Yearly Archives: 2007

The Unheralded

  • Reading time:3 mins read

It seems like Who fans are bizarrely rigid and humorless in their idea of a “good” story. Anything held up by characterization is a failure. Anything held up by humor is a failure. Anything held up by concept is a failure. Anything held up by warmth is a failure. Anything that isn’t spelled out, point by point, is a failure. If it’s not a straightforward story with low lighting, told with a serious tone, preferably with a lot of violence, it’s not Doctor Who.

Just lovely.

So far as I’m concerned, Time-Flight and Arc of Infinity are two of the four most enjoyable and/or intriguing Davison stories. The standout Hartnell serials, to my mind, include The Keys of Marinus and Planet of Giants.

The Mutants and The Time Monster are amongst the Pertwees I most see myself rewatching. Though there are a few decent stories before it, season seventeen is more fun and clever than Tom Baker’s period had been to that point.

With the exception of the icky Mindwarp, season 23 is one of the most droll and warm things to come from the ’80s. And then there’s the whole McCoy era, including season 24, which I find refreshing as all hell.

Then likewise, with a few exceptions (including the Pertwee reptiles), I find most of the “good” stories extremely tedious: predictable, samey, slow, long. Full of stock elements, played straight. Little attention to psychology or human behavior. How many plots have relied on one unreasonable hothead in a position of command? How many alien cultures consist of flyspeck feudal European kingdoms with political or social issues (mostly put forward or maintained by one unreasonable hothead)? How many ’70s stories rely on plots ripped from B-movies, in place of the speculative concepts of (for instance) the Hartnell era?

For the most part, the stories I enjoy are the ones that take advantage of the format to try something unusual — be that conceptual, comedic, or dramatic. By nature, these will also be the least balanced stories. Who cares about that, though — or rather, who should care? Part of the reason why season sets make so much more sense to me than individual releases is that, like the tracks on an album, it allows serials to lean on each other to make a larger point and explore a greater spectrum of ideas without each one necessarily having to stand on its on feet.

Would you release “Cars Hiss By My Window” or “Been Down So Long” on their own, to fight their way up the charts? Of course not. But as parts of L.A. Woman, the album, they’re very welcome pieces of the overall picture; they cover ground that wouldn’t make sense to cover in other songs.

By and large, excepting some accidents of fan taste, it’s the “classics” which to my eye tend to specialize in nothing and do nothing to stretch the format. And frankly, I can’t see the appeal there. Maybe it’s comforting. Maybe it’s nostalgic. It just feels like wasted opportunity, though.

Tools of the Trade

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Let’s look at the items in the original Zelda.

Armory

  • Wooden Sword -> White Sword -> Magical Sword
  • Shield -> Magical Shield

You don’t even need a sword, yet if you want to you can keep trading up for better stuff. You can buy a better shield anywhere; the trick is finding the cheapest price. All posturing aside, it is helpful to have some kind of a sword, and you can claim a weak one right in the first screen. It is interesting that the key word is “helpful”, though, not “necessary”. If you want to avoid it, there’s nothing stopping you.

Collectibles

  • Heart Containers
  • Triforce

There are only so many heart containers, and every time you find one you get an automatic and immediate benefit: another whole heart on the life meter. And the triforce pieces are really just there to check off the dungeons as complete, to give you a reason to delve all the way and beat the boss rather than just rummage around until you find a treasure then skedaddle.

Secondary Inventory

  • Raft
  • Ladder
  • Blue Ring -> Red Ring
  • Power Bracelet
  • Magic Book
  • Magic Key

All “automatic” items, which you don’t need to explicitly use. Only three of them (ladder, raft, power bracelet) really increase the player’s range or abilities, and I don’t think the power bracelet is ever necessary; it’s mostly just useful for opening the warp tunnels. As with the swords and shield, you never need to upgrade your armor, though hey, you’ve got the option. There are enough keys in the game that the magic key is never necessary; it’s just a convenience. And the magic book is an accessory that enhances another item that you don’t even need.

Furthermore, you buy the blue ring in a store and you randomly find the power bracelet in the overworld. You only need to use the raft once. That leaves the ladder as the only really significant upgrade here, and you get it really early on.

