Brett's Footnotes¹

April 03, 2008

This Message Brought to You By...

The other night I was watching The Weather Man, a quirky little film starring Nicholas Cage¹. Although it turned out to be somewhat mixed up with the point of the movie, product placement featured heavily in it, particularly early on, with three very prominent fast food franchises appearing in the first 30 minutes or so of the film. It was so blatant that I had to hope that it had something to do with the movie, but at the same time, I was still being subjected to a bunch of marketing. All of this had come a scant half hour after watching an hour of HBO's The Wire², where the detectives were sitting around a table, a Dunkin Donuts box prominently displayed in the foreground. I'm thinking of switching entirely to period pieces and science fiction³ to get away from the constant incursions of advertisting.

You know, it starts to get annoying, ads all over the place, the constant encroachment of other marketing opportunities on entertainment. It's twelve minutes of previews before a film, preceded by a slide-show sponsored by Coke. It's DVDs where you can't skip past all of that with a simple tap of the menu button. It's constant and everywhere and very hard to escape, even in a world which includes TiVo and its brethren.

I hear about in-roads being made to place advertising in games. There was a story up on GamaSutra just this past week or so, two companies joining together to provide ads in future games. And since I've begun writing this piece, Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford has shown up on GamaSutra to discuss the benefits of ads in games. Pitchford identified three reasons for in-game ad placement: authenticity, budget, and cross-promotion. Although I have some thoughts about those last two, I want to focus on ads and authenticity.

Authenticity is an interesting beast. I haven't played Gearbox Software's games, except for a little bit of that multiplayer Wolfenstein game, but on the face of it, authenticity seems like a fairly reasonable argument. Pitchford cites specific examples of real-world corporations that participated in the Nazi war effort⁴, such as Philips and Opel. Not having agreements with these companies, says Pitchford, would mean leaving out authentic details like the Philips and Opel logos.

Now, I'm not going to claim that there aren't any players out there that would miss such details, but I have to say, I suspect their numbers are relatively few. And as soon as advertising money starts getting in there, I start to wonder about things. I'm not asserting that there was or has ever been any impropriety at Gearbox -- Pitchford is in the industry news a fair amount and he seems like he has integrity. But when I read Philips is giving them money and at the same time hearing that one of their levels "happens to take place in" the Philips factory in Eindhoven (in the Netherlands), I see the potential for the whiff of impropriety.

It's my feeling that when you deal with corporations about issues like this, you need to question their motives. In the case of Philips, are they hoping to get a fair shake from history about their involvement with the Nazis? I gather (from Wikipedia) that some would call Philips' actions during the war collaboration. Are they simply looking to get the brand out there, assuming brand growth simply from recognition? After all, most people don't associate Tylenol with poison despite the Tylenol killings (still unsolved!) back in the 1980s. Wouldn't it be better to associate the Philips name with a pleasant series of scheduled rewards, make the consumer associate heroism with the Philips brand. Are they going further, suggesting that a helpful supplier of intelligence might be a Philips manager, wearing a Philips cap?

Honestly, I don't know. But I wonder how I would be able to determine authentic from ad-driven in Brothers in Arms. I doubt we'll get information about what Philips paid for, and how much they paid, as most companies would consider those to be trade secrets. We have Pitchford's reassurances, but once money enters the equation, it's hard to know where the authenticity line is. The point is not that I think Gearbox's games will be less authentic as a result; the point is that I won't know what's authentic and what's not, despite being a fairly well-read and literate consumer of games. It's distracting not knowing while I play.

I'd like to see Gearbox be able to just use the material, since it was clearly present in photographs of the period; then at least I'd know that it was coming from their own point-of-view, and I could read their attempts at authenticity as genuine, as a selling point, or as a creative drive. But I know that lawsuits, with their immense expense, have had a hugely chilling effect of the use of such materials. I look around at some of the threats of lawsuits and such and wonder what brought us this far. It's crazy to me that the Anglican church would threaten to sue a video game maker for the portrayal of Manchester Cathedral, a long-standing public building. I realize that England's protection of speech is likely different from the Constitutional protections we enjoy here; even so, it seems that it would be covered by the freedom of expression article in the European Convention on Human Rights. I almost wish Sony had just stood up and said, "You know what? Sue us, we'll defend under freedom of expression" to set a precedent, particularly given one impression I've read of the deeper meaning of the Cathedral gameplay. They have the deep pockets to do so, and thus, they can and should act as a vanguard -- if only to prevent such chilling effects on the industry in the future, and therefore help to ensure their long-term business.

I've been playing co-op games of Rainbox Six Vegas for quite some time now, and it's been interesting to see the advertising at work in that game. From what I've seen, the ads tend to be on the billboards outside the missions, in the helicopter-ride cutscenes. One night in particular I noticed an Axe ad on the billboard, which might fit in perfectly in Vegas, I have no idea, having never been. But I'm fairly certain that it wasn't the same ad that had been there the last time we had played; the art stood out like a sore thumb, since it was easily twice the resolution of the rest of the level (which gets all blurred out due to post-processing effects).

In cases like these, where the cutscene occurs at a particular time in the story, the changing of these ads is remarkably distracting. I mean, that's sort of the point, in a way... if I hardly even noticed the ad, or didn't notice it all, it wouldn't be doing its advertising job. But it works directly against the grain of the game, which is, of course, the thing I purchased. I am distracted from the game I'm playing by the sudden lack of realism in the environment -- the inconstancy (in time) and the inconsistency (in visuals) of it.

I expect advertising in magazines; they're set apart, though I don't like the ones that mask themselves as if they were articles (with a discreet "Advertisement" across the top or bottom). I expect previews before movies⁵; I can at least attempt to ignore them. But I don't expect ads in books. I don't expect them in the midst of television shows or movies, as product placements. And I certainly don't expect them in games. In these latter three examples, they almost always distract and detract. Advertising, even when well done and even in the service of authenticity, pulls me out of the game; it's an unwelcome incursion.

¹Cage does the occasional quirky performance, in things like Bringing Out the Dead, but oddly enough, it turned out to be directed by Gore Verbinski, recent headliner at DICE and director of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, the first of which I really enjoyed. (back)

²Until recently, the best show on television, but it recently finished up after 5 seasons. I can't wait until it turns up on DVD. (back)

³I was thinking of Battlestar Galactica as I jotted that down, which doesn't have any of that, but of course, Blade Runner featured an early, particularly egregious example of in-film advertising, which might have fit the setting but still came off as garish. (back)

⁴I had assumed that Philips was a German company, but as it turns out, it is headquartered in the Netherlands. (back)

⁵Even though there, too, they work against my needs -- watching most previews is usually enough to fill me in on the plot details. I'll never forgive Warner Bros. for the detail of Richard Kimble jumping... well, if you've seen it, you know. Of course, Chris Corry won't forgive me for giving away Half-Life 2, Episode 2, so who am I to throw stones? (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 01:17 PM | Comments (0)

February 25, 2008

GDC 2008

I've just got back from the 2008 Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, and it was again a great time. Great to see people who I generally see once a year now that I'm out here in Maryland, and great to get all energized about game development again. Last year I don't think I posted anything about the conference, but as I used to do at LucasArts, this year I'm going to go ahead and post little capsule reviews of the talks I attended. I'm not going to go into lots of detail on any of them, but these are what I saw for better or worse and the slides and such should be available on the Game Developer's Conference site eventually; some contributors post their slides and text to their blogs.

Wednesday

I arrived for 10:30 on Wednesday, not expecting there to be much that would interest me; what I didn't realize was that that would also be the time of the Microsoft keynote, which didn't interest me enough to have me pile into the big hall in which it was held. So, I ended up bumming around the West Hall expo, running into friends and generally getting a handle on what I was going to do that day. Onward to the talks...

Rules of Engagement: Blizzard's Approach to Multiplayer Game Design

This was a solid, practical talk by a VP at Blizzard, Rob Pardo. While I haven't myself spent a lot of time worrying about multiplayer game design¹, I appreciate the issues involved. While there were several good points that came out of this talk, the big one for me was to Overpower everything, at least at first. There are several reasons for doing this:

• Every strategy seems unbeatable, until it's beaten. The idea is, people feel really powerful with overpowered strategies, tactics, and all that, and what you need to do rather than super-balancing things and thereby making everything equally bland is making sure there are appropriate counters in place.
• It makes things get tested in beta. If you overpower things by a little bit, it will focus your beta testers on that strategy because they're competitive and want to win. If you simply bring something up to be on par with other strategies, it won't likely get the test time it really needs. Giving the impression that it's overpowered will cause more people to experiment with it, which will help you find the balance more quickly.

Design Reboot

I'm a huge Jonathan Blow fan, I'll go ahead and admit that right up front. I had listened to his Montreal Game Summit talk some time after it was given and was looking forward to seeing his further thoughts on that topic at GDC. Of course, since he was already happy with the talk and it had gotten plenty of press, he decided to give another talk, which turned out to be about ten ways of looking at games.

I didn't have a particular takeaway from this talk except that we should continue to re-examine our assumptions about what games can be. Jon gave ten different ways of looking at games, and only the first two were the common ways we look at games, as consumer products and as escapist entertainments. He presented eight more, and there are almost certainly others. Instead of attaching those two viewpoints to our heads as a pair of nicely matched blinders, we should only put those on when they're appropriate.

Structure vs. Style

Chris Hecker gave an interesting talk² about how to view programming problems, and AI problems, as a differentiation between structure and style. (His canonical example was that the programmatic data structure encapsulating a polygon or a triangle is structure, whereas the actual model data is style). He thinks AI is the big problem for games coming up and for the near future, and he thinks that this is largely because we haven't found the structure/style distinctions in AI yet. I'm sympathetic to the view, but I need to think about it more before I can say I think he's right or not. Anyway, interesting food for thought.

