any design elements, or philosophies, from Western games, that you appreciate or find interesting?”

“Personally I think that Western developers keep the movies held in mind when creating and developing a game. So in the game there is a… it is seemingless?”

“Seamless?”

“Yes, yes – seamless. So in the traditional Japanese game it’s not seamless. It says – this is… a battle. This is… the game. This is an very interesting thing between Western games and traditional Japanese games. So I think that the seamless element is very interesting, and I think it is a constant possibility to introduce this seamless element into new Tales Of games in future.”

That’s it! Hideo Baba talks JRPG seams! That’s my leader! That’s my… one piece of useful insight from the day. The French PR lady leans over and tells us we have time for one more question, and it’s not my turn, and it’s over, and I’m pissed off because there’s clearly this massive, fascinating powerhouse of game design ethics and philosophies locked away in Baba-San and I can’t get at him because I don’t speak Japanese.

He’s a fascinating individual but under these circumstances he’s about as much use as a pinwheel. We stand up and say our goodbyes and Baba-San says “Thank You!” in English, and bows, and we sort of bow a bit too while we shake hands, and I ask get out my iPhone and motion at the backdrop whilst holding it like a camera and smiling at him. He gets it eventually.

I’m about ten seconds off asking for one of me standing next to him, too, but I resist. Until next time, Baba-San.

“Keep your arms in off the side,” says the woman in charge of the ride. Beside me, metal bolts slide into place which don’t strictly bar my egress but mean that I would have to dislocate both my knees if I wanted to get out.

“There’s a parrot,” she says, dead-eyed. “Smile when you see the parrot.”

Okay.

CHOCOLATE SNOB

These are the Chuckle Beans. They are awful.

I am at Cadbury World, a corporate theme park and chocolate propaganda warehouse nailed onto the back of the factory four miles South of Birmingham. I’m not a chocolate snob – I’m not a complex man to begin with – but it’s been an hour and I’m already tired of Dairy Milk. The instructional videos, during which you are physically locked in a room by automatic doors so you have to watch and cannot escape, treat Dairy Milk as a sort of modern panacea, a cure to all the world’s ills developed by the Socialist Visionary Mr Cadbury and his assistants.

It’s not that. It’s not that by a long shot. It’s nice, for sure, because sugar and milk are nice and it’s an easy way to eat those things without using a spoon or a glass. But it doesn’t taste of much, really, and it leaves your mouth coated in a sort of semiliquid brownish deafness after you’re done eating it.

Anyway. I am sick and fucking tired of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and now the Cadabra Ride is beginning and I cannot escape without dislocating my knees.

THE BROCHURE LIED

The Cadabra ride is one of the “Fourteen Amazing Zones” that the brochure lied about, right there, right on the front cover. One of them is “The Purple Planet” which is, and I shit you not, a curved wall covered in tinfoil and surrounded by mirrors. That’s not an Amazing Zone. You could claim the toilets were an Amazing Zone by those criteria. Maybe the automatic doors. Who knows. Could be that’s all lined up for the 2015 refurbishment.

The Cadbra ride is impressive because it manages to be so underwhelming it comes out the other side and overwhelms you, leaving you staggered as to how such a thing can continue to exist. It is, at the root of it, a haunted house with no ghosts or skeletons but is somehow, subtly, more distressing than any haunted house I’ve been inside.

“MAGICAL JOURNEY”

This is… an ice egg? I don’t know.

It is a “magical journey” through the world of chocolate making which manages to be less exciting than the non-magical version of events, lead by a gaggle of partially-animated brown egglike creatures called Chuckle Beans. Roll that those words around in your mouth for a while. “Chuckle Beans.” Chuckle. Beans. Nothing good is going to come of those words. Think about them. Write down the first three things that Chuckle Beans could be, screw the list up, and throw it in the bin.

The Chuckle Beans are bastards the lot of them, represented by either a) shonky little models that hide in tiny houses or emerge from dustbins and watering cans around the area, as though they’ve built their horrendous warrens amongst humankind and keep us awake at night with their manic laughter or b) CGI models, but the sort of CGI models you’d associate with mid-90′s bowling alley scorecard animations. They speak in absurdly high voices, inaudible to humans, as though the whole ride was designed for dogs and people were allowed in as an afterthought.

