Change of address; do not be alarmed

Well this is a good couple of years overdue, but I only just remembered this thing existed, so now's a good a time as any for me to announce that I've moved my blog (and my various other web-type activities) to my actual website: tombattey.com.

Go there, read some stuff, and let's hang out!

Dark Souls

(21/10/2011)  By now, you will know that Dark Souls is hard.  ‘Prepare to die!’ screams the launch trailer, and die you shall, but though the game takes every opportunity to kill you, death is not really the point.  Like Demon’s Souls before it, the core of the Dark Souls experience lies in the meticulous balance between risk and reward.  The odds you must overcome, which will at times feel almost unfairly stacked against you, make overcoming them something of a euphoric experience for those with the stomach to persevere. 

This will kill you.

Dark Souls is the spiritual successor to Demon’s Souls, one of my favourite games of this console generation and, indeed, ever.  Everything that made Demon’s Souls great is reprised in its pseudo-sequel.  I stand by everything I said in my review of Demon’s Souls, and everything there applies equally to Dark Souls, so for a comprehensive run-through of why these games are so good, I suggest you read that.

Instead, I shall focus on how Dark Souls differs from its predecessor, and even surpasses it, for there is little question that the this is the superior game.  Dark Souls is more than a spiritual sequel to Demon’s Souls; at times, it feels more like a re-imagining.  Concepts and characters from the original reappear here almost untouched; the fire-breathing gargoyle boss that spawns a friend just as you think you’ve gained the upper hand, the sorcerer that clones himself to surround you, the oppressive toxic swamp level and that one bastard who promises you treasure and then kicks you into a hole.  There’s much here that will be familiar to veterans of the original, and will surely raise a smile.  

The real difference here is that these elements are now tied together into one great sprawling world.  This massive world is truly Dark Souls’ greatest achievement, invoking a level of immersion unattained by its predecessors’ mostly linear stages.  The level design in Demon’s Souls was impeccable, but here it is a taken to a new level.  The surprisingly varied environments are woven together with a masterful hand, with shortcuts opening out into areas previously visited and far-off caverns promising access to unexplored lands.  The greatest praise I can offer to the game’s design is that, vast and sprawling as it is, I never felt the need for a map; the twisting tunnels of Lordran are firmly etched into my memory as if it were a place I had personally explored, rather than a particular ingenious work of level design.

This too.

Dark Souls is, contrary to the title, a much brighter game than Demon’s Souls, which entertained itself almost exclusively with dark passages and oppressive abysses.  These are more than present here, don’t get me wrong; Dark Souls is more than happy so send you treading through the tombs of giants in utter darkness, or venturing into a boiling netherworld.  But it is also unafraid to send you through shimmering crystal caves or across the balustrades of a sun-drenched palace; these moments of beauty belie the grim fiction of the forsaken world you are swept up into.

It is also a much larger game than Demon’s Souls.  I remember finishing that game in something like forty hours; this one took me more than sixty, and there are still areas I have yet to explore and bosses I have yet to fight.  Every time you think you are pushing the boundaries of the game’s world, it opens up further, sending you deeper down into its hellish interiors.

It is enough to say that Dark Souls is a bigger, more open and more beautiful version of Demon’s Souls.  It feels as though this is the game that From Software wanted to make in the first place; only with the budget afforded from the success of the original were they able to realise their often nightmarish but unquestionably brilliant vision.

And this.

What faults there are are largely technical.  Sections of the game suffer from some seriously debilitating lag, occasionally causing me to wonder how this passed through testing.  Lag such as this would be an issue in any game, but here, where the difference between life and death can rest on a split-second reaction, death through technical fault is unacceptable.

The game’s peculiar yet inspired online system suffers too from technical issues, though how much of this is down to my own broadband connection I cannot say.  Several times, a player would attempt to invade me and fail, and the game would leave me locked behind fog walls while it tried to reconcile connection issues with XboxLIVE.  This happened rarely, but when it did my only solution was to quit the game and reload.  I lost nothing but a few seconds of playtime, but even so, this is an area that lacks the laudable polish of the rest of the experience.

There are times too, especially towards the end of the game, where it threatens to tip the fine balance of its difficulty towards frustration.  Forcing you to retread trying gauntlets to re-engage with a seemingly impossible boss is Dark Souls’ bread and butter, but the triumph of this design lies in artful balancing of risk and reward, and certain late game sections begin to feel vindictive in what they ask of the player.  The same could be said of parts of Demon’s Souls, but in a game so much bigger and so much broader, the thrill of the challenge occasionally – and only occasionally – threatens to become muddied by frustration.

This will also kill you.

None of this truly detracts from the triumph of design that Dark Souls represents.  This is a videogame wholly unique from its contemporaries, a starkly pure vision of what a game can be.  It will certainly not be to everyone’s tastes, and isn’t as immediately playable as the myriad blockbusters released this fall, but to those who can appreciate this sort of games, Dark Souls is one of the finest videogames you will likely play in a long while.

107,429

(04/10/2011)  And then there was a second draft.  Yes, it's time for one of my ever-so-infrequent updates on the progress of my novel.  And while it's much harder to call this second draft 'done' than it was the first (where I just wrote until I ran out of story, and which point I stopped), this concludes the first stage of editing required.

What this means in hard maths is that a story that was once 119,651 words long is now 107,429.  That's a difference of 12,222 words, or about 4 chapters.  There are now 29 chapters where there were 33, with very little change to the overarching story, which says something about the flabbiness of my first attempt.  Draft 2 is leaner, sexier and more muscular than the first, and while it's still short (or, in actually, long) of my goal of a sub-100k word count, such an objective is now looking achievable by the third go round.

Another key improvement is that the central story caveat is now set in stone.  This is obviously something I should have done sometime before I started writing, but, at the end of the first revision, I now actually know what's going on in my own story. 

This alone is going to make the next editing session much more enjoyable, and much more productive.  With a really solid knowledge of what's going to happen, I can now work on seeding these events earlier on, and cut out anything that isn't relevant to the end goal.  Before, I had a vague idea of what was going on, and kind of wrote towards that, often changing ideas or adding new caveats whenever it suited me, effectively writing off huge swathes of story that I'd written previously.  It is a lot of fun to play with different ideas, but when experimenting with an idea involves abandoning tens of thousands of words worth of work, it's far from productive.

The next step, now that the ideas are set and the story reads correctly from start to finish, is to go back and polish these ideas, enmesh the technology I've designed more completely with the story.  This is the fun part, the bit I like doing most.  I get to separate the story into individual strands for each character, and treat each one as if it were its own novella.  This way I get to establish the characters and their voices more completely, but I also get to add in and polish lots of little details that I may have overlooked when writing the broad story arcs, the fun little clever bits that make a science fiction story enjoyable to write.

To use an analogy I know very little about, the body of the building is now complete, and it's not going to fall down.  The next step is to add the facade, the adornment that makes it stand out from all those other buildings.

 Gears of War 3

(03/10/2011)  For me, the first Gears of War was the game that justified my purchase of a spangly new high-definition games console.  It was the first game that didn’t seem like a polished-up PS2 title, that felt like a genuine generation leap forward.  All that much-lauded ‘next generation’ tech was finally being used for something.  And it was great.

Five years later, we have Gears of War 3.  The end of the trilogy, arriving in the impending twilight years of the Xbox 360.  The technology that once seemed so promising and powerful now feels everyday, even a little dated.  People are looking towards the future, towards the next Xbox.  And Gears of War is still great.

New baddies keep things fresh.

There’s little to say about Gears 3 that you won’t already know, other than that it’s Gears of War at its finest.  The formula that made the first game seem such a revelation was so close to perfect in its first iteration that only the tiniest of tweaks have been made over the course of its two sequels.  Gears 3 will not change any minds; if you loved the first two, you’ll love this equally.  If you’ve never liked Gears, there’s nothing here that’s going to change your mind in the slightest.

Some areas are surprisingly pretty.

This is probably the best Gears campaign yet, and that’s largely down to the pacing.  After working on three games, Epic have got the formula down to a fine art.  They know where to place choke points, where to allow downtime and when to break it, when to throw in a turret section; it’s something Gears has always done better than many of its contemporaries, but this is the tightest iteration yet.

It’s also bigger, bolder and brighter than its predecessors.  Fittingly, this final chapter contains more grand set-pieces and large-scale battles than ever before.  The maturation of Unreal Engine 3 shows in the number and variation of the locations you visit; a far cry from the almost monochrome palette of the original.  Gears 3 is, throughout, a surprisingly varied and colourful journey.

Plus, there are girls in it now.

There’s also a stronger story focus this time around, with the plot established over the last two games finally reaching its long-awaited conclusion.  It may finish rather abruptly, and doesn’t answer as many of the series’ long-standing questions as I would have liked, but in truth, I don’t really care.  Gears of War is not about accomplished science-fiction; it’s about shredding grubs with a chainsaw bayonet, diving into cover amidst a storm of bullets and tearing through the horde with a sawn-off shotgun, and it does all of these things impeccably.

It’s enough to simply say the Gears of War 3 is Gears of War 3.  It’s exactly what you’d expect from the conclusion to one of the most well-respected series of recent years.  Perhaps now Epic are looking to the future, working on a game that will come to define the next generation of console in the way that Gears did this one.  Whatever the case, they’ve crafted a fitting end to the Gears saga; grand, violent and bombastic, Gears 3 stands confidently amongst the finest of modern shooters.  As if anyone expected it would be otherwise.

 

Ode to a PlayStation 2  

Dark Chronicle

(30/09/2011)  Whilst digging through boxes during my mission to transfer all my worldly possessions to one place, I came across my dusty old PS2, and became a little bit nostalgic.  I also discovered my collection of PS2 games, and felt and immediate urge to go and play them.  I resisted, on account of there being so many shiny new modern games out in the next couple of months that I’m going to have scarce enough time as it is.  But once I’ve slogged my way through this years’s blockbusters, I’ll be firing up the PS2 again for some nostalgic time with some classic games.

God Hand

The PS2 era was something of a halcyon time in my gaming history.  It was the gaming era that dominated in my formative years, and coincided with me owning my own money for the first time.  I could go out and buy games indiscriminately, to start building up a library, free from the old ‘one for Christmas and one for your birthday’ constraint.  Not having to buy food, clothes, petrol or second homes for MPs meant that pretty much all my money went towards games, and not having a job or a social life meant that all my not-at-school time was devoted to gaming.

Okami

So I played a lot of PS2 games.  A lot of them were rubbish, but a few of them were great.  Properly, lastingly great, in a way the very few games of this console generation have been.  I’m inclined to agree with the people who suggest that the PS2 era represented the peak of console videogaming; where technology and creativity could perfectly intersect.  Consoles were finally powerful enough to render humans that looked like humans, with recognisable facial expressions and distinct clothing.  We could do audio that sounded proper, and have characters that actually spoke.  But at the same time, development costs weren’t so enormous as to restrict depth and creativity.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

Modern technology can certainly render object with a fidelity that makes the PS2 look laughable, but it does so at the expense of the deeper experience.  Modern versions of older franchises are by necessity more linear and less interactive that their forbears; look at the original Deus Ex compared with the recent Human Revolution, or Final Fantasy XII next to Final Fantasy XIII.  And who could afford to take a risk like God Hand or Ico on a modern platform?

Dragon Quest VIII

None of this is to say that modern games are worse than those of the previous generation; they’re just different.  Games are moving away from broad, deep experiences and towards more controlled, cinematic ones.  This is fine.  And it’s worth noting that while I hold up the PS2 as the pinnacle of the videogaming experience, there will be people ten years my senior who would offer an equally informed opinion of why the Super Nintendo era featured the best games we are ever likely to see.

Persona 4

But, as we run full-force towards the always-online, digitally distributed and publisher controlled future, stamping gleefully on the shiny round plastic of our past, it is worth stopping occasionally and dusting off a trusty old companion.  It’s worth recalling a time with no installs, no firmware, no DLC or DRM, no online passes or pre-order exclusives.  It’s worth recalling, if only to remind ourselves that things haven’t always been this way, and to appreciate those games that have defined our tastes, and, by doing so, which define the impact we have on the future of our medium.

Now with that out of the way, back to Gears Of War 3.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

(16/09/2011)  Some games are RPGs.  Some are shooters.  And some shoot for the stars – spanning genres far and wide and combining elements from across the gamescape, aiming to become some sort of mega-game, an experience that defies genre with expansive grandeur. 

The original Deus Ex is amongst the first of these grand hybrids; it’s most recent successor, Human Revolution, matches itself against the likes of Mass Effect, Bioshock and Fallout.  And even with such stiff competition, it stands out as a unique and gripping experience, and presents a world well worth investing time in.

2027 is breathtakingly imagined.

The issue that occurs whenever a game promises to explode genre staple is that there’s always compromise.  It’s impossible for a modern game to be a great shooter, and a great RPG, and a great open world game, and a great story game.  Parts of the gameplay invariably suffer in the bid to balance these often conflicting elements.

And balance is something that Human Revolution excels at, possibly more so than its peers.  While no individual element can match a dedicated genre game – as a shooter, it’s stiff yet functional, as a stealth game, it’s somewhat shallow – it displays a masterful hand at combining these elements into a cohesive and engaging whole.

In short, there were very few points where I found myself wishing it was better, something that can rarely be said of similar cross-genre experiments.

Player choice is the fulcrum of the Deus Ex experience, and it’s this sensation of freedom that is Human Revolution’s strongest individual feature.  It’s not a massively open game in the way something like Fallout 3 is; instead, it presents you with many fixed situations, each with countless different ways to tackle them.  Sneak in, hack the security system, and climb out through a vent, or talk the guard on the door into simply letting you stroll through?  Almost every mission feels charged with countless possibilities.  This focus on player choice and experimentation is refreshing in a gaming environment that seems bent more and more on restricting the player’s impact on their own gaming experience.

Much is owed to Blade Runner.

I get the impression that a lot of this choice is not in fact as sweeping as it seems while playing, and certainly as the game moves on the artificial nature of its apparent openness becomes more obvious.  Vents are conspicuously placed, boxes of just the right jump height are noticeably snug to troublesome walls, and once you’ve fully upgraded your hacking abilities the whole thing becomes a trial of patience rather than skill, and you move slowly through the game hacking everyone and everything with ease.

More impressive is how the game adapts to your style of play – at one point fairly late in the game, having tired of sneaking everywhere, I decided to simply waste everyone in sight.  Once the somewhat dumb AI adjusted to the shock, the game adapted easily from a tight stealth game into a surprisingly solid cover shooter.  The robust formula encourages players to experiment, and while the game displays a definite favouritism toward the stealthy player, it does reward any style of play, something I don’t think another game has done so well since, perhaps, the original Deus Ex.

Gunfights are rarely the only option.

It’s something of a shame that the character upgrade system doesn’t reward specialisation in the same way.  At first, choosing where to place each upgrade point feels vital, often the difference between winning or losing a mission.  But by the end, if you’ve even been half-attentive to the side-missions, you can’t avoid becoming a cyborg powerhouse.  All the carefully placed obstacles become irrelevant when you can either blow everything up with a shotgun or simply turn invisible and wander through entire facilities.

You will get used to office infiltration.

Then there’s story, which builds a compelling and believable 2027 only to spiral down through countless sci-fi clichés and nonsensical plot-twists to end in a convoluted mess.  This is compounded by the fact that major plot points are often skimmed over in painfully brief pre-rendered cutscenes, leaving me checking my mission log to find out what was actually going on.

