We All Fall Down

Smaller Every Day… Hero Core [Review]

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [redacted]

Somewhere in the early 1990s, the console-style adventure game got sort of codified, with Super Metroid as the main reference point. The ideal form, as wisdom had it, gradually opened up the world to the player as the player gathered new and usually tactile abilities, the better to traverse the world’s obstacles. Basically it’s a lock-and-key system, except instead of the green doors requiring green keys they demand super missiles and instead of unlocking the next section you climb or swing or blast your way there, once you’ve the right abilities.

This system is valid enough, and when done well it can be fairly invisible. You notice somewhere that you can’t go, and after trying everything in your power you remember your failure. So when you get a power that might let you past that obstacle, you race back to put it to use. The clever thing is that usually this new ability generally improves the player’s character, and slots into the existing move set naturally enough that soon the player kind of forgets that ability hadn’t been there the whole time.

This design’s appeal rests in an illusion of problem solving that makes the player feel clever and involved, when in fact the game is manipulating the whole situation, blocking off whole areas of its world until it figures the player may be growing bored of his current situation and powers.

This system — walling the player off until the game, or rather the designer, feels the player is ready, doling the game out in parcels measured both to prevent confusion and to manage enthusiasm and flow — has always bothered me. Mostly it feels transparent and mechanical. Its worst offenders, like Wind Waker with its inventory full of nearly identical items that each only is useful in one part of the game, raise too many questions. Why can’t I go down here? Because the game doesn’t want me to. Why can’t I open this? Because the game doesn’t want me to. Why can’t I just use the grapple instead of the hookshot? Because the game wasn’t designed that way.

A better way to limit progress is to put most of the onus on the player. Let the player decide when he’s ready to progress, and then be it on his own head. If he gets lost, or injured, or killed, or confused, that’s his decision. Let the player form his own rules: “Okay, the forest is too dangerous and is kind of scary; keep away for now.” And then later “Hey, I’m stronger and I have more resources; maybe I can risk the forest now.”

This is the system that you find in the original Zelda, and in Dragon Warrior. It’s what you get in Lost in Blue, and to an extent in Riven. And it’s more or less how Daniel Remar organized Hero Core.

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Fire and Ice and Gristle and Fat and Blood and Wine…

  • Reading time:2 mins read

That scene at the end of “The Family of Blood”, when the Doctor distributes weird Old Testament punishment to the antagonists of the piece? We never properly see what happened. It’s just narrated in voiceover — from the villain of the piece, no less. And it’s accompanied by over-the-top visuals. So I’m not sure how much weight we’re really supposed to give that version of events.

If you ever look in a mirror, any mirror, that’s where the sister is? Really? The son is left to dangle forever in a village cornfield — that presumably someone owns and will tend to eventually, or at least stumble across? Trapped forever in the event horizon of a star — and that’s keeping her alive? Likewise, kept alive by impossibly heavy chains? That somehow he’s just collapsing under as the Doctor walks away? The punishments don’t make the slightest sense, except in allegorical, fairy tale terms. And yet up to that point, the story tries to be fairly realistic within its own terms.

Furthermore, the way we’re shown the events, it’s all heightened. The colors are washed out, it’s grainy. The performance is all done for the camera, as if it’s illustrating the narration, rather than simply showing us a sequence of events. It’s a huge stylistic difference from the story to that point.

Anyway, how is the son narrating, and who is he narrating to, and why, if he was frozen forever?

It’s not just that the deeds don’t fit the character who we know, or who we’re shown throughout the story; it’s that the mode of storytelling doesn’t fit what we’ve seen first-hand to that point. If the sequence were intended literally, there would be much more to explain.

Maybe the Doctor did something to punish them, and maybe it was something along the lines of what we’re told, but all we have is this legend of the events, that seems to serve more to illustrate an impression or a concept of the Doctor, and of his behavior toward the antagonists, than it serves to illustrate a matter of fact. And frankly, again, we’ve just got the villain’s word for it all.

Unless there’s a sequel, we’ll never really know what happened; just that the Doctor impressed the hell out of Son-of-Mine.

