Blips: Not From Nothing

Source: The isolation of Metroid Prime reflects its hero’s sense of loss
Author: Nick Wanserski
Site: Gameological

I can't pass up a good article about the Metroid Prime games, so here's another one from Nick Wanserski over at Gameological that ties into their "empty spaces" series. If you've played Metroid Prime or even the original Metroid, you'll already know that emptiness and isolation go hand in hand with those games. Metroid has mostly solid black voids for backgrounds, contains no dialogue, or map, and generally leaves you to fend for yourself. The first Prime game drew most heavily from its predecessors, adapting both environments and gameplay into polygonal spaces, with plenty of silent, contemplative voids to boot.

What Wanserski brings to light that I hadn't really considered in depth is Samus' relationship to her surrogate parents, the Chozo, told through discovered texts and glyphs, as illustrative of Samus attempting to fill in an empty space in her personal history. In a sense, Metroid Prime is the story of an adopted daughter, twice orphaned, seeking to learn about those that raised and took care of her. Of course Samus is also an incredible warrior, so she's on an important space business mission too, but the narrative arc of Samus' relationship with the bizarre planet of her surrogate caretakers always stood out to me as the most memorable aspect of that game.

Blips: Moments of Silence

Source: Myst uses emptiness to calm you; its sequel uses emptiness to provoke you
Author: John Teti
Site: Gameological

This week over at Gameological, John Teti has begun a series of posts about empty spaces in games. He sets up the series by pointing out the disconnect between images of games that depict them as all-out action while the reality is that games allow for many quiet moments as well, often at the player's discretion. Of course there are games that are largely devoid of action, no matter how you play them, and two of those games, Myst and Riven (it's sequel), are the first to go under the microscope. Teti's argument is that while Myst uses emptiness as a way of ensuring that the player doesn't feel pressure to complete puzzles quickly or shame in failure to do so (no one is watching), Riven presents people on the fringes of your view. In Riven, you don't feel extra pressure because there are humans elsewhere on the island, but finding out why they're running away from you serves as a kind of motivation for puzzle solving. I'm excited to see where this series goes next as there are many games that offer moments of silence or emptiness that are often glossed over in favor of more frenzied moments.

While there are certainly a multitude of games that position characters in empty worlds, I hope that pause menus are spoken of at some point too. When I think about menus, I think about RPGs, and how much time I spend navigating them compared to "playing" the game. Whether it's arming characters in Final Fantasy games or navigating deep space in Mass Effect, my time spent in menus has offered me a solitary, introspective space. How do I want to engage in this next scenario? What should I wear? Time collapses in pause menus, and nothing proceeds without you (unless you're playing online, of course). Sometimes the official game clock even halts while you're in menus as well, as if to say that time spent amongst the upgrade paths and equip screens is somehow separate from everything else. In a way, it is separate, but that shouldn't diminish its influence on the tone and pacing of the game as one, whole experience.

Blips: Resonant Echoes

Source: Feel The Pain
Author: Peter Malamud Smith
Site: The Gameological Society

I'm just going to come out and say it: the original Metroid and Metroid Prime 2 are the best games in the franchise, and in turn, two of my all-time favorite games. Now, most Metroid games are quite good, so this isn't meant as a slam on the rest of the pack, but the majority of folks seem to put Super Metroid and the first Prime game on a pedestal above all others. So, I was quite pleased to read Peter Malamud Smith's piece where he seems to hold a similar outlier stance to my own. Super Metroid and Prime are perfect games in a way, with the rough edges sanded off and explicit, unwavering purpose in level design and pacing (Prime's late-game fetch quest notwithstanding). These games are designed with fluidly scaffolded player experience at their core. Prime 2 and Metroid however, often keep the player in the dark, sometimes quite literally, and that's part of what I like so much about them.

Sure, Metroid could have used a map, and Prime 2's Dark Samus is a dumb, lazy antagonist, but everything else about those games creates the foreboding, otherworldly atmosphere that has always seemed like the brass ring of the franchise –one which none of the other entries manage to grasp. Metroid's background is solid black, which may have been a technical limitation, but nonetheless evokes both the empty vacuum of space and the dark void of an uncharted cavern. Prime 2 has a "dark world" that is essentially poison, forcing you to dart between clean air safe-spots to survive. In fact, survival is as much a part of Prime 2 and Metroid as adventure, which makes exploration a rather tense affair.

This is not to say that Super Metroid and Prime were devoid of these atmospheric qualities, but neither game puts the player in a downright oppressive world or fosters feelings of dread quite like Metroid and specifically Prime 2. Maybe it's just a matter of personal preference as to which tone you find more appealing or memorable. While I'll always remember Super Metroid and Prime as amazing games, I'll never forget my actual experience trudging through the darkness in Metroid and Prime 2.

Blips: Bloody Good Tune

Source: All You Need Is Blood
Author: Derrick Sanskrit
Site: The Gameological Society

Yes, this is pretty much just an excuse to embed one of my favorite video game tunes of all time: Kenichi Matsubara's "Bloody Tears," which was originally part of the background music for Castlevania II: Simon's Quest on the NES. I even had a ridiculous remix of the track as my ringtone for several years. "Bloody Tears" has appeared in just about every Castlevania game that has come since, solidifying it as a series icon almost as much as having the Belmonts perpetually hunting Dracula. What's maybe most surprising is that my favorite arrangement of the track is the original 8-bit one. Simple yet effective, I suppose.

