new challenger

Here Comes an Old Challenger - GOTY Edition

2009-12-29T19:56:00.000-08:00

I knew I hated Street Fighter IV the first time I played it.

It was 2008 and I was in Japan. Street Fighter IV wasn't actually even released yet; the version I was playing was just an arcade test. I don't even remember if I was there for Street Fighter IV at all - there's a good chance I just stumbled on the test while intending to play Virtua Fighter 5. I remember I selected Blanka to play first, whom I've chosen as a main character on and off since Street Fighter II. While I've never gotten to a competition level of play in Street Fighter, I've always been able to eke out a measure of local success with my Blanka in almost any game in which he's on the roster.

My success with Blanka in SF4 during that first play session can be calculated simply: I had none. But what bothered me more than anything was that I just didn't like the way Street Fighter IV played. It had a weird feel to it. I'm not sure what I was expecting - Super Turbo, perhaps, based on the way the producer went on about it - but what I ended up playing felt nothing like Street Fighter to me.

Still, I felt in my heart that Street Fighter IV was an important game that warranted my attention. You see, 2009 was dubbed "The Year of the Fighting Game" primarily based on Street Fighter's return. Yes, there was also a new King of Fighters, a new Tekken, the debut of an all-new fighting game called BlazBlue, and a host of other lesser games, but Street Fighter is, and probably always will be the fighting game that defines the genre; without it, fighting games might as well not exist.

So, at the next opportunity - E3 2008 - I decided to give Street Fighter IV another chance. My next character choice was the character I always go back to, the character that I actually selected the first time I ever played Street Fighter II - Ryu. Ryu is my favorite fighting game character of all time. That he keeps showing up in basically every fighting game ever made is a testament to the impact he's had within the genre. I haven't ever really been good with Ryu, though; despite his being billed as a middle-of-the-road character, I feel that he's actually quite a difficult character to really be proficient with in most Street Fighters, and I've never really clicked with him (I've never learned how not to throw that third fireball...).

At E3, I was equally fruitless with Ryu in Street Fighter IV. And I still didn't really care for the game, either.

What bothered me most was the way the characters stood up. It was just so freaking slow. I complained to Seth Killian about this. He mentioned aloofly (he was not being rude, but at E3 2008 Street Fighter IV was a big star and it was making Seth a big star too) that there was a command input to get up quicker. I didn't have a chance to test this out, though, as the day was drawing to a close and I wanted to hang out with some friends from out of town.

Eventually, Street Fighter IV was released in Japanese arcades, and again I set about trying to play it. For this attempt, I ended up choosing Abel, mostly because I thought it would be amusingly ironic to do so. You see, Abel is Street Fighter IV's "MMA fighter." That he doesn't seem to have anything even remotely resembling a move that I would associate with an MMA fighter apparently didn't dissuade Capcom from giving him this designation anyway.

I should mention here that my arcade of choice in Osaka is something of a hardcore fighting game hotspot. As is typical in Japanese arcades, there is an entire floor dedicated to fighting games. On weekends, it's not unusual for my arcade to host a tournament for Super Turbo or VOOT, despite their advanced age. The Street Fighter IV machines (only 4 of them - apparently my arcade recently has trended more towards VF and Tekken) were placed in a prominent position on the floor, with a large space around them for spectators. Stepping up to the machines to play is an anxiety-filled endeavor; lots of opportunity for people to see you perform, and perform badly. Being a 188-centimeter tall foreigner only heightens my conspicuousness.

So I bet you figure this is where I finally get to have my shining moment. Surely now, with the right character and the right opportunity, I was finally able to find some success in the game, which solidified my love for it, enough so to compel me to proclaim it my game of the year some 24 months after first playing it, right?

Wrong. I was knocked around like a flimsy rag doll. It was almost like someone was just reaching in my pockets and taking all the money out, that's how quickly the matches would go. I was thoroughly embarrassed by my poor play time and time again.

And I loved every minute of it.

I purchased Street Fighter IV for the Xbox 360 in February of 2009. It is the only Xbox 360 game I have played since.

Thanks for reading.

Well, this didn't turn out at all like I imagined

2009-07-23T15:30:00.001-07:00

So yeah, I made a game about the Ultimate Fighting Championship. I'll get around to making one of those games that make you cry at some point or another, I guess. A commenter requested that I give some insight into how we went about making UFC 2009 Undisputed. Well, I'll try to do this and avoid being fired by shedding some light on some of the more abstract decision making that went into the creation of the game's combat system.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, first off, what's wrong with you? I update this thing every six months or something ridiculous; find some new interests. Second, you've probably realized that I like fighting games, and above all fighting games, the Virtua Fighter series. Long criticized as being sterile, boring, and bland by the majority of fighting game players (shunned so is Virtua Fighter that at this year's Evolution 2009 World Championship, an event attended by only the most distilled and dedicated American fighting game player, it was completely unrepresented), Virtua Fighter has steadily eased itself into comfortable obscurity in the West. Its latest arcade incarnation, Virtua Fighter 5 R, is unlikely to receive any sort of console version, a feat almost unheard of in the current arcade market, which is shrinking by the day. There are a combination of factors that led VF to never really catching on in the West; like a lot of Sega games, the visual design of the game is rooted in a much more pragmatic aesthetic, focusing on believability more so than excitement. And the game's combat mechanics, while solid and not at all uncommon within fighting games as a genre, are perhaps more difficult to learn through simple empirical play than either its 2d predecessors or its 3d contemporaries. The Virtua Fighter series is known for being one of the few 3d fighting games that actually looks better in the hands of experts than in the hands of novices - and while I think that contributes to the game's celebration in some communities, I'm fully convinced it led to its downfall in ours (there's also that whole Virtua Fighter initially being only available on Sega consoles and Virtua Fighter 3 costing a dollar to play in arcades thing, but that doesn't really fit into the argument I'm making at all).

So of course, when I sat down to design the combat system in UFC 2009 Undisputed, the first thing I said to myself was, "Well, I better get started ripping off Virtua Fighter." I can say this now because where Undisputed ended up is quite a ways away from VF. But in my opinion, most of Virtua Fighter's core mechanics are more than suitable for extraction and translation into other fighting games. There was actually an early version of UFC 2009 that featured momentum swings based on guaranteed throw situations, which is the cornerstone of Virtua Fighter's gameplay. Ultimately we had to go with something else for a combination of reasons, one of them being a desire for more a more organic, physics-driven reaction system (another being that in focus testing, people just weren't getting the subtle nuances of a -8 frame advantage after blocking a mid attack; no, I'm not joking).

This plan of mine, to root UFC 2009 Undisputed's gameplay in the fertile soil of the traditional fighting game, was a controversial one at the time. The expectation was that the game would be more spiritually aligned with sports games that happen to feature combat elements, like Fight Night. I have written about Fight Night, suggesting that it and games like it represented an opportunity for fighting games to survive what I perceived to be the genre's pending demise (that fighting games are experiencing a tremendous resurgence speaks loudly to just how wrong I am about a great many things). But in saying as much, I'm also asserting that Fight Night is not a traditional fighting game, and I stand by that, while stressing that I say that not as an insult, but simply as a descriptor. Its core gameplay is not rooted in the fighting game tradition, and while Fight Night is one of my most favorite series, it does not satisfy the same gaming hunger that I satiate with Virtua Fighter. I wanted to make UFC 2009 Undisputed feed that hunger, for a combination of selfish and altruistic reasons. I wanted to prove that the fighting game was still a viable medium, and one that could be played and enjoyed by the general gaming public, not just the nomadic tribe that puts its tents up in Las Vegas for three days every August, and in doing so I was taking a big gamble in the minds of my co-workers, many of whom disliked traditional fighting games for their complexity, arbitrary mechanics, and lack of relatability.

Given the unsuccessful early play testing sessions, my co-workers were justified in their concerns. So, after my initial failure at implementing a throw-based frame advantage system, I decided on another approach. Rather than pull out the actual mechanical gameplay elements, I elected to instead try and replicate the emotional decision-making that's involved in playing Virtua Fighter. I tried to recreate the sense of "risk mitigation" that dominates so many of Virtua Fighter's encounters. Rarely in Virtua Fighter does a defensive maneuver leave the player free from attack. The famous "Evade, Throw Escape, Guard" macro-movement, the first step in becoming an advanced VF player, only protects against a limited amount of retaliatory attacks from an opponent; it's up to the player to decide to which side to step, which throws to defend against, etc. I took this concept and applied it to UFC's defensive systems by making them exclusive. You can block against strikes, and you can block against grapples, but you cannot block against all strikes simultaneously or all grapples simultaneously, and never both of them at the same time. By making most of the offensive options as equally viable as we could across striking and grappling, KOs and Submissions, I also tried to encourage as much true yomi (literally the Japanese word for "reading," but in the fighting game community, the word is used to describe predicting the intentions of your opponent) as possible. While not exclusive to Virtua Fighter, yomi is often considered most potent in VF due to the inability to effectively mitigate all types of attacks with any consistency; players must truly "read" the intentions of their opponent at any given situation and take the appropriate action. I think UFC 2009 Undisputed does a good job of replicating this. By making the match-ending conditions so lethal and omnipresent, players have to quickly discern the intentions of their opponent based on things like character selection, and whether the opponent chooses to fight standing, in the clinch, or on the ground.

It would seem that generally, the public likes what I'm feeding them. While internally there was a lot of what I'll call "concern" prior to release over some of the decisions we ended up making, UFC 2009 Undisputed is off to great success, both critically and (I presume) financially. There is an initial learning curve to the game's mechanics and control scheme, and the complete nuances of the game continue to be discussed and debated. Most reviewers agree that the game is much more (enjoyably) complex than your standard gaming fair. Whether or not the game's success is due to, or in spite of, a more hardcore fighting game experience than anyone (except myself) envisioned is kind of a wash to me. I got the chance to expose a couple million people to what I consider to be gaming at its finest for the very first time in my career. If I don't get to make another game ever, at least I have that. Plus, I think we've shown that games don't have to be dumbed down to be made palatable to the lowest common denominator to succeed, which is a popular theory amongst executives in this new gaming world of ours. If the subject matter of a particular game is attractive enough to a demographic, the people will rise to the occasion and dedicate the time and energy into getting better at your game and they'll thank you for it. There's a really impressive new community that has sprung up around the game, and that they appreciate what we did is humbling, gratifying, and inspiring all at once.

You could kind of say that UFC 2009 Undisputed is my console port of Virtua Fighter 5 R, but that would probably get THQ sued, so I won't be saying that.

Thanks for reading.

They Call Him Punches in Bunches

2009-05-07T15:13:00.000-07:00

Just finished a game recently, hope you guys dig it.

Game Begets Game 2: The Begettening

2008-12-18T11:33:00.000-08:00

Well, the success stories keep pouring in. Turns out that Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix is well on its way to being the highest-grossing digital download ever. A homegrown fighting game community kid by the name of Dave Sirlin is more than a little responsible for helping HD Remix achieve this amazing feat.

I won't lie, it warms me somewhere deep in my cold heart that a fighting game - perhaps the finest fighting game the industry has ever produced - is going to set this record. At a time when fighting games are oftentimes relegated to second-class status, as most major American publishers don't even consider fighting games to be a core gaming genre, this is a huge victory.

Congrats to Sirlin, and to everyone who made this possible.

Thanks for reading.

Game Begets Game

2008-12-05T08:25:00.000-08:00

I'll admit it; I get really giddy when I see coverage of my friends' games. I entered the industry with a group of designers born from the fighting game community; a group of guys for whom simply playing games was never enough. My good friends John and Paul Edwards, Adam Puhl, Eric Williams, and extended family like Ben Cureton, Jason Cole, Ed Ma, Dave Sirlin and Jason De Heras all came into the industry around the same time and have all gone on to show themselves as rising stars in the industry; if you haven't heard some of their names yet, trust me you will.

Another good friend of mine birthed from the fighting game community, all-star designer Derek Daniels, is currently tearing it up within Activision's venerable Central Design department. This means he gets to demonstrate his prowess over many of Activision's titles. One of those titles is set to be EGM's January cover game - X-Men Origins: Wolverine. A quick look at the quotes from their teaser over at 1up clearly show that Derek's influence is showing through:

"In our January issue of EGM, we tell you all about real-time in-game healing, the simple satisfactions of an elegantly accessible combat system, a sweet boss fight against the very first Sentinel robot prototype, and lots more...We also chat with Raven about a few of Origins' influences, from God of War to Super Smash Bros..."

So yeah, this post is just me bragging about my friend's accomplishments. Game seems to be shaping up nicely and I can't wait to play it. Kudos to Derek!

Thanks for reading.

Please Accept this Meager Update

2008-11-15T18:11:00.000-08:00

Apparently, David Jaffe is unaware that when a product is marketed, occaisonally one is lied to about that product's contents. In case Mr. Jaffe is uninformed with regard to some other truisms of the world, I provide this valuable lesson: water is also wet.

I don't have many words on this subject; I think Jaffe speaks for himself pretty well. Ironically, I have never felt that God of War's marketing does the complexity of that series justice. Maybe the themes I appreciate most aren't the ones on which Sony wants to sell the game; it's their right to do so.

And just for the record, God of War is one of my favorite games ever, and my second favorite game on the PS2, right behind ICO and right ahead of Metal Gear Solid 3, so let it never be said that I'm not fair and balanced.

Downright Fierce

2008-11-04T15:47:00.001-08:00

The above picture is from an ad campaign for the console release of Street Fighter 4. I wish I could say I found it over at Kotaku, a cool site that I don't feel gets quite the recognition it deserves, but I actually stumbled upon the set through NeoGAF. This particular picture, with the instructional commands for a Hadouken, had an immediate impact on me. Street Fighter 2 was a watershed game for me. While Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros. won the first Battle for my Heart, Street Fighter handily won both the Battle for my Brain and the Battle for my Soul (all important battles in the hotly contested, yet completely fabricated Omar War).

This particular picture made me chuckle because I recently received a bug on the game I'm working on at the moment. In short, the bug complained that controller inputs changed based on screen orientation - an input performed when a character is on the left side was mirrored when that character was on the right side of the screen. You know, exactly like Street Fighter. In my entire design career, it never occurred to me that anyone who's ever played a fighting game would ever find something like this strange, which of course reveals a more important lesson: there are a lot of modern video game players for whom fighting game conventions are not a part of their gaming language.

That really sucks.

Anyway, please check out the recently released Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, an update to the greatest fighting game ever made. There's not a game being released this year that deserves your money more.

Thanks for reading.

RotK - GIRPN: Acronym Edition

2008-08-24T16:45:00.000-07:00

I'm almost reluctant to resurrect this series. I kind of feel like making games threatens to render me ineligible to comment on my personal play preferences, which is a stark departure from my previous feeling. But, at the end of the day, I wouldn't be fulfilling the premise of this blog without talking about the playing side of this whole games thing. So, here we go:

Bangai-O Spirits
Developer: Treasure
Publisher: D3

Bangai-O spirits bills itself as a shooter I think, but it's much more of a puzzle game. Sure, you navigate a giant robot - giant, despite it's relatively small on-screen presence - and you definitely dodge bullets, while throwing out a megaton of your own. The robot itself has 4 weapon slots: two "normal" infinite weapon slots, and two "super" weapon slots that exhaust, and require power-ups to refill. There are a handful of different weapons you can equip in these slots, and some of them, when paired, combine to form complimentary abilities. Each "stage" is broken down into individual "challenges," each with their own unique combination of enemies and objectives, and a big bulk of the strategy in the game is figuring out the right combination of weapons to bring into the fight. Some challenges seem to be solvable using a variety of weapons, but others seem to require a very specific combination. In this way, the game has a very puzzle-like feel. Oh yeah, and you die a lot; there is no real way to figure out which weapons to bring to many fights until you arrive upon a situation in which you can't prevail; this game is definitely for masochists, but it's also pretty good fun. Plus it's by Treasure; every time you don't buy one of their games, a kitten dies.

Soul Bubbles
Developer: Mekensleep
Pulisher: Eidos

I had a design I was working on a while ago involving bubbles that never went anywhere, so this game kind of holds a special place in my heart. I don't even know where I heard of it, and it's only available at Toys "R" Us, so it's not exactly the easiest-to-find. In Soul Bubbles, you take the role of a custodian of souls; you place these souls in a bubble, and move them from one place on a map to another, collecting various trinkets along the way. Occasionally, you'll have to divide your big bubble up into smaller bubbles to fit through tight passageways, and sometimes creatures will come onto screen that you have to jab with the stylus. That's pretty much it.

Yes, I suppose this is a bit of an oversimplification, but really, the game isn't that deep. It's certainly not as deep or complex as Mekensleep's Creative Director Oliver Dejade recently suggested. That doesn't mean I'm not enjoying Soul Bubbles. In fact, I quite like it. But sometimes people get a little caught up in their own hype. What kind of hype am I talking about? this kind of hype, which appears every time you turn on the game:

So yeah. Check Soul Bubbles out, if you get the chance.

Braid
Developer: Number None
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

Those of you who follow the blog will know that I've been waiting for this game for a while. It might surprise some of you to know, then, that I just recently bothered to fire up the 360 and download the thing.

Turns out, Braid is a pretty good game. Braid is a side-scrolling platformer with a focus on collecting. It's really good looking, and surprisingly challenging. It does a so-so job of teaching you about itself. In some instances, it is meticulous in showing you how to walk, and jump. When it comes to solving its core puzzles, however - collecting puzzle pieces - Braid is shockingly bad at teaching. Going through the first level, I collected the majority of the puzzle pieces, but was somewhat puzzled as to how to get the last remaining ones. They were placed in a way that really led me to believe that I simply didn't possess the "power-ups" required to collect them. In truth, I guess this isn't so much a problem with Braid as it is a problem with the library of game information that I bring to Braid, but it had an effect on the way I approached the game nonetheless. It turns out that I was able to collect all of the pieces on the first level using the skills that my character already possessed; Frustratingly, I discovered this through a series of happy accidents, but it almost felt like chance. I could imagine a lot of players simply walking away from the game in frustration.

Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 (Demo)
Developer: CyberConnect2
Publisher: Namco Bandai Games

Let me first say that when I pay Naruto, I don't feel like I'm playing a game with any spiritual connection to a traditional 3d fighting game. I don't even feel a similarity to fringe 3d fighting games like Power Stone or Smash Bros. Now, don't mistake this for a compliment; it's simply an assertion. Those looking for me to give the game a compliment, look here: Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 is freakin' awesome. It's a fighting game alright; there are combos, normals, throws, specials and supers, launchers, juggles, and even more nuanced fighting game features like helpers, meter management, and okizeme. But CyberConnect2 has managed to assemble these familiar pieces together in a really unique and interesting way. And surprisingly, I'm in control of my character most of the time! When you watch a lot of the promotional material, like that I've linked to in previous posts, one could get the impression that this game has a lot of moments of non-interactivity. Yes, the supers (called Ultimate Chakras) are long, but I found them to be surprisingly infrequent, and not at all obtrusive. Most importantly, the game makes me want to hang around and learn its ins and outs. I don't know anything about the license upon which this game is based - and I don't really care to learn about it, either. This game (okay, technically it's a demo, but that just means the final game has even more to love) is really fun. This obviously goes without saying, but I give this game my highest recommendation!

Monster Madness: Grave Danger (Demo)
Developer: Psyonix Studios
Publisher: SouthPeak Games

This game is another one that I was rooting for. I have a great fondness for the action/hack-and-slash genre, and I hope to get a shot as designing one someday. But I may never get my chance if games like Monster Madness aren't more successful. Unfortunately, Monster Madness is probably best described as Hunter: The Reckoning with a great sense of style injected into it, and all the fun taken out of it. It's obvious that the creators of this game have a very strong artistic sense. The characters and world in the game, while somewhat cliche, look interesting and exciting. But when it comes to actually pushing buttons, the game kind of falls apart. The attacks in the game feel really slushy, and there's an overwhelming feeling of disconnectedness between the player and the character on screen. Like Hunter, this game is probably a lot more entertaining when played with friends. Unlike Hunter, and a more successful example of the genre like Diablo, Monster Madness isn't at all entertaining when played solo. And honestly, I feel really bad saying this, but I was really disappointed with this game. Usually, I'll buy a game that I support philosophically, even if I don't necessarily love the game in practice; I'll probably be doing this with Monster Madness. I don't see this as rewarding bad behavior; the guys making this game are working hard to deliver an experience, and I feel like I've been in their shoes before. Sometimes I miss being in an situation to work on a game like this, one where I really get a strong sense of passion and personal pride in the artistic side of the game.

I'm playing a few other things at the moment, but none so much that I'd be willing to share my thoughts on them. I almost left Monster Madness out, because I really don't want to go down the road of bashing games right now, but maybe there's someone out there who hadn't heard of the game that might give it a chance, despite (or even due to) my harsh words.

Thanks for reading.

Goats

2008-08-21T08:48:00.000-07:00

Quick question.

Humanity has an obsession with greatness. I'm told that Americans in particular seem particularly occupied with determining the best of something (quite frankly, I've yet to meet the culture that doesn't have the same tendency, so, yeah). Just recently, Michael Phelps was anointed as the greatest Olympian ever. With regard to entertainment, it's widely considered that Hollywood makes the best movies in the world, and Citizen Kane is considered to be Hollywood's greatest movie. However, it's just as commonly argued that Bicycle Thieves holds the title for the world's greatest movie. James Joyce's Ulysses and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita are oft cited as the greatest novels ever written. In the world of television, the debate over greatest series ever rages admirably, with the most recent contender being The Wire, hot on the heels of The Sopranos garnering the same praise during its recent run.

What about videogames? Well, we have Super Mario Bros. And...that's about it. Sure, occasionally you'll hear someone mention that Ocarina of Time has the highest Gamerankings score, or they'll cite a Famitsu survey whereby crazed, deranged souls vote Final Fantasy X to unnaturally great heights. Sometimes the non-enthusiast American press, in an effort to appeal to domestic audiences, will shower praise on Will Wright's The Sims (mostly, it seems, because of its phenomenal sales). But generally speaking, Super Mario Bros. stands alone as videogaming's undisputed champion.

That disappoints me.

It's not that I disagree - if anyone asked me what I considered to be the greatest videogame ever, Super Mario Bros. would be my response (actually, I would say Super Mario Bros. 3; it is functionally superior to the original Super Mario Bros. in almost every way). It's just that, well, Super Mario Bros., within the scope of videogaming, is a really old game. It was released just eight years after the first mainstream home console - the Atari 2600 - hit the scene. Does it freak anyone else out that in the two-plus decades since its release, the gaming industry has not surpassed one of its most primordial offerings?

I told you it was a quick question.

Thanks for reading.

Two Things I Liked from E3

2008-07-21T08:26:00.000-07:00

Hopefully this is my last movie link post for a while, but I wanted to share my two favorite trailers from E3. Note that these are not necessarily my favorite games from E3; simply, these are the trailers that make me wish they were trailers for a game I was making. Ready? Let's go!

I am convinced that the next game that makes me doubt my qualifications as a designer will come from Ubisoft (for those keeping score, the last game to do this was ICO). This is not to say that I've been brought low by any particular Ubisoft game until this point, although I am a fairly large Prince of Persia fan. I just get the sense that Ubi is allowing their studios to earnestly experiment with the established conventions of videogames. Their new trailer does not disappoint:

(it's the song that gets me most). Viewers will note that the PoP team is probably just as enamored by ICO as I am; they certainly seem to be continually inspired by it.

This second E3 trailer has convinced me that Microsoft has the best PR/marketing division on the planet. I did not particularly care for Gears of War. I knew I wouldn't care for Gears of War pretty much the first time I saw it. I play shooters - all of them, really, as part of the designer tax - but they're not really one of my preferred genres. Nevertheless, two trailers last year convinced me that I would somehow enjoy shooters more than I ever had before: the Halo 3 Starry Night trailer, and of course, the Gears of War Mad World trailer, probably the best video game trailer ever made.

