As a result, you have a game that will please practically nobody. Veteran Ace Combat players will encounter a game both severely dumbed down but also fundamentally compromised, and new players will be subjected to a capricious set of quick time events, a bumbling, poorly told story, and gameplay so utterly monotonous the moment to moment experience can become downright maddening.

I’m one of the former category. I’ve been so much a fan of Ace Combats 4 through 6 (including Zero but none of the PSP titles) that it’s approaching some fan’s relationship to Metal Gear Solid. I loved the world Project Aces built, I loved the melodrama, the insane boss planes, the shopping and collection of planes, even collecting *colors* for the planes. It was a series that always got the fundamental joy of flying around firing high tech weapons at high tech things absolutely right, with a wonderfully tuned arcade flight model and a delicious sense of overkill.

I’m also a fairly hardcore flight simmer, having invested handsomely in controller hardware, and running a squadron in DCS A-10. So I can appreciate the difference between an arcade sim and a realistic sim. Ace Combat has always straddled the midpoint very well, with serious attention to detail for every plane. Fire up AC6 and note how even the redundant mechanical navigation aids in the A-10 cockpit animate and respond. The games are plane porn.

Assault Horizon is explosions porn. Or at least it wants to be very badly, and it does so at the direct expense of an enjoyable flight experience, and at the expense of the central fantasy sold by the franchise.

Reality sucks dude

The game immediately veers off the path of its predecessors with its story, set in a near future version of our own reality, where a NATO unit is tasked with putting down an WMD-driven Russian military coup before they do evil Russian things to America. I lost interest practically at once, and the story never recovers. The point where it introduces the main villain, a pilot with a shark’s mouth painted on his jet (original) actually made me laugh out loud, as the music kicks in as the camera zooms in on this dude’s face, and we are expected to feel some kind of awe. We don’t. We don’t give a shit at all.

Past AC games have always told bizarre but still engaging stories, because they stood free to do whatever dumb sci-fi nonsense they wanted to. The idea of a massive meteor strike throwing the world into economic and consequentially diplomatic chaos was a wonderful premise, and the games used it well.

Assault Horizon, shackled by reality, puts itself in a position where melodramatic cliches stop being endearing in that Anime storytelling sense, and simply become mundane idiocy. There are twists to the story delivered with earnest that will make you shake your head in disbelief; At one point I looked at a dude’s face and told my girlfriend exactly what I thought that character was going to be doing. 4 missions later I was proven right. It’s abysmal and derivative storytelling, and it only gets to be called functional because of some serviceable voice work.

Reality offers more trouble. In the imaginary world of previous Ace Combats, dozens of planes dogfighting in the sky over a city-cized gun made a sort of strange game sense. Comparable situations set against a real world context seem incredibly stupid by comparison, because we are subjected to how the military operates in the real world. We’ve seen air to ground ops on TV. We know how this should be. Assault Horizon has absolutely no interest in actually capitalizing in any way on its real world setting, and as such feels very poorly thought out.

The story in Ace Combat 6 was similarly terrible, but survived because you could skip every cutscene with no real story lost; Every cutscene was essentially a series of non-sequiturs to the actual story arc the player was involved in, and even if the cutscenes were terrible, the in-flight chatter was entertaining and well done. Assault Horizon gets no such free pass: The cutscenes are long, boring affairs where the player is given slight camera control. To look at what, exactly? Boxes and walls? In-flight chatter is an abject failure. Speech is so processed and distorted by radio noise it becomes impossible to pay attention through the constant racket of heavy metal bullshit techno and explosions. It’s just a constant distorted drone. This is actually the first game I’ve played where the audio mix was directly detrimental to the playing experience.

Actually, screw reality altogether

Assault Horizon doesn’t care about real planes. Where previous Ace Combats modelled HUDs with an eye on reality, Assault Horizon just throws some shit up on screen and hopes it works. There are mistakes in design here that blew my mind. How about a vestigial, duplicate ammunition counter that sits right on top of your aiming reticle, making actually aiming at anything a chore? Or how about removing the machine gun leading indicator altogether, taking out the pleasure of accurately leading and popping a target at long distance and relegating gunnery to an impotent supporting role? How about three camera angles where only one offers you a useful, playable perspective?

Actually, hey, how about we just forget how planes work. Let’s set the default control scheme to an abortion of a third person shooter scheme where roll control is removed? How about we take the skill out of lining up a ground attack, and make players move to a point and press a couple of buttons to magically teleport the plane into a nice vector? Actually, about that…

Scripting engage!

I was not aware that the attractive traits of Call of Duty included “tight linear scripting”, but apparently Project Aces thought that was the absolute bomb. Assault Horizon is linear to a fault. Gone are branching missions, multiple operations, plane/upgrade purchases, even squadron orders. On that basis alone, replayability is at zero. Double this with a campaign so tightly scripted it regularly wrests control from you at a rate that becomes alarming. This is a game where a particular enemy plane can NOT be shot down with missiles no matter how long you try. You HAVE to fly up to it and engage one of Assault Horizon’s many gimmicky minigames, called DFM (Dog Fight Mode, geddit?). In this mode, your plane is on a rail, and so is that of your opponent. Within moments, you’ve subjected him to enough punishment to kill a bomber, but no. The game doesn’t want you to kill him yet. See, you have to see him fly under this exploding building first. THEN you can kill him.

Or how about a plane that just won’t go down, and you pound it with all your special weapons ammo, only to realize later that oh, the scripting was set up such that you couldn’t kill him; He had to fly into a building as part of a scripted sequence. Thanks for making me waste all my special weapons ammo!

It extends to ground assaults, done through a similar minigame. Here’s a ship that you can shoot at for hours, but it won’t take any damage. Not until you fly to a preset point and engage a minigame. THEN you can kill it.

The irony is that the dog fighting system has some merit; Planes can counter your DFM, and you can counter theirs. And you can counter their counters. Against the normal planes that aren’t tied into any kind of stupid rollercoaster animation for you to watch, it’s actually enjoyable. Then you encounter a boss enemy and realize that even though the game mockingly insists you should stop him as soon as possible, the game will literally not ALLOW you to stop him until it’s good and ready for it. This entails a frustrating, long chase where your life hangs in the balance, and your enemy remains essentially invulnerable.

The game just feels hugely out of control. The aforementioned ground attack sequences will occasionally interrupt your carefully adjusted angle of attack to show you an explosion somewhere, and then return you to a plane on a totally different course. Every time you feel the least bit invested, the game yanks you out of it and makes it absolutely clear that you are watching more than playing.

For a player out for a fair skill-based experience, such as those offered by past Ace Combats, games that remain playable and enjoyable at the highest difficulties, it’s like a cruel joke.

A/V

Visually the game is fine. It’s not a huge leap over AC6, which I replayed in preparation for Assault Horizon’s release, and that game still looks and sounds superb. Assault Horizon has a gritty, high contrast look to it that sometimes works and sometimes don’t at all. Some missions take place in an Apache helicopter, and they take place a little too close to the ground than the relatively low resolution satellite imagery making up the ground textures can handle. One mission in a dense city requires you to fly at street level, and it’s during these sequences the game looks its absolute worst. It’s a shame, because the apache sequences, hampered by two camera angles so unhelpful it boggles the imagination, are among the least gimmicky the game has to offer, feeling like a totally serviceable shooter.

The audio fares much worse. This is a dense, noisy affair, and it comes off as simply ugly, with a mixture of overly compressed metal guitars and breakbeats. One mission has what sounds like a disco theme thrown in for good measure. It’s pretty weird. The voice work would probably be fine if you could hear any of it through the game’s muddy mix.

If it ain’t broken…

Some perceive Ace Combat as fundamentally busted games, because all you do is shoot at dots in the distance. The reality of it is that flight combat IS shooting at dots in the distance, while managing a good sense of spatial awareness between yourself, the target, your allies and the terrain. Flight combat is never going to be palatable to those without a real fundamental urge towards it.

Assault Horizon attempts to drag the player closer to each kill and, through a more intense audiovisual experience, be more engaging for those turned off by past titles’ relative sterility. The result however is a game that steals control away from you on so many occasions and in such a haphazard fashion it becomes nearly impossible to maintain any such spatial awareness. One moment you are facing one direction, two button presses and you’re on a completely different altitude and vector, with the camera shifting to another position. You’re shooting a tank, but suddently the camera cuts to a soldier being shot somewhere. It’s nuts, and it robs you of ever feeling like you were on top of the situation, one of the primary joys of any combat flight sim.

It’s hugely ironic that instead of being a game about shooting dots in the sky, Ace Combat is now a game about moving icons and circles around and timing button presses. You stare intently at moving icons on your hud more than you look at what you’re trying to shoot.

Summary

Assault Horizon can, in this Ace Combat fan’s eyes, not be seen as anything other than a failure. It’s a charmless, derivative game with a severe identity crisis. Ace Combat vets will pine for more control and more to do, while newbies with a moment’s alertness will see through the game’s thick layer of capricious rules and scripting to reveal an action game experience that is painfully shallow and contrived.

I have two hopes at this point.

First, that Assault Horizon is an offshoot, and not a reboot. The lack of a number in its title makes me tentatively glad, because this is, so far, the lowest point of the franchise: A flight combat game where neither flight nor combat is satisfying. If this is the future of the franchise, we’re in the shit guys.

Secondly, once I’ve had a chance to try the multiplayer, that the player versus player dogfighting will be more satisfying than the scripted nonsense the campaign puts you through.

in·cred·i·ble [in-kred-uh-buhl] –adjective
1. so extraordinary as to seem impossible: incredible speed.
2. not credible; hard to believe; unbelievable: The plot of the book is incredible.

The game follows an FBI-agent assisting the local law enforcement to solve a bizarre murder mystery in a small rural town. The game takes on strong occult overtones, and features a bizarre collection of townsfolk, all of which behave nothing remotely close to normal.

I’d followed Giant Bomb’s “Endurance Run” of the game, which lampooned the title for a pair of full play-throughs. A curious thing happened during that long stretch of gameplay;  As the game introduced them to its menagerie of ridiculous characters and spaced out protagonist, they laughed at it, while groaning at the awkward controls, terrible localisation, bad graphics and silly audio production. However, as the endurance run stretched on, you could notice a subtle change in atmosphere. The game, with all its flaws, endeared itself to the players. By the end, it was even the centerpiece of a heated discussion on the site’s 2010 game character of the year award.

When I found a copy of the game for myself, I was ready to laugh at it like I’d laughed at Ed Wood’s nonsensical cinema. Instead, I found myself drawn to it, and the shocking revelation dawned on me that this piece of muddled auteur debris was genuinely entertaining. Even more so, it was making me look at other ostensibly more competent titles in my collection with a new-found disdain; How boring!

This is Deadly Premonition, a game so overflowing with unchecked ambition and self-indulgence, so broad in scope and in its generosity, its urge to entertain, so perfectly singular that it has become, in my mind, close to what the gaming press has been clamoring for for years; “our” Citizen Kane.

Scope, art and budgets

Games like this aren’t made anymore. They just aren’t. Historically, the scope of a role-playing game is balanced directly against the budget allotment for asset creation. Games such as The Elder Scrolls II, which offered a frankly ludicrous amount of terrain to explore (twice the size of Britain, allegedly), did so by repeating a limited collection of assets. Its scope was allowed to grow unchecked because the very design and ambition of the game treated art assets as a means to an end. Spiderweb software’s Exile series of RPGs offered players *vast* worlds presented by a collection of a few hundred tiles and characters that didn’t animate. As the complexity of game engines grew and artists were given more tools, the amount of time spent on creating art clashed directly with the conceivable scope of a title.

