Mammon Machine

Fantasy: The Genre

2012-02-07T09:46:00.000-08:00

Mammon Machine, how do you feel about the title of upcoming AAA hit franchise Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning?

The same way I do about the names of these other hit franchises:

Kingdoms of Azeroth

Kingdoms of Ferelden

Kingdoms of Westeros

Kingdoms of Steelport

Kingdoms of Dredmor

Kingdoms of Sera

Kingdoms of Nova Prospeckt

Kingdoms of Gran Pulse

Kingdoms of Tamriel

Mushroom Kingdoms

Still Kind of Fun: Duke Nukem 3D

2012-01-25T13:00:00.000-08:00

In the interest of science I went back and played Duke Nukem 3D.

It's still fun, in the same way that Doom is still fun, but it's almost insane how random and illogical level design was back then. Randomly flipping a series of switches for the right combination to open a door? Bizarre jumping puzzles that would have been physically impossible without the cartoonish geometry of 2.5D that make no intuitive sense, such as walking along the top of a 2D wall? Duke Nukem, even more than Doom, takes its level design from the Cabinet of Dr. Calagari. I actually entreat you to play the game again, to see just how strange and unstructured the game is. The last Duke Game took place in an genre that bears almost no resemblance to a modern FPS.

Duke Nukem (the character) is old too, and how many Dukes have we had in the meantime? Bulletstorm's dialogue is a hell of a lot funnier and creative than Duke ever was. Hell, Duke's best line, like all his lines, was lifted from a B action movie. Duke was less of a parody and more of a homage. He was trying to bring some of that flavor and charm to a video game genre populated with a plotless parade of grim enviorments.

Duke Nukem Forever, then, is a caricature of a caricature. When Duke came out, he was the best protagonist you could get. When Doomguy was the standard, he was a big deal. Now our standard is Nathan Drake, and in trying to bring back Duke just like he was, he's no longer a goofy, charming caricature. He's an unironic celebration of what he was supposed to be making fun of.

Duke worked back in the day because a caricature was all the tech could support for a game as action-heavy as Duke. Nowadays even the most viserceal have at least the plot and characterization of a summer blockbuster.

Duke Nukem is frozen in an era that no longer exists. Much like Doom 3 came out in an era in which its magnificent tech was all to bring a fundamentally outdated concept to the modern era. Whereas Half-Life 2 at the same time brought plot and game design forward. Maybe this is because Half-Life 2 was an expansion of the innovatice game design principles that Half-life brought to life, whereas Doom came from a totally different era with fundamentally different design.

We're used to thinking FPS as a monotonous genre, but because it sees so much content it sees some startling evolution. I still love playing Doom, honestly; its fun is eternal. But games have changed so much, and graphics wars have leveled off so much, that I can't really think of how Duke fits into the modern era of the FPS, or if there's anything in there really worth stealing.

Grim Grimoire Design Decisions

2012-01-18T13:00:00.000-08:00

Grim Grimoire, a Japanese console RTS, exists, which is quite a feat.

Vanillaware, of Muramasa and Odin Sphere fame, made this game so the sheer actual beauty of it is equivalent to an army of living and talking toys that you play with in-between reading bits of Harry Potter. There is also a character in this game named Margarita Surprise and that should really seal the deal.

So Vanillaware, like the ancient Egyptians and Shigeru Miyamoto, knows that profile is the best perspective for a full and detailed view of a human being. This is a gigantic problem for an RTS, however, as they have traditionally been isometric, and for good reason. The illusion of depth helps present a view of both the characters on screen and their accurate positions while still allowing the player to see more of them than the backs of their heads. In Starcraft the isometric perspective is critical because of differing levels of terrain and the presence of flying units. Flying units and ground units attack each other in completely different ways and are created to counter each other, so players need an instant visual indicator of what's flying and what isn't.

No one before Vanillaware has tried to solve the problems with the isometric perspective because no one has had reason to, and, most likely, never will, because the problem is purely aseshetic. The mishapen blob-units are, at least in starcraft I and II actually quite detailed, but you can barely see any of it at range. Isometric graphics and ugly and unflattering, except to spaceships. There is a reason that portraits appear when units are selected, and that is because adding life and character to units goes a long way. Children who played Starcraft can quote the Terrans verbatim, and often did to each other's amusement.

Grim Grimoire solves the perspective issue in a couple of clever ways. First of all, the game is set at Hogwarts, so levels are composed of gigantic halls and winding staircases. Troops climb them to reach each other. One of the nice side effects of this is that chokepoints can be covered and established just like in Starcraft, but pathing is altogether much more simple: there might only be a few staircases to the next level, so the chances that your units will delibrately path through a barrier of twenty towers and self-immolate at their hands is relatively low.

Now, how to deal with flying units? First of all, one must remember that Isometric is not actually 3D in any sense of the word. Starcraft II is as 3D as Street Fighter IV, 3D in polygon only. The difference between flying units and grounded units has nothing to do with depth. It's actually a combination of two factors: which attacks can or can't be used against each other, and the ability to ignore terrain.

Grim Grimoire separates the two, which makes sense; on side perspective 2D plane, there's no way you can make the case that a grounded unit couldn't hit the ranged unit right next to it. A ranged unit could hit a ground unit on the level below it, but the ground unit could walk up to where the ranged unit was to attack. Range is fastiidiously balanced in this game, and only very rare units can attack at such far range that they can't be countered.

So on to the second factor: who can hit who with what weapon. In Starcraft, this was really, really important. Most air units had a strong air to air and weak air to ground attacks, but that was made up for because they could kill units without an air attack with no retailiation. Units with strong ground to air usually didn't have a ground attack. Essentially, everything had a rock paper sicissor like counter.

In GrimGrimoire, this property is called "Astral" and represented visually by the blue, ghostly look of certain units. It resembles invisibility, except you can see them, but visibility in Starcraft was actually just like flying, only with different counters and solutions. You can see the influence in GrimGrimoire: the Fairy, a flying unit, can turn invsisible just like Wraiths in Starcraft, and the Homunculous unit in Grimgrimoire can drop a flare that makes astrals vulnerable to physical damage, similar to the scanning ability of Terran command centers. But like flying, units have different attacks for astals and substantive units. The Phantom, a ghostly knight highly reminisent of the Dark Templar in Starcraft, is an astral unit that does high amounts of physical damage but low amounts of substance damage, which is represented beautifully in game; the ghost knight carries a metal sword, which even clangs to the ground during his death animation. Not everything is so beautifully communicated, but the work is fantastic considering that, unlike starcraft, the units in Grim Grimoire do not have multiple attack animations.

The Devil on G-String

2012-01-11T13:00:00.000-08:00

Knowing it's a visual novel really colors how that sounds, huh? It's supposed to be a play on "The Air on G-String" I prefer using translated titles but at least "G-Senjou no Maou" sounds a bit less dirty.

This game is basically a detective thriller (tons of Death Note style double reverse twists), but I rather than talk about all that cat and mouse stuff I want to talk about the plot structure.

So VNs usually have multiple heroines. This one is a bit in a weird way, though, since the heroines basically show up in chronological order. Haru is the main heroine, long haired nerd detective, but the other three are all supporting cast, each being the center of each chapter's diabolical plot by the mastermind "Maou." The funny thing is that choosing one of the girls just says fuck it to the rest of the plot and sends the protagonist off on a merry adventure with one of the girls. One, for example, focuses entirely on a highly dramatic figure skating competition and the heroine's difficult relationship with her mother, to the point of virtually ignoring the protagonist (which is fine, no one cares about him).

And this entire story is a relatively small portion of the game. Two choices lead to it. There is very little control in any VN, but maybe there's a lot of power. Nothing Bioware or Bethesda has put out allows you to make choices that lead to the equivalent of becoming an entirely different genre of game. Which is not practical, maybe, but number of choices does not equal power of choices.

I Drive a 1991 Commander Shepard

2012-01-04T13:00:00.000-08:00

I literally have never been able to care whether my protagonist is good or evil. No matter how many stupid choices I make, no matter how many times Bioware lets me punch some reporter or be a dick to everyone for no reason, Shepard or whoever never feels more human than a Toyota Camry. I get in Shepard and drive around a little, maybe to Barnes and Nobel to read and not buy manga or Steak n' Shake to hang out or to the graveyard to smoke, so don't get me wrong, I love my Toyota Camry and all and it's a great car, but it really isn't a person.

This is because Toyotas, like Shepard, only go to places because you tell them where to go. The Toyota doesn't have a personality. It doesn't go to Barnes and Nobel one day because he's a shy nerdy type and off to a party the next because he's secretly a delinquent, he did those because I was stepping on the gas pedal.

Pretending Shepard is a person involves developing the character of a Toyota Camry, which—don't get me wrong—is a pretty fun exercise. We only have the consequences of the Toyota's actions, not the motivations, so it could be really fun to think about how the Toyota Camry is probably shoplifting at Barnes and Nobel or only going to the party because his friends dragged him, or whatever to make those two disperate errands make sense together (not that bookstores are incompatible with parties for normal human beings, just accept my dumb imagination for a minute).

Even full voice acting and all of these other wonderful things that make Mass Effect a really great game and Shepard emotive and fun to watch don't really solve the fundamental problem (not that it needs to be solved) that Shepard is this weird hollow cipher.

I love imagining characters, but I guess what I like about the sort of art that has people in it is that I get to see and explore the personalities of fictional people. Hey, that's mostly what you do in Bioware games, other than kill people, but in good stories, the main character gets to be one of those people too.

It's not a bad thing though! But I think this is what happens: Shepard is not a person "within the game Mass Effect." I can make Shepard a person with imagination, which is fun, but in the game: still not one.

Blizzard

2011-12-28T13:00:00.000-08:00

I've played a lot of WoW, but I think my experience was a bit different than the norm. A friend introduced me to WoW, but my computer at the time couldn't run it (a college laptop). When I got a new computer, it was a year later and my friend had moved on. But I was home and my friends weren't, so I decided to try it out.

So maybe the reason WoW didn't have a huge effect on me was because I played it like a single player game. I didn't join a guild and I didn't play with friends. This was a pretty common practice for leveling even back then (this was right before the first expansion was released).

In WoW, the names of everyone in the world float just above their head, and your selected adversary of the moment has an up-close depiction of their often-ugly face displayed on your screen along with their health bar, as if this millionth reincarnation of a nameless foe on the edge of the world is yours alone.

Some enemies, however, have a dragon coiling around that portrait, and they're called elites. Elites are considerably stronger than normal enemies, which are designed specifically to pose absolutely no threat to a player who hasn't overexteneded herself. Elites are much harder to kill with some classes than others, because elites are designed to be attacked in groups, and based on that reasoning, Blizzard has not (until recently) made class balance in solo play a priority.

The first class I played was the mage, who is utterly helpless when alone, which I was most of the time. This is because mages wear nothing but cloth, and against two headed ogres twice my size wielding various blunt instruments I would die unless I killed the ogre before it reached me. It created a wonderful bit of tention, actually, as I only had a few ways to escape from them if I was caught. On the other hand, nearly any other class could tear through those same monsters far more quickly while shrugging off anything they threw.

The best solo build for mages was based around ice magic, because while it didn't do as much damage, it slowed and froze enemies in place. By managing a couple of different abilities, you could kill a wolf before it even had a chance to nip at your robe. Afterwards, though, you'd be pretty much helpless; drained of the mana you need for the spells, and all your abilities in need of cooldown. One at a time, sometimes two at a time, three on accident; highly dangerous.

Elities, then, massively stronger than other enemies, would have been quite difficult. Mess up the rhythm and die, but that's not actually how it works, because WoW follows the perfectly sensible but frustrating logic that powerful enemies should be immune to thinks that hinder their ability to operate, like slows and freezes. Mages cannot win without them, and the elite simply runs into the mage and kills her, and she cannot even escape because those abilities are all slows and freezes too.

The reason why immunizing elites makes sense (even though it doesn't) is because WoW, for various reasons, wants a completely controlled world where systems cannot be exploited. When nearly all of the monsters in the game are based on walking up to a person and hitting her, an ability that prevents them from doing that can potentially wreck the game. A horde of mages could become the most potent combination in the game, rotating snares forever until even the strongest opponents are dead, so WoW preemptively prevents this.

This kind of design, however, reflects a certain prejudice that combat is hitting and being hit, and that keeping any enemy trapped and helpless is cheating. Which is a little sad, since Blizzard actually did a very good job of keeping the snaring process interesting, tense, fun, and difficult. It's much, much easier for me to run a paladin into the middle of a group of enemies, do tons of damage to all of them with area attacks, and take little enough damage from my armor. This is cool, but playing the mage feels clever.

In MMOs cleverness is a legitimate problem. In Skyrim, you feel smart for gaming the system. In MMOs, the competitive nature of millions of other people ensures that any broken mechanic quickly becomes mandatory. In Skyrim, I can use whatever works, but in WoW, if I want to play with anyone else, I have to use the best thing that could possibly work ever that someone else discovered, regardless of how much fun it is. Blizzard wants people to have fun, so they remove anything like that, but in doing so, they make it impossible to figure out interesting ways to be the best at the game, which is kind of the point of any game. You optimize with the tools you're given. In late game WoW, even the highly interesting bosses are researched to death by raid leaders before you fight them. Not that going through the motions isn't exciting and interesting—rhythm games are fun—but half the game is gone.

Why I'm In the Cult of Far Cry 2

2011-12-10T09:41:00.001-08:00

It goes a little bit like this: I'm playing the sort of game in which you shoot a lot of people through someone else's eyes and it's all very exciting and then I see a building off in the distance and know I can't go there; it's just the background. In Doom and older games like it, the background would have literally been a 2D image, wrapped in a sphere around the universe of the 3D level, not unlike the set of a play or black and white film. In the lull right before/after a firefight all I can think about is wandering over there, where it's quiet.

2

It's very likely there will be a rock in front of you and you can't jump on that rock. Far Cry 2 lets you jump on that rock. Wandering means reaching what you can see.

3

The fundamental lie of the war game is the same as the war film, which is that war travels a line, that war is a story. The storyteller lies so that reality will move in lines with characters and plots and beginnings and endings, because humans compute lines more effectively than reality. In war (but not just in war) lines are dangerous; war is too big and awful to fit in a line.

4

Apocalypse Now doesn't spin a story. Apocalypse Now tells stories, plural. The soldiers go down the river and one crazy thing happens after another, like they're wandering through the sets of a dozen different war films, like they're guests in someone else's movies. This breaks all the rules. You can't get away without lines in novels or films. Stories are supposed to have beginnings, middles, and ends. People change and grow and overcome. They don't stay confused. They don't watch a bunch of things happen to other people. They don't wander around and suddenly die for no reason, because some lucky asshole they didn't see shot them. But in Apocalypse Now, it happens just like that.

5
When game critics complain about linear games, sometimes I agree, but not because games and films are different.

6

You can't get away without lines in games, either. There's not a beginning, middle, and an end like the movies, yet there still is a beginning, middle, and end. You start the mission, then there's some conflict, then you figure it out and kill them, and then the mission's over. Beginning, middle, end, even in Tetris, even in Grand Theft Auto, in every single game those lines are everywhere. And Far Cry 2's just like that too.

7

Except in Far Cry 2 a jeep comes out of nowhere and runs you off the road, full of crazy people you've never met with guns who all want you to die. The tires scream and the bullets fly but because you'e safe in the living room you have a moment to think, and because nothing happens without a reason, you start thinking about why, where the hell did they come from, what the hell do they want, what is happening within the brains of those people, mercenaries or freedom fighters or just assholes with a jeep and some guns, that makes them want to kill more than everything else in the world? They've got no reason not to kill you. So maybe that's it. The answer is locked up in their heads, whatever it is, and you'll never know because the only way this ends is with them dead or you dead.

8
Reasons they could have to kill you:

Need guns
Need a car
Need medicine
Need ammo
Want diamonds
Bored
Hate you

9

I know nothing's going through their heads. They're polygons, they're AI scripts, but have some imagination. When you watch Apocalypse Now, do you think about what Marlin Brando's thinking or what that monstrosity of a man in the jungles of Vietnam is thinking? Maybe you do, but thinking about what's in the actor's head is like thinking about what was in the programer's head. It's how they made the story, not what the story is.

10

Apocalypse Now moves in a line, but it's a fucked up line.

11

In Far Cry 2 your shit falls apart. You have to kick your car to start it. Your guns jam. Your flamethrower breaks down. This doesn't need to happen, because this is a fucking video game, and in Far Cry 2 such staples of human existence such as eating and drinking are fairly well ignored. As in life, nothing in a game happens for no reason.

In this case, the reason is so that your gun will fail when you need it the most, so that when you run our of ammo in your rifle and switch to your sidearm, that piece of shit will jam too. Because in Far Cry 2 you are always fighting. There is nothing in the game but fighting and running, and because of that, everything you take you will eventually lose. You pick up a gun and throw it away when it jams. You take guns from dead people because you need more and they're dead. You take things because even at your highest point, pockets full of medicine and morphine and bullets, when they hit you with the molotov as you barrel through the checkpoint, you're going to lose it all. The only permanence is the state of uncertainty. Are you going to get away this time? Or are you running straight into another camp of them?

12

War is a place. We go to war, as in, war is a place you can visit. You can drive through war, or ride a boat through it. There's a war in Iraq, yet Iraq is also still somehow a place that can be visited. Baghdad is a city and people live there. In the center of Far Cry 2 is a small town with a church and bar. In Apocalypse Now they airlift in Playboy Bunnies and go surfing.

Wishlist for Skyrim Mods

2011-11-29T11:08:00.000-08:00

1. Mod to make human beings appear not hideously ghoulish. Or makes them all appear hideously ghoulish. But it is somewhat bizarre to have the elf in the loading screens appear as a luscious Drizzit while the ones in the game appear to have the eyes and skin tone of a Japanese beetle.

2. Mod to give me a physics gun. I'm modest, I don't expect Half-Life 2 here. The physics gun in Bioshock sucked a lot but I'd take that. In Bioshock, I grew quickly tired of flinging dressers at people, but there are ton of cliffs I can fling people off and traps I can push them into. Look, they even stole the oil slicks from Bioshock, some physics other than awkward body dragging would be just peachy. The shouts are just okay. They're not playful enough.

3. Mod to remove dialogue. I believe that there are two kinds of dialogue: dialogue that is pleasant to read, and dialogue that should not exist. Has anyone made a mod that fixes dialogue? That would be so rad, but that sounds like the sort of thing that would never happen ever (but if it has, tell me on twitter okay?). So in this case, wouldn't be interesting if everything just sort of happened? The story unfolded before my eyes, that is, instead of told to me by strange and unfamiliar men.

I found a ghost in a dungeon that didn't speak a word to me. Rather than stop me in the middle and explain the story I didn't care about to me, they implied it throughout the dungeon. The last boss actually felt kind of important. I still didn't care about him, of course, I just wanted the loot, but the ghost cared about him, and I wanted to see how that played out.

"Remove all exposition from Skyrim." Please create a patch for this that can be applied to all video games. Video games don't need it! Just ask Valve!

4. Mod to make it look like something. You might not understand how much I love fantasy, and because I love fantasy so much, I loathe it completely. See, I read Dragonlance in the fourth grade, a form of therapy I recommend to anyone who wants to fall into and out of love with fantasy as quickly as possible, though it helps to have a TA at your summer writing classes to point out what bullshit it all is.

I'm serious, I like fantasy! But I've already read it. Watch me be blasphemous: I have never read Lord of the Rings. I've tried, I've seriously tried. They're not even that long. But I've been reading these regurgitated cliches since I was nine, and I'm sorry, they've ruined it for me (maybe someday).

Just like every line of dialogue in Skyrim sounds like it comes lifted, out of context, from a Dragonlance novel, so too does a screenshot of Skyrim look indistinguishable from any other video game. This is very hard, I understand. You know, though, Demon's Souls looked almost exactly like this too, but it was so creepy and dark and depressing and atmospheric (pretend my bullshit adjectives mean something) that wow, I can really tell the difference from a screenshot. Yeah, the vistas are so pretty, sure, and I love running up the mountains full of snow, but I've been through the ruin at the top of it like ten million times.

That mod's so silly. But hey, it looks really different. It doesn't look like every other western RPG I've ever played, and that's a pretty good. (I slipped into secretly ranting about this post by Tadhg Kelly for a minute there but next week I will have a post about why his is being kind of wrong more exactly next week, stay tuned.)

5. Mod to make combat more fun. I actually already have a lot of fun with combat. I don't mind dying because I can to try new stuff out each time, and that's really fun. I don't like that I can barely see what's going on in front of my face or that the camera moves with my arm. That's not actually realistic, you know right? The human eye does not stop looking at something just because the head turns. Judging distance is pretty hard too. Also, it's sometimes really hard to find cover from the dragon breath, and I think I'm basically just supposed to die if I can't find it, right? Stil, I love dragging every nearby monster into the fight and that works pretty well, and the point of the game is that I can do that and the game says, "Yeah, go for it. That's okay."

I get that response from the game constantly, which is why I sort of forgive Skyrim, and I think that it's okay to forgive games for being bad at some things if it's because they're trying so hard to be good at other things.

It's also why I sort of don't forgive Skyrim. Why make a literally epic fantasy world populated with boring, flat characters who speak inane dialogue? Why meticulously sculpt an entire country out of data for the sole purpose of looking exactly like everything that has ever come before it? Why completely separate all forms of melee combat to punish me for trying everything the game has to offer?

Well I mean I know why, but I don't think even the most hardcore fans would object to them subverting a few of the forty-year-old D&D cliches.

Occupy Choice

2011-11-21T10:45:00.000-08:00

"I am free to vote Labour or Conservative, but if I try to act on the belief that this choice itself merely masks a deeper prejudice — the prejudice that the meaning of democracy is confined to putting a cross on a ballot paper every few years — then in certain unusual circumstances I might end up in prison." — Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction

We are living in certain unusual circumstances. But as this is blog about cultural detritus, I will leave those other implications of Eagleton's quote up to your imagination so we can talk about video games.

Terry Eagleton is ostensibly writing the above quote to draw reader's attention to the fact that while we may disagree about which choice to take, questioning the premise of those choices is unacceptable. You can probably tell from the book I quoted that this analogy is supposed to help his readers understand how culture controls our subjective appreciation of art, but you can probably also tell that he doesn't feel like leaving it at that.

Video games are written off as escapism more than other flighty forms of entertainment. All art takes you to a different place (so I believe) but games writing takes to the reader to the author's childhood fairly more often most others. We have our nostalgia to work through, but we also, like all children, were unhappy, and games brought many of us happiness. La la la, I escaped to some far off place.