Neither of these games set my world on fire. It's also safe to say that I would have purchased these games without either trailer existing. But I have to assume that there is more than one person, who like me, doesn't particularly care for shooters, but unlike me, doesn't feel compelled to buy every game that comes out, who probably did buy one or both of these games simply because they were seduced by excellent marketing.

The E3 trailer for Gears of War 2 has seduced me again:

An Alan Seeger poem?!? I'm still trying to get my head around this one. Maybe it started with a conversation somewhere about war poets; I can only speculate. But this trailer does exactly what the Mad World trailer did: imply that there is emotional depth and nuance where there is none. And damnit, that's exactly what a shooter trailer should do. Well done.

My next post is guaranteed not to be a, "stuff I like" post.

Thanks for reading.

Japanimation lawls

2008-07-08T08:32:00.000-07:00

I was on NeoGaf the other day - which is kind of like admitting you do drugs, now that I think about it - and I stumbled upon this thread about fixing fighting games. The thread itself is mostly useless, filled with approximately 3 different answers: there's nothing wrong with fighting games (wrong), make them like "real life" (wrong), make Tobal 3/Power Stone 3 (despite my deep yearning for both of these games, also wrong).

The thread got me thinking though, about what it would take to "fix" fighting games - and by fix I mean to return them to the glory days they used to enjoy, when fighting games were just as vibrant a genre as racing games or shooters. I broached the subject with Derek, and he had some insightful thoughts on the subject that I may compile and share at some point. But one of the most difficult challenges fighting games face in my estimation is that of relatability. Relatability, in short, is the ability for a player (or, more accurately, a potential buyer), to make an easy association between something with which he is familiar (and hopefully finds appealing), and this game (or, more accurately, this product) you're making (selling).

Most of the very successful genres in videogaming capitalize on being relatable. One of the more legendary game pitches is that of Gran Turismo, which is supposed to have begun with the simple desire to allow game players to drive a video game version of their own car. Most publishers are quite familiar with relatability; it's why in this post-GTA world of ours (70 million copies sold and counting), every videogame studio on earth has been tasked with working on some variant of the "open world" formula.

For a time, fighting games were also fairly relatable. I had not seen Master of the Flying Guillotine before playing Street Fighter, but I'm sure everyone my age has seen Enter the Dragon, and the concept of the martial arts tournament is a fairly ubiquitous one with people my age. It's hard to remember conversations I had regarding Mortal Kombat when it was new that didn't include at least one Big Trouble in Little China reference. But what about kids today? Do those same relatable elements retain their intensity for someone playing Soul Calibur 4?

I doubt it; at this point, most modern fighting games are parasitically sold on the strength of their own lineage. Street Fighter 4 is being sold on the nostalgia of Street Fighter 2, and every subsequent iteration of Soul Calibur has been sold on the residual memories of the console port of the original game (In the arcades, Soul Calibur, and its true predecessor Soul Edge/Blade, were two games that exactly no one cared about).

Note that I said most fighting game franchises do this. There are, as far as I can tell, two exceptions. The first exception is reality-based fighting games. Games like Fight Night and the upcoming UFC 2009: Undisputed (man that game looks interesting, we should all check it out) both capitalize on their sport counterparts to boost their relatability, the former grabbing a far larger share of the gaming marketplace than the popularity of boxing would suggest, mostly because it's a downright awesome game in its own right. The other exception is the anime-based fighting game. These games, like the astronomically successful Dragon Ball Z: Budokai series, sell almost exclusively because of their relatability; despite their encyclopedic cataloging of the source material, actually playing most of these games is kind of like (I'm sorry) slow torture.

I was mulling over all of this in my head when I saw this:

I have to be careful about this game. It looks absolutely stunning, for one, and beauty's always a seductive thing. I barely know what Naruto is, other than some cartoon about ninjas who fight each other, and I'm excited! This is not good for me, but it's great for a game maker. The trailer indicates that this game has elements that I've never seen before in a fighting game. But I'm not really sure which parts of the trailer show moments where someone would actually have to press a button to make things happen - my guess is that most of the stuff that I'm really excited about in this trailer is non-interactive. I honestly don't know if that's a good thing or not; fighting games have gone down a weird road from a gameplay standpoint, and I really don't know how to reverse that trend just yet. Also, I own the current game in the series, and I do not like it very much at all; it's likely that the philosophy of game making has not changed drastically between iterations, and I'm in for more of the same, just prettier. But I can dream, right? It's so pretty!

Here's Hitoshi Matsuyama, from the very well-respected studio, CyberConnect2, talking about the philosophy behind this newest Naruto game:

What interests me most about this interview is how flippantly Matsuyama regards the actual genre of the game, even downplaying the nature of it being a fighting game at all. I think this is effective because it doesn't rely on a potential buying audience that is already predisposed to liking a particular genre. What's obviously important to him is communicating how thorough CyberConnect2 is being to make this the most authentic Naruto game ever. It is the dedication to the relatable elements that is stressed the most - I think this is a pretty smart strategy for a game like this, and an important element to any game, fighting or otherwise, that's looking to assert relevancy in today's market. Personally, I'd love to stumble upon some non-licensed subject matter that was equally appropriate for a fighting game; Call of Duty gets away completely license-free while maintaining an amazing level of relatability, even when skipping their series decades into the future. Any suggestions? If they have anything to do with tournaments held by megalomaniacal/evil/mysterious corporations, please hold off on them for now.

Thanks for reading.

I Approve this Message

2008-06-25T15:34:00.001-07:00

I really don't want to start a trend of posting little more than links to movies, but well, here you go.

Note: I don't know much about this game, and it's unlikely I'll ever play it.

Thanks for reading?

The Dreams in which I'm Dying are the Best I've Ever Had

2008-06-17T08:42:00.000-07:00

My local magazine stand doesn't carry Edge. Thus, I have to make a special trip to Barnes & Noble to buy it every month (as not to be completely discriminatory, I also purchase games there). I ordered a subscription once, but I never got a single copy in the mail. This hasn't tarnished my opinion of this magazine, however, which in my estimation is pound-for-pound the best gaming magazine on the planet. I was introduced to Edge quite a few years ago by this really talented but really annoying artist I knew. The selling point of the magazine back then was that they had the most stringent reviews of any magazine around - print of otherwise. This was back when I gave a damn about game reviews. And to be sure, a game that got anything above a 6 (on a 10-point scale) in Edge was probably a pretty good game. Sometimes they didn't get it quite right - like the rest of the UK gaming press, Edge seems to have an unnatural affection for Tekken, perennially giving it higher acclaim than Virtua Fighter - but generally speaking, the magazine was beyond reproach with regard to reliable critique. The magazine also uses really high quality paper and employs some refreshingly eloquent and intelligent editors that seek to elevate games journalism beyond game previews, rumors sections, and exclusive first looks.

This post isn't meant to be exactly about Edge, though. Really, until I saw this July cover, I had no intention to make this post at all. I guess this post is about Mad World, the upcoming game from Platinum Games:

Mad World is made by a bunch of guys who make games that you don't play. Well, I guess that's not totally true. Lots of people play Resident Evil; I guess I'm just talking about all those other games that Clover Studio made that people like to like, but don't like to buy. I have a feeling that Mad World will fall into the same category as the rest of Clover's games in this regard. In fact, I'm willing to wager that Mad World will generate a little more buzz than God Hand, but a little less buzz than No More Heroes (yes, I know Clover didn't make NMH - please shut up). Neither of these titles, incidentally, were blockbusters.

But man, that Edge cover sure does look cool.

Thanks for reading.

And I'm Actually a PC Fan...

2008-05-31T01:39:00.000-07:00

Choose your own adventure post! You can either read this post or go watch this movie, followed immediately by this movie. Like a real Choose Your Own Adventure, you can actually go watch those movies, and then come back and read this post too if you want; it's up to you!

This will not be a typically long post; I just saw something that forced me to update.

Remember last year, or the year before that, when I would frequently reference my computer? You know, the one that cost more than all my consoles combined? Well yeah, just recently I replaced that old computer with a newer, much more expensive one. As pretty much any computer made after 2002 can check e-mail and browse the internets just as well as my new computer, it can only be my love and devotion for PC video games that demands this heavy tax. I even have a rather gaudy 26" LCD monitor for no other purpose than compelling my PC games to run in only the most stressful of resolutions.

But quite frankly, it's hard out here for a PC video game fan. Not only are the titles worth buying few and far between, what with many of the great PC developers escaping to the relatively pirate-free environments of consoles, but when a game worth buying actually does get released, the hoops one must jump through to get the thing to work properly hovers somewhere between masochism and dark ritual. I used to scoff at people who tried to tell me this before, chalking the assertion up to a general lack of basic computer savvy, but somehow, when I wasn't paying attention, things became very real.

Case in point: Mass Effect's PC release. Now I know I said something earlier that made it seem like I would be talking about "a game worth buying" on the PC, and maybe to some of you console guys, talking about Mass Effect now might sound strange, but, well, it just came out on the PC. I purchased it when it came out on console, and didn't feel that strongly about it then or now to talk about it as a game, but it's current situation makes it post-worthy in my eyes.

There's a good chance that those of you who've purchased Mass Effect on the PC know where I'm going with this. For the rest of you, the ones with sense, let me fill you in: if you purchased a copy of this game, it's more than likely that the thing will just not work for one obscure reason or another. This is actually a shockingly common experience had with PC games, one that I've had personally more than once. Typically, a trip back to the store is all that's required to solve this issue, but that is obviously a crap shoot, as these types of issues are rarely isolated. And hey, Mass Effect is a very big game from the very biggest of publishers, so it, more than any other game, ships with a basic expectation that it should at least, I don't know, install without significant issue. Bioware has somewhat humorously posted a set of installation instructions to be used as a work-around if you have one of those copies of the game that won't install. The humorous part is just how involved a process it is. For your indulgence:

You will need:
1) access to the contents of the data directory (either off CD, download, temp files, etc)
2) WinRar or 7zip or any tool that can extract .rar files.

Steps:
1) Create a folder on your system somewhere. Default for the installer is "C:\Program Files\Mass Effect\" or a games folder.
2) Open each .rar file in the utility chosen (WinRar for e.g.)
3) Extract each .rar file into this folder. If you are using an English build, you won't need to extract any .rar file that has a different language code (_es, _fr, _de, _it, etc)
4) After extracting all files, your folder should look like this:
...\Mass Effect\Binaries\
...\Mass Effect\BioGame\
...\Mass Effect\data\
...\Mass Effect\docs\
...\Mass Effect\Engine\
...\Mass Effect\MassEffectLauncher.exe

5) Run the MassEffectLauncher.exe and quit immediately.
6) Run the "Mass Effect (tm)_code.exe" from the data folder. Enter your CD Key, click next, it will exit out.
7) Run the Launcher again, hit "Config". under the "Repair" tab, you can re-create your shortcuts if running XP. If running Vista, I'm sorry, you can't add the game to the Game Explorer in these instructions.
9) Quit back to the launcher.
10) Play! (everything should work nicely now)

Anyone else as horrified as I am? And before a single one of you defends this process as being "not that bad," I have something for you to read. When you get back from reading that, if you still feel like commenting that the process is "not that bad," well, go right ahead. I'll be over here, playing this game about killing monsters and staying trendy. I don't know if I like it, but I'll be damned if it didn't work straight away after I inserted it into my DS (note that my DS does not look like that, because I am not a moron. I would, however, love a DS that looked like this).

Thanks for reading.

It Snowed in Osaka Today

2008-02-23T19:46:00.000-08:00

Before I start, I'd like to mention that listening to Feist's "I Feel it All" over a laptop speaker makes it just about the most bittersweet song ever made. This makes me absolutely obsessed with it, of course. Also regarding the title of this post: it's not meant to be metaphorical - it really snowed in Osaka today. Put the 2 and 2 of me listening to music on a laptop and me knowing it snowed in Osaka today together...

So I've been spending time in arcades recently (well, one in particular). I must admit, despite my established love for Virtua Fighter, this new incarnation, for a number of reasons, didn't click with me. This hasn't stopped me from purchasing both the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of VF5, but when I'm in the arcade, I'll do an obligatory drive-by past the block of Version D machines (six of them in total, just in case some ultra-elite player is there worth pausing for), and then I head straight for the Tekken 6 machines.

Tekken is something of an interesting phenomenon. For reasons frequently debated, the series, created to capitalize on the popularity of 3d fighting games as a genre (at the time wholly monopolized by Virtua Fighter), rocketed to popularity in the Western world, while always maintaining something of a second-class status in Japan, duking it out with the likes of Dead or Alive in a sort of 3d-fighting ghetto. I admit that my introduction to the world of high-level fighting game play was through the Tekken series - it wasn't until deep into my "study" of fighting games that I began to develop disdain for Tekken. In the West, it is the standard by which all 3d fighting games are judged.

But then something happened. Virtua Fighter 4 sparked a movement to reposition the series as the preeminent fighting game in the world, not just Japan. For whatever reason, the Western media that had always shrugged its collective shoulders at VF, preferring Namco's forays into the genre, decided to anoint Virtua Fighter 4 as "The Greatest Fighting Game Ever Made." And for a while, it seems like people begrudgingly agreed. And yet VF has never, and I predict will never, capture the West in the same way that Tekken did on the PS1 and PS2, but it has come a long way from the dark days of the Saturn and Dreamcast.

But Sega couldn't capitalize on this in any meaningful way. Subsequent iterations of Vf4 never really gained traction in the West, and even in the East, attention started to wane. The latest version, Vf5, hasn't exactly set the console world on fire. It was in this interest vacuum that Namco released Tekken 5.

Tekken 2, 3, and Tag Tournament represented a block of dominance on the level today's Halos of Call of Dutys - they were really that big. But like the Street Fighter community before them, the Tekken community developed a tendency to dislike anything not immediately familiar. Tekken 4, while in my opinion being just as broken as all the Tekkens that had come before it, was broken in a different way than previous Tekkens. This did not sit well with the community at large, and the series' popularity waned. I'm still not exactly sure why the series decided to make the changes it did. Maybe there was a change in the talent at Namco. Maybe they got tired of making the same broken game - I'm not sure. But for Tekken 5, Namco listened to the people and got back to the business of being broken yet familiar. Capitalizing on a weak moment in the Virtua Fighter series, Tekken reasserted its popularity both in the West and carved out a new popularity in Japan. The newest iteration, Tekken 6, looks poised to continue the Tekken renaissance.

The bottom line is that Tekken feels good. Attacks have cool sounds associated with them. Characters look flashy and neat and virtually every combination of directional input and button press yields a result that borders on sensory overload. It almost universally pats everyone on their heads and says, "Hey man, you're alright with me." And that's a very comforting feeling. That Tekken is almost more fun when playing against the AI, doing the same three juggles over and over is very telling, in my view. Broken or not, the designer in me believes there's something to be learned there.

Today the old men came out for a Super Turbo tournament at the arcade, so I ended up not playing anything. But I've reached a point in life where I don't mind sitting down to a Tekken machine and just pushing buttons - even if it's just for a little audio-visual overdose.

I should mention that this entire post was inspired by a fantasic review of Tekken 6 over at Action Button dot Net. It is to date, my favorite review that Tim Rogers has ever done. Reading over that sentence again, it may appear that I'm being sarcastic. Please trust me when I say that I'm not! I agree with everything Tim says in his review, and I enjoyed reading it so much that it prompted me to bring my blog out of the mothballs. Tekken just got lucky and found me at a point in my life where I don't mind so much anymore.

Thanks for reading.

"...obscure Japanese illustrator..."

2007-11-21T09:33:00.000-08:00

I was just looking for a good excuse to update this thing, when lo and behold, this drops into my lap. Eric-Jon (pardon the inappropriate familiarity) has taken up the task of chronicling the nouns that are "...pointing the way to the future." The future of video games, that is.

I must admit, after reading the first of the three articles, I remain unconvinced as to the validity of this premise.

My uncertainly comes from the ambiguous term "future." None of the games mentioned in this piece could be considered blockbusters, so the forerunners mentioned here have to be judged on their critical worth. I think Eric-Jon does a good job of proving his case in that regard on the games mentioned, so for now I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

And plus, Eric-Jon is awesome. Check out the article here.

Thanks for reading.

My work is a game, a very serious game

2007-09-21T09:34:00.000-07:00

Hello. I'm back. Somewhat.

So far, the thing - and please note that I use this word very deliberately - that has piqued my interest the most coming out of this year's Tokyo Game Show is flOwer. I presented the aforelinked (yes, I'm coining a term, let's move on) trailer to a friend and colleague of mine; he was nonplussed. His main complaint stemmed from a fundamental inability to figure out just what the hell was going on in the trailer. Specifically, I intuited, to what extent his participation governed any action or result. He went so far (after alliterating that flOwer would flOp) as to assert a complete inability to form an opinion at all.

Another friend and colleague of mine, at some unrelated point, directed me to watch a trailer for Afrika. It too is a trailer from which very little is discernible with regard to participatory action and result, and within this context, said friend semi-jokingly referred to it as a pending Game of the Year. I, up until watching this most recent trailer, had been keeping an eye on Afrika with some optimism. But after seeing the human character models, my interested has dropped a bit. The representation of humans in this next generation of ours just bothers me.

There are a handful of other things that have piqued my interest lately: Patapon, Imabikisou, and Echochrome are at the top of the list. Some of them have more clearly obvious indicators of action and result - of participation and feedback, if you prefer - than others. They have all contributed in steering me to evaluate just what it is that defines a game for me personally, as well as in the minds of the audience. I have, with an admitted level of condescending bemusement, read flOwer described on various message boards as a "non-game," a term frequently declared but rarely defined. The term is recurrently used in the derogatory, in an apparent deviation from its original intent, to refer to a sort of underclass of gaming. While I understand that tastes differ, and that the tendency to classify and rigidly define is also pretty natural, I can't help but feel that this move to classify games as having clearly defined goals, objectives, and (for me the most contentious distinction) challenges, as being very dangerous, particularly in that it serves to classify anything that does not contain these elements as not games. All of a sudden, a psychological fence is erected around what is suitable for the traditional conceptualization of a game, excluding what is not. There is something ominous in this, I think.

For one, I believe it prematurely stifles creativity in our young industry. Despite how it appears myopically, I am reluctant to concede that any wildly divergent ground has been covered in terms of what characterizes a game as such. The styles of interaction and the classifications that encapsulate them have remained fairly consistent for quite a while now. Some of the earliest trends in gaming, like shooting and driving, remain shockingly unchanged. By immediately discounting new interpretations of the form as existing outside the realm of gaming, effectively banishing them to an ideological purgatory, it encourages the industry to simply recreate the same picture using only slightly varying shades. While I personally enjoy a great many established genres, conventions, and play styles, that doesn't mean I'm enjoying all there is to enjoy. Nor does it mean I couldn't enjoy something else even more. And more importantly, albeit perhaps to the current, voracious game consumer, most dangerous, a new type of game might attract a new type of gamer. I guess this is where the real resentment gestates - in that if there is a new, larger fan base to satisfy, the old fan base will cease to be fed.

This is a legitimate fear for the current fan base, I guess. Myself, I'm a big fan of fighting games. I've spent more time in the arcades than I ever have in front of a SNES. I got my start in the industry writing fighting game strategy guides. The first handful of games I worked on as a designer were all fighting games. But, as time has gone on, fighting games have fallen into a steady popularity decline, and we now sit in the twilight of a once great genre, with only a few old dinosaurs still holding vigil, with no real inheritors looking to continue the tradition. But, a sort of new fighting game has emerged. They don't appeal to the same type of player that plays the old games. Nevertheless, the efforts of EA Chicago have given rise to new fans and new opportunities that will keep fighting games alive in a new, and probably more sustainable, form. Sure, I love my games of yore, and I wish more people did. But if they were truly meant to be timeless, they never would have fallen out of favor in the first place. It's kind of Darwinian, isn't it?

So while I go along, playing the Bioshocks, and the Skates, and the Halos, I'll also wait on the FlOwers, and whatever else awaits us in the new future. Either that, or I'll play some VF by myself in my living room.

Thanks for reading.

Jonathan Blow, Braid

2007-08-10T08:34:00.000-07:00

I'm not yet ready to pronounce this blog dead, despite the obvious death knells. I got into a pretty bad run of simply hating on everything here, and that's not a pattern to which I want to succumb. So, while I finish up another game, I'll try to figure out how to regroup this fall with something more productive.

In the meantime, anyone still coming to this blog should check out Stephen Totilo's interview with Jonathan Blow, "indie game designer" currently working on Braid. I've been a fan of Stephen's for a while now, and while I had a passing interest in Braid prior to reading this article, what I feel about it and its creator now can only be described as "awe." I don't know if his game is going to suck, or be the second coming. I don't know if he's a nutcase or a genius. But I do know that Blow is trying really, really hard to make something noteworthy, that says something different than what has been said before, and there aren't nearly enough people in our industry doing that.

Thanks for reading.

I set up this domino - now knock it down.

2007-06-20T07:50:00.000-07:00

I'm in the midst of a particularly busy time at work, which is all I'm willing to concede as to the reason for my lack of updates. But even in the midst of all that busyness, I still find time to visit Next Generation. I do so because, on occasion, Eric-Jon Russel Waugh writes articles for them. He has done so recently, and you should check it out. Not because he's right about everything - he's prone to making polarizing assertions - but because he seems well-intentioned and forward-thinking. Obviously, it helps that I find him a kindred spirit - I would love, in that distant utopia that he suggests, to make games for him. I have written designs that flirt with the subject matter that he broaches, but at the same time I am mated with the reality of the machine as it exists. So.

Eric-Jon's new essay is about leveling up. It's an exciting premise, and it lets slip my mind on wild tangents and possibilities. Necessity can be the only impetus for a viable manifestation of what he suggests, however; negative reinforcement seems to be the only motivation that stirs radical change. The industry has cast its lot with the status quo; it remains to be seen whether or not they're wrong.

A Requiem for God of War II

2007-03-28T19:37:00.000-07:00

This is a piece I've been waiting two years to write, so allow me to indulge myself . I don't plan on inundating this post with lots of pictures and links. The concession on the left is probably the only one you're going to get.

Videogames are not like cars. With cars, there are certain things to which people have grown accustomed; things that are not noticed. When we insert our keys into our ignitions, we are not surprised when our cars start. When activated, windshield wipers do not shock when they usher away the raindrops. When cold, the heater reliably warms us. These things go largely unnoticed, in our cars. Not so in our games.

In our games, we have instead grown accustomed to the heat not working. Sometimes we don't even complain about it; oftentimes embracing the malfunction as charming. Poor visibility is seen as a great separator between the dedicated and the uninitiated - some great challenge to overcome. Nevertheless, disproving completely idiocy, it seems that most people won't accept a game that doesn't start.

The original God of War had scorching hot heat, and relentless high-speed wipers. And not only did it start every time without complaint, it never needed gas! God of War argued in the loudest voice yet that the shortcomings so many of us had allowed ourselves to accept were in fact, not okay. In the process, it brought along with it a whole host of exciting features like power steering, windows, and door locks - things that we didn't even know we were missing out on, but things that now we can't imagine life without. God of War was effortless in its refinement and confidence. It is a milestone achievement in videogames.

Through a series of events almost bordering on coincidence, God of War also managed to do something very profound to go along with all those unconscious refinements. At its core, God of War is about emotions that appeal to the reptilian brain; emotions that don't have to be explained. The game, through its progression, manipulates these feelings, creating a concentrated core of emotion, ultimately exploding these emotions in a series of events culminating in The Hug. I've written about The Hug before, so I won't go into it now. But The Hug transformed God of War from a utilitarian piece of machinery into something else, something significant. Something that rises above nearly every game ever created.

