Death of a Swordsman

Demon's Souls (DS) was one of those games that, if you believe that games are art, then you should play. Since I fall into that category of people, I decided to buy it with my new PS3 system. It was a greatest hits version so it was only $20 and considering the price of that little black box of processing it was all I could really afford. I got home installed it, created a dead faced old man avatar, and started my journey through a castle (I looked like Danny Trejo after a cheap facelift ).



Then I died.

And I died…

And I died.

If you don’t know, DS is a game that is purposefully difficult. Playing it reminded me a lot of trying to get through that one hall in the first Castlevania (Ryan, Krystn you know what I’m talking about (da da doo, da da doo, da daa)). But I beat Castlevania, I can beat Megaman without continuing, I should be able to handle this.

Apparently, I can’t.

DS refused to offer any sort of help to get through the game. Hell, it took me several hours to figure out that I could run. Also, when you die you get resurrected but with only a portion of your health bar. Most enemies will either hack off most or your life in one hit or they’ll call all their friends for a good ole rat king hello.

At first I guess I was enjoying it. However, I got this nagging feeling that I was giving the game way too much of a benefit of the doubt; that maybe this game is only good because I’m choosing for it to be good. So, I stepped back and reevaluated, realizing that I wasn’t actually having any fun.

To put this into presepctive, I'll quit a game in Modern Warfare because my team is getting pummeled. This isn't because I can't deal with losing but more so that I'm simply not having fun. I've learned that I can pop the battery out of the back of a 360 controller by twisting it enough. Being pissed off isn't fun for me.

Sorry.

I like a challenge but this game isn’t challenging, it’s obnoxious. You remember in Final Fantasy 7 having to fight the Emerald and Ruby Weapons and you had to build up all your characters to level 99, get their best weapons and hope that you got a little lucky when you went into battle? Yeah, I don’t either because I’m not a loser.

I don’t like grinding for hours just to get one stat to go up by one point and quite frankly neither should you.

DS has an illusion of epicness but at the end of the day the game seems grandiose because you have to spend a lot of time doing to same thing in the same place. This processes gets reset every time you have a pack of cyborg skeletons using your torso for a sharpening stone (trust me, it’s nowhere as cool as it sounds). Yeah, you start noticing subtleties in the brick laying of a prison but, at the end of the day, all I’ve really done is dodge a Chutulu-faced wizard a hundred, million, trillion times. I guess if that’s your thing then more power to you.

Maybe it’s a WOW thing.

I have yet to finish DS because when I started playing all of the worlds were white and I was still having trouble (there’s a mechanic that online players control the difficulty of the game, white: easy, black: hard).


I played for a couple of weeks then the worlds all turned pure black to celebrate Halloween or their 3rd year anniversary or whatever (yeah, I know keeping this thing current). I just didn’t have the time or effort. DS is a game for people who like Steven King or Robert Jordan novels e.g. high volume, low content.

Maybe one day I’ll finish it…

but it’s not likely.

I also want to apologize for the gross overuse of parenthesis in this post.

The Last Guardian: Why I worry so...

Team ICO, Oh Team ICO.

Why hasn’t this game been released yet? No, seriously. Why?

Do you hate us? Have we not used Shadow of the Colossus and Ico as glowing examples in the “videogames are art” argument? I will literally buy a PS3 to play this game – well, that and Final Fantasy versus 13 – because your pedigree means so much to me. I would buy this game before I would buy food.

So, WHY WONT YOU RELEASE THIS THING!!!

Alright, how about a little back story. The Last Guardian is a game about a boy and his giant griffin released by the earthy manifestation of god Team ICO. Preceded by ICO and Shadow of the Colossus (the Nick Drake and Big Star of video gaming) Last Guardian has quite the reputation to live up to.

The Last Guardian was also announced in 2009 meaning that it’s been in the works since at least 2007. Well, after trailer after trailer and updated screenshot after updated screenshot, it’s finally going to be released in early 2012. Quite frankly, that’s ridiculous.

The ICO mythos has never been accused of being a story that’s over told. You could sum up the plot of both Ico and Shadow of the Colossus in a couple of paragraphs and I would be surprised of The Last Guardian is going to be any different. In fact, I’ll predict the entire story right now.

