Monthly Archives: August 2005

Still waiting for red

  • Reading time:5 mins read

aderack: Just because it’s right in front of me as I type this. I… the DS thing. The Sony guy. The DS outselling the PSP by FOUR TIMES, and furthermore selling more than every other console PUT TOGETHER. Gimmick. Limited appeal.

… Yeah. Don’t need to talk about it really. Just observing.

I’m kind of surprised, on a level, that people have started to notice the obvious. It doesn’t often happen. I mean. With the DS being the only interesting system out there now and certainly the most interesting thing since the Dreamcast, with Sony completely missing the point with the PSP, with the DS bringing in people who’d never been interested in videogames before…

I just wonder why it’s not available in more colors here.
ajutla: It’s funny as hell.
aderack: It’s… weird. They’re figuring it out on their own, and with only about half a year of lag. Maybe that says something. Like people are getting fed up.
ajutla: You can only play videogames because they are videogames for so long.
aderack: I mean. A couple of years ago, I don’t think I’d see people mocking the Sony guy the way they are now. You’d see Sony claiming the PS2 was the first Internet-compatible home console, and no one would call them on it. Even though, say, Sega had just launched Seganet. And PSO was only a few months away. And the Dreamcast wasn’t even the first, either.
ajutla: The big thing that characterized this generation for me was people noticing the rot starting to set in. Just–nothing really happened. And people realize this.
aderack: Maybe the stage is getting ripe for the Revolution. Especially since it’s supposed to be priced under $200 at launch (last I heard), compared to the 360 and PS3 — which, if you’ve not noticed, are selling in bundles that go past $1,000. And it’ll have the same DS thing going for it, it looks like, versus the PSP of the otther two systems. Also, the other two are almost indistinguishable, while the Revolution should stand out.
ajutla: To be fair, I’m pretty sure that $1,000-plus 360 bundle assumes you’re buying every launch game that will be available, even the ones no one is sure will be available yet. Still.
aderack: Yes. Still, the standard bundles are around $700.00. That’s the only way to buy the system from some retailers. It’s just — holy shit. Who wants to invest that much in a fucking game console?
ajutla: IT’S BECAUSE IT’S AN ENTERTAINMENT SYSTEM NOW.

…except they’ve already done that before.
aderack: But no one will use it for anything other than playing videogames and maybe watching DVDs if they don’t have any better player.
ajutla: The psp/DS thing suddenly becomes very ironic with that idea in mind.
aderack: Oh. Yeah.

I guess Kutaragi got the wrong message when, for, like, a YEAR after the PS2 was released in Japan, the best-selling application for it was The Matrix. And people used it mostly as a DVD player until around the time the other two systems came out. It’s not because that’s what people want from a game console; it’s because there weren’t any cheap DVD players in Japan at the time.
ajutla: Right.
aderack: And the PS2 filled that gap.
ajutla: The thing is. Kutagari / Allard / et al have the idea that videogames are over. In a sense. And that you can build this big box. That you put your videogames in. And your other entertainment, too, while you’re at it.
aderack: Because the market’s stagnating, so they need to lean on other things until it magically recovers.
ajutla: And the market is stagnating because they’re leaning on other things.
aderack: Or more simply because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.
ajutla: That too.
aderack: They’re not really interested in videogames; just in being in the videogame business. And so fair weather friends and all…

Compared to people who are doing this for a business because, well, it’s what they do. So they have a vested interest. Not that Nintendo doesn’t have its own problems to address…
ajutla: It’s kind of telling that the most interesting feature about the Revolution, right now, is that you can play old games on it. Nintendo is looking forwards by looking backwards.
aderack: Making all of history current. That strikes me as important. The way that all of cinema is “current”, in a sense. Especially thanks to things like DVD and the recent restoration trends.
ajutla: Yeah. Videogames fade away. So you forget that you’ve FUCKING played most games before.
aderack: It’s a step toward, really, finally establishing just what the fuck videogames are and what they have to say.
ajutla: It solidifies things; it’s creating a critical mass–like, here, this is Videogame (1984-2005). It’s pointing that way.
aderack: Right. The first real state of the industry address.
ajutla: The design philosophy behind the psp is…sort of entirely the opposite of this. Right down to the UMD thing. The thing could have taken mini DVDs, you know. But. You should buy everything again. Always.