Primary Inventory

  • Blue Candle-> Red Candle
  • Bombs
  • Food
  • Letter -> Blue Potion -> Red Potion
  • Boomerang -> Magical Boomerang
  • Bow/Arrow -> Silver Arrow
  • Recorder
  • Magic Wand

So more important stuff here. You need candles to light the way and burn stuff. Bombs are maybe the most vital item in the game. You need a bow and (some kind of) arrow to beat two bosses. The recorder has its uses. That’s about it, though: candles, bombs, bow and arrow, and recorder. A blue candle, you can buy in almost any shop; the only advantage to the upgrade is that, like the magic key, you can use it indiscriminately. Enemies drop bombs all over, and you can buy them in stores as soon as you’ve the rupees. There are bomb bag upgrades, though once more they’re just an issue of convenience. You find the bow in the first dungeon, and can buy arrows anywhere. I think you need the silver arrow to beat Ganon, but it’s also hidden in Death Mountain, right before the final battle, so.

That only really leaves the recorder as a special and unique item that takes a while to find and is critical to finishing the game. You can buy the food anywhere, and only really need it once. You find the letter for the old women in the overworld, then buy all the potion you want — yet it, like so many other items, is just there for convenience. Enemies drop both boomerangs, and they’re only there to make life easier for the player. The magic wand only exists to be awesome.

The Bare Minimum

So going back through, what do we really need?

  • Bombs
  • Blue Candle
  • Bow/Arrow -> Silver Arrow
  • Raft
  • Ladder
  • Recorder

You can buy half of these in any store. You will have half of them by the time you finish the first dungeon. You find the raft in the third dungeon (which you can enter and complete at any time), and all that really does is grant you access to the fourth dungeon. There you find the ladder, and that opens up almost the entire game. We’ll ignore the silver arrow for the above reasons. That just leaves the recorder; you need it both to beat a boss and to enter another dungeon, and you need to go through a few steps before you can find it. So it’s the only really inaccessible and significant tool in the entire game.

Otherwise, to have all the basic tools, all you need to do is run into level three and grab the raft; use it to enter level four and get the ladder; then buy bombs, a blue candle, and an arrow, and grab the bow from level one. Once you work your way through and find the recorder, you are completely equipped to finish the game.

That’s kind of amazing, really.

As for access:

The entire overworld (save two screens) is accessible from the start. The first three dungeons are immediately and fully accessible. You can enter the fifth and sixth, though without a ladder can’t go far. You enter the eighth by burning a pretty obvious bush, that, should you go exploring, you’ll probably try to burn the first time you see it. If you want, you can beat it right up front — though it’ll be hard.

Burning and bombing are the player’s two main overworld activities. You burn your way into dungeon eight, so you bomb your way (again from a blatantly obvious location) into dungeon nine. You just can’t enter until you have all the triforce pieces, and fair enough.

Four, you need the raft to enter. Which you can claim immediately. Seven, you need the recorder to enter.

So basically, once you have the ladder the only thing aside from the final level that you’re missing out on is duneon seven — again, the recorder.

So again: almost total access within two steps. The only things hindering your progress are danger and a lack of knowledge. There’s practically nothing scripted to hold the player back.

To Put It Numerically:

Collectibles aside and including the armory, there are 26 total inventory items
of those, 8 are required
of those, 5 are freely available from the start
of those, 3 are in shops

of the items that are not freely available:
1 requires only two steps to claim
1 is not necessary until the final battle, and is located near that battle

Again, that only leaves the recorder.

Counting another way:

You start with 1 item
8 items are available in shops
7 items are just lying around to find
10 items are buried in dungeons

Of the items buried in dungeons:
5 are merely upgrades to other items

Of the remaining, distinctive items that are buried in dungeons:
4 are necessary to finish the game

Of those necessary items buried in dungeons:
2 are primary inventory items (that you can use)
2 are secondary (automatic) items
2 (one primary and one secondary) are freely available from the start of the game

Of the remaining necessary items buried in dungeons which are not freely available:
1 can be claimed quickly
1 takes several steps to acquire

A very old story

  • Reading time:4 mins read

I keep harping on this, yet the original Zelda really isn’t that sequenced. There are certain barriers you can’t get past without certain items, yet you find most of those items early on — and you can at least explore most regions and dungeons to a certain extent, whatever equipment you have. You can beat the entire game without a sword, if you want. You don’t require half the items the game offers; they’re just convenient to have. Most of the things you do require, you can buy in a shop.

What Wind Waker kind of does is try to pull the design back in that direction, only more so — yet it doesn’t completely have the confidence to break with the sequencing and hand-holding. Which, for such an otherwise free-spirited design, is kind of frustrating. It’s like it’s taunting you with excellence. This is almost such a great game. It just needed more encouragement. Or a rewrite.

