Super Mario Maker - Packed Pipes

Packed Pipes

https://supermariomakerbookmark.nintendo.net/courses/2875-0000-011F-8981

I think this course is a failure.

I wanted a course where all the platforms were pipes, which I thought would be aesthetically interesting, and it would give a chance for me to play around with the “enemies coming out of pipes” mechanic. I tried to set up a gradual increase of enemy difficulty, from goombas to piranha plants to flying koopas. I also wanted a branching path because I think that’s what interests me most in my favorite Super Mario World courses.

By the time I finished creating my course, I was pretty happy. It seemed to be the right level of difficulty and surprise. However, after letting it sit for a week or two, I came back to it and it doesn’t hold up so well against some of my later levels.

The most irritating thing about this level is the length. I think early on, I was intimidated by trying to fill out a large screen with tons of stuff. I kept the course at the default size and tried to fill in from there. As a result, this level is really dense. Playing through it doesn’t take very long, and there’s no time to really absorb what’s happening.

The density of the level also throws off the difficulty curve. Piranha plants don’t activate until you get reasonably close, which ambushes an unsuspecting player. I never noticed this effect because I already knew the plants were there! Other enemies spring out of the pipes in such rapid succession that they quickly fill up the space between the columns. After seeing a few other levels with this mechanic, I think the best idea is to let the pipe-spawned enemies fall off the stage after bouncing off a wall. This allows the constant flow of enemies to be intimidating without becoming overwhelming.

Finally, the flying koopas that spawn just before the end are just annoying. I wanted to make the last pipe hard to reach without bouncing off an enemy, but I also wanted the difficulty of a piranha plant trying to ambush you. Those two ideas are introduced at the same time, and the pattern of the koopas means they get stuck for a bit before moving into an ideal jumping position. It’s just sloppy. If I made this level longer, I could have given more time to each individual idea instead of piling them on top of each other like an overstuffed sandwich.

I do like the top path, though. There’s a question block, which is what I like to use to distract the player for a second in order to let any potential dangers reveal themselves. In this case, the question block gives a mushroom. As the mushroom travels down to the player, the piranha plants spring into action, revealing the dangers ahead.

The mushroom also gives the player the ability to soak up the inevitable damage from the piranha plants. The invincibility frames the player gets after getting hit allow the player to run to the end, where another mushroom hides in a question block. I think this is a decent implementation of “you need to take damage to move forward” tropes that appear in harder levels. However, I’m not entirely sure it belongs in this particular stage, which is not supposed to be all that difficult.

Looking back on this course, it’s definitely a sophomore attempt. I think it would be interesting to go back and revise it. In the meantime, it’s more of a warning to amateurs than it is an interesting and engaging level that stands on its own.

Me and MMOs

I just went through a gigantic MMO bender, followed by some Life Changes, which is why I have been totally inactive on this blog.

I never considered myself an MMO person. I played Runescape briefly. It was unfriendly and grindy. I was never tempted to play World of Warcraft or EVE in college. I played Guild Wars 1 at launch, maybe for about a month. Star Wars Online: The Old Republic held me for a month and a half before I realized I spent more time worrying about the subscription fee than I did playing the game.

Guild Wars 2 really broke the mold for me. The combat was actually active and engaging. The world was beautiful. The player races were unique, and there was a heavy emphasis on cooperation and storytelling over competition and grinding. Around my fourth Guild Wars 2 character, though, I started looking for other games to scratch the same itch.

First I tried The Secret World. I was tantalized by the bizarre puzzle structure and the flexible yet overly-complex combat trees. That was all good fun until I got stuck in a gear grind just after getting out of the first map.

Then, I tried Neverwinter. That was a decent enough trip. I don’t actually remember much about it. I quit that after hitting max level and realizing everything was gated on how good my gear was. I had never encountered a game telling me “You can’t even try to participate in the rest of the game until your stats exceed this limit” until that point. That was pretty demoralizing.

Eventually, I remembered I bought some promotional Steam package that included Rift for about $1. Rift’s distinguishing attribute at launch was the “dynamic” events where rifts would suddenly open and monsters would come pouring out. Other than that, it’s a bog-standard WoW clone. Rift has the usual quests, 5-man dungeons, 20-man raids, PvP, and two factions with faction zones, etc.

The first 20 levels of any WoW clone feel fantastic. Quest turn-ins are clustered together, level-ups are frequent, and learning a new character is a lot of fun. The problem is that later levels (especially those added in expansions) are a grind. Combat doesn’t change much and isn’t particularly engaging. The dynamic events are mostly just enemy spawns and boss fights. You can sleep through most routine activity like farming and questing. Difficulty primarily comes from “mechanics” (AKA boss-specific knowledge of attack patterns) and enemies with more HP dealing larger amounts of damage (“DPS”). Players learn mechanics by asking others, or watching a YouTube video, or suffering through extremely slow trial and error to learn what implications a boss attack has. DPS is mitigated by grinding for better gear.

