I'm wrapping up my series of 'infatuated critic' posts on DeathSpank with my latest column over at GameSetWatch. I discuss the evolving role of comedy in games and why I think DeathSpank is worth noting in this regard. In a desperate lunge at objectivity, I also explain why I think the game falls short in a few places.
Here's a snippet:
As a comedic game, DeathSpank advances the ball down the field in some creative ways, and I'll discuss those in a moment. But I also think DeathSpank exemplifies the conundrum faced by video games that try to be funny. We can illustrate that tension with two apparently contradictory claims:
Claim 1: Video games are well-suited to making us laugh. Like a well-crafted game, a successful comedy is highly technical, based on a set of clearly-defined rules, and carefully engineered to trigger a calculated response. It relies on the precise execution of a final build, fine-tuned through iteration and feedback.
Comedy, as Henri Bergson observes in his seminal "Theory of Laughter," is "something mechanical encrusted on the living." One could easily apply the same phrase to describe games. Game developers understand how to build complex systems for interactive communication, and that's exactly what a successful comedy is. Comedy is aimed at the intellect, and gamers are smart. We can do this!
Claim 2: Video games are hopeless vehicles for comedy. They may manage to deliver wordplay and 'wackiness,' but desperately trying to 'be funny' usually results in an outmoded brand of one-liner comedy that died with the Borscht Belt. Furthermore, player agency in an interactive world (a defining feature of modern games) is mostly antithetical to comedy.
When choice, pace, and timing are handed off to the player, the potential for comedy dissipates. We may play an interactive role watching a live stand-up comic, but we don't write the punchlines; nor do we decide when to deliver them. In the same Bergson essay referenced above, he describes comedy as a "social gesture." Nearly all the 'funny' games we've seen are single-player affairs, lacking the spontaneous group-mind formed when we experience comedy in other media. We're out of our league!
Today's video games don't do comedy. Sure, there's the revived Sam & Max series and Penny Arcade Adventures. GLaDOS is funny in Portal, and Brucie Kibbutz has some choice lines in GTA IV. Battlefield: Bad Company brings some dark humor, and MadWorld takes it to an unhinged extreme.
But for a medium that generates so much entertainment content, it's surprising how few modern games can be described as genuine comedies. It wasn't always the case.
Back in the day - roughly the decade bookended by Duke Nukem ('91) and Conker's Bad Fur Day (2001) - we saw a steady stream of games designed to tickle the funny bone: Crazy Taxi, The Monkey Island series; Day of the Tentacle; Sam and Max Hit the Road; Grim Fandango; Banjo-Kazooie; Crash Bandicoot; Earthworm Jim - the list goes on.
Before that, of course, Infocom, Sierra and others produced sharp-witted games like Leather Goddesses of Phobos; Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Leisure Suit Larry; King's Quest; Space Quest; and the Zork series.
What happened to all the laughs?
Actors and writers often say comedy is hard, and that's because it honestly is. Comedy is tough because it can only exist as an unwieldy 3-headed beast. Comedy is cerebral, technical, and deeply human. If you don't understand the joke, it's not funny. If the gag isn't perfectly timed or executed, it falls flat. If you don't see yourself in someone else's predicament, the humor leaves you cold.
Video games can handle the first two with ease, but the third element - the human factor - is where most recent games fail.
It's no coincidence that as next-gen games grew more photorealistic, they also grew less funny. The uncanny valley is nobody's friend, but it's an especially harsh environment for comedy. We can create amazingly detailed worlds populated by characters who walk and talk and ride horses fairly convincingly; but despite all the progress we've made, it still feels just a little stiff and awkward. And when comedy feels stiff and awkward, it dies.
So writers and designers have increasingly come to rely on comedic dialogue to deliver the laughs in games like GTA IV and puerile offspring like Saints Row. Toss in a wacky sidekick, an assortment of nutjob NPCs, and a stream of sardonic observations from the hero, and presto, you've infused your game with comedy. Wisecracks are everywhere in today's games, but ripe comedic situations are in short supply.
The problem is that comedy can't be delivered like a pizza; nor is it an ingredient stirred into a recipe. Comedy is a system. It's a living body made up of interdependent parts forming a unified whole. A game that wants to be a comedy must be a game channeled through a comic vision that defines the project. Back in the 80s, Infocom regularly provided such a cohesive experience, drawing the player into the comedic world of the game from the moment he opened the box.
Happily, a new game has arrived that conducts a virtual clinic on how to do video game comedy right. It's called DeathSpank, and it's easily one of the best games I've played this year. I'll discuss it at length in my next post. In the meantime, I encourage you to check it out for yourself. A demo of the game is available on both XBLA and PSN.
If you're a serious gamer (my wife prefers the term "certifiable"), you probably find yourself tracing the lineage of games you enjoy. You do that, right? Please tell me I'm not the only one.