Thursday

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

I largely went to this talk because this product is what I would have been working on had I decided to stay with LucasArts several years back and not moved to Maryland. I still have a lot of friends at LucasArts, and it was nice to finally see a bit of the game running. The takeaway: you can't afford to build a game, a team, a studio, and a technology pipeline at the same time unless you have the backing of someone like George Lucas.

I-fi: Immersive Fidelity in Game Design

Clint Hocking is another one of those guys who I have lots of respect for -- I've made it to his talk each of the last three years and always find them interesting. Clint talked about two types of immersion, sensual and formal, and how they work in games -- taking Trespasser as a touchstone for much of his discussion. While I had some minor quibbles with some of his specific non-Trespasser examples (in particular, Guitar Hero), I thought his final points about how being able to explore things like emotions through formal systems could allow us to reach out and touch people by presenting games and other interactive experiences which actually explore the human condition. Look for his talk to be posted on on his site in the not-too-distant future.

Experimental Gameplay Sessions

This was another Jonathan Blow session, though he's primarily there as the organizer in this case. This year, I actually almost sent something in for these, but I don't think I would have had enough time to get either of my ideas finished for the show. There's always next year, I suppose. In any case, about a dozen interesting games were shown, mostly small web- or downloadable games, around a few different topics, such as Obfuscation or Two Worlds. I'm hopeful that Jon will put up the full list and links over on his site.

The Game Design Challenge

Hmmm... this is another one I go to every year. Perhaps I'm getting into a rut. In any case, this year, returning champion Alexei Pajitnov faced Brenda Brathwaite and Steve Meretzky with the challenge of designing a game for humans and one other species. Personally, I found Brenda's superior, though Meretzky's delivery was hard to beat.

The IGF Awards/Game Developers' Choice Awards

The IGF Awards remain great largely due to the energy and eccentricity of the indie developers themselves. Lots of good titles were shown up on the big screen, and some truly interesting games won.

Regrettably, the Choice Awards were presented by Jason Rubin. Admittedly, it would have been difficult for anyone to top Tim Schafer. And perhaps, in their desire to be "presentable" for a G4 audience or something, perhaps the writers of the show simply stayed away from anything... funny or meaningful or really of any substance whatsoever. Message to CMP and IGDA: Bring back Tim Schafer, let him do his shtick. He almost certainly won't have a crab or octopus or other form of marine life in his chest next year.

Friday

Treat Me Like A Lover

BEST OF SHOW

I dragged myself out of bed Friday morning both to be there in time to meet someone and to attend this talk, about which I knew nothing but the title. I am so glad I got there in time to see it -- it was a presentation by British journalist Margaret Robertson (whose blog, Lookspring, has been added to the sidebar). The hook of the talk was looking at games (and designing them) through the lens of a romantic relationship with the player. Though this was useful, what was particularly great was the specificity of her examples -- she pulled out little bits of games that did things right and wrong for each point, and her analysis seemed spot on. An absolutely terrific talk; I hope she'll come back next year.

What's Next for God Games

I generally really enjoy Ernest Adams' talks, much as I generally enjoy his GamaSutra column. But this year's talk, which was essentially the God game Adams pitched to EA years ago (and which was never built, though it was prototyped), fell entirely flat with me. While I agree with his main thrust, that exploring different areas such as actually addressing religion in a God game is interesting, telling me so would have taken about the 5 minutes it took me to write out this sentence. I have high hopes for the return of a more interesting talk next year. Perhaps it was simply that he didn't have his usual top hat.

Game Designers' Rant

Hmmm... yes, another I attend every year. I was particularly moved and motivated by Jane McGonigal's talk, and to a lesser extent, by Clint's. I suspect Jonathan Mak has simply always wanted to get a huge room of people playing with balloons, so I'm glad he got his wish here. McGonigal pointed out that game designers are the smartest people on the planet at making people happy -- it's time to get out there and solve reality, since in her view, "reality is broken". A terrific talk, well presented, and thought-provoking, although the problem is probably just that game designers looking to fix reality just haven't met up with the right programmers... :)

Three 20 Minute Sessions

I attended an hour comprised of three 20 minute sessions. One was by my friend and former co-worker Tim Longo, who tried to present 10 keys to working with an established IP in 20 minutes... which was about half an hour too short. I worked on most of the projects whose examples he cited and still had a hard time following him -- perhaps you can bring it back next year as a full hour, buddy? I think it would work that way. How to Create the Greatest Boss Battle (and Why Not to Do It!) and How to Pick a Lock: Creating Intuitive, Immersive Minigames were a bit better-suited to the time allotted, and presented good examinations of those topics. If you're working on either minigames or boss battles, I recommend tracking down those slides to see what those guys had to say.

Dynamic Cinematic Gameplay

This was a talk addressing the specifics of issues the speaker had in creating Stranglehold's "Tequila Bombs", which were cinematic moments in the midst of gameplay. While I think the idea of the topic was a good one, I felt like the presentation got mired in details about the specific elements in that game, which I haven't played. A slightly higher-level talk would have almost certainly been more helpful to the audience; I think there are lessons there that can be more globally applied. As an example, it's probably worth saying "Plan to have multiple camera views of your character during each shot... and schedule plenty of time for them" rather than going into the minutiae of what kind of cameras you had and what bugs each exposed in your engine.

Thanks!

I got to see lots of friends while I was out, both during the week and on Saturday. Great to see you, Andrew, Jen, Evan, Tim, Harley, John, Jamie, Bill, Nathan, Greg, Daron, Reed, Chris, Susan, Hal, Pat, Jeremy, Matt, Riley, Morgan, Charlie, Troy, Tim M., John S., Haden, Chris, Rich, Ric, Geoff, Jeff, and anyone else I ran into but who I've forgotten in this mad list. I'm looking forward to next year already.

¹Though each of the games I've shipped had some sort of multiplayer component, and I worked on an MMO for a couple of years, I haven't been terribly involved in the design of the multiplayer aspects to any great degree. I do contemplate multiplayer issues for my own game designs, but that isn't my particular focus. (back)
²And one I admit I hadn't planned on attending -- the creator of Heroes was supposed to be on at that time. I'm a big fan of the show and so I decided to take that in... but Jesse Alexander was a no-show. Bummer. (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 08:41 PM | Comments (5)

December 11, 2007

Here's a blog post I wish I had written

Steve Gaynor presents his thoughts about a games industry version of film noir.

I think this is happening to a certain degree, just not in the 3D space -- admittedly, there's room for improvement. Apparently folks are still making money with text (see Skotos Tech, which has been around for quite a while now) and as Gaynor mentions, 2D abounds. It may be that 3D just hasn't hit the 'cheap enough' mark; it may be that the casual/downloadable game space represents this market to some degree. But it's worth reading and thinking about.

Posted by Brett Douville at 10:08 AM | Comments (5)

December 03, 2007

Rewarding the Long Look

Warning: The following article contains a significant spoiler for Half-Life 2 Episode 2. Caveat lector.

So, a few weeks ago I found myself in San Francisco, happily at the same time that the Jeff Wall exhibit was at SFMOMA. I first read about Wall's work in the New York Times magazine some time ago -- probably around the same time that this exhibit opened in New York, though I didn't make the connection at the time.

Wall works in large-format photography; he takes photographs that he then blows up to fit inside of lightboxes, you know, those advertising boxes that you find in places like bus stops and in airports. Typically, his photographs might occupy a sizeable spot on the wall, up to 12 by 12 feet, though I guess they are mostly six by six. The diffuse, rear lighting accomplished by fluorescence enlivens the photographs and enables the viewer to spend a lot of time discovering the photograph.

Case in point: A ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947 was a photograph I looked at for a long time. In particular, after a bit of time, I was looking at the shadows on the ceiling cast by the balloons. When I finally connected the shadow of the balloon in the left center of the photograph with the orange balloon perhaps held by the little girl seated at left, and then to the light to the ventriloquist's right, the room came alive for me in an extraordinary way, perhaps because it suddenly felt like a very, very real place and time to me. The effect of the golden light gave it a warmth that I could almost feel, even though I was in the far starker setting of the white-walled exhibit at the SF MOMA. It was simultaneously like occupying a place in that room and at the same time feeling like I was looking at someone's photo album, perhaps a grandparent or something, telling me about the time when she was a young child and a ventriloquist came for her brother's birthday.

As I mentioned, I had read not too long ago about Wall's work in The New York Times Magazine¹, where it described his process as an artist, something which was apparently discussed in a documentary/interview at the MOMA, though I was so interested in the photographs I didn't take time to learn more about their construction at the time². He uses a technique which he describes as cinematographic; he carefully stages his photographs and particularly the people in them, giving them directions as to what they should be doing, but then fades back behind his lens to wait for the picture to arrange itself. (He also uses digital techniques to merge several images together at times, though not always, and his pioneering use of digital apparently caused some backlash way back when.) It's almost as if Wall himself is taking a long, long look at his subject matter and awaiting the photograph he wants, waiting until just such time as he understands all the elements at play.

I felt this way about several of the photos, such as Steves Farm, Steveston, which is a wide-format landscape incorporating a decaying farm (nonetheless bursting with life) set side-by-side with soulless tract housing arranged geometrically beyond a barren scrubby area populated with dead trees. Wall generally stages his photographs, and no doubt some of that was going on here (particularly with the man walking towards us not far from the center of the image, and perhaps with some of the animals), but this image is of a real landscape, a real place, and it must have taken quite some time to find the correct vantage point to capture this image. But what an image! I stared at this photo for probably ten minutes alone, walking up closer, discovering the human figure, moving slowly past it from left to right, trying to puzzle out its meaning. Or at the very least, coming up with some meaning for it from within myself.

