Obscured Edition
I was sitting there, enjoying the end-of-GDC special edition of the Listen Up podcast when they got to the part where they were talking to Insomniac Games’ James Stevenson and Ryan Schneider. At one point during the discussion of Resistance 2, Stevenson and Schneider are addressing some of Garnett Lee’s complaints about the game and they have this to say:
“At the end of the day, we made three games into one in a very short amount of time… We did a solid job making a [big] game and… could we have done things better to make it a more consistent experience all the way around? Yeah.” Then, shortly after they follow up with this: “It always comes down to time versus resources versus where do we allocate our time and resources to [sic]? People say, ‘Well, why didn’t you do that?’ It’s like, well, if we had done that the game costs this much more to make, which means we make less money. Or, we have to charge more for the game.”
I paused the iPod at this point and just had to sit back and marvel for a moment at the patently ridiculous nature of what was being conveyed in that conversation. Essentially Insomniac is saying that they made a product that was three games in one and they recognize that they didn’t produce something with all the “consistency” it could have had. Their defense for this is that given the time and resources they had, they chose to sacrifice on overall quality rather than sacrifice what I can only presume is their vision of three games in one. I can’t comprehend this logic. I talked a little about this last week, how Valve has created Left 4 Dead which is simply phenomenal. It’s a polished, taut experience that, perhaps as a result of that polish, lacks a little breadth.
It’s utterly backwards that someone would say, “Our design document was too big, too ambitious for us to be bothered with making it good unless we wanted to charge you extra for it.” No. Just… no. You do not get to blame the consumers or suggest that it is somehow my fault that your game sucks in some way. If you over-reached, you screwed up in your job function and you don’t get to sit there thinking that there is some valid excuse for that.
The crazy thing is that I didn’t even play Resistance 2 because, as forgiving of first person shooters as I am, I couldn’t get through the original Resistance: Fall of Man because it was so uninspired. Come to think of it, I couldn’t be bothered to finish their other game, Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, either. So thanks, Insomniac. You just confirmed that I never need to bother with one of your games again. Charge whatever you like for ‘em. Maybe eventually you’ll put out something good that I still won’t play because I can’t afford your idea of quality.
- Haze
One of the aspects of a lot of longer-format media like games, comic books and TV shows that intrigues me is the, for lack of a better phrase, switcheroo effect. What I mean is the sort of alteration event that changes everything you think you know about what’s going on. Sometimes these things are unplanned: You can look at the death of Jason Todd in Batman which was a narrative decision made after the introduction of the character or the first appearance of Dawn in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They serve the arc of the story as significant events and their gravity is what makes them interesting. Then there are the built-in switcheroos, where a game-changer is planned from the outset. It’s easiest to see these in shorter format narratives like movies but regardless of how much time a writer has to build “the norm” which is basically designed to be subverted, the key in effectively jarring the audience is to set the stage first. After all, with no frame of reference for how things ought to be, you can’t be impressed when that scenario is flipped upside down.
Which is why it surprises me when things like Haze come along and frustrate the audience by either playing their game-changer too early or who establish the potential for it immediately. I mean, the introductory cinematic—which plays before the menu is even displayed—reveals that whatever you do as a Mantel soldier is going to change at some point in the campaign. And to me this is broken from a storytelling standpoint; the first couple of missions are bogged down by identifiable foreshadowing events that highlight something you already know and there is never a point at which you can really feel like you understand the character you’re supposed to be at the outset. You’re given no time to formulate an opinion of Shane Carpenter or Mantel because the game batters you about the head with its judgment of them both.
I realize a lot of ink has been spilled going over BioShock and its narrative choices but one thing that I think is pretty self-evident, at least, is that the run up to the switcheroo effect was paced in such a way that it could be significant because it allowed the player ample time to reach their own conclusions about the world being presented and their place in that world. Haze suffers because it tells you at every possible step not just what is happening but what is coming and how you’re supposed to think about that. Which is infuriating because the potential exists here for something pretty startling to occur.
