From There to Here: Super Metroid (WiiVC/SNES) Review

I've been living in New York City for almost 6 months and I still get lost all the time.  Even with pre-trip research, I regularly go the wrong way or pass my destination.  Typically, before venturing out of my apartment I'll Google Map my destination to look for nearby subway stations, and if there is one in close proximity I'll open a subway map pdf to plot my route.  If there are no nearby subway stations I'll Google Map driving directions and look for parking options.  Planning the expedition is a task in itself, but that plan can be easily derailed by any number of unforeseen variables once I finally hit the trail: road construction, poor signage, or faulty GPS, to name a few.  It seems like I'll just need to learn from experience and refine my transportation instincts to the point where I just know where I'm going.

The universality of this experience could be why a video game like 1994's Super Metroid has such lasting, broad appeal.  The Nintendo keystone has topped numerable "best game ever" lists, and inspired plenty of imitators, even this year.  And deservedly so, it is a great game.  Super Metroid has action and atmosphere, but the core of the game is traversal and cartography of the alien planet, Zebes.  The world of Super Metroid is full of bizarre underground passageways.  It's not unlike the NY subway system: dark corridors, deadly electrified pits, and an air of toxicity.  When you enter a new room in Super Metroid, the in-game map draws a pink square on the pause menu's graph paper background.  Additionally, I kept a full world map with detailed legend beside me on a laptop for further reference.  I constantly paused the game to get my bearings and see which spaces I hadn't visited or fully explored.  The map system is helpful for waypointing, but before I'd gained an understanding of the intricacies of Zebes' layout, I had to blind-jump in and hope for the best.

When I forged my own path, putting myself out there in the world, no amount of planning could have fully prepared me for what I might have encountered.  On roads and rails, unexpected late-night track maintenance, station closures, or unpredictable expressway traffic have cast doubt upon my carefully constructed plans, and occasionally motivated a change in course.  The maps I carefully scour before heading out the door are only the system in abstract with limited applicability.  Even Google Street View, which let's you see what buildings look like from the street, can be outdated and misleading.  Super Metroid parallels this disconnect.  When a Map Station is discovered, you can download a rough blueprint of the surrounding area, but it's incomplete. There are huge gaps between rooms that I had to chart myself, which pushed me to engage with my surroundings in real-time.  I didn't know exactly where I was going, but the only thing sacrificed was efficiency, which is, ironically, the element of most concern for commuters.

Meandering exploration is the name of the game in Super Metroid, but most often when navigating big city transit, time is of the essence.  Given the similarities between navigating real and virtual spaces, it's not happenstance that Super Metroid is one of the most popular games for speedruns: attempts to beat the game in as little time as possible.  My playthrough took about 9 hours with an 87% completion rating, but the fastest single-sgment run through the game is 32 minutes at 14%.  Someone even made a 100% run in 48 minutes.  I'm guessing these folks probably know how to get to work on time.  New York is a massive place to explore, and while there is no 100% completion rating, you can figure out how to get from point A to B with as little trouble as possible, at least in theory.  Super Metroid presents the player with an environment where seeing everything is attainable, where the systems are predictable and mechanics are flexible enough to be used more effectively by dedicated players.

When it comes to NY transit, I'm mostly at the mercy of the system, but there are ways to use knowledge of that system to better handle random variables.  When I commuted to work in DC, I knew the exact subway door to enter so that I would exit right in front of the escalator at my destination.  I was pretty proud of myself.  At several points on my way into Manhattan from Brooklyn I can switch to express subway lines that make fewer stops and arrive downtown in a fraction of the time.  I could pour over subway schedules and use the MTA's online trip planner, but show me a public transit system that runs on schedule to the minute, and I'll do something equally unbelievable.  As a result, I just go to the station when I'm ready, and peek out at interchange stations to listen for incoming express trains.  It requires quick thinking, and forces me to learn where all of the lines stop since multiple lines might come through one track at a transfer point.  If no express train is nearby, I can take a gamble and step out and wait for it or take my chances at the next station interchange.  I'm getting better, but like to imagine what I could do with a Grapple Beam.

Decoding Super Metroid's environment moment-to-moment is what makes the game satisfying to play.  The basic gameplay mechanics involve running up against puzzling obstacles with unique visual traits and searching for power-ups that will increase your repertoire of abilities to overcome them. The game's non-combat puzzles ask you to use the correct ability to get from one space on the map to another.  I reached a point where I worried that I had pushed ahead to far, too fast, cutting off my return route and unable to progress forward.  I thought if only I'd consulted the map more thoroughly, I could have avoided the predicament, and I was on the verge of starting the entire game over.  I cross referenced no less than 3 maps, with no apparent answer.  Luckily, after much critical thinking, bomb blasting, and wall jumping I figured out a solution that showed an avenue forward and, eventually, a way back.  I had to play to figure out the right path.  Crazy, I know – a video game that required me to play it.

Even though Super Metroid pulls from the same strange-person-in-a-strange-land feeling that mimics the experience of learning your way around a big city, it's tremendously fun.  That's more than you can say for your average bus ride.  This is where the science fiction fantasy of Metroid comes in to play.  Metroid games are known for their isolated atmosphere and slick sci-fi armaments.  A sure way to look lost or worse, uncool, while riding the NY subway is to pull out a map for reference.  Samus, on the other hand, equips a stylish X-Ray Scope and scans the environment for clues.  Also, she's always alone, so no one is there to give you a look that dismissively mutters "tourist," providing a safe space to be overly meticulous.  Even if someone else was there, remember, Samus' right arm is a laser cannon, so, 'nuff said.

When it comes to traversal Super Metroid behaves like a metropolis in microcosm, albeit a fantastical one.  It takes the challenging aspects of learning to navigate a major city transit system, but substitutes mundane actions like "board the subway car" and "sit in traffic" with entertaining space opera fare like "open the door with a Super Missile" and "freeze the flying jellyfish with an ice beam."  It's not that Super Metroid has helped me feel my way around New York City or that learning the subway has changed the way I approached the game, but I did relate to Samus more than the typical silent protagonist.  "Finding your way" is a concept that travels effectively between fiction and reality and across age groups.  It's a concept that, surprisingly, I empathize with more literally as an adult than I would have when I was only 11 back in 1994, – a testament to Super Metroid's enduring cultural significance.

:top photo modified from Christopher Allen:

Confessions of a Last-Gen Gamer

Back in September, Sony unveiled a third body design for the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console, which left many game journalists puzzled, or at best, indifferent.  There was no headline-grabbing price drop, despite the system being constructed from cheaper materials.  The timing was odd and anticlimactic: too far away from a projected PS4 release next holiday season, yet somehow too close.  Maybe Sony wanted a new piece of hardware on shelves to counteract the Wii U launch.  If nothing else, a cheaper manufacturing assembly could only improve the PS3's per-unit profitability, a problem for Sony since the console debuted in 2006  Speculation went on, but the big question was "who is this for?"

The answer: me.  I live and breathe games, but I've yet to own a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, until now.  It's a little embarrassing to admit this in the age where anyone who talks about games first must prove their "gamer cred."  But it's true, for the past 6 years, I've been a "last-gen gamer."  With my new PS3 this year, I've finally entered the current generation of consoles.  It didn't have anything to do with the console redesign, just that this was finally the right time for me.