The world you inhabit starts off as Generic Fantasy World, pretty much. The first enemies I fought were skeletons and zombies. There was some sort of plot, where my character was… re-animated in the future and sent back in time? Whatever. Once I got into the content added in via expansion, there seemed to be more intentional and unique designs. I came across gigantic water creatures who towered over me and plots about collecting the different personas of an AI that scattered itself to escape dragon worshippers.

I did find an active, supportive guild who helped me hit max level and get past the first gear cap. And now… Well, all that’s left is getting better gear to see higher-level dungeons. That doesn’t motivate me. Now I find myself tempted to just say, “So long and thanks for all the fish.”

I tried picking up Final Fantasy XIV to heal the wounds. It has a free trial for 14 days and a level cap of 20. I’m just on the edge of the level cap. It is gorgeous and inventive, like anything you would expect out of a Final Fantasy game. It’s also grindy, slow, and repetitive, like anything you would expect out of a Final Fantasy game. I see a lot of people having fun with it, which makes me want to get back into it. However, it’s one of the few games that still has a subscription fee, which makes me want to ignore it.

the banquet is over

Things I have noticed about Porpentine’s games:

She places links at the ends of sentences. When you finish a sentence, a word links to the next sentence. Placing a link on a word in the middle of a sentence means I read the entire paragraph to get the context of the link, then go back and evaluate the linked word. When the link is at the end of the paragraph, I already have the context I need and I can immediately click to see more.

Macros control the rate at which sentences appear. A long, slow pause makes you consider what’s happening, or sentences rapidly appear to induce frantic scrolling. The choices she gives you make you consider “your” role in the story, as in this example from CYBERQUEEN:

flail scream breathe

It’s similar to Planescape: Torment, which gives you multiple ways to say the same thing. A literate player can recognize there’s not likely a difference between these options, so stakes are low. You aren’t going to “mess up” by choosing to flail instead of scream, so you’re free to experiment without consequence and choose the one with the most meaning to you instead of nudging you toward choosing the option granting +5 to diplomacy rather than strength. This nuance encourages role-playing and immersion.

In the above example, after clicking through all three options there’s a second where nothing happens. It’s an inversion of traditional game logic, where every action has an immediate reaction. In this case it has the effect of being a mind game. Surely “the game” (the designer) wouldn’t leave you hanging in this state, would they? It’s a fun example of the game designer making the player sweat a bit, mostly for the game designer’s own pleasure. (See also: Anna Anthropy, GLADOs in Portal)

Many of Porp’s games revolve around coercion, subjugating the player’s will. Howling Dogs and ALL I WANT IS FOR ALL OF MY FRIENDS TO BECOME INSANELY POWERFUL both feature a central hub with mandatory routine activities: drinking milk, eating nutrient bars and drinking water. In both cases, the routine establishes a rapport with the player, makes the player comfortable. And when the player is settled into a familiar routine, the routine is disrupted. The player is unsettled, and the plot catapults the player into a new, less familiar, less safe routine. Until finally the routine collapses altogether, and the setting congeals into something entirely alien. As one ending to Howling Dogs says, “The banquet is over”.

Endless Space and UI

I really love playing Endless Space. The UI is really frictionless in that it’s always pretty easy to get the information you need but is otherwise unobtrusive. A few simple principles in the interface make Endless Space really engrossing. In short, Endless Space:

• Makes it easy to access information you need
• Keeps the context of your decisions clear
• Uses well-crafted icons to make your decisions as unambiguous as possible

Like many strategy games, ES puts a toolbar at the top of the screen. Each button represents typical strategy game stuff—taxation/empire overviews, research, military and ship design, diplomacy and special “hero” units—but what makes this really useful is how the toolbar is always present and always gives you a quick tooltip summarizing the most important information in each tab. Just hovering over the Empire tab will tell you your income, and hovering over the Military tab tells you your total strength as well as rankings compared to other empires. This may sound like small potatoes, but the tooltip is much more expressive than some of ES’s competitors:

Galactic Civilization 2’s toolbar spreads across the entire bottom of the screen. Tooltips only indicate what each button does. The graph above the buttons gives a really generalized view of each civilization’s progress over time, which isn’t useful when you want to know if your tax income is killing morale.

