Alethiometry

Tearing Down Walls

2011-05-01T14:05:00.002-04:00

Last Christmas I bought I bought my mom Kirby's Epic Yarn. All the reviews I read praised its overall quality and nearly all commented on how relatively easy the game is. She got frustrated fairly early on with New Super Mario Bros on the DS and even sooner with New Super Mario Bros. Wii, so it seemed like a good fit. And yet, when we started playing together, she had the hardest time figuring out the controls. How to hold the controller, which buttons to push and when, and remembering the various moves available to her led to frustration. It seemed I had yet again failed to find a game that really resonated with her. I had hoped that the arts and crafts aesthetic of the game would draw her in, and she loved Kirby's yarn inspired animations, but the play's the thing, really, and the playing was difficult.

I visited again for Easter and fired up the game to start my own save file. My mom and sister sat watching the game as I played. At one point, a large bunch of beads was behind an indestructible wall. I immediately continued to the right, knowing there was no way for me to break it myself. Soon after, a large spiked ball starting rolling towards me. I ran back to the left, jumped on top of the wall, and the ball destroyed it, allowing me to grab the beads inside. My mom looked at me and asked, incredulously, "How did you know that?" I didn't really have a coherent answer and my sister piped up with, "Video game logic." Really, I just knew from so many games played that SOME method of breaking the wall would present itself eventually.

So, I thought I would write a post on gaming literacy and what effect playing a bunch of games in the past has on playing them now, but while looking for past articles and blog posts on the subject, I found a post by Chris Bateman written in 2008 that pretty much said everything I wanted to. You can read it here, as it's pretty excellent.

Yesterday, Kirk Hamilton wrote an article on how Portal 2 is an excellent introduction to gaming for someone who's unfamiliar with games. He also wrote a companion piece on his blog ruminating on the sometimes towering walls between those who play video games and are steeped in gaming culture and those who are not. The issues with the culture of gaming aren't as interesting to me as the experience of play, but Garrett Martin wrote an interesting article about his misgivings during PAX East, and Alex Raymond wrote a rebuttal that's also worth checking out.

The phenomenon of the Wii is fascinating. Remember the initial promise of motion controls? The controller would simply be an extension of your will, and the actions you perform in real life would be immediately shown on screen. Why was Wii Sports so successful? Because the traditional abstraction of a controller was almost completely removed. To play tennis you just swing the Wii remote like you would a tennis racket. To play boxing, you punch. The bowling game is probably the most popular game in the set among people I know, but it also causes the most frustration because it requires far more button presses to play. Moving the Mii around and changing its angle is something I rarely see people do, and learning when to release the B button to release the ball takes practice. Not a lot, but enough that it's a stumbling block for new players. Otherwise, though, there were no more walls separating those who play from those who don't. No learning where the left bumper is and is that different from the trigger and oh god how do I look while moving in 3D??

Nintendo has been experimenting with controllers and how people interact with games for a while. The Gamecube controller's massive A button was one attempt. The touch screen DS is another. The Wii was the boldest experiment yet. A gesture is far more intuitive than a button press. But because the Wii remote kept all the complexity of a traditional controller, we ended up with a lot of games with typical controls and a bit of motion waggle thrown in. Developers tried to fit existing ideas onto the Wii without going far enough with the motion controls to make games that truly felt at home there.

(This isn't just a problem with the Wii. The DS, iPhone/iPod Touch, and iPad all have first person shooters on them. Why??)

Perhaps Nintendo should have removed the Wii Nunchuk entirely. Perhaps the Remote should have only had a D-pad and two buttons. Maybe that would have provided the necessary constraints to inspire true creativity on the Wii. Nintendo's baffling indifference to the quality of third party developed games means that no critical mass of high quality motion controlled games ever materialized. In terms of living up to its potential, I'd argue the Wii is a complete failure. Perhaps Microsoft was right when they said that the controller is the biggest impediment to getting more people to play games. We may roll our eyes at the "You are the controller" tagline, but they may realize that the way to force true inspiration and innovation on their platform is impose the strictest set of constraints. I don't know if Microsoft allows Kinect developers to implement hybrid controller/Kinect controls in their games. The upcoming Child of Eden will allow the player to use either method, but that seems more acceptable to me than trying to force a hybrid of both on a game. iOS devices took the same leap over the Nintendo DS and its combination of buttons and touchscreen. Some amazingly compelling games have appeared on that platform to take advantage of the touch-only interface of an iPad. Again, gesturing on a screen to control an avatar is more intuitive than pressing a button.

Portal 2 is an amazing game, and I agree with Kirk that it's a great place to start when learning how to play a first person game. But learning how to use dual analog sticks to navigate a 3D space takes a significant amount of time. Nintendo's habit of only using one analog stick on their controllers makes it simpler to move around, but it also shifts the complexity of creating a good camera system to the developer. You only have to compare Epic Mickey to Super Mario Galaxy 2 to see how this can go badly. I played shooters for years on the PC, and it still took quite a while to adjust to playing with a controller. I've seen a few people on Twitter post on how their co-op partners have struggled with using dual analog sticks to move about the world.

Video games take skill to play, and gaining those skills is a large part of why we play. Learning the basics of control is usually separate from learning to play the game though, and I believe this is the single biggest reason why so many people are reluctant to even try console video games.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

2011-02-25T18:04:00.000-05:00

Like, I suspect, most players, when I play a game that offers two moral paths to follow, I inevitably follow the "good" path by default. While I may try the evil path in a subsequent playthrough, I've traditionally kept my characters on the straight and narrow for my first and "true" path through the game. Though some mistakes were made, my first time through Mass Effect 1 and 2 was with a full Paragon female Shepard. The mistakes I made such as accidentally missing a side quest or fumbling some dialogue and causing a less than optimal outcome in a conversation made for a richer role playing experience. My Shepard was good, but she wasn't perfect. We didn't always know the consequences of our actions, and sometimes those consequences were sobering.

I decided to change up my usual pattern for two RPGs, Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising, and the BioWare classic Knights of the Old Republic. Ostensibly a real-time strategy game, Chaos Rising eschews the traditional base-building/management gameplay of most other RTS's for a highly tactical squad-based role-playing game. For those who don't know, Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) is a Star Wars game using Dungeons and Dragons rules for its combat and leveling. Both games allow you choose a good or evil path based on your actions.

In both cases, choosing the evil path has made for an almost clinical experience while playing. Being evil in these games means killing people who don't deserve it, or simply standing aside and letting innocents die. While Chaos Rising allows you to gain corruption from the gear you equip on your squads, there are still active choices made in missions that make a large impact on your squads' corruption level. From what I've played of KOTOR so far, your dialogue choices determine whether you gain light side or dark side points. In that regard, it's more personal than Chaos Rising. Nonetheless, I have to shut off my empathy towards nearly every character I encounter. It could be allowing allied soldiers to die, or killing a woman who had a bounty on her head because she injured a man making unwanted advances on her. The protests of my squadmates or party members are ignored, along with those of my trembling victims. I have to focus more on the fact that I'm playing a game and that these digital characters aren't real. It kind of makes me feel like a sociopath.

Because of this, the experience for me is much more passive. I'm no longer inhabiting a role where I'm trying to be the hero who saves the day. Instead, I'm choosing the bad dialogue option and watching what unfolds. Since I can't empathize with the character I'm playing, I get the same feeling I would get from watching unlikeable characters in a movie or book do something horrible. I'm not invested in the characters, so I don't really care what happens to them, other than a vague hope that they get what's coming to them.

All BioWare RPGs (ok, most blockbuster video games) are heavy on the combat, so getting up close and personal to cut a guy up with a sword isn't a big deal, whether I'm playing a good guy or bad guy. The dialogue sections and combat are segregated enough that they're two experiences. The story telling and dialog in Dragon Age: Origins were good enough that I effectively connected with my surly, emotionally damaged city elf. In Mass Effect, the dialog wheel and, more importantly, the interrupt ability in Mass Effect 2, added a nice bit of interactivity that made me more invested in the conversations. KOTOR, unfortunately, is old enough that dialog trees feel static and there's not much in the way of nuance or shades of grey between light and dark side conversation choices (at least in the starting area I'm currently still playing). In some ways it's more thematically appropriate for the Star Wars universe, but it still feels limiting.

Chaos Rising integrates the choices you make in a more interesting way. Certain items such as weapons or armor add corruption or redemption levels to your squads. Capturing key structures in some missions will redeem your squads, while some one-time use items will add significant amounts of corruption or redemption to your squads. One of my favorite aspects of the game is the idea of items that are worn as penance to redeem a squad. Completing a mission with that item will reduce your corruption, but the effects in the mission are harsh. Redeeming armor may actually have a negative defense rating, making it likely that the squad wearing it will die frequently. Penance should be painful, after all. As you move down one moral path or the other, new abilities will also unlock. There are constant choices, large and small, with consequences reflected in both the story and the gameplay. Unfortunately, the impact of those choices is undermined by the Warhammer 40k universe the story takes place in. Dawn of War II presents its characters and world as deliberately bombastic, over the top, and campy. It's an extremely fun world to live in for a few days, but there's no nuance or subtlety. Your squadmates aren't people you connect with. They're caricatures of soldiers whose personalities match the types of guns they carry. Having no experience with the table top wargames or the legions of novels set in the Warhammer 40k universe, I can't say whether or not that's always the case.

While it's been interesting being the jerk for these games, I think I've gotten my fill of it for the foreseeable future. I'll of course finish my run through KOTOR firmly on the dark side of the Force, but in the future, games such as Dragon Age II will see me firmly ensconced in the warm embrace of the light. This taste of evil is sour.

A History of Violence

2011-01-27T21:07:00.000-05:00

The rise of the achievement during this generation of games is a fascinating thing. Their usage and potential for both good and evil towards games and the people who play them will be debated for a long time to come.

I have no desire to talk about them in that context today, though!

Achievements, especially how they're usually implemented on the Xbox 360, tend to be little more than a meta-game. They're something to keep track of in addition to the things you may naturally do while playing. I was highly amused when achievements themselves started going meta. Well known achievements began to be referenced by other achievements. Without further ado, here are my two favorite family lines of meta-achievements on Xbox Live:

SERIOUSLY

Gears of War
US Release: November 7, 2006
Seriously... 10,000 kills in multiplayer
50 Gamerscore

The Club
US Release: February 7, 2008
No, Seriously 10,001 ranked kills in multiplayer
40 Gamerscore

Battlefield: Bad Company
US Release: June 23, 2008
Beans Bullets Bandages (Online) Get 10002 kills
30 Gamerscore

Gears of War 2
US Release: November 7, 2008
Seriously 2.0 Kill 100,000 enemies (any mode)
50 Gamerscore

ZOMBIE GENOCIDER

Dead Rising
US Release: October 8, 2006
Zombie Genocider TYPE: 1 Play REQ: Defeat at least 53,594 zombies.
20 Gamerscore

Left 4 Dead
US Release: November 20, 2008
Zombie Genocidest Kill 53,595 infected.
30 Gamerscore

Dead Rising 2
US Release: September 28, 2010
Z-Genocider 2: Genocide Harder Kill 53,596 zombies
20 Gamerscore
Zombie Genocide Master Kill 72,000 zombies
20 Gamerscore

Rock Band 3
US Release: October 26, 2010
HOPO-cidal Maniac Kill 53,596 Hammer-ons and Pull-offs
25 Gamerscore

Were you to complete all of these achievements, you would net yourself a paltry 265 points! I hope it was worth it.

There I Will Sing All Their Names

2010-12-27T22:32:00.000-05:00

The last great unknown has passed from my life.

Pffft.

Ok, indulge me, though.

After deliberately delaying and avoiding it for several years, I finally reached the clearing at the end of the long, long path laid down by Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. This was a series I began reading sometime in elementary school, when I was around 9 or 10, borrowing the beat-up copies from my dad's bookshelf. The sudden end of volume three, The Waste Lands, was my first encounter with a gut-wrenching cliffhanger at the end of a story. I would go into the Waldenbooks store in the mall and occasionally ask the employees if they knew when the next volume would be released. They never did. Waiting for that fourth volume, Wizard and Glass, was my first experience in eagerly anticipating a media release. When it finally came out I believe I bought it as a "gift" for my dad, but you better believe I read it as soon as he tore the wrapping off.

(When I asked my dad why he let me read Stephen King's books at that age, he thought about it for a minute then replied, "Well, there wasn't anything in there I thought you couldn't handle, I suppose.")

I re-read the books a few time in the next few years, and when I found out several other King books tied into the Dark Tower mythos, I read them as well. When the last three books were released six years later, though, I didn't buy them right away. I suppose I just didn't have the money at the time, and I ended up checking out Wolves of the Calla and Song of Susannah from the library. I tore through them and then just... stopped.

The series had been a part of my life for so long that I didn't want it to end. Roland and his companions had occupied a place in my mind for so long, and I had imagined how everything would end up so many times, that the journey had become more important than the end. Roland was after the Tower in order to save his world, but I knew flipping that last page would mean, in my imagination at least, an end to that world. I had grown comfortable with the mystery of what lay at the top of the Dark Tower.

At the same time, books five and six just weren't very good. They lacked the strong and lasting imagery of the earlier books: the slow mutants under the mountains; the lobstrosities; Shardik in the forest and Blaine the Mono; Rhea of the Coos and the thinny. Nothing so memorable was found in these two volumes. Song of Susannah doesn't even function as its own novel like the previous five books. I could understand an ending to an epic saga not living up to expectations, but what if it was just flat out bad? Stephen King's novels are not known for their climaxes. It's the stuff leading up to them that you remember. What if he just couldn't pull off the ending? I have no doubt the same thoughts probably passed through his own head as he wrote, but that didn't diminish them in mine.

So I passed on the last volume. Message board discussions of the series were avoided and Google searches that might have led to spoilers were only made when strictly necessary. It wasn't until last year when I started reading the graphic novels and some jerk on Twitter spoiled me on the recursive nature of the ending that I began to think I should just suck it up and find out how everything turns out. I really liked the graphic novels, but didn't want to risk being spoiled on the end, despite being prequels. And, you know, at least this series DID get its ending. Unlike Dune, Wheel of Time, and at this point probably A Song of Ice and Fire, this was one long-running series where the author got to see it through to the end.

I acquired all the books and began reading from the start for the first time since 2004. It took two or three months to get through volumes one through six again. When it came time to begin the end, it was physically difficult for me to turn to that first page. I stared at the artwork on the cover for a long time. I turned the weighty tome in my hands over and over. I found the copyright page particularly fascinating. Reading the table of contents and seeing bizarre, foreign terms that would fit right in with The Lord of the Rings helped a bit. What did devar toi, can'-ka no rey, and ves'-ka gan mean? The series had a bit of its own peculiar terminology and quite a number of memorable dialects in dialogue, but these new phrases were both ominous and inviting as I whispered them to myself. I lingered over the page with "19" and "99" printed in large type, pondered the words REPRODUCTION, REVELATION, REDEMPTION, and RESUMPTION on the next page, closely studied the black and white illustrations from Michael Whelan on the next two pages.

And, you know, once the loose ends from Song of Susannah were tied up, all was well. The birth of Mordred and his first meal marked the return of the macabre fantasy the earlier entries had done so well. Once things got moving, I found it very hard to put the book down at night. It's amazing how much suspense is built when the author tells you ahead of time a beloved character is going to die. Maybe it won't happen, right? Narrators can be unreliable. But like a monorail crashing through the end of its track, there's nothing you can do one way or the other except to watch everything unfold. With Lovecraftian horrors, devious vampires, and a surprising confrontation with the Crimson King marking the way, this was the ending given. While I don't think it was perfect, it did feel right. Ka is a wheel, and it always rolls back around to the place it started.

Roland's past was fleshed out fairly well by the graphic novels. While it bothers me that more are on their way, and that King has mentioned he's thought of writing an eighth Dark Tower novel, any mistakes that may or may not be made in the future won't detract from what exists now: an epic masterpiece that spanned worlds and decades, and whose presence has been felt for a large percentage of my life. I miss the mystery and anticipation of the unknown, but knowing has its own satisfaction. As silly as it sounds, I think I can move on now.

One Of Us One Of Us

2010-12-06T21:45:00.000-05:00

To my vague horror, the past two weeks have been spent playing almost nothing but World of Warcraft. Sure, some Rock Band 3 has been consumed for IRL social-interaction, but for the most part, I've been questing my way through the world of Azeroth.

The thing that frustrates me is that I'm not really sure why I feel compelled to play. I do enjoy the exploration of each zone, uncovering and filling in the map. The art style is wonderful (though I do wish the game looked like the glittering cinematics produced for each expansion). An amazing mix of pathos and humor runs throughout the game's quests and characters. At the same time, the basic combat mechanics are incredibly boring at low levels while fighting random monsters running through the wilderness. The crafting and gathering professions are a grind with no intrinsic depth to them. The only times the game has truly shined for me have been the rare occasions I've tackled bosses with a few other players. It feels to me as if this is the true way to play so that you can see how the different classes, abilities, and even races interact with one another. Everyone has a role to play, there are specific actions to take at specific times, and the rush of collectively bringing down an elite monster is undeniable.

Unfortunately, most of the time I play it as a gigantic single player RPG that happens to have a few other players running through it. It's almost like playing Fable 2 with the online player orbs turned on, except you can see the actual characters. While the updates in the Cataclysm expansion made some zones of the game feel incredibly dynamic and even, occasionally, made me feel like I was actually participating in an epic adventure, many of the other zones are the same old pointless grind with nothing holding it together. Several story threads seem to drop off with the local guy in charge saying, "It'll be awhile before we'll be ready to tackle this big bad guy. We'll call you later." What this seems to mean is, "There will be a high level raid dungeon for you to enter in 40 levels." While the flow of quests and the paths you take seem smoother and less meandering than in the past, there are still dozens of "kill X number of Y monsters to collect Z organs" quests. With all the talk of lessons learned in the past six years of WoW's existence, it's astonishing that so many of these quests still exist. While one or two in the beginning of a zone can function as introductions to the types of enemies you'll be facing in the area and unlocking the first few areas of the zone, there has got to be a better way to consistently keep a player engaged.

The problem is that this is still something that seems to work. 12 million subscribers are playing the game, and I'm one of them. I'm supposed to be playing Persona 3 and Epic Mickey and working on my gargantuan backlog of games, yet I have a list of quests in Booty Bay a part of me feels compelled to work on. There are always more quests to do. Is that all it takes for me? Give me a never-ending to-do list and I'll happily march to your tune until the end of time? I haven't participated in any guilds. The two times I tried playing in random dungeons through matchmaking were somewhat horrible experiences. I've ignored the majority of the game's social aspects.

There are two games I've consciously made a choice to stop playing because they were too addicting. One was Civilization Revolutions, and the other Rome: Total War. Both feature the well known "one-more-turn" hook to keep you playing well into the night. WoW seems similar in that I find myself saying "one more quest" quite frequently. It seems pathetic that this is all that's keeping me playing, but I seem unable to figure out what else it could be. The loot grind isn't nearly as compelling as in Diablo. It seems I'm a slave to my to-do list. Maybe I need to do a better job of creating one for my real world problems, and thus solve my procrastination issues forever. Surely it can't be that simple?

Which Button Do I Push?

2010-11-10T10:33:00.000-05:00

Harmonix is on a roll lately, recently releasing the excellent Rock Band 3 across multiple platforms and Dance Central for Kinect on Xbox 360. I'll just go ahead and shamelessly link back to this post about Rock Band's user interface, and I also wanted to link to this post on Ars Technica about how Harmonix designed the menus in Dance Central. As someone with an interest in human computer interaction and user interface design, I find this kind of stuff really interesting. I haven't picked up the Kinect, and don't plan to any time soon, but the changes Microsoft made to the Xbox 360's Dashboard software to accommodate navigating by voice and "touch" are interesting. I'd like to try Kinect out for a few days just to get a feel for the choices they made and the issues they attempted to overcome. For giggles, I read the Windows Phone 7 UI Design and Interaction guide, and while it felt like a bizarre religious document at times, it's interesting to see justifications for why the user interface on those new phones behaves the way it does.

Just some light reading for your Wednesday.

Clicking In A Technicolor Dreamcoat

2010-09-27T23:30:00.000-04:00

Double Rainbow

The first Diablo has a very local setting. The game starts and ends in the town of Tristram, and the sixteen-level dungeon lies entirely within and beneath the cathedral on one side of town. The colors are dark and dreary. The music in the dungeon is unsettling and contributes to the oppressive atmosphere. Screams and moans echo through the halls, pathways are often twisting and narrow, and the low resolution means ranged attacks frequently come from off-screen unseen demonic beasts. No matter what, you always feel like you are going further down into the beating heart of terror. The jangly acoustic musical theme in Tristram is an audio relief every time you return from the dungeon.

The bits of color found in the game come from the impressive magic spells, and certain areas contain bright rivers of water, acid, or lava. It is certainly not a game devoid of color, and the use of light is judiciously used to enhance the overall atmosphere.

The world of Diablo 2, in contrast, practically bleeds with color. While rainy, the first Act of the game is a lush green field. Act 2 takes place in a bright yellow desert. Act 3 takes place in a darker, more frightening jungle environment, but it's not until the fourth act, in Hell itself, that Diablo 2 returns to the claustrophobic feeling of its predecessor. Obviously, the size of the world you explore in Diablo 2 is far larger; the return to Tristram is merely a quick stop along the way in a much bigger adventure.

Both games feature weapons and other items that increase the amount of light that emanates from the player. Using these items increases the area you can see, at the cost of allowing monsters to see you from further away. In Diablo, this was a serious concern to weigh, especially in later levels of the dungeon where enemies frequently used devastating magic attacks from across the room. In Diablo 2, you can nearly always see everything around you. Certain smaller dungeons dotting the landscape tend to be darker, winding caves, but even they tend to be well lit with torches scattered about. My biggest disappointment going from Diablo to Diablo 2 was that the sequel never achieved the same overwhelmingly oppressive atmosphere of the first game. A new floor in Diablo was a terrifying prospect, often because I never knew if it would cause me to restart the game in order to progress. Diablo 2's re-balancing of, and stronger focus on, character development means that the only real trepidation came from facing bosses. Certain enemies, especially in Mephisto's levels, would cause me to panic and run. Most of the time, though, each trip to a dungeon was merely an excuse to hunt for more gold and gear.

So then. Diablo is a game about horror and madness, while Diablo 2 is a grand adventure to save the world. The two defining moments in Diablo's backstory are when King Leoric is driven to madness by Diablo, and when the treasonous Archbishop Lazarus leads the people of Tristram into the defiled cathedral, having fooled them into thinking they would be rescuing Leoric's son. Most of them were of course slaughtered by the horrors in the labyrinth, and Leoric's son was already in the process of being possessed by Diablo himself. The only time Diablo 2 touches on these themes is during the cutscenes between Acts showing the descent of the Dark Wanderer as he slowly loses his internal battle to keep Diablo under control. Once Baal is freed though, even these cutscenes resort to spectacular battles between the supernatural. Only at the end of Act 4, when the narrator realizes who he is talking to, do feelings of hopelessness and terror return.

(Having played both games back to back, it's obvious to me that the people complaining about the supposedly bright color palette of Diablo 3 either never played the second game or simply have a very selective memory.)

