He Turned Us Into Killers

Wake Up and Smell The Ashes

 Maybe it will fade with time, but Spec Ops: The Line has had a large impact on the way I perceive and approach shooters. Much like The Incredibles and Watchmen made me reconsider how superhero stories should be told, Spec Ops seems to have shifted what I look for in video game shooters specifically, and possibly in video games as a whole. Time will tell.

Previously, the best modern war game I had played was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. While the sequels devolved into Michael Bay absurdity, the first game in the Modern Warfare series presented a scenario perfectly pitched to play on post-9/11 fears while skillfully using the first person perspective to enhance the drama. Its story was extreme without being ridiculous, and felt believable. It still had the respectful tone towards war and soldiers which previous games in the series maintained.

It also, of course, went out of its way to make you the hero in the end. The last, slow motion sequence where the player shoots Zakhaev is one of my favorite examples of melding gameplay with cinematic trappings. After saving the world from the brink of nuclear war, you got to personally take out the diabolical mastermind behind it all. Badass status confirmed.

Spec Ops assumes you are literate in the genre it attempts to deconstruct, then forces you to confront the things you've done and why you play these games. Killing white dots from the AC-130 in Modern Warfare was a disquieting take on the way the US hunts its enemies today, but you were never forced to see the screaming victims who weren't lucky enough to be obliterated instantly. You were a force of righteous American justice, so why should you care? Spec Ops makes you hear the screams, see the missing limbs, and literally asks if you still feel like a hero. The game is still meaningful if you aren't as familiar with your standard military manshoot, but I feel the impact is lessened if you haven't shot waves of generic foes in Modern Warfare or listened to the chatty, snappy dialogue of your bros in Gears of War.

Spec Ops isn't perfect. It goes pretty far in making you feel like a standard military shooter badass. Headshots cause a short, dramatic slo-mo, and during an initial playthrough, you are bombarded with reminders of how far you have to go to unlock its many achievements. When many games pop up an achievement just for hitting the start button on the main menu, not being more subversive with the achievements in particular feels like a missed opportunity.

Perhaps we had to have games like Gears of War, Modern Warfare, and Army of Two in order to get to the point where developers are actively trying to make something different in reaction to them. Indie games seem to be perceived as the go-to place for "meaningful" games, for whatever reason. But we're getting to the point where triple-A games are moving beyond winks and nods to their influences and more towards actual commentary and incisiveness. There are more and more options available for games with good writing and thoughtful presentation while still retaining responsive gameplay and player feedback. These are the games I'm more and more drawn towards. I've played enough mindless games.

Tearing Down Walls

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

Clicking Repeatedly

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.

*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*

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.

Anticipation

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

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

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

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

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.