It is in this way that the creators of God of War, and the situation that surrounds the game in general, are special. God of War is crafted by the folks at Sony Santa Monica. Sony is the platform holder of the most successful video game console of all time, Playstation 2. This thrusts the games that Sony creates into an interesting situation. These games must justify the existence of the system in ways that third party games simply don't have to. Appropriately it seems, Sony Santa Monica has grown adept in sniffing out the talent is takes to bring these games to fruition. In truth, the majority of the people within the industry I most respect, fear, admire and aspire to be like work at this studio. God of War is a special game because it is made by special people, in an environment that requires its games to be special. And these same special people got together to create a special sequel: God of War 2.

If it can be imagined, God of War 2, as a game, is superior to the original God of War. In the same silent, deft way of its predecessor, God of War 2 continues in the tradition of unconscious refinement. Presentation is top-notch. Load times are nonexistent. The music is moving. Vistas are stunning. The villains are varied and menacing. The main character is still best-in-class in control and feel. And all of the aforementioned elements have been enhanced in some way. The game knows, it seems, when you're going to die most often, and helpfully supplies restart points in the most convenient of locations. Two mechanics are prominently featured - chain swinging and ceiling hanging - accentuating the unique experience that God of War 2 aims to create. I only have two real complaints with the game's structure. The first is with its pacing - the game drags in spots, and some fights just feel like filler - a tax, it seems, for the original game's only nagging complaint - that of being too short. My other complaint is with the game's boss fights. They seem excessive, with several fights featuring notable characters from Greek mythology (notable I should say, through no help at all from the game) feeling dutifully encyclopedic in their inclusion (more on this later). And yet with all of this going for it, something about God of War 2 feels not quite right. It is both hard to explain, yet painfully obvious.

God of War 2 has nothing to say.

The original God of War redefined the standard of how a videogame should be. This, because of its profoundness at the time, was noteworthy. Two years later, we have grown accustomed not only to our reliable heat and clear windshields, but to our power steering and windows too. That God of War 2 throws in heated seats and auto-dimming mirrors feels more like an expected upgrade to a model now long in the tooth than noteworthy improvements worth pause and consideration. This is no more a fault than it is a defense; it is what it is. Treading so faithfully in established waters will inevitably create diminished effects.

But it is not here that God of War 2 creates its most salient offense. Nowhere in the entire game do you really get a sense of what the creators - those special people - have to say. Instead at every turn, I am struck with the sense that the creators went out of their way to appear as transparent as possible. Where the original God of War stood by my ear, shouting at me to care and kill and maim, God of War 2 stands in the kitchen and loads my dishwasher. It organizes my magazine rack. It feels self-conscious at every turn, begging to please. I am struck with the feeling that the creators are terrified that the brilliance created in the original may have just been a happy accident, and that the adoration heaped upon them will be taken from them at any moment. I also sense an internal struggle in this regard, with two notable, rather self-indulgent features. The first being the previously mentioned boss fights. You fight many figures of history and mythology, most without any explanation of their significance. Like Theseus, known for his six labors, or Perseus, perhaps most famous as the main character in the movie Clash of the Titans. That these figures are thrown in with such little fanfare or explanation reinforces the notion that these characters were included first and foremost to satisfy the desires of the creators. If the player recognizes these characters, well that's just icing on an already delicious cake. The same goes for the Golden Fleece, a piece of armor that from my perspective has its roots in the parry system from Street Fighter 3. The parry is a surprisingly advanced maneuver for a "game for all people" like God of War 2, and yet here it is, an integral element of the game. Perfecting it has a marked effect on your success throughout the game, yet I can't help but feel the vast majority of people who play the game will never get a handle on it. And for what it's worth, I don't feel like this is the Fleece's purpose; it exists solely for the pleasure of the creators. And because of it, it feels special, and unique, and altogether out of place in the game, which is a shame. I wish the game was filled with these sorts of idiosyncrasies. I wish the game was selfish all the time, and not just in sporadic bursts. I wish the creators of the game were as sure that what they had to say was as important to videogames as I am. But they aren't, so instead the game defaults on what is safe and reliable. The warm heater and power seats.

Because of this, I have a hard time saying that God of War 2 actually improves on the original. Sure, in the metrics of evaluation, God of War 2 is functionally superior. But what God of War does that its sequel does not is try to be significant. Regardless of the success of failure of the attempt, it tried (and yes, where it tried, it succeeded). God of War 2 does not try.

So yes, God of War 2 has nothing to say. And I make this assertion knowing full well the capability of the team to deliver something that can again change the landscape of gaming. I demand it of them because it is their purpose, and I expect no less because it is their design. And so I will wait, steadfast, until they are finally ready to speak.

Thanks for reading.

Is This Thing Still On?

2007-03-13T21:55:00.000-07:00

Well.

The dearth of posts is due to many, many contributing factors. One is that, at the end of a long day, there are several other activities with which I prefer to unwind. Of those activities, some are gaming related. I play Company of Heroes - Game of the Year 2006 - almost every day. I record a lot of television, and despite the cancellation of many of the shows I found interesting this season, I still spend one or two nights a week catching up on missed episodes. And despite many happenings in the world of videogames since my last post, I really haven't been compelled to complain - or celebrate - about anything (this is not entirely true; there is one particular topic that I'm waiting to dive into, but I haven't yet found the proper tone with which to address it). I find myself becoming rather apathetic towards videogames as a whole.

I attribute this feeling to an accelerated inevitability that in my opinion, faces all game players if things continue as they are: that of a diminishing return on videogame satisfaction. I say accelerated in my case because, as frequently mentioned, I probably play an abnormal amount of videogames. I can say with little hestitation, for instance, that I own most of the games released on the Xbox 360 this past year. And of those games, I probably could have skipped all of them and not missed out on much in terms of real significance (this is obviously a sweeping generalization I know, but if I have to give pause to come up with the Xbox 360 game that really impacted me in 2006, then the point is kind of self-evident, isn't it). But I didn't skip them, I played them. I played a great many games on the PS2 and PC as well. I purchased the collector's edition of Bully - it came with a rubber ball I never inflated and a comic book I never read. I spent a week of vacation time playing Final Fantasy XII (which is, disappointingly, just enough to scratch the surface of that game; a problem in and of itself). When the Ps3 and Wii came around, I picked those up to, and played them, dutifully (and in the Wii's case, begrudgingly), for a while. And what I've realized, through playing all of these games, is that they're all fundamentally, really freaking similar. If you've played GRAW, you rest assured that you've played Rainbow Six: Vegas too. Feel free to tell people as much when they ask you. And the entire time I played Bully - which I consider to be the best console game released last year - I felt that inevitable GTA3 deja vu; its composition as a game is unabashedly iterative. Lucky for me, I guess, that they iterated on the best videogame of this generation.

In other words, I'm burnt out. I have very nearly had my entire fill of what games, as they are presently crafted, can offer. And I think that as more and more people reach the accumulated play time that people like myself have amassed, they too will experience the same estrangement. I see elements of this inevitability in the sentiments of others; one only need look at the anger and venom that plagues the members of the NeoGAF forums to see these feelings manifested. And the things is, I only have myself to blame. Not because I buy an abnormal amount of videogames; I maintain that getting burnt out on videogames as they are currently planned and constructed is an inevitability only accelerated by my frequency of purchase. But I place the blame on myself and others like me who continually, by our pervasive purchasing decisions, indicate to publishers that we absolutely love the current status quo. It's the buying community that told Ubisoft to give us two Ghost Recons (and a Rainbow Six: Vegas to boot) in one year. It's the buying community that encourages publishers to annualize any (and nearly every) successful game franchise. It's the buying community that said, "Hey, I really like these game elements, and I will blindly purchase any other game that emulates these same game elements," thus creating these prematurely formulated game genres - comprised of arbitrary properties like camera perspectives and the odd gameplay mechanic or two - in which all games are now carefully packaged. It is the buying community that places more value on games as cutting edge technology showcases than as a thought-provoking medium. And invariably, once this same community grows weary of the monsters that they create, they characterize the publishers who provided these services as being greedy and opportunistic for giving them what they once wanted.

This behavior goes way back, pretty much to the rise of the Super Nintendo. Successor to the NES, the SNES was really an evolutionary machine, and its games reflected this. Super Mario Bros. begat Super Mario World, and thus the template for iterative design was not created, but at the very least was most loudly celebrated (this happened before Mario of course; Pong begat Pong Doubles, Asteroids begat Asteroids Deluxe, Pac-Man begat Ms. Pac-Man, but I doubt many of you readers were even alive when those games were created). More and more publishers saw the success afforded to this trend, and sought to accommodate the public's insatiable thirst for sameness. To this day, the trend continues. It's why you still have new Marios sitting alongside new Sonics sitting alongside new Ratchet & Clanks. And the trend is wholly based on the buying public's bullishness with regard to accepting unproven concepts. Pick the worst, most derivative, broken game that I've ever worked on ( in your opinion of course; you can see them on this page). No matter what you choose, every single one of them has outsold Killer 7. And Meteos. And Gunvalkyrie. Depending on your choice, you may have selected a game that outsold Katamari Damacy. And Shadow of the Colossus. Nintendo is still shamefully guilty of this iterative development (and they rewarded heavily for it), and yet most people seem to give them a pass, preferring instead to attack companies like EA - I guess because EA doesn't have stock in our collective childhoods - for doing nothing more than engaging in largely the same practices. But again, I'm not here to attack Nintendo or EA; if people didn't buy the iterative and shun the new, the iterative wouldn't get made. It's an entirely cyclical event.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to play God of War 2.

Thanks for reading.

The Following Games are NOT the Best Games of 2006

2007-01-03T09:24:00.000-08:00

I really wasn't going to do a "Games of the Year" type post, because there are plenty of those out there and they're all equally meaningless (or, I guess, meaningful, relatively speaking). However, it was Next-Generation's list that was the back-breaking straw upon my back. I might throw together a quick list of the best games I played this year, if I have the patience, sometime later. But for now, a clarification on what certainly were not the best games of 2006 is needed much more. If you wanted to, I guess you could consider this somewhat of a, "Games I'm Playing Right Now" type post; I'm overdue enough on those to warrant one anyway.

Gears of War
I’m still trying to figure out exactly why this game isn’t being hung high. In fact, I am downright stunned at its staggeringly warm reception. If I wasn’t so sure that the game was startlingly average in all regards save technical horsepower, I would honestly feel the fault was with me, and I’d make sure to keep my opinion to myself. But if you go past the numerical reviews that Gears is getting, you’ll see that I’m not as alone as perhaps it would initially seem. Edge magazine, legendary for their conservative scoring, dedicated virtually their entire review to criticizing the game, only to lavish an 8 on it at the end of their review - an enviable score by any measure.

The entire time I played Gears of War, I sat waiting for the promise of the game’s greatness to hit me. Yes, I saw the pretty graphics. I reloaded my weapons perfectly. I executed numerous enemies with my chainsaw bayonet. I stopped. I popped. All the way up to and through the final boss, I waited. And as the credits rolled, I sat completely unsatisfied. Like apparently all of gaming, I allowed myself to be swept up by the Epic hype, believing that for whatever reason, they would be able to make a game with more substance than any of their other competent but ultimately forgettable games. What differentiates me from all of gaming, apparently, is that I sat and took Gears at face value, for what it actually did as opposed to what talking heads told us it would.

Wii Sports
Okay, here’s the deal: the Wii has an uphill battle ahead of itself with me. I agree that video game control has gotten excessively complex, and that steps to rectify this will likely lead to increased market penetration. But when I sit the Dual Shock next to the Wii controller, simplification is not what I see. Rather, what I see if a different direction of interface entirely: mimicry. It’s the same type of interface exploited in games like Dance Dance Revolution, Taiko no Tatsujin, Guitar Hero, and pretty much every arcade racing game since the dawn of time. Playing Wii Sports is just simulating the act of actually playing real sports. You want your in-game avatar to swing a baseball bat? Act like you’re swinging a baseball bat. You want your in-game avatar to throw a bowling ball down a lane? Act like you’re throwing a bowling ball down a lane. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This is Wii Sports. If you like games that already exploit this style of interface, you’ll probably feel right at home with the Wii. Me, I’ve never cared for this type of performance gaming – it’s just doesn’t fit my personality type. Data suggests, however, that most people do. My girlfriend likes bowling, and so it’s reasonable that she likes Wii Bowling. I’ve thought about taking up golf recently, but I’ll be damned if Wii Golf appeals to me in the slightest. When I’m ready to take up the sport, I’ll throw on a colorful polo shirt, some expensive shoes, and haul myself over to a proper golf course. If all the Wii has to offer is simple mimicry, color me disappointed.

Resistance: Fall of Man
Of these three most decidedly not games of the year, I feel most sorry for Resistance. You see, I’ve never gotten the impression that Resistance was supposed to be a very big deal. Rather, the game has the misfortune of being a first-person shooter developed by a company known for making cool games for Sony, set to be released at the launch of the Playstation 3. Had Resistance been made by any other developer, and had it been released at any other time, it probably wouldn’t garner nearly the attention it has. Had Warhawk, Motorstorm, Lair, and a handful of other key titles met the PS3’s launch, few people probably wouldn’t give a damn about this game. Such is life, I guess.

Resistance is nothing more than a very competent first-person shooter. It looks and plays more or less like any average first-person shooter should. And unfortunately, that’s probably the greatest offense a game in its position can commit. I purchased two games for my PS3: Resistance and Ridge Racer 7. As a known quantity (I just played Ridge Racer 6 at the Xbox 360 launch), Ridge Racer 7 still sits in plastic. Resistance is the game that currently sits in my PS3 drive bay, and it takes supreme effort for me to choose firing it up over other domestic recreational activities, such as reading a magazine or cutting my toenails. And it's not because Resistance is a chore to play, but simply because it feels like I’ve been down the road it travels so many times before. In many ways, it's as much a known quantity as Ridge Racer.

So this is my attempt, dear reader, at helping you avoid any confusion as we bring 2006 to a close. Undoubtedly you have read or will read in the future lists proclaiming that one or all of these games are among the best releases the year had to offer. Well my friends, these lists are simply wrong. There were far, far better games released in 2006 - games that really deserve your time, money, and attention. Don't be mislead.

Thanks for reading.

Oh, Grow Up

2006-12-19T21:29:00.000-08:00

I just caught the Spike TV Video Game Awards. Late I know, but with the advent of digitally recorded television, it's rare that I catch anything live these days. It was mostly horrible and sophomoric, made somewhat bearable by the ability to fast-forward any time shame and embarrassment overcame me. Even on a major (basic cable) television event, video games have still failed to embrace an identity that isn't cringe-worthy. Anyway, in the second hour comedian Sarah Silverman, whom I thoroughly enjoy (well, as thoroughly as someone can be enjoyed short of actually sharing space with them), came out to do her whole deadpan thing. If I were to create a ranking of my favorite comics, Sarah Silverman would likely enjoy a position at or near the top of said list. She's definitely an acquired taste, though. I purchased her movie, Jesus is Magic, as soon as it came out, and watched it with my girlfriend, who couldn't have been more disinterested in Silverman's intentionally awkward, oftentimes hard to watch style of comedy. I've noticed that recently Silverman's performance has become more and more difficult to differentiate from her as a person, which isn't exactly unheard of with regard to comics. In fact, it could be a credit to her craft that she is so deftly able to integrate her irony into her public appearances.

But back to the VGAs. Now granted I had just recently seen Sarah Silverman do an extremely funny routine at the MTV Video Music Awards, where she chastised Paris Hilton for being overweight - something at the time I thought was dangerous, hilarious, and appropriately awkward (as Hilton was in the audience at the time). Thus I was already prepared for a similar shtick. So when she began by revealing herself to be a "real live woman" to the audience of "gamers," I was both unsurprised and entertained. However, when she asked the audience how many of them were over the age of 15, and subsequently began to ridicule them for wasting their lives and the like, I was out of my chair, shouting back at the digitally-recorded comedian about how her sentiments were exactly the type of thing that "we fight against," and how the stigma that video games are something for children would burden us for years to come, forever threatening any possibility of legitimacy in the minds of the general population. For me, with the next generation trifecta resting comfortably under my television, her words had simply struck too close to home. I had completely forgotten that Sarah Silverman was a comedian, and that a crucial element of her humor relies on some segment of its recipients to be inappropriately offended. The audience at the awards show was likewise affected, booing her incessantly throughout the routine. It was not unlike what you would expect from Andy Kaufman's similarly ambiguous style of entertainment. That she so expertly inserted her routine in what had been up until that point some of the most embarrassing television ever produced only made the whole thing all the more poignant. Well done.

Whether or not Silverman's rant on video games was as socially ironic as her other comedy I'll probably never know, but I was struck nonetheless, as is the intent in much of her work. I have a permanent aversion to German automobiles due to material of hers, similarly tinged, calling attention to their ties to the Nazi party and WWII. And her rant on Paris Hilton, of course, was more of a commentary on the vapid state of celebrity and the detrimental effects it has on society, body image, et al.

In a recent interview, Phil Harrison, boss of all things Sony internal software development (and as such, one of the most powerful men in our industry) is quoted as saying, "I fervently believe that the biggest challenge we face is that our industry is referred to as 'video games,' and games are supposed to be fun." I wholeheartedly agree with this, adding that video games as a format have had the misfortune of being branded as some sort of idle past time reserved for children, a label that before the rise of Nintendo and their venerable Entertainment System, didn't seem to exist. Prior to the NES, video games were frequently relegated to bars and pool halls, hardly places frequented by children. And now, after 20 years of accrued stigma, video games are struggling to be seen as more of a legitimate medium. Some question this desire, and are content with whatever position video games occupy, so long as their personal video games needs are met; a new Zelda or Halo every 2-3 years, and all is right with the world as far as these people are concerned. But me, I won't be satisfied until purchasing a video game is as ubiquitous an act as going down to the local movie theater to catch the latest release. No one outgrows going to the movies, and yet the same expectation is not held for video games. Give me a break.

It's here where I offer my solution to the problem. Phil Harrison is looking for games that "...deal with fear...with comedy and with death." I can deal with that. But I would love to see games attempt something that it seems most are completely remiss to broach: subtlety. Subtlety is what takes The Sopranos (the television show, my god, not the game) from gratuitous to distinguished. It's what makes Jaws (again, embarrassingly, not the game) culturally significant, rather than simple exploitation. Unfortunately, the industry still seems poised to capitalize on the one thing that we have always done well, something that can be quantified, calculated, and evaluated with a large level of autonomy: detail. It's the philosophy upon which the Xbox 360 and PS3 are built (the Wii is barking up an equally misguided tree, that of interface. I actually wouldn't mind if the Wii packed more detail-inducing horsepower in its diminutive frame; it takes a balance). It's why most video games attempts at dealing with fear, comedy, and death come off as gratuitous and exploitive. The difference in philosophy is huge.

Jack Thompson famously labeled the video game Bully a "Columbine Simulator." Anyone who has played the game surely realizes that nothing could be further from the truth, but let's stick with this for a second. One of my favorite movies, Elephant, is unabashedly inspired by the Columbine Massacre. It was, in fact, originally intended to be a factual account of the tragedy. During production that idea was abandoned in favor of a fictionalized retelling. The notion that a movie would take the Columbine Massacre as inspiration for its basis is only marginally controversial; nothing significant enough to keep Elephant from earning highest honors at the Cannes Film Festival. But even suggesting that a video game might exhibit similar qualities to a real life tragedy instantly conjures up controversy, enough to land Bully in front of a circuit judge in Florida. To be fair, the judge wisely dismissed the case as groundless, but I wish I could say I had absolute confidence in the video game industry to one day attempt to make a game that actually broached the same subject matter as Elephant. Video games are very good at what they try to express. It's just tragic that most games are about recreating nothing but the very basic verbs, like driving and shooting (and playing?). I'm scared of what my industry might come up with, if it were challenged with the task of creating something more eloquent.

We've seen some attempts at subtlety already, and I'm sure we'll see more. Read any article on this blog and you'll undoubtedly be able to decipher which games I feel are closer to my perceived ideal. Most of what we'll see in the coming years, I'd wager, is more of what we've already seen, which means lots of really entertaining, disposable, meaningless games that do nothing to challenge the perception that video games are idle wastes of time, meant for men living in their parent's basements. Men who never grew up, who never developed important social skills, like those needed for, I would imagine, making movies or television programs. Or perhaps stand-up comedy. It is subtlety, after all, that separates the initial knee-jerk reaction I had to Sarah Silverman's comments from the reality of her sentiment. It's why, ironically, what she does is the work of grown-ups.

Thanks for reading.

I Just Wanna Show Some Videos

2006-10-28T20:21:00.000-07:00

So there's this promotional video going around - let's call it a trailer, for ease of use - of Gears of War. I must admit firstly that I have had only moderate interest in Gears of War prior to viewing this new trailer. Everything I've seen of the game has pushed me steadily further and further away from it. Its generic space-marines-versus-aliens premise is probably the worst offense (having never really liked Epic's big, blocky cro-magnon take on its characters only exacerbates this feeling), but the gameplay doesn't seem very promising to me either. And yet I had unquestionably committed to buying it - Gears of War has become bigger than a video game; it has become an event that demands, even deserves, my attention. So relax, Epic, in knowing that you already have my money (don't count on me forking out for the "special edition," though). Anyway, let me show you this trailer.

There is some debate over whether or not the trailer features real time or pre-rendered graphics - I honestly don't care. The song is called "Mad World," written and originally recorded by the New Wave band Tears for Fears, although the version contained in the trailer is performed by Gary Jules. The song was also featured in the movie Donnie Darko, which although I have yet to see, I am constantly recommended. This song, paired with some effective (if not spectacular) imagery, has turned me into a card-carrying Gears of War fan. I watch the trailer at least once daily, and on one occasion, I listened to the song on repeat for an entire day at work.

I'm not alone in my adoration for this trailer. I chose the above video from dozens of identical ones uploaded to YouTube. At work opinions vary from those similar to mine to outrage over what is seen as emotional co-opting on the part of Epic, capitalizing on Mad World's already effective use in Donnie Darko. While I wouldn't go as far as to call this view baseless (I know more than one person who enjoys the trailer specifically because it conjures up residual feelings from the movie) , I will at least say that my adoration of the trailer lends credibility to its effectiveness as a standalone piece.

The trailer works on me for a number of reasons. For one, I'm a sucker for the stoic, dutiful hero. Given the choice between Superman and Batman, I choose Superman every single time. In fantasy RPGs, particularly MMOs, I frequently opt for warrior types, those who protect weaker party members with their big shields and heavy armor. And the song. What can I say about it, other than that it's perfect in its cheerful moroseness.

I can say that I find it interesting that a video game trailer - consisting of an entirely non-interactive sequence (and probably one that doesn't exist anywhere in the actual game) - has brought me closer to a fever pitch, for a game whose concepts have heretofore left me tepid. Remember, I'm the contextual narrative guy, the storytelling through gameplay guy. But this trailer succeeds because it hints at a subtlety that before its release had been completely absent from Gears of War's hype machine. It is perfectly conceived marketing. And it's not the first of its kind.

That's a trailer from Silent Hill 4, a game that spawned some of my favorite video game trailers ever. It does exactly what trailers should - try to convey what it's like to experience the product they represent. I find that trailers like these are far more effective than trailers that simply show gameplay footage. Gameplay trailers fight an uphill battle because games tend to present themselves in a way best-suited to effectively communicating pertinent information as opposed to presenting information in the most glamorous way possible (although this is changing, for better or worse). And since when viewing a gameplay trailer you tend to have no idea how a game is actually played, this can lead to a disconnect. Attempts are being made to remedy this, but I'd say we're far from any sort of ideal.

That's a trailer for Red Steel, probably the Wii title with the largest hopes riding on it. While I don't have high expectations for this game in particular, I have to say that the Wii does allow for some expressive gameplay, perfect for demonstration through trailers. I imagine I won't mind Wii gameplay trailers nearly as much as gameplay trailers of old.

So that's pretty much it. No huge conclusions, points, or dogma to beat in. Just a really cool Gears of War trailer with a great song. Shouts out to Derek for inspiring me to flood a post with YouTube spam.

Thanks for reading.