As Derrick Sanskrit says in his post, "Bloody Tears" is perfect adventuring music. It has a propulsive beat and a dramatic orchestral flair to it, that is common in a lot of video game scores, but not usually done this well. I think the chiptune nature of the song actually helps it here, keeping it from becoming to overwrought with excessive production. While I love some of the wicked guitar shredding that has become a part of more recent Castlevania music, and am aware that you can't use chiptune music in your game without looking nostalgic, I think the limited palette actually makes the arrangement more impressive. Hmm, now I'm sort of in the mood for some good ol' vampire whippin'!

Blips: RIP Hiroshi Yamauchi, 1927-2013

Source: Hiroshi Yamauchi, the executive who turned Nintendo into a video game giant, dies at 85
Author: John Teti
Site: The Gameological Society

I don't have a whole bunch to add to what's been said already, but I wanted to link to an obituary for former Nintendo executive Hiroshi Yamauchi, who passed away this week at the age of 85. It's astounding to consider how long Yamauchi was running things at Nintendo –over 50 years before stepping down in 2002. Though Shigeru Miyamoto was the man behind the design of iconic characters like Mario and Link, Yamauchi was running things back when Nintendo's primary business was playing cards. While many Japanese companies have their hands in a diverse array of industries, that Nintendo was still a games company at its inception is pretty cool.

Of course, Yamauchi's Nintendo would go on to be a video game powerhouse, reigniting the industry after the collapse of Atari and mounting skepticism around the medium as a reliable investment at retail. Yamauchi's Nintendo is the one I have a personal affinity for as well. The NES was my first home console, and even though I diverted to Sega in the 16-bit era, I came back for the Nintendo 64 years later. Those systems are a part of my identity now, and though I know massive commercial efforts like video game console production are a team effort, Yamauchi was in the driver's seat. So, I feel like I owe him a debt of gratitude. Who knows where video games would be without him?

Blips: You Have No Choice

Source: A Player Obeys
Author: Sam Barsanti
Site: The Gameological Society

I only played the original Bioshock for the first time a couple months ago and never got around to writing anything about it, so I was delighted to see Sam Barsanti's new interpretation of the game's contentious final act. This post and Barsanti's are full of spoilers by the way. To summarize Barsanti's take on the last third of Bioshock, after Andrew Ryan's dying tirade about the differences between "men" and "slaves," the game pushes you through a string of tired video game objectives (fetch quest, escort mission, etc) that, when presented in succession, call greater attention to Bioshock as a video game than it had prior. These game-y portions aren't executed with the same level of quality and openness that Bioshock seemed to have before the Ryan plot twist. Despite your character being released from mind control, your path feels narrower and duller than ever. Barsanti sees this as Bioshock commenting on the perceived freedom through choice in video games, and cynically telling the player "you have no choice."

For the most part, I can get behind this interpretation, but I question the necessity of those video game-y missions to be below-par experiences. I think it says something pretty damning about video game players that the parts that would make us step back and acknowledge the medium we're engaging with are some form of laborious punishment. Do the game-y parts have to be the parts that are terrible? In fairness I don't think the last section of Bioshock is all bad (I actually like how Fontaine turns into a living statue of Greek Titan Atlas in the final boss fight), but that escort mission was one heck of a slog. I like to think that Bioshock could have made the same point about the lack of freedom and choice in games while still offering fluid, unbroken versions of those video game tropes. Then again, maybe the disappointment is integral to driving home the frustration about perceived choice versus actual choice.

If nothing else, I'd argue that players always have a choice when it feels like a game is exploiting their time and energy: they can stop playing it.

Blips: The ______ (name) of ______ (medium).

Source: Chasing the Dragon
Author: John Teti
Site: The Gameological Society

It's great that the gaming press is as reflective as they are, consistently examining aspects of their practice and coming up with new ways forward. Sometimes this works out for the best as with recent changes to comment moderation policies on both Kotaku and IGN, at least partly spurred by Samantha Allen's open letter about issues in gaming forums and comments. Other times we end up with Warren Spector pushing for a Roger Ebert of video games. John Teti dismantles Spector's remarks in a thorough essay for Gameological that claims video games don't need their own Roger Ebert.

The crux of Teti's argument centers around the fact that Spector is looking to the past for answers without acknowledging how technological shifts have fundamentally altered the landscape for publishing criticism. Spector wants game criticism in general interest print magazines and newspapers where, in a best case scenario, folks who don't normally read about games can see stories and gradually warm up to them. At the very least, Spector's stance is that having games writing visibly present on newsstands and magazine racks along with other "culturally accepted" media like movies and books, that more people will begin to view games in a similar light. As Teti makes clear, this is a backwards perspective. He notes how TV criticism has found a newly resonant form in online episode breakdowns, posted within 24 hours of the original airing. It's debatable whether this is ultimately the best form for TV criticism to take, but it has undoubtedly found an audience that was not satisfied with the old ways.

It's worth noting that Ebert has a pervasive body of film criticism outside of newsprint too, having written numerous books, produced and starred in his own TV show, and published numerous writings online, including his work for the Chicago Sun-Times. In fact, it's his work outside of newsprint that made Ebert a household name.

Tet's strongest point may be in examining how "cultural acceptance" is measured through old media standards like award shows and film festivals. It's not just that technology has pushed criticism to evolve into new forms, it's that "mainstream culture" does not exist that way it used to. To appeal to the mainstream is to appeal to whom exactly? That Spector cites French New Wave cinephile journal Cahiers du Cinema as an example of a magazine that would be mainstream critique is beyond absurd. There used to be a ton of videogame magazines in the 90s, if that's what you're looking for. For the record, I'm not opposed to seeing more games criticism in print mags and newspapers; I think it would have a positive impact, but would in no way produce game crit's Roger Ebert.

John Teti's full essay is worth checking out. I know I'll definitely think twice about writing the words "cultural acceptance" from now on.