ES keeps relevant information close together and quickly accessible. In ES, my tax balance is shown above the tax management button, and has a green little smiley face to indicate my empire is happy, whereas GC2 keeps the balance tooltip on the far left, even though you need to go to the middle of the screen to change it. You can’t tell just by looking at the screen where to find a mood summary. On top of that, the entire interface is buried under a giant graph which isn’t really useful for turn-to-turn management.

At the beginning of every turn, ES stacks all the information you need next to the End Turn button.

When your turn starts, everything that needs your attention just sits there unopened until you take a look at it. Here, from top to bottom, the notifications are telling me that another player has something to say to me, that my science research is done, that I have two completed constructions and, slightly to the left of the End Turn button, I have two ships without orders. Just from a glance at the icons, I know exactly what needs to happen this turn.

To be fair, GC does have a notification icon too:

It’s a ship launch reminder / new ship finder. Planets also get a green globe when they’ve completed construction, but these notifications don’t stack, so you can easily end up with 30 of these if you’ve finished 30 ships on 30 planets. They aren’t readable at-a-glance, either. Every completed construction uses the same icon. Most importantly, GC’s stack isn’t inclusive of everything I need to do in a turn, but we’ll get to that in a second.

ES’s Completed Constructions window, accessed from the notifications above, is also really great. It very clearly lets you know when a planet’s queue has run out:

See? The next box is empty! Damn, I should really do something. Fortunately, clicking on a row will take me right to the planet so I can start editing the queue. Once I come back to the notice, it’s updated with whatever I added. This makes it really easy to just scan for empty blocks in the queue to know what I still have to do in each turn. If I want to leave this screen and come back, “minimize” returns the notification to my tray so I can get back to it later. This is useful when I want to check on a planet’s location to decide between making sensor arrays for border planets or ships for more centrally located planets.

Remember how GC doesn’t give you a notification icon for every task you need? That’s because it pops a giant box up at the start of a turn:

A few points in comparison to ES:

1) You can’t see what is next on the planet’s production queue for ships. This is because ships just repeat production endlessly. For buildings , you can see what’s next, but

2) For buildings, the queue doesn’t get updated when you change production of a planet. If I go to a planet to change production and come back, it will still report my planet as not having any construction planned for next turn. Speaking of going to planets...

3) You can’t click or double-click on the event listing to get to the planet, you have to select the right item and click “go to” in the bottom right. Once you click “done”, this screen becomes inaccessible for the rest of your turn.

Speaking of planets!

Endless Space extends its wonderful tooltips to the system management screen. Every output from a system can be moused over to see the breakdown of elements, and every bonus or penalty is clearly accounted for.

This also applies to resources found on planets, and the planet types themselves:

GC has something similar, but it’s cramped. ES lays out accumulated values like an accounting ledger from top to bottom. This lets the numbers line up so you can scan the column at a glance and see where your big bonuses and penalties are coming from. GC muddles its message with asides like, “You are only charged for half of this”. I don’t know what “charged” actually means in this context. A penalty to money? To production time?

Also, GC is more reliant on text than ES. This leads to ambiguous situations like this bonus on my planet:

“Influence bonus: Any cultural district built here will receive a boost in its effectiveness”. Okay, fair enough, but...

Which of these buildings will get the boost? There is no “cultural district” listed. There is a “planetary influence” building, and a “influence” building. Will either of them get the bonus? 

The building description at the bottom of the screen gives some insight, finally[1].

ES avoids ambiguity by relying on iconography. Because each planetary resource (production, dust, science, food) has a color and icon associated with it, it’s very easy to tell at a glance what any given building does. And the tooltip you get for any building is quick to resolve any ambiguity:

The marker in the upper left of each building is color-coded according to what resource it helps develop. The tooltips use the same icons found in the system status screen to unambiguously define the exact effect a building has, as well as any negative effects. If you’re colorblind, the triangles might not be too helpful, but that’s where the icons and tooltips come in.

So how can we summarize the UI decisions Endless Space has made versus those of Galactic Civilization 2?

• Show the player the information they need in a way that’s easy for them to access.
• Useful information tends to be values that directly affect player decisions, like net income, rankings or morale.
• Sprawling graphs can probably hide behind a menu.
• When you want to grab the player’s attention, use consistent messaging that makes the context clear.
• Make it easy for the player to take action directly from the notification.
• If you’re presenting information that needs action taken, keep that information up to date so the player doesn’t lose track of their progress.
• Try not to rip the player’s context away through use of full-screen windows or unclear notifications
• Icons and color-coding can prevent ambiguous wording from complicating player decisions.
• Keeping consistent iconography through the game can make decision making much easier by keeping related concepts linked in the player’s mind

[1] As an aside: There’s a game design issue where GC loves giving percentage-based bonuses, rewarding exploration with 1% increases to this or that, and buildings that increase a value by “15%”. Someone once wrote a great article about why this is not as clear and effective as whole-value bonuses, but I’ll be damned if I can find it. In short, though: a percentage bonus makes me do division, rounding and addition in my head, whereas additive bonuses are much easier to figure out.

Nier

Nier is a game that is kind of unusual in structure but which would easily and quickly win a game of jRPG Trope Bingo. You briefly enjoy a text-adventure boss fight, but you then visit Desert Town and grind for items for villagers. Kaine might curse a bit, but her armor is not only beyond impractical, it’s somehow a plot point that she gets stabbed in the chest on three separate occasions. Boy, some armor would be really helpful in a situation like that!

One problem with the game’s structure is the dungeons. Like many games, you venture into dungeons to grab Macguffins, unlock new powers and fight gigantic bosses. In Zelda games, you get your new ability about halfway through the dungeon and you’re forced to use it to overcome the obstacles of the dungeon. In Nier, you wander through hallways, fight the same enemies over and over, take on the Big Boss and then you get a fancy new ability. Zelda uses dungeons as a training ground for new abilities; Nier’s dungeons are just filler. Zelda bosses have a specific weakness to whatever new weapon you’ve acquired; Nier asks you to take a wild fucking guess at the best strategy at defeating a boss through trial and error, and then asks you to go through the entire process three more times to see All The Endings.

I ragequit Nier twice during boss battles where the bosses spam magic bullets at you with very little chance of evasion. There’s a hard limit on how many healing items you can carry and no chance to replenish before facing the boss. Very, very few enemies require the same sort of tactics you’ll use on a boss. Zelda teaches you how to defeat a boss through its dungeon structure. Nier throws you into the dungeon and gives you a gimmick boss and dares you to get it right on your first try.

I did finish the game, but mostly because of the setting. There are only about eight locations in the world, which makes for a smaller, relaxed and more intimate scope. After a certain point, the protagonist mentions the world is in decline, and it seems like a well-supported conclusion. You visit the towns, see how they struggle to get by and understand how the frontier is pressing in on them throughout your travels. In the early acts of the game, it’s a quick journey through frontier areas to visit each town. A few quests challenge you to reach another town without dodging enemies or getting hit, which is feasible in the wide-open spaces linking locations. Once the enemies ramp up, venturing into the field is legitimately dangerous with tons of enemies spamming magic and swarming over you. Unfortunately, the limited scope backfires when Act II ends up repeating Act I scene-for-scene in almost the exact same order.

There’s also a nonsense plot, vaguely explained, about um, Shades? Betrayals where the bad guys spend 90% of their time straight-up helping you destroy their plans? “Sacrifice”? Whatever. Rest assured, this is a game where you Kill Bad Guys with a sword and then, after all the killing, the game tries to pretend you’re the real monster.

I was told that Nier subverted design tropes, that it was a meta-RPG, that it Tackled The System. It doesn’t. You kill bad guys, you get stronger. If it wanted to do something different besides a tacked-on text adventure, which in all honesty seems like a level sequence that got cut, it could have tried going backwards. If the game is about the decline of a world and the disappearance of humans, wouldn’t it make more sense to start with a horrifically strong protagonist with a ton of abilities, who gradually loses those abilities as his world collapses around him? A game where you lean on your abilities until they are taken away from you and then you are left only with the skill you’ve acquired over the course of playing the game? A game where your strength can’t save the world, not even once? A game where destiny is final and can’t be rewritten by The Chosen One? That would go a lot further toward subverting jRPG tropes than having a sassy sidekick complain about fetch quests.

Kingdoms of Amalur

It’s really cool to go into the ancient temples of Teeth of Naros and find historical documents and accounts of the people who worked on that specific temple. I enjoyed it a lot more than finding Volume XII of Disappearance of the Dudes. It was relevant to what I was doing, so I didn’t mind stopping and reading a few pages of the background.

And honestly that’s all I have to say about Kingdoms of Amalur. It was an amusing way to spend forty hours and what happened to the studio is horrible, but at the end of the day, yeah, it was a High Fantasy RPG.

Driver: San Francisco and Design

An important element of any driving game is the actual cars. An open-world driving game, like Burnout, is specifically about the right car for the right mission, but one of the biggest drags in Burnout was returning to the garage to pick out a new car, then driving back to the event destination. An interface that lets you arbitrarily pluck a car out from the ambient traffic of the city is more than a plot device. It’s also a great way to encourage the player to screw around with different cars without penalty.

My favorite missions in Driver are the open-ended “dares,” which give you a ridiculous condition (drive 150mph in opposing traffic for twenty seconds), but without a time limit. You can swap cars in and out at your leisure without breaking flow until you achieve your goal. Then you can zoom out to a city-wide view and pop directly into the next story mission without driving across the city. It’s extremely handy and a great design idea that really simplifies the act of playing an open-world game. (As opposed to Prototype 2, which forces you to walk to a specific transport point, in costume, in order to switch areas.)

Another great feature of Driver is the minimap. As per its name, the minimap normally shows a very small area of where you are, maybe two or three blocks at the most, but you can press “Y” to make the map expand across the screen, which reduces your field of vision while you’re still barrelling down the wrong lane at 90mph. It makes me think of unfolding a paper map across your knees while trying to keep an eye on the road.

You can pause the game and go to the Big Definitive Map, but 1) it kind of breaks your flow and 2) unlike the minimap, it doesn’t adjust relative to your position, so you can suffer a bit of confusion as you reconcile which direction you’re facing against the absolute direction of the Big Definitive Map against the relative positioning of the minimap. Those two factors meant I used the minimap-expand feature way more than the Big Definitive Map, and really enjoyed doing it since it kept me in the flow of the game.

papo y yo

There’s a whole host of things I thought Papo y Yo did really well. The setting of a magical neighborhood where houses stand up and walk around was a great use of architecture. I often lament (privately, to myself, into a stiff drink) that even though architecture in games is not constrained by reality, too many designers still think in terms of strict realism.

The music also carried a lot of the mood for the early game. The transformation of Monster wouldn’t have the same impact without the intense drums—or for that matter, the way his transformation happens in dreamlike slow motion before he chomps into you and throws you away.

I thought the puzzles in the game was the right amount of “filling.” It gave you time to enjoy the goofy emoticons Monster popped out whenever he unthinkingly trotted between two fruit-spawning trees, which let you develop a weird connection with him, but it wasn’t too hard or too frequent such that it really got in the way of the stuff you wanted to see—the horrible realization of Quico that Monster is really someone else. I think the worst thing the designers could have done was given us a full Zelda-like experience, where we fiddle with items and inventories and side quests. That would have diluted our time with Monster.

And that final scene, Jesus. Since Monster is often a walking puzzle piece—go here, stand on this switch—we get a very systematic view of his motivations. He likes fruit, but if there’s no fruit he sleeps. He likes frogs more than he likes fruit (and will knock a frog out of your hands). He behaves docilely but selfishly when he’s normal. He behaves aggressively when he’s tripping on frog juice. The last puzzle in the game makes the pieces of that puzzle clear—as clear as you were afraid it would be from the first scene. It’s not a shocking revelation to the player (or even to Quico, I guess), but disposing of the pieces of the puzzle has an element of finality and closure as you strip away the metaphor and dispose of Monster once and for all.

Speaking of finality and closure:
WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS GAME HAVE COLLECTIBLES THAT ONLY APPEAR IN THE SECOND PLAYTHROUGH. THAT COMPLETELY GOES AGAINST THE ENTIRE MESSAGE OF THE WHOLE FUCKING GAME.

Journey

I finally got to play Journey. For reference, I think Flower is one of my favorite games, so I had high hopes for Journey as well.

I liked it. I thought it was fun and cute, like an experimental Disney film. Occasionally it was beautiful. I loved seeing the terminal mountain in the background. Like Flower, the musical cues were gorgeous and perfectly authored to keep themes dropping in and out at thematically appropriate times.

However, these horrible players kept popping into my game. They were unable to keep up with me even as I carefully explored all corners of the screen, and I ended up leaving them behind. I guess some other people had really great experiences with these mysterious figures who join their games, but I got people who just mashed the chirp button and ran around in circles and off cliffs. I felt a little bad about abandoning one person in the snowfields after we kept each other warm through tempestuous snowstorms, but uh, he ran right into a dragon’s line of sight. It’s like, why did you think the pipes were placed in the level? You’re supposed to hide and time it, not charge ahead and hope for the best.

30 Flights

30 Flights of Loving was a great proof-of-concept. I played Gravity Bone immediately beforehand, and I enjoyed the setting (a kitschy spy thriller) as well as the complete lack of expository cutscenes or text. 30 Flights was very similar: a great set-up, a great sense of how to tell the story, and an amusing thrill ride through and through. However, while the technique was impeccable, the actual story was pretty unremarkable. Like Gravity Bone, it was a quick tale about betrayal and love in the spy world.

The best moment in 30 Flights is definitely navigating through an airport. You’re lost, but you pick a direction and start going. There’s a sudden hard cut, and regardless of which direction you were going, you end up where you needed to be. Normally, most games will either: 1) punt you into a cutscene where the correct path is chosen for you, or 2) make you walk the entire length of the corridor to reach your destination.

A hard cut shaves off that obnoxious empty walking time, and avoids the helplessness of watching a cutscene.  It’s a great showcase of how to tell a story, and that’s awesome and badly needed, but (“by design” and not by accident) the threadbare plot isn’t anything more than an instruction manual. It’s not a complete and worthy story in its own right.

P.S. Over at This Cage is Worms, Cameron has a completely different reaction to the game.

Sanitarium

We played Sanitarium with two friends at PAX. Since we’re generally not competitive people, we were attracted by the cooperative mode and the short time commitment.

What was interesting about the game was the “board” is constructed every turn by drawing an item card and placing it face down, so the board constantly expands in strange and unpredictable directions as the Bad Guys chase you around. Since the game is about escaping a sanitarium (by collecting your personal totem items and shedding whatever neuroses you’ve acquired), it becomes an exploration of the Psychic Space of a Sanitarium.

Unfortunately, I can’t really tell you about the Psychic Space of a Sanitarium because the game wasn’t very good. There wasn’t any mechanic that hooked me. There was nothing that made me say, “Oh, I’ve got to play another round.” We finished the game and asked, “Wait, how could we have even lost?”As it turns out, the last page of the rules said the game ends when you run out of item cards, but the Bad Guys chasing us were pretty easily evaded or diverted, and even if one “caught” you, rolling dice to pass an increasingly difficult horror check meant nothing because the consequences were not that dire.

The concept of spreading nebulous, hidden information onto a map that connected distant safe rooms was a great concept, but it didn’t go any further than that. Probably without the cooperative goal we would have been reduced to betraying each other (the real monster is MAN’S INHUMANITY TO MAN), but then we wouldn’t have been playing a cooperative game, which was our #1 goal.

Dear Esther

A series of questions and answers about Dear Esther:

What makes you finish your first “round”?
The simple joy of walking around a beautiful landscape. The slight mystery of the island. The music. The view.

What makes you start a second round?
For me - I did not realize the island could be explored thoroughly in a single pass. I thought I missed some places.

For others - Discussing the island turns the player into an unreliable narrator; “I heard X” is not true for other players, which prompts a replay to prove one person right and ultimately prove them both wrong.

In particular, “I saw a ghost”, “I saw a car”, “I heard no one died in the accident” all made me replay the game.

What makes you start a third round?
Realizing there is a very large script with a huge amount of variation. Realizing the repeated symbols across the island change. Starting to dig into where symbols are repeated and why. Letting the island inhabit your brain, to the point where you start feeling sympathy for the boredom and endless repetition to which the protagonist sometimes refers as you start at the lighthouse again.

What makes the game compelling to replay?
Realizing it’s a ten-minute investment to play a single chapter over. Not being afraid of encountering endless, pointless combat or searching for that one last collectible that eludes you.
=-=-=-=-=-
Here is the first choice in Dear Esther.


Do you take the high road, or do you take the low road?

If you are unfamiliar with the game, your question is probably, “Why does it matter?” The joy of this game is that it doesn’t matter. There is no “left for loot” rule, no minimap to consult, no collectibles, no change in difficulty, not even a time limit. You could walk down to the beach, come back up, and walk along the cliff.

The game asks, “What do you want to see today, right now? The cliff or the beach?” I choose the cliff almost every time. I like being up high and looking at the water below. You might choose the beach in order to hear the waves and look at the scrawlings in the sand. There is no “correct” answer, no metagame. There is only your personal preference. When you take a walk, do you go on the high road or the low road?

How come when we talk about 8-bit systems, we talk about the beauty that comes out of working within constraints (four sound channels, eight colors, 16x16 pixel sprites), but when we talk about playing a game, the game becomes worthless if there isn’t a branching ending, different styles of play, or high scores? Isn’t the act of playing a game also an act of creation? When we start a new Settlers of Catan board, we proceed to tell the story of that board--the person who immediately gets a monopoly on wheat, the three players who start too close to each other, and so on. When we start a new season in Madden ‘12, we tell the story of our franchise team. Maybe you’re playing the underdogs as they climb their way to the top, or the established veterans who falter in your unworthy hands.  We get invested in outcomes, we curse and scream when we are betrayed, and we laugh and gloat when we succeed. These are things we create when we play, so if it’s still an act of creation to play, why is it that games aren’t allowed to be constrained?

Some people might not enjoy constrained games, but people hate RPGs and sports games and board games. We don’t allow them to redefine those things as “not a game”.

Gameslisting

Okay, hi! That was enough of a diversion. Let’s talk about video games again.

