What’s Old Is New

With the announcement of Sonic the Hedgehog 4, it’s official: [insert article title here].

What I mean by this is that we’re not just receiving new installments of classic franchises, but that we’re receiving them wholeheartedly in the style of their forbearers, to various extremes.

Why this is such a hallmark occasion begs to be asked, in a way. Some game series have stayed reasonably within bounds and when a new installment rolls around we might enjoy it, but we aren’t exactly wowed.

Take Nintendo’s Kirby franchise, for instance. Since the game’s second installment, Kirby’s Adventure on the NES, the series really hasn’t changed all that much. Kirby still goes through easy to moderately challenging levels, inhales enemies and takes their powers.

The series has remained consistently 2D, and while the mechanics are sometimes toyed with as to how he acquires the powers (and sometimes Nintendo, y’know… steals his arms and legs), the games really haven’t changed to any spectacular degree.

For a long time, it felt like the question was how to transition a classic series into 3D, a sort of “keeping up with the times.” The Legend of Zelda series migrated beautifully, creating new mechanics that worked in conjunction with the old and really realizing where the series needed to go.

Yet at the same time, portable Zelda games have continued to exist, retaining that “classic” feel, so the Zelda of old has never truly left.

Metroid transitioned into Metroid Prime, to the delight of some and the ire of others, yet now the franchise’s next installment seems to be taking a step back, with a mix of 2D and 3D.

So why then should we thrill at the announcement of games that fulfill the idea of [insert article title here]? Such excitement suggests that what we’ve been getting in place of the classics haven’t really been up to par.

So haven’t they?

What we have for example of this are three major franchises: Super Mario Bros., Mega Man and now… Sonic the Hedgehog (like how I worked that in there?).

Starting with Mario, the series has retained the most clear sense of popularity throughout the years. When Mario went 3D, he callously left his brother behind, rendering Luigi a flat, unpopular for years, hidden in Super Smash Bros., never to grace cover art again until Luigi’s Mansion on the GameCube.

Super Mario 64 launched the Nintendo 64 system with much fanfare, and is lauded as one of the games that defined how 3D gaming should play.

Personally, I just about hated it.

It’s not that I think everything is wrong with the game, but the levels are far fewer, I was constantly slipping off the sides of levels paths and falling into oblivion, and I hated being shuttled back into the same levels over and over again just to make a little progress.

I have since reconciled my hate with the game, at least a bit (I like the DS version better), but I waited years… YEARS!… for a new Mario game, a real Mario game. The New Super Mario Bros. on the DS came years later, answering my cries at least.

It’s not that the game broke new ground in any way when it came out. Like any good sequel- like the Kirby games and Zelda games I was mentioning- it improved upon old design, but it did so while preserving the sensation of what made the games so great.

The recent New Super Mario Bros. Wii only carried this design further still, adding in new abilities and basically put everything in all the 2D Mario games from the past and stuck them in a blender. It is in essence a fully realized Super Mario sequel on a home console, the likes of which we hadn’t really seen since the original Super Mario World back in the early ’90s (Yoshi’s Island, while good, doesn’t really count; it’s too far removed from the design of the classics).

While it was the release of the New Super Mario Bros. for the DS that I think really got the ball rolling, I would have to say Mega Man 9 brought the ideal of “[insert article title here]” to the height of its extremes.

Like Mario, Mega Man has been no stranger to franchising the $%&@ out of itself. The series updated to Mega Man X in the SNES days, and only saw three real installments in the original run after that (Mega Man 7 & 8, and Mega Man & Bass). Like some blue armored cycle of nature, Mega Man has flourished, faded and renewed again and again, each time in another heretofore unseen form.

And goddammit, I was getting sick of it.

I mean, seriously, how long does it have to be before the evolution doesn’t even resemble the original life form? I mean, come on! I know humans are capable of more complex things than cavemen… but I really think there’s something to be said for the cavemen!

And that’s why we got Mega Man 9. A game that not only embraced the ideal of the old school design, it even embraced (to a ballsy degree) the ideal of the old school graphics.

Everything in Mega Man 9 reeked of NES from the bracing 8-bit difficulty to the 8-bit sound to the, yes, 8-Bit graphics. Even the art was inspired by the campy covers of the classic games in the ’80s, back when awkward looking men in their mid-30s were the ideal icons to sell video games.

Games like these are not designed for the faint of heart. They’re designed for retro addicts, for people who pine for the old days or want to understand why other people pine for the old days. Games like this are an art form, when the developers have incredible processing power at their fingertips and they have to work to grind the graphics and sound down to its rawest form at every possible angle.

So now we have Mario, almost picking up where it left off, and Mega Man, picking up much earlier than it left off (well, except for the chronology). And that leaves us now with Sonic. So what will Sonic do?

It’s no secret that Sonic games for a while have sucked… the only debate is to “when?”

Some argue that merely going 3D (as with Sonic Adventure) was the beginning, while merely the attempt (as with Sonic 3D Blast) was where it all went wrong.

I have preferred the 2D Sonic games myself, but while I think the classics are still the best, the portable ones (on the GBA and DS) have been pretty good.

Still, they haven’t captured the magic of the old days.

Of course, anything regarding Sonic the Hedgehog 4 is somewhat speculative right now as the game was only recently announced. The design is claimed to be inspired by the Genesis days, and the screens certainly verify this, aside from the lack of the blurry-spinning legs that Sonic used to have trademarked.

One aspect of the game that stands out is the claim of it being “Episode 1″, which is another way of saying, “No, you’re not getting the entire game in one shot.” Whether or not this ends up being good or bad depends on how much we do get. After all, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 was broken into two games (the latter being Sonic & Knuckles) and I still tell everyone that the combination of the two is the best entry in the series.

And admittedly, it offers a different approach, and a measure of commitment. With New Super Mario Bros. it could be years before we get another one like it. We probably will, as Nintendo would have to be friggin’ retarded to not get the hint people more of this (Super Mario Galaxy in its wildest dreams couldn’t get this many buyers).

Similarly, Mega Man 9 was made with no promise of anything more, depending on how well people even responded to its 8-bit awesome… yet Mega Man 10 is now on the horizon.

Not to be confused with Mega Man X, because even though X is the roman numeralization of 10, it’s totally a different series.

Of course, if the first installment of Sonic the Hedgehog 4 sucks (or ends up being, like, 3 levels long) dragging the entire adventure out could end up as a cruel joke or a short experiment.

So, this brings us about to a simple question: why is it that [insert article title here]?

Nostalgia may be one reason. Surely none have embraced it better than Mega Man, but clearly none have achieved the desired results (to date… though probably just unconditionally) as Super Mario Bros. has.

As I suggested earlier, there may be a deeper appeal to retro, to see what games of yore were like for a younger or less inducted audience.

Yet, one last possible reason remains: accessibility.

It’s no secret that games today have become increasingly more complicated on a number of levels, including story. The earliest titles and the micro games of today alike offer(ed) a somewhat limited and even sometimes shallow experience. Maybe it’s just that there’s something refreshing about having a pretense to the events without actively being bogged down by the story. To just drop in and play, non-stop, within a minute (at worst) of hitting the start button.

Hell, even in the Sonic Advance and Sonic Rush titles, I found the story to be inconvenient at best (a sub-fault, admittedly, is that they weren’t especially compelling). I didn’t care why Amy was finally being unlocked or what was going to suddenly bring Blaze the Cat into the picture.

So let’s hope that [insert title here] remains around for a while, in measured doses of course. I still want to stomp goombas and defeat the robot masters and collect the chaos emeralds the old fashioned way.

Sometimes, I just wanna play.

Solo Act

Often times one of the most uncommon and bold traits of design is a turn-based RPG where you’re only allowed one character to play as. This is unusual on principal, as usually RPGs are turn-based due to the expressed fact that you’re controlling multiple characters at once. To create this circumstance seems to be almost circular in logic of design, but can produce impressive results when done correctly.

Perhaps fittingly enough, the first true RPG was one such game. The original Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior in the U.S.!) only had one playable character, the hero of the story. This actually made the game pretty frustrating to play, as while the game only pitted you against one enemy at the time, wandering into a battle that was too hard (which was easy to have happen in a non-linear, text-sparse RPG) could swiftly result in your death.

To that point, perhaps it’s not surprising that RPGs switched over to the party system, for variety purposes as well as balance purposes. This isn’t to say it’s necessarily made the genre easier, but it has allowed more variety in the distribution of skills, largely eliminating the purpose of the one-size-fits-all hero.

Indeed, even now today I’m loathe whenever one of my characters ends up alone, for any reason. In the original Lunar: Silver Star on the Sega CD, one of the most frustrating points was when Alex had to go through the magic trial cave, as the design was reduced to blasting the same fire spell over and over again. To this point, it’s no surprise that support-mage Luna is present with Alex in the remake (and presumably the remake of the remake… or the remake of the remake of the remake if you want to count the GBA version).

Suddenly switching to a new character can be equally bad. In the case of Final Fantasy VI, the game switched to General Leo for the sole purpose of suddenly killing him dramatically. The character was technically powerful, but the most you could really do was spam the same technique over and over again until Kefka snuffed him.