Comfort Zone

2006-09-27T11:53:00.000-07:00

I’ve started watching quite a bit of television lately. Last week saw the return of several of my favorite shows, as well the debut of some new shows that may eventually become some of my favorites. I must admit that I’m blown away by the quality of it all; surely after what had been an extremely dark period in network television’s history (spurred on it’s been said, by the departure of long-running sitcoms like Seinfeld, Friends, Everybody Loves Raymond, etc., with a lack of quality programming in the queue to replace them), this is the best new season of television in years. It seems to me that The Sopranos, Lost, and shows of that ilk have really influenced the new season, with one mystery-themed situational drama after another. I don’t mind per se, because I’m a big fan of these shows, and it’s likely that I have a propensity to like shows that contain the same elements as these shows. But at the same time I have to imagine that there are tons of other concepts and show formulas that I’d enjoy just as much, if not much more.

The same thing has happened with games, and this “next generation” has really driven the point home for me. Just like this season of television, I’ve been privy to some really good games so far on the 360, and both the PS3 and the Wii show the same great promise. The overwhelming majority of the games on these systems, however, are either sequels or games easily quantified into existing genres. From a business perspective, this is reasonable, of course. Successful games become successful franchises, subsequently garnering imitation from competitors ad infinitum. Genres form, and all of a sudden games become slaves to their own convention; guided by arbitrary rules that no one can even remember the justifications for.

And make no mistake that I blame the consumer as much as I blame the publisher. I’ve seen a recent flood of spirited sentiment expressed over the very nature of what defines a videogame, and a downright reluctance to mess with the “formula” in any way. From removed heads-up displays in Fight Night Round 3 to the apparent lack of any goals at all (so far) in Sony’s Afrika, there are attempts from developers all over the world to reexamine what it is we all do, and these attempts are criticized and attacked by a vocal minority.

It could be argued, I guess, that we’re simply refining an inevitable formula (it has been argued that we are definitely refining a formula, minus the inevitable part), and it’s not my goal to dispute the value of the successful genres that have been developed. Like I mentioned, I’m having a blast playing games from these genres, and there are millions of other people that feel the same way. Just thinking about Lost Planet makes me warm and fuzzy (if this game lets me down I don’t think I’ll ever recover). But I have to imagine that the millions and I will ultimately get tired and want something more. Even Ken Kutaragi criticized publishers for their reliance on rehashing at this year’s Tokyo Game Show (of course, this is at the same keynote where he announced PS3 emulation for Mega Drive and PC Engine games).

You may be wondering, at this point, what solutions I have to address this dilemma.

You might be surprised, then, to find that the answer is none. I know this is the point where I’m supposed to bring it all together, where I explain how dumb and pointless it is to pursue this path. But it’s tough to argue the reality of it all: a known quantity that delivers reliable return is better (financially – this is a business after all) than any unproven alternative. So even though it seems like inevitably this behavior will lead to a huge videogame slump like in Hollywood, it also seems like the only reasonable course of action to take.

However.

Eventually we’ll have to change. I don’t imagine any sort of catastrophic cataclysm where you never see another third-person shooter or Final Fantasy XIX, but I do think when enough guys like me do stop buying traditional titles and start spending their money on other forms of entertainment, you will see opportunists who begin to make games that do stretch the boundaries. That’s right, I don’t think it’ll be from some benevolent creative visionary getting all esoteric because he loves games; I think it’ll come from smart business people who see an untapped market. And I think it’s already happening, somewhat, at developers around the world right now. I was expression my current frustrations to a friend of mine the other day. I said I wanted to work on a game with no winning and no failure – with no end and no goals at all; no implemented objective or purpose whatsoever. I said I wanted to work on a game that simply reinforced the core element of what a videogame really is: input and response.

He replied that I already had; he was referring to the game I had just finished working on, which he had played recently.

Remarkably, he’s kind of right.

Thanks for reading.

Games I'm Playing Right Now - Part 7

2006-08-10T18:54:00.000-07:00

I've run out of things to say temporarily, so time for everyone's favorite recurring series!

Tekken – Dark Resurrection (PSP)

Tekken, as a series, is a damn fun thing. I’ve been a fan of some level or another of the series since its first iteration, graduation from Street Fighter and various SNK fighters to the graphical showcase that was ultra-low quality 3d. My love affair with Tekken grew to its pinnacle with the release of Tekken 3. It was simply the smoothest, most fluid 3d fighting game ever created, and I dedicated years of my life to its study.

Tekken 3 was released in 1997. Since then the series has suffered the embarrassment of Tekken Tag Tournament, and Tekken 4. I know both of these games have their fan bases, but for me and many other “old men,” these games represent a significant change in the series. In short, they just don’t feel right – they don’t feel like Tekken. So it was with great disappointment that I held Tekken at arm’s length for nearly a decade while fans and developers alike agreed that what the series really needed was to go back to what worked in the first place – Tekken 3.

Tekken 5 and Tekken – Dark Resurrection play damn near exactly like Tekken 3. The rough edges have been smoothed here and there, and yes of course there are lots of new moves, but at its core these new Tekkens are just prettier, shinier versions of the game I’ve loved for years. True to form Namco has packed Tekken DR with tons of extra gameplay modes – the majority of which I have not touched. Most of my time has been spent playing the Tekken Dojo, which is essentially Virtua Fighter 4’s Arcade mode, replicated nearly feature for feature. Tekken wisely borrows many concepts from VF, most notably its character customization option, which allow you to take money earned from beating various AI characters and purchase items with which to append your character. My one complaint is that there aren’t enough cool compositions you can create with these purchased items – in VF you can assemble items that completely change the look of your character (my favorite is the full set of Roman armor available for Jeffry), whereas in Tekken the majority of the gear is just mismatched knickknacks. Nevertheless, this game is easily my favorite game on the PSP and I give it my maximum recommendation.

Prey (PC)

I’m playing Prey on my computer that costs as much as every other gaming device combined. Thus, it’s a very, very beautiful experience – one that unfortunately will be short-lived. I played the Prey demo prior to picking up the actual game, and in hindsight I realize this may have lessened my impression of the final game. The Prey demo is about all the Prey that I needed, I’ve come to realize. I thought the demo, which reportedly comprises the first 20% of the game, was well paced and appropriately impressive. I particularly liked the inclusion of the song Barracuda in the bar’s jukebox - to this day Barracuda is still my favorite part of Prey. Once you get past that first 20%, Prey kind of dissolves into a very basic, boring game. The much celebrated portal technology fails to impress; I’ve been traveling through portals since Super Mario bros; I’m not sure why I’m supposed to be blown away simply because Prey’s portals are placed in tiny boxes or hang in thin air. Then there’s the walking on walls (or ceiling) stuff. I’ll tell you what that did for me – it pointed out how nonsensical and arbitrary the level design seemed. Little in Prey makes sense, which is only remotely forgivable when I concede that this race of invaders whose space station/vessel I’m storming is incredibly advanced, and perhaps their sensibilities are on a far more efficient level then mine – basically your standard suspension of disbelief bullshit.

I thought the weapon selection was kind of interesting, and the first boss you fight (I call him the first because I got a weapon from him; it’s debatable that there are encounters prior to this that could be considered bosses) is very cleverly designed. The “you don’t die” thing is handled pretty miserably though – I’d almost rather die than go to that weird spectral realm where I shoot red and blue wispy things to regain health. And speaking of spectral realms, I thought the spirit form use in the game is depressingly basic. Invariably you’re only asked to go into spirit form to pass through intermittent force fields or pass over gaps. Once on the other side you hit a switch that disables this force field or closes the gap, and then it’s back to regular gameplay. The whole thing strikes me as kind of half-assed.

I haven’t played Prey for over a week or so, and it’s unlikely I’ll go back to it again.

Simple Series 200 Volume 101: The Onichanpon (PS2)

The Onichanpon is part Dynasty Warriors, part Devil May Cry action game from the fine people at D3. It is the special edition version of The Onichanbara 2, which I guess means that The Onichanbara series is something of a success. This can only be further evidenced by the series making the next generation leap to the Xbox 360. I must admit, the game’s appeal is easy to understand. A bunch of girls running around, killing zombies – I know I’m sold! The game itself plays well for a D3 game, but if I were to compare it to a God of War or something, I might find it lacking.

Unfortunately I’m not without complaint. The game’s structure is tragically basic. Essentially, you select a pair of girls that you control one at a time. The option to hot swap between the two girls happens with a trigger press, and while playing one girl, the other regains health. You take these two girls and perform a dungeon clear, over and over and over again. During these clears, you are able to complete various macro goals, like killing every single enemy on a level or clearing a level without using any items. These macro goals, once completed, unlock various things in the game like costumes and additional characters. Other than these diversions, the game offers little to keep the player motivated, which is expected from a Simple Series game but nonetheless a bit disappointing. I expect to see more effort made with regard to the moment to moment play in the 360 version of the game, which despite my complaints, I look forward to greatly. If you’re anything like me and enjoy sampling as many video game flavors as possible, this game is easy to recommend. If you’re the type that is extremely critical and demanding of your releases in every facet, I encourage you to steer clear.

Naruto: Ultimate Ninja (PS2)

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I picked this game up after seeing it get reasonable praise in various magazines. Play even said it was like the best fighting game since Power Stone or something equally ridiculous. I can say that Naruto has some really cool ideas in it – even the ones not stolen from Smash Bros. or Power Stone. I particularly like the projectile system, which kind of reminds me of the help system in Marvel vs. Capcom. But I get the feeling that I’d enjoy the game a whole helluva lot more if I gave a damn about the license this game is based on, and I hate when that happens (particularly since I don’t really care for anime in general). The game has these supers that consist of really long animated sequences. You can even extended the length of the already long sequences by imputing additional buttons at various points in the supers. I assume that these are taken from various points in the actual anime, but for me these sequences ended up being an enormous chore, especially when on the receiving end of them, where my only option was to enter counter button sequences to reduce the overall damage – which is actually a really cool feature. If such a mechanic is used without being associated with really long, bizarre cut scenes, I bet it would meet with great success.

The game looks pretty enough, although I’m pretty tired of looking at grainy cel-shading on the PS2. I just can’t recommend this game to anyone unless you’re a fighting game aficionado like myself or a fan of the anime - and even then I can’t guarantee you’ll like it.

Something tragic happened this summer, in that I purchased a great many more games than I actually played. Chalk it up to a busy time at work but several games have fallen to the wayside – hopefully I get a chance to tackle them all, but with the 4th quarter approaching (and with it, an avalanche of new games), the odds don’t favor it.

Thanks for reading.

Ties That Bind

2006-07-27T20:54:00.000-07:00

It’s been quite a while since I’ve touched on any subjects relating to my pet project, which I have christened Contextual Gameplay Narrative. I’ve discussed narrative and gaming with Derek several times, and we’ve come to agree that gaming and narrative are not inevitable partners; rather there are some games that will choose to utilize narrative to enhance the core elements that videogames already manifest and there are some that will not – there will always be spectacular games that have no story elements whatsoever. But forget about those for a second and allow me to talk about the ones that do. I’ve always felt that the videogame structure of dividing gameplay elements and story sequences into separate components was a gross misuse of opportunity – imagine going to see a movie and every 30 minutes having the lights come up and an usher pass out books to the audience; such is the general state of gaming narrative. A much more effective strategy, in my opinion, would be to seamlessly integrate gameplay sequences and narrative in such a way that they are no longer individual entities – in effect, narrative is unfolded through play. There are games that have succeeded at this – Half-Life was probably the first, and Valve has gone on to show their mastery of the technique in both Half-Life 2 and Episode 1. ICO brought this concept to an entirely new audience, actually crafting gameplay mechanics that centered on forwarding narrative goals, and God of War went from best action game of a generation to best game of a generation altogether with one desperate, selfless embrace.

The games mentioned above all have different ways of going about gameplay and narrative implementation, and all of them rely on traditional conventions at one point or another as well, so by no means am I willing to concede that they’ve arrived at the perfect ideal, if such a thing exists. But they are easily the most advanced in terms of forwarding my agenda, and as such they are the best games over which to scrutinize. The first thing that leaps out to me when examining Half-Life 2 Episode 1, ICO, and God of War is that these three examples of contextual narrative all rely on the same motivational feelings; specifically, those of a man’s innate tendency to protect and care for women. Is this accidental? It most certainly could be; since it’s safe to assume that most of the people who developed these games are male, the concepts created could have simply evolved unconsciously. If purposeful, it is logical for the developers to conclude that the bulk of the playing audience would be male, thus scenarios taking advantage of natural male tendencies (like say, holding a girl’s hand and leading her out of a scary place) would be successful. Accepting this observation for a moment, I'd like to examine the unique ways in which these games successfully achieve their common goal.

I maintain that the greatest videogame persona of all time is Gordon Freeman. This stems primarily from the way that Valve presents, or doesn't present, the details of his character. Sure, you know he's a scientist, one who is late to work now and again. When thrust into a stressful situation, people look to him for help. Later, he turns into a sort of legendary figure and the one true Free Man, an instrument of revolution. But mostly, Gordon Freeman is whoever the hell you, the player, is. As he never talks, you as the player are solely responsible for the thoughts and actions of Gordon Freeman - you are Gordon Freeman, and in concept, I don't think there is any equal. But if there was a close second, it would be Alyx.

I'm guessing Alyx is supposed to be some sort of love interest. She's young and strong (stronger than Gordon, actually [she's seemingly invincible], but the game is careful never to paint her as such), and she lets her gazes hang a bit longer than they should on Gordon. She goes as far as to place a longing hand on the other side of a pain of glass, presumably awaiting Gordon's reciprocation, which of course you are unable to do. But strip away Alyx's comforting voice and athletic frame, and you've essentially got a really nice tutorial/prompt system. Alyx tells you where to go, moving the plot forward through some sort of overlying need (the destruction of the city and everything in it, most recently). She gives handy advice on how to dispatch of enemies, oftentimes in convoluted ways (cars on top of ant lion dens, hello). There’s one particular puzzle, however, that I find quite compelling. A staple of the shooter genre, Gordon Freeman carries a flashlight, useful for getting around in the typically over dark areas that have plagued first-person shooters virtually ever since their inception. Tragically, Alyx has failed to bring one along on their journey, and thus in some situations, she insists that you shine your light on enemies for her, so that she can see them. It essentially breaks down to simple plate spinning - the game wants you to be preoccupied with your interests as well as the interests of an external element. But because it's young, strong, Alyx asking for your help, and not some level object that simply requires your partial attention, you're compelled on a completely different level - an emotional one. Most of Alyx's core functions could be easily replicated by boxes of text, occasionally instructing you to complete this level puzzle here, or to help a group of fleeing refugees over there. Note, though, that the most important function Alyx serves could not be rendered so sterilely - she's meant to make you feel. Alyx is so effective because as a young athletic female she is able to reach your brain on an emotional level, perhaps in a way you don't even consciously realize. My conspirator James Chen would call this a more immersive way of going about things. I just call it awesome.

If there was ever a prototype for Alyx, and a prototype for all in-game companions after her appearance, it would be Yorda. In interview, Fumito Ueda (who is either very brilliant or very lucky – it almost doesn’t matter which) has stated that the relationship between ICO and Yorda was inspired by classic anime featuring younger males paired with older females, like Tetsuro and Maetel from Galaxy Express 999. In Galaxy Express, the relationship between the two characters is maternal; Maetel reminds Tetsuro of his mother – a similarity that plays an important role in the bond between the two characters. Ueda brought the ages of ICO and Yorda closer together to create a more romantic connection. This change was so effective because it allowed ICO to retain both maternal and sexual elements (icky for some of you I’m sure, but this is no new notion). Visually ICO appears young and clumsy, and like all adolescents quite awkward in his body. Still, he retains that boyish adventurism that allows us to climb to heights in our youth that we can only imagine reaching as adults. Yorda is timid and unsure of herself, stepping lightly and hesitantly, only making herself vulnerable at ICO’s beckoning. While they are both childlike, their movements are reminiscent of two young people in the early stages of a relationship, still nervous, and shy around each other, desperately attempting to seem composed at all times, which invariably encourages the opposite result. Because they are thrown into this dire situation, they naturally find strength in each other. This is reinforced by the complimentary abilities that the pair posses. ICO is able to fend off the shadow monsters that seek to steal Yorda away, and Yorda can open various doors with a magical energy that emanates from her body. You as the player must guide Yorda out of danger, and the game must show you through Yorda that your efforts are successful. One of my favorite moments in ICO comes during a routine moment, where ICO and Yorda are jumping across some small gaps. Normally, Yorda is too unsure of herself to attempt large jumps on her own, but on this occasion she makes the jump on her own, without ICO having to instruct her to do so. This is because, according to Ueda, Yorda has learned to trust herself, and her traveling companion. They have formed a bond, and this is that bond’s expression. It’s is a subtle indicator, but the message is delivered all the more powerfully because of it.

Yorda is unlike Alyx in a lot of ways. Yorda is physically weak, and she doesn’t do any guiding at all. Most of the game, in fact, has the player trying to figure out just how to get Yorda to places that ICO has relative ease negotiating. And yet there is so much similarity between them as motivators. Games have always relied on various story-driven impetuses through which to guide us through, whether personal like saving your girlfriend from a marauding monkey or grandiose, like the ever-popular saving the world from a seemingly endless supply of aliens. Yorda and Alyx are certainly meant to appeal to the player on a more fundamentally reptilian level; they tug at the very fibers of nature and humanity itself. They are as real as you are within the synthetic game spaces, and their states, whether triumphant or vulnerable, are communicated to you more directly than perhaps any other characters in videogames.

[Aside: On]

I talk about God of War a lot, I know. I do this for a few reasons, one of which is that it is probably the best console game of this generation. If you’re tired of me referencing it I’m sorry, but there’s hope for a respite on the horizon: God of War 2 comes out early next year.

Kratos is a really interesting character, one that divides, I think, how many people feel about God of War. Many people, in this era of the erudite and emotive male, interpret him as this ultimate manifestation of the Generic Angry Videogame Character, smoldering with a healthy dose of omni-directed rage. I can possibly understand this opinion if it is partially formed by the public perception of the game’s director, David Jaffe. He’s got a great big personality which tends to clash with the traditional (Japanese) concept of the modestly reserved videogame director (see Miyamoto, Kojima, the aforementioned Ueda, etc.). I think many erudite, emotive males have trouble making sense of the way Jaffe comes off, and moreover, I think a fair dose of bias for Japanese sensibilities has made Kratos an unfair target of criticism, which is ironic, of course, because God of War takes advantage of several of the same design sensibilities that many of the more popular Japanese games also utilize.

Sorry to digress, but some of the criticism I’ve heard of God of War really confuses me. Alright, back to feelings and whatnot.

[Aside: Off]

Kratos has made a lot of mistakes in his life, mistakes that culminate in the adventure chronicled within the game. I’ll be honest, until the final boss fight, I thought of God of War as simply the most sensibly designed, well-crafted action game of this generation. It was gorgeous, its level design was impeccable, its camera was flawless, and everyone could effectively utilize its world-class game play systems – the very same design choices that catapulted Resident Evil 4 to its critical acclaim. After completing boss fight stage 1 however, the game aspires to something much more. Kratos is thrust into a world comprised solely of a very pivotal event – the murder of his family by his own hands. In this world, however, his hands are multi-fold - dozens of Kratos clones rush the scene, attacking Kratos’ wife and child. In a powerful moment of self-sacrifice, Kratos must defeat these variations of himself, and when his family suffers injury, he must transfer life to them through hugs.

I want you all to think about that for a second. This supposed vessel of generic rage must embrace his family to progress the sequence. Kratos’ wife and child don’t utter a single word in this entire game; they don’t even have proper names. And yet in this moment they are so fundamentally well expressed that they annihilate pretty much every other video game martyrs that have come before them. And had they been any other relation to Kratos – brothers, parents, cousins, comrades, etc. – the effect would have been completely different. Again, this is a simple matter of human nature. We as men are providers and protectors, and the circumstances depicted in this man versus himself battle concentrate these tendencies in a super–frenetic action sequence that has you throwing Kratos around more frantically than any other time in the game. After successfully negotiating this sequence, I hated Ares. Not “me” Kratos, but “me” Omar, the guy playing the game. I wanted to get back at him for what he had done to me, and what he had done to Kratos. I remember the venom I felt going into the final battle, and I remember the tragic vindication I felt when I beat him. And I know I just wouldn’t have felt the same without the final moments spent between father/protector and family/protected.

So what can we learn from all of this? Most of the experiences crafted in games exploit fundamental “guy” feelings; it’s just that usually, it’s the more aggressive expressions – the testosterone-fueled scenarios filled with big guns and fast cars. It’s obvious, however, that there are many more aspects of human emotion – both masculine and feminine – that can be engaged with great efficacy to forward the medium of games; maybe even to that point where we stop asking ourselves, constantly, if we have achieved legitimacy.

Thanks for reading.

The Best a Man Can Get

2006-07-14T00:00:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I was with a group of friends about to get down with some sweet Super Turbo goodness (the one true Street Fighter 2), when someone pulled out a recent AAA-licensed videogame. I’m going to buck a trend of mine and not name the game – so don’t try to guess, and don’t bother to try to get me to spill. Suffice to say the game was from a major publisher, and was quite high profile, capitalizing on the public awareness of its product tie-in. I myself had seen screens and movies of the game in question before, and what I had seen did not particularly impress me. Nevertheless, I was enthused when some of us decided to take turns playing (the Super Turbo machine was undergoing repairs, so we had some time to kill). While waiting for my turn to play, I was treated to competent yet otherwise unimpressive graphics, and the current player expressed frustration at the game’s general play. Still, opinions can vary, and so I remained cautiously optimistic – I honestly wanted to give the game a fair shake.

My optimism was dashed against the rocks of mediocrity the moment my hands touched the controller.

This game is absolutely awful to control. With no exaggeration, it’s a chore to play. Flabbergasted in the middle of my play turn, I asked the room aloud why a developer would make these horrid control decisions intentionally. Eric (that’s right, I only play ST with top-tier developers) suggested simply, that perhaps these decisions were not intentional at all. Perhaps it was simple lack of skill on the part of the developer. He’s was right, of course. No sane developer would intentionally make their game so unwieldy, tedious, and frustrating – particularly one aimed so squarely at the mass market. With this revelation, though, a new question arose. Why would a publisher allow such a high profile game to rest in the hands of such an incapable developer (and before I appear to paint such a black-and-white picture, I do concede that it’s entirely possible the game was not given enough time by the powers that be to make the game as good as it should have been)? The answer is chillingly simple.

Videogames are generally only as good as they absolutely have to be.

I want you all to mull this over for a second. Many of you probably perceive games to be delightful little labors of love. After all, if you play games, there’s a better than average chance that you have a strong emotional attachment to at least one of them; it’s reasonable to imagine that love begets love. It would be ridiculous for me to try to convince you that all games are made devoid of any passion or love, and that’s not my aim. But make no mistake, games are a business first. If one day there’s no money to be made in the gaming business, you can be sure that videogames as you know it will cease to exist, passionate or otherwise. With big business comes careful calculation, planning, and risk management, and profitability comes before everything. Tragically, sometimes profitability comes before making the best product you can. Let’s face it, in life the best isn’t always the most popular – it’s public perception that rules the day. There are better sounding, more feature-rich mp3 players than the iPod, but that doesn’t stop it from being the undisputed king of portable music devices. There are cleaner burning, more abundantly available fuel sources than gasoline, yet fossil fuels are still the fuel de jour.

