Outside Your Heaven

Interview With Terri Brosius & Dan Thron

2012-01-19T06:36:00.000-08:00

Part 9 of a continuing series, where I interview members of the now-defunct but highly influential Looking Glass Studios (1990-2000), which wrote the book on 3D first-person narrative game design throughout the 90s, in such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief.

This week is Terri Brosius and Dan Thron. Dan was an artist/animator on Terra Nova, System Shock 2, and Thief, doing much to solidify the look and feel of the Thief universe. Terri was a voice-actor in both System Shock (as SHODAN) and Thief (as Victoria) as well as a writer/designer for Thief, doing much to shape the overall story arc of the franchise.

I talk with Terri and Dan about how they got into the industry, what influenced them in their contributions to the Thief franchise in particular, and what they consider good storytelling/world building in video games.

If you ever wanted to know who to thank for Thief's infamous eyeball-plucking scene check it out!

Download the podcast here.

How Zelda Became Uninteresting

2011-12-26T06:59:00.000-08:00

The Legend of Zelda, for a brief period of time, was one of the most vibrant, experimental video game franchises around. Now it's a shell, having been browbeaten into apology after apology for having dared be so interesting. The "trilogy" of Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and Wind Waker, spanning 1998 to 2003, are the key games in the series, as they represent the apex, destruction, and transformation of the design that began with the original Zelda in 1986.

Zelda series helmsman, Eiji Aonuma, who took over from Shigeru Miyamoto after Ocarina of Time, has said repeatedly he feels haunted by that game. It looms large in the imagination of gamers as The Classic, never to be equaled, and Aonuma's job has increasingly become to replicate this platonic phantom - this mythical 'ideal Zelda' - that arguable never existed. Nostalgia is a powerful thing. Enough to hold a man's entire career hostage.

I was at Aonuma's talk at GDC 2007, which was a double apology. First he apologized for making Wind Waker. Then he apologized for making Twilight Princess, the game that was an apology for Wind Waker. After the Western gaming press responded badly to Wind Waker, he tried to guess what this mysterious audience wanted. He did his best. He threw in a werewolf because he didn't have any better ideas (yes, he said that). But he still wasn't personally thrilled with it. The game was still a polished piece of craft, but the spark was gone, the bravery that made Majora's Mask and Wind Waker such stand out experiments, almost arthouse games.

Twilight Princess was a ploy to regain the audience that had rejected the creative direction the series was going after Ocarina - the right creative direction. This direction was not only different, fresh, and exciting. It was the only logical thing to do after the classic Zelda formula reached its highest expression. Ocarina of Time was the classic, dumb hero tale of every other Zelda game (boy has to save girl, goes through trials, finds sacred items, defeats wizard, etc.) done with exceptional epic flourish, culminating in the most awesome knight-versus-bad-mutherfuckin'-wizard fight ever in a video game. It was the game every other Zelda had been trying to be, and there it finally was. Done. What's next?

What came next was a marvelous dark fantasy mind-fuck. Majora's Mask was not only thematically and narratively the best thing ever associated with the Zelda name (it was what Shadow of the Colossus would get credit for being some years later, only deeper, richer); it was one of the most complete narrative worlds in a commercial game. Ocarina had dabbled in world-simulation, with its day-night cycles and open 3D terrain, but Majora's Mask was like Ultima VII on redbull. In a time when 3D graphics where inspiring most developers to make big, shallow worlds (Morrowind, GTAIII) Majora's Mask focused on being narrow and deep. Its nuance, the lives of NPCs as they existed in time, was unseen. And the time-travel mechanics, the clockwork social puzzle they formed, has never been equaled.

This all dovetailed together into one of the most total experiences I've had in a game. Majora's Mask inverted, subvert, destroyed - it ravaged Zelda every which way, all with a wicked smile. Never has a formula's self-destruction been so well-deserved, so resonant, and so wonderful. It did for Zelda what Watchmen did for superheroes, what Planescape: Torment did for Dungeons & Dragons. Saying it was the best Zelda game doesn’t begin to express its value. No other game in the series comes close. No game in the series ever will.

If Major'as Mask was the bonfire that burned Ocarina to the ground, Wind Waker was the phoenix that arose from its ashes. It was a Zelda game about a changed world, a post-apocolyptic regeneration to Majora's apocalyptic misery, though it remains one of the brightest, most pleasant destroyed worlds you’ll visit. It goes out of its way at every turn to emphasize the changed-ness of Zelda, from the cel-shaded graphics to the sailing mechanics to the story about how Hyrule is a relic of a dead past that should stay dead. Wind Waker is, if you’re clever enough to notice, an elegy for the series, a meditation on its irreversible transformation.

Ganon is the villain of Wind Waker because he wants to resurrect the Zelda formula. Why can’t things be like the good ‘ol days in Ocarina of Time, when everything was cool and epic? Because we all have to grow up sometime. Ironic that Wind Waker’s cel-shaded graphics got labeled “childish” by mouth-foaming fanboys who pined for their adolescent notions of adulthood, their cool wizard fights, their Link and Ganon who looked like they were drawn for Marvel Comics. Wind Waker’s gentle plea was a very adult one, and its rejection proof of how children, of all sorts, still hold sway over the art form.

Wind Waker was one from the heart, a game close to Aonuma. (His band, in which he plays percussion, is called 'The Wind Wakers'.) Twilight Princess, on the other hand, radiates desperation. Aonuma was grasping at something, anything, to give the global market what it seemed to want. What it wanted of course was crawl back into the womb, into its fuzzy memories of Ocarina, but have this infantile nostalgia obfuscated with so-called "darker" content... as if werewolves, shadows, a scarier Ganon with big biceps, and a mean-lookin’ teenage Link were the very definition of seriousness.

Twilight Princess is sheer pap of course, just a muddled variation on Ocarina’s good-versus-evil nonsense. It has none of Majora’s moral anguish and none of Waker’s transformative maturity. It barely registers in memory next to Ocarina, which at least had the benefit of straight-forward mythic simplicity. People liked it, but since it’s chief value was reminding people of Ocarina, it lacked any sort of future-trajectory of its own, rendering the creative evolution of the series effectively dead.

Skyward Sword represents a cautious step back towards the creative energy the series once had. Traumatized, but yearning to pick up its lost strands of inspiration, Skyward feels like a calculated attempt to bring back the color and spark of Wind Waker while avoiding the superficial elements that drive petty fans berserk.

Link and Zelda are cool-looking teens, with relatively human proportions, but the world and characters around them exhibit a stylized freedom closer to Wind Waker's. The fully open sky world, with its endless billowing clouds and floating islands, feels like a reiteration of the ocean from Wind Waker. The town and characters are fleshed out in a way closer to Majora's Mask, and the puzzle/dungeon design - which makes extensive, often ingenious use of the Wii motion controls - gives the most basic challenges (combat, navigation) a sense of newness.

Who knows what Zelda might be today had it not been side-tracked by the blood sacrifice Aonuma was forced to make to the Western market. Skyward Sword might be truly exciting, yet another balls-out experiment in world/game/story fusion, rather than a surprisingly well-executed puzzle/dungeon exercise with clearly partition barriers between innovation and fan-service. While it's nice to see the series regain a bit of its purpose, this surgical approach to innovation makes it clear Nintendo is still scared shitless.

Where will it go from here? No doubt Aonuma is up nights trying to figure that one out. God help him.

Bringing 3D to the Masses

2011-12-17T12:54:00.000-08:00

Super Mario 3D Land may look cute and colorful, but it's actually an insidious plot to corrupt 2D gamers into 3D gamers. This happened 16 years ago with Mario 64, a game that wrote the book on a lot of 3D gaming concepts (analog-stick movement, simultaneous character and camera control, etc.) even though today it hardly ever gets credit for them. While brilliant, it ultimately failed to make 3D accessible to a broad audience. The games that followed in 64's footsteps abandoned its careful scaffolding and banked on an ever narrowing hardcore demographic, one that could already parse its complicated conventions. 3D Land - much more than other recent 3D Mario efforts - is a do-over, a back-to-basics attempt to get things right.

At first I was disappointed at 3D Land's simplified controls. Mario 64 was brilliant partially for its use of the then-novel analog stick, still the most nuanced and responsive uses of the interface (and somewhat due to hardware design of the N64 analog itself, far more sensitive and flexible than modern analog sticks). 3D Land, like many modern games, opts for a 'run' button, rather than mapping speed to the stick itself. Over the years we have proven ourselves impatient, unsubtle creatures with thumbsticks. We'd rather yank them around than carefully modulate our input, even when the controls respond to such modulation beautifully.

3D Land's choices aren't a knee-jerk acquiescence to modern gaming, however. They are a careful indoctrination strategy, designed to lull 2D gamers into a state of comfort. It takes only one level to realize 3D Land's template is not Mario 64 but New Super Mario Bros., the reboot of old-school 2D Mario that came out a few years ago (and proved very popular). 3D Land is quite obviously a 2D game modified to be a 3D game, not the other way around. This explains the 'run' button, the lack of a heath meter, the simplistic swimming mechanics, the appearance of the classic flagpole at the end of stages, and the profoundly 2D nature of its 3D spaces. It's classic Mario straight from 1986... except you can walk around things instead of having to jump over them.

Astute players should recognize this strategy - of embodying the "2D-ness" of a space in the level architecture, not the controls - from Metroid Other M, another recent Nintendo reboot/update. Other M's medieval sexism distracted a lot of people from noticing it was doing some very interesting things with 3D. It was a throwback to the early days of 3D, when developers tended to preserve the strong orthogonal logic of 2D worlds in their 3D worlds. As much as hardcore gamers hate to admit it (and they do) there's a simplicity to north, south, east, west orientation that more complex 3D worlds struggle to achieve. Try to teach a non-gamer to play both Asteroids and Assassin's Creed and you will see what I mean. The literacy gap between 2D and 3D interfaces is massive. Gamers understand them, but the rest of the world was left behind in the 90s.

3D Land is the most calculated experiment I've seen in shepherding players from 2D to 3D, mostly because of how openly it plays with the idea of 2D versus 3D, inviting the user to engage with these concepts in a self-conscious way. 3D Land bares more than a passing resemblance to Paper Mario, the surreal Mario spin-off that parodies the concepts of 2D and 3D by allowing the player to look at a 2D world "sideways" and see all its inhabitants as flat strips (hence the title). The way the world looks when switching between views in Paper Mario is almost exactly the difference between 8-bit Mario and 3D Land, a fact 3D Land seems to acknowledge with its occasional "fake enemies made of cardboard" gag.

The impression left is that someone took a 2D Mario level and "built it" in real life, and now you're navigating through it - a human video game. 2D platformers have been recreated in real life before, most notably in the late-80's Japanese game show Takeshi's Castle. (The idea of "being in a video game" was one of the organizing principles of the show, as seen in the short pixel art animations that introduced each event.) Nintendo imported this idea to the U.S. for the New York launch of Super Mario 3D Land, setting up a Takeshi's Castle-style platforming challenge in Times Square.

This is a great way to teach 3D to people. Everyone understands these kinds of spacial constraints when encountered in the real world, so why not just replicate them in a video game? The irony of 3D gaming is that 3D space is "real" in a sense. It is unabstract, a 1-to-1 simulation of space as it actually exists. 2D space is abstract, an imaginary reduction of real space onto a flat plane. So why then is 2D much easier to navigate than 3D? Because, if we acknowledge the complete reality of video games, we must acknowledge that they take place on a screen, and screens are flat.

North, south, east, west are the most logical orientations for anyone controlling an object on a screen. 2D games take place unabashedly in screen-space, not real-space, and designing to that reality makes games more intuitive, more connected with the matter-of-fact-ness of mediated televisual experience. 3D games don't take place on a screen, they take place in a screen. But since we are never in the screen with them, we need all sorts of convoluted gear to bridge the barrier. 3D games that fail to acknowledge the screen always feel awkward, because they fail to acknowledge the primary agent that shapes our interaction, instead pretending like we're "immersed" in some world... but can never feel more immersive than remote-controlling a robot via video.

Games like Super Mario 3D Land are built around the screen, around its logics, its limits, its shape. They are 3D spaces articulated in the language of 2D spaces, because that is ALWAYS the language of screens. This is why when 3D Land indulges in some of the more esoteric 3D conventions, it carefully constructs screen-based metaphors around them. As an adept 3D gamer I missed the ability to enter first-person view at any time like I could in Galaxy, but I have to admit re-imagining that convention as tourist binoculars - the kind you might find at Niagra Falls or the Empire State Building - is a stroke of genius. Like all clever scaffolding they make you realize 'first-person view' has always been like using tourist binoculars.

Super Mario 3D Land may not be everything I want out of a 3D Mario game. But I find it hard not to be impressed by its laser-thin shrewdness when it comes to reaching a 3D-averse audience. It slips the drug of 3D - the drug of Mario 64, of Galaxy, that intoxicated me so long ago - into their soup, in doses small enough to give them a gradual, imperceptible high.

As the game progresses the levels slowly open up, like those in Mario 64, but the transition is subtle and seamless. All the while the game presents the stereoscopic 3D, the selling point of the 3DS, as if that were the innovation of the game. It's just a ruse, a good excuse to get a second shot at the vast swathes of people who have been kept from the pleasures of 3D gaming by a decade of dual-analog controllers and byzantine level architecture.

The people who fail to understand those things are not the freaks. We are.

The Narrative Fatigue of Dark Souls

2011-11-28T13:35:00.000-08:00

I just finished Dark Souls, the notorious sequel to From Software's 2009 sleeper hit Demon's Souls. Dark Souls was a game I was more excited to play than any other this year. Demon's Souls was a revelation for me, one of the richest, freshest, most daring AAA games of the last decade. It was also - contrary to popular belief - a superb narrative experience, with a game system and a fictional world that informed each other in resonant ways that hearkened back to the heyday of Origin and Looking Glass.

I was expecting a lot from Dark Souls, and "a lot" is exactly what I got. It is an absurdly massive game, making Demon's Souls, which took me 100 hours to finish, look small. I only finished it just last night, and my first thought as the credits rolled was: what the fuck was that?

I was expecting it to be cryptic, but I wasn't prepared for how terse it was. It was over in 30 seconds. If I include my hour-50 restart, I played Dark Souls for 150 hours. Demon’s Souls took me 100 only because I let it. I could have easily finished it in less, but I wanted it to be longer. I was ready for Dark Souls to be over by the end, but I plugged onward in good faith, assuming that a narrative payoff similar to Demon's Souls was waiting for me at the end, an ending sequence that was the final key to decoding the moral politics of its crypto-gothic mythology. Instead I got an almost immediate staff roll followed by an auto-restart / auto-save.

Demon’s Souls let you keep your end-game save if you wanted to poke around. But Dark Souls literally forces you to replay it, over and over, to solve its narrative riddles. If the game were 10 hours long - like Silent Hill, Deadly Premonition, or other similarly cryptic story-driven games - this might be good, but it’s 100+. Who the fuck has time? Really? You really expect me to devote every evening I have for a year to solving your fucking riddle? You gotta be joking.

Demon’s Souls, while also cryptic, didn’t seem like such a fuck-you to the player when it came to stumbling upon its key narrative components. If you paid attention it was hard to miss, and its climax that put a lot of its more puzzling bits into perspective. But Dark Souls... even if you do figure it out, there is no pay-off at the end. At first I thought it was just the ending I got, but I looked at the other ending on YouTube and it was almost as slight.

I didn't expect answers, but I did expect the core questions I had about Lordran to be addressed and given illuminating, perhaps decisive context. What happened to the world? Did you really end the curse of the undead? Was Gwyn and the fire-worshiping religion he founded, which seemed to have created as many problems as it solved, morally better than the alternative... a dark world ruled by men, without the gods? The game is right to leave this question unanswered, but I expected an inkling of what the consequences of these two paths might be, how their pros and cons might play out. Instead the game just jerks you back to be beginning without being able to process anything new.

In a way this all seems like an extension of the same “problem” the game has with its difficulty design. I still maintain Dark Souls isn’t as fair as Demon’s Souls, in spite of what the developers say. It has more cheap deaths, more things that are impossible to predict, more riddles that seem designed to fuck with you. In the first game you got the feeling that they weren’t trying to be especially difficult or cryptic. It was just a beautiful, strange, brutal game world that had its own dark logic, a logic that wasn't very difficult to decipher and, once deciphered, ensured you would both survive its challenges and experience most of its content.

Dark Souls is a classic example of people listening too much to their own press. Demon’s Souls didn’t need to be bigger. It didn’t need to be harder. It didn’t need to me more cryptic. It was brilliant the way it was. The extra weight just makes the whole experience flabbier, looser, more unwieldly. Sure it is obviously by the same minds as the original, which is why it has the same seductive draw, and a lot of the same great elements, but in the end it’s too much - way too much - of a good thing.

Dark Souls took a LOT of my time. A lot of my life. Demon’s Souls did too, but when the credits rolled on that game I had a warm feeling that all that time was well-spent. It was because of that feeling that I got up and immediately wrote my essay on the game that was eventually published. This, what you’re reading now, is what Dark Souls prompted me to write when the credits rolled.

I may one day write about the game’s good points - about how brilliant its non-linear level design is, how awe-inspiring the world is as a narrative object if you manage to explore all of it, how its multiplayer system feels like a cynical morality play, and how, in the end, its inversion of 'good' and 'evil' is subversive in ways most games can't imagine, let alone attempt – but I don’t feel like it now.

Right now, I don’t want to play video games anymore.

Interview with Marc "Mahk" LeBlanc

2011-11-10T08:36:00.000-08:00

Part 8 of a continuing series, where I interview members of the now-defunct but highly influential Looking Glass Studios (1990-2000), which wrote the book on 3D first-person narrative game design throughout the 90s, in such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief.

This week is Marc "Mahk" LeBlanc. Marc was a programmer/designer at Looking Glass for most of the company's life, and was one of the major voices in shaping the overarching design aesthetic of the company. This is partially what lead to Marc being a thinker, writer, and educator on game design, developing the MDA framework (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) as a simple tool for creating emergence-centric games. I talk with Marc about his time at Looking Glass, how he remembered dealing with simulation, fiction, and emergence across various projects, and how those lessons and strategies have filtered out into the rest of the games industry after the company folded.

If you ever wanted to know how performance-enhancing drugs can help you in System Shock or what the exact difference is between the design philosophies of Deus Ex and Thief, give it a listen.

Download the podcast here.

Blog Anxiety

2011-11-02T18:33:00.000-07:00

I've been having a real problem updating the blog the past few months. This is because I've been busier this year, in terms of travel and projects, than any other year in recent memory. Since March I've been to Spain, Singapore, Montreal, Holland, Texas, and have been bouncing back between Boston and New York it seems like every other week. In this time I've begun several blog posts, but haven't been able to finish them properly.

At this point my backlog is fairly massive, including some stuff from last year. I've got articles on Epic Mickey, Minerva's Den, Ocarina of Time 3D, Catherine, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dark Souls, and one on the overarching politics of Metal Gear that I've been tinkering with for months.

I feel like the "window" for many of these has passed. Ideally, you want to get out posts when the game in question is still topical. On the other hand that's weird of me to say, since I often write about older, obscure games that have nothing to do with what's "hot" in gamer circles (and pride myself on the fact). Clearly it wouldn't be out of character for me to publish them anyway.

I'd like to release all these articles by the end of the year, in addition to the final Looking Glass podcasts, the next few of which are finally finished and coming (Mark "Mahk" LeBlanc is next). I plan to release an article a week, even if I have to force myself to post some of the above articles in a less-than-ideal form.

This is a blog after all, I often need to remind myself. My style (I've come to realize) tends toward the shape, length, and voice of traditional print media essayists. I read a lot of early 20th century political writing like George Orwell and Bertrand Russell, and for film criticism my touchstones are people like Pauline Kael Jonathan Rosenbaum.

What these people do isn't so different from what bloggers do, but print media, being less ephemeral than digital media, does have the added advantage (or disadvantage, depending on your perspective) of being "final" in a sense a blog never is. You want to polish things off, be absolutely sure you put your best foot forward, and be as certain as possible that what you publish might have some value for posterity.

It is this mentality I have trouble letting go of online, and I'm not so sure this is a bad thing. I once saw Arianna Huffington interviewed on The Daily Show, calling herself a blog "evangelist", and claiming you don't have to filter yourself online. You just post your thoughts, as messy as they are, and keep going, free from having to edit or polish. Blogging is just raw, uncut thought.

John Stewart seemed to think this was a bunch of crap, arguing that we have editors for a reason, and doesn't it makes sense to at least try to make something good - to revise it, to scrutinize it, to streamline it, to improve it - at least a little bit before you publish it? Huffington was having none of this, of course, but Stewart didn't seem convinced. Neither am I.

While it's obviously possible to tinker too much, I do think a degree of old fashioned print media self-scrutiny is useful. I dunno about you, but I tune out quickly when a blogger just seems to be writing their stream of consciousness thoughts on a topic. I expect a writer to parse their own mind, to exercise some discretion and select the best bits for my consumption. I want a statue. Not a slab of rock.

Interview with Eric Brosius

2011-07-27T15:29:00.000-07:00

Part 7 of a continuing series, where I interview members of the now-defunct but highly influential Looking Glass Studios (1990-2000), which wrote the book on 3D first-person narrative game design throughout the 90s, in such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief.

This week it's Harmonix Audio Director Eric Brosius. Eric originally hails from Boston's music scene. He was in the band Tribe along with Greg LoPiccolo and came to Looking Glass as a sound designer around the same time, working first on Terra Nova before moving on to bigger projects. He was one of the few members who continued to work on Looking Glass properties even after the company closed, doing sound design both for System Shock 2 at Irrational and Thief: Deadly Shadows at Ion Storm. I talk with Eric mostly about his approach to sound design, how he dealt with things like music vs. ambience, and how such choices became an integral part of Looking Glass's aesthetic and legacy.

If you want to know why there is no "music" slider in Thief or why stealth "works" in System Shock 2, check it out!

Download the podcast here.

Interview with Greg LoPiccolo

2011-07-13T14:12:00.000-07:00

Part 6 of a continuing series, where I interview members of the now-defunct but highly influential Looking Glass Studios (1990-2000), which wrote the book on 3D first-person narrative game design throughout the 90s, in such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief.

Next up: Greg LoPiccolo. Greg has risen to impressive heights as the vice president of product development at Harmonix, makers of world famous games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but he got his start at Looking Glass back in the 90s. Coming from the music industry (he was bass guitarist in the Boston-based rock band Tribe) he started out as music/sound designer on System Shock, eventually becoming project lead on Thief 1. I talk with Greg about his roots in the music business, how he adapted to the culture of video games and software design, and how that has affected his approach to game development overall.

If you ever wanted to know how SHODAN's voice came about, be sure to give it a listen!

Download the podcast here.

Interview with Ken Levine

2011-06-29T20:21:00.000-07:00

Part 5 of a continuing series, where I interview members of the now-defunct but highly influential Looking Glass Studios (1990-2000), which wrote the book on 3D first-person narrative game design throughout the 90s, in such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief.

In this episode I talk with Ken Levine, creative director of Irrational Games and mastermind of the Bioshock series, who got his start as a writer/designer at Looking Glass. Ken was one of the main creative forces in the early days of Thief, helping to shape its eventual story, world, and core mechanics. I talk with him about his memories of working at the studio, his writing and creative process, and how his experience at Looking Glass relates to his later work at Irrational Games.

If you ever wanted to know what film noir has to do with Thief or whether the Master Builder really exists, check it out!

Download the podcast here.

Interview With Randy Smith

2011-06-22T07:28:00.000-07:00

Part 4 of a continuing series, where I interview members of the now-defunct but highly influential Looking Glass Studios (1990-2000), which wrote the book on 3D first-person narrative game design throughout the 90s, in such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief.

In this episode I talk with Thief level designer extraordinare Randy Smith. Randy created some of the most memorable levels in the Thief series, often bringing the more horror-inspired elements (zombies, ghosts, mysteries) of the Thief universe to the fore.

We talk about his approach to level design, and how it developed and evolved in the creative environment of Looking Glass, before seguing into some of his post-Looking Glass work, including his role as project lead on Ion Storm's Thief sequel (Deadly Shadows) and his indie company Tiger Style, makers of Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor.

Download the podcast here.

Rockstar Confidential

2011-06-18T08:38:00.000-07:00

I know L.A. Noire isn't exactly a Rockstar game. It's by Sydney-based developer Team Bondi, who started the project before Rockstar was even attached as a co-developer/publisher. Still, the final product has Rockstar's fingerprints all over it, most notably in the driving mechanics which seem entirely lifted from Grand Theft Auto, and don't really sit well with the game's other elements, such as the investigating and cross-questioning.

I find the driving in L.A. Noire a major distraction from the core detective-based gameplay, a hold-over from GTA that doesn't seem particularily well-justified by the game's design. Ironically, the driving in Deadly Premonition, which was widely lambasted for being boring and tedious, made a lot more sense in the context of that game's over-arching design. Deadly Premonition is a complete world simulation, whereas L.A. Noire is a fractured, half-hearted one.

The driving makes sense in Deadly Premonition because the game is presented as a world, not a narrative. York has to get up, get dressed, have breakfast, drive to the crime scene, go get coffee, etc. and this level of fidelity makes the driving feel like a necessary part of its "day in the life" approach. Phelps by contrast never exists so completely in the 1947 Los Angeles Team Bondi so painstakingly built. He comes into existence in fits and starts, sometimes in the middle of a foot chase. Chapters begin with Phelps appearing in mid-situation, like you're watching a TV show. Why does that massive, seamless world even exist if some omnisicent narrator is just going to teleport you around it at will?

I'm not saying every game has to simulate life in all its mundanity. However, if you're not making a world simulation, you shouldn't bloat your game with world-sim features, like a GTA-style open city complete with pedestrians, cars, functioning stop signals, etc. I doubt anyone would have complained if L.A. Noire had simply cut between locations. Would past detective games like Snatcher, Policenauts, Blade Runner, or even Phoenix Wright have been improved by tedious world navigation?

In those games you just choose where you want to go from a list, and then you're there. This makes perfect sense because those games are about being a detective, not a driving-school student... which is what Rockstar's sloppy, built-for-mayhem driving mechancs make you feel like. (It matters a lot in Deadly Premonition that driving on the road like a normal driver is relatively easy - like it is in real life - whereas in L.A. Noire it's as difficult as it is in every other Rockstar game.)

What's bizarre about L.A. Noire and the hype/criticism surrounding it is how its being presented/discussed as if it were somehow original, when in fact it's just an extremely expensive, bloated, somewhat confused version of what many games have done before. It's hardly the first detective game (the ones I listed above are only just a few). All of its mechanics are swipped from better games. Take for example the interrogation system, an intriguing if inferior version of the cross-examination mechanics from Phoenix Wright. It took me forever to realize how L.A. Noire's cross-questioning worked, mostly because its on-screen UI suffers from mixed metaphors.

Your three possible responses - Truth, Doubt, and Lie - are utterly confusing. Only one of them (Doubt) is a player action. I had to read the instruction manual before I realized that "Lie" isn't something you can do. The actual action is "Accuse", which you do if you think they are lying. Likewise "Truth" really means "Believe" as in "Believe what they just said". How such a mixed up UI got through focus testing I can't imagine, since I find it hard to believe many people figured it out without being told by a Team Bondi QA person what the hell those buttons actually meant.

It also took me several interrogations to realize that you have a fourth option, not shown on-screen, "Present Evidence", which only appears if you choose "Lie" (which really means "Accuse"). Counter-intuitively, choosing the "Lie" option - which seems like the harshest option - is the only one you can back out of, since if you accuse them of lying but then decide you don't have the evidence you can backpedal out of the accusation. Why can't you do that with "Doubt"? It would be incredibly useful since the resulting dialogue often is not a measured expression of doubt but a random outburst from Phelps on an entirely new subject.

Has no one at Team Bondi played Phoenix Wright? That game came out years ago, has virtually the same statement analysis / present evidence mechanics, and presents them logically, elegantly, clearly in the first 5 minutes. This failure to learn from other games is bizarre, considering the audience L.A. Noire is going after, which is apparently much more mainstream than Phoenix Wright. I know more than one baby boomer who has finished every Phoenix Wright game - all five of them - and I can't imagine any of these people suffering through L.A. Noire's bewildering interface enough to realize it's the same game.

Only hardcore gamers have the patience for such nonsense, which further begs the question of what, exactly, is the point of spending so much time and money on photo-realistic performance-capture? Does Rockstar/Bondi actually think the mainstream audience such stunts are designed to snare would be able to parse their game? What kind of people spend all that money on breaking games out of their low-culture niche and then hide the solution to their byzantine game mechanics in the instruction manual?

UPDATE

I just heard you can skip the driving in L.A. Noire. I tried it out and sure enough if you hold (as opposed to tap) the 'get in car' button, Phelps will tell his partner to drive, at which point it simply skips to the destination. How players are supposed to figure this out I'm not sure, but it does make the game less tedious. It also makes it even more obvious that the open-world aspects are an entirely disposable legacy feature inherited from GTA.

Interview with Tim Stellmach & Laura Baldwin

2011-05-08T05:47:00.000-07:00

Part 3 of a continuing series, where I interview members of the now-defunct but highly influential Looking Glass Studios (1990-2000), which wrote the book on 3D first-person narrative game design throughout the 90s, in such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief.

In this episode I talk with Tim Stellmach and Laura Baldwin. Tim was lead designer on Thief and Thief II, as well as a designer on Underworld II, System Shock, and Terra Nova. Laura was a designer/writer on Thief. She also worked in System Shock 2. Joining us is also Sara Verrilli, QA on System Shock and designer on Thief and Thief 2.

The discussion mostly covers Thief, though there is some discussion of other projects. If you want to find out where lingo like "taffer" comes from, or what it means, be sure to check it out!

Download the podcast here.

Cinephilia as Characterization in Deadly Premonition

2011-04-27T14:44:00.000-07:00

Now that the dust has settled a bit on Deadly Premonition it's interesting that by most accounts it's actually a good game. The bad reviews it got early last year seemed to fade completely by year's end, leaving only warm and fuzzy feelings form the increasingly vocal minority - both inside the games industry and out - who loved it. SWERY's GDC talk - and even just the fact that he was given a slot at GDC at all - seemed to disperse any lingering sense that the good points of his game were an accident.

Given everything that's already been said about Deadly Premonition I'm not sure what to add, though there is one thing I feel hasn't quite been articulated to my satisfaction. The copious film references in the game, appearing almost exclusively in optional monologues by Agent York (mostly while driving) and dealing primarily with 80s pop-cinema, are a lot more than just a developer speaking through his character about his love of movies. By the end of the game, and especially in light of the final plot-twist involving York's real identity, these references reveal themselves to be an important element of characterization and story.

The only other game I know of that uses film references as extensively, or at least the only one that's coming to mind, probably because it's also Japanese and exhibits a similar sense of exotic fascination with American pop-culture, is - surprise, surprise - Metal Gear. If we put the two games side-by-side however, it becomes clear Deadly Premonition has much better reasons, on the whole, for its characters to be so be mentioning movies all the time.

When Snake in MGS1 makes a joke about his real name, David, being the same as the protagonist of 2001: A Space Odyssey it feels like Kojima baldly projecting his cinephelia onto a character. It's not believable that Snake, a hardened special forces badass who lives in Alaska (and doesn't even seem to own a television) would be quite so familiar with 2001. Likewise in MGS2 Snake's choice of "Pliskin" as an alias, and Raiden's instant understanding of why he chose it, suggests a world where everyone is just as familiar with John Carpenter's 80s output as a film nerd like Kojima.

Kojima's best rationalization for expressing cinephelia through his characters is in MGS3, where nearly all of them are filtered through the sweet bookish girl who saves your game, Para-Medic. Her extensive knowledge of American movies from the 40s through the early 60s is of course a winking nod to Kojima's cinephilia, but it also functions quite well as an extended piece of characterization. Because she's the only real movie fan in the story the movie conversations feel more like part of the fictional world than quasi-diegetic asides.

It becomes a running gag in MGS3 that Big Boss doesn't watch movies at all, which makes his conversations with Para-Medic, who tries to sell him on a different movie every time you save your game, a rather nice window into both characters' personalities. Movie conversations go in all sorts of places, like the time she mentions how the 1953 film version of War of the Worlds wasn't as scary as the Orson Welles radio play, which she remembers from being a kid in the late 30s, which causes her to tell the story of what her family did the night of the mass panic following the broadcast. This is characterization, backstory, and a film history lesson all at once.

MGS3 doesn't do much with this aside from use it to make Para-Medic, a supposedly minor character, surprisingly endearing and fleshed out. Though these film references arguably serve a thematic function, they don't serve a literal function in the overall story. In Deadly Premonition however they do, and quite cleverly.

York's endless monologues about movies are rather similar to Para-Medic's conversations with Big Boss, only the decade under examination is the 80s not the 50s and the conversation is now one-sided, since York is speaking to "Zach", a mysterious unseen person who cannot answer back. Deadly Premonition's brilliant central conceit of course is that you, the player, are Zach, and that the person York is speaking to the whole game is really just his other personality, the one who handles things like shooting and driving while he handles the talking.

This much is clear after the first few hours... or is it? Although any reasonably astute player will pick up on the psychosis-as-interface metaphor early, it is impossible to predict the curve they throw into this concept at the very end. York, not Zach, is the made-up personality. Zach is the real him, the person he was before a traumatic childhood experience causes him to invent a second personality, whom he increasingly imagined as an unflappable, wise-cracking know-it-all. York is the Tyler Durden of the story, the impossibly capable and confident person Zach wished he could be / needed to be / became to survive his trauma.

York's unflappable nature is rather hilarious. Nothing, not even someone mutating into a Dragonball freak before his eyes, seems to phase him. ("Hm. No Olympics for you, George.") Throughout the game this just seems like the behavior of a typical (though untypically witty and well-acted) smart-ass hero. In the end, however, we realize York's comical unflappableness is very much a function of his status as a defense mechanism for Zach's shattered psyche, a psyche that also happens to house an encyclopedia of 80s pop-cinema. In a lot of ways he is very much like a character from those movies, handling increasingly absurd situations with the cool aplomb of Remo Williams or Christopher Reeve's Superman, but still maintaining the knowing smirk of a child who knows it's all just pretend, that it's "only a movie".

The Sublime Joy of Flight

2011-04-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

Playing Pilotwings Resort this past week has reminded me why I love flying games so much... at least when they get out of my way and let me fly. I never liked flight sims, an unwieldy genre that's more about dials and switches than the joy of aviation. The flying games I love are the ones that strip away all that techno-fetishistic noise and just let you feel how amazing it is to actually fly.

My first real encounter with this sort of game was the original Pilotwings on the SNES, and the new Pilotwings for the 3DS is a similarly pleasant love letter to aviation aimed at a mainstream audience. Both games have extremely simplified flight controls, minimal UI, and breezy music that creates a deliberate mood. In the 3DS version you can't even control the throttle. The game controls it for you, and you can only temporarily boost or break.

Pilotwings Resort is quite nice, but it also leaves me craving for a deeper, more textured exploration of humankind's romantic obsession with flight. To date the only game that has really satisfied this craving was Sky Odyssey, a little known PS2 launch title that everyone seems to have forgotten, but which, to me, represents one of the best, most complete expressions of Man versus Nature in a video game.

Sky Odyssey is one of the most exciting games I've ever played - a superb action game. It also has a oddly spiritual dimension, a thick sense of human smallness at the edge of an expansive Unknown. It is not, in this sense, unlike two of my other favorite games: Demon's Souls and Shadow of the Colossus, both games that achieve a phenomenal sense of scale and use it to evoke the sublime. It's no coincidence that Colossus and Odyssey share the same composer, Ko Otani, whose music in both games creates the same mixture of awe, desperation, nostalgia, and terror.

The first time I got this feeling is when I saw The Right Stuff as a kid. There is a scene in that movie when a (heavily mythologized) Chuck Yeager, played by playwrite Sam Shepherd, steals a conventional aircraft and tries to fly it into outer space. In spite of its hokiness (mostly thanks to Bill Conti, who also scored Rocky) this scene does manage to express something unspoken about humanity's (not just America's, as the movie seems to suggest) inherent, sub-rational desire to break free of Earthy limits.

The shit you do in Sky Odyssey all feels similarly reckless, extravagant, and irrationally irresistible. Each level is about trying to survive horribly exciting things, like having to perform a daring mid-air refueling from a speeding train as it's going through a tunnel. Or flying your plane through an underground cave as it's collapsing. Or attempting to slingshot your plane over a mountain twice the height of Everast by dropping your fuel at the summit and then coasting on air down the other side. Or catching air currents to shoot your plane through the heart of the lightning storm. Or, to top it all off, flying right into the eye of a fucking hurricane.

The developers of Sky Odyssey do everything in their power to try and convince you that nothing could be more exciting than flying. They throw every conceivable exciting thing that could possible happen to a plane at you, and the earnestness of their romantic vision is so desperate it's almost heartbreaking. They even concoct an elaborate framing narrative to justify their whimsy, something about the last unexplored island on Earth in the twilight of aviation's golden age, when (at least in the minds of Sky Odyssey's makers) there were still some legitimate mysteries left on this planet... and aviators - those amazing men in their flying machines - were the lone explorers of the last frontier.

This brand of nostalgia feels a lot like Hayao Miyazaki, in that it is a Japanese evocation of a romantic 1930/40s centered around flight technology of the era. Porco Rosso is probably the most direct expression of this in Miyzaki's canon, showing a particular love of the pre-war era, an exotic fascination with the West, and a transcendental sense - present in all his work, but most directly expressed in this film - of what it means to fly. I am thinking of the moment when, after being separated from his friends in battle, the protagonist encounters them again above the clouds only to realize they didn't survive after all, but are in fact spirits ascending - still in their planes - to join the rest of the dead in heaven.

Aviation as a concept holds the promise of transcendence, of somehow being able to reach heaven through creative use of technology. Those who know me know I like Kubrick, so take this as you will, but I can't help but think "Sky Odyssey" might be a riff on "Space Odyssey". 2001 is a movie about God made by an atheist. The desire for spiritual transcendence, to commune with forces we don't understand, seems to be a hard-wired human need. Secular attempts to grapple with this, I suppose because of my own atheism, feel a lot more interesting than religious ones... perhaps because religious mythologies are "known", whereas scientific rejection of them lands spiritualism squarely back in the realm of the unknown.

What does flying mean to us? In Pilotwings Resort (and in most conventional flight sims, I'd wager) it's a fun way to relax, but in Sky Odyssey it can be a serious encounter with our own existence. There are times, somewhere in the clouds, when the you seem to leave Earth entirely and enter another world, a world of unfamiliar colors and lights. What is that place?

Of Rockstars and Revolutions

2011-03-28T08:00:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I wrote blog post comparing the graphic novel Persepolis to the video game Just Cause, lamenting that while a revolution would be a great setting for an open world-style AAA game we would likely never see it, because AAA developers seem to have neither the interest for nor the balls to treat the subject as anything other than a GTA-style violence-fest. Persepolis, a touching and complicated personal account of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, is closer to what I wanted to see in a game that dealt with such potent concepts. Just Cause, while fun, was - like GTA - a joke when it came to addressing the topics it raised.

Four years later it seems like someone is trying to make my dream come true... at least in theory. To my amazement this person is former Rockstar writer/designer Navid Khonsari, an Iranian-American who is apparently putting his full weight behind a commercial video game based on the 1979 revolution, called simply 1979: The Game.

I'd never heard of him before, but Khonsari was apparently one of the driving creative forces behind the PS2-era GTA games - GTAIII, Vice City, and San Andreas. So not only was he at Rockstar, he was specifically involved in the initial birth, evolution, and maturation of GTA as a mass-cultural phenomenon, setting the tone for all Rockstar's subsequent creative output as well as their public image as the badboys of the industry.

Given my sour stance on Rockstar (I find their use of irony more evasive than genuine, rendering their supposed "social commentary" insincere in most cases.) I admit that I didn't want to believe Khonsari might be making my dream game: a sophisticated political statement, occupying a space outside America's dominant narratives, with a AAA budget behind it, and made by an articulate visionary who is also a good game designer. Yet I have to admit... this interview comes close to creating such an impression.

It's interesting what he says about fiction versus non-fiction. This, I guess, explains how the same mind that (partially) produced GTA: Vice City can also produce 1979: The Game. I don't agree with what he says. The mercurial relationship between fact and fiction is not so simple. Myth shapes reality and reality shapes myth. I don't believe that labeling something 'fiction' is a free ticket out of treating social, political, or whatever content with subtlety or complexity.

Khonsari seems to be arguing that GTA's pseudo-ironic vapidity was justified by the fact that it was "in the crime genre", which is how he distances 1979: The Game from it in terms of social outlook. Yet if we look at the crime genre outside games we see a massive swath of approaches and styles, from shallow and cartoony to mature and serious. GTA didn't have to be Scarface. It could have been The Wire, and the fact that Khonsari glosses over this fact seems calculated.

That said, his over-simplified construction that non-fiction demands social responsibility seems to serve him well as a mass-cultural stance. It's certainly an easy way to justify both GTA and 1979: The Game at once. A more complicated stance would certainly be harder to explain to his rather skeptical interviewer, which makes me wonder whether Khonsari himself believes it or whether it's something he just tells journalists. Either way, if it helps him get such a game made and distributed I can't fault him too much for it... though it could be a problem if such rhetoric became commonplace.

There are virtually no gameplay details, so who knows if this game will ever even see the light of day. It is significant though, I feel, that a former Rockstar designer is taking a vocal stance on such a game, chatting it up to the international press and making an impassioned argument about the value and place in the AAA market for such games. It really makes me reconsider my take on Rockstar, considering that perhaps not everyone there is satisfied by the company's approach to controversy. If so we'll hopefully see more Khonsaris in the future.

Interview with Dan Schmidt

2011-03-21T11:50:00.000-07:00

Part 2 of a continuing audio podcast series, where I interview members of the now-defunct but highly influential Looking Glass Studios (1990-2000), which wrote the book on 3D first-person narrative game design in such games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief.

In this episode I talk with Dan Schmidt, who was with the company from its very early days (back when it was called Blue Sky Productions). A programmer by vocation, but filling a variety of roles from project management to design to music composition, Dan helped set the tone for the company's subsequent creative output in early projects like Ultima Underworld and Ultima Underworld II.

The podcast covers these projects, as well as Dan's work on Terra Nova, the ambitious squad-based robot sim, and his work in the early stages of Thief before moving on to work at Harmonix Music Systems in its pre-Guitar Hero days.

If you want to know what NHL '92 has to do with both Ultima Underworld and Rock Band (and who doesn't?) give it a listen.

Download the podcast here.

See a transcript here.

Shinobido - The Lost Ninja Simulator

2011-03-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

I am embarrassed to say I was unaware of Shinobido's existence until a few months ago, when the design lead of Fallout: New Vegas recommended it to me over drinks at Austin GDC. I was mildly shocked to learn it was by Acquire, the makers of the original Tenchu, and that it continued that game's more open-world approach to stealth that the later Tenchu sequels abandoned.

I had no idea Acquire had lost the Tenchu license, and that after they lost it they created Shinobido as its spiritual successor, combining its open level design with the choice-driven narrative structure they pioneered in Way of the Samurai, their other main series. Given my love of Tenchu, Way of the Samurai, and open-world experiments in general I was flabbergasted this game somehow got by me... until I discovered it had been localized for PAL regions only. Apparently it was too experimental for us yanks.

After searching for several weeks (and being shipped a Norwegian copy by mistake) I managed to procure the U.K. version of Shinobido. To me this was the "real" Tenchu 3, the game that continued to build on the design agenda of Tenchu and Tenchu 2. The latter had actually expanded on the open-world aspects of the original, added a level editor, but was marred by the fact that the PS1 hardware couldn't quite handle the size of its world.

Shinobido looks a bit like Tenchu 3 at first glance, only unlike From Software's PS2 sequel it isn't just a streamlined version of Tenchu 1 with prettier graphics. It's a crazy, ambitious experiment that feels more like a "ninja simulator" than a game. It's over-arching structure reminds me a lot of Deus Ex (though it obviously comes from Way of the Samurai) with three opposing warlords all seeking your service in their quest for political power.

Each "phase" of the game involves a series of opposing job offers, only one of which you can take. What really makes this interesting is how elegantly the high level politics connect with the low level gameplay. You can accept missions against lords who like you, and they will be none the wiser if you are clever enough not to get caught. This is, in fact, how a faction system should work: as a matter of NPC perception, not global switches.

Failing a mission does not mean death in Shinobido. I means humiliation, the loss of reputation with a lord. In fact, you can only "die" during certain boss fights, something which the game warns you about beforehand and gives you the option to opt out if you aren't confident you will survive. Although you can cheat this system with save/loading, it is extremely tedious to do so, making Shinobido a game about weighing the political consequences of every moment.

You have to be very good at being silent in order to navigate the politics effectively, and the way the game brutally punishes any form of grandstanding reinforces this. Taking on multiple opponents, martial arts movie-style, is quite impossible. A group of startled guards will simply rush you, screaming into the night for anyone in earshot to help. Soon the whole damn neighborhood is awake, your lord will be furious, and you feel like the worst ninja ever.

Though Shinibido nominally follows a Tenchu-like mission structure it's really an on-going simulation of faction politics, with the missions serving as on-the-ground reflections of the current political climate. High level goals have low level consequences, like when, having delivered a box of weapons to a lord in one mission, you find all his soldiers equipped with them in the next... making him harder to betray, should you feel so inclined.

To me this is a much cleaner, more interesting variation on the faction politics of Deus Ex 2, in which faction decisions didn't seem to effect the core gameplay as directly or as obviously. I love the idea that a faction is a living organism with persistent features that change based on your story decisions, and Shinobido deserves credit for showcasing this idea well, even if it doesn't explore the idea fully.

Other points of interest: Shinobido one of the only stealth games I've played where guards will actually pick up and carry dead comrades away, something which seems like it should be addressed a lot more but somehow never is. The game also does a brilliant job of incorporating its level editor (one of the clear hold-overs from Tenchu 2) into the fiction, presenting it as the "garden" outside your house that you "decorate" it between missions, adding straw dummies for training but also traps to ward off invaders, who appear periodically in the form of a fortress defense mini-game.

Physics are a big part of Shinobido's gameplay, which is unusual for a Japanese game, and is the source of some of its flaws. In a game with consequences this steep, the unpredictability of collision at times can be very frustrating, though it does contribute to the general sense that being a properly elegant ninja takes real dedication (the animation for when you trip over a dead body, for example, seems designed to humiliate).