For years I got by just fine, discovering older games that I never had the chance to play, while keeping abreast of current game culture through various podcasts, news feeds, reviews, and feature stories instead of actually playing the titles being discussed.  On the upside, there are so many interesting older games that I could dedicate time to, instead of overlooking them in favor of the constant cycle of zeitgeist-of-the-week titles.  For a long time, I was quite content to revel in undiscovered 8 and 16-bit treasures, absorbing Mass Effects and Assassin's Creeds from the sidelines.  Sure, I've missed those big communal gaming moments, like the collective puzzle-solving of Fez upon release, but that was all part of the gamble.  However, since I spend so much time and effort writing about games, it became clear that I could no longer hang back.

In large part my decision to withhold buying a current generation console until now was based on money.  I was a PS2 loyalist from launch who wanted nothing to do with Xbox and it's giant jewels-for-buttons Halo controllers.  This was also high school, so let's not dwell on biases.  Naturally, I was interested in continuing the legacy by purchasing a PS3 in 2006, but the $600 price point was a nonstarter.  I was then a very recent college graduate, trying to practice personal fiscal responsibility and independence.  I didn't want to throw down that kind of money on something as seemingly frivolous as a new video game console, especially when the price of games also increased to $60 from 50.  The PS3 was even too expensive to feel comfortable asking for as a birthday gift from my parents.  Besides, for that kind of money I'd rather have invested toward something truly extravagant like an arcade cabinet or a pinball machine.  I knew from history that console prices eventually lower; they always had.  I figured I could just wait for Sony to come to me, but that wait was much, much longer than I expected.

Despite this, being a last-gen gamer isn't depressing like you might think.  In fact, during my current-gen fast I discovered several substantial benefits of forgoing day-one-purchase culture.

1: Hindsight.  2012 alone has seen the release of hundreds of games—far too many for a single person to play in one year.  Coming to a console after-the-fact means I can easily select the critical standouts and avoid the noise.  Games are a unique medium when it comes to the quality of sequels, often iterating on their predecessors, improving functionality and addressing unresolved issues from the previous title.  If I can buy LittleBigPlanet 2, I really don't need the first one.  This logic doesn't apply to all franchises, but is especially applicable to sequels plagued by critical labels like "more of the same" which were otherwise touted as technical improvements.  I spend less time and money, but still get the best of a particular brand of experience.

2: Cheap games.  This one's pretty simple.  I don't need to spend more than $20 for new, in-box retail games that originally sold for 3 times as much.  Deluxe reissues and trilogy collections abound, including DLC add-ons for a fraction of what they would have cost a la carte upon debut.  As for downloadable games, they're digital, so there's no "limited pressing" impulse buy.  Digital supply is virtually unlimited, so there's no need for consumers to rush out and pay a premium for fear that a game might be hard to come by later.  Plus, even downloadable games go on sale from time to time.  This isn't even taking into account used games, which can reduce costs even further, despite having to deal with blocked online modes and anti-resale DRM.

3: Avoid the hype.  It's refreshing to exist outside of the realm of tech-lust.  In fact, I'd say I'm more appreciative and caring of the technology I do possess because I'm more invested in its longevity.  Part of the appeal for early adopters of new technology is the sexiness and air of luxury that comes with owning something few but the elite crop of die-hards have.  Perhaps it's just come as a part of getting older, but I don't feel an intense need to be a member of that club anymore.  I like new stuff, but if a product is built for the long haul, it'll still be around when a purchase becomes more personally convenient.

The wait-and-see approach has its downsides though.  Conversations about current games are richer when drawn from the physical experience of actually playing them.  Even with a background in previous console generations, I can only assume so much based on descriptive video footage and commentary.  Also, much the way services like Netflix and Hulu have been accused of killing the simple pleasures and unexpected discovery of channel surfing, a last-gen gamer making the leap forward is more likely to invest in a "greatest hits" game collection than try out B-tier titles that try something unique, but flounder on the overall package.  For example, I may give the supposedly provocative, yet middling shooter, Spec Ops: The Line, a shot someday, but it's certainly not on my initial list of must-plays.

Ultimately, I recommend being a last-gen gamer, at least for one console generation.  It was a great run — I've learned quite a bit about my own consumer preferences and have observed the video game industry from a more objective, disconnected perspective.  As long as you're not a collector, last-gen gaming is a super cheap way to maintain a gaming hobby.  I've only joined the corporate-indoctrinated fray because writing about games has become more than a recreational exercise for me, and at some point I was missing essential tools for the job.  There's not one correct way to play or interpret games, and by extension, there is a diversity of gamers who consume games at their own pace.  I don't know if there are enough last-gen gamers out there to make an impact on the video game marketplace, but no matter—flying under he radar is sort of the point. 

:image modified from The Daily Mail:

What's This Do?: McPixel (Mac) Review

Before you can navigate the top menu in the blocky point n' click adventure game, McPixel, you're faced with a brief gameplay scenario.  Your character, the titular McPixel, stands in a field awaiting your orders.  In the center of the screen is a big red button with a giant arrow pointing to it that reads "Press to start."  There is no way to continue in the game without giving in to the temptation of the button, so you click it, like so many Wile E. Coyotes who have come before.  Instantly, a boulder falls from the sky, crushing McPixel and everything else on screen.  The main menu then pops up and you're free to select game modes and fiddle with the options as you'd normally expect.  In this short little introductory scene, McPixel let's you know exactly what kind of game it is: a cartoonish, old-school adventure game with a sophomoric sense of humor.

The premise of McPixel is a twisted joke itself.  As the player, you click around in screen-sized areas to interact with objects in hope of defusing a bomb, but often you'll click on the wrong object, triggering a quick animated gag before the whole scene explodes.  Seemingly derived from SNL's MacGruber skits about an inept bomb-defusing action star (itself a spoof of the late 80s TV action series, MacGyver), McPixel plays it's own influences up for laughs.  It's a bit like that part in Multiplicity where Michael Keaton clones himself so many times that the quality of his copies turn out a bit...unflattering.  It's true that McPixel's major "plot" conceit, like the Macs from which it's derived, is still bomb disarmament, but it's the clone that came out very wrong.  That may be a long walk to take for the concept of a game that primarily trades in fart jokes, but a funny juxtaposition in its own way.

Mechanically, McPixel is a conventional point n' click adventure game, but because of it's short-fuse timer and rapid level cycling, it feels quite different from other genre entries.   McPixel's levels are divided into subsets of six that you tackle in rotation.  You're only given 15 seconds per scenario to make a definitive action before the bomb explodes and the scene shifts to the next level in the group.  Adventure games are traditionally known for their slow pace, smart writing, and lengthy inventory-based puzzles.  McPixel dials up the speed, substitutes writing for Dumb and Dumber-esque visual punchlines, and makes combining the incorrect objects part of the fun.  It's true that you can find yourself stuck on a puzzle, rewatching incrementally less amusing gags play out multiple times, but you'll be onto the next set before too long.  This rapid-fire approach is an appealing recipe for someone like myself who needs an extra push to get my interest up for a point n' click adventure.

Juvenile humor combined with the act of "daring" McPixel to put himself in compromising situations is at the heart of McPixel's appeal. With 15 seconds to solve puzzles, you can spend your time clicking on things that you think will disable the ever-present bomb, or you can click random stuff that you want McPixel to mess around with before inevitably being blown to bits.  The character McPixel is quite a gullible dolt, succumbing to the mildest of peer pressure, all for your amusement.  McPixel's base-level instinct is usually to kick whatever you click on, which rarely ends well for him.  Policeman?  Kick 'em!  Stick of dynamite?  Kick it!  In one scene you're presented with a hair dryer, a yeti, and a barrel with a lit fuse.  You could click on the barrel in hopes that you put the fuse out somehow, but you'd probably rather see what happens when McPixel tries to blow dry a yeti.