The car – a yellow and purple car, everything here is either yellow or purple or both – shuffles around a track at the sort of speed that makes you painfully aware of how fast your fingernails are growing. I could get out, I think. I could stand up, eventually, and walk out of here, towering over all the tiny models, brushing my head against the low ceiling. What would the dead-eyed woman at the front say? Would she let me out? What happens when someone just walks out of the damn thing? Is that covered in their employee handbook? It must be. You must get walkouts every day. Weaker men than me would charge out of here in droves.

THE PARROT APPEARS

We go deeper into the land of the Chuckle Beans and there are faces, there are faces everywhere, there are faces where there ought not to be faces at all. There are too many faces. The bushes, the cardboard and plastic bushes, are moving. The Beans aren’t. What’s in the bushes? Are the beans fucking in there? Is that how they breed? That’s disgusting. Their little shiny brown bodies tensed in coital rictus, cocoa butter smeared everywhere, and those faces, those faces, always watching.

We walked around the factory before this, and right in the middle of the place set up in a corner that would otherwise be bare stood the shadiest-looking “Face and Body Painting” stall I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been to raves AND Northern church fairs. There were a couple of women sat hunched under a banner reading “HAPPY EASTER” and various badly-lit photographs of their work. It looked like they’d broken in and set up shop in an effort to extort money. Maybe they had.

With a flash the parrot appears, a mad squawking thing covered in not enough multicoloured feathers, bursting through a window and instructing us to smile. A video of a high-pitched Chuckle Bean mangles out words that used to be English into an approximation of “Say cheese!” and holds up a camera. I do not smile. I thought it would be fun to look disapproving instead, but it turns out – as I saw after the ride was over – that I just looked small, and hunched-up, and scared. The place had got to me.

(There was a sign next to the sales desk that read “We reserve the right to refuse to sell any pictures that we deem inappropriate” and, you know, there’s a story there)

PSYCHEDELIC SHITFEST

Brr! A chilly cactus! Just what you need.

Anyway. At least it’s over, I think, except it wasn’t. The makers of Cadabra wisely determined that putting the camera at the end of this psychedelic shitfest would capture the point where people got angry at everything they’d seen, so they put it just after the first third of the ride in an attempt to counterfeit expressions of confusion as, I dunno, joy?

So immediately, of course, the ride turns a corner and enters an ice world because that’s the next idea the people had when they were making this and it was clearly designed in one go whilst blindfolded. There are a pair of cows looking at the ice world next to six milk churns, all of which have terrifying, gurning faces painted on them. This was clearly not designed for children, or at least the people who designed this had clearly never interacted with children. Perhaps they just watched them through playground fences and took notes. This – the goggle-eyed cows, the tooth-crunching milkchurn bastards – is the sort of thing that scars a child forever.

Distinct details are fading, now, a day after it happened, and the whole thing starts to run together into a blurry smear. I remember that some of the Chuckle Beans were sitting in deckchairs in the midst of this Arctic wilderness and that was somehow supposed to be funny. There was a cactus wearing a scarf. I think there was music. There must have been music. The whole thing played out like the sort of It’s A Small World After All ride that you might buy out of a wire basket in a motorway petrol station.

Earlier on in the day a tired-looking man in his mid forties with a dog hand puppet spoke to us while we stood in the impossibly long queue to get in, and he told us about the magic and puppet shows that were happening later on that day while the kids petted the puppet. A little further up the queue, he spoke to a Cadbury’s employee in her fifties with permed hair and the sort of makeup you apply with a spade, and she coquettishly toyed with the dog’s chin across the purple crowd divider while they spoke. Were they fucking, off-camera, once the lights are shut off? Does she rip off his striped waistcoat and dog and he her ill-fitting purple fleece and trousers and do the pair of them rut messily on the break-room floor?

BURST INTO TEARS

These people are at the start of the ride. They have no idea what they’re getting into.

The ice world gives way to a cave bathed in UV light, which like all UV lights serves as a great indicator of where my dandruff is. It also shows markings on the walls, cave paintings in a variety of different fluorescent colours, presumably drawn there by the ancient ancestors of the Chuckle Beans, and I think some of them might have been hunting something. It’s hard to take that much crud in. It was like falling downstairs. It was awful.

