Games

Mirror's Edge

2008-11-27T01:02:00.000-08:00

Finished Mirror's Edge tonight.

How was it? It depends. Overall, the game had some frustrating points. The combat can be annoying, there's a reasonable amount of trial and error, and the animated cutscenes look like absolute shit next to the in-game stuff.

On the other hand, when the game works it fucking WORKS. Running across the rooftops, grabbing ledges, sliding under things, kicking off walls and running up stuff, busting through doors, scrambling to get away from the cops...

When you're running, the game is perfect. It's unlike anything else you've ever seen. Reminiscent, at times, of Namco's Breakdown, though Breakdown focused more on the hand-to-hand combat, and totally fell apart at the end. But no game has had such a "complete" first-person experience that really makes you feel connected to the world. The things you do are incredible - leaping from rooftop to rooftop, jumping off a stairwell that cops are rushing up, and bounding from beam to beam, descending the stairwell by basically leaping down the center column and bypassing the cops... it's awesome.

The visual design is stellar - again, totally unique. The story... eh. The story's alright. Predictable, more or less boilerplate stuff - serviceable. Has some nice moments. All in all, though, what can I say? There's stuff in there that will annoy most people. It's not perfect. But it's trying to do something really, really difficult, and something really, really new. In that respect, it's actually a massive success. So it fails in some ways - they've taken HUGE risks. So, if you want something that isn't your run of the mill FPS/third person cover shooter, this is it.

For me, so far, despite its faults, despite the fact that there are tons of other really extraordinary games out there... I think it's my game of the year.

Blog Moving

2008-07-17T00:11:00.000-07:00

This blog's going to be moving in the relatively near future. www.helava.com will become the home of Helava Systems, my dad's new company, and the game blog will probably move to papercupgames.com, or something on blogspot.

Yes It Is.

2008-07-05T19:34:00.000-07:00

Read this, which was linked from Kotaku today. The thrust of the article is that a game isn't a series of interesting decisions, and games like Guitar Hero prove that some wave of new games moves away from this definition into something new.

Wrong.

I mean, I don't even know why I should have to explain this, but maybe it's difficult to understand if you're not a working designer. Rock Band/Guitar Hero/Beatmania, etc., all rely on a combination of pattern memorization, quick reflexes, and a good sense of timing - no decisions there - but the good rhythm games, and when you get to harder levels where the "expert play" comes in, you have to be constantly making decisions about fingering, which hand to use at a particular time, and when to use your Star Power/Overdrive to maximize your score or save your friends.

These are all decisions - the fact that you're functionally repeating a linear pattern of notes doesn't make those decisions go away - they're the "stuff" in between the decision points that Soren Johnson was referring to in his quote in the article.

The author of the article states that this may be an appropriate definition for a strategy game, but isn't appropriate for other genres. I disagree. FPS's are almost entirely about ammo management, proper weapon selection, and use of the environment - all those are decision points supplanted by gameplay that requires ridiculous reflexes and hand-eye coordination.

Brain Training is a serioes of short, controlled decision points (what does 2+1 = ?), Guitar Hero is described above, and the Sims *is* a straightforward strategy game, with a suburbanite layer, full stop.

I could see there being an argument that the granularity of the decision points makes them into "gameplay" rather than "decision making," but I think that's improper - the speed and magnitude of the decisions you're making doesn't transform that process into something different.

Battlefield: Bad Company

2008-06-29T23:36:00.000-07:00

The latest and greatest version of Battlefield actually has a single player game. It's also on console in its full multiplayer glory, and not an uprezzed port from a last-gen game.

I can't say I liked Battlefield: Modern Combat all that much. I really wanted to like it, because I couldn't run Battlefield 2 on my PC at home - but its awkward mix of arcadey game conceits and realistic military combat never sat right with me.

It's a shame for them that they didn't get the balance right, because a couple years later, Call of Duty did more or less the same point accrual system and worked out the kinks. Bad Company gets it much more like Call of Duty, and as a result is a huge step up from Modern Combat.

The other "hook" that B:BC has going for it is destruction. Almost every wall can be destroyed with enough high-explosive, and the mechanics work like a charm. On top of that, it really *feels* like you're laying waste to huge environments, and has pretty substantial gameplay ramifications. No longer are walls guaranteed cover, no longer are long-distance snipers safe from rocket fire.

The multiplayer is fun, frantic, and evolves substantially over the course of every match due to a progressive map-unlocking structure. As you play, if one team achieves their goal, another portion of the map unlocks, the defenders fall back, and the attackers press their attack. It's great fun, and the constant medal award system keeps you hooked for just one more game.

The single player's a bit strange. While again, it's leaps and bounds above Modern Combat, and mechanically, it's as sound as any other FPS out there, they strike a strange "lighthearted" tone throughout the game. The characters are constantly spouting jokes (to limited success, though some of the background animations are *really* well done), and talking about very cliche things (If Sarge makes it to the end of the game with his constant talk of retirement, I'll be really surprised) - so it's clear that you're supposed to take this all with a wink and a nudge.

The problem is that periodically, something like having an allied helicopter or patrol blown to smithereens right in front of you breaks the lighthearted tone, and reminds you that people (and not just the enemies) are being killed. It's a difficult balance to strike, and while for the most part, the game's story works, it periodically veers into the unintentionally grim.

Overall, between a fun, engaging single-player game and a ridiculously entertaining multiplayer game, Bad Company's definitely worth picking up if you're done with Call of Duty 4... or even if you're not.

B/85

Follow up to a Previous Post

2008-06-17T00:22:00.000-07:00

In the comments to "When is a Medium Not a Medium," A_B basically makes two points (if I'm summarizing correctly):

The designer can't be an "other" in game theory
There is no distinction between the medium and the method

On the first point, he asks a mathematician about the post, and the response is this:

"However, in particular, he stressed that the "others" are the participants in the system and not the creators of the system. The whole point of game theory is to "consider interests that are not your direct interest. It's not the choices of the designers. It's not a choice if they're not players in the game. It's irrelevant."

While I think that's true in most games, as it is in the example given (pool), I don't think it's the case in all videogames. In pool, the designer created a game where two people compete on a level playing field. That, to me, is like the creators of Quake 3, creating the maps, placing the weapons, etc. They're creating the tools for two people to test themselves against each other.

In a single player game (and this is where I should have been clearer), the designers aren't creating a playing field - they're creating the playing field and they're creating the competitors - everyone in the game who isn't you. While scripting AI or various in-game events, the designers are interested parties - they're betting on your expectations, how you'll respond to various inputs and what you level of skill is. Yeah, it's disconnected, and (for the most part) doesn't happen in real-time, but you do make decisions, as a videogame designer, about what you think the player will do, whether they'll sacrifice health for a better gun, whether they've developed an emotional attachment to an NPC or not.

In some sense, yeah, it's like you're administering the Prisoner's Dilemma, but at the same time, you have a vested interest in the other prisoner. But yes, some games you can definitely make the argument that it is like pool and the designer isn't a participant - I was thinking more of single player games, though that's a little narrow-minded of me.

I'm familiar with the McLuhan quote, though I can't say I've really "internalized" it. I think you can say that videogames, as they've traditionally existed, have been a medium - for sure. I think when you get into the realm of "games," though, you're moving out of the "medium" territory, and even out of the "message" territory. You can have games that are almost entirely devoid of message, except those that are conveyed by their mechanics (though I'd guess McLuhan would tell you that's the message that's inherent in the medium...).

I guess the way I'm thinking about the application of "game" (not "videogame," which I think is harder to categorize as a non-medium) is more like a paintbrush than a brushstroke. It is, essentially, a tool for motivation. A structure that creates both a carrot and a stick, and provides the user with feedback at regular intervals. Whether that manifests itself as something on a screen, or a card, or what have you, it's essentially an engineered experience that encourages a particular behavior.

Is that a medium?

Getting back to an earlier point - I wonder what the distinction is between something like Quake, where the designer is entirely uninterested in the specific outcome of the game, and a single-player game where the designer *is* interested in how the player is doing, how they're making decisions, and are actively trying to guide them through an experience. Obviously, they're both "games" - at least as they're currently labeled.

Saying there's a distinction between "game" and "sport" feels sort of right, but that's using such baggage-laden terms that it's impossible to discuss the distinction without getting really confused.

I think where I'm trying to draw a distinction is maybe not with "game" as something non-medium-y, but rather, the concept of applying a very tight cycle of feedback, consistent behavior, and regular rewards as a motivational tool to encourage specific behavior. That *is* a method, and divested from any particular medium. It's not "videogames," or even "games" as they're traditionally known. It's more the idea of taking the part of videogames that makes the good experiences compelling and using that in other applications.

Gack. My brain hurts. Ei-Nyung and I had this problem trying to talk about this post after the fact - calling something a "game" has a lot of other implications, "game theory" has a specific definition, "medium" and "method" are both terms that people have discussed to death, and wandering through the minefields of potential misinterpretation is pretty bonkers.

But yeah - I guess it's the application of the process that concerns me.

late

2008-06-15T22:28:00.003-07:00

would post, but my right hand hurts a lot. I think I managed to pinch a nerve playing Rock Band - of all things, drumming to "Go With the Flow."

Will post once the hand is better.

When Is a Medium Not a Medium?

2008-06-09T22:09:00.000-07:00

For many years, videogames were dismissed as toys, incapable of artistic expression or meaning. Then, as time passed, the medium matured and began to tell stories that meant something. Sometimes, at least. For years and years, people have argued over and over that games are/are not a legitimate medium unto themselves, independent of the conventions of cinema, books, blah blah blah.

The argument's always been a strange one, because I've always been of the view that what games are capable of is much broader than simply story or no story. Obviously, there's a huge spectrum of possibilities, and they're all legitimate. The only time that they're not legitimate is when they're not games. That is, when they're not interactive.

For a long time, my personal definition of a game went like this: "A game allows the player to make informed choices that affect their ability to make further, better choices." Over the last few years, this definition has served me well. If a game allows you to make multiple choices, that's a good start - but it's the sort of causal cascade that makes a good game really satisfying - not only feeling like you're having some impact on the story but that your impact on the story changes the way you interact with the story on down the line.

Great. And frankly, it works for everything from Halo to Tetris, from Grim Fandango to Madden. It weeds out the things that aren't interactive, where the choices are meaningless, and where there's only one binary choice of any consequence (strangely, this pops up every now and again).

Today, I saw an interesting snippet from Will Wright on Kotaku - he said,

We have yet to prove we can do meaningful things with this form of expression, but I believe we are at the cusp of a Cambrian explosion of possibilities [referencing the geological era in which complex life flourished]. We are a couple years away from being respected as a form of expression, but it's not a battle we need to fight. We'll win anyway."

Here's what I wrote in response when I shared the item in Google Reader:

“This is sort of an interesting issue that's shaping up a little as games continue to evolve. More than "winning" legitimacy as a form of expression, I see games simply becoming part of everything. "Games" will simply be the delineation between passive and active media. TV will include games or game-like qualities in shows where it's appropriate - hell, you already have large-scale participatory shows (American Idol, et. al.). Sure, right now, they're the functional equivalent of "Hello, World," but the fact that participatory, active media is now not an aberration but something that's expected and well-understood, expansion of the concept is sure to follow. Similarly, interactive art installations, remixable music, blah blah blah - they've been around for years, but videogames have shown how these things will develop in the future. Think of it - for years, MIT's Media Lab wanted to do something that made music interactive - the Brain Opera was a step in that direction. But it wasn't until the mechanics of that interaction worked like a game that it exploded into mainstream entertainment. (Yes, I'm aware of the direct link between the Brain Opera and Harmonix.) Point being - it's not that movies, comic books and games are fighting for legitimacy. "Games" aren't a medium - they're a method. It's the method that's proven to have results - genuine, inarguable, positive results. The medium is still a pseudo-cinematic mishmash that only a few companies (Valve) have managed to crack. But the mechanics are everywhere, and they're getting only more pervasive as time goes on. The battle Wright alludes to is already over.”

This kept rolling around in my brain. While I wrote it somewhat on the spur of the moment, without thinking about it a whole lot, the notion that "games aren't a medium, they're a method," really stuck with me.

It reminded me a lot of Jane McGonigal's "Reality is Broken" rant from the 2008 GDC. Her central tenet was that the real world can benefit from the application of game design. It's something I wholeheartedly agree with, but it's not making reality a game medium, it's simply an application of a method to a thing.

Then, there was this article, on Wii Fit being expensed as a fitness item. Of course it can be - it's barely a game - it's a fitness tool that uses game mechanics to motivate the user to keep using the game. The reward structure is pure game, but the product itself is not first and foremost a game. It's a game as we currently define it, but let's just call it what it is. It's a fitness tool whose reward structure is derived from games.

So, I'm sitting here, now in retrospect thinking, "Duh. This is such an obvious conclusion that I'm going to look online, and hundreds of people are going to have well-written, thorough discussions about games not as a medium, but as a method." And I'm sure they're out there. But unfortunately search terms being what they are, it's difficult to find out for sure, since people may be using slightly different wording.

But to me, this is the end of the debate about whether games are art, or whether they're a valid medium. Of course they can be art, just as they can also not be art. But the question isn't whether games are a valid medium or not: it's whether they're a medium at all.

Assorted Completions

2008-06-08T23:05:00.000-07:00

Finished Superstar mode of Sega Superstars Tennis this afternoon. Talk about a strange game. On one hand, it's a very straightforward tennis game, mechanically not very different than Virtua Tennis. Fun, and one of the best tennis games out there (though Top Spin on the original xbox is still my personal favorite), but a little ... workmanlike.

On the other hand, it's a nostalgic romp through Sega's DC-era games and characters, and that part of it strikes a chord in me, as I have very, very fond memories of the 2000-era DC lineup. Seeing Beat, from Jet Set Radio, playing tennis against Amigo, the dancing monkey from Samba de Amigo brought an irrepressible smile to my face. Yeah, it's tennis, but they managed to capture some of the iconic visuals from the games. JSR *feels* like JSR. The House of the Dead stage feels just like House of the Dead 2. Samba's stage is exceedingly bright and cheery, while the Outrun stage has a laid-back beach vibe. With Magical Sound Shower playing, the game took me back to my middle-school days, playing Outrun in the sit-down motion cabinet version of the game on some lazy Sunday afternoon at the local pay-once play-all-day arcade.