Except that's not how it actually happens. Games creepily mirror reality, as Eagleton unintentionally points out. In a video game, I can choose between binary choices A and B, but no power that exists can challenge the premise of those choices (except mod tools, but then we've crossed the line from reader to author).

Playing a video game means a temporary vacation to a police state. This lack of freedom isn't noticeable at all in mediums that don't allow for choice, but despite games being about as subtle in their control structures as real life, something about their artificiality makes them easier to question. Maybe it's the overambitious designers who kept promising freedom they couldn't deliver when players called them out on it. More likely, it's that we feel safe testing those boundaries because we are aware they are artificial. Key moments include Half-Life 2 and the propensity of players to immediately attempt to murder civilians and allies for the sake of seeing what happens. This behavior is illogical even in the game world's context, but because it has no consequences, players become curious and decide to question the premise of the game.

It is good that we do not question society by shooting people in the face, although sometimes this is what real people in this world have done. Game critics tend to make fun of these game conventions, and while I am much more interested in what designers are saying through the worlds they create than in what I can say within them, designers often need a reminder that the choices they set up in the games they make may, in fact, mask a deeper prejudice.

Bioswift: A Solution to the Problem With Our Communities

2011-10-03T15:17:00.000-07:00

It's happened to all of us at some point: we've witnessed a person, on the Internet, criticize a game. All of us have wondered in response: what can be done? It is clear to all of us that this is one of the most significant problems facing the games industry at the moment. How will games ever be recognized as art if they are constantly subjected to ruthless, unfair, and venomous criticism? As games inspire our hopes, dreams, and imaginations, a significant portion of self-proclaimed gamers insist on focusing on the negative, comparing video games to ridiculously unattainable standards such as film, comics, television, and other video games.

Obviously, video games are just video games; taking them too seriously is for nerds and Ian Bogost. But at the same time, video games are as meaningful to us, and more, than any work of literature. So when an Internet commentator leaves a negative comment, such as "it sucks" or "it's offensive to people who are not in the majority " or "It's strong but could be better" it's a unproductive sentiment that does nothing to advance cultural acceptance of video games or to increase our appreciation and love for video games as a whole.

Fortunately, the solution is within our grasp. With just a few small changes to the way we communicate on the Internet, we can finally usher in a new age of dialogue about video games.

Since its inceptions, the enthusiast press(I prefer the more dignified term "true gamer loyalist press") has been beset by two masters: the makers of the wonderful form of television entertainment know as video games, and the people who love to play them. The press has long belabored under a misunderstanding that made it difficult for them to serve both equally. On the one hand, the developers made video games, but on the other hand, their audience wanted honesty and fairness. This was frustrating for everyone. The press was forced to maintain a careful balancing act: How honest was too honest? What was not honest enough? Sometimes it was impossible to tell, and the press ended up with angry comments, or no review copies. Surely playing the role of publicist and judge was not out of the realm of possibility, but the enterprise seemed doomed to fail.

Fortunately, I have the answer: the problem is, and has always been, criticism. We know that games are wonderful. Why is this not enough? The answer is that it is enough, and we should stop worrying otherwise. Long has the press thought that gamers wanted a critique of their favorite games that have not been released, but this is far from the truth: gamers want only to know how wonderful the games are.

What a burden will be lifted from the press when this truth is accepted! The first step towards implementing this strategy is to ensure that 8 is the lowest score a game can receive. While we know that some games are better than others, we also know that all games are good: why else would it make sense that we know what we like before it comes out? Occasionally there are disappointments, yes, but these can all be handled through Yahtzee's department of spoof and shenanigans, to serve as an outlet for the understandable but unproductive desire to hate things other people like. We can even vastly improve this system by forcing all games to be skewered in such a manner, which will keep community morale high while being sufficiently in-jokey to not alert the cultural as a whole to idea that games are bad.

We can also safely ban and/or shun commentors and critics of all kinds, safe in the knowledge that if they were real gamers, they wouldn't engage in such unproductive behavior. Have you ever met a gamer that didn't like video games? The very thought is absurd! Why allow pernicious non-gamer influence into our communities if all they have to offer is a refutation of years of the very hardest work by some of the top people in this industry? If a games PR specialist offers a certain interpretation of the universe, such as that Rage does not look like every game released in the past five years, what arrogance would it be on our part to refute him? Is this what professional journalism has become? If it were possible to make better creative or business decisions, it stands to reason that they would have already been made by them. If it was possible to do better, surely the games press would be the titans of the industry instead of the other way around.

This sort of banning will require a great deal of diligence, but reputable companies can help by refusing review copies to known critics, or in extreme cases, banning their accounts on Steam, PSN, or Xbox live. Such measures may be looked upon as extreme, but if a critic does not intend to like a game, what right does she have to play it? Certainly their are millions infinitely more deserving than the critic, who spends more time generating words out of a keyboard than headshots. This is only asking for trouble, and there is no shortage of true loyalist gamers eager for the chance to express their love in the modern sonnet of our age, the thousand word review.

Once we have refreshed the community by removing comments on games that have been released (for the sake of historicity, a twenty-year embargo can be implemented so that the unfortunate necessity of academic involvement can at least be postponed until true gamers have ceased caring) it's time to look at how the process can be streamlined. Eventually, it will become possible to give a metacritic score to a game before the pre-alpha stage through the application of simple logic: if video games are good, and a company is making a game that is good, how could it intellectually be possible for the game to be bad? Gamers will finally have to confidence and reassurance that the game they will spend three years anticipating will be a 9/10, rather than having their hopes dashed at the last moment by an unscrupulous critic.

I am but a dreamer, but I know that in the end, love for games will win out. We have come so far, and in the horizon I can see the beautiful gaming future that waits for all of us.

Good, Clean, Fun

2011-09-26T19:30:00.000-07:00

The people whose knowledge and expertise re: The World of Gaming have displayed to me in no uncertain terms again and again in single voice that gamification is at best the worst thing to happen to the human race since market research. They are people who I respect, who talk about how it is bullshit and who write Chrome apps to change the word gamification to a more accurate term. On the other side is a legion of people whose job description is to maximize profits, and someone who is too naive to distance herself from them. I will explain my conclusions.

My father works in an English department and is responsible for me using Macs since long before they were cool and depriving me of every good PC game before 2008 except Marathon and Dark Castle. He's got a secretary. She, like most people bored at work and adjacent to computer, plays a lot of Facebook. She plays Facebook because it's a video game (incidentally, games on Facebook are as redundant as monetizing products). There's a minigame within Facebook that she plays a lot of; after describing it to my father, he realized it was Farmville.

I don't know if she spends money on Farmville. Neither does my father. She does, however, have a gambling problem. Things have sometimes been rocky for her. She is in her thirties, and I hear older women spend a lot of money on this gamification thing. At least, that's what the market research says.

If you get bored here, please read insert credit on gamification and McSweeny's on gambling, attempting to find a difference between how the institutions find and target customers.

The US has some severe laws regulating online gambling.

Gambling is considered to technically be a form of entertainment; the Vermont Lottery advertises their lottery with the slogan "It's good, clean fun!"

Video games are some of the most fun things a human being can reasonably be expected to experience. Designers talk about fun as if they are alchemizing it out of gold, but I have never seen a box of video game that dared use the word on its packaging.

Note to my students: stating something without evidence makes your claim suspicious. How is it fun? The Vermont Lottery believe that the sheer enthusiasm of their lie will win you over. Gears of War lists the kinds of aliens you can decapitate and the chainsaw guns you can use to do it. Gears of War supports its claim.

For thousands of years, the house has worked to improve its odds. This is because gambling that is fair makes no sense; it's an arbitrary form of wealth redistribution that rewards the compulsive mathematically, over time, with their own money again and again. It is entertainment from putting your cash in a time machine.

The house exists to provide this same entertainment while making sure that a cut is taken. For the service of sending your money through a phone microwave, you subliminally pay the house its share. It works best because the wins and losses come too fast to keep proper track of. If the risk reward is hard to perfectly and mathematically grasp, then it becomes easy to imagine, with sheer enthusiasm, that your wins outnumber your losses.

All of my gambling friends consider themselves consistant winners. They know they come out on top.

The Nevada Gaming Control Board reported that in July 2011, Nevada Casinos took in $860,089,795.

Obviously the most nakedly efficient method of gambling would be the ludicrous promise of math black magic: you pull the lever on the slot machine and Monopoly money comes out. Which is fucking awesome, right? This shit is basic, isn't it? Farmville is more of a game than slots.

The only reason "social" games aren't considered gambling is because they have achieved such perfect cruelty that there is no possible return from the customer on their investment.

There is no other difference. This is not a skinner box. This is a slot machine that blinks and doesn't give you any money. It gives you plastic coins when you pull the lever.

This is not video games. It is the evolutionary end of gambling. It is the other gaming, the one with the scary laws.

This is the part of the essay in which you must now realize that my naked bias against the specter of gamification has revealed a terrible, immanent, and real threat to the actual game industry, perhaps in its entirety, because who can distinguish legally between social games and video games anyway? Privacy issues are the red herring, but it will turn many eyes upon the unpleasant aspects of social games and they already know an 8-year-old-kid spent $1,400 on smurfberries.

I do not promise this. I am not a pundit, and thus not dumb enough to know how smart I am. This means I know my limits to predict the future of social games.

There will soon be many eyes on the social gaming sphere, and their future will depend on how well they can prevent anyone who cares from reaching this same conclusion.

Spoil Me Rotten

2011-09-15T23:02:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia, a fascinating disaster zone for popular culture, proves time and again that those most knowledgeable about their fandom are frequently the least equipped to write about it.

A character description should probably just describe the character, not relate their entire history. Not that I am smarting from particular case of spoileritis, but I recently read a Wikipedia entry that, had it been for Charles Foster Kane, would have been the equivilent of : "A boy raised as heir to a vast fortune whose favorite possession is his childhood sled named ROSEBUD."

Incidentally, Citizen Kane was spoiled for me by the opening sequence of Animaniacs. Everyone in my generation has grown up on a mountain of baby boomer pop culture that's constantly referenced and refereenced and satirized, that we get and understand only through the relationships we have with our parents. If multigenerational cross-referencing has no upper limit it will be complicated world for our children indeed, but for now the main consequence is unlimited satire is that we grow up with spoilers as our punch lines. Animaniacs is the one I remember, but it was hardly the only one.

So years later, upon watching Citizen Kane for the first time, I started off knowing the biggest spoiler in cinema history alongside "I am your Father" (which was ALSO spoiled for me).

I can't say that it ruined Citizen Kane for me because I can't know what it would have been like to watch Citizen Kane without knowing Rosebud is his sled. One thing I can tell is that Rosebud is one of the least important parts of that film. It's about the journey to that point, the picture of the person who is Charles Foster Kane. All of this is totally clear to the viewer long before they throw his sled in the fire.

This is the one side of the spoiler. The other side is the horrible sinking pit in your stomach that forms when you learn something long before you're supposed to, like the killer in Persona 4. This is the part unaccounted for in the Ars article on the subject, and one that's certainly worth discussing. Why do we feel that way? Why do spoilers annoy us? If reading it while spoiled is just as good, why do we care? Is something lost or do we just assume something is lost?

This is difficult to answer because we cannot look into the alternate universe where I somehow avoided the spoilers for Citizen Kane, just as we can't look into the future in which I was spoiled for Madoka Magica. Was I spoiled for Harry Potter? I don't even remember, to be honest, and maybe that in itself says something.

To read a spoiler is a nasty experience. It feel like being cheated. Yet spoilers are also a lie—they're a wikipedia summary at best. And seriously, who would compare the experience of reading something they liked to the experience of reading the summation on the Internet? To have any sense of the value of writing or any artistic craft we've got to believe that the way a story is told is infinitely more important that the paragraph that restates the major plot points.

I still hate being spoiled, but I hate it because of that nasty feeling you get in being told something that would have been told better by the actual artist. I cannot say that a spoiler has ever reduced the experience of something that was not already bad.

I think spoiler warnings are a good idea—but I can't see spoilers as doing any lasting harm.

Sailor Moon for Twentysomethings that Grew up Watching Evangelion

2011-08-19T05:01:00.000-07:00

Love Me Do

You should go ahead and watch Madoka Magica before you read this. You liked anime didn't you? You'll like it, I promise.

Film critics who enjoy flaunting their disconnection with society at large enjoy comparing the latest sequence of explosions arranged in a movie-like pattern to a "video game." I find this pretty funny, because I think that today's standards for videogames would be a bit higher if the people making them had watched movies other than Predator, but that's not what I want to talk about today. Today, it's about game design in old-fashioned linear narrative. That is, movies that are like video games in that they have elements of game design, not in that they have explosions.

Madoka Magica, which is depicted very accurately in the above picture, is an anime whose premise follows a game-like premise that drives the drama of the story. This is not uncommon in anime and manga, because unlike the highly lucrative IPs of the tight-clad heroes of our comic books, Japanese comics can be canceled by an editor sneezing. Many of them, including your favorites from when you were twelve in which men screamed at each other five days a week, ran in weekly publications. If you want to fill 22 pages a week (or write a novel in three days), you need to have a system down. Game-like premises work really well for this because a few simple rules creates an engine for drama that can go as long or short as the whims of their fans and editors (or you could just have guys scream at each other every week). So you end up with series that have silly rules with endless possibilities—like "Ranma turns into a girl when splashed with cold water" or "I'm in despair about this minor annoyance of modern Japanese society" or "Whoever wins this duel will be engaged to this girl with psychological issues." They're helpful for many reasons, but particularly in serial fiction because something new and fun has to happen every week.

Pretty much all science fiction and fantasy runs on rules like this—we've got a machine that predicts future crimes, or we've got a time machine, or we're all going to die if we can't get rid of this ring. Philip K. Dick never really gave a shit why or how his science worked, he just set it up and threw his characters in it to see what they did. What do you do in world where the US lost WWII, knowing that this wasn't the way things were meant to happen? Dick is a good fucking writer, so he can make a bunch of random, insignificant people his protagonists, and watching them stumble through this nightmare world is absolutely chilling.

Rules fuel drama—they indicate exactly what's at stake, and they make the writer's job much easier because the character are always having to deal with the rules. Ranma's got to keep people from finding out secret, after all, although it's not like it matters that much. But readers know he's got to do everything to stop that from happening. And they know exactly what will screw up his plans, so we laugh when he just barely stops himself from falling into a lake—and then it starts raining and soaks him through.

This shit is funny, but humor depends on drama and tension and action. Without these rules, or if we didn't know the rules, the tension wouldn't be there. This means that, yes, entirely linear narratives are actually using game design. And conversely, that video games are inherently dramatic.

Well, maybe it's none of these things but this: rules make drama.

Much like life, Madoka Magica is a permadeath MMO. Unlike life, though, you can stave off death. Magical girls run off of a horrible cycle in which by using magic they become closer and closer to turning into a monster. They can only recharge by killing monsters (which in turn feed on humans). This creates an obvious population problem, and a vicious cycle that leads to endless tragedy.

Rules are boring though. What's interesting is watching people navigate those rules, just as it's fun to navigate them ourselves. So let's look at how two of them navigate this.

Sayaka is the main character's best friend, who becomes a magical girl in the middle of the series in exchange for her terminally ill crush being healed. Kyouko is homeless and has been fighting monsters for a long time. As a result, she is a lot better at this game, while Sayaka is a bit of a scrub.

It's not like we needed another word to mean noob, but scrub is actually pretty helpful, since it describes the arrogance of the unexperienced, someone who persists in making a mistake and rather than fixing themselves, lashes out at the system.

Sayaka wouldn't have much sympathy if she was playing Street Fighter, in Madoka Magica, gaming the system means letting monsters eat humans until they get big enough to drop the loot you need to keep living. Being good at humanity means being bad at being a magical girl, something that is driven home again and again throughout the series.

Madoka Magica speaks to the potential for rules to make humans behave in terrifying ways, much like the horrifying Mildgram experiment that measured just how easy it was to pressure human beings to violate their conscience in the face of authority. The Mildgram experiment is a model for just how easily rules can affect morality, and game design is constantly forcing us to behave in bizarre ways. In GTAIV pedestrians are basically speedbumps, making Sayaka the person who tries to obey the impossible laws of traffic in that game, where even the laws of physics encourage wanton destruction.

Maybe the reason why we are talking about and enjoying video games is because they speak to a fundmental human reality—we live our lives governed by countless rules. Games are not the first to speak to how they fuel the drama of our lives, but they are uniquely positioned too. There's a lot to be learned about game design from linear narrative.

Passing the Buck

2011-08-11T13:13:00.000-07:00

I Really Wish Someone Would Make an Andy Warhol shop of the Femshep Parade

The Mass Effect 3 Shepard beauty pageant was an obviously brilliant move, but I'm still trying to decide if cynical or sarcastic describes it best.

The story so far (that I have decided to believe) is that Bioware found itself in a lose-lose situation in which it would be forced to choose a certain iconic look of the female version of its cipher-protagonist and thus be judged (rightly) for the implications of that choice. Bioware has a fairly impressive commitment to diversity for a AAA game studio so expectations were high, yet that did not put them above the real or imagined (mostly imagined) pressures of What The People Want (more white people, preferably male and bald).

Cleverly, to avoid this fight, Bioware decided to pass the buck on to the community and let them take the blame for Shepard's default look. In this way, no matter what commentary on racial diversity or female stereotypes that this choice could be interpreted as, it is now the community's fault, and we have no one but ourselves to blame.

So you see how this could be interpreted either as a cynical ploy to shift blame or a sarcastic indictment of the community that voted the blonde Shepard in. And of course arguments against her become very complicated as well, because acting like there is something wrong with a blonde woman saving the universe is a pretty big problem too.

I find this strategy kind of disappointing. I mean, whatever, Shepard is a totally nonlinear character and this is just marketing bullshit so who cares yet...letting the majority decide on an issue of diversity is a bit funny, isn't it? I wouldn't suggest a better way of staging a contest, however I might say: are contests really a good way to decide anything vaguely creative? I'll keep reminding myself MARKETING CAMPAIGN but the look of characters is something that, (and I'll be naive while saying this) are made by wonderful talented people who can be trusted to do wonderful things. I rely on these people to tell me stories and if it is difficult for a group of dozens to tell a coherent and personal story it would be insane to assume the decision of (let's say) thousands or millions would produce anything of that realm.

Thus, disappointment. Again, MARKETING CAMPAIGN, yet the unwillingness to take a stand is kind of sour, isn't it, like shoving us on stage instead and watching us fumble instead of taking the lead. Well, they certainly aren't obligated too, but on the other hand they are storytellers and I do tend to like the stories they tell. They also do enjoy telling stories about racism and such with blue people and elves, so taking a stand—any kind of stand might be something I'd hope for them to do.

So maybe I am just feeling a bit mean, but I don't want Bioware to feel like pushing the decision on us gets them off the hook. There is no way to perfectly score on an issue of diversity like this, which is not a bad thing at all. Diversity is so big and so complicated our only choice is to stumble forward and brutally criticize each other for falling short. That's the only way we're going to learn.

I Hate that Hedgehog

2011-08-03T10:12:00.000-07:00

This story started as I flew downwards on Juri's dive kick and pounded Rufus right in the face with it like a scrub and everything went all slow-motion, which is the best feature of Street Fighter IV other than how satisfying the punching sound effects are, because you get to feel the exact moment of loss or victory before your brain can even notice the life bar go empty. So finally, and as Juri danced around my 18% win ratio, I suggested that we play something else before my friend beat me in the rematch.

"Eh sure, check out my demos," he said. Perhaps if it was possible to create a painless UI for a console I would have been saved, but then I scrolled past the Sonic 4 demo and then grimaced so hard my friend heard it across the room.

"You should check it out. It's pretty decent, although I probably wouldn't buy it."

"Oh man, I don't know. I try not to touch Sonic anymore," I said, starting the game. This is the destiny of all those cursed children who owned a Genesis in their youth.

The worst part about Sonic 4 is that it looks so much like Sonic 2 that if I just let my eyes go out of focus the fuzzy colors could nix the difference between the 3D and 2D and I'd be seeing the same green hills, same palm trees and waterfalls, same spikes and loops and little robots. Same spinning blue in the middle of the screen. This was my first clue that something was wrong.

My eyes couldn't tell the difference, but my thumbs could.
"This game fucking sucks."

"Oh come on, it's not that bad. He's got this homing attack, it makes the game a lot more interesting."

"I'm not joking, he moves like molasses. This is so weird."

He shook his head. "That's pure nostalgia talking. You played Sonic when you were three, right? There's no way it will compare to your memories. This game is fine."

I trudged reluctantly up a loop. It felt so much like being underwater I wished that terrifying drowning music would start playing and put me out of my misery.

"Are you okay?"

"My head hurts," I said.

"Drink more water," he said, refreshing his drink.

But it wasn't the tequila. Well, it was the tequila, since my head hurt the next morning, but when my hands were on that controller it was easily 50, 60 percent Sonic the Hedgehog 4. I could feel that old wound aching again, and there is no deeper wound in all the wide land of video games than the one in the heart of every human being who owned a Sega Genesis.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing. It is also not a lie. Nostalgia is not invention so much as forgiveness, specifically the forgiveness of Act 1 of Aquatic Ruin zone and the part where you climb upside-down through sheer speed through an ivy-encrusted ruin and as soon as you are level again a robot with drills for hands bursts through the wall like the kool-aid man. This moment, and there are many like it in Sonic, can be generously described as "pure bullshit" but this is why nostalgia is necessary.

Nostalgia forgives the unforgivable because within the sequences of that favorite game of yours there exists something worth forgiving, something so awesome that you complain about it to this day. The bitter core of games journalism is driven by an insatiable thirst for Sonic the Hedgehog that will never be satisfied. This does invoke an image of Tim Rogers with a stuffed hedgehog around his neck intoning "Sonic, Sonic, every where; And all the boards did shrink: Sonic, Sonic, every where; Nor any drop to drink."

This also doesn't have to do with anything, but remember that Lumines fanfiction and Sega memorabilia drove UK Resistance for nine years past the death of the Dreamcast. Sonic the Hedgehog is a scientific experiment in the limits of human love for cultural phenomena.

It is as impossible to show someone how Sonic the Hedgehog was a good video game as it is easy to show someone a good Mario game (Or at least it was until last week when Runman was ported to Mac, and I got the Sonic game I've wanted since the nineties). This is because for each era there is a Mario that you can simply take off the shelf and bestow upon a friend, and this game will both conform to the standards of the era as well as the principles of Mario in such a way that they will have an approximation of what you once had when you played Super Mario Bros. 3, even if playing that game now might have confused and frustrated them.