They could have given you 3-5 missions that felt an awful lot like Halo: You are super soldier, you use the might of your Nectar to suppress the insurgents and you build a commeraderie with your squad mates, who would of course have to be toned down from the unlikable slavering psychopaths they are in the game and into a more typical group of stunted development secondaries from most action games or movies. Then, after you’ve settled into what you can only assume is the norm, the pieces that are currently thrust into the narrative scope in the first four minutes of the game (the wayward soldier adjusting your gear, the deepening madness of your rank-equal, the malfunction of your super abilities) can begin to unfold in a more measured approach. The key is that the longer you take to build up to the reveal, the more meaningful it is. As it stands I felt truly relieved to be rid of the Nectar which was frankly nothing but trouble for the hour I used it and I don’t think that was the sense the developers were going for. - Mirror’s Edge
Let’s get this out of the way: Combat in Mirror’s Edge stinks. First-person melee combat is typically a bit dicey. Condemned did it passably although I hated the block mechanic; Oblivion’s combat is okay but being a role-playing game it is relatively obscured by statistical and level-progression factors, etc. But frequently the rule is that if you want a player to engage in fisticuffs you need to pull back from first person. So it is with Mirror’s Edge where any time Faith has to slow down and address the armed foes in her way (as opposed to merely fleeing from them) the game loses some of its magic.
But when you’re tasked with merely fleeing, via some well-crafted parkour-style moves in first person, the game hits on all cylinders and it reaches for that plateau of transformative experience where you cease to control an avatar in a virtual world but you step into it with your full imagination. There have been times where I find myself sitting too close to the screen, where a failure has me resetting my physical person to a degree and finding, to my surprise, that I’ve been tensed up: jaw clenched, legs taut, eyes narrowed, arms locked in an effort to keep my in-game self alive. The game works best when the ubiquitous police presence is just on your tail but not actively blocking your path, such that bullets rain around you without seriously threatening you unless you stop moving for too long. It creates a frenzied pace and the inclusion of “runner vision” where key world features like ramps and launchpads are highlighted in red amplifies this, creating a scenario in which my lack of actual understanding of what works in a freerunner’s mind is approximated so I can traverse long sections of unexplored territory on my first pass.
I feel like the game should have been entirely about this situational immersion: Foes at your back pressing from behind, quickly evaluating your surroundings and finding a route to escape without the benefit of trial and error. Even something like randomized level design would have helped so you don’t start to do the gamer thing and find the pattern, memorize the route, practice the buttons until it comes together. I’d rather have to catch the groove, build the chain and just start entering that zen state that is all quick decision making and confidence and reflexive action.
Unfortunately Mirror’s Edge is still hampered by the idea that it has to be a captial-G Game, which means if you see guns somewhere eventually you have to be able to pick one up and it means you need to be able to do speed runs and you have to cater to the people who think they need to fight if they have a punch button. I’d be okay if the game even gave players the same tools but punished you realistically for behaving like a gamer. Shoot a cop? The intensity of the pursuit suddenly quadruples.
I do find it curious that the cut scenes look like a bad fan-made project with their flat Esurance style. The game itself is beautiful, I just can’t understand why they didn’t do in-engine scenes. I even like flat, cel-shaded aesthetics but here the animations are simply so poor that characters (like Faith) who are supposed to be catlike and graceful move like finger puppets. The whole thing is just very distracting from the otherwise solid quality and design. So far the story isn’t anything to write home about but its clichés are unoffensive and, unlike some games, I can at least follow the story so the writing is doing something correctly. - Puzzle Quest
Let me describe a peculiar challenge in writing a weekly game blog: Sometimes I play a game semi-casually for a very, very long time. In those cases it can be very trying to come up with even a brief bit of commentary on it week after week as I continue to play it. This has never been more true than it is with Puzzle Quest. Not only am I still playing the PSP version, but I’m playing it after having already devoted weeks and weeks to it on XBLA and having played another version of it on the DS for a couple of weeks. And yet the strongest testament I can give to this game is that I keep playing it. Few (video) games have the power to capture my attention for long stretches. I played an awful lot of Counter-Strike. Twisted Metal 2 spent several months in the PSOne. I put a load of time into Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. I played Oblivion beyond my usual attention span. Geometry Wars has stuck with me. There have been a few games I’ve played more than once. But by and large I’m a consumer of games: I play them until either they end or I tire of them and then I move on. I don’t typically dig in and master a single title. For a game to reach this plateau with me it has to be beyond addictive and into some strange Neverland of perfect balance, replayability, theme and I think place and time play a huge role. None of the games I count in this class of long-term play are strikingly similar: A multiplayer-only FPS, a multiplayer racing/combat hybrid, a turn-based tactical RPG, a sprawling western role-playing epic, a twin-stick shooter and now a fantasy-themed puzzle game. I guess when something works for me, it just works. - Dig Dug II
This has become my standard go-to inbetweener game, played in short 3-5 minute bursts while I wait for something else to happen. Part of it is that I’m carrying my DS packed with Namco Museum DS on me more in case someone wants to get a game of Pac-Man Vs., but the other part has less to do with Dig Dug II and more to do with my favorite hardware feature on the DS: Clamshell sleep mode. I know it’s a little thing but the convenience of saved states is so perfectly aligned with how I want my personal electronics to function that it makes me feel as if things were right. - Pac-Man Vs.
