Noise Tanks!

Storytelling in Alan Wake

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 20:34:00 +0000

I finished Alan Wake sometime last week. It had a few problems, but overall was a very immersive experience with a very well done story. Oddly though, I found that the longest and least interactive sequence in Alan Wake was the most memorable and interesting section for me.

Generally, over the last decade or so most designers have been straying away from the dreaded cut-scene, with the reasoning that games are not movies and need to find their own way of conveying their stories. I wholeheartedly agree with this idea, but one of the most common solutions has a serious problem. Mainly, the Half Life 2 approach of never taking control away from the player, but forcing him into a situation where the only thing he can do is stand and watch the events unfolding in front of him, usually a conversation between some major characters. Naturally, this leads just about everyone to jump around the room like a coked up ferret shooting everyone in the face and throwing all the interactable objects at all the other interactable objects. The reason players do this is simply because they can. There are no repercussions aside from maybe being unable to hear the conversation unfold over your pointless shotgun blasts.

What Alan Wake does is more or less the same approach, but the designers take away just about all the players abilities. In these sequences all Alan can do is walk. He often loses whatever weapons he has on him, so it makes sense that he has none during these parts, and since the enemies only come out at night time, any day sequence is used purely for story advancement. In the section I was referring to earlier, Alan wakes (hurr hurr) up inside a mental clinic after falling from a cliff into a river. Dr. Hartman, a character Alan despises, runs the clinic and spends the entire section trying to convince him that everything that has happened since the opening of the game has not been real and has been one of many “episodes” Alan has suffered since his wife drowned. Alan immediately rejects the idea, but Dr. Hartman keeps pushing him until I as a player almost believed him.

Being forced to slowly walk around a mental clinic listening to a doctor droll on for around ten minutes sounds like a terrible way to utilize a video games interactivity to tell a story. Yet, because I am able to control the main character I typically feel more attached to him or her than in any other form of a story. When I started to doubt Alan’s belief, all kinds of repercussions started to flash through my head about what it would mean for Alan were Dr. Hartman’s words true. Because I had spent the last four hours playing the events the doctor was claiming to be false I felt incredibly more attached to them than if I had simply watched them unfold.

Alan Wake’s uses of semi-interactable sequences are successful because they make the player care. In contrast, by the time I got to any of these sequences in Half Life 2, all I had done is blow stuff up in an awesome propeller boat. I had little interest in the story because so much of the game had been the journey and that was clearly the interesting part. By the time Half Life 2 Episode 2 came out however, I was a lot more invested in the relationship between Gordon and Alyx. By the end of Episode 2 I completely cared about their relationship and the one between Alyx and her dad so I tended to be less of a coked up ferret and more of a patient listener.

The Nostalgia Effect

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Tue, 11 May 2010 07:14:00 +0000

The other day I was reading the new VGcats comic. It’s a strip I like quite a bit on the rare occasion it’s updated. The most recent comic on the site however left me feeling confused. Essentially, what it says is that FF13 sucks for A, B, and C reasons, while older RPGs like FF7 were excellent for comparatively better reasons. The comic was quite funny, but the authors’ argument sounds completely nostalgia driven. I wonder if Scott Ramsoomair were to play FF7 for the first time today if he would like it anywhere near as much as he did as a child.

He makes arguments such as the music in FF13 is bland and cookie cutter, while songs like “One Winged Angel” were iconic and memorable. I’ll concede that “One Winged Angel” is a pretty awesome song, especially the orchestrated version for Advent Children, but I can’t think of many other songs that were that memorable from FF7. “Aerith’s Theme” is up there, but overall I’d have to say that at around halfway through FF13 I’m enjoying the music as much if not more.

He also complains about FF13’s linearity versus FF7’s (or any older RPG he likes presumably) illusion of freedom. FF13’s lack of an open world has been a huge point of contention among all Final Fantasy fans since its announcement. I personally prefer it, though I suppose I can’t fault others for enjoying a vast open world. That’s fine, but complaining about a lack of an illusion of choice is just silly. I could understand wanting side quests, but he makes it sound like he just wants to think he can do other stuff and not actually do it.

The most obvious example of his argument being a nostalgia driven love affair is when Scott says FF13 removes any semblance of strategy from the fights by only allowing the player to control one character. I actually played through FF7 for the first time fairly recently and naturally did not have my “Eye’s of a Ten Year Old Makes Everything Awesome” goggles on for the experience. The game has held up over the years, I thoroughly enjoyed it, but being able to control three people at the same time hardly made any of the fights strategic. The materia system essentially made every character the same, which made the fights boil down to what they are in almost every RPG, everyone attacks until their health drops below 50% and then switch the weakest character/healer character to healing duty. There were a few fights that required specific strategies, but all but a handful of boss fights could be beaten by using the aforementioned strategy. Most of the trash monsters could be defeated using only the A button while my left hand was free to feed me pizza.

FF13 on the other hand is about as close to a real time combat system as you can get while still remaining turn based. Once it gets complex the player may only be controlling one character, but he is also in charge of managing which classes everyone is in order to heal, debuff, deal damage or attempt a Stagger. This would mean, for instance, that a fight could start with my chain heavy set of classes (called a Paradigm) followed by an immediate switch to his damage dealing Paradigm in order to take full advantage of the Stagger effect his chain Paradigm triggered, then again followed by a quick switch to a more heal/defense oriented Paradigm, but only long enough to get everyone back to around 3/4ths of their health, and then start the process over again on the opponent he was slowly weakening during the healing phase of his strategy , altering as needed for the decrease in enemies. That is just one strategy I came up with last night when I started facing some enemies with a lot of health that I needed to deal with quickly and I didn’t even go into any of the other facets of combat such as the myriad of moves each class change brings or how triggering a turn early can be incredibly advantageous if it saves the Stagger bar from being depleted. I only mentioned the Paradigm changing aspect of the combat, there is still the timing of the ATB gauge, items, techniques, summons, elemental weaknesses and more all requiring thought in real time.

Most of that stuff probably doesn’t make much sense out of context, but my point is FF13’s combat system is objectionably incredibly more complex and strategic than FF7’s could ever hope to be. If the player was in control of all three characters he would be physically unable to keep up with everything needed to be done. As is, he is micromanaging their classes which is essentially controlling their actions. Of course there are easy fights where pressing auto attack six times is sufficient for a victory, but that is the case with all these games. It may be a faulting point, but for all RPGs, not just FF13.

If FF13 and FF7 switched places and somehow magically had their graphics and audio changed accordingly to match their times then I propose Scott’s comic would be about how the newest RPG from Square Enix features dumbed down combat and a largely superfluous open world. That may be an exaggeration, but FF13 isn’t quantifiably better or worse than any previous game in the series and most complaints against it that I have heard seem to confirm this. Take a look back at your favorite RPG from your childhood and see if you can tell me exactly what it is that makes it so much better than their modern day equivalents. I’ve mentioned before how the genre has been in a perpetual state of stagnation since its creation, so I won’t be surprised when all you can come back with is your personal taste about each games individual story.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy JRPGs, I just think everyone is looking back at the gems from the ‘90s with rose-tinted glasses and refuse to acknowledge that the blockbuster RPG’s of today are just as good* and the RPG’s of the past are just as bad.

*Except Star Ocean 4, Tales of Vesperia, and Eternal Sonata (despite its rad combat system).

Spoke to Soon

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 07:34:00 +0000

Well, I finished Bioshock 2 yesterday and I think I have to say I misjudged it. I really enjoyed the last half of the game, the storyline wrapped itself up nicely and all the loose ends I mentioned in my last post were taken care of in a quite convincing manner. Also, the series change of focus from a commentary on Objectivism to being about a commune styled utopian "family" was a very interesting and fresh change for Rapture.

That said, I’m sticking with my opinion that the combat was my issue with the game, but I’m changing my mind about it being solid enough to keep my interest. What I realized is that my problem with the combat, and in retrospect I had the same issue with the first Bioshock, is that the game starts off far too difficult. Enemies do way to much damage, they attack from multiple angles with weapons that obstruct player vision upon impact. Your arsenal is also hardly up to snuff early on in the both games. Yet by the end of the game you are essentially a walking tank. I could hold a room from an assault of twenty guys without breaking a sweat by the three quarter mark. With proper preparation I bet I could do it without using a med pack, though since both money and med packs flow like water by the end. Once I got to this point in both games I had a great time with the combat. The weapons allow for so many options that fighting off hordes of Splicers never gets old and setting up elaborate preparations to defend the Little Sisters became a game by itself.