Certain genres lend themselves especially well to genealogy. We can track, for example, the platformer line from Donkey Kong and observe it slowly metamorphosing all the way to Super Mario Galaxy ... branching at Metroid, spawning Castlevania (with a self-contained lineage all its own), branching again at Super Mario 64 - whose 3D design and mechanics clearly influenced non-platformer Ocarina of Time, which forked the Zelda series (with a self-contained lineage all its own)...
Well, you get the idea. It's fun to do and often leads to animated discussion among longtime gamers. "Pikmin is a Nintendo-ized version of Populous mixed with Lemmings." "What? No it's not!"
I've been thinking about genre bloodlines lately, provoked by one of my favorite recent DS games: Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes. If you haven't played it, I strongly recommend you grab a copy...or hold off until later this summer when developer Capybara releases its HD version for XBLA and PSN. For what it's worth, the DS edition is my idea of a perfect portable game: conducive to quick bursts of challenging play with achievable short-session goals. Simple mechanics, elegant gameplay. Pause wherever, resume whenever. Perfect.
This post isn't intended as a review, so if you'd like an evaluative essay on why Clash of Heroes succeeds so thoroughly, I recommend Brad Gallaway's review over at GameCritics.
Clash of Heroes is a genre mash-up: a puzzle-strategy-adventure game with RPG elements. But mostly, CoH is a Match-3 game, and unless you've been hiding under a rock for the last decade, you know all about the Match-3 genre. According to developer PopCap, a Bejeweled game is sold every 4.3 seconds, translating to sales of over 50 million units.
Tally free-to-play versions on the internet, trial downloads, and PC pre-installs, and an estimated half-billion people have played Bejeweled in one form or another since its release in 2001.[1] We've been playing variations and transmutations of Bejeweled ever since:
Add Tetris-style falling blocks, a launch mechanic, and an emphasis on speed, and you've got Meteos.
Change the falling blocks to 2x2 squares, add a music and rhythm component, and you've got Lumines.
Translate the Match-3 puzzling as combat, set the game in the Warlords universe, add quests, EXP, classes, and side missions, and you've got Puzzle Quest.
Reformat it for the iPhone, add a time-lock and tilt-screen controls, and you've got Aurora Feint.
Shift the RPG to the Ultima/Wizardry end of the spectrum, add turn-based strategy, army recruitment and resource management, and you've got Clash of Heroes. Voila! Bejeweled begets Clash of Heroes (with many incremental steps omitted in my brief, admittedly simplified account).
But hold on there, pardner. We started with Bejeweled because it's the 800 lb. gorilla of Match-3 games, but PopCap hardly broke new ground there. Gamers of a certain age may recall Pokémon Puzzle League, a Match-3 game for the N64, which appeared before Bejeweled and was essentially a Pokémon-skinned version of Tetris Attack for the SNES...which itself was a Yoshi's Island-skinned version of Panel de Pon, a Match-3 falling block game never released in North America.
So it all goes back to Panel de Pon, right? Actually, no. As far as I can tell, the first electronic Match-3 game was Shariki developed for DOS in 1988 by a Russian programmer named Eugene Alemzhin.[2] Before Shariki, matching colors vertically or horizontally was strictly a tactile experience.
Matching them diagonally, on the other hand ... such nefarious strategies are best left to sneaky siblings.**
**Readers under the age of 30-something are advised to play the above clip.
Are you interested in video game genealogy? Does it influence your choices or your perceptions of the games you play? If so, I'd love to hear about it.
Ask an actor to name the toughest crowd he's faced, and he's likely to say it was a auditorium full of squirrely kids. Children's theater is thespian boot camp. When kids get bored, they don't quietly doze off or check their Blackberrys. They let you know about it. At one performance I attended a few years ago, a boy left his seat, approached the stage, and loudly inquired "When can we leave?"
Kids are brutally honest, and that makes them an ideal test for writers and performers who need to learn about narrative compression, clarity, projection, and pacing. If you fail to provoke kids' imaginations or hold their attention, you're toast.
But, if you do manage to engage them, I can tell you from first-hand experience that no on-stage success feels more magical or rewarding. Kids are a tough crowd, but when they love you, they really let you know it.
I mention all this because I've been playing Free Realms during my vacation. Yeah, that's right. Sony's family-friendly, chock-full 'o whimsy MMO adventure game. The one with winged pixies. The one that recently hit 12 million registered users.
This isn't my first time with Free Realms. I became interested in the game back in '07 after reading about Sony's desire to broaden its demographic (85 percent male and 32 years old at the time) and its decision to hire two women - Laralyn McWilliams (Creative Director) and Rosie Rappaport (Art Director) - to helm the project. I was keen to see what they came up with.
So I played the game shortly after its release last year and found it interesting, but oddly conceived. The interface and art style (and tiresome tutorials) seemed to target MMO newcomers, but its core gameplay and mechanics felt like WoW-Lite - too steep for casuals crossing over; too simple for vets of MMOs. It was hard for me to see the audience for such a game.