Ironically, sometimes going for the sight gags ends up disarming the bomb anyway, leading you to question your judgement about whether the obvious solution is too obvious to be the real answer.  McPixel plays with this nonsensical logic throughout its length, at times requiring you to pursue a ridiculous pair of actions (two clicks at most) to diffuse a bomb, but other times the solution is as simple as clicking on a bomb in clear view to swiftly win the level.  Note that if you can get a character to consume the explosive, it will probably detonate in their body, puffing out their stomach like a balloon, but ultimately saving the stage from annihilation.  With this precedent established, McPixel's play incentive stems from a desire to view all of the comedic possibilities, regardless of whether the bomb gets taken care of or not.  Plus, since the only way to earn 100% completion on a level and unlock bonus areas is to witness every joke in a scene, you'll spend a considerable chunk of your time with McPixel hunting them all down.

Make no mistake, McPixel's humor is as dumb as it gets, but it still made me chuckle from time to time.  The game goes lowbrow, but sticks mostly to slaphappy, cartoonish violence and bodily functions, instead of wading into dark or offensive territory.  Granted, someone might find the bonus level set inside a toilet offensive, but it's all quite tame in the grand scheme of internet-borne comedy.  It helps that the visual style of McPixel is, well, pixelated to such an extreme degree, reinforcing its harmlessly crude nature.  The character McPixel is nothing but a dead-eyed, pot-bellied stack of red and blue squares, and the rest of the resident populace is rendered in similar MS Paint fashion.  McPixel is full of nerd-culture references that look great/terrible in the game's chunky, low resolution world too.  The whole game comes off a bit like an overly-compressed JPEG version of MAD Magazine.

Like most middle-school humor, you'll probably reach a point where McPixel's jokes begin fall flat and the thinking behind them becomes too transparent to enjoy with your initial enthusiasm.  If you play McPixel for more than one suite of levels at a time, you risk stretching the appeal of the game's comedy beyond its limits, but in small doses, it's the interactive syndicated comic strip that your local paper would run if they had the technology and weren't opposed to jokes about public urination.  The same way a comic like Marmaduke is really just the same two punchlines repeated ad infinitum, McPixel also offers mere variation on a handful of gags.  At their core though, those jokes are still so stupid that they're pretty funny.  McPixel may not have perfected the accessible adventure comedy game, but it does step in a progressively-minded, if aesthetically dim-witted, direction.

Authentic Authenticity

"It's as close to the real thing as you can get without being there!" has become the philosophy behind use of the term "authenticity" as it pertains to video games.  Notably, the word was used as part of a public relations strategy in promotion of the recently released modern military shooter, Medal of Honor: Warfighter (MoHW), which came under fire from critics citing laundry lists of features that detail the gulf between the game and real world combat situations.  Amidst some other PR follies, developer Danger Close set the record straight on what they define as authentic in their game: weapon models, field equipment, and squad chatter, among other largely aesthetic categories.  War games like those in the Medal of Honor, Tom Clancy, and Call of Duty franchises take criticism on issues concerning authenticity, but the vagueness of what makes a game "authentic" is not genre specific.

This semantic gray area is problematic when the word "authenticity" is co-opted for deployment by marketing teams in a fallacious, occasionally hypocritical manner, as was the case with MoHW.  When you see a trailer for a game or hear a publisher's spokesperson hyping their upcoming title, it's in the service of selling a product to consumers.  "Authenticity" is a buzzword, used primarily when speaking about how a game has adapted elements from another work or from real life.  When potential players are told that a game is supposedly authentic, it's easy to react with skepticism.  In most cases, using "authentic" as part of a marketing campaign for a video game either sets up players to think that they will actually have an authentic (insert game inspiration) experience when in fact the game only offers a visual sheen of realistic tropes, or it places the bar for authenticity so low that the game easily hits its mark.  These possibilities will produce players who are either cynical toward game marketing or who develop lowered expectations for what qualifies as authentic, or both.

Contextual authenticity is a crutch when true historical reenactment is an impossibility.  Since history happens one way, even if witnessed from multiple perspectives, it can pose a problem for game developers that seek to offer player agency in historical contexts.  If you're designing a game set in 1944 where players command Allied forces as they storm the beaches of Normandy, you have to challenge players to succeed, but ultimately, a string of very specific actions need to happen for the sake of historical accuracy.  One way to ensure that an event happens in a game is to narrowly script it, taking a certain amount of control away from the player.  Commonly this results in plot devices such as non-interactive cutscenes, areas where you can't draw a weapon, locked doors, and forced prompts.  These moments can add authenticity in a more cinematic execution, but they ignore the strengths of the video game medium.

Video games can present alternate, what-if histories that can offer a degree of insight, via roleplay, into various cause and effect relationships throughout time.  In authentically reenacting history, the Civilization games wildly miss the mark, (Montezuma vs. Gandhi: not historically accurate, turns out) yet they are one of the few go-to titles for social science educators.   All entries in the Civilization series put players into virtual leadership roles, asking them to consider and act upon variables consistent with the depicted eras of history to ensure the continued existence and prosperity of their citizenry.  The lack of real-world chronological beholdenness unchains Civilization's gameplay from following a strict timeline, and instead focuses play on decision points and resource management that actual national leaders must consider, albeit in simplified form.  Civilization has proven that it's not necessary to force a historically accurate narrative in a game in order to say something significant about history.  In contrast, MoHW's use of the word "authentic" rang hollow not because the game lacks realism, but rather, the areas chosen to tout as authentic are ancillary to the nature and quality of the gameplay experience.

Some games merely claim authenticity, but true simulations are most likely to legitimately earn the title of "authentic."  Simulations acquire this status because they focus on authentic mechanics above secondary aesthetic details.  Take the Digital Combat Simulator (DCS) line of flight sims for example.  In DCS games you sit inside a virtual cockpit and must flip all the switches and turn all the dials in the proper, real-world order to get your plane in the air, at which point you fly it using a control stick built to mimic the steering interface of an actual aircraft.  This is an authentic video game adaptation of something that exists in the real world.  You could say the same for the act of driving with a racing wheel in a game like Gran Turismo or even performing classic dance moves in front of a Kinect in Dance Central.

The aforementioned simulation mechanics have the benefit of unique controller interfaces that speak directly to the game experience instead of mapping actions to button presses on a DualShock.  Control schemes are the first layer of abstraction from authenticity that most games have to tackle.  Some players will never make it over that hurdle and will always note the artifice of the controller as an obstacle that makes otherwise realistic stories trivial or unbelievable.  The fact that with standardized controllers the same physical actions are required of the player to accomplish wildly different tasks from one game to the next can amplify the inauthenticity of those mechanics.  If pressing the "X" button means saying "Hi" to a character in one game and "stealth killing" a character with a knife in another, then the potential corollary meaning of pressing the "X" button is negated.

Even if authenticity can be achieved, to what end?  Flight simulations are used to train would-be pilots and the US military has their own crop of combat simulators for tactics and strategy.  There is a very direct relationship between playing a simulation and improving a real-world skill.  The virtual act of killing, specifically gun violence, is at the real heart of the controversy surrounding consumer-ready war games and authenticity, not Danger Close taking some heat for a marketing pitch.

