Nostalgia of the Infinite

Review: Spore

It was exceedingly easy to come into Spore really, really wanting to like it. It sounded, at the time like a really great idea, an idea so great that one could forgive the utterly uninspired and generic cartoon animals on the cover. A simulator from the creators of the iconic Sim City series that follows a creatures entire evolutionary existence; single celled organisms moving up a ladder of biomass onto sentience, technological accomplishment and ultimately space exploration. This was quite probably going to be the shit and it was going to leave you feeling like you had experienced something actually momentous in the history of interactive media and the grandchildren were going to hear about this one. One that one might think Maxis, out of any development studio, might actually have been able to pull of with some style, not to say competency. Looking at the various development videos that emerged prior to the game’s release it seemed as though interesting things were happening and that something good was going to come out of it, there was more of a focus on the seams between the different levels of evolutionary accomplishment; You could see an animal given legs haul itself out of the ocean and onto land. This is the stuff fossil layers are made of. Hearing now that Will Wright initially wanted to call the game ‘Sim Everything’ and had to be brought round to Spore pretty much sums up all that was wrong. There was no one initial idea. There was just a thought that ‘oh we seem to have done everything we can think of with sim in it, let’s just simulate life itself’ without much regard to how exactly it was going to be accomplished. In a game worth playing there is an idea that gets stuck to or else you end up with a clusterfuck. The chosen position for Spore was clusterfuck coupled with massive dumbing down when they realised just how far up shit creek had been traveled and the startling realisation hit them that paddles were in short supply. Let’s just go out and say it, the creature creator is the best part of Spore and what’s more telling is that Maxis knew this. They came out and released it months before the rest of the game. When you saw that it allowed you to fuck about with a character model and still have it actually move in a reasonably believable fashion it was still possible to have a glimmer of hope about how the finished product might turn out. Even if you want a movable set of gonads. Especially if you want a movable set of gonads. It’s very, very easy to use the character creation in Spore to create things which were clearly not what the designers had hoped for and that in and of itself is a (good) achievement. That ‘sporn’ (try youtube for it) became successful is a testament to just how well their tools worked, it became the premier dick creation simulator out there. Who else can claim such a majestic title? They could have just released the creature creator with slightly more polish and just had it as a finished product and it would have been more of an accomplishment than 90% of the rest of the game. Sure the creator has its limitations but that’s what you ultimately want from a game, having endless possibilities makes it into modelling editor, not something that’s actually fun to play with. There are a few fairly glaring annoyances that could and should be fixed, not least that for all their skill in making models that change their movements depending on the number of legs (or claws or flippers) Maxis managed to have about five different sounds recorded for their vocalisations. The result of this is that most of your creations end up sounding like an overly excited sea lion about to be fed a bucket of fish heads at every opportunity. The creature creator though stops being ‘good’ when put into context with the rest of the game. Here it utterly loses any semblance of point and just becomes a furious exercise in self abuse. Feel sorry for poor bastard who had to come up with copy for the box of Spore. He actually had to put the word ‘evolve’ on it. In all respects Spore is the complete antithesis of evolution. You can just imagine this being the game that fundamentalist Christians use to amuse their children, were they not too busy branding such interactive amusements as products of Lucifer. The natural selection portion of the game would be the perfect plot device to use in a b-movie, the premise of which is that decaying corpse of Charles Darwin is resurrected and rampages around throwing explosive Galapagos Finches at Anglican cathedrals. What also causes a problem is that there is no ability to have sex in spore. You would think that a game that specifically involves multiple generations might have realised that it was a pretty fundamental part of the process of, well, creating those generations and handled the process with some kind of subtlety and artistry. At least in the ‘cell’ stage one might assume that the logical way to do this would be to reproduce asexually. Will Wright must have done a modicum of research and realised this, yet he chose the completely inexplicable path of both completely ignoring the one way that might have allowed him to pass off the game as still being ‘suitable for children’ and still have kept at least a glimmer of scientific accuracy. Even the ‘cell’ stage manages to jam in ‘romance’ and one wonders, why is it that games that end up being shoved to as broad an age range as possible seem to gravitate to reproductive themes so commonly while managing to completely and deliberately ignore the process (here might be a good time to mention Viva Pinata and Harvest Moon so here they are duly mentioned). ‘Romance’ is merely something you can hit to allow you to go through another round of squishy organism tinkering, to something that is always going to be vertebrate, land based and anthropomorphic. There’s no penalty to the choices of body parts you might choose attach to any creature at any stage of development. Sure you can make decisions that might make less sense or make your playing perhaps slightly more difficult but none are crippling enough that they would actually cause the extinction of your race. You don’t even lose anything if you suddenly decide that you don’t want that extra arm with suckers. Any idea of progress totally gets flung out of the window when you can reshape at any time with absolutely no penalty all of the mistakes that you made in the past. Spore’s Creatures not only have their cake and eat it but decide that they wanted it to be chocolate after they’ve eaten it. There’s not even an elegant way to get new parts to add to your creature, kill something with what you want or scrounge around the locale for a bit and there it will be, a little glowing thing that just happens to come with all of its statistics neatly laid out for you. Who needs experimentation when you can min-min max something without even having to try it out in the world it’s meant to live in.worked, and I use that term loosely, because it managed to capture a microcosm of humanity inside something resembling an ant farm. You could persecute your sims to the point of exhibiting your latent sadism without being arrested; even in their simplified forms they were recognisably human and what you were doing was something to a group of humans. What Spore attempts to do and fails at is to make creatures which are both anthropomorphic and mutable. Because of the user input it’s almost entirely pointless to try and shoehorn everything into a sim like state of domesticity but you can see the bulges where they tried to force it to happen. Where in The Sims you were altering the makeup of your house and the composition of the family living in it, in Spore you’re altering the very fabric of your creature but still not quite enough to make it really a game in and of itself. What Spore ultimately fails to learn is that forcinghorribly unconnected mechanics into one pile does not automatically make something better than the sum of its parts. flOw, a game that executes only the ‘Cell’ stage is in almost all ways a better game than the totality of Spore, it knows what it wants to do and does it with elegance. It has subtlety and an idea of what it is that it wants to do, two things that Spore is hugely crying out for. There is no gristle in flOw, no fluff, no padding and no spinning badges leaping out and telling you I AM A MOTHERFUCKING TENTACLE YOU WANT ME, YOU NEED ME, YOU MUST HAVE ME, YOUR INSIGNIFICANT LIFE WILL BE INCOMPLETE SHOULD YOU PASS UP THIS GENETIC SPUTUM. This being from only one portion of the game, the initial creature phases where you actually have some control about what you look like and how you as one animal react. The sub-sections of the game feel about as connected to the last as a giraffe’s head might be if spliced onto your cat’s torso. To leave a stage in your pet’s development you literally get a message telling you that you have suddenly realised that legs are pretty cool and you might want to grow some instead of swimming around in goo or that, hey our brain just quadrupled in size and making a tribe now might be fun you totally want to be a part of that stuff with spears. It just happens to you without any real explanation of why it’s happening, short of a bar filling up with green. By the time you reach the ‘Civilisation’ phase the novelty has worn of almost entirely and but for a brief respite in designing your own house/car/civic structures you’d almost certainly have more fun playing the actual Civilisation. Once you reach space and the tutorial is almost (but not quite) over there might be some hope that you could finally do away with petty grievances of the home planet but that’s never the case. Your entire existence becomes pinned to the need to constantly maintain an empire, like a fussing housewife with not enough to do there simply has to be something wrong at every stage, everything constantly crumbles around you leaving the thankless task of micro managing every single fucking thing that could possibly go wrong in the world. This is probably the biggest insult of all, you’re given the tools to make things and then are forced to use them in such small and infrequent bursts to render their existence almost meaningless in their small and ineffectual nature. By reaching completion in this game you will have earnt your masochist merit badge and also we hope, will have recovered well from your voluntary lobotomy. People have noticed that many games turn into something that feels like a job, but it seems to have more of a reason for doing so if the game at least lets you know who your workmates are (see MMORPGS). If Spore is a job it’s that of Sisyphus, endlessly rolling that boulder uphill, only to have it roll down again before he can reach the top. There are, at least notionally, lots of other people playing Spore and having an impact on your world but it never feels like you mix with them. For all the overlap you really get there could be a faceless computer in the bowels of the EA corporate building churning out every possible combination of variables that the game allows, in a twist of ironic fate that would actually end up more closely emulating evolution that the game ever did. It was exceedingly easy to come into Spore really, really wanting to like it. It sounded, at the time like a really great idea, an idea so great that one could forgive the utterly uninspired and generic cartoon animals on the cover. A simulator from the creators of the iconic Sim City series that follows a creatures entire evolutionary existence; single celled organisms moving up a ladder of biomass onto sentience, technological accomplishment and ultimately space exploration. This was quite probably going to be the shit and it was going to leave you feeling like you had experienced something actually momentous in the history of interactive media and the grandchildren were going to hear about this one. One that one might think Maxis, out of any development studio, might actually have been able to pull of with some style, not to say competency. Looking at the various development videos that emerged prior to the game’s release it seemed as though interesting things were happening and that something good was going to come out of it, there was more of a focus on the seams between the different levels of evolutionary accomplishment; You could see an animal given legs haul itself out of the ocean and onto land. This is the stuff fossil layers are made of. Hearing now that Will Wright initially wanted to call the game ‘Sim Everything’ and had to be brought round to Spore pretty much sums up all that was wrong. There was no one initial idea. There was just a thought that ‘oh we seem to have done everything we can think of with sim in it, let’s just simulate life itself’ without much regard to how exactly it was going to be accomplished. In a game worth playing there is an idea that gets stuck to or else you end up with a clusterfuck. The chosen position for Spore was clusterfuck coupled with massive dumbing down when they realised just how far up shit creek had been traveled and the startling realisation hit them that paddles were in short supply. Let’s just go out and say it, the creature creator is the best part of Spore and what’s more telling is that Maxis knew this. They came out and released it months before the rest of the game. When you saw that it allowed you to fuck about with a character model and still have it actually move in a reasonably believable fashion it was still possible to have a glimmer of hope about how the finished product might turn out. Even if you want a movable set of gonads. Especially if you want a movable set of gonads. It’s very, very easy to use the character creation in Spore to create things which were clearly not what the designers had hoped for and that in and of itself is a (good) achievement. That ‘sporn’ (try youtube for it) became successful is a testament to just how well their tools worked, it became the premier dick creation simulator out there. Who else can claim such a majestic title? They could have just released the creature creator with slightly more polish and just had it as a finished product and it would have been more of an accomplishment than 90% of the rest of the game. Sure the creator has its limitations but that’s what you ultimately want from a game, having endless possibilities makes it into modelling editor, not something that’s actually fun to play with. There are a few fairly glaring annoyances that could and should be fixed, not least that for all their skill in making models that change their movements depending on the number of legs (or claws or flippers) Maxis managed to have about five different sounds recorded for their vocalisations. The result of this is that most of your creations end up sounding like an overly excited sea lion about to be fed a bucket of fish heads at every opportunity. The creature creator though stops being ‘good’ when put into context with the rest of the game. Here it utterly loses any semblance of point and just becomes a furious exercise in self abuse. Feel sorry for poor bastard who had to come up with copy for the box of Spore. He actually had to put the word ‘evolve’ on it. In all respects Spore is the complete antithesis of evolution. You can just imagine this being the game that fundamentalist Christians use to amuse their children, were they not too busy branding such interactive amusements as products of Lucifer. The natural selection portion of the game would be the perfect plot device to use in a b-movie, the premise of which is that decaying corpse of Charles Darwin is resurrected and rampages around throwing explosive Galapagos Finches at Anglican cathedrals. What also causes a problem is that there is no ability to have sex in spore. You would think that a game that specifically involves multiple generations might have realised that it was a pretty fundamental part of the process of, well, creating those generations and handled the process with some kind of subtlety and artistry. At least in the ‘cell’ stage one might assume that the logical way to do this would be to reproduce asexually. Will Wright must have done a modicum of research and realised this, yet he chose the completely inexplicable path of both completely ignoring the one way that might have allowed him to pass off the game as still being ‘suitable for children’ and still have kept at least a glimmer of scientific accuracy. Even the ‘cell’ stage manages to jam in ‘romance’ and one wonders, why is it that games that end up being shoved to as broad an age range as possible seem to gravitate to reproductive themes so commonly while managing to completely and deliberately ignore the process (here might be a good time to mention Viva Pinata and Harvest Moon so here they are duly mentioned). ‘Romance’ is merely something you can hit to allow you to go through another round of squishy organism tinkering, to something that is always going to be vertebrate, land based and anthropomorphic. There’s no penalty to the choices of body parts you might choose attach to any creature at any stage of development. Sure you can make decisions that might make less sense or make your playing perhaps slightly more difficult but none are crippling enough that they would actually cause the extinction of your race. You don’t even lose anything if you suddenly decide that you don’t want that extra arm with suckers. Any idea of progress totally gets flung out of the window when you can reshape at any time with absolutely no penalty all of the mistakes that you made in the past. Spore’s Creatures not only have their cake and eat it but decide that they wanted it to be chocolate after they’ve eaten it. There’s not even an elegant way to get new parts to add to your creature, kill something with what you want or scrounge around the locale for a bit and there it will be, a little glowing thing that just happens to come with all of its statistics neatly laid out for you. Who needs experimentation when you can min-min max something without even having to try it out in the world it’s meant to live in.worked, and I use that term loosely, because it managed to capture a microcosm of humanity inside something resembling an ant farm. You could persecute your sims to the point of exhibiting your latent sadism without being arrested; even in their simplified forms they were recognisably human and what you were doing was something to a group of humans. What Spore attempts to do and fails at is to make creatures which are both anthropomorphic and mutable. Because of the user input it’s almost entirely pointless to try and shoehorn everything into a sim like state of domesticity but you can see the bulges where they tried to force it to happen. Where in The Sims you were altering the makeup of your house and the composition of the family living in it, in Spore you’re altering the very fabric of your creature but still not quite enough to make it really a game in and of itself. What Spore ultimately fails to learn is that forcinghorribly unconnected mechanics into one pile does not automatically make something better than the sum of its parts. flOw, a game that executes only the ‘Cell’ stage is in almost all ways a better game than the totality of Spore, it knows what it wants to do and does it with elegance. It has subtlety and an idea of what it is that it wants to do, two things that Spore is hugely crying out for. There is no gristle in flOw, no fluff, no padding and no spinning badges leaping out and telling you I AM A MOTHERFUCKING TENTACLE YOU WANT ME, YOU NEED ME, YOU MUST HAVE ME, YOUR INSIGNIFICANT LIFE WILL BE INCOMPLETE SHOULD YOU PASS UP THIS GENETIC SPUTUM. This being from only one portion of the game, the initial creature phases where you actually have some control about what you look like and how you as one animal react. The sub-sections of the game feel about as connected to the last as a giraffe’s head might be if spliced onto your cat’s torso. To leave a stage in your pet’s development you literally get a message telling you that you have suddenly realised that legs are pretty cool and you might want to grow some instead of swimming around in goo or that, hey our brain just quadrupled in size and making a tribe now might be fun you totally want to be a part of that stuff with spears. It just happens to you without any real explanation of why it’s happening, short of a bar filling up with green. By the time you reach the ‘Civilisation’ phase the novelty has worn of almost entirely and but for a brief respite in designing your own house/car/civic structures you’d almost certainly have more fun playing the actual Civilisation. Once you reach space and the tutorial is almost (but not quite) over there might be some hope that you could finally do away with petty grievances of the home planet but that’s never the case. Your entire existence becomes pinned to the need to constantly maintain an empire, like a fussing housewife with not enough to do there simply has to be something wrong at every stage, everything constantly crumbles around you leaving the thankless task of micro managing every single fucking thing that could possibly go wrong in the world. This is probably the biggest insult of all, you’re given the tools to make things and then are forced to use them in such small and infrequent bursts to render their existence almost meaningless in their small and ineffectual nature. By reaching completion in this game you will have earnt your masochist merit badge and also we hope, will have recovered well from your voluntary lobotomy. People have noticed that many games turn into something that feels like a job, but it seems to have more of a reason for doing so if the game at least lets you know who your workmates are (see MMORPGS). If Spore is a job it’s that of Sisyphus, endlessly rolling that boulder uphill, only to have it roll down again before he can reach the top. There are, at least notionally, lots of other people playing Spore and having an impact on your world but it never feels like you mix with them. For all the overlap you really get there could be a faceless computer in the bowels of the EA corporate building churning out every possible combination of variables that the game allows, in a twist of ironic fate that would actually end up more closely emulating evolution that the game ever did.