I created a character and completed a few tutorials, but the game didn't hook me. My initial impression of Free Realms was World of Warcraft meets Dreamworks with a dash of The Sims...and a cumbersome UI. I wanted to like it, but the launch version of Free Realms spent too much time explaining itself and too little enticing me to play. That was then.
One year later, Free Realms is a vastly improved game. The developers at Sony San Diego were clearly taken to school by their players, and they responded with a series of smart iterations that have opened up the game and transformed the player's experience. Nearly everything has been tweaked, upgraded, or overhauled, including the game's UI, job system, inventory management, guild structure, and combat mechanics, among many other elements.
For example, the "starter zone" has disappeared. Now a new player can create a customized character, enter the world, and wander freely. No more "Do this, talk to this person" tutorials. An on-screen atlas is available with dozens of destinations to explore immediately with no apparent gates limiting access to any area. When you're ready to try something new, context-sensitive help appears to guide you.
Free Realms' colorful new UI is the best I've seen for any MMO. It requires a few too many drill-down clicks here and there, but overall it's an incredibly well-designed and intuitive interface that's easy on the eyes. Its flexible navigation system - especially its atlas/mini-map combo - puts WoW's to shame.
I like Free Realms for what it doesn't do. It doesn't force me to choose a single character class. All jobs are open to me, and I can switch among them at any time. It also doesn't force me to fight or kill things. I can cook, forge, mine, or simply exist in the world as an adventurer, applying various skills to different situations. I can be a soccer star, a card dualist, or even a postman.
The game offers a variety of navigation aids, like a Fable II-style glowing quest path (which can be toggled on or off). After completing a quest, I can choose "Take Me There" and the game will steer me to the quest-giver automatically. I can also walk there myself or teleport if it's far away. These are little things, I realize, but they're thoughtful options that suggest a design that has evolved to accommodate a range of play styles.
Not all the iterations are about making the game easier. The action combat system has received a big makeover, adding more nuanced weapons, passive skills, and tougher monsters. Free Realms will never match WoW's battle feature set, but there's plenty here for players who want to play as an Archer, Brawler, Medic, Ninja, Warrior, or Wizard.
The game even boasts a robust trading card game you can play virtually in-game or IRL with physical cards. I've spent less than an hour playing it, but what I've seen looks fun, with familiar tasks like building decks, posting trades and battling with other players.
My favorite bit of iteration in Free Realms is the Game Guide, which now appears in the game dock at the bottom of the screen. Choose it, and up pops a map full of activities occurring throughout the world. Job-related activities like Fishing, Forging, and Battles appear - as well as a wide assortment of mini-games like Tower Defense, Kart Racing, Chess, and dozens of casual Flash-type games.
I'm admittedly less interested in Free Realms as a game (though I continue to enjoy playing it) than in the many ways it illustrates responsive iteration and clever, user-friendly design. In a recent piece she wrote for Game Developer Magazine (April '10), Laralyn McWilliams discusses the challenges she and her team faced creating a casual virtual world within a culture steeped in traditional MMO development:
SOE is a flagship studio for MMO development. Everquest is going into its 11th year as a live service. We have an unprecedented depth of experience in online world design and development. That’s also a lot of history and habit to overcome when you try to make something new. Even with a huge amount of team enthusiasm for the concept, phenomenal support from the entire company, our seasoned leads and directors, we struggled as a company to overcome all our ideas and preconceptions about the way an online game “has to work.”
She goes on to discuss the lessons they learned and the balance they've tried to strike between depth and accessibility in Free Realms. And while I'm recommending reading, I'll also point you to a terrific interview with Rosie Rappaport in which she discusses her visual concept for the game.
I encourage you to give Free Realms a look. Even if it's not your cup of tea, I think you'll find it's full of ideas - some big, some small - about what an MMO is, how it works, and whom it's for.
ModNation Racers belongs in the Seinfeld universe. It would fit in nicely with the "re-gifter," the "close-talker," the "low-talker," and the "anti-dentite." For, you see, Modnation Racers - an otherwise perfectly wonderful kart racer - is a slow-loader. And, like Jerry's beautiful dinner date with "man hands," that single disturbing trait is impossible to ignore.
I wrote aboutModNation Racers back in April, having played the beta, and I registered my excitement about the game's powerful content creation tools and their potential to encourage even casual players to build cool stuff. Now that I've played the released version of the game, I can happily report that MNR makes good on those promises. It successfully advances Little Big Planet's "Play, Create, Share" formula with an astonishingly user-friendly toolkit for designing borderline fair-use characters, karts, and tracks.
If you're itching to race through a charming Alpine village as Mr. Peanut driving Batman's 1966 Batmobile, this is your game. Just don't get in a hurry. Here's why.
