Joel's Weblog Primarily Concerning Games

Red Dead Redemption's Endgame - Narrative and Design

2011-06-17T16:59:00.000+01:00

Okay, okay, a year ought to be enough to string out that joke.

Though that said, some of you may prefer to skip this particular post, as it is entirely concerned with the endgame sequence of the generally marvellous Red Dead Redemption, and story spoilers are a natural part of that.

For the most part, Redemption is an excellent piece of videogame fiction. Practically everything a player can do within the game's expansive sandbox world - hunt animals, capture or kill outlaws, tame wild horses, chat with bartenders and so on - complements and builds on the atmosphere the central plot is trying to deliver. This, in stark contrast to the schizophrenia of its predecessor-of-sorts Grand Theft Auto IV, the grim earnestness of whose storytelling quite often struggled to stay afloat surrounded by the series' core design ideal of dicking around. The game isn't without its flaws - a poorly-delivered tutorial here, a redundant fast-travel mechanic there - but, this not being a review, these are not my current concern. Instead, I want to discuss a particular isolated decision of design and storytelling, which I feel makes for an interesting case-study.

Towards the end of the game, protagonist John Marston has killed off his entire former gang, been reunited with his kidnapped family, and sets about starting a new and honest life as a cattle rancher. Inevitably, the federal agents who had previously forced him to revisit his old outlaw days betray their word and bring the wrath of the US Army down on the Marston estate. After a short battle, John sends his wife and son packing and finds himself holed up in his barn. In a textbook display of Cutscene Incompetence Syndrome (a mercifully far less frequent occurrence in the game than it might have been), he chooses to ignore the cover his position affords him, and instead throws wide the barn doors and steps out into the open to face the numerous remaining soldiers alone.

I shouldn't have to tell you that John doesn't survive this encounter. The narrative very much calls for it, and that I don't object to. Potential gameplay consequences are dealt with cleverly as well, with an endless epilogue starring John's son, Jack, a few years later allowing players to tie up loose ends without damaging (on the contrary, actively aiding) the story. The Cutscene Incompetence, too, I can live with - indeed, perhaps an advantage of directed cinematic sequences over Half-Life's passively interactive approach to delivering narrative material is that the player-character disconnect they produce allows writers a little more freedom without compromising a player's suspension of disbelief.

But the game chooses to return control to the player's hands for this last stand, and the way in which this is delivered constitutes a huge design error. The player will, by this point, have spent a considerable amount of time as John, building up a formidable arsenal of weapons and abilities in the process, most of which are awarded during story missions and are therefore unavoidable. Even with all of this equipment - including petrol bombs, shotguns, automatic pistols and large capacity rifles - stashed on John's person, the game roots him to the spot, forces the player to draw a rather pathetic 6-shot revolver to face down the twenty riflemen lined up in front of him, prevents the player from accessing the weapons menu, and automatically initiates an artificially shortened version of Redemption's target-painting take on bullet-time. The game, with no overt in-universe justification, restricts the player's options.

It changes the rules.

In doing this, Rockstar San Diego must have hoped to better integrate the traditionally rather disparate twin disciplines of narrative and gameplay (something they do rather well elsewhere in the game, as the few examples I have cited previously demonstrate), keeping the player firmly immersed in John's shoes in his final moments for that personal touch. But by breaking several basic game rules - rules that a player would have been exposed to consistently for as many as twenty hours before this event - it actually serves to do the opposite. We catch a glimpse behind the curtain, at the play-pieces being surreptitiously but cackhandedly rearranged, and so, instead of John being cheated by his fate, the player has been cheated by the game.

What's particularly frustrating about this is that it doesn't take much creative effort at all to think of several ways by which the player could have been forced into a conventionally, legitimately unwinnable situation: encircle John with enemies; insert a scripted sniper shot; cripple his arms and/or legs in the prior cutscene. And so on.

Design defines the rules by which a player understands a world. Changing those rules part way through for the sake of your narrative is an ultimately fruitless exercise. No matter how better served your story may be by doing so, the player will not believe it.

How did one game become a classic?

2010-06-15T20:16:00.001+01:00

Activision poses us this question in their cringeworthy announcement trailer for GoldenEye 007 on Wii.

Since you asked, there's rather a lot of reasons that a game could become regarded as a classic. In GoldenEye's case: a robust control interface solution which proved that the FPS genre was viable on console platforms; the innovative approach to singleplayer difficulty levels based around increasing the number and complexity of mission objectives; the 4-player multiplayer mode being completely unprecedented for a shooter on console; the skill with which encounters were crafted across extremely open-ended level designs; and many more reasons, I'm sure, largely owing to the talent of the developers at Rare. I don't think the magical powers of the title and film license are generally considered to be high in that list.

It's like history is repeating itself, not necessarily in the way they intend.

That's two short posts of pure jaded cynicism in a row, so next time I'll make sure to talk about design or something.

Gaming News of the Century

2010-06-10T21:25:00.002+01:00

VG247 are reporting (through a GameTrailers video) that - brace yourselves - an unnamed game developer is going to announce a game.

Who would have thought!?

In other news, a car is going to drive somewhere tomorrow, and someone is going to put on their shoes at some point.

I had decided not to bother with calling out rubbish journalism myself anymore since I discovered the wonderful Game Journalists Are Incompetent Fuckwits, but this is a special occasion.

This is so completely stupid and pointless I'm actually kind of impressed.

Halo 3: Retcon and The Fallacy of the Tabula Rasa

2010-03-24T14:06:00.005Z

Determined as I am not to begin another post with the phrase, "having recently completed X", I shall just say this:

Halo 3: ODST.

I thoroughly enjoyed this relatively overlooked entry into the Halo canon. It's interesting to play with the expansive and imaginative Halo 3 sandbox via player abilities more in line with Combat Evolved - namely, health packs, no Equipment and no dual-weilding. It might not have such a satisfyingly epic scale as did Halo 3, and it might absurdly imply that the events of Halo 2 were spread over more than a month, but Bungie know how to make Halo games, and ODST demonstrates their unparalleled command of meticulous weapon balance, expressive but readable AI and freeform level design - all interconnected toyboxes, revelling in chaos and experimentation - as well as any other.

But there is one thing I took from the experience in particular that I don't think Bungie intended.

In ODST, players assume the role of the Rookie, a nameless, faceless, voiceless new recruit to a squad of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (they fall to earth from low orbit in little shock-absorbing drop-pod things). He's the classic videogame blank slate - less character even than the Master Chief, the Rookie is Gordon Freeman in a helmet. The rest of the squad - mostly played by the cast of Firefly for the sake of their natural chemistry (and probably nerd-cred) - are clearly defined characters, with names, faces and voices.

While dropping to Earth in the middle of a Halo 2 cutscene, all the troopers are separated and the Rookie is knocked out. When he comes to several hours later, the hub world - sadly not quite as interesting a departure from tradition as it sounds, though it does have a lot of character - opens up and the player is tasked with following waypoints to track down evidence of their missing squadmates. Finding something triggers a flashback in which the player takes control of one of the other troopers. So what we end up with is a juxtaposition of the Half-Life tabula rasa approach to first person characterisation versus, well, the precise opposite - with player characters regularly spouting dialogue, and even fighting alongside former and future player characters.

What is interesting about this, is that I feel far more agency in the flashbacks than I do as the Rookie.

I think the reason is this: when a player buys a game, she is already as willing as she will ever be to buy into the narrative and immerse herself in the characters and world. Agency is the default state; something that can be lost, not something that must be earned. The Half-Life approach doesn't (necessarily) damage agency, but it is a total myth that it does anything to aid it.

For example, let us look at a well-known game which did not deliver especially well on agency: Shenmue. Shenmue presents itself as a sort of life-sim; organising your own days as you see fit, taking the story at your own pace, and full of nonessential pursuits to occupy the time. The problems arise with Ryo; the protagonist, and a bit of an idiot. One especially memorable sequence - part of the central plot thread - has love interest Nozomi confessing her feelings for him one night in a playground, and telling him that she may be moving to Canada in the near future. Ryo rather flippantly says, "Oh", then leaves. Later that evening I decided to rectify this ridiculously unfeeling behaviour of Ryo's by calling Nozomi on the phone in Ryo's house. Here is a transcription of the resulting conversation as I remember it:

Nozomi: "Hello?"
Ryo: "Hello Nozomi."
Nozomi: "Oh Ryo, have you thought any more about what I said before?"
Ryo: "No."
Nozomi: "Oh... okay..."
Ryo: "Bye."

Up until this point I had completely bought into Ryo's parental vengeance motivations and his tremendous naivete, but here something cracked, then shattered. In the first cutscene Ryo's flippant behaviour was at odds with how I would have wanted him to act, then in the subsequent phone call - which I had made with the specific intention of damage-control - he acted even worse. When your character makes an independent decision, as Ryo's response in the cutscene, agency can take a hit. When your character does the precise opposite of what you intend, agency is lost.

Ryo was no longer me; he was a dick.

Now turn back to ODST where, like most singleplayer videogames, the plot drives the characters rather than the other way around - things happen to them, and players have no choice but to react to these events in a certain way. The player characters in flashbacks, just like the Rookie, never make decisions at odds with player motivations, so there is nothing to prevent you from buying into your character - whoever he may be - at any given time; and you do so.

When any of the talking characters have conversations about the events unfolding around them, there's no feeling that they are doing something independently, or against your own will. Quite the opposite in fact; when player characters make quips as a direct result of player actions and decisions - vehicle stunts, weapon selections, enemy kills, etc. - it serves to draw you, immerse you, further into the fiction.

By contrast, the Rookie never commented on my skills and kills, never talked about his situation. All he did to express anything more than sheer indifference towards anything I was doing was to grunt when injured (though better at least than Gordon Freeman who actually requires his clothes to say "ouch" for him). Even worse, when the Rookie is asked direct questions by other characters towards the end of the game he still remains silent, and this feels jarringly inconsistent. Annoying even. I expect him to be just as talkative and likable as the other people that had variously been "me" when placed in that same situation, and he disappoints. Lampshading his completely vacant characterisation with the tedious game dialogue cliche, "You don't talk much, do you?" and its awkward variations does not help matters at all.

I'm not saying that the Half-Life series would be better if Gordon Freeman spoke - on the contrary I think his sheer ambiguity aids the story Valve are telling, with Freeman himself being one of the most enduringly interesting mysteries therein. Nor am I saying that Bioshock could be improved with sarcastic quips and James Bond one-liners - in fact I'd argue that the whole point of Bioshock and its final twist is to satirise everything I am describing here. What I'm saying is that the tabula rasa is not a brilliant videogame storytelling device - at best it does nothing to promote immersion or agency, and at worst it can damage it when it becomes conspicuous that your character is inexplicably boring, as it does in ODST.

It's just an excuse not to write properly.

Zero: Observations

2010-03-04T14:20:00.004Z

Having recently completed Zero: Tsukihami no Kamen for Wii, or more accurately the unofficial English translation patch entitled Fatal Frame 4: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, I figure this would be a logical time to detail my thoughts on the game.

The latest in Tecmo's excellent Zero horror series, also known as Fatal Frame in America and Project Zero in Europe (the latter being the result of PAL edition publisher Wanadoo mistaking the development team's name for the title, and the former being cheesy enough that they felt compelled to replace it in the first place), it is sadly the first to remain a (REGION LOCKED) Japanese-only release. Much like its predecessors, Zero 4 combines linear Adventure/Survival Horror exploration with RPG stat upgrading and an ingenius first-person photography combat system. The most obvious distinction between this and previous games is the presence of Co-director and Co-writer Suda Goichi (a.k.a. Suda51, who has long held the prestigious position of my hero) and other Grasshopper Manufacture staffers in the team.