If first-person shooters (FPS) like MoHW were to explore more authentic mechanics they'd risk the ethical dilemma that players could get better at shooting real guns by playing their games.  Light-gun games, which require players to hold plastic firearms and aim them at the screen, have been around for decades, and footage of them, framed accusingly, was included in many post-Columbine media packages about violence and video games alongside the now primitive-looking FPS pariah, Doom.  Light-gun games have the potential to approach more authentic gun-shooting mechanics, but developers usually take measures to assure that the interactivity isn't "too authentic."  In arcades, guns are painted bright colors or have sci-fi twists that serve to break the illusion of holding a real firearm, and the games themselves are comically over-the-top and formatted for short bursts of fluffy entertainment.  No developer wants the kind of critical scrutiny that ends in lawsuits like those filed against id Software (creators of Doom) and other game companies in 2002, and it's clear that producing games that offer truly authentic gun-shooting mechanics would approach an ethical threshold that's yet to be crossed in mainstream gaming.

Without authentic mechanics, MoHW can only get so close to putting players "directly in the boots of the soldier," especially with the inclusion of a multiplayer mode that has more in common with football scrimmages than real warfare.  In these multiplayer modes, the gloss of any overarching narrative or character motivation is replaced with the player's basic desire to win competitive matches and rank up their persistent statistics.  It's much more like a sport than a military campaign.  Modern military FPS games like MoHW succeed or fail at market by their multiplayer modes, leaving the "authentic" single player campaigns to be seen as bonuses, if played at all, by the most ardent of the genre's fanbase.  These multiplayer modes are big business for mega-publishers like Electronic Arts and Activision (this whole discussion came from PR-talk, remember), scheduling new releases annually that only slightly tweak gameplay rather than disrupting the successful formula.  When "team deathmatch" is going to be your game's most popular mode because it was that way last year, not only are you strictly obligated to a very specific control scheme, but it becomes very difficult to paint a picture of authentic, introspective wartime struggle when the most popular, time-engrossing section of your product screams otherwise. 

There is room for games to approach the subject of authenticity from a multitude of credible angles, but above all else, the final product needs to be able to speak for itself and have something worthwhile to say.  Games that are adapted from real life subjects and events, especially those striving for authenticity, should be held to high standards, both for accuracy and for the ethics of their social impact.  MoHW's big mistake wasn't its mixture of real guns and unrealistic mechanics, it was billing itself as authentic and failing to deliver.

 :Reposted on Medium Difficulty:

Wii U as Portable Console: Lessons from Sega's Nomad

The Wii U has launched and Nintendo loyalists are busy testing out the console with their non-gaming loved ones.   One of the big selling points of the system is its ability to play full games on the Gamepad controller's built-in touchscreen, without the need to turn on the TV.  According to the marketing pitch, this feature frees up the TV for other members of the household and makes it possible to play Wii U games in otherwise TV-less rooms.  Word on the street is that the Gamepad can be taken about 20 feet away from the console and still hold a strong enough connection to function.  So, within a moderate range of the Wii U game box, the system has the ability to act as a portable home console video game system.

This is an exciting revelation, but not the first time something like this has been attempted.  Sega's Nomad was a fully functional portable Genesis, released toward the end of the 16-bit era in 1995.  The Nomad was short-lived, but it's easy to see some lessons that Nintendo could have taken from the system, and surprisingly, some missteps they failed to avoid.

Console and portable games have traditionally felt very distinct from one another, with portable games usually falling into one of two camps: those built uniquely for the on-the-go experience, focusing on short bursts of play, and games that act as little siblings or sidestories to their canonical console relatives.  The Nomad's promise of portability for standard console titles brought a different pedigree of games to this market.  I owned one, and often used it to play Sonic the Hedgehog 2 at my brother's basketball games.  While there had been some decent portable Sonic games on the Game Gear, those titles never held a candle to to the mainline series on the Genesis.

The Wii U Gamepad allows portable gaming of full console games around the house, designed with an active, social household in mind.  Had the Nomad been more successful, it could have set the precedent for this kind of family oriented gaming platform.  The Nomad could be plugged into a TV for big-screen viewing, and had an on-board controller port for a second player to join in.  Though if the Nomad was not attached to a TV a second player would have to look over the shoulder of whoever was holding the 3 inch screen (the original asynchronous multiplayer?), at least the there was the option.  The Wii U Gamepad only offers a solo experience, at least for the time being.

One feature where the Wii U definitely has an advantage over the Nomad is in ergonomic design.  Comparing the two is like putting an iPad next to one of those old, bulky cellphones from the 80s.  The Nomad was shaped like a brick with a battery block containing 6 AAs stuck on its back, making the system kind of weigh like a brick too.  The Wii U Gamepad is surprisingly light and features all manner of contours that make you feel like it was designed to be held by human hands.  The Wii U's touchscreen is large and prominent in its design, while the Nomad's LCD monitor is a bit dwarfed by the rest of the machine.

The reports of short Wii U battery life are a bit troubling, but anything was likely to be an improvement over the Nomad's power storage woes.  It seems the Wii U Gamepad can last anywhere from 3-5 hours depending on screen brightness, whereas you couldn't expect to last much more than 2 hours using the Nomad's rechargeable pack.  However, considering that the Nomad was a full-on game system in handheld form as opposed to the Wii U's mere video relay, the Gamepad's stunted battery life is pretty underwhelming.  That said, since the Wii U isn't expected to leave the house, Nintendo seems to be anticipating that AC power will be reasonably accessible if the situation calls for it.

The Nomad's failure was a product of circumstance as much as anything else.  It was released at the tail end of the Genesis' lifespan as consumers rallied excitement for the upcoming 32-bit machines.  The Genesis hardware was also widely recognized and often derided for its glut of unsupported add-ons like the Sega-CD and the 32X.  The Nomad debuted behind these other peripherals and likely suffered from the resulting market fatigue and loss of credibility in Sega's ability to release competent supplemental hardware for their 16-bit machine.  Additionally, if you had a 32X, you couldn't even hook it up to the Nomad because it blocked the AC output port.

The Wii U's Gamepad is poised for a greater chance of success.  It's a necessary part of the standard Wii U experience, bundled in with the console's launch.  The Gamepad is also multifunctional, making its ability to be a portable console not the sole make-or-break feature of the device.  Since the Gamepad is billed as an at-home device, it's not up against the iPad in terms of portability.  The Wii U Gamepad may not reach true portable console status since it can't leave the house, but it seems to recognize its limits and owns them.  With the 3DS and Vita struggling to gain substantial market presence in the face of iOS and Android games, Nintendo certainly doesn't need to make a go at a true Nomad successor.  Instead, Nintendo has wisely incorporated Nomad-like features into their Wii U Gamepad to make that controller incredibly versatile and adaptive to a plethora of home gaming situations.

No One Expects the Martian Inquisition!: Jamestown (Mac) Review

For most arcade-style games, directed storytelling is more about setting up a premise than fleshing out a plot in cinematic detail.  Take top-down shooters for example.  These games were born out of the arcade scene, full of other games loudly competing for players' attention with the promise of instant action at the drop of a quarter.  It's simply an understanding that you'll pilot some kind of aircraft and shoot everything that moves before they shoot you.  What's the plot of Galaga?  Of Raiden?  Of Ikaruga?  Space Invaders pretty much says it all in the title.  The aliens aren't Space Explorers, they're Invaders!  You have to defend your ground.

In contrast, indie shoot 'em up nostalgia trip, Jamestown, features a story that's a clash of such disparate elements that the product is undeniably memorable.  You see, the colonial American settlement Jamestown is actually on Mars.  Neighboring towns are under attack by Spanish/Martian conquistadors, donning pointy metal helmets and curly mustaches.  You play as Raleigh, a convicted criminal back in London (also on Mars?), who's looking to do anything to clear his name.  Turns out what's needed is to hop aboard some kind of flying buggy, alongside John Smith of course, and fight back against a particularly evil conquistador bent on using an ancient Martian weapon.