Point: The children who were able to forgive Sonic the Hedgehog found in that forgiveness a game that they've never had the chance to play since. In many ways it was the perfect game for kids, because it was more like a toy than something you had to beat. In the modern manshoot logic, Games=fun and fun=challenging, but what about when you just sort of want to play for its own sake and that being said:
do you remember playing with superballs as a kid?

Because that is what Sonic is. Not a puzzle of clever jumping through candy-colored blocks, only running and bouncing. Go back to your childhood, specifically when you were dragged to the supermarket on a Sunday, and remember those machines, the ones at the entrance. You'd ask for a quater and put it in and crank, crank, crank, out popped the little plastic thing that looks like a UFO with all kinds of things inside.

Superballs are the smallest, simplest possible way to have infinite fun. No kid is guaranteed more fun for a shorter period of time with the highest possible catastrophic consequences as with a superball. When you're a kid, just experiencing the laws of physics is enough to keep you entertained, and superballs are perfect because kids are small and weak in a world built for much bigger creatures. The superball has more energy and power than anything else in the world and even a kid can just barely touch it and it'll ricochet off the floor, into the shelves, a stranger's shopping cart, and while your mother apologizes profusely the kid in the cart will start crying that she wants one, and as the disaster slowly consumes the aisle and then the entire store, there's more than enough time to sneak some pop tarts in the grocery cart.

This is what it's like to play Sonic the Hedgehog.

Sonic is a game where you can hold right to beat a level and still have fun because winning it just something that happens when you play it, not something you care about doing. The exit is there so you can have a direction to run, because all you want to do in Sonic is bounce and run. This was the polar opposite of Mario, which is all about thinking and timing and exploring and puzzling. Sonic was more toy than game, and screwing around without a care is something a lot of us miss.

Evening of Earth

2011-07-05T10:20:00.000-07:00

It will not be a real game as I can't program (thanks Ren'py!) and have no art because I can't draw (thanks Wikimedia Commons!). All I can promise is a series of short science fiction stories starring emotionally incompetent protagonists.

Your ex-boyfriend has invented a machine that lets you see a random end of the world. Roll the dice and hope that by watching, you can find a way so we don't end up like all those poor dead people (spoilers: nope).

Features:

•Sarcastic commentary on apocalyptic tragedy
•Pretending you're over someone when you're not
•Talking tanks
•Extremely disappointing zombies
•Artwork composed on pirated software
•No anime
•Utterly meaningless gameplay decisions

The theme is "romantic pessimism"

I am making this game for fun and to apply for an Official License To Talk About Videogames. Look forward to actionable critique, coming late this summer from Mammon Machine.

Jamestown

2011-07-01T08:11:00.000-07:00

It’s one thing for such a story to amuse and surprise, it’s quite another for it to charm. Jamestown describes its Martians as “betentacled,” understanding that anachronistic neologisms are the most important part of world building.

Jamestown is a retelling of the history of Space Invaders through a retelling of the history of 17th century colonialism. It is a loving, careful recreation of the most modern entries in the Shmup, one of gaming’s oldest and most awkwardly named genres.

Jamestown does just enough innovation to keep the genre fresh, and they steal from the best; a dash of indie game series Touhou’s boss patterns, a generous helping of lone shooter bastion Cave’s pink bullets, and a surprising cherry top of Ikaruga’s claustrophobic level design. For shooter fans, Jamestown is awe-inspiring in its faithfulness. This is not a surface reading; this is a PHD thesis worth of understanding.

Jamestown has modest ambitions; no superstar research and scholarship. No stirring up the genre. Jamestown just want to teach. Jamestown does what no other shooter has done and turned a genre that was fun because it was impossible and made it possible for human beings to enjoy, without sacrificing the pain and frustration that makes the game so sweet.

This battle through a steampunk colony of Mars (a playful joke on “New World”) doesn’t take so much from that primordial ancestor Space Invaders as it does from its youngest descendants, Japanese bullet hell shooters, and their influence is in Jamestown in everything from the hypnotic waves of pink and purple lasers that cover the screen like fireworks to the terrifying stress of weaving through them. Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than some of these patterns.

Which is, incidentally, the reason this genre has shrunk so much. Today’s Shmups are, arguably, only for those people who have in some small way transcended their human limitations.

Such difficulty has its origins in their arcade origins. Good Shumps were punishingly difficult so they could vacuum up quarters, yet possible enough that each game brought players tangibly closer to beating the whole game on a single credit. It’s that exhausting and exhilarating feeling of training and getting better and better that makes these games so fun. People who play Shumps have the same brains as those who run marathons.

But how do you make that transition with a genre whose difficulty curve was based entirely on plunking in quarters, with the assumption that its players had reasonable allowances? Most of Jamestown’s contemporaries have infinite virtual quarters, but in doing so they make death meaningless, the equivalent of running a marathon on a Segway.

Jamestown knows good shooters backwards and forwards. Jamestown understands what makes Shumps fun. It understand that means making them hard. Jamestown understand what makes Shumps fun so well that it effectively breaks the game up into manageable chunks.

I am not eager to extoll the merits of treadmill rewards and achievements, but that’s just what Jamestown uses to train you. But maybe the difference is that Jamestown thinks of itself as a gym, while World of Warcraft thinks of itself like gym class. Good job, says World of Warcraft, everyone’s a winner!

Jamestown is a personal trainer, eternally patient, supremely helpful, always accessible, knowledgable and informative, and offers no reward other than personal satisfaction. All of its many achievements and alternate modes exist only to make you better at the simple art of shooting and being shot.

These are little things, like surviving for 15 seconds against a horde of small robots and their screen-coating pink lasers.The intensity of those 15 seconds isn't the norm for Jamestown, but you'll encounter those 15 seconds of terror, give or take, again and again throughout the game, and this mode prepares you for them. These 15 seconds will be the longest of your life, guaranteed. They will also end prematurely again, and again, and again. But when those 15 seconds are up and you're still alive, something miraculous has happened: you are better at a video game.

It almost seems dumb, doesn't it? But Shumps, like fighters, are one of the few genres that make training seem fun. You can feel yourself getting better. The best thing about Jamestown is that its achievements and gated content are fuel for achieving true success, not a replacement for them.

The Video Game RPG Illusion

2011-06-24T13:00:00.000-07:00

I don't get tired of talking about World of Warcraft, even though I got tired of playing it. It's like talking about some long-running sitcom that most people you know are tired of but they've all watched it and you've still got a few friends who love it. If it was the nineties, WoW would be the Friends of video games.

No one seems able to stop talking about WoW the way some people can't seem to stop playing it. We're fascinated by that endless ladder that captivates players and irritates critics. How did they make that net to catch millions and millions of people and keep them there? If we aren't caught in it, we're wondering how they did it.

We also hate it. We hate the treadmill of it, the fact that the game rewards players for time instead of effort, the feeling that, despite the obvious fact that the game is an illusion inherently, that somehow not "earning" rewards makes it fake. Jonathan Blow was the loudest and fiercest critic of WoW's approach to game design, because it offered candy, not nutrition, but that still begs the question of what makes one illusion so different from the other.

The effort in creating a purely illusory sense of advancement is pretty incredible, if depressingly pointless. It is in all seriousness awesome that this is possible. Look at all the work that goes into that illusion, then remember that the entire game is an illusion.

Is WoW bad because its fun is fake, or because its fun is shallow? The sin of WoW's treadmill leveling isn't that it's the greatest trick ever played, it's that the stakes are so low. All media is never anything more than illusions. More illusions=more in your bag of tricks to give everyone the feeling that something really amazing actually happened. WoW can't be blamed for tricking players; it can only be blamed for what it tricks them into.

Dungeons and Dragons understood this and that's why it invented the treadmill in the first place. It's not a platonic ideal of game design, it's a game about paperback hero fantasy, and D&D uses game mechanics to make players feel like the swashbuckling treasure hunters of Conan and pulp. Should we judge D&D on how fun the combat is, or how much the players feel like they're fantasy heroes?

Those may be two right answers to the same question. You might even be able have both at the same time. Let's still not let WoW's failure to do anything interesting with its greatest illusion close the idea of using it productively.

Duke Nukem FOR NEVER LOL

2011-06-20T20:25:00.000-07:00

It would make me look like a smug jerk if I said I saw this coming, but, I saw this coming.

14 years is a long time. You know how sometimes they say stuff like that for movies, like it's a good thing? Usually they are lying, and really mean"I watched Outer Limits as a kid, and then thirteen years later I wrote Terminator. NEARLY TWO DECADES IN THE MAKING" or something like that. This is because an unexpected benefit of actors being temperamental is that they will not spend fourteen years on a film set. If anyone involved wanted to make a good game, and not just market the legendary failure, they wouldn't have even looked at what 3D realms had been making. There is no possible way that baggage could help today's ultracompetitive FPS market, where new ideas are the only possible way to get sales from the under the looming shadow of giants like Halo and Modern Warfare.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the games industry is that it is possible to spend so much time on making a video game. American workaholic culture leads video games to be made under the assumption that the more hours sunk into a project the better, and so we have year long crunch times and 80 hour work weeks. Somehow I doubt that Duke will make the industry reconsider if the way it spends its time is healthy, but perhaps we can at least invoke its name when these sorts of arguments come up.

The real victim here, though, is Gearbox. When Take-Two got the rights to Duke Nukem Forever, what studio on earth could turn around over a decade of failure in less than two? Considering the game's age, though, it's possible that more than a few members were in Duke Nukem's target audience when it was first announced. I really wish I knew what it was like at Gearbox when they learned they'd be finishing DNF. Were they ecstatic, nervous, thinking they'd been handed a childhood dream and the chance of a lifetime? Or were they savvy enough to be suspicious? When they were handed the unfinished game to complete, were they gripped with dawning horror? For that matter, what did Take-Two even hand them? How much did they have to make up from scratch and how much did they even use?

A PR firm lost a client and fired a spokesperson over how bad the reviews for this game were; the bad luck that follows the swirling hole of money that is Duke Nukem just doesn't seem to end. Actually content aside, Duke stands poised to be the Macbeth of video games, so cursed it won't be mentioned by name.

Everyday Game Design

2011-06-07T07:46:00.000-07:00

Warning, this post contains gratuitous amounts of Modern Warfare discussion.

Games are art because they do exactly what all other art does, through the medium of game mechanics.

I think that it is very cool that games are art and we don't have to discuss it anymore. Every time this dead horse rises from its grave, we beat it down a little harder, and with video games now in museums we can lift our brandy and monocles in triumph and ignore the mournful neighing outside the window.

Still, while the debate over whether or not games are art has ended, the debate over how they are art has just begun. Figuring this out is important enough that even the crowd that sees games criticism in terms of how actionable it is will find this is as important as it gets.

If "art" is too exclusive and pretentious a word (and let's face it, it is) just mentally switch the word "art" in this post with entertainment. Many would say that there's an inherent difference between the two, but when it comes to actually pinning it down it becomes really hard to do so. Maybe art has a special degree of sophistication or whatever, but we use the same tools to make art as we do entertainment, and using those tools well and knowing how to use them results in good art and good entertainment.

The point is that humans are drawn to art and entertainment both because they make human beings feel things, and that is the same reason they are drawn to video games.

In other words, not because video games are fun.

Not to say that fun doesn't factor into why people play games, but it certainly isn't the last word and it isn't the only end for game design. Modern Warfare may be fun, but it also taps into a certain fantasy about war that is most accurately embodied by the above video: fake war about gritty Americans kicking ass to save the motherfucking day. Of course it looks like a film, because even though the methods are so different(game vs film) the resulting emotions in your human brain are scarily similar.

Modern Warfare wants to plant certain emotions in your brain, and despite the voice acting and the cutscenes and Tom Clancy plot, it works, and it works because of mechanics. Think of those moments in which you exchange gunfire and take cover: In those few seconds of waiting and recovering, you're thinking only about how to shoot the person who just shot you.

Modern Warfare isn't necessarily fun, and in fact, I'd say most if not all video games are fun incidentally—they're actually about conveying a very specific EXPERIENCE to players. This is the reason why many game designers would prefer that the word fun could be banished from the industry. I mean, it's not like there have been games that were critical and financial successes called Silent Hill despite not being fun in any possible sense of the word, and in fact it was precisely because the combat of that game was not fun that the game succeeded so powerfully in being scary.

Gamification has raised some ugly possibilities for games, but if nothing else they've proven that games aren't just a fun diversion but a force that can really have a hold on people. I doubt gamification is much worse than the emotional predation of the cover of a lifestyle magazine, so this is less a new revelation and more the disappointing affirmation that game mechanics are just as manipulative as the written word.

Stick it to the Man (wow I need to go back to pun college)

2011-05-24T17:59:00.000-07:00

So I decided to get a fighting stick. However, I am flighty and forgetful, so it was important that I get a stick that cost less than fifty bucks, betting on the likelihood that I would both forget about it and continue to be bad at fighters.

The go-to stick for vaguely reasonable price and good parts is the long since sold out Street Fighter 4 standard edition, which now sells for ridiculous prices. In today's world, buying a fight stick for less than $100 has become difficult. This is a pretty heavy barrier to entry for aspiring fighters (me) who must now pay premium entry fee for the right to get their ass kicked in new and exciting ways while learning a how to control their(my) characters again for the first time.

The reality of any competitive game is that, unlike the gentle and lovingly crafted learning curve of a single player game which makes you better without you even realizing it, competitive games mean getting punched in the face constantly while fighting for every inch of improvement.

This, I believe, is more than enough reason to pay under $100 for that privilege, which is why I resisted the move to stick for so long.

But when I play with a controller, what I'm missing torments me. In street fighter it’s obvious; six attacks, four face buttons. The math speaks for itself: that does not add up. Now, one might question a game that has six buttons for a race of creatures with five fingers, but I think we can fudge that math a little.

In all seriousness, the main reason why you need a stick's buttons is to press them at the same time. Street Fighter in particular lets you execute moves by releasing them, and on a controller, it's a mess fumbling with one's thumb to cover the right ones at the right time.

Nothing is more frustrating than seeing the opportunity and having one’s execution fail. To have the opponent land in your face and fail to counter with the 360. To watch them come falling down to you and to produce a fireball instead of an uppercut.

This is where tears are born.

So I went to the cheapest stick I could find. It was far, far cheaper than it had any right to be, for about half what it was supposed to go for. This result is about as bad as expected, but it is, at least, a stick. The buttons squish like mud and the joystick clicks like a horde of chattering skeletons, but again, and I can’t emphasize this enough; it is a stick.

I got this particular stick not only because it was cheap but because it was “easy to mod.” Apparently that is a dangerous statement because while I might assume that easy to mod means something like snapping buttons in and out, this turned out not to be the case, because for my sources online "easy to mod" means wielding dremel tools and soldering guns against the poor plastic of my stick. So this should be fun. I’ll be using this stick until it wears out or I rage too hard at missing inputs. And if I destroy it, hey, only twenty-five bucks.

Skulls for Girls, Part 2: Skull Harder

2011-05-19T06:16:00.000-07:00

Here it is, the legendary (not really) part II of my interview with Mike Z. It's a bit shorter than part I, because I suck at formatting. WHOOPS. Anyways, this part of the interview was actually my favorite, as I am a nerd for comic art and have been following (stalking) the artists and animators working on this before Skullgirls was even a real thing. They're all very talented and it's great to see them working together.

In this part, Mike Z details how he turns Alex Ahad's art (pictured above) into a thing with hitboxes that can fight. And at the end he's got a final statement summing up his philosophy as a game designer and gamer, and what he finds so compelling about fighters.

MM: How does the process of designing characters with Alex Ahad work?

MZ: There’s a lot of general concepting at first. Then we’ll have a giant brainstorm session with all the artists and come up with, you know, 150 different moves that they could do that all fit in with the aesthetics of the character. For example, with Cerebella [pictured above] a lot of the concept art involved her doing big punches or grabbing people and attacks like slams and that sort of thing, so it sort of falls that she would be a grappler. Then it’s up to me to say that these types of moves make a cohesive grappler, and she’s missing, for example, an anti-air throw so can we get some concepts for that. And it sort of grows organically from there. It mostly comes out of “what types of moves would this character have that fits with their personality?” and once you have a general idea of what they would look like, what archetype would that actually make them? And then we go in and design them with both of those things in mind.

MM: So then do you start off play-testing with some sort of prototype and then add or remove moves based on how it goes?

MZ: Yeah, we usually do key framing for everything so they’ll have a weak punch that’s 3 frames of animation instead of say 15, and we’ll put things in and time them and make sure that everything is actually fair. From there, we come up with a basic working prototype of the character and then go in and fully animate everything and color it in after that.

The basic goal is that they should look cohesive and be fun from day one, well not day one, more like day five because on day one they have like two attacks. But they should be some level of fun and some sort of identifiable character type early on.

MM: It sounds very organic.

MZ: Yeah, I remember reading a bunch of articles on this, but it’s kind of how the Guilty Gear characters evolved. The thing that I really admire about Guilty Gear, more than any other series of fighting games, is that they had a bunch of character designs, and however they designed them originally, whether they figured that Eddie was going to be zoning or Venom was going to be rushdown or whatever, as each game progressed, they actually looked at how people were using the characters and adapted them in the next couple of sequels to be played more that way.

So Anji had an unblockable in the first couple of games and in the later couple of games they changed his gameplay to revolve around being able to set that up in certain situations, because it wasn’t overpowered, it was just really good, and the rest of him was pretty terrible. So they actually let him evolve in ways that let him use the tools that players had found and thought were cool about them. Millia became extremely rushdown and mixup heavy so they allowed her to airdash cancel some of her attacks on hit, and they gave her a couple of extra tools for mixup, and they actually took away one of her tools that made her a really good zoner that she didn’t need to use. So I’m trying to do that some thing, but on a smaller scale, before the first game actually comes out. When people player characters, I look at how they play them in our wednesday night meetings and if they’re playing someone in a certain way that wasn’t how I saw them being played, and it sort of evolves that everyone is playing them that way, then I’ll see what I can do to make them more approachable to play that way.

The concepting stage is really important in fighting games. As you probably know from talking to other game designers, if you give someone complete freedom, it’s really hard for them to figure out what to do. IF you sit them down in front of a world editor and say, “You can make ANYTHING you want” I’ll be like, “i don’t really know what to do, maybe I should put something over there maybe there should be an island? I don’t really know...” but if you say. “we’re making a game set in a destroyed factory, and you get to make the third floor of this destroyed factory” then it’s a lot easier to figure out what I want to do with that because there’s some sort of structure. So the concepting session really helps with all of this. THey sit down and they say what they expect the character should be like.

MM: So do you ever ask the animation team to fill out your roster with certain characters?

MZ: Oh no. He’s the character designer and the characters are who they are and it’s my job to make sure that they’re represented and fair. I look at my job as, if you played with the art off and just the hitboxes on, it ought to be fun and the character ought to be identifiable from just that. I’m the kid that buys the box of Legos—I didn’t make the Legos, but without me there’d be no house.

When we need extra stuff I will say that. A lot of the times when we’re concepting we won’t get weak attacks because everyone really likes to draw big flashy sweeping things. So we usually get tons of good supers, a lot of really good specials, and some really good hard attacks, but we usually don’t get, say, weak punch. So I have to come back and say “well, these are all really cool, but we also need for these other buttons to actually do things so gimmie some stuff that works with that.” A lot of times I’ll think that they need a medium kick that can launch the opponent, so it has to have some sort of upward hit, but beyond that, it’s all up to the artists.

MM: Any final thoughts?

MZ: I hear a lot of people say "Just because you’re good at a game, doesn’t make you a good game designer,” and that is actually 100% true. A lot of people who are good at games wouldn’t know how to make them fun if they didn’t already have a game to be good at. Skill at a game doesn’t necessarily mean you can think about it from all the different ways it would require to make a new game. And i’ve been very fortunate to have been able to be a game designer before, and to approach games from an analytical perspective for a long time. I don’t think I would have been able to create this game if I had just been a player, and I don’t think I would have been able to create this game If I had just been a designer. You have to really look at it from both sides.

Rather than cutscenes, rather than animation, rather than style or all the rest of it, you want to be able to use your controller and feel like you’re actually accomplishing something. The reason that I play fighting games has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that you’re punching people. You could be pillow fighting or hugging or standing around swapping insults, and it would be the same thing. I think a lot of players play for the same reason: it’s completely the person you’re playing against. Are you smarter than them, are you faster than them, did you make the correct decision when they didn’t, did you spot the mistakes that they made, do you know how they think? In these games, it all comes down to you.

Skulls for Girls, Part 1

2011-05-16T08:52:00.000-07:00

I originally did this interview for Gamasutra, but Christian Nutt ended up doing an interview at the same time (which you can read here). Thus, I thought I’d just put it up here. I am ridiculously bad at judging time so this is one long interview! It might be the longest Skullgirls on the internet, for all I know.

I’m really interested in how designers...design, so there’s a lot in here about that. The Skullgirls team has been remarkably open about showing off their game even though it’s still in development—I’ve seen very few games in such an early state, let alone a fighter. So many good things are coming out of the recent indie game movements, but for journalists and aspiring designers, the best is getting clearer picture of how games are made.

I find fighters as fun and interesting as I am bad at them, which is part of why I did this interview. That said, this interview gets into some hardcore details about fighters so I’ve tried to fill it in for those aren’t so savvy. Those who are savvy will probably find it especially interesting.

OH YEAH IMPORTANT: This is a game in the midst of development, so anything stated in this interview could change for the final product. Most of what is discussed is also illustrative examples, not necessarily things that will be in the game, but that's noted as it comes up. Basically, take it easy and don't spread weird rumors and then wonder why game developers aren't more transparent with their design process.

Okay, enough, here's Mike Z, after the jump. Part 1 is mostly about systems, Part 2 focuses on character design.

Mammon Machine: What is Skullgirls doing that other fighters aren’t? What’s the gap it’s trying to fill?

Mike Zaimont: I can only answer that from a gameplay standpoint, but I’m aiming to do two things: First, I’m aiming to be as approachable as possible for beginners, without doing something like adding input shortcuts, or adding an easy mode where all your special moves are on a button, which actually changes the balance of the game and has you learn different strategies.

We’re doing things like making all the motions for everything as simple as possible and as lenient as possible—like if you would have had to hit three punches for a move you only have to hit two, and you don’t have to hit them on the same frame. Or if your character has a 360 move[full circle with the joystick], the game knows that you’re doing it so you won’t jump during the “up” part. We’re doing all that kind of stuff so that beginners can do the things they’re supposed to do without having to change what they’re supposed to do.

MM: You just mentioned that you couldn’t assign special moves to buttons; why is that?