The rewards that come from the long look at Wall's work come up elsewhere as well, from the connections you draw, once you've spent a lot of time with a medium or a couple of media. With regards to film, I've been watching (and re-watching) V for Vendetta over the last couple of days, and while of course I've been interested in the connections (and changes) from the graphic novel, I also look at John Hurt as the authoritarian High Chancellor Sutler and think, "Did they choose him because he was Winston Smith?" Great casting in any case, but when your despot can call up echoes of that greatest of dystopian novels, it's brilliant.

When I started this article/essay/ramble, I didn't expect to end up discussing Lucky Wander Boy, D. B. Weiss' novel about one man's obsessive quest to find meaning in old videogames, and particularly in the meaning of the titular arcade machine. But it fits so perfectly. In the novel, the protagonist is driven to compile a "Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments", in which he discusses the deep inner meaning of various classic videogames, and several of these articles are reprinted in the book³. When he writes, "It is difficult to ignore the similarities between Donkey Kong and the demiurge of the Gnostic heresies" it's completely believable -- not necessarily believable that such an association exists, but that someone who takes a long look at early videogames might come up with such a connection.

In the case of our intrepid hero, he is particularly obsessed with Lucky Wander Boy, the imagined unemulatable arcade game which gives the book its title, but also reflects this same sort of long look. In the game, a player who spends enough time exploring the game is ultimately rewarded by entering the third level -- no one can agree on how this happens, but picking up items in the appropriate order might have something to do with it, as might the order of traversal of the landscape of the second level. It's bizarrely described, but I think we're meant to understand that the game makes a model of the human playing the game and tailors the third level specially for him. Lucky Wander Boy is therefore not just the name of the game, but role of a player who explores the game long enough, who wanders about in the empty second level aimlessly until the third level reveals itself.

One interesting statement made in the "Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments" and one that long-time readers will be unsurprised resonated with me was the following, which appears early in the book.

< Game > showed and showed well that video games can traverse the entire range of imagined experience, and resonate effectively with the wider world of which they are a part.

Lately, of course, there's been a bit in the gaming news about Jon Blow's talk at the Montreal Game Summit in which he decries what he feels is a lazy game design. He spoke, of course, of industry darling World of Warcraft, which boasts something north of nine million subscribers and climbing. Having played it entirely too much myself, I can understand what he's getting at -- WoW presents a constant but ultimately meaningless chain of rewards, much in the same way Diablo did. I've not listened to the full talk yet, and so won't comment on Blow's talk at length either, but it seems that Jon's trying to get us to make games that reward a long look at the lessons they teach⁴, rather than those that simply spoonfeed sugary snacks to our audience.

I know what he means. Although I thoroughly loved Half-Life 2, I recently played through the episodes and found the second one to be especially forced in its storytelling. Clearly, the fine folks at Valve are reaching for something here, trying to tell a story with more resonance than your typical first-person shooter. But in making NPCs who act primarily as vehicles to tell you the next bit of story while they (frustratingly slowly) open a door between bits of excitement fails to deliver on the promise of the title they extend. Half-Life 2 was very memorable to me -- so much so that I recently played through a whole bunch of it again -- and I think that the opening of that game tells a story in a much more compelling way through knowing how to draw the player's attention, through prodding the player just enough so that he gets the correct impressions but not so much that he feels the prod.

Instead Episode 2, while still enjoyable as a pure shooter, relies on thin Hollywood tropes and such blatant manipulation to attempt to deliver an emotional punch in the death of Eli Vance that I ended up feeling more annoyed than saddened. Eli constantly telling Gordon how he's as proud of Gordon as if he were his own son. Alyx making more frequent contact with him. Eli looking at old photographs and worrying over Judith. Eli telling his daughter to look away, to close her eyes, as he died. Alyx' tearful voice over a black screen as we await the credits. I was meant to feel sorrow and empathy, but the manipulation was so unsubtle as to leave me feeling merely hollow and uncaring.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad someone's trying it; even if the result didn't work for me, perhaps it's working right now for someone else. But I look forward to subtler storytelling, something that rewards deep thinking about the result. Something that rewards a longer look.

¹Every time I mention the NYT Magazine to one of my friends I assume that he mentally rolls his eyes, since it seems so much of my view of the outside world comes from there. I've been reading the magazine religiously since about 1997, week in, week out, and have missed only a small handful of issues. This is far longer than any other periodical has been able to hold my attention. Which I guess is another long look... (back)
²I did, however, purchase a coffee table book of Wall's work, which incorporates a lot of interview material, and have been reading bits and pieces of it. I've never bought a coffee table book before, though I've always had books on my coffee table. :) (back)
³As someone who himself discourses at length in his blog, I found these to be the most interesting element of the book, which is not all that surprising, I suppose. (back)
⁴Braid has jumped through its first hoop with XBox Live Arcade certifiication, so it looks like I'll have something else I'll want to play on XBox Live when I finally buy one some time next year -- I mean, in addition to Schizoid. (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 09:15 PM | Comments (7)

October 19, 2007

So I Guess I Know When I'm Buying a 360

Sometime in 2008

Posted by Brett Douville at 10:50 AM | Comments (10)

October 01, 2007

Our Lost Classic

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a nice little retrospective of my last published game, Star Wars: Republic Commando. Nice to still have it out there a little bit.

Posted by Brett Douville at 08:03 PM | Comments (3)

September 22, 2007

The Zelda Economy

What is it with the Zelda economy?

I recently finished The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The dungeons were exciting and interesting and puzzling, and because I spent a significant time doing side quests, travel times didn't bother me as much as they did in Wind Waker¹. Sure, it had the same structure as every other Zelda game -- run around finding the three pieces of this, so that you can then go find the four pieces of that, which will mean you need to go and get the eight pieces of the other thing, and then you'll open the portal to that place, so that you can go and fight Ganondorf. It's a series of locked doors, each with its own key, most of which have to do with some new object you can equip and use in an interesting way.

Money, of course, is every which where. While it's not technically true that it grows on trees, it's frequently in barrels, boxes, blades of grass, urns, under rocks, and of course, jumping out of the puffs of smoke from the disappearing bodies of your vanquished foes. You are frequently maxed out on money, even when you go from the kiddie wallet to the adult wallet, even when you go from the adult wallet to the ultimate wallet (a quest which was a significant contributor to the running all over Hyrule).

In past Zelda games, I never found anything to spend all that cash on; but then, I was generally focused only on the main storyline, and not running around finding golden spiders or Poes or whatever the Wind Waker equivalent was (undersea treasures, I seem to vaguely recall, but I may be confusing things there). And indeed, in Twilight Princess there was only a couple of times that I can recall having to actually purchase something necessary to continue: bombs of a couple different varieties. It was actually kind of shocking, returning to play it after some months away, to have to buy something I'm used to finding in Zelda games under bushes and such.

But aside from these two necessary items, I didn't have to spend money on anything. And yet, there was a significant side quest to be able to carry more of it. There's a young woman in the city who collects bugs, and she's trying to collect enough to have some sort of bug ball. There are twelve pairs of bugs out in the world, which you can spot reasonably easy with your wolf sense, once you're able to transform into a wolf at will. A few of them are off the beaten path, but in general, you can find them, and as I recall, there's even a bit of an audio cue to let you know one's around. The male and female of each pair are generally found fairly near to one another, and so you can track them down with a bit of comparing the map to places you've already found bugs. The bug collection screen is fairly helpful in this respect.

You get the adult wallet, moving your maximum funds from 200 to 600, when you first turn in a bug; after that, Agatha gives you 50 rupees for every bug you bring her, unless it completes a pair, in which case you get 50 rupees for the bug and 50 rupees for finding a match². I brought her bugs all the time even with my wallet maxed out, just losing the money to finish the collection quest. After bringing her every pair, I was granted the "ultimate" wallet, which allows for holding 1000 rupees at a time. Let me tell you, a thousand rupees takes a long time to find, unless you find some of the special little hideaways with chests containing 100 rupee gems.

Around this same time, other side quests opened up around the Zelda economy. MaioMart wanted to open a branch in the city, but to do this, there were two separate things going on. On the one hand, you had to buy enough stuff from the store (and keep in mind, this is generally stuff you can just find out in the world, like bullets for the slingshot or whatever) to make Maio have enough money to purchase the existing store in the city. And a beggar appeared in MaioMart asking for donations to repair some bridge to make commerce between the towns and the city possible. The need for this wasn't entirely clear, as Link had no trouble getting to the city, but hey, given the already bizarre nature of the Zelda economy, who was I to quibble?

Having donated enough to those causes to open up the city branch of MaioMart³, you could now purchase the Magic Armor, which cost 600 rupees -- the complete contents of your adult wallet (though not of the ultimate wallet, which you received from Agatha). And what's the magic ability of the Magic Armor?

To consume rupees. The Magic Armor converts damage to a loss of money, and slowly burns through money whenever you're wearing it besides.

That's right, the whole exercise of spending something like 2600 rupees (easily found, slow to amass unless you're thinking about it) was to be able to convert money to health. Something that you could do basically the first time you got an empty bottle -- by buying red potions to fill that bottle from a local vendor.

Now, I didn't feel gypped -- it more felt like some sort of cosmic joke, really. I had a bit of a laugh when I got the ultimate wallet and the magic armor, only to find myself quickly penniless (rupeeless?) whenever I wore it. It came in handy really only in one circumstance, in the Cave of Trials, a 50-level dungeon of increasingly difficult combatants where there was virtually no health to be found. There were, however, three Poes to be found in that vast time-sucking dungeon, and that's what I was really after.

I can think of two explanations for the Zelda economy in Twilight Princess. The first, and the one I want to believe, is that the designers are trying to say, "Money isn't everything. Money just gives you means to do stuff. Doing stuff is more important." The other is that it's essentially the biggest shell game I've ever participated in.

Come to think of it, it's probably both.