One of my least favorite moments in Shadow Hearts: Covenant¸ a game I otherwise love, as at the mid-point when the player is suddenly forced to control Kurando, the 8th party member, by himself. As combat is played by interacting with timed button pressing on a visual ring system, I was locked into a battle I couldn’t customize with a ring pattern I was not familiar with, and I ended up botching over half my attacks, barely surviving the battle. If I’d had a few familiar characters with him to help it wouldn’t have been so bad, but instead…

It’s not to say solo fights in an RPG can’t go well ever. Recently when playing Persona 3 I had one battle where my party kept getting kicked around by a particular powerful group of mini-bosses, even after I altered my hero’s abilities so that their attacks couldn’t touch him.

Finally, I realized that the best thing to do was let the rest of my party wipe and kill a couple of the monsters myself, reviving my fallen allies when only one was left, so that my foes could no longer gang up on people.

Similarly in Final Fantasy VII, you pretty much needed to tackle the Ruby Weapon boss solo, as it would otherwise just steal two of your party members away at random, leaving you stuck with Tifa when you’d stacked all your good skills on Cloud.

So, moving on with the show, what about games that make a point of running the characters solo? Why do they work?

Gameplay variety versus the norm is probably my best conclusion. All the examples I’m about to cite have succeeded because while they were turn-based, you could do more than just cycle through a menu and hope your attack does critical damage.

I came upon this thought recently while playing Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story on the DS. While playing the game, I’ve realized I greatly prefer playing as Bowser over the Bros., and that I’d have rather the whole game been about him. Part of it, admittedly, is that this is the third game in the series and the play-style for Mario and Luigi themselves hasn’t changed too much. It’s not bad, it’s just mostly rehash aside from some new special attacks.

Bowser on the other hand utilizes the touch screen effectively for all his special attacks and has a more interestingly designed set of defensive responses for dealing with enemies during their turns. He’s for more powerful and I have had a few times where I lost because I was operating solo and didn’t have a second party member to revive my, yet I’ve had more fun while playing as him.

One of the odd moves Bowser gets early on is the ability to inhale in the direction of his enemies, absorbing coins, healing items and certain other rare goodies in particular circumstances, something the Bros. have never had anything resembling. In fact, tactically interestingly enough, he can inhale smaller enemies where the Mario Bros., trapped unknowingly to him in his stomach, can fight to dispatch these foes.

Part of the factor could simply be that Bowser brings some welcome change to a series where the protagonists handle exactly the same, but I do enjoy tromping through the landscape, kicking smaller enemies out of the way without having to worry about fighting them while finding out how to deal with the larger, heavy hitting foes that come my way so I don’t die suddenly and violently.

M&L: Bowser’s Inside Story is a more recent example, of course. The 32-bit era had a couple of strong contenders, the first of which I will recall is Parasite Eve.

In the single player capacity, the restrictions to a single player worked wonderfully well for a few reasons: for one, player mobility was relatively free within the combat zone, but players had to choose their movement in part due to the effective range of their weapons and spells.

To this point, increased defensive capacity seems almost requisite in designing the turn based single character RPG. By restricting the player exclusively to a single character, some degree of increased control over defense becomes requisite. In the case of Mario & Luigi 3, the timed defenses assist to this. In the case of Parasite Eve, the ability to move Aya Brea around, to be able to retreat to some degree accordingly and move back in is another form of defense.

Of course, the best defense can be a good offense, as the saying goes. One of the tricks to succeeding in the game was to customize weapons to increase their effective range, allowing Aya to keep her distance while dealing heavy damage. When the player is restricted to just one character, the priority to keep that character in good health naturally increases exponentially, and in turn it falls on the player to find the best way to achieve these results.

This is similarly why the Saturn classic, Panzer Dragoon Saga was at least equally successful, perhaps more-so. With PDS, timing and position were key. The game’s design oriented on moving your dragon riding hero around a group of enemies, and trying to position yourself against their weak points, while evading their movements as they try to position into yours.

This simple element of design worked impressively well and effectively carried the weight of the game. An essential part of complementing the single character design is complementing the amount of work the player has to do to maintain and protect that character. In the case of PDS, the player had to juggle position along with allowing multiple time meters to build up so they could release their best attacks and knock their enemies out.

This does mark a strong trait of the single-character RPG: the advantage of singularity over your enemies. With one character, you generally outmatch any foe before you because the rule seems to go: the fewer you are, the strong you are.

This has held true for the Mario & Luigi RPG series in general, as it’s been technically (and I stress, technically) possible to go through the entire game without taking damage. This is even more prudent for Bowser, who has A) marked a significant change in the gameplay structure while still remaining true to the essence of the design and B) as mentioned, has no allies to support him.

Aya Brea is similarly quite powerful, as is Edge, the hero from Panzer Dragoon Saga. But because they are alone, the difficulty is changed to rely more heavily on the player’s tactics and responses to situations as opposed to the tactics of spamming powerful strikes and healing spells in rapid succession to solve a problem.

This is of course something of the modern school of design for this idea of turn-based role-playing. The original Legend of Zelda may have stated that it’s dangerous to go alone, but it’s the Dragon Quest camp that reminds us why. Gearing up really well and casting “Harm” a bunch of times may save us in one battle, but it’ll just get us killed when we encounter that frakking dragon in the next.

Phantasy Star Universe

In light of a recent announcement, I’m doing something a little different this week. Normally I just try to write a review on something that recently came out, as I figure that’s the only time someone’s really going to care about it. This week however, the review is something of an overview/retrospective on Sega’s Phantasy Star Universe.

Last week, Sega announced the forthcoming closure of the American PS2/PC servers. This was not a shock to me as they’ve been practically dead for some time already (the majority of the ingame servers always registered as virtually empty, and the highest population server averaged 1/5th of its capacity at best these days). I also admittedly barely touched the game for some time, in part due to moving, school and my wife no longer being in another country (playing together online was the only way we could have fun together), but also in heavier part due to the complete lack of solid updates.

The shorthand is that I wanted more levels… I always want more levels, really, and new gear would be nice too. My interest in the game returned and spiked intensely the one time I actually got what I wanted… but I’ll get into that in a minute.

Okay, lemme see… when the game came out, I paid around $40-50 for the PS2 version of the game, $20 on a USB keyboard (an essential!) and paid for a monthly subscription (about $10 per month) for half a year or so before just paying for the six month block subscription and shifting to that permanently. The game came out in late ‘06, and was supplemented one year later by a so-called expansion subtitled Ambition of the Illuminous which I paid about $60 for ($40 for a PS2 version for my collection and $20 because I went half-way on a PC copy with some friends).

Offhand I’ve probably invested close to $500 in this game since its release.

I initially started playing on the PS2 version as I am at heart a console player. The experience was… mediocre. The game was pretty cool at the start, but the loading times could be annoying and the game slowed down pretty bad if the party went to more than four people or too much was happening. On top of that, there wasn’t much to do when the game came out in the online mode. In the interest of providing content updates, a number of levels were locked out, including a whole planet (I’ve probably gone over this a bit in one of my older mockeries, so forgive some redundancies).

Plus… the game was hard. Not “fun/challenging!” hard, but “Ow! Ow! Stop hurting me!” hard. Leveling up job classes was incredibly slow, leveling up combat techniques (which were the only thing you wanted to use back then) was also pretty damn slow, and I was playing as a Newman fighter, which was an oxymoron in the world of PSU.

Not that this stopped me.

It took about a month before Sega even unlocked the third planet, Moatoob, and by then the population had diminished a little bit, and never really rose that high again. Content was doled out every few weeks, but I’d already seen most of it via the story mode, so largely I was waiting for stuff I’d already seen.

The story mode itself was something of another flaw of the game. Part of the appeal of PSO was building your own characters and traversing the dark but sparse story mode. And then taking them online.

PSU, presumably in the interest of preserving gameplay balance and protecting players from hackers, locks these modes off from each other, annulling the beautiful marriage of offline/online the original game enjoyed in the process. This is upsetting for a few reasons, but the key of which personally is the loss of a character with whom I had so much attachment. When the game is taken offline, I lose Dahna Suem, Ca’tan’ka and The Possessed CAST forever, characters I’ve logged hundreds of hours with and have a lot of good memories playing as.

Going back to the story mode, however, it was a bit of a let down. It felt somewhat campy and awkward, forcing the player to act as ubër-dork Ethan Waber and traipse through his world of half-developed characters and lovable clichés, and Karen Erra, who was the only interesting one and forced to become the Space Pope at the end of the story.

In the process of doing so, the player saw all the levels and learned what they’d be waiting for four months down the line in the online counterpart, which killed at least some of the surprise. The online mode was the place to be- it’s where your characters were and the only way to play with human beings, while the offline mode for a long time carried the weight of the complete content— some variations of the levels in the offline mode (particularly the iced versions of several levels) never even saw realization in the online mode!

Fact of the matter is, the game experience as a whole was either grossly imbalanced or incomplete. Weapon creation was frustrating, money was sparse and the player shop system was poorly implemented… which ended up being capped by a decision to remove elemental synthesis ingredients from the common shops, creating a mutated economy when coupled with hacked money and some perverse twist on supply and demand where synthesis ingredients were commonly worth more than completed items.

