J Burger Analysis...es.

Limbo

2011-12-22T00:14:00.000-08:00

Limbo is a game about two things: platforming and death. But it's also about gigantic spiders, perilous pits, murderous hotel signage, facades of danger, and mysterious tribal children who want to kill you.

Because of this, you could say Limbo is a game of two sides, of which all games are divided between: gameplay and story. Gameplay consists of the acts of interaction the player performs: jumping pits, pulling levers, pushing boxes, and evading danger. Story is the meaningful connotation those acts take on through visuals, sound, and writing. Combine the two and you are no longer a series of pixels jumping across an empty pit with spikes, but you are a lost boy with glasses, evading a gigantic spider, and searching for his missing sister.

Limbo is a game that takes advantage of this. It doesn't isolate its puzzles from its story but uses its story to infer meaning beyond its puzzles. What about games that focus on gameplay without story, such as Bejeweled, Solitaire, or Tetris? These games are fun on their own but what does story bring to the table? Story elicits an emotional connection between players and the game. Story has the power to create feeling, to give you a reason to play, to interact with your mind while your hands interact with the game. It has the power to re-contextualize actions so that they take on a meaningful form greater than the sum of their parts. Instead of Limbo being a game just about evading traps and progressing through a world, it instead becomes a game about an oppressed boy searching for his sister through many different perils. And I would argue that's where the real magic of games comes from: when stories and games work together to create something more beautiful than their isolated parts.

Limbo is a beautiful game also because it does not force any of these story elements on the player. There is no direct exposition, no text, and no narrator telling you who you are or why you are doing it. Therefore the meaning of the story is left up to the player to infer. When a group of tribal children begin to attack you, the player is left to wonder why are these children attacking me and who are they? One of the more poignant moments in the game is when the player sees one of these other children operating a fake gigantic spider after the player killed the real spider earlier. Moments like these raise narrative implications that go beyond their immediacy. Does this mean that this entire world of Limbo is a facade? That these children control all the traps and deviousness out to kill you? Such questions are never answered (for better or worse).

In that sense there is no narrative progression in the game; it works instead as an atmospheric exploration of the world the player inhabits, which inevitably must be about death. The core experience of the game revolves around platforming, yes, but everything and nearly everyone is out to kill you. And the amount of times you die as the player reinforces this notion of despair. If the game were to make a final narrative say, then it must be about death--what does it mean that this boy dies so many times? That everyone wants to kill him? That even the boy would risk so much for his sister? It may be assumed that she must be the one person not attempting to kill the boy but the ending of the game leaves this ambiguous, which remains a perhaps better thing.

Limbo is a successful game through its use of signifiers, things that take on new meaning based on their appearance or context. You are not just a player solving puzzles; you are a boy fighting for his life. This is more than what Braid did, which I commend Limbo for. It is in the meaning of the gameplay in Limbo that the true story emerges, not in narrative bookmarks left for us at the ends.

Prelude of the Chambered

2011-08-31T22:49:00.000-07:00

Notch, the creator of esteemed indie hit, MineCraft, recently released a made from scratch in just 48 hours freeware 3D browser dungeon game called Prelude of the Chambered. And it's brilliant.

The game begins in a small jail cell; players have only one interaction (press space to use) and then start to explore and collect different items which have new interactions; as they continue to discover items, each new ability gives players access to larger areas with new items and more puzzles. The graphics are reminiscent of doom; the textures are extremely pixelated and the corridors are completely rectangular. And yet, despite the crudeness of the experience, the game evokes more primary joys of gaming than many modern games with years of work put into them. And I'm going to talk a little bit about why I think that's the case.

Games have the capacity to evoke certain experiences not found in other media and they do this through interaction. Whereas books and film directly communicate to the viewer through pictures, text, and sound, games communicate to players by letting them experience things and making choices firsthand. In theory, this can produce a much more engaging experience than being at the passive end of the literary stick. Part of what makes Prelude so good is that there is virtually no text in the entire experience. All of the journey, the characters, the explanation, comes as a result of firsthand player experience. We start in a jail cell - innately, we know we need to escape now. This isn't told to us in a cut-scene, rather, it is experienced by us. And there's no cut-scenes either. When something happens as a result of our direct participation, it becomes much more real to us and strengthens the experience so much more.

Prelude also contains a unique sense of empowerment through self-made goals. In the beginning, we are trapped in the jail cell - we have the goal to escape. Then we break open a wall using our only weapon: our fists. However, the next area is blocked by a boulder, too heavy for us to move. Instead, we descend into a dungeon behind us and find a power glove; we head back up and knock the boulder out of our way to continue on. The goals in Prelude are not forced upon us as a player - we are meant to discover them, create our own goals, and then find the means to reach those goals ourselves. When we finally find the item that can enable us to continue on, it empowers us in a way that many other games cannot. This sense of personal empowerment - the at first unsolvable problem becoming solvable through firsthand discovery - is something that Prelude does perfectly - it lets us create our own goals, and then empowers us with new abilities to find the means to reach those goals.

Finally, Prelude also creates meaning through gameplay--the narrative, the goals, and the emotion in the game come from our interaction with the world itself and how it reacts to us as a player. We start to feel and understand the world around us, not through exposition or backstory, but through gameplay. For instance, bats are perceived as friendlier due to their more harmless nature, while cacti men are dangerous due to their harmful projectiles which propel towards us. We understand who these characters are in relation to how they function in the world; a crack on the wall symbolizes a new path just waiting to be opened; a ladder represents a descent into a new territory; a golden enemy symbolizes a powerful foe with a great reward waiting to be gained upon its defeat. Meaning is created through interaction, which is something Prelude capitalizes on excellently.

The last boss encounter in Prelude is one in which we must face an enemy whom we cannot kill or attack - a golden ghost whom we must lure back through a bewildering maze into a magic urn, while dodging enemy attacks, and staying close enough to the ghost that it will continue to follow us. The experience this creates, while extremely low-fi at best, is one that evokes intense feelings of desperation, anxiety, and in the end, triumph.

Prelude is a simple game, which is also why it succeeds. It doesn't hinge on the outward form of its presentation, but rather presents an engaging set of mechanics that create an experience, rather than force one on the player. Prelude doesn't do more than it needs to and it sticks to what it does best - it returns to the primary roots of gaming and what makes it so fun in the first place: an immersive, empowering, and meaningful experience.

Lucky Number Slevin

2011-08-28T01:00:00.000-07:00

Lucky Number Slevin is a movie that tricks the audience (spoilers to follow). This is important because there is definite distinction between tricking our protagonist - the character with whom the audience is usually supposed to sympathize with - and tricking the audience, whose very embodiment in the film is channeled (usually) through the protagonist. The difference between the two is that there is a clear violation of trust in tricking the audience not involved in tricking the protagonist.

The nature of trust stems from the principle of sympathy in films. We, the audience, need to embody our emotions in a character in which to understand the story. And so, we do that with a character who gains our sympathies. We want to feel things - and if we feel for a character, we root for them, and thus put our own emotional backing within that character. In Star Wars, Luke wants to become a Jedi; his parents die; Han Solo makes fun of him; and we emotionally back Luke - we want him to succeed. Luke becomes the embodiment of our sympathy and eventually so do the other cast of characters in the film, as well. In Lucky Number Slevin, the introduction is a bit more unconventional, but we are eventually made to believe that a guy named Slevin is our protagonist. And so, through his constant perils at the mishaps of mistaken identity at the hands of mafia henchmen, we are probably going to sympathize with him.

However, when characters do things that violate our trust - things that we disagree with - we (the audience) become unsympathetic to them. This is most common with villains, the "bad guys," of a story. Back in Star Wars, Darth Vader chokes the helpless rebel man who doesn't know where the Death Star plans are; he chokes again his own subordinates on the Death Star; he kills our dear friend, Obi-Wan. As a result, we don't like him - we are unsympathetic to him; and as a result, we don't want him to succeed. Rather, we want our protagonist, Luke, to succeed. In Lucky Number Slevin, we see the mob bosses and assassins of the film as unsympathetic in general, for they run contrary to Slevin's goals. They want Slevin dead, hurt, mangled, or otherwise. So we want Slevin to win, right?

Things become complicated when the film unveils it master trick, or "twist" (called a 'Kansas City Shuffle,' no doubt). Tricks are usually nice in movies - we like a good twist. But since Lucky Number Slevin tricks the audience rather than the protagonist, it fails to win our sympathies. When we find out that Slevin was really working with Mr. Goodkat, it meant that Slevin was lying to us the entire time. And because he was lying to us, that is a clear violation of our trust and we lose our sympathy with him as an audience. As a result, we don't feel anything in the twist - we just feel that we were lied to. We can't embody ourselves in him anymore as a character, because we never really knew him. In Star Wars, when it was revealed that Darth Vader was Luke's father, we felt that, because it wasn't revealed to the audience, per se - it was revealed to Luke. And we were right there with him, taking in all the joys and sorrows of his journey.

But Lucky Number Slevin violates this trust in tricking the audience, not the protagonist. We don't feel for the twist because Slevin wasn't tricked - we were. And the filmmakers knew that. Slevin knew everything that was going on, and we were led to believe that he was just as clueless as we were. We were rooting for him because we thought he was in peril. When we find out he was just deceiving us the whole time, we have no one to sympathize with who isn't killed, except for perhaps Lucy Liu's character. The one moment of redemption in the film is when she is saved, for she is one of the few characters kept alive who didn't know Slevin was a liar. When she dies, the movie becomes cold to us; when she is saved, there is some hope left.

Lucky Number Slevin is a movie that violates our trust, and in so doing, loses the audience. Movies are all about trust - we trust our characters, and we trust the filmmakers to provide a certain experience. When that trust is violated it breaks the suspension of disbelief and our sympathy. If we can't feel anything from a movie, then that movie failed to do what movies should do - and that is to tell us a story, not trick us for the sake of it.

6 Things I Learned From Mass Effect

2011-08-16T22:22:00.000-07:00

Mass Effect (2007), by BioWare, is an exploration of a traditional role-playing-game mechanics into less traditional RPG spaces. It takes risks, explores customary RPG tropes, and comes out a mixed bag. I would not say it's better than Knights of the Old Republic (well the combat, maybe) because it lacks several things that KoTOR just did so excellently: the proper sense of adventure (replaced in Mass Effect by a lawman investigation), a galactic conflict (replaced by a mostly solitary manhunt), or the endearing cast of characters whom you pick up in the most varied of ways (replaced by a small cast of characters mostly all picked up at the beginning, who really want to talk about their unique position in the universal socio-political space drama affecting everybody it seems).

The game explores character customization, loads of backstory, a fusion of RPG and FPS elements, and the ever-popular moral choice scheme. However, at the same time, it felt like BioWare was holding back - that they were keeping the best on reserve for use in coming sequels. Here are six things that I discovered while playing it, concerning both RPGs and storytelling as a whole in games.

1. Player Customization Only Occurs Out of Necessity

Like in so many other role-playing games, in Mass Effect, you are allowed to customize your character's armor and weaponry on the fly. The sentiment behind this is that you want to adjust your character's attributes for your style of play and the enemies you will encounter. For instance, when fighting organic life forms, you want the "organic-life-killing" type of bullet.

However, I totally ignored these options - whether out of boredom or plain negligence - until I finally started dying - a lot. Which made me realize in this case that dying was actually a good thing. It forced me to re-evaluate my stance on how I was playing the game. It forced me to actually strategize and make use of the game's features (granted, I still didn't know about biotics and I was six hours in). Once I kept getting killed by the same three Krogan mercenaries, I finally customized my armor and weapons in order to be able to survive the next battle. Dying is not necessarily a bad thing. It can actually enrich a player's experience, when used correctly. You want your game to be hard enough that it forces players to actively engage the features in front of them, and to make choices that thereby enrich the game's experience.

2. Backstory is Interesting Only When it Matters

An unfortunate incident that occurred in Mass Effect was the introduction. Unlike Knights of the Old Republic, BioWare's previous foray, Mass Effect begins with a lengthy dialog sequence on our ship's helm, explaining who we are about to fight, where, and for what reasons.

Does this matter to me as a player right at the beginning? No, not really. When KoTOR began, we understood that the Sith were evil and were trying to kill us. The game doesn't need to explain every detail of our mission (we're here to escort Bastilla, a Jedi - good enough). We just need to know the immediate situation. But in Mass Effect, we are encouraged to listen to something about a human colony, Prothean artifacts, intergalactic racial tension, and more all before we even have any actual gameplay. Since I have no emotional stake in this world or in these characters, why should I care about these things? Only when I have actually started playing the game, or experienced the world, or can connect these facts to a sympathetic character would these things start to matter to me.

Not to say that all exposition is bad - it works when it is presented at the right time and in the right place. But in Mass Effect, there's just so much of it - you can learn about the Citadel, dozens of alien races, countless planets and moons - that it becomes hard to realize what is important and what is just "filler", so to speak. Which led me to realize that the only time I cared about backstory was when it had a direct influence on my character and my main goal: to stop Saren. If it was important about the main goal, about the Protheans, or about understanding what I was doing, then it was important to me. Anything else presented was at a disadvantage of "Why?" Why is this useful to me as a player? Does it give me a better understanding of why I'm doing what I'm doing? If not, then that backstory information holds little value.

3. RPG Elements Only Succeed When We Have Enough Time to Act

Mass Effect is unique among many RPGs in that it is really an FPS-RPG: a First-Person-Shooter with Role-Playing-Game elements. This means that there exists both real-time, skill-based gameplay (aiming/combat), and turn-based, strategy-type gameplay (powers/customization). Mass Effect is not the first game to try this - the BioShock series also did something similar with its own assortment of weapons and Plasmids. However, Mass Effect's execution succeeds far more than BioShock due to one critical element: time.

In Mass Effect, players have a sufficient amount of time to strategize with their powers due to the fact that they can pause the game mid-battle, set up their next attack, and then resume. Contrast this to BioShock, in which when you want to use the appropriate plasmids on the correct enemies and environmental objects, the game can at many times be so chaotic that you don't really have a chance to make informed, strategic decisions, which defeats the purpose of having so many powers in the first place. On the other hand, because Mass Effect gives players sufficient time to pick and choose their powers of attack, it successfully melds both skill and strategy-based gaming elements.

4. Planning and Progression is What Makes Players Come Back

Why are RPGs (including Mass Effect) often so addicting? One way Mass Effect accomplishes this is through setting up goals only achievable in the future. For example, when you bring your two best buddy squad mates with you on a mission, you probably level up several times, and then realize that the other squad mates you left on the ship also leveled up. After this, you want to keep playing to get back to your other squad mates and level them up. You want to play and finally regain access to that reward - it's the idea of planning your next actions and playing in hopes of fulfilling that plan.

So many games today are about instant gratification and action that it's refreshing to play games that offer long term rewards. It also comes back to Flow Theory - you want the player to be engaged at the micro and the macro levels. Mass Effect contains both immediate goals (kill the enemies in the level) and long term goals (upgrade your squad mates with the loot you got, sell this weapon you found, complete this quest you discovered). Engaging the player both in the immediate and the long term encourages players to keep playing the game, enhancing its longevity.

5. Quests are Cumbersome Once Loot Becomes a Burden Rather Than a Reward

At a certain point in Mass Effect, side quests become very repetitive, becoming a chore rather than a fun activity. Part of this comes from the fact that the reward from the quests start to become a burden rather than a reward. How does this happen? Once loot from enemies starts to become useless (meaning you would have to sell or discard it to gain any real value), then the quests associated with that loot become a chore, since the reward from the quest is not worth getting at all. Therefore, it doesn't make any sense to go through the quest if your time is not justified by the ends.

What would have worked is A) Removing many of the side-quests; many of them are simply repetitions of each other and have no real intrinsic value. Just imagine if in KoTOR there were random side quests in-between planet-hopping to kill a Sith outpost resulting in useless loot - it doesn't add anything to the game - rather it just distracts from the main storyline. B) A second solution is to lessen the amount of "useless" loot and assign one specific item of value to the completion of each side quest. This way, players know that the completion of each side quest results in something particular gained, not just a repetition of the last quest's rewards. C) Or, simplify the process of discarding "useless" loot, so that the burden to sell it or break it down is removed from the player. Much of the hassle from these side quests and their loot comes with the monotony of performing the same item-discarding after the quest is over. When the rewards in a quest don't justify the means, then that quest no longer is fun for the player.

6. Choices Without Emotional Investment Aren't Meaningful Choices.

***Spoiler Alert*** One of the main emotional cruxes of Mass Effect takes place during an infiltration mission in which your team gets split up into two branches. With you are your immediate two squad members, and with each separate branch is another of your squad mates. One branch contains Kaidan, a biotic soldier; the other contains Ashley, a gunnery soldier. At a certain point in the mission, you are separated from both groups, each under attack by Geth soldiers. At this point, you only have the option to save one group and its squad member, leaving the other to die.

Admittedly this is a great set up. It forces you to make an actual decision which has severe repercussions - a character you have been playing with for 10-20 hours will die because of your actions. However, this didn't work for me because I wasn't emotionally invested in both characters enough to have to make a difficult decision. What I thought was going to happen was that the game would force you to choose between one of the members in your immediate squad. If one of these squad members had died, then I certainly would have been more emotionally invested, since I liked them enough to take them by my side in the first place. However, certain characters like Kaidan I almost never interacted with or shared any sentiment for. This could have been alleviated had the game forced me to use different characters at different sections of the game, becoming more attached to them emotionally. But because I never really used Kaidan anyway, a choice that was supposed to be emotionally difficult ended up not really being a difficult choice at all.

Part of that is understandable, for if the game let any character die, then it wouldn't make any sense, production-wise, to record so much dialog and gameplay in the sequels for characters that could have died. So, by limiting it to only one of two characters, Mass Effect restricts wasted production costs in the next games.

Conclusion

Mass Effect is a game that tries to do many things: meld FPS and RPG combat, create a living universe, have vehicle sections and many explorable planets, but it seems to fall prey to a recurrent trend in open-world gaming: the more freedom a player has, the less interesting the choices become. That is, the more options you give a player, the more generic they must become in order to be produced. It's the same in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion - the world is huge and filled with so many things, yet the more you explore, the more everything seems to remain the same. Mass Effect appears to fall susceptible to the same error, for in trying to accomplish so many things, the game becomes more and more cumbersome and less generally interesting. There are so many repetitive side-quests, identical worlds, useless dialog sequences, endless backstory, and unintuitive customization options that Mass Effect becomes redundant rather than immersive. Had BioWare focused less on sheer quantity and crafting a tighter player experience, then Mass Effect would have been a much more enjoyable game.

Maybe in Mass Effect 2.

BioShock 2: On Rapture and Isolation

2011-07-24T16:02:00.000-07:00

BioShock 2 is a re-journey through the city of Rapture, the failed underwater utopia, since befallen at the helm of Andrew Ryan, so thoroughly investigated by the game's predecessor. This time, you play as a Big Daddy, and your villain is the all-powerful female psychiatrist, Sofia Lamb, pitting against you many "Big Sisters," (above) while your goal is still somewhat to escape. However, the more I waddle through Rapture, the more I realize that BioShock is in essence not about failed utopias so much as the idea of social isolation.

From the beginning of BioShock 2, we get the sense that we are hated, as we were apparently forced to commit suicide in the distant past through the Plasmid mind control of Sofia Lamb. Once we wake up, we return to Rapture, still despised by the mix of raging splicers, whom we are forced to battle through a series levels, each controlled by a quaint ol' character with a stake of their own in Rapture's lineage. But the point being, the only social contact you have with the world is always plagued by negative reinforcement. Everyone out there is trying to kill you and even your fellow Big Daddies want you dead. And the only sane characters are always separated by a pane of glass, in a different room than you, disembodied - speaking to you through the radio (or even telepathy) - or in hiding. In this sense, you remain constantly isolated from every other character in the world of Rapture, including those of your fellow Big Daddies.

The Big Daddies, of whom you are the foremost, are some of the few characters who actually have a social attachment to another entity: the little sisters. In killing the Big Daddies (which is so integral to the gameplay - they give you Adam, the necessary ingredient for upgrading your character attributes and abilities) you sever the little sisters' connection from their Big Daddies, and forcingly take the little sisters to your side. This somewhat contrived social relationship gives you, the player, some form of companionship, yet it is tainted by forcefulness and fabrication, still leaving you with a lack of genuine friendship.

Yet the little sisters stand at the centerpiece of BioShock 2. You are meant to rescue them - and eventually be united with your original little sister - by exploring Rapture with all of its inhabitants, since impacted by the changes after the fall of Andrew Ryan. However, the times where I truly started feeling something - any sort of emotion in Rapture - weren't the times when I learned about the history of Rapture or its inhabitants' troubled pasts. Those stories are just words - they don't have any pertinence to the immediate. They don't have any impact on my journey - it's all history. On the contrary, what created feeling for me was what impacted me in the present, and that was companionship - from the little sisters, or even the hacked turrets, or the sentry bots, simply by fighting at my side.

BioShock 2 is a game in which you are literally pitted against an entire world of crazed maniacs who really, really want to kill you. Because of this, any sort of companionship means so much more, because of this great negativity oppressing you. This runs more so than other games such as Halo or Call of Duty, because the very nature of your character as a Big Daddy reinforces this, coupled with the physical detachment of being deep underwater. I didn't care so much for the plot - the gameplay was fine, although it turned into a cycle of 'spam projectiles, scoff down medkits, and then scavenge each room like a homeless person' - it doesn't matter why we're going through these levels, does it? We just do it because that's how the levels are designed - to be completed and explored by players. It's not because we really want to find Eleanor Lamb - we don't know her, or have any emotional connection to her; she's a disembodied voice who tells us things that we don't even know are truth. We go through these levels because they exist as levels, meant to be progressed and completed.

Which is disappointing because the real essence of the game comes from that sense of purposeful companionship, between Big Daddy and Little Sister. Yet the majority of the game is spent on killing varieties of monotonous enemies, scavenging resources, and performing the same mini-games over and over in order to survive. We do interact with the little sisters, but their function in the game is to serve as mini tower-defense sequences, not as a physical character journeying with you, sharing your hardships and trials. Yet it should have been more about the gaining of companionship, the triumph over isolation. Because that's what Big Daddies are about, right? The loss of humanity, the severance of emotional ties, the fabricated relationship with a 'Little Sister.' And to regain that true humanity is what the story should really be about.

The highest crux of emotional feeling in the game, being the arcing change from social isolation to companionship, occurs towards the end, when you are reunited with your little sister, Eleanor, now a Big Sister, ready to fight at your side. She comes to your aid in times of distress, actually wards off dangerous enemies, and finally gives you accompaniment through the once desolate and deadly environments of Rapture. When the game ends with your mutual escape, it is a powerful thing. It wasn't about all the environments, myriad of details, or the well-written depth of characters, telling us why we should do certain things. It was that feeling of companionship that made the game - some emotional connection to a character that actually affected us, not a disembodied voice or an array of narrative backstory. It was to about going from being isolated, socially, to having a friend. And that's what BioShock 2 was about in the end: gaining a friend - a big sister.

