According to Eurogamer, "Fallout man" Ashley Cheng (allow me to introduce myself, I'm "BioShock man" Steve gaynor) has asked forgiveness for saying in his personal blog that he's disappointed that the design of Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 look "conservative."
It's one sad-ass day when somebody has to present a mea culpa for calling a spade a spade. The low-level mechanical changes and additions might be debated by hardcore fans, but to the uninitiated viewer, Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 are outright continuations of the same 2D isometric games I was playing in high school. They might have smoother gameplay, the character models and environments may be rendered in three dimensions and have fancier particle effects, but on an experiential level these are games expressly for the existing fanbase: safe, predictable qualitative refinements in mechanics and presentation, the most conservative possible approach.
The funny thing is, the closest comparison to this situation that I've considered is the game Cheng is currently working on: Fallout 3 could have taken an incredibly conservative approach if it had gone into production as the isometric-3D direct continuation of Fallout 2 that was once under development by Black Isle. That might have satisfied the entrenched, but I'm personally glad to see Bethesda's Fallout 3 trying to create a new, different, more personal experience out of the Fallout universe. How successful any of these projects will turn out is yet to be seen, but I know which has piqued my interest, by virtue of eschewing conservatism.
7.02.2008
Conservatism
6.29.2008
Critique: Haunting Ground
Quite a while back, I was turned on to Haunting Ground by Leigh Alexander's writeup of it for her Aberrant Gamer column on GameSetWatch. Her insightful critical read of the title made me want to see it for myself, but the disturbing subject matter she described kept me from diving in for a long time. And now that I've played through it, I've been taking even longer to write up my experience.
It's because Haunting Ground is a tough game to write about. Half of it's brilliant, the other nearly unplayable; it treads patently unpleasant and distressing territory, but features clever, enjoyable design that can be great fun to play. It uses exploitation and objectification to challenge audience identity and gender expectations in ways that only a game could, but feels simultaneously pandering and puerile. It's a great success, and a great failure. It's a weird game.
Haunting Ground is a Capcom survival horror title of 2005, following in the tradition of the Clock Tower series. The player is cast in the role of Fiona Belli, a young woman who wakes up in a strange castle with vague memories of a car wreck floating in her head. Fiona soon befriends a helpful German Shepherd named Hewie, and with his assistance must navigate through a convoluted series of puzzle rooms while evading the depraved denizens of the castle.
The first half of the game is an incredibly well-crafted example of classic survival horror design. The castle itself has a creepy-but-plausible layout which includes bedrooms, sitting rooms, bathrooms, gardens, studies, a kitchen and dining room, along with a number of stranger, more baroque locations such as alchemy labs, a gallery filled with dolls staked to the walls, and a demented merry-go-round. The dense puzzles filling the castle hinge on a distorted abstract logic, and beg the question of just what kind of madman would construct such a lair. The setting layers surreality on top of mundanity with aplomb.
Mechanically, the clues and solutions to the first half of the game's tightly-knotted puzzles are wonderfully decentralized and satisfying to solve. Much like the dreamworld of Silent Hill 2, Haunting Ground's early puzzles operate on an otherworldly but readable ruleset which begs nonlinear thinking from the player.
The gameworld's structure and puzzles encourage the player to constantly make connections between distant points, while providing just enough direction to keep the player from getting completely lost: the clue to any given puzzle always lies in one room, while a pertinent object lies in another, and the place the puzzle must be completed in another still, resulting in puzzle solutions that sketch complex webs across the playable space.
The castle is divided into distinct chunks composed of a dozen or so rooms apiece, each chunk initially blocked off from the other by doors "locked from the other side." As the player enters a new chunk, he builds a mental map of that isolated physical space, then by clearing obstructions unlocks the blocked doors to prior sections, gradually building out the full map of the castle as a whole. From the nonlinear objectives to the physical shape of the gameworld and the player's course of progression through it, the first half of Haunting Ground presents a wonderful mechanical experience centered on completing circuits within a system driven by interconnectivity.
The character dynamics and narrative frame that buoy the gameplay in the first half of Haunting Ground are equally compelling and challenging, in totally different ways. Filling the role of Fiona Belli places the player in limbo between voyeur and subject, exploiter and exploited, violator and violable, and for most players, between masculine and feminine. It's a distinctly tense space to occupy, and can only arise from the play of a video game, as opposed to passively observing other entertainment media.
We first see Fiona in Haunting Ground's attract screen movie, padding down a long, red corridor wrapped in a translucent bedsheet, intercut with footage from a camera that follows a blooddrop trickle down the contour of her nude body:
The symbolism makes itself clear here, and colors the game's ongoing depiction of Fiona, which emphasizes her femininity, vitality and vulnerability. These aspects of the protagonist drive all of the ongoing narrative and secondary character motivation in the first half of Haunting Ground, which finds a pitiable rogue's gallery chasing lustily and relentlessly after Fiona. She is expressly designed as an object of desire.