So what does this have to do with videogames? Well just like those other products, there are certain games that people will buy, regardless of their actual quality. Isn’t it kind of disconcerting that the lowest rated Madden in seven years is also the best-selling? Madden is far from being a bad game, but what happens when EA and Tiburon actually stop trying as hard, reassured by the fact that quality and sales are not directly proportional? One of my co-workers spoke to me recently regarding one of his past projects. The game was close to its release date, yet desperately behind in its schedule. Instead of being allotted more time, the developers were instructed by the publisher to get the game done and on time, quality be damned. The publisher’s unwillingness to allow more time to make the game better was simple. According to them, research indicated that the game was going to sell a certain amount of units no matter how good or bad it was. The game, a licensed one, was primarily going to appeal to young children, whose parents, who have no interest in actually playing the game themselves, would buy it for them. This particular buying group is typically less savvy than the hardcore gaming audience, who are more likely to check reviews and gather community feedback before committing to purchasing a new game. Parents pay more attention to the license of a game than its actual quality, and children are more tolerant of flaws so long as the license is represented well enough. This creates a perfect storm for publishers, who simply want to exploit this willingness on the consumer’s part to buy lower quality, cheaper games. The money saved in development can then go on to buy more and more lucrative licenses, which while not assuring financial success, certainly increase the odds of it. My co-worker’s game was released, to great commercial success and harsh critical attacks. That, ultimately, is how we ended up that day, playing that awful game.

Fortunately, there are still a lot of publishers out there who are dedicated to making the best product they can. For some games, quality is the most important factor in ensuring success. God of War is a great example of a game with no license, poor cultural relevance, and limited potential audience that has gone on to be one of the biggest successes of this entire generation, riding simple excellence of execution to both critical and commercial success. Rest assured that other publishers have already observed God of War’s successful practices, and are well on their respective ways to bringing you games of the highest quality possible. I can’t wait.

Thanks for reading.

Games and Metaphor

2006-06-29T20:37:00.000-07:00

Eric-Jon Rossel Waugh has written a very brilliant article on the dog chasing its tail that the videogame industry has become (metaphorically speaking - hah). I try to avoid making newsy-type updates, because there are tons of websites you can go to for that type of thing, but I break for insertcredit and their various crusaders. This particular topic is one of my favorite subjects, and rather timely, considering the recent back-and-forth that James Chen and I have been engaging in as of late.

Go check the article out here. I promise that as soon as things at work slow down, I will get back to posting with better regularity. In fact I've got a pretty snazzy set of topics that I'm itching to write about, not including the 8 or so games I've purchased since my last GIPRN update. Please feel free to leave comments.

Thanks for reading.

Games I'm Playing Right Now - Part 6

2006-06-11T19:57:00.000-07:00

So slowly but surely, James Chen is eliminating the need for my blog to exist. While we don’t necessarily approach things from the same perspective, we do seem to like to talk about the same things a lot. As an added bonus, he updates much more often than I do. In a bit of turnabout being fair play and all that, I’ve decided to steal some of his presentation cues for the Games I’m Playing Right Now series that he stole from me. I hope you all enjoy it.

The Sims 2/The Sims 2 - University (PC)

Yeah. He got me. When I told my PC gaming-centric co-worker that I spent nearly every waking hour of an entire weekend playing The Sims 2, he kind of laughed, and said, "Oh, you haven't gone through that yet?" And I had not. Content to admire the series afar for years (inspired in no small part by my distaste for the traditional Sim games), I had maintained a comfortable distance from the series. It was a phenomenon, I came to understand, because it had attracted a non-traditional gaming audience. You may have read a previous post of mine in which I asserted that a specific group of people made games for a specific audience. Well, The Sims, whether purposefully or not, had broken down a barrier to a previously untapped audience, namely casual female gamers. Armed with this knowledge I purchased The Sims 2 for my girlfriend - the gaming genius. She played somewhat consistently for about a week before losing interest. I was somewhat disappointed by this, as I'm always trying to find a game that pulls her in as much as so many games pull me in. Then a few weeks ago I decided to give The Sims 2 a try for myself, and inevitably I got pulled in. I can see why the game is so compelling; challenges arise frequently; one Sim is tired here, one bored there. One is carrying around a cloud of green stink-gas. Resolving these challenges gives you a mini-feeling of accomplishment, and these bursts of feeling come often - it's quite intoxicating. I'm not completely devoid of complaint, though. For one, your Sims age and thus you must either spend time delaying their inevitable deaths by completing achievements which earn you money, with which you can buy an age-retarding brew. Or you can simply let them die and replace them with new Sims. This is both a macro-challenge - an overlying "point" to the game - and a way to make the game linear; I don't like either implementation. I much prefer The Sims as a world without time; as a little world I can enter and make happier by helping with life's little challenges. I like what the game has to say about me as a person, and about people as a whole.

Quake 4 (PC)

I bought a new PC. That's really all I can say to explain why I'm playing Quake 4. One of my good friends is the probably best first-person shooter player in the world, and he introduced me to Quake some eight or more years ago. When Quake 3 came out, he used to beat me up in it all time. I never learned how to play competitive first-person shooters, as I have really terrible spatial recognition, and that's kind of what those games are all about. And during the time of Quake 3’s reign, it seemed that unless a first-person shooter was played competitively, it wasn’t really being played at all. Fast forward to today and you have the reign of the single-player shooter. Party helped along by Half-Life and its host of clones, it seems that PC gamers remembered that playing games by yourself can be pretty fun too. Quake 4's single player game was rolling along for me enjoyably (if not a little predictably) until I got to this part where I had to ride this train-like thing around and shoot missiles out of the air. I get to this one point where the train-like thing stops, and all of these missiles rain down on me from off-screen and I die. I die there every time I play the level, and then I turn the game off. It's a shame, because Quake 4 really shows off how awesome my computer is - this game is unfathomably good looking.

Half-Life 2: Episode 1 (PC)

I consider Half-Life 2 to be one of the best games ever made. But that's actually a really boring thing to say because the more I look around the more I realize that everyone thinks Half-Life 2 is one of the best games ever made. I tore through Episode 1 within the span of two sittings, and I'm about to go through it again with the commentary on, just for kicks. In fact, it's occurring to me that there's nothing I can say about this game that will be more meaningful than actually playing it. I give HL2E1 my highest recommendation; it's one of those experiences that come along every so often that makes me forget all the bad things I want to say about video games. It is, in essence, the perfect video game experience. Please, please play it.

Rockstar Presents: Table Tennis (Xbox 360)

From the first time I saw this game, I knew I wanted it. Some saw it as Rockstar's attempt to clean up their image in the wake of the Hot Coffee scandal. I discovered in actuality that this game has been in production in one form or another over at Rockstar San Diego for years, going as far back as before they were even owned by Rockstar at all. It seems that the developers are just big fans of table tennis, and thus decided to make a game about it. I cannot express the great respect and admiration I have for this sort of game making. Table Tennis is the most inexpensive 360 game I've purchased. It looks great and is thoroughly executed and polished. It is obvious just from going through the tutorial that the developers really know their ping pong. This, unfortunately, does not always equate into a great experience for all. I ended up playing it for about a weekend tragically, before deciding it wasn't for me. Note I'm not saying it's a bad game - I find it, in fact, to be a pretty good game. But I realized through playing that my interest in ping pong is low, and my desire to play people anonymously over Xbox Live is even lower. This makes me and this game a bad combination. I liken my feelings about Table Tennis to the way I feel about Madden. Having played many different iterations of Madden over the years while not giving a flying flip about the actual game of football, I’ve come to respect the craftsmanship while at the same time having no interest to play the game anymore at all. I consider my Table Tennis purchase money well-spent, however. Sometimes you can just tell when a game is made for passion rather than profit - this is one of those games, and I will show my support as much as I can.

Radirgy (PS2)

I have no idea where I even heard of this game (when reading the katakana, I would like to point out the game’s name is pronounced “rah –jee-roo-gee”) - it might have been from the good people at insert credit; they're always paying attention to things that no one pays attention to. Anyway, Radirgy is a cel-shaded shmup; its graphics are what initially attracted me, as I claim no particular interest in the top-down shooter genre (I do however, observe it with morbid interest. I am convinced that left unchecked, the fighting game genre will follow in the footsteps of the shmup by becoming so overly-complex that only a small, rabid fan base cares about them anymore, dooming themselves to obscurity). I am a bit disappointed that the PS2 version of the game is a bit fuzzy and jaggy around the edges, but I don't know if it's the developer's fault or the hardware's – I’d be curious to see the Dreamcast version of the game, as the arcade version was originally built on Naomi hardware (the Dreamcast’s structural sibling). The game's style still shines through though, and for that alone this game is totally worth it to me. It plays well enough too; you're piloting a ship-like mech-like thing that can shoot bullets, throw up a shield, and swing a sword. The bosses are big and cool, and power-ups come regularly enough to make you want to keep playing. It, like all shmups these days, is a bit too hard for its own good, but I can make it through the first couple of levels with relative ease. I wonder if there’s a way to reintroduce the mass market to this genre; the play mechanics are so ubiquitous – certainly more so than your average third-person console shooter, and the format lends itself well to technological showcasing. Oh wait, this has been done already – it’s called Geometry Wars. Maybe there’s hope for the genre yet.

Black & White 2 (PC)

I wish I could tell you more about this game. I wish I could tell you how fun it was to be a god; how I helped the Greeks rise up and defend themselves against the Aztecs, recruiting other peoples to help them in their cause along the way. I wish I could tell you about the demi-god that I chose as my assistant, the kindly cow, and how I taught him to be a protector of his people. I wish I could tell you more about the game’s impressive engine, which allows you to zoom in to observe the smallest detail of the daily lives of one villager, while at the same time allowing you to zoom out so far as to observe the entire land mass of an island all at once. I can't tell you more about any of that, though, because the god-forsaken game won't behave on my computer long enough for me to discover any more than what I just told you. I have an AMD cpu and an Nvidia video card; apparently, there is no worse setup you can have when trying to run Black & White 2, as it is designed to run best on both Intel and ATi hardware; go figure. It is this, the variable preferences in hardware, that makes PC gaming so absolutely infuriating. That and the blinding speed at which PC hardware becomes obsolete – undoubtedly my shiny new computer will be rendered second-class hardware within the calendar year, and that just sucks. For as much complaining and protesting that people do over the rising price of consoles, I could buy an Xbox 360, a Playstation 3, a Nintendo Wii, a Sony PSP, a Nintendo DS, and another Playstation 3 for the money I just spent on my shiny new computer (and that’s guts only; I did not buy a new keyboard, mouse, sound system, or monitor). That’s right, the very same computer that can’t play Black & White 2.

That more or less sums it up for now. Sorry for the long gaps between updates, but I think a combination of the slow summer months from a release standpoint coupled with the increase in workload professionally has made updating feel more like work than fun. I’m sure something dramatic will happen soon that will stir me to climb my soapbox again soon, but for now all is well.

Thanks for reading.

Discovered Country

2006-05-26T09:02:00.000-07:00

Console Gaming is all about the characters. Sure, Gordon Freeman might entertain some mild celebrity on the PC, and the Doom Marine is a fairly ubiquitous icon, but really, no character who calls the PC home can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Mario, Sonic, Snake, Lara, or even the Master Chief in terms of fandom, fanaticism, or following. This happened for a number of reasons, the most obvious ones involving the way in which PC games and console games elect to relay their experiences. PC games tend to favor either the more immersive first-person perspective (found in shooters like Doom and Half-Life, and RPGs like Oblivion and System Shock) or extremely detached perspectives (found in “god games” Like Black & White and The Sims, and RTS games like Age of Empires or Warcraft). Also, PC games tend to use cut scenes quite differently than console games. Whereas Blizzard might use a spectacular cut scene to illustrate the general, conceptual conflict between humans and orcs, Konami will use their cut scenes to show the character Raiden (“hero” of Metal Gear Solid 2) getting all badass at the expense of several frightening pieces of machinery. And of course, there are exceptions to every rule. Doom 3 uses cut scenes to prominently feature their main character, and conversely, first-person shooters, RPGs, god games, and real-time strategies all reside on consoles comfortably. But in general, I assert that when it comes to strong characterization in games, PC and consoles are in completely different leagues.

That’s probably why third-person shooters are all the rage on consoles as of late. Undoubtedly spurred on by the success of Resident Evil 4 (and certainly a product of console gaming’s two-dimensional roots), games like Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Gears of War, and Mass Effect have all experimented with third-person perspectives heavily influenced by RE4’s claustrophobic – but character-centric – camera angles. Previous attempts at third-person perspectives have largely come off feeling a lot like first-person shooters, prioritizing feel over aesthetic. Avatars would whip around unnaturally, trying to maintain controller immediacy, eschewing any and all notions of composition, believability, or cohesiveness. On the other extreme, when third-person games are mindful of character sensibilities, they oftentimes end up feeling sluggish and unresponsive. What RE4 and its offspring have begun to focus on is reinforcing the feeling of actually moving a meaningful person around in a world space while also being fun to control – something that first-person shooters – still the lords of the PC action experience - have all but abandoned. Beyond modeling a set of arms and putting a wobble on their guns (which is annoying as hell), first-person shooters seem largely content with having control interfaces that feel like you’re maneuvering disembodied limbs through meaningless space. For better or worse (I lean towards worse), Resident Evil has always tried to increase tension by making character movement a conscientious, weighty act, thus strengthening the bond between avatar and player.

It’s looking like consoles may have finally bridged the gap between the responsiveness needed to feel good and the aesthetics needed to look right. Don’t believe me? Well go download the Xbox 360 demo for Lost Planet. Upon its release, Lost Planet will be the best game for the Xbox 360, period. Now, it’s possible (although not probable) that Capcom will screw this game up between now and its end of the year release, but based on the impressions I’ve gathered from the demo, this game is shaping up to be one of the most powerful and satisfying shooter experiences ever. I want to take a look at a couple of the things that Lost Planet does so well, the things that make its feel stand out amongst the flood of third and first-person shooters rising around us. Let’s take a look.

The first thing I noticed about Lost Planet is what I like to call “The Dead Zone.” While moving the target reticle with the right analog, I noticed that the camera did not update its position until I had breached some invisible box, which exists just above the head of the main character, and stretches a few shoulder lengths beyond in each direction. Thus, when aiming within that area, the camera maintains a fixed orientation while the reticle moves freely. This, in turn, coincides with the player avatar adjusting his animation as well, in synchronicity with the reticle. I, perhaps confusingly, commented to a colleague of mine that they had, “…made game function and character movement exclusive.” I don’t think he understood what I was saying, but in traditional shooters, particularly of the first-person variety, game function – things that relate to the player and his interface with the game (which could include utilities like heads-up displays, camera control, navigational abilities, etc.) – are typically streamlined to produce the most immediate, perfunctory service to the player, so that as little interference as possible gets in the way of world orientation/navigation, aiming, and subsequently firing at a target. Reticle aiming, for instance, typically moves at a one-to-one pace with the camera; differentiating between reticle movement and camera movement in traditional shooters is usually meaningless – they are the same action. Character movement and orientation usually get dragged behind this functionality in most shooters, with any positioning and movement by an avatar merely serving the basest level of believability and appropriateness. Lost Planet has broken from this tradition, and I was completely shocked at how dramatically the adjustment affected the overall feel of the game. Now, when I aim, it’s Wayne (the curiously antiquated name of Lost Planet’s main character) on screen repositioning his gun sights, rather than me the player moving a camera with a crosshair attached to it in abstract space.

Highlighted in red, the glorious "Dead Zone".

The next thing I noticed was the variety of expressive feedback that Wayne has. A friend/co-worker of mine and I were having a discussion about what this “next generation” really meant, and we seemed to agree that if nothing else, the amount of information communicated visually from the game to the player will increase dramatically. As such, subtleties that were only implied previously can be conveyed much more explicitly. Lost Planet is a game set in a snowy world, and when Wayne is running, he has to take these high, measured strides through the knee-deep snow. When walking, the effect is exacerbated with even more pronounced struggle animations and haggard, beleaguered breathing sounds. After jumping down from height, Wayne is completely disrupted, crashing heavily back down the ground, going as far as to use one of his hands to prop himself up and temporarily losing the ability to aim and shoot. One particular enemy in the demo has ground-shaking attacks, and if Wayne stands too closely, he is again affected by stumbling, temporarily suspending the ability to retaliate. Weapon choice is reflected accordingly as well. Heavy weapons that are typically affixed to the robot suits (called VSs) that dominate the Lost Planet landscape slow Wayne’s movement when the player carries them, requiring him to stand still when firing. This type of gameplay has met with some controversy in other, more traditional shooters (in Counterstrike, which does have a weapon weight system, players go as far as to switch to lighter weapons during moments of the game where navigation is more important than firepower – an option that Lost Planet, with its inability to store heavy weapons in your inventory, does not allow). In the world of Lost Planet, though, it makes complete sense. What’s perhaps most contextually interesting is what happens when Wayne is hit with heavy fire of caught too close to explosions. On several occasions when playing the demo, I would become caught between two or more opposing enemies’ fire. This oppressive barrage would inhibit my ability to move by throwing Wayne into reactionary fits, oftentimes resulting in my death. If within range of an explosion, Wayne can be knocked completely off of his feet, further exposing himself to additional damage. These types of consequences are what you’d expect from a melee-based action game, not a shooter (although to be fair Call of Duty has played with a disorienting shell-shock effect for some time). It’s pretty standard affair that while enemies may buck or tumble under fire (although some games, like Quake 4, don’t even respect this notion), but typically the player and his avatar and able to run through bullets as if they had never been hit. Punitive reactionary systems not only exist in Lost Planet, they thrive.

I’ve been paying close attention to the buzz surrounding both Lost Planet and its stable mate Dead Rising. It seems that people are really responding well to them – particularly Lost Planet – which got a lot of attention due to its brilliantly timed demo. I hope Capcom gets to reap the rewards for their efforts with these two games, as the 360 could really benefit from Capcom’s continued support in the coming years. While I consider my 360 purchase money well-spent, the game library it has amassed so far doesn’t really suit my tastes as well as I’d like. What you have on the 360, by and large, are very big, bold, safe games (with perhaps the one notable exception being the phenomenally underrated, yet gloriously worthwhile Condemned). Lost Planet is big and bold, but I would call a shooter from the land of the shooter-phobic many things before I would call it safe. I have to give credit where credit is due and acknowledge Capcom for being the most adventurous big publisher in videogames today.

Thanks for reading.

Games I'm Playing Right Now - Part 5

2006-05-22T14:33:00.000-07:00

It’s been a while since I’ve done a proper one of these, and since the last I’ve played and beaten a couple of games, which as such don’t really qualify as games I’m playing, but I’ll include my thoughts on them nonetheless. I’m currently working on an article about a game I’m really, really, really obsessed with right now, and I may even post it one day. Until then, you’ll just have to make due with my cruel pontifications…

The Elder Scrolls IV – Oblivion (360)
I played Oblivion exclusively for about 80 hours before beating it. During those weeks I couldn’t imagine myself playing any other game. I would come home from work and play for hours a day, every day. And then I finished the critical path, turned the game off, and have never looked back. There’s quite a bit of work I left unfinished in the land of Cyrodiil; in fact, immediately after completing the main quest some woman came up to me and requested that I help her father who had gotten himself into some trouble of some sort. Or perhaps it was her brother, or husband. Either way, she’s still there, waiting in the world for me to return. She’ll probably wait forever. This probably says more about me than it does about the game. In truth, Oblivion is easily one of the best games yet released for the young Xbox 360 – but let’s face it, that isn’t saying much. I’m a goal-oriented type player, and I just saved the whole world, so I have little motivation to go help get some guy out of jail. Go figure.

Tomb Raider: Legend (360)
I had been looking forward to this game for quite some time, pretty much ever since I heard that Crystal Dynamics was helming the project. No, I’m not a Legacy of Kain buff, and I passed on Whiplash, as did the rest of the world. So why the anticipation? Well, in part I guess it was just the idea that someone else besides Core Design was going to get a shot at the project, and I figured they couldn’t screw the game up anymore than it had already been screwed up. And I was right. Tomb Raider: Legend is not great, but it is good. It plays a lot like a Prince of Persia clone that’s trying really hard not to feel like a Prince of Persia clone, and that’s okay – nothing wrong with stealing successful formulas. There is one issue I had that stood out above all other issues: Lara kills pretty wantonly, and that bugs me. In a game that’s seems to be about exploring and discovery, every time I had to pull out the firearms and get crazy on some thugs, my respect for the game lessened a bit. I know, at this point I must sound like some peace-sign waving hippie, with all my whining about violence. I won’t try to convince you otherwise, but I still think Lara would do better to spend more time puzzle-solving and less time busting caps. Oh yeah, and the motorcycle levels suck.

New Super Mario Bros. (DS)
This game, functionally, is a sequel to the original Super Mario Bros. I don’t get to fly in it, and the only “suit” I don is a blue shell that might possibly be the most useless power-up in the history of videogames. I spend most of my play time feeling either bored or bogged down by tedium. It’s not fun that keeps me playing it so much as it is the hope that eventually the game gets fun (I’m on World 6). New Super Mario Bros. has broken my heart. Yes I’m completely serious.

Mega Man: Powered Up (PSP)
I don’t even feel right giving my thoughts on this game. You see, I hate Mega Man, and I always have (well okay, I liked Mega Man 8 for the Saturn, but everyone likes that one). MM:PU didn’t change this feeling, although I do like the new style choices. I wish I could put a finger on it – my hate for the series – but I can’t seem to. I mean yes, I can easily identify some decisions that I question, like dying on a boss having to send you way far back in the level, but I think the biggest beef I have with the game is that when I’m playing, I constantly feel like the game is being unfair – Mega Man is not a game that roots for you. It exists, and if you conquer it, so be it. If you don’t, the game will still go on, oblivious as ever. I’m really torn on this, as Keiji Inafune has recently become my personal god (knocking David Blaine out of a spot he has occupied for years), but I guess even gods have their off days, on which they can only hold their breath for seven-odd minutes or so.

Capcom Classics Collection Remixed (PSP)
I may have mentioned this before, but my second favorite game mechanic of all time is the helper system. I define a helper system as any in-game assistance that once acquired, augments your abilities through reasonably autonomous means, usually taking care of obstacles without your direct involvement. You’ve all probably played a game or two with a helper system – Gradius, Secret of Mana, Half-Life 2, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and a score of other games all flirt with it. Even Ico had a helper system of sorts. Magic Sword is my all-time favorite game featuring a helper system, and its presence alone makes this collection worthwhile. There’s some other games on there that I’m sure a lot of people will be interested in, but yeah, Magic Sword – totally worth it.

The Pirates (PS2)
So there’s this Japanese publisher called D3, and they have a series of budget games (actually, they have a few budget series, but I only want to talk about this one) that they release every so often called the Simple 2000 games. In a nutshell, these original games are made quickly and cheaply, and are accordingly expected to be fairly low volume sellers. Most of the games appear to be heavily influenced by other popular games released by various publishers. Zombie vs. Ambulance, for instance, was inspired by Crazy Taxi. If a game does well enough, sometimes they get sequels; I’m playing one of those now, but I don’t want to talk about it just yet. Instead, I’ll tell you that The Pirates is a God of War clone (it’s got a bit of Devil May Cry in there too) where you, the player, take the role of a Pirate sailing the seas and looking for treasure. In the midst of these treasure hunts you jump onto other ships filled with zombies and ghosts, and you exterminate them. Half of the fun of playing The Pirates comes from the fact that it’s such an obvious God of War clone – while the game doesn’t play nearly as smoothly, you can almost feel the unabashed joy the developers had in spoofing it. Such freedom of development must be pretty liberating for them. Either that or they hate their jobs thoroughly.

Loco Roco (Demo, PSP)
It’s just not cool to like a game simply because it’s from Japan and you think Japan is mysterious and exotic and home to these crazy, quirky games. If you think it is cool, well, at least now you know that I don’t think it’s cool. Loco Roco is a game with a very interesting visual style that I don’t like playing very much, yet. I hope that changes, because I really want to like some of these damn games I buy for my PSP. When the Nintendo DS first launched, it was accompanied by a bunch of tech demos masquerading as games, and it took a while for the system to get to a place where it didn’t feel that it had to prove its worth with every release. And when that happened, a bunch of cool games got made. The PSP hasn’t gotten to that point yet. Every time I stumble upon a game that I think I can get behind, I lose interest. So yeah, Loco Roco just isn’t fun. It’s got this really blunt control interface (combinations of the L and R buttons) that ends up making me feel really detached and out of control. I like being in control, and it’s unlikely that much is going to change in terms of the interface they give you, so my relationship with the game will probably be strained at best – that’s a shame.

