Game Eaters

In Defense of Stat-Porn.

2007-06-06T00:37:00.000-05:00

I dislike heavily stat-oriented RPG’s. I feel I have better ways to spend my time than doing the same actions over and over and over again, just so I can unlock a new cinematic with the same cloying melodrama. But once in a while a game comes along, does all these things, doesn’t innovate at all, and I love it. Odin Sphere is one of those games.

I usually play mainstream RPG’s like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, or Genso Suikoden. These are RPG’s where exploration, story, combat, and character advancement exist in roughly equal proportions. But there is another strain of Japanese RPG, like Disgaea or Final Fantasy Tactics, where character advancement and combat are much bigger parts of the game than story or exploration. These games seem designed for those with a fetish for complex systems and a low interest level in narrative. They are stat-porn.

I’m normally driven crazy by the tired conventions stat-porn RPG’s indulge in. In my old age I have become a critic of game conventions that constrain imagination and keep designers from better exploring the worlds they create, thus preventing games from reaching a wider audience. There’s no worse offender of this than Odin Sphere. I was disappointed with Kingdom Hearts when a non-gamer friend lamented that its rich fictional universe was expressed strictly in terms of opening treasure boxes and hitting people. So how can I not hate Odin Sphere, which takes Norse mythology and makes it about whacking monsters and mixing potions?

I’m sure most will assume art is the decisive factor; the sublime 2D art of Odin Sphere. The art is a big part of the aesthetic experience of this game. It does make the world feel evocative, which inevitably encases the play experience—as pedestrian as it is—in a warm and magical glow. I suppose next one might assume it’s the story cinematics. The stately Japanese voice acting removes a lot of the normal barriers to taking an RPG melodrama seriously, and the story itself achieves the human pathos that mythology is supposed to embody. Ever since Square made unconventional plots boring I’ve come to appreciate RPG’s that have the grace to make me care about simple tales of love, lust, power, and betrayal. This is why I now find Dragon Quest far more human than Final Fantasy has become, and I think it’s why I find Odin Sphere romantic. The central metaphor of Odin Sphere is a little girl in a dusty attic reading age old tales of princes, princesses, battles, and gods. The story appropriately feels like a long old book, but one that’s populated by beings of human frailty.

But aesthetics are only part of Odin Sphere’s appeal. Also important is the fact that the mechanics, for all their repetitiveness and simplicity, yield dynamics which are not repetitive or simplistic at all. Lots of reviews complain that characters have very limited moves and that the game is really about doing the same combo over and over. On some level Odin Sphere is about repeating the same combat moves, but what I fail to see is how these reviewers missed the strategic planning one must achieve in order to survive. I’ve done more thinking in Odin Sphere than in games with more so-called variety. Gameplay requires an impressive level of concentration. The dynamics created by one enemy type versus another enemy type, by groups of enemies versus a single enemy, or by one boss versus another boss, are always complex. Odin Sphere is a triumph of minimalist mechanics giving rise to multi-layered dynamics.

I like Odin Sphere for holistic reasons, even though it isn’t the sort of holism I hope for in games. I want games to be better combinations of mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics but not in ways that require years of genre literacy to enjoy. Because it’s mired in the fetishism of Japanese stat-grinding RPG’s, Odin Sphere requires a deep level of genre literacy. On the other hand its combination of mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics are unusually balanced for a game of its type… which is something I, at my literacy level, can appreciate.

There’s nothing wrong with game conventions that require literacy in order to engage players. After all, there is no such thing as media that is devoid of convention and therefore no media that doesn’t require a form of literacy. The games industry needs to work a lot harder to pioneer new conventions that require new literacies so we can reach new audiences. That said, it’s nice to see existing conventions—arcane as they may be to new players—handled with such superb artfulness. It may be stat-porn, but Odin Sphere is one game that will make you proud to be a pervert.

After GDC: Reflections on Eiji Aonuma

2007-03-15T16:28:00.000-05:00

At GDC, Eiji Aonuma gave a talk entitled Reflections on Zelda that could be briefly summarized as "Nintendo's special brand of development hell." I found it an insightful examination of the various different market and internal forces that shaped the creation of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Aonuma explained each creative decision made for each major change to the series since Wind Waker, including the handheld iterations. In some ways, Aonuma's generally humble tone seemed to me to be an apology to all the Zelda fans who disapprove of various changes to the series.

The Game-Eaters met up at GDC and voiced our opinions about Aonuma's and Nintendo's decision making process, not least being the decision to make Twilight Princess "120% Ocarina of Time" instead of continuing the trend of giant innovative steps in Wind Waker, Four Swords, and Majora's Mask. As always, our GDC discussions get pretty spirited and our dinners get pretty Mexican.