And I could go on. As things opened up one of the missions made available rewarded substantially higher Mission Points than most of the standard runs, which resulted in over half of the players spamming the mission over and over again to raise their character class levels. This resulted in an incredibly hostile play environment, as any player who wasn’t equipped with a full set of Scape Dolls (PSU’s auto-revive item) would invariably die during the end of the run, screwing the mission ranking and being cussed out and kicked off the team by the other players.

On top of all this, the story missions which saw release every month or so were largely a retread of the events covered in the offline mode, reusing the levels already seen in the offline story with Ethan Waber, thus providing almost a minimum of new material with only the benefit of being able to play as your own character.

By the time summer rolled around (keep in mind, the game released in about October the previous year) there was virtually nothing left to do. The game’s first event, running off a batch of fire themed levels, was pretty fun and rewarding, but suddenly that was it. There was just nothing left.

During this same time, the follow up to the main game, the aforementioned Ambition of the Illuminous was seeing release in Japan, while the US players were wondering if they’d even see the game at all.

Surprisingly, we did.

PSU:AotI added so many fixes with its release that it became fully apparent that PSU in its original state was never a complete game. A number of tweaks and features were added to PSU in general just in preparation for the game’s launch.

Characters were rebalanced in general so that there was more balance between classes (my character finally stopped sucking!), the player shop system was changed from its original “blind search” interface (which forced you to go into a player’s shop to physically examine an item to see if its what you wanted… only to find half the time that shop was locked out) to a much more intuitive set-up, and timed attacks were added in to discourage fighters from button mashing like retarded chimps on Ritalin.

Among other things.

But in many ways, this was how the game should’ve launched. There were a number of levels already available, based both on the old stuff and on the new stuff, and more content was set to show up. Leveling up classes was now much easier, and the difficulty was rebalanced to be less scathingly frustrating. Even the penalty for dying was lightened up, with more realistic terms set to punish players who actually left the mission after dying, rather than for those who’d been blindsided by an instant-death spell.

On top of that, the story for the online missions surprisingly got interesting. The story set for the original game ended on an unusually dark note and fulfilled something that’d been building up in the last couple events. The new story missions were set in the new levels of AotI, and covered a more intense set of events with a better sense of progression as opposed to a set of meandering side trips.

Still, there were some problems.

For one thing, only a few new bosses were added, and only one new type was added on top of that. This is particularly glaring as there were only five types of bosses to begin with, with several reskins peppered throughout the various levels. While the new bosses were at least interesting, the palette wasn’t exactly greatly enriched with this expansion.

Another downside was that the new missions ended up becoming very circular in nature. To explain, one of the neater aspects of PSU in its original form that was sadly never fully utilized were the lobbies set between each mission. Clearing a mission brought you to a safe area in between, and some of the safe areas deeper into their respective planets turned out to be quite awesome to arrive at. I still remember traveling through the deserts and the caves on Moatoob only to emerge at the top of the snow-covered summit and find the breathtaking view at the cliffs before me. Thinking back, arriving at this lobby for the first time is still one of my favorite memories.

But one of the best traits about PSU’s lobbies, that indeed made the sequel so appealing, were the locked doors and blocked paths that begged to be seen open. When AotI was released, many of these paths were indeed opened up to make way for new areas. Routes promised to continue and lead deeper into the planets and it was exciting to think about what areas I might find and what wonders might await.

Yet when I started clearing through these missions they unexpectedly looped back to other lobbies in a circle, and I started to realize that the game had suddenly tied up its own loose ends. In fact, almost every route that was opened up closed off within two stages, which I have to say was genuinely disappointing.

At the same time, there’s still a few paths I remember that haven’t been opened, the biggest one to me being a cavernous path on Parum blocked by some crates at the waterfall, still one of the more gorgeous lobbies in the game. I’d hoped some future expansion would open up that path, because I always wanted to see where it would go. I guess now I never will.

Another fault with AotI was that the levels were, admittedly, a mixed bag. Some of them were outright awesome, like a stage on Neudaiz composed of giant mushrooms and carrying a sort of etherial sense to them. Many of the stages however were built using pre-existing assets from the original game, generally with a texture and color change. The stage design was generally much improved, don’t get me wrong, but there wasn’t truly as much of a sense of “new” going on when you realized the sakura tree stage looked pretty similar to the earlier forest stages in the original game… just, y’know, prettier.

On top of this, one of AotI’s biggest selling points were a set of stages modeled after the original four levels of Phantasy Star Online, PSU’s precursor. Yet these stages, while initially exciting and refreshing, still fell short. The music, because of PSU’s pacing, lost a bit of its flavor, and the levels too didn’t have as much character.

This was for two reasons. One reason is that while Sega rebuilt some of the original monsters from PSO, they didn’t rebuild all of them. This led to a feeling of things just plain missing for fans of the original game, and felt like corners were cut (and maybe they were).

The second reason is that building PSO’s levels like this just made the flaws in PSU’s more apparent. Despite having fewer stages, PSO featured greater variety as each stage changed design between floors. The Caves was drastically different between the first, second and third floors, and it brought a refreshing sense of journey as one progressed, especially if they tried to play through the entire game in one sitting (and maybe this goes back a little to my problem with the lobbies and the looping).

PSU’s levels were designed to be played fast, however, because the pace of the game was very different. More than that, the levels were not nearly as big yet the stages remained consistent from beginning to end, marking no real change as players moved on.

PSO’s levels had been included, but were only a ghost of their former selves. The event that heralded the return of these stages quickly became repetitious as only one level sequence for these levels was included. The levels themselves after the point were set daintily aside as “rare maps” (actually a decent idea unto itself) where the players could enjoy boosted EXP and other rewards.

But AotI’s biggest problem, like its predecessor, was that the ride eventually came to an end. Except this time there wasn’t another expansion coming to save the day and revive flagging interest, and the bad launch had already done too much damage.

In fact, AotI was “followed” by a PSP version of the game which lost a few stages, gained a mass of new equipment and generally enjoyed a much better sense of play balance in terms of drop rates for items and the like than the online version ever enjoyed. Already out in Japan and (presumably) forthcoming later to the US is a sequel that features genuine new stages on top of the old ones, and so many gameplay changes that it would’ve been the expansion I wanted if it was, y’know, online.

So this all comes down to the question of “was it worth it?” My answer is… yes. Kind of. For every session where I was enjoying the game I always had two more where I was thinking of all the ways it could be better. Some of my problems were addressed, and I’d be a fool if I denied that the game had gotten better as time went on, especially when the expansion came out.

I have a lot of good memories playing the game, with exciting runs and playing with my friends and my girlfriend who in time became my fiancé and then my wife. I hope one day Sega will try again, either in this game’s universe or some other new one, and maybe get it right and capture the best traits of this game with the magic of the original PSO.

One of the biggest problems this game faced was that it was shackled in many ways to the PS2. PC and Xbox 360 players (the latter of which aren’t being cut off, so the game isn’t totally dead) had the benefit of harddrives, yet the game was always geared in favor of the one system that didn’t. Hopefully whatever Sega does next can take full advantage of this, allowing for more elaborate patches and updates of the kind of stuff that needs to be handled player-side.

Hopefully there’ll be more levels too. Maybe even more players.

I suppose I should say in post script that if one good thing has come from this (aside from the couple hundred dollars I’ll be saving per year now) it’s that it’s spurred me into getting a few more Guardians Gone Wild videos done before our characters are sent to the big server in the sky. My wife and I had intended to do more, but moving and school got in the way of that. Well, no time like the present.

Tales From the Workplace #6

Sales Tax Evasion?

Teenager comes up to buy a game. I forget which game, it’s probably not important, but the total with sales tax comes up to $53.78. So I tell him—

“53.78.”

He hands over $53.

“I need the seventy-eight cents.”

“Seventy-eight cents?”

“Or a dollar.”

He checks his pockets.

“I don’t have a dollar.”

Teenager then proceeds to stare blankly for a good ten seconds.

“…are you going to get it out of your car?”

“No.”

“Do you have a dollar?”

“Seventy-eight cents?”

“Or a dollar. Whatever will cover the seventy-eight cents.”

Yes, my patience is straining. And he stares blankly again.

“I still need the seventy-eight cents.”

Backfired

Among the many, many things I hate in retail, one of them is people who try to ask for a discount. But lo! I was a good mood and attempted to run with someone’s lame joke!

“So, hey, how about $5 off for guys who wear hats?”

Yes, he was wearing a hat.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I say with a smile, “We have a staunch anti-hat policy.”

Three minutes later, I’m on my break. Co-worker comes in!

“Hey, Lucas? We’ve got a guy out there who said you told him to take his hat off?”

…I can’t win…

Hear No Evil

Deaf fellow comes in with sign-language adept friend to sell an X-Box 360 and a bunch of games. Deaf fellow and friend shop around for a while, with said friend helping him communicate with sales people. All goes well for a time!

360 is tested, works fine, guy is to be paid out for it. This is where I come in.

