Once More, With Stealing - On Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist (2015)

From the designer of The Stanley Parable, comes Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terrible Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist! It’s free! It’s short! I’d recommend playing both games first before reading this!

Now, onto our main attraction!

AIMless: On Catherine (2011)

I played Catherine pretty soon after playing Emily is Away (which I wrote about here), and those are pretty interesting experiences back to back.  You could almost imagine Catherine being the continuation of the story of the protagonist from Emily is Away twelve years later, even though their mindsets are different.  But both games try to catalog relationships with the opposite sex from the male perspective, and neither are much interested in simply telling a tale of romance.

In Defense of Free to Wait Games

Jim Sterling (of The Jimquisition, formerly of The Escapist) put out a review and also a video last year about a game called Dungeon Keeper Mobile.  Here's the review, and here's the video:

The Jimquisition - Free to Wait

Dungeon Keeper Mobile kicked up a bit of fuss when it was announced.  It was a mobile revival of a long dormant franchise that had its heyday in the 90s.  (Fun fact for those that don't know, Peter Molyneux worked on it).  And Electronic Arts decided to shamelessly cash in on that IP and they turned what was a strategic, well remembered PC game into a "free to play," "pay to win," "casual" game for mobile devices.  Or so the story goes.

I haven't played Dungeon Keeper Mobile, and I doubt I ever will.  I haven't played a lot of these "free to play" games.  If I have free time with nothing but my phone, I'll generally read something on it instead.  But then these games aren't for me.

Jim Sterling, in the video, complained about how little there was to do in Dungeon Keeper Mobile.  You'd start the game, click a couple times to place down a few blocks or dig or put things down, and that was it; you'd have to wait a couple hours for that task to complete before you could do anything else.  That was the "gameplay."  Sterling focused on the fact that the game would harangue you to pay some real money to speed up the process.  It's a game that seems built primarily to make money off the weak-willed, by making the waits agonizingly long.  It's temporarily holding your gameplay hostage, for money.

And I'm going to try to defend them.

Forgetting You, But Not the Time: On Emily is Away (2015)

Emily is Away (2015)

(some spoilers)

Late last year I saw an article about this game called Emily is Away in Wired. The headline caught my interest: it said the game was AIM-inspired and set in the 2000s. Generally, I don't like reading too much about games I think I might play in the future; I wrote about how pre-set expectations changed my experience with Gone Home before. So I didn’t read the article. But I saw the game get articles in other publications as well. And I saw that Emily Short had written about it, and I made a mental note to definitely give the game a shot at some point. (Her review is here). But even though I’d avoided reading articles about the game, I still couldn’t avoid reading all those headlines, and though I can't find it again, I'd seen one article/blog/forum post/Youtube title which said the game was about getting friend-zoned. Remember expectations? Yeah, there they were, being pre-set.

Civilization and Ruin: Fallout 3 Vs. Fallout: New Vegas

I should probably get this done before Fallout 4 releases, right?

So: Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. It's pretty rare to have such an apples-to-apples comparison between games and their developers. Fallout 3 was released in 2008 and developed by Bethesda Game Studios; Fallout: New Vegas in 2010, developed by Obsidian Entertainment. They both take place in the same in-game universe, they were both developed using the same engine, and they both ostensibly share the exact same underlying gameplay mechanics and genre. These are games from two of the biggest western RPG game studios around (Bioware's also there, of course), but although both studios sort of share the same philosophy of providing freedom, choice, "open-worldness," and player-driven gameplay, how that ethos manifests in their actual games is actually pretty different.

There's also this divide between the players, and it isn't just that people slightly prefer one over the other; the emotions run higher than that*. Fallout 3 is, I think, going to come to be one of the defining games of the Xbox 360/PS3 era, and for the generation growing up on those consoles, it's going to define what video games ARE, pretty much. And a lot of those people played New Vegas afterwards and found it boring, and restrictive; they thought it didn't measure up. And then there's the people that consider New Vegas one of the best RPGs of the last couple years, who detest Fallout 3 and that hate everything Bethesda did to the franchise (if they played 1 or 2 first). Sure, there's a middle ground, but there's also a lot of people that feel very strongly about this. So what makes Bethesda's Fallout so different from Obsidian's? One of the biggest, I think? Bethesda's games get better as you move away from their games' cities and people, but those are the areas where Obsidian's games excel the most.

Staged Fighting: Guacamelee's Combat

Guacamelee's combat feel different that of other beat'em up games I've played.

Elsewhere, combat seems like it's about rhythms, about getting in sync with the enemy, about learning the right times to attack and when to counter or dodge.  Or they're about button mashing, or combo memorization, or pattern recognition.

Guacamelee (2013) has some of that, all of that, certainly.  But it asks something different of you, I think, than games like Devil May Cry, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Castle Crashers, Dark Souls, the Batman: Arkham games, or older beat'em ups like Double Dragon or that Simpsons arcade game.  It's more active.  More dynamic.  Like I said, different.

Footsteps to Follow: On Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons and Ico

Imagine you are the younger of two brothers. You will not get to forge your own path through childhood, because there will always be an elder sibling that came before you. Your parents and your teachers will always look at the two of you, and they won't be able to help but compare. Your own decisions will be flavored by the choices your older brother made before you, and at every turn, there will come a question: will you emulate, or differentiate? Will you invite the comparison or run in the opposite direction?

Brothers:  the story is about two brothers trying to cure their ailing father

Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons is a story about two brothers, trying to find a cure for their ailing father. And it is a game, one that is consciously trying to follow in the footsteps of an earlier game, Ico. The shadow Ico casts is long: it is considered a classic, a game that pushed the medium in new directions upon its release in 2001 by Sony Computer Entertainment.  Developed by Fumito Ueda and team ICO in Japan, Ico is a name that is likely to come up when you try to discuss Games as Art, for its style, for its storytelling, for its innovation, and for its imagination.  Brothers, released 12 years later, developed on a different continent by Swedish developer Starbreeze Studios, and directed by filmmaker Josef Fares, embraces the influences of Ico proudly and eagerly, and because of that you can't help but compare the two as you play through it.  (here's a link to an interview where Fares says Ico influenced his game:  Shack News - Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons creator talks inspiration and a grander world)

When No One's Watching: On Dishonored (2012)

A view from high above in Dishonored

After I'd finished Dishonored, I was curious to see how its chaos mechanic worked, exactly, so I looked it up. Dishonored was a game released in 2012, developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. You play as an assassin, and there was a “chaos” system in play that wasn’t fully explained within the game itself, only a screen that told you that killing more people would mean a “darker outcome”. I was wondering if it was simply a case that killing more enemies would = higher chaos and a worse ending, and yeah, it basically was. I also came across a forum post¹ that argued that Dishonored discouraged players from engaging in a high chaos playstyle, and that that was a mistake because killing was a lot more fun in the game than stealth. Dishonored gives you a range of gadgets and supernatural powers, but most of them were either noisy or lethal. Dishonored only allows the player to take out enemies non-lethally in only two ways: choke them out from behind, or shoot them with a sleep dart. The poster found enemy encounters boring because of this limited interaction with them; they found himself reloading often once they got spotted, because enemies are difficult to take out non-lethally head-on, so they found it easier to reload the game instead. Then they watched videos of other people's playthroughs; they watched other players kill enemies with their own bullets by stopping time, possessing them, and moving them into the path of the bullet they'd just fired. They saw players shoot grenades out of the air by stopping time, and they watched other players incinerate enemies by wind-blasting (that’s a magic power you can get in the game) them into Arcs of Light (which were electrical force fields that electrocuted anyone that touched them). But more than that, the game included a morality system, and it explicitly tells you in loading screens that the story would get darker and that there would be consequences if you went the high chaos route and killed too many people. The game was telling you that the “right” choice in this game was to avoid killing whenever possible, but to play the game “right” would limit the variety of enemy interactions and the creativity you could use, and all of this was something that the developers had built into their own game.

(Not) Seeing the World Through a Mini-map - On Mini-maps in Sleeping Dogs, Grand Theft Auto, and Metal Gear Solid

Metal Gear Solid's Radar

I remember a couple years back, re-playing Metal Gear Solid and thinking it would make a great flash game.  The stealth sections, specifically, where you're perhaps in a room trying to reach the exit, and there are guards patrolling the area that you have to avoid.  Because what actually ends up happening is you're playing through these sections not watching your character all that much, but instead the little minimap in the corner that represents your radar, making sure your dot never enters the cones of vision of any of the guards or security cameras.  Go onto any flash game portal, and you'll see that's occurred to a lot of people.  Zoom in on the mini-map, Remove all the extraneous controls outside of movement, and you have a straightforward mechanic you can replicate with simple geometric shapes, no art skills required.  The radar is completely unrealistic, of course: how would a radar show you what guards are looking at?  And then there’s the fact that all these guards are so short-sighted that they can only ever see several feet in front of them.  Stealth in Metal Gear Solid is an overtly game-y and unrealistic mechanic, but then again, it's not like the game was particularly slavish to realism anyways.  And because stealth is built around the mini-map as a central component of gameplay, these sections work, which is why even if you take out everything else and focus only on the mini-map, the game still functions pretty well.

Minimaps are a user interface component that have become especially prevalent with the advent of open world games in the past decade and a half or so.  Given large maps which players can easily get lost in, a large number of collectables, enemies that can come from any direction, and multiple missions you can start at a time, there needs to be some way to convey to the player a lot of spatial information.   Mini-maps are a fine tool for this.  But they don’t always completely fix all these problems, and sometimes, they can introduce new ones, especially if you’re just using them because everyone else is, without thinking through how they’re being integrated into the game at large.  Like, for example, in GTA IV.

Medium Expectations: On Gome Home (2013)

Sam's bedroom

Five minutes: that's how long it took Gone Home to let me down.  It wasn't a big thing, really.  The game starts you off at the front door of a house, luggage at my feet and a locked front door beckoning.  I was Katie, a young woman back from a trip to Europe, and I'd arrived at night, with darkness enveloping everything beyond the porch.  A steady torrent of rain beats down, punctuated by occasional thunder and lightning, which lent a sense of urgency to the proceedings: don't you want to get out of the rain and cold?  I'd just figured out how to unlock the front doors, and now I was inside the lobby.  It was an actual relief entering the house and putting walls between me and the raging storm outside.  I took a look around, the first glimpse at the eerie, creaky, antiquated house that my younger sister Samantha (or Sam) and my parents were living in, although most of that was probably was the dark stillness, and the house would be more welcoming in the morning.  None of them were here apparently for my homecoming; the note on the door from Samantha had said as much.  My parents were on holiday, my sister had something to deal with.  So, I contemplated the wooden staircase in front of me, and the doors to either side.  Then I turned around, went back outside, and tried to pick up my bags, still on the porch, to bring them inside.  No dice.  Trying to pick them up had been one of the first things I'd tried to do when the game started, but left-click had done nothing, and neither did the spacebar, e, or u keys.  Perhaps now that I had the front doors open, Katie would logically have a better reason to want to pick them up, and the game would let me move them inside, away from the outdoors, but unfortunately, the bags still proved unresponsive.  The game wasn't able to interpret what I was trying to do, what I felt was a logical thing to do, and what I felt was a logical thing for my character to do, and that brought me out of the moment, if only for a bit.  This was a small thing, of course, that I was being bothered by, and you can forgive small things.  But it’s often these small surprises and disappointments that can stick with you, long after you finish a game.

Thoughts on Final Fantasy IX

I just downloaded Final Fantasy IX off of PSN a week ago.  I had a copy of it back on the PSX; it was probably the first really big game I ever played, certainly the first RPG, and I remember really liking it back then, but replaying it now gives me a whole new appreciation for it, especially having played FFX and several other RPGs since then.

In Final Fantasy IX, the physical journeys the characters take mirror the journeys the characters take emotionally. All of the cast are constantly challenged. Vivi struggles with quesitons about his humanity and the meaning of his existance. Dagger is confronted with her lack of real world experience as she desires to help the people (her people) she feels like she has a duty to protect. Steiner is confronted with the possibility that the side he has sworn allegiance to and spent his life serving might not be the right one. And Zidane who has spent his life chasing girls and being irrelevant at the fringes of society, starts to develop a relationship with Dagger knowing the gulf that lies between the two, and is suddenly thrust into the role of a hero. All the rest of the characters also have their stories, and that's the important thing: you can generally tell what motivates the characters and what they are thinking. Alright, Vivi's dilemma is perhaps touched on a bit too repetitively, and sure, the characters could be a bit more nuanced, but the important thing is that the characters have at least something that defines each of them.

The whimsical feel, too, is something that no other Final Fantasy (that I've played) has, and it's really refreshing. Zidane is actually a protagonist hero that is actually eager to help, and who doesn't mope around all the time. The story has a lot of downer moments, but it also mixes in humour and a sense of adventure as well. The art in the game for everything other than any of the humanoid main characters (That's Dagger, Zidane, and Eiko, all of who look unappealing to me) is gorgeous. There's a sense of scale and history to every city and locale, and even though the streets aren't teeming with people, there's a lived in feel that makes the cities feel alive and dynamic. What also helps is the camera, which swoops in and out, which can start out really far away and then slowly zoom in, which is sometimes perched above and sometimes shoots from the side. This is the game that demonstrates the power that a camera on rails and at a distance and pre-rendered backgrounds can have over the standard over-the-shoulder third person viewpoint that every western RPG takes. The music is good, the mini-games are time sinks; thank god, also, that this game came before voice acting made its way into Final Fantasy games. I can't imagine any way that Vivi wouldn't become completely torturous if he were given a voice to what he says.

The battle system is incredibly slow, and stealing from bosses is a real pain, but in the end, it doesn't matter. Final Fantasy Versus XIII is not going to have many of the things I mentioned that make FF9 so enjoyable, but hopefully it approaches its greatness anyways.