2009: The Year in Review(s)

New hiatus record! I doubt I'll beat that one, but you never know.

So then, twenty-oh-nine. What a year.

Since my posts last year generally strayed away from the review format that dominated 2007-8's output, I'll make that up here by briefly discussing a few of the games that have particularly excited me over the last twelve months.


Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4

Some of you may remember me describing Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 as the finest RPG I have ever had the pleasure of playing.

This is no longer true.

Instead, that honour goes to its extraordinary successor, unsurprisingly entitled Persona 4. Major changes from P3's formula are few, and are vastly outnumbered by refinements. Most obviously, the player now has the option of direct control over all partymembers in battles, not just the protagonist. Difficulty is ramped up appropriately to account for this greater degree of tactical control, though with this in mind one wonders why the P3 AI options are not only still present, but enabled by default whenever a new character joins your party. This - a reduandant optional feature hungover from the previous game - is as close to a criticism as I can muster. I similarly struggled to criticise P3 of course, but next to its sequel the flaws seem so obvious: the new game's characters are far and away more interesting than Yukari, Junpei and co.; all partymembers now have their own 'Social Link' sidequests and offer special abilities as an incentive to getting to know them; the music manages to be - despite the lack of slightly absurd Japanese rapper Lotus Juice - even more catchy and enjoyable; the English voice cast is a massive improvement; the story is engaging, and doesn't sink into wangsty melodrama (P3 played the tragic parental death card far too often); the randomly generated dungeons are much more varied; and the setting, a small rural town as opposed to a major coastal city, has far more character.

I look forward to the inevitable Persona 5 making me view this game as tired and dated. But until then, Persona 4 is the finest RPG I have ever had the pleasure of playing.


Batman: Arkham Asylum

An exercise in how to do a license justice. With no cinematic blockbuster or new TV series to tie-in with and promote, Rocksteady were able to make a Batman game that stands on its own two feet. Or hangs upside-down from them at least.

Based on the tried and tested Metroid formula of exploration unearthing tools and those tools facilitating further exploration, and borrowing Beyond Good & Evil and Metroid Prime's scanning for secrets, Arkham Asylum primarily alternates between stealth and melee combat.

Stealth is mostly very simple (enemies aren't very good at spotting huge men in bat costumes dangling from gargoyles - considering the license you'd think they'd have received special training) and only occurs in controlled environments, but offers an extremely wide range of techniques to play with. Fun comes not from overcoming the challenge itself, but instead from finding imaginative and unusual ways of doing so.

Melee combat is an elegant system, focused entirely on the art of selecting the right kind of moves - strike, dodge, throw, counter, block, stun - to maintain an unbroken combo. The greater your combo the more experience awarded, which can be spent on nonessential things like health upgrades or new special moves made available after a threshold combo number is reached.

The essential tools are, generally, grappling hooks. There's the basic hookshot, the long range hookshot, the zip-line launcher, the claw for yanking things, and the stronger triple claw for yanking things. There's also explosive gel, which you squirt on things and then blow up. Pretty straightforward. They all have their uses in stealth, combat and exploration, as they should.

As for criticisms, the script (performed by the excellent cast of the acclaimed 90s cartoon) is a little... gamey at times, bosses (few and far between though they are) are often frustrating and repetitive, and the Killer Croc sequence - built up as a huge dramatic climax for almost the entire game - is incredibly boring. But all in all, a great Metroidvania with masses of Batman fanservice, and fun and inventive mechanics. Highly recommended.


1 vs. 100

And now, our live host.

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Thanks host.

Seriously, he either doesn't exist in this second series or he doesn't know what button he's supposed to press on the desk and has spent the last two months talking to absolutely no one.

A live multiple-choice trivia quiz show available to Xbox Live Gold members, 1 vs. 100 is far more entertaining than it might seem to the uninitiated in the hardcore gaming community. The main show, on Tuesday and Friday evenings between 7:30 and 9:30, offers actual prizes in the shape of a selected Live Arcade title (different every week) and Microsoft Points (which I prefer to contract to "Microints") to the players selected for the 'Mob' of 100 and the 'One' contenstant - randomly drawn from the best players from previous rounds.

A rather hollow experience when played solo, but the point is that it's great fun with friends to compete against. I am currently one series up and tied for the current season title with Mr Tony.