Chief among the mechanical changes is the new and interesting twist to exploration. In the original trilogy critical items would be represented as glowing blue blobs that appear when certain conditions were met (Zero's equivalent to the classic Resident Evil glint) while health and ammunition resources would be hidden with no visual clue among examinable bits and pieces in the environment such as drawers, suits of armor, etc.; the idea being to reward players for exploring thoroughly, though in practise leading to the pragmatic (and so not especially atmospheric) technique of wallsurfing and mashing. Zero 4's solution is extremely elegant. The game has dispensed with the fixed-camera view, instead opting for an over-the-shoulder Resident Evil 4 camera system where the character's torchbeam is pointed at the centre of the screen, and view is controlled by tilting - not pointing - the wiimote for pitch or pivoting with the thumbstick (pivoting the view can also be achieved without turning your character by tilting the wiimote while stationary if desired - I dunno, maybe you want to see the character model from the front or something). When standing in the vacinity of items, a blue filament appears on the HUD that glows brighter when facing the correct direction, and should the torchbeam pass over any interactable item in the area it will appear as the old glowing blue ball for you to pick up. The system requires enough precision that waving around wildly for a few seconds when entering a new room will not be tremendously effective, but little enough that locating well-hidden items is not frustrating. Once an item has been located, you must examine it, the process of which is itself a new feature: while health and ammo is granted instantly, files, key items and upgrade resources (more on them later) are examined by slowly reaching out for them by holding A (where releasing A will retract the character's arm). Rather predictably every so often a ghostly hand will emerge to grab you as you reach out, requiring you to shake it off - literally, since this is the Wii, but at least the traditional wiimote waggling represents an action which is similarly wild and aimless - and preventing you from collecting the item (of course this only happens with the nonessential upgrade items - never with files or keys). My initial reaction to this system was rather cynical - I couldn't see any pragmatic value to retracting my hand as the ghostly grabbing hands cannot be dodged in this way, so it just seemed like an unnecessary time-padding barrier to progress - but when the concluding ghost battle of the second chapter was triggered by similarly reaching out to touch the shoulder of a character I had been searching for, I understood its worth. In Zero games, all the major story events - and crucially the most threatening ghost battles - are triggered by the player picking up an item, be it a file, an abstract key or a literal key. The combination of the knowledge that a critical item could spell serious danger to you and the uncertainty over whether the item is critical at all grants the reaching-out sequence a great deal of tension, and the opportunity to retract your hand becomes a means of changing your mind - perhaps this item looks to be in too important a location and you want to be more prepared for what it might throw at you. It's a beautiful new way of abstracting the question "Are you sure? Yes/No" which gamers naturally associate with extremely significant decisions. While I must say it's a shame to lose the gorgeous standard of fixed-camera cinematography from the old games, it's definitely worth it.

Playing on uncertainty in a similar manner to the above, nonaggressive ghosts are not distinguished from their aggressive counterparts when they appear. In the originals, filament colour would determine whether an apparition was a threat - blue for safe, red for danger - but here the blue filament is already in use for locating items. Instead, all ghosts are indicated with the red filament. Some ghosts are deliberately intended to function as a false alarm by appearing in threatening positions, while some lull you into a false sense of security by doing the opposite before beginning their attack routines.

Another new feature is the shop available at save points. Points earned from combat and nonaggressive ghost photographs can be spent on healing items and film (that is, ammunition). Points are plentiful enough that cautious players could easily reguarly arm themselves to the teeth and equip more healing items than there are ghosts to harm them, but endgame ratings are awarded based heavily on the amount of points that remain on completion. It makes a lot of sense to do it this way - presumably the players who actually care where they fall on the D/C/B/A/S scale will be the same players who want the game to offer some degree of challenge, so everybody wins. While it doesn't make much sense from a narrative perspective to have old stone lanterns function as herbal medicine vending machines, it provides a nice means of ensuring players are equipped in a way that makes them comfortable to play on and prevents sticking points from emerging.

While levelling up your camera's capabilities used to be done with that score currency, now it costs two other resources - blue and red crystals - found as reach-outable items in the environment. Blue crystals upgrade your camera itself, while red ones upgrade the special ability lenses (which are, incidentally, also found in the same way). There isn't much to say about this beyond the fact it works.

Camera combat remains largely unchanged from previous games, aside from the extremely forgiving lock-on function, presumably there to prevent the wiimote tilting pitch control's inherent instability from interfering too much, though it still can be problematic when locked ghosts vanish and the view suddenly snaps back to full player control. The camera users can also dodge ghost grapple attacks (once a certain item has been found) by waggling at the right moment, which is rather reminiscent of Resident Evil 3's evade system. Much faster paced than the second game's extremely slow building combat tension but nowhere near as bastard hard as the first game, the third game's combat makes for a fair comparison. New to the combat aspect is character Choushiro's "Spirit Stone Flashlight" - a device which seems utterly absurd until you remember that it's not really any sillier than the series' trademark magical excorcismal camera - which doesn't allow fatal frames or shutter chances (for those unfamiliar, these are brief moments during enemy attack routines at which they can be hit for extra damage). The flashlight deals damage determined by how long the fire button is held down, drawing from a limited power resource which must be recharged every so often by switching back to third person for a while. Choushiro can't lock on, and has by far the most group fights, turning his game into one of gradually backing away while dealing as much damage as possible, and interrupting incoming attacks with stronger shots. It certainly keeps things interesting, as even when fighting the same ghosts - with the same AI no less - Choushiro's system offers a completely different experience.

The story has all the basics of a classic Zero plot - someone goes to an old haunted place in Japan in search of someone else who went missing there, and finds the aftermath of an ancient Shinto ritual gone wrong, relating in some way to a gate to hell - but plays with the formula in inventive and satisfying ways which I shall try not to spoil too much. Rather than seeking a lost loved one as were Miku, Mio and Rei, the protagonists of Zero 4 are searching for their lost memories relating to a mysterious kidnapping ten years prior, that occurred during an old festival popular among tourists on an obscure Japanese island. The setting - an abandoned psychiatric hospital specialising in treating a local illness known (in the translation) as "Luna Sedata Syndrome" - combines the classic Zero traditional wood, paper and stone Japanese architecture with early-mid 20th Century modernity, granting it a creepily familiar quality reminiscent of Silent Hill.

If I was to criticise anything (aside from the occasionally problematic wiimote pitch controls in combat and ghost hunting), it would be the anticlimactic nature of many of the boss fights, notably the final one. I would approach significant fights expecting them to be a serious challenge, and would appropriately equip powerful film I had saved in the same manner as one would a Resident Evil grenade launcher. But nearly every time this occurred, including the final battle, I completely crushed my opponent in two or three easy shots. Where bosses are large group fights they provide the necessary challenge (if not perhaps too much challenge), but solo opponents rarely take any time let alone draining the resources you have collected and retained for them.

I'm currently replaying on Hard mode to see if it provides the kind of game I was expecting. So far the primary differences appear to be the frequency with with grabbing hands interrupt your item examinations, the damage that enemies deal and take, and the cost of items in the shop. The HP changes might have granted significant fights appropriate longevity if not for the fact that I am equipped with almost fully upgraded cameras and a huge stockpile of film and health supplements from my previous playthrough - Hard mode is only available as a New Game Plus.

But all together an excellent entry into the series. I still call the extraordinary second game Crimson Butterfly my favourite, but Zero 4 takes a more than respectable second place, and with the region-lock bypassing English patch now available, comes as a highly recommended import.

Stephen Totilo Doesn't Understand Words - Episode #8,649,365,871

2010-02-25T15:04:00.000Z

Short filler post!

You may have heard the unfortunate news that some Ryu Ga Gotoku 3 content is to be dropped for the forthcoming Yakuza 3.

Here's Kotaku's Stephen Totilo on the subject.

And here's a recap of the pertinent details:

"Regarding Yakuza 3, we had a tight schedule to abide by for localizing and releasing Yakuza 3 in the west. Due to the limited time we were given we had to leave certain bits of the game out..." - SEGA

"Yakuza 3 was released a year ago in Japan this week, which makes Sega's comments about time pressures confusing." - Stephen Totilo

Totilo appears to believe, then, that localisation consists of taking a disc image and sending it through Google Translate.

How do Kotaku writers manage to dress themselves every morning?

As for the story itself, as someone who was rather fond of the previous two games I find it a real shame, but there remains the possibility (however unlikely) that some or all of the missing content could be translated and included as DLC should the game sell well. Or that its sequel could be afforded a localisation budget sufficient for the whole game. So buy it you goddamn philistines.

On an unrelated note, I recently felt compelled to start another, more frivolous blog. Have a gander. Or don't, it's up to you really.

Coming up next time: a review-ish thing of Zero: Tsukihami no Kamen.

2009: The Year in Review(s)

2010-01-14T13:45:00.007Z

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.

... ...

... ...

... ...

... ...

... ...

... ...

... ...

... ...

... ...

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

2009-10-01T12:49:00.005+01:00

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

2009-08-26T20:50:00.001+01:00

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:
Move Forward/Back
Strafe Left/Right
Jump/Activate
Shoot Weapon
Target Lock
Crouch
Reload Weapon
Scope/Binocular Mode
Switch Between Weapons Carried
Switch Between Grenades Carried
Pause Menu
Swap Between Weapon Carried and Weapon on Ground
Equip ASE (All-Seeing-Eye) / Special
Aim Reticule/Turn Camera
Melee Attack
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

2009-07-02T16:18:00.003+01:00

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:

A giant space rock threatens the protagonists.
A spaceship is sent to destroy it.
The attempted destruction only serves to split the big rock in half.
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

2009-05-12T18:46:00.012+01:00

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/s

2

or 0.376g, as opposed to Earth's 9.80665m/s

2

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

2009-04-05T17:09:00.007+01:00

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 disincentivised (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?

2009-02-23T14:21:00.009Z

"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.

Oh For Haruhi's Sake

2009-02-06T09:06:00.007Z

Dear loyal customers,

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUU.

Best regards,
Kadokawa Shoten Publishing Co., Ltd.

PS: Buy our merchandise!

This is a complete PR disaster.

Come Tuesday when the magazine is out we will be able to see just what kind of disaster it is - either communications are really messed up in their PR department and Season 2 will also air in April (presumably back to back with Season 1), or they have engaged in barefaced deception by advertising a rerun of Season 1 with an image from Season 2.

On top of that, still no word on Volume 10 of the light novels, and it's been almost two years since the last one. Volume 9 was the only book in the series to end on a cliffhanger (or two cliffhangers really, but I'm straying close to spoiler territory there), so this wait is rapidly becoming excruciating. I'm pretty convinced now that Kadokawa Shoten is holding it back for an anime cross-promotion, seeing as they own all aspects of the Haruhi brand.

So, fuck you too Kadokawa.

By the way, I linked you to them ages ago. Read them already.

Housemate Evil

2009-01-30T15:36:00.008Z

I wasn't convinced by my first play of the Resident Evil 5 demo. Gone was the knife-edge tension that made Resi 4 so engrossing, replaced by respawning enemies and protracted fights with tiresome damage-sponge bosses. Gone was the obsessive-compulsive organisation of the last game's inventory, instead we have a cumbersome real-time version of Resi 0's item swapping system.

Along with every control mapping available being equally confusing (even according to Resi conventions), I was pretty much resigned to disappointment.

But then I played it cooperatively over Xbox Live.

AI Sheva isn't a complete moron, but she's no tactical substitute for a real person with whom you can communicate - when there is two actual human beings working together, everything falls into place. Against coordinated attacks the thick-skinned bosses seem more reasonably balanced and don't take a lifetime to dispatch. When the other agent is as effective as you it's useful (if not absolutely essential) to watch each other's backs, and the vast enemy hordes begin to make more sense. Even the inventory starts to become something of a tactical puzzle game, where precious handgun bullets cannot be exchanged in any smaller a quantity than all of those that you carry. One can imagine this extending to other forms of ammunition, healing items, and even weaponry in the full game.

As a result, I can't help but wonder at the decision to retain the same difficulty level for the single-player game. Just a slight drop of the health of most enemies (and certainly boss enemies) in single-player could be the difference between frustration and flow. But this could possibly be dealt with by the time the full game is released, or if not the standard difficulty options (missing from the demo, but rather likely in the final product if past Resi games are anything to go by) ought to go some way towards alleviating the problem.

Without the slow and deliberate pacing and tension of its predecessors (even 4) It still feels as if it's Resident Evil only in name, but as a co-op focused action game it's certainly one to watch.

Sincerest Consolevances

2009-01-16T10:16:00.008Z

Excellent videogames show Consolevania has drawn to a close.

