Jeuissance

Lux Pain, Podcast, etc!

2009-04-24T07:37:00.000-07:00

I've got a couple of content-related things right now!

First is a review at Battlereports about the awful DS game Lux-Pain.

Second, my friend and I have started a podcast called Cartridge Blowers. You can hear the first episode here. I'm proud of this, though there are a lot of obvious audio problems that we'll improve on as it goes on. We're going to be doing this weekly.

Gamewise, I am totally loving Tales of Legendia, though I am not sure why exactly. I hope to figure that out in the next few weeks. I'm also in the middle of the third Phoenix Wright game.

I suppose I should play something more recent...but why? Oh, right, so I can write up some reviews to be posted elsewhere. People may be interested in older games, but they may not pay you for your opinion on them any more...

I beat a game!!: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorny: Justice for All

2009-04-11T11:16:00.001-07:00

Almost as good as the first game--it's Capcom, guys, so there's not going to be that much in the way of innovation. The major addition is the Psyche-lock system. At certain points during the investigation, a bunch of locks appear superimposed over the character you're talking to, and you've got to question them to get them to open up. It becomes a little mini-trial sequence, except without the guarantee in the trials that you have everything you need. It ensures you know what's going on a little better: if you're in a trial and completely stuck, you can scrub everything against a witness and eventually get through; if you haven't investigated the proper things, you won't be able to beat a psyche-lock. And it's friendly enough to let you back out and try again if you don't think you're ready enough.

The cases simply aren't as intriguing as the ones in the first game, until you get to the last one, which features a lot of really cool twists and exciting things. So far it's the best case in the series. I'm told that the third game is just as good if not better, so I'm excited for it.

The translation is not nearly as good--the localizers seem to think that commas are excellent (there's a ton of "What are you doing Phoenix" type things) and the phrase "What in the world..." is used pretty much every other line. And there's the infamous "the miracle never happen" from one of the game over screens. It's a shame because, at least as far as I remember, the translation of the first was excellent. It's not that this was a bad translation--it just needed a good editor. Which is why I really should be hired by some game company--I'd much rather review videogames than software manuals like I do.

That's the one problem with games like this: they're so similar to their predecessors that there's really nothing new to say about it. But again, I like the series so much that I'm excited for the third and fourth.

I Beat a game!!: Dragon Quest V

2009-04-10T07:54:00.001-07:00

...but you won't be able to read about it here. My Dragon Quest V review is up at a new site called BattleReports, and here is the link:

http://www.battlereports.tv/?p=1748

I think I did a good job with it; it's nice to know I can still write a proper review when I need to.

Why I stopped playing: Castlevania Double Pack

2009-03-20T09:13:00.001-07:00

With the amount of enjoyment I got out of Order of Ecclesia, I definitely wanted to get into the rest of the series. So I was at the mall and saw Castlevania Double Pack--which contains Harmony of Dissonance and Aria of Sorrow--for about $10 and picked it up.

It's a very big disappointment.

Harmony of Dissonance I spent the most time with. It's not a great game by any means, made even worse by the fact that there's way too much backtracking through two versions of the same castle. I found myself aimlessly wandering, and frankly, if I'm not sure where exactly to go, I don't want to spend ten minutes going from one end of the ugly graphics to the other. The music is awful; I don't like to play games without their intended soundtrack, so I won't just put on regular music, but this was ridiculous.

And the game contains the stupidest sidequest I've ever seen. You find a few items of furniture--a chair, a statue, some sconces--and when you go into a certain room, your character says something to the effect of, "This is a nice room, but it needs furnishing!" And you drop off all of your furniture items and they are arranged for you. You even get items like full-length mirrors and king-sized beds. The thought of a character traipsing around fighting monsters while carrying around a bed, only to furnish a room in Dracula's fucking castle is just...ludicrous, and in a very very bad way. It doesn't even pretend it's in a semi-scary game--it even bypasses camp entirely. And from what I've seen on gamefaqs, the sidequest...seems to give no reward whatsoever.

Aria of Sorrow fares slightly better, but it also has the problem of backtracking and not knowing exactly where to go. I'm fine with a huge sprawling castle, but I don't like wandering aimlessly. At least there are teleportation points in this one. Still, I didn't find the action nearly as compelling as I did Ecclesia. I liked the satellite areas as well as the castle in that.

I think the structure of Ecclesia with a slightly different flow would be an ideal game for me--where you have the gigantic castle and the other outside areas...except instead of, as in Ecclesia, you go from one area to the other linearly, you can explore all areas at once, collecting items at your leisure.

I'm going to give Symphony of the Night a try, since most people consider that the finest game in the series, and I'm actually very interested in Portrait of Ruin, but I'm not holding out terribly much hope.

I guess I just like a lot of focus in my games--I like to know that there are distinct goals for me to get. "Sprawl around this castle" is not a focused game for me--neither is "randomly investigate until you find stuff." Eccelsia had that focus: through the first part of the game, for the most part, you're chasing another character, and you go from location to location to find him. During the second half, you have Dracula's Castle, which is slightly more linear than its incarnations in Harmony and Aria; however, while it takes as much time to finish Dracula's Castle as it does the entire rest of the game, storywise it's set up as the climax. Rather than a sprawling world, conquering this one castle is itself a goal, and I like that a lot better. I guess that's why sandbox and sim games don't appeal to me--I want to be told what to do. And yet I somewhat disliked Bioshock. Go figure.

I beat a game!!: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

2009-03-19T20:50:00.000-07:00

Excellent, excellent game. I'm not sure why I never had an interest in the Phoenix Wright series; I bought a copy of Trials and Tribulations for my friend who was in law school (I didn't realize that there was an overarching storyline through it), but never had much of an interest until I saw a friend playing Apollo Justice, and it looked fun as hell. It took me about a month to track down the first game, and it's one of those rare games that was worth the wait.

My criticisms are minor and mostly relate to the investigation portions of the game. The trials are goddamn exciting--battle motion lines and exaggerated reations, it's like an anime battle scene, made even more ludicrous by the fact that this is done in a courtroom. (I was on jury duty recently; it was a LASIK malpractice case, much lower stakes than the murder cases in the game, but I can tell you that this is how lawyers actually act.) One mistake too many and the entire case is lost. The investigation sequences are...much less well-paced--there's no tension, basically you're bumming around looking for clues. The trial sequences move forward of their own accord; here, if you're not sure what to do, the game grinds to a halt. Still, everything was well-designed enough that I only got stuck to the point of viewing gamefaqs twice--both times in the fifth case. (Once, I didn't pixel-hunt properly--there's a surprisingly awesome lack of that in the most part of the game, and I might have simply been lazy; the second time was because I got confused by the navigation and didn't visit an entire location.)

The fifth case is exclusive to the DS remake--the game originally came out for the GBA--and it's...kind of a mixed bag. The first four stories are much more obviously connected--they form an arc of their own--and especially at first, the fifth case seems to be just thrown in there as bonus content. Your main sidekick through the main game leaves at the end of Case 4...and is replaced by a character who looks very much like her (it's commented on in-game), and yet is incredibly annoying at first. (She grows on you.) However, they do manage to make the fifth case tie in a little more deeply to the characters' arcs--it explores some facets of their personalities, and ends up working well. And it is hard--I think I spent about as much time on the fifth case as I did the first four cases combined.

To criticize the legal system in the game as ridiculous is missing the point--of course it's ridiculous. Trials cannot last more than three days, defendants are guilty until proven innocent, evidence law can be covered in exactly two sentences, there is no jury, lawyers seem to concentrate mostly on pointing out logical flaws...and yet, it amounts to a more fun and interesting game than a straight legal sim would be. And I like the idea of a court that throws around confetti when a defendant is found not guilty. The localization is excellent; I grew up in the days of the NES and never managed to learn to take for granted that a tradition would not be all "A WINNER IS YOU."

About the only real hinderance to enjoyment I found was the text speed. Phoenix Wright is one of those games where the text types out one letter at a time. I've taken a few speed-reading tests online and generally score between 400-600 words per minute; I could read the sentences about six times in the amount of time it takes to type it out. They use the speed to great effect--excited characters type their text out very very quickly, and when a character is carefully musing on something, the text is slower--but still, it makes replaying sections tedious. I savescummed not because I thought the game was too hard, but because I didn't want to stay and read the fucking text over and over again.

I don't know if that was fixed or not in the sequels, or if navigation is made easier--but I'll spend another month hunting down the second game in order to find out.

OVERWHELMED

2009-03-09T06:57:00.000-07:00

This weekend I made the mistake of buying three games--Tales of Symphonia (played about two hours of it as a rental a few years ago; was unimpressed, especially with the storyline, and then I read that the story is basically "cliched as hell for about five hours then turns INCREDIBLY screwy, so why not; I'm about five hours in and waiting for the screwy, though there have been some very dark notes here and there), Tales of Legendia (I wanted to try a Tales game, in any case, and I liked the idea of the setting of this one), and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (which I've been searching for for about a month; I saw a friend playing Apollo Justice and it seemed really cool.) I went to about five different stores on Saturday looking for any one of them and found Symphonia; I only bought the other two because I was at the mall with my parents and saw both and figured, okay, save myself future effort.

I started Phoenix Wright and am enjoying it a lot--it reminds me very much of the kids' PC game Eagle Eye Mysteries (I should give that another go, I have fond memories of it.) I'm about 5-6 hours into Symphonia. I played about an hour of Legendia, just so I could say I have; I'm going to hold off on that until I beat or give up on Symphonia.

So right now, I am in the middle of the following games:

PS2:
Dragon Quest 8
Persona 4

Gamecube:
Tales of Symphonia

Wii:
Zak and Wiki
Dragon Quest Swords (though I might move that into the "given up on" pile)

DS:
Retro Game Challenge
Dragon Quest 5 (I just have the bonus dungeon left to do)
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

(That list is completely out of sync with the list in the right sidebar, I know...)

On top of all of that, I preordered the snazzy red limited edition RE5 XBox 360 bundle, which comes out Friday midnight. I am completely overwhelmed by gaming. I ought to be able to knock off at least the DS pile by then, and I could officially decide to give up on DQSwords...and that still leaves 4 games, 3 of which are long-ass RPGs.

I think I need to take a week off, disconnect my computer and my phone, and do nothing but game. Or move back in with my parents and just play. That could be fun...

I beat a game!!: Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

2009-03-02T16:53:00.000-08:00

I've never been the hugest Castlevania fan; if I'm playing a platformer, I want it to be based on jumping more than fighting enemies. Mario has enemies, but they're distractions between jumps; Castlevania tips the balance in favor of the enemies. At least, that's the feeling I got from playing the old games. The physics were off--I know it's impossible in real life to be able to change direction mid-jump, but since when have videogames been about real-life physics? The controls have always felt awkward to me. I haven't played a Castlevania game since III--maybe I played a little of Super Castlevania, I can't remember--and for the most part the series has passed me by completely.

But a friend recommended Ecclesia to me, and an episode of the Game Overthinker featured some footage and it looked AWESOME. For--I paid something like $20-25 for it--I figured I could take a chance on the series, and holy wow am I glad I did.

Order of Eccelsia is possibly the finest game I have played in a VERY long time. The day I got it was a Sunday; I logged about 8 straight hours of playing it. Yeah. I have not felt compelled to spend that long on a game in years. I was liking it that much. I played until my thumbs were literally in pain. And the next day--I was on a jury and there was a lot of time spent in waiting rooms--I logged another couple of hours. I played the hell out of this game. While I didn't get all of the collectables--I really rarely do in anything--I've seen all of the content I feel like seeing.

The closest thing to a flaw that the game has--and this will sound strange because everyone you've talked to is talking about how tough it is--is that the last few stages were not nearly as tough as the first few. I faced one boss SEVEN TIMES in a row, dying and immediately challenging him again and dying and immediately challenging him again. I didn't find that in the latter stages. I'm not sure if it's a balance issue or due to the fact that in the latter stages of the game I was finally able to afford potions, but who knows. There's always Hard Mode.

I beat a game!!: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

2009-02-08T22:26:00.000-08:00

Yeah, Metroid Prime 3, the same game I said was broken and awful.

I dunno, I decided to give it another shot. I think my main problem was being too reticent at Hypermode the first time around--I think when the plot of a game tells me "this attack, though useful, can kill you," I don't use it much. I had the same exact problem with Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, though that one was a little more insistent in its rationing of its Omega 13.