MZ: Number one, it makes moves take a certain amount of time to execute. For example, a move that uses down, down-forward, forward, punch, takes a minimum of three frames—and no one’s really going to do it in three frames. Number two, if you have a move that’s down, down-forward, forward, punch and one that’s down, down-back, back, kick, you can’t be doing them both at the same time; you have to choose one that you want to try to do and do it and if you pick the wrong one, you fail at the situation. You don’t get to cover both of your options and then choose at the end by hitting a button or anything like that.

The reason Sonic Boom, for example, is a charge move is not so much because it fits with the move, but because one of the reasons you make something a charge move is to limit how often the player can do it. If you have to charge for forty frames, you can only do it every forty frames at maximum, and if you have a button, you can just spam it. And if the move has very little startup or recovery, like Sonic Boom does, that’s unbalanced.

MM: So the delay of human interface is important to the balance of the game?

MZ: Yeah. Like, if you put a 720 on one button, and someone is doing a pressure string on you and you’re just smashing on that button you can still be blocking that whole time, and all they have to do is leave a one frame hole at the time you hit the button, and you get your super. People complain about that from the AI all the time when they walk up and do a flash kick in your face or whatever.

We’re never going to get rid of the fireball motion, for example, but we do want to make it as easy as possible to do a fireball motion. There’s a ton of leniency and you can skip the middle direction (only if there wasn’t a neutral inbetween, that’s technical) but basically, if you did anything that looks like you meant to be doing a fireball or whatever motion, then you will get the move associated with that motion.

MM: Is there are reason other games aren’t as lenient?

MZ: They’ve tried. SFIV and to some extent Marvel Vs Capcom 3 have tried to be as lenient as they could possibly be. But they did a lot of it with input shortcuts, allowing you to do completely different motions that have nothing to do with what you were doing to get what you wanted. There’s a really fine line between guessing that you’re doing a fireball and the game actively looking for anything that could possibly be a fireball.

MM: So your worry has to do with accidental inputs?

MZ: Most games will let you cancel a normal move into a special move on the first couple of frames, in case you do down, down-forward punch, and then forward and let go of the button, so you cancel the first frames of the punch into the special move. But in our case we got a step further: if you meant to hit the two buttons at the same time and you were off by a few frames, you’ll actually cancel the special move you did with the one button into the special with the two buttons. Every time there’s a more complicated movement, you have a couple of frames to get it right even if you ended up executing the simpler movement first.

Aside from this, I don’t know why fighting games have chosen to be nice to beginners in the way that they have so far. We actually want to have a training mode that teaches you more than just combos.

MM: That’s a good point. Why do fighting games tend to be so obtuse to beginners?

MZ: Most of the stuff that you need to learn to be good at a fighting game is not attacking, which is what beginning players always want to do. This is one of the most frustrating things when giving interviews, actually. When I was showing third person shooters, you put the controller in someone’s hand, they’ll aim the reticle around, look for an enemy, and shoot him in the head. When you give someone a racing game, they’ll pick a car, point it down the track, try and find the gas pedal, and probably run into a couple of walls. When you hand them a fighting game, they’ll pick a character and immediately start hitting buttons, unless they’re already a good fighting game player, in which case they’ll look for what the special moves are and how all that other stuff works.

It seems to be that the things people instinctively want to do isn’t the stuff that you actually want to do. It’s kind of like real fighting; yeah they teach you how to punch and kick and all that, but a lot of it is about positioning and control and knowing what your opponent is going to do, and momentum and all that other stuff. And that’s the stuff that only comes with practice and instruction.

MM: So how do you give that instruction to players?

MZ: You basically start by teaching defense. Doing attacks is really easy; you press a button and there it is. Planning out defense is not as cool looking and not as straightforward. It doesn’t look glamourous, but it is much more important than learning how to attack. Even if you know a combo that kills your opponent from 100% life, if you can’t hit them, it doesn’t matter. Tutorial modes and things like that for fighting games tend to focus on combos and the stuff that looks flashy, rather than teaching you what you need to know in order to open your opponent up, so you can create situations in which you can do that stuff.

MM: Would you do so by, say, making blocking more interesting, or by teaching them how important it is?

MZ: More of the second; there aren’t a whole lot of things you can do to make blocking more interesting other than giving the player something to do while blocking (which we have). It’s mostly about how you approach the game and what you first tell people. If the game can figure out you’re not blocking, and at the end of the round say, “hey, I noticed you weren’t blocking, you want to learn why it’s useful?” That’s a really easy thing to do.

But to go back to your question of what the aims of this game are, the other half of it is definitely not for beginners at all. I play fighting games all the time at a high level, and I notice a lot of the same things being broken or abusable in a lot of different games. So one of the aims of this game is, rather than taking the traditional game design approach which is test it test it test it, and if character X has some abusable move or some infinite combo then fix character X so they don’t have it, I’m taking the approach of designing the game engine so it doesn’t have it in the first place. Designers always want to make the cleanest game possible and players always want to break it, because that’s what is abusable and that’s what gets you wins. So i’m taking the approach of assuming that players will find broken junk since we can’t possibly fix it all, and limiting what the broken junk that they will find can actually do.

A concrete example of that is, instead of implementing a system of hitstun decay or adding gravity over the course of a combo, or building up a resource to break out of the combo after a certain number of hits to prevent infinite combos.

All of theses are systems currently in games, and they have two downsides. First, all of them will stop long combos that aren’t infinite—even if you would have had to stop eventually, they’ll still stop you early. The second downside is that they won’t stop loops.

The biggest problem with an infinte combo is not that it goes on forever, it’s that it’s a very short sequence of incredibly easy things to do in a row. Iron Man’s infinte from Marvel vs Capcom 2 is hold up-forward and press four buttons, and Captain America’s infinte in Marvel 3 is throw shield slash over and over. The problem is not that the combo goes on forever, it’s that it’s super easy to do, and you just do the same short sequence over and over. So instead of the traditional approach of trying to find all those or put in a sequence that will fix all those, the way that skullgirls handles it is the game engine knows when you’re doing an infinte. It’s not quite that simple, but it basically detects loops and when it detects that you’re doing an infinte, it lets you hit any button and basically escape.

MM: Can you tell me why this particular approach is so much better than other approaches like hitstun and proration?

MZ: Sure, I can compare it a bunch of existing system. The system they had in early vs games is they built up your stun meter so that once you got to what would have been dizzy, you just flew out of the combo. If I do a combo long enough that you would get dizzy, then you pop out of it. The downside of that is that it stops combos that aren’t infinte, and that you could do enough of an infinite that you could kill a character off completely before they got dizzy. So yes, it stopped combos from going on forever, but it didn’t stop them from still being practical and useful.

Hitstun decay and gravity scaling have another downside, which is if you start your combo with different things, sometimes the end of it won’t work. For example, if I normally start with light kick light punch medium punch, and then one time I happen to start it with light punch light punch, then the gravity scaling and hitstun scaling will be slightly more and the end won’t connect. So it actually leads to people looking for short loops because that maximizes your damage. And that leads to a lack of creativity in real gameplay. Because if off of my light punch, for example, there is a “best combo” I can do, if i do anything else, I have cost myself damage or you’ll be able to get out at the end or whatever.

MM: It seems to me that what people on the forefront of the fighting scene really love is creating those combos and finding ways to break the system—does that sound right to you?

MZ: Oh, that’s exceptionally true. What we really like is finding things that the game designers didn’t intend, and what seems to happen then in most games is that once they’re figured out, that’s the end of it.

MM: So then what your system would allow is more freedom for players to discover combos on their own, rather than memorize some perfect combo?

MZ: Exactly. What I really want to get out of this game is the creativity of the older games that really didn’t have any attempts at infinite prevention, like X-men vs Street Fighter, where you can just do anything and it feels so free and so great. I’m trying to go for that, but have the infinite prevention anyway.

So if you want to do something really cool in Skullgirls, like a 100% combo or finish the opponent off really early or something, you have to do resets, you have to really figure out what you want to do and do something that’s long and flashy rather than something short over and over until the other person dies.

MM: So even if you could kill someone in one combo, at least it would look really awesome and be really hard to do.

MZ: Yes. And I have nothing against 100% combos—i do have something against, say, 10 hits being 100%, but I don’t have something against 90 hits and costing five meters to do 100%. That’s not my big problem because if you sit down and practices something like that, hey, why not able to do it?

MM: It sounds like it’s important for players to respect the way that they died, or that they earned what they accomplished.

MZ: Yeah we’re trying to do things that will minimize the cheapness of what they can do. One thing, other than the infinite detection, is—you know what a high/low unblockable is? Basically, if you have a move that can only be blocked low, and a move that can only be blocked high, and can do them at the same time, the other person is unable to block both, because you’d have to be holding the joystick in two different directions at the same time. It’s not really unblockable, because they don’t actually hit on the same frame, they just hit really close together, so it’s just humanly unblockable, because you’d have to switch your joystick on the same frame the move impacts you so that you can defend the second attack, which for all intents and purposes makes it unblockable. Eddie, from Guilty Gear, is top tier because he has unblockables, and he can do a combo and knock you down, and then do an unblockable when you get up, and a combo, then a different unlblockable when you get up, and then kill you. There isn’t anything you can do. Every once in a while you will see someone get extremely lucky and block it and everyone in the crowd is like “WOW! he finnally did it” and then the eddie player is like “crap, i have to hit him again.”

In Skullgirls, what we’re doing to combat this is if you get touched by a hit that forced you to block high or low, for a period of time after that happens, you are protected both high and low. So if you do something humanly unblockable, as long as they block the first hit properly, they’re protected. Unblockables are usually not intended by the game designers, they just sort of fall out of the system or the characters. So what this means is that we can do things like allow you to have low assists or allow you to have overhead assists without ever having to worry about someone discovering an unblockable.

The general approach of the whole engine is to assume people will be looking for things that are broken in this way, and make it so that if they find one that we didn’t catch, it won’t matter. But we can only fix problems that we can anticipate. We have infinite detection in Skullgirls we know it’s been a problem in fighting games before.

The only thing we can hope is that since fighting games have been around for such an extremely long time, and because we’re not reinventing the genre, we’re trying to perfect it, and in that vein most of the problems that players will cause and that the game will encounter have hopefully been encountered by the genre by this point. So we can address the things that are wrong.

MM: Is that why Skullgirls is more focused on overcoming old problems than throwing in new things?

MZ: We do some of that, but it comes out of the way we’ve solved the existing problems. For example, because we know that there aren’t any infinite combos, we can be a lot more free with the juggle system so we can allow you to do something that games don’t let you do, which is go from an air combo to a standing ground combo on your opponent. And we can do that because we know that there aren’t any infinites, and most games don’t let you do that because it leads to extremely easy infinites.

Another thing that we allow are custom assist types. So normally when you pick a team, you choose what you character is going to do when you call them in as a helper. Traditionally, they give you three choices that were designed by the designers, and if they didn’t give your character the assist that you want then you’re SOL.

So we actually have two predetermined assists and one custom which is basically whatever motion you want to do. So you can do a trip, you can do a throw, you can do a launcher, you can basically choose from anything your character is allowed to do other than supers and have that be your assist. So you’re not as constrained by what the game designers think is useable or fair. And the reason we can do that is because we have infinite protection and unblockable protection and other stuff that would prevent players from choosing assists that would be inherently unfair in other games.

MM: What are hardcore players looking for in competitive fighters, and how is Skullgirls going to provide it for them?

MZ: That really differs between players, but a lot of hardcore players are looking for, honestly, the cheapest in their mind that other people can’t get around. Some hardcore players are looking for a cool character that they can really bond with; I’m one of those, I’ll play who I like regardless of how good they are, but a lot of people are just looking for who’s best, or how to I win with the least effort.

I think most hardcore players are, regardless of what type of character they want to play or even which game they’re playing, they’re looking for something that feels either the fairest, or the least fair, depending on who you ask. They’re looking for a game either in which everything is abusable or everything is pretty fair.

Artist Tuesday: Emily Carroll

2011-05-10T09:52:00.000-07:00

Emily Carroll is wonderful with fairy tales. She uses stark colors, lots of shadows, and characters with plump bodies and pointed limbs. Her style reminds me a bit of children's books and bit of Tintin; her comics are heavily stylized for their often grim fables, like the story above, Face All Red, about a man who kills his brother.

She's also got some very nice Dragon Age and Mass Effect fanart, in addition to a very disturbing dream diary. Her comics are really good at using her format (that is, the internet) to great effect, when most webcomics are still fitting in the constraints set by newspaper comics.

Book Friday: Norwegian Wood

2011-04-29T12:30:00.000-07:00

Murakami seems to love writing about sex, and he does it with such natural honesty, unlike so many writers who make me cringe when they try. Murakami is very deft, which is why he can write a story that is fundamentally about sex and death yet so often is funny and sweet. His ever-present thoughts of death are, unlike the crushing weight it holds Russian lit, like a small, deceptively heavy pebble.

I love Murakami's magical realism, and while this isn't as vividly present in Norwegian Wood, the flow of the novel still has that air. Murakami can make you fall in love with a character in moments, wish they would tell you their life story, and soon enough, they will. Murakami's novels are full of smaller stories; a short story collection wrapped in another narrative sound awesome to me, and if that sounds awesome to you, enjoy.

Game Thursday: suteF

2011-04-28T12:29:00.000-07:00

Puzzle games lend themselves surprisingly well to horror, as you'll find in suteF. It's all in the sound, and the grim pixels. The recurssion, both in the narrative and in the game mechanics, which have the screen wrap right to left and up to down. If you fall down you'll come out at the top of the screen, but if you fall down and there's no blocks to catch you, you'll be falling from top to bottom forever until you hit the restart button. As you control an endless march of blue creatures, and revist the same areas each time stacked with more corpses than the last, that recusiveness become the subtle horror. It's not a game about big scares, although the game will suddenly betray your expectations again and again, but it's disturbing none the less, and it works.

Art Tuesday: Gigi

2011-04-26T12:15:00.000-07:00

You may know her as Hiimdaisy, the author of those metal gear solid and persona 4 comics. She's not into that anymore (and please don't bug her about it) but her original art is, if not nearly as funny, certainly quite beautiful. Her use of color and brushstroke style drawing gives her art a storybook quality, with an obvious Mary Blair influence. Her comics were in black and white, but her color work is where she shines the most.

However, her fan comics have proven if nothing else that she's great at writing, especially humor. Which is important, you know, for comics.

It's possible she'll start on a webcomic, although she could do wonderfully in anything she wanted, I think. I have a tendancy to project my aspirations onto artists because I cannot draw, but Gigi kicks ass so fucking watch her.

http://gigifritter.tumblr.com/

http://cucumber.gigidigi.com/

2011-03-31T12:10:00.001-07:00

Skulls of the Shogun interview is up! It's awesome! Go read it!

TEMPEST

2011-03-28T07:04:00.000-07:00

Tempest is a dream of monsters crawling out of a hole. All old games are nightmares like that. It's the vague suggestion of the primitive graphics. It's the psychedelic detail of the monsters crawling along the sides of the arcade cabinet, in full 80s colors. It's the dark sketchy arcades themselves, where idle youth hang out and electric sounds drone on. It's the starry backgrounds they crawl from, big empty space full of grotesques forever. I wonder if it's the arcades that brought Lovecraft back. He was scared of space before we realized it was the right thing to do.

These games were new and strange and more than a little disturbing, and if there's proof of how that it's the urban legend of Polybius. Tempest's elegant and simply vector geometry vaguely resembled 3D and was flush with all the colors of the rainbow, as in the picture above. There's no internet to scour for the evidence to discredit the rumor, which helps of course. But when the latest graphics look more beautiful and complicated and deep than ever, and yet look even further removed from reality, it's easy to see why in the 80s teenagers could have scared kids with the legend of a game that would make you go insane from looking at it.

Monsters crawling out of a hole. The lines of the vectors leave a lot to the imagination.

Fantasizing

2011-03-25T17:00:00.000-07:00

Comic is by the incomparable Brandon Graham.

Oh please EA I know you have DLC to sell but your website is starting to look like a parody of itself. Your DLC arsenal is especially terrible when its bullet points are described in meaningless in-game statistics like "contains a rune slot" and "critical damage factor." WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? I don't want to agree with Nintendo too much but when they were complaining about devaluing content this is what they were talking about.

OMFG PAX

2011-03-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

I am a nerd of nerds, so I barely spent any time at PAX actually playing videogames. But it was all to provide you, readers, with coverage of PAX's (frankly quite great) panels. On Friday I got you Jane McGonigal's keynote, an all-star discussion of dialoge and gameplay from Bioware, PHD researchers, and interactive fiction authors, and the postmortem of a whole company. On Saturday I got to hear Activision's indie studios reassure us that they are not all like Infinity Ward, and on Sunday I covered the most direct response to the Dickwolves at the con, as well as a frank and honest discussion of the state of hate speech in the gamer community and how to fight it.

In the days to come I will do impressions for all the totally awesome indie games I played. There were exactly two AAA games I was interested in: one unplayable because there was no game there (but the trailers showed Portal 2 is funny as ever) and one unplayable because too many people wanted to play it (but Bioware was nice enough to send reps over to answer my questions).

I wondered why there was so much middleware being hocked at the con, but I guess there are people less poor and skeptical than me. Still, the appallingly misspelled Gunnar Optiks, selling snake-oil overpriced "gaming" glasses, sounds way, way too much like exactly the sort of thing that Penny Arcade makes fun of on a regular basis. They were letting us use them at the console free play though, so I tried them with some friends on Halo 3. Their incredible ability to make everything slightly yellow was as bullshit as I thought, so we had a good laugh and that was that.

Finally, this wouldn't be complete without a moment of blinding irony. In my above coverage, there is an article on Activision's indie studios. Among the swag they were giving out? Guitar Hero keychains. Ouch.

Unintentional

2011-03-07T09:32:00.000-08:00

Social games are chafing under the distaste shown by developers and gamers alike, so despite being with Ian Bogost on this one I do like to hear them make their case.

But this particular rant is great not as a case for social games, but as an unintentional case against them.

What happened was that Ryan Henson Creighton, founder of Untold Entertainment, won himself a guest rant by tricking a conference associate into handing him a bag of coins. The game was supposed to be a mini social game where attendees tried to collect coins from each other, but Creighton's point was that he was able to win by breaking all of the rules, just like him and all his social game developers.

But perhaps advocating for legitimacy is not best accomplished by larceny? Let us note that a sub-industry thought of most generously as irresponsible money vampires may not makes themselves more sympathetic by, say, doing what everyone thinks they are already doing. The unintentional irony of breaking rules by stealing makes me question whether this is one of the rules we should cheer for once broken. Now, not everyone is a company called Zynga that signed advertising deals with spyware sites to get off the ground, and I do happen to be a pinko liberal, but I still tink that we should not make the mistake of confusing sleazy business practices in an unregulated market with innovation. Creighton says he's breaking the rules, but it's really that there are no rules in this market because it's so new: it's like the first days of consoles all over again. It's an exciting time, a great time for innovation but also a great time for underhanded deals.

I'm actually an optimist about social games at heart, and I can't wait to see what people will begin to do with them, but art isn't a business model. Not even "mere" entertainment is a business model. There are some awesome social game developers out there, and I'm sure next year wil bring some really great stuff to that space. But while Creighton makes great points about addictiveness in games being more or less equal, that's personally never been the issue for me. It's been about how they're parting fools from their money, and it's discomforting in the same way that gambling is. So not that I think it should be illegal, but that particular industry is regulated in very specific ways. Social games aren't even rated by the ESRB.

Hand Holding

2011-02-28T08:39:00.000-08:00

So here's the thing about that Ars article. It may have already been too late for handhelds.

Here's some old statistics. They're two years old, but I would have to agree with them. Although I think it's important to note that I think it's 79% of people who use their machines at home more than any other location, which makes sense because they're at home more than any other location.

So the point of the Ars article, that iPhones and such will outcompete portables for gamer's time, seems to have if anything come true long ago. Or at least, time on the road hasn't been their selling point for a long time.

For kids portable gaming may be a different experience. After all, you're getting shoed around the house and the world all the time and going to places you don't care about. This happens as an adult as well, but as a kid your indifference is acceptaible or at least not rude, so nobody cares that you have your nose in your gameboy while they chat. As an adult you're oblidgated to pay attention to people. The point is, as an adult, you're most often going somewhere with someone you have to talk with. So perhaps I'm just saying that portable gaming may always have that place, at least.

I have no shame, of course, so I still play my games on the bus. But I assume that most businessmen wouldn't feel comfortable with a device meant only for gaming. I see plenty of people playing games on their mobiles, but there is no circumstance in which these guys would be playing a DS anyway. Maybe as generations grow up that had consoles as children, but even then I doubt it.

For gamers, handhelds have always been just another system to buy. Especially considering the advent of DLC, there's no reason that I couldn't play the games I have on my PSP on my PS3, and frankly if I had the option I'd do it. Which is why, of course, they don't give me the option.

So really the popularity of "mobile gaming" is almost irrelevant to the whole discussion. As long as there are great apps for handheld gaming, the systems will sell, especially since mobiles haven't shown any signs of being able to compete with the experience of consoles. It would be awesome if smartphones could be the PCs of mobile gaming but they aren't quite there yet. If touchscreens get to the point where they can legitimately replace the controller, maybe.

With the 3DS, we can see that Nintendo is cleverly realizing that the key to the handheld market is paradoxically the hardcore. It makes sense, since unless they want to put out the Nintenphone they've got no chance of competing for casuals. Sony, with access to Sony Ericson, does have that shot, and they're already taking it. But this is a completely different kind of market with a completely difference audience. Nintendo is shrewd to use their handheld to both show off an amazing new technology as well as reconnect with hardcore gamers that felt left out by the Wii.

There still may come a day in which handhelds outlive their usefulness, but I think gamers love their handhelds enough that we won't see it for a while.

The Worldbuilding Fiction of Killzone

2011-02-25T07:36:00.000-08:00

I know, I know, who gives a shit about the plot of a first person shooter? Well, other than, you know, nerds. Cause they'll care about anything if you let them. "Most" (arbitrary assumption made up on the spot) people don't care, or profess not to care, whether or not their game even has a plot, let along if it's good or not. Funny thing though, I tend to hear people claim this most often when a) someone very boring is attempting to explain it or b) someone is pointing out how embarrassingly bad it is.

I don't have to use scare quotes to say that most people aren't going to read through the 6,862 articles on the Halo wiki or participate in the ARGs or read all the novels or even not skip all the cutscenes, but plenty of people played this game single-player and loved it and everyone in the world knows Master Chief's face even though he doesn't have a name OR a face and I bet you can make almost anyone vaguely affiliated with video games mad if you call him Halo. So rather than say no one cares, I say that everyone cares—even if it's only a little.