Worlds

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Occurs to me that the thing The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly has definitely in common with Fellowship of the Ring (more than the other two Rings movies), and indeed with things like Lang’s Metropolis and The Third Man and Nosferatu — basically every movie I find magical and involving — is that the movie’s world is in a sense the main character. There are other characers in the movie, with their own agendas that we follow. The main conflict or relationship, though, is between those characters and the world they’re in — which in most cases is their own world; they just don’t see all of the aspects of it that we do, because they live there. The characters exist to bounce off the scenery, to ignore it, to walk us through it, to give us contrast with it..

This also describes The Legend of Zelda. And Silent Hill. And Phantasy Star II. And Dragon Warrior. And just about every videogame I find magical and involving. Hell, Riven is nothing but environment.

In a certain meta way, it also decribes more postmodern fare like Charlie Kaufman and Treasure. In MGS3, Kojima does both at the same time! Resident Evil 4 tries to as well, though it’s a little more clunky in execution.

…

A thread here.

Perspective

  • Reading time:3 mins read

LttP focused things. everything became more well defined, limpid. for people who thought the important parts of the original had to do with the “gameplay,” the structure of the game itself, LttP was a masterpiece. for people who valued the original for its “ideas,” the way it made the player feel as if there really were limitless possibilities (even though this feeling was the product of haphazard design, more often than not), LttP feels neutered, and misses the point, sacrificing the idea of free adventure for well-crafted but unimportant gameplay.

That’s about it. Or even more simply, it’s a matter of the game for its own sake versus the game as inspiration for things outside the game. Objective versus subjective value. Definition versus ambiguity. A dead end and a mere strand in the larger endless net of life.

Since, you know. The games themselves are just things. They don’t really matter.

There’s a word for the worship of objects rather than appreciating what they suggest and stand for within the context of human experience. It’s not a terribly flattering one. Actually, there are several, and none of them are all that positive. It seems to say something about the relationship between human tendencies and ideals. We like the idea of hope, but usually don’t have the energy or will to entertain it for long.

Even just growing up is the same struggle. The same awkward balance. Generally in this culture people wind up feeling defeated by life by the time they’re middle-aged. Thus the stronger tendency toward conservatism in the elderly. This is kind of sad, from my perspective. A last desperate attempt to reclaim what’s come and gone, to make sense of a life that one never took the time to understand the first time around and now it’s getting on to too late. It’s a sign of despair.

I’ve gone through adolescence, a less than ideal first twenty or so years of my life. I’m past it now and I’m done despairing what there was to despair, which in the grand scheme of things isn’t really all that much. Time is too short and too interesting to wallow.

It’s a shame other people can’t get over their own problems the same way. Then, I guess that’s why I write the things I do. Try to offer some glimpse of how else things might be. Videogames are, I guess, as good a tool as any.

Holy Moley.

  • Reading time:1 mins read

From what I can tell, that ridiculous NextGen column of mine yesterday got the most hits of anything on the site. The piece with the second-most hits seems to be the J.Allard interview, where he drones on the thought process that led to the two variations of the Xbox 360 hardware. Not a bad topic; the kind of thing you’d expect on the top of the heap.

In comparison, my column got… let’s check again… something like every news piece on the site combined, times three.

So. Maybe that explains something?

This Week’s Releases (Aug 22-26, 2005)

  • Reading time:21 mins read

by [name redacted]

Week seven of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation

Today (Monday, August 22nd)

Advance Wars: Dual Strike (DS)
Intelligent Systems/Nintendo

Now, there’s nothing wrong with the Wars series. This is, what, the fourth Wars game announced in the West, after the two GBA iterations and the endlessly-delayed and frequently-renamed GameCube iteration. And it looks every bit as good as previous games. I understand it’s to make some decent use of the touchscreen with a real-time mode where you move things around with the stylus. Good and well; this is something the DS should excel at. I’m surprised we haven’t seen more strategy games and RPGs for the system.

