Rise of the Videogame Zinesters - Review

A little while back I heard Patrick Klepek mention this book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters by Anna Antrhopy, on the Giant Bombcast which I listen to regularly.  It sounded interesting and at the time I didn't make the connection to the game Dys4ia which Anna made and Patrick had posted a link to on his worth reading segment a few months earlier.  I had played Dys4ia and thought it was alright, but then swiftly forgot about it because while it was interesting there wasn't very much to it.  Rise can be summed up pretty much the same way: interesting, but not much to it.  To break it down, Rise is a book about how now through the power of free tools and distribution made easy by ubiquitous internet access, we should all start making smaller more personal games so that there is more art.  It sounds good in theory, but Rise fails in its execution.

 The most interesting, largely because it's the most problematic chapter in Anna's book is the first one, entitled "the problem with videogames."  Anna starts by making a lot of bold claims about how most games are about "men shooting men in the face," and if not, they must be abstract games or games where female characters are in some position of servitude.  This is on page 3 for Christ's sake, and is just the start of a whole book full of super reductive claims that there are no worthwhile games coming out of the mainstream anymore.  She proposes a model where an industry dominated by white males suppresses innovation and perpetuates what she perceives to be a stagnant medium.  This is her foundation for the rest of the book, which is unfortunate, because it's a really crappy attitude to have about games.

Anna Antrhopy - just THRILLED with games.

Maybe Anna didn't play the same games that I did this generation, or even last generation, or even the one before that.  Is Mirror's edge a game about shooting dudes in the face?  Catherine? Demon's Souls? Limbo? Trials HD? Flower? Heavy Rain? Mass Effect?  Isn't it horribly reductive to say that Bioshock is mostly about shooting dudes in the face, even when it's a first person shooter?  Is that what that game is really about?  I don't think so. Is Bastion a game that a stagnant industry produces?  If so, don't you ever change, game industry.

Machinarium - I'm pretty sure nobody is getting shot in the face.

It's not all bad, though. There's a pretty soberly written brief history of games. There are good descriptions of tools that are available for people to make games.  Anna even spends some time talking about games that' she's made, and her unusual perspective is kind of compelling, though honestly her ideas of what constitutes a "game" deviate wildly from mine and what most gamers might consider a game.  Hell, if you think quick time events suck some of the game out of a videogame, wait until you read the description of the stellar "gameplay" in her game, Gay Sniper.

If you still enjoy games, this book probably isn't for you.  I lent it to a visiting friend to flip through one night and she summed it up as "feminist smut."  That's a pretty astute description of Rise.  This is a book that's preaching to the choir, specifically designed for the already converted.  It's for all those folks you see trolling news blogs making hyperbolic comments about how there's no variety anymore, despite this being arguably the most diverse market for games that's ever existed.  It's a shame, because there are some good ideas in Rise that wind up taking the back seat to the author's mission to shit all over the existing establishment when she writes statements like "fuck Steam" without irony.

What To Play This Holiday Season

 me:  there's some good games on amazon buy 2 get 1 free.... but I don't need more games 

 Sent at 1:21 PM on Friday

 Steven:  Yeah

I'm already getting kinda sick of battlefield

Their rewards are too slip apart.  It doesn't give you enough incremental benefits

I think I'm going to try to learn how to play the jets and helis though

 Sent at 1:38 PM on Friday

 me:  bummer

yeah i guess they should have made 2143 instead

SEE

 Sent at 3:28 PM on Friday

 Steven:  haha, maybe

I might be more on board now

 me:  the future is the future man

 Steven:  But it's gotta be a lot spacier

 me:  lol

so.... Quake 3?

 Steven:  Giant walking spider bots spacy

that would awesome!

now the Quake 3

but spider bot tanks

 me:  if they just added a conquest mod and vehicles, done

 Steven:  They already tried that though, Quake Wars

It was quite terrible

 Sent at 3:37 PM on Friday

 me:  oh yeah

haha

well, maybe they should let DICE develop it

actually, maybe DICE should just make my goddamned mirror's edge 2

 Steven:  haha

 me:  this game seems to be kind of a let-down

for people

do you think MW3 is going to be any good?

 Steven:  I don't think it's a let down.  It's everything I wanted in BF, I just realized that everything I wanted can be kinda boring

 me:  lol

 Steven:  it's MY fault!

 me:  LOL

 Steven:  I dunno about that MW3

It's fun until you realize that it's bullshit

I guess I'll just keep playing Dark Souls.  You should do that too, if you aren't already.  It's great, 10/10.

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?

Get Physical - Meatspace Preorder Bonuses

When Sony released the comically inadequate PSP Go, it seemed as though physical media might not be a thing that made the transition into the next generation of handhelds. On paper that seemed like a fine idea, especially for people who wanted to carry around a library of games without the hassle of lugging around a collection of UMDs, miniscule though they may be. Unfortunately, with no way to transfer their existing collection of UMD games onto their PSP Go, owners of the handheld were stuck with the unappealing and frankly criminal prospect of having to repurchase their games on PSN, those which were available anyway. This is probably the single largest contributing factor to the failure of the PSP Go, and although support for full retail releases on PSN has been adequate, there are still a lot of gaps in the library and far from every title is available. Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together was just released this week and is available on PSN, but there's still no legitimate reason to ever purchase it as a downloadable title unless of course you only have a PSP Go to play it on, and not one of the many superior older model PSPs.