These are the only games that I remember well enough to comment on. I played a little bit of Driver: Parallel Lines, but only long enough to realize that I hate it, so hopefully no one is out there eagerly awaiting my thoughts on it. I’m debating doing an E3 GIPRN edition, but I only played like 5 games there, and one of them was Call of Juarez, which I probably shouldn’t comment on, for obvious reasons.

読んでいただきまして　ありがとうございました.

Alternate Routes to the Mass Market

2006-05-11T14:15:00.000-07:00

I realized recently that my girlfriend is some sort of an observational genius, if there even exists such a thing. At the very least, when she and I look at the same thing, she perceives elements that I completely disregard or fail to interpret altogether (interesting, isn’t it, that I define genius as anything beyond my level of perception …). Her most recent proclamation occurred at this year’s E3, at which she assuredly declared, “There are too many fighting games.”

Note that when my girlfriend says “fighting games,” she doesn’t mean it in the traditional Street Fighter/Virtua Fighter terminology. In fact, she made this declaration in the midst of several futuristic (and props deserved – freakishly gorgeous) first-person shooters in the EA booth. Instead she refers to the act of people engaged in direct, harmful conflict with one another, typically resulting in injury and/or death. This definition encompasses fighting games, first-person shooters, action games, and virtually every other genre currently experiencing any sort of financial success on a videogame console, except of course for the perennially inexhaustible sports genres.

Of course, my girlfriend could have been simply expressing dissatisfaction at the lack of titles catering to her interests. While being nothing close to what I would consider a “gamer” in the traditional, somewhat condescending sense, she has a respectable arsenal of gaming experience stockpiled, having done recent time with several DS titles, including the very gamer-typical Mario Kart DS. Her most favorite games, at least as far as I can tell, are puzzle games. She still plays Puyo Pop Fever daily, and not too long ago she atypically went down to the local EB and placed a pre-order for Tetris DS. She counts Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario Bros. as two of her favorite videogame experiences ever, so she even flaunts some old-school credibility.

For whatever reason, though, her anti-fighting decree did not ring to me as sour grapes. Rather, what I heard sounded more like, “is that all there is?” Is this the pinnacle of our gaming expression? And for god sakes, don’t take this as either one: a rant about violence in videogames or two: another designer asking for games that make people cry. In fact, just about every single videogame I was eager to see at E3 this year featured violence as a main component. Instead, I’m raising the question, has videogame design really tapped into the most effective mechanics with which to reach our audience? In terms of premise, impetus, action, and response, are we really “next gen?”

A day or so before E3, a trailer for Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 hit the net. I admit with no shame that I am a huge fan of this series; maybe it’s the volleyball, I don’t know (I consider Beach Spikers to be among the best games on the Gamecube, so there’s at least evidence to support that hypothesis). A lot of the videogame press, in my opinion, rather hypocritically criticized the game for being gratuitous in its use of graphics - Team Ninja had the audacity to use great looking graphics to sell their game! I guess good graphics are alright so long as they’re used to create guys in spacesuits with guns and aliens, but beach volleyball should utilize nothing more than a text-based interface or something. Anyway, while watching this trailer, I was really impressed with the elements that Team Ninja has cobbled together into what will ultimately comprise this game. It seems as if the Dead or Alive girls have once again taken a break from their usual corporation-toppling hijinks to take a well-earned vacation, full of innocuous party-gaming and volleyball. If the trailer is to be believed, there’s even a bit of water park action to be had, as one of the girls was inner-tubing down a giant waterslide. Besides the pick-up games of volleyball, there’s nary a traditional videogame genre in sight. And yeah, it also has some really, really pretty graphics – hopefully pretty enough to attract some deserved attention in this technology-centric, gun-toting period in videogaming.

The one-two punch of my girlfriend’s observation and DOAX2 has really got me thinking. The fact of the matter is that a very specific type of game maker is making a very specific type of game for a very specific type of game player. This vicious cycle began accidentally, but now has become formula, as the videogame audience has reached a sufficient level to sustain videogame development’s rather myopic goals. Nevertheless, I’m going to spend some time in the near future developing different strategies with which to approach the creation of a successful, mass-market videogame that doesn’t rely on traditional “fighting” sensibilities. I think it’s a worthy endeavor, and at least my girlfriend will appreciate my efforts.

Thanks for reading.

Games I Want to Play Right Now – E3 Edition

2006-05-05T11:55:00.000-07:00

So a friend/co-worker of mine asked me for my recommendations on what to make sure to see at E3 this year, and I thought it’d be cool if I made a post out of it. So what follows is my complete and wholly subjective list of the 10 games of E3 that I am most looking forward to, done up in a handy ranking format:

10. Resistance: Fall of Man

I don’t consider myself a shooter guy by any means. Sure, I buy them just as often as any other genre, and I count Half Life 2 as one of the greatest games ever made. Doom and Doom 2 probably hold the record for games I’ve beaten the most times, and the series gave me my first taste of competitive multiplayer gaming, from which I’ve never truly recovered. But I’ve never reached that Nth level of nirvana, never truly connecting with the spirit of the first-person shooter in that way that I’ve connected with, say, the fighting game. Thus, it may seem strange that this game appears on my list. Well, R:FoM is being developed by none other than Insomniac Games, makers of by far and away my favorite video game series of this generation, Ratchet & Clank. I will go anywhere they lead me, and from the looks of things, where they’re leading me is to a grayish world with heavy guns and scary monsters. Sign me up.

9. Gears of War

What’s this, another game with heavy guns and scary monsters? I’m sensing a next-generation theme here. I respect Epic as a company, but I’ve never been personally enamored with their games. But with Gears of War, something changed. That something, I think, is that the games that the developers name drop when describing their game – namely Resident Evil 4 and Kill.Switch – are pretty cool in their own right, and in this industry great ideas tend to be built on the backs of other great ideas. Plus, Epic seems poised in the exact same position that Criterion was in last generation. They are the makers of the hottest middleware in town and they must show the power of what their product can produce. Criterion did it with Burnout, and Epic will do it with Gears of War.

8. Resident Evil 5

So Capcom did something really cool last generation. Without anyone really noticing, they quietly produced some of the boldest, most daring, and purely entertaining software around. Then they capped it all of by releasing Resident Evil 4 – a game that many consider to be the best game of last year (more on this later). If I was a betting man, I would wager that subsequent Resident Evils will owe a lot of their themes and concepts to RE4 (and to a larger extent, many games in many different genres will all take a feather out of RE4’s cap. Look for closer third-person cameras, cameras offset from directly behind the character, escort missions, and horror themes to permeate into all your favorite games). Resident Evil 5 will garner huge attention the closer we get to its release, and I’m hoping that all kicks off starting at E3.

7. Dead Rising

If you know anything about me, you probably know that I like zombies. There is just something about the despair created by the world falling apart and the co-dependent relationships that develop as the few remaining survivors struggle to make sense of it all that I find irresistible. The Japanese, on the other hand, like zombies because a zombie is as close as you can get to killing real people without actually killing real people – something that, I guess, is still largely distasteful there. So like chocolate and peanut butter, my love for the human drama and the Japanese love for killing humanesque things will come together in the form of Dead Rising. Plus I hear the blood effects are pretty swanky. We’ll see.

6. Lost Planet

Lost Planet – the third Capcom game on my list – is a game I’m looking forward to both as a fan and as a developer. I’m excited as a fan because the game looks amazing – the enemy designs and setting choices are spectacular. I’m not a big mech guy, but this game seems to be trying really hard to correct that, and the on-foot action looks frenetic and exciting. Am I the only one who detects a slight Zone of the Enders vibe? As a developer, I’m really curious about the third-person shooting. I find the third-person perspective to be so much more compelling for a console audience – particularly the Eastern audience, which places a very high value on character attachment, and I’m eager to get a non-Resident Evil take on the perspective.

5. Metal Gear Solid 4

By George, this generation I became a Kojima fanboy. Having never thought the Metal Gear series to be anything particularly special, I was completely caught off guard by Metal Gear Solid 3. I personally find it to be a more compelling and enjoyable experience than nearly any other game this generation, up to and including the venerable Resident Evil 4. As has been stated many times before, Kojima Productions holds a stranglehold on presentation and refinement that no other developer on the planet can seem to match. But not only that, Metal Gear seems to possess an awareness of what it is as a game and a purposefulness in what it intends to communicate to the player that just seems light years ahead and what anyone else is attempting. And yes, they make very pretty games as well.

4. Virtua Fighter 5

I must preface this by saying that although probable, no official mention of a console release of Virtua Fighter 5 has been announced. With that said, it’s more than a little likely that one of Sega’s “three surprises” at E3 is an announcement of exactly that. VF has regained much of its lost luster in the eyes of the Western market with the release of Virtua Fighter 4 and its update, Evolution, and it’s virtually guaranteed that Sega will capitalize on this at the show. My thoughts on this are simple – Virtua Fighter is to fighting games as Ferrari is to automobiles. There are lots of car companies making lots of cars, and while many are good, only Ferrari is truly great. Like it or not, it is the same with VF.

3. Sonic the Hedgehog

The very first booth on the very first day of last year’s E3 that I visited was Sega’s, and upon reaching it I immediately got in line to see what they were showing in their theater. I got to see video of the games they were showing on the floor that year, and many of them were pretty interesting. But of course it was the next generation video that piqued my interest the most, and out of all the games in that movie (Afterburner, Chrome Hounds, and Virtua Fighter 5), it was Sonic the Hedgehog that left the greatest impact on me. In this current generation, Sega has really abused the Sonic franchise. For whatever reason, these games of questionable quality have sold by the bucket load, and it seems there is a new one out every quarter. I have skipped most - but not all - of these games (I did buy Sonic Heroes, which was awful, and Sonic Rush, which was great), but there is no way in hell I am skipping Sonic the Hedgehog. It’s as if Sega is looking at us with a knowing, apologetic look, and Sonic the Hedgehog, with one gloved paw, may wipe a generation’s worth of bad memories from our minds.

2. God of War 2

Let’s get it straight people – God of War is the best game of this entire console generation, let alone the last year. No other game player better, looked better, sounded better, storied better, did more for the platform, or left a bigger wake than Sony’s big-budget action romp. All you people evangelizing while holding down the B-button to run, take note – I’ll be over in the Sony booth, motion canceling my ass off and tipping my hat to the guys – an American team – who showed once and for all that Western development is about more than tech demos and horsepower. This year’s E3 is definitely going to be about bright and shiny next generation consoles, and that’s understandable, but something tells me that you’re going to see more than one game that is directly influenced by this genre-defining series (I’m playing one right now).

1. Super Mario 128

When the time of human beings is over, there is only one videogame from one series that I really and truly hope survives as evidence as to what humanity accomplished with videogames, and that game is Super Mario Bros. 3. Like a lost people roaming the desert, I have waited for a decade for Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka to show me The Way by giving me a proper console iteration of Mario (Sunshine be damned). It’s entirely possible (although not probable) that the only taste of Mario I will get is New Super Mario Bros., but somehow I doubt that. Nintendo is really good at E3 surprises, and I think the speculation regarding this game from the pre-E3 hype is conspicuous by its absence – something tells me that people know more than they’re letting on; here’s hoping I’m right.

So that’s my must-see list, but it’s obviously not all I hope to see at E3. I’m actually really hoping to see a new Silent Hill, maybe even one that responds to what Resident Evil did to their pre-existing gameplay mechanics. I would also really be pleased with a new iteration of Ratchet & Clank; I’m one of those crazy people who enjoy both the platform-centric and shooter-centric versions of the game equally, so I’ll be pleased with pretty much whatever they come up with. I’m also pretty damn excited to see Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. After two versions of the soul capturing system, I’m really looking forward to Iga and the boys (and girls) covering some new ground. Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball 2, Ultimate Ghouls N’ Ghosts, Tekken 6, and I’m sure a metric ton of other games will all get at least some face time with me; this looks to be one of the best E3’s in quite some time (although nothing really tops the Oddworld booths of old).

Thanks for reading.

Mistaken Identity

2006-05-01T22:06:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine suggested that I start writing articles about the way I think games should be. I have no earthly idea how games should be, other than exactly what they are. This doesn’t mean I think that the games industry is perfect; rather I simply don’t think I’m in any position to proclaim anything definitive regarding issues I’ve only dabbled in professionally for a few years. So there’s no way I’m writing anything even closely resembling a manifesto. Well, I mean other than the one I’ve already written.

Instead, I’ll just write about this idea I had.

This idea came to me while misinterpreting something I saw in a screenshot, which in and of itself is kind of cool. If you think about it, my brain connected dots that only existed in my own head – it was a flaw of the brain’s ability to process images that brought about my new idea. No, I don’t know which screenshot it was, because I don’t mark events like that as an occasion. But I do remember the game – it’s called Contact, and it’s for the Nintendo DS. On certain days, Contact looks like the type of game I would never play – and what a rare type of game that is! On other days, I can imagine myself regretfully plunking down my hard-earned dollar on a game I know I should avoid (I will more than likely buy Contact). The Japanese RPG is probably my least favorite console genre. Please don’t take this statement as a challenge to either come up with a genre I should like less or to come up with a Japanese RPG that will change my mind about the genre. I liked Final Fantasy 6, so there.

Anyway, here’s what I thought I saw in Contact: I thought I saw two characters, one on each screen. They were in the exact corresponding spot on each screen, meaning that if the two screens were superimposed on top of each other, only one character would appear, because he would overlap the other. The environments on each screen had the same basic geometry, more or less, but the environment locations themselves were completely different. The top screen reflected something reasonably familiar, a science laboratory or hospital, something cold and clinical with bright fluorescent lights. The bottom screen’s environment was completely different – some sort of dark, organic, alien swamp. The two locations both had corresponding entrances and exits, as well as generally comparable navigational land masses.

I refocused my eyes on the screenshots, however, and this vision was gone.

I’m sure you’re all at least somewhat aware of Rubik’s Cube. In short, you have these six colored sides of a cube, comprised of nine mini faces on each side. The goal of the Cube is to get all 6 sides of the cube completely uniform in color. Rubik’s Cube is a puzzle because the relative position of certain mini faces with regard to one another is fixed. In other words, you cannot move faces singularly, and the orientation of one face can have a direct (constant) impact on the orientation of another; to move one face to where you want it to be, you’re going to have to bring some others along for the ride. Ideally, where the first face ends up is beneficial to the rest. Sometimes, the road to that beneficial position goes through what appears to be less-than-ideal orientations. But in the end these temporarily inconvenient positions ultimately lead towards the greater good, and the solving of the Cube.

This, in effect, is what I thought I saw in the Contact screenshot. I honestly thought there was a gameplay mechanic there in which you controlled two characters with one input – in this case the game’s d-pad and face buttons (let’s face it, the DS’s best games don’t even need the stylus). Guiding these characters through two similar but different worlds, I imagined one character on the bottom screen needing to cross a large gap, and there being a tree log close by that he could use to accomplish this. On the top screen, the other character would not have the corresponding large gap requiring a log, but the path he would have to take, pulled along by the other play’s need to get to the log, would be beset by some other challenge – say a series of undulating platforms. The player would have to negotiate the platforms on the top screen, acquire the log on the bottom screen, make it back over the gaps on the top screen again, and place the log across the large gap on the bottom screen, allowing both characters to progress to the next area. I thought this would be a pretty fun game to play. It would take some work to create enough interesting character abilities to keep each challenge fresh, and I really think you could create an intriguing enough storyline/premise to tie the whole thing together.

I’ll probably never get the chance to make a DS game, but if I did, I think I’d try to make this one. If you guys think this idea is cool, or even the worst idea you’ve ever heard, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading.

Game I Won't be Playing Anymore - Brain Age Edition

2006-04-20T21:04:00.000-07:00

I had intended to write this article about how games are made by a very specific group of people, thus they tend to attract people who share the sensibilities of that specific group. You see, while we’re all here scratching our heads on how to break through to mega sales and capture all of these untapped segments of the population, we’re all approaching the problem with the same mindset and logic. Thus, we tend to reach very similar, yet perhaps misleading conclusions. It’s exemplified by this Buddhist quote I got from 21st Century Game Design, bar none of the best game design book I’ve ever read:

“Six wise, blind elephants were discussing what humans were like. Failing to agree, they decided to determine what humans were like by direct experience.

The first wise, blind elephant felt the human, and declared, ‘Humans are flat.’

The other wise, blind elephants, after similarly feeling the human, agreed.”

So, I was all set to get preachy and philosophical about the whole issue.

But then I bought Brain Age.

This "game" and its sequel are something of a phenomenon in Japan at the moment. That's what they call games when they sell 2 million copies in a country of 125 million. This product is marketed as a tool that will help you hone your brain to a razor's edge, bringing you back from the brink of dim-wittedness, I guess. I consider myself a pretty smart guy, and I thought it would be a fun endeavor to put this to the test. So I fired Brain Age up and went into the Quick Play. My first impressions were not favorable.

Words! Pages of instructions on how to "play the game" (“use the tool” is probably a more accurate characterization) had me a little wary. This really isn’t a game in the traditional sense at all. No biggie, I’m all for new and interesting experiences. The Quick Play mini-game is this test where words are displayed in various colors. Brain Age asks that you simply call out the color of the text. The challenge is that the words displayed are all colors too – Blue, Red, Yellow, Black – but never the same name of as the color of the text. The brain oftentimes has a tendency to read the word rather than say the color. It’s kind of cool in concept, and I was eager to find out my Brain Age. The instructions warn that this voice recognition system works best with native English speakers. Originating from Midwestern America, I come equipped with a deliciously neutral accent. Perfect! So I began the test. The variously colored words began to appear on screen, and I started in, calling out the colors.

“Blue.”

“Black.”

“Yellow.”

“Red…Red…Red…Red…RED...RED.”

“Yellow.”

“Blue.”

“Red…RED…RED…RED.”

My Brain Age ended up being 80. The god-damned game wouldn’t recognize my voice! I couldn’t have been more annoyed at the whole thing, and I turned the game off in disgust. My girlfriend, having become something of a game aficionado since the advent of the Nintendo DS, picked up the game shortly after I dropped it, and also immediately selected the Quick Play. I listened to her test with interest.

“Red.”

“Yellow.”

“Black.”

“Blue…Blue…Blue…Blue…BLUE…BLUE…BLUE.”

“Yellow.”

“Blue…BLUE…BLUE…BLUE…BLUE…”

Click. Brain Age turned off.

Later that evening, my girlfriend gave Brain Age another try. There’s another Quick Play option that’s basically a math test. It asks you to write the answers down to a streaming set of simple math problems. Apparently this test went over for her much better than the first one, as she excitedly asked me to try it. For the sake of science, I gave the game the old college try.

11 – 6 = 5.

4 x 3 = 12.

7 + 8 = 15.

6 x 7 = 42. 42. 42. 42. 42. 42.

The test said my brain speed was that of a car or something. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but the thought of the results being tainted by shitty writing recognition is just too much for me. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that I will never play Brain Age again. In gaming conventions, the controls just suck. As a counterbalance to my steadfast revulsion, my girlfriend continues to play the thing – she’s got her age down from somewhere in the late 50s to somewhere in the late 30s, and she appears to be enjoying it. I’m not going to tell people not to buy Brain Age, because that might be akin to swimming upstream – Brain Age could very well end up being a cultural phenomenon here in the States like it is in Japan. I will say that the game has gotten surprisingly tepid responses from the American videogame press – probably because a lot of them are blind elephants just like me and can’t tolerate the natural shortcomings that come from voice and handwriting recognition. Ah ha! Bet you guys didn’t see me wrapping that up all full circle-like like that, did ya?

Thanks for reading.

Games I'm Playing Right Now Part 4 - PSP Edition

2006-03-23T15:39:00.000-08:00

I didn’t make a conscious choice to stack a bunch of PSP games up and play them all back-to-back until I realized just how many PSP games were in my “to play” stack. The last couple of months have been extremely strong for the Sony handheld, and there are some pretty interesting games on the horizon that may permanently legitimize the PSP as an actual gaming device, despite Sony’s best efforts to sell it as something more convergent.

Pursuit Force (PSP)
When I first saw Pursuit Force, my interest was piqued immediately – primarily because in all of the pre-release footage of the game, it seemed to be a mechanic-driven game. Let me clarify the term “mechanic-driven” before I go further. Super Mario Bros. is a mechanic-driven game. In it, players use a jump mechanic to perform most of the game’s activities. You jump to kill enemies, clear gaps, access power ups and end levels. There’s even a special reward for performing 8 successive jumps without touching the ground. It is the mastery of the jump and its varied use that drives the game’s play. You can jump anywhere, if you’d like, and oftentimes experimentation leads to interesting and entertaining outcomes.

Pursuit Force, on the other hand, would probably be better categorized as a gimmick-based game. Its main distinction is that the player takes control of this sort of highway patrolman (although to be fair, not all the action takes place on roads), whose goal is to thwart the activities of a handful of crime syndicates. This is largely accomplished by killing them all during high speed chases, during which the player jumps mightily from vehicle to vehicle, blowing away driver and passenger alike, then taking the recently appropriated vehicle, advancing to the next target, and doing it all over again. The jumps, while visually impressive and exciting are only possible when you orient yourself in a very specific way in relation to your destination. When in place, an icon appears, letting the player know that they can perform their aerial assaults. So really, getting your vehicle into desired locations is the impetus of the game, whereas the selling point – the gimmick – of the game is the jumps.

So with that clarification out of the way, all that’s left is to judge the game based on what it is. The game is fun enough, and it’s certainly presented well, and I was really into it right up until the moment I first died. Now before any conclusions are jumped to, this is not a rant about difficult games, I’m quite fond of challenge – I’m currently playing Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence on European Extreme difficulty (you know, the one where if you’re even seen, you die). My issue with Pursuit Force is that when I retried the mission that had previously killed me, I successfully completed it without a hiccup – The part where I died before didn’t even come up again as a tense moment. I didn’t feel that successful negotiation of the mission was due to some sort of masterful negotiation of a challenge. When I’m spotted in MGS3: S, it’s because I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time, or I didn’t disable a guard quickly enough, or my camouflage isn’t appropriate for the environment. There’s something that I as a player can improve on. Death in Pursuit Force is not a tool used to show what you shouldn’t do because death in Pursuit Force feels entirely arbitrary. The player’s interface with the world of Pursuit Force – particularly the aforementioned jumps, but also in the actual killing of your targets – is so rigid that it doesn’t really feel like there’s anything at which to excel. My understanding of the game seemed to have reached a plateau – and unfortunately when there’s nothing left to learn in a game, player interest drops dramatically. I’ve played it a bit since this realization, but I’ve mostly moved on to other things. Such is my experience with Pursuit Force.

Daxter (PSP)
I’m going to go ahead and get it out of the way here: Daxter is my current frontrunner for Game of the Year 2006. I have had no greater addiction, enjoyment, and satisfaction from any other game released this year, and I couldn’t be more surprised. I’ve been a fan of Jak and Daxter primarily through proxy. The few times I’ve played the series, I’ve found it competent but flawed. While I respect it for many things, including its technological achievements, I have always found its spiritual sibling and stable mate Ratchet and Clank vastly superior. I’ve always rooted for the series, as its roots lie deep in the platformer, where my console gaming obsession began. Plus, their former leader Jason Rubin is a vocal critic of the current state of the videogame publisher/developer relationship, and his developer call-to-arms from a few years back was both invigorating and inspirational.

