One Dimension Too Many - PAX East 2011 3DS Impressions

This past weekend the second PAX East was held at the Boston Convention Center. The venue was noticeably larger than that of the inaugural PAX East, and this was most obvious was on the expo floor. The floor seemed roomier, with wider aisles, larger booths and more games to see and play. The idea of queuing up just to SEE a game like Battlefield 3 or Portal 2 was obviously appealing to some considering the length of the lines, even if that video would eventually be on the internet anyway. There were also a lot of playable demos for upcoming titles, including the now destined for the bargain bin Homefront, the hotly anticipated Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Gears of War 3 which from appearances might as well be called Gears of War 2: Green Sleeveless Edition. The expo floor was also a first chance for many attendees to see the soon to be released Nintendo 3DS in action. Given Nintendo's incredible success with the DS, one would expect the next iteration to advance the brand's dominance exponentially. However, after spending some time with it, it's hard not to think of the Virtual Boy. Obviously it won't be such a grotesque failure, but it's possible that Nintendo may have put too much into the gimmick of this device.

Closely resembling the later model DSi, the 3DS adds a number of features including more graphical power, an analog stick, a gyroscopic sensor, fancier cameras and of course glasses free 3D. Nintendo's last two major hardware releases, the DS and the Wii, managed to really push stylus (touch) and waggle (motion) controls and make those things that everybody understands. Both pieces of hardware seemed crazy at the time they were released, but now touch only devices like the iPad/iPhone are sometimes seriously referred to as gaming platforms and both Microsoft and Sony have taken their first steps into the motion control arena. With 3D becoming a staple of modern blockbuster movie releases and 3D televisions making their way into homes and finding support in some games, it seems like putting such a small and relatively inexpensive device into the hands of consumers might just be Nintendo being ahead of the trend curve again. After spending a few moments with the unit in Nintendo's little demo corral though, how far ahead they are seems questionable.

Available to demo were a number of games, including the AR game Archery, Dead or Alive: Dimensions, Super Street Figher IV, Steel Diver, Nintendogs and Cats, Kid Icarus:Uprising, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D and Pilotwings Resort. Playing these games was interesting, but revealed some pretty deep rooted flaws in the fundamental premise of the platform. The 3D effect works, but the actual amount of depth seems inconsistent between titles and it generates a pretty noticeable amount of eye strain. Steel Diver, for example, looks very flat even though the field of vision is very similar to that of Pilotwings which looked noticeably more 3D, though neither title was helped by incredibly bland artistic designs. Certainly the raw graphical output of the device is more than that of the DS, but it was not head and shoulders above recent PSP games, which is disappointing considering the PSP was released more than 6 years ago. Kid Icarus looked the best out of all the games on display, resembling sort of a Space Harrier meets Panzer Dragoon with some Virtual-On thrown in for ground-based action, but with so much on-screen activity the difficult to focus on 3D effect makes it impossible to clearly see more than any one thing at a time. The gyroscopic sensor and camera work nicely for Archery when you're aiming at targets that appear around an actual card that is sitting on the table in front of you (the game utilizes the 3DS camera), and AR games are admittedly awesome conceptually, but when the fidelity of the 3D is based completely on your viewing angle, moving the device is not an option unless you move your entire body to maintain direct line of sight. The real problem though, was that the thing just felt like a chore to look at after about 20 minutes. You can use the slider on the device to turn down the 3D effect and mitigate some of the eye strain, but if you're going to have to turn off the main feature of the device what's the point?

The Penalty For Death - Difficulty & Death in Games

Difficulty has changed a lot since the early days of electronic gaming. Back then most games were brutally hard, probably since they were born on arcade machines designed to destroy your quarters in a relatively small amount of time. Failure in most games comes in the form of death, and in the past we were dying a lot. Now we have games where you literally can't die. At some point publishers probably realized that there's no need to torture the player with heinous difficulty since you've already dropped $50 or $60 on the title, and that all they need to do is make sure you feel like you got their money's worth so that you'll buy the inevitable string of sequels. Make a game too hard and it's likely that your audience probably won't even finish it, let alone buy the next one. Games do need to have some kind of challenge though, otherwise they don't feel satisfying. Where should developers draw the line, and how do you punish failure and keep the player coming back for more at the same time?