There is a small child in the car with us and part of me wishes it would burst into tears so that I could validate the way I feel about this 99p Golgotha. It doesn’t. This whole thing makes my teeth hurt in more ways than I can really understand.

The cave ends and we’re out. A man tells us that we can buy pictures of ourselves at a kiosk down the corridor from here and I almost grab him and ask why, why would anyone want to do that, why would they want a memento of this cobbled-together bollocks, but I don’t because that would be weird. But almost.

See, Games Journalists don’t get what you’d call “training,” the same way you do in other jobs. There’s no period where you practice writing reviews off-site for a bit, do a skills assessment day with other journos, or watch best practice videos gathered around a dusty VHS unit in a room full of old boxes.

No; you do the job, and if you do it right, people give you money. If you do it wrong, people don’t give you money and you starve. Occasionally, if you’re lucky, some prick might turn up in the comments section and correct your punctuation. Or an editor might say “Yeah, it’s great, but it needs to flow better. Can you make it flow better by this afternoon, please” and leave it at that.

I started out working the web content role at FHM, kicking out stories day after day that saw a frighteningly scant level of editing; on one hand it was because they were all basically fine, and on the other hand they were for a genre of journalism that is generally pretty low on available Fucks to give.

(This one time, though, I got in trouble for a throwaway gag describing soldiers as “Goverment-sanctioned murder enthusiasts.” Which may have been a poor choice of words considering our readership at the time. After that, everything had to be at least glanced at by a Sub before it went live)

LINGERING SECOND

So you muddle through on a freelance budget, and often the money that you should have been saving to buy a professional dictaphone gets spent on discount red wine. The money you should be spending on a camera – a proper one, not the shitty one on your out-of-date phone that makes people seriously doubt that you’re a journo for a multi-national brand – generally gets spent on sausage rolls, supermarket sandwiches, medium black Americanos two sugars, that sort of thing.

And so, one day, I had to interview Nolan North about Uncharted 3. Nolan North is an absolute dude. Nolan North is a fucking hero. Nolan North demands your respect. Nolan North is every voice in video games ever. The second I got Nolan North’s personal phone number to ring him on, I did a little dance and immediately rang up my best friend to tell him.

(I imagined Nolan and I would ring each other, I’d be like “Oh hey N-Dog I’m in LA, we should do lunch” and he’d be like “No worries G-Unit, hey, why don’t you come over to my house we’re firing up the grill” and we’d kick back and play with his dogs – I assume he has dogs – and we’d laugh and laugh and laugh and there’d be a lingering second of eye contact but we’d move on, we’re married men both, there’s no need to let our passions get the better of us, and as I wave goodbye he’d smile softly and shake his head and think about what could have been)

FINANCIAL BUMFLUFF

Look at this handsome motherfucker and tell me you wouldn’t

So I had actual Nolan North’s actual phone number but, and here’s the kicker, I had a phone on credit and I hadn’t been paid for the best part of 10 weeks. I’m eking out an existence day-to-day on the financial bumfluff that could laughably be called my “savings.” I go to the corner shop and put £10 of credit on it, all that I could afford, and sit stewing for the rest of the day. How much time will that buy me? Will I be able to ask all my questions?

It’s only after an hour of stewing that I realise I have no way to record the conversation and half an hour until the interview starts. I’m panicking. I’m panicking hard. This is the first person I’ve ever had to interview that I gave a fuck about and I’m going to mess it up. This is going to be worse than the John Carpenter interview where he asked me to slow down my speech no fewer than three times. Worse than the Hulk Hogan interview where I asked him “Can you lift me” and he simply responded “No.” Worse than the time I did a video interview with rapper Sway and held the camera the wrong way round for half of the interview.

I improvise. I grab the microphone from our copy of Rock Band on the PS3 and plug it into my computer. It works! I open Sound Recorder – the only sound recording program I have, who’d download another one, who ever has to record sound – and I balance the fucking thing on a paperback sat on my desk, over my phone (my battered Sony Ericson, at least five years old at the time, set to speaker mode) and hope. And pray.

MANCHILD NUMPTY

And, you know, it goes okay. I get through the second or third time I ring him, and for a while I entertain the notion that it would be wonderful to not have to talk to this man, this hero, this leading man of my industry, that I could call the whole thing off and just slump quietly into another Friday evening and my heart might finally, gradually, stop trying to rip itself out of my chest and do laps around the living room. But he picks up.