The heartfelt speech of a final episode - the apparent reason Series 4 updates have been slow of late - can be downloaded from here. It would probably make sense to watch it before reading on.

I completely agree with Rab on everything he has said. Like I said about the Kotaku community's reaction to the SoulCalibur IV/Star Wars crossover, "stop complaining about everything". So what if it's not as pretty as its rivals. So what if it involves grunting space marines and evil aliens. So what if it's fairly short. When I was 4 and my brother first let me play Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on his new Mega Drive, I didn't sit there slagging off the framerate, or complaining about the pricepoint of a game I could get through in about half an hour. I was having fun. Surely that's what matters.

And I know I have been guilty of that same kind of unnecessary snark on this very weblog at least once. When I've written reviews (if you can call them that) here, I've always tried to say everything that stuck in my head about a product - everything that matters to me personally. That's why I've generally only discussed games that I love.

But it is tempting when you're trying to entertain people to focus on the negative, to criticise unfairly. That's not to say that I like The Bourne Conspiracy, but rather that maybe it wasn't worth disliking it so publicly.

Thank you Consolevania for managing to stay honest to the end.

TEAM.

Happy New Year

2009-01-04T10:49:00.004Z

2009 already? Goodness, doesn't time fly?

I have been equal parts busy and lazy for the last few weeks, so if anyone was concerned that I might have abandoned this weblog you have my sincerest apologies for the wait.

No one? That's alright then.

Now, we've hit the point where I should really write out my promised list of short reviews for the games that really stood out for me in 2008. But, you see, there's a small problem: I've already written quite long reviews for most of them, and I doubt it would be very hard to fish them out of the archives. Last year this issue didn't really arise since I had only just started this page up. I repeated myself a little bit regarding Halo 3, but that's it.

So, to recap the ones I've already done...

Audiosurf (I get to the point eventually)

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3

World of Goo

Mirror's Edge

That's four, just like last time, but in more detail.

Other things that people like me might like that I haven't spent any time discussing include Grand Theft Auto IV (just remember to turn your bloody phone off) and Geometry Wars Evolved 2, about which there is respectively too much and too little to write. And then there's the fact that I've probably forgotten something else I really liked this year, just as I did last year with Crackdown and Portal.

While on the subject of 2008, it became something of a theme for a couple of months (and, if you're curious, I am still the top result for both haruhi panties and haruhi's panties) so I would like to take a moment to fill you all in with some of the more entertaining dubious search terms by which people (possibly including you) have found this weblog, placed as it is inexplicably highly on Google.

anime panties game

when can you see eclairs panties? (When can't you, more like.)

hirano aya panties (Though not the post which was intended to draw this term.)

And my personal favourite:
what are the best animes that show a lot of panties

Yeah, justify that.

So then, let's come out of the past and-- Professor Layton and the Curious Village; I forgot that one.

Let's come out of the past and look to the present and future.

Presently I have a few games on the go which might be worth talking about in the future, either in full reviews or with isolated discussion of their less orthodox ideas. These include Gears of War 2, the new Prince of Persia and The Fallout Scrolls III. I also have a couple of independent projects slowly moving to a point where I'll have something worth discussing. And they will, you mark my words. This year's resolution is to finish everything I started last year.

I will not, however, do what the Consolevania boys keep doing this series by promising updates of any greater frequency than that which my readers have grown accustomed to. I'd rather you were disappointed with the content than with the lack of it.

In conclusion, Happy Twenty-Oh-Nine. It's really starting to sound like the future.

I refuse to write a pun on the word 'Faith'

2008-11-17T12:03:00.004Z

The second of today's promised two posts.

As usual, I will get straight to the point.

Mirror's Edge is great.

DICE's first-person parkour platformer is set in a near-future city somewhere in (probably) America, where the Big Brother establishment monitors all behaviour and communication. Faith, the heroine, is a 'Runner' - an outlaw who transports secret messages and upholds civil liberties via the medium of free-running. I'm sure the majority of my readers know all of this backstory from the countless previews, trailers and promotional materials. Strangely, it has literally nothing to do with the plot after the two or three minute opening prologue level.

The actual plot is a tangled web of murder, deceit and intrigue, not one point of which can last half a second of fridge logic. In fact it rarely makes sense at face value, with one sequence mid-way through the final chapter having two characters engage in some fist-shaking at the name of the entire conspiracy's apparent instigator, who has been dead for the last six levels. The Adobe Flash cutscenes look cheap and ugly next to the beautiful and striking in-game art direction, while the voice cast fluctuates between passably average and utterly terrible.

Of course, this story rubbish doesn't remotely matter. What does matter is whether or not DICE delivered on their promise of an expressive, intuitive and fluid first-person parkour system.

The basic move, look and attack controls of standard dual-analog FPS games are instantly familiar, but it takes a few minutes of acclimatisation to grow comfortable with the context sensitive parkour. 'Up' actions (jumping, vaulting, wall-running and climbing) are assigned to LB, 'down' actions (dropping, rolling, sliding, crouching and coiling up in mid-air) are assigned to LT, and 'reverse' actions (turning 180 degrees, twisting round in mid-air, or turning to face 90 degrees from a wall-run) are performed by RB. Once you are familiar with what each button can do, stringing together elaborate combos and maneuvres becomes second nature. The environmental puzzles easily match (and often trump) the best of the recent Prince of Persia games, by rewarding experimentation and exploration away from the more obvious routes with hidden collectibles, faster Speed Run and Time Trial times, and the satisfaction of using generally cooler combos. While there are occasions where certain actions - grabbing ledges for example - will fail unexpectedly, this is by no means unusual among platform games, and Mirror's Edge is more reliable than most.

Armed combat is a fairly standard FPS run-and-gun system, with Faith noticeably slowing down and losing much of her freedom when carrying a weapon. In order that there is no path of least resistance, shooting is much less accurate and reliable than in more focused games of the genre, but it can still get you out of a tight spot. Hand-to-hand combat is cleverly tied in with the free-running mechanics, with different states (jumping, falling, wall-running, etc.) enabling different moves with RT, and secret achievements awarded for a discovering a handful of the more unusual techniques. Y, meanwhile, performs instant-kill disarm moves when timed correctly, or when an enemy has his back to you. The combos that can be performed from these simple elements are numerous, distinct and rewarding. Like the tragically underrated Breakdown, unarmed combat requires you to isolate your enemies and deal with them one-by-one. Unlike Breakdown, which was widely criticised for the difficulty of doing this, the scale and complexity of the environments combined with Faith's freedom and athleticism makes this an appealing and relatively forgiving challenge - there is always somewhere to run if you mess up. Playing through the game for the oft-mentioned Test of Faith achievement - going start to finish without shooting a single enemy - can be frustrating however, and the best solution to most large encounters is to intelligently combine martial arts with gunplay.

It isn't mechanically flawless, however. The bullet time system, designed for aiming trickier jumps and making it easier to time disarms, cannot be cancelled once it has been initiated, and when it has run dry it takes a great deal of leaping about before recharging. I understand that if it recharged quickly it could be exploited or damage the sense of momentum, but five seconds of slow motion for every two minutes of normal gameplay in such a fast-paced game is pushing it hard. Enemies can be cheap sometimes too, with their wildly fluctuating accuracy making it just as likely that you could sprint through an area unscathed as you could take one step and be instantly mowed down. Enemy spawning is often based on a timer from a save point rather than a straight trigger, meaning that certain platforming sections can be rendered impossible if you don't pass them early enough. This latter problem is made even more frustrating with the lack of an option to reload the last checkpoint on the pause screen. Suicide against hopeless situations is all too frequent.

Loading is slow, and I often found myself overtaking the streaming for flow-breaking Half-Life loading pauses in the Story modes. Since there was no sign of this problem in the demo, I suspect that Mirror's Edge will benefit greatly from the installations allowed by this Wednesday's NXE update, or on the PS3. Time Trials are wisely confined to a single preloaded area and, mercifully, can be quickly restarted as a result.

I cannot begin to describe how glad I am that Mirror's Edge has been touted as another of those 'planned as a trilogy' things. If DICE can smooth off the rough edges of this gem in subsequent installments, and deliver on that level editor they mentioned, it could shine as one of the best of this generation.

As it stands, it's just a bloody good game.

Inside Jokes

2008-11-17T11:22:00.004Z

The first of two - that's right, two - posts today.

It would have been just one, but Kotaku's Owen Good diverted my attention from reviewing Mirror's Edge to mocking his spectacular naiveté regarding Rare in-jokes. It's one thing to be unfamiliar with the long history of asking the wherabouts of a new Killer Instinct/Battletoads/Jet Force Gemini, but it's quite another to take the bait when it says it's a joke right there in front of your eyes.

Hey Owen, I know the push-button codes for Perfect Dark. Drop me a line and I'll tell you them.

Dismembrance Day

2008-11-10T11:06:00.011Z

Videogames based on world wars are always going to be something of a moral grey area as they try to strike the balance between history and entertainment, respect and exploitation. Brothers in Arms always prided itself on its authenticity and (though rather mawkish in my eyes) sensitivity, then Hell's Highway incorporated the slow-motion look his leg's come off camera. Infinity Ward's Call of Duty games aim to induce the panic and fear of a battlefield, but do this by having a massive bodycount on all sides. Even the gung-ho one-man-army Medal of Honor series makes a visible (or at least musical) effort to put across the emotions that soldiers would have been going through, all while you gun down the rows of moustache-curling Indiana Jones pantomime Nazis.

But even taking into consideration the familiarity of the wobbly ethical platform it stands on, Activision's launch of Treyarch's Call of Duty: World at War is worth questioning.

Here's the new launch trailer:

Having the slow-motion total immolation of conscripts and high-definition blood splatter accompanied by some heavy rock music is rather short on taste, but what really gets me is the timing.

World at War's North American release is the 11th of this month. That's Armistice Day (or Veterans Day to my American readers). This can't be an accident. The European release by the way is the 14th, but this is only because of our strange obsession with Fridays this side of the Atlantic.

Forgive my idealism, Activision, but if you're going to launch a World War 2 FPS on the 11th November - itself not an especially sensitive move, though admittedly not quite as bad as releasing a World War 1 FPS - I'd appreciate its promotion being just a little more tactful than that trailer.

This is just offensive.

Video Games Live

2008-10-31T15:45:00.007Z

Videogames. Compound word. Sort it out.

I have finally got around to posting my thoughts on the Video Games Live concert at London's Royal Festival Hall last week, so here they are.

This is the third time I have been to a VGL concert, having also attended the previous two London shows, so I must applaud this show for not being exactly the same as the first two, memories of which I can barely distinguish between but for the change of venue. It's also reassuring to know that the organisers are working hard on several new segments, including Mega Man, Chrono Trigger and the excellent Shadow of the Colossus.

The show itself was, to put it lightly, patchy. It began (as it did last year) with a painfully outdated Zero Wing reference projected onto the screen above the stage, followed by a fairly watchable example of one of those real-life Pac-Man (or Ms Pac-Man in this case) things that college students do because they haven't realised that it's been done a thousand times before. The retro medley was as listenable as it has ever been. I still don't understand the inclusion of Dragon's Lair or Space Ace, but what can you do? Prolific composer Tommy Tallarico was, as in every show, our host for the evening. He has a presenting style reminiscent of awful American videogames TV shows, which makes sense, since he has done that in the past.

The Metal Gear Solid segment, mostly taken from Harry Gregson-Williams's arrangement for Sons of Liberty, was unchanged from last year and still entertaining. Other repeat performances included Mario and Zelda (taken from the Game Music Concert/Orchestral Game Concert series), World of Warcraft, God of War and Kingdom Hearts (adapted from the original scores), and Martin Leung's dexterous Final Fantasy piano medley (all his own arrangements as far as I can tell). Final Fantasy VII's emo fanboy anthem 'One Winged Angel' - possibly the most boring rip off of 'O Fortuna' ever written - managed a third year running too, this time accompanied with a showreel of deviantART Sephiroth fanart, all of which which was either traced, stolen official artwork, or just crap (or any combination of the three). It ended with the words "Fanart FTW!". I mentally reversed the initials.