So, it's a strange game. I don't know why tennis, though I suppose tennis is as good as anything else. The Virtua Tennis-style minigame structure was perfectly suited to Puyo-Puyo, Super Monkey Ball, and House of the Dead for sure. I'm not really sure what else you could do with the Sega lineup. A lightgun/fishing/driving game? Sonic Shuffle tried the Mario Party-style game with little success, though that failure owed more to the failure in execution than anything else.

I could see a Kingdom Hearts-style Sega Superstars RPG working out really well. Maybe taking Ryo from Shenmue, and pulling him into the Fantasy Zone where he has to samba his way out of a horde of zombies...

Anyway - tennis. Fun, not the best game ever, but definitely for *me*, a nostalgia-inducing good time. B/80

Also finished the "7th and 8th" missions of Army of Two. For free content, they integrate remarkably well into the storyline. They might as well be Army of Two 1.5, given the brevity of the original campaign. The maps are more interesting than the originals, and there's even a final "boss" fight that feels strangely like an old-school videogame boss fight. I ended up playing it co-op with a friend, and it was a really good time.

For free, A/95. One major technical glitch made me have to "push" a guy who was trapped in an improper collision box - almost made me lose 15 minutes of gametime, but since I knew what I could do to potentially resolve the problem, it didn't hurt too badly.

MGS4

2008-06-02T13:14:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I missed last night's post.

So, two things, re: MGS4 - the first being that IGN has reviewed the game despite Konami's insistence that they not publish a long list of unspecified information. EGM, on the other hand, has refused to review the game because of those restrictions.

Kudos to EGM, whose reviews continue to actually have value, and boo to IGN, whose entire catalog of reviews instantly became utterly worthless. They continually show themselves to be unable to grasp even the simplest concepts of basic journalism.

The second bit is this - there's some rumor swirling around about MGS4's plot, and though I've only played through MGS, MGS2 and part of MGS3 (that game was completely broken, from a gameplay perspective, IMO), and am REALLY unlikely to play through MGS4 any time soon, I wanted to give speculating on what Kojima's undoubtedly ludicrous plot would be.

Basically, I think the entire game is Snake dying as a result of the virus that was injected into his system way back (MGS1?). The player's basically playing his last few moments, as his brain tries to sort out the meaning of his life, and at the end, all of the action the player took was essentially a metaphor for his entire life. Or rather, "It was all just a dream." I know, sounds stupid. But it sort of fits into the whole VR-as-reality schtick of MGS2, and the whole "Oh shit, the past!" schtick of MGS3.

So, you're not *really* old Snake, and that's why Snake is old but no one else is. The current explanation is that since Snake is a clone, he ages really fast - and maybe that's the actual case as well - but I think it's more about the fact that Snake is thinking about the fact that he's hit the end of the road, and he can't imagine the other characters as old/decrepit as he is, which is why they're represented at their current (younger) age. The physical appearance of the character indicating more of a mental/emotional state rather than the physical *reality* of the situation would, IMO, be an interesting use of current-gen technology, fooling the player on a really fundamental level.

I dunno whether it'll happen in MGS4, but if I had to guess, I'd hope it was something that interesting.

Ouch.

2008-05-29T00:11:00.000-07:00

If you take every game I've worked on that's been rated on Metacritic and averaged them all, you can sum up my career in a single number: 69.2.

That's not good.

Sadder still, as time progresses, it's almost consistently downhill:

Seaman: 82
The Urbz: 70
The Sims 2: 75
The Sims 2 Pets: 68
Brooktown: 53

Those are the five games I had a material contribution on. If you include Lair, where I had an "Additional Design" credit but essentially nothing I did made it into the game anyway, the average goes down even further to 66.5.

This means, if my entire career were averaged out into a current game on the market, it turns out to be... Lost Cities, the card game recently released for the 360 on Live Arcade.

Hrm. That's not a terrible game.

The other current 360 game with a 69 Metacritic: Turok.

Shit.

It's frustrating. Obviously, everyone wants to do well - for their games to be well-received and fondly remembered. Of all the games I've worked on, only two really fit that bill - Seaman and The Sims 2 for consoles.

The easy excuse is that I've never had any measure of control over the overall quality of the game - I came on to Brooktown quite late, for instance, but the counterpoint to that is that the for the biggest success, Seaman, I had *nothing* to do with the game design, and only had an impact on the implementation (though don't get me wrong, I think there's still significance in that).

So, while Metacritic is obviously not an infallible measure of quality, it's not a terrible one - and it really is up to me to try to make my contribution drag that number up - to make games that are memorable, quality experiences that people *love*.

There's really no other reason to be in this industry, is there?

Games I'm Finishing

2008-05-27T00:31:00.000-07:00

So, GTA IV is out, and it's got a long-assed, involved, complex single player story of astonishing production values and scope. But since it came out, I've finished:

Assault Heroes
Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Volume 1
Band of Bugs

and I've made substantial headway on The Club, and Sega Superstars Tennis. All five of those games have one thing in common - they're quick to pick up and put down, and can be played in relatively short bursts. Yes, GTA can be played in relatively short bursts, but it's all part of one monolithic narrative, and re-immersing yourself in that mindset takes a reasonable investment.

Finishing a game is not necessarily a barometer of quality, either - GTA IV is a better game in every way than Band of Bugs, which is a largely over-simplified turn-based strategy game with a nauseating visual aesthetic and cast of characters. Still, I played it to the end - and I'm not the kind of person that finishes games that they actively don't like.

So why do I make a decision to play The Club instead of GTA IV? Why do I play Sega Superstars Tennis instead of finishing Episode 2 in The Orange Box? There's something to be said for a self-contained burst o' interactivity without the story to put it all into context and make it mean something. Sometimes I just want to hit buttons and have flashy lights go off.

Assault Heroes: B/65 - some interesting features (weapons, car as the default avatar) and some nice boss fights, but a really sloppy implementation that was often missing audio, with really badly timed cutscenes.
Band of Bugs: C/50 - a genre Live Arcade could use more of (I never got Commanders: Attack of the Genos, but it's in the same vein), but a really "bleh" instance of the genre. Not enough real strategy, too much randomness, a sometimes indecipherable UI/visual style with a story about bugs. Ick. Not a game for the turn-based strategy fan (not enough strategy), not a game for the casual player (indecipherable). Bad combination.
The Club: A/80 (so far) - have only made it about halfway through, and it's starting to feel repetitive, but the shooter-as-racing-game works *really* well. No other game has made me feel like I'm scrambling through an environment, desperate to find the next thing. Great stuff, and sadly overlooked.
Orange Box: A/100 - the best value on the planet. Portal would be worth the full price alone, but combined with Half Life 2 and Ep. 1 and 2, and Team Fortress... it's *ridiculous*. If you don't have it, you should.

PAA:OTRSPODV1

2008-05-27T00:05:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, I grabbed Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Volume 1 from Xbox Live Arcade for $20.

I'd been looking forward to the game for a while, given that it's from the creators of Penny Arcade, was supposed to be some sort of pseudo-adventure-y turn-based combat episodic thingamabob. The short version is: If you're a fan of PA, it's worth getting. If you're not, it's not.

You play a custom character whose home gets flattened moments after the game starts. You meet up with Gabe & Tycho, though they're sort of alternate Steampunk-y versions thereof, and chase after the giant robot that smashed your house.

For the first part of the game, there's not much more to it than smashing garbage cans, walking to the right, and periodically fighting stuff. That's actually all there really is to the game, plus talking to some people and periodically walking in other directions.

The bulk of the gameplay is in the combat, and this part of it actually worked really well for me. It's a JRPG-derived "active timer" system, so each player can make a move when their meter fills. In this case, you can use an item after a short time, attack after a slightly longer time, and do a special attack after an even longer time. If multiple characters have specials ready, they can "team up" and do unique team-based attacks. When an enemy attacks, their health bar blinks - if you hit a button at the right time, you can block the attack or even counterattack for free.

It's relatively simple, but a little ungainly - you're constantly shifting your view from the upper window (where the attack/block indicator is) and the bottom half of the screen where the various characters' counters are running. There are a couple other mechanical "difficulties" here - you've got to have the right character highlighted to make a move, but if a special move then gets activated, it interrupts your menu commands, which can be a touch disorienting, for instance - but the core mechanics work pretty well.

More, they're *tuned* really well. You can get by against easier foes just doing straight up attacks, but very quickly you'll have to learn to manage your items, block attacks, and make sure you're accounting for the enemy's vulnerabilities and resistances. More, you can carry a relatively limited amount of each item, and in this case, it really works to encourage players to *use* the items, or exploration becomes basically meaningless.

So, the combat is engaging. The rest of the game doesn't *quite* measure up. The visual aesthetic is a reasonable approximation of PA, but there's something about it that definitely feels a little "off" - Gabe's smile in the talking sections, for instance. There's something really distinctive about "Gabe's" art style, and it's easy to spot even minor deviations from model.

The oddly disappointing bit for me was the writing. I *love* Tycho's weekly posts. He's got a really great way with words, and will often find turns of phrase that make me awestruck. So, when I say I'm disappointed by the writing, my expectations were really, really high. Looking at it with a (relatively) objective eye, it's not bad, it's even very consistent with the Penny Arcade's strips. It feels like Gabe and Tycho, for the most part - I just wish it felt like "Tycho" - that is, Jerry Holkins writing the news posts for Penny Arcade.

Still, the story's fun, the interactive dialog is funny in the way that old adventure games are funny - lots of humorous item descriptions, etc. I'll definitely be picking up future installments of the game, and I'd recommend it with some reservations to Penny Arcade fans. It's one of those games I wish I *loved*, but I just don't - it didn't quite pop for me, but it showed there's some potential there. Looking forward to seeing what these guys can do now that they've got some experience under their belts. I'd guess that for the most part, Ep. 2 is nearing completion already, so likely it's more of the same, but it'll be interesting to see how Ep. 3 & 4 evolve based on feedback from the first game.

B/75 - B for the episodic nature, the mix of JRPG-style combat with a slightly adventure-y feel, and 75 for the very well-tuned battle system, but a slight miss for the somewhat disappointing story. I'd love to see what these guys do next.

Cry Me a River

2008-05-18T18:58:00.000-07:00

I saw this piece of drivel linked from Kotaku a couple minutes ago about some guy who tried to get into the game industry, failed, and is publicly whinging about the fact that he wasn't given a fair shake.

There are a LOT of things about this article that I could go on for pages about, but let's just hit a couple of the big ones:

1.) "Two years ago, I moved from Ohio to Arizona to pursue my dream of becoming a part of the industry. I attended a school that offered the promise that with hard work, the school would provide the education and support I needed to learn skills I had never learned before. I was told that over the course of my studies, a powerful portfolio would be created and my degree would confer confidence to game developers because the school was known and accredited. "

A piece of advice - if you're looking for an education that is relevant to a specific field, rather than looking at the advertising brochures (or worse, the late-night TV commercials), you should figure out whether any of the graduates of a program *actually* move on into the game industry.

I did a quick Google search for game education programs in Arizona, and nothing came up. Frankly, in terms of game education programs, if it wasn't Full Sail, USC's game program or the ETC at Carnegie Mellon, game-specific education is functionally worthless, IMO. If you want to break into the industry as an artist, go to art school and get a well-rounded art education. If you want to break in as a programmer, get a well rounded software engineering education. If you want to break in as a designer... good luck. But the industry is only 30 years old, and is one of the fastest growing, fastest changing industries around.

Game development depends at this point on people of wildly varied educational/experiential backgrounds to bring new perspective to the industry. If your education has been solely focused on game development, and your hobbies/passion are games, what new perspective do you bring?

2.) "I believe the industry needs to allow for outside and inexperienced people to reinvigorate the game development process. I believe that those who have a shipped title on their resumes, while talented and dedicated, perhaps are closer to burning out than an individual out to make his or her mark."

Awfully presumptuous, don't you think, to talk about the people who have shipped games without actually having gone through the process? The people in the game industry are incredibly talented, incredibly energized creative people. There is almost no shortage of ideas, and no shortage of people who want to push the envelope. There are a lot of issues that make that difficult - the business model, the money involved, blah blah blah - that's probably a hundred posts on its own. Fundamentally, though, everything in this paragraph is wrong.

Yes, new people bring fresh perspective that is great - but that's balanced with a naivete about how development actually works. If you want to break the rules, *learn* the rules first. Yeah, maybe you'll be the new face that destroys the paradigm and revolutionizes the genre, but even in those cases, generally the people are smart enough to learn what's going on before flipping the table over and peeing on the floor.

3.) "New studios understandably don't want some inexperienced person with a mixed portfolio and no projects or titles. It's very risky. However, I believe that a new studio should take some risk to recruit hungry and fresh outsiders instead of just looking for people who may already be disaffected by their own careers."

Again, it's infuriating that you're talking about how burned out and wasted developers are when you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT. Yeah, hiring someone with no shipped games with a "mixed" portfolio (whatever that means) is risky. And yet it happens all the time. People find incredibly creative ways to break into the industry. Create a mod. Make a map and get people to play it. Get involved with community sites. Write a Flash game. You're an artist? Make some models while you work another job to pay the bills. Bust your ass and don't give up.

The fact that you've quit - walked away with your tail between your legs is a *sure* sign many companies would *never* hire you. Game development is a tremendous pain in the ass. It's an industry that you're *only* in because you have a ridiculous, overbearing passion for game development. If you wanted it so badly you gave up, you didn't want it badly enough.

4.) "Individuals with base skill sets and true passion are ready and waiting to be given a chance to shine."

And they'll keep waiting until they get off their ass and go grab the opportunity, or they turn those "base" skill sets into extraordinary skill sets. Passion doesn't get you shit. No one gives a flying fuck that you *want* something. You show them you *need* it, and more, that they *need* you, and maybe - just maybe, you'll open those doors yourself. No one's going to give you a chance. You've got to earn it.

5.) "The industry needs to do something to bring in new talent and prevent scores of people from wasting money on schools that won't help them when they're done."

It isn't the industry's responsibility to keep you from making bad decisions. It's not the industry's responsibility to keep you from giving up. Yes, there could probably be better sources of information out there, but did you check the easily discoverable ones, like the IGDA or Gamasutra? Probably not, but that you're putting it on the "industry" shows me where you think the responsibility lies.

6.) ""The game industry needs more women because it needs more games that appeal to women, thus allowing the market to grow further."

Your wisdom is inspiring. None of us have ever thought of this before.