We talk. I have twelve minutes overall on my credit to squeeze in the interview; I spent around four of those listening to him complain about the way he was treated after I tell him he was credited as a “motion capture performer” in the promotional video and not “voice actor,” too. He gets pretty pissed off about it. I hope it’s the sort of thing that might lead to a good interview but, well, you know, it doesn’t. This is FHM I’m working for. They’re not interested in Nolan North getting pissed off about the way his talents are perceived. They’re interested in girls you’ve never heard of wearing wooly hats and pants, photographed through some daft instagram-alike filter.

And I get the serious part of the interview out of the way, the bit where I talk about the video and the game and stuff like that, and I ask him my first stupid question – namely, as he’s billed as one of the voice actors in Goldeneye 007 on the N64, what on earth he actually did because as far as I can remember there’s no voice acting in that game.

But it cuts out halfway through his answer, and a minute after I said “Oh shit Nolan I’m um I’m running out of credit we’ve only got a minute left” and I don’t think he understood me because surely if you were the sort of journalist to work for a world-famous magazine website you wouldn’t also be the sort of staggering manchild numpty to still have a prepaid credit phone at the age of 25. But here we are.

OFFICIAL SECRETS

I cobbled it together into a piece. I wrote to the PR to thank her for the interview slot and to tell her that I’m very sorry but the phonecall cut out 12 minutes in and she responded like I’d said I was very sorry but the phonecall cut out because Nolan North was run over by a bus; she said it was a “disaster” and that she’d “try to get some more time with him next week” and generally treated me fairly appropriately, I think. She’d not met me. She didn’t know what sort of a useless prick I was. She had no idea what to expect.

Later on that week, some money came through and I put another £10 on my phone and immediately sent a very expensive text to Nolan North thanking him for the interview, as though that would make any difference to what happened. I’d embarrassed myself and the worst part was that he probably didn’t care; I was probably the third guy to interview him that day, for God’s sakes.

Anyway. I’m posting the interview below as part of my own version of the Official Secrets Act. I’ve not listened to it since I transcribed it into this article over a year ago, and I’m not going to either because if I had to sit through all twelve minutes of it I’d cringe up like a concertina and it would take four stout men an hour to unfold me. It’s there if you want it. I’m done.

Grant Howitt “interviews” Nolan North.

POSTSCRIPT: “Oh, Grant, why didn’t you use Skype?” “Oh, Grant, why didn’t you go into the office and use their phones?” Because these are the words of a SMART and PREPARED person and I was and am still NEITHER OF THESE THINGS

Of course, I’ve been a writer for longer than that, as the reams of notebooks that I’ve kept from the last decade will show. I’ve always thought better outside my own head, as if it’s too busy in there and having the chance to pin down the ideas in ink makes them more manageable by far.

But on this day two years ago I sat down at my computer and I wrote; I wrote, I believe, an article about Kelly Brook running around a beach advertising shoes and trousers, and I was paid for it. I was working full-time for FHM, but under a freelance retainer agreement that meant they didn’t have to pay me if, for some reason, I couldn’t work on a particular day.

Later that I wrote an article on Duke Nukem, which is the first piece of games journalism I ever wrote. The day after, I went to the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall and walked through a darkened maze of costumed zombies to watch a preview video of Dead Island, then walked out to claim two free slices of Hawaiian pizza, a beer, a bottle of undrinkable coconut liqueur, and a pineapple. I didn’t know what to think. Maybe all days were like this.

TERRIFYING DOCUMENTARY

Anyway, the money was terrible, and the work was hard – one gaming article a day, four “girls” articles a day, all at 250+ words – but it taught me how to bullshit. In interviews, in job apps, I always say that it taught me how to scour for stories and turn in things on time and deal with PRs.

While all those things are definitely true, the biggest thing I learned from my time at FHM was how to stare down five empty word documents at the start of the day and think – “I will fill you. I will destroy you. I will lie and cheat and steal until my job is done. I do not care what I have to say to make those pages go away.”