The first Diablo's relative simplicity and much more effective attempts at setting a mood and atmosphere make me prefer it overall to Diablo 2. The sequel adheres to the Bigger, Better, More Badass school of thought in regards to making sequels, and it seems like something was lost in the transition from one game to the next. Diablo only does a few things, but does them quite well, and its a testament to the quality of the game that it holds up to this day. For many people this is not a vintage game that they can only play out of academic interest. It's still fun, engrossing, and highly replayable (sorry Ben).

Stay Awhile and Listen

Diablo doesn't try very hard at presenting its story in-game. The manual fleshes out the backstory of Tristram, the surrounding kingdom, and the war between the forces of light and darkness. Quests encountered in the game make mention of certain events described in the manual, and books in the dungeon flesh things out a bit more, but a player who ignores the manual is unlikely to have any idea what's really going on. I suppose this could fit the idea of the lone adventurer coming to Tristram looking for gold and glory and not really caring about why hell itself is springing up around him. It even contributes to the atmosphere of oppressive doom and despair if you're in the dark about what's going on in town. My problem the first few times trying to play Diablo was that I expected the game to present the story in the same amount of detail that the manual did, when this was simply not the case. The plot is really just a premise for why you're killing hordes of monsters and taking their stuff. There are three brief cutscenes, with the latter two being near and at the very end of the game.

The production of Diablo 2's cutscenes is much better, and the overall story and characters are much more interesting. There are more people to talk to, the plot actually has some pacing, and the generally larger scope of the setting really makes it seem as if you're saving a world with something resembling real people. Most of the quests contribute directly to the larger goal of tracking down Diablo and his brothers instead of feeling random and almost pointless like the first game's quests. The goal of your quest is always at the forefront of the story, and even though the game is at least a couple dozen hours long, you always feel like you're pushing ahead and making progress.

What's Next?

As far as the action-RPG/Diablo-clone genre is concerned, I'm not really sure that it's progressed much over the years. I'm certainly no expert on the genre, having played few of the similar games that have come out over the years. Titan Quest and Torchlight, two of the biggest entries in recent years, and certainly done little to revolutionize how these games behave. The settings are different, but the fundamental game loop (equip your character, go into the dungeon, kill everything that moves, take their stuff, sell it in town, rinse, repeat) has stayed the same. Torchlight was made by many developers who worked on Diablo and Diablo 2, and it is truly those games with a different coat of paint. The biggest innovations have been enhancements to the user interface and improving the overall game flow. It's easier to compare found loot with equipped gear, and Torchlight adds a pet that you can send back to town to sell gear so you can continue killing things. Torchlight's premise is even flimsier than the original Diablo's, but it compensates by showering you with so much loot that it's the most addicting entry in the genre I've played. It's following the path created by Diablo 2 in that the announced sequel will prominently feature online co-op play and will take place in a much larger area.

While visiting a friend in Austin this summer, I got the chance to play a 15 minute demo of Diablo 3 at a regional tournament for Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft. There were lines to play the upcoming Cataclysm expansion for WoW and Starcraft 2, but the line for Diablo 3 was by far the longest. I chose to play the Barbarian class, and I was struck by just how similar the game was to Diablo 2. Keyboard shortcuts were nearly all the same, character movement was exactly the same, and basic combat was the same. Skills now have a cooldown time, and mana has been replaced with some sort of meter that builds up over time and allows you to unleash more powerful attacks. Combat felt faster and more brutal, more bloody, and the 3D graphics were highly detailed and quite good looking, but it didn't really excite me overall.

Now, part of this is absolutely due to Diablo-fatigue on my part. I played Diablo and Diablo 2 back to back, and that's a hell of a lot of mouse clicks. If Blizzard announced today that Diablo 3 was being released next week, I'd be hard pressed to muster any enthusiasm. But my friend, who played Diablo 2 and Starcraft when they were first released, watched me play the demo, saw the Starcraft 2 demo, and expressed disappointment that both games seemed exactly the same to him as the previous ones. He had no interest in their respective stories, so these shiny new games didn't appear to offer him anything new. It's a valid criticism, and one I saw in several reviews of Starcraft 2. Despite adding health orbs and upgradable merchants, my impression right now is that Diablo 3 will feel like more of the same with some user interface improvements. I will certainly be buying the game when it's released in a year or two, and I look forward to continuing the story begun in the town of Tristram. My enthusiasm will surely be rekindled by then. But I'm not expecting it to change the world. Blizzard has never seemed to interested in that sort of thing though, so perhaps that's fitting.

Clicking Repeatedly

2010-09-08T23:29:00.000-04:00

Going In Circles
One of the selling points when Diablo was released was how "replayable" it was. The game randomly generated the 16-level dungeon every time a new game was started, and certain quests and enemies would only be seen on second or third playthroughs. What caught me off guard was how the game essentially forced me to replay the game in order to progress to the end.

The dungeon in Diablo is divided into four areas of four floors each. After getting through the first four cathedral floors with my melee warrior, I was immediately overwhelmed in the new catacombs area. I thought maybe I was doing something wrong, but after consulting the manual I realized that the game expects you to take an existing character through the game several times in order to level up and acquire the appropriate gear to take you to the end. After replaying the first four floors, I had to restart again on hitting the caves at the ninth floor. Once I made it to hell, I had to restart a third time. It was only on that fourth playthrough that I made it to the end and killed Diablo himself. This of course lets you see new enemy types and try some different quests, but it never really sat well with me. It was too videogame-y for my tastes and felt like a lazy way to pad the game's length. There's no narrative reason given for the ability restart at will, and it's a case where the gameplay completely steamrolls the plot. While I was playing Deathspank, the recent action RPG from Ron Gilbert and Hothead Games, I laughed when a character implies that the magical underwear the titular character is wearing is the reason he is able to resurrect at the nearest outhouse upon death. It doesn't matter that the reason is ridiculous; it just matters that a reason is given at all.

Despite my complaints above, I didn't really mind too much while playing. I was addicted to buying new gear for my character by this point. Each time I restarted the blacksmith seemed to have particularly good gear for me to buy at that initial start. There's also the undeniable satisfaction of easily slaughtering monsters that previously gave me trouble. The biggest problem was that after a while, lower level monsters no longer gave me any experience points. Experience is given out on a sliding scale depending on the player's level and the monster's level. On my third playthrough, I didn't earn any experience until the seventh floor or so. On my fourth playthrough, it took until the tenth floor to start earning experience. There was no point in killing earlier monsters, so I found myself running through each floor looking for the next staircase down until I got to a point where I thought it might be worthwhile to start killing things again. This was tedious.

I finished the game at level 25, finished all the game's quests, and saw just about all the different types of enemies in the game. I'm pretty sure that it's impossible to play as a warrior and not have to replay the game to get to the end. I'd be interested to hear if playing as the rogue or mage classes changed this. Leveling up your character is capped at 50, but I don't think it's possible to get to that level while playing single player. Even the monsters in the last few floors would eventually stop giving experience. Multiplayer characters can access harder difficulty levels not available in single player, so players can continue to develop their character further after finishing the game the first time.

Diablo 2 does things pretty much as differently as possible. Instead of one ever-deepening dungeon, Diablo 2 introduces large landscapes full of monsters and small two- or three-floor dungeons, along with larger quest-specific dungeons. Their layouts are still randomly generated, but the vastly increased scale of the settings is one of the first things I noticed after playing the first game. The environments are varied, there are more monsters, and the quests are more involved and often have multiple parts to them. Quests do not reset, but you can access all areas and bosses previously encountered on those quests. The game is divided into four Acts (five with the expansion installed) that feature different environments and monsters. While this is the same number of sections in Diablo, there is much more variety within all of the dungeons' layouts and atmosphere. Act II took me to a sewer, a desert wasteland, Egyptian themed tombs, Gothic catacombs, and an Arabian palace.

Compared to the first game, Diablo 2 is massive in terms of how much area there is to see and explore. Because of this, the designers were able to balance things so that there is very little need to return to previous areas to grind for levels or gear. If the only reason you're playing is to see the story and beat the game, there is much less repetition required to do so. Especially if you're like me and explore every corner of the map, killing every enemy you come across, there's no reason you can't make it at least all the way to Act IV without having to redo a single dungeon. In Diablo, clearing a floor left it clear until you restarted the game. Diablo 2 respawns all enemies and bosses whenever you load the game up or you move from one one Act's area to another. This way, you can choose to return to an area to fight tougher enemies or bosses as often as you want in order to get better gear. Like restarting in Diablo, this really makes no narrative sense, especially when you vanquish one of the Prime Evils for the first time, then immediately return to do it again for better gear. Again, though, gameplay is the ruler.

Harder Better Faster Stronger

Besides the increased area of the game, the other frighteningly large change from Diablo to Diablo 2 is the addition of skills and a skill upgrade tree to go along with it. Leveling up in Diablo simply involved distributing five points between your various base stats. Diablo 2 still includes this, but now I get the pleasure of agonizing over where to put one point into a vast matrix of interrelated passive and active skills. Passive skills do things like improve elemental resistances or improve proficiency with certain weapons types. Active skills are powers that must be (surprise!) activated by the player and require mana. Now even melee characters need to manage their mana pool. A degree of planning is then required to develop an effective character. There aren't enough points to effectively use every skill available, so you have to decide which track to follow. I played a melee barbarian character, and while all of his active skills were geared towards various forms of controlling how hordes of demons attack up close, there are definite tracks ideal for solo play or multiplayer.

I deliberately didn't consult any guides for the "ideal" way to level my character. I was trying to play it as close as possible to how I would have played the game when it first came out. I've never been one of those players who tries to find the "perfect path" through a game. No min-maxing here! I've read some players' complaints that Diablo 2 makes you choose 2 or 3 skills to use exclusively. This is probably true if you're trying to make a character for a very specific use, but I had fun putting one point into a skill just to try it out and use as I saw fit. It was exciting trying new things out.

Diablo 2 came with five classes, and the expansion added two more, so there are very different ways to play the game, but even within classes there is a lot of replayability as players can tailor a class to one play style or another. The patch released only a few months ago added the ability to freely reset a character's stat and skill points so that they can be reallocated from scratch. This can only be done once, but it provides more flexibility for new players like me who discover that maybe they didn't choose so wisely while developing their character. Once I got more familiar with how the skills worked in the game, I used the free respec and chose my skills a little more judiciously.

The above screenshot is my Diablo 2 character after I had finished the game. If I want I can start the game over in a harder difficulty. I also have the option of taking this character into multiplayer games. I don't know what Diablo 2's level cap is, but I have a lot more options for continuing with this character if I choose to. Between how acquiring gear changed in Diablo 2 and how leveling up expanded, it's obvious that one of the goals in Diablo 2's development was to give people as many options as possible so that different types of players could all find a way to have fun playing the game.

My next post will probably not be as long but will compare how the two games present their story, along with what I thought was the most disappointing aspect of Diablo 2.

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2010-09-01T23:28:00.001-04:00

A bit late to the party, but I recently completed both Diablo and Diablo 2. I believe Diablo was the game that had been on my backlog the longest, so it was nice to finally get through it and its sequel. I thought I'd compare and contrast the two games and go into what I thought about the design decisions made in each. I'll take a few posts to discuss different aspects that stood out to me.

I had tried Diablo three or four times in the past, and never got far. I was always hoping for/expecting an RPG with a fairly deep story, and killing monsters in dark halls for hours never kept me engaged for very long. It wasn't until Torchlight came out last year that I began to understand the "right" way to play these games. The emphasis is on improving your playable character through improved stats, weapons, and armor so that progress can be made through increasingly difficult areas. When I realized that character progression was the point of these games instead of particularly deep stories, I had more fun playing. In the first Diablo especially, the plot of the game is extremely simple and only really hinted at in books and some quest text. What threw me off was the manual's pages and pages of backstory and lore. I assumed the game itself would spend as much time on those aspects of the universe as the manual did. I was wrong. Torchlight adjusted my expectations for Diablo, and it made all the difference in my enjoyment of the game.

Phat Lootz

Diablo's main gameplay loop is extremely tight: equip your character, go into the dungeon, kill everything that moves, take their stuff, sell it in town, rinse, repeat. As more monsters are killed you gain experience and level up. You can put points into base stats such as vitality and dexterity, but the main way to improve your character is through getting better gear.

Early in the game, lack of gold means you have to get better gear from monster drops, but I quickly found that the really good stuff is, bizarrely, back in town. Monsters drop tons of gold and gear for me to sell, so it was easy to accumulate enough coin to purchase whatever I wanted. The blacksmith sells premium stuff with various stat bonuses and extra damage or defense ratings, and this is what's truly needed to delve deeper into the dungeon. These magical items are pricey, but gold quickly becomes plentiful. In fact, my inventory was often half full of gold while I waited for better gear to show up in the blacksmith's shop. I ended up spending silly amounts of money buying the cheapest item in his shop just so something new would cycle in. I'd immediately sell the item back for a much lower price of course, but other than that there was no penalty.

You could also buy extremely expensive rare items from the peg-legged orphan, Wirt. It cost 50 gold just to view the one item in stock, but it was often tens of thousands of gold to actually purchase it. These items only changed when you bought one or every other time you leveled up. I was only able to purchase a few of these items.

Certain quests and bosses would drop powerful unique items. The iconic early boss The Butcher drops a cleaver that I held onto for quite a while. Similarly, a later quest gave me a set of plate armor that I had equipped for a very long time. These items were far better than even most of the gear back in town. In fact, a valid criticism of Diablo is that the sense of progression can tend to level off fairly quickly. Unlike later games in the genre, once you get a good item, it can be a long time before you find something better. While your character continues leveling up, you may find yourself needing a better weapon with nothing better showing up in town or in dungeons for a long time.

I think it's because of this that Diablo 2 has a far better drop rate for good loot from monsters. Common enemies will drop high level or even unique items, and bosses drop absurd amounts of special items. I wouldn't say that you're constantly upgrading your gear, but you certainly go through stuff a lot faster than Diablo. Gear can be bought in town, but I didn't do this nearly as often as in the first game. Getting a great drop is certainly the kind of rush that any WoW player can tell you about, and Diablo 2 does a much better job of feeding that addiction than Diablo.

As an alternative to finding better magical items, Diablo 2 introduced the socketing system. Players can find gems, skulls, jewels, or runes to insert into weapons or armor with one or more sockets. Socketed items were usually non-magical, and relatively easy to find at shops or dropped by monsters. The color of the gem determined the effect, and some were of a higher quality than others. The type of gear they were inserted into could also determine the effect. An emerald inserted into a weapon would inflict poison damage, but would add resistance to poison damage done to the player if inserted into into armor or shields. Jewels could be inserted into any type of item with the same effect, while runes behaved similarly to gems but were more powerful and offered different types of benefits.

It also let you craft gear tailored to a specific purpose. Some gems increased a weapon's effectiveness against undead enemies. Others increased effectiveness against demonic enemies. This let you have weapons that were maybe only so-so against regular monsters or demons but would absolutely crush hordes of zombies and skeletons. This added a small but welcome bit of strategy to equipping gear depending on the area or dungeon.

I didn't use socketing very often, but it offers a good alternative for players who don't necessarily want to depend on purely random loot drops for better gear. At the same time though, gems, jewels, and runes were themselves random drops that couldn't be bought in stores. I personally found the rate of new items I found or bought to work for me, though I didn't complain when a magical item did have a socket or two for me to use.

Diablo 2 expanded on the semi-mystery of Wirt's items in the first game by adding merchants who would let you buy magic items without first knowing the effects. You could see the various types of items for sale and their general category (shield, two handed sword, ring, etc) but only by purchasing the item at a fairly high price could you actually find its properties. If you were lucky, you got a great piece of gear to replace what you currently equipped. If not, a relatively mundane item plunked into your inventory whose only use was to be sold back for a fraction of what you paid. Diablo 2 didn't seem to throw as much gold to the player compared to the first game. It definitely wasn't stingy, but since there was more to buy in stores, and prices were higher relative to the amount of gold you were given, it wasn't a good idea to recklessly gamble away all my money in the same manner I would clear out the blacksmith's inventory in Diablo.

Diablo and Diablo 2 both significantly increase the drop rate for good items when playing in multiplayer. Crazily powerful items drop from the lowest of monsters, nevermind bosses. This perhaps justifies the other new feature added to Diablo 2: item sets. Sets are items with similar names and magical bonuses that, when worn together, further increase their bonuses. In my entire time playing Diablo 2, I found two items that were part of a set, and both were part of different sets. I get the feeling that these are intended for the really hardcore players who enjoy farming areas for loot with other players, and that a full set is ridiculously good if you can get one. Torchlight had the same feature, along with the Xbox 360's Too Human. There, too, I rarely found items from a set and certainly never found a full set.

On the whole, though, Diablo 2's loot systems are about giving players more options than Diablo. I liked the thrill of getting a sweet sword from a random drop, but players can buy good gear if the dice rolls aren't coming up for them, or build their own with the sockets. In my next post I'll talk about how leveling up differs between the games and how Diablo 2's leveling further supports the idea of giving more choices to players. This also feeds into how both games handle replayability.

Anticipation

2010-05-21T22:02:00.002-04:00

It starts with the preorder. After reading about the concept, seeing some screenshots, and watching the gameplay video, I know I want this game. I will pay the $60 and it will be glorious.

Then I stop thinking about it. Oh I might read a developer interview, or make sure the release date hasn't changed, but my mind is made up. I won't even play the demo. Demos are always too short, anyway. Can't get a feel for a game from the tutorial.

A couple weeks later, I get an e-mail. "Your Amazon.com order has shipped" Yessss.

The next day, while running simulations, populating spreadsheets, and glancingstaring at TweetDeck, I'm keeping an ear cocked for the sound of the doorbell. I almost never answer the door for visitors at work, not wanting to be bothered, but today I do. Once it arrives, I walk back to my desk, flipping the package over in my hand. It's the same size as the DVD case inside. The lack of padding worries me, but perhaps UPS is told to handle these packages more carefully. I slide my finger under the flap, gently pulling the glue up along with stray bits of brown paper.

I pull the case out and gaze at the box art. I still hate the obnoxious green color of the DVD case and the garish green and white Xbox 360 logo at the top of the front. Flipping the box over, I gaze at the screenshots I've already seen a dozen times on Kotaku and Destructoid posts about the game. I read the text on the back. Nope, my grandmother would have no idea what this game was about if she just picked it up and looked at it on a whim. I get my nail underneath the tiny flap of plastic on the top of the case and pull up, then down and to the left. Now I have a small opening in which to slide a finger and pull the plastic in an ever shrinking ribbon from around the case. I pull the bottom half of the plastic off, then gently pull off the security stickers. They used to be a pain, but I've learned the exact angle to slide a nail in and how much force to use to get it up and off. They're quickly crinkled and stuck to the stray plastic wrapping.

Inside is the token manual. A controller button layout, some boilerplate info about Xbox Live, and the warranty. A card with a code for 48 hours of Xbox Live Gold service also falls out. I probably have enough of these for a couple weeks of service now. The disc sits tight on the other side. I pry it out, wincing at how it bends, and make sure there are no scratches on the back. Satisfied, I put everything back in the case and set it aside for the rest of the work day.

Driving home, I remember that there are still coins to be found in Super Mario Galaxy. Maybe I should play a little of that first. Oh, and I'm still only about 2/3 of the way through my 7th playthrough of Half-Life 2. It feels wrong to leave that game unfinished. It's so great. Maybe I should do those first.

But no. No. I've been waiting for this game all day. It would be perverse to continue denying myself. I turn on the Xbox, and pop in the disc. I navigate to My Xbox, press Y, and begin copying the game to the hard drive. While that's going on, I find the proper alphabetical spot by console on the shelf for the game. I move the other game cases over by one and slide the new one in. I look at it for a few moments and see how that tiny strip of new color plays with the rest of the strips on the shelf. I pour a glass of milk and a small bowl of Goldfish crackers.

Done copying. I boot up the game. For the first and last time, I sit through all the splash screens for the various developers, publishers, and middleware tools used to make the game. I hope I can press A to skip these next time.

Press Start to begin.

Check to see what's under the options menu.

New game.

Choose a storage location.

Here we go.

In Which I Rant About Science Fiction Fans

2010-04-12T22:44:00.002-04:00

Well, science fiction is not, and traditionally hasn't been, about the future, science or technology. It's about us. Now. - Joel Kelly

WARNING: BATTLESTAR GALACTICA AND STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE SPOILERS AHEAD

Lately I've been getting more and more aggravated with so-called science fiction “fans” on the Internet. It began when the series finale to Battlestar Galactica aired. Unsurprisingly, there were all sorts of opinions about the finale. I liked it overall, though I was disappointed by some of the unresolved plot threads. The mystery behind Starbuck's return from the dead and the identity of the “head” versions of Baltar and Six were chalked up to God sending angels to directly intervene in the affairs of the characters. With the angels' purposes fulfilled, they vanished. It felt like a cop-out from the writers. They couldn't seem to come up with a satisfying explanation, so they simple brushed it aside with a bit of religious mumbo jumbo.

Still, BSG remains my favorite science fiction show of all time, and probably holds my personal top spot for any show, period. It presented believable characters in a horrible situation and examined how those characters, and the remnants of their society, coped with losing their entire civilization. It avoided or subverted the typical tropes of most sci-fi shows today: the alien or monster of the week; snarky characters bubbling with repressed sexuality; the believer and the skeptic; the nutty professor. It was most interested in how real humans find the will to survive.

Sadly, some have taken this show for granted and for many people the ending is a travesty they can't forgive. This hit home for me when I began trying to discuss the new prequel series to BSG, Caprica, with folks on the Internet. I'd start a discussion on a message board about the latest episode and invariably one or two people would post about how “terrible” BSG's ending was and how they would never watch another show from this group of writers. When I pressed them to better explain their feelings, the basic explanation was, “The writers have established a universe where at any moment they can just have God swoop in, wave his hand, and save the day. The prospect of a Deus Ex Machina is never far away.”

Suddenly everything made much more sense to me.

Remember that Caprica is technically a prequel to Battlestar Galactica. It shares a setting and a few characters, but in every other aspect it is a fully standalone show. No knowledge of Battlestar Galactica is required to enjoy Caprica, though watching Caprica and knowing that that entire civilization is doomed does add an extra layer of texture to the experience. The writers on Caprica take some of the central ideas of BSG like what it means to be alive, the role of technology in society, how people cope with tragedy, and religious fanaticism leading to terrorism and examines them through a more intimate and down to earth lens. Battlestar Galactica had a more epic scope, while Caprica keeps things personal.

Most science fiction media has devolved into a pale shadow of what the early masters like Asimov, Clark, Heinlein, and Dick explored in their stories and novels. What I consider pure science fiction is about exploring ideas from an altered perspective to make them more palatable to the reader. Big ideas like the nature of humanity and what it means to be alive were explored in fantastical settings that made you willing to go along on a journey and open your mind to something bigger than yourself. These writers told good stories, but they were also interested in and concerned about the direction toward which humanity was heading. Their stories acted as warnings, philosophical ruminations, treatises, and exclamations of hope. Science fiction is about ideas, and is about us. A moral quandary faced by their characters in the future is really a moral quandary we face now.

At some point, however, science fiction began following in the footsteps of fantasy and became absorbed in building huge universes and detailed encyclopedias of lore. Maybe the release of Star Wars and its brand of space opera spurred this on. I don't know. Science fiction became less about ideas and more about the lasers and spaceships that originally surrounded those ideas. I recently tried reading David Weber's Off Armageddon Reef. I had to give up on it before too long because the author devoted page after page to detailing the history of his world, the political bodies and personalities behind it, and the family histories of the main characters. It was almost bizarre how much the author expected me to give a damn about his universe without introducing any likable characters or other reason to care. It also followed the now-tired premise of a band of scrappy rebels taking on a massive empire.