I haven't finished Shinibido, but I like a lot of its design conceits. The way it connects its faction system to its moment-to-moment experience makes a lot of sense, at least conceptually. I think it would be more interesting of the simulation aspects were more persistent, less branchy... meaning it would be nice if characters and events would exist in the world whether or not you accepted a mission about them. I would have liked to have been able to simply decide for myself to assassinate Sadame, attack a shipment of weapons, etc., and watched the political fallout from the shadows.

Interview with Austin Grossman

2011-02-25T11:51:00.000-08:00

For a while now I've been conducting interviews with ex-members of Looking Glass Studios. Looking Glass (1990-2000) was, of course, the developer of such influential (though not always recognized) games as Ultima Underworld, System Shock, and Thief. They basically wrote the book on 3D first-person narrative game design throughout the 90s, and I've been tracking them down in an effort to get them to share their memories -- the challenges, the regrets, the triumphs -- of how this process unfolded.

Podcast 1 features Austin Grossman, writer and designer on Ultima Underworld II and System Shock, as well as Andrew Grant, who worked with Austin on his (infamous) post-Looking Glass Dreamworks project Trespasser, and Sara Verrilli, Lead QA on System Shock. The discussion focuses mostly on where the "environmental narrative" conventions System Shock famously pioneered (which later influenced everything from Half-Life to Deus Ex to Bioshock) came from, and how they evolved and manifested even in Austin's post-Looking Glass work.

If you want to know why Bioshock would never have existed if you hadn't been able to throw fish at people in Ultima Underworld by all means do not miss this podcast.

Download the podcast here.

See a transcript here.

2010 Retrospective - Part 4: Pigs, Premonitions, Paganism

2011-02-13T14:13:00.000-08:00

Aside from Deadly Premonition, Shalom was probably the most original, bizarre, and funny game I played last year. The third game in the Knightmare series, it was never released outside Japan, and it's easy to see why. It's a truly weird creation. Not quite an RPG, not quite an adventure game, and nothing like its predecessors (the first was a shooter, the second a platformer) Shalom is one of the weirdest games from that wild era when game sequels often threw out everything and started from scratch: a rollicking, self-reflexive genre mash-up with a bonkers sense of humor.

Shalom begins in the "real world" where your girlfriend buys you Shalom. (Yes, really.) After some Japanese dating sim-style interactions where you can try to avoid kissing her, you are sucked through your MSX screen and into the game, where you find yourself saddled with a talking pig. While it looks like a top-down RPG there is virtually no combat. You just explore and talk to people, often with hilarious results. The goofy English translation, based on a Portuguese fan-translation, feels like a plus here, enhancing the manic state everyone seems to be in. (NPC: I don't see anything weird here. YOU: The only weird thing here is your face!)

I didn't finish Shalom, but it's not for lack of trying. The game is so obscure I couldn't find a walkthrough anywhere, which made the experience truly "retro". Before game magazines or the Internet you really were at the mercy of whatever esoteric bullshit designers threw at you. Shalom reminded me what it was like to be stuck in a game and not care — to walk around for hours, not knowing what to do, but be so thrilled by a game's weirdness you love it all the same.

I managed to avoid writing about Deadly Premonition all year, mostly because it was my favorite game of the year and I couldn't begin to imagine what I'd say about it without tripping all over myself. The game is utterly fucking brilliant, so much so that its genuinely bad aspects (interface design, technical visuals, combat) barely register after the first hour. What's left are some great characters, great dialogue, great music, wonderful simulation-based world design, and the single most ingenious conceit for dealing with player/avatar dissonance I've ever seen. Deadly Premonition may be an obvious rip-off of Twin Peaks, but not since Snatcher has a Japanese developer justified their shameless plagiarism with such clever application to the digital medium. It marks Hidetaka "SWERY" Suehiro as a genuine auteur, and perhaps one of the five or six people in the game industry who knows a goddamn thing about movies... or at least what Roger Corman was doing in the early 80s. Right Zach?

Lords of Shadow is a game I reluctantly picked up after a friend of mine made a convincing case that it was really about the pagan roots of Catholic mysticism. He isn't entirely wrong, but the game doesn't seem able to make these ideas as interesting as they should be, opting for a cloying Hollywood style that's not only cheesy (Patrick Stewert nearly sinks the whole game with his patronizing delivery) but disappointing coming from a European developer.

I didn't finish Lords of Shadow, but I got about 80% through it. I warmed up to the game somewhat when I realized it does have actual glimmers of Castlevania in it, primarily in terms of how it handles backtracking and false linearity within levels, a la Rondo of Blood. The rest is rote God of War imitation... which isn't badly done but rather misguided given I never felt God of War was very similar to Castlevania at all. (Castlevania was never a brawler.) Ironically Other M, in which combat is the spice and exploration the meat, was a much better contemporary approximation of Castlevania to me.

Epic Mickey was a game I played because of its association with Warren Spector, a childhood hero of mine and collaborator on some of my favorite games (Ultima VII, System Shock, etc.) Epic Mickey was seen by many as the long awaited follow-up to his critically acclaimed Deus Ex over a decade ago. In an upcoming post I will discuss how Epic Mickey relates to this legacy, specifically in how it deals with so-called "player-driven" narrative, so here I'll just give my other major impression about the game: that it is one of the most reverent bits of Disney fan adoration I've ever seen. While not surprising (the developer is owned by Disney) it does render the game's supposed darkness — its willingness to take risks with the iconic IP — rather insincere. And I'm not speaking of the fact that the original concept art, which was far more apocalyptic and disturbing, was toned way down in the final game. I am speaking of the Stalin-like reverence with which Epic Mickey treats Walt Disney himself: as the paternal god of our collective imagination who is ever-wise, ever-loving, and beyond all reproach. "Dark" my ass.

Spy Fiction was the last game I played in 2010. I picked it up when I heard it was by the same developer as Deadly Premonition, hoping to find some of the same originality and cleverness buried under its Metal Gear-lite exterior. Once you get past the misleading combat-intensive tutorial level, the game quickly begins to live up to its title. Its disguise mechanic, which allows you to "steal" the identities of literally any NPC by secretly taking snapshots of them, is one of the best I've seen, better in some ways than Hitman's in how it encourages and rewards experimentation. The core game, which involves finding the right disguise to eavesdrop on the right conversation, is actually built around this mechanic, making Spy Fiction one of the few espionage games that involves actual spying as its primary activity. This alone makes it worth playing, even if it lacks the clever dialogue and quirky humanity of its successor.

2010 Retrospective - Part 3: Taxidermy, Porn, Politics

2011-02-05T15:07:00.000-08:00

Another of 2010's critical darlings, Amnesia is a game I felt I had to play given my interest in horror. It's certainly good, but the sheer amount of praise it's gotten alarms me. It has been called the first great survival horror game in years, one of the scariest games ever made, etc. It isn't any of these things. What it is is a polished, well-made, extremely reverent fan work... so reverent it borders on fetishism. The makers of Amnesia clearly love survival horror. A bit too much.

Amnesia cannot be a "great" horror game to me because it does not possess an imagination of its own, like Silent Hill or Resident Evil once did. Outside of its clever interface design (and an admittedly phenomenal encounter with an invisible monster) it brings little new to the genre... unless mid-90s point-and-click horror games are so old they qualify as new again. I understand that people lament the death of survival horror, of the days before action gameplay creep reduced the genre to a thematic subset of third-person shooters. But I've played plenty of games recently that evoke those lost tensions and manage to be original. Demon's Souls, Deadly Premonition, and Hell Night were all superior "survival horror" experiences to me. Compared to such fresh experiments, Amnesia's strictly lock-and-key puzzle design and effective-yet-monotonous atmosphere feel like calculated exercises in fanboy taxidermy. It enshrines, rather than reinvents, the genre.

Postscript - added 10/06/11 - I just attended a conference where I meet and got to know Thomas Grip, the designer of Amnesia. One thing he mentioned was that many puzzles do, in fact, have multiple solutions, which they added as the result of playtesting. He said he wished they had constrained the player even less, and that in the future they are looking for even more ways to make solutions and progression more emergent. He is one of the more intelligent and savvy indies I've spoken to, so I thought I should mention that here. Though Amnesia wasn't the revelatory horror experience for me it was for other people, I'm happy people like Grip are around, and the fact that he considers Amnesia an evolution towards something better is encouraging.

Other M is a game I liked quite a lot, in spite of its gag-inducing gender politics. It's a bit unfair how the game design itself drew criticism from a lot of people, who seemed loath to consider its gameplay and story separately, heaping them both into the same sour judgement. In a world of God of War clones, Other M's novel 3D gameplay was refreshing to me, re-capturing the excitement of mid-90s 3D experimentation. The story though was rightfully considered shit by almost everybody. I am not the sort who demands Japanese games conform to an American liberal standard of what women should be (Celes is still one of my favorite game characters), but Other M had me choking with disgust.

Samus relationship with Adam, her former commanding officer, had been explored in Metroid Fusion, and Other M hits virtually all the same story beats, even though it is supposedly a prequel. Really it's just a thinly veiled remake of Fusion (right down to the reappearance of certain bosses) only with the melodrama cranked up so high it could shatter glass. Metroid was never exactly a feminist manifesto, but it also never portrayed Samus's gender as a point of weakness. Other M does, saddling her with a band of macho marines that call her "princess" and — I swear to fucking god — have to save her when her suit (her only source of power, apparently) luridly evaporates off her naked body any time she suffers a crisis of confidence. It's like a porn-parody of Iron Man.

Raging fans tended to blame Team Ninja, given their penchant for bimbo characters. As far as I know though, they were mostly tapped for visual design of Other M, which may explain why all the women in the story (not just Samus) look like 9-year-olds who've just found their mother's make-up case. The writer of the actual plot was still long-time series helmer Yoshio Sakamoto, and I'm sure this was his honest attempt to "humanize" a character he felt responsible for.

It's a shame because, after the macho (read: American) militarism of Metroid Prime 3, I was keen to see the series given back to a Japanese developer, who have always treated the militaristic aspects of the mythology with more ambivalence (the military turn out to be the villains in Fusion). The medieval sexism of Other M however had me missing Prime 3, a game where the military seems to A) employ women and B) allow them to wear normal clothes. Between the two games, Metroid has the worst aspects of both cultures covered. Maybe the next game should be Swedish.

Silent Debuggers is a game I had never heard of until last year. It was on a list of overlooked Turbografix-16 games, and the description intrigued me. It is, in fact, one of the better variations on the film Alien I've ever seen in a video game, nailing a lot of elements that later variations failed to get right.

Especially good is the game's modeling of the motion-tracker from the film, which emits an audio pulse when a creature is close. Because of the game's primitive "fake 3D" approach, which is just a bunch of static 2D images of 3D corridors that it flips through as you move, it creates the impression that each move is a "step". Hearing the motion-tracker go berserk when you take a single step into a room and hearing it instantly go silent when you step back out achieves a clarity of cause-and-effect that even the Alien vs. Predator games didn't really have.

I also really liked how the game, which came out in 1991, prefigures the brutal resource management of survival horror, forcing you to constantly ration ammo and health, both of which can only be replenished from finite supplies located in the core "safe" section of the ship. (Use them up and you're fucked.) This, combined with the fact that the whole game is on a single timer, and you must find a way to escape before the ship explodes, creates a surprisingly tense experience, in some ways akin to the white-knuckled thrill of System Shock 1's final sections.

I didn't finish Silent Debuggers, because it got rather hard and repetitive after a while, but that didn't diminish my impression of just how effectively it captured a particular kind of suspense, a kind many games try for but few achieve.

I played Bethesda's Fallout 3 like everyone else, and enjoyed it like everyone else, but it still felt like a watered-down version of Fallout to me—the bloated Hollywood remake to Black Isle's lean, sassy original. This could be seen primarily in terms of the writing, which was cartoony and obvious compared to the sharp satire of Fallout 1 and 2, and in terms of the game's general moral view, which was much more binary.

Fallout 3 was definitely a post-KOTOR Fallout, tending to view the wasteland much more in terms of obvious heroes and villains. (Thanks Three-Dog, for letting me know which ghouls are "okay" to kill.) New Vegas, thankfully, is a return to the more murky moral universe of the original games, and not coincidentally given that Obsidian is partially made up of refugees from Black Isle. To my mind this makes New Vegas a more "legitimate" Fallout sequel, with a stronger continuity of tone and attitude.

I didn't even come close to finishing New Vegas, but I didn't have to to feel refreshed by its less jokey, more complex take on post-apocalyptic politics. Its faction system, while more "top down" than I'd prefer (I don't like how factions magically know you killed their members, even if no witnesses survive), presented an intriguing tangle of opposing world views, all of which seem to have their own logic and potential for corruption. One person's hero was always another person's villain, and the way New Vegas repeatedly asks you to make political decisions based on incomplete or distorted information is commendable. Like Alpha Protocol, it insists on seeing the world in more complex terms than the majority of triple A games do... and that's easily worth the price of a few bugs.

I have a longer post about Shinobido waiting in the wings, so I will not go into great detail about the game here, aside from saying it was a game I'm very glad I played. Released outside Japan only in PAL regions, it was an obscure and original alternative to the Tenchu series, made by Aquire after they lost the Tenchu license to From Software. For anyone who's a fan of stealth, non-linear narrative, or faction-based politics Shinobido is a must-play, if only to see a relatively fresh take on these ideas.

Up Last!

Shalom: Knightmare III

Deadly Premonition

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

Epic Mickey

Spy Fiction

2010 Retrospective - Part 2: Nostalgia, Sin, Editing

2011-01-24T09:17:00.000-08:00

Aside from Red Dead Redemption, Heavy Rain was probably the triple A game last year that left me the most thoroughly unimpressed... at least in terms of artistic ambition. Yes, it's much better than self-proclaimed game auteur David Cage's previous effort, Fahrenheit, but that's hardly saying anything, considering what a train wreck of interface design and pretentious bullshit it was.

Heavy Rain is an incredibly misguided game, with an utterly bone-headed philosophy of how to create narrative engagement, but with production quality so slick and expensive (though, I would argue, still not very "good") it managed to hoodwink a lot of people into thinking it was somehow what interactive narrative should be. Predictably, the best moments of the game are the ones that are the least cinematic, like when you find yourself with a whole evening to kill, and you have to responsibly manage dinner, your son's homework, your work, and relaxation, all while time ticks away.

Heavy Rain isn't a bad game; just a stupid one. Its interface design is interesting, doing a decent job of marrying symbolically gestural controller actions to on-screen character actions. This is the game's only real contribution (and the big improvement over Fahrenheit), since everything else it does has been done before, mostly in the mid-90s "interactive movie" craze that almost killed videogame storytelling. It's as if Cage got bonked on the head in 1995 and woke up in the era of the PS3. His approach to narrative design is basically "cinematics" that you can control the speed of because they are rendered in real time, and require pressure-sensitive controller actions to make the "film" run through the projector. I mean, it's novel... but it's closer to being an editor than an actor.

I would feel a lot kinder toward Heavy Rain if all its stumbles, indulgences, and genuinely clever moments weren't hamstrung by Cage's dull imagination, whose idea of "good writing" is on par with a mediocre X-Files episode. His notion of "gritty reality" seems to come entirely from American television, the sort where everyone's hair and teeth are perfect and everyone wears designer clothes but we as viewers are instructed to believe they represent "average" people. Only if you buy into this kind of Hollywood ruse daily will you buy into Heavy Rain, the first videogame to really nail the depravity of bourgeois cinema.

I originally passed on Retro Game Challenge but picked it up after I heard it wasn't just a compilation of retro-style games but actually used 80s game culture as a framing device, even to the point where you have to consult "game magazines" to make progress. This seemed rather charming.

I got through most of the game, and found it to be a consistently clever, if slight, experience. I say "slight" because the 80s cultural aspects are indeed more of a framing device than something explored thoroughly. (I could never figure out why you or your friend didn't seem to age between 1982 and 1987.) Also, perhaps more importantly, I felt there was a big missed opportunity in the localization. American, European, and Japanese 80s game culture were all distinctly different, and the way the game coyly wants you to pretend otherwise is disappointing.

The best thing about Retro Game Challenge is how well it demonstrates how creative goal design can give a lot of depth to supposedly "simple" mechanics. The meta-game involves becoming an adept "gamer", not just finishing games, which means you have to play the same games over and over in order to perform esoteric tasks that make creative use of each game's mechanics. This aspect of the game is very well realized, and actually does a good job of re-creating the mindset of what it meant to be a young gamer in the heyday of the NES. Of course, one could easily imagine this sort of game also being a cutting commentary on the self-serving propaganda machine of Nintendo and the Stalinist grip it maintained on the culture... but I don't suppose we'll ever see that on a Nintendo platform.

Sin and Punishment: Star Successor I played because it is a shooter by Treasure, and two of their previous efforts in this vein, Gunstar Heroes and Ikaruga, are among the sublime game experiences of my life. Not that I was expecting this from Star Successor, which was a sequel to one of their more obscure, experimental shooters, an early 3D effort on the N64 that I'd only played briefly.

I didn't finish Star Successor, but my deep respect for Treasure inspired me to play it a fair amount, in spite of the fact that I'm not a big fan of its mechanics. It's basically a rail shooter where you control two avatars: your target reticule and your character, who floats around freely via a jet pack. Games where the main concept is "move a cursor around the screen and shoot things" always feel tedious to me (which is one of the reasons I can appreciate, but never really enjoy, Rez). Star Successor mitigates this tedium somewhat with melee attacks and a charge shot that, if used cleverly, do not require the player to hold down the 'fire' button the whole game. But still... like Geometry Wars, Space Giraffe, and other shooters in which liberal swarms of seemingly chaotic elements flood the screen endlessly, you inevitably feel that you're fighting a losing battle against entropy.

To some people this may not seem much different that the harsh bullet-hell challenges of Ikaruga, but, to me, there is something so logical about what Ikaruga throws at you that falling repeatedly in that world feels like a failure to master order, not a failure to master chaos... which, to a personality like mine, constitutes a very big difference.

I wrote a rather long post about Shattered Memories months ago, so I won't bother to recount my thoughts in detail here. My feelings about the game are primarily positive. It doesn't deliver what it (absurdly) promises: a psychological horror experience tailored to the individual user. But it does deliver a well-realized, agreeably fresh take on survival horror, and one that surprisingly manages to demonstrate a nuanced understanding of the original classic upon which it is based.

One of Shattered Memories' best features is its excellent interface design, which uses the wiimote modesty and intelligently, not overreaching the hardware's capabilities. Also, it's one of the few games I've played that seems to achieve the right level of graphical fidelity in the environment to forgo the use of superimposed text. This really makes one examine the environment, not just look for hotspots and items, which subtlety encourages a measured, more detective-like approach to basic navigation. This was one of the few games in recent memory that I actually played twice in a row, and enjoyed doing so.

I actually enjoyed Obsidian's much maligned "spy RPG". The game did have polish issues, but a lot of the design conceits it received heavy criticism for (like the way your pistol stat dictates the speed of your aiming reticule) were identical to other, well-respected Action/RPG hybrids. One wonders what these reviewers would have said about Deus Ex ten years ago.

I didn't finish Alpha Protocol, mostly because its world and plot got so complicated it was hard for me to re-orient myself when I failed to play it for more than a week. Also, my interest waned after I realized how the game was less of a simulated world and more of a heavily-scripted tree that just happened to have a ridiculous amount of branches. Obsidian isn't unique in defining "choice" this way (it's basically the way Bioware, Bethesda, and virtually every other Western RPG developer has for the last decade) but in the case of Alpha Protocol it began to bother me since, being used to espionage-themed games that take a more simulation-based approach (Metal Gear, Hitman, Deux Ex, etc.), I increasingly found myself unable to do fairly basic things, like backtrack or explore to gather my own intel. The missions are surprisingly linear, with your "choice" exclusively relegated to how you dispatch people based on how you've built your character. I suppose this is true to the ads that said "Your weapon is choice.", but I guess I was expecting it to be more than just a weapon.

Still, Obsidian deserves credit for doing what bigger companies seem consistently unwilling to do: create a murky, morally complex world. Not that Alpha Protocol reaches the level of daring political statement (alas Fallout 2), but it does manage to make you feel like the U.S. isn't particularly better than every other corrupt government... which is always nice.

Next Up!

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Metroid: Other M

The Silent Debuggers

Fallout: New Vegas

Shinobido: Way of the Ninja

2010 Retrospective - Part 1: Sex, War, Religion

2011-01-19T10:23:00.000-08:00

It's 2011 and many have already posted their "Top Ten of 2010" lists. Every year I find it hard to take part in such list-making, mainly because I spend my year playing whatever the hell I feel like, regardless of whether it is old or new. So here's my rather unconventional list for 2010. These are the games I played last year, why I played them, and what I thought of them.

Bayonetta I think was the first triple A game I played last year, and I don't have much to say about it other than I thought it was not terribly deserving of the controversy it generated. A videogame crassly objectifying women isn't news, and I personally didn't find Bayonetta's deliberately outrageous attitude towards its own indulgences as unique as many bloggers and critics seemed to.

As a game I found Bayonetta more interesting than your average brawler, with a rich move-set and more expressive strategic possibility than, say, God of War. I also found its world extremely beautiful, and its vision of Purgatory--in which normal humans are oblivious to the demonic battles going on around them--a rare example of interesting metaphysics woven into incidental level design. The writing however, in spite of being somewhat self-aware, was mostly clumsy, and the gameplay was samey enough after a while that my interest waned.

If anything, Bayonetta made me think a lot about what a much smarter, more daring game could do with similar ideas. I actually love the idea of using sex as a weapon, and positioning that against Christianity as an opposing force seeking to snuff it out has extremely rich--and exquisitely controversial--potential. Of course, being a Japanese game, Bayonetta is either unaware of or uninterested in making any statements about the connection between Western religion and sexual repression, but I can't look at the game without imagining how one might transform it so. I'd love to play a game where you were a witch beating the shit out of male Puritans, who were so stunned by your naked body they literally would stand agape as you pummeled their self-righteous faces into mush. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that I was reading His Dark Materials while playing Bayonetta, and wondering why a game about a war between Heaven and Hell couldn't have... well... more balls, so to speak.

2009 was the year of Demon' Souls, one of the best games of the decade, so naturally I decided to explore its roots. This eventually lead me to King's Field, though not the one you might remember. The "King's Field" we got in the West was actually King's Field II. King's Field I never came out here, but was fan-translated some time ago.

Though I never finished it, I played King's Field a good while, enough to see that it was even more like Ultima Underworld than its sequels. Demon's Souls reminded more of Underworld than any game had since Looking Glass Studios went out of business, and it was surprising to me how much this spiritual predecessor felt like a "Japanese Underworld", right down to the color palette, making it an interesting alternative to the actual Japanese port of Ultima Underworld, a game that was strangely (if fascinatingly) crippled by its cultural transition.

King's Field held my interest for a few reasons. It's a rare example of early 3D gaming (circa 1994, two full years before the Playstation hit non-Japanese regions) and, even more rarely, a Japanese first-person game, something that is uncommon even now. I'm not sure if there even is an earlier example of a first-person 3D game by a Japanese developer, which gives the game historical value. It also, like many pre-millennium games, isn't interested in holding the player's hand. It just drops you into a (mostly) non-linear world and lets your exploration alone be the shaping force behind the experience. If not for the fantasy setting, it would be a survival horror game in the most classic sense (much like Demon's Souls) which made it absorbing despite its crude simplicity.