Mass Effect headed up this year's new segments, and was enjoyable enough to tempt me to resume my game the following weekend. I turned it off fifteen minutes later, but that has nothing to do with the music. Everquest 2 was a strange choice for a new addition, and the music - best described as very ordinary - outstayed its welcome by several minutes. Metroid was unfortunately rather disappointing. It was mostly taken from the Orchestral Game Concert 4 arrangement of Super Metroid background music, but had been cut short by about three or four minutes, entirely missing what I would call the good bit. Also new was the performance of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, by the winner of this year's pre-show GH competition accompanied by the orchestra and the host on guitar. It was our first taste this year of Tallarico's utterly embarrassing guitar playing, replete with Blink 182 jumps and death metal grimaces. There was much more of that to come.

Tallarico, as he did last year, unnecessarily embellished both 'One Winged Angel' and the Halo segment with his self-indulgent shredding. Though unlike the previous shows where he only rocked out to the Halo 3 announcement trailer music (the full Halo segment, by the way, is almost long enough to be considered a concert in itself), this time his axe was wailing for the whole thing. The roadies behind the desk can be blamed for his performance drowning out the orchestra as it did, but only Tallarico can take responsibility for prancing around like a twat in the first place. Castlevania also featured the guitar, and is arguably the only segment that should have. The audio balance was still miles off though.

The Meet & Greet after the show, while not quite as star-studded as last year's (when both Robin Beanland and Marty O'Donnel were present), was still worthwhile. Steve Burke was wearing a FreakAngels t-shirt. Good on him.

All in all, I still enjoyed the show, though had I not been in such delightfully sarcastic company (thanks again, Tony, Lucy and Simon) I'm not sure I would have been left with such a positive impression. Tommy Tallarico should not be allowed within six miles of a stage. Next year's show has promise assuming the new segments are ready in time, and that surely can't take long considering VGL's arrangements are generally second-hand.

Aside, Blogger appear to have UK localised their example post labels. Where previously it said "scooters, vacation, fall", it now reads "scooters, holidays, autumn". That's nice of them.

World of Good

2008-10-10T10:14:00.003+01:00

World of Goo.

2D Boy decided to honour their PC preorders a little earlier than next Monday's official release date.

So, on the 21st birthday of voice actress Hirano Aya whose love I secretly yearn for - one day, one day we will be one, even if you do like Disney films and Avril fucking Lavigne I can forgive you for your smile as bright as all the stars which summons the blissful sound of angels singi--

I'll try that again.

So, on Wednesday, imagine my surprise and delight when the full game download link popped up in my emails.

World of Goo is the follow-up to physics toy Tower of Goo, one of the best things to come out of the Experimental Gameplay Project, and just like in Tower you click and drag your little goo-balls into girders to build wobbly structures. As you build, the unused balls conveniently travel along the structure so you can reach them. But instead of just building as high as you can go, World gives you the goal of getting your structure to the level's end point where your unused goo-balls are collected. If you save enough goo-balls, you pass the level. Simple.

As you progress through the game, different goo-ball "species" start to appear which all have their own unique quirks. There's the standard black balls from Tower of course, but then there's balls you can remove after creating girders with them, balls that only connect to balls of the same type, balls which connect with more or less links than other balls, balls which can catch fire, balls which break into smaller balls, balls which you fire from structures like a slingshot, balls which stick to things, balls, balls, balls, etc. On top of this there's all the physics puzzle staples such as spike traps, moving parts, block sliding and so on. It's rich with small variations on the core features, which are all easy to understand but in practise offer a huge range of puzzle-solving possibilities.

Level design is consistently inventive and challenging, from the early gap-bridging and spike-evading to the later bomb-detonating and gravity-orbiting. The flimsy nature of goo-structures can make some of the levels fiddly and frustrating, but a simple undo feature is included to rectify that one misplaced ball that brings everything crashing down. And, if you get really stuck you can even skip the odd level, so there's no barrier preventing you from having fun with it. Even after finishing a level, there's the added challenge of the Obsessive Compulsive Distinction - a special secondary objective - or just collecting more extra balls.

Extra goo-balls make for a fun hi-score metagame. Collect more goo-balls than a level's quota, and the extra balls will be sent to an inifinite Tower of Goo level. In this level, you build a tower from the ground up, and with an internet connection can see the heights that every other player in the world has reached (with their profile name and country), as well as your numerical position on the world goo-tower leaderboards.

Everything is controlled with a simple and intuitive point and left-click system, making it a promising prospect on WiiWare next week. The green balls, which can be repositioned or removed after being used, do present frustrations however. Presumably to prevent you from accidentally removing a goo-ball of structural importance, the game prioritises the selection of unused balls. This means it can be difficult to pick up used goo-balls when a lot of other unused balls are moving around the structure in the same place. The whistle ability (click and hold in empty space to make any unused balls travel in that direction) partly solves this problem, but on smaller structures where there isn't space for the unused balls to clear the area these difficulties persist. This flaw is certainly not game-breaking though.

As you should know if you have seen any promotional materials for the game, the presentation, be it sound, music, art direction or writing, is outstanding and charming - even moreso than Tower.

Though the Q4 rush of big releases is just beginning, it would take one hell of a Christmas for World of Goo to be missing from my games of the year '08. And I suppose I'll have to do one of them in Jaunary again now that I've written that.

And if I just write the word "panties" here, then combined with the third paragraph this post ought to get a me hell of a lot of Google referrals. Take that, The Man.

Sporacy

2008-09-15T10:44:00.005+01:00

I previously chose not to post my anger over EA's use of the incredibly overzealous SecuROM anti-piracy solutions with Spore since plenty of others have already done the same, and I wouldn't be adding anything as yet unsaid.

Effectively spyware, limited installations, single user-account, etc.

My problem with this kind of protection is that it only serves to inconvenience people with legitimate versions of the product, practically assuming that anyone who buys the game is buying it with criminal intent. I have always said that this kind of approach, if anything, encourages piracy, as hackers always bypass these protections and make their cracked, DRM-free versions available online for nothing.

Which brings me to the reason I went back on my decision not to post the above grumblings:

I told you so.

I won't pirate it myself, as that would break my personal code of digital ethics, but I refuse to purchase it. So if any of you wanted to know what I have to say about Will Wright's most ambitious project to date, you - like me - will have to live without.

Why does he fight?

2008-08-29T17:00:00.009+01:00

My apologies for the wait for this post.

I could have filled the gap by waffling on about how much I enjoyed Braid, but I figured you would have had your fill of articles on that beautiful puzzle-platformer by now. I certainly have.

Other than that, the break can be attributed to my acquiring, building and generally setting up my new high-end PC. I won't bore you with shameless boasts about all the technical details and specifications, so suffice it to say that it is good, and will be a valuable asset in the production of Scoregasm's current projects and in the general prettifying of my portfolio.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

Since graduating from University I have been on a mission to get myself an entry-level design role in the videogames industry. I have applied for several places, but my decision to apply to one studio in particular - casual game developer Zoë Mode - came about after I asked myself a question which could well mark the most important moment of my career, even before it has begun.

"Why do I want to make videogames?"

Surely the answer is obvious. I want to make videogames because I love videogames. But if that's the only reason, then why bother becoming a developer? If I love games, and always have done, then what is wrong with remaining a consumer and persuing a different career path? The industry has proven itself quite capable of catering to my desires without my help for my whole life.

Then maybe I want to make videogames because I'm good at making videogames. No again. I'm also good at writing music, but after I finished my A-levels I realised that I was following the wrong ambitions. For years I'd been convinced that I wanted to write music for games and film, but this was only because I was good at music, and loved games and film. I never felt fulfilled writing or performing music as a job rather than a hobby. I hated the feeling of pressure and expectations encroaching on what was just fun to me. Being good at something has nothing to do with being happy doing it.

Those two answers are lazy and unconsidered. Of course I love games and of course I'm good at making them. Those aren't reasons to want to make videogames, they're simply license to be able to.

So what's left? What about making games do I find satisfying? What makes me want to do it?

Then I realised. The answer is simple. I want to make videogames because I want to make people have fun.

I have fun when I play games, and so do probably hundreds of millions of other people. But I'm not blind to the fact that there are further billions of people who don't know the fun of games like I do, and these people aren't at fault for it, they just have different tastes. Like everything else in the world, games aren't for everyone, but that doesn't mean that they can't be for everyone.

Zoë Mode - and a handful of other casual-oriented developers - is run by and staffed by people who must have asked this question of themselves and come to a similar conclusion. They make games for (irritating buzzword alert) emerging markets not because they have to in order to stay afloat, but because they want to. The dedication to the noble goal of making a good game is all that is important in game development.

And that's why I want to make videogames. So people - any people - can have the fun with them that I have.

I appreciate your bearing with this rather self-indulgent post. The next one will have twice the usual sarcastic jokes to make up for their absence here. Promise.

RP3

2008-08-05T11:02:00.005+01:00

I feel it's about time I let my readers know about my new game of the moment: Persona 3 for PlayStation 2.

Recommended to me by Scoregasm's resident unashamed Persona fangirl Dawn, this is the first Persona game I have played - my first MegaTen game in fact.

It can be described as a hybrid Random Dungeon/Dating Sim RPG. By day you are a normal Japanese high school junior. You can choose to spend your time studying, relaxing, making friends and shopping. But every night at midnight, time stands still for all but a select few people for one hour (the Dark Hour). During this time your school transforms into a giant towering randomly generated dungeon populated with mind-eating shadow monsters. It's your job to climb this tower and kill the monsters that guard its mysteries.

It all sounds rather disjointed, until you consider the series' titular summons. During the Dark Hour you can summon your Persona (a demonic "manefestation of your character" - essentially your Magic and Tech attacks) by shooting yourself in the head with a device that looks like a gun but isn't one. There are a huge number of possible Personae, which can be won from battles or custom-made through fusing others together, and each Persona is distinguished by its Tarot Arcana. Similarly, during the day, each one of your Social Links (your friendships and romances) is aligned to a specific Arcana. Level up your Social Links, and your corresponding Personae can grow stronger, or gain generous experience bonuses when created through fusion.

Combat during the Dark Hour constitutes possibly the most elegant RPG battle system ever devised. Rather than having full control over your party's actions, you only directly control the player character, and on his turn are able to give orders to the other three partymembers which switch their AI rules predictably. Another game which I am not so fond of tried something similar with its Gambits system, but suffered from its completely incompatible real-time pretentions (a real-time Action RPG battle system in which you spend most of your time sitting and waiting) and clumsy, overcomplicated UI. P3 gets it right by placing it in a traditional turn-based setting, giving you direct decisive control over one character (who has by far the most tactical options available to himself anyway), and allowing you to select between sensible pre-set AI rules rather than constructing them from scratch, move by move. The traditional rock-paper-scissors elemental balance is present (and complex, though not confusing), with attacks against weaknesses (or just the odd physical critical hit) knocking enemies or teammates down to miss a turn. If all enemies are down at once and the player character isn't incapacitated in any way, you can perform an All-out Attack, which interrupts the turn order to deal heavy physical damage to all the enemies at once.

As you level up, you can last for longer periods of time in the tower. Fight too much and you end up tired and eventually sick, which puts you out of shadow-slaying action for a full night, or just makes you really bad at it. After each two tower bosses you hit a barrier and can't move up any further floors. But once a full moon, a special event boss will appear to move the story forward and unlock the next set of random floors.

On the Dating Sim side of things, P3 could make a competent game in the genre even without the excellent RPG dungeon crawling. Three statistics - Academics, Charm and Courage - determine who will and won't want to socialise with you, and can be levelled up through various optional activities which generally cost time and move you on to the next stage of the day. Otherwise you can choose to improve your present Social Links by spending time with your friends. As you move through the Japanese academic year practically each day offers something new, be it exams, sporting events, trips on holiday or newly available Social Links.

Presentation-wise, P3 still excels. From its appealing character design to its stylish anime cutscenes, and from its mostly-good dub cast to its wonderfully unorthodox pop/rock/hip-hop soundtrack. Below, as an example, is the unreasonably cool intro movie.

I am presently 40 hours in, and nothing has started to drag even slightly. Combat is as fresh as it was at the beginning (if not fresher, what with its constant variation of tactical challenges), and the social sim sections are still entertaining and meaningful.