On the day the game was released, I loaded ModNation Racers from my PS3's XMB and was immediately greeted with a prompt informing me the game required a software update. No big deal. The update was only 30MB and installed in less than 2 minutes.
This was followed by a a one-time install to the console's hard drive, which required 7-and-a-half minutes to complete. Again, I thought, no problem. A hard drive install will save time in the long run by cutting load times and limiting reads from the game disc.
By the time the game was installed to the hard drive and the unskippable opening credits finished, I had waited 9 minutes and 54 seconds to play the game. After responding to a "push any button prompt," I waited another 31 seconds before arriving at Modspot, the game's central hub.
Choosing "Career Mode," I was presented with a 2-minute, 43-second cutscene (skippable) with studio announcers and an introductory story scene. Once complete, a loading screen appeared with a 'percentage-loaded' counter. The track required another 52 seconds to load.
At this point, I'd been waiting nearly 12 minutes (and that's if I skipped the story-mode cutscene entirely) to begin racing. After the race ended, the game required another 20 seconds to return me to the main hub. Choosing a single-player race took a bit less time than career-mode: 44 seconds to load the track. Subsequent tracks required between 45 seconds and a minute to load.
Getting to the content creation tools takes less time: 12 seconds - which is still too long, but relative to MNR's other load times, feels positively snappy - but exiting the modding area and returning to the hub requires another 25-30 seconds every time.
I know less than nothing about how games manage what they do under the hood, but it's hard for me to understand how the folks at United Front Games or Sony San Diego could sign off on a game - a racing game for goodness' sake - that repeatedly subjects the player to such fun-killing load times throughout a typical play session. I'm guessing it had something to do with meeting a deadline.
If I didn't hold MNR in such high regard for the many things it does well, I suppose long loads wouldn't get under my skin so much. But I fear that unless UFG optimizes the game, and does it soon, the persistent annoyance of waiting will overshadow all the other joys ModNation Racers brings.
I believe Jason Rohrer stole his new game, Sleep is Death, from me. I can't prove anything, but I've got a pretty solid theory. I believe he performed some kind of Vulcan mind meld thing on me when I wasn't looking, possibly at a recent GDC, and he extracted a fully-formed game design straight out of the fiery yearning cauldron of my Id.
How else to explain a game that fuses improvisational theatre and video games? How else to explain a game that exploits the interactive power of the medium in service of storytelling (actually, storycrafting)? I mean, seriously! What the heck have I been writing, teaching, and generally prattling on about for all these years?
I wouldn't be surprised if the game's original title was Baseball is Death, but Rohrer changed it because, COME ON, then it would just be so obvious it was all my idea!
Okay, so maybe he didn't. Maybe I should give Rohrer the benefit of the doubt. After all, he's clearly one of the brightest minds making video games today. His "Beyond Single Player" presentation at GDC 09 was one of the most thoughtful talks on games I've heard. And, of course, his game Passage is perhaps the definitive title in the art-game movement. So, yeah, Rohrer probably didn't need any help from me to make Sleep is Death.
But, in fact, he does need my help to make Sleep is Death meaningful. He needs your help too because SiD is less a game than a storycrafting device (tool? environment? engine?) for two people who collaboratively create a story, taking turns, with one person functioning as Player and the other as Controller. The Player responds to characters, environments, and objects created by the Controller, and the Controller responds to the actions or dialogue of the Player. In SiD, the intelligence on the other side of the screen isn't artificial at all; it's a person, ideally someone you know and in the same room with you.
And, actually, that Vulcan mind meld analogy isn't far off base. In a well-played game of SiD, two players join to create a 'storymind' that exists as a fusion of both players' thoughts and actions. One player hosts as the other probes, and each succeeds - so far as success can be measured in a game with no win state - by the degree to which each fuels the other's imagination. It's improv with avatars and a level/sprite editor. In the right hands, it's genius. In the wrong hands, it can be, well, less so.
In my next post, I'll offer a few thoughts on how to improve your chances of avoiding 'less so.' Before I do, however, let me explain what I won't do. I won't suggest there's a single best way to play Sleep is Death. I won't insist on any predefined approach.
Maybe you've had fun messing around with the game's Controller tools. Maybe you've waged a thrilling no-holds-barred insult hurling contest between you and a buddy. Fun is fun, and SiD can be played in all sorts of ways, so who am I to say you're doing it wrong?
What I will suggest is that SiD rewards, even insists on, a certain collaborative approach that's different from other co-op games. SiD relies, more than any video game I've played, on imaginative, improvisational actions and choices from both players. In my next post, I'll suggest a few simple things you can do to feed this dynamic process and make SiD sing.
My latest monthly column for GameSetWatch focuses on realism in sports sims, and I compare two games released 23 years apart: MLB 10: The Show and Earl Weaver Baseball. Here's a snippet:
The holy grail of graphical sports sims is an experience that feels realistic, and we routinely measure these games by their ability to convey that experience. If you'd like to test that contention, peruse the reviews of the latest high water mark in graphical sports sims, MLB 10: The Show, and count how many times reviewers deploy "realistic" in praise of the game.