The shift from big ideas and believable characters to self-centered world building has been the downfall of many a science fiction series. The Matrix is a prime example. The first movie dwelled on the nature of reality and free will, and also managed to be a stunning action and science fiction movie with clever writing and good characters. The sequels degenerated into self-absorbed anime pretentiousness. While I enjoyed the sequels for what they were, they didn't come close to approaching the first movie's intelligence.

Star Trek fell into this same trap, along with simply running out of new ideas. Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation originally built themselves around a what-if? scenario each week. What if there was a society that executed its citizens for the smallest infraction? What if there was a race of beings completely absorbed with making money at any cost? What if there was a machine race that grew by absorbing other societies? What if you found out you had been genetically engineered to be perfect? The characters in these shows perhaps played second fiddle to these scenarios, but they grew over time, became more fleshed out, and most of us grew to love them as time went on. Star Trek usually had a point to make about our own society. Unfortunately, by the time Star Trek: Voyager ended and Star Trek: Enterprise was canceled, the franchise had become mired in the decades of lore it had built up. The producers of the show were unwilling or unable to genuinely shake things up for fear of alienating those obsessed with continuity (we can't have anything that contradicts how we "know" the warp core works!), and the same tired ideas were endlessly recycled (the machine who wants to be human).

I believe it's possible for a balance to be struck between ideas and lore, and the third Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine, achieved this the best of any of them. The majority of the show focused on a galaxy-wide war between the generally peaceful Federation and the sinister Dominion. This war spanned more than half of the show's seven seasons. However, it used this premise to examine the effects of war and how far people are willing to go for victory. The morality of the show was often gray. In the season 6 episode "In The Pale Moonlight," Captain Sisko and another character, Garak, concoct a plan to trick the powerful Romulan Empire into allying with the Federation. Sisko tries to convince a Romulan senator that the Dominion plan to invade the Romulan Empire. When the plan goes awry, Garak detonates a bomb on board the senator's shuttle, killing him and making it look like a Dominion attack. The Romulans join the fight against the Dominon. Sisko eventually accepts this as a small price to pay to stop the Dominion. Religious themes and examinations of how an oppressed society handles regaining its freedom were also heavily prevalent. It was a premise enhanced by knowledge of the show's lore (the history between the Federation and the Romulan Empire is well established within the various Star Trek series), but still managed to make it about characters and individual morality.

It's no surprise then that the lead show-runner of Deep Space Nine, Ronald Moore, was also one of the principle minds behind the reboot of Battlestar Galactica. The remake took the original campy '70s space opera, extracted the original genuinely horrifying premise, and turned it into a serious and thoughtful military and political drama examining what it might really be like if the entire world ended and the survivors had only the barest hope of a mythical lost home to keep them going. It took that premise and constantly asked what if? What if you had to leave behind or even kill thousands in order to ensure the survival of thousands more? What sort of government would arise from the ashes of this society? What would make the “good guys” turn to suicide bombing? How would people react to being told by their leaders that their arch enemies were now their allies? The first line of spoken dialog in the opening miniseries is, "Are you alive?" It's a frequent question throughout the show. It had a cast of believable and complicated characters trying desperately to survive while also struggling to be worthy of that survival. Some rose to the challenge, while others did not. One of my favorite plot lines was of the young lieutenant stranded with a group of mechanics in hostile territory. The officer was utterly incompetent and couldn't act as a leader for his team. As the situation worsened, he became progressively unhinged until he finally ordered his team to participate in a suicidal attack. It was a fascinating way to look at the incredible stress and pressure of military command under fire, and thankfully didn't have the typical gruff but loving platoon leader.

In this way, Battlestar Galactica was a return to form for (sort of) popular science fiction. Like the earlier Star Trek shows, BSG used science fiction as a means to explore humanity in the here and now. It's easier to watch our heroes act as terrorist insurgents on a far away planet than it is to think about what leads disillusioned and hopeless Muslim men and women to strap bombs to their chests and blow up crowded markets. Even the widely and deservedly reviled "Black Market" episode had an interesting question at its core: what would the criminal underground look like in this post-apocalyptic society?

Battlestar Galactica's misstep was to shift away from the ideas and focus on the lore. Once the show began dwelling on the Final Five Cylons during the latter half of the third season and who they were, why they were important, and what they meant, the show stopped being about us and started being about the writers' universe. While the show dropped Lost-style mysteries right from the beginning, they weren't the focus of the show. Even the search for Earth was less of a central plot and more of a means to motivate both the characters and viewers to continue. While it was interesting in theory to show how the Final Five reacted to learning their true nature, in practice they mostly just moped around. The one exception was Tory, who used it as a nihilistic excuse to give up her humanity and morality. The show regained its footing briefly during the mutiny storyline after the fleet finally discovered that Earth was nothing but a radioactive wasteland. Felix Gaeta's tragic character arc ended here, and was probably the best of the show. Only a few episodes later, though, the writers pooped out an episode where nearly the entire backstory of the Final Five and the reason for the twelve Colonies' destruction was finally revealed from one guy's mouth while he was stuck in a hospital bed.

The problem with the finale, then, was that it didn't focus on the lore and mysteries to the same degree the last season and a half did. It was concerned mostly with wrapping up character arcs. Most of these were satisfying to me, but even I had bought into the central mysteries of the show and was disappointed when they were left dangling at the end. Fast-forwarding 100,000 years to show our society was almost required and could have been cool, but the writers instead decided to jump back to lore mode and throw in more obtuse references to God (who apparently doesn't like to be called that) and ended with an awkward robot montage that seemed to act as some sort of warning against... AI? Technology as a whole? It wasn't really clear.

Having said all that, the issue I have with the people who feel the ending “ruined the show” is that they ignore all of the brilliant work that came before. The morally gray situations, the complex characters, the stellar music, and the believable writing have been swept aside by these “fans” just as much as the writers swept aside their lore for the finale. Claiming that the final 20 minutes of the show invalidates all of the 80 hours that came before is ridiculous. If you stuck with the show all the way to the end, I can't believe that it was the vague hints at divine intervention throughout that kept you hooked. It had to be the characters, and the writing, and stories that worked their magic on you. Some shows' finales deliberately sabotage the audience's expectations. I don't believe that Battlestar Galactica's is one of them.

So for those of you who refuse to give Caprica a chance, get over your misplaced sense of betrayal. The writers employed science fiction the way it was meant to be: to let us critically examine ourselves from a safe distance. Caprica is continuing that tradition. It isn't perfect. It's a show in the process of finding its feet. But to dismiss it outright is to give tacit approval to the weak and shallow Warehouse 13s, Heroes, Stargates and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallens of the world.

I'm Doing A Thing

2010-04-02T17:09:00.000-04:00

Yeah so instead of adding anything new to this blog for the foreseeable future, I've decided to write about my experiences playing through the entirety of the main Final Fantasy series. You can check it out here:

http://notsofinalfantasy.blogspot.com

I'm up to Final Fantasy II, so I still have a ways to go. However, I am committed to getting through all of them, so there will be several months of content coming. I hope you enjoy it or find it interesting.

Rocking the Periphery

2009-12-01T21:34:00.000-05:00

I dove back into the rhythm music genre recently with Lego Rock Band. I just haven't gotten around to The Beatles Rock Band but I'm sure I will eventually. It's been several months since I've played Rock Band 2 seriously, probably closer to a year, and I'm rediscovering why these games are so fun. I haven't played a Guitar Hero game since the third outing, so I don't know how they do things these days' but I've really been impressed by one particular aspect of this latest Rock Band: how it conveys information to the player. This might all be obvious to some people, but I still think it's worth pointing out because it's done so well.

Different types of games have different requirements for letting the player know what's going on around them. Shooters typically need to show how much ammo and health a player has. They may also need to show where mission objectives are located and where enemies are located. Rock Band needs to show:

The player's or band's current score and how many stars have been earned so far
The current score multiplier
How much Overdrive energy is stored up for each player
How well the player is doing overall

All of this in addition to the note chart itself. Most other games can present information to the player however they want with their HUD as long as it's clear and readable. The player can easily glance at the various indicators on screen and deal with that information accordingly. With the current crop of rhythm music games, though, the player's focus is almost entirely on the note chart. Especially on higher difficulties, taking your eyes off the note chart is a very risky act. So how can Harmonix tell the player things he or she needs to know without causing them to miss notes? They do it through sound and peripheral vision, and do it in such a way that both beginner and advanced players get something out of it.

For most players, the actual score is probably not the most important thing they need to know when playing a song, especially when playing that song for the first time or two. However, the number of stars earned are used to unlock new gigs and venues when playing the World Tour mode, and earn more fans and money for buying things to customize the player's character, so it's helpful to know how close you are to earning all five stars. As each star is earned, a glittering jingle plays. Its volume isn't that high, so sometimes it can be missed while concentrating on playing the song itself. When the fifth star is earned though, the jingle is louder and slightly louder. It's pretty obvious when it plays no matter what the song is. At this point you can relax somewhat and just focus on making sure you and your bandmates don't fail out before the song ends.

To earn those stars, it's important to keep the score multiplier high. The current multiplier is displayed at the bottom of the screen and a small CD icon fills up fills up for each multiplier, but they don't stand out and are easy to overlook. However, getting the maximum multiplier changes the multiplier display to a bright blue that can can be seen out of the corner of the eye while playing. Bass players also get a shimmering blue background behind their note chart, but in either case a player can easily know when they've maxed their multiplier. This of course plays into when Overdrive energy should be deployed.

Everyone I know still calls Overdrive by the Guitar Hero term Star Power. Whatever you call it, Overdrive doubles the current multiplier and is essential for earning high scores and getting gold stars on expert difficulty. Playing glowing white notes successfully fills up the energy meter by a quarter, and when it's halfway full the player can deploy the energy to get the score boost. Since looking away from the note chart to see if the meter is ready can be dangerous, Harmonix adds a large pulsing yellow glow when the meter is halfway full. Again, it can be seen in the peripheral vision without having to look away from the note chart.

An interesting situation emerges for more advanced players. Players can deploy their energy when the meter is halfway full, but experienced players know to let it fill up all the way for longer multiplier boosts. Once the meter starts pulsing, it doesn't change when it fills all the way up. The player who wants to use the full meter needs to either mentally keep track of how much energy is stored after the halfway point or take the risk of glancing at the meter instead of the note chart. For these players, the higher scores are usually worth the risk if it can be pulled off.

Finally, Harmonix uses several methods to provide an overall indicator of how well a player or band is doing. The crowd will begin singing along with the band once a high enough note streak has been hit, and of course everyone is familiar with the jangling of missed notes, boos from the crowd, and blinking red note board when failing out is imminent. A crowd meter is also shown on the left side of the screen. At first I wasn't sure how much this adds to the player's knowlege of what's going on, but I think it ends up being useful for when multiple people of varying skill levels are playing together. A more advanced player can quickly look at this to see how well everyone is doing and decide whether they should use their Overdrive energy for a score boost or hold it in case someone fails out.

All of these add up to a highly effective way of communicating some of the most important information to the player while minimizing the risk of breaking the player's concentration. While things like attempting to activate Overdrive or overly frenetic animations in the background can cause a player to lose the beat, it's pretty easy for a player to know how well they're doing at any particular time, and I'm sure Harmonix iterated a lot on those methods of communication while developing the game. It's also fairly easy to track the improvements in this aspect through the course Guitar Hero 2, Rock Band, Rock Band 2, and Lego Rock Band. So good job, Harmonix. It's not something that most people notice, but I know it takes a lot of thought and work to get something like that right.

The Dark Is Where I Shine

2009-09-21T17:26:00.003-04:00

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is a remake and expansion of 2004's well regarded The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay. If you've seen the movies Pitch Black or The Chronicles of Riddick you know that Vin Diesel's Richard. B Riddick is the galaxy's ultimate badass. He can see in the dark, he can take on anyone in hand to hand combat, and if he doesn't want to do that he'll simply sneak up on his enemies and break their necks. He has no remorse, no fear, and no one who can match his skills.

He is, however, as vulnerable to bullets as you or I.

Riddick excels when it tasks you with skulking around in the dark, taking out frightened enemies along the way before they know you're there. More than any other game I've played, I really felt like I was inhabiting the character and doing things just like he would in "real life." The lighting in the game is fantastic. Shadows are black as jet, lights flare when coming to a bright space, and entire spaces can be momentarily lit up by gun flashes. You always know when you're effectively hidden by the dark, even without the game artificially tinting the graphics blue to let you know that you're hidden. When sneaking up on an enemy from behind, once you're close enough to take them down Riddick's hand's raise in preparation for the kill. Initiating the kill causes Riddick to leap up and snap their neck. There are maybe one or two seconds of struggle from the victim, but it always ends with a sickening crunch and a limp body that you are able to drag into the darkness or leave as you see fit. Like any good stealth game, the tension of sneaking around and quietly dispatching foes is excellently done.

The game also features a fairly good melee combat system. Brass knuckles, shivs, scalpels, screwdrivers, and in Dark Athena, wicked looking blades called Ulaks all increase the damage you can do whilst fighting hand to hand. Different moves can be performed depending on the direction you're moving, and different animations play out depending on the weapon you're using. The impact of flesh on flesh are satisfying, and the sounds of sharp objects penetrating skin are cringe-inducing. Once you finally do enough damage to your opponent, a vicious animation plays out where Riddick painfully and permanently ends that person's life. It may be repeatedly smashing his knee into a person's face. Or it may be to shove a screwdriver through an exposed throat. Or he may just slice an opponent's neck open with the scalpel. The finishing moves are visceral and brutal.

In many parts of the game, Riddick is unable to carry firearms. When faced with an armed opponent, the best course of action is to sneak around and try to take them out from behind. The game doesn't always allow you to exercise this option though, in which case you must try to take down the enemy head on. Riddick dies quickly under sustained gun fire, so instead you must run at them headlong and start punching. The enemy will begin to melee you in an attempt to push you back, therefore giving him enough distance to start shooting. When he swings at you with his weapon, a well timed button press will cause Riddick to grab the gun in mid-swing, force it under the enemy's chin, and pull the trigger.Eventually, Riddick gains access to a tranquilizer gun which paralyzes them on the ground for several seconds. If you can get to them in time you can trigger a quick kill where Riddick will crush their skull under his heel.

It's safe to say that the non-interactive animations make up a big part of what makes the game satisfying. They are the rewards for all the skulking around, and effectively release the tension of stealth and melee combat.

The game fails pretty hard, though, when it decides to stick with gunplay exclusively. Enemies are frequently hard to see. While it's possible to shoot out the lights with the tranquilizer gun, many enemies are equipped with flashlights that can expose you from quite a long distance away. Stealth in these cases is not an option. A headshot is just as effective in this game as any other shooter, but it's nearly impossible to get a headshot on a moving target in this game. Enemies seem able to soak up a clip and a half of rounds to the chest area before going down, while Riddick can only take a few shots. I noticed in The Darkness, Starbreeze's other game, that the shooting mechanics seemed off as well, but the supernatural powers available to you in that game made up for it. For whatever reason, it seems difficult to put the aiming reticule precisely where you want it. Instead of feeling like a stealthy demon preying on victims in the dark, you feel like a big, slow, clumsy buffoon spraying bullets indiscriminately at enemies. Perhaps if I had played on PC this wouldn't have been an issue.Admittedly, I am also not the world's best shooter player. Nevertheless, shooting accurately in this game felt like a real struggle.

The Escape From Butcher Bay campaign constantly switches between stealth and gunplay, with a few mech sections thrown in to spice things up. I essentially found myself alternating between really enjoying and really hating the game, depending on what segment I was in. The first half of the Assault on Dark Athena campaign is almost exclusively stealth focused, or tuned in such a way that you can get the drop on several gun wielding enemies. There are a few exceptions, and the AI has a frustrating habit of cheating at times, but overall, the first half of Dark Athena is a stellar exercise in first person stealth culminating in a tense and exciting hand to hand boss fight. The second half is nothing but shoot shoot shoot, much of it in broad daylight, and ends with a gun battle against a fast moving mech thing that's more annoying than anything else. If you want the purest experience of what it's like to be Riddick, play the first half of Dark Athena. The second half, along with Butcher Bay, can safely be skipped.

A Tale of Two Adventures

2009-09-09T00:59:00.000-04:00

To start things off, I want to compare two older games I recently played: The Longest Journey and LOOM.

Both of these games are from the previously defunct but now resurrected point and click adventure genre. A player typically enters an environment, explores it to find objects and/or non-playable characters to interact with, and encounters some sort of puzzle that must be solved in order to progress to the next area or plot point to repeat the process.They also tend to focus heavily on dialogue, character, and plot.

Released in 1999, The Longest Journey was one of the last great adventure games released (with 2002's Syberia, perhaps, being the very last) before the genre's current revival. It centers around 18 year old April Ryan and her reluctant quest to save both her world, the science oriented Stark, and the magic filled Arcadia, from being destroyed by the forces of Chaos. Stark, as far as I can tell, is our world, just several hundred years in the future.

As the player solves puzzles and the plot progresses, April fulfills a few prophecies, reunites estranged races, and ends up cavorting with god-like dragons as she fights to restore balance to the two worlds. Before all that, and after a brief dream-like prologue, the game introduces us to April and her daily life. We meet her landlord, Fiona, and her partner Mickey. We also encounter her two closest friends. Emma is the hot friend who always ends up with the wrong guy. Charlie is the open minded but tragically friend-zoned companion she works with. There's the sleazy neighbor who just wants to get in April's pants and penny pinching boss who nevertheless cares for his employees. They're all painted with broad strokes, but they effectively convey April's little community and provide a human anchor for the epic events that follow.

As the game continued, I found myself hooked on finding out what the next fantastic environment would be. There's a huge variety of locales featured in the game, all beautifully rendered and in pseudo-3D. Despite that, though, whenever I was back in Stark I made it a point to try to find my friends in the game and see how they were doing and what they were up to. They tended to be my main motivation for continuing in the game.

This brings up my main point. In adventure games, I rarely enjoy the puzzle solving. What some see as the meat of the gameplay, I usually see as an irritating obstacle keeping me from finding out what happens next. I enjoy the stories and characters in adventure games more than anything else. While there is of course a certain satisfaction that comes from solving many of the puzzles, I very quickly lose patience when I get stuck on a particularly obtuse problem. Sometimes the leap in logic required is not at all what I'd consider logical. Other times, the environments conspire to make me miss a crucial item or object with which to interact. When I think back on an adventure game I played in the past, I remember two things: the writing and characters, and the puzzles I got stuck on. I may remember a puzzle's solution on a repeat playthrough, but I generally don't think about them afterward. When I'm gushing to someone about The Longest Journey, it's usually about the character of April Ryan or a particularly memorable event in the plot. Similarly, the things I remember about The Secret of Monkey Island are the great gags and jokes, and how I always seem to get stuck on the boat after getting off Melee Island.

Contrast this with LOOM, which features a more traditional fantasy world where you, as Bobbin Threadbare, learn to "weave" spells by playing musical notes with a distaff. Each spell consists of four notes, and some can be reversed to produce the opposite effect. For example, the Open spell also closes things when played in reverse.

Like all PC adventure games you click on the environment with the mouse to move around and select objects. To cast spells, though, you press the keyboard key corresponding to the note you wish to play. To turn straw into gold, press C, C, C, and E. This added an interesting tactile feel to all the puzzles. Clicking the mouse is something that long time computer users don't notice or acknowledge unless something goes wrong. Games like Diablo and Starcraft have taken clicking the mouse to almost absurd extremes, but it still requires little effort or thought to move the mouse button down a few millimeters.

This more methodical, tactile approach reminded me of the first time I played the Wii or DS. The novelty of doing the same old thing in new ways makes quite an impression, even though that novelty wears off quickly. It seems like a silly thing to say; playing games on the computer of course requires the use of the keyboard. The WASD keys in shooters are such a standard that my fingers instinctively go to that position when I sit at my keyboard, and they're effectively invisible when I play those games. With LOOM, though, the gameplay is completely different, and perhaps because I have no musical skills in my body, entering each spell was a somewhat methodical act. The Open spell is used often so I memorized it quickly, but others required me to hunt them down in the manual where I wrote them down. Then it was a matter of pecking at each key to fire off the spell. Instead of just clicking through the puzzles, I actually felt like I was interacting with them. While I still got stuck a few times, I tended to look forward to the next time I could cast a spell and have it work.

I found out later that you can click on the notes displayed on the screen instead of pressing the keys, but I stuck with the latter. I suspect a more musically inclined person would have gone through the game quicker than I did. Indeed, there is a higher difficulty level where the notes are not displayed on screen and only by listening and knowing what each note is can you cast it. Something like that is only possible with this particular game, but it's a wonderfully unique way of adding challenge.

The makers of video game consoles have spent decades figuring out how to make good controllers, game developers have wrestled with creating the best control schemes for those controllers, and it's often said that the best games make you forget that you're holding a controller at all. The old keyboard and mouse, though, doesn't seem to get much attention. Barring flight sims and maybe racing games, it's just what you use on the PC. LOOM made me "see" the keyboard again, and it made the experience more enjoyable as a whole.

A New Focus

2009-09-08T21:43:00.001-04:00

For several months now, I really haven't had much to say here. While I've been playing plenty of games, I've had nothing in particular to contribute to the conversation around them, if one even exists. I don't have the liberal arts education or, it seems, frame of mind, to do in depth critiques like my favorite bloggers L.B. Jeffries, Michael Abbott, Leigh Alexander, Iroquois Pliskin, Corvus Elrod, and a host of others have learned to do so well.

So! What now? Well, I enjoyed writing my posts on difficulty in games. Why? Because I was able to figure out just why I enjoy Burnout Paradise so much. It was an interesting thought exercise for me, and it was satisfying to figure out something that is usually just a vague feeling in my mind when playing a game.

Most, though not all, of the gaming blogs I read have some sort of overarching theme or focus to their posts. Many authors have found a nice niche for themselves in examining games from a particular focus or viewpoint, and for a while I've felt like I needed the same thing in order to keep myself motivated to post and to connect posts together a little more coherently. Therefore, I will try to do the same thing I did with Burnout Paradise on a regular basis. Why is the game I just played fun? Why is it not? What is it that added to the experience, and what is it that detracted from it? I may not say anything new about a particular game, but I look forward to it as a good thought exercise for myself, if nothing else. So off we go! I hope some of you find this interesting, and maybe some people will comment with their thoughts on what they do or don't find fun about whatever game I'm rambling about.

Post-Apocalyptia Done Bright

2009-04-14T11:43:00.003-04:00

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker opens the words "This is but one of the legends of which the people speak..." and presents a montage retelling the events of Ocarina of Time. A great evil steals the golden power of the land, and a Hero travels through time to defeat him and restore peace to the land. I'm sure it brought a smile to the face of those players who played Ocarina. But then the story continues. Some time after the Hero of Time completed his quest, the great evil returned and apparently destroyed the land. The Hero never returned, and the ultimate fate of that kingdom was forgotten.

The story is presented in a primitive art style that emphasizes that the story has been passed from generation to generation. A specific time frame isn't given, but I get the feeling that several centuries, or perhaps even a millenia or two, have passed since the events told in the legend. At the beginning of the game, on the aptly named Outset Island, boys who have come of age dress in green clothing on their birthday to celebrate the legendary Hero and to hopefully inspire them to act with the same maturity and bravery that the Hero himself showed.