There are only two things holding me back from hailing it as the finest RPG ever made. First, I've not finished it yet - in fact according to the in-game calendar I'm not even half way through. Second, the impending release of Persona 3: FES, the extended and improved (neither of these terms should be used lightly regarding P3) version, which I will undoubtedly buy the second it lands on this country's shelves.

If you haven't played this marvellous game, either buy it now or wait for FES (unless it's already out in your territory, in which case just buy it now). But you have to buy it. There's no two ways about it.

Victory

2008-07-27T09:02:00.002+01:00

Let this day go down in history. Click for full 1360 x 768 widescreen success.

Unfortunately I beat the Scoregasmonauts' suggestions.

Haruhi Panties Update

2008-07-26T10:23:00.007+01:00

Second result on page one.

Shit just got real.

If I hit the top spot, I feel a celebration would be in order. I'll take your suggestions for what that celebration should entail in the comments - Scoregasm members reading are required to contribute.

Shake to Wiiload

2008-07-19T14:23:00.004+01:00

First-person shooters on the Wii.

I was never one of those people who thought that the Wii's pointer would be the console's answer to mouselook (that would be dual-analog). But that doesn't mean I've not been rather disappointed in the way that FPS games are mapped to the system.

The usual (and so far, only) method of control in Wii shooters is to assign the traditional WASD strafing controls to the nunchuck analog stick and view control to the Wiimote in an attempt to mimic the way more traditional input mechanisms do it (movement on the left hand, view control on the right). The problem here is that adjusting your view with a mouse is entirely different to operating a pointer. With both mouselook and dual-analog controls, your view is moved as if the entire screen area is a mouse cursor, with your crosshairs (visible or not) always in the dead centre of the screen. Meanwhile with the Wii (or indeed the DS), in which you interact directly with the display itself, you are constrained to moving within the size and shape of the screen, and your crosshairs can be wherever you want them to be. Having the view move according to the cursor's position on the screen means that shooting is only effective in the small area in the centre which will not move the view, and that slipping slightly outside the screen will send the player character spiralling out of control at top speed.

I find it quite frustrating that the designers responsible for these interfaces have yet to attempt any alternative mapping, especially as there is one method which has occasionally appeared in console shooters that would serve to solve this problem entirely.

The problem at present is that the Wiimote is inadequate as a means of view control, so the obvious solution is to simply assign view control elsewhere - for example, the analog stick. In GoldenEye's default mapping, left and right on the analog stick pivot the view instead of strafing. This can also be seen earlier in games such as Doom, and later in games like the first two Metroid Primes. Strafing becomes a secondary motion most sensibly handled by holding a button down (Z on the nunchuck would be ideal) to revert the analog stick's functionality (as in Metroid Prime), while pitch control is either rendered unnecessary by the level design (GoldenEye), or handled automatically (Metroid Prime).

Putting all movement and view control on the left hand frees the right up for nothing but shooting, effectively turning it into a lightgun game taken off the rails.

The Wiimote isn't console gaming's answer to mouselook, it's just a different answer to the same question that mouselook answered.

You Know Who You Are

2008-07-11T11:27:00.007+01:00

This morning I checked my Google Analytics statistics - in particular my recent search engine referrals.

Someone, somewhere (Edit: Roswell, Georgia, USA on July 10th - yes, you), got onto this blog - specifically last week's filler post - by Googling the search term 'haruhi panties'.

Naturally, I immediately repeated this search to see just how desperate this individual was to find an image of Suzumiya Haruhi's undergarments. I figured I would be able to roughly quantify this desperation by the number of the page on which my humble blog appears - accurate enough at least for a joke post on the same blog, I'm sure you will agree.

What I didn't expect was this:

In case you didn't get that:

I feel almost privileged.

Well, I can only sincerely apologise to anyone directed to that post (or quite likely, this one) looking for less-than-respectable images of a fictional fifteen/sixteen year old girl, but Haruhi's panties don't come within this weblog's primary (or secondary, for that matter) concerns.

And that is what you're looking for, don't try to deny it. An eBay search for 'haruhi' in clothing (which was my also failed back-up joke, something along the lines of "here's a link to some Haruhi panties") produces exactly zero branded lingerie.

For shame.

Chopin Bored

2008-07-08T10:00:00.006+01:00

Alternative post title: Trusty Hell. But I thought that was a bit extreme, and wasn't nearly as good a pun.

I have finally - after abandoning it for several months - returned to and completed Eternal Sonata for Xbox 360.

So, as I promised in January, here's my thoughts on the game.

A Japanese RPG revolving around the death of the genius pianist and composer Frédéric Chopin is an intriguing prospect, and for the first few hours of the plot it appears to make good on that potential. As he lies unconscious on his deathbed dying of tuberculosis, he dreams of a fantastical world filled with allegory for his life and works (as well as a real-time battle system) - like a surreal take on the 'life flashes before his eyes' cliché.

Combat starts out with potential, but it quickly becomes clear that there are only two strategies worth employing: against regular enemies you mash A until your timer is almost out, then press Y, while against bosses you mash A until your combo gauge is full, then press Y. While enemies have their turns you can guard with a well-timed press of B to render their damage negligible. You can also press A to cancel their move and get an extra move yourself at random occasions, but this only serves as a win-a-bit-quicker button, and pressing B instead guards like normal. As long as you deal with 90% of the enemies in your path the game offers very little resistance to your victory - in fact, playing in this way puts the hardest battles nearer the beginning.

It's an imaginative system, but one which is implemented with no real consideration for tactical depth - even the familiar RPG trope of elemental rock-paper-scissors is omitted. The combat may be shallow, but it's consistent and never frustrating or cheap. The flashier endgame moves are often distractingly impressive too.

Structurally, it gets off to a strong start, with genuinely interesting uses of space (almost unheard of in the genre), and well timed and well edited cutscenes maintaining interest. This balance of storytelling and dungeon crawling doesn't last however. The latter half of the game is entirely dungeon after dungeon after dungeon, with an occasional respite to watch an overlong cutscene (which often, towards the end, fails to make any sense anyway). These dungeons get very boring, very fast. But this is a game I was drawn to mainly for the potential held in its story, and I brought myself to finish Xenosaga Episode II for similar reasons, which is mechanically far worse.

In the world of Chopin's dying dream, the ability to weild magic is symptomatic of imminent death, and these terminal magic users are shunned through fear of contagion. A 14 year old girl - Polka, the female lead - is cursed with magic herself (tuberculosis claimed the life of Chopin's youngest sister at this age). She takes Chopin to see the rare blooming of a field of nocturnal poisonous bioluminescent flowers called Heaven's Mirror, which serve as a symbol of both death and hope (with Chopin initially taking the more cynical former view, while Polka takes the latter).

It is after this moment that it begins to drift away from all this allegory and symbolism. Further chapters are merely loosely based on the composer's works, and the circumstances surrounding their composition. The story on the whole suddenly ceases to be about Chopin, who is unceremoniously replaced as male lead by Alegretto (in love with female lead, lovable rogue/Robin Hood-esque do-gooder, orphan, etc.), and instead tells a tediously clichéd story of a malevolent ruler sacrificing his own subjects in order to create a deadly army of mind-controlled monsters with which he can take over the et cetera. None of the characters aside from Polka and Chopin himself (though you might be able to include Jazz at a stretch) have any relevance to Chopin's life, and until the ending sequence Polka's terminal disease and the nocturnal flowers are almost entirely forgotten.

The ending - and I mean the very ending, when the credits roll, not the three or four sub-endings - while rather historically inaccurate since singer Konstancja Gładkowska, his first love, was not present at his deathbed in real life - suddenly snaps back to the story it started as, and concludes with a genuinely moving callback to the last time they really did perform together.

Because of all this, my intuition tells me that everything Alegretto onwards in the story is the result of heavy-duty executive meddling. You can't have a JRPG without a romantic subplot. Who would buy a game where the protagonist is a dying 39 year old? We need a double-act of cutesy light relief child characters with absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the plot, but who can slow it to a crawl by spending ten minutes at a time arguing about hats. Why not have a shinto ritual incongruously inserted towards the end, as if Chopin would have any idea why Polka is tying her bad fortune to a tree? And just in case people don't get our preachy aesops, we should have the characters break the fourth wall and directly address the camera for fifteen minutes so that they can explicitly list off every moral a story could ever have (honestly, this part of the ending belongs in Dora the Explorer, or possibly Animaniacs). Only the opening few hours and the final moments as the credits roll appear to belong in the story that was originally written.

Supporting my theory, Bandai Namco VP Shin Unozawa was allegedly suggesting the company would like to assist in a sequel at a Japanese launch party.

A sequel.

To Frédéric Chopin's death.

All of the insight into Chopin's life that the game provides can be read on Wikipedia (in fact, this article is far more enlightening), and the game systems are shallow and poorly balanced. Aside from the five or six worthwhile hours of the story, the game has only one thing in its favour. The music is easily composer Sakuraba Motoi's best work to date, far outdoing any of his best compositionts in the Star Ocean or Tales of... series, and of course it also contains several excellent live renditions of Chopin's more prominent piano pieces.

In the end I can't recommend the game, but if you're especially interested, you could do far worse than the original soundtrack CD. Just play it while you read that Wikipedia article and you get the best of the experience, with none of the tedious dungeon crawl, shallow combat or nonsensical narrative.

Schools, Robots, Gods and Panties - Anime I've Recently Watched

2008-07-02T11:23:00.004+01:00

A scooters, vacation and/or fall post to fill the rather long gap that has appeared as I've been starting pre-production on Scoregasm Project #2 and working on my portfolio.

In my spare time I've been watching quite a bit of anime recently. It usually works out that I'll see something really good by accident and think "now I'm in the mood for some good anime", then I'll either look up something related or go by a friend's recommendation and watch that. This carries on until I hit something that fails to interest me (the last cycle was concluded by Gunslinger Girl: Il Teatrino, as if you hadn't guessed).

So, here's what I've been watching.

The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi

I'm two years behind the times with this, of course. I actively avoided it entirely because of the obsession several Kotaku staffers have for all things Haruhi. But much to my surprise, it's brilliant.

Based on an excellent series of light novels (translations of which can be found here, and I strongly recommend giving them a read), the story is narrated by Kyon, a deadpan, sarcastic high school freshman who meets an eccentric girl named Suzumiya Haruhi on his first day. She refuses to socialise with anyone who isn't an alien, time traveller or esper because ordinary humans are too boring for her. After joining and rejecting every club and society in the entire school Kyon accidentally gives her the idea to start her own. She quickly obtains (or rather, kidnaps) three other members then announces that the purpose of her "SOS Brigade" is to seek out aliens, time travellers and espers and have fun with them.

Unbeknownst to her however, the people she enlisted are respectively an alien, a time traveller and an esper, all of whom quickly inform Kyon that, though Haruhi is entirely unaware, she has the omnipotent power of a god.

Hilarity ensues.

No really, it does. It's easily in my top three anime of all time along with Gunslinger Girl and Cowboy Bebop.

Lucky*Star

After striking gold with Haruhi, I took a similar Kotaku-informed gamble with Lucky*Star, a slice-of-life high school comedy in which roughly 20% of the jokes revolve around the fact that the actress portraying lead character Konata (a huge Haruhi fangirl), is the same actress as played Haruhi in the above show. It's rather a lot like Azumanga Daioh, but just not quite as good.

But it's still very funny, with the best of its jokes easily topping the average output of Azumanga, and only its cast of characters falling a little short in their believability.

Rah Xephon

Recommended to me by a friend, Rah Xephon is a fairly recent humongous mecha series often called out as a rip-off of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

It's not.

As the time-devouring TV Tropes Wiki so eloquently puts it:

"Where Evangelion is about dysfunction and despair cloaked in the arcanobabble of the Kaballah and Judeo-Christian myth, Rah Xephon is about transcendence and revelation, blending musical imagery and Mayan lore to produce a result that is diametrically opposed to the bleakness of Evangelion's climax even while superficially resembling it."

I can't really say anything about it without ruining the story, other than that episode 19 in particular is absolutely amazing.

Kiddy Grade

I've just started watching this (finished episode 3) entirely on the strength of voice actress Hirano Aya (the aforementioned lead from Haruhi and Lucky*Star) playing Lumiere, and despite being no more than a child at the time this show was made she has so far put in a commendable performance.