Actually, that's the best place to start with Killzone 3: Master Chief. Every game wants to start selling with their icon, and in 99% of cases that's their protagonist. Killzone, curiously, leads with their antagonists. It's sort of like fighting against an endless horde of Master Chiefs. This is cool because you're constantly looking at them and their glowing red eyes makes for very convient crosshairs (not even sarcastically, it actually works really well). This is cool up until a cutscene in which it is revealed that you are a very boring person. "Oh, I'm that guy" is what you're thinking, followed quickly by "who the fuck is he, anyways?" Modern Warfare never lets you outside of head of your avatar unless you're dying and moving to another one, which is actually a really cool narrative decision (and the only one in the game). It's sort of like snapshots from a war, cool from a game design perspective because they can do whatever they want by jumping from one dude to the next, and cool from a narrative perspective because you get to see the whole world fall apart from every angle. They may suck as hard as they possibly can at writing a story, but their structure is nice and it keeps players going.

Most importantly, players don't need to give a shit about who they are. This fictional war is the main character. You can tell that the designers are huge war history junkies, because this game which would I guess technically have to be science fiction is instead more like a historical fiction of the modern day (which I guess what Tom Clancy [the books] is all about, not that I would know). But it's not a historical narrative, it's a history textbook where you live the events. The "No Russian" level is the equivalent of a stealth mission that ends with killing Archduke Ferdinand. The story of World War I isn't about the assassins, it's about the assassination. The first person perspective is perfect for this kind of storytelling because it's about the victim, not the actor. As the player, you watch the history unfold. You are the observer.

I bring up World Wars because Killzone's space Nazis are obviously (too obviously) tapping into that most emblematic setting while throwing it in science fiction so they can give you all the cool guns. Killzone's a fusion of historical fiction and heroic space opera, and its plot is just the same, stuck somewhere between Halo and Modern Warfare.

This matters, and it matter a lot. Some people—I won't name names—tend to think that 3D modeling is an afterthought to the core that is game design. This is as true as it is fundamentally misleading. It may not matter what the guns or the enemies look like if the play is the same, but spoilers: there is no platonic form of the first person shooter that you just paint over with Helghast or Covenant or Russians. The reason different shooters look different is because this is a reflection of differences in their fundamental core of game design. Killzone resembles a World War II game because not because they wanted to tell a story about Nazis (because they suck at it) but because they wanted to evoke the same emotions and lethal play that we associate with the war. Halo has you playing a super soldier, which is why it's set in a colorful space fantasy. Gears of War is claustrophobic and lethal, and the enemy and level design reflects it. You're thinking too small if you think that appearance doesn't matter, because game design is about bringing that setting to life. The setting isn't an excuse for gameplay, it's the ideal that the gameplay is trying to live up to. Get it?

Killzone is not a heroic narrative, it's a war story, which is why what you're looking at—Helghast and gorgeous vistas—are way more important than the instantly forgettable character you're playing as. Yet those cutscenes always cut back to him. Personal narratives work by making the hero significant as a character, which is the track that almost all narratives run on. Video games are freer than most and go off the rails and ignore characters altogether. That's pretty radical for games in the niche Killzone is trying to fill, so it's not much of a surprise they didn't go all the way, although Modern Warfare should have been their guidepost.

Games don't need a story, and that is how they differ from film and literature, but games still have to be about something. It is not a coincidence that the single player campaign is getting meh reviews and the multiplayer is getting hyped. Even the developers knew what they really cared about. This was always a game where war was the main character, and multiplayer just tells that story better.

Love and Hate the JRPG Part 1: Random Encounters

2011-02-22T22:27:00.000-08:00

Oh that nostalgia. I wanted to like Final Fantasy: The Four Heroes of Light, but it wouldn't let me. It's a game that's as good as it is bad, my favorite kind of game to write about.

The theme of Four Heroes is nostalgia, and the key to nostalgia is to bring back what something felt like, rather than what it actually was. This is why remakes are so hard to do right, because it's never enough to bring something back from the past. To really get nostalgia, a game has to be more than what it was. It's got to acknowledge how game design has progressed while keeping the feel of the past.

Four Heroes is pitch perfect on the visuals. They're absolutely adorable and I wouldn't even hesitate to say they're the most beautiful polygons i've ever seen on DS-level hardware. Like good sprite art, Four Heroes has visuals that transcend time and technology and they're perfect for the low-fi storybook feel of an old RPG. Note that Final Fantasy never tried to evoke those feelings before, but that's why the visuals get the nostalgia so right—it's about recreating the feel of your first Final Fantasy game, not its actual content. A one-for-one wouldn't work, not after decades of videogames between you and that precious moment in time. So Four Heroes is wonderful at looking like what you wished those old games were.

But Four Heroes falls flat, ultimately, because it doesn't apply the same lessons to the rest of the game. Final Fantasy is known for dragging its beginnings out excessively, but there's nothing fun about a game based around a four person party that constantly splits up the group. Nothing interesting is happening plot-wise at the beginning that really necessitates the heroes being in different parts of the world, and limiting the party only makes the game less fun—if this is their idea of a tutorial, it's pathetic. Tiny spoonfuls of new content every few hours is awful design, especially when there's nothing new to do in combat or out of it. Nostalgia is about taking all the good stuff and conveniently leaving out the bad.

For me, it's the random encounters that really kill it. There's a reason they're almost universally gone from the genre, and the two games I know have that have successfully retained the feature flipped it around. I'm talking about Ar Tonelico and Etrian Odyssey, and they solved the probably of random encounters a detector that lets you know roughly when the next fight is going to happen. This takes the random out of the encounter, which is huge because it's no longer a frustrating interruption to what you were doing. You can plan for the encounters. In Ar Tonelico, areas actually have a limited number of encounters. So if you get lost and have to backtrack, you don't have to fight a ridiculous number of enemies forever just to walk a few steps. Ar Tonelico knows when enough is enough, while Four Heroes never gives you a break. When enemies drop little experience and your party can kill everything in sight, encounters just aren't fun anymore. Etrian Odyssey has infinite encounters, but it also has very easy ways to prevent them in case you want to just explore. Also resource management is a very important part of the game, so those continuous fights continue to be important. In Four Heroes, the battle system (which is actually pretty good) lets you adventure forever, but in the very monotonous dungeons it actually feels more like a drawback. Not to mention that the encounter rate in Four Heroes is leagues higher than Ar Tonelico or Etrian Odyssey.

I can't say that I hated random encounters when I was a kid, mostly because I didn't known any other way. But it's been a long time since my first Final Fantasy and even though random encounters are a throwback to those early days, I forgot all the bad parts of those games. Nostalgia makes all the dirt wash away and the good time shine. I don't remember bad graphics, I remember the sort of stuff I'd never seen before. I don't remember tedious grinding, I remember kicking ass. Four Heroes reminds me more of why it was good to leave those times behind, and worse, reminds me of how Square has the tendency to push in random direction when it comes to game design. I love that they try new things, but they never seem to really throw away stuff that clearly doesn't work, and leaves strange little problems in the name of tradition.

Clinical Morality

2011-02-17T13:50:00.000-08:00

So yeah, I may have said one or two times that I don't like the good/evil binary but I've got one more reason.

I'm not the person on the screen, no matter how compelling the illusion may be. Which is good, because I know I'm not the one killing people.

Where am I going with this.

Well, before I even picked up my first controller I was in the business of killing people, and by that I mean writing. Now, even if your short stories don't involve any killing, you're pretty much guaranteed to do something horrible to somebody—that's the whole "conflict" thing that drives narratives forward. Feelings will be hurt, lives ruined.

I don't kill or torment or break hearts because I enjoy it. I do so with the clinical dispassion of a scientist dissecting a mouse. Any writer will tell you the same. There's absolutely nothing moral about the construction of a story. Oscar Wilde, you're my bro.

Now, in video games, players hover somewhere between reader and author. I feel things when people die, like when my Garrus died on the suicide mission. It wasn't overwraught or anything, he just got shot and was dead, and maybe I felt it especially because it was my fault that I gave him a job he wasn't suited for. Sure I reloaded. But when I look at Garrus now, I see him getting shot in the head. And he wasn't even my favorite character.

But on the other hand, there's a bit of the writerly persona swelling within me that wants people to die so I can see what will happen. I like seeing things happen, and it's an untapped part of many games because when people die for reals in a video game it's because you either messed up or acted like a jerk. Now, I appreciate a bit of the make hard decisions part of games. That stuff is compelling. Sometimes, though, I want to act like a narrative designer the way LittleBigPlanet lets you act like a level designer.

Some VNs actually have bad ends that are as good, if not better, than the good ends. I mean, duh, right? Tragedy is a powerful thing.

That choice isn't something that players are expecting though, and I don't think I've seen it in any game other than those of Daniel Benmergui (especially Storyteller, bu they're all highly recommended). These worked by giving the player control over the whole structure of the story, like a god game. But when playing as an individual, given a choice, players won't want to loose them. So designers have to force it a little for it to work.

I'm fine with keeping it in-character, but then you start making the player want to fix what they did wrong. Mass Effect 2 makes you chose between crewmates at certain points, but you can avoid the dispute with enough charm. That's good—but it also means that the tragedy is a mistake, not an inevitability, and that is where the tragedy lies. I mean, no one wants to build up a character only for them to die, but it worked for Aeris, in one of the most popular games of all time. In fact, it's surprising how little that card has been pulled since then. I'd like to see it again.

The Player

2011-02-08T09:36:00.000-08:00

I'm a player, not a gamer.

Maybe not strictly true. I don't know if anyone notices or care about how I use the word player but I thought I'd talk about it for a second. I'm certainly not the first person to do it, and I'm not sure how much it really works, but I wanted to talk about it anyway.

My big problem with the word gamer is that it doesn't mean "person who plays games." It's more like nerd or geek or hipster or jock, a subculture label and I find those inherently excruciating. They mean almost nothing and exist only to box people in or make fun of them or exclude others. None of that is anything good or positive.

If gamer just had something to do with shared interests that would be one thing, something I could get behind, but I feel less and less like it does that and more and more like it's an exclusive club. Just look at the fight against casual games. It's resent at an intrusion on the gamer's exclusive club. I feel like gamers are more threatened by that than by any perceived "dumbing down" of video games and that really bothers me. I love video games; I want nothing more than for more people to understand how amazing they are. Granted, I'd be more excited if the average casual gamer was doing more than swinging imaginary tennis rackets and flinging imaginary birds, but it's not like the average hardcore gamer is going anything more than stomping on imaginary zombie faces or shooting imaginary ~~Taliban~~ opposing forces in the face.

So sure, it makes my articles read like a self-help book written by a 90s rap star, but player, like reader or viewer or audience, is a perfectly neutral word. I don't want to exclude people who don't identify with the label and I certainly don't want to encourage the trend of gamers thinking they have some sort of ownership over the medium, like comic book nerds over comics or hipsters over music. That thinking is self destructive and stifles the medium.

Gaming Culture Needs Criticism

2011-02-05T10:25:00.000-08:00

So this is in response to Penny Arcade and the whole dickwolves thing.

Now, people who are much better than I at writing and such have written reasoned,
persuasive arguments about why the whole thing is problematic.

I still don’t understand why Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins let it escalate this far. Or rather, I understand why they let it escalate this far, but I’m disappointed that they did. When legislators and pundits attacked the game industry for corrupting children with violence, Krahulik and Holkins created a charity to help sick kids. When their own fans criticized them for saying irresponsible things about rape...I wish I could end that sentence with “created a charity to help rape survivors,” but that sentence actually ends with “blew them off and made a shirt about it.” Influential people should use their power for good, or at least, you know, to not be a dick.

The solidarity of gaming community that helped weather outside threats from legislators eager to gut art and entertainment for short-term political gain is now becoming an ugly, insular resistance to criticism. This is the opposite of a healthy community, and it’s blinding us to the very real fact that there are problems with gamer culture that we need to point out.

I wasn’t offended by the strip, but the controversy was not about being offended. It was about respect (or lack therof) for criticism. The reason this blew up so much was an unwillingness from Penny Arcade to differentiate between criticism and censorship. Like most problems, it has happened before, and also like most problems, it clears up more quickly when you define your terms correctly.

I mean, this is basic. Censorship literally means removal or suppression. Unless that is happening, censorship is not occurring. None of the people taking a stance had the power to take anything down (and few if any were even asking for it). They were asking for sensitivity, and pointing out the depressing reality of Western culture.

This bears so much repeating I’ll never be able to say it enough. Criticism is not censorship. It is as much free speech as that original comic and it is something gamer culture and the gaming industry needs desperately. Criticism is always good. Criticism only makes things better.

To help understand this, let’s just look at violence for a second. Putting warning labels on games on the word of inconclusive and contradictory studies is pure censorship and utterly irresponsible. But, and I can only speak for Americans here, we live in a culture that loves violence, and our video games sure reflect that.

Which I love as well. Vientnam vet Tim O’Brien describes it best when talking about actual war, the beauty
of white phosphorus and orange napalm: “you hate it, but your eyes do not.” I enjoy these games knowing they represent assumptions about violence that I don’t entirely agree with. It doesn’t make me violent or
less of a person to play violent games, but the jingoistic fantasy of Modern Warfare 2 or Medal of Honor doesn’t even reflect the way most Americans feel about our current wars. It’s good to take a look at the level of violence and think about why it’s there, and why we’re so reluctant to sell anything else.This is worth pointing out, just as it's worth pointing that the dickwolves comic, even if you laughed at it, still reflects some uncomfortable truths about the way we think about rape. That’s criticism, not censorship. It’s not about removing content, it’s about making content better. It is a simple request to think about what we play or laugh at.

The thing about criticism is that it expands and enlivens and enriches. It hurts like hell when you’re the one on the sharp end, the one who gets cut is the one that comes out of it even stronger and more powerful than before. Criticism is like experience points for artists. Penny Arcade itself is constantly criticizing the games industry and gamer culture. That makes them pro-gamer, not anti-gamer. But it doesn't make them immune to criticism.

A little criticism never hurt anyone, except for their pride. And that’s the human organ that hurts the most to loose, even though it’s the one you’re healthier without.

BLAH BLAH BLAH NUCLEAR MISSLE BOMB

2011-02-04T23:00:00.000-08:00

HAHAHA OH WOW. Okay, it wasn't the best and "describe everything that happens as it happens" humor plays out fast but it didn't overstay its welcome, and the beginning and end are gold.

Portable Holes

2011-02-02T13:00:00.000-08:00

I love how much the watermark adds to the surreality of the image.

The handheld console wars are a something that actually exists now, but we'll see how thrilling the battle actually gets.

Comparing consoles on the merit of their individual hardware used to be mostly irrelevant since the technical specifics were so similar in terms of performance (Super Nintendo vs Genesis, PS1 vs N64, PS2 vs Xbox vs Gamecube) that all the extra details of processing power and hard drive and whatever never seemed to be a real factor in which console was going to dominate, since the only thing that actually mattered was software. If consoles were computers, choosing them would matter, but since that's not the case it's the games that made the difference.

At least, they made the difference. Now that we have motion control, touch screens, and 3D, hardware is suddenly making all of the difference. The Wii continues to crush the competition in terms of numbers despite inferior hardware, and iOS devices have achieved a similar revolution on the mobile gaming front. The Wii "won" the console war by running away from the home front and redefining the permitters of the conflict. Same for iOS; the iPad, used more for web surfing and gaming than anything else, is a GameBoy for people who think they're too cool for video games.

That battle, however, is going to be between iOS and Android, and there's no room for the familiar game systems there. Instead, we have two totally separate competitions—although it'll be interesting to see if the gap can be bridged. Sony's taking the first stab with the Playstation Phone, although hopefully it won't be as embarrassing as the N-Gage was.

I think the other half of the games industry will eventually pay off very well for the hardcore. I don't mean stuff like Infinity Blade, although it's nice that it showed that you could have a AAA iOS game, because that's what we already have on another platform. I want to see new kinds of games. I'm big on accessibility because that's the road to art; the more people that can consume, the more will create, and the more diversity of ideas we'll get. Watching the mobile market evolve is like watching the games industry be born again from the beginning, and we're only at the 8-bit generation so far.

EDIT: Blogger, I hate your timestamps.

Desperately Needed Satire

2011-01-30T09:25:00.001-08:00

Wow, this is exactly how I feel! And I just wrote about Starship Troopers too.

Mammon Machine two-point-oh

2011-01-26T18:39:00.000-08:00

Redesign! Fun for the whole family! Blogger being a piece of crap! Learning html that I will forget at the bottom of a glass of tequila and coke!

I was resistant to remove a picture of the Mammon Machine from a blog called Mammon Machine, but I think it looks nicer now, don't you? By the way, the top picture is from Fullmetal Daemon Muramasa (not to be confused with Muramasa, the Demon Blade), if you're wondering. It's a Nitroplus visual novel, so uh, don't satisfy your curiosity about it while you're at work. Maybe it will be translated before I'm 30! I'm not holding my breath though. It's written by the author of Hanachirasu though, which has been translated, so check it out if you're interested (and not at work).

I'm not sure if I've ever mentioned why I choose the title for this blog. It's not because I'm actually that big of a Chrono Trigger fan, though I do love it. In Chrono Trigger, the Mammon Machine was created in 12000 BC at the pinnacle of human civilization to harness the powers of Lavos, a world devouring monster nestled in the center of the planet. That's the backstory, of course, but the Mammon Machine is REALLY a metaphor for uncontrolled greed, and its name, Mammon reflects this.

Kind of seems a little evil, doesn't it? But I love how its message of materialism as sin is a pretty perfect description of how we treat or bang zoom, explosions for money pop culture. I love fine art, but I also like this geeky machiney stuff, and I think, truly, that there are beautiful things here, in science-fiction, fantasy, and video games, for anyone who has the inclination to pick them apart.

So yeah, it's like, I'm being ironic. Ugh, sorry. But, I'm being ironic in a sincere way, so it totally doesn't count—fuck it just go here and look at how awesome these sprites are. 16-bit bosses were the best, weren't they?

EDIT: Let me know if the site now makes your eyes bleed. I'm a writer, not an artist, dammit.

Forget Wells, We Need Tarantino

2011-01-25T18:37:00.000-08:00

So how about that Bulletstorm?

It's stupid, but it's fun.

The game is actually, no joke, the most original FPS in a long time, at least since Borderlands,whose style they seem to have liked. I mean, I can, and probably will devote a Design Diversions to the Skillshots, even though it's pretty much no different than the high score of Touhou or any old arcade game. Score is pretty amazing thing; or at least, what it drives players to accomplish is pretty amazing. Well, more on the gameplay on DD.

In the meantime, why don't we talk about this article?

This argument, of entertainment vs art, is far older than the games industry. It's a worthwhile discussion to have, and despite some misses and terrible generalizations I really encourage you to read the comments. Bullettstorm Lead Designer Adrian Chmielarz nails the core of the debate saying, "I do believe this industry will only be considered mature only once it stops being ashamed of itself."

I'm of two minds. Not all creative endeavors need to be or should be art. It's unrealistic, even pretentious, to demand it. I mean, between Indiegames, Rock Paper Shotgun, and Twitter, I'm play amazing achievements of video game art every week, if not every day. I just started Penumbra today and it's art, no question. I've got a backlog of beautiful games like this, so is it really so bad that Bulletstorm is there too?

And yet, come on. There's no reason why entertainment has to be this dumb. Anything worth doing is worth doing right. Besides, in terms of violence and vulgarity, this game doesn't offer much that's new, other than the lack of shame. Stereotypes are not broken by this game, and Uncharted 2 the dialogue isn't. It's creatively crass, but not clever enough to give it the satiric bite that the industry needs.

I mean, this game is great. Epic and People Can Fly put a lot of effort into this game, and it shows. But that doesn't give it a free pass to be dumb. I wish that, rather than reacting against games like Bulletstorm, we were pushing developers to make games like Bulletstorm smarter.

WEAK OTAKU

2011-01-19T08:30:00.001-08:00

If I see this article one more time...

Incoherent and passionless, Patton Oswalt's rambling on geek culture is as dated as his references (dohoho). I could go on and on about how biased he is towards 80s pop culture and how little it seems that he counts anything created since (and I will) but it's hard to let his bizarre use of the word otaku slide.

Like nerd, it was born as a insulting term and like nerd, the Otaku community has attempted to reclaim it, but it still remains a negative term, and its usage in English is very different from its use in Japanese for a variety of reasons, and in much the same way as the infantile nerd/geek divide, Japanese nerds still find the term a bit offensive, just like in Oswalt's time no one would have ever self-identified as "nerd" (Weirdly, the Japanese love using the English word maniac to describe pop-culture obsessions, so in the end we have two cultures trying to use another language to sound cool.) In English though, it's not an elitist term for nerd, as Oswalt apparently thinks, but a specifica word for non-japanese nerds whose particular flavor of nerdom resides in Japanese pop culture. He's not talking about anime, so he's only losing what nerd cred he has by misusing it for no apparent reason.

Why this dude is using otaku to describe 80s pop culture is beyond me, particularily because the term Otaku didn't really peak as a term until the 90s. So his use of the term is wildly out of touch with the place and time JUST LIKE THE AUTHOR WOOOOOOO.

Seriously though, pop culture elitism is the cardinal sin of the nerd, and it's clear from his references Oswalt hasn't given a serious look at geek culture since the 80s. His examples seem to indicate that, outside of Avatar and lolcats, the only pop culture he's been absorbing in the past two decades is derivative of what he found in his first pop culture dive. He's only looking at the pop culture he grew up with. He doesn't seem to acknowledge that anything original has been created since the 80s, literally saying "everything we have today that’s cool comes from someone wanting more of something they loved in the past."

That statement could apply equally to EVERYTHING THAT EVER WAS. All art is a reaction to the past, and that's a pretty basic concept. You think 80s pop culture was extracted ex nihilo from some black hole by aliens? I wish that this is what he was saying, but to these ears it sounds like he's saying that current pop culture is nothing but the pale imitations of his pop culture, to which I say: you are not finding it because you are not looking.

Which is exactly what this dude is doing? Is he too busy lamenting the death of culture to pick up an issue of Walking Dead, play Mass Effect, read a Caitlin R. Kiernan horror story, or watch District 9? Remember, this is a man that is seriously suggesting that less original content is created today because of the internet. Even discounting all pop culture remixing this isn't true by a long shot. Indiegames blog gives me at least one poignant thought-provoking videogame a week. We are lush with original content, but apparently this dude doesn't feel like doing the work.