Not knowing about the games at first (as I didn’t receive the system) I total up the system and accessories at $109. Deaf fellow shakes his head and writes down on a piece of paper “$225.” I look at it quizzically, double check the paperwork, then ask if he had games. Friend of deaf guy says yes.

Glancing back, I find the games tucked away on a shelf and pull them up, letting the duo know that I need to check them off first. I check the discs, most of them are fine, only a couple are a little scratched. There’s a Resident Evil 5 in the collector’s edition case but without the bonus disc or any of the other swag. I decide not to take it as the managers may become irked at me for doing so.

I convey this information, and the deaf guy becomes irate, tapping the “$225″ pointedly.

“He was told he’d get $225.” The friend speaks.

“He shouldn’t have been told that. The system tester is only supposed to quote you for the system, anything else he would’ve quoted is an estimate.”

Some signing ensues. Deaf guy makes it clear he wants the $225 he was expecting.

Oh boy.

“Sir, I haven’t even totaled up your games. I don’t know what it’s going to come out to yet.”

Deaf guy holds up the RE5 I rejected, and writes down saying “I was told I’d get $10 for this.”

I look to his friend to translate, “I can’t buy that game. It’s in a collector’s case and there’s an empty space where the bonus disc is.”

Message conveyed, deaf guy writes “I bought this as a regular green case and switched it to a metal one.”

“I understand, and if you have it in the regular case, I can probably buy it. But I can’t buy it like that.”

Somewhere around here, the friend gets fed up, “Look, you really should be talking to him. I’m not his translator.”

“You’ve been translating for him the whole time.”

“This isn’t my problem!”

“You’ve been helping him out the whole time! I can’t spend the whole time writing notes to him, we’ve got a line of people getting backed up because of this payout.”

“He’s the one you should be talking to!”

Somewhere around this whole stupid affair, I ask him tensely if he wants to deal with my manager… who happens to be one register next to me. The whole transaction passes over, and the argument recurs (he handles the deaf guy directly as the line getting held up is something that’s pretty much just expected at this point).

Then he tells the people in the back to bring the system back up, and the deaf guy quickly backs off when we’re prepared to reject his system and they go through the transaction. The total is $205, meaning the whole fight was over a matter of $20.

(On a side note, I checked with the tester who’d received the system and he in fact gave no such exact quite, having saved the written conversation. He even told the guy explicitly that we might not take RE5 and that the final values of the games were subject to the cashier. Wonderful when people pay attention, isn’t it?)

Four Wheels, No Respect

In the course of a weekend I once encountered two troublesome people with bicycles.

I should preface by saying that A) There is a bike rack outside the store and B) Bikes are not allowed inside the store, as they would block passages and create a fire hazard.

The bike rack usually is ignored and people try to park their bikes inside, at which point someone is supposed to inform them and oversee the removal of the offending transports.

The less stupid story occurred later, during a busy people at which the bike was brought in unnoticed and left in the lobby pathway. Upon its’ notice:

“Does anyone have a bike in the lobby?” Real loudly. With a co-worker. Four times. No one response. So I yell, “If no one comes up, the bike will be forcibly expelled from the store!”

Still no response. I start to follow through!

To my surprise, the bike has been chained to the L.A. Weekly rack sitting near the entrance. I blink.

He has a chain… and he chained it to this rack?

I’m on the verge of taking the bike- rack and all- outside (which I’m sure would’ve made a better story) when the owner of said bike comes up.

“Excuse me, sir, your bike can’t be in the lobby.”

“Yeah, I heard you yelling.”

“Well, you chained it to the L.A. Weekly rack.”

“That’s right. I did it so people like you wouldn’t move it.”

I blink again. People like me? Employees in the store into which you wrongly brought your bike?

Oddly, he didn’t make much of a fuss… he just took it outside and (presumably) chained it to the rack. Still… rude.

The second event, which happened first, I think surprised me more. In this instance, the fellow in question actually was caught in the act of placing his bike.

“Excuse me, sir, you can’t have your bike in the lobby.”

“Well, where am I supposed to put it?”

“There’s a bike rack outside.”

“I don’t have a lock, I don’t want it getting stolen.”

An ironic statement, no?

“Well, sir, you can’t have it in here. It’s a fire hazard.”

“Why is this a problem?”

“Because if there’s a fire, it’ll be in someone’s way! That makes it a fire hazard!”

“You should be making a space for me to put my bike.”

“Sir, it’s not the store’s responsibility to take care of your bike.”

“Well you’re supposed to! This isn’t good customer service!”

At this point the assistant manager comes up as the argument has escalated and says “Sir, you can’t keep your bike in the lobby. You have to chain it up outside.”

The customer seems huffy but says, “Okay, that’s all you had to say. You should have someone talk to that guy—he was very rude.”

I can’t win.

Threats People Make Before the Door Hits Them on the Ass

“I’ll be waiting for you outside!” – Threat. Never followed through on.

“I’ll tell all my friends not to shop here!” – Threat. Impact, if any, unnoticed.

“I’m never shopping here again!” – Promise, generally made by self-entitled people. Sometimes followed through with.

“I’m going to GameStop!” – Proclamation, usually uttered by people trying to sell crap. Assumed to be follow through.

You Mean I Have To Read?!

I often have to warn people when games involve reading. It doesn’t seem like something one should have to warn anyone about; I’m not aware of reading constituting a danger to one’s wellbeing, yet people seem to recoil in revulsion when learning of games that may pose just such a threat.

Popular titles are the worst. I routinely encounter this problem with the Mario & Luigi games, particularly Superstar Saga on the GBA, mainly ’cause it’s cheaper than the rest and people are routinely looking for a cheap Mario game, blithely unaware that popularity tends to raise a price, not lower it.

Similarly, the game is routinely returned for just the same reason. “It has too much reading.” Granted, half the time it’s bought for a little kid (who apparently can neither be troubled nor encouraged to exert) and even if the reading didn’t scare them away, the RPG trappings inevitably will.

Back when I started playing games, the depth of reading involved boiled down to “MASTER USING THIS AND YOU CAN HAVE IT.” Or my personal favorite “DODONGO DISLIKES SMOKE.” I still think the blatantly cryptic method classic games employed meant you had to be some kind of genius to get through them- looking back, I’m not sure how the hell I was supposed to decipher some of the obscure clues given to me in an 8-Bit game without the benefit of an FAQ, a strategy guide and some sort of hint system.

Hell, I still remember having to kneel in front of a lake while equipped with a blue crystal in Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest for a minute in order to make the screen dip down and expose a hidden area beneath the water. How the %$^& did I ever figure that out?

As the quality of writing improved in games, the stories became more indepth and the puzzles became more intuitive. Back in high school, I used to figure myself for a friggin’ sophisticate when I was playing intellectual games of the likes of Xenogears.

I feel that games as a larger medium have veered away from real reading in recent years. This is in part more a result of evolution than it is of design. Reading was required to express a story, a story which is now told through full voice acting with optional subtitles. The dialogue is often a bit more terse to keep the story going, so lengthy exchanges are generally avoided.

Voice acting is no longer a treat, or a marker for a special or important scene, it’s a standard, it’s expected. Stories are not so much told as expressed these days.

Depending on what games you play of course, the impact varies. A full-blown high-budget RPG produced by Bioware, or anything with the name “Final Fantasy” guarantees this to be true. Bioware’s once more indepth responses have been shaved to vague rebuttals to be expressed by the actor/actress, leaving the player less to read and evaluate in the list of choices previously provided for them.

Alternately, my recent (and admittedly belated) experience with Persona 3 has treated me to a more classic form, where major scenes are voiced along with dialogue boxes. It’s strange that it’s almost become uncommon to play something that involves cycling through so much text.

Of course, I love RPGs, but as a gamer, even I have to wonder if there’s a point where I become adverse to too much reading. One inevitably plays a game for the experience of playing, but what does one do when there is more reading than there is playing? Can it still be accurate to call it a game when the actual thing itself is less and less involved?

To explore something of a contrast to this, I recently started playing a visual novel. For those not in the know (and I’m something of a neophyte myself), visual novels are basically just pictures, a messload of words and (usually) choices… something like a choose-your-own adventure book, I guess.

I’ve actually been adverse to the genre for a long time… I still kinda am. However, I started reading the manga version of a visual novel called Higurashi: When They Cry a month or so back, and found the story very addictive. So much so, in fact, that I decided to turn myself to towards a gaming experience that involves only the most minimal amount of interactivity.

All in all, I’ve actually enjoyed “playing” Higurashi but it redefines gaming as I know it in some ways. This particular novel (which I’m assured, most are not quite like this) involves no choices- I only read through the story, come to the horrible, horrible ending where bad things happen, and then basically come out of it with a set of information which I’m free to interpret until I tackle the next story, which basically starts over at the beginning with a different chain of events in the same setting.

I’m no stranger to game analysis; I used to partake in much discussion and dissection of the original Silent Hill, and a fair bit of the sequel as well.

But can comprehension and analysis be considered part of the game experience? Indeed, can the game experience then exist beyond the game itself? Is a game defined purely by the tactile interaction as we know it, or can we take a game and call it such if it’s capable of existing beyond it’s own confines?