You know that business at the start where you’re picking up weapons and items all over? Imagine if the entire game were kind of like that, until you found the Master Sword. Instead of necessarily having specific “treasures”, each with its own specialized use (grapple versus hookshot, for instance), you’d mostly just find and hang onto whatever objects seemed convenient to the task at hand, or looked like they’d be useful down the road. If you found really special, “permanent” items, they’d mostly just serve as a shortcut for tasks you could perform otherwise only with a bit more effort and inconvenience. Kind of like how paths open to earlier areas in Metroid games, to allow you to cut back and forth instead of taking the long route every time.

I like that Link is a real character, for once, with his own life, ideas, likes, dislikes, and priorities, that the player and the quest are just intruding on. I like the way it treats all the previous Zelda games as, literally, a legend; a relic of an unthinkable time, that doesn’t really matter to anyone anymore. I like the implication that Link actually failed at one point, by not appearing when he was needed. Someone suggested once that Wind Waker is sort of the follow-up to Majora’s Mask, in that the historical Link went off somewhere and never came back, without growing up to save Hyrule as he was supposed to. That’s pretty interesting.

And, again, I like that nobody except Ganon really cares. Hyrule is gone; life goes on.

The world has a certain coherence and thought put into it, strictly for its own sake, that the main series rarely has. It’s very much a reinvention of the franchise, in the form of a storybook; an acknowledgment that the same story will keep repeating, even if nobody believes in it anymore. Somewhere out there, maybe in the real world, there is a Link and there is a Zelda, even if they don’t know it. There is a Hyrule, buried somewhere, if you know where to look. This is pretty good stuff.

Mechanically, the game feels smooth and cozy to play. For a while, anyway, there is a real sense of adventure and discovery; that anything could be out there. The fact that you can pick up and use all manner of stuff even if it’s not an “important” item adds to the sense of improvisation. The game puts a lot of work into this feeling. It also undermines most of that work, but we’ve had that discussion.

The entire game is sort of jaded about the idea of a Zelda-like quest. (In theory; it becomes credulous as hell, in practice.) Yeah, we’ve seen this all before; tell us a new one. Isn’t the whole thing a little twee? I mean, look at this green outfit. Who on Earth would wear something like that? Yet it’s also joyful and energetic, almost driving home the message that although, yeah, this story has been told countless times before, what matters isn’t the broad structure and gestures; it’s the individual lives that are affected, and what it feels like for them to take part in that story.

It’s a very postmodern take on the series, and pretty sophisticated. Again, though, it just doesn’t go all the way — which keeps the game from really making its point as solidly as it might.

Ueda Coulda Shoulda: The Quest as the Shadow

  • Reading time:23 mins read

by [name redacted]

A somewhat edited version of this piece was published by Game Career Guide, under the title “Rock in His Pocket: Reading Shadow of the Colossus“; here is the article as originally intended. This version is also available, largely intact, in The Gamer’s Quarter.

Going by his two big brain dumps – Ico and Shadow of the Colossus – Fumito Ueda is a complicated guy to put in charge of a videogame: an ivory tower idealist, with only a passive understanding of practical architecture. As a dreamer, his ideas are too organic, too personal to fit the cliches that most of us take as the building blocks of game design. Knowing that, he sidesteps convention whenever it gets in his way – which is often. The problem is in those conventions which, though they mean nothing to Ueda as narrator, just as frequently get in the player’s way.

The Pathology of Game Design

  • Reading time:18 mins read

Originally published by Next Generation.

As I entered adolescence, my mother decided in her wisdom that I was destined to be an actor. That I showed no particular enthusiasm or indeed talent did not dampen this enterprise for years to follow. One summer, between calls for music videos and hypothetical summer blockbusters, I chanced into a tryout for a hypothetical Blockbuster ad. To the best I can recollect, the company was adding Genesis and Super Nintendo games to its rental library, and to demonstrate the premise was sending out a net for the archetypal game-playing teenager.

Thus I found myself lost across a desk from a pockmarked man with a mustache. When the man asked me to show him my “videogame” acting, I hunched over and concentrated at a spot a few yards ahead of me, miming my button presses with an imagined precision. I knotted my brow, maybe gritted my teeth or moved my lips as if to mutter. You can imagine where the scene goes from here. The director keeps asking for “more”, growing frustrated in proportion to my unease. He wants me to thrash in my chair, slam the buttons like a jackhammer, contort my face, and show him my best Beverly Hills orgasm. I am amazed; he patronizes me; I get to go home. Later I met the man they cast as the teenager; he was in his late twenties and had a habit of performing rude gestures to passers-by.