How Halo 3 Ended a Trilogy

2011-07-05T23:52:00.000-07:00

I liked Halo--the first one. It was a game about space, discovery, science-fiction. It was about saving the human race, killing aliens, exploring a mysterious new world, escaping alive in one piece--discovering something unique, leaving it behind and having changed something along the way.

It was a story about the hero's journey. We are Master Chief, in the human fleet, minding our business, trying to do the best we can to keep Earth a secret from these nasty Covenant aliens. But they attack our ship, we get thrown off course, and crash on a mysterious alien world which turns out to be an artificially constructed ring (a Halo, get it?). We grab our assault rifles, join forces with our comrades, rescue our captain, explore this ring, discover that it goes deep for (hundreds of?) miles, and try to find a way to escape. Eventually this means we blow it up, and in a thrilling final sequence we barely escape as the last soldier or alien alive.

But six years later in 2007, Halo 3 seems to have forgotten what made it so great in the first place. Halo 3 isn't about a journey, the battle for people we care about, or even survival against an unstoppable foe. Instead it's about repetitive action and bad space drama, barely excused by a setup of invasions, war, explosions, and ancient alien technology. It's a game that's lost a sense of self, what it's trying to achieve or convey to players. It's a game that tries to be too many things, and in the end, isn't left with much anything at all.

It first started in Halo 2, when it tried to portray both sides of this intergalactic war and have us empathize with our enemies. The game had us control a new protagonist, the Arbiter, who previously killed humans but then decided to rebel and stop the other Covenant aliens. Then the true villains turn out not to be the covenant, but a council of evil snail-like aliens, which is spearheaded by an even more evil snail-like alien who wants to activate an ancient alien technology in a remote part of the galaxy that will inevitably kill all humankind and probably the universe.

Alarm signals started to go up when we were watching long cut-scenes about aliens incapable of human vocal tracts speaking in English and debating space drama unrelated to what we thought was a story about Master Chief. This is raised another step in Halo 3 when the Flood, the zombie-like creatures in the game, proceed to join forces with us, speaking to us through animated tree-branch-like appendixes hanging out of their deformed mouths. This is the equivalent of the zombies and headcrabs in Half-Life 2 deciding to ally with Gordon Freeman and doing so by speaking to him with sensible English dialog. In Halo 3, the dynamic relationship between the Flood, the Covenant, and Master Chief constantly shifts until all understanding and sympathy is lost in the process.

The gameplay in Halo 3 consists of romps through different locale throughout Earth and beyond, but the setting is barely made important other than the fact that we are always chasing someone or something related to the end of the universe. Contrast this to the goals in Halo 1, which are progressive as we discover with our friends, the other human soldiers, where we are, and what we are trying to achieve. First there is the discovery of the Halo, the map room, and then the control room, each adding deeper layers to the story and our overall goals. Halo 3's goals consist more of locations--the game wants you to be here, and then there, which is briefly explained in a voice-over and pitched with a few key terms, such as "Ark," "Covenant," or "High Runner," meant to alleviate the fact that there is no progressive reason for you to be at these locations other than for convenient action sequences.

Interrupted by these segments of action in Halo 3 are meaningless monologues by Cortana, whom we have since been separated from in Halo 2, who spouts bits of information without any real purpose. These aren't like the audio logs in BioShock or the propaganda in Half-Life 2, which enrich the world and enlarge our sense of immersion by detailing important backstory and enhancing characterization. Halo 3's monologues consist of phrases such as "I am your light, your savior. I knew you," or "The way it ends is foreseen. You know this to be true." These segments are more like bad poetry than any pertinent story development. Furthermore, these segments actually slow down time in the game to a crawl and steal control away from the player, getting us further annoyed by hampering our progress in between actual gameplay.

There were one or two moments in Halo 3 where I felt that sense of meaning in the original Halo. It was when I jumped into an Orca (the flying helicopter thing, like the one in Avatar), and two other human soldiers jumped on the side of the wings, and we proceeded to do something related to one thing or another. But the point is we were part of a larger battle. The game wasn't about me killing endless enemies with a large assortment of weapons. The game at that moment was about achieving a series of goals with your human comrades, as part of a larger battle against a horrible foe.

As a whole, Halo 3 lost this sense of meaning for me. It appeared to be a game constructed for the sake of itself--for action, closure, and the fulfillment of the marketing of a popular sequel. Halo 1 was about something, even to the smallest degree: discovery, survival, camaraderie. Halo 3 wasn't about this; rather, it was about the immediate, the superficial--action for the sake of action, an ending for the sake of an ending--a game that existed just to exist.

Portal 2

2011-06-13T21:37:00.000-07:00

Sequels must balance a fine line between predictability and novelty. They must capture the essence of what made the original so great, while standing on their own as a complete experience. The first Portal succeeded because it surprised players. It took something vaguely expected--a challenging, dimension-altering puzzle game--and subverted that with dark humor, an emotional and physical rebellion of the artificial intelligence overlord, Glados, and the manifestation of a world beyond the immediate testing chambers. We expected to be trained in portal technology--we didn't expect to go an emotional journey through a science fiction narrative.

With Portal 2, we come with many expectations. At the end of Portal, Glados is destroyed, we escaped (or did we?), and Aperture Science stood as the enigma facility that it was. So how do you innovate on the concept of portal gameplay, testing chambers, aperture science, and the artificial intelligence overlord, Glados?

The beginning of Portal 2 gets this right. We are awakened by a new voice, that of Wheatley, in a foreign location. This creates an expository "gap-filling" in the player's mind, causing them to interact with the game narrative by filling in the missing details between Portal 1 and Portal 2: how did I get into this 1950s hotel room? Where am I? Who is Wheatley? And how does he function? This gets us interested in the narrative in the same way that Portal 1 interested us: Who/where are we? Why are we testing with portal guns (and so on)? If Portal 2 began outdoors, with the wreckage of Glados, then it would not be nearly as engaging, because that is the expectation. Portal 2 subverts that with a new, disembodied character in a foreign environment, and thus we are motivated to keep playing and alleviate this narrative dissonance.

Unfortunately, the game becomes more predictable from here on out. With the revival of Glados, she re-assumes her role from Portal 1, and expectantly takes vengeance upon us. Having Glados serve as our overlord does not offer us anything new, because we already experienced this in Portal 1. We know how she will act as our testing proctor, we know how the test chambers will proceed, and so this decreases our motivation as a player. Even though it was fun to fight Glados the first time, we evolved from that. We overcame Glados. We defeated her. And now the story and gameplay should move on.

Moreover, reviving Glados this early in Portal 2 disinterests players by removing that great "gap-filling" narrative dissonance. By entering the narrative this early, she is able to spout direct exposition at you, removing key mysteries in the narrative: What happened since she was gone? Was she really not even angry? Was she being so sincere right then even though you broke her heart and killed kill her? If you do not allow Glados to answer this by keeping her dormant, this leaves those open questions to the helm of Wheatley. This would make it much more interesting, since Wheatley speaks to you with the clout of unfamiliarity, not directly acknowledging the events of Portal 1. Continuing this would have made the story much more engaging due to the lack of narrative closure, motivating the player to continue playing and find out the answers to the dissonant questions between Portal 1 and Portal 2.

In contrast to reviving Glados early, a better way to have subverted player expectations in Portal 2 would have been to treat Wheatley as the main villain during the first act of the game. Instead of reviving Glados, simply input Wheatley into the dead Glados core early and have him betray you at that point. Then, leave Glados out of the narrative until the mid-section of the game when you explore Aperture Science's history. If you let Wheatley serve as the villain during the first act, it gives the player the firsthand experience of his villainy so that players can learn to despise him as a character. You can use him as a different test proctor to provide a new testing experience for players instead of rehashing Glados in the first act. Then Wheatley's evil nature would be directly impacted on the player's tests, motivating the player to overthrow him as the facility overlord. This makes the player much more motivated to defeat Wheatley in the second act by finding and allying with the player's previous enemy, (and the lesser of two evils) Glados.

Moreover, you can use Glados' second act introduction as a catalyst for the backstory of Aperture science. Just say that Glados has a reboot copy of her personality hidden deep within the mining sections of the facility. This gives a natural story incentive to explore these back sections of Aperture Science other than just, Let's run with Potato Glados, escape the underground, and defeat Wheatley while learning about the history of Aperture Science on the way! You can then tie in learning Aperture Science's personal history into discovering the location of Glados as a story means. Then, the back-story of Aperture Science would be embedded into the story goal of finding Glados' backup, rather than the side-juxtaposition it is now in the happenstance discovery during your mining escape.

Finally, the last act of Portal 2 subverts the player's expectations better, but by this time in the narrative, we can already see how the game will end. The original Portal was great because we started the game only with the expectation of completing test chambers. However, this was totally subverted towards the latter chambers, as notions of an escape crept in on us. By the time we switched our goals from testing to escaping and got to Glados' final test chamber, the realization that we were going to destroy her finally became a fulfilled reality. In contrast, in Portal 2, our expectation at the beginning is already to escape. Even after this is thwarted with Glados' resurrection, our goal never changes from this, even after Wheatley betrays us, and we get dumped into the back-sections of Aperture's history. Despite the fact that the during the last act, the game uses a great set piece (Aperture Science 1950s-1970s) and the new gameplay devices of the gels (which are implemented very intuitively), it is all progressing toward a predictable conclusion. Because of this predictability and the fulfillment of our expectations in our narrative goals, we are not nearly as motivated to escape as we were in the spontaneous rebellion in the last act of Portal 1.

CONCLUSION
So how do you successfully subvert player expectations when creating a sequel? Valve already did it with a different "2" game, Half-Life 2. That game took the original source material of Half-Life and expanded on it to create the oppressed, post-apocalyptic world of City 17, where aliens have enslaved the human race. It did not retread its old material at all--an alien invasion in a subterranean New Mexico facility--rather, Half-Life 2 used its source material as a foundation to go further, to explore new areas (Ravenholm, the Coast, Nova Prospekt), new characters (Alyx, Eli, Dr. Breen), and new forms of gameplay (the Gravity Gun) not restricted by the original concept of Half-Life. Half-Life 2 subverted our expectations as a player, and because of that, it broke new ground and made Half-Life 2 an arguably even better game than the first.

Portal 2, however, mostly sticks to the expectations from Portal 1: the return to Aperture science, the continuing use of test chambers, the vengeance of Glados, and more portal puzzles in a linearly progressing chamber sequence. We experience the same type of portal gameplay as Portal 1, yet unfortunately we don't have the succinct emotional beats of isolation, rebellion, and escape or even that sense of mystery which motivated us to escape. Instead, we experience the expected: a prolonged and failed escape, a continuous use of testing chambers, our submission to Glados, and a foreshadowed betrayal with Wheatley. Portal 2 does do many things right, such as the role-reversal of Glados as our inferior, the handling of the gels, and the ultimate relationship with Wheatley, but its failure to subvert our overall expectations results in a game that cannot match the same awe as in the first Portal and the surprises that it gave us.

Visually Directing the Player

2011-06-04T01:16:00.001-07:00

A while ago in 2009 I wrote an article called "Visually Directing the Player" for HardyDev.com.

The article has been slightly updated for the UCLA Game Lab in February 2011 and was just posted online here.

In the past, the article has been used in Carnegie Mellon's Graduate Level Game Design Course (Spring 2010 and Spring 2011)
and also Michigan Tech University's Intro to Game Design Course (Fall 2010).

The most current version can be found at the UCLA Game Lab.

Happy reading!

Gemini Rue: Postmortem

2011-04-14T15:14:00.000-07:00

Now on Game Career Guide (via Gamasutra): here

Gemini Rue: OUT NOW

2011-02-24T18:08:00.000-08:00

Out now--
DEMO
FULL GAME
PRESS

Gemini Rue: coming FEB 24, 2011

2011-01-11T13:49:00.000-08:00

Gemini Rue
Coming Feb 24, 2011 to a PC near you

Playthrough :: The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening

2010-12-08T22:41:00.000-08:00

This article was originally written over the Summer of 2010 with the intent of a full play-through with commentary--However, that never happened, and so the article will only be published in its first part. Enjoy! -J

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The Legend of Zelda series uses a recurrent formula. Over eighteen years ago, A Link to the Past was released as the third game in the Zelda series, and since then, the Zelda formula has been more or less set in stone: Wake up with little more than the clothes on your back, find a sword and a shield, progress through several initial dungeons in order to gain power-ups, encounter a story reversal at around dungeon #3, and then complete several more dungeons to fight the ultimate boss and restore balance to the world.

Although this formula has been well-used, the fourth game in the series, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, was the very first game after A Link to the Past to continue to build on that formula, bridging a gap between the 2D Zelda games and the then upcoming 3D Ocarina of Time.

Through particular design choices, Link's Awakening crafts a prime example of what makes the Legend of Zelda series as engaging, stimulating, and successful as it is today.

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening Playthrough!
(With Analysis & Commentary)

Part 1: Intro - First Dungeon

Player Motivation

How do you motivate players to do something? Why should they jump across a pit, stomp on a bad guy, or crack open a crate? The reason players do this is because they are faced with the prospect of reward, whether it is narrative progression, health power-ups, or extra ammo.

So let's say you want players to talk to NPCs in your game, either to dish out narrative or world exposition, and you also want players to explore your game world. How do you get the player to talk to NPCs out of his or her own free will and how do you get him or her to explore the game world?

The very first room of Link's Awakening uses the concept of gameplay rewards to encourage the player to talk to NPCs. How? By asking a NPC how he knows the player's name, the player receives his shield back as a reward. This sets up a correlation with the player: talk to NPC; get a reward (my shield). The presupposition of a reward through NPC conversations is thus encouraged by the game, prompting the player to continue to talk to more NPCs later, even though they may just respond with a "Have a nice day, Sir!" However, by setting up this correlation early on in the game, it creates an incentive for players in the back of their head to continue to talking to NPCs, resulting in both narrative and gameplay information relayed to the player.

What about rewarding exploration? By giving the player a map with the entire island in shroud, Link's Awakening creates a goal for the player to achieve--uncover every square inch of that map by traversing every screen on the island. When the player enters a new screen, she is rewarded with the addition of that screen revealed on her world map, creating a sense of accomplishment. Also, crucial items, such as the player's sword, are only discovered after exploring the game world for several screens--they are not found immediately without any effort. These two features set up an automatic reward/explore system that gives a small sense of achievement to the player as she explores the game world.

Thus, for both talking to NPCs and exploring the game world, Link's Awakening uses a system of reward so as to give the player incentive to apply its game mechanics.

The "A-Ha!" Moment

In creating puzzles, there is a certain "A-Ha!" moment that is so coveted to implant into a player's mind when they discover the solution. If in Portal the goal is to jump across a chasm much too long to traverse, and the player finally discovers the tiny bit of portalizeable wall that allows them to attain enough forward momentum to jump, it creates that "A-Ha!" moment when she realizes she's solved the puzzle. This occurs because the player first knew the problem (the chasm), which then prompted her brain to search for the solution. Upon discovering the solution (the extra portalizeable space) it creates the "A-Ha! I found it!" moment, resulting in a satisfying conclusion to the puzzle.

Link's Awakening does something similar by establishing a series of problems before presenting their solutions. For example, a little Bow-Wow creature wants to be pretty; a young couple needs a Yoshi doll for their child, an Alligator wishes he had dog food, etc. These problems are then implanted in the back of the player's head as a check-list of items to attain or search for. When the player finally does find an item in question, for example, the can of dog food, a light then springs on in her head, resulting in the "A-Ha! I found it!" moment, giving the player further satisfaction.

What's worth noting in Link's Awakening is that all of these needs or wants are firmly established in the introduction, much earlier than the solutions are found, giving players the room to explore and find those solutions on their own as a satisfactory gameplay goal.

The Power of Limitations

Since Link's Awakening is on the GameBoy, it has many technical limitations. One of these is the small, pixelated font, which can only display about 4-6 legible words on screen at a time, until it prompts the player to press a button and scroll down to see the next part of the sentence. While this may been seen as an outdated, lo-fi, feature, in retrospect, it actually forces the designers to consolidate each message and expository point of the game into its purest, least-amount-of-words form.

Just think of games today that are able to display pages upon pages of information, but how much of that information is actually useful to the player or even relevant to the game or the gameplay? Why should the player have to read one page of contextualized exposition in order to arrive at the one message of "Go Right and Kill the Reactor!" Instead, Link's Awakening takes each bit of expository information, and distills it down to only the vitally necessary bits so as to speed the player through to her goals.

This goes to show that restrictions, although many times obligatory, are actually useful as they force designers to think around the box to come up with even more creative and efficient solutions.

Gameplay & Narrative Progression

Zelda games--and nearly all other narrative-based games for that matter--exist on two axes: story and gameplay. Both story and gameplay have their own independent structures, features, and progressions, which should be equally balanced when transmitted to the player. If a player goes through a series of eight dungeons over twenty hours, but nothing happens in the story, it creates a sense of futility, that none of the player's actions have any ultimate consequence on the narrative axis. Or, if the player successfully restores balance to the world by simply slaying one monster without even trying, then the narrative axis supersedes the gameplay axis. Games then, have to maintain an appropriate balance between their narrative and gameplay axes to complement the player's progression.

One moment in Link's Awakening that embodies this balance is when the player rediscovers his sword on the beach, which is linked with the introduction of the Owl character, who guides you in the game's story. The Owl is the one character who relays information to the player about the island, the player's goals, and the mystery surrounding the egg. By introducing the Owl with the discovery of the sword, the game correlates gameplay progression (the sword) with narrative progression (the Owl), making sure that both the narrative & gameplay axes progress at the same rate. The Owl, who orders the player to take heed to your journey, and the weapon, giving the player an attack ability, come together to move forward the story and the gameplay together at the same pace.

Trusting the Stranger

Finally, the Owl presents an interesting character, often present in most video games: the one of the helpful, insightful, yet unacquainted stranger. The Owl is first presented to the player at the discovery of the sword, and then orders the player to embark on a quest to the forest in part of a larger goal to wake the egg and escape the island. One factor that attributes to the Owl's trustworthiness is the fact that he shows up at each location he sends you to, rather than not show up at his spoken location. If the game did not do this, then the player would be less willing to trust in the character as the Owl continues to give the player advice and guidance throughout the game. Unacquainted side-kicks are often used in video games, and Link's Awakening reinforces that trustful relationship by having this new stranger follow up on each promise he makes.

---

Link's Awakening, though by now over 15 years old, still contains inherent design principles that attribute to a meaningful player experience, many of which are still in use in modern games today. Whether it is a simple gameplay-story correlation, or even a technical limitation, Link's Awakening is a prime testament to the excellence of Zelda's design.

Gemini Rue

2010-09-28T18:13:00.000-07:00

Coming soon...

Boryokudan Rue = Gemini Rue

2010-06-27T15:28:00.000-07:00

Hi, to the three followers of my blog!

Announcement: I have changed the name of Boryokudan Rue to Gemini Rue. Official Press Release as follows:

--

Boryokudan Rue is now Gemini Rue. Tell your friends!

Official Link here.

Josh

Boryokudan Rue: Post-IGF

2010-03-17T14:30:00.000-07:00

1 Week later...

So last week I had the privilege to attend GDC in San Francisco and demo Boryokudan Rue for about three straight days to hundreds of passersby. This experience taught me many things, some of which I thought I would share.

The first thing I realized was just how critical physical playtesting is to a game. I've had games playtested (and playtested others' games) over the internet, and that suffices well enough. But when you physically get to be in the same airspace as your tester, you receive so much more critical feedback that you would otherwise probably never get. Every little action a player performs, be it a mouse click, reading a line of dialog, or walking across a room, is conveyed back through them through a twitch of the eye, the raising of an eyebrow, a small grin, or an exasperated keyboard dab. Little non-verbal cues like this tell you so much about the psychology of the player, and what is specifically working and not working in a game. I would say that to undergo minute testing such as this, and specifically remove every element of unwanted frustration from a game, is to successfully playtest and debug that game.

The second thing I learned was about gratification. Since other attendees usually only had a couple minutes to spare on the show floor, that meant they would only play a game for a minute or two, several at most (usually). What this means is that those players need some sort of gratification or reward to justify their playing of your game. For platformers, this is easily achieved as players get instant feedback as whether or not they successfully jumped over a pit. For fighting games, players know when they've killed the enemy, and when they've succeeded. However, since my game was more story/puzzle driven, I found it much harder to give that sense of gratification to players in such a short time span. I realized that players needed instant goals, and instant objectives to achieve; nobody wanted to be wandering around, or figuring out what to do on their own. Once I switched the demo scene from a free-world, exploratory section, to the most linear tutorial section of the game, that's when I found out that players would actually play the game for 5-10 minutes, instead of the normal 1-2. So, the lesson learned here is to hold your player's hand--they don't want to be lost, they want your help.

One week later, I can say that overall, GDC was a very surreal experience, and one I'm glad I had the opportunity to go through.

Oh yeah, I didn't win. Forgot to mention that. :)

Game Review: Fallout 3

2010-02-15T00:30:00.000-08:00

Edited for clarity - 3/7/2011

Fallout 3 is big, really big. However, size does not equal greatness. Having a dozen bad tasting cupcakes is not as satisfying as one deliciously sprinkled cupcake. In the same way, Fallout 3 certainly gets the notion of quantity right, but fails to engage the player in the aforementioned quantity of content. If Fallout 3 focused more on how to get the player to engage its world and gameplay, then Fallout 3 would be a better, albeit smaller game.

1. Story - Lack of Conflict
First, the player's narrative motivation in Fallout 3 could be improved by the earlier introduction of narrative conflict.

The beginning of the story is marked by the disappearance of your father from your hometown, the Vault, prompting you to leave the vault to find him once again. But this then leaves the questions: why do you want to find your father when he disappears? What's the motivating force?

In Monkey Island, your goal is to rescue Elaine, but you are always faced with the looming threat of LeChuck after you leave the SCUMM bar, creating a reason for you to hurry up and become a pirate. In Knights of the Old Republic, your goal is to find star maps, but you are constantly in battle with the Sith, forging a race for each consecutive star map. In BioShock, even though you must escape Rapture, there is the ever-imposing figure of Andrew Ryan, a nemesis whom you must overcome to escape.

So what is there motivating you--conflicting you--to find your father in Fallout 3?

Nothing, really. Your goal has no direct opposing force (there are Mutants who fight you, but their goal is to kill everyone--not specifically you) until about nearly two thirds of the way into the story. Once that happens, you realize who your enemies are and who you have to stop in order to find your father. Before that point, however, no one is trying to stop you from finding your father; no one is battling against your progress.

A lack of conflict breeds a lack of tension, urgency, and challenge to overcome any obstacle in order to reach your goal, in this case, your father. Instead, the majority of your journey to find your father stems from town-hopping, interrogating by-standers for answers, and then performing fetch quests to gather more clues--not fighting your adversary for dear life as s/he battles against your every progression and accomplishment.

Guess who's trying to stop you? Nobody!