This makes the second half of the game a blast, but the first a chore. Luckily the game offers a solution for the early difficulty, Vitachambers. Anytime you die in Bioshock 1 or 2 you are immediately revived in a nearby Vitachamber and any progress you’ve made, including damage dealt to your enemies remains unchanged. Therefore no matter how many times you die it doesn’t matter, you could technically run out of ammo with all your weapons and melee a Big Daddy to death over the course of twenty minutes if you were stubborn enough. Naturally, I think this is a pretty lousy solution for poorly paced difficulty. Unless I was being super careful I was using a Vitachamber during at least a quarter of my fights early on. During each major fight I’d be lucky to die and be revived reeking of failure and incompetence only once per boss while the game gently added insult to injury by telling me to keep whittling away at that Big Sister. Then for the last five hours of the game I never once even came close to dying, laughing as I passed by countless unused Vitachambers armed to the teeth with rockets and EVE.

Games often get easier as you progress through them for several reasons. For one, players tend to get better at games the longer they play them, but a larger reason is usually unlocking newer and better powers as the game progresses. Generally you fight tougher enemies to counteract this increase in strength, but games almost never up the difficulty enough. I understand that it must be a difficult line to walk, there’s always at least two variables determining how hard the latter half of a game will be and both of them vary based on each players personal improvement and dedication to finding every powerup. That’s still no excuse for the stark contrast in difficulty Bioshock 2 has from start to finish.

Making a few of the better weapons available earlier, or lowering the health of some of the earlier Splicers would have gone a long way toward making the beginning of the game as enjoyable as the ending. Even being more generous with the med packs early on rather than later when they aren't nearly as needed would have been a huge improvement.

I wrote this post because I changed my mind about Bioshock 2 so I should probably reiterate I still think the game as a whole is enjoyable and by the end I was quite impressed. It’s definitely a worthy sequel, it’s just a shame they didn’t improve upon such an obvious problem from the first game. Or maybe I just totally suck and no one else had this problem. My pride says this isn’t the case and it's usually right.

You're polishing bone!

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 23:56:00 +0000

I recently played through God of War 3 and absolutely loved it. As usual it was totally epic from start to finish. In fact it started off with such a big bang that I’m not sure it ever quite topped it, but the rest is still plenty good. Funny thing though, aside from some minor tweaks to combat, the game hasn’t changed. The move set for Kratos’ main weapons is exactly the same. The puzzles are as clever, yet simple as ever. Even the anger is the same, actually, the anger might be even more over the top. Kratos kills every single person he encounters with the exception of three. The only three he doesn’t kill he has sex with during the also expected sex mini game.

Has this repetition affected my appreciation of the game at all? Hell no, the first sentence of this article says I absolutely loved it. The fact that the main move set hasn’t changed allowed me to play like a pro right from the start. The outrageous story is as awesome as ever and the new HD graphics and set pieces are jaw dropping. God of War 3 really shows you what the PS3 is capable of.

Yet, when I sent GoW3 back to GameFly and received Bioshock 2 in return I was faced with a similar situation, but am having an opposite reaction. Bioshock 2 looks almost identical to the first game, aside from a few combat modifications it controls the same, and so far the story even seems to be unfolding the same way. It’s pretty much a more polished and updated version of the first game. So why is it that God of War 3 feels like a polished and refined version of its predecessors while Bioshock 2 feels stale?

At first I thought it was because the story seemed to be built on a much shakier foundation than the first. I immediately had questions like why do the Vitachambers work with the new player character and what is the reasoning for Lamb and co. staying in Rapture for 10 years after it all went to shit? That isn’t it though; I’m willing to overlook these flaws for a couple of reasons. For one, I’m only a third of the way into the game, really though, most of my plot problems are minor. Another thought was due to some dissonance stemming from playing as a Big Daddy, but feeling as agile and vulnerable as the human I played in the first game. This can’t be the issue either (though it does constantly get on my nerves), I’ve played through countless games with god awful stories full of player/character dissonance and it’s never been an issue as long as the gameplay is interesting and fun enough. I can’t wait to play Bayonetta after I’m finished with Bioshock 2 and I haven’t stopped playing Borderlands since January, neither of which can even really be said to have stories. I mean they are there, but who cares? The developers certainly didn’t.

I guess that must mean I don’t find Bioshock’s gameplay compelling enough to engross me for an entire new game. Thinking back on the first one this makes sense. My favorite parts were not the plasmids and elaborate traps you could set up for Big Daddies. It was the setting and characters. Rapture was so fully realized and the characters were so well written that just being in the game was enough. That allure must have worn off either during the first game or sometime over the last two years though because I’m struggling to finish this one.

Anyway, I think I had some greater point I was trying to make about fun gameplay, but I can’t remember what it was and Slevin just texted me to play some more Borderlands.

You know what, upon further reflection I may have already made this point with my Mass Effect 2 post so just go read that instead.

Jebus out!

Weapon of Choice

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 03:32:00 +0000

Recently while reading Brainy Gamers’ article about Heavy Rain I started thinking about player choice in games. I have heard a lot of people making the critique that games only offer an illusion of choice because the story still has to unfold in a certain way. I even heard it from my roommate while playing Heavy Rain just last week. This is kind of a silly complaint. I want to clarify before I begin that Brainy Gamer doesn’t ever say this in his Heavy Rain post, he just got me thinking about this.

While it is true that games don’t really allow the player to do whatever he wishes, there are few insurmountable problems that cause this. The most obvious problem is that in order to have a narrative game, which is the only type of game where this issue could arise, the player cannot be allowed to do whatever he wants. It’s impossible to tell a story when the main character can just kill any other character whenever he wants. What if in Half Life 2: Episode 2 Alyx actually dies anytime you get curious and shoot her in the face? I’d be willing to bet almost everyone shot at her at least once. The entire story would have to change. What if the story was complex enough that it had a ton of characters, the amount of branches the developers would have to create would quickly become astronomical. That’s just thinking about the freedom to kill anyone at any time, what if you could do other things, all altering the story appropriately? Even if someone managed to get over the technical feat this would require, you would no longer be playing a story, you would be writing your own.

The best example I can think of a narrative game that allows you to do whatever you want is the GTA series. In GTA4 you can go out on dates, drink with friends, surf the net, or drive a stolen taxi down a sidewalk leaving dozens of broken corpses in your wake. You can't do anything you wanted, but there was plenty to do in Liberty City. Still, any mission you embarked on relating to the story could only end one way if you were to proceed. Yes, there were maybe three or four key missions that gave you some superficial choice that had little bearing on the story, but overall there was no real choice because it was necessary for Rockstar to prohibit certain actions in order to tell their story. This resulted in critics coming up with newfangled words like ludonarrative dissonance to describe the disconnect players experienced when Nico would take Kate out on a nice date and discuss his desires to escape a life of crime shortly after murdering thirty people on a busy street because he was bored between missions. This type of freedom has its problems. Besides, it is an entirely separate entity from the narrative, so it doesn't address the critique at all.

On the other hand, games like Mass Effect 2 do an interesting job incorporating player choice. Depending on your actions you can be a total jerk, an agent of justice or more realistically anything in between. Pretty much every other game that has a morality systems is superficial and silly, but the Mass Effect series has some subtlety. Shades of gray does wonders for this kind of system. When you get down to the story however, aside from a few major bulletpoints it plays out the same for everyone. I’d put this into the branching storyline category I was talking about earlier. BioWare went with the much more technically feasible approach of only having a half dozen or so branches all ending with essentially the same thing, still leaving players with only an illusion of choice.

I think a current idea is emergent narrative is the solution to this problem. Hell, I get the impression that emergent narrative is the heralded promised land of storytelling in games, period. It is a neat idea, making the focus of the game how the player accomplishes a task rather than the intermittent story his actions interconnected definitely plays to the unique strength of the medium and I would love to see it flourish in the future. However, the poster child for emergent narrative is Far Cry 2 and it has a very rigid story that it adheres too. Clint Hocking and Ubisoft Montreal made the decision to put emphasis on the player experience and provided the player with lots of tools to have a myriad of them. They all have these experiences while going through the exact same story however so player choice only goes as far as how you want to go about killing the next group of guys.

