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

When is Customer Appreciation Day for the game industry?

Interestingly, I've been mulling over which direction to take this week's blog post; my first idea was to recant a statement I made last week about adventure games needing to appeal to a wider audience.  Game initially started as a niche appeal, and by attempting to broaden the appeal of a particular genre too much will spread that genre's appeal too thin to for any audience to enjoy.  Then information about the new XBox and the resignation of Electronic Art's CEO came to light, so I figured why not talk about the state of the industry?  Perhaps my previous idea will come to fruition in the near future.

This information about the XBox came from an article on media news site The Escapist.  Previous articles about the XBox detailed that it would be available in different versions to suit the tastes of "casual" and "hardcore" audiences, and hints have been dropped on multiple occasions that Microsoft's new console would implement features to prevent used games from being played.  A recent article makes no mention of this, but it does detail how the new XBox (named "Durango") will not support play from game discs; instead, games must be installed to the hard drive before they can be played.

Putting aside the installation issue - for which there will be fixes, reportedly - the leak mentions that the console always has to be online.  Putting aside for a moment the issue of not everybody has internet, there's the issue of the recent SimCity debacle on the side of EA.  For those not familiar, Electronic Art's recent game SimCity forced the player to always be connected to the internet, even for single-player games.  Why this is bad is because you are always at the mercy of the company whose servers your game runs on; if the company's servers go down, you can't play your game.  The big problem with SimCity was that EA's servers couldn't handle the sheer volume of players logging on to play on the first day, resulting in people being unable to play because of EA's problem.

 

The icing on the cake is when modders removed two lines of code and could play the game perfectly fine offline, despite being told over and over that being online was a necessity because of the sheer enormity of SimCity's worlds.  It's damning evidence that EA just wanted the game to always be online so they could enforce their Digital Rights Management policies.

I know I just got done talking about Valve and their digital distribution platform Steam a few posts ago, but I really cannot emphasize how well they know both their customers and those who pirate.  Rather than tightening the leash by imposing a laundry list of DRM, Valve opened its doors to pirates and made buying games a quick procedure that ends when you download the game.  They won't stick around with fingers in your wallet, and you don't have to worry about them looming over you deprive you of time spent playing a game because their servers are down.

There's an incredibly sharp contrast between EA and Valve in the aspect of respect.  Valve respects its potential pirates' methods, and as a result attempts to make a system to better accommodate them.  EA's handling of SimCity and Microsoft's always online/rumored anti-used game policy won't make the customer want to buy their products because of how manipulative the whole process feels.  Given the current economy, these models simply are not sustainable for the game industry.  Industry commentators are predicting the console gaming market to crash, and honestly, I can see it happening given Microsoft's and EA's flagrant disrespect for their consumers.

The bottom line is that considering the enormous amounts of money that EA and Microsoft put into their franchises - Halo 4 is the most expensive video game made to date, weighing in with a budget of over $100 billion -  One has to imagine what Microsoft and EA will do when their practices alienate faithful and potential customers alike in the future.  Consistently working making games with these prices on a foundation of shaky business tactics simply won't pan out in the future, and the weight is on the developers' shoulders to make things work out.

Further reading:
Rumored information on the new XBox
The new XBox' supposed exact details
Resignation of EA's CEO, Jogn Riccitiello

Where's the Adventure in that?

I consider myself a fan of the Zelda franchise.  I'd consider myself a bigger fan of the Metroid franchise, but why limit myself to just taking about intellectual property?  I'll say that I'm a fan of the adventure genre of game.  Adventure is sometimes used as a Swiss Army knife of genre definitions, being used to apply to lots of games even if they don't really capture the feel of an adventure.  When I think of an adventure game, I think of exploring an unusual world, surprised at the unique and sometimes bizarre creatures and tools that I find, and overall having this sense of discovery of something new and grand beyond this world.

However, all is not well on adventure island, the land of the new and unknown.  While games like Super Metroid and may have been a new and breathtaking experience at the time, the most recent poster boy for the Adventure genre, Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was received only lukewarmly by critics.  What I'd like to talk about this week is Nintendo's recently stated objective for the the next Zelda game being to bring back the feeling of adventure from the early entries in the series.  However, the real problem is that whenever the player is struggling, they can always jump on the internet and sort out problems by looking up an FAQ.  If I compare it to spoilers for a book or movie, then one can see how it drains away the defining aspects of the medium.

Before I ask "How can game designers reincorporate a sense of adventure into a culture that can easily find out how to solve their problems with no effort?" it may help to look back on how games accomplished this in the past: the original Legend of Zelda left a handful of clues lying around on how to find otherwise ridiculously well-hidden secrets, such as taking a certain path in a looping section of the map, or blowing up normal-looking walls.  Castlevania II: Simon's Quest gave even fewer clues and had non-player characters (NPC's) give cryptic hints or even outright lie to the player.  The problem with these games was that their tactics worked a little TOO well; if you've never played Simon's Quest before, I dare you to finish it without an FAQ or hints.

You probably won't beat Simon's Quest, but you'll remember this phrase for the rest of your life!

What's interesting is after the release of Skyward Sword, an essay called Saving Zelda became fairly widespread, explaining the fundamental differences between the fun in Zelda games of the past and today.  While I don't agree with everything (such as the suggestion that adding cracks to walls to make it more apparent what is and isn't a waste of time and energy attempting to break) but it raises some very good points, especially on the idea that newer Zelda games are too easy.  The N64 Zelda games, Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, eased back on being so vague and toned down the difficulty as well.  What resulted were battles and puzzles that - in my opinion - were too easy to accomplish and lots of your adventure being laid out for you.  How can you discover new and unusual things if you're being carted around like you're on a train track?