This time around I only died once--actually by getting corrupted during the last level of the game--and managed to get all but 2 of the pickups. (I've tried. I've searched every corner of the game I can think of and just...can't...find...them. Who knows.)

The game, again, has the same problems that Prime 2: Echoes had--namely, that it's not Metroid Prime 1. When you begin a series/subseries with such a bang, anything is going to be a disappointment. I really enjoyed exploring and scanning and finding out the storyline from logs in the first...here it's more of a chore than anything else. The fact that the game is told through a lot of cutscenes is, as I'd said, a downfall: it's just not as creepy as I want a Metroid game to be.

It's particularly interesting: in several areas, after you've cleared the major threats, the Galactic Federation establishes a little presence there to keep the peace--so you see soldiers walking around. On one hand it's a nice touch--it makes you feel that you're genuinely making some changes to the environment--but on the other hand, any threat that was there is neutralized.

I'm slightly on the fence about the fact that you get to travel between several planets in this game, though I'm leaning toward disliking it. The fact that there are loading times disguised as unskippable cutscenes of your ship flying to the next place is part of my antipathy. You will see these cutscenes MANY times. They get really old really fast. The scope of the game might be bigger than the others and if they were all connected it would get annoying to walk from one end of the planet to the other--but Tallon IV was a large planet--so, in its way, was Aether, though not as successful--and now we have several smaller planets. It isn't as impressive to have all of these subareas.

But on the whole I did enjoy my time through Prime 3 this time around. It would have been nice, given the new controls, to have a redesigned system: Prime 1 was a complete reimagining of Metroid for the Gamecube. This was not as dramatic: it was a simple remapping. But it brought the subseries to a satisfying conclusion, and I'll be interested to see what they do next. Hooray Metroid.

I beat a game!!: Dragon Quest IV

2008-11-07T08:26:00.000-08:00

Well, let's just say I take back a lot of what I said: I don't necessarily hate the RPG genre, I hate its bloat under the reign of Final Fantasy. I'm not interested in tedious sidequests, or long drawn-out storylines, or playing for 70 hours just to get through the main quest.

Dragon Quest IV is an RPG without the bloat. I made it through the main quest in a little under 20 hours, and it took me another 3-4 to finish the bonus dungeon and get the secret ending, and I enjoyed pretty much every minute of it. There is no padding, no overly-long dungeons, no extraneous levels. Part of this is faithfulness to the original game it's a remake of--which was made right around the time RPG Bloat was discovered--but part of it is the fact that Dragon Warrior, even in its 100+ hour seventh incarnation, simply prides itself on the fact that it is simple, stripped-down, old-school.

In 1992 I was too young to get games on the day they were released--pre-orders didn't exist that I was aware of, and I was dependent on pooling allowance and begging my folks for money and to drive me to the store--but I'd been anxiously awaiting the game since it was announced. Previews were not the prominent irrelevancy that they are today, and I didn't have much more information than a notice in Nintendo Power to the effect of, "Dragon Warrior IV is coming out!" I got the game soon after it was released and it kicked me in the face, with its structure, with the simple hugeness of the world.

DWIV's main conceit is its chapter system. When you begin the game, you get to name and gender your hero, and you won't see him or her for a very long time (unless you're playing the remake, where you get a 5-minute prologue showing the hero in his hometown.) The first four chapters of the game each take place in a different area of the world (with a few overlaps) and star a different main character. It's like a collection of short stories--each has a goal which ranges from a simple "go on an adventure to prove yourself" to a more elaborate "find out who killed your father and go and get revenge." Behind the scenes, the overarching plot begins to bubble up--you begin to hear whispers of someone named Saro, begin to learn about the chosen hero, begin to realize that the forces of darkness are gathering. Each of the characters ends his or her story knowing their journey has just begun, and resolves to do something about the evil that is about to awaken and destroy their land. In the fifth and longest chapter (longer than the other chapters combined), you finally get control of the hero you named at the beginning, and the first half of this quest is to find the other characters to form your party.

At the time, nothing like this had been seen in RPGs or otherwise--the most elaborate narrative structures were either "go through the same amount of levels but pick a different character to go through each" (Mario 2) or "select your stage from a menu" (Mega Man). I've always been a sucker for multiple points of view--not sure if Dragon Warrior IV started this love or if I love the game because of it, but whatever--and this was one of the most sophisticated structures I'd seen. It makes the threat to the world seem much more dangerous--people from all over are becoming aware of it, and we get to see it build up from a personal threat (the kidnapping of children from a small remote village) to a worldwide one. It also services the non-Hero party members much greater than any other game. DW4's immediate predecessor allowed you to form your party from random adventurers--you picked a name, gender, and class and that was ALL you learned about the person. Here, rather than passively learning their backstory through flashbacks or dialogue or whatever, you actively participated in How We Got Here. And rather than simply supporting the hero, the characters are shown to be perfectly competent and capable on their own before they meet him.

I remember the game being extremely hard, a few dungeons in particular; it took me over a year to get to the final boss and I still have never defeated him on my original cartridge. In contrast, I made it through the main quest of the remake in about a week, with another week (of admittedly less-concentrated play) to get through the bonus dungeon. The final boss kicked my ass on the first try; after about a half hour or so of levelling, I beat him on my second. I'm not sure if I've just gotten more used to levelling up--when I was a kid I would try to avoid it as much as possible, and now, even though I'm not grinding's biggest fan, I recognize that it needs to be done sometimes--or if they've tweaked the system to make it easier. Possibly a combination. Finally beating Necrosaro was almost sad. It's like the conversation between Bud and Elle Driver in the trailer in Kill Bill 2--Do you feel relief, or regret? Necrosaro was one enemy from childhood I could never kill, and now I've done it.

Necrosaro has the most sympathetic backstory in the Dragon Warrior series. For the most part, the villian is a Big Hulking Evil who wants to Destroy Everything because he is Evil. (And the vast, vast majority of these Big Hulking Evils turn out to be controlled by a Bigger Hulking Evil who is More Evil than you could imagine.) Saro is different. He's got the general monster contempt for humanity and an insatiable ambition and lust for power, true, but he's in love with an elf woman that cries rubies. Because of her talent, she's cruelly abused by greedy humans and eventually killed. Her mistreatment and eventual death drive him insane and lead him to believe that humans need to be purged from the world. It ain't Dickens, but by 1992 standards it's impressive. The bonus dungeon--which you need to go through either six or seven times if you want to get the best equipment--lets you find a way to resurrect the elf. It turns out that Saro's been manipulated by one of his generals--a mini-boss character that you face earlier--who turns out to be the true villain of the game. Saro joins your party for revenge, and he's a tough little guy. It's very weird--I've always been fond of the-enemy-of-my-enemy teamups--but this is a guy I've cursed for the past 16 years, and now he wants to join my party?! Although I guess that's kind of the point. The bonus boss is a simple pallate swap of the final, and that's disappointing too--it'd be cool to have some new and more horrible design--and he went down on my first try. (I had made my way through the bonus dungeon those 7 times, had the best possible equipment in the game, and was very overlevelled, but still.)

But I do like that I could have all the best equipment. The hero's legendary equipment is gained through the normal course of the game; Saro's ultimate is gained through the aforementioned 7 trips through the bonus dungeon; everyone else's is either found in treasure boxes or bought from stores. There are two major sidequests in the game--one involves scouring the world for medals which can be traded in for better equipment, and I got most of those; the other involves finding people around the world in order to grow a town, and you're given clues as to where they are. I like this very very much. The game can be completed to perfection without a guide if you're in an exploring mood--nothing is vague or bizarrely clued or arbitrary. There's no clicking on every single pixel on a wall to see if there's a secret there. RPGs should be this way. To me, who does not have the time or the ambition to dodge 100 lightning bolts, a game like this feels challenging--I do have to explore and find stuff--but not frustrating--everything's findable. Again, the original game came out before RPG Bloat.

The Final Fantasy IV DS remake felt useless--it was in a way too faithful in that it kept all of the problems of the original and what it added was stupid. DWIV's remake keeps everything that was good in the game, and fixes any problems it has by virtue of being almost 20 years old: battles are streamlined, the Tactics system is fixed (originally, in Chapter 5 you could only have your characters be computer-controlled and you only manually controlled the hero in battles. It's handy when levelling or going through random encounters, but a lot of the characters ended up doing stupid things like wasting turns and MP casting Instant Death spells on the final boss. You can now have the option to manually control everyone, which makes bosses a LOT easier), there's an excellent map screen, there's a bag (Dragon Warrior has always had a limited inventory for each character; since VII, I believe, they've added a bag which never gets filled; it's balanced by not letting you access it during battle, so you've still got to manage your character inventories), walking is fast, the graphics are excellent. Polygons only vaguely make sense as far as the DS is concerned--although I'll usually come on sprite graphics' side whenever possible--because with the system's power, it's a lot easier to make good-looking sprite graphics than it is to make good-looking polygon graphics. FFIVDS comes across looking ugly and dated; DWIVDS looks fresher and prettier.

I'm mildly excited about the remake of V coming out--it's not my favorite in the series but it's not a bad one--and I'm extremely thrilled for the upcoming remake of VI, which I've played and loved (it's got a job system! I'm a sucker for job systems!) IVDS does exactly what a good remake should--it stays close enough to the game to give the same sense of it, but makes enough changes that it still feels fresh. It does not stray so far that it feels like a different game, but is not so slavish that it keeps what sucks.

It seems the Enix branch, then, knows what it's doing a little better than the Square branch.

Ugh, Passage. Ugh.

2008-11-06T06:22:00.001-08:00

Are people seriously still convinced that Jason Roher's Passage is a brilliant artistic work? Like, seriously, it's late 2008 and we still believe this?

I'm actually sick of most "art games" in general--there have only been a handful that I've actively enjoyed. Mighty Jill Off is perhaps the best of them--it manages both to make an interesting parallel between a queer/lesbian SM aesthetic and the inherent concept of "games as a hopefully-increasing challenge put upon us by a higher authority" and somehow it's still a hell of a fun game. That's an exception.

The La La Land series, heavily recommended by MJO's author, I found to be completely incoherent and unplayable--to the extent where there were goals and controls, they were actively unfriendly. I dimly understood that the author was making some sort of comment about game goals and game controls, but it was made with such carefully-studied ineptness that whatever he was trying to say was lost. I've used programs such as Game Maker before and I know it takes a lot of talent to suck so much at design.

Rod Humble's games (The Marriage and Stars Over Half Moon Bay) are also cited as textbook art-game examples, and both are terrible--too abstract, too fuzzy and unclear.

But Passage is the worst of the lot. There's the old playground joke about Sonic the Hedgehog that Nintendo supporters would say--in Mario, you get to explore and shit. In Sonic, all you have to do to win the game is hold right and you'll be at the end of the level. Well, in Passage, that's pretty much what you have to do to win. You're in a very simple maze and you have to get to the end. Your character starts off as a child on the left side of the screen and by the time you finally make it to the end of the maze, you're an old man. There are tiny little diversions--you can get a wife, who follows you for the entirety of the game until she dies of old age, and you can get little treasure chests which do nothing. That's the entire game. If you hold right, with the exception of a couple of roadblocks which you navigate around, you will get to the end.

I know, I know, not the point. It's Symbolic. The maze symbolizes your Journey through Life. Many "players" (I use the term loosely since I'm not 100% sure it's a game, but I don't want to get into that argument today) report tearing up when the wife died because she's with you the entire game and then...not. The treasure chests represent random goals that you can achieve.

I do find this an extremely nihilistic interpretation of life. The characters are given no characterization whatsoever--I'm not so much upset with that per se. Cutscenes would be inappropriate. [Though it's not like games have been unable to convey emotion without words and cutscenes. ICO is the gold standard for this--most of the characterization of Yorda (and Yorda and Ico's relationship) is done wordlessly, through the way the two interact; Roher seems to be unable to do this--partially because he has chosen such a simple and retro style which does not physically allow for much interaction.] But as it is, the wife is just a sprite. And the protagonist is not me--I'm not heterosexual or married, and I don't feel interested in doing the work to mentally substitute "male partner" for "female wife" in my mind--I do enough of that crap when listening to music. So ultimately the game seems to be saying that marriage is meaningless--there is no benefit to having a wife. Fact is, in traditional game terms, it's a disadvantage--it slows down your character speed, and certain paths with treasures are unattainable. Even getting those treasures is pointless. Some of the chests are empty, symbolizing, according to the author's statement, that "not every pursuit leads to a reward---most of them are empty"--but there is no particular difference between getting every reward and getting none at all. In other words, there's no point in accomplishing anything. He who dies with the most toys still dies.

