More of the Same

You want games as art? I'll give you games as art.

2010-05-02T23:26:00.001-07:00

Hatetris.

This is game-programming-as-sculpture, not "I want to make something that's fun to play" (sculpture equivalent: "I want to make something that looks pretty"), but an attempt to achieve a platonic ideal -- find the sculpture already in the stone. Everyone who's played Tetris has felt at some time like the game hates them. This is an attempt to program a version of Tetris that really does hate you, the pattern within the pattern made real.

It's not perfect. I don't think it quite works. It's a draft. But it's still art.

Floor Wax / Dessert Topping

2010-05-01T16:15:00.000-07:00

Game designer interviews are depressing. There's too much money on the line for candid statements. I don't remember the last time I read or watched an interview with a game designer where I didn't always know what the response would be just by reading the question.

Take this one, for instance.

It's about Dead Space 2.

I loved Dead Space. Loved loved loved. I would go so far as to say I lurveded Dead Space. I am really looking forward to Dead Space 2. The reveal trailor has me pumped. Necromorphs and PTSD? Yes, please!

(I want a whole Aliens movie with no aliens in it, just Ripley dealing with PTSD. Remember, the amount of subjective time she's spent between the beginning of the first movie and the end of the fourth is maybe two months, and most of that was as a dockworker between the rescue at the beginning of Aliens and getting recruited to go back to the colony.)

Man, take a look at that interview. "We're adding more action!" "Won't that entail reducing the horror?" "No, there'll be just as much horror as before, but more action! We're empowering the protagonist!"

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't horror traditionally entail giving the audience the impression of a disempowered protagonist? (Ha! Irony, suggesting action precludes horror in a blog post that invokes Aliens. But you know what I mean.)

...

Again, I get it. They've got to say something. Gotta keep the hype up. Gotta chase that Modern Warfare 2 audience, but can't risk scaring away the established fans either.

The really terrible thing is, even if they're being completely sincere, and they're Aliens-level competent, and it really is going to be just as scary as Dead Space while also being way more action-packed, this interview doesn't tell me that, because they'd be saying the exact same thing if they had no idea what they were doing, and were just creating an incoherent mess. It has zero information content.

So much gaming press is like that.

That new X-Com first-person shooter thing

2010-04-13T23:15:00.000-07:00

Okay, look. When I was... I think it was eight? Six?

Really young, anyway.

When I was really young I remember, vividly, watching television and seeing a commercial for some Consumer Reports type thing, I'm pretty sure it wasn't actually Consumer Reports, but something that lists products by quality. And I remember a tagline, "We sort products by the most reliable something something whatever... by brand name."

It didn't actually say something something whatever. It used coherent language. But "...by brand name" was the tagline.

I remember this vividly because I remember hearing that, and even at six, or eight, or whatever, thinking "That's bullshit. There's no way sorting by brand name is going to make for a sufficiently accurate quality metric. Different companies excel in different areas. You're selling me something." I didn't use those words exactly, but that's what I thought.

My parents were hippies. They taught me at a young age that anyone trying to sell me something is my enemy.

(Growing up a bit more I've come to realize that's not the best way to look at the world in all contexts, but it's still my default filter.)

2K is making an X-Com FPS. I am supposed to be excited by this because X-Com was great, so X-Com as an FPS should be great. But there's no reason why that should hold true! Just because X-Com was a great isometric base-building-and-squad-tactics game at some point in the past doesn't mean it'll make a great FPS now. 2K marketing guys, whichever one of you wrote the press release you have to know that you're insulting my intelligence by presenting such a facile argument. And, I mean, I know, you're a press release writer. You have to write something. Drawing on the power of established brands to pitch your new product is a tried-and-tested marketing technique and it works. I get it.

None of that matters. You're selling me something. In particular you're selling me bullshit and absent logic. I'm not buying it.

I will give this FPS a fair shake. I'm sure the people who actually are making it want to make a good product. I won't hold the stupid, insulting press release against the game. But it is a stupid and insulting press release and it's not exactly making me better-disposed towards the products.

At least put a picture of a Chrissalid in there.

Kingdom Hearts and Free Time

2009-05-28T19:47:00.000-07:00

So.

I just spent about 200 cumulative hours playing Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories, Kingdom Hearts II (normal mode) and Kingdom Hearts II (proud mode).

What did I used to spend my free time doing, before that franchise sucked me in? I forget. It's been a while.

Viceland Reviews: Star Ocean: The Last Hope and Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

2009-04-18T21:13:00.000-07:00

They're up.

Words cannot describe the degree to which I'm disappointed in Star Ocean: The Last Hope, although I tried to come close there. It has so much cool stuff, but it also has so much ridiculous bullshit. It should be a crime to bury that much awesome in that much shit.

H.A.W.X., on the other hand, was a brief, fun diversion.

The Gaming Hour: Episode 1

2009-03-30T02:21:00.000-07:00

Call of Duty: World at War and The Last Remnant.