Review: Braid

Braid by Jonathan Blow, developed by Hothead Games and published by Number None, Inc. for the PC in 2008

‘Now we are all sons of bitches.’ - J. Robert Oppenheimer

One of the two reasons I decided to start this blog was due to Braid. Even the name in some part relates to the game, though probably that one comes most strongly from the European cover art of Ico that took its inspiration in turn from the early surrealist artist de Chirico. Now Braid is not by any means the best game I’ve ever played but it has stuck in my mind as probably one of the most intellectually complete. To explain in a way that doesn’t sound quite so terminally pretentious, Braid manages to get its thoughts across in a manner that at least has a coherent internal logic. There are a few design decisions that can be criticised (when aren’t there?) but they manage to make sense when looked at as a whole and very few criticisms really stick. What better measure can there be about a finished complex work that you can think of things wrong with it but that still don’t end up detracting from it enough to stop you enjoying it? Being who I am however I’m going to do as much as I can to find those flaws because I can’t but want to learn from the mistakes and try to suggest how a successor to Braid’s crown of being an extraordinary game in a sea of mediocrity.

For those of you who might never have played it (I strongly suggest you do, even if you’re not a fan of the style or indeed games at all) the basic premise revolves around traversing two dimensional worlds collecting jigsaw pieces where you happen to have the power to reverse time. It is though, perhaps unsurprisingly, not quite that simple.

It’s unclear to me as to what exactly these jigsaw pieces are meant to represent though the pictures they create do end up having a greater meaning that contributes to certain aspects of the rest of the game. One part in particular which involves a certain amount of lateral thinking really does set the player up for later parts of the game and really emphasises the sheer amount of planning and forethought that went into designing each section.

The Prince of Persia series was one of the first to introduce the idea of rewinding time but made no real use of it in its non-combat sections, all it could do was let you relive the past ten seconds to get out of a hole you had made for yourself. In practical use all the prince could do was to have a limited number of self controlled checkpoints, baised on the amount of time sensitive sand he had at his disposal. In Braid the movement of time can be used in a life saving capacity and you will now and then have to reverse the flow to get yourself out of un-winnable situations but that is seldom its function.

The best levels are those where your use of time distortion is not simply to alter the flow of everything around you but to cause local changes and end up with a similar but just altered enough outcome to get past an obstacle. The levels in which your movement either reverses or starts the flow of time are really a challenge and take a fair bit of time to get used to. The resultant joy when you finally crack the answer is also resultantly satisfying, I managed to keep the number of spilt drinks in my latest playthrough down to only one glass of wine.

Because of what might otherwise be an overwhelming learning curve involving time the game actually seems to go out of its way to make things easy for a new players with its controls. By initially having fairly few different controls to master in a solution you pick up on them organically. Introducing them to the player slowly means that it never feels, as many more mainstream titles do, that you are having ‘Press X not to die’ rammed down your throat at every opportunity. In a word it has an elegance that other games lack. The irony here however is that in rewinding the game with an xbox controller, one is literally pressing X not to die if an enemy hits you.

It’s not a bad thing though limiting the number of possibilities that can be done as the puzzles do end up getting more and more difficult, making use of clever and intricate nuances in time flows. Seldom if ever does a puzzle require you to do the exact same thing that you have done before and in those that are similar there’s always a new twist to it. Some of the criticisms I’ve read about the game were that it was too short but if in creating this game there had been more unnecessary levels where the exact same mechanic was rehashed in exactly the same way there would have been cries of anguish that it were too long. This is a game that is possibly not long but it is exactly the right length.

In the ‘fifth’ hub (one has to use quotation marks here as it’s labeled as ‘World 6’, more on this later) one is shockingly given the opportunity to use Y (aka △ or the triangle for those of you with Unicode challenged browsers) to drop a ring that locally slows time more strongly as things approach it. Now this is really and truly something that I have yet to see done since with such sheer artistry. When one thinks that Blow is here taking and implementing something much akin to simplified two dimensional representation of Einstein’s theory of relativity (assuming one can at a pinch think of the ring as being an object of huge mass) and having time bend around the ring. It doesn’t stop or do anything so crude, it doesn’t even fall off directly at the circle shown on screen but just gently starts to taper back as you get further and further away. It’s actually subtle and it has a point.

To take the most obvious unused portion and scrutinise it overly closely, there is no point to the toilet. Okay so there’s a set of WASD keys telling you you can use them to move but really, not much of a point at all. Especially if like me you don’t use a Qwerty keyboard so the suggestion is worse than if it were non-existant. Now this isn’t to say that all games should have no areas that are for gameplay purposes unnecessary but it does just seem a little out of place for a game that is no so much infused with the desire to attach meaning onto things as it is visibly oozing meaning out of every orifice.

Possibly one of it’s more ham-fisted design decisions is the method in which you’re presented with the story. It’s not a bad story as it goes, but it’s not so much a part of the game as it is a sheet of A4 copied paper stuck into the (metaphorical) case that you’re supposed to take out and look at when predefined cues are shown to you. At the start of each world there are a series of books that you can stand next to and which will cough up text onto the screen but that will invariably by so many simply be sped past towards the doorways that open up more play time. Clearly having the books between the player and the door that signals the start of the world was an attempt to force them to be appreciated but in that regard they fail.

Sometimes all you have to do is wait…

The first time I played the game on a (cathode ray) TV rather than a computer I was actually forced to skip them due to the pain of reading them on the relatively limited resolution of the medium. That I didn’t really mind all that much is a crushing inditement on how poorly they were interwoven, though as much of the story makes little sense otherwise (even despite) reading the texts it surely has to be another wreath to lay at the feet of the gameplay ideas and the implementation thereof.

It’s a shame that the text might be so ill read as while some of it feels a little bit pretentious it genuinely is an interesting bag. The explanations for some of the mechanics work pretty well and on managing to work your way forwards (and yet back) to world one some of the themes mentioned in the plot start to make more sense. Some, well, less so. The semi-veiled references to the Manhattan project to me don’t really add all that much to the flavour of the game and serve in a lot of ways to actually detract from the whole Tim/Princess entanglement.

One other note has to be made regarding the music of Braid. While in itself the music is good, a mix of nursery rhymes and haunting melodies it’s worth mentioning that it responds in game in just the same way as everything else. As you rewind time the songs start to play backwards, if you slow it down then the song slows too. It’s a small thing but has a huge impact on the feeling and overall connectedness that surrounds the rest of the game.

Much of what saves Braid from some of its frustrations is that they’re such a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things. There are a couple of places where there are doors that for some inexplicable reason can’t be opened with the key you have and nor can the key/door breakage be rewound, forcing you to reset the entire level to try again. I’m puzzled as to quite why Blow thought this was a fun idea and it’s one of the few parts of the game where I felt annoyed, rather than challenged.

In going through Braid again for what must now be the third time I’m still struck by how much of it actually feels raw and untested to me, despite the fact that I do recognise puzzles and remember at times the way to solve some of the more obtuse ones. There are clearly games that have followed have been influenced heavily by it, one of the best in the relatively few years that has passed since its release is Limbo which picks up on the 2D puzzle mechanic and pulls it off in similarly head exploding fashion.

Braid is certainly a game that will influence others to come and stands out amidst a sea of easily overlooked titles as one that will truly make you think about what it means to play.

You may be interested in:

http://www.davidhellman.net/blog/the-art-of-braid-index

Review: The Binding of Isaac

The Binding of Isaac by Edmund McMillan & Florian Himsl distributed by Valve and found in the Humble Voxatron Bundle

I’ve played games coming from the so-called Roguelike genre before and it’s generally been the case that almost all of them were a horrible experience. I’m perfectly aware of their influential nature and the sheer amount of things that have sprung using them as a basis for game design but that doesn’t get around the problem that most of them just aren’t really that much fun anymore. If I wanted to spend all my time in a world that will ultimately end in my death and the loss of all my stuff I wouldn’t be playing video games at all and concentrating on real life™.

Yet I have played these games, despite my frustration at death being the resetting of gameplay and some of them have managed to capture my attention, even with all of their faults. I have played for hours with an ultimately doomed Dwarf Fortress even though I might have otherwise been entertaining myself by doing something equally productive, for example sticking my head into a bowl of alphabet shaped canned pasta and screaming about the incoming trolls. I play Dwarf Fortress with a graphical tileset and I am not apologetic about it.

Part of the problem I have with Roguelikes is their seemingly wilful obtuseness, those I have played have as a rule had terrible tutorial or help systems and seemed to positively revel in making it as difficult as possible for the new player, presumably on the grounds that it was ‘authentic’. I can’t help but notice that those games that take the idea with a pinch of salt, the widely praised but personally disliked Diablo series being a prime example.

To impart my first thoughts about playing the Binding of Isaac then. I have played this game a lot. I have played this game with the focused, malevolent desire and fixation of a crack addict after one last rock of cocaine infused goodness.

The premise of the game is that our hero Isaac has been sacrificed, much like his namesake, because his parent (in this case there is a break with biblical tradition it’s his mother) has been told to do so by God. Isaac therefore has to survive through various levels of the basement until he can reach and defeat his mother to escape. Just quite how going down, presumably into the bowels of the earth will help one escape is not explained, though one must assume that his mother bought her house at the top of a hill or something. Actually, thinking about it further, having the manifestations of the seven deadly sins makes even less sense so in terms of logical thought one should probably attempt to suspend disbelief.

Part of what makes the Binding of Isaac so satisfying/frustrating is that each time you play the layout of every dungeon level is randomly generated. This game is completely unafraid of being relentlessly and sadistically cruel, though it manages to be so in a way that can’t help but feel fair in its mathematically derived method of world creation.

Other reviews have mentioned the games liking to the original Legend of Zelda, presumably because it has a dungeon and your health is measured in hearts and, shock horror, you have money and bombs. This is somewhat akin to saying that a digital watch is like an iPhone because both of them have clocks on them that use digits to tell you the fucking time. Yes, there are similarities and it wouldn’t be surprising if the game creators have played a Zelda game in the past (though in my mind it has more in common with Link’s Awakening than any of the others) but there are some pretty major differences.

In Zelda every room is a specific puzzle that’s a part of a larger whole, in that the dungeon has a specific solution. In Isaac every room is something to solve but it’s far more of a global meta puzzle, the entire game is one dungeon but not necessarily one you can be shepherded through and at times you’re weighing up the possibilities rather than with a certainty that you will succeed. You want that demonic power up? You can have it but you then have to decide if it’s actually worth losing health for. 

Yes that is Isaac complete with demonic wings and an aborted foetus vomiting blood at an enemy.

Sometimes you’ll fail or do something that you later curse and wish that you had done differently. Due to the possibility of ‘one more time’ inherent to the game’s design it becomes very easy to get into a loop, endlessly trying to get that one lucky break that might let you get into the deeper levels and ultimately complete the game.

One of my biggest gripes with this game is not so much the game itself but the platform the designers have chosen to present it on. Flash may be an interesting animation medium but for games it’s a pretty horrible thing to use. I found my laptop to be incinerating my thighs after fairly modest timespans of playing and certain bosses with large numbers of enemies on screen caused the screaming of fans going full tilt to obliterate 90% of the sound effects. The Binding of Isaac probably wouldn’t work on the iPad for fairly obvious control reasons but making it in Flash positively eradicates any chance of portable play, which is a great shame.

I’m aware of at least some of the problems that accompany the creation of independent titles, not least those made with teams of three people, so I don’t want to overly stress a technical point which ultimately has a fairly small impact on the game. It’s most glaring issues for me on a Mac were that the achievements don’t currently seem to get triggered (personally I don’t give a toss about them, as long as the internal works of a game function without them) and that there was no support for gamepads.

It’s currently sitting at probably my largest total of time played vs time owned, which has to say something about its ability to captivate. I have beaten the game precisely once.

Review: Painkiller (Black Edition)

Painkiller, developed by People Can Fly and published by DreamCatcher Interactive in 2004 for Windows

I didn’t actually end up playing Doom until I was in my 20s. I never really had access, nor a desire, for a computer running Windows up until the age where I actually had some say in the buying of them. So despite being of an age where I could easily have been a part of the then emerging PC gamer generation I never really got into the shooter craze and have always been somewhat suspicious of slavering devotion they inspire in people and the seemingly uncritical eye that so many people pass over them.

I know that partly what impressed people when Doom was released was the technological innovation and advancement that iD software had achieved in creating the engine. Sure it started the trend that seems to be driving the expensive development budgets that hold power in the industry at the moment but it didn’t really grab me as necessarily being that one thing that should be seen as the germinating seed for so much.

Seeing so much being put into print about how this or that new shooter (shoot-em-up seems more fitting in this case) has always left me feeling slightly confused, is there really so much that a slight change in guns can have when you’re essentially rehashing the same games over and over? In an attempt to understand this important thread in the evolution of shooty gaming I decided to try out Painkiller after seeing it being hosed over the customers of Steam in one of their ‘It’s so cheap you’d have to be physically or mentally retarded not to buy this’ sales. As the game was originally released in 2004, roughly a decade after iD’s seminal shooty offering it seemed like a reasonable example of what might be the half way mark in firearm related entertainment.

Times has not it seems changed much in the intervening years between genesis and analgesics. It is in almost all regards Doom in a more realistic 3D environment. Doom without the bleeding face but with more spinning knives. Doom with both more and less Doom.

To offer a little background, Painkiller is set in some form of occult cave and graveyard complex, filled with oddly empty and yet explosive boxes and the odd arms cache. Waves of identikit enemies burrow their way out of the ground and throw themselves towards you in huge and unthinking masses. As you move on through a level you are presented with various doors that open only when the corpse count is high enough and weapons occasionally are presented to you in glowing swirling circles. In an almost one for one inspiration/theft from Doom one has the ability to top up your health past 100 in single chunk increments by picking up the glittering green remains of your enemies and very slightly hidden armour adds another layer to your ability to soak up damage.

Imagine this repeated with some small variations in enemies, light levels, guns and gore and you pretty much have Painkiller down.

Going past a certain amount of time playing this game I actually felt like I was visibly getting stupider, that each and every shot I fired was blasting away another neurone in my brain that might otherwise be linked to doing something thoughtful. At the end of a level you’re helpfully shown how many kills you managed and I can therefore say that in the last 11 minutes I’m 180 synapses worse off.

There’s no real substance to this game, no solid core that you can get your teeth into. Once you get bored of the fairly wooden shooting, something you will very quickly you suddenly realise that you’re essentially just shooting fish in a medium sized barrel. The enemies are painfully thick, getting stuck on pieces of scenery and rushing into your spinning knives to have chunks of themselves splatter into the ceiling in what must then have been state of the art gore but that now looks painfully (though understandably) blocky.

When the initial planning stage I can’t help but wonder what drove the minds of the developers, did they really just think that unloading round after round into shambling enemies was enough of a pastime to really entertain for hours? This is a game that ends up giving out the aura of a teenage girl at a rock concert, the idolising fan going up to her heroes and showing them the hundreds of drawings and song covers because really she loved their old stuff and wanted to do a copy to show her devotion.

The problem that Painkiller builds for itself is that it hasn’t really done enough to make itself better. In shying away from really innovating the options open to it were that it could either attempt to make an engaging story for itself (something exceedingly difficult given the game design choices) or to really polish something that exists until the shine given off by it burns holes in your retina. 

In my mind there’s nothing inherently wrong with designing a game where the whole point is to shoot things, something like Halo which has a pedigree dating back to before Painkiller is essentially all about shooting stuff but did so with a certain elegance and grace that made it endearing for all of its faults. Its enemies did at least try to roll out of the way when you chambered a round and sent hot lead/plasma/pink things towards it, rather than sticking their head even closer so that you might have an even greater chance to blast it off. In some form of begrudging acceptance of the lack of intelligence in the AI the level designers of Painkiller seemed to decide that the correct response was to spawn enemies behind you, resulting in many frustrating deaths to enemies with exploding barrels unless you regularly spin on the spot.

By hiding in a cleft in the wall you can effectively become invulnerable as your enemies are too thick to slash in towards you.

I say exploding barrels but everything destructible, despite being empty, either gives you rather fiddly to pick up gold coins or explodes. Sometimes these explosions can be used tactically but generally it just serves to take off another chunk of your health and drag out even more agonisingly the task of slaughter by making you repeat sections you’ve done if you happen to accidentally blow yourself up.

The first boss I encountered made me want to rage and throw my keyboard at the fucking screen. In a monumentally confusing move this is an enemy that is entirely resistant to shooting and requires a fiddly and inexact jump to kill, assuming you can work out that the tiny hole above you should be shot to let in moonlight which apparently this hulking creature is vulnerable to as a vampire might be to sunlight.

The music. Ahh yes the music. The term generic rock comes to mind but it’s something more than that, it’s the ice picking bland generic electric guitar that noticeably only appears when enemies are around you. It’s such an unsubtle device that it manages to visibly split the sections of aimless wondering from the clutter of the reanimated corpses you’re swiftly to despatch and make it yet more disjointed an experience.

I couldn’t finish this game, not only could I not finish this game I couldn’t even bring myself to play it for more than about twenty minutes at a stretch and finish the first chapter. Out of five.

You might like this game if you like shooting virtual things with a virtual gun but then you might also like shooting real things in real life too and those things might actually be people. 

Review: God of War III

God of War III, Developed by Santa Monica Studio and Published by Sony Computer Entertainment

In the God of War series you play the part of Kratos, aka ’strength’ a demi-god who really appears (albeit briefly) in Greek legend. Alongside his siblings zeal, victory & force he was part of an Avengers like team in the original myths, enforcing the will of Zeus on the hapless mortals that surrounded Mount Olympus.

It is therefore somewhat odd, if unsurprising that Kratos in his video game outing not so much takes liberties with the source material but straps it down, beats it over the head and tears out its entrails with its teeth. Like the mostly forgotten Dante’s Inferno of 2010 the use of existing writings is taken to be more of a vague hint rather than cannon despite the obvious qualities that both The Divine Comedy and the cannon of Greek myth have for something like a video game where one battles gods and monsters.

You are in the God of War games unceasingly both killing things and people. This is entirely the kind of game that misguided politicians should be referencing if they want to make people aware of the corruption of youth, its 18 certificate in that regard notwithstanding. While as an adult I’m perfectly aware of the difference between real life and fantasy even I stop at times to question if tearing the head from an enemy and using its corpse to bludgeon others is entirely necessary, nay encouraged with its award of extra upgrade orbs for a ‘brutal’ dispatch.

Intermingled with your various attempts to commit what I suppose cannot be called genocide exactly (considering the nature of the monsters/undead you are killing) but is certainly in that sphere of crimes are the odd small puzzle element. Thinking perhaps that its player base might object to being made to think too strongly without seeing a fountain of blood spurt out of a gaping wound these are mostly fairly short and relatively untaxing, though there can be some that are slightly less obvious albeit usually because of design oversight than actual challenge. Some of the more platform oriented sections can be frustrating due to the difficulty of judging some of your jump distances. One might think that using the wings of Icarus would not be the most sensible of ideas and indeed as it turns out you are in many cases likely to fall to your death on obtaining the skill to glide over short distances.

I’m not entirely sure what it is exactly that compels me to continue on playing games akin to God of War. While the combat is undeniably bloody there is something elegant about its fluidity and the response it gives to each of your movements. While it’s certainly not on the level of sophistication as it could be (mentioning no names here) it does have a fairly varied amount of combinations and counters for most weapons and enemies it throws at you. I am a particular fan of you basic knives-on-a-chain which will swirl around you as you rotate the stick on your controller in a deeply satisfying motion.

To finish of most of the slightly more taxing adversaries it becomes necessary though to do a certain timed button press events. While the finishing moves offered by these quick-time-events certainly do mean you can have animations that would otherwise be impossible, the lack of meaningful control over your actions makes them a little bit less satisfying than the combination of dance and destruction that makes up normal combat.

One of the better places for button mashing events is when playing this game the generally rather tasty boss fights. It is in this area that the game really start to feel like it’s getting into its stride, mixing the flow of your character with a shifting array of things that are trying to kill you alongside combat and interesting multi-tiered environments. When you have to do a specific combination of button presses here it makes more sense, because how else exactly could you slice of the tentacles off of a giant tentacled seahorse?

Certainly though the narrative structure is not what makes me want to play more, as I played through the game I realised that Kratos also sounds something akin to an intensely unlikable American version of Michael Cain. To explain, he shouts an awful lot; he shouts at people, at gods, at titans, at wailing corpses that he’s stamping on and, well, pretty much everything else. It’s as if he’s incapable of not being both annoyed and angry at every possible moment and that the standard animated object in the series is either profoundly deaf or will be after they meet Kratos.

Some other minor gripes, such as the titanically idiotic system used to highlight text in the game do somewhat annoy though they can for the most part be forgiven. During one particular taxing segment I was asked if I wished to switch to easy (from hard) and due to their choice of typeface managed to select the opposite of what I wanted (i.e. yes instead of no) and was forced to repeat the fight from a much earlier checkpoint. This tendency to offer you a downgrade in difficulty also does not take account of the difficulty on which you are playing by suggesting knocking you down one notch, instead of to the bottom. Nor does it notice when you’re dying to the environment rather than enemies which are the only thing it effects. This in turn affects your sanity.

Even putting aside the odd gripes I’ve had with this game it’s certainly a very well made and mechanically sound game. If you suspend disbelief and avoid thinking too hard about the flagrantly silly elements you can have a very good time and take out stress you have while you do it. There’s no particular need to have played the first two games to get into the action, though there is a recently shined up version of them for the PS3.

Play this game, but don’t think too hard while you’re doing it.

Review: Demon’s Souls

Demon’s Souls, Developed by From Software and Published in Europe by Namco Bandai Games

‘Negligence is an extreme thing.’

In the Hagakure, it is stated that the way of the Samurai is found in death, that one learns from the teachings of those who have died to gain their wisdom so that we might carry on their teachings to better ourselves and those after us when we ourselves die. The Samurai must be ready to die for his master at a moments notice, once the decision is made it should be carried out to the last. He should always consider himself as already dead.

Demon’s Souls takes this concept, it elevates it to the level of an art form and is a fucking awesome game by any metric that actually matters. Demon’s Souls is Japan’s telling of the code of the Samurai, as interpreted in video game form.

The setting of the game is deliberately macabre, every level, every room reeks of the death and decay that the world of Boletaria has become, infused with the demonic lust for souls that is the driving goal of every creature in this game. There is no joy, no glory. This is a game entirely about death. The corpses of the foes you slay remain slumped on the ground and remain a telling feature of where you have and have not been, the lack of piled of slowly rotting dead giving you a pointer as to where your next steps should take you.

In a game where death is not permanent it tends to be that time is the currency of choice and irritation about how you have failed is the main thing that separates you from playing and turning off in disgust. In Demon’s Souls, death is something more though, it exists on multiple levels and with varying results, fitting to a game such as this.

When you die you will know what you have done wrong. Be it trying to get in that one last hit you really didn’t have the time or the stamina to do or fumbling and rolling into oblivion there will always be a visible reason. There is no sense of cheap defeat here, you will have made a mistake. It might fill you with rage or sadness, an understanding that you have failed your digital avatar (a fitting term in this case, considering that the original avatars were the manifestation of a deity’s soul in bodily form) but you will know that there is nobody to blame for the failing but yourself. You can either live or die by your action or lack thereof. 

It’s important to note that Demon’s Souls has no pause function; whatever you are doing you are subject to the vulnerability you have to your surroundings and the lack of mercy of those about you. To explain, the online mode of the game is not what one might think of in terms of a traditional gaming experience. You can choose, when dead and in your soul form, to either offer yourself up as a friendly blue phantom to be picked up by someone wanting aid or to rip into a living player’s world with the express intent to find and destroy them. The possibility to invade a player’s world is always there and always a threat. You have a small warning that such an event is happening but other than that you are left to contend with what is now not just an unfriendly world but an unfriendly world with ravening and murderous interloper in it, bent on your destruction. 

I have killed assassinated murdered two people as a black phantom. One I impaled with a spear, tracking him to a cave and rolling behind him until a vulnerable spot was exposed and plunging my horribly bespiked spear deep into his back. The other I hunted until he reached a narrow ledge, flanked on one side by a dark long limbed creature and myself on the other. I flung him off a cliff. I regained my body, saw a brief congratulatory message and my soul tendency, that which shows you if you are tending toward white or blackness became ever more murky. Part of my soul had actually been tainted by my actions. 

What makes this a departure from other games that have a good/evil slider is that your choices and actions actually become meaningful. Fallout 3, Mass Effect (and many of Bioware’s games) have had a measure of your actions but they are always a very blunt instrument to deal with what is a very complex and nuanced thing to deal with. That you have to either choose to be a massive dick or a whiter than white paragon never sat well with me and even using the Dungeons & Dragons system of law/morality there was usually a flaw, in that you had to pick your ‘alignment’ before you began in almost all cases. Demon’s Souls doesn’t give you a limited option to talk to a guy with a funny hat who you can call a dick and therein gain ‘renegade’ points. In Demon’s Souls you can either talk to the man or beat him to death, taking any items that he may have had on his person and driving you towards a darkness of soul that drives you into places that would be otherwise hidden to you. Likewise the world is influenced by your actions, not merely your dialogue trees; if you kill a demonic boss in a level you drive it towards whiteness and purity causing enemies to become lower in health and to have more healing items on them, if you die in bodily form it falls towards darkness and more and harder enemies emerge from the darkness but that hold more souls and are worth more when killed because of this.

Don’t get me wrong though, I really love games with a good set of dialogue when there’s a place for it but the adage ‘do by showing, not by telling’ is something that has been overlooked and this game implements it beautifully. Everything that can be done within its mechanics is permitted, and the world is not there to push you in the right direction, it’s as much your adversary as enemies are. If you want to try killing that huge dragon, go ahead. It might be hellish and difficult but it’s an option. You want to murder every npc, including the only one who lets you level up? Go ahead, if you don’t one of the people you rescue will start do do it for you.

There are also some lovely designs to the varied enemies and landscapes, even if a few will drive you to despair. The twin gargoyles, the Maneaters are a particularly unpleasant experience even after multiple tries due to their annoying habit of knocking you off their platform into the abyss. Possibly the most horrible however is that of the poisoned swamp, an area in which you can only trudge slowly through a horrible ooze, one that saps your strength and infects you as you try to battle through it. Your enemies notably suffer no such penalties. This level manages only to get worse. Are you a fan of a bloody, plagued bog, complete with hideous and ravenous babies that try to gnaw your legs off? Yeah. That’s the next part.

The game is not by any means perfect. It suffers in part from its reputation as being the embodiment of tough for the current generation of console games (this epoch’s God Hand) and also from it’s somewhat ropey engine at times. There are significant drops in frame rates at some points and when using certain spells. The interface suffers somewhat from feeling rather like it was designed for an earlier age, trying to use the same item (for example a consumable) a number of times it can quickly get frustrating having to flip through from the start of a list each time. None of this is anywhere near enough to make you stop playing.

Demon’s Souls is very much a video game. You should play it when you are tired of your life.

Thinking About Writing

No. 61 (Rust and Blue) 1953, 115 cm × 92 cm by Mark Rothko

I’ve decided to only write reviews about things from now on. While it’s possible to just write about ‘A Thing’ it’s also important to have some examples about just what it is you’re talking about.

The other benefit of writing reviews only is that it means I have to actually play through a game and think about its relative benefits and failings in their entirety, rather than simply pronouncing on a subject. There’s a gap here in terms of thoughtful insights on the subject that take the form of something you want to read. I wrote a dissertation, a confused and unfocused one, on the subject of art in video games for my degree. Part of the problem with doing that is I realised that is there are almost entirely two schools of writing on related subjects. There is the overly verbose, entirely un-absorbing area of academic study which seems, if unintentionally, to suck out any life or enjoyment that the subject might have. For example, while the horribly titled ‘GAM3R 7H30RY’ by McKenzie Wark means well and attempts to analyse some of the ideas behind the creation and design of game, it turns out to really be pretty horrible to read. Then there is the journalism sphere which generally gets split into the overly admiring they-slipped-me-a-fiver school and the more independent smaller and actually thoughtful sphere that probably doesn’t make very much money and is done as a labour of love. Then there’s the self published masses. The opinionated without pedigree, the raging, the fanboy and the troll. Me.

Part of the problem I have with most of games journalism is that it’s so very uncritical about the medium. The slow dawning realisation that I’ve been having while writing this blog is that while I may play games an awful lot, I actually don’t like most of them. Be it that they have mechanics that actually aren’t really enjoyable or are frustrating in their leaden exposition of narrative in most cases there’s something that should just push me to a point of saying Enough and yet in most cases I don’t do so.

What I intend to do now instead is to either stop putting up with the bullshit that I’m actually paying to play or to dissect those games that do seem to hold up enough and think really hard about what they have done and how they could do it better. I’m not doing this because I want to be overly critical, there’s nothing constructive about being bile filled with no real suggestion as to how to make things better. Games are never going to be an evolving medium when they’re treated as their constituent parts.

It’s been very easy for the games are something more crowd to say ‘look look games are just as good as film/books/tv/art but they’re being blinded by their own eagerness in most of their criteria. Is the latest first person shooter really as enlightening as Picasso or Rothco? It’s almost certainly not, but that’s not the interesting part about it. Why it’s not, that’s what people need to think about. It might make more money, have beautiful aspects to it and really use some very clever coding to make it work but it’s not going to be something that revolutionises the way we look at its contemporaries unless there’s a really worthwhile and obviously advantageous development. I’ve nothing against reinvention of a genre, there’s nothing inherently bad about shooters or having a fashion which means they’re currently à la mode with publishers but the sheer amount of effort given to analysing just how x shotgun feels or the endless mouse/analogue stick debate just reeks of wasted effort.

I want to talk about the experience of games, not the technicality. There are problems in the way games behave right now and ignoring those problems isn’t going to solve them. We need to talk about what games are, not what they do.

Review: Monster Tale

A review of ‘Monster Tale’, developed by Dreamrift, published by Majesco Entertainment for the Nintendo DS

Monsters. What small child doesn’t like monsters. Scratch that, what child isn’t deathly afraid of monsters to the extent that they piss the bed and what adult doesn’t think that actually having a slavering huge beast wouldn’t be actually kind of cool?

It turns out that having a monster is actually just kind of weird, at least in this game. The basic premise of the story is that you are a small child, thrust into a new land by way of a magical bracelet that you have found whilst out in a forest. Her shoes, sadly, are not red so the obvious Dorothy (re: Wizard of Oz) reference is not as obvious as it might be, though one can choose to place her point of origin as a dirt farm in Kansas if it helps you with the immersion. As you arrive in Oz you happen upon a ‘Mysterious Egg’ and rather than plotting a huge omelette you watch the egg crack open to reveal a small red floating monster who is dubbed Chomp for his ability to gnaw on the first food item conjured up in front of you.

Now if you set aside the obvious question of what a small girl could possibly have to do alone in the woods (other than visiting her suspiciously hirsute grandmother) the game is not exactly plot heavy. Your usual fare of defeat the evil queen who’s terrorising the landscape, alongside her sub bosses of slowly increasing difficulty.

The game is I’m lead to believe brought to us by the people who made me rage with frustration at the puzzleformer game Henry Hatsworth and there are a lot of similarities between the two. The art style has clear connections to Hatsworth, as do some of the more unnecessarily aggravating moments. For a game clearly squarely aimed at young children and up it’s oddly challenging in parts and inexplicably has a fair amount of grinding to buy power ups which will be very much necessary to avoid some pretty horrific repeat deaths. The art style is cartoonish and well drawn, if perhaps like many games in the genre slightly brought down by the lack of enemy variants. There are something like ten different enemies to tackle, each with a fair share of different skins to change their elemental weakness or to add more hitpoints to them. Level design is fairly simple but there are varied worlds and backgrounds to go with each, though perhaps not quite as much variations in mechanics as could have been hoped for.

The game is very much in the vein of the ‘Metroidvania’ school of design, with branching paths and various collectable items used to access new areas. It loses something of the charm of this in actually ending up very linear, while there are split paths and areas you do have to do them in specific orders, ending up at the same point however you might want to progress. In almost Zelda or 3D era Metroid like form there will be doors that clearly cannot be unlocked until you discover a new item that quickly start to feel frustrating. There are some optional rooms with things in like extra power-up slots for your pet monster but they’re pretty hard to miss. If you happen to have gone past a room on the map without going in, chances are pretty high that there’s some added bonus in there and there’s no way to miss a doorway, the lack of ambiguity in this case making it much less satisfying.

In terms of basic combat it’s a reasonably solid system, you smash people with melee attacks to recharge your ranged weapon, which slowly gains extras like the ability to do charged shots or a powered up laser blast. The need for something which can either totally blast things or deal with multiple groups of enemies becomes much more vital later in the game where you can either be pushed off the side of a screen (annoying) by a tough monster or completely overwhelmed in sections where you have to fight until no more come (many deaths here, far more annoying). It does slightly make you feel like you’re dealing with a limited palette of moves but once you unlock the various combat additions it proves to be much more satisfying. 

Your monster gains new forms as you progress through the game, foundling to teenager to adult, but none of them really feel that exciting. Chomp will basically do what he feels like whatever the form, unless you make him use one of his power-up moves. While he gains certain amounts of stats and progressively levels up to do more damage in these different forms each one appears to start again from level one on changing to it, making them feel largely pointless. I played the game trying to unlock as many forms as I could, feeding each preceding one with cookies or ham or whatever it was fond of and on reaching the end realised I had largely wasted my time. Part of the point of the different changes for chomp are that they can have different elements, in a rock-paper-stone method of strengths and weaknesses. Even when ineffective however it largely wasn’t a problem as you are doing far more damage than Chomp will ever do so you’re left largely wondering why you bothered. The different forms feel somewhat tacked on too. A water (read blue) variant was doing a move I had learnt as a stint as a fire elemental and actually changed during the cast animation back to red for a brief second. While it’s not in any way game breaking it did leave one wondering if they intended you to use much of this stuff at all.

Chomp’s forms do change in art style somewhat, he’ll gain claws or become a hulking Cyclopes but they don’t really deviate much from the standard models of his three ages. By far the cutest and therefor best model is his default one which I ended up sticking with whenever I had nothing else to feed to him with a chance for expanding into a new one. Lots of effort seems to have been made to make his animations in his base forms feel solid and meaty, in contrast to his powered up ones. The eating of a sandwich is backed up with big toothy munching and reading a book has him conjuring up a pair of reading glasses, it’s just that these don’t end up impacting enough on the rest of the game to feel like enough of a compensation for the vague aimless floating around he does for most of the rest of the time.

I may have seemed very negative about this game but it’s by no means bad. It feels like an experiment made by people still slightly unsure about how to make something really feel fun but knowing they’re getting close to it. I think much of the problem in this game is that the progression mechanic isn’t really tied to your character. You can strengthen Chomp but by feeling like a free floating creature, it’s never really a big part of the gameplay, short of the few mechanics which clearly say ‘you need him to do x to proceed’. There’s actually far more things you can customise about him than yourself but ultimately there’s almost no reason to bother doing so as the slight additions to his skills are almost certainly not going to really swing the tide in your favour.

I did actually manage to play through the entire thing which is in my current state of mind something unusual so there must have been some spark of interest there. It’s certainly worth trying.

Batman Arkham Asylum

I’ve been punched in real life before and it was majorly anti-climactic. Plus it really hurt. One hit, I fall over with blood coming out of my nose in a totally undignified way. It was swollen for a week and I didn’t even see the guy coming up to hit me, let alone have a chance to take a swing back at him. I sat there just staring stupidly up at the clouds while my friend dodged a blow from a second guy, looked worried and told me to call the police. 

I’ve been brought up by Hollywood films and video games to believe that when you’re in a fight there’s a whole interplay of feints and taunts, culminating in a few whacks before someone goes down. In real life I knew it was different but I swiftly learnt that if you get smashed in the face it a) really fucking hurts more than you think it does and b) the person who manages to connect first has probably won the fight already.

In Arkham Asylum Batman smashes a lot of faces. He smashes them so hard that little cartoon stars, much like those in the campy 60s series, appear around their heads. When an enemy thug, and there are many of them, has been punched, kicked or bone crunched enough they’re seen to be ’incapacitated’ in a semi-violent not-killing-this-guy Batman form. I find it hard to think of a game that eschews mass killing in the same way that this does, the nearest thing to it in a similar form of game is Mirror’s Edge, though even there there was something of a retreat with the odd segments that had you steal guns and use them briefly. What I like about these thugs is that they actually seem to be able to think at a level above you usual game’s worth of meat vehicle. When you’ve been crusing around up in the rafters for a while, perching on grotesques (yes he calls them gargoyles but they’re fucking not, look it up) and swooping down to beat into unconsciousness some unwary boob, they get the hint and start planting explosives on them.

Arkham Asylum is a surprise because of how clearly the intentions of its designers come through. Here is a game that takes the well honed mechanics started in its current form by Miyamoto’s Zelda series, applies it to a new setting and does so satisfyingly methodically. That might sound like a bad thing, surely you want verve over solidity, but the confidence with which the pace of the game moves steadily wins you over. 

There are a set of different gadgets that Batman slowly acquires and none of them feel like an afterthought, there’s a use for almost all of them in both tactical and explorative forms which feels fantastic. The upgrades to them too feel like they make sense, and it suffers much less than the feeling of one gadget per dungeon plodding that Twilight Princess was very guilty of. It is in this case a Zelda that is better than Zelda.

There are nods, subtle and well placed nods, to much of of the Batman cannon, taking the form of various Riddler trophies. While this gives a few widget hunts, to fetch various trophies, there are also some more subtle challenges which remind you of Batman’s detective abilities. Some of these actually require thought to complete, rather than simply flashing at you and saying ‘PICK ME UP I’M SHINY’ which may have had a few of the games more knuckle-dragging players reaching for the walkthrough. Now I’m not really a huge stickler to the backstory of the DC universe, I downright dislike Superman and Batman is, if you think about it, completely stupid as a concept. As put by Reginald D Hunter, Batman is a bit of a dick, but, by putting in the references as actual objects relating to the people it’s talking about you get a far better look into what the game is talking about than just happening to find a completely unrelated pile of crap that then gives you an essay on the motivation of Villain X. Or for example Scarecrow.

There are segments involving (the?) Scarecrow which seem to have been influenced by someone who played and very much enjoyed Psychonauts. With surreal and slightly frightening sequences in which you’re in imminent danger of being crushed by a hand with gigantic syringes strapped to each finger these things are actually fun and don’t feel like a tacked on afterthought. Indeed the level of detail is such that during an unavoidable sequence where you are shot inside your nightmare the helpful hint on death is to ‘Use the middle stick to dodge’. Agani here there’s something that sniffs of one of the designers having played games by Hideo Kojima here, and learnt the lesson of breaking the fourth wall but without being such a big dick about it.

My biggest gripe with Arkham Asylum is that the faces of the characters involved all look kind of like a potato with a semi-irregular factory second load of teeth hammered into them and when it was found they wouldn’t all fit, someone decided ‘What the fuck’ and just crammed the rest in anyway. Clearly nobody who was working on this game went to medical school. Or paid much attention when they were having their expensive inevitable American dental work done. It goes on to such an extent that the joker easily has about twice the normal quantity of teeth as a human being and, as the joker, takes every opportunity to show them off. There are also only incisors in his jaw, his box full of teeth clearly came from one machine that was overproducing. It’s disturbing but then, that’s sort of the point.

More than the teeth the models being a ghastly example of the Uncanny Valley, the a glassy eyed stare so common to many games using the Unreal engine makes itself felt here. Batman has a habit of staring directly over the shoulder of whoever he’s talking to, blinking at just the right time to make you think he’s about to leap out of the screen screaming and telling you that you watched that fucking videotape a week ago and it’s time you were dead.

The cityscapes in certain segments do have a very strong likeness to part of the underwater vistas in Bioshock but score major points because, holy fuckballs Batman, things actually change when the  environment in the story does, Poison Ivy going apeshit actually causes plants to grow out of things and when something gets blown up it’s actually blown up when you come back to it.

While the facial animation may be questionable the movement and combat feels much more polished, either due to the speed with which you flow through it or the bulk of the time having been spent on what must have been a higher priority. Though it lacks some of the sheer balls to the wall fluid grace of Demon’s Souls and the face punchey face punchingness of Godhand combat has a heft to it, and while you can try madly mashing the punch button the later enemies will make short work of you if you do. Once you start making a chain of jabs, flips, throws and takedowns you start to feel like you’re taking part in a huge dance around your foes and are equally annoyed at yourself if some misstep causes interruptions.

If you haven’t already, play this game. Not only for the novelty of a game based on an existing series that hasn’t been flogged into a shambling form of undeath by a stream of cynical producers and marketing hacks who think that explosions are better than substance but because it’s actually worth your time. Now try and say that about the cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid 4.

Interfacelift

Dictionary from Apple’s OS 10.6

Interfaces are to me an important subject, not least because I use them on a daily basis and spend a part of my time thinking about and designing them. For almost everything I do it’s necessary to use computers all of which have an interface in some form. Indeed various appliances also have interfaces, from the coffee maker to the washing machine.

Part of what makes an interface so special in my mind is just how much cultural background you need to make sense of almost all of them. Even if something is very slightly off, say the mangling of text by a chinese-english translator who hasn’t quite got a grip of the idea, can totally change the way you react to it and how well you perceive its effectiveness.

They’re something that at first glance seems to be something that’s fairly self explanatory but actually end up to be amazingly complex creations.

Some of the best interfaces are the most simple, those that with the least amount of cultural baggage can be the most quickly understood. To use an analogy of blogging software, Tumblr here is great because it’s simple enough to grasp quickly and Wordpress loses out on a ton of points because though it is possible to do almost anything with it you have to spend weeks getting to that stage.

Having been playing League of Legends a fair amount recently I thought it would be interesting to see how it compared to some of the other offerings in the same ‘battle arena’ genre. These take form of the original Defence of the Ancients, Valve’s upcoming DotA 2 and Heroes of Newerth. I’ll say in advance that I’m far more of a fan of LoL than HoN in gameplay terms but it was only until I thought about it that I realised that I actually find its interface to be an improvement too (I find this annoying however, as HoN appears to be far better coded on a base level and doesn’t use the awful Adobe Air…).

Here then are the interfaces:

League of Legends by Riot Games

Heroes of Newerth by S3 Games

DotA2 by Valve

Now all three of these examples have almost exactly the same amount of information to display to someone playing them. There are a few minor variations (for example LoL lacks a day/night cycle and strength/agility/intelligence stats but has a passive spell and three summoner abilities) but largely they have to tell a player the same sorts of things and behave in a similar way.

Now you might think that fairly small differences in these layouts don’t matter very much but, when playing, they add up to some pretty big differences in play styles. The first and most obvious is the position of the mini-map in each. Both DotA2 and HoNtake their cue from the original Dota which, limited by the Warcraft 3 engine had its map on the left hand side. The problem that occurs with this is that large portions of the game are played with camera movements from the bottom left to the top right. This means that it is annoyingly possible, when panning the camera to hit your map, thus moving focus away from whatever you’re doing and possibly getting screwed over as a result of this.

LoL and Dota2 also have come across the idea of segmenting health bars, something which I can see as nothing but a positive move. By adding in a separator to indicate specific health amounts it becomes much easier to judge the relative strength of someone, how much life they have in relation to their total amount.

One more telling thing that LoL does well is again relating to its mini map, where salient points, i.e. champions, are far more obvious in comparison to the basic small enemies. This means you’re going to take in the position of both allies and enemies far faster and be able to react accordingly. 

These are not the only changes but they are quick things that end up making your time playing either a better or a more frustrating experience.