Another games that has done emergent narrative very well is Left4Dead. The stories you hear fellow gamers tell after playing this game are always about their unique experience rather than one specific part of the game everyone went through. Left4Dead might be the best example of a game succeeding in giving the player freedom of choice. Valve provides the players with a setting and really does allow them to write their own story. It is an interesting compromise between narrative and player choice. The only problem is the story Left4Dead tells is hardly of the type that gamers like us are asking for.

What I’m getting at is if we are going to ask for meaningful and interesting stories in our games, we cannot possibly expect them to give us the freedom to do whatever we want within their world. It cannot work on a fundamental level. Besides, I don’t quite see the problem with our current setup. Sure, video games interactivity is what makes them unique from the other art forms, but interacting can still have a very powerful impact without allowing the player to make any meaningful decisions. Just by virtue of being in control of the main character is enough to add that extra layer of feeling that movies and books cannot. The anxiety and pressure I felt during some of the more intense scenes in Heavy Rain and the adrenaline rush I got from certain parts in God of War 3 were far more powerful than if I just watched them on a screen. Kratos doesn't have to have the option to give Zeus a bouquet of flowers and a bucket of puppies instead of punching his face into oblivion for games to truly reach their full potential!

Celebrate liberty by pre-ordering Splinter Cell Conviction

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 04:33:00 +0000

I just got an email from GameStop with the same subject as this article. I don't have anything terribly insightful to say about it, I just thought it was totally absurd and felt like sharing. Can you think of any better way to celebrate your freedom and liberty than by purchasing a game from a faceless corporation several weeks before it's released?

I'm pretty sure I can... but that silenced SPAS-12 is pretty enticing.

Heavy Rain Addendum

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 19:38:00 +0000

Maybe a half hour after posting my Heavy Rain review I realized I forgot to touch on a key point. A large part of what made the game so intense was that it could unfold in quite a few different ways and once you made a decision or a mistake there was no turning back. This meant that if during one of Ethan’s trials you failed and he died, his story was over and he was obviously no longer able to save his son. I’m not entirely sure if you can die in every dangerous situation, but I know every playable character can die and alter the story accordingly. There is no reloading, the story progresses no matter how well you do, which makes every decision and every rapid button press that much more important.

I found this quite interesting because it made death actually mean something in a video game. Joystiq interviewed the Heavy Rain writer and designer David Cage, and he touches on how killing another person is very different in this game as well. I can’t really go into any detail without spoiling anything, and definitely don’t read the interview if you are worried about that. I just found it amazing how with a few small changes killing and dying in a game becomes much more like real life than it ever will be in something like Halo.

Heavy Rain

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:02:00 +0000

I finished Heavy Rain yesterday and while I will say it has a lot of problems, it clearly stands out in my mind as being one of the most intense game experiences I’ve ever had. The divided nature of its criticism makes perfect sense. Heavy Rain is not for everyone, it’s bound to displease a few people. That’s just comes with the territory of taking risks I suppose, universal acclaim only seems to come to highly polished and well done versions of established ideas. Games like Uncharted 2 comes to mind, my and many others game of the year for 2009.

Let’s start with the problems before I join the praise brigade. Heavy Rain has a pretty underwhelming introduction. The opening scene felt forced and artificial. At important times even the animation looked wrong, so much so that once the climax had reached I was left feeling more confused than anything else. The game quickly makes up for this problem by having much more polished and moving scenes for the rest of the game. Still, there are a few times when certain characters motivations are left unexplained and once the story was complete I had a few lingering questions. Honestly though, I am willing to overlook them considering the big picture of what Heavy Rain set out to do.

My only other problem is the controls tended to get quite tiresome after an hour or so of playing. Since you could technically call the game one big quicktime event I wasn’t surprised to feel this way. The only times the game isn’t acting like a quicktime event it is plagued by contextual movement based on a constantly changing camera that often times resulted in me walking back and forth erratically trying to figure out the right direction to push the thumbstick. What I was surprised by however was the incredible job Quantic Dreams did at creating some of the most overwhelming and emotional playable sequences using nothing but timed button presses for input. Heavy Rain had me gripping the controller tighter and focusing harder than games that require far faster reflexes and much more complex thumb maneuvers like Devil May Cry.

Despite these problems, I was enthralled by the game and couldn’t put it down. If it wasn’t for having to work an abnormally large number of hours this week, I probably would have finished the game in two play sessions. The story had me guessing until the very end (though that was in part due to the game lying during a particular scene) and combined with excellent graphics and an intense musical score, Heavy Rain definitely delivered the powerful and emotional game they set out too.

I doubt this type of game will become the new norm for quality narrative experiences in games, but there is definitely room in the market for this style. With a bit of refining, I expect this genre will become an important part of the currently unfolding storytelling movement. Still, I’m not entirely sure how successful it will be with a story that doesn’t keep you as engaged as Heavy Rain. The controls are tedious enough at times that if not for absolutely wanting to know what happens next I may have put it down. Overall, I think I’ve made it clear that if you have a PS3 it definitely deserves eight to ten hours of your time. It’s a pretty unique experience that you should check out.

One Move to Rule Them All

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 23:58:00 +0000

I’ve found while playing games, I fairly quickly latch onto a handful of moves that I like and use them constantly while all the others fall victim to neglect. The greater variety of moves the less I tend to use. For instance, I am currently playing through Tales of Vesperia. I’m quite close to the end and my character currently has at least fifteen “artes” at his disposal. The game enables me to hotkey eight of them, but I only use four with any real frequency. Of those four, two would be more than enough to keep the combat entertaining for the duration. The same is true of just about any hack and slash style game I pick up. I find it interesting that despite all the effort developers put into diversifying their games, I always tend to latch onto my favorite and most effective moves and then proceed to spam them for the next ten to forty hours.

This has never been more apparent to me then when playing Mass Effect 2. I chose the Vanguard class, same as in the first game. Each class has several abilities, but once again I only care about one. I use a second on rare occasion and the third is a passive upgrade on my shotgun so it’s pretty much always on. I think I’ve used my fourth ability twice now. Yet that one main ability is so awesome that I’d be content just doing it over and over again with little regard for the rest of the game. It’s all fluff on top of that ability. In fact, I sometimes feel like all the story and character development gets in the way of the combat. I once read an article where a developer said if your gameplay mechanic isn’t fun enough to create a survival mode with, it probably shouldn’t be in your game. This obviously doesn’t apply for every game type out there, but I think it’s a very strong argument considering the combat in most games is little more than storming room after room eradicating the forces of evil or whatever.

Since I made such a fuss over this ability, I suppose I should explain what it does. The Vanguard class in Mass Effect is essentially a shotgun wielding mage. They aren’t called mages because this is a science fiction universe, but for all intents and purposes that’s what the class is. Since my specialty is shotguns I generally want to get up close and personal as quickly as I can. From a distance my character is essentially worthless. That’s where Charge comes in. It teleports my character in a straight line directly to the enemy I’m targeting and slams me into him with a huge impact. They go flying backwards while I simultaneously get a second shield for four seconds. At later levels it even slows down time for a second giving me a tiny bit more time to mow down whatever poor group of saps I just went careening into. The coolest part is I go through any obstacles between me and them, including solid objects, gaps in the floor, and even the rocket that was just fired at my face. It’s a brilliant move and right when I discovered it I knew Mass Effect 2 would not be a disappointment.

Without this move I would have probably called Mass Effect 2 a pretty standard upgrade to ME1 with improved Gears of War style combat and more of the same dialogue trees. Instead it’s rocketed itself into one of my favorite games in quite some time. The move has even made me further appreciate everything else the game has to offer. I’ve found myself doing more side quests in order to partake in more combat and because of that I’ve subsequently been becoming more engrossed in the story, characters and universe Bioware has created. I find this all very amusing considering I could have picked one of the other five classes and never even known about Charge. It makes you think, maybe there is even something cooler I’m missing....

iPad

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:18:00 +0000

Yesterday Apple announced their long leaked and highly anticipated tablet, the iPad. I understand the hype, the last big thing Apple announced was the iPhone and despite not having one or even a remotely high tech phone, I think it’s a pretty cool little device. I’m not sure it changed the face of the world or whatever the hell the Apple marketing machine said it would, but that’s beside the point.