It is, as it turns out, very difficult to write something and perform it both. Instead of just remembering the script, I have to also remember which bits of stuff I'm remembering as the script are the script, and which bits are cut material that were in the script for variable periods of time until I edited them out.

The camera and editing work is really impressive, though; thankee, Vice people, for making me look better than I am.

Viceland Reviews: Halo Wars and Moon

2009-03-10T01:09:00.001-07:00

They're up.

Killzone 2: A Review

2009-03-06T00:42:00.001-08:00

I am unlikely to review Killzone 2 for Vice, on account of it's one half the subject of my first non-review Vice Magazine column, due in the April issue. I think that means can review it here, instead. Amy, my boss at Vice, is pretty cool and has never gotten angry at me doing this sort of thing before.

In some objective sense, Killzone 2 is an admirable attempt to move the tropes of World War II shooters into a science fiction context, where most non-World-War-II shooters dwell, while leveraging the Playstation 3 hardware to create one of the most visually attractive games I've ever seen. In a completely subjective sense, as a game it's pretty awful and I just as often hate it as enjoy it.

Its designers have chosen to import my least favorite parts of WWII shooters, namely, huge open battlefields with dozens of allies and enemies interacting simultaneously, which makes it hard for me to keep track of what's going on and feel like I'm winning because of my own mastery of the play mechanics. Two thirds of the way through I had to dial the difficulty down to easy to progress pass a few bottlenecks, places where the game was hard in an annoying, "Do everything right and maybe you die because of sheer bad luck anyway" way. Unlike, say, Halo, which I quite enjoyed tackling on Legendary difficulty, I can imagine no reward to trying this game in its harder modes. The weapons are poorly differentiated and distributed, the enemy soldiers are all very similar in appearance and behavior, and there's not much variety in play experience that I could detect. Maybe someone who's well versed in the subtleties of single-player WWII shooter campaigns might appreciate its play experience more than I.

Moreover, the elements it pulls from more traditional shooters, namely the boss fights (a fight on a rooftop against an enemy automated flying drone and a duel at the end against one particular elite soldier), are poorly implemented and feel both thematically out of place and badly designed. In the former's case, I can accept puzzle bosses in games that try for less verisimilitude than this one, but here it feels like the game stopped being Killzone 2 for a wile, and in the latter's case, the one guy isn't a puzzle boss but he is a teleporting super-soldier who can inexplicably take twenty times as many bullets as any other dude wearing the same model armor I've met throughout the game. See above, re: acceptable in games less verisimilar than this.

I can't recommend Killzone 2 to anyone who wants a solid game to play. It makes for a good, I dunno, historical benchmark experience, in a "This is the state of gaming right now" way, and it's going to go down in history as an Important Game, so if you want to have experienced that sort of thing it's good, but in terms of a polished shooter that requires player skill and follows internal logic, stick with F.E.A.R. 2, the other half of the subject of my first non-review column for Vice Magazine's April issue.

Why I Don't Actually Like Video Games

2009-02-14T23:23:00.000-08:00

I said I'd do this some day. Now seems good.

Video games, on the face of it, are a ridiculous hobby; especially the sort of video games I play, which is to say largely the single player ones. There is nothing of value they provide that can't be provided better elsewhere. About the best I can say of them is: They're no more wasteful than television, and less wasteful than, say, brain-frying chemicals.

As an example, just read my reviews of Persona 4 and Prince of Persia, and then ask yourself this: When I say Prince of Persia is "not deep," what do I mean? Not deep compared to Persona 4? What is the value of depth in this context?

Certainly Persona 4 has more challenging gameplay and a more engaging story, but by what standards? Persona 4's story is very good by the standards of video game stories, but that still means it's very bad compared to, for example, 90% of the books I'd see if I walked into any given library and looked around. Even if one accepts the premise that exposure to quality storytelling is somehow life-enriching (I do, but am not sure why), few to no video games have provided a quality of storytelling that couldn't be easily exceeded by a trip to a local library, where access to the stories in question is free. As for the more challenging gameplay, as long as I'm questioning the values of things, what's the value of that? I can barely think of any; I may be engrossed in complex turn-based strategic battles between benevolent and malevolent elements of humanity's id, but while it may hold my attention, it's not life-enriching.

I play video games because I need something to fill my time and distract myself from the fact that for any moment of time I'm engaging with most of my hobbies, I'm not accomplishing anything of value, either internally or externally. The finite hours of my life tick by as I perfect the motions behind Ryu's fireball, so I can defeat M. Bison to unlock Sakura, so I can defeat M. Bison with her to unlock Dan, and once I've unlocked Dan, I'm not left with anything except a jerk with pink gi and a ponytail who doesn't even exist.

People who play multiplayer games are different; they, at least, are using games as a medium for socialization, which arguably is valuable if "value" is to be a useful concept.