Last week I played a couple of games with Nik, and this week I had a chance to play through about a dozen games with my friends. I still haven’t gotten a full four-player game going yet, but I was able to try out all the mazes available in the single-cart mode (I’m not sure if there are more if you do multi-cart or not). Frankly it seemed like the choice of maze was largely irrelevant and more significant was some lag that we had to deal with on a couple of occasions. Plus it took us a while to figure out that AI-controlled ghosts have to be “activated” by the human ghost players by touching them and that if the ghosts get the fruit, their view of the maze expands greatly for a short period of time, making it easier for them to track down the Pac-Man player. We also started to understand how the scoring works a little better (Pac-Man start with 1600 points and any ghost who captures him takes those points but if Pac-Man can clear the maze those points are added to his score).
This addition is literally the reason to own Namco Museum DS, even though I like a few of the other titles. It’s one of those things that highlights the DS’ strengths (including the less tangible strength of being comparatively ubiquitous especially among gamer circles) and, frankly, ought to be built into every DS’ internal memory. I’m not sure if the forthcoming DSi is going to have anything like that, but if they do and part of it doesn’t include even a single-maze variant of this game, consider the Opportunity Missed stamp primed and ready to strike. - Rock Band 2
My long-struggling RB1 guitar controller finally gave up the ghost in a serious way this weekend: It no longer registers downstrokes on the strum bar. I even tried to pull out the wireless GHIII controller and quickly remembered that it works in the strictly technical sense but the blue and yellow keys have to be hit just so and frankly that’s no way to play the game. We did find a literal replacement on eBay for pretty cheap so hopefully we will luck out and it will work perfectly. In the meantime, Nik and I occasionally struggle to figure out what to do since after all our shows are watched and our chores are done, we always default to Rock Band. - Scrabble
I know I said last week I wasn’t going to mention Facebook Scrabble here any longer but this time Nik and I actually pulled out our physical copy of the game and gave it a go. The online game, I quickly realized, is really more of a variant since a mechanic of the board game is the challenge, where you risk your next turn to pause the game and do a dictionary lookup on the last word played. If you’re right and the word is invalid, it doesn’t count and the offending player loses their turn instead. On Facebook, the built-in dictionary prevents you from playing words that are not valid, and the dictionary lookup is right in the interface. So part of the game is trying to find words that you think are real and testing them out. If you’re patient and less concerned with playing the game “right” you can just type combinations of letters into the dictionary from your rack to find a decent match. In “real” Scrabble the use of a word you aren’t completely sure about is a calculated risk, as is proposing the challenge if you think someone may be trying to play a phony word. I’m not sure how they would get around the limitation in an online mode other than the honor system but the loss of a turn can be a huge setback in the game so I think it’s strange that they felt it needed to be omitted. - Half-Life 2
I spent a curious moment on Saturday morning after I had watched the credits roll on Mirror’s Edge and Haze where I realized that I didn’t have enough time to play a whole Left 4 Dead campaign nor enough time to set up my painting station to get some work done on Blood Bowl teams and I needed an interminable PSN update before I could pick up LittleBigPlanet again. I wandered into my graveyard of not-yet-traded games and sort of blindly selected The Orange Box because apparently I’m all over First Person games all of a sudden. I’ve been meaning to go through Half-Life 2 again at some point before Episode 3 comes out and a friend at work has recently picked it up himself so it has crept back into my mind. I didn’t get far, as expected, but it was intriguing to note how quickly the game grabs your attention. Having played Haze so recently it was very striking to me the difference between developers who understand how to write a video game and those who just don’t. - Gang of Four
I haven’t played this one, which was a favorite a couple years back, for quite a while. We pulled it out as a starter for our board game night and got through about half the game before we knocked off in favor of Galaxy Trucker. I started out strong even though I had forgotten most of my strategies, winning the first three rounds. But then everyone had started to get their sea legs back and I wasn’t able to luck my way through any longer. I never did get the titular gang of four (or five or six) which can sometimes be the difference in getting your strategies to execute but more often than not I found myself getting beat by very narrow margins like one suit/color higher on single card plays or a full house with a slightly higher three of a kind but a much lower pair. I had fun but I remembered why the game doesn’t get played all that often: It’s pretty light for a game that requires a minimum of three people and a maximum of four. In my gaming circles, that many people sort of suggests something with a bit more meat. - Galaxy Trucker