Fifteen years later, despite what seem obvious advances in technology and design, people don’t really see videogames any differently.

Crime of a Mâché Nation: The Condescension of Viva Piñata

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Viva Piñata was supposed to be Microsoft’s mainstream breakthrough and Rare’s return to form after years of… well, Star Fox Adventures. More than that, it was supposed to be the game that showed why Microsoft paid so much money for Rare, almost five years ago now. The problem is, the game wasn’t really meant to carry all this weight. At its core, this is a modest, intimate, and difficult game – difficult in the sense that, despite its charm, it’s more exclusive than it is inclusive.

( Continue reading at Game Career Guide )

Dead Rising: A Trope Down Memory Lane

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

In 1985, Shigeru Miyamoto came to down with a truckload of tropes, and they were so wonderful, they did such a great job at filling the creative vacuum of the time, that it took two decades for people to notice the limits to their application. Now, step by step, we’re kind of getting back our perspective. Under Satoru Iwata’s oversight, Nintendo – so long, so much to blame for the entrenchment – has painted a huge “EXIT?” sign in the air, with a wave and a sketch. Valve has suggested new ways to design and distribute software. Microsoft and Nintendo have tinkered with how videogames might fit into our busy, important lives. Blog culture is helping aging gamers to explore their need for games to enrich their lives, rather than just wile them away. And perhaps most importantly, the breach between the Japanese and Western schools of design is finally, rapidly closing.

( Continue reading at Game Career Guide )

Fromage

  • Reading time:1 mins read

There are four levels of cheese reception.

1) Being unaware of cheese
2) Being disgusted by cheese
3) Being able to ignore the cheese
4) Being able to embrace the cheese

Ambition and Compulsory Design in Animal Crossing

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

The thing about portables – and not everybody cottons to this – is that people use them differently from other game systems. You cradle them in your hands, within your personal space. You drag them around with you, pull them out of your pocket like a dime novel, then snap them closed when you step off the bus. Where console and PC games ask you to set aside blocks of your time, portables fill the cracks in your day.

All of these situational dynamics, and the psychology lurking behind them, inform the basic checklist for a portable game.

( Continue reading at Game Career Guide )

Balloon Fight (***)

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Time was, Nintendo was a company was a game. Then Mario was a commodity was a template was a cult.

The guy who dragged Japan’s oldest hanafuda manufacturer into videogame design was a quiet, oddball toy inventor named Gunpei Yokoi. Thanks to Yokoi, Nintendo had already been making “inventive and strange” toys and arcade amusements; in the late ’70s, videogames were just the next logical step. He rounded up a posse, agreed to babysit a slacker friend of his boss’s family, and built from the ground up Nintendo’s first design studio: R&D#1.

Before long, the kid — an art school graduate named Miyamoto — set the editorial tone of bold colors, bolder concepts, and boldest character design. Then he graduated again to set up his own internal studio, and over the next five years completed and refined the two or three ideas he would ever have as a game designer.

( Continue reading at ActionButton.net )

Altered Beast (**)

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

By no means is Altered Beast a highbrow game; by neither means is that important. The game’s problem is that no one finished putting it together.
The premise: one or two players, formerly living Roman centurions, are reanimated to interfere with Greek mythology. They do this by punching and kicking zombies, and a touch of randomized lycanthropy. Today you’d call the game a “walk-and-punch”. Not a brawler like Double Dragon; think Bad Dudes. Punch, kick, jump. Press up and jump to jump to a higher platform. Duck and kick to attack upwards. It’s clumsy and stupid, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

( Continue reading at ActionButton.net )

This = American Life

  • Reading time:3 mins read

There’s a certain irony to This American Life transmogrifying into a TV show, all the more fun for being left unstated. It’s still produced by Ira Glass, who it turns out looks like the son of Jarvis Cocker and Elvis Costello. It’s shorter than the radio show, by far — only about half an hour. The format suits the visual approach, though.

Really, I think it’s a swell adaptation. As great as the radio show is, I’m maybe more intrigued by this version. In place of the intimacy there’s a certain objective distance that puts a neat spin on the stories. The surreal narrative framework and editing adds to the effect, almost coming out the other side and making the stories more intimate.

He was on Fresh Air today, talking about his approach to adapting the show and the changes he had to make; I’d forgotten it was happening, and it sent me running to Demonoid. Two episodes so far; it seems to air on Saturdays, on Showtime.