While the legend speaks of a land of mountains and green hills, the world as it stands now is nothing but several islands scattered across a vast sea. There doesn't seem to be any government or group to unify the people. The people of each island take care of their own affairs and only sporadically trade with the other islands. A race of birdmen take to the skies to deliver mail to the islands, and are probably a more reliable means of communication than shipping letters on boats. Strangely, even though the world is dominated by the sea, few people seem to have the knowledge or skills to take to the ocean themselves. On the commercial hub of the world, Windfall Island, sailors and civilians tend to avoid each other, and more unsavory types gather in the pub at night. Perhaps the lack of a more pervasive seafaring culture is explained by the dangerous creatures, cyclones, and whirlpools that can spell doom for the careless sailer. It also seems that pirates roam the seas, including a band led by a girl who may be around the same age as the pirates gunned down by US Navy SEAL snipers the other day.

The world seems to have experienced its great cataclysm, and moved on. So much time has passed that the broken, isolated groups of people now see their lives as normal. In Fallout 3 only two centuries have passed since nuclear Armageddon and evidence of the old way of life still litters the landscape. Anyone can look around and see what kind of life they could have had if only things had turned out differently. In The Wind Waker, the world is perhaps just as dangerous as the Capital Wasteland, but the tragedy of what's befallen the people isn't nearly as evident. It's presented in the isolation of the people, in the glimpses of strange lands that dot the ocean, and in the remnants of powerful magic that anyone who played Ocarina of Time will recognize. How sad is it to see the great Deku tree tormented by mere Chu Chu's? The world is a pale but beautiful shadow of its former self, and the great evil seems to have won, though where he went off to remains a mystery. It's a world that the player wants to save so that the former glory might be restored.

A Liberty City Story

2009-03-02T12:06:00.004-05:00

The Grand Theft Auto games, as we all know, are routinely criticized for their brutal violence. Whether it's the brutal lifestyle of crime that the stories dwell on, or Youtube videos of mindless rampages through the city, the series is steeped in violence. It's part of the appeal, and I'm not here to attempt to condemn or condone it. I have fun playing the game and I'm perfectly aware that what's happening is not in the least bit real.

On the other hand, the simulation of the city, traffic, and people within it often comes together to make for some uncanny moments. I've played nearly 100 hours of GTA IV, and one moment stands out in my mind as the only time I actually felt disturbed and a little sick by my actions in the game.

The Xbox 360 version of the game has an achievement called Chain Reaction. To unlock it you must cause ten vehicles to explode in ten seconds. I started my attempt by hijacking a parked bus in Star Junction and driving it to the nearby bridge leading to Broker. I then turned it so that I was completely blocking traffic on the bridge. After a couple minutes I had a nice little traffic jam of a dozen cars or so in front of me.

It takes a lot to rile the citizens of Liberty City. You can walk around in public with a weapon drawn, and while a few people may make a surprised exclamation, they don't really seem frightened by a man walking around with a sniper rifle or rocket launcher drawn. It's only when you begin aiming it at people that they begin to freak out. Perhaps the constant threat of death at the hands of terrorists or, more likely, the inept Liberty City Police Department have hardened them to the supposed dangers of an armed common citizen.

With my herd of vehicles waiting to be exploded, I climbed on top of the bus and surveyed the road in front of me. Several drivers honked angrily and hurled profanities my way. Others tried to creep forward, causing a few fender benders and even more cursing and gnashing of teeth. I switched to my grenades. There were no reactions. Then I pulled the left trigger to aim where I wanted to throw.

The drivers went nuts.

People began screaming. Instead of angry exclamations of profanity, now they were terrified. Some tried to back up, but were unable to because of the cars behind them that impatiently ran into their bumpers before. They were trapped. They had nowhere to go, and all they could do was look at me in horror as I prepared to end their previously mundane in-game existence. The few smart ones got out of their cars and ran away as fast as they could. In all of this, they had gone from amusing avatars made to resemble people to realistic people reacting to a sudden, unexpected, and horrifying situation. I suddenly found it difficult to say to myself, "It's just a game." While I certainly wasn't confusing it with reality, the elements of the simulation managed to convey how real people would likely act in that scenario. I thought, "Wow, this is kind of sick."

After a couple seconds hesitation, I lobbed all of my grenades into the drivers' midst. A large series of explosions engulfed the bridge and traffic, including the bus upon which I stood. My body was thrown around the pillars and supports of the bridge, and I laughed at the hilarious rag doll effects. The achievement didn't unlock, but the moment I actually felt discomfort and remorse for my in-game actions is not one I'll soon forget. I think the game unlocked an achievement for itself in that moment.

February 2009 - The Month of DLC

2009-01-22T21:00:00.006-05:00

February is looking to be an odd month when you look at some of the new videogame related stuff coming out. FEAR 2: Project Origin and Street Fighter IV are coming out, but it seems like the biggest new releases are for games we've already played.

Fallout 3, Burnout Paradise, Mirror's Edge, Tomb Raider Underworld and Grand Theft Auto IV are all getting new expansions to the original content they came with in some form or another. Developers now seem fully committed to extending the life of a game through new downloadable content, and now that the holiday crush is over, they want us to return to the games we rushed through earlier, or finally pick up the ones that we regretfully decided didn't make the cut for a purchase. I would love to see the sales figures for downloadable content from the last few years, but that information seems to be a closely guarded secret for reasons I don't understand.

In a way, Bethesda helped pioneer this brave new DLC frontier we're currently exploring. They still haven't lived down the overpriced horse armor they released for Oblivion, but the subsequent expansions they released were much more feature rich and sensibly priced. It sounds like the new stuff they have planned for Fallout 3 will take a lot of what they learned from their experiences on that earlier game. They all look like they're going to offer a substantial amount of content for the amount of money being asked for. The DLC for March will also fix one of the main complaints about the game: not being able to continue past the main quest.

Burnout Paradise of course has been receiving free content for the past year, but February's DLC will mark the first time an update is being charged for. There will also be a free patch to go alongside it, but the paid portion will test just how much goodwill has been built up over the past year from the free stuff. My worry is that this first premium pack seems to add features that nobody was really asking for, while not adding what people DO want. It adds a local multiplayer "party" feature where players pass around a controller and compete in challenges like the online multiplayer has. What people have actually asked for is a split-screen racing mode, but that has not been added in. The free patch will be adding a restart option for events, which will at least address the other large complaint many people have about the game. I still contend that pining for such an option misses the point of the game, but I'll live.

Mirror's Edge is getting a new pack of time trial levels for players to master. The interesting thing about them is that they're presented in a very different and abstract style compared to the levels in the main game and original time trials. As shown in the picture above, the new levels look to be purely a playground for the fast, fluid freerunning the the story mode only occasionally got right.

The DLC for Tomb Raider and GTA4 seem to be the most traditional. Tomb Raider simply adds a few new levels to explore that were cut from the main game. GTA4's episodic expansion, The Lost and Damned, will cost $20 and feels like the disc-based expansion packs that used to be sold for PC games a few years ago. It adds a new story and characters, but other than that we don't know much about it.

The first three examples are the most interesting to me because they all represent efforts by the developers to respond to player feedback. Mirror's Edge may be a happy coincidence, since the DLC for it was announced soon after the game was released, but otherwise we're finally seeing significant changes come to game instead of having to wait for a sequel to fix our collective gripes. It will be very interesting to see if The Lost and Damned has responded to the narrative and character complaints that people had about the original game. I think it would also be hilarious to hear the term "ludonarrative dissonance" mocked on one of the new radio or TV stations that will be added.

Responding to player feedback through patching has been pretty common on the PC for years, but it's new for consoles, and monetizing it is new to both sides. Bethesda once again seems to have paved the way for paid downloadable content on the PC with Oblivion and Fallout 3. Valve has released a slew of free updates for Team Fortress 2, but will be forced to charge for them on the Xbox 360. Infinity Ward released several free map packs for Call of Duty 4 yet charged for them on both the Xbox and Playstation 3. I'm frankly surprised that there wasn't more of an uproar from PC gamers when the Oblivion content was released. Except for the horse armor, perhaps people felt that the content being offered was done so at a fair price. When you add in the fact that DLC may directly address the larger issues that players may have had with a game, it becomes worth the price even more.

Playing Catch Up - Final Fantasy VII

2009-01-18T16:54:00.005-05:00

I've stated before that I have a bit of an insecurity about the games I never got around to playing. Like I stated in that post, I had a Sega Genesis and played the Sonic games obsessively, then stuck to playing Star Wars games on the PC until I bought an Xbox 360 in 2005.

The latest effort to shorten my list of gaming classics never played has been a playthrough of Final Fantasy VII. I managed to snag a copy relatively cheap compared to the astronomical prices found on Ebay and am currently working my way through the first disc.

It's hard to know how you're "supposed" to react to these older games. I've been hearing people rave about FF7 for years now. Everyone wants a remake on the PS3. Everyone's heard about how the game made players cry. So how is someone like me supposed to react? I suppose it's like reading a classic novel, or watching a classic movie. Even if it may not be the greatest thing ever anymore, you can still appreciate what it did at the time. Having said that, here are some quick initial thoughts on the game:

I miss the sphere grid. FFX's leveling system was much more interesting and fun to me than FF7's old fashioned passive advancement system. The Materia system is an interesting attempt to go beyond just earning levels, but so far the Materia I have grow so slowly that I don't think about it much. It's obviously harder to go from a more refined version of a game to an older one.
Similar to that last note, the graphics are rough. I don't mean that as a knock against the game, but it's amusing to go from the extreme amount of detail in Fallout 3 and then look at the "state of the art" graphics from the PS1 days. It's amazing how far we've come, and how far we still have to go in terms of realistic graphics. It also makes me wonder about the number of "all time great" games like Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64, Metal Gear Solid, and Final Fantasy VII. These are undeniably excellent games, but I wonder if seeing these already long running franchises in three glorious dimensions had a larger part in imprinting these games in people's memories than they give it credit for.
The tone of the story and characters seems a bit schizophrenic. It's like the game can't decide if it wants to be a goofy lighthearted adventure, or a more serious and dark adventure about a tormented superhuman and the people he's hurt in the past. Barrett annoys me every time he opens his goofy text-based mouth. I think this, along with a somewhat boring leveling system, has contributed the most to my somewhat "meh" feelings toward the game.
Why does the game wait several hours to tell you what the various statuses in combat mean? Why is that explanation in an optional area of the game that some players could easily miss? Not even the strategy guide I acquired explains everything. Not everyone has been playing these types of games since birth.
The moment Sephiroth discovered who he was and destroyed Nibelheim WAS cool. Dark and dramatic, with the perfect soundtrack to go along with it. I can see why that character in particular has stayed in gamers' collective memory this long.

I'm not really sure how far I am in the game. I've been doing a lot of preemptive grinding in order to try and avoid the frustrations I had in FFX where I moved through the game at what I thought was the pace determined by the developers, only to be stopped short by an annoyingly hard boss. I guess grinding on my own terms is more acceptable than being forced to by the game.

In all, my feelings so far are that it's an enjoyable game, but I'm not finding myself ~~blown away! (ign.com)~~ drawn into it like I was with FFX. I do plan to keep playing it though. Hopefully it won't end up feeling like an obligation. My OCD already hates me for not having finished FFX yet.

Difficulty Done Right - Part 2

2009-01-08T10:32:00.001-05:00

I meant to have this up sooner, but I wanted to play more Prince of Persia first and ended up playing, well, all of it.

A lot of reviews I read for Prince of Persia made it sound as if the game practically played itself. I suppose to the jaded reviewer tasked with reviewing five games a week, the game is easy to blow through quickly. For myself, I still found plenty of occasion to get annoyed at myself when I messed up a tricky platforming segment, or missed a quick time event during a boss battle.

Many of the game's achievements on the Xbox 360 (and, I assume, the trophies on the PS3) are comically easy to get, but some of them do require a bit more skill, or, at least, patience to acquire. Beating the game under 12 hours is easy if you only get enough light seeds to beat the game and don't bother with the side conversations between the Prince and Elika. Using all of the combos in the game is easy if you use the list provided in the menus, but the certain situations make it so a combo doesn't "count." Probably the trickiest achievement is having Elika rescue you fewer than 100 times during the course of the game.

Even so, the game is easy compared to most triple-A games being released, and I'm not sure that adding difficulty through achievements or trophies really counts as adding difficulty. The platforming doesn't require the precision and timing of Super Mario Galaxy or LittleBigPlanet. Bosses can regenerate health during fights, but only a few times. I confess that I found the boss fights frustratingly drawn out until I realized how to string combos together to take out large chunks of an enemy's health. I think the hardest part of the game is tracking down all the light seeds that end up scattered around each area after a boss fight.

Overall, the game is welcoming to newcomers, and the platforming looks and feels good enough that someone who prefers a harder game may forgive the low barrier to entry. The combat at least benefits from learning the combos, but if nothing else the enemies can be killed through slow attrition. Ubisoft made it much easier for people to play, but they perhaps didn't do enough to make it appealing to the more hardcore gamer.

So we've discussed Call of Duty on Veteran and how only the most skilled and dedicated are able to complete it. Burnout Paradise rewards exploration and knowledge of the city more than straight reflexes, but those reflexes are still necessary to progress. Prince of Persia is a pretty easy game compared to most, perhaps too easy for many. Is there any game that casts a net wide enough to catch those looking for a more casual experience along with something to appeal to the masochists out there?

I believe one has at least come close.

As I've played Super Mario Galaxy, I've been struck by how the game is structured to include multiple difficulty levels around collecting all 120 of its power stars. Each of the game's six observatories has several galaxies. As you collect stars, you unlock new galaxies. Later galaxies in the observatory are generally more difficult than the earlier ones. Many galaxies contain hidden stars, and finding them takes more observation than simply completing the level. Even when you know where a hidden star is, the route there may be far more treacherous than the rest of the level.

In addition, many levels will have a star that you can only acquire when a comet shows up. The comets take a previously played level and change it somehow. Sometimes you have to race the clock. Sometimes enemies are sped up. Sometimes you have to fight a boss with only one slice of health. Sometimes you have to race a doppelganger of Mario to the star. All of them require at least a passing familiarity with how a level is structured.

As you collect Star Bits, the in-game currency, you can unlock other galaxies that are outside of the normal observatories. These levels are also generally more difficult than normal. Finally, there are three hidden green stars that unlock the trial galaxies. When I decided to do the final boss fight, I had between 80 and 90 stars total, and the three trial galaxy stars were the most difficult to acquire. They required all of the skills gained throughout the game, and two of them had no checkpoints at all. If I died at the end of the level, I had to do the whole thing again.

The great thing about these varying difficulty levels is that it's completely up to the player whether or not to attempt them. Only 60 stars are required to defeat Bowser, but the game encourages you to get more by hinting at the rewards that will be unlocked. Earning stars unlocks chapters in the storybook, which explains the origins of the enigmatic Princess Rosalina. Even opening up new galaxies is a reward in itself. I was constantly wondering if the game could top the previous levels I had played, and it almost always did. A red star sits atop the library in the hub world, teasing you with, "I have a secret! But I'm not telling you." Get enough stars, and you'll eventually learn what that secret is. Getting all 120 allows you to play the game as Luigi. There always seems to be another reward to shoot for.The game accommodates multiple skill levels from the outset while encouraging players to push themselves further to see what they will be presented with next. Burnout Paradise, as much as I like it, really only presents completion itself as a reward for progression. There are dozens of cars to unlock, but only a few balanced enough to use regularly.

Obviously, a certain amount of skill is required for even the easiest levels. My mom has a DS and New Super Mario Brothers. She enjoyed it, but wasn't able to get very far in the game. When visiting I could often hear her yelling "Come on Mario!" when she missed a jump. When I showed her Super Mario Galaxy, she loved how it looked, but didn't even want to give the game a try. I think she assumed that she'd have no chance at doing well in the game's 3D environment, especially in levels where gravity and the camera are constantly shifting around. I can't blame her for thinking that way.

Prince of Persia - Why?

2009-01-03T19:47:00.006-05:00

Major Prince of Persia spoilers ahead.

I can accept that the Prince fell in love with Elika. Okay, as their relationship developed over the course of the game, it felt like it went from mutual loathing to friendly respect, rather than loathing to love. However, the Prince has always been a loner, living for himself and staying on the lookout for the next fortune, the next girl. He may not have known he had those feelings until Elika dropped dead at the base of the tree imprisoning Ahriman. Or, perhaps he simply kept those feeling hidden from Elika, and by extention, the player. I can believe it in the same way I believe two people can fall madly in love over the course of a 90 minute movie.

What I'm not sure I can accept is that the Prince is so grief-stricken, so selfish, and so stupid at the prospect of Elika's death that he would then unleash Ahriman again into the world, completely invalidating the previous 12-14 hours I put into the game. He's selfish, but the game convinced me that he's not a fool. He understands the devestation that Ahriman will wreak upon the world. He knows how the corruption can distort even the most honorable of kings. He also understands that to Elika, imprisoning Ahriman and helping her people return to their lands is the most important thing to her.

So to suddenly have the Prince be so devestated by Elika's death that he decides to free Ahriman again in order to resurrect her feels like a betrayal of the character, and a betrayal of the player's understanding of the Prince and the time spent playing. Was it supposed to be justified by his established selfishness? Was Ahriman strong enough to cloud the Prince's feelings so much that he would completely undo everything he just did? It feels like Ubisoft Montreal couldn't figure out how to have a cliffhanger ending while also having an epic final battle. As I neared the end, I thought to myself, "I wonder what the story for the sequel will be." Apparently, it will be the same as this game. The final line in the game is Elika asking the Prince, "Why?" That's what I'd like to know.

Difficulty Done Right - Part 1

2008-12-28T21:11:00.014-05:00

I don't enjoy overly difficult games. Challenging games are fine, but it's a rare game that strikes the perfect balance between just tough enough and soul crushingly difficult. I don't usually play games on "Hard" or whatever the game calls it. I'm usually more interested in the narrative and experience of playing than I am in conquering whatever sadistic difficulty level the developers put in. I want to have fun! It's a highly subjective thing, of course, but I doubt I will ever play Ninja Gaiden 2 or Ikaruga for this reason.

While I generally play on the default difficulty in games, there have been a few exceptions. Before Halo 3 came out, I read that the Heroic difficulty was the way the game was "meant to be played." This piqued my curiosity for some reason, and I decided to start the game at that difficulty setting. I found it painfully frustrating, but I was able to push through. After completing the story, I went back on Normal difficulty to get a few skulls I missed, and was struck at how much easier the game was. The difficulty curve from Normal to Heroic is steep, and I think I would have enjoyed the game more the first time if I had played on Normal. Heroic was hard enough that when I pushed through a level or particularly difficult fight, I simply felt drained, rather than accomplished. I did eventually complete the game on Legendary, but that was with a group of four people in co-op, making the game ridiculously easy.

The Xbox 360's Achievements are what really inspired me to start playing games on harder difficulties in the first place. I picked up my 360 a month after it launched, and one of the games I got with it was Call of Duty 2. I played and finished it pretty quickly on the default difficulty, but my friend at work started on Veteran difficulty and got every achievement in the game. I felt I had to match his accomplishment, so I began a new game.

For those of you who haven't experienced it, Veteran difficulty in the Call of Duty games is one of the most punishing and soul-crushing experiences in modern gaming you can have. You only take one or two shots before dying (just like real life!), enemies instantly spot you and are 99% accurate, and their endlessly spawning waves mean you can't simply camp in one spot and clear out everyone in an area. You end up learning exactly where the spawn points and script triggers are because you hve to play each segment over and over and over. I've had Call of Duty 2 since December 2005, and I still haven't finished it on Veteran. My Achievement list for the game is a timeline chronicling the periods of my life where I felt the urge to wallow in misery. Some of the dates in the list are separated by more than a year.

Because of experiences like that, I usually sample a game's hardest difficulty level, but rarely complete it. Other games don't have a difficulty setting, but rather ramp up in difficulty as the game progresses. Burnout Paradise is one example of this.

Burnout Paradise presents you with an open city for you to explore, with various events at every stoplight. Completing these events unlocks new and better cars for you to use. There are traditional races, Burning Route events where you have to get from point A to point B in a certain amount of time, Stunt Runs, Marked Man events where you must get to the finish line while being pursued by opponents trying to take you down, and Road Rage events where you try to take out as many of your competitors as possible in the time allowed without taking too much damage yourself. In addition to that, each road in the game has a Road Rule time to beat getting from one end to the other, and a Showtime mode where you must flip your car down the road causing as much damage as possible.

In short, there is a ton of things to do in the game. If a particular event is giving you a headache, try destroying everything in your path in Showtime. If you lose a race, try linking together three barrel rolls, a 720 degree flat spin, and three seconds of air time in a Stunt Run. There is a certain way to enjoy the game, and whining about having to drive back to the start of each event is not it. The game reduces frustration by giving you an abundance of things to do. Of course, as you near the end of the game, you find less and less to do, but by that point you're generally good enough that the final few events aren't too much trouble. Also, all events can be accessed at any time, even if they no longer contribute towards your progression. Road Rage is a great way to decompress after work.

While each event type requires mastering a particular set of skills, the most important thing is to learn the layout of the city. Compared to the previous game in the series, Burnout Revenge, the AI is more forgiving. Most racing games quickly become utterly intolerant of mistakes as you progress. In Paradise, you can crash once, twice, sometimes even three times in a race and still end up winning. The reason is that having a completely open city allows you to find your own route. The game will give you a path to follow, and it's the path that your opponents will take, but it's rarely the fastest or the best path to take. The biggest reward in the game is learning where the shortcuts, hidden jumps, and best paths are throughout the city. Since all events end at one of eight locations, you learn fairly quickly the main thruways of the game. The other necessary skills like learning how to handle each car and how to pull off the various tricks don't matter if you don't know the best path in which to use those skills.

Since learning the city is the key to winning the events, doing well in the game is much more on the player's shoulders than other games. It still relies on quick reflexes, and the regular traffic in the streets adds a bit of luck to everything you do. On the whole, though, balancing the use of boost and knowing when a turn and/or shortcut is coming up is the most important skill to have.

I think this is part of why I enjoyed Burnout Paradise so much. Unlike Revenge's brutal difficulty late in the game or Call of Duty's Veteran mode, I actually felt like I had a chance at doing well at the higher difficulty levels. The game challenged me and encouraged me to do well, instead of kicking me in the face repeatedly when I did poorly. If I can just make that turn and nail that jump this time, I know I'll come out ahead this time. Like I said before, the sheer amount of things to do means it's hard to be frustrated for long. It may be the only game that I've gotten 100% completion in, and it's in large part because the game made me feel like I could actually do so.

While writing this, Michael Abbott put a post up about Prince of Persia that dovetails nicely with this subject. In my next post, I'll give some thoughts about that game, and also talk about the game that I think has perfectly nailed the idea of multiple difficulties in games.

Sony Impressions

2008-12-18T18:18:00.008-05:00

I picked up a PS3 a few weeks ago. The number of exclusive games for the system currently and soon-to-be available finally pushed me to pool my resources and complete my current generation console collection. Last weekend I also scored a Playstation Portable from the random gift draw at my company holiday party. That, plus the consoles and my Nintendo DS, means that I have fully joined the current gen videogame club.

(I'm going to ignore the iPhone for now until a truly amazing game comes out for it.)

I'll say it right now: the PS3 is an intimidating console. Physically, it's an almost ridiculously large piece of metal and plastic. It seems to almost dominate my entire entertainment setup. It's dark, shiny monolith makes the Wii look utterly pathetic in comparison.