Daxter was not developed by Naughty Dog. It was developed by Ready at Dawn, but it seems as least plausible that the two companies had some back-and-forth with the development of the title. The most obvious giveaway for me was the masked loading – there are little if any loading screens once you get underway. Levels are streamed, and lots of zone changes are hidden with elevators and doors that take a while to open. This is actually a really nice touch for a system like the PSP, where loading time can really eat in to the shortened play sessions I typically allot for handheld play. The graphics are spectacular, consistent with the cartoon-like style that the Jak series has always retained. And then there’s the actual play itself – pure platforming goodness. Sure, the inevitable vehicle levels with their sloppy friction rear their heads, but that just seems to be par for the 3d platformer course these days. Daxter is a perfectly polished, well-executed wonder of a title; I give it my maximum recommendation.

Exit (PSP)
I decided to buy Exit based on the first impressions I got of it from Tokyo Game Show last year (wow, marketers must love people like me). I saw the graphics, I heard it was about rescuing people from dangerous situations, I read the inevitable comparisons to Elevator Action, and I made my choice. This game hits on a lot of the things that I approve of in games. Its graphics are bold and distinct. Its play seems specifically targeted towards brief handheld-friendly play sessions. And its premise is about helping people. Ah, helping people.

I have a weakness for games about helping people, and I don’t mean the world is in danger, and I need you to kill 4,000 aliens to save the world type of helping people. I mean an earthquake has stranded people in precarious situations that require your assistance, and an evil mom has locked away her daughter in a big castle full of easy-to-push blocks type helping people; a more personal approach to the concept, you could say. This type of play is my videogame kryptonite. Thus, Exit seemed like a perfect fit for me. And it almost is.

Where Exit breaks down is in its controls. It’s just too damn clunky, relying on grid-like movement and precision when actually manipulating your avatar is annoyingly obtuse. Some of the control decisions are perplexingly arbitrary, like the mouse cursor you use to associate your companions with certain environmental instructions. It all just comes together a little jarringly, and the game ends up feeling more like a puzzle game with human-like avatars than an action game with rescue as a motivation.

Despite this I still recommend the game – it’s very fun, if you’re a puzzly kind of guy, which I most certainly am.

Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror (PSP)
I saved this game for last, not because it’s the best, but because I played it for the longest before reaching a conclusion on it. I spent at least 4 or 5 play sessions just going through the tutorials with different controls options, trying to find something that was comfortable. Although I still haven’t yet reached Syphon Filter Nirvana, I can at least say with some certainty that I’m enjoying the hell out of this game. Based purely on the recommendation of new challenger reader cog (who apparently shares my distaste for capitalization of proper nouns), I went out and bought Syphon Filter, half expecting not to like it. You see, I haven’t played a Syphon Filter since the PS1, and back then I billed it as a sort of poor man’s Metal Gear Solid. Having not been a Metal Gear fan at the time (that would have to wait until 2004’s masterpiece, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater), you can interpret this to mean a greater insult than it may appear to be.

Okay, so I’m not completely wrong in my characterization of Syphon Filter as a poor man’s Metal Gear. The first “boss” in the game is a watered-down version of The Fury, complete with flame thrower and fire-retardant outfit. Also, the main character is supported by a varied cast, including several women; your main sidekick is even a Chinese woman, a la Mei Ling. Again, in and of itself, a Chinese woman as a partner in a videogame is not enough to warrant screams of “MGS clone,” it’s more of an accumulation of coincidences is all that leads me to the conclusion. Perhaps it’s a bit of tongue-in-cheek on their part, I don’t know, but the similarity is enough for me to notice. One thing that’s hugely different between the two games is that where Metal Gear promotes stealth and non-interaction, Syphon Filter is all about blowing people away with various weapons. The developers encourage conflict most of the time, and when they do want you to be stealthy, they’ll place enemies with their backs to you, intensely focused on one goal or the next.

I know it sounds like I’m kind of bagging on the game, and I partially am – the game is not perfect. But Syphon Filter is the real deal. I used to have a pretty strict rule about not playing console-styled games on the handheld (the first time I sat down to play the story mode, I literally turned off the game as soon as the opening cut scenes were done playing out – they took that long), but Syphon Filter has taken a sledge hammer and reshaped my tolerances of what I will give a chance on my PSP. That doesn’t mean I’m buying Me and My Katamari!

Thanks for reading.

Defining Success

2006-03-17T10:20:00.000-08:00

Derek has started a series of articles on fighting games. The first entry lists his top 5 most successful fighting games ever made. The original source material for this and the forthcoming articles dates back some years, and when I asked Derek how he defined “success” in his article, he told me that he didn’t remember. This got me thinking about my personal definition of success and videogames, as coming to terms with something I feel comfortable with as both a developer and a player has been very difficult for me over the years. My first definition of a successful game went something like this:

A successful videogame is one that satisfies my personal requirements for enjoyment.

I call this my naïve definition. For the general videogame public, this definition is reasonably functional. From the perspective of a consumer, games should strive to satisfy my needs, and if they do so, they have accomplished their mission. But this definition is woefully myopic when I position myself as a developer. Surely I can’t responsibly hope to satisfy one, two, or even a few thousand people. If fifty thousand people walk away from my games satisfied, even that is a horrible failure. The longer I’ve been in the industry, the more expensive games have gotten to produce, and to make enough money back to justify the investment made in development I now have to satisfy hundreds of thousands, and perhaps even millions of people. This realization led me to my second definition of videogame success:

A successful videogame is one that appeals to the broadest number of people possible.

I call this my pragmatic definition. From a business standpoint, this is an ideal definition of success, and undoubtedly it’s one that is held by a great many developers, but also probably by a great many people who sit in much larger offices and have much fancier cars than any developer has. I’m talking about the money men – the management and publishers that really drive this industry. The better my games sell, the better I appear in the eyes of the bigwigs, the more games I get to make – with bigger budgets, and better people, which leads to better sales, which leads to more stature in the eyes of the bigwigs, and on and on. But this definition began to eat at my soul a bit. After all, I don’t consider game gesign a job people take to pay the bills or to climb the corporate ladder; this is a job of passion and love. Developers dedicate more time and energy to their jobs than most people could possibly imagine. There’s a reason the average career span of a game developer is only 10 years – this shit is hard. Digesting this, I began to explore the realm of critical analysis, commonly known as game reviews. The games industry has its own vibrant system of critical commentary, and just like other entertainment media, the videogame review system even has its own review collation sites – my favorite is Gamerankings. Armed with this new tool of observation I came to yet another definition:

A successful videogame is one that gains wide critical acclaim.

In and of itself, I still maintain that this, my humanist definition, has merit. It might seem odd then, that I recently abandoned this definition with great relish. You see, my educational background is in Literature. Before I got around to game design, I was seriously considering a career in writing. I spent nearly two years of my college career taking nothing but literary critical analysis classes. I fell in love with both the subject matter of the analysis as well as the art of analysis itself. I began to understand how external the definition of what is “good” and what is “bad” can be. Unfortunately, and I don’t mean to reignite a debate on videogame journalism, but videogame reviews as an entity aren’t about objective analysis and worth quite yet. They’re about political machination and emotion. I came to this conclusion in the past year, and one game above all illustrated this to me rather clearly – Shadow of the Colossus.

Shadow of the Colossus is a game I’ve been looking forward to pretty much since the moment I completed ICO. Before even playing it, I would imagine how much I would love it, and what important work Fumita Ueda, Kanji Kaido, and the entire crew over there on Team ICO was doing. I felt that they were making the kind of games that the industry needed more of. And you know what? A lot of videogame reviewers were feeling the same things I was. They wanted Team ICO to succeed. They wanted Shadow of Colossus to serve as some sort of call-to-arms for the industry to make more esoteric experiences, to challenge art standards, to evoke emotional responses. The difference between me and those reviewers is that I’m not paid to review videogames – I’m a fan. The only thing that matters to me as a fan is my naïve definition, my personal requirements for enjoyment. These reviewers, in my view, let this investment of desire get to them, and it completely ruined their analytical perspective.

Playing Shadow of the Colossus revealed many things to me. The first was that Team ICO is not infallible. As a game, Shadow of the Colossus is not a masterpiece. Ueda is an animator by trade, and it’s obvious that subtle nuances communicated through motion are very important to him – more important than, say, how his game actually feels to play. In some cases, it works out. Climbing the colossi and killing them is exhilarating, and the information exchanged between motion on screen and the player’s awareness contributes to this. But sometimes it goes horribly wrong, as is the case with your horse Agro. Quite simply, Agro is a pain in the ass to ride. He doesn’t respond well enough to the player’s input – intentional, apparently, to communicate the free spirit of the horse. It’s hard to point him straight. He crashes into collision and ledges violently. And because you spend so much time on him – I would say at least 1/3 of the time you play the game – he sullies the experience. The game is worse because of Agro (there are also huge problems with actually tracking down the colossi, which exacerbates the Agro problem, but I’ll stick to shitting on Agro for now). Yet somehow, this was lost on reviewers, as they celebrated Shadow of the Colossus as a near-flawless landmark achievement in gaming.

I don’t think videogames are ready to rely just yet on their journalists to provide the kind of service that the literary community yields from theirs (although even the literary critics get pushed and pulled by politics every now and again). So what definition do I use to define success in gaming now? Well, it’s kind of an amalgamation of all these definitions:

A successful videogame is one that achieves a meaningful connection with its audience.

I call this my abstract definition. I don’t really have the intricacies of what it truly classifies all figured out, but somehow it makes sense to me, and that’s good enough for now. Maybe you all can help me come to grips with a formal meaning.

Thanks for reading.

Games I'm Playing Right Now - Part 3

2006-03-13T08:30:00.000-08:00

The ongoing series returns! I was trying to hold off on one of these until I finished the giant stack of games I have in front of me, but I realized that it might take a while to do so. So instead, I'll give you a rundown of what I've gotten to so far.

Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (Xbox 360)
This game almost proves my photorealism argument without me having to lift a finger. So you've got this pretty damn good looking game space, complete with lots of next-gen buzzword technologies like HDR, and then you've got this annoyingly garish HUD system to help you figure out what the fuck is actually going on in the game. It's almost comically difficult to discern what a crucial game aspect is and what's not.

I don’t mean to be overly harsh, but I feel like a lot of reviews have been overly kind, perhaps blinded by the HDR-laden glare that paints every horizon. The game does do some cool things. For instance, I like the wobble on the camera in 3rd person mode when you run - It reminds me of the chasing bad guys through the backyard look of the television show COPS. I also like how world objects react when they take fire. Cars shake and rattle when shot and explosions are both graphically and audibly satisfying. Once you get the hang of manipulating troops/vehicles/spy planes the control system is pretty handy as well. And then, of course, there are those pretty graphics.

So far GRAW has left me pretty “meh.” Hopefully that changes, because I really do want to like it.

Super Princess Peach (Nintendo DS)
I haven’t been in awe of Nintendo since 1996. That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed a great many of their products, because I have. I love the Mario Kart series. I got suckered into Nintendogs, as did a couple million other people. But I haven’t been humbled by Nintendo’s ability to create a product that is simply impossible for any other developer to make in essentially my entire adult life. I don’t know if that speaks more about me as a person than Nintendo as a company, but it is how I feel.

So yes, I’m enjoying Super Princess Peach. I’m enjoying it quite a bit, actually. It’s gorgeous, it’s well-thought out in terms of puzzles, and the Princess feels really good to control. It does what I think all good platform/puzzle games should do – it makes me feel smart for figuring stuff out. I had to force myself to stop playing it last night, I became so fixated. But it doesn’t put the fear in me like I want it to. I guess I’ll look to another game to fulfill that need.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance (PS2)
You read that correctly – I’m playing MGS2, not MGS3. I’m playing it for the 3rd time, although in my previous attempts I had never made it off the damn boat, which is the first level (I have done so now, thankfully). Having played MGS1 and not been terribly impressed, and having played MGS3 and finding it be one of my favorite games of this generation, I didn’t know what to think of the middle child of the Solid series. I now find it to be a combination of both good and bad.

It plays like a mix of MGS1 and MGS3, which makes sense. The controls and game rules feel like a stepping stone, and while functional, I feel myself yearning for MGS3’s sophistication. The game is also terribly codec-heavy so far, more so than I remember MGS3 being. One thing that strikes me as odd is that after playing the game for an hour or so as Snake, and being offered little if any instruction on how to play the game (which I didn’t need anyway), you’re immediately thrown into several tutorial-like objectives with Raiden. It really feels like Konami meant to ship the game without any Snake at all, and they threw in the first bit as a last-minute addition. I haven’t gotten far enough into the game to explore its more esoteric elements, but I’m eager to – there’s something about how ferociously debated the game is that I find compelling. For the record, I have no problem playing as Raiden at all. Maybe if I had the unexpected shock that so many people had of not knowing beforehand it would be different. Maybe if I hadn’t watched Metal Gear Saga Vol. 1 immediately before playing MGS2, in which Hideo Kojima explains that Raiden was an attempt to attract a segment of players who had no interest in Snake as a character, I would mind more. But hell, functionally Raiden is superior to Snake, and from that perspective I prefer him.

And so it goes. I picked up some other games this past week – Pursuit Force, Black, and Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams to be specific, but I haven’t played any of them to a level where I feel comfortable talking about them. I’m actually pretty enthralled with the three games I talk about above, and I feel no rush to move on just yet.

Thanks for reading.

Symbols, Icons, and the Best Games Ever Made

2006-03-06T19:01:00.000-08:00

Exclamations > Snake.

I’ve been thinking a lot about photorealism lately. In the midst of the current console transition, the actualization of what could truly be considered photorealistic recreations is upon us. Personally, I find this to be a great thing; there are many games that will benefit from the ability to accurately reconstitute the subject matter upon which they are based – racing and sports games in particular will undoubtedly experience a golden age within this console cycle. But the wholesale push towards photorealism concerns me quite a bit as well. I think in many cases that voraciously replicating real-world objects, settings, and characters can actually have a negative impact on a great many games. In fact, I assert that some of the most successful videogames ever have utilized iconic and symbolic imagery to reach unparalleled levels of consumer penetration and cultural awareness.

A symbol is one thing that is meant to represent something else. In the case of videogames, it's typically a graphically simplified version of an object used to convey a concept or idea. You know, like the hunks of meat that drop in Streets of Rage, symbolically representing potential health rejuvenation. A symbol becomes iconic when it retains a core likeness with the object it represents. The mushrooms in Super Mario Bros. are iconic representations of the magical mushrooms from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The usage of symbols and icons throughout history is well documented, and the human aptitude for symbolism allows us to make associations between objects and concepts on a level far exceeding any other beings on earth. It's is an innately powerful ability that videogames have taken advantage of since their inception, when graphical limitations precluded the ability to do much of anything else. However, with the advent of new and more powerful technology that frees us from iconic “restrictions,” it’s important to recognize that in many cases, symbolic imagery is more effective than other, more complicated means of communication.

Symbols are so intrinsic that the brain doesn’t even recognize them as unusual.

There is one thing we should get out of the way here – good graphics and technological advances impress people, including me. Project Gotham Racing 3 and Fight Night Round 3 both attracted enormous (deserved) attention due to their stunningly photorealistic graphics. Resident Evil 4 has also received enormous acclaim for exhibiting a graphical level considered impossible on the Gamecube (which is strange, considering on paper the Gamecube is in many ways significantly more powerful than the Playstation 2…). But what has not kept up with the graphical achievements in these games is the nature of interaction that the player has with these worlds – players interact with PGR3 and FNR3 in much the same ways as they did in their predecessors. In Resident Evil 4, for all of its graphical prowess, players still move along largely linear paths, rarely (if at all) interacting with the world in any meaningful way - certainly not in any way previously impossible due to graphical limitations. So perhaps the assumption on the part of publishers and developers is that photorealism yields better sales than advancements from a gameplay standpoint?

That forest sure is pretty. Too bad you can't touch it.

Well the evidence just doesn't support it. In 1980, a little wonder of a game called Pac-Man was unleashed upon the world, spreading like wildfire and ultimately becoming the most successful coin-operated videogame ever made. Pac-Man is a stunningly well-executed collection of symbols. The game space is defined by a simple blue border. Enemies are rendered as iconic ghosts. The pills/pellets are simple off-white balls; the small ones are required to clear a level, the large ones imbue Pac-Man with the ability to eat his enemies. And Pac-Man himself is a yellow circle with a wedge removed. Few games have the public awareness saturation that Pac-Man entertains; its infectiously pure gameplay coupled with its universally appreciated symbols and icons made it a certifiable phenomenon the likes of which is unseen in videogames today. So what, then, does constitute a cultural peculiarity in today’s marketplace?

Pac-Man – perhaps the perfect iconic game.

Chess - another game that has entertained some moderate success through the use of symbols.

Well, The Sims is a good candidate. Also known as the best-selling PC videogame of all time, The Sims single-handedly kept the PC videogames industry afloat for half a decade (until a moderately successful role-playing game came along to help shoulder the burden), and it continues to be a videogame juggernaut with its subsequent sequels and expansions. The Sims is a fascinating jumble of both universally recognized and contrived symbols, such as the green diamond “plumbob” that shows which Sim is currently selected or the entire Simlish language, that has no publicly understood meaning yet is nevertheless effective (coupled with emotional voice-recorded delivery) at communicating the states, moods, and emotions of the denizens within the Sim world. Certainly the game could achieve a more realistic portrayal of people and objects if it sought to, but what exists is powerful enough to communicate the general ideas and concepts that the creators wish to convey. The Sims 2, which deviates even further from a realistic style to near complete iconography, is compelling evidence that the creators are purposefully attempting not to recreate reality, and are being rewarded for their efforts with stunning commercial success.

Sims 2 - Easily mistaken for reality.

What about consoles? I know what you’re probably thinking – Super Mario Bros. is a perfect candidate for discussion, what with its iconic imagery and status as the best-selling console videogame of all time – but that might lead to indeterminate conclusions. After all, Super Mario Bros. was released at a time when virtually all videogames took advantage of iconic imagery. It’s difficult to conclusively argue that Mario’s symbols were any more significant than any other games’. Instead I’m going to talk about the most successful console videogame of the modern era – Grand Theft Auto, which relies heavily on symbols and iconic imagery to convey its messages to more people than any other series in gaming today. I’m going to skip over the first two games (like most people do anyway), because it could be argued that those games relied on icons due to technological limitations. Instead I’ll focus on the GTA trilogy (3, Vice City, and San Andreas), and the PSP game Liberty City Stories. First off, all of the games rely on a highly stylized depiction of reality – character proportion, lighting, and world logic like car physics all behave as gross approximations of the entities they represent – a cornerstone of symbols. But it is in GTA’s crucial gameplay identification system that uses symbols in the extreme. Want some health? Look for floating red hearts encased in blue circles. Looking for a way to get the cops off your back? A blue shield with a golden star will do the trick. And what about that star system? One star prominently displayed represents the basest level of law response, with subsequent stars directly correlating to the escalation of retaliation against the player. The world layout is expressed through a thoughtfully useful iconic mini map, permanently displayed in the corner of the screen, indicating where weapons can be purchased (little handgun icons), food can be eaten (disembodied chicken head icons), the game can be saved (house icons) and missions can be undertaken (letter icons). It all makes for an immediately communicable experience, one that again, reaches more people than any other photorealistic game can claim to.

Hail to the King.

I could go further and talk about Tetris, the best-selling handheld videogame of all time, but by this point my argument has been pretty well exhausted; suffice to say Tetris is about as stripped of any real world graphical representation as you can get.

Symbols 4, Photorealism 0

I personally am all for graphic and technological advancement - but "advanced graphics" is not synonymous with "photorealism." There are many games – like some of the ones mentioned above – that take advantage of bleeding edge of technology while still benefiting from symbolic imagery. This utilization – coupled with all-around good design motifs – has benefited these games and many more with mind-blowing sales figures. And truly, it’s the ability of a game to connect with an audience that makes for the most tangible conclusions regarding its merit (one might suggest that critical acclaim and analyses are valid measuring tools of a game’s merit. I would agree with this if the ruler by which games were judged was a lot more sophisticated). Great games that use symbolic imagery have consistently performed at the top of the industry – and those that remain on top know this, and consistently employ them in their projects.

Thanks for reading.

Self-Inflicted Wounds

2006-03-01T22:29:00.000-08:00

The internet is getting to know both Dave Sirlin and Raph Koster a little bit better lately. Sirlin wrote an article about World of Warcraft, and he used a definition of fun offered in Koster's absolutely phenomenal book, A Theory of Fun for Game Design. I really have nothing to add to the argument that Sirlin proffered; it just so happens that I had started reading A Theory of Fun days before his article hit. In it, Koster touches on a point dangerously close to home - that of the designer's aptitude for playing an inordinate amount of games - what Derek calls the Game Designer's Tax. Specifically, Koster worries that designers digest the systems in scores of games wholesale and create a sort of mental rule set not only by which to live, but also by which to create. This, he asserts, leads to a cyclical regurgitation of the same systems, thus stifling creativity.

I have to admit, the guy's got a point. I've written about my adoration (and mass consumption) of other games, as well as my desire to recreate the elements of games that I find noteworthy. I've pointed out this phenomenon of recycled ideas in other games, undoubtedly designed by people suffering from a similar affliction. I've also touched on the scaling sophistication within established genres, spurred on by the accumulated knowledge that designers bring to the creative process. All of this is almost certainly leading to an industry full of games produced from a very refined, exclusive, and prohibitive collection of ideas.

Koster also asserts that the most productive designers draw very little motivation from games. I know Miyamoto, for one, is often characterized as a banjo-playing, bike riding, mountain hiking Renaissance man. I, on the other hand, must admit to playing a lot of games and doing very little of anything else. Does this mean I'm doomed to forever mimicry, making a career of incremental progress based on the work of others? I don't think that's what Koster is suggesting, entirely. I'm pretty sure he doesn't think I'm helping my odds of creating something new and original by obsessively cataloging the modern history of videogames. But Koster does think there is value in a side effect of the game designer’s incessant need to absorb so many games. By playing games and then talking about them, we begin to formalize the analysis of game design, essentially paving the way for true videogame criticism.

I guess, in a way, I engage in videogame criticism with this blog. In the vaguest of terms, criticism is an interpretation or judgment of merits; when I write an article about why I think Power Stone’s external objective reflexive gameplay systems are noteworthy, in some tiny way I’m subscribing to the idea that videogame design is a legitimate discipline. Doing so is a crucial step in getting this thing we do to grow up – not in the sense of subject matter, but in terms of recognition and acceptance. No, I’m not talking about videogames as an art form – I couldn’t be more tired of hearing that argument. I’m simply talking about videogames being recognized for something more than just fun. Chess is fun. Going to see a movie is fun. Reading a good book is fun. But the notion that they can be something more is an accepted given. Can the same be said for games?

So no, I don’t think I’ll be taking up the banjo any time soon, but what Koster suggests has given me pause, and while I don’t think I’ll stop playing as many games as I do, I will certainly be mindful of broadening my horizons and seeking out new influences. His book, for one, has been quite inspirational - I recommend it to you if you're even remotely interested in game design.

Thanks for reading.

Welcome to the Power Stone World!

2006-02-27T16:01:00.000-08:00

Power Stone is coming, again, and I could hardly be more excited. Between the original and its inferior sequel, the series only managed to sell some three hundred thousand or so copies in America, and while critically celebrated, it is publicly considered forgettable. Admittedly, the game doesn’t seem to try very hard at winning people over, with its esoteric character design, unrealistic graphical style, and barebones presentation. Acknowledging its obscurity, Derek and I affectionately designated Power Stone, “a game that only developers play.” Yet the game’s influence is undeniable, with Power Stone clones donning numerous disguises over the years. It is a game that I myself have tried to replicate – twice – with tragically poor success. This incessant desire to recreate the tepidly received series is, I conclude, because of the game’s fundamentally basic yet undeniably compelling strength – its genre-defining gameplay promise. Power Stone is the second evolutionary step in fighting games. It is the fish that emerged from water onto land, leaving familiarity and comfort behind, and changing the course of history forever.