However!  Majora's Mask is easily my favorite Zelda game because the bulk of the adventure was focused on in the sidequests, most of which revolved around ordinary people.  The main strength of Majora's Mask was its unusual world and surreal, downbeat atmosphere.  If you're not familiar with the plot, it centers around Link's adventures in an parallel world called Termina that will be destroyed within three days by the falling moon.  This atmosphere of inevitable doom that hung over the entire game - literally, as the moon can be seen inching closer as the game's plot progresses - made even the mundane more interesting and exciting while simultaneously building a world with its own cultures.  Atmosphere can really make or break a game; look no further than survival-horror siblings Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill: Downpour respectively.

This harbinger of the apocalypse can be seen from any outdoor location in Majora's Mask.

Incidentally, I consider survival-horror games to be an adventure in and of themselves.  Even if I know what to do in a game like Resident Evil, it's overcoming the fear what lies beyond that feels truly rewarding to the player.  From my own personal experience I can say that one level in the Gamecube remake of Resident Evil (known affectionately as REmake) had such a depressing and sinister atmosphere that I had to retreat to the save room just to keep calm.  Rewarding a player by playing by the rules of the game is how an adventure game should work.

More recently, the emergence of "hardcore" role-playing games such as Demon's Souls and Dark Souls have emerged, whose mystery and adventure is shown through the difficulty.  The real challenge isn't finding clues and studying maps, it's in beating powerful monsters to be able to advance to the next area, which diminishes the effectiveness of an FAQ somewhat.  The difficulty makes it so getting to future areas may take a while, which allows tension for what the player may face in the future build.  Youtube content creator The Gaming Brit sums it up in a brilliant video where - not directly, I merely interpreted it this way - he compares the difficulty of a game to being a metaphor for the sense of discovery necessary in an adventure.

Neither of these takes on re-establishing adventure into our games are without their flaws, though.  With Majora's Mask the game is still too easy - again, in my opinion - and merciless difficulty in a game like Dark Souls will turn off all but the most dedicated and hardcore of players.  If one wants to win over a large playerbase, then soul-crushing difficulty is a less than savory option.

The adventure genre was one of the go-to genres before the rising popularity of shooters.  While it's by no means a dead genre, adventuring is in a tedious state.  What's important from here on is focusing on making the mechanics simple yet deep without holding onto the player's hand too much, like in Skyward Sword.  Straying too deep into the waters of high difficulty will alienate players.  It's a matter of balance.

Image Sources:
http://www.sydlexia.com/
http://operationrainfall.com/

Additional Reading:
Essay: Saving Zelda

The Legacy of Aliens: Colonial Marines

I'm on Spring Break at the time of writing this.  While that means that I don't need to make a blog post for a grade, I figure it's good to stay in the habit of posting regularly.  I originally planned to not bother posting, but I came up with a decent topic so I'm going to roll with it.  I was originally going to talk about computer-controlled allies in games, citing reviews by Yahtzee where he complains about hyper-competent computer-controlled partners playing the game for him, as well as talking about my own experiences with a particularly frustrating section of Fire Emblem: Awakening where I had to protect a computer controlled NPC with no self-preservation instincts.  I was even going to bring up the upcoming The Last of Us for showing off the next step in AI partners.

But then a tiny spark of doubt ignite in my mind.  What if all the trailers and promotional demonstrations of The Last of Us were set up to look nicer than the final product?  What if all of the interviews and design logs and all those things that make me want to give Naughty Dog my money were engineered to wring as much money out of the consumer?  Some of you might be asking yourself why I'm being so paranoid over something I've been excited for, while others might know the phrase "Aliens: Colonial Marines" and thus be more familiar with where I'm coming from.

This boxart is a visage of dread.

 For those not familiar with it, Aliens: Colonial Marines is a first-person shooter game set in the universe of Ridley Scott's successful Alien franchise developed by Gearbox Software, probably best known for Borderlands.  What happened was the demo and PR ended up being significantly stronger than the actual game was, which caused outrage when it finally reached the hands of consumers.  Game journalist and reviewer Jim Sterling broke his regular schedule to point out the differences between the game and the demo on his weekly video feature, The Jimquisition.

What I am not trying to do with this post is incriminate Naughty Dog for something that they very very very likely haven't done.  The Last of Us has received lots of  attention outside of a controlled environment and has had a lot of gameplay videos and interviews and articles that assure it to be the genuine article and not a company's fabrication.  The point I am trying to make by pondering over the legitimacy of a product whose quality seems high if paranoia.

Gearbox' shenanigans have done more than make a lot of people very mad at them, they've spread paranoia in an environment where consumers are already angry at sleazy business practices like locking content on the game until additional money is paid.  Gearbox not only made themselves look bad, but also made consumers paranoid about being lied to.  Gearbox' actions put consumers in a position where they may second-guess themselves out of buying a legitimate product, not just from Gearbox, but any game currently on the market.  If you can't trust gameplay videos and game demos, then what should the consumer trust?  Post-release reviews that have likely come out after the game has been sold?  Pre-release reviewers who take paychecks from developers to falsely promote their games?

It's good to be wary of a product.  If its creators make it out to be the second coming of whichever deity you worship, then chances are it might be overblown.  It pays to be patient and listen to unbiased opinions of games without being swayed by what you've heard about them.  And as time passes, hopefully more companies will learn from the mistakes of Gearbox and not flat out lie about their product.  "Buyer beware" is a popular enough phrase, but I'd like to think that companies won't take try to make a trend out of tricking consumers, no matter how much they want your money.

Further reading
Colonial Marines' demo vs the finished product

Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliens: Colonial_Marines

Playstation 4: a Digital Distribution Dilemma

In my effort to nip an issue of mine in the bud, I kicked off this blog's school debut with talk about Blazblue, but failed to take into account that news moves at the speed of light, and have since been woefully behind on "current" news. Yesterday Sony revealed more information about their recently unveiled Playstation 4, so I figure that there's no better time than the present to put a well-developed post on the back burner so I can make an up to date point in an attempt to bait and switch readers into reading about the state of the adventure genre next week instead of my opinion on how David Cage made more of a fool of himself than he did the week before.