To understand the nature of MLB 10 as a sports sims, it's useful to look back at EA's Earl Weaver game as a kind of swan song in sports game design. Its sequel, EWB 2, employed a 3D camera that radically altered the player's perspective, and the series shifted from simulating the experience of playing baseball to the experience of watching it on television. For the graphical sports sims to follow, there was no turning back.
What we create touches the hearts and spirits of people and moves them. This gives us big responsibilities. I imagine the faces of my wife, friends, and complete strangers. More and more I think about the face of my son. These are who we make games for. Inspire them. -Yoshio Sakamoto
Here's a highly generalized assertion based on impressions from the three most recent San Francisco GDCs. My stab at profundity is probably more than blind guesswork, but less than wisdom from industry experience.
It seems to me that Japanese designers have a particular knack for discussing the personal origins of their work - the seeds of inspiration, if you will - but almost no inclination to discuss the nuts and bolts. Western designers, on the other hand, are incredibly adept at lifting the hood on their work and explaining precisely how all the parts function; but they rarely connect us to the passionate impulses from which their ideas flow.
Exceptions exist, of course. Brenda Brathwaite's presentation on Train last week was easily the most personal of the conference; and Tsuchida and Yajima's talk on automatic sound triggering in FFXIII was mostly technical.
But more often than not, I think my thesis holds. Yoshio Sakamoto's (dir. Metroid series) presentation on designing for different audiences at this year's event reminded me of others I've attended by notable Japanese designers like Suda, Ueda, Kojima, and Miyamoto. Compared to their western contemporaries (Wright, Meier, Hocking, Pagliarulo), these Japanese designers seem to prefer articulating personal impulses and tracing genesis ideas.
At a conference like GDC, this approach can frustrate some who come looking for practical tools or concrete takeaways. On several occasions I've been advised to avoid presentations by Japanese developers in the Design Track of GDC. "They never say anything," cautioned one GDC veteran. "They're here mostly for PR, and they stick to a rigid script."
If someone had asked for my impressions after the first 30 minutes of his talk, I might have agreed. He presented a history of the Metroid series, showed a promotional trailer for the upcoming Metroid: Other M, and generally paid tribute to the genius of his boss Satoru Iwata.
But then his remarks turned in a more revealing direction. He discussed his need to explore both the serious and comic sides of his personality, aware (painfully, he hinted) that Iwata thinks of him "only as someone with a comical side" because of his work producing the WarioWare games.
Sakamoto explained that he's fascinated by horror and traced his respect for the genre to Italian filmmaker Dario Argento, and he cited Argento's Deep Red as deeply inspirational. "Before Deep Red, horror always left me feeling empty. Argento arrested me."
Sakamoto studied Argento's work and concluded that his primary tools for engaging his audience were mood, timing, foreshadowing, and contrast. "My early design work was an homage to Argento's work. I have continued this through my career, and Other M is no exception." But soon after launching the Metroid series, Sakamoto realized that he needed to find his own aesthetic sensibility.
"I'm not a movie fanatic. I probably don't watch any more movies than the average person," Sakamoto stated. "However, films have opened my eyes to techniques that can bring a story to life. I'm not obssessed with them, but they have inpired me." Sakamoto began looking beyond horror movies to non-Hollywood films like Besson's Léon: The Professional and John Woo' s A Better Tomorrow series.
Sakamoto loves making people laugh, and he began to see a connection between the dark films he admires and his penchant for comedy. "I'm not a comedian, but I enjoy helping people have a good time. I"m actually quite meticulous about it."
Reflecting on personal experiences and discoveries - which he has recorded for many years in a journal - Sakamoto realized that, for him, the line separating comedy from horror is quite thin, and both rely on the same core elements: mood, timing, foreshadowing, and contrast. Tomodachi Collection, which Sakamoto describes as more comedically subversive than people credit it, is the outcome of this personal exploration.
Regardless of whether he's working on a Metroid or a WarioWare game, Sakamoto's creative process is essentially the same for each. "As long as one is open to the possibility of new expriences, you can move people in a variety of ways."
"My spirit has been moved by interactions with the world. These experiences create indivisual images that stay with us. It's our mission to give our images shapes that can be conveyed to other people. I had to find my own way at Nintendo. Similar to the way a child is given a new toy and becomes engrossed in it."
Sakamoto found his own way, and through that process came to better know himself. His account of that journey may or may not inspire other designers, but I found it captivating.
Lately it seems every game I a play has a "2" in its title: Uncharted 2, Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2, No More Heroes 2, Assassin's Creed 2. I'm not complaining. The common wisdom that says sequels are bound to be inferior cash-ins on their originals ignores a mound of evidence to the contrary. With the exception of NMH2, which both improved on and fell short of NMH1, these games illustrate how developers can smartly iterate on a successful formula and produce games markedly superior to their originals.