Another game I played mainly because of its tenuous connection with Demon's Souls. (It was also by From Software, but in collaboration with an outside developer.) It was nice, but I remember losing interest when I realized Zelda was its only real reference point. The art style, somewhat misleadingly, presents the game as a love letter to a broader range of 8-bit games, including Dragon Quest, and I think it would haven been more interesting if the gameplay had been a similarly eclectic mish-mash of styles. As is Dot Heroes is essentially Zelda 1 re-skinned, with a lot of jokey dialog about 8-bit game conventions, but with no challenging of those conventions within the actual game design.

If you want to know what I think of Rockstar's current best-seller and critical darling you can read my previous posts on the subject. Suffice to say I was not as taken with Redemption (or John Marston) as most people were, though I do admit that, for a blockbuster game, I enjoyed it a fair amount. This will no doubt be remembered as the game of 2010, but for me it was the game that proved that the audience Rockstar insists on pandering to will forever prevent them from generating work of moral or political sophistication.

Over-reliance on RPG conventions aside, Peace Walker was a refreshing return to form for Hideo Kojima. MGS4 was a bit of a travesty, an unfocused mess that's conceptual sloppiness and dearth of imagination was obscured by its stellar production value. Peace Walker however is a clear, confidant, clever game that knows exactly what it's going for and achieves it with elegance... primarily in terms of gameplay but also, with a few caveats, in terms of story as well.

The first half, in which Kojima and his co-writers weave together myth and politics in Cold War-era South America, is pretty great, but then again I suppose I'm partial to a game where the Nicaraguan Sandinistas are portrayed as good guys. (Suck it, Reagan!) The second half, which suffers (though not greatly so) from the same navel-gazing Metal Gear mythology fan-wanking that destroyed MGS4, isn't as sharp or interesting, but still manages to crash-land into a semi-intriguing meditation on the symbiotic relationship between peace and war.

Gameplay-wise Peace Walker is note worthy for how it brilliantly condenses 20 years of game design into a single, streamlined gameplay system, hacking off time-honored conventions left and right (no crawling?) but somehow retaining the essence of the franchise. It's the game that people who think Kojima isn't a game designer (or, at least, doesn't employ any) should play... though they obviously won't.

Up Next!

Heavy Rain
Retro Game Challenge

Sin & Punishment: Star Successor

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

Alpha Protocol

How RPG Elements Hurt Good Games.

2010-11-18T11:25:00.000-08:00

Peace Walker is the stupidest boss in the history of the Metal Gear series. It takes 30 minutes to beat, has a reoccurring instant fail phase, no weak points, and approximately a gazillion patterns that are impossible to avoid. The only way to kill the thing is to just pelt it with endless missiles while absorbing as much damage as possible before your healing items run out.

I know this is a type of boss design (most commonly found in Japanese RPGs) but it is one I personally hate. It is the polar opposite design philosophy of what Metal Gear used to be, which was more puzzle-oriented, like Zelda. Metal Gear bosses used to be about learning patterns, exploiting weaknesses with specific weapons, crippling the enemy to give yourself an advantage, etc. The bosses in Peace Walker swing completely in the opposite direction, into stat-driven endurance battles. This is where the Monster Hunter influence goes too far, reducing Metal Gear to a straight-forward grind-fest.

I love the Pokemon stuff, the kidnapping and army building, but in some ways it was better in Peace Walker's predecessor, Portable Ops, when these elements were simply a meta-game laid over a core game that was still recognizably derived from classic Metal Gear. While it’s true that Portable Ops marked the first time bosses lost some of their puzzleiness (mostly as the result of letting players design their own arsenal) they never required grinding to win.

Unlike in Peace Walker, weapon and tool development in Portable Ops was holistic, not incremental. In other words, items did not have various "levels" of power or effectiveness. You didn’t have to “upgrade” your rocket launcher to make it do more damage. A rocket launcher was a rocket launcher, and you either had one or you didn’t. Sure, there were the RPG-ish elements of needing scientists to build weapons, and what they created and how fast they created it were based on a rudimentary stat system, but once you had an item in the field stats didn't matter. It was about which weapons/tools you had, not what “level” they were.

I can't stand the way Peace Walker scales difficulty by scaling enemy statistics. This essentially means the only way you progress in the game is by scaling your own statistics. It’s less about how good you are and more about how many fucking rations and supply markers you have, so you reach a point where you outlast the enemy simply because you put endless hours in the game. It's the kind of game design that devalues learning and skill in favor of not having a life.

If there was any doubt about Peace Walker’s "damage sponge" difficulty philosophy it is proven by how the game omits any and all permanent effects that might give players a strategic upper hand. Setting anti-tank mines or blowing up a fuel tank only stops land vehicles “temporarily” even though they should in all rights stop them permanently. It’s clear each boss is designed not to be “too easy” for players who want to pound away on it with their snazzy guns. Since everything has hit points now it’s just a matter of hitting bosses—anywhere—until they go down. This is a far cry from the tank battle in Metal Gear Solid 1, where one grenade would disable its treads and another down the top hatch would finish off the gunner. The main challenge was getting close enough to the tank to do this, and the fight was perfectly interesting, logical, and satisfying.

Given how excellent the simple puzzle-logic of Metal Gear boss fight have been in the past, it feels dumb for Peace Walker to simply abandon all of it in favor of straight-up RPG stat-grinding. The better fights in the game—the PUPA, the ZEKE fight, and if you choose to try and stealth the vehicle bosses—retain some of the old Metal Gear strategic thinking. When it comes to the later bosses, though, it’s so stat-heavy and grind-necessitating the game feels more like Dragon Quest than tactical espionage.

I always loved Metal Gear’s reliance on tools with discrete uses rather than stats with incremental effects. This is what put the series in the same category as Thief and Hitman—all superb games about using sharply-defined tools to make decisions in a richly simulated world. Peace Walker takes a disturbing turn away from this, sort of like when Irrational “improved” System Shock by adding stats… taking a richly simulated world and reducing it to a mere RPG (albeit a good one).

This isn't to say stats always work against strategic decision-making. It depends on how they are implemented. When they seem to exist only to augment things like health or damage they do. But when used in other ways they don't. Metal Gear Ac!d, the short-live Metal Gear spin-off series released on the PSP some years ago, indulged RPG conventions without undercutting this sort of tool-decision-making. It's hard to imagine anything more RPG-ish than Ac!d's turn-based, card-based combat system. Yet I have to confess that—when put side-by-side with Peace Walker—both Ac!d games manage to express the strategic thinking of classic Metal Gear in a way Peace Walker seems to totally lose sight of.

Even though Ac!d featured a "card deck", in which actions could only be "played" based on which cards happened to come up in your "hand", all these actions had discrete functional values, not arbitrary incremental values. Drawing the card of a particular tool or weapon meant you got to use that particular tool or weapon. Pistols, rocket launchers, etc. all had specific strategic values. It wasn't just about how powerful they were. There was no rocket launcher "+1" or "+2" because challenges did not scale primarily in terms of how much HP enemies had (like they do in Peace Walker). Like any true turn-based strategy game, the Ac!d series was all about, well, strategy. It was about how well you could out-think your opponent by seeing several moves ahead of them and using your resources accordingly.

I remember spending hours on some screens of Ac!d, just trying to figure them out like puzzles. I specifically remember a screen full of snipers perched on ridges, and having to figure out how to use my current card deck to sneak past them. It was hard but rewarding once I developed a successful strategy, the way any turn-based strategy game is. In this sense Metal Gear Ac!d recalled Front Mission, Vandal Hearts, or even the original X-Com—all turn-based strategy games where cleverness was more important than how high you had grinded your characters.

Metal Gear Ac!d was a PSP launch game, and at the time I remember Hideo Kojima claiming he was skeptical as to whether the real-time tactical stealth gameplay of Metal Gear would "work" on a portable platform, hence Ac!d's "experimental" turn-based approach. Ac!d was predictably criticized at the time for "not being a real Metal Gear game" even though most people admitted it was quite good turn-based strategy game. Portable Ops, in obvious response to this, was intended as the the first "real" Metal Gear game on the PSP console, and Peace Walker was even more hyped as a full-blown main series installment, even though in some ways Ac!d was more true to the concept of tactical espionage action.

Thinking about Ac!d again makes me wonder if Peace Walker's more frustrating battles would actually be fun if they were turn-based. Even if they were they probably wouldn't be as fun as Ac!d, because they'd still be just endurance tests, which is the least interesting type of strategic problem I can imagine. Two opponents hit each other until one of them dies. Brilliant. If I wanted that I'd play...

...well I wouldn't play Metal Gear, that's for sure.

I Will Not Write About Deadly Premonition.

2010-10-20T21:37:00.000-07:00

MIT Tech TV

I've been putting off posting about Deadly Premonition for weeks, even though it's a game I've been obsessing about. There's a lot I'd like to say, and I may write about it in the future, but for now I'll just post a link to a talk I gave about the game at MIT. A friend of mine, Generoso Fierro, recorded the "lecture" (really just an improptu rant) and posted it online at MIT Tech TV. A lot of it is what I would have said in a blog post anyway, so here it is.

(Incidentally, if you're not into watching a 40 minute talk there's a pretty good text summary of what I said here.)

Sexual Nightmares in Silent Hill.

2010-09-28T09:04:00.000-07:00

This post contains spoilers for Silent Hill 1, 2, and Shattered Memories.

I just finished my second play-through of Silent Hill Shattered Memories, studio Climax's remake of Silent Hill 1. As much as I dislike the developer's pretentious claims about their game “playing you as much as you play it” I have to admit it wasn't too bad. After their mediocre Silent Hill: Origins I had Climax pegged as a bunch of Silent Hill 2 fanboys whose idea of “improving” Silent Hill 1 was to turn it into Silent Hill 2, i.e. to make it about the psychology of a sexually troubled protagonist. Sure enough Shattered Memories does this, but in a more original and thoughtful way than I expected.

The idea of Silent Hill becoming the “personal nightmare” of people who have past traumas connected with it was actually invented in Silent Hill 2, not 1, and since everyone seems to agree that Silent Hill 2 is the masterpiece of the series its “formula” has become highly fetishized, especially by Western gamers. What people forget, though, is that the “it’s your nightmare!” twist of Silent Hill 2 was originally surprising because it was someone else’s nightmare in Silent Hill 1. It was the nightmare of a girl named Alessa, a poltergeist who had been horrifically abused by her mother and whose latent psychic power had exploded in adolescence and transformed Silent Hill into a living manifestation of her pain.

Harry’s search for his daughter Cheryl (whom you eventually discover is a phantom projection of Alessa) in Silent Hill 1 wasn’t about him at all. It was about him baring witness to Alessa’s anguish, and Alessa was in a sense the real main character. Virtually every screen was symbolic of some horrible thing that had happened to her, making her interior psychology the literal subject of the player's exploration. Silent Hill 2 revised this slightly. It suggested the town itself had a quality that caused reality to take the shape of people’s trauma, which was necessary to explain why you were in a nightmare other than Alessa's. This revised explanation defined the Silent Hill mythos from then on—which is fine because it was quite good—but a downside is that a lot of people seem to have forgotten that Silent Hill 1 was just as “personal”... and in some ways more tragic and harrowing.

The guilt James suffers from murdering his wife in Silent Hill 2, for me at least, does not compare to what Alessa went through. She was abused by her religious fanatic mother, burnt to a featureless husk, and then imprisoned in a hospital basement for nearly a decade, tied to a wheelchair, in a straight-jacket, with nothing to do but lose her agonized mind. Alessa’s trauma might have been less everyday than James’, but it hardly seemed unreal to me. On the contrary it seemed to be the sort of unthinkable fate we don't allow ourselves to imagine most of the time, because it would shake the foundations of our belief in civilization... that humans are more than just animals.

Alessa in Silent Hill 1 was for me an Ann Frank-like figure, a case study in what happens when the sickest shit human beings are capable of collides with the everyday trivialities of growing up. The astonishing contrast of Silent Hill 1’s imagery—an elementary school that turns into an Auschwitz-style prison, dolls and children’s toys scattered about rusty syringes and barbed wire, endless bodies in straight-jackets trapped in cages—touched on something unspeakable. They never talk about it in school, but as a kid it’s hard to read Ann Frank’s diary and not imagine what it was like when people like her died in death camps. The world you explore in Silent Hill 1, to me, is very close to what I imagine the wrecked mind of a young Holocaust victim would look like if it were captured in their final, tormented moment.

Shattered Memories, somewhat smartly, doesn't try to address the same set of ideas. It isn't about horrific abuse. It isn't about disfiguring burns, imprisonment, wheelchairs, straight-jackets, or rusty metal. It is, though, still about the interior traumatic mindspace of a teenage girl, and the vehicle used to explore it is still her father. You still play as Harry looking for Cheryl in a snow-swept Silent Hill, and the world still oscillates between reality and a nightmare version of itself. But the nightmare imagery is different (snow and ice, not rusty medical torture) and appears—at least initially—to represent Harry's mind, not Alessa/Cheryl's.

The impression that you are in Harry's nightmare stems largely from first-person "therapist" scenes. Periodically the story stops and a sleazy therapist appears, urging the player to do little "exercises" before continuing. They range from answering questions about sex and family to taking Rorschach tests and drawing pictures. What they are supposed to do is "tailor" the nightmare imagery and narrative to reflect your—meaning the player's—psychology. Since Harry is the player's avatar, all this manifests in-game as if your sexual, social, family issues were Harry's. If you tell the therapist you sleep around, all the women around Harry dress sexier, seem more seductive, and in the nightmare world disfigured naked women chase you. However...

...in the ending you discover you're not in Harry's mind at all. You're in Cheryl's. The game ends when you finally reach the mental health clinic, thinking you'll find Cheryl. You run down the hallway, burst into the room, and you're in the therapy room you've been seeing the whole game. The camera finally cuts—for the first time—to a reverse shot of who the therapist is speaking to. It's Cheryl. Harry, you discover, died in a car crash years ago, and the whole game has been a waking dream Cheryl's been describing to her therapist.

This ending is unexpectedly touching. The therapist explains Cheryl has constructed a heroic fantasy of her father trying to "find" her, because she felt so abandoned after he died. He postulates that she blames her mother for her father's death (since he left because of a divorce) and that as a result has developed an honest-to-god Electra complex—seeking out surrogate "fathers" in all her sexual relationships with other men and seeing all competing women as surrogates for her mother. This is actually foreshadowed throughout the game, with Harry being constantly seduced by a teenage, slutty version of Cheryl's mother Dahlia, and through rumors of a nameless teenage girl (obviously Cheryl) who is ridiculed for pursuing older men.

In the first ending I got (just one of several) Cheryl stares at the phantom father, the idealized male of her subconscious, and says goodbye to him. In that moment he crystallizes into a statue of ice, a rather horrific event you've seen happen throughout the game to other people, much to Harry's astonishment. To see it happen to Harry himself—you—is pretty striking. You're already reeling from the shock that you're not Harry but Cheryl, and the wave of melancholy she feels at saying goodbye to her father feels like an echo of you saying goodbye to your avatar. It's "letting go" of a phantom surrogate, a decoupling of yourself from a fantasy construct you have affection for but know isn't real.

This twist is in a lot of ways a very good one. It feels dramatic, satisfying, surprising, and functions nicely as a metaphor for the player's relationship with the game (Harry is, after all, Cheryl's "avatar" too). Where it perhaps falters is in its implied mechanics of human psychology. The twist that you're not in Harry's mind but Cheryl's is clever, but it also requires you to believe that the psycho-sexual dreamscape of a middle-aged man is interchangeable with that of a young woman. If the game “creates your own personal nightmare” based on how you answer the therapy questions, doesn’t that diminish it as an expression of Cheryl’s personal nightmare? Is Cheryl just an empty vessel for the player? She doesn’t seem to be, since there are lots of hints in the game as to specific things which happened to her and specific traumas she has, so whose mind is it?

The obvious answer is both, but I wonder if the developers at Climax have a subtle enough view of sex and gender to give such duality proper breathing room. If I’m a man who “tailors” my dreamscape to involve a lot of extremely male-driven sexual anxieties, what does it mean that I'm revealed to be a woman in the ending? Is that what women are afraid of? Skimpily dressed cops and naked booby monsters?

I suppose you could argue that Cheryl isn't directly afraid of those things herself, but that she imagines (rightly or wrongly) that those are the sorts of things that might distract her father away from her. There is possibly some credence to this, especially if you view the story as a series of seductions—some literal, some figurative—that Harry/the player narrowly escapes... rather like what Tom Cruise's character goes through in Eyes Wide Shut. I wonder, though, how absurd Kubrick's film would have seemed if in the end you discovered Tom Cruise was just a figment of Nicole Kidman's imagination? Would anyone have believed his fantasies were in reality the product of her subconscious?

The somewhat cavalier view Shattered Memories takes to dream logic is arguably the result of its "adaptive" narrative system, in which dream images and symbols are interchangeable based on the player's choices. I am not convinced this system helps the game. One reason Silent Hill 1 and 2 endure as artworks is because they have consistent, meticulously designed dreamscapes worth studying and interpreting over multiple play-throughs. Shattered Memories may be trying to do too much by wanting to create a similar experience that dynamically changes. The big “innovation” of Shattered Memories seems to be that the nightmare is the player’s nightmare, but it possibly makes a fatal mistake by assuming it can be the player’s nightmare and someone else’s nightmare at the same time. As an experiment in interactive narrative it's interesting, but as a portrait of a fictional character it may have been stronger had it been entirely static.

My second ending wasn't as satisfying as my first. Cheryl seemed more bitter than bittersweet about her father, watching stoically as he turned to ice. Afterwards there was a clip of a sex video Harry apparently made with Michelle and Lisa (two characters encountered earlier in the game) which assumedly Cheryl saw at some point. This explains their presence in her dream as "seduction obstacles", and may also explain the “TV static” motif of the interface at times. There are many other examples of videos too, and Kauffman (the therapist) suggests that Cheryl watches home videos obsessively. In any case, my new answers to the therapy questions apparently turned Harry into a womanizer and an adulterer, which made Cheryl resent him. Oddly Kauffman still talks about her “idolizing” him, inventing a fantasy where he is coming to save her.

In my first ending instead of the sex video I got a video of Harry leaving and Cheryl being sad. Not only do I like the ending a lot more emotionally, it also frankly seems to make a lot more sense. Choosing more sexual and/or cynical answers seems to make the story reflect this in a rather literal fashion. In my first game Cheryl seemed like a nice, if a bit introverted, girl who idolized her father in ways that (unconsciously) lead her into unheathly relationships with men, which made her bitter-sweet “letting go” of her father sort of touching. In my second game Cheryl seemed to be a slut and a criminal whose “positive” fantasy of her father was less easy to explain.

I don’t mind the choices you make changing things, but one thing I had (incorrectly) assumed is that the player’s choices simply change how Cheryl’s psychology is expressed, not what Cheryl’s psychology is. Playing again therefore isn’t even exploring the same mindscape, but a different mindscape… which is sort of interesting… except that this requires the “meanings” of the dream imagery to be so interchangeable they fail to feel as subtle or as purposeful as those in the original Silent Hill games. The gender swap of the ending “twist” is a variation on this problem, and is further complicated by the fact that the player may be male or female, in which case it would be possible for the game to be the nightmare of a woman (the player), role-playing a man (Harry), who is secretly a figment of a woman’s imagination (Cheryl).

The paint-by-numbers dream logic and dime store Freudianism Climax adopts in order to make their adaptive narrative workable does not seem able to embody such complexity, at least not to me, yet it's unclear whether Climax themselves are silly enough to believe they do. The beginning “psychology warning” feels tongue-in-cheek, but on the other hand the story clearly wants to be taken seriously as a psychological thriller. This leads me to believe the writers and designers of this game actually expect the player to take some of their more absurd constructions—like Kauffman—seriously, as if he weren’t obviously an awful therapist and a fucking asshole and a maniac. He leers at you the whole game, makes constant sarcastic comments, and blows his top at the end, smashing his wineglass and screaming in a fit of rage over Cheryl's inability to "get over" her fantasy. This sort of ludicrous Hollywood crap makes you think no one at Climax has ever even talked to someone who's been to therapy, let alone gone themselves.

Overall I found Shattered Memories pretty interesting, in spite of its over-reaching pretension and occasional bad writing. I really liked the first ending I got, which seemed to quite cleverly pay homage to Silent Hill 1 (it’s all about Cheryl) while simultaneously paying homage to Silent Hill 2 (it’s all about the protagonist), while still maintaining some of the pathos associated with the series’ best moments. Maybe one of the reasons the ending affected me is because I still have this lingering sympathy for Alessa as a character, and I like the idea of her overcoming her past in order to live a normal life. Silent Hill 3 sort of dealt with this idea, as a direct sequel to Silent Hill 1 in which Alessa is reincarnated as a girl named Heather and given the opportunity to take revenge on the cult that abused her.

Shattered Memories feels more touching to me though, especially when read against Silent Hill 1. I like the idea that life can still be scary and difficult even if you were never the victim of horrific torture. Cheryl in Shattered Memories doesn't know how lucky she is, to have her skin, all her limbs, to be able to walk, to run, to speak. But that doesn't make her happy... anymore than it makes the rest of us happy who take such things for granted.

One-Paragraph Review - Vagrant Story

2010-09-19T20:53:00.000-07:00

Vagrant Story (PSX, 2000, 40-50 hrs) - A beautiful, if immensely complicated, late-generation PS1 game that artfully draws from survival horror, turn-based RPGs, platformers, and block-puzzle games. Its gorgeous art style is second-to-none on the platform, with impressive cinematic presentation even though cut-scenes are short and sparse. The story, which involves a whole lot of socio-political-religious intrigue, is difficult but absorbing thanks to its sharply-written characters and morally complex world. Equally baffling at first is the weapon crafting system, which, unlike most RPGs, demands total comprehension from the player in order to make progress. Mastery is daunting but also rewarding, giving the player a deep sense of ownership over what they create. Vagrant Story is recommendable ultimately for the dark spell it casts, for how you lose yourself in the intricacies of both its mechanics and its plot, for how it makes magic seem magical and tempers that whimsy with refreshing political cynicism. It is one of the precious few games where light and darkness don't represent good and evil but, in fact, may represent the opposite. Directed and produced by Yasumi Matsuno, whose Final Fantasy Tactics demonstrates a similarly black view of politics. Art direction by Hiroshi Minagawa. Character and environmental design by Akihiko Yoshida. Main programming by Taku Murata. And music by Hitoshi Sakimoto, at the absolute top of his game.

What Metroid Other M Can Teach Us About 3D Game Design.

2010-09-13T11:46:00.000-07:00

Metroid Other M has problems, mostly revolving around its badly-conceived integration of narrative and its dopey gender politics. But one thing I do like is its unorthodox take on 3D game design, which is conceptually very good. The game offers a fresh take on what it means to navigate and interact in 3D space, hearkening back to the days before developers had 3D "figured out", when it was common for every game to experiment with 3D differently.

I like how Other M takes place in 3D space but "pretends" to take place in 2D space. At a glance it looks like a "2.5D" game, the sort where the world is 3D but the player is confined to a 2D plane. Last year's Shadow Complex, which was an unabashed (and quite decent) Metroid clone, was basically a 2.5D game, though it did offer limited ability to shoot into the background. This is where Shadow Complex ran into problems however, since its manual aiming system was fidgity when it came to deciding whether "up" meant "up" in 2D space or "back" in 3D space.

