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Game Guy
September 14th, 2007
Whoops! Detteiu Mario video series
This was going to be an entry about obscure video pinball game Necronomicon. I was going to upload a video I made of the game to convey what it was all about, complement the contents of the article, that kind of thing. Unfortunately, due to problems with both my video capture device and youtube, I couldn’t make it happen this week. Crud. Next week, for sure!
Instead, let’s take a look at the Detteiu Mario video series. An intrepid user on youtube who goes by the name of daigam has uploaded a series of videos demonstrating hacked Super Mario World levels. This is not particularly interesting on its own – there are a lot of people out there who have hacked their own levels into the classic platformer, especially on youtube. What’s intriguing about the hacked levels it that they run through on their own, start-to-finish, without any input from the player whatsoever, and often in the most absurdly roundabout manner possible.
You can watch the entire series right now on youtube, in eight installments: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and eight. A lot of comparisons have been made to Rube Goldberg machines and even Mr. Magoo, which… yeah, seems about right. The level designer’s real name is, as far as I can tell, unknown, but whoever he is, well. He’s probably lost quite a bit of time making these things!
September 6th, 2007
Condescension and Confusion
I don’t normally write about hugely popular mainstream games on this blog. I won’t really be doing that today, either, but Time Magazine’s Lev Grossman wrote a baffling and condescending article about a <i>very</i> popular mainstream game that I figured I’d talk about a little. The article is titled <i> The Man in the Mask</i>, and it is an embarrassing mess. The subject is the soon-to-be-released Halo 3, a video game sequel for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console. Developed by Bungie Studios, its prequels were the most popular games on the original Xbox console by far, and Halo 3 itself will undoubtedly sell millions and millions of copies when it’s released on September 25. Grossman’s article touches on that, but mostly he makes it obvious that he doesn’t know much of anything about video games beyond the same old clichés and generalizations that the high-brow cognoscenti seem to have picked up back in the early 80s . Failing that, he’s some kind of brilliant, sarcastic madman! I’m not about to give him the benefit of the doubt, but it’s possible.
“It’s difficult to explain the story of Halo, but that difficulty is in itself worthy of note. This isn’t Donkey Kong,” writes Grossman. I slap my forehead every time I read that line. If you pay attention to video games at all, you know why it’s insulting: the vast majority of video games released in the past twenty years “aren’t Donkey Kong.”
“The Master Chief is not an Italian plumber whose girlfriend has been kidnapped by a gorilla. His story is rich and complicated in ways that we’re not used to in video games. The Master Chief is a supersoldier, the only one of his kind, equipped with–encased in, really–powerful battle armor. He lives 500 years in the future, at a time when humanity is fighting a group of alien religious zealots known as the Covenant.” Again. Halo’s story is “rich and complicated” in all the ways that <i>we’re used to</i> in video games. Sci-fi supersoldiers battling aliens in the future is <i>par for the course</i> as far as video game stories are concerned.
So what is Grossman talking about? He mentions Halo’s “curiously lyrical quality,” its “literary touches,” its “romantic weather effects and sublime vistas and soaring Gregorian chants,” but pretty much all of these things were present in Halo’s predecessor, the Bungie-developed Marathon series, which was developed over ten years ago. More importantly, the trend in mainstream video games for the past fifteen years or so has been towards the overwrought and the cinematic - Halo is simply the most popular and recognizable purveyor of that trend. Grossman singling out the game’s cinematic qualities as unique betrays his ignorance.
Even more baffling is the way Grossman juxtaposes these seemingly fawning, complimentary paragraphs with the usual condescending chestnuts about video games. “The Bungies bring a grinding, jeweler’s meticulousness to what most people consider an unhealthy amusement for children,” writes Grossman. I’m assuming that he wrote that sentence as an attempt to build credibility with the older and probably more conservative audience that reads Time Magazine, people who probably assume (even now!) that video games are “an unhealthy amusement for children.” But to do so would ignore the industry’s recent growth, the astonishing popularity of the Nintendo Wii in the United States, and the growth and popularity of the casual games market.
There’s a strange contradiction in these paragraphs. A bizarre leap in tone from condescending and ignorant to admiring and bemused. One invariably gets the impression that Grossman was forced to match up his thoroughly antiquated views about video games with the subject he was actually covering. Considering the very real possibility that video games will one day be as ubiquitous to media consumers as film, music or television, I’m forced to wonder why Time settled for such a myopic and misinformed piece of writing on the subject.
Maybe next time.
August 29th, 2007
Knytt Stories is Marvelous
Knytt Stories is the latest freeware work from Swedish independent game developer Nicklas “Nifflas” Nygren, and it, like the rest of his work, is thoroughly charming, atmospheric and enjoyable. Nygren’s previous game, which was simply titled Knytt, provided the player with an enormous, gorgeous 2D world to explore, with little in the way of objectives or interference. After the game’s release last year, many players expressed concern over the game’s “unfinished” feel and lack of goals. I strongly disagreed with that opinion - the lack of unnecessary video game trappings served the overall experience of playing the game, which was, like a good walk in the countryside, extremely relaxing and satisfying in its own right.
Nygren has attempted to please both camps with Knytt Stories, which is less a self-contained game and more a game creation system using the distinctive qualities of Knytt as a jumping-off point. Nygren writes on the game’s homepage that ” Knytt Stories doesn’t have a specific plot. Instead, each level is its own little adventure.” The included demonstration level, titled “The Machine,” posesses all of the qualities that made Knytt so compelling. The game’s world, despite only being visible one screen at a time, remains remarkably coherent and beautiful from a design and aesthetic standpoint. The way that the different terrains and little details of the world blend together from moment to moment feels startlingly organic, and it’s even more remarkable when you consider that everything has been put together using a unified set of tools which are included with the game, free-of-charge.
Assuming that you have a computer with Windows installed, you can (and should!) download both Knytt and Knytt Stories from Nygren’s website, which can be found here. Hm. I might have to make a level or two myself!
April 26th, 2007
Talkin’ ’bout Those Pokemans
My roommate is probably a little insane. The new versions of Pokemon for the Nintendo DS got released in the
For someone who last played the game back in 1998 on a monochrome Gameboy that I accidentally left in the backseat pocket of a jet airliner, it’s all new. Unfortunately, the game is also kind of insanely time-consuming in a bad way, so I’m having a hard time getting into it, what with finals approaching. So what can I say about the game from the two hours of play that I’ve put into it so far?
-The graphics are simultaneously adorable and ridiculously antiquated. The buildings in towns are comprised of polygons, for example, but the in-battle graphics are nearly identical to those found in the Gameboy Advance iterations of the game. The overhead-view character sprites have a wonderfully squished and personable feel, despite being poorly animated. A plus in my book!
-My roommate got an oversized novelty Pokemon stylus for pre-ordering the game, yet the game makes remarkably little use of the DS touch-screen. You can select commands in battle with it, and some menus allow for easier navigation using big, colorful touch-buttons, but the brunt of the game is controlled with the d-pad. Couldn’t they have at least parlayed some of the battle display onto the bottom screen? It’s easy enough to say “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” but this just strikes me as laziness on the developer’s part.
-I played my first thirty minutes of the game with headphones on, and the music is lovely. Who’s the composer for these games, anyway? Junichi Masuda? And he was the lead director for Diamond and
-The game seriously takes forever to play, in the sense that during battles, you frequently don’t even need to look at the screen. Instead, you can set your DS down, lay one finger on the A button, and press it repeatedly over a period of about 3 minutes until a victory fanfare plays. I finished half of a homework assignment while playing the game via this method. I’m confident from prior experience (circa 1998) that eventually the gameplay will become more compelling. I just don’t think I have the willpower these days to slog through the artificial gauntlet of laborious timesinks that the game presents in order to get that far. To the kids out there who have the stomach for this kind of thing, however, I say, “Have fun!” Hopefully you will not look back on the time you spent playing with regret
April 19th, 2007
Groan
Within hours of the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech, activist attorney Jack Thompson appeared on a Fox News segment, and proceeded to connect the actions of the at-the-time unidentified Virginia Tech gunman to video games. What an interesting media sound-scape we live in! He is identified in the Fox News segment as a “School Shootings Expert.”
Brian Crecente of Kotakuwrote an interesting if overzealous analysis of Thompson’s words in an article titled “Dissecting Jack’s Lies,” which you can read here, if you’re so inclined. The conclusion that Crecente reaches at the end is that “you can say anything on TV and not have it fact-checked as long as you say it quickly, when TV needs someone to fill time and it’s a good sound bite.” Disheartening to be sure, but not especially surprising.
April 16th, 2007
Game Center CX and You
The guide itself consists primarily of screenshots from each episode of the show in turn, with description from Barnholt that conveys what’s going on fairly well, despite the lack of any actual sound or video. It’s a pretty entertaining read, regardless, with the host (comedian Shinya Arino) going up against infuriating Nintendo games like Ghosts ‘n Goblins and the crazy original version of Super Mario Bros. 2, and nearly going insane in most cases. Unfortunately, youtube was unable to provide any actual footage of the show, despite the fact that I <i>know</i> I’ve seen clips from the series in the past without realizing it. Maybe not? Man, I don’t even <i>know</i> anymore.
March 30th, 2007
Misunderstood - Armored Core 3
There are a lot of games out there that mean well, but which are inevitably misunderstood by both the average video-game-playing-person (white and/or nerdy) and the average person-who-writes-about-video-games (see last parentheses). And hell, I can’t really blame either group, most of the time. Video games and people alike can be demanding, self-centered assholes. Even if they mean well, most people would rather just spend their time getting instant gratification or complimented incessantly, regardless of any involvement on their own part. Again: can you blame them? Nonetheless, it raises an interesting question: can a game be initially repulsive, only revealing itself as an entertaining experience after considerable effort on the part of the player, and still be considered “good”? If From Software’s Armored Core series and its legion of devoted followers is any indication, the answer is “maybe. Now get me a sandwich and no back-talk!”
As a long-running franchise of video games goes, Armored Core is a bizarre mainstay. Despite receiving nearly thirteen entries over multiple platforms, the series has remained in a thoroughly entrenched niche for its entire ten year existence, never achieving anything resembling widespread popularity in the United States. Truth be told, the series hasn’t moved much in a decade. Most of the games in the series have a very similar premise: as a “Raven,” a giant-robot-riding mercenary in a dystopia ruled by feuding corporations, you’ll undertake missions given to you by various organizations, all the while earning money to upgrade your robot (the “armored core” of the game’s title, or AC for short) and advance the story. Over the years, I thought it interesting that the Armored Core series saw continuous releases on a yearly basis, despite my knowing of no one who actually played the game, and hearing little from anyone either offline or on who had anything good to say about the series in general. With the recent release of Armored Core 4 on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, however, people started talking. An excellent gamesetwatch article by longtime series-fan Ollie Barder piqued my interest further. When I saw a copy of Armored Core 3 at the Foothills Mall Gamestop for $10 a month ago, I decided to give the game a shot. I was eager to find out if Armored Core was “misunderstood,” or if it was just not very good.
It didn’t take long to understand where the series’ bad reputation had come from. Armored Core 3 simply doesn’t do a very good job of presenting itself. It assumes too much of the player, having no in-game help or tutorial. This is exacerbated by the fact that the controls are terribly cumbersome. The right analog stick, typically used to adjust the camera’s viewpoint in most games, is almost completely unused. The d-pad handles camera control instead, with the L and R shoulder buttons controlling both horizontal movement of your AC and… looking up and down! The looking up and down part was enough to nearly turn me off to the game entirely during some missions, because your view doesn’t auto center. This means that if you, say, boost into the air and want to look down to keep your aim focused on whatever you were looking at beforehand, you’ll have to: hold down the L2 button for a second while boosting with the X button, turning with the d-pad, shifting to the right with the R1 button, and firing with the square button. <i>Then</i>, once you land, you’ll have to readjust your now terrestrially-focused viewpoint by holding down the R2 button, presumably while doing a very similar series of button-combination juggling. When some robot is shooting stuff at you, warning klaxons blaring, it’s immensely frustrating initially to accidentally look in the wrong direction due to the game’s byzantine control setup. The only silver lining to any of this is that you can change the controls, but only slightly - you can’t use the right analog stick for viewpoint control no matter what, for example. Some AC cores have the ability to overboost - a concentrated, short-term boost that gets you moving very quickly but drains your generator in seconds.
It’s an extremely handy ability, but in order to use it you have to click <i>in</i> the right analog stick, most likely while using the rest of your digits to manipulate the other controls. The whole control setup feels, well, intentionally confusing - after all, why would the developers have ignored the right analog stick <i>except</i> for its least intuitive use as a button? This kind of makes sense if you look at it from the perspective that big, bipedal robots are not easy beasts to control. Having to wrestle the control setup into submission just comes with the territory, you might say. I’m inclined to agree with this after finally getting the hang of playing the game, but the first few hours of play, spent mostly looking at the ground like a moron or accidentally overboosting out of the mission area and failing immediately without realizing it, well. They are <i>alienating</i>. It is not wonder that so few people were willing to give the game a fair shake.
Of course, that’s just the tip of the confusion iceberg! One of the big draws of the Armored Core series is the huge array of robot parts available for use in constructing your AC. The problem with this from the perspective of a series neophyte is twofold: the game offers no explanation as to what half the part types even do, and you start with so little money that it scarcely matters, anyway. Confronting the first problem was easy enough - the game’s manual has a decent enough listing of part types, and further explanations can be found online if you’re willing.
The second problem is trickier. You can complete missions in order to make money and advance the story, but this is in itself a dicey proposition. Even if you complete a mission, it’s difficult to actually make money unless you play extremely well - if you take a lot of damage, most of your pay will go into the repair bill for your AC, and if you play recklessly and use up a lot of ammo, you’ll lose even more money replacing your munitions. The first game I started saw me making no headway as far as money was concerned, and I was frustrated. So I asked a friend of mine who had played the game before about it. He recommended starting a new game, selling all of the default gear the game gives you and buying an energy weapon of some kind.
Since energy weapons draw power off of your AC’s generator, you don’t get slammed with the bill at the end of a mission. You can also earn money by fighting one-on-one duels in an arena, which proved to be significantly more interesting than actually playing the missions. Not only do you earn more money from arena matches, but you also don’t have to pay a repair or resupply bill afterwards. You also get significantly more play experience and can make more mistakes, because losing in the arena is inconsequential: if you lose, you can retry without penalty, as opposed to failing a mission, which docks you money and most likely forces you to reload your last saved game. After spending a few hours goofing around in the arena, I actually had some money, and the game opened up. From there on out, Armored Core 3 was actually fun to play.
Nonetheless, it made me wonder: why not just have the game tell new players about how to make money, give them a pointer or two in the right direction? And the reason I decided upon is that this would be, intrinsically, against the nature of Armored Core as a series. The satisfaction of playing the game, I found, is derived almost entirely from the thrill of besting the confusing and chaotic system that the game presents to you. If the game explained itself on its own, without any effort on the part of the player, would it be nearly as interesting or satisfying? Most games released these days are eager to get the player on its good side. They over-explain themselves, and have a tendency to feel hollow, artificial and boring as a result. Armored Core 3 doesn’t tell the player a goddamn thing, and while it’s initially disheartening, figuring it all out yields a far more interesting game than I expected. Of course, now I have to check out the rest of the series and see where it evolved from here.
Maybe in a few months?
March 26th, 2007
Oops - Oh My
Hey guys! How was your Spring Break? Yeah, yeah, I know I’m late. I think. It took me a week to get school stuff out of the way! Also: I started using Google Docs, which solved a bunch of issues that were preventing me from actually being able to write blog entries on a regular basis. I could get into specifics, but I think it would be better if I just told you to never, ever use recent versions of Microsoft Works. They save in a format that no one will be able to open on their computer no matter how hard they try, and you will flunk out of school and have to go home and tell your parents that you spent all your money on booze. That might happen anyway if you’re a college student, but it’s best to avoid anything that could steer you in that direction, y’know?
Catching up on some recent news, first — the Playstation 3 officially launched in
Forget about $600 game consoles for a moment, however, to take a look at Understanding Games, a pretty great flash-based attempt at introducing the basic concepts of games and game design from those guys at pixelate.de. There are three episodes so far, starting with the underlying concepts behind a simple game like Pong, and going from there. All three episodes are surprisingly entertaining and have great music, and I strongly recommend checking them out. As they say — you might just learn something!
Episode 1 - Episode 2 - Episode 3
March 5th, 2007
Routines and Rewrites
I have a routine on Monday mornings. It’s a simple one, I think – my first class is at 11, mercifully, so I get up around 9:40 and watch The Price is Right at 10. Simple pleasures are always the best, if you ask me. Recently, my roommate purchased one of them newfangled Nintendo Wii’s, and it’s contributed another little step to the routine. See: one of the features touted by the rather austere game machine is that of the “Virtual Console,” a glorified outlet for legal emulation which allows users to download older games to their wii’s at prices in the 5 to 10 dollar range.
When the service launched with the console back in November it had an embarrassingly limited selection of about 12 games, but since then the smoke-enshrouded overlords at Nintendo have seen fit to update the service with new games on a weekly basis. The day of the week chosen for updates in North America is, oddly enough, Mondays at 10, Mountain Time. So in addition to Bob Barker, I also get to marvel at the frequently odd Virtual Console game additions for the week.
Last week saw the addition of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a game which defined video games for kids growing up in the late 90s, and which has become almost impossible to talk about due to the absolutely staggering level of hyperbole attributed to it since then. They also added a few obscure games from the 16-bit era, including the remarkably-poorly-named-but-totally-awesome-regardless Chew Man Fu for the Turbo-Grafx 16, and the just-sorta-poorly-named-and-pretty-good Bio-Hazard Battle for the Genesis. A pretty good range of choices for one week, really. And hell, the opportunity that the Virtual Console provides for older games to reach a newfound mass audience that they never would have had originally is really intriguing. Except that, well - sometimes the weekly updates just ain’t no good, son.
This week, for example, saw the addition of three games from the NES, Super NES and Genesis, respectively. There’s the not-worth-5-bucks NES port of Elevator Action, the head-smashingly difficult Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, and the Genesis role-playing game Sword of Vermillion, which some nasally-voiced guy on youtube made a video review of, and by “video review” I mean that he swears a lot while clips of the game play in the background. Not the best selection of games, y’know? Especially coming off of last week. If there’s a silver lining to any of this, it’s that the descriptions they write for each game in the official weekly update press releases are kind of amazing. Elevator Action is described as a “multidirectional, scroll-type spy-action game that is a blast from the past.” Do they have, like, a computer writing these? Let me try my hand at it.
Monopoly™ (Dinner Table, 2-8 players, 2550 Wii Points): A classic paper-board game in which you can own properties. Choose from twelve playable characters including Thimble, Wheelbarrow, Top Hat and The Boot. Move around the board by rolling the dice – small cubes with dots printed on them. Try not to land on your opponent’s spaces or you will have to pay them money, and don’t go to the jail-space! When you cross the box marked Go, you get 200 dollars. Features real-life locations like the Waterworks and Community Chest. Monopoly is fun for the entire family!
Hm. I think I may have a newfound respect for whoever’s writing these. Missing the entire point is an art.
February 28th, 2007
Game Guy Links Recap Or Man, Atlantis Was Pretty Rad
Yes, links! Amusing ones! The kind of thing that bloggers resort to when short on time and good ideas, which is totally not the case here, except for the time part. Let’s take a look.
A youtube user by the name of fraziergorgehas uploaded a fascinating episode of the PBS series “Enterprise” from the early 80s, which details the design and production of classic Atari 2600 game Atlantis. It includes interviews with the game’s developers at long-defunct game studio Imagic, and there’s a lot of interesting insight into the early days of the game industry.
There’s a great scene in which the entire development staff of Imagic is gathered at a picnic table in front of a lake, an extremely bearded design member waxing rhapsodic about pixelated mother-ships and space aliens, and we realize that this is a brainstorming session for a new game. The episode is separated into 3 parts, and is about 30 minutes altogether: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three.
-Uh oh, looks like I’m going to have to buy one of these newly announced Video Game Style Guide and Reference Manual’s! Promising to answer my “most pressing questions” when writing about video games, including the thousand-year old “Xbox, XBox or X-box?” I’m inclined not to pass judgment about the value of such a tome, not having read it and all, but my gut reaction is that it’s kind of ridiculously silly. Is there even a standardized body or organization overseeing this kind of thing? It does include a foreword from Dan Hsu of EGM, who famously sorta-savagely-interviewed Microsoft’s Peter Moore. That has to count for something!
-AdventureCon Las Vegas is yet another convention that I can barely fathom actually existing, but it does, and it’s happening this August, so. It’s geared towards people who looooove adventure games (not me, I just really enjoy them), and it’s even going to have Al Lowe as a guest-speaker. His career’s pretty much dead at this point, since the last game he made that garnered any attention at all was Leisure Suit Larry 7 back in 1996, but that seems pretty much besides the point when talking about adventure games in general. Because, y’know. They’re a dead genre. Sounds like fun, though.
-Wrapping up this bevy of links that I assume no one could possibly care about is an article about moving a Virtual On arcade cabinet, which, if you’ve never seen one, well. They’re 
pretty huge. The article’s hosted over at GameSetWatch, and the author, Ollie Barder, describes the entire process as being a little like building a ship in a bottle: “One of the slightly more difficult aspects of owning an arcade machine is that you sometimes have to move it around. Considering that this particular cabinet weighs nearly half a ton and is pretty sizeable, it doesn’t exactly travel well. Basically, to get the machine anywhere means it has to be completely disassembled and then rebuilt in its new abode.” The article is part of a regular series that Ollie Barder writes about big robots in video games, two things that go together better than Mr. Pibb and Red Vines. Man, that sounds pretty good right about now!
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