Like many video game stories, the basic setup boils down to "fight back," but Jamestown takes its history/sci-fi mashup backdrop and brings it to realization with a deep sincerity that gives you room to care about it.  Between levels, narrative unravels via text as exquisitely painted scenes pan across the screen.  Serene, contemplative strings set the stage.  The writing is from Raleigh's perspective and has an air of "letters from the front," written from the point of view of a downtrodden, educated man in a situation that only rewards keen instincts.

For players, having your wits about you is the utmost importance.  Jamestown is born out of the same space shooter tradition that regards "bullet hell" as a revered pastime.  There are 5 difficulty options and I highly recommend you begin with the easiest one.  This makes initial runs through levels breezy and empowering.  You'll have to rank up to at least the third difficulty level to unlock the last stage, but the game tiers you up to the challenge in preparation.  The story plays a strong role in incentivizing replay and practice.  I wanted to see what would happen after the final confrontation, or rather, I wanted to read what Raleigh had to say about it.  I'm not putting this on the same plane with, say, indulging in a FMV cutscene after a hard fought Final Fantasy battle, but it's in the same vein.

When the credits do roll, you're treated to Jamestown's real-world narrative in a message from the developers at Final Form Games: a team of only 3 people.  It says that the team had to spend two years and the majority of their savings to make Jamestown, followed by a heartfelt "Thanks for playing!"  If Jamestown's colonial America/Martian shoot 'em up outlay seems a bit farfetched as a player, imagine deciding to take that gamble as a developer and an investor.  The love of classic games is apparent, but Final From shows that games of this style have legs, particularly as value-priced downloadable titles, where their arcade-embedded predecessors always struggled: on the home front.

Jamestown has an in-game "shoppe" where you can trade in ducats (yes, ducats) earned from excelling in the campaign to unlock bonus challenges, weapons, and game modes.  All of this is par for the course nowadays, but I was particularly smitten with the unique "Farce Mode."  Even though Jamestown's story is one of its primary standout features, it's great to see the developers have a little fun with how ridiculous it all is.  With Farce Mode enabled, gameplay is unchanged, but Raleigh's story text is replaced with a guided preschool history dictation of the events in the game.  "Have you ever heard of Mars?  I bet you have," It begins.  The first segment ends in Nick Jr. fashion, exclaiming "Let's solve [the] mystery together!"  Farce Mode is a hilarious, knowing send-up of Jamestown's insane premise, but you're unlikely to unlock it before completing most of the regular story, keeping the core experience from being detrimentally self-referential, as so much game humor tends toward.

Sticking staunchly to the arcade formulas of old, right down to its impossibly dense 2D sprite art, Jamestown could have been a nostalgia-chasing also-ran, but instead it integrates storytelling that charms and invites.  There's not a ton of room to maneuver in the narrowly focused top-down shooter genre, a type of game that has struggled to gain a foothold outside of arcades, but Jamestown boasts the best of both worlds.

Review: BIT.TRIP RUNNER (Mac)

Prerequisite: check out this video of an individual demonstrating their mastery of the game/toy Bop It.  It's best if you watch the whole thing, but I understand if you become impatient and bail early. BIT.TRIP RUNNER is a video game version of Bop It.  No, it's not an official tie-in, but the mechanics are transferred nearly verbatim.  In RUNNER you control a character who must dodge obstacles as the environment force-scrolls past.  Directional buttons trigger block, kick, slide, and vault actions while the spacebar executes a jump.  These moves are sort-of tied in to the accompanying music score, but mostly you rely on visual discernment to time and select your actions.  Like Bop It, one false move while playing will stop you in your tracks and force you to try again from the beginning.  Also like Bop It, you can beat and master RUNNER, but doing so is like learning to play a song that no one wants to listen to on an instrument that doesn't really exist.

When it came time for me to decide what I wanted to play in my grade school band, I chose percussion.  Drumming seemed more fun than brass or woodwinds, but I was also more confident in my ability to keep a beat over maintaining melody.  My sister took piano lessons, which I was encouraged to take as well, but never did.  We got a programmable electric piano at home eventually, and rather than actually play conventional music, I'd setup the percussion kit that assigned individual drums and cymbals to specific keys and make all sorts of noise.  There was also a neat trick you could do by pressing two low-octave "square lead" keys at the same time, producing some pretty satisfying bass rumbles.  I own a MPC drum machine, though it's been sorely underused.  I adore Rez and was a die-hard DDR player for several years.  In short, though I would not call myself a musician of any kind, I know my way around button/key-based beat making.  On its surface, I should love BIT.TRIP RUNNER.

Unfortunately for me, RUNNER plays how I always feared piano lessons would go: demanding, unforgiving, and with a slavish dedication to someone else's creativity rather than my own. In RUNNER, you can't study notes on a page to prepare, you must react in real time and memorize the level's patterns through failure.  At most, you have a full second to recognize what object is heading your way and tap the appropriate key to evade or deflect.  Each time you screw up, it's like the piano instructor wraps your knuckles with a ruler and points to the first note on the sheet.  If you play a piano piece correctly, you enjoy the satisfaction of hard-earned accomplishment along with the joy of hearing a song that you presumably like.  In RUNNER, you just earn arbitrary points and the music you've produced only occasionally sounds like a song.  There is no level editor or any way of really getting hands-on with the mechanics beyond the prescribed courses.

People have compared RUNNER to mobile games like Canabalt and Temple Run for their similar, forced running perspectives.  Both Canabalt and Temple Run use randomized obstacles and challenge players to get farther than their previous attempt, but as far as I'm aware, neither has endpoints.  RUNNER is broken up into 36 preset levels, and withholds progression until you complete the stage prior.  The big difference between RUNNER and something like Canabalt is how you feel after triggering a fail state.  With Canabalt it feels like the game playfully dares you to try it again.  You know losing is inevitable, but it's fun to try and get farther than last time.  In fact, "losing" isn't really "losing," it's just the end of the round.  Retries in RUNNER are instantaneous.  If you forget to kick a box on cue, the game zips you back to the start of the stage, and after a brief moment you're back on your way again.  I applaud Gaijin Games for making the process so snappy, but subsequent runs feel more like a matter of survival than heartfelt attempts on the part of the player. You're trapped in the gameplay loop until you either win or cry "uncle" and quit.

There are collectable gold bars throughout RUNNER that encourage a more daring style of play, but the game doesn't offer rewards that merit the effort required to snatch them all.  If you do collect every gold bar in a level you can play a bonus Pitfall-styled area, which is neat a couple times, but not 30+.  You only get one try at the bonus levels per completion of a regular stage, which means you may have spent a half hour trying to get a perfect run, only for your "prize" to last a fleeting handful of seconds.  The numerous retries on regular levels pushed me to ignore the gold bars as much as I could, eliminating several tricky maneuvers from my regimen, but also rendering the music more spartan, lacking the distinctive chimes emitted by grabbing the bars.  You could interpret the game as an incisive metaphor for the daily, 9-5 grind perpetuated by an uncompromising capitalist economy, but that's an unearned credit.  Instead, playing BIT.TRIP RUNNER feels like a really difficult motor skills exam – something for the sport stacking set.

I'm being pretty hard on RUNNER, but it does have its merits.  Visually, the game renders Atari 2600 graphics as 3D cubic blocks to grinning, stylistic effect.  If you collect enough point multipliers in a level, an old-school Activision rainbow will tail behind the titular runner as it goes – RUNNER's incentivization at its most effective.  Mechanically, the game is as sharp as it gets.  Though it asks for tight precision, failure is never the result of ambiguous design.  I could knock the effectiveness of RUNNER's musical implementation, but having listened to the soundtrack outside of the game, their track selection is appropriate and catchy.  Lastly, I began this review by comparing RUNNER to Bop It, but I should point out that I actually like Bop It.  It's a party icebreaker game that asks players to focus their attention, likely in a social situation that requires otherwise – a humorous juxtaposition.  As an unfortunate point of contrast, there just isn't much to laugh about in RUNNER.