To be candid, I don’t have a clear answer. I’d argued with my wife extensively as to why visual novels aren’t games as there’s no definably challenge that requires skill to overcome. Even now, having played one (and while I should technically say I’m reading one, I’m compelled to say I’m playing it) I’m still not sure.

If one defines playing a game as overcoming some sort of predefined challenge with at least a minimal iota of skill, then how much does reading factor into this? If, say, one were to play a game where there’s fifty hours of reading and seven minutes of actual playing, can it still be called a game? Can it only be called a game for those actual few minutes?

As someone who is working towards writing game scripts, this is often important for me to mull over. I routinely have to reexamine story sequences to shave off extraneous dialogue in order to make sure I’ve upheld the idea that the player is never sitting around for too long, not playing a game. Ideally, I try to make sure what needs to be there is what’s there.

By contrast, I’ve played my share of games where I wish the story, in whatever form, would carry on a bit long, and that the developers rushed me out of the narrative and back into the game so brusquely that the narrative felt to be little more than a pretense or a courtesy.

Reading in a game can mean a lot of things to the quality of the experience. In the case of the aforementioned Xenogears, which I still hold in high regard, the absolute dragging point of the game was when the experience was reduced from story telling and gameplay to almost nothing but reading.

Dialogue sequences, on-screen actions and dramatic pacing (which in itself can be fostered by gameplay) was replaced by a long sequence of text narrations by the main characters, which did tell the story but did itself and the players a disservice as to how it was done. (which is, unto itself, mainly Square’s fault more than the developers, but still…)

Even in the case of Higurashi, if I didn’t have a preexisting degree of awareness with the story, I don’t know how far I would’ve read when I first started the game (“game”?) – the story starts at a slow boil and much of the stuff encompassing the actual mystery doesn’t begin for at least a couple hours worth of reading (well, depending on how fast you read).

Part of the difficulty of defining the role of reading in a game is that it’s almost an element of preference, in the same way one might enjoy a particular genre, and reading itself is limited to the genres in which it’s relevant.

Obviously, by that token, we’re not going expect an intense, text-heavy narrative experience in the next Madden game, and shooters would be somewhat bogged down by too much reading. Similarly in Bayonetta, I’ve not really stopped to read the numerous text files I’ve picked up- I plan to do so later, but the few I’ve snatched didn’t offer enough to seriously compel me and whenever I’m grabbing them I’d usually rather be killing things.

The pacing by contrast in Resident Evil is somewhat different, and I usually want to read any file I come across. Of course, in these games even the text files can lend to the atmosphere – I still remember finding files left by the sorry survivors in the RPD back in Resident Evil 2.

Getting to the meat of it, the volume of reading in a game does and should vary from game to game – a game can be meant to be a reading experience, and other games should minimize it as it wouldn’t be conducive to what’s being done.

By conclusion, if the volume of reading in gaming as a whole isn’t wrong on a subjective basis, then the problem as it hypothetically exists must by assigned to the players. While it might sound silly to criticize people for how they enjoy their hobby (and, okay, it probably is) it could be taken as a larger analysis of society as a whole on how they spend their time. While I have no qualms with someone deciding to run over the occasional hooker, I do have to wonder when how much is too much.

Much of my concern with the aversion I’ve seen people express towards reading in games is that they generally aren’t the kind of people who pick up intellectually stimulating titles; they seem to be the kind of people who “just want to shoot $#!^” The kind of people who play for the self-indulgent thrills and nothing else all the time suggest themselves to be the type who can’t see gaming as a potential for an art form or a means of expression, and only as the next new really neat toy.

So I say to the gaming mass, read a little. Though it’s possible if you’ve read this far, you probably don’t have that problem anyways.

Quick! Time! Events!

Or “How to produce complex actions with simple buttons and piss a bunch of people off.”

Rising in popular design in gaming is a device commonly referred to as the mini-game, or the quick time event. The idea largely stems from the Dragon’s Lair school of design which boils down to “push a button to not die.”

Back when Resident Evil 4 and God of War were the bee’s knees, QTEs were exciting, and neat. Then, other games started using them and the design element was jeered as stale and unimaginative. But what does the mini-game mean to us?

Let’s start with the rationale. Does it serve a purpose in design?

In a word, yes. QTEs can be used to perform complex actions under simple circumstances, and allow the player to perform more exciting and dynamic actions than the game’s design may otherwise allow.

This is double-edged, of course.

Often accusations fly of “lazy design” with the use of QTEs, and indeed this can be the case. 2009’s Wet is a fantastic example of this, where the gameplay is rough but fun (okay, so I liked it) but the boss fights are conspicuously absent. This made the game feel somewhat rushed and unfinished, but particularly hurt the experience every time a major enemy whom you expected to be a boss ends up being killed by Rubi in a quick time event.

Particularly memorable is the assassin you fight at the end, who in the course of the interactive cutscene demonstrated an ability to vanish in plain sight (I believe rain was falling, for dramatic effect), and whom I kept pressing buttons in a timely fashion to battle. I kept waiting for the event to end and the fight to begin, so I could figure out how to outsmart the Magical Vanishing Lady™ but the opportunity never came. Instead I just sorta killed her and the game just sorta ended.

Use of such a device does not in itself suggest bad design, of course. Such a mechanic should be permissible in an instance where it complements the gameplay, or where such a fight would simply be out of place in the design.

BUT IT SHOULD NOT BE USED FOR THE FINAL BOSS FIGHT IN AN ACTION GAME.

Deactivating the Caps Lock. Moving on.

Resident Evil 4 provides a firm example of an effective QTE boss fight. Late in the game, the character Krauser is introduced, and shortly thereafter, Leon is confronted by him. This results in an awesome knife fight between the two, structured around a quick time event.

The sequence works well for a number of reasons. Foremost, true to RE4’s mantra, a cutscene runs during the fight scene, meaning it’s not just part of the action, but part of the story. The sequence can be tricky (partly because some of the commands rotate on retries) and it’s generally the part I usually have to go through several times in order to get it right.

The second reason this sequence works is because RE4’s gameplay was not designed around knife fights, but around gunning down large mobs and larger monsters. Ergo, forcing in a literal knife fight would’ve been awkward, and including guns would’ve been unbalanced.

The last reason this sequence works is that while it’s late in the game, it’s hardly used in the finale and in fact, Krauser himself is dispatched as a more powerful monster during a gameplay sequence.

This logic of design is part of why RE4 was awesome. Resident Evil 5 stuck close to this school of design with Wesker, including a gameplay fight against the superhuman baddie, following with a brief QTE sequence, followed by the final boss sequence against a more monstrous kitty-eyed Wesker.

Of course, these sequences could still run pretty rough. One wrong move during a story sequence often resulted in one’s death, as are often the case with this device. Now, granted, most games don’t rely on the mini-game during cutscenes – generally, they are used during gameplay to varying degrees.

Still, penalties for failure must be implemented. The question then is how drastic must they be?

In part, it depends on intention of design. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed really just utilized QTE for flair; there was absolutely no penalty for messing up a sequence, generally utilized to finish off an otherwise defeated boss. Hitting the wrong button would simply mean being knocked back on your ass and having to just try again, exactly where you left off.

This is something of a “soft” implementation of the device. QTEs are utilized more for effect than for challenge. Kingdom Heart II operated on a similar mentality, as the triangle button was context sensitive and required no real skill to utilize – you could simply mash the button whenever something was about to happen (or hell, if you thought it was about to happen) and achieve spectacular results.

The God of War series, where mini-games are generally well recognized and more ingrained into the overall design, takes a more medium approach to the implementation.

With GoW, QTEs are used to finish off a sequence of a boss fight or take them out completely, as well as for dispatching many of the lesser enemies. The catch is that failing to do these sequences correctly restores the boss and requires you to redo some of the damage in order to open up the minigame again.

In short, the more you succeed the more you advance; the penalties for failing are generally not damning but are integral to part of the challenge of the game.

Of course, it’s possible to go one step further with QTEs – they can of course be used to just screw a player over. This usually doesn’t happen as often, though in the case of Bayonetta, as a villain might say, “The price for failure is DEATH!“

In fair disclaimer, I’m still pretty early on in the game, having only cleared three chapters at the time of this writing. However, in two of these chapters I’ve suffered a number of ignominious deaths because of QTEs.

The first of these caught me completely off-guard, as I really didn’t even know they’d be in the game. The second caught me off-guard when I probably should’ve been prepared for it (at least if only because the first let me know they exist), but I didn’t have much time to react and was promptly consumed by fiery lava.

This isn’t exactly what I call a desirable outcome. In Bayonetta, damage taken counts against your score for the level, and dying hurts badly as one might imagine. This is a clear discrepancy between the level of skill required to kick ass and take names versus pressing the X button at the right time.

In the instance where the QTEs really fouled me up, I’d been doing well thus far but had taken a bit of damage and had just used a healing item. The QTE caught me offguard as there was no real clear signifier that one was upcoming, and the span of time was so brief I’d not had much time to react to it.

So I died. I tried again, this time knowing what was going to happen. I hit the button in preparation… did so prematurely, and was punished with death.

