videogames

Car-wash-ima

  • Reading time:1 mins read

It’s been over a year since I’ve played Brain Age — actually, more like sixteen months. I played it for two months straight, then got distracted. That, and I felt guilty for the days I had missed — so I as time went on, I grew all the more reluctant to return, lest Dr. Kawashima give me a digital scolding. Considering my vaporous mental state of late, I decided to give it another shot. Result: my head feels like it just did a successful round of sit-ups.

Though, curiously, I’m still getting something around my real age. It just feels like more work, getting there.

Dr. Kawashima claimed not to remember who I was.

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 )

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.

Rainbow Six’s Upton Talks Landscaping Game Worlds

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

The final session of the final day of last week’s GDC 2007 was a cross-disciplinary take on level design. Brian Upton, a senior designer for SCEA and the lead designer for Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon, called on theme park design, landscaping, and city planning as parallels for level design, explaining that they all work under the same principles.

The main concern with all of these disciplines is human psychology – an understanding of how people orient themselves within, organize, and think about the space around them. Since theme park designers, landscapists, and city planners have been doing their job a heck of a lot longer than game designers, Upton suggested looking to these older fields not only for technique but for terminology with which we might describe and define level design.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Aonuma’s Reflections On Zelda

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Check out the comments section on the original article. Seriously.

On Thursday Aonuma candidly, and with self-effacing humor, spoke of his period of aimlessness and mistakes that began with the release of The Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker, the way in which they reflected the Japanese industry as a whole, and how they led to Nintendo’s shift of focus over the last few years.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Randy Smith Doesn’t Save the Day

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Though on the one hand it is comforting to be able to save and load at will, continually loading – thereby undoing events, and making consequences irrelevant – tends to diminish a player’s belief in the game world, making it all the harder for the game to affect the player in a meaningful capacity.

The situation is kind of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, in that allowing free saving tends to lead to abuse yet disallowing it leads to player complaints.

EALA game designer Randy Smith gave a brief speech on the psychological factors that tend to result in save abuse, and how potentially to avoid or undermine those triggers, such that players are tempted to save and load far less often, thereby allowed to take their in-game experiences at face value.

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Ubisoft’s Hocking Talks The Power Of Self-Exploration

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Video games are all about exploration – about living in someone else’s world for a while, learning the rules, learning the territory, and maybe taking something home with you. Ubisoft’s Clint Hocking has his ideas about what that means for the medium and anyone who might set out to explore it.

Although the virtual space of a game world is perhaps most obvious, the most fundamental aspect of a game is its underlying systems – the physical laws and properties that govern that space. Exploring those systems is in a sense the scientific method in fast forward, a series of experiments in cause and effect that forms the substance of game play.

The more immediate and tangible the results to the player’s experiments, the more readily the player feels progress, so the more rewarding the system feels. “It’s supposed to be beautiful,” Hocking said. “If you get this part wrong, the rest doesn’t even matter.”

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

Industry Vets Never Metagame They Didn’t Like

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

Two teams, split up amongst Eric Zimmerman of Gamelab, Warren Spector, Mark Leblanc of Mind Control, video game theorist Jesper Juul, Ubisoft’s Clint Hocking, Jonathan Blow, and USC Professor Tracey Fullerton, moved their virtual quarters around the board to make thematic comparisons between often highly-contrasting games.

Has World of Warcraft created a more intense subculture than Asteroids? Is Guitar Hero more culturally sophisticated than Parappa the Rapper? Is Wipeout more realistic than Nethack? Is Oregon Trail more emotionally rich than Virtua Fighter? (See below for answers.)

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )