We All Fall Down

The Remake of Samus

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Someone put a lot of effort into addressing the common complaint that the entire Metroid series isn’t exactly like Super Metroid, with different maps.

You know what a Metroid II remake would really need? Complex lighting. And lack thereof.

Lack of ambient lighting, a lot of the time. You’d get some from lava, from certain bioluminescent materials, and whatnot. Maybe some areas would be brightly lit. Mostly, though, and at times exclusively, you’d be relying on a certain tapering bubble of light around Samus. Outside of that you’d get a vague hint of shapes and motion. This would also give the game a somewhat monochrome appearance.

Maybe the more injured Samus is, the smaller the window or the dimmer the light, or the more flickery.

Heck, maybe phaser shots would set things on fire, creating light and attracting/distracting certain monsters.

Maybe, instead of a map, a way of marking the terrain. So you’d know if you’d been somewhere. Like, if the spider ball were to leave a faint residue behind…

Shepard: You could even have upgrades that enhance how much light Samus gives off, as an extra bonus.
Like maybe your gun shots are a little more sparkly now.

Me: I can see an argument for adding the charge shot.
Just hold the charge to light the room, pretty much.

Shepard: Try to tune it so that Samus’s ambient light increases as the environmental light decreases.
So at the beginning you’ve got all these fungi and lava pits and glowbugs.
And by the end it’s just… a dead pit.
Maybe the occasional nigh-dead Chozo lamp.

Me: I like how a lot of the natural lighting will be a deep, threatening red.
From all the lava.

Shepard: Mmm.

Me: A lot of the game, where there’s color, it will seem tinted.
Oh heck. And light would generally just show the surface of things. So outside a certain number of pixels (one “block” or so), walls would be flat black.

Shepard: Yeah.

Me: A narrow, well-lit corridor would still leave half the screen dark.
Creating a sort of letterboxed, managed feeling to the space.

Shepard: I wonder how that would look if you had the rare, fully-lit-even-penetrating-the-tiles room, for Chozo Artifact rooms.
I get the feeling players would want to just chill out in those rooms.

Me: That would seem comparably tranquil, wouldn’t it. especially if the light were to have a sort of ethereal, light blue cast to it.

Me: I want to play this now.
Heck, this sounds closer to what Metroid should be doing in general.

Shepard: It is warm inside the power suit.
Everywhere else is cold.

Me: The third game set too much of a template for laying everything out in front of you like a videogame. Here’s this kind of tile, which needs this kind of key to break. You need this to get through here. Everything laid out clearly; you just have to go through the motions. All very rational. Of course, it’s a lot less obnoxious about this than other games that followed (and preceded it). Still, Metroid shouldn’t be an action puzzle game. It’s supposed to be mysterious, oppressive, anxious, and a little wonderful.
The first two games have this.
Fusion does, a little, in its completely different way.
Prime does, pretty much. The first one.

Shepard: It turned “do it because I said so” into the actual story.

To add to earlier ideas: surfaces glisten. So (depending on the potency of a light source and the reflectivity of a material) to things just outside the range of full lighting, you’d still get some faint one-pixel-wide reflection off any surface parallel to the light source, partially outlining an otherwise black mass. Which would be incredible if there were several living things around the edges of the screen.

Combine this with the business about spider balls leaving residue, and there’s a lot of complex stuff going on with edges.

Maybe an infrared visor upgrade, that you can toggle. Danger of flaring sometimes, especially when you’re shooting. When exploring and travelling, generally speeds things up.

On Monsters

  • Reading time:5 mins read

A good monster isn’t just a neat design and a memorable catch phrase; it taps into some deep and basic human anxiety and makes it animate. This is the nature of horror. The Daleks do this; the Cybermen do this.

The Master, as a villain, works dramatically because of his classic archetype: he’s just like the hero, except bad. He just serves to make the audience hate him, out of loyalty to the protagonist. Which is a strong way to go. Anger is just as good as fear.

Out of the new series, the Slitheen probably come the closest to something significant, in a children’s book sense: the idea of adults (especially petty, hypocritical adults) being ridiculous, childish monsters in disguise. Which children all know anyway, but here it is, made real! On that note…

Regarding Daleks

What makes Daleks work is that they embody more than pure nastiness. They’re pure, shrill, unreasonable nastiness. In theory at least, there’s no arguing with a Dalek; there’s no chance of discussion, no chance of compassion. They simply out-and-out hate you for the fact of being you. Whoever and whatever you are, if they get the notion and the chance, they will kill you out of that blind rage just because they can. And there’s very little stopping them.

This is the substance of many of my nightmares: accidentally crossing someone threatening, then doing everything I can to ease the situation, yet everything I say or do just digs me in deeper, makes the threatening person angrier, more violent, more crazed. And there’s nothing I can do to escape or halt the fury. This feeling is something that children, in particular, should understand well. Both the Slitheen and the Daleks call on senses of adults and authority at their worst; they just take different routes to a similar point.

Of course in execution they’re both more adorable than anything. Still…

While we’re here: although Davros is an interesting character, I’m not sure what he really has to offer on a primal level. He’s more of an abstract concept. And not even a very good abstract concept; I’m not sure that the Daleks need a creator, or that we need to meet him. That’s got nothing to do with what makes the Daleks work. Davros does have a right winning personality, of course. That’s pretty much what makes him. And that’s probably why the Big Finish audios are where he really shines.

The Boogieman vs. Dramatic Conceit vs. Mundane Menace

Doctor Who has a lot of “monsters” and villains like this, based on dramatic or thematic concepts rather than anxieties. Sometimes they can be rather sophisticated, as with the Silurians and Sea Devils: good conceits and neat designs, that don’t really have much in terms of boogieman credentials. So (aside from them looking and behaving oddly) there’s nothing really scary about them; they’re just interesting points of discussion.

Then there’s this third tier of monsters, just designed to look interesting and have a slightly alien culture or behavior. In the new series, the Ood are of about the same level as the Ice Warriors or Yeti or Sontarans. Well-developed and often nicely designed, yet (unless used in an insightful way) ultimately meaningless either from a primal or a dramatic perspective. They’re just pure abstraction, for the sake of having an original monster. With some of these, there is potential to pull a Silurians and justify them dramatically; it’s just not happened yet.

Someone objected that the Ood are clearly on a level far below the Ice Warriors or Sontarans, because as with the Yeti or Autons they have no self-determination. Which kind of misses the point, I think; neither do Cybermen and Daleks, really, classically. If anything, Ice Warriors and Sontarans are less of an interesting threat in that they are rational and they have their own agendas that don’t necessarily have anything to do with you personally. Neat designs, certainly. Yet they’re not boogiemen; they’re not out to scare you or get you. They’re just bullies and jerks. Keep out of their way and you’re probably fine. And again, they’re pretty much just dramatic placeholders. One proud warrior race is as good as another.

On the other hand, Autons do work (though I keep forgetting about them) because mannequins are sort of creepy to start with. It’s pretty common to see one out of the corner of your eye and not realize it’s a dummy until you turn and look at it full-on. The Autons to some extent seem to justify that existing fear. It’s not even just about mannequins, though they’re a convenient embodiment of that kind of fear. Imagining that (plausibly threatening) things are animate. Signs of life where there shouldn’t be, yet you fear there might be. Ties in to fear of shadows and snapping of twigs in the forest.

Curiously, all three of Moffat’s threats have been of the boogieman variety. They’re just so story-specific that they can’t easily be used again.

Adrift, indeed.

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Some good stuff in here. It kind of falls apart once Gwen actually finds the island. It becomes icky, and it seems like Chibnall was searching for an excuse for all of those people to be held there. Then since the excuses he found weren’t particularly persuasive, he lumped in some ham-handed philosophy about whether some things are too horrible to know. On the basis of the last part of the episode, and the lingering annoyance it’s left me, I’d say maybe. I’m not sure that’s the parallel he was looking for, however.

What a weak and uninquisitive mind Chibnall seems to have. One of the things I like about Doctor Who is its sense that knowledge and experience sets a person free. That whatever the hardship, however difficult the knowledge, it’s better to know and have done than not. It’s better to grow than to sit and cower about what might happen. But Chibnall… he consistently writes shrill characters who go histrionic when presented with anything they can’t immediately understand. And whose minds MELT when forced to deal with anything outside themselves. This… is not enriching my life.

Again, though. Some neat character and myth stuff in the first thirty-five minutes or whatever.

The Purple Rose of Cardiff

  • Reading time:4 mins read

This year, Torchwood has become a very entertaining way to make fifty minutes disappear. It has pretty much worked out what it’s doing, even if it has yet to figure out why.

Today’s episode, though (which deals in nasty people materializing out of old films), resembles a lot of series one episodes, or “42” from series three of Who, in that it feels like it could be an episode of nearly any TV show with a vague sci-fantasy bent to it. Although the hero roles are roughly adapted to the main cast and all their quirks (despite continued confusion about Owen’s current status; can he feel anything or not? Can he breathe or not?), the same script could have been tweaked for The X-Files or Supernatural or (yes) Hammond’s own Sapphire & Steel, or any number of other shows in this vein. And it might fit in any of those somewhat more mystical shows better than in Torchwood.