And of course it doesn’t end well.  Following in the footsteps of Bioshock and Fallout 3, Human Revolution falls apart in its final hours.  Freedom, choice, basically everything that makes the game great are stripped away, ending in a bizarre and misjudged boss fight followed by little more than a slideshow and some exposition.  It’s certainly more whimper than bang.

All of this dampens the overall experience, but doesn’t stop Human Revolution from being a great game.  Despite some poor story beats, questionable boss fights and a limp ending, for the vast majority of its playtime Human Revolution is grand, confident and enthralling.  It’s a rare game that offers real freedom for experimentation while suffering little of the crippling compromise that often plagues games of such scope.

Science Fiction in an Interactive Medium

(06/09/2011)  Whilst busy crawling through the many convenient air ducts of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, obsessively hacking everyone's email account and occasionally stopping to give some hapless security guard who no doubt hates his job a few broken limbs and a serious case of concussion, I came to the conclusion that videogames may be the perfect platform for science-fiction stories.

There are two main elements to science fiction, whether on page or screen; the narrative, that is, what the characters are doing, and the idea, the special set of rules that make a specific sci-fi universe unique.  Whether writing for page, screen or stage, the art of writing good science fiction is in the balancing of these two elements.

Focus too much on the narrative at the expense of the idea, and your left with characters navigating a world that seems vague and badly thought out.  Focus too much on the idea, and your left with a detailed and nuanced world populated by boring characters doing nothing much at all.  In my experience with the genre, the balance of narrative and idea is one of the most difficult aspects of writing science fiction.

 Videogames circumvent this issue of balance by allowing the player to control these elements, to govern how much of the world’s lore they want to absorb.  If they’re only interested in the drives of their character and the immediate plot, then they can effectively ignore the world around them and barrel through the main story.  Those of us more inclined to become immersed in a game’s fiction can spent time pawing through every environment, constructing a great mental map of the world the writers’ have built for us.

All the great science fiction games do this, from Deus Ex and Mass Effect through to Half Life and Bioshock.  All of these games build their fictional world by hiding the details away, there to find for those that are willing to search but of no crucial importance to those who would rather just reach the next checkpoint.

By far and away my favourite part of Human Revolution is the way the writers have built their fiction, through liberal dispersion of eBooks, pocket secretaries and emails, strewn throughout the game world waiting to be uncovered by my inquisitive, level-5-lock-hacking fingers.

But I also realise that many people’s favourite part of the game will be a perfectly executed stealth assault, or conquering the next boss, or fully upgrading their pistol.  These people won’t bother seeking out all that hidden information, beyond perhaps promise of an achievement.  What’s great about the interactive format is that it’s entirely possible to cater to any and all audiences.

When writing passive fiction, you’re always going to alienate a section of the possible audience, however finely you strike the balance between narrative and idea.  I can’t write a novel that is at the same time a great action novel and a studied theory of a future society.  I can choose to do one or the other, or strike a compromise and land somewhere in between, an exercise that will still alienate those geared heavily towards one preference or the other.

It is possible for a game to be a great action game and a great story game, however.  A game writer can create content that is both broad and deep, and leave it up the player how they want to experience the story.  It’s a different approach from the games-as-cinema ideal that many modern blockbusters ascribe to, also to the interactive narrative approach hailed by games like Heavy Rain, and, topically, Deus Ex.  The story itself doesn’t have to be interactive, but the way that it is told can be.  The player decides how much of the story they’re willing to absorb, and thus craft their own experience.

RPGs have been doing multi-level storytelling for years, but the trait has now crossed into other genres; even mainstream heavyweights such as Gears Of War and Halo feature optional diaries that fill in the game’s underlying narrative.  Portal’s wall scrawls hint at a deeper plot untouched by GladOS’ narration, there for those who are willing to speculate.  A game doesn’t have to be a ‘story game’ to be a solid work of science fiction, it merely needs those two crucial elements, narrative and idea, and to allow the player the freedom to explore both of these as they see fit.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have facilities to infiltrate, walls to punch through and conspiracies to uncover.  And probably another hundred or so virtual eBooks to read.

 Shadows Of The Damned

“Taste my Big Boner!”  Garcia Hotspur grips his Boner firmly with two hands, thrusting forward with his hips as he fires salvo after salvo from its throbbing shaft.  Around him, demons with televisions where their faces should be crash to the ground amidst neon spires, overcome by his weapon’s penetration.

(26/08/2011)  Shadows Of The Damned is a silly game.  With a relentless sense of humour that regularly crosses the border from innuendo into plain absurdity, it’s never as funny as it thinks it is.  Still, it’s a rare game that entirely eschews sanity in favour of balls-out (sometimes literally) zaniness, and while it caters for a very specific taste, it should be applauded for the effort.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that Shadows Of The Damned should be better than it is.  A joint effort from two of Japan’s most influential developers, Goichi Suda (Killer 7, No More Heroes) and Shinji Mikami (God Hand, Resident Evil 4), it should have been extraordinary.  Instead, for all the silliness and attempts at humour, it’s disappointingly ordinary.

Bosses are a highlight.