It’s curious that this was produced for a pay channel rather than PBS. That certainly should explain how expensive and tight it looks. It also ties into some observations a while ago that what HBO and Showtime have been doing with original programming — The Sopranos, that cowboy thing — is pretty similar to what the BBC has been up to. Similar style; similar kind of expressive freedom.

Free of the limitations of commercial sponsorship and ratings — since the channel is paid for directly, in one way or another — the producers are allowed freedom to make whatever they want, so long as it’s a good product in the end. A nice perk and reason for people to subscribe, and something that maybe the channel can turn into a retail product down the road, as DVD sets. Thus there’s a certain maturity, a security to the approach. They can assume a certain level of understanding and interest without necessarily catering.

So, I mean. I was thinking about that already, making those parallels, and thinking how interesting it would be if PBS were to get the same kind of funding. Then a few days ago HBO annoucned it was cooperating with the BBC (oh?) to produce a show about Einstein’s formulation of the theory of relativity (oho!), starring Andy Serkis (huh) and David Tennant (huh!). And… what the hell, I thought, is HBO turning into the new WGBH?

And now there’s this, an NPR staple turned into a quirky Showtime experiment. So it seems there’s… at least something to this analogy. I wonder.

Donkey Kong 3 (*)

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

It’s been said that each of us only has one tune to play; all we ever do is change the way we play it. It’s also been said that Donkey Kong and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s tune originates in his personal hobbies, filtered through a love of Japanese and Western fairy tales. The Legend of Zelda has its roots in the fields and caves behind Miyamoto’s childhood home. Pikmin comes from Miyamoto’s garden. And Donkey Kong 3 is based on the premise that it is fun to spray DDT up a gorilla’s asshole. While being attacked by bees.

( Continue reading at ActionButton.net )

Serialization

  • Reading time:3 mins read

I’m getting my cable disconnected because I don’t really watch it. The few shows I do watch, I can just torrent or whatever. That’s… Lost and BSG, really. And BSG is going to be off-air until 2008, so.

Bittorrent is the future of television, I swear. Between that and DVD… The thing about BT is that it’s global. I mean. Doctor Who’s starting up again in a few days, in the UK. Though it’s being picked up sooner than before, it still won’t show on Sci-Fi for months. Doesn’t matter if you’ve DSL!

There was a recent survey I read that said that the average person in the US has something like 130 TV channels available to him — and yet the average person only ever watches something like 6% of those channels. That’s foolish. Were I given the option to choose, say, a dozen channels that I actually felt were interesting (plus all of the local stuff — PBS is important), that’d be fine. Maybe a buck a channel, per month?
Plus a ten dollar flat fee, including all the local stuff?

You can’t even get Comedy Central here unless you pay thirty-something dollars a month — and to hell with that. The Daily Show isn’t worth that much to my life. They need a system where you pay for what you actually watch. Or intend to watch.

The whole channel system is a bit screwed-up anyway. Outdated. In the future, the ideal way this would work would be subscriptions to particular shows. Which would be delivered at certain intervals. And you could watch them whenever you wanted. And it would be worldwide. So if I wanted to subscribe to an obscure Indian show that was starting to gain popularity, I could do so.

Maybe the way it would work is you’d have a certain number of points to allocate in a given month. You could buy more, if you wanted. I guess it’s kind of like Netflix — pay more to get more DVD rentals at once.

If you found a show you liked, you could have the option of starting from the current episode or starting from the beginning. Likewise, you could splurge a bunch of points to watch the whole thing at once, or you could just go one episode at a time, a normal subscription, starting from the start.

This is the way television will work, eventually. DVD sets would still exist as compilations, the way they sell episodic games in boxes.

The tide is turning; people are starting to realize that the shows are more important than the networks. DVD is helping a lot in this. And actually-good TV being made.

How to Make the DS Better

  • Reading time:6 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

That the DS is a sensation is both indisputable and deserved. That it has helped to change the industry should by now be reasonably obvious. All the more shame, then, that the system is not really built for success.

The DS was an experiment – a cautious stab in the dark, introduced almost with an apology in Nintendo’s early assurance that it was not replacing the Game Boy. Instead, Nintendo insisted, the DS was meant as a “third rung” in the company’s strategy in addition to its traditional handheld and console systems. Judging by how long it took the industry and its followers to “get” the system and its improved follow-up, the Wii, Nintendo’s caution was probably well-advised.

To Nintendo’s credit, it wasted little time.