Still, there are clearly a lot of people who dig what BIT.TRIP RUNNER brings to the table, and far be it from me to say not to like something people seem to enjoy, but the game feels masochistic for nostalgia's sake.  There's no denying its style, but you'd be hard pressed to locate any real substance here.  And if you choose to play BIT.TRIP RUNNER, make no mistake, you will be pressed...hard.

Review: Rayman Origins (Wii)

Let's get the critical evaluation out of the way: Rayman Origins is a fun, smartly-designed 2-D platformer that strikes a balance between the charm and detail of Kirby's Epic Yarn with the trial and error, twitch challenge of Super Meat Boy.  Sounds pretty good, right?  For the most part, it is.  Game reviewers have heaped near-universal praise upon the title using phrases like "wonderfully crafted," "gorgeous," and "controls perfectly."  I agree with all of these, and yet, Rayman Origins still comes off a bit empty.  The only reason I can think of for this disparity was the difficulty I had empathizing with the ragtag group of bohemian shit disturbers that serve as the game's protagonists.  This disconnect effectively eliminated my attachment to the characters' motivations and relegated the game to a product of craft rather than a work of art.

I do fear that this opinion could brand me as some kind of humorless square, but characters who have been created solely for mischief usually rub me the wrong way.  I have always been pretty straight-laced, staying organized and avoiding trouble whenever possible.  In elementary school, I observed conflicts and elicit conversations from a safe distance, honing my "excellent listener" skills overhearing discussions of cigarettes and R-rated movies.  I hated Michelangelo from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because he was the idiot who always dragged the others into avoidable hostile situations.  So, when Rayman Origins opened with the full cast of layabouts harmonizing beatnik music via chewing and snoring noises that essentially annoyed the neighbors into retaliation, I felt less like exacting revenge and more thankful that somebody said something.

At least in Mario games Nintendo fabricates a premise of "rescue" for your quest.  You might not desperately need to save the princess, but you assume Mario probably does, so you oblige.  The "white knight" stereotype isn't what makes the character interesting or believable – on its own the characterization is quite shallow.  It does set a stage for you to quickly get behind the protagonist's motivation though.  This works for morally ambiguous protagonists too, just using different criteria to match the context.  In contrast Rayman and his friends are a bunch of hedonists, apathetic to current affairs except when their collective buzz is at stake.  It's like playing a game where a small party of stoners embark on a quest to find the nearest convenience store and eat day-old taquitos.  Actually, nevermind, I'd totally give that game a shot too.

The fluidity of Rayman Origins' level design and platforming controls largely make up for the shortcomings in plot establishment, but only to the extant that great mechanics can reach on their own. The moment-to-moment satisfaction in Rayman Origins is quite high.  Levels are designed for smooth runs if played precisely.  If the sensation of speed was faster you might think you were playing the Sonic the Hedgehog sequel that never was.  Better yet, you never feel like the characters are out of your control.  If you screw up, there's always something you could have done better.  After all your hard work, finally you reach the end of the level and the camera zooms in to show Rayman thrusting his limbless torso around, mouth agape.  This guy again.  In the scene that follows, one of Rayman's big-nosed pals straddles an incredibly phallic test tube as it fills up with all of the Lums (yellow, glowing collectables) you found in the level.  When other reviewers talk about this game being "unmistakably French," this is what they're actually referring to.

So what am I left with in Rayman Origins but an excellent product of gameplay craft, shouldering an otherwise driveless game.  It's a shame because so many pieces are in place for Rayman Origins to be a certifiable work of art, but it falls short on a holistic level.  The mechanics that are present are rich, but they're not deep.  The game doesn't invite immersion – I got burned out after few levels each time I came back to it.  It's great that Ubisoft recently published a strikingly similar game for mobile devices, since Rayman Origins' structure is better tuned to short gameplay bursts over long-form, sit-down experiences.  If a game/painting/song doesn't ultimately provoke questions or reflection or welcome a more intimate play of engagement, then it's just serving a specifically crafted entertainment experience.  Sometimes that's exactly what I want, but I had higher hopes for Rayman Origins.

We can talk "art v craft" inconclusively for longer than it takes to play Rayman Origins, so let's just consider the established critical baselines as laid out by Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant.  To state it plainly, Kant divided art objects into "fine art," "agreeable art," and "craft."  A great deal of intricacy goes into these categorical assignments, but the easiest way to distinguish them from one another is by the purpose of the object in question.  Craft objects serve direct practical purposes: cups are vessels for water.  Agreeable art serves to entertain: a well-written joke incites laughter.  Fine art seeks to act as, well, art: a video installation provokes a play with ideas.  Many individuals hold fast against Kant's distinctions between art, craft, and entertainment, but institutions of the art world (museums, galleries, and art schools) still hang on to them as guideposts for taste.

Games, and obviously video games, weren't a part of this discussion in the 18th century, but Rayman Origins was clearly built for entertainment.  That said, entertainment itself could be interpreted as a practical purpose too, thus placing the game into the "craft" category as well.  You could argue that even if I absolutely adored Rayman and his buds, the game would still be "agreeable," not "fine," art.  Who knows whether that would actually be true though?  If art was just a matter of pushing sliders more to the left or right, then the answers to these questions would be obvious.  But I digress.  My point isn't to trudge around in semantic minutiae, but simply to concretize why my time with Rayman Origins left me lukewarm when most signs within and around the game seemed to be pointing in a more prestigious direction.

I want games that match the mechanical challenge they're so clearly capable of with intellectual challenge, or at least stimulation. I'd love to see developers use the gameplay systems from Rayman Origins as building blocks.  The side-scrolling action/platformer can be considered perfected at this point.  That's a milestone achievement, and deserving of serious praise, along with the economical UBIart framework used to create Rayman Origins' visual assets.  But what of it?  I've spent years playing games where I move a character to the right, so here's hoping that the next Rayman game will return the favor and actually move me.

Review: Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii)

How long does it take to tell a good story? In person? Maybe 5 minutes. In film? About 2 hours. A book? Let’s say 5-10 hours. Video games? No less than 50 hours. This means you could watch every major Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David Lynch film before finishing one game. Sure, the standards for game stories have changed over time as shorter action titles have steered toward a cinematic style and runtime, but the progenitors of story-driven gaming, the Japanese role-playing game (JRPG), remain as staunchly extensive as ever. Xenoblade Chronicles is the latest JRPG from cult-favorite and aptlynamed developer, Monolith Soft. In it, you play as Shulk, a “chosen-one” who brandishes a mystical sword on an epic quest to defend his homeland and unite two worlds at war, for 80+ hours.

For all of the evolving JRPG conventions that Xenoblade perpetuates, egregious game length is an interesting choice; however, it matches its expansive world. The characters live like insects on the bodies of two gigantic titans, frozen still amidst an ancient duel. Your party gradually traverses from the right leg, all the way up the titan’s back, to its head – and that is just the first act. From the “ground,” the opposing giant is always faintly, ominously visible in the distant sky. Individual areas are pretty big too, and require you to explore on foot before a fast-travel option opens up for return visits.