There we go. A top three for the year, again in no particular order, and again not in any way implying that nothing else of worth came out last year. Don't you ever say I'm not treating you right.

Achievement Locked

I was recently wondering about region locking on today's home consoles. On Wii it is mandatory as per tradition, while on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 it is simply an option open to publishers (though locking is far less common with PS3 games).

As far as I can see, the only justification for a region lock is to encourage consumers to buy games in their own region where they otherwise might be able to import sooner or for less money. This keeps the gears of the games business turning worldwide (I have mentioned the folly of taking retailers for granted before) and also provides potentially useful information to marketing folks about how to treat future products in specific regions.

But with region locking now optional for the most part, I have to question the thought process behind its use on games that are entirely unavailable in certain regions. For example, a look over Play-Asia.com's handy compatibility guide for the Xbox 360 shows several games unreleased outside of Japan, but only playable on Japanese systems - games for which there are no plans (and little to no chance) of further localisation, such as visual novels or danmaku shooters.

So what advantage could this possibly offer to publishers? Without a big enough foreign market to justify localisation and shipping across further regions, surely by preventing any foreign players from playing their games imported they are essentially costing themselves local sales. Likely not a huge number of sales, admittedly, but sales nonetheless. It leaves import gamers with, bar piracy, two options: modifying their console to bypass the region lock - not something platform holders would be quick to encourage, and illegal in some places; or importing a whole new console, which is of course prohibitively expensive.

Another curiosity of Play-Asia's list is that all of the 360's unlocked games are major cross-regional releases such as Star Wars: The Force Unleashed or Halo 3: ODST - surely the only sort of game that could actually benefit from region locking, though to be fair in this age of near-simultaneous worldwide releases even that is unlikely. And these games are generally also available completely locked in certain regions, such as Gears of War's Japanese edition (presumably a decision made based on the disc space available for different languages), confusing the matter further.

It just strikes me as backwards, and I'd like to see region locking done away with altogether, or at least its general use reconsidered. Not that my weblog's audience is likely to include very many Japanese videogame publishing executives, mind.

Videogames and the English Language

Of course, Deep Impact didn't wrap the action around the edges of the screen, unless there's any continuity errors I missed. Maybe Asteroids will be filmed in 360 degrees or something.

And if I let the posts bleed into each other like that, maybe you'll be less likely to notice the vast chasm of time in between them.

I recently re-read Politics and the English Language by George Orwell; a short piece about what he saw as a decline in English writing as a result of pretentious language, and overused metaphors and idioms. An excerpt:

"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you - even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent - and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself."

As I read this I suddenly remembered a Flash game I had played years earlier on Newgrounds. Unfortunately I have no memory of its title, and likely search keywords failed to uncover it, so you'll have to rely on my description of it rather than playing the game yourselves (though if anyone can identify it feel free to let me know so I can post a link). It was an 8-bit styled generic 2D platformer, whose core gameplay consisted of jumping over obstacles and gaps, shooting forwards at enemies, avoiding moving enemies, and avoiding enemy shots. Nothing special. But one small feature got me extremely riled up. If you pressed the down arrow, you could duck.

I didn't hate the crouching feature because it broke the game, making it too easy or too hard. The opposite in fact: I hated it because it was completely redundant - there was absolutely nothing to duck under.

Since it was redundant, so that it could easily have not been there at all without affecting any other part of the design, a more charitable person might have just overlooked it entirely. But I think Orwell's writing does a good job of explaining the reason I was so irritated by that useless ability: It demonstrated a total lack of consideration on the part of the designer.

You could crouch in that game simply because the designer had made the lazy observation that you can crouch in several other 2D platform games. At no point did the designer ask why you can crouch in any of those games - they just allowed that "ready-made phrase" to think for them.

When Sonic the Hedgehog ducks, he can view the level directly below his position, and perform his spin attack ability. When Mario ducks he can evade certain hazards, and use his momentum to pass through small gaps. When Toejam & Earl duck (specifically while in Panic on Funkotron) they are immune to certain enemy attacks, and can plant their magic jar weapons on the ground with a short timed fuse. But in this unnamed Flash game, nothing. There's no secret passages to spot, no abilities to enable, no low ceilings to negotiate, and critically, no enemy attacks high enough to dodge.