Actual footage from David Cage's Fahrenheit.

 What I'd like to talk about is Sony's stance on digital distribution.  Sony announced on February 26th that every game released for the upcoming PS4 would be available for digital download.  I think this is great especially considering how much Sony emphasized that the Playstation 4 would streamline game downloads, allowing customers to play games as they download without having to wait or download in the background.

However, Sony announced alongside this that they would also release some games in physical copies.  As a person who prefers physical copies of thing - as I mentioned in my very first post, I own the soundtrack for Machinaruim on vinyl, and much prefer it to MP3 files - what would you think if games that you wanted weren't available in physical form?  Additionally, lending and borrowing between close friends would become convoluted and inconvenient, assuming there wouldn't be some way to share non-physical copies between games.

Speaking of physical, do you know what else is a physical thing that can be held in one's hand?  Money.  It seems monetarily inefficient for the industry to release physical copies at greater cost alongside non-physical copies that don't need to be boxed, print an instruction manual, and a disc.  How would this impact the consumer in an environment that is already rife with outrageous downloadable content practices?

Additionally, think about how this would impact game retailers.  Used games are already under fire from the industry, with rumors that games for the new XBox will come with a one-time use code that must be entered to play that game to prevent used games from being played.  On one hand you've got the dilemma of fewer used games making their way to retailers such as Gamestop, and on the other hand Gamestop is losing customers because people who want niche games on the cheap won't get them because high-profile games or ones guaranteed to sell will probably be the only games to get physical copies.

Finally, I'd like to draw a direct comparison to Steam, Valve's digital distribution platform.  Steam is incredibly convenient and streamlined, and even has sales on a regular basis, with special sales that users can vote on in summer and winter. Sure, you might not have physical copies, but with the implementation of a Cloud system, you can download the game on a different computer and then sync the cloud files to pick up where you left off on a different machine.  Even if it's not the Playstation 4's super-swift downloads, it's fairly convenient to be able to pick up and play when you're not on your PC of choice.

And now as a counter-balance here is a strange image and the phrase "Half-Life 3."

Carrying over from the last point, Sony has already announced that downloaded Playstation 3 titles won't carry over to the Playstation 4, AND it's not backwards compatible, essentially meaning that you should hold onto your cash on PSN games if you want to save up for a PS4 (no price has been announced at this time).  I've found hints about a system called "Gaikai" which will apparently stream information from other PS3 consoles to let you play those games on your PS4.  As of no it sounds pretty vague, so I have no clue what to make of it.  Additionally, saved games won't carry over onto other Playstation 4 consoles, assuming that you want to buy more than one, or use your account on a friend's console.  It's the inverse of Steam's slow but steady Cloud supplemented distribution platform.

What are the opinions of the readers?  Do you prefer physical copies of games or digital copies?  Do you think the PS4's download benefits outweigh the negatives?  Or do you think there's not enough information yet?

Playstation 4 downloadable game details
Gaikai information
Playstation 4 and backwards compatibility

David Cage Re-examined

I mentioned this a few weeks ago, and no doubt readers on the up-and-up are aware of this already, but about two weeks ago, French game designer most well known for games like Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, David Cage, held a speech at the D.I.C.E. (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada.  The speech in question was titled "The Peter Pan Syndrome: The Industry that Refused to grow up."  During the speech, Cage gave his vision of the present and future state of the video game industry.  The speech in its entirety is in the video below.

Cage's claim that the industry refuses to grow up comes from the top-selling games of all time only being limited to a handful of genres and repetitive themes in games.  Cage's heavy emphasis on repetitive themes is explained through games like Wolfenstein carrying on into current games such as Call of Duty, pointing out that most games are based on violent actions or platforming.

Those who read my post two weeks ago may have already gleaned that I do not think favorably of David Cage's presentation.  The enormous amount of generalization done in his speech is ridiculous. There are plenty of games out there that don't fit into his formula; games like survival horror Silent Hill, creativity sinks like Minecraft, or even simple puzzle games like Tetris.

Cage then goes onto say that the audience for games hasn't changed either.  This is of course, completely ridiculous, as it was only in the last ten or fifteen years that figures of the industry used the word "casual" to refer to a genre of games.  Everything Cage has called the industry out on so far can be easily argued against with multiple example, assuming that "But will it make money?" won't be used as a counter-argument.

However, I'm not going to snub David Cage just for challenging the way that gamers think.  There are some nuggets of truth in what he said.  In fact, the rise of casual gaming was a marketing strategy by Nintendo.  There used to be a brilliant article on it called "Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy" that has unfortunately disappeared from the internet that detailed how Nintendo conquered the casual market simply because other companies had no clue that it even existed.  Appealing to an older market like Cage suggests could recreate this success by targeting a crowd that the gaming industry hasn't really paid much attention to.

Past that, Cage talks about how traditional gaming is under pressure from digital distribution and platforms such as Android and iOS gaming.  He then mentions how lack of innovation is a problem within the gaming industry.  He moves onto mentioning that story isn't a big focus in the industry, and that this issue can be solved by connecting better with Hollywood, and letting writers from movies tackle that aspect of gaming.  Cage's talk on censorship is also an interesting point.  Lots of games only really use their "M" rating to allow copious amounts of blood to be spilled.  Cage's talk about how games should address sexuality or other "taboo" ideas is fantastic.  Cage claims that movies and television are allowed to go much further than games can, and that as long as it's in context, there should be no reason to censor violence and sexuality within video games.