¹Although, I have to say, I far preferred the look of Wind Waker to the more realistic look presented here. In a way, the realism accentuates issues like the Zelda economy -- with a world that looks so real, how can there be money under every bush and tree? In the GameBoy games, in Wind Waker, and in games like Four Sword Adventures, the fact that money is hiding in all those places matters less, somehow, because the look better lends itself to it. (back)
²Somewhat amusingly, the last pair you're likely to encounter is the snails. Snails are natural hermaphrodites, and she even mentions this in the little song she sings or poem she speaks when she receives them. Subtle humor entirely lost on young'uns, I suspect, who are thought to be Nintendo's target audience. (back)
³Itself a supremely surreal experience, with disco-style lights and dancing patrons and a dancing storekeeper who appeared to be singing some sort of song to you... (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 02:36 PM | Comments (4)

September 09, 2007

Interesting Choices?

A week or so ago I finished BioShock, tearing through it in what seemed like fairly record time, at least for me. I enjoyed it more than any shooter I've played since Star Wars: Republic Commando¹. Again, spoilers will occur, caveat lector.

At the time, I was in the midst of playing Rise of the Kasai, a sequel to the very enjoyable 2002 SCEA action-adventure title, mostly remarkable for its art style and innovative combat style. I mention this because we'll return to Kasai in a little bit, because that game seems to want to offer some sort of interesting choice, but fails so miserably that it's an object lesson in What Not To Do™².

Much virtual ink has been spilled over the moral choice that BioShock provides -- to rescue the Little Sisters or to "harvest" them. To recap (and to spill a little more): either choice will give you a certain amount of Adam, a useful game resource which effectively gives you weapons and other increases to your abilities (more health, more power for your bio-weapons, better ability to hack in-game computers and other security devices, etc.). Rescuing a Little Sister frees her from her endless quest to find Adam in corpses throughout the underwater city of Rapture, turning her into a human girl again, while harvesting her generates more Adam for you, but at the cost of the life of the Little Sister, who does not survive the procedure. I haven't seen the result of harvesting, but rescuing them is a decidedly creepy affair, with chilling Exorcist-style lines and animation, with the ultimate result of a tranquil little girl who thanks you and runs off to the nearest Little Sister tube, apparently so they can creep around Rapture hiding from Slicers much like Newt.

I read in a couple places where critics/commenters indicated that this was a false moral choice, since as gamers we would choose the option which had the greatest game utility. While I'm sympathetic to the argument, I don't think it applies to BioShock, simply because this utility was false -- or at least, I perceived it to be false.

The issue is that the resource -- Adam -- wasn't rare enough for the choice to be all that meaningful in game terms. I ended the game, on normal difficulty, with several hundred Adam left over, which would have been enough to buy myself a couple of new powers, or more health or energy (had either been available to me at that point). I had maxed out the plasmid attacks I used most frequently, and even some I pretty much never used (freezing, for example, or incinerate). I guess I could have gone and bought additional attacks -- but I already had more than the 6 plasmids that could fit in the plasmid attack slots. The utilitarian value of the Adam resource was simply too low for me to care one way or the other, which made it no choice at all -- in a choice between doing "good" and doing "evil" in terms of the game's fiction, no matter ambiguous they try to make the choice.

It wasn't just on the subject of the moral choice that the game's choices felt meaningless -- it was pretty much across the board, in every choice I might make. Late in the game there were goodies hidden behind glass (health, ammo, that sort of thing), but breaking the glass would cause drones to fly after me for a minute or so. Choosing to break the glass to get at something was fairly meaningless -- the drones were not much of a threat, since my first person shooter skills are pretty decent, and a cost-benefit mostly came down to whether I felt like adding a couple of drones to fight on my behalf for a little while, since they could be fritzed out and hacked to fight for me. That's just an example -- I simply never felt that my decisions had much in the way of long-term impact, either because my first-person skills would save me, or because of other in-game helpers (the ability to completely swap out plasmids for other ones, for example).

It's hard to be down on them for that, though, since the pure play was fantastic -- Ken Levine frequently said that it was a shooter first, and absolutely, the shooter elements are fantastic. I can also see that the ability to switch out plasmids is a natural response to complaints about being unable to understand which choice you'd prefer to make between competing augmentations in Deus Ex. I can also understand why the degenerating weapons of System Shock 2 would be abandoned -- why spend time thinking about what weapons to use, if you have plenty of ammo and oodles of weapons? It keeps the pace going, and makes you less cautious about mistakes.

Of course, I liked having to take a moment to think about what augmentations would make sense to me; I think another mechanism could have been chosen to improve on Deus Ex's augmentation system. I also loved System Shock 2, even if I did get to the end only to discover I was effectively unable to continue (not enough psi power) -- I didn't feel cheated, I felt like I didn't pay attention and make good decisions, it was all above board.

With regards to BioShock, this sense of decisions not really mattering all that much was the same with the Little Sisters: sure, I could "rescue" them and get X Adam, with some additional Adam every time I had rescued three. I could "harvest" them and get Y Adam (with Y greater than X) with no such promise of later reward. I have no idea how balanced this equation was, but I had so much left over at the end that arguing that the choice had a significant gameplay impact seems a bit wrong-headed.

Now, one thing I will say that they did very well is to telegraph that this would matter in some way, that some sort of reckoning was coming based on how you treated the Little Sisters. It was very evident in the way that Tenenbaum would speak to you that the game was keeping track of every decision you made with regards to those little girls, even saying at the end that "even losing one" was bad, was a tragedy. It strongly reinforced that the choice you were making was a moral one, in the context of the game, even if in my view there were really no game system consequences to one choice or the other. So, I was left with a choice where the gameplay consequences mattered little, but I knew that might be some long-term result that mattered one way or the other (could be game-play, might not be). I hadn't read any spoilers beforehand, so I wasn't aware that there were multiple endings; but I could tell something was going on, even if the game wasn't explicit.

I mention this in particular because of another game I've recently been playing, Rise of the Kasai, which doesn't telegraph that you're making choices that have any long-term impact at all. The game had a host of problems and head-scratching design decisions, from the minor (unable to determine how many of a particular collectible are left to be found while in the level) to the horrendous (when I'm busy doing some other task, it is unforgivable that the AI controlling the other character die somewhere else in the level if there's nothing I can do about it), but the core combat remained satisfying when used skillfully, and the stealth kills were still memorably savage and rewarding to pull off.

I was a fairly big fan of Mark of Kri, which I thought presented a really interesting combat system -- simple enough for button-mashers, but still satisfying for those who could get into the nuances. I hope that will survive somehow into this generation; it'd be a shame to see such a clean combat system go, but I don't think that poor sales of this sequel are an indicator of the strength of the core gameplay. I also liked the strong, silent hero, Rau. In any case, each level in the game offers you the choice to play either as Rau or as his sister, Tati, and after playing the introductory level as a character more like Tati, I had decided to stick with Rau and if I really felt like it, I'd go back and try a few of the levels with Tati.

Well, apparently that choice had an impact, which was never specified nor explained. Late in the game, two or three levels from the end, Tati was faced with a choice to join the Dark Side or not⁴. And apparently, whether or not you had much in the way of input into that choice was decided based on whether you had played her very much, or whether you were playing her then, or something. In any case, I was unable to choose for her to stick with Rau and team up to fight the bad guy. Instead, my only option was to have her join the enemy, and apparently kill her. I replayed to that point several times, and came up empty every time -- while there was a little bar indicating that the decision was somehow being made, it was completely unclear to me what I had done to affect the decision, if anything. To date, I don't know -- I started playing some of the earlier levels with Tati, but after it crashed a few times in loading screens, I gave the title up for good. I'm very forgiving, but even I have limits.

What killed me about it was that apparently out-of-game choices were influencing in-game results; there was some meta-tracking going on that mattered to the game but which was unclear to me. I would happily have taken a little control over the story -- but I need to be nudged to know that's what I'm doing. I'm not sure what was going on, but it seems unfair that the story would be forced into a path where the AI's choices have turned my characters against one another. The lack of agency on my part to influence that decision was appalling, and were it not for my curiosity to figure out how it was supposed to work, I would have probably broken the disc in half right there.

So, systems designers: giving us choices that impact real game results: good. Not telling us that we're making those choices? Bad.

¹That's about as blatant a plug as I think I've ever pulled... ;) To be fair, I haven't played oodles of shooters in that time, though I played Quake n (was it 4? it was completely bland), Doom n (okay, being snarky, it was Doom 3), Deus Ex 2 (not better than SWRC IMO, falling far short of the bar set by its predecessor), and Thief 2, which I finally finished after a multi-year hiatus, and which was probably better than SWRC but so significantly different it's not realistic to compare them. Anyway. (back)
²Or maybe I should say "Patent Pending", since it came from Sony. Sony, this generation at least, seems to be driving very hard towards What Not To Do. Yes, that's a Sony slam -- the PS3 has a ways to go this generation. I think the power of the brand is strong enough to overcome all of their missteps, but poor PS3 market performance is clearly hurting them. (back)
³It's confusing, which is a whole different problem with the game altogether. The story weaves in and out of time, going back twenty of thirty years to lay some groundwork, then bringing it forward, then swinging back again. The two character archetypes are reflected in each set of characters, though -- there's really only two ways to play the level, but even that is a step up in terms of replayability. In theory, you can play the whole game twice, and other than cutscenes you'll pretty much see new level areas. (back)
⁴Or the legion of evil, or whatever. Who even cares. The story is pretty forgettable, even twisting through time as it does. I did like how they were able to generate player interest in a character who was going to die, but that's a tricky one, since it's a character you play, and having him die later on... (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 08:45 PM | Comments (5)

July 17, 2007

Peanut Butter in my Chocolate. Again.

Elsewhere in this increasingly sporadic blog I've commented on how it can be interesting to mash together unusual elements in the hopes of finding new nuances or textures¹. But it can be equally uninteresting to add the same old elements to every experience. [Note: spoilers ahead.]