7.) "My own lack of a mind-blowing portfolio and lack of completed projects -- due to many factors both within and beyond my control -- is not the reason I set out to publicly harangue the industry."

Here's where you're mistaken - your lack of a mind-blowing portfolio is your fault, and your fault *alone*. And your public "harangue" of the industry is such an embarrassment that it boggles the mind - it's like those guys on Craigslist who post how nice they are and how much they love and respect women and how those fucking whores never give them a chance.

8.) "I just want the industry to be aware that there are people out there with deep passion and love for this medium who simply want a chance."

Just to make this absolutely clear, the chances you make are the only chances you get. You wanna sit around and wait for someone to hand you a job? Fuck you. Get a job in test. Prove you're passionate and willing to bust ass for the job. Build up your portfolio with amazing work. Persist. Passion and love don't get you shit - show me you're *talented*. Show me you bring something new to the team. Show me why we can't live for one more second without you, and then, when we talk, it's because you made that opportunity happen.

Otherwise, keep waiting.

9.) "I believe the game industry would be pleasantly surprised to find that those on the outside really just want to make appealing games, the same as someone with a Grand Theft Auto title on her resume."

You know who wants to make awesome games? EVERYONE. The reason you go with the guy with GTA on his/her resume is that they've busted their ass on a crazily ambitious project and finished it. You know they've got the passion, the drive, and you can see their talent in their work. What do *you* have to show?

10.) "I am now pursuing my "plan B" and have no doubt I can lead a productive and happy life outside the game industry. All I want is for those with base skills and the deep desire to make a difference get a fair shake, too."

Good luck on Plan B. Seriously. Game development is clearly not for you - you have *no idea* what it's like. I'm not sure what you think happens, exactly - that there's some inner circle that conspires against n00bs or what - but the game industry is one place where a lot of the entry level positions are genuine meritocracies. In most cases there are so many extraordinarily talented, driven people vying for the same jobs that it's *easy* to give the job to the best of the best, and completely ignore everyone else. You're not in that 99th percentile with a portfolio that'll blow everyone's mind?

Cry me a fucking river.

My Life as a King

2008-05-12T23:12:00.000-07:00

So, interested in how the WiiWare service was going to work, I plonked down 1500 Wii points for Square Enix's Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King (stupid name).

The experience started out quite badly, as purchasing points through the Wii is about as elegant as any of their other online offerings - that is, it's total garbage. Having to input a credit card number, security code, city, state, county and more to get the points is idiotic. It's even dumber that on the last screen where you actually say you want to get the points, they switch the position of the "yes" and "no" buttons, but don't give you any confirmation that you're about to quit and have to reenter all that information again, from scratch.

I honestly almost didn't get past this point, just because the experience was such a pain. What's worse is that the game is taking up 250+ blocks of the Wii's memory, which actually puts it to the point where it's no longer 999+ blocks free - now there are only 700 some odd blocks free. From the sound of it, this would imply that I've essentially only less than three games worth of space left before I have to start juggling them around on an SD card. Given that there are no free trials of WiiWare games, I can guarantee you that it'll make me very, very gunshy about future purchases, as that memory (and the convenience thereof) is extremely valuable.

I honestly don't know how Nintendo's failed so badly at their online implementation - every aspect of it is horrible.

But then, finally, I was able to (without background downloading, naturally) grab the game and play. It's interesting. It's almost like the anti-Dungeon Keeper. You apparently have to manage a small town, commissioning adventurers to do all the assorted crap you'd do in your standard Final Fantasy games while you stay at home and make sure your town's developing based on the revenue you're taking in from taxes and looting the nearby dungeons.

It looks like FF:CC, which is to say that it looks ludicrous. Your characters are semi-SuperDeformed, they wear a traditional excess of nonsensical accessories, and your avatar, the King... well, the term "androgynous" doesn't really do him any favors. Effete? Maybe. Still, it's all saccharine-sweet and still strangely sort of charming, and the process of seeing a town grow still has a nice positive effect, just like you had in old-school Sim City games.

As you post adventures, the people who take the tasks level up and grow stronger. I haven't yet pushed a low-level adventurer into something that's sure to kill them, so I have no idea what'll happen there. I'm only an hour or so into the game, but so far, it's been fun - it's a nice twist on the FF franchise - something that shows the world from a genuinely novel perspective. I'm looking forward to building the city, leveling up the adventurers, and seeing where this all goes.

Definitely good counter-programming to GTA, but good grief, I wish Nintendo's online had been even marginally competent. The whole purchasing experience is terrible, and if Live Marketplace or the PSN store was this bad, Sony and MS would have been torn to shreds. Still, if the quality of the game is any indication, WiiWare does hold some promise. I'm looking forward to World of Goo, and possibly picking up LostWinds.

Quick Bits

2008-05-11T23:37:00.000-07:00

Been playing more GTA IV over the week - still trying to wrap my head around it. I've gotten more used to the car physics, and the missions have gotten a little more involved, which is both a blessing and a curse. Failure is now a bit more frustrating, but the overall experience is much more fun.

The world they've created is quite astonishing, but it actually feels a little more sterile than past games. I know that's a bit of a weird thing to say, but it's almost as though they've reached the uncanny valley of interactivity. The city *looks* so realistic, I want there to be more - it now feels like a game system operating on top of the real world, but the real world is missing.

The original complaint is still quite relevant - that they've spent a lot of time modeling things that are mundane. Obviously, this increases the sense of reality, but it's also really annoying. I want to catch a cab to skip to the destination rather than drive, but I need to *find* a cab, which sucks. Still, as the game progresses, it definitely gets better. The story's taken some interesting twists and turns. The writing is passable - certainly better than most games, but what stands out for me is the characterization. Yeah, a lot of the characters are stereotypes or relatively two-dimensional, but they use those stereotypes effectively, then turn them on their head enough that it's a pleasure to see who will stick to type and who won't.

Lots left to do in the game. I'm enjoying it, which means I've gotten over the controls for the most part. It's strange to me that the early parts of the game weren't better than they were, but in the midst of a four-star police chase... that's definitely when the game shines. Looking forward to more of that.

In other games, I've been playing a lot of Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. It's pretty much more of the Advance Wars formula - if you have an older AW game you haven't finished... you might as well keep playing that one. This one has a bizarre aesthetic - it's taken AW's traditional cheery approach to war and made it much more dreary. It's got amnesiacs, the destruction of most of humanity, and a bunch of people betraying each other to survive. Which means it's a really weird turn of events for a game that's lived on its charming bobble-headed approach to combat.

If you've read reviews, you'll probably have heard that the game's been stripped back quite a bit - most of the new stuff in Dual Strike is gone. To me, I'd say it's for the best. The game feels streamlined and efficient again. One of the things I really enjoyed about Advance Wars was how much it felt like a game of chess or checkers - simple pieces in complex combinations. Everything had a purpose, and each piece's utility was perfectly balanced. With Dual Strike, things got a bit out of hand. Managing two fields of battle with a bunch of units that didn't feel particularly distinct... it got to be a bit much. Where in AW, you could jump right in after not having played for months because there were only a handful of units, with AW:DS when I did the same, I felt lost. With Days of Ruin thus far, even if there end up being more units, the core mechanics have been dialed back a bit, making the focus more on the strategy than trying to juggle multiple fronts all the time.

As for the aesthetic, it's strange - it's almost like Jak 2, for me - something that had the "right" aesthetic in its earlier iteration needlessly tarted up to appeal to brooding fountains of teen angst. I didn't like Jak 2 (the core gameplay also felt focus-tested to death and a clear rip-off of the flavor of the month (at the time GTA3)), but I still like AW:DoR, simply because the game mechanics feel so right.

Other than that, game-wise, not a lot going on. I keep meaning to play more of Viking, but I don't. Instead, I finished Assault Heroes and played some PGR4. PGR is hands-down my favorite racing franchise. Here's to hoping that Activision lets Bizarre do their thing uninterrupted.

GTA IV

2008-05-02T21:53:00.000-07:00

I've spent about five hours with GTA IV. Five hours with a GTA game is basically just scratching the surface, but I've played enough to experience the core mechanics and a reasonable chunk of the world.

This game currently has a 99 Metacritic, which (I think) makes it the highest game *ever* reviewed.

That is fucked up.

While obviously no game is perfect, and I don't mind giving a "10" or a "100" or whatever to a game that really moves me even if it has some technical flaws, GTA IV has some serious problems that I can't ignore (on top of the control issues mentioned in the previous post).

The car physics are horrid. I mean really, genuinely, almost-unusably awful. Every single car I've gotten into has barely been able to go around a normal 90 degree turn at a relatively normal speed. The motorcycle handling is abysmal. Yes, I understand "GTA Physics" are not real-world physics, but when your car can't take a single goddamn turn in an entire chase sequence, something is *wrong* with the way you have the cars set up. When I dread driving in a game that's called Grand Theft AUTO you have a pretty serious problem. When you have that problem in one of the two major mechanics of your game, it would seem to me that that's the kind of thing that should affect your score.

Will I get used to it? Probably. But I've been playing for HOURS, and I still can't go around a standard corner with any sort of regularity. It's unbearable.

The second thing (again, this is all in addition to the awful character controls) is that they spend a huge amount of time giving me beautifully animated representations of SHIT I DON'T CARE ABOUT.

You know what the last thing I want to do in a game is? Play pool. There have been dozens, if not hundreds, of shitty pool games throughout the years. I don't want to spend 10, even 5 minutes to play a shitty version of a shitty videogame. Arguments that it lends the world depth and believability have been made, but they don't fly with me. The makers of GTA have spent a huge amount of time building a gorgeous world of epic scope, and they've filled it with minigames I wouldn't even play for free. The bowling sucks. The pool sucks. I haven't played darts yet, but given the quality of the other two games, I'm not all that compelled to.

Take a game like Crackdown - there's an open-world game (by one of the original creators of the GTA franchise) that takes what's fun about the open world sandbox (exploration, visceral combat, freedom of movement) and makes the fun stuff even more fun. GTA IV has taken exactly the opposite approach - they've removed the fun (by making the car physics unmanageable), and increased the real-world tedium (phone calls, people nagging you, etc.).

Yes, the story and characters in GTA are lightyears beyond Crackdown. Yes, the world is more detailed and fully fleshed out. And in the end, I don't care. I don't give a shit you can play darts. I don't give a shit I can buy clothes. I don't give a shit about all the real world bullshit I do *in the real world*. I feel guilty for doing the stuff the game requires me to do because the narrative is REALLY confused about what kind of guy Niko Bellic is. Sometimes I'm free to choose my morality, and other times I'm not - with no clear cut reason why, other than some stuff needs to happen because the core story is linear. It's lazy, it's inconsistent, and it really breaks the feeling of immersion and investment in the character.

I really want to like it. But I keep hoping it'll be more than it is. The controls are horrible. The car physics are even worse. The missions (so far) have been more tiresome and tedious than interesting. The world, while more realistic, has been less fun than previous iterations of the game. That every reviewer and their goddamn mother has given the game a nearly perfect score is *absurd*.

Fucking Useless

2008-04-30T22:10:00.000-07:00

So, this isn't about GTA 4. This is about GTA 4 reviews.

I picked up the game yesterday and gave it a shot. There are many things that are astonishingly good - the rich characterization, the scope of the city and the level of detail and interactivity are revolutionary.

And in terms of reviews, 10/10 isn't "perfect" - there is no perfect game. But when I *read* the reviews, I hope to have some understanding of what I'm thinking about purchasing. And when I read all the major reviews and there's no mention of control problems or that the multiplayer experience is either really unfocused or different enough that it takes a lot of getting used to, I'm generally not expecting to notice that the main character controls like a tank and that the multiplayer experience is a really unfocused mess.

One of the first things that I noticed when picking up the game is that while there's a lot of interesting animations (scaling walls, leaning into turns, etc.) and the character *looks* much better than they ever have before, the controls are incredibly sluggish and unresponsive as a *direct* result. On more than one occasion playing multiplayer, as a result of triggering an animation - some collision response, the animation has caused me to clip through a boundary and fall a substantial distance (the airport map, clipping through a railing next to a ladder, specifically). These are problems with really fundamental things in the game. The last game I played where the character control was so unresponsive was Virtua Striker, in 1999.

Yeah, the game is epic. Yeah, the writing so far has been great, though the contrast between the more realistic art/writing and the pervasive juvenile humor is a bit starker this time around. Yeah, the sheer scope and variety of the game is unmatched by anything else. But the game has problems that really affect a person's enjoyment of it - I suspect I'll get through it and love the game - but the point is that *no* review I've read points this out. Worse, *no* review I've read points out that the camera control is completely non-standard and that there's no option to return it to something more familiar.

Why? This is what a REVIEW is supposed to be about - it's not just the story - this is a GAME, and it's gotta be about the experience. The controls are a huge part of that experience. Yeah, everyone's falling over themselves to be the most sycophantic yes-man for the game, but that's NOT YOUR JOB. PR people get paid a ton to do that sort of thing. YOU are supposed to be CRITICAL. YOU are supposed to do BETTER.

Stop fucking up.

What is Your Game About?

2008-04-27T22:24:00.000-07:00

One of the best pieces of advice about game design I've ever heard was, "Figure out what your player is doing most of the time, and concentrate on making that fun." I don't remember where I heard it - I think it might have been at an IGDA meeting or something, but it stuck with me.

What's strange about that relatively straightforward, relatively simple piece of advice is how few game developers really understand the concept, but more, how people can be easily confused because they don't actually know what the core of their game is.

Look at a game like GTA - you could make an argument that what you're doing is running and shooting, but what you're *really* doing, because of the auto-aim is running, picking a weapon with the right capabilities, and then managing the auto-aim algorithms. Yeah, it's a little nitpicky, but it makes a *huge* difference. It's really surprising how many people will suggest auto-aiming as a "tweak" to make a shooter more accessible - it's not a tweak, it's a fundamental revision of what the gamer is required to do on a moment-to-moment basis.

The game no longer becomes about understanding the weapon you're using, aiming at a target, then pulling the trigger at the precise moment where your aim is dialed in. Instead, the game is about selecting the proper weapon, making sure the computer has locked on to the right target, then shooting 'till dead. There's possible decisions to be made re: ammo conservation, which target should be the highest priority, and whether you're using a weapon that has the right range/damage combination - but aim is removed, timing is radically de-emphasized, and a large number of potential variables for weapons (lead time, etc.) are removed from the equation.