The comments following 4 Color Rebellion article about Wii Sports and Wii Play going platinum reminded me that Aonuma claimed that Wind Waker did extremely poorly in the market, despite breaking a million preorders in North America. A little digging in Wikipedia, that resource of oh-so-reliable information, indicates that Wind Waker was the poorest-selling home-console Zelda thus far. Some of the handheld versions sold fewer copies. It sold slightly less than Majora's Mask, which in turn only sold half as well as Ocarina of Time. Sales-wise, the latter is the champ for the entire series.

Twilight Princess worldwide numbers appear to be about 300k copies away from catching up to Wind Waker, which is coincidentally the difference between the Japanese sales numbers for Twilight Princess and Wind Waker. So, despite the change to Aonuma's "US-focused" graphics by moving away from cel-shading, it sold about the same in the US. The game has been on the shelves for a while, but Wiis are still in short supply, so it's possible for Twilight Princess to perform well in the long-tail and sell more copies to prove Aonuma right. As of this moment, though, Wind Waker is still doing better than Twilight Princess.

Seeing the marked downward trend since Ocarina, I'm not at all surprised that Nintendo wanted to keep their their game development low by throwing out hi-def from their Wii strategy. It also reinforced the doom-and-gloom pronouncements of the Japanese "Gamer Drift" that drew every major Japanese game publisher's eyes to the US market in the past two years, until Nintendo stemmed the tide with the DS. Japanese speakers at GDC gave a lot insight into the various alternative strategies from Konami, Capcom, Nintendo, and Square-Enix, the results of which are only just beginning to hit the shelves.

Christmas at Ground Zero

2006-12-21T07:43:00.000-05:00

A holiday mod for Introversion's Defcon. Merry Christmas!

The Dangers of Playing Guitar Hero

2006-12-14T22:43:00.000-05:00

So the pitcher of the Detroit Tigers has hurt his hand... not by training, but by playing Guitar Hero. It's a problem that is unavoidable when you play the game; you're so into it, it's difficult to put it down, even when your hand is hurting. One of the first things I noticed when I started playing was that my left hand hurt the same way it did when I (unsuccessfully) tried to teach myself to play the real guitar. But pain is no obstacle to go on playing... nor tiredness--right after after getting Guitar Hero II, I played until I was practically falling asleep and therefore failing to hit a single note.
Soon we will hear about "wiimote's elbow" or "DDR knee". Doctors should start preparing a speciality on videogame injuries.

(We Game Eaters bloody love Guitar Hero, don't we?)

There are cool games for Mac (only) too

2006-12-01T19:58:00.000-05:00

I just came across Sketchfighter 4000 Alpha, a Mac-only game by Ambrosia Software (these guys also did the Mac port of Darwinia). It's a shooter game, but not a shoot'em up--it has the controls of Asteroids, which force you to navigate the space carefully, while you shoot the enemies that come at you. This, in a way, it forces you to move carefully and not too fast. The concept is interesting, though its hybrid nature makes it more appealing to players that like slow-paced games rather than action-packed.

What made me download the game was how it looked. Following on with the confession series started in the previous entry, I have to admit I admire retro-looking games which turn technical limitations into a style choice. What is now "realistic" (mind the quotation marks) will look old-fashioned with the advent of the next generation of consoles; you can see this yourself by checking early PS2 games, for instance. Making a statement with your visual style that goes beyond "you can count the hairs in this guy's head" is what I'm interested in. There are beautiful "realistic" 3D games out there, as FFXII (which looks fenomenal), but if game developers give a chance to riskier and new visual styles, we can get more stuff like Okami.

Sketchfighter is neat, it makes its visuals part of the concept of the game, the game that you imagined with your notepad doodles, this time moving for real. The music is not sci-fi themed, but more of a retro-calm-leisure soundtrack which makes you feel, not that you're in outer space, but that you're a kid playing with pen and paper.

The only bad thing is that it's for Mac only. Give it a try if you can.

I like to watch...

2006-11-30T01:12:00.000-05:00

... people playing games. And before you start thinking that I'm a videogame pervert, remember that in South Korea there are three cable channels that broadcast videogame matches. I like playing too, of course, but I still keep a certain fascination about watching people play. Perhaps it's part of my academic side, always observing how people relate to media. Perhaps it's my crazy scientist side, the same side that showed clips from Braindead (a.k.a. Dead Alive in the US) and Evil Dead 2 in a symposium to my fellow students and teachers of English Literature, and watched their faces instead of the screen.

There is an inherent pleasure in seeing other people play. C'mon, you've done it too. Watching sportsment while they play cannot be so different from watching someone playing a videogame. As in sports, it is more enjoyable to see a game played when we know what it is about; we should have played it ourselves to appreciate good (or bad) gameplay. Only when you've played Guitar Hero can you be astounded at a video of someone hitting all the notes of 'Bark at the Moon' in Expert mode.