My first poster quote. I think I got one on Skyrim, too, but it sounded less like I was describing a particularly good shit

If you go back and read my articles now – and some of them are pretty good, actually – then they’re grade-A nonsense, the lot of them. Kelly Brook drinks some cider? I write about how fun it would be to get wasps drunk. Cintia Dicker is in ANOTHER underwear commercial? I treat the entire thing as a dizzying, terrifying documentary. Kate Middleton visits Canada? I ascribe her super powers that she uses to conquer the populace.

Crystal shards. Giant ominous stars. Trouser-nazis. How much I hate Cricket. Jason Statham gutting you like a fish. (All of those are gold, by the way.)

PICTURES OF TITS

Because this isn’t writing grand epics of opinion for RPS, this isn’t honing some column for Edge – this is jamming some words around pictures of tits so Google will recognise it as a useful source for pictures of tits. Time and again you are repeatedly reminded that your words are a secondary concern, and after that you switch your mindset.

Which is an interesting lesson to learn, really, because as writers – most of us – all we do is make advertising nicer to look at. We are a lure to bring people to places where they see things that that mean they might buy one brand of crisps over another. So they might pre-order Metal Gear Whatever. So they might sign up for a season pass to their favourite multiplayer game.

The Tom Cruise on the right was drawn blindfolded as part of an article that never saw the light of day

And so I did a lot of cool things in my time at FHM, because a) no-one really cared too much what I wrote about so long as it was funny and b) I had a big-name brand to wave around and thus secure interview time that I’d waste on getting famous people to draw stupid pictures for me and talk about their favourite kinds of breakfast cereal. I also wore bright red PVC hot pants and several scarves and not a lot else on one fateful day in February.

REDUNDANT

And then they made me redundant, almost a year ago. They made a load of us redundant over the period of around a week after some poor choices in management and funding which left us staring down the barrel of a massive fall in profits, and first to go was the web team. After all, the print team can already write, surely? Just let them do it. Not as though they’re busy making a magazine or anything. I can’t see how that could go wrong.

Sony set up a Rizzle Kicks interview. I hadn’t the slightest idea what to say to them so I arranged for us to have a shootout instead

(It went wrong. They recently hired two writers to tackle the web work, and I’m pleased to say that at least one of ‘em is pretty good. I applied, too, but the sample article I attached was so poor and rushed-out that I really don’t blame them for not hiring me back)

HALF-CUT ON RED WINE

And I had the option of going back into an office job, but the Guardian came through with some work, arranged over the phone four days after I got fired and when I was half-cut at a friend’s house, both of us recently out of work and trying to drown our sorrows in Co-op red wine and a series of awful films.

This is from one of the press trips; a pre-E3 showing of Assassin’s Creed 3. I’m like, “Muskets, what the eff right?”

I went off on two press trips for them and off that I met some people who managed to work me into their magazine rotation. I’ve learned, more than anything as a freelancer, is that it’s important to get drunk with as many commissioning editors as you can. To shake hands. To make your face known. Portfolios will only get you so far. And that’s depressingly old-fashioned, but there you go.

I’ve had to become more serious since leaving FHM, so my articles about mysterious otherworlds and strange flights of fancy have been pushed to one side in a desperate attempt to appear earnest; occasionally I have a pop at some actual criticism, too, devoid of jokes, and it’s gone okay for me. I’ve started going to press events and just writing about what happens, a trend which is going well for me and some others, too.

Of course, this is barely sustainable. I’m lucky enough to have married a tremendously competent woman who earns far, far more than me and is happy to support us both; if I lived alone, it would be in a cardboard box outside a cheap internet cafe.

THE BEST THING

And now, terrifyingly, I’m moving to Australia where I know absolutely no-one and will have to start my career almost all over again. I don’t know if they have games journalism in Australia, unless you count Zero Punctuation which is technically imported, anyway. It’s been two years, and I’m still the young guy, still the underdog, still find myself mooning over established freelancers or staff journos and wondering how they did it, how they got there, how they manage to support themselves in this ridiculous life that we all lead. I have no idea.

This, now, is what I do for a living. Somehow.

And I still have dreams; I want to earn enough money to not worry about buying food from month to month. I want to write a book. I want to write for Rock Paper Shotgun or PC Gamer or, in some alternate timeline, N64 Magazine circa 1998 because it is officially the Best Thing. I want to steal Ken Levine away for a romantic weekend in the mountains. Any of the above would be good.