An alternative way to begin Fallout 3 would be this: make it so that your father is kidnapped from the Vault. This sets up a mystery (who kidnapped my father?), an opposing force (the kidnappers), yet still creates the same narrative goal as before (find your father); except now you have a conflict to engage in which you must overcome in order to rescue your father. Fallout 3 eventually does this by introducing the Enclave two thirds into the game, but that is much too long to wait for this sense of a larger conflict. Before this, you are allowed to just meander around the wasteland, with no real excuse for finding your father, no sense of urgency. Introducing an opposing force earlier would have made the story much more instigating for you to find your father.

2. Gameplay - Guns vs. Swords
Fallout 3 also boasts the unique inclusion of FPS elements within its RPG table set, yet this doesn't come without some drawbacks. With FPS elements comes the fear of labeling Fallout 3 a "First-Person-Shooter with RPG elements" rather than"Role-Playing Game." So, what the developers do to alleviate this is include the VATs targeting system which essentially pauses the game, lets you choose limbs and areas of enemies to shoot at, and then the game executes those orders based on a percentage of impact. This system, while appreciative, is much less fun than the combat system in Oblivion, because it's just a simple probability roll.

VATs: A series of percentage signs.

Contrast this to an adaptive combat sequence which is more of what Oblivion had with its melee combat. What made these encounters much more fun than the ones in Fallout 3 is that you were always involved in each battle. You had to swap between a series of block/attack moves in each encounter and always had to adapt to your enemies' movements in each situation. This put a constant life or death struggle onto each enemy encounter--you had to keep your guard up in order to not fall susceptible to your enemies' blows. Also, just hearing your blade slice into your enemies' flesh was much more satisfying than the click of a bullet piercing your enemy's skin. (Moroseness! Hooray!)

Fallout 3's VATs system doesn't have this strategic balance, this level of required thinking or involvement in each battle. Instead, you can just run up to an enemy, point a gun in their face, and then let VATs calculate that you will get a 95% hit without the need for you to retaliate or adapt to the enemy's next action. It's just a simple roll of the dice, a playing of the odds.

Gameplay mechanics should be fun, challenging, and thoughtful, forcing you to adapt to each situation by requiring you to improve your current level of skill--not just a viewing of the odds and then a decision based off of a percentage point.

3. Exploration Motivation
Lastly, Fallout 3 suffers from exploration motivation--in other words, why explore this world? Why traverse through this gigantic, uninviting, mono-chromatic wasteland? This is because of three main reasons: lack of novelty, ambiguous atmosphere, and lack of challenge.

First, every location is just a copy and paste rendition of the other, so there's no real reward for exploration. You can enter any number of buildings that you want, but you're still going to find the same 2 stimpaks, 3 ammunition crates, 8 Super Mutants, and the generic toolboxes with wonderglue and hammers that come with it. Locations or quests have the same, generic items associated with them so that it becomes tedious, rather than exciting, to advance through your journey. Even though games such as Final Fantasy or KoTOR offer fewer more compact worlds, each discovery in these worlds is made all the more important because of that. You know that every treasure chest you open and every new weapon you find can be unique and different from all the others in the game. However, Fallout 3 removes this novelty of discovery by generically copying its items and environments, and because of that, the game lessens the value of its discoveries for the player.

Down these mean streets a man must go--
but oh well, they're all the same.

Second, Fallout 3 suffers from atmospheric ambiguity in its environment. Part of the fun in exploring any environment is to be immersed in it--to truly feel as if you are there. For post-apocalyptic environments, this is most often a feeling of solitude and isolation--the lonely realization of humanity's self-demise. However, in Fallout 3, this feeling is consistently destroyed by lonely robots, mutant zombies, or an annoying, chattering voice screaming "Free dawg! Owwooooooot!" Before the player has a chance to become immersed in any one specific feeling (isolation, humor, danger), the game consistently flips itself upside down. This changes the game's experience from a lonely, post-apocalyptic world, into a awkwardly heterogeneous world.

Think of a game like STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl--this game lets you run along vacant roads and hills for what seems like miles, encountering few or no enemies; and when you do finally encounter another living being, the impact is made all the more forceful, thanks to the amount of solitude you just experienced. In Fallout 3, this feeling of solitude is constantly destroyed by haphazardly trotting mutants, brain-bots, zombies, rabid dogs, and scavenging wastelanders, decimating the atmosphere and discouraging exploration in the process.

Thirdly, and lastly, a lack of challenge in Fallout 3 removes any need to further explore new environments. Fallout 3 is too easy, which is the exact opposite problem that Oblivion had. This is because Fallout 3 does not contained scaled enemies (in contrast to Oblivion), meaning that when you level up in Fallout 3, your enemies do not level up with your progress. Non-scaled enemies make sense, because if they leveled up with your progress, it would reduce all cause to improve your character, as your enemies would increase in strength at the same rate, which was one of the core problems of Oblivion. However, because Fallout 3 removes scaling-enemies, the game becomes ridiculously easy during the latter half.

The second half of Fallout 3: Hi-tech power-armored Gatling-gun wielding super soldiers vs. defenseless Zombies

Because players can already destroy most every enemy opposing them, this removes rationale to keep exploring because there is no reason to obtain better weapons and items since enemies are not difficult enough to make obtaining those items necessary. Enemies start to drop without any real challenge, and health never becomes a concern for the player, thanks to the endless amount of Stimpaks found scattered throughout the world. Since enemies are easily defeated, there is no reason to gather more weapons, items, or health packs via exploration, thus removing a whole purpose for exploration. Even though having non-scaled enemies is a good thing, there should have been some kind balancing factor or reason for players to continue to exploring the world, gathering more items.

Conclusion
Players need reasons to do things--goals to achieve. Goals drive players--they give them a reason, a motivating factor to guide themselves through a meaningful experience.
If the player doesn't need ammo, there's no reason to scavenge new areas for crates of ammo. If the player doesn't need to upgrade his weapon and can defeat every enemy he faces, there is no reason to try and gather new weapons. If the player already owns all the best items in the local shops, there is no reason to gather or look for any more gold in each dungeon.
Fallout 3 contains a massive, very-well constructed world, yet lacks the incentive to drive players to explore it. Why should players explore open-ended worlds? For the reward? For the story? Games can have the most inviting, detailed, and rich worlds, but unless there is a reason to explore these worlds, then the players will never do so.

Boryokudan Rue: Official Trailer 1

2010-01-31T19:39:00.000-08:00

Up now. Watch it.

Film Review: Moon

2010-01-24T01:09:00.000-08:00

Moon (2009), by Duncan Jones, is a very complete film. It's not exactly the most thrilling, entertaining, or even thought-provoking film, but it succeeds on every level of what it tries to do, and for that, it's hard not to commend it. As I was watching the film, and approaching the ending (warning: Spoilers commencing in 5--), I was worried that it wouldn't complete the film. Thankfully, however, I was wrong.

What Moon successfully achieves during its last several minutes is the already over-analyzed and discussed term, "a character arc." Thanks to Wikipedia, I can tell you that a character arc is "the status of the character as it unfolds throughout the story, the storyline or series of episodes. Characters begin the story with a certain viewpoint and, through events in the story, that viewpoint changes."

As an example, what is the character arc (for Batman) in The Dark Knight? In the first scene with Batman, he forcefully ties up his unwanted allies, the people of Gotham, along with his captured foes, reclining their offers of help. This sets up a character flaw: a mistrust towards others. When nearly all hope is lost and the Joker has Batman pinned down near the end of the film, he needs the people of Gotham in order to succeed. In order to succeed in his external goal (stop the Joker) he must overcome his flaw and complete his internal goal (trust in others). He needs to have faith in people--to believe that each boat will not flip the switch to destroy the other--and because of that Joker falters and Batman succeeds. Batman's character arc in The Dark Knight is to go from a lack of trust in people, to having faith in them instead.

Then what is the character arc in Moon? At the beginning of the film, Sam has one goal: to get back home after his 3 year stint. What is his flaw? His life is centered around him and his desires. Toward the end of the film, Sam² gets into the pod to escape the Moon. It was at this very moment I was worried that the film would carry me off into an unsatisfying ending, because Sam's lack of intervention would let the cycle of clones continue. It is at the exact point when Sam decides to jump back out, destroy the pylon tower, and care for someone other than himself, that he completes his character arc. That is the moment when the film becomes complete. He goes from being self-centered around his goals, to caring for others, even if they are the same as him.

Thanks to that transformation, I was satisfied with the film. Sam completes his character arc, the world changes thanks to his intervention, and some nice credits music rolls. The film reminded me of this point: It is not a sequence of events that results in a satisfying film--rather, it's an emotional transformation, a change, a payoff, that reveals a bit more of what it means to be human, a bit more of the humanity that lies within us all. It is not events that satisfy, but emotion.

Boryokudan Rue: 2010 IGF Student Finalist

2010-01-18T12:17:00.000-08:00

For the past two-ish years, I have been working on a game. This game is called Boryokudan Rue. For some reason I haven't been posting much about it; however, in November of 2009 I entered it into a little contest called the "Independent Games Festival" as a student entry. Today, I found out it has just been nominated as a student finalist in the 2010 Independent Games Festival.

This is the game. Boryokudan Rue.

This was a very, very, awesome surprise. Thanks to everybody who helped support this game, whether it be through a simple play-test, or a word of encouragement. Without you, Boryokudan Rue would not be where it is today, so thank you, one and all.

Hopefully, I will be going to the Game Developers Conference in March for the Independent Games Festival, where the final winners will be announced. Until then, I will keep you posted! Thank you, and good night!

Review :: Terminator: Salvation

2009-12-25T21:33:00.000-08:00

Movies usually have goals, directions--things they want to accomplish. For example, District 9 wants to tell you a story about racial segregation in Johannesburg through a guy who turns into an alien. Up wants to tell you a story about love, loss, and dreams through a journey to South Africa. Terminator: Salvation, on the other hand, is just confused. It doesn't know what it wants to be, what it's doing, or what it's trying to say. All it really knows is it wants to have a lot of action scenes.

First of all, the movie is confused about who the main character is. The movie tries to swap between three characters, and in so doing, lacks any clear protagonist at all. We don't know whose story this is. First, we have Sam Worthington's character (A terminator?) in the introduction, who also appears to be the antagonist, flashing forward into the future, rising out of the flames like every confused Terminator before him. We also have Christian Bale, who mainly sits around yammering for people to obey his orders, probably due to his control-freak disorder brought upon by his prophetic status, making him one of the most unlikeable characters in the film. And lastly we have a young Kyle Reese, who mainly exists just to exist, otherwise John Connor couldn't have existed.

The film starts off with Sam Worthington, then goes to John Connor, and then back to Sam and Kyle Reese. Just when the film seems to be about John Connor, it goes back to Sam, and then to John, and vice-versa. The film is split between two protagonists, and eventually it seems that Connor is more of an antagonist, being the unlikeable chap that he is, and Worthington the protagonist (although this is reversed again in the end), due to him being the only real character with a direction. It's fine to swap between different characters and storylines, but we need to know who is the instigator of the action, who the hero is. In Lord of the Rings, Frodo is the bearer of the ring, the ultimate goal, and this allows us to understand the swap between the secondary characters. In Star Wars, Luke is the one who must master the force and destroy the death star, not Han Solo or Leia. We don't know who the main character is in Terminator: Salvation, and that just makes it all the more confusing and apathetically charged .

Additionally, the film is confused about what each character's goals are, a.k.a. desires. Movies are usually about characters trying to get something: Indy tries to get the Ark, Neo tries to save Morpheus, Batman tries to save Gotham. But in Terminator: Salvation, there is lack of this--a lack of want. Sam Worthington wakes up in the future, and we are just as confused as he is about what he is doing there. Is he a terminator? (Obviously, or how else would he get into the future?) But then what is he doing in the future and how did he come from the past (and what was he doing in the past)? He eventually runs into Kyle Reese, and it becomes his goal to save him, for some humanized reason. At least Kyle has some kind of goal--to find John Connor--but that is quickly interrupted by his capture. Lastly, the character of John Connor does have a goal: it is to successfully test the doomsday weapon of a radio signal. He does it. And succeeds; and then moves on.

The movie does look nice, and atmospheric, and most of the scenes are well-done (However, with the added niceness of each shot, it seems to become an annoying recurrence to have the camera pan over a character aimlessly staring, reflecting his lack of humanity, and then stepping down into the next scene). What the movie lacks is any sort of coherence, any unifying thread, any reason to keep watching it as a movie, not a connection of well-paced action sequences. Terminator: Salvation tries to grasp at what it thinks an entertaining film should be about, but in the end is just a poorly concocted sequences of events that suffices for a 'story.'

Review :: STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl

2009-12-05T23:10:00.000-08:00

There are games that create stories and there are games that create worlds--the truly greatest games are ones that do both. Games that create worlds exist independent from any situated narrative; games that create narratives are locked on that narrative's rails, usually restricting the player from exploring that world. STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl is a game about a world; it's not about a linear narrative, moments of high-escalating action, the illusion of morals and free choice, or all that other nonsense. Instead, STALKER drops you into an environment: the post-apocalyptic fallout of the Chernobyl power plant, and you are put at its mercy and rules until the game promptly ends.

In that respect, it is a convincing world with a desolate atmosphere. You can stop walking along the barren roads, observe the sun beaming through a patch of clouds, see the trees and grass swaying ever so slightly, uncover a briefcase in an abandoned, rusted, truck, and then notice two mercenaries on an upcoming road heading towards you with guns ready. In much the same way of Oblivion, this is a world that you have entered, which happens to contain a narrative in it. It's not a narrative you enter which happens to contain a world around it. The difference between the two is that you can enjoy being immersed in a world without having to do some specific task, but it is much harder to enjoy being in a narrative without any specific task.

When games create their own worlds, it is an ambitious undertaking, and oftentimes the narrative can suffer as a result. Here are some ways that I think the narrative could be improved in STALKER.
Ways to improve the narrative in STALKER (the game, not the profession)!
1. Introduction of Conflict
There's a certain element that is needed to maintain interest in a story: conflict. This means there is an opposing force to your action: you try to do something (rescue a princess) and somebody tries to stop you (the evil Koopa king). What's the conflict introduced in KOTOR? The Sith attack the Endar Spire in order to capture Bastilla; you have to stop them. In The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion? The evil council of bad guys kill the king as you try to escape; you need to save his son. What about in Half-Life²? The opening scene in which the Combine have enslaved mankind; you need to rescue them.

All of these stories introduce conflict either in the opening scene, or very, very shortly after.

The sooner you introduce conflict in a story, the better, because it introduces an obstacle to overcome: a goal, and with that, a chance of failure, challenge, and victory. When I awoke in STALKER, there wasn't a sense of conflict. There was no power-push intro in which to establish an opposing force who would try to destroy me for the rest of the game. When the game started, I was in a little homey town in which I could wander and explore endlessly. This wasn't like the intro in Oblivion or KOTOR, in which I knew there was a larger goal at hand, a narrative which I needed to return to, which propelled my motivations forward even in the most mundane dialogs.

However, when I finally ventured out of my starting point in STALKER and encountered a group of loners fighting off mercenaries, that's immediately when the story (or world) became interesting to me. I finally felt that sense of a larger battle, a sense of an opposing force that I had to overcome, a goal to which I had to aspire. When the conflict was introduced, that's when I finally started caring.

2. Heart

I once saw somewhere that the "BioWare method" for side-quests was something akin to this: Make the player compelled to act because of an emotional connection to the character giving the side-quest. Why do we care to perform a "quest" for a non-player character? What's our motivation? In film and movies, the audience needs to sympathize with a character in order to care about that person. The same principle can apply to games. For example, don't just have an NPC come up to a character and say "Hey, can you kill these two bandits at this shed and I'll give you some gold?" Instead, give the NPC an emotional context in which to engage the player: "Hey, can you kill these two bandits because I'm a pilgrim and they stole my loot and murdered the rest of my family and now I am homeless and this evil gangster lord is out to kill me because I can't pay him back?" Which of the two is more engaging and compelling for the player to act? With the emotional back-story, or without?

As STALKER currently stands, there's not much of an emotional connection--there's not much heart to it. All the characters in the game exist as pointless mercenaries just sitting, waiting, guarding; shooting anything that enters their territory. That actually makes contextual sense, I guess, because why would there be any heart in the midst of bands of mercenaries in a desolate and mutated fallout region? Despite that, I still believe there should be more substance, more life to the characters in STALKER. They need to have more dreams, aspirations, lives, or cares; not just be sitting around waiting for something to happen or to shoot the next guy not on their patrol. Giving the characters more heart would give me more of reason to care for them (and then carry out the side-quest they give me!).

3. Player-Control
Rather than going into the myriad of problems associated with the second half of the plot (amnesia, wish-granting, meta-physical scientists, plot-twists) I'll just discuss the one of the player's control over the narrative.

The final scene in the game (depending on which ending you receive) takes place in the form of a granted wish (don't ask what this means in a science fiction story). You spend hours killing mutants and other mercenaries in order to get into the core of the power plant and approach the "Wish Granter," when suddenly the game takes over in a cut-scene showing you, the player, saying: "I wish... I could be rich/powerful/not-an-emotionless-loser!" and then the ceiling collapses on you and you die. What makes this so frustrating is that you spend all this time embodied in the protagonist (who up to this point was totally 1:1 with your actions) only to have him independently grant a seemingly arbitrary wish at the end which subsequently leads to your demise.

I don't want to play through a game, able to control my player's actions for the entirety of the time, only to have this control yanked away from me at the very end for the very last and crucial decision of the game. I don't want to play Half-Life 1, only to watch myself reach the final stage in Xen, then witness a cut-scene where Gordon falls into a pit because that was the presupposed ending the designers wanted you to have. I want to be able to control my actions, especially at the end, because that is when my actions (usually) matter the most--that is when I can resolve the conflict, and end the story.

--

Interesting and compelling worlds in games are great, but there also should be something to direct a player's actions: a narrative. It should compel the players forward, encourage them to explore this world, and remind them of their goals, no matter how far astray they may run off. STALKER still stands on its own as a world, but without a strong enough narrative, it is not the complete and engaging experience that it could have been.

Review :: Call of Duty 6: Modern Warfare 2

2009-11-17T20:35:00.000-08:00

Some spoilers below.

After playing Call of Duty 6: Modern Warfare 2, I still feel the same amount of apathy that permeates the "Call of Duty Problem." (Go back! Read it! Shameless plug!) When I sit down, I know I'm about to enter a long, linear shooter that is going to thrust me through many 'exciting' environments in an effort to give me the 'coolest' experience possible. The more I play Call of Duty games, the more I'm convinced that they're not going to change. It's the same principle with the television show, '24:' watch one season, and you get the gist, the basic formula (and the enjoyment along the way). Watch any more seasons (or play any more games) and you're in for a downhill ride of repetitious scenarios that can never seem to match the original.

CoD6: MW2 is a game defined by context: the events which are going on around you. I think that's why the original Call of Duties were so successful: never before in a game did you feel so authentically like you were part of a larger-scale war. People weren't standing around like stick figures waiting for you to talk to them--in contrast, your comrades were ducking for cover, chucking grenades, pulling each other to safety, trying to advance without you. Something was always happening, independent of your actions, and that made the world feel so much more alive, the battles so much more authentic. It was new, it was fresh, and it was exciting. Flash forward to today, and Call of Duty 6 relies on the same principles, except perhaps even more so. CoD6 continually uses the same game mechanic (or rather, only game mechanic): run into an arena of enemies, tap zoom-in to auto-aim at the baddy (at least for the console version. Maybe I would've liked it if I played it on PC), press fire, then rinse and repeat for maximum fun. What changes throughout the game, however, is the context. You shoot bad guys in the same way, except you do it in different environments: in a helicopter circling a castle, in a raft roaring down a river, in a snowmobile jumping over a ravine.
Don't get me wrong, it's good to change the context--it provides variety, new environments to switch up the game mechanics in, and new scenarios to take part in. What's disappointing, for me, however, is that the designers seem to be so focused on what's going around you, rather than on what's going on because of you. They seem to be so concentrated on providing interesting settings and scenarios--icy cliffs, burning white houses, raging rapids--that what few actions you can perform no longer have as much meaning.
When you're with the terrorists who are shooting up an airport in Russia, you're not allowed to stop the attack, shoot back, or take action; you're only allowed to view the onslaught (or participate in it, for gosh's sake) until the mission is over.
When you are an astronaut in space, you can only view the impending explosion from your static viewpoint, not influence it or try to stop it.
These scenarios are interesting to be in, but you can't really participate in them. You are sitting, watching, viewing--and the only way you can participate in the scenario (if at all) is to shoot enemies until you clear a location so that the soldiers around you can hold your hand until the next story segment.

I want my actions in a game to have meaning. I want to influence the story, be a part of it, not be a passive viewer on the sidelines. I want to stop an assassination, kill an enemy leader, successfully break down an enemy outpost, and then see the repercussions of those actions. This happens in Call of Duty somewhat, but it seems to happen less and less, especially for the current game. So many things in CoD6 currently take place independently of your actions (the terrorist massacre, the EMP missile launch, the betrayal by a certain comrade), and because of that, you are reduced to more of a viewer than a participant.
Then again, that was part of the original point of the Call of Duty games: to make you feel as if you were a small piece of an ultimately larger and global conflict. It worked, in that respect, but it feels so scaled down currently, than any actions I make don't have any meaning at all--all I can do is just kill endless waves of enemies in confined and pre-determined locations, and then watch everyone else get to do the fun, important, plot-changing stuff.

The last scene in CoD6 exemplifies what Call of Duty has now become for me, in both scope and methodology. It doesn't take the game mechanics, make you exploit them in an innovative way, or challenge you to perform your best to finish the fight. Instead, you, the player, sit and watch, and watch as your ally fights the last boss as you are helpless to participate in the fight. The game restricts you to a dying position without any movement, then literally tells you to smash your SQUARE button endlessly as a quick-time gimmick. You don't have to think, strategize, or perform--you just do what the game tells you to do. After that, the game lets you aim at the final boss with virtually no chance of missing or losing. This isn't an exercise in gaming--it's an exercise in viewing and following instructions.

Games, as a medium, are different, important, fun--whatever adjective you want--because of one main element: interactivity. Without this, it becomes a passive medium, much in the same way of film or literature, which are enjoyable on their own right, but in a different manner. What makes interactivity interesting is in the ways in which (you think) you can directly impact the game world, however small or large. What Call of Duty has progressively shifted towards is a game with many moments of action, except you are not causing the action, you are viewing it. Moments like these are exciting to be in, but don't always work as a gaming experience because there is no interaction, no feedback from the player. If Call of Duty could keep the same moments, the same level of polish, but make you, the player, the instigator of the action, then it would be a much more enjoyable game.

Film Review: "9"

2009-10-01T22:43:00.000-07:00

Several days ago, I watched Shane Acker's feature length film "9" (based after the short of the same name). I wanted to like the film a lot, and I did; it is visually captivating, beautifully animated, and contains all the pieces of a powerful narrative. What I was disappointed with, however, was how it did not connect these pieces together in the best possible way in order to unfold the narrative to the audience.

