I've moved from Pittsburgh to Silicon Valley!

I'm spending my last semester in Silicon Valley!

The good:

The time zone change means all the websites I check daily update earlier now.

The girls. Pittsburgh? No girls.

Rail transit. I have no idea why I like rails so much.

The weather. Pittsburgh? No weather. It's weird - the daily weather report is always just the word "no," and the entire city is, day-and-night, suffused in a sourceless gray light.

The bad:

Local grocery store is Safeway instead of Giant Eagle. Now when I'm cooking meat for someone, I can't plausibly say I got it from a giant eagle without breaking a lot of laws.

No harsh, murderous winter. It's going to throw off my internal rhythms if there's no part of the year when Death Himself rides in on a cold front and molests every inch of my exposed skin.

The cost of living. Pittsburgh? No cost of living. When you arrive in Pittsburgh, the Matron (the less said about her, the better) shows you to an apartment that has been appointed to you. Mine was okay, except for the constant, soft sobbing that sounded a lot like my own voice.


Four good, three bad. Consensus: Happy!

Soul Calibur IV: a Non-Feminist Review

I think we can all agree that a female perspective on games is a good thing, whether it comes from a hardline feminist or a bound-and-gagged sex slave. But it’s important to remember that gender isn’t the only lens through which games can be approached. So as a thought experiment, I’ve decided to review Soul Calibur IV in a way that is not only not feminist, but which completely excludes women, female issues, and female needs from the discussion.

In short, I tried to begin this article by completely forgetting that women exist, and proceeding from there. See what you think.

Soul Calibur IV

First Impressions:

I was a little distracted by some of the characters in Soul Calibur IV. Don’t get me wrong, the character design is quite good, and I don’t mean I was distracted by the presence of sci-fi icons Yoda and Darth Vader. What I’m referring to is this: there were quite a few characters with basically familiar human proportions but a physique that was distractingly unfamiliar.

Let me see if I can describe it: they’re a bit shorter than average, and a bit – how to say it – curvier? Particularly striking are the two protrusions, “lumps” you might say, front-and-center on the torso. I flipped through the instruction manual to see if they might be a fantasy race, like the Black Plastic Head People that Darth Vader hails from, but I didn’t see any explanation.

I know, I know. It’s a fighting game, I shouldn’t be delving too deeply into the backstory. But I saw hints that the inclusion of these characters was well-thought out; for example, they tend to be referred to as “she” and “her,” which I assume are honorifics on their homeworld. You don’t put that kind of detail into your characters without some kind of reason. I know Vader and Yoda because I’ve watched Star Wars; is there some hugely popular sci-fi or fantasy series that explains these other characters? Or perhaps some other video game, one that details how they live, work, and play beach volleyball?

I have to admit I’m intrigued by these creatures, and I’d like to learn more if someone could point me in the right direction.


Sound, Graphics, Gameplay, Balance, Fun, and Story:

I couldn’t be bothered to evaluate these things. Too intrigued.

What I Believe, part 1

Games are the new journalism. And "new games journalism" is the new new games journalism journalism.

I've Recently Been Annoyed by Quick Time Events!

So... Quick Time Events.

Really. Truly. Who. Likes. These. Things.

I don’t mean “who likes games that have contained Quick Time Events,” I mean who likes the Quick Time Events specifically. Is there anyone?

I see what developers are trying to do with QTE’s. They’re trying to combine cinema sequences with interaction. Very noble, but it’s hard to imagine it being done worse, at least without malice. Yes, as a player, I want to be in control of my avatar as she jumpkicks a nuclear missile and bites the head off a lava monster, but unless you can give me real gameplay during those moments, I’d prefer to just watch. It’s good that you’re asking “how can we let the player control the missile/lava monster sequence?” but the correct answer is not “by pressing the square button once”.

As Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw said in his Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune review, if you’re going to make QTE’s a part of the game, make them a core part of gameplay. But I’m going to do Yahtzee one better (I’ve been doing that to him his whole life. He hates me) and name a game that actually did a good job of that. It’s called Indigo Prophecy, or Fahrenheit, and a great many of its cutscenes are overlayed by a Simon-like game which roughly mirrors the onscreen action and which determines your success or failure.