But I love it. I adore it. I wouldn’t change it for the world. (I would, that’s an exaggeration, of course I would) I get to wake up every morning and walk though to my living room and wear what I want and eat what I want and do the job – the jobs, if you count game design – of my dreams. I strive never to forget how impossibly lucky I am.

(I preferred the one that shot massive fuck-off cannon balls, really, but the stage was a good idea if a little badly implemented. Mainly because listening to the songs you play is one of the worst things you can do with your ears)

But I loved it. I got into it hard, because it’s a JRPG and they give you plenty of time to get to know them. I was about three weeks in when it happened; I’d hit the game’s first big city after taking a arduous trek across a desert and fighting bandits off a wagon train, and I was ready to get my sidequest on.

And I got some good ones! I picked up requests to go help my friend try out an experimental new mech part, which I’d doubtlessly be able to nick when I was done. To venture back out into the desert and investigate some mysterious disappearances. To go and sign up as a journalist at the local paper and uncover the corruption rotting the town away from the inside. To help the guitarist in my band get over a musical slump and find him an electric guitar. All good.

This is the sort of thing you’d pilot around

Also, I was told to investigate the Bloody Mantis paramilitary force that hid in the sewers under the city. Obviously that was my first port of call. Bloody Mantis, right? That’s a draw right there. Love me some intrigue, even when it’s seen from the starboard side of a whacking great steam mech.

I went into the sewers. I found a guard. He welcomed me in, which was odd, but okay. I found a commander. He asked me if I wanted to join up with the Bloody Mantis. Confusing! I figured, hell, why not? What could possibly go wrong? This is just like Oblivion, obviously. You just join up to everything and muddle through until you’re the chief Mage Assassin Warrior and everyone walks around calling you sir.

So I say, “Yeah, I’ll join your band of clearly evil mercenaries. That sounds right up my street. Oh, what’s that, I get a snazzy uniform? Boss. The girls are gonna love this.” My commander asks me to go and duff up a wagon train in the middle of nowhere and steal the stuff off it, and I figure I’ll get right on that after I complete all the sidequests. I pop round to my friend’s house to check out that mech part and…

AND?

… and he won’t talk to me. I press X over and over but he doesn’t budge from his one-line response, that he’s against the actions of the Bloody Mantis and he wants nothing more to do with me. Maybe if I changed out of the uniform, I’ll – oh, you’ve destroyed all my other clothes? Even my white suit and matching hat that I put on to play the trumpet?

Oh.

I go to talk to my band, none of whom want to speak to me either. My guitarist is going to find his own path, now. The girl who I’ve been sexual tensioning with for the past two and a half weeks won’t turn round in her seat to speak to me. Steambot Chronicles has broken up with me.

I didn’t KNOW, Steambot Chronicles. You have to TELL ME. COMMUNICATION, yeah? I saved the game after I got the uniform. I can’t go back. I made some mistakes. We all make mistakes, whether that’s kissing the wrong girl, getting the wrong job, or joining an increasingly-sinister-sounding murder cult in the sewers. Can’t we be friends? No?

No. Nothing. All sidequests wiped. My band disbanded. I lost out on everything I’d been building up until then, nearly a month’s worth of character-building dashed against the rocks of my ambition. My mech was bright blue, for God’s sakes. That’s not a sewer-dwelling paramilitary colour.

I went off on the mission that the Crimson Mantis had set me, in the end. I was stealing sheep. I think you had to pick them up and shove them in a box, or something.

This is that aforementioned stage arm. It’s not very good at hitting things tbh

I stopped playing the session after that, and I couldn’t quite believe it had happened. I’d get in the door after Uni and think, ooh, I know, I can play Steambot Chronicles tonight! – and then remember that yeah, I could, but none of my friends would speak to me and I was stealing livestock for a man with a daft uniform and an unconvincing moustache who lived in an area normally sectioned off for poo.

I still have it; the disc, I mean, and the memory card with the save on it. I’ve got the box on my desk next to me now as I type, and it’s reminding me that the steam-powered mechs were called “Trotmobiles” which is a really, really stupid name for a thing to have. I’m not going to get rid of it for at least another five years.

