Metagaming Part 2: Glitches and Developer Responses

This week's post carries on the discussion of playing a game against its rules by talking about glitches.  This was hinted at last week when I linked an archive of speedruns of various games which more often than not take advantage of errors in programming to slice through regular playtimes by a huge margin.

Games that are particularly popular to speedrun such as Super Metroid or Metroid Prime typically have opportunities for "sequence breaking" which involves getting certian items early in order to progress through sections of the game earlier than the player should be able to. An example in Metroid Prime involves a bug that allows a player to increase their jump height, allowing a skilled player to obtain the most powerful weapon in the game, the Plasma Beam, less than a quarter of the way into the game.However, sometimes these time-saving sections seem to be anticipated by the programmers.  If you get the Plasma Beam in Metroid Prime early then you'll be ambushed by a Plasma Trooper enemy, a fairly strong type of enemy who can only be hurt by the Plasma Beam.  Obtaining the Plasma Beam later in the game does not cause a Plasma Trooper to appear.

Another example from the Metroid series is in Metroid Fusion, which is an incredibly linear game by Metroid standards. In Fusion, a clever use of the Shinespark maneuver will allow a player to bypass an upgrade necessary for escaping the area that the player is otherwise trapped in.  If the player manages to pull this off, the game's mission control will acknowledge that you broke the sequence of an otherwise linear game with a special message.  While it's cool that developers seem to be aware of what players like to do with their games, the glitch allowing for the player to obtain the Plasma Beam early was curiously removed in the Metroid Prime Trilogy collection.

Glitches, bugs, errors, or whatever else they are called are examples of programming oversights on the part of the game's programmers.  Sometimes, these glitches can be harmless graphical errors that don't really effect the gameplay.  Other times, you can get potentially game-breaking bugs like the "Handcuffs" glitch from Street Fighter II, or any of a dozen of shoddily programmed sections of Donkey Kong 64.

In the current age of gaming, glitches can and often are fixed through swift patches. Maybe I'll touch on this in a future post on day one DLC... However, not all game companies are so swift to condemn glitches; Guilty Gear had a glitch termed "Jump Install" that allowed players to jump without actually jumping, which in turn "stored" the jump to be used later in a situation where a character wouldn't normally be able to jump. Interestingly, this was never fixed in future versions of the game, despite re-released versions of the game - like Guilty Gear XX: Reload - fixing other issues with the game. As Guilty Gear was a game made to be played competitively, Jump Installing still remains usable as part of Guilty Gear's metagame.  Additionally, another ArcSys game Persona 4: Arena had a glitch where the character Yosuke was able to descend while airdashing, allowing for a more aggressive playstyle.  Despite numerous game-breaking glitches being fixed in patched after Persona 4: Arena's release, Yosuke's "gliding" bug was never fixed, and as a result has been adapted into the metagame much like Guilty Gear's Jump Install.

A less serious examples in Valve's FPS game Team Fortress 2 involve a glitch where when the game goes into overtime, the Announcer's voice files will glitch, causing her to yell "overtime!" over and over again.  While this bug was fixed, it proved so popular that Valve gave servers the option to have the Announcer to continuously say "overtime" or not. In the original Pokemon games (Red and Blue versions) a highly desirable glitch that allowed the player to clone multiple items sometimes manifested an extra monster known as "Missingno" that fans have humorously interpreted as a sort of reality-warping Lovecraftian horror due to the numerous amount of game-breaking glithes that occur after encountering the inexplicable monster.

It's even got an single unnerving eye that it just watches you with.

 I see glitches and opportunities to allow for speedrunning and sequence-breaking as another form of "art from adversity." I subscribe to the belief that video games are a form of art, but the unique part of video games - gameplay - is where the true art is. The fact that your game can be played in a way completely differently than you intended and gain popularity and notoriety from this aspect is incredible to me.  It's not unlike how something like The Rocky Horror Picture Show gained a cult following to the point that audiences interacted with the movie. It ties into my post from two weeks ago about how the games can interact with the player outside of the gameplay.

Image Source
www.wikipedia.org

Further Reading
Wikipedia article on Missingno
Demonstration of Guile's "Handcuffs" glitch
Demonstration of Yosuke's "Gliding" glitch

Metagaming Part 1: How not to play a game by its Rules

There are a lot of topical things I could talk about in this week's post. Capcom announced new ideas to improve its sales, the background check on guns bill just got shot down so I could do a piece on violence in gaming for example.  The former is something I'll think about but have already touched upon, and the latter is something I'm actually already working on in debate form for class. Perhaps I'll regurgitate my argument here after I present it in class.  Until then, here's something that ties in with last week's entry on different ways to play your games.

What do I mean by metagaming? Perhaps you're more familiar with the term tan you may think. Metagaming is defined as playing a game in a manner that transcends the game's established set of rules, such as using knowledge outside of the game to affect how one plays.  It can be as simple as writing down answers for a memorization puzzle or using the internet to find a hard-to-find item.  A good - if unintentional - example I've discovered is a video from internet content creator Egoraptor's series Sequelitis whereupon he talks about games and their sequels.  The sequel in question is Super Castlevania 4, where he talks about how the series' staple of subweapons didn't change to reflect the design of the newer games (please note that his pronunciation of meta sucks).

 

The video talks about eschewing situations where the game encourages you to use items to beat it, and that's kind of the core of metagaming that sets the standard for a lot of other situations I'll talk about.  Probably the most well known form of metagaming is a speedrun.  It's exactly what it sounds like; running through a game as fast as you possibly can.  Adventure games like Super Metroid are perfect for this, especially because of how these games emphasize collecting items to proceed. By skipping over key upgrades, one can either bypass challenging sections to come back with equipment that one shouldn't have yet.

An example of this can be seen in the original NES Zelda, where it's possible to get to the final dungeon of the game without ever needing to use the sword. Some games reward the player for getting through the game quickly or accomplishing difficult challenges.  The PS2 brawler God Hand puts a "kick me" sign on the player character in an early cutscene that gets blown away if the player uses either of a pair of power-ups.  If the player gets through the game without losing the kick me sign, then they unlock bonus content depending on the difficulty level.

Some games don't reward challenge.  Classic games like Super Mario Bros. and Quake - one of the games that spawned the concept of speedrunning (which is exactly what it sounds like) where no reward was involved - have no incentive to play through the game quickly.  In this case, it mostly revolves around a player showing off how knowledgeable or skilled they are with a particular game.

I won't say that recent games have been easier recently.  However, making one's own rules to play the game with can amplify the challenge and possibly enhance the enjoyment of a game, depending on how into said game a person is.  Speedruns in particular have been embraced, with several sites raising money for charities while doing speedruns of games.  Others do it of their own free will out of determination or love for games.  Often the two coincide.

Some of the ways that these guys exploit the game is nuts.

I plan to follow this up with another part detailing examples the attitudes of game companies on the part of metagaming.  Look forward to it!

Image Source
http://speeddemosarchive.com/

Further Reading
Wikipedia article on Speedrunning
Wikipedia article on Quake done quick

How Games can interact with the Player

I realize that the tone of my last few posts has been pretty grouchy, and I'll more than willingly admit that the previous one wasn't my best and only served to enforce that image.  A figurative tidal wave of Jell-O was descending upon me, and ignoring it would have seen me swallowed up never to emerge, while only making a modest effort to prepare for it would leave bits of gelatin all over the floor for me to grind into the carpet at a later date.  Basically what I'm saying is I was busy and this week I've had time to actually plan out this blog post rather than hammer on a keyboard for ten minutes and call it a day. This week I want to talk about something I really like for a change rather than harp on about the next thing about the industry that makes me mad.

Like David Cage.

I've noticed that I talk an awful lot about survival horror games like Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil, and the reason for that is simple; having only just gotten interested in the genre, I'm discovering new and interesting things about it that make it unlike any other kind of game I've played before.  You see, when I played Resident Evil for the first time, I ended up in a situation where my regular storeroom and save point became less accessible after a door got stuck and I didn't want to waste ammo killing the zombie in the room.  It was then that I did something very unusual: I thought about how to play the game after I'd put down the controller for the day.  It's not unusual to want to play more of a game to see where it goes or think about playing the game later, but Resident Evil made me think about how I was going to play the game the next time I turned fired my Gamecube up.