Think of it this way - where is the player's skill required? In a game like Quake, the skill is seeing a target, tracking them, having the right weapon, shooting it at the right time, and managing ammo. In Quake with GTA's auto-aim, for instance, seeing the target may not be an issue - they may be automatically highlighted if they're the only target in the area, tracking them is not an issue (that's the "auto-aim" bit), having the right weapon is solely about range, ammo, and firing rate, and shooting it at the right time is solely an issue of line-of-sight and range. Ammo is pretty much the same, though.

So, that adage about finding what your players are doing most of the time may not be quite specific enough - it's also about finding where you expect the player's skill to be required and ensuring that those decision points are compelling. This means developing the game with a very thorough, detailed understanding of what those decision points are - something like auto-aim changes *everything*. Level design is less about the process of aiming, tracking and maintaining lines of sight - it's less about skill at mitigating the technical differences between weapons and exploiting the actual differences between weapons. If I've got a sniper rifle and my enemy has a shotgun, at a long distance I should be at an advantage, except that I *suck* at using sniper rifles. Auto-aim means that independent of my personal skill at aiming/shooting sniper rifles, I will *always* have an advantage over shotgun guy because my skill doesn't play into the conflict at all.

How does that get resolved? How do you create gameplay out of those kinds of situations? Some of the answers are very similar to how you'd do the same for the manual-aim versions - break lines of sight, create mechanics where a player can mask themselves (smokescreens, invisibility, etc.) - but they're less about confusing the opposing player, and more about forcing the auto-aim algorithm to abandon its lock on you. A good player could predict where you might go, even if they can't see you - a lost auto-aim makes that skill totally useless.

Anyway - it's just strange how many games suffer from people either not fully understanding what the core of their game is, or simply not spending the lion's share of the time on making that fun. Find where the player is making the most skill-based decisions, and ensure they ahve a good time doing it.

A Solved Problem

2008-04-21T23:37:00.000-07:00

I recently picked up Blue Dragon for the 360 (this is not the US cover art) for cheap at Toys R Us. While I'm not a real fan of JRPGs, for $15, I figured it'd be worth checking out what Microsoft hung their hopes of Japanese success on.

It's a strange game. It's obviously a JRPG in the traditional JRPG mold both mechanically and narratively. It tries to do a couple things differently, but the differences are so insignificant that they may as well not have existed at all.

The rendering style is somewhat unfortunate, as well. They took some sort of sub-par Akira Toriyama character designs and made them into a plasticky 3-D that only serves to make them even more generic-looking. While in hi-def, it has a distinctive, clean look, the characters just aren't as memorable or interesting-looking as the (still generic) characters from a cel-shaded game like Dragon Quest VIII (also Toriyama-designed characters).

One bit where the game does something really nice is that it has a very unusual depth-of-field effect. Combined with the relatively spare, clean aesthetic design, the game definitely has a unique look to it - the problem is that it's a really unique-looking blandness that still feels boring. It's nice that it's a contrast to Final Fantasy's excessive business, but still not all that appealing on its own.

The big problem for me, though, is that it suffers from one frustrating design failure - you can only save at predetermined save points. This is totally ridiculous, because there are only two reasons to have predetermined save points:

You don't have enough memory to save the game's current state in a complete enough fashion - this is obviously untrue, as many other 360 games allow you to save anywhere, and honestly, Blue Dragon doesn't even save that much info.
You want to create a specific risk-reward balance - by having save points spread apart, you create an escalating tension the further the player is from a safe haven.

While I can sort of academically understand point 2, it SUCKS when someone invites you to play another game online, and you have to run around like a jackass looking for a save point or lose an hour's investment of time into the game. Worse still, this is a problem that *already* has a solution - allow the player to save & quit. When the player resumes the game, the temporary save file is destroyed, meaning the player can't restore to that state - they can only restore to the predetermined save points. Essentially, this allows the player to indefinitely "pause" the game at any point, but only save where the game allows them to.

Why Blue Dragon doesn't allow this is completely beyond me. It's technically within their grasp. At this point, it's almost purely a design failing. Is there something I'm missing? I just can't see any reason to ever have a save structure like this, when the temporary save & quit solution has existed for years and years. Lunacy.

Delay of Game

2008-04-21T00:18:00.000-07:00

In case there are people who actually check this for posts, sorry, tonight's post is going to be late. I've got a cut on my thumb that makes it a bit of a pain to type. Expect a post shortly about how save points in jRPGs are a solved problem and that it's really, really stupid that Blue Dragon doesn't handle them right.

Dumb.

2008-04-13T23:33:00.001-07:00

So here's a really great question: Why do good people make bad games? Here's a really insipid article written based on that premise.

There are a LOT of reasons good people make bad games. More than it's reasonable to put in a single article. Still, there are really three big reasons this happens:

1.) Resource limitations
2.) Creative conflicts
3.) Innovation

Resource limitations are the most obvious culprit - the main ones being a lack of time, a lack of people, and a lack of money. In most games' development, some of these are known from the start. You can have a pitch with a budget and ship date before the content of the game has been locked down. On more than one previous occasion, I've known when the game was supposed to be done, the team size, and the overall budget before even knowing what the game was. It's crazy, but it happens more often than you'd expect.

This causes some pretty serious problems. If the ship date is inflexible, and your time is limited as a result, if you have to push for more resources, you can only push for more people and more money. But often, hiring more people requires more money (obviously) and worse, more time - it takes time for someone to "ramp up" on a project. So, what usually happens is that the resources don't change - the game design is "scoped" to fit into the available resources.

"Scoping" is a hard process - it's where you take the beautiful, detailed, well-integrated design that's full of awesome, revolutionary, genre-defying innovative genius, and you hack it to pieces so that it can be made with five guys, a box of socks and an old hamburger.

It's where you have to find the "core" of your game, and throw almost everything else away. If there are other features you absolutely must have, you find a cheap, fast way to do it, and hope it all holds together. Often it doesn't - we'll come back to that when we talk about innovation.

The second point - creative conflicts - is a tricky one. Game development is a creative process - a unique combination of art and engineering that requires tremendous collaboration between people with wildly different skillsets, working in a new medium where the end user's input can radically change the experience. Getting everyone on the team on the same page is fantastically difficult, and there are often huge creative differences between members of the team.

"Fun" is a really subjective thing. If someone thinks collecting 300 flags in Assassin's Creed is "fun," I think they're completely out of their mind. But I know people who have tried to do it, and who think that it brings genuine value to the game. In some sense, it's just a creative difference - a difference in what someone thinks is fun. There's a huge amount of that in game development. Is jumping "fun"? Is death "fun"? What *kinds* of death are fun? What aren't?

Worse, the longer you've been working on a game, the harder it is for the developer to really understand what's fun and what's not. If I've been working on an action game for two years, I have *no* idea what it's like to play that game for the first time. I take a lot of things for granted - the controls, the "intention" of a level, etc. I have a lot of information that the novice player won't. But because development is such an iterative process, and it takes so long before a game is really *playable* in a way that's polished and working, that it's often difficult to playtest with "new" eyes and hands on the project until relatively late in the development process.

That mentality's slowly changing - people are learning to playtest with less "fully-developed" games, but the simple fact of the matter is that the people making the decisions about what's "fun" or what goes in the game are people who are so deep into the game that they no longer even understand what it's like to play it. So, a combination of creative differences between the developers, and the inability to actually make good judgements often lead good people to make bad decisions. If there's a reason that you've seen something that appears to be totally unreasonable, that's probably the main reason.

Last, though, the reason that things are difficult is because games continue to be innovative. Trying new things is difficult. Making something fun is a hard process. Making something new fun is astonishingly challenging. It's an extremely iterative process, where you need to be able to try a number of approaches, scrap the ones that don't work, and polish it up until you can tell whether in its final form, it will be fun or not. Even when well-managed, this kind of iteration can't be guaranteed to result in a fun, new idea. When poorly-managed, this kind of iteration can spiral out of control, consuming huge amounts of resources and resulting in little that can be applied to a fun, new experience.

Thing is, while in game development the main development process is referred to as "production," it's nothing of the sort. In manufacturing, "production" is cranking out a million widgets. In game development, "production" is creating something entirely new. That's research & development. In R&D, budgets can't be set to the dollar. Timelines can't be set to the day. You can try to reach certain goals, you can make educated guesses, and you can work hard to meet targets - that's how you can keep the process focused and efficient - but the end result is never guaranteed.

You can't give someone six months to make something fun. Adding another week doesn't make a bad idea good - it takes good ideas to turn the bad one around - but finding that good idea is an unpredictable process. I've seen people work at an idea for years - literally - and not be able to breath that spark into it to give it life. Not for lack of trying, and not for lack of them being a quality person with good ideas. Sometimes it just doesn't come together how you thought it would.

Everyone who's worked on a bad game knows these things - the lack of resources, the creative conflicts and the iteration required to take something new and make it work. Hell, everyone who's worked on a good game knows these limitations, too, and how sometimes the difference between one and the other is almost intangible. Good, even great people can make terrible games - for me, I'm much happier seeing someone try for something new and fail than I am seeing a dozen cookie-cutter games all molded from the flavors of the day. Innovation is hard, sometimes it sucks, but it's the only thing that makes us better.

Social Cooperation

2008-04-13T21:54:00.000-07:00

So, it's been more than four months since Rock Band came out - there's not a lot I can say about the game itself that hasn't already been said. Best multiplayer in-person game ever made, blah blah blah.

But four months later, I play Rock Band more than any other game I own. Rarely a week goes by without a couple games or Rock Band with other people, which means that almost every week since the end of December, I've been playing a game with a friend, in person, every week.

Rock Band's almost like a social "endcap" to an interaction. Brunch ends with a game of Rock Band. Dinner, then Rock Band. An afternoon get-together -> Rock Band. Almost everyone I know has played it and enjoyed it. People I would never have thought would sing, sing. People I would never have thought would have any rhythm play drums. The cooperative nature of it prevents newbies from feeling incapable, and there's enough levels of difficulty that even four months later, I can have a nice challenge while playing with someone who's never played before.

So it's a great game - but that it's become such a part of my social landscape is unusual, and that it's become a regular experience for so many non or casual gamers is astonishing.

Would that every game were this good.

Echo Chambers

2008-04-02T23:29:00.000-07:00

I finished Super Smash Bros. Brawl tonight. Well, not "finished" per se, since collecting all the random trophies and such would take the better part of my free time for the rest of the month - but I did finish the Subspace Emissary mode, and I'm about halfway through the challenges. So, for single player, I'm functionally done with the game.

It's fun. The mechanics are still a bit "mashy" to me - I absolutely despise the "up to jump" functionality of the controls, and even playing with a classic controller, if I hit Y (to jump), and then hold up, I immediately double-jump, which is idiotic.

Still, the fighting is fun, fast, and frenetic. It's largely accessible to new players, though I'm not sure whether that's because of, or in spite of the visual chaos that makes the game nigh-unintelligible. An unfamiliar player can quickly jump in, smash some buttons, and periodically hit an experienced player out of the ring, getting some sense of satisfaction in the process.

So, it's a reasonably entertaining multiplayer game, and if that was all it was, it's successful. But that's not all it is. It has a single player mode, and online multiplayer - and it fails pretty dramatically on both counts.

The single player mode has one (or two) player(s) basically doing a combination of platforming and fighting through a series of levels, periodically unlocking little cutscenes that nonsensically pair up the various casts of Nintendo characters in improbable ways. The major problems with this mode are that the controls aren't particularly good for platforming - the jumping problem I mentioned above made a lot of the jumping sequences really, really frustrating, and that there's little reason to actually stop and fight except for the few areas where the game requires you to. For the most part, you can simply run by everything until you get to a little staged fight, beat that, and be on your merry way. It's repetitive, it's boring, and while charming at times, all that charm is undone by the last level, which basically recycles half the content from the earlier parts of the game and makes you play through them again.

Why this has become a staple of Nintendo games I have no idea. It's boring, it's tedious, and really, really annoying.

Worse still is the online multiplayer. It's impossible to find your friends online, impossible to get a game together while using the Wii, impossible to do anything while waiting for your friends to get coordinated (since you're "not online" unless you're explicitly connected to the WFC), and even when you can get people together, you can't talk or even type. It's intensely pointless, and compared to Xbox Live, it's so utterly backwards and ill-conceived that it has almost no practical use. I don't see myself ever playing Smash Bros. Brawl online. Ever. I've tried for three weeks to get a game together with absolutely no success. What a waste of my time and theirs.

So, what's that all mean, in the end? The mechanics are good enough that I tolerated the absolutely horrid last level of the Subspace Emissary mode. It's the first game on the Wii that I've actually finished (SMG and Zelda included). So that says something. But I don't often have friends over to play games in person, and the unusable online functionality basically means that the multiplayer portion of the game is totally lost on me - which is a real shame, because it clearly has the potential to be a good time.

All in all, if you have friends over for games regularly, it's worth getting. If you're a die-hard long time Nintendo fan, you have to pick it up simply because it's fan service explosion. But for anyone else? It's really nothing special.

Single Player: C/70
Multiplayer In Person: B/90
Multiplayer Online: D/0

A huge amount of content, a lot of love of the characters, and a lot of really, really big disappointments.

The Simpsons, or, How A Bad Camera Can Almost Destroy An Entire Game

2008-03-30T23:25:00.000-07:00

Full disclosure: I had the distinct pleasure of working with a LOT of the people who made this game. I don't think my opinion of it is particularly skewed by that fact, but I can't say for sure.

Overall, I liked it. I mean, I played it through to the end, which is quite rare for me these days. The writing's funny, the graphics are pretty darned good, and the game does a really good job of evoking Springfield - whatever it means to you.

It's really self-referential - the characters know they're in a game, and as a result, it's quite ... er... "gamey." There are a lot of essentially randomly placed collectibles, there's even a whole collection of "game cliches" that you can find, though the fact that the game knows they're cliches doesn't make them any less... overused.

Still, for almost every downside, there's an equal upside. The writing is really quite good - it's as funny as a reasonable episode of the Simpsons that just happens to be focused on games - keeps things clever enough to dress up the relatively generic platforming bits. For the terrible partner AI, there's the option to play with a second live player. The list goes on - for all the characters' special powers, their use in-game is often very hamfistedly scripted - use the Homer Ball here, use Lisa's Hand of Buddha here, etc. It's not a bad thing, it's just that the powers seem so single-use that it's almost like they're keys to locked doors, and not interesting things that the characters can use anywhere.