Battling and traversal occupy the majority of your time in Xenoblade, but their significance to the narrative remains up to interpretation. The “story” is mostly delivered in dialogue-heavy non-interactive cutscenes that flesh-out the characters and setup the next party objective. Once control of your posse is given back to you, it’s time to climb some mountains and slay some beasts. These lengthy stretches of exploration and survival put you into the shoes of the characters whose narrative motivations demand persistence and diligence. Similarly, you, as a player, must also possess a certain amount of endurance to see the journey through to the end. That’s not to say that playing the game is a struggle, just that it entails a significant physical commitment on the part of the player.

Some players may look at Xenoblade’s demands and choose to walk away from the game before the end, due to real life time limitations or in-game frustrations. EGM Managing Editor, Andrew Fitch, seemed particularly frustrated by his playthrough of Xenoblade, as evidenced in his review, so I wanted to pick his brain a bit further. He told me that he did complete the entire game, including dabbling in some sidequests, but that, in general, he doesn’t think it’s absolutely necessary to spend the full length of 80+ hours with a game to be able to evaluate its quality. “At 35 hours, a game—even an RPG like Xenoblade—has revealed its true self,” he wrote, referencing commenter outcry at Jason Schreier’s review for Kotaku. I agree with this statement, especially in terms of evaluation. You don’t need to get more than a handful of hours into a game to decide if you’ll objectively enjoy it, and if a game hasn’t made itself known by that point, it probably has serious pacing issues. However, I’d argue that stopping short of completion in a game like Xenoblade negates some of the experience of long-form play, which is in this case essential to the experience of the game.

Xenoblade took me about a month to complete, playing in chunks of a few hours here and there, and occasionally taking several days away from the game entirely. I found my attachment to the game at its fondest when I maintained a steady stream of “healthy” play sessions, where I knew that I could take a break and the game would always welcome me back. Towards the end of the game, I hit my first wall where I could not beat a boss character and continue forward.

Before this point I had never needed to actively grind through fodder enemies to level up my characters to be strong enough to topple a foe for narrative progress. That I hit this wall some 80 hours into the game made me feel a bit betrayed. I’m sure other players hit walls earlier, depending on playstyle, but mine felt like an act on Xenoblade’s part to delay my imminent completion. I knew I’d finish the game eventually, but hitting the level wall sucked all of the momentum out of the narrative as well as my general drive to play.

Grinding is an old standby of JRPGs, a design decision seemingly made for the purpose of extending the length of time spent playing one game. Grinding, on its own, is not an especially enjoyable experience, and the payoff is indirect. That said, every aspect of a game shouldn’t need to be fun for it to be considered good and/or necessary, as long as players aren’t being unknowingly exploited. If you could simply waltz up to a boss character at any experience level and win, the intended power and gravitas of those conflicts would be diminished. At some point we’re discussing the relative virtues of “practice” here as well, since grinding is also about testing out and refining different engagement strategies. Xenoblade, like most JRPGs, uses a quantitative reinforcement pedagogy instead of a qualitative one. The side effects of this are games that take eons to complete, but inspire a transposed empathy for the hardships of the virtual characters you control.

It’s worth examining how much “story” is really being told in Xenoblade since the vast majority of play time is spent doing things that seemingly have no bearing on the plot beyond contextual nuance. Monolith Soft previously developed a trilogy of RPGs called Xenosaga, each providing 40-50 hours of gameplay and featuring what at the time were considered extensive cinematic cutscenes. Part 1 was never released in Europe, but bundled with the EU version of the sequel was a video of all of the original’s cutscenes, running over 3 hours. That’s a long movie, but less than 10 percent of the game. I bring this up to illustrate Monolith Soft’s penchant for story-centric games that actually put the player in command the vast majority of the time. It’s the player’s choice of actions with those characters that makes the story sink or swim as a game. After all, what’s way more boring than 5 hours of expository dialogue, rote cinematography, and a short rotation of canned animations? Answer: 45+ hours of tedious button-pressing sequences, broken up only by fits of inventory management.

Xenoblade comes out mostly on the positive end of the spectrum here. Battles play out MMO-style, similar in execution to FFXII’s Gambit system, which makes for seamless transitions between fighting and traversal and fun, snappy combat. Individual battles require you to position yourself on specific sides of monsters to increase chances of dealing critical damage. Things actually happen so quickly that it takes a few hours with the fighting system to catch up and really understand what you’re doing. Once you’re there though, you can establish rhythms to maximize how different characters’ attacks can play off of one another. Xenoblade piles systems on top of systems to such a degree that you really won’t master everything unless you play well beyond the basic story path. I felt like I was constantly reaching new tiers of understanding with the combat system up until the final fifth of the game. The length of Xenoblade allows you time to figure this stuff out at your own pace. Even after finishing the game there are several parts of the battle system that I never grasped, particularly Melia’s magic spells, which could make for a totally different approach to confrontations altogether.

One of Xenoblade’s major accomplishments was how briskly and efficiently it flowed throughout its considerable breadth, level-walls in the final stretch aside. Its dialogue has an economic sensibility that prioritizes character action over character depth, making narrative setpieces attention-grabbing, if emotionally detached. This is bucking the JRPG trope of long-winded, redundant internal monologues and painfully melodramatic conversations. Not that Xenoblade doesn’t turn insular and sappy from time to time, but you end up tasting it far less than you’d normally expect. The UK voice crew deserves some credit here too for realistically grounding the characters and delivering lines in a way that brings them to life when some of the animation falls short. Outside of cutscenes though, be prepared to hear the same handful of pre- and post-battle quips hundreds of times, which will grate no matter how much you like hearing the word “jokers” in an English accent.

And that’s the quandary of the epic game: how much repetition can players take without “play” turning into “work?” The more similar battles you fight, the more likely you are to notice a multitude of annoying “flaws.” Why do party members willingly tread into poisonous water when fighting? Why is the camera so close when fighting gigantic enemies that you can’t see anything? Why is the inventory system so laborious to configure? The list goes on (again, Andrew Fitch has your back). When Xenoblade is flying high, the imperfections fade into the background, but there are bound to be lulls in any 80-hour experience.

Repetition and “practice” reveals the true nature of systems and mechanics to the player over time, both good and bad. Xenoblade’s approach to this inherent hazard is to load up with so many systems and accruable points that something is always unlocking or reaching a new level. It’s the video game equivalent of sleight of hand. This strategy works remarkably well most of the time, pushing you through slower moments without batting an eye. That said, nothing brings the whole trip to a screeching halt like detrimental AI behavior or an unwieldy camera, both of which plague Xenoblade sporadically.

Monolith Soft could have just made a shorter game and delivered much of the same content, but it just wouldn’t have been the same Xenoblade Chronicles. There is something to the 80-hour experience that 20-hour games don’t have, that they can’t have. It is a unique feeling to play such a gargantuan journey. This is because each upcoming play session is iterative, building on the last, but offering the same repetitive pleasure that keeps people tuning into soap operas on a daily basis. There is drama and progression to a point, but you know the actions to get there are going to be relatively unchanged each time. What separates playing Xenoblade from watching Days of our Lives is the sense of increasing complexity that eventually comes to a head. I’ve always found the unending nature of MMOs unappealing and desperate. In contrast, the monumental JRPG isn’t afraid to end, shoving you out of the nest and into a world in its wake. I respect that confidence; it’s a rare thing. That’s a large part of why I consider my experience with Xenoblade Chronicles as time well spent.