A game of Simon is far from the most graceful interface for an action sequence, but take note: this is what it looks like when QTE’s are stretched into a full-fledged element of gameplay. And get this: they’re preceded by a message to “get ready!” So unlike, say, Heavenly Sword, where I can never tell whether a cutscene is going to let me relax, the user interface communicates clearly how and when I should interact! What a fresh concept! Except totally, completely not!

Did I manage to keep a positive tone in this post, despite my annoyance? I’m going to say I did! I’m terrific!

Gaming Goofus and Gaming Gallant: Comparing adultswim.com's Gigolo Assassin with Telltale Games' Sam and Max

"But Trent," you say, not even giving me a chance to start my own article, "how can you have the same expectations of a free flash game on a cable channel's website and a professionally made game from a dedicated game studio?"

I'm reeling a bit from your pre-emptive ire, but the short answer is, I don't. But that doesn't mean I can't draw comparisons, and it doesn't mean I can't have minimal expectations. I realize these are two strange games to talk about, since there are relatively few point-and-click adventures on the market, but they're a pretty clear-cut example of a user interface done right and done wrong.

In case you missed it, Gigolo Assassin is an old-school point-and-click adventure, in the same way that trepanation is old-school medicine.

I'm sorry, I can't decide if I want to be one of those angry reviewers who constantly exaggerate their fury at poor game design. Time will tell.

Anyway, what I mean is that Gigolo Assassin divides your interactions up into "Pick Up," "Look At," "Use," and "Talk to," while Sam and Max combines all meaningful interactions into a single-click interface.

Believe me, I understand how the divided interface came about. You do different things with different objects. And it creates design space for puzzles involving objects that you should look at, but not pick up. Because… y'know, everyone likes things that you can look at but can't touch.

But really, there may be one or two decent uses for that kind of interface. But none are so compelling that it justifies the aggravation that the interface causes. If I click on a bottle of poison, the game can safely assume I want to LOOK AT it, and maybe PICK IT UP, but not USE it on myself or TALK TO it. Unless it's a talking bottle of poison, in which case the game should make me talk to it by default instead of waiting for me to guess. By the same token, if I click on a person, the game can safely assume I want to TALK TO her and LOOK AT her. No meaningful challenge is lost if "click" always means "interact with or perceive this object in every rational/purposeful way possible." If you want to make certain interactions optional, then prompt a separate "drink poison/don't drink poison" interaction.

Do you know what happens when I lose my way in a Sam and Max game, and I can't reason out a way forward? I click on every object in the world. Do you know what happens when I lose my way in Gigolo Assassin? I click on every object in the world four times. Actually, I select each option, then click on every object in the world. That's eight times the clicks. That's punishing. It's defeating. And, sure, I should be able to figure out point-and-click puzzles without having to retrace every possible interaction, but the game should account for the possibility that I can't.

I feel like a persistent theme of my reviews is that it's good to make games easier for the player. That was even the theme of my gimmick review of the deathtraps in Saw. I honestly feel, though, that I'm always promoting not simply ease but user friendliness. I thought Braid was brilliantly designed, after all, and there's plenty of people who can vouch that it's not an easy game. I suppose you could argue that the single-click interface for takes away too much challenge because it does work that the player should be doing – that, in a well-designed adventure, it's should be player's job, not the interface's, to observe and judge. But I don't see divided interfaces being used that way. I see them being used to punish me for TALKING TO a man but not LOOKING AT him, and so failing to notice his nametag or something. As if I was averting my gaze from him the entire time we were talking. You know, like people do.

I also see it being used to punish me for not knowing which items I'm allowed to pick up. As far as I'm concerned, usable items in adventure games fall more or less into two categories:



1. Obviously useful items, like screwdrivers or keys, which the game shouldn't even have to ask whether I want to take. If I were on some sort of adventure in real life, I would grab these even if I had no specific need for them at the time.

2. Really obscure items, like dirty napkins or broken pencils, which the game should automatically make me pick up because I would have to be insane to independently guess that they would be useful.