This videogame voyeurism probably started with my own limited gaming skills. I've improved a ton, but there are still certain genres that I completely suck at, so I need someone to play them for me. Six years ago, when I started studying games, if I got stuck in a certain level of a game, I would call my brother to help me pass that level or that stupid boss whose strategy I could not figure out. We scholars need to know as much of the game as possible, so at times we must resort to surrogate players to get us through the game. (Stop that disdainful smirk, you've used GameFAQs too, I'm sure!)

I must confess I'm not so interested in watching a video of what the screen shows while someone plays. I like to watch what people do, their gestures, what they say. More importantly, I love to see how people learn to play the game, and improve with every try. Again, Guitar Hero is an excellent example of this--you can see a newbie from failing the first song to happily rocking on in less than an hour. Every game of the Wii, so far, also brings out that sense of wonder, since we're still getting used to the new controller.

However, the biggest kick I get from watching people is when they play a game I had a hand in. When I was demoing my interactive fiction piece (which I'll post here one of these days), I was thrilled to see what people would try that I had not thought of, and later I would try to incorporate it into the game if it wasn't supported. I would not get discouraged if they did not do what they were supposed to, I made a note and tried to make changes for people to understand what they could do. On the one hand, making games gives you a sense of power, since you get players to do what you want (more or less, if you're a good desinger). On the other, it's also gratifying to give players a sense of power too, by which games allow them to do things that they can't do in real life.

The empowerment of players, letting them do things that they can't do in real life (flying an acrobatic plane, swimming in deep waters, fighting aliens, being a thief, a pirate, a rock star, a surgeon) is what I like to watch, whoever made the game. Sharing that power, that thrill to people around is what I like when I watch people play games.

(... Okaaaaaay, watching people suffer while playing games can also be fun. See "Why Doom 3 is rated mature".)

Triforce on MIT Dome

2006-11-20T12:28:00.000-05:00

Clara noted this on the web before I did (kudos to Bryan O. '07), despite the fact that I'm currently in Boston and she's in Atlanta. I'm verifying that there actually is a Triforce on the Great Dome on the MIT campus, commemorating the launch of the Wii this past weekend.

For those who haven't figured it out yet, all the contributors to Game Eaters are MIT alums, so hacks such as random sculptures on the Great Dome are part and parcel of our collegiate experience. It's always heartwarming when the prank takes a form related to one's favorite hobby, though!

Rollercoaster Tycoon Evilness

2006-11-02T16:52:00.000-05:00

From The Last Boss, a piece of sadistic brilliance, courtesy of Rollercoaster Tycoon.

More on the ESRB ratings

2006-10-27T13:23:00.000-05:00

(Rescuing this article from draft limbo)

As a follow-up to Matt's complaint about the double standards of the ESRB, I must post this practical example of what type of values the ESRB is watching over.

This started the day that Matt discovered that Indigo Prophecy, apart from having a different title in Europe (Farenheit), also had different content--there were sex scenes that had been censored in the US. If you go to the ESRB site and look for the game, you find that both versions have been rated by the ESRB. The European version is AO (adults only), while the American version is rated M (Mature).

The difference between both versions is that the AO version has "nudity" and "strong sexual content" and the M version as "partial nudity" and "sexual themes". By the way, the definitions of these ratings go as follows:

Titles rated AO (Adults Only) have content that should only be played by persons 18 years and older. Titles in this category may include prolonged scenes of intense violence and/or graphic sexual content and nudity.
Titles rated M (Mature) have content that may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language.

(If someone can explain to me how you can get more intense violence than with the depiction of blood or gore, I'd be eternally grateful.)

Let's jump across the pond. Farenheit, that is, the uncensored game, is rated 16+ by the PEGI (European equivalent of the ESRB), for sex ("game depicts nudity and/or sexual behaviour or sexual references") and violence ("game contains depictions of violence"). The PEGI ratings are not as detailed as the ESRB, and the range is also different: the PEGI age bands are 3+, 7+, 12+, 16+, 18+. So basically what in the US is "adults only" (and it's actually not widely available), corresponds to a rating for younger people in Europe. What is more, in the UK, where publishers seem to alternate between the PEGI and their own rating system, the game is "suitable only for persons of 15 years and older". This rating system is the British Board of Film classification, that is, the standards for film have been extended to videogames.

You can see a scan of the European boxes here.

Case no. 2: Hitman Blood Money, which presents the same version on both Europe and the US. The ESRB classification is M, the PEGI classification is 18+, in the UK is 18 years and older. That is, the game is considered "adults only" in Europe.

The point I'm trying to make is that different game classifications reflect different values--sex is more "censorable" than violence in the US than in Europe, which is no news. The problem, as Matt pointed out, is that these classifications not only affect the marketing of the games, but also their design and content. Videogame makers must keep these constraints in mind while the game is in production, though the odds are that the rating boards would find something that is not appropriate for a certain age range that the designers had not thought of.