If you are whining about the lack of original culture instead of looking for it, you are the "weak otaku," whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean. And then, bizarrely, his solution to derivative culture is for everything to go back to the 80s? I thought that was the whole problem? Then he starts diving into 2001 territory with his post-apocalypse fantasy and I can't follow him into the stream of consciousness. I know the sort: its sounds SO BRILLIANT when you write it but once it is observed by another human being begins to suddenly taste like cardboard.

Next time: why pop culture remixing is not the end of culture, and why this dude is a hypocrite for even suggesting it.

Oh yes.

I mad.

Look at This Fucking Computer

2011-01-07T06:25:00.000-08:00

I promise I'll make a real post soon, but first you have to look at this fucking commercial. Just look at it. The intensity of Razor's CEO(and chief gamer?) is, quite frankly, just phenomenal. When average PR goons (like the other guys in the video) use marketing gibberish it sounds exactly as fake as it is, but when Min-Liang Tan says "portable form factor" he delivers the line like James T. Kirk ordering the shields deployed. He doesn't even qualify his hyperbole and says straight out that PC gaming has been IMPOSSIBLE until now.

I'll stop gushing now, but I guarantee you won't be able to get past the part where he says SHEER GENIUS without totally losing it. I wish all ads could be this sincere.

(By "You" I Mean "Me")

2010-12-16T05:53:00.000-08:00

My class in arts writing just ended with a discussion on how much of a cheerleader writers are supposed to be for the arts, especially the art that are in danger of dying (Jazz, Ballet) or the ones that haven't even been born yet (video games). My teacher, the very sharp Alicia Anstead, felt advocating for the arts should, at best, be a byproduct of good arts writing and not something arts writers should obsess over.

But when your art form is dying, or in serious danger of being stillborn, I. It's your livelihood and a pathetically low paid livelihood at that, and you choose it because that's how much you care about art. I mean, if I thought games were just fun and nothing more I'd be spending this time playing them. This stuff is important: really, seriously, it is important. I can think of a dozen things happening over the world right this second that are more important but I've long ago made piece with the fact that what I most care about is stuff that is In The Grand Scheme of Things Not Important. I mean, it's only the way we think about our lives that's at stake, not our actual lives.

But whatever. You have to be past the point of being worried over whether it sounds stupid to care about this stuff or what you sound like saying it. It's really easy for cheerleading for the arts to turn into self justification. I mean, it does matter: if no one takes the people who make or talk about games seriously, how can we even got our foot in the door?

But remember, it is not about us. It is about the games. Games are exactly as relevant as we make them. Either we make games that speak for themselves or we write about them so their voice can sing a little louder. As bad as I feel for Warren Spector when he has to watch reviewers cut up Epic Micky, he should know that he can’t speak for his game. It’s for the same reasons they tell writers in their first class “show, don’t tell.” You can’t tell the world games need to be taking seriously, you need to write seriously about games. You gotta kick reason to the curb and just do it.

Harry Potter and the Unnecessarily Long Camping Scene

2010-12-02T10:21:00.000-08:00

After reading 1up's eviscerating review of Harry Potter VII part 1 I feel a flabbergasted sympathy for the poor bastards forced to program it. On the other hand, they can't have been working against much of a deadline. The quality of the game suggests the cynical launch was conducted according to a marketing schedule as the quality of the game was obviously not a factor.

But the fact is that even if Gears of Potter had gotten the polish it needed to not be a terrible game, it still would have been a terrible adaptation. The feeble attempts at stealth are the closest it gets to something resembling the books. I am not a nerd for details; the best adaptations always fudge them, because they get the details of the heart down. Film's been doing this right and wrong for years but they know a little better how to do it. Harry Potter is clearly bad on purpose, but it's admittedly hard to think of what would make a good game of Harry Potter (as opposed to a good game with the name Harry Potter on it).

Harry Potter doesn't really fall into an easily adaptable format. I'd say adventure game is probably the most fitting, but no one's going to make one of those in this day and age. The phone-book sized Harry Potter novels don't actually have enough action to sustain a video game, and there isn't a whole lot of repeatable challenges. Repetition is death for literature and film but it's the backbone of video games.

Well it's not repetition per se, but games need to allow you to go out and do stuff. Games need to be way bigger than just the one story, so that players can basically make their story happen as they go along. It's hard to talk about the Potter game because it's such a mess, but surely it's possible to come up with something that feels like the books, even if it isn't the same.

I'm not really interested in a Harry Potter video game. I'm reading Murakami though. Is it possible to make a game of meeting very strange people and wondering around in a state of ennui? Suddenly I want to play that. I really honestly do. I certainly enjoyed reading it.

First Google Image Result for John Marston: Not John Marston

2010-11-24T06:38:00.000-08:00

So I did grow up in the midwest. "Corn," you immediately think--and then you start wondering how I was able to play videogames growing up since, you know, there's nothing in the midwest except for corn. I'll have you know that I was the proud owner of a Sega Maizesis, as well as the Sony Cornstation and Cornstation 2. No, my portable systems were not made out of Corn, that would be silly: on car trips I played on my Soyboy Advance.

Actually though, the midwest does have cities, one of which I grew up in. South Bend is best known for Notre Dame and the corny Americana movies inspired by its football team. My favorite reference to my hometown in cinema is the pet name they have in Home Alone for the old scary neighbor that freaks out Macaulay McCulkin: The South Bend Shovel Slayer.

Great name for a band. Anyways, this is all by way of saying that yes, my friends in high school would go around shooting animals at around this time of year. It wasn't even terribly surprising when our very young and enthusiastic science teacher proudly presented us with a freshly harvested deer heart during our week on circulation, and I would be lying if I said that wasn't totally cool, despite that the thought of running around in the woods with a gun sounded insane to me.

Watching John Marston do it, though; that I'm okay with.

I can't fully express to you how much the storyline and characters of Red Dead Redemption fail to hold my attention against running into the dessert and blasting the feathers off of birds. Is it the simple act of dropping loot that makes me want to kill animals? Weirdly, yes, even though I couldn't care less what they drop or what I can do with them. Supposedly these are used for something or I can sell them or whatever; I don't really care. I just want to ride out to the middle of this rendition of the American Southwest that's more real and alien than any virtual fantasy land I've walked through and just wait around and hunt. It doesn't matter what the reward is, just that I'm rewarded.

Don't underestimate these rewards, and certainly don't dismiss them as some cynical tool to make players grind. Think back instead to my science teacher holding a deer heart in front of a classroom of students. When they weren't bringing in body parts to teach science, my classmates and teachers ate them and made stuff out of them. Not only is it less effort to buy that stuff, I am sure it is much, much cheaper than all of the equipment needed to hunt seriously.

But that heart is their reward. I really don't care how many virtual dollars my virtual cougar fang is worth, but that I got rewarded for almost getting myself virtually killed for virtually killing it. I mean, rewards may be silly or arbitrary but you know, video games did not invent them. Video games tend to copy stuff like this without really thinking for one second about it which is sort of what they need to do to become, you know, art, but that's still something. I could spend all day just living off the land in Red Dead Redemption's America, and I don't think I could do that without the trophies they drop. I know some games ask you to grind on killing stuff in order to have fun later, but Red Dead Redemption, probably because it just takes it easy, doesn't do that. Instead, it teaches you a whole new way of having fun that's arguably better than the rest of their game.

I know deer hearts are gross, but think for a minute about why my high school science teacher spends fall hiding in the woods. Or why we play video games.

Attack of the Ancients

2010-11-10T19:00:00.000-08:00

I should have seen this coming.

The only surprising thing about DotAgate is that it has taken this long for Blizzard to enter the picture.

I'm sure everyone's familiar with the noob-toxic multiplayer game by now, the mod that surpassed the popularity of the game it was modded from. DotA took the confused design of Warcraft III's multiplayer (caught as it was forcing players to play Diablo while they played Starcraft) and turned it into something that, like tower defense before it, came to define a new genre of games. It's probably more like a team competitive Diablo than anything else, with the added gimmick of leveling up from 1 to 25 and buying new gear with every round. That mechanic has also made it legendarily hostile to new players, since there's a positive feedback loop on killing opponents that makes easy prey a literal goldmine.

Within the last few years, a number of DotA devs have gone on to launch commercial products, like League of Legends. And that puts DotA in a strange place. Tower defense has nebulous beginnings, and may have been popularized by RTS mods but wasn't necessarily invented by them. DotA, on the other hand, is essentially a stable commercial product, but it's been worked on by many different people in an informal, amateur setting.

So the strangest thing about Valve grabbing DotA is that Blizzard didn't do it first. Then again, that hasn't really been Blizzard's MO (which is MMOs, har har dur hur). But it is Valve's; they have a history of grabbing talent when they see it, which is a fairly excellent policy. It got us Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. So it's no surprise that when Blizzard completely ignored the goldmine it created that others would swoop in. In fact, Valve's late to the party, which is part of the problem. Why do they get to grab the name brand when a dozen of DotA clones have already dropped? League of Legends also has DotA design alumni in their numbers, and they just settled for a pun in their acronym dumber than WoW. It's a smart business move for Valve, but it dives into a copyright battle that I'm surprised we haven't had sooner. Of course, copyright law only protects the specifics. No one can trademark gameplay. But DotA uses models and character designs that were made by Blizzard and the name itself was shared by quite a few designers. The former is a basis for infringement, and the latter just makes people uncomfortable.

Or so it seems. Anyone else not sure what to think of this?

Activision Theater

2010-10-31T09:38:00.000-07:00

Oh Bobby Kotick, you're a goldmine for video game journalists thirsty for some corporate drama. It seems every time I look at the news his grinning face is there. When Kotaku reported on the grudge match between Tim Shaffer and Kotick like a good little gawker affiliate, the backpedalling between the two escalated to a ridiculous degree as they realized how closely the world was listen. Watching executives dance for the press is always amusing, but Kotick seems to have a particular knack for it that's born either from a good sense of PR or a bad sense of timing. Kotick's PR generated response was amusing in its inherent insincerity, and while they do have to both act like they feel the opposite of what they do (that is, caring about the situation) the damage has to be irrelevant at best.

I guess Kotick has to pretend he doesn't hate gamers (i'm joking) but he doesn't do a good job of it and I'm not sure that he has to (although it's more likely that who he actually hates are game designers, as Elder Game highlights). He has not only become the symbol of monolithic corporate greed, he has fully embraced that role and he's not done anything real to change that reputation. That's fine, actually; that's the reputation his shareholders want. He backpedaled on his comment about "taking the fun out of games" by saying it was just a show for the shareholders--and he will probably tell his shareholders he only said that to put on a show for the gamers. This could go on forever.

The celebrity gaming executive is a very interesting phenomenon. It used to be that you had to actually make games, but now all you have to do is be unable to keep your mouth shut. It's reached self-parody in the form of Sony's Kevin Butler (which is genius, if only because an actor isn't liable for anything). I'm unable to figure out what exactly Kotick or Activision gains from this publicity. However, it is indisputable that by talking, Kotick attracts a lot of attention. I am not of the opinion that any press is good press, but I am well aware that I had friends growing up who liked bad guys better than good guys.

Being the Darth Vader of the games industry isn't a bad thing. People love a great villain, and Kotick absolutely fits the bill. In fact, I'd go as far to say that he is the Citizen Kane of video games, with all the power and money and tragedy and hubris of that character. When I film the documentary of his life, I'll be sure to end it with someone chucking a copy of modern warfare 2 into the fire.

Twelve Dozen Polygon Tanks Were Killed to Make This Pun

2010-10-19T20:30:00.000-07:00

Certainly I agree with the spirit.

But not this: "Other media can evoke emotions, but we can offer the reality of choice, and I think that’s what we’re meant to do.”

Because it's wrong. Games offer reality in exactly the same way as film, which is to say: not at all. Video Games offer the ILLUSION of choice. This distinction is important.

I can choose any of the outcomes already prepared by the designers. That's all the choice we'll ever get out of videogames. We might be able to choose things the designers weren't prepared for, or didn't understand, but the world they made is all there is.

It's because of this that games can be art, instead of making art.

Creation is not the same as experience. For lack of another way to describe it, playing games is play and making them is work. Video games are special. But they aren't that different from other mediums. Games absolutely should stop trying to be movies, but Spector, please don't get too carried away, or loose sight of what video games are really best at.

A Healthy Distrust

2010-10-11T19:00:00.000-07:00

It's a good album, but that's not what I'm going to talk about.

I'm not going to talk about STiNG either, at least not today, but I promise I will.

I love Nippon Ichi and STiNG, but why do I trust them? Part of love is trust, you know. I may love EA for ending Tim Langdell's reign of terror, but do I trust them? I trust them marginally more than Bobby Activision, which is roughly about as I can throw Modern Warfare 2's sales figures. Even Team Ninja, which I could always count on for very fun action and the industry lead in boob-based physics engines, has utterly floundered on Other M. Oh sure, we should all have heard the warning bells at "story based" and Team Ninja in the same sentence, but I don't think any of us thought it wouldn't even cut it as a game.

Gene Wolfe, one of my favorite authors and possibly the best scifi author alive, has written some books that don't fall in the same level of canon has his others (I liked Free Live Free, but it won't stand with the Book of the New Sun). If you can't trust one person to be good 100% of the time, you definitely can't trust a whole team of them.

You can, however, trust Gene Wolfe to be Gene Wolfe. Even if he does something strange and weird--or rather, doesn't do something strange and weird as cleverly as he normally does, it's still him, and that's why even his worst is incredible.

When I was little, I used to buy pretty much everything that had Squaresoft on the box. That was not because Square was better then, or that games were better then. It was because I was stupid.

Well, not stupid really. But I didn't really have any idea of who made games and how. I know now it's lots of people, working under all kinds of constraints against a deadline. And I know that those people can change all the time, and they'll be treated differently and have different tools to use depending on where they go. The people at Squaresoft weren't the same people on each game I loved, and they certainly aren't the same working on Square games now.

On one of the first articles I wrote on GameSetWatch, in which I compared Metal Gear with Silent Hill, someone ask condescendingly if I was a Konami fan. I found that so strange--the people involved in them were so different; what did having the same person signing their paychecks have to do with anything?

I read an article the other day about how books tend to sell authors, while film and games sell IPs. That's true, but films have famous directors and famous actors. We have some gaming celebrities, but only half of them actually have anything to do with making games (Peter Molyneux and trust is something I can save for another time).

But without knowing individuals, what can you trust that any given game will be as good as that other great game?

I trust indie devs and I trust small studios because there's simply less that can be shuffled away into oblivion. But you know, big studios like Bioware or Blizzard are pretty trustworthy too.

As long as you watch them.

Alright, Time to Bump That Idiotic Post Down

2010-10-04T16:52:00.002-07:00

Argh, I am incapable of consistently blogging here. Two months, really? I should be arrested by the blog police. Thanks for the comments by the way--I will promise to never let something like this happen again, and by promise I mean you will be disappointed.

Anyways, I've been driven to write by the super wonderful Brainy Gamer, who I'm being especially generous with praising because he was talking about the best JRPG series ever.

EVER.

Seriously though, Etrian Odyssey is a series I turn to for a number of reasons. It's something that I turn to when I want to play an RPG that's actually fun as a game. It's something that I turn to when developers complain about the lack of innovation in games coming out of Japan.

But last of all, it's one of the best examples of minimalism in storytelling.

That's why I much as I love this post in Brainy Gamer, I feel like it doesn't accurately convey the white hot rage one might feel at reading some of the reviews he quotes. Sure, EO doesn't barrage you with cutscenes or overwrought characters, but it gives a nuanced story that humanizes everyone from the villains to the shopkeepers without the cliches that absolutely plague eastern RPGs (or western ones for that matter).

I feel like the idea of what a JRPG is has been so thoroughly ingrained in the minds of gamers that reviewers don't seem to know what to do with something like EO. But on the other hand, it's avoided and surpassed of the worst cliches of the genre, ones that fans of the genre find themselves apologizing for all the time, even when they know better. Every time I hear someone complain about ridiculous Judeo-Christian imagery and spiky-haired protagonists, they're not looking hard enough for something different.

Expand your mind, man. Think about what JRPGs could be.

Well if I say something like that, I'll probably have to write about STiNG next. And I will definitely never proofread a blog post again. Blogs should be good for something, at least.

What Am I Doing Here Anyway?

2010-08-07T19:36:00.000-07:00

I actually mean that seriously, just not existentially. Well, what is this blog doing here anyway. I made it because it was a good idea, not because I knew what I was doing. This blog will probably continue to be a collection disjointed nonsense until I find something that works.

But since there are a few people (very few) following this blog, or wandering in from Design Diversions or here for whatever reason, I thought I'd just ask--what would you like to see this blog do? Reviews, recommendations, half-finished articles, or unrelated bullshit?

If no one stops me, it'll probably just be all of the above.

I don't know Why?

2010-07-26T07:30:00.000-07:00

Unrelated to videogames, but I've got another blog going on at Boston free paper Weekly Dig , about the band Why? and a van related incident that ends in tragedy.

Half-Life Crisis

2010-07-24T08:02:00.000-07:00

Gabe Newell claims to know what players fear, as he told Edge, and it it's about as dark as it gets: "The death of their children. The fading of their own abilities."

It's interesting how different kinds of media interpret this. The headline for Kotaku, for example, is "Whenever the Next Half-Life Comes Out, It Had Better Be Scary." Look at how it sells the news from Newell--it's about the next half life, so it's practially a preview. Valve is thinking about making a new half life, sor ther emight be some sort of pre announcement to say there might be eventually a release date soon, and it's all saying tsomething about the game (it'll be scary). The kicker, of course, is that it won't just be scary. It'll be a very specific kind of scary.

That's interesting for a whole other reason. The fear that Newell's talking about is cerebral, for one, something that has I think not been done nearly enough in games, at least not without much, subtley. That's something that I want to see more of, and not in the heavy handed and dull ways they're dealt with in games like say, Bioshock, which is utterly superficial in the way it deals with children.

Of course, the only game I can think of that directly invovlves the avatar's child is Silent Hill (ps1). That'a a great game about fear, and the furtive search for her is really powerful, especially with how her pressence is everywhere but she's frustratingly out of reach and who knows what's happening to her. This classic "save the princess" plotline is underscored by the fact that Cheryl could die at any moment, or worse, and the player would be helpless to stop it. Bioshock 2 also did an excellent job of that.

I don't know how Half-Life could engage the same sort of fear. Although I would love to see where Gabe Newell would take this thought, I really hope that more designers, as they grow older themselves, start recognizing that these issues will speak to the heart of their audience.I'm only twenty-four, but I'm getting older and Newell's talking about the sort of things that are more and more often in the back of my mind.

Losing With Grace

2010-07-19T08:57:00.001-07:00

So I have a bit of a conundrum when playing with my girlfriend. She likes games but she’s not as avid about them as I am--she likes her WoW and I grab whatever’s next in my Gamefly que.

I just read an article in Wired from a dad asking how hard he should try against his kid in Halo, and it made me think about playing games with my girlfriend. She likes rpgs mostly and plays a lot of WoW, but she also really enjoys Blazblue. Of course, since I’m the primary player of the game and this is actually her first real fighter (not that I’ve played competitively before this point, but I still knew what a quarter circle forward was.

I tried as hard as possible to play as well as she did. One thing I messed up was using Rachel’s Frog. Rachel is a really odd character and she has an electric frog that paralyzes opponents and sets them up for a lot of damage; I made my girlfriend so terrified of them that she would stop and jump back if she saw me drop one, which was the opposite of what you want to do, because if you continue with a fast attack or jump you can fly right over it and the recovery on the move is really long. A lot of fighting game pros talk about “training” their opponents which is the same sort of thing (just on purpose).

My guy friends tend to be especially ruthless to people who haven’t played before, so I hope it’s not patronizing of me to play this way. I think though, that I tend to play the way I wish they did. I play my girlfriend not to win, but to teach (badly). A little mercy is in order when someone’s still learning which buttons do what, though there is something to be said for the sink or swim method. Though unlike real life, you can drown more than once.

My friends are not often merciful. They will cheerfully brutalize me, which is a bit discouraging when you’re new to the game and not quite sure what’s going on. A particular friend of my was, and maybe still is, a genius at discovering the simplest way to create a permanent death loop for me. He pulled this off in both a fighting game and a FPS (Sentinal in MVC2 and player guided rockets in James Bond). It’s a bit frustrating, but it’s sort of perfect, because stopping your opponent from learning is the perfect way to win.

Bravely Ran Away

2010-07-16T07:00:00.000-07:00

Etrian Odyssey has become easily one of my favorite RPG series, mostly for the fact that it remembers that it is, in fact, a videogame. The fact that its subtle, simple, minimalist plot is among one of the better ones I’ve ever played is a consequence I think of the general love and creativity expressed by its designers.

Etrian Odyssey is stellar, and a large part of this is the fact that it remembers to be a videogame. It’s a game that is fun on its own terms, and the story and general beauty of the game is a compliment. I’m not the only person who excused playing games like Final Fantasy by telling people it was for the story. Final Fantasy has always been a gorgeous and imaginative series but it is stuck in quite a lot of cliches (of both narrative and gameplay) with no signs at all of questioning them. Etrian Odyssey is not too proud to borrow from western games and it dares to make really annoying gameplay elements (like random encounters) fun. Despite its retro feel the design philosophy is cutting edge. It is hard because it wants to be a game that is challenging and interesting again. Final Fantasy hooks players on the story and makes it easy for them to continue playing. Etrian Odyssey stands only on its gameplay and lets the small jewel of its story simply sit nearby for contemplation.

I was more than a little shocked at how poorly rated EO’s story was, considering how well the gameplay was received, but I suppose that just shows how thoroughly Final Fantasy has trained our expectations of what a JRPG’s story should look like. Rating a story low for being light (or ignoring the fact that it has one) ranks with rating games low because they are hard in terms of misleadingness. It’s not like anyone would criticize the lack of plot in Tetris, but then again we aren’t trained to expect story in those sorts of games. The storekeepers question whether what you’re doing is right or not by plundering the labyrinth and stealing its secrets. Your superiors order you to devastate a race of people living deep below. And the final secret of the maze (it was earth all along) is handled very well, with thought-provoking implications. It doesn’t force a message down your throat and the main cast is only as obnoxious as you imagine them to be--which I’ll talk about more next time.

Final Fantasy XII

2010-07-12T07:00:00.000-07:00

Square was a company that, during the PS One era especially, came out with a fairly wide variety of JRPGs of all kinds. I feel like the sort of diversity I used to see is sort of turning into a large number of FF spinoffs.
It's not the setting that I mind. Since Final Fantasy changes with every generation, the settings rarely outlive their welcome. It's that the Final Fantasy series, even with all the changes it has gone through, is still repeating gameplay mistakes that are as old as the genre. Until recently, it hasn't been as noticeable, but now we are final beginning to see games that are trying new approaches rather than replicating cliches that haunt the JRPG genre.