So how did they do it? I think these games impart some useful lessons in how to do sequels right. I'm not a game designer, so my observations are derived purely from a player's perspective; but from where I sit here's what I see.
Hold fast to the vision of the original, but resist the temptation to retrace your steps. Give us a new destination and ensure that journey amplifies the meaning of the first one. Bioshock 2 is a case study in how to do this effectively. Bioshock 2 functions as a dialectic with the first game, re-exploring Rapture by revisiting and re-contextualizing its environments and opposing ideals. I'll explore this further in a post devoted solely to Bioshock 2 later this week.
Learn from your mistakes, including the ones we don't know about. The most obvious outcome of positive iteration is fixing the stuff that didn't work in the first game. Assassin's Creed 2 eliminated the repetitiveness; Mass Effect 2 upgraded the combat mechanics; No More Heroes 2 jettisoned the open world; Bioshock 2 killed the maddening "Circus of Values!" clown (voiced in the original by Creative Director Ken Levine) - a little thing, yes, but THANK YOU.
These are welcome changes, but skilled designers see things many of us don't, and targeting those issues too suggests a development commitment that transcends addressing player complaints. Mass Effect's awkwardly staged cinematics didn't draw much ire from fans (in fact, lots of reviewers praised them), but ME2's greatly enhanced dialogue scenes prove its designers weren't satisfied with what they accomplished the first time.
Bigger isn't necessarily better.Bioshock 2 and Mass Effect 2 are both shorter and more compact than their originals, and both are better games for it. Some bemoan the loss of backtracking in Bioshock 2 or the fewer number of planets in ME2. Not me. The narrative drive forward is more powerful in both sequels, and neither sags in the middle as their predecessors did. More stuff to do doesn't necessarily translate into better.
You don't have to 'go dark.' The common trajectory in storytelling across media is to darken the protagonist as he/she grows more complex. This can be a good or bad thing (Prince of Persia: Warrior Within = bad; The Dark Knight = good), but it shouldn't be treated as a default choice. We learn more about Drake, Desmond, and Shepard in these games, but their designers wisely avoid the sullen, doleful fate that befalls other game heroes. Travis grows a little angsty in NMH2, but the game isn't committed to exploring it.
Don't assume "developing the characters and story" are sufficient reasons for a sequel. Uncharted 2, Bioshock 2, and Mass Effect 2 each advance an existing storyline, but they also do more important things like enhance their gameplay with genuinely fun new options and features; refine their interfaces; lower their barrier to entry for new players, and generally communicate a sense that this game has been honed and polished by a development team that went all-out. A sequel needs a compelling story, but that story should be embedded in a game that feels like it's advancing too.
This, in my view, is the particular triumph of Bioshock 2 - a game whose most convincing initial argument for a sequel was financial. That 2K Marin overcame this cynical impetus and built a game that surpasses the original in nearly every way is a testament to their ingenuity and their devotion to creating a sequel second to none.
I'm sure I've neglected a few 'rules' in my list. If so, I hope you'll let me know.
I've been reading lots of reviews and blog posts certifying Mass Effect 2 as the future of RPGs. It fixes what's wrong with the genre and sends designers of backward-looking games scrambling to the drawing board. It represents, as several notable outlets have noted, the future of storytelling in games and a lesson in how to do narrative games right.
I'm going to play contrarian here, but first let me say I think Mass Effect 2 largely earns the lavish praise heaped upon it. It's an exceptionally fine game with fabulous production values, and I've enjoyed just about every minute I've spent playing it. I'm not quibbling with the hype. Not much anyway.
I'm troubled by the mentality that games exist to invalidate other games; that the most effective measure of a game's value is its ability to surpass or trump other games that preceded it. Among its many praiseworthy aspects, Mass Effect 2's success as a kind of refutation of other games is considered an especially noteworthy achievement.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it mistakes streamlining for refinement. It assumes the fiddly RPG elements the game eliminates are vestiges of outmoded design. It presumes that frequent skirmishes and action-based gameplay are more fun or engaging than the strategic RPG elements they replace. It assumes that a dialogue-tree system of interactions enables a more sophisticated form of player agency. None of these assumptions are incontestably true.
I'm not suggesting ME2 lacks refinements. As an iteration on the original game, ME2 is chock-full of mechanical, interface, and visual upgrades. As many have noted, its shooting and cover system is vastly improved from ME1, and Bioware seems to have learned from its mistakes in this regard. ME2 improves on ME1 in all sorts of useful ways, and that's a good and praiseworthy thing.