Other M solves this problem by providing a genuine 3D world, with full three-axises of movement, but retaining a 2D-like level design and camera system. Movement into the background or forground is constrained not by some invisible wall but by actual level architecture, which is made up of long narrow corridors and sharp right-angles. The camera always remains at an orthogonal angle to Samus, with obscuring structures becoming transparent as the player runs behind them. The effect is somewhat like being trapped in an ant farm, but a slightly wider ant farm than normal, giving the player some limited room to move laterally.

This is an interesting idea for a 3D navigation system. It seems designed to utilize the simplicity and clarity of 2D controls while boasting actual 3D gameplay. Other M controls with the d-pad, which might seem limiting but makes perfect sense given the strong orthogonal logic of its spaces. You don't miss analog movement simply because the level design doesn't require it, and the problem of aiming at enemies--which can come from any direction--is solved by an extremely good auto-aiming system.

In some ways the ballsiest thing Other M does is take aiming almost entirely away from the player and hand it over to Samus. All the player has to do is tap the button and Samus will automatically blast left, right, up, down, or where ever enemies happen to be. The only thing she won't do is turn to blast enemies directly behind her, so it is up to the player to position Samus so that she has a clear shot. This mostly consists of moving her to one side of an enemy swarm so the autoaim can do its trick.

What I like about this is it turns combat into more of a navigation problem than an marksmanship problem. In a sense the player is the driver and Samus is the gunner, which reinforces Other M's navigation-focused design philosophy. Combat is not a trivial element (even with Samus's smooth moves it still requires some player skill) but primarily Other M is a game about moving through space, not fighting things. This is why, in spite of whatever other problems it has, it still feels like a proper Metroid game, because at its core the ratio of combat-to-exploration is similar to classic 2D Metroid.

I find this approach pretty clever, especially in how it solves the problems so many other 3D Metroid clones run into, most notably Castlevania. That series' big mistake, I feel, was to become more combat focused in the switch to 3D. Those games also kept the orthogonal level design of their 2D counterparts, but they went with traditional 3D cameras and analog movement, presumably because it would be difficult to fight enemies otherwise. What this did, however, was turn Castlevania into almost a straight brawler, in which exploration felt like a tedious afterthought.

What 3D Castlevania seemed to misunderstand about its 2D predecessors (and the Metroid games that inspired them) was that combat was never the center of the experience. It was merely something you did along the way, something which--in games like Symphony of the Night--seemed to exist primarily to make you feel cool as you glided elegantly through space. Alucard remains one of the most absurdly overpowered protagonists in videogames, and the sense that he could do incredible (and beautiful) things easily--i.e. with minimal input from you--was part of the appeal.

Samus in Other M is similar. It is slightly thrilling the way she responds in a complex fashion to minimal input, like when she appears to catch a glimpse of an enemy out of the corner of her eye and twist her body like some combination ninja/ballerina/gunslinger to blast it just before it gets her. I like moving Samus around just to see how she'll "handle" the situation. It's this sense of surprise that makes a player/protagonist relationship interesting, a fruitfully ambiguous fusion of self and other. When Samus does something cool, I feel cool, even if it was primarily her doing it.

Other M's design is refreshing ultimately because it demonstrates a willingness to re-think 3D as a problem. In this way it reminds me a lot of early 3D games like Fade 2 Black, Mega Man Legends, and Metal Gear Solid--all sequels to 2D games that deliberately preserved the orthogonal logic of 2D game design. Other M, however, benefits from a decade of 3D gaming, which allows it to mix-and-match 3D techniques that weren't around during the heyday of 3D experimentation. My favorite is how it switches to an off-set, over-the-shoulder camera (similar to Resident Evil 4) in certain rooms. In these rooms Samus slows to a walk and Other M suddenly controls like a conventional 3D game, but if you walk out of the room the camera and the controls switch back to orthogonal.

Other M uses this primarily to create suspense, or when the player enters a room too small for running. It feels nice and logical, like Samus has "decided" to have a closer look at a space. Unfortunately Other M doesn't really capitalize on these moments to build itself into a rich fictional world. Not that it has to to be a good game, but environmental narrative depth was one of the things Metroid Prime--Other M's single 3D predecessor--did exceedingly well. Other M borrows certain elements from Prime, like its 1st person camera with a "scanning" function, but it doesn't seem interested in using it to impart narrative information to the player, only gameplay information.

The only scannable objects in Other M are game items, whereas in Prime virtually everything in the environment--gameplay-related or not--was scannable, and would yield information that fleshed out the gameworld as a coherent fictional space. Other M has nicely detailed environments that easily could have supported a deeper scan function, but the team chose not to tell the story this way, instead opting for absurdly overblown, unskippable cut-scenes and a fairly linear game progression. When things like the over-the-shoulder camera and first-person scan function are used for narrative effect, it is always in highly controlled (and highly frustrating) ways that quickly degenerate into "find the pixel".

Other M doesn't really follow through on the rich possibilities suggested by its 3D paradigm, but I want to stress that the paradigm is very good, and I feel the game deserves credit for showcasing it. With better narrative design the game's elegant combination of first-person, over-the-shoulder, and orthogonal 3D schemes could have been shaped into a dense and rich experience on par with Metroid Prime, while simultaneously recapturing the fast-paced acrobatics of classic Metroid that the Prime series played down. The fact that it's crippled by bad narrative design, unnecessary linearity, and (towards the end) an over-reliance on combat makes it a less-compelling final product but not a less useful experiment. Its willingness to rethink 3D gives it a freshness many better games lack, and in many ways it generates the sort of experimental excitement 3D games haven't in over a decade.

Amnesia - Adventure Gaming in the Age of First-Person Shooters

2010-09-10T11:26:00.000-07:00

I spent a few hours with Amnesia: The Dark Descent last night, and what strikes me most about the game so far is not its atmosphere (which is excellent) but its controls, specifically in relation to the game's somewhat nebulous genre. It's billed as a "horror game", and that it obviously is, but it's also a 3D first-person game that's not a first person shooter. What it reminds me of most are old first-person point-and-click adventure games like Uninvited, Shadowgate, and Deja vu. What Amnesia really feels like is an update of these types of games, and what's clever about it is how it reverse-engineers adventure game verbs out of what is essentially a post-Half Life 2 physics-based FPS.

Part of what defines adventure games are their "verb + object" interaction scheme. In classic adventure games players chose these verbs from a list, and later games found ways to reduce and consolidate verb sets (though there were both pros and cons to this reduction). Amnesia has only two verbs--grab and throw--but the developers use these verbs to "create" most other traditional adventure game verbs on the fly with game physics and traditional WASD controls.

Since there is no "open" verb the way you open doors is by "grabbing" the knob and moving backwards or forwards, which pulls or pushes the door open. Because it's physics-based, you can do this slowly or quickly, or you can slam the door shut with a right-mouse click. Left mouse is "grab" and right mouse is "throw". If you are grabbing a doorknob, "throwing" means you slam the door. If you are holding an object, it means you throw the object.

The world of Amnesia is designed around puzzles and exploration, not combat. There are monsters and it is possible to die, but the way you progress is by solving puzzles, puzzles that more or less emerge out of game physics. They are traditional adventure game puzzles--like stand on a box in order to be able to reach the lever that opens the secret passage--but since all these things are governed by physics, not hard-coded cause and effect, they contain the subtle possibility of alternate solutions which (in theory) gets you out of the common adventure game trap of "guess what the desginer is thinking".

What impresses me most about all this is how logical, minimalist, and intuitive it all is. I can easily imagine someone who's never played adventure games easily understanding the controls and logic of Amnesia. It almost feels like a deceptive experiment to corrupt modern FPS gamers into liking adventure games, which I am all for. Anyone familiar with Half-Life 2's physics and "grab" mechanics will easily understand how Amnesia works, and they'll have no idea they're really playing Shadowgate.

I am still very early in the game, so I'll be interested to see if my initial impressions stick, or if the game transforms itself into something else along the way. Regardless, Amnesia has already proven it is possible to adapt certain conventions of adventure games to modern first-person 3D gaming, and do so intuitively and fluidly, which is itself a minor achievement.

Why I Didn't Like Scott Pilgrim.

2010-09-06T17:12:00.000-07:00

I am 33 years old. I grew up on the NES, and yes, I remember Clash and Demonhead and Crash and the Boys Street Challenge. Those were my games; that was my generation, and I walked out of Scott Pilgrim unimpressed. I feel it's important to explain why, since the gamer community seems to be going hysterical about the film, even as it's failing at the box office, putting it on the fast-track to cult status before it even hits DVD.

There doesn't seem to be much room to be down with gaming but not down with the film. It's almost as if you have some cultural duty as a gamer to like the film, since it is one of the first films by a director who "gets" gaming culture. The problem for me is that Edgar Wright's SPACED, which he made with his Shaun of the Dead co-writer Simon Pegg and actress Jessica Hynes, and which he made over a decade ago, was a thousand times better than Scott Pilgrim as a look at gamer culture. A kind of dream-like mediation on what it meant to be a 20-something Londoner in the late 90s (during the height of the Playstation 1), it was more real, more clever, more complex, and far more intelligent. By comparison Scott Pilgrim is a pantomime cartoon that confuses caricature with character in ways that seem below Wright's directorial talents.

Sometimes I wonder if Sin City "ruined" comic book movies, since nowadays people seem to have this idea that the proper way to adapt a comic is to simply mimick it on-screen in a grotesque combination of special effects and slavish, puppet-like acting. Although certain actors in Scott Pilgrim handle this better than others (notably Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Jason Schwartzman, who aren't "real" but seem to find the right note for their stylized performances) it largely results in a kind of wacky, sustained phoniness, as if you're watching a sketch comedy stretched out to the tedious length of a feature film. I am not against stylized craziness, but content of this sort needs a strong undercurrent of emotional and psychological reality to ground it, to make all its flights of fancy feel like poetic expressions of something real, and not just empty exercises in pop-cultural chic. One way to achieve this is for the actors to behave naturalistically, to provide a counter-balance to the unreal style. Suspension of disbelief works when we believe actors believe what's happening to them, and by and large the performances in Scott Pilgrim are way too telegraphed, way too controlled, to achieve that.

If you compare Scott Pilgrim to Wright's previous work, you'll see this is a big difference. SPACED, Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz all are about the mundane reality of real people colliding with fantastic genre worlds, and in each case the acting and dialog provides a clear counterpoint to the highly stylized world of the genre. The thing that makes Hot Fuzz not a Michael Bay movie is its deliberately down-to-Earth (though still comedic) acting and dialog, and the reason Shaun of the Dead is, in a lot of ways, superior to the George Romero films that inspired it is because the level of dialog and acting is far above Romero's ever was, making the characters frankly a lot more believable. SPACED, which is more about the imagined worlds of genres (including those of movies, science fiction, and videogames) colliding with the everyday life of Londoners, has a similarly dialectic approach to fantasy vs. reality. The fantasy largely comes from Wright's direction, in his stylistic references to Quentin Tarantino, Sam Raimi, and various Playstation games. The reality comes from Pegg and Hynes, who wrote the dialog and play the two leads. Though Hynes wasn't a writer on Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Pegg was still a co-writer. Scott Pilgrim marks the first time Wright has worked without Pegg as a grounding influence, and one has to wonder if the monotonous fantasy overload of Pilgrim isn't the direct result.

I don't mind if other people like Scott Pilgrim. I'll admit the film is clever in certain ways, and I am not above feeling a small thrill at some of the references. Still, I must stress the thrill is rather small, and I would never confuse this kind of thrill for nuanced writing, acting, or storytelling. Gamers are still, in certain ways, a marginalized culture, largely misunderstood by the mainstream, which is why we often embrace whatever meager representation comes down the Hollywood pipeline. But a movie isn't good just because it validates your culture, and I personally find my aesthetic sense of film is too strong to accept a movie like Scott Pilgrim based purely on such criteria.

You know what would be better than seeing a Clash and Demonhead reference in a movie? Seeing one in a good movie, the sort which I know Wright is capable of, and which I hope he'll do again if given the opportunity. Until then I'll still be recommending SPACED to anyone who wants to know what being a gamer is like.

One-Paragraph Review - Metroid Prime 1

2010-08-31T07:07:00.000-07:00

Metroid Prime 1 (GC, 2002, 15-20 hrs) - A very nice first-person 3D exploration game by Texan developer Retro Studios, based on the original Nintendo franchise helmed by Yoshio Sakamoto. In terms of writing and backstory, Prime 1 is probably one of the more interesting examples of Western rationalism coming into contact with Japanese techno-mysticism. The techno-mystical mythology of Metroid, centered around the shaman-like "Chozo" race and its seemingly "magical" technology, is neither disregarded by the American writers nor fully embraced. Rather, it is cleverly scrutinized throughout the game in the guise of enemy science reports that keep trying--and failing--to understand it. Though entirely optional, this aspect of Prime 1 makes the game somewhat of a thoughtful exploration of not only the implied metaphysics of Metroid but of videogames in general, since many of the scrutinized concepts are common game conventions, like "life". Otherwise Prime 1 is recommendable as a marvelous work of atmosphere and game design, with mechanics and interface that blend together so seamlessly they recall the sublime immersive coherence of System Shock 1. A much, much better game than either of its sequels, largely because (unlike them) it retains the mystery and loneliness of its Japanese brothers, making it a more provocative piece of science fiction. Credits: Michael Mann (producer), Mark Pacini (lead designer), Mark Johnston (lead engineer), Todd Keller (lead artist).

Revisiting Riddick.

2010-08-27T11:32:00.000-07:00

I just played Starbreeze Studios' Chronicles of Riddick for the first time in several years, and I was struck--yet again--by how good the game is. In general I dislike "macho" games, so when one cuts right through my disdain for testosterone-fueled bravado I sit up and take notice. The only game in recent memory to have this effect on me was last year's underrated Bionic Commando, which I found genuinely thrilling, nuanced, and superbly designed in spite of its meat-head protagonist. One might imagine it's the sheer polish and professionalism of these games that makes me gladly overlook their juvenile swagger. But if that were the case I'd also like God of War, Halo, Gears of War, Call of Duty, and just about every other AAA game that features men unironically kicking ass. Such games tend to bore me, so why does Riddick make being a bald asshole in a wife-beater seem interesting?

Some of it is undoubtedly Vin Diesel's voice performance, which is so humorless and dead-pan it easily qualifies as camp. Camp alone, though, doesn't save a game for me. Mad World was similarly campy yet bored me to death in the first hour, probably because it was about nothing but smacking people around. Starbreeze's Riddick, however, is about a hell of a lot more than that. It is a surprisingly subtle game that combines stealth, shooting, boxing, and conversation more elegantly than most other 3D games I can think of--easily better than Deus Ex, which is one of the more historically famous examples of such genre-bending. (Although, to be clear, when I say "better" here I mean it strictly in a usability sense, not in the sense that Riddick in any way approaches Deus Ex's ethically complex narrative universe.)

This is perhaps the big difference between a game like Riddick and many other "macho" games. The obvious production quality of most of them is in service of game design goals I have no real interest in, goals that seem to grow out of their macho attitudes. God of War is a brawler, and Gears of War and Call of Duty are both shooters, which we might include under some uber-genre of "Men Breaking Shit". No matter how good these games are all their quality is squarely aimed at trying to make punching, shooting, and eviscerating people more fun... as if there weren't enough of this in games already.

I was at GDC the year God of War 3 premiered at the Sony keynote, and I remember--to my astonishment--the audience going bonkers when Kratos ripped a griffin in half in mid-air. The same thing happened at E3 a few years earlier, at a presentation when duel-wielding in Halo 2 was revealed. People just went nuts. It's not so much that gamers like this sort of thing, but that so much time, effort, and money goes into advancing it. Should I be impressed that ripping off heads is more fun now than it's ever been? Am I supposed to believe this is some sort of important frontier in game design that we need to direct millions and millions of dollars toward?

I don't see how such things advance the medium. They seem to advance only their own genres, which are both static and narrow in the experiences they are hell-bent on providing (again). What lessons, for example, could a developer trying to make a narrative game aimed at senior citizens learn from God of War? Games that have more eclectic design goals--even if they involve men breaking shit--tend to be more useful to the ongoing advancement of game design. Riddick might be about male rage, but it's also an experiment in the complexities of immersive role-playing, of what it means to "feel" like a certain kind of person in a certain kind of situation. An experiment of this sort feels more potentially useful to me than figuring out yet another way to skin a hydra. Starbreeze's game remains one of the better examples of how developers can combine elements from various familiar genres to create a game that doesn't seem to be dictated by genre logic but by fictional logic--the logic of story, character, and world.

Viewed in parts Riddick's various game systems are obviously ripped-off several famous games--including Punch-Out (for puzzle-like boxing), Thief (for light-based stealth), Deus-Ex (for conversation and choice), and Half-Life (for non-cinematic narrative devices)--but viewed as a whole none of its influences feel derivative since they are all so artfully combined. Take for example the brilliant tutorial sequence, where Riddick escapes captivity and blasts his way to freedom so you can learn the basic game mechanics. Most games come up with with lame reasons as to why you are stripped of all your badass abilities after the first 20 minutes, but Starbreeze's choice to structure this as a daydream--a pathetic fantasy you are having before you go to prison--was a small stroke of genius. The contrast between the agency felt in Riddick's fantasy and the brutal lack thereof in the following credit sequence, in which the player (in handcuffs) is only allowed to move the camera as they are marched into prison, is quite effective, and shows a synthesis of familiar conventions into a cleverly expressive whole. The "on rails" opening is of course lifted from Half-Life, but it's actually much better than Half-Life, because here it is more than a formal experiment in delivering narrative information. It is being used to illustrate a point about freedom and agency, of fantasy versus reality, that eases the player smoothly into the challenging "prison" of Starbreeze's game design.

I could go on about the various unoriginal game conventions Riddick expertly bends to its will, a will that seems to have little in mind besides making you feel like you are Vin Diesel. That I don't particularly want to be Vin Diesel is mitigated by the fact that this game makes you feel like Vin Diesel so well it is hard to play the game without wondering why more games don't achieve a similar level of protagonist-player fusion. Batman: Arkham Asylum is one of the few games in recent memory to really follow Starbreeze's example, ripping off other games left and right but arranging their familiar elements in such a way so that they cease to feel like "parts" of other games and instead blend into a sharp procedural portrait of an iconic protagonist.

I guess my ideological view of game design is that we should be spending our time exploring how to shatter genre, not reinforce it... but we don't have to start from scratch if we want to create a particular effect. Lots of individual game conventions have been experimented with in literally thousands of games over the past few decades, and lots of them create specific effects rather well. It's is a shame, then, that so many of them have become arbitrarily grouped together in the prisons we call "genres" when they can be mixed and matched to achieve cohesive, expressive effects. Developers should not be thinking "lets make an RPG" so much as "lets make a game that makes you feel like a knight"... or a firefighter, or a grieving parent, or a professor, or anything really. Most of all developers should be aware that they have a massive palette of design tools to achieve these things, not just those arbitrarily bound together by formula.

An artful combination of the right game conventions--even familiar ones--will achieve their own expressive coherence, a sum much greater than their respective parts. It would be nice if there were more games that did this well. Then I might not have to settle for one starring Vin Diesel.

A Design History of Metal Gear - Part 4: Soldiers Are People Too.

2010-08-02T08:00:00.000-07:00

MGS3 was the moment when the Metal Gear series transformed from refining its core concept (military espionage) to expressing new concepts (mortality, survival, etc.). It did this by taking the ever expanding system of actions, goals, and behaviors built up over the course of four games (MG1, MG2, MGS1, and MGS2) and re-organizing them along the contours of a particular theme (surviving nature) which grew out of a particular setting (a sprawling wilderness). The following games in the series follow the same basic design exercise, of choosing a setting and theme and allowing them to guide the rearrangement of familiar elements into a new system of meanings that make the game "about" something new.

Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops (PSP 2006) looks almost identical to MGS3 at first glance. A budget sequel made on a portable platform, it reuses a large amount of art and gameplay elements from its immediate predecessor. Yet the way these things are reconfigured makes the ultimate experience quite different. MPO boasts almost all the same core actions as MGS3, including interrogation. In this game however interrogation takes on a whole new meaning. Interrogated soldiers now give two kinds of information, expressing either loyalty or disdain for their commander. If they are disdainful you can knock them out and drag them (like in MGS2/3) to an extraction point. Once extracted, they will "join" your cause, becoming playable characters in future missions. You can recruit loyal soldiers as well, but they take longer to "convince" to join your cause.

Time, unlike in previous Metal Gear games, is an important part of MPO. Instead of a single, on-going "mission" MPO is broken into several smaller "missions" accessible from a map screen. Going on a mission shifts the clock forward 12 hours, turning day to night or night to day. This day/night cycle has implications for many traditional Metal Gear mechanics, including sneaking and stamina. The camo system from MGS3 is gone, but now visibility is determined by time of day. Night missions provide better cover than day missions, and stamina is replenished not by living off the land but by resting. Players can choose to "wait" a 12 hour cycle in order to replenish stamina. (After all, running three missions in a row means you just went 36 hours without sleep.) The same low-stamina effects from MGS3 remain (shaky aim, etc.) but they require different strategies to deal with. Food can replenish stamina, but since MPO takes place in primarily urban environments there are no animals to hunt. Food must be found in storerooms or other buildings, and there is simply not enough to sustain one indefinitely.

Another major change in MPO is the radar, which replaces MGS3's dual radar system (itself a split-in-two version of the radar from earlier games) with a general aureal sensor. Clever players will recognize that this sensor is basically a visualization of the directional mic from past games, showing which direction sound is coming from and how loud it is but nothing else. This makes navigating around MPO's urban environments fairly tricky, as great care must be taken to guess where enemies are based on sound. In true Metal Gear fashion, however, MPO alleviates this anxiety by adopted another special case mechanic from past games and blowing it up into a core game system.

Both MGS2 and 3 allowed players to done disguises at certain key points, which allowed them to walk freely among the enemy provided they did nothing "suspicious" (like, for example, wave a gun around). MPO approximates this mechanic by considering all uniformed ex-enemy soldiers "in disguise" when they are on a mission, blending in with enemies of the same uniform. When playing this way a chameleon icon appears on the screen, indicating your cover is intact. In this state you can walk around at your leisure, explore areas, and find items all without having to sneak. Do something "suspicious" though, like skulk around a corner or crawl into an air vent, and your cover is blown. These tensions are further alleviated by "field data", dots that show up on your map telling you where items and enemies are. This is the exact same data that was procured in MGS3 via interrogation, only now it is gather by dispatching "spies" into the field. Unused recruits can be assigned to several jobs of this sort, including weapon development and medical research. These jobs have various effects on how you perform in the field, making them essential to mission planning.

At its simplest MPO is a game about the tensions and logistics of kidnapping, the way MGS2 was a game about the tensions and logistics of murder. It's about winning the hearts and minds of the enemy and building your former foes into your own guerrilla army. These logistics, which existing Metal Gear mechanics are reconfigured around, grow out of a theme, this time derived from the overarching Metal Gear mythology. Snake/Big Boss's transformation from a solo operative into a great military leader, which had long been part of the Metal Gear backstory, doesn't just guide the narrative of MPO but the entire game design, a design where every "enemy" is just an ally you haven't made yet. In the next installment, we'll see how this increasing focus on soldier behavior leads to a procedural model of the psychological effects of war.