The trepidation I had about Final Fantasy XIII came from my disappointment in XII, which was mostly that the elegance of its design distinctly highlighted all of the oldest problems of the franchise and made me realize how stubbornly the series refuses to evolve. Final Fantasy invented and sustained the cliches that JRPGs are built on, and it is becoming harder and harder to excuse why certain aspects of the game remain as stilted as they were when the series was on the Super Nintendo.

First of all, there's the gameplay, which I feel somewhat bad criticizing considering as it's one of the most fun combat systems I've seen in a JRPG. It's seamless and quick, utterly unlike the random encounter system that was already unfashionable when Final Fantasy X came out. One of the reasons I find random encounters are so goddamn annoying is because they interrupt my train of thought. I'm trying to find a switch or solve a puzzle or just find the door, and a random encounter is all it takes to make me completely forget where I am and what I was doing. Even when I can keep my (admittedly short) attention span focused on the noncombat task at hand, it turns dungeons into a chore, especially with loading back and forth between combat and environment. FFXII solves this problem nicely, with fights that can not only be avoided, but resolved in a very reasonable amount of time.
(On a side note, Etrian Odyssey is the one game that does random encounters right, which they did by giving the player an icon that indicates when the next encounter is going to happen.)
Unfortunately, this also had the result of revealing how relatively unsophisticated combat is in a Final Fantasy game, and part of this has to do with how easy the encounters are and the lack of diversity in player abilities. With the same monotonous elemental damage spells and interesting but weak physical skills, FFXII is basically buff, heal, wack, aoe, and this isn't especially interesting most of the time. FFXII isn't boring because you can program the characters to autoattack and buff and heal (if you couldn't, it would merely be tedious as well) it's boring because strategy is minimal and repetitive enemies wear out their welcome quickly. Very few of them require any strategy beyond the blindingly obvious, meaning basically that I didn't have to think too much about what I was fighting, since the same strategy worked on basically everything, barring a FEW boss fights.

This is pretty standard for FF games, but recent RPGs (east and west alike) have demonstrated that creative enemy design is possible. I certainly wouldn't accept anything so monotonous in an action game, and as RPGs and action games become more similar there's not a lot of excuses left for making them so weak.

Zombie Blog Rises From Dead, Three Notice

2010-07-09T10:16:00.000-07:00

"Without a guided experience, you're just demanding of people, "Invest your life into this game to figure it out." You can't have that demand on consumers. I think that's naive. We're trying to show people the road to Battlefield and the open sandbox gameplay by guiding them into the experience. It's not always easy, but we're trying."

--Patrick Bach on Bad Company 2.

I read a fairly amusing comment from someone who claimed that they'd play a certain game the way they wanted to and that they couldn't care less what the designer thought was fun. This made me think about how good game design is so amazing at giving players the illusion of free will that some players think that they have it.

Players may THINK they're playing the way they want to, but they're only playing the way they want to in the world of the designer, and they specifically made this world with their entertainment in mind. It's relatively simple for designers to twist a knob here and a dial there and turn fun into tedium and back again. Sometimes players can brilliantly synthesize fun out of crap, but if they are at all good at their job their unseen hands will be with you every time you play.

I think the attitude of this poster may have emerged from the tendency to put emergent gameplay on a pedestal, as if it were a more true and fundamental experiance and that following developer intention is mindless and sheep-like. While emergent gameplay is facinating to study, it's unfortunately more often the enemy of fun than its inspiration. The overall fun generated by griefing, for example is negative.

It is a little bit ridiculous to disregard that developers make everything there is about a game, and that includes the fun, even if it's up to the player how to enjoy it.

2010-06-08T07:56:00.001-07:00

Gabe of Penny Arcade fame has a distaste for political cartooning that occasionally takes a turn for the hilarious, as seen below.

It is the sad reality of America, but our newspaper cartoons are shit. Oh it's easy to complain about internet cartoons on the internet, but the worst webcomics I've read--even the ones that frame the author's horrifying fetishes in chilling clarity--are not appreciably worse than say, Marmaduke.

I'm not going to comment on the movie they just made of it, but I think it might prove my point.

I can count the number of good newspaper comics on one hand, and even then I think I would come up a few fingers short. Creative work thrives on personality, but nationally syndicated comics thrive by being as unoffensive as possible. Rather than do anything to make someone want to read them, all they have to do is not get themselves pulled from a newspaper. But online, doing something that shocking would only grab more attention, no matter how offensive it was.

em

2010-03-27T16:55:00.000-07:00

If you had told me that ubisoft was making a god damn Scott Pilgrim game with sprite work by Paul Robertson and music by Anamanaguchi I would literally have PUNCHED YOU IN THE FACE and then cried myself to sleep.

BLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD

2010-03-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

"[God of War III director] Asmussen remembers one scene in particular, a violent moment inspired by the Gaspar Noé film Irréversible, infamous for its brutal rape scene and gruesome beating death of a man by fire extinguisher," (Kotaku,When Does God of War Go Too Far? When Someone Laughs).

God of War presents me with a conundrum. On the one hand, I loved Devil May Cry and love it even more when it's better and comes with a different name. On the other hand, I wish videogames, and this genre in particular, would stop trying to remind me of Todd Mcfarlane.

There are three possibilities for violence: tragedy, farce, and bullshit. Tragedy is when an artist succeeds in making violence, well, violent. Irreversible, for instance, induced vomiting in the audience during the premiere. It is the sinister twin to videogame violence, a brutality no different in level but EXTREMELY different in tone.

Just try comparing Irreversible to Mortal Kombat. Pixels aren't the factor here--the intensity of the violence is in how absolutely detestable the act of it is. This is violence as tragedy, a series of sounds and images that are so contrary to humanity and so indicative of it that humans literally have a gut reaction to it.

As for farce, see above. While that image is so wildly out of context it's impossible to tell if the farce is intended or not, it doesn't really matter. They could start out as seriously as possible and flop so hard they make a sequel called Army of Darkness and pretend they did it on purpose the first time. This is where Bayonetta falls, and it's more or less what I prefer, for fear of option three's bastardized offspring.

The third way of representing violence is bullshit. This boring but necessary violence is the staple of summer blockbusters and the fate of every computer controlled opponent in a modern videogame.

The reason I wince when I hear Irreversible and God of War in the same sentence is that when you try for tragedy and can't pull it off you end up with something far worse than comedy; superficiality. Shock for the sake of shock falls here, but more often than not this is just an excuse for violence that is as extreme as it is uncreative. The Kotaku comments from posters eagerly waiting for an Irreversible level of violence have missed the point of the movie by a mile. Irreversible is meant to invite abhorrence. Violence in a game that's nothing but fantasy battles can only glorify violence. That's why I play it, for the fun of a fantasy and no matter how much depth they pour into whatever cutscene the director mentions, it's not going to look that way sandwiched by eight hours of gleeful brutality.

I say this as someone who loves this stuff. But this is why I love it when they're over the top, out of control, and know better than to take themselves too seriously. A good story can be told this way, even a deep one. But no way can you have violence as routine, played for coolness and shock, and then turn around and try and deliver depth.

At least not without making someone laugh.

Virtual On 2: Ontario Taragon

2010-03-18T20:05:00.000-07:00

Leigh Alexander had an article up at Kotaku exploring controllers in the age without controllers. It's nice because it explores what people are doing with controllers, which is itself a fascinating process. The train game in particular made me think of how people get attached to their controllers, which then reminded me of the Insert Credit posts about the twin stick controller needed to play Virtual ON and how passionately this dedicated group of fans feels about having the right controller.
It's for this reason that I feel controllers should be judged for the possibilities they lend to a game rather than their ability to let marketers go "IT'S LIKE YOU'RE REALLY VERBING THE NOUN!"

Call of Booty

2010-03-06T09:29:00.000-08:00

I hadn't played a Call of Duty game in forever, so after Gamefly stopped sending me games that weren't Modern Warfare 2, I found myself liking and not liking the game in surprising ways.

I love FPS but I am bad at it, so I tend to go for the single player game. The single player plays, somewhat predictably, like a game designed by people thinking about multiplayer above all else. Consequently the single player replicates the feeling of the non-stop action of a deathmatch or deathmatch with flags and stuff. That's okay, but when the pacing is one long line of action it starts to feel exhausting and repetitive. More so even than multiplayer, because there aren't the breaks that respawning or loading the next map provides. It's the opposite of games like marathon or

On the other hand MW2 has amazing set design. When I came out of the foxhole and saw the ruins of the Washington Monument, it was absolutely breathtaking (despite the fact that the image is wholly inaccurate and it has no internal skeleton). Whenever I read about war, the thought of what it would look like if it came to my home creeps into my mind. The fidelity with which they rendered a war on the American mainland made me feel like I could have been running through my own neighborhood, no matter how unrealistic the circumstances were that led the plot in that direction. This is actually a pretty gutsy move--I can't even imagine a post 9/11 Hollywood blockbuster that put a war directly on American soil. Monument destroying lasers are safe in a way that a full fledged war isn't, and the ground level perspective is something I feel that videogames are better at depicting than film.

Modern Warfare 2 is missing about half of what it would take to make it as coherent and compelling a story as something like Uncharted 2, but I'm honestly blown away by how amazing some sections of it are. Games are obviously capable of immense quality, but it seems as if the studios or publishers aren't very interested in a quality in every aspect of their game. Which is a shame.

Chubby Rain

2010-02-14T20:42:00.000-08:00

Heavy Rain, that is. The tutorial was awful in precisely the way an entirely quick time event based game would be, but after learning how the game was expecting prompts the process quickly became intuitive to the point where it didn't feel like the experience would be a total train wreck. The fight scene was extreme tense, very well done. Quick time events are awful game design not for any inherent flaw, but because of two huge and common flaws with their implementation.

First of all is the infamous "PRESS X NOT TO DIE" problem. Bayonetta's a great recent example--if you press the button at the wrong time, you're forced to watch the same cutscene over and over again to the point of total boredom and frustration. This is what I enjoyed most about Heavy Rain--missing a button just meant that the goon you were fighting managed to get in a punch. It feels like a fight because of the exchange, and it doesn't demand ridiculous perfection. Bayonetta annoyed me especially since it had quick time events that didn't kill you if you messed up, leading me to wonder why, in a game the penalizes you for every death, they thought instant death for a missed button was a good idea.

But the second problem is the more serious one I think it may be the reason why we think of quick time events as being different from any other form of gameplay at all. The controller (wii and touchscreens included) is an abstraction. Arrows have a generally accepted meaning, but the letters and number and symbols depend mostly on the individual game you play. The difference is that these games establish context first thing, and then leave players knowing what these tools are and how to use them, from jumping to interaction to shooting. In fact, most games have buttons with contextual application. Interaction is the biggest one--that button does everything from opening doors to flipping switches, but it makes sense to the player because those actions all fall under the general category of "interaction."

So pressing X TO JASON is as much an abstraction as pressing X to jump, but the difference is that in games that are not Heavy Rain, X always does what it does. It may do different things in different contexts, but all of that is predefined. In one scene of heavy rain, X may do a host of different and completely unrelated things, and no established meaning is placed on the buttons. When I press X in Bayonetta, I'm not thinking of the button, I'm just jumping. As compelling as Heavy Rain is, it makes me feel a bit like a trained monkey. It's like I'm obeying the game instead of the game obeying me.

What I'd rather is that we had a meaning attached to all of these gestures established at the beginning. The directional ones are fairly intuitive, but wouldn't it be nice if each of the other buttons had an abstract meaning that had different effects in different contexts? A button for general interaction, a button for aggression, a button for empathy, a button for introspection, etc. I'm not entirely convinced that breadth of actions required for Heavy Rain means that there's no room for intuitive gameplay.

Alistair Can't Danmaku

2010-01-26T12:08:00.000-08:00

I decided to finally give the Touhou games a try, inspired by a comment on my column on Ninja Gaiden 2's health system.

Here is the video Atanok linked.

Absurd, isn't it? Not all of the game is that insane, but I've only been playing them on normal and easy for now.

There are a lot of reasons to like Touhou. Its simple, but has a lot of depth and tricks. I like games that are easy to get a handle on immediately.

Another thing I like is that playing Touhou makes you really good at touhou. Playing different games at the same time has the tendancy to make me comparing apples and organes, or in this case, Dragon Age Origins to touhou.

Obviously, they have nothing in common, but what's annoying about DAO is that it can be fairly hard to understand what is going on and who is doing what. I don't have a lot of confidence in the AI and there have been a fair number of scenarios in which I've annihilated a group of enemies but a slightly different mob of them destroys me, and it's very hard to distugish why I died.

Imperishable Night, on the other hand, is a lot easier to understand, despite the chaos filling the screen. Projecties, enemies, and powerups are clearly diferentiated. THe problem with RPGs can be the fact that there are so many abilities being used all the time. Buffs and debuffs and special attacks and spells. Since the console version somewhat discourages the pause and input system of the PC, these things all seem to happen at once, and it's hard to tell what is important. What exactly are those glowy sparks over the monster's head supposed to mean? Is it going to cast Unicorn Rainbow Surprise, or Deadly Fireball of Deadly Death? How am I supposed to play a game if it won't tell me what's going on?

Combat in DAO can range from simple to unmanageable. I like touhou because I always feel like i'm playing a game. I know what I'm doing, how I died, and how I can do better. Touhou isn't a simple game, but despite the fabulous dresses and blinding colors, it's a clearer one.

It's An Inside Joke, and You're On The Outside

2010-01-25T16:43:00.001-08:00

Videogames are perceived strangely by those who don't play them, but perhaps more strangely by those that do.

Stephen Totilo, of Kotaku, does not believe that videogames will become less marginalized as those who play them grow into power.

"I'm not with those people, subscribing to my theory that video games are more like musical instruments or foreign languages, things that take practice and skill to indulge in and for which there will always be a vast population of non-participants and outsiders."

That contrary view is a pretty hard sell. The points of comparison, first of all, are a little hard to swallow. Perhaps there's a bit of truth to the music part--how many kids did I know in high school with an electric guitar and faint aspirations of bandom that dropped it once they hit college(or picked it up then and dropped it on graduation)? Well, that metaphor doesn't do much to change the image of games as a childish pursuit dropped on entry to the real world. On the other hand, anyone with that much musical skill knows that music is much, much harder than playing videogames. But language? Excuse me, but not only is that of massive difficulty, it hardly compares to sports or art or anything. Language makes up the foundation of a whole culture, and it's so difficult that one must have a both a desire to experience that culture on level that they can't already get from translation, and the time and dedication to learn. I really can't allow him to get away with comparing that to videogames. They're fundamentally different in so many ways.

His argument, that games require a level of practice and skill that puts them outside the average person's enjoyment, is laughable, even elitist.

Now, I suspect what he really means is that story-based games are outside of the grap of the average person, and this might well be true. After all, Nintendo for all its waggling hasn't handed the parents and grandparents it's so proud of courting anything more narratively complex than Mario. Those games simply aren't being marketed at those outside of the hardcore audience. I wouldn't even go as far as to say the games are too difficult. Actually, I would, but that may be more do to the fact that the basic conventions of most games (third and first person games with lots of things to do) take some time to pick up.

I think this might be an issue with design. The Wii doesn't do anything to give players more control over the game, but it is intuitive. I think right now all of the big three are overstating (just a tad) what they can accomplish with motion control, but technology will inevitably improve.

All human beings enjoy problem solving. Whatever fundamental human need games fulfill, I don't think it's the sole province of the elite.

Of Localization

2010-01-23T07:22:00.000-08:00

All the visual novels lately have interested me in Ar Tonelico 2, which is an JRPG with a lot of vn tropes. It's a ps2 game, and it is both cute and as naughty as it can possibly get away with.
The battle system is pretty interesting too, more like Valkyrie Profile than Final Fantasy. Anyways, it's the sort of game that might remind you of the 90s, if you played a lot of those RPGs, especially when it comes to the graphics.

Unfortunately, the localization quality is also fairly evokative of that era: Poor translations, reversed meanings, shoddy graphical editing, and somehow, a bug that causes a boss to freeze the game. In fact, it's so bad that there is a relocalization project aimed at retranslating and fixing the game.
It's doubly strange because companies like NISA (who also localized Disgaea3 ) found their niche by localizing games for an audience that knows very quickly when they've been had. NISA also has a successful online presence and close involvement with its fans, factors that Atlus (who originally published NIS games, like early Disgaea) also exploited. Atlus became successful by giving the fans (that is, the people buying what they were selling) what they wanted, even though that means leaving in Japanese honorifics, a practice that is bad localization but a successful fan-pleaser.

Still, it's kind of mind-blowing that the company energetically pushing a very indie-style and unique game like Holy Invasion of Privacy Badman (what a name) ends up with something like the AT 2 localization. NISA's been fairly tight-lipped and their response to the bug was very disappointing, and even dishonest(scroll down to the part about Raki, the boss in question). They misidentified both the workarounds and the cause of the problem, which players discovered by opening up the game and looking at the code. It's doubly disappointing because the localization of the first game was much better, and that leaves little excuse for the subpar sequel.

If nothing else, it's interesting to read the relocalization blog just to see how the process of translation works. The play-by-play of development's inner workings is something a lot of companies have instituted, including Blizzard, Bioware, and Platinum Games. It's similar to what NISA has done, though it's decidedly less superficial. It's impossible to hide stuff anymore. The fan community is too strong and knowledgeable to be fooled. It's hard to have confidence in companies that don't acknowledge their problems, and it's frustrating for fans who wish that another company could pick up their licences.

I've always found competition a funny thing when it comes to Intellectual Property. Sure, two companies can compete on the quality of translation, but they have a monopoly on whatever IPs they buy. With fansubbed anime, or fan translation projects, there is actual competition over who can translate a specific series the best (not to mention greater transparency). I find it interesting that the fanbase wields enough power to force competition into this field.

It's Time To Kick Ass and Lick Lollipops, and I'm All Out of Lollipops.

2010-01-20T06:45:00.000-08:00

Yes, Bayonetta is campier than a performance of The Rocky Horror Show the middle of Yellowstone, but it's also self-conscious, ironic, and even clever.
Tiff Chow helpfully brings a reasonable approach to the issue of Bayonetta's sexuality, reminding us both that it's neither a step froward nor a step back. It's difficult to take Bayonetta seriously as a feminist icon, but it's also difficult to take Bayonetta seriously as anything, and that's not a bad thing.

Thankfully, most seem to get that Bayonetta is about as representative of her gender as Duke Nukem is of his. She really is a female Duke Nukem, and she brings the same satire of overblown action male action stars to the cliched kick-ass girls so common to videogames. Bayonetta's absolutely absurd imagery drives home with sledgehammer-like subtly that this game is not to be taken seriously. Even Bayonetta (especially Bayonetta) doesn't take her game seriously.

Here's what the localizer, JP Kellams had to say about her: "To me, Bayonetta had to be posh, sassy, and totally aware of herself. When Bayonetta is cheesy, she knows she is cheesy. When she is teasing, she knows she is teasing. Her inner monologue is fast enough to get out the line a normal person only wishes they would have said, and she exudes confidence in everything she does. There is nothing subtle about her, but that is exactly what you want her to be, and she knows it."

Her body is parodic to the point that commentators have dismissed any danger she might cause to body image on the simple grounds that it's too ridiculous to take seriously--another trait she shares with Duke. I love the irony of a man that uses feet and guns exclusively is built like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

If there's a difference between Bayo and Duke, it's that Bayo is aware of her own campiness. Remember, these are the people who made Okami. They know how to be funny and sly, and while their perspective is unabashedly male, they at least have the decency to make fun of themselves while envisioning it.

NERF GAMES JOURNALISM

2009-12-18T10:57:00.000-08:00

Dissecting a game is an incredibly difficult process. When reviewers complain about a certain aspect of the game, they only know the result, not the accumulation of programing and design that led to the one wrinkle that screwed up the experience. They say that final polish that makes or breaks a game, and it really shows. If you are playing a game that is say, 50% punching people, if there's one little thing wrong with it, you'll spend 50% of the game noticing it.

The thing is, I don't know how to make that change. I only know what I want the result to look like, and it's a little bit frustrating. On the other hand, it's not like this means journalists have no right to criticize. They absolutely do, especially if they are good at understanding the end result. There's a lot on the surface of a game to understand. Too bad most don't take the time to.

As a reader of games journalism, and its deranged stepchild, the comments section, it kills me to read a post that criticizes "poor game balance." What the hell does that mean? There are literally infinite problems that could cause "poor game balance." How can I even take a statement like that seriously with no other information? It's as worthless as saying HALO? MORE LIKE GAYLO.

People who understand why the problems are happening, however, are actually telling me about the game. In fact, they may be telling me things about the game that I don't even know from having played it. The bottom line, of course, is whether the game is good or not, and that's what I want to know from reading a review. However, I do not assume that reviewers know better than I do. Maybe they hate fun, or colors.

2009-12-05T07:31:00.000-08:00

Dragon Age Origins is great. Not in every respect, but in enough of them that when it’s all pieced together the end result is on the level. The gameplay is certainly good, but it’s the writing that saves this game, and possibly all of us. It’s not good “for a videogame” it’s just good, and while we’re on the subject of the inherent worth of certain art forms let’s also not forget that the writing is way above your average fantasy novel as well.
It’s so good that I’m actually glad the setting and plot are just on the contemporary side of generic. What it shows is that even the most clichéd setting and plot can be made fresh and original with good writing and compelling characters. My girlfriend loves spending time in camp talking to everyone between bouts of violence, and she’s frequently laughing with them or wistfully signing at their sorrows.
They are well written and well acted, more real than anything else in the game. Please, take note of what a difference writing makes. Scifi and fantasy epics are worth less than a fanfiction.net account without the skill to back them up. It’s the difference between this:

I always get the shakes before a drop. I’ve had the injections, of course, and hypnotic preparation, and it stands to reason that I can’t really be afraid. The ship’s psychiatrist has checked my brain waves and asked my silly questions while I was asleep and he tells me that it isn’t fear, it isn’t anything important—it’s just like the trembling of an eager race horse in the starting gate.

I couldn’t say about that; I’ve never been a race horse. But the fact is: I'm scared silly, every time.

At D-minus-thirty, after we had mustered in the drop room of the Rodger Young, our platoon leader inspected us. He wasn’t our regular platoon leader, because Lieutenant Rasczak had bought it on our last drop; he was really the platoon sergeant, Career Ship’s Sergeant Jelal. Jelly was a Finno-Turk from Iskander around Proxima—a swarthy little man who looked like a clerk, but I’ve seen him tackle two berserk privates so big he had to reach up to grab them, crack their heads together like coconuts, step back out of the way while they fell.

-Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

and this

John Stalvern waited. The lights above him blinked and sparked out of the air. There were demons in the base. He didn't see them, but had expected them now for years. His warnings to Cernel Joson were not listenend to and now it was too late. Far too late for now, anyway.

John was a space marine for fourteen years. When he was young he watched the spaceships and he said to dad "I want to be on the ships daddy."

Dad said "No! You will BE KILL BY DEMONS"

There was a time when he believed him. Then as he got oldered he stopped. But now in the space station base of the UAC he knew there were demons.

"This is Joson" the radio crackered. "You must fight the demons!"

So John gotted his palsma rifle and blew up the wall.

"HE GOING TO KILL US" said the demons

"I will shoot at him" said the cyberdemon and he fired the rocket missiles. John plasmaed at him and tried to blew him up. But then the ceiling fell and they were trapped and not able to kill.

"No! I must kill the demons" he shouted

The radio said "No, John. You are the demons"

And then John was a zombie.

-Peter Chimaera, DOOM: Repercussions of Evil

Both of these stories are, no matter how you slice it, about spacemen shooting aliens with guns. The difference is not between bugs and cyberdemons, or between power armor and plasma rifles. The Shamaylon Chimaera pulls at the end does nothing to save him, but you’d be surprised how many writers think a plot twist can stand by itself.

So please, when writing, think of the innocent words.

Song of Saya

2009-09-29T17:13:00.000-07:00

I thought of reviewing Saya no Uta, but considering what Saya no Uta did to me the give or take just doesn't seem equal. Readers tend to say that they like books because they take something away from the experience.

Song of Saya, on the other hand, will take something away from you.

The VN has a merciless premise: the main character, Fuminori, nearly dies in a car crash, and the neurosurgery used to save his life permanently deranges his view of the world. His hospital looks like a gore-drenched nightmare, and his friends appear as hideous monsters who talk in barely decipherable static. He tries to continue his life as a medical student, but he can barely stand the presence of other human beings.

He has, however, met a girl named Saya. She is the only person in the world that appears to him as a human being.
Of course, if humans look like monsters to him, what must Saya look like to the rest of the world?

Saya no Uta makes The Call of Cthulhu look like Goodnight Moon. It's a well written, amazing story, but it's honestly too much for a human being to handle. No matter how sweet Saya looks, she still leaves you with the knowledge in the back of your mind that she is, in reality, something so horrific that normal people go insane just from looking at her. And she and the protagonist have sex.

How do you talk about a work of fiction that is honestly too fucked up to talk about in modern society? I'm not even entirely comfortable associating my real name with knowledge of this work. It would be one thing to distance myself with "lol Japan" and take a patronizing attitude to the erotic grotesque nonsense but I did actually find it really good.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but so is sanity, morality, and love. To his friends, Fuminori is a depraved sociopathic monster, but in the world he sees all of his actions are irrefutable. While preparing to kill one of his friends, he explains to Saya that "What's 'slaying a monster' to me is 'murder' to him."

It's creepily reminiscent of the real life case of Russell Eugene Weston Jr., a paranoid schizophrenic who killed two policemen he believed to be alien cannibals while storming the US senate in search of a Ruby Satellite that would save the human race from an incurable disease called Black Heva. In the world he lives in, his actions are right.

Visual Novel Binge: Seacats

2009-09-20T18:16:00.000-07:00

I just read a ton of visual novels, the Japanese spin off of adventure games that leave behind gameplay completely in favor of story. This is mostly because of a program called ONScripter which fan translators sometimes use to apply patches which render the games readable in English while also making it possible run the result on Mac and Linux.
What I enjoy about Mac gaming, which is really only the upside to a downside, is that the library of games is so small I end up playing things I probably might have skipped over if I had been drowning in choices.
Now, when I say "just read" you need to remember that the term visual novel is not just for show. Just for curiosity's sake, I wonder what the easiest way to measure them would be, as they don't have anything as convenient as pages. Regardless, my proudest hour in quick reading was finishing The Golden Compass before dinner after receiving it that morning. This was when I was on vacation and had a day of doing absolutely nothing else.
I spent most of my free time for about two weeks reading When the Seagulls Cry (Umineko no Naku Koro ni) and it certainly felt ridiculously long, even though it was a collection of four separate parts. The author, Ryukishi07 (talking about web based authors always makes me feel like I'm writing fanfiction) is bringing out a new part every six months in an interesting revival of serial fiction, which is also part of how the story unfolds.
Umineko starts out as a murder mystery with elements of horror that in subsequent episodes turns that premise on its head and eventually the mystery not only concerns who the murder is, but if the genre of the story itself is mystery or fantasy as the murders get so incredible and impossible that everyone starts to believe that they were accomplished through magic. Each of the four released episodes chronicles the same two day period, which typically ends in the murder of all of the characters. Each episode starts again from the beginning, with different events and through different perspectives to shed more light on the mystery.
It's pretty jarring to read a story that has two genres vying for dominance, which leads to some (intentionally) hilarious scenes in later episodes. But another thing about VNs that I've found is that their authors have little trouble jumping from comedy to horror. Ryukishi07 is one of the most accomplished writers of murder scenes that I've ever read. He manged to make a scene in which one of the characters rips apart her daughter's stuffed animal in front of her feel more disturbing and brutal than if it had been alive. It's interesting, although it's pretty deeply invested in the anime community, so it's audience is quite limited.

Zombie Zombie Zombie Zombie

2009-07-10T11:57:00.000-07:00

So a couple of friend of mine are moving into the Boston area and since we had some free time, we took a stroll down Newbury Street. If you enjoy looking at things you can't afford, it's really the place to be. It's the only area I know of where even the thrift stores are out of my price range. Of course, that's because the brands they get second hand were so absurdly expensive in the first place. My friend got a 40 dollar shirt that would have gone easily for twice that. I know, right?

But they had some pretty great T-shirts there. As I was browsing through them, I saw something vaguely familiar. Zombies, huh. But there was something horribly familiar about these zombies:

Yes, that is an ultra-trendy Resident Evil T-shirt. It's by Uniqlo, who also did a bunch of Metal Gear Solid 4 shirts last year. I have no idea how it ended up in this hip little vintage store but it's MINE NOW. Seriously, I don't think this was even sold in America. Someone must have imported it and then ditched it after hardly wearing it. Okay, it is really bright yellow, but this is classic stuff!

E3: Now with More Waggle

2009-06-09T15:51:00.000-07:00

I think a lot of people misunderstand the point of E3, fans, journalists, and companies alike.
E3 is entertainment. It’s informative in the same why an advertisement is informative, which is to say not at all.
But it’s fun. It’s fun to watch one a half minute trailers that have no gameplay footage. It’s fun to watch executives give speeches awkwardly. It’s fun to watch Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo simultaneously copy existing technology from each other. E3 is a spectacle. It’s like the Oscars for movies that don’t even exist yet.
E3 is a carefully controlled environment that allows marketing departments everywhere to make the most ludicrous claims seem possible by not releasing a drop of tangible information about how they will be made into reality. What, for example, does the trailer for the Knights of the Old Republic MMO or Halo: Reach tell us about the games? (The trailer for Halo:Reach was the most disappointing in terms of generating unearned hype. Metal Gear Rising’s piece of floating concept art was more informative, unless Halo Reach is supposed to be some of spinning planet game.) Obviously, the trailers tell us nothing about the game, but it makes the whole E3 production have the same effect as a late nineties Final Fantasy game, breaking up monotonous press conferences with flashy cutscenes.
Any discussion of E3 is going to be speculation, unless you feel like reviewing a bunch of commercials. But the key to dealing with E3 is treating it like the entertainment it is. Enjoy the movies. Enjoy speculating how new technology will play out. Enjoying being told monstrous lies. Enjoy wondering what the announced games will be in reality.
Just don't take it seriously.

Knights in the Nightmare

2009-03-29T07:59:00.000-07:00

The entire premise of this game appears to be based on the silly pun in the title, but I enjoy silly puns and Sting RPGS (all two of them) and Knights in the Nightmare is actually one of the first games in a while that has me interested because of its gameplay rather than the name of its creator.
Sting's Dept Heaven games don't have many common elements (other than very cluttered menus) but the creators are very intent trying a great many new things. Not all of them work, but the worst that can be said is that the games are refreshingly different. I'm hoping that some of these new ideas will prove influential, although many of them are a little too unique, and Knights in the Nightmare especially looks like a game that few will imitate just because of how weird it is.
Essentially, Knights in the Nightmare plays out like a somewhat simple tactics RPG (like Disgaea) in which you direct heroes of different classes to kill monsters. What makes the game unique is that the cursor you use to equip units and issue commands is actually under attack from ancient mystical laser beams while you're trying to play the game. Essentially, the game makes you play Ikagura in order to give your units commands. Awesome.
Awesome because I really do like to actually play RPGs, and so many games in this genre seem committed to making the gameplay as bland and easy as possible so as to better advance the plot. Knights has rounds, levels, and scores which makes it feel more like an arcade game than anything else. I approve.

Fashion and Power

2008-11-07T12:55:00.001-08:00

A month or so ago, I was dragged by my girlfriend to see the Sex and the City movie. It was not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. It was a bit on the boring side and the writing was not so great, but neither of those were the reason I was being dragged there. As my girlfriend pointed out, you don’t watch movies like this for the plot- you watch them for the clothes. Which is true; there are much better romantic comedy/drama/whatever movies out there, but few have such fabulous shoes.
This is why Sex and the City is just like World of Warcraft, which is, ultimately, a game about shoes. Sure, experience points are cool and all, but it’s really about the clothes. Despite the fact that WoW’s shoes add a bonus to agility, the emphasis of the game is firmly on the clothes. Some players would rather play with inferior equipment than look silly, and more powerful equipment is intended to be both better looking and more unique, affordable only to the elite.
The undercurrent of clothes is power. The women of Sex and the City are wealthy, beautiful, and powerful, not unlike player avatars. And in WoW, more fashionable clothes literally make you more powerful. In WoW, beautiful and fashionable people entertain themselves by drinking potions and killing monsters. In Sex and the City, they drink expensive cocktails and have sex with beautiful people.
WoW is the American capitalist ideal in videogame form. Anyone with ambition and skill can climb to the top of the social ladder.
Many critics of MMOs such as WoW complaign that the game is too full of drama, too much like having a second job. WoW’s appeal is not in the fact that it’s an escape from ordinary life, but that it gives a taste of all that our society values most highly in life. Anyone who puts enough time and effort into WoW can have beauty, power and status, but very few people will ever enjoy that kind of wealth and beauty available to the stars of Sex and the City. Both forms of media allow the viewer to experience the fantasy, but of course, neither will bring it any closer to reality.

2008-10-13T12:41:00.001-07:00

I'm very interested in the story direction in Diablo III. Not so much the story itself (I haven't really played a Diablo game before) but the philosophy behind how they want to deliver it. One phrase that really stuck out for me was the idea of "show, don't tell" which one the developers mentioned in an interview. This is the central thesis of the way creative writing is taught today, and even in a visual medium like gaming, it's all too common for designers to set up the story through gratuitous dialogue rather than something more dynamic and engaging. A problem with the previous Diablo games (and many other games) was that the player gets talked at, rather than with. Although this is often cited as a technical issue with having a selectable protagonist, what it really means is that it's a lot more work creating dialogue for each character. Certainly understandable, but if a game is going to have a story there's no excuse for boring the player with it.So it's nice to see this recognised as an issue. Dialogue means more interesting conversations for one thing, and more character development on the other.
Speaking of which, although I'm always pushing for more player immersion and more focus on the player, I am very intrigued by the idea of developing the player characters as side characters to world they're living in, because there's a lot of potential in reserving character development for a specific side of the game. The issue of focus on the player has nothing to do with how powerful or important to plot the character you are playing is, and everything to do with how much you care about that character. One of the big problems I had with Final Fantasy XII was that the main characters got barely any development. Vaan was literally just tagging along for the ride and he was supposed to be the main character. At the time, I was really annoyed because the stories of the main characters were tangential to the plot, but in retrospect I think I would have actually been okay with that if they had made me care more about the characters. Maybe having a specific part of the game devoted to character development will help out with this problem (if it's well executed of course).

"Selections From H.P. Lovecraft's Brief Tenure As a Whitman's Sampler Copywriter"

2008-08-19T14:01:00.000-07:00

McSweeney's may be the best thing ever. It's like the literary counterpart to all those math-snob webcomics. Only without the comics.

"Snake, try to remember some of the basics of CRWR..."

2008-08-05T09:42:00.000-07:00

I've had a hard time thinking about what to write for my post on Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, mostly because there is so much to say about the game. So instead of talking about how great the boss fights were or how much the pacing has improved or how many times I ran straight into a Russian soldier because those guys are like invisible or something, I'll talk about the health bar.

Part of the considerable difference between previous Metal Gear games and Snake Eater is due to the way the health bar is treated. The notion of damage and hit points is so universal to video game design that we rarely think about how differently that concept can be implemented in different games, and the effect that has on the overall experience. In Snake Easter the health bar creates a sense of urgency and tension because since your health bar is regenerating constantly and you can take a lot of damage before you die, conflict in the game can drag on for a very long time. This is very different from MGS1 or 2, in which gunfights were over pretty quickly one way or the other since combat was very lethal and regeneration was limited.
The health bar is representative of how overall Snake Eater replaces the clear precision of MGS2 with dirtier, more desperate combat that can even be somewhat agonizing to play. For example, the soldiers tend to hunch down more and hold their guns close to their heads, making headshots difficult even at close range. This forces you to break out the automatic rifles when you're discovered which in turn leads much bloodier combat (compared with the sniper-like precision which was required to excel at MGS2). Since the process of staying alive is much more involved, what with hiding, healing, and eating food, recovering from injury or discovery can take a long time and sometimes dying can actually feel easier.

As a side note, I read an article recently about how people feel a sense of relief when their character dies in a videogame, which I believe is linked to sense of relief one feels when one dies in a dream. But in Snake Eater, the process of recovery is so drawn out and difficult that it postpones that feeling of release and creates a very tense experience.

Next time, I promise to talk about something other than Metal Gear Solid. I'm happy that the games are realtively short, since it's so much easier to finish them than say, Persona 3 Fes (even though I love it). I don't really have as much time to sink into these games as I used to.

OMG

2008-08-04T09:37:00.000-07:00

This is too goddamn cute. I especially love mini-ocelot's "BUT I LIVE ON THROUGH THIS ARM!" pose.

I also found by clicking around on the site this amazing T-shirt design.

Unfortunately, that is, according to Play-Asia, US $49.90 worth of T-shirt. Yikes! Almost worth it though. The quality of all this mechanizing is quite nice- this is certainly very fashionable .

After finishing MGS3, I feel like I finally get the whole craze around the series and I'll post my thoughts on it tomorrow.

And Then the President Grabbed My Junk: A Metal Gear Solid 2 Retrospective.

2008-07-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

Hideo Kojima tried to kill me again last Wednesday but he was much more gracious about it this time, which pretty much sums up my impression of Sons of Liberty.
Last time I mentioned that Metal Gear Solid feels like a game that's still getting used to the third dimension, and I happily found that Metal Gear Solid 2 had become much more comfortable in that role. Camera angles are a little less hazardous, but it's the simple introduction of first-person aiming that really makes the third dimension interactive in a way that it wasn't in Metal Gear Solid. I also enjoyed the plot greatly despite the fact that the interaction between Raiden and Rose was pretty irritating. There was some interesting ideas about the nature of videogames, especially towards the end, but those long monologues really bogged the game down.
It's annoying in any medium for an antagonist to wax philosophical at the last minute, as if trying to squeeze out every last bit of pretension he can before he bites it, but I notice it so much more in videogames because directors seem much more reluctant to let the protagonist interrupt them.The fake colonel at the end of Sons of Liberty, all I wanted was for Raiden to say something, anything at all in protest.
So I was completely blown away when I discovered that I actually could say my mind: Pressing the R1 and R2 apparently lets you elicit a response from Raiden during a codec call, yes or no depending on the button and mild or severe depending on how hard the button is pressed. It's such an odd feature to put in the game because using it makes no difference at all; that feature is purely there to get a reaction out of the player, and when I went back and replayed it was vaguely satisfying to heckle the fake colonel's arrogant psychobabble.
I like little touches like that. It gives you a feeling of power, even though it isn't real.

An Ikean Wasteland

2008-07-14T12:38:00.000-07:00

Ikea is kind of fun, as long as you don't let the absurdity of it all cause you to giggle to yourself too much. My personal experience there is usually pretty boring (what color shelf do you want? I don't care, what color do you want?), but eavesdropping can be a fun distraction when you're tired of staring at TV stands.

Sometimes you run into families that have spent so much time trying to decide on their furniture that they forget they're still in a store and not yet at home. This occasionally leads to very loud and intensely personal conversations.
"Which color is this? Is this birch?"
"No honey, this is beech. "
"You said you hated beech."
"No, I said I hated birch. Do you ever listen to me?"
"Our whole kitchen is done in birch! It'll never match!"
"If you had listened to me back then we wouldn't be here now!"
"I want a divorce."

This always happens in kitchenware. At the beginning of the store, full of couches and comfy chairs, the couples are always so full of hope. The world teems with possibilities. But as the store begins to stretch endlessly before them, it causes a sensation of vertigo. How many cabinet variations can a man compare without going mad? How many hideous upholstery patterns can you sit on before you finally snap? How long can you listen to atonal Swedish advertising jingles before the Slipad knife set looks like the only way out? And you can't go backwards in Ikea. Up-only escalators and disapproving stares from the staff block you at every turn. Shortcuts take you right back where you started. I once met a man there who had forgotten English and could only speak in eastern European furniture designers.
Okay, not completely true, but Ikea sure feels that way at least.

Diablo III: The Quality of Being Obvious

2008-06-29T15:30:00.000-07:00

Despite the mounting suspense over at Blizzard, the resulting news should contain the same level of surprise as say, Duke Nukem being delayed again or the media blaming violence on Grad Theft Auto. Since Blizzard has exactly six IPs, and most people are lucky to have heard of more than three of them, this one was pretty easy to figure out unless you were crossing your fingers for a Lost Vikings MMO. Now if they announced a whole new series, then I'd be really surprised. Of course, who cares about Diablo III when Dialbo IV and Diablo V are on the horizon.

Since they've already announced that the game will be part of Battle.net, it seems like this pretty much indicates that Diablo III will be free to play online and effectively land Blizzard a spot in the growing free MMO market.
Ever since Blizzard effectively announced Diablo III when they started recruiting for a mysterious (read: obvious) next gen MMO it was pretty safe to assume that it would be free to play online, not just because the first games were, but because Blizzard would be shooting themselves in the foot if they had two pay by the month fantasy MMOs. It's this worry that effectively killed all chances for a Starcraft MMO (or any other kind of pay for play MMO for that matter). So it seems to be a fairly safe bet that Blizzard would rather break into the growing free MMO market.

Of course, there's also no profit to be made in making a free WoW, but they probably aren't too worried since World of Warcraft's most touted features are raiding and mass PvP, neither of which are features of Diablo. Diablo is probably going to be targeted at those players who just enjoying leveling and fighting with their friends, as Blizzard is probably betting that making a MMO of the most neglected portion of WoW won't result in them losing customers to themselves.
That suits me just fine. It's like they're making a game out of the only part of WoW i like!

Snake? Snake?! SNAAAAAAAAAKE!

2008-06-17T21:05:00.000-07:00

So, I have a confession to make: I've never played a Metal Gear game until now. This is a somewhat misleading statement, as I've watched my friends beat it after I died dozens of times in the all of five minutes they left me alone with the controller. By the time I got a Playstation, the Metal Gear fever had died down and I didn't have that much interest in the game anymore, since I'd seen the game in action many times. But with all the excitement over Metal Gear 4, it made me feel like I had really been missing out on something big. So I picked up the Essential Collection to catch up on what I had missed.
When I died four times on the very first floor of the game before the credits had even finished rolling, I began to realize that I had entered a very different era of gaming. After the fifteenth time I had my lower jaw blown off by Sniper Wolf, I recalled that feeling of controller devouring rage that I hadn't experienced in years: A truly nostalgic feeling to be sure.

From my perspective, Metal Gear Solid actually plays a lot like a Super Nintendo game, which is not surprising considering this is one of the early 3rd person action games. Metal Gear Solid encourages puzzle solving even in boss fights, as well as pattern memorization and expert timing, all of which are distinctive features of pre-3d videogames. Not necessarily a bad thing, but many of the fights were hampered by poor control, visibility, and hit detection, which certainly don't help.
My favorite boss fights were the second ones against Sniper Wolf and Vulcan Raven, because you weren't punished for not using a specifc strategy and you could pretty much fight them however you wanted. I died almost as much against the other bosses, but I didn't mind because I had so many options to experiment with, rather than knowing exactly what to do be not pulling it off perfectly (like the first fight against Wolf). Each time I restarted I got a chance to try a completely new approach . That's cool. It's rare even now for a boss fight to allow that much creativity.
I did nearly bite my left analog stick off while I was fighting Metal Gear Rex, however, which required a lot more pinpoint twitch timing than my hands and the camera angles would allow and after about 30 attempts I threw down the controller in frustration. Just then, I heard
a knock at the door. When I answered it, Hideo Kojima put a cigarette out in my eye. As I lay on the floor of my apartment, clutching my face in pain, he lectured me about how love could bloom even on the battlefield.

It'sa Me!

2008-06-01T18:21:00.000-07:00

So when I wrote Shut Up and Save the World I briefly mentioned Mario as a silent protagonist, and specifically his role in the Mario RPGs. Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga is one of my favorite RPGs for a variety of reasons, but it's one of the few occasions where I think the silent protagonist actually works for player immersion rather than against it. What really makes the silent protagonist silent isn't absence of voice, but the totally inability of the protagonist to effect the environment.For example, in Persona 3 all of the portraits of the supporting cast members have all sorts of different expressions while the silent main character only has one. To be truly silent, the protagonist must be inexpressive as well.
But in Mario and Luigi they scream, jump, tremble in fear, sigh, and generally do just about everything except talk.
Instead of being forced to watch the supporting cast talk around the main character to compensate for his silence, these emotional displays draw the player in and create an emotional reaction. The game makes you laugh; it doesn't get more interactive than that. It's far more interactive than making a dialogue choice every once and a while that will have little to no effect whatsoever on the game.
Don't forget, videogames are supposed to interact with you.