Demon's Souls is a pretty good recent poster boy for gratuitous difficulty. Its reputation as a game for the truly hardcore and the legacy of previous From Software titles like King's Field were able to garner enough sales to see a sequel announced, much to the joy of mashocists everywhere. This was a game that innovated by making death matter in an era where save games and frequent checkpoints have all but eliminated its relevance. You could spend 45 minutes navigating the dark corridors of the game's world only to get struck down in mere seconds by a tentacle faced-wizard, losing your night's progress. You heard his bell chiming in the distance before you even saw him, and then at the critical moment the trajectory of your dodge maneuver is slightly off and you're paralyzed by his ranged attack, left to watch helplessly as he comes to devour the contents of your skull. This is the sort of thing that happens in Demon's Souls the time, and for some it was too much but for many it was just what the doctor ordered. The possibility of succeeding against a machine so expertly designed to destroy you was motivation enough to keep throwing yourself back into its gears.

Super Meat Boy, on the other hand, is a game that managed to be incredibly difficult without having any penalty for death whatsoever. Playing the later levels of SMB for even a few minutes means you will die countless times, and after each death you will be ready to attempt the stage again within half a second. An errant jump that sends you into one of the game's many spinning buzz saws doesn't send you back to some loading screen, or cost you a life, or penalize you in any way really. When you're going to fail thousands of times, this is an inspired design choice. It's not all plummeting into lava and getting disintegrated by lasers though. Between all of the death and frustration there is the moment of exhilaration when you discover that the path to victory you thought was just a naive fantasy is actually possible. The carrot can barely be seen dangling over the horizon, but it is within your reach if you're willing to try for it. You may have to try many, many times, but when the consequence of failure is so minimal why shouldn't you?

Offline Low-tech Co-op - Space Hulk: Death Angel Review

With the advent of online matchmaking services such as Xbox Live and PSN there has been a marked shift away from local multiplayer towards the inclusion online multiplayer in games, be it cooperative or competitive. In fact, a lot of titles now have online multiplayer modes that seem as though they've been shoehorned in by developers, probably at the urging publishers who are hoping to give their customers a reason not to sell games on the secondary market after finishing them. In the past multiplayer usually meant 2-player with the exception of some arcade cabinets which were made to support multiple players. Even up to the previous console generation online multiplayer was a thing that happened almost exclusively on the PC, which has never come close to being the vast cultural phenomenon that console gaming has become. It may seem unfair to say something like that about the PC as a gaming platform, but the PC gaming demographic seems to have not changed at all within the context of a larger culture which has evolved to the point where the elitists now derisively comment about how Call of Duty is a game for frat boys. Taken in that light it seems clear that the home console is now defining online multiplayer to a greater extent than the platform on which the feature originated. There was a time, though, when local multiplayer was the standard rather than the exception. When afternoons were whiled away on games of Battletoads, Street Fighter II, Golden Eye, and Guilty Gear X2. That time is over now, but a bastion of local multiplayer still exists in the realm of board games.

Board games?! No, not those board games that killed so many weekend afternoons in youths, but good board games. The past couple of years have seen an incredible rise in the popularity of Eurogames, which differ from the classic American boardgames in a number of ways. In general, Eurogames are not luck based (little or no die rolling), do not have player elimination (everyone plays to the end), and have themes can seem somewhat outlandish. They're mostly competitive but we have seen a number of cooperative eurogames over the years in which players compete against the board, but these games suffer from a fatal flaw compared to cooperative video games. In a video game, each player controls their "character" or "guy" or whatever and they're the only one who can do it due to the nature of the inputs (i.e. game pads or controllers). In a cooperative boardgame like Arkham Horror, depending on group dynamics, the slow paced turn based nature of the medium can lend itself to an experience of playing by committee, where an individual player's experience is sometimes diminished by a desire to go along with everyone else and not rock the boat. Fantasy Flight Games seems to have at least partly solved this problem by with the release of Space Hulk: Death Angel, which is not a Eurogame in any sense, but manages to rise above the pitfalls of traditional American board game nonetheless.