But when we discuss Mass Effect 2 as the game to finally shatter RPG genre limits and chart a new narrative path, I think we project too much on a game that exchanges some limits for others. I want meaningful interactions with my
environment, not pop-up notices for glowing blue frames. I want dialogue unbound
by a nice/naughty/neutral triad. I want to do trivial things. I want
lower stakes. I want to play a game that doesn't insist the future
depends on me. I want a game that defines role-playing more broadly than dialogue choices. I want a game that won't insist my actions and movements (what I do, not what I say) are merely bridges to the next fight.
I'm not suggesting ME2 is a bad game because it fails to meet those expectations. On the contrary, I think it's a terrific game. I'm merely pointing out that while ME2 is unquestionably a high peak, there are plenty of other mountains worth climbing.
It's useful to consider how ME2 succeeds as a well produced RPG that elevates certain genre elements, and de-emphasizes others. But Bioware is up to more than simply rearranging the RPG furniture here. ME2 is a canny scramble of storytelling and game design highlights from previous Bioware games, Gears of War, Star Trek/Wars/Galactica, and The Magnificent Seven, among other influences.
What Bioware has accomplished with ME2 is less about refining the RPG or blazing a new narrative trail than about distilling and mashing up stuff that works from other sources. ME2 is a tantalizing cocktail of action, adventure, sci-fi, RPG, and shooter ingredients, poured into in a big cinematic shaker.
Bioware knows what we who write about games ought to know better. Genre classifications are essentially meaningless, and it's time to drop them and move on. Three of the best games I've played in the last year - Mass Effect 2, Demon's Souls, and Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor are all classified as RPGs, even though they actually have very little in common. On the other hand, IGN may classify MLB 09 as a "sports game," but I say it has more in common with Mass Effect 2 than Mario Baseball. More than ever, genre categories seem like arbitrary labels we apply to games so they can be properly shelved.
And, of course, the scramble extends beyond games. It's the Judd Apatow Effect. Inject moribund romantic comedy
genre with lowbrow buddy-movie humor to create slacker-striver films
with male and female box office appeal. It's Robert Plant and Alison Krauss; it's MMA; it's the Subaru Outback; it's Elton John and whatever flavor-of-the-week artist the Grammys pair him with.
It's the inevitable trajectory. For better or worse, we like our entertainment scrambled. Sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes - as Mass Effect 2 skillfully illustrates - it does.
Back before the dawn of time - before HD, virtual lens flares, and 14-button gamepads - text adventures lured us into their virtual worlds with smart storytelling, clever writing ... and feelies. If you're too young to remember feelies, well, I feel for ya because feelies were something special.
Feelies were physical items included in the boxed versions of Infocom games from 1984-1989. These small artifacts, most of them nuggets of sly inventiveness, were far more than window sill collectibles. They often functioned as indispensable tools to the player, providing contextual backstory, clues, unlock codes, and other data enabling progress through the game. Feelies weren't toss-in extras; they extended the game experience, literally, right into the player's hands.
If you're lucky enough to have played the original Leather Goddesses of Phobos (my mother's family hails from Upper Sandusky, Ohio, for those in the know), you will surely recall the scratch and sniff card required when the game instructed you to scratch a number and report the corresponding odor; the Adventures of Lane Mastodon 3D comic book (and 3D glasses) containing vital hints; and a catacombs map warmly welcomed by IF gamers accustomed to creating our own on graph paper.
Of course, feelies also served as a clever form of copy protection at a time when asking the player to type the 4th word from the 3rd paragraph on page 27 of the manual was the best safeguard anybody could think of.
If you'd like to see .jpg scans of every Infocom feelie, including game manuals and box art, I highly recommend The Infocom Gallery. This is why we have the internet.
To my surprise, I've been thinking about feelies since I started playing Mass Effect 2. It seems to me that Bioware is attempting - and one can see this evolving from its prior games - to embed content in and around ME2 that looks a lot like a digital version of feelies. It's not a perfect analogue (nothing compares to holding an artifact in your hands), but it seems to me they're tapping into the spirit of what Infocom tried to do 25 years ago.
It's important to note that I'm not talking about the ME2 collector's edition swag. An art book, a comic book, and a making-of DVD are nice souvenirs for Mass Effect fans, but they're commemorative items that don't deepen or extend the game. A bonus weapon may impact the player's experience, but it's superfluous by design.
ME2 delivers its digital feelies via an extraordinarily rich in-game codex and by a decidedly un-extraordinary online service called the Cerberus Network. When first announced, I mistook Bioware's press release description of Cerberus ("a direct channel for our players to dive deeper into the intriguing lore of Mass Effect") to mean an online hub for players to gather and extend their experiences with the game. Silly me. Cerberus is Bioware's DLC channel that doubles as a disincentive system for players who prefer to rent or purchase a used copy of the game.
But, ah, the codex. Reviewers have understandably focused on ME2's improvements to the original Mass Effect: upgraded shooter mechanics, streamlined RPG elements, polished cinematics; but precious little has been written about the powerful storytelling dimension of ME2's in-game codex. Slightly modified with a cleaner interface, it's the same gloriously overstuffed lore device that appeared in ME1, but its utility in the middle of a sprawling 3-part epic is greater than ever.