The film starts out with the character, '9', being created by his master. This initial scene is fascinating to behold as it develops, because it handles the transmitting of information from the screen to the viewer much better than the rest of the film does.
The world of '9' is introduced through the awakening of the protagonist, who stumbles upon an open window and views this world he must discover. At this point we don't know who he is, why he is created, or why the world is in the shambles that it is in, and that is fine; in fact, it's much better that we don't know these things.

Information is best given out in controlled amounts, spatially placed for the viewer to consume at chosen intervals. At the beginning of 'Portal' we don't need to know that Glados killed everyone in the facility; we don't need to know that there were other test subjects who tried to escape; what we do need, however, is to be spoon fed just enough information (little bits of dialog slowly giving hints who and where you are, in Portal's case) so that we are hungry for the next bite--we don't need a gigantic mouthful of information that we can barely swallow in one gulp. Stories do not need to reveal everything at once; the viewer can be satisfied without knowing huge chunks of information, and the introduction of '9' does this quite admirably.

Immediately, '9' is a somewhat likable character; his lack of a voice causes the audience to sympathize with him--perhaps if they kept him voiceless for a longer period of time the addition of a voice would carry more weight with it. Shortly after he meets '2,' however, the story starts to sway from its promising beginnings.

One reason that the story loses its weight is by faulty motivations through its characters. When the character '2' is kidnapped, '9' agreeably wants to chase after him. At this point it's a bit hard to sustain a suspension of disbelief since '9' just woke up in this world, has no emotional attachments whatsoever, and seems to spontaneously bond just enough with the character '5' to convince him to disobey his leader's--for who knows how many years--orders just at the simple whim of his new buddy and pal whom he barely even knows, our protagonist, '9.'
When the characters' motivations become unbelievable, it causes a lack of sympathy, because the audience can no longer put themselves into the shoes of a character who does something unreasonable. What would have made this choice more believable for the audience is if they were introduced to the rag dolls' daily routine in their sanctuary. Instead, the audience is thrust to this new place for a brief moment to have '9' suddenly state, 'let's leave and advance the plot because we must save time on animation costs!' so they do that instead and it's much less believable. If the film spent more time with its characters, this would create more realistic motivations that the audience can sympathize with.

What I would have liked with the film is:
a) More character moments - as the director stated, the audience needed to care for the characters more, and to do that we need to spend more time with them in just simple, humanistic ways. One thing they could have done was have '8' pull out the magnet earlier in the film, get chastised by '1' for doing so on duty, and then the audience would wonder what 'the deal' was. Little quirks and mannerisms like that make characters more believable and real, so more of that would have been nice.

b) Exploiting the nature of the tiny rag dolls more - these rag dolls exist in a miniaturized version of our blown up (literally and figuratively) world. I would have enjoyed to see how their size played more of a function in interacting with their larger human counterparts.
c) Feeling of hope and desperation - this is something that the short film did extremely well: it portrayed a sincere and utter hope of laying everything on the line for one last chance at redemption after every other character had been killed by this beast. '9' only had one opportunity to destroy the beast, and it created some increasingly tense drama that is not present in the feature film, only because '9' is never put in the same desperation in the full length version.
d) More solid story goals - currently, the story goals of the film go something like this: '9' must explore this world; he wakes up in the sanctuary and now must save '2' by destroying the beast; he does this but awakens the master beast and now must do research to defeat it; somewhere along the line he decides to go back and destroy the master beast; he figures out he needs to grab something off the master beast before they kill it, and then does so. This sequence of goals sort of works, but it's quite hard to follow and to relate to the characters as they pursue each ensuing decision. I think the story would benefit a lot more from a restructure that would simplify each goal to a couple of basic concepts and then exploit those concepts to their fullest potential. For example, off the top of my head: '9' wakes up and goes back to sanctuary; sanctuary is destroyed and some get kidnapped leaving '9' to choose sides about whether to hide or go after the kidnapped people (this would give him more of an incentive since the stakes are now higher); the beast lets '9' kill him but the trade-off is somehow '9' activating the master bot; then '9' must find the missing members to set up a final trap to destroy the master bot. That's just one simple example.

All in all, '9' is a great film to look at, but could be improved in the story department. It was interesting to hear how the director himself said that they needed much more time than the given 6 months of pre-production to lay out the story, because once the story is set, animation is expensive, and you can't throw away money out the window. It just goes to show that story--is everything. You can have great visuals, great characters, and a great setting, but unless the viewer is catapulted on one long emotional, narrative ride, it can all be for naught.

REVIEW :: Batman: Arkham Asylum

2009-09-27T18:08:00.000-07:00

When I hear that Batman: Arkham Asylum is a 'good' game--and while agreeing with that sentiment--it makes me wonder what the definition of a 'good' game really is. It certainly means fun and entertaining, but it is not necessarily synonymous with original or innovative. With that in mind, I agree that Arkham Asylum is a 'good,' fun game, but it is also an unoriginal, and sometimes apathetic game.
It's fun because it does what it attempts to do, and does it right--it successfully melds combat, stealth, exploration, and puzzle-solving together while inadvertently ripping off Assassin's Creed and Zelda in order to do so. That being said, Arkham Asylum is unoriginal in that everything it tries to do has already been proven.

Although Arkham Asylum is fun and tries proven methods, there is still room for improvement. I am going to put out 3 suggestions that I think could make Arkham Asylum a better game.

3 Things that Could be Fixed in Arkham Asylum
1. Addition of a Mini-Map
There is a consistent problem in Arkham Asylum in that you can't really tell where you're going all the time. Part of this is caused by the fact that the camera is narrowly zoomed into Batman's cape, and part of it is attributed by the fact that the scenery recurrently blends together with or without Detective Vision™.
What this leads to is a constant re-checking of the map screen by the player in order to figure out where he/she is and where he/she needs to go. This constitutes pressing the 'select' button, pausing the game, letting the map screen load up for several seconds, and then pushing 'select' again to return to the game--an entire process which takes several seconds and must be perpetually repeated.
It really wouldn't hurt to have some sort of mini-map or radar always available on-screen to the player. Adding a simple mini-map in the corner of the screen (Ala Zelda style) would alleviate much of this problem and prevent the player from getting irritated by re-pressing the map screen button so many times in one arena.

Twilight Princess and its mini-map.

2. Arbitrary Gameplay Rewards

Another thing that could be fixed in Arkham Asylum is the arbitrary handing out of gameplay rewards. Currently, in the game there is no definite reason as to why the rewards you get (new items, gadgets, or keycards) don't come earlier or later in the context of the narrative. For example, when you decide you need a new bat claw you haphazardly hop back to the Bat Cave and decide to improve your arsenal only at that specific time, when you could have done it much earlier in the game, if only the game let you. Another example is when the Warden of the asylum conveniently decides to give you a card which magically unlocks a large portion of the inaccessible areas in the game, only after you find him after an indeterminate period of time. Furthermore, Batman only decides to retrieve his handy zip line the second he needs it from his Bat plane by phoning it into a remote part of the island, when he could have easily called it in at any other time in the game.
By giving the rewards out to the player in this way, the game prevents the player from feeling like he or she has actually earned the rewards. In contrast, this puts the player at the game's mercy of giving out new items not when the player has accomplished a certain feat or defeated a certain boss, but instead when the game 'feels' like giving out these rewards.
This is in opposition to other games such as Zelda, in which the gameplay rewards are situated within the context of the game world and story. For example, in a Zelda game the player is rewarded with new items not when Link feels like pulling them out of his backpack, but instead when the player discovers them in a subterranean dungeon or when defeating an evil leviathan.
If the gameplay rewards in Arkhum Asylum actually depended on the player's progress and victories instead of arbitrary backpack pulling, then the game would provide a much more gratifying gameplay experience.

3. Status-Quo Storyline
Arkham Asylum's story leaves much to be desired in terms of clasping onto the player and never letting go. This is because in a comic-book world, everything revolves around returning things to a state of normalcy, back to the status quo.
No matter how much I loved Spider-Man and Batman as a kid, I always despised the fact that things would never change. At the end of every episode, Batman would arrest the villain, Spider-Man would revert to his normal self, and everything would return to the status quo, the same as it was before.
This is the exact reason why it's so hard to get involved with the storyline in Arkham Asylum when it starts out by saying: 'The Joker's escaped and set all the inmates free! What should we do?!' And then ends by saying something like: 'Good job Batman, you returned the Joker to his cell and put all the inmates back. Nothing's changed!'

Guess where he's going by the game's end.

Despite the game needing a story to motivate the player's goals, this is about as one-dimensional as the narrative can get. Playing through the game, I'm not compelled to pursue each goal, because I don't care about the inevitable outcome of the story. What I want from a story is change, tension, things to go wrong, mystery, suspense--things that the film 'The Dark Knight' all did admirably, but fail to apply to Batman's video game counterpart.
If Arkham Asylum attempted to create a more challenging, multidimensional story, it would provide an incentive for the player to keep playing the game and it would create a more satisfying experience in the end instead of containing the detached and apathetic feel it currently has.

--

In conclusion, Arkham Asylum is a fun game, but it's too safe. It doesn't offer anything new, challenging, or unique. Even though Mirror's Edge is a game that has remarkably more frustrations, I would say Mirror's Edge is still more fun than Arkham Asylum because it offers something that Arkham Asylum does not have: an original, exhilarating experience. When it comes down to what I want in a video game, it is all about providing a unique 'experience'; the feel of being able to do something in another world, to journey through a compelling story, to challenge myself in new ways. Arkham Asylum doesn't fully offer an original experience such as that, and so, despite its accomplished design, the game eventually remains more to be desired after its completion.

Mirror's Edge

2009-09-02T20:58:00.000-07:00

Mirror's Edge is like a Jackie Chan stunt: exhilarating when pulled off correctly, but frustrating and irritating the five or six takes it demands before it's done right. For that reason, I would not say that Mirror's Edge is a bad game, but just a failed game. It has the right ideas and direction, but fails to pull them off in the correct execution and/or presentation.

There's no question that the game does something right: it offers the chance of freedom, exploration, and the thrill of the chase across city rooftops and narrow corridors. However, it has an equally fair share of problems that diminishes this enjoyment from being the centerpiece of the game.

What I am going to do is discuss what Mirror's Edge does wrong, and how it could be improved to create a tighter, more accessible, and less frustrating experience.

Things That Need to be Changed

1. No-Error Policy

People are always going to make mistakes, especially when learning new ideas. If the penalty for these mistakes is death (and a quick load dozens of second prior) like it is in Mirror's Edge, then it becomes annoying and frustrating to the person making the mistake. This is an unavoidable pitfall, because making mistakes is an essential part of the learning process.

In Mirror's Edge, if the player jumps slightly to the left too much, a tad too short, or lacked a tiny bit of momentum on a wall crawl, then that player is punished with death, which becomes frustrating as a recurrent penalty.

How can this be fixed?

The first thing you can do is to create a gentler learning curve so that the player can master the essential game mechanics before being exposed to a more dangerous environment. This is what Portal did. It allowed the player to learn all the core functions of the Portal gun and its mechanics in a controlled environment where they weren't threatened by death at every corner. If Mirror's Edge extended it's "safety net" for the player, then that would give the player more time to become comfortable with wall running, kick-jumping, and the like before the consequences of failure are death. This can be accomplished by removing the pits and deadly drops below each wall run or failed climb. If the player can make mistakes without having to worry about dying, then that player can master the game mechanics much more quickly.

The second thing the game can do to alleviate its "no-error policy" is to create a series of safety nets for the player. This means that the game will catch the player from falling whenever he or she makes an innocent mistake. A game that does this well is Assassin's Creed, which also prodded itself upon the aspect of free-running. In Assassin's Creed, if the player walked off a nearby edge accidentally, the protagonist would fall off but catch onto the ledge to avoid certain death. This avoided many frustrating scenarios of dying by careless mistakes. On the other hand, in Mirror's Edge, if the player walks off nearby edges many times, he instead falls off to his impending doom every time. It would be much less stressful if the game "caught" the player in instances like these instead of allowing him to die. Little features like these allow the player to make tiny mistakes without having to face dire consequences.

The third thing Mirror's Edge can do to become less frustrating is to add gameplay "indicators," letting the player know when a jump is attainable or not. Many times in the game the player faces obstacles or gaps in which he or she is unsure that it can be crossed. For instance, there is a zip line hanging over a ledge which is just out of reach. If the player knows for sure whether or not a jump would reach the zip line, then she would not have to guess after every jump if she will land at her destination. This indicator need not be on a HUD, but could just be a simple display of the character's hands in a certain 'ready' position. By using these indicators, the game prevents the player from performing many blind leaps of faith in hopes of reaching the other side, a feature which will lower the stress level of the player if implemented.

2. Abrubtly Flowing Gamepay

The second main element that would benefit from a change is the abruptly flowing gameplay. As it stands now, the gameplay in Mirror's Edge runs akin to something like this: Enter a new rooftop; run to the edge and scout for possible exits and/or paths to progress to the next area; jump across the correct path (after failing several times) and land in the new area; stop, turn around, and then scout again for the next path.

Because of this, the current flow of the gameplay is somewhat jarring and abrupt. There is rarely a free-flowing feeling of continuous momentum, which unfortunately ruins the free-running aspect of the game.

So how can this be fixed?

Part of the problem with this lack of awareness on the player's part (which requires them to stop and check their surroundings so often) is due to the first-person nature of the game. However, the first person feature is partly what gives the game its unique quality: to put the player directly in the shoes of a free runner, not in the position of a detached third-person camera.

An alternative way of solving the problem of brevity--without changing the camera view--would be to somehow distort the camera so that the player can see a wider view than currently possible. This would allow the player to see more routes and pathways than just a narrow tunnel vision ahead of him. With this feature, the player can then make decisions about where to go without having to wait to reach the very edge of each roof.

A second way of solving the problem of abrupt flow is to include a map feature, however arbitrary this may be. This would allow the player to see where she is going without having to stop at every edge and peek over before deciding the next course of action.

Lastly, a third way of solving this problem is to massively expand the amount of available routes in each level to make the game much more non-linear. This would mean that there is no one direct route for the player to progress through a level, and can instead jump off to any which way that he or she desires. Expanding the available routes would mean less time searching for the one way the designers' intended the player to go, and instead more time jumping around and free-roaming the accessible rooftops, improving the flow of the game.

3. Lack of Complexity/Progression

Finally, Mirror's Edge also suffers from a lack of complexity and progression in its gameplay. There's only so much you can do with the same gameplay mechanics re-used over the course of an 8+ hour game. Assassin's Creed is a prime example of this; it keeps the same ideas and mechanics that it uses in the first two hours, and then repeats them over and over throughout the rest of the game, with little variation or development. This creates a stagnant gaming experience primarily instigated by repetition.

Mirror's Edge suffers from a similar quality, in that it never grows beyond the mechanics it establishes in the beginning of the game. At the beginning, the player is presented with crawling, jumping, wall-running, double-wall jumping, and several varieties of combat options. By the end of the game the player has not gained any new abilities, items, or weapons, which makes a somewhat lackluster gaming experience.

Even a bit of variety beyond the free running mechanics would have made the game somewhat more interesting. Currently, the majority of the game is spent running to and fro from various locations. If the game managed to chop up these running sections with something else (for instance, assassinations?) then it may become more interesting (but then it would be copying Assassins' Creed, as well).

What Mirror's Edge can do to make the latter half of the game more interesting is to introduce new abilities, such as the already incorporated increase in speed during the last levels. If the player got new acrobatic abilities, or boosts in their current attributes (running, jumping, crawling) then it would provide some much needed variety and development in the game.

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That being said, Mirror's Edge is still not a bad game despite these problems. It has some truly innovative and unique ideas and experiences that make it stand out from the rest of the conventional brown, murky, space-marine-infested insipid shooter crowd. If you can endure the many hardships of failing the same jump over seven times, then you will be rewarded with an exciting free-running sequence that is rarely found in another game. For that reason alone it is still worth playing.

In conclusion, what is the main game-design lesson that is to be learned from Mirror's Edge? I would say it's this: Don't punish the player too severely for making mistakes, especially early on and when learning, for this can cause an annoying amount of player frustration (but alternatively, it also makes a challenging game, which also forces the player to continue to play and get better). Players need to be able to learn without being afraid of dying every several seconds. It doesn't matter if a game has the best, most innovative concept in years, unless it can execute it in the correct way for the player's enjoyment.

Braid

2009-08-31T13:20:00.000-07:00

Braid has been critically acclaimed (and rightfully so) for doing what it does right: innovation in conventional platforming (through a nifty time manipulation mechanic), beautiful hand-painted graphics, and an excellent soundtrack that all come together in a tightly polished package.

There's no question that Braid is an innovative, fun, and challenging game. However, where it fails, in my opinion, is by not meshing the story cohesively with the gameplay.

In Braid, the player is presented with a series of worlds with individual stages where the player must solve puzzles. These puzzles usually relate to collecting a piece of a larger puzzle that correlates to finishing each world and progressing onto the next. With this, there's no real connection between any sort of narrative and each puzzle the player solves.

The only exposition the game gives is before each world in the form of symbolic excerpts about love, loss, mistakes, and regret. The only way that this connects to each world and subsequently its puzzles is that Tim, the protagonist, is attempting to find the princess discussed in these excerpts by reaching a castle at the end of each level.

Thus, the only relation between the puzzles and the narrative is the player unlocking a further door to reach the next stage, and next stage, and then the final stage where the princess may finally be.

This doesn't detract from the value of each puzzle at all in hindsight. The player still receives the same joy and benefit from solving each puzzle, no matter how decontextualized it may be. What the puzzles DO lose however, is the emotional connection that is correlated with solving a puzzle, advancing a narrative, and progressing through the game.

What I mean by this is that in Braid, the player is solving the puzzles just for the fact in itself--to solve a puzzle. In Half-Life 2, the player's actions are always contextualized in the narrative. When the player kills an enemy guard, he or she knows it is to help liberate the fellow citizens of City 17 and continue the revolt. In Portal, when the player begins to break out of the facility by escaping through unauthorized areas, he or she has an emotional connection to each action, because the player's very freedom is at stake.

In Braid, there is never such an emotional connection that these--among other games--achieve when progressing through the game. Each puzzle is just an isolated afterthought to reaching the end of the game. The only time that Braid nearly achieves an emotional connection with its gameplay is in the end sequence, when the player finally sees the correlation of their actions and how it actually affects another character and subsequently the narrative. For this reason, the ending sequence of Braid packs a much greater emotional punch than the entire previousness of the game combined. If the designer(s) found same way to connect each prior puzzle to the narrative, rather than just "find key to unlock door to reach princess" then Braid would have been a much more powerful game.

As it stands now, Braid is still an excellent game thanks to its innovation and presentation, but it will never contain the same emotional connection that other games, such as Bioshock contain. What can be learned here is that there should be some correlation between gameplay and story, because the player needs to feel that he or she is influencing the narrative. If the actions that the player performs are independent of the narrative, then there is a lack of indentification and connection to what is going on. Instead, the player's actions should directly instigate the narrative to provide the player with an emotional attachment.

Battlestar Galactica: Razor

2009-08-25T12:55:00.000-07:00

"Battlestar Galactica: Razor", a two-hour mini-movie as an extension of the series, is quite simply, a history lesson. History lessons--although this is a large generalization--are boring. Assuming you know history, history lessons are not exciting, tension-filled, or suspenseful because they contain an outcome already known by the audience.

When the audience watches the attack on the Battlestar Pegasus in the opening scenes of "Razor", they are not fearful or worried about the characters because they know the characters will be "okay" in the end. The characters aren't going to die here, they aren't going to kill "so-and-so" because the audience has a window into the future that tells them who is going to live and who is going to die. This creates a lack of sympathy with the protagonists because the audience can't worry about the characters, they can't put themselves in their shoes. Instead, they are watching them from a distance, through a history book. (This was also the same problem I had with LOST season 4 and its use of flashforwards.)

So what's the point of creating a history lesson, then? In this case it would be to explore the differences in morality and ethics between the crews of the Galactica and the Pegasus. What makes this pointless, however, is that we already know these things from the 3 episode arc in Season 2. All "Razor" does is put a face to the stories we have already heard before.
For example, in Season 2, Colonel Tigh asks the Pegasus colonel about how the Pegasus survived so many months in deep space. The Pegasus colonel, drunk and intoxicated, tells Tigh about how the Pegasus crew killed civilians and stole their supplies.
This was a great bit of exposition. It worked because this short snippet of dialog in itself provided all the information we needed to know that the Pegasus and its crew were ruthless in their survival. By leaving out certain details, the show lets the audience ponder what actually happened and speculate on the true nature of the Pegasus' past.

Now, "Razor" comes along and what does it have to add to this story? Nothing, actually. It just creates a visual record to reinforce exactly what the Pegasus colonel said in season 2. Entire scenes are devoted to restating what we already knew, which makes them pointless. The show is not making any new point, or revealing any details we did not already know. Instead, the show makes us sit through dozens of minutes of exposition in order to arrive at the same conclusion which was reached in a simple line of dialog in season 2. Effective? No, just boring, and redundant.

The other thing that "Razor" suffers from is being a one-dimensional story. The entire film is centered around the idea that Pegasus had to dehumanize themselves in order to save mankind. This is a fine idea, and it was already explored in season 2, but it is not substantial enough to devote an entire two hours of film to it.
One thing that makes the new series of Battlestar Galactica so successful is that it explores every aspect of its concept of the human race on the run. It is not concentrated on just the military element of the escape. Instead, the show also explores the maintenance crew's lives, politics, a traitor scientist, enemy Cylons, personal relationships, and more. Razor only focuses on the military aspect of the show, and because of this is not as "multi-layered" or interesting as the show it attempts to emulate.

If there's one thing you can say about Battlestar Galactica: Razor, I would say that it shows that portraying the entire backstory of a character is unnecessary. You don't need to visually communicate a whole character's history in order to reveal his or her qualities. Simple lines of dialog suffice just as well. Creating entire scenes to just reinforce one point about a character is a waste of the audience's time and attention span when there are much more efficient and quicker ways to relate the same idea to the audience.

Firefly

2009-08-06T23:54:00.000-07:00

I like Firefly. It's a fun show. But not the best show.

What makes it so fun is its originality, or its skewing of cliches. The show takes what you expect in a certain situation, then flips it upside down in an entertaining way. It's original because it does things that you don't expect so that you don't know what's going to happen.

So what does Firefly do to be original?

First, it flips dialog upside down to break from cliches. It takes the standard dialog exchanges that we all know and loathe and turns them into an entertaining and unusual experience.

Case 1:
Mal and 'Jerk' are about to get into a bar fight because Jerk said something that Mal is not fond of. In a typical, cliched scenario Mal says, "Say that to my face," then Jerk repeats his comment by facing Mal, who then punches Jerk out of aggravation--boring. Here's what happens instead:

Mal: Say that to my face.
Jerk: I said, you're a coward and a piss-pot. Now what are ya gonna do about it?
Mal: Nothing. I just wanted you to face me so she could get behind you. Zoe hits him from behind

Yep. Fun.

Case 2:

Another example: Mal and his nemesis are in a fist battle, locked in an epic struggle of will power over a careening and deadly pit. Mal's friends come in to save him whereupon Zoe, Mal's first mate, intervenes and says that this is something Mal must finish for himself. The cliched outcome? Zoe and his friends let Mal almost die and then Mal defeats his enemy and calls it a good day. Here's what happens instead:

Zoë: Jayne, this is something the captain has to do for himself.
Mal: (Struggling) No! No it's not!
Zoë: Oh! (Zoe shoots the bad guy who was about to finish Mal off)

Wooee.

Case 3:
Last one: Mal is trying to comfort his accidental wife into being an independent person. Normally, this would constitute a bunch of positive, cliched talk about free will and happiness. Instead, here's what happens:

[Mal is alarmed about his new bride's expectations and attitudes.]

Mal: Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill 'em right back! Wife or no, you are no one's property to be tossed aside. You got the right same as anyone to... live and try to kill people.

Mmmhmm.

There are two main ways the show treats its characters to reach these creative dialog exchanges.

The first method to get creative dialog is breaking from cliched characters by mixing them up from their orthodox roles. Instead of having the first mate of the ship be a cocky, young male, the first mate is a battle-hardened woman. Likewise, the mechanic of the ship is not a dirty old man who resembles a trucker, but an energetic and perky girl. Then you have the preacher who is not a stereotypical pacifist but instead adept with violence, weaponry, and the criminal way of life. The show thinks of the traditional way that the characters of 'captain', 'pilot', 'first mate', 'mechanic', and 'gunsmith' are portrayed, and then changes something about each character that makes them different from what is expected. This makes the situations the characters are put in much more fresh and interesting.

The second method the show uses to get creative dialog is by having deeply contrasting character traits. Jayne, the intellectually challenged gunsmith is contrasted with the smart and uptight doctor, Simon. Inara, the morally questionable "companion" is contrasted with the morally upright (and most times nameless) preacher. Kaylee, the young socialite is contrasted with the socially inept Simon. Inara, the polite and upper-class woman, is contrasted with the jovial and laid-back Kaylee. By having contrasting character traits, it creates some hilarious exchanges due to the differing backgrounds in terms of social status.

Case 4:
This exchange illustrates the intellectual gap between Simon and the rest of the crew (Simon is teaching the crew doctor jargon in order to pose as orderlies and infiltrate a hospital):

Mal: "Patients were cynical and not responding and we couldn't bring 'em back-"

Simon: "They were cyanotic and not responsive."

Simon: (to Jayne) "What about cortical electrodes?"

Jayne: "Oh..." (obviously doesn't know the answer) "We forgot 'em."

Mal: "Pupils were fixed and dilapidated-"

Simon: "Dialated-"

When you put contrasting characters in a situation that explores their differences, funny things can happen. It's the disagreements between the characters that create the hilarity. If all the characters were from the same background, social status, or moral-standpoint, they would all agree on everything and act the same. Instead, opposing views make each conversation a joy. Conflict is good, right?

So, Firefly is a pretty fun show. Fun, but not as gripping as LOST or Battletar Galactica, partly due to its lackadaisical attitude. After some episodes, it does become a bit cringe worthy to see this mishapful crew of nine to jovially engage in laughter after all their space journeys of danger. There's never as much tension or drama that you get when dealing with "The Others" or the Cylons. However, Firefly's great dialog and original ideas make it a sometimes more enjoyable show.

Worth watching?

Yes, definitely. You will have a fun time.

Creating Satisying Goals

2009-08-06T12:11:00.000-07:00

Last week I was climbing up a gigantic piece of granite rock by the name of "Lembert Dome." This experience taught me some things, the least of which is related to game design, which is why I am referencing it.

By the time I reached the final stretch of the hike, the sun was about to set and the peak was still ahead of me. With a little help from my friends, I made it to the top, and learned some valuable lessons about goals and what it means to achieve them.

How does this apply to game-design? I would say that in order to have satisfying goals, you need three elements: Payoff, Originality, and Failure.

1: Payoff
Why do people do things? Why do you endure struggle, pain, and hardship? The obvious answer is because it will be worth it, but the end goal must be gratifying enough that it is worth the struggle. If you know the payoff will be high enough, you can endure many difficulties in order to reach it.
What's the notion behind hiking to the top of a giant dome? The 'explorer' answer is for the view--you get to a see an aerial perspective that is not available from down below. As you're climbing, in the back of your head you know that there is a great view waiting for you, and that motivates you to keep going. This is the reason why you would exert force and endure the pain to reach the peak--because you know that there will be a payoff, a reward for your efforts.
In game design, there should always be a payoff to every task that requires the player to struggle. Why should the player explore a giant underwater, mutant-infested Utopian residential section? Why not just sit in the corner and not doing anything? In order to motivate the player to explore, there needs to be some sort of reward, and in this case it would be extra health, ammo, items, or power-ups. What's the reason for the player to defeat the gigantic cyclops boss in the Earth temple? To gain an extra heart container, advance the story, and unlock new areas of the world. Whether it's fighting a boss, or just exploring a level, there needs to be a reason as to WHY the player should be doing it. If there were no rewards for completing a given task, it would be pointless to do so. In game-design, there should always be a payoff to each of the player's accomplishments, whether they are big or small--the payoff will be adjusted accordingly. The greater the promise of reward in each specific task, the more incentive the player will have to reach it and the more intrigued he or she will be to keep playing the game.

2: Originality
The second item required in achieving satisfying goals is originality. When given the choice of hiking two places, one already hiked and one never traveled previously, which one will a given person choose assuming that both hikes have an equal payoff? Logically, most people will probably choose the hike they had never done before, because it provides a new experience.
When hiking Lembert dome, I had never seen the top before, so it was a new experience for me. If I had already experienced the view before, it would have not been quite as magnificent.
Likewise, with game-design, goals should be new and original in order to be satisfying. If the goal of every level in a game was the same (interrogate the traveling merchant, pickpocket a thief, then eavesdrop on a conversation) then it will become stagnant and boring. When you achieve those goals, it is not as rewarding because you've already done them before. If goals are new and unique (become a Big Daddy, liberate City 17) they will be more fulfilling because you have never done anything like it before. Goals should be original as much as possible in order to provide the best experience for the player.

3: Failure
The last element necessary for satisfying goals is a chance of failure. When reaching the peak of Lembert Dome, I saw the tall granite cliff wall and wasn't sure if I could scale it to the top, especially since it was dark and the sun was setting. Also, since this was an original goal, that added to the difficulty since I was not sure I could do it. If I knew I could have made it to the very top before I even started hiking, that would not have been as fulfilling. Instead, since there was a chance I could not do it, that I could fail, that made it much more rewarding when I got to the peak.
With game-design, an element of failure helps to motivate the player to give her best to complete a task. If a game is too easy, there is no satisfaction when reaching a goal. If you already know you can kill these two-hundred Germans because your health respawns and you quickload when you die 5 seconds prior for each death there is no chance of losing at all. This makes the completion of each goal unsatisfying since it was a matter of when, not how to complete the goal. In contrast, if you don't know how to defeat an enemy and may die in the process, it makes the success much more enjoyable. When the Big Daddy comes around a corner, and you are not sure if you have enough health, ammo, and leeway to destroy him while staying alive, it is very fulfilling when you fire the last bullet into him and he thuds to the ground, giving you a payoff of money and more. When you jump onto the final dragon boss and hookshot your way across several flying pedestals to reach the dragon's neck with only several hearts remaining, it is much more satisfying to destroy him while almost dying than to have beat him without losing a single heart container. It is the chance that you can fail, that you can die, that makes something so much more fulfilling when completed.

Conclusion
When I reached the top of Lembert dome, there was a feeling of mutual victory, thanks to the fact that I had some fellow hikers. In the same way in games, victory is just as sweet when shared with fellow players.
On last stage of Goldrush in Team Fortress 2, when the cart is several feet away from the drop zone for the first time (originality), and there is only several seconds left (chance of failure), victory is mutually satisfying when you push the cart in and get to kill your enemies while seeing the gigantic hole explode (payoff). A shared victory always holds something slightly more than an individual victory, but both still benefit from a payoff, originality, and chance of failure.

Patton

2009-07-02T19:28:00.000-07:00

After finishing the movie "Patton," I thought to myself, what makes this movie work? What keeps the viewer, interested, entertained, an intrigued (hopefully) for nearly 3 hours (170 minutes), especially when most of the scenes center around one character?

There are a lot of qualities I admire about the film. One of them is the epic scale, authenticity, and brutality of the battle scenes. When I watch this film I get nostalgic for a time when tanks and fights weren't rendered from afar so as to hide their superficial quality, which is so present in this day and age. Instead, we get an epic scope of how large these battles truly were. The film moves between every side, angle, and perspective of the battles, from the tanks, soldiers, and commanders. This puts the viewer in a position where the battles are real, and not so 'cosmetic' in appearance. However, despite these positive qualities, the battles are not primarily the central factor that makes the film work.

The film works because it centers around a particular type of character--one that has inner conflicts. Patton is a man who is torn between two worlds: contemporary vs. historical; authoritative vs. compassionate; disciplined vs. subordinate; brutal vs. polite; glorified vs. sacrificial. What the film then does is sequentially explore each aspect of his character through the various situations he is put in. Every new scene in the film literally has two outcomes: He can either go with his often contrary nature (and face the consequences), or against it (which is often what is required of him). Because of this, each scene in itself is a battle in which the viewer must ask: Which decision Patton is going to make?

As a biographical film, it truly works in this respect. The very opening shot of the film presents Patton in a speech to his troops, illustrating his character, ideals, and mannerisms. Through the backdrop of World War II, the film places Patton in situation after situation examining his character. Is Patton going to sacrifice his glory and protect his fellow general's flank, or is he going to leave them behind and race to the city first? Is he going to slap an insubordinate soldier who is afraid to perform his duty, or is he going to show him compassion in his failure? Is he going to accept the Russian victory and subsequent friendship, or deny it entirely at the expense of foreign diplomacy? The film puts all these questions and more to light through all the different environments Patton is placed in.

World War II also works as a significant plot device to further explore Patton's character. The very fact that we know that World War II is approaching an end puts Patton on a time-constraint to change his ways (implausibly, I might add) or remain the same as before. Moreover, the film uses the characters of Rommel, Bradley, and Montgomery to contrast with Patton. Rommel presents a formidable villain--if you could call him that--to Patton, and this sets up a necessary conflict and goal to which Patton must aspire. Bradley contrasts with Patton in the sense of glory vs. sacrifice, in which Bradley does what is best for his men, and Patton pursues glory for himself. Montgomery presents a similar situation which also extends into Patton's diplomatic character; will Patton sacrifice his bitter relationship, or accept an unwieldy friendship? Through the contrast with these characters, Patton's own qualities are heightened in that respect.

All in all, "Patton" is an admirable film for what it succeeds in doing so well. It paints a picture of an iconic, conflicted hero, all through the midst of an inspiring history lesson of World War II.

Army of Shadows in 5 Sentences

2009-07-02T18:22:00.000-07:00

Note: This is about the film, not the French Resistance.

A quiet-mannered man in his mid 40s--who in fact happens to be the chief of the French resistance--is taken to a German prison camp and eventually escapes.

He goes back to his resistance's headquarters and executes one of his own men (a traitor, of course).

He, along with his other resistance members, continue to frolic about recruiting other people, get help from the British, and live in fear--all through long, painful extended shots exhibiting mundane and everyday behavior, most notably long, drawn-out sequences of walking or performances of ordinary tasks such as putting on a coat in the slowest way possible.

Eventually, they get captured several times, escape several more times, and then kill their own members several more times.

By the end of the film, they accomplished nothing, got arrested a lot, endangered the lives of everyone around them, killed their own members, and then all died shortly after.

THE END

Halo 2

2009-06-19T19:54:00.000-07:00

Halo (2001)--the first one--was a game that was innovative, new, atmospheric, and challenging. It revolutionized several video game concepts including, but not limited to: a maximum of two weapons (swappable with any others on the battlefield), a shield system that allowed the player to jump back into the battle without having to worry about health, multiple vehicle systems with good handling, smart(er) AI teammates, an epic science-fiction story, and more. It was genuinely fun, well-told and paced, and only had several nitpicks that detracted from it, the most primary due to the repetitious level design.

And now we come to Halo 2 (2004), a game that picks up right where Halo left off, for better or worse. As a whole, Halo 2 seems to suffer from a lack of focus, vision, and consistency.

The story, which is split up between Master Chief's defense of Earth and the Arbiter's chance for redemption, seems to suffer in its execution in several parts. On Master Chief's side, we are given the story of the invasion of Earth, but never a glimpse of its full scope. As an idea, the invasion of Earth has been repeated many times in the past, and is by now almost a cliche. This is why other stories choose to focus not on the invasion itself, but on other aspects such as the aftermath of its effects. Other stories such as Half-Life 2, or Ender's Game, are set in the aftermath of an alien invasion, one successful, the other not so. The consequences of these invasions are much more interesting than the battles themselves, something which Halo 2 does not capitalize on. I understand that the invasion of Earth provided the much needed action for the story, but it feels as if it could have been given a unique or better twist to it other than "The aliens are coming, let's defend!"

On Arbiter's side of the story, he is not without his own flaws. Firstly, a dramatic soap opera story about betrayal constituting aliens speaking a human tongue (without lips or a human vocal tract, mind you) is somewhat hard to take seriously. This story eventually pits you up against YOURSELF (the humans) in the other story, so it would no longer make sense to start debasing your progress on each side. Thus, the entire plot twist of "Arbiter turns good!" is totally negated by the fact that it was absolutely necessary, and thus predictable, for it to happen.

Taken as a whole, the composite story is unfortunately a rehash of all the events in the first game, except told in a more inconsistent manner. Each side eventually comes upon another Halo ring,searches for the key to use it, and then something blows up in the end. What's worse about this retelling than the first one is its inconsistency. It goes from being a comedy (Master chief holding a rocket which has a picture telling him to "Hold it this way!"), to a serious story (Arbiter getting betrayed by his fellow alien), to downright odd (A giant underground flower-alien thing picks up Master-Chief and Arbiter and has a conversation with them). The story is told from multiple perspectives, angles, and styles, and the atmosphere is totally all over the place (At one point there are aliens dancing in front of the camera for no apparent reason as you crash land on a planet). Because of this, it is no longer a story about the survival of the human race, and it is instead reduced to some kind of bad Hollywood action movie.

Halo 2 continues in the vein of its predecessor in the gameplay department, but also suffers from some awkward gameplay decisions. First off, many times in the levels there is a lack of direction or goal as to where to go. Oftentimes the true exit is comprised of a single green (as opposed to red) door out of many in a giant arena. What makes matters worse is that these arenas often repeat themselves, and the exit often jumps around from door to door, making it a nuisance to find out where to go next. Even when the exit to the level is made clear, it is not made apparent whether or not you actually have to kill anyone to proceed. Due to Arbiter's cloaking device, as well as a low gravity jumping system, large sections of the game can be sped through by simply avoiding to engage in battle with the enemy. This is subsequently countered and made confusing by the few sections in the game where you actually have to kill all the enemies--for what reason I do not know--in order for a gameplay flag to check itself off so in order that you may proceed to the next level.

A second matter that is annoying is the overabundance of pitfalls and open-air platforms that you are forced to traverse. Oftentimes you are presented with a sweeping vista that you believe you can jump down to, but instead you fall to your death when you were heading to your apparent goal. Or, you are trapped indoors to search for the only way out (a green door, perhaps), and believe that maybe you are supposed to jump down this chute or into this pool of water below in order to proceed, which in the end turns out to be the wrong decision. Most times, there are literally NO reason for these pits of death to exist at all, other than to provide another way to die when jumping around dodging enemies. Even worse, large sections of the game use glass floors without any texture whatsoever, leaving you confused as your teammates walk across large open pits which are in reality glass floors.

The final gameplay matter which could be improved upon was one of the core selling points of the game: dual-wielding weapons. Yes, you can now wield up to two small firearms at a time. However, this oftentimes is counter-productive since you can no longer throw grenades or melee enemies while keeping your two weapons. This is somewhat ironic since the main opportunity to use dual weapons is within large groups of enemies, which requires the only action you can no longer perform--throwing a grenade. Even though there had to be a drawback to dual weapons, the lack of grenades and melee (while keeping your two weapons) makes it feel like dual weapons does not provide much of an advantage in the same battle scenarios as wielding a single weapon.

Taken as a whole, is the game fun? Yes. Is it also mindless, repetitive, a rehash, and unimaginative for being a sequel? Yes, it is also those things, as well. Given that Halo 2 came out in the same year (2004) as other great shooters such as Half-Life 2, it is easy to contrast how two different sagas produce their own sequels, one that greatly improves upon the original, and one that does not. Overall, Halo 2 is a fun sequel, but does not expand upon or innovate gaming in the long run.

Seven Pounds

2009-05-30T00:47:00.000-07:00

Seven Pounds is a movie that has one idea, and tries to stretch it into a two-hour length movie and does so unsuccessfully.

From the immediate start the movie poses a question that controls the entire experience of the movie: Why does this man want to commit suicide?
If you are a competent viewer with a brain, you can arrive at the correct conclusion after 30-40 minutes as Will Smith continually speaks to people in need of organs; we, as the audience, receive car-crash and life-debilitating flashbacks; and then Will Smith wraps up any notion of doubt by talking about killer Jelly Fish and signing organ donor papers--and he does all of this about 40 minutes in about a 2 hour movie. This leaves the remainder of the time just pointlessly re-establishing Will Smith's intentions. Everything he does thereafter has already been stated before in the movie. The whole second half is basically a load of redundancy and boringness. Yes, he cleans and fixes some kind of machine because he's an engineer and he wants to do nice things for people. Yes, he gives a poor lady a house because he's abandoning his former life. Yes, he is doing all these things, but we already know that because it was established priorly in a different and perhaps more effective manner.

The movie goes on and on and on, seeming to meander around in pointlessness as we are approaching the ever nearing conclusion which was already solidified in the back of viewer's heads an hour ago. The only thing that film attempts to do in the second half is establish a romantic subplot which nulls viewers to sleep. I would attribute this boringness to a lack of any conflict in the story--but I am not a professional screenwriter--and since the mystery has already been solved, there is nothing else to watch for. As such, the romantic subplot does not provide much of a context in order to improve the plot.

This movie was interesting at the beginning, but once the mystery is solved, there is nothing else there. The IDEA itself is not bad--it's just not fit to be a 2 hour length film. It would work MUCH better as a 20 minute-or-so short film of the like, where they cut out all the redundancies, chop up all the meandering dialog, and give the basic plot in a much more tight execution.

Seven Pounds, as it stands, has a good idea, but its execution cannot support it for a full two hours.

Lost Season 5 (REVIEW)

2009-05-18T00:35:00.000-07:00

To me, LOST is a show that works because of one thing: mystery. It presents you with a series of unexplainable or mysterious phenomena, and then proceeds to give you a series of clues--or lack thereof--which allows viewers to postulate all sorts of crazy ideas and theories about what's going on. In my opinion, everything else comes as secondary to that. Sure, you have great characters who conflict with each other, and you have all sorts of plot strands and backstories, but what ultimately keeps me watching is the idea of explaining the unexplainable--of picking up these little strands and pieces of dialog and forming them into a hypothesis in my head. It is that experience that makes this show so satisfying.

So now we come to Season 5 of LOST--a season that is predominantly plot-focused. This isn't bad, perse, except it means that we're not focusing on the mystery and instead focusing on the narrative-vehicle in hopes of arriving at the destination the show wants to take us. Unfortunately, this means that the characters can take a backseat and ultimately become arbitrary plot devices to keep this story going. Jack can try to come up with any reason he wants to find this H-Bomb and blow up the island, but it all feels forced by the plot--the plot compels the characters to arrive at this loop because the new dichotomy of time-travel demands it. This means that we're not so much getting drama or story created by characters and their decisions--think back to Season 3, Jack saves Kate & Sawyer during Ben's surgery, or even Season 2, when the characters argue about interrogating Ben--instead, it means that the plot creates the characters, which makes it much less effective and believable. One thing that I think could have helped this situation was to add one or two more episodes in between the crucial plot decisions. Many of the episodes felt rushed without much time for the characters to contemplate their current predicament and forge their own motivations while being out of place in 1977. Instead we, as the audience, are rushed through these characters' decisions to a predefined conclusion.

However, season 5 does have its fair share of mysteries. The opening scene from the season finale is perhaps the best case in point. Ever since season 3, the show has taunted us with the idea of Jacob--who is he, what does he do, and what is his role in all of this? We are finally given a glimpse of this new character in a dialog that hints at the ever-expanding mythos of LOST, perhaps dating centuries back in time. The pieces of this dialog are just a plethora of clues for the viewers to deconstruct and then place in their own personal theories. It is the dialogs like these that make the show's mysteries what they are.

Lastly, I'm going to talk about the notion of receiving answers. As a viewer, I want to know more about the Dharma initiative, so what would be the best way for the show to give us that information? Through endless backstory flashbacks that contain no immediate suspense or tension or relevance to what's happening at the current time? Nope, so here comes the introduction of time travel to place our favorite group of stranded castaways in the midst of the great Dharma initiative to give the viewers the answers they long have waited for. As I've said before, this allows the show to give us exposition in the context of something else: the LOSTies' search for survival and reunion. With this added sense of tension and character placement, the viewers are given the exposition while at the same time caring for the characters in the context of the exposition. Jack, Hurley, and Kate could die at any moment--this couldn't happen in a flashback. Essentially, the time-travel plot-device, however illogical or nonsensical it may be, works extremely well to explain backstory.

But in the end, what do we really want from the show? More answers? Because as time drags on, I start to doubt if that's what I really want from this show. Do I really want to know how and why the smoke monster operates, where the whispering voices are coming from, and why dead people, stallions, and visions pop up all over the jungle? Sometimes, I, as a viewer, just want clues, and more clues to draw my own inferences to decide what's going on. I don't always need a concrete explanation, because when you have an explanation, you don't have a mystery, so why keep watching?

It reminds me of a magic trick. First, LOST has given us the pledge: the normal plane crash on the deserted tropical island. Next, it has given us the turn: hatches, polar bears, statue feet, mysterious Others, unexplainable phenomena. Finally it must give us the prestige: the truth, the answers to all these mysteries.
However, It's been five years however since the pledge. The Prestige seems to be coming, finally, but we'll have to wait for the final season to figure out if it was worth waiting for.

So, see you in nine months.

The Prestige

2009-05-15T23:36:00.000-07:00

The Prestige (2006) was made by Christopher Nolan after Memento (2000) and Batman Begins (2005), but prior to the Dark Knight (2008). The Prestige, like The Dark Knight, is an excellent example of storytelling in film, no less due to a grasp on film and literary techniques.

Starting off from the beginning, the opening shot once again represents the idea of the film in the scattered field of top hats. It presents a moral dilemma in the nature of a magic trick and what lengths a magician will go to to deceive an audience. This is further explained through Michael Caine's ever-so-eloquent dialog about the 3-Act structure for a magic act. The Pledge, the Turn, and the Prestige, which can be said to represent the movie's structure up until the very end.

Right from the introduction, which is the inciting incident, thankfully, you have three key things in The Prestige that Nolan also did in the Dark Knight: conflict, things go wrong, and mystery. First you have the conflict between Bale and Jackman as Bale rushes on the stage and watches Jackman drown. Bale appears to make no attempt to save Jackman, which works to establish conflict between the two characters--one wishes the other to die, or at least it appears so. Without this conflict, a story about an obsessed magician wouldn't be very fulfilling. Second, things go wrong in the inciting incident. It appears that Jackman fell into the wrong tank, or even a tank to begin with, and in so doing altered the correct state of affairs. A lesson learned from The Dark Knight: Everything going according to plan = BORING. Lastly, the inciting incident also has mystery--the audience needs a question that must be answered, otherwise there won't be an incentive to keep watching. Why does Bale kill Jackman, through inaction, no less? What is this giant Tesla machine that Jackman is using? What fueled Bale to let Jackman die? Questions also existed in the Dark Knight, except to a lesser degree, because Jokers could rob banks for any standard reason. In essence, however, both the Dark Knight and The Prestige have excellent inciting incidents that provide a strong foundation for each respective film.

The Prestige is told through a non-linear, flashback structure, starting the film at the ending, and then reverting back to the beginning. I usually loathe structures like this because they suspend the real narrative at hand and keep you restrained from further plot development. However--of course--I actually loved this in The Prestige, because it does it a bit differently. The film is set up so that there are three narratives going on at the same time: The End narrative (Christian Bale's jail cell), The Beginning narrative (Starting with the feud and the first murder), and the Middle narrative (Tesla storyline). Furthermore, each narrative has its own plot problems and goals for each character to achieve: Christian Bale must escape prison, Hugh Jackman must be a better magician than Bale, and Jackman must get the machine from Tesla. This works much better than those boring flashback story structures where the flashback is just exposition and buildup until the story problem which was revealed at the present (Iron Man--har har). By having three narratives, the stories intertwine and strengthen each other better than a linear narrative could. The non-linear aspect sets up key questions, such as: why did Jackman go to find Tesla? How and why did Bale murder Jackman? This non-linear narrative structures the story in a way that benefits it more than a linear narrative could.

The editing in The Prestige is also very well done. Key sequences are built up suspensefully by swapping shots between the incident itself, and the aftermath of the incident. When Jackman goes to Bale's magic show, the film does not portray this in a linear sequence with the show, and then Jackman's thoughts afterward. Instead, the film swaps in between what Jackman thought of the show afterward while reverting to the present, building up suspense toward the prestige (har har) in Bale's current magic trick. Doing this places a higher value on the scene and the suspense level. Nolan--or his editing man for that matter--also did this in The Dark Knight, most notably in the scene where Joker crashes Wayne Manor while simultaneously murdering the judge and the chief of police. This swap editing technique used in both The Prestige and The Dark Knight is an excellent trick to build up suspense.

So how does The Prestige compare to The Dark Knight and Nolan's other films? I would say that each film has its own distinct theme, and therefore must be judged separately for that. Each film endeavors to encapsulate its own ideas, morals, and themes, and should not be judged for not doing what the other films did do.
Memento is a film about memory--leading to death, revenge, trickery, deceit, obsession.
Batman Begins is a film about fear--leading to death, revenge, trickery, deceit, obsession.
The Prestige is a film about trickery--leading to death, revenge, trickery, deceit, obsession.
The Dark Knight is a movie about suspense--leading to death, revenge, trickery, deceit, obsession.

Each film has its own specific theme, but uses that as a foundation to catapult itself into its own unique story with its own twists and turns. The Prestige is no exception, and uses trickery as its method for success.

Resident Evil 5

2009-04-09T19:05:00.000-07:00

Imagine you are playing a survival-horror action game as a buff, looks like he's on steroids, macho-Americanized young adult male in his 20s or 30s. The game throws you into a small, remote village, where the suspicious inhabitants turn hostile and try to eat your guts. Eventually, you team up with a female companion; cross lakes with a water boat; go into some giant maze-like, ancient architecture; enter a high-tech security facility; come upon another female whom you have crossed paths with in the past; discover that bad guys have been putting evil viruses into the locals; then kill the ultimate bad guy in a super showdown with a RPG.
What game is this?
a) Resident Evil 5
b) Resident Evil 4

The answer is:

BOTH.

Resident Evil 5 literally has a nearly identical screenplay, gameplay progression, and all that. Re5 does have some differences, but not all of them are for the better.

Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 4: The same game?

Could it be?

In Resident Evil 5, the only notable exception from Resident Evil 4 is the addition of a female partner who actually has a gun this time around. While the addition of a sidekick is a welcome change to the standard formula, it has the negative effect of removing some of the "scare" element from the game, in the sense that you are now no longer all alone, helpless, and trapped in a nightmarish world of monsters and zombies, with no one but yourself to help you get out of it. On the plus side, the sidekick AI is particularly well done, and it works suitably with both a human and computer counterpart. Overall, it's a welcome change, but gameplay-wise, it does not change the formula too much. All the sidekick can really do is provide a second gun to shoot the same zombie, press "HELP!" when you get grabbed by a zombie, or use the secondary lever to open this door instead of the single lever in the previous games--might I add is not a really a puzzle at all, just an excuse to require two players at each locked door. All in all, however, the added partner does not detract from the atmosphere or fail overall, but there seems to be more room for potential.

However, continuing in the vein of Bioshock's following of System Shock 2, Resident Evil 5 does not copy everything from its predecessor; rather, it dumbs down or removes entire elements. No longer do you get to meet and greet the friendly Weapons Dealer who mysteriously runs around zombie-infested villages and canyons in order to sell you the best deal on a pump shotgun. Now you just buy stale weapons and items from an in-game "BUY" menu, which, in my opinion, takes a huge fun factor out of the game. In addition, you no longer get the stress-relieving and variety-providing mini-games that the Merchant so kindly sets up in the midst of enemy hideouts. Yes, it was a corny and unrealistic thing to have in RE4, but so were tiny Napoleons, cheesy dialog, zombified viruses, and missions to rescue the president's daughter. It all worked well in the slightly tongue-in-cheek atmosphere RE4 set up. However, RE5 seems to have gotten all serious now, and thus removed the merchant, which takes out a whole interesting section of the game.

The second thing that Resident Evil 5 removes is the complicated briefcase inventory system from RE4. I'm aware that inventory screens are a thing of the past, but the briefcase system in Resident Evil 4 was done reasonably well. You could upgrade the briefcase to include more slots, and you could realign small items like eggs or herbs in order to create more room for weapons. In RE5, you are restricted to a 3x3 grid for all of your items, many of which have not been carried over from RE4. The limited inventory size in RE5 creates a plethora of problems, even more so than the prior, more complicated inventory system in RE4. You are given many of the same items and weapons you had to carry previously, but now you only have 9 slots to carry them in. This includes all your armor, 3 weapons+their ammo (7 slots gone already), and additional grenades, herbs, or even more ammo. There are countless cases in which you cannot pick up additional items because your inventory is much too small. In reality, RE5 defeats the purpose of simplifying the inventory when it still creates the same, or worse management headache that you get from a more complicated inventory screen.

The last thing that RE5 removes from the previous game is the micromanagement of all the treasures and herbs you gather throughout the game. In a sense, it's nicer to not have to worry about which herbs to combine and keep, and which treasures to hold on to in an attempt to upgrade their selling value, but at the same time it removes another layer of strategy from the game. In RE4, each herb you collected carried with it the sense that you had to wait for a green, yellow, or red herb in order to create the best potion possible. Every treasure or diamond you found had the potential of increasing another item's value incrementally with each new addition. However, in RE5, every treasure is autonomous from the others, and there are no no such things as "yellow" herbs, simplifying the potion-making process. I understand that the evolution of gaming for future generations is about simplifying concepts and mechanics to its most fruitful potential, but there comes a line where in doing so, it just dumbs down a game to its lesser potential.

When a game copies directly from its predecessor in terms of story and gameplay--I'm looking at you as well, Zelda--it loses something in the process, despite the fact that it may still be a great game regardless. When you enter the same situations, with the same items, and kill enemies the same way, there is a sense of a lack of motivation, because you've already done all this before. To make matters worse, copied stories totally decimate motivation, because there is no incentive to figure out what is going on or to care for the characters. RE5 comes with the added bonus of dumbing down gameplay elements, something which Twilight Princess also did. In the end, RE5 belongs in that category of next-generation games that repetitively copy successful formulas of the past, but in the process, can never fully surpass their original predecessors.

Final Score: 8.0/10

Quantum of Solace

2009-04-07T20:38:00.000-07:00

Quantum of Solace is a movie about two things: chases, and over-editing.
It seems like the makers wanted to make a movie about a guy getting chased, and/or chasing a character, over, and over, and over. The movie starts off with a car chase in a tunnel at the side of a body of water, and then the chase ends when Bond gets back to his lair. Then, the film only gives us about 10 minutes of exposition in a brief interrogation scene before throwing us into a foot chase across Spain or whatever random European country Bond is in now. After this lengthy foot chase is over, we are told through an over-extensive use of technology, marked bills, laundering money, plot elements, and blah blah exposition, that Bond must now go to another random European country to find another random bad guy (the Bourne similarities are already lining up). In this new country, Bond enters the bad guy's hotel room and fights him off in classic Bourne style with a pen and a q-tip before walking outside and hap-hazardly coming upon the movie's female lead. This scene eventually leads Bond to get on a motorcyle and start a motorcycle chase of the female's car. Just when that finishes, we get some more exposition about needlessly-confusing events that priorly occurred, and then the female character's alignment gets thrown off to the "good" side for convenient plot reasons. Bond proceeds to chase after the newly good female character on his motorcycle, only to jump off his motorcycle onto a boat, whereupon a boat chase starts. After this, it appears that the movie has exhausted every form of transportation usable for chase sequences when it once again proves you wrong. Bond eventually gets on an airplane in the middle of the desert in order to start an airplane chase with his fellow enemy airplanes, thus giving this movie the honor of containing the most varied chase sequences ever.

The second item that the movie does exceedingly--not well--(imitating the Bourne Supremacy in the process) is over-edit every single shot and action sequence to the point where you start to lose sense of what is going on. Straight from the get-go you get a The Dark Knight-esque zooming in camera technique, but Quantum interrupts this serenely panning camera by repeatedly chopping in flashing splits of different shots. Even in every action scene in the movie, it constantly switches the camera angle every time a different action is preformed. Villain lifts up his arm to stab Bond? Switch the camera angle. Bond turns his head to dodge? Switch camera angle. It's annoying to have to reorient yourself every split second in an action scene, because then you lose the idea of what's going on. I'm pretty sure it's quite possible to pull off an exciting and daring action sequence without changing the camera angle every 0.8 seconds.

That being said, is it a bad movie? No, not really, but it's not a very good movie either. The entire movie is just a concoction of action and/or chase sequences in a variety of European countries fueled by some arbitrary plot reasons primarily focused on revenge. After all is said and done, there is not much more to be talked about.

Worth Watching? If you want action, but not story.

2 Things I Like About LOST: Season 5

2009-03-29T20:26:00.000-07:00

After you can get over the initial facade of time travel and all the science fiction implications it carries with it, LOST has returned to its roots in season 5 to become a better show than it previously was. There are two things LOST does correctly for the most part that make it a much more interesting show this season than compared to last season.

The first thing that season 5 of LOST does correctly is reintroduce fresh, new ideas and concepts. Throughout the course of the first two seasons there are these crazy elements that make the show interesting, such as polar bears on tropical islands; mysterious, unknown groups who kidnap people from lists and take children; whispering voices in the woods; a radio signal repeating a series of numbers for the past so-many years; an underground hatch with a button that resets a timer every 108 minutes for an unknown reason; and so on. However, these new ideas and concepts decreased in growth up until season 4. Season 4 just took the established premise and used it as a war zone without introducing too many major ideas. They explained some of the older mysteries, but did not really expand the show into new territories.
However, Season 5 of LOST has finally took the show into fresh ground where they can do many more things that were previously not possible. By using time travel to jump into the island's history, the show engages the characters and audience in the backstory of the island without giving it to us through boring exposition with a foreknown resolution. By simply having the LOSTies in the midst of the action in the past, it makes the island's history much more interesting.
We also get two time-lines running parallel to each other, and the potential benefits of this concept haven't been fully explored yet. It puts the present-day LOSTies in a unique position by having to blend in with Dharma, or fabricate their identity as a "Hostile" in order to fit in. This concept also puts the other present-day 2008 LOSTies in a confused position as to what course to take next. The past season or two of LOST was becoming stagnant for treading the same ground over and over without making any new conceptual progress in terms of world elements (Jacob's cabin was one of the few new ones), but season 5 has finally introduced some new and interesting ideas that make the show entertaining again.

Continuing from that, season 5 of LOST also gives you little idea what's going to happen next. One main reason I did not like season 4 of LOST as much as the prior seasons was the unnecessary foresight of what was going to happen to all the characters. I understand that the flashbacks were becoming repetitive and useless, but the flashforwards destroyed an entire element of surprise by GIVING you the future outcome of the present situation. You weren't worried that certain characters were going to die--you saw them alive and well in the future. You weren't excited or tense when the helicopter barely made it off the island--you knew it was going to happen. Even though the flashforwards were necessary to give the show much needed life, they came with the unfortunate side-effect of being a suspense killer. During season 4, you almost felt like a passive viewer, because you were viewing a story while already knowing the ending.
However, in season 5, LOST has once again moved into a position where you have nearly NO idea what is going to happen next. That was one thing I loved about LOST during the first two seasons: you have all these interesting ideas, but you have no idea how they will be utilized and what the ultimate goal is for them (other than get off the island). In this season, you can finally sense that feeling again that you don't know what's going to happen next, and because of that you can be more engaged in the show.

As of right now, the time-travel concept is paying off for the show in its current state. However, it seems all too easy for the show to misuse this concept to fall in a convoluted plot mess. In the end, only time will tell.

Lost Season 5: Jumping off the Deep End

2009-01-22T16:32:00.000-08:00

Lost has jumped off the deep end. It is approaching the shark. It is coming closer to being a bathos than ever before.

Lost has always been plagued by questions of a ridiculous and a ludicrous nature. You have dead people randomly cropping up and talking to other characters. You have black smoke monsters flying through the island and ripping people into the sky. You have countless unexplainable phenomena.

This worked fine. I didn't need a solid explanation. You actually want the show to explain in quantum physics why dead human bodies re-animate and then verbally soliloquize in the presence of other characters?

Up until now, the show either brushes these unexplainable events aside, or they hint to their explanation through subtle cues in dialog. You get little snippets of science-fiction, time travel, paradoxes, experiments, and quantum physics, but each is never put out in the open for the viewers to dwell upon as the core plot element of the show.

I liked this. It worked because you were allowed as the viewer to piece together your own conclusions on what was going on. And it didn't make all the explanations awkward by forcing the characters to converse about plot elements.

That is the difference with this season's opener. They fully acknowledge the ludicrous, the unexplainable, the ridiculous, the oh-my-gosh-what-is-going-on and throw it out in the open for all the show to dwell upon. This is a huge jump from keeping all the science-fiction, all the subtle plot elements on the side line. It's an understandable leap to steer the show towards a conclusion where all the loose ends are tied up, but this doesn't make it feel any better. The current setup feels so needlessly ambiguous towards its chartered course.

And finally, I am sicked and tired of "twists" that put previous characters in new roles. I know, it was cool to see Desmond as a random jogger who talked with Jack and then he was in the hatch, but in the big picture of things, who cares? Did Desmond knowing Jack beforehand have any real significance? No.

And now they've been doing this little "let's pull the LOST universe together even tighter from two degrees of separation to 1.5!" so that all your random characters continue to crop up in roles that jump from one side of the spectrum to the other. I don't CARE that some lady in some dream was the same lady who was in some other random place doing this thing that totally doesn't explain anything. That's not a twist--that's just a ridiculous character tie-in that makes this universe feel needlessly smaller and smaller.

LOST has always been hovering over the pool of science fiction, the super natural, and magic tricks. Only now has it finally taken the leap to jump in and approach the shark. Whether or not it succeeds in missing the shark or jumping over it, I don't know, but I'll continue to watch it.

To utterly misquote Alfred from the Dark Knight: "Things were always going to get corny before they got explained."
And Harvey Dent: "The mystery is always awkwardest before the explanation. And I assure you, the explanation is coming."
Random LOST Fan: No more dead characters!
Season 1 Viewer: Yea!
Theorist Fanatic: Things are more unexplainable than ever!
Harvey Dent: So be it. No more mysteries...
Harvey Dent: ...Explain them... with TIME-TRAVEL.

Things I Learned From Don Suggs

2009-01-20T20:24:00.000-08:00

This is Don Suggs.

Don Suggs is a guy who talks a lot. Here is what he told me.

General Advice:
- Steal everything you can while you are a student. Take everything that you like and put it into your own work. Originality is not important now. Building a wide vocabulary is.
- Visual Representation alone is not interesting enough by itself. You need something more.
- Things put where we least expect them create interesting pictures.
Art vs. Illustration
- Illustration is about giving you all the information necessary for you to receive it and move on.
- Art is about provoking you, grabbing you, and giving you a deeper meaning.
- If you want the viewer to linger on your piece, don't give them all the information. Use inferences.
- Art is NOT about inspiration. Art is about working through boredom for 8 hours a day to produce something that is not horribly unnattractive.

Art Advice:
- Don't look at the details. Look at the big picture. Work from the formless to the forms.
- There is no reason why you can’t tilt the horizon.
- Don’t be too cute. Always be a little sinister in your pieces. [???]
- Still lifes are boring. [...]
- Don’t overwork one area of your image. Concentrate on the image as a whole. Work on everything with equal priority.
- Repetition (or echoes) creates visual interest and partnering balance [...].
- Unifying patterns or textures help to break up the space in an otherwise “clean” image.

Important Advice:
- Adding birds makes everything better.

The Call of Duty Problem

2009-01-12T00:55:00.000-08:00

The continuing Call of Duty series suffers from three main problems:
1) Repetitiveness
This is not just confined to one specific area of the game. How often can you take the same setting, the same battles, the same situations, the same weapons, the same screenplays, the same levels, and repeat them in each game, and then make five games exactly the same? With Call of Duty 4 being the exception, all the Call of Duty games have been set in World War II. Many of them contain the same battles (Stalingrad, Berlin, etc), and have you doing the same things as in the other games (raiding houses, shooting people, not being allowed to open doors, waiting for your slow comrades to continue). Each game virtually has the same weapon list since the beginning (Thompson, M4 Garand, Mp40, Sniper, etc) with few exceptions. Wrap it up in the same generic levels of "shoot respawning enemies from a variety of locations in a variety of environments all while your teammates are useless," look down on the battlefield from below in a plane mission, get on a tank in a vehicle mission, drive a car in a chase mission, and then get giddy in the good ol' grab a sniper rifle and shoot limitless enemies from a battlefield safe location. Even the individual games repeat their own missions and gameplay concepts, so how does it make sense to repeat those games over, and over, and over? It already gets tiring after the second game.
The FEW--and I must stress FEW--exceptions to the Call of Duty formula are where the games truly shine. In the first game, there was no established formula to expect, so all the situations and ideas were unique and fun. In the second game, the formula was repeated, but they still had enough variety in the missions to maintain a level of interest. The few things that Call of Duty 5 does differently (flamethrower, solo sniper missions) are the only interesting scenarios in the entire game. Looking back, it's been that way for each Call of Duty game, since the standard combat formula that constitutes the majority of the gameplay is just plain repetitive and boring. The unique missions where you do things other than just kill respawning, endless clones of Germans are where the most fun lies.
When a game sticks to a strict formula, it might work the first time (because you don't notice it), but then it ridiculously hampers enjoyment from then on if it is the meat of the entire game's core--which it is, in Call of Duty's case.
2) Lack of Strategy
The Call of Duty gameplay formula for individual battles goes something like this: Confront the enemy, shoot him with your rifle from a distance, advance on him by rushing to cover spots, throw a grenade to kill him if you can't shoot him, if in close quarters use an automatic rifle, if in really close quarters use melee, and finally... when your enemy is dead move on to the next enemy.
You are always given the same weapons and the same environments and the same enemies. You approach every battle with the same mindset, the same strategy, the same plan to what you are about to do. This reduces the game to a chore--a "to-do-list" of things you know you have to do. You already know what you are going to do, how you are going to do it, and there are few spontaneous events that truly force you to adapt to a situation and use the game mechanics at your disposal in order to solve that problem.
This is what separates games like Bioshock and Team Fortress 2 from Call of Duty. The first two have you constantly adapting, thinking, and analyzing every new combat situation in order to get out of it. You are always engaged in the battle. On the other hand, in Call of Duty, every battle unfolds the same way, with the same set of tools to overcome it. There's no strategy here. Just mindless reflexes, timing, and pacing--which is fine if done right, but Call of Duty has just repeated it so many times that this mindless combat can't survive on its own.
3) Lack of Challenge
Games should be challenging. On one end of the spectrum you have the "Win Button," where the solution is in front of the player, and all he or she has to do is click it. On the other end you have whatever you can imagine to be the most frustrating, inane, and difficult game you can ever conceive of. Games (and the word "challenging" for that matter) should fall somewhere in between the two.
Call of Duty has progressively moved into a zone where it's not challenging because of the design of its combat. You are always given the objective to kill the random Germans, and you are told how to do it, where to do it, so all you have to do is go out and do it. Everything just becomes a matter of when--not how, where, or why. When is the endless respawn wave going to end so I can move on to the next arena? When am I going to have to use this Panzerfaust on the inevitable tank that will appear? When am I going to finally kill enough Germans for this area to be designated "clear" and this mission victorious? It's not how am I going to do it, or why am I going to do it, or where. All of these things are given to you, so the game just waits for you to do them.
This is not a matter of challenge. It's more like a matter of how fast can you beat the current level, rather than how do I figure out how to destroy these enemies in the most efficient way?
Without this challenge, the gameplay becomes stagnant and unmotivating.

Call of Duty 1 was a great game. Call of Duty 2 was just as good, except it was more of the same. Call of Duty 3, I will not talk about. By the time we hit Call of Duty 4, this formula had been repeated too many times, with too little variation. Call of Duty 5 was just worse.

Many of today's successful franchises rely on repetitious formulas. The Zelda or Half-Life series, for instance, are prime examples. What those series do differently however--for the most part--is disguise the repetition through different environments, storylines, and characters. Call of Duty currently lacks that, and because of this, its future as a series looks like to be more of the same. Unless it can solve these problems, each game will progressively become more and more generic.

Chatroom: 15th Best Freeware Adventure (2008)

2009-01-07T10:43:00.000-08:00

Indiegames.com posted their list of the best freeware adventure games of 2008, and Chatroom made #15 out of 20! Hooray!