My first experience with this quirky board game was really positive even though I lost by a ratio of almost 2:1. It is basically broken down into two phases played across three rounds: The build phase and the travel phase. Each player gets an identical ship grid which consists of empty squares in roughly spaceship-shaped configurations which start small in round one and get progressively bigger. You build your ships by placing tiles on connections in a way that is somewhat similar to the Carcassonne games. The building components can be lasers, batteries, crew compartments, cargo bays, shields, connectors, boosters and a few other special bits and the idea is to create the best ship you can from the tiles you draw. You can replace tiles but the ones you put back are face up so anyone can see and/or take them. Once your ship is built you handle the travel phase by going through a random deck of cards which each feature certain events like abandoned space stations which you can use to trade crew members for resources or cash, planets which can give you resources, asteroids which can damage you ship or empty space which lets you try to jump to the head of the pack. Some things like asteroids and pirates can be driven back or countered by shields and lasers, but often you end up losing parts of your ship from these events due to a clever 2D6 dice rolling system that maps grid rows and columns to outcomes from the rolls. At the end of the travel phase you tally up your damage and bounty and receive cash for how successful your shipment was and after three rounds the player with the most money wins. It’s really cleverly designed and the aesthetic I thought was phenomenal. I really liked that both of the key phases were equally enjoyable as opposed to some multi-phased games which are imbalanced from one part to the next.
I also enjoyed that most of the time players are either acting in tandem as in the building phase or the individual actions are quick so even on the first play through there isn’t a lot of down time where you’re waiting for opponents to figure out what they want to do. Aside from the obvious thematic similarity I thought about Race for the Galaxy a lot while playing it, I think because the mechanics were simultaneously complex and yet had a kind of knowable logic to them which relied on about as much luck as I like in a game but leaving plenty of room for solid strategic decision making to keep me coming back.
As big of a fan of Race as I am, I think I might like Galaxy Trucker even more. - Dead Space
My gaming week’s coda, I played for about an hour Monday night. I managed to miss most of the hype and details about the game during its initial launch window and found the first chapter that I played pretty enjoyable. It took some getting used to that the camera is extremely close to the back of the player character so your model takes up a huge portion of the screen real estate. I did settle into it and thought they did a good job with the atmosphere. I have been playing all my games with headphones lately since I try to avoid subjecting the already sleep-deprived Nik to any unnecessary noise, but it underscores some of the sound effect work that goes into games sometimes and they did a bang-up job with the creepy whispers and clattery aliens in this one. It seems like it has a bit of the silent protagonist thing happening which I’m not to crazy about, but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. So far I’ve found it sort of unnerving more than really scary, although it’s gotten me a few times already with the sudden startle. I think this is going to be my gaming project for the coming week so expect to hear a lot more about it in the next Edition.
Spoiler Alert: Haze and Mirror’s Edge
I finished both Haze and Mirror’s Edge this weekend, and largely my opinion of Haze was unchanged from beginning to end. Even though the game suggests that it should be a super-soldier Halo-clone it differentiates itself by ultimately pitting you against an army of super-soldiers. The abilities you get once you join the opposing faction are frightfully dull in comparison which means the game has this sort of uneven quality where you never really see any benefit to having the Nectar abilities: They are annoyingly glitchy to start with and you lose them very quickly, but even once you’re fighting as a regular person the game lacks any real punch behind your opponent’s Nectar. Opposing forces seem no more difficult to bring down than the insurgents did before your flip-flopping loyalties kicked in. I’m not sure, even having finished the game, what the hook was really supposed to be here. I guess it’s brief enough (I probably finished the campaign in 9 hours) that ultimately there dosn’t have to be a hook, but I can’t figure out what I was supposed to like about this game.