But I'm not living a life, much as Roher would have me believe. I'm doing something similar to playing a game. Videogames' most obvious inherent trait is their interactivity (I'm convinced that bit is completely grammatically wrong, but if Roher can throw out all the rules of videogames and get acclaim, I can through out the rules of grammar), we all know this, and the point of games is to convey delight through that interactivity. While many games do have cosmetic awards--unlocking an alternate costume for your character if you kill enough monsters, for example--that can be successful, games are at their best when they reward in a system of gameplay advantages and disadvantages. (I'd go to say that cosmetic awards are the lowest form of reward--altering the sprite with no particular gameplay advantage or disadvantage. It just gives you something different to look at.) Mighty Jill Off rewards good progress by making its levels harder--which fits its theme (masochism) perfectly--the more pain a bottom takes, the more a good top will respond by increasing that pain; a masochist will find that pain pleasurable, and dammit, we do to when playing the game: the difficulty spikes every level and gives the impression of, yes, now I have to use all of my reflexes here, now I have to step up to this challenge that's been given me. Most good games do this ramping in difficulty; while the balance isn't always as good in MJO, a well-crafted game will teach you to play itself. It'll present you with a challenge that you have to solve; the next level will be harder and you've got to apply what you learned in the last level plus come up with some new techniques. If the character's moveset is static throughout the game, this is the best way of giving reward to the player.

With a dynamic moveset, you've got a few more options--namely, giving more toys to the player. Zelda and Metroid work this way--you do a challenge, and you get a new weapon, or more energy or ammunition. Obviously this can tie in with cosmetic rewards and difficulty ramps--sometimes learning a new technique proposes its own challenges. In its best incarnation, which is the Spinner from Twilight Princess (a toy so awesome that my best friend and I were moved to dub it The Coolington), it provides a new technique, shows you a cool picture, and gives you a new type of level to worry about.

Passage attempts to give all of these and fails. Having a wife in tow is a cosmetic award, but since the sprites are so stripped-down (I'll get more into that later) and since it conveys a strong disadvantage as far as pure gameplay goes, it's not that great of one. It attempts to ramp up the difficulty--it adds more roadblocks as the game goes on--but it's neither challenging nor pleasurable, it just means you have to tap up or down a little more often than just tapping right. And it attempts to give you toys--the treasures--but since they don't do anything, what the hell is the point?

Many art games are done in a retro pixelly style [partially to tap into nostalgia, partially because they're generally made by one person and simple sprites are easier to do without a graphics team], and Passage is no exception. The problem is Roher's art is just plain ugly to me. It's like he's trying to tap into the Iconic--as Scott McCloud and several papers I wrote in grad school will tell you, the more stripped down an image gets, the more likely you are to identify with it--but failing greatly. I'd go to say the graphics are too stripped down. McCloud identifies two dots and a curved line--the clasic smily face--as the most iconic you can get within cartooning; a single large pixel (remember Atari 2600 days?) is the most iconic you can get within videogames. But there's such a thing as too iconic--when something gets to that level of abstraction, it stops being something to identify with and starts going to be a symbol. That dot represents an adventurer, Roher's art represents a man on a life journey; both are too roughly-drawn to do the work of being a shell to put ourselves into. If he's trying to create empathy, he's failed: it almost seems like he's drawing in his style because That's What Art Games Do rather than because it helps his theme. The Marriage features geometric shapes as its "characters"--and we see them as geometric shapes rather than the types of people he's making a comment about. It doesn't work; it's about as emotional as an Excel chart. Facade, which features distinctive characters (except for the protagonist, who's first-person and faceless and designed to be an avatar of the player), manages to create more empathy because it gives you something to hang emotions on. Passage is alienating.

I'm just the most familiar with Passage, but the same could be said about most Art Games, and it's a damn shame, because there is a need for more sophistication in videogames. But it just seems they concentrate too much on the "art" and not enough on the "games." A game is fundamentally interactive and the joy comes from that interactivity. Story, we have found, can be incidental to an excellent game--"save the princess" was the cliche of 80s and early 90s gaming, and the games were often fun--but gameplay cannot--there's a reason that Interactive Movies failed. Using interactivity to tell a story and create emotions and empathy has been done before many times--we wouldn't be playing games if this weren't the case--and Passage most emphatically does not do that: it's an exercise in tedium and pretentiousness with no point to back it up.

So guys, stop getting hysterical about how "great" it is.

Tell your children not to walk my way.

2008-10-17T21:03:00.000-07:00

Mother 3 translation patch is now out!

This is one of those exciting things that everyone on the 'net is talking about, and for good reason: I'm two hours in and it is AWESOME--just as good as its predecessor so far.

Any time a group announces a translation or a fan project I take it with a grain of salt--the interweb is littered with the ghosts of fallen fan projects. This is one that I had had high hopes for--and so far they've delivered. The translation is spot-on.

Great job, kids.

Why I Stopped Playing: Final Fantasy IV DS

2008-09-23T18:26:00.000-07:00

I am so sick of this goddamn game.

Of this whole goddamn series, maybe. I've always been a Dragon Warrior guy rather than a Final Fantasy guy, and it's things like the DS remake of Final Fantasy IV vs the DS remake of Dragon Warrior IV that remind me why.

This will be my--let's see, I never had an SNES so I didn't play the game till I was in high school on emulation, then once at some point in college, then the GBA remake, and now this one--my fourth time through the game in one form or another. I know there are guys who have played it a dozen times, but that's just not me.

I'm tired of long drawnout broody storylines. I'm tired of monsters that are by and large generic and uninteresting. (Scarmiglione's graphics in this game are awesome and terrifying: credit where it's due. I don't remember what the others really look like--I could probably conjure up a few of the bosses, but I can't tell you what a single normal enemy looks like.)

I'm tired of obscure and arbitrary sidequests. IV is not as bad as some of the later ones in the series--Final Fantasy X, while a decent game in its main quest, was absolutely *idiotic* in its sidequests--dodge lightning 100 times? win this chocobo race that's partially luck-based with a time of less than zero seconds? FFIVDS, as you may know, features a revolving door of characters, and you can get different characters' abilities for members of your party after they leave, but most of them are not clued at all. It looks like--from the little bit of strategy guides I glanced at--if you give certain ones to certain members you get certain other ones, but the only way you'll reliably figure that out is by reading the guide. I am tired of having to Read the Guide to get the optimal experience. It is insulting: it is saying that I either need the dedication of a tester, the bizarre skewed way of thinking of a Rainman, the ability to read the designer's mind, or a walkthrough to make significant progress.

These games are for the most part not made for normal people to play.

I really want to like Final Fantasy as a whole--just hearing the music of VII gives me inordinately strong flashbacks to senior year of high school when I played it for the first time; there are sections of VIII that I'd love to go through again; and what I saw of XII before I got irrevocably stuck was excellent; but I just don't have the heart any more. You've got to be a certain type of gamer and you've got to have a certain type of mindset or you won't see large swaths of the game; and without the patience to level-grind for hours, you likely won't even beat the final boss.

Commenting in a friend's journal about this post at The Brainy Gamer, I said the following:

I like to joke that I should be given a dispensation against random battles--I've been playing RPGs for about 17 years and should earn my fun--but, really, genre in videogames is about mechanics rather than subject matter. (Survival horror is a borderline exception.) In my old age I'm getting much less patient, I have much less time to game. Years ago, in between college semesters, when I had AT LEAST 5 hours a day to game, spending two solid hours levelling up wasn't even half of my play session. Now, I'm lucky if I get an hour in, and it's more likely that I'll have a couple quick bursts of a half hour here and there. It's quite possible that my play sessions of a week or two could be devoted solely to levelling. And that just isn't fun.

So it's kind of an anti-tautology: I'd like RPGs if it weren't for that pesky levelling-up. (I'd like murder mysteries if there weren't all that crime; I'd like political thrillers if there weren't all that politics; I'd like fantasy if it took place solidly grounded in the real world.) The Holy Grail of gaming would be an action/adventure game with statistical growth, a convoluted story, a well-drawn setting, a sense of exploration, and it'd be over in 10 hours. Too bad the aforementioned autistic tweekers are the ones that people are making games for. It's saddening, and it's the end of an era for me, but yeah, just as I'm outgrowing point-and-click adventures, I'm outgrowing RPGs.

I might go back to this point when I talk about Dragon Quest IV, cause my unabashed love for it is seeming to prove me wrong, but it's starting to feel really unfair. I used to be a gigantic RPG fan--my first published games writing was for the fansite AllRPG.com, which I chose beacuse the vast majority of games I played--and had something to say about--at the time were RPGs. I've played almost all of them, from the sublime to the execrable, I've played LEGALLY BOUGHT AND PAID FOR HA HA HA games which never made it to these shores. But not only do I not have the time any more for them--even if I did, really, it's not fun. It's not fun to walk over every tile clicking A because you need to pixel-hunt for a quest. It's not fun to randomly guess which four chests you're not allowed to open in order to get a powerful weapon. It's not fun to fight the same group of monsters because there's a .5% chance they'll drop a certain item.

Final Fantasy IV s the product of fatigue; it's not a terrible remake by any means, the graphics are solid, the translation is comprehensible, the voice acting isn't bad, it's not unplayable by any means. Maybe if this were my first time with the game, I'd be more charitable. As it were, IV's never been my favorite of the series, I've never been particularly into the characters (blasphemy!, the fanboys cry!)--so after a dozen hours with it, with the certainty of having to face a couple dozen more, I'm just giving up on it. Oh, sure, I'll buy XIII when it comes out, but it's seeming more and more like it's out of a masochistic sense of duty--Final Fantasies are always very high-profile, and I can't legitimately call myself a videogame critic worth my salt if I don't play the newest one--than the feeling like I'll have fun with it. The last time I had fun with a Final Fantasy title--pure, unabashed jeuissance--was Final Fantasy X-2: yes, I said it. The game that gets the most flack and criticism--from people who haven't even played it!--was the most interesting. It's solely because every quest was different: it never devolved into a random mush of grind like all the other titles go. Hour 1 of Final Fantasy IV is the same as Hour 5 is the same as Hour 20 is the same as Hour 40; while the majority of quests in X-2 were indeed straightfoward dungeons, there were enough minigames and interesting little challenges that I didn't get bored: it broke up the monotony excellently. X-2, more than any other Final Fantasy, felt like it was trying to entertain me. That's the point of games: entertainment. Gaming should be more fun than my job, dammit.

The new old school

2008-09-22T19:13:00.000-07:00

Oh man, it's a great week to have been a kid in the late '80s-early '90s.

(Actually, any week is a great week for that...I was too young to have gone through the trauma of the videogame crash and old enough to have seen the Golden Age of Nintendo firsthand.)

Two things have come out within this week that have reminded me exactly why I love and play videogames. (After a while, after the sixtieth straight hour of angsty cutscenes in the latest boring Final Fantasy, you begin to forget.) One is the Dragon Warrior/Quest IV remake; the other is Mega Man 9.

I'll post full reviews (and I should probably do a Why I Stopped Playing of the Final Fantasy IV remake while I'm at it) if I ever beat them (Nintendo Hard, people) but for now I'm thrilled as beans. Seriously: run and get them. One is the greatest RPG of all time; the other is a worthy sequel to a generally phenomenal series. (Guess which is which.)

I'm going to stop goddamn blogging. There is gamin' to be done. (To say nothing of the applications to PhD programs I should be filling out.)

I beat a game!!: Super Paper Mario

2008-09-04T12:11:00.000-07:00

Mario-related RPGs are a sketchy bag for me: Super Mario RPG is an awesome game any way you slice it, and Superstar Saga was a LOT of fun, what with one of the best localizations I've ever read, a fun and somewhat innovative system: it was a good time for me. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door I found to be tedious and boring, without the same sense of fun that the other games had. I picked up Super Paper Mario on a whim, out of a desire to give my Wii some lovin', and because I had a credit from returning Drakengard.

It's a far from perfect game, but I enjoyed the hell out of it.

Where the earlier games put platform mechanics onto a traditional RPG structure, SPM does the exact opposite--it puts RPG mechanics onto a platformer. That's not unheard of--many platformers let your characters level up, gives them hit points--but the blend here is excellent. Both your character and the enemies are given hit points, and stomping a goomba doesn't squash him outright but deducts hp based on your attack score. Levels are structured like a platformer--think of Simon's Quest or Zelda 2, but less mazelike--most levels are a straight path from left to right, with a few doors for detours. It's fun. There are jumping puzzles--not as complex as the average Mario game, but it's still a Mario game and you will need to bound back and forth from time to time. Part of me misses playing a regular platformer, and given the choice between the two I'll fire up Mario 3 for the millionth time, but as platformer-light, it's decent.