Digging up the Dirt on Life+

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Life+ is a rather adorable little exploration platformer by Pastel. The game is long in development, and the development blog is updated only infrequently. The game is coming along well, though, is smooth and gorgeous, and incorporates several interesting ideas.

The main mechanic is a digging/pluck-and-throw mechanism rather like Super Mario Bros. 2, FiNCK, or Rescue Rangers — the difference being, you can rip up a clump of floor nearly anywhere. Some objects are heavier than others, and you’ll need to power-up before you can seize them. Once you’re holding something, you can toss it, bowl it, or lock onto an enemy and sling from anywhere.

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Primal Urges

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Chris Chibnall’s style is hugely sensationalist. You can see it in Law & Order: London, where he sorted through the archives of the original show to find the most sensational handful of scripts possible, then ramped up the sensational qualities within them, and the emotional response of all the characters in the show, such that often it all can feel a bit… icky, to my tastes. Everything that he writes seems to be a canvas for characters to make bad decisions and scream at each other.

The thing is, if that’s what you’re looking for, Chibnall is very good at it. It’s not that he doesn’t know how to write; it’s that his taste and style and judgment aren’t the kind of thing that I like much, and I’m not sure if they’re all that appropriate for Doctor Who.

It’s easy to get the two mixed up. I know I tend to dismiss anything I feel is crass or tawdry. But any aesthetic can be done well, and Chibnall has consistently shown that he knows what he’s doing and can translate his vision into any genre that’s thrown at him.

Taking this in another direction, I’m rather afraid he may be taking a note from Gatiss and Roberts here, as from the clips and the previews this episode sounds like basically a pastiche or conflation of all the fan-favorite Pertwee stories. We’ve got the town trapped under a bubble from The Dæmons. We’ve got the experiment from Inferno. We’ve got the antagonists from The Silurians.

I’m always apprehensive about stories that people describe as delightfully old-school, as it tends to mean they’re more concerned with evoking memories of past stories by quoting huge swaths of them than with taking the show into new and interesting directions. I’m sure it’s possible to make a story that evokes classic Who without simply remaking it. “Amy’s Choice” feels very 1960s to me, for instance, as does “Midnight”. That comes out of working creatively within similar logical constraints — budget, limited sets and effects — rather than rote imitation.

Of course I’ve not seen it yet, so I’m just voicing apprehensions. One sign that this story may be a bit more advanced than I fear is, perhaps unintuitively, the makeup. The original Earth Reptile stories were great, but considering the neutral line they tried to walk they were somewhat let down by the difficulty in making the antagonists individual, identifiable characters. The Silurians and the Sea Devils all look the same, and any characterization is let down by the immobility of their masks.

Of course it’s unfortunate that for a character to be identifiable that means, in cosmetic terms, to make them more like us, basically people with green bumps on their faces. But outside of complex animatronics or something, the most elegant solution is to show us the actors’ faces — their eyes and mouths and facial muscles — and to dress them individually. Then the dilemma becomes not just an intellectual exercise where, yes, in theory we can understand the Doctor’s argument that these are intelligent beings with their own legitimate argument that we ought to take seriously. Instead we might have a chance of giving a damn about the Silurians ourselves, on an emotional level.

Considering the emotional level that Chibnall likes to work on, that also makes me wary. But we’ll see.

Preview: Super Mission Extreme

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Blastforce and Sword of Legends developer Deadheat has begun to leak information about his Mission Extreme sequel, Super Mission Extreme.

The original Mission Extreme is a crunchy platform shooter that manages to find its own style in favor of simply aping Contra or Metal Slug. There’s a certain exploration element, and death is no kind of a setback. The (well-composed) music doesn’t even skip, and the action doesn’t pause. You just start up again at the last checkpoint, and all your accomplishments remain accomplished.

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The Game-Maker Archive: Eclypse Games

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [redacted]

Eclypse Games was basically a guy named James Faux, aka OmegAkira. He lived and attended high school in New Jersey, and he ran a Game-Maker dial-up BBS called SiNiSTRY, which I think was also the name of his personal rock band. The board was only available irregularly, as he ran it off his primary phone line. I can’t quite remember where I first found his work; perhaps on the official RSD BBS in Rockport. Eventually I found myself calling his BBS at all weird hours, to cut down on long-distance charges.