The name, though – why is it still Advance Wars? The answer is the same as why Retro’s second Metroid game is called Metroid Prime 2, instead of just “Metroid: Echoes” and why Metal Gear Ghost Babel became simply “Metal Gear Solid”; it’s an issue of branding. The assumption, from a Western marketing perspective, is that you need “brand unity”. If you’ve got a successful product, you need to cash in on its name as far as you can. So if you’ve got a new cereal, you’re better off introducing it as, say, Cinna-Crunch Pebbles and putting Fred Flintsone in it, rather then letting it fend for itself, on its own merits.

The thing about the Wars series – well. It’s been around for a long time. Going on twenty years, actually. It began on the Famicom as Famicom Wars, then moved to the Super Famicom and Gameboy as Super Famicom Wars and Gameboy Wars. Thus we have Advance Wars. And since the GBA games were the first we were introduced to over here, every future game in the series must have the word “Advance” in it.

Well, to be fair, we’re to receive the GameCube one (called, inexplicably, “Famicom Wars”) as (even more inexplicably) “Battalion Wars”. I guess that complicates the theory right there. And the Western title for the DS game is no less arbitrary than the Japanese one (again, simply “Famicom Wars DS”). That doesn’t make this trend any less irritating.

More on experience

  • Reading time:3 mins read

If EXP and other RPG elements are so horrible, why do they get implemented in just about every other type of game? From platformers to GTA to fighters to shooters to sports games, there’s no other genre that hasn’t been infected by the RPG virus at least a little, and often a lot. RPGs don’t seem to be dying, as much as growing, in both audience and into other genres. So they must be doing something right, right?

Not necessarily something right, in that it’s ideal for its own sake. It’s simply an easy solution for just about any context. Design problem? Balance issue? Afraid the game will alienate people if it’s too hard? Throw in an experience system, and let the player work it out.

For a topical example, see the discussion on Sigma Star Whatever in the other thread, and the people pissed off that its shooting segments depend on levelling-up rather than on skill. From some accounts, it’s to the point where skill doesn’t really matter, as the game will just throw things at you that you can’t deal with through any means other than leveling up.

Another high-profile example. The only reason there’s an experience system in the Metroidvania games is that Igarashi wants everyone to be able to finish the games, and doesn’t want people put off by the difficulty. This is a design problem with many elegant solutions (see Metal Gear Solid — or hell, Metroid). Experience is the easiest, though. You don’t have to think about it.

It’s kind of a lazy out. Which would be, I’m guessing, the best reason why it’s used so much, in so many games. It’s almost a get-out-of-jail-free card if you don’t know what you’re doing as a designer.

On that note: experience is often used as a way to make the player feel like he’s actually doing something in a framework where he’s not really doing much of anything else. When you win a battle, you feel like you’ve accomplished something because, hey, you just collected 156XP! It’s materialistic in a monetary way, in a system where there is no real ceiling to inflation, therefore no implicit value.

This is even more obvious when you consider that as you progress, the difficulty generally scales to match whatever experience you collect. Some games even cause monsters to level up at the same rate as your characters, meaning there is effectively no point to this game system at all.

And that’s what I think annoys most of us, and sends us looking for alternatives.

Then again: although obsessive-compulsive game design is a plague in a general sense, and you honestly can’t make me care about those last few emblems in Sonic Adventure, not every widget hunt is unfulfilling. It’s all about context.

Similarly, if experience points aren’t an annoying mechanism in, say, Dragon Quest, then maybe that has to do with what they mean both in the context of the game’s objective design and in the psychology of the playing experience.

The question, therefore, is: what’s the difference? Is it in how the EXP are gained? How they’re used? What they represent? What’s the context?

I venture a big factor in Dragon Quest has to do with expanding horizons (on the player’s end), and the part EXP play in the facilitation and regulation thereof.