That isn’t to say it’s a bad game.  It’s a solid, simple, and satisfyingly old-school third person shooter.  It says something for the prevalence of modern gaming tropes when a lack of chest-high cover and regenerating health can feel refreshing.  Big chunky power-ups, bosses with a plethora of glowing red weak spots and weapons that develop wacky secondary-fire options over the course of the game give more than a nod to a now-lost era of shooters.

This ain't you father's underworld.

It’s clear the developers had fun designing the game; the number of ludicrous set-pieces they’ve dreamt up play out like the fantasies of an adolescent drunk on Red Bull.  Their vision of the underworld is a colourful departure from the standard bleeding-red-walls portrayal so often depicted in games.  Garcia will run across the giant undulating body of his captive girlfriend to find himself in the middle of a demonic Las Vegas strip, surrounded by towering demons.  You rarely have the chance to look at one thing long enough to get bored.

In fact, the game seems so terrified of the player getting bored that it becomes a bit schizophrenic at times.  Some of its attempts to distract from standard shooting work – a rotating-room puzzle late in the game is surprisingly well thought out, and underused – while some do not – multiple run-from-the-instant-death-girlfriend sections are purely frustrating, and a shoddy but ‘hilarious’ side-scrolling section overstays its welcome.  An interesting light-and-dark mechanic adds welcome variation, while ‘find the key to put in the door’ puzzles derail into tiresome plodding about.

You will learn to dread this.

Shadows Of The Damned is a decent game; it’s as serviceable as any other almost-AAA shooter out this year, and a lot more visually interesting than most.  Its grindhouse-inspired vibe goes a long way to raising it above the competition, but it’s hard not to wish for more, given its developer pedigree.  Good as it is, is doesn’t come close to either Suda’s or Mikami’s finest work.  Through no fault of its own, the game feels like a missed opportunity.

 

Bastion

Words can’t express what happened, but they’re all I got.

(04/08/11)  There are certain games that make me wish I could buy their developers a drink.  Bastion is such a game.  On the surface, it’s a simple dungeon-crawling RPG with some lovely graphics and a neat method of narrative delivery, but it’s underpinned by some fantastic design decisions that set it amongst XBLA’s finest offerings.

Bastion comes across like a playable fairytale.  The narrator’s gravely tones guide you through the game world, giving life and history to what would otherwise be merely pretty window dressing through which to hack-and-slash.  It immediately made me wonder why more games haven’t used this method of storytelling, as it effortlessly solves one of the biggest problems regarding storytelling in a videogame; the need for the player to stop playing to absorb the story.

Bastion never pulls you up to read a page of lore, never subjects you to a lengthy cutscene, yet manages to reveal a colourful post-apocalyptic world with depth, nuance, and history.  The narrator describes the habits and habitats of the creatures you encounter even as you slice them to pieces.  The lore of the desolate vistas is told even as the world itself is built around you, pieces falling into place as you move.  Bastion’s universe, though simple, is fleshed out and detailed without relying on the heavy text-feed that has become something of a crutch for the genre.

The narrator is always a joy to listen to, dry, sharp, and witty, and the story he delivers builds up to an ending with genuine impact.  With so many games these days implementing an arbitrary morality system that often has little relevance to the narrative, the choices you are required to make in Bastion’s closing moments are given real weight, built up gently over the entire course of the game. 

Mechanically Bastion is simple yet sturdy, with a robust dual-weapon hit-and-dodge control scheme that is easy to learn, and with just enough nuances to be satisfying to master.  It’s the mechanics that underpin the controls that are more impressive; weapon- and character-upgrade systems give you a good deal of control over how the game plays, but it’s the game’s variable difficulty system that truly shines behind the scenes.

The Shrine, which lets you invoke gods to empower your enemies for greater rewards, allows you to effectively choose how punishing the game is; choose to battle through a gruelling gauntlet and you’ll be rewarded with more EXP and money to spend.  If you’d rather just experience the story at a gentle pace, then simply disable all the gods, and there’s little of real challenge standing between you and victory.

It’s a neat alternative to the standard ‘easy’ ‘normal’ and ‘hard’ difficulty tiers still used in many games.  By giving the player direct control over the game’s difficulty, Bastion ensures that hardcore players are rewarded for mastering the game without evoking feelings of frustration or inadequacy in those who’d rather take things gently.

There’s much to be said for a game that does not waste a player’s time.  Bastion is finely tuned, trimmed of all the flab that so often surrounds games of this genre, and as a result it feels fresh and vital.  It’s not overlong and it’s never boring, yet its simplicity belies a subtle depth which encourages repeat play-throughs and prioritises player choice.

As such, Bastion is a game that appeals to new players as much as it does fans of the genre.  It’s a title I would recommend over many full-priced retail titles at any time of year, but as an antidote to summer’s current gaming drought, it comes as something of a godsend.  Effortlessly charming and surprisingly gripping, it's an easy game to recommend.

The 3DS Issue

(30/07/2011)  So the 3DS is doing a bit shit in the sales department.  So shit, in fact, that Nintendo have implemented a massive price cut only a few months after the device went on sale.  It would seem that, for the first time since the ill-fated Virtual Boy, (incidentally, the only other gaming device to tout 3D as a selling point) Nintendo have misjudged the handheld market.

Good on trains.