In an early scene, Fiona trades in her wispy bedsheet for a set of clothes she finds disconcertingly laid out on a bed as if for an expected guest, and which furthermore seem to be tailored just for her. As she dresses, we observe the scene through the eyes of an unseen figure watching from behind a painting hung on the wall; we are momentarily put in the shoes of someone preying on Fiona, while simultaneously charged with keeping her from harm's way. The clothes she's been given are exploitative and degrading: a skirt much too short for decency, a bodice cut too tight for modesty, bringing into question the motives of her gracious host. But meanwhile, the game's developers also intentionally invested in a system for simulating breast-bounce as Fiona moves about the castle. The revealing costume serves a fictional purpose as an outfit orchestrated by Fiona's perverse captors, but the computational power poured into depicting boob jiggle can serve no one but the (predominantly male) developers and players of the video game. The overall effect is to reinforce Fiona's vulnerability as a captive subject within the gameworld, while also indicting the player as a voyeur in league with the story's antagonists.
Fiona is hereafter imperiled by the ongoing threat not just of death, but of vague and looming bodily violation. Her first pursuer is a hulking manchild referred to as "Debilitas," seen in the attract screen movie above. When he initially encounters Fiona, he glances from a filthy ragdoll he's holding, to our protagonist and back, then tosses the doll aside and lurches after his new object of desire. As Fiona progresses from room to room, Debilitas will attempt to chase her down when their paths cross. During the pursuit he'll shout out "Dolly!" giggling and stomping with child-like delight, but also sometimes stop to paw at the crotch of his pants in frustration. The implication is that his adult body and stunted mind may be in conflict: the player gets the feeling that Debilitas wants to rape Fiona when he catches her, without even understanding his own actions. The dissonance between physical and mental intent places the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between the threatening-but-blameless Debilitas and the helpless Fiona in an exceedingly uncomfortable frame.
If Debilitas embodies the conflict between male and female, lust and innocence, brawn and intellect, Fiona's second pursuer, Daniella, explores a range of conflict between two female forces: sensation and function, humanity and inhumanity, servitude and dominance.
Daniella is the maid of the castle, and takes over as Fiona's pursuer when Debilitas steps down. She reinforces one of the ongoing themes of the narrative frame, which deals with alchemy and reanimation. As the game progresses, it becomes clear that Daniella is an automaton: she has a body and sentience, but no humanity. As she says, she is "not complete," and can't "experience pleasure or taste." Daniella's turning point from observer to pursuer comes when we find her running her hand over Fiona's body as the girl sleeps, her palm coming to rest over the womb. As Fiona awakes, Daniella goes on to study her own reflection in a window, then bash her head against it in disgust until it shatters, from which point forward she mechanically follows Fiona around the castle, wielding a huge shard of glass as a blade.
Unlike Debilitas, Daniella isn't after Fiona due to any physical urge, but out of jealousy, confusion and contempt. Daniella covets everything Fiona represents: her vitality, her fertility, which spring from her femininity and youth. Daniella has no youth because she has no age; she's an empty shell and she knows it: simply being reminded of such by her own reflection drives her over the edge. When her polar opposite arrives in the form of Fiona, she simply can't process the contrast. Daniella is associated with dolls and puppets via mise en scene throughout the castle, and is just that: a body without a soul, a tinman without a heart. She is broken, pitiful, and terrifying.
The most unsettling aspect of Fiona's predicament is the vagueness of the threat that looms over her. If she's caught by Debilitas, what is he capable of? What is Daniella's true nature? And who is the madman orchestrating all the events in this demented castle anyway? Dolls, mannequins, puppets, earthen golems, mummified girls and even partially reanimated corpses occupy room after room; what is the obsession with life from death?
At one point, Fiona's unseen host, a mysterious hooded figure known as "Riccardo," tells Fiona to remove the tarp from a form sitting on a couch in the study. Upon pulling back the sheet, Fiona finds a clay replica of herself in a state of full pregnancy. Just what the hell are these people's intentions? Overtones of Rosemary's Baby intensify. While the player wraps his head around the castle's abstract puzzles and flees from an array of freaks, an abiding, oppressive fear of the unknown always looms large over the proceedings. It's the opposite of the explicit threat of having Leon's head chainsawed off in Resident Evil 4. Does Fiona face a fate worse than death? Not to know is to dread it all the more.
Haunting Ground chooses a female protagonist deliberately, almost perversely. Unlike many games that put an attractive female shell on an otherwise genderless protagonist, Haunting Ground exploits the trope of the woman imperiled in a way only video games can, twisting it to overlap with the player, resulting in a strange duality that requires the player to really delve in and inhabit the role, to identify with the uniquely female aspects of the character and be driven by her fear and vulnerability, as opposed to observing from a detached viewpoint. The player of the game is charged with protecting Fiona, but also with being Fiona, a character who is different from the player in much more psychologically significant ways than your standard video game protagonist. It's a unique experience for a male player, and uncomfortably so, but one worth braving for its truly alien qualities. Both as a set of engaging game mechanics and as a novel and affecting transportive experience, the first half of Haunting Ground is an overwhelming success.
