Terrible Twos

Every so often something miraculous comes out- a game that is either an entirely original title, or one that reestablishes a long dormant franchise to a new audience, with something brilliant and enticing to it.

Games like Metal Gear Solid and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, highly reviewed across the board. Action epics like Devil May Cry, role-playing classics like Chrono Trigger and even 8-bit classics like The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros.

Games that shine as pillars among the wasteland as to why gaming is great.

Then comes the sequel.

This isn’t a problem for everything of course, but it seems like there’s been so many cases where something great comes out and what makes it great is inevitably marred in some way by the need/demand to follow it up.

I’m going to go into a few examples, but the best one is probably Devil May Cry 2. Capcom had a hit with the first DMC- they knew it and pushed hard for a sequel. A sequel handled by a different team with a different art style, and beyond a few trademark moves felt barely like the original.

The game was offensively easy, the graphics were muddy and uninteresting, and Dante himself was reduced from a largely upbeat wise-cracker to a quiet, surly jerk. It’s like he got in touch with his inner Squall Leonhart.

The team who handled this game clearly had no idea what made the first game great and weren’t given a lot of time to find out.

Embarrassingly enough, I bought the game when it came out. I heard the cries, the warnings, and I thought to myself “It couldn’t possibly be that bad.” But it was. It was bad. Sickeningly bad. It was so bad that I refused to buy DMC3 until it dropped to the $20 mark, not because I felt the game could possibly be bad (the buzz all around was decidedly positive), but because I was honestly under the impression that Capcom owed me money.

The hardest thing to talk about this game is that as a sequel and just as a game in general, there’s so much wrong with it, that it’s ridiculous. It feels like such an unrelated title that it seems like it’s only related by the grace of Dante himself. And he ain’t that graceful here.

Let’s look at something with a little more meat: Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. PoP2 provides more substance because there’s a clear process as to what went wrong with it- and while the game isn’t fundamentally bad, it isn’t fundamentally as good either.

The original PoP of the last gen. was praised across the board- the graphics were beautiful, the gameplay was brilliant and the story was meaningful. In fact, the only point of contention was the combat system- which was in no way bad, merely limited in scope.

So when the developers took the sequel to task, they tried to revamp the combat system. Okay, that’s fine. Then they decided to make the sequel all about the combat system.

Uh…

Then they decided to cater the game to the people who didn’t buy the first one by adding high concept stuff like: Blood. Swearing. Cleavage. Angry brooding ‘heroes’. Rock music. Lots and lots of fighting. A less charming actor for the Prince.

Now, it’s one thing to try and make your game more appealing to people who didn’t like the first one- but you don’t do that by making your game so completely less appealing to fans of the original in the process.

Now, I’ll grant, PoP2 is an extreme case- most designers don’t violate the trust of their original audience quite so explicitly. Most do it by accident, not by design.

In its defense also, PoP2 was still playable. It was rushed. It was buggy. Whenever the characters moved their mouths the sight was so horrific that I was certain I was about to be sucked into hell- but the game was playable and largely fun, which is more than I can say about DMC2 which technically so much more polished but technically so much worse to ‘experience.’

In fact, a fair number of flawed sequels are still perfectly playable. Take Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty for example.

I’ve probably played MGS2 more than any other game in the series, despite the fact it’s my least favorite. The gameplay itself was a logical but well structured improvement over the original game, and while I think Snake Eater in particular did a lot of stuff I favor and Guns of the Patriots was a technical marvel, I so happened to have one summer which I ran through MGS2 a couple dozen times, deviously refining my technique until no guard would ever see me and nobody would ever die- only sleep a deep, never-ending sleep.

It’s just that the story blew chunks.

The story of MGS2 starts as a sequel and then becomes a side story which is kind of a sequel and slowly becomes a little connected again to the actual plot until you realize that it’s conspiracy theory schlock with a sci-fi edge that won’t be rationalized until the next two games come out, one to explain how we got here and another to explain where we’re going.

Much of the problem drawn is that MGS2 seemed fundamentally confused as to what kind of sequel it was. After all, we have many sorts of sequels.

We have the Final Fantasy sequels which really just rely on names, creatures and a guy named Cid but are otherwise entirely unconnected in terms of history and location. We have continuity heavy sequels like what comprised a large portion of the Legacy of Kain series where everything is tied so snugly together that if you tried jumping into the game late you’d just be very, very confused. Then we have episodic sequels, where the games are connected but written so that you can hop into a later installment without being completely confused like, say, the Jak & Daxter series.

MGS2 started as the latter, picking up a few years after the original, filling in the gaps… then suddenly became a Final Fantasy game about Raiden taking on a totally new team of terrorists, trying to confuse the player in the process with startling plot twists which are completely spoiled in the process based on the fact that you had to play the Tanker chapter first so you pretty much know all the accusations of Snake sinking the tanker are total bullshit…

And then! the game turns around and goes overboard with the continuity, turning the whole Raiden story into a (not so) clever rehash of the first game’s plot and concepts with enough overdrawn conspiracy rhetoric to make Amy Hennig (Legacy of Kain’s writer) raise an eyebrow.

The short hand is that the game never knew what it was, and it showed.

Chrono Cross had a similar problem; it never knew what it was until after the final boss fight. It suddenly realized it barely qualified as a sequel on every possibly level until you beat the final boss, the Dragon God, at which point the game exclaimed “$%^&! I’ve got a legacy to uphold!”

At which point CC drew in as much BS about Schala and clone daughters and anything else that it could as if to exclaim “See! See?! I’m a sequel!”

It barely qualified.

Not all games have such a severe case of identity crisis. Sometimes a sequel tries to be something new. Sometimes it’s considered to fail miserably.

Take Zelda II: Adventure of Link way back in the NES days. It maintained enough staples of the first game to fairly qualify as a sequel, but it also was so completely different that many people dislike it not necessarily on its own merits as a game, but because it was so completely not what the first game was, or what any game in the series since has aspired to be.

It made a jarring number of changes- it replaced the overhead dungeons with side-scrolling, platforming environments. It added magic spells and experience for leveling up. Link was not the last young man on the planet.

All in all it actually came together as a perfectly good game. It’s just not what people wanted in a sequel, and what people want in a sequel is a degree of familiarity. It’s not to say designers can’t do something new or shouldn’t do something new, but it seems that when one invests in a trustworthy name they expect a trustworthy experience.

This is actually the case with a lot of games and their sequels, but it also begs to ask would a game be better if it wasn’t a sequel? Would it be worse?

Devil May Cry 2 might be the best one to look at objectively. Beyond a few physical traits, Dante barely resembles his former self. There’s no real connection to the first game’s story at all, and what’s there is easily omitted or overwritten. The combat style could be argued to ‘borrow’ from DMC1 more than anything else- the combo system is more limited and less intense.

It’s entirely possibly if the designers simply had removed Dante and changed the name it could’ve been an entirely different title and no one would’ve batted an eye. Of course, it probably also would’ve sold less without the DMC name since it would still suck.

Of course, you can’t do this with everything. MGS2 still plays heavily like an MGS game with or without Snake (which it did largely without him). Similarly, as much as Prince of Persia: Warrior Within was for all intentions a deep cutting betrayal, it still handled very much like a PoP game- in fact, if it had been a different Prince entirely it probably would’ve made more sense than claiming the protagonist to be the Sands of Time Prince.

It seems like problems such as these come about because someone higher up just doesn’t understand their target audience.

Take Super Mario Bros. 2. Which game you think of depends drastically on where you live and what you know. If you live in Japan then you’ll think of a game similar to the first one, but with new features and a much meaner streak in design.

If you live in the U.S., which is more likely given this blog is only available in English (no one’s licensed GamEntropy for international distribution, sadly) then you know a game where you plucked turnips out of the ground and sometimes went into subspace.

Many people in the U.S. dislike their version of SMB2 because it was not similar enough to the original game. It’s not because it was a bad game, but because to them it was not a Mario game. If we had gotten the original version of the game, Doki Doki Panic, the game would’ve been exactly as good as it is now and no one out here would’ve played it because it wasn’t Mario.

Obviously this sort of switch out is harder to do these days- you can’t just swap out the character sprites, change the opening text and be done with it (unless you worked on DMC2, possibly). But it says something about how an audience interprets a game and what a sequel really means.

A sequel being bad isn’t necessarily the result of a rush job- it can be, such as with PoP2, which was released roughly a year after the first one, and it showed. At the same time, MGS2 had about 3 years and was perfectly polished yet full of bad ideas.

Part of the trouble with doing a sequel is trying to make it like the original but not like the original. It does need to feel like it’s connected to the original entry (otherwise, admittedly, you have Zelda II), but it needs to be different enough to justify moving forward into a new installment so it doesn’t feel like rehash.

A symptom of this may also come from developers trying to challenge themselves while keeping the audience happy- other cases may come from developers handed a task to do instead of working on what they want.

Regardless, once development for a sequel starts responsibility does fall on them to choose the best point between the rifts of old and new to let the sequel bridge. If one side ends up longer than the other, then well, the whole bloody thing turns out uneven.

Decisions, Decisions

One of the generally weaker aspects in gaming is the approach games take to multiple endings. Here, we have a genre that can utilize elements of a ‘choose your own adventure’ book without including the crappy jump to page 68 that just kills you every time the option comes up.

The downside though is that games that tout multiple choices and multiple outcomes often don’t do it very well. I’m not just talking about the endings themselves, which usually are either predictable or only mildly varied, but about the methods to acquire these endings… which are also usually predictable or mildly varied.

In the beginning of choice, this isn’t a bad thing. The very existence of the concept itself was new, from saving a couple of characters in the original Resident Evil to rescuing Kaufman and saving Cybil in Silent Hill, these things were cool for their time… but inevitably we expect something more.

Yet even today, we still see many of the same mechanics being utilized, or see good ideas go underused.

When I was playing Saw not too long back, I knew ahead of time there were two endings, and having heard you could supposedly choose who lives and dies with regards to the major characters, I thought that might have an effect.

But I couldn’t choose who lived or died… pretty much everyone just lived, and then died shortly thereafter with no help from me. Then, when I arrived at the ending, they gave me two big freakin’ doors with the ending types written on them so I knew just what I was getting into.

This was a clear example of the most black and white type of ending choice out there. While the endings themselves were really more about the character instead of the usual “Will you be a dick?” option so often employed in games that like you to wrestle between good and evil, the mechanic itself used in Saw really just affirmed that this wasn’t going to be a game with heavy replay value.

By far one of the worst examples of this sort of black and white choice is in one of my favorite games, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Near the end of the game you confront Bastilla, who has totally turned to the dark side, and she offers you a choice between staying with the good guys and getting destroyed or teaming up with her to overthrow the lord of the Sith.

Technically, the choice itself isn’t the source of problem. This isn’t to say that it’s implemented in some brilliant fashion, but it’s done in a way that’s narratively interesting, so I forgive it.

Actually, my biggest problem with it stems from a replay I did. Noting the wide variety of “I kill you!” choices available that I never utilized, I decided to do a run through the game with a character whose sole solution to every problem was wanton slaughter.

Naturally within the first twenty minute she comes off looking evil as fuck.

So, as I expected. I play through the game, I smash relentlessly. Then I get the choice.

Bastilla offers, reasons, argues… I just keep threatening to kill her, over and over again. So, naturally, when my raging psychopathic perspective culminates and Bastilla realized I’m probably not going to won over because I only do the right thing if it happens to let me kill the thing that’s right in front of me, I’m forced on the light side path despite the fact that I’m a violent lunatic and I get a heavy shift of light side points, making me look considerably less evil and nerfing my Force Lightning somewhat.

I’m not sure what moral lesson I’m supposed to learn from this. Indiscriminate killing is okay if life forces you in the right direction? If I’m psychotic enough I’ll eventually loop around the Dark Side like it’s a race track and get back on the right path?

It’s not so much that I was annoyed by the lack of a third neutral ending as I was by the illusion of options. I’m obviously a violent brute- I’m clearly not one of the good guys just as much as I’m not one of the bad guys- why is no one trying to kill me? Why does Jolee Bindo just keep giving me firm brow beatings? Why the hell is Carth Onassi okay with me as a human being?!

So, yeah, that was pretty bad. The choice options were pretty much par for the course with Bioware, but this was a case where when I actually explored all the options, it became apparent that some of these options just didn’t make any sense.

Part of this trouble comes from having only two endings, which can summarily be boiled down to “Yay, Republic!” or “Let’s go Sith!” Not much subtlety there.

A better use of choice nearly came out of Silent Hill: Homecoming last year… until the designers kinda flubbed its potential. The Silent Hill series when compared to Star Wars… and possibly a lot of other stuff… has the advantage of not being shackled by a large-scale conflict of good and evil, or even any overall continuity since the games in the series tend to stand alone.

Silent Hill: Homecoming had dialogue options in the game that let you decide just what you wanted to ask, how you wanted to react and define what your Alex Shepherd cares about and where that might take him.

Except all those choices didn’t really matter. Only three choices actually mattered, two regarding your parents and one regarding whether or not you were going to be a dick and keep the first aid kit for yourself when your friend is dying on the table.

This undercut many of the occurrences because anything you tried to care about wasn’t wholly relevant in the long run. It didn’t matter if I placed value on finding out what happened to the town versus how my childhood sweetheart was doing, or whose well-being I prioritized. The two branching choices they went with weren’t irrelevant- but things that could’ve been weren’t given the chance to be.

Another underlying problem in this avenue of choice may be present in the active choosing thereof. In a way, it says something to see what someone does of their own accord versus when what they’re doing is pointed out to them.

In example, if you were actively presented with an option to choose to kill or not to kill someone, versus just playing a game where it happened to be something you could do, would you be as likely to do it?

Okay, so some of you would.

My point though, is that when we’re actively presented with a choice, we tend to make our decision based on the information of that choice. Ergo, that choice which we make may then not necessarily be in line with what we’d actually do if we weren’t presented with a sentence that makes us stop and think about it.

Silent Hill 2 presented a different approach to gauging the outcome and circumvented the usual methods. Rather than demanding some active decision, the game analyzed what you did based on what you examined, listened to, how you protected Maria (or didn’t) and other, lesser things.

It didn’t work perfectly, sure. In fact, the biggest problem is that it seemed to lock players into particular paths based on their play-styles- I routinely talked to people who couldn’t help but get the Maria ending (which I got exactly once and I liked) whereas I always got stuck with the Leave ending (which I disliked), which most of these people said they could never get.

On replays it made it difficult to track what ending you were gonna get before you got it. It could be argued that it punished the curious and the thorough. It didn’t allow much for error where Maria was concerned (unless you thought she was a bitch and didn’t care about her).

Still, it was different. It integrated the determination for the ending much more naturally into the game’s infrastructure than most any game before or since.

Part of what made SH2’s ending system work was the way choice was integrated into the experience. Another part of what made it work, however, was the subtlety- the fact that there were no clear right or wrong actions to take. If SHV had used such an option just with the choices given, the experience could’ve been much more interesting.

I’ll admit, I’m a little lukewarm about multiple ending approaches. I believe I’ve said in the past that they generally tend to lack a more concrete structure to their outcomes. But I do enjoy the choices made in the game, and if I’m going be given choices to make I’d like to have them play on more subtle notes, and with that, I’d like them to matter.

Finish Him!

Admittedly, this is probably not the best title for this article. I’m not a Mortal Kombat fan, and this article isn’t even really about it, nor will it mention it in any way.

But the name kinda makes sense, so oh well.

So! I like games that make me go an extra mile to kill something. I mean, maybe not all the time, but a lot of the time. I’ve also found a majority of these games happen to be licensed titles, which I’m trying to figure out still if that’s a weird coincidence or if the element of the design I so gracefully refer to as THE KILLING BLOW happens to work better in them.

THE KILLING BLOW (which I will no longer capitalize as from here on that would only be annoying) is basically when you beat an enemy within an inch of his life, but then you have to take that inch.

This of course alters course from the majority of games wherein you just beat the crap out of something until it dies. God of War is a popular example, as it marries both standard gameplay methods with THE KILL… er, the killing blow. In God of War’s case, you can kill something ’til it does or engage in a mini game to finish it off, which will be a lot faster and yield specific rewards. With standard flunkies, you can usually bypass killing them and just target one and rip him apart directly.

Wet played it a bit differently, wherein killing the enemies was purely standardized, but certain major enemies, primarily jackasses who came out with gatling guns, had to be killed by triggering a mini game after dealing a certain amount of damage.

The first time I encountered the killing blow was in the original Silent Hill, where enemies would regenerate if you didn’t stomp ‘em dead while they were on the ground. Sometimes lining up on the enemy could be a little tricky, but it added a new level of tension whereas Resident Evil by contrast, had required that you merely shoot something enough times.

Of course, I did just say that I mostly see this in licensed games so I’d look silly if I just talked about non-licensed games, now I wouldn’t I (though I’ll admit, I conjured up a few more examples than I expected)? Besides, while I’m sure there’s a few more, I think I’ve run out of examples.

The first time I recognized the killing blow for what it was happened to be in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, on the original X-Box.

The good one. The sequel wasn’t as good.

Buffy, I mean. Not the sequel to the X-Box itself. I think the 360 is a marked improvement.

Anyway… in Buffy (yes, I’m a fan of the show. No, I don’t care if you think it’s funny if you’re one of the people that never watched it) you have to slay vampires. Stunning concept, huh? But what was nice about the game is that they really made sure that you had to do it properly but that there were a number of ways in order to get it done.

Foremost, you’d be relying on the almighty stake to the heart to do the majority of your dusting work. However, you couldn’t just run around and stab the bastards left and right- you had to deplete their health in order to make them tired enough for you to get an opening. Otherwise, they would just keep blocking your pointy stick over and over again, and if you didn’t kill ‘em fast enough they would just regenerate over and over again ’til you got it right.

Or died.

But it didn’t stop there- you could use a crossbow for sniping (which admittedly I didn’t) holy water- both by lobbing holy water grenades or throwing some at small water sources to sanctify then as almighty death spots. There were also hellfire grenades, a super-soaker which could be loaded with fire and holy water, there was a blade you could use for easy decapitations later in the game, and then there were the environments.

Oh, how I loved the environments. You could throw an enemy into the train, kick them into the sunlight, punch them into a nearby fire… the options were pretty numerous. And of course there were shards of exposed wood everywhere, like a broken two-by-four or a mop handle sticking out of a trash can.

There were many ways to kill! And this is what I liked about Buffy, and probably why it sticks out in my mind foremost as an example of the killing blow. Not only could you not beat most conventional enemies into dust with mindless pummeling (except for the zombies) but it made me appreciate the show from a weird standpoint- like just how hard it is to kill a freaking vampire.

I think much of why this stood out in my mind more prominently is while Silent Hill added a dynamic to survival horror combat, Buffy for me was an extreme shift in what action combat relied on.

I’ve seen other games do it since, but none have ever done it for me quite as well as Buffy. It was a game I went back to play time and time again solely to find new and different ways to kill my enemies. Sometimes I would try and rely entirely on environmental kills, which made some normally easier foes much tougher, particularly when you’re trying to position and throw one onto a shard of wood, but another you haven’t dealt with yet interferes with your plans.

I enjoyed the challenge. If there were achievements, I’d probably have all of them.

As I said though, this concept has been used to some degree in other games as well, though maybe not quite with the same level of death.

The recent Batman: Arkham Asylum built its combat around the very same idea I just talked about in Buffy. In the case of Batman, you’re of course not staking your enemies, but in order for them to stay down you do have to knock them out. This isn’t quite as fast as staking, but the bright side is you can always do it- if Buffy’s stake was knocked out of her hand, that was time spent retrieving your weapon before finishing the job.

Of course, Batman, running on better technology and more current design methods, fights much more smoothly. But much of the challenge would be lost if the developers hadn’t employed the killing blow. Because the game operates, Batman fights, well, like Batman. Does the everyman thug really stand a chance?

So, in order to justify letting you take on ten people at once and, y’know, win, the game requires you to clock your enemies in order to make them stay down. What this utilization of the killing blow results in are fights which are made considerably harder than they would otherwise be, by making sure that if you don’t clear the space you need to knock someone out permanently you can very easily get overwhelmed by the five guys you knocked down just a minute ago.

Alternately, Evil Dead: Regeneration used the killing blow method to complement its Devil May Cry-esque gameplay, making sure that when you killed your enemies, you had to look cool doing it. Sufficiently knocking an enemy down meant you could hit a button and trigger the kill move, which usually resulted in something cool with your chainsaw or shotgun. You were safe doing these things too, so with ED:R it was less a case of it being part of the gameplay challenge, versus what we saw with Buffy and Batman, and more intended to be complimentary to the style of the game.

Of course, these are all standard examples of the killing blow in action games, and serve to represent various incarnations of what you’ll usually see. To its credit (and to some people’s dismay) Ghostbusters provided an interesting but logical (to its material) idea a few months ago.

Much in the style of the aforementioned games, Ghostbusters too required the player to deplete their enemy’s health before finishing them off. The catch with Ghostbusters however was that instead of simply dealing a finishing strike, the ghost had to be wrangled and drawn into a trap in order to take them out.

This sort of killing blow was received with somewhat mixed applause. It’s not because the idea was bad- it was right in line with the source material. Nor was it because the mechanic was broken, as it handled fine and did what it was supposed to. Rather, most people who didn’t like the game just seemed to be unhappy with the amount of work it took to finish off your average ghost. Wrangling wasn’t meant to be super easy, and some people are just of the “kill and move on” state of mind.

The killing blow is clearly becoming a more prominent device in gaming as time goes on, with many major titles as stated using it. Even games that don’t rely on it so completely still make some use of the device in part.

For example, Kingdom Heart II required that bosses be finished off with the closing strike of a combo, and would not die even at one HP before then. This was done in part so that no boss could be defeated with Mickey Mouse if the player had to fall back on him, but added a touch of challenge, especially for players used to extended the heck out of their combos.

Way back in the day, the original Legend of Zelda couldn’t be beaten without using a silver arrow to finish Ganon off; without said arrow, ol’ pig head just would not die.

The killing blow is indisputably requiring more effort on the player’s part per encounter, and is not likely to be a device loved by everyone. But for its salt, adding creative means to dealing with enemies can make individual encounters more memorable and satisfying, and can allow designers to space out enemy encounters a little where needed without sacrificing length by demanding the player focus more energy into the fights that do come up when they occur.

Eligible Bachelors

It has occurred to me recently that married men do not represent a large portion of the protagonists in gaming. The majority of these men are either single, recently widowed, or the subject of their significant others simply doesn’t come up.

This isn’t to say I’m necessarily espousing any one marital lifestyle, but let’s see if we can’t get the word out and get some ladies flocking in the right direction.

First up on the list is Jack from Bioshock. We, uh, don’t really know much about him. I mean, he’s white… he might be handsome and he can do some freaky things with his hands (definitely a pick for the fetishists out there).

He definitely does have sturdy hands- and the man is pro with a pipe wrench. He’s capable too- just put a gun in his hand and he can take down a whole airplane if he has to! I think we’ve found the next star of Die Hard!

But don’t think that Jack is all business- he’s sentimental too! He always carries a picture of himself and his parents back on the farm, so you know he got some real familial love and probably isn’t going to have any “issues” down the line.

He’s good with kids too! Or awful! He’ll take down monstrous Big Daddies in order to save the Little Sisters who are stuck with them! Or cannibalize them!

He’s flexible with kids! And that’s the kind of flexibility you’ll need in a long-term relationship. Plus one way or another, he definitely doesn’t support child labor, and that’s the kind of respectability that’s hard to find in this day and age.

So what’s his best trait? Jack’s selling point is that, ladies, you can probably get him to do just about anything with the right amount of coaxing. “Jack? Would you kindly take out the trash? Would you kindly do the dishes? Would you kindly massage my feet?”

And so much more! Remember, he can’t say no (in fact, he probably can’t say much of anything at all).

Okay, so if you’re looking for conversation, Jack’s not your guy. If you’re being harassed, it’s hard to say if he’ll rush to defend your honor… or do anything at all.

So let’s look at another contender.

This guy will speak- loudly. Not only will he defend you in a pinch, he’ll probably rip the guy’s arm, beat him to death and then stuff the appendage down the asshole’s throat just for looking at you the wrong way.

Yes, I’m speaking of Kratos from God of War!

He’s Greek. He’s edgy. He rocks the goatee.

Kratos is more than capable of doing any absurd degree of physical labor- you’ll be amazed with his furniture moving skills! And his voice, wow! Even if you’re on the other side of the supermarket, you know you can hear him “DO YOU NEED ME TO GRAB MORE MILK, WOMAN?!”

It’s worth mentioning that in a crisis, Kratos is the kind of guy whose side you want to lean against. After all, he’s not skittish in the face of blood. Or gore. Any amount of it, really. You can count on him to keep his cool in front of the stuff even if you yourself cannot.

Now, granted, Kratos is recently a widower. He may not want to get close to another woman emotionally (he’ll definitely still bang ‘em though) so trying to form a lasting relationship with him could be a challenge. He may act like a violent jerk, but odds are pretty good that he’s just a big teddy-bear beneath the surface.

In fairness of full disclaimer, I probably should mention he’s a widower because he killed his wife. Nothing to be alarmed about of course, it’s not likely to happen again unless he flies into a violent bloodthirsty rage and really! What are the odds of that?

Anyway, if it does happen he’ll at least feel really bad afterward.

Okay, so Kratos may be a little rough around the edges, and not necessarily the right guy for all the ladies. For those looking for someone a little more down to Earth, James Sunderland of Silent Hill 2 may just be the perfect man.

Now, I’ll admit that much like Kratos, James also used to be married until he also killed his wife. But let’s turn that con into a pro! Look at what a devoted husband he was! James Sunderland dived headfirst into Hell to try to find her! He would drop into random pits, stick has hand into strange, creepy places that no man would dare!

So, you’re probably thinking “Well, that’s because he was married!” Keyword: Was. After all, Silent Hill 2’s endings didn’t exactly have him reuniting with Mary and riding off into the sunset with her. There’s an eligible bachelor out there just waiting to be snatched up!

Now remember ladies, you’ve gotta dress to please. He already made a mistake once- just look at Mary! She dressed like a prude, and James knew it. Maria, his fantasy version of his wife? Totally dressed like a hooker. And that’s what you’ve gotta work in order to snag this dreamboat.

The man is resourceful- he can turn a plank with a nail sticking out of it as a weapon and not bat an eye. He’ll unclog your toilets (just make sure he washes his hands afterwards- and gets under the nails!).

Not too mention his social skills are impeccable- despite meeting a small band of psychopaths in Silent Hill he only really ends up actually killing one of them! That’s a track record I wish I had!

So there you have it- strong, soft spoken and if you’re dying of a mysterious disease he will put you out of your misery if you ask!

Or maybe just because he got sick of your complaining.

The perfect man!

Watch Your Step

One avenue of design that I feel is sorely underused in the survival horror genre is that of the dangerous environment. Much of the intention seems to be focused largely on who can kill you rather than what can kill you.

I currently say this in the midst of playing the game incarnation of the Saw movie franchise. I’d tried it at E3 and surprisingly was not disdained by what I… saw. I… saw… some potential in the game, and figured most horror buffs could get into it if they saw what I saw, you see?

Punnery aside, the game’s most interesting element of design is its focus on environmental traps, to hurt and kill the player to death. Granted, this is as much congruent with the movies more than it necessarily brilliant design, but while there is some combat it isn’t the point of the game, and I like that.

Now, I’ll grant, the game sometimes sidesteps logic in order to get this done. In particular, your character’s shoes are missing when he awakens trapped in the DEATHHOUSE that the game is set in. Mainly, this is done in order to make it so that he has to be wary of broken glass which serves to cut the ^%$# out of his feet if the player isn’t paying attention.

This is all good and fine, but you will inevitably encounter other people trapped in the place with you, you’ll kill them (self defense, I swear!) and wonder why you can’t take their shoes, since a couple dozen people later you figure someone’s gotta wear your size.

Other environmental traps abound- in particular, tripwires linked to shotguns blew my head off a few times when I didn’t pay enough attention or failed to watch wear I was running.

While there are numerous other environmental knick-knacks strewn about in the game, I like and am citing these two in particular because they’re the ones that can be bypassed if the player is attentive- one harmful, one lethal.

What this does it forces a player to pay attention- to calm down, to not panic in an environment that’s meant to incite them into panicked behavior.

The last time something like this really stood out for me was in Silent Hill 3 a few years back. It was one thing that the game did that no other in the series had done before or done since, and that was the fact that environmental pitfalls were in all actuality just that- environmental pitfalls.

Normally in this series- hell, in most of these games- if you run up against the edge of a crevice/chasm/dimensional vortex to hell/secret passage to the underground railroad, you just hit hard air and you’re fine.

Silent Hill 3 played it differently and made it so that if you blindly ran forward in a dark environment, you fell to your death. Intentionally walking let you push against the ledges and be okay, but given the fact that the player will be more prone to run…

I knew about this feature going in to the game, but knowing it and experiencing it wasn’t quite the same thing. I was in the Otherworld Mall- first area of the game, and I stepped into an open area (suitably dark as hell, of course) and hit sensory overload by an enemy (admittedly, my least favorite)- these rather obnoxious insect things that continuously flip around as they fly towards you while making this really loud, grating buzzing noise (the noise being why I dislike them).

Plus there were dogs.

Not wanting to fight the damn things, either from lack of ammo or lack of incentive- I chose to beeline it. I ran blithely towards my exit, dodging a dog along the way- and promptly fell to my death.

It genuinely caught me off guard. In a genre where I’m normally so protected from the environment (and does that make sense in survival horror? To protect the player from something?) I had just fallen off a cliff, Wile E. Coyote style.

Along with a few other combat design touches which really fleshed out the experience for me, I was rather bummed that Silent Hill 4: The Room forsook one of these aspects of design in its entirety, and that the series to date has not picked it up again (we’ll see what SH: Shattered Memories does).

My initial assumption was that maybe felt that letting people fall off in dark environments where they might not see the ledge- which is what happened to me- is somehow unfair. I say this kind of play should be encouraged.

Part of survival horror is decision making- deciding to run or stay and fight, deciding if you have the resources. Part of this decision should rest on whether or not it will be any safer to run or stay and fight. If running is always the safest solution, if we only need to get to that next door and not worry about anything else, then it’s not as much of a choice, is it?

There are other ways environments can be used against the player- puzzle punishment, for example. Silent Hill’s original installment featured a cabinet with a sword stuck through it and a broken chain hanging from it. If Harry blindly grabbed the sword without locking the chain links together with the Ring of Contract (now available in a cereal box near you!) then a tentacle creature would reach out and grab him upon trying to leave the room and do to him what tentacle creatures normally do to Japanese school girls in all those fun cartoons I’ve heard about.

Alternately, a middling-to-decent survival horror game called Obscure (if you’ve never heard of it, blame the title) put you in control of five disposable teens trying to get out of their evil high school. I say disposable because if one died, they stayed dead.

In one particular point, there was an elevator puzzle in the auditorium which could be solved but not “completed.” Completing the puzzle meant securing the elevator- failing to do so meant it would fall while the teens were climbing down, killing one of them in the process.

Admittedly, when this happened I totally cheated and reloaded, since I happened to have saved right before going down. Still, credit for trying- these all hold to the idea of encouraging the player to be careful and observant before proceeding.

Alternately, we have the “throw a big rock at them” from the original Resident Evil and its flashier remake. While deep in the caves under Arklay Mansion, you must inspire a large rock to roll forward and crush you flat. Or you could hide from it. Admittedly, tank controls, not your friend- but having a large stone that can kill you in one go was a change of pace from the hunters and such that could kill you in one (or two or three) goes- and it was the one thing you couldn’t just shoot to get rid of it (sure, you could try).