That being said, I have to move on to some criticisms: I really want to hear what kind of games Cage would think will appeal to an as of now non-existent market.  Cage never really details what kind of people these would be, so it's difficult to plan around no details, but wasn't the whole point of the "casual game boom" so that people who wouldn't normally play games would be more inclined to do so?  It seems like Cage is telling the industry to corner a market that has already been targeted.  If Cage means to appeal to the elderly or intellectuals for example, then should we treat this as its own niche?  I guess that's what Cage is going for, but again, casual games already fulfill that to a degree.  Cage should be showing us what kinds of ideas he has to accomplish this goal before we'll listen more closely.

Additionally, Cage's own game, Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit outside of the U.S.) had multiple scenes censored, but kept a handful because they had context.  While it shows maturity to call out your own mistakes, isn't it sort of hypocritical to cite your own mistakes as something that should be avoided in order to lend credibility to the industry?  Furthermore, games like Silent Hill 2 and Catherine embraced these censorship limitations in their plot, which serve as a sort of counterpoint to Cage's insistence that game companies should be inspired by Hollywood when creating plots.  Silent Hill 2's use of symbolism allowed the player to explore and interpret it themselves in a great example of showing versus telling, and Catherine had cutscenes that intentionally showed little to no "explicit" content in order to throw the player for a loop in an ensuing plot twist.  Additionally, I'll leave it up to the reader to decide if games are as heavily censored as Cage seems to think they are by linking an article that I recently at the end of this post. The article is about how the American publisher of the aforementioned Catherine, Atlus U.S.A. managed to convince family-friendly retailers like Wal-Mart and Target to stock Catherine by showing these retailers scenes from the games that these stores already stocked that contained scenes more explicit than the ones found in their product.

Which must have felt like a slap in the face to the companies that Atlus called out.

Even with these "less is more" examples that embrace the limitations imposed upon them, the problem that Cage appears to have is that he assumes that every game has to be about shooting or punching or driving cars.  The fact that he seems so obsessed with cramming meaning into a game or crafting a game with no guns seems silly when you consider games like Spec Ops: The Line or Journey when the former is a shooter with a deep message behind it and the latter fits into both categories that Cage mentions.  Admittedly, for every game with a deeper meaning like Catherine there are a dozen testosterone-driven Call of Duty or other such games.

Another conundrum within Cage's speech is that he talks about how games are different because they're an interactive medium, yet he says that writers for movies - which are a distinctly non-interactive medium - should be involved with video games.  Are movie writers better qualified to incorporate interactive options into a script than programmers?  Cage also talks about how huge talents from Hollywood should be incorporated into video games despite the industry already using legions of established voice actors on a regular basis, as well as there being the inverse of past games like Apocalypse touting the big-name actors they pulled on board, but ultimately only amounting to having a famous guy talking.  If we've already got tons of willing actors at hand, why should we uproot them to bring in people who may not even do a better job?

A voice actor on Twitter voicing his opinion on David Cage's speech.

Here's how I see it: Cage is frustrated at the current state of the industry because they're less accepting of riskier, experimental titles like the ones he has designed in the past.  That's fine, it's alright to be upset with the system.  Remember when George Lucas made the original trilogy of Star Wars?  How about all those incredible Spielberg movies like Jaws, E.T. and The Duel from the 70's and 80's?  They were both discontent with the system and rebelled against it.  Challenging the system is a great way to improve the quality of yourself and the ones around you by showing everybody what can be done when you flaunt established convention.  That being said, I've spent this whole blog post poking holes in Cage's argument, so why should the industry try something this problematic if it doesn't sound good?  David Cage's games are notorious for having little interactivity and being more along the lines of movies that involve button-pressing now and then.  David Cage's solutions come off as attempts to make the game industry conform to his vision of art in an interactive medium, despite the limited interactivity of his projects.  Cage's vision of "risky, ambitious games" doesn't match up with what he provides, so unless Cage puts his own games on the line then I really don't see how to make the game industry buy into it.

Additionally, a friend on Facebook linked an article shortly before I planned on publishing this post with quotes from Hideo Kojima of Metal Gear Solid fame detailing one of his upcoming projects.  In the article, Kojima claims that the upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes will contain "taboo"" content and may not sell if it even gets published.  However, Kojima stated that "I'm approaching the project as a creator and prioritizing creativity over sales."  While I haven't been following Metal Gear Solid much (I only just got my first taste of the franchise this January with Metal Gear Solid 3D: Snake Eater!) this is the kind of attitude that David Cage should have brought to the table; rather than telling us these good ideas on how to rework the industry, he should have manned up and shown the industry what kind of fruits can be borne by having the guts to start such a project rather than telling the industry how to solve something that he sees as a problem.  It's the classic match-up of showing vs. telling, and I've spent far too many posts detailing something so basic to talk about it all over again.

Further Reading:
The blog belonging to the person who wrote the "Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy" article that I mentioned
D.I.C.E. Summit's official website
Kotaku's article on Atlus U.S.A. and publishing of Catherine
Eurogamer's article on Kojima's comments about the upcoming Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes

Blazblue as a franchise: no Vision and no Relevancy

Blazblue is a multi-faceted series; not only am I criticizing it for its unoriginal ideas, but its bad gameplay as well.  Chances are good that I wouldn't have ragged on Blazblue's story and characters as much in my previous post if it was a solid fighting game.  It's not, and honestly, a lot of the mechanics in Blazblue's newest installment Chrono Phantasma are toxic in a competitive and casual environment.  If the series started out with a shot in the knee because it attempted to recreate Guilty Gear's success, then the whole franchise is in the process of being dragged out to the parking lot and beaten senseless by its creators with the bad decisions being implemented.  Before Chrono Phantasma was announced, a new installment of Guilty Gear was announced.  Adding insult to injury, Arc System Works' Persona 4: Arena received great acclaim for being easy to pick up without pandering too much to newcomers to the franchise owing to it being the sequel to a role-playing game, which was supposed to be one of Blazblue's main selling points back when the series was first announced.  Take into account that a new revision of Guilty Gear - the game Blazblue was created to entirely to profit off of! - has already been rereleased on PSN and XBox Live and is recieving an update, and Blazblue: Chrono Phantasma is already irrelevant as a fighting game despite not even having come out on consoles yet.

