Boogie: Superstar

At the beginning of the year, I received a copy of EA's Boogie from a friend who had, herself, received it for free. She had a nasty case of the flu at the time, and in retrospect I should have been leery of her attempts to foist any games on me, at least not without searching Metacritic for the phrase "so bad, it might give you the flu."

Boogie wasn't a good game. Its dancing mechanics, at least what I saw of them in the tutorial, were "huh?"-inspiring - just complex and silly-looking enough that I couldn't persuade myself to bother learning them. If I'm going to expend effort to make myself look like a fool, I will do it on my own terms, thank you.

That may sound mentally lazy, but in doing game design myself I've learned to put myself in the shoes of the average player, who fears change and balks at steep learning curves. You can teach this gentle creature to do amazing things, and show them new and fantastic worlds, but only if you don't spook them right out of the gate.

Boogie's tutorial - God, I barely remember, but... there were these creatures I was supposed to keep an eye on, and I had to move around the stage, and... it made me say, "no, I'm not doing that."

And just like that, I was done playing Boogie. I just wanted a game that asked me to keep a rhythm, and Boogie wasn't that game.

Plus, its characters were... A starfish, right? Who acted like Elvis? That was one of them. I'm not opposed to wackiness, but that character concept has just enough staying power to be a one-off Conan O'Brien joke.

"Here at the Late Show, we promise to do only highbrow, socially relevant humor. Isn't that right, Starfish Elvis Impersonator?"

As a relateable player avatar, it just doesn't work. So I had to try Boogie Superstar, which, from the previews I saw, was about humans and seemed to have a reality-show aesthetic, which struck me as instantly more engaging than whatever Boogie Classic purported to be about. And I don't watch reality shows, singing-based or otherwise.

Boogie: Superstar's a pretty solid game. And if you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe the TRIFORCE OF HAIR:



Basically, the game has you doing simple, arm-based dance moves in rhythm - pointing, doing an arm roll, miming a lasso or a drumbeat - and switches it up enough to keep things interesting. The got the note of simplicity right - dancing is supposed to be about the way music makes your body move, and cluttering that up with anything else is just diluting the fun. And damned if Boogie's dance moves didn't get my hips moving. Imagine that!

That's not to say that Boogie: Superstar is-

Hold on. Are you still imagining me moving my hips? Because I didn't say you could stop.

That's not to say that Boogie: Superstar is perfect; it suffers from the same interface woes that all Wii games do. For example, I'm occasionally instructed to "jump," and I do, and the game doesn't think I did it right.

I've been jumping my whole life, Boogie: Superstar. How long have you been around? Couple months, tops? Yeah, I thought so. I know what jumping is.

But Boogie:Superstar's not bad. I didn't look too deeply into its multiplayer, or its full songlist, but its core gameplay works: Keeping rhythm with a song is mindless fun, but mindless fun is still fun, which puts it ahead of a lot of other games. It didn't keep my interest for all that long, and I don't see it catching fire outside of the teen girl demographic, but I could see myself playing it again if I ever found myself in front of it. Imagine that!

And keep imagining it until further notice. Cheers!

Dead Space

So Dead Space is basically a party where a lot of good design choices got together. The first thing you'll notice is what I'll call the "Right-Shifted Third Person Camera," which is what it sounds like: a camera that shifts to the right side of your avatar at all times. This gets your guy mostly out of the way of the camera, which is sort of a toss-up between a normal third-person camera. It mostly works, but there really are a few times when I wished I knew what was going on to my left. Mainly what the camera does is make room for the plot-justified HUD, which is a series of holograms that pop up to your avatar's right, presumably generated by his technometal jumpsuit. It's very useful for the player, although the angle at which it pops up is of dubious usefulness to the suit's wearer. I suspect everyone in the future has some kind of repetitive stress injury from constantly craning their head to the right in order to see their suit's pop-up window.

Dead Space is a beautiful implementation of HUD-clearing-away, or whatever you'd call it: all the holograms make sense as conveniences for the suit's user (Isaac), and items of constant concern are displayed as various meters on the user's back. The life bar is a glowing flexi-rod that sits over the spine, and your oxygen meter appears as a little countdown on your back. If we assume that the same information is displayed on the inside of Isaac's glowy maskplate, then it makes sense to display this information somewhere the user can't see it - if you don't think so, wait for the section of the game (brief, I assure you) where you're protecting a woman from monsters. You'll be happy that her health is displayed on her spine.