Now, I personally am a bit of an outlier—for me, playing and writing about video games is life-enriching in that it nets me riches in the form of paychecks. So it all worked out peachy for me. Still, I can recognize that much of the challenge -> reward cycle video games use to keep our attention is manipulative bullshit.

I am not a big fan of the whole Puritan "First toil, then the grave" school of how one should live one's life, but the more I try to meaningfully analyze games, the more I come back to most games just not having much meaning, when you get right down to it. Exceptions spring to mind (Ico, Rez), games that show me new storytelling techniques—techniques that could not be accomplished in non-interactive media—and expand the range of imaginative tools with which I can envision the world around me. Arguably these games give the rest of the game industry meaning, in the sense that it provides an environment where they can be made. But individual games? Time sinks. I would be better off organizing my receipts or, yes, reading a book.

That's why I don't actually like video games, for some value of "don't actually like video games."

(Most of my posts are intellectually deconstructive these days. I figure if I keep doing it, I'll eventually find something to reconstruct.)

Viceland Reviews: Persona 4 and Prince of Persia

2009-02-14T11:28:00.001-08:00

They're up.

The Unholy Trinity

2009-02-01T22:44:00.000-08:00

I don't play a lot of MMOs. I have tried World of Warcraft and I hated it. Eve Online... well, I don't much like unregulated PVP. I do like City of Heroes, though, and I especially like City of Villains. And not just for the character creator. I'll get back to why I enjoy CoV in a moment.

That said, due to my unfamiliarity with the genre, the following may be unqualified statements.

...

Tank/DPS/Healer is dumb. I can't stand it. The more a game separates those three roles, the less I will play it.

The ideal fantasy game, for me, is a game that allows me to feel as if I'm participating in the sort of fantasy fiction I enjoy, whether that be fantasy fiction first experienced through books, movies, or television. Even if I'm not playing Aragorn (actually I'm not a fan of The Lord of the Rings, either, but that's a topic for another blog), I want to feel like I'm playing a guy who might occupy an Aragorn-ish role.

Is Aragorn a tank, a DPS guy, or a healer?

He's none, and that's a terrible, stupid question, because fictional fantasy combat does not work that way. Fictional fantasy characters don't fill out those roles unless you squint so hard your eyeballs pop out of their sockets.

For lack of better terminology, the "Holy Trinity" feels very first draft. Very clumsy. It feels like the result of someone making a list of all the things you can do in virtual combat and then saying "Okay, we'll make one type of player character to do each of those things." There is no finnesse there, no effort put into making these characters feel like actual fantasy characters who show up in fantasy settings; it's just raw compromise for the sake of easy game design.

Compare City of Villains. City of Villains has five archetypes: Brute, Corruptors, Dominators, Masterminds, and Stalkers.

Brutes are heavy DPS guys who can mitigate damage against themselves, but they cannot tank effectively in the classical sense. (Fortunately, due to the way the rest of the archetypes work, they don't have to.) Corruptors are comparatively fragile but weaken enemies, acting as force multipliers in groups of player characters; they can heal, but it's not their focus. Dominators manage enemy behavior and can hulk out, increasing their direct combat effectiveness. Masterminds summon minions, which gives them both decent damage output and something like classical tanking ability (though, like Brutes, not to the extent of tanks in most MMOs). Stalkers do huge damage but are quite capable of defending themselves through stealth, if played correctly.

1) They all play differently.
2) They all play well alone.
3) They all play well together.
4) They all feel like the sort of character archetypes you actually get in comic books.

None of them fit obviously into one spot on the tank/DPS guy/healer trinity.

I would not call City of Villains the pinnacle of MMO design, just the most convenient example I could think of of... second draft play design. It benefits from the recognition that enemy damage mitigation, player character damage management, and player-character-on-enemy damage are the three roles that need filling in conventional MMO play, but it doesn't go the cheap and easy route of just making one character type to fill each of those slots. It's got problems (it's repetitive, for one) and I haven't actually played it in a few months, but it's a good illustration of the reason why I hate most MMOs, hold the design theories behind them in contempt, and will never play WoW again.

Where The Dislike Is

2009-01-23T04:05:00.000-08:00

I hate Playstation Home. There's nothing to do there except wander around looking at the pretty graphics, play that UFO game in the central plaza, agonize over the face editor while looking at photo references of my own face, and spend money on clothing and a mountain apartment.

So why do I do all these things? Why have I bought a shirt, a pair of pants, two pairs of glasses, and a mountain retreat apartment? Why do I log in and wander around and not chat with anyone, and fail to decide whether I want to go with the more accurate brown hair or the better looking blue?

Well, okay, I know why I bought the mountain apartment. I was curious what it looked like, and it was five bucks. And I know why I bought the glasses -- they were a buck each, and the two pairs of default glasses look nothing like the ones I wear. (As it turns out, the bought ones don't, either; damnit.)