But here's the thing though:
The second half of Haunting Ground takes every aspect that made the first half interesting or enjoyable and turns it absolutely on its head. Once the third of four acts begins, puzzle design devolves almost instantly into a linear set of rote objectives, with no thought or deduction required. The areas thin out and transition from unsettlingly surreal to simply goofy and implausible. While the early acts had me making interesting mental connections and criss-crossing the map to clear obstructions, successive acts had me simply walking from room to room pressing the buttons in the order I was instructed, or worse yet participating in terribly-designed boss fights.
Player feedback, which was a point of emphasis in the first half of the game, takes a nosedive: I banged my head against one bossfight for the longest time because using the "come here" command on Hewie seemed to be resulting in an aggressive attack that I was just mistargeting, while in fact a FAQ revealed that I had to use the "attack" command explicitly to achieve my goal, while nothing in the game even pointed out that I was making a mistake in the first place. I solved another puzzle by sheer coincidence: one progression gate requires you to simply have a candle in your inventory while your pursuer follows you into a room which also contains some dynamite, at which point a cinematic plays, solving the puzzle for you. Thank god I hadn't actually been trying to figure that one out in any kind of intentional fashion. The final sequence in the game is horrifically punishing, obtuse, and just awful: an invincible boss that kills you in one hit chases you through a gauntlet, requiring the player to restart over and over, scouting with death to build enough precognition to perform the routine perfectly, lest the "game over" beast catch up to you for the dozenth time. The abruptness with which the quality of the game design drops off after the second act is striking, and it continues plummeting all the way til the final credits roll.
Furthermore, any subtlety or restraint the game showed regarding its themes is sandblasted away. We go from uncomfortable sidelong allusions to reanimation, fertility, and impregnation, to Riccardo shouting in the player's face, "Your father and I are clones! WE.. ARE.. CLONES!!" and yelling outright, "Fiona! Let me into your womb!" The story, which pointed in an intriguing direction in its early stages, descends into silly nonsense along with the gameplay self-destruction. We see clones floating in green goo tubes, Riccardo makes himself invisible by casting some spell on Fiona's eyeballs, and we meet an ancient alchemist named Lorenzo who falls from his wheelchair and scrambles along comically behind Fiona, flailing his arms in triple-time, practically begging for strains of Yakkety Sax to play in the background. Everything foreboding and unsettling about the game's narrative frame is transformed, alchemically, into its polar opposite: laughable, eye-rolling camp.
So, Haunting Ground is a game that I can recommend emphatically, up to its halfway point. Buy a used copy of the game for cheap and play up through the end of Daniella's chapter, then turn off the PS2 and don't look back. Despite the second half's implosion on every level, I completed it out of respect to what a great game the first half was, and out of some vain hope that the conclusion would make my devotion worth it. It wasn't worth it though, except to be able to report with confidence that you definitely shouldn't do the same.
Haunting Ground isn't pleasant. It isn't uplifting. Hell, it isn't even noble or progressive, considering its queasily pandering depiction of its protagonist. But its first half is incredibly well-crafted and entrancing while it lasts. At its best, Haunting Ground will take you to an unfamiliar place, ask you to put yourself in a pair of shoes that are particularly difficult to wear, and to experience all that comes along with that challenge. Good luck.
6.23.2008
Quick Critique: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King
The Nintendo Channel worked on me. I was drawn in by its video and description of My Life as a King, and after looking up a few generally-favorable reviews, cashed in some Nintendo points for this WiiWare title.
The first four-to-six hours were great by my estimation: I was introduced to the world and began building my town and sending out adventurers to explore nearby dungeons. The story was fairly tepid but new buildings were quickly and steadily introduced to my town, keeping my interest and encouraging me to keep playing just one more game-day to gain the next unlock.
Before long my town was bustling and I had a crowd of (all basically identical) skilled adventurers lining up to do my bidding. The story kept grinding on stupidly but was overall inoffensive. I acquired all the building types (including the DLC ones I paid for) and integrated them into my little city.
And then.. the game fell flat. I'd exhausted the mechanical payout curve by unlocking every building type before the story ended, so that my motivation to advance another game-day went from "discover what new kind of building you'll get next" to "build a second instance of that same building you already have."
My two major critique points would be these:
I'm not sure how far through the campaign I made it, but I'd guess about halfway. I have a mild urge to pick it back up, but it feels like there's nothing left to discover, and the urge passes. I don't understand the predilection for mechanical frontloading that so many game designers have, but at this point I feel like I've seen all My Life as a King has to offer. It plays into the self-fulfilling prophecy wherein traditional wisdom states that most players don't complete games, so we should put all our content up front, which makes players unmotivated to actually complete our games... and whoops, here we are.
It was a very nice first half, though!
6.20.2008
Bushido
I bought a used copy of Bushido Blade for the PSX and began replaying it tonight. It's still a fun and very interesting game from a mechanical standpoint, but what I hadn't remembered was its broad set of subfeatures and its unapologetic localization style.
There are a number of "flourish" features in the game that are just sort of strange, left-field ideas that could nevertheless make it to retail in the age when Bushido Blade was first released. For instance, while Bushido Blade is first and foremost a third-person swordfighting game, the developers also included a "POV Mode," which allows the player to control his avatar in a (near-useless) first-person perspective. It's novel-- hell, semi-experimental-- but in 1997 warranted its own main menu entry. Smaller touches include a black & white mode, which desaturates the screen entirely, much like the same feature found in Sam & Max Hit the Road. Presumably in Bushido Blade this is to emulate the feel of an old samurai movie-- a worthy aesthetic goal, and nice to see as a supported menu option as opposed to a hidden cheat code.
The localization of the game is striking for how little it tries to hide its Japanese origins on any level. Except for one opening narration, there is no English language track: Bushido Blade is a subtitled game, period. Unlike newer games with an equally Japanese premise, such as Sega's Yakuza, when you pick up Bushido Blade you're signed on for Japanese vocals with subtitles. Kanji also appears prominently throughout, on the character selection screen and elsewhere. Where many publishers attempt to Westernize Japanese games as heavily as possible to draw a mass market audience, Bushido Blade stands by its identity unabashedly.
Other great touches in the core game include the player character getting bandaged up in places they're struck non-fatally by a sword swing, resulting in most of my playthroughs ending with my character sporting a cool-looking bandage eyepatch. The game also offers the ability for the player to mix-and-match any character with any weapon. While many games would automatically pair the quick, weak character with the small, nimble weapon and so forth, Bushido Blade allows you to equip a rapier to the hulking brawler or a battle hammer to the waifish female fighter, to your own handicap (and amusement.) The internal matrix resulting from all those combinations of characters and weapons must have been incredibly complex from a production standpoint, but pays off in the player's feeling of agency and the inherent replayability of the game.
These are all risky decisions that I feel may only be possible with a game of Bushido Blade's limited scope. If the production costs had been in line with a modern-day AAA title, and the target audience broad enough to support such an investment, could the game have gone out on a limb for oddball features like black & white or POV mode, committed to a huge mix-and-match matrix of fighting styles and animations, or stuck to its baldly Japanese presentation? I'd wager not.
Looking back on a number of older games recently has caused me to ponder a specific kind of 'discipline' that might be required to create a modern commercial game with the attitude of experimentation and discovery that was prevalent in the time of Bushido Blade. It's another manifesto kind of thing, and elaborates on the 'game noir' ideas I posted some time ago. I'll think some more and write on it soon.
6.17.2008
6.09.2008
Nameless
I saw this on GameSetWatch earlier today: a trailer for Square's upcoming "Nameless Game," along with an insightful writeup by Chris of niche blog Chris's Survival Horror Quest.
The game itself sounds wonderfully clever: first off, it takes the idea of the "haunted video tape" from The Ring and rolls it into a video game cartridge-- the one you actually put in your DS and play. Part of your time is spent playing the game contained on the haunted cart: an 8-bit Dragon Quest-like RPG which exhibits graphical corruptions quite authentic to media of the time, according to Chris. The other side of the game is first-person 3D exploration seemingly set in eerie deserted apartment buildings, giving off a Silent Hill vibe. Tying it all together, your actions in the 8-bit game-within-a-game affect the state of the 3D gameworld and vice-versa, creating a surreal dialogue between the game you're playing and the game your character is playing... in the game. It sounds just brilliant.
I love how it embraces the specific language of a bygone era of video games and uses it as a tool of subversion, presupposing that the player will be familiar with the touchstones it's referencing and then playing with the assumptions of that informed audience to upset their expectations.
I love how the 3D and 2D games are supposed to be deeply intertwined. It's not like playing Space Harrier in Shenmue as a little distraction; instead, you're indirectly communicating between two digital worlds via your play in each. Awesome.
I love how it takes a staple of Japanese urban myth and casts the physical media you've actually purchased as a supernatural artifact. Like buying a book that's about a cursed book... which is in fact the book itself. It extends the game's mythos into the real world in a way that is quite rare.
And I love that it's a game about playing a video game. Yeah, it's "meta" as hell, but it speaks through an act that its target audience all shares, kind of the collective unconscious of people who have all been playing video games since the 80's. It's speaking to a community, like a film that speaks directly to film lovers: "you get it; this is for you." That the trailer begins with footage of the cart being booted up on a DS just reinforces its self-referential nature. Much like No More Heroes, it's the opposite of the all-inclusive blockbuster that lives under the mass market umbrella, which I think is incredibly important as a means of maintaining balance... and also because I feel like I'm one of the people it's aimed at, which is nice.
Also just a note that I love dedicated, passionate niche sites like Chris's-- people that drill deep into a particular subset of media and clearly take joy in immersing themselves in the genre. Chris, for instance, is on a quest to play every survival horror game ever made-- or at least the ones that live up to his exacting criteria. It takes a certain devotion to explore every nook and cranny of your chosen twisting back alleyway, and I really appreciate the folks that put in all the work to share their expertise with the rest of us.
In any case, Square's "Nameless Game" could be great or it could be a total wash; who can say this early just from a short trailer? But conceptually, it's off the charts. If it does turn out to be great, and it does get translated to English, I'll be tickled pink. If it fails, it won't be for lack of potential!
6.08.2008
Nintendo
4.15.2008
4.03.2008
Ending
My favorite video game endings. Players who haven't yet but plan one day to finish Full Throttle, No More Heroes, F.E.A.R., The Darkness, Metal Gear Solid 3, God Hand, or Fallout may want to selectively avoid certain entries below.
Full Throttle
The inevitability and melancholy of the final scene are incredibly heart-breaking. Sam & Max Hit the Road receives a runner-up prize for its enviro-revisionist fantasy and wonderful credits sequence/shooting gallery.
No More Heroes
The ending matches the tone of the preceding game perfectly, spinning out into a wildly absurd and epically silly finale.
F.E.A.R.
The sheer, deafening power of the shockwave is capped off by a perfectly-timed surprise which left the hugest grin on my face as the credits rolled.
The Darkness
The sorrow and longing of parting with a loved one have seldom been conveyed so simply, sadly and beautifully, especially in a video game. The ending to The Darkness pulled a tear out of me. They could have shown Jackie being tormented in hell, but rolling credits at the last moment he'll ever see Jenny carries so much more emotional resonance. Wake up.
Metal Gear Solid 3
While predictably long-winded and statically filmic, the ending to MGS3 cinched up all The Boss's underlying themes and motivations in a moving way, cementing her as one of my all-time favorite video game characters.
God Hand
Much like NMH, the end credits of God Hand are hilarious and gleefully ridiculous in a way that perfectly tops off the wild experience of the preceding game.
Fallout
Another terribly melancholy, downtrodden ending. After saving the people of Vault 13, the player is exiled to the wastes for his trouble, an outcast and wanderer with no home. Seeing the results of your decisions upon the fate of various locations you've visited lends impact to the preceding journey. It's a shame this video capture contains the branch where you kill the Overseer; I much prefer simply turning and walking away, shouldering your burden as you step out again into the sunlight.
Depressing video game endings rule.
3.26.2008
Advice
If you are a video game character, DO NOT get in a helicopter for evac, no matter what. That shit is going to crash and burn, I can guarantee you. Thank me later.
3.24.2008
Flattery
Some days it must feel really good to be Cliffy B.
[UPDATE 2/26/08]: New kid on the block-- 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand!
Click for big3.16.2008
Requests
Things I'd love to see more of in video games today:
- Interactive conversation. Let me talk to NPCs, even if it's in a very conventional way. Dialogue trees are okay as long as I can be engaged in meaningful conversational exchanges with NPCs.
- Functional spaces. A house you could live in, not a movie set or dressed up tunnel. Bathrooms, kitchens, fire exits, storage closets. Apartment buildings filled with apartments, not painted-on doors lining the halls.
- Mundane places. Malls, gas stations, diners, houses, apartments, cafes, hotels, shops, offices.
- Living worlds. Places currently in use, populated with non-hostile NPCs. Not derelict, destroyed and empty ruins. Places filled with living people going about their daily business. Friendly, happy people being nice to you. Not dead worlds, where the only actors are the player and things that want to kill the player.
- NPC Mentors. NPCs who know what they're doing better than the player does and will lead the player through the world, adding life to the gameworld and giving the player an example to follow. Better than the old disembodied voice in the ear. Good recent examples: GUN's tutorial level featuring a hunting trip with your Pa; Call of Duty 4's Pripyat level featuring Capt. MacMillan as your mentor.
- Real-world clocks. Animal Crossing knew what time and date it was in the player's world, setting the events in your virtual town by the real-world clock. Day turned to night in your Animal Crossing town just as it did in your own living room; when you visited your town the next day, things had changed while you were away. Lends the gameworld a feeling of realness by implying that it keeps going even when you're not playing. Makes play of the game part of your everyday life in a low-impact way over the long term. Why haven't any other non-MMO games seized on this?
- Hand-scale interactions. Let me grab and turn doorknobs, pick up items, interact with computers, write & draw on paper, zip zippers and button buttons, slide open drawers, and perform other hand-scale tasks manually with full interactivity. Good recent examples: pulling and twisting the controls of Samus's ship in Metroid Prime 3; picking up items in Crysis; interacting with computer screens in Doom 3; most all the interactivity of Penumbra: Black Plague.
- Etc.
2.06.2008
Concepts
A former colleague sent me this link which, as a fan of Monolith's games, I found really excellent. It's the flickr photo album of Monolith's art director, which includes concept pieces for the NOLF series and FEAR as well as sketches and studies from life. The drawings themselves are quite nice, and I always love seeing original concept work from great games. It's interesting seeing early sketches from FEAR that line up with comments I remember Craig Hubbard making about revisions that occurred over the course of that game's development: for instance, Jin was originally to be sniper support for the FEAR squad, which is why they gave her the red trigger finger on her glove; in the sketch here we see an early Jin with her rifle (which, by the way, appears to simply be the G2A2 with a large silencer attached. Not ideal for sniping considering how it handles in FEAR.) Similarly, it would seem that the ghoulish Assassins originally carried submachine guns. Lots of interesting behind-the-scenes insight to be found.
Oh, here's a funny connection I discovered while researching FEAR during my time in Texas: one of the main factions in FEAR is the ATC, Armacham Technology Corporation. Around midgame you raid their offices and mow down wave after wave of their private security force, including opponents in hulking powered combat armor, trying to discover the secrets behind Paxton Fettel and all the strange goings-on in and around the city's Auburn district. Displayed throughout their facilities are graphics and replicas of orbital satellites.
Funny thing is, the ATC first appeared in the backstory of Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, the first game that Hubbard was the writer and project leader for. According to an article on shogomad.com, Armacham is "one of the dominant megacorporations" in the Shogo universe:
Armacham Technology Corporation got its start with the manufacture of commercial satellites and ground-based communication systems. Eventually, they would expand to encompass civilian and military vehicle manufacture, musical equipment, security systems, and, predictably enough, MEV and MCA ["mobile combat armor"] technologies. Their MCAs (they discontinued their MEV lines after some early experiments) immediately caught the attention of the private sector and various military organizations alike.So, in both FEAR and Shogo, ATC manufactured communication satellites as well as powered combat armor for private and military use. Is the implication that FEAR and Shogo take place in the same universe, with the events of Shogo simply occurring many centuries further down the line? Going a step further, do the events of NOLF also take place in this same universe, some 40 or 50 years before the events of FEAR? I haven't seen any evidence of this last connection, but it's interesting to consider all three of these stories occurring within one strange little off-kilter alternate reality.
Well, enough geeking out for me! To get back to the point: I do wish more game concept art like the above were available, anywhere, in art books or online. It's nice seeing all the concept pieces in No More Heroes' New Game + mode, but why aren't all those concept works up online somewhere in high resolution (aside from a few nice images I found scattered throughout IGN's NMH screenshots?) IGN also houses a handful of gorgeous character concepts from Monolith's Condemned: Criminal Origins, but I unlocked all the concept art in that game and I know there's more to be found. Where's the rest of the great foundation sketches that led to the visual look of all my other favorite games? Granted I probably just haven't searched hard enough to find more of this kind of material, but it seems only the most wildly successful franchises make their concept art easily accessible, usually in the form of an expensive art book like the one for Half-Life 2 or World of Warcraft. Either that, or you get something like the anemic little "art book" that shipped with the Persona 3 special edition, which Atlus practically might as well not even have bothered with.
Have you got any good links to more video game concept art available online? Leave a comment, I'll appreciate it.
[Update: After a bit of googling, I found Creative Uncut's game art galleries. Much of it is devoted to concept art from fairly minor fighting games and JRPGS, but some interesting properties are represented including Bioshock, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, Chrono Trigger, Okami, and Zelda. More resources to come, hopefully!]
[Update2: RPGamer has an extensive collection of concept art for nearly every RPG they list, both Western and Japanese. Click an upcoming, series, or other game title, then click "art." Their set of Mass Effect concepts is rather nice, for instance. Too bad the site is genre-specific.]
1.26.2008
Grasshopper
Thanks to the gracious editors of Gamasutra.com for republishing this essay in slightly altered form, and again on their blog GameSetWatch.
At this moment I am experiencing the post-game rush. The one that comes immediately after you complete a really great game and you're vibrating with excitement over it. I just finished my playthrough of No More Heroes, and I'm feeling a serious love buzz for Grasshopper Manufacture: for the game itself, the ethic that brought it about, and everything it does that is unique and joyful and uninhibited.
Above all, No More Heroes is gleefully absurd and self-referential. It lampoons the standard pretenses of video games as well as its own audience. It revels in all the ridiculous elements of standard 'bad-ass, gritty' action games. It refuses to take anything about itself seriously, while being fully aware of the culture and conventions it's playing off of. It speaks to an audience familiar with action video games as well as the ephemera that surround them, and can take pleasure in all of No More Heroes' knowing jabs and perversions.
No More Heroes throws the player into the role of Travis Touchdown, a broke, idiotic otaku living in a cheap motel room filled with his anime posters and poseable figurines. Uncharacteristically, Travis is a good-looking, well built dude who shares fashion sense with Tyler Durden.
One day, Travis wins a lightsaber "beam sword" off of eBay an "internet auction site" and somehow ends up killing the United Assassins Association's (UAA) number 11 ranked member. A mysterious woman approaches him and suggests he climb the UAA ladder by eliminating each of the top ten ranked assassins one by one. So, the player leaves his anime pad to go on massive killing sprees with his lightsaber, driving to his assignments on his enormously tricked-out motor scooter and then suplexing and hacking up tons of goons like a cross between a Mexican luchador and the Star Wars Kid on meth.
The premise essentially takes a rabid anime nerd's ultimate fantasy life and turns it into a video game, showing how completely ridiculous and laughable it is in the process. Beside the premise and the protagonist, the gameplay itself pushes every element of action games over the top into the absurd. The combat is outrageously gory to the point of being a cartoon, and the bosses are so contrived and implausible as to put Metal Gear Solid villains to shame.
As the game boots up, The Grasshopper Manufacture crest is emblazoned with the credo "Punk's Not Dead," and declares GhM a "Video Game Band."
Just seeing that logo as a splash screen is incredibly heartening, and the implied ethic really does show through in the product. No More Heroes takes the standards of the genre and throws them back in its face. It's loud, abrasive, concerned as much with image as substance, and completely exhilarating. Maybe it really is punk.
There's been some writing lately about the schism between the hardcore reviewership and the casual game market. Some bloggers dismissively condescend toward players engaged with the lineage of games that require high investment in and dedication to the act of play. The anti-hardcore "like being treated gently" while playing a video game-- they "don’t want to be knocked unconscious" by their entertainment; they "just want to relax in front of the television set, doing not much of anything."
No More Heroes is not the game for them. No More Heroes grabs your collar and screams in your face. It revels in the sensory overload normally provided by a game like God of War or Devil May Cry and amps it up to an unprecedented, speaker-popping assault. It's just what Grasshopper set out for it to be: it's the Sex Pistols or The Stooges freaking out and pissing off your parents. At its best, a good fight in No More Heroes is as unrelenting and destructive as a track off of Raw Power. And those leveling criticism are right, Pitchfork shouldn't be reviewing Enya. People who just want to relax in front of the televison, doing not much of anything while they play a video game need not apply.
There's just too much to love about this game.
I love that it's a Japanese title that blatantly draws inspiration from Grand Theft Auto.
I love that it has character customization, including over 100 different shirts to collect and try on. I love that the majority of these shirts seem to have been designed by Suda 51 himself (under the transparent pseudonym "Mask de Uh," pointing to his ongoing infatuation with luchadors.)
I love that it's a hardcore, gamer-focused, direct character inhabitation game that relies on the lo-fi graphics and technology of the Wii. It's pragmatic, and uses superfluous design sense to make up for technical shortcomings. It eschews HD. I love it for that.
I love that, in a strangely affecting twist, the game takes moments to acknowledge the aftermath of violence much more directly than its contemporaries: the mangled corpse of each boss character that you kill remains on the scene as you walk around collecting your reward, forcing you to face the evidence after the act is done. It's somewhat grotesque, and refreshingly so when death is otherwise so meaningless in the vast majority of action games.
I love that the game is legitimately challenging, and requires the player to pay great attention to the bosses' behaviors and precisely time his inputs. And I love that when you do die to a boss, an extremely player-friendly retry option lets you immediately jump back in and give it another shot. I love that it's not easy; I love that it expects more out of me.
I love how much actual gameplay lies outside the core mechanics in the form of side jobs and miniature distractions. You don't just run, jump, fight and kill. You exterminate poisonous scorpions, defuse land mines, gather up trash off the street, collect coconuts, whitewash graffiti, mow lawns, and rescue stray cats. It appeals to me for the same reason that Raw Danger!'s variety of non-standard interactions did: it's something new, a range of experience I'm not used to receiving through a video game.
I love how "gamey" the final product is-- it relies as much on the old-school pixelated tropes of the earliest arcade games as it does on the conventions of titles like GTA3. The UI is decidely 8-bit, with the UAA leaderboard being depicted as a Galaxian-alike arcade game high score board. There are segments of play that include side-scrolling, and even a mini shmup used for one of the lead-up levels. The game isn't trying to be something it's not-- there are cutscenes, but the overall presentation isn't anywhere near "cinematic." That would be too serious, too pedestrian, too commercial. No More Heroes is not of a piece; it's fragmented, eclectic, and in love with being a video game. Maybe that's why I love it so damn much myself.
In the end, I often judge the worth of a game on how much it makes me laugh. I love how much I laughed while playing No More Heroes.
There are disappointments. I wish the bike controls were more intuitive. I wish that all the buyables didn't cost so much, so I didn't have to grind side-missions to buy all the clothes and upgrades I wanted. I wish that the side-missions had that nice instant retry option like the main missions do.
I wish the game had tried to play with its structure more. I love how devoted the developers were to making the lead-up to each boss fight unique: you spend levels doing everything from fighting on a moving bus to driving down a highway to running through a maze to pulling donuts on your motor scooter in the middle of a baseball field. But the overall flow of the game is cyclical and repetitive, down to the very end. Play through level, beat boss, grind for money in town, buy upgrades, then on to the next level. Repeat. A game like Portal shows how effective messing with player assumptions of game flow can be: how excellent was it to be lulled into the idea of playing through 19 chambers, only to have your expectations turned upside down at the game's midpoint? How excellent would it be for Travis to climb halfway up the UAA leader board, only for the game structure to change completely, introducing you to an entirely new view on the experience? No more of the same old routine, suddenly the course you thought you were on changes. But no, in No More Heroes you just keep stepping up one rung at a time til you hit the end you'd seen coming from the very start. It quickly becomes rote. An opportunity for subversion was missed.
I wish the fucking manual included some credits for the developers. Yeah, I know, most gamers don't even open the manual, much less read the credits. But don't the men and women who toiled long and hard to give us this game deserve to have their name on it? Somewhere physical and permanent, not just in the scroll at the end of the game? Is that too much to ask? Is this standard with Japanese games brought over to the States? I noticed that there are no Japanese credits in the Katamari Damacy manual either, though I remember there being credits in the Final Fantasy 7 manual when I flipped through it long ago. It probably depends on the publisher. But it feels like an injustice to print an accompanying pamphlet and omit the names of the product's creators. Maybe nobody else cares, but I do.
No More Heroes is brash, daring, absurd, hilarious, exhilarating, and absolutely one of a kind. It speaks directly to me. It makes me feel happy that such a difficult, impossible thing could make it to market. Congratulations to everyone at Grasshopper for pulling it off. You have my deep respect.
1.25.2008
Phrases
There are certain game titles that speak to me more than others. I'm personally tired of literal-minded, object-based titles-- a title that names a specific entity within the game itself in straightforward terms. These would be things like Halo, God Hand, Portal, Persona, The Darkness, Metal Gear Solid, Mafia, or Metroid. They serve their purpose: they're easy to remember, speak aloud, and type out; they're distinctive; they represent a core element of their product. But, I don't know, they don't really excite me. Maybe because they're the status quo.
Lately I've been digging phrase titles. They're usually a few words or even a full sentence, somewhat abstract, and don't directly name a major component of the game. The best are in the declarative or imperative. Here are some titles I can get behind, quality of the game itself notwithstanding:
The World Ends With You
No More Heroes
Beneath a Steel Sky
Calling All Cars
You Are Empty
Death to Spies
Faith and a .45
Devil May Cry
A Mind Forever Voyaging
You Don't Know Jack
Zombies Ate My Neighbors
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
Destroy All Humans!
There are a lot of games that would have great phrase-titles if they just cut off the part before the colon and used the subtitle by itself. For instance:
Contents Under Pressure
Dark Corners of the Earth
You Are the Wheelman
No Remorse
Back to Nature
Another Wonderful Life
No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way gets double points for having a great long-form phrase both before and after the colon.
I know I must have missed a bunch of great ones that would also fit the bill. I suppose I just wish game titles didn't feel the need to be so literal. Is this marketing driven? Would "You Are the Wheelman" automatically sell X copies fewer than "Driver: You Are the Wheelman?" Is this why the team at Monolith followed up the commercially-underwhelming No One Lives Forever series with F.E.A.R. (and now, further, is dropping the acronym thing for Project Origin?) I couldn't say.
Use your game titles to speak to me.
1.19.2008
Rainy Woods
Snatcher was a completely shameless appropriation of Blade Runner, but I thought that the days of games so baldly ripping off established works on screen had passed back in the early '90s. Then I saw this:
I am simply without words.
12.19.2007
Yuletide
Thanks again to Simon Carless for posting a slightly-altered version of this article on GameSetWatch.
My blog's been getting pretty serious lately. I want to do some frivolity. So, considering the season, I present my list of "Best Games Set During Christmas." This isn't a numbered countdown or a definitive round-up but simply a little compilation of the best games I can think of that have Christmas settings.
Snatcher - Hideo Kojima's 16-bit adventure game was developed during that long gap between Metal Gear 2 and Solid, and released in the west on Sega CD. Its gameplay is staunchly point-and-click in the Sierra or Lucasarts tradition, with a little bit of Hogan's Alley thrown in every once in a while. The game is a transparent "homage" to Blade Runner, mixed with some Invasion of the Body Snatchers and a cornball anime veneer to top it all off. It takes place in Neo Kobe after a catastrophic man-made disaster wiped out much of the world's population. Expats trapped in Japan turned Neo Kobe into