The level design is very good, very tight. At first its purpose is to usher you from scripted spook to scripted spook, which it does well, but when Dead Space opens up a bit and becomes more game than movie, it also works admirably as a series of battlegrounds that allow each encounter to play out in a way that's at least somewhat fresh. And the navigation system, which gives you glowy lines to follow, upon request... GAME INDUSTRY TAKE NOTE: Until you find a way to make aimless wandering fun, please always make sure I know where to go next. Thank you.

Obviously Dead Space isn't the first game to give the player good navigational tools. But I so often found myself thankful for them that they deserved a mention.

Combat's beautiful too. A symphony of mutilation, is what I'd say if I were a slightly creepier person. Actually, I think I am a slightly creepier person now that I have played and enjoyed using the Ripper on enemies.

Let me explain: in Dead Space, the dominant strategy is spelled out for you: CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS is written in blood in the first battleground, and it remains the rule throughout the game. The tools you're given let you aim for flailing limbs and hack them off at a distance, which gives a frantic sense of strategy to encounters and provides you with a lot more options than boring ol' "shoot for the head." We're all really good at shooting for the head now, game industry. Take a page from Dead Space and give us something else to do.

Anyway, the Ripper is a weapon that levitates a spinning saw blade about six feet from you, functioning as a sort of medium-range chainsaw. Whether you're chopping off legs or giving that circular saw a tour of your enemies' gut, it's a grotesquely satisfying weapon. The other weapons are a bit subtler, if the term "subtle" can really be said to stick to the experience of punching through a tentacle with a line of hot plasma. The various types of enemies give combat a sense of priority, and the wide-beamed default weapon lets you strike a comfortable balance between firing frantically and lining up shots. When your weapon is essentially a foot-long blade, you have to aim carefully - but not so carefully that you become monster food in the meantime. It gives combat a perfect sense of pacing.

Speaking of pacing, Dead Space's overall story and objective progression is likewise great. From the minute you get on the ship, you have your objectives, handed cheerfully to you by the other members of your team. And it always feels like you're accomplishing something. There are setbacks, but for the most part you are steadily progressing from "no hope of escape" to "some hope of escape." You can't send a distress signal, so you fix that part of the ship. Then you send the signal but you can't get a response, so you fix that part of the ship. A lazy game would give you one objective and a villain that keeps you from reaching it over and over until everything seems pointless. In Dead Space, you're in constant danger and overwhelmed by enemies, but you have the feeling you're getting on top of the situation in one way that counts.

And as for the rest of it? The store works really well, the weapon upgrade system is pretty good (I've never liked having to permanently devote resources to upgrades, because it's hard to know what's going to be the most useful weapon later on, but the store system gives you a decent way to correct mistakes: upgraded weapons sell for huge coin, which you can use to buy more of the "nodes" you use to upgrade weapons. So you can sell your upgraded weapons and try again, at a loss). The story's good, if not mindblowing, and the atmosphere is dark and forbidding without being crushing and miserable.

I do have one beef with the story: Isaac comes to the space station partly because he's looking for his wife. She might be alive, says everyone. We'll find her.

But I took one look around that place, and I didn't believe for a second that she was still alive. The odds were just really badly against it. That's not a spoiler, by the way. I'm not telling you whether she is alive or isn't. I'm just saying I never felt like she would be. That sort of ambiguity is difficult to create; maybe if they'd given me some reason to believe it? Like, I don't know, she's part of a science team that operates in a heavily secured area of the ship, equipped to survive on its own indefinitely. Then maybe I'd give her a fifty-fifty on managing to seal herself in there safely.

But maybe that's how I was supposed to feel. Resigned to the probability of her death, but seeking her out because, on the tiny sliver of a chance that she's alive, I have to save her.

Okay, I like this game even more now.

Anyway, it's a great game overall, certainly among the best survival horror has to offer, maybe even the best, all things considered. Like Silent Hill 2 if you made the story a little bit worse and the combat about infinity times better.

MS Paint Adventures: Besides, you don't have enough MANNERCITE SHARDS in your ETIQUETTE MONSTRANCE for a polite request.

http://www.mspaintadventures.com/

I barely know how to talk about this, it's so incredible. All I can do is describe it simply: it's a faux adventure game, run using suggested input from visitors to the website. Sounds bland enough, until you read it and see the expansive imagination of Andrew Hussie, the man behind the show.

It's something unique, a blend of the demanding rigidity of computer games and the inspiring fluidity of a pen-and-paper (or live, whatever) role-playing games.