So I think I've made my case that frustrating and clumsy interfaces are bad, and don't constitute meaningful difficulty. Another triumph. Tune in next time when I guess I'll pick an even higher- and lower-profile pair of games and draw unflattering comparisons between the two. Or come back in a month when I'll be explaining why Portal is better than Jim's Awesome RPG Maker Game.

Braid

Sometimes there’s a new idea that changes the world because it fulfills a desire that nobody knew they had. And sometimes a new idea is powerful because it fulfills a desire that everybody has always, always known they’ve had, but they’ve felt like a pussy for asking for it.

Any video game you’ve played, you’ve wished you could take back a mistimed jump or a brush with a touch-of-death enemy, but errors like that are where the challenge comes from, right? How can you make a game where errors are instantly and easily reversible, but still gives players a challenge?

Well, that’s Braid. And Braid’s greatest triumph is not its graceful weaving of story and gameplay, or its gorgeous artwork, or even its clever and logical puzzles. It’s the way it fulfills our desire for forgiveness in our games (forgiveness is, in fact, the theme of the first world, which introduces the time-reversal mechanic). Braid encourages you to learn how its world works, and lets you learn in the best possible way: by making as many mistakes as you need to. Braid pays homage to Super Mario Bros. in more ways than I care to list, but rejects, in the strongest possible terms, its unforgiving gameplay(granted, the Super Mario series, and the industry in general, had already rejected it). Where Super Mario Bros, and countless other early platformers, demanded hours and hours of your life, honing reflexes and restarting levels, Braid wants you to reach the end as quickly as your brain can take you there.

Of course, the wind of game design had long ago turned toward forgiveness, as a consequence of the gaming market expanding to include people without infinite free time. We have FPS’s where your health regenerates, action games where you reach a checkpoint after every accomplishment, and platformers where extra lives are in arbitrarily large supply. Braid is not a revolution in that sense, but it does represent a high point on the “challenge versus forgiveness” graph.

The official website of Braid will tell you that its puzzles are “reasonable,” and that is no empty boast. The world of Braid is logical, and made of small, easy-to-grasp pieces. Once you’ve beaten World 3 (the second world), the environment practically has no new surprises for you, just familiar elements arranged in a different and challenging way. There’s only a couple puzzles that I would consider a logical stretch. I’m reminded of Telltale Games’ Sam and Max series, which are absolutely the best point-and-click adventure games I’ve played, because they do away with the sort of “use spatula on tiger” nonsense that adds artificial, hair-pulling-out difficulty to some of the genre’s older offerings. Granted, Sam and Max’s approach to logic is a bit more madcap than Braid’s chrono-logic, but both games understand that real challenge comes only from a game that makes sense and communicates clearly with the player.



Story’s a little tricky to address, with Braid. It’s less a game of story and more a game of themes: case in point the aforementioned “theme” of forgiveness in the first world. Each world is preceded by brief text passages that tie an emotional state to the prevailing game mechanic of that world. Before World 4, where time runs forwards and backwards as you run forwards and backwards through the level, you will read (or ignore) passages on how different places evoke different times and different memories. After that, the levels themselves contain no text, no ruminations, no sense of a story. But the theme sticks in your mind, and lets you do the thinking for yourself. In an interactive medium, game designers are constantly trying to figure out how to better tell a story without taking too much time and control away from the player. The way Braid manages it is a hell of a trick, if you can pull it off. The last level in particular is a wonderful and surprising – but logical – merging of gameplay and story.

I’m a firm believer that, limitations aside, an interactive narrative has tremendous potential to be personally meaningful, even without trying to script out twenty different endings or create a world of perfect freedom. Braid succeeds because it has something to say, says it, and gets out of the player’s way.