This has been my least favorite part of an otherwise enjoyable and challenging game. This is also what I’d quantify as an example of “hard” implementation, where one wrong move is your funeral. Tactically, it’s least fair to the player and it’s the least desirable to see in a game. While the penalties are arguable superficial (there’s no limit of “lives” or anything like that), the punishment is still rough for someone trying to get a good score.

Comparatively, in Resident Evil 4, messing up a QTE and dying in a cutscene means you have to try again. There’s no other penalty other than having to try again, and the game succeeds just fine both as being fun and challenging.

So I suppose the last question drawn is that of “what constitutes as a QTE?” Anything, apparently.

To put it in context, when Batman: Arkham Asylum came out a few months prior to the writing of this article, I recall a reviewer praising the game for not using mini-games past the sequences where you had to mash the X button to pull open a grate.

Is it fair or valid to quantify this as QTE, whether or not it was a service to the game? Rapidly hitting the action button is probably the closest thing to the sensation of struggling to pry the grate open. There really isn’t a button that’s used exclusively for the prying open of grates, nor should there be. Rather, the button is made context sensitive to the appropriate situation and utilized accordingly in said situation when it arises.

Similarly, Silent Hill: Origins used QTE to deal with certain enemy maneuvers, but the game didn’t rely extensively on them. QTE by definition seems to be used to term any action that’s not performed completely directly by the player. The more intricate the technique, the greater the offense to the player.

However, it’s my conclusion that QTE is not inherently bad unto itself, nor should it be treated as though it is. If the gravity of the offense is based on the complexity of the actions performed, then perhaps it falls on the designers to either increase the complexity of what can naturally be done, or increase the complexity of the QTE itself.

To go back one more time to RE4, part of the game’s success is that it demands that you never put the controller down. You’re never safe, even in a story sequence (I mean, okay, so you can still pause…), and that actions that in other games which would normally be a guaranteed success are now dependant on the player to guarantee the performance.

How is this bad?

Proper implementation of QTE depends on several factors. The first is the question of how much complete control should be taken out of the player’s hands. That said, QTE should be used as a tool, not a crutch. Wet’s implementation fails because what should’ve been exciting gameplay was reduced to QTE without cause, and that does make poor gameplay design.

The second question is where it’s permissible. A little button mashing never killed anyone, and it’s honestly retarded to quantify simple actions such as a pulling open a grate or keeping that damned knife out of your face as a QTE sequence. On the other hand, jumping on the player’s back and saying “Hey! Press this button in the next two seconds or you die!” isn’t exactly going to win new friends to the cause.

The last question is whether or not it complements challenge. In God of War, it has largely been used to positive effect, and I see no point to strip it out as it provides visceral punch and it used accordingly as to when it best fits with a generally reasonable penalty implemented for failure.

On the other hand, Force Unleashed used it for nothing more than feigning the effort of telling the player they’re still involved in fights they’ve already won. Unless I’m either going to be actually penalized for losing a QTE sequence or failing will change the course of the fight somehow, I’d just as soon see them gone from the sequel.

So that’s my QTE analysis. Feel free to rant and object during the appropriate ten-second interval by pressing the right buttons. Do it correctly and you may even hurt my feelings! On the internet!

Warrior Princesses

Picking up from where I left off last week, we move away from women forced into classification and examine the treatment of women who in fact are fighters, kickers of ass and takers of names.

I won’t talk about Final Fantasy as a series nearly so much this time around, as there’s really just not much to say about it. However, I will open with Final Fantasy VII’s Tifa Lockheart, undeniably iconic but also sort of a mixed example.

One thing one cannot get around with Tifa is the fact that she is stacked. Back in my high school days, I tended to refer to her as “Tifa of the Well Built Rack.” This is in no way meant to demean her, of course, but one can’t deny that she’s generally regarded as the most attractive girl in the game’s cast, and if one is so inclined to scan for hentai (that is to say, dirty, dirty artwork) on the character they will readily find far more imagery of Tifa than of Aerith and Yuffie combined.

While this is more sex driven than an article about women who can fight should start, it raises the question of whether or not badass women have to be attractive in order to rank in popularity.

If one examines Tifa from a character standpoint, how satisfactory are the results. She is an important pillar to Cloud’s story, it’s true; however, by that same standpoint, if one removes Cloud from the story, Tifa doesn’t have enough of a character arc on her own to really hold any weight.

While in a single instance this isn’t necessarily bad, if Tifa is to be our prime example of mainstream feminism in gaming, do we really want to count on the only character who got her ass completely kicked in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children?

There is Lara Croft of Tomb Raider fame of course, who does have the benefit of being more self-reliant… of course, as the Tomb Raider games are entirely about her, it’s expected. Still, her early efforts were heavily supported by the perceived attraction of the character – why people found a jagged lump of polygons to be “hot” is admittedly beyond me, but that’s a matter for another day.

Still, the games rely on images of her finely toned body even today. Hell, look at the cover of the recent Tomb Raider: Underworld. What’s the one thing that’s missing? Her head. We’re given Lara Croft from the neck down.

Now, I’m not trying to say that this will make a game sell. As I recall, TR:U in fact didn’t sell nearly as well, while the last new installment, Tomb Raider: Legend focused on her head and was in fact better received. Rather, it suggests that the publishers or whomever made this decision relied on the iconography of Lara’s body to sell a game.

These are both fairly prominent examples of popular fighter gals, which is in a way a shame since both were spawned back in the PSX era. Two console generations later, and these are still some of the best examples we have.

Let’s look at some other games in popular series. 2006’s Phantasy Star Universe saw main character and uber-dork Ethan Waber paired up with a Newman hottie named Karen Erra who was surprisingly an antitheses to the Numans Newmans = mages approach that this recent installment had embraced.

In fact, the character was decently tough and couldn’t use magic techniques at all, which made her an ideal example. However, in the course of the story as Ethan totally falls for her (as she is the first girl introduced, a method half the RPGs out there rely upon) she is forced to take the place of her twin sister, who happens to be the SPACE POPE, and thus must don a meek appearance in order to maintain the ruse for the sake of galactic sanity.

It’s actually done a little better than it sounds, but it also means a tough character is reduced to playing a meek character by the end of the story. At least in Karen’s case, she didn’t actually change in personality, and it can be argued that it’s a strong act to shoulder such responsibility.

Actually I decently respect Karen- she’s not nearly as oversexed as she could’ve been and her personality is decently tough. In a way, it’s part of what’s so frustrating about her because she’s the most interesting character in the story and she’s given the least screen-time, especially in the online chapters that followed the offline game.

In a different spectrum of science fiction we have Samus Aran of Metroid, single-handedly the toughest babe in the galaxy. In many ways, Samus is the ideal warrior woman- nothing in her attire is sexy, slutty or revealing- hell, she’s clad in power armor. She conquers overwhelming odds by herself and she doesn’t display any signs of perceived sexist weakness.

Of course, this is all overshadowed by her limited development. Samus is entirely silent in almost every Metroid game, so it’s difficult to say very much about her. The only game in which she’s gotten direct development was Metroid Fusion on the GameBoy Advance earlier this decade. In fact, Metroid Prime 3 a couple years ago missed a prime shot for her to speak more, approaching a more story driven narrative approach yet failing to have her speak a word.

It was very frustrating, in fact- you know all about Samus by reputation and history. The soldiers give her respect – respect – in the beginning of the game, and it’s pleasant to see. But she doesn’t talk at all. It’s almost as if there’s a collective fear that opening up her character further could risk diminishing her. Still, she’s one of Nintendo’s most iconic characters despite not sharing the same level of popularity with Mario and Link.

It’s possible the new forthcoming game by Team Ninja will focus more on the character; the early trailers released certainly suggest it. It’s either that, or her boobs will bounce more. It’s hard to say with Team Ninja.

Moving on.

I think a more recent positive example which probably will never carry broad appeal is Wet’s Rubi Malone. Rubi does represent a prime example of a positively represented tough chick in gaming; she’s attractive but is never exposed nor does she act slutty at any point in the story. She drinks and she fights she cusses a lot, so she may not be the ideal representative of the proposed cause, but to her credit she in no way diminishes that, which can’t be said about many female characters out there.

Rubi helps support the idea of what’s seldom right in games- how women are represented. The forthcoming main character of Bayonetta… who is named Bayonetta… is designed to be hyper-sexy and will routinely become naked (the naughty bits will presumably be conveniently censored off) when dispatching massive foes.

Japanese review scores have been quite good. The graphics look nice, and it looks fun in a completely “I come from the Devil May Cry pedigree,” so I am looking forward to playing it. Still, the concept reeks of blatant exhibitionism (for the uninformed, her body is clad entirely in shape-shifting hair, which will sometimes leave her skin in order to rip things apart), and her lack of modesty feels like an attempt on the developers to use her sexiness to sell a game.

I bring these two games up in sequence because I saw both Wet and Bayonetta at E3 back in June ‘09, and while Bayonetta undeniably has better graphics and more of an actual budget, Wet was the game that got my attention more, for both it’s gameplay approach and the design of its protagonist.

In this way it’s a shame that Wet couldn’t have been a better contender. I love the game but I see why its review scores weren’t higher, whereas Bayonetta clearly had strong backing from Sega, coupled with the former Capcom employees developing it.