I'm juggling several different games, which makes it difficult to carve out time to write a detailed blog post for each one.

Shin Megami Tensai: Devil Survivor 2 - SMT:DS2 is a great strategy RPG, a great jRPG, and a great monster-collecting RPG. It's also a bit grind-heavy, but that makes it ideal for short bursts of play on my bus ride into work. You can spend twenty minutes grinding and ten minutes rearranging teams and skills, then close the lid of the DS and head into work. On the way back, you can spend ten minutes taking care of plot events and another twenty minutes fighting, then close the lid and head home.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning - Well, here's the deal. The Editor, as a hardcore Bioware fan, gets first dibs on Mass Effect 3. I, trying to avoid spoilers, lock myself in the next room and play through games I wouldn't otherwise play. So far, I've skipped through most of the plot of KoA, but the conflict between the immortal Fae and the mortal...other people, seems unique enough. Movement is fast and fluid, and combat feels pretty crunchy (on Corvus' exhortations, I've picked up some chakrams and I enjoy their weird rhythm). I don't feel particularly constrained by the class system, unlike Skyrim. Right now, I do feel a little rushed through some areas--again, unlike Skyrim, wherein I felt quite comfortable taking my time to do shit. I'm not sure if it's my mindset (FINISH MASS EFFECT SO WE CAN DISCUSS GARRUS-SEX, KATY) or if it's some property of the game.

Star Wars Online: The Old Republic - At the release of Cataclysm, The Editor persuaded me to give WoW a try. We played for about two months, I hit level 65, and then I quit after reaching The Outlands. The first twenty levels of WoW felt great--levels popped frequently (almost too frequently, although I understand that was intentionally tweaked to get players to the endgame faster), crafting was rewarding, and in general I Got It. I started playing SWOTOR with a friend and I'm just about to hit the 2 month mark. Again, the first twenty levels felt great. On top of that, I loved my giant yellow Twi'lek Jedi Knight, her yellow lightsabers, and her slightly sassy take on the Light Side. The mission structures really contrasted WoW's goofy plot, which is now patched together across several different expansions. However, the honeymoon is starting to wear off. I hate paying $15 to maintain an account that I only play for 6 hours a month. Crafting is prohibitively expensive for my level, so I have to let the interesting parallelization of crafts grinding lay dormant while I build up cash. As fun as the plot is for my main Jedi, I can't bear the thought of going through Dromund Kaas again with my Sith alts. That said, I heard a rumor that the next content patch will have new lightsaber colors, and as a hardcore Star Wars nerd, I'm not sure I can resist giving my Twi'lek a yellow/purple lightsaber set.

Dwarf Fortress - New release, new excuse for me to pick up one of my favorite games again. This time, I wrote a beginner's tutorial since the Wiki's tutorial is nigh-unreadable to me, and doesn't flow through the game in a way that's useful to a first-timer. The tutorial is currently being playtested by random DF first-timers. Once I get enough feedback, I'll release it on this blog.

Dear Esther - I find this game a great blend between very relaxing and very emotional. I want to write a ton about it. I will soon. For now, I'll just say that very few games ask little enough of me that revisiting them is not a chore, and very few games reward me so much for deciding to revisit them.

Braid Podcast w/ Critical Distance

So Eric Swain generously allowed me to discuss one of my favorite games in a podcast for Critical Distance. It can be found here:

http://www.critical-distance.com/2012/01/19/episode-9-a-braid-companion/

Eric always does a great job editing, and everyone was a great speaker, so it's quite easy to listen to.

I really enjoyed the format (and the other guests!). I sometimes struggle to fit everything I think about a game into a neat little monologue, so being able to hear other people's opinions immediately after I said something was very valuable. If you don't have the entire hour, I put out my entire thesis at 24:53 and then Maggie jumps in with an incredibly clear explanation of her opposing view. It was really, really good. I think if we had this conversation via blogposts, it would have been a lot less helpful. Blogging sometimes can get a bit digressive and insulated, and it's hard for other people to keep track when discussions spin out into comments, Twitter, other blogs... It's just nice to have instant feedback from wonderful people.

Towards the end of the podcast, I mention David Hellman as the incredible artist for Braid. I specifically reference one of my favorite comics he did for A Lesson Is Learned, which can be found at:

http://www.alessonislearned.com/index.php?comic=15

His explanation of the art underneath the comic was one of the things that really blew my mind when I first read it.

That's all.