Firstly, let's talk about three good fighting games that really scratch my one-on-one deathmatch itch.  Street Fighter III: Third Strike is probably the least balanced and certainly the oldest of the three, having been released in 1999.  It makes my list for having the balls to innovate the already established Street Fighter II cast and having the parrying mechanic.  Parrying is the precursor to the Focus Attack mechanic from Street Fighter IV, which allowed a character to absorb a hit while preparing for an attack.  Parrying in Street Fighter III completely negates damage, but can only be performed right as an opponent's attack hits you, requiring very precise timing.  However, with this difficult technique comes a greater benefit; parrying successfully leaves the character in a neutral state, able to continue parrying attacks or leaving them in an optimal position to unleash a counterattack.  In the following video, note how both characters parry each others' attacks, though Ken's lengthy parrying saves him at the very end.

Arc System Works' Guilty Gear XX: Accent Core and Persona 4: Arena are more balanced than Third Strike, but none of the mechanics have the same impact that Street Fighter III's high-risk, high-reward Parrying does.  Instead, they both focus on great characters and solid fundamentals, and while Persona 4: Arena does have a Comeback Mechanic in the form of Awakening - increased defense and special meter as well as an extra super attack when your character's health drops below a certain point - a skilled player can completely bypass this by defeating their opponent before this can occur, and the defense boost only really shuts down single attacks and smaller combos, requiring more thought to be put into every action.  Guilty Gear is sort of a "happy medium" between Persona 4: Arena and Third Strike in that it is modestly balanced between the two and has no comeback mechanics.

To those not really familiar with fighters, you may be wondering what exactly constitutes a comeback mechanic?  Put simply, it's a facet of the game that gives players that aren't doing as well an added advantage.  A good example from outside of a fighting game would be in Mario Kart, where you get better items when your placement is lower in a race.  It's fine ordinarily, but most people play fighting games to see who's better.  Plenty of fighting games like Guilty Gear and Street Fighter appear at enormous tournaments where hundreds of people compete to see who the best is.  If a winner emerges because they were helped back up, then why should it be treated as anything but a hollow victory?  Imagine if when a team scored a touchdown in football, the other team was given the opportunity for a PAT instead of the team on the offensive.  It wouldn't make any sense because it would punish the team that managed to make the effort of scoring in the first place.

A real-life example of a comeback mechanic from the 2012 Olympics.

Comeback mechanics aren't anything new either; they've been appearing in fighters like Street Fighter 4 and Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and the fact that the company creates games that encourage competitive play but promotes mechanics that don't promote as much skill is mind-boggling.  This could easily tie into last week's post about how Blazblue has no clue how to do anything new, but I'll let that slide for now.  All you really need to know is that Blazblue: Chrono Phantasma implements a comeback mechanic.  The issue with such a mechanic that the risk vs. reward is skewed in favor of the player who has performed poorly.  As a counter-example, Street Fighter III gave resources (super meter) both to players attacking and being attacked, but gave more to the player on the offensive, incentivizing the player on the offensive to continue being aggressive while also incentivizing the player on the receiving end to fight back in order to get the resources that they needed to win.  At the same time, its parrying could be used by either player in an attempt to thwart an aggressive opponent or shut out an opponent who was already on the ropes at any point in the match.

While there are improvements made in the new Blazblue such as toning down the ridiculously long combos and damage, the speed of the game was increased as well.  As it stands, fighting games in the same vein as Blazblue, like Guilty Gear and King of Fighters XIII, aren't really played in the U.S. because of their speed.  In my opinion Chrono Phantasma's speed increase will only really serve to alienate players accustomed to the modest pacing of the previous Blazblue titles as well as prevent interested parties from actually buying the game.  As of now, Blazblue is something of a middle child among the fighting games that populate Arc System Works' roster, discounting the ridiculous one-offs like Fist of the North Star and the criminally under appreciated Battle Fantasia.  It's younger than the experience and reliable big brother Guilty Gear but older than the rising star younger sibling Persona 4: Arena, and as a result it has no real identity in terms of gameplay or story.  It attempts to parrot its more competent family with little success, and with no features to make it unique among games with three-man tag teams like Marvel vs Capcom or King of Fighters or a functional gimmick like Persona 4: Arena's Personas make it feel thinly spread in its desperate please to other game's fanbases.  The next installment of Blazblue needs to be game-changing in order for the series to remain relevant among a crowd that vastly outclasses it.

The image used can be found at the following article: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/olympics-fourth-place-medal/boxing-judge-expelled-olympics-controversial-decision-170133250--oly.html

A Lack of Vision

The trouble with hinting at a definite subject of discussion long beforehand is that with all the issues that have popped up lately - the virtual boycotting of Ninja Theory's DmC, David Cage's disastrous commentary on the industry at D.I.C.E. and shipment problems with Fire Emblem: Awakening and Ni no Kuni - what I'm going to talk about this week feels pretty small-time by comparison, no matter how timely it is.  The good news is that this blog is going to be weekly from now on as part of a class I'm taking at VCU, so I'll at least be able to touch on a few of these with some manner of timeliness.  Anyway, continuing from last time, I said I'd talk about the story of a game that I'm not fond of.  Since I usually end up writing this introductory paragraph after everything else, I see now that such a claim was misleading in that I really don't talk about the story of Arc System Works' Blazblue franchise from a sense that I talk about the written plot and dialogue.  This post focuses on the how the characters have no real vision behind them - instead focusing on the franchise's weakness of parroting other successful franchises - and how this game feels less like its own idea than it does an amalgam of everything else that's been successful ever.