The point being that death traps and hazards can provide a nice change of pace from the usual horror stuff. In the case of Saw, the game sort of relies on it- there are enemy encounters with other people, as mentioned, but the risks are far less visceral than getting smashed or shredded or all the other horrible things that the asylum you’re trapped in can do to you.

In the other games I mentioned, and more still, they throw all sorts of horrors at the players, Lovecraftian or otherwise, and call that scary. And hey, it works, but sooner or later seeing a zombie just isn’t going to freak you out as much anymore, unless you’re out of bullets- in this case, though, it’s not so much the zombie that scares you as what the zombie represents.

So why not mix the two? Give the player enemies that they should be scared to fight in an environment they should be scared to navigate, not just because of what’s lurking around the corner but because of what might happen to them if they go there.

Anti-Climax!

Sometimes a gaming experience is running along fine only to suddenly and unexpectedly fizzle near the end. It’s not just that what you expect to happen doesn’t, but nothing really happens at all.

Such was my experience with Wet recently, an acrobatic shoot’em-up hack’n’slash experience which was commonly reviewed as “flawed but fun” in some capacity- a review I largely agree with.

What hurts the game more than the graphical imperfections, in my opinion, is the complete void of a final boss fight, or any real boss fights in general. What’s weird is that there are a few characters, henchmen to the bad guy, that clearly fit the boss-fight bill, but are dispatched through interactive cutscenes rather than any fight at all.

Maybe Wet’s lack of such fights is due to a lack of time or budget to truly finish the game as they intended. Maybe the fights weren’t coming out as they intended or maybe they couldn’t build compelling fights in the game’s infrastructure for some reason.

Regardless, design decision like this invariably hurt the overall game, even if they make it better than if they’d implemented the alternatives. It’s not to say the designers were necessarily wrong to omit a more interactive climax, but it could be a case where there was no truly “right” decision to make.

This isn’t to say that there necessarily needs to be a boss fight specifically to carry the climax- but something needs to happen that the player is enough part of to reduce it from being a cutscene-fest, even if it’s an interactive one.

One good example, I feel, is Soul Reaver 2 of the Legacy of Kain series. The game didn’t have a true final boss (or any real bosses at all, insofar as I can recollect), but it ended with a sequence and a series of encounters that were so integral to the events at hand that the game ended on a high note- even if that note turned out to be a cliffhanger.

Alternatively, Metal Gear Solid 4 also lacked a final boss fight- if you look back at how the game in the series are structured, this is functionally true. In the last chapter you fight the last member of the game’s FOXHOUND-type unit, and while this foe has a few unique qualities the main story doesn’t hinge on them.

Normally, this would be followed up by Snake singlehandedly taking up some sort of giant robot monstrosity- only this never happens in any form. Instead, some climactically exciting gameplay sequences follow, cutscenes up the wazoo, and finally the token one-on-one fight that normally would happen after the final boss fight occurs.

The game isn’t bad for it; some might argue the game is bad for other things, but the Snake vs. Ocelot bit at the end is never really evoked as one of them. While there is technically a void of a final boss fight, the game doesn’t necessarily hurt for it.

The absence of a climax can mean other things as well, like whole pieces of gameplay. Lord of the Rings: The Third Age is a narrative laundry list of things not to do with the story in an RPG- not because the idea was bad, but because it was really badly executed.

Case in point, and I’ve cited this in the past so bear with me, there is no final dungeon. There’s no sense of approaching finality near the end of the game, no chance for the player to get psyched up. Sauron, the final boss simply happens much as how rain or car accidents sometimes happen.

This would be a case where the developers confused outcome with climax. Climax isn’t just the big fight but the things leading up to the encounter as well. In the case of Wet the character who was marked as the bad guy didn’t show any indication of fighting talent on par with the heroine- to a point this was refreshing because it existed outside of the norm for games, but I was worried with the encroaching finale, indicated to me solely through the magic of checking the Achievements, that I might not get a final boss that was up to snuff with what I was looking to expect.

I was right to be concerned as it turned out. A flunky, however cool, is still just a flunky. And I didn’t even get to fight her head-on; I just had to press a few buttons at the right time.

Anti-climax is something that can be built up through the story just as much as a failure to execute. I think Final Fantasy X’s story suffered from this due to its rather murky antagonists- not morally murky, but structurally murky, to be clear.

Part of the problem is that the game presented Seymour Guado as part of the series line-up of token of creepy pretty boys that tweenage girls are meant to enjoy looking at and feel so bad for wanting to date. Except, as a villain he never quite has any teeth- the worse thing he tries to do is force heroine Yuna to take his hand in holy matrimony, and even that felt more like a plot device so main character Tidus could save her to advance his own token love story with the white mage of the party.

Seymour seems like he’s going to somehow take the reigns of Sin, the ever-destroying hate machine of the world, but never really follows through. He just sorta shows up for no reason, fights and dies.

It was the same problem with Final Fantasy VIII years before-hand. Not only did Squall’s antagonist Seifer disappear after the third disc, the supposed bad guy, Edea, actually turns out to be just possessed by a different bad guy whom you don’t really encounter until the end, has almost no scene presence because of it and has a silly name to boot.

Final Fantasy IX (since I seem to be operating around these games right now anyway) provided an alternative where the climax was undercut for no real reason. Kuja, who should’ve been the final boss and even had the requisite pre-final-boss boss fight is suddenly supplanted by some douchebag named Necron who pretty much shows up just to cast Southern Cross on your party again and again like a dirty bitch instead of having a reason for existing.

This was a case where the climax, which was doing fine, was senselessly undercut by a pointless follow-up encounter right out of left field. As a result, the impact of the climax diminished a little bit.

An overall lack of development can be equally harmful to the presence of a boss fight. In the case of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, the Dark Samus character felt like an after-thought, showing up largely without provocation to provide one more boss fight during the escape sequence.

It was worse in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, where the character had been mysteriously catapulted to final boss status without any real sense of reason. Assorted logs in the game identify Dark Samus as being some sort of effective leader, but never once is that seen in the game. The character never speaks to you and in the end comes off as the same idiot monster she was in the last game- only now she’s the final boss for some reason instead of some tacked-on bonus boss.

The inherent problem with this failure to design is that it drags down the whole experience. Part of the thrill of the finale is that it should be, ideally, what you’ve been waiting to get to; what you’ve wanted to do for a long time.

Ergo, if the game doesn’t make you want it enough to derive any satisfaction, or similarly fails to even attempt to give that satisfaction in any way at all, the whole experience kinda crumbles. It doesn’t make the game bad, but rather it makes it not as good.

Part of what has to be remembered is that the ending may be the last thing the player does with the game- it’s the defining stroke, the thing that made it worth playing. A friend of mine never got to finish Breath of Fire III for years- he always hit some technical hitch near the end and never quite made it to the final dungeon. I lent him my copy of the game and he enjoyed it until that point- the endgame material was such a letdown that he wished he’d never finished the game as it now just left a sour taste in his mouth.

This all invariably ties into a game’s memorability as well as what people say about it. If I have to tell people that Wet is fun but there’s no real end boss fight, they lose motivation to play it or decide to get it later when’s cheaper/used, which ultimately hurts the developers.

While the game of course needs to be playable and engaging enough to get there, the climax of a game should be one of the most important parts to any developers. After all, it’ll become the most important part to a gamer because, as I said, it’s likely the last part they’ll ever see.

The Saving Grace

Every once in a while, there comes along a game: a game that is great, or good, or playable, solely because of one aspect of that game. If that aspect was not there, the game might suck in its entirety.

This year, that game is Scribblenauts.

As a game, Scribblenauts would be incredibly frustrating to play. The controls suck. Moving your character is entirely dependant on the stylus, with no option to turn it off, but you also have to use the stylus to interact with the game’s world.

What this means is that often- every time, in fact- when you go to interact with something, and miss, your character will advance forward, often into foiling your plan or into a trap or something equally stupid. The fact that he auto-jumps when presented with minor barriers only worsens this problem.

In fact, having to actually play as a character and accomplish a goal nearly ruins Scribblenauts, as you’ll largely curse your avatar for his boundless stupidity.

So why is the game totally awesome?