Mega Man Generations

This video explaining why Mega Man X is actually a great sequel was making the rounds (warning: is a YouTube video about video games--jump to 12:11- 15:45 for the relevant bit), but one claim in particular stood out to me. The author says, “Mega Man X is about growing stronger,” and he cites evidence from the game-play and the scripted sequences. It’s true! The Mega Man series has a lot of hidden depth that tends to get ignored. The games are separated into sub-series, each of which takes place about 100 years apart. While the games evolved to keep up with (or even define) modern conventions, the progression of the Mega Man games when examined together also tracks the optimistic rise of a new technology, the unforseen side effects, the struggle to control and contain technology, and the rejuvenation that comes at the end, starting another cycle.

Mega Man, Dr Light and Rush stand on a ruined highway beneath a clear, blue sky as Dr Wily taunts them with his magnificent mustache.

Source [ign.com]

Mega Man 7 - 20XXAD. Mega Man 7 was the first Mega Man game that took plot as something more than a few words on an interstitial screen. In this game, Mega Man is a bright character in bright world, and the game even starts with a bit of slapstick as Mega Man dons a met hat instead of his helmet. Oh, and let’s not forget the wince-inducing naming schema of Rockman, Roll, Blues, Bass and Treble. The sky is pure blue even with the temporary devastation of yet another Dr. Wily jailbreak. Mega Man is a new creation, a new technology, fighting against those who use the same technology for evil. The comically-evil bad guy always goes to jail at the end, even if he breaks out in the next game.

X leaps above a torpedo shot from a giant flying bee under a dark sky. Some Blade-Runner-lookin skyscrapers rise up in the background. 

Source [ign.com]


Mega Man X - 21XX AD. The X series was a major tonal shift. It was on the same hardware as MM7, but the palette is completely different. No mention is made of the world previous to this one, except for Dr. Light’s ghostly hologram. X is a bright character in dark world. He literally glows with energy, and his armor upgrades turn him towards pure white, even as the highway collapses in ruins under his feet.

According to the plot, X is lost technology rediscovered by Dr. Cain. Cain clones the technology he finds from X to revolutionize industries across the world. However, the Sigma virus rewrites this poorly understood technology and destroys the earth just as the new automation has finished building it. The future is grim. X sees a future with constant warfare and wonders at the futility of his goal. Does he have to fight forever? 

Zero sits in the rain, alone. A ruined city is in the background

Zero chills out in an underground ruin while a giant robot hand grabs Ciel.

Source Gallery [ign.com]

Mega Man Zero - ~22XX AD? The Zero series starts with a dark character in dark world. The techno-utopian Neo-Arcadia (literally: a new place where people are believed to live peacefully) sentences dissident robots to death while the city’s humans remain mysteriously out of view. Technology is wielded by the entrenched hierarchs of Neo-Arcadia, who use their endless supply of Pantheons to maintain power through complete control, in this case, of energy supplies.
The shining optimism of new technology present in Mega Man is gone. The struggle to control existing technology in the X series has been lost. Zero is from the past, and he is the only one who can dismantle the tight control of production maintained by Neo-Arcadia.

The game emphasizes Zero’s brutality. Unlike X, he gets up close with his sword for the kill (rewarded in boss fights with a shot of your enemy split neatly in half, revealing their inner circuits before they explode). The Zero games have a scoring system which emphasizes Zero’s remorseless killing--levels where you finish under a par time, kill lots of enemies and don’t take any damage get you higher ranks. This leads to a guerilla-like approach to combat: move quickly, exploit terrain to your advantage, only engage when necessary.

Zero’s mobility is reinforced by the nomadic nature of his allies, who travel in caravans and attack remote bases in the desert. They are outcasts, struggling for survival and hoping Zero’s ancient technology can lead them to victory.

ZX (look, I don't name 'em, ok?) is chilling in a verdant forest fighting a snake-monster thing. The trees in the background have faint traces of wiring sticking through. Well, except that one tree, which has a big-ass wire wrapped around it. 

Source [gamespy.com]

Mega Man ZX - ~24XX AD? The ZX series got weird. It was the shortest series and probably the most reviled*. It was about technology regenerated, as the palettes started shifting back towards bright. Z and X have become “biometals”, merged with a human, and their collective angst has been toned down.
You explore cities and wilderness meshed together in an open world. It illustrated the tension between this happy safe world of technology but also the wilderness of unchecked Reploids.
However, the game is also about the influence of the past. You collect the remnants of the last series’ Big Bads, and their ghosts guide you. Technology has been tamed again, but will the ghosts of years past let it sleep peacefully? Where will this world be in another 100 years?

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*Well okay anything past X4 or X5 is really the most reviled since the whole thing with Keiji Inafune having his creative authority overridden by Capcom’s insatiable desire for sequels really got out of control after X5 (the series went up to X8, unfortunately), but there were only two ZX games, and they were largely hampered by an inscrutable map screen and a blandly designed, forgettable world.