All in all, it's probably the best Simpsons game ever made. A solid B/80...

Oh, wait. I forgot the camera.

The camera is *horrible*. It is one of the worst implementations of a relatively straightforward camera I've ever seen. It's not that it tries something spectacularly different and fails at it - it's that it tries to be absolutely generic and still manages to be utterly horrid. The worst thing is that conceptually, at least, it's relatively easy to fix. It all has to do with what happens when the camera collides with an object.

In the Simpsons Game, the camera circles the player character at a fixed radius. If there's an object in the way, the camera stops on that object. After a few seconds of being obstructed, the camera then changes to (what feels to be) an arbitrary position. Where the camera moves appears to be completely unpredictable - sometimes it moves nearly 180 degrees, sometimes it moves maybe 10 degrees. If there is a pattern to it, as a player, it's impossible to discern. Sometimes it tries to recenter itself behind your character, other times it doesn't.

For a game where precision jumping is important, having a camera with a mind of its own is an unmitigated disaster. Every time the camera moves during a series of precise jumps, it's the game's fault I die, not mine. The biggest problem is that this is something that's been done to death in other games. This is a "solved problem" - when the camera collides with an object, you move the camera closer to the player until the object is out of the way. In the worst case scenario, the radius R goes to 0. When the camera becomes obstructed by the player, you fade out the player-character so that the player can continue to see the environment.

This prevents the camera from getting stuck on obstacles, generally prevents obstacles from getting in between the camera and the player, and ensures that the camera almost never has to move automatically. At the very least, in some of the sequences that required precision jumping, they could have locked down the camera to a fixed perspective, which would at least have made the jumping easier.

This problem is *so* bad that it almost ruined my enjoyment of the game. Honestly, had another friend of mine not been playing it recently, I probably would just have never bothered to play it again - which is a shame, because a lot of the best levels are closer to the end.

If you're a Simpsons fan, and you go into it knowing the camera's garbage, it's an enjoyable part of the series, and a fun time. If you get frustrated dealing with a finicky camera, this is NOT the game for you, even if ou are a Simpsons fan. If you're not a Simpsons fan, it's probably not really interesting enough to be worth getting anyway. While there are attempts at diversity, the basic platforming is really nothing to write home about.

Still, I played it as a Simpsons fan, and knowing the camera was garbage (I played the demo). It was funnier than many 10th Season-to-Present Simpsons episodes, and a good sendup of games and the game industry in general. I enjoyed it, despite its flaws.

B/55, mostly due to a bad camera and some really, really insipid collectibles.

For a Simpsons fan, who cares more about the "Simpsons" than the "Game" part: B/75 (the camera will still piss you off).

Cooperation is the New Black

2008-03-17T00:53:00.000-07:00

Over the last few weeks, I've been in the middle of the spring gaming glut. I know, there is no spring gaming glut - except there is. Games that got overlooked during or delayed during the holidays are hitting shelves (or hitting shelves cheap), and I've got more on my plate than I have time. Two games that I've been playing a little of recently are Burnout: Paradise and Army of Two.

Now, the notion that co-op games are awesome is so old that it's hardly worth mentioning. But between Rock Band, Army of Two, and Burnout: Paradise, what's clear to me is that games that involve social cooperation/collaboration are absolutely here to stay - not as a fad, or a feature, but as an entire genre of gaming. It used to be single player or two-player, back in the day of games like Contra and Ikari Warriors. Then, for a good long while it became single player or competitive multiplayer, and the cooperative, social nature of games was shelved for a while. Now that it's back, I can't imagine letting it fall by the wayside again.

There's something deeply satisfying about saving a fallen bandmember in Rock Band, or hitting that last note and getting the bonus. There's a lot of communication involved in synchronizing barrel rolls in Burnout, or trading aggro in Army of Two. Yes, you get it in team-based competition, but the shift towards one-on-one cooperation creates a much more personal dynamic that's been missing in games for a while.

Any other co-op experiences like this I've been missing?

Army of Two: B/80 (not very far in, very limited multiplayer experience)
Burnout: Paradise: B/95
Rock Band: A/100

Idiots.

2008-03-13T00:27:00.000-07:00

So, Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out this weekend for the Wii. It's a fun game - sort of a charming, fluffy timewaster. There are a lot of people who think the SSB series is manna from heaven, but I don't really "get" what it is they get out of the game.

While it's fun, it's a mess - it's basically a spastic buttonmasher - I don't doubt you *could* get good at the game, but I also don't doubt that people who have invested hundreds of hours in it still get beaten on a regular basis by total n00bs.

That said, it's fun. I'd like to get some chaotic, four-player action going. There are enough wacky control options that I can actually provide four suitable controllers, which is awesome. The problem, of course, is time and space. I can regularly play with four people - they're just not all in the same place at the same time. So the fact that SSBB comes with online play was a huge factor in why I picked it up. But here's the kicker(s):

1.) Setting up a friends list is nigh-impossible: You have to give them your SSBB "code" - a 12-digit code that is utterly without identity. You can then give the person a five-character nickname. Fine for me, but not for people with names longer than five characters. On top of that, THEY have to input YOUR code as well. There's (as far as I can tell) absolutely NO WAY to transfer a friend code online. That is pure insanity. It means that tonight, even though we'd agreed to play together, I had to text-message my coworkers my code, and vice versa. How stupid is that? Really, really, really stupid. It's cumbersome, user-hostile, and a giant pain in the butt. There's no way this should be acceptable in a post-Xbox Live world.

2.) No voice chat: There's no way this should be acceptable either, in a post-Xbox Live world. No voice chat at all. There's no support for a microphone peripheral, nothing. There's barely even text chat. You can input four phrases, and map those to your "taunts." That's it. When you're playing with friends, there's effectively no trash talking. When you're playing with randoms, there's enough that they can be incredibly annoying, but otherwise basically remain faceless, nameless might-as-well-be-AI characters. It's ridiculous.

Here's the thing that bugs me - SSBB has been getting rave reviews all over the internet. 9+ scores all over the place. But they agree that the Subspace Emissary mode (the bulk of the single player experience) is an incoherent mishmash of stuff that doesn't work very well with the controls, and that the 1995-era online implementation is abhorrent.

And yet, 9+ scores, all over the place.

I'm sorry - SSBB has a lot going for it. The core mechanics are fun, and it's fun when you have people over (I assume). But the lack of what are now *critical* features is a knock against it, and the fact that the core single-player experience is a total crapfest should also be a knock against it. I get that it's a party game. But as a multiplayer experience, it's missing the MULTIPLAYER EXPERIENCE for anyone who has a full-time job and whose friends are the least bit geographically distributed.

I enjoy the mechanics, but there's no way this can possibly rate higher than a 7.

For me, it's a D/85 - the core gameplay is technically accomplished, but it loses points for having a really badly designed single-player experience, and the lack of innovation is for an absolutely garbage online implementation - something that can barely even be considered to meeting the minimum standard.

Poor showing, Nintendo - while I expected as much, given past online forays, it's unacceptable that something as good as Live could have been around for more than FIVE YEARS and the implementation of online play in SSBB is so bad.

Ninja Warrior

2008-03-11T23:06:00.000-07:00

So, this isn't a videogame, but it is a game. Twice a year, the Tokyo Broadcasting System runs an obstacle course called "Sasuke." 100 people compete to finish a four-stage obstacle course that tests the competitors' strength and speed.

There are a lot of reasons that Ninja Warrior is so appealing - obviously, watching people do extraordinary things is often interesting. And if that's all there was, Ninja Warrior would still be quality TV. Still, there's more to it than that. There's almost no prize money given out. The prize for winning the contest - finishing the fourth stage, is only $17,000 dollars (or thereabouts, in yen), and over ten years of the competition, only two people have ever completed it.

So, the competitors aren't just in it for the money. They're in it because of the challenge. But there's more to it than that. Here's the thing that I think makes it really appealing: Everyone can win.

Now, let's be clear - that's not "Everyone deserves to win." That, I think, would be the sentiment in the States - that everyone deserves to win. They'd make the obstacle course reasonable. A course that no one completes in eight years of attempts would be intolerable to US TV audiences. But everyone *can* win. One person winning doesn't exclude anyone else from *also* winning. The competition is solely with yourself, and the clock. The only competition with others is to see who can do it first.

To that degree, I'm sure the competition is quite fierce. In the US, you'd have the top ten all trash talking each other, spouting how they're the best, and no one else can match their skills, blah blah blah. Here, the top competitors share a common interest, and have a camaraderie that is really refreshing to watch. They share each other's joy and agony, as they all work toward a common goal. They aren't keeping their competition down, they're cheering them on.

There's something in this, I think, that can be learned by game designers. It feels like there's a link to the concept of "biasing toward success," that I talked about in an earlier post - that Nintendo, by allowing even new players to succeed, has made the Wii appealing to a broad audience. I'm not sure what the link *is,* exactly, but it feels like there's something there. That developers can make multiplayer experiences that are social, buoyant, collaborative, and still be challenging and fun without fostering hostile competition.

Nostalgia

2008-03-02T22:48:00.000-08:00

Sega Bass Fishing came out sometime in the last couple weeks. I had no idea it was coming out, but I saw it on store shelves and bought it on the spot. It's basically an arcade fishing game, and if that doesn't sound fun, don't worry - I didn't think it was, either.

But in 1999, I saw it at E3 on the Dreamcast, and on the drive up from LA, instead of going straight home, I swung by an import shop (Network Video, in Milpetas) and picked it up with the fishing controller, naturally, for my imported Dreamcast. I played the crap out of that game. My friend would come over, and we'd take turns sitting in the "boat" - the loveseat that sat sideways in front of the TV.

"Small one!" the announcer would shout, in Engrish. Years later, my friend (who is at best a casual gamer), still remembers the "Enjoy your fishing!" shout-out at the beginning of the game.

So, when I picked up the game on the Wii, it was pretty obvious we'd have to get together and get some fishing on. We ended up playing for hours while my wife and his girlfriend watched, sometimes participated, laughed and laughed.

Is Sega Bass Fishing a great game? Yeah - it's great. Maybe not in the same way that something like Ico is great, but it's sort of like Rock Band - it's accessible for the non-gamer, it's charming, and a really good time. More, it's part of some really great memories - having fun with friends.

The other experience I've had that is sort of like this was playing Virtua Striker on the Dreamcast while in Japan. I was at my aunt & uncle's house with my parents. My Japanese isn't particularly good, and even when it's alright, it takes about two weeks before I get comfortable really speaking. So, my young cousin and I were hanging out in awkward silence, without really being able to talk to one another.

After a while, he got bored, and threw in Virtua Striker. Now, if you've never played it, it should be made clear that Virtua Striker is a terrible, terrible game. It's not only bad as a soccer game, but it's bad as *any* game. The controls are so unresponsive that it's often difficult to tell whether you have anything at all to do with what's happening on screen.

But I picked up the controller and played with him. At first it was strange, and awkward, but within a few minutes, we were both sucked in to the game and the friendly competition. It gave us something to talk about that was simple, clear, and accessible. We got to talking about other things - slowly and in a combination of terrible Japanese and terrible English - but we had a common experience that we could share, and it opened up a lot of other communication that we didn't really have any other avenue to explore.

Eight years later, I have really fond memories not only of that time, but of that game. Whenever I think of unresponsive controls, I have a sort of warm, happy feeling that reminds me of my cousin.

Wacky stuff.

Sega Bass Fishing: A/90
Virtua Striker: D/20

GDC: A Call to Unspecified Action

2008-02-23T23:44:00.000-08:00

Went to GDC for a couple days this year, and attended a wide variety of talks, mostly design and writing-related. Good stuff, for the most part. Met a lot of interesting people (albeit briefly), and caught up with some friends from old jobs.

Over lunch, one of these friends and I were talking about what we'd been to, and he mentioned he'd gone to Jonathan Blow's "Design Reboot" talk, and that it was an inspiring talk about shaking up the status quo, but that it ultimately led nowhere. An inspiring call to unspecified action.

The Game Designer's Rant session, which I'd just gotten out of, had a similar call. In some cases, the desired outcome was more specific (Jane McGonigal, for instance, talked quite specifically about applying game design to the real world to make it better, and Clint Hocking called for games about things that matter (why isn't Medal of Honor about honor, or Call of Duty about duty?)), the overall message was "break out of the idea that games are limited to what games are now." The problem is fundamentally, I think most people want that, but there are obvious barriers.

When someone asked Jonathan Mak (Everyday Shooter's creator, whose rant was a couple minutes of interactivity - bouncing balloons with messages on them around while some upbeat music played - genius) how to break through those barriers, his response was, I think, incredibly naive - he said you just have to own it. Make the goal your own, and work towards that. That's how to get past the barriers.

I was surprised, honestly, that no one just stood up and said, "Money." The obvious answer to that problem is money. In any media, any brave artist can make something for just about nothing. You can write, and it costs you little, even if you want to experiment. You can write intensely non-commercial music, and there are ways to distribute it. You can make art-house movies, and be supported by offshoots of mainstream movie studios.

In games, part of the problem is that to make a game requires a lot of investment. Even if it's only time, making a game takes a tremendous amount of time and a wide variety of talents. Art, design, programming, audio... it's a lot of stuff, which translates to a lot of time, which translates to a lot of money. I hugely, hugely, hugely applaud Microsoft for allowing people to publish their Creator's Club games straight from XNA into Live Arcade. It's a great move on their part, and will undoubtedly pay off in spades. It does genuinely lower the bar to a mainstream audience in a way that's never been done before on a console. While XBLA allows small teams to get their games out to an audience, the barrier to entry (certification, etc.) is still quite hefty for a group of only a couple people.

The details for getting an XNA game published are still somewhat uncertain (at least publicly), but from what they've said, it sounds relatively straightforward (how they deal with QA is the big mystery to me). But I can't wait to see some of the stuff that comes out of this. We will see things that are going to break from the standard game mold. Things on XNA may not change the world, but when this generation began, I said to a couple people that the best game of this generation would come out of XBLA. I stand by that, and with this XNA initiative, the probability just got a whole lot bigger.

The only question I have to ask myself is whether I'll seize the opportunity or let someone else be the one to make that game...

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

2008-02-19T00:13:00.001-08:00

Yeah, so I'm almost three games behind on this series, I know. I played halfway through the first one about two or three years ago, and had a good time of it, but didn't pick it up at the time (was borrowing it from the company I worked for's library).