Despite the hamfisted storytelling, the game did have one effective moment in the closing seconds as, after destroying the Nectar facility in the Observatory and then fighting through the land carrier and ultimately killing Duvall (which I did with a couple of simple hand grenade tosses… easy peasy), you sit with Morenio on a chopper and he tells you that he thinks Nectar was just mismanaged by Mantel and actually could be effectively administered to ease fear and anxiety in the populace now that they have to rebuild their war-torn country. He rails against the corporation and ultimately calls them “animals” in a creepy juxtaposition with the psychotic Duvall’s catchphrase that allowed him to justify his actions. The problem is that, as with the rest of the writing in Haze, there isn’t enough context and the characterization has to be blunted due to the writers’ inability to properly provide a sense of personality to the game itself, much less its sketchy characters. Earlier we had seen Shane question Morenio about the assault on the carrier once the Nectar plant was disabled (note that there are still plenty of apparently functioning Nectar-soldiers on the carrier so whatever you did wasn’t quite good enough) and Morenio’s response is somewhat injust but the potential impact of the whole sequence, and really the entire narrative, is watered down by the lack of dynamic and the visibly disposable nature of the story being told. I don’t demand that my games contain story enough to compare to a top-tier novel or film, but there’s no reason the story can’t achieve at least the plot quality of a half-decent comic book or role-playing module.
The contrast to all the murkiness of the Haze story (har har) is the simple but effective tale presented in Mirror’s Edge. I have to say that overall my impressions of this game are remarkably high. It too is fairly brief, I finished in maybe 12 hours. But where I doubt I’ll be able to remember the story from Haze in a week, I feel like the whole experience of Mirror’s Edge is going to stick with me. EA/Dice did so many things right with the game that I’m simultaneously forgiving of its flaws and yet painfully betrayed by them. Let’s talk for a moment about the 2D cutscenes that comprise the game’s narrative cinematics. There are unplayable first-person cutscenes in the game, and they are so viscerally effective that I want to weep when I think of the missed opportunity that the hoary Flash interludes represent. There is a moment fairly early on where you (as Faith) encounter your sister, Kate. You discuss a tense situation and then embrace, before you turn to run. This simple moment, a first-person in-game hug, is so immersive and conveys so much about the characters since Kate is, for all intents and purposes, one of the police “blues” you’ve spent much of the game to this point running from. Without battering you over the head with inter-family conflict dynamics and exposition, you understand that Faith and Kate have taken different paths but in spite of that they share a bond.
That somewhere in the process of creating this game the decision was made to subvert this potentially remarkable device and create crummy cartoons almost makes me despair. The good news, if there is good news, is that in spite of this cardinal sin Mirror’s Edge transcended for me into the realm of entertainment that I know games can be. I’m not sure non-gamers get this, but you can watch a movie that moves you or thrills you or excites you but those will always be vicarious experiences: You feel those things with a character on-screen. What games hold in their gossamer core of True Potential is the ability to allow you and you alone to be moved or thrilled or excited because you’ve not been taken for a ride but you’ve conducted the train. I mentioned it above with the discussion of how tense I found myself at times while playing, but what highlights it even more is the ending sequence. You work your way up to the top of The Shard and you enter the server room that contains the data fed from all the city’s surveillance. Your final test is to kill or be killed and you take out the guards, turn their guns on the glass partitions and high-tech equipment and then ascend to the roof. Of course you’re betrayed by Jackknife, as if he hadn’t betrayed you long ago, and then you realize quickly that there isn’t going to be some big boss battle. You don’t have to take down Jackknife in hand-to-hand combat or some quick time event, you don’t have to find a rocket launcher and shoot down his helicopter. Instead, you just have to make one more jump. The first-person experience of the helicopter crash and the rescue of Kate results in a spinning panorama of the city as the screen fades to white and the closing credits roll as “Still Alive” (no relation) plays. Like all the fantastic music in the game, it fits the mood perfectly and plays just long enough for the radio broadcast epilogue to cut in and give that last bit of welcome closure. The pacing is so spot on and the whole ordeal is so measured and almost minimalist in feel that it’s on the verge of anticlimax except that after the journey through the story that has just been told, I felt like it was exactly as it should be.
Let me crystalize what I mean: The end of Mirror’s Edge puts the game on the backseat to the story. It’s the first time I can ever remember thinking that had been done in a game. The move sequence that ultimately dispatches Jackknife is literally the easiest move you pull off in the entire game. And why not? It works. Listen, I wasn’t on the verge of tears or anything but I did feel like, well, like I had just been through something. The biggest praise I can give to Mirror’s Edge is that when it was over I felt like Faith’s path had been my path and we shared some kind of bond. Yeah, I can step back and say that the story was presented poorly and the combat was a concession to consumer expectation and many of the plot points were predictable… but three days later I’m still humming the title theme and thinking about that time I had to climb to the top of the atrium or dance across moving subway cars or scamper across rooftops while three snipers tried to take me out. That right there? That’s why I play games.