I'm not disputing that convention is a valuable thing. If your players are accustomed to certain ways of doing things, it is often wise to conform to their expectations. But this is no excuse for throwing together a bunch of generic features without considering their appropriateness.

Now let's look at commercial videogames in the same light. Take recent Wii FPS The Conduit, for example. Last September, High Voltage ran a competition for fans to submit their own suggestions for the game's control schemes. In doing this, they presented the full list of commands to be assigned to the controllers:

"The contest rules are simple; using a standard Wii-Remote and Nunchuk combination, fans should send in what control mapping they think would be best for the following functions:

1. Move Forward/Back
2. Strafe Left/Right
3. Jump/Activate
4. Shoot Weapon
5. Target Lock
6. Crouch
7. Reload Weapon
8. Scope/Binocular Mode
9. Switch Between Weapons Carried
10. Switch Between Grenades Carried
11. Pause Menu
12. Swap Between Weapon Carried and Weapon on Ground
13. Equip ASE (All-Seeing-Eye) / Special
14. Aim Reticule/Turn Camera
15. Melee Attack
16. Throw Grenade"

What we see here (with the exception of the gimmick 'ASE' feature, which I recommend you look up to judge how valuable it is to the game as a whole) is a shopping list of features from other shooters. Firstly, long time readers will remember my feelings on the Wii hosting move/look controls in the manner implied above (points 1, 2 and 14), then there's weapon switching from Halo, and target locking from Red Steel. All together a massive list of commands for 1 analogue stick, 1 d-pad, 8 buttons (only 4 of which are readily accessible), a pointer and a couple of imprecise accelerometers.

When High Voltage set out to make "the Wii's defining FPS", it seems as if they became preoccupied with their dogmatic interpretation of the FPS side of it, and neglected to fully consider the Wii. Rather than finding the most effective way of shoehorning traditional features onto a nontraditional input mechanism, would it not have been wiser to design the product around the system itself from the ground up?

As I did in my previous Wii FPS post, I have to return to the example of fan-favourite GoldenEye. GoldenEye shows that even the genre staple of jumping is essentially extraneous. You can't jump, but you don't need to jump, because the game has been designed around the idea of not jumping.

And I think this is the most important thing to remember when designing games. Every game is itself, so no matter how apparently generic (or not) your product is, you must always re-examine and consider your decisions as a part of that product. You must always ask yourself: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? And is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Asteroids: The Movie

Just a short post to fill the gap here.

You may have heard of this curious development in the always interesting relationship between cinema and videogames. That's right, a film of Asteroids.

On the surface it seems a bit, well, batshit insane to attempt to adapt Asteroids into a feature film. I doubt many people have played the game continuously for an hour and a half, so it doesn't seem very likely they'd have the patience to sit and watch it for that long.

But, the more I think about it, the more I start to feel as if this film has already been made.

Just consider the plot for a moment:

1. A giant space rock threatens the protagonists.
2. A spaceship is sent to destroy it.
3. The attempted destruction only serves to split the big rock in half.
4. Eventually and inevitably the protagonists lose, but they have the opportunity to start their lives afresh.

Just substitute "protagonists" for "player", and it's bloody Asteroids.

And in-keeping with videogame movie tradition, it was awful. So why bother making Asteroids now?

The Science of Brain Training

Are there any geeks reading?

I should expect so, given the nature of this weblog's stated primary concerns. But today I will be talking about a videogame that many non-geeks will be familiar with, making this surely the most accessible post on this weblog thus far *.

We've all heard of Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training and Big Brain Academy on the Nintendo DS haven't we? Software that purports to improve the mind's general cognitive capabilities. Today, in what is definitely not a filler post, I shall examine how it works.

The basics are easy to understand. First you are instructed to do something simple, such as adding up some numbers, or clicking on the word that's coloured blue. But here comes the interesting part - the word that's coloured blue might read "yellow". So the system calculates how good you are at selecting the word that's coloured blue which isn't necessarily the word "blue", and feeds your average aptitude back to you, congratulating you for improving your ability to select the word that's coloured blue which isn't necessarily the word "blue", and assuring you that this has also somehow made you better at things other than selecting the word that's coloured blue which isn't necessarily the word "blue".