Chatroom was a game that some people either 'got' or didn't 'get.' Overall, I would still consider it a semi-broken experiment (due to that vast amount of responses that give incorrect feedback) but it's nice to see people that appreciate the concept and the current state of the game anyway.

This came as a bit of a surprise since La Croix Pan (which remains the more popular and IMO, better work--it took 3-4 months to make compared to one week!) didn't get listed anywhere last year, but now Chatroom did, despite its not-as-popular status on the AGS forums.

Anyway, this was a nice little sign of appreciation. So, Hooray?!

Bioshock

2009-01-04T13:20:00.000-08:00

Bioshock is an First-Person-Shooter-Role-Playing-Game (FPSRPG) set in the dysfunctional and failed-Utopian underwater world of Rapture--founded by Andrew Ryan--where the player can use either the standard weapon set of pistols/machine-guns/grenade-launchers/etc or powerful tonics called Plasmids that enable the player to preform a variety of magical attacks on their enemies, who consist of mutants, malfunctioning machines, and mysterious creatures called Big Daddies and Little Sisters, who also happen to have Adam, the secret ingredient that gives people even more magical Plasmid powers.

Things I liked about Bioshock:
1. The environments are stuffed with information. You don't walk around boring corridors and lifeless arenas that could pass for any random location or hallway with generic pipes/branches/walls/doors. Everything in Rapture is filled with posters, audio logs, sculptures, propaganda, and anything you can think of that helps reveal back story and makes the city feel more alive. You can literally spend hours just searching the environment and inferring back story from the levels. This makes it much more fun and interesting to be playing in this setting.
2. The combat has strategy. Compare a game like Call of Duty 5 to Bioshock. Call of Duty 5 has only one strategy for every combat situation: shoot the enemy, advance by cover, if possible flank the enemy, if you can't see the enemy, throw a grenade, then move on when the enemy is dead--REPEAT. There's no variety to that formula, no thought, no challenge, and little if any fun. In Bioshock, you are given a variety of weapons and powers, constantly changing environments to use them in, and an array of different enemy types to battle with. These scenarios constantly challenge the player as he or she must decide what, how, and where to use their combat abilities. You can approach an enemy with a variety of plasmids that range from fire, ice, telekinesis, lightning, or even bees. Coupled with the environment, you can use these powers on things like oil spills, water puddles, or lying gas cans, to manipulate the physical world to your advantage. For weapons, you are given the standard melee/pistol/shotgun/machine-gun/rocket-launcher/sniper, but they all work the way they're supposed to. Each weapon has its own highlights and drawbacks, making every weapon useful in a particular circumstance. Even more, you can customize the different types of ammo in the guns adding a further element of strategy. Because of all this, there is no one sure-fire way to approach every combat situation, and you must always be on your feet about how to engage the next type of enemy in the next type of environment. This makes the game challenging and saves it from becoming boring or repetitive.
3. The Audio Logs serve a purpose. System Shock 1 had audio logs; System Shock 2 had audio logs; now Bioshock has them too. In each game, they have been subsequently improved over the last. In Bioshock, the audio logs are genuinely interesting, well-written, and well-voice acted. They still occasionally give the generic "Mr. Suchong, I changed the door code to 5-6-7-8. Please don't tell anyone!" but it works better in this game than the previous ones. Overall, the Audio Logs are a great story incentive to motivate the player to search a new environment for something other than ammo and cash.

Things I didn't like about Bioshock:
1. Switching between Plasmids is cumbersome. So you have these magical powers called plasmids, and you get to put them in up to six available slots from which you can access them during any battle. The problem is you can't remember which slot holds which plasmid, and switching between them with F1-F6 isn't very intuitive while trying to fight off two attackers and a Big Daddy at the same time with all your fingers preoccupied with WASD+Mouse. To make matters worse at the beginning, you acquire enough plasmids fast enough that they shuffle through each slot continuously, removing any previous slot memorization you may have made. Even in Gene Banks (where you can swap available plasmids), you aren't allowed to move around the order you put them in without going through a hefty work-around. The least they could have done was permanently leave the Plasmid Slot GUI at the top of the screen so you remember which slot goes where (like Psychonauts did with their powers). The result is that when combat becomes hectic, Plasmid management becomes unintuitive, something that makes battles a tad frustrating and chaotic at times.
2. The game becomes too easy. The first third or so of the game has excellent pacing and an appropriate difficulty curve that can be labeled as "challenging." However, as the game goes into the second half, it becomes annoyingly easy to the point of boredom. Why?
2.A. During the second half of the game, ammo, medkits, money, and anything you could ever want or desire is littered all over the place. But by this time, you don't actually need any of these items because your character has become so ridiculously powerful. Ammo is easily acquired and stockpiled because you don't have enough time or inclination to switch and use all the different weapons you have. As such, there are some weapons you never touch or use for entire stretches of the game. It's much more preferable to use plasmids--something you can recharge--instead of weapons, which consume precious ammo every usage. Medkits and Eve Hypos become less useful because of new Plasmids that actually recharge these two attributes in a variety of ways. E.g. you can whack at enemies with the wrench to stealth their health, OR, you can hack a vending machine and gain health and eve, OR, you can just pick up any alcohol you find in a container and drink it down plentifully. Finally, because you don't really need any ammo, medkits, or any of this stuff, money becomes useless since there is nothing left to purchase at Vending Machines that you don't already have. This is especially tedious since all the Big Daddies you so valiantly kill drop generous amounts of cash which you can't pick up in the final levels. All of these useless items just remove player motivation to explore new arenas. Even more, it removes an entire element of survival strategy. Games like Resident Evil use ammo consumption as a fair way to have the player conserve and find the most efficient ways to use his or her weapons in every situation. Without this element of strategy, you lose an entire game mechanic in Bioshock.
2B. Most Big Daddies don't attack you unless you provoke them. This sounds good in theory, since nobody wants to find off a monstrous attacker who leaps out on them by surprise. However, this means you get to set up ridiculous amounts of traps and barbed wire in order to take him down while he stares you in the face, oblivious of your plan. After that, all you need to do is fire a single shot at him for the Big Daddy say, "I'm gonna get ya'!" and then he runs through your obstacle course of destruction and falls down dead without you ever taking a second shot.
There are sections of the game where Big Daddies are alone, without their Little Sister companions. I think those times are appropriate for neutrality. I do think, however, that when Little Sisters do come out, they should force the Big Daddies to attack you. It would make the combat much more scary and tense and provide a second gameplay purpose for the Little Sisters.
3. The game is fatiguing. When you enter the next level of this grand city of Rapture, all you need to do is Press "M" and see the gigantic maze of a level that you must now enter--they could have just used the fog of war effect, only revealing the part of the map that you've been to. This wouldn't be so bad if the player had an incentive to explore this level and proceed to advance the story, but the game frequently makes it frustrating to do so.
First of all, since the second half of the game is so easy, often times there is little left to explore to buff up your character. I would walk through levels maxed out on ammo, health, medkits, and upgrades, so then all that there was left to look for was Adam. After you destroy all the Big Daddies in a level (who have the Adam), there are only Upgrade Stations or Loose Plasmids to look forward to, both of which are extremely rare. Because of this, I was in no rush to explore optional places looking for character advancement.
Second of all, many of the story goals have nothing to do physically do with the story. When you enter a level, you are often told to kindly go on a fetch quest across the room, which leads you to another fetch quest on the other side of the level, and these annoying task-hand-offs continue throughout the entire game. Many times you are just told to flip switches, or acquire nameless or generic items to proceed. It was hard to distinguish actual story goals from going around and picking up the next labeled item you were told to acquire. It would have been more interesting if you had to complete goals that were unique or pertinent to the world itself (something which happens only much later in the game). Instead, you just run around searching for Red Keys to unlock Red Doors--except replace Red Key with Electromagnetic bomb, and Red Door with Andrew Ryan's office.
4. The Story relies too much on inference. There are two ways a game can tell you what's going on. For instance, take Half-Life 2. You can infer from the city, background, and setting, that the Combine are the evil overlords who have enslaved the people. You are told directly that you must go to Eli's Lab and get the gravity gun, that you must escape Ravenholm because the Combine are coming, and that you must rescue Eli because you know he is a good guy.
Now, Bioshock on the other hand relies almost solely on inference from the player. Every feature of the world is immediately thrust upon you from the beginning. What is Rapture? Why is it now so decayed and ruined? What are these Little Sisters and Big Daddies, and what is Adam?
The answers are never told to you directly. Instead, you have to infer them from the environment, dialog, and audio logs you find all over the place. However, by putting a large chunk of the story in audio logs, the game takes a huge risk. Often times the player can miss these audio logs, removing a critical part of the background story. Or, the player can pick these up out of order (but the game saves you from doing that, for the most part) and instead get a disgruntled version of the story. Or worse, the player can find these logs and listen to them, but not even pay attention to what is being said because of the blaring alarms, screaming mutants, moaning big daddies, and singing little sisters who are all slowly creeping upon you.
Since so much of the story relies on inference, many key plot points are somewhat muddled and not perfectly clear. You don't know for certain which character is who, and what they are trying to do. So when the story finally reveals itself, you are left in state of slight ambiguity trying to remember who did what and why.

I really liked the first third of Bioshock, but as the game progressed, its complexity dragged it down to a state of lesser enjoyment. All the key components of an excellent game are there, but they don't feel fully put in the right places. Portal is a game that works because of its simplicity. It takes an idea, and fully expounds on it to its highest potential. Bioshock takes tens of ideas, and when trying to balance them all together, doesn't fully succeed in the long run. Still, the game is an achievement worth experiencing, and contains enough fun to make it one of the better FPS games of this generation.

Final Score:
4/5
(Play it)

The Dark Knight in Nine Acts

2008-12-20T16:17:00.000-08:00

Revised Jan 5/09

Spoilers follow.

The Dark Knight is a movie with many themes, morals, and meanings. However, this analysis is mainly focused on the plot through the Nine Act Story Structure.

A brief description of the Nine Act Story Structure:
0) All the background information and setting: the things that happen before the story
1) Initial Shot: establishes the premise.
2) Inciting Incident: starts the story.
3) Character introductions: the good guys and the bad guys.
4) Pursuit of first goal: go after the initial goal.
5) Realization of wrong goal: the story twists and turns
6) Pursuit of correct goal: going for the new goal.
7) Climax at resolution: something changes to reach the correct goal.
8) Conclusion: ties up the story.

The Nine Act Story Structure is considered the basis for many blockbuster movies and well-written screenplays. Using this, here is a brief analysis of The Dark Knight.

1. Opening Shot -- Setting/Premise
The opening shot in The Dark Knight serves two purposes: it provides the setting of the film (Gotham in its heavily dense and populated city) and the whole premise of the film (to keep the viewer guessing what will happen next, or "Things not going according to plan"). The setting is self-explanatory, and that is what the opening shot is supposed to do in terms of the Nine-Act structure. The premise however, is a little more tricky. The camera starts off by moving in at a high speed, setting the story in motion. After the inciting incident (Act 2 -- Intro), the story never stops until it reaches its conclusion. When the camera zooms in closer to the central building, we are given the entire idea of the movie: Something bad is going to happen--but we don't know where, when, or how, as the window finally explodes and reveals who is inside, which leads into Act 2, the Intro. This idea of "Something is always about to happen" permeates the movie, and that is what makes it so suspenseful, paired with the chilling and tension-filled soundtrack, which always escalates before every major incident.
2. Intro -- Things Go Wrong, Fast
The first scene (after the opening shot of a movie) should be the inciting incident, not a load of backstory, boring monologues, character introductions, or history lessons. This should be the event that sets the story in motion and lets the rest of the movie try to fix it. The audience must have the problem of the story to know what the goal is before letting the movie drag them off into nothingness. The Dark Knight does that here with the Bank Heist. This scene sets off a chain reaction which leads to the first goal, the second goal, and so on until we reach the conclusion of the movie. In this scene there is the acquisition of the mafia's money from the bank, which eventually leads to Batman's involvement in the matter and the first goal of the story. Things also catch us off-guard and go wrong in this scene (such as the killing of each heist member), and these things make the story interesting. If everything went according to plan (a theme central in the movie), this scene would be much less effective. However, the introduction also serves a secondary purpose in The Dark Knight to introduce the character of the Joker.
Here, we get background information about the Joker through dialog, not by itself, mind you--but as an extra through the already occurring action. The audience is told how the Joker acts, what he does, and everything he stands for until his reveal towards the end of the scene. By doing this, the movie saves the audience the boringness of having a 'proper' introduction and instead introduces the Joker through the action sequences. By introducing the Joker early, the movie makes the viewers aware of the character's potential actions for every scene he is subsequently in, and thus those scenes are made much more intense.
3. Introducing The Main Players
This act is where all the main characters are properly introduced, so we understand their relationships to each other, who they are, what they want to do, and why they want to do it. Immediately after the heist we are first given the city's view on Batman, his relationship to the criminals, and how he has eluded the police's capture for so long. This leads into a fight scene where Batman reinforces his stand on the city and his new relationship to the criminals and citizens there. The scene also contains has the "Mad dogs"--another theme in the movie--who represent the Joker, and are unleashed by the unsuspecting mob. The real mad dogs in this scene promptly attack Batman and thus scar him, which is what the Joker will do later in the film. The scarring also works as character sympathization, so that the audience can root for the protagonist. Afterwards, Bruce Wayne goes back into his underground lair to stitch himself up (The conversation during this sequence being further informative of story themes), and this leads into the next character introductions: that of Harvey Dent, and Rachel Dawes.
The courtroom scene is mainly focused around Harvey, who is shown in his poise to be a crusader for good, and unafraid of the mob, even when they try to kill him. On top of that, we are also reintroduced to Lt. Gordon in his meeting with Harvey Dent (after a brief scene with Batman and Gordon) and led into the first goal of the movie: to stop the mafia's flow of money by seizing their funds from the city's banks. Finally, we are given the Joker's new relationship to the mafia in his first 'proper' introduction, and we are told of Bruce Wayne's new relationship to Harvey Dent in the next restaurant scene. The character introductions in these scenes establish each character's motives and outlooks. Over the course of the movie, these characters are changed from who they who are initially by the actions of the Joker. The audience must be clear who the original characters are, so that the audience can understand who they transform into as the story goes on.
4. Pursuit of 1st Goal -- Stopping the Mafia's flow of Money
Act four is where the characters commit to the first problem.
Stories are all about solving problems. Things go wrong, and the protagonists have to fix them. Antagonists, on the other hand, try to stop the protagonists, and this conflict between good and evil makes up the chunk of any good story.
The first goal of in the Nine-Act Structure has the main players committing to the initial problem, created by the inciting incident (Act 2). We have two opposing forces here that provide the conflict (a necessary ingredient for any story) in the movie: Joker, whose goal is to kill the Batman by working with the desperate mob; and Batman, who continues to try and put the mob out of business by going to Hong Kong and stopping the flow of money after it eluded the police in Gotham.
Batman arrives in Hong Kong with the plan to arrest and capture the mafia accountant--only after things did not go according to plan with the Bank seizures. This first goal was brought upon by the Joker's initial bank heist, and this idea of two forces of good and evil bouncing back upon each other will continue throughout the movie and escalate each stage until the final conclusion. Every subsequent action that either the Joker or Batman preforms from this point on will have an equal repercussion from the other side. This bouncing back and forth is what will drive the plot continually, over, and over. The first goal provides the primary incentive for the audience to commit to the film.
5. Pursuit of Wrong Goal -- Realization
Act five is where the main characters realize that they were pursuing wrong goal and instead go after the new goal.
Movies today--for the most part--do not survive on One-Goal screenplays. A One-Goal screenplay means you start out with the initial goal of "saving the princess" and then at the end of the story the hero "saves the princess" and the story ends.

Things going according to plan = boring.

Screenwriters realized this and they adapted to include a double-goal in many successful movies. This is because the viewers need to be tricked in a story; they need to be surprised and carried off in an unexpected direction for that story to be successful. The initial goal of a story will not be the final goal.

The new goal is only brought about after the first goal is realized to be the wrong one. Batman succeeds in his capturing of the Mafia accountant, but instead this leads into the Joker's public announcement, and his intent to introduce mayhem and anarchy in Gotham. Through the previous introduction of the Joker, the viewers know what the consequences are if Batman does not stop him as the new second goal. If the audience was just given the "capture of the Joker" as the initial goal from the beginning of the movie, the story would be made much less effective and feel needlessly protracted. Instead, the Joker is introduced as the prime goal later in the movie.
6. Pursuit of 2nd Goal -- Attempt to Capture of the Joker
In the protagonists' pursuit of the second goal, things are usually at their lowest in terms of moral. The city is in turmoil over the Joker's terrorism and assassinations, and the Joker continues to evade police (The [k]night is darkest before the dawn). This act in the Dark Knight subsequently starts when Batman and Harvey Dent commit to capturing the Joker (the press conference scene). The stakes are at their highest, and failure is more costly than ever. This act contains much of the conflict in the film, and thus provides much of the suspense and action. Throughout this act, Batman succeeds and fails in capturing the Joker (things didn't go according to plan!), and subsequently reaches the final goal, but not without cost.
7. Completion of 2nd Goal -- Victory at a Price
For the second goal, victory always comes at a price--something changes because of it. In the final act it is made apparent that the Joker's true intent is to change people from who they are (to dethrone Gotham's 'White Knight'), and the Joker does this through introducing anarchy, chaos, and mayhem. Batman nearly breaks his one rule by almost killing the Joker in the final scene, but instead saves him from his own demise. Harvey Dent fails to resist the Joker and lets himself fall to what he believes is a chance fate, and thus demoralizes himself. He eventually lets chance--or even more, the illusion of chance--decide his fate. This entire point of character adaptation is boiled up in an allegory on terrorism by showing what Batman must do to stop a madman and prevent subsequent deaths. Batman must sacrifice the freedom of the city in order to stop the Joker.
In the end, the whole movie builds up and ends on the theme of inherent good and evil. Will people destroy themselves when put under the pressure and anarchy of villainy, or will they prevail and hold fast to what they believe is right? When the Joker realizes that he cannot dethrone society into anarchy and change people into what they are not, that is when the movie reaches its climax; Batman apprehends the Joker, and the second goal is achieved. The plot reaches its conclusion; the theme of the story is made; the story draws close to an end.
8. Conclusion -- Wrap up the Loose Ends
Act eight, while wrapping everything up, also contains a short epilogue in Harvey Dent's character. We are given the final themes of the movie regarding what it must mean for one to tackle a psychopathic anarchist, and how the world will view the one who battled him afterward. These themes lie along the lines of heroes, lies, and what it means to live in a society of good and evil. Batman is what Gotham needs: not a hero, but The Dark Knight.

Obi Wan (Digital Painting)

2008-12-10T19:08:00.000-08:00

Digital Painting Attempt #02.
Rules:
1 Layer + Background
No Tracing, No Color Swapping
No Photoshop Effects, No Transparency (100% opacity brushes)
No Manipulation of image (Brushes Only)
5-10 MIN: My main plan is to work from large forms and break them down smaller and smaller until I reach the final image. I want to start out with large brushes, and only several colors, no more. I attempt to start out with loose shapes to Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy (Thanks, Miss Frizzle)! I currently have three colors here: Skin, Robe, and Dark Robe.20 MIN: I realize that the round brush in Photoshop is not very good. I switch to a somewhat horizontal brush that closer resembles that of a paintbrush. I go down slightly smaller in brusher size and I use more colors, but I still keep the palette manageable.
30 MIN: Now some real forms start to appear and it looks like a human, but not Obi-Wan yet; continuing with smaller brushes and more colors. This is the first real stage where I start to refine the shape from my messy beginnings.60 MIN: I get pickier about the palette and try to nail the basic forms down to the wire. It starts to resemble Obi-Wan. I must get the likeness and impression down here, before I go down and refine it, or else I am a goner.
100 MIN: This is where I start the process of refinement to break down the larger forms into smaller forms. It starts to look like Obi-Wan a lot more. I still must resist the notion of going into details, however. I also must be careful in my smaller work process not to destroy the basic forms. 150 MIN: Further refinement leads to a crisper image. Since I have the basic forms down now, its just a matter of more refinement (last time I use this word, I promise), cleaning up, and alteration to fix any mistakes. This is where it can get tedious.190 MIN: I add in a background. I'm getting slightly bored after three hours.
300 MIN (Final Image): Five hours later I break my rule to add a lightsaber with a glow effect on a separate layer (it wasn't worth it to paint the glow). That didn't feel like five hours. Luckily I am not a perfectionist anymore, or else I would be here for at least two more hours. I think I did alright for my second ever digital painting, but this is more like my first digital painting since my self-portrait doesn't really count. That was more like a digital mish-mash experiment.
The End!

Pixar Movies

2008-11-28T12:20:00.000-08:00

Pixar Movies in Order of Their Horribleness (in descending fashion)

Cars - Boring, predictable, and trying too hard to be likable.
Monsters Inc - Too long, too many chase-sequences--although the idea was good.
A Bug's Life - A standard Pixar movie. Not bad at all, but doesn't enthrall you as much as others.
Toy Story - The beginning. The standard.
Toy Story 2 - More fun than Toy Story 1.
The Incredibles - Ripping off other people is okay as long as it's entertaining to a high degree.
Finding Nemo - Interesting concept that takes a long time to fully fulfill.
Ratatouille - An excellent film, except somehow feeling watered down to its basic premise.
Wall-E - Filled to the brim with interesting ideas, concepts, and storytelling devices. Beautiful movie just to visually experience. Gets slightly predictable, which only marginally hampers enjoyment.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots :: Tactical Espionage Action

2008-11-04T20:10:00.000-08:00

MGS4 is an experience that can only be judged based on its predecessors (dating all the way back to 1988) and the MGS story as a whole. Since I don't have that, I won't review it. Instead, here's a list of some nice things that Metal Gear Solid 4 does that makes it not a sucky game!