I can’t go back and play it again, enduring the burning stares of the people that used to respect me. And I can’t start from the top, because a) that would take ages and b) I’ve already DONE that, I’ve already told that part of the story. Maybe this is the story that Steambot Chronicles told me. The story of someone falling out of contact with all their friends and dropping off the map, never to return. It’s certainly stuck with me, that’s for sure.

“Remember Florence,” says the man stood on the dark stage. “Remember Masyaf. Remember the streets of Boston. ” The room is lit with red light and packed with smoke and too many journalists. I sit next to one of the few people I know in there, a man I dragged half-naked down a hotel corridor after a press trip gone wrong in Turkey two years ago. He threw up on my feet. There’s a bond there. Once a man throws up on your feet, you can’t pretend you don’t know him any more.

Before the speech started, there was an embargo warning onscreen in big red letters (an embargo that was subsequently broken) that asked us to turn off our phones, laptops, and tablets. That’s never going to happen – how else would we write things down? It’s a hollow threat, a waste of big red letters. I turn my phone off anyway because it’s new and I don’t know how to put it on silent.

I’m really hoping they’ll make the combat more exciting, rather than the sort of Dance Dance Shivolution timing game that it’s been for the last couple of games

The man onstage is naming places we have been in Assassin’s Creed games. He’s asking us to remember them. He’s an actor, I think, although I can’t for the life of me work out who he is.

(He stays afterwards and I approach him and say Oh hi, sorry, ‘scuse me, where do I know you from because I can’t place you and he says his name was Ralph Ineson, that I might remember him from such shows as The Office and Game of Thrones and I nod and say Ahh, Ah ha, That’s it but in reality I’ve never seen either of those programmes and I run back to the other journos and proudly announce his name after everyone else was too sober to risk asking him)

“Remember Venice,” he says, “where genius and revolution stood side by side.” He goes through to list off every location from every Assassin’s Creed game, save the side-missions in Brotherhood. He doesn’t say “Remember Monte Circeo, where you stole a wooden tank and farted it around several arenas and somehow earned a parachute for doing that,” but he’s close.

WRUNG THROUGH A THESAURUS

“Remember the people we were!” He says, and the lights come up on two costumes – Altair and Ezio – stood at the back of the theatre. Connor is nowhere to be seen. Maybe they couldn’t borrow a Connor costume. He goes on for minutes, offering plot synopses of AC1, AC2, Brotherhood, Revelations, and AC3. It sounds like a Wikipedia article wrung through a thesaurus.

“But now, let’s weigh anchor and raise a cup of rum, because we’re plotting a new course.” Pirate terminology! We’re getting somewhere, finally; Kotaku leaked the pirate details earlier that day. I write down “YARR PIRATE SAYIN’S” in my notebook, all in caps because it’s dark in here and I can’t see what I’m writing. It takes up three lines.

He leaves the stage. I am worried that I don’t know whether or not to applaud, but as no-one else does we err on the side of caution and let Ralph leave the stage in complete silence as a video starts up – a cinematic teaser, which shows Blackbeard saying… something.

“You’d best come right away, we’ve got those hovering machetes again”

There’s footage of our main character being a baddass – he dual-wields his swords and quad-wields his pistols, giving him overall three times as many weapons as he has hands to hold them with. He’s a busy man, obviously. He doesn’t have time for maths. He fights by spinning around in circles and letting enemies sort of come into contact with him.

Throughout the video the bass is so heavy and the volume so loud that I can’t understand most of what Blackbeard is saying. We’re shown ports and jungles and sultry ladies of a variety of races reclining in a bed behind the main character, who at this point looks like someone slapped a late-90′s underwear model in a white hoody and asked him to look mean.

I write “PORTS AND JUNGLES AND FUCKING” in my notebook.

I COULD HAVE IMAGINED THAT BEFORE

The video stops. Another man comes out. He is in charge of Ubisoft in some capacity and not an actor I haven’t heard of. He spends ten minutes convincing us that Piracy is a perfect vehicle for the Assassin’s Creed brand, that a game about climbing tall buildings and working as a secret blade in the crowd can be perfectly expressed by sticking you on a honking great boat and letting you go duff up enemy ships.

I write “PIRATES = ASSASSINS, SHUT UP” in my notebook.

It all starts to feel a bit Red Dead Redemption, more so than the previous game. Maybe Grand Theft Auto: Golden Age of Pirates, except you don’t jack enemy boats and ramp them off conveniently placed coral reefs to achieve sweet air.