Significantly, Jim was a musician and he was one of the few individuals outside of Epic Megagames to figure out what to do with the .CMF music format that Game-Maker relied on. So if nothing else, his games tended to be all original: new ideas, new techniques, new graphical elements, new sound effects, new music. A few of his earlier games do use the familiar stock tracks, though that tendency soon diminished.

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Steam Play Indie Pack

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Spring must be the season for indie game packages. Following the Humble Indie Bundle and Sleep is Death pay-what-you-want specials, and indeed Valve’s own free offer of Portal, Steam has a new package of five indie games for $20.00. Not quite as cheap, but still tidy compared with the $50.00 cover price for all five.

The Steam Play Indie Pack includes Broken Rules’ And Yet It Moves, Hassey Enterprises’ Galcon Fusion, Amanita Design’s Machinarium, Hemisphere Games’ Osmos, and (in case you haven’t already claimed it elsewhere) 2D Boy’s World of Goo.

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Phantom Fingers: The Series – Part One: Echolocation

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [redacted]

We are all inhabitants of our own reality. On the one hand we’re kind of like sponges, absorbing everything around us and integrating it, whether we care to or not. On the other hand, deliberately or not we shape our worlds to reflect our own inner structures.

Whatever we may carry into a situation, experiences physically change our neural pathways. Repetition, familiarity, reinforces a link, like sketching over a line again and again until it becomes solid. Likewise, the way we position furniture, leave piles of papers or empty cans, what we choose to clean and how, what projects we leave unfinished, what we ruin, what we fix, what we wear down; how we choose to break up and break in and use the space given to us, it all imprints our environments just as emotions crease our aging faces.

In effect, our inner and outer worlds build up a feedback loop. As we carve out our place in the world, we settle into the spaces we carve, reassuring ourselves with their familiarity while we use those bold lines, so often scribbled over, to brand ourselves inside and out. This, we tell ourselves, is how the world works.

This is why videogames are so interesting; they are, in effect, bottled external worlds, into which we can momentarily plug our inner worlds to see what happens. Each game is a little feedback loop, allowing the player both to imprint his actions into a world, to leave his little mark — even if only in a high score table — and to absorb, from a simplified sketch with no social or practical consequences, a new way of being, a new way of doing things.

Some people are more concerned with leaving their mark, others more with expanding their horizons. Some give more, some take more. The point is that in their essence, videogames encapsulate this dynamic between the two. They are a study in cause and effect; the easier those worlds are to affect, the more useful a response they give, the more the player owns actions and consequences alike, the more satisfying the experience.

( Continue reading at Game Set Watch )

Poto & Cabenga Released

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Honeyslug‘s Gamma 4 presentation piece, Poto & Cabenga, has now gone public. If you’ve got trouble multitasking, maybe this is a good life tool. It’s a single-switch game, where you control two characters at once.

For Cabenga, hold the space bar to run and release it to jump. For Poto, hold the space bar to slow down and tap it to jump. You can imagine the complications that play out, as you collect objects, avoid stray hedgehogs, and collaborate between the two characters to solve problems. All with a single button. Now there’s overloading the functions for you.

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A Life Worth Living

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [redacted]

Some of the typical themes to indie games, and art games, and deconstructionist games in general, include violence, death, and loss. I find it interesting that the deeper problems of game design, toward which the more thoughtful game authors are drawn, so closely mirror a boilerplate list of human concerns. At least, metaphorically speaking.

Of the three, death and loss, and the association between the two, are the bigger concerns — perhaps because in the short term, with such a narrow communication bottleneck, it’s more worthwhile to hand out monosyllabic verbs for the player to sling around: shoot, run, jump, grab. Let players use the grammar they know, while you precisely sculpt a context to lend the discussion an illusion of eloquence.

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Daniel Remar’s Hero Core released

  • Reading time:1 mins read

New as of the Saturday before last: the sequel to Iji and Garden Gnome Challenge author Daniel Remar‘s own Hero, Hero Core. It’s a crunchy, deliberately old-fashioned game, apparently influenced in equal parts by Section-Z (the character movement), Zelda (the overall structure), and Blaster Master (the enemy movement, and some of the tone). I’d say Metroid, but that’s too easy and doesn’t seem accurate in this case.