On the other hand, I don't want to give the impression that the ESRB is worse than PEGI, or the other way around--both organizations have difficult jobs, and mostly have to respond to people that don't play videogames or only talk about them in overgeneralized, stereotypical and uninformed terms. The ESRB is also trying to resist anti-videogame bouts -- for instance , Bully has been released in the US with a Teen rating, which has been protested by our old friend Jack Thompson (as a last stomping on the ground after failing to ban it altogether in the US). Apparently, "gay content" (meaning the possibility of kissing a boy in the game) should change its rating to Mature, or so Thompson thinks. Fortunately, the ESRB has not given signs of intending to change the rating. Sex may be taboo, but homosexuality is not for the ESRB.

Note to self: write more entries, but shorter. And publish them.

Bush-Era Rhetoric Ruins Another Great Game Idea.

2006-09-10T11:05:00.000-05:00

Usually, I don't rely on ads for my awareness of games. But I confess that before I saw the ad in last month's issue of Game Informer, I'd never heard of Just Cause. The premise is intriguing: a politically-charged GTA. Just Cause is a giant, open-ended world sim where your goal is not to just explore and create havoc but plot and execute the downfall of a government. Set in a fictional South American country, it seems like a great opportunity to combine the mechanics of GTA with some topical, socially complex content. So you can imagine my disappointment when I read the following description on IGN:

In Just Cause, you take on the role of the flamboyant Rico Rodriguez - an undercover CIA operative specialising in regime change - as he tries to overthrow the corrupt government of San Esperito. This rogue South American island is suspected of stockpiling WMDs and it's your job to negate the threat to world peace.

And here I was naive enough to think, even for a moment, that the title "Just Cause" might refer to the injustices of a corrupt government perpetrated on its people. What was I thinking?

It's not as if every game has to bend to my personal politics, but Jesus, how about a little variety? God forbid we'd have a videogame where the excuse for regime change wasn't WMD's and you didn't play some swaggering yank who kicks ass in the name of world stability. What's wrong with playing as a citizen of San Esperito who is tired of being oppressed and decides to fight back? Oh wait, that would suggest violent revolution against your own corrupt government is justifiable... and we wouldn't want that in George Bush's America would we.

How the ESRB can hurt gaming.

2006-08-10T10:40:00.000-05:00

I picked up the new GameInformer of the floor at the office today (which is typically where we keep our magazines) and I noticed an interview with Patricia Vance, President of the ESRB. In it she said:

[O]ur ratings are more conservative than movies and television. Yet, we're not at a point where we can be comfortable to make them more lenient. One of the things we do every year is we go out and test our ratings assignments with parents. We find that the way we assign our ratings is very in line with mainstream American tastes. I don't think we're in a position to adjust that at all based on that research.

It's at moments like these I wonder if I'm just a simple creature. Maybe this proves I'm a naive hippy with no sense of political give-and-take, but I found myself imagining the following conversation...

ME: Hey ESRB! Why do you perpetuate the double-standards held by the game-illiterate mainstream? Aren't you supposed to be on our side?

ESRB: We aren't a public service, duh. If our ratings help stifle the artistic growth of the industry by forcing the market to conform to a conservative world-view that's your problem, not ours.

ME: Golly! Thanks ESRB! I'll never complain again when you slap an AO rating on a game with PG-13 sex!

ESRB: No problem, kiddo. Check back with us in 20 years. By then the mainstream might be on your side.

ME: Will do! Let's just hope the misconceptions about games endorsed and officialized by your current rating system don't shape anyone's perception over the next two decades.

ESRB: *sigh* Silly boy. We just reflect culture. We don't influence it.

ME: I guess you're right. How could I ever doubt you, ESRB!

bit Generations

2006-08-06T04:01:00.000-05:00

I didn't have any luck finding the first series of bit Generations (Boundish, Dialhex and Dotstream) but I managed to pick up most of the others. So far, I'm a little ways into Soundvoyager and Digidrive. I'll get to Orbital and Coloris eventually.

Soundvoyager has many different modes, but the basic concept seems to be variations on a single theme: use the shoulder buttons (or left and right on the D-pad) to intercept or avoid glowy dots. The dots emanate a sound, often synchronized to a background music track, and get louder as they get closer. They also have a cute doppler effect as they pass by. Generally, the games move at a relaxed pace, and you may be wondering where the fun is in that.

Trick is, the dots get dimmer and dimmer as you successfully collect or avoid them, then they completely disappear. That's when you realize that the game isn't about seeing the dots at all... they're only visible in the tutorial levels. For the rest of the game, you're doing the same thing, only faster and occasionally with multiple sources of sound, and the only way you'll be able to figure out what to do is to trust your ears. You'll also start to really appreciate the fact that the game is in stereo, although I found the games easier to play by reversing the left and right speakers, which is only practical if you're using earphones or headphones. I believe all the actual GBA's (Gameboy Advance, GBA SP, Gameboy Micro) only have mono speakers built-in, so you'll definitely need some sort of headphones handy. At any rate, this is possibly the first game I've played where the experience is dramatically improved by keeping your eyes closed.

