Exploration & Cookery Game

One thing that I find disappointing about Skyrim is how cooking serves no purpose. There’s a paltry Xbox achievement for cooking, mining and chopping wood once. The health benefits you get from cooking are nothing compared to the most inexperienced alchemy, the ingredients of which are cheaper and abundant. Besides which, pre-made potions are two a penny – much more common than cooking spits.

Then there’s the fact that you mainly find food items in towns, where you least need health items. The weight values of vegetables versus their healing properties make them not worth carrying around. Finally, if you calculate it, you notice that selling the individual food items raw fetches more gold than cooking them together. Not that any of them are worth anything like as much as any other piece of junk you can pick up out in the field.

It makes food in Skyrim a gimmick, one that you’ll get bored of quickly – just like chopping wood, which is the least time-efficient way of making money. If you never stole a single item in the whole game, you’d still make plenty of money just going out questing. If you don’t go out and quest, there’s no point playing Skyrim in the first place, which is an exploration RPG, not a life sim. In other words, cooking is pointless.

Inventory space

Inventory space in games is a contrived thing. Assuming that we aren’t so deluded as to think video games have to be realistic; and knowing that the processing power and memory of video games today is such that no one player can ever hold so many items as to break the system; and having seen improvements to inventory design that makes them easy to sort through even when there are hundreds of items; I assume the reason for inventory limits is to artificially make the game harder.

Inventories take a few forms. Some of them have “slots”, where you can only have one or a few of the same type of item. For example, you may have a special weapon slot, where you have to choose between the grenade launcher and the flamethrower, or you may have an explosives slot where you choose between the rocket launcher and the RPG. Some allow you a limit of one specific item but allow you to hold all the items in the game at once. For example, you may be able to hold ten medicines and ten antidotes, and having nine medicines doesn’t allow you eleven antidotes. Others are space determined or weight determined, and these are generalised inventory spaces. You choose whether you fill your pockets up with armour, weapons, health items, drugs, food, alcohol, minions, tin cans, and once the space is full, it’s full. Sometimes overfilling your inventory is allowed but carries a cost, such as slowing you down or preventing quick travel.

Whence we sprung

We’re being forced to return to where we came from.

Home. Home is where the heart is. Or, failing that, the car. And the wardrobe. And the random pieces of crap you’ve collected on your travels. I could quite easily be describing life itself, but I’m actually describing the world of video games where you own a safehouse or some kind of base. Sometimes, several.

I have mixed feelings about homes in games. It does sometimes satisfy the nesting instinct to return home and put a load of things away in drawers. Working up to buying a house or several houses quickly becomes the aim of many a game which is supposed to be about stealing cars or fighting dragons. But, such homes usually create the necessity to return periodically; to drop off, to pick up, to heal, to organise, to faff about.

Pokemon Black / White

Close, but just falling short of the mark: 4/5

Pokemon. A franchise you either politely and determinedly ignore, like a yelling homeless man on the London Underground, or one which you follow with an insane glint in your eye and a fire in your heart that may well turn you into that yelling homeless man on the London Underground. I fall into the latter category, I fear. An avid Pokemon fan since the age of eight when I stole my brother’s version of Blue and used his Venusaur to destroy a Persian, I am hooked and lost to the world.

The franchise has continued, rightly or wrongly, for fifteen years, spinning off shows and toys and comic books, plus a whole host of other gimmicks, interesting for five minutes and hanging around for just as long. Yes, at one point I really did want a Pokemon themed N64. But we won’t talk about that. After all, Pokemon is a collector’s game; now with 650 little critters to collect, I’d say you’d have to be dangerously obsessed to keep on going.