One-Paragraph Review - Hell Night (AKA Dark Messiah)

2010-07-26T06:37:00.000-07:00

Hell Night (PSX, 1999, 7-10 hrs) - A modestly budgeted, extremely fucking scary Japanese first-person horror game, in which you find yourself trapped in the Tokyo subway system being pursued by a single, relentless monster. Not released in the U.S., but translated to English in PAL regions, Hell Night (originally titled Dark Messiah in Japan) is a very unusual combination of Myst-style adventure game design, Ultima Underworld-style real-time exploration, and Japanese visual novel-style narrative design. If you can get past the somewhat awkward grafting together of these components, you will find the game rewarding in many wonderful ways. Highly recommended. Credits: Hiroyuki Tanaka (producer), Yutaka Fujimoto (planner), Hiroyuki Fujiwara (programmer), Hoshito Yukizawa (artist).

Why Red Dead Redemption Is Disappointing

2010-07-10T15:44:00.000-07:00

In a previous post I praised Red Dead Redemption for almost being a great world simulation. Really what I meant is that it looks like one if you squint hard enough. Although what I said before basically holds, I would like to elaborate on exactly what it does that keeps it from being a genuinely robust simulation of real emergent consequence.

First of all, there are different rules for different situations. Shooting someone in the leg or arm is non-fatal... except when the game arbitrarily decides otherwise. For example if someone steals your horse and you shoot them in the leg to knock them off, it is for some inexplicable reason always fatal. The same goes for large scale shoot-outs, the kind where several dozen enemies are shooting at you from behind cover. In these situations shooting people in the arms or legs simply kills them, apparently for no reason other than in such circumstances you're "supposed" to kill people. This is made clear by an omnipresent, ever-helpful on-screen prompt, which pops up from time to time to inform your what your goal is. "Kill the outlaws" is a typical prompt, which makes unambiguously clear what sort of behavior is expected (and allowed). Even though Redemption supports a much wider range of behaviors than killing, the game frequently flips certain ones on and off like a light switch in order to force the player into a singular challenge with a singular solution.

Having a voice "tell" you your goals is of course a way of preventing you from developing your own. A real world simulation would simply have consistent rules and let any emergent outcome they support be fair game. If Rockstar had the balls to rely on this consistency, to trust that it in and of itself is interesting enough to carry a game, they'd be making more than just virtual theme parks. Historically they seem to back away from any emergent possibility that might not cater to their juvenile audience, which is why they promise richly simulated worlds but then always cop-out by forcing the player into canned situations. Because what kind of wild west sim would it be if you could go through the whole game without getting into a single gunfight? A great one, obviously. Or, to be more accurate, an actual one.

It's ironic that a game which promises and even bases its narrative on the concept of "freedom" offers so little of it. This is why Redemption is best when it gets out of your way and just lets you solve problems according to consistent world rules. Missions are uniformly awful, boring affairs where you are ordered by a voice from the sky to kill people en masse. One can expect shoot-outs in a Western of course, but by the standards of any Western film the amount of people you kill in Red Dead Redemption is ludicrous. Any given mission qualifies you as a mass murderer, as you kill literally dozens upon dozens of people all by yourself--more than Clint Eastwood ever did in every Western he ever appeared in combined. This is made possible largely by the way the game approaches difficulty design. John Marston is an indestructible tank, who can be shot endless times in the chest, face, or where ever and still pop heads with his winchester like he's the fucking Terminator. It's Westworld alright... except you are Yul Brynner.

It's both interesting and disappointing how games like Red Dead Redemption create painstakingly simulated worlds built on recognizable genre logic but intervene the moment any emergent consequence falls outside the "normal" borders of power fantasy. It says much about the gap between my sensibilities and Rockstar's that being an indestructible killing machine ordered by God to kill people seems, to me, entirely at odds with the game's surface image of being a "serious" and "adult" game experience. Rockstar typically likes to project this kind of image, as if they were somehow the vanguard of "mature" videogames, though I personally find it to be a ruse most of the time... both in terms of their instant-gratification / zero-consequence game design and their conveniently nihilistic narratives. The frontier in Redemption is arbitrarily sick, featuring cannibalism, bestiality, grave robbing, etc. While I'm not against such content on principle Redemption exhibits the typical Rockstar trait of exploiting such ideas for simple shock value, or as sick jokes, without really dealing with them.

The game is filled with the usual Rockstar gallery of meaninglessly grotesque crazies. Major characters are taken seriously, but minor characters feel more like the punchline of a dirty joke than actual people. (A guy who has sex with his horse? Hilarious!) The professionally done, decently acted cut-scenes seem calculated to obscure this, and it's only videogame culture's maturity complex--which tends to define "maturity" the way a teenager would--that allows such content to historically pass for "serious" work. It's interesting to think how superficial our concept of "seriousness" is, when something that simply looks and sounds like a real movie gets lauded regardless how morally simplistic it is underneath, whereas something that has cute characters or lower production values gets ignored even though it might be suggesting much more complicated and ambivalent things about heroism, violence, etc.

Rockstar's dime-store cynicism comes out even more in Redemption's total lack of variation in world events. It might have felt different if the behavior of the people you encounter was randomized (as in sometimes a hitchhiker might not want to rob you, etc.) but they aren't, which means you get cynical about people really fast. This could be seen as a sort of commentary, but after a point it feels so shallow and simplistic it's yet another example of the petty nihilism that permeates all Rockstar's efforts. "The world is ugly and everybody's bad" might be a kind of social commentary, but it's a very cheap, childish kind... the sort you might expect from a high school emo poet. This is why Rockstar at the end of the day tends to feel like the Coen Brothers at their worst: people for whom ironic distance is not a mode of thought but a substitute for it.

Rockstar's worlds are stupid, ugly, and weird for arbitrary or petty reasons. They seem more about the narcissistic pleasure of feeling repulsed by (and therefore superior to) other people than trying to understand them. You see this pattern again and again in Rockstar games--in Vice City, in San Andreas, in GTAIV--of a snarky, aloof protagonist encountering weirder and weirder people, all of whom seem crazy and whose craziness seems to exist for no other reason than to give the player something to chuckle at. It's entertaining, but it's hardly nuanced, mature writing ...it's precisely the opposite.

This is all not to say that Redemption has no redeeming aspects as a world simulation or as a serious treatment of the topics it raises. At times, when the Rockstar-ness of the game recedes into the background and you are just left alone in its beautiful frontier world, it's quite nice. The best parts of the game, of course, are those that least resemble Grand Theft Auto, notably the hunting, trading, cattle rustling, etc. The combat can be interesting, but only when the game gets out of your way and lets you try to solve problems on your own, and when it gives you the leverage to do that by not changing the rules on you. As I said before, it has all the pieces of a great Western simulation. They are just crippled by the fact that it's a Rockstar game, which traps it in a definition of "maturity" that leaves much to be desired.

One Paragraph Review - The Lurking Horror

2010-06-07T18:22:00.000-07:00

The Lurking Horror (PC, 1987, 4-6 hrs) - The best H. P. Lovecraft game ever, at least in terms of evoking the famous horror writer's ambiguous prose style. Text is the perfect medium to describe "indescribable horror", and there's a lot that's indescribable in this effective text adventure from INFOCOM. The Lurking Horror puts you in the shoes of a student at "GUE" (actually MIT, right down to the floor layouts) who is snowed-in on campus while trying to finish a paper late one evening. This simple set up is all designer/programmer Dave Lebling needs to send you on a dark journey into the unspeakable, which involves extensive exploration of the campus tunnels, encounters with creepy janitors, and runs-ins with the occasional unseen terror. Puzzles are sometimes esoteric, but the slow-burn sense of dread and evocative anti-description make this a superbly memorable horror experience.

Rockstar's Westworld.

2010-05-27T17:15:00.000-07:00

I am currently having more fun playing Red Dead Redemption than any other open world game in recent memory, and certainly more fun than I've had with a Rockstar game in several years. The last Rockstar game that felt similar was Grand Thief Auto: San Andreas, largely because of its heavy emphasis on role-playing elements. Grand Theft Auto IV was marketed as if it were a role-playing experience, but it didn't have San Andreas's benefit of a clear genre reference to build its various game systems off of and give them coherence. The clarity with which Redemption identifies itself as a Western, and the surprising extent to which it allows that to inform its world design, puts it head-and-shoulders above every other Rockstar game. Though it suffers from some vestigial design conventions inherited from GTA (mostly having to do with GTA's open world strategy of being a theme park rather than a holistic world simulation) it offers the player more choices, more expressive ways of behaving, than many open world games.

What's striking about Redemption is how unlike GTA it is, in spite of following a lot of the same conventions. It's pretty ironic, considering the associations of Westerns with guns and violence, that Redemption is one of the least violence-centered open world games I've played... even less, I feel, than RPGs like Fallout 3 or platformers like inFAMOUS. The fact of the matter is in the world of Red Dead Redemption there is a whole hell of a lot to do that doesn't involve killing people. I spent the first several hours of my game simply hanging out on a ranch, learning to tame horses, herd cattle, hunt, trade, forage, play cards with the locals, and in general just enjoy the beautiful countryside. I've heard the first few hours of the game criticized as "slow", but I wonder if this is just because no one asks you to kill people until a good while in. The only violence I engaged in (not counting hunting) in my first few hours was night watchman duty for a small ranch, where I was delighted to discover that killing was only one tool in my toolbox of available actions. All it took to scare off some cattle rustlers was pointing my gun at them. More belligerent trouble-makers could easily be disarmed with a well-placed shot, and if they still didn't feel like running they could be wrestled to the ground and knocked unconscious. And this was before I was given the lasso, which is originally for breaking in wild horses but works just fine on people too. Folks can be intimidated, knocked out, humiliated, scared, tied up, carried, untied--all without being murdered. Any combination of these things usually gets the job done, and the job is usually trying to maintain some semblance of order in an already fairly civilized (by video game standards) world. Probably the biggest irony of Red Dead Redemption is that its vision of a frontier civilization feels more peaceful and less violent than most video game worlds. The countryside isn't overwhelmingly hostile like it is in virtually all other open world games. Animals largely mind their own business, and most of the people you meet are friendly. You will occasionally encounter a hungry pack of wolves or some bandits, but these are always the exception, not the rule. You'll hear gunshots often in the distance, but you can simply mind your own business and go along your merry way. Life's too short, after all. And the open sky too beautiful.

The world of Red Dead Redemption is more indifferent than hostile. It isn't trying to kill you by default, and this may be why your range of responses to it involve a lot more than killing. When violence erupts, you know there's a range of ways to respond, depending on what sort of person you want to be and how you want others to regard you. The social simulation aspect of Redemption fits nicely in with the rest of the world. Murdering someone in the street is considered a crime, even if it was part of the duel, as is hogtying or assaulting random citizens. I once shot dead a man threatening a prostitute with a knife, and I was promptly run out of town by the authorities. Murder in defense of the weak or even in self-defense is frowned upon... unless you happen to wear a badge, in which case you basically have a license to kill anyone considered an "outlaw". Bounties always pay better if they are alive, but most gangs refuse to come quietly, so killing tends to become a natural consequence of law enforcement in practice. Of course, you can try to shoot everyone in the leg, hogtie everyone, etc.--and you may even get a few of them--but when you're pinned down in a canyon by seven snipers who have no qualms about killing you where you stand, pacifism becomes the quick road to suicide.

As a simulation Red Dead Redemption isn't as nuanced or as consistent as it could be, which hinders role-playing at times. I blame this primarily on the game's adherence to the "Rockstar formula" for how it attempts to integrate story and world design. Rockstar games have always been more like theme parks than proper world simulations. Story missions and challenges are like rides in a theme park, and the open world mostly serves as a fun space to explore while traveling from one "ride" to another. The rules that govern the open world are built on the story's theme, but they cannot be very complex or have very serious consequences because that would inhibit the players ability to experience all the "rides". There has always therefore been a disconnect between story and world in Rockstar games, and Red Dead Redemption is no exception. As an experience I feel the game would be a lot stronger if your behavior in the game world actually effected the story. For example, it would be nice if the sheriff of Armadillo wouldn't talk to you if you were an outlaw. Likewise it would be nice if all your actions in general had more lasting consequences. The fact that the game responds to you killing everyone in a town by having the town become a ghost town is great, but the fact that everyone respawns six days later is silly... just like the fact that a killing spree gets you in jail, but only for a week or so. Rockstar still doesn't want to prevent players from basically doing whatever they feel like at any given moment... like any paying customer at Disneyland.

The dissonance created by Red Dead Redemption's theme park structure, along with its occasional bugginess and thematic verisimilitude, makes it feel at times like a computerized version of Westworld, that old sci-fi movie from the 70s about a Western theme park populated by robotic cowboys. When the spell of Redemption breaks down, when the simulation suddenly feels shallow or the narrative inconsistent with my personal player behavior, it feels suddenly like I'm a customer in a Western-themed amusement park, not a carefully role-played persona in a richly simulated world. However when the spell holds, when the stars align and none of the various elements contradict each other, it's the wild west simulation I've waited my whole life to play.

One Paragraph Review - Chrono Cross

2010-05-21T14:20:00.000-07:00

Chrono Cross (PSX, 2000, 40-60 hrs) - A lush, beautiful, and deep Japanese RPG that suffers from a fatal case of bad storytelling. A sequel to Chrono Trigger, which was much better, Chrono Cross pretends to be an unrelated story about alternate dimensions for the first two thirds and then turns into something resembling a bad Chrono Trigger fan-fiction before self-destructing in a fit of hysterical pretension. Not that this necessarily matters if you're in it for the gameplay, which is pretty well-done and notable in particular for its excellent magic system. Though seemingly arbitrary at first, the magic system is deeply integrated into the plot, so that by the end the game cannot even be finished unless the player understands the cosmological significance of the magic system and its symbolic relation to the story world. A long game, but the gorgeous graphics and wonderful music (Yasunori Mitsuda at his finest) make the journey pleasant enough. Those expecting something as elegant, focused, and unpretentious as Chrono Trigger however will want to vomit by the end. Directed and written by Masato Kato, who swiped most of the story material from his equally self-destructive Xenogears. With Hiromichi Tanaka (producer), Kiyoshi Yoshii (main programmer), and Yasuyuki Honne (art director).

Letting the World Be - The Inherent Politics of Stealth?

2010-05-14T11:50:00.000-07:00

This phrase appears if you pause Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. It appears in English under a bit of Kanji, the same Kanji that appeared on ads before the game's release. It also appears in-game on Snake's suit. I'm not sure how diegetic it's supposed to be, if the implication is supposed to be that it's been consciously chosen by Snake and Co. or if its just so supposed to be a symbolic statement by Kojima, but it clearly is important in light of the game's narrative arc... or, more accurately, the series' narrative arc. "Let the world be" is a variation on what Big Boss (the supposed "villain" of the series) tells Snake at the MGS4's end, which sums up his (and assumedly Kojima's) entire world-view, the sum-total of everything he's learned over the course of his political and military career, which spanned most of the major conflicts the 20th century and involved as its principle enterprise the creation of a country in opposition to (among other things) the United States' military hegemony over the world.

This phrase is, at the end of the day, probably the biggest problem I had with MGS4 (and I had many). I felt it was a disappointing cop-out to the provocative 20th century counter-mythology Kojima and his collaborators had developed over the course of 20 years, but which flowered primarily in the latest three installments (MGS2, MGS3, and MPO). I realize Kojima doesn't want to advocate war or revolution, but going so far as to have Big Boss--the series' fascinating ideological enigma--flat out say it's categorically bad to try to change the world was to me a betrayal of every interesting moral/political contradiction the series had previously (and boldly) reveled in.

Not change the world? Let the world be? That's always the right political choice, huh? That's what you've got to say to Gandhi, Malcolm X, and anyone else who ever felt injustice demanded change? Maybe not "by an means necessary", but surely there is change worth fighting for, and surely the means are up to each one of us to either support or denounce based on what we personally consider necessary. Surely the lesson cannot be "fighting for anything is bad". Or am I misunderstanding the phrase "let the world be"?

"Letting the world be" may be the absurd ideological resolution MGS4 attempts to force on otherwise rich material, but it interestingly mirrors the ideological resolution of another great stealth series, one that isn't nearly as absurd. Thief III (or Thief: Deadly Shadows, as it was publically known), the final if little played installment of the (mostly) brilliant Thief trilogy, actually had a similar kind of thematic arc. The Thief series was about Garrett, the greatest thief in the world, rejecting the way of his mentors, the Keepers. The Keepers used stealth to observe the world and be its chroniclers, sort of like historians. But Garrett chose to use the skills they taught him to steal rather than learn. The Keepers have a philosophy of balance, which manifests politically as a strict policy of non-involvement, which is why they practice stealth. Thief III was about Garrett realizing how corrupt the Keepers had become, about how they really were meddling in political affairs, and how he activates an ancient fail-safe designed to wipe out their age old store of knowledge. Garrett does this not out of altruism or a conscious belief in their values (which he thought he had rejected) but out of a desire to keep the Keepers from messing with the delicate political balance he profits from by stealing. (Wars are bad for business.) In doing so he ironically was the one true Keeper left, because he wanted balance, and achieved it through stealth.

The Metal Gear and Thief series both feature central villains whose original intentions to change the world for the better become hopelessly corrupted, which necessitates their destruction by a reluctant, stealthy (anti)hero. "Leaving the world as it is" (to uses Big Boss's phrasing) has an interesting resonance in both cases, especially when one realizes this concept is fundamental to the gameplay DNA of the stealth genre. In stealth games players must ask themselves at any given moment "do I interfere?". Sometimes intervention is best. Someones it is not. But it's not coincidental, I feel, that both these series are stealth-based, which means that "to let the world be or to not let the world be?" is a political question the player answers in microcosm every time they make a decision during play.

Are stealth games fundamentally about the morality of covert versus overt intervention in any given circumstance? Is it worth killing someone to steal something? What about to save the world? Am I just the ultimate non-interventionist if I play Thief or Metal Gear without touching or altering anyone? Have I agreed to "let the world be"?

Funny that I find doing "pacifism runs" of stealth games so satisfying, such an exquisite test of my obsessive-compulsive moral conscience, but still I find the ideological conclusion at the end of MGS4 so infuriating. Maybe it's because MGS4's story is stupid in about 20 other ways, or maybe it's because I feel the real world geopolitical problems Kojima mythologized demand a less bone-headedly sentimental resolution. Thief took place in a steampunk-ish medieval fantasy world, but it still managed to generate a resolution that was subtle and complex, not silly and reductionist. If Big Boss's final lesson had to be that "stealth" is the best political strategy for a war-torn world filled with suffering, that could have been an interesting notion had it been treated as the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one, as a question rather than (absurdly) an answer.

Part of me thinks Kojima was just so intent on ending the series--in tying up all its loose ends, even its thematic ones--that he reached for easy solutions more out of desperation than any genuine ideological agenda. Big Boss's weird apoliticism at the end of MGS4 seems to have been thrown totally out the window, for example, in Peace Walker, which is about Big Boss defending a seemingly defenseless country (Costa Rica circa 1974) from covert U.S. military occupation. Of course, one might assume this just represents a step on his road to regret (he doesn't see the "error" of his ways, according to MGS4, until 2014), but on the other hand it's really hard to imagine Kojima suggesting that letting a super power walk all over a smaller country is the "right" thing to do. Indeed, all advertising for the game seems to suggest precisely the opposite.

The stealth genre may be the ideal one for posing political questions surrounding use of force to the player, precisely because it is the only game genre where violence is always a question. Is violence necessary? Do I really need to kill this person? What if I sneak past him? What if he tries to kill me? Then do I kill him, or do I run away and sneak by him later? I know there's a way to do this without killing anyone, but I also know it's the hardest possible way to do things. Every time I take the easier way out, or try to rationalize my mistakes, and the resulting bloodbath, as inevitable (and therefore justified), have I done what politicians, generals, and soldiers do when they make the decisions we pay them in order to not make ourselves?

It's a question worth asking, and one that the player (not the developer) should be answering.

One Paragraph Review - Killer 7

2010-05-06T20:36:00.000-07:00

Killer 7 (Gamecube, 2005, 10-15 hrs) - A stellar mind-fuck exploration/shooter game, and in my opinion the best work of self-described "punk" Japanese game developer Suda51 (at least of what's been released Stateside). The set-up involves a group of professional assassins--the Killer 7--who all inhabit the body of a wheelchair-bound old man and can only "come out" when in proximity to a functioning television set. The player must make use of their various abilities to take down "Heaven's Smile", a group of invisible, shape-shifting, and apparently skinless suicide bombers who laugh as they explode. While not technically "horror" Killer 7 manages to be scary in ways few horror games are, and the way it weaves (or rather smashes) together science-fiction, occult fantasy, and political intrigue is genuinely surreal. Unfairly criticized as a mere "rail shooter" by its critics, it actually has a nicely designed combat system that recalls some of the best aspects or Resident Evil 4 and Dead Aim. Its spacial navigation system is especially innovative in how it removes virtually all redundancy from the survival horror exploration/puzzle framework, streamlining it into a smooth, slick experience. Suda's signature ultra-high-contrast cel-shaded visuals give the entire game an appropriate neo-noir look. In the name of Harmon. Credits: Goichi Suda (story, writer, director, producer), Shinji Mikami (story, executive producer).

Cold War Punk.

2010-04-25T20:18:00.000-07:00

Hideo Kojima's political mythologizing, which was so frustratingly absent from Metal Gear Solid 4, seems to have returned with a vengeance in Peace Walker. Returning to the Cold War era seems to have energized him and his team, with a game that looks to be more colorful and focused than MGS4's mish-mash of half-realized ideas. A lot of this might have to do with the fact that Peace Walker is clearly a game he wants to make, not one he thinks fans want him to make. No one asked for a euphoric, philosophical, Wagnerian extravaganza set against the backdrop of Nixon's resignation, but Kojima and Co. seem determined to deliver a bizarre, science-fiction version of the politically-charged 1970s whether you want it or not.

Cold War Punk. What else could you call it? MGS3, with its strange James Bond-inspired retro-futurism, certainly was this, and now that we have this label we could easy include things like the Fallout series. Such works exploit the iconography of that era to create fantastic worlds, alternate 20th centuries whose familiar symbolic landscapes are reconfigured into operatic counter-mythologies of world history. They mythologize the 50's, 60's, and 70's the way Sergio Leone mythologized the American West, turning it into a larger-than-life fantasy world that comments on the real world through exaggeration.

The symbolic universe of Peace Walker already seems a thousand times richer than MGS4. The use of television as a visual motif, of using what I can only assume is a riff on the emergency broadcast system (the TV images that was supposed to show if there was a nuclear attack), is instantly evocative. And the modification of the peace symbol, so that it looks like a bomber jet, perfectly embodies the contradiction at the center of the game's story, that war and peace are inseparable.

This is expressed in a Kant quote that presumably begins the game, that peace is an "unnatural" state, that the natural state of human affairs is war, that peace must be "created" by war. This doesn't seem to be a conclusion Kojima agrees with so much as a terrifying philosophical position that explains the madness of the Cold War. The title of the game is a reference to Metal Gear, the walking nuclear deterrent. By threatening war it ensures peace, thus it is the "peace walker", a walking machine that creates peace out of war. It is a monster that embodies the Kantian contradiction, just as the modified peace symbol does, as does the visual motif, seen in the Maurice Binder-style trailer, of one finger versus two fingers.

One finger extended can press a button and end everything, but raise another finger and you have "peace". The way the trailer ends, with the emergency broadcast system image, with the modified peace/war symbol at its center, being "pressed" by a single finger (as if it were a launch button), only to have a second finger at the last moment extend and create "peace", right before the TV image violently cuts and the world is plunged into (nuclear?) oblivion... this all represents a marvelously coherent appropriation of pop-cultural symbolic language to express what the game's about. It's the madness of nuclear brinkmanship distilled to a single, potent image.