Digidrive is, for lack of a better term, a hardcore realtime puzzler. You have colored shapes "driving" in from all four roads of a T-junction. It's reminiscent of Crash from gameLab, where you can steer the incoming shapes to the left or right of their trajectory or just let them keep going. Unlike Crash, however, the "cars" don't drive off the screen, they stop at the end of the road. If you match two or more cars of the same shape and color, they start to stack. Accumulate five in a stack and they disappear, but a gauge appears next to that road in the color of the cars and begins to fill.

That's the basic idea of the entire game: stack like-colored, like-shaped incoming objects and separate different objects into different roads. By doing so, you fill up the gauges. The gauges start out as triangles; fill it up completely, and it becomes a square, then a pentagon, then a hexagon, and so on. It gets faster and faster over time and you start seeing more shapes (even having three different shapes can get hellish, but at least the colors and shapes are always associated... good for colorblind players). What happens if you make a mistake? You lose your accumulated gauge for that road. If you're lucky, your gauge will fill up the other gauges a little in the process of disappearing.

On the right, you have something that looks vaguely like a cosmic shuffleboard game, complete with a shuffleboard cue and distance markings. Bet you didn't expect that from the previous paragraph. The cue is evil; if it touches your cosmic shuffleboard disc, the game ends. You need to keep propelling your disc further and further away from the cue to keep the game going, and your high score at the end of the game is the total distance that you propelled your disc.

Yes, this game is a simultaneous combination of Shuffleboard and traffic conducting. Every once in a while, an "ambulance" with flashing lights and sirens comes down the crossroads, and if it runs into a road with a nicely filled gauge, the gauge gets converted into a good shove for your shuffleboard disc. This game is a real tangled pile of metaphors. You can actually create new ambulances, which you can call up by pressing the A button, but I'm not even close to figuring out how to do this on a regular basis.

The amazing thing is that the whole game works. It recalls another gameLab experiment, Arcadia, where you had to play four games at once. In Digidrive, you play one game, whose results influence another game, which is the one you actually care about. Switch to two-player mode and the meta-level goes up another step, turning the game into something akin to one-dimensional Shufflepuck Cafe with powerups. If you enjoy studying complex realtime systems or discovering rules through exploratory play, Digidrive is surprisingly elegant despite its confusing premise(s).

All bit Generations games seem to share a minimalist 2D art aesthetic and an ambient/electronica hybrid soundtrack, bringing to mind Electroplankton or a more mellow Lumines. If the style interests you, bit Generations games can be a real treat. I'll post up more impressions as I work through the collections, but it's already clear from the above two that the gameplay between each title will be drastically different. As such, there are probably some real problematic games in the collection, and some real gems. Hopefully these posts will help you find the ones you'll like.

Building games as a motivation for academic excellence

2006-07-25T07:47:00.000-05:00

Got this one from Gamepolitics:

The Dayton Technology Design High School will enroll about 100 students, with about 80 in the “virtual game” track, requiring a three-year commitment and culminating in the completion, marketing and possibly sale of a student-created educational video game...

...The technology design school is for 16- to 22-year-olds willing to make a three-year commitment. During 70-minute periods, course work will cover math, science, social studies and English. In virtual game classes, students will work in groups of no more than 12 on a schoolwide project, creating an educational video game. The goal is to teach the kids work force, academic, life and “new economy” skills. Student work will focus on developing the technical framework of the game, managing the process and marketing the end product.

In my opinion, that's great. Assuming that they're selecting for students that are already engaged with games as an entertainment medium, the team structure and intensity of game development should be quite a challenging, yet exciting course. I hope that they will also be aiming to develop art and music (audio production?) skills for those students that are so inclined... I expect that they already have programming courses planned.

Also, only Dayton superintendents can make remarks like this and get away with it:

“When we first started talking about the video game, people laughed at us,” Superintendent Percy Mack said. “But they laughed at the Wright brothers, too.”

Valve wants to break your head

2006-07-19T05:13:00.000-05:00

Buried in the Team Fortress 2 hype, Valve has announced that an experimental puzzle FPS game called "Portal" will be bundled with Half-Life 2: Episode 2, anticipated for release on Steam in Q4 2006. It appears the "experiment" that Valve is performing here is one explictly designed to bend your noggin as much as possible. I don't think I've seen a more vertigo-inducing videogame clip since Descent.

Edit: Here's a link to the 720p HD version of the trailer.

Mascots and Messages

2006-07-13T21:37:00.000-05:00

Next Generation has an insightful, detailed look at Sonic's life as Sega mascot, as well as theorizing a little about what makes a mascot powerful and relevant, or dated and out-of-touch.