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Plague of Options

  • Reading time:6 mins read

So The Vampires of Venice didn’t offend me as much as episodes two or three; it wasn’t so much offensively poor as it was deeply mediocre. In modern Doctor Who terms, it has to be the epitome of nothingness. It is practically the same as half the episodes made to date, and in that sense it’s a bit of a shame. It’s a shame because the writer and director were handed piles of bountiful, pregnant, deeply fascinating material and then they came up with… this.

I’m just now watching the Confidential. The writer, Toby Whithouse, is in Venice, chatting with a historian about the city’s relationship with the plague. This brings up a bunch of information from my own plague research — such as the islands off of Venice where, over the years, one fortress after another was built to house plague sufferers. They were sort of horrible leper colonies, where it’s said that today the ghosts of plague victims, tortured and anguished, practically own the place. The historian gets into that, a bit.

Actually, the first thing he asks is, this Doctor Who character — he’s a plague doctor, is he? And Whithouse is a little confused. “Uh, no,” he says, and starts babbling about sci-fi concepts. You can see the historian’s face fall. So to try to bring things back into an interesting realm, he starts talking about plague doctors — you know, with the bird masks and the robes and hats. They’re iconic as hell, and practically ready-made Doctor Who characters. Hell, the secret could be that, behind those masks, the plague doctors were in fact vampires. Wouldn’t that be something.

As they talk, the historian actually has a mask at hand. The writer sort of shrugs and changes the subject. It goes on like this. I feel embarrassed for the guy.

There are at least three areas in which this episode criminally squandered its potential. First, the whole setting and premise — plague, in Renaissance Venice. These horrible plague colonies, filled with victims. That’s neat, and relatively unexplored territory. Next, add in vampires. Vampires are, of course, historically associated with the plague. People have blamed the plague on vampires, and there’s thought that vampire lore exists largely to rationalize, put some comprehensible narrative to, the plague. Also this is Doctor Who. Plague doctors. Imagine a couple of mistaken references in there, crossed wires about which doctor is which. How is it, then, that the only reference to the plague is a line or two at the start, explaining… well, nothing, really. It’s just there to namedrop the villain, to get the Doctor on her track without any effort.

Next, vampires. Aside from their deep relationship with the plague, they are an important, if fairly unexplored, part of Doctor Who lore. They are, in fact, the ancient enemies of the Time Lords. We’ve only seen them once on-screen because the Time Lords thought they killed all the vampires off. The last time we saw them, they were in E-Space, a bottle universe that… well, never mind. Too complicated. They were in another universe, that was locked away. This is, incidentally, the same universe in which Romana was locked away.

So think about this for a minute. Instead of wasting half the episode establishing the vampires then saying, hang on, they’re not really vampires at all; they’re some other kind of alien-of-the-week that nobody cares about in the least, we could have had real (in Doctor Who terms) vampires. Which opens the question: how did they get here? Where did they come from? Well, they probably came from E-Space. What, E-Space is open? What else does that imply? Could… no, Romana couldn’t still be alive, could she?

So the episode squanders the historical and thematic premise it sets up. It squanders some potentially momentous Doctor Who continuity and mythology. And in shooting the story as if it was based entirely on a set, director Jonny Campbell squanders an absolutely gorgeous location. This is some of the flattest direction I’ve seen since “Daleks in Manhattan”; even though the compositing was, in truth, fairly limited, my first impression of anything interesting was, oh, there’s another bad greenscreen shot. There was no dynamism or genuine sense of place. It was all so… matter-of-fact. How can you give a director architecture and spaces like that and come out with something so fake and forgettable?

The only thing that raises this story is the regulars. I’m going to just stop talking about how wonderful Matt Smith is, in his every motion and gesture. How delightfully awkward. Instead, I’ll talk about how refreshing Rory is as a companion. A good male companion always balances out the TARDIS crew anyway — most of the men have been amongst my favorites. Ian, Steven, Ben, Jamie, Harry, Turlough. Not a bad lineup there. And Rory, as awkward as he is in his own way, seems to “get” the Doctor and his world in a way that I’m not sure any new-Who companion has. From the bit when he first walks into the TARDIS to his analysis of the Doctor’s effect on people, Rory is a sharp guy and he makes the Doctor work a bit in the way that none of the female comanions, or Jack, have.