When Neverwinter Nights launched, it attempted to utilize repeated assets to offer players a vast world while maintaining the visual standards of its day, and Bioware was criticized for the repetitive visuals. This occurred again more recently with Dragon Age II, which is practically notorious for its repeated scenery. You have to sympathize with RPG developers like Bioware and Bethesda, who have to offer players vast, dense worlds, yet still have to compete directly with titles like Call of Duty who can commit its “art budget” to a very constricted set of assets. Creating an RPG that can appeal on the same visual level is an almost impossible task, and so procedural asset generation and other such techniques are very much in the wind as Bethesda prepares to launch its next Elder Scrolls title our way. In more recent years, Spore offered a vast universe of strange creations by leveraging procedurally created assets. For the most part, however, players have become accustomed to beautiful, custom art.

Deadly Premonition has terrible assets. It barely blends between animations; nudging the stick forward sees the protagonist slide slowly across the floor, while still walking at a full clip. Walking by a supermarket fruit counter, the textures are crude, flat photographs of  fruit; They aren’t even bump or normal mapped! The soundtrack seems to consist of a grand total of 6 poorly mixed songs.

Deadly Premonition’s developers, at some point, must have fully come to terms with their budgetary restrictions, yet they still managed to offer an open, living world filled with things to do and explore (whether these things are interesting or fun is another matter). Their goal, apparently, became to deliver scope. If it was intended or not, the way Deadly Premonition almost spitefully subjects you to assets that are *clearly* bad, actually has the effect of adjusting your expectations to the point where it all sort of snaps into place; The poor dialog, the silly music, the controls, and the assets.

Once you adjust to it, everything about Deadly Premonition seems just right in a very rare way that effectively grants it a carte blanche; It can do no wrong.

“Just call me York; that’s what everyone calls me”

You can’t discuss Deadly Premonition without paying close tribute to its protagonist; FBI special agent Francis York Morgan. Clearly an attempt at replicating Twin Peaks’ Dale Cooper’s quirky charm, the effect misfires completely as York proves himself a bit of an arrogant, self-obsessed prick, with so many obsessive-compulsive ticks and strange behaviors that you come to the early, intuitive conclusion that he is absolutely bonkers. This, again, has the effect of making you doubt his claim to be an FBI agent; That he appears to lapse into dream worlds where he kills zombies and monsters, before discussing 80s cinema in the car with his imaginary friend Zach makes everything he says feel unreliable.

The interesting thing is that this works. York becomes the friend you hang out with just because he’s unpredictable in a safe way. He clearly means well, but his conduct is like a steady stream of ticks and non-sequiturs. You giggle at his madness, but you’re genuinely interested in where he’s going with it. In this way, the player takes the part of Twin Peaks’ Harry Truman, being puzzled and amused by this foreign figure, but we can’t deny his methods somehow get results. We’re the straight man.

In fact, the game appears to break the fourth wall regularly, with York’s constant discussion with his imaginary friend Zach, some of which appears to directly adress the player. It’s as though York includes the player in the game by making you a character. When York talks about his love for the film Tremors, I couldn’t help but fall into character. Few games have inspired so many out-loud responses from me  (though perhaps that says more about me than it does about Deadly Premonition…).

“Red Ivy, the shadow thing, the generator, it all makes sense!”

Few things in Deadly Premonition are satisfying. A chess puzzle is so simple you feel almost offended when you solve it, yet York discusses it as a “battle of wits”. Firing a weapon , which you can do at any time at anyone, with absolutely no effect unless it’s a zombie, feels so weak any visceral joy from the gunplay is completely lost.  The game even manages to undermine any seriousness to the combat by having York constantly mutter to himself whenever you score a good hit. Driving around is equally ridiculous; Every vehicle feels like it spins around its center axis, and seem to have a top speed of 50mph, and a turning radius of a full block. Crashing into anything, living or dead, simply stops the vehicle dead with no other effect. As York solves the mystery, the way in which he does it is disjointed and random, with a logic only apparent to him.

The compound effect, however, is of a disconnected, dreamlike consistency. As York falls in and out of a horror-themed riff on Silent Hill’s “dark side”, either side feels equally unreal. After all, this is a game in which you are paid an FBI salary with bonuses for shaving and peeking through windows, and penalties for being “stinky”, before you go riverside and go fishing for submachine guns. Pretensions towards normalcy and realism in this game would have created a number of dissonances with its ridiculous story that the game escapes cleanly by being a bit shit all around. Instead of complaining about the poor driving physics, you learn which cars behave in which ways, and learn to manipulate the system for the best possible outcome; I dare say at this point I’m a pretty effective Deadly Premonition driver.

“Do you feel it, Zach ? My coffee warned me about it.”

Not too long ago, Remedy released Alan Wake, a Twin Peaks influenced game with stellar production values and a frankly ridiculously long production cycle. Released to much expectations, the game, for me, fell flat for a number of reasons. The biggest of which is that the game is about a horror writer, and features some absolutely horrible writing in spite of taking itself seriously. Guys, you can’t do that. Horror is in itself inherently ridiculous. Successful horror stories in whatever medium are without fail dreamlike or extreme, and get to us by manipulating and sometimes transposing our understanding of reality and its rules. Twin Peaks worked as a horror story of sorts because it took its viewers to a strange place where the rules were fleeting and nobody acted anything like a normal person. It effectively used the soap opera format to emphasize the strangeness of its characters and mundanity of its setting to emphasize the ugliness of its dark edges.

This is something Deadly Premonition *nails*. It becomes an unnerving experience because of its flippancy, which is often countered with frankly disturbing actions and stories. This is a game where a rocker guy constantly and frantically snaps his fingers while carrying on a perfectly normal conversation, and also one where characters discuss serial killers that urinate in and drink from the victim’s skull, as the background music consists of whistling and kazoos. It takes you and your sensibilities to a place where their value becomes obscured.

Funny/Scary

What’s interesting to me about laughter is that it’s primarily a nervous reaction. We laugh to communicate our insecurity to the outside world, and we want our laughter reciprocated because that lets us know everything is alright. Who hasn’t been freaked out by a noise or movement, only to laugh to ourselves when it proves to be nothing? The best comedians deliver ideas that challenge our world view, and do so without a smile. We are left to laugh because we subconsciously *desire* the balance a smile would lend the situation. We love to laugh together, because the more of us that laugh, the safer the situation. We’re just animals, after all.

Deadly Premonition makes me laugh all the time. I’ve sat by myself, simply driving around the game world, bursting into laughter for no discernible reason. It’s consistently wrong, and my brain, conditioned by modern and more polished games, finds it hard to deal with the internal consistency of modern game design and how Deadly Premonition seems completely uninterested in any of that. This dissonance is absolutely core to the experience, as the absurdity of light-heartedness reaches a kind of balance with the absurdity of the horror it presents. Zombies moan ridiculously in low pitched voices, but as the game goes on even this becomes tuned to the vibe of the game world to the point where it starts actually being unnerving.

The net result, successfully emulating the Lynchian weirdness of Twin Peaks, is that the game is simply a joy to experience, for reasons that become hard to rationalize. Alternating between being disturbing and being ridiculous, you’re put through an almost literal rollercoaster of emotions. One moment you’re desperately running from an axe murderer in a section so long it actually becomes physically exhausting, and then you’re peeking through a motel window to watch an effeminate man dancing like a stripper.

About the only thing the game genuinely lacks is a sense of emotional attachment to any of it, instead casting you as a kind of disinterested observer. You get the sense that this would be going on with or without you, as the game frequently directs you to carry out tasks for no intuitive reason. Why am I pushing this button? Why did I pick up this object? You’re guided by the game to simply perpetuate its content. You aren’t York. You’re the player. As a result of this detachment, the game is more interesting than immersive, which is starkly divergent to the current trends towards personally immersing the player and urging us to inhabit the player character. Deadly Premonition is absolutely fine with leaving you a viewer, even adopting TV-like mechanisms such as a “previously on…” segment when loading a saved game.

Perfect 10

The notion of perfection is strange to any art form. Outside of the realm of science, where something can truly be described as perfectly matching to an ideal, in art the definition progressively loses its purpose with every new observer of a piece. Deadly Premonition is notorious for receiving wildly divergent review scores, ranging from a 2/10 at IGN to Destructoid’s 10/10 “perfect” score. Personally, I feel the game is perfect, in that it takes its budget, its scope and its vision and combines it to form a sweet spot where they all are appropriate. It’s a game that offers something no other game has offered me; A genuine B-game experience that tells a story unlike any other in a form factor unlike any other. It’s so unique it’s practically punk rock, evoking Grasshopper Manufacture’s games and to a certain extent the work of Platinum Games. With Deadly Premonition, Access have become the anti-Platinum, equally perfect in its imperfection. They’ve created their own playing field, and they have no competition.

The game is perfect, singular and so unique in its time that it escapes all meaningful comparison. For quirky, surreal, open-world murder-mystery-horror games, Deadly Premonition is the absolute gold standard, and I can’t imagine it will ever be bettered.

You can pick it up for a song and a shuffle today, and I can’t recommend it enough. This is a game I feel everyone interested in the subject of video games should play. It’ll broaden your horizons and challenge your expectations.

Everything I’ll say from here on pertain to the Kinect as part of the Xbox 360 experience, and as a games system in its own right. The hardware itself is pretty stellar, and having played around with OpenKinect and openFrameworks for a while now, I see nothing but good uses for it. Outside of games.

There are a number of fundamental flaws to the Kinect experience. At first glance they appear to be software related, but with further use they feel philosophical, for lack of a better word.  There is no denying the slickness of the setup wizard, the sense of eerie drama when the camera performs its self calibrating vertical scan of the room, and the odd moment when your avatar stops being a comically animated character and instead animates to your stance and becomes “some dude” on your screen. It’s certainly got a nice bit of wow to it, but already at this point my sensation that the Kinect was not for me intensified exponentially, along with the sensation that Microsoft doesn’t fully know who it’s for.

The waggle gimmick

Much has been said of how the Wii was founded on a gimmick that became endemic to the weaknesses of its software. The same was said about the Nintendo DS and its double screens. The image of a gamer shaking the Wii remote where a simple button press could suffice has become a joke that has dogged Nintendo almost from the start. The key, however, to Nintendo’s success has been in marrying the familiar and tactile to the chaotic and unknown. They took what was known and infused it with just enough of the unknown that it became enticing. They polished off enough of the edge that the “hardcore” felt precision suffered, but in the same genius move this evened the playing field. They created a system that was familiar enough that it could support titles like Super Mario Galaxy 2 (which will kick your sorry ass in a moment’s notice), yet simple enough that anyone could pick up Wii Sports Resort and learn not to worry about the controller buttons. At least in terms of the game interface, they hit both marks, and created platforms where developers could choose what functionality to use.

Wat.