(Man, I wonder if Mark Gatiss is going to write for this show. That would have been so appropriate for series one.)

It’s just this narrative island, that sticks out from the relatively tight narrative this year. And it’s clumsily written in places. The ending, in particular, which pulls out that “The story isn’t over! Be afraid of everyday objects!” trope card (which worked well, for all its hammer-over-the-skull directness, in “Blink“), is just… Well, the whole episode feels like it was written for an audience of twenty years ago. Never mind that the premise is old hat in itself, and that film as a cultural and technological concept should long since be demystified; it’s just… hard to relate to a fear of something so specific and (by 2008 standards) so esoteric as old film cans that you might dig up at a rummage sale. How many people do you know who own their own film projectors?

As far as the story itself goes, were those images on the piece of film or not? The young editor claims they weren’t, when he spliced it together. Indeed, they continue to show on his monitor even after the film is unspooled. Yet when the Torchwood team takes the film can, the images do seem to be physically part of the reel. Granted, the story probably isn’t meant for rational breakdown; it’s B-grade mystical faff. Yet it is distracting when a story can’t even get its own internal logic straight.

The bad guys suffer from that ineffectual, poorly-defined TV villain thing. Why do they spend most of the episode looking bored, milling aimlessly through abandoned places? You’d think if they were motivated enough to escape from a bit of celluloid they would want to use their time more efficiently. If the undrownable woman needs or loves water so much, and they’re in Cardiff, why is she squatting around, guzzling from stagnant ponds and lying in bathtubs? They’re right on the Bay! As evidenced in all of those helicopter establishing shots. It’s even salt water, which seems to be her preference!

Julian Bleach is decent, if a bit unchallenged, in his role as the head villain. Going by his Shockheaded Peter stuff, he just seems to be stamping out his trademark performance. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when he has a suit as specific as Davros to fill out.

Anyway. Harmless enough; just kind of irrelevant. Next week‘s looks interesting. From here on it seems like all the continuity guns are going to be blazing, on the road to a snazzy climax for the year. Though I doubt it will ever completely justify itself, this show has on a whole become a very genial piece of television.

The Nuance of Uncharted Character Design

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Uncharted had about a three-year development cycle; a year of pre-production, followed by two years of active production. Early on they began to research all manner of pulp adventure fiction, from Tintin to Doc Savage, to seminal movies like Gunga Din and more recent stews like Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Mummy.

Beyond the hair-raising, larger-than life quality of these stories, the team wanted, wherever possible and appropriate, to capture the “certain lightness of tone” in the source material, to contrast with the current standard for Western games, which Lemarchand described as “overwrought and all a bit emo.”

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

The Recall Horror

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Nostalgia is poison. Zombie thoughts, out to getcha! They’ll eat you alive!

The present is all we’ve got! If you can’t keep it vital, let it go!

Of course, in our postmodern world there are plenty of ways to fold most of the history of the universe into a pithy, intertextual, and up-to-the-minute Youtube video.

What we really need is a post-fetishism movement.

For further discussion, see this. And how’s that for reappropriation, daddy-o!

GDC: The Top Ten Peter Molyneux Quotes

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [name redacted]

Although the concept got an enthusiastic approval, the officially published article was toned down a bit. Fair enough. But there’s no holding back Peter Molyneux. So here this is.

On Friday, the syrupy and gracious Mr. Molyneux held a session to show off his half-complete mega-opus, Fable 2. There are, however, a few problems in covering the session, in that a valiant effort in spin control has stifled what Molyneux can actually discuss. Most of what he was left to reveal, therefore, had already been revealed at an earlier keynote. The rest of the material was generally familiar from a much smaller press gathering a year ago, at which Molyneux personally served cookies to all interested parties. Which was… mostly this writer.

Nevertheless, in lieu of actual information, one can always rely on Molyneux himself as a topic of interest. Let us, then, revisit the session and stroke our chins to the form, if not the content, of Molyneux’s message. Since most of these quotes are more fun out-of-context, the explanations have all been spoiler-tagged. Highlight to reveal.

Busy busy busy

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So for the last two months I’ve been under a boulder, localizing a sort of insane Russian RPG. It’s taking way longer than it should, for a bunch of reasons (most of them out of my hands, for once!), and it’s kind of driving me batty. As if that’s not enough, last week I had GDC to contend with! So that put back the work another week, while I saddled up the BART and began to regularly drink coffee for the first time in my life, just to keep myself moving.