And I kinda know why I wander around. It's a confluence of factors. First, there's the novelty of actually existing in a virtual environment that's somewhat akin to those I read about in science fiction for ages and ages -- a fake world to be in, and not a set of skinned goals. Second, it's not demanding. When I play other games, lately, they feel like work, even when they aren't, so Home is an opportunity to engage in an activity I like (project myself into a virtual environment) without having to deal with any stress. Third, it really is pretty, if you can get by the vacant looks on the faces of (or so it seems) every character but mine -- you'd be surprised what a bit of tweaking the advanced eye and mouth options can do to make a Home character look less like these, especially if you're willing to introduce a bit of asymmetry.

I really don't like it, though. The environments need to be bigger and more seamless and there needs to be more stuff to do.

And I'm not buying any furniture. That shit is ridiculous -- the only way to make Home less boring is to walk around its environments, so what's the use of things that you can only sit stationary on?

The reason why I don't post here more often...

2009-01-19T18:44:00.000-08:00

...well, one of the reasons why I don't post here more often, is that usually when I get the urge to post, it's something like "Sweet Jesus, I wish I had more time to play the games I want to play, instead of the games I have to review."

Which is a stupid, unworthy complaint to make, because I'm being paid to review video games, which isn't something I should be complaining about.

Gluttony

2009-01-09T16:03:00.000-08:00

Sorry for immediately breaking my new year's resolution to post at least three times per week; I've spent this whole week tearing apart and reorganizing my living space. It's still a mess—boxes everywhere; dust and rubbish kicked up that need vacuuming; books, knick-knacks, and disc cases of various sorts that need shelving (more, really, than I have shelving to fit). I'm sure you all know how it is during a serious reorganization of a nerd's cluttered room. Today, though, something relevant to my gaming life occurred.

The following games arrived for me in the mail.

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne
Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga
Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 2
Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia
Mana Khemia: Alchemist of Al-Revis
Metal Gear Solid
Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance
Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence
Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow

Of them, I've played in the past only Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance. I used to own them both; I lost them to separate thefts. Since then, I replaced them with Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (which I ultimately disliked, as I found the new voice acting inferior to the original) and Metal Gear Solid 2's Xbox port (which I ultimately disliked because it had sub-optimal controls due to the number of shoulder buttons on the Xbox controller, and because its framerate halved during rainy scenes). So for those two, it's just nice to have versions I like kicking around. And hey, they were cheap—they came in the Metal Gear Solid: The Essential Collection box.

The other games in that list go on the pile already occupied by Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth, Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness, Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories, Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts II, Odin Sphere, Eternal Poison, and Armored Core: for Answer. The pile's theme is largely niche Japanese games I've gotten into, or wanted to get into, and dropped due to distraction. I'll return to them some day, I'm sure... though the presence of the two Kingdom Hearts games on that list suggest otherwise. This didn't stop me from buying the Disgaea 3 DCL characters the other day, though. On the plus side, I finished one playthrough of Chrono Trigger DS, and I've gotten pretty far into Persona 4; the latter's not optional, though—I'll be reviewing it soon. I'll probably have to put a "I haven't actually finished this game yet" disclaimer into that review. Note to self.

Long before I've fully delved into even a fraction of the above (I don't expect to have even half of all those games finished by 2010), I plan to have picked up Mana Khemia: Student Alliance and Disgaea 2: Insert Funny New Subtitle Here for the PSP. Never mind that each is a PSP port of a PS2 game I already have. They'll have extra content!

I'm a bit of a consumer whore. (Of course that link goes where you think it does.)

I may also be a bit of a poseur.

Do I like these games, or do I just like the idea of liking them? I think it's the former, but if it were the latter, would I know? It's hard to see the back of your own eyeballs. And it's not that I'm super-concerned with peoples' motives for self-identifying as part of a given fandom—I wouldn't use the word poseur to describe someone else. But it bothers me that my buying habits might be hoarding instinct rather than a genuine desire to play these things; I thought I'd gotten over that when I stopped buying every tabletop RPG supplement that momentarily caught my eye.

About a decade ago, I was a much bigger geek and Japanophile than I am now. This was before I had the Internet (thus, I'd never met the sort of people who'd today fling—accurately, at that—the word weeabo at then-me); we were poor. I bought gaming magazines despite owning no gaming consoles of the then-current generation; the magazines were cheaper and let me experience games vicariously I would otherwise have been unable to see at all. My favorite was GameFan, and the two games that intrigued me the most—neither of which I ever got to play, until two weeks ago—were Persona 2 and Suikoden. (Two weeks ago, Suikoden went up on the Playstation Network Store. I grabbed it. Maybe I should add it to the list above.) By that time I'd already been hooked on and Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI, which back then I knew as Final Fantasy 3. I wanted more games like that.

For ten years I wanted to play a Persona game, based on nothing but a quarter-page review.

As my access to game consoles and the Internet gradually expanded, I learned, in bits and pieces, more about Atlus and the Shin Megami Tensei series. I learned that Persona 2: Eternal Punishment was the second half of a duology, and that the first half, Persona 2: Innocent Sin, had never made it out of Japan (a gay romance in a video game would have been too big a deal back then). I learned that the Persona series was a spin-off of the core Shin Megami Tensei series. I learned about companies peripherally associated with Atlus in different contexts. I developed an appreciation for Disgaea's humor from descriptions on the Internet long before I'd actually played a Disgaea game.

Then last summer, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES's release date came around just as I was aware of it. I picked it up, played obsessively for a bit, realized I'd been playing suboptimally, deleted my save file in annoyance and started again. Then I did that another time, and on the third time through the game's first ten hours I got distracted by something else. I forget what.

I like these games in theory but I'm poorly adapted to the play style they encourage; I'm simultaneously too obsessive and too impatient. I can't stand playing suboptimally, but if playing optimally requires too much time and patience I get frustrated and look for something else to do. Something like Final Fantasy X-2, with its normal bad ending and its hidden good ending that requires hundreds of trivial tasks performed to perfection, would drive me nuts.

If someone would just make a game with a quick pace and simple, twitch-based gameplay at about the depth of Halo 3, married to characters and a story as complex and engaging as Persona 4, I'd be in heaven.

Am I more a fan of the idea of video games than the games themselves? It seems likely. I dislike most games I play, after all.

...

I apologize for my rambling. I'll endeavor to make the next post more pointy. I'll probably just post my thoughts on whatever game I'm currently playing for the next little while; it should help me stay focused.

Fragile Expectations

2008-12-29T20:44:00.000-08:00

I have just watched the latest (first?) Fragile trailer, courtesy of the Kotaku newsfeed and YouTube:

Fragile is a game I've been looking forward to since I saw my first batch of screenshots. It's for the Wii and it's very pretty. In aesthetic, it resembles the sort of beautiful desolation I enjoy in everything from the anime Kino's Journey to the manga Yokohama Kadeshi Kiko to Steven King's The Dark Tower, coupled with shojou character designs straight out of CLAMP. There's really nothing there I don't like. I don't understand a word of the dialogue spoken but I'm looking forward to listening to more of it, with English subtitles. Using the Wii remote to direct a flashlight while exploring environments worthy of Misty Silent Hill but without Silent Hill's oppressive atmosphere it something I can buy into.

Or could.

Pay attention to the, oh, four seconds of video starting at the 1:31 mark.

I think I see a protagonist standing mostly in place and flailing rather limply against huge numbers of slow-moving and unresponsive identical low-poly enemies -- low poly enough that they look out of place in those beautiful environments. Given that he's using his flashlight, directed in the rest of the gameplay by the Wii remote, I'm guessing it's waggle-controlled, too.

I've played enough mediocre 3D platforming games with combat mechanics like that to know I don't want to play another.

I could, of course, be wrong, though since we're only a month away from the game's Japanese release date I doubt that's an alpha version of the combat. The game looks promising in other ways; God knows Ico didn't have very in-depth combat mechanics and it was great.

Still. Four seconds of video, and if most of my enthusiasm is, if not shattered, at least cracked.

I'm getting pretty jaded, to have expectations that fragile.

No More Tears

2008-12-25T22:32:00.000-08:00

So. Cry On has been canceled, apparently.

This is good news.

Here's the thing. Creating a game, as in many endeavors, requires many different skillsets, and they don't always occur within the same person. In the same way that someone who's good at drawing comics is not necessarily good at writing them, someone who's good at convincing an electorate to vote for him isn't necessarily good at governing a nation, and someone who's good at plotting and producing space adventure movies isn't necessarily good at scripting or directing them, someone who's good at creating compelling gameplay is not necessarily good at creating compelling narrative.

Unfortunately, like the comics thing, the politician thing, and the George Lucas thing, being good at creating compelling gameplay is often a good way to put yourself into a position where you're in charge of narrative.

This causes problems for creators who are good at creating gameplay, bad at creating narrative, and much more interested in the latter than the former. I will submit Hideo Kojima as Exhibit A -- I like Metal Gear Solid 4, but still admit it's full of stupid bullshit. The same stupid bullshit was in MGS and MGS2; it was just less visible in the former's case because the technology didn't allow for as much extravagance, and possibly because Kojima wasn't big enough at the time to operate without oversight.

(For Exhibit B, see Xenosaga. For Exhibit C, see Too Human.)

You get the same thing with a lot of authors. They get big, editors stop being strict with 'em, and suddenly you have the late career of Robert Heinlen and the middle Harry Potter books. Joanne Rowling seems to have learned this lesson, and so the late Harry Potter books have better editing than the middle ones, but lots of authors don't.