That is, they are the key objective metric. They therefore have purpose, value, and weight. They have practical representative meaning, even if they remain mere representation.

Sonic and Yuckles

  • Reading time:2 mins read

The problem with S3&K, in a word: clutter.

It’s a problem on a micro, a macro, and a lukero level. It’s a problem with nearly every design element from art direction to level design to game structure.

What good ideas are there — and there are some good ideas — are smothered by reams of noise. Sonic 3 was bad enough, both being cluttered and clearly unfinished. Put the second half on, though, and what you get isn’t a complete game. It’s a game that was complete once, then someone fucked with it for six months to make it bigger. For the sake of being bigger. More full of stuff, for the sake of having more stuff in it.

It needs an editor. Badly. A third of the ideas need to be killed. Half of the levels need to be removed. The levels need to be redesigned with some focus to them. Somewhere along the way, someone needs to ask just what the game is attempting to accomplish, both in a grand sense and at any individual moment.

And redraw the damned graphics already. Jesus. Stop pretending all the sprites are digitized clay models. Learn how to use the colors you have instead of pretending you have a larger palette than you do.

A good game could be made from Sonic 3 & Knuckles. It’s not a bad starting point. On its own merits, the thing is just a ridiculous mess.

Speaking as an editor.

This Week’s Releases (Aug 8-12, 2005)

  • Reading time:8 mins read

by [name redacted]

Week five of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation

Finally this week, a good balance: not too many games, not too few. About the same number of Japanese and North American releases. Some mainstream, some casual, and some incredibly obscure and hardcore releases. If only the release calendar were always so even, maybe videogame sales wouldn’t slump so much in the summer. Have at you! (Remember to note the release region.)

Today (August 08):

Madden NFL 06 (DS/GBA/Gamecube/PS2/Xbox)
EA Sports/EA Sports (NA)

Yes, yes. Another Madden release. EA’s stock price goes up, enabling it to buy out another six or seven indie developers who were daft enough to sign publishing deals in the last few years. Or maybe buy out Activision. Or Equador. I understand Saudi Arabia’s government is going through a period of transition. Weird what can happen to a company when it goes public. I wonder what Trip Hawkins thinks of his old labor of love. The company that was founded to promote game designers as authors in their own right.

Oh, whoops. Sorry. Tangent. This is a football game in what I understand is a popular series that began on the Sega Genesis in 1991, on one of those weird custom cartridges that EA manufactured before it bothered to acquire an actual license to publish Genesis games. I am told each incarnation of the game is essentially the same as the previous year’s, with a few slight adjustments and an updated team roster. I am also told that the last couple of games have been a little better than usual. That’s nice. I guess.

The 2006 edition (that is, the one released in 2005) is reported to feature a “brand new passing game” in the “Quarterback Vision Control system”; “Formation Specific Audible”; and some fiddling with the offensive and defensive games. There’s also a “Superstar Mode” single player game, which allows the player to “live the life of an NFL star”. I’m sure this must appeal to a lot of people. If you’re one of them, now you know which mega-corporation to support. Get to it!

Seeing Ear Theater

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Hey, now that BBC7 radio has begun broadcasting the McGann audio plays, the BBC has suddenly been scrambling to tie them in with the new series, with RTD’s “blessing”. And heavily promoting McGann’s Doctor, perhaps as a stopgap between Eccleston and Tennant. By all appearances, McGann’s “audio seasons” have turned into canon overnight. At least, as far at the BBC actually keeps track of this stuff. Which isn’t too far. I guess it makes sense. I mean, why not. It’s the closest the show has had to new (forward-reaching) episodes between 1996 and 2005. And it’s the only opportunity McGann’s really had to play the role, and make it his own.

So that seems to mean that Doctor Who’s official run now consists of 26 TV seasons, then four seasons of radio with the Eighth Doctor, then the new series.

Roger. Noted.