The Kinect, in contrast, demands creativity of its prospective developers that is actually sort of mindblowing. It asks developers to literally throw away everything they have learned in favor of an interface with no tactile feedback, relatively high response time and a large margin for error. The feature-set made available to games amounts to a slightly shit motion capture studio in your living room, coupled with a truncated set of voice recognition features. Beyond this Microsoft offer developers practically nothing. Sony, I feel, did a very wise thing when they based their Move controllers on a known quantity. When Sony literally up-scaled Nintendo’s solution, they allowed Wii developers a chance to move up to a more powerful platform without losing the value of their experience, effectively cancelling Nintendo’s developer lock-in. This broadens the market and makes for exciting times. Through Kinect, Microsoft attempts to create a developer lock-in situation of their own, and I believe it’s going to bite them in the ass.

The biggest core design problem with Kinect is simply that the system doesn’t just have a gimmick. It’s that it has one gimmick which the entire system is built around. It offers practically nothing beyond its “you are the controller” mantra.

Disconnect

I have a nice and sizable living room. In fact, according to the Kinect itself, it’s perfect. I had to move the living room table and an arm chair literally out of the room before it became plausible to move around in the way the system wanted me to during the calibration process. Even then, my height became a problem as the system would frequently lose my shoulders and head and have a fun little freakout until I’d step back into full view. It certainly worked for the most part, but  I can not imagine the household where this kind of interactivity is suited. A glance at Microsoft’s marketing really shows how huge the philosophical divide between Nintendo and MS really is. At E3 2006, I stood in line for a little over an hour to get a look at Nintendo’s booth. We’d seen so many ads where players were jumping behind couches and flailing around that some of us were worried about just how crazy this thing was going to be.

Turns out, for the most part, Nintendo intended for you to sit on your couch in your living room and relax while playing these games, just like you always did. Of course there were games that asked you to move around more, but always with a certain abstract distance from the action you are trying to portray. The image of some dude on a recliner lazily “bowling” by gaming the gesture system was seen as indicative of a weakness in Nintendo’s design, but that the system has enough dirty leeway to offer such varying styles of play is a boon, not a flaw. It allows those of us who want to really get into it and “play along” to make asses of ourselves, while others who just want to beat their record play any which way they want.

When Nintendo introduced the MotionPlus addon to the Wii, I picked it up with a copy of Red Steel 2. I really enjoyed Red Steel 2, but the game practically demanded that I stand up and put my body behind my motions; I couldn’t get away with winging it anymore. If I wanted to beat this guy, I’d actually have to swing my arm like I meant it. This was very cool for short sessions, but for a game that is actually quite big, I must admit I simply couldn’t commit to that kind of experience; It had taken away my choice to play it lazily, and so I couldn’t relax with it.

The Kinect is, for better or worse, 1:1. Not only can you not wing it.  You also have to literally stand inside your table if the game wants you to do so, if not your move is invalid. It creates an abstract yet direct connection between the real world and in-game actions that are, in my opinion, misguided. The Wii or Move don’t offer physical feedback to motions, but they do offer rumble as an indicator of tactility. The human brain is amazing in its ability to correlate perceptions. The Kinect offers a delayed 2D image as its only response to a relative full-body 3D motion. If you thought judging jump depths in Super Mario 64 was hard, give Kinect a go.

I play games to lose myself. This abstraction of interface, the disconnect between realities, so to speak, is key to that experience. The idea of immersion is not different in games from what it is when you lose yourself in a book or an engrossing film. The interface stays out of the way so the brain can transpose itself to another context. At its best, this sensation of losing the real world is absolutely euphoric. Kinect, with its explicit connection, forfeits the ability to transpose the mind. It can only transpose the body.

Waaaat.

Some Kinect launch titles have understood this. Dance Central notably hides the player from view, allowing players to lose themselves in the idea of matching dance moves, rather than awkwardly watching themselves fail at looking anywhere near as cool as the game is trying to make them feel. Like some people have said, Dance Central is the game that proves Kinect can work. Personally I’m not convinced silhouette detection of the sort Kinect can offer is required for this style of gameplay, considering the popularity of simple games such as Just Dance.

In short, Sam Fisher is a cool character because he is a cool character. I am not Sam Fisher, and no manner of motion control will let me be Sam Fisher. The moment Sam bumbles about with my inelegant motions is the moment he ceases to be a cool character, and Microsoft’s notion that putting you in the game world is the epitome of gamer fantasy is simply flat out wrong.

Personality flaw

This is a personal gripe, and much more subjective, so I’ll apologize in advance. But how fucked up is the Disney Channel-esque aesthetic Microsoft has chosen for its casual line of products? The United Colors of Benetton families in their oversized living rooms playing generic green-orange-yellow flailing-games and enjoying the shit out of it gives me serious chills. There is nothing human about anything Microsoft is showing, from the games themselves to the people playing them in the homes they live in. Microsoft is targeting a type of human being I’m not convinced exists, at least not where I’m from.

Creepy.

Tapping out

In general, from the name to its logo, to its target demographic, to the games it supports and the future it predicts, I have no interest whatsoever in partaking in the Kinect brand from here on. The best possible future I can imagine for the system is significantly less than the sum of its parts, and while I’d love to be proven otherwise I see no reason to have high hopes either. Every moment I spent with it connected to my 360 compounded the sensation that this was, in short, some stupid bullshit.

For Christ’s sake Microsoft, if you were so worried about buttons, just launch a casual controller instead. You know, with less buttons.

This thing drove my "hardcore gaming" for years

Oh and gamers who think full-body motion control is truly the way to go; Go play outside for a change. Take a walk. Reality doesn’t SUCK, guy!

1. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (Wii)

My favorite Silent Hill of the series, Shattered Memories consistently surprised me with its atmosphere and narrative quality, its smart use of motion controls, and in how it made me feel. It’s also the first time I’ve seen my girlfriend not only grasp but fully master a third person control scheme within moments of picking up the controls. We had an amazing night playing the hell out of this game, and while its psycho-analyzing replayability is apparently amazing, I feel content leaving my experience on the high note where it ended. It really, really sucks that there won’t be another one like it.

2. Limbo (Xbox Live Arcade)

Limbo is an ambient video game. It’s not particularly hard, not particularly long, and certainly not complicated. But every moment of its design exists to put you in a very specific space. From its vignetted silhouette imagery and its understated, gorgeous soundtrack, to the soft rumble when your character jumps and the way his legs kick when he’s climbing a vine, there is a quiet hostility and fragility to the game world that I can’t remember seeing elsewhere. It doesn’t hurt that the game has one of the most subtle, beautiful endings of any video game I can remember. It’s just a sweet, terrifying joy to play.

3. Vanquish (PS3/360)

I’ve already written at length about Vanquish. Suffice to say I still stand by my words. It’s an absolutely mindblowing third person shooter that asks players to do things they have always done in new and exhilarating ways. It’s a stunning technical achievement, stylish as hell, fun to play and – like Batman: Arkham Asylum – simply rock solid. I cannot recommend it enough.

4. Bayonetta (360)

Another Platinum game! The best character action game since Ninja Gaiden Black, it blew my expectations away with its generosity, ridiculous sense of humor, willingness to be wrong, and with a score-attack system that still keeps me coming back to levels again and again and again. It’s gorgeous, fast paced, tight and funny as all hell. Alongside Vanquish, Bayonetta stands as an epic middle finger to anyone riding the Japan’s Game Industry Is Dead band wagon. Show me a western game that can do these things, then we can have a conversation.

5. Starcraft II (PC)

You can strip away the multiplayer, and Starcraft II would still be one of the absolute best single player games on the PC this year. It has some of the worst characters and writing I can think of, yet the sheer joy of simply playing its missions and fuddling about with the bounty of new toys it throws your way makes for an astonishing real time strategy title. What puts it on top compared to other excellent genre entries like Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising is its unflinching dedication to delivering one of the hardest core multiplayer experiences on the market. I heard Starcraft II described as “Football II”, and this is absolutely true. FPS tourneys are moot; This is the first de-facto PC gaming sport.

I was not only surprised to really enjoy watching games being played, but Starcraft II awakened a competitive instinct in me I wasn’t ware that i had. It’s as much a cultural phenomenon as it is a game, and for that it’s one of the biggest gaming events of 2010.

6. Amnesia: The Dark Descent (PC)

As a Lovecraft fan with a big spot in his heart for 2005′s Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, Amnesia was like receiving a love letter. With its excellent Lovecraftian story, tactile physics, fun insanity mechanics, terrifying monster encounters and pervasive sense of dread, Amnesia is one of the best first person horror games since System Shock 2.

7. Red Dead Redemption (PS3/360)

I have a confession to make. Prior to Red Dead Redemption, I have never completed a Rockstar game. Even the ones I really enjoyed, such as Bully. There’s just always a moment where the games have fizzled out for me. I stopped caring about the characters, the story just drags on and on, and the mechanics become a set of errands to run. It boils down to a sandbox, and after a while that sandbox becomes boring too. Red Dead Redemption somehow avoided all those pitfalls. It offers characters I genuinely cared about, and a world I wanted to explore. Red Dead Redemption also gets this year’s Game That Almost Made Me Cry award for its amazing ending and choice of soundtrack.

It’s the best game Rockstar have made. That’s a pretty serious accolade.

8. Minecraft (PC)

I knew Minecraft was amazing the moment I realized I could plant a tree on a tree. I spent forever building the biggest tree imaginable, way above the clouds, and tunneled an epic tree house through its leafy walls. Then I dug out the ground beneath it, making it a free standing world-tree in the middle of the ocean. It was beautiful! Then, later, a friend of mine built an even taller burning swastika on the horizon, just to spite me.

Minecraft is the most delightful game I have played in years. It’s a roguelike made out of Legos, a playground that inspires creative rivalry. Its non-physics allow for amazing constructions. An undersea glass house filled with trees and flowers, leading to an underground mining and construction complex. I can only hope Mincraft grows laterally. It doesn’t need to be deeper. It just has to offer more variety.

9. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (PS3/360)

I don’t know how Criterion do it, but they are the best guys on the planet for making arcade driving games that still feel grounded in reality. Hot Pursuit is a game about angry cars smashing angrily into each other while sounding angry. It’s addictive, gorgeous, competitive and, I’d say, the best Burnout game since Burnout Revenge. The Autolog feature is a great piece of design that facilitates constant score-attack rivalry, a form of multiplayer I’m absolutely stoked is returning to form.

10. Darksiders (PS3/360)

I’d written off Darksiders as a heavy metal Zelda clone. It turns out it IS a heavy metal Zelda clone. But it’s so good. Nintendo has dibs on the Zelda formula to the point where nobody else seems to regard it as a feasible genre. It reminded me of when Volition cloned GTA with Saints’ Row, and responded to criticism with “GTA is a genre”. Zelda is also a genre, and right now there’s only Zelda and Darksiders in it. And they’re both absolutely stellar. If you enjoyed the Zelda games at all, I can not recommend Darksiders enough. It’s a stunning game.

Look this up in the dictionary. I believe you'll find it under "Fucking awesome"

In my young mind, before games like Ninja Gaiden played around with more complex narratives, this was the most amazing story to be allowed to play. There is something to be said for simplicity and linearity that the early Castlevania titles exemplify:

As Simon Belmont stands outside the imposing gates of the castle courtyard, looking up at the dark castle looming ahead. This is his first opportunity to turn back. He passes through the eerily quiet courtyard, lit by a few lone torches. He reaches the entrance to the castle proper, and you, the player, make him walk inside. The gate slams shut behind him. The music kicks in. He is immediately assailed by panthers, bats and ghosts. Holy. Shit.

He fights his way to the end of the entrance hall, defeating a giant killer bat by throwing axes at it (you know you did). Then the gravity of his situation sets in.

Castle map from the Japanese manual

Linearity and the need to fight

The thing about Castlevania and the linear narrative that I like so much, is that once Belmont breaches the gate, there is no turning back. Every door slams behind him. He is being led inextricably towards the final confrontation with Dracula himself in the lonely peaking tower of the decrepit castle, and the path ahead is gruelling indeed. But he must fight. Simon has gone and gotten himself into this shit because it is what the Belmont family does. When Dracula reappears, the Belmonts must defeat him. That is what they are born for, it is what they do. Someone said every generation has to experience some sort of war, well, every generation of Belmont needs to experience some sort of Dracula.

As Castlevania titles and other games experimented more with freeform gameplay, the systemic complexity of the gameplay perhaps changed for the better, but as the impetus to fight became blurred. Since Castlevania became Metroidvania, the primary reason a Castlevania character fights is out of duty. There is no real gravity felt by the player. Just the battle, for the battle’s sake.

Other games “suffered” for me in this regard too. I’m not about to say nonlinearity is bad. I’m trying to say that linearity used well with purpose can offer the player a need to play that nonlinear games cannot. I’m not ashamed to say I haven’t completed a single Grand Theft Auto game, ever, though I’ve played them all and enjoyed them for their sandbox fun. Given such freedom, there simply isn’t enough need to go on.

So Simon goes to the castle, alone. First out of a sense of duty perhaps, but once that gate slams shut his path is clear. There is no turning back. There is no time to dilly dally around the place or “explore” or any of that crap. Either Simon dies, or Dracula dies. Death at the end. That’s all there is.

Belmont’s Revenge

For me, while the series linear form peaked with Super Castlevania IV on the SNES, my heart has always kept one peculiar little game hidden in a dark little oft-forgotten chamber. It is, ironically, the first truly non-linear Castlevania game, and it was the second Castlevania title on the Game Boy.

Belmont’s Revenge was special to me, because it had some of the best and most technically accomplished music ever put out on the Game Boy, which axiomatically means it’s some of the best chiptune work ever done. Symphony of the Night is often held up as the go-to Castlevania game for music, but I’ll take a single piece of Belmont’s Revenge soundtrack over the its entire mass of jazz-rock nonsense any day of the week.

Having played Castlevania: The Adventure, which was a middling but acceptable platformer with average written all over it, my hopes weren’t exactly high for Castlevania 2. To be met with such an onslaught of brilliant music took me completely by surprise, and became my driving force to keep playing the game. I’ve read stories of other kids loading the game up just to listen to the music, and I was one of them. I used to sit in the local park with my earphones in, playing the game not only because it was a lovely, gothic platformer, but because that music made me want to make music like it.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Belmont’s Revenge was one of the primary reasons I became a musician. To this day I can hear similarities between my own style and what this game taught me.

Low tech, bad ass

What needs to be understood about Game Boy music was that these guys had next to nothing to work with. Skipping the details, at it’s absolute most, a Game Boy can produce 4 simultaneous notes, which is barely enough for a power chord. Yet here these guys were looking at these capabilities and working out how to use tempo, arpeggios, psychoacoustic tricks and pure composition to produce works of blistering drive and energy, with structures right up there with classical music.

To contrast, the first and third Game Boy Castlevania titles never even approached this grandeur. Competent, but not much else.

Castlevania Adventure had a fairly good style exemplifying Konami’s bass-heavy arpeggio-laden chip music through the 80s and early 90s.

Castlevania Legends (Adventure 3).. I don’t even know what to say about this one. It’s primarily remixes of tunes from other games, and sound like someone violently rammed the MIDI files through some primitive cookie cutter to stuff it on the cart. It’s just disgraceful.

So.. Belmont’s Revenge:

What. The. Hell. You just didn’t go into a handheld title and expect something like that. You weren’t getting it from NES titles, or even PC games for the most part. Stuff with proper sampling capability didn’t commonly attempt this kind of stuff. To hear it blasting out of a tiny bit of gray plastic bent my mind apart.

New Messiah

Perhaps the best known track from Belmont’s Revenge is ‘New Messiah’, a high energy arpeggio-driven anthem piece that could not serve as a better backdrop for whipping the shit out of some burning eyeballs in a crystal castle.

While not my favorite, it’s only appropriate that when Konami decided to remake the Game Boy Castlevania titles in Castlevania Adventure Rebirth for the Wii, this was the one track they decided to take with them.

The dude behind this stuff is one Hidehiro Funauchi, and as game crediting wasn’t exactly given where it was due in the early days of the industry, tracking down his catalog is difficult. It pains me to think that such a talented artist can fade away into obscurity in such a way. Here’s a toast to H. Funauchi! You helped make me who I am!

Exploring Game Boy music further

If you’d like to explore Game Boy soundtracks further, I can not recommend Zophar’s domain enough. It’s just an amazing repository of music files and tools.

Shooting games. Next to the RPG, this genre most clearly proves the split in design mentality between the east and the west. Both in the east and the west, shoot’em ups (or shmups) began proper with Space Invaders.

To contrast, in the west, we fell in love with the art and pacing of games like R-type, and created the sub-genre of shooting games known as “euroshmups“; A focus on visuals, a predilection for horizontal scrolling, and a lessened focus on pure hardcore skill and more on story and design elements. In the shmup community, these games are barely considered part of the genre. As such, popularity for western-developed shooting games has declined rapidly. For all intents of purposes it has died outright.

In the east, where the arcade scene survived for much longer, the focus on skill and high scores reached perfect furious crystal clarity: The goal is not to beat the game or see its “story” to its conclusion. The goal is to be amazing at it.

Shooting games in Japan are considered, as in the west, a niche product, but it is large enough a niche to warrant studios like Treasure and Cave pouring all their effort into the genre, pushing it further and harder than anyone would honestly deem necessary. If you want proof of how strong these developers are in their pure craft, head to the iPhone app store and download a copy of Espgaluda II or DoDonPachi Resurrection; Shooting games by Cave that make better use of the raw hardware than any iPhone game before it (strong claims, but I stand by them). Blisteringly hard, and deeply satisfying on an almost Zen-like level, these games act beyond their visuals and media, becoming exercises in pure game design on a level the west has barely -if ever- attempted in the genre.

DoDonPachi Ressurection (iPhone)

Meanwhile, in the west, we abandoned the traditional shoot’em up, and starting -for real- with Quake, began “our own” shooting genre, one the east would not pay real attention to for years and years to come; The first person shooter. Shooting games with an emphasis on immersion and complexity of tactical space, and an early innovator in skill-based player versus player combat, the genre became immensely popular in the west, while the multiplayer-shy Japanese audience simply wasn’t buying it.

While the west kept innovating the genre towards adding further tactical complexity with the advent of the cover based shooter, Japanese publishers were slowly starting to realize that to keep international sales high, they needed to capitalize on a genre they did not fully understand.

Gears of War - The quintessential cover based 3rd person shooter

So let me tell you about the single best third person cover based shooting game I have ever played.

Vanquish

Vanquish is a Japanese-made third person cover based shooter produced by the godfather of the genre, Shinji Mikami. It’s Mikami’s first game in 4 years, and his first with Platinum games, a studio created by ex-Clover developers when Capcom chickened out of Clover’s artistic niche output. If a third person shooter directed by the creator of Resident Evil 4 and Killer 7 developed by the dudes responsible for Viewtiful Joe, Okami and God Hand isn’t enough to get you at least vaguely interested, Vanquish is probably not for you in the first place. If else, just go buy it. Or read on as I spend way too many words trying to sway you.

From its opening moments, Vanquish hits you square in the face. The short sharp tutorial teaches you the basics of the game as well as its idiosyncrasies over the span of minutes. You spot the game’s visual direction, with sharp, angular surfaces, an abundance of greebles, a rock solid framerate, hard techno, one-dimensional characters that can not wait to get you shooting at things. Having played 3rd person cover based shooters before, this looks and feels familiar, but not. The aiming is slightly different, the camera movement is slightly different.

The game has an immediately apparent “edge” that strongly differentiates it from its genre predecessors. This is a game that has been honed to the degree of a Katana blade; and the thousands of folds this game has undergone have created a game of absolute world class craftsmanship. Aiming is smooth and precise, movement is fast and tight, the stickiness of the cover system is spot on, guns are loud fast and satisfying, and the game’s core gimmicks, the ability to “boost” around the world at hyper speed or jump into a heightened-senses state of slow motion, are satisfying as all hell to execute. It takes fundamentals defined by games like Gears of War and raises the bar considerably.

The story is not the point. You could criticize Vanquish for not building a strong narrative, but here the goal is not to beat the game or see its “story” to its conclusion. The goal is to be amazing at it. There’s a story here to be sure, but it’s barely an excuse for its characters to go into space and shoot the holy hell out of some robots and spout one-liners. That is not to say it’s offensive; Sam Gideon, the player character, is a constantly smoking smirking jerk who is never less than entertaining to listen to or watch as he pulls of chains of unfathomably stylish bullshit. He is, for all intents and purposes, a male Bayonetta without the sexual vulgarity. He exists to wear a crazy high-tech suit and blow shit up while looking cool. And he totally does all those things non-stop throughout the entire game.

The movement

Vanquish is fast and demanding. The familiar movement of running around the battlefield is augmented with lightning fast evade rolls and the ability to squeeze a trigger and turn into a howling rocket-man sliding on your knees across the entirety of the battlefield in seconds, or turn moves like evading or vaulting over cover into gorgeous slow-motion style moves offering you the ability to land mid-air across-the-map headshots with a sniper rifle. Getting into and out of cover is executed with a button press, with the stickiness and distance of the “snapping” perfectly judged.

I have never played a cover based shooter where I felt so in control of the cover mechanic. The closest would be Splinter Cell Conviction, with its “point and click” approach to moving from cover to cover, but compared to this that mechanic seems like training wheels to support poor fundamentals. As you squeeze the boost trigger in cover and Sam slides stylishly around the corner and into the next barrier at hyper speed, a timed press of the cover button putting you right where you wanted to be, not only does it feel good, it feels skill based. It feels like you did it. It helps that movement is coupled with stellar animation work across the board, from facial animations during cut scenes to Sam’s sense of righteous flipping out, looking awesome climbing up a ladder not to mention grabbing an incoming missile mid-air before pile-driving it back into the gun from whence it came.

Small adjustments to the template winds up having a strong effect, such as the way the camera pulls back to give you a bigger view of the battlefield if you run towards it, or how switching weapons while holding down the trigger simply switches the kind of bullet coming out of your gun. It’s just expertly tuned.

The shooting

No weapon is unsatisfying. No weapon is anything less than an absolutely destructive force. Firing a bullet into this world causes -without fail- explosions of some sort, and you will constantly be firing bullets. Always. Enemies go down wonderfully, losing bits and pieces under fire before exploding gloriously. The game pits you against a variety of robots and cyborgs, and for some reason going in I felt worried that this would somehow make for a boring shooting experience. I don’t know what it is about shooting games in the past that have indoctrinated me to believe I have to be shooting people to feel good about gunplay, but there you have it.

The robots in Vanquish are brilliant opposition, with tight AI, group behaviors, endless walls of incoming fire and a superb sense of scale from the lowliest grunt – who can destroy you easily up close and are as likely to duck behind distant cover to take pot shots at you as they are to leap terrifyingly at you in groups for a melee kill – to the absolutely epic bosses. The game is hard as nails from the outset, with the very first gigantic boss countering your ability to hide with instant death rays and missiles that evaporate your cover altogether. You quickly learn to appreciate your freedom of movement, because you need to keep moving constantly to survive, exercising the ability to drop into slow motion for a few precious seconds of calmness as you pick targets and reorient yourself.

Vanquish feels amazing to play. If you ever wanted a third person shooting game with the deeply rewarding skill mechanics of a bullet hell shoot’em up, or the controller-clenching intensity of a game like Ninja Gaiden or Platinum’s own Bayonetta, this is it. It’s absolutely transcendental.

Style

Even if Vanquish was a sub par game to play, it would still look like something you never saw before. From screenshots it’s easy to think its steely grays will become monotone, but what the game does with that art direction in terms of density is unparalleled in the 3rd person shooter genre. There are more individual details going on at any given moment here than your mind will be able to cope with. From the loud, fast, harsh techno soundtrack to the myriads of characters constantly fighting, the way the air is constantly burning with tracer fire, the way entire gigantic space ships will almost casually crash into the middle of the battlefield, or how the intense sound scape fades into a dreamy muted reverberating echo as you drop into blue-tinted slow motion and individual bullets streak past you in a way that seems almost gentle, there was not a moment where I did not look at what was happening on the screen wondering what the hell’s kind of glorious shit I was even looking at.

The game even innovates in tactical space in a sense western games dream they had. One standout set piece has the player board a low-gravity train, taking fire from another train as it spins and loops overhead. When that train went up above me it made me wonder just why the hell I hadn’t seen that before, like the first time I massed Pikmin to move a crate out of the way. Another level has the player fight on a massive conveyor belt between two forcefields, the cover constantly scrolling across the battlefield as combat commences. Vanquish feels fresh and cool and always new.

The characters propelling the game forward are simple caricatures, but it ends up working in the game’s favor. When Steve Blum’s one-note gruff army dude spouts movie references and roomba jokes over a drone of machine gun fire, techno music and explosions, it’s hard not to crack a smile, or like I did, laugh out loud. The characters are guns with voices, and every effort is made to focus the player back on the immediate need to shoot more bullets into robots and look cool while doing it.

This is normal.

Vanquish does not let up. Ever. Literally the moment you are given control you are met with a hail of gunfire and an imperative to find cover, and fast. This continues literally until the conclusion of the game. It’s total sensory overload, and actually makes taking breaks a necessity to get the most out of the experience. It’s not the longest experience, clocking in at around 7 hours, but it’s profoundly replayable. It’s a third person shooter that inspires the same instinct to excel as a fighting game.

Buy.

Or check out the demo. Regardless, please give this game a shot. I have a deep, fundamental fear that this game, which shows up out of a country known for making sub par third person shooters with no big fanfare, will slip the west by. To see fervent expectations for Gears of War 3, which seems content to do what it always did, while Vanquish gets written off as a wannabe, it breaks my heart to little pieces.

I urge you to play the demo at the very least. THIS is the game that moves the genre forward.

PS

Wow guys, how far has the PS3 come? In the early days of drifting purpose as a “computer”, media center, overpriced under-performing games platform, you could have thrown a unit after me and I’d barely pay attention. If I was ever a 360 “fanboy” it would have been then, when the argumentation was so simple to get behind. The 360 had the performance, the games and the online community. Reports of the PS3 being uncommonly difficult to develop for, fed by a number of noticeably poor ports for the system fed this negative vibe even further.

Then along comes Uncharted 2 and makes every critic look like an uninformed asshole. The PS3, in a couple of years, with a redesign and company shift to focus on its capability for technically driven titles, has gone from a turkey to an essential games console. Cross-platform titles have reached a level of parity between the 360 and PS3 that the PS3 has now become my system of choice. I never thought I’d say that, but there you have it. If you were ever on the fence, now is the time to grab one.

My chief complaint about Sonic 16 was simply that the pleasure derived from it was directly proportional to the speed and momentum you were able to build up, and the game adored taking that momentum away from you with enemies coming at you too fast for you to realistically react.

Sonic 16 was the R-Type of platformers, rewarding memorization and trial and error with a sense of exhilarating flow that wasn’t really available elsewhere. That said, when he wasn’t running like a madman, Sonic was, by any standard, a very boring character to play; If you weren’t playing Sonic “right”, I felt, you weren’t playing a very fun game.

Regardless of which port was superior, the 16-bit Sonic was the true starting point of the franchise, a franchise that started out obsessed with speed, flow and momentum, but gradually, literally lost its way with a menagerie of spotlight-stealing supporting characters that wound up diluting the game’s personality to the point where it was impossible to care about.

As the series has evolved, it has become one of the most wayward of franchises. Almost every single title to come out since Sonic CD has been weakly attempting to toss up the formula and find some sort of modern uniqueness to make it relevant, and they have for the most part been failures across the board.

I rather enjoyed the first Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast, but even that game was often a complete bore to play because of its insistence on contrived storytelling and unpolished supporting characters. As the modern titles experimented with Sonic’s sole unique attribute, speed, the emphasis on memorization and trial & error made the games even harder to love.

Them's a lot of generic looking mascot dudes!

Sonic the Hedgehog needs to grow up.

There is light however. There has been one branch of the series that surprised and impressed me. Sonic Rush on the Nintendo DS brought the game straight back to level-for-level traversal with a huge emphasis on constant speed, alternate paths and a trick combo system that aided both your score and your momentum.

Topping it off, courtesy of Hideki Nakanuma (also known for his stellar work on Jet Set Radio), was one of the most fiercely hyperactive rave soundtracks ever committed to a platformer; I don’t use the word “rave” lightly. This was straight up rave, 303s, pitched up samples, cut up breakbeats, outright randomness. This was a game that not only played fast, but felt inherently fast.

The soundtrack was absolutely central to the game. When playing through stages with Blaze, the only playable supporting cast member (thank god), a remix of the original tune would play with more up-beat percussion. The result tentatively approached synesthesia, urging you to go faster, flow better, do more combos, and just headnod like a jackass to the catchy infectious music.

Sega has since abandoned Sonic Rush, and proceeded to create this shit instead.

“Sonic the Hedgehog”, a next-gen “reinvention” of the series that among other things featured Sonic, a surreal blue hedgehog, romancing a generic human princess lady, all set to generic techno rock (the de-facto standard music genre for Sonic ever since its brief ridiculous stint with big-band calypso after realizing it wasn’t 8-bit anymore). Sonic Team seems utterly incapable of evolving the Sonic franchise.  When hordes of fans clamor for the pure gameplay of old (though IMHO this is also misguided), Sega again and again looks to Sonic Adventure for inspiration. It’s crazy.

As Sonic 4 is about to hit us, created by Sonic Rush studio Dimps, playing by the 16 bit template to a fault, I have to wonder if Sega haven’t completely and utterly lost their marbles. I have a vague hope that Sonic 4 will at the very least be a competent platformer, but without a real hook to its character beyond trial and error resulting from unplayable speeds, it blows my mind that they haven’t stolen more from Sonic Rush’s mechanical innovations, such as a trick-powered boost meter letting you maintain your ridiculous speed while simply powering *through* any obstacles in your path.

It started with a few too many Paulaners, reading Eurogamer’s articles on Sonic 4 and Sonic Colors, and the resulting drunken musing;

Why on earth doesn’t a game character named Sonic have any sound-related powers?

One of my favorite moments in the absolutely stellar Limbo is a set piece in which the rules of the game change in sync with a pulsing rhythm in the background music/ambience. Being largely abstract, finding the rhythm in the ambient chaos to traverse a range of insta-death hazards was an almost transcendental experience as a gamer.

Here was a game that understood that a large portion of our brains is continuously working on processing environmental audio, and leveraged it to craft a deeper connection with the player.

Most games are more than happy relegating music to the status of background noise. It’s as though we have music for the sake of having music. Sound is feedback, but we are rarely offered a chance to feed back into the sound in a meaningful way. Some games play around with this, but with the way the market seems happy to overlook the technicalities of sound, I can imagine the interactive soundtrack of SSX Blur, rewarding flow and skilled play with music that “leveled up”, could have been a tough sell to the funding party.

If any franchise has a natural connection with sound, I suggest, it would be Sonic the Hedgehog. From the banality of the name, to the fact that the character’s inherent abilities are tied inextricably to flow and rhythm. I would love to play a Sonic game in which the soundtrack shifts to telegraph challenges, increases in intensity with the gameplay, and rewards flow and skill with not only progress, but with a better experience. Anyone who has played REZ will know the sensation of advancement is as tied to evolving the music as it is to actually winning the game. A huge part of the appeal of rhythm action titles like Guitar Hero is the inherent reward mechanic; By playing better, you get to hear better music.

Fingers crossed Sega will look to Rush again for their future titles. They need some fundamental color like this angle to differentiate themselves; You can’t coast on nostalgia like this forever. Worst case scenario, Sonic 4 will remind veterans of the series of how clunky it actually is in today’s environment.

For a character called Sonic, it’s about time he actually breaks the sound barrier.

You may remember Ang Lee’s underrated movie adaption, and the scenes showing The Hulk bounding through the sky, running along walls and throwing tanks into the horizon; This was a full game of that, with none of it on autopilot. Some games seem designed to make your palms sweaty within minutes, and Ultimate Destruction was spectacular at this. It even leveraged it with a control system where every single thing you did, from punching to jumping to throwing  and ripping at things, was chargeable; By holding down or tapping the button in question the effect of a given move would increase exponentially. This was a game where, if you wanted to hit the guy again, but harder, you could do just that.

When Radical’s next iteration on this style of gameplay hit us in 2009 in the form of Prototype, reviews were mixed. It arrived in close proximity to several other open world action games, some with tighter scope and higher polish, most notably Sucker Punch’s Infamous, a truly impressive open world action game. Perhaps worst of all, Prototype had an image problem, featuring one of the least photogenic protagonists in recent memory.

Seriously, what the hell

This game swaggered out of the gate featuring what would appear to be a cookie cutter anti-establishment story about a government coverup, a superpowered amnesiac urban guy-man-thing with Awesome Powers, set in boring old Manhattan. On first glance, for all intents and purposes, it was an embarassing tribal tattoo of a game.

And then I played it.

Prototype blows my freaking mind, every time I play it.

I played through the game once when it was released and I recently decided to play it again. I quickly remembered both why I love it so much, and also why I think it’s a special game that deserves greater attention.

Prototype plays its premise with a straight face, and a terribly mean spirit. As New York is quarantined and the military attempts to contain a horrible viral disease that threatens to end mankind, Alex Mercer, a superpowered amnesiac infected with a special strain of said disease tries to use his mutations to get back at whoever infected him and “caused all this”. Caught in the middle are thousands of terrified, screaming civilians.

Alex is a complete textbook psychopath. Everything he does is for his own base needs, and his need for revenge. Collateral damage takes up a whole new meaning as bystanders aren’t merely ignored in the heat of combat, but take on the role of thrown weapons, disguises and even food.

As Manhattan is torn to bits by the desperate struggle of the army to contain the thousands of hyperagressive viral monsters, the sky turns red with fire, and the streets fill with the panicked screams of the innocent.

At first while you play, perhaps you’ll try to minimize the collateral damage, swerving to avoid civilians or taking the battle to less populated areas. But all these attempts are futile. Eventually you WILL have to grab an innocent old lady, drag her to the top of a building, hear her feebly cry that you are hurting her, before you devour her alive. To survive.