Boy is in trouble, probably because someone is trying to sacrifice him to something. Boy stumbles across giant bird thing and after some light tension they become friends. Bird thing saves boy from baddies. Bird thing dies.

What? They killed Argo. This doesn’t take rocket science to figure out.



What I think is happening is that The Last Guardian is being “Portal 2”ed. Portal 2 was an infinitely easier game than the first Portal. This is because they play tested the game WAY too much and it was made easier as too make sure no one’s brain hemorrhaged when challenged with a mildly difficult puzzle. This lead to a lot of really easy puzzles and a game that felt really padded out all for the sake of accessibility. On one hand this is okay – I want more people to play video games – but at the same time I feel like it took away from what, made Portal so great.



Here is a quote from Fumito Ueda, “I also want people who are not serious game players to try out this game. So I want the controls to be simpler than before.” This attitude usually leads to games being insultingly easy. In Portal 2 it was really hard to get immersed in the game world because you were being shuffled from one scene to another never really getting much of a chance to take it all in.

In Shadow of the Colossus there is a battle where you have to get a flying dragon Colossus out of the sky. As the player, you spend a lot of time staring at the sky trying to figure out how to get the big guy to come down. This is a carefully planned gameplay decision which is meant to give scale to what you are about to undertake. The Colossus seems so small in the sky and when it finally swoops down to attack you it feels much bigger than it actually is.

It feels like a Colossus.

I worry that they are in the process of trading accessibility for immersion and if that is the case then that makes me kind of apprehensive. Without immersion Shadow of the Colossus wouldn’t have been the game that it was. The same goes for Portal.

Sometimes you really need to just stare at a wall while figuring out a puzzle.

Sometimes it’s important to feel confused and lost.

My prediction is that The Last Guardian is going to good but not a successor to the games that came before. It happened to Return of the Jedi, it happened to Return of the King and it happened in other things that don’t have “return” in the title.

Um…

…

Silent Hill 3!

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars

Alrighty, you’ve had enough with the philosophical waxing. Lets do a game review.

I have a special place in my heart for Turn Based Strategy (TBS) games. All the way back from Tactics Ogre to Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift (essentially the same game). This probably had to do with my obsession with forcing others to blindly follow my orders. I usually pretend to be the benevolent dictator that I wish would come and fix this country. Leading us to a brighter tomorrow where all decisions are made for the collective cause of the common identity. RISE my minions and I will lead you all to Eudaimonia: the sovereign collective fatherland!

Ahem…

The tedium of playing stupid Ocarina of Time for the 30-bazillionth time was really starting to get my goad. I went to check the reviews for 3DS games and the superfluously named Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars: The Final Tussle: Clancy Edition 3D: Chapter One: Episode 3: These Wretched Days: and A Bag of Chips by Tom Clancy caught my attention. I was interested because to my surprise the game had gotten good reviews but also wary because of the phrase “good for a 3DS game” came up a lot.

This worried me but I gave it a whirl anyway. Well, it’s 2 weeks later and according to my activity log I’ve been playing Shadow Wars for 18 hours 45 minutes and average a 1 hour session when playing. Needless to say Shadow Wars is not only good for a 3DS game but it is good, period.

First there is the story.

I’ve never read a Tom Clancy book or even played any games that he’s had a hand in creating. However, Shadow Wars almost makes me want to change that fact (I said “ALMOST”!). One thing that I noticed about Clancy or at least this game is that it is essentially a Westernized Ghost in the Shell/Appleseed story. In fact, I would say that this plot could have been written by Masamune Shirow if he one day decided that he was terrified of Russians and their pesky ideals. The anti-Communist sentiments are a little heavy handed but you can always pretend the Russians are the Others and you’re a mercenary hired by Charles Whitmore and BOOM season 4 of Lost.

TBSs are kind of like chess. Certain fighters have specific way that they can attack and you build strategies based around what you’re given. Shadow Wars can boast one of the most well-balanced and thought out approaches to TBSs that I’ve seen. Generally when playing a TBS it starts off simple enough but by the 10^th mission your options get so out of hand you feel like you’re trying to order off the Cheesecake Factory menu.

