May 14, 2006
What is wrong with the video game industry
David Wong at PWOT spent the days after E3 updating his critique of the game industry, Life After the Video Game Crash. Wong is an interesting guy, he has great and incisive ideas, and he also comes up with a lot of novel profanity. This article features the phrase “foppish wide-brimmed a– –hat”, in bold type; you have been warned. Still, Wong is more on-target than almost anyone else analyzing the industry.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 08:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 12, 2006
MGS4 Trailer Torrent
The new trailer for Metal Gear Solid 4 [100MB, BitTorrent] is worth seeing. Too bad about the $600 price tag.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 05:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 23, 2006
Myst IV Diary
Among my birthday presents was the sweet nectar of Myst 4. I hadn’t played a Myst game since Myst III: Exile came out back when I was in D.C.; I think I ended up completing that game in 48 hours of non-stop play. Needless to say this was well before meeting C.
I suspected that another binge like that was probably not in anyone’s best interests. So I let Uru, Myst IV, and Myst V pass by (didn’t hurt that for most of that time my only computer was a relatively-pokey PowerBook).
But I’m back, baby. Picked up Myst IV at Fry’s and have been working my way through it on the iMac when I get a chance. I’ve poked my way through two Ages now, and have reached Serenia, a.k.a. the “Age of Plot Development.” Here are a few thoughts on the whole experience, FWIW.
The FMV—The first scene in the game places you in a sort of flying rail-car… with some random FMV little girl. The whole thing is kind of unsettling (she’s not much of an actress) and while it’s technologically impressive (you can swing your perspective around 360° while she’s talking to you), it’s not very Myst-like. I want to explore recently-abandoned islands full of dark stories, not have Punky Brewster tell me how to use my camera.
Atrus and the first puzzle—Atrus is still kicking, and is the second person you encounter. He also completely ruins the first puzzle (a kind of quasi-electrical wave-matching thing) by walking you through it. It’s like ten minutes of him “helping” you by saying things like “try turning the left knob” or “Hmm… that’s not right.” I almost threw the computer out the window. Shut up, fat man! Myst is about figuring things out for yourself. I spent four hours using three air-horn things to talk to a bunch of monkeys and loved it. Luckily Atrus takes off shortly afterwards, and hasn’t really interfered since, so stick it out.
The graphics/the worlds—Everything looks fantastic. This 360° view thing was introduced in Myst III, but everything’s much more animated now and it looks great and very alive. I”ve spent most of my time on a sort of jungle island, with little monkeys and everything running around. It takes getting used to, but the feeling of immersion is real. I was poking around Achenar’s now-abandoned study and C walked up behind me and really startled me. Oh, and the depth of field effects—where focus changes depending on what you’re looking at—are fantastic.
The music—The box art heralds that Peter Gabriel did the music for Serenia. Well, he phoned it in. Serenia’s music, at least so far, is not that great. But the ambient music everywhere else is good and fits in very well with what’s going on on-screen. I wish I had a CD of some of this stuff.
I love Myst. I love Cyan, and I mourned the death of Uru: Myst Online, which seemed like a really groundbreaking effort, but maybe ahead of its time (see Tycho’s reflections on this point). I’ll post more thoughts here as I move through the game.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 09:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 19, 2006
Learning by losing at Go
High on my list of hobbies to develop is Go. The game’s intricacy and subtlety is mind-blowing, but there’s a rush that goes along with detecting an opponent’s strategy that keeps me coming back. One of the quotes on the page linked above is, “Lose your first fifty games as quickly as you can.” I’m on my way, but it’s hard not to feel a little intimidated. Divining an opponent’s intentions simply from the pieces on the board is like looking through a cage, and it’s easy to overthink.
My goal is to become comfortable enough with the fundamentals that I can start to think about the more humanistic elements of the game. Hiroki Mori’s Interactive Way to Go has been invaluable in that search. 35 lessons, most driven by Javascript, that help develop pattern-recognition and strategic thinking. So much fun.
But my goal now is real opposition. The computer’s fine (I use Goban) but it doesn’t teach. I crave humanity. So if you’re willing to work with a rank amateur, drop me an email. I think I’m configured for Internet play of various kinds. Or if you’re in the area, let’s meet up. Drew gave me a board that I have only used twice.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 03:44 PM
February 15, 2006
It’s-A Me, Gameplay!