Even the interface conspires to make me feel like I've entered a club that nobody invited me to. The XMB is as black as the hardware that houses it. The number of options underneath each category, especially under the settings section, is dizzying. While I'm sure I'll get used to it, moving around seems to generally take a few too many button presses.

I downloaded Home and briefly played around with it. Going from the dark XMB to the bright white initial Home screen was jarring, and made me think that Home is even more cynical an attempt to reach the Wii crowd than the 360's Avatars. It even features the silly "soothing" music that the Avatar editor has, and that both are again imitating from the Wii.

The controller itself is a mixed bag. Like the PS2 controller, the DualShock 3 feels too small and light in my hands. The d-pad and shoulder buttons are much much better than those on the 360 controller. Seriously, Microsoft. Just license the d-pad patents from Nintendo and Sony. It's worth it. Wireless is of course nice, and even better is not having to buy batteries or rechargable battery packs to keep the juice flowing.

Trophies and the online community integration are pale shadows of Microsoft's offerings, of course. No surprises there.

Of course, games are why we buy consoles. I picked up LittleBigPlanet with the console, and when I got home I immediately downloaded Super Stardust HD, Echochrome, Everyday Shooter, PixelJunk Eden, and Linger in Shadows.

LittleBigPlanet, unfortunately, has been disappointing. In Super Mario Galaxy, I pretty much always know how high, how far, and how fast Mario will jump at any particular time. In LBP, there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to how Sackboy will behave at any particular time. He builds up momentum incredibly quickly, so sometimes it'll seem like I'll make a jump, only to slide right off the other side of a platform. Sometimes I'll hit the jump button and he simply refuses to do anything. Moving objects are particularly frustrating, as often times Sackboy will land cleanly but then slip off, often to his firey or watery doom. It can also be hard to tell when you need to move forward or backward in order to catch a ramp or other object. I think it's great that Media Molecule have made such a full featured level editor, but the underlying game just doesn't seem to completely work as a platformer.

I've only played Super Stardust HD once so far. The graphics are great, and the various weapons and enemies are fun. However, I found my thumbs constantly slipping off the sticks during the frantic movement and shooting. I think most of that comes from not being used the controller, and trying to cope with its small size.

Echochrome is an interesting case. Having levels based on M.C. Escher drawings is a neat idea, but the graphics are so sparse, and the music so conducive to drowsiness, that the only real stimulation the game offers is the puzzle solving itself. While the 5 laws the game revolves around are interesting, they don't carry the game enough for me. The harder levels just require more convoluted combinations of the 5 laws. The game reminded me of reading a college textbook: an overall dry experience.

I really like Everyday Shooter, even though I'm really bad at it so far. It's mostly the music. It's catchy and memorable, like Geometry Wars' music. I've managed to get to the third level after half a dozen tries, but I'm not giving up yet. Figuring out how to chain points in each level adds a nice bit of puzzle solving to the initial playthroughs of each level.

PixelJunk Eden is as good, and frustrating, as I've read. I love the art, flinging around each garden is soothing, and it's also likely to induce streams of profanity when I tumble all. The way. Down. I haven't gotten out of the first garden yet, but my only complaint so far is that it seems a bit repetitive. Get one spectra, then two, then three, and so on. Maybe that changes in later gardens.

Linger in Shadows was pretty interesting, though it left me confused and slightly depressed each time I played. I feel like it stopped rather suddenly, and I wish I knew what happens next. Perhaps there's some hidden method of unlocking more content? The color palette, the look of the strange flying robot, and the flowing blackness reminded me very strongly of Shadow of the Colossus, which is no bad thing. Even though it's just supposed to be an interactive art piece, it made me wish it was a full game.

Overall I'm happy with my purchase. I think I'll be picking up Uncharted: Drake's Fortune next. It's supposed to be one of the best games on the PS3, so hopefully it's worth the purchase.

(Re)Discovering the Joy

2008-12-14T22:48:00.005-05:00

When the shape of this holiday season's videogame release schedule began to come into focus a few months ago, I promised myself that I wasn't going to obsessively get every single game. For one thing, my wallet simply couldn't handle the vast flood of games coming out. More importantly though, I was trying to keep from rushing from game to game. I wanted to take my time and not feel pressured to play every game the instant it's out.

To some degree, I succeeded. I didn't get Gears of War 2. I decided to hold off on Fable 2. I asked for Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider Underworld for Christmas. At the time, I didn't have a PS3 (by the way, I have a PS3 now!) so I wasn't factoring in those games. I also wasn't really paying attention to my Wii, so I ignored any games that were out or coming out for it.

I ended up getting Rock Band 2, Too Human, Silent Hill Homecoming, Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Mirror's Edge, and Dead Space. I also played Sam and Max Season One on the Wii. The first three were a bit spaced out over time, but the last four hit within days of each other. I played pretty much non-stop, and Fallout 3 took up a massive number of hours in particular. A couple weeks ago I finished slogging through Dead Space and was feeling pretty burned out on videogames in general. Except for Dead Space, I loved all of those games. But the tsunami of new releases still left me tired and not particularly inclined to pick up a controller any time soon.

After several days of binging on The Office and generally forgetting that my Xbox 360 played games, I began eyeing my stack of unplayed games. The chance to catch up on those older games and the fact that they weren't the latest hot thing appealed to me greatly. After narrowing my choices down to Super Mario Galaxy, Final Fantasy XII, and restarting Wind Waker, I held an epic Twitter and IRC chat election in which Mario emerged victorious.

I'm so glad he did, too.

Back in the summer when I bought the game, I played the first few levels then got distracted by other games and didn't touch it again. Now, I'm playing through with a vengeance. I'm 40 stars in and just rescued Luigi from the haunted mansion. The exuberantly bright colors are a relief after the next-gen browns and greys of Fallout 3 and Silent Hill. Problably more than many gamers, I need a story to really motivate me to play most games. Galaxy's plot, while threadbare, has just enough meat on its bones to keep me motivated to play its levels repeatedly to get all the stars. Princess Rosalina is a pleasingly mysterious figure who I'm curious to learn more about. So far I'm frankly stunned at the amount of creativity that has gone into each of the levels. Not once have I encountered a galaxy or planet and thought that it was just a rehash of a previous one. I feel like every pixel of the game is made to bring joy into its players' lives.

While getting reaquainted with my Wii, I also saw that I had some spare Wii points available. After poking around the WiiWare selection, I decided to finally give World of Goo a try. Michael Abbott's posts in October really piqued my interest and convinced me to get the Wii version. The first time I played it was when my sister and brother in law were over visiting. I was once again stunned at how amazing and purely FUN the game was. I love the music and desperately wish there was a soundtrack available. The art is unique to any game I've played before and solving the puzzles is incredibly satisfying to me.

Since my sister was over, we brought out the extra controller and played cooperatively together, with her husband providing backup. Playing local co-op in games isn't something I'm used to. Since I didn't grow up with consoles, I'm used to either playing by myself or hopping online to play something cooperatively. Playing together with my sister, working out the puzzles together, grabbing a goo ball when the other drops it, and arguing over the best course of action has made the game far more fun than it ever would have been if I had just tried it myself. Some of the more difficult puzzles were made much more bearable by the presence of another person to share the frustration. It's a new experience for me. Even when playing Rock Band with friends and family, I didn't feel the same sense of shared enthusiasm for doing well together. After they left I played a few more levels by myself, but it just wasn't the same. Now I only play when they're over. For me, it's simply the way the game is supposed to be played.

These games have been great palate cleansers after the flood of high profile games. They've reminded me that I still primarily play games for fun and brought the joy of picking up the controller back. The added baggage of deep, complicated stories, hyper-competitive multiplayer, and furthering the graphics race has been stripped away to a simple set of rules that are used in a multitude of unique and creative ways. It's nice to get back to basics.

Should Games Have Content Filters?

2008-12-07T18:14:00.008-05:00

I never got around to posting it here, but I got a position writing at Hardcore Christian Gamer, aka HCG. It's a volunteer thing, of course. It's Yet Another Games site, of which there are hundreds or thousands on the Internet, so it's not like anyone is getting paid to write for them. The community is growing though, and I enjoy doing it during my free time at work. It gives me a way to work on my writing skills and learn how to write for a specific audience. I write the occasional review, and post news up throughout the day.

My evangelical Christian days are behind me, for the most part, but I'm still sympathetic, I suppose. The range of beliefs among the community is pretty wide, and some of the discussions on Christianity get pretty heated. One topic that comes up fairly often is whether or not a particular game has language and gore filters on it. The Gears of War games have these filters in them. Gore is changed to bright sparks. The language filter apparently only blanks out the f-bomb, which disappoints many in the HCG forums. I've heard that Call of Duty: World at War also has some sort of filter. Some won't even play games like Guitar Hero or Rock Band because of some of the lyrical content in the songs. Others can tolerate most bad language, but get upset when a character takes the Lord's name in vain.

My first reaction to questions about filters in these games was, "Isn't the gore and language part of the point of these games?" Taking them out leads to an experience as watered down as an R rated movie shown on network TV, or a vulgar rock song played over the radio. The tune is there, and so are most of the lyrics, but it loses its impact.

This of course brings up other questions like, should there even be such a thing as "bad" words? Or, why is the violence okay but the language not? I occasionally see someone start a thread on other forums asking about content filters in games, and the responses are usually something like, "Go play crappy movie games if you don't like language." People looking for the fun of a certain game without the more questionable content are generally dismissed without a second thought.

I think, however, that if we ignore those questions and take the desire for tamer content at face value, it brings up some interesting issues. The gameplay and story are almost always mutually exclusive in your typical triple-A game. The parkouring gameplay of Mirror's Edge could as easily have been featured in some kind of extreme sports game instead of the dystopian future it actually contained. The cover based, psuedo-platforming, shooting gameplay Gears of War could easily have been set in some sort of benign lasertag game. The underlying gameplay, and whether it's fun or not, is what keeps people playing. The gritty settings and characters of Gears of War are just an aesthetic choice by the developers.

Since videogames, in my mind, are more deliberately constructed than a song or a movie, I think they are more able to feature customized content. Like Gears of War, a game can be programmed to show either sprays of blood or sprays of bright sparks. A more text based game can feature alternate passages of text that don't feature the profanity that offends some people. It presents more of a problem for a game featuring full voice acting since it would be expensive to record to versions of dialogue for a significant portion of the script, but it's still doable. A movie on TV may feature jarring blanks in dialogue or, even worse, bad overdubs to add in a more "appropriate" word. A game just has to have a bit of code to swap in a particular piece of content depending on what the user chose. The RTS Company of Heroes apparently is an extremely fun game (I haven't played it myself) and can even be used to teach about WWII, but the language and gore in the game makes it something you may not want to expose your fifth grader to. The ability to turn that content off wouldn't take away from the gameplay or setting.

If these sorts of things can be added in, then a developer has broadened the audience for its game just that little bit more. It's impossible to please everyone, of course (Just the other day on the HCG forums, a mother was fretting over the presence of cheerleaders in the DS version of Madden 2009. Yes, the DS version.), but I don't think there's a good reason to simply ignore the sizeable population of people who would appreciate that sort of feature.

Incidentally, I also wish that some games were more liberal about the content they allowed. I've often wished that Harmonix would release a version of Rock Band that didn't censor the lyrics of the songs. Alanis Morrisette's You Outta Know loses some of its punch when the line is changed to "...and are you thinking of me when youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuher?" Let people have a choice, either way.

Thoughts?

Oh Microsoft...

2008-11-05T12:35:00.001-05:00

Last night, flush with the pride of performing my civic duty, yet tired from a typically uninspiring day of work, I sat down to lose myself in a few hours of Fallout 3. I loaded my save game file, made sure I was sneak mode, then began creeping forward.

Then something catastrophic happened.

The HUD was still displayed, but behind it was a distressing checkerboard pattern. The ambient sounds from the game seemed to be caught in a loop. The game itself was frozen. The guide refused to appear.

Perturbed, I got up, turned off the Xbox, then turned it back on. I was met with three flashing red lights surrounding the power button. My stomach dropped as I powered it off and on again. Still flashing red. I sighed, looked around the room for some unknown sign of hope or encouragement, then tried it once more. Ah hah! The boot-up animation is star... Oh wait, it's frozen again with that charming checkerboard pattern overlaying it. Hopes fading, I rebooted and once more gazed upon the infamous Red Ring of Death.

I've had this Elite for just over a year. It was my second 360. after my Premium model from 2005 stopped outputting video. Since it hadn't given me the RROD, and was therefore out of the original warrany, I decided to simply upgrade to a new Elite that was hopefully more reliable. I also bought Best Buy's 2 year replacement plan. It came in handy last night.

I packed everything up and drove to Best Buy. I was sadly bemused to see a teenager and his older relative in front of me in line also exchanging their broken 360 for a new one. While waiting for the Best Buy employees to process our returns, the teenager and I chatted and commiserated about our mutual console woes. Apparently his stopped working after he put in his friend's hard drive. That seems like an odd problem to have, honestly. Maybe he tried doing this while the console was on? I didn't think to ask him about it.

Anyway, the exchange went smoothly, though I did purchase a new replacement plan. It was certainly money well spent the last time. The new one is significantly quieter, which is nice. Also, the new one came bundled with Lego Indiana Jones and the game of Kung-Fu Panda. They were supposed to remove them but forgot. Bonus for me.

Ode to Mass Effect

2008-10-14T16:09:00.001-04:00

Spoilers ahoy. Watch yourself.

Last year, one of my most anticipated titles coming out that holiday season was BioWare's epic space opera RPG, Mass Effect. I was looking forward to a space-based RPG as opposed to your typical swords and elves fantasy setting. I had recently finished their last RPG, Jade Empire, and enjoyed it immensely. Mass Effect's universe looked interesting, I love a good western RPG, so basically it looked like everything I could want.

I preordered the collector's edtion, and it was with great excitement that I fired up the game for the first time. The graphics were excellent and I loved the old-school synthesized style of the music.

And yet...

I started noticing issues. The game wasn't doing much to show me how to play. I had no idea until much later that you could add upgrades to weapons and armor. The combat in general was a bit bland. The Mako vehicle was extremely frustrating to drive. The optional planets were boring and lifeless, they contained the same three buildings ALL OVER THE GALAXY. When loading scenes and areas it sometimes took several seconds for the textures to finish streaming, making the game look like it belonged more on the N64 than the Xbox 360. Most of the time, the characters talking have no expression and fall squarely within the Uncanny Valley.

The main quest was the most compelling part. Tracking down Saren and unraveling the mystery of the Reavers and Protheans was exciting, and the story kept me wondering what was going to happen next. The final space battle against the Reaver ship amidst the Citadel was truly epic, and ranks as one of the few endings to a game that actually lived up to and exceeded everything that came before it.

I completed the game, happy, though slightly disappointed that the many issues detracted from what could have been a masterpiece.

And yet...

I am in the midst of my 5th playthrough, with my third character. The first 3 were with the same character, a female, leveled up to the max and trying the different good/evil conversation options and using a combination of biotic powers and short range weapons. The 4th was with a male soldier decked out with heavy weaponry. My current character is a female engineer, master of technological attacks.

Playing as a soldier is pretty boring. Doing so makes the combat into a substandard shooter. It's when you start using biotic or tech powers that the game gets interesting. Lifting an enemy into the air, then throwing him across the room, or better yet, off a cliff, never gets old. Hacking an enemy geth so he turns around and begins firing rockets at his friends is great fun.

More than anything, though, the universe and people inhabiting it continue to draw me in. BioWare went to a LOT of effort to flesh out the history and motivations of the various races, and of many of the characters you come across. It feels like a real world, with real people.

My favorite parts of the game are on the Citadel in the beginning and on the first part of Noveria, one of the main quest planets. The Citadel is scattered with quests. They're quick, but bring up a variety of situations for you to resolve. They often require a high conversation skill to get the best or most interesting resolution to the quest. Noveria, though, really showcases BioWare's writing ability and questmaking skills.

Noveria is a world controlled by amoral corporations doing research across the planet. The side quests are made so that it's very tempting to choose the mercenary, look-out-only-for-myself path. If you do your utmost to stay on the straight and narrow, there might not be any benefit whatsoever. No experience points, no money, nothing. Being evil, on the other hand, makes it possible to backstab and betray nearly everyone you come across. Agree to smuggle illegal weapons into the port for a merchant, then sell it directly to his customer. Agree to place a computer virus on a businessman, inform the businessman of the plot against him, then tell your contact you planted the virus AND demand more money. In 5 playthroughs, I'm still encountering new outcomes to these quests.

In addition to things like that, the companions you have with you can change how some conversations play out. The order you choose to do quests can change other quests. The back story you choose for you character changes some quests and adds completely new ones.

Basically, if you only play the game once, you're missing out on a fairly large amount of the content BioWare created.

So I suppose that explains why I keep coming back to the game. I still feel like I haven't really described some of the undefinable appeal this game has for me, but I think I got the gist across. Even with the flaws listed above, I truly love this game. It sweeps me away to another world, and it's a world I can lose myself in.

The Pile of Shame

2008-10-14T16:05:00.000-04:00

I probably beat more of my games than the average person, but like everyone, there are games I own that I either haven't finished, or haven't even started. Without further ado, here is my list:

PS2
Final Fantasy X - I'm at the final boss fight, and can't beat him. I don't want to spend hours doing the necessary tasks to get the ultimate weapons, and all my characters are extremely high level. I just want to see how the game ends. I really loved this game until the point I'm at.

Final Fantasy XII - I would like to beat X before I start this one

Killer7 - Just havent gotten around to it

Gamecube
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker - I got stuck at the water temple. I really really liked the game. The art was fantastic, and it was my first Zelda game. The combat was a little clunky with the Gamecube controller, but everything about the game is great.

Resident Evil 4 - I know this is in people's top 10 game lists, but I HATED the controls. I also didn't like the fact that the zombies endlessly spawn

Wii
Super Mario Galaxy - I really like this game, but for whatever reason I don't really think about it much. It's just neglected and forgotten.

Xbox
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic - Excellent excellent game, but I was playing it on the 360 and the software emulation introduces a lot of sound popping and other problems. It made the game unplayable for me. I should start it again on the PC.

Xbox 360
Overlord - I really liked the demo, but for some reason had a hard time getting into the whole game. Basically I just got bored with it.

Hitman: Blood Money - I got this off Ebay for cheap. Played the intro level, and thought it was ok. Got stuck in the first mission and never went back. I doubt I'll ever finish this.

Viva Pinata - A very good game that nonetheless feels like too much work. I'm not a big fan of micromanagement in games and that's all this game is.

PC
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl - This game is a little too hardcore for me. Very realistic weapon behavior, very difficult enemies, it's just very unforgiving. I liked the atmosphere, but it wasn't much fun to play.

Fallout/Fallout 2 - No excuse, really. I've started Fallout a couple times but haven't got far. There's not really time to play them before Fallout 3 comes out either.

Diablo/Diablo 2 - I've started Diablo several times and, like Fallout, haven't gotten far in that one either. It just doesn't suck me in for whatever reason. I have a feeling I'll like Diablo 2 better but I'd like to finish the first one.

I'm probably forgetting some, but those are the biggest offenders at the moment.

How Much Game You Want?

2008-09-08T10:36:00.003-04:00

A few weeks ago, Shacknews.com was looking for more writers. I threw my hat in the ring and submitted a few things. It appears that they didn't take me up on the offer, so I'll go ahead and post what I submitted.

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How much game do we want in our games? How many hours of entertainment do we expect to get before we say that, yes, our money was well spent? Twenty hours? Forty? 100?

A frequent lament of gamers this generation is that games are becoming shorter. They yearn for the days of shooters with thirty hours of gameplay, and 100 hour epic RPGs. However, developers often claim that relatively few players actually get to the end of their games. Whether it’s because of uneven difficulty, boredom, or simply a lack of time, most people will never see the end of the adventure they’ve spent so many hours on. With this fact in mind, and the skyrocketing cost of producing triple A games, should developers continue making games that take weeks to complete?

There are a few ways developers extend the length of time we play their games. The most obvious way is adding a multiplayer component. For many gamers, multiplayer is the primary reason they buy a game. There are people who haven’t touched the single player campaigns in Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4. When the gameplay comes together just right, there are possibly hundreds of hours of enjoyment to be had in shooting strangers over the Internet.

Not everyone enjoys traditional multiplayer gaming, though. For some, the joy comes from experiencing a well done story. Developers make a choice on how long to make this story or campaign, but some have added ways to extend that experience through replayability. For some games, it’s nothing more than having multiple difficulty levels. Some games add optional collectibles to find. Collectibles add an incentive for exploring the game world thoroughly, and the best ones have a direct impact on the gameplay. Assassin’s Creed’s flags had no impact on the gameplay, but it did give the player an excuse to see parts of its cities that the story itself doesn’t take you to. Occasionally, these led to some beautiful vistas in the cities and kingdom. Crackdown’s collectibles were more satisfying, as finding the agility and hidden orbs improved your character’s stats.

Others add cooperative play to the mix. Playing with friends can make the most mediocre game more enjoyable. Throw in something like Halo 3’s skulls and campaign scoring, and you have multiple kinds of experiences to be had in the same story.

Let’s talk about the length of the story though. Whether playing alone or with friends, the length of a campaign, and whether or not it’s long enough, is a highly subjective but critical aspect of feeling as if you’re getting your money’s worth from a game. For me, the hours spent playing a game don’t matter to me as much as the feeling that they were hours well spent. Having just recently completed Okami, I can say that it was a great game. My main problem with it is that it’s so obviously padded for length that several times I contemplated giving up on it. Why did I have to fight many of the bosses twice? Why did I have fight one of them three times? It didn’t further the plot at all.

Some of my favorite games of the past few years have been relatively short affairs. Portal is the obvious example. Short, sweet, and as close to a perfect game as any I’ve yet played. I would have paid $60 for it. Call of Duty 4 has a fairly short campaign that could probably be beaten in one six hour sitting. Yet, it packed a more dense variety of locations, settings, and types of gameplay than many 40 hour “epics.” Half-Life 2: Episode One fixed my primary beef with its predecessor, Half-Life 2. For me, Half-Life 2 offered plenty of variety, but for the first two-thirds of the game it felt like each segment overstayed its welcome by an hour or more. On the other hand, once I hit Nova Prospekt, the game goes into overdrive for me and I don’t want to stop playing until I reach the end. Episode One, though, offered a dense variety of situations that lasted just long enough for me to feel satisfied, and so far it’s my favorite entry in the series.

As games and the consoles that play them get more expensive, this will become more of an issue. Right now, we’re seeing a lot of experimentation as far as pricing for downloadable titles on consoles. Five and ten bucks used to be the norm, but now we’re seeing fifteen and twenty dollar titles. Every gamer has a different idea of what a downloadable title is worth, so you get arguments over whether or not Braid is worth 1200 MS points. There’s the sense that XBLA, WiiWare, and PSN games aren’t “real” games because they’re so short. It makes more sense to me to judge a game’s worth on the overall experience though, not its length. Again, that’s a highly subjective thing to say, so I wouldn’t presume to force that viewpoint on other gamers. However, it may become a more common viewpoint out of necessity as the trend towards shorter games continues.

Your Love is Like Bad Medicine Company

2008-08-20T18:04:00.002-04:00

I won Battlefield: Bad Company in a raffle. It's not something I would have bought on my own, but I had my pick of any game. This seemed like it would be a nice diversion for a week or so.