Wet seems to be destined for “niche” categorization… but do games has to be niche to accomplish something with how women are portrayed as something other than Fira casting future housewives?

The Phantasy Star series, by contrast to Final Fantasy, has never been nearly so big. The first game in the series featured a female protagonist, something which most RPGs still don’t do. The only Castlevania game in the series to feature a female Belmont (which means she actually could fight) was retconned out of the series canon.

The Silent Hill series, which borderlines closely between mainstream and niche, has seen one female protagonist in the form of Heather Mason.

In fact, I like Heather from a visual standpoint for the same reasons I like the aforementioned Rubi of Wet – she doesn’t dress like a slut, but she still looks good. While the question of whether or not women have to be pretty to be a prominent character in a game is a whole different matter.

Heather also represents another, curiously underused, concept in the horror genre, the notion of female vulnerability. While screaming, running women are a common staple in film, you don’t see many such examples of women cast in the protagonist capacity in horror games. Or, if you do, it might just be in something like Clock Tower 3 where you mostly scream and run.

Heather Mason, by contrast, in reasonably attired and respectably armed, able to fight as well as the past protagonists (okay, honestly, better than the past protagonists) and has the best developed personality of any SH protagonist.

But Silent Hill still doesn’t command the same mainstream appeal as, say, Resident Evil, where Jill Valentine dresses like she’s about to go clubbing during a zombie apocalypse.

The concluding question is where does the aversion to the Warrior Princess lay? Is it the gaming public that’s adverse, or the publishers/developers?

One has to remember, we buy what we’re given. And people tend to buy most what is budgeted the most. This is what makes Final Fantasy XIII almost an anomaly, at least on the outset, is that it does feature a tough woman who kicks ass, and we don’t normally see that on such a high profile project.

If we were given, say, a Gears of War 3 with a heavily armored woman blasting/chainsawing aliens, people would still buy it because it’s Gears of War. But would it sell as well? Would people not buy it because the main character of the series is iconic, or is there a chance that the average Halo/Madden player would avoid it if they see a woman on the cover?

Objectively, it’s hard to say, because after all, we buy what we’re given, and in turn what we’re given is what we’ll buy. If military men and jocks sell, why take the risk trying to make a game that does something different?

Magical Girls

When someone tells us we fight like a girl, are we compelled to think that means we’re prone to casting Ultima?

To put it another way, is it unfounded to suggest women are stereotyped into the role of the meek mage? This is not to say that this happens all the time – there are certainly a fair share of lady bruisers and I’ll go into them more next week – but when we think of women, especially in role-playing games, there seems to be a tendency to classify them as magic users primarily.

There is of course a standard of pros and cons to the mage class that have to be considered; in the positive light, it tends to imply that women have higher mental power of some sort, and certainly no one is going to be insulted if you say they’re the among the smarter ones in the group.

On the other hand, mages usually can only give and deal back as much physical damage as a slice of soggy toast. While this is considered a standard part of class balance, the fact that female characters are routinely cast into this mold rather than one of the more physical classes does convey some sexist implications.

Let’s look at the Final Fantasy series for a moment, as it’s one of the more prominent series out there. As the games usually involve free distribution of magic between characters, it can be difficult to readily classify anyone as a mage with all but a few games as the exception.

Final Fantasy IV & IX both were among the few that featured preset classes as part of the character building system. Having not played all of IV (I’m a cad, I know) I can only readily call forth Rosa, who is the consummate white mage.

FFIX is a bit more complicated- two of the characters you get in the story are mages. The first is the Princess Garnet, who is both white mage and summoner, magic classes of course, and she is also love interest to the main character Zidane, who is a more dynamic fighting class.

Aside from a second mage, the little girl Eiko, there is Freya, who is a fighter and can be classified in the Dragoon class of the series. However, it’s worth noting that while Freya is a useful character, her character arc largely vanishes from the game not long after her introduction. While she is an example of a female fighter in the series and in this specific game, she’s not given as much prominence in the story as her magic using counterparts.

This does bring to attention a sub-aspect of the problem of how women are often represented in RPGs, and it’s how much they’re represented. The proportions are admittedly better today by and large, but this seems to be in part occurring because core playable characters are getting few in numbers.

To make a few contrasts, Final Fantasy VI’s cast featured only 3 women and some 11 men with the maximum number of characters you could have by the end of the game (maybe it’s 4 to 10… or 3 to 10 to ?… not completely sure what Gogo is). More recently, on the contrary, Final Fantasy X featured 3 women to 4 men. Percentage-wise, this is a great improvement; by diminishing the overall cast, the remaining characters do get more increased focus.

Of course, examining these numbers we have to ask how many of these women are fighters, outright, versus mages. With FFX, Yuna and Lulu (both featured for more of the story) are mages while Rikku, who joins later, fills the thief class, and isn’t especially strong. The guy who throws a dodge ball at the enemies hits harder, for cryin’ out loud!

I’ll admit some of my examples thus far are, arguably, a little dated. I haven’t played FFXII (the MMO-esque structure isn’t appealing to me) and XIII isn’t out yet. However, more recently we did see the U.S. release of Final Fantasy: Dissidia (maybe the “Dissidia” part comes first… but I don’t really care), which recaps and evaluates the first ten games somewhat nicely.

What one quickly notices upon initiating the game is that there is exactly one female hero between Final Fantasy I through X, FFVI’s Terra. The more experienced players will subsequently notice that Terra’s ability to use a sword is almost completely absent and that she’s dependant almost entirely on magic.

It’s not to say she shouldn’t use magic, of course; her ability to do so was a big part of the story, but she was never solely dependant on it, let alone downright restricted to it. Yet in Dissidia, the only time she doesn’t use magic is when she’s chasing an enemy down- she has no standard physical attacks.

So why is Terra, who was originally more versatile, suddenly boiled down to the de-facto mage? It isn’t helped that the character arcs from the original games are rehashed rather than continued in Dissidia, reducing Terra to the pseudo-amnesiac dependant she was at the beginning of the story, rather than the stronger and more assured woman she was at the end.

Why push the character down this way?

Much of this seems to come down to the love interest/save the princess mentality games have been built on.

I should stress that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with occasionally saving princesses. I’ve been known to do it myself and sometimes they, like any respectable people, need help.

At the same time though, has this created in part a sexist preconception in what we expect of women in games today, one that we haven’t entirely broken free of. To say that a woman might need to be saved versus to expect her to need to be saved are two very different things, after all.

A woman’s role in a story, in relation to the male main character, is often to provide support or spur him into action, inevitably resulting in love. Because of this, and perhaps in part because for so long the primary demographic playing the games (like the main characters themselves) are male, the lead female cannot overshadow the main character as that would interpretably emasculate him, which would in turn make the player himself feel emasculated.

Take the iconic Aerith of FFVII, for example. Looking at the material by itself, it can be readily concluded that she is meant to be Cloud’s love interest, and can easily end up becoming such based on readily available choices one can make in the game. Physically, Cloud is fairly buff while she’s a sweet, pink clad flower girl.

Of course, I’ve been focusing on Final Fantasy somewhat intensely here. As one of the premier RPG series out there, it does provide a lot of material. Still, other games come into consideration as well.

My personal favorite, Lunar, offers something of a mixed bag. Gender balance is largely better (in fact, for a good portion of Lunar 2 you only have two males in your party) and one of the girls is always physically capable.

Of course, in all the Lunar titles to date, the main character’s love interest is always more magically charged while he is physically adept. In both cases as well, the male hero needs to save the female damsel in distress (though in Lunar’s defense, said damsels are at least integral to the plot, so they’re put in danger for reasons other than merely pissing the hero off).

In the Breath of Fire series, the winged girl Nina who serves as a love interest to the main character (except in the fifth one… unless you’re really into little girls) is also always magically oriented. In fact, in the first game she at least wielded a rapier, but all future incarnations of the character have been reduced to wands, seemingly cementing her status as requisite mage to Ryu’s might.

Chrono Trigger offers a thematically better example, at least. Although Marle is still a magic user, armed with a crossbow (so as to avoid too much upper-body strength) when the main character Crono dies, she pushes for his resurrection and is there when he is brought back to life. This seems to be one of the rare examples of the woman saving the man- though indirectly as he’s not in direct peril at the time of his rescue (I mean, once he’s dead, he really can’t get any deader).

A problem that reveals itself with this analysis is that these are all titles that haven’t had new entries for almost a decade. Lunar, aside from one crappy prequel, is caught in remake limbo. Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter was a deviation from the main series of mixed quality that apparently convinced Capcom that people just didn’t want it anymore. Chrono Trigger’s sequel isn’t really fit for analysis in this article as virtually every character is underdeveloped — Kidd, seemingly present as the counterpart to the main character is present for maybe a quarter to a third of the story.

Other series which have persisted have done little to push forward. Princess Peach of Super Mario fame has been captured so often that it’s become a running joke in the series, never mind that Bowser seems to enjoy capturing her for no purpose other than to have her.

Zelda of The Legend of Zelda has fared somewhat better as time has gone on. She’s at least evolved from merely being the princess who gets captured to having a more pronounced role in the later stories. But when she is involved in any capacity it’s always in a magical form… and she does eventually get captured by Ganon regardless.