When Sonic started off, he was one of the most well-conceived mascots probably in the history of mascotdom. Sega's console was faster than the competition's, so Sonic was super fast. Sega was the scrappy underdog, effortlessly showing up the "big guys", so Sonic was full of attitude. Sega's logo was blue, so Sonic was blue. The Genesis was targeted toward kids who were growing out of the NES, so Sonic was a sleek teenager (compared to the fuddy uncle Nintendo had going, who by comparison seemed to represent the "past generation").

Bit Generations

2006-07-02T20:52:00.000-05:00

A quick glance at Nintendo of Japan's bit Generations site tells us that Digitylish/Digiluxe, a grab bag of abstract (and possibly musical) GBA minigames, hasn't died a premature death since its subtle appearance at E3 2005. It's just being rebranded and tested in Japan first, I suppose. I'm hoping one of the other Game Eaters will take a crack at translating some of the Nihongo on the page.

There was some speculation that, due to the "Digi" name, the games in Digitylish were actually student projects from the Digipen Institute of Technology. However, some reporters have traced some of the origins of the minigames to Japanese game studios. Of course, that doesn't put an end to the speculation, since Nintendo works pretty closely with Digipen, and not all the minigame sources are necessarily accounted for.

I, for one, would love to see more student work appearing on Nintendo's portable machines. It could give this medium the random bit of mutation that is essential for future evolution... I don't really trust publishers to perform that function, and neither does Ron Gilbert, the "grumpy" designer of Monkey Island fame.

Ouendan LIVE

2006-06-09T08:22:00.000-05:00

A live performance of Ouendan, complete with giant stylus!

Final Fantasy Food Service

2006-06-01T04:31:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Robot Chicken!

Professor Fizzwizzle

2006-05-30T22:18:00.000-05:00

It would seem that as a game-eater I have been fasting in the last couple of months, shame on me. So back to blogging duties!!

I should have written my entry on Professor Fizzwizzle a loooooooooong time ago. It's a really cute puzzle game that is also a fine example of excellent level design. I played it before going to GDC, and then I found out that it was nominated for a couple of categories at the Independent Games Festival this year. I had fallen in love with this game (I'm a puzzle game junkie, remember?), and was really impressed when I read that the developers are just two (extremely nice) guys. (Well, they hired a guy to do sound, but still!). The production value of the game is astounding for an independent game, and considering the size of the "crew", it's just fantastic. When my brother saw the game, he said (in Spanish), "These guys completely rule!".

Professor Fizzwizzle is a puzzle game, in the vein of games like Tiny Skweeks (old but still great), Chu-Chu Rocket (a Game-Eaters favourite) or the newer PQ for PSP (though, come to think of it, it's a lot better designed and more fun to play than PQ). Okay, yeah, all these are rather obscure puzzle games, so probably I should also mention that this is a game for fans of The Incredible Machine.

The aim of the game is to help the Professor of the title to get from the start point to the goal, strategically placing objects to help him in the way. The objects range from boxes to inflatable magnets (sic); the obstacles can be getting stuck, or being caught by one of the Professor's robots run amok. What really impressed me was the level design--there are levels for kids, and levels that are wickedly difficult; when you think you mastered the game, a new type of puzzle comes around to challenge you. The programmer told me that it took him four hours to figure out the design of the last puzzle, so by that you may imagine this it's not your usual "casual" game.

It's certainly worth a try, you can download the demo and see for yourself what a cute game this is. The complete game also has a level editor, and you can download user-developed levels from the same website. What's better, the developers have been mindful enough to release versions for Linux and Mac, apart from Windows. So there's no excuse.

This game evidences that there's still hope for independent videogames.
Enjoy!

Self Murder By Command.

2006-05-19T12:32:00.000-05:00

Hey kids! Want to crack codes for Uncle Sam? Visit Cryptokids, the NSA's new website full of flash games that are JUST FOR KIDS!

In the Arts today...

2006-05-07T10:33:00.000-05:00

Not that the Sims really needs a pat on the back, but I was sent this NYT article by our friend William.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/arts/07schi.html

At least as far as the gaming community is concerned, this article is relevant because it gives a fair treatment of the topic and issues involved, and it reflects positively on the medium.

Now if we could get more games that have the same social impact that the Sims has had, maybe we wouldn't have to fight Yee and Clinton quite so much.

Follow the bouncing ball(s)...

2006-05-04T23:54:00.000-05:00

Mo, a friend of mine from last summer's internship, has put together this neat Flash game called Bounce. It's pretty simple - bounce the balls into the blue box at the left side of the screen, but quite entertaining. Has that classic arcade feel of "How long can you go for?" All it needs now is a coin-op interface. =p

http://www.opticuslabs.com/mospider/bounce.html

お楽しみに(Enjoy!)

