Octopus

Review Thing: Saints Row: The Third

2012-01-21T19:25:00.000Z

It's impossible to talk about this game without talking about some Rockstar games, so I'm gonna do that a bit.

I'm not a game historian and I haven't got the time right now to go look on Wikipedia or google an inevitably insightful article called The History of Rockstar, but with my broad brush I'm going to paint a picture: Rockstar is a developer which used to make games about killing people. Now they make games about individuals who are mired in the ethical quandries of killing people, and some people think this is art.

The argument goes that, despite not being very good either as narratives or games, these titles at least display an intention to have something to say, and so should be commended for going above and beyond games that don't 'say' anything. This is wrong. These are games in which the player is in control of the protagonists retarded brother, a la Lenny in of Mice and Men, interrupting the protagonist's personal journey for redemption or peace of mind with a single-minded desire to murder people by shooting them in the face. In Red Dead Redemption, tortured cowboy John Marston is looking for the man who betrayed him and left him for dead. It is convenient that in order to do so he must kill hundreds of people with lots of finely-tuned weapons and a machine gun mounted on the back of a horse-drawn carriage.

Some people figured it out: Call of Duty isn't about politics or patriotism or anything like that. It's about finding an excuse for the elation we feel when slaughtering humanoids. It's almost comical the lengths the game goes to to justify what it is you are doing: THE RUSSIANS THEN LIKE TOTALLY INVADED EUROPE AND BLEW UP A CHILD AND SHOT UP AN AIRPORT THOSE DICKS. Games like Red Dead Redemption provide nothing more than a strong excuse. Marsden's quest for redemption and reconciliation is an internal justification, which contextualises the actions of the player as necessary for the advancement of Marston as a chess piece in a series of events constituting a 'narrative'. Don't let this distract you from the fact that these games are still juvenile power-fantasies as have existed for aeons in the pantheon of videogamedom. These games are lying to you.

Saints Row: The Third only lies to you a little. The majority of it is absolutely bananas, so tonally it can accommodate you playing the game for the story or playing the game how you want (that is to say, like a maniac). There is a mission where you play as a toilet. You run up to people and melee them and you play the same animation as usual, except you are a toilet. The lid flaps up and down. If you cannot see the genius in this then really don't know what to say. To list all the similar bits I liked would ruin the only part of this game worth talking about. Whilst the game is a succession of inventive contexts, the gameplay remains consistently only just above average the whole time; not well designed, just well written.

I thought this was charming at first. It was a game that liked fast cars because they go VROOOM. It was a game that liked guns because they go BANGBANG and make people fall over. It was a game that wallowed in itself, yelling proudly from the rooftops 'I symbolise nothing!'

Once I'd finished the game's missions, I searched it's overworld for more of this insanity. After a short while I realised what I was actually doing was playing this other, really boring game where you go from one floating 'for sale' sign to another pressing the y button to make various numbers go up and down. If the number that I needed to be up wasn't up enough I could go into the pause menu and make it go up automatically, an ability I had received as a reward for going up to signs and pressing the y button. If I really wanted something to do there were mini-games to play, but I only put up with that shit in No More Heroes because it was necessary for progression and satirical. This is neither. This is doing a number of activities just as much as I want numbers to go up. Do I want that? Should I want that? All I know is that I wanted to play this game a whole lot more when it was lying to me.

Let's talk about Grand Theft Auto again. I was eleven years old when I 'played' San Andreas. Usually when I say I played x, I mean 'having engaged with the content of x in a manner of which the developer intended'. I don't classify using the disk to hold my page in a book as 'playing' it, even though I paid for the disk and I could do that with it. Neither do I 'play' Alan Wake when instead of moving to the next trigger I try hopelessly to jump off a bridge. Though I say I 'played' San Andreas, I never touched more than like two missions. I played this other game that was there on the disk, where I put all the cheats on and ran around killing a whole lot of people, usually in really fucked up ways.

There's a lot of moral outrage about that kind of thing, but lets forget the question of whether those games were right or wrong because that question is always boring*. Let's consider for a moment why people were outraged: this was a game that let people engage in violent acts, and for many was a kind of implicit endorsement of said acts. Now I dont tend to think that the folks at rockstar want people to buy a sniper rifle, find a good spot and kill as many police officers as possible, but I think they're well aware of the nihilistic power fantasy it represents, and they've gone to lengths to accommodate that.

The cities in these games weren't intended to be simulations. Policemen didn't get called from the station and drive there. Citizens weren't rushed to hospital. Hot dog stand owners didn't have wives to feed. So when people in the games media call these 'living breathing worlds' they are stupid and maybe indicating there is something wrong with their brains. The minutia of these worlds are clearly generated as you turn the corner of every street. Go up a crane and look below, and the sollipsism of these worlds is patently obvious. These worlds gain their power from how they superficially represents an urban environment, not how the game simulates one. Each story mission occurs in the same environment populated with enough agents to make a car chase exciting as you rocket past them. My eleven year old self was perverting this.

I mean what was I doing, really? I was living out the fantasy of going out into the street, stopping a taxi in the street and shooting him through the windscreen**. This city to me was a crude representation of human activity that I could use to live out violent fantasies without the consequences of being shot dead or being arrested or even having it reflect on my character. I wasn't a person who did violent things in the real world, even though, and despite the fact, I had some desire to.

So in Saints Row 3 if you shoot a random civilian they flip through the air ridiculously. The police show up and after a few minutes you begin to notice that the civilians aren't there any more. It's just a load of buff dudes with guns shooting at you. Same with gangs. I used to get into fights with the police in GTA, but there I was going fucking crazy in a city to scare people and have the police come after me, and then I get to bazooka a police car, because that caveman part of my brain thought that was so fucking cool. Eventually the army would show up: the army! I'd kill them too, steal their tanks, it was pretty cool. Getting the gangs to hate you in Saints Row 3 causes them to send big muscled dudes who can flick cars away, a guy with a flame-thrower, and Ramona Flowers from Scott Pilgrim. The decision to have being in trouble feel like that probably came from a slide in a Powerpoint presentation early on in development titled 'enemy variety', but what it means is that going crazy in a city doesn't feel like going crazy in a city. It feels like playing a video game where enemies keep attacking you, especially when you get flying motorcycles with gatling guns or tanks with laser beams. This isn't a call to realism, it's a call to representational simulation, you feel me?

When I was enjoying this game, as a series of well-designed linear missions set in an interesting world connected by at the very least outlandish narrative tissue, I noticed that his game loves its toys but cant think of anything interesting to do with them, so it just kinda gives you them and asks you to figure it out. This would be cool but, like I said, going crazy in this world has no representational value, and frankly has no game value either, since the coolest things are usually aerial vehicles, and enemies can't really effectively attack you while you're up there. There is also no opportunity to, say, come up with a strategy of using the flying motorcycle you got to complete this mission faster. So you get all this cool shit that's no fun to use in this world and impossible to use in this mission. This is reason #2345 this game is not as good as Volition's previous Red Faction Guerilla, which I'm now content to write off as a fluke.

Saints Row The Third superficially resembles a kind of heightened GTA III, but inside it's rotten core of a heart it's just a GTA III that's divorced itself from reality so completely that it violent escapades aren't so provocative. It doesn't appeal to that fucked up part of my brain that wants to just randomly murder people, and accusations of encouraging violent behaviour seem trivial*** in the face of it's absurdity. Beyond attitude it's not really a very interesting game. Do you want that? Are you looking for that? Or are you looking for a game that doesn't lie to you as much as play with you, nodding and winking at it's own adolescent absurdity? I don't know. Who are you? Why am I asking you again?

* The answer is neither! I am a philosophy student and am qualified to say this.

** was this only added in GTA IV? I can't remember

*** Accusations of sexism + a severely fucked up sense of sexual morality are not however. Women in this game are constantly parading themselves around with little more than two strips of fabric placed over their giant swinging mammary glands. There's also an explicit division between men and women's clothes that largely hinges on how much cleavage was programmed into your character at the outset. The only way to not look ridiculous as a woman is to wear men's clothes, and while I appreciate that they give you that option (as well as the option for men to do vice versa), I'm made more than a little uncomfortable by the suggestion that women are creatures whose sexuality must perpetually be on show.

And MY GOD is this game afraid of sex. It is full of sexy characters who are supposed to be adults but the only things implied to actually be doing it are varieties of basically mute sex workers. The only explicitly sexual act reference in the game is when a man is anally raped repeatedly by leather clad gimps in an S&M club. In the world of Saints Row sex is a means be which people control each other, and a form of violence perpetrated by sick, crazed individuals. My understanding was that this game was developed by grown-ups but I'm not quite sure.

In case anyone was wondering...

2011-08-28T02:53:00.003+01:00

Yes I did make another game. It's a two-player game called Our Conflict is Meaningless that I made for the Blitzkast a few weeks ago. I started and finished it in 4 hours, so it's a bit rough.

Also, I am a member of the Poppenkast now, which is a really cool thing!

Also also: I have been neglecting this blog. I would like to say it's because I'm working on a huge project right now (which I am) but it's mostly due to a lack of motivation. OH WELL.

Let's Kill Hitler is the worst thing Moffat has ever written for Doctor Who.

2011-08-28T01:42:00.001+01:00

Let's Kill Hitler

What a wonderful title! That's what I thought six months ago when I saw it come up at the end of the mid-series finale. It's the archetypal Time Travel fantasy - going back in time and stopping the most evil man who ever lived, retroactively punishing him before he could carry out his atrocities. It's also a Doctor Who episode that writes itself: someone wants to use time travel kill Hitler, but just like River said in The Impossible Astronaut: revenge isn't his thing, and just like the man himself said in Vincent and the Doctor: life is made up of good things and bad things and each define us.

Spoilers below for, uh, well pretty much everything.

This all happens of course except it's contrived to the point of absurdity and then thrown away in an instant. The Doctor is taken hostage at gun point by Amy and Rory's closest childhood friend, Mels, and demands to be taken to kill Hitler because... reasons. But surprise! It turns out that Mels, the very important character we have known for a long time, is actually River Song/ Melody Pond, but before she knew the Doctor, so Alex Kingston gets to strut around chewing the scenery and even sometimes forgetting to act at all. It turns out that young River is both not as interesting and also several times as annoying as older River.

Okay, so I don't like to make rules up for things, but introducing a character, and then in the next scene showing a montage where you reveal she's been there the whole time and everyone already knows her should be banned, and punishment should be death. I am fucking serious here. Moffat probably thought to himself 'wouldn't it be cool if a character that was Amy's friend was a pre-regeneration River Song?', but then he remembered that he forgot to include any friends for Amy. What's the solution? Throw the idea away! Don't make one up and insult my intelligence by trying to pull a twist out of your arse! It only works if you earn it, and Let's Kill Hitler doesn't - 4 minutes is not enough time for me to care that Mels is really... anybody.

Okay so then, after they're in Hitler's office, Rory punches him and then locks him in a cupboard and we never hear from him again. See what I mean about contrived? Why even have Hitler in here at all if you're going to forget about him so soon? In fact, why even set the episode in 1938 Germany if the plot is going to revolve around River Song and the Doctor being poisoned and whatever? Could it possibly be to include lots of images of Hitler in the preview materials, or perhaps to justify the use of a that title? The answer is yes.

Next: the final scene. Sorry, I meant the second scene. So River poisoned the Doctor and then the Doctor went inside his spaceship and just checked with his computer that he was going to die for realsies. Which he is. Oh no!

One of the problems some people had with the Impossible Astronaut is that it tried to get us to care about the Doctor dying, when the audience knows full well that he's not going to. The program is going to go on, and so is the Doctor. The reason I thought it worked there though was that 1) more questions were raised than 'would the Doctor die?' and 2) the characters genuinely believed he was dead. We understood the events through their eyes and empathised with their feelings. However, when he's dying, totally for realsies remember, for like 20 minutes at the end of Let's Kill Hitler, there's nothing at all mysterious about his death, and neither Amy nor Rory nor the audience, believes for one second that is ever going to happen.

And really, think about this: what's the plot of this episode? I mean, after Hitler's shoved in a cupboard? There's that robot thing that's trying to kill River, but the plot isn't really about that. All the drama actually hinges on The Doctor dying, and I didn't stop rolling my eyes around in their sockets until River used her magic regeneration energy to bring him back to life. Oh and by the way, this used up all of her regenerations, which is why she died in the Library. I would call it contrived plot convenience of the 'Call Me... Magneto!' variety, but they already explained that the thing in the library would kill a Time Lord anyway. It just seems like Moffatt messing with continuity for... I can't even think of a reason! Is it because it made River bringing the Doctor back a sacrifice? Is that because The Doctor could have just told her what to do otherwise, and so we wouldn't have had that 'He's dead, Oh No!' scene that didn't even work anyway?

It's impossible to say it's a complete failure, since it's got some neat ideas. The little people piloting the robot was neat (even if it was once again very convenient that they landed at exactly the right place and time, though this happens in Doctor Who pretty much every week, so I'll forgive it). I also really liked the Jellyfish things that 'implement death' as well. However, these big ideas were pushed to the sidelines so Moffat could continue the story of River, a story which teaches us absolutely nothing that wasn't already implied anyway. Let's Kill Hitler has all the problems of a prequel without the excuse of being one.

Let's Kill Hitler isn't just boring, like the 2nd-worst Moffat script, The Beast Below, it's contrived, incoherent and self-indulgent. Worst of all, it kind of seemed like it's going to be important going forward.

A Little Thing

2011-07-26T12:06:00.001+01:00

I make youtube videos now.

New Game

2011-07-04T13:10:00.003+01:00

Yes, it's true!

An Important Announcement.

2011-07-04T01:59:00.000+01:00

People, I understand that you hate me, but it's never been more important that you listen to me than it is now. Stay calm and prepare yourselves for what it is I have to say.

Ricky Gervais is a robot dog.

I'm not sure about the where or hows or whys yet. I'm not sure if this is localised or whether you should stay indoors. I'm not even sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. The only thing I know is that I must go forth and spread the word. I imagine this is what Moses must have felt.

Go home to your loved ones, look them in the eyes, and say 'I love you and Ricky Gervais is a robot dog' then embrace them. Today we are all but men in the eyes of God.

E3 COVERAGE DAY 11: Exclusive Interview with the Creative Director of Hitman 5.

2011-06-24T21:16:00.004+01:00

The future.

So what did you set out to do with the new Hitman game?

Don't you mean 'Hitman: Absolution'?

I literally could. Not. Give. A shit.

Well, with 'Hitman Absolution' we set out to make a game that captured the stealthy aspects of the old games, but refined those mechanics until all that was left was a thick, juicy Pulp. We then reconstituted this something that more or less resembled a Hitman game.

Oh, that sounds a lot like what Ubisoft did wi-

Shhhh.

Splinter Ce-

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Shhhh. We know what you're going to say, but we want you to know that this is totally different in every way conceivable. You see, Conviction was muddied by a tumultuous development.

Haven't you been making this one Hitman game for like 5 years? Haven't you also been hit by massive layoffs in that time?

Well, the other difference is that Conviction was made by the French. The dirty, dirty French.

Oh, well I don't know abou-

We're Danish.

Okay... Umm... So, uh, why did you set out to destroy everything people liked about your game?

Well, what we figured was is that gamers pride themselves on the franchises they follow. To them it is an integral part of their identity. They don't play the games they love because they love them in a lot of cases. They play them because they know them, and because they want to continue knowing them. Even when the series becomes terrible over time, fans still flock around the latest titles, just to be 'in-the-know'. How many shitty Sonic sequels are we at now? like 8? And there's still this hardcore fanbase that buys that stuff, right, because it's part of their identity - it's an integral component of who they are. It's not even a social aspect, where they talk to other Sonic fans about how much sonic sucks. No, it's sadder than that. Nerds grew up with these things and they cling to them as hallmarks of their identity, even if they don't like them any more or the people behind these franchises never cared about them in the first place.

What we figured was that Blood Money was one of the most beloved and critically acclaimed games of all time, so all the hard work was done. Hitman is a 'thing'. A tumour on the game industry that won't go away until we destroy it intentionally or kill it through incompetence. People are going to buy the next game just because they liked the last game. In fact, people are going to buy the next game as a statement of just how much they liked the last game. When fans inevitably start their 6 page write-ups of how Absolution is 'the worst game ever', they'll begin with 'I was a huge fan of Blood Money'.

So then, we have those people sewn up nicely. What comes next is appealing to everybody else in the world, which is hard but we've come up with a few solutions to manage it. Firstly, we'll appeal to those people who love shooting stuff with guns and hitting people with things. God bless these caveman-brained cretins. They're the ones whose gaming diet consists of Call of Duty, Gears of War, and Michael Jackson: the Experience (for when they fancy trying something different). They single-handedly keep this industry afloat. They're also not intelligent enough to have an existential crisis, which is why we call them 'long-term consumers'.

What's the criteria for pleasing these people? Guns, Explosions, Dead People, more Guns. We have all of those. In fact, even if we didn't have all of those, all we'd have to do is put them on the cover of our game and these fuckers would still buy it.

... You're done?

Yes.

You're insane.

'No, no, the other thing'

What?

It's... it's like that line. From Superman?

I don-

WRONG!

I want this interview to be over.

One thing we noticed with previous Hitman games is that people would look at a situation and think 'I have too many options', or 'I have to live with the consequences of my actions for like 20 minutes, which is no good'. What we decided to do was reduce the amount of things you can do so that these people would stop thinking that.

But those sound like the people who don't enjoy the game on a fundamental level.

You're absolutely right. These guys are the kind of people who always wished they could play stealth games but just never got into it because they didn't have the time or it didn't resemble the games they already play in enough numerable ways. These people don't actually enjoy stealth games but wish that other people thought they did. They, like the hardcore fans, seek to use games as an augmentation of their identity, except these guys aren't even basing it on something they liked originally. There is no nostalgia for them. There is no memory of 'that time in Blood Money when I...'; it doesn't exist. They haven't had a positive experience that they want to last as an epoch of game design. They want games they don't play to play like games they do play. They want the illusion of choice without the drawback of potential unsuitability to their wants. We hare happy to oblige them with their request.

That's very nearly almost evil.

Thank you for your time.

I think I say that.

Thank you.

2011-06-22T13:26:00.000+01:00

"I wondered if the single most damning thing about video games is the fact that one could argue, legitimately, that 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is a better game than L.A. Noire"

Tom Bissel's LA Noire review.

E3 Predictions 2011

2011-06-04T18:12:00.004+01:00

SO ARE YOU READY FOR THE E3 COVERAGE HERE ON OCTOPUS IT IS SURE GONNA BE SOMETHING ILL BE ON THE SHOW FLOOR AND ILL HAVE SOME INTERVIEWS WITH RANDY PITCHFORD AND MAYBE IF I HANG ROUND THE NINTENDO BOOTH LONG ENOUGH WE'LL GET A LOOK AT REGGIE OR MIYAMOTO OR REGGIE AND MIYAMOTO TAKING PART IN SOME KIND OF SATANIC RITUAL OH JEEZ ITS THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN OH YE-HA THERELL BE SOME BRAND NEW GAMES THAT I KNOW ABOUT BUT I AM NOT TELLING YOU ABOUT BECAUSE WELL I DONT REALLY KNOW BUT WOWEE DO WE HAVE A SHOW ON OUR HANDS

I will actually be trying to cover E3 in some capacity from my home here in London. Despite petty geographical matters I will be trying to post some kind amateurish commentary on events which, let's be honest, is the absolute worst kind.

But anyway, E3 hasn't actually happened yet, so I'm gonna do some pre-E3 stuff, namely: predictions. ARE YOU READY!?!?!?!?!(!?!?!)

Microsoft
I expect the big thing to come out from them will be Kinect games. It sold great despite having absolutely no notable software to show for itself, so I think Microsoft really need to get some out there to keep it's momentum going.

There's already been some leaked boxart for both Ghost Recon: Future Soldier and Mass Effect 3 that shows a 'better with Kinect' logo on the box, which is indisputable evidence of some hybrid Kinect/controller stuff incoming. I think there are a great deal more than just those two, and I promise to methodically smash each one of my fingers in with a hammer if Gears of War 3 doesn't have some kind of Kinect functionality. I also expect some Kinect-only games, but if Microsoft has quasi-Kinect 'core' games and full-Kinect 'casual' games in the wings, they're gonna use E3 to showcase the former at the expense of the latter.

There's no getting over the elephant in the room: The Big Thing going into E3 is the new Nintendo console. Do Microsoft try and go all out for their core fans to tackle them head on, or do they continue playing catch-up to the 'broad audience' like they did last year?

Either way, I don't expect a lot. There'll be a new Halo (probably 343's Combat Evolved remake), and maybe we'll see what Peter Molyneux's working on, but I don't think anything too surprising is coming here. Microsoft aren't really known for their exclusive software anyway.

EA
Okay so... Battlefield 3, Mass Effect 3 and The Old Republic are the big ones. I expect those to consume the most time at their presser, with stuff like SSX and their sports titles mopping up the rest of it.

EA went through this period of super-creativity a few years ago, but now I can't think of a single game they have coming out that isn't a known quantity. Even Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 3 are pretty easy to understand. They're games that I don't really need to hear anything more about: Mass Effect 3 will be a shootery-RPG type thing. Battlefield 3 will be a shootery online type thing. There, done.

Looking at their line-up, I don't see anything big, which leads me to believe they have something up their sleeve. Dead Space 3? Dante's Inferno 2? No matter how many dicks I offer to suck, no one wants to make Mirror's Edge 2, so that's not happening. Are they finally gonna show what Respawn are working on? If they do, they have a good chance of walking away as the talking point of the entire show, especially since Bungie's Activision project is expected to be a no-show.

Edit: All signs point to them revealing their Insomniac exclusive. That'll be it then.

Ubisoft
Firstly, I think a large portion will be taken up with a playable demo of Assassin's Creed Revelations, just like with Brotherhood last year. Secondly, I think an even larger portion of the show will be taken up by Tom Clancy stuff. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier went silent a while ago, despite the fact it's supposed to be out by now, so I expect that to pop up again (in fact, the boxart pretty much confirms it will be). Aside from that Kotaku already blew the lid on a new Rainbow 6 set in New York, and Ubisoft Toronto are working hard on a new Splinter Cell, so maybe that will show up?

In fact, I think the conference is going to be more or less exactly the same as last year: 'gamer games' (shooters + Assassins Creed) to start, followed by casual shovel ware, followed by a short collection of some weird creative stuff like From Dust and the new Rayman.

Part of me wants to believe Beyond Good and Evil 2 is coming but part of me also really wants to throw things out of windows just to see what would happen. There was a rumour a short while ago that Ancel had postponed it until after he completed a game based on the new Tintin movie. Peter Jackson first began collaborating with Ancel because he loved Beyond Good and Evil, so if it turns out he is stopping that from happening just so he doesn't have a guilty conscience about his Tintin movie I will personally find him and be mushed into a pulp by his extensive security detail. It's something that needs to be done.

Sony
Ummm.... I don't own a playstation of any kind, so I don't really care. Sorry.

Nintendo
Like I said: the big news is that Nintendo is showing off a new console.

So what we know so far is 1) it's coming next year 2) it'll have a touch screen controller and 3) it'll be easily more powerful than Xbox 360 and PS3. IGN tried to assemble something comparable to the console using commercially available parts, but the exercise was somewhat misguided considering the final console won't run windows, and will be optimized for playing games. It's safe to assume it'll be far more powerful than what they mixed together, but how powerful that is exactly remains to be seen.

In regards to the controller: I have absolutely no Idea how the thing is supposed to function. It's gotta be able to play current-gen titles, so it's gotta have dual analogue and heaps of buttons AND a 6 inch touch screen. Not only is it hard to imagine as a physical object, it's hard to imagine how much this thing is supposed to cost, especially if the Nikkei report is to be believed, and this thing is actually a handheld in it's own right. Will there be a non-touch screen controller in the box with this thing sold seperatly? Will it support Wii controls? I wish I had faith in Nintendo to pull it off, but the Wii and the 3DS have damaged my faith in the company's ability to pull this off.

Very, very recently there was a list of games claiming to be from somebody who works at the ESRB. I cannot for the life of me find the original source, so, against my better judgement, I'm going to quote an article from Destuctoid:

One of the more popular Project Cafe rumors going around right now comes from someone who claims to work for the ESRB, an agency which is tasked to rate the appropriateness of everything vidoegame related, even the trailers. This ESRB employee claims to have seen the video that Nintendo will be showing at E3 to promote Project Cafe --or, as they call it, "Current" -- and the list of games they've named from the video is pretty astounding.

This list includes: a new mini-game collection, Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros. 4, Endless Ocean, Pikmin, Kirby, a new Zelda collection, Animal Crossing, Kid Icarus, Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario., Dead Rising 2, Street Fighter 4, Resident Evil 5 "or something that looked like it," Silent Hill Downpour, a new Suda51 game that is "not No More Heroes" but is about "something hunting demons," "some mech game," Trauma Center: Current Crisis, Soul Calibur, Tekken, GTA V, Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, "some Metal Gear Solid game where you play as a girl," "some cyber punk game" that looks like Snatcher, Gradius, Contra, Castlevania, and "Fallout 3 or 4."

I wouldn't give it much credence, but then I saw this on my twitter feed (click to enlarge):

Of course, the post could have been based on the previous rumours. It's entirely possible this is a load of bullshit, and come Tuesday I'll look silly having believed it, but right now they kind of look legit. We'll see.

I Revoo Doctor Who: The Almost People

2011-06-02T01:30:00.000+01:00

So, uh, wow. Who'd have thought that last's week's decidedly dull opener had this up it's sleeve? There was only two ways it was really going to pan out: The Almost People would continue to build up slowly and awkwardly without coming to a satisfying conclusion, or it would take the world that it had set up in the first part and just go for it with as much energy as it could muster. Thankfully it was the latter.

Oh hey, guess what: spoilers!

I don't want to say that this really should been a single episode rather than a two-parter, but all the really interesting stuff happened this time around: there were two Doctors, a more even handed analysis of the Gangers, and a genuine sense of tension. The Rebel Flesh kind of looks like it was stretched out to fill the time by comparison, so I wonder if this episode wouldn't have benefited from a shorter runtime. Maybe the Doctor could have arrived just as the Gangers wake up? Or just shortly after?

Speaking of two Doctors: there were two Doctors in this episode! And rather than have this be the main gimmick in an otherwise lifeless 'war' plot (I'm thinking particularly of the awful 'The Doctor's Daughter' from a few years back), the conflict with the Gangers is still the core story thread, with the two Doctors strengthening it, rather than providing a more interesting diversion. I also want to say that the two actors had great chemistry, but they were both Matt Smith. In any case, Matt Smith had great chemistry with himself as always.

It's delightful watching the Doctor have such fun standing alongside himself, ecstatic at the simple joy of a new experience in a way that feels very true to his character. There a number of moments where we see the pain in the Doctor's eyes as he's shunned by Amy, or the rage with which he pushes Rory away, where it seems like the Doctor is going to side with the Gangers in killing the humans, but it's a fake-out. The twist of the episode hinges on an understanding of the core philosophy of the Doctor's character. There's too much love in the Doctor for him to kill the humans, or the Gangers, but the way he acts never feels like it's being conjured up just for the sake of the plot. He acts like he's with the Gangers to earn their trust. He swaps the shoes because he doesn't mind bearing unwarranted prejudice to make a point. Matthew Graham writes a story that demonstrates just how good the Doctor really is, and it never feels cheap or smug about it.

Keeping with that idea, I was also really impressed with how the conflict wound up. In the end, it's not the Doctor who saves the day, but it's humanity, who he helps realise what they want. They don't want to be murderers. They don't want to be monsters. The transformation of Jennifer from sweet young girl to scheming psychopath is not just an excuse for scary monster scenes and violence, but the thematic underpinning of the episode. In the end, the humans and the flesh reject violence because despite what it could achieve, it fundamentally alters who they are.

I'm super hopeful that Matthew Graham will come back and write some more 'Who' in the future, because The Almost People was pretty excellent. The lacklustre nature of The Rebel Flesh stops this being a great 2-parter, but the latter half is definitely my favourite non-Moffat episode of this series.

This was a bit of a short review but I don't really have much to say other than that it was a smart, entertaining and thoughtful episode. Oh, and HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT TIME

Brink sort-of review.

2011-05-24T01:30:00.000+01:00

You. Maybe.

The reaction to Brink has been weird, and I think that's because it's a really fucking weird game. Some people have glanced at the vibrant white environments and the first-person climbing stuff and compared it to DICE's Mirror's Edge, but that's only a superficial resemblance. The climbing doesn't reward skill in the same way Mirror's Edge does, and the game contrasts it's sparkling utopian industrial locations with rusty, dilapidated slum towns, which is precisely eight-million percent more varied than Mirror's Edge was. Where Brink really resembles Mirror's Edge is that it takes some unorthodox approaches to the fundamentals of the genre. I personally think Mirror's Edge suffered critically from not having a focus for it's novel mechanics; it controlled great, but struggled to invent a challenge better than 'go forward'. Brink's dodges this pitfall by being a tried and true team-based online shooter. If all else fails, you will get to shoot some people in the face and win matches.

The impression I got from the game's marketing was that the quasi-multiplayer nature of the game would be a more important than it is. Blame my expectations, but I was kind of hoping it would not only be novel, but also click together in a satisfying way. In the end all it amounts to is, outside of a few challenge maps, a game that features only multiplayer modes. Yes, it's possible to play the 'campaign' mode offline, but 1) you don't want to 2) I'd technically still classify it as multiplayer. The campaign in Modern Warfare 2 is not multiplayer because the enemies and allies are constructed to perform select functions. They only carry one gun, they peak out of cover for the player to shoot them, and they are balanced in way to entertain the player rather than to express themselves. What I mean is that the enemies don't have agency in the way we understand a player character, or even a potential player character, to have. Even when playing against AI, you're all playing with the same set of rules - the game is not rigged against them in the way a true single player game would be, and their winning is a perfectly reasonable outcome of the game system.

Now, the problem with recent online-heavy shooters like Homefront and Medal of Honour is that rather than try to acknowledge the elephant in the room, they try and sell their own elephants. It's hilarious to see THQ spent all this money trying to come up with something that would ape Call of Duty, and the method they chose was to essentially make exactly the same game and hope people would pick it up by mistake. The conundrum is that they want to make a game that will make people sit up and notice, but they also have to make something that's going to sell if even it doesn't. They've been paralysed into making me-too products, seemingly ignorant of the fact that CoD got big by appealing to people who didn't like CoD. Brink immediately wins kudos for trying to offer an alternate experience.

There are no 'KDs', or even a post-match readout of your performance, in Brink. Some reviews I've seen have talked about this as a 'missing feature', but this fails to consider that it's missing on purpose. The focus is not on what you're doing for yourself, but what you're doing for your team. Not 'am I getting kills?', but 'am I winning matches?'. Actually, it's more like 'am I gaining experience', which I suppose CoD does as well, except not really. Experience in CoD is just a by-product of how many people you can murder and how big you can make some numbers on your playercard. Experience in Brink, thanks to the omission of post-match read-outs, genuinely directs the player into performing certain actions above and beyond kills: building gun nests, capturing command posts, completing objectives or buffing your team mates.

So what makes Brink so weird then? Well, it's actually two game design ideologies pulling against each other with no clear victor. Brink wants to one-up CoD in terms of customisation, but it also wants to be a game where you work as a part of a whole. This clash of individualism and collectivism ultimately leaves the game unfocused and hard to understand from the player's perspective.

Let's talk about CoD again. There's no denying that CoD4's multiplayer caught on in a big way. Whether it was innovative is arguable; it was more-or-less a combination of an online-shooter with a character RPG. Instead of choosing what fire spell some spiky-haired berk was going to use, you were deciding what guns and equipment you would be taking out into the game. It was more than just unlocking new guns, it was building your own character. It was making choices to define your own interaction with the game world. The extent to which this approach has been borrowed by other multiplayer games in almost every genre imaginable is a testament to the power of that idea. I think it was a forgone conclusion that Brink would have customisation in the vein of CoD, but it then tries to one-up it by allowing you to customise not only your guns, attachments and perks, but also the appearance and body-types of your character.

However, this kind of system is designed for a game of individual triumphs. Even when you're playing with friends on CoD, the focus is on how you are doing. What's your KD? What gun are you using? Are you having a good or bad match? In Team Deathmatch, the winning team is largely irrelevant, and while objective-based game modes are hampered by excessive individualism, victory in them is at best irrelevant and at worst unnecessary to the meta-game of levelling up and building your load out. Brink, however, makes a number of decisions to emphasise collective action over individual heroism. Assault rifles have barely enough ammo to kill somebody and while using a pistol grants you a knife it's not a one-hit kill by any stretch of the imagination. The idea is that firing as a group will be more effective than flanking 5 enemies on your own.

Also, whilst it's possible to customise your guns and abilities extensively, you still have to choose one of four classes, but you can switch between them from any command post on the battlefield. It's a muddied system: The logic behind some things being customisable and some things not being customisable is unclear. For instance, it's possible to change to any gun you like from within a match, but it's impossible to change what attachments you have on them. I'm not saying that every game should be like CoD, but the weapon system is used for the same effect and gains nothing by being limited the way it is. The game gives you enough freedom to choose your preferred class, weapons etc., but it also wants to be a co-operative classed based shooter, so it can't prevent you from winning games with your inappropriate personal choice, that's presumably why classes work the way they do.

Splash Damage are actually a London-based developer literally down the road from me. I'm halfway tempted to just kind of walk up there and leave these questions at the reception for somebody to answer (That won't be creepy or anything). I don't want to speculate on the internal workings of Splash Damage, but they're past work is dominated by team-based online shooters rather than individualist ones. This, in conjunction with the excellent art design and fiction the game lavishly under represents, leads me to believe that Brink was an absolute labour of love for the development team. However, it's been tempered by the realities of the market and the conditions of cultural relevance for a video game in 2011. Brink isn't broken or poorly made, but just unfocused; the result of two approaches to online shooters pulling against each other. Right now it's clear the developer was passionate about it, but it's hard to understand exactly what they were going for.

Brink feels like the poorly-timed punchline to a joke. Just take a breath and try again. I'll promise to laugh next time.

I Revoo Doctor Who: The Rebel Flesh

2011-05-22T00:50:00.000+01:00

So, this week's episode was written by Matthew Graham, who previously wrote the series two episode Fear Her. This episode was actually a lot better than Fear Her, but I would hardly call that any kind of accomplishment.

Am I being too negative? I love Doctor Who, I really do, but even I have to admit that the majority of it is a load of rubbish. I mean, for every Impossible Astronaut there's a Beast Below, and for every Utopia there's about three End of Times. I remember when Moffat took over the job as showrunner, I kind of expected every episode to be great from then on. I don't think the last few weeks have been great at all, but that's to be expected. Even though I think the quality has gone up, there are still mediocre episodes in every series, and I'd be a crazy man to demand otherwise. It's just how Doctor Who works. It's a Doctor Who thing. Maybe I shouldn't tolerate it but I do, because when it's good it's inventive, intelligent, entertaining and wonderful. When it's not then it's Fear Her.

I'm just gonna make a habit out of this: Spoilers below (though no really big ones)!

So the Doctor arrives on a kind of Acid mine/factory in a monastery on future earth (as you do) to find that the people there don't mine the acid themselves, but use mind-controlled doppelgängers (called 'Gangers') made out of this alien substance called 'The Flesh'. A solar storm hits the facility and the Gangers start walking around on their own, struggling to come to terms with having the exact same memories as their human counterparts, and just generally being all freaky-looking. Got all that? That's basically the entire plot.

The episode moves along at a fair clip and features lots of science-fictiony concepts which surprisingly aren't just the Doctor yelling about reversing polarity and whatnot. I said a while ago that Doctor Who is fantasy and not science-fiction, but The Rebel Flesh does deal with, not necessarily scientifically accurate, but scientifically charged themes. I think the Gangers themselves are a neat way to raise questions about what exactly we would consider human. The Gangers remind me of Moffatt badies like the Weeping Angels or the Silence, except the Gangers won't necessarily kill you, and there's no easy way to get rid of them otherwise. They do more than just frighten, However. They bring up questions that us regular-flesh people are going to have to answer eventually; how do you define 'human'? Should non-human sentient beings have rights? How many 'you's are there allowed to be? how do you deal with somebody with all of your memories aside from kill or be killed? The Doctor tries to bang out an agreement between them in the same way he did with the Silurians, but nobody's having any of it.

If I had to point out a problem, it's that the Gangers are kind of a muddled threat. On the one hand, they're creepy looking, and the idea of them having all the same memories as their human counterparts is appropriately unsettling. However, they're too evil at the end to be sympathetic, and they spend too long just kind of hanging around to be threatening. I assume that bad stuff will start happening in the next episode, but it's a considerable amount of time before anything really happens in this one. It's pretty disappointing that the Gangers don't cement themselves as a threat until the last few minutes, but I suppose I do really want to see what happens next time now.

One thing I really liked was the Doctor's pragmatic approach to the whole thing. Of course in the past we've seen the Doctor try and end a conflict peacefully at all costs, but only recently have we seen what the Doctor's willing to do when that isn't an option. Do you remember that bit in The Poison Sky, where the Doctor teleports up to the Sontaran battleship with the bomb? He knows it will kill both him and the Sontarans, but he goes up just to give the Sontaran's a choice. Of course, it was a fake-out since that side-character, you-know-the-one-I-mean-oh-gosh-what-was-his-name-again, ended up blowing them up instead of the Doctor. In the recent Day of the Moon, the Doctor decides to just kill the Silence outright rather than give them the choice to run away, because he knows they won't run away. Here the Gangers kind of run off and declare war and the Doctor has to deal with it - it felt like he was being entirely rational, even if his ultimate decision was a difficult one. It just feels like the Doctor is making intelligent decisions for the best outcome, rather than taking an unrealistic moral high ground until he gets what he wants.

This being the opening of a two-parter, it was mostly build up, so all we've really got is a setting, some characters, a threat, and an interesting twist. It's difficult to judge the entire story until we get the second part, but The Rebel Flesh is an interesting set-up so far, even if as a standalone episode it's kind of unfocused.

I Revoo Doctor Who: The Doctor's Wife

2011-05-14T23:29:00.001+01:00

I have been meaning to write about something other than Doctor Who but keep losing my motivation. I have some game stuff half-written but I don't know if I'll finish anything. Maybe something in the week? Maybe not?

____________________________________________________________________

I read Sandman, okay. I read it. It was okay. You heard me: It was okay. It was certainly better than, say, having your eyes gouged out with a sharp implement. It was better than stubbing your toe. Also: burning toast, leaving your flies undone, and forgetting what you walked into a room for. It was also worse than a lot of things, like finding a pair of shoes you thought you lost, putting crisps on the top slice of bread in a ham sandwich, or anything I have read by Alan Moore.

I don't want to turn this into a discussion of who's better, him or Neil Gaiman, because I don't think I've read enough of the latter to make broad generalisations of his quality. However, things Moore have written have blown me away and personally affected me; The Doctor's Wife is okay.

How amazing would an episode written by Alan Moore be? Like, if he hadn't gone crazy and alienated himself from the people who adore him in the process of alienating himself from those that seek to exploit him? I assume there'd be lots of sex, probably between Amy and some kind of horrible alien or supernatural being (those Ood tentacles look like they'd be good for something...). There'd be a scene where the Doctor finally recognised the sonic screwdriver as a phallic implement: 'It opens doors, but sometimes it doesn't. That makes me feel sad for some reason. What a horrible human being I am'. And at the end of it all there'd be a 20 minute speech where the Doctor would make references to all the books that Alan Moore had read, soaring over the entire audience's head in an amazing spectacle because, like, fuck them, Am I right? It would be glorious is what I'm saying.

Spoilers, again.

So Idris is the Tardis. They come up with an explanation but it's typical Doctor who fluff, and Suranne Jones spoke so fast I couldn't quite catch it. All you need to know is that the Doctor and the Tardis run around having an adventure together for once. I'll give Gaiman the credit here, it's an interesting take on the mythos, and it makes for some great scenes between the two. Especially when she explains why she stole him to take her around the universe. It's great seeing the Doctor's adventures from a different perspective, especially from someone, or something, that's been there since the beginning. The final scenes, in particular her final line, were simultaneously interesting, heart-warming, and profoundly sad. There's an irony in the fact that the Doctor goes to the junk planet looking for time lords, but the episode ends up with the Doctor and the Tardis, the core of the show, being the principle focus. There are so many nerdy references to Doctor Who canon that the symbolism can't be accidental: Fans have craved the return of the Time Lords for years, and here Gaiman makes the case that they aren't important. Kudos to you sir.

However, you are redacted points for trying to write the Time Lords, of which there are none left living in the entire universe, back into the show by going 'outside the universe'. The Doctor hangs a lampshade on the absurdity of the conceit, but it's not funny, it's just dumb. A slap on the wrist to you sir.

Doctor Who can be smart, but it also has to be entertaining. The Auntie and Uncle characters aren't. If I had to point to the most Gaiman-esque thing in the episode it would be these two - they weae sewn together rags for clothes, they speak in strange accents, and they perform immoral acts without quite realising that they're doing it. It's a Gaiman trifecta! They're never a threat and we never care enough about them for their deaths to be meaningful. In fact, we never quite learn where they came from either, but whatever, I'm not the continuity police. There's an Ood that shows up to menace people at one point as well, but the episode still can't escape the fact that it's villain is a disembodied voice with unclear intentions.

What does The House want? Tardis'. So it wants to get to the universe, right? Okay, so it traps the Doctor outside the universe and then puts Amy and Rory through some psychological torture. I think I've got that understood. What I can't understand is why it needs servants like Auntie or Uncle, or how it moves into the Tardis, or why it wants to kill the Doctor, or where it came from, or why it was outside the universe, or... At one point it shows it could just suck all the air out of a room, but that doesn't really create tension, because the only way for the Doctor to get around it is to have The House not do it. The House is just kind of... there, in the background as a disembodied threat, literally and figuratively.

I should also mention, because I do so every week, that Matt Smith is still brilliant. He quips, he walks up and down all funny-like, and he gets real mad and real sad at different points. Once again, he's absolutely electric to watch, and even though I kind of couldn't engage with the plot, just seeing Matt Smith running around trying to do something or other goes a long way. He's starting to remind me of Tom Baker - he always looks like he's having fun, even if he doesn't have much to do or the episode doesn't demand the kind of effort he's putting into it. I'm hoping Matt is sticking around for a while, because I'm not sure I could sit through an entire series any more without someone similarly energetic flying the Tardis.

The main draw of the episode was seeing the Doctor have an adventure with the Tardis, which is why it perplexes me that they've tried to keep that fact a secret so long. Yeah, it's a twist part-way through the episode, but the central plot thread isn't very interesting in comparison. The Doctor's Wife is a very clever episode that just isn't engaging. A bit like Sandman then.

I Revoo Dr Who: The Curse of The Black Spot

2011-05-08T00:04:00.002+01:00

This was 'the pirate episode'.

That's all the publicity's been willing to say in the run up, and it's the only thing the cast and crew would talk about in Confidential. The screenwriter wasn't present (it was Stephen Thompson, the mastermind behind that 'ugh' episode of Sherlock, but I had to Google that) and the only thing coming out of Moffat's mouth was a list of various piratey tropes that the episode has.

No, I am not also going to list what those are. Go read another review.

Once again, spoilers below...

So the Doctor and company find themselves on a pirate ship in... well, whatever point in history there were pirates doing pirate stuff. I'm not actually sure if that was a real period of history and not some kind of media-fuelled distortion, though, there is a bit in Curse of the Black Spot where one character teaches another character CPR by telling them: 'you've seen it in the movies!' So maybe movies are extremely accurate representations of reality then? That would explain a lot of things.

Anyway, the ship has been stranded without wind for weeks, and there's a mysterious Siren picking off members of the crew one by one. The Doctor makes friends with the Captain and they then run around trying to solve whatever it is that needs solving. It's a solid enough premise, but if you've seen much Doctor Who you can probably tell where it's going. It suffices to say that the threat turns out not to be supernatural, but is:

an Alien,
an AI and
From another dimension

Which is pretty much every rubbish Doctor Who plot twist rolled up in one especially rubbish package. There's a line early on where the Doctor dismisses the suggestion that the Ship is cursed, but then he later theorises that the siren can pop out of any reflective surface it sees fit, be it water or lockets or polished metal crowns. I guess the idea is that the pirates are easily tricked while the Doctor is super smart. The only problem is taht the 'there's a logical explanation for all this' stuff only makes sense in, say, Scooby-Doo, where there is actually a logical explanation. Doctor Who isn't really science fiction, it's fantasy - it's about a man who flies through space in a magic box, battles monsters, and solves all of life's problems with nothing more than a screwdriver and a cheerful disposition. As much as the Doctor wants to dismiss superstition, he still won't deny there's an equally daft sciency-mumbo jumbo logic behind it all that us mere humans can't understand.

Last series there was a similarly so-so episode about vampires in venice, except it turned out they weren't actually vampires: they were alien fish things. The twist wasn't really relevant to the episode beyond the fact that vampires are kind of a thing. It'd be straight up embarrassing to turn in a script that's not self-aware enough to cross through the word 'vampire', and replace it with 'alien fish' or 'robot with holograms' or 'nano-machines in a balloon' or whatnot. They'd laugh you out of television land!

But I mean, really, what would the difference have been if it turned out the Siren was actually a Siren? I understand it must be really hard to write a Doctor Who episode where the Doctor isn't so smart he solves everything by the end, but let's just suppose that for once the Doctor didn't have some kind of sciencey explanation for it all:

Would it have undercut the tension? The 'rules' of the Siren are spelt out in the first 10 minutes, so there's not really enough time for us to wonder what's going on or actually be worried much.
Would it have been unbelievable? Probably more believable than 'my time machine exploded which cracked the universe and caused people to be erased from history'.
Would it have been tired or hackneyed? No more hackneyed than 'it was an alien artificial intelligence from another dimension'.

I guess what would have changed would be that there wouldn't be a lot of whizzing about and frantic music and people acting like stuff is happening even when it isn't. The last third of the episode is all about the alien spaceship that's been causing all this trouble, trying to heal the crew members (though it doesn't explain why the AI could only appear in reflections, or why it got angry when it was shot at or yelled at, or... gah, I am becoming the plot holes guy). It's more or less the exact same twist as Moffat's series 1 two-parter. It's also not very surprising because the set they use for the sequence looks like... well, a space hospital. It seems it was designed for it's purpose as a physical space, but not for it's purpose in the plot, which is to not ruin the plot. The spaceship stuff seems like it's there just to keep the episode moving forward, since the whole 'pirate movie' thing doesn't have a whole lot of mileage.

There's actually a neat scene early on where the Doctor and Captain Beardy talk about flying the Tardis, but it's undercut by the fact it's nearly a 15 minute scene just to explain why the Doctor couldn't use the Tardis. Maybe that could have just been a throwaway line? I don't know. I kind of thought that 'the pirate episode' would have pirate stuff as it's main story thread but I guess not.

All in all, Curse of the Black Spot is a bunch of Piratey moments, images, characters, and things, wrapped around a fairly basic and uninteresting plot that fails to get anything interesting out of the characters. Matt Smith is once again electric even when he's not given much to do, and the production is top-notch, but beyond that there's not much that makes the story stand out. These kinds of episodes exist every series, but with the frankly fantastic pedigree set by the opening two-parter, this one in particular is kind of jarring. File it away with other such forgettable non-episodes as that one where the Doctor carried the olympic torch, or the one where he met Agitha Christie, or the one where the Doctor unfortunately shit himself and had to go looking for a new pair of trousers in 17th century Paris.

I Revoo Dr Who: The Impossible Astronaut/ Day of The Moon

2011-05-01T00:40:00.004+01:00

Wow. Okay, I understand it is a rather hackneyed part of the nerd vocabulary to say 'this was the best thing ever', but this was really the best series opener since... well, last series.

I can't really talk about the plot at all without spoiling it, so for this very special occasion, I will be asking you to join me again 'after the Jump'. Don't worry, there'll be no more nonsense blogspeak down there.

So within the first ten minutes, the Doctor is violently shot and killed. Now, it's a pretty daring move to kill off your main character at the start of a series, but especially so when said character's main schtick is that he can't die.

There's a terrible moment from the end of Davies run where he has the Doctor begin to Regenerate, but before he completes the process he shoots the energy (?) into his previously severed hand (?) which absorbs the energy (?) and turns into another version of himself. It's stupid even when you type it out like that, but it's especially so when you consider that it was the central ploy of a cliffhanger. It's only after an agonising wait, and a great deal of public hysteria here in Britain, that we learnt Davies didn't have the balls to introduce a new Doctor by surprise, and that the quasi-regeneration would just devalue the very idea of regeneration. I mean, usually when monsters show up the threat is that they will just straight up kill the Doctor, and unless stated otherwise, the audience kind of assumes that is what's going to happen. It's a suspension of disbelief held up by an unwritten rule: don't talk about regeneration unless the Doctor is going to regenerate*.

But whereas the Tennant fake-out regeneration felt cheap, this one really hit me quite hard. The first difference is whereas Tennant started to regenerate, and figured out a way to stop, Smith just got shot again and died for real. This was completely consistent with what we'd heard so far in canon, and wasn't just pulled out of thin air as a flimsy excuse to have a regeneration cliffhanger and another Doctor to tie up Rose's story. We'd heard before that the Doctor can be killed mid-regeneration, but we've never seen anyone deliver on it; it was previously only a qualification to make the Doctor being in mortal danger mean something. Moffat bringing out regeneration and then showing the Doctor be killed is brave because it delivers the goods: it shows that the Doctor isn't invincible.

I've heard some people argue that the death is meaningless, since we know the Doctor is going to come back somehow, otherwise the show would be over. I think maybe they took the wrong idea away from the moment: it's not that you're supposed to genuinely mourn the Doctor's passing, it's so you can understand what it would be like to see the Doctor finally die. We are placed in the shoes of Amy, River and Rory, and watch this supposed immortal be shot dead. It doesn't matter how much we grieve over the Doctor, only how much we can empathise with his companions. It's not a pure emotional tug, which, you're right, wouldn't work, but a driving force behind the motivations of the other characters for the rest of the series. Not only does it bring the Doctor down a few pegs by showing that his death is a very real possibility, but it also provides the other cast members with information the Doctor doesn't have. It changes the dynamic of the show and provides an interesting starting point for the rest of the series, which in my mind is worth it, even if we know the Doctor's always going to make it all right in the end.

The relationship between The Doctor and River song continues to impress me. It has it's cheeky, witty moments, including one I-can't-believe-this-went-out-before-watershed joke, but also sinks into unbelievably tense nadirs. River implores the Doctor to trust her, but he carefully unravels and deconstructs their relationship, reminding River exactly where she stands, and reminding the audience that he's absolutely not an idiot. He's playing along, but he's not willing to cede control of the Tardis to someone he doesn't quite know yet. It's an absolutely painful moment, and a reminder of both the incredible range Matt Smith can display in the part,and the incredible depth of their relationship.

The characters are absolutely the driving force behind the episode. There are these new aliens introduced called 'The Silence'**, which are built off a similar psychological trick as the Weeping Angels. Essentially, whenever you turn away, you forget you've seen them. They're plenty scary, and I'm sure the kiddies will get a great fright out of them, but when contrasted with the rest of the cast, they're just not very interesting. There's a scene where Canton traps one in the prison, and it gives him this gravelly-voiced speech about the role of the Silence in human history, and I just found myself kind of bored. The villains, who I assume are going to be the central villains of this series, just aren't as deep as the Main character and his friends, which shouldn't really be the case for a creature that has supposedly controlled the entire course of human history. Though I suppose most of that is Moffat trying to save more for later in the series, and it's not really fair to say that this one aspect was not as good as the best aspect.

I think what the episode showed most of all is that Moffat succeeds at creating an 'ensemble cast' kind of show where Davies kind of couldn't. It's not just a matter of having lots of characters, but also having& characters that play off of each other. I think there's something interesting to be said about every character, not just in what they look like or what role they fulfil, but also how they mix with each other, and act for or against each other's favour. There's a brilliant moment where Rory is listening in to Amy's panicked rambling on a psychic voice recorder, where she says 'I know you think it's him... but it's not... it's you'. Immediately, The Doctor knows what Rory's thinking: Rory's insecurities run through his mind and he begins to question why he decided to take his honeymoon with this madman in a box. The audience feels a twang of pain: how is this going to straighten itself out? The best part is that even at the end of the episode it still hasn't. I'm eagerly waiting to see where it goes from here.

The only thing I thought was bad about both episodes was the openings, which tried to fit way too much into 5 or 6 minutes. The first episode brings us up to speed on the cast before getting them all together again in that time and I was just kind of overwhelmed by all the information I was being given. The opening for the second episode also has the doctor trapped in Area 51 for 3 months, where he's grown a massive beard and looks all beaten up. You know, that scene from trailer that made you go: 'oh wow, how is that going to happen? What happens after that?'. Well it gets resolved in about 3 minutes of screen time. What should have been a cool dramatic moment is just a neat visual set piece that doesn't make much sense (why would he be in Area 51 if the president was still in on it? Where would humanity in the 1960s get the strongest substance in the universe?) and quickly goes away.

* Of course there are exceptions to this. I don't mean that the Doctor shouldn't explain what it is, only that we shouldn't be reminded that the Doctor isn't really in danger of dying. Also, there's a bit in Forest of the Dead where River mentions how something would be so dangerous that it would kill the Doctor beyond regeneration. I actually kind of like this bit, because the point was to establish River as someone who knew the Doctor just as well as we the audience did, it didn't undercut the stakes so much as raise them, and it happened rather late in the episode, when the Doctor had more or less fought off the threat.

All in all it was a strong start, and I was more than a little disappointed when the Doctor declares at the end of the episode that he wants to just go on more adventures before he starts trying to solve all the mysteries again. Oh well.

** I say new; they've been hinted at since last series but only shown now.

Redesign/ Other Shit

2011-04-29T22:48:00.001+01:00

I made the blog look less awful. If I can't design websites I don't think I should try.

Also, I merged my other blog with this one, so there are loads of posts from there, and posts that were here and then there and now here again. Some of them are old/bad sooo...

I am not the Writer

2011-04-29T22:46:00.004+01:00

Alan Wake is not a bad game. What I mean to say was that if I were to judge it on a ten point scale it'd probably be up the top somewhere. It's also to say that, in the current culture of video games, Alan Wake is pretty good by a lot of standards - I mean, it doesn't feature any hideous bugs, and the combat has a nice feel to it. The production values are good and...

Actually, fuck this. Fuck this pussyfooted 'here are the good points' bullshit. Alan Wake is an absolutely despicable game. It's a game that I'm glad sold terribly and lost money. It's a game whose creative leads I wish I could tie up in an old submarine and whip their testicles with a knot tied in a length of old rope. That last one was a joke but when someone says they want to commit suicide, even if they don't mean it, you better look into it.

So here's the first level of Alan Wake: Alan Wake arrives in the town of Bright Falls on a ferry with his beautiful and lovely wife. Then he gets out of his car and his wife tells him that she wants to take some pictures of him standing on the far end of the boat. But then something curious happens: Alan Wake starts running around in circles. He runs to the opposite end of the boat and stands uncomfortably close to a guy in a trucker hat, before running to where is wife wanted him to go and standing uncomfortably close to an old guy who is a radio host or something. Him and Alan have a conversation about his radio station, but Alan refuses to make eye contact, revolving in circles and bumping into the sides of the boat. The old guy talks to him as if he were just standing there normally, and even Alan's wife doesn't seem to notice that Alan is acting like a weirdo. It's almost like they're suffering from some kind of brain disease that only allows them to recognise certain specific actions that Alan performs. Now THAT's some creepy Stephen King shit there.

So Alan and his lovely wife get off the ferry and drive to a local diner, where they were told to meet the owner of the cabin they are going to be staying at. Alan gets out of the car and walks into the diner. Immediately, he's acting like a weirdo again, running around the diner as the waitress tries to tell him how fucking wet she is for him. You see, Alan is a famous and well-respected writer, who's so famous and well respected that even people in this rural american town have cardboard cut outs of him in their windows. Alan then runs to the back of the diner in the middle of the waitress talking, before stopping running and then walking again. While he is walking, he comes across a creepy old lady that gives him some keys to a cabin. Who cares if it's the right one. Alan, not making eye contact with anyone, then runs out of diner. Well he would, but Alan suddenly suffers from a crippling brain disease that renders him incapable of moving faster than a slow walk. I mean, that's some scary Stephen King shit right there.

Alan and his wife get in the car and drive off, but then the guy they were supposed to meet runs out and yells 'Mr. Wake, you forgot your keys!', and the audience is supposed to go 'OH FUCKING SHIT THEY'RE GOING TO THE WRONG CABIN', but Alan was actually in the car and didn't see the guy running out of the diner. He is probably not worried about it then. I think, if he did see the guy, he could have just got out of his car and walked up to him and straightened things out. They could have talked about the crazy bitch who dressed in all black and hung out in a dark corridor at the back of the town diner who gave Alan the wrong key. Then Alan would have gotten to the cabin and had a nice holiday. Him and his angelic wife would have gone home and, instead of having experienced countless untold horrors, told this super creepy story to other couples at dinner parties in their trendy New York apartment. 'And this old woman knew we were going to a cabin and totally gave us a fake set of keys. Yeah, I know, that's some proper Stephen King shit, isn't it?'

But he didn't see it. If only you were in control of Alan Wake, you probably could have gotten it all straightened out, huh.

Okay, so then Alan and his wife arrive at the cabin. Suddenly, the lights go out and Alan's wife begins to have a panic attack. She says she won't go in until Alan turns on the lights, because she's afraid of the dark. At this point, Alan, thinking that the fact the cabin is open means he's supposed to go in there, starts running around it with a flashlight. He goes through it and finds a pier, which he runs to the end of, thinking maybe it was there for a reason. So then he runs back into the house and gets lost. He goes upstairs and looks round all the rooms for something to turn the power back on for a good 10 minutes before going back outside to see if he missed something on the way in. Turns out he'd missed the generator, which was like, just outside the front of the cabin. Alan's wife was standing outside the cabin, and the generator was directly in her eyesight, which is why it's weird that she just stood their while Alan was looking round the rooms for all that time. It's almost like she had some kind of mental illness, where her vocabulary was limited to a few select phrases, none of which could adequately communicate that Alan was going the wrong way, and that the generator was right there. At this moment Alan feared greatly for his wife's mental health. Or he would have, but he had to go and start the generator. He did so and Mrs. Wake moseyed on in to the house and proceeded to strip off into her undergarments and lay suggestively on the bed. At this point she starts having a proper conversation with Alan. Back to normal then!

Oh, but then they have a fight, because Alan hasn't written anything in 2 years, which is super bad because they only have enough money to live in a trendy New York apartment. I mean Wifey works as well, but Alan is the man of the couple so his working regularly is super important. I am not suggesting that Alan Wake is a game that perpetuates restrictive gender roles. I am just saying that Alan's life doesn't make a lot of sense and I don't care about it. Oh and then Alan and Wife get attacked by a bunch of scary crows (?) and Alan's wife gets dragged away (?) and thrown in the lake (?) and Alan dives in and then wakes up in a car several miles away (?).

Alan gets out of the car and wonders aimlessly through the forest. He runs around, sprinting, waiting 'til he get's his breath back, and then sprinting again. He does this until he runs into the guy from the diner who was going to give him the keys but didn't (though Alan doesn't know this (actually he says in the monologue who he is. Maybe he was sent a picture of the guy before he came out to bright falls? Ummm... I don't know)). The guy is immersed in this thick black smoke, his body contorted into an odd stance, and his speech incomprehensible and panicked. He approaches Alan with an axe: OH NO! Alan dodges and runs into a nearby building, locking the door behind him. Alan finds a revolver and a flashlight, which he says he'll use if he runs into the guy again.

Actually... ummm... I forgot to mention there was this dream Alan had in the car journey to Bright Falls. I didn't mention it because it was a tutorial for the player on how to fight enemies. So I or Alan or both are standing in this building with a mad axemen outside, and the very tools I can use to kill a mad axeman are in my possession. Alan goes over to the door he ran through and leans on it to open it, but then says he doesn't want to go through the door because he doesn't want to be killed by the axe guy. That's weird; Alan walked over to the door to open it, but then he said he didn't want to open it. I mean, if I started doing things like that, I would be seriously freaked out. If I started reading Stephen King novels and then I thought 'I have never liked reading Steven King novels', I would be super creeped. That's some proper Stephen King shit there.

So Alan then runs out the other door of the cabin, the door he wants to go out of, and faffs about a lumber yard for precisely forever. In the process, he comes across some bad guys, who are like regular people with black smoke around them, who yell creepy and throw an endless supply of axes at Alan. Alan shines a torch at them and the smoke goes away. Then he shoots them with two revolver shots, or one shotgun blast and they die. Alan remarks that he has never fired a gun before.

I have fired a gun before. I mean, not in real life, but I know how to move and shoot with a dual analogue controller. Good thing I can help Alan out with that huh?

Alan eventually kills like 20 monsters, including the key guy, before making it to the gas station, where he sees a sign and realises that a week has passed since he arrived in Bright Falls. He phones the police and tells them his wife has been kidnapped; sheriff arrives and asks if Alan's seen the key guy; Alan lies; big letters flash up saying 'end of episode'. End of episode then. End of level.

Okay, so at this point I'm not impressed. Like I said, the combat is okay; nothing special, but okay. I mean, I can tell the game is trying to scare me, but the mechanics are so straightforward that I am never really on edge. It seems like they started from the perspective of 'how do we make an action game that's scary', rather than 'how do we make a game that's scary', which ultimately ends up hindering it's efforts. The tropes an action game uses are there because they feel fun and empowering. Good horror thrives on making you feel powerless - the quasi-post-modern monologue even says as much! Using flashbang grenades to make bad guys blow up is cool, but knowing I can destroy everything around me in a single button press compromises the mood somewhat. It gets better when you have to run away and dodge attacks rather than fight, but I only ended up doing this when the game forced me to, I was out of ammo, or the sheer number of enemies made combat impractical. Not hard or scary, mind you, just potentially tedius.

But then the despicable thing happens. More letters come up: 'Episode two'. Then, Alan comes in voice over: 'Previously on Alan Wake'

Just the first minute or so...

That's fucking bullshit! Did you hear all that? Not only does the game constantly remind you that you and Alan are completely separate (Alan possesses agency in his actions; you blindly following whatever it is he says he wants) but the game then actively re-writes itself AS YOU ARE PLAYING IT, to remove your involvement. There's absolutely no mention of the stupid darkness monsters I spent like an hour shooting. There's no mention of the fucking Thermoses I picked up or the weapon cache I found. In short: there's no mention of all the video-gamey stuff. The game thinks that it's story is not only the principle draw, but that your presence is hurting it. It needs to get rid of you and does so.

It's the ultimate symbol of why these 'story games' are fucking bullshit. Games are a medium defined by agency in a system. If you are going to control that system as much as you can and use it as an engine for your fiction, what good are you doing the medium? What good are you doing people who want to play games? You're trying to make games into something they're not: receptacles for an authored narrative, rather than celebrating or innovating on their strengths.

Apparently Alan Wake was an open-world game when it was first announced, and then it was scrapped and changed into the linear action game that is sitting in my xbox right now. I'd wager the thing that survived the creative upheaval was the story. Already in their minds, the developers were taking this story, this extended fiction that they had spent a great deal of time and resources fleshing out, as the base and building a different game from it. In their minds, the story was a transcendent quantity: the core of the project.

Sometimes I say that I would like to see games tackling more adult themes than they usually do, like maybe a basic human relationship. Alan Wake as a product tackles those subjects, but as a game it shies away from them. There's some interesting stuff about writers and writing and insanity and whatever, but the mechanics don't reflect that in any way. I loved Kane and Lynch 2 because the mechanics of the game reflected the nature of the story and it's characters. In Alan Wake these two elements are kept at arms length. The story is mildly clever, and the game is the same dumb shit as every other video game.

Fuck Alan Wake.

Dog Days

2011-04-29T22:45:00.001+01:00

Kane and Lynch 2 is a game about violence. I don't just mean that it is violent, I mean that it is about violence.

There's a part where you run through the streets armed to the teeth, trying to nonchalantly weave through an alley filled with civilians going about their business, without causing a ruckus, when you're ambushed by the police. Eventually, after a laborious shoot-out, you come across a dvd shop. Most of the films are gangster films, or at the very least feature gratuitous pictures of guns, or celebrations of violent figures on their posters. It stands in stark contrast to the hell that you and Kane have dragged yourself through for the last few hours, where there are no heroics, only the desperate killing to survive. Kane and Lynch 2 clearly tries to ape Gears of War, more so than it's predecessor, but it's goes above and beyond Gears in terms of self-consciousness. Whereas Gears celebrates characters who communicate only through violence and gruff, snarky, emotionally distant banter, Kane and Lynch passes no judgement. It crafts a world, without the use of science fiction, where these kind of people exist: the sociopaths ostracised from our culture, whose only means of expression is a curse word or the pull of a trigger, but refuses to glorify them or condemn them. I think Kane and Lynch are horrible and sad, but Kane and Lynch, if games could speak, doesn't think so. Though Kane and Lynch, if fictional characters could speak and were honest, might.

When Kane arrives in Shanghai, Lynch greets him after arriving from the airport. He is holding some luggage. Lynch says hello. The briefly run down what Kane is here for (some kind of arms deal). Lynch mentions Kane's daughter, which he shouldn't have. The conversation is stilted and awkward, neither looking the other in the eye.

I think maybe, since all games are essentially judged by the same standards nowadays, games journalists might have misinterpreted this as bad writing, but being stiff and awkward is only bad when the characters you are watching are supposed to be happy, in love, or entertaining. If there were an exchange between Nathan Drake and whoever he fancied sticking his penis into this week, and it came of stiff and awkward, that would be grounds to complain, because that's not the intent of the scene. Not so with Kane and Lynch. The intention is to have Kane walk up and have Lynch not know what to say, and to have Kane not know how to respond and so forth. Later, when the action starts, the two are as eloquent as they can be, shooting people and asking why the fuck this is happening. That's the only thing they know how to do: shoot people and wonder why their lives are so entirely devoid of meaning. The mechanics of the game have been considerably pared down since the first game, and their focus strengthened: there are no useless squad tactics or grenades. There is only killing. These are two men who literally find it difficult to express themselves in any situation that doesn't involve violence.

In the first game, the only way Kane can even begin to talk to his teenage daughter is by trying to read out the letter he wrote to her. In Kane and Lynch 2, Kane is no longer in contact with his daughter, but hopes the money he'll make from this deal will allow him to get his life in order so he can talk to her again. We don't learn this motivation until quite late in the game, but when we do it makes us realise why Kane was so reluctant to reveal it: he hasn't talked to his daughter. It's not that he doesn't want Lynch prying into his personal life, it's that he doesn't have one, but desperately clings on to any notion that he might. Lynch, on the other hand, has a girlfriend, to whom he makes various strained phone conversations, unable to communicate the exact nature of his violent escapades: Kane isn't a mercenary, he's 'an old friend'. Now, when I was talking about Kane and Lynch being socially stunted previously, I wanted to stop short of taking a jab at 'gamers', but here the comparison is inevitable. It's common for people who have never played video games to get the wrong idea about what we are doing when we play them; when we talk about pulling off headshots and attaching a masterkey to our M16s, it's understandable that 'normal' people raise their eyebrows like we are psychopaths. I mean, how do you even begin to cross that gap, to tell them that the violence isn't you, it's just something you do? Kane and Lynch spend their time trying to bridge that gap, a gap they're aware of but they can't comprehend or break down.

Lynch invites Kane back to help him even though he had no reason to - he feels drawn to him but he doesn't know why. It's because they are two men incapable of living in society. They both have a life that they aspire to, but find themselves constantly separated from it. Lynch at one point blames Kane: 'Everything you touch turns to shit'. But he's not angry at Kane; he's angry because he's so much like Kane, because even when he had no obligation to sort out Kane's problems, he still ended up bloody and naked, running through the streets of Shanghai, fighting for dear life.

So why is there such a disproportionate response to these two psychopaths? Why the police, and the mafia and the army? There's an irony in the fact that they kill hundreds of people in their every effort, yet all the violence stems from the accidental murder of a single woman near the beginning of the game. You see, the violence in Kane and Lynch is unrelenting, but more than that it was always there. It was in the DVD shop. It was in the gangster films. It was in the armed police walking through the streets. It was in the sweatshops and the electronics store. It was in the roads and in the office blocks. Violence permeates every level of society, just waiting for the opportunity to go off. Violence permeates so wantonly that it ceases to seem real any more. Recently I was watching a video of the tsunami in Japan, ripping through a village, and I all I could think about was how unreal this looked, how it seemed like a Roland Emmerich movie or some other piece of pop culture lodged in my subconscious. Whatever it was, it wasn't real. The opening shot of Kane and Lynch 2 is the camera looking at a another camera, filming Kane and Lynch being violently tortured. The violence in this game is extreme, but it's okay as long as you tell yourself it isn't real, as long as you pretend there's sufficient distance between you and the events. Handy then that the entire game looks like it's been filmed by a shitty mobile phone camera; a constant reminder that you are not Kane or Lynch, they are just something you do. It's a strong visual metaphor: violence has been transformed by our culture, by the hand-held camera, 24 hour news, video games, movies, into something that is sold as a commodity without any understanding. Kane and Lynch are two sad individuals, who try desperately to claw together a stable personal life from their life of violence, but they are seemingly more honest than the people in the street who run away from them, who can't face the true manifestation of a culture that fundamentally misunderstands violence**. Those are the people we ostracise: the people who reflect us, who show us exactly what we are. Kane and Lynch 2 makes the point that we have become desensitised to violence more trenchantly than Jack Thompson ever could.

When Kane and Lynch break free of their torture, they run through the streets, covered in massive, bleeding cuts, crying out in agony at one another, yet their testicles are pixellated out. That's the heart of it: our culture celebrates violence and censors sex. What is natural becomes unnatural, and what is inhuman becomes as easy as putting a disc in a games console.

* - The top image is shamelessly borrowed from this blog, Jump Over The Age. It's a powerful image from a game we are both talking about so I stole it.
** - In this review of the game, Gerstman dismisses the scene thusly: 'Oh, and there's a chapter where you're naked and covered in gnarly looking cuts, but that doesn't really have any actual gameplay changes to consider'. The way he can just bring it up and dismiss it nonchalantly shows how removed he feels from it.

Philosophy Junk 2

2011-04-29T22:42:00.003+01:00

We dismiss hallucinatory experiences because they can be explained with further experience. We construct an order of sense data based on which ones conform to a coherent structure. It's my opinion that we don't have super-sensible access to the world, but that we build a mental model of 'the world', and that model includes the fact that certain sense data does not correspond to physical objects in the same way as others. There has been a whole lot written about this for hundreds of years, because it's a difficult/ interesting question. I appreciate you trying to come in and clean it all up but it's a harder than you're making it out to be.

It is not even a matter of which experience comes first, it is of which succeeds the other. The thought that 'I am experiencing' entails the higher-order thought of 'I think I am experiencing'. There are even higher order thoughts of 'I think I think I am experiencing' and so on; it is a peculiarly human thing to think in such a way.

I have the thought 'I am experiencing' in the case of 'real' experience and hallucinations, but in the latter case I have the higher order thought of 'I don't think I am experiencing'. Experience on hallucinogens does not contain within it the experience of not being on hallucinogens, but the opposite is true (I am not trying to use this statement to make a point, because the order it implies is just based on language).

But I understand that I haven't really answered your challenge, and that is what makes one experience better than another. If I had to pare down the difficulty to it's essential, I'd say it's that our senses get information and they don't really care about the source. We do not have direct privileged access to the world, otherwise there would be no error or deception.

The thing is it is hard to find someone who's entire experience has been dominantly on drugs rather than the other way around. Our world, as much as some would wish otherwise, is to a great degree constructed by how we humans interact with it. What I mean is that us and the world are co-dependent, and the majority rules; pavements aren't designed for the blind and our world isn't designed for the madman who sees only unicorns. We can never understand what it is like to be these people who see the world completely irrevocably different, as Paul said, but we understand what the construct the majority of us buy in to, and why we have bought into it.

Maybe that is not good enough for you but I can't offer anything more. Certainty inevitably leads to scepticism.

[source]

Philsophy 1

2011-04-29T22:42:00.001+01:00

When there are two opposing viewpoints, it is not always the case that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Knowledge is never certain. This is the delicious meat between the mouldy bread in the sandwich that is post-modernism. Rejecting absolute certainty in any statement is required. This is because, as the sceptic challenge plainly shows, no knowledge is beyond refutation.

God exists: show me.

Water boils at 100 degrees: I see it, but my eyes are not adequate judges. They are fooled by magic eye pictures, and it is plainly possible that my every experience is the illusion of a waking dream or the fiction of a higher power. You cannot convince me that the water exists in front of me, let alone the exact temperature it boils. The scientific knowledge you aim to give me is built upon foundations that are equally dubious.

This assumes a kind of space, a hole of sorts, in the make up of every proposition. 'The cup is red' - what's a cup? Does the cup exist? Is the cup defined by use or by intrinsic cup-like qualities? How do you know the cup is red when the colourblind do not see it as such? Such questioning expands this hole, and seems to overpower and refute the proposition that it started with. This is lazy thinking. These are not questions that expose the falsity of all knowledge, but rather perfectly acceptable scrutiny that needs to be answered. It must be answered because try as hard as you might, you are unable not to see the the red cup; unable to change that aspect of the world outside yourself by thought alone. Even the colourblind man is unable to deny that the cup has any qualities at all, and even he would freely admit that the colour of the cup was beyond his grasp, having spent his whole life living in a world constructed around the colour comprehension of statistically average people.

We don't know things beyond knowing them. This might seem obvious but I feel like I need to reiterate it. When we say the cup is red, we don't know that the cup is red in some super-sensible way. We merely experience sensations and logically induce the existence of a cup, and the presence of the quality red. Whether the sensations are 'correct' or not in some super-sensible way is irrelevant. If I were a brain in a vat being supplied the redness, the shape etc. of the cup, it wouldn't matter because the cup's existence doesn't matter. My sensation is the only thing I know to be undeniably existent, even if I know not whence it came or whether it represents the world accurately. The existence of things in the world outside my mind is silly when we consider these things to have qualities beyond my perception of them.

People are similarly mental constructions. I have no doubt that I am an agent. I personally don't believe that there is a 'me', who is separate from all other things and has free will, but I am a thing at least.

The difference between religious conviction and scientific conviction is that though I might say that when a pistol is fired at me God will stop the bullet in midair, but I am not free to test that to it's limits: God is not to be tested as such. All that indicates is that I can never test for God in any way. If I am to look for what I know on the basis of what I can know then what good is metaphysics, constructed out of unknowable quantities? This is stronger than agnosticism, though comparable. My reasons for not believing in God or religion is that any supernatural belief is wholly unnecessary for the construction of a model of the world. If I were to build a bike, and the existing designs for bike building had a 20 pound weight attached to one of the pedals, I would find it useful to remove the weight, since it is not a necessary component for the bike to function. In trying to construct a model for understanding the world, why would I include things I am unable to justify or quantify? By contrast, Scientists once said they could put a man in a box and then fly him to the moon. They then did so.

Two Pieces of Heart

2011-04-29T22:40:00.002+01:00

Light does not work like you think it does, Wind Waker.

Wind Waker is a game I remember seeing in a magazine before it came out: 'Yes, the graphics are bad' the young me said to my friend 'but at least you can tell what's going on' (If only I knew how trenchant that statement was at the time!). Then I bought a Gamecube just for this game. Wind Waker was then a game I remember playing and enjoying. Then I kind of went through this period of hating Wind Waker, because I wanted to like 'mature' games, like the absolutely mature Metroid Prime. Then I played it again and I think I liked it again. And then I saw some screenshots of Twilight Princess in a magazine, and I started hating it again. Then I liked it again for a while, but then slowly began to despise or at least become apathetic about it. Wind Waker has occupied 7 or 8 conceptual pigeon-holes in my mind at various points, though none of them come close to describing what I actually feel about the game at any given moment. The way I feel about Wind Waker is so temperamental that any assessment I'm bound to make will be built on shaky grounds. I might change my mind completely by the time I wake up tomorrow morning.

So yeah, I played Wind Waker again recently, and I liked it.

I think a mistake that a lot of Zelda fans make is that they think dungeons are the most important areas of the game. There's lots of reasons why they might think this. Maybe it's because Link to the Past or Ocarina were many people's first and favourite. The subsequent perceived decline in the franchise might be deeply associated for some people with the amount of dungeons: 'In my day, there were like eleventy billion dungeons.'

But seriously, if we're going to judge Zelda games on how much dungeoning there is to be done, then I guess Twilight Princess is objectively the best, right, At least in 3d? Because it has nine? Well that's clearly daft. People hate Twilight Princess more than child molesters, so there has to be something wrong with that standard. But it's a bit more than just sheer number: what I understand by the belief is that the dungeons are the axis around which the rest of the game turns. If the dungeons aren't good then the game won't be; the dungeons are the meat and everything else, the people walking round castle town, the chickens, the gadgets and projectiles and mini-games, are the vegetables. You get only the vegetable right, and then what have you got? Salad. Fuck, we don't want that right?

There's something to be said for this model of thinking. Have you played Spirit Tracks? It is an abysmal game. Okay, that's not fair: there's a good game under there, but it's been buried beneath heaps of meaningless twaddle that doesn't engage the player so much as waste their time. There's something like half an hour of poorly-written cutscenes before I even got to do anything Zelda-y, and then, each and every action throughout the game was punctuated by these same droning, self-serving break aways. Want to get across the map? You have to draw your route out and then wait for the train to slowly make it's way there. You can't even just leave the game running, because there are a myriad of different elements: route changes, cows on the track, monster boars etc., that exist for no other reason than prevent you from putting your DS down and waiting until something you care about happens. I got to the final boss one time, but after I stabbed it in the face I was asked to play the pan-pipes at it and gave up. The pan-pipes are no fun. The pan-pipes are impossible, and like all the train track shenanigans, exist only to waste my time and show off a principle gimmick of the hardware. When I say that thinking about dungeons as the most important part of the game has merits, this is what I'm talking about. In the dungeons you are playing. There are no story bits in the dungeons, and even if there are story bits, they're kept to a minimum so you can concentrate on solving puzzles and killing moblins, and ultimate unravelling the dungeon itself. In the dungeons, you always feel like you are doing something, whilst outside the dungeons, you are constantly reminded that you are doing nothing.

If we accept this criteria then Wind Waker is a dissapointment for a number of reasons. Firstly, the dungeons in Wind Waker aren't very varied. Sure, the Tower of The Gods was pretty memorable, but I still have trouble differentiating the Earth temple from the Wind temple. I think the Wind temple was the really really boring 'stone' one, while the Earth temple was the one that looked exactly like the Forest dungeon. I mean, seriously, did we need two foliage-based dungeons in the same game? Some of the more visually interesting environments, such as the snow island, or the haunted ship, are only used in for 2-minute island caves and whatnot, which is a shame. Especially when you consider there were two foliage dungeons; Two!

Also, Wind Waker is way to easy. While this makes for a pain-free experience, it also removes any tension. I played Kane and Lynch recently, and there were one or two sections that seemed way to hard for normal humans to have any chance of completing on the medium difficulty. This is frustrating, and I wished in these sections that the game was less like pulling teeth. However, I never felt bored, and the difficulty always forced me to consider my actions carefully. Since Wind Waker is so easy, you never have to consider any of your actions carefully: fail at a boss battle and there are pots with hearts everywhere; fall down a bottomless pit and you just start back from the cave you arrived from with a quarter heart missing. There are only two parts that are remotely difficult: the later temples, where those purple hands pull you under and throw you out at the beginning of the dungeon; and the final dungeon. The former isn't a pressing threat to my life so much as an annoying threat to my time, while by the time the latter rolled around I had stockpiled so many potions and fairies I still didn't care. The problem this creates is I'd walk into the boss room, watch them flaunt their immense size in their elaborate intro animation, and then yawn. Since I knew they were never a threat, I never had to worry. At the end of the game it throws several of the bosses back at you, which just made me roll my eyes. Since there's no concern that I could fail, then I just think of it as a waste of my time. Work often isn't hard, it's just tedious, which is what Wind Waker could be at times. This is why I think difficulty setting for Zelda are a good idea, and people that raise a stink over them are crazy. People who don't play a lot of video games can play on easy and have a good time, while people with more experience can ratchet it up. Either way, all players will face an appropriate level of challenge, because striking a balance between challenging and frustrating is important.

So then if Wind Waker's dungeons are too boring and too easy, then what saves it? I mean, I can't help but think it's great. Some people are capable of convincing themselves on ideological grounds that they actually didn't enjoy something, but I try and work the other way. I enjoyed Wind Waker: why was that? It wasn't the dungeons, clearly. So then what was it?

The secret of Wind Waker is that the axis around which the game revolves is not the dungeons, but Windfall Island. Windfall Island is the absolute core of the entire experience.

Okay, so, I arrive at Windfall in the dead of night, with my newly acquired fire and ice arrows. You see, I know Wind Waker, so I know that if you go to the top of the Ferris wheel at night and light the bundle of wood at the top, then... something good happens. I couldn't remember what I would get out of it, only that there was an action that could be performed. There was an input that would result in a positive output, something which the game had been drilling into me constantly from the outset. So I go and do all that, and a chest appears on a tiny island just off the beach. However, before I collect my spoils, I talk to the lighthouse keeper, since he had previously expressed disappointment that the lighthouse wasn't functioning. Surprise, surprise, he expressed how happy he is at my actions (even though he's unaware It was me wot done it), and then gives me a piece of heart. 'Oh', I wonder, 'what's in the chest then?' Surprise, surprise, surprise, there's another piece of heart in the chest.

Which piece of heart is more important then? Looking at it mechanically, they both involve an input action and then a favourable outcome. In fact, the same favourable outcome, and the same input action: lighting the lighthouse. So then, aren't they exactly the same action? But I didn't actually get anything just from doing the lighting. In the case of the chest, I had to float down to the chest on a Deku Leaf and physically open it. In the case of the lighthouse keeper, I had to go up to him and talk to him. Both actions are completed by pressing the A button, so haven't I just gone up to two objects and pressed the A button, and then got a piece of heart? If you're thinking of things purely mechanically, then yes, but a purely mechanical approach fails to explain the clear difference between the two actions. You see, it's actually important that the lighthouse keeper is happy. It's not important to the game, since it alters none of it's rules: his happiness didn't give you a piece of heart, some script written by a programmer did. No, the happiness of the lighthouse keeper is important because it gives the action a context. Link is not just taking an item that he worked for, he is receiving it as a gift previously owned by another person, for the merit of his actions.

That's why Windfall is the centre of Wind Waker. It is full of people, and it is constantly changing. Yes, there are inputs and outputs (give the guy on the step a picture of the moon, and he'll give you a piece of heart; give Maggie's father skull necklaces and he'll give you rupees), but these interactions are all based on the navigation of social conventions. In a dungeon, you'll interact with things: springy things, wet things, things that block your path, things that have to be burnt. However, on Windfall, you interact with people. The only creatures you meet in dungeons are animals that need to be killed. But, on Windfall, there are people that need to be talked to, listened to, or helped with their problems. People whose personal ticks and social wants need to be understood in order to succeed. In the article I linked above, I said that making an object look like something the player recognised allowed the player to understand that's object's function in the game world. I was talking about treasure chests, but it's equally applicable to people. In order to get the output from the gossipy women, you need to discover the source of their distorted rumours. In order to receive the output from the man on the bench, you have to plant flowers around town (He likes flowers). In order to get things you have to understand that these game mechanics resemble people.

I love Twilight Princes, and I think the people who say it is awful or terrible or whatnot need some perspective, but I'd say it was by far the weakest 3d title. If there was a lighthouse that needed lighting in Twilight Princess, you'd only get one piece of heart, and it'd be the one from the chest. In Twilight Princess, most of the people in Kakariko have been murdered, which I guess is dark and extreme and stuff, but it makes for a boring place to hang out. The only characters that hang out in Kakariko are ones that play a role in the story at some point, simply function as shops, or have only two lines of dialogue. Castle town is more populated, but the people there are just window-dressing. I wouldn't mind that, so long as there was something to see through the window itself, but the only characters in Castle town either repeat the same lines of text over and over, or just want material things in exchange for other material things. They say: 'Give me 100 rupees and I'll tell you where the heart pieces are', or 'do this Clawshot puzzle and I'll give you a quiver'. They don't need to be understood as people, they need to be understood as an input.

You might argue that it's just the veil of humanity being pulled back, but illusion is a necessary part of fiction. A skilled writer is able to create a fake person that resembles a real person. A skilled game designer will build a world full of fake people that feels alive. The majority of NPCs in Twilight Princess are non-interactive, since the only people who inhabit the towns and cities are involved in the story at various junctures. There's no opportunity for say, Colin, to undergo serious character development as a result of the player's actions, since his character development is plotted out to go along with the main storyline. The world of Twilight Princess is a baron landscape devoid of meaningful social interaction. The controls work well enough to make it a fantastic action game, but without the social element of the post-Lttp era games, it feels emotionally cold.

Sterling

2011-04-29T22:39:00.001+01:00

This was intended as a comment on a blog post but it spiralled out of control and I thought I'd just finish the tangent I ended up going on here.

Wouldn't you like to be this cool?

I.
Jim Sterling is an arsehole, but I don't think this article really deals with the intended irony of his statements. In particular, his Fat Princess article doesn't seem sincere in the slightest. Your point-by-point criticism of a lot of sexist things he says, or for that matter your conclusion, don't seem to address that dimension of what he is saying. I understand that the things he is saying are horrible, but you need to say why they're horrible taking that into account, otherwise there's a clear flaw in your line of argument.

Now I don't want to make this wholly a discussion of Jim's notorius anti-art game stance, but in one of his more recent 'jimquisition' videos (This one methinks) he says:

"Gearbox's Anthony Burch, who used to work with Destructoid, once said, famously, that 'fun isn't enough', and I would like to counter that and offer my own argument, which is: no, fun isn't enough, fun is paramount! Fun is the most important thing that a game needs to do in order, in my mind, you know, be a suitable piece of entertainment, because that what games are first and foremost"

His initial conclusion that we can enjoy 'dumb' games just as much as serious games displays a frightening lack of self-awareness; this is exactly what other people are arguing! That is exactly what Anthony Burch was arguing in his video!

"I've read comments from a fair amount of people who actually think, actually think, that if really serious, really sort of navel-gazing games ever became popular then the fun games we all grew up on, the arcade-y games, the violent games, the action games, would actually sort of fall by the wayside, and they get very very protective, and very very scared at the idea that one day, you know, games like God of War would become extinct.

Now I wanna say two thing about that frame of mind: A... or one... that anybody that legitimately thinks that games like Gears of War or God of War, or any 'Guh' of War, is actually gonna be outnumbered in the future by games like Passage or Flower or Braid needs to seriously rethink how illogical and silly that actual fear is, when you consider how profitable games like Gears of War are. And two, people... nobody is saying that all games should be very serious and very moody and vary navel-gazing. What they are saying, or at least what I'm saying, is that right now about 95% of the videogames in the world are juvenile, stupid, pointless, completely irrelevant macho male power fantasy.

[...]

If games don't branch out, if games don't begin tackling bigger issues, or think about different ways for the player to interact other than killing things or levelling up, then that's what games are always going to be."

Jim offers a quasi-counterargument; he ends up agreeing with Anthony's conclusion at first, though thinking he’s disagreeing. Later, he seems to conclude that 'dumb' games are better than art games because fun is the only criteria for judging games. What he also does is he tries to make the other side sound completely irrational, and his own viewpoint an understandable compromise:

"Games like Gears of War, Bulletstorm, God of War even, are talked about as if they’re detrimental to this industry, as if their existence somehow precludes art games from existing, or video games from being taken seriously as a more interesting and deep and emotional way of communicating a message.”

If this were Jim’s conclusion then he would be agreeing with the position held by the people he is attacking. No one in their right mind is saying that fun is trivial; making something fun is very hard and takes a lot of dedication and craft. You need only play a game that succeeds at being fun, say Super Mario Galaxy, and compare it to a game that is not very fun, say Psychonauts, to see this. Above and beyond that though, simply wanting to make things that people enjoy is an admirable goal. Heck, all of the games I've made have simply been for people to enjoy, so I would be a hypocrite to demand more from every game.

Jim Sterling has us wrong. What I, Anthony Burch, and anyone else on this side of the debate are saying is that it's not the only admirable goal, and it is, in fact, limiting in it's interpretation of game design, and stifling the medium as a result (and not the industry, as Sterling says, conflating the two concepts). This is a medium that has, potentially, such wonderful expressive power, and it's a shame that we should continue to waste such potential in the same purile nonsense that we have been making for years and years and years. To say that it should be only one thing is an exclusive and snobbish idea.

II.
Have you ever played Gunstar Heroes? It’s about 3-4 hours long, its balls hard, and it consists entirely of a non-stop cavalcade of shooting robots until they explode and kicking people in the face. I was thinking long and hard about this the other day, and I came to the conclusion that Gunstar Heroes is pretty much the perfect action game. What I’m saying is that the genre already peaked in 1993 and has done nothing but repeat the experience over and over again since then. In fact, The only thing we've done since is make action games easier in order to represent to those less skilled at video games what playing Gunstar Heroes was actually like.

'Ah! But what about games that aren’t straight-up action games? What about games that feature action and fun but aren’t just about violently murdering people over and over again? Stealth games? Or horror games? Or sports games?'

Well my first answer would be that Stealth games and Horror games have been, at this point, so watered down that they resemble Gunstar Heroes more than they do their ancestors. Resident Evil is now all about punching and shooting people to death, and features a robust system whereby you can purchase a variety of weapons to explode zombie’s faces in a myriad of ways. You can use a pistol or a Gatling gun: the choice is yours! Similarly, Dead Space, which was formed in the contemporary survival horror mould, is just a third person shooter that is very dark. You might say that you shit yourself playing it, but that's not enough to qualify it; compare it to the original Resident Evils or Silent Hills and there's a clear difference. You might say it's been made 'better', but it's actually just been made more like the games you like, which is not better so much as different, and not different so much as the same, and not so much the same as Gunstar Heroes.

In the past the goal of stealth games was to accomplish objectives without being seen. Now it is to murder everyone in sight without anyone noticing until they are dead. There is a scene in Splinter Cell Double Agent where the terrorist cell Sam has infiltrated tell him to 'clean out' a boat of everyone on board, and Sam makes a heartfelt call to Lambert where he's audibly distraught about having to kill all those people. By the time Conviction rolls around the game is now wholly about the violent murder of hundreds upon hundreds of people. Sam Fisher can’t help himself! He’s walking down the shops to get a pint of milk and he ends up killing three people and a dog just by accident. There is no way to express yourself in the game system of Conviction other than to murder a person. Metal Gear Solid has also given up: in the fourth game it just gave you a load of guns, and then essentially said it didn't give a fuck what you did so long as you watched all of it's cutscenes.

Similar to Dead Space's genesis, Arkham Asylum sprung forth from the primordial soup of the modern Stealth game, and subsequently prevents you from hiding. Sure, you can stay out of sight of the people you violently ~~murder~~ bludgeon into submission, but there is no option to not budgeon them into submission. Yeah, it's a different kind of stealth, but it's a step towards the same type of action games.

My second answer would be that perhaps we need to trace the genesis further back than Gunstar Heroes then. It's hard to point to any specific game, but since the dawn of the medium, games have been about triumph. That's what the original Super Mario Bros. is all about. Accomplishment, vanquishing your foes and completing your epic quest. This is what 'fun' games are all about; empowering you; making you feel like you are in control. Gunstar Heroes is just the epitome of that control being expressed through violence.

I don't want every game to be Gunstar Heroes. We, as a human race, made Gunstar Heroes already. And then we made it again and again for several years. If you want to make another one then all power to you; I would never dream of prescribing you not to make the games you want to make (it's all I do). Just be aware that following in these well-tread footsteps will push no boundaries, and will do nothing for the medium in the long run. Why not tread the unknown path? Carve your mark into interactive space that's indefinite and unexplored? I know: because it's hard, and it's scary, but it's worth doing.

III.
The reason I wanted to talk about the 'serious' games thing is because it embodies a logical paradox that Jim Sterling uses often. He says everything with a semi-serious tone, making his work defensible on grounds of irony:

"In fact, the message of this commercial seems to be that if you consistently beat your woman and mess with her head until she's a hopeless, despair-ridden wretch, all it takes is one material gift and she'll instantly forgive you. So, a pretty realistic portrayal of all women."

"Fat Princess is a game about having fun, first and foremost, which is something that Feminists are 100% against! Just take so-called Woman Suffrage , for example. The American government denied women the right to vote for a joke, and a bunch of stupid women took it too far and then had to be force-fed through tubes because the silly bitches wouldn't eat thanks to some idiotic hunger strike. If they'd have laughed along like they should, they probably would have gotten the vote in another fifty or sixty years anyway. Whatever happened to patience being a virtue?"

These are clearly pretty horrible jokes to be making, right? Well, no because he's being ironic, right? But I don't think that saves him. He has never qualified a truer position on women than the one he is presenting here; recently when David Jaffe said the PSP2 was like a 'fresh pussy', and Jim defended him, he was attacked regarding his sexism. Now if at this point you are not a sexist, you've just made ironic sexist jokes, and someone has said you are, what's your response? Would it look anything like this?

I know exactly what cunts look like. I'm talking to one right now

Just ask your husband for permission before using the computer next time.

People like you *revel* in sexism, so sure. I'm just giving you what all attention-seeking little bitches crave.

You're the embarrassment. To your gender, your species, and all feminazi sluts like yourself.

Oh.

That's what's so fucking offensive about all these 'mak me a sandwich' memes. They recognise that they belong to a mindset that is frowned upon, but justify themselves with a veneer of irony. The trouble is that their not laughing at the poor judgement on the part of the joke teller, and the intended irony of the statements saves them from the accusation that they are laughing at the women themselves. What they're doing is laughing at the cultural standards they are purposely breaking. 'What kind of society won't let me call a women a femanazi slut when I think she's a femanazi slut?'

This is what Jim Sterling does in regards to everything. He says the most unreasonable shit and then hides behind post-modernism, saying at one moment 'games should be fun, it's what they're for' and at the next 'well, you know, in my mind at least'. I think that Reverand Anthony's video (which I don't think is perfect I should add) is far more trenchant to Jim Sterling's argument than he realises. In fact, Burch recognises and shoots down Jim's position so effectively I am led to believe he never actually watched the video in the first place:

"Every two months or so, like clockwork, someone in the gaming industry will sya that games need to get away from violence and fun and focus more on thoughtful, relevant, more emotionally engaging, more intellectually stimulating ideas. And they'll discuss the need for a Citizen Kane of video games; they'll talk about how games need more mature subject matter, rather than just chainsaws and guns, and, without fail, the response by the commenters and the gamers etc. of the world is always the same on the internet. A small group vigorously nods their heads while looking down their noses at the other group of gamers, who says that 'games shouldn't be serious; games shouldn't be any one thing, and anyone who says that is a pretentious asshole!' and then they turn round and say 'well games should be fun! We grew up on games as fun. They should be fun. That's what they're about.'"

Fuck The Oscars, And Fuck You Too

2011-04-29T22:38:00.001+01:00

Oh shit, so this film is dumb because it's not about norse gods or robots or a man who dresses up as a bat and punches people until they fall down?

The academy hates sci-fi films. Big whoop. If you like sci-fi films then why should you or anyone else care? Is their opinion sacred? It's the industry pointing to what it likes about itself, not an absolute judgement on what the best film that came out this year was. How the fuck would that even work? Short of some kind of shamanistic ritual there's no indubitable method of intuiting a 'good' film. Just because some institution likes to place itself on a podium and then disagrees with you shouldn't bother you, provided you're not insecure about your own opinion. You like the films you like. The academy likes the films they like. You don't have to like what the academy likes and they sure as hell aren't going to consider your opinion from up there on the podium.

If you like your 'genre' movies, then have fun with them. Relish in the fact that you're enjoying Jeff Bridges shoot computer lightning at himself, and If someone says 'you shouldn't be enjoying that', tell them that you are and that they can fuck off. Don't yell back at them that the movies they like suck and that they shouldn't enjoy the things they do, because that would betray a disturbing lack of self-awareness. You should reject the academy's standards of quality for your own because it claims objectivity or superiority where none exists, and it contradicts your own dispositions. Don't try and impose your own standards back the other way, because then you're being a hypocrite.

Also, did you play this? Or at least watch the 4 minute play through on youtube? It's terrible. It's not so much a criticism or a satire as much as a snide list of things. All it does is name the various tropes a Call of Duty game has and then says that they're dumb, like when I was younger and my older sister repeated everything I said in a whiny voice. It also defeats itself as a promotion for a game by lampooning many of the tropes the game it's promoting also follows. That's what you're doing here. You don't like The King's Speech. Okay, explain to me why you don't like it. That's your job, isn't it?

I mean if I didn't like x, I'd tell people why it failed to fulfil my standards for what good xes are. I see that you've rejected this in your movie reviews because it admits a certain degree of subjectivity; If I'm not willing to externalise my own opinion then why would people want to listen to me!? They want objective facts about how good this movie is, not subjective opinions! that's why I only offer objective opinions!

So I suppose the second way to tell me this movie is bad is to assume we all have the same standards and then argue about the facts. Any movie with British people is undoubtedly a cynical ploy! This film has British people in: it is a cynical ploy! Setting a movie in WWII is lazy, you imply? Well I suppose there's simply no argument to be had then! The King's Speech is lazy! ~~You set the standard~~ We all agreed on the standard at the dawn of time, and we have to follow them I guess.

Finally, I think it's especially kind of ironic considering the kinds of film that you are a proponent of. You think it's impossible to reduce the plot of Iron Man 2 to a set of tropes? Would that make it a bad movie? No? Then why do the same thing to King's Speech if it doesn't indicate either way whether it's any good or not?

Tetris is Not The Answer Because You Got The Question Wrong

2011-04-29T22:37:00.002+01:00

Visual Display/Computer or Visual Display/Human Brain?1

Tadhg Kelly got something right. Games are cubes. Absolutely. Every game can be reduced to squares. Well not squares, but geometric shapes. I once read an article about the making of Brutal Legend, and it essentially said that the main character isn't really ~~Jack Black~~ Eddie Riggs, walking around in a heavy metal album cover landscape: They didn't program in 'Eddie Riggs' or 'Heavy Metal Landcape'. The system doesn't compute that. What the system actually computes is a cylinder sliding against some polygons. This is simpler apparently (though I am no expert on computers).

It doesn't matter whether that's what the computer does or not though; it provides a neat analogy for what our brains do. We 'block out' large sections of our visual stimulus once we're comfortable with it. Our brain knows there's a tree without looking at each individual leaf. One criticism I heard levelled at the game Darksiders was that the main character was too detailed, and that it was hard to tell what was going on with his character model. This was basically a criticism of Joe Mad's art, but then also saying that Joe Mad's art was harming the game design itself. If you don't like his art that's cool; I'm not a huge fan. However, at no point in the 15 hours or so I played it for did I stop in the middle of slicing a demon's fucking head off to muse on whether War had the appropriate number of belts, or what exactly was going on with his shoulder pads. These were things I did eventually wonder, but during the game itself it sufficed to know that he was a vague red blob in the centre of the screen. That's all I need. The diagram above represents what our brains do to games, as much as it represents the collision masks of the sprites involved.

Scott McCloud describes in Understanding Comics a process whereby when we enter a car we project our identity, our sense of self, onto the car itself: we extend our sense of physical space to include the car. His theory was that we also do this for any visual representation of a human. If a character is more exaggerated or abstract, we find it easier to project our sense of self onto them, wheras if they are very detailed and specific, we tend not to so much.

Not strictly relevant, but I thought McCloud's diagram would explain his point better than I ever could. He intended it to be a comic for a reason!

I'm don't think McCloud played a lot of video games when he wrote UC in 1993, but the 'avatar' of the player in a video game is probably a better example of the effect he's describing. Once we understand that there is a character on the screen that responds to our inputs, we project ourselves onto the character. We no longer have to understand everything that is going on with them, their belts buckles etc. only that they are us. When our character gets in a helicopter, then the helicopter is then us. If the helicopter then lands on an aircraft carrier that we are given control of, we then project ourselves onto the aircraft character.

A bit like this.

The reason I wanted to talk about this idea is because in a game, once we sort out everything in the visual landscape of the system, we no longer need it's details. Here's a picture from Cave Story:

Very pictorial today, eh?1

I have heard some people say that they misread Quote's sprite completely. Rather than seeing the two blue vertical lines as eyes, the saw the one on the left as a sideburn, the one on the right as the left eye, and the green antanea on the right as a little green nose. These people also claim to have played through the entirety of Cave Story without even noticing. The mind might initially boggle: imagine conceptualising the character so fundamentally wrong. Not only that, but you have to multiply how fundamentally wrong they were by the amount of time in which they didn't take the opportunity to correct themselves, don't you?

No, you don't. Once each player absorbs and conceptualises what the face is the first time, it no longer becomes necesssary to know what the face is like. There are plenty of examples from the early NES era: 'You thought you were shooting bullets at a fire bat? I thought I was throwing eggs at a giant Pizza!'. It doesn't matter. What matters is it's place in the system. Not what it is (becuase everything is squares, remember), but what it's function is: Does it hurt me? Does it power me up? How far away from it do I have to be to interact with it? Quote's nose is irrelevant. Quote's jumping or shooting or getting hurt is not.

I suppose that view would be called a 'Tetrist' view by Kelly. But I'm not trying to say games should be like that. I am saying they are like that. There is no changing it. No matter how much narrative you spread over the top, the meat of the sandwich is objects with relational concepts, best conceptualised visually as simply geometric shapes. Sorry Kelly.

I am, however, not saying that our narrative focused game design is being dishonest. Consider my first diagram again. Which one is more interesting? Perhaps that's the wrong question. While McCloud might be right, and the more abstract Zelda on the right is more impressionable or open to interpretation, perhaps it goes too far? McCloud, after all, stopped his abstraction of the human face: he didn't remove the eyes and mouth, or simply draw a black dot presenting the basic idea of unity which could be interpreted as a human face. He stopped because too much abstraction will eventually alienate the reader: it will detach the face from any recognisable human aspects, thereby removing any projection of oneself into the character. Abstract Zelda, on the right, is squares because it's a handy visual metaphor for what the mind does, not because that's what our mind actually translates our visual experience into.

Abstract Zelda has abstracted too far. It has removed any recognisable human aspect from the game, and thus has ruined the attempt on the part of the developer to provide a recognisable human experience. The ludonarrative on the left is 'I am a boy adventurer; I lunge at a monster with my sword but I miss'. The ludonarrative on the right is 'I am a green square; I can make a brown square come out of me. I think I am trying to hit the pale orange squares'. The human element is important in that it provides context, and also helps the player learn relational concepts. A lot of games have treasure chests in them, because the player understands what to do with a treasure chest: you don't avoid it, or shoot at it, you go right up to it and open it! The narrative is therefore important.

That's the game design part of the original article covered. The sociological aspects don't interest me because they are either wrong or heavily caricatured. Quotes speak for themselves:

It’s not hard to see why Tetris seems perfect. It has a low adoption curve, but a high maximum mastery. It is extremely elegant in how it’s constructed, to the point of being beautiful. And there is something intrinsically compelling about the game dynamic of sorting oddly shaped blocks into neat rows on a recurring loop. It is thus pure.

The Tetrist wants to return to a time of yore when things were perfect. They are driven by the idea of purity, that perhaps at some point the games industry got lost, bedazzled by Hollywood and fast cars, and they find many modern games unsatisfying.

...

Indie developers in particular often harbour deep frustration with what they see as the corporate conglomerates bewitching the gaming masses and fooling them. Yet as many experts will tell you, that view of how marketing works in the 21st century is nothing short of quaint.

...

Tetrists are just as much in love with the fantasy of games as everyone else. The only difference is that their cultural bias is deeply rooted in the past. One of the reasons why Minecraft is such a hit is its deliberate retro styling, for example. The Tetrist loves that small-textured 8-bit sensibility because it speaks to an emotional part of him. He wants to believe that games exist in an idyllic state, are not over-run with fashion-ability, and so childhood can exist in a permanent state forever.

Do I really need to say anything here?

1. Original pictures come from Giant Bomb: Zelda, Cave Story

What's the difference

2011-04-29T22:36:00.003+01:00

The following is little more than an exploratory ramble. I thought it might be interesting.

_____________________

between a film and a game?

Film

A film is a series of images placed one after another to give the illusion of movement. That it provides the illusion is important: place the images too slowly and the illusion of movement is lost and the film becomes a slideshow. It's also important that the images be placed one after the other temporally, because images placed one after the other spatially is comics. But then isn't a game a film? It's placed on a screen and then one frame is placed after another in time to give the illusion of movement. The difference is that a game is interactive; the images produced are not set in stone, and cannot be accessed in their entirety at any point - there are no temporal anchor points in a game aside from 'beginning' and 'end'. Some games even lack those. The images produced are at the whim of a few selective inputs, be they buttons or touch screens or motion sensitive apparatus. Even if the underlying reaction to the player input is stored in a computer or made up as you go along, there is still an action, and a reaction, an expression, and a result.

Why so finicky over definitions? I don't wish to argue that there are a hierarchy of arts or mediums really. I'm not perturbed by a work's inability to be easily defined; are films where the ending is selectable form a few options a game? Are slideshows with a running voiceover films? Are film reels comics before they've been projected? I don't care if bentosmile makes games or not (though I don't think he/she does), outside of a desire to get my definitions sorted. As long as something exists it can be described. As long as art is created it can be experienced. As long as it communicates ideas and involves interpretation, then I feel no benefit is to be made by calling it one thing rather than another. Definitions are not important because they allow me to sort out which expression I consider legitimate, but because they allow us to talk intelligibly and accurately. Further vocabulary that is self-consistent will continue to expand the way we think about these things.

Take for example, 'fun'. Ask the average game player, and they'll say that games should be fun, and any deviations from this purpose are irrational. Try to image a hammer (noun) that doesn't hammer (verb) things. It becomes simply a lump of metal on the end of a piece of wood. To these players, this is what removing the purpose of fun from games is. Separated from it's purpose, it no longer retains the luster with which we once appreciated it. It removes what they use them for and leaves simply an interactive system, a series of action and reactions calculated by a computer without their explicit benefit in mind. Would you really want to do that?

To confuse my previous definition of film I'd like to bring in these systems of action and reaction. Suppose we took a game, and removed the main character from the game world, but still rendered it and placed it on a screen. Essentially we remove the interactive aspect of the system. Assuming the game world doesn't crash upon on the removal of the player character, the system that the player would ordinarily interact with is still there and functioning, and since it's rendered, we have an image of it. Not only that, we have a series of images played in sequence to give the illusion of movement; is it a film?

My first instinct is to say that the system doesn't display simply images, but rather it provides a representation of what is going on in the actual system that is being calculated. However, this is phenomenological error: an example of representative realism in practice. I can't know that there is a system underneath without further experience to tell me that: experience of the development tools, or explanations of it's computational aspects. We cannot know what the underlying system is simply by looking at it, only what images we are presented with, which we use to conceive that there is a system at work. Experience of the development tools would further my conception of how the system works, but it can never prove to me that there is in fact a system. I can hypothesise that the representations I am receiving are based on a system, but since we cannot directly experience the system, we cannot talk about it with any sense. But then we run into the problem of how to differentiate film from non-interactive systems. If you played me a system, alongside an animated fake of the system, I could not tell you which one had an underlying system and which one was only a film, because I only have representation to go on. It now seems to me that rather than focus on simply the images, we must focus on what is being represented.

Game

My previous definition of film does not rely on what it is representing, because that would exclude certain things from the definition that seem illogical to exclude. A live action movie certainly represents real people doing things, but a cartoon represents things that do not exist in any real sense, only as computer models or a a series of drawings. That the film represents something or does not represent something is irrelevant to it's being a film. It suffices that it is a series of images, irrelevant of whether there is anything 'real' underneath it. It seems illogical to define games similarly: that games represent a system of action and reaction is absolutely central to them being games.

We ordinarily understand that a film will only play out one way when we sit down in the theatre. But perhaps a creative director might film several different endings, and parcel them out to different cinemas at random. Here we would understand that we would not be viewing the same images in sequence every time we watched the film, but we would also understand that nothing we do whilst in the theatre will change the film as it is being played to us. The ending that has been allocated to us is the ending that will play, and the same temporal anchors will be present. The film is not a system, so can not react. It is a non-negotiable series of images played in sequence. There is no system underneath there.

When we leave the system running without the player, various things are being computed by an underlying system that generates the outcome. If it were a Deterministic System, then the events, and therefore the images generated would be exactly the same every time. Character A would walk over to the hotdog stand, buy a hotdog, and begin chatting to character B. As long as A and B calculate their actions the same way, are in the system at the same position when the system starts, and the hotdog stand is there, then the same sequence of events will play out every time, since there is no player to interfere with the system. I'm using human metaphors here, but a system can involve giant bugs or whatever, so long as it is a continued chain of action and reaction calculated by the system.

However, it is difficult to build Deterministic Systems, especially for something as trivial as a computer game designed for entertainment. If we were creating a non-interactive system to see what would happen in the event of a natural disaster, or the economic effects of buying or selling stocks, then it is key that the system adhere to strict Deterministic principles; actions will happen the same way every time so long as no starting variable of the system is changed. That way, when one of the variable is changed, we know that changes to the system are results of it's change rather than of the natural variability of the system. That being said, it''s still very difficult to build a Deterministic system, especially ones that are meant to represent sociological or psychological factors. Instead, human brains are often reduced from a complicated series of inputs, a still little-understood internal decision making process, and a natural output, into something that will make variously weighted arbitrary decisions. As such, Deterministic Systems will often contain elements that are random. There's a 75% chance our virtual being will run from the virtual tidal wave, and a 25% chance they'll try and find somewhere for shelter. The best option would be to create a fully functioning working human AI, and a system that could emulate the various environmental and social factors that come to define a human being, but this is patently ridiculous.

So, the Determinist System in our game, devoid of the player character, will function one way and exactly one way. From A and B at the hot dog stand, right down to Y and Z playing ping pong five million steps later. In these systems we build limits to ensure there are certain constants. There are no builders. There are no sex drives or reproductive organs. There are no philosophers or theologians or carpenters, not in any function analogous to their real world function (and the function that my using of the word implies). In Assassin's Creed, you may see a man sawing from time to time but he is not building anything, because if the system could build then it would build beyond the limits that the designers intended to place. They wanted a system representing Rome in the 16th century, that exists purely for the entertainment of the player, and not for it's own development.

Not to mention the sheer amount of processing power it would be to generate and render a Determinist system the size of Rome. It's much simpler to randomly generate NPC models and positions; giving the indication of a massive simulated history for the world and it's inhabitants without actually building said system.

So what's my point again?

I think the definition of games is wrong. What I mean by that is that the things that I enjoy, that I refer to as 'games', is not what I am enjoying or what I am referring to anymore. There will be no arguing here that we should change the definition of the word game; it is a word that has existed for hundreds of years beyond our little medium here. It refers to an artificial, usually non-practical goal that needs to be achieved utilising a system of rules. Football wouldn't be football if there were no goalposts, but equally it wouldn't be football if there were no rules governing how you could go about placing said ball in said goal. Placing the ball in the net, the goal, is still a rule. Take the rule away and leave the goalposts and it will equally lose it's status as a game. We must ask why this is? Why do you want to put the ball there in the first place? What is the ultimate goal? Well, you get one more point, and then the team with the most points wins the game itself. Winning the game is not a rule of the game, but is the purpose of the game. Removing the goalposts, or removing the rule that states the goalposts will give you points, and you are removing the ability to win, which is removing the purpose of the game, and also one of the necessary qualities of what makes a game a game.

That's why I think we need a new word, for systems that are interactive, without being defined by rules or purpose. 'Interactive Systems' seems a likely candidate, though it's not very catchy. Whatever this new word is it needs a strong definition: it needs to be self-consistent, and it needs to help us describe something in need of describing. 'Interactive System' can't be like 'fun'. It needs to help us understand something rather than confusing it. It must include games with goals, but not be defined by the inclusion of said goals. Instead it's necessary parts should be rules, and interaction from an autonomous being from outside of the system itself. That's broad enough to include games, but not so broad that it it contains the entire universe or the physical world around us. It also does not limit us to the world of the computer, though I have too much to say on that for just now.

My disdain for the use of the word game also comes from one common argument for it's use. 'Games should be fun'. 'A game's purpose should be to be fun'. Alright. You win. I'm not going to argue that you're wrong forever (a bad game isn't fun, but it's still a game; It still has rules, they just don't work very well so on and so forth). Instead, let me have my own definition; let me have my own criteria for a successful thing. You can play your games, I can interact with my Interactive Systems. Then we should both be happy, right?

Musings on Bionic Commando

2011-04-29T22:34:00.002+01:00

I've been reading Twilight recently. I understand that I might be eschewing some key gender roles by admitting that, but it's true.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about reading it is that I'm discovering it's more than just a joke. Yes, the book is terrible, but only by reading it have I come to understand why it's so terrible, and perhaps more importantly, why people are capable of liking these books. This might be a surprise but the book is not bursting at the seams with shite. The prose does not in anyway resemble a drunken slur but actually features words placed sequentially to imply a specific meaning; certainly they might not be the right words, or in the best order, but this book is written in English, and can be understood by English speakers. It is completely understandable that people can pick up this book and like it, because it's easy, and I'm sure a lot of people relate to what's going on in this book.

So recently, with the announcement of DmC and the release of Dead Rising 2 (I'm getting my copy this Tuesday), people have been mentioning Bionic Commando a lot. Bionic Commando meaning the 2009 video game of the same name. It wasn't the last Capcom game as part of their 'western outreach' whatever, but it's certainly the most high profile for being based on an existing Capcom brand and for failing miserably. It sold only 27,000 units in it's first month, and was almost universally critically panned. Naturally the hostile reaction DmC has received can be backed up by pointing directly at Bionic Commando and yelling 'look at how fucking terrible that was! This is a bad Idea!'

The thing is, as cool as its pedigree and its announcement trailer are, we're still left with lingering doubts. It's always possible this could turn into another disappointment along the lines of Final Fight: Streetwise and Bionic Commando – both, incidentally, produced by DmC publisher Capcom – and certain details in particular leave us a little suspicious. - Gamesradar

It dawned on me that Bionic Commando is now a joke, like Duke Nukem Forever, or Metal Gear Solid in the eyes of people who have never played Metal Gear Solid. I believe this is harmful for a number of reasons.

- Can you imagine being the developers? The people at Grin? Who lost their jobs when the game bombed and their studio went under? Not only do the have to live with that, but they also have to live with a culture that considers their biggest game a joke, something to be mentioned in passing as 'that piece of shit'.
- It prevents us from learning anything about the game, or games in general. To dismiss Bionic Commando, or any game, as a piece of shit is to ignore everything it did right, and what we can learn as a medium from everything it did wrong.

It also occurred to me that if Bionic Commando was a joke, I had used that joke. I realised then that in order to talk about Bionic Commando, I needed to play it. Now that I have, I simply can't dismiss it as flippantly as our culture did, or as flippantly as people dismiss Twilight. Bionic Commando is not a great game, but we need to understand why it wasn't great, which is much harder, but reaps much greater rewards.

Other M, Dead Rising, and Social 'Rules'.

2011-04-29T22:20:00.001+01:00

So Metroid: Other M finally came out last week. Reviews have been mixed, some finding a solid Metroid game, others maybe realising that solid Metroid games have existed for years, and before now didn't have an anime-inspired tale of conspiracy and revenge tacked on to them. Then again, I wouldn't know. To say I'm not a Team Ninja fan would be an understatement, and even in positive reviews, what I've had described to me doesn't sound appealing. I'm probably going to rent it eventually, but I'm saving my money for other games in the meantime.

What interests me though is a nitpick many people have expressed about the game (epitomised by the Brawl in the Family strip above). If you've never played a Metroid game, or never played a game with a Metroid-like structure before, each game involves collecting power-ups from around the world, which then allow you to access new areas and dispatch enemies a whole lot easier. Other M, however, unlocks each new power-up based on whether Adam Malkovich, the gruff commander turned AI taskmaster first mentioned in Metroid Fusion, gives you the permission to do so.

Interesting thing about games: social obligations can be implemented in the game world in the same way as gravity or time, or any of the other laws of physics present in the real world.

Recently I played through Dead Rising 2: Case Zero, a downloadable first chapter to Dead Rising 2 proper, which is out in less than a month. In Case Zero, you have to find a drug for your young daughter to stop her breaking out with a bad case of Zombieism. The game makes it clear that if you don't find the drug and give it to her at the right time, then you will fail.

The reason why Case Zero succeeds is because it doesn't limit how you enjoy the rest of the game, and it doesn't force you to accomplish the goal. It's perfectly possible to ignore the mission criteria and just have fun killing zombies. I think it would work even better if the game didn't end when Katy dies, that way saving Katy is really a choice you have to make, but Capcom haven't contacted me for design tips yet, and I doubt they're going to.

I think one of the things that bugs people about the 'Permission' thing in Other M is that it's the story taking precedence over the gameplay. One of the strengths of Super Metroid is that after the opening, it leaves the player to their own devices in a large world. They then have to explore for themselves, and when they discover each new powerup, they know that they were never required to, they were never told to, and did so of their own accord.

'Joe!' you might say, 'Super Metroid was actually quite linear, wasn't it? Isn't the player not really required to do anything in the game world? If the player decides, say, that they're not going to pick up the morph ball, then the game is essentially over, because they can't progress. If it is their choice, then it's Hobson's choice.'

Yes, but the difference is that the choice is in the hand of the players, or rather, it is out of the designer's hands. In Other M, though the narrative justification is that it's Adam's permission, it is in fact the designer's. It's the designer who's choosing when to give you the powerup when you most need it (or rather when you are least likely to break their carefully planned level design with it). In Super Metroid, on the other hand, the abilities are in the game world in real time, where the player can choose to pick them up or not, rather than existing in some abstract sense, functioning on the whims of the designer.

That's why Case Zero, Super Metroid, and even the more recent Metroid Prime work and Other M is getting on people's nerves. They place the whims of the player over the designer's hubris.

List

2011-04-29T22:17:00.002+01:00

This is a complete list of all the reviews I wrote for IndieReview.tk.

Action Fist (****)
FallOver (**1/2)
Aftermath (****1/2)
The Adventures of Archie Pegalo (**)
Deep Under an Island (***1/2)
Idolcraft (**)
They Need To Be Fed (***1/2)
Lackadasium (****)
Gravity Core (****1/2)
Fault Line (***1/2)
Black and White (***)
Enough Plumbers (****)
Worm Food (****)

Oh Dear Oh Dear

2011-04-27T00:44:00.000+01:00

Still figuring out how to divide content between two blogs. Figuring right now that I should combine the two into one.

Later though. Here are some screenshots for a game I am kind of working on:

If you want to keep up on my inane thoughts then follow me on twitter --->

New Blog

2011-03-22T21:52:00.000Z

I have decided to post all my long articles on a new blog called I Thoughted. Go looksee

I used to post quotes every so often.

2011-03-17T22:27:00.002Z

"The theme of Ocarina of Time is very simple: it’s about a child becoming an adult. There are people who watch over that protagonist. There are many encounters and partings, and the three women. We protected that structure. But if you just scatter that theme and story around a landscape, it won’t make the game interesting."

Miyamoto.

Zella is done.

2011-03-16T17:29:00.000Z

I dun made a game. Go play it.

More EGP stuff

2011-03-14T18:33:00.000Z

Will be done today or tomorrow.

EGP

2011-03-13T14:22:00.000Z

I am making another game for the EGP. It is completely original.

It Looks Better

2011-03-04T15:39:00.004Z

As in not terrible!

v.early playable thing

2011-02-28T17:19:00.001Z

Here

Controls:
WASD - Move
K - whistle (not currently animated)
L - Melee/Drag Bodies
Stuff to note: Graphics are placeholder, death animation is super early, sprites for dead bodies are replaced with a big x, enemies won't recognise bodies yet, and whistling has no direct visual/ audio indicator. I just intended this to show off a very basic framework and get feedback on it, so a lot of it is not finished yet.

Soon...

2011-02-28T00:39:00.002Z

...ALL THIS will be yours.

Stealth Game Mockup

2011-02-23T13:41:00.000Z

Something playable soon. It'll have shitty graphics though.

I have not abandoned this by the way, I just got bored.

Stufffffff

2011-02-16T21:26:00.001Z

The first two are for my stealth game 'Always Well Dressed', and the last one was just me messing around.

I have a Twitter now that you can see on the right there. You can use it to see how terrible I feel about myself every day!

What I have been working on.

2011-02-12T19:55:00.001Z

Sometimes games are beautiful and sometimes they look like this.

EDIT:

: )

The Joy of Teen Sex

2011-02-09T16:36:00.003Z

The Joy of Teen Sex
is that no one is old enough to talk about it.
I heard someone make a joke about my mother's genitals
but that is about it;

It's hard to take seriously things you don't know how to understand,
which is why I laugh about my anxieties.
When life gives you anything, make lemonade.

Maybe invite her round for a glass,
share lemonade production tips,
laugh about why you had lemons in the first place:

'they gave them to me when I wasn't old enough to know if I wanted them yet.
I sometimes think they are too sour but I know they are good for me.
At least I think I know that.'

'it is hard to know things like that.'
Then we fucked like 30 times.
I am only joking. That never happens.

Go Play Something I Am Making

2011-02-06T12:39:00.000Z

Updated Version of They Come Out At Night, featuring a lot of the changes I have been working on. There are known bugs (particularly weapon scrolling), and there's no sound, but the outline is there.

Some pictures.

2011-01-24T09:14:00.002Z

Checkpoint Glitch

2011-01-22T18:11:00.003Z

It's like The Prestige!
EDIT: I just realised I might have ruined the entire fucking movie... Go watch the prestige!

The World Ends Tommorow

2011-01-17T00:04:00.000Z

Then with the rest of it
I'd call up everyone I wanted to talk to
one by one
and tell them things that I secretly thought about them;

'I really liked you
and thought about sticking my genitals inside your genitals
but I guess
we are all going to die now',

'We're really good friends
but because we're men
sometimes I think we pretend
we don't need each other
as much as we do
but I guess
we are all going to die now',

'You were a really good friend
and I'm sorry things didn't work out
between us
and that you were never very happy
but it's okay because
we are all going to die now'.

Hey Bro.

2011-01-06T16:33:00.187Z

I.
What did you get for Christmas?

Stop right there; I don't really care. Like a great many questions people have asked you in your life, no one really wants to know your answer: they just want to communicate something to you by asking. What I want to communicate is that I want to talk about something I got for Christmas. Whinge all you want, but it's my blog. A blog I use to talk about my video games, talk about other people's video games, gush over Doctor Who, and write terrible poetry. If you got an electric razor, or a pair of underpants, then would it be strictly relevant?

I always see posts on Kotaku start like that. 'What did you do this weekend?', 'How was your New Year?', 'Did you like game x? Well you'll love game x+1!'. They're trying to get chummy with you. They're asking you questions as if, like in ordinary human communication, your answer were on equal grounds with the question. Kotaku is trying to be your friend. But this is not Kotaku, and we are not friends.

We're not enemies either mind you. If I had to sum up our relationship, it would be like two members of the opposite sex who have a mutual platonic appreciation of each other. Don't weird that up by expecting something more.

So anyway, I got Assassin's Creed Brotherhood for Christmas, and I want to talk about it.

II.
I guess I should start, for the sake of context, with what I thought about last year's Assassin's Creed II. The misunderstood beauty of the internet is that you can choose to not care if you want. For those that don't not care, here's a short something I wrote about it a whole one year ago:

So I completed the game this afternoon.

I like it, but there is so much wrong with it. It's improves on nearly everything that the first game did, but still doesn't quite get it right.

The game never stopped teaching me things, which might sound positive, but there came a point when I just wanted to get on with it. I wanted to apply all the different techniques to actually sneaking around and assassinating people, but just like the first game all the assassinations are really fiddly and particular, never building up to a satisfying conclusion. That's dissapointing since there were so many cool toys and tricks this time around. When the game ended, I thought: 'I haven't actually done anything awesome yet!'

It was better, for sure, but it's still not quite there, which is a shame two games into the series.

Also, I thought the ending of the first game was a big WTF, but this one takes it to a whole new level. Seriously. WHAT THE FUCK.

I've since played through ACII again, and on the whole I agree with my past self. Each mission of the game is a heavily scripted tutorial for a new mechanic right up until the end of the game, and it provides scant opportunity for you to utilise these mechanisms on your own terms. Each 'major' assassination only requires the player's agency in so far as moving from point A to point B and finally point C, where they get to kill someone. The player is in control of what Ezio is doing in a physical sense; they control how he weaves his way through a crowd, how he climbs a building, or how he stabs a dude in the face, but not anything on a macro scale. The player is not asked to plan assassinations, or even improvise a strategy, but simply to go along with a set of instructions. When the game wants you to use the pistol, you'll be told to do so at the end of the official pistol-using-mission. The player controls what Ezio is doing, but not where he is going.

This is why the optional assassination missions were my favourite part of ACII. You were given a target and asked to murder them in whatever way you saw fit, which is much more interesting than simply doing what the game tells you. There were often clearly-marked paths of least resistance through these stages, but you have the agency to ignore them.

Though Mike of Five Players included Assassin's Creed as part of his wonderful taxonomy of stealth games, but I don't quite feel comfortable with it sitting there alongside Hitman or Splinter Cell. In Hitman, you choose some guns, and then you're plonked into a level that has some NPCs of various classifications running around it. There is one particular NPC in that level that you have to kill. That's it: the game lets you accomplish said goal however you want, and the various mechanisms of the Hitman games means there are usually a number of interesting ways to do so.

Unfortunatly, not all Hitman levels are born equal. The best are wide and open, based around clear visual landmarks and contain a simple, understandable goal that can be accomplished in a variety of ways. The worst levels are tight and linear or pointlessly vast, are confusingly designed, and only allow one way to win.

ACII unfortunately felt more like the latter than the former. Linearity is not necessarily a death sentence for stealth games though, as the superb Splinter Cell series shows. Splinter Cell uses it's linearity to curb frustration, by making the game more local smart: if you mess up in the first five minutes, that won't come back to bite you later in, say, Hitman. The levels are narrow, but they're also wide, and the player still has a great deal of choice in each of their actions. ACII on the other hand uses it's linearity simply to force the player into a narrative: you are Ezio Auditore de Firenze, and this is how he did this thing. He entered the party at the gate, then he walked over there, then he shot the guy. This moves from implicit design nonsense to explicit narrative justification when the game makes you restart for 'desynchronising' from Ezio.

III.
One of the first things I did with the game was play through the virtual reality training missions (essentially because I wanted to unlock Raiden). For starters I want to say that this mode is excellent; it seperates the mechanics form the open world and asks you to manipulate them far more accurately than is required of you in the main game. The free-running, which might have seemed only to be suited to getting from point A to point B, proves itself adept at handling precise and complex movements using a variety of techniques. It makes 2008's Prince of Persia look like an embarrassment by comparison, and at it's best reminds me of Mirror's Edge. If Ubisoft wanted to please me in particuar with their DLC plans they would add more of these challenges, particularly some more of the excellent assassination ones.

The combat challenges don't fare so well. They function similarly to those found in Arkham Asylum, except those work, and these don't. The reason the challenges work in Arkham Asylum is because the combat is entirely based on skill. I wouldn't say it was as deep as the combat presented by Brotherhood, but making a mistake is never a product of the computer making a calculation out of your favour. If you miss the timing of a counter, that's your fault; If you're not close enough to link together a combo, you haven't thought your positioning through. Asking the player to pilot Batman accuratly through these scenarios works because the combat sytem is accurate enough to accommodate such play.

In Brotherhood, you can now string together 'executions' (killing animations), so one counter or combo can be strung between enemies indefinitely so long as they don't hit you. The combat becomes a game of stringing together as many kills as you can, but also knowing when to stop and counter an incoming attack. There are also some enemies later in the game who can't simply be countered, and need to be tackled with alternative strategies. The combat has a great deal going on at once, and is far more interesting than the agonising waits for an enemy to counter you from ACII.

I'm sure some will criticise it for being 'too easy', but this ignores the true problem with ACII's combat. It wasn't that it was too easy (though it certainly was), it's that it involved large periods of time where the player would do nothing. This is the genius of Arkham's combat that Brotherhood has borrowed: there is little to no downtime, since even while executing one enemy you have to account for several others. The player's mind is constantly working away at the next step.

If there were any improvements I could suggest, it would be that spacial positioning should be more important. You can counter incoming enemy attacks from any direction, so there is little incentive to move from wherever you are when you're spotted. In the first Assassin's Creed, the presence of scaffolding or a market stall could change the ebb and flow of a fight, an aspect that was diminished in ACII and is almost completely absent in Brotherhood. A fight in one street is the same as a fight in any other; there are loads of environmental factors in free-running, why not in combat?

I enjoy the combat in the main game, but it's simply not accurate enough to work in the training missions. You see, there are several factors in the system, like enemy blocking, or whether the flashing symbol over an enemy's head means they are going to attack you or grab you, that are at the will of the computer. In real life, whether an enemy can deflect an incoming sword swing depends on spatial positioning, technique, the angle of the swing, and a whole heap of other contributing factors. However, 1) people who play Assassin's Creed don't know how to swordfight and 2) simply pressing the x button is not enough of an interaction to draw most, if any, of these factors from. It's easier to make these things a random process. I think this works in the open world, but when the game asks you to acheive 'killstreaks', i.e. stringing together kills without getting hit, being grabbed, or having your attacks blocked. These random components of the system mean that it's improbable to complete this task effectivly, so the combat training falters.

The core gameplay in Brotherhood is great, but it's also being built on a foundation that was previously pretty good. I stand by my previous assertion that if the mission structure of the previous two games had been more open, the games would have been excellent. Simply having great controls isn't enough, though it certainly helps.

IV.
So how does Brotherhood fare in terms of game design?

For starters, there are far more straight-up sneaking missions this time around. Some of them are linear, but they're much better than the scripted A-B-C jaunts of the last game. Curiously, the best stealthy parts focus more on positioning Ezio out of line of sight using acrobatics; running up buildings, hanging off ledges, quickly darting out of view before a guard can notice you. The system proves itself adept at handling honest-to-goodness stealth, which is simultaneously impressive and kind of depressing, considering the previous two games were supposed to be 'stealth games'. It's still not as open and in-depth as the Hitman games, and it still doesn't feel fair to call it a 'social stealth' game, as the series is sometimes classified. In fact, If we're going to classify things, Brotherhood might be considered an 'acrobatic stealth game', where spatial positioning and motion are paramount to remaining undetected. It's something that could have added some much needed variety to Mirror's Edge, and might still add some variety to Mirror's Edge 2 if EA ever answer my prayers.

It also leaves a lot more up to you. you start the game with all the items from the first game, which they don't bother going through the trouble of explaining to you. The new mechanics they introduce are also simply given to you, without instruction. The crossbow, for instance, can be bought at any time in the game from a shop, and you can then use it as you see fit.

If this were ACII, you would meet a character called 'La Freccia', who was a master archer. First, he'd require you to go on mission and find various materials he needs to make a crossbow. Then there'd be another mission where you'd practice using the crossbow on straw dummies in his back garden. Finally there'd be a mission where you'd go after your target, whereby using the crossbow was the only possible way to kill him. Then Freccia would tell you how proud of you he was, and he would send you on your way to meet 'Madame di Fumo'. Rinse and repeat.

It's liberating that things like the Crossbow, Poison Darts, and *spoilers* Parachutes, are just kind of given to you with very little fuss. Missions are designed so that you can use any of these items if you want to, but you don't have to. There's a far greater degree of agency; far more options for the player to utilise in any given scenario. Each mission now features two levels of 'synchronisation', essentially the best way to accomplish the mission will get you 100% synchronisation, but other methods are sufficient to complete the mission.

V.
The only thing that baffles me is how on earth Brotherhood was made. This is a game that is leaps and bounds above ACII in terms of design, story, and even length. Yet it only took a year to make, and was the result of some pretty nefarious dealing from Ubisoft higher-ups. I suppose the engine itself and many assets were re-used, but my mind still reels trying to imagine how they made the time for it, especially considering that another big game is supposed to be coming out at the end of this year (possibly the third numbered title).

One possibility is that Massive entertainment are making next year's title, while the regular team will be working on the one due in 2012, giving them the two years they need. This would have freed up a year for them to make Brotherhood, basing it on a lot of the assets from ACII.

Another possibility is slightly more cynical; that Brotherhood was intended as a part of ACII, either in the game itself, or as a downloadable add-on. The fact that ACII ends in rome, but you never get to explore it, sort of hints that there was supposed to be more there, but I feel that the two games are extensive enough as standalone titles that any claim of being sold short is quite petty. This might be true, but even if it is, it doesn't bother me.

However they did it, the game is excellent. It's so odd to think the game I was most cynical about approaching it's release is my favourite of the year. I finally feel like Assassin's Creed has hit the right spot, and I'm eager to see where it goes from here.

New Stealth Mockup

2011-01-03T16:26:00.002Z

I am a Mockup MACHINE.

New Mockup

2010-12-30T02:59:00.000Z

Most of the work I've been doing since I got back home has been behind-the scenes stuff (in particular cleaning up some of the messier code), which isn't very visually interesting. This might be though! it's an environment mockup:

Enjoy (hopefully)!

I am away for the holidays.

2010-12-25T12:38:00.001Z

I am away for the holidays.

Another screenie

2010-12-21T11:27:00.002Z

Barricades now work perfectly. That was a lot easier than I thought it'd be.

UPDATE:

New Lighting script works great (this pic is from imageshack, so it'll disappear eventually).

UPDATE2:

Chests now tell you what's in them.

Problems/ Solutions.

2010-12-20T14:52:00.001Z

Based on feed back from various peoples, as well as a bit of my own playthroughs:

-This error shows up when you die:
___________________________________________
ERROR in
action number 1
of Draw Event
for object oCursor:

Error in code at line 9:
if oControl.vNight=0 && oPlrtop.vEquip=0
^
at position 34: Unknown variable vEquip
This is due to oPlrtop being destroyed, so oCursor has nowhere to get vEquip from. I already fixed it by adding a line of code checking whether oPlrtop exists. It's a mistake I'm frankly embarrassed to have made.

- It's hard to know things like when you're being hurt, or what items you are getting out of chests.
These are examples of nice things I had to forget about in order to get it done in time. I'll be telegraphing damage better and there'll be text coming out of the chests to tell you what you got.

- It's small. Too small. My eyes hurt from staring at your teensy tiny videogame.
Right now you can resize the window, which kind of solves this. The problem being that it looks blurry as fuck, which kind of ruins my lovely pixel art. I'll be working on a 2x option later, but right now I'm concentrating on more abstract design fixes.

- It's too easy because:
- There's no incentive to kill enemies; just bunker up for the night and wait.
- There's too much health.
Two birds with one stone: Chests no longer give out health, and health pickups are dropped by enemies. Secondly, there's now a limit to your HP. Finally, there's now 'the money gun', which will exchange HP for certain things (more on that in a minute).

- Barricades only disappear at dawn, which removes any tension of them failing during the night.
Barricades aren't solid until you purchase them with the money gun. Then their health can be upgraded with it. Their HP will wear down over time, so there's every chance that they'll fail during the night (which might make bunkering down more interesting). This isn't implemented yet, but hopefully it'll make for some nice risk/reward.

- The Map is a bit boring - visually, mechanically and in terms of design.
The map was the last thing I designed, and I designed it on-the-go as I was making it. Also, I suck at designing maps. That being said, I will be trying harder in future: there will be 3 different areas, and they're probably going to be much smaller than the current one. They'll also look nicer.

The Best Thing I've Seen All Day

2010-12-19T01:31:00.001Z

For the next few weeks/days...

2010-12-18T21:36:00.001Z

...I will be working on TCOAN again. The TIGsource compo I was taking part in is over, and people have been showing some interest in it, so I thought why the fuck not.

Coalition: The Game

2010-12-17T23:37:00.007Z

I.
I recently attended this. It was an educational conference organised by our wonderful legislative body for post-16 students. There were some interesting talks, particularly from John Bercow, the current speaker of the House of Commons, and David Lamey, MP for Tottenham. We also received speech from Baroness Hayman, speaker of the House of Lords, though she didn't allow questions and was dreadfully boring. There were also some fun activities that we all did.

I'm not sure I emphasized the word fun enough in that last sentence.

My class didn't take part in all the activities - only these ones (copy pasta from the link above):

Show me the Money - a chance to choose which policies to prioritise with a restricted budget.

Forming a Coalition - an opportunity for students to find out for themselves how coalition agreements are made.

II.
The first workshop involved each of our classes at a table, where we were assigned a government department - Health, Education, the Home Office, Culture and Sport, or Business. Secondly, we'd decide amongst ourselves what we'd want to introduce in our departments based on some laminated cards representing policies. After that we had to go in pairs to other tables, so each table would then have representatives of each department/class. We'd then have to decide how to spread out the budget between the laminated cards, which each had a star value analogous to actual cost. The laminated cards also measured the economic benefit, popularity and the public well being (or something) each policy would cause. Finally we given a set of three tubes to place coloured baubles in, which would represent each of those three aspects.

The biggest problem with the activity was that it was remarkably easy to decide our budget. Since we were only allowed to make decisions in short time frames (2 or 3 minutes), there wasn't long enough to debate each policy on any serious or intellectual grounds. The fact that each policy was designated clear cut values - how much it would cost, how happy it would make everyone - ensured that in the end it boiled down to a game of top trumps, except we weren't competing with anyone else.

"Well we have 'free tv licenses for the over-75s'"
"Hmm... we have 'raise the price of alchohol', which is +1 economic benefit and provides +2 better quality of life"
"Okay, lets go with that then"

At the end we were asked if we had trouble deciding our budget. The answer was of course, no: We had experienced little trouble deciding which laminated cards we should put back in the envelope. This government stuff is well easy!

I have a feeling, and this is only an inkling mind you, that the goal of this little game might have been to simulate what it was like to actually decide a budget. The first problem is that we were teenagers, and are naturally disposed to not give a shit - especially when the work has already been done for us. I know at least three people in our group who just threw some cards in the middle of the table and then sat there looking up at the ceiling. The second problem is that the game has no real weight - it's a neutered representation of a real life event that is extremely contentious, complicated, and will effect the well being of countless numbers of people for years to come. Of course when we think about it in terms of simple values that have been assigned to us, it is going to seem easy, but anything would. There's a reason our government doesn't just plug our policies into a computer.

III.
Here's what our government looks like now.

In the UK there are three main parties: The Conservative Party, the Labour Party, and the Liberal Democrats. The Liberal Democrats haven't been in power for years, and modern political history has been dominated by a struggle between Labour and the Conservatives. The Conservatives were in power from 1979 until 1997, when Tony Blair won the election by a landslide.

At the beginning of this year Blair had already been succeeded by Gordon Brown, former chancellor of the exchequer, as both Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party. He is and was regarded almost universally as an uncharismatic hanger-on, desperate for power. The Conservatives, after a period of incompetent leaders in opposition, had a strong leadership and united party under David Cameron. The Liberal Democrats were under the leadership of Nick Clegg. No one really knows who he is at this point; comedian Frankie Boyle joked that 'Nick Clegg is so unknown, when he tells his mum he's coming round for tea, she has to look him up on Wikipedia'.

In the summer leading up to the general election in May, we had our first Television debates between the party leaders. I don't just mean 'the first set of debates this year', I mean 'the first television debates in British history'. At this point both Gordon Brown and David Cameron are aware that they're in trouble: neither of them are ahead enough in the polls to form a government with a majority control of Parliament, though the Conservatives are winning slightly. Both recognise that they might be forced to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, in order to gain more seats. The phrase 'I agree with Nick' was used a great deal by both leaders in the debate, and quickly became a joke phrase in the media.

The debates also meant that suddenly, everyone knew who Nick Clegg was. There was, for a while, a sense that the Lib Dems were seeing a surge in popularity, and that they might honestly come from third place and win it. However, come polling day, this 'Cleggmania' failed to translate into electoral success, and the Lib Dems walked away with even fewer seats than they had before. The supposed popularity of Clegg revealed itself as part media invention, part public disillusion with adverserial party politics; there was a sense that maybe, maybe, we could escape this constant back and forth between one useless, war-mongering government and another slightly worse one. In the end however, people settled on safe votes for established parties, sticking to their camps when the election might conceivably go either way. It's this reason I suspect people didn't flock to the Conservatives in the great numbers they did to Tony Blair in 1997; even though the Conservatives 'won' the election, they didn't have enough seats to form a majority government. The ball was now in the Lib Dem's court, and they had, in my mind, three possible courses of action:

The Lib Dems could form a coalition with Labour, and a variety of other, smaller parties to form a majority. This might lead to allegations of them 'propping up' the government, which had just, essentially, lost the election. It also wouldn't give them as strong of a majority as a Conservative coalition would, making it harder to pass legislation. However, the Lib Dems would probably be more ideologically comfortable with the Labour Party, both being roughly on the 'left' of the political spectrum.
The Lib Dems could form a coalition with the Conservatives. This would be easier, since it would create a majority government, capable of passing any legislation through so long as there were no revolts in it's own ranks. However, the left of the Lib Dems and the right of the Conservatives are so ideologically opposed it would threaten the stability of the government. For many who voted for the Lib Dems as an alternative to the Labour government, installing a Conservative one would be the ultimate betrayal.
The Lib Dems could refuse to form a coalition, or form an 'unofficial' coalition with the Conservatives. If they did the former, then the Conservatives would either have to rule as a minority government, which would severely hamper their ability to pass legislation, or call another general election, which would risk repeating this confusion a second time. If the Lib Dems did the latter, then they would pledge to vote in favour of Conservative policies, and would probably still be unpopular, but would not have any seats in the government itself.

For the next few days there was confusion as the country was left without a government as back-room dealings were happening at Westminster. Paddy Ashdown said at the time: 'The people have spoken, but we don't know what they've said'. A breakthrough came when Gordon Brown, a few days after the election, announced his resignation as Leader of the Labour Party, effectively confirming the impossibility of a Lib Dem/ Labour coalition government. It was announced that evening that a deal had been made between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, which would result in a coalition government, constituted by MPs from both parties.

Fast forward to now and the Lib Dems, Nick Clegg in particular, are public hate figures and have slipped significantly in the polls. The float pictured above shows David Cameron, the Prime Minister, standing over parliament and using Nick Clegg like a puppet. It's indicative of what people think of Clegg now, a far cry from his popularity after the televised debates. Last week a vote was passed allowing universities to raise their fees to £9000 pounds with the help of the Liberal Democrats, which is at odds with their election pledge to scrap fees altogether. As Mark Steel says:

Some of them insist they haven't been deceitful, because: "scrapping fees is still our official policy." And too often we're judged by what we do rather than by our official policy. If for example you take out a mortgage and don't make a single payment, you should be able to write to the bank, saying: "Although I'm 20,000 pounds in arrears, please be assured it remains my official policy to become King. So there's no need to worry."

IV.
For the second activity 'Forming a Coalition', each class was put on their own table, and there was no interacting with other classes. We were then split up between the majority 'Purple Party' and the minority 'Silver Party'. Both parties were handed a laminated sheet outlining what they stood for, with the policies for both parties being broadly analogous with the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. Each policy was given a number of stars, denoting how important it was to the party. Then we were made to decide which policies to write down on a sheet in the middle of the table as our 'official' coalition policies.

Unlike the first activity, we were given about 20 minutes to debate our decision, which is better, but once again it was fruitless to discuss the policies on any real world basis. Since all the policies were carefully outlined and ranked according to how we should prefer them, debate centred around their arbitrary values rather than their merits as government policy. In our group, none of us really acknowledged that we were one party or another; we were just a group of individuals, segregated at random and given a administrative goal to accomplish. Either this was a haunting piece of post-modernist satire, or the game had gone a bit wrong.

On our table, the leader of the Silver party refused to budge. We, the purples, offered him concessions and compromises; this policy for that policy; an amendment in exchange for a dropping of one of you more contentious pledges. He wasn't having any of it. At the end of the discussion, every table in the room was asked whether they had successfully formed a coalition, and our table was the only one not to. We were subsequently asked to consider the error of our ways.

But you see, we hadn't been informed explicitly that to form a coalition was actually the win condition. We therefore assumed that there were no such conditions for winning and losing. You know, like in the real world? The world that we live in every day? The world that politicians live in? We 'lost' not because we were trying to form a coalition and failed (considering that the poilicies were already sorted and ranked for us, such an outcome would be remarkably easy), rather, the Silver party leader simply decided he was playing a different game with a different set of rules. He didn't want to form a coalition because he said it would compromise his principles, or dilute the focus and support of his party, which didn't make sense in the game because his fictional party didn't have either popular support or an ideology. He had his own value judgements that weren't consistent with fiction of the game, and thus, he lost.

The game is supposed to show students what it's like to form a coalition, but it removes the historical, social and personal context of those involved, both from the analogous real events, and from the classes themselves. Forming a coalition is the win condition, but who's to say both parties are in support of such an outcome? Our policies are ordered by our parties preference, but who's to say that either party is unanimously decided internally on which policies are it's priorities? The decisions we had to make are remarkably easy when we are neutral overseers of number-allocated policies, but the world unfortunately doesn't work like that. We bring our personality and our history into every discussion. It's the basis for every interaction we have with the world. The game reduces the players simply to the 'deciding' parts of a simplified simulation of a coalition, rather than allowing them to interact with that system in a way that is meaningful. This is easy to organise, and provides lotsr press photos of young people looking enthusiastic for your website, but it won't teach them anything, or even the right things, about the political issues being demonstrated.

2010-12-12T20:48:00.000Z

Oh yeah.
They should totally assassinate him.
For treason.

...

I think you are committing
reason treason
by not making sincere statements.

I believe your
insincerity
is threatening our National security.

I also think you're a rapist.
Don't ask how I know
I just do.

Woah

2010-12-12T14:13:00.003Z

I got a massive view spike! My game, They Come Out At Night, was featured on Jayisgames.com as part of their weekend downloads feature. Thanks guys!

TCOAN is not in any way finished, but I'm busy making a game for a competition over at Tigsource (if you're interested in that then look here.). As soon as I'm done with that, I'm gonna jump in there and start seriously fucking around with it. I think it has some good ideas, and I think I did a lot of good for just 7 days, but it still needs a lot of work.

If any of you new guys plan on sticking around, enjoy the site I guess!

2010-12-10T20:58:00.003Z

You're Beautiful.
But sos is Gazelles
And I aint never fucked a Gazelle
Least not what you can prove.

2010-12-06T16:30:00.002Z

Jesus loves you
so much
he sent me a drunken text message
telling me to tell you.

Exclamation!

2010-12-03T15:30:00.004Z

Seriously? They can get away with this?

Given that Comic Jumper packed in free DLC for Splosion Man, any chance Ms. Splosion Man will pack in free DLC for Comic Jumper?

We love giving away free stuff in our games, but it is unlikely there will be Comic Jumper DLC in Ms. Splosion Man. As awesome as that would be, Comic Jumper levels are extremely involved and would take a large amount of time and money to create. At some point though we would love to do more with Comic Jumper, especially if we can add more sexist and racist things to it, because according to some people on the internet, that is what we love here at Twisted Pixel! **** women! **** other cultures! Yayyyyyyy!!!

No wait, they're not sexist! Look! Twisted Pixel's CCO said so!

It's a classic defence of this kind of sexism. In their minds they think that sexism is simply hatred or subjugation of women, and since they don't hate or actively subjugate women, then obviously they're not sexist. The reality is that having your character called Ms.Splosion Man (which must be intended as an ironic reference to Ms.Pac Man, since it doesn't make sense otherwise (she's not exactly a great example to follow)) and having them prance around in a pretty bow and lipstick, winking, and make girlish cooing noises to the camera, is absolutely abominable in this day and age. Look at these logos:

Doesn't there seem like something horribly wrong here? Splosion Man is, aside from his name, fairly androgynous, but Ms. Splosion Man has to be pink and femine and wear a bow in her hair.

2010-12-02T21:19:00.001Z

I keep having this
fever dream
everything is fuzzy

I work at a post office
or something.
Every person hates me.
I don't have many friends.
I spend all my time
laying on my bed
wishing I was dead.

...
You weren't dreaming.
You felt fuzzy because
someone left the
cooker on and
you got high
off the fumes.
We really do hate you.

Yeah.

2010-12-01T07:31:00.003Z

Yeah.

2010-11-30T20:46:00.001Z

I could not give a shit
about this play.
while I was sitting here
I wished I was dead
or everyone else was.

I am sorry
but your play can go
suck a dick.

Three Dees

2010-11-30T16:38:00.002Z

Adorable.

2010-11-29T00:18:00.001Z

I managed to buy it before it is even out apparently. I can state that it is without a doubt the most adorable thing that has ever been created by a human.

Hmmmm...

2010-11-26T21:26:00.002Z

Splinter Cell 6 is in development! Surprise! I have a feeling it will be 'Conviction 2', since they went to all that trouble of rebooting the franchise with the first title. But it seems development has been moved from Ubisoft Montreal all over to Ubisoft Toronto. I'm hoping this means something. Something a lot less like Conviction.

The Best Video

2010-11-25T13:44:00.002Z

Why has no one remixed this yet?

I have started...

2010-11-24T15:34:00.005Z

A new game (or just some mockups so far). It's an entry in this competition, themed Ghosts. Go look at that topic to read the crazy rules. I have a Tigsource devlog here, which I'll be posting about it in, so don't expect to see much of it on here.

COD:BLOPS

2010-11-23T23:16:00.012Z

I.
So. Black Ops.

It's good. It's really good. The 25 or so hours I've spent with it so far pale in comparison to frankly ridiculous amount of time I will be spending with it in the future. There will be other games to be sure - Skyward Sword, Portal 2, Arkham City - but they will be played through to the finish and and filed away accordingly. Black Ops is a different beast - it's currently my 'go-to' game; a game that is free-form enough to be interesting every time I play, and one that I will return to regularly. It's a title previously held by the likes of Modern Warfare 2 or Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and barring a usurpation from the likes of Brink, or whatever Call of Duty based concoction is brewing at Sledgehammer Games, it's likely to remain that way for some time.

This is a long one...

II.
I don't like linking to 'Yahtzee', but I'm going to link to 'Yahtzee', Particularly because he's the proponent of a frighteningly common argument regarding multiplayer games. Point 4 in the above article (which is like a year old (sorry)) is the one I want to talk about:

4. Because the single player must stand up by itself.

...

Other human beings are basically unreliable. If you play with them online they're an unknown quantity: an internet connection can drop out at any time, and there's no way to know if the people you're playing with are playing from some kind of prison for sociopaths. And if you try to get your friends around to play LAN or splitscreen, you have to make sure everyone's schedules sync up, and there's a strong possibility that most of your guests will vote to switch over toTekken half an hour in.

No, if you're trying to get into a game, the only person you can rely on is yourself. So games must always have single player by default, because there will always be factors standing in the way of multiplayer that the game cannot help. All of which brings me to my last and most important reason:

Well this is silly. I don't have a problem with him not playing Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer mode if he didn't want to (though this does raise some ethical questions as to whether he was in a position to review it properly) but I have serious objections to his assertion that a game must be able to stand up on it's single player alone. That's an objective statement about the way things should be, not just a subjective one on the way he likes his games.

Now lets look at this properly. If Yahtzee is seriously trying to argue that every game should be judged on the basis of it's solo content - how it's played without interacting with any other people online or offline - then what would he say about games that have no single player component whatsoever? What are they supposed to stand up on then? Sure, it's rare, but it's not unheard of, and it's certainly a hypothetical possibility. The proposition 'the single player must stand up by itself' relies upon the game in question having both in order for it to be intelligible, something which might not necessarily be the case. Games that don't correspond to this criteria are thus outside the statements domain, which undermines the intended objectivity of it.

The second assumption the argument makes is that the multiplayer is a secondary aspect to the single player. I thought Yahtzee's article was going to be an explanation as to why he thinks this is the case, since it seems like a vital component of the argument, but all of his bullet points, barring the one previously mentioned, rely on subjective explanations as to why he doesn't like multiplayer or is not in a practical position to enjoy it - Internet connection in australia is bad; I don't like interacting with other people etc.

Yes, I had a feeling I'd be answering for this today. Why didn't I give Modern Warfare 2's online multiplayer the time of day, despite it being one of the game's big selling points and apparently bestowed upon this Earth by the divine hand of Siddhartha Buddha? I suppose if people are confused enough to use five question marks at a time then I'd better explain why I usually feel that online multiplayer isn't my department.

I think the problem with Yahtzee's article, and his opinion, is that he hasn't quite thought it through - you can't say that multiplayer isn't your cup of tea, and that you're not really in a position to talk about it, and then dismiss it completely. It's contradictory - I think you either have to say that the purpose and quality to be found in games is dependent upon the judgement of every person, or that every person has to judge games by the one objective criteria. The latter proposition is elitist, reductive, and prevents us from ever developing any further theories on the quality or purpose of games beyond what we have now, and what we have now is not good enough.

III.
Black Ops has been given a bad reputation, I think to some degree deservedly, for it's atrocious single player. I think this video pretty much sums up the popular objections to it: whereas the Modern Warfare games, though scripted heavily, provided at least a modicum of agency (some of the more open combat sections, e.g the Gulag or defending Burgertown, require genuine tactical forthought) Black Ops constantly makes efforts to stifle it. Even some of the more linear missions in the Modern Warfare games would have a penalty for failure beyond starting from the previous checkpoint.

It's a pretty roller-coaster ride involving just enough gunfights and explosions before the game is finally over. During that time the player is not required to think or express themselves in any other way than down the barrel of a gun, and I can think of at least one scripted sequence that denies even that. The player is instead an actor, or a puppet, in an elaborately staged play. If the single player of Black Ops had any sort of philosophy on design, it would be that the advantage of video games over movies is that you can have a scene that recreates the entire Vietnam war, or where an entire city is nuked, or where helicopters fall out of the sky as our actors run underneath them, except you don't have to worry about actually filming it. Sure, all those computer graphics are expensive, but not as expensive, time-consuming or death-defying as it would be to actually film.

I don't agree that that's what makes games special. Whilst it might apply to Black Ops, or Uncharted, or Halo, it fails to apply to the likes of Advance Wars or Hitman, or more experimental fare like Noby Noby Boy or Norrland. These are games where the principle attraction is not narrative or spectacle but agency in a system. Isn't that the true merit in games - providing a space for a player to express themselves? How does limiting that expression in the way Black Ops does do us any good? I personally believe that the language of games is neither written nor spoken. It is one based on interactivity, control, and agency within a system, and one remarkably different from other art forms.

IV.
So yes, I believe the single player is, barring one mildly interesting plot twist, fairly atrocious and indicative of a design Philosophy I believe doesn't emphasise enough that is special about our medium. However, I still think it's an excellent game, purely because I don't believe, like Yahtzee, that a game must be judged by the merit of it's single player alone.

You see Black Ops single player, and Black Ops multiplayer are almost irreconcilably different - they speak different languages. The language of the single player bears the hall marks of film - camera positions, perspectives, angles, author driven pacing. The language of the multiplayer is removed from this, and is native to games as a medium.

Actions are it's verbs - running, aiming, shooting, throwing, stabbing - each seems simple enough on it's own, but can be strung together by the player into complex strategies. 'Camping' is the technique of waiting in a single spot, killing opponents as they run past in a hurry. It's effective against a large majority of players, who run around the maps with little to no consideration for where they're going, and assures those who know the maps best will triumph. 'Spawn Trapping', is a tad more complicated. The spawn points in Black Ops are fixed in each map, but depending on how close opponents are to them, you'll end up spawning at different ones. Spawn Trapping involves memorising the boundaries that will trigger each spawn point, so that you know exactly where enemies will be coming from. The first of these tactics is one that is only possible in a system that facilitates considerable player expression - it is both reactive to human inputs, and can be reacted against in the same way. Once you know where a camper is, it's not too difficult to flush them out, because humans are not robots; they're adaptive enough not to fall for the same trick too many times. The latter strategy is based on human input and reaction, but it's mediated through the computer - the system itself. Player's learn the rules of the system in depth and then use them tactically against their opponents.

I think Black Ops aught to be celebrated on the merits of it's multiplayer, rather than dismissed because of the failings of its single player. The multiplayer portion represents a purity of interaction and reaction that is unfortunately rare in games and becoming rarer. We live in the epoch of the cutscene and the scripted sequence, but I dream of a day we play in the epoch of the reactive space. One that openly encourages us to express ourselves, and does not patronise us by prohibiting or disqualifying agency.

Is that really too much to ask?

Blorg Redesign

2010-11-19T12:09:00.000Z

Will be redesigning the blog today. Expect it to look all kinds of fugly in the meantime.

Here's a picture to help you cope:

Super Warm

2010-11-16T18:56:00.001Z

Moar of the same (will be bigger eventually).

Dock Torr Hoo

2010-11-12T20:22:00.001Z

Deleted scene from Flesh and Stone. It rambles quite a bit, and it trudges through canon a bit too much, so I can understand why they cut it. but it does feature a bit of character development that wasn't quite apparent in the show.

Warmth

2010-11-11T20:26:00.001Z

Little pixel piece I did. Based on a game Idea.

Of Course

2010-11-11T18:42:00.002Z

ITS DONE

2010-11-10T10:05:00.001Z

I WENT TO BED BUT THEN I UPLOADED IT ONLY MOSTLY FINISHED.

EGP FINAL DAY SUPER COUNTDOWN OF DEATH

2010-11-09T18:09:00.002Z

Well, here's the final stretch. Will update as I work.

18:06

Death condition added. Title screen + blog plug added. Sound effects added. Final map designed in prototype. Framerate still a massive issue, though I'm confident that will change.

23:43

So much for updating as I work

Framerate all cleared up. Ai better. graphics final. its in a playable (even fun!) state. Should be (must be) done in the next hour or so.

EGP Day 5+1=???

2010-11-08T22:11:00.000Z

HOLY JESUS ONE DAY LEFT

It's coming together. I just need to fix framerate issues/optimisations, add a death condition, add a start screen, fix the pickup code a bit, code in movable block health, balance the game, and design the final world map... FUCK

EGP Day of the Dead (5)

2010-11-07T19:25:00.000Z

OH HAI THERE

Mostly doing stuff behind the scenes - cleaned up some code and worked a bit more on my enemy AI, so showing a screen shot is a bit pointless : /.

Still a game-breaking bug at night. I only have two days left, so I need to seriously buckle down.

Verr Interesting

2010-11-07T00:00:00.001Z

There's an interesting interview between Ken Levine and Cliff Blezinski as part of the 'Irrational interviews' series. Of particular interest are Blezinski's statements about why a lot of the games on unreal engine look the same - it's not his fault!

EGP Day 3.5

2010-11-06T15:17:00.000Z

Didn't post at the end of yesterday because I didn't do much work, and I what I did wasn't very visually interesting.

I've got all the items and inventory finished, which took bloody ages. The first screenshot is me testing the transition to night, and the second is me testing enemy AI. A couple of days ago when I said my night/ day stuff was finished, I didn't realise that it created some god-awful frame rate issues, so I'm gonna have to fix that.

EGP Day Deux

2010-11-04T21:20:00.000Z

Rejigged the colour schemes, put in some new tiles, perfected my day/night code, and started a rudimentary HUD. I'm quite proud of the font (not shown in full here).

EGP Day uno

2010-11-03T23:14:00.000Z

A while ago I did like a day-by-day update on where I was with my EGP entry. I am doing that again.

Pictures

2010-10-31T15:08:00.000Z

Who needs words?

The first was done about 4 years ago. The second was done relatively recently. I hope there has been some improvement :/

Aside from a small animation bug, the water in my game is working perfectly. How about that.

I am a big nerd

2010-10-28T22:22:00.005+01:00

1) OMG ELEVENTH DOCTOR IN SARAH JANE ADVENTURES. It was actually pretty awesome - as much as I loathed Russell T. Davies when he was in charge of Doctor Who, he can write some good episodes now and then. I think he even writes a rather excellent Eleventh Doctor, and Matt Smith is still as charming as ever.

On the other hand, Davies can't quite resist messing around with Doctor Who canon while he's here; the exploits of all the Doctor's previous companions since they left the TARDIS are detailed, and The Doctor reveals he can be any skin colour and can regenerate far more than the previously canonical 12 times (though this might have been a joke). I don't have any real problems with these changes, especially if Moffat and co. aren't planning on trawling through the backstory anymore. I just think it's kind of out of order for Davies to do it in a mid-series episode of a spin-off show. The only particular thing I had a problem with was the reveal that Tennant's 'sad time walk' lasted even longer than the already ludicrous amount of time we saw it on screen, and once again Davies emphasising that regeneration = death.

2) NEW BATMAN FILM CALLED THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. I approve.

3) GOING TO THE SHOPS TOMORROW. Gonna buy myself Fable III.

4) THIS SONG.

More mocks

2010-10-26T15:55:00.001+01:00

More mocks.
EDIT: And one more:

Look, A game I am making.

2010-10-25T00:16:00.004+01:00

(This one was uploaded before, but I accidentally deleted it (It's also pretty old))

For reals this time.

Also:

Changed up the 'about' page - it is now far more cynical. Also, yellow!
I want to point out some good articles I have read about the videogames:

That's all folks.

Pyramid Head

2010-10-23T21:54:00.001+01:00

My interpretation of Pyramid Head. I don't think people liked it much.

No, I haven't played any Silent Hill games; why do you ask?

YESH AND NOO

2010-10-19T21:55:00.001+01:00

YESH AND NOO

Yes - New Pheonix Wright game from Level 5.
No - It's a crossover type-thing, so the gameplay won't be a continuation of the series, and it's status as canon is looking tenuous.

Which means AAI is still the only thread the series has going, which is terrible, terrible news.

: ) ?

2010-10-12T17:18:00.000+01:00

So it seems Capcom are teasing some kind of Ace Attorney related collaboration. PLEASE LET IT BE THIS. Please.

Sprits

2010-10-06T22:36:00.000+01:00

These are edits of some pixel work a friend of mine did. I did them (mostly) during school today, because I was bored :/

I'm nearing the end of Dead Rising 2 (I'm in overtime). Enjoying it immensely - will share my thoughts eventually.

This is Getting Ridiculous.

2010-10-05T18:27:00.000+01:00

My 'Games I need to finish' pile. Something tells me I am never going to finish A Boy and his Blob.

Hells Yes

2010-10-01T15:16:00.001+01:00

It's not Beyond Good and Evil 2, but I'll take it.

There Was Vomit Everywhere.

2010-09-30T21:17:00.000+01:00

An interesting change in Dead Rising 2 is that much more of the drink just lying around is alcoholic. If you drink too much Chuck will vomit, and then he'll last a couple of seconds before vomiting again. And then he'll vomit again. And then possibly again. Vomit isn't just something to be 'splashed' over the environment either - Zombies and Bosses will slip over it, leading to some interesting scenarios.

Less 'interesting' (depends on your definition though) was one boss battle against two sword-wielding lesbians in a trendy bar. You see, the only thing to heal yourself with there is alcohol - beer, vodka, cocktails, or whiskey. The boss battle is tricky, but especially so when Chuck can't stop spilling his guts on the probably very expensive carpet. And then getting hurt. And then drinking. And then vomiting again. It's an endless cycle of drinking, hitting people over the head with sledgehammers until they are dead, and vomiting. Over and over.

I eventually triumphed, but the battlefield was caked in my insides. There was vomit everywhere.

Other M & Dead Rising 2

2010-09-30T18:35:00.003+01:00

So, earlier this week (Sunday or Monday (?)) I finally got my officially official Wii lens cleaner in the post, which meant I could finally play Metroid: Other M with my dusty, dusty console. And then, the next day, my copy of Dead Rising 2 came in the post. I've been playing both concurrently (along with Bionic Commando), and just wanted to share my thoughts:

Other M is much better than I expected - I seemed to align philosophically with the game's detractors, but the first few hours were surprisingly pleasant. The combat is very Ninja Gaiden/ Devil May Cry etc. action game fare, more so than it is 'Metroid'. It places far greater emphasis on where Samus is in physical space - dodging is key, and tougher enemies require you to jump on top and grapple with them. It's actually really fun, even if it is a million miles away from, say, Metroid Prime (stick with what you know, hey Team Ninja?).

Outside of combat though, things are bit more precarious. Your power-ups aren't discovered by exploring, but authorised by your commander, who makes a habit of authorising abilities just after they'd be useful. A notable example is when you have to run through the lava level where you constantly take damage, before he gives you permission to use your heat-proof Varia Suit. Later on he tasks you to go all the way up one 'path' until you reach a challenge you can't pass without the wave beam, So you go back to where you started, and where some new enemies have spawned. Then Adam authorises the wave beam, which means you have to go all the way back up that 'path' again. And then after that, back again, because the level design is often completely arbitrary in that way.

It seems odd that such a defining aspect of the best Metroids (which I'm positing as Super and Prime - feel free to disagree), that the player is left alone in the environment to discover things at their own pace, is ommited in Other M - replaced by scripted sequences and arbitrary triggers. There's no consistency in how you unlock power-ups. Just keep going forward along the telegraphed route and you'll get them I guess. It's the difference between

Leaving the player in a room with the red key and the red door.
Telling the player to approach the red door and then have the key appear in their inventory.

No.1 might be Hobson's choice - choosing not to pick up the red key would prevent you from making progress at all - but it's clearly more fulfilling than No.2.

Also, though I emphasise mechanics over story, I agree with these two regarding the narratives's treatment of women. There's an unfortunate scene late in the game where Samus meets (SPOILERS) Ridley, starts having a mental breakdown, and turns into a little girl. I mean literally, it's a visual metaphor or something. All this despite, this being a prequel to fusion, having fought and the killed the fucker seven times over by this point. I also object to her having to react for me - in Super and Prime, we didn't see Samus babbling like a child at the sight of every boss because the reaction was left to the player, who's experience was ultimatly considered more important than Samus's. Also because that reaction doesn't make any sense.

So, Dead Rising 2. I can't remember how many real, human hours I'm into it, but I have about 48 in-game hours until the military arrive/the moon crashes.

I must admit, I had big expectations going into it, because I loved the first Dead Rising and the improvements being touted in the sequel (and it's downloable prequel/marketing tool, Case Zero) were all based on hangups I'd had about the first game. Character movement feels better, it's easier to save, and AI partners are all now at least competent and at best potent in their zombie killing/ avoiding abilities. So yeah, All that stuff is great, and I'm having a good time.

I guess my biggest problem is that Dead Rising 2 is, aside from these improvements, very,very similar to the firs game. The original had a lot of new and interesting ideas that aren't utilised on regular basis. Dead Rising 2 uses the same ideas, so is similarly atypical, but now that it's working from a template, it feels a lot less daring and original.

I'm still playing both, and might post a bit more about them later.

In-Engine

2010-09-28T09:41:00.000+01:00

I love using video-gamey phrases. It makes me sound like i know what I'm doing.

Bionic Commando - Part 1

2010-09-27T10:09:00.005+01:00

The thing is, as cool as its pedigree and its announcement trailer are, we're still left with lingering doubts. It's always possible this could turn into another disappointment along the lines of Final Fight: Streetwise and Bionic Commando – both, incidentally, produced by DmC publisher Capcom – and certain details in particular leave us a little suspicious. - Gamesradar

- Can you imagine being the developers? The people at Grin? Who lost their jobs when the game bombed and their studio went under? Not only do the have to live with that, but they also have to live with a culture that considers their biggest game a joke, something to be mentioned in passing as 'that piece of shit'.
- It prevents us from learning anything about the game, or games in general. To dismiss Bionic Commando, or any game, as a piece of shit is to ignore everything it did right, and what we can learn as a medium from everything it did wrong.

Pixels

2010-09-25T20:07:00.000+01:00

Another stealth game mockup.

I Forgive You Capcom

2010-09-25T12:02:00.003+01:00

The other day I asked if somebody could make a good Ace Attorney game instead of Investigations 2. Well, they are, according to a tweet from Jiro Ishii of Level 5. They're supposedly working on it with Shu Takumi, the creator of Ace Attorney's 1 through 4, which is excellent, excellent news.

EDIT: Jiro Ishii has distanced himself from the news, saying "Just so there's no confusion, I am making only "Time Traverers", now". It's a good thing I'm not a games Journalist : S.

Bored

2010-09-24T21:02:00.001+01:00

Inception Video Game?!

2010-09-21T22:57:00.006+01:00

The strip above pretty much sums up my feelings.

Euphoric feeling countdown:

More Inception? Yes please!
Christopher Nolan wants to be involved, or at least wants this to happen? FUCK YES.
Warner Bros. are presumably in charge of Inception, so they'd naturally want one of their own studios, under the Warner Bros. Interactive label, to handle this, correct? I can't be the only one thinking of a certain studio? If you get the gig though, just get Nolan to do your script this time, okay guys?

Inafune vs. Japan

2010-09-21T18:38:00.000+01:00

Here's something I posted on TIGsource that I liked. Enjoy. Hopefully.
____________________________________________________

Mini TGS rant:

I'm officially sick of Inafune and his "Japanese games suck" attitude. If he truly believes there's something wrong with Japanese games - why is the solution making them more Western-ish anyway?

Inafune defines success by sales. He recently made comments about how he wanted Dead Rising to be 'more successful' than Resident Evil, which clearly meaning 'sells better', rather than 'is better'.

His complaints about the Japanese games industry are twofold:

Japanese developers are making games that only appeal to people in Japan (he even criticises Capcom for this, citing Lost Planet 2, which he felt was too much like Monster Hunter)
Japanese developers are making games that are at least 5 years behind western developers.

Personally I find little to disagree with in his comments. Especially so if he's thinking of success monetarily.

Of course I think you should make games for a niche audience who enjoy them (I'm posting on TIGsource for heavens sake!). However, Inafune's point is that the Japanese industry just keeps doing that, over and over again. If it doesn't stop it will become stale and complacent, and the world will leave it behind.