XBlaze Etc

So, I decided to try a visual novel out for my morning commute game, and I picked the most recent one: XBlaze. Or XBLA*ZE, whatever. It's by the BlazBlue folks, so I knew that it'd be full of grim dark grimness with grim grim darkness and one joke character.

What I didn't expect is that it would be the most stereotypical thing possible. Literally, it is impossible to cram any more stereotypicality into this game, because every character, every set, every story beat, and every plot point is the most stereotypical rehash of a common trope they could find. Every single character is a fetish stamped on tissue paper, every plot event would have been considered old and tired in 1989.

The format is easy to consume while standing with one hand on a train rail, so I've played it through a fair amount. Nothing has been even vaguely new or interesting.

See, the basic problem with XBlaze is actually the basic strength in BlazBlue.

Arc (the devs) are pretty good at throwing tons of polished stereotypes into a game. In BlazBlue, every character is a stereotype, but that's actually good in a fighting game. You have to know who someone is within 1.5 seconds in a fighting game. So you walk a narrow line: stereotypical enough to identify, but interesting enough to look at that people will remember them later. It's actually advantageous to not have any character development - so all the character "development" is actually just revealing the past to the players. That way the characters don't change over time, and everyone who plays the game will always face the same version of the same characters.

Moreover, a wide variety of instantly recognizable characters means everyone will find someone they are interested in playing. It's the "shotgun" method of character design: put a ton of instantly-recognizable characters in your game and let the player sort out which ones they like. If they dislike 80% of the characters, that's fine: they don't have to play them.

While that's good in a fighting game, that's awful in a visual novel.

Visual novels work in exactly the opposite manner. It's less important that a character be immediately identifiable, and more important that they evolve over the course of the story. Hidden backstories being revealed are common, but it's a way to make the characters behave differently. Since no two players are competing, it's not important for characters to be the same between multiple players.

The selection of characters is also less important, because a player cannot really choose to spend time with one character and ignore another. All the characters are always interwoven. Maybe in a dating sim a player can choose a particular favorite and it will matter, but in a typical visual novel you are always stuck with all the characters. If you only like one of the ten characters that you're stuck with, that's considered 9 fails rather a success.

Fundamentally, Arc took the same approach in their visual novel as their fighting game. They filled their story with a huge variety of instantly-recognizable stereotypes.

Unfortunately, none of them are even slightly interesting.

They attempted to make the characters evolve by applying the standard story for each standard stereotype. For example, the cute robot girl slowly learns human emotions and, I presume, will die while betraying her creators in favor of her new friends in the third act. Doubt I'll play long enough to know for sure, because the robot learning emotions is so painfully standard that it predates robots, and there's no spice in this particular dish.

The hope with XBlaze is that you will find at least one of the story lines to your taste, at least one of the characters. Unfortunately, that's not how stories work. That's how fights work, sure, but this is a story.

A story is much more cohesive. While a reader can technically ignore large parts of the story, that's a sign that a story has failed. Instead, each of the pieces of the story - whether a character, place, or event - needs to contribute to the core of the story.

In a fighting game the core of the game is the fighting. The characters, settings, and events all contribute to the feel of the fighting, giving it a strong flavor and unique texture.

In a visual novel the core of the game is the heart of the story. The characters, settings, and events need to contribute to that.

In XBlaze, the story is theoretically about a pacifist having his worldview challenged by harsh realities.

Having three different kinds of magic does not help the story any - it just allows you to have three different kinds of stereotypical magicians. This is a sacrifice made to enable more characters at the expense of the story.

Having a robot learning emotions could actually be a powerful echo of the story. The robot could go from being a militaristic, violent, order-following machine to being a dedicated pacifist at the same time that the pacifist main character is pushed into fighting. But instead of serving that end, the robot is simply allowed to trundle along their trope's default plot line regardless of the fact that it doesn't have even the slightest bit to do with the core storyline.

You have to balance your characters and how they relate to the core story in the same way that you would balance the character's fighting styles in the fighting game.

What I'm saying is that Arc has misunderstood what a visual novel is.

Doing Animation Wright

I like the new Phoenix Wright game. It translated everything into 3D, so all the characters are 3D models (or very convincing pseudo-3D models). The art style survived almost entirely intact, aside from some damage to the way that hair looks.

But there is one big change that I think I finally figured out.

The motions inherited from the old games (TAKE THAT! WHHAAAAT!) look robotic and excessive. But not all the animations look robotic: a lot of animations originating in this game seem very natural and powerful. It's not universal. Some old motions translate very well, and some new motions are awkward.

It took me a while to figure out why that is.

It's the framerate.

The old games literally used animated GIFs. The frame rate was very low. Because of this, you couldn't really create secondary nuances very easily. Instead, you usually take advantage of the low framerate to put serious "pop" into your animations, the same way you might cut a frame out of a cartoon to give it some extra pop. So the classic style was to cut to just before the primary stance and use a simple "pop" animation to bring the stance to the fore. You put in plenty of exaggeration to make it pop properly.

The classic example is the "TAKE THAT" finger point, along with most of the other lawyer animations such as lashing a whip, pounding on the table, having toupees blown off, and so on. The panicked animations for various witnesses are also done like this. These are perfectly suited for the low frame rate - they take a simple stance and use a POP animation to transition into the final stance.

There are a lot of examples of nuanced animations in the old games, too, usually on the part of people who don't get excited. The most iconic is probably Trucy's bounce. Put her in her primary stance and then just create a subtle bounce. The secondary animation of her hair and cape follow in turn, and make it a very engaging animation. There are other examples, such as Gumshoe's head-scratch, but in all cases these subtler animations were fighting against the GIF format, squeezed into a low framerate and with a significant file size cost.

But in the new game, those are the animations that shine. With 4x the old frame rate and no significant file size problems, the animations can be as subtle as you like. Moreover, nuances and secondary events can easily be put in.

You can easily see this with Trucy's new bounce, which is identical to the old bounce except that the secondary animation is a really intricate ripple. Another clear example is the first witness' hair-pull action, where she tugs on her long braids and causes them to stretch. The new heroine's BLEAH face also has some really great nuanced animations that shine in this new format.

But the old animation style looks awkward and stilted. Just compare the hair pull animation from our first witness to two of her other animations: letting the hair bounce into her eyes, and pulling down a flower inhaler off her hat. Both of these are obviously done in the old style, with a simple starting pose followed by a straight-through exaggerated motion into the final pose. At eight frames a second, they would look great. At ~32, they look clumsy.

It's clear to me that the animation team was working through this same thought process and will probably continue to polish their presentation in later games.

I don't think that big gestures are coming to an end in Phoenix Wright. It's not the big gestures that are bad, it's the oldschool "pop" animation style. There are big gestures which work, such as Trucy's magic trick. But these gestures don't pop into exaggerated existence. Instead they follow a more refined style with standard pre-motion countermotion and a feeling of weight and substance. It is a better animation style, and it's the one they'll use now that they're no longer trapped by GIF.

Of course, the "POP" of the old animations will be missed... they'll have to find some way to make the new animations as explosive and iconic.

Quest for Epic Loot first reactions

So, I was selected for a beta key for The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, the newest game from Ubisoft. I've been slow on playing it for two reasons. First, it involves Uplay, which makes my skin crawl. Second, even though the game doesn't look particularly complex, it eats my graphics card and there is a worry of it overheating and causing my computer to hard-crash, something that I normally only have to worry about with cut-rate games from the early 2000s that don't understand the concept of a frame rate.

Oh, dear, I've started bitching already. That's, um... that's kind of the sort of review it's going to be. Sorry.

I actually don't think I can put much of the blame on the Ubisoftians for the things I don't like about this game. It's clear that what they've created is simply something that isn't aimed at me. In fact, it's aimed at all the things that piss me off. It's essentially casualified Diablo III mixed with Farmville.

My first real annoyance is that their cash shop is pretty much fucking your ear from the first screen. I'm not kidding: the character select screen is two generic white guys, or a third generic white guy for cash. And every loading screen comes pre-equipped with an ad and a shortcut key for their cash shop. And their preloader/patcher contains ads for their cash shop. Before the game even begins, you've been subjected to three screens demanding money. And, of course, nearly every other screen in the game also informs you that you could be spending money to just win this shit without slogging through the treadmill.

I guess maybe that's the way of things these days, but it gives the whole thing a cheap and chintzy feel. I would only be moderately annoyed by it except for one detail: THIS IS A CLOSED BETA. It's a closed beta, and their cash shop is already demanding your coin. Moreover, beta testers don't get any kind of cash shop bonus so they can beta test the cash shop stuff... it's just so... grasping.