It's because of this trailer that I did a little reading and realized that the peace symbol is, in fact, a direct reference to nuclear disarmament. It is an iconic abstraction of "N" and "D" in semaphore code, so the attempt to also associate "fingers" simultaneously with nuclear destruction and nuclear disarmament seems a fitting extension. If the difference between peace and war is one finger, how hard is it to extend that extra finger? But even then, what would it mean? One finger can press a button, but does two fingers necessarily mean peace? Kojima mentioned in an interview that even 'v' is ambiguous. It could be 'v' for victory. Is victory the same as peace? Is peace only created through victory, through war? Peace Walker layers all these double meanings on top of each other, so that they become a haze of contradictions we feel lost in.

It is a very Kubrickian view of war, and indeed Kojima seems to be drawing from Stanley Kubrick in both subtle and unsubtle ways. Not only is there a character in the game called "Strangelove", everything about the game seems to suggest war's absurd duality, a view that was most directly expressed in Full Metal Jacket, in the scene where Matthew Modine's character is questioned by his commander as to why he would wear a peace symbol on his helmet. His response is ""I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, the Jungian thing..."

"Jungian" would be a good way to describe the insane symbolic universe of Metal Gear, with its bizarre characters, technology, and iconography that seem to rise out of our (or at least Kojima's) pop-cultural unconscious. Kojima's graphic design team is incredible, and they seem fascinated by collecting symbols and icons that elegantly capture the big ideas they want to explore.

Unfortunately, Kojima doesn't seem able to capitalize on these rich symbolic systems--to really back them up with content--as well as you'd hope, the way people like Alan Moore do in Watchmen (another work we might call Cold War Punk). This has especially been a problem lately. MGS4 was more about oogling tits and teary reunions than really examining in detail the socio-political implications of a war-driven global economy. Kojima sometimes seems to make the mistake (which, I'd argue, is a common pattern among fans-turned-practitioners) of confusing symbolism with content. At his best moments, his symbolic labels and operatic exaggerations serve to reinforce an underlying depth (The Joy and The Sorrow in MGS3) but at other times they insist on a depth that just isn't there or--at worst--blatantly contradicted by crass presentation (the Beauty and the Beast Unit in MGS4).

What Kojima and his team are consistently excellent at is showmanship. What he's really promising with such ads is that his games will be about these ideas, and he has delivered enough in the past (mostly in MGS2 and MGS3) to still make such hype genuinely exciting. Most game makers don't even seem interested in promising such things. And even if Kojima doesn't keep these promises, maybe somebody inspired by his tantalizing sound and fury will.

UPDATE

It has been brought to my attention that what I thought was an artistic riff on the U.S. emergency broadcast system was, in fact, a PAL test pattern. The color bars that I showed above (known as the "SMPTE color bars") are the NTSC test pattern. The black and white image to its right, known as the "Indian Head test pattern", is what the NTSC test pattern was before the color era. Both test patterns have vague connotations of nuclear disaster in the U.S., because the Emergency Broadcast System used to show the test pattern on television and state that this is what would show in the case of a nuclear attack. I have personal memory of this, having grown up in the 80s in the U.S., which is perhaps why I and other American game makers associate the SMPTE color bars with national emergencies.

I had originally assumed that Peace Walker's test pattern was some combination of the SMPTE color bars and the Indian Head circles, but it's actually just a copy of the PAL test pattern. This makes me wonder if the theoretical practice of showing test patterns in the case of nuclear attack was as strong in PAL regions during the Cold War as it was in the U.S. Peace Walker seems to suggest it was, although I'd be interested to hear if this was (or still is) indeed the case.

Another possibility for the choice of the PAL test pattern is the association of "P-A-L" with "Peace At Last". PAL stands for "Phase Alternating Line" but when it was first introduced industry insiders sometimes joked it stood for "Peace At Last" or "Perfect At Last" because of how superior they felt it was to NTSC. Though somewhat oblique as a reference, it seems possible that this was one of the main reasons for the choice of the PAL pattern, since it would give Peace Walker's television motif the same contradictory connotations as the rest of its symbols. If the PAL test pattern simultaneously suggests nuclear attack and "Peace At Last" that seems to fit right in line with Kojima's dualism.

Discovering Chris Marker.

2010-04-18T15:18:00.000-07:00

Chris Marker is a filmmaker I'd heard about for years, but I'd never seen any of his films until recently. As an American who grew up on the usual diet of Hollywood movies, I'd only heard about him in relation to films like 12 Monkeys and The Terminator, which supposedly drew their inspiration from Marker's arty, ultra-low budget science fiction film La Jetee. I still haven't seen La Jetee, but I have seen two of Markers other films, A Grin Without a Cat and The Last Bolshevik. I became interested in The Last Bolshevik after reading an essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, who described it as an elegiac, somewhat bitter attempt to understand what happened to The Left's idealism over the course of the 20th century, specifically in relation to the failure of the Soviet experiment. Given my own fascination with this topic, it seemed like a film I couldn't miss.

The Last Bolshevik I saw about a year ago, and I felt it was a pretty great film. It's about Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin, a participant in the 1917 revolution who miraculously lived to see the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It certainly does express a kind of complicated, critical, but also reverent portrait of the life of an artist trying to weather the storm of the 20th century, and the devastating effect it had on his ideals.

A Grin Without a Cat, which I watched this morning, is by comparison a much more detailed film about a much shorter window of time, concerning mostly the May 68 uprisings in France and the effect it had on the New Left thereafter. It was harder for me to follow than The Last Bolshevik, mostly because it's filled with a lot of dense information about French politics leading up to, during, and after May 68. Because the documentary is not just about France, but about how what went on in France relates to global socialist movements at the time, there is a lot of other information as well. For someone such as myself, who only has a passing knowledge of events like the Prague Spring and Che Guevara's Bolivian campaign, it's interesting if brutally educational. Just when I thought I was hopelessly lost in an ocean of history, Marker pulled everything together in a surprisingly concise and moving ending... just like The Last Bolshevik.

Watching Marker's films makes me realize how much I have to learn about just what the fuck happened in the 20th century, the century I was born in but now feels like ancient history. One thing the film convinced me of is that Fidel Castro was once quite charismatic, with quite a folksy persona. Not that the movie is pro-Cuba really. It doesn't seem to be pro-anything specifically. After seeing these two films I get the sense that Marker is basically a leftist who is constantly critiquing his own movement, by trying to identify and contextualize its perversions as well as its achievements. Both A Grin Without a Cat and The Last Bolshevik appear to be about this, about trying to examine an absurdly tangled ball of string that has taken a century to tangle itself... about stubbornly trying to untangle it rather than throw it away.

I don't see Marker as a propagandist. He's too ambivalent for that. He clearly believes in certain ideals, and a lot of his work seems to be a struggle to re-examine and maintain those ideals against the messy, frustrating, bloody 20th century history of socialist movements. In this way his films really seem to be based on a kind of self-criticism, which I think is healthy for a nakedly personal artist dealing with such difficult material. He seems more interested in posing questions than offering answers, which, as I get more jaded and bored with American political "discourse", makes him my kind of filmmaker.

A Design History of Metal Gear - Part 3: Man versus Nature

2010-03-02T07:10:00.000-08:00

It may be fair to say that all Metal Gears up to and including MGS2 had similar design agendas. They were attempts to model, at increasingly levels of complexity, the core concepts of military espionage. Basic things like sneaking around, taking down enemies silently, and what to do when they found you were the main things being experimented with and revised. This all changes with MGS3.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (PS2 2004) on the surface seems much like MGS2. It has the same basic controls, the same mechanics of sneaking, of holding enemies at gunpoint. It has the same enemy alert phases from MG2, with their expanded enemy behavior from MGS2. It has the choking from MGS1, and (in a fashion) the same radar system. MGS3 reshuffled these familiar elements, however, giving them new meaning in a different context. A lot of it grew out of a decision to partially remove the radar, by breaking it up into two separate radars that (thanks to finite battery life) could not be used indefinitely. The radar first introduced in MG2 and revised in MGS1 showed enemy position, movement, and terrain with 100% accuracy. The radars in MGS3 showed neither terrain nor enemy vision. One showed moving life forms; the other stationary life forms. And since screens in MGS3 (thanks to its wilderness setting) were filled with animals as well as enemy soldiers, using these radars became a game of detective work, one that required cross-referencing with the player's knowledge of the current terrain and its wildlife. If the difference between soldiers and animals could not be determined, the player's directional mic (which could hear footsteps) was often the only way to definitively tell. The directional mic was introduced in MGS2, where it had limited, special-case application. In MGS3 it became part of the player's core gameplay vocabulary. Unlike MGS2 the player began the game with the directional mic, which made listening a new core action at the player's disposal. By limiting the player's ability to see, but enhancing their ability to hear, MGS3 made the process of simply finding enemies a major aspect of play.

Fighting an invisible enemy--of finding them before they found you--became the defining tension of play, which gave the expanded enemy interrogation mechanics a whole new value. Interrogation went from a cheap way to get items (in MGS2) to the primary mode of gaining gameplay-related information in MGS3. The choke action from MGS1 was retooled to be non-lethal: now a grabbed enemy could be squeezed for info. A chatty enemy could give away the positions of his comrades, which showed up on a sub-screen map. This effectively recreated the same radar information enjoyed in past games, though only after significant thought and planning. Discovering enemy positions in order to avoid (or subdue) them was much more important in MGS3 because the alert phases were much, much longer. Enemies would now search for a matter of minutes, not seconds. Even if the player escaped with their life, they were punished by having to wait for an agonizingly long time for enemy units to perform their sweep-and-clear patterns. Impatience could result in endless chases and gunfights over a wide variety of terrain. And although the player could sometimes call off an alert using the enemy's radio frequency (another useful bit of info that could be procured through interrogation) the only surefire way to achieve your objectives was patiently shaking down soldiers for field info, until you were 100% certain your imaginary map of the situation matched reality.

Interacting with these re-tooled old systems were MGS3's new systems, namely its camouflage and stamina systems. The camo system allowed the player to change Snake's outfit at any time, into a variety of patterns and colors. The closer the pattern and color was to the texture Snake was currently on (grass, gravel, tree bark, mud, sand, etc.) the higher the "camo index". An index of 0 was total visibility. An index of 100 was total invisibility. What was interesting about this system is how it reconfigured the entire game map in an instant based on the player's chosen camo. Similar to Ikaruga, which involved as its principle player action the inversion of hot (dangerous) and cold (safe) space, MGS3 offered players the strategic affordance of deciding for themselves what spaces would be hot or cold. A tree trunk was as perfect hiding place in tree bark camo; a horrible one in snow camo. In past Metal Gear games the configurations of hot and cold space were always fixed, and this fluidity made MGS3 a different strategic animal than other games. It wasn't about finding safe spots so much as creating them, something which was only made possible by its organic (and often vast) wilderness environments. Although there were a few indoor locations that required the symmetrical, ordered thinking of past games, most spaces in MGS3 were messy and sprawling. Some screens contained acres of chaotic, tangled undergrowth, where textures and colors mixed and swirled together in crazy ways. Learning to read and exploit the potential of the natural world was really the main challenge of MGS3. Both you and your enemies were at its mercy, rendered obscure by its twisty madness. Using nature better than your foe (who were also somewhat camouflaged but, unlike you, couldn't change their camouflage) was the order of the day, and it meant the difference between success and failure.

The theme of wilderness survival reached much farther than just manipulating visibility (and therefore combat advantage). It was also woven into the mechanics of health, which departed sharply from past Metal Gear games. Health was no longer replenished by healing items. The player had to wait for their health to recover naturally over time, which was essentially an expansion of the bleeding-recovery mechanic from MGS2. Like bleeding had previously, overall health in MGS3 would recover faster if the player lied still. Lack of stamina would also impede health recovery, as well as cause a host of other ill conditions. Like the directional mic, MGS3's stamina meter was a core game system generalized from a past game's special-case function. It was essentially a re-tooling of the grip meter from MGS2, which governed how long a player could hold onto a ledge. Unlike the grip meter, the stamina meter was on-screen at all times, and would deplete for a variety of reasons. Running, swimming, fighting, hanging, or just natural hunger: all these things would make stamina deplete. Low stamina caused not only slower health regeneration but also diminished aiming ability. The screen would shudder while in first-person mode, making it harder for the player to perform effectively in battle. All this necessitated catching and eating the live animals littered throughout MGS3's wild world. Only by eating the right animals (and avoiding the wrong ones) could the player maintain their health and their physical combat performance.

Far from being just a localized mechanic, eating and stamina in MGS3 was a global system that governed all human behavior, not just Snake's. All enemies had stamina, which depended on stores of food rations scattered throughout the wilderness. Sneaking into and blowing up one of these store houses would cause all enemies in the nearby area to starve, giving them all the same low-stamina effects you would suffer under similar conditions. Their aim became worse, and a single punch would cause them to fall unconscious. Destroying the enemy's non-food resources was another way to manipulate their behavior. Blowing ammo stores made them less likely to waste bullets unless they had a clear shot. This, combined with the fact that enemy soldiers would not shoot a comrade you were holding, gave shrewd players enormous leverage should they find themselves cornered by an group of numerous--but tired and under-equipped--enemies. Taking a hostage, backing towards an exit, and then making a break for it as the few bullets your opponents had missed you by a mile was just one way to bend these logics to your ever improvisational advantage.

Metal Gear Solid 3 is a great example of existing game mechanics reconfigured to create a different game from its predecessors. With the core mechanics of military espionage more or less solidified after MGS2, MGS3 feels like a conscious experiment to explore new flavors of (rather than just better or more complicated) stealth gameplay. It does this by focusing on a setting and a theme, and allowing that setting and theme to both inspire new mechanics and reshape existing mechanics. As a result MGS3 is a game about wilderness survival as much as it is a game about sneaking behind enemy lines, a fact that can be felt coherently in every aspect of its design. This man versus nature conflict, embodied globally in the game system, might explain why enemy soldiers seem a bit more human than before, for now they are unambiguously subject to the same forces as the player. In many games the rules that govern non-player characters and those that govern player-characters are different, but in this game they are the same. Understanding this, that your foe contains all the same human frailties you do, is your key to to defeating him in MGS3's unforgiving world. As we'll see, this gradual humanization of the enemy will only increase as the series progresses.

A Design History of Metal Gear - Part 2: Going 3D

2010-02-11T13:07:00.000-08:00

For me the Metal Gear series doesn't fit the franchise model of "same game plus one new feature". It feels more like a 20-year-long prototyping exercise in espionage dynamics. Rules are reshuffled from game to game to create different flavors of emergence. Sometimes the same mechanics dropped into new kinds of level architecture creates a different experience. Unlike most videogame sequels the Metal Gear games are actually different games... with only a few notable exceptions.

Metal Gear Solid (PSX 1998) is notable in that shares more with its immediate predecessor than any other game in the series. MG2's additions of crawling, the radar, and enemy alert phases remained unchanged in MGS. Even the wall-tap, which MGS added as a way to distract enemies, was functionally the same thing as the wall-punch from MG2. One thing it did add was camera manipulation. Being the first Metal Gear game in 3D, Solid essentially took MG2's design and dropped it unchanged into a 3D space. Hiding under things now forced the player into a low angle view. Pressing against a wall caused the camera to swing down into a landscape view, allowing players to see down long hallways. And at any time the player could enter "first-person view mode" which allowed them to look at the surrounding environment through Snake's eyes, although in this mode they could not punch, shoot, or otherwise interact. Certain weapons, like the sniper rifle, allowed such actions in first-person, but they were the exception. By and large combat and movement happened in the same top-down perspective as in the 2D Metal Gears. The camera was pulled much farther in on Snake, giving the player a more limited view of the surrounding space. This is what necessitated the various camera actions, to approximate (albeit with some new cinematic flair) the kind of spatial understanding that was effortless in earlier games.

Gameplay-wise the only new core actions MGS added were in hand-to-hand combat. Players could now grab, choke, and throw enemies. These new moves were useful because of another big change: punching was no longer lethal. Fisticuffs now simply knocked enemies out temporarily, which necessitated alternate silent take-down methods. In MG2 players could always punch enemies into oblivion if weapons failed. In MGS the same behavior would only delay a threat, not eliminate it. And since choking was a lot harder than punching, attempting silent take-downs in MGS generated a lot more anxiety. There were more possible outcomes, more ways to both succeed and fail than before. This, combined with the stronger need to observe before acting thanks to the camera limitations, gave the system largely inherited from MG2 a higher-stakes kind of tension.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (PS2 2001) added a slew of elements that changed the core experience. New kinds of environmental architecture prompted the existence of new moves, including hanging off ledges, somersaulting over obstacles, and hiding in lockers. More significantly, all guns could now be aimed and fired in first-person, which made marksmanship a key factor in play. Precision was necessary because enemies now responded differently to being shot in different locations. Leg shots hampered movement, arm shots hampered aim, and head shots were fatal. Another big change was enemies would now respond to threats of violence rather than just violence itself. Pulling your weapon on an enemy would make them surrender, at which point training your weapon on different parts of their body would terrify them into dropping items. Disposing of these soldiers once at your mercy became another new aspect. For the first time players had the option non-lethal take-downs, in the form of a tranquilizer gun. Enemies could be put to sleep for long periods of time (as opposed to briefly dazed, like in MGS). Bodies now needed to be hid before other enemies saw them, which players could do by dragging them to lockers and other hiding places. Soldiers responded to fallen comrades with complex group tactics. Enemies now functioned as units rather than individuals, performing complicated sweep-and-clear maneuvers. Enemies on the offensive would try and flank the player, cut off exits, or call for reinforcements.

The stealth basics of MG1 and the expanded palette of MG2/MGS did not prepare you for the dense and subtle world of MGS2, which required a very different approach to problem-solving. You couldn't just run around killing everybody anymore, even if you did so quietly. Your strategy had to include removing evidence of your encounter. This catapulted Metal Gear into into a new realm of Hitchcockian suspense, as the game was now basically about the logistics of murder and not getting caught. Bodies were not the only evidence to be dealt with. Snake would now bleed when shot, leaving telltale trails of gore for soldiers to follow. Bandages would stop bleeding, but the easiest way was to simply stop moving for a period of time, further reinforcing the value of tactical stillness. The collective fury that would be unleashed on the player if caught made covering your tracks imperative. Engagements had to be kept on an individual level, to prevent group tactics by any means possible. The highest moments of tension were those between when the player was discovered and when the group was alerted. Unlike in MGS, where public alerts would sound the moment anyone saw you, enemies in MGS2 needed to communicate with HQ before the group responded. Killing an enemy just as they reached for their radio was a crisis averted, just as disabling a radio with a well-placed shot was a free ticket to make mistakes.

MG1, MG2, and MGS were fun little cat and mouse games, but MGS2 was really where the series opened wide as a possibility space. The number of dynamic outcomes involved in any given encounter, based on the various cascading levels of enemy behavior, was huge. More importantly, MGS2 required different types of thought and problem solving than previous Metal Gear games. Just because you were good at MGS did not mean you were good at MGS2. Enemy soldiers were different behavioral animals, ones which demanded private attention to be dealt with effectively. MGS2 is when your relationship with the enemy became intimate. "What do you do with enemies once you have them?" increasingly became the key question of the series, and as we'll see many of the big design changes (at least in the next two games) revolve around this idea.

A Design History of Metal Gear - Part 1: The MSX Years

2010-02-01T12:55:00.000-08:00

I just finished the demo for Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, and I am struck by how streamlined its game design is compared to previous Metal Gear games. The number of core actions available to the player have been significantly reduced, at least at first glance. Some have just been made context-sensitive, while others have indeed been eliminated. Given that Metal Gear is basically a 20 year old game design, one where the core mechanics can still be traced with impressive fidelity back to the 1986 original, its interesting to chart how they've mutated over the course of roughly eight games.

Metal Gear (MSX 1986) had a fairly small set of core mechanics. The player could move, punch, and shoot various weapons. Enemies would patrol around and attack if you crossed their line of sight, which was pretty straightforward since they had no peripheral vision. Levels were simple affairs where each room was a single screen, and all level design architecture was in right angles. (There was no diagonal movement.) Escaping to the next room/screen meant escaping your pursuers. Enemies could be dispatched up-close and quietly, via punching, or from a distance and loudly, via weapons.

Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (MSX 1990) added quite a lot of new elements. The biggest was probably the radar system, which was really several new design elements working in concert with each other. Unlike the first game, enemies in MG2 would follow you from screen to screen. Thanks to a 3x3 grid radar, the player could see which of the adjacent screens had enemies and which did not. If an enemy spotted you, they went into high alert and gave chase. If you managed to break their line of sight (usually by escaping to the next screen) they would begin searching for you. Since moving to the next screen no longer constituted "hiding", new hiding mechanics were introduced. Crawling allowed you to hide under tables and sneak into air vents, which was now the only way to shake pursuers.

MG2 still contained all the same core player actions established in MG1, only now some of them were given additional meaning in the context of the new system. Punching, which before was only useful as a silent take-down technique, became a mode of distraction. You could punch walls to make noise, which would lure enemies towards you. This example of appropriating old mechanics and given them new meaning in the context of a larger dynamic system is primarily what makes Metal Gear an interesting case-study, an on-going game design matryoshka in which each new design encapsulates the last but still manages remain a distinct experience.

Getting off on Inglorious Basterds

2010-01-26T17:07:00.000-08:00

Inglorious Basterds was a movie I liked quite a lot, and I think it's a lot more complex than most critics--even ones who liked it--care to admit. My biggest contention with popular views of the film is that Tarantino's portrayal of the Nazis is somehow intended just for sadistic laughs. Although this is certainly how the film was advertised (at least in the U.S.) I don't think the film upon viewing bares out anything so simple.

The way I read Basterds (and its critical reception) is that it intentionally sends mixed signals to the audience about how you're supposed to respond to its violence, and people find this so confusing they tend to respond by filtering out any complex feelings it generates, falling back instead on simplistic assumptions about Tarantino's intentions that the film itself doesn't support. Tarantino's Nazis are not remotely cartoonish. They are all complex characters with subtle psychology, and they remind me more of the Nazis in Paul Verhoeven's WWII films (Soldier of Orange, Black Book) than what we normally get in Hollywood movies.

Tarantino likes violence, clearly. He gets off on it and expects his audience to as well. But he's also proven over and over again in the course of his career that he is a genuine artist trapped in the body of a genre nerd. He has always seemed a lot more interested to me in complex human characters than in getting off on violence. When he has a choice between the two he opts for interesting characterization every time.

Honestly, who would think the scene where Eli Roth kills the Nazi with the baseball bat was just about getting off on his death? Why was he such a human character? I love the moment when Roth says (pointing to his medal) "What did you get this for, killing Jews?" and he responds stoically "No... for courage." The Nazi is arguably right, and he's already much more human than Roth's character is. So what am I supposed to feel about that? Is this scene really just about nothing more than the guilty thrill of justifiable violence? I don't see how you could come to such a conclusion without ignoring most of what's happening on screen. There are obviously some moments (I wouldn't call any of them full-fledged scenes) where the cold brutality of the Basterds is presented comically, sure, but even those moments to me say more about the Basterds than they say about the Nazis.

Considering that the Basterds are basically minor characters in the film, and considering that most of the movie is intelligent people--half of whom are Nazis--trying to out smart each other in tension-filled conversation, I find the accusations of anti-Nazi violence porn especially weird. They seem based far more on the ads for the movie and Tarantino's reputation as a violence hound than on the movie itself.