Attacks upgraded over time, starting at simple punches but inevitably offers devastating earth-cratering thunderbolts as part of your common meat and potatoes arsenal. As you drop from a skyscraper into a crowd, bystanders are pulverized, and after an hour or so of gameplay, you are desensitized. The screaming, panicking innocent just become part of the background noise, already dark with brooding synthesizers and distorted percussion.

Prototype is one dark game, and it’s dark on a scale other games don’t dare approach. It offers you ultimate physical power and agility, to the point where it can barely be contained, and set you loose on the masses. This is a game where you will inadvertently kick a person so hard he will become a bloody surf board as he slides along the ground with your foot embedded in his head. It is relentlessly grim, relentlessly intense, and it just never, ever lets up.

There is no open-world model of hell as complete as Prototype’s, and it is completely stunning to play for this exact reason. Where Infamous toyed around with this darkness, Prototype has no inhibitions. It wants the horror to be front and center, and pulls out all the stops. Compared to the swaths of death Alex Mercer carves through the innocent, Infamous’ heartstring tug at the loss of loved ones becomes almost funny.

Prototype is never funny. It is dark, painful, bleak, screaming chaos. When the sun rises against the Manhattan skyline, it feels ironic.

If Radical hadn’t been impeccable engineers, this nightmare vision could never have been done. The streets are densely crowded, the framerate never cuts, and your movement never stops. Monsters leap and bound after you, as agile as you are, and you never have a second to stop. You need to keep running, you need to keep attacking, and you need to keep surviving. Nothing in Prototype breaks character. It is a stunning technical achievement.

With time, I come to accept Alex’ character design as well. He’s not someone to like. He’s a monster. And playing him is harrowing and primally delightful.

The best way to play the game, if you ask me, is on a well specced PC with an Xbox 360 controller. Crank up the resolution, max it out, put on some good headphones and just immerse yourself in how horrible it all is. It’s stunning.

I mean.. I barely even know what The Peanuts was *about*. Let’s avoid Wikipedia for a moment. There were some kids I think.. And they were bored? Something about a ball. And a piano, and a mean girl. Just existentialist horror through and through. Never growing up through a torrent of mediocrity and boredom. Also there was a dog. The dog was so utterly and thoroughly depressed by his meaningless limited existence that he, if I recall correctly, dreamt up an alter ego for himself as a WWI fighter pilot. You know, to escape endless mediocrity as an slave to an idiot boy who doesn’t care.

Whatever.

So let’s say I don’t have a big place in my heart for Peanuts. I’d go so far as to say I’ll purposefully avoid anything to do with the strip, its annoying meaningless characters and endless repetitive tedium. So normally when a Snoopy game is announced, it simply doesn’t register with me.

But then this thing happened.

I am a hopeless sucker for arcade flight games. Ever since I stumbled on the first Ace Combat (Air Combat) in arcades in the 90s and was introduced to the basic mechanics of what has become the standards for arcade-style dogfighting. I just love the sense of speed, movement, the way the perspective moves.. I can’t explain it in other terms. It’s just deeply exhilarating to me. I’m an absolute die-hard fan of the Ace Combat series, who are banner bearers for the genre, but almost any game that taps into this sense of freedom in flight. Most recently I’ve played a lot of Warhawk on the PS3, and Innocent Aces on the Wii.

Snoopy Air Ace is the Mario Kart of arcade flight games. It is largely nonsensical, happy, colorful, and has planes doing things planes would never do. To man a turret on a map, you essentially barnstorm it, flying into a barn door on its side. The maps go from ice caves to Egyptian landscapes to the Paris skyline. Online game modes offer modes I’d never expect to see, such as a game of football (or Pigskin in game terms) having players pass a ball around trying to take it to the opponent’s goal. Crazy weapons, powerups, and a near constant sense of chaos. Everything blows up, all the time, and you’re spinning and rolling through it all in a gorgeously colorful game world that never slows down.

It’s an expertly produced game that has me absolutely and thoroughly engaged, and I can’t for the love of god figure out why a Snoopy game can be this enjoyable.
It’s not as though the game ignores Peanuts in any way. Rather it thoroughly embraces it. The soundtrack is jaunty piano jazz. The art style is subtly nostalgic. Hell, if you get a kill streak in multiplayer your plane turns into a dog house. It’s a beautifully innocent, gentle game. Shooting down an enemy plane results not in a death, but in a parachuting pilot. As the game is avatar-enabled, in my case this resulted in a mohawked skinny man hopping out whenever I “died”. It’s warm and fun and friendly.

There are problems of course. It has some issues with information. Picking up a powerup doesn’t tell you what it does, and it can be very hard to pick out friends from foes at times. But in the rampaging chaos of a match it never seems to actively hamper your enjoyment.

I heartily recommend it. Hell, it has a demo. You SHOULD check it out. I’ll be online hammering it the coming weeks.

I am not economically incapable of meeting your demands. In fact, I have met your demands time and time again, for close to 20 years of my life. Living in Norway, where almost every expense is a quarter again as expensive, your brutal pricing model consistently transcends reason and oversteps into the domain of prohibition.

The majority of high-profile games media is American, and as such, enthusiasts in Europe are pummeled with the $60 baseline. In Norwegian terms, where taxation adds 25%, $60 ends up being simply multiplied by 10: We are paying 600 Norwegian Kroner for a new title. That’s over $90. $90 for a 5 hour slice of man-shooting is a absolutely hilarious prospect, but that is what we are asked to pay.

In the states, a $30 game is considered a bargain. Half price! A bargain game in Norway costs us about 400 Norwegian Kroner. That’s $46. No matter which way you slice it, it is no longer a real bargain:  In Europe, this bargain price is twice again as costly as a DVD, and you are getting a budget game to boot. You are paying more for less.

I realize our taxation is not your problem, but that is not my message. The message is that the consequences of your prohibitively high pricing are consumers moving to the pre-played market, where pricing is comparatively reasonable. When I picked up a PlayStation 2 late in its run, I was immediately offered a wide selection of absolutely killer titles at a fraction of their original price. I have never spent more money on a console; so much so I had to abandon my rule of keeping the original box and move the DVDs to folders instead. And you never saw a single percent of that money. Doesn’t this drive you absolutely crazy? All this money invested and no gain?

Of course it does. That is why you are making strides to secure sales before your titles hit the pre-played market. Pack-ins, activation codes, pre-order exclusives, we’ve seen a wide range of desperate attempts at securing launch sales in the past year. Some ostensibly to prevent piracy (another topic altogether, but you are getting that wrong as well), but much is done to affect a sort of end-user lock-in.

You may remember another market segment where this was done unsuccessfully: PC gaming. Not only did you fail to affect lock-in, but you effectively caused the industrialization of high-end piracy,  CD-key generators and NOCD executables. You may even say the CD-key concept created modern piracy.

I’ll ask you plain; Couldn’t this be solved by making early adoption more economically viable? Unlike the music industry, still flailing desperately trying to secure sales through intimidation, control and subversion of consumer rights; shouldn’t you reassert market control by making buying the game new the more attractive option? I challenge you to take a hard look at what constitutes an attractive purchase in a shopping environment where every product in sight costs more than 2 weeks supply of food, and identify the actual competition you are up against.

You are fighting a pricing battle, and as it is you are not even putting up an effort. The pre-played market is not only winning, it is wiping the floor with you.

I’ve been playing games most of my life. I know hard workers in the industry, and I have always wanted to work in the industry myself. I have the utmost respect for the work being done on these titles, and as a game enthusiast I cherish the ability to pay full price for a new game and send as much money back to the developers as I can. I love a well-taken-care-of box, clean discs, even the pitiful excuses for manuals you currently put in there. I like games not just as playing experiences, but as slices of time in an industry I’ve been following since the moment I learned how to run by holding the B-button. They are history.

Currently, you are effectively denying people the ability to enjoy games on the same level as they enjoy films or books. You are barricading yourself off as an entirely abstract luxury, and wondering why people want to buy your product from a cheaper vendor.

The cost is not only prohibitively high even for regular gamers and enthusiasts, but the barrier of entry for the next generation of players is keeping the market from expanding; If you want a good look at the success of Nintendo, throwing out a motion controller and casual titles isn’t nearly as significant as the average cost of a third party Wii title, even in Norway.

You are eating yourselves alive, and you are causing me to have to reassess the value of games in my life.

Hello Pre-played market, I didn’t miss you, but here I am again.

In fact, a board game is the best comparison I can think of. You move along a closed world, effectively a  table, the game state governed by a distinct sequence of time based “turns”, where the end of a turn signifies a new round of resources to gather, missions to complete and the like. Adversaries move around like you do, taking resources you need to further your own cause. All players are doing what they are intended to do, and that is where The Void takes the most inspiration from its predecessor; the profoundly masochistic Pathologic.

Pathologic was a game that  knew it was a game, and knew that you knew it was a game. You, the player, have a part to play. You have an intended purpose, and your goal as a player is to follow the script, step onto the stage and act accordingly. Pathologic stated this plainly. You were essentially an actor in the play, and sinister characters would reprimand you if you attempted to break sequence or not follow the script. The Void is much the same, but it is a play where the characters are ALL slaves, to the point of obsession. As you are eased into the world – sparsely populated and obviously long dead – you are bewilderingly met by characters who already know why you are there and what it is you are supposed to be doing. Now that you’ve arrived, “life has returned”. Now that there are enough players, the game can begin anew.

It feels needless to describe the rules of the game much further, because discovering the rules is as big a part of the game as it is to play by them and eventually bend them. Suffice to say the world of The Void is obsessed with Colour; Everybody depends on it for survival, yourself included, and running out of it means a tragic and anticlimactic death. You are always starving. Everybody is starving. And everything you do, from travel to combat to conversation, it all costs Colour. But you can’t simply pick it up and use it. In its raw state, Colour is simply stored. And simply hoarding it is wasting it (and there is no bigger sin in The Void). To use it, and for you to survive, it needs to be “digested” in your body. As it moves through you it passes to a usable state in your “palette”, where it can no longer be used for sustenance, but can be used actively to manipulate the world. But you can’t simply hoard it in your palette either; space is limited. Excess Colour passing through your body is wasted. And Colour is always passing through your body. That different shades of Colour act differently in your body adds another level of complexity to what quickly becomes the most demanding economic simulation you likely ever encountered.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The world responds actively to your use of Colour, and you are never told explicitly how. You are even given conflicting information, and you are left to intuit what does what and why what happened when. In this day and age where game experiences have been practically homogenized to allow even the briefest attendant a notion of mastery, The Void is flamboyantly ignorant of such banal terms as “usability”. The Void is nothing without its mysterious and chaotic world, where one character will ask you to perform one cryptic task, only to have you be reprimanded for it and asked to reverse what you did. The Void keeps you on toes you didn’t know you had.

All this, and I have neglected to even mention what the game looks like. One “level” consists of a pale, platinum blond girl resting in what appears to be a suspended gondola, unblinkingly staring up through a hole in her ceiling at the moon, which happens to be staring back. From a sky made from blasted rock.

The game is simply a stunning collection of set pieces. It’s practically a gallery of surrealist landscapes and characters, who speak to you in riddles and poetry, all bleak. For a game about Colour there isn’t much of it around. This is an utterly blasted landscape. Whatever was pretty here is now gone.