Actually, now that I'm starting to write it up, I'm having a less positive view of it: my praise seems slightly forced. Let me back up a second.

In a way, the game purports to be The Best of Both Worlds--half platformer, half RPG--but it suffers because it doesn't fully commit to being either. It's platformer in the sense that you're jumping and bopping things; it's an RPG in the sense that it's got a lot of story (and a LOT of text...I don't mind reading at all, and most of the text was funny, but it felt very excessive--if I felt bored with it, I can imagine how someone younger who isn't a strong reader is going to feel.) But the platforming segments feel somehow perfunctory: fighting enemies is pretty fun throughout the whole game, but the jumping isn't nearly as challenging as a Mario game should be. The RPG elements beyond hit points and stuff is confined mainly to dialogue and fetch quests--entertaining if excessive in the first case, and always tedious in the latter.

There are *MANY* levels where I was honestly tempted to give up just because I didn't want to go through an area. It seems padded. One area, Princess Toadstool is magically asleep or something, and you need to find a magical fruit to wake her. It's a vaguely maze-like area that you have to wander through, there are three or four incorrect fruits scattered around, so basically the level consists of exploring for a tree, bringing it back, finding out it's not the right one, exploring for another tree, and so on until you finally get it right. That's not an uncommon occurrence in the game, although it tends to happen more and more during the later levels. The first few chapters are a lot of fun--quick action, interesting level design, *entertaining*, and had the game continued in that vein it would have been a lot stronger.

One of the main gimmicks of the game is the switch from 2-d to 3-d. The main view is of a traditional platformer--2-d plane, moving from left to right--but early on you get a power which lets you shift the view to 3-d, so you're viewing Mario from behind. Items are behind pipes and things. Pathways are hidden in front of the screen. (I ain't so good at describing this bit.) It's good in its execution, and there *will* be a lot of levels where you're stuck and then slap your forehead because you forgot to simply switch perspective. There's a meter which deducts health--a minor amount, but enough to eventually be an inconvenience--if you stay in 3-d mode too long, so you're not able to overuse the system. (I wouldn't anyway--you move more slowly in 3-d for some reason.)

Most of your special abilities--in this case, little creatures called Pixls which follow you around--take the form of keys: one shrinks you, one is a bomb, one lets you ground-pound--and I've never been a fan of powers-as-keys: I think their uses should be a bit more fluid. Some of them--the bomb, for example--are useful as attacks, but the vast majority have no use outside of a few limited and specific situations. That's not terrible, but the other characters you get--Toadstool, Luigi, Bowser--act as keys as well, even though they're ostensibly playable characters. Each has a special move or two, and you'll need them from time to time, but none of them can switch perspectives, which is the most useful skill in the game. They all also move more slowly than Mario, so it really becomes a case of there being a very high jump so you switch to Luigi then switch back, or needing to float over a gap so you switch to the princess then switch back.

The game goes out of its way to feel fresh and interesting though, and I do like unexpected genre changes from time to time. One boss--an otaku who kidnaps a character--has a sequence where you face him in a dating sim. A segment where you have to determine which is a real character and which is a shapeshifting imposter is resolved through a quiz show. One encounter takes the form of a traditional RPG battle. One level is a space shooter. I always like it when a game distracts you with different types of challenges from time to time: it keeps it exciting.

And the game *is* really funny.

It's an uneven experience but a relatively short one--17 hours with no sidequests. But it's a testament to both my lack-of-time and my gaming ADD that it took me two months to beat. A good 10 of those hours were spent over two days, and then I got about an hour in a week. If the game had been less repetitive I would have played harder.

Why I Stopped Playing Drakengard

2008-07-04T19:01:00.001-07:00

Actually it's a very simple reason this time: the disc was irredemably scratched--you could literally see through it. I did not notice this when I bought Drakengard and made it through most of the chapters required for the first ending when the game plain refused to load.

This sucks, because Drakengard is emphatically not a good game, even though it's a relatively beatable game. I wasn't enjoying the experience, though it wasn't so horrible that I stopped playing it, and the fact that I didn't even get to see the ending was a little slap in the face.

I kind of knew this--I'd rented the game when it came out and got about an hour in before giving up in disgust. One of my friends, over the years, periodically insists that it's the most fucked-up game I'll ever play...and I like fucked-up. So I figured, hell, I'll give it one more shot.

Up until the ending, I can't honestly say it's particularly skewed or anything--storylinewise, it's an extremely dark fantasy--we're talking Song of Ice and Fire-level dark. I've seen videos of the ending, and while I don't really have any context...damn, I really wish I could have seen it through to the end. I went to the store to get another copy but they were sold out; I picked up a copy of Super Paper Mario with my credit, and I'm enjoying it immensely...maybe I'll pick up Drakengard again when I can be bothered to find another copy. It's indeed creepily surreal. I'd been told to expect "gigantic floating babies"...but didn't realize how literally I was supposed to take that.

But what I said goes: it's not a particularly good game. An hour in you've seen all it has to offer, and it's not much. There are three modes of play: typical action-RPG "hero mows down an army of mooks," an aerial flight on a dragon, and a combination of both. All three have their flaws.

The aerial mode is perhaps the worst: while there is nothing resembling a good camera anywhere in the game, this tends to whip around vertiginously. Targeting is weird: you're always semi-locked-on to one target, and pressing a button will turn you slooooooooowly to face that target. Holding down another button and sweeping your cursor will let you lock on to a few targets at a time in addition, so it quickly devolves into holding down square, sweeping the screen, and releasing. There are a couple of one-on-one fights, and those are the worst: the enemies tend to move extremely quickly, way too quickly for your dragon to turn around. Your cursor finds itself behind the borders of the screen while you hope the enemy hovers long enough for you to turn around.

Hybrid mode is also a bit difficult in that the dragon's flight speed isn't really controllable; while you can do a basic thrust, she always crawls forward. You'll target a group of enemies on the ground with fireballs, then find you're too far ahead of them and have to turn around. It's tedious. There's a quickturn combo--hit L1 and R1 at the same time--but there were many times it didn't work right away; hitting one of the shoulder buttons on its own makes you fling yourself to the side about a hundred feet, and I often found myself off target. (I'm open to the possibility that it was simply a controller issue--I play with a cheap third-party wireless--but I've never had problems with any other games, so I'm assuming that the programming on that action was slightly off.) If you scroll the enemies offscreen, the game apparently does not save the status of their health--there are thousands of enemies in a level at any one time, so that's somewhat understandable--and their health bar resets to full.

The ground melee mode is the most successfull and is pretty satisfying--run to any group of those thousand enemies and bash away. While there's a combo system, it's pretty perfunctory. There are 65 weapons to find through the course of the game--please, do yourself a favor and get a guide for that, because it's a Square game and therefore completely nonintuitive for most of them--and each handles differently. YOu'll have your favorites; I tended to prefer a katana. Each weapon has a different magic spell associated with it, and I rather enjoyed that feature.

But due to a combination of hardware issues and the programmers being idiots, melee comes off as extremely frustrating. It's related to draw distance--you don't see enemies unless you're practically on top of them. You'll find yourself in an empty field wandering about, so you click a button to bring up the map, which takes a second, then locate the enemies and click to bring back the battle screen, which takes another second, and meander to that area, at which point the game's shitty camera will reveal that it's tricked you and you've been going in the opposite direction. I speak about two seconds of delay, which may not seem like much--but when you consider that you're literally bringing up the map screen two or three dozen times in the course of a mission...it gets boring. There is a radar screen, but it's next to useless; if enemies show up on-screen when you're 20 feet away from them, they show up on the radar at about 40 feet. The radar also shows no terrain features, so it's next to useless.

There is a jump button. I am not opposed to jump buttons; quite the opposite: I rather like jumping. (Grew up on Nintendo platformers.) However, I am honestly not sure why they bothered with it. Drakengard is one of those games rendered in three dimensions that's actually two-dimensional. The entirety of the action takes place on one plane; it could--and probably would have worked well if this were the case--have worked with top-down sprites. You can do some awesome things with sprites. Your character *cannot jump over rocks*. There is some vague tiein to attacking, I believe, but I never figured it out, never needed it. It's a tease that plummets the gameplay into the uncanny valley; don't give me a jump key if you won't let me do anything with it, it's jarring.

Cutscenes are skippable but not pausable; another sign of lazy programmers.

I enjoy the way chapter selection is handled. You have basically a master save file, and can auto-save at the end of every level. The game will progress linearly until you tell it to stop, at which point you can revisit any area you've played already--both cutscenes and levels--in order to level up or gain treasure or whatever. There are also several side missions which don't affect the storyline at all but merely provide an alternate set of goals. There are a few side chapters which are tied to the game's various endings, available when you complete certain conditions. The game tells you EXACTLY what you need to do to unlock side chapters--"unlock Alternate Character B and beat the dragon fight within 4 minutes"--and that's appreciated, it really is.

I did find interesting the way the game treats two givens of RPGdom--the fact that the protagonist is basically committing genocide, and the Non-Speaking Hero. Many people parodying RPGs will mention the fact that, by the end of the game, your character has killed thousands of enemies--particularly egregious in games such as Final Fantasy VII that have environmentalist undertones--but no one really does anything about it. Killing thousands of enemies--human or otherwise--is in itself the sign of someone mentally unhinged; even if someone's doing it for duty, he's bound to get a little loopy after seeing so many die by his hand. This is very much a part of Drakengard; all of the characters comment on how bloodthirsty our hero Caim is, how he's insane with his desire for revenge...and many of them find him kind of scary.

But we never get to hear Caim's side of the story beyond the first chapter, because after a level or two in which he does speak (or yell or grunt), he becomes a nonspeaking hero for plotline reasons--the pact he makes with the dragon causes him to sacrifice his voice. (Several characters make pacts throughout the game, and they're all extremely symbolic--according to the manual, one loses his sight, one loses the ability to age beyond childhood, one loses her fertility, and one loses...his hair...) And that's powerful. Most games silence the hero so we can more easily enter into his role, but--hopefully--we aren't expected to identify with Caim because he's craaaaaazy. Having him lose the ability to speak, rather, seems to stress how swept up in events he is.

Unfortunately, and somewhat paradoxically, it violates the "show, don't tell" rule. We're shown a lot--Caim snapping and threatening the bald guy, Caim killing mook after mook after mook after mook (10K kills by the point where I started)--but his motivations...remain clear, and this is not a point where ambiguity would work. Characters tell him every five minutes, "Gee, you sure love killin'," but the fact is, Caim is in the unusual situation where his sociopathic tendencies are completely validated by the world he's in. The enemy soldiers are either inhuman or vaguely possessed, and they're trying to destroy the world. He's given a free ride. And he's under stress. The man is snapping as we play him...and he can't tell us how he feels. Vaguely waving his sword around during cutscenes isn't enough.

I also kind of wish there'd been some sort of explanation about what the world was like before the game started. It opens on Caim's castle under siege by The Empire; Caim belongs to the Union or the Alliance or some such conglomerate. What is the government like here? Do they control opposing territories? Is the Union the bunch of rebellious upstarts, or is the Empire? Who rules each? Does Caim have any political power? What is his average day like? There's something to be said for opening up on a tense scene...but then again, Good Morning Crono isn't the worst opening either for a game like this. Whether it's missing the point or not, I want to know what the world was like before everything went to crap, and the game never seems to feel the need to show me.

Voice acting is a mixed bag, as most games are, but I have to give big ups to Mona Marshall who plays the dragon; it's a tough role but she does it wonderfully. The dragon is arrogant, powerful, desirous to save the world, contemptuous of Caim even as she's growing fond of him, and raspy--and she pulls in an excellent performance. Other actors in the game aren't as good, but I like to point out good things when I see them.

I beat a game!!: Soul Blazer

2008-06-22T08:08:00.000-07:00

Soul Blazer is a cute little game for the SNES in which you play an angel sent by God to save the world; it's a mark of the fact that it was made in the pre-Playstation era in that religion, while not the huge presence you'd expect in a game with this premise, is unambiguously Not Evil. God (or "The Master" as he's named) does not betray you and show himself to be secretly the Big Bad; the Church is not corrupt; there's no moral ambiguity.