In R-Type Command you start off with a easily understood fleet of a few ships. By the time your fighting the Bydos in a black hole you are inundated with so many options of fighting tactics that it’s nearly impossible to choose between the long range fighter that can cloak itself within 3 moves and not use it’s secondary weapon or the long range fighter that can cloak itself within 2 moves but you can use the plasma cannon. Does it really make that much of a difference?!?!

What I like about Shadow Wars is that you are given a core group of 6 soldiers who have specific jobs. They can be tweaked a little but not enough to feel overwhelmed with the “spice of life”. What happens a lot in TBSs is that you pick a team based on some light intel. Whether or not that team bodes well depends on your ability to pick a team that will strategically give you the upper hand with info like: “there will be a battle, it happens in space”.

I hate this approach.

What this boils down to is that there is no strategy involved. You play a battle, figure out what you’re fighting, typically lose and restart the battle with a reformed party that is based around the weaknesses of the baddies you just fought. You basically use your first battle as a cheat sheet for the second go around. Shadow Wars builds maps based around the party that it already knows you are working with. This translates to maps are created with an answer built into them. Essentially, the problem has a solution.

This is what makes for a great TBS game. If you like Final Fantasy Tactics or Advanced Wars but hated playing the same level 50 times because you didn’t have the clairvoyance to know exactly what you where up against. Well, my friends, Shadow Wars will quell that nagging irritation and also hold you over till Nintendo starts throwing free games at you.

Casual or Business/Hardcore?

Lately I’ve been struggling with the concept of what exactly constitutes a casual gamer or a hardcore gamer. I started at the Mecca of legit info (Wikipedia) and found myself even more lost. Yeah, I know this is Wikipedia but where else am I going to find a definition? Hardcore gamer was described as people who “prefer to take significant time and practice on games.” And generally I thing this is a pretty accurate description.

This foil conjures up images dead eyed 30-something males who invent things like the Totino’s Taco. Or of Code Red guzzling, gold farmers, slowly supernovaing into fits of nerd rage and hypertension when some n00b snatches up all the loot. Refusing to LARP because that would require too much physical activity. RED, RED, WHITE, BLOCK! For Darkon!

…nerds

However, while thinking about this subject I watched a Zero Punctuation episode that described FPSs by saying, “you point at things you don’t like and they go away. They’re not exactly the 12 Task of Hercules”. Fair enough however this got me to thinking (now that I’m done with school I can do as much of that as I need). This made me think of another game rarely associated with hardcore gaming: Angry Birds.

You point (birds) at things you don’t like (pigs) until they go away.

Quick disclaimer: I’m going to keep this discussion about FPSs to the online multiplayer and kind of ignore the campaign.

What? You did.

In most FPSs the main attraction is playing multiplayer online. A general simulation of this activity can be summed up by point, shoot, point, shoot, kneel, teabag, scream, repeat. Or if you’re feeling a bit more multicultural you can play in the middle of the night and have a fat, lazy Limey man-child expound on how fat, lazy and man-childish YOU are. POINT BEING that it’s a bit repetitive and though strategic variation comes into play it’s no different than Salmon is to Nantucket Red.

Angry Birds has a similar sort of repetition to it as well, which usually is categorized by the term “casual gamer”. You have birds, you fling them at a perplexing combo of basswood and reinforced concrete magic, and pigs go away. I get the appeal to this kind of simplicity, I being someone who can boast total kick assery at Super Bust-A-Move.

Yeah, there’s a storyline in Angry Birds but for this discussion it will be ignored.

What? You did.

Wait a minute! There seem to be a lot of similarities here. There is monotonous gameplay with varying levels of difficulty, questionable addiction to said gameplay and a distaste for narrative that would make Joseph Campbell roll in his grave.

You all are the same people!

Replace the Spetsnaz with pigs, the SPAS-12 with a slingshot and aforementioned British mutant hate speech with weird Sims 3esque jabbering and you’re essentially playing the same game. Granted, I’m making some rather broad generalizations but there’s a bigger point to be made. Not just about gamers but gaming as a whole. Just stick with me.