Now, I may be coming across as perhaps unfairly flippant and dismissive towards the efficacy of Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training and Big Brain Academy on the Nintendo DS as tools for self-improvement. I assure you, however, that they do work. There is a great deal of complex science behind them, which I will now attempt to explain in layman's terms.

You see, unlike other videogames, they don't simply record the length of time you take to select the word that's coloured blue which isn't necessarily the word "blue"; new hi-score; input three initials. Instead, Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training and Big Brain Academy on the Nintendo DS use real science to respectively calculate your brain's age in Earth years, and its weight in grammes at 1g. As an aside, perhaps I shouldn't have used the word "instead" there, as that implies that a simple timer-based hi-score mechanism and the complex scientific calculations performed by Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training and Big Brain Academy on the Nintendo DS are effectively equivalent. Of course, they are not.

What Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training does, is as you are playing, it creates a kind of rift in the fabric of time - a temporal nexus of sorts - inside your skull. While this is active, it reverses the physical ageing effects of time on your brain. The software, calculating from the length of time you were using it and the aptitude you displayed, gives an estimate of your brain's age in Earth years.

But wait! Why, you must be wondering, is there such a discrepancy between a first-time user's bodily age and his or her brain age? Well not many people know this, but before you are born, while you are still a fetus in your mother's womb, you don't have a brain. All human brains are granted to us at the moment of birth by the enigmatic interstellar race known as the Brainmasters by means akin to teleportation. The Brainmasters can see through time itself, and by observing the span of human existence they cultivate and raise our brains for many years before the birth of their respective hosts - the minimum age for a brain to be fit for a human being is 20 Earth years, while some supposedly 'new' brains are as old as 80 Earth years. This is also the reason that the temporal nexus brought about by Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training freezes once the brain has reached the minimum (and optimum) 20 years old. Kawashima is not so naïve that he would risk acting against the will of the Brainmasters.

Big Brain Academy meanwhile, rather than manipulating the fabric of time, instead affects the space inside your cranium. It has been clearly proven that brains of greater weight are capable of greater intelligence. It is for this reason that H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds is considered thankfully unrealistic by most scientists - Martians with brains of roughly equal mass and density to that of a human being (and of course the brains of all sentient life in the Universe come from the Brainmasters' mould), living with an equatorial surface gravitational acceleration of 3.69m/s² or 0.376g, as opposed to Earth's 9.80665m/s² or 1g, are capable of less than 38% of the average human capacity for intellect. Similarly, if men are from Mars and women from Venus, men have approximately 41.6% of women's capacity for cognition when inhabiting their respective homeworlds. But if dolphins are indigenous to Earth, our days are numbered as a species. That was a little joke about equatorial surface gravity.

So, Big Brain Academy uses the spatial nexus created by its subtly different blend of selecting the word that's coloured blue which is not necessarily the word "blue", to add more (artificially synthesised) grey matter to your brain via their laboratory wormholes, thereby increasing its weight in grammes. The total value of your brain's weight is then fed back to you by the software.

Naturally, if you were to use both Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training and Big Brain Academy on the Nintendo DS simultaneously you would create a rift in both space and time within your skull. Theoretically, this would enable your brain to travel freely at superluminal speeds, amassing knowledge from all corners of the Universe and all aeons of time while still physically connected to your body. Scientists warn against doing this however, as laboratory tests show a significant increase in the probability of subjects being seriously injured by mopeds and bass guitars, and on at least one occasion the combination of this software was shown to be the direct cause of the eruption of giant robots from a subject's forehead.

Please use this software responsibly.

On an unrelated note, Yellow.







*This may be a lie.

Contention: Used

Long absence, I know. Same reasons as usual, so screw giving you the usual excuses; my handful of regular readers will have seen them all already, and any new readers won't have suffered the downtime. Maybe "suffered" is too strong a word anyway.

Instead I'll get straight into what I want to talk about today: the controversial hot-button issue of pre-owned videogame retail.

It's an interesting debate, what with there being three distinct camps of conflicting interests. There's the publishers, that would quite reasonably like the consumers buying their products to actually contribute to their finances. Then we have the high-street retailers, themselves concerned with earning enough money to stay afloat. And finally there are the consumers, understandably in favour of lower price points for videogames - an extremely expensive hobby. Obviously there are overlap groups - consumers and publishers satisfied with the existing system, and even consumers backing the publisher perspective - but they can still be split into these three positions, so for argument's sake I'll stick to the publisher/retailer/consumer distinction.