Spike Lee vs. San Andreas.

2006-04-29T23:53:00.000-05:00

Clara and I just got back from seeing Inside Man, Spike Lee's new film about a bizarre bank heist. There's a scene where the bank robber, played by Clive Owen, talks to one of his hostages, a young African-American kid with a PSP. He wants to know what the kid is playing, so the kid hands over the system. Suddenly the movie cuts to a giant, full-screen image of what is obviously a parody of GTA: San Andreas. In it a guy with an Uzi (assumedly the player) chases down another guy, shooting him in the legs. As the victim lay on the sidewalk, the phrase "KILL THAT NIGGA!" flashes on the screen, at which point the player jams a grenade into the victim's mouth and trots away as the guy's head explodes like a water balloon. The conversation Clive Owen has with the kid, which plays out over these images, goes something like this:

Robber: What do you do in this game?

Kid: Rob people. Kill people.

Robber: You think that's cool?

Kid: Yeah. Like my man, 50 Cent. That's what it's all about. Get rich or die tryin'. That's what you're doing, right?

Robber: Never mind what I'm doing. I think I should have a talk with your father about this game.

There's a lot of complicated stuff going on in this scene, and I found myself having a complicated reaction to it. First of all, it's yet another example of videogames shown on film in a visually inaccurate way. The graphics were too clean and detailed for an actual PSP game. Rather, they looked like what they were: some pre-rendered CG trying to pass for in-game footage. This put me on guard, since it's the first sign in any film that the filmmakers aren't gamers. Secondly, there was the obvious way in which Lee was criticizing GTA: San Andreas for its glorification of urban black crime. I think this would be clear to anyone who is familiar with Lee's politics. Bamboozled could be read as (among other things) a rant on the subject. Thirdly, it was a strange contrast to the way the PSP had been shown as blatant product placement in the rest of the film. The kid is never seen once without the PSP in hand, and there are several lines of dialogue, aside from the scene I mentioned, that seem designed only to draw attention to it.

So...

We have a movie where the filmmaker clearly doesn't know that much about games. But the people who hired him want him to sell games to his audience. He shows the hardware, but then he turns the one showcase of software into a suckerpunch at morally corrupt pop culture and bad parenting. You've got to wonder if that was Lee's response to being told he had to feature the PSP.

Whatever Spike Lee intended, I have to admit that I've seen worse. I didn't walk away with the impression that Lee is pro-videogame regulation. The fact that the kid mentioned 50 Cent makes Lee's criticism seem directed more at gangsta culture than videogame culture. And the corrective impulse is constructive: Clive Owen's response is to educate the parent... not do the parent's job for him.

I can't think of many examples where filmmakers showed they understood either the technology or the culture of videogames. Shawn of the Dead is the only one in recent memory, and it was merely showing that games are (gasp!) a normal part of people's lives. I can't think of a movie that used real videogames (which excludes videogame-as-metaphor movies like Tron or The Matrix) to say something positive. Inside Man isn't exactly a step in this direction, but at least it doesn't feel like a step backward.

I guess that's sorta good news.

Splinter Cell: Game Design Theory

2006-04-24T20:44:00.000-05:00

I’m finally playing Splinter Cell Chaos Theory.

Chaos Theory has fabulous production values (even if the visual design—aside from Sam Fisher’s signature goggles—is typically forgettable.) The game's biggest triumph is the sheer number of context sensitive animations. They don’t add much gameplay, but they do succeed in making Sam’s actions feel unusually purposeful. The way he switches to a tip toe creep when skulking near an enemy or the way his head automatically turns towards his prey. Not only have the developers made the animations fluid and expressive, they’ve made the *transitions* between animations smooth. This is key to making a character feel life like.

Any schmoe can mocap an animation and stick it on a character model. But to make sure said animation, at any given moment, can be interrupted by another animation and not seem artificial… that’s the secret sauce. Chaos Theory does this as well as any game I can remember. The real show stopper is how Sam stops in mid-creep when you let up on the move button. At literally any point in his creep animation you can just stop, and instead of reverting to his squatting stance Sam just freezes in mid step, wavering ever-so-slightly. This creates a marvelous sense of tension when closing in on an oblivious enemy. It looks like Sam is holding his breath, internally battling to keep his balance in that exact position, lest any movement give him away. It’s a wonderfully realized aspect of Sam’s character, making him seem both more human and more comical. One could imagine a similar physical gesture in a Chaplin or Keaton film. In an artform where movement is everything, characters are defined by how they move. This is what the makers of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus know better than anyone, and a bit of that knowledge is on display in Chaos Theory.