What I want to know is why do gamers care?

I get that the app store gave rise to a huge amount of games in an incredibly short period of time, but I personally don’t have any desire to play any of them. By the sounds of it, which I’m basing on the almost absurd amount of reading I do on video games, not many other gamers do either. I hate the separation of casual versus hardcore discussion so I’ll just say it like this; of all the news sites and pretentious analytical blogs I read about video games, rarely do I hear anything noteworthy about iPhone games. I hear a lot about their potential, but nothing on the platform has resonated with me enough to buy an iPod Touch.

It’s clear the gaming community that I subscribe too, and you too probably if you are reading this doesn’t really care about these games. So why then are gamers freaking out about the IPad? It’s basically a bigger iPhone with a few added gaming related features. Since its announcement yesterday though, Joystiq has had half a dozen posts and updates about what it is capable of gaming wise. Yet, unless the few announced games (most of which are dumb downed ports of console games) churn out something major, we’ll probably be back to ignoring it quite soon.

Honestly, the only cool and useful thing I can think of that the iPhone has done is the app store. It’s definitely a better setup than the Xbox Indie games store and something Microsoft might want to look into emulating. I suppose the iPad also fixes the problem of user input horribly conflicting with your ability to see the screen, but that’s just because they made the screen bigger. Your grubby gigantic thumbs are still going to be all over the screen that you need to see to play.

Well, I’ve ranted enough. I’m probably making a bigger deal out of this than is actually the case, but based on the current state of affairs gamers don’t really care about games on Apple platforms and I don’t see that changing any time soon because of the iPad. Seems kind of strange how much coverage it is getting. Maybe if the oft rumored Apple gaming console ever comes out we’ll have something to care about, but for now I’ll stick with the major consoles and on occasion use my PSP… probably not though.

Hating Friends and Family, but in a Good Way

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:28:00 +0000

I’m just about done with my first playthrough of New Super Mario Bros. Wii and I think I fully understand the mixed feelings I’ve heard about this game. I totally get why this game is tearing people apart. I pretty much can’t play some of the more difficult levels without killing or getting killed by my partner once every minute or so. Still, it hasn’t bothered me much at all, in fact I often find it quite hilarious. There are a few things working in favor of me liking this game though that I find interesting.

First of all, due to a certain someone, my third Wiimote is God only knows where. This limited us to only two people rather than three, or Heaven forbid four. I played with four people at PAX and what should have been a fairly easy level for anyone well versed in Mario (which I think should be just about everyone at PAX) turned into a horrible clusterfuck of Italian and fungal death. If all my friends tried to play this game together I imagine it would be a nightmare. The simplest tasks would result in deaths which we could never have planned for. I still want to try it out of morbid curiosity, but it’ll be awhile before I acquire a fourth Wiimote (the third is on its way from Amazon as we speak.)

The second and most important part of my resounding enjoyment rather than utter hatred and frustration of all things mushroom is who I have been playing the game with. My friend and I are both quite laid back and find stupid humor in everything, so generally when one of us gets totally boned by the other we just end up laughing or making some faux angry comment and then laughing. We also both tend to think the levels that screw us over the most are also the most creative and fun ones to play. If you were playing with the wrong person I could definitely see a potentially fun time blowing up in your face. Hell, I’ve already been threatened with physical violence while briefly playing with another friend. In his defense I did throw him into a bottomless pit because he didn’t know about the bubble system yet. :)

Which leads me to my next topic, Nintendo did quite a bit on their own to alleviate cheap deaths by turning the A button into an “Oh shit” button. By pressing A at any time your character will be encased in a bubble and will start floating toward the other player characters if you shake the Wiimote. You are impervious to everything while in the bubble, in fact you are pretty much in a plane that is in front of the level and only your teammates can free you. It has a few problems, such as being freed directly above a lava pit, and if everyone is either dead or in a bubble then you’re still starting the level over, but overall it has come in handy at least half a dozen times per difficult level. Besides, if you’re quick you can rebubble before hitting the lava which solves that problem nicely.

Nintendo also must have known about the difficulty spike starting around world 7 or 8 because just before it gets hard you get the opportunity to acquire a ridiculous amount of lives. Going into world 8 I had over 50 lives and I believe my friend had over 60. I have since lost 30 of those in World 8, but it’s hard to care when you still have 20 and unlimited continues.

Anyway, New Super Mario Bros. Wii is an excellent synthesis of classic Mario sidescrolling and its direction it’s trying to take the Wii as a social living room device. It might be a little too hard for the average non gamer, but the beauty of Mario is in his simple mechanics that take forever to master. Besides, I think everyone on earth has at least some experience with the Mario’s of yesteryear, even if it was 20 years ago. Check it out, just be prepared to never talk to your loved ones again. It’ll be an interesting test to see how close you really are. ;)

Obligatory Game of the Year Post

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 05:33:00 +0000

So it’s been almost exactly a year since I started this blog. I started it on New Year’s Eve 2008 with a post about why I read game blogs, but being the end of the year it only made sense to follow it up with a Game of the Year post. Anyway, here’s one for this year with hopefully many more to come. Maybe next year I'll have some readers.

I find it amusing that of the 70 or so games I played this year and the 63 I played last year, only 17 were on the PS3 (and half of them were small downloadable games), yet my favorite game in ’08 and ’09 were both on the PS3. Of course part of that is because I play all my multi-platform releases on the 360, but it’s still interesting that I only use my PS3 every month or two and am almost always impressed with what’s on there. Sony definitely has gone all out with first and second party development this year. Except for Killzone 2, that was an overrated piece of crap.

Moving along, you can probably already guess my game of the year. What’s the one PS3 game that everyone’s been raving about since its release two months ago? Better yet, what's that a picture of at the top of this post? Why Uncharted 2, of course! It has already been said all over the internet why this game is so great, so I won’t add fuel to the fire. I will say this however, I knew it was my game of the year by about the half way mark and it just got better from there. I don’t think any game has ever resonated with me that strongly and immediately. If you haven’t played it yet, then go buy a PS3, or use your friends, or send yours to be repaired, Slevin!

Looking back on the year, there were a lot of great games, but picking Uncharted 2 wasn’t a difficult decision to make. Assassin’s Creed 2 would probably be my next runner up, but it had too many problems early on to be GOTY material. Does anyone else think “goatee” when they see that acronym? No? Ok, well the only other games I’d consider would be Flower and Batman: Arkham Asylum. Flower was an incredible game that showed the world what games could be, or it would have if any non gamers played it. Hell, I don’t even think many gamers played it. I loved it, it was short and sweet and I still go back and play a level or two sometimes when I’m bored. In fact, I might even say Flower trumps Assassin’s Creed 2 for the number two spot. Not really sure, ranking these things is kind of dumb anyway. I think I’m digressing, where were we? Oh right, Batman was good, but it got too repetitive by the end. I think I did the Bane style dodge and batarang boss fight four times by the end and the combat was awesome, but it was a little too simple. However, like I said in a possibly confusing manner after I played it, the stealth sections were awesome and just got better as more abilities became available.

So there you have it, the Noise Tanks: Official Game of the Year goes to Uncharted 2. Unless Slevin or Squash make a GOTY post, but that’s about as likely as Naughty Dog putting my commendation on the back of the Uncharted 2 Greatest Hits box. See yah guys next year.

Opinions over Time: Assassin's Creed 2 (Final Thoughts)

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 23:25:00 +0000

It’s rare for me to feel sad at the end of a game because I want more. I think even most good games wear out their welcome by offering tens of hours of gameplay. Every now and then however I’ll be watching the credits roll and be thinking how I want more. Of course nowadays there is downloadable content, so I’ll have more to do in Assassin’s Creed 2 within the month I believe.