The second major problem with the game is one I've already alluded to. You get to pick one of two generic white guys or buy a third generic white guy, at which point a generic white guy narrates a story and then another generic white guy sells you castle and takes you through a tutorial. The first non-generic-non-white guy you meet is a goblin.

The whole game is deeply uncreative and anchored in super-safe vanilla fantasies. There are no women, no black people, no children - just endless rows of white guys killing safely and cheerfully inhuman monsters such as chickens, skeletons, and goblins renamed to something so you won't call them out for complete uncreativity.

Some of the monster designs are kind of fun at times, but even they feel super generic because they take place within the scaffold of the game's battle system... which is super generic.

It's a bit like Diablo if you really dumbed it down. The skill system is painfully bland, the "stats" are more or less nonexistent... gear pours in, but there's not really any deciding to do, it cheerfully tells you which piece of armor is the best and expects that you'll just equip optimally constantly.

The fighting is a bit like Diablo in that you click to move, click to shoot, click to use special powers... but the tactics involved in a game of Diablo are completely muted. You can tell the instant the game starts that it's going to mute the tactics, because the camera is about four feet above your head. You can't see enough terrain to use the terrain. The archer's range is approximately nine feet, with the total view range maybe being 12.

It's not completely brainless, but it is very casual. And, of course, loot piles up and you grab it. The dungeons might get creative later, I don't know, but in the beginning they are strictly one-room encounters where there's some arbitrary combination of traps and enemies and you just deal with it strictly inside that one room. The Diablo equivalent of Call of Duty's regenerate-between-every-skirmish design.

Your castle serves as a modular home base, but there's not as much depth to it as you might hope. Most of your base serves to host generic shops that you have to place - not sure why. There's absolutely nothing interesting or significant about how you can place them or use them. You might as well just hop down to a shopping district.

You can build a variety of modules for making money or fighting off adventurers, which is where the game starts to feel like a Farmville clone. Of course, whenever you buy anything, it reminds you that you could be buying it using real money instead of gold... and after you've bought it, it builds nice and slow so as to prod you to pay some real money to have it skip the construction delay.

There may be some complexity to the base building, I don't know. I haven't gotten far enough into it to be sure. But I would be a bit surprised, because there's really no creativity or complexity anywhere else in the game.

But... here's the thing: I think it'll do fine. It's exactly the sort of bland, repackaged casual garbage I've come to expect from casual games, but dolled up in a package of ADVENTURING! So I expect a large number of people will be happy to sink their teeth into this dolled-up casual game and pretend they are eating meat instead of chugging soda.

"It's not a casual game! It's got a preloader and doesn't run in the browser and has 3D graphics!"

Well, it's too casual for my taste.

We need more base construction games, but this seems to distract the player with shiny baubles and mirrors rather than offering actual play. It's doubly poisoned by its omnipresent cash shop.

Theoretically, it could radically pick up in the later game. That really seems kind of unlikely, but even if it's true, the first few hours are full of predictable blandness and a very loud cash shop.

Games I Like

I have recently noticed that whenever I pick up a game everyone loves, I spend the next two weeks bitching about how games all suck, especially that one that earned a unanimous 10/10.

You could be forgiven for thinking that I'm just a whiny asshole. Well, I am. But I'm also someone who likes games. That's right! I like them!

So let's go over some games I like, and what I like about them.

I like Valkryia Chronicles a little... but I like Valkyria Chronicles 2 for the PSP a lot! While the tactical gameplay is sometimes a bit dodgy, their home base mechanic is really exquisite. It combines the grind rewards of leveling up and changing classes with a participation reward of advancing soldier character arcs a bit after they participate in a few more battles. None of the soldiers are individually very interesting, but unlocking their arcs bit by bit is a fantastic way to do things. There is also a beautiful synergy where you get a unique mission related to their story arc every half dozen episodes or so - these missions are not usually significantly different from the norm, but it's enough to really make the characters and the progression gel into a crispy, crunchy whole.

I like Saints Row III a lot. A lot of people hate it because it's fundamentally kind of a dumbed-down version of Saints Row II. But I find myself returning to Saints Row III more than Saints Row II whenever I need a fix of dumb people causing extremely unlikely catastrophes. While nothing in the game particularly stands out, all the pieces mesh well with good timing so it's easy to just roll along from mini-event to mini-event. By the time you're starting to get bored of driving around, you run into a gang shooting. By the time you're getting a little bored of that, you get a paycheck and have money to spend. By the end of that you've noticed a pickup you didn't get and are now on a helicopter expedition...

I like the new XCom game. It's chunky and tactical enough to have some bite to it both outside and inside combat, but it never feels weighted down by the extraneous complexity most other tactical games (including earlier XCom games) forced on us. It moves well, swapping out between combat and base-building at just the right speed.

Those are all old! Do I like any recent games?

Well, let's look at 2012 game releases and see which ones I liked.

I actually liked Binary Domain, although most people didn't seem to. It's a relatively lightweight shooter, but with the addition of having to juggle your party members and their goodwill towards you. I liked that addition. It gave me some knobs to fiddle with over the course of the game, unlike most shooters where you just march from A to Z. In addition, the social soundbytes the characters give both as part of and independently from my interactions with them added a feeling of personality to the game world and the squad. Normally I get pretty bored with these kinds of action shooters, but in this case there was a glue that held my attention throughout: the other characters. It wasn't perfect, not even close, but it was more compelling than the Halo games to me.

As always, I liked the most recent Disgaea. I do have a problem with Disgaea where I get bogged down in details, so if I leave for a week I basically have to start over because I feel so lost. But while I'm playing, there's a great flow between fighting, managing warriors, and interacting with the base. The great character-driven plot moments are also very juicy, although I feel they are more useful as changes of pace than as actual plots. They don't make me care about seeing the next one - they just entertain me for a few light moments to break up the tactical weight of the rest of the game.

Obviously, I loved Dragon's Dogma. It has a good combination of self-directed exploration, leveling, and quests. The game was horribly flawed in many ways, but it was also fun to play. Like many such games, I never beat it. It's just too long. But for the 100+ hours I played it, I thoroughly enjoyed it, bugs, boring plot, and miscalibrated balance aside.

Believe it or not, I really liked Theatrhythm Final Fantasy. Talk about a pointless, shitty game. But I love rhythm games like that, even though I'm crap at them. This one emerges from the pack because it has a lot of complex progression - earning characters, skills, items, new tracks, and so on. Classic RPG grinding style mixed in with rhythm-based gameplay made it perfect for my train commutes. I wouldn't want to sit and play it for 100+ hours like Dragon's Dogma, but I played it for around 40 hours, 20-30 minutes a day on commutes.

Borderlands 2 was one of the few long games I actually managed to beat, I liked it so much. Extremely fluid play, both within the running gunfights and in terms of the pacing of rewards, exploration, level-ups, and character quests.


The common thread between the games I like appears to be pacing. These games all have really excellent pacing. They hand off between various elements of play with good timing, neither too fast nor too slow, and rarely if ever force me to do something at the game designers' whim. They have long-cycle and short-cycle gameplay intermixed well, and alternate between heavy and light nicely.

On the other hand, many of the games that the world considered to be the big winners last year, I didn't like. I didn't like Dishonored or Batman: Arkham City, for example.

These games tended to have very, very good graphics, animations, sounds, voice acting... but I found them really boring to play. No flow.

So, yes, I like games. I just hate all the games everyone else liked.

ME3 Review

This review contains spoilers for Tali's mission, and extremely minor spoilers for everything else.

Let's talk about Mass Effect 3, one of the very few AAA games I played and enjoyed in the past year. This is a review in the literature sense, so don't expect a rating or fanboy gushing.

Firstly, I'm not playing to get a perfect. I'm pretty much playing through with a "whatever happens, happens" mentality. With that in mind...

One of the most irritating things about the ME franchise is that it imports your saves... but if your saves were on a different kind of machine, there's no easy way to replicate the choices you made. This wouldn't be a huge problem if canon-Shepard didn't always make precisely the opposite choice that I made in literally every situation.

For example, it's revealed that canon-Shepard killed the last Rachni queen. Really? My default personality is "unapologetically murders helpless species"? You want me to play a character that literally killed a whole sentient species while it was helplessly imprisoned? After it had been tortured for years and was talking, lucidly, about just running off and finding a planet somewhere? You want me to play someone who unabashedly murdered a torture victim and the whole sentient species they belonged to?

As personality traits go, it's hard to think of a more horrifying one.

Well, whatever.

Playing the game, I'm trying to figure out why I'm only touched by certain scenarios. The writing is pretty solid, but a lot of the things that are obviously supposed to be touching just aren't. But others are. What is it?

After a while, it became clear: I was having a really hard time empathizing with anyone that had a face. The facial animations are still so... weird and creepy. Ash and that white-hexagon-ass psychic lady especially. This was true in earlier ME games as well, but it bothered me less for some reason. The female faces are especially creepy: the men are okayish, but the women all strike me as zombies. And there are a lot of human-faced women in this game - around half the cast. The other half is filled out with all the men and the women who don't have human faces.

So I was running around the game world empathizing with the fat little environment-suit aliens and the walking tanks that say their emotions and the Turians, and along comes Tali's mission. The Quarians against the Geth, HUGE SURPRISE.

I pretty much already knew everything that was "revealed" about the Geth, because it was painfully obvious in the previous games. However, whoever animated the helpful Geth was a real master of conveying emotions without using the face.

Once again, I renewed my knowledge that the Quarians are total monsters who basically want to murder their own children. And me being all paragonny, I say "well, I'll go in and broker peace, somehow. Tali's my favorite character, so I'll try to get her people to be less horrible."

Unfortunately, the writers for ME3 made the Quarians incredibly aggressive, genocidal to a psychotic degree, and completely unwilling to listen to the two people who had literally saved their species twice already and were actively saving it again (me and Tali).

As a result, I basically said "fuck the Quarians, I'm siding with the gentle, intelligent, promising young Geth. They've been given a bad rap for defending themselves against psychopaths."

Unfortunately, the Quarians were ever more stupidly aggressive and unwilling to listen to the people who were actively resolving the situation, and in the end I had to murder an entire species in order to save the Quarians from the catastrophe they had created. For the fifth time this freaking game.

Every even vaguely intelligent NPC is like "oohhh, you should have found a way to save the Geth, you're awful!"

Here's the problem. There is no dialog option for "fuck off, you don't understand shit".

I'm sure there was a way to save both, hidden somewhere for people with a walkthrough or enough time to try every permutation of the event. That's what they are saying. Like when Eve died because I didn't, I dunno, talk to her enough or something, everyone kept harping on it. "If only Eve hadn't died!" Because Eve can live. That's what they're telling you.

But that's not the game I'm playing. In the game I'm playing, Eve died, and I can't rewind time and change that.

In these games, they give you a "paragon" option or a "renegade" option. Which is slightly better than "good" vs "evil" but still not very good at representing your character. There is no ability to tell people how you are feeling, or that they are being really horrible.

Because here's what I wanted to say to the Quarians after the mission: "you're all monsters. You forced me to murder a species in cold blood because you couldn't be assed to fucking listen to me. I've saved you from your own catastrophes at least half a dozen times, and you continue to cause them. You would all be dead if I didn't like Tali this much. Get off my fucking ship."

Hell, I didn't even want Tali on my ship after that, but I couldn't see any option to kick her off.

.

I sincerely doubt that the writers of ME3 intended for this to be a huge affair for the player. They don't seem to give a fuck about genocide between two species without human faces. To me, it's a big deal, and the Quarians are clearly the monsters.

So, ME3: poignant when it doesn't mean to be. Still has pop-in textures and very stiff facial animations. Pretty good, although the battles are definitely oriented towards heavy-gun Shepards.

Mass Effect 2 and Wide, Flat Gaming

Haven't played as much Mass Effect 2 as I would like. But I have some things to say.

They made some really oddball gameplay choices. Like everyone, they're trending towards "packet gaming". The idea seems to be that we would prefer each encounter to be its own little game with no connection between them. Why they think we prefer this, I don't know.

It is like many other games of its quality, such as Doom III. At the end of a firefight, you are instantly restored to maximum. Your health regenerates in five seconds (literally), and you always find plenty of ammo for your guns. In fact, there is so much ammo, the only thing I've ever run out of ammo for is my sniper rifle. This is only because in order to make the fights challenging, they have to throw fifty enemies at you at once.

This style of game is becoming ever more common. They write attrition out of the game entirely. Presumably, this is so that they have a much clearer idea of how encounters will progress. In horrible games like Doom, System Shock 2, and Riddick, why, they had to actually design levels instead of designing encounters. That's why those games were so terrible! Man, can you imagine a game like Half Life 2 coming out today? Who wants levels? Pshaw.

This lack of attrition radically reduces the depth of ME2. Not having to worry about resources means that the game plays out super-linearly. Explore a level, hit a fight. If you lose the fight, try again. If you win the fight, no matter how narrowly, you'll be back and at full long before the next fight. This basically reduces the game to an adventure game, except without any puzzles.

ME2 has reduced depth along every category of gameplay except, perhaps, the ship navigation.

Apparently they took our whining about "guns in everything" to heart, because now there is almost nothing in the way of inventory management. Instead, you pick up endless Amounts of Elements, such as "500 iridium". While this is arguably better than finding guns in trash bins, it is a flat gameplay experience. It turns searching for loot into walking over money. Because, essentially, each element is simply a different kind of money. So 95% of the level's pickups are money and ammo. Worse, the ammo is "generiammo", to insure you never ever have to worry about pesky issues like managing your combat loadout. Or thinking.

I'm not sure why ME2 went this way. They have grossly simplified every aspect of the game. While many areas have been broadened (Shephard's armor), they are not very deep (only Shephard's armor, not anyone else's). They seem to have decided that players can't handle a game with any depth.

So I'm replaying Disgaea. Tell me when a game with some gameplay comes out.

Dragon Age Animation

I've done the snarky bit, let's talk a bit more about what went right with Dragon Age.

One of the things I really liked about Dragon Age was the body language. They almost completely avoided the Oblivion dead-man's-stare, especially during cutscenes. This was done partly with generic body language, but also partly with camera tricks. Most people overlook that even if NPCs have realistic body language, if your screen is constantly focused on their face, then the PC has unrealistic body language. Like your avatar is staring with an Oblivion dead-man's-stare.

However, you can't make the camera swing around. That would be very disorienting. Dragon Age instead uses a variety of cuts to give you a more movie-like feel, which I think was a good idea. The two methods combined - camera tricks and body language - combine to make the characters feel a lot more realistic and immersive than previous games, graphically speaking.

There is still a lot of room for improvement, and I think we can expect to see improvement in the next generation of triple-A titles.

One spot that stuck out egregiously was the head turn animation. Probably the most common social animation aside from "generic hand waves 1 and 2", it was the worst animation in the entire game. It revolves the head like it's on a platter, with a constant speed and a sharp-edge start and stop. You can hear the greasy robot blood in the character's veins.

I presume that this animation is the way it is because the "rotate head" function takes an arbitrary angle to rotate to. The engine then either performs a simple rotation or, more likely given the way these engines tend to work, animates a fragment of a larger, linear head rotation animation.

This is a shortcut they should not have taken. The only time an actor rotates their head like this in a movie is when they want to be clear that the character is unnatural and insane. So, no, not a good choice for a major animation nested into every character.

While the engine may have technical limitations that prevent it from running on-the-fly or layered animations, it is still possible to create a selection of rotation animations and either place the targets in the spots where the animations make sense, or slightly rotate the body beneath the head to make it all line up nicely.

Head animations were a big opportunity to distinguish the personalities of the various characters. A normal person, when they turn their head, ducks their chin a bit and blinks. And definitely doesn't have a flat speed with a sharp start and stop. But you can throw in variations to distinguish both characters and moods.

For example, the grumpy witch might not "come out of" the duck-turn, leaving her chin down, glowering askance at you. The insane zealot girl might lead with the top of her head, giving her more of a cuckoolander feel instead of a robotic, "I keeel you in you sleeeep" feel.

Add in some more general head posture animations, and you can give the characters a lot of personality without needing to fully mocap and tweak every scene. In the game as it stands, the difference between mocapped and generic scenes is both striking and distracting.

Now, the head turn isn't the only thing that could use added juice. Right now the body language is still very restricted and limited, with the body itself standing rigidly. Presumably this is to keep the number of required animations down: if everyone can use the same twenty animations, you don't need to make twenty animations for each character. In order to keep them generic, you have to keep the body language from being too communicative.

It's obvious that what we'll need for the next generation of body language is an engine that can synthesize animations on the fly, augmenting the "gross" animations with layered and amped sub-animations to give them more personality.

This would also be useful in fixing of the worst animation remaining: the walk animation.

The walk animation is so bad it is the sole reason I have to play in first person mode. This isn't really a rant against Dragon Age: everyone's walk animations are hideously bad.

First, they're not even vaguely unique. Usually there's only three: woman, man, and big huge dude. Second, they're animated without taking anything else into account.

Sure, it would be nice to have walk animations where the characters actually looked at things, actually stomped when they're angry, actually turn to the person they're talking to. But easier than that, please put in a turning animation.

When I turn left, my walk animation doesn't change even slightly: I revolve seamlessly. When the rest of your game is super-realistic, does that make sense?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I would prefer to lose half the graphical quality to double the way it's integrated into the game world. When one aspect of your assets so far outstrips the others, maybe you should stop spending on the excellent asset and shore up the crappy ones.

Unfortunately, to really do it right, we need to have a next-generation engine that allows for arbitrary, layered, on-the-fly animations.

What do you think?

Dragon Age Early Review

So, I'm playing Dragon Age. It's obviously a very polished game, and I'm enjoying it to some extent, but it really does exemplify all the things I hate about modern RPGs.

The checklist leveling is bad enough, but the developers have the gall to put in quests that require premium content. Put the hooks right in the game. "I need help!" "Oh, I'd love to help you, except I can't. Because I'm not willing to spend extra real-world cash to do something in-game, you assholes. So, yes, I'm a hero, but I can't help you. OH WELL."

No, that doesn't break immersion! NOT AT ALL!

I don't mind you selling additional packs or whatever. But the moment you make them intrude on my experience, you have ripped the guts out of your game and turned it into a pathetic shadow. You have made it impossible for my character to act in character. All while shouting "BEND OVER!" You might as well put a rapping spiky blue hedgehog in the game to shout coca-cola slogans at me. "I'm the real thing, baby! I'm not distracting you, am I?"

It's bad enough that it's basically an MMORPG. That's such a terrible terrible idea right there. Why would you mimic something that's specifically been crippled and neutered when you don't have to? It's such a bad design decision!

The fact that it's as good as it is is a sign of truly stellar assets teams and a solid writing team. Now all they need is some game designers.

I also like the fact that it will cover your characters in blood and you'll do truly gory finishing moves, but they still use "safety underwear". It's like the design team's whole thing was "let's make a game that takes absolutely no risks."

And they did.

ODST, yeah you know me

Finished playing single-player Halo 3: ODST. I don't have any particular interest in playing it competitively on-line, so I'm going to review it based on the single-player game.

Anyhow, ODST wasn't a bad game, although there were some infuriating segments. And, for some reason, it gives me a headache to play for more than an hour or so. I don't really hold that against the game, though.

What I do hold against the game is that they got rid of Master Chief only to give you someone even more faceless and banal. It's sort of like when everyone said they hated the Ewoks, so George Lucas came up with Jar Jar Binks.

I do like that they put Mal in the game, I hadn't read up on it much so I wasn't expecting it. It was quite a surprise. He gave some veneer of human touch to the story, although all the characters were well into the uncanny valley.

There are things I miss as Halo advances. I miss the troops actually mattering. I miss being part of a larger effort. I miss being able to kill shit: every episode they give everything more shields and more hit points until, at last, in ODST you simply rely on instant kill methods 90% of the time.

I understand these changes: they have to make the game better for competitive multiplayer mode. All of these adjustments are in the name of multiplayer enhancements, even if they damage the single-player game. Hell, you can't even dual-wield anymore.

Where are my one-player games going? Even Crackdown 2 is "focusing on multiplayer gameplay". Which, as far as I can tell, means crippling most of what made Crackdown fun in exchange for balancing a game I don't want to play. I want to play Crackdown. ODST is a bit similar: the single player game is neutered due to the focus on the multiplayer gameplay. A continuing evolution throughout the series.

I don't mind games that focus on multiplayer modes, but I don't like games I liked for their single-player aspect gutting the single-player aspect to enhance the multiplayer aspect. Grrr.

Blue Mars

Well, I'm going to rag on Blue Mars a bit. If you're a Blue Mars fan (or employee), don't take it hard, I rag on everything. I'm just one of the internet's many assholes.

I understand that Blue Mars is in early beta, but there are core design decisions that don't change, and those are what I'm going to rag on. Even if Blue Mars was fully populated and had a larger feature set, I would still find it disappointing for many reasons, all of which revolve around the idea of empowering your user base.

Blue Mars is occasionally compared to SecondLife. Usually in the form of, "Unlike SecondLife, Blue Mars does not allow content creation". It's important to realize that not only is Blue Mars technically incapable of allowing the kind of content creation SecondLife allows, it's also a corporate-mindset money guzzler with no intention of allowing ordinary users to create mediocre content, instead starting right from the get go by explicitly focusing only on well-funded teams of professional content developers. As Blue Mars will find, that is not a viable path into the future. You gotta eat your veggies before you get any dessert.

Like the other 3D chat rooms running around, Blue Mars is a game of pure luxuries, where the only thing to do is dress yourself up and cyber. Of course, Blue Mars "isn't sure" about this "adult content" thing, so it's illegal to do that. Leaving you with basically nothing to do. Oh, "the Cryengine supports advanced gameplay, so you can make good games within the context of the Blue Mars space"... my ass.

People who think that way have obviously never tried to make a game. It takes a lot of tweaking down in the guts to get a game engine - even a really good one - to respond properly. If Blue Mars is counting on the Cryengine to allow for the development of immersive games in their space, they're counting eggs that ain't ever gonna hatch. They will, however, have no problem creating samey spaces for people to extremely clumsily stagger around in. Why they decided not to use Cryengine's navigation, and instead went with a painfully nasty implementation of their own, is never really explained.

I don't think that Blue Mars is bad. I just think that there's no reason to choose it over, say, IMVU, which is easier to make content for, has more fluid animations, and you can see people's faces.

My bitterness is at least in part because I'm a Mars terraforming fanboy, and now that these berks have put their corporate thumbs into the "Blue Mars" name, it'll be decades before anyone else can make a game with that name that does the concept some justice.

No, I don't see any reason to play Blue Mars. I imagine it will do well enough, because advertising blitzes aimed at the non-geeks they're really intending to target will generally yield dividends. But as a replacement for SecondLife, it is totally not an option. And I hate SecondLife. So that's saying something.

...

There's just something wrong with this whole idea of commoditizing game elements. They don't even bother pretending there's any gameplay. They flat out state that it's a micropayment beast that exists solely to make you pay out the nose for any content they deem worthy. This whole thing - not just Blue Mars, but all these games - these are a huge step backwards.

When are we going to start stepping forwards again?

Das Uberscripten

I've been playing Ghostbusters the videogame. The only little problem with the game is that it's bad.

The issue here is that the game manages to be less than the sum of its parts. It has all the pieces of a really great game but, like Doom 3, manages to put them together into a very tepid experience.

In part this is detail work, like the fact that their mouth animations aren't turned up enough and the fact that their AI is so bad it makes me cringe even now. But mostly the problem is that the game is overscripted.

Overscripted games are becoming more and more common. These are games where the developers obviously intended to make a movie, but accidentally put in some interactivity. Every step is carefully scripted. You will fight N enemies in Y configuration, then A and B will talk to you, and you need to pull lever C to fight M enemies in Z configuration.

This is adventure game mechanics. And there's nothing wrong with adventure games, except for the small fact that their mechanics are the reason they died. Today's adventure games carefully support their adventure game mechanics with a heavy dose of Other Stuff, and even then they still don't reach mass approval.

The most terrible thing about Ghostbusters is that it really could have been excellent. All the pieces are there. Great atmosphere, interesting weapons and enemies, some really cool Mario Sunshine elements, quality voice acting, and really memorable characters. All combined with a world-class IP.

But its like world-class IP means death. There are so many things that went wrong with this, all of them involving overscripting.

Why was I playing a new kid? The whole point of Winston was that he was the window character. Why do we need a new one, exactly?

Why does it have to be linear? Is there any reason I can't get a dozen hot spots around the city and choose which mission to do when?

And why - WHY - isn't there a secondary gameplay element? You can't have a horror game without a secondary gameplay element, the pacing doesn't work out. Some games use puzzles (there are "puzzles" in Ghostbusters, but I wouldn't call them that), but in this case I can think of dozens of other secondary gameplay elements I would have liked. For example, helping Igon with his science or Ray with his research. Or how about ghost-dueling with the other Ghostbusters using trapped ghosts? Or how about some slice-of-life KOTOR crap with the other Ghostbusters and the HQ? Hell, even a political minigame to try to mitigate negative press.

Endless stomping through dungeons doing overly scripted fight followed by overly scripted cut scene and repeat over and over... that's just not going to cut it.

Have you played it? What do you think?

Immersion?

I bought Overlord II and I'm playing it. I do have an in depth review in the wings, but because I'm not far enough along yet, I'd instead like to talk about another interesting topic: cultural believability.

Overlord II has you play a rather villainous character, portrayed as really quite evil. In the ads you are sitting on a throne, draped in women who apparently don't care that your armor is spiked. It sets the mood, you see: you're a kind of self-indulgent, spoiled-rotten evildoer.

I can understand the restraints placed upon the game, of course. Allowing players to be evil up to real evil standards wouldn't just get it rated AO: it would be banned from nearly every country and certainly no store would willingly carry it. So you can't torture people, put them on spikes, render them for fat, or any of the truly vile things humans customarily do when they get a taste of power. There aren't even any children in the game, aside from the intro level.

I can live with that. Frankly, I wouldn't be able to play such a game, because I'm NOT evil. I can't even play Dark Jedi in the various Jedi games. I play a remarkably kind and generous evil overlord.

But there are some in-game elements where you are SUCH a pansy. Gameplay elements, not scripted events. And I don't get it. It's immersion-breaking for me.

For example, you can dominate the minds of peasants and they'll follow you around and generally be helpful. However, when you've got more than, say, two, they really get in the way. Pushing past them is a slow process, with the peasant backing up about an inch at a time - assuming there isn't anything for a few yards behind him (or her). It gets so bad that I've had to KILL them just to push by.

Why, exactly, is my ten-foot-tall armored behemoth with glowy eyes participating in this farce? Is there some reason he doesn't simply fling them ten feet away when he runs into them?

There are a lot of these kinds of details, where your badass dude is a badass dud. This is simply the most... tactically irritating one.

Another example is your women. It's true that you have multiple mistresses in this game, but you are a serial monogamist. Similarly, they aren't even window dressing: they just walk around and occasionally make a neutral noise. They don't even LOUNGE properly, let alone hang off you or be, you know, mistressy. In game terms, there's absolutely no difference between how they act and how J Random Goblin acts.

To make the matter worse, they don't let you really just drop the issue. At every turn they talk about your mistresses, your potential mistresses, and decorating your not-so-private chambers. It's roughly the same noise level as collecting stars in Mario Galaxy. Except that the stars are more interactive.

It seems strange to me: you're portrayed as a badass, everyone talks about you as if you're a badass, but you can't ever do anything even vaguely evil, save for stabbing villagers if you really feel inclined. I can stab villagers in Oblivion as well: who cares?

The Incredible Machine...

... and a bird with a wrench.

Recently, I've been playing Nuts and Bolts, the most recent Banjo-Kazooie game. The previous games aren't really my style, being platformers. This one isn't a platformer. Its a build-your-own-vehicle game. It's pretty much right up my alley.

One of my friends feels the opposite - he likes platformers and not build-your-own-vehiclers. So I'm not making any judgments here, just talking about me. It's what I do best.

Build-your-own-vehicle games are an interesting and fairly rare phenomenon. It doesn't surprise me that I like them a lot, because they are basically the part of RPGs I like refined down into a pure form.

Even when the customization is fairly weak, such as in the various giant robot games, I still love it. Building a working system is great. I also, unsurprisingly, love all the various simulation games such as The Incredible Machine, Evil Genius, Sim City, etc. Sim City's a bit too loosey-goosey for me... but I'm falling off the subject here.

I'd like to talk to you a bit about the way this Banjo & Kazooie game handles the progression of play. Don't worry, there aren't any important spoilers. I'm not sure it's possible to spoil the game, as it's a farce with no plot twists or reveals.

The developers decided to start the game off really slowly. It was a good thing I picked it up during a slow week, because if I had tried getting into it on a normal schedule, I would have given up: it takes five hours before the game gets interesting.

Those five hours are spent slowly accumulating very generic parts. Basically, you get wheels and engines and some guns. This really limits the kinds of things you can do, and it's actually deadly dull. I imagine if I started over knowing what I know now, I could probably power through it in two hours, but still...

It's important to note that in the hub world (the "real" game world) you are forced to use a trolley cart, a very basic vehicle, so navigating in that world is extremely dull. In the mission worlds you can use whatever vehicle you want, so it's a bit more interesting, but not a lot when your self-made vehicles are basically just souped up trolleys.

At some point, things slowly pick up. You get the ability to fly, which is a lot of fun, not only in challenges but just in general flying around the mission worlds. Your trolley gains new abilities, allowing you to reach new locations, and exploring the hub world becomes fun and interesting if you're the sort who likes to explore. Which I am. Which is good, because as build-your-owns go, it still wasn't much fun: it's just that the exploration became a bit more fun.

The build-your-own options keep increasing, and it's gotten to the point where it's a lot of fun to build custom vehicles for whatever mission I'm attacking. It's a lot of fun to invent weird approaches, such as using the sticky grapple for air races, or building a glider with no engines or power source.

But should it have taken thirty hours to get here?

I'm all for the gradual curve: give the player more and more options over time. However, that gradual curve can backfire when someone comes in with a lot of skill inherited from other, similar games. It's important to provide a ramp for unskilled players, but it's also important not to apply brakes to skilled ones.

Actually, although I say that, I'm not sure it was the wrong decision. The play is not as deep as I would like, and I spend most of my time trying to figure out ways to do interesting things that the designers never intended (or, at least, don't bother to mention or require). I'm not sure the game would actually be thirty hours long if they let me accrue a lot of interesting parts right near the beginning, because I'm running dry on the building challenges included in the game and beginning to invent my own.

I keep wanting some things that aren't there, like a big ocean so boats are vaguely useful, or a 45-degree angle piece, or the ability to map things to directional presses and buttons in a far more carefully-specified way.

I guess what I really want is a lego-style universe to build and explore. Like Boom Blox, except without the pointless blowing-stuff-up-all-the-time parts and a lot more exploration. Ideally a MMORPG, so I can explore other people's worlds...

Anyhow, those are my thoughts on the matter. How about you?

Dead Space

So, I wasn't planning on reviewing Dead Space, since it's... not really very interesting. It's basically System Shock II minus Shodan, psychic powers, and hacking. IE, a random repairman against The Many.

I was just gonna let it slide peacefully into oblivion but, but...

Then I met the Asteroid Shooting Minigame. A mandatory minigame where they put you in a seat and make you play Tie Fighter. Not the later ones. The original one. On the Apple II. The one that isn't even listed in Wikipedia, presumably because it was someone's basement hack.

I always hated that game, and I have not improved any with experience. So I've tried to beat this dumb, infuriating, pointless thing several times. Each time I think to myself, "IF I WANTED TO PLAY TIE FIGHTER, I'D TIME TRAVEL BACK TO 1988! SHUT UP AND BE A SHOOTER!"

But every time I die. And every time, I get a little further. Oh, good, maybe I'll eventually beat it!

Except your captain-type-dude is sitting in your ear the whole time. "Almost got it! Just a little more!" "You said that five minutes ago, dipshit, what's the point of lying to me? Just to fool me into thinking maybe I'll win this time, maybe I'll hold out long enough on this idiotic, sub-par minigame designed by brain-damaged, idiot monkey-men and implemented by sadistic, gibbering idiots and playtested, evidently, by savants with astonishingly good control over the MOST IRRITATING MOTIONS ON THE CONTROLLER? We'll call them idiot savants, just to keep with the theme."

Yeah, I'm really enjoying it.

So the game went from being "decent" to being "totally shitty" in one fell swoop.

Reading the walkthroughs, I find that not only does nobody have any useful suggestions aside from "not sucking", but there's ANOTHER ONE OF THEM LATER ON.

See, this kind of shit is just bad game design. The idea here is that they mix it up a bit, you know? Give you a break from the regular gameplay. Maybe the game needs it: the regular gameplay consists almost entirely of walking around slowly, then freezing and dismembering zombies. It's not exactly rapid-fire. The minigame certainly is.

But you know what? Mandatory minigames are a sign that your game design is fundamentally flawed. Doesn't matter what they are - quicktime sequences, turret fighting sequences, PRESS A REALLY QUICK sequences... they're all a sign of shitty basic play being desperately propped up by other shitty play.

You can put minigames in, sure. System Shock II, which Dead Space obviously wanted to be, had a hacking minigame. I'm sure it irritated some people. But you know what?

IT WAS OPTIONAL.

Man, I go on and on about weird, advanced little theories about game design, but then I go play a so-called triple-A game and I find they need BASIC DESIGN LESSONS.

I can't imagine the designers were really this bad. All I can think of is that they had a boss breathing down their neck and two days to do something. Because it's really bad. Ugh.

UGH.

The funny thing is that every other review on the planet seems to have loved the game. Not only did they not even notice this minigame, they thought the game itself was better than I think it is. This is probably the most negative review written about the game, but even before I got into this dumbass minigame, I didn't consider the game to be so great.

Maybe I'm spoiled by the fact that I'm kind of a scifi-survival-horror specialist. All these people comparing Resident Evil to Dead Space. Nooo, you did NOT. No wonder you think it's good. Maybe you should play System Shock II again. Or, hell, Shadowgrounds is scarier than this is.

This artificially crippling the camera crap? It doesn't make the game scarier to me. At all. More responsive - even eagle-eye - cameras work just fine because in survival horror, a big part of sustaining the scare is in maneuvering. And there isn't any in RE4 OR in Dead Space.

It's just someone walking around shooting zombies.

And, you know, playing painfully retarded minigames.

Mirror's Edge & Motion Sickness

A few of my less game-related RSS feeds are pointing to a Wired article which suggests that Mirror's Edge is a proprioception hack. IE, it screws up your sense of where you real limbs and body are.

I guess, technically, you can call motion sickness (which is what he's talking about) a proprioceptive effect, because it originates from visual cues not matching up to your body's more subtle cues about movement, speed, etc. But to imply it's something new and amazing is really pretty silly.

Motion sickness is a pretty complicated subject, and most people don't realize the full spread of cues and effects. For example, my mom is fine on boats, in cars, and so forth, but revolving cameras in movies and first-person video games give her serious trouble. Similarly, I have a friend who can play FPS games all day, but if you expand the view angle to more than ninety degrees, he gets really ill.

What we're seeing in Mirror's Edge has nothing to do with the fact that you can see her hands and everything to do with the motion of the camera. We're not used to this kind of bobbing, tilting camera work in a video game. You know the only thing it's been used for until now?

HORRIBLE MONSTERS. We use it in movies to show the viewpoint of a werewolf or some other slavering beasty. Why do we use it? Well, one of the reasons is BECAUSE IT MAKES PEOPLE UNCOMFORTABLE AND NAUSEOUS.

I will say that I am 99% sure Mirror's Edge is not doing some amazing new "proprioception hack". It's just making you (well, some people) motion sick.

It's riding the edge of providing too much visual data about motion your real body isn't doing. The more data it provides, the more realistic the game will feel... but the more people will tend to get motion sick. If that realism is a "proprioception hack", people's standards on the matter are way, way too low.

Mirror's Edge

_{This is in two parts. The first part is me making my typical whiny review of a game (no spoilers). The second is me discussing design details. If you don't care to hear my whining, skip to the "***". The other "***", obviously. I mean, uh, the FOURTH "***".}

So I'm playing Mirror's Edge. I'd like to remind everyone that I love moving in games. I love my avatar maneuvering through levels. It's a passion. So, I would say that I am their target audience.

It's not a game I can give a numeric rating to. Like the first Sly Cooper, there's nothing else in the niche to rate it against. Unfortunately, Unlike Sly Cooper, it is a pretty badly flawed game.

It's not a BAD game. It's just that, like its main character, it tends to fall short a lot.

First, the cutscenes are mostly 2D animations done by the Esurance guys. That style works well for snappy commercials, but is ill-suited for anything faster, slower, or more fluid. When they can tween, they run at full frames, but when they actually have to redraw a frame, they drop to animating on twos. There's nothing wrong with animating on twos IF YOU STICK TO IT, but switching framerates mid-scene is horribly jarring. Also, they don't use any animator's tricks, so things like sprinting appear very disjointed and jumpy instead of appearing properly fluid.

If I had to describe their animation style, it would be a graphical quality slightly below that of Teen Titans with the animation quality of South Park. So, not very impressed.

Also not impressed by the character design. All the characters are painfully bog-standard except the main character, who is painfully bog-standard and ugly. I'm impressed by the shoe design, and by the way that the level designers played around with color and luminescence.

Graphically, the game is glitchy even on the 360, with numerous dropped polies and thin black origin lines flickering around. It also features The Return of the Long Ass Elevator Rides Two: Electric Boogaloo.

The story has only one upside: they didn't try to write a romance plot in. Unfortunately, everything they DID write in was painfully stereotypical. The only surprises in this game are in the level design - you won't find any in the plot. The "big twists" were evidently shocking to my avatar, but they only served to make me think Faith is a bit of a retard.

No, I take that back. There were surprises in the plot: when I overestimated them, they consistently surprised me by falling short.

Only bloody-mindedness kept me from skipping the cut scenes, which are badly written and animated in a style I don't much like. At least the audio is solid, with decent voice actors, decent sound effects, and very suitable and listenable-toable music.

The setting is a painfully bland police state with painfully bland corruption running its painfully bland course. At least it doesn't look so standard, thanks to the graphics used in the levels. It's a very CLEAN painfully bland city, you see, which actually adds to the experience.

"But that's all besides the point! It's all about the gameplay! How's this first-person free-running game PLAY?"

Weeeeelllllll... let's leave the bulk of that for the design section. But lets briefly talk about level design and pacing.

The game features a lot of classic navigation puzzlers a'la Prince of Persia, but the pacing is awkward unless you've memorized the levels. The fighting is a shame, included just because nobody can imagine releasing a noncombat game. It's terrible, whether you're kung-fu fighting with ninja (AKA "strafe, slide-kick, press Y") or fighting cops (AKA "Press X, press Y, hold the trigger"). It's not terrible in that it's EASY - you die like a dog - it's terrible in that it's NOT FUN.

The game is laser-focused on its linear path. There is no side exploration, no bonuses, no nothing. The closest you can get to expressing yourself as a player is to find little bags which serve ABSOLUTELY NO PURPOSE. There are no interesting secret zones, very little secret information (a few screens with a bit of text hidden in a corner, a few voice mail messages), very little of interest. There are occasionally multiple paths to your goal, but one is obviously better than the other and neither is particularly interesting.

***

Let's talk about the design details.

Moving a platformer into first-person view is a dangerous move, but one that's been brewing for a while. Games have become more and more free-running-esque as the years go by and our hardware improves. Prince of Persia has become a nostalgic look into the days when swinging from flagpoles was new and amazing. These days, even the (surprisingly good) TMNT game features more advanced motion than PoP, and games like Assassin's Creed and Crackdown make PoP look like a tinkertoy.

All of these games are third-person for a reason. As you know, Bob, platformer games are mostly about where you are in relation to other things. Like, say, the platforms.

If you can see where you are in relation to other things (IE, you can see your feet), you can know when and how to jump, land, and so forth. This is, as you might have guessed, an important part of your balanced daily not-falling-to-your-deathfast.

So moving to a first-person view offers some serious challenges. You have to keep in mind that your players don't have as clear a view as they normally do. It's very hard to chain motions together because first-person view means they'll only be looking at whatever they are about to hit instead of being able to see everything around them.

Mirror's Edge tried to solve this problem in two ways. First, it painted things red. Red means "jump here", and if you see something red, you'll remember where it is even if you can't see it precisely at the moment. In the game it is used primarily to tell you where it is safe to make blind jumps, but it is occasionally (and in my mind, more importantly) useful in highlighting a path through puzzling terrain. In either way it works to offset the limited view of the player, although in the former application (jumping off buildings) it offsets a limited view that even 3rd-person players have. Crackdown had to zoom pretty far out and up to give you a decent view of where you were jumping to in such situations, and it still wasn't perfect.

The second way Mirror's Edge tries to solve the problem is through level design. Most of the levels consist of climbing up sheer, blind faces (or staircases) for a while, and then running and jumping in a generally downward direction. This is helpful because if you're looking down at where you're about to go, you can get a pretty good mental map of the place even if your viewpoint will be too limited to see much when you're actually in it. This considerably offsets the blindness, especially since you can usually see the red marker showing you where you ought to go next.

However, these methods (and other aspects of their level design) take most of the spontaneity out of navigating the levels. It's all made very linear, mostly a matter of pressing the left bumper at the right times, occasionally while fiddling with the control sticks. When you are "free" to move around (say, on a rooftop), your freedom is pointless as the only things worth doing are moving to whatever is red or climbing to the highest point so you can see where you're going.

My problem isn't that such movement is boring: it isn't. Or, rather, it doesn't have to be. My problem is that they didn't really embrace it at all.

In most modern movement games (Assassin's Creed, for example) a big part of the gameplay is figuring out how to work your way to some location. Sometimes, it's painfully linear, but there's usually a rewarding rhythm and sense of progress - for example, finding a new plot element, getting an upgrade, climbing to someplace high, or finding something weird. Unfortunately, Mirror's Edge tries to do this, but there is never any sense of progress because they wanted to focus on relentless forward movement rather than the slow figuring-and-working-forward pace of normal movement games. They wanted to be more like Sonic, so they don't ever give you any roses to stop and smell.

In other movement games, flow is the point. TMNT and Crackdown are good examples. When these are linear, they are linear in a really obvious way to allow you to know well in advance what buttons you should press when, giving your avatar a continuous stream of uninterrupted forward movement. When they aren't linear, they allow you to freely explore an INTERESTING terrain, rather than a tiny rooftop. Mirror's Edge tried to do this with red things but they didn't take it very far: they wanted to be more like Assassin's Creed.

This has the added problem that Mirror's Edge is entirely first person, which means you are mostly good at seeing places you AREN'T. Fundamentally, I think it's a rotten choice for a movement-based game, because movement-based games are about changing where you are, not changing where you aren't.

Another big issue is that the players are limited by what they can recognize in addition to what they can see. Games like Crackdown make it easy because your method of movement is actually pretty simple and limited, just amped up to silliness. But in a proper free running game, your movement capabilities are going to be a lot more nuanced: you aren't just jumping the fence, you're scrambling over it, or maybe it's low enough to Kong. Similarly, maybe you need to wall jump up to the lattice across the way.

This would be almost impossible to properly see using third-person view, and it IS impossible to see using first-person view. This is why real parkour and free runner folks carefully familiarize themselves with wherever they are before they do anything dangerous: they need to know the "grooves" in the local space, places where their capabilities will allow them to fluidly move through. It's not something that can really be done on the fly.

Most games try to get around this with level design. Oh, look, it's a wall of exactly that height, so I know I can scramble up it, every time. And I know there will never be a wall of ALMOST that height, or a wall of that height I can't scramble up for some reason... and I know that if I vault that wall, I will land safely on the other side, no matter what the terrain.

But this doesn't help chains of movements. You know you can vault the wall, but you don't realize that you need to spring off the wall to the chandelier and then swing across through the window. The only way you can know that is if you've seen all the parts of the chain and have them mapped out in your head. That's much easier to do from third person.

Well, there are a few other options, I think. One is touched on in Mirror's Edge: important elements can stand out (in this case, be colored red). If used more excessively, they can form an unbroken chain of where you SHOULD be going, allowing you to maintain flow. I would actually suggest something a bit less world-centric, such as lines of flowing, floating pips.

This limits the puzzle-ability of your game, though. If there's always an obvious path to get where you want to go, you're not going to have to think about it much. Instead, you'll be more like Sonic or TMNT or Crackdown: navigating is a lot of fun, but many of the challenges come from exploration or combat rather than navigation.

Another option is to remove the realtime element from the game. If you "draw" your path in space rather than navigating it personally, it will allow you to analyze exactly what the situation is in a more relaxed way, allowing your avatar's progress to be fluid and sequenced even if YOUR progress involves tweaking paths for a minute.

Anyhow, either or both of these options would get rid of one of the stupidest parts of Mirror's Edge: DYING. Whoops, I died. Respawn. Whoops, I died. Respawn. Often five, six times in a row. Unlike TMNT, the respawn is a significant irritation which often takes you back forty or fifty seconds (this doesn't sound irritating until you realize that you have to repeat that minute many times if you're trying for a difficult jump). Also unlike TMNT, it MAKES NO SENSE. There is absolutely no reason given for your amazing respawn talent. It's not part of the game world in any way. It's just there to let the designers create levels that you have to play through several times to be able to beat.

Nothing breaks immersion like inexplicable and unrewarding failure mechanics. :P

All that aside, I think that there IS some potential here. First-person mechanics are inherently more immersive, and you could make a very exciting game if only you could figure out how the player would navigate it.

Howl's Moving Castle

_{This is your pointless review of the month...}

I saw Howl's Moving Castle last night, and it was odd. The story was largely charming, the imagery was very interesting... but the animation was extremely erratic, and some of the plot just didn't make much sense. Not "not much sense" in a kind of fairy-tale vagueness, but "not much sense" as in "NOT MUCH SENSE". I can only presume the English dub skips a lot of the Japanese plot, because I've never seen a Ghibli movie make so little sense.

Who was that little kid living with Howl? WHY IS HE LIVING WITH HOWL? What's up with the prince? "Hi, I came out of nowhere! I'm in true love with you!" "Oh, I'm in love with someone else." "Oh, that's okay, I'll just come back in a few weeks." WTF?

Probably my least favorite Ghibli film (some of the animation was just flat-out BAD), but it's still better than most things out there.

Reviewer Unleashed!

Okay, I got a copy of the Force Unleashed, and I'm gonna whine about it.

Short review: Oh, look, another game where lightsabers don't cut shit and you suck! But with added quicktime events, because we don't want you to have any fun!

Long review: Wait, I played this game already. On this console, even. Except it was called Conan.

Except in Conan, your mana didn't refill as fast. This was okay, because fighting was fun. Conan was, of course, absolutely ruined by the idiotic quicktime events that happen at every point. Quel coincidence!

So, I haven't played the Force Unleashed for too terribly long just yet. I stopped when I got shot to death by a race that's not supposed to have fucking ranged weapons. So far, it's not very good. Their much-vaunted physics/animation system is... um... pointless? Not terribly interesting? The ability to throw shit at other shit doesn't really support very much gameplay. It's kind of fun for a bit, but it gets pretty repetitive.

The rest of the game is cookie-cutter action game. Your character might as well be Kratos, except that your melee combat is really dull and there are no really awesome boss battles. Just really boring ones.

Now that I've ranted, let's see what the average score is from the rest of the world... Reviewers seem to rate it as a high six or low seven, players seem to rate it as a high eight. I can only assume this is because reviewers are smarter than fanboys.

A lot of people talk about how pretty it is, which is true to a point. Boy, I sure would have liked them to think about using lights other than "ambient standard". I also liked how their cutscenes tend to use in-game animations, meaning walking so wooden and lock-step it's painful. The story might be good, but there's a whole lot of quicktime events between here and there, so it's going to be irritating.

Whine whine bitch moan. When did the rebels get shocksticks that can block lightsabers? Why does my lightsaber do a fraction of someone's HP in damage instead of, say, cutting them in half? For that matter, why can't I cut anyone in half? It's a big part of my Sithy ideal. Force grip, check. Cut people in half, not check. You see, that'd be straying from the cookie-cutter action-game mold, and they'd actually have to start thinking about balance and fun, instead of stamp-stamp-stamping down levels.

I'm always depressed by the new Star Wars games because Force Powers are depicted as, basically, D&D magic spells. Unleashed's push-physics is a step in the right direction, but let me explain to you what's missing from all of these titles:

The Force.

Whoa-ho, you know, it flows through all things, you can sense it, feel the Force, be one with the Force, trust the Force...

The Force can be more than just magic spells. In fact, in all the various Star Wars stuff (canon and otherwise) we see people on both sides doing a lot more with the Force than we do in these games. Stuff that seems insignificant until you think about just how cool it would be in a game.

For example, it's common for Force users to jump off something high and land on a moving vehicle. It's common for Force users to sense other Force users. And, hey, saber combat isn't about stringing together combos, it's about using the Force to guide your blade. Let's not mention the whole redemption/falling stuff, which is always simplified to a painfully childish level.

Here's a thought experiment: this is a Star Wars game very similar to the Force Unleashed. Except we'll start as completely untrained, and it's in black and white.

As we train up, colors are added. But they aren't the "true colors": they're representations of various ways of seeing the Force. So, when we learn to see the Force in all living things, we see all living things limned in, say, green. The further away they are, the more stuff in the way, the foggier and fuzzier the lining is. The halo sparks and fizzes based on the personality of the life form: a Sith would have delightfully sparky halo, while a Jedi might have one that is a gentle rivery-type effect.

When we learn to see opportunities - to "trust in the force" - we see a fog that flows towards important things, and bunches and swells with timing opportunities. So if we're standing in a corridor on a space base, we see a slight fog being sucked down the garbage shaft, or chugging in clumps towards the edge, where platforms are moving by beneath.

There could be a system for sensing raw Force, for sensing connections in the Force, for sensing danger, for sensing the future...

The idea being that, by the end of the game, you are experiencing a radically different environment than a non-Jedi. You can tell that people are going to shoot at you when you turn the corner, because you can see the red streaks that represent danger. You can tell when to jump off the cliff, because you can sense when the ship's going to drop by. You can track down another Jedi, because you can see his distinctive glow even from space.

I understand this kind of thing is difficult (especially to not make it overwhelming), but it is really any more difficult than the advanced physics and AI Unleashed uses?

To be honest, I'll gladly stick with shit-tastic Light Side powers if I can have the Force overlays.

What do you think? Have any of you played it?

Edit: Having played more of this game, I can safely say that I wouldn't have even given it a 6.

Soul Calibre IV

_{I haven't posted in a while because I'm working on a tool... more on that if I ever finish it. For now, have this piece of fluff!}

I bought Soul Calibre IV yesterday, just finished beating every character's story mode (no reward). I have some thoughts, not all of which are positive.

First, the good stuff. It's a solid game, a lot of fun to play. Everything moves nicely. Basically, it's what I hoped for.

Now, the whining.

Half the stories don't make any freaking sense. Half the characters just kind of stumble across the end boss, kill him, and then wander off. Ooh! Exciting! You spend three years doing eighty pieces of clothing for each character, but you can't spend ten minutes making sure their story makes sense?

Maybe I'm just spoiled by the extensive adventure mode in the previous game, which had a world map and a convincing set of mini-stories. Maybe I'm spoiled by DOA, in which all the characters actually have a personal reason to be beating the crap out of each other. Either way, I feel a bit let down by the lame endings.

I also feel let down by the new characters. I admit that most of the character designs are pretty shaky even on the best of days: they seem to follow a particular school of character design. "Did we see that character in a movie somewhere? Yes? Put it in, but change it so nobody will be able to sue us!"

The problem is that the new characters are all pretty dull. The new end boss is basically Cervantes (an end boss from an earlier game, now become a normal character), except without any sense of style. The add-ons are Yoda and Nameless Sith Apprentice. To be honest, they're pretty cool, but they clash with the scenery and make absolutely no sense. One of the sith's throws is to grab you by the throat with the blade of his light saber and throw you fifteen feet that way. It does 10% of your health in damage. No freakin' sense at all. (Also, Yoda appears to have been voiced by someone who thought he wasn't enough like Liono. He's got a weird, smarmy undertone all the time.)

The big thing they push for this game is clothing. Most characters can equip a huge variety of equipment in a large number of layers, which can then be knocked off in combat a'la Fighting Vipers. This is all well and good, except that it's really complicated, and not in a good way. There are six different kinds of "capacity" you can have that let you load up on skills, except that you have to unlock the skills. Also, you have health, defense, and attack stats that have a direct influence on the fight.

Trying to balance all this stuff is confusing at first, and then it's just irritating. It's basically impossible to get a fighter that doesn't look like a six-year-old who snuck into a Hollywood costuming closet. "I'm a ballerina! And... a bandit! And... a witch! And... um... a crocodile!"

Dunno, maybe there's a trick to it, but all my custom characters end up looking slightly demented.

Okay, very demented.

...

Also, as a side note, they've officially entered the uncanny valley. Whenever there's a close-up on a face, I shiver a little. Especially about the eyes, which have become really unpleasant-looking.

...

Last but not least is the fighting itself.

I'm a little concerned about the depth of skill this game can support. The blocking and countering feels too easy, the throws feel too accepting (I can throw people in the middle of their swing). I haven't been playing long enough to know for sure, yet, but it doesn't feel very deep.

Also, I don't know why the hell they're still doing that "FORWARD AND ATTACK = TWO INCH PUNCH, BACK AND ATTACK = GIANT FORWARD LEAP AND THRUST" crap. If I press forward and attack, I'd like to attack forward, not do a pelvic thrust or whatever other quarter-foot range attack they do. If I press back and attack, I'd like to attack while moving back.

It's especially irritating because half the characters do it that way, and half the characters do it the other. For a generalist like me, that's really irritating.

Anyway, there's my fluff-tastic review.

Lunch time, then back to tool programming.

Persona's Personas

_{(Apologies in advance for the pluralization. It's not my fault, I'm following the source material...)}

I'm playing Persona 3: Fez. I've been playing it for 915 hours, so I'm about halfway through it.

Overall, it's a very good game, obviously made by a team of experienced, polished professionals who know their vision inside and out - both for gameplay and story.

The part I'm disappointed about is, surprisingly, the personas.

For those of you who haven't played, personas are (unsurprisingly) pretty much the core of the gameplay.

In most RPGs, you equip a weapon and some armor, and you permanently learn spells and techniques. In persona, you equip a weapon and some armor, but you also equip packages of spells and techniques. Sort of like Final Fantasy Tactics' job system, except you can switch between rounds of combat.

Each persona is some mythological personality, like Jack Frost, Lilim, or Cerberus. They are not simply packages of abilities: switching to a different persona is more like swapping out a character. Although they inhabit your body (getting your HP, MP, and equipment), you inherit their affinities, weaknesses, statistics, spells, techniques, and abilities. You have no stats of your own.

The personas also gain levels, although not as fast as the main character (that's important). As the personas gain levels, their stats improve and they gain new abilities. So the personas really are characters, certainly more interesting than the bland, statless, abilityless main character. (I tried to name him "Basil Exposition" to give him the right feeling of being bland, but there wasn't enough space for the characters.)

What this means to me is that I fall in gamer love with specific persona. Exactly the way that you tend to favor your favorite characters in, say, a Final Fantasy game. I want to keep using specific persona. But you'll be thwarted because as the main character gains levels, he can create new personas.

Let's use an example. Let's say you've got two personas you really like: Jack Frost and Lilim. You gain a few levels, and you combine them to make a new persona: Cerberus (no, this isn't a feasible example). This removes Jack and Lilly from play, and to pull them back into play costs a small fortune. Although they don't lose levels, Cerberus will start between 3 and 8 levels higher than they are just due to the way this works. That's not so much "significant" as "insurmountable".

The more advanced personas are simply flat-out better. If I leveled Jack Frost and Cerberus both to level 99, Cerberus would be far more powerful: Jack Frost's most advanced abilities are about on par with Cerberus' middle abilities.

To make it worse, every level there are more personas you can build and more slots you have to store them in. I have a hard enough time remembering all my personas when I only have room for six... now I'm carrying around twelve and have fifty more in the bank? I can't even remember their NAMES any more, let alone feel some kind of connection to them.

As a specific example, my powermongering gamer heart fell in love with one persona in particular: Lilim. An early spellcasting persona, I accidentally built her to have five of the six elemental attacks.

This made her invaluable. I could fill the rest of my slots with anything I happened to stumble into without worrying about balance. If I had nothing but five fire demons and Lilim, I was all set: I run into something that absorbs fire, I switch to Lilim.

She was even an expert against the "brutal" encounters where they set you up against several enemies with conflicting weaknesses. I could use lightning against half the enemies, air against the other half, and wipe the floor with them.

However, even Lilim's horrible broken-ness could not resist the eternal march of levels. Even leveled as high as I could, she was still half the level of the newest generation of persona. Her abilities were all learned: she had nothing else on her docket, while the newest generation were learning spells that were more than twice as effective.

More importantly, her multi-elemental approach was itself becoming obsolete. It was hard to keep six elements and a healer all available when I only had six slots... but now that I had twelve, simple mathematics keeps them covered pretty well.

So, sadly, I retired Lilim (I had to retire her, she was so low level she couldn't be combined with anyone to make a useful persona). I haven't really gotten attached to any others since. I occasionally feel a twinge of interest at an interesting character, but why should I bother? In two missions, I'll have replaced him with something five levels higher. Probably two somethings.

To me, this is really saddening. Disposable characters always make me feel sad.

Did anyone else feel this way?