Like the fake "Dakota Magazine" feelie (dated 'April 2031') included in Steve Meretzky's masterful A MInd Forever Voyaging, ME2's codex enriches the storytelling by contextualizing it within a dynamic, self-contained world. It serves the practical function of helping players new to the Mass Effect universe get up to speed, but it also satisfies lore-hungry players who want to immerse themselves in a rich role-playing experience. Given Bioware's decision to simplify some of the game's traditional RPG elements, the codex plays an even more important role in this regard than in ME1.
RPG scoffers may smirk, but to a devoted player it actually matters that the Asari reproduce through a form of parthenogenesis. That information, explained and archived in the Primary Codex, will impact a player's perceptions and choices. It's pertinent, not disposable lore. It also matters that these primary entries are delivered in spot-on 70s-era Disney-Tomorrowland narration by VO vet Neil Ross.
I miss the Infocom feelies and all the other fun stuff game companies once stuffed into boxes along with their discs. Mass Effect 2's terrific media-rich codex imparts a bit of that old flavor to me, even if it can't match the charm or tactile feel of, say, an actual letter to shareholders from John D. Flathead IX, printed on genuine FrobozzCo letterhead.
Come to think of it, maybe a wee bit of humor would liven up the ol' Mass Effect codex. Hmm.
Note: The Mass Effect 2 cover art shown above was replaced by another design prior to release, but this one looks nicer next to the Planetfall cover.
No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle is a better game than the original NMH. It streamlines or eliminates most of the problems folks complained about in the first game - vacuous open world, monotonous required side jobs, muddy visuals - and reviewers have rewarded it with generally higher scores (Metacritic 89 for NMH2 vs 83 for NMH). As 1UP's review notes, it "takes the fun parts of the original...and tries to make those the focus while practically quartering off the weaker parts."
So you should definitely play NMH2, if only to reward Grasshopper Manufacture for its signature pursuit of brash idiosyncrasy and deviant design.
Sadly, NMH2 is also a worse game than the original in ways that can't be tallied on a feature checklist. Designer Goichi Suda missile-launched the first game at our heads - rough edges, obtuse objectives, design misfires and all - and his singular vision exploded on impact. NMH was a bombastic mess, but a startlingly prodigious one. When it appeared two years ago, NMH was the game for gamers sick of cookie-cutter games. A turd in the punchbowl.
Audacity is tough to do twice. The first time feels like inspiration; the second time can feel like calculation. NMH2 doesn't ease off on the stuff that grabbed our attention the first time. Suda's adolescent fascination with potty humor, sexual innuendo, splattering blood, and general bad-boy punkster 'tude permeates the sequel no less than the original.
But discovery is a precious one-time event, and NMH2 faces a nearly impossible task in that regard. This cleaned-up, streamlined version of Santa Destroy doesn't grab us by the throat as much as it eases our re-entry. The original NMH may have been a better experience than a game, but its sequel reverses that formula and the result feels less satisfying.
Remember that "joy of iteration" essay I wrote a while back? I guess I was lying.
It's hard to quantify such things, but NMH2 often feels less creatively invigorated than its predecessor. Indelible bosses like Doctor Peace and Harvey Moiseiwitsch Volodarskii have no equals in NMH2. The fabulously wacky boss intros are simplified and diminished, as are most of the strategies needed to beat them.
Remember receiving phone calls from Sylvia on your Wiimote? The baseballs slung at you in Destroy Stadium that required you to hit them? The sprinkler system used as a weapon to shock you with your katana? Surprising and clever little ideas like these are missing from NMH2, and the game suffers for it.
And I miss Travis' bike. Okay, okay, I know it was a pain to control, and I know the dead open world was a charming joke that wore off after about an hour. But Travis is a biker, and I say he needs his bike. I won't argue that an open world works better than NMH2's menu system, but I wish Grasshopper had found a way to connect Travis to his bike more inventively than an awful bike joust battle and an oddly meaningless open road ride near the end of the game.
After WWII, Italian Neorealism arose to challenge Hollywood's "tradition of quality," and the French New Wave later extended the argument. Those filmmakers objected to the values and standards of Hollywood production, arguing that such a system codified narrative and stylistic conventions and imprisoned artists in a paint-by-number process of filmmaking. The punk aesthetic Suda espouses advances the same essential argument.
Suda's second No More Heroes game makes a series of concessions to conventional game design that improve the game, but the overall experience feels diminished. So by embracing a certain tradition of quality, is Suda a sellout? Maybe, but I don't think so.
It seems to me NMH2 suffers, not because of its smoother interface and less irksome gameplay, but because the game feels less personal, less defiant, less inspired, less insistent...less like the creation of an uncompromising artist with a head full of big ideas.
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