So, what does this mean? Are hardcore gamers actually casual gamers? Or vice versa? Can the Financial Auditor with a wife, kids and house who spends 4 hours a day carefully grooming their FarmVille crop into the Dharma Initiative symbol be lumped with the Cheeto munching, profanity spewing Data Analyst who just got a chopper gunner and is going to ensure total PWNage in your mom’s face?

Absolutely. You say tomato, I say ketchup.

It seems to me that these labels don’t really bring anything to the table when it comes to explanatory power. They do not define any sort of character trait that is intrinsic to casual or hardcore gamers. We all love playing games (well, at least most of us do) and all in all these labels are essentially meaningless in their current iteration. The demographic of gamer has broadened so far that using them almost sets us back.

It may be better to actually drop these terms completely and lean toward labels that encompass us all as gamers rather than create rift between us. Many a time I have heard the “casual gamer” get the short end of the stick because they are “ruining the industry” by not knowing that Angry Birds is just a copy of Crush the Castle and thus snuffing out all innovation. Or conversely, the “hardcore gamer” demanding that games like Silent Hill 2, ICO, Out of this World and Killer 7 be considered legitimate forms of art and are met with eye rolling only paralleled by a Williamsburgian plastered on Four Loko.

It’s all just kind of silly.

In the end it seems these terms are used in the same way that a Philosophy major would call a neophyte a "sofa philosopher" or how Joe Lunch Pail would call the academic an "egghead". At the end of the day all these labels really do is generalize and create rifts. This alienation is rather disheartening especially when you consider how much gamers are alike.

It is important to find your identity in gaming as to help others understand your point of view as well as help define this amazing new medium in the art community. There is a cavalcade of possibilities out there in terms of knowing what we like in a game and what games are.

I think it’s about time to throw out the old filing system.

HOORAH for games!

How the "Nerds" Ruin Everything

So, Nintendo is in dire straits reporting losses for the first time in over a decade. They dropped the price of the 3DS a dramatic 33% to $170, they’re giving us fan boys 20 free games to keep us from sending them mail bombs and Saturo Iwata (Big N’s President and CEO) is taking a 50% pay cut taking full responsibility in a way that you would never see the US financial industry stoop to. Nintendo has debased themselves and lie prostrate at the their consumer base begging for forgiveness.

But you know what, I don’t blame you, Nintendo. Get up off the floor. This is not (entirely) your fault. But who’s to blame? Yamauchi couldn’t have lost $300 million with nary a sea of rolling heads.

Who do I blame?

YOU! Yeah that’s right, you (no, not you Nintendo, get off the ground, geez) or more specifically what passes for a “nerd” these days. You people who buy Donkey Kong wall stickers, who shop at ThinkGeek.com, who listen to Anamanaguchi, who though that Tron: Legacy and Transformers was AMAZING, who’s “best of” consists of Megaman 2, Final Fantasy 3, and Ocarina of Time, those who show a sliver of excitement in another Bill and Ted movie, who bake Portal cakes and make DNF jokes about Duke Nukem’. I’m talking about all of those dinks out there that cannot be satisfied with anything that has come out in the past 2 decades. I hate all of you.

Why? Well, I’ll tell you.

See, wut had happen’d is that Nintendo (and 3^rd party supporters) have spent all their time working and releasing games that appeal to those who fall under the above categorization. All these people are contrarian nostalgiaphyles and wouldn’t be caught dead playing a game that they hadn’t researched to death, torrented and condemned because it didn't emulate the innovative gameplay of Pong.

This new breed of gamer is terrified of any sort of change. If a Mario game comes out it better emulate Super Mario 3 or Super Mario World. If not it will be eternally damned by those who are fairly sure that those where the best games ever and all new ideas should be stifled like one that argues that 2+2=4 (oh, literary reference).

I’ve heard the launch of the3DS being compared to the Virtual Boy a lot. Well, I guess they where both 3D and Nintendo released them and that’s about where the comparisons end. This is the complaint that only a self-satisfied nostalgiaphyle-nerd would make showing off their ability to constantly check Boing Boing, Topless Robot and i09 (generally, I like these sites they're just patronized by the "nerd" equivalent of hipsters).