Case in point: The Departed, which I finally caught on DVD the other night. There are some really interesting performances here, and a terrifically bleak atmosphere of moral ambiguity. Everyone is in bed with everyone else; the first substantial character to die is also perhaps the most virtuous. Admittedly, some of the direction seems almost heavy-handed, particularly in the treatment of Matt Damon's character, who Scorcese seems to be at pains to paint as the worst of a bad bunch - he's the only character whose face gets roughed up, and at least the last quarter or so of his film time shows him with cuts and scrapes; furthermore, we never see him do anything that isn't underhanded, he's the least ambiguous character in the film². It's a great undercover story, with everyone undercover, even the ones you least expect to be.

But tacked onto this really interesting and ambiguous environment is a love interest angle, with Vera Farmiga in the center of it³. I like her and all, she's nice to look at and has very alluring eyes, but come on! Not every movie needs a love interest. I don't mean to say that her character has no place in this film whatsoever -- actually, I think it's kind of interesting that we see Dicaprio's inner turmoil reflected in a visit to a shrink⁴, and the economical laws of screenwriting almost guarantee that that character needs to play a double role in the film, but come on. It's like a recipe written by a committee -- "no matter what the chef says, our focus groups say that everything's better with butter, so add a stick to that saffron-mint lamb chop you've been working on". It's as if Griffin Mill had creative input on the project⁵.

I came away feeling that a very good movie could have been a half hour shorter, lost an unnecessary element, and become substantially better.

I felt exactly the same way playing Trauma Center: Second Edition recently. In fact, I had to put the game down and haven't picked it up again, except to demonstrate for friends and family some of the more interesting uses of the Wii-mote I've seen.

I was really enjoying this game, essentially a fun update to Operation, the wacky doctor game, except that instead of merely steady hands, you also needed to remember procedures and work pretty quickly to get the best scores for each surgery, and the nunchuck and wii-mote interface which feels really slick and nice. Plus, there was a little side story going on, reminiscent of cheap "nurse and doctor romance" paperbacks of the 1950s, about a young doctor (ostensibly the player) who was trying to learn the ropes as a surgeon. There was also a parallel storyline involving a doctor who seemed to be living life a little bit like a fugitive -- I don't really recall the details of that, because I hadn't gotten much into that storyline yet.

So, here I am, thoroughly enjoying this environment, when all of a sudden, I begin to see signs of something unnecessary intruding. First, it's that the main character is apparently the descendant of Asclepius, the Greek demigod of medicine. That made me a little nervous... but it allowed for the ability to add bullet-time, and it's hard to swing a dead cat around videogames these days without having some sort of bullet-time. So, I tried to chalk it up to some sort of special focus that the character had, and tried to leave it at that. But it was nagging at me.

Another operation or two down the line had me facing a young girl who had tried to kill herself -- a fairly simple case, mostly involving suturing lacerations, if I recall correctly. But the storyline took a weird turn here -- after we spend a little time with her in a cutscene, we can tell she was depressed and feels pretty bad now about what she must have put her parents through. Suddenly, she's back in the O.R., where her lacerations are showing up again suddenly and spontaneously. Back in we go.

That's where I had to put the game down; I had been enjoying this reasonably logical surgery game with a side-story with perhaps some romance and soap opera elements when suddenly and spontaneously magic appeared. Here I am, no longer a struggling young doctor, but instead the direct descendant of a demigod, fighting the physical manifestations of Guilt⁶. Was this really necessary?

It's not that I was looking for realism -- after all, there's a sort of magical cleaning/healing antibiotic solution that helps promote blood-clotting or something. But the unrealistic elements were in service of gameplay -- the sheets of tissue-healing stuff you'd put over an internal incision was simply a step on the way back from having cut out a tumor and needing to patch that hole (and could be sufficiently general purpose to serve this role in multiple surgeries, rather than a specific device which might clutter the interface). I was enjoying building up my skills along the lines of what a real surgeon might be called to do -- first simple, external procedures involving removing broken glass, then more involved internal issues like broken bones, then tumors, maybe building up to things like transplants and other really complex real-world examples, while enjoying the story of Derek learning how to be a Real Grown-Up Doctor™ and maybe falling in love with a nurse or this other doctor character. Instead, I got magic. Instead of a courageous and interesting fiction, which I agree with Tadhg Kelly is important, I got something out of the Hardcore Gamers Focus Test Playbook -- when in doubt, add some magic to the mix.

I'm not all "holier than thou" about it -- after all, I did spend the first seven years of my career making Star Wars games, and the number of times we'd wave our hands over some bit of magic and say, "It's Star Wars" is not small (and LucasArts employed someone just to be on top of such canon and "extended universe" fiction issues). But we were making Star Wars games for Star Wars fans -- not growing the gaming market, as Nintendo purports to be doing with the Wii and DS. My mother enjoyed our brief time playing Trauma Center: Second Opinion together, even trash-talking my suturing skills (she's an Adult Nurse Practitioner), but had she been playing it alone and not skipping past all the fiction, as I was doing, I suspect she would have gotten to the magic and been a little let down, as I was.

Designers, feel free to take chances -- you don't have to fall back on the Playbook. It may not always work, but please, give it a shot, because sometimes it will, and the games will be more interesting for that.

¹Indeed, this was part of the charming description of cooking presented in Ratatouille, which I finally saw this weekend with the boys. It was a great little movie, and one I'd highly recommend, but not the subject of today's chat. (back)

² It's almost cute how he is surprised and bothered by the fact that Nicholson's character has been feeding information to the "feebs" for years. (back)

³ And there's another bit of directorial heavy-handedness for you: while we see Leonardo Dicaprio's character romancing Farmiga, we see very little of that with Matt Damon. In fact, Dicaprio gets the love scene with her, and Damon's bed scene with her is considerably less romantic, where he basically says, "If this isn't good, you'll need to go, because I'm Irish and I'll stick with it even if it's bad." (back)

⁴ One almost wonders if there's more to that story, that maybe there was something having to do with his mother or his estranged uncle that ended up on the cutting floor or was part of the formative years of his character. Dicaprio's performance is splendid enough to make you believe there might be.(back)

⁵Bonus points to those playing our home game if you knew who Griffin Mill was without checking, and keep in mind, we're using the honor system. I had an unfair advantage, I just watched that again last year. (back)

⁶To be fair, Gamefaqs indicates that apparently this "Guilt" turns out to be some sort of terrorist-created virus -- but to me, that's not a lot different, and maybe even a little worse since it's inconsistent with the Asclepius angle. It's still magic. (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 08:16 AM | Comments (2)

June 15, 2007

In response to Dead Man's Hand

(This entry is in response to a post in Tim Longo's new blog. It's copied clear over from there, so it doesn't have my usual level of editing, etc.¹)

(Further note: this is not a dead blog. I've been working on a post lately about transgressive media. It's been a little slow. Sorry. Just lost the blog-o-rhythm.)

[Spoilers virtually in every paragraph coming up, you’ve been warned.]

Last night, Longo, Reed Knight and I were playing Neverwinter Nights 2 co-op. It features a very cheap-shot death quite early on, and then a much better departure for a character. Through a day at the Fair, you’re exposed to a few characters, who are ostensibly friends of yours, with whom you’ve grown up. You spend a day at this fair, even controlling each of these characters, and one in particular, Amie, is extremely likeable (the other can be a bit whiny).

That night, the village is raided, and a powerful wizard kills her. It comes out of nowhere, it’s unavoidable, and there is no way to counter it — it happens in a cutscene, and no one will resurrect her. You’ve invested maybe a few hours in the game at this point, and in my case, I had really come to like her character, and was actually looking forward to seeing more of her. I think the idea was probably to put across the idea that the world is a dangerous place, or some such cliché, but it completely fell flat in my case. I even spent time noodling around online with gamefaqs and what-not trying to see if there was some way to avoid that, but apparently not.

On the other hand, the other character from that day at the fair stays with you a little longer. You can help him save his mother and siblings from marauders. He accompanies you into a dungeon on the edge of town. Sure, his voice can be a little annoying, but he’s a decent fighter and helpful.

You return to town, and you’re about to head out into the world beyond, and you ask if he’ll accompany you. But he declines, saying that he needs to stay close at home with his family.

At that point, my feelings for that character totally grew — he felt like a real person all of a sudden (despite living in the uncanny valley, art-wise). He made a departure from the story that didn’t feel cheap or forced, and that felt consistent with events that had gone before.

There are a couple of deaths in games recently that worked for me. One was the “death” of Agro in Shadow of the Colossus — I had really come to love that horse in my travels. I tried that jump several times, hoping that there was some way to get past it, even as I knew inside there wasn’t. It was shocking to feel that way — Shadow mastered “less is more” both in its gameplay and its ability to draw emotion from the player.

The other interesting death in a videogame recently was in God of War (the first). In a game filled with death, from dozens of different methods, the scenes close to the end which explain how Kratos came to be the “Ghost of Sparta” truly fit the epic scope of the story and his revenge — the death, at his hands, of his wife and child, while they were disguised in an illusion by Ares. It’s a game of truly Greek proportion, with outsized personalities and motivations, something very primal, and the story works precisely because of what various deaths in the story mean to Kratos. Compellingly done, and perfectly in keeping with the type of story they’re telling.

¹ OK, Feil, you called me out, so I went ahead and cross-posted per your suggestion. I think you only updated your blog today so that I couldn't similarly call you out! I've got your number, Feil.(back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 12:51 PM | Comments (3)

February 28, 2007

The Pleasures of Training

This is an article I've been trying to write for a good six months, but it's always eluded me, for reasons I'll lay out presently.