Many voices are citing the runaway success of iOS and Android devices as a reason for the 3DS having such a hard time at retail.  The argument goes that with multi-functional devices now capable of playing games, there is no compelling reason to purchase a stand-alone handheld game device.  I don’t think this is necessarily true; I just think that Nintendo are missing the actual point of handheld gaming.

Handheld gaming is about minutes-long play sessions, something you can blast away on the tube to work and then shove back into your pocket without a second thought.  In the past, this is what Nintendo’s handhelds have offered.  The Gameboy offered Tetris, the seminal timewaster that offers pick-up-put-down value similar to today’s Angry Birds.  Even the bigger games of that generation, like Pokémon, were designed so that they could be played in batches of minutes as well as hours.

As the hardware power of handhelds has increased, with the advent of the DS, the PSP and now 3DS, the design of handheld games has moved more towards a console-lite experience, resulting in games that aren’t nearly as convenient to break out for a ten-minute bus ride.

Also good on trains.

The issue the 3DS is facing is that it’s trying to offer a home-console experience on a handheld; for evidence, look at its most-touted game, a spruced up port of an N64 title.  The limited success of the PSP, often billed as a pocket-sized PS2, seems to indicate that this isn’t the best idea.  Is there anyone out there who really wants to immerse themselves in Zelda whilst on a train journey?  It’s the kind of game designed to devote some serious time to, and if you’re going to devote so much time to a time, wouldn’t you rather do so on a sofa in front of your TV?

The reason games like Angry Birds are so well suited to the handheld experience is that they are just the right sort of thing to play on a reasonable-length journey.  You don’t have to commit more than maybe a couple of minutes at a time, perfect for a busy commute into work.  Zelda, with its checkpoint system that more or less demands you play for at least twenty minutes, is the less appealing option.

Not so good on trains.

The trouble Nintendo have is that they are just doing what they always have done in the past – pushing out the best versions of their key franchises their hardware will allow.  The difference is that in the past, the limitations of the hardware actually played out in their favour, forcing the type of design that leads to a simple, accessible title.  In reality, a full-blooded Mario or Zelda title just isn’t that well suited to what the majority seem to want from a handheld game.

I don’t believe the real issue is iOS and Android devices rendering a new Nintendo handheld irrelevant; I just think the best developers for these devices understand how to make a handheld game better than Nintendo do.

119,651

(29/07/11)  Today I completed the first draft of Answer.  It weighs in at 119,651 words, 302 pages (12 point Calibri, 1.5 line spacing) and 33 chapters (plus epilogue) long.  I estimate that thus far, it’s taken me maybe one month over a year.

Of course, despite being technically finished, it’s not actually finished finished.  Not by a long shot.  There’s a whole lot of editing, cutting and rewriting to be done.  Firstly, it’s too long; I know for a fact there are many places where I can cut a lot of weight whilst actually improving the flow of the story.  The current manuscript is flabby and uneven; over-wordy in places, and too sparse in others.

One problem is that my style of writing has changed quite a bit in the year or so since I started.  When I began writing, I didn’t know how to write a novel; I just started writing the same way I’d start writing a short story, and expected the narrative to just unfold as I go.

A year on, and the bulk of one entire novel written, I now understand how to write a novel.  This may sound silly and obvious, but that’s how it is.  I now believe I could draft a new novel in perhaps a couple of months.  The problem that leaves is that there’s a good possibility that the end of this novel, written today, reads totally differently from the start of the novel, written over a year ago.

One of the major undertakings of editing is to eradicate this unevenness, to bring the standard of the older chapters up to match that of the later ones.  I’m a better writer now, which is great, but also means I have a lot of re-writing to do.  To make the process a little less painful, I’ve devised a plan for the various edits I have to do.

The first thing is go back and do over the part of the story where I know plot holes have developed and changes need to be made.  The shape of the story changed quite a bit as I wrote, a result of poor planning, and as a result bits of the story don’t match up.  Fixing these known issues is the first priority, and should be fairly easy.

The second step is to split the manuscript up into character-specific segments and edit these individually.  There are seven characters from whose viewpoint the story is told; three who bear the body of the narrative, and four more minor characters who add differing viewpoints.  I need to separate these characters’ narratives and edit them as if they are each an independent story; this will make sure a characters ‘voice’ is maintained throughout, and also to make sure a character isn’t showing up somewhere they shouldn’t be.

Then I will look at each chapter individually, make sure the different segments fit together nicely, and make sure any of my editing in the previous step hasn’t buggered up the structure of the chapters.

Finally, I’ll put the whole thing back together again, and do a good old-fashioned front-to-back read-through.  By now I should be tiresomely familiar with the story, and it should be pretty much error-free at this point, so any errors that might have slipped through the net should jump out here.  This also serves as a point for any final fine-tuning that needs doing.

I may be a little optimistic here, but I’m aiming to have all of this done by Christmas, so I have a taut, lean, and all round fabulous manuscript ready to send to publishers in the new year.  Before I do all of that, however, I’m going to shelve the damn thing for a few weeks; should give me chance to clear my mind of the writing-fog I’ve been in for the last few weeks, so I can approach the thing with a fresh mind in the coming months.