Cry On was to be Hironobu Sakaguchi's next big Xbox 360 Mistwalker project after Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, my reviews of which can be found here and here. Now, since I didn't like Blue Dragon and did like Lost Odyssey, one might expect me to have had quite high hopes for Cry On. I didn't. Lost Odyssey is a decent game, but it's flawed, and notable for how it's flawed.

It's slow. In a few respects, such as the long text stories of the protagonist's life as a wandering amnesiac immortal, it's just slow enough, but in most ways it's too slow -- this includes such things as the length of the game's animation for seeking treasure in pots.

What's also notable is the way it insists on players experiencing it on its own terms. That pot treasure animation can't be skipped. The game's boss battles are hard, and the game's experience curve is set up so grinding to overlevel a hard boss fight is almost impossible. Lost Odyssey is has no interest in accommodating players who wish to experience it on anything other than the way its designers' envisioned. They've created something cool and meaningful and you will watch it and not interrupt, damnit!

The whole game design screams of self-indulgence on the part of its creators, much more than Blue Dragon did.

With Cry On, Sakaguchi's explicit goal was to create a game so emotionally affecting that it brings the player to tears every twenty minutes. I have never heard a more self-indulgent-sounding game premise when I take into account Sakaguchi's history as a designer and the progression of his proclivities from the Final Fantasy series to Blue Dragon to Lost Odyssey. Cry On was always doomed.

Hironobu Sakaguchi is a talented game designer. He invented Final Fantasy, and by extension the JRPG. He saved Squaresoft from bankruptcy and put it where it is today. But he bought his own hype and lost sight of where his talents lay. Like so many creators, he lost the ability to self-edit even as he grew out of a position where anyone else could edit him... except, as it turns out, he didn't. Because Cry On has been canceled. He was edited.

This is a good thing. Hironobu Sakaguchi can make good games again, but not to put too fine a point on it, first he needs to get over himself. Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe the cancellation of Cry On is a great tragedy, but I think statistics -- the number of creators who go through the same process I see in him -- say I'm right. With luck, this setback will inspire in him some of his previous humility of ambition. I'm looking forward good Sacaguchi-produced games in the future; I just don't think Cry On could have been one of them.

...

My New Year's resolutions are to post more and, appropos of nothing, to draw for half an hour every day. Also, to watch my own self-indulgence. This post was pretty bad for that.

The problem with video game enthusiasm

2008-06-14T09:12:00.000-07:00

Why is it that I can eagerly anticipate a given video game for up to two years, even though I know fully well that when it is released, I'll probably be done with it within days?

Concerning Devil May Cry 4

2008-04-02T01:59:00.000-07:00

Dear Capcom,

Thank you for Devil May Cry 4. Having now put sixty hours of play into the game in question, and having beaten every difficulty setting save for Dante Must Die and Hell or Hell, I can say with some certainty that it's very nearly everything I could have hoped for. I forgive you for re-using level geometry, since I know current generation games require truly ridiculous amounts of art assets. The strength of the game has always been in the combat, and you delivered on that.

I don't quite forgive you for the dice game, but I won't speak of it at the moment. There is one complaint I do, indeed, wish to speak of, however.

I know it's coming up to time for the super-duper bargain-priced re-issue edition, probably within a year or so of now. You did it for Devil May Cry 3, I see no reason to suspect you won't do it for Devil May Cry 4. DMC3's special edition included a new character with a new combat style. When you re-release DMC4, please address the following problem:

Dante's gameplay is ass.

Sorry, but it needs to be said. I'm sure a direct lift of DMC3's controls seemed like a good idea at some point along the way. However, there are only so many times I can attempt to switch to trickster style in order to teleport next to a far away enemy, throw the enemy into the air with Rebellion (holding the button down to follow it), switch to swordmaster to do three hits from the four-hit swordmaster air combo, then switch to dark slayer style to perform its two-hit air combo, switch to gunslinger in time to land in order to use Coyote-E's fireworks maneuver to clear away any nearby enemies, and then switch back to trickster to do it all over again with another foe, only to have some part of this process disrupted by a crappy D-pad switching me to royalguard instead of swordmaster or gunslinger, or to gunslinger or swordmaster instead of trickster, before I grow tired of the process.

Playing as Nero is much more satisfying.

When you re-release DMC4, please enable the following control scheme for Dante:

Right Analog: Camera
Right Analog (click): Center Camera
Left Analog: Movement
A Button: Jump
B Button: Trickster Maneuver
X Button: Gun
Y Button: Devil Arm
Left Bumper: Devil Trigger
Right Bumper: Lock-On
Right Trigger: Royalguard Maneuver
Left Trigger + B Button: Dark Slayer Maneuver
Left Trigger + X Buton: Gunslinger Maneuver
Left Trigger + Y Button: Swordmaster Maneuver
D-Pad Up: Next Gun
D-Pad Down: Previous Gun
D-Pad Left: Next Devil Arm
D-Pad Right: Pevious Devil Arm
Start: Pause
Back: Taunt

Got it?