As I’m sure you’ve surmised already using your incredible deductive reasoning, I’ve finally beaten Assassin’s Creed 2. The reason it took me so long is because I think I was actually trying to savor it. Each time I’d play I would spend hours wandering around the world working on various tasks. I’m not even sure I was working towards any specific goal a decent chunk of the time. Simply put, the world Ubisoft crafted for Assassin’s Creed 2 is remarkable. Venice specifically is the coolest virtual town I’ve ever been to.

The strange thing is I thought the story of the game was pretty weak, the gameplay and controls had a few glaring problems, and yet it was hands down one of my favorite games of the year. Didn’t beat Uncharted 2 for my love though, maybe next time. I should probably clarify what I mean by the story being weak. I thought the whole revenge and redemption thing was fine, if not a little hard to keep tabs on, but the future science fiction aspect of this series is starting to piss me off. In both games it is so vague that I almost don’t see the point in including it at all. This time you only even see the “real world” for maybe 20 minutes of game time, but the ending practically invalidates Ezio’s entire story. And if one more game ends with a cliffhanger that won’t be resolved for at least 2 years I’m going to stab something. It’ll probably just be a tomato or something, but it’s going to be brutal.

Now that you’ve read two paragraphs praising AC2 and another hating on it, let me try to explain why I liked it so much. As games tend to be more and more sandbox style with emergent narrative techniques being employed, the worlds we play them in have to be immersive, believable and most of all interesting to interact in. That’s what makes games with insipid storylines like Crackdown so freaking awesome. Assassin’s Creed 2’s story wasn’t as bad or as pointless as Crackdown’s, in fact if you ignore the science fiction it was pretty good, but if I had nothing but the world and guards to mess around with I’d still probably have fun for more hours than I’d care to admit. That's what I loved about it, if they can nail down some of their storytelling techniques for the third we'll have something truly special.

Check it out if you’re on the fence; just remember the first three or four hours are pretty dry. You must endure, it's worth it!

Legendarily Brütal

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:14:00 +0000

I, like every other self respecting gamer, played Psychonauts and like most of the fifteen people that played it, I loved it. I have to admit it was my first Tim Schafer game. As I’ve said in the past I’ve always been more of a console gamer so I missed all the old Lucas Arts point and click games. Though as you probably guessed from the title, this post is going to be about Tim Schafer and Double Fine’s newest game, Brütal Legend.

I’m not a huge fan of metal music, but I was still excited about this game solely because it was the next thing out of Double Fine. Sadly, I’m not so sure it lived up to Psychonauts previous greatness. The game is by no means bad, but the entire thing just feels unfinished. Well, maybe unpolished is a better word. The game is definitely complete, but there are tons of little instances of shoddy craftsmanship that I would never have expected after playing the highly polished Psychonauts. For example, often times a line of dialogue that was triggered by some in game event would get cut off by the start of a cutscene or a load zone. These situations weren’t caused by me completing the games tasks faster than the developers thought I would. Sometimes the dialogue would continue for another twenty or thirty seconds if I knew ahead of time to wait and let it finish. In one instance the Guardian of Metal was saying his goodbye quip as the game played the animation of my character exiting his lair and even then he was cut off. That means someone recorded a line that was longer than the non-interactive sequence it was intended to be played over.

This might not sound like a big deal and I guess it isn’t, but the game is full of little problems like that and it started to get to me. These guys are known for their stories and characters as much as they are for their gameplay and level design. How can you appreciate the story if important pieces are constantly being cut off?

I also ran into a decent amount of glitches, including one where my car did a U turn in mid air and then landed sideways in an impossible to drive out of location. The game must have realized its error because my car spontaneously exploded fifteen seconds later, either that or the thing I was running from finally caught up.

As far as gameplay goes, it’s actually a pretty cool and rather unique set up they created. It’s an action game that slowly turns into a simple RTS where you control what I would call a hero class while still building and managing an army. It works fairly well, but the controls for getting your army to do anything but gang up in one spot is pretty cumbersome. Also, the game goes from being painfully easy to quite difficult right before the last three RTS battles. I actually enjoyed the difficulty spike, but it was unexpected and I think probably the cause of a somewhat defensive blog post by Tim Schafer.

Luckily all the humor of a Tim Schafer game is there and amplified significantly by Jack Black and some excellent facial animations. It’s not often a game causes me to laugh out loud and this one did on multiple occasions.

Overall the game isn’t bad; it’s just not up to the caliber I’d expect from Double Fine. A few more months probably would have done the game a world of good, but after reading their post mortem I can understand a bit better why the game ended up how it did. What happened was a shame, but I guess it gives me a wonderful excuse to blame all of Brütal Legend's shortcomings on Activision, so let’s do that.

Opinions over Time: Modern Warfare 2 (Final Thoughts)

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:40:00 +0000

Well I finished Modern Warfare 2 a week or two ago, but never wrote up my final impressions. That was largely due to the fact that writing three articles about a six hour game is a bad idea. That and everyone and their grandmother had already bought MW2 by that point anyway. If you must know, MW2 was an intense, almost over the top romp through an interesting yet incoherent war. It did all the cool first person tricks MW1 did, but better. Still, the whole thing felt lacking in the impactful department. Aside from the “No Russian” level, nothing in the game really resonated with me about the horrors of war. MW1 did that fairly regularly, while still maintaining a healthy dose of epic.

Opinions over Time doesn’t work for this game though because it’s too short. I mean I guess you could say at first I didn’t like how much of a cluster fuck the first level was, then I was impressed by some of the themes Infinity Ward dealt with, but ended up enjoying the game solely for its presentation and overall epicness. As you can see that’s not really worth three articles. I just summed it up pretty comprehensively in one sentence. It might be considered a run-on by elementary school teacher standards, but I think my point still stands.

What we ended up with was a middle post almost exclusively about the “No Russian” level and a final thoughts post about how redundant this whole exercise has been. I don’t think the whole feature is totally worthless, but upon further reflection most games don’t result in a huge range of opinions. Generally I find games to be either consistent in their quality, or they start off slow and end up great. The latter type leads to at two articles I suppose, but not really three.

Well whatever, I’ll finish up the Assassin’s Creed 2 final impressions once I finally finish that game and hold off on trying this feature again until I play either a really lengthy game like FFXIII or maybe if one just screams out to me as being well suited to the format. Or maybe I’ll just call it a failed experiment and cut my losses. See yah next time!

Stop While You're Ahead

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:01:00 +0000

Anyone who reads this blog regularly could probably guess I’m a huge fan of the Prince of Persia series, then again, you two probably already knew that before I started this blog. I think I've written more articles about the last game than any other game on here. So naturally when Ubisoft announces something outrageous like the next PoP game being a continuation of the Sands of Time trilogy, instead of the story they ended with a cliffhanger less than a year ago, I’m going to rant about it.

A small part of me is excited if only because the characters from the Sands of Time trilogy are awesome and I’ve spent so many hours in that universe, but the rest of me knows that story is over. Ubisoft pushed their luck by giving Sands of Time a sequel when it was clearly a standalone story and somehow managed to tie it all together beautifully by the end of the third game. I sincerely doubt they’ll be able to pull off a fourth game with the same kind of grace and care that they gave Two Thrones. Hell, they almost killed all hope for the trilogy when they made the prince “dark” and angry in Warrior Within.

Then there’s the fact that this game is slated for May of 2010, that means that it has either been in development alongside the last PoP, or it is going to have less than an 18 month dev cycle. I know the two Sands of Time sequels were both made in a year, but they had all the assets from the previous games and didn’t alter an enormous amount of the core gameplay. This game however is probably not going to use a lot of last year’s game seeing as it was cel shaded and significantly different from the other universe.

The last thing that really makes me nervous is May is the same month that the Sands of Time movie is coming out. Based on the trailer, the movie seems to take bits from the entire trilogy, but will mainly focus on the story on the first game. Jordan Mechner wrote it, so it’s probably not that bad, but we’re still talking about a game movie here. What I don’t want to hear is this new game is going to be a movie tie-in because that would just be ridiculous. How could they possibly make a game that is based on a movie that is based on three other games and expect it to be better or even equivalent to the originals? The reason the movies story was changed so much (I imagine) is because games don’t translate directly to movies very well. The same is true the other way, so doing both is probably a recipe for disaster.

I’m always hopeful and I guess I’ll have a better grasp for what is coming once they release a trailer on the 12th.