:Reposted on Medium Difficulty:

Review: Digital: A Love Story (Mac)

It's often taken for granted that people who play a lot of video games know a lot about technology.  I'll attest that there is generally aptitude in these circles beyond that of the non-gamer crowd, but it's not something that comes entirely natural.  Maybe I'm just being defensive because I was always late to the party on so many aspects of new and emerging technological trends in the past 3 decades.  I didn't send an email or use AIM until I started college in 2002.  Same goes for having a cell phone for more than emergency calls.  I would have needed to be unrealistically aware of the personal computer scene at a very early age to feel nostalgic about the interface of the Amie Workbench, an Amiga analogue, and Bulletin Board System (BBS) communications represented in the game, Digital: A Love Story.  Since I wasn't, few of the game's techie in-jokes and references stick.  However, since Digital places you in a sort of 1988 simulation mode, the unfamiliarity lent itself to a more personally authentic experience.

You begin Digital as a someone who's using, for all intents and purposes, the Internet for the first time, but through the very limited lens of the Amie Workbench.  Visually, the game is the computer screen: everything fits the blue/white/orange color scheme, the monitor has heavy scanlines, and the cursor is a big, fat, red arrow.  You receive a message from a friend of your dad that tells you what to do to get on BBSes and chatting with folks.  Where instructions in a game can often remove you from the experience, here everything is presented in proper context and actually reads like messages real people would send.  Because the connection between using a computer to play and the game virtualizing a specific operating system is so direct, very little suspension of disbelief is needed to jump into the narrative.

As the title suggests, Digital is a love story, but it's also a mystery.  You're introduced to the "love interest" character, *Emilia, early on, and when she disappears, it's up to you to figure out what happened.  The narrative convention, which is also the primary game mechanic, is the exchange of BBS posts and private messages.  Everyone you interact with has a unique voice and motivation, creating conversations that reach far beyond typical NPC fare.  You never actually type any messages, instead simply hitting reply and reading contacts' responses.  This string of communication works best when you're in "conversation" with one or two other people and the back and forth is readily apparent.  At other times you'll just callously reply or send PMs to everyone on your list, making sure you're doing everything necessary to trigger the text that will allow you to progress further in the story.  The introduction to *Emilia follows the better of those two paths, and though it's clear that I was just messaging a fictional character as part of an interactive short story, I did develop an attachment to that character; enough of an attachment to drive the mystery plot forward with a degree of urgency.

The writing in Digital is very consistent, believable, and emotionally affecting.   Digital's designer and author, Christine Love, bills herself as a writer first, and it shows.  That's meant as a compliment to her writing skills, not a knock on her game design abilities.  Truly well written games are few and far between, but even fewer are as dependent on quality writing as Digital.  Characters' messages vary in articulation and sophistication, as you'd expect from a bunch of random people on the Internet.  I'm reminded of Gus Van Sant's teenager-starring Paranoid Park for how real its characters felt despite, or perhaps because of, the amateur statuses of its actors.  Love is likewise able to find a tone that is reflective of the production process, and somehow more authentic in doing so. 

Digital plops you into the world of BBSes, stranger-in-a-strange-land style.  Yes, there's a missing person mystery to solve, but navigating the uncharted online world is a mysterious voyage in its own right.  Imagine a game that has a clear story objective, but in order to proceed you need to drive a tractor, and before you can drive the it you have to figure out how it works.  Do you need keys to start it?  Where are the keys?  Which lever is for reverse?  Oh wait, does this run on gas?!  BBSes are just as foreign to me as tractors, and I appreciated how Digital didn't assume any prior knowledge.  If there's a tendency nowadays to forget just how open the Internet is, typing in phone numbers in hopes of connecting to a heretofore unseen places is a healthy reminder.  No one even dials numbers to place phone calls anymore, further distancing us from the real technological processes happening in the background.  If you did hand-dial phone numbers, you might mess up and call a random bystander by mistake.  In Digital, instead of hanging up and correcting the error, every number has an unknown on the other end; there's a sense of discovery.

The feeling of openness makes for an ideal learning space, which goes as much for the in-game world as the one outside of it.  Digital teaches you about BBSes and early Internet history through message texts, but in allowing you to actually dial the numbers and direct message other users, you learn by doing.  The mystery/love story paces you through the learning process, heightening the meaning behind your actions.  Later on, the Internet "history lesson" takes some sensationalist turns, but it makes for a great moment of culmination when you finally gain access to the fabled University BBS where they don't just have direct messages, they have email!  A story that's willing to go a little over the top is helpful to make up for the potential dryness of a game centered around an archaic computer interface. The online communications depicted in Digital remain the foundation that our modern Internet is built upon, reminding us of the vast expanses available to users at increasing speeds and densities.  It's up to us to make the stories real.

Digital: A Love Story is available to download for free here.

Recap: Bennett Foddy at NYU Game Center

Last night at NYU Game Center, indie developer and ex-Cut Copy bassist Bennett Foddy gave a presentation wherein he detailed several core principles he strives for when creating games.  If somehow you've never played any of Foddy's games, do yourself a favor and head over to his website where you can play them all for free.  Foddy is most known for QWOP, the game where you use four keyboard buttons in rhythm to propel an Oympic runner 100 meters.  Or at least that's the premise.  You'll probably spend most of your time banging the runner's head against the ground trying to take your first step.  The results are quite hilarious as limbs fly all over the place, but there's always a modicum of understanding that you're figuring out how the system works and could maybe, actually get the runner to, well, run.

QWOP has gained a high enough profile to be visible in mainstream pop culture (making a cameo in this year's season premiere of NBC's The Office, for one), but Foddy's other games operate in similar fashion, enlightening players of the physical actions needed to control the characters in the games.  The immediacy of these games, one of the subjects Foddy's lecture focused on, allows for even a simple button press to result in a satisfying in-game consequence.  In CLOP, a QWOP-like game with a unicorn, each of the four control buttons kicks out one of the unicorn's corresponding four legs.  The animation of even one leg kicking out is so unlike anything that a real horse would do that I can't help but crack up at the mere sight of it, not to mention once you really get the beast "going."  I found it interesting that Foddy didn't directly mention humor in his discussion, since I find it to be part of the prominent appeal of his titles.

Foddy's outlook on game design shares much in common with contemporary art practice, conjuring the notion that there is a rich middleground between the two that takes into account player interactivity and artistic practice in corollary measure.  In games, designers have to choose their controller/platform.  In art, artists select their medium, which for the past half century could acceptably be pretty much anything.  Only recently have game designers been fiddling with new ways of using traditional and standardized controllers in new and exciting ways (see Johan Sebastian Joust).  Yet, art has often struggled to stretch out of the austere, institutional art/viewer relationship by limiting patrons to actions like "standing," "looking," and "walking around,"  A game/artwork that bridges the gap between the two would likely also confront these issues from both sides.  Foddy seems to be on this track as he's been hanging out with some of the JS Joust creators, developing some kind of trampoline-powered Move controller game.

The principles Foddy presented weren't without their own self-conflict though, making them more aspirations than hard and fast rules. For example, if a designer is creating a game that asks players to hold DualShock controllers backwards, a prompt to inform them of how this is supposed to work might be needed, but that would sacrifice some degree of immediacy.  A minor criticism of Journey was that an outline of a controller with some arrows is displayed at the beginning of the game to let players know that they can tilt the controller to rotate the camera.  The necessity of these sorts of prompts is debatable; the point being that there is no one correct solution.  However, I think Foddy would argue that it's best to attempt the game that adheres to principles of immediacy and fully-integrated worlds, and only make concessions when there don't seem to be any better options.

Foddy came off as a game designer on the bleeding edge of the medium, in terms of his games as well as his production practice.  He said that he hopes to show the trampoline game at Indiecade, so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime you can always try and get to the top of this wall.  Um, good luck?

Photo by Finn Taylor for Wired