You can summon almost anything you can write to deal with your problems. Solving puzzles isn’t just a matter of hitting switches or moving from point A to point B, it’s about dealing with all that stands before you with such awesome weapons as: C-4, a tank, God, Quantum Singularity, Cthulu, the Jabberwock, Rail Guns, Excalibur, wings (you can fly!), a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The list goes on.

The amount of stuff you can conjure forth is vast, bound only by the limits of the programmers, copyright laws and the ratings (I get why I can’t call forth kinky sex toys, but I can’t even bring out a bottle of wine?).

Yet if it weren’t for this feature, which in this case if the selling point, the game would suck. I would hate playing it, I would think it’s overrated or overhyped crap. If Scribblenauts was just a game without a gimmick, simply applying a standard vehicle to its design for puzzle navigation, it would blow.

Now, this point shouldn’t be misconstrued as saying a game would blow under all certain terms without its gimmick- Viewtiful Joe would have still been a competent game even without the movie elements of slow-down/speed-up/zoom in- it just would’ve been really frustrating.

Going on, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like this, though I’d definitely say it’s one of the more successful attempts.

For example, years ago I remember playing Xenosaga II. I’d been looking forward to its ever since I played the flawed but fundamentally engaging original. A friend of mine who’d played the Japanese version warned me it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, but I figured I could see past its surface flaws and still enjoy the story or gameplay even if the graphical overhaul made it dull to look upon.

Boy was I wrong.

Xenosaga II was a train wreck on virtually every front. Aside from the revamped/dull graphics, the story was overrun by a lack of direction, and repetitious, nonsensical plot points. Half the voices I loved from the first game were gone, and it overall had very little gameplay (magically less than the original!).

And oh, the gameplay. If you thought the game could at least be fun once you actually were playing it (this is assuming you’ve come to cope with hour-long cutscenes) you were wrong.

See, aside from creating a series of dull and lifeless dungeons (one of which you have to go through twice with a skin change!) the developers butchered the battle system.

While Xenosaga I’s battle system was fast and smooth, two’s was slow and drawn out.

It was also, in its weird way, the one saving grace of the game.

You see, with Xenosaga II, the battles took ten seconds to load (every time) and featured a drawn out system that essentially made every fight take at least 3-5 minutes, no matter what level you were.

To be clear on this, at the end of the game I returned to one of the beginning areas to look for missed treasures. The fights were still taking forever to clear, despite the enemies not posing any real threat to me. I gave up my search in frustration.

However, the one things- probably the only thing- that made this game fun was the boss fights. Xenosaga II’s battle system sucked for regular battles but was fun as hell for boss fights.

To explain this (based in part off what I remember) the battles of Xenosaga II were oriented around a mechanic of the characters all having different types of attack to hit enemies in different places and do more damage. Since all the enemies were durable if you didn’t line up these attacks correctly, it made regular fights were you have to kill six of what should be a weak enemy incredible frustrating and tedious.

However, put this same battle against a boss and suddenly you’ve got a long, satisfying fight where you’re building up your energy and waiting for just the right moment to strike and rip him a new one.

This didn’t save the game, of course. But the boss fights were fun.

Of course, Scribblenauts and Xenosaga II both provide gameplay examples. Story can also represent a saving grace of sorts, though it’s often much harder to pull of (if a game is outright unplayable, there may be no story good enough to save it).

A few examples come to mind.

One for me is Dreamfall: The Longest Journey which I’ve mentioned a few times in past articles. This is actually a game I personally love, though I acknowledge if I was just to play it for the game it would be largely mediocre. It’s not to say the play experience is bad- it’s just that it’s not the point-and-click adventure that the original was, and it’s not dynamic enough to fully be the action game it moved towards being. It’s somewhere in the middle, and while it does it well it doesn’t do it very well.

But- BAM!- add in the story and my reason to play is complete and fully embraced.

Another might be Vagrant Story, which people praise up and down for the story… but I found frustrating and personally unplayable. I hated the menus, the environments and I wasn’t thrilled with the battle system either. The game had a strong opening, but I just didn’t see enough of the story to care- I finally threw down the game in frustration, forever in the dark as to why people think it’s so keen.

My closing example, however, is PS2’s Rule of Rose which came out back in 2006. My girlfriend had shown interest in the game from a story and music standpoint, and urged me to get it and play through it for her.

I say ‘for her’ because it was technically horror and she doesn’t like playing too many horror games hands-on. Also say ‘for her’ because the game was incredible poorly built and bordered on unplayable as it was.

Don’t misunderstand of course- the story and music, the reasons she wanted me to get the game, were interesting and unusual and held up well. The story is unusual for most mediums in general, games included, and is one of the best part.

But everything else…

The game’s chapters relied exclusively on two environments, and this was almost entirely by changing which doors were locked or unlocked per chapter. The objectives were obtuse, and your character moved slow and fought like a little girl (which, technically she was supposed to be, but it still feels like more good could’ve been done with it).

It’s not really a game I can recommend to anyone looking for a good game. I don’t specifically regret playing it (unlike Xenosaga II, which I’m routinely trying to forget), but my love for it isn’t especially strong either. If it weren’t for the story and unusual music, this game would rank much lower on my list- these two aspects saved it from being relegated to complete mediocrity.

Of course, the problem with story (and I think I’ve mentioned this in the past) is that if a game is bad enough it can’t save it, while a good enough game can forgive a bad story.

Still, story and gameplay elements alike can both serve as key ingredients to save a game that would otherwise kinda blow- this really is the case with Scribblenauts (which would just be infuriating as a standard platformer without its gimmick/selling point).

This idea of design can help catapult a mediocre game into the annals of greatness or memorability- such is the value of a game’s one saving grace.

Click Here to Download

Digital distribution is something I’ve had some heavily varying opinions on. I’ve never been a serious PC gamer (what I play is few and far between, and only if it seriously interests me and utterly lacks a console release, such as American McGee’s Alice).

In the last few years, I’ve had to reconsider my stance from “something I don’t care to touch” to “something I might have to consider.” I don’t especially like digital distribution, per se, but it has merits and flaws that must be considered.

Foremost, I should say that speaking specifically as a gamer, I’m not a big fan of digital distribution. For one thing, I’m something of a hardened collector. I own over six hundred games at this time. I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars accruing my collection, at times merely to ensure that a particular game is of optimal quality.

Some people buy old cars. Some, old books. I collect video games.

As such, however, couple this meticulous nature of mine with my eschewing of downloadable content on the PC medium, and you might understand my reticence to receive any form of downloadable content on the console side. As I’m presently involved in an indie project with some friends of mine, this is a very weird stand to take.

To clarify, however, as a gamer I like to own what I pay for. Not just to digitally have it, but to physically have it. To look at it on my shelf. To think “if nuclear hell rains from above, at least I have my video games.” I’ll need to buy a generator to properly realize this.

And maybe food. I’ll see if it fits in the budget.

A little extreme, admittedly, but this really is how I look at something. It’s the same reason why I’ve been reluctant to dive into MMOs- I want to know my character will be safe even if the game is no longer supported by the publisher. It’s part of why I preferred Phantasy Star Online over its Universe counterpart- despite the fact that I have (and I begrudgingly admit this) spent far more overall time on the sequel.

Then the X-Box comes along and… largely fails to change this for me. I mean, they had downloadable content and it was kinda neat, but I wasn’t interested in playing online and I’d have to pay at the time for Live access just to download the otherwise free stuff.

So I thought I was safe, at least last generation. And I was. Then 360 came out and allowed access to their stuff without having the pay to play online. This more or less was the precursor to a complete change on how the internet side of console gaming is handled. Now Sony does it. Nintendo does it (albeit poorly).

We are officially in a digital download age. It can only progress from here.

So is this good or is it bad?

Well, for me, it’s bad. And good.

As a gamer, I’m losing out on product. I’m not getting a physical copy- circumstances may contribute to my being unable to pay what I’ve paid for. I’m on (admittedly) my second X-Box 360- certain things I’ve downloaded aren’t available if I’m not connected online- this means games, Rock Band music, and so forth. Nintendo (supposedly) doesn’t link purchases to accounts- meaning if I change Wii systems in the future, I’ll have to (as I understand it) buy anything I bought before all over again.