 The next time I found myself doing this was with 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors.  It's a visual novel with a well-written plot that has more twists and turns than a warehouse full of spare plumbing parts.  The character in 999 all have numbers assigned to them that prevent them from entering certain areas (it's a lot more complex than that), and when one character suddenly died, I did what I could to figure out who could have done the deed by comparing and working with these numbers. It was a futile effort because of plot shenanigans, but again, I actively took part in the game when I wasn't playing it.

What I'm getting at is that games that involve the player in an act outside of playing the game are more likely to leave a greater impression.  A really direct example would be Metal Gear Solid, which features a sequence where the player character encounters a psychokinetic boss demonstrates his abilities by reading your mind (the other games on your memory card and tracking your in-game stats), moves matter with his mind (makes the player's controller rumble) and finally disrupts the player's movements.  The only way to beat him is to move the controller to the system's second controller port.

I'm not even playing the game and he's reading me like a book!

There's been a lot of interest in augmented reality games recently, what with AR cards being included with Nintendo 3DS systems that take pictures like a camera and overlay them in gameplay. I suppose a point that I'm trying to dredge together out of all of this is that augmented reality games don't have to center around taking pictures or all that.  Developers should feel free to go ahead though, my friends and I had a blast blowing each others faces up when the first of us got a 3DS. I think that "AR" is at its strongest when it supplements gameplay or maybe doesn't actually augment reality.

A further point I've though of after meditating on inviting the player to play the game when they're not is that it's extremely difficult to do intentionally. Sure, you can go the Metal Gear Solid route, but while it's memorable, it doesn't particularly add to the game's plot or gameplay in the same way that 999 and Resident Evil did. If a developer's goal is to make consumers want to continue playing their games, wouldn't hooking them in this manner be the optimal solution?  Let's see more of this in the future, games industry!

Image Source
www.giantbomb.com

Further Reading
Augmented Reality Games article on Wikipedia

Companies need to realize that games are a niche interest

In my post about adventure games I concluded by talking about how adventure games should attempt to reinvent themselves in order to appeal more broadly.  Looking back I feel kind of silly, given that this is a negative direction I think the industry is taking.  I understand that attempting to make a single game appeal to as large a crowd as possible makes sense from a business standpoint, but those who haven't been to interested in games for a long time have to realize that games themselves are a niche interest.

Which is a shame because not everybody is patient enough to get context for this scene.

So many recent games like Dead Space have been claimed to be able to appeal to a broader audience.  What this means is that Dead Space changed from a survival horror game to a game with an emphasis on combat rather than horror.  As a result the horror genre is feeling severely undercut.  About the only "Triple A" horror games that have come out recently are Silent Hill: Downpour and Resident Evil 6, the former of which trips over the horror aspect of the genre and the latter having long since cast its bet in with action and shooting rather than legitimate horror.

By watering down these genres and muddling them together, you get problems like Assassin's Creed 3 had, that there really is no core gameplay mechanic for the game to focus on.  If your game can't focus on doing one thing really well then it's going to bland, forgettable, and probably really bad.

Yet more and more Triple A games seem to be doing this.  I won't lump all of them together, but the bulk of them seem top be designed to appeal to everybody with thinly spread mechanics from across the spectrum of genres.  Games and movies have never been closer together; churn out a game that will be bought on brand recognition and people will be guaranteed to buy it while going down a checklist of stuff that needs to appear in everything or else it won't appeal to a broad audience, with absurdly large budgets to boot.  The recent Bioshock Infinite clocked in at an indefinite amount estimated to be more than $100,000,000 but less than $200,000000 according to developers.  Bioshock Infinite is incredibly solid from nearly every source I've questioned, so hopefully change is in the winds.

Games are looking better than ever, but how much money is being spent on just looks nowadays?

It's cool that companies want to appeal to a larger audience, but they should do it by making games that fit into specific niches rather than blending elements of the genres together.  It seems like the only companies willing to take risks and throw their lot in with a definite audience in mind are the ones that make indie games.  Machinarium - in my opinion the king of video games - had an incredibly modest budget, with only $1000 spent on marketing.  The game was sold at very reasonable prices on distribution platforms like Steam and PSN which allowed the company to turn a profit.  Indie games have a much more sustainable business model in the current industry, which has seen the loss of prolific studios like THQ and LucasArts.