I'm a sucker for a good action-RPG. I like games that have the depths of an RPG system, but I'm sick of micromanaging my character, sick of levelling, sick of turn-based combat--I've been playing RPGs for the past 18 years, when I got a copy of Dragon Warrior for subscribing to Nintendo Power, and it gets kind of old after a while.

While Soul Blazer is far from a perfect game, it's hard to find any obvious flaws that glare at you: there's a bit too much backtracking, but I played the game on an emulator (after, of course, legally purchasing my own copy, sure). Gameplay-wise, it's a pretty solid Zelda clone with fewer puzzles. The handling of enemies is interesting: except for a slight sprinkling of respawning enemies, the enemies are all handled through monster lairs: a glowing tile that a finite number of a monsters spawn out of. When you've defeated all of them, the color of the tile changes, you stomp on it, and then you'll never get monsters from there again. It makes end-of-game levelling difficult but also unnecessary: the game expects you'll get 100% completion (which is awesome, I hate obscure and overwhelming sidequests), and you'll be at the proper level to beat the final boss with a bit of strategy.

When you stomp on an enemy lair, a few things happen: a treasure chest will appear, part of the landscape will change to let you progress further, or you'll unseal a creature. That's the main gimmick of the game: the Big Bad has sealed away all of the life in the world. When you start a level, you come upon a completely-empty town, and as you go through the level, animals and buildings and people begin to appear. It's a precursor to Dark Cloud in this regard, and calling it "a 2-d Dark Cloud without randomized dungeons" is a pretty good descriptor. The player, however, does not take an active role in arranging a town--characters appear in one location and one location only and it's all handled for you automatically. The game Actraiser--also by the same company--is very similar, and I'm interested in playing the other games in the loose series (Actraiser is simply by the same developer; Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma are somehow directly related to Soul Blazer but I misremember how; I've played all of them and all are good, and I think I'll get through them next.) If you're as much into animals as I am, you'll like it, particularly Stage 2, where you restore a forest and get to meet dogs and moles and birds and deer and all cute little things.

Particularly amusing to me--considering that the game was published by Enix, who is famous for it in the Dragon Warrior games--is the handling of a But Thou Must in the game's ending. The Designated Love Interest (who, based on the portrait of her we see during the credits, will be played by Laura Dern in the movie) asks the hero if he'll promise to remember her and come back for her, and a dialog box pops up. Because we've played RPGs before, we expect the box to say "Yes/No" and if we say "No" we'll get a scolding and the box will appear again. The box simply says "Yes"--only one option. But Thou Musts allow the forcing of one choice while giving us the option of more than one, but I've never seen it so transparent, and I've never seen subversions of it as early as this game, at least not that I can remember. More recent games do parody it by making all of the choices variations on "Yes" or "No" but I don't think I've ever seen a single option in a box.

It's worth playing--it's one of those rare games that's charming and fun enough that you can excuse any flaws and the lack of polish. Soul Blazer won't change your life, but I've got a soft spot for it, and it'll give you a week or two of idle playing (or a weekend of concentrated play) that you'll enjoy.

Non-diegetic gameplay

2008-06-16T14:46:00.000-07:00

It's an old joke: when a meteor is poised to destroy the earth, it's only appropriate and proper to do sidequests. It'll wait. Unless there's an explicit timer counting down the time until the Mako reactor explodes, videogames give you an unlimited amount of time in order to complete their goals. Xenosaga Episode 1 is one of the more egregiously amusing examples: when the party enters the final dungeon, the Big Bad appears and tells you that he's going to Turn On The Big Gun Of Doom, which will take him about ten minutes. If I remember correctly, he wasn't bluffing. Simply going through the dungeon took me over an hour--the dungeons in that game are huge--and before I did that I decided that I was way underlevelled, so I spent another three or four levelling up and doing sidequests. Time limit of ten minutes notwithstanding, you still make it to the final room just in the nick of time.

The folks at TVTropes call this a particular form of Gameplay and Story Segregation, a fairly common one, and it's not hard to see why it exists: you want to give the story a sense of urgency, and having a villain simply hanging out in the back room playing paddleball while he waits for you to show up isn't a good way of heightening dramatic tension. We'll be told that time is of the essence because we're at the climax of the game, but meanwhile, we may not be done with the gameplay: we may be underlevelled, there may be some items we want to buy, and it's fair enough that we get the chance to club some more rats.

The term diegesis--and its related adjective diegetic--are generally used in film and most often used to describe music. Diegetic basically means in-world and has an antonym in the term non-diegetic. Diegetic music is music that the characters can hear--a character turns on his CD player and begins grooving to "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate" by Mission of Burma. He can hear it--every character who comes within range can hear it. In another movie, a character is running because he's late for class and "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate" comes on the soundtrack as we see him tearing across campus; the audience can hear it, it underscores the tension and speed of the moment, but all that the character can hear is his own heavy breathing, his heart pounding in his ears, and the kids he's almost crashing into yelling at him; this is non-diegetic music. It's a convention we accept: no one imagines that he can hear the song in the second case, and in fact, some movies will set up gags based on that expectation. One of my favorites is in the eating disorder episode of Strangers with Candy. Jerri looks sadly into the camera as the soundtrack swells: "Your problems couldn't be any clearer/ no one pays any attention to you/ you are large and quite obsese"--and, annoyed, Jerri turns the radio off because she's sick of hearing that song everywhere. (The gag repeats two more times, once in Spanish and is one of those examples of a repeated gag that is funny every time, Family Guy I'm looking at you.) We're set up by television convention to believe that this is not an in-world song--and our expectations are thwarted when it turns out to be diegetic.

I've heard the term "non-diegetic gameplay"--at least on Wikipedia--used to refer to, for example, the out-of-world elements of a game--talking about character sheets and rolling dice and all that--but that's a slightly different term, specifically, metagame. (In a console game, metagame refers to what you do with the controller.) I use the term non-diegetic gameplay to refer to parts of the game that don't actually happen.

Consider a hypothetical example based on Dragon Warrior mechanics. Nigel, our hero, is at level 4; he's tasked with defeating the Evil Kobold that has taken place in the woods behind the town. He fights through the wood, faces the Kobold, and promptly gets his ass handed to him. He revives in town with half of his gold taken from him but figures that he's simply misunderstanding the nature of the boss--that he's using the wrong strategy. So he fights through the wood again, faces the Kobold, tries a different, better strategy, one which knocks more damage off, but he still gets killed. So after he revives again, he spends the next hour of gameplay and makes it to Level 5. He faces the Kobold again and once more gets killed. He spends two more hours of gameplay and makes it to Level 7. This time, when he fights the boss, he defeats it, gains 100 gold and 200 experience, plus the respect of the townspeople. (If this is Dragon Warrior VII, he's got an awesome feast awaiting him too.)

Were Nigel to narrate the story of his quest, it would not be, "Well, I explored the woods, fought the Kobold, died, fought the Kobold again, died again, leveled up a bit, fought the Kobold a third time, died, leveled up some more, and defeated the Kobold on the fourth try." It would likely be along the lines of, "I explored the woods, and then I fought and defeated the Kobold." Storywise, the protagonists--even the angsty, edgy ones--are traditionally heroic as far as combat prowess goes. The plotlines of most of them describe the characters as chosen, or gifted soldiers, or specially trained, or even simply normal people who are really goddamn lucky. There is no room for a character who is clumsy or failure-prone. The storyline ignores the hours of training and preparation; while the gameplay--and more importantly, the player--can't do that, the NPCs in the game merely act as if the main character is wandering from town to town solving problems and succeeding, rather than trying and failing multiple times before getting it right.

The narrative of the storyline and the narrative of the gameplay are different; for all intents and purposes, a majority of the narrative of the gameplay simply does not happen in the world of the game. Levelling is non-diegetic; I would venture to say that a majority of the gameplay in an RPG is non-diegetic.

Basically this does explain a lot: If all those hours of clubbing rats to get gold to get better equipment didn't actually happen, then the characters weren't ignoring Meteor: in the world of the game, they went straight to the final dungeon. The whole "Why don't they just use a phoenix down on Aeris" argument becomes a moot point: in-battle deaths are non-diegetic; Aeris is the only character who "really" dies. (Otherwise, the narrative becomes, "Tifa died, and I revived her, and Barret died, and I revived her, and I died, and Tifa revived me, and then Aeris died, but I couldn't revive her for some reason, then Tifa died again..." It's more along the lines of, simply, "Aeris died.")

But I'm not sure if it's a good thing, and I'd like to see games do something with the concept--I mean, the metagame has gotten parodied and deconstructed and all that, but I can't think of a single instance of a game that takes seriously the concept that the player's experience and the character's experience are two different animals, or at least pays attention to it. Granted, every player levels a different amount, and you'd have to take that into consideration: Seth might beat the Kobold on his first try, and Nate might have to get to level 9 before he wins the fight. I don't think that putting the entire game on a timer is the way to go every time, but I'd like at least an acknowledgement from the game that I am, indeed, playing it.

Kingdom Hearts

2008-06-10T19:06:00.000-07:00

I just can't tell why, exactly, I consider Kingdom Hearts to be a great game--it's certainly not a good game. It's maddeningly flawed: the level design is awful, the levels themselves are pretty barren, the gummi ship bits are execrable and you've got to do them OVER and OVER and OVER again, the controls are stiff, the whole "you can't view your menu even to change camera settings" thing was a bad idea, the whole mythology--while interesting--is convoluted beyond belief--

--and yet, somehow, it's a compelling experience: this is my third time through the game, and since I rarely replay games that's saying something significant. I think the audacity and outright charm of the premise still hasn't gotten old. It pissed me off, all the "kiddie" comments it got--I'm a red-blooded American boy, and I grew up with Disney characters, with the movies it redoes. It's impossible to play through the game without feeling like some part of your childhood is being validated--turned darker, the sequel especially but also the first game having some relatively disturbing undertones.

Kingdom Hearts ends up feeling like the effort of a team that knew the basics of what they wanted to do but not being quite able to make the end product match their vision--you can see the game they were trying to make, and that game was awesome--and it's the rare case of a sequel which fixes most if not all of the first game's problems. It's been two years almost to the day that I last played Kingdom Hearts 2, so I might be rusty (part of the reason I'm replaying the first is because I want to replay the second and need a brushup on story)--but I know the gummi ship areas were better (if still not *thrilling*.) The battle system felt a bit tighter--fighting a thousand enemies in the first game's battle system would have been a frustrating goddamn mess. Doing that fight in the second game's battle system is almost a pleasure.

The sense of pace, particularly in the first game, is very weak. It's an incredibly common technique--used in film, literature, games, any kind of media--to have an extremely tense series of scenes, a hook to thrill us immediately, and then calming down the pace and introducing the characters. Kingdom Hearts tries to do that--we get a pretty video of Sora's dream, and then we're taken to a black void with floors made of stained-glass portraits of Disney princesses, for a tutorial section. It's decently atmospheric--and it's got a badass orchestral theme which slowly and subtly increases in volume--it sets up a few themes--those princesses are important, the whole darkness/shadow themes are introduced--and it's vaguely more integrated than the average tutorial--but it doesn't come off as particularly tense--it's very obvious that you're playing a section completely separate from the rest of the game. And then, it's off for fun on Destiny Islands, where you see a series of scenes, and...get to have more tutorials. You're given a mission of putzing around the island and finding a few scavenger hunt items for a raft, and since none of the environments across the game are particularly interesting, it doesn't come off as particularly fun. After a cutscene, you're tasked with...finding more scavenger hunt items. Since you've just done that, it's much less fun. After that--almost two hours in--the game becomes properly exciting--your island begins to go to hell, people make strange pronouncements, and then...you find yourself in another town, puttering around.

And as far as I can tell, there's no real aim for you puttering around. The game tries to make some Comedy out of it--you're looking for the next cutscene while Goofy and Donald are looking for you, and they do the thing where you exit a room and they come into the same room looking for you. And you go to the next area, and they come into the area that you just left. Repeat until you get bored, go to the save point, and quit for the night, because leaving the room where the save point is is apparently the trigger for the cutscene. There's no real indication of that--it happened to me almost randomly. The entire game is like that--fight some mooks, wander around, fight some more mooks, wander around, and hope that this is the room with the cutscene. (If I remember correctly, KH2 features a minimap with a flashing red arrow, and I hate anyone who thinks that that cuts down on exploration, because by and large wandering around is not fun.)