Luckily I only bought Mega Man 9. And my PS3 sits largely unused, so I think I’m safe.

The other problem, predictably enough, is that I don’t get to actually put something on my shelf. I try to accrue a collection of good games- weird as it sounds, it’s kind of a show-off thing. I actually had co-workers ooh and aah at my collection- it was intensely satisfying.

How can I do that if things go digital? It seems like a silly thing to complain about, but part of my acknowledgement to the quality of a product was to seek it out, pay good money for it, and put it on my shelf. Games like Lunar 2 (Sega CD version), Phantasy Star IV and Panzer Dragoon Saga- I wasn’t able to buy them when they were new, but I have them and the command a degree of respect in their having.

The fact is, I’ve had a number of XBL Arcade games I would physically buy- the Prince of Persia remake, the Penny Arcade Adventures (preferably a complete collection), Shadow Complex- but I can’t, much as I’d like to. I’m not saying gamers of today should necessarily be denied a chance to buy the gold of yesterday- certainly Castlevania: Symphony of the Night shouldn’t be kept in the restricted section- but will value in obscurity still be measured if everything goes this way?

Admittedly, this is a long way off. Digital distribution is growing as a medium, but it’s not going to overtake physical releases yet. Microsoft has released some early X-Box 360 titles, but they’re not shifting to the disc-less format yet.

For one thing, there’s data-space to consider. Given how much space games currently use, we’d need to be measuring our standard hard drives in terabytes before we even considered going all digital. PlayStation 3 game installations are bad enough- imagine having to download an entire Bluray’s worth of data.

Still, things are steadily moving in that direction. The PSP Go system was a big catalyst for this particular article.

The PSP Go, for those not in the know (rhymes!), has forsaken physical game mediums for digital copies. Now, it should be granted that the standard PSP’s UMD format for games is downright shitty. I’ve seen how people handle these things- it’s terrible. The cases get beaten to all hell- and even if the case is fine, it still comes apart at the seams. This is neverminding loading times of course, not too mention circular scratches occurring on the discs while in the system (a less common problem, admittedly).

In fact, moving away from CDs/DVDs one day is an ideal outcome for gaming. It’s a terrible format from a longevity standpoint- I try to handle my games as carefully as possible, but even a minor accident can cause irreparable damage. This is a bright side to digital distribution- though Blurays represent a positive alternative, as they’re at least scratch resistant despite other problems.

Anyway, back to the PSP Go. Doing away with UMDs, not necessarily a bad idea. I’d actually buy the system under certain considerations.

The problem, of course, is that because UMDs are phased out Sony is going with a purely digital form of distribution. I haven’t heard anything about major games no longer receiving physical release, so I don’t think we’re in any danger of that. In fact, I think the PSP Go is as much an experiment as anything else on Sony’s part.

Personally, if I could somehow download my UMDs onto the PSP Go, it would be ideal for me. I could legitimately buy the product, download it onto my system and let the physical copy rest safe at home. I could delete the game data if it lay unused for some time, and reinstall it without digital pipeline concerns.

I’m living in a dream-world, of course. People will rent games, download them, and Sony won’t see a cent. That’s why my little world of fairies and prancing unicorns will never happen. And that’s the lighter side of piracy.

So, as such, I’m not happy with the PSP Go. My current PSP is dated, and I’ll probably replace it soon. But not with this. I like owning things, and I’m not going to buy a game twice in order to play it on the more up-to-date system and maintain my vain satisfaction of seeing it on my shelf like a porcelain doll.

This does bring me to consider some brighter sides to digital distribution, however. For one thing, there’s more money to be made for the developers and the console makers (in this case, Sony). Publishers are cut out.

Depending on the business standpoint, this can be kind of dirty. But speaking as someone who’s forayed into development in the past, this can also be a relief. Not having to wonder if you’ll have to adjust your product to someone’s beck and call, to not have to sacrifice your piece of the pie in order to release something- there’s some serious upsides to cutting out a publisher.

Not to say I’d want to do this outright, necessarily- I want to see my own games on the shelves one day, more than on some online listing- but it does have its pros.

A digital game can also potentially retain its value for much longer. Without burdening some salesperson’s shelf, there’s no push to make a game that’s not selling move faster. Word of mouth can travel just as well, and finding the game is guaranteed to be a lot easier since there’s no risk of digital copies being sent back.

The third bright side- and this is sort of important- a game that’s kept vibrant via the web can’t ever completely fade away. Sure, the price might lower after a certain point- but imagine if cult classics like Snatcher or Einhander had a second chance a few years later, long after they ceased publication- the impact of these games and their possibility for a sequel might’ve changed considerably from what we saw.

On the downside, if support for a digital-only game ever goes away (i.e., they decide to take it off the server) there’s really no getting it back. It’s gone, possibly for good. With the game data locked to the account of the buyer, there’s a chance someone might hack the code, but even then there’s no guarantee that a complete build will ever make it out there. Never mind the need for emulators and the like.

Granted, data can deteriorate on cartridges and CDs too- but we haven’t hit the point where that seems to be happening yet. The digital culture may need to preserve itself one day, just as classic stories and movies are preserved too- we may lose the Zero the Kamikaze Squirrels and the Wally Bear and the No Gangs, but what happens if we lose even The Legend of Zeldas and the Shining Forces?

This presents us with the real double-edged sword of digital distribution- total potential for preservation and for loss. With so many classics going up for download, it’s possible these Iliads of their time (perhaps too lofty of an analogy?) will make it through the years to come.

But what of the modern classics? Will their enjoy the same treatment? Will No More Heroes and Wet one day be available to download for 800 whatever points on some company’s online server? What if these companies one day fade and new ones rise- will the old trademarks perpetuate?

…honestly, these are probably all really weird questions. Some people are likely to look at this and think I’m whacked, assuming they’ve read this far.

But, at the same time, it’s important to me. Quality work should be respected, studied, embraced and remembered. Digital distribution may be the way to this- it may also help new development find a legitimate place where the current infrastructure doesn’t allow. There’s a lot to consider.

Alternately, people might just keep downloading Tetris.

Tales From the Workplace #5

Things Aren’t What They Seem

Customer comes in and asks for a Gameboy Advance SP system. We have exactly one, standing all alone in plain sight, in a plastic case with a yellow sticker, clearly reading “Used! $59.00”

So, I pull it down, leaving the shelf where it rested barren and forlorn.

“This is new?”

A common assumption when there is no legitimate packaging around an item. Also a common assumption with open games where the customer can peruse the manual at their leisure or examine the disc.

“No, this is used. They don’t make these new anymore.”

“I want more.”

“This is all we have.”

“You have any more?”

“This is it.”

“Only this?”

“Only this.”

You’d Think the Name Would Say It All

Father comes in with Son and asks about the Grand Theft Auto Trilogy box. As I show Father said game set, I comment thusly:

“You do know these games are all very violent, right?”

“Violent, really?” he asks in surprise.

“There’s also a lot of sexual content and a bit of swearing too.”

“Violence, sex and swearing?!” he seems genuinely surprised. Doesn’t a game’s title say anything to anyone?

He turns to the Son and says, “Did you know these games were like this?”

The Son shrugs and just replies, “So?”

Bonus points time! I also add:

“Yeah, basically you’re playing as a criminal in these.”

“You’re playing as a criminal?!” the shocked father exclaims, and to my own surprise, “I am not buying this for you.” And thus he walks off, a wiser man than when he came in.

I Guess I Look Like I Was Born Yesterday

Guy comes in with a backpack, says he has games to sell. Expecting the motherload. Getting ready.

He pulls out Zelda: Phantom Hourglass.

Okay, a little let down. Also, it’s sealed.

“Uh, sir, I can’t buy this from you. If you want to sell it, bring it back another day when it’s been opened and used.”

This is more or less my common response to someone bringing in new merchandise. It’s not that they really have to use it- we have no way of verifying this- but by stating this I’m hoping the person will get the idea that we need to believe they used it.

It’s basically a legal thing.

“Okay, so what if I just open it now?”