So that’s all nice, though it’s got little to do with the episode per se. Ah well. Toby Whithouse is on my dud list, I guess, next to Chris Chibnall, Gareth Roberts, Mark Gatiss, Tom MacRae, Matt Jones, Helen Raynor, and Matthew Graham. And Johnny Campbell is on my dud list next to Andrew Gunn, Colin Teague, James Strong, and Keith Boak.

Guess what? After next week’s episode, which looks swell, we have:

1) Two Chris Chibnall episodes, followed by
2) a celebrity historical (always a bit dubious anyway) directed by Johnny Campbell again, followed by
3) Hey, a Gareth Roberts episode.

Previously, the two weakest stories this series were directed by Andrew Gunn — the weaker of which was written by Mark Gatiss.

So, basically between next week and the two-part finale we’re on thin ice. Oy.

Why don’t people always consult me before making any creative decisions?

5.06 – The Vampires of Venice

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Yes, well that was about what I expected on the basis of “School Reunion”: some fun, if vapid, character stuff and dialog; a completely nonsensical story; and a curious union of long, boring dialog scenes and rushed plotting. The centerpiece standoff between the Doctor and key foe is almost exactly like the pool scene from “School Reunion”. It’s also interesting that the most profound character observation was quoted almost verbatim from that earlier episode.

Anyway. Matt Smith is doing well as ever, though maybe not guided as well here as in the Adam Smith episodes (1, 4, and 5). He makes the most out of some absurd situations, and generally makes the show worthwhile on his own. Rory is going to be pretty good — we’re verging into 1960s companion territory now, between him and his fiancée. I also like that, in the abstract, he sort of understands what’s going on with the Doctor.

I am intrigued with next week’s episode. I like that it looks to be breaking the mold a bit, the way the show stopped doing after about 1970. Back in the ’60s, before the show was completely codified, there was stuff like The Mind Robber and Planet of Giants and The Celestial Toymaker. I’m excited at the idea that the format is starting to loosen up a bit.

Offhand this also brings to mind “Father’s Day”, a little. Toward the end of Davies’ era, I recall commenting a few times that I didn’t see a story like Father’s Day being done again, the way the show had developed since 2005. And yet here we are again, Matt Smith’s reminding me of Eccleston’s first (and only) series.

I notice I’ve barely talked, or thought, about today’s episode. Well, yeah. I guess it’s not very remarkable. In the most literal sense. New Who by numbers. Nothing special about it, though (as the template decrees) several nice things. Might as well be a Gareth Roberts episode.

Fred Wood’s Love+ Updated

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Love is a splendid argument for minimal design. The entire playfield is only a handful of pixels. You walk, you jump, you set your respawn point (a nice compromise between quicksaves and lives). White objects probably hurt you; other colors probably don’t. That’s it. Yet the jazzy music, the crunchy mechanics, the feisty interface, the droll explanatory text, and the memorable level design paint the game as a classic.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )

The Game-Maker Archive: Matt Bell

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [redacted]

Though I’m not sure if he concerned himself with the broader community, Matt Bell’s Paper Airplane is perhaps the most widely-distributed Game-Maker game, and Yuphex is one of the most sophisticated. Matt’s games are defined by a meticulously clean visual style and a talent for both subverting and capitalizing on Game-Maker’s design quirks. It’s not that his games are purely experimental; that same sense of cleanliness and discipline extends to his design concepts, lending his games a strong feel of professionalism.

Matt began his Game-Maker work in high school, as was common to most of the designers I encountered. Most of my our communication was through the post, and carefully packaged 3-1/2″ floppies. From what I remember of Matt he was fairly reserved and didn’t mince words, which shows itself in his art. Offhand I am only aware of three of his games, which I will discuss below. If anyone can fill the gaps, please consider this an interactive discussion. All the better to unearth some indie game history.

( Continue reading at DIYGamer )