Blazblue's central character, Ragna.  The red trenchcoat + white hair + big sword formula has probably only been used about a dozen times before.

Starting from square one is necessary to prove my point; Guilty Gear was a fighting game created in 1999 by Arc System Works.  The game was successful enough to garner several sequels, its most distinct aspect being the emphasis on rock soundtracks - a rarity at the time - and references to heavy metal in its characters and story.  Blazblue was created in 2008 as a result of the copyright controversy that arose after Guilty Gear publisher Sammy was absorbed by another game publisher, Sega.  In order to continue making high-quality competitive fighting games in the same vein as Guilty Gear without breaching the copyright conflict, Toshimichi Mori created and designed Blazblue, a spiritual successor to Guilty Gear's signature style.  Blazblue was also a chance for Arc to start from scratch with a newly budding arcade scene, and changed several game mechanics to help broaden its appeal.  In the long and short, Blazblue's initial iteration, subtitled Calamity Trigger, succeeded; it became a popular addition to arcades, and it became a staple at tournaments.  That being said, Blazblue failed to measure up to Guilty Gear in the character and storytelling department.  I'll air out the dirty laundry immediately, neither of the games have very good stories; they're both messy attempts to justify all these badasses fighting each other.  However, Guilty Gear's story is told well though, with a lot of subtle hints in the story and setting department that help the already unique characters shine, preventing it from becoming becoming another faceless fighting game in today's figurative mob of fighting games.  This post is an attempt to point out what's been done wrong in the past to get you up to speed for Blazblue's next installment; Blazblue: Chrono Phantasma.

Because Blazblue's initial intent was to succeed an already popular series. Street Fighter III before it proved having no familiar faces makes a reboot a tough sell, which is why Capcom put established characters Ryu and Ken in to help give the game a "face" to work with.  Ordinarily a new cast isn't a bad thing: the aforementioned Street Fighter III started over fresh and has one of the most memorable casts of characters I can think of off the top of my head.  While tossing the bulk of the series' established cast was a risky move, the shock was lessened by taking established character's traits and mixing them with new concepts that let them all stand out despite being reworks of older ideas, either through having unusual variations on existing moves - Yang's sequential slashes overlap with Fei-Long's series of punches and Hugo's body press is essentially Zangief's piledriver - or by straight up making their moves as unusual as possible, like Urien and Q's flashy super moves.  Blazblue does a terrible job of this though: it only grabs the most obvious of Guilty Gear's that it can, and rather than using them as a springboard to reach new heights simply copies all Guilty Gear's sillier decisions without trying to have them make sense on their new characters.  The most egregious example I can think of being main character Ragna forgoing his giant weapon for a lot of his attacks in the same vein as Sol, despite Sol's sword being the source of the fire that shows up for most of his special attacks.  Ragna's lifestealing abilities are shown to be used without his sword several times, which makes it all the more weird to watch Ragna wear his sword like a decoration and then all of a sudden use it for only one or two of his attack animations.  Another example is werewolf character Valkenhayne, whose signature move mimics that of Jon Talbain, another werewolf from Capcom's Darkstalkers series of fighting games who fights using kung-fu.  Rather than innovate, Blazblue's cast just uses these attacks to mimic the characters that inspired them, often in a manner that isn't consistent with hoe they're presented.  It feels like how Homer Simpson becomes more and more stupid as The Simpsons goes on just for the sake of being more stupid.

Bizarrely enough Blazblue also suffers from the opposite problem in its Story Mode.  Noel, the leading female character of Blazblue, is established to be a shy character, typically timid, but has a strong sense of justice, going hand in hand with her being an officer of the law.  That being said, she rarely ever shows any form of competence in the game's story.  She gets bullied to the point of crying by Rachel, is uncomfortable around her friends because she has smaller breasts than them, and takes it too hard when total stranger Taokaka makes fun of her for it. To cap it off, she gets shamelessly exploited for the sake of fanservice by Litchi in a gag ending, being chased around and dressed in several different sets of suggestive clothing with no real repercussions.  Because it's a gag ending, we're supposed to accept this as humor, but since it's consistent with how meekly Noel has been portrayed, it just reinforces Noel's general ineffectiveness as a leading character.  Sure you could argue that she's supposed to get beaten around because of the breakdown she has at the end of Continuum Shift, but you'd be wrong.  That scene is plot-driven and is there to force her to play a part in the villain's plan.  The earlier examples of her exploitation have no relevance to the plot, yet we're forced to see her cry and in general be bullied, taking it much harder than a character so relevant to the plot should be.  It undermines her effectiveness as a character when she whines and cries all the time, and feels sickening and exploitative to her as a whole.

Honestly, the gag endings as a whole feel silly - not in the haha way that they should - and out of place.  While it's understandable that a joke ending should be silly and unusual, hardly any of them actually feel like they're playing to their character's funnier aspects and just try and jam in as much out of context humor as possible.  The only time that the gag endings work is when they center around Bang, whose character revolves being as over the top as possible.  Games like Guilty Gear never implemented gag endings because they were unnecessary.  Pretty much every character was unusual in some way and a lot of the game's humor came from their interactions with the other bizarre members of the cast.  Even in the case of straight shooters like Ky and Slayer, one could always count on Faust or Bridget to show up and make things hilarious.

Interestingly, the American publisher for the series is renowned for their excellent localizations.  I can only guess that they included a tired pop culture reference to accurately capture how unfunny these gag endings are.