The Imagination Gap

(07/07/2011)  I crouch in cover, the red rock hot against my back.  I’m down to my last few clips of ammo, and I can only hope that my assailant is too.  I can hear him moving, drawing closer to my hiding place, heavy steel-capped boots loud against the compacted dust of the wasteland.  I take a breath, ready myself, and dive from cover.  Time slows as I open fire.  He fires too, and I feel something white-hot sear my arm, but my bullets find their target first.  He jerks back, blood spraying onto the hot dust, weapon falling from his suddenly-slack grasp...

At least, this is what happens in my head.  In reality, or the reality of Fallout: New Vegas at least, my opponent and I are standing a couple of metres apart, both crouched, both firing.  My crosshairs are lined up on his head, and my bullets are hitting him repeatedly in the face.  He doesn’t react, although blood does periodically spurt from his skull.  His bullets are hitting me too, which only serves to make my screen blur a bit and my health bar to dip a little lower.  Inevitably his health bar runs down before mine, at which point his head explodes into several chunks, his body drops to the floor, and I walk over and nick all his clothes.

A regualar occurance in the old West.

Videogames have come a long way since their tabletop origins, but as the above hopefully demonstrates, the player still often needs to make a significant leap of imagination to experience a game’s fiction as intended.  My fight with the wasteland bandit is evidently meant to be a desperate struggle for survival.  The fact that it’s more like race to see who can deplete the other’s health bar goes to show that, well, we might have come a long way, but we’re not quite ‘there’ yet.

Some games require greater leaps of imagination than others.  The RPG genre, still a hotbed of statistics stables and static decision-making, requires more imaginative input from the player than, say, a racing game.  Turn-based battles are a wonderful example of the imagination required to justify the fiction; what is clearly supposed to be an epic battle of world-ending proportion is in fact four dudes standing in a row, literally trading blows with another, bigger, evil-looking dude.

And this differentiation seems to affect which types games are the most popular, for quite a simple reason; it’s easier for a non-gamer to become invested in something that doesn’t require a great deal of imagination to understand.  We, the player, understand that what’s happening in Fallout is in fact a life-or-death struggle between two desperados, but if someone who had not played the game were to walk in and witness what’s going on, then, well, they’d just think it looks stupid.

Fifa 12.

Our mega-selling franchises are those that most accurately represent their intended fiction.  Watch someone playing Call of Duty, for example, and it’s pretty obvious what’s going on; everyone’s seen war films, everyone knows what war should look like, and the game is going everything right.  Guns look like real, men die when they get shot, buildings crumble and collapse when hit with an explosive.  It looks like what people expect war to look like, and therefore grabs the interest of the uninitiated more easily than an approximation such as Fallout.

Real football.

It explains why sport games are so well-received by those who don't play many other games; Fifa’s only job is to look like football.  It doesn’t have to create an alternate reality or juggle a complex narrative; it just has to look like a game of football on the telly does.  Everyone knows what football looks like, and everyone can see that Fifa looks like football.

One day, ‘fiction games’ will be able to catch up.  A future Fallout will manage to play just how people would imagine life in an apocalyptic wasteland to be.  We’re getting there already; id’s Rage looks like a much more believable approximation of a post-apocalyptic world, although I don’t doubt it will lack a lot the depth that we enjoy in Fallout.

One day, games will have grown up properly.  Non-gamers will be able to sit down in front of a game, without necessarily even having play, and they’ll understand what’s going on.  It won’t look silly.  It will be fully-formed fictional world.  Until then, thought, we’ll just have to keep fighting those titanic battles half in our minds, and half in brilliant but flawed approximations.

First Impressions Matter

(06/07/2011) They say a novel has to grab the reader in the first paragraph.  A novel must make a good first impression, even more so than a film or a TV show, because a novel is asking for a lot more of a reader’s time.  A film will be over in 90 minutes or so (unless it’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the running time of which is closer to a full calendar month), a TV show in under an hour.  If you didn’t enjoy it that much, it’s not taken up a serious chunk of your time.  No biggie.  A novel, however, requires a more serious time investment, and if it doesn’t draw you in immediately, the urge to put it down and save wasted hours is greater.

A playable essay on terrible openings.

The same should be true of videogames.  Even a ‘short’ game is at least three times the length of an average film, and a ‘long’ game can last longer than the most studied read-through of War and Peace.  We commit a lot of time to these games, so the onus should be on the developer to create an introduction that is compelling enough to keep us playing.

Why is it then, that the beginning of a videogame is almost always the weakest section?  The play mechanics are certainly part of it; games are obliged to drag us through a tutorial at the first chance they get.  Certainly, frustration at not knowing how to play the game properly would be a key factor in a player giving up early on, but so is a badly-designed tutorial section that almost invariably makes the game seem way less interesting than it might be an hour down the line.

No one wants to look at this.

This problem has worsened since developers have realised that no one gives so much as a cursory glance at a game’s manual any more, meaning they have to clarify the function of every damn button with massive icons right at the point when the game should be drawing the player into its world.  What most developers fail to grasp is that the reason no one reads the manual is because reading the manual is incredibly dull; turning the first half-hour of your game into an interactive version of its own manual only serves to make the game itself appear incredibly dull.  It’s the equivalent of a novel opening with a brief recap of the alphabet followed by a description of what a paragraph is.