THQ is known for game series such as Saints Row, Red Faction, and Dawn of War.

The point I'm trying to make is this; Indie games with lesser budgets don't need excessive sales to turn a profit, and by focusing tightly on a specific genre, indie games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent can capture all of a niche audience.  At the moments big name games are incorporating elements from lots of genres to appeal to as many people as possible, but more often than not it comes off as spreading everything too thinly to really grab hold of any audience.  As a result, sales decline, which is affecting the industry negatively by forcing budget cuts and bankruptcy of competent studios.  Something's gotta give.  I agree with the current forecast for the industry: a crash.

Image Sources 
http://gaming.thedigitalfix.com/

thekoalition.com
www.wikipedia.org

Further Reading
Bioshock Infinte's budget estimates and general information on game budgets
Goodbye, LucasArts.

Will Remakes Trend in the current Industry?

I know what you're thinking.  You're thinking that I'm going to talk about two of the biggest recent "things" in gaming right now; Square Enix's money problems or the statement by Irrational Game's Ken Levine that having female characters on the front of a game's boxart doesn't sell after a female central character in Bioshock Infinite was relegated back of the box.  Jim Sterling's weekly video show The Jimquisition covered the latter more eloquently than I could hope to, and  just did a bit on the instability of the game industry as it is, so what I'm going to talk about this week is Ducktales.

Ducktales was an early example of how to license an existing property and make it into a great game.  Capcom was the go-to company for adapting Disney licenses into games, and pretty much all of them are bang-up jobs.  In particular, Goof Troop for the SNES was the first game designed by Shinji Mikami, the big brain behind Resident Evil; one can even see the parallels between the game's single-item inventory slot and the limited carrying capacity in RE.

Speaking of Resident Evil, the Gamecube Remake of Resident Evil is - in my opinion - the golden standard for game remakes.  Released in 2002, it was the start of an exclusivity agreement between Capcom and Nintendo to give the Gamecube a line of games to appeal to mature gamers.  Given Nintendo's traditional "family friendly" background, Capcom pulled out all the stops, giving the games tons of new content, like new areas, new mechanics that change how the game is played, redone music and sound effects, an attempt to make the storyline more coherent, and gave it graphics that for their time were incredible.  Nintendo had a modest hit that secured future releases like Resident Evil 4 and other games that weren't Resident Evil 4.

It's generally agreed that RE4 is the magnum opus of the series.

Since then, Capcom has rereleased several of their older titles, and long-running series like Mega Man were compiled onto one game disc and sold as collections.  While it's cool that they're releasing all of these classics for future generations to enjoy, I'm concerned that not enough of these future remakes will have new content.  The Ducktales remake promises to have voices provided by Disney's cast (I found a particularly heartwarming article about how the 94-year old voice actor for Scrooge McDuck breezed through the recording session), a more-fleshed out story and updated graphics.  However, arcade games like Final Fight see ports onto newer consoles with little to no new content.

Here's the kicker; this is a safe trend for the industry.  Capcom has seen botched launches of  big-name titles such as DmC and Street Fighter X Tekken; the former was a reboot of a franchise that had run low on ideas and the latter a team up from two well-known names in fighting games.  Both of these games failed to live up to sale expectations, so I feel that Capcom is "retreating" into safe territory with remakes of older titles after being scared away by trying something new with their reliable franchises. What this means is that it will be difficult to see fresh new content from Capcom in the near future.

I understand the need to play it safe after lackluster sales, but Capcom has made this a running trend.  If Ducktales Remastered sells well (which I really don't doubt) then it will encourage more HD remasters of other titles.  I'm fine with that, but the industry has had one fiasco after the other, and I want something that will give me confidence that the industry is headed in a bright new direction rather than wallowing its past successes.

Too obvious of a joke?

 Images Source:
Wikipedia.org

Further Reading:
Original voice cast returns for Ducktales HD Remastered
Street Fighter X Tekken sales fall short
DmC projected sales almost halved
More remastered Disney titles are a possibility