This would be the common response. Most people seem to think “new” and “sealed” are the same thing. Technically, the latter informed the former- but something that was just unsealed is still, in fact, new.

I tell the man something to this effect, mentioning the legal implications of buying new merchandise and he says “okay”, puts it back and pulls out a copy of the New Super Mario Bros. And by “New” I mean the title, not the condition- this one’s actually used.

So, fine. I check it out, it works, the game is bought, life goes on.

Five minutes later…

Guy comes back into the store. I see him standing around, waiting for help.

“Can I help you?”

Guy walks over, holding- you guessed it- Zelda: Phantom Hourglass.

“Hey, I found another copy I had. I want to sell it.”

Another copy? Right. Sure.

“Sir, I can’t buy that from you. I just saw you in here five minutes ago with a sealed copy- I have no guarantee that’s not the same game.”

I may be paraphrasing, but that’s what I told him. Most people argue a little. He argues. Most people will at least give up when they know they’re not getting around their lie.

“I want to talk to your manager.”

Some people do that instead.

There’s not much more to the story- the actual manager was on break, and not available, so I just had a co-worker handle it and tell the guy the same thing I told him. Mostly, I find it impressive the lies people will tell to try and make a few quick dollars.

And I don’t even mean a lot of dollars. Like, $12.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

It’s been a while since I’ve written a review. It may yet be again. I mainly stopped since I realized I was successfully liking games I bought and if I just talk about how awesome everything is then it either makes me a lousy reviewer or a poor entertainer.

Well, I want a break, so screw all that. Today I’m going to talk about Batman: Arkham Asylum and how $%&^ing awesome I think it is. I will likely proceed to reference this game in assorted articles sporadically for the next month or two, and any handful of irregular readers that stumble into this site will think I either only ever played three games in my life or that I have some sort of bat-fetish.

Which I don’t. Honest.

So, in case you haven’t guessed, I think Batman: Arkham Asylum is $%&^ing awesome. It’s probably the best super-hero game ever made. Why is this?

Well, once upon a time, super hero games sucked. Or so I heard. I hadn’t actually played any of them back when they were 2D, since they tended to suck, apparently. The X-Men arcade game was pretty cool, but no one will put that on a home console, so it hardly counts.

Then technology kicked in and Neversoft took a break from skateboarding games to make a Spider-man game which was fun (and I actually still think their original is on the list of some of the best superhero games out there).

Building from that, the more socially accepted superhero games today seem to fall into two categories: the free roaming, Grand Theft Auto inspired affair that the fourth 3D Spider-man game, sinisterly entitled Spider-man 2, helped launch. Alternately, we seem to have beat-em up RPGs of some sort, started by X-Men Legends and branching out to lesser effect to other games that weren’t X-Men Legends.

And now we have BAA, and it’s none of those things. Yes, BAA. Like a sheep. This is my abbreviation hereon, all others on the internet will follow it in time. Like a sheep.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is a 3D adventure with a hint of free-roaming but in a confined and therefore actually detailed environment space. You level up. You get new gear. You kick the crap out of a whole lot of henchmen.

I spent about a hundred dollars to do this. I don’t know if I recommend you do it as well, but the special edition sounded cool at the time. The batarang it comes with was the big thing, and it is indeed the big thing… physically. Unfortunately, it looks cheap and plasticky  up close and you can’t throw it since it’s mounted for display. There’s a second disc with some making-off stuff and a nifty leather booklet about the criminals.

Actually, I think the booklet’s the best part. I don’t know if the regular edition’s is the same, but the booklet I had looked like it was constructed by the Joker, a pair of scissors, a stack of magazines and a magic marker, all eager to teach me how I to play the game.

Other than that, regular’s probably fine.

The game sets you in the Arkham Asylum so commonly seen in the Batman series. If you don’t know what this place is, like my present employer, you might just think the title sounds really stupid and think the game will never sell (not that this should be taken against my boss- he’s just not a Batman fan).

The inmates have broken out. You, as Batman (although Batman as you would be much funnier) must sneak about, do detective work and beat up some bad guys in order to set things straight.

So it’s like all the other Batman games. Except better, ‘cause all those things I crossed out? It turns out they’re actually there because the developers knew who the hell Batman is.

Is the game too hard? No, not especially. On normal, it’s the right kind of hard. Regular thugs can beat you up, but only if you don’t pay attention and fight smart. There’s only one actual attack button, the counterattack button is your best friend and the other button is useful against guys with knives but if you’re like me you’ll just ignore it and jump over them and punch them in the back.

One thing I particularly like about this (and I’ll be talking about this more in a week or two) is that the game uses one of my favorite little conventions for dealing with enemies: the killing blow.

Not literal killing, since Batman doesn’t do that, but killing in the sense that in order to knock a thug out, you actually have to knock a thug out. Seems easy enough with one guy, but when you’re dealing with four or six guys surrounding you, it’s time to stop and ask yourself if it’s worth exposing yourself long enough to club a guy in the skull or should you let him wake up, keep dancing around and biding your time.

And I like that.

You know what else I like? The no-falling damage/death principle. BAA lets you save yourself from bottomless pits if you make a mistake (or like to experiment… non-sexually!). BAA makes sure Batman will catch himself just near the end of a long drop. If you’re looking to enact funny deaths by swan-diving from high points like I made Lara Croft do a couple of times last week… look further. You won’t find them here.

The boss fights are good, if not brilliant. Since half the game’s plot revolves around a new variation of muscle-man Bane’s Venom steroid, you can imagine a few of the bigger enemies you fight are somehow sooped up on the stuff (and I don’t think there’s a correct spelling for that term ‘sooped’; spellcheck keeps shooting me down).

But you know what really helps the game? It’s fun to look for stuff.

Firstly, the Riddler has scattered oodles of secrets all over Arkham Asylum, no doubt the combination of boredom and foresight regarding the events at hand. These include Riddler icons, audio files and environments keypoints that must be identified. One of the cooler types involves matching up segments of a question mark from completely different angles and locations- it’s a little tricky on the camera, but the use of perspective is downright clever.

But the best part? You can find maps for all this stuff. And since all these varying secrets all fall under the Riddler’s banner, all the odds and ends hidden in the corners of Arkham Island are fair game. This means, unlike Grand Theft Auto, Lost Odyssey and any other game I bitched about back when I talked about games with a hundred collectables, you can actually find everything scattered around in this game.

It’s hard to imagine how happy this made me. I naturally proceeded to collect everything, getting most of it before the final boss and the last few bits after the final boss. The game made me want to make the extra effort.

The music is good. It’s Batman-ny. The graphics are good too, though the Unreal engine which the game is built on doesn’t seem to allow much for hair. I will say Batman’s character model seems a tad closed in or stubby (the arms felt a bit short), but this isn’t really a problem since you mostly see him from the back and his cape looks totally awesome doing anything at all.

The writing and acting also wins points. The story feels a little like it was set up for a game (which, okay, I can run with) but the good stuff comes from Paul Dini of the animated series of the 90s, and he brought a few of the best actors with to voice Batman, Joker, and Harley Quinn. Except with more swearing and innuendo and all the stuff that would’ve rounded off the 90s series if it wasn’t for kids.

I mostly wanted to mention that in the off-chance that someone didn’t know. It made me happy, it made my wife happy and when my wife’s happy I get something more than a crust of bread and a glass of water for dinner.

I could list out a million little things I like about this game (aside from the better eating it provided!): Batman’s suit takes damage as the story progresses. Gliding from a high point halfway across the island and getting an Achievement for it. The Scarecrow sequences, which make me pine for Eternal Darkness (this can’t be happening?).

In case I’m geeking over this a bit- I’m geeking over this a bit. I’ll try to find something that sucks to write about one day, promise. Then I can bitch and scathing comments are fun.

I will close by saying play this game if you like good stuff and have nothing against Batman. I will also say that I was initially looking forward to playing this game back in June before it got delayed. Ghostbusters was there to keep me entertained- and it did and it was good, but it’s better Batman got delayed. It would have been a disservice to Ghostbusters (which was good but almost certainly would’ve been overshadowed) and it helped fix whatever needed fixing in Batman.

So get this game. Play it. Beat people up.