Good. I'm glad we understand each other, Capcom.

Halo 3 vs. The Orange Box

2008-02-08T18:39:00.001-08:00

"The hours are good, but the actual minutes are pretty lousy." —Douglas Adams, The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy

That might be a misquote; I can't find my copy of the book at the moment.

One of the problems with the way video game reviews work—and movie and book reviews as well, though I think the problem is worse with games— is that market forces exert pressure to release the review simultaneously with the game, but (at least for me, and I suspect for many people) the real quality of a game sometimes becomes apparent only after weeks or months of interaction with it. The video game industry is hardly mature in the same way that the movie industry is at this point, but we have had many years of observing game releases, and reviewers have become skilled at predicting whether a given game will have a lot of replay value or not, and gamers do need advice as to whether a game is worth perusing immediately upon release, a job reviews do serve, so it's not a big problem. But neither is it inconsequential.

I thought Halo was great, and found Halo 2 disappointingly lacking in replay value (though I enjoyed my first time through it). Upon Halo 3's release, I liked it a great deal—enough that I bought it, even though I'd completed it during a rental. In fact, I bought it before the rental was due back. At the time, I had no Live connectivity, so I didn't buy it for the multiplayer, and indeed from the time I finally got my free month of Live Gold working to the time my free month of Live Gold expired, I played no Halo 3 multiplayer. I bought it for the single-player campaign.

After completing The Orange Box (my fourth time through Half-Life 2 and my third through Episode 1), I began to look upon Halo 3 in a different light. I decided I'd given it too much credit. It was, I decided, a bit crap. Then I played through Episode 2 one more time and Portal four more times, which reinforced my opinion.

That was four months ago. So, since that time, what game have I keep returning to whenever I have fifteen minutes free and really want to play some excellent FPS action?

Halo 3, of course. Crow's Nest for preference, or the entire Arc arc. Special credit to the dogfighting with the hornets, and any sequence involving one or more scarabs or a room full of brutes and a lot of cover and variety of available weapons. Boo to the Flood.

The Douglas Adams quote isn't entirely accurate. The Orange Box's hours are great, but I'd never call the actual minutes lousy. They're pretty good. Still, Combine AI has nothing on Brute AI; there's nothing like braving a bit of fire to take out a pack leader, then watching pack cohesion fall apart while I mop up the underlings. While the hours of Halo 3 aren't great, the minutes are excellent.

So which is the better game?

Well, by what standard? I have, in the past, enjoyed The Orange Box much more than I've enjoyed Halo 3, but I will, in the future, enjoy Halo 3 much more than I will enjoy The Orange Box. Halo 3 is more valuable to me at this moment, but if someone asked me which of the two to rent, having played neither, I'd say rent The Orange Box. Compounding this problem of which to recommend, I'd never suggest Halo 3 to someone who hasn't enjoyed the first two, but someone who has enjoyed the first two almost certainly is going to seek out the third already and doesn't need any recommendation from me at all.

Putting numerical values on them is like comparing apples and, er, orangess. See, the apple is Halo 3 because the Master Chief's armor is green, and the orange is... never mind.

Mainstream reviews stand forever, because you can access their archives alphabetically. Forum posts and blog entries are dust in the wind. (Er. By the standards of the fast-moving game industry, anyway.) Months after a game is released, people will still go to the reviews published in the days following the game's launch to see if they should check it out, yet by that time, those reviews are obsolete, and the reviewers may have completely changed their opinions in retrospect.

The amount of effort it would take to fix this fault in the review apparatus is, I suspect, far greater than the pressure that exists to fix it, assuming there's any pressure at all and I'm not just tilting at windmills. And I still don't know which of Halo 3 and The Orange Box is the better game.

Thoughts on Zelda

2008-02-03T18:03:00.000-08:00

(Man, I need to remember to update this thing.)

So. Twilight Princess.

For many reasons, I found this game unimpressive enough that I stopped playing it shortly after picking up the first mask, or shadow, or whatever those things Midna's telling me to collect are. Fused shadows? The gorons were the breaking point (they seem superfluous, being newcomers to the franchise that just kept showing up again and again after their introduction), but really, it just felt done. I liked Wind Waker. Wind Waker was full of things no Zelda game has done before, amongst them the end of Hyrule. The ending impressed me a lot, not just because Badass Pirate Zelda was a participant in the boss fight but because the king of Hyrule decided it'd be egotism to try and bring his kingdom back at the expense of the folk above and their not-very-Hyrule world. More and more I've become fond of stories that end, and Wind Waker works well as the last of all Zelda stories. Seeing the series return to ground thoroughly covered years ago was depressing.