It’s a tough game to build a real opinion of. The prevalent sense, even after hours and hours of play, is that you are not really getting it. I’m certainly not sure I’m enjoying the game in the traditional sense. I can’t describe it as “fun”. It is blisteringly difficult to understand and get into, and will often punish you much later for things you did early. It demands absolute effort and attention, which by definition makes it a game unsuitable for a jolly good relaxing time. But it is a fantastically interesting game, and never stops being interesting.

A long session of The Void made all other games in my collection seem primitive. I’m very happy we have PC gaming and distribution such as Steam to let us get a taste of this kind of divine madness, painfull or not, in a market that seems more than preoccupied with making another military shooter or franchise sequel. I’m eagerly anticipating what Icepick Lodge does next.

Hi Roger

I wrote you an e-mail a while back (which you printed) lamenting, in nicer words, how someone so in love with one form of art can be so ready to cast stones at another.
This article saddens me. A lot of the comments too.

I’ve had a few evenings now with my dad — a teacher of art for as long as I’ve lived — trying to show him why i value games as much as i do. It is proving incredibly difficult. Games often stand strongly *in memory* rather than in the moment, and a game’s duration is in several, perhaps dozens of hours; Not something you digest quickly and easily. To sit a person down with a trailer and assume he or she will “get” any of it is astonishingly arrogant, which unfortunately is true for a lot of gamers; We simply can’t fathom how someone can not understand how fantastic this is, and why they should spend hours upon hours of their lives experiencing it. We don’t get it.

Games saturate you in their subject matter, letting you wander and observe from any angle, whereas films, ironically, often adopt a tell don’t show method in this regard. James Cameron gets a lot of credit for creating worlds with his films. This is what (the better) video games have been doing for the past 20-something years. I reckon world-building is an art.

A game itself, presented as a technical design of successes and failures, may not be immediately identifiable as art. But there can be no denial of the amount of art that goes into the production of a game; Music, cinematography, writing, 2D and 3D artwork, not to mention programming; Engineering is certainly an art.

I suggest you look at games as sort of a themed museum. Perhaps it will give your soul some rest on this matter.

Ps. I’ll go out on a limb and say Braid has some horrible writing, and Flower is the dullest pretentious makeover Pacman has ever seen. Art for arts sake is always a doomed endeavor.

This is what the game is like at any time you want it to be.

I have logged 70+ hours of Fallout 3. A fair portion of those hours are arguably just me futzing about or travelling from A to B, but I’m willing to bet I was still having a game-related goal in mind. In Just Cause 2, I’ll steal a plane just to fly high and jump off into freefall. You know, just because.

And for the view.

The world is vast and gorgeous. Moving around it is tactile and liberating in its disregard for physical law. I’ll stumble onto a military facility and spend 10 to 15 minutes or so simply blowing everything up. The explosions are fantastic. But then i move on. The shooty bits are alright. Enemies fly around with exaggerated ragdolls and comical gouts of red. Attacking helicopters are gnats to be smacked out of the sky. You are absolutely all-powerful, the only possible failure being a death by a thousand little cuts as persistent enemy fire wears you down. You shoot things until nothing is shooting back, then you grapple hook yourself into the sky, open another of your infinite supply of parachutes, and you’re off to see the view again. The horizon at dawn is amazing.

I have 20 hours of Just Cause 2. The number is shocking to me. Playing through Silent Hill Shattered Memories on the Wii I took my time, and clocked around 8 hours of play. 20 hours of JC2 has me both yearning to go back to that enormous gorgeous world and fly around again. But I still have absolutely no interest in it as an actual game. It’s a fantastic sandbox. Perhaps this is all it needs to be? Goals are fleeting, personal and improvised. Strap an enemy soldier to the rotating blade of a windmill and watch him fly. I spent a good half hour working out a way to yank a beached boat off into the water again, only for it to flip over when i finally succeeded. At this point, how can I flip it back over before it blows up (as all sandbox game vehicles do when flipped upside down; a jarring mechanic in this post-Halo world)? Another physics puzzle of my own making.

Strong words, but for my buck Just Cause 2 may be the first truly modern sandbox game. I am having improvised fun for hours and hours, and it’s hard to stop. It doesn’t thrive on giving you a big world full of activities and goals to complete. It simply plonks you down into a REALIZED world, gives you a fantastical toolbox and leaves you to your own devices. You can go around Just Cause 2 for hours without firing a single bullet. It’s astonishing. I’m a big fan, and I’m also honestly feeling a bit distraught by it. I have Red Steel 2 sitting on the table waiting to be played, and so far what that game has shown me has been much more of a real challenge than Just Cause 2 even remotely attempts to be.

Red Steel 2 is a game. Just Cause 2 is a holiday.

Coming from meaningful experiences like Silent Hill or Heavy Rain to what basically boils down to tourism with explosions makes me feel deeply conflicted. After all, I’m in this for the stories. GTA lost me until Nico Bellic brought me back with a real character in GTA4. Silent Hill Shattered Memories had me genuinely moved at its end; honestly, there were potential tears at one point. Just Cause 2 technically has “a story”, but what you take with you from it is really the stories you wrote yourself.

It’s obvious that these DRM implementations are experimental at best, with every game appearing to try a new approach. While Assassins Creed 2 simply dumps you out of the game should your connection go down, C&C4 and SH4 both withhold game progress until a connection can be restored; a relatively lenient approach, but still absolutely draconic compared to past DRM.

DRM has always been a problem with PC gaming, but conspicuously reserved for the paying customer. While piracy is an enormous problem, pirates have always found a way to circumvent new DRM, and as such the short end of the stick is handed candidly to the paying customer while pirates are free to play games without shackles. I will freely admit to buying games in the past only to download no-cd patches/cracks simply so I won’t have to keep the disc around. DRM of this sort stands a better chance of making someone a lawbreaker rather than prevent lawbreakers from access.

This issue is entirely relegated to single-player games. If you are playing an online game, you’ll obviously need to be online, and most publishers have their own proprietary online service to double as DRM, such as Games For Windows Live or Steamworks. For these games, piracy is a deeply remote option. The latest DRM developments are fundamentally flawed in their assessment of the people who play single-player games and the internet connections they have; If your access is down, what kind of game would you want to play?

Making it work

The question for me isn’t whether this is a good thing or a bad thing or if it can be stopped or whatever. It’s happening. Games in the future will require online functionality for verification. It is simply the only way to realistically safeguard and meet the expectations of publisher shareholders. The question isn’t if pirated copies are lost sales or not – “if a tree falls and nobody is around to hear it”. The question is, how can you make online functionality a core feature of the game? How can you make the need for a connection valuable to the single-player gamer?

First to mind is convenience and streamed content. Games grow and grow in scope, and require more and more drive space. Recently, Aliens vs Predator requires a whopping 15 gigs of HD space to install, and this number is becoming the norm. Perhaps a game could be split into chunks downloaded on demand, so a player can get a basic game client, sign in to the service for validation, and then download the required assets. This is much like how Guild Wars worked, which was arguably as much single-player as it was multiplayer; Entering a new scene would download the content needed and store them locally for future use. Eventually you may well end up at 15 gigs, but you are no longer limited to disc space or lengthy downloads of full installers from digital distribution services.
At this point i am still able to play the game offline for as long as the content needed to play is cached.

Not optimal, but it already has real benefits for the enduser, real benefits for digital distribution, and carries the possibility that ANY game can be moved to an episodic format.

So let’s stop talking about how EVIL this always-online DRM paradigm is and instead consider how it can be molded into something mutually beneficial. Developers want paying customers, paying customers want the best possible product they can get. The internet is leveraged for online games in this way; Why is it so difficult to imagine single-player games benefiting in the same manner?

But i love Dreamweb to death. Because i infer.

In 1992 i was 10 years old, and despite trying hard, completely incapable of understanding what Dreamweb was all about. It was a Blade Runner-esque dark sci-fi trip into a perpetually rainy city where the protagonist, Ryan, is suffering through a psychotic break.  Ryan, through his dreams, receives messages from a mystical council of hooded monks, who assure him the world is going to end unless 7 powers are stopped. These 7 powers conspire to tear apart the Dreamweb, which i assume is akin to Stephen King’s “beams”; the fabric of reality. These 7 powers are contained by 7 people. Ryan must murder these seemingly completely unrelated 7, or the world will end. As such, the game boils down to 7 murders. The puzzles are essentially murder scenarios to be played out.

In waking life, Ryan is miserable, working as a bartender in a dive bar. His frequent nightmares and messages from the dream world are beginning to distort his perception of reality, drives him into a deep depression, skewing his priorities to the point of open neglect. His girlfriend, Eden, a receptionist at Sartain corporation, is at the point of the game’s start weary of Ryan’s constant nightmares and turn towards the dark. She loves him, but he is drifting away from her, and she’s realizing that at this point she can do nothing but watch.

The game begins as Ryan wakes up from yet another apocalyptic nightmare. He’s been given the name of the first power, and has reached a point where the dreamworld seems more real than reality. He is convinced, and sets out to perform his divine duty. It’s the middle of the night, at Eden’s apartment. Eden sleepily tries to console her boyfriend, but drifts off, as Ryan gets dressed and exits into the perpetually rainy neon-lit metropolis, knowing only his target’s last name.

Granularity

The heart of Dreamweb’s appeal is atmosphere. Almost every element of the game is fanatically detailed. A common criticism of the game was the ability to pick up nearly every item that wasn’t bolted down, which resulted in a whole heap of confusing puzzles. Why, for instance, would you need a screwdriver to bend open a locked cabinet when you were already holding a full set of cutlery? It’s telling that the game’s UI contained a separate zoomed-in per-pixel view of the cursor’s surroundings;

This was a game that knew it was firmly embedded in a hardcore pixel-hunt and gave players a sniper scope to carry out the grim task. It was also not above putting players in situations where, if they failed to pick up a key item, they could leave without it and never be given the chance to get it back. Knowing what a key item was was hard enough to begin with.

Rather awesomely, the game models a sort of 1980s conception of the internet, being console command driven. Ryan can access a terminal to check his mail and the daily news, as well as check the contents of the game world’s common storage unit, the Cartridge. Some cartridges hold information vital to advancement, but the world is literally strewn with red herring cartridges, and the process of digging out the gold could be absolutely maddening.

The murders themselves, the payoff if you will, were loud and graphic. Ryan’s first kill involves breaking into a penthouse hotel room, burying an axe in the chest of an unsuspecting man, taking the head off another with a gun, and coldly executing his target as he begs for his life. The red flows free and often, and morality is never a question. Everyone is rotten, and anyone can die.

All this is framed in a wonderfully moody synth-based soundtrack by Matthew Seldon, which elevates the game from oddity to something quite special. If anything is fondly remembered about the game these days, it’s the music.

Dreamweb flounders a bit in terms of storytelling. It paints a broad picture of a man who thinks he’s saving the world, but is wildly out of control, and bombards us with hints that he might not be mad at all. Taken at face value, Dreamweb is a basic story of a Jesus figure who suffers for our sins and saves us all from chaos and oblivion, and for me this was both its largest strength and weakness. It begins with enough hint that Ryan is simply going bananas, but spends the last two thirds of the game reassuring us that he is in fact right. We are never forced to question our motive for murdering these people, and characters close to Ryan vanish as soon as they appear. The game can’t see the forest for the trees, and struggles to draw emotional investment. The mystery dies quickly, and leaves us with atmosphere and gore. A concept this good deserves so much more.