It's like I said: the game works in spite of itself, and while it might have made a better movie, a lot of it is great--I love seeing familiar plots get turned around to fit an overarching metaplot. And where the game succeeds, it succeeds brilliantly: the beginning of Wonderland was exactly how I wanted it to be (and I wouldn't have minded if it'd been extended in favor of kicking out the boring Lotus Forest scavenger hunt), and I remember flying around in Neverland to be awesome. (I'll see if my memory is correct.) I'm hoping to knock this one out quickly, although Cerebus is being a bastard--I know I beat it within a rental period the first time around, although I didn't have a job wasting all of my time when it came out. Some, start paying me to write about games: I hate working.

Your Girlfriend Mode

2008-06-02T18:06:00.000-07:00

It may not be the most feminist term I've ever come up with, but my friends and I use the term "Your Girlfriend Mode" to describe the difficulty level that I regularly play at.

The etymology is along these lines: You have this game, and you want your girlfriend to see it, because it's blowin' your mind and it's awesome and you'd like to share it with her. Unfortunately, all girls, without exception, suck at videogames. If you give the game to her at a normal difficulty level, she'll keep dying, will get tired of it, and won't want to play it, and will miss the experience. Easy Mode to the rescue: put it on a level where all enemies will die on one hit, where all the secret riddles are extremely simple, and there are health nummies all over the place, and she'll be able to have a version of the experience that's more than just watching you play.

I tease--it's funny on the level that many of my female friends do play videogames and can kick my ass, and on the level where I haven't dated a girl since 1999--but I am extremely glad that many games nowadays contain a Your Girlfriend mode. This is the level that I regularly play on. It's excusable when I'm just renting a game--I want to beat it before the rental period is up, and don't want to spend much time dying--but even on games I've purchased, I just simply don't find harder difficulty settings to be more enjoyable. Normally they do things like give monsters more hit points, give you fewer, and scatter fewer health items around--and that, to me, doesn't make games harder, it simply makes them more frustrating. And let's face it: I have a job and a life and if I'm spending too much time on a level, I'm going to give up on it, plain and simple. The types of challenges I enjoy in games--mostly environmental puzzles like in Zelda or ICO--can't really be made any harder or easier.
Well, okay, they can, but then you're going to get into the area of multiple versions of dungeons--in effect creating two or more separate games--and few if any developers are willing to do those things. It is much easier to make combat more "difficult" and since I don't enjoy combat...

Difficulty settings are one of the few things that The World Ends With You did perfectly--you are able to customize the game's difficulty level on the fly to your heart's content. You can raise or lower your character's level, which mostly affects how many hit points he has. You can raise or lower the difficulty level of the fight--which I believe affects the monsters' stamina. And there's an actual reason to make the game harder on yourself--lower levels make the enemies drop more items; higher difficulty makes the items better-quality. It goes beyond simple bragging rights ("Yeah, I beat that boss on SUPER HARD.") There's usually no functional difference between difficulty levels as far as most games are concerned. If there's any difference, it's usually there'll be a different cutscene or a better ending on a harder level--and frankly, I'm just going to go on Youtube and watch it anyway. If you're going to make difficulty settings, give me a reason to play harder, make it more of an interesting challenge rather than a frustrating challenge--don't simply make it easier for me to die.

Why I Stopped Playing Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

2008-05-26T17:36:00.000-07:00

I should say that I'm a pretty huge Metroid fan--if I start getting videogame-related tattoos I'm going to get a little Metroid tattooed somewhere--and that Prime 1 is regularly featured on any Top Ten lists I make--it had a tight set of controls, beautiful environments, a gigantic, breathing world, some truly terrifying boss fights, and some of the best integration of story and gameplay I've ever seen--it told a relatively detailed story without a single line of dialogue, without any cutscenes. The only cutscenes in the game were aesthetic--flyovers of vistas and things like that, to show how cool the world was. The translation of the 2-d game into 3-d was pretty much flawless.

Prime 2 was a couple of steps back--there weren't really any significantly new items to add, and some of them--the light and dark beams--seemed missteps. I'm sick to death of light-and-dark-world games, and the whole "bubble of safe space" got old. really. fast. Most damningly, there were cutscenes and dialogue--rather than getting a story after-the-fact from logs and computer screens, we're narrated the fall of the Luminoth race by a character--much less effective--it gave us more moments in the game where we weren't playing. But it was still a solid game, and I've often said that if that had come out first I would have liked it as much as I did Prime 1, and the fight against the Ing Emperor ranks as one of my personal most intense boss fights of all time.

And now here's Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, to put a black mark on the series.

And it really sucks, because the beginning, I was pretty much loving--it was quite intense and extremely tightly-focused--you catch your breath a second, and then something explodes. You take care of it, and then something else explodes. That's how a game should be--there shouldn't be any wandering, any moments were we can just putz around the gameworld--we should always have a goal in mind. (Of course I hate sandbox games, so.) And there are some amazing setpieces--one involving Ridley that stands out as one of the top moments in any Metroid game.

And then, things just kind of...fall apart.

There are a TON of cutscenes in the game, and about a half-dozen other characters. They're decently-acted, and they've all got their own fun personalities, but...Metroid to me is about being completely alone, in space, on a planet where everything wants to kill you. The game is a pretty obvious homage to Alien--the tagline to which is the brilliant "In space, no one can hear you scream." Metroid should be dark and unfriendly...having Mission Control give you tips on where to go next is kind of missing the point.

But what really got my goat about the game where two bits that I just dealt with. In one, you're trying to destroy a turret that those lovable rascals the Space Pirates have set up. So there's a control underneath it that you use to turn it off/blow it up/whatever. When you enter the room, a pair of SPs set up a trio of locks which you have to deactivate in order to hit the control. You've got to fight the pirates in the room while you climb up to each lock in turn; once all three locks are deactivated, you can go underneath and destroy the turret. Okay, fine. Only problem is first of all, the space pirates are infinitely spawning--every so often, two more appear. Which is fine as well--there should be something more than a simple climbing puzzle here. Where the puzzle fails is the fact that the SPs are able to reactivate any locks that you've deactivated. SO not only do you have to master the jump--which isn't hard, but if you're in a firefight your time is split between jumping accuracy and shooting accuracy--but you've got to babysit everything you've done. Quickly kill the Pirates, go to the next lock, deactivate it, kill the new pirates, go to the next, and repeat. What should have been a quick little setpiece ended up taking me a good fifteen minutes because the enemies kept undoing what I'd done. It's not always possible to take the Pirates out from your perch at another lock--the way the room is laid out, the turret blocks at least one of the locks, so if a Pirate is over there, you've got to make your way over to that side and defeat him before he locks the turret again.

I got through that one okay, but I completely gave up on the boss of the area. He's got four zones where he takes damage, each covered by a sort of shield. You use your normal weapon to destroy the shield, then use a special charge attack to completely destroy the weak point. Said charge attack sucks up a full tank's worth of energy. I've got a total of five tanks at this point of the game, and that's with discovering some of the hidden ones out of my way--I'm a decent Metroid player so I'm pretty sure I've found nearly all of the ones available to me at this time--I wonder how many an "average" player would have. Basically this means that--assuming that my attacks completely destroy each weak spot before the timer on the special attack counts down--I've got just enough energy to destroy the enemy, if I don't really take any damage from him. The immediate solution would be to destroy each shield, charge up the special attack, and let him have it--it's completely possible to destroy a weak spot entirely and still have charge on the special attack--except for a few things. After you destroy a weak spot, the boss puts up a shield which can only be destroyed by bombing it--an attack you have to be out of special mode to do. Also, the boss is capable of recharging his shields, so it's quite likely that your work on that will be in vain. The structure of the fight is such that you pretty much need to concentrate on one spot at a time. And likely while all of this is going on, you're taking damage, and you don't have enough health in order to charge your attack. Most bosses have little crates around the room or some other way of getting a slight charge to your health--this one really doesn't. (One of his attacks, he throws something at you you can shoot, but I didn't get anything more than a health nummie which restores 10 energy...out of 100 per tank. You've got to do this ten times, then, without taking any damage, in order to get an extra charge attack...and this attack is one of his rarer ones.)

At this point I looked at myself in the mirror and said, self, this game you're playing is intent on unraveling every stitch you put in. You're not having fun with it. Let's put it away and play a good game.

So much as it pains me to say it, I think I'm going to stop playing Metroid Prime 3.

If the controls weren't awful, I wonder if I'd feel the same way--I can picture the game on the Gamecube, using Gamecube controls...and I think that'd be a pretty sweet game. It's the fault of the Wii controls, really. There are several different options for sensitivity and locking and all of that, and none of them felt really tight enough--my cursor kept going way over to the edge of the screen, getting stuck beyond the border, not going exactly where I wanted it to. The controls seemed a poor emulation of PC FPS controls--mouse to aim and shoot, keyboard to move forward and strafe. But I'm not playing on a PC--I'm playing with an analog stick. Prime 1's control of having the analogue go forward and turn was infinitely preferable to this. If I'm going to play an FPS, I'm going to play one--but this is a Metroid game, dammit.

But honestly, I can't say I could do a better job--given what the Wiimote is capable of and the context of Metroid, I'd probably come up with the same scheme. I don't really have any other ideas for it--although, if the nunchuck were used for turning and forward/back, and you could strafe with Z and the nunchuck, then maybe we could use the Wiimote solely as a light gun? I think that control scheme would work better, and it's a shame that Corruption couldn't have used it. The game got uniformly excellent reviews, which is another reason I'm sick of most gaming sites--they're too complacent--and I was really hoping this one would be good. (It's one of the reasons I bought a Wii, and along with Mario Galaxy [which was AWESOME!], one of the two games I bought with the system.) It's a shame that the games ends up standing as an example of what not to do.

Fitness

2008-05-22T20:19:00.000-07:00

Due to Miracles, I snagged a copy of Wii Fit.

I popped by my local Gamestop cause I was waiting for a friend at the Starbux next door. A woman was in there picking up her preorder; she was standing at the register rummaging through her bag for a gift card.

"Hey," I said to the guy. "Would you laugh if I asked if you had an extra copy of that?"

He smiles. "Ordinarily I would, but someone just canceled her pre-order, so we've got one."

The woman smiles and high-fives me. "I'm not even buying this for my kids," she says. "It's for me."

"Yeah," I say. "I figure maybe I'll drop a couple of pounds."

I played for about a half hour and the game is made of painful, which is all us masochists ask from an exercise program. I used to do yoga before I started college--from a video, cause I couldn't afford classes at the time--and it's funny because intellectually I know I used to be able to do these poses but since it's been about seven years, I just dont' have those muscles.

Some of the poses are relatively hard--I live in an attic apartment and there's slanty ceilings on one side and a ceiling fan on the other, which makes some of the arm-raising exercises pretty interesting. It's good to cheat for things like the leg extensions and the tree pose, which my oddly attractive trainer scolded me about ("You're not strong enough for this exercise yet," he says, and it's like, jeez, man, I bet eighth grade graduation pool parties weren't a horror for you, I bet you never clawed at your own chest and stomach because you were so. goddamn. fat. and. ugly. and. you. hated. yourself. Why am I so sure? Because you're made of polygons)--my balance ain't good enough yet to stand on one leg. (Let's not talk about the dreaded "stand still" test.)

I will join the parade of fat folks that the software calls obese, with a BMI in the low 30s--that's what being 5'7 and 200 pounds makes you. I'd *love* to be a sweet 150, but the software won't let me lose any more than 22 pounds. I favor my left side slightly as far as my posture goes--that might make sense because I'm left-handed--and I am so, so goddamn tired.

From a gaming standpoint, while it's a phenomenon, I don't know if there's necessarily anything to say--you can't analyze Wii Fit in the same sense that you can analyze Killer7. It's not so much a game as it is a piece of software. And we could turn that into a larger point--but it's not one I'm interested in making.

There ain't nothin' more to say: everyone's posting fitness diaries and critiques of the BMI system and stuff like that, anything else I'd have to say would be filler. I just wanted to brag about my good fortune, I guess.