Opinions over Time: Modern Warfare 2 (Midway Impressions)

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:19:00 +0000

I’m probably about two thirds of the way through MW2 now, rather than the half hour in I was last time I wrote about it. There hasn’t been anything remotely as crazy as the on rails sequence I mentioned. In fact the rest of the game has pretty much felt like Call of Duty, makes sense I suppose. There have been several of those moments, generally at the end of a level, where the game does something unique and cool with the first person camera while remaining playable, which is more than half the reason I was excited to begin with. Also, the now infamous “No Russian” level was a bit of a surprise, I had of course heard about it, but all I knew before going in was that it was the offensive mission everyone was talking about. I had no idea why.

I don’t really want to add more fuel to the fire, but since playing it I’ve done a bit of reading and was kind of shocked to find I’m in the minority in that I think it was a fairly effective level. The biggest issue I disagreed with was from Anthony Burch of Destructoid who claims that because games are an interactive medium he should not have been forced into playing the mission in the particular way you have too. Too that I say yes, this is an interactive media, but MW2, like most games is a linear narrative and is only interactive in the sense that you get to experience firsthand the story Infinity Ward is trying to tell. This style of storytelling is starting to be replaced, but it hasn’t been yet and I’ve heard some pretty compelling arguments as to why it should stick around in some form forever. Anyway, you don’t have to agree with Infinity Ward’s story, and having other options because you don’t agree with what you’re being forced to do goes against their point. Pvt. Allen (the player controlled character) feels the same way IW is trying to make us feel and based on the outcry I think they succeeded. Burch even acknowledges and is okay with most games being linear stories. I feel his only real reason for wanting a choice is because this time he didn’t want to partake in this particular story. The thing is IW was expecting people to not wanting to partake, if you really don’t want to experience it, there are plenty of opportunities to skip it, including during the mission itself if you happen to let curiosity get the best of you and then decide you do not want to finish. I applaud IW for their efforts, it may not have been the best way they could have conveyed their message, but every suggestion that I’ve heard so far to do it differently seems like a cop out because the person suggesting didn’t want to have to play by IW’s rules. It seems strange to me that after a game finally tries to do something mature and take advantage of some of its mediums unique abilities to resonate with its audience that there would be such a backlash.

Well this wasn’t supposed to turn into another “No Russian” post, but whatever. A six hour campaign that several million people have already purchased and possibly already played doesn’t really need three impressions articles written about it anymore.

Opinions over Time: Assassin's Creed 2 (Midway Impressions)

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 01:20:00 +0000

While Squash ignores Modern Warfare 2 and Assassin’s Creed 2, I on the other hand am making steady headway into both. I know MW2 has a very short campaign, but I’m currently quite engrossed in AC2. That and I’m currently at my parents house for the holiday and they don’t have a kickass sound system like I do. Assassin’s Creed 2’s sound is cool, but I think I can live without 5.1 and all that other jazz. MW2 though, really has memorable sound design, something the franchise has always gotten right, so I’m holding off. It really has more to do with AC2 than the sound system however, I’m not that big of an audiophile/douche bag.

So in my initial impressions, I said it felt like AC2 hadn’t even started. Well the next day I played for another hour and felt more or less the same. Still I wasn’t dissuaded however because once that third hour or so was done I was finally free to do whatever I wanted to with the world. Not only that, but Ubisoft Montreal throws so many options at you by that point that it is almost overwhelming. I could almost understand why the start of the game was so slow going for that reason except the majority of the things you can do aren’t slowly introduced over the three hours, they are all dumped on you about right before they give you free reign. So the slow start is basically just plot that could have potentially been told in a more interesting way, but if you can endure the beginning, I’m here to tell you it’s worth it.

I read a review the other day saying that if the original Assassin’s Creed was a proof of concept then the sequel is the full fledged game. I can totally see where that reviewer was coming from. The game still very much feels like the original, which was what was bothering me initially, but it eventually offers so much more. The first game gives you this giant sandbox, but gave you almost nothing to do in it. There were flags to collect if you were a masochist, but for the most part there was just the main campaign that consisted of climbing to the top of a tower, syncing and then using that to find and complete a few missions. There were only maybe five mission types and you had to do at least three before you could assassinate your target. After repeating this process nine times you had beat the game! Woohoo! Like I said before, I enjoyed the game, but I can totally see why others didn’t.

Assassin’s Creed 2 fixes that problem. There are so many things to do besides the main story that I am not going to even try to list them. This time around the developers took the sandbox approach more seriously and the result is a huge immersive world that I’ve spent hours exploring. The main missions are fun too, and they actually primarily consist of assassinating people. What a concept! There is still the occasional boring mission, but so far they have either been very short or part of what made the introduction so lousy.

I’ve found the plot a little difficult to follow, partially because I take so much time in between missions and partially because I can’t keep all the Italian named conspirators straight, but the menu has lots of documentation to help keep it all clear.

If it sounds like I’m bashing on the original despite claiming I loved it in the last post is because the sequel shows how good the first game could have been. It’s really what it should have been.

I can definitely say my midway impressions are a good deal better than my initial reaction. I’m excited to finish the game and write up my final thoughts. This game is huge however and I still have MW2 and Borderlands to finish as well as Brutal Legend waiting in my mailbox, so it may be a bit longer than I’d like. Luckily all the distractions are quite good. :)

Girls or Games

noreply@blogger.com (Squash) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:08:00 +0000

Tonight I sat down in my computer chair and began writing an essay for an advertising class. The assignment research lead me to an advertising website, which linked me to another advertising website, which linked me to Gamestop.com, which distracted me from the essay that within seconds I stopped writing to focus on this post. Yet again, there I sat. Thinking about video games. Avoiding my homework. And pondering the reason my video game play-time during the last three weeks was less than twenty minutes.

Girls. That’s right, girls. Well, one particular girl, anyway. Why is that? Why, when I start dating someone, do I forget about video games? I know they’re there, but they seem invisible. As though Katy—or Jenny—or Christina—or Michelle—whoever she may be—suddenly becomes a black hole in my video game universe, sucking all video game pleasure into her dark oblivion.

And the worst part? I love it. What kind of guy would I be if I didn’t? Sure, I have to relinquish a small amount of my “hardcore gamer” status. But it’s all in the name of love (or hormones (who really knows the difference?)). Any man, when presented with an opportunity for making-out, must take it. Even with titles out there like Modern Warfare 2 and Assassin’s Creed 2. Yes, in my mind, they compare to the passion of love. But I’d rather protect my masculine identity than encourage the nerd in me.

And so I do. Modern Warfare 2 and Assassin’s Creed 2, you’ll just have to wait. And I know you will. You’ll be there waiting for me when I’m ready. Girls may come and go. Flowers may live and die. But not you. Oh no, not you. You’ll be there in the end, until the end. Our bond is strong. Our relationship eternal. Until I’m single again, I bid you farewell. I’m sure plenty of other gamers will take advantage of your magnificence while I'm busy taking advantage of my dating life.

Opinions over Time: Modern Warfare 2 (Initial Reaction)

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 07:58:00 +0000

At the time of writing this I have only played the tutorial and the very first level of Modern Warfare 2. The tutorial, while seeming fun and refreshing in Call of Duty 4, just came off as annoying this time around. Especially since how well you do is far more influenced by memorization than skill with the Call of Duty franchise. I didn’t really think much of it though, complaining about tutorials is kind of redundant. They are designed for newcomers and if I was a newcomer I probably would have enjoyed it. I suppose they could have included an option to skip it, but I wouldn’t have anyway. Hell, maybe there was an option, I didn’t check.

Ever since I played Call of Duty 2 on the 360 (primarily since there wasn’t anything else worth playing on my shiny new 400 dollar console besides Geometry Wars) I’ve loved the intensity Infinity Ward has managed to capture. During some of the more action packed battles I really feel like a tiny part of a much larger offensive. I think they took that intensity one step too far with this particular game however, or at least the first level. I understand they want to capture the insanity of war, but the first level has an on-rails section that is such a clusterfuck that I pretty much let go of the controller and let the fact I’m practically invincible on normal carry me through. I was getting shot and blown up from so many directions that it would be almost impossible to deal with it on a clear screen much less with all the vision impairing damage indicators covering the screen. I suppose that is a great way to capture the intensity and craziness of battle, but it wasn’t very much fun and taking three rocket blasts to the face and living sort of kills the immersion a bit. Maybe I should play on Veteran, but I don’t think I have the patience to even attempt to survive that section without the Normal settings huge cushion.