Ninja Gaiden II

Ninja Gaiden II is in most ways a skilful refinement of the previous game, which is what we had every right to expect. Mind-blowingly new features are all well and good, but to be perfectly honest, they have their place and I suspect it isn’t here. I was impressed with the way Metal Gear Solid 4, for example, stuck to its core gameplay but took it in engaging new directions, making new demands of the player. But the Ninja Gaiden games are not thinkytime games. When I sit down to a game of Ninja Gaiden, I expect to slip blissfully into a warm bath of ninja limbs and backflips. Occasionally my higher-order brain functions will rouse themselves to solve a dead-simple puzzle or suggest a charge-up attack instead of my default “flying decapitation technique no matter what” strategy, but overall I’m not looking for an intellectually challenging experience. Ninja Gaiden is a workout for the twitch reflexes, and most of the time it’s a well-crafted one.

The most noticeable improvement on the previous game is solving a number of control issues that hampered freedom of movement. In creating Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox, the developers boldly – BOLDLY - envisioned a game that let you move like a ninja, but they only took it halfway.

Okay, more like nine-tenths of the way. But there was still room for improvement. For example: that “flying decapitation technique” I mentioned got its start in the previous game, and it got my love for being a fun and practical way to move around in combat. Jump, slash, and you’re fifteen feet forward, usually behind a headless opponent. Kickass. The problem was, it only worked when an opponent was within range, as if his cooperation was somehow required. So I’d misjudge the distance between myself and my opponent, and instead of diving forward like a hawk, I’d slash in midair and fall straight back down into a cluster of enemies. Ninja Gaiden takes away the arbitrary restriction on the technique, and they make other tweaks to combat that generally make the player feel more like a ninja, free to leap about and cleave apart lesser martial artists.

And the other martial artists you encounter are very lesser, which is as it should be. No single enemy grunt is going to present a challenge, which is why they attack in at least threes and sometimes in waves. The game has an auto-heal system after encounters, as well, which is another trend in gaming that I’m really fond of. Nobody likes limping to the next encounter with three hit points and no healing items, knowing that a single enemy bitchslap will kill you. Regenerating health, or in this case a checkpoint-based health refill, is a great way to keep the player from having to ever, ever do that.

Enemy mooks are, as I mentioned, pushovers. The bosses, though... look, I don’t object to hard bosses. I also don’t object, at least in principle, to you-have-to-die-a-hundred-times-and-memorize-his-pattern-flawlessly bosses. I don’t object to them, I just reserve the right not to play their games. So when I say the bosses in Ninja Gaiden II are too hard, it’s not just because I suck. It’s because the game doesn’t prepare you for them. There are no grunts who interrupt my combos, or whose combos I can’t interrupt. There are no grunts who dodge my decapitation attack without explanation, or who pull off several combos in a row with minimal indication of when it’s going to be safe to attack them. At least not in Novice mode. You want to throw a tough boss at me, fine. But get me ready for it.

I’ll admit that games tend to be favoring playability over difficulty these days, and a game that demands as much from the player as Ninja Gaiden II – even in easy mode – is rare. But the reason for that is that game design is being refined. Like phones and computers and all manner of interactive devices, games are now made with an educated understanding of the player’s needs. Needs like “having at least a glimmer of an idea of how I might approach the next challenge.” And that decreases difficulty, in the same way that eyesight decreases the difficulty of birdwatching.

Ninja Gaiden, along with games in general, is in a tough spot, challenge-wise. A predictable, Mega Man-style combo wouldn’t be nearly challenging enough for a Ninja Gaiden boss, but when the developers take it in the other direction and – so it seems – try to mimic the experience of facing a strong, unfamiliar opponent, it just becomes unpredictable, which makes the player die a lot in the process of figuring everything out.

Ooh! Ooh! I know! What if you were fighting an opponent with unfamiliar moves and patterns, but in a game where failing to react properly generally resulted in a clash of swords rather than damage to your flesh? That way, you could carefully parry and read the opponent’s moves until you were ready to strike back! Yeah, I like that. It may sound less challenging, but since Ninja Gaiden forces you to spend about the same amount of time figuring out your opponent, why not cut out the constant dying and reloading?

Well, I’m sure that game has its time and place. For now, Ninja Gaiden II is more or less what the fans expected, and it does right by its predecessors. But I have my differences with it – differences that I will take to my grave, once I am hacked apart. Again.