Space Hulk: Death Angel (Board Game, 2010)

Released about a year after Games Workshop's 3rd Edition Space Hulk, Death Angel is a pared down version of the beloved miniature/board game hybrid that manages to condense the incredible flavor and intensity of the original into a sandwich sized package that plays just as well with 2 players as it does with 6. The theme is pretty rich and beyond the scope of this post, but the tag-line on the box sums it up well as "man versus alien in a desperate struggle."  This flavor is carried very well by the card art and gameplay, so players familiar with the Warhammer 40k setting will feel right at home.  Inside the box you'll find cards representing space marines, genestealers (4-armed scythe-taloned alien monstrosities), actions, locations and events.  You'll also get a number of thick cardboard tokens and a special die.  The die and tokens are nice but the cards are a little small and thin, though they do shuffle very well.  Overall, it is a nice package and a solid value at $25.

During the course of the game, space marines controlled by the players will work together to move through the decks of a derelict spaceship infested with genestealers intent on tearing them to shreds. Each player controls the actions of 1 or 2 teams of space marines, with each team consisting of one basic marine and one command marine (seargent or librarian), heavy weapons marine (heavy flamer or autocannon), or close combat specialist (lightning claws or thunder hammer and storm shield). Each team of marines has three unique action cards which dictate what they do each turn (attack, move and activate, and support), and each turn the team will perform one action so long as it is different from the action they performed last turn. Each space marine, location, and genestealer is represented by a card, and at the start of the game the space marines are lined up in a column which is flanked on both sides by corridors, doors, vents, dark corners and other features of the ship from which emerge genestealers. Throughout the course of the game the space marines will clear sections of the ship and advance through a series of increasingly dangerous random locations by eliminating genestealers until they arrive at the final location where they'll have to satisfy a specific victory condition such as kill the genestealer broodlords or activate a special control panel.

The tension of the original board game is recreated here by the near-constant tide of genestealer cards which are spawned from blip piles based on the location of the marines in the ship, which changes whenever a blip pile is exhausted (i.e. the space marines have survived long enough in the location and killed enough genestealers). The number of genestealers, their locations, and their movements around the formation of space marines are based on a random event card that is resolved at the start of each turn, and the regularity with which they spawn makes it seems like the marines are fighting an uphill battle most of the time. Combat is resolved with a simple die roll, and players must take advantage of each of the unique marine's special abilities to get the most out of their actions each turn, because any genestealers left after actions are taken will attack back, forcing a defense roll that is more difficult depending on how many genestealers are engaging the defending marine. Eliminated space marines are gone for good, so a big part of the game is trying to figure out which marine is most expendable, and making sure your more valuable special weapons marines are not having to make defense rolls that are too difficult. In lieu of attacking, space marines can maneuver around the formation and change facing to interact with special locations  by taking movement actions, or gain support tokens which allow re-rolls on attack and defense by taking support actions. All of the actions have additional benefits that are team specific, triggering a unique bonus effect once those actions are taken, such as firing multiple shots with an autocannon, counterattacking on defense rolls or locking a group of genestealers under a stasis field.

So how does this game solve the problem of gaming by committee that plagues most co-op boardgames? It does so by stipulating that players choose what actions they take secretly and then resolve them based on initiative order (determined by a number on each action card). How much each group of players wants to do this is up to them, so it's a nice option to have in case you get worn down by this unforgiving game in which space marines live and die by the dice. One criticism of the game could be that it the outcome is too dependent on die rolls and luck with the event deck, but if you're coming into Death Angel expecting the tactical depth of Twilight Struggle you're setting yourself up for a big disappointment. This is a light, fun, flavorful game that's good as a warm-up for your game night's main event or as game to share with less experienced gamers who will appreciate the short play time and quick to learn rules.