I like Nintendo and specifically I like the 3DS. We wanted a handheld system with better screen resolution. We got it. We wanted retro games available on online shops. We go it. We didn’t want to be told about it 4 years before it actually came out (yeah, I’m looking at you Team ICO). We got it.

We’ve looked this gift horse in the mouth so hard that we’re falling out the horse’s anus.

Was it rushed out? Yes, that’s why there aren’t many games. However, the fact that the first major title to be released is a port of Ocarina of Time only supports my position that Nintendo has jumped through rings of fire to satisfy these contrarian nostalgia-holic faux-nerds. Well, congratulation you’re ruining Nintendo, gagging the game industry and built Sauron’s Tower with Legos.

Iwata, I accept your apology and I will happily take your 20 free games. And I will happily spit in the face of everyone who already played them on an emulator.

Cave Story

I’ve been away from writing for a bit because I’ve been completely enamored with 2 games: Cave Story and Nier. Strangely enough I’ve been suspect of both of these games because of fan boy reviews of the former and critical revulsion of the latter. Either way what I’ve learned is that reviews on GameFAQs should never be read.

Cave Story is a 2D platformer where you play an amnesiac robot that finds himself in a self-referential cave. In this cave (which is actually a floating island) there are creatures that are being used as weapons against their will. Your job is to change their grammatical modifier from “oppressed” to “liberated”.

I like this game for several reasons. First and for most, it has a pseudo-8-bit stylization and game play. I love when things are pixelated on purpose. Your control options are move, jump and shoot which is kind of nice considering how every game I play now has to have some cryptic Gordian set of controls. It's hard to remember which random shoulder button reloads your gun on a controller with 16 buttons when someone is filling your torso with daylight.

One thing I do hate about Cave Story is the fact that Nintendo has this insufferable habit of pretending that everyone on the planet has enough disposable income to buy a DSi and a Wii and a Xbox and a PS3 and a PSP and every other iteration of everything ever made… Ever. Yeah, it’s only $10 but I’ve never paid that much for a DSiware game. Even still, Cave Story isn’t even that long and a high ticket price wont attract the casual gamer who is usually looking for the biggest bang for the buck. And the casual gamer is who spends the most on the gaming industry (either them or the obnoxiously frugal parents of bleary-eyes troll spawn).

This is espically annoying when you realize that Cave Story was originally released as freeware for the PC.

Cave Story will be released on 3d format for the 3DS.

Probably for a lot of money...

Stay tuned of my review of Nier.

Pixels on the Silver Screen – Laura Croft: Tomb Raider

The first thing worth noting about Tomb Raider is that I fell asleep watching it 3 times before I actually completed it. Yeah, I know. How could I ever get bored of watching Angelina Jolie’s audition tape for Cirque du Soleil? She runs up pyramids, flips around on bungies in a mansion and does everything in her power to destroy some ancient science project.

The only thing more impressive than Jolie’s Indiana Jones impression is Daniel Craig’s not James Bond impression. That’s right ladies Craig makes his appearance known by being naked and grinning like a hipster at an Arcade Fire show.

Actually, now that I think about it both Jolie and Craig appear naked (with strategically placed tables, hand guns and tombs to preserve feigned modesty). This came across as really weird to me mainly because I think Craig looks like a slightly downsy tree and Jolie has the face of Mother Brain from Captian N. However, Tomb Raider relentlessly throws their sexuality in your face.

It’s like, “ Look how sexy archeology can be. LOOK, DAMNIT!”

As I trudge through the notes I took while watching the movie I come to the conclusion that I have no idea exactly what this movie is about. I do not blame my note taking. There are clocks,the Illuminati and some mild time travel. Which, for the record, if I was going to go back in time I don’t think I’d waste it on turning a knife around (and cutting myself in the process(yeah, that happened)).

The best way to describe this movie is aggressively forgettable. I realized towards the end that I had actually seen this movie before. And like the first time, Tomb Raider slips from my memory. I’m just happy that I have the movie on DVD to remind myself not to watch it.

Seriously, I put a Post-It on the DVD to remind myself.

But like Yoda’s death rattle that expounded on Luke’s family tree, there is another…