The last physical aspect of characters that I'll touch upon is the clothing that the characters wear.  It may feel like nitpicking, but I promise that I'm trying to make a point.  Blazblue has this motif of mixing Japanese and western clothing.  I guess it's supposed to contrast, but all it does is make these characters feel disjointed, like they didn't know what they wanted to wear.  It's even more odd now that a character for Chrono Phantasma - Amane - is supposed to be full-on Japanese and wears all Japanese clothing.  It feels so strange because Jin's full name is clearly Japanese, yet he doesn't share Amane's cultural taste in clothing.  It all contrasts poorly with the mixed motifs for other characters, like Ragna's hakama pants and Devil May Cry-esque trenchcoat or Tager's bizarre samurai skirt.  It clashes pretty hard with characters like Noel and Carl who wear full-on "western" style clothes.  This frustrating lack of consistency makes it feel like the designers have no clue what these characters should be doing visually.  Guilty Gear has characters that go the full monty with Japanese clothing, but the story touches upon the entire Japanese race being an endangered species.  When characters with Japanese names wear these traditional looking clothes, it's not a stretch to assume that an endangered race is holding onto the only thing that they had left of their culture.  Such a simple detail that falls in line with the established story gives the world depth.  Blazblue just sort of tacks on these Japanese-style looks for the sake of appealing to more people.

Another thing that Blazblue has problems with is implying the traits of its characters rather than showing them off.  One of the characters from the new Chrono Phantasma exemplify this well; the first character is Bullet, a female grappler whose presentation as a strong, tomboyish woman acts as an anti-thesis to the weeping mimsy of the cast, Noel.  In her character description, it says that she dislikes skirts, which is supposed to keep with her tough female character image I guess.  Despite this, her character design unironically sports what Ragna's Japanese voice actor refers to as "hot pants."

are you kidding me

If you label characters as having wacky traits in their profiles but never take them into account when actually making the game's scenario you get inconsistencies like this.  I won't say that Guilty Gear did it well, but it at least it showed this to its audience rather than committing the writing faux pas of telling us rather than showing. Without even looking at story mode, there's a pre-fight aniation between Sol and Axl where they argue about what Queen's best album is, which goes hand-in-hand with the rock-inspired world of Guilty Gear.  At the very least, they're acknowledging these traits rather than telling us.  Another thing that sticks in my craw about these profiles is that they detail the characters' origins being real places, but the game's actual setting is a fictional city that seems to sprout a new district as the plot demands it.  With no real connection to the world that it claims to be set in, the city of Kagutsuchi feels like it's suspended in the air, untouched by the settings that the characters are all listed to come from.

Given that I'm talking about a fighting game though, I'm sure that plenty of people will rebut my argument with lines like "It's a fighting game, who cares about characters?  I just want to play online.  Who cares about story mode?"  To which I say that in a game like this, characters are everything.  As a casual player of fighting games, I don't just pick the best characters and roll with them; I pick a character who appeals to me visually, and if their personality and other attributes appeal as well I stick with them, regardless of how bad they are.  In a game like Blazblue, Arakune is the one of the few characters that isn't a mess, so I'm less likely to look into other characters, and thus spend less time with the game overall.  Long story short, because Blazblue couldn't think for itself, a potential customer has been lost.

I saved the counter-argument for last because it segways well into my next counter-argument for Blazblue.  I'm sure that some will argue that if it's got solid  mechanics, then who cares about the story and characters?  Blazblue's emphasis should be on how it's a fighting game, and I have no trouble putting up with shallow characters so long as I have fun playing the game.  My rebuttal is this: next week I'm going to drop the bomb on Blazblue's mechanics.  If Blazblue's story shows its lack of vision, then Blazblue's gameplay shows how this still young intellectual property is already irrelevant amidst the swarm of other fighting games that crowd the market.


All images can be found at http://blazblue.wikia.com/wiki/BlazBlue_Wiki

Story in Games: Signifier vs. Signified

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward and Tales of the Abyss.  Those who wish to play it or haven't beaten the game yet have been warned!

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Let's talk about a concept I learned about last semester in my Literary Theory class, that being the idea of a Sign.  The definition of a Sign according to linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is "something that can have meaning."  A Sign can be broken down into a Signifier and a Signified.  What this means is that an object that can be two different things; the word attached to it, and a person's idea of it.  To simplify that, people think in signs, and signifier and signified help us to better understand those same signs.  Signifier stands for the concept that a word stands for, whereas the signifier stands for the concept that the signifier represents.  If that is somewhat difficult to understand, I'll use the word "cat" as an example: the signifier in this case is the word cat, whereas my idea of the word is a black cat.  Because the relationship between words and concept is arbitrary, there is no set in stone concept that ties to the word "cat."  Somebody else's idea can be a tabby cat, or a white cat.  It doesn't really matter.  A word doesn't actually refer to the word, it refers to a loosely defined concept.

tl;dr

Some of you might be thinking, "Very nice, way to tell yourself that majoring in English wasn't a waste of time.  But why talk about it now?"  Well, the reason why is that story in video games is an incredibly loosely defined concept.  Compare Metal Gear Solid to Castlevania: a pair of Japanese games both published by Konami that have very different storytelling styles.  Both use similar ideas - story through gameplay, cutscenes and themes - to tell their story, but the way their stories are told emphasize these differences.  While Metal Gear Solid mostly uses cutscenes to tell the story, it also uses strong gameplay to further emphasize the aspects of the plot, such as the stealth elements.  Castlevania doesn't use a lot of drawn out cutscenes or gimmicky gameplay and focuses mostly on gameplay to move the story along.  Admittedly my only experience with Metal Gear Solid is Snake Eater on the 3DS - I grew up with a Nintendo 64 - and I've only just gotten to The Fear, so my apologies if my argument is as of this moment uninformed.  I'm mostly just trying to make a point about the differences in storytelling styles, and from there one can look at the strengths and weaknesses of them.