What’s the solution?  We can’t demand that gamers read the game’s manual; inflicting reading upon a person is heinous.  The obvious answer, of course, is to make a good tutorial section.  Does anyone remember the tutorial sections in Half Life 2 or Bioshock?  No?  Well they were there, believe me, they were just interwoven with the narrative and gameplay in a way that meant the player absorbs the tutorial whilst convinced they are in fact already engrossed in the game proper.  And they are, because in a well-designed game the tutorial is part of the game proper, not a tacked-on-at-the-last-minute training course that teaches you to shoot cardboard men and how to identify the ‘do a knife stab’ button.

The worst offenders for dreadful introductions are almost certain RPG and adventure games.  The crime of the terrible intro is worsened by the fact that these are usually the games that last the longest, and therefore have the most pressure to make a good first impression.  Who wants to spend 70 hours playing a game that is no fun for the first 5?  Anyone remember the 15-hour tutorial in Final Fantasy XIII?  Of course they do, because it half of the whole damn game and sucked, enormously, for just the longest time.  I know plenty of people who gave up on that game way before it deigned to take the training wheels off, and I don’t blame them in the slightest.

My pet hate, and one pretty much exclusive to the RPG genre, is the obligatory ‘make a character and do all their stats’ part.  This usually happens before you even start the tutorial, and can take anything from a few minutes to up to an hour.  And it’s boring.  Really boring.  You’re not even playing the game; you are, in fact, giving the game instructions on how it should play when it can be bothered to start.  It’s like the programmers got bored, and decided to leave the last little bit of tweaking up to the player.

I totally would.

Now there’s not really a way around character creation; it’s a necessary part of these games, and besides, you can usually just pick a preset and fire away in a few seconds.  Mass Effect does a good job, in that it has an ‘official’ Shepard, who goes on the box art and everything, which everyone can use hassle-free.  If a player wants to spend an hour making Shepard’s face look like someone ran over a mongoose, then they can, and that’s great.  That’s choice, and that’s what videogames are all about.

What hacks me off is when the game demands that I customise my character’s stats before I’ve even started playing.  Now, I’m the kind of player that gets a perverse pleasure from stat-tweaking once I’m playing a game.  I like fiddling around to give my sword a +2 fire stat.  As an RPG fan, the right amount of stat-twiddling gets me sort of excited. 

The trouble with making the player set their stats right at the start is that there’s no context to the stats themselves at this point.  I don’t have a clue what a ‘perception’ stat does when I haven’t been allowed to play the game yet, so how the hell should I know how many arbitrary points I want to put into it?  What if I put all my points into the ‘perception’ stat only to discover, upon actual gameplay being introduced, that the ‘perception’ stat sucks?  “Tough shit,” says the game, “you used up all your starting-the-game points in that laborious, context-lacking create-a-character section that you spent an hour swearing through earlier.  Deal with it.”

Nothing makes me less inclined to play a game than the first thing I see being a massive stats table that the game expects me to absorb, understand and manage before it lets me actually play.  As an example, I’m going to look at Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.  These two games are almost exactly alike except that one has a good introduction and the other has a terrible one.

Fallout 3 merges its stat-building into the narrative; you start the game as a child growing up in an underground vault.  You grow up, and as you do, you go through a number of experiences common to childhood.  Things every player will be able to relate to.  You have to deal with the local bully.  You experience your first childhood romance.  You have to go school and take exams.  You get given a rifle for your birthday and use a giant mutated cockroach as target practice (alright, maybe not everyone can relate to that one).

Not only does this give your rubber-faced character some narrative weight and a level of player involvement – you helped this character grow up, after all – but the game is setting your character’s stats in the background, based on the actions you take.  When it’s time to leave the vault, you get the option to tweak these stats as much as you like, but if you don’t want to, you can leave reasonably safe in the knowledge that you’re using a character that you’ve shaped through your own actions.

The stat screen, or, the antithesis of fun.

In New Vegas, you play as some guy who has recently emerged from a bullet-to-the-head induced coma, and as a result has lost all sense of his identity.  It turns out the only way to forge a new identity for yourself is to walk over to a machine and spend ten minutes pressing ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ keys on the stat screen.  Then you answer some completely context-free questions.  Then you choose some ‘perks’.  All before you have the slightest clue what any of these decisions you are making mean.  And do you get a chance to change your mind if it turns out you made a bad decision?  Nope; you deal with it.

The resulting feeling is something akin to anxiety.  I desperately want to skip this section to get to the actual game, but I know that the decisions I make at this point will affect the entire of the game’s billion-hour length.  Anxiety is not the emotion a game should be invoking with its introduction.  Awe, yes.  Joy, wonderful.  Anxiety?  You’re doing it wrong.

The solution is the same as the solution to the much-maligned Tutorial Section; weave your stat-building into the actual game.  Make the player’s choices matter in the context of playing the actual game, not in a tedious menu screen.  Having a character evolve as we play builds up a relationship between the player and their character – the way you play the game affects the way your character behaves.  Making us define the character before we’ve even started is just annoying.

It’s like a novel opening with a ten-page description of its main character, including vital statistics such as what they eat for breakfast and whether they prefer cats or dogs.  Would you want to read that?  I sure as hell wouldn’t, so I don’t understand why we have to sit through the equivalent at the start of so many purportedly ‘epic’ videogames.  I propose that a game, however grand and deep it might eventually become, cannot be deemed ‘epic’ if it starts with a series of sliders and a description of what the A button is.