The spark of this post was seeing Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day at GDC last year¹, and then purchasing it a few weeks later. I played it for a solid week, getting in my half hour or so a day, testing my brain age on occasion, and trying out new tests as they came on line.

I thought a lot about the experience in terms of training -- as a simulation of training, and comparing it with training I had done in the past. At around that time, I started running again², and having run under a coach back in high school cross country and track, I spent a lot of time comparing and contrasting the two experiences.

The one overriding thought I had was that training in running typically has a goal or a series of goals. In the case of cross country, for example, improving your performance at each meet or contributing to the team's overall score, with an end goal of participating in regional or state level competition at the end of the season. So, having started running again, I ultimately latched onto a long-term goal -- running a half-marathon with my brother-in-law, which was several months off. In the meantime, I'd table my thoughts about Brain Age and come back to them in September.

I thought a lot about the goals, though. Brain Age doesn't really have an explicit goal. Implicitly, however, the sense of achievement you get is from acknowlegement of progress by the polygonal head of Dr. Kawashima, whose research into "brain age" in Japan is what motivated the game. He seems genuinely excited by your progress, with hearty chortles and double- and triple-takes, and he commiserates with you when you have an off day at a particular activity. He's such a simple character -- probably a few dozen polygons at most, from my recollection -- but he manages to convey just the right amount of emotion. He even manages to give you unexpected compliments: there are times in the game when you'll be asked to try to draw something, such as a rhinoceros or a particular famous landmark, and your image will be compared against a professional illustration and salient features pointed out ("Note the large horn!"). One day, I was quite surprised to have Dr. Kawashima ask me to draw myself -- and then afterwards, having nothing to compare it against, he said, "Emphasize the good loooks!" This kind of feedback from an abstract character really elevated the experience from something I would have done a few times to something I did for a solid month or so; it should also be noted that my view of Dr. Kawashima, someone who I know very little about but who nonetheless manages to motivate me, almost exactly replicated the experience I had had of my coaches in the past.

The addition of new training techniques over time also reminded me of past training in running. At the beginning of the season, you'll start out simply by jogging and running each day, usually starting out with a little stretching³. Soon, though, you'll add a variety of training methods to your arsenal -- you'll add fart lek, interval training, hill training, Indian running, and others. Over time you'll intensify these -- tougher hills⁴, longer distances in your intervals with shorter cool downs. This is all exactly analogous to the training approaches provided in Brain Age.

The real difference, I guess, was that Brain Age lacked the specific orientation towards peak performance that would often accompany my high school running -- emphasizing certain aspects of your training to cause your body to peak during the crucial last few weeks of the season, when all the big meets (regional and state contests) would occur. Brain Age doesn't provide anything like this, as far as I can tell -- Dr. Kawashima never says, "Well, we're heading into a few weeks of intense brain training to help you lower your brain age. Get ready for a workout!" So there are some differences, too.

Unfortunately, towards the end of August, I ceased to be able to run, and had to abandon my half-marathon. I have an old knee injury (high school indoor track) and some trail-running in California had caused a recurrence; I was out for a ten mile run just a few weeks shy of the half marathon when I had to abandon running altogether due to the pain⁵. And with it, I abandoned this article; and around that time the blog stopped too.

But around the time I started having the knee pain, I got back into training of a different kind. For about a year now, my sons have been training in karate a couple of nights a week. In the late spring, they started pestering me to join them; it was a few months before I did, joining them in the dojo about a month after my knee failed me. Here was another sort of training, less specific in terms of performance -- no direct comparison of your performance versus another student's, with the exception of sparring -- but still with a lot of similarities. Karate training doesn't really have goals; attaining belt ranks is not really the focus of the training, though it is a useful way to track when you're able to take on more (to add more forms to your repertoire, for example, or to judge your relative strengths in sparring). The idea of training is to improve your karate, to improve your skills, moving them constantly towards a perfection you will never reach.

In January, I had my first belt test, and tested well, attaining my yellow belt. And at that point, I decided it was time to increase my training; prior to that, I had almost entirely been training with the childrens' classes, since that was when my sons would train. But after my first test, I was ready to start training more seriously, to push myself harder and further. Over the last few weeks, despite some pretty severe bruising (the adult classes introduced me to contact training, which involves tagging punches and kicks, and let me tell you those black belts can hit pretty damned hard!), I've thrown myself into the training, spending many more hours in the dojo in a given week. I guess that refocusing, and that belt test, were what got me thinking about Brain Age again, and the pleasures of training.

Over the last several months I've gotten out of the habit of blogging, of writing these articles about games and other media (and now, I guess, other experiences). But lately I've been missing it, and I'll make an effort to get back in the habit. It's like a different sort of training -- keeping your mind sharp by thinking about the implications of something you've been reading, or playing, or watching, turning it over in your mind and applying it to games.

Hope to see you in this space again soon, and thanks for waiting.

¹ I had the opportunity to get a free copy at GDC, which was a good move by Iwata, giving away a thousand or so copies for good word of mouth. However, I held off, because Will Wright's Spore keynote followed, and I really didn't want to wait in that line a second time. (back)

² This was the result of a competition with my father -- a "biggest loser" style of weight loss competition. Although there was a bottle of scotch on the line, the real competition was for bragging rights; it has been nice to have had a good six months of trash talking my father since I won, and now I'm doing that online to my, ahem, vast readership. :) (back)

³ Come to think of it, the little illustration exercises in Brain Age generally preceded daily training or brain age testing, which sort of made it a good form of stretching. (back)
⁴ For me, hill training will always mean what we on the cross country team called "ass break hill". I have no idea what the real name of the hill was, but on relatively flat Cape Cod, it was a doozy. (back)

⁵ This made me very aware of the physical analog to Brain Age: body age. Nothing makes you so acutely aware of your aging body than having to limp several miles back home due to joint pain. (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 12:31 PM | Comments (5)

October 18, 2006

Le jeu, c'est moi!

Not too long ago I was watching an Ingmar Bergman film, puzzling at the meaning underlying the story, trying to understand what it was that he was really getting at. As it turned out, certain characters in the film stood in for parts of the psyche, somewhat related to id, ego, and superego, though not directly. The moment I understood this was an epiphany, that piercing of the veil to let a little truth in, and it was heady, made more heady, in fact, because I felt such a strong recognition of myself in the mental life that the film represented.

I felt an amazing kinship with Bergman in that moment, knowing what a personal filmmaker he is, knowing that he may have been trying to represent aspects of himself.

It recalled for me a statement by Gustav Flaubert, who said of his famous heroine, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi". Now, there are any number of ways to interpret that statement -- that the book is him, that the character is him, that the forces which give rise to a book and character like Emma Bovary are what give rise to an author like Flaubert. In most ways of interpreting his statement, however, it's clear that Madame Bovary is an immensely personal work, one that only Flaubert could have envisioned and executed.

Finally, I recently read the following bit in prep by Curtis Sittenfeld¹:

I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will -- that is the part that's almost unbearable.

That moment of recognition was something of what I felt for Bergman (and in myself, through his film); that recognition is something Flaubert perhaps sees in Emma (and therefore perhaps we can see in Flaubert). And it's a recognition I never see in games.

That's not to say I don't see parts of people in games -- Tim Schafer's desperately manic humor comes through in both his games and in person -- but it's rare that I can look at a game and feel like it's telling me anything more about myself, or that I can recognize myself in it.

I don't think it's an inherent limitation in the medium. I can sort of do a gedanken experiment where I envision an interactive experience along the lines of Grace and Trip in Façade which isn't all that different from the film I describe². In such a game, the characters might experience several scenes, rather than just the one, and their available mental states might be highly constrained according to the point of view the auteur is trying to put forward³. This doesn't seem like it need lead to some sort of fatalism -- after all, the film that Bergman constructed is only one of myriad possible scenarios between these characters, and perhaps the interactive experience involves finding new juxtapositions, experimenting with the potential relationship space that those characters represent.

I think a contributing factor to this lack of recognition is that we work in such a highly collaborative medium these days that single auteurship has pretty well gone out the window. When so many people work together in close collaboration, it's often to the benefit of the game, since so many shifting viewpoints will hopefully create fun for a wider audience⁴. But this is very counter to the experience in watching films by those directors we call auteurs (and naturally, entirely different from reading a book) -- directors who chose collaborators who were able to work within their framework.

In terms of the fun gaming experience, though, maybe the best we can hope most of the time for is a game which uniquely caters to one's own sense of fun -- one to which we respond, "That's my fun!" rather than "That's me!" It's a small mirror, to be sure, but a mirror nonetheless, and I'll keep holding out for the bigger ones, that reflect more of us.

¹Though I enjoyed the book, I'm not in complete agreement that it was one of the most notable books of last year. It seemed a little, well, chick-litty to me. Which yes, is an admission that I can enjoy certain forms of chick-lit, I suppose. But I'm man enough to admit that without feeling threatened. ;) That said, a quote like the one that follows above is sometimes enough for me, though the density of such quotes was pretty low here. I feel like I could jot down passages from just about any random page in Saramago. (back)
²Oh dear, I've done it now, I've painted myself into a corner where I must reveal the film, and therefore perhaps reveal a bit of my psyche. In any case, the film was Bergman's Cries and Whispers, a totally great film. Wow. Anyway, psyche exposed, let's now continue. (back)
³With all due respect to the makers of Façade, it doesn't feel like this level of authorship is at work here -- and in fact, that might work counter to the goals of the exercise, or simply be a side effect of the limitations that they have, in terms of a character's sublety of emotion. (back)
⁴Which is a great reason to diversify our industry; wider inputs probably mean a wider audience. Suits take note, if you can find a way to incorporate a more diverse team, you will likely sell more units. (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 07:12 PM | Comments (0)

October 12, 2006

Something that rang a bell

I know, I know, two posts in as many days. No doubt I am spoiling my readership. How are you, my reader?