Garcian Smith, Sinnerman

2008-05-22T12:09:00.000-07:00

Killer7 is sort of one of my favorite games. I consider most of it to be near-unplayable--it's not a fun experience by any means. And it's pretty much the most terrifying game I've ever played--something about it just gets to me on a very fundamental level. I frankly don't think I have it in me to play it again, now that I know what I'm up against, what I'd have to go through. But it's rare for a work to still feel so brutal three years after playing it, and it's a work that's like nothing else--all of its aspects are uniquely itself. There'll be assholes who snark about the fact that the plot is incomprehensible and that means The Game Is Bad, but frankly it reminds me a LOT of David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE (another work that's sort-of one of my favorites that I'd like to see again but am daunted by cause I know what I'm up against): I can't follow the plot of INLAND EMPIRE if there even is one, but I can follow the emotions and the mood of the story--which is really the point. You don't know exactly what Laura Dern is dealing with, or why, but the ending, in which a group of tertiary characters dance to a lip-sync of Nina Simone's "Sinnerman" while Dern relaxes, smiling, is one of the most cathartic endings of all time. Killer7 is primarily a story about acceptance of responsibility for one's sins, and it features a similiarly cathartic and disturbing scene on a rooftop as its ending: Garcian Smith breaks down with the guilt and the weight of his transgressions: much like Dead Man Walking, the goal is not to Set Things Right--both Dead Man Walking and K7 are set in worlds where immoral acts cannot be undone or righted--but to accept that wrong has been done.

It's necessary that there's another chapter after the ending of Killer7--an epilogue of sorts--where you get to choose whether Japan or the US should be destroyed. As counterpoint, a repeat of the ending of Chapter 1 is played, featuring a never-ending battle between two men that the game pretends are the incarnations of Good and Evil. (Morality is much more complex than that in the game, but I don't feel like discussing that bit here.) There will always be war, the game says. There will always be pain, and sin, and fighting, and struggle: and all we can do is accept our part in it. To be redeemed is not to avoid sin: in this game's world, an avoidance of sin is impossible because no one is innocent. To be redeemed, instead, is to admit to one's portion of sin.

The rest of the plot is noise. All of the political manipulations and contortions the plot goes through are to set up that choice between the US and Japan. For that choice to mean anything, one needs to be physically drained, almost physically ill when making it. To make us physically ill, the game sets up a series of punishing and disturbing scenes which we can't make sense of. The entire game is a psychic attack which is simply context for that choice. It is an assult--the horrific laugh of the Heaven Smiles, the repetitive and catatonia-inducing bursts of static in the loadscreens, the mindless puzzles (almost, to my mind, a deconstruction of Resident Evil's puzzles: if getting a code in one room and inputting it in the next is considered a fair and standard survival horror puzzle, Killer7 takes it to the next logical conclusion: the very first puzzle is basically inputting a combination which is ON THE VERY SAME SCREEN as the place to input it--and yet, why did that puzzle get more flack than those which inspired it?)--all of them are designed to wear down the player.

It is worth mentioning that the outcome of the choice is irrelevant--it amounts to basically a screen which says "Oh no, the US was destroyed!" or "Oh no, Japan was destroyed!" Much like a But-Thou-Must in which both answers are wrong, Destroy-the-US-or-Japan is about the act of choosing. The entire game is set on a path of irrelevant choices--which is why it's set on rails. You can only progress towards your target or away from it. Suda51 seems to love to give us the illusion of choice--if I talk about No More Heroes that'll be one of the things I'll mention--an illusion which only serves to let us know that sin is inevitable.

Ignoring Coin Heaven and underground bonus areas, platformer games only give us one major path, traditionally--we move Mario from one end of the screen to the other--while sandbox games (which I openly hate) give us more freedom--Grand Theft Auto and Morrowind let us dick around as much as there are sidequests to still do, letting us take on the thread of the storyline when we get bored of taking sidequests. Both usually take the concept of the game's ending as an unnecessary-to-examine given which'll happen eventually. Killer7 is the result of examining goals in a linear game; No More Heroes examines them in the context of a sandbox game. I would be very interested in seeing Suda51's take on the MMORPG (another genre I can't stand), which generally *has* no predefined goal. Killer7 is about the inevitability of getting to the right-hand-side of the screen. No More Heroes is about the inevitability of getting bored with or completing all the sidequests. How would one make a game about the inevitability of the point where a game isn't fun enough to continue paying for?

The two-hours-and-fifty-minutes before the ending of INLAND EMPIRE are setting up a wonderfully powerful music video for "Sinnerman," just as the twenty hours before the ending of Killer7 are an emotional context to the Moment of Choice (and really, "Sinnerman" would be an appropriate theme song for that game too.) And the meaninglessness of the choice serves to highlight that, for all the promise of interactivity most games give us, all we can ever do is beat a game, turn it off to have dinner, or delay either inevitability.

Bullets on FFXII, 6 Hours In

2006-11-04T22:29:00.001-08:00

--The game touts the fact that the license board allows you to heavily customize your characters, but I'm getting the sense, because you can only reveal certain spaces after revealing other spaces, that most of the characters will be pretty same-y. Maybe some will have more magic than others. I'm still scratching the surface, but it doesn't seem like it'll be *easy* to create customized characters as it was in, say, X-2 or 5 or something like that. I much prefer when the character is pre-defined. I'm not into micromanagement.

--I am six hours in and nothing has really *happened* yet, even though there have been loads of cutscenes. By this point in an FF game you at least have a goal, if it's not your ultimate goal; oftentimes that goal is handed down to you by an entity higher up than you (VIII is a perfect example of this) or your character is tagging along and helping another character's goal (X); ultimately one of the major narrative thrusts is the character claiming the quest as his/her own and making decisions. At this point, Vaan is still floundering and wandering around trying to find out why he's the main character. I trust that there'll be more important things happening later on, but at this point even though several big things have happened, none of them felt major--it still feels like I'm at the first act waiting for the plot to come into focus.

--When "Amalia" opened her mouth, I expected to hear Hedy Burress as Yuna coming out of it...and was pleasantly surprised to hear a commanding, deep voice. I thought Burress's portrayal of the character was wonderful, but I've spent two games with that character and want someone a little more active. Kudos to the casting agent.

--Same with Vaan's voice. I am not a fan of James Arnold Taylor's performance, and upon seeing first screenshots, was expecting more of the same. While I can't tell if I like Vaan or no, I like that Square's giving the characters different personalities now (if not different looks.)

--If only Fran had been played by Bjork.

--They must be doing something right beacuse I find myself looking for hunts and sidequests. I ordinarily hate sidequests and the obscure things you need to do to trigger them (FFX, I'm looking at you.) So far the hunts you more or less pick from a menu and then get to questin'. I like that. It's much clearer than dodging lightning 100 times in a row. Perhaps there will be inane quests like that later on; I kind of fear that.

--I want to hear a Moogle in a cutscene. I want to know what a Moogle accent sounds like. There was one cutscene I saw where a couple Moogles squeaked at the party, and I nearly died of cute, but I'd like to have a conversation with one.

--Why does Square insist on putting a stupid Stealth level in every game that they make now? Their engines are simply not set up for it, and while the levels are never *hard* they're always *tedious*. Even friends who are fans of stealth gameplay hate these levels. Why keep them in?

Bullets on FFXII, 3 hours in

2006-11-01T09:45:00.000-08:00

--I bought the limited edition which comes with a bonus DVD in a tin case. It looks pretty, except for the fact that the disc holders are the kind that refuse to let the fucking thing out. I'm terrified I'm going to crack a disc while taking it out. And then I'll write to Square for a new copy.

--There is a featurette on the History of Final Fantasy on the DVD. I personally dont' like the narrator. It's kind of ironic: the narrator has a very deep and soulful voice, very masculine, and yet the heroes of Final Fantasy games are traditionally very twinky guys. I'm actually surprised that they didn't get one of the FF voice actors to do it--the guy who plays Tidus or Vaan would have been natural choices for it.

--As far as the featurette itself, it's oddly cursory in many places. In so many ways it's made for the fans of the series--they go into very brief explanations to the effect of, "Magic and espers are controlled using Magicite," and that's the entire explanation. If you don't know anything about the game, it won't make any sense to you. And yet they skip over so many things that fans would have loved to have seen. They talk about FFVII without even so much as touching on Sephiroth. His name isn't even mentioned.

--There's a series of developer interviews. An old PR trick for interviews is "answer the question you'd like to be asked"--if you've got a crisis you're trying to cover up, what you need to do is not ignore the question but ask a slightly different version of the question so you don't *exactly* admit to a mistake or whatever. But this isn't a nuclear power leak; this is questions about a videogame. Most of the people they interview don't answer the question they're asked. "Tell me what you like best about Final Fantasy XII" is an easy question to answer, and yet several of the people say things like, "Final Fantasy XII is a new game that we made, and we spent a lot of time working on it." One guy in particular didn't even touch on anything remotely related to the questions he was asked. Granted, the interviews were translated, and it's possible that there's a language issue here. Still, it was funny.

--The starting city, which I get the sense I might be spending a lot of time in, is huge. Too huge. Square has not realized that games can be made without load times, and if I'm on one end and I have t do something at the other end, I've got a long walk and 2-3 loads ahead of me. Granted, they're only a couple of seconds, but that's more than what needs to exist. Even pulling up the map takes an extra second or so to load, and since you use it a lot, it's extremely annoying to have to wait so much.

--I was about to get annoyed at the fact that about half of the cast has British accents and half has regular American accents, and my initial reaction to that was, "Can't they keep it consistent?" I mean, what is it about fantasy fare that screams "British accent"? It wouldn't be as bad if they got genuinely British voice actors, but they always seem to grab Americans that can't fake the accent convincingly. I was about to get annoyed, but I'm realizing that the American accents are from one country and the British from another. That's actually a really nice touch. If only they didn't make the actors playing the soldiers try to butcher a Cockney accent I'd like it more.

Bullets on FFXII, 2 hours in

2006-10-31T14:31:00.000-08:00

--Vayne is intensely charismatic and intensely likeable; I'd swear allegiance to him. He must therefore be psychotically evil.

--The battle system is quite bizarre; I realize I've only gone through a couple of fights but as of the moment the strategy consists of clicking Attack, then running away so the enemy can't attack, then running in close when it's time to swing the sword. I haven't seen any Gambits yet so that'll probably get more in-depth.

--This is the second Squeenix game in a row that I have played that I can think of in which your character in the prologue is not the main character. I wonder if that's a trend and I wonder if I like that.

--The prologue is intensely unfocused. Within the first 20 minutes we have a parade, a wedding, some political intrigue, a battle, the fall of a city, an excerpt from a character's memoirs, an honest-to-goodness playable section/tutorial, a shocking event, some more memoirs, and then we get to see the main character. On one hand, it makes the story seem very epic--the introductory movie is full of excitement--on the other, I'm not sure what i should be focusing on yet.

--The menus are slightly clumsy, and Square doesn't seem to realize that it's at worst difficult and at best extremely awkward to control both the left analog stick and the digital pad at the same time, and yet the game makes you do as such.

--At least the game recognizes that peopel want to skip and pause cutscenes. FMV segments are skippable but unpausable, and I'm not sure why. But in-engine cutscenes you can do both with, and thank you Xenosaga for letting other companies realize the importance of that.

--The game's license board, while I haven't even begun to really spend much time with, is unimpressive at a first glance. While the board allows you to learn dozens of skills and could probably have some very deep strategy in later stages, since all the spots are extremely close together, so it looks small and unimposing. One of the things I liked about FFX's sphere grid was the fact that it was so spread out that it looked like you'd never get it finished and that there was a virtually unlimited amount of skills you can learn. The License Board might even have more varied skills than the Sphere Grid, but it looks like you can complete it easier. I know that won't be the case, but I'm just talking about immediate impressions.

Okami, 20 hours in

2006-10-04T01:14:00.000-07:00

I am around 20 hours into Okami. My friend who is playing through the game--he started the same day as I did, but I've been a little more flitty about it and haven't spent as much time as him--is around 50 hours in, and he says he sees no end in sight[1]. This is a game which the major review sites have estimated at 40 hours[2].

I am loving every second of it and I don't particularly care for it to end every time soon; I will be upset when it does. Okami is the best game I have played in a long time, possibly one of the best I've played ever. I take it back--I've said lately that it feels like people don't know how to make a game that's fun, and I take it back: Okami's people do. It's made by Clover Studios, who made Viewtiful Joe. That's another game that was just fun to play. The name of this blog is Jeuissance, which, as we all know meens joy of play--which means that a game should be fun.

And Clover, thank you.