Having never played a Battlefield game, I wasn't too sure what to expect. This is the first game in the franchise with a true single player campaign, so as always, I was more interested in playing that than the multiplayer. Things have taken a surprising turn, however.

I started the game on Normal difficulty and immediately began giggling at the dialogue among the characters. The banter between the Sarge (squad leader), Sweetwater (soft spoken yet talkative techy), and Haggard (loudmouthed and talkative explosives expert) is highly entertaining. You play as Preston Marlowe, a bland and quiet new recruit to B Company. While my playable character didn't excite me, the rest of the characters gave me high hopes for the rest of the game.

Unfortunately, as soon as I actually started playing I started to have misgivings. The enemies blend into the scenery a little too well. This may be realistic, I dunno, but I became very frustrated when I was being shot at and couldn't find the person shooting at me. I ended up having to stand still and look for muzzle flashes, all while continually losing health. Thankfully, you can restore your health at pretty much any time, and while you do respawn when you die, any enemies you've killed are still dead. The shooting itself didn't really excite me either. So far, none of the weapons have had any real oomph to them. Perhaps later weapons will feel more deadly as I find them.

I jumped into the multiplayer with some friends to try it out, and at first it was as unfulfilling as nearly every other multiplayer shooter I've tried. As we all know, human opponents in a game are the bane of my existance, and I find the mindless killing of deathmatch to be boring. However, once I tried the sniper and demolition classes, something clicked. Much like the two Ghost Recon games on the 360, there is some undefinable quality about the game that makes me enjoy playing, even when I'm dying over and over. Playing as a run and gun class was typically frustrating, but being about to sit still and snipe, or sit still and fire rockets at vehicles, was much more fun. Maybe I should stick to that for all my multiplayer gaming.

I'll keep hacking away at the single player unless I get totally bored with it. However, if you're lucky, you may actually get the unique pleasure of playing a multiplayer game with me. Assuming you have the game, of course.

It Is Finished

2008-08-13T00:07:00.002-04:00

Finally beat Okami. I may or may not have more thoughts on it later. For now, I'm going to bed.

Game Log - 8/11/08

2008-08-11T12:47:00.004-04:00

100% in Burnout Paradise! Woohoo! Now to work on getting all 420 online challenges. I think I'm up to 184 completed so far...

Made significant progress in Okami over the weekend. I think I'll have it beat in one or two more sessions. I'm probably not going to bother trying to get 100% completion in the game. It would just take too long and I don't feel motivated to take that amount of time to do so. Next Wii game is Super Mario Galaxy. That should be some good silly fun.

Bought Braid, and I really like it, but some of those puzzles are brain busting... Truly an amazing game though. I can't imagine what it takes to design such fiendish puzzles.

Even though I got to the final boss and was promptly slaughtered, I may once again try to beat Final Fantasy X. But I'm also thinking of starting Final Fantasy XII. But then I hear that it's a 60 hour game. I'm losing patience with these so called "epic" games that are really more like 20 hour adventures unnecessarily padded out for length. I want to play Lost Odyssey on the 360, but am hesitant for the same reason. Plus, with these JRPGs in particular, I'm afraid that I'll be stuck in the same situation as I am in FFX. I don't want to spend all this time progressing, only to get stuck at the end, unable to actually beat the final ultimate evil. Perhaps that's how these things play out in real life...? Whoa, I think I just blew my own mind...

Zoom Zoom!

2008-08-04T15:54:00.004-04:00

I haven't made much mention of it before, but I have become seriously hooked on Burnout Paradise.

It was a slow process. I hated the demo when it first showed up on the Xbox Live Marketplace. The open world environment was radically different from Burnout Revenge's traditional tracks, and the ever-present DJ Atomica made it feel as if I was trapped in a car with Ryan Seacrest. In real life, such a situation would call for smashing your car into oncoming traffic. In Burnout Paradise, you're ENCOURAGED to smash your car into oncoming traffic, yet doing so does nothing to make DJ Atomica shut his mouth. I deleted the demo and didn't give much more thought to it.

The thing is, I kept reading on message boards and chat rooms about how awesome the full game was. There was a constant stream of enthusiastic ravings about the game, and many of them were along the lines of "I hated the demo, but love the game now." So I finally procurred a used copy at a discount and got to exploring Paradise City.

In 6 or 7 weeks I've now logged between 60 and 70 hours total playtime, and have an 87% completion statistic. I've found the 400 fences to smash, the 120 billboards to jump through, and all 50 super jumps. I have nearly all the cars. It's addicting to upgrade my license, unlock new cars, and find new things in the city.

Perhaps most surprisingly for me is the fact that I actually play online in the game. Most of time it's with people I know, but there are 350 online challenges to complete, and sometimes you just need to find some strangers to do them with.

The latest update for the game, called Cagney, finally comes out on the 360 today. The PS3 players have had it for a few weeks now, but some last minute bugs have kept it from my desperate hands until now. It contains many bug fixes, and more importantly adds a host of multiplayer content to the game. I'm sitting here at work feeling like a kid on Christmas Eve waiting for the time when I can leave and play with all the new toys available to me. If you ever want to experience the rare joy that comes from playing a multiplayer game with me in something other than a co-op campaign, acquiring this game is probably your best bet.

Just thought I'd share that with you all.

(Supplemental, yet required, viewing: Zero Punctuation's take on the game)

Well That Was Different...

2008-07-31T12:46:00.003-04:00

So after writing my last post about Okami, later that night I played some more. During my playthough, I was shrunk down to 1/1000th of my original size. I then had to infiltrate the imperial palace and track down why an evil mist was emanating from it. Turns out, the sick emperor was the source of the mist. So what do I do? Jump down his throat, fall down his esophagus, and fight a boss battle in his stomach, of course!

And, well...

That was awesome.

Watercolor Dreams

2008-07-29T14:57:00.003-04:00

I picked up Okami for theWii, and it's been quite a fun experience. The motion controls are a little twitchy and take some getting used to, and your companion in the game, Issun, is mostly annoying. Everything else though is excellent. The graphics are gorgeous and really make me feel as if I'm walking inside a painting. The story is different enough from anything else I've played that it mostly feels fresh.

Here's the thing though.

I've played for around 21 hours or so. Very suddenly, without much warning, I was plunged into a pretty epic fight with the main antagonist. I was a little puzzled at this. As I progressed through the game I picked up various abilities that allow you to use your paint brush to perform different actions. There are 13 total actions, but at that point in the game, I had found 9. I also knew there was a whole other city that I hadn't gained access to. I thought that maybe the game gave you the option of finishing it without finding all of the powers and other content, which would have been very different from any other game I've played before. Alas, it was not to be.

I killed the bad guy, saved the day, everyone was celebrating. And then the game kept going. Apparently, some other evil wormed its way out of the original bad guy's rotting corpse and still needs to be put down. And to be honest, I'm not sure how inclined I feel to continue.

At this point, I feel like I've experienced the whole package. Sure, there are 4 more brush powers to find, but I looked the game up on GameFAQ's and it appears that I'm barely halfway through the game. What new stuff can there be to sustain another 20-30 hours of playtime? The story, being heavily influenced by ancient Japanese mythology, is different, but it still boils down to saving the world from the Great Evil. I've saved the world several times over at this point in my gaming life, so that's not a great motivator.

It doesn't help that while continuing into the next area, the Wii froze up about an hour after I had last saved my game. I thought only Xbox 360's came with that feature. :-(

Appreciating Older Games

2008-07-04T12:03:00.005-04:00

I finally finished Metal Gear Solid. Pretty much all of my thoughts that I had on it here still hold true. I did end up restarting the game though. I found a guide and had a lot more fun because of it. I finally found a lot of the hidden items that made my life easier in the game. I also was able to take advantage of some shortcuts that were only available in the Twin Snakes remake of the game. Finding the tranquilizer sniper rifle made it so I didn't have to backtrack through the whole freakin game to find the regular sniper rifle. Also, using the hot and cold pipes in Metal Gear Rex's facility to change the key card speeded up the process of deactivating the nukes considerably. Of all the boss fights, the confrontation with Metal Gear Rex was the only one that felt like a true boss battle to me. The entire game has been building up Metal Gear to be this invincible walking battle mech, and now I finally was able to take it on. The only other boss fights I really enjoyed were the ones against Sniper Wolf.

As I've been replaying, Metal Gear Solid 4 has of course come out and the hype for it has been through the roof. There have been plenty of reviews about the game, all mentioning many of the same complaints I have about the first one. Another thing I've been reading lately are people's recollections of the original game. Many talk about how blown away they were by the fight with Psycho Mantis, where he reads your memory card, telling you the games you've played, and have to plug the controller into another port for so that he can't predict your attacks. I've also read people talking about how unbelievably epic it was to fight Sniper Wolf in the snow field, or to rapel down the communications tower while under attack from the Hind helicopter.

For me, the only epic moment I felt was fighting Metal Gear. Dodging the lasers, diving out of the way of missles, then quickly bringing up the Stinger to fire off a missle at the radome before running away was exciting. It makes me wonder if games as a medium are more difficult to appreciate when you try to go back and play older games. As technology moves inexorably forward, the things you can do in games increases and makes it tough to go back to something older. After playing Half Life 2, I was wishing older shooters had realistic physics. After playing FEAR, I was wishing Half Life 2 had melee combat.

The time in which we play these games certainly has a huge impact on how much we appreciate them later. As I've said before, I had no consoles between the Sega Genesis and the Xbox 360. Part of why I started playing Metal Gear Solid was to catch up on this famous franchise I had missed out on. It's very likely that had I played it when it originally came out, I would have been as blown away as anyone else. The context of the time in which a game is released is important. I'm convinced that the 2007-2008 timeframe will be looked on as an important time in games. Call of Duty 4, Portal, Bioshock, Metal Gear Solid 4, and GTA4 have all pushed storytelling in games forward to one degree or another. On the other hand, in 10 years a young player may decide to play Portal for the first time and wonder what the big deal is. I never played Chrono Trigger. It's apparently a classic RPG. It's coming out on the DS now. I'll probably pick it up. I have a feeling that I'll like it, but not be blown away. Then again, I played The Longest Journey long after it was originally released, and it's one of my favorite games of all time. So we'll see.

Why We Play

2008-06-30T13:53:00.007-04:00

A few weeks ago I was working some pretty long hours compared to what I'm used to, and came home pretty tired and wanting to crash. Like most nights, I wanted to play some games, but I wanted something I could relax with. Looking at my shelf, I found very little that fit that requirement. Most everything I own are action games in one form or another. If I was at an earlier point in Final Fantasy X, I would have chosen that as its random battles are something you can take your time with. However, where I am now, each battle is a nail biting affair where I hope some monster doesn't get lucky and wipes out my whole party in one turn. I wasn't in the mood for a shooter. Burnout Revenge and Burnout Paradise can be somewhat cathartic when you're blazing through the streets at two hundred miles an hour. The problem is that it requires a high level of concentration and reflexes to avoid smashing into the obstacles in your way. I usually can't manage that even at the best of times. I finally settled on Rock Band. I played my favorite songs for a while on medium so the challenge was minimized. This worked admirably to destress me after work. In fact, after a while I bumped up the difficulty to hard and practiced that for a while.

It made me think about the kind of things I generally want from the games I play. I think more than anything, I want a well told story that sucks me in accompanied by gameplay that is addictive, intuitive, and, well, fun. I'm usually stressed out when I'm playing a game. Trying to survive a vicious firefight in Half-Life 2 is an exhilarating experience, and nothing is as thrilling and heartpounding as fighting an epic boss battle and coming out victorious. The key word there is heartpounding. While it may end with a smile on my face, I usually need to take a break and do something else before continuing after an experience like that.

A game like Burnout, Skate, or Rock Band usually has the addictive part down, at least at first. But the difficulty curve steadily (or not so steadily) increases as you progress. Eventually I don't have the patience to spend time getting good enough at the game to keep going, so I put it down and move on. They're fun, but they're not lasting experiences. Rock Band is a bit of an exception because there is a constant supply of new content to try.

I think my favorite games are ones that I don't actually remember playing. By that I mean that the story and characters were so amazing that I don't remember the actual gameplay. The Longest Journey is probably the best example of this. The only puzzles I remember are the incredibly frustrating and illogical ones. For the most part what sticks in my mind are the wonderful writing and characters that moved the plot along. Half Life 2: Episode One is another example of this. Alyx is the only AI companion in a game I've ever been happy to have along with me. In these and other games, I forget I'm playing a game and feel like I'm just along for a wonderful ride.

Successful Experiment is Successful

2008-06-26T11:32:00.003-04:00

The Great Game Watching Experiment of 2008 was, I think, mostly successful. We got all the way through Call of Duty 4 on the easiest difficulty. Even on that difficulty, there are parts of the game that were fairly difficult. It's interesting when you compare it to Halo or Half-Life and see the wildly different levels of difficulty that make up the so-called "Easy" setting.

Erin and Dan seemed to have trouble following the plot in certain points. COD4 in particular relies a lot on the loading screen between levels to set up the context for what's about to happen, and if you miss the information presented, either through text or voice overs, the following level won't always make much sense.

It was also interesting for me to replay the game with the intent of giving the other people in the room the best "view" of the action. I was acting as the director in a real sense, so I tried to make sure I was always facing where scripted actions were occurring so they wouldn't miss cool and interesting scenes. Sometimes I was successful, other times I don't think I was.

As I was playing I noticed where the game padded its length to fit more "game" in. I don't mean padded as in it needlessly made its length longer. I mean in the sense that there are sequences where the plot isn't advanced in order for the player to complete certain scenarios that are fun and exciting. Before, when I thought back on the game, I usually remembered the major plot points: the opening assassination, the nuclear blast, the utterly epic slow motion finale. I didn't really think about all the stuff that happened between those moments. COD4 could absolutely be condensed into an awesome action movie, I think. However, sequences like saving the disabled tank, the escape from the farm while calling in air strikes, and possibly the escape and standoff from Chernobyl didn't do much to advance the story. They're exciting to play, but for someone watching me play, it dilutes the main plot of the game and makes it hard to remember what's going on.

We'll be trying The Darkness next. It's got a story with a bit more emotional heft, and tells it a bit more traditionally as far as videogames are concerned. It has five acts, so I'm hoping we can do one act a night until we're finished.

Hyrule is Saved! (Again)

2008-06-10T23:49:00.005-04:00

Well, I officially beat my first Zelda game tonight. All in all, it was a good time. The things to do were varied and interesting. There were charming characters to interact with and epic bosses to conquer.

Having said that, I do have some complaints. I listed some the other night, but i'll add a few more.

I've heard people say that they really enjoyed the character of Midna. For me, she started out as annoying, then eventually became sympathetic as the story progressed. For me though, the most interesting relationship in the game was between Link and Ilia. Ilia is a teenage girl living in the village with Link. She helps take care of Epona, Link's horse, and seems to be in love with Link. She's eventually kidnapped by monsters, and Link rescues her. However, she's lost her memory. There's not much you can do about it at first, so you continue searching dungeons for various widgets to be used to defeat the evil king from the Twilight Realm.

The nice thing is that Link and Ilia's relationship was fleshed out enough in the beginning of the game that I was genuinely concerned about her when she was kidnapped and subsequently without her memory. Between dungeons and other activities I was constantly checking on her to see if and progress had been made by the local shaman. I was thrilled when I finally was given the set of tasks to restore her memory. While the music left a bit to be desired, the moment when she recognized Link was a memorable one, and made me genuinely happy.

The problem is that after this, she pretty much disappears from the game. You can go see her, sure, but she doesn't have much to say. During the credits, you see her waiting in the village for Link, but you never get to see their reunion. Do they happily wed and pop out a bunch of kids? Are they a cute farming/ranching couple? Does Ilia eventually become tired of hearing of her husband's legendary exploits as the Chosen Hero? Who knows. The game didn't see fit to tell me. After defeating Ganondorf, the game essentially just shows a montage of the characters returning home, but doesn't elaborate on much else. In my mind, I was saving Hyrule so that Ilia would be safe, not because the world itself was in danger. In Wind Waker, your sister is kidnapped in the beginning, which begins your quest. I knew nothing about her though. I felt more connection to my grandmother telling me to rescue her than the sister herself. I really didn't feel much of an impulse to continue Wind Waker once I got stuck, while Ilia in Twilight Princess served as my motivation.

Another part that felt undeveloped were the group of knights or adventurers who appear about halfway through the game. They sort of appear out of nowhere and lead you to the second set of dungeons. They talk about valiantly defending the kingdom and defeating evil, but all they really do is sit around a table in a bar. How are they qualified to help me? In the final dungeon they show up to help in one tiny section, run bravely into the dungeon entrance, and are never seen again. During the fight with Ganondorf, the castle explodes. Does that mean all those adventurers died? I don't recall seeing them in the closing montage, but I may just be forgetting they were there.

Speaking of the exploding castle, it would have been nice if the game had let me return to the world and hear people's reactions. The castle exploded! That's a big event!

Anyway, I DID like the game, I just felt that it didn't live up to all the potential it seemed to have. The idea of a reincarnating hero sent to defeat an undying or reincarnating villain is a cool one. From what I've read on Wikipedia and elsewhere, Wind Waker and Twilight Princess are most likely happening in parallel timelines created from the events of Ocarina of Time. I'd love for the next game to somehow bring those timelines together and bring some kind of closure to the seeingly eternal battle between Ganon and Link.

Game Log, and a Multimedia Experiment

2008-06-09T22:18:00.003-04:00

Sooo, what've i been playing since last we spoke?

Kameo: Elements of Power
Finally beat this, after buying it with my launch 360 way back in 2005. The graphics are still gorgeous, but the controls and gameplay are just kinda meh all around. Now I know why I gave up on it all those months ago.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
Very nearly finished with this. It's been fun, but the dungeons wear me out. Each one can take 3-5 hours to complete, with the climactic boss battle at the end. The battles are epic, but by the time I finally get to the boss, I just want out of the dungeon so I can either save and quite or move the plot along. Also, the contrived nature of the dungeons and how they're designed around the tools you find, along with arbitrary limits on things like the wallet tend to bring me out of the experience and remind me that, yes, I am in fact playing a game. Still, I'm glad to say that I will have finally finished a Zelda game.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Ahh yes, somewhat of an old standby for me. This time I'm playing it on the 360 as opposed to the PC. I miss the mods, especially the interface and texture enhancements, but the underlying game is still as fun and addictive as ever. I did, however, forget how tough the game can be on lower levels. Cyrodil is an enchanting place to spend time in.

Grand Theft Auto IV
Like millions of others, I've been spending lots of time exploring Liberty City and doing my best to disrupt the peace there. Don't have much to add that others haven't said, but the characters are interesting, the story mostly engaging, and the city itself great fun to play in. It can be incredibly frustrating to have to redo a mission for the 4th or 5th time because of shoddy handling of vehicles, but there are so many spontaneous moments that bring a grin to the face. These weren't scripted or programmed events, but just things that randomly occur because of what the designers made available in the world. I always have great stories to exchange with one of my coworkers who's also playing.

I convinced my sister and her husband to let me try a little experiment. There are a few games out there that I think have such good stories and interesting gameplay that I think they would work well as a "movie" or other non-interactive visual entertainment medium. So I thought, why not have someone watch me play the game much like we'd watch a movie or TV show together? A couple of candidates that came to mind were Call of Duty 4, The Darkness, and Shadow of the Colossus. I ended up trying COD4, and the two of them said they enjoyed it. I played on the easiest difficulty to minimize having to replay portions. Unfortunately, there is no invincibility cheat for the game on the 360. This may prove problematic on some of the tougher, later levels. They said they were willing to continue, so hopefully the plot makes up for any rough patches in the game.

That's all for now folks! Next post in... whenever it's posted!

Game Log - 5/1/2008

2008-05-01T16:59:00.003-04:00

Sorry I missed a day, but here we go.

*Condemned 2
Finally beat this. Felt like the game just stopped. There was a boss fight, but it was no more interesting than some of the other bosses I had faced. Finished off some easy achievements. The combat really is fun when you get in a groove and start making crazy combos against your opponent and then smash their head into a TV.

*Professor Layton
I've done only a few more puzzles on this. Haven't had too much time at work to whip out the DS. The past few puzzles have been pretty fiendish though.

*Burnout Revenge
This is something I haven't played in months. I burned myself out trying to get achievements, which in this game is very difficult to do. Last night I through it in the drive and actually played for fun, and, well, HAD some. The sense of speed is glorious and the crash intersections are particularly fun. Trying to deliberately cause as much destruction never gets old.

Game Log - 4/28/2008

2008-04-28T18:36:00.002-04:00

I did manage to get some gaming after all, though not much.

* Guitar Hero 2
While at my parents I set up my mom's new Xbox and we rocked out for a few minutes. What people say is right: Guitar Hero 2 on Hard difficulty is much harder than Rock Band's Hard difficulty. I need to practice.

*Condemned 2: Bloodshot
Got past the "shooting" stage that I was in. I was in the midst of a shoot out that I kept dying in, where enemies just kept spawning. Then, on yet another reload, I shot a few guys and a scripted event occurred to end the level. I don't really know what was different on that try compared to the others.

The subsequent level is back to quality bum beating form. The game still likes to throw parts at me that are significantly harder than what comes before or after. This causes me to get frustrated and quit, though usually coming back the next day is enough time between sessions to get me through.

That's all for the weekend. I might make an all-nighter of Condemned 2 tonight and try to finish it up. GTA 4 tomorrow!

Game Log - 4/26/2008

2008-04-25T13:36:00.002-04:00

In the spirit of Stephen Totilo's Game Diaries on the MTV Multiplayer blog, I'll attempt to list what I played the previous day and give some quick thoughts on it.

* Condemned 2: Bloodshot

I'm about halfway through this now. The first few level I had a hard time with. I wasn't completely clear on the combo system, and like the first game, getting the timing down for blocks and hits can take a while. The most frustrating part is when you're bumrushed (literally) by more than one enemy. The combat system doesn't seem able to handle that situation. The best solution in that case is to simply let one of them attack the other and pick off the survivor.

The level I'm in now is a pure shooting level. I'm not entirely thrilled about it. The draw of the game is first person melee combat. The guns were originally there to offer what I felt to be a breather from the close combat, and almost a reward for progress. Beat your way through that level? Here's a gun and six bullets for some easy long range kills. But when the game becomes exclusively a shooter, the flaws in the mechanics become more apparent. There's no aiming reticle, so you have to aim down the sight to be accurate. Also, you have to find bottles of alcohol around and drink them so your aim is steady. It becomes more of an annoyance than anything else. I've read that most of the end of the game revolves around shooting instead of hand to hand combat, which is disappointing.

*The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

This game is really fun, I must say. Granted, the gameplay is exactly like Wind Waker on the Gamecube, but I'm starting to think that my problem with Wind Waker and Metal Gear Solid may just come down to the fact that the Gamecube controller sucks. It's clunky and the buttons aren't laid out in a way that makes it easy to reach with your fingers. Maybe it's just my hands. The Wii controls in Twilight Princess just feel a lot better to me. I can't really quantify it.

I wasn't sure about the more realistic art style they went with, but it's grown on me now. I can't help but think that Link looks like a young Shigeru Myamoto. With elf ears.

I finished up the second dungeon, couldn't figure out where I'm supposed to go next (north, but WHERE north?), and put it down. It seems easier than Wind Waker as far as combat and puzzles, but I don't mind that.

*Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Played for an hour during lunch at work and unlocked a new section of town to explore. The puzzles are still keeping me entertained, even the frustrating ones. I haven't been this happy about a game purchase since probably The Orange Box last year.

***

Unfortunately, family obligations mean I probably won't get to play anything until Sunday at the earliest. We'll see though.

A Curious Occurrence

2008-04-24T14:53:00.003-04:00

I own a sleek Nintendo DS and a half dozen or so games for it. I had a lot of fun with New Super Mario Bros. and Tetris, but it's mostly been collecting dust since then. I bought Final Fantasy III for it but gave up on it after awhile. Recently, I've found reason to dust off the sleek handheld.

I was looking for a game to pass the time at work during lunch, and decided to pick up Professor Layton and the Curious Village. It's a great little puzzle game following the adventures of Professor Layton and his apprentice, Luke, as they try to solve various mysteries in the town of St. Mystere somewhere in Europe. The people of St. Mystere are pathologically obsessed with puzzles and brain teasers of various sorts, and they usually won't help you until you've solved a puzzle for them. They range from relatively straightforward to some that are true mind benders. Other puzzles are hidden around the game world, and there are also puzzles closer to the jigsaw variety, where pieces are scattered around the game and you find them in hidden places or get them for solving puzzles. I'm finding pieces of what appears to be a mechanical dog, and scraps of a painting. Not sure what it's a painting of yet.

The writing is excellent and there's quite a bit of voiceovers, which is rare for a handheld game. The art is a semi-cutesy 2D cartoon style. The town and characters are detailed and memorable, and the mysteries are interesting enough to keep me interested in finding out what happened.

It's great as a mobile game because you can do as many or few puzzles as you have time for (though you'll probably find yourself wanting to do more than you have time for if you're in a hurry). At home I have a 360, Wii, and PS2, so my gaming time is constrained as it is. Playing for an hour at work this past week has been a great way to get back into the DS. I was tempted to sell it, but the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog RPG from BioWare convinced me to hold on to it. I'm glad I did.

Your City Asplode!

2008-04-11T16:15:00.003-04:00

Half Life 2 - "Follow Freeman" level

Call of Duty 4 - Charlie Don't Surf level

I don't know about other people, but I find urban combat settings in shooters to be among my favorite. There is something about being in a chaotic warzone, bullets flying, rockets propelling, soldiers yelling in the distance, that gets me much more excited than your standard corridors and rooms in most shooters. Perhaps it's the feeling of being a small part of greater battle that is exciting. The battles also feel much more desperate and frantic. Any moment, you could walk around a corner and see an army of foes approaching you. It's not like a battlefield in the 18th century where everyone rushes at each other across a field.

Some games like CoD 2 don't get that feeling right. Everything feels very self contained in that game. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (GRAW) and its sequel also didn't quite get the feeling right for me. The levels were too sterile. It was only your squad, occasional support, and Mexican rebels. There were no civilians, animals, or anything to make it feel like a living city. It may come down to something as simple as sound design. If I can hear shouting, gunshots, and other sounds of battle in the distance, like they're just over that wall there, I immediately like a level more than if they weren't.

A good non-game example is the end of the movie Children of Men, when Clive Owen's character runs through a battle in the refugee city looking for the baby. I couldn't find a good clip of it, but if you've seen the movie you know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, that's one way a game developer can make me like their game more.

Final Fantasy X Annoyances

2008-03-31T17:03:00.002-04:00

I'm still really enjoying this game for all the reasons I listed previously. I have run into a few aggravating things about it though.

First off, unskippable cutscenes. As I said before, I like the cutscenes in this game, but I've now run into a few boss battles that are preceded by 5 minute long cinematics that I'm forced to rewatch when my party gets killed. Sometimes you can hit a button to cut short some of the dialog, but the animations still play out. I want to get back to the fight, not rewatch the same thing over and over.

Secondly, and I hear this is common to JRPGs, are the boss fights that are far more difficult than anything you've previously faced. At one particular boss fight, I was completely wiped out in one turn. It was so fast and brutal that I thought it was one of those boss fights that you're actually supposed to lose. That hope was dashed when the Game Over screen floated before my eyes. The same thing happened later. That particular boss had three different forms. I powered through the first two forms, but the very first turn of the last form destroyed me. Now I have to play through all three forms again.

Part of the problem I think is that the game is very forgiving during most of the regular exploration/dungeon crawling monster encounters. You don't have to worry too much about what characters to use. Sure, some are better than others in different situations, but for the most part you can brute force your way through the random encounters. The harder bosses, however, require a deeper understanding of the various status effects in the game and the various abilities of your characters. The game doesn't explain what Zombie means. I guess it expects you to either know from the previous games, or look at the manual, which is what I did. It's frustrating to spend 30 minutes on a boss then die because you weren't aware that the Zombie status, which is normally a bad thing, is actually required to survive one particular attack.

So those are my main gripes with the game so far. I've fairly close to the end now, and I'm ready to find out how this quest wraps up.

Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

2008-03-31T15:49:00.001-04:00

I bought a Nintendo Wii from a gentleman in New York State. Paid $300 plus $10 shipping. Went out and bought Twilight Princess and component video cables. Hooked it up. Basked in the comforting blue glow of the disc slot. Gloried in my ability to get news and weather from my gaming console. Didn't play any Wii games, but put in my Gamecube games.

Wait, what?

I guess I'm weird, but I was excited to be able to finally see Wind Waker and Metal Gear Solid in widescreen. Wind Waker in particular looked gorgeous. It really makes me want to play it again, which is good since I never finished it in the first place.

The Wii has the original Legend of Zelda, Zelda II, Link to the Past, and Ocarina of Time available for downloading. I'm seriously contemplating downloading them all and starting from the beginning. I think it'd be very interesting to chart the evolution of the series over time. If I did so, I'd have to make sure I didn't get burned out on Zelda. But it could be fun.

My current plan is to finish Final Fantasy X this week and start Condemned 2. Then we'll see where we go from there. I get the feeling that if I don't finish Metal Gear Solid now, I never will. How much does that prospect bother me? Hmm…

Do I Have Any Idea What I’m Talking About?

2008-03-25T16:46:00.001-04:00

In addition to the many I already have, I've recently developed a new insecurity.

You see, my first gaming console was the Sega Genesis. I didn't own another console until the Xbox 360. No Nintendo (of any flavor), no Playstation, no original Xbox. That's a massive gap in my gaming experience.

For a while I played exclusively on the PC. X-Wing, MechWarrior, Jedi Knight, Monkey Island, Half-Life, and Elder Scrolls were my entertainment of choice. At the same time I never played Starcraft. For Half-Life and Elder Scrolls, I didn't play these until the hype for the latest installments in the series was at full blast and I wanted to know what the big deal was.

This is mostly my fault of course. When my family had a Sega Genesis, I mostly played the Sonic the Hedgehog games. My parents didn't have the money or desire to buy me the latest releases, and eventually I grew bored with it. I read lots of books, and moved to computer gaming when we got our first IBM Aptiva desktop with Windows 95. I was still too young to be able to buy my own games, and even when my parents gave me an allowance I had to hoard it for weeks in order to buy something I wanted (which quite often was Star Trek action figures). Since I showed little interest in having another game console, my parents never bought me one.

Lately I've been trying to get caught up on older franchises on the console side of gaming, but it's a nearly impossible task. It's made slightly easier by services like the Wii's Virtual Console, so I don't have to track down and ancient game system and cartridges, but there's still the issue of time. New games are coming out all the time. There are thousands of older games I've missed out on. True, probably only a few dozen are worth playing, but that's still a lot of games.

Here's a handy list of some of the games and game franchises I've never played:

The Legend of Zelda (any except Wind Waker and the first hour of Ocarina of Time)
Just about every Super Mario game except Super Mario Bros.
Most Final Fantasy games
Every other famous JRPG out there
Most of the famous western RPGs (Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, most of Fallout)
Metal Gear Solid
Anything from Blizzard except for the beginning of Diablo
Deus Ex

And many others I'm sure I'm forgetting.

So, many times I feel unqualified to comment on something game related. I've read a LOT about these games, so I can point to what other people have said. There's a great series of posts at The Brainy Gamer about how Zelda might be improved for the future, and I did leave a comment on one of the posts, but I really couldn't contribute much because I hadn't played most of them. Kind of frustrating.

So to the one person a week who reads this: do I have any hope? Will I ever be able to hold court with the gaming cognoscenti?

Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy X, and Cutscenes (and Misc. Bits)

2008-03-24T16:52:00.001-04:00

I've gotten through the first disc of Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, and to be honest, it's been a struggle to get through. The game has no tutorial to speak of and simply throws you into a room with several guards and expects you to figure out how to either evade or incapacitate them. I was stuck in this first room for about an hour before I cried uncle and cracked open the manual. Only then did I learn that you can sneak up behind guards, choke the life out of them, and drag them out of sight. I suppose this is my fault more than the game's but I've grown to expect console games to show me how to play it. Mass Effect had much the same problem.

Once I managed to get out of the first room I was able to get a little more comfortable with the controls. But they strike me as incredibly clunky. You use the analog stick to move, but you either creep or run, and there's no smooth transition between those states. It's hard to know where the threshold between the two is. Many times I've been sneaking up to a guard, only to accidentally lunge forward, alerting him and everyone within a half mile radius to my location. It's frustrating.

The Metal Gear Solid series is known for its convoluted storyline told through extensive cutscenes. I don't mind cutscenes, but the ones in MGS are pervasive to the point of annoyance. When I finish one ten minute cutscene, get two minutes of gameplay, and then have to sit through another ten minute cutscene, I start getting frustrated. I just want to PLAY.

Don't get me wrong. One of my primary motivations for completing a game is to find out what happens in the plot of the game. Unless I'm replaying a portion of a game several times, I don't skip cutscenes. They're rewards for getting through a portion of a game and serve to further motivate me to continue. The problem is when the game forgets that it's a GAME and not a movie. This is Metal Gear Solid's problem. It wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that when I actually get to play, it's an exercise in frustration for me. The irony is that the story is pretty good. Espionage, double-crossings, and sudden twists are the name of the game, and it makes me interested to know what happens next. I'm just losing interest in playing to find out.

The other annoying thing is that there are sequences that require you to backtrack through areas you've already been. I basically had to replay the entire game at that point in order to find a weapon for a boss fight. Later, while looking online, I found that doing so wasn't strictly necessary, but that was what the game told me to do. Backtracking through levels of a game is a sure way to make me not want to continue playing.

On the other side of the coin, Final Fantasy X has been a wonderful experience. I think I'm about ¾ of the way through, and as my first extended experience with a Final Fantasy game, it's been great. The characters are interesting, the story has drawn me in, and the gameplay itself is great fun. My experience with JRPG's is limited, but I find FFX's sphere grid to be more interesting than Enchanted Arms' or Eternal Sonata's boring method of leveling up. You're constantly leveling up as you play, therefore making each play session feel rewarding. The puzzle sections are a nice diversion, though it would have been nice to have them more integrated in the rest of the game rather than keeping them in certain sections only.

Cutscenes in FFX are spread out pretty evenly. They can be long, and they've occasionally devolved into melodrama, but the excellent gameplay between them makes me far more tolerant of them. It uses a mixture of in-game engine and pre-rendered cutscenes. The pre-rendered ones are gorgeous, and are truly a nice reward at the end of an extended series of dungeon crawls. Every time I see one, I want more, but the game wisely keeps them special by not overusing them. I don't know if this applies to every Final Fantasy game, but it's certainly effective in this one.

In other gaming news, I finally finished Gears of War's campaign. I started from the beginning and beat it on Hardcore difficulty with help of a few people online, then played through Insane mode with the help of yet another. The game is much easier, and consequently much more fun, when you have someone playing with you. I even went a few rounds online, but as expected it didn't really suck me in.

I also picked up Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 again. The developers released a new set of co-op missions for download, so decided to try them out. I forgot just how difficult those co-op missions are. Once I found a group of good people to play with, it was a great time. Those missions really require coordinated teamwork. Strategy is essential. The only problem is that strategy can only be formed by playing a mission several times in a trial and error fashion to figure out what needs to be done. It's still immensely satisfying to beat those missions.

Finally, I received Condemned 2: Bloodshot in the mail. The first game was a terrifying experience, and I'm looking forward to the sequel. I'm going to try to hold off on it until I finish FFX though. As for Metal Gear Solid… I want to finish it. I want to know what happens next. But I won't be surprised if it enters my pile of unfinished games. And will I even give Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 a try? Stay tuned.

Shadow of the Colossus - Final Thoughts

2008-03-03T17:08:00.002-05:00

A month since my last entry! Well, I can assure you that I did finish Shadow and have a few thoughts on it. Some spoilers lie ahead.

The ending was as tragic and bittersweet as I expected, though there was a small glimmer of hope at the end. One interesting thing it did was give me control of the character during moments that most games would leave exclusively to cutscenes. While the outcome is set in stone as far as I know, there's a moment where you're being pulled down into a vortex. The game gives you control, and lets you desperately fight to stay alive as you're inexorably pulled toward your fate. It was a powerful moment, because I thought I could actually win and be reunited with my love. Sadly, this was not the case.

The battle with the final colossus was a truly epic experience. It was far larger than any of the others, and just getting to it was a harrowing, heart-racing experience. It probably took me around two hours to figure out how to beat it. Now that I know how it's done, it probably wouldn't take very long at all, but it required lots of trial and error at multiple steps to figure it out.

I suppose I have to mention Agro, the horse. It had previously been spoiled for me that he died a rather unexpected death, so while I was sad when that moment occurred, it didn't have as much impact as I'm sure it did for many other people. What I didn't know, however, was that he wasn't actually dead! When he limped back into the temple, I was truly elated.

One thing I was a bit disappointed in was that, even though there were a couple moments of interactivity, the ending was told mostly through cutscenes. I think I'm starting to get tired of the traditional cutscene in games, and hopefully I'll put my thoughts down in writing sometime soon.

Next post will be about my experiences with Metal Gear Solid, and that'll tie in with the cutscene thing.

Shadow of the Colossus - I feel so sad

2008-02-05T18:23:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about the fact that I feel bad about killing the colossi and how other games haven't really elicited this sort of response from me. When I'm playing I feel pretty gloomy. There are fun moments of course, but in some ways it's like watching a gloomy movie. Movies like A History of Violence are entertaining, but they're not particularly cheery either. You feel kind of sick watching some parts of it. More extreme examples are Requiem for a Dream or Schindler's List. Those are both all around dreary movies. You're more likely to say "It was a good movie" than "I liked it." I mean, who likes Schindler's List? Shadow of the Colossus is the same way. I feel like I'm watching a tragedy unfold before my eyes, but the difference is that I'm causing it to happen. I'm so selfish and grief-stricken at the loss of my love that I'll do anything to bring her back, even at the cost of my soul. I'm not passively watching people spiral into oblivion. I'm sending them there myself. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's as bad as Schindler's List, but I think A History of Violence is a better analogue.

The monsters are getting more and more difficult to take down, and it's truly becoming an exhausting experience. While it took me around 3 hours to beat the first eight, the last two took me nearly two hours to bring down. This contributes to feeling down when I play the game. At the end of the battle there's no elation, just relief that it's over. I noticed in the first eight that the difficulty levels were all over the place. Some went down quickly, while others took longer, so perhaps an upcoming battle will be more straightforward than the last couple. When I turn the game off I long for something sunny and happy to watch or play. I really need to find a Wii so I can play Super Mario Galaxy...

Shadow of the Colossus, Part 2

2008-01-31T23:49:00.000-05:00

Well I'm about six monsters into the game now and I think I've got the format of the game down. It's basically a puzzle game. The puzzle is how to get on to the creature in the first place. The first monster was simple: just walk up to it and start climbing. The rest haven't been so simple. It's usually involved getting the creature to lower a limb. Occasionally I've had to bait it to attack me, dodge the attack, then quickly climb up the weapon or limp before it pulls up. A couple of times I've been unable to figure out what to do. When this happens, the game gives hints. So far there's a general hint, then if I'm still running around not getting anywhere, the hint gets more specific. I don't mind this much since I prefer to progress through the game instead of wasting time not getting anywhere. In once instance the hint was something that, to me at least, was not obvious or intuitive at all. In other cases, I'm able to figure it out and feel good about myself.

The fights themselves are still always tense and exciting. However, I still feel somewhat bad once the fight has been one. I have noticed though that the creatures are starting to attack me first more often, and that because of this I don't feel as bad when they finally go down. But then I wonder, has news of my exploits spread to the other creatures? Are they using a good offense as their defense? Then again, the flying creature that I had to kill in mid-air didn't bother me at all until I shot it with a bow and arrow. I imagine that would piss most people off.

I'm mostly okay with the controls at this point. My main source of frustration now is that sometimes when climbing the beast they're unresponsive. Depending on where on the creature's body you are, it will try to shake you off. Depending on how hard it's trying to do this, my character can do nothing but cling valiantly for his life. Since there is a limited time in which I can hold on, I've run into situations where once I grab on to the beast I can't go anywhere because it's shaking too hard. So then I plummet to the ground, usually surviving the fall, and have to start from the bottom all over again. I guess this is a realistic game mechanic, but when I have one blow left to kill it and then get shaken off, I get frustrated.

All in all though, I'm enjoying the game. I've been playing it one or two monsters at a time, since the fights tend to be kind of exhausting. There are sixteen monsters in all, so I still have some ways to go. There are no hints yet as to the motives of the disembodied voice that's tasked me with killing these beasts. I'm looking forward to finding out what's going on there.

Shadow of the Colossus, Part 1

2008-01-28T23:02:00.000-05:00

After a lot of creative rearranging, replugging, and tidying up, I got my entertainment setup all arranged with the shiny new PS2 and the Gamecube I got for free a while back. Everything seems to be mostly working, but my TV is out of inputs, so I can only have the Gamecube or PS2 plugged in at a time, not both. I definitely want a new TV.

I was housesitting my parents' house this past weekend, so when I bought the PS2 I was down in St. Mary's County. I hooked it up to their TV to make sure it worked. I also tried playing Shadow of the Colossus for a few minutes. It actually didn't work at first. Insanely long load times, graphical glitches, and lock ups greeted me when I tried to play. But after looking at the disc and wiping off the strange goop I found, it seems to be working perfectly so far. Serves me right for buying the game use.

I've heard a lot about this game, almost all of it good, so I was anxious to see how it goes. When the game loads a cutscene plays showing the main character riding his horse through a treacherous cliffside path and approaching an incredibly long bridge while a rather haunting but beautiful musical score accompanies it. After loading a new game, the cutscene continued and my character wound his way into a sort of temple. He got off his horse, and then picked up something from it that I hadn't noticed at first. I realized it was the body of a woman. He carried her to what looked like an altar then cried out for the attention of some god or mythical being. The god, whose name I can't remember, answered and basically asked what this guy wanted. The hero answered that he wants the woman's soul returned to her. I guessed that meant she was dead, and that this hero was in love with her. The god said that it was impossible for mortals, but since the hero happens to be carrying a special sword, it might be possible for him. All he has to do is destroy the colossi roaming the land. There is a statue in the temple for each one. The hero agrees to do so, but the deity warns that there will be a price to pay. The hero says it doesn't matter and goes on his way.

At this point I'm guessing that this quest isn't going to end well. The god speaking to the hero has a rather creepy sounding voice. The way he spoke about the colossi seemed vaguely sinister and he seemed to be using the hero to serve his own ends. It's just a feeling I have, and we'll see how it turns out. Perhaps the deity is one of the colossi, and is seeking to destroy the others for his own ends? We'll find out, I guess.

After the cutscene ended, I was given control of the main character. Right away, I hit a snag. The direction the camera moves is, by default, inverted from the direction it moves by default on the 360. Pushing up on the analog stick made the camera go down, instead of up like I'm used to. I was able to change this in the options, however. The controller itself took a bit to get used to. It's significantly smaller than the 360's controller, and I felt like my hands were too close together. By the end of my time, however, I was more accustomed to it.

After a tutorial that felt rushed, I found myself facing my first colossus. It was a hulking beast with hooves almost twice my height and it wielded a massive club. It was pretty magnificent to behold from a distance. It shook the ground as it walked and created gigantic cracked footprints int he earth. As I ran towards it I realized just how huge this thing was. Unfortunately, I found myself starting to wrestle with the controls. The control scheme is different from any other game I've played before, so I had a hard time remembering how to jump, climb, and grab on to things. The main portion of the game seems to be climbing these giants and attacking their weak spots until their dead. I basically got trampled to death a few times because I couldn't figure out how to climb up the beast's body. After several tries I started to get the hang of it. There's a meter that shows how strong my grip on the beast is, which helped my realize when I was about to get shaken off. I also found a few platforms on the beasts back which I was able to climb onto to get my bearings.

Climbing this thing was pretty exhilarating once I figured out the controls. I found its first weak spot on its leg and slashed away at it with my sword, and after that was able to climb higher. In some ways it seemed like a giant, furry, walking building. It had hair that I could use to climb, but it also had the aforementioned platforms to use, along with what almost looked like carved stone. It's final weak spot was directly on top of its head. I climbed its fur all the way up and started attacking it. It actually managed to shake me loose and I fell all the way to the ground again. I thought I was dead but I somehow survived. I climbed back up and dealt the final few blows, bringing it crashing to the ground. A mournful piece of music began playing, and I actually felt a little bad about killing this thing. It hadn't done anything to me, I just ran up to it and started slashing away at it. I've heard of people saying they didn't finish this game because they couldn't bring themselves to kill the remaining colossi. I can already understand why.

The whole tone of the game so far is mournful and subdued. The hero is obviously grief stricken from this gir's death, and he's traveled far to get to the temple. The music is sad and mournful. The color scheme so far is washed out browns, yellows, and some greens. It's not a cheery landscape to ride across.

So that was my first hour or so with Shadow of the Colossus. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to play more. I'm not sure how many colossi I have to kill. Maybe eight to ten in all. I know I've read the number somewhere, but the exact number escapes me at the moment. Here's hoping it's a fun quest.

I bought a Playstation 2

2008-01-28T12:33:00.000-05:00

Yup, I went out this weekend and bought me a shiny silver PS2. Along with that, I also picked up Final Fantasy X and XII, Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3, Killer7, and Shadow of the Colossus. I also have coming in the mail Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes, for the Gamecube. I've wanted to try out the Metal Gear Solid games for a while, along with some of the other franchises I've missed over the years, so I plunked down the money and am on my way to not-quite-retro gaming bliss. Can you believe I was still in high school when the PS2 came out?

In other news, I recently completed Tomb Raider Anniversary, the remake of the original Tomb Raider. It was fun, but it was interesting seeing how the series has come since it first started. Most of the levels revolved around a hub room, with several rooms branching off. To solve the main hub room puzzle, you had to solve the puzzles in the other rooms first. Tomb Raider Legend was much more linear. You enter a room, solve a puzzle, then go to the next room and solve its puzzle. Anniversary (and I guess, by extension, the original Tomb Raider) felt much more contrived and "game-ish." It didn't bug me too much though. They also dropped some hints that linked Anniversary's story with the story that began in Legend and, I assume, will continue in the recently announced Tomb Raider Underworld. There was also an unexpected but welcome bit of character development.

I honestly don't remember how this played out in the original game, but in Anniversary Lara doesn't kill any body until near the very end of the game. She kicks the crap out of folks a couple times, but comes short of taking their life. Near the end, though, she finally has to kill a man to continue on her quest. After she does, she realizes what she's done and is horrified, and tries to wipe her hands off. She can't wipe the blood off though. They really nailed her animation and facial expressions when all this is going on. Contrast this with Tomb Raider Legend, where the first enemy she meets is a faceless mercenary she casually guns down. I'm wondering if they'll touch on this in the next game.