Advertising in Games West

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

The first Advertising in Games West conference was held on Thursday, July 28th at 600 Townsend Street, near the Sega building in San Francisco, and consisted of six panels, a keynote, two breaks, and a lunch, all on the subject of how to intelligently twine the worlds of game development and consumer advertising. Each of the first four panels contained more or less the same points and information; the last two, which dealt with the design and publishing ends of the argument, were a little more varied and informative.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

This Week’s Releases (Aug 1-5, 2005)

  • Reading time:5 mins read

by [name redacted]

Week four of my ongoing, irreverent news column; originally posted at Next Generation.

This week is devoid of releases. There are only three games coming out in North America in the next seven days, the most noteworthy of which is the PC port of Bloodrayne 2. So again we turn our gaze across the sharp, cold fins of the Pacific in search of inspiration. As before, everything that Japan has to show, it’s showing on Thursday. That is, in this case, August fourth.

Armored Core: Last Raven (PS2)
From Software/From Software (J)

The tenth Armored Core game in ten years, Last Raven is intended as a kind of return to form after the previous game, Formula Front. From is trying to stir up a bit of hooplah over this entry, both by posing it as a “tenth anniversary” game and as the final PS2 game in the mech action series. As far as what this game does differently, each part of the player’s mech now accrues its own damage; too much damage, and its efficacity suffers. Notably, according to the plot, the player must finish the game within twenty-four game-hours.

It comes down to this…

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Here’s a theory: The worst thing a videogame can do is assume I have nothing better to do than to play videogames.

The problem here is that I still manage to play Nintendo’s recent games, sort of, begrudgingly — so either it’s not the worst thing or EAD hasn’t yet quite refined its process.

Here are some not-unrelated forum posts, which I provide without context:

  1. Super Mario World sets the stage for the star hunting bullshit to come along half a decade later and confuse game design for another half-decade after that.
  2. Oh hell. Yeah. The puzzle element of the level design. Which later turned into drek like the Metroid Fusion level design and… everything else Nintendo’s done lately. Making all of Nintendo’s games feel exactly the same, when they each originally had such different things to say.I don’t like that, either. It’s in SMB3 also — though the focus is different there. It’s incidental, and just meant to augment the experience. In World, it’s practically the whole point. Locks and keys. It’s all locks and keys now. Find the right block. Goddamn.
  3. That’s about it. World is about milking the game for all it’s worth. It sets up the whole modern design philosophy of “here’s a bunch of stuff to do — so get to it, because doing things is what the player is supposed to do!” without thinking too much about providing emotional motivation. You wind around and around until you’ve scraped everything out of the game — and not by choice. Not by whim. Not because you’re clever or lucky. This isn’t like the “secret worlds” in Metroid. It’s calculated. It’s what you’re supposed to do. What you’re expected to do, just because that’s what people like you do. It’s like Miyamoto has headed the player off and ruined all of the fun by setting up a theme park where there should have been something special and personal. I find it kind of patronizing. Note that, for its own sake, I don’t really mind Super Mario World. It’s not offensive yet. It’s just less interesting than what came before; given that what came before is perhaps one of the best games ever made, that probably doesn’t mean lots. It’s only in the broader Nintendo timeline that the game starts to irritate me. Cause and effect. Context and consequence. So on.

Scrawled amongst conference notes

  • Reading time:1 mins read

As you get older, you drop the specific questions. You get more general. You see the patterns. See past the inane, the momentary — grow to appreciate the inane, the momentary.

People walking up to each other as if they are old chums. Talking, giving long anecdotes — they’ve never met. They just like to talk. Mouths never stop. Talking about improv comedy — Second City — and their education. Laughing insincerely. Speaking with continuous lilt: “you know? isn’t that wild?” Travel, polo shirts, connections. Hot out of college and onto the job market.

Very expensive sandwiches and beverages.

Rent and groceries — not a bad lifestyle if you can meet it.

one as a person
No one
someone

Person standing ildy while people around her die; X-files style show; comes up with bizarre theory that would be right in any normal drama; “are you insane?!” people would ask; turns out, yes, actually. The end.