For starters, pre-ordering the retail box game would have got you this incredibly sweet tarot card set featuring the 22 original art major arcana that you might remember from playing Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen on SNES so many years ago (or on Wii Virtual Console not so many years ago). Even if you didn't preorder, this game comes with a manual so thick it hearkens back to the days of PC gaming before there stopped being any particular reason to buy boxed PC games (i.e. Steam). It's imaginable that they would have made the manual thicker if there weren't such a limited amount of space in the box. It is crammed full of the kind of useful information that is necessary to succeed playing a game which requires a bit more effort than most modern games which simply task you with remember that square is a light attack and triangle is a strong attack. They must have simply ran out of room judging by the absence of the ludicrous "notes" pages that occasionally still appear in the flimsy pamphlets that pass for game manuals these days. God of War III, does your manual really need a notes section? The answer is an emphatic "NO."

So what is the deal with downloadable games anyway then? It makes sense on a platform such as Apple's app store, where there has never been a precedent for boxed games since the devices have never had physical media drives. It also makes sense for PC games which are becoming an increasingly niche market, and also exist on a somewhat of an eternal format. You can rest assured that your Windows PC games you purchased on Steam will always play on a Windows PC for as long as the platform is around, which will probably be forever. Consoles and handhelds are a different matter altogether though on account of their generational hardware iterations, unless you're Nintendo, who have recently been pretty stellar about maintaining backwards compatibility across their platforms. The exception of course are titles that are available only as downloads due to their narrow appeal or insubstantial nature that does not warrant a full box release. How long, though, until the new generation of consoles or handhelds no longer have physical media drives? When will box sales become negligible to the point that publishers no longer care about maintaining a relationship with brick and mortar retailers? Hopefully that day will never come, for more than a few reasons.

First of all, you can give a goodbye kiss to most of your ownership of the games you laid hard earned cash down for. As of now there's no way to share downloadable titles, sell them back to the store (if you're into that sort of thing) or even lend them to friends, and it seems unlikely that such a system would ever be implemented. Additionally, the incentive for publishers to offer awesome preorder bonuses or collector's editions goes right out the window. Without a physical product, there is no medium by which to deliver things like original soundtracks, art books, terrible "making of" documentaries, or the rare creepy perverted mouse pad. Obviously there are huge incentives for publishers to eliminate physical media if they can do so without impacting sales, and luckily that time has not yet come. Unfortunately, it seems inevitable the infrastructure required to deliver that product to every potential customer will someday exist, and that will be a sad day for us all. Until then, keep it real.

Retro Active - Where New Games are Terrible

At some point, electronic gaming matured to the state where a sub-culture of gamers known as retro-gamers could appear. It's hard to say when this happened exactly, as I'm sure there were a ton of people kicking it old school and consistently jamming through NES Marble Madness playthroughs during all subsequent hardware generations. It's also hard to say how old a game needs to be to qualify, since recently we saw the release of an updated Golden Eye on the Wii and during the lead-up to its release whole pages of commentary recalling the good old days of playing the original on N64 sprang into existence. Clearly, games from that era (1997) hold some kind of retro-cachet, but it's only more recently that brand new titles have been delivered to us with deliberate retro qualities. Throw in the huge number of straight up ports that are available, especially on handhelds (ahem, 3DS first party ports), and you could probably make a stack of new-old games to keep you busy indefinitely. Playing these titles now can teach us a lot about games, including how far the medium has come, how sometimes it doesn't need to go very far, and how occasionally you wish it could just go back to the where it came from.

In terms of how far games have traveled from their origins, playing a game like Pacman Championship Edition DX is a real eye opening experience. It's like all bets are off and you can imagine a world where as soon as you think you understand how a franchise works, especially one so rooted in its own conventions, they go and add bullet time, "ghost trains", techno music and bombs. This has been tried before, but Pacman CE DX is the true realization of the potential that can be unlocked when you take something so well understood and ever so gently turn it on its head. It is simultaneously so Pacman and so not Pacman, and I was not surprised to hear it at least mentioned during a variety of game of the year discussions last year.

Sometimes a brand new game can still feel incredibly modern even if it hasn't gone through any significant updates since earlier titles in the franchise, even when those games were released over 15 years ago. Playing Donkey Kong Country Returns for any amount of time will trigger an almost Pavlovian surge of joy deep within you. This is in spite of the fact that not a whole lot of innovation has occured since the orignal Donkey Kong Conutry. It's all mostly the same, except now the fidelity is incredibly high, with sharper looking graphics and crisper sounding tunes. The gameplay consists mostly of the same stuff we were doing on the SNES all those years ago, so you'll spend a lot of time running, jumping, launching out of barrels and riding in mine carts, and all of that is just dandy. There's no shoehorned competitive online multiplayer, no DLC, no pan-media saturation campaign, and that's fine.

Lastly, you sometimes play a 13 year old game and wonder what the hell went wrong since then. Maybe that game is Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, which you've picked up on the PSP to satiate some ravenous hunger for turn-based strategy RPGs the likes of which are rarely made in modern times, while you await the remake of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. Realizing that the genre peaked so many years ago can only be torturous for people who have been with Square from the beginning, enough to make them start saying "geez Square Enix really needs to just stop." It might be true SE needs to change how they do things on account of their recent record of mediocrity and rampant franchise milking (2011 will see at least five "Final Fantasy" releases), but what becomes apparent is that SE really needs to do is stop trying to fix things that aren't broken. Stop taking away equipment slots. Stop simplifying the level up and magic systems. Stop making games were all you do is travel between cut scenes featuring ridiculously dressed characters who blather incomprehensibly about having to save the blah by collecting the bleh with the right fighting spirit. It's in rare cases such as these, in this golden age of gaming where there's literally something for everyone, that it doesn't seem dishonest to pine for a past which was arguably worse in almost all other ways.