The initial idea for this post came from reading an article interviewing Shawn McGrath, the creator of Dyad, where he stated that traditional storytelling in games is "idiotic."  His argument is that a linear narrative where you make lots of decisions that have little to no impact on the game in titles like Mass Effect and Skyrim is badly done.  The article can be found here:

http://bitmob.com/articles/dyad-creator-thinks-traditional-storytelling-in-games-is-idiotic

McGrath does bring up a fair point; if you're not familiar with Egoraptor's series Sequelitis, I recommend you watch the Castlevania and Mega Man episodes, as they do a great job of breaking down the strengths of linear gameplay and telling stories without words.  According to Egoraptor, Castlevania's motif is that of horror, and the way the game demonstrates this to the player is by having a delay on the attack, which makes plowing through the challenges that assailed not a very viable option.  Mega Man X deals with the theme of getting stronger, and every aspect of the gameplay - beating bosses and getting powerups - all deal with the theme of getting stronger.  It's a pretty interesting example to use, considering the main purpose of video is to talk about gameplay and design rather than story.  Check it out sometime.

The thing about this is that games were pretty limited back in the era of the NES and SNES.  For the most part games with long narratives were limited to RPG series like Mother and Final Fantasy.  For the most part, early games were a result of being about escapism in the same manner tha movies were back in the 1930's; they were supposed to be something fantastical that would let us take a vbreak from the normal world. With the next generation of consoles - Playstation, Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn - more powerful systems allowed for more emphasis on cinematic storytelling, which gave rise to games like the aforementioned Metal Gear Solid.  The point I'm making in bringing these games up is that while McGrath isn't wrong, it's just that his idea of story is more similar to what game creators were forced to work with because of technology limits at the time.

A traditional narrative in a game may be there to make us look at a character and learn about them as they struggle to accomplish a goal. We see the characters act, learn about them, and maybe root for them.  They're more akin to movies or novels in that they focus more on characters over the experiences of the player.  However, multiple games that follow this formula have been lauded by critics and financially successful because they've focused on an atmosphere that draws the player in despite having no real connection to the game's narrative.  Games with distinct atmospheres like Silent Hill 2 and Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker do this to immerse players in the world which helps them sympathize with the characters to an even greater degree.  Multiple endings in games like Silent Hill can play in with McGrath's vision of the player's decisions having an impact on the story.  Every Silent Hill game has at least three endings that radically change how the characters act at the end.

Is one better than the other?  No, I don't think so.  While McGrath has valid points, that doesn't mean that his opinion is king and all other opinions are bad.  Let's take a look at a game like Persona 4; in the game you have the option to pursue "Social Links" with various characters that you meet that grant you bonuses in battle and creating Personas, Pokemon-esque entities that give you power in battle.  However, they also flesh out the characters and tell us about them.  However, Social Links don't really contribute to the game's story outside of changing the game's ending sequence slightly,  Is this a choice-based system that has no impact on the story like McGrath discussed?  You could interpret it as that, yes.  But we learn more about the characters that let us look at them in a different way, so his argument that choice-based systems that make no difference on the game isn't completely valid, especially in the case of the characters or Kanji and Naoto, a pair of characters that struggle with sexual and gender identity respectively.  These subjects are practically untouched in most games, and learning more about their issues helps the player understand more about how these issues can affects not only the character, but also give a fairly good impression of it overall.  Just because these choices might not impact the storyline of the game at all doesn't mean that the player won't see it differently as a result.  It's a good example of "story being told without text" that McGrath champions in his interview.

Let's talk about some examples of how to tell a story in a game without using text.  Games like Portal and Virtue's Last Reward that build their story around a gameplay mechanic are the bet way to do it, as it's a good way to make the story feel balanced and not have the characters take actions that seem strange, and plot points based around gameplay won't feel illogical.  Probably the best game that drives the story through gameplay that I can think of is Virtue's Last Reward.  You'll find early on that there is a menu called "Flow" that lets you revisit alternate story paths that you've already ventured down.  This can be accessed at any time, can let you revisit any point, and cuts down on backtracking through the story to get the next plot point.  However, the big twist of the game is that the main character, Sigma, can project his consciousness into alternate timeline versions of himself.  Additionally, certain plot paths can't be accessed until you've found out information from other plot paths that fit the situation.  During especially tense bomb defusal scenes, the player is encouraged to jump back to the right spot if they haven't written down the passwords needed to defuse the bombs.  Additionally, the memo screen becomes blurrier and less clear for each jump you make, tying in with Sigma's difficulty in remembering things from alternate timelines.

Now we'll compare the Flow menu from Virtue's Last Reward with the Seventh Fonon plot point in Tales of the Abyss.  It's a type of magic that a certain character possesses, but about halfway through the story, the main character Luke comes into possession of this ability.  Luke uses the Seventh Fonon's powers in the plot several times, but this only happens during cutscenes; Luke can never use huge explosions or magic fixes in the plague the game's cutscenes to supplement himself in battles, so the Seventh Fonon just feels like a hamfisted plot point that only serves to make an already dreadful story feel even more ridiculous.  With all the words it devotes to talking about the Seventh Fonon, we don't get to use it once or even really realize its effects because of how detached the cutscenes are from the world that game takes place in.  Virtue's Last Reward's Flow mechanic is a great example of a mechanic that lets you make multiple decisions that have different impacts on the story like McGrath supports, and the game itself is a visual novel, meaning that its storyline is more along the lines of a complex narrative.

Welcome to the first third of the game!

Stories in gaming are the perfect example of a Signified.  Because there are so many ideas of what a signified can be , it's no wonder that story in gaming has so many different interpretations in different games.  This post isn't a rant on how to tell your story, but to play devil's advocate against McGrath's decrying of the traditional narrative in a game.  Nope, that comes next time when I take on a game franchise that I legitimately despise and thought should be prematurely ended despite the creator's intents to make multiple more entries into the series.  Oh, and it'll be a timely release for those trying to find hints to what I'm talking about.  See you in February!