To start with, let's look at the publishers' perspective. If retailers sell games - games still fresh on the market - at lower prices pre-owned than new, naturally their customers are deincentivised (if that's even a word) from buying the brand new copies. Some of their arguments have gone as far as likening pre-owned sales to digital piracy, and not without justification. If consumers are playing videogames without funding their development in any way, what - from a publisher's perspective - is the difference between resale and theft? Publishers therefore often take a stance directly opposed to any and all pre-owned sales.

Consumers, meanwhile, are opposed to the current system for precisely the opposite reason. Retailers make huge margins of profit on pre-owned games - several times more per disc than new stock. Customers in all areas of the second-hand system often feel shortchanged, believing that they could easily save more on games (which are far and away the most expensive popular media), or at least be given greater sums of money for trading in their used products. This in turn conflicts with publisher interests - if pre-owned games were even cheaper the incentive to buy new would be yet further diminished, while if customers were reimbursed more generously for used games there would likely be a sharp increase in the volume of games being resold, stealing important shelf-space from new games.

In the middle of this debate, voices barely audible under the clamour of the other parties' advocacy groups, and struggling to remain relevant with the ubiquity of Internet shopping (can you even remember the world before Amazon?) and the rise of digital distribution systems like Steam, sit the high-street retailers. From their perspective, pre-owned sales are a must, as are the margins they make.

I find myself compelled to side with the retailers on this issue. The compromise they have reached and continue to operate is as satisfactory to either opposing camp as it could ever be. I am sure I don't need to patronise my readers with any further explanation of the existing workings of used videogame retail, so instead let's qualify that statement by examining the alternatives.

Publishers would argue that without pre-owned sales taking their rightful cash games could be priced lower, benefiting consumers and publishers alike. This argument seems to forget that retailers exist at all, or at least unfairly take them for granted. If retailers are not making their used game profits, they have to find some other means to make that money - the shelf price of new games. At best this would have new games around the prices at which they are currently sold, which would hardly be beneficial to either the consumers unable to spend so freely or the publishers trying to attract these consumers. The consumer argument against retailer margins themselves can be discounted for the same reason.

The only alternative is to completely eliminate high-street retail from the system, leaving digital distribution and online stores in its place. Aside from people such as me who would decry the loss of hard copies (though online retail would mitigate this if it remained sustainable), there are - to put it lightly - a lot of jobs dependant on high-street videogame retail. The direct-to-consumer digital distribution future is a wonderful ideal to aspire to, but the economic reality is that we cannot simply switch to it overnight, to say nothing of the logistic reality.

The system we have now doesn't over-incentivise the sale of pre-owned titles, gives lesser-known products longer shelf-life (would Beyond Good & Evil 2 be in production without used game sales I wonder), keeps the sales of new games flowing through trade-in deals and giving hard-up consumers more spending money, and gives sentimental fools like me our precious boxes and manuals.

It isn't perfect for any one of the parties, but such is the nature of compromise.

T&A, WTF?

"Booth babes".

I appreciate that their presence (or not) at this year's E3 will be entirely down to the individual exhibitors, but with lifting the ban being a part of the ESA's attempt to restore the show's former glory, I have to question their definition of the word "glory".

In recent years, we have seen a great increase in the industry and its consumers aggressively - and quite legitimately - defending and championing videogames as a rising expressive medium. Does not allowing smut and barefaced sexism to run rampant across the public face - or any face - of the videogames industry somewhat undermine this claim to artistic respectability? Does it not seem rather silly that we are earnestly searching for ways to attract more women into the hobby, and further into development itself, while at the same time we shamelessly pander to adolescent heterosexual male fantasies? We are successfully pandering to these juvenile fantasies at a supposedly media-only event too - isn't it about time these professional writers grew up?

Consider, for example, the end of this very sentence, which concludes a brief but carefully considered and articulate presentation of my opinions regarding the use of so-called "booth babes" at videogame industry consumer and trade events with the words I WANT TO MASTURBATE OVER YOUR BREASTS.

The banning of this pathetic objectification of women at E3 should surely be one of the only things the ESA got right in their yearly quest to stop people hating the show so much. If this was a decision controversial enough that it has now been reversed, perhaps it's not the show that's the problem. Perhaps the people need to change.