Yesterday All Things Considered discussed Marc Ecko’s new game, Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. Robert Holt gave a telling and pithy review.
Now that we’re done talking about [this game], I probably won’t play this, but I will actually go get a book on graffiti art… .
The music is fantastic, the fashion is fantastic, the graffiti is awesome, the gameplay, not so much.
In other words, the best thing about MEGU:CUP is its capacity to redirect you to other, non-interactive forms of entertainment. While Marc Ecko might make a good book, jacket, sneaker, or CD, here he has made a Bad Game. And the thing that made it a Bad Game was Bad Gameplay.
When a game has Bad Gameplay, it doesn’t matter that it has a cool-sounding plot or narrative; the shelves are overflowing with games that Sound Cool but are Bad. Plot, graphics, sound, and all the rest are just window dressing, and what makes a game good or bad is gameplay. Pretty much every gamer understands this.
Critics—at least most critics—certainly understand it too, but they have a hard time communicating it. I suspect this is because either the critics or their editors analogize game criticism to movie criticism. Thus, they fall into the trap of thinking that the core questions are What’s It About? How Does It Look? How Does It Sound? You can answer these questions for a video game, but your answers won’t cohere into any real concept of the game experience.
The question How Does It Play? comes closest to capturing Gameplay, but it’s not an easy question to answer. It is extremely subjective, and only the best critics can convey it without sounding pretentious. Take a look at some of the video reviews on Gamespot to see what I’m talking about. It’s a tough racket. These are regular guys, probably very likeable in person, making terrible and honestly creepy efforts to help others make game buying decisions. They flounder because they are out of their element. You can tell by looking at them that these are not men who are normally inclined towards sharing things personal to them. Games are personal though—when you play the game it’s just you and the controller, so the only way we know what you thought is if you share your feelings. The Gamespot guys are not great at this; as a result most of the reviews include a lot of pedantic discussion abut framerates, poly counts, Dolby sound, etc.
Reviewing MEGU:CUP, Holt shied away, and said only that the gameplay was “Bad.” That’s not much of a review, but it’s not his fault, since we hardly even have a vocabulary for describing gameplay. The best we can often do is to apply gameplay categories, like Platformer, Puzzle Game, FPS, RTS, RPG, etc., but (a) there is so much crossover among these categories now as to render them useless, and (b) applying these categories doesn’t help us achieve better precision along the spectrum of Good Gameplay/Bad Gameplay.
Critics of other media, at least the good critics, will often try to answer the question How Does It Feel?, which should inform how we approach How Does It Play? The great Roger Ebert analyzes how a movie makes him feel in each of his movie reviews, and often the number of stars the film receives derives from what he feels, and how effectively the movie helps him feel it. [ 1 ]
Ebert is on the right track. Why do we play games if not for the way they make us feel? Analyzing those feelings might help us separate Good Gameplay from Bad. But we should not expect too much. For better or worse, nearly all games today have a core gameplay mechanism of “winning,” and that really does place limits on where the game can go.[ 2 ]
I sympathize with Robert Holt. He felt in his heart that he had been handed a Bad Game to review, and he faced an audience unaccustomed to video game criticism—and deeply infused with movie and music criticism—and about two minutes in which to convey his impressions. Plus he’s got a game that’s cursing like a sailor in the background while he’s trying to speak, which blows like twenty seconds right off the top. In the circumstances, I think he did well. Listeners come away with the sense that, while the existence of a game like MEGU:CUP challenges in some small way conventions surrounding graffiti art, this is not a Game that one Plays. That’s pretty good criticism.
[ 1 ]: Interestingly, Ebert recently stated that, in his opinion, games aren’t art, since the medium cannot convey an author’s intent sufficiently to trigger an emotional response in the viewer/player. He is probably right, at least for the time being, but not permanently right. More on this later, I have no doubt.
[ 2 ]: The only exception I can think of right now that’s had any kind of real distribution is Second Life, which, though fascinating in theory, in practice is completely uninteresting in any real sense.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 11:22 AM
February 14, 2006
Well, that was a pleasantly understated credits sequence.
I enjoyed the cheesy retro ambience.
Posted by Rob Courtney at 04:47 PM