Otherwise, Chaos Theory is not terribly amazing. What Splinter Cell really delivers on is sheer production value and polish. It’s a great looking game and a great playing game. Everything it attempts it realizes effectively. This is why, I suppose, some people consider it the pinnacle of the stealth genre: it has virtually no flaws. But it has virtually no ambition either. Splinter Cell, as a series, brings almost nothing original to the table. It’s a patchwork of features and mechanics swiped from other stealth games. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it does basically mean that polish is about the only thing that sets Splinter Cell apart from the competition.

I do not prefer innovation alone, just as I do not prefer polish alone. But I tend to favor innovation over polish provided the innovative game contains at least a basic level of polish and its mechanics are not totally broken. I suppose this is why I prefer Hitman to Splinter Cell as far as what the Western world as to offer the stealth genre. The Hitman games are not graphical powerhouses, but they manage to not look shabby while innovating in non-linear gameplay far beyond what Splinter Cell even tries to achieve. The simulatory aspects of Hitman are robust and, for me, encompass all the tension that Splinter Cell has to offer within a larger framework of persistent, realtime world dynamics. In Blood Money there’s a mission where, in order to assassinate an opera singer onstage during a live performance, you have to wait and snipe him at the *exact* moment he is shot by a fake gun as part of the opera. This is not an event that starts and stops as the result of a cinematic or because you cross some invisible line that triggers it. The mission lasts for the duration of the opera, and the rest is sheer clockwork. To me that’s compelling in ways most stealth games don’t approach, and even if the realtime aspect makes it more frustrating than the bite size “one hallway, one problem” design of Splinter Cell, I’m willing to put up with it because of how fresh the experience feels.

There’s nothing wrong with Splinter Cell, but it is not the best the West has to offer. Many like to compare Splinter Cell to Metal Gear because of the military theme, but Metal Gear is such a different creature, operating under a such wildly different design logic, that comparing them doesn’t feel very useful in the end. Hitman is the only other high profile stealth series that seems to have the realism-oriented and simulatory (i.e. Western) design goals as Splinter Cell. Out of those two I think Hitman trumps it in terms of ambition, and the hit it takes in production value is negligible. Since Thief has faded away (thanks to Thief III’s failure to reinvent itself) there hasn’t been much left to carry the torch. Hitman fills this need as well as any as far as I’m concerned. It’s pushing the genre, not just its own IP, forward.

In short, I doubt a Splinter Cell game will come out that I won’t play. But I also doubt there will ever be a Splinter Cell game I’ll truly love. I need something a little more unpredictable to really stoke my passion.

A mix of H20, Na+. and Cl-

2006-04-23T00:25:00.000-05:00

So I know I'm a total sap, but I just finished Kingdom Hearts II and have to admit that I leaked a few tears at the end. What I can't figure out is why...

Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed the game. The part that perplexes me whether it was the game that provoked my reaction, or was it just the cutscene? It seems nearly impossible to disentangle one from the other, but here goes.

My first instinct is to say that it's the game, but that's more of a knee jerk "We need more games that have emotional impact," reaction. When I step back a little and consider the exact moment of saline secretion, it was one of those classic moments:

Sora: "We're back."
Kairi: "Welcome home."

which I can guarantee in the Japanese version was:

Sora: "Tadaima."
Kairi: "Okaerinasai."

For anyone that watches any Japanese film, drama, or Anime, this is a fairly typical narrative device that wraps up a lot of pent up emotion into a ritualistic phrase. (Note: Not trying to imply here that this device isn't found in other nation's media, just that this particular instance is a quintessential moment in cheesy Japanese dramas.) Despite their cheesiness, these kinds of moments tend to 'get me' more often than not. So maybe it was just the cutscene...

... or maybe not. I invested a solid 35 hours into getting to that one moment. And it wasn't because of the mechanics. The gameplay was tight, but uninventive. More often than not, it's a lot of mashing the X and Triangle Buttons with an occasional nod to the Square and Circle. So imagine this, I was actually playing the game for the story *gasp* and not the gameplay. Does that make all gamey the stuff in between the narrative chunks irrelevant? Or does the investment that one has to make in order to move from one chunk to the next fundamentally alter the reception of the chunk?

David Cage, the self-proclaimed auteur behind Indigo Prophecy, came to MIT, and said that all American games were like pornography - that their stories are irrelevant and trifling, and people generally skip through them because all they really want is the action. While he is right to some degree, it's experiences like the one that I had this evening that make me question the 'disconnection' between cutscene and play. To draw a parallel to film - if you're watching Zatoichi, are you constantly thinking about the reprecussions to the town that Zatoichi's violence will have, or maybe, just maybe, for a few split seconds you think "how @$!*ing cool was that move!" So, does one have to constantly have in mind the particular narrative context that drives their action in order for it to connote truly 'narrative' gameplay? Or is it sufficient to have the context set up the action, and then we resolve the narrative outcome to reflect the new state of affairs that has arisen as a result of the action?

Or is this all moot, Square RPGs don't make people cry, and maybe I'm just a melodramatic simp? ;)