Anyway, my plan now is to try Shadow of the Colossus and write about it here as I go along. Once I finish that I'll start on Metal Gear Solid, and then maybe Final Fantasy X. I don't want to play all the games in each series in a row or else I'm liable to get tired of them. It should be interesting.

An Hour With World of Warcraft

2007-12-13T16:45:00.001-05:00

My sister has been having persistent issues with WoW such as Blue Screens of Death, crashes to the desktop, etc. At this point I think it has to do with the particular combination of hardware in her computer, since no amount of software updates have managed to take care of it. The annoying thing about them is that the problems never seem to happen immediately. My sister plays for an hour or more, and then it will suddenly crash. It's hard to test if my ministrations have had any effect. A few days ago, I went over to her house to take another crack at the problem. Instead of trying some things and then leaving immediately, I decided to try playing and see if I could reproduce the problem. The added bonus to this was that it kept me from having to help my sister with frantic preparations for a Christmas party the day after.

My sister has commented on the fact that I seem to know a decent amount about the game even though I had never played. This is because of the massive number of gaming sites I read. I'm bound to pick things up as time goes on. I've also learned things just listening to my sister talk about the game. But as with any game, you have to play to really be able to talk about it. At least now I can say I've played it.

I rushed through the character creation process because I just wanted to get in and start playing. I chose to play as a Tauren, a race that looks like a bunch of Minotaurs. I pretty much chose them because I had never heard of them while reading things about the game. Since I rushed through the screens, I missed the part that let me choose my class, so I ended up being a straight up warrior. My guy had a big two handed hammer on his back, which I figured I could live with. After a short, though unskippable, cutscene describing the Taurens, I found myself in the middle of a small village made up of tents with various merchants inside. Guards wandered around, along with other new and low-level characters like me. In front of me was another Tauren with far more elaborate clothing than what I was wearing. He also happened to have a gold exclamation point floating above his head. I figured that this meant I could talk or interact with him in some way. I was right, and he gave me my first quest!

As far as RPG quests go, this was about as stereotypical as you could get. Bring back seven feathers and seven of something else from the creatures wandering the nearby plain. I don't remember what they were called, but it doesn't really matter. The first thing I think is "Why seven?" Is that a special number? Why not ten? Or fifteen? It seemed somewhat arbitrary. So I go forth from the village, ready to pillage the countryside. I encounter my first creature and attack. My first encounter with combat in the game was less than satisfying. The animations were relatively simple, and there was no sense of weight or impact when you hit your foe. It seemed to be somewhat turn based since I would attack, then the creature, then me again, and so on. He fell beneath the blows of my hammer nonetheless and I searched its corpse for the items I needed. Yay, a feather! But not the other item I needed (I can't remember what else I was supposed to find). But I did get a couple cracked eggs! So I needed to kill more than just seven. I understood right away that this was a grind. Keep killing hapless monsters until I get what I need and, hopefully, level up in the process.

Eventually I killed enough creatures to get what I needed and headed back to the village. The guy was pleased and let me choose a piece of armor for myself. It seemed like a pretty good upgrade, and he had another quest for me. Kill ten cougars and bring back their furs! Ugh. Ok. So I went and did that. At one point my health was somewhat low, and a person with a higher level druid character wandered by and healed me. I thought that was nice of him. He had nothing to gain by it as far as I knew. I brought back the required number of furs and got another piece of armor. I was given a new quest to go find a missing woman who had wandered from the village.

Instead of following through with that right away, I started exploring the village and selling the various bits of crap I had accumulated from my monster massacre. I was able to get a few nice weapons. I also saw several characters wandering around with the gold exclamation point floating above their head, so I got a few more quests. There was another kill this many of that quest, but one person wanted me to deliver a package to a town to the north. Another person wanted me to go speak to a hermit to begin my rite of passage in the tribe. So I had a few options available to me now. I started off after the missing woman and found her nearby at a well. I walked back to the quest giver, but apparently I didn't read carefully when I was talking to her and was supposed to give him a pitcher of water. So I walked back to the old woman, got the pitcher, and walked back and delivered it.

The first couple of quests were less than inspiring, but once I finished the missing woman quest I started to get sucked in more. I began looking for the village to the north to deliver my package. While wandering the countryside I killed random beasts that I encountered, many of them more formidable than what I had encountered previously. I learned how to use some spells to help me out, and it was a real rush to take out a level 7 monster with my level 2 Tauren. I started gaining experience and leveling up. After delivering the package and selling more stuff, I started to finally notice what it was about the game that makes it more of a lifestyle for some people. Getting new gear and money for each quest was nice. The rewards were immediate. The little jingle and animation that played when I leveled up became something I looked forward to. The quests were short and relatively easy to accomplish, at least up to that point. I started thinking to myself "one more quest" or "one more monster."

It was at that point that I stopped.

I had quickly grasped the interface and gameplay mechanics, and it was slightly disturbing to see how little time it took for the game to sink its hooks in my brain. I've had this happen with a couple games in the past, and they usually kept me up into the wee hours of the morning. I didn't think my sister would appreciate me hanging out in her basement all night. So I walked away wanting more, which is what I suppose the game's developers were hoping for. I have no intention of setting up my own account. I can't see myself paying every month to play a game. However I can now say I spent some time playing the game, and came away with mostly good impressions. It was an interesting experience.

Story and Character Driven Gaming

2007-11-27T01:22:00.001-05:00

Six weeks since my last post. I'm really going to try harder to do this more often. Seriously, it's pathetic that I can't force myself to sit down and write something.

Lately I've been playing games that are heavily story driven. There are what might be considered more traditional types of games such as Tetris or Pac-Man, which are driven purely by their gameplay mechanics. If you move up the scale slightly, you have games like Super Mario Brothers or Sonic the Hedgehog. A wisp of a plot is there, but often you'll only find it by reading the manual. As you keep going up the scale measuring relevance of plot to the game, you start getting into games like Assassin's Creed and at the farthest extreme are games like Half-Life and Knights of the Old Republic. At this far end the story is developed simultaneously with, or even before, the gameplay. These tend to be the kinds of games I gravitate towards.

A lot of games that have recently come out try for a cinematic experience. Call of Duty 4's sole goal seemed to be to place the player into an intense and almost overwhelming action movie-ish war scenario in a modern setting. In my opinion, it does this almost flawlessly. The game starts with a coup in an unnamed Middle Eastern country that you view from the first person viewpoint of the deposed leader. It ends in slow motion, with the player dramatically (melodramatically?) taking out the coup's mastermind. In between is urban warfare, a nuclear blast, and heart pounding stealth action. It's a relatively short and self contained story. It's short enough to truly feel like an interactive action movie where you get to play the hero.

Games like Half-Life might be better compared to a TV show. There are over half a dozen games in the Half-Life universe. Some are part of the "main" story while others tell peripheral stories from other viewpoints. All of them take the time to develop their characters over time. I'm not a huge fan of most of what's on television, but of the shows I do enjoy, part of what I like is how the main characters are fleshed out over time. In some ways they become like old friends who you've grown to understand over time. Long series, or long games like those in the role playing genre, feel like this. Like other forms of fiction, you start to care about these companions and grow concerned about what happens to them. This is obviously something that's different for every game and every player, but for many the reason they keep playing is to find out what happens next to these people. An example from my own experience is a scene from Half-Life 2: Episode One.

At the beginning of Half-Life 2 you meet Alyx Vance, the daughter of Eli Vance. Eli Vance is one of the scientists you encounter in the original Half-Life. She's tough, smart, and funny. Notably, she's not hyper sexualized like most games portray women. In Episode One she becomes a valuable companion as you make your way through the game. She's highly effective at taking out enemies with you, she makes comments about the situation that are alternatively funny and insightful, and she cares about what happens to you. Up to this point, every sidekick I had ever been stuck with in a game usually did more harm than good. They tended to make me want to kill them myself rather than continue on with them. This was not the case with Alyx. She was someone I enjoyed having around. About 1/3 of the way through Episode One you and Alyx escape from an enemy installation on a train. As the train starts moving Alyx realizes that the car you're in is filled with caged humans who have been reduced to blind, insane slaves. There's a loud noise, the lights go out, and the train derails. When the lights come on, you're at one end of the train and Alyx is at the other. The cages have fallen over and the slaves are mindlessly screeching and screaming. Alyx is pinned beneath one of the cages with a slave biting and clawing at her face. You have to make your way to the other end of the car and pull the cage and its screeching contents off of her so she can climb out. There's an opening in the side of the car, and you climb out with Alyx following behind. Ahead is a door leading away from the area. You start moving towards it.

"Hold on a second."

Hmm? I turned around. There's Alyx, the zombie slaying badass who's accompanied me through a dozen or so hours of game, slumped against the wall and visibly shaken by what's just happened. A shriveled, screeching, shell of a person just tried to kill her, and she was helpless to do anything about it. I felt bad for her. This digital character, whose only link to reality is the voice actress and the person used to model her face, was someone I cared about and wanted to look after as much as she did for me. I wanted to comfort her somehow and was frustrated at the fact that the game had no way to allow me to do this. I rarely get attached to characters in a 90-120 minute movie. It happens slightly more often in TV shows, but it's still not common. Somehow a game was able to wring out genuine emotions from me other than frustration or the excitement. This is the kind of experience I want from all of my games.

I'm not saying that I ignore games like Tetris. Games that rely solely on gameplay are great and are among my favorites. But I'm a huge proponent of the idea that games can also tell meaningful stories about real people. For the most part, the primary driver of most games is violent conflict. Whether it's a first person shooter like Half-Life or an intricately plotted RPG like Mass Effect, the primary gameplay is combat. I'm hoping that within the next five years or so we'll see games that at least present other options as resolutions to problems, or make them the only options. No guns allowed. Storytelling in games is still in its infancy, and as the medium matures I'm hoping that developers and designers come up with novel ways of using games to present an interesting narrative. Where's the gaming equivalent of Forrest Gump or A History of Violence? Hopefully we'll see it soon.

Testing Posting from Microsoft Word

2007-10-13T19:57:00.001-04:00

Supposedly you can post from directly within Word now, so that's what this is! Neat!

Why I Love Half-Life

2007-10-13T19:27:00.000-04:00

The latest installment in the amazing Half-Life series is out as part of The Orange Box from Valve. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 is the continuation of the story from Half-Life 2: Episode 1, which was a continuation of Half-Life 2. Silly naming convention, but the games are awesome.

I love how the games have the consistent goal of making you feel as if you're in your own action movie. What makes this work for me is the perfect choices they make in where to put music. All the games have these memorable moments in particular that stand out because of the awesome action music that starts at just the right time. In HL1 it was your first firefight with the soldiers. In HL2 it was the beach assault on Nova Prospekt right after you gain control of the antlions. In Ep1 it was when you and Alyx mow down zombies with shotguns in the hospital. In Ep2 it's the final part of the turret vs. antlion battle when the Vortigaunts show up. I love the more traditional scores from many games such as Elder Scrolls and Halo, but Half-Life's sparingly placed techno beats elevate those moments to true action hero awesomeness.

The various sounds are part of the experience. When I heard the suit's Geiger counter go off in this latest episode, a big grin appeared on my face. The weapon sounds are instantly recognizable, as are many of the voice actors and other sound effects. The Halo games have many familiar sounds throughout, but they don't give me that warm fuzzy feeling that Half-Life does. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but it works wonderfully in my case.

So overall I guess a big part of what makes Half-Life such a favorite of mine is the audio experience. You can tell that they've spent a lot of time on that portion of the game.

The other part of what makes these games amazing are the characters. Valve has spent a considerable amount of time on the AI and character animations for the people who accompany you through the Half-Life 2 saga. They also have amazing voice actors to give life to these characters. The original Half-Life had pretty good enemy AI for the time, but nobody accompanied you throughout the game. Through all of the Half-Life 2 games, there are recurring characters that you grow to care about. In Episode 1 especially, the character of Alyx is the best AI companion I've ever had in a game. She's written very well, and is genuinely helpful when battle hordes of zombies and soldiers. After a rather horrifying experience, she stops and almost breaks down. It made want to give her a hug and tell her everything will be fine. No other game has made me emotionally invested in my AI companions. The other characters are also interesting, and while not all of them are likable, they're all memorable. Episode 2 has at least two gut wrenching scenes involving these characters.

Anybody who calls themselves a gamer needs to play these games.

Teh Haloz 3

2007-10-07T23:26:00.000-04:00

Well that was an incredibly short lived streak. Oh well.

I finished Halo 3 today, a little over a week after getting it. This time I played on Heroic difficulty, and it was challenging but overall a fun experience. It was definitely more of the same, but that didn't bother me. There were new weapons that took some getting used to but nothing that really surprising. Story spoilers now commencing...

Storywise, the trilogy was wrapped up pretty well. There were many nice nods to the first game that made me glad to have played it instead of just jumping in to this first one. The first two games had you stopping Halo rings from firing, which would have wiped out all sentient life in the galaxy. This game finally let a ring fire, though it had a much more localized effect. You're finally able to kill a robotic being from the first and second game who alternately helps and hinders you throughout all the games. The grizzled sergeant finally meets his end. The Flood is stopped, and the Covenant defeated. Pretty much every story thread was dealt with in some fashion.

Some of the problems still remain. Backtracking still makes a few appearances, and once again there are few audio options, so it's easy to miss dialog while playing. There are subtitles during cutscenes, at least. The difficulty level fluctuated pretty wildly at times. Some areas were a breeze, even on Heroic, while some areas were incredibly tough. During these parts I got the sense that these had been designed to play through on Coop as opposed to single player. In the last third of the game there are two massive battle tanks called Scarabs that you have to take down. This took many tries and I was only able to beat it through a great stroke of luck. It would have been much easier if I had had even one person playing with me. Having a full team of four players would have been a breeze.

I'm not sure what else to say about it. It was fun, which is the most important thing. I hope that I can play through it on Coop one day, but I doubt that'll happen.

Teh Haloz 2

2007-10-02T20:55:00.000-04:00

As of tonight I'm three for three in my contiguous days of writing goal.

My overall feeling toward Halo by the time I was finished playing was that it felt like work. It did have some good things about it, but I doubt I'll ever pick it up again. Once I was finished with that, it was time to move on to Halo 2.

My first reaction to Halo 2 was that the graphics were MUCH better than the original. I've always found it fascinating that when a new console comes out, the graphics on the first generation of games for that system often don't look much better than the latest offerings on the previous console. However, if you jump ahead a few years and see how the games are looking, you'll see that there is an enormous leap in quality and overall graphical shininess. Developers just need the time to figure out how to unlock all that power. Halo 2 proved this handily.

The biggest difference I noticed right away was the introduction of dual wielding. One handed weapons could now be held in both hands, instantly doubling your firepower. The trade off is that you're unable to use grenades. I had trouble adjusting to using both triggers on the controller to fire, so after a short time i gave up using it and switch to the tried and true weapon and grenade formula from the first game. I was forced to switch back to dual wielding at the first boss battle. An enemy on a jetpack flits around a large room while two holographic copies do the same. The problem with the copies is that they do just as much damage as the real one. After several tries I realized that I simply wasn't doing enough damage in the time I had. Plus, the enemies were also dual wielding and were doing too much damage to me in a short time. After deciding to dual wield myself, it took a few more tries before I was successful. Once a new race of enemies called the Brutes were introduced I found myself using dual wielding again much more often. The Brutes soaked up bullets like a sponge and there weren't enough grenades to go around for everyone, so dual plasma rifles became my preferred method of exterminating them once i ran out of explosives.

The second, and biggest, change from the first game is that the story switch perspectives between the Master Chief and a character known as the Arbiter. The Arbiter is a member of one of the Covenant races that you spent the first game slaughtering. The story of Halo 2 is more complex than in the first game, and much of this is accomplished by the fact that you now see the enemy Covenant from their own point of view. The Arbiter and his race are eventually betrayed by the Covenant's leaders and end up joining human forces. While this made the story of Halo 2 more interesting to me than Halo's, the story broke down near the end. The perspective switched suddenly back and forth between the characters and I had trouble knowing where exactly I was. The Arbiter levels were actually easier to follow than the Master Chief's. In the last third of the game I thought that the Master Chief and the Arbiter were on different parts of the Halo ring world. Later, through Wikipedia, I found that the Master Chief was actually on a Covenant city-ship. The levels at the end finished abruptly and felt like there was more to do than I got to play. Then there was the sudden end to the game itself. This didn't bother me much because Halo 3 was of course coming out the next week, but I can see why people playing it when it came out would be upset. The game didn't end, so much as just stop.

Playing the Arbiter was fun at first, but I soon came to dread the levels played as him because they usually involved fighting the Flood. It was obvious that they weren't as hard as the first game, but they were still a downright annoying enemy to have to deal with. It wasn't until late in the game that Master Chief had the (dis)pleasure of dealing with the Flood. The one good thing about these levels is that the Arbiter had a kick ass energy sword that dispatched swift death to the Flood, and all other enemies as well. It almost made up for the frustration of dealing with them in the first game.

The first level of the game was surprisingly tough, but overall the game felt easier than the first. I was playing on Normal difficulty, and it brought back the satisfaction that I had been missing while playing Halo on Easy. The challenge was there, and there were parts where I got stuck, but it once again felt fair. There WAS a way to get through the tough battles as long as you had the skill and didn't mess up. It wasn't just luck that was propelling you through the tough parts. There were new weapons to master and each had their tradeoffs. I often found myself returning to old favorites from the first game, but I found uses for just about all of them.

There was much less copy/paste level design in this game than in the first one, though it was still there in spots. It had few open areas for the kind of open ended "arena" type battles that the first game had. Hallways leading to rooms leading to hallways seemed to be the more prevalent level design choice in this game. There was more variety to the levels though, and for the most part I didn't find myself getting bored with each level like in the first game.

Overall I had more fun in Halo 2 than Halo. I'm apparently in the minority, but the improved graphics, variety in levels, switch in perspectives, new weapons, and tweaked difficulty level all combined to make Halo 2 an overall better experience for me. Except for the storytelling, just about every aspect of the game was an improvement on its predecessor.

I think I've decided to hold off on talking about Halo 3 until I actually finish it. So.. until next time.....

Teh Haloz

2007-10-01T21:11:00.000-04:00

I'm going to try to write something here every day if I can, even if I'm not feeling particularly inspired to do so. I figured I'd start with my limited experience with the Halo craze that has been rekindled with the release of the third installment.

I bought my Xbox 360 in December 2005, about a month after it launched. It was my first console since the Sega Genesis. In the couple of years before buying it, I had begun to get more interested in computer games and had built a high end gaming PC. I had also started reading various gaming websites like Joystiq and Shacknews. Information about the new Xbox was starting to come out and I closely followed all of it. This was more because of the constant flow news about it rather than any great interest on my part. The Wii and Playstation 3 were still a year away from release.

Between my time with the Genesis and 360, my time with game consoles was mostly limited to kiosks in stores and occasional encounters with friends' consoles. I missed out on the Dreamcast, Saturn, N64, Playstation 1 and 2, Gamecube, and the original Xbox. When Super Mario 64 came out with its newfangled three dimensional graphics, I had a very hard time figuring out the controls when I tried the game in stores. My first "real" experience with a console since the Genesis was when my boss let me borrow his Xbox, along with the game Halo.

I of course knew about Halo. It was Microsoft's flagship title for the Xbox. I suffered through the massive hype train that steamrolled through everything for the launch of Halo 2. The first day sales statistics for Halo 2 ($125 million!!) were burned into my brain simply because I read it everywhere. It was largely irrelevant to me though because I didn't own an Xbox and had no particular desire to.

One day, for reasons I don't remember, my boss brought in his Xbox that he had bought for his grandson. During lunch a group of us hooked it up to a projector and took turns playing. My boss told me he had never gotten comfortable with the controls, and as I attempted to play I could understand why. I had spent the past few years playing first person shooters on the PC with a keyboard and mouse. Playing with two analog sticks on a handheld controller was like trying to learn a foreign language. Despite that, I managed to have fun, and asked to borrow the Xbox for the night. That night saw several hours of me struggling to get comfortable with the controls and fighting for my life against hordes of aliens bent on my destruction. It wasn't anything life changing for me, but it was fun. Fun is the important thing, after all.

In December 2005 I found that the hype about the Xbox 360 had won me over. The games looked fun and the features of the console itself were cool, so I found myself at the local Best Buy three hours before it opened so I could secure myself a place in line. They had 15 available that morning, and I was number 8 in line. I believe I walked out with Call of Duty 2 and Kameo: Elements of Power as my first steps into the next-gen video game world. A few months later I had finished with those games and was smack in the middle of the post-launch release draught. There being nothing else I was interested in at the moment, I decided I may as well pick up Halo. It felt like one of those games that you have to have if you own an Xbox. Halo's Master Chief is to Microsoft what Mario is to Nintendo, for better or worse.

I began playing from the beginning again. It was still fun, but as I got farther in the game I found myself not being pulled in as much as I had hoped. Everything about the game felt solid and the battles were satisfying, but I didn't spend moments at work or in the shower thinking about the game. Around this time I believe Oblivion came out and promptly grabbed hold of all of my gaming time. Around a year later I picked Halo up again from where I left off and got far enough to run into the infamous repetitive copy/paste level design. I didn't get too worked up about it but it was painfully obvious. The build-up to the Flood was well done. Seeing the bodies of alien enemies piled up in a hallway with their bright blue blood smeared all over the walls, then watching the recording of the human marines vainly try to fight this new enemy was a highlight of the game. Eventually, though, I began to reach a painful conclusion: fighting the Flood was not fun. The tiny small forms that swarmed you were annoying, the exploding form that spewed the aformentioned tiny forms were aggravating because the explosions killed me instantly, and the melee fighters were frustrating because they moved fast and did an incredible amount of damage.

Before the Flood showed up I had been fighting the alien Covenant forces. The comical Grunts, quick Elites, and shielded Jackals complemented each other with their different fighting styles. Battles were intense but immensely satisfying in victory. Tossing plasma grenades and using the Covenant's own plasma rifles in open ended battles was a visceral experience, and while I tended to die often I never got frustrated or felt like the game was being unfair. Battles never played out the same way twice in replays because the enemy AI was generally very good. The Flood, however, felt like dumb pixels whose only advantage was sheer numbers. They swarmed in vast numbers and the game got to the point where it lost the Fun. I set it down.

Fast forward to about a month ago. The Halo 3 hype was (and still is) at full steam. Having just finished BioShock and having no other games to occupy my attention, I decided to once again see what the fuss was about. I started from the beginning again but blew through it on the easiest difficulty. I noticed that the battles were far less satisfying. They were too easy. The Flood were more manageable but were still aggravating. As I got further in the game the cookie cutter level design became even more prevalant. Overall the game just felt like work on this playthrough. I did finish though. I made a more conscious effort to follow the story, but the game didn't do a very good job of telling it. I got the gist though.

This is taking far longer to write than I thought, so I will continue tomorrow. Halo 2 and 3 will be discussed!

Howdy

2007-09-30T20:50:00.000-04:00

It seems that Sean's Great Website Experiment has failed, due entirely to my laziness. I will attempt to be a little more diligent in posting the various things I'm up to and the games I happen to be playing (or want to play). None of the various templates here really excited me but i'm sure if I google around i can find some better ones. This one did seem Web 2.0ish enough though.