I thought it might be a good game for my wife, though, so at some point when it got cheap, I grabbed it. She played through it (and the second, and part of the third) and really enjoyed it, so finally, I sat down, figured out where I had left off, and started playing the game again.

It's interesting - there's very little *to* the actual game. Branching dialog trees, some locations that have clickable hotspots and a basic inventory management. It's like "text adventure plus" in terms of complexity. That said, it's still really entertaining, and it comes down to two basic things:

It's really well written. The plots of the cases are interesting, the characters are multi-faceted, and there is actual clear character development over the course of the game.
It's about something really unusual. I don't know of any other lawyer games. In the same way that watching a show like Project Runway gives you some perspective (however warped) into a fashion designer's career, the Phoenix Wright series is interesting because it's about putting yourself into an interesting person's shoes, and not just shooting everything in sight.

I think point two is why I didn't really enjoy Cooking Mama all that much. while Cooking Mama is more complex that PW from a mechanical perspective, there's no narrative content to it. There's no insight into the process of doing the mechanics, you just do them because that's what you're supposed to do.

If Cooking Mama had a reason to cook, the player would not only have embraced the mechanics, but also the motivation behind them. PW isn't particularly complex or deep, but it forces you to be in the mindset of the main character, and provides a totally compelling, unique narrative and mechanical experience - something that I think you could hold up as the hallmark of a game that gets the balance of interactivity and narrative right.

I'm on the fourth case right now - I've heard the whole game structure goes a bit weird in the fifth case - the only one specifically written for the DS (and probably the best hallmark of what the upcoming Apollo Justice will be like) - but I'm looking forward to knocking the rest of this down, and moving on to the next two in the series.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - B/90
Cooking Mama: A/40

ps: No, I don't feel like I need to finish a game to give it a "review score," nor do I feel like the scores are immutable. This is my impression of the game right now, and if I enjoy a game five hours into it, it's probably worth playing, unless it goes totally bananas at the very end. If it sucks, I have no intention of slogging through suckage just because maybe it gets better later.

The only games that I've played that would really get radically different reviews from the start and end would be Mass Effect (horrible beginning, but awesome once the player learns the mechanics), and Breakdown (awesome first-person brawler, but with a last boss that is so awfully designed that it literally ruined the entire experience for me - up until the last boss the game was an A/90, then with the last boss, it goes to an A/10. It's not a really fair review, but that last boss is so bad I almost broke the game in two, and threw the pieces in the trash. The frustration alone makes the game not worth anyone's time.)

Good Customer Service: Rock Band Drums

2008-02-17T09:11:00.001-08:00

So, after weeks of enthusiastic playtime, our Rock Band drums finally met their demise last night. The yellow pad had split in two sometime during the evening. The pad still works, technically, but it's clearly going to degrade from here - the rubber pad's already showing where the edge was rubbing up against it last night.

I called the Rock Band support line (since the automated stuff all assumes faulty pads from the start), and talked to a guy there. I explained entirely honestly that the pads failed through normal (but heavy) use, and that I was just wondering if it'd be possible to order a spare part.

He told me the pads were still covered by warranty, and it wasn't a problem to replace them. Using the same "Express" method that they shipped our replacement guitars with, the new pads should be here in a couple days, and then we have a month to ship out the old set. While obviously, I'd have preferred indestructible pads, or guitars that worked correctly from day one, the Rock Band customer service has been really, truly excellent, going well above my expectations of what they needed to do.

Professor Layton & the Curious Village

2008-02-13T23:47:00.000-08:00

Professor Layton and the Curious Village may be the perfect game for the DS. It's essentially a collection of puzzles - some are logic puzzles, some are basic math, and some are tricks - presented in the form of a Euro-style comic mystery.

The setting and story that frame the game are charming and distinctive, and they lend the relatively straightfoward puzzles a visual style that keeps them from feeling as mechanical as they actually are.

It's a game you can pick up and play really quickly, make progress in short bursts, step away from for a long while and return without penalty (they even have a "The story so far..." re-intro whenever you load a game), and more, the game has an addictive, "just one more..." quality that keeps a person playing for dozens of puzzles in a row.

Yeah, the fact that every time you talk to someone, they want you to solve a puzzle is strange. Yeah, it's artificial - but it's like a musical. People break out into song, and you just accept it for what it is. When you buy into the game's setting, the puzzle-ness comes along with that. It works, I get a huge kick out of it, and I can't wait for more. If you've got a DS, this should be in it.

A/95

DS

2008-02-10T21:51:00.001-08:00

The Nintendo DS is a curious console. As anyone reading this is probably aware, it's a huge, huge success - far beyond what almost anyone could have predicted. It's still regularly selling out, and since late November, it's been impossible to find on store shelves.

When I first saw the DS, I was completely dismissive of the touchscreen. There's no feedback, they tend to be imprecise, they can't really track fast movement all that well, they get scratched up, and are generally frustrating. The PSP trounced it from a graphics perspective, its high resolution screen made the DS look like a sorry joke, and overall, I thought the PSP was going to hand Nintendo its ass.

Of course, the best piece of advice you can ever give someone is to never, ever bet against Nintendo in the handheld market - for NINETEEN YEARS, Nintendo's owned the space, and handfuls of challengers have had their dreams shattered by the lower-tech Nintendo handheld. The Lynx, Game Gear, Nomad, Wonderswan, Neo Geo Pocket Color and PSP were almost universally "better" than their Nintendo counterpart. Why the success?

Normally, I'd say it comes down to software. Hardware power's never been the determining factor in a console's success, except as it relates to how that power translates to software. But the PSP's had some great games that look much, much better, complex, console-style games like Metal Gear: Portable Ops, Wipeout, and Daxter. These are portable games that feel like their console counterparts with minimal sacrifice except load times.

But where the PSP is frustrating - the delicate media, the huge, unprotected screen, the short battery life and long load times, the DS is extraordinarily elegant. The screen is protected by the clamshell design. You can 'sleep' the system for weeks on end without worrying about the battery, the battery lasts almost a full reasonable weekend of play, the media is nigh-indestructible (and small), and the load times, where present, are minimal.

The DS, as a result, actually works *as a handheld*. It's explicitly *not* a portable console - it's something uniquely geared towards playing games in short bursts. While the available software is a really mixed bag (there are a few extremely high-quality standouts, like Mario and Zelda, as well as some really interesting options like Phoenix Wright and Elite Beat Agents, but the vast majority of the DS's software lineup is *terrible*), the good games are designed to actually work in a completely "portable" environment.

The DS's big problem is that Nintendo needs to start clamping down on quality. Both the DS and Wii's software libraries are so full of shovelware that it's increasingly difficult for an uneducated consumer to actually make *good* purchasing decisions. If Nintendo continues to let garbage like Elf Bowling and Chicken Shoot taint their libraries, they're really risking killing the casual market through bad games.

Still, it's hard to question Nintendo these days. I was sure the Wii was going to be their last console, and the PSP was going to hand them their hat. I was wrong on both counts, but I worry that between the Wii's relatively low attach rate and the DS's mixed library that their success is not as stable as people seem to think it is. Obviously, they've made a huge, huge amount of money so far, and as a result, they are free to make some genuinely risky decisions. The ones they've made so far have paid off in spades.

We'll see how it goes from here on out...

The Week In Games

2008-02-04T00:36:00.000-08:00

Rez HD: As awesome as I remember it, but with better graphics and sound. A/100 - if you've never played this, you absolutely must. For $10, it's a steal.
Need for Speed: ProStreet: I don't really know why I'm playing this. Forza 2 is, by many measures, a better game, with a better handling model. Still, for some reason, I've been playing this more than Forza. C/80
Rock Band: Got some drumming in today, but also played a bit with the Oasis Pack, which is definitely worth picking up if you like the game, and have any inclination toward the band. Rock Band: A/100, Oasis Pack ?/90
No More Heroes: Played a bit more of this. The action and style remain as engaging as ever, but I read a review where the reviewer basically summed it up - the game is split into two parts - action and "open world." The action is great, the open world is a failure in every way that matters. Still a really enjoyable game, but some really boneheaded design decisions do make the game more frustrating than it needs to be. A/80
Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer: Hit up a bit of this one night with some coworkers and a friend from way back. Really, really fun with a really unique and addictive reward structure. One of the best multiplayer games I've played in ages. B/95

Not a bad week of gaming. I'm hoping to pick up Burnout: Paradise at some point in the relatively near future, and I'm curious to see the reviews of Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles for the DS. If the reviews are good, I'll almost certainly pick it up, but I haven't heard much about it, so my hopes aren't way up. Culdcept SAGA is also coming out, and it's a series I've always heard a lot about, but have never played. Maybe worth checking out? Who knows. It'll probably be one of those games that disappears instantly and is hard to find for a reasonable price, or is $19.99 within a month.

"Wouldn't it be cool if..."

2008-02-03T20:38:00.000-08:00

That phrase drives me absolutely batshit crazy. Why? Isn't that what you think, when you're trying to come up with an interesting idea? Wouldn't it be cool if you could build your own city? Wouldn't it be cool if you had a sword made of light? Wouldn't it be cool if you could fly, or run super-fast, or be invisible?

Sure.

So, I guess the phrase itself doesn't drive me nuts. What drives me absolutely crazy is how many people I've known that seemed to think that a game designer's job starts and stops with that phrase. Some of those people are themselves game designers, but the vast majority are executives and managers who don't really understand what it is a game designer brings to the table.

Designing a game isn't terribly different than the process of cooking, so let's try that analogy. The designer is basically a chef - they need to figure out what they want to make, and in general, how ot make it. Now, you can run a perfectly passable eating establishment without a chef - you can have line cooks who work from a plan, or you can have an untrained person come up with a general menu, and noodle around until they get something that's tasty. But the chef will make sure the ingredients are use to their fullest.

They'll be used in dishes that are designed to accentuate their flavor. They'll be used at the right time of year. Leftovers will be reused in ways that extend the ingredients' value. They'll adapt to the changing palates of their clientele. While it's *possible* to run an eating establishment without a chef, doing so means you miss out on a tremendous amount of efficiency, quality, and direction.

The designer's job is relatively similar. A good designer has a deep understanding of the field - they know the full spectrum of ingredients, as it were, and how to use them. They're always on the lookout for something new, and how those things can be used in interesting ways. They understand the conventions of their medium, and are constantly looking for new ways to push the boundaries. Sometimes, they'll even invent something completely new and different.

It's not simply, "Wouldn't it be cool if..." The thing is, while people push the notion that games are art, they're not just art. The're also science. Basic psychology plays a huge role in whether a game is successful or not. Games need to be subtle in how they direct the player. They need to use the conventions of the genre appropriately, and they need to have a keen awareness of difficulty, frustration, and how to balance those aspects with rewards that entice the player to keep playing.

Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adria are artists - but they're also scientists. They experiment and analyze their food to discover new and interesting ways to manipulate it. The basic mechanics of food are science. Blumenthal says you should cook asparagus in oil, not water, because some of asparagus' critical flavor compounds are water-soluble. When you cook asparagus in oil, you retain those flavors, making the asparagus taste more like itself. This is more than just "art," it's a combination of art with a deep understanding of *why* these things work.

I'm no Heston Blumenthal. While I try to understand why a mechanic should be a certain way, and devise things that bend (and sometimes break) genre conventions, I don't have a genuinely deep understanding of the psychology of how this all makes people feel. But I can apply basic knowledge of art, music theory, interactivity, film, writing, years of game playing, and an understanding of the design process to create something far more interesting than a simple rumination of, "Wouldn't it be cool if..."

Still... it's a semantic niggle. A pet peeve I can't let go of, because it viscerally pisses me off. It's not a bad starting point, but finding something that's superficially cool is barely even scratching the surface. Genuinely good ideas are a hell of a lot more than cool.

No More Heroes

2008-01-27T20:56:00.000-08:00

No More Heroes, for the Wii, is the latest bit of insanity from SUDA51 and his crew at Grasshopper Manufacture. Their last game, Killer 7, was an incredibly audacious and daring ... uh... monstrosity. While the Sin City-inspired graphical style was unique for a game, and the story was a mind-bending bit of weirdness, the actual gameplay left a lot to be desired.

Still, with Killer 7, it was hard not to admire its total devotion to insanity. The tutorial system was a strange, bondage gear-clad man who randomly appear, the main character was an assassin with a variety of different personalities... the whole game, from its core concept down to how it dealt with very basic gameplay concepts (moving forward required you to press the A button) was crazy. It was like the game wanted to break every expectation you might have had about what a game was. In that regard, it succeeded - the problem was that it also failed to be comprehensible, or in many cases, genuinely engaging.

I don't mean that it wasn't "fun" - I'm really pretty sick of games being pigeonholed into 'fun' being the only metric by which a game is judged. Killer 7 was a disappointment because while it was incredibly interesting, and challenged my preconceptions, the core mechanics were actually actively boring, and the story was so bizarre it simply failed to keep my interest after a few hours of play.

Given that, I was really looking forward to No More Heroes - it promised to be a bit more accessible, but still push the boundaries of normalcy. In that regard, it's quite a success. Think of No More Heroes as a classic hack & slash - that's what the core of the game is. The main character, Travis Touchdown, runs around and hacks people to bits with his lightsaber (they call it a Beam Katana, but come on, let's call a spade a spade). For the most part, this is accomplished by just mashing the A button, but finishing moves are gesture-controlled. A quick swipe of the Wiimote in the direction of the arrow, and Travis hacks his opponents in two.

One of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten, as a game designer, was to take a long, hard look at your game, figure out what the player is doing most of the time, and focus on making that fun. It's also a pretty good metric of whether a game is actually good or not. Is what you're doing for the majority of the time fun? Why? Why not?

In Final Fantasy X, you spend most of your time walking around. There's simply nothing to do while walking around. You walk at a middling pace, there's rarely a genuine reason to walk anywhere but the obvious direction the game guides you to, and as a result, the vast bulk of the time you're playing FFX, you're simply walking, slowly, to your next destination. The end result was that the game bored me to tears. That the "reward" for walking around was more of the hamfisted, stupid story didn't help matters.

This is also where Killer 7 and No More Heroes differ. By really changing up the basic control scheme for a game, Killer 7 made tasks that are normally simple quite tedious or confusing. In No More Heroes, the core mechanics of the game are relatively familiar and accessible. It's pretty easy to just jump into the game and do things.