All this comes down to the question of “why magical girls?” Aside from the reasons given, societal expectations of women in society seem to fuel this as well, coupled with the fact that women aren’t as well represented in the physical arena nor are they nearly as present at this point in time. Without a common range of physical talent represented, gender majority suggests that magic is the best capacity to make women useful… though archers and medics can have some representation as well.

This isn’t to say women can’t or shouldn’t be magical girls of course, but rather than it’s not all they should be or should be expected to be. Final Fantasy XIII’s Lightning looks like a move in the right direction, as she’s tough in both prowess and attitude. Of course, as the game isn’t out in the U.S. yet, so it’ll be hard to say if she effectively breaks the conventions or if she’ll fall into a few of them later in the story… still, I have high hopes for her.

Aside from the forthcoming Lightning, there are a share of other women in gaming who can fight, can be badass and do break the norms. But, as this was about the Magical Girls, their roles and why they have these roles, I’ll be examining the Warrior Princesses in detail next week.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is unlike any game in the series, for good and for bad. SH:SM revisits the ideas of the original Silent Hill, the concept of Harry Mason awaking from a car crash and trying to find his missing daughter, Cheryl. Most of the familiar characters of the first game will return, though in unfamiliar ways.

I’ve seen many people argue that the series has gone downhill since the team that handled the original three were no longer involved and to a point I’ll agree. The series composer, Akira Yamaoka has recently left Konami, and unless he is hired as a freelancer or something specifically for future Silent Hill games, this could for all intents and purposes make this the last game in the series (at least for some time) with any thread of connection to the original team.

Still, it’s a good note to end on if this is the case. I’d actually like to see the series rest for a few years and have the original team return to it, look at what the last couple games did (this one and SH: Homecoming) and take the elements that worked best and mingle them into a more adept package.

That’s my ideal situation.

It should be said on the outset that Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is not scary. It is tense, it is unsettling, but it is not scary. The game opens with a “Psychology Warning” about how the game plays you just as you play it, and the warning is well founded; Silent Hill will truly #$^& with you.

At the very beginning you find yourself in a psychiatrist’s office, where you fill out a simple questionnaire with somewhat invasive questions- answer honestly, as it’s key to the experience. Throughout the game you are brought back to this office again and again, where you are asked to interpret little games and puzzles put down before you with no real right answer. Rather, the answers you give all say something about you and define what you see and experience in the game.

It’s hard to explain how effective some of this is without giving much away. Because of how the game is defined you almost want to look desperately to see what you might’ve changed, be it the path you took or the signs and decorations.

To give an example that’s not tied to the story, in the wall of the high school I’d noticed a message about a girl who would “… for $$$ or tequila.” The meaning of the “…” is hopefully obvious. I called the number (you have a cellphone now, you see) and got a voice mail from an angry girl saying she’d changed her number because the sign was put up as a prank. My roommate played up to that point, and his call to the girl revealed she was a total slut and the sign was completely true.

This is one of the more casual examples of how things change- thinks like the personalities and attire of other characters can be drastically altered by the answers you give and the choices you make. While the play experience itself is somewhat on rails (you get a few options for routes but you have to come to the same destinations) what you see on the journey is heavily defined by who you are (or who you pretend to be, I suppose).

Not only does this produce some shocking results (my wife, my roommate and myself were all present when I was playing and several key moments caught all of us off guard) it serves as the best replay incentive in the game, to see what your answers might change.

The story itself, while not necessarily as convoluted as the original SH, is very compelling all on its own and takes the idea of Harry searching for his lost daughter in a different but compelling direction. The twist that everything is building up to is so incredibly sobering that it’s easily comparable with finding out that James had killed his wife in Silent Hill 2- and in fact, I think this may be more heart-wrenching in its own way.

The story is told almost entirely the cast of the original game, save for a couple of faces that weren’t there before. Just by knowing the classic title you can easily identify pretty much everyone upon seeing them, though you don’t need to have ever played the classic to understand who they are.

The characters are all in very different roles, and in some cases the capacity of that role is further defined by the responses you give. My encounter with Cybil had her dressed in a heavy coat, drinking coffee and showed her to by supportive my search for Cheryl. My roommate’s Cybil was smoking, had exposed cleavage and was kind of a bitch. I don’t know if the clothes are necessarily tied in with the personalities, but regardless it makes for some very interesting encounters.

It should be said while the game is very interesting, it’s also fairly short. It can be cleared in about 6-8 hours – probably a bit less if you know what you’re doing.

Unlike Silent Hill: Homecoming, which focused on improving the combat (which was probably the game’s strongest trait), Silent Hill: Shattered Memories has abandoned combat completely, going for a Clock Tower 3 approach of encouraging the player to run for their lives.

When you’re in “normal” Silent Hill, you’re fine. Creepy things happen, the atmosphere is great, but you’re in no real danger. You’re meant to look around, explore, find stuff and get background info. When things shift to the Otherworld, however, this time by icing over (a welcome change from the blood and rust, which needed a vacation) monsters will try to kill you.

This is where you find out you cannot ‘Game Over.’

The Otherworld sequences represent the least enjoyable parts of SH: SM for the most part, save for the last segment which is reminiscent of “Nowhere” in Silent Hill 1, and probably the one time where the idea of “running for your life” is used effectively.

The sequences are generally somewhat short, however. You’re primarily required to run from point A to point B, trying to navigate around the iced over paths and sometimes maze-like environments. It’s often easy to get lost, and since the map your phone comes equipped with only covers the town at large, it won’t usually help too much in these segments.

The developers had claimed in articles, and to my face at E3, that you can sneak around the monsters undetected. I’ve tried… it doesn’t really work. I’m not saying that you necessarily can’t—the mini-map on your phone even shows enemies in the immediate area. It’s just once they draw close the automatically know you’re there, even if your flashlight is off. A lot of tension that could’ve been gained by a more indepth stealth system is unfortunately lost. It doesn’t break the game, but it forces the Otherworld sequences to be frantic when that’s usually what Silent Hill as a series is not, at least not to that degree.

Another part of the problem comes in the monster design- there are a few variances but there’s only one actual type. Short, lightly humanoid, made out of funny parts. Some have gears for heads.

These monsters are meant to chase after you- they can burst through doors and climb up ledges after you. When they get to you, they sort grab onto you and you’ve got to try and shake them off so you can break free and run for your life some more.

While the designs feel a little uninspired, the problem more comes with these being the only monsters. They’re not exactly on par with the knife wielding Mumblers of the original game, and other creatures like the requisite skinless dogs could’ve easily been included (imagine being chased by some, leading them into a pit and making your getaway by climbing out where they can’t follow). My wife had suggested using the large-armed monsters from Silent Hill 3, and I’d agree that using something like that to block a key doorway would’ve forced the player to give pause on their approach.

To this point, it’s not that the idea itself is bad. I liked the tension in Clock Tower 3 of running for my life. However, that tension worked because I still had to complete other objectives and hiding usually gave you a bit of breathing room. Hiding in SH: SM might keep you safe for a minute- unless you forgot to turn your flashlight off, in which case it doesn’t even do that.

Similarly, as there’s no combat there’s no definable final boss sequence. Without this element of scripting in the game, it does feel as things come to a head somewhat abruptly. While the timing of the ending more or less makes perfect sense in the sequences that follow, the fact that there’s really no way to lose actually makes it a bit confusing when you win, since you’re not necessarily sure you have until the credits roll.

On a presentation standpoint, the game is good, though not the best in the series. The problem here is more that the original Silent Hill team was able to do incredible stuff with the graphics and the sound- while Shattered Memories neither looks nor sounds bad, Silent Hill 3, now about five years old, managed to look and sound better by comparison. It’s not that the developer Climax lacks talent- it’s merely that they have the misfortune of trying to follow an incredible act, and probably without as much budget (I could be wrong, but I’m of the impression that Konami isn’t pushing the series development as hard since they shifted it stateside).

From a replay standpoint, I got nothing for beating the game, though my roommate who was continuing off my file noticed clues that would seem to lead to the UFO ending (since there has to be a UFO ending), so there’s at least that. However, this is the first time in the series I’ve wanted to replay the game for the changes the game itself offers, not just for the ending as was the case in the past. So while the rewards are skimpy, the replayability is unusually high, especially since I know there’s some people in the town I never even met because of my choices.

I played the game on the Wii system, as it was developed with this hardware in mind and using my Wii remote as a flashlight is awesome. The controls worked well for the most part, though trying to shrug off grasping monsters was kind of a pain in the ass sometimes.

I paid about $50 bucks for the game- the PS2 and PSP versions which should be out later will almost certainly be cheaper, and if you’ve got a button against motion controls it’s probably the way to go. It might be a hard sell if you have a very specific notion of what Silent Hill is, but many essences of the series are intact, if presented in a new fashion, and this game is in its heart consummate psychological horror, and for all its flaws I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Finals Week

So no article this week. I was working on it but it wasn’t really up to snuff (I swear I have standards) so I should be back next weekend with something new for public consumption.

Lotsa love!

~ Lucas Paynter