It's about a pair of interstellar crimefighters in The Future, Eclair and Lumiere. Eclair is characterised by her magical lipstick which gives her super strength, or alternatively can be used as a whip. Lumiere meanwhile just controls all machniery within a certain radius with her mind, and also carries a sort of wine bottle smoke grenade thing.

Eclair also has the power of white cotton panties, which she invokes frequently. Four times in the first five minutes, in fact. Naturally this led to me playing a game of count-the-pantyshots for the subsequent episodes, a game which rapidly became equal parts entertaining and disturbing.

The show's description suggests that the later episodes take a turn for the dark, as the characters unearth their mysterious pasts, but so far it's just been reminding me of the more frivolous episodes of Cowboy Bebop, but not nearly as good.

It's likely that this will be the show that ends my "feel like some good anime" mood, but I'm not through judging it yet.

Hopefully next time I'll talk about games and/or their design in some way.

SoulCalibur IV: A New Hope

2008-06-11T08:10:00.007+01:00

I've been waiting for something to kick-start my angry rant engine, and here it is.

It's not the news itself. I couldn't care less what's on the box, and frankly my skepticism regarding SoulCalibur IV has nothing to do with the uncanonical cameo characters, instead being informed by the fact that SoulCalibur III was a steaming pile of horseshit. I'm waiting for a demo to make or break it for me.

No, its Kotaku's coverage of it which rubs me up the wrong way.

Ashcraft seems to think that representing one of a game's primary selling points on the box is somehow detrimental to the product itself. And as we all know, this kind of thing is completely unheard of for the series.

And, though this is hardly surprising, the majority of the Kotaku commenters - people whom, I hate to admit, pretty much represent the core videogaming audience - back him up on this, displaying either a YouTube comments level of eloquence:

"lol this game is a disaster."

Or a Squidi level of pretention:

"Gotta agree with you on that one Ashcraft

Being a long time Star Wars fan, I feel that the Star Wars characters have no place in the Soul Calibur world.

Inversely, with all this, it diminishes Soul Calibur's.... soul, as an entity in and among itself..."

What the hell does that even mean?

On top of this is the frequent ridiculous criticism that "lightsabers would cut through metal swords". But if we're going to go that far, isn't it equally valid to point out that metal swords would cut through people? No, no it's not equally valid. It's more valid. Because swords and people exist, whereas lightsabers do not exist. We have tangible evidence that swords cut through people, while we only have Rule of Cool-compliant ILM special effects to back up the lightsaber complaint.

In making a game where characters can have their necks broken, spines twisted, and vital organs impaled and sliced, but still get up to fight as if nothing had happened as long as they have some hit points left in their health bar, I don't think the Project Soul team is especially concerned with physical realism.

So, gamers, stop complaining about the addition of some potentially very distinct swordfighting styles to a swordfighting game.

And more broadly, stop complaining about everything that... no, just stop complaining about everything.

You obviously like games, so stop pretending to yourselves that every game you play marks some kind of downturn in standards.

Portal is long enough.

Borne Yesterday

2008-05-22T11:38:00.009+01:00

I downloaded the demo for The Borne Conspiracy from Xbox Live yesterday afternoon.

Obviously I proceeded to run it. But I wouldn't say I "played" it. I think that's too strong a word.

The demo gives you one example of each of the game's three mission varieties: the present-day running away missions, in which you are racing against an entirely unexplained clock to escape your pursuers; the flashback assassination missions, which Borne apparently remembers with suprising clarity, and in which you are allowed to shoot people; and the present-day driving missions, if you can really call that driving. Assuming there's no time spent wallsurf adventuring for clues elsewhere (and if there is, that would hardly change the workings of the other distinctly separate missions), I think it's fair to say that the whole game is represented.

So then, let's go through each mission one by one.

We start our Mysterious Timer Mission by getting our first taste of hand-to-hand combat. This system basically boils down to mashing X and Y randomly until your attacks stop connecting, at which point you hold A (block) until your opponent's flurry ends. Deep. Also as a result of your successful hits, assuming you're in the right place, you're occasionally granted the ability to press B treating you to a brief cutscene (sorry, "environment takedown") and knocking a chunk off your opponent's health to speed things along a bit. Movement is essentially meaningless (beyond shuffling between the context sensitive Press B locations), as your opponent moves with you forwards and backwards in perfect sync. If there's a lot of enemies around you, you're occasionally tasked with a one-button QTE input as they remember that they're meant to fight you as well as the guy you're currently pummelling. Successful input smacks them in the chops so you can get on with dispatching the guy you're currently working on. Incidentally, there's no way of exiting this combat once it's initiated until the guy you're working on drops. And combat automatically initiates the second you get within a certain radius of an enemy. You can also kick by holding down X or Y if you feel like it, the timing of which being the closest this system ever gets to skill.

After this a tutorial screen informs us of our sprinting ability. By holding RB you run quite fast, significantly shortening the time between each QTE and cutscene (from 6 or 7 seconds to a mere 2 or 3). And there are a lot of QTEs and cutscenes. Bizarrely, even though the game tells you to hold RB during any period in which you aren't fighting someone or watching a cutscene (or both), releasing your grip on the button too late when a QTE input icon appears (that being more or less the instant it appears) counts as an instant fail. Also while not beating people up or watching cutscenes, you can press Y to make the level's critical path (or, the next place you need to press A) appear as HUD icons. A whole core ability, which they call Borne Sense, meant for the sole purpose of compensating for their shoddy level design. Oh by the way, here's another cutscene.

So, that's the first demo mission done. We can spend as long as we like wondering why the hell there was a time limit for that sequence of bad fighting, running and cinematics, then move on to the next one.

This next one is an Assassination Mission. It's basically the same as the Mysterious Timer Missions except that you can shoot people and there's not quite as many cutscenes and QTEs. There's not nearly as many checkpoint saves either. After an unskippable piece of exposition (which you'll have to sit through again if you die before the distant first checkpoint) you get to draw your woefully inadequate pistol and start gunning down faceless goons. Getting too close gets you into the interminable hand-to-hand again, which is made all the more annoying by the fact that people are shooting you with assault rifles and shotguns while you slap these guys about, unable to take cover or recharge your health. It's particularly great if you get into a scuffle on the railway which throws bizarrely frequent trains at you to dodge, and of course you can't dodge when you're stuck in a fight. Similarly to the melee system, after amassing enough hits and kills you gain the ability to press B to cutscene-kill as many people as you have saved up the power to, assuming you time your QTE input right for each one. I like the Press B To Make It End Faster mechanic. It's quite humanitarian. You can take cover behind anything with a tap of A rather like in Gears of War, except with no diving out or moving between points etc. Moving while carrying a large weapon is practically impossible due to the camera putting itself in exactly the wrong place for seeing where you're going.

Finally, after all that gunslinging, there's a boss fight. It's basically the normal combat, except that you're against the damage sponge of the century. He can also perform takedowns on you occasionally, which basically means that a QTE occurs repeatedly at random intervals - succeed and it's like nothing happened, fail and you lose a chunk of health, then carry on anyway. This fight, the nuance of which is exhausted the second he tries his first takedown (triggered as a tutorial about 30 seconds in), takes roughly eight minutes. Gripping.

So what more can this cinematic action adventure bring to the table? Why, the worst driving model I have ever laid my hands on. Thanks for asking. In the Tacked-On Driving Mission, cars apparently pivot from the centre, and feature grip that I can only call extra-dimensional. I was able to perform a drift turn by applying the handbrake in mid-air. The steering is absurdly oversensitive, sending your vehicle swerving at a right-angle from the tiniest tilt of the stick, leading me to wonder why the tutorial screen recommends use of the handbrake for sharp corners. I certainly didn't spot any hairpins. Braking is more or less instant, even at Improbable MPH. A scripted event blocks the exit for as long as it takes for Marie to say that it "might have been unblocked by now", so in the meantime you just idly swerve around the tiny level wondering what you're meant to do. When finally you can cross the blocked exit, guess what? Yeah. QTE. Marvellously, this cutscene features vehicular physics every bit as ridiculous as those you just played with. At least it's consistent.

Basically, it's rubbish. Far more rubbish than a ~~movie~~ book licensed (must be why it has the same logo design and soundtrack) action game has any right to be. I expected mediocre, but I got terrible.

And if you have a spare 1.2Gb on your Xbox 360 hard disk you can see for yourself, but don't say I didn't warn you.

Turnabout Disappointment

2008-05-03T14:53:00.009+01:00

Let's be clear here, I don't hate Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. In fact, as a game on its own it's pretty good. But as the latest instalment in the exceptional Ace Attorney series, it's weak. Very weak. Every little bit of it is just not-quite-as-good as the Phoenix Wright canon.

First, and most obviously, Apollo Justice himself. While Phoenix was always a bit of a Deadpan Snarker and thought of himself as The Only Sane Man, he was always doing the right thing (indeed, it transpires, even over his seven year absence from court before this game). Apollo is just a prick. Perhaps he'll spend the next game finding out what it means to be a defence attorney like Phoenix did in Justice For All, but we've already been through that plot once. And even before then Phoenix was generally a pretty nice guy.

Second, the mysterious disappearance of every remotely appealing character from the previous games. Phoenix himself is there of course, though it takes about a case an a half before you make even the tiniest crack in his mysterious facade. But conspicuously missing are Edgeworth (the fangirls will burn shit down on finding this out), Gumshoe (well, he is there, in one brief flashback scene), and Maya. No one cares about Pearl, so I'm not bothered about her.

Maya not being there is something I'll devote an entire two extra paragraphs to. While her continued existence is something vaguely alluded to on two or three occasions, the series' best character has absolutely no direct part to play in this latest game. One flashback sequence seems like it should feature her but simply doesn't, while a line of Phoenix's dialogue in the final case has him lamenting the fact that a key player has died and so his knowledge of the whole case has died along with him.

Yeah, Phoenix, if only you had some way of communicating directly with the dead. Too bad you don't know any master spirit mediums, eh?

Their replacement characters add nothing of value. Ema Skye (formerly Phoenix's temporary sidekick in the bonus case of the first game) is an incompetant detective, but her dialogue is never as entertaining as Gumshoe's. The new prosecutor Klavier Gavin has an awesome air-guitar animation, but has next-to-nothing to do with the plot (remove him and replace with any generic mannequins to fill the voids and you simply wouldn't notice) and doesn't make much of an antagonist considering how nice he is to everyone. Trucy, Phoenix's adoptive daughter, is essentially Maya without any interesting traits or backstory (her relation to the plot is significant, but has absolutely no effect on her flatlining character arc). To be fair, Trucy's Amazing Mr Hat talking animation is unreasonably cute, but that's all.

The story itself isn't bad at all - in fact it gets quite exciting during the multi-part final case - but a great number of the ideas feel rushed and could have done with fleshing out a bit more. Case in point, songstress Lamiroir's relation to the central thread is relegated to a couple of throwaway lines of dialogue before the credits, despite being (as these lines and only these lines establish) centrally important to the story. I would go into more detail there, but as far as I know none of my regular readership has finished it yet.

Finally, the mechanics have bizarrely recieved something of a downgrade. Psyche-Locks are almost nonextistant, Profiles can no longer be presented as they could in Trials and Tribulations, and courtroom scenes are for the most part insultingly easy (notably the final climactic courtroom sequence) or, on occasion, insultingly obtuse. Far more than in the previous games there is a tendency to have to check everywhere until something happens, with no discernable logic or goal to these bottlenecks. The new feature, 'Perceiving', isn't bad at all once it gets into its stride, but one wonders why a new gimmick was added to the courtroom when another (better) mechanic was more or less stripped from the investigation sections. I never had a problem with the courtroom parts as they stood, but without Psyche-Locks to give clarity to your bottleneck-surmounting goals, the investigations can be labourious and frustrating.

But still, I played till the end. I did enjoy it. As an adventure game it's still among the best. It's just that as an Ace Attorney game it's really not up to standard.

And it doesn't have Maya in it.

Sam Malone PI: No More Justice

2008-04-26T14:48:00.004+01:00

I said that I'd eventually get round to posting about this project, and I kept my word. Even if we did go gold on Thursday night.