Anyway, I've been thinking again about the whole marketing push whereby Sony declares the PS3 to be a computer (rather than a gaming device). It has been gnawing at me for awhile, and I couldn't really figure out why.

Then it came to me. Just like other claims Sony made about the PS2, this one I've heard before. You see, while describing the PS3 (or for that matter, the PS2) as a computer doesn't make much nevermind to you or me the consumer, since we'll basically play games on it and nothing else, the EU makes a useful distinction, to the tune of a 2.2% duty on game consoles.

Now, granted, 2.2% on any individual unit isn't a lot -- it's about $12 in the States for the "high-end" PS3, give or take. On the other hand, if you multiply that by a few million units, it starts to add up -- and in fact, there have been around 40 million PS2 units shipped to Europe over the course of the console's cycle. Let's say that adds up to around $4 per console over the cycle on average (the PS2 being quite cheaper than the PS3); 160 million dollars is nothing to sneeze at, even for a big corporation like Sony.

I was thinking a little bit about this recently because of some of Mark Rein's comments about Intel -- basically, he claimed that Intel, by using integrated chipsets incapable of running higher end graphics, exactly the kinds of high-end capability that the Unreal 3 engine depend upon.

The differences are clear, and were essential to the EU last time around: when someone buys a PS3, they're buying it to play games, so the tariff is justified. In the case of Intel, when someone buys a PC, they are most likely not buying it to play games (and certainly not the high-end games such as Epic provides) but to fulfill some generic function (probably business-oriented).

Basically, I think that in both cases, the companies are doing the right thing for their bottom lines -- Sony wins if they fight the tariff, because they charge the same price either way, and Intel wins because they can afford to shave some of their profit margin to compete against AMD in the wholesale market. This leaves me thinking that Sony is basically trying to market their way out of paying a tax, that Intel is just doing the smart thing for their market, and that Mark Rein is... well, kind of not focusing on the right things.

Honestly, I don't think that most people who buy a PC with an integrated chip are going to want to play an Unreal Engine-licensed game. Those who want to play high-end games are going to continue to pay for high-end cards -- they will buy a PC for the flexibility it provides to their home in general (Internet browsing, printing, word processing, their home finances, whatever) and buy the card if they want to play games. Everyone who owns a PC is a potential customer for Epic only in the sense that they own a PC -- not because they have, or will ever have, much interest in playing Unreal games. My folks, my grandmother, my sisters -- these are people who might be interested in games, but just not those sorts of games, and these are exactly the folks who would have an integrated chipset.

Posted by Brett Douville at 02:47 AM | Comments (0)

October 11, 2006

Irregular Feature: Stuff I've Been Playing

Games Finished¹

Tomb Raider: Legend, Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves

Games Played

Titan Quest (also bought), Evil Genius (demo), ElectroPlankton (also bought)

Games Bought

Okami, The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls

So, yeah, been a while. Sorry about that. I've got a few things coming down the pike, so keep an eye on this space for future posts.

It's actually been a busy month or two in which I managed to play a few games, primarily of the action-adventure stripe, broadly speaking.

I mentioned some months ago on the Evil Avatar podcast that I had been playing Tomb Raider: Legend; it definitely seemed like a very refined, polished, Lara experience. Comparing it to older games in the genre, I realized how much this genre refinement addresses simply making it easier and or prettier to do things that were annoying in the past.

The biggest gameplay improvement here is in lining up jumps; old-school games like Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine required you to perfectly line up your jumps and ladder-climbing, which was irritating at best. The latest incarnation of Tomb Raider allows a free-form jumping experience that goes further and adds more forgiveness to badly placed jumps. In other words, if you miss the jump but are close, Lara will grab on and give you the opportunity to recover by pressing the Y button. This is a nice addition -- turning the annoyance of death and replay into an opportunity for agency -- but I'd love to see it go further. Lara is quick-thinking and agile; giving players the opportunity to stay alive in a variety of ways as long as they keep doing something, that's what I'm after. Make death a thing of the past, as long as the player does something appropriate -- whether that's throwing out a hand to catch a niche, or shooting the grapple hook above the ledge she's seeking to grab. My hope is that this would turn what is a false agency that merely eliminates an annoyance into a potentially meaningful choice -- perhaps missing and grappling gives you an angle on an enemy that would have been impossible otherwise, or causes the AI to peer over the ledge, allowing Lara's lovely legs to sweep up, encircle his neck and snap it.

Another refinement came in the form of inventory management. In the older games, managing inventory for things like health packs and weaponry was flawed -- it involved pausing the game to pop up an interface, and navigating this interface to find the thing you wanted, and then applying it, a sequence of three or four button presses². In TR:L, this is whittled away to a single button press on the D-pad, and there's no management -- Lara can hold three of them, and use them at any time, picking up more as she goes along. Less distracting, no need to interrupt play or the rhythm of a fire-fight, it's a win all around. If games today are shorter, but leave out some of this useless fiddling, that's a big win in my book.

I know that the idea of going back and finishing a sub-par game from years ago probably seems a little nuts. In this case, I was talking with one of the original designers via IM³, when I said that I wouldn't mind playing another similar game in the near future, if I could think of one. I joked that maybe I should go back and finish his game (I had never played any of the levels he designed, which occur late in the game), and over the next couple of days I did.

It was a bit of a perilous experience. The game's technology had aged quite poorly⁴, which was unsurprising, considering that the technology was pretty poor when it debuted. The art was quite below today's standards, but this didn't bother me a bit; comparing it to current games was meaningless, and even thinking about what it might have looked like compared with other games of its time was pretty pointless. The art more or less faded into the background. Certain macro-design issues were difficult to comprehend -- the inability to turn Indy around quickly (another thing that later games have improved on); a poison mechanic which wouldn't go away over time; the inability to move Indy while he was delivering such cinematic, mission-critical lines as "I don't think that will work". On the macro level, the design could have been significantly improved; the combat, in particular, had aged extremely poorly.

What stood out in the last few levels I hadn't played was the level design, in particular Mëroë and the Aetherium. Mëroë was everything I could possibly want in archaelogical exploration: labyrinthine tunnels that wound beneath the surface of the sand, connecting in "real" but still surprising ways. Though there was some combat, it was limited and really only a bit of a spice to what was mostly about puzzles and exploring; in essence, it was very similar to the movies in this way. The interior of the Infernal Machine was great in this way too -- not lots of combat, but interesting puzzles and good exploration that all tied together really nicely.

And then, there was the Aetherium, the final level, which did something few games manage to do well -- to take a 3D experience and make it do strange things, in this case, by bending "reality" to create passageways where passageways should not have been, due to intersecting other geometry in an Escher-like way. This is something I've always expected more in games, particularly in certain licenses, especially superheroes and anime. Combat in comic books and cartoons doesn't obey physical laws -- it obeys dramatic ones. When enemies or heroes are knocked back, they are thrown through what looks like a really big space -- even if it's only a 20' by 20' room -- without showing lots of detail of the room other than color and a lot of motion lines. I've seen this a lot lately on Teen Titans, which I watch with my sons -- there's a constant playfulness with reality, some of which is to show the emotional state of the characters, and a lot of which is to dramatize the combat to make it feel, well, "super". I'd love to see more of that in action games.

I see a little bit of that in the Sly Cooper series. Like the Ratchet and Clank folks, they've ignored animation advice to "not stretch bones", and as a result, they end up with characters whose animations better emphasize the characters themselves. Sly, of course, stretches longer when he jumps, but I think there's also some stretching going on in Murray when he bounces, and of course, Bentley's turtle nature virtually requires stretched necks and arms at times.

It's a pity that I came away from the last in this series feeling that they had made refinements that didn't meet my needs. In the first two, bottles were placed throughout the environment, which encouraged exploration -- those were removed here. Exploration in platformers is often good, because it gives you an opportunity to improve navigatoin skills you'll need throughout the game -- in Sly's case, this is his jumping and cane use, but it might just as well be Psychonauts' use of the acrobatic skills of Raz. There's also a 'cool factor' of being able to use these skills to get to places in a level you might never expect, such as the top of a very high tower. With the variety of new characters and skills available, I would have loved to have kept this element, if only to have exploration-based ways of improving my skills with these new characters.

The further refinement to take the place of these were 'challenges'; accessible from the main menu, you could return to certain sections of the game and repeat them, often to beat a time or a specific scoring metric (taking very little damage, for example). Unfortunately, these were essentially removed from the normal play of the game, and didn't encourage things I enjoyed. I played several of them, but only enough to know that I won't be going back now that I've completed the main storyline.

So, I guess in the end you need to be very careful where you refine. Refinement that eliminates annoyance or enhances agency? Good. Refinement that eliminates features which encourage exploration and skill-building, bad.

Well, now that I've posted again for the first time in a while, I hope to have a few more posts⁵ in the near future -- it's not for lack of thoughts, just prioritization of time, and now Okami and Zelda are beckoning... Cheers.

¹This irregular feature is completely stolen from the Believer column of a similar name by Nick Hornsby; I may even do a "Stuff I've Been Reading" column. We'll see. (back)
²Another implementation, which was visually cleaner than Indy's but no less distracting, was the inventory management of Metal Gear Solid.(back)
³Tim Longo, who was designer or director on each of my own three shipped games, is now at Crystal Dynamics, new home of Tomb Raider; I was giving him my thoughts on the game and the genre. (back)
⁴In particular, there was an assert which would trigger frequently; eventually, I realized that this was due to how much faster PCs are these days than when this was released, when a 233 MHz machine was pretty beefy. As it turns out, (back)
⁵Including one that discusses some elements from Castlevania... (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 08:34 PM | Comments (3)

May 26, 2006

We Were Superb

I know, I know, I said a couple of days for the Brain Training thing but I just haven't gotten around to it¹.