I knew I needed Okami the second I saw a single preview image of it. I'm a sucker for cel-shading and otherwise striking visuals, and Okami has that in spades. The game is based on Japanese mythology, and the visuals look exactly like an classical Japanese painting...except it's 3-d, and in action, and moving. No attempt at realism is even considered--things are stylized, and it looks beautiful. The foreground is bright and colorful, and in the background are simple lines--single lines--of mountains. And you see craggy mountains and wherever your character runs little flowers and grass springs up, and the monsters are horrific in their detail and it's beautiful. And the people are all quirky looking and offbeat, and your character is graceful and elegant and powerful. And when you draw with your brush, it becomes uneven and you see the bristle marks and--God, I could point out things for hours. But play it. You'll see one thing if you see a screenshot, and just about every view is screenshot-worthy, and yet--and-yet--it is amazing to actually see it.

The major gameplay feature is what's called the Celestial Brush, which is a magical calligraphy brush which allows you to do--well, just about anything that the game requires. Hit R1 and the game will pause and a parchment overlay will appear onscreen (and, mercifully, thank you Clover, you're able to change the angle of the camera and pan the view so if the angle isn't exactly right you can change without any effort at all), and hit a button, and move the stick, and draw. You can cause trees to bloom, and cut enemies in half, and create lilypads in the water, fly through the air on vines, change day into night--. It's a combination between a magic spell system and a bag of tools, and it works elegantly. I realized it with the vine thing. There are flowers scattered across the land hanging in the air. If you draw a line from the flower to your character, a vine will cling to her and pull her up. It's a way to get to high places and to travel across great distances, and it works remarkably like the Hookshot from The Legend of Zelda series. The day/night brush techniques work remarkably like the various songs that you play on the Ocarina or whatever. The problem with Zelda as far as those go is that each item needs to be equipped separately. You need to go in the options screen, decide which button you want to assign the tool to, and get out; when you need to equip a different tool, you need to repeat the process again. Okami gives you a series of over a dozen tools or spells, and you access them immediately. No tools need to be equipped because it's a technique rather than a tool issue. And the brush techniques take context-sensitive to a whole new level taht I've never seen. The basic techniques are all similar--in order to summon the sun, cause a tree to bloom, or manifest a lilypad, you just draw a circle, either in the sky, on the ground, or on water. I can see a lesser game putting a lot more clutter in--you'd have a different brush for each technique. Okami puts a lot more effort into streamlining, and it makes for an overall better game.

Okami is definitely concerned with an aesthetic experience, it's definitely concerned with showing you a new world, and it's definitely concerned with a strong narrative--culled from Japanese folktales but told in a particularly interesting way--and yet, unlike so many games which seem interested in those things, it wants to be fun to play. More games need to see this--need to realize that there's someone controlling it and looking to have fun with it. A movie can be watched and one can derive pleasure out of the story and characters--and while a game can and often does give pleasure through that, it adds that interactivity. Interactivity is the most important part of gaming--Pac-Man gives pleasure even though it has no characters and no plot--and if we're not getting pleasure from that, then we won't get pleasure from the game as a whole. Okami gives narrative and aesthetic pleasure, and it gives jeuissance too. I haven't even played a bad sidequest, there hasn't been a single portion of the game that's felt tedious or boring.

[1] He's admittedly much more thorough in his gaming than me. Sidequests are very hit-or-miss for me, though I've been a bit more into collecting optional items in this game than I am in others.

[2] See also Clive Thompson's article on "The Myth of the 40-Hour Game" at Wired. http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71836-0.html?tw=wn_story_page_prev2.

Final Fantasy IV's Magnetic Cave

2006-09-30T17:02:00.000-07:00

My thoughts towards Final Fantasy IV are pretty mixed--while on one hand it's one of the more historically important RPGs (the first TRULY epic storyline that American audiences played, one of the first RPGs to find a mainstream audience, the largest cast at that time), and while many of those aspects hold up well, and it's a generally solid game, there are tons of bits about it that just don't work. One of the more shallow considerations is that I'm playing the GBA port, which is kind of glitchy in spots--there's often troubles with the ATB system (either a character will attack twice in a row, or sometimes they'll hang on and wait a while before they do indeed attack), it's laggy in spots as far as navigating menus are concerned. There are more personal considerations--I normally dislike mages* (especially white mages), and most of your characters are magic-users. Finally, the whole game reeks of being a stage where they're just figuring things out--VI, for example, is made by a company that had mastered the sprite-based console RPG, and most of the elements are perfect in it. IV is a company trying new things, succeeding in some, and failing miserably in others. While you never really need to spend time levelling--they did make the game relatively well-paced, and if you're fighting every battle you'll probably be at the level you need to be--but occasionally you'll want to, and even if you're just moving your way through a dungeon, you'll notice that there's an extreme lack of variety in monsters. You'll fight the same exact party of monsters three or four times in a row. There needed to be a bit more randomization as far as that's concerned. But where it fails, it fails respectably--it fails because it seems like this is a developer unsure of exactly how to do certain things; even though it had made three critically- and commercially-successful RPGs, it didn't feel like becoming complacent. That, coupled with the new hardware of the SNES, gave Square license and reason to experiment, and where the experiment fails we can't fault them--in later games, we see that they learned from their mistakes.

However, one of the more notable areas--an area that stands out as a terrible idea because I have never seen a single other RPG attempt to even touch upon emulating it, is the Magnetic Cave.

At this point in the story, the party has been unsuccessfully trying to protect the four crystals which control the forces of the world and which Golbez, the Bad Guy of the moment, is chasing after. The main character's girlfriend has been kidnapped, and Golbez proposes a trade: the girl for the final crystal. So the party goes to the town of Troia, where the crystal is housed, only to find out that the evil Dark Elf has stolen it; if they can get it back, they'll be able to borrow it for the trade. Okay, well, good--a little yak-shavey, perhaps, but it's a second-generation RPG and no one knew any better. Trouble is, the Dark Elf has erected some defenses--magnetic ones which make the characters' armor and weapons too heavy. If you've got anything metal equipped, you won't be able to lift it to attack--which, as far as the game is concerned, means that in battles, your character is considered to be paralyzed and cannot attack or anything. If all four of your characters at the time are wearing metal, they cannot run away from the battle, and the party is considered to be defeated. Game over.

An extremely interesting contradtion appears almost immediately. No matter what armor or weapons are equipped, the party can move about the dungeon with no hassle; if a random battle occurs, however, they'll be unable to move. There is always a major disconnect between the Field Screen and the Battle Screen--random encounters are always jarring and are only accepted as convention and nothing more--but this is an especially prominent one: either I can move or I cannot. Either I can not only walk through the dungeon and run from enemies, or I can neither explore nor run.

At this point in the game, we have in our party Cid, who is a decent physical attacker that cannot use magic; Yang, who is an excellent physical attacker that cannot use magic; Cecil, who is an excellent physical attacker that can only use white magic; and Tellah, who can use both black and white magic. Yang can attack bare-handed. Cid's weapon is a wooden mallet that is not affected by the magnetic field. Tellah can use magic to attack enemies. Cecil is the most affected by the field: as probably the best physical attacker in the party at this time, he uses swords mainly; if we de-equip him, his attack goes down to an almost embarrassign level. And while curing is always helpful, it won't damage any enemies**. Yang and Cid can do some damage on the enemies, but it'd be helpful if Cecil were there to lend support.

As far as defense goes, obviously most of the decent armor at this point is metal in origin. De-equipping them and equipping cloth armor means that the characters' defense goes down greatly, making them more susceptible to enemy attacks. And while some armor is explicitly labeled as metal--Gold Armor, Silver Armor, Mythril Armor, etc--there are many pieces where it isn't clear--just what is a "Kenpogi" made out of?

So as far as defense goes, if you want a character to be usable in battle in the Magnetic Cave, you've got to equip him in such a way that he'll be very vulnerable. As far as offense goes, two characters do moderate damage, one does none, and one is a special case.

Tellah, it is true, is an excellent mage--he's got pretty good stats and almost all of the spells in the game. However, he's only got 90 MP, and when most of the good offensive spells cost at least 15 MP, it's clear that you can't cast much.

If I may digress--this is my blog so I may of course digress--there are storyline-related reasons as to why Tellah's MP caps off at such a low number--other characters' MP way overtakes his. Tellah is, first off, an extremely old character. He's grown, stats-wise, as much as he ever is, and even though his levels are increasing, he's not really going to get any stronger. (I read somewhere that some of his stats actually decrease, but I don't remember where, I can't find confirmation, and I don't feel like experimenting in the game to find out if that's true.) He won't get better, he'll get worse. Second, the most destructive spell in the game, Meteor, needs 99 MP to cast. Meteor is listed as one of Tellah's possible spells, but it's always grayed out because you don't have enough MP to cast it. A major plot point of the game involves Tellah using all of his power to cast the spell--with tragic results, of course--and the scene would have no import if he'd been able to cast it all along. I understand, storywise, why Tellah is given such a low MP score.

As far as gameplay is concerned, however, it's a terrible idea--it makes the game unnecessary problemmatic--either you can't use Tellah much, or you need to waste MP-healing items on him.

It's pretty much a given, as far as I am concerned, that a game's System can be used effectively to bring the state of a character across--a game like Silent Hill which stresses its protagonists' Average-Joe nature by disallowing them to run fast for a period of time and giving them shakey aim, for example, manages to convey that this is an untrained and unathletic individual, without sacrificing gameplay too much. Here, the decision to characterize Tellah as a weak person does not serve the game--it hurts it, in my opinion. This is a major problem with Final Fantasy IV, in my opinion--Edward is another character who's weak, both physically and emotionally, when we first have him in our party, and he has low accuracy, does little damage, and has the wonderful special ability of "HIDE" which does exactly what it sounds like. While it hits home that we don't have a brave hero on our side, it doesn't make the game any more fun.

To add insult to injury, literally an hour before the Magnetic Cave is confronted, we have two excellent mages--one black, one white--in our party. If they were still in the party, we'd be able to do some damage without having to sacrifice strength and defense. If Square truly wanted to make a dungeon where physical strength is not prioritized, it ought to have done that at a point where we can exercise magical strength.

My strategy for the Magnetic Cave, incidentally, is to de-equip the character with the highest agility and put him in the back row (which lets him escape most damage.) I level up outside the cave if I need to, and I then just charge through, running from every battle. It's nowhere near what Square intended, but I don't like their idea, and it's so much easier to do it my way. As I've said, I respect that they tried to do something different, but I breathe easy knowing that so few people thought it was a good idea and that no one else tried to do the same.

* Playing through the GBA ports of FF 1 and 2 did give me a bit more of an open mind towards magic-using characters, actually. There's first off much more choice in both as to what spells you can get, so while IV attaches certain spells to each level, 1 and 2 allow you to bypass crummy spells like Death or Break that never really work anyway. 2 especially impressed me with its magic system--any character can learn any spell and grow exactly how you want him or her to, so essentially you can make anyone a Red Mage, meaning that you can have a character heal--but also do some major damage to enemies. Each spell also has its own level that you can strenghten by the number of times you use them, so mages can end up becoming very devastating. The spells themselves are more useful, and you can pick only the spells you want. I do like that element of choice as opposed to, "Let's give you a character who's a white mage, whose CURE spell is the only useful one, and who can't do any significant damage." That's what I hate about mages sometimes.

** To be fair, healing spells will damage undead enemies (zombies, vampires, etc) in the Final Fantasy series--most notably, an undead boss in Final Fantasy X can be killed in one turn by using a Phoenix Down (revive item) on him. However, none of the enemies in the Magnetic Cave are undead, and therefore Cecil indeed cannot do any significant damage on them.

First post!

2006-09-30T12:51:00.000-07:00

Hey, folks. Richard Goodness here with my new blog, Jeuissance. This is going to be a basic depository for my thoughts on gaming--either basic analysis, impressions/reviews, commentary on events, or whatever I feel like writing about. Don't expect anything like regular updates or a posting schedule--I'll post when I have something to say.

So what, exactly, does "jeuissance" mean? The term "jouissance" ("jou"=joy) is used in psychoanalytic and other literary theory to mean a release of joy akin to orgasm; it's often used to describe the pleasure one gets from the act of reading. "Jeu" is the French word for game and it's
pronounced very similarly to "jou," so in a lot of ways "Jeuissance" is a kind of pun. I use it to mean "the joy of play"--a feeling of joy you get from the act of holding a controller, pushing buttons, and interacting with a world in a way that only a videogame allows you to. It's that feeling that makes you say, just one more level, even though you've got to be up for work in four hours. That feeling which, even though you're faced with a boss you just can't beat, makes you need to keep going. It's the reason I kept that controller in my hand after my first, disastrous game of Dig Dug when I was three, and the reason I still play to this day.