So, what is it?

It's a total conversion mod for the Source 2007 (that is, Orange Box) engine which takes the basic workings of a point and click adventure and slaps them into a first person perspective. All the inventory stuff you'd expect from a classic game in the genre is handled for you, and instead the focus is on exploration and discovery as you investigate the various detailed locales with your magnifying glass and print duster.

As you can probably tell from the title - or possibly from the fact that most of my regular readers make up my team so you know all of this already - we went for a Film Noir aesthetic, setting it in 1930s Chicago.

We've spent the best part of a year on this project and, cliched though it may be, it has been a learning experience for all of us. I for one have learned how to lead a creative team, how to work a whole new SDK tool suite, how to structurally design an adventure game, how to deal with the repercussions of cutting major design features (and how to go about cutting them in the first place)...

And of course how to hack together a game beyond the means of its technical limitations, and make the hacks look like features. The answer to that one, dear readers, is clocks.

So since it's now gone gold, I'd like to give my sincerest thanks to all of my loyal team Scoregasm for working so hard on this product with me. You are the best colleagues and friends a cocky and pretentious systems designer like myself could ever hope for.

Here's to the next mod.

Rock Band

2008-04-09T09:06:00.002+01:00

Costs £180.

EA can fuck right off if they think I'm paying that. Not the usual 60% mark-up we expect over here, this is a 124% mark-up, for something that costs a bomb to begin with.

How could they be this stupid? Sales will tank. No one is going to spend one-hundred and eighty pounds on a novelty item in May. Released six months earlier for less than half the price (but still not exactly cheap) in America it had the advantage of the Christmas period, a time when consumers actually do spend large sums of money on novely items.

But at the beginning of summer? For twice the price? When Guitar Hero III - with its better-established brand identity to boot - is sitting on a shelf next to it for just over a quarter of the price?

No sale.

IndestructoTank: Anniversary Edition

2008-04-02T09:41:00.005+01:00

Where did the exclamation mark go?

Oh well, it will always be IndestructoTank! in my eyes.

I am of course referring to Tony's spangly remake of our beloved bouncing suicide tank's first outing this time last year. The game which made his name, the jammy bastard.

Play it here. And vote 5 because it deserves it.

This blog is linked from the credits (as if anyone will read them), so if you're a newcomer feel free to introduce yourself in this post's comments, and I shall adjust the running joke about the size of my readership accordingly.

Finally, let it be known that the previously mentioned exclamation mark is only missing from the labels down there for technical reasons.

Red Ring etc

2008-03-29T15:42:00.002Z

My 360 gave me the infamous RROD this afternoon.

But I'm not going to be one of those bloggers who rants about subjects that have been covered a thousand times before by better writers.

I'm not going to bother grumbling about how shoddily put together the Xbox 360 is, with its warping components that can't take the heat it puts out when idle, or its sticky disc tray which often requires hitting in order to eject successfully.

I'm not going to moan about Microsoft's inexplicable adherance to this faulty design, when the Three Red Lights problem in particular is so prevalent and so widely reported that I would bet every penny I have on it hurting their hardware sales.

And no way in hell am I going to write an ironic blog post of self-depricating humour that isn't especially funny, followed by a punchline paragraph which some might describe as 'meta'.

Post-dissertation, Post-break-up, Post on Blog

2008-03-07T17:36:00.006Z

Okay, maybe now I can get into the regular posting routine I was planning on when I set this blog up.

My dissertation - on control interface design, with a great deal of reference to HCI, in case you were curious - is in so I'm giving myself a breather from all that word processing by typing things into a computer.

So, what has happened since the last post (a question I keep finding myself asking - one of these days I might post something else)? Well, I have been having an extremely stressful time with No More Justice, I've had a similarly stressful time with my dissertation, and I found out my now ex-girlfriend (who makes up an eighth of my readerbase, unless she's being unfaithful there too and reading squidi.net or some shit like that, the whore) has been cheating on me for the past half-year. She was still my girlfriend when I found out. Not the best of timing really considering the whole stress thing.

But fret not, loyal readers, I'm not going all emo on you.

And why is that, I suspect you will want to ask upon reading this?

I'll tell you.

Audiosurf.

The result of Mean Bean Machine and Vib-Ribbon's secret night of steamy passion playing PaRappa the Rapper for a fool that freakish Japanese rabbit BITCH. HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN GOING ON FOR? PaRappa KNEW it for all that time, but just put his suspicions down to the stress he was under, and then SHE has the nerve to act the VICTIM?! He TRUS-- wait...

Hang on...

There. 23,875 for Girlfriend in a Coma (a suprisingly hard level that I picked at random in order to make this part of the post not be a total lie*) by The Smiths on Mono Pro. Could have done better, but hey, it's fun.

As I was saying, Audiosurf is the illegitimate lovechild of Vib-Ribbon and Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. You load in an audio file (it supports virtually every format there is) and the code constructs a psychedelic rollercoaster/motorway of a level out of it, populating the lanes with blocks of various colours which you need to catch and match in groups of three or more for points, combos and hot, juicy scoregasms.

A pretty neat idea, I'm sure you'll agree, but wait! There's more.

The algorithms that build the levels are far more sophisticated than Vib-Ribbon's, by discerning individual instruments and melody lines, and shaping the rollercoaster's peaks, troughs, turns and barrel-rolls according to intensity, shifts in pitch, and probably a great deal more. Despite this, build times are extremely quick, and once a level has been played once, the track is precached for you to speed things up further.

Sounds interesting, I might consid-- but wait! There's more.

If the whole colour matching business is a little too much to take in (it often is for me), there's a few alternative - but equally entertaining - gametypes based on the same core concept. My personal preference is Mono, in which coloured blocks must be collected and comboed while grey blocks must be evaded (with a bonus multiplier if you don't hit any of them). Simple, exciting, and you get to litsen to your music collection while you're at it.

This is easily my favourite music game of all time. And it makes me extremely happy.

Well, hey, look at that. I reviewed a game rather than talking about posts I might write in the future. Could this be the turning point in this weblog's general quality of content?

Don't count on it.

*Seriously, I did. Check the leaderboards.

Okay, I'm Over It

2008-02-09T14:13:00.001Z

Gunslinger Girl: Il Teatrino is crap. But everything is okay.

So much has happened in the time since I last posted here - a length of time which can only be described as a "Temporal Abyss", so consider that its official designation. You might argue that it's not too different a length of time to the previous "short break", but this time while I could have been posting, I haven't bothered, and therein lies the difference.

Four episodes of the aforementioned wank of a TV show have been so far translated by the excellent fansub group The Triad, I've recorded some short and poorly written videogame reviews for Leicestershire's Carrilon Radio (check out that hardcore WordArt), videoGaiden is still good, we've cast some (not all) voice actors for No More Justice, and an epic battle between good and evil has commenced.

I am, of course, referring to PROJECT CHANOLOGY: the all-out war between the unstoppable forces of Anonymous, troll-lords of the Internet, and the sinister cult of Scientology. Perhaps suggesting that Anonymous is "good" isn't entirely accurate. But at least they're honest about how evil they are, and they're right, it is funny. Whatever the case, the Church of Scientology is a dangerous cult whose only goal is money. It employs brainwashing techniques and a mythos demonising psychiatry, healthcare and newsmedia to ensnare its followers and cut off their only potential lifelines, and uses lies, slander and intimidation to silence its critics. However frivolously this started (with Anonymous' reaction to the infamous Tom Cruise video leak), the cause Anonymous now stands for is a just one.

There's a worldwide protest tomorrow morning - arm yourself with knowledge and join in. You know, if you agree with the point of it.

In other, more appropriately game-related news, I can't think of enough games I genuinely hated from last year, so I'm not going to bother with that post I suggested. If I recieve requests from a substantial number of you, my small but loyal fanbase (which as far as I know, consists entirely of my team, my girlfriend, and Tony), I'll consider going into more detail on why I think Final Fantasy XII is so spectacularly terrible. But for now, just know that I think that.

Finally, I'd suggest you all play SHIFT, but I suspect that most if not all members of my target demographic already have. I mean, 12.5% of you made it.

Gunslinger Girl - Il Teatrino

2008-01-14T14:02:00.000Z

We interrupt your regular games-related blogging to bring you this breaking news.

Gunslinger Girl - Il Teatrino, the second season of the anime based on Yu Aida's excellent Gunslinger Girl mangas, is bad.

Not just comparatively bad, like the theatrical cut of Blade Runner is next to the director's cut, or like anything and everything is next to the first season of Gunslinger Girl.

No, I mean bad bad. And in the name of sheer cynicism, I will now tear this show up, and feed it to the first season as one would feed a fish.

The first season:

Good isn't it? Exceptional voice talent, art direction, framing, editing, animation, and music. Everything is considered and controlled (apologies for the spanish subtitles, it's the best Youtube has to offer, and I'm in too foul a mood to rip and upload my own clip).

The second season:

Poor voice talent (Guise is apparently fifteen now), art direction (something this bleak with the colour palette of Pokémon), framing (if you shoot it at a slant, it looks rad), editing (fade to white, always works), animation (I swear, I could probably count the frames), and music (courtesy of the Tales of... series).

Also, special mention must go to the title themes, which are quite representative of the differences between the seasons.

The first season:

The Light Before We Land by the now split Scottish indie group The Delgados there. Not only a pretty good song, but somebody obviously cared about this show enough to find a piece which genuinely fits it.

The second season:

And it has been replaced with Feel Good Anime Title Theme A-1, by Whatever J-Pop Group is Fairly Popular At The Moment.

In summary, Gunslinger Girl - Il Teatrino: an excercise in cost-effective milking of unexpected popularity.

And you can tell how pissed off I am by the ratio of italics to regular.

The Best Games I have Played Enough Of to Formulate a Clear Opinion on that Came Out in 2007

2008-01-11T15:27:00.002Z

Here is the first in the promised series of 2007 summaries. I haven't put these in any type of order by the way. So, the games:

Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation

The latest iteration of the long-running and highly regarded Ace Combat series is surely an equal with Hitman: Blood Money as my favourite game on the Xbox 360.

The new features are cleverly thought out. The majority of missions feature a large set of objectives available from the off, but the player need only finish roughly 60-70% of them. When an objective is complete, the unit assisted in that task can then be ordered in to defend the player or attack specific targets (assuming the player has done enough blowing-up on her own to fill a gauge) with the tap of a direction button. Each friendly unit has its own specialities, which makes picking your objective order, objective selection, choice of plane, and arsenal of weapons a wonderfully subtle layer of strategy and grants the game some real longevity.

Everything else of the game is dripping with experience and refinement. The controls in particular are tight and simple, yet they offer a huge range for expression. Each plane behaves distinctively, and it doesn't take long to develop favourites that cater to an individual playstyle. The visual polish is remarkable, especially the volumetric vapour trails and clouds. The music is catchy. The sound is exciting. The story is stupid, in a good way. It's all exactly right.

Eledees

The Wii hasn't had a huge sum of excellent titles since it first appeared on shelves, but an isolated excellent game is still excellent all the same.

Eledees plays like a cross between Garry's Mod and Katamari Damacy. It is an FPS in which players are given a gun which serves the dual purpose of picking things up like the Physics Gun, and collecting the little creatures of the title. Collecting enough ordinary Eledees brings you closer to the level's target score (measured in watts) and powers up electrical devices in the environment when a certain wattage has been attained. Operating these devices produces Power Eledees, which charge up the gun allowing it to move heavier objects, revealing further Eledees. There are also a number of temporary powerups such as the Eledee Cookie which draws the creatures to it, or the Homing Laser which allows the easy capture of many Eledees at once. More points are awarded for catching Eledees napping or with their backs turned, while less are awarded if they are unhappy when captured (for example, if they have just been hurt by things you have been throwing around the room).

The Wii's motion controls are integrated beautifully, so that picking things up and reorienting them how you would like, or operating devices such as handles or levers, is just a case of twisting the remote relative to how it was when you first got hold of the object. This kind of control becomes important as the game begins to impose noise limits and punishes you for damaging delicate objects. The movement controls are similar to those of Red Steel, except that by virtue of the impeccable framerate they actually work quite well.