So I guess, as with my Assassin’s Creed 2 initial impressions, I’m once again still excited to play the game, but disappointed by the intro. I saw the beginning of level 2, which starts in the middle of what I think is Siberia. It is definitely going to be a much smaller scale level, possibly a stealthy one, so the game is definitely going to offer up plenty of changes to keep things fresh. That is something Infinity Ward did flawlessly with CoD4, so I’m going to tread on with cautious optimism. If the story and first person narrative techniques are even half as cool as their last game then I’ll be happy. I can’t imagine they’ll top CoD4’s ending, but here’s hoping.

Opinions over Time: Assassin's Creed 2 (Initial Reaction)

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:35:00 +0000

I'm trying something new here that I'll hopefully be able to turn into a regular feature. The idea is I play a game for a little bit and write my immediate reaction to it. Once I'm a good deal farther into the game I'll write up another set of impressions, and finally once I'm finished with the game and have seen the credits roll, I'll post my final thoughts. We might find out that my gut reaction, final thoughts, and everything in between end up being the exact same, which is why I chose not to use Uncharted 2 for my first run at this. That game was fantastic right from the start and just got better and better. Instead I thought I'd give Assassin's Creed 2 and Modern Warfare 2's single player a try and see how varied each of the three articles are. If I end up saying the same thing three times for both games then I'll scrap the idea entirely. Hopefully though, I end up with an interesting progression, we'll see I guess. Let's get started.

So Assassin's Creed 2. I was one of the gamers that landed on the loving side of the Assassin's Creed 1 fence, I recognized it's flaws, but was willing to overlook them. That said, I am not willing to overlook them a second time. Everything I've read about Assassin's Creed 2, and the live demo I saw at PAX make me think I won't have to worry about that. However, I started the game up yesterday afternoon and played for about 2 hours. What I played sadly made me think it really is exactly the same, just in Italy 300 years later. The combat hasn't changed, the free running hasn't changed, and the missions have been a series of deliveries and boring escorts that involve nothing more than walking beside an NPC, at a crawling pace I might add. So I guess those two mission types are new....

Still, I have high hopes for this game. I had been avoiding the hype until I saw the PAX demo and have been super excited ever since. When I turned it off last night I still felt like the tutorial was just barely ending so I'm thinking the real game is about to kick off. I suppose that makes sense for such a huge open world game, but such a long intro was fairly tedious after so recently playing Uncharted 2's ridiculously engaging thirty second opening cutscene that ends leaving you in quite the precarious and playable situation. Hopefully when I give it another spin after work tomorrow I'll get to see all the cool stuff I saw at PAX, and more. I've seen hints of the all the good to come, but hints can only hold me for so long.

Anyway, there's the first thoughts, I'll post further middle impressions once I've had a bit more playtime under my belt. Expect an initial reaction to MW2 first though, since I already started that.

A Worthy Sequel

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:10:00 +0000

A few friends and I went up to the University's computer science lab last night and played some Left4Dead 2. We only played two campaigns, out of order, and shamefully were unable to finish the final onslaught of the second one, but I think I had enough time with it to form an opinion. It has a few problems, but all in all I'd say it is a well done sequel that added more to the franchise in a year than most hyped up two or three year dev cycle sequels do.

First off there are tons of new weapons, they were all right, but most were similar variations of each other, like three versions of a shotgun. The melee weapons felt kind of awkward, but work fantastically when surrounded by swarms of zombies. That and hearing a southerner randomly walk into an abandoned convenience store and yell, "Ninja Sword here!" never really gets old.

The first campaign we did was "Hard Rain" and even though it reused the first two chapters by making you backtrack through them for the next two, the rainstorm changed it so significantly that you could hardly notice. Also the horrible peaks of the storm happening every few minutes definitely kept us on our toes. The second campaign we did was "Dark Carnival" and that one had some pretty incredible environments, including running along a roller coaster track and a finale that I won't spoil. The level design for both campaigns were very reminiscent of some of the more memorable sections of the Half Life series and that's never a bad thing.

Where the game really has a head over it's predecessor however is the AI director. That bastard is harsher than ever before. If anyone happens to fall behind, within a minute he'll have to deal with a Jockey or some other special zombie. Same thing if you pull ahead, you'll find yourself face first in a Chargers giant palm in no time. The whole game just feels more frantic as well. You have to keep moving, dawdling just results in more zombies rushing you, but you also have to stick together. It's the same concepts from the first game, but with the pressure ramped up, combined with less ammo than before. It almost feels like a survival horror game in that respect. Valve turned it up to 11 and the result feels much fresher and newer than the Halo or Gears of War sequels ever did.

Still, the game is not without it's faults. For one, the bare bones emergent narrative structure of the game hasn't changed at all. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I seem to recall Valve saying they were going to put more effort into the story telling this time around. Aside from a few more snarky comments and references to their surroundings from the characters it really hasn't changed.

Also, not really a gameplay issue, but we ran into a number of bugs or glitches while playing. Every now and then, with increasing frequency, the game would temporarily freeze up for one of us while still going for everyone else. I'm not sure if this was a game issue or a lag issue, but it was fairly obnoxious by the end got us killed in more than a couple clutch moments.

The weirdest thing we saw all night was a Witch that would not die. My friend startled her with an incendiary shot, while I blasted her with a shotgun. We both went down, then she started to freak out after she realized she was on fire and wandered around twitching. She continued to do this fire induced animation long after the flames were gone and no longer seemed to have any interest in us. It was quite the glitch.

Faults aside, Left4Dead 2 was not a let down and would have been a pretty ridiculous content pack. The AI director really changed the pacing and the whole game felt kicked up a notch. It's nice to see Valve pushing out quality with some sort of frequency. Now I'd just like to know where the hell is Episode 3?

Breaking the Habit

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:52:00 +0000

A little less than a year ago, so during the Christmas holidays, I was thinking about all the games I had played that year. I realized that since just about every one of them was on the 360, which keeps track of not just when you last played them but when each Achievement was unlocked, I could fairly accurately construct a list of every game I played. This was also the year I got a GameFly subscription, so between the two sources I compiled a list of 63 games I played in 2008, 53 of which I finished, and 5 which I deemed unable to finish such as Warhammer Online. After showing Slevin the list, he constructed a list of his own. Upon further discussion we realized we could probably do the same thing for 2007. I did so and saw I had played significantly less games that year, only 25 that year, 20 of which I finished. There's actually a few reasons I played so few games in 2007, but I'd rather not get into them.

Since I was making this list at the end of the year, I naturally saw the increasing pattern and thought I could best 2008 in 2009. I wanted to finish more than 53 games, the goal I vaguely thought about was 60, but I would be content with anything over 53. As of now I'm at 48 and am quite confident I'll pass 53, but most likely won't hit the 60 I was originally on track for.

So now that I've had you read all that back story, let me get to the point. The combination of a GameFly account, which is most worthwhile when you beat games rapidly, and my goal to finish a fairly exorbitant amount of games has resulted in me plowing through about a game a week. That's fine, I have no problem with playing that much if I can find the time, but it also meant that any game I had a decent amount of time invested in had to be finished. I hated the idea of spending 5 or 10 hours on a game and not being able to add it to my finished list for any number of reasons. This of course led me to finish some games I thoroughly did not enjoy, such as Majora's Mask or Velvet Assassin.

Until one game finally made me realize how ludicrous this had all become. I have spent around 40 hours playing this game, and am on the final boss. I can't beat him without several hours of grinding, either leveling my current party or leveling a healer class I never needed until now to catch up to my current party. I can't do this very easily in the final dungeon without straying ridiculously far from a save crystal, and the game has a tendency to freeze on my Xbox. This basically makes grinding impossible and I think I'm finally willing to accept that I can't beat this game.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the game is absolute crap. I knew it wasn't for me early on, and discovered after about a third of the way through that it wasn't going to get any better. The story continued to get more and more ridiculous and incoherent while the pacing got more and more grueling. It pretty much turned into a few hour dungeon crawl followed by almost an hour of nonsensical plot revealing cutscenes with some of the worst dialogue and acting I've ever seen.