Still, the thing that really stands out about No More Heroes is how dedicated it is to its particular vision of the world. Travis, the main character, is a bit of a loser slacker. His whole existence is a mix of the absolutely tedious and the extraordinarily bizarre. The game has the player both mowing lawns and getting into full-scale lightsaber fights with opera-singing assassins or school janitors.

The Grasshopper Manufacture logo which appears when you load the game has the slogan "Punk's Not Dead" at the base of their crest. It's clear that the game is meant to have a bit of over-the-top excess mixed with a bit of nihilism. There's something very ... exuberant about the game. It's like a high-school slacker's notebook illustrations and fantasies come to life - intense, rebellious, a bit angry and a bit entitled. It's completely weird, but also completely dedicated to that vision.

That dedication is what sets the game apart, and what keeps me interested in where it'll go next. In a sea of this last holiday season's excellent, even extraordinary games, No More Heroes stands out. Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, Mass Effect - there's something about them that does feel similar, and eventually, you feel the need for something different. No More Heroes is that something. There sure as hell ain't anything else out there like it.

(Still in progress) A/85

The Wii

2008-01-20T23:58:00.000-08:00

So. You may have heard about Nintendo's new console. It has two major things that set it apart from its competition:

1.) It has a novel motion-sensing controller
2.) Its graphical horsepower is substantially worse than the 360 or the PS3

The graphical horsepower issue is sort of a mixed blessing. On one hand, games on the Wii tend to look worse than they do on either of the other consoles. Sure, art direction can mitigate the hardware issues, but only to a limited degree.

The fact that the Wii is limited to 480p is almost a dealbreaker. Once used to 720p+, 480p is noticeably pixelated. It looks terrible in comparison.

However, on the plus side, games are cheaper to make on the Wii - you don't need extremely high-res art assets (or high poly models), your environments by necessity have to be smaller and less densely populated, and AI and such have to be much less complex. This means that compared to the 360 and PS3, game development on the Wii costs much less, and involves less risk.

The motion sensing is a similarly double-edged sword. On one hand, you have a really novel, accessible control scheme. Players can mimic real-life motions in games like Wii Sports, and feel like they instantly understand how to play the game. You also have a pointer, which by now is almost a universally understood input mechanism.

The problem is that the technology is really limited. It can fake a lot - Wii Sports is a great example of taking only the "right" data, faking a lot, and really creating the illusion that the Wii can understand subtle and complex motion inputs. There are undoubtedly ways of tricking the player into believing the hardware can "understand" more than it can, but it's not as easy as players might think.

Still, the biggest problem with the Wii's motion-sensing capabilities will likely eventually become its biggest strength: Game designers don't have a clue what to do with the Wiimote. In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, the controls are essentially a remap of the Gamecube controls with some minor "waggle" and pointing added for effect. In practice, it's functionally *worse* than the Gamecube controls.

Similarly, a game like Alien Syndrome should have a relatively simple control scheme - one stick for movement, one stick for camera control, and some buttons to shoot, change items, and the like. Problem is, the Wii has no second stick for camera control. As a result, the game completely botches the control scheme in order to get camera control *somewhere*, by putting it on the tilt control on the left-hand controller. It's insane.

But that's the crux of the problem. Some games simply *don't work* with the Wii's control scheme. The dual-analog control that has become the standard over the last few years often cannot be elegantly remapped to the Wii. And even if it could be, it shouldn't be.

The thing that people love about the Wii is the belief that you're *doing* something. Wii Sports works because people can utilize their real-world knowledge about the sports they're doing. Warioware and Zack and Wiki work because the motions of the controller mimic, in surprising ways, motions the player is already intimately familiar with.

Once people figure out how to make games that focus on the *right* way to use the Wiimote, Nintendo will have a lock on that whole genre of games. But until then, you get games like Alien Syndrome, which are really square pegs in round holes.

Even Super Mario Galaxy, hailed as one of the best games of all time, doesn't really use the Wii to its fullest. Almost everything about its control would have been better on a Gamecube pad. And with the exceptions of Wii Sports, Warioware: Smooth Moves and Zack and Wiki: The Quest for Barbaros' Treasure, that's true of all the Wii's games.

It's going to take a generation or two before designers really "get it," or for the technology to allow for better recognition of high-speed motion. Until then, the Wii remains a console with more potential than most people know what to do with.

Recommended on the Wii:

Wii Sports (obviously) A/100
Zack and Wiki: The Quest for Barbaros' Treasure A/(85ish - not far enough in to really give it a definitive rating)
Warioware: Smooth Moves B/85
Super Mario Galaxy B:/85

Not Recommended:

Alien Syndrome D/20
SSX Blur (an interesting, but failed attempt at a novel control scheme) B/35
MySims (a game that strips away what makes the Sims interesting, and replaces it with painfully clumsy and boring "construction" tasks) A/15

Bias Toward Success

2008-01-13T23:34:00.000-08:00

Good input leads to good results. Bad input leads to bad results. This isn't something that's true about games, it's true about most things in life. Sure, there are some strange times where bad input accidentally leads to good results - the people who follow up on why their assessment of the quality of their inputs was wrong are the people who make all sorts of wacky discoveries.

But that's a bit of a digression. The point is, in most games, when you do the right thing, you're rewarded. Mario jumps on the mushroom, and an obstacle is cleared. If he fails to jump at the right time, he's likely killed, resetting the player to the start of the level. Most games have this sort of punishment for failure - whether it's the limited life scheme of old-school arcades, or reset to a checkpoint a'la Halo, the punishment for failure in most cases is death. This is a paradigm that has existed in videogames from their very inception. Spacewar has this risk-reward balance exactly.

And then there was Wii Sports.

In Wii Sports, if the game doesn't know what to make of your input - if you're swinging the Wiimote around haphazardly, instead of bowling properly, the game tends to interpret it as successful input, and behave like you told it the right thing to do. Try it - next time you're bowling, instead of "bowling" properly, swing the Wiimote in a completely arbitrary way. You'll find that a huge portion of the time, your ball will still go mostly down the lane, and probably even hit a couple pins, if not strike altogether.

The first time this happened, my wife's younger brother showed us how to "break" the game by swinging in a completely oddball way. Nothing like bowling at all, but he nearly doubled our scores, and we'd been trying to "bowl" legitimately the entire time. At first, this seemed like a glitch - some exploit he'd found, and in a way, it is.

With most traditional games, input is binary - you either hit the button or you don't. Sure, there's "analog" input on the sticks, and all sorts of strategic decisions you can fail, but the core mechanic for most games is that you either hit the button, or not. With motion control, everything becomes a lot hazier. There isn't a single "right" input - how you hold the controller changes the input. How long your arms are, or what degree your wrist is twisted in your natural relaxed position... all these things affect the specific input of a motion controlled game.

How, for instance, in Wii Sports, can you really quantify every part of a bowler's pitch? It boggled my mind, originally, when it "felt" so right - but the simple fact of the matter is that they don't actually read all that much input from the swing - it's mostly a very limited set of inputs that they check, and they assume everything that they're *not* checking is going well.

Because everything that's important to the gross motion of the bowling swing reads right - because the output feels like a natural extension of the input under normal conditions, most people aren't going to question specifically which input is being taken in. Enough, it seems, to understand what the player is doing correctly. Not so, I'd say. Not at the edge cases. Not during the weird swings - things that would normally be considered failure states.

Now, it was undoubtedly a conscious decision on Nintendo's part to bias the game toward interpreting uninterpretable input as "good" rather than "bad" input. But the repercussions are astonishing. Wii Sports is a spectacularly inclusive, accessible game. People can jump right in, and feel like they're doing well. Imagine if they'd biased the game towards the traditional failure? The first few times you'd bowl, you'd gutterball, or miss all the pins. Your first experience with the console wouldn't be one of success and joy, marveling at how the console interpreted your obviously wonderful bowling motion for what it was, but instead, a feeling of misunderstanding, failure, frustration, and defeat.

This kind of reward isn't limited to Wii Sports - a lot of casual games bias the player towards success. Peggle's a good one. There's no way that anyone is making judgements about the fifth bounce of their ball in that game (a weird mix of pachinko and Puzzle Bobble), but that randomness tends to work out on the player's behalf. Bejeweled is the same way. There's strategy involved, but no one's making 8-chain combos - they just happen periodically as a random reward to the player. Is it a result of random gem generation? Maybe. Maybe not. The point is, it makes the player feel successful, rewarded, and happy, even if they really had very little control over it. They gave the game input - good or bad, and it tended to reward them with something.

I think it's interesting to note how few other console games (even on the Wii) actually bias the player towards success. So often, the punishment for bad input is failure, which just leads to frustration, irritation, and anger. It requires a huge amount of finesse on the designer's part to keep that level of frustration low - to make the player feel like it was their fault for failing, instead of the game cheating them out of success. But there's one really straightforward way of making that frustration disappear. Bias the player's input towards success.

I'm not going to say that all games have to be "fun" - some games are about giving very controlled, "right" input. Mario is the classic example - remove the challenge and you remove what the game *is* at its core. But there are a lot more games that could benefit from learning how to turn bad input into good results, or at the very least, bad input into good input. Encouragement is a good thing. For many years, games have responded with the stick. It's time to learn how to respond with a carrot.

Undertow

2008-01-06T22:37:00.000-08:00

So, last week, for the "Best of XBLA" post, I mentioned Undertow as a game that had gotten some reasonable buzz, but one I hadn't played myself.

Over the course of the last week, I picked it up and ran through the single player. It's basically a dual-stick shooter in the vein of Geometry Wars, but with the control-point gameplay of something like Battlefield. Basically, what that translates to is that you control a unit that can shoot and move in any direction, and you have to take over areas of the map, and hold on to them until the other team runs out of points.

There are four basic classes that progressively increase in size, firepower and hitpoints while decreasing in agility and speed. Each unit can be upgraded with points that you earn for killing enemies and holding on to control points. The player also has "depth charges," which act like proximity mines, and can "dash" - move quickly in a particular direction for a short period of time.

Though the basic mechanics are simple, there's a surprising amount of strategy and depth. The units nicely counter each other, each has a purpose (hulking destroyers are easily taken out by fast-moving soldiers, but the destroyers' projectiles do a huge amount of splash damage, which make them very good for holding down tight corridors) and a counter. You can play single player or co-op, or play competitive matches online.

The problem with the multiplayer is that there simply isn't a community forming around the game, and online games are extremely hard to find. This is a real shame, because the game is really quite good. A simple, quick diversion, but a real breath of fresh air in this year's onslaught of epic, 20-plus hour games. Undertow is a sad victim of bad timing, but one that I hope doesn't get totally overlooked. I'd love for Chair (the developer) to do another marketing push for it somehow, or for MS to release this as the "make up for two weeks of shitty Live service" game.

The game deserves an audience.

Presentation Matters (no spoilers)

2008-01-01T21:48:00.000-08:00

This is an example of how a relatively small change can make a really big difference in how a game's mechanics are perceived.

From the first time I saw Assassin's Creed, I knew I would have to play it. On top of being done by the same team (or as much of it as possible, I suppose) that did Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (one of my favorite games ever), the mechanics and scope that they described were extraordinary.

Parkour, dynamic crowds in an open world, "social stealth," espionage and free-form assassinations... wow. This game has everything! And indeed, it did. The parkour, in particular, is extraordinary. Controlling the main character is a pleasure, and the way he runs through the city is nothing short of revolutionary. The game's other individual mechanics, from blending in with monks to simply listening in on a conversation are also well-executed and entertaining. The story is interesting and well-told, and that's as much as I can say about that without getting too spoiler-y.

However, Assassin's Creed suffers from one major problem, and it's bad enough that it is, I believe, the cause of all the "hate it" reviews on the "love it or hate it" spectrum:

Repetition. Or rather, the fact that the game *feels* repetitive, not that it necessarily is any more repetitive than any other game.

Calling the game repetitive feels really unfair, having played through the entire game. The game consists, essentially, of nine individual assassinations. For each assassination, you have to scout your target, learn where they're going to be, what the general populace thinks of them, and what the best way to get close to them is. Every assassination has potentially an identical flow: find local assassin's bureau, find a number of "viewponts" (tall locations from which to survey the surrounding area) to find the "scouting" objectives, perform a number of "scouting" objectives (which include things like pickpocketing, listening in on conversations, interrogating people, and performing random fetch quests), then carrying out the actual assassination.

This is actually a really wide variety of stuff to do, and the fact of the matter is that you can perform a relatively minimal number of these tasks in whatever manner you wish. You don't have to do every single one - it's up to you how you want to scout the target. The problem is that each task is highlighted on the player's map once it's found via a "viewpoint", and all you have to do is go to the area on the map, perform the task, and be done.

This is a really, really big problem, because fundamentally, that simplicity and straightforwardness work against the core mechanics of the game.

The game is about freedom of movement and observation. The best parts of Assassin's Creed are when you are running around making really quick decisions on the fly, based on where you are and a quick analysis of your surroundings.

Unfortunately, the highlighted tasks on the minimap force the player to concentrate on the minimap, and not on their surroundings.

That the player knows everything that they have to do without looking at their surroundings is a really big problem. It completely breaks the illusion that the people are behaving autonomously - all their actions are predetermined, and the player is told by the minimap that they'll happen on cue.

When the player gets to the highlighted spot, the conversation the player needs to overhear starts, or the NPC with the item you need to pickpocket starts in a specific location and walks off - always perfectly on cue. Obviously, for a game, you need things to be controlled and communicated to the players in some way, but this still sucks.

Thing is, the trigger for the behaviour *still* happens, even if you don't have the objective on the map. When you happen across one of these things and recognize it in the world, it's much, much more immersive.

Best of all, it's still recognizable. If there had been a slightly different HUD element that kept the player's focus on the world, that forced the player to watch the crowd instead of the minimap, the entire atmosphere of the game would be totally different. Even better, if the animations and crowd reactions were distinct enough to draw your attention to the events, you could conceivably do it without HUD elements, or restricted to the existing in-game HUD elements that are used to highlight characters.

The second problem with the minimap is that it shows *all* the local events. When you present a gamer with a variety of events and they're all undifferentiated, it places the same value on them all. If you have to complete one objective, you have to complete them all. Again, this works against the concept of a world that feels real. In a real world, you never have five objectives that all have the same basic value. Because everything feels the same, there's no real way or REASON for players to choose one objective over another other than what they want to do.