Anyway, happened upon a brief mention of Jedi Starfighter over at Wired today. I missed this column when it came out, but it popped up in my RSS today and I was pleased to see one of my games mentioned as being a great Star Wars experience.

JSF didn't do tremendously well in the marketplace; it didn't sell nearly as well as the original, which became a Greatest Hit on the PS2 and a Platinum Hit on the Xbox, leading to a long life of sales via the 'long tail'.

Despite the relatively weak sales, I was very proud of our accomplishments in JSF: we improved performance by a factor of 2 to support lots more ships and huge capital ships, we introduced some great new gameplay elements (a tug of war mission by John Drake, a missile command mission by Rich Davis), a couple of big boss battles (Doug Modie, Troy Mashburn, and Rich again), cool new uses of the wingman feature, and a multi-mission arc involving the theft and reconstruction of an enormous space cannon (just about everyone was in on that -- so I'll additionally mention John Feil and Quentin Westcott). Plus we added the Force Powers and additional weapons and all that under Tim Longo's overall design direction -- it was a sequel of which I'm very proud.

I could go on and on about the successes of the team, which was composed probably of 50% new folks and delivered in under 9 months. You should check out the MobyGames page, everyone made great contributions. (A couple more: Lynne's contributions as art lead were great, Rebecca Perez saved our bacon and delivered stunning animations to boot -- plus a whole bunch of extras that late-night contributors like Ryan Hood put together, Greg Land was great at keeping design on track and bringing home the performance and memory savings at the end of the project, god, there's too many to count.)

So, Brain Training, this weekend, really.

¹I'm actually glad I haven't, since I played it all week and have a lot more thoughts than I had last weekend. Anyway².
²Sorry, Nartz, no footnote links -- if this doesn't fit in a single browser window you should stop reading on your cell phone.

Posted by Brett Douville at 09:49 AM | Comments (1)

January 22, 2006

Obsessions and Compulsions

Some time ago I watched Sideways on DVD; at the time I hadn't the faintest clue what I would blog about it. Some months later, I happened upon the audiobook version of Jonathan Lethem's collection of essays The Disappointment Artist at the library and eventually it all started to coalesce a bit.

Both of these works have strong elements of obsession. In Sideways, Paul Giamatti's character Miles is obsessed with everything: obsessed with his ex-wife (and her pending remarriage), obsessed with perfecting his novel before he can send it off (and making it more and more like the headache-inspiring tome in The Information), and of course, obsessed with wine, particularly with pinot noir. Certainly, the film is about other things too, and is remarkably funny and fresh; both the director, Alexander Payne, and Paul Giamatti were seriously overlooked by the Academy on this one, with neither of them earning an Oscar nomination for their work here. But when I think back on the film, I remember the central facet of Miles' character being his obsessions, contrasted starkly with his buddy Jack, who appears so laid-back that if he's obsessed about anything, he's obsessed with relaxation. Towards the end of the film, Miles is starting to relax his obsessions, and in so doing, open up his life a little bit.

The Disappointment Artist, which includes an interview with the author in its audio version, presents a series of essays about Lethem's obsessions, which include certain types of music, certain films (including, bizarrely, The Searchers, which gets a full essay here), and comic books, among a few other things. Listening to the book as read by the author gave these obsessions more palpable force, as he still clearly carries these obsessions with him, or at the very least, can clearly remember what it was like to be in their grip.

I thought a long time about this post; I finally gave up on finding exactly the right angle for it and just started writing because I wanted to get something out today, which is the one-year anniversary of this blog. What got me thinking originally about the obsessive elements in these works and the relationship to videogames were a couple of things. The first was the obsessions I was undergoing myself at the time, one of which still grips me: with Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando and with Guitar Hero. The second was my general process of writing this blog, which involves constantly looking ahead to what I'll soon be blogging about, keeping detailed lists of what I read/watched/listened to when, and consultations back to movie reviews and book criticism and what have you. I don't think I'll talk much about this second element, but the first is something that should be familiar to videogamers everywhere.

I've taken a look over my game shelf¹ and thought about the games I can remember there, considering most closely those I've played this year. One very common element through all of these games is the collection/completion elements in them which spur the obsessive in me, who feels a burning need to find all the shines, collect all the figments, discover all the platinum bolts, and perform my absolute best in these games I play. Here's a sampling of just the games I've played at least a time or two in the last year and their corresponding OCD elements:

• Animal Crossing: Fill the museum with butterflies, dinosaur bones, etc.
• Ratchet & Clank GC: Platinum bolts, weapons
• Resident Evil 4: Treasures
• Psychonauts: Figments, memories, cobwebs, brains, mental baggage
• God of War: phoenix feathers, unlockables for multiple playthroughs
• Sly 2: messages in bottles
• Jade Empire: fighting styles, side-quests
• Guitar Hero: 5-star performances, multiple levels of difficulty/skill
• Indigo Prophecy: bonus cards
• Metroid Prime 2: scans, missile and other power-ups

Now, not every game I played had such elements (a couple notable exceptions being Shadow of the Colossus and Mario Kart Double Dash, which we play obsessively anyway), but it's a pretty overwhelming commonality on my shelf. And you could say that a couple of these above are a bit of a stretch -- Jade Empire's side-quests probably stand out -- but my response to these elements is just as obsessive as with the others, since I'll spend all kinds of time making sure to get every possible side quest in Jade Empire and will be annoyed and frustrated when one escapes me².

There are a number of ways to explain this. One obvious one is to say it's me: that the games I enjoy playing tend to have these sorts of elements to them, and there's just no two ways about it, it's me. I don't think this is the case: I think the list above is indicative of a lot of folks' game shelves in terms of it's obsessive content. Granted, I respond to some of these elements more obsessively than they probably warrant, but they are there to be obsessed over.

Another way to explain it is that game makers are simply trying to include "something for everyone" when they're building their games, and that includes us obsessives out here in gamerland. I don't really think this is the case; I think it's more likely that it's simply ingrained in the culture, and is an easy thing to include in your game to get more time out of it. The recent rise of achievements on Xbox Live via the 360 reinforces this opinion -- now literally every game released for the platform has some sort of OCD element to it.

Regardless of the explanation, I'm going to come right out and give some feedback to my fellow developers on some things I'd like to see in every game which includes these elements. It's probably too late for me to be anything but the obsessive player that I am, but these would at least help me to get through these obsessions a little more quickly.

• Give me an easily accessible counter. I want to know how I'm doing; I want to know how many things I need to find in your level or area or what have you; I'm completely willing to run all this stuff down, but you need to give me a little help. Sly 2 did a good job of this -- just pressing down on one of the analog sticks would give you an explicit count, at any time, of how many message bottles you had found and how many there were left to find. The original Metroid Prime was rather poor about this -- other than telling you what "percentage" you were through the game, you had no feedback whatsoever how many items were left -- I quit looking for missile powerups when I got to 150 missiles, only to later learn that there were more than 200.
• Maps are good. It's okay to wait until near the end of the game to give me a map which will help me run these things down, as Ratchet and Clank 2 does, but please provide the option. I spent a good couple of hours in Psychonauts looking for the missing figment on the Napoleon level, nearly making me a candidate for the nuthouse myself. Hey, I'm even willing to spend some in-game cash to get those things; one of the first things I bought in Resident Evil 4 was the map for the treasures.
• Tell me what good they do, or at least be honest that they gain me nothing. I've been picking up these bonus cards in Indigo Prophecy, having no idea what they're for. Contrast that with the elements in Psychonauts which would lead directly to improved psychic abilities or bonus material such as "the good Chans" that Tim used to always give me a hard time about.
• Don't make me play through the whole game again, or at least make it easier somehow. God of War breaks this one for me: there's simply no way I'd be able to make it through on super-hard-mode just to watch the movies. It's nice to reward your hard-core players this way, but it leaves me feeling left out in the cold -- I beat your game, why can't I watch the yummy extra content? Ratchet & Clank follows the second half of the rule: you have to go back and play the game some more to get the greatest weapons (though in theory, you could simply play in easy mode for a long long time), but they multiply up your score based on how long you can go without being hit by the enemies, which is generally pretty long.
• Give me alternative feedback to help me find them. The Sly series is very good about this -- all those message bottles make a little dinging noise. If you listen carefully, you can find them this way, which is great when you've found 99% of them and just need that one more.

And of course, finally, you can think about the last suggestion: don't include them at all, like Shadow of the Colossus, which was one of the most remarkable game experiences I had this year. As with Giamatti's character in Sideways, sometimes you need to let go of your obsessions to grow.

¹My game shelf these days is entirely console titles, since my PC games haven't yet made it out of the boxes they got stowed in when I moved from California. I don't think what I'm discussing here is a purely console-oriented phenomenon by any means, but I haven't exhaustively considered the PC games I've played. (back)
²Most notoriously, there was a closed fist approach quest that I simply couldn't have garnered, but which stayed in my quest log mocking me for almost the whole game. (back)

Posted by Brett Douville at 10:44 PM | Comments (4)

December 30, 2005

Christmas Purchases

A quick entry today before an extended one in the next couple of days.

I managed to get out and buy a few games that I've been meaning to get for one reason or another. I had a $150 gift card to Best Buy burning a hole in my pocket, and so I headed over there to see what could be seen. Here's what I ended up with.

• Gun for Xbox. A little while back, I blogged about Westerns in these pages. Gun is a new entry into the genre, and I've been meaning to get around to it. Reviews have been mixed; they seem to take a lot of hits for the story mode being "too short". If it's ten hours, I'll have gotten more than my money's worth, so that works for me.

• Indigo Prophecy for Xbox. I've been hearing consistently good things about this title, which may have something to teach me about videogames and stories. So, we'll see. Sounds interesting anyway, and since I gripe about story here a fair amount, it only seems fair that I should give one of the better-reviewed story games on Xbox a try.

• Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal for PS2. I'