I know this just sounds dumb, but I've seriously been blindly determined enough (or maybe just stupid enough) to play games I've despised for several hours all year long. It's not as bad as it sounds, because I generally won't play a game unless I know I will like it, but I still have probably spent at least 50 hours playing crap. 80% of which was probably this game alone.

This raised an interesting question for me however. I've always been of the opinion that a game, book, movie or whatever should be judged as a whole. It's served me well in the past with games like Mass Effect and The Darkness. I didn't really like either game going in, but ended up really enjoying them by the end. Same with a few books, Dune in particular, which is now one of my favorite science fiction books ever. It starts off quite slow, but it's quite necessary and completely worth it in the end.

So where do I draw the line? The game that I decided not to finish was an easy decision because I knew pretty early on it was only going to get worse and sure enough, it did. I'm on the final boss and I can safely say I have no idea what's going on and no huge amount of boring cutscenes after the fight will make it any better, but what about the games like Mass Effect? With my new willingness to quit games when I don't like them I could easily quit potentially great games in disgust before I ever really figure them out, but if I want to quit the game in disgust, how can it possibly be worth finishing? Maybe disgust is too harsh a word, Mass Effect was never that bad, I just thought the combat was clumsy and the story wasn't terribly engaging, but by the end I really enjoyed both. Star Ocean 4 on the other hand, the previously mentioned game that I arbitrarily left nameless until now, was freaking terrible and it was quite obvious it wasn't going to get any better.

So I guess I should thank Tri-Ace for creating a game I hated so much that it broke my habit of finishing every game I start. Or maybe I should thank Microsoft for making their early Xbox 360's so shoddy that I can't play the shitty game for more than an hour without it freezing. I might have actually tried grinding in an attempt to beat the final boss if it weren't for the game freezing far more frequently than it's inconveniently placed save crystals.

Either way, it's crappy design that made this all possible, which I find fairly amusing.

Animation killed the Infected Super Soldier... Star

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 04:05:00 +0000

I encountered something in a game the other day that has never really been an issue for me before. The game was Prototype, and as my fairly cryptic title may or may not convey, its player character animations were often a problem when choosing my tactics. They all shared one common problem.

They were too damn long.

All the crucial animations such as absorbing someone to regain health wrench control from the player for a few seconds, but leave them vulnerable to attack during that time. Often times I would lose more health during the act of consuming someone than I gained from doing so. Even worse, sometimes I would be hit so hard that the animation wouldn't complete and I would be left with significantly less health than when I started.

I didn't really notice this as a problem early on, but the farther I got into Prototype, the more crap the game threw at me. By the end of the game I was often fighting off multiple helicopters, tanks, infantry, infantry with rocket launchers, and super soldiers or giant infected monsters called hunters. Most of these guys direct attacks will knock the player back and when enough are firing at once Alex (the player character) can quickly become what feels like a ping pong ball. This means stopping for even a split second can have pretty devastating results, yet several moves require three to five seconds of extremely vulnerable stationary actions. To make matters worse, all the best moves, the Devastator attacks, require a certain amount of health and then a charge period of a few seconds. If you are lucky enough to consume enough people to get your health up past the midway point, often times you'll take enough damage during the charge up to fail the attack completely.

This resulted in several missions devolving into me reusing the same move over and over again. For example, one of the very last missions had me chasing one tank, and destroying all his friend tanks whenever he stopped with to try to thwart me. Earlier in the game I would have just jacked one of the tanks, used it to blow the other three up and then moved on. Or maybe I would have used my Hammerfist power and pounded them into the ground. I could have jacked a helicopter and blown the three up that way as well. Devastator attacks also would probably end the entire confrontation and the rest of the city block in one foul swoop. Yet none of these were possible. The tank jacking animation takes so long that my character can only try it once before having to go hide and regenerate health. Everytime I tried ended with a rocket to the face knocking me clear off the tank and ending the jacking sequence. Helicopter jackings are a bit faster, but often times ended with the helicopter propeller first in a building with every enemy targetting it, meaning I'd have about three seconds before the damn thing explodes. Landing near the tanks to punch them with the Hammerfist power lends itself nicely to that whole ping pong effect I was talking about earlier and I've already explained why the Devastator attack was a no go.

I found one feasible option. Basically Alex dive bombs from a glide headfirst into the ground, damaging anything in a fairly small radius. It looks awesome and is really fun to do, but aiming it is quite difficult. Also, the novelty of the move wore off after the fifth attempt to blow up the twelfth tank of the mission. By the end I was able to run up a skyscraper and nosedive perfectly on top of a tank from a hundred stories above, destroying it and everything nearby, but doing the same pattern over and over again for ten minutes is just not fun.

It's obvious why Radical chose this route for Prototype. By allowing the protagonist access to as many awesome powers as he has, they almost made him invincible. Of course that may lead to some boring game design, running around as an unstoppable God is fun, but gets old fairly fast. To counter this they just threw more and more enemies into the mix until it was just unfair. If they had just made the animations for all the moves mentioned above twice as fast, or made the player invulnerable during them I think all my gripes would be solved. This would allow all the fun and useful moves to be actually usable during the times they were most needed, while still having the fear and danger of an entire army trying to stop you.

I never thought something as simple as animation length could have some a huge impact on gameplay, but Prototype proves it does.

P.S. Despite it's irrelevance to everything, I feel obligated to mention I think I liked Prototype better than inFAMOUS, but Red Faction: Guerrilla was better than both. ;)

I don't want to talk about it

noreply@blogger.com (Jebus) — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:39:00 +0000

The other day I was reading Sexy Videogameland when a particular part of one of Leigh’s articles grabbed my attention. “Sometimes I wish "people in the real world" were more interested in video games, so that I could talk about 'em with them. Other times, I wish they'd never talk about them ever-ever.” I found this very amusing because I’m the same way. I love talking about games, but I’ve found as I get to know more and more about them, who is making what, new trends and gameplay experiments, and what’s on the horizon that I’m less and less inclined to talk about games with the casual audience.

Anytime anyone new wanders into my living room, which happens fairly often, I have three roommates and a no knocking policy with all my friends (we’re too lazy to get up just to let our friends in), they immediately see two things. One is the giant mural of Hedonism Bot on the wall, whom I aspire to be someday. The other is my game setup, there’s a large TV sitting above all three current gen consoles and a giant receiver, which immediately tells the person that someone residing in our home likes to play video games. The first question out of their mouths, assuming it isn’t related to Hedonism Bot (he’s kind of distracting), is who owns all the gaming stuff. Once informed they proceed to tell me all about how much they love Call of Duty 4, or Halo, or whatever one game they play incessantly. This is great, I’m glad more and more people are discovering video games as a form of entertainment, but the gaming conversations I crave are generally not of that nature.

I’m not entirely sure how to continue this article without sounding like a pretentious gamer nerd, but we’ll give it a shot. As I’ve gotten more and more obsessed with gaming and its culture I’ve found fewer and fewer people to converse with about it. I suppose that goes with the territory of being knowledgeable about anything, but with games it has gotten to the point that I only know maybe one person that isn’t from the internet that can hold their own in a conversation. I’ll be damned if I ever run into another person in close proximity to me that knows what ludonarrative dissonance is all about. Well, that one is pretty damn abstract, I’m not even sure Slevin and Squash know what the hell that one is all about, but my point still stands. I’m so desperately lonely! ;)

Seriously though, it’s gotten to the point with me now that I just sort of tune out and let whoever is excited about Call of Duty ramble on for awhile and then we talk about something else. Even my local gamer friends, most of which have now moved away, tended to rely on me for their gaming news and weren’t all that interested in anything but the fun.

At the risk of sounding anymore elitist, I think I’m going to cut this article short. Let’s just conclude it with it being a good thing for the internet otherwise I’d probably never have found people with the same sort of common interest as me. Ironically, without the net, I can’t imagine I’d have ever even discovered the very thing I’m interested in. Without it, I’m sure it’d be another couple of decades before an intelligent discussion of video games became prevalent in academia and the published world.