A Unity3D remake

I’ve been scrambling for a Unity3D project to devote my time to, and I’ve always gravitated towards the adventure game. Dreamweb is a wonderful place to visit but a tough place to stay, and every time i boot it up i recognize more things that could be bettered. A dark cyberpunk murder-scenario psychological adventure game? Why not give it a go!

I’ve been working on a Dreamweb re-imagining for the past month. I’m doing basic engine work at the moment, putting the mechanics into place for puzzle mechanics, item use, inventory management and, yes, combat. The game will be a first person adventure game in the vein of Penumbra, with a large emphasis on atmosphere, physical interaction, item-on-item puzzles, social engineering, computer interfacing and short, sharp combat. This is not a first person shooter. Bullets are important and big events, and a single one will do.

Besides this, i am writing a new script. The outline and characters are the same as the original game, but dialogue, puzzles, locations and core elements of Ryan’s character are thoroughly altered. So much so i am considering hiding Ryan and his name, as well as making his gender ambiguous.

I’ll keep posting news here as i go on. For now, as a teaser, here are the first 3 pages of the script for your perusal. Enjoy, and do post feedback! Dreamweb! Yeah!

If you haven’t played Animal Crossing on the DS or Wii, i strongly suggest that you find an opportunity to do so. On its own the game is addictive, but its weird implementation of massively multiplayer online play is really worth a long look. Nintendo are infamous for their friend code system, which puts users who want to play together through a good few burning rings before they can actually do so. Because of this system, you will never openly communicate with an identifiable unknown. The system allows for play with random strangers, but communication seems to be reinvented every time. If you are connected friends, you might get a full suite of options, but for random strangers you’re typically given what amounts to a few emotes and canned phrases. For a game with MMO pretentions, this is obviously hugely challenging.

Animal Crossing lets users that aren’t connected friends “interact” through side-effects of their actions. I had a real moment of wow when i spent a few irrational minutes making a pixel perfect nazi swastika pattern and put it up in my clothes shop for my (already utterly irreverent) animals to wear. Soon, the swastika pattern had migrated from my town to my few friends’ towns. And then the ball just rolled from there. Friends of friends of friends of friends would see nazi animals show up in their towns.

Media in Animal Crossing spreads like a disease. It’s a viral mmo.

An animal will show up in your town and ask for a new catchphrase. The next day, it might have moved out to another town. Which town? You’re not the one who decides. This lets you communicate ideas, but only to random recipients. This system is epitomized in the bottled mail system, which lets you write a message, put it in a bottle and toss it into the sea. Whoever gets the message is apparently completely random, throughout the online service. I have gotten bottled messages ranging from ascii cats to sorrowful suicide notes.

This is what makes Animal Crossing so enticing for adults i think. A combination of pure OCD collectomania and a world that seems wildly chaotic. In my mind, after a few weeks play, an Animal Crossing town is like an out of control train in a tight turn teetering on one rail.

What we begun putting together today is a purification of the bottled mail system. An anonymous client that lets you post messages into a pile, and retrieve random ones you haven’t written yourself. When you retrieve one, it is removed from the database. This ensures that a message is anonymous and personal. Of course, the system is widely open to abuse, but i actually don’t mind that aspect. Sitting on the beach sifting through debris for gold, you’re likely to find a whole lot of junk.

I’m hoping the system will find a place as a way to let off steam, and let off guilt. Somewhere to confess, or to be heard by someone who will know that somewhere, out there, a single individual posted this thought for a single individual to read. The internet is so often about the individual entity spreading information as widely as possible; the cluster bomb collateral damage model of information.

This narrows the focus back on the individual recipient, and theoretically eliminates the egotist exhibitionist publisher.

It’s the Anti-Twitter, anti-Facebook. It’s not about the masses, but the individual, sporadic connection of strangers’ eyes meeting sporadically through the window of a passing bus. The prototype is in development here, and I hope you’ll find it interesting as it evolves. At the time of writing it has almost no effort whatsoever put into the UI. Making it pretty comes next.

Oh Tecmo. Seriously. Fuck you, you god damn imbeciles. You’re sitting on one of the best action adventure properties of the modern world, and you resort to this shit. You stupid motherfuckers. Watch me Ninja the eff away from your brand.

Merely concept art, this stuff is nonetheless absolutely abominable. I would love to see stuff like this on Deviantart, but as a visual guideline for a Mickey game? A post apocalyptic steampunk Disney universe. How BORING could you possibly be man?This is the least Disney Disney Disney has ever seen! Disney was ALREADY steampunk! Not “x-treme” enough for you?

Tell me, mr designer hero man, why the world needs another rosy red ideal painted over with the moral grays and apocalypse browns of the post 911s. We already live in a world smeared with shit, and we like nothing better than to add more depressive shit to it. If your idea of brand renewal and going further is by taking the chief characteristics and utterly reversing the polarity, i must confess to serious misgivings about your ability.

There is a rich cosmology to take from. There is a largely overlooked internal logic to the Disney universe that could be used to create an interactive experience where the most mundane things of day to day life could be made mad and incredible, but you choose to break everything and shove it down the post-apocalyptic game world dead-end. Make a darker, edgier Gummi bears while you’re at it.  Jesus fucking christ. We do not need more of this brooding depression.

You should be ashamed.

It turns out either i had misunderstood, or my opponent had, but having been told every team would be freshly rolled i was surprised to meet an experienced team of Lizardmen featuring a scrimmage line of  level 2 sauri all equipped with the block skill; a serious problem for a rookie Skaven team, which hasn’t matured enough to feature any players really capable of a good punchup.

Blood bowl tackles (or “blocks”) are carried out with sets of special dice with icons for the various results. One of the results is “both down”. If player A attempts to block player B, and his roll comes up “both down”, he goes down along with his opponent, causing a turnover, forfeiting any further moves this turn. “Block” is a skill offered to certain player types, or won through level advancement, which essentially replaces the “both down” result from the die with “opponent down”. A block-equipped player will never go down on a “both down”.

Lizardmen teams are divided into two core player types, “skink” and “saurus”. The skink is lightning fast, dodgy and agile (though weak), while the saurus is a bumbling monster that can barely pick up the ball, but can cause serious damage to opponents. As a Skaven player, my primary weapons are speed and agility, and i’ll be spending as much time staying AWAY from the opponent as i will be  trying to get the ball into his end zone. If i allow a player to be blocked, it’s a complete gamble in which “both down” is practically a jubilant occation. Facing a team of dedicated blockers, like the dwarves, skaven defense will be piled high. In advance i was glad to know i was facing Lizardmen, as they have no inherent block skills, granting me the dubious boon of possible both downs. Not so against this team.

Dauntless, i spent my pre-match balancing cashes on extra rerolls and went forth. Blood Bowl is after all a game governed chiefly by the winds of luck.

Unfortunately for me, the winds of luck were firmly against me the first half. My scrimmage line (the players at the very front facing the opponent) were systematically smashed to bits every kickoff, my super-speedy slippery gutter runners had terrible luck at my favorite play (which is to simply grab the ball, cross my fingers, trust in dodges and rerolls and just run for it) and i faced a rapid set of dramatic failures, coupled with ruthless precision play by my opponent, netting him a rapid fire soulcrushing 3-0 before halftime, a failure i hadn’t imagined in my wildest dreams.

The thing with Blood Bowl however is that failing is often as fun as winning. You’ll make plays purely on gut instinct, fingers crossed, and be delighted if it succeeds or lament your own boldness when it typically fails. The best parts however is when failure has a cascading result. A brilliant laugh-out-loud moment occured early in the second inning, where a pass failed repeatedly, with one player dropping the ball back into the square it was passed from, the passer failing to pick the ball back up and sending it back to the original target square, where the pass is finally picked up correctly, saving me from 3 narrow turnovers in quick sequence.

The second inning went much better, netting me two textbook touchdowns with gutter runners, and in the indominable way of Blood Bowl, gave me temporary christian faith. For an agnostic, it’s stunning how readily i’ll resort to prayer when a series of dice rolls is at hand. This is definitely why i succeeded; Jesus. Jesus made me roll higher.

Regardless of my temporary luck, my rapidly diminishing manpower was really causing me trouble. At the latter quarter of the game a mere half of my team was on the field, with his entire team still in place. In spite of my best attempts, he aborted my final attempt at evening the score with a brilliant play netting him the final touchdown of the match at the very last second.

At 4-2, i’m effectively out of the cup. None of my players gained levels, and worst of all, one of my 2 precious storm vermin (skaven capable of actually blocking okay) wound up with a broken collar bone and a -1 modifier to strength. An expensive storm vermin with a strength of 2 is borderline useless; He could conceivably be blocked by the weakest players in the game!

The state of Ratzeputz after their first match (and defeat)

All said and done, i had a lot of fun. I went up against a powerful experienced team and almost came out even. I sincerely wish my stormvermin (named Airwolf, sadly) hadn’t sustained his crippling injury, but with a pair of gutter runners on the verge of levelling up, that’s a small price to pay; my other (far more successful) Skaven team plays without stormvermin altogether.

I’m looking forward to the leagues. I’m not entirely sure i’ll keep playing with this exact team or i’ll reroll the lot of them, but we’ll see. Until then, lots more practise!

Blood Bowl was originally a popular tabletop board game by Games Workshop (of Warhammer fame) from the late 90s, depicting a fantasy version of American football pitting elves, orcs and the like against each other in a game that’s equally as much about luck and chance as it is about tactics and strategy, with persistent team members (adding a management and roleplay aspect to the game) as well as a high bodycount; putting your star players in harms way might just get them killed!

Recently, Cyanide games have produced a PC version of the game, and while it’s sort of a mess in terms of polish and presentation, the board game itself remains intact, complete with online multiplayer.

I’ve never played Blood Bowl before this, and my opponents are veterans, but it’s not a very complex game to learn, and because the game has such a large element of randomness to it i figure i stand as good a chance of failing miserably as of failing gloriously. I’ve spent the past week playing a bunch of games against the AI, learning the ins and outs of the various teams and figuring out a play style i agree with.

At first i was drawn to Orcs, as playing the game in a bashy, agressive way is instantly satisfying. As much success as i was having beating opponents to a pulp however, i wasn’t scoring a whole lot of touchdowns. After experimenting with more agile teams like Goblins and Elves, i eventually became rather comfortable with the Skaven. Skaven are essentially evil rat-men with a sharp emphasis on moving fast and dodging out of the way. They have exactly NO tools with which to break through a solid defense, but get their hands on the ball, and a touchdown is rarely more than 2 turns away. Provided you can keep their impossibly fragile frames out of your opponent’s reach that is..

Ladies and gentlemen, i present to you my Skaven Blood Bowl team:

Team Ratzeputz!

Blood Bowl players tend to grow personalities as they grow experience, so i’ll refrain from describing every individual rat just yet; They aren’t very varied as it is.

I’m set to play my first match this week, pitting my team of Skaven rat-men against a bunch of stinky lizards. Lizardmen have highly specialized player types catering to both the bashy side and the speedy side of the game, but nothing inbetween. I found them hard to play, and i’ve won my best victories over lizard teams. Then again, an AI is never anywhere as devious as a human player..

I’ll be back with a game report once it’s over. Predictions? I’m gonna get my ass kicked in a most epic way.