The game also features an editor rather similar to Halo 3's Forge, which allows players to enter any unlocked environment (basically just some walls and doors, with so much of the world being physics props), and just stick things in to them and play around. It is just as possible to create an intricate level design as it is to make the ultimate Eledees domino chain.

Halo 3

There was absolutely no chance that any game could live up to that hype, but Halo 3 certainly didn't get complacent with it. This is to my mind the finest that First Person Shooters have to offer.

Campaign is almost perfect, with only one sharp diffuculty spike (2nd level, ramped hallway with the Hammer Chieftain) and one level which isn't really to my taste but someone probably likes it (Level 8, Cortana) damaging the general fun-ness of it all. That is surely the most striking thing about Halo 3. That, despite it having one of the strongest narratives in the genre, Bungie never gets lost to the po-faced pretention which drags games like F.E.A.R. and Crysis down. It's all meant to be, and all is, really good fun. Case in point: the enemy AI is full of character, and has a broad range of possibilities, but it is always apparent why it has chosen its option, and gradually you learn to exploit it creatively. You learn how close to a grenade an enemy has to be before it will dive for cover. You learn what changes in state occur in the different classes when particular members of a Brute pack are killed. You learn when and why the pure Flood forms mutate into their different classes. This is what videogame AI is meant to be about. Not near-sentience realism, but fun. The game, in turn, keeps you on your toes by making its skirmishes bigger and more complex as the game progresses, rather than just changing the ratio of Guys Without Helmets And Armour to Guys With Helmets And Armour in the Abandoned Power Plant.

The weapons and vehicles are much more balanced than they were in the previous game, and are all both distinctive and entertaining. Even the four types of grenade all behave in entirely different ways. The new Equipment feature broadens tactical options without overcomplicating the interface, and each device is useful for something.

Theater mode is a nice touch, too. The camera controls are smooth, and taking screenshots or film clips, or just roving the camera around staring at yourself blowing stuff up out of sheer vanity, is suprisingly diverting and satisfying.

Look, here's me destroying a Scarab on Legendary difficulty with a Sniper Rifle.

I'm hardcore.

Super Mario Galaxy

As I said before, decent Wii releases have been few and far between. This is last year's other Wii-exclusive game that impressed me (bear in mind, I haven't played Endless Ocean or Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles yet). But I shouldn't really belittle it with the word "other", because Galaxy is virtually flawless. Every moment is brimming with imagination and an absolute joy to play. Every level - indeed, every star - is a pleasant surprise.

The new ideas built around the Wii remote integrate themselves with the workings of the rest of the game comfortably, and even on the few occasions where they do feel like tacked-on minigames, these tacked-on minigames are a great deal of fun. The other new features - mainly bizarre gravity twisting - breathe new life into the Mario 64 formula, and make platforming exciting again. It also helps that the camera behaves itself far better than any platformer camera has done before, with much of its motion carefully scripted, and where it isn't it's still just as competent as that of 64.

There is far too much I like about it to go into any detail, and I can only think of one actual criticism. Swimming functions in the same way as it did in Mario 64, which means it's alright, but not really up to the rest of the game's control standards. That's it. And you can play the vast majority of the game without ever swimming.

Excellent.

I think four will do, since much as I love it I'm really bad at Armored Core 4, and haven't got far enough to feel right about commenting on it in detail.

Next time, bad games. But before I post I need to think of more than just Final Fantasy XII.

Late Edit:

Wait, Crackdown came out in 2007? Seems so long ago. That was good too.

Even Later Edit:

And Portal is a given. But I think enough has been written about it across the Internet for all of my readers to be already aware it's probably the best game ever.

Another Time-period Definition

2008-01-06T17:55:00.000Z

I think I'll call this a short break. I have been out of direct Internet for a while, so with priorities being work-related I've had little time to blog.

In the meantime Christmas and the New Year have come and gone, and much has happened on my end of the cyber space.

Over the holiday I found myself in posession of Eternal Sonata, Project Sylpheed, and the Ex-box version of Hitman: Contracts. All of which I am thoroughly enjoying (though they each also have their flaws), but I have thus far finished none of them. More detailed impressions when I do.

For my team's exciting 3rd Year project Sam Malone PI: No More Justice, I spent many hours recording myself putting on unconvincing - and geographically inappropriate - accents to read the entire script. Then I chopped it all up and lipsynched it using the famously fantastic Face Poser tool, which is absolutely the best thing about developing for the Source engine. When I get round to it I'll post something about what this game actually is, too.

The Board of Zombies playtest went suprisingly well, though I am making many changes in its wake. These will be much easier to implement and test now that Mr Tony has started to produce a rough digital version. Again, more detail in a more focused post.

Also, in a forthcoming post(s), I will be doing what surely every games blog on Earth will also be doing and come up with a list of my Games of the Year 2007, except with detailed reviews because I've not done any on this blog yet. And I'll probably do the same for the rubbish games I've played too.

I might even do one of those Ones to Watch 2008 things. Fills the space.

videoGaiden 3

2007-12-16T13:56:00.000Z

Series 3 of the BBC's videoGaiden got underway a few weeks ago. It comes from the brilliant Rab and Ryan of Consolevania fame, and this series - while almost exclusively presented on the Internet - is surely the biggest commitment to videogames coverage British TV has ever made. Eighteen web shows, three half-hour TV specials, and a huge amount of extra content on the website.

It is undoubtedly the best example of a videogames TV show we are ever likely to see. No pretentious fluff clogging up their honest reviews, no arbitrary numerical scores, and none of that annoying mass-market zany humour you find in most American efforts. There is humour, but it's actually funny.

Watch this, and then watch the 21 Consolevania episodes and specials, and the other 14 full videoGaiden shows (and the 6 'advent calendar' episodes) from the last three years. Then you'll be all caught up with today. No one should miss out on this.

Forgery

2007-12-14T18:25:00.000Z

As you might notice from my Gamer Card on the sidebar, I've been messing around with Bungie's excellent Halo 3 again. I bought the new maps so I could muck around with the new Forge materials in the Foundry level.

It didn't take me that long to produce a decent enough gametype and map variant, which is a testament to the tools you are provided with. It's so easy to test things out, with direct access to virtually the entire Halo 3 multiplayer sandbox in any given map. Prototyping and refining a game idea is as simple as spawning your absolute basic elements, and throwing them together to see if you were right about them. I spent a good hour two nights ago trying to see if it was possible to produce a workable volleyball game, by simply throwing down a few grav-lifts, a gravity hammer, a man-cannon, a soccer ball, and a large shield door for a net. It was a fruitless attempt (though I'm going to have another shot), but what's remarkable about Forge, is that it's fun simply conducting these little experiments.

"I know the hammer can deflect rockets, but can it deflect fuel rod gun rounds?"
Spawn, spawn, fire, swing, die.
"No."

Forge lets you just play with this fantastical toybox, and through simply messing around with all this stuff you're given, interesting game ideas often just spring up out of nowhere.

Oh that's right, I was talking about my gametype. I call it Basketman, and it's basically a game of Capture the Flag, except that the flag is hidden in the opposing team's basket at the far end of the court, and the only way to capture it is to hop in yourself somehow. There's many ways to go about that - gravity lifts, speed and gravity modifying powerups, grenade/rocket jumps, or just jumping off someone's head - and just as many ways to stop the other team from managing it. Once in the basket, you need to grab the flag and hop into the convenient teleporter which takes you to the centre of the map and deposits your flag for one well-deserved point. But you must do that quickly, because there's a fusion coil sitting in that basket with you, and any explosion in or around the basket will set it off and blow you to bits.

If anyone reading has the Heroic map pack (or it's next Spring and they're free anyway), download the files from my fileshare. They're only a few Kb.

(Never) Board of Zombies

2007-12-14T10:41:00.001Z

In my spare time I've lately been working on a hex-grid strategy boardgame. It has zombies in it.

I always find myself turning to zombies when I experiment with something new to me (in this case, designing games with a hex-grid in mind). I think they fit game design beautifully, and yet I've rarely ever seen them done properly, which is something I find quite perplexing.

Zombies (that is to say, the mindless flesh-eating George A. Romero variety) have an elegant set of gameplay mechanics and dynamics built-in. They are slow and stupid where you are fast and intelligent, but this is weighed against the fact that you must destroy their central nervous system in some manner in order to bring them down, while all they must do is bite you. Once. Then, you become one of them, and their threat resultantly increases dramatically (one less survivor vs. one more zombie).

I can see clearly why singleplayer action games such as the Resident Evil series don't represent this dynamic - one hit and you're dead would not be nearly as tense and atmospheric with no health resources to manage, and would probably be quite frustrating. But why most online multiplayer-focused games and strategy/tactics games (which charge you with the management of multiple agents, thus a couple of deaths are something to be expected without ending the session or destroying progess) stray from this formula is boggling.

The closest a commercial videogame has come to this system appears to be the forthcoming Left4Dead, which aside from having an atrocious title, features the unpleasant action:atmosphere ratio which results from using the Dawn of the Dead remake's super-strong and super-fast non-zombies. Speeding combat up means more is going on, which is good in some contexts. Some. In the context of horror, it has a detrimental effect. Compare, for example, the first two Fatal Frame/Zero games. In the first game combat is fast and intense, with ghosts rapidly appearing and vanishing, and the player is required to snap like crazy, balancing availability of film (ammo) against its potency. Close Shots, Zero Shots and Fatal Frames were additional bonuses, which provided you with more points to upgrade your camera with, but were ultimately unnecessary. The second in the series changed the combat dramatically. The damage dealt to enemies with an ordinary (non-bonus) shot is minor, and instead players must wait, staring at the ghost moving slowly towards them, listening to a rising crescendo of noise and percussion, until the last second when the ghost is looking you right in the eye just before attacking (always the opportunity for a Zero Shot). Obviously, the latter is far more atmospheric.

So back I come to my boardgame. I've tried to recreate the Romero zombie mechanisms accurately in a turn-based strategy setting. There are four possible game variants through mixing and matching two distinct rulesets, and it works like most strategy games work. There are different classes of agents (in this case, Survivors and Zombies), and these agents have different rules associated with their play. I tried to replicate the speed and intelligence difference by allowing Zombies one action per turn, and Survivors two (where an action can be moving or attacking), and for one of the variant rulesets I even defined a sort of simple AI system for the zombies in case no one wants to play as the bad guy today. Because I wanted the certainty of zombification from a single zombie attack, and didn't want to complicate the game with multiple core systems where one would suffice, combat is absolute (as Chess) rather than dice-determined (as D&D). The game still gets something of a random mix-up in the shape of Equipment Cards and Goals. There are three possible goals, one of which is chosen at random (a D6 roll of 1 or 2, 3 or 4, 5 or 6), and Equipment Cards are rather like Monopoly's Chance cards - draw one from the shuffled face-down deck upon landing on a special space - except that they become "equipped" to the Survivor which landed on that space. This Equipment includes weapons (of varying ranges and durabilities), ammunition (of varying quantities), and barracades (which permanently block all agents' passage across the space they are used on). The player with the most Survivors on the Goal after a set number of turns wins. Unless the Zombies eat them all, in which case the Zombies win.

I'll be blind-testing this over Christmas with my folks back in Melton, and my good friend Mr Antony Lavelle is planning on producing a Flash prototype for ease of level editing. Should be fun.

Also, "short while" officially means approximately 13 hours. That's reasonable. And I've still got "soonish", "a few days", "a later date" and "sometime next week" left to define.

The First Post On This Blog

2007-12-13T21:56:00.000Z

Is what this is.

I will be mostly using this blog to talk about videogames, be that what games I am currently playing and what I think about their design, or what games I am currently designing and what I think about their play. I did a clever word thing there, did you see it?

This post, and any others not directly related to the core subject will be tagged with "scooters", "vacation" and "fall", because they are Blogger's example labels. While I am aware "fall" probably refers to the autumn in this deeply American Internetland, I like the idea that such a large number of blogs are created entirely to discuss minor accidents on mopeds whilst holidaying, that Blogger chose to use those labels as suggestions.

Friends and/or stalkers may wonder why I abandoned my previous blog. It's simple really. This one is shiny.

I'll post something proper in a short while. However long it takes me to will set the precedent for what "short while" means on this blog, so I better be careful about that.