That's not the right kind of choice to present to a player, again, because it destroys the illusion that the world is a living place. If the player can say, "During every assassination, I want to do only the pickpocketing objectives," and they can, it's not a real world with real people in it. In a real world, the assassin has to find the opportunity and utilize it. In this game, they present you with every opportunity, and it's up to the player to take their pick.

Again, the weird thing is that this doesn't make the game any better - it's one of the main reasons the game feels so repetitive. Not only is each option present in each assassination, each of those objectives is essentially free of context. They're simply small objectives that open a larger objective. If the objectives were put into a larger context, if they weren't all there at the same time, and it wasn't solely up to the player to choose, these things could be woven into the larger objective in a stronger way.

The context, then, would make the objectives themselves feel less isolated. A pickpocket objective where you're pickpocketing a specific person in a specific place is interesting - but because of the choice you're given, and how isolated each mission feels, each pickpocket mission feels basically identical.

Assassin's Creed is fundamentally an extraordinary game. Its movement mechanics are utterly unparalleled, and the world feels really well-defined and real. The story is interesting and the mechanics are diverse and varied. The problem really lies in the details of the presentation - by giving the players choice but stripping away the reasons one would actually make a choice, the developers missed a great opportunity to take a collection of excellent mechanics and turn them into something greater than the sum of their parts.

Best of XBLA

2007-12-30T12:40:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of great, epic games this holiday season. But rather than looking at the biggest games of the year, what about the small ones? Here's some of the best games on XBLA.

Every Extend Extra Extreme: Get past the stupid name - the game's spectacular. It's an adaptation of Every Extend Extra for the PSP, which itself was an adaptation of Every Extend, for the PC. The basic mechanic is that you control a small cursor onscreen that you can self-destruct. Anything the explosion touches also explodes. The goal is to create crazy chain reactions, and then collect the resulting powerups during the "safe" time you have after your cursor respawns.

E4, for short, does the "Q? Entertainment" thing of having a strong tie between the music and the visuals. It's also a huge improvement over E3, due to a much stronger connection between the music and the gameplay. Blowing up the cursor on the beat increases a multiplier, which in turn creates a nice bit of tension between your "safe time" running out, the on-screen enemies being in the right place, and hitting the beat. It's one of those games that's incomprehensible at first, which is a shame, because once you get it, it's the kind of game you'll sink hours into.

Carcassonne: A spectacular translation of a great board game, Carcassonne for XBLA's actually an improvement over the game it's based on. All the scoring is automated, all the available moves are clear, and the focus shifts entirely to the strategy. The graphics are pleasant without being overwhelming, and the game is deep enough to sustain hours of interest. One of the best things about it is that you can play multiplayer either online or off, since there are no "secrets" you have to protect from the other players.

The one problem with Carcassonne is that, as far as I can tell, you need multiple controllers to play with multiple people. This is a real shame, because there's no reason you couldn't just pass the controller from one player to the next. I wonder if you could play with the Rock Band controllers?

Catan: Unlike Carcassonne, Catan can only be played multiplayer online, since it's based on a game where you need to keep some cards secret from the other players. It's a shame the Dreamcast VMU died a horrible death, because Catan would be the perfect game for those little screens. That aside, Catan was one of the first boardgames to really be successfully translated to the console, and it's a huge success.

The trading interface is intuitive and easy to use, the opponent AI is challenging and fun, and the graphics are either a very literal interpretation of the board game, or a slightly less usable but nicer looking adaptation of the game's tiles. Even if you've never played Settlers of Catan, I'd recommend checking this game out, and playing the trial until you win a match. The mechanics are relatively simple (trade resources until you can build stuff), but the strategy can get rather complex. Both Catan and Carcassonne are tremendous values on XBLA, cheaper and in many ways better than their boardgame originals.

Pac-Man: Championship Edition: Pac-Man's original creator, Toru Iwatani, apparently retired after PM:CE's release. It's fitting that Iwatani ended his career with the only game to have really improved Pac-Man at its core. PM:CE is in many ways a familiar game - your little yellow chomping circle runs through mazes, avoiding ghosts, eating pellets. The difference is that now, the mazes are dynamic. Each screen is split in two - the left side and the right side. When you eat all the pellets on one side, a fruit appears on the other. When you eat the fruit, the empty side of the maze changes.

Because every game is now done under a timer (the standard game only lasts five minutes), this forces players to find the best strategy for their situation to maximize their score. Do they clear as many maps as possible, to get the most valuable fruit? Do they eat as many ghosts as possible, trying to chain many together to get a huge multiplier? The game's pace keeps the frenetic craziness of the original, and running through a junction, avoiding ghosts by mere pixels is commonplace. It's crazy fun, and a genius reimagining of a familiar and accessible classic.

Puzzle Quest: If you never played Puzzle Quest on the DS or the PSP, it's on XBLA (as well as Wii and PC). XBLA is a faithful, high-res translation of the wildly original combination of RPG and Bejeweled, except now you can play against others online. It's a strange combination of games, and I'm not sure that the casual gamers who are into Bejeweled will actually find Puzzle Quest particularly accessible, but regardless, it's hugely addictive, and the RPG elements add an additional layer of strategy to the mix.

The one weird thing about Puzzle Quest is that if you're used to Bejeweled, you'll try to set up the "next" move. If you do that in Puzzle Quest, you'll set the enemy up for success! You have to try to sabotage the next move while setting up for the move after that. It's an odd change, and takes a little getting used to. But that said, if you're anything more than a super-casual gamer, Puzzle Quest is well worth playing.

Undertow: I haven't played this yet, but will be shortly. It's an odd mix of dual-stick shooter and control-point based multiplayer. I've heard lots of good things, but haven't yet given it a shot. Anyone given this a go, yet?

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Anyway - that's my pick of the relatively recent XBLA bunch. There've been a lot of stinkers recently - Word Puzzle comes to mind, and I really didn't like Space Giraffe (though it does have a passionate fanbase). Looking forward to Rez HD.

Mass Effect

2007-12-29T23:47:00.000-08:00

I almost skipped Mass Effect. In a season utterly jam-packed with extraordinary games, Mass Effect was almost the only game I could put off without some ill effect. There were good deals on Call of Duty and Mario, COD and Orange Box were Live-enabled, and Assassin's Creed was a game from one of my favorite developers that I'd been looking forward to for years.

Mass Effect, on the other hand, would require a substantial investment of time, was strictly single-player, and well, I had a ton of stuff to wade through. I could put Mass Effect off 'till January, or whenever it got cheap. The only reason I picked it up when I did, honestly, is that the Limited Edition looked like it had a reasonable amount of interesting stuff, and it was getting impossible to find.

So, when I started playing it, it was ... it wasn't the right time. I was in the midst of five or six other games - shorter, focused, highly polished experiences. Mass Effect, on the other hand, was a game of tremendous scope, whose core mechanics simply aren't as polished as a game like Call of Duty 4, which has had a couple iterations to get it right.

The camera was the biggest problem, at the start. They've clearly cribbed a lot from Gears of War, but they did it really inelegantly. The camera appears to track with the character's locator, which means, for instance, when you're walking down stairs, the camera travels along the steps, instead of on a smooth slope down the steps. This results in the camera "bouncing" as you move down the steps in a way that feels completely robotic and wrong. The problems don't end there, but it's weird, because it's a lot of small problems that make the thing feel really unpolished and "off."

Still, the world you're dropped into has clearly had a lot of effort and love poured into it. Science fiction these days is really difficult to pull off. A lot of what people associate with sci-fi has become really cliche. Between Star Trek, Star Wars, Alien and Blade Runner, it's difficult to find a niche that feels original. Mass Effect manages to walk a really interesting line between Star Trek and Blade Runner, with a vaguely dystopic utopia. It's like if Syd Mead had made Blade Runner a nice place to inhabit. The music's Vangelis influences are obvious, almost from the start.

So, a mixed start. I was enthused about the story, but not all that jazzed about the game's presentation or mechanics. The presentation problems were legion, but it really boils down to a single problem: Mass Effect is a really deep, interesting game with a lot of systems that work together. The character and weapon customization have huge impacts on how you deal with combat and conversation, which are what you're doing the vast majority of the time. The problem is that there's almost no introduction to how to use any of the stuff.

For instance, Mass Effect gives you a relatively standard choice at the start of the game: choosing your character class. There's a short text description that tells you what your class does and why, in an effort to help you figure out which class is appropriate. The problem is, you have to make this completely irreversible choice that defines how you play the game before you've had a chance to experience any of the game at all.

So, when I chose the "Infiltrator" class, the description appealed to me - you're basically a sniper, and you'll have to work to find advantageous positions, and use your distance advantage to its fullest. Sounded great. But in practice, at the start of the game, it's incredibly frustrating. Sniper rifles are hard to use, and as a result, I died. A lot. "You suck!" you might say. You're right. I did suck. I had no idea what I was doing. Every time I got into combat, I just keeled over dead within ten seconds.

Part of the problem was that fundamentally, I didn't know what Mass Effect was. I assumed it was like Knights of the Old Republic at first, but it also looked like Gears of War. I didn't know how to play it. If I approached it like KOTOR, I died. If I approached it like Gears, I died. Over and over again.

The second problem was one of choice. The game gives you a couple things you can do, right after the intro. You can go to one of two planets, and you're free to make the decision however you want. The problem is, one is radically more difficult than the other, and I had no way of knowing which was which. If they told me, I was confused by this giant tidal wave of information - the new galaxy map, the new ship, and a wide variety of game mechanics that I was unfamiliar with.

So, I was in way over my head, but had gotten to a point where I could no longer turn back, and I was still completely confused as to how to actually play the game. The end result was that I died, over and over again, for reasons I simply couldn't understand. After a couple hours of this, I hated the game. It felt broken. It felt unfair. It was absolute misery, coupled with the fact that there's almost no intelligent checkpoint system, and if you weren't careful about saving, you could often lose an hour of playtime if you died. And since I'd die in a single hit during combat after ten seconds, it meant that every time I entered combat (where you couldn't save), if I hadn't saved before, I lost a tremendous amount of time.

Frustrating. Extremely frustrating - to the point where at this point, I strongly considered breaking the disc in two, throwing it out the window, and never playing it again. The lack of checkpoint saves felt like a relic out of the mid-nineties. The combat system felt utterly broken and horrible, and as much as I was enjoying the story, I hated everything else about the game.

If I had to rate the game at this point, it would have been something like a B:15. Like Top Gear, "Ambitious, but rubbish." (Though Top Gear would merit a much, much, much higher score - an A/100, without a doubt.)

I thought to myself, "How can anyone tolerate this crap?" It was such a disaster, I couldn't understand how it could be getting decent reviews, even if they were all talking about the fact that it was great in spite of itself. Penny Arcade even did a post on how Mass Effect dumps you into the ocean without ever telling you how to swim.

So, I gave it one more shot, at 2:30am one night. I read some board posts at GameFAQs trying to figure out what the hell I was doing wrong during combat. Lo and behold, after reading about a dozen posts, I got it. I understood that you had to target the biotic powers using the RB pause menu. I understood how the shields and health actually worked. I understood the weapon upgrades, the importance of cover, and how to properly use my teammates.

It was a sea change. Finally, the combat made sense. The inventory system made sense. The frustration melted away, and finally, the story and the mechanics worked together to form something that felt right.

Finally, I could experience the universe, the conversation system, and everything the game had to offer without seeing it through a veil of seething hatred. The plot and writing are excellent, if not extraordinary. In Mass Effect, Bioware's done the nigh-impossible. They've made a unique, utterly compelling sci-fi universe.

Post actual introduction to how the game's supposed to work: A/85.

The game's still got a lot of rough edges. The camera still sucks. There are a lot of really bad animation transitions. The load times take forever. The binary choice between good and evil can be a bit tiresome. But the things that are good are really good. The character animation, when it's not popping, is awesome. Their facial animations are excellent, and do a great job of making the characters feel real and believable. There are choices that matter in the game. Choices that don't feel like arbitrary bullshit, and that emotionally involve the player.

That sense of involvement makes the game extraordinary. You become the lynchpin of an incredibly epic story, and it leaves a lasting impact. There's a saying in the game industry - "A late game is late only until it ships, but a bad game is bad forever." To rejigger that a bit, Mass Effect's frustrating mechanics are only frustrating until you understand them, but the storyline is totally freakin' awesome.

When you play through the first time, play as a soldier.

Scoring and Discussion

2007-12-29T23:25:00.000-08:00

So, this is a game review site. It will be updated on a weekly basis, every Sunday evening with a discussion of whatever games I've played this week. It's not an objective review site, it's purely my opinion, biases and all.

The "scores" which I'll use to rank games are relatively arbitrary, and more of a gut feeling than anything else. They're made up of two parts. The first, a letter grade A-F, is a measure of the game's "innovative" quality. The second, a number grade which will use the whole spectrum from 0 to 100, is a measure of how well the idea was executed.

For some basic reference:

Ico: A/100
Drake of the 99 Dragons: C/04
Call of Duty 4: B/100
Final Fantasy X: C/30
Super Mario Galaxy: B/90
Bioshock: A/90
Assassin's Creed: A/85
MySims: A/12

Some of my favorite games:

Ico
Grim Fandango
Half Life
Rez
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Rock Band

Some of my least favorite games:

Final Fantasy X
Most sports games
Most jRPGs

Basic biases:

I absolutely adore Xbox Live. I think it's the best thing to happen to games in decades.
I'm not a huge fan of the Wii. Though it obviously has potential, its going to be a while before people really understand the limitations of motion control, and make another game that's as successful as Wii Sports.
I've been actively irritated by how Sony's handled themselves the last two generations of hardware. Every piece of Sony game equipment I've ever bought has failed.
I loved the Dreamcast. This may account in some respect for my anti-Sony bias.
Despite my anti-Sony bias, many of my favorite games in the last generation were on the PS2, so credit goes where credit is due.

Not every update will be a review of a single game. It may simply be me talking about whatever suits my fancy, game-wise, but I'll make a concerted effort to actually update regularly, and keep the posts at least marginally interesting. If there isn't a review, it'll be something game design related, most likely.

For the record, I work for a game company. I won't be discussing the game I'm working on, for obvious reasons, and when I talk about design stuff, I'm not going to be talking about work-related design, which means there may be weird holes in subjects I'll talk about, but there you go.

I have a personal blog, which does not reside here. If you came here looking for that, please send me an e-mail. If for some reason, you don't know my e-mail address, post some way for me to get in touch with you, and I'll make sure the connection is re-established.

Now... let's see how this goes.