Most of the fruits of my labor, for what they’re worth, are now up. Pay especial attention to the content of the last one. (That’s the animation panel.) There’s a real howler coming up; I’ll amend this post when it goes live.

There was also a session on using games as tools for meditation, that I just didn’t have the time to write up. I’ll go into more detail if anyone is really curious. I thought there was some neat stuff in there, even if three-quarters of the session was an infomercial for a new agey revival of early ’90s-style multimedia starring Deepak Chopra & Company.

EDIT: I just noticed that someone switched around a few things in the animation article, such that it’s not completely accurate. (I also notice a lot of grammatial errors; this is what happens on an instananeous deadline.) Early on, the hour-long program they were discussing was literally just all the cutscenes from one game or another, edited together. They example they used was Prince of Persia: The Two Whatevers. The third game, you know, that’s got both the good and the evil Prince in it. (Or the sixth game, if you include the originals, plus that weird 3D thing for the Dreamcast.) Hi ho!

EDIT 2: All fixed! Well. As far as information goes. It could still use a copy edit.

EDIT 3: See above!

The Future of Animation is Games (No, Really!)

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Bill Kroyer of Blockade Entertainment and Mark DeAngelis, VP of programming and development for Voom Networks HD, sat around on Thursday and talked about their vision for the future of machinima: namely, mainstream broadcast animation.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Nintendo Reveals Wii Pay-For-Online Play, WiiWare Compression

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

In a curiously confidential session, Nintendo Network Administration Group Group Manager Takashi Aoyama spoke at length on the thought process behind the Wii’s online offerings.

Amongst his anecdotes were a story of how WiiConnect24 came out of early dial-up concerns, during planning stages around 2000 for a GameCube network. (Maybe if users could download content overnight, that would alleviate some of the cost and delay — except, wait! This is dialup!)

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Emotiv Knows What You’re Thinking

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

The svelte Emotiv headset uses an array of sixteen EEG sensors to detect electrical impulses in the scalp. These signals are then interpreted by a suite of tools, each with its own range of applications.

The “Expressiv” application identifies and interprets facial expressions; one of Wixson’s associates demonstrated winking, blinking, and an unnerving grin, each of which was replicated on a rough facial model. Another application, called “Affectiv”, recognizes emotional states.

The most substantial and interesting application is the most active one, “Cognitiv”, which “classifies conscious active intent”. That is to say, it interprets what the wearer wants to do, allowing a player to execute specific commands and actions through thought alone.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

The Media Myth Of The Casual Gamer

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Gabe Zichermann of rmbr.com spoke with ebullience and verve of the chutzpah that has to some extent defined the casual game industry since Bejeweled sprung from the void in 2001. Zichermann implied that, on a level, the whole idea of a casual gamer is more of a “media meme” than anything real. He attributes the myth of casual game market to a mixture of somewhat mundane factors.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Filling the Void Between Casual And Mainstream Games

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Last Day of Work’s Arthur K Humphrey spoke extensively, if rapidly, of what he sees as the false and destructive conceptual divide between casual and mainstream games. Casual games are supposed to be accessible, and mainstream games are supposed to be deep. Games that are deep yet accessible are thrust into one or the other camp largely on the basis of their presentation.

Humphrey’s solution, in part: “in-between” games. His definition is “a game that takes the depth and qualities of a core game and brings it into a place where casual gamers can appreciate it.”

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Baer, Alcorn Talk ‘Brown Box’ Beginnings, Industry Birth

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Baer started off by leaping back to the late ‘30s, the time before “electronics” was a noun. Back then, it was all about radio. Radio enthusiasts were radio hobbyists, and radios were simpler to build than a model Gundam. They were also a cultural phenomenon. Baer showed off an advertisement that read “Big Money in Radio – become a Radio Serviceman!” “Hey,” the young Baer realized. “I think this could be me.” So he spent the next few years dangling off roofs, installing wires through people’s windows.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

GameLab’s Zimmerman Says Casual Games are Dead (Sort Of)

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

You can’t make money making casual games, Zimmerman said. It’s a broken business model for developers, with low royalties, a ton of middlemen, a high turnover of software, a hugely saturated market, and ever-increasing production values, therefore production cost. Finally, now that the casual industry is no longer just a little club in a back room, the “big boys” like EA have shouldered their way in, driving independent developers ever more to the periphery.

On the creative end, “Casual games began with a promise.” They were meant to be a meritocracy, Zimmerman said; smaller in scope, and therefore more conducive to experimentation than big-budget mainstream games. Instead, the field has “almost become a parody of itself… The degree of shameless clones seems, to my eye, to be more prevalent than other sectors of the game industry… I’m not seeing that innovation is rewarded.”

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )