Jeffs Gameblog: An Alchemical Proposal

Jeffs Gameblog: An Alchemical Proposal

KNYTT Stories

I have long held the belief that PCs are not for games. "If God had meant us to play games on a PC" I would say in my haughtiest tone, relishing the looks on the faces of the 5 or so people who were about vehemently disagree with me "He would have put joystick ports on them".

I have learned my lesson, by which I mean, in a shocking turn of events, my facetious comments weren't, in the strictest terms, truth. It is not the compulsive charm of a game in which I click on things and tweek numbers that has brought about this transformation (these are the kinds of games *they* like to play), but the plethora of awesome, shining hand crafted nuggets of burning spirit real people (by which I mean, largely, ones who don't make games for a living) give away for free on their webs. Watch the intro for Dwarf Fortress. If you are not freaking out and partying at this point, the doctor suggests you may be dead inside.

KNYTT, the original version, is one of these games. It's "best" described as a 2D exploration focused ICO, if ICO had been made by Hudson in 1991. It's meandering, goal-less, a bit confusing, and engrossing. The author has just released KNYTT stories, which uses the same engine to tell more focussed, level-like "stories", 5 of which are available from the website. I've yet to play it, but I suspect it's a real treat. Go on, give it a try yourself. This will be on the test.

http://nifflas.ni2.se/index.php?main=02Knytt_Stories

(Cross posted from my LJ in leiu of actual content that I *promise* will be forthcoming and actually good):

WELCOME WORIOR MEET MY BORLAX KA KA KA KA
Or something.

I am developing a mild obssession (possibly due to wild flights of fancy brought on by having to look at pictures of guns) with 1986 arcade game Wizard of WOR. If I had my druthers, and wasn't attached to the name I have enough already, I'd be weaselling around my internets changing it to Wizard of WOR right now. It's already being used as one of those "generic names for things" that I keep in reserve; my current windows media player playlist is called Wizard of WOR for example - it's awesome (WORSOME~!), by the way.

But I digress. Wizard of WOR!



Check it out! I love how there was a period in the early eighties (CF: The Adventure Game) where Spelling Things Wrong and/or heavy sounding vowel rearrangement were the new black. Anyway, to illustrate: WIZARD of WOR!

On Videogame Morality and the Decline of Heroism

Or

How I Came to Hate the Sniper Rifle

To re-appropriate a phrase, “sniper rifles are like assholes, everyone has them”. Or, like red (or whatever) is the new black, sniper rifles are the new stealth mission; a game element that is seemingly de-rigueur in any game that features a gun, or, let’s face it, any kind of projectile weapon. Unlike the humble stealth mission, the sniper rifle at least has the upside that it can’t be used in every game that involves the player having an avatar, but nevertheless it’s become pretty much ubiquitous in the modern action game. Ask any gamer what you might do in a “sniping section” and they’ll know just as intuitively as if you’d have said “driving section” or “fighting game”.

To cut to the chase, I think I hate sniper rifles. To explain this sweeping statement, let me illustrate two different game experiences. Back in the glorious, innocent Eighties, gaming was in the midst of a simpler time. Operation Wolf lured the player and his cash to its camouflaged cabinet by mounting a full size replica Uzi sub machinegun up front; now this, Mr. Arcade Gamer would say, is a shooting game – so much so that I don’t even need a joystick or buttons to control my path of carnage, just a big honking gun. So, after depositing your coins, the player smoothly scrolled sideways crab style through a military base, slaughtering the hapless bad-guys in his path, soaking up their bullets like a perforated sponge until the inevitable “You have sustained a fatal wound” screen appeared (the cold brutality of that speech sample still echoes fresh in my ears many years later). Into this cold-war den of vipers were placed a bunch of generic pink-jump suited hostages (it was obviously inevitable they’d be captured, with outfits like that, or perhaps it was a punishment from the malevolent terrorists); when a hostage appeared, he/she would limp across the screen to the nearest edge, whereby, assuming you didn’t accidentally mow them down with a never ending stream of gunfire, they would be miraculously rescued. The player character in Operation Wolf had three lives; if you did gun down a hostage, he’d lose a life, if all the hostages in a stage were killed, the game was over. It was a simple and effective way of making the player manage screen space and not just carpet the entire screen with gunfire; it was never explained what exactly caused this damage – whether it was soul-wrenching angst at the senseless waste of human life or damage from explosive hostage bone fragments, it was a mechanic which was used throughout hundreds of games in the Eighties and Nineties. The assumption behind it (in terms of player behaviour rather than mechanically), is that the character is a “good-guy”; as we well knew back then, good-guys shot bad-guys, they didn’t shoot hostages, because it was wrong.

Back in the present, a group of friends have scraped enough consoles, TVs and joypads together to find the holy grail of Xbox gaming, eight player Halo. As they play, numerous amusing situations and heroic deeds occur, like when one player, out of ammo and fleeing his opponent, is saved at the last minute by a team mate running over his pursuer in a jeep, or when the players killing spree is ended by a flying Street Fighter style pistol whip from the top of a nearby building. How we laughed. One player though, is positioned behind a big rock with a sniper rifle. Every now and then, a player is slain from out of nowhere, and an ominous gloating laugh kills the aforementioned joy in the room. Soon, people begin to complain. It’s no fun, I can’t get anywhere without being shot in the face by Mr. Ninja. It all goes sour, and soon, Mr. Ninja is the only one having any fun. Beforehand, the player’s were creating a shared experience together, celebrating each others’ skills and playing for the moment; now, ugly competition has reared its head – Mr. Ninja loves sniping people, it’s the best way to win, he says.

Now, you could say that this is a bad comparison, and in fact, I’m not even talking about the same thing in each example – I’m not really. The link occurs when you look at why the sniper rifle is so popular in Halo and games like it. The bible talks about not suffering a witch to live, and years later lots of nasty people would use this as an excuse to kill people they didn’t like – these nasty people defined witchcraft as “the power to harm another over distance” – that then, is the appeal of the sniper rifle; it feels more powerful than the other weapons, because it kills over such a long range, because the victim is unsuspecting of such a powerful attack when the coast seems relatively clear. Going with this then, the sniper rifle is all about power – it’s about killing who you want, when you want, without them having a chance to counter attack or defend themselves. This maps precisely onto the sadistic glee we get when shooting AI opponents right in the face during the one-player game of Halo; that’s ok though, right, since we’re the good-guys, and they’re not – good guys kill bad guys. But what then, if, like in Grand Theft Auto and its demonic kin, we can simply stand wherever we like and shoot whom ever we like; what if we can use the same thing to humble our friends in a friendly competition (by shooting their virtual representative of course, I’m not implying the average gamer is into shooting his or her friends in the face with a real sniper rifle)? Then, it becomes about power over distance, killing whoever you like – contrast this with the acceptance of accidentally terminating a hostage in Operation Wolf and the ensuing loss of life, or even the game. It’s not about being the hero now; it’s about having the power; it’s masturbatory – the guy with the sniper rifle is a wanker. And that is how I came to hate the sniper rifle; I’m working on a game with one in – don’t make the same mistake I made.

The “Feature Suite” and the Death of Arcade Gaming

Apparently, if you make football games, according to my 733t insider knowledge, there are three main areas you compete in – the first is licensing; FIFA is the leader here, so FIFA games have all the right looking advertising hoardings, all the correct player names, the same music off the telly. This is important because a lot of football gamers like to play the game to recreate the experience of watching football on television rather than actually playing the game, physically themselves. The second area is gameplay, and I’m led to believe that Pro Evo is the leader here; as shown by the comparative sales of the two titles, this is less important to the average casual gamer, but gets you votes with the hardcore gamer and the hardcore/football fan crossover audience. The third area, and apparently the one where you can slot your new football game (if you’re content with third place I guess) is its “feature suite” – this is essentially the whole meta-game package, all the modes, league structures, kit editors and assorted other gimmickry. So basically your game may play like ass, and your user gets to see goals scored by Davis Veckham or whatever, but they can make a model look a bit like them, name it after them, and have it play for England.

Now, the football game market is quite different to the way most other game genres are made and marketed (hence the dominance of chav gaming kings EA in the genre), but other games can gain heavily from focusing on their feature suite as well. As my example, I give you Tekken 5. Tekken 5, like its predecessors has always had an odd position in the fighting game pantheon; generally disliked by the hardcore for its lack of game balance, somewhat bland character design and button-bash heavy fighting system, the Tekken series has nevertheless remained the most popular and profitable fighting game license in the post PlayStation world. As an answer to this quandary, I direct you back to the traditional reason cited for the fall of arcade (it this sense we mean competitive, skill based) gaming since the advent of the PS1 – that in the arcade, where once the coolest, bleeding edge games resided, we had to pay 20 pence (or 10 yen, or a quarter) to play – therefore, getting good at the game got you more playtime for your money; also, arcades being social places, having the high score on Galaga carried a not inconsiderable amount of Geek cultural cache. These days of course, most arcade machines are just powerful PCs in a bigger box, and home versions of arcade machines are often arcade perfect and released simultaneously alongside their coin munching counterparts; no-one has any reason to leave there bedroom to play the coolest games. They also get the game after one down-payment and want to see as much of it as their concentration span allows with little effort, the knock on effect being the predominance of “experience based” games that one simply plays through to see the whole story and get the cathartic reward of smacking down the last boss – everyone you know has finished the game, so whether you did it quicker or more skilfully ceases to matter so much. This leaves the olde-skool arcade game in an uncomfortable position – no-one will play or like it if it isn’t easy enough to complete after a few hours play, after a few hours play, no-one is going to get deep enough into the game to want to play competitively, and as such the game is criticised for its simplicity or lack of depth, generally because Johnny PlayStation has slapped it on Easy and completed it first go.

So, what do you do about that? Tekken 5 sorts this problem out admirably by presenting not only a solid fighting game, but also an incredibly extensive feature suite. So we not only get a fighting game, we get a level based, almost RPG style career mode, a story mode, all the usual tag, time attack, and survival modes, a score of unlockable characters, custom costume variations for every character bought piece by piece with gold earned in the career mode, arcade perfect versions of Tekken 1, 2, 3 and Starblade, and a vestigial but actual-size action game based on the Tekken engine. If I so desire, I can still put the difficulty on easy and play through the game with all the characters, though this is a far longer process if you include all the bonus characters, but if I want to change how my character looks, I need to put some time into career mode, if I want to see the whole game I need to explore every expansive nook and cranny of the disc.

It’s in the feature suite then that Tekken 5 outshines the superhuman twitch tactics of Virtual Fighter Evolution and the appealing atmosphere and intuitive controls of stable mate Soul Calibre II – essentially by being an arcade fighter designed primarily to be played, learnt and explored at home rather than in the smoky ambience of the local arcade. Cracking the feature suite problem never really helped the third string football title I mentioned earlier – because despite appearances (and Winning Eleven) to the contrary, the core/casual audience wants an experience based football game, not a skill based one; it certainly doesn’t want an encyclopaedic options menu next to a game that plays and looks like a 10 year old budget title. That’s not to say that a good feature suite can’t push a game from competent to classic; Tekken 5 is a good example of making the stick as appealing as the carrot, and shows how, in a move suspiciously parallel to the all consuming Grand Theft Auto phenomenon, we might re-capture a lost generation of arcade gaming by opening these games as far wide as they can take, and giving the user a whole play room full of arcade toys patterned after one winning central concept. Gamers may, to quote the Simpsons “Come for the Freak, Stay for the Food”.

Brief Musings on GTA: San Andreas

Last night I played some GTA: San Andreas; god damn that's a sad and lonely game. A bit less so than Vice City, since at least the guys giving you missions are your friends (in a fit of White Boy, I can't think of how to spell "home-ees". Homeez? Homyz? Homes? Homez?), but it doesn't feel much better when you're slitting throats to steel a book of rap lyrics for a guy you don't even like. Contrary to popular belief, I actually think Rockstar's Quantity over Quality approach to designing the GTA iterations has kind of crossed the line and backfired a little; there are so many different things to do in San Andreas, the majority of them feel under-developed, tacked on, and mostly, tokenism. I mean, stealth – who honestly thought that stealth missions would improve GTA? But everyone else is doing it, and it's easy, so fuck it, chuck it in. Instant boring-ass missions. The stat improval is pretty much the same; basically, to power your character up, you have to play about five minutes of button bashing sub-games per play session – dull. Incorporating things like the stealth missions has also kind of sucked the life out of some of the games' vitality – in Vice City you didn't really mind playing certain missions over and over again, since different random stuff tended to happen each time – now, and awful lot of the missions happen in buildings or in secluded locations instanced away from the main city, eliminating this random element – it makes for more elaborate set pieces, but loses a bit of the games very fragile heart – a loss I'm not sure GTA can take much of, at least for this gamer.