Someone make that game tho

He says that they wanted to stray away from the weird elements; no ghost ships, no sea monsters. As a series which has already featured ghosts and sea monsters, I’m not a little disappointed to learn they’re pulling ever-futher away from the supernatural, but I guess it’ll be better than the paranormal cocktease that made up much of the Frontier Investigation missions in AC3.

(“Ooh, is it the Headless Horseman?” No, it’s a bloke in a hat. “Oh, is that a ghost?” No, it’s a stick with a sheet nailed to it. “Oh ho, is that a terrifying sea monster?” No, it’s a dude in a diving suit. AC3 is like an older brother ruining Christmas)

The truth is so interesting, in fact, that this chap wants us to imagine what they’re going to do with it. He instructs us to do so. He stands onstage in front of the world’s press and tells us stories of the Golden Age of piracy, accompanying each with a single frame of concept art. He talks about our hero getting marooned with a madman, and says “You can imagine how this scenario might have played out.”

I could have imagined that before.

FRANTICALLY SCRIBBLING

He leaves and Jean Guesdon, Creative Lead, takes the stage. Unlike the previous two speakers Jean talks about the actual game and doesn’t try to paint a picture through our minds, which is nice; he’s very much the main course of the evening, after the amuse bouche from Ralph and our other friend who spoke like a focus group was sat inside his head pulling the levers.

He talks about mechanics and locations and gameplay types and generally gives out the sort of information that has you frantically scribbling in your notebook, the stuff you want for actual previews. He talks about the different ways you can attack an enemy ship; you can climb the rigging and vault over, swing over on a rope, leap as the two ships smash into each other, or swim around the back and sneak on. There’s a little spark in me at that; after AC3 proved to be more flash than substance, the promise of emergent gameplay mechanics gets me hot under the collar.

There’ll be plenty of opportunities to plunder sunken booty, we’re assured

And it keeps going; this is an open-world game, this is a vast ocean that you’re free to explore but certain areas are guarded by double-hard fleets so you need to level up your boat and your piracy skills in order to take them on. It’s not Assassin’s Creed by a long shot, it’s a far cry from the dusty market squares of Jerusalem, but it’s an interesting concept. Jean keeps saying how there’ll be no gameplay breaks between land and sea and ship and boarding actions and if that’s true, on current-generation consoles, then Jean is a wizard.

WE LOVE BART

He says that the team are building on years of Assassin’s Creed games that have come beforehand. He draws up a list of them on the projector and says that he wants to draw the Open-Ended Assassinations from AC1, the learning curve from AC2, the freedom of interlocking mechanics from Brotherhood, and…

… and there’s a pause in his speech before he says that he wanted to take the “Graphical Richness” from Revelations and the “sense of being part of history” from AC3, and it’s like that bit in Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire where Marge is writing a Christmas letter and says:

“Grandpa’s still going strong, Maggie’s learning to walk all by herself, Lisa got straight A’s in school and Bart… well, we love Bart.”

For some reason Ubi didn’t put in hidden blades in peg legs, which upsets me

Finally, we’re shown a gameplay video, the first evidence of the game past cinematics or screenshots or the wonderful world of our own imaginination. I take down everything I can.

I write: “SHARKS! SHARK RIDING! WHALES! SPINNING BULLET-DODGE? FALL 2013.”

PISS IN THERE

And then, beer. We walk out of the theatre into the corridor which, too, has been bathed in red light. Treasure chests and skulls on spikes line the walls of an otherwise beautiful conference centre in the heart of London, and we scavenge free drinks as the staff hand around food, quite rightly staring down their noses at us.

I ask a waiter where the bathrooms are and he tells me, ending with a “Sir” said in a tone of voice you’d reserve for pulling hair out of a plughole, but in his defence the bathrooms were not only nicer but significantly larger than my house and really I shouldn’t have been allowed to piss in there.

So, Assassin’s Creed 4 isn’t what you’d expect an Assassin’s Creed game to be, in that it’s ceded almost all of the main mechanics and largely takes place in a boat. But I can live with that. After AC3, we weren’t really expecting the next Assassin’s Creed game to be good, so a break with tradition in that sense would be welcome.