Inglorious Basterds is defensible ultimately because it draws some pretty obvious connections between violence, entertainment, and propaganda. These connections are so explicit the fact that the majority of critics seemed to have missed them feels like a kind of mass hypnosis to me, some bizarre inability on the broader population to review the film, not the filmmaker. The whole last section of Basterds concerns the showing of a Nazi propaganda film, Nation's Pride, in which we are treated to endless shots of Nazis in a movie theater laughing and cheering as they watch Americans getting killed. It doesn't take a brilliant mind to relate this back to earlier in the film when we were encouraged to laugh at the exact same sort of shit.

All this is compounded by the fact that Nation's Pride is shot and edited more like a modern American action movie than a Nazi-era German propaganda film. When we get off watching Nazis die, is it that different than when they got off watching their enemies die in their own films? When I found myself laughing at one of the shots and then Tarantino cut to a giant close-up of Hitler laughing at the same shot, I'd found my answer: when you laugh at this kind of violence, you laugh with Hitler.

Tarantino remains an intriguing filmmaker because this sort of ironic commentary seems entirely intentional, yet that doesn't seem to negate him (or us) getting off on violence in certain circumstances. While I wouldn't go so far as to say Inglorious Basterds is anti-violence, it clearly isn't afraid to embrace the complexities and contradictions generated by its own voyeuristic thrills. It's a much more complicated film than people seem to want to give it credit for, just like Tarantino is a much more complicated filmmaker than people seem to want to believe.

Tracing the Design Heritage of Demon's Souls

2010-01-24T18:42:00.000-08:00

My fascination with Demon's Souls has spurned a quest to discover where the hell its brilliance came from. Most people say it's a descendant of King's Field, the cult first-person RPG series Demon's Souls's developer, From Software, did some years ago. I have only really played one King's Field game, King's Field: The Ancient City for PS2, and not for very long. Although there is some resemblance, I think another series, one that isn't as well-known outside Japan, may be the real ancestor.

Shadow Tower was another first-person RPG series by From Software, one I'd never heard of until I began poking around the Internet. Some descriptions I read made them seem a lot more like Demon's Souls than King's Field, so I tracked them down to see for myself.

There are two games in the series: Shadow Tower for the PS1 and Shadow Tower Abyss for the PS2. I managed to grab them both off ebay and played each for a few hours. Shadow Tower is available in English. Shadow Tower Abyss isn't. This a shame because Abyss is by far the superior game, and the one that is, I feel, much closer in style, atmosphere, and gameplay to Demon's Souls.

The first game is okay. The controls are the clunky non-freelook ones common to many Japanese first-person games, but otherwise Shadow Tower does feel like a somewhat slower, awkward Demon's Souls. Weapon degradation is a major aspect of the game, and encounters with minor enemies can be pretty epic. And, of course, you upgrade weapons by collecting souls, although in Shadow Tower you actually have to pick them up as items. The importance of blocking is also another big similarity, with you being able to map a weapon to one hand and a shield to the other. It doesn't even remotely approach the sublime combat system of Demon's Souls, but you can definitely see the template being set.

The world is rather non-linear and rewarding of exploration. While I am not one to bash PS1-era graphics for being what they are, I do feel that the ones in Shadow Tower are somewhat repetitive. Like Demon's Souls there is no map, but unlike Demon's Souls a lot of environments look the same. This can make the game pretty tedious unless you are prepared to make a paper map as you play. From what I played the game seems actually less linear than Demon's Souls, with more alternate paths available.

The story for Shadow Tower is extremely minimal. There is a tower that is, er, forbidden. You go in. That's it. The games does contain some of Demon's Souls's brooding sense of silence and loneliness. (Like Demon's Souls there is no music.) The environment does seem to be imbued with some elements of narrative. There is writing you come across from past explorers, which looks a lot like the player messages in Demon's Souls, only here they are just baked in as part of the story.

One of the biggest arguments for Shadow Tower being an ancestor to Demon's Souls is the intro cinematic, which features a knight getting the crap beat out of him by a variety of monsters. The game really seems to suggest a similar sense of mortality and exhaustion on the part of the protagonist that was one of Demon's Souls distinguishing features. People familiar with Demon's Souls's non-U.S. box art will remember the knight riddled with arrows, ambiguously either dead or battle fatigued to the point of collapse. One gets the sense that Shadow Tower was an early attempt to create a player experience shaped around similar ideas.

Shadow Tower Abyss is very similar to its predecessor, except that it has superior art direction, narrative design, and usability design. The real good news is that it has an option for dual-analog Western-style controls, which is something King's Field never had. In this mode the weapon buttons are the trigger buttons, and players can switch back and forth on the fly between weapons in the right or left hand. (I didn't get a shield in Shadow Tower Abyss, but I'd be surprised if there aren't any.) This makes it almost identical to Demon's Souls's control scheme, which makes the gameplay nice and fluid.

Shadow Tower Abyss has firearms, which is probably the biggest thing which makes it feel different from both Demon's Souls and the original Shadow Tower. It takes place in the present day, and you begin the game with a gun. It isn't designed at all like an FPS though. Guns are useful, but they run out of ammo, which is why you need to deck yourself out with the knives, swords, and other melee weapons you find. It feels like you are an FPS-protagonist who somehow wandered into a Demon's Souls-like game, which is interesting. Functionally speaking the game is not that different, since firearms basically take the place of bows, but it's still an intriguing twist.

The story and world in Shadow Tower Abyss really makes me wish my Japanese was better. The thought and detail put into its environmental narrative is much closer to Demon's Souls than the first Shadow Tower. It's use of sound, light, and color is also closer to Demon's Souls in terms of establishing a mood, and suggesting danger around the next corner. There are a fair amount of NPCs, all of whom you can kill for no reason if you wish. I wandered around for a while just trying to figure out what the fuck was going on, where I was, and just what all these creepy tunnels were built for. The game has a fairly Lovecraftian vibe, with you basically thrown into this scary cave which leads you deeper and deeper into a complex netherworld. In this sense Shadow Tower Abyss really reminded me of Hell Night, another (wonderful) game I played recently that also achieved a similar effect, what I'd called the 'Ultima Underworld Effect'. These are games that really make me feel like I'm a normal human being trapped in a cave or some other such subterranian world, which is where a lot of their elemental power comes from. The lack of load screens helps this feeling a lot, as does the non-linear space design. You really feel like an explorer, not some videogame badass who's just in it for the asskickery.

If I had to recommend one of these games I'd obviously recommend Shadow Tower Abyss. It can probably be played and completed without understanding much Japanese, and the world and feeling it creates is thick and memorable. It's no Demon's Souls, but it's recognizably similar and effective in what it does. If you want to trace the design heritage of From Software's towering masterpiece, Shadow Tower Abyss is a great place to start, possibly a better place than King's Field.

Problems With The Lovely Bones.

2010-01-19T21:13:00.000-08:00

WARNING: This post contains spoilers for The Lovely Bones.

I saw The Lovely Bones last night. I have a lot to say about it that I can't quite formulate, but I found a reviewer who seems to have a take similar to mine:

Peter Jackson and his usual screenwriting collaborators, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, have simplified and amplified Sebold’s text, turning it from a meditation on the interiorpolitics of family into a supernatural revenge story. While there are a lot of things Jackson does right - chief among them the perfect casting of the young Irish actress Saoirse Ronan in the central role of Susie Salmon, a 14-year-old girl who is raped and murdered in 1973 - the movie seems to miss the point of the novel.

I think this is dead-on. Alice Sebold's novel is about grief, and how it is a long aching process in which absolution only comes with age. In the book the protagonist's narration from the afterlife is more of a device for Sebold to explore the way a family deals with loss. And although Sebold does dabble in some bitter-sweet metaphysics in which the girl's ghost occasionally breaks back into living world, it is done very sparingly. The overwhelming feeling of the novel is not that of a supernatural story, but a serious family drama where the ghost is mostly a narrative device to examine real living human pain. I found the book incredibly moving, precisely because it refused to offer any easy answers or absolutions to a family paralyzed by sadness.

There is a happy ending of sorts in the novel, but it only arrives after years of dull agony, in which we watch the family grow and change. The father's obsession to catch the killer is there, but it's not the center of the story. Neither is the killer, really. The detective bits of the novel existed, I felt, to illustrate the dangers of obsession, to show that absolution has to come from somewhere else.

When I remember the novel, the main narrative and emotional arc to me has nothing to do with the killer. It has to do with the Susie's younger sister gradually growing out of her shadow, of having the adolescence she didn't and the rest of her family finally recognizing and appreciating this. In my memory the climax of the book is when her younger sister and her boyfriend, now in their late teens, spend the night in an old house and decide to get married, which feels like a big cathartic moment. Either that or when Susie--in the novel's only overt moment of supernatural shenanigans--borrows the body of another girl to have sex with the boy she liked. While I thought that was maybe going too far when I read the book, it makes some sense when you consider that the novel was inspired by the author's own experience of being raped as a teenager. The ghost-sex near the end was, I thought, a sort of healing antidote to Susie's rape, like she refused to move on while her only sexual experience remained a horrific one. Given that the book was written by someone who experienced rape but was not murdered, the notion of reclaiming sex as an act of love and not of violence has obvious therapeutic connotations.

None of this is in the movie, which makes me wonder what Jackson, Boyens, and Walsh felt the point was. I read a quote by Jackson where he explained why he wanted to adapt the novel in the first place, saying "like all the best fantasy, it has a solid grounding in the real world". Why did he think it was fantasy, I wonder? Because it involves ghosts and heaven? 'Fantasy' is the last word I'd use to describe Sebold's novel, because there is nothing fantastic about the feelings and situations it explores.

Reading the book I was reminded of the horrible accounts I've read from time to time about surviving families of real murder victims. I read once about two parents dealing with the loss of their daughter, who was raped and murdered with a tree branch. Years afterward the father, still living with the grief and rage every hour, got a serious tooth infection. He refused to go to the dentist, choosing to spend days on end in agony. When his wife asked him why he refused to get help he said he was trying to absorb their daughter's pain, as if by taking pain upon himself he was retroactively shielding his daughter from the pain she went through. It made no sense at all, and this is perhaps what makes it such a heartbreaking example of how the mind attempts to deal with grief, especially a parent's grief.

There was no easy absolution for that family, no heartwarming moment where the ghost of their daughter appeared and said everything was okay. That's why grief is so hard: because it's not a Hollywood movie where people get to say goodbye one last time. This is a view Sebold seemed to share in her novel, in spite of a few carefully placed instances of the supernatural. The ghost-sex in the novel is more for Susie's piece of mind than for her friends', which I feel is the big (if subtle) difference between the book and the film. The film is all about how she's not really dead, and how that helps heal her family. The novel is about how she is dead, and how her family manages to heal themselves anyway.

Games That Made Me - Part 3: The 00s

2010-01-18T11:04:00.000-08:00

There's only one game released this past decade that made the sort of impression upon me that earns it a place on this list. I've loved plenty of games in the past 10 years, but only one that really changed my idea of what videogames can be...

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (Playstation 2, 2001)

My feelings about Metal Gear Solid 2 are intense to the point of incoherence... much like the game itself. A lot of why I love the game has to do with when it was released, which was right after 9/11. For me the game served a function that must have been similar to the film Dr. Strangelove when it was released at the height of the Cold War. As daring, irreverent political commentaries in games go, there is MGS2 and then there's nothing. Okay, well maybe there's Fallout 2, the game that ends with you wiping out the last remnants of a fascist, genocidal U.S. government. But that's just the end of the game. MGS2 is a balls-out 'fuck you' to America's worst dystopian impulses from the moment you press 'start' to the moment the final credits roll. That it seemed to be about America's post-9/11 nationalist hysteria was, of course, an accident of its release timing. But that doesn't change the fact that it functioned so well as a bombastic parody of Bush's new world order.

Because of MGS2 I still think of the people who run my government as "The Patriots": the faceless, powerful elite that are just out of democracy's reach. Whereas games like Deus Ex gave me the same old international conspiracy theories I'd seen in the X-Files, MGS2 gave me a deliciously national conspiracy theory: a horrifically corrupt U.S. government with a puppet democracy and a global censorhip agenda. The Patriots were responsible for everything in MGS2, including the game's intentionally linear design. You follow their instructions and do everything they ask you to, and thereby prove you are willing to be controlled. It's the same game design-as-mind control metaphor Bioshock would use years later, only MGS2 never contradicts itself by pretending rebellion from within the constraints of a designed system is possible. As the authors of your "game" The Patriots' stranglehold on you is absolute, a fact which they rub in your face by the end. A videogame is not a democracy, because the player does not have the ability to rewite the rules. But you don't really want a democracy anyway, do you? Not if you're being sufficiently entertained...

The way MGS2 positioned videogames, with their coyly disguised limits, as metaphors for similar kinds of deceptive government was, in a word, brilliant. It really did have a lasting effect on how I think about both games and government, which to this day is rather cynical. I suppose I feel as incredulous about Warren Spector's utopian notions of "shared authorship" as I do about Obama's promises of hope and change. They are nice promises, but really what does it mean to say a choice is "meaningful" when it is someone else deciding what "meaningful" means? Is the choice between the Left and Right in America a meaningful one? Is the ability to choose between path A or B in Mass Effect a meaningful one? Both game companies and politicians would like us to believe so, but it is important to recognize that these "choices" have been pre-defined within limits we, in fact, have no ability to influence.

MGS2 darkened my view of games forever, and it still remains an astonishing example of political commentary in a mainstream videogame. My demand that games be controversial on political subjects as well as hijack massive commercial budgets for the sake of naked personal statements is due entirely to MGS2. Splinter Cell, Call of Duty, and even Fallout 3 are inferior versions of MGS2 by this metric. In fact, nearly all games are inferior by this metric.

Final Thoughts

There are many, many games that remain important to me that I have not included on this list. Stuff like Super Punch-Out, Gunstar Heroes, Ikaruga, Snatcher, Symphony of the Night and many other of my favorite games are not ones I can really trace back to a "taste genesis", a prototypical game experience that I feel prepared me for loving these games. Looking at the games that influenced your taste is not really an exercise in listing all the games you love, but listing the games that determined the types of games you love. That's why Ikaruga is not on the list in spite of being one of my favorite games ever: because my love of it in no way lead to a love of shmups.

While I like games of all sorts of genres, there are certain types of games I keep coming back to, certain groups of aesthetic choices I tend to look for my enjoyment in. The games I listed--Frantic Freddie, Super Mario Bros., Ultima: Exodus, Bionic Commando, Ultima VII, System Shock, Thief, and Metal Gear Solid 2-- are not necessarily even my favorite examples of the game types they represent. But they are the ones that helped me developed the road map by which I found some of the best games I've ever played, and, more importantly, the tools to understand why I like them.

Ultima VII --> Arcanum, Fallout 1/2, Majora's Mask, Planescape: Torment

Final Fantasy VI --> Suikoden 1/2, Odin Sphere

System Shock --> Metroid Prime, Demon's Souls, Silent Hill 1/2, Hellnight

Thief --> Metal Gear Solid 3, Hitman 2

Metal Gear Solid 2 --> Killer7, Eversion, Passage, Shadow of the Colossus

Games That Made Me - Part 2: The 90s

2010-01-11T13:39:00.000-08:00

Continuing my series where I look at the games which most profoundly shaped my taste, I turn from the 80s to the 90s, and discover that my feelings about games definitely got more complicated as I got older.

Ultima VII: The Black Gate (PC, 1992)

Ultima VII was the reason I got into PC gaming. For a 13-year-old who had been weened almost exclusively on Nintendo, the deep dark world of The Black Gate was transcendental. It was clearly for adults, but not in the pandering way most games are now. Blood and sex were all handled in witty fashion, and I never got the sense the developers were impressed with themselves simply for having such things. They were, like everything else in Ultima VII, just part of an astonishingly rich world. Ultima VII was the first time I'd ever seen a game with no loading screen, with NPCs who weren't just signposts, and with party members who responded dynamically to many of your actions. My love of persistent, seamless game worlds and witty, complex dialogue comes almost entirely from Ultima VII. Any Elder Scrolls, Grand Theft Auto game, and, yes, most Bioware games are inferior versions of Ultima VII to me.

Final Fantasy VI (SNES, 1994)

Final Fantays VI was the first game I played that really moved me. This probably had something to do with the fact that I was an emotionally sensitive teenager at the time, but I think it also had something to do with the game's delicate (and arguably unique) sense of loss and tragedy. Unlike all other RPGs you don't stop the end of the world in FFVI. It happens, and it has a devastating effect on the group of characters you have gotten to know. The completely non-linear final sections of the game, in which you have to slog through a dying world in an effort to pull their friends (kicking and screaming if necessary) back towards hope, remain some of the most emotionally intense hours I've spent with a controller in my hand.

It may be nostalgia talking, but I feel that FFVI's melodramatic indulgences have aged a bit better than many other Japanese RPGs, largely because of the pixel art graphics and understated nature of the characters. Very few games in my experience earn the right to engage in the sort of emotion Final Fantasy VI does. It's probably the main reason I retain a soft spot for melodrama in games... when it's done well.

System Shock (PC, 1994)

System Shock is probably the most immersive experience I've had with a game. To me System Shock isn't so much a game as it is a place. Though I had a very similar experience with Ultima Underworld (a game which System Shock is basically a cyberpunk re-skinning of), System Shock still looms larger in my imagination as the game which made me consciously realize what a game-based first-person suspense story could be.

The implementation of a rogue A.I. as a metaphor for the game's designers was a masterstroke which made otherwise pedestrian use of game conventions (puzzles, power-ups, etc.) into a secret engine which fueled the narrative. Matching wits with the game became matching wits with SHODAN, which allowed for all kinds of devious reversals and thwarted expectations without the player's suspension of disbelief so much as shuddering. This all built towards a sublime final moment in which you literally lock wits--as in, you lock consciousnesses--with SHODAN via a cyberspace terminal connected directly to your brain. Having failed to destroy each other physically you face her on her home turf: as software. SHODAN attempts to overwrite your mind--which is expressed visually as her face overwriting your computer screen, pixel by pixel, while you desperately try to delete her mind from the inside out. It's stuff like this that not only makes System Shock a phenomenally memorable game, but also one of the best game-based examples of cyberpunk fiction I am aware of.

System Shock also did wonderful things with keeping physical space coherent without resorting to putting the player on rails. There were no load screens that weren't disguised, no cut-scenes that weren't explained as either remote surveillance footage or recorded messages. None of the games which later borrowed these devices (with the possible exception of Portal) used them as holistically or as consistently as System Shock. My demand for complete coherence in fictional 3D spaces as well as my taste for environmental narratives (real ones that require detective work, not ones that are handed to you on rails) comes from System Shock. Games like Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Bioshock, and especially System Shock 2 are all inferior versions of System Shock as far as I'm concerned.

Thief: The Dark Project (PC, 1998)

Since stealth games are the closest thing I have to a favorite game genre, I should include Thief: The Dark Project. Also by the makers of System Shock, Thief was great for a lot of the same reasons, but several new ones as well. The biggest thing I took away from it, I think, was the idea that stealth games are in a sense nerd revenge fantasies. They are about a smart weak person taking down a bunch of strong dumb people. Garrett's internal monologue in Thief is about how I imagined my own internal monologue in high school: full of smug superiority, mute rage, and ample wit. This might be why the dumb A.I. (still smarter than a lot of game A.I.) never registered as a flaw to me: the opportunity to taken down a bunch of idiotic meatheads was clearly a feature, not a bug.

Thief also impressed upon me, subconsciously perhaps, the notion that violence in games doesn't have to be a foregone conclusion. The stealth genre is basically predicated on the idea that violence is a choice, which might explain why I find its natural contours so appealing. Violence is, after all, a brutish solution to any given problem. But Thief wasn't boring enough to suggest alternatives based on moral grounds. Rather it suggested that pacifism can be more about narcissism than morality... an intriguing notion that probably speaks more to the real reasons behind the behavior of players (such as myself) who obsessively refuse to kill. It's not about right and wrong. It's about one drop of blood ruining my masterpiece. An artist like Garrett--like me--is clearly above such things.

Thief is one of the reasons I'm not particularly impressed by many stealth games, but why I try every one I can find in hopes they will generate the complex set of feelings and ideas that it did. Certain games in the Hitman and Metal Gear series approach this, but none of them quite achieve Thief's sense of exquisitely smug empowerment.

Games That Made Me - Part 1: The 80s

2010-01-09T21:14:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd kick off my blog with the "games that made me" exercise that's become so popular. It's where you take a look back at your life and try to identify the games that had the biggest impact on your current taste in video games. They don't necessarily have to be your favorite games (although they can be), just the most influential. I liken this to what psychologists say about parental modeling, about how we go through life looking for surrogates of our parents, our earliest relationship models. Similarly, one can imagine that many of the games we encounter early in our lives are the standards by which we consciously or unconsciously judge games afterward. We look for the games which shaped our tastes in every new game we play... and are usually disappointed when we don't find what we want.

Looking at the games which shaped us helps us understand why we like certain games and dislike others, or, to be more specific, why we see certain games as inferior versions of other games. I don't think this is anything to be ashamed of, as long as one doesn't pretend there's any objectivity to be hand in this process. We like what we like for complex reasons that were formed reflexively and unconsciously, by our natural gravitation towards certain works of art. Discovering why we gravitate towards some things and not others is a process of self-discovery, and one that is arguably required to intelligent criticism.

Frantic Freddie (C64, 1983)

The first game I remember playing for any significant amount of time. I have no idea how it shaped by gaming tastes other than being the first time I became genuinely obsessed with a game. I never did finish it.

Super Mario Bros. (NES, 1985)

The fist game I can remember that pulled me into a fictional world. I remember going to Chucky Cheese with my parents and dropping endless quarters on a Play Choice 10 just to play the first level of Super Mario Bros. I don't know why I found it so captivating, but I distinctly remember reality dropping away and be being only aware of what was happening inside the arcade cabinet. It was like reading a book or being underwater.

Ultima: Exodus (NES, 1987)

My first RPG and, interestingly, a twice-translated port of a port. Ultima: Exodus for the NES was a surprisingly faithful re-creation of Richard Garriott's pioneering original. All the Japanese developer (Pony Canyon) did was make it cuter. I didn't think much about it at the time, but my experience with the NES Ultima: Exodus--which was, ironically, my first exposure to "Western"-style open-world RPGs--may have profoundly altered the course of my taste development as I got older. I probably wouldn't have gotten into PC gaming if I hadn't first experienced a taste of it on the NES. I wouldn't have known what Ultima was, so I wouldn't have gone crazy when I saw the Ultima VII box in a PC store a few years later. (VII?! Holy shit! It was like getting a game from THE FUTURE!) To this day I am one of the few people I know who loves both Japanese and Western game design aesthetics about equally, who gets just as excited about Final Fantasy as Ultima, who doesn't regard one as an inferior version of the other. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that my first "Western" game was filtered through Japanese sensibilities.

Bionic Commando (NES, 1988)

Bionic Commando was the first game with a story and characters I really loved. They weren't complex at all, but for some reasons the game's presentation--with game design logic being totally dictated by dramatic logic (and not, as is usually the case, vice versa)--enthralled my friends and I to no end when we were 11. This game is still the reason I never mind an irregular difficulty curve as long as it makes sense story-wise. If the last boss is flesh and blood and I have a bazooka... well... he shouldn't take more than one hit, should he? Certainly not if he's Hitler.