After I put down Twilight Princess I picked up the original NES The Legend of Zelda on Wii Marketplace, and it made me realize Shadow of the Colossus is the best Zelda game I've played in years. Hear me out: large, empty landscape to explore; horse; kid in green with sword. Obviously it's not actually Zelda, but it's a lot closer to the sort of Zelda game I want to be playing than anything Nintendo's doing, and in a few ways that appeal to me, it's more faithful to the original Legend of Zelda than any of the NPC-rich sequels. Miyamoto famously doesn't care about story, but if your game is going to have minimal story then I'd rather play through a good story minimalistically told than have to deal with a bunch of cruft optimized for exposition-laden storytelling without any story that makes wading through the cruft worthwhile.

I figure this post about marks the point at which I should give Twilight Princess another go, so maybe I'll have to eat a bunch of crow in a big "I was totally wrong and should have stuck with it for longer!" post next week or month or whatever.

The one thing I'm looking forward to is more Midna. There's something appealing about taking the annoying quest-giving NPC who's always telling you what to do and making her fully cognizant of how annoying and bossy she is, so she can revel in it. But then, I don't identify strongly enough with Link to feel anything more than amusement at his misfortune.

Thoughts on Abstinence 1

2008-01-05T22:31:00.001-08:00

Golly, do I want to play video games. Any time I want to do anything else, I think "Well, I'll just go for a quick game first... wait, no."

Thoughts On Vice

2008-01-04T19:43:00.000-08:00

The weird thing about the Vice Magazine game review gig is that it was offered to me just as Tycho and Gabe were examining the problems inherent in the conventional review format, and just before the whole Jeff Gerstmann thing (which went down as I was writing the first batch of reviews; and which I probably wouldn't even have noticed if I hadn't started reading up on prominent game blogs following the job offer). This was also shortly after the debut of Zero Punctuation, which... let us say raised the bar somewhat.

Vice Magazine game reviews are, of necessity, short, because Vice isn't dedicated to gaming . I was also given much leeway in what the reviews would contain. Now, I hate redundancy—the idea of writing abridged summaries of what other websites could offer never appealed to me. What I didn't want to do was write the sort of reviews readers could get elsewhere.

I knew this would attract negative comments from the folks who are angry at Gerstmann for giving Twilight Princess an 8.9. I understand the impulse to decry an 8.9 score on a Zelda game. If you're a Zelda fan, you want other people to play Zelda games, too, because they're awesome. If someone unjustly lowballs the score of a Zelda game, that's dangerous. It might trick a few readers into not playing that Zelda game, which would be a tragedy! What fans of Zelda games, who want other people to play the same games they enjoy, want to see is this: A lot of reviews that all say the same thing, so no counterargument has any weight. They want their own opinions validated (arguably a selfish desire) and they want others to have no fear of trying the things they, themselves, enjoy (selfish or selfless depending on how you look at it). I once felt the same way about low scores on Legacy of Kain games.

As it happens, I loved Wind Waker and hate Twilight Princess, but the article that explains why is bought and paid for by Vice, so you'll have to talk to them if you want to hear it. The unfortunate side-effect of work-for-hire is that I don't own my ideas.

So the philosophy behind my Vice reviews is this: I will try to say the sort of things that other game journalists aren't saying, or, at least, say it in a way other game journalists aren't saying it, not because I'm laying out the raw truth everyone else is too afraid to speak or some bullshit, but because, well, I don't need to say what everyone else is saying. They're saying it for me. So if my Vice reviews look a bit odd, if maybe my viewpoint seems skewed, if I skip over obvious points to dwell on trivialities and specifics, now you know why. I'm not claiming my writing so far has achieved the goals I've set for it, but I know what those goals are.

(Now you know why this blog has the title it does.)

The other philosophy behind my Vice reviews is that espoused by Penny Arcade: My views aren't special, and I'm just sharing my own impressions. My comments are not definitive, and it'd be folly to act as if they were. I lay no claim to authority on these matters.

Obviously this is entirely tempered by the desires of my editor. Them what cuts the checks get input on the tone. No one has asked me to change anything yet, though.

Temporarily Setting the Activity Aside

2008-01-04T18:38:00.000-08:00

I've decided to answer Leigh Alexander's request that others join her in abstaining in games for a week. I won't be playing video games until January 11th. I'll be talking about them and thinking about them and reorganizing them on my shelves, though.

First post!11one!

2008-01-04T18:11:00.000-08:00

Hi.

I'm Stephen Lea Sheppard, I review video games for Vice Magazine and their website Viceland, I write freelance for tabletop RPGs, I moderate on the RPGnet forums and I played Harris on Freaks and Geeks and Dudley in The Royal Tenenbaums. I also drove an airport cart in a Mario Kart: Double Dash commercial once. You will note that my credentials for writing about video games are rubbish. That's okay.

This is my blog for talking about video games in all the ways I don't have space to do at Vice, because in my efforts to see how other game reviewers do things, I've discovered a few of them keep blogs like this. It's different from my other blog, Output, in that it's about games in specific. Hopefully this won't be a mere exercise in cargo cultism.

That should probably cover the introduction.