Allow me to wallow in nostalgia for a moment:

I imported my copy Power Stone. Being the Sega fanboy that I was, I had actually purchased a Japanese Dreamcast to get my hands on Virtua Fighter 3 as soon as possible. I didn’t know it then, but the Dreamcast would go on to become the greatest fighting game console ever, with Capcom’s tireless dedication to the prematurely terminal little white box (with some help from a little weapons-based fighting game, as well as some truly underrated games from Sega themselves). I still remember reading the back of the Power Stone jewel case, fascinated by its three green bullet points:

Nandemo dekiru – You can do anything.

Daredemo dekiru – Anyone can do it.

Henshinmo dekiru – You can even transform.

I guess it flows better in Japanese, but its effect on me was substantial, particularly the first line - you can do anything. This is a formidable boast, particularly from a fighting game. But the boast was somewhat justified, as Power Stone broke from the traditional fighting game structure in a very meaningful way. You see, despite the change from two dimensions to three (a change that for years was largely cosmetic), fighting games have always been about controlling space, and using that control directly to defeat your opponent – classic player versus player gameplay. Power Stone did allow dramatic situational advantage to be gained through controlling space. Items encased within treasure chests yielded upgrades in the form of various weapons. The player could use background items to facilitate his direct attacks: ceilings could be clung to and leapt from, poles could be uprooted, and chairs and tables could be picked up and thrown. And not only was the environment beneficial, it was also harmful; conveyor belts led the player into spiked hazards, pots crashed down overhead, inhibiting movement, and even the walls themselves could fall down around you. While you couldn't exactly do anything, you could sure do a helluva lot more than you ever could within the confines of what we consider fighting games.

The second bullet point - Anyone can do it - undoubtedly led to the game's lack of a meaningful following; in a lot of ways, Power Stone felt not only like anyone could do it, but that it had mostly already been done. Power Stone's traditional gameplay mechanics - the punching, kicking, throwing, and jumping, were largely perfunctory. There were some clever innovations in terms of defensive schemes (although in-close attack dodging was disappointingly exploitable) and environment negotiation (auto-navigational movement over small objects was practically defined in Power Stone), but these were subtle nuances that only manifested themselves through extended play. Power Stone, if judged on these factors, was nothing special. And make no mistake - it is on these elements that the game was largely judged by many game players - hardcore and otherwise.

It's only now, nearly seven years after first playing the game that I realize it is the 3rd bullet point that is the game's true strength, and it's most important feature. It is a feature that every single Power Stone clone overlooks, because what it produces has a difficult time existing within the worlds the clones recreate. Players are able to transform into more powerful versions of their characters upon collecting three gems randomly spawned throughout the level. In a wrestling game, it would be odd to have dramatic physical transformations through such artificial means (wait a minute...). But it's not the transformation itself that's key; Power Stone as a game is built around the impetus created by wanting, needing, to get those damn gems and the advantages that they represent. The gems facilitate a transition of power, the transformation, which then enables one player to exert a dramatic situational advantage over the other. You controlled space in Power Stone to get gems. You got gems to make yourself strong. You got strong to control space better.

You can even transform.

Power Stone's player versus player versus environment gameplay changed video games forever by connecting the dots that were always there, yet few people realized the significance at the time. Others have tried to replicate the successful formula contained within, but none have succeeded in creating something as universally powerful and effective as the original. So while I wait for the fates to align again (and don't count me out - I still plan on giving it a go again myself, one day), at least I can bask in the glory of the original, and best, one more time.

Thanks for reading.

Games I'm Playing Right Now - Part 2

2006-02-21T22:37:00.000-08:00

I'm debating the possibility of making this a weekly/semi-weekly topic on which to post. As I mentioned before, I tend to play a fair number of games, and as such, I would have a new batch of games to talk about fairly regularly. So instead of rehashing a bunch of stuff, let's just dive into the games that are currently tickling my fancy.

Full Auto
I can't believe how much undeserved hate this game is getting. It is easily one of the most entertaining games out there for the 360 right now (although I guess depending on your perspective, that ain't saying much). It's fast, it's got shiny cars and guns, and yes, it actually has quite a bit of strategy going for it. Sure, the back of the box probably reads like a generic parts bin for mass-market gaming features (rewinding time, exaggerated car physics, nitrous, and the aforementioned shiny cars and guns), but I'll be damned if when you put 'em all together, you don't get a really fun game - and isn't that what it's all about? Full Auto will probably join the elite list of Xbox 360 games I bother to beat.

Fight Night Round 3
I am a perversely huge boxing fan. It is the only sport I watch with any sort of regularity, and in this case, regularity means several times a week. Thus, I'm probably not the best person to objectively score this game. Thankfully, I am in no position where objectivity is a requirement. This game is fucking awesome! If you're any sort of gaming fan, you probably already know the graphics are mind-blowing, so I'm not even going to go into just how great they are (best of the generation). This game's play is really where the series has always shined for me. You see, even with the incredibly annoying parry system that the series has floated for years, this game can still be played very much like a real boxing match, in that positioning, punch choice, and counterattacking are all vital strategies that you need to employ to win. They've gotten rid of the haymaker travesties that plagued the last game, and they've added several new offensive and defensive styles that really add to the wholeness of the experience. I've only played a handful of matches (including a few over Xbox Live, which were fantastic), but already I can see I'm going to be playing this game for quite some time. It is truly that awesome.

State of Emergency 2
I didn't even know this game was out - even the publisher's website has the release date listed as sometime in early April. I just happened to be in my local video game store buying Fight Night when I saw it behind the counter. Anyway, this series seems perpetually maligned. The original was released shortly after Grand Theft Auto 3, and was (wrongfully) marketed as a sort of spiritual brethren to its label mate. It sold reasonably well based on this characterization, but it was regarded harshly by many for its perceived shortcomings. The sequel seemed doomed to vaporware status, jumping publisher, then developer, being shown at one E3, then not the next, only to appear again the following year. Ultimately, the game has emerged triumphant, although not unscathed.

You see, the original SoE had this charm about it, primarily because it was so busy. The cusp of the game was that the player was some sort of freedom fighter in the midst of political unrest. To further the aims of your comrades, you would engage in various missions, but that's not where the game's draw lies. You see, you would perform these missions in the middle of full-scale riots. There were dozens and dozens of people everywhere, clogging the halls and streets of every location. It was downright mesmerizing - particularly so, I think, because of the game's charmingly simple graphical style; a technique no doubt utilized to permit the raw volume of people the game allowed. The sequel, tragically neuters a great deal of the chaos in favor of a more focused end. You see, it's obvious that the developers want to tell a story now, and in adding the order they felt the game required to do so, the game has lost a bit of what made it special. To be fair, I'm still fairly early on, and I find a great deal of the game's charm still intact. It's just that I had expected lightning to perhaps strike twice, and now I don't think it will.

Well that about sums up the new stuff on my docket. I'm still playing some of the old stuff too, particularly The Rub Rabbits and Drill Dozer (there's something to be said for portability), but hopefully I find time enough for it all. I also hope that you all find time to play some of these games too.

Thanks for reading.

Tekken PSP - A Sign of the Times?

2006-02-17T08:41:00.000-08:00

So Tekken Dark Resurrection is coming to the PSP, completely sidestepping a console release. I have to say, as a longtime Tekken fan - at least, someone who has played Tekken for quite a while - this is quite disappointing. You see, while the PSP does possess multiplayer capability, most see handhelds as largely a single-player device. Particularly the PSP, which despite being the dominant handheld in America, is perplexingly uncommon. And while certainly fighting games can be played single-player, their greatness is truly born out of the multiplayer experience (one of the things that I attribute to the decline in popularity of fighting games, but that's a subject for another time).

So why is Namco doing this? Well my first guess is that they don't have much choice.

Back in March of 2002, Sega unleashed their legendary opus Virtua Fighter 4 on the Ps2, garnering immediate praise and rare commercial success for the series in America. Always the perfectionists (and opportunists), Sega released an update to the game - called Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution - in Japanese arcades in the summer of that same year. This update, offering substantial upgrades to both the combat system as well as the highly-regarded customization modes, catapulted the series to even greater heights of popularity. In a circumstance that has become internet legend, Sony is said to have balked at Sega's application for license, refusing to allow Virtua Fighter 4: Evo to come out on the Ps2 at full price. Wanting to release their game on the dominant platform, Sega was left with little wiggle room. They released their semi-sequel as a Greatest Hits replacement for the original Virtua Fighter 4 in August of 2003, retailing for twenty dollars.

I bring this up to speculate. While we may be gnashing our teeth and shaking our collective fists at Namco, is it possible that we're placing the blame in the wrong place? Maybe they wanted to bring the goodness home to the Ps2, and it's Sony, in their desperate attempt to gain a foothold in the portable market, who're strongarming Namco into releasing their hugely successful franchise on their software-anorexic device. And let's not forget, while Sony might let Namco release Tekken Dark Resurrection as a Greatest Hits on the Ps2, which would sell for twenty bucks, the PSP version will sell for $40 or $50 - effectively earning Namco more money for the same product. Tekken on the PSP is almost guaranteed to sell more hardware, and I can easily see the game becoming one of the system's best sellers. Plus, despite the complaining that some of the hardcore may do, ultimately they're going to buy the game anyway. So really in the end, Tekken on the PSP is a minor annoyance for some, and a huge win for most.

It won't stop me from complaining, though.

Thanks for reading.

A Place for Hardcore

2006-02-15T08:36:00.000-08:00

As a developer, I've grown to hate the hardcore. You know, the guys who complain that Prince of Persia: Warrior Within is too easy, thus causing Ubisoft to revamp the checkpoint system in Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones so that saves are oh, about 2 hours apart. Most of the people I work with share this general disdain for the hardcore. In some ways, we are completely justified in our severe dislike for this group; there is evidence that adhering too closely to their tastes can ruin your product's sales potential, as the hardcore are a pitifully small percentage of the people who actually buy games (and let's not kid ourselves, please - if games are not profitable, people will stop making them). But the more I think about it, the more I begin to recognize the potential usefulness of the hardcore, just not in the way that they'd probably like.

Videogames aren't the only scene populated with hardcore. Fashion, music, and movies have them too. Know someone who thinks Paper, Denim & Cloth is tired, and that Levi's Capital E is where it's at? What about someone who listened to Fall Out Boy "before they sucked?" How about someone who asserts that Chan-Wook Park is the new Tarantino? We don't necessarily call these people hardcore, we call them trendsetters, and within their respective specialties they are envied, not vilified. What these people revel in today, the mass market glorifies tomorrow. These people are cutting edge, and not because it's easy to do, but precisely because it's hard; it takes an exclusive amount of effort to stay ahead of the next big thing, effort that the mass market - while not willing to spend - is more than willing to exploit. They are pioneers on the forefront, romanticized, not ridiculed. So why the discrepancy?

One big difference, I think, is that games require more from consumers than perhaps any of the above examples. Sure, a pair of expensive jeans may cost quite a bit of money, but they take no more effort to wear than the $30 pair of jeans from the mall. The prevelence of easily obtainable music and movies makes it so that pretty much anyone with a fat enough pipe and a big enough hard drive can have virtually any recorded song or video in the history of man. Games on the other hand, while relatively easy to obtain, are not all easy to enjoy. Some ask for a level of dexterity and game logic familiarity that automatically disqualifies all but the most dedicated patrons of a particular sub-genre (more about that dangerous subject here). It's unrealistic for me to expect a veteran of console shooters to enjoy a game made for first-time console shooter players; the methods I use to teach players the fundamental nuances of play will seem tired and mundane to the veteran. He will get bored, and he will think my game sucks. And yes, it probably does suck for him. No matter how well executed a tutorial is, it's still a tutorial. Dead or Alive as a series was specifically made to appeal to people who hadn't played fighting games before. Is it any wonder that it was almost universally panned by fighting elite? The conventions and rule sets that the game tried to establish were oftentimes contradictory to ones established in other fighting games, which of course felt odd to people who had already adopted a set of conventions for a decade or more. While the game was profitable, it was never accepted by the hardcore, magazines never gave it any credit, and it sat behind other established series as a sort of second-class citizen. Finally, the developers relented, added some changes to the core fighting engine, and released a more hardcore-friendly Dead or Alive 4. Isn't it ironic, then, that these changes haven't warranted any appreciable change in the game's perception?

As a player, I probably am the accursed hardcore. I want games made to satisfy me, with my 25 years of gaming experience. The trick that developers need to master is a way to satisfy the hardcore and the mass market with the same product; while the hardcore, like all trendsetters, don't drive sales directly, what they like trickles down into what the masses like. It's how a small-time community game (in the West anyway) like Virtua Fighter can go from laughing stock to The Best Fighting Game Ever Made. It's also up to the hardcore to realize that every game on the planet doesn't have to be made for them to love, or is somehow less of a game if it isn't. Return of the King was not the best movie of 2003 for everyone - Battleship Potemkin fans probably weren't jumping for joy (or were they?) - but it was the best movie for the most amount of people.

So what are developers to do? Well, I would suggest not writing off the hardcore entirely. There are many elements of play that the hardcore enjoy that can be extracted and presented to the masses in a digestible manner. Head to the message boards, listen to what they're saying. Sift through the fanboism and elitist bullshit and try to get to the meat of why they like or dislike something. Then, be a responsible developer and ask yourself if those kinds of things have a place in your games. The hardcore might not love the way you present a feature in your game, but it may open the door for the hardcore of tomorrow.

Immediately following that, find a pair of Levi's Capital E jeans and buy them. They're the shit, I promise.

Thanks for reading.

Games I'm Playing Right Now

2006-02-13T08:38:00.000-08:00

I play a fair number of games. I hesitate to say I play "a lot" of games, because inevitably that opens the door for someone who really plays a lot of games to come and tell me so. Anyway, I'm working on a rather large article, and I thought to fill the time until I post it I'd give a quick rundown of the games that I am currently playing. My definition of currently playing means I would have had to actually played the game at least once in the last week. Whether or not I pick them up again depends on a lot of things.

Street Fighter Alpha 3 MAX (PSP)
While I will always pledge allegiance to Street Fighter, as I imagine any fighting game fan who started playing them around the time I did probably does, I'm not particularly fond of the Alpha series. I used to be a fan of Street Fighter Alpha 2, but even now playing that game is somewhat laborous. The original Street Fighter Alpha was fun for about 1 day, until the novelty of chain combos wore off (ironically, chain combos propped up the entire Versus series for years, seemingly without complaint [although I hated those too]. Go figure.).

My biggest complaint with the PSP version of the game is its controls - it's just too hard to do anything. I can't even jump forward reliably. I guess I could use the gamepad thingie that Capcom's selling, but here's one thing they don't tell you - once you attach the little do-dad to your PSP, it's not meant to come off. Attempting to do so apparently seriously fucks your hardware. I don't think I'm willing to destroy an overpriced accessory like the PSP just yet, especially for a game that for me, it's average at best.

Anyway, I figure SFA3M will be a sufficient fighting fix until another Street Fighter I'm not particularly fond of is released

Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition (Ps2)
This is my 3rd attempt to play Devil May Cry 3. I've always been rather disgusted by the series, but I persevere because I know this game is loved by many, and I really do look forward to the times when I finally "get" whatever it is fans of things "get." I think Dante is an asshole, and I think he looks ridiculous; neither of these things helps my cause to complete this game. Then there is that aggravating initial difficulty when you first start out. I'm sorry fanboys, the first level really is unnecessarily hard, and I completely understand why many people turn away in disgust. There's also the distinct repetitiveness of the singular attack button, a feeling compounded by your limited moveset in the early goings - alternating between those two combos gets old fast. And don't get me started on the game's structure: cut scene, action, score splash screen, menu menu menu, cut scene, action, blah blah blah. I think I'd like the game a lot better if it stripped out any story elements whatsoever. They seem to get in the way of the true essence of the game, which is basically that of a skill challenge.

With all that said I'm actually liking the game more than I ever have before. I don't think I "get" it yet (if getting it means I will somehow like it better than God of War, because I don't), but I at least look forward to playing it, and that's a start.

The Rub Rabbits (NDS)
I'm something of a Sega fanboy. I guess there are degrees to this whole fanboy thing, because I don't love all things Sega does, but on a scale from 1-10 I'm probably at least a Level 8. I really loved the original Feel the Magic, and this sequel, which I've played all of one mission of, looks to be more of the wonderful same. I really dig the art style, and if I'm ever in need of a DS tech demo, well there are few games that fulfill the job so completely. Plus the whole thing is just so unapologetically weird that you just have to acknowledge the effort that went into it. Well, I guess you don't have to, but I like to.

Drill Dozer (GBA)
I was somewhat reluctant to buy this game, mostly because I've developed somewhat of a GBA bias recently. Although Nintendo insisted that the DS was not to be considered "The Next GameBoy" I can't help myself but to see it that way, and buying games for the GBA feels about as weird as I'd imagine buying a new Ps1 game to be. Nevertheless, this game seemed interesting, and so I bit the bullet. I have to say I'm glad I did. While you won't see a reinvention of the wheel in Drill Dozer, what you will find is a pretty solid action/platformer with a cool drill mechanic. Plus, there's just something about the 2d gameplay sensibility (that Eric really should write an article about) that just feels right.

One large complaint I have about the game is in its drill gear system. You see, your drill can operate at 3 different speeds - the higher the better - depending on how many gears your drill has equipped. You have to find the gears scattered about each level of the game. Once you find all 3 and you've got your drill feeling all nice and powerful, they take your gears away and you start the next level with only 1 gear. Why games do this just absolutely baffles me. You see, you actually feel really strong when you've got all 3 gears going. You kill enemies really well, and you can drill for much longer, allowing you to travel faster. Taking all of that away makes the game feel bad (well if not bad, at least not-as-good), and that's just bad design.

I still think the game is reasonably enjoyable, and I'll continue to play it, but damnit they were so close to having something really great.

Zombie vs. Ambulance (Ps2)
I've been looking forward to this game for a while. This game was described by its developers as a sort of Crazy Taxi with logic. Essentially, the game has been overrun by zombies, and you as the player take your ambulance around town picking up recently infected people and bringing them back to the hospital. For doing this, you're rewarded with upgrades to your ambulance, which allow you to travel faster and carry more people and such.

I really, really like zombie movies. There is something about the despair involved in being the last few normal people in a world overrun with monsters that's just too cool. It's a shame this feeling hasn't really been translated into games yet. Zombie vs. Ambulance seemed to hint at doing this - rescuing people and all that. It's a damn shame that this game is one of the ugliest, clunkiest, most un-fun games I've ever played. You basically drive around these really short streets in a car with controls right out of GTA. On occasion you'll see a group of zombies - run over those. On even rarer occasion you'll see a big blue circle with a pedestrian inside. Stop within the circle and the pedestrian will get in. Go back to the hospital and you'll be rewarded. Sometimes you'll unlock upgrades to your ambulance, sometimes you won't. Then it's back out onto the streets again to rinse, wash, and repeat. It's really, really bad, and that's a shame.

So that's what's on my docket as of late. Some of these games I'll beat, some I won't. Check some of them out, if you'd like; I recommend it (although I won't tell you which ones).

Thanks for reading.

I Suck at Geometry Wars

2006-02-07T22:04:00.000-08:00

I'm serious. I really do.

This is fairly new to me - being so awful at a game at which so many are accomplished. My video game origins lie primarily in the arcade. When kids were at home geeking out on their consoles, I was getting to know the boys at Namco, Capcom, SNK, Midway, and Sega in a completely different way. It hadn't even occurred to me, in those early days, to be good at something purely for the intrinsic value that being good offered; being better than the next guy meant you got to stay on the machine a little bit longer.

So now, in this late stage of my gaming life, I find myself being left behind.

When the Xbox 360 was fresh and new and rare, I was somewhat not horrible. I could score in the mid 100k range, which at the time wasn't that bad. Confident in my early domination, I let my interest settle on other things. Time passed and the 360 became more prevalent. Some of my more dexterous friends started playing. It wasn't long before my score ranked dead last amongst my friends, there for all the world to see (if "all the world" can be considered the nine people I know who purchased Geometry Wars) on the Xbox Live Arcade screen. The shame of it all finally forced me to resume my campaign against the shapes (damn you, pink squares), and I am somewhat embarrassed, and somewhat proud to say I have just broken into the mid 250k range.

So don't expect any insights into the future of game design or deeper meaning or any of that crap in this post, no! Consider this me putting the Geometrically Inclined on notice - I'm coming for your scores, bitches.

Thanks for reading.

My Manifesto: Contextual Narrative Through Gameplay

2006-02-04T12:57:00.000-08:00

As a designer, I think it's fairly natural to develop an approach; a perspective from which to consider ideas. I've seen this tendency in my other fellow designers. Derek Daniels has a very tactile focus when he thinks about games. He considers what sort of repeated motions of activity a player's hands will undergo, and he dedicates focus to ensuring that each and every moment of the player interface with the game is fun. Eric Williams is a systemic designer. From the overriding rule set of the game world to the laws that dictate AI logic, he enjoys creating web-like mathematical road maps for the player, that once understood create entertainment through exploitation. Both of these strategies are very effective at making games fun.

For the last few years, I've been developing my own approach, primarily formulized through the games that I not only find both entertaining and noteworthy, but also vital to the future of game growth (it's not as dramatic as it sounds, trust me). Games as an entity have gone through many stages of development, from the early hand-eye dexterity tests to the heights of postmodern political exposition. But perhaps because of the comparatively rapid maturation of the video game scene, these two divergent focuses - the game made for its play and the game made as a narrative experience rarely ever meet (and even more rarely is that meeting successful). Sure, you'll have games that play great, and games that have effective story, and sometimes those elements even exist in the same game. But do you really have great games that succeed in merging their play and story into the same action?

When I'm playing Ratchet: Deadlocked, I am treated to enormously entertaining cut scenes, some of the funniest stuff I've had the pleasure of witnessing in video games. They're mostly television-esque newscasts poking fun at modern-day television news journalism. When I play the game, I'm mostly shooting stuff and jumping over gaps, actions I greatly enjoy. But isn't there some way for these aspects of games to become one? As a matter of fact, there is.

ICO is a game that haunts me. It's like a constant reminder of heights I haven't reached. In it, you play a boy who meets a girl. You're both trapped inside a castle, and you commit to helping the girl escape. This is mostly communicated through non-interactive cut scenes. For the next five to ten hours, that's exactly what you do - help a girl escape a castle. This is mostly communicated through play; holding this girl's hand, helping her get around to places she normally couldn't get to, occasionally swinging a piece of wood at shadowy monsters who would very much like the girl to stay with them. It is the most captivating, troubling, fantastic experience I've ever had in a video game. Everything in it is contextually dedicated to facilitating a constant narrative through action. Many developers fell in love with this game, and there's rarely a week that goes by where I don't hear it mentioned. Yet rarely, if ever, do developers actually attempt to recreate this technique.

This is most likely due to the mechanics that modern games typically employ. Western game development is largely comprised of driving, shooting, or some sort of sporting. The game mechanics that these genres employ just don't lend themselves very well to narrative. For gameplay and storytelling to truly integrate, new mechanics will need to be created. In 2005's breakout original IP, God of War, you play as Kratos, the hound of Ares, and the world's foremost kicker of ass. Hellbent on revenge for the slaughter of your family, you slice and dice your way through hordes of enemies until you finally reach the murderer of your family - yourself. In a moment best realized in video games, you (as Kratos) face down a battalion comprised entirely of copies of yourself. This clone army attacks not only you, but a facsimile of your wife and daughter. To keep your family alive, you must hug them and transfer your life to them. It is a powerful, touching, and wholly unforgettable sequence that elevates God of War from the best action game ever made to one of the best video games of all time, period. It serves as a shining example that developers are learning, and responding to the desire in the public for video games to live up to their potential as the true inheritors of the storytelling mantle.

So there you have it. In the future, I'll probably go into more detail about the different ways these two divergent aspects of video games can better be melded. I'll undoubtedly also talk about games that do a very bad job at reconciling their play and story, yet still enrapture me.

Thanks for reading.

I Cor. xiii. 11

2006-02-01T07:46:00.000-08:00

When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.