- Short, brief loading screens: Although its a minor issue, loading screens can become exceedingly tedious in some games today (Assassin's Creed and Oblivion being two culprits), especially games where you must go through them constantly. MGS4 on the other hand, has relatively few loading screens (for the most part) and they all range from 5-10 seconds, which is great considering how admirable the game looks. Another nice thing they did with the loading screens was have the music carry over from the previous scene. This adds a nice flow during action scenes, that prevents the momentum from dropping.
- Gameplay Gimmick explanation: Previously mentioned in the Assassin's Creed review, that game uses the story element of "reliving your ancestor's memory in a computer" to explain how they highlight interactable objects in the background, something which many games (can and should) do. MGS4 doesn't have to rely on some kind of story gimmick--instead, it uses the concept of the Solid Eye, a device hooked up to the player that identifies weapons and items on the battlefield. The player must use the Solid Eye to find items, but it can run out of batteries, returning you to your normal vision. This is just one way that you can explain these "gameplay gimmicks," and a better way to do it than Assassin's Creed.
- Game Over Screens are given a narrative spin by having Oticon scream "Snake? Snake...?! SNAAAAAAAKE!" and flashing images of your life. This reminds the player of the larger narrative at hand, and what the consequences of dying are, rather than just quick-loading them back again with a black screen. The current game over is made much more effective because of this choice.
- Locked weapons are conveniently handled in the game. Instead of not allowing, or even not revealing powerful weapons like RPGs early in the game, the game shows them and allows you to pick them up. BUT--You can't use them because they are locked with a kind of nano-machine ID, which you can only unlock by talking to Drebin later. This allows the game to use high-powered weapons early, without letting the player get the best weapons in the game too quickly. Good design choice.
- Gameplay doesn't rely on the same few mechanics; there's tons of variation and variety in-between the missions, so you're always doing something different than before. You start off with the standard Sneak/Shoot approaches, and then you continue to get more options to that scenario, including: flashbangs, grenades, claymore mines, tranquilizer pistols, silenced guns, m249s, grenade launchers, etc. Then you have different mission goals that range from: Get through the level by killing or evading your enemies-->Try to navigate the way out of a broken building-->Track a missing person by their footsteps trail-->Tail an informant back to his hideout without being seen-->Participate in a car chase by riding shotgun-->and the list goes on.
- Character sympathization: I almost forgot what it was like to actually care about characters in video games. Solid Snake is actually a nice character to play, because you can sympothize with him in a variety of ways. His life is cut short by a premature aging process, so he is a generation older than all his friends. This process will eventually kill him off, leaving him to carry out his remaining days trying to fight to save the world. And then he gets kicked around, beat up, breaks his back, and walks around liked a tired corpse, muttering about cigarettes and whatnot.
- Music: Lastly, the music in this game is quite excellent. That is all.

So, Metal Gear Solid does some nice things. As a whole, it works together well, but it's a tailored experience. If you want this kind of experience in a game, this is the best kind you can get, from perhaps one of the most experienced and dedicated teams in the video game industry. However, this experience isn't for everyone, compared to a game like Portal.

Two thumbs up! Watch it!

Metal Gear Solid 4isms

2008-11-03T10:14:00.000-08:00

1.
MGS4 takes place in some weird, alternate universe where all the major good guys and bad guys in the world are either relatives of each other, old friends, or frequently meet up every year. (Also known as an Anime)
2.
To prove how realistic and movie-like this game is, the game uses the camera to collect water and snow particles on every ensuing shot-change. It doesn't matter that water collects on the screen every time a car rounds the corner. Keep doing it!
3.
The game will start the longest, 60 minute cut-scene at the most inappropriate time for the player, such as when they must leave because they are late for school or it's half past midnight and you have to get up at 6:30 the next morning.
4.
The most dramatic scene in the game involves a lonely 40-year old computer technician hugging his Apple laptop and crying.
5.
Snake: So what about the PCMs?
Oticon: Liquid is trying to use GW to undermine PB's overriding code! Snake! We have to stop him!
Snake: But GW has control over the nukes. There's no way JD can do that!
Oticon: So that's why he has to use the Mark II. That's why he has to use Rex!
Snake: But why does he need JD to use Rex when he can have GW?
Colonel: Excellent question, gentlemen.

Toby's Daily Schedule

2008-10-30T21:00:00.000-07:00

Based on a true story.
Click for full size

10 Minutes of Portal Prelude

2008-10-21T23:19:00.000-07:00

Portal Prelude is a fan-based MOD created to tell the story of Aperture Science's testing facilities before the invention of the all-knowing and loving supercomputer Glados.

In the first 10 minutes of the game, Portal Prelude does two things wrong:
1) It stammers on itself by using unnecessary dialog to prolong play time.
The game starts out the exact same way as Portal does; you wake up in the isolation (relaxation) chamber, ready to go out and conquer this world of white. But Portal Prelude mars the introduction of its game for one reason: the lengthy dialog sequence.
Portal (not Prelude) introduces you to the game by having Glados provide you with a brief synopsis of your state and what you are supposed to do. If my memory serves correctly, this is done in less than a minute or so.
Portal Prelude however, decides to use two (European accented) scientists as your observers, and they yammer on endlessly about extraneous (and unfunny) material for what seems like an eternity before you are allowed to exit the test chamber. They ramble on about some kind of test procedure, your goals, and everything else, but none of it is really necessary--assuming you have played Portal (not Prelude!). They also continue to do this--unnecessarily--before every succeeding test chamber--which for the first ten minutes only counts as the next test chamber.
The general rule here, is you want to use the minimum amount of dialog as possible, in order to get the player playing the game, and not reading a book or watching a movie. Every line of dialog should contribute to some kind of story or atmosphere, and Portal Prelude fails to do this.
2) The game forces you to use a complex gameplay mechanic, and imposes death on the player much too early, allowing frustration to set in and perhaps cause some people to quit the game.
The game crawls along to the first test chamber and gives you the first version of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device which can only shoot orange portals, and leave you at the mercy of wherever the game desired to put the blue portal.
In the first test chamber, you are stuck in a square room, enclosed by glass walls, and required to jump out with an orange portal. The trick here is: the blue portal--which you cannot move--is situated in the center of four laser turrets, all of which can kill you. Thus, you are left as the player, to use the orange portal in only way one possible (because you have to shoot it on the wall next to you to exit the room) to get yourself killed because you can't move the blue portal.
Portal Prelude happily throws you into the first test chamber where the majority of players will frustratingly die about 5 times before figuring out the puzzle which requires you to use a gameplay mechanic only introduced in the second half of Portal (NOT PRELUDE).

It would be understandable to take a slightly different course than that of Portal (not the prelude), but starting the first test chamber on such a high ramp of difficulty is not engaging or fun--just frustrating if you don't "get it."

The Departed vs. Infernal Affairs

2008-10-06T13:04:00.000-07:00

The Departed (2006) was based on a Hong Kong movie entitled Infernal Affairs (2002). There are many similarities between the two, and many differences as well. The result is two differing takes on the same screenplay.

First off, the most glaring difference between the two movies is that The Departed is nearly fifty minutes longer. Many of these fifty minutes are devoted to character development (particularly at the beginning of the film) and a building tension up to the first scene where both sides of the war discover a mole on the other side. Infernal Affairs just jumps into this concept about ten minutes in, whereas The Departed allows the story to boil over for about forty-five minutes first--as far as I can remember--before kick-starting the plot. The result is that the same scene in The Departed has a greater impact, because you care about the characters more and you contemplate the potential outcomes that every little repercussion the characters make may have.

Second, the two movies go off about handling the plot devices slightly differently. Infernal Affairs makes it immediately clear who each mole is and what side they are on. The Departed instead uses a long dialog between many characters, and still after that you are not 100% sure of what is going on. Other differences in the plot include little clarifications on The Departed's behalf, such as the cops asking 'Why are we chasing Martin Sheen?' before actually doing it. Little things like this give the viewer a more concrete understanding of each scene before going into it. This allows the viewer to better evaluate what is going on before it happens. Lastly, in The Departed, Matt Damon kills Jack Nicholson because Matt believed that Jack was ratting him out to the CIA. This was much more plausible than the idea in Infernal Affairs that the 'asian' Matt Damon decided to kill the 'asian' Jack based on some kind of childhood vow to make a choice in life and turn to the good side.

Third, most of the pivotal scenes--the scenes where major characters die--in Infernal Affairs were handled much differently. Infernal Affairs would use long, drawn out, slow cut-scenes, and then proceed to use flashbacks after it was revealed who died. In my opinion, this just lessened the shock and emotional impact of the surprise that somebody died. The Departed just kept the movie going at a fast-pace and didn't stop for any breathers. This upped the shock of every subsequent death as the movie progressed, as the murders seemed to come out of nowhere and be even more surprising than the last.

In conclusion, I would say that The Departed is a much more concrete and satisfying movie than Infernal Affairs. The Departed is much longer, but for good reason, and the result is that every scene has a greater impact than it did in Infernal Affairs.

Assassin's Creed

2008-10-05T19:15:00.000-07:00

Words words words, kill somebody, words words words, kill somebody else. That sums up the majority of Assassin's creed.

Good:
+ The platforming+climbing: Continuing in the vein of more modern platformers, Assassin's Creed wisely gets rid of the 'jump' function for the most part, and lets the AI take over when you need to make a leap across an alley-way. This means you don't have to time jumps, and you just run off every edge and watch your character leap across.
+ The city life: When you enter a largely populated city, compare a game like Assassin's Creed to Oblivion. In Oblivion, you walk around densely populated areas, but the characters are all stiff action figures, walking up to each other like mannequins, and carrying out rudimentary and fictionalized conversations. In Assassin's Creed, the city life is much more alive, realistic, and impressive. There are many different types of characters in the city: pot-makers, chest-carriers, beggars, guards, soldiers, and a random array of many citizens. They all walk around independently of you and behave as if they had meaning and purpose to their daily actions. When you put it all together, it creates one of the most believable city experiences in a game to date.
+ The combat system: For a game centered on assassinations and stealth, the combat is surprisingly very well done and fun to operate. Each attack movement is lucid, and there are many ways of carrying out a single fight.

Bad:
- Repetitiveness: Many games have you repeat certain elements over and over. You might call these gameplay mechanics or whatever else you want to call them. For example, in Zelda games there is a set progression of a series of dungeons, and each dungeon has its own progression of puzzles, traps, and fights which eventually lead up to a boss. You repeat this dungeon sequence over and over until you get to the end. Repetitive? Yes, but it is still enjoyable because each section builds upon the last, and the puzzles, enemies, dungeons, and bosses change every time. The way you complete each dungeon always changes.
Now take Assassin's Creed. You have 9 assassinations that you must complete in this game, and you perform each in the same series of steps: you go to the city, do some random side-quests that range from pick-pocketing to interrogating, find your assassination target, then kill him. What makes this so much worse than the repetitiveness in Zelda is that it NEVER changes. In each city you do everything EXACTLY the same way as before. You fight guards the same way; you pick-pocket people the same way; you interrogate people the same way; each section doesn't build upon the last or change in any way. There is no variety, and no further development of the gameplay.
That being said, the individual elements of the gameplay, such as pick-pocketing, citizen-saving, tower-climbing, are not bad at all. The only bad thing about them is that you already do them 3-6 times for each assassination, but then you multiply that by 9 for the other cities, and you are doing these same things over and over to an extent where it becomes extremely tiring.
Assassin's creed would probably benefit from a somewhat different approach to the gameplay. As it stands right now, a genre switch to RPG, or free-roaming may work better for the current gameplay features. That way you are not required to do anything you don't want to, so you can perform assassinations all day, or you can just pick-pocket people instead.
- Story: On the surface it may seem that Assassin's Creed is just about a guy in the middle-east who must kill people. While this is true, the game begins in the near future/present-day, where scientists have imprisoned a bartender whose ancient ancestor was an assassin in the Holy Land. Using a special machine called an "Anubis" the scientists must unlock the ancestor's memories hidden in the bartender's mind--don't ask me how they do this--and it is through these memories that you experience the majority of the game.
I can understand why they would want to use this story device for two reasons:
1)It creates an explanation for all the little gameplay 'gimmicks' that would seem otherwise... more gimmicky. I'm talking about not being able to access other sections of the city (UNABLE TO ACCESS MEMORY AT THIS TIME) or little equations floating around important objects and characters, that would otherwise blend into the background. It works here, but other games like Twilight Princess accomplished the same 'gimmick' explanations, without having to use a dual, external storyline.
2)It creates a sense of mystery, as you are trying to understand what is going on, and how the present is connected with the past.

However, after the entire storyline is over, the story doesn't wrap up anything at all or even connect this future world with the past. Because of this, I don't see how that 'future' story line benefits the game at all. All it does is create mundane sections of the game where you must walk around extremely slow and try to solve a generic mystery about a company of scientists who are doing evil stuff. Portal's mystery was similar but executed much, much better than it was in AC. In AC it fails to intrigue for a large number of reasons. In my opinion, AC would be better without the entire future subplot to it.

When you put all of the individual elements of the game together--storyline, combat, assassinations, cut-scenes--the result is a game that feels somewhat directionless and incoherent, for lack of a better word. In short, Assassin's Creed is a game that does some things extraordinarily well, and others mediocrely bad, and because of this the game suffers as a whole in the play experience.

Score: 8/10

Assassin's Creedisms

2008-10-02T22:28:00.000-07:00

1. Every male, 40-ish-year old person in the Holy land has at least two sons, both of which are apparently cowardly and need to learn from your brave example.
2. Educated scholars are allowed to pass any guard posts, and enter any high-security area in every city, as long as they bow their heads and act humbly.
3. Stacks of hay are conveniently placed at the edge of every elevated tower, perchance a daring climber fall to his otherwise unwieldy demise.
4. After losing their assailant, guards and soldiers will stumble about blindly, ignoring the only possible hiding spot in front of them, which is usually a stack of hay, a bench, or a curtained room. After not checking the hiding spot (because there's no way you could be in there!), they all immediately turn around at the same moment and walk away.
5. Assassins are unable to swim, probably due to the 5 layers of clothing they wear, and thus, they will die after being emerged in water for more than 3 seconds.
6. Fellow guards will watch in horror, unable to intervene, as you stab their comrades in a combo-switch, awesome kill where you shove the sword straight into the guy's chest. They just have to watch you finish it, because it's too awesome.
7. When Assassin's INC decided they would install a headquarters in every major city in the Holy land, they decided to prefab every entrance so that it would look exactly the same in every city with zero differences.

Broken Chatroom

2008-09-11T12:59:00.000-07:00

I found these screenshots on Mobygames. They are quite funny because they illustrate all the problems of my game, Chatroom.
Okay, not that painful yet. This first screenshot illustrates Luke's inability to recognize common acronyms, specifically conversation starters. This is not a major flaw in the dialog system, because there is a chance that acronyms aren't recognizable to everyone in the population, or that they will die out in another 88 years--though it is highly unlikely.

Okay, now there are some clearly evident problems. The first 3 lines illustrate Luke's inability--whenever I say Luke's inability, I really mean my inability to program a proper, functioning AI--to recognize specific subsets of a conversation topic. For instance, 'sculpture', 'drawing,' and 'painting,' for the art topic. Luke would only recognize the art topic, and perhaps the drawing or painting section of it. That's all.

The second problem here is that MobyGamer is asking 3 questions simultaneously, while Luke only responds to the last question. Every other question asked before in the chain is cut off for the last question asked. Somewhat realistic, but not always practical.

The third problem is that the parser doesn't recognize specific questions about a topic, for instance, art. MobyGamer asks "why didn't art school accept you?" but Luke just gives the generic "CHECK FOR 'ART'" response, where he just talks about art in a general sense.

The fourth and final problem contained in this screenshot is Luke's phrase "I'm not going to do your math" which is a bit random. I had it programmed in so if the player typed any of the following ("+, -, =, *, /") math symbols, Luke would give a generic response about not doing math, because he's not a bot or something. I didn't expect people to use hyphens however in a general sense, like MobyGamer did. And as such, you get this awkward, seemingly random response.

Once again, the awkward hyphen detection causes Luke to talk about math in the fourth line of this screenshot.

Second problem here, the player talks about transportation, to which Luke responds "You kidding me? There are none of those left." This is the transportation response, but it was more intended to be for the keywords, "car," "boat," "plane," etc. As such, it doesn't really make grammatical sense right now.

The last problem is that Luke gives a generic response whenever you mention 'war.' This leads to a repeating of the same response over and over, in slightly different phrasings.

The pain is almost over... last screenshot:
I'll just skip all the awkward replies and go down to the bottom of the chatlog where there is one problem with Luke referring to his age again. This was because the previous line, "so they had us wage war?" contained the keyword "AGE" in the word "WAGE." This led to Luke responding about his age, which was again, totally random.

So, yep, Chatroom is far from perfect. I could probably spend more effort on it, and fix some of these problems, but I'm too lazy and I'm not sure the workload would justify the end means. It also would've helped if I used a parser-based engine, like ADRIFT or Inform, or whatever is out there, instead of a graphically based engine such as AGS.

I still had tons of fun making it, and it seemed to garner a lot of publicity once again, just like La Croix Pan did. The End!

Battlestar Galactica (Season 3)

2008-09-03T14:06:00.000-07:00

Season 3 Mini! Review¡

Battlestar Galactica is a show about an old man who was in Blade Runner who runs a ship with his son and crew and they have to run away from bad guy robots called Cylons and then at the end of season 2 they decide to settle on a planet instead of finding the long lost colony of Earth but things go haywire because the Cylons find them again and kind of enslave them in occupation but that doesn't make sense because earlier in the season they said they wanted to be peaceful friends with the humans so I don't know what's up with that.

Moving on in a more serious tone, Season 3 starts off with a booming (1 YEAR LATER) subtitle to it. This opens up all the multiple possibilities for character and plot development, new twists, etc. However, I could have done without the not-so-obvious-please-make-it-more-obvious political commentary for the first five or so episodes on New Caprica.

Battlestar Galactica is a character-driven show, as opposed to a more mystery driven-show such as LOST. This means that the character's personalities and motives drive the plot rather than an arbitrary mystery set up on a jungle island. This is all well and good in BSG, except when the character development starts to go in circles. At the beginning of the third season you have this new setup where EVERYTHING has changed from the previous seasons, but then they practically throw most of it away six episodes in and start going in circles with the character relationships so that they are back to season 1 all over again. I was all for the characters developing, changing their relationships, motives, dreams, outlooks on life, etc, but when the characters do it so much that they come full circle into where they were six months ago? I don't know. It seems slightly ridiculous, bordering on absurd.
Also, the characters get even more unbelievable when they forgive a fellow shipmate who stopped the end of the war by not letting the humans kill the Cylons once and for all. It was basically like, the humans were about to launch a nuke into the Cylon death star that would set off a chain-reaction to kill all the baddies in the whole show and end this crusade once and for all, but one little passenger sabotages the torpedo and makes it a dud and the Admiral forgives him and says, who cares we did not want mass genocide anyway, we prefer to fight to the death manly style instead and potentially lose this war because we are humane people.

Despite that, three seasons in, Battlestar Galactica is a show of a much higher quality than LOST and 24. It is consistently better instead of being a roller coaster of good and bad episodes. It actually has real substance and meaning to every episode instead of tantalizing you with the juicy steak of mystery then pulling it away from you until next season. It actually has a story arc instead of recycling the same screenplay every season with the same characters who haven't changed and are still falling susceptible to the same predictable plot twists over and over.

To rank Battlestar Galactica (S3), I wouldn't say it's better than the second season of LOST and it still never reaches the level achieved in the 3-Episode Story Arc "Pegasus" in BSG Season 2. BSG Season 3 doesn't quite top the other contenders in every aspect, all the time, but it is a consistently satisfying and well-made show, and one of the best on television.

BattleStar Galactica :: Season 3: 9.3/10.0

The Mummy 3

2008-08-28T13:40:00.000-07:00

Chatroom Feedback

2008-08-06T23:07:00.000-07:00

Ten days later, here is some of the positive and negative feedback, taken from the updated version of Chatroom (sorry--old feedback doesn't count! I changed the game!).

Archive Updated: 1-6-09

"15th Best Freeware Adventure Game of 2008" - Indiegames.com

"Like La Croix Pan (which was also reviewed here ), Chatroom can be seen as “one of those AGS experiments,” except, of course, given its implementation time, La Croix Pan remains to be the author’s better work. All in all, I would still recommend playing Chatroom just for the sheer concept. That 10 minutes one this game will be well-spent." - An Occasional Player's Review

Freeware Game Pick: Chatroom (TheJBurger)
"Chatroom is a short game designed to simulate an IRC chatroom, created by the developer of La Croix Pan for a friendly One Room One Week competition held in the AGS forums..." - Indiegames.com

"In what genre would you classify a post-apocalyptic chatroom simulation? I suppose it would be the "post-apocalyptic chatroom simulation" genre, which up until now has had a grand total of 0 games released. That changed a few days ago when an Adventure Game Studio enthusiast decided to push the limits of the program by writing a game that was also a chat-room simulation. The game is called (get ready for a shocker here) "Chatroom "." - StoryGamer

"Without going into much detail, the ending was... really good and ironic on many hilarious levels but I felt that the fact that it ended that way led to a lot of plot holes in the dialogue, the biggest one being... I discovered Luke was actually a bot after he answered with THE SAME RESPONSE THREE TIMES despite whether it related to my questions about food or not." - JojoBoy

"That was really nice. On average, the AI does well, even if the questions you ask can't be too precise, as shown by the "food" example above. I could see the ending coming from miles away but it was still a very entertaining short game. It would be a nice thing to implement in a bigger game." - Lufia

"Once I had that idea of making a game that takes place in a chat room, but that idea was too freak for me. I was unsure if I could do an AI that responds us well. And I didn't tell that idea to anyone.
It seems like TheJBurger made my old idea come true, in a much better way that I could do. An exciting plot does exist in the game and I must say I loved the plot." - Gord10

Ratings:AGS Panel: (what is this?)
The AGS Review Panel has left a comment about this game:
An unusual, and well written, attempt at an IRC simulator. Some slight inherent parser quirks don't detract from an otherwise enjoyable game. Recommended.

^_^

Thoughts On Pan's Labyrinth

2008-07-31T13:25:00.000-07:00

I didn't get it.

*SPOILERS*

*SPOILERS*

There are two stories going on here: the story of Ofelia who is given three tasks by a mystical faun in order to prove her worth as a princess (um, what?), and the story of the guerrillas versus the soldiers which involves a cast of characters, betrayal, and intrigue, resulting in lots of people getting killed off.
As far as the story is concerned, I didn't really get how this was supposed to work. The main problem of the story is that the girl doesn't know if she is a princess and must do 3 tasks to prove it?
Anyway, what I did like was the parts of the movie where the fantasy world interacted with the real world and had consequences that impacted the plot and the characters. These would be the parts where Ofelia ruins her dress, the mandrake root has a weird, allegorical impact on the baby, and the final sequence of the movie where you don't know what's going to happen.
However, despite whatever qualms I had about it, I thought the movie really picked up during the second half, and had some great scenes, such as the one with the baby-eating-feast-man. It was very reminiscent of the Mummy-Stare-Freaks in Zelda, or entering an unknown dungeon in Oblivion.
In the end though, the movie completed on an unusual note, making me feel like I missed something or just didn't "get it." It would appear that the movie would be good to those movie viewers who could decipher some obviously hidden meaning, putting all the scenes and actions into perspective, but I find it hard to be enjoyable since I don't understand what all the undertones mean (though they appear to obviously be religious-based).
I watched Spirited Away, and I knew there had to be some hidden meaning, but I didn't have any clue what it meant. Did I still enjoy it? Yes.
In Pan's Labyrinth, I felt as if I had to get the hidden meaning for the movie to actually be enjoyable. At least that's my experience.

Worth Watching? Yes, to draw your own conclusions about it.

And seriously, how many times is the director/cinematographer going to do scene transitions by panning the camera over the giant black tree/post/pillar/rock/wall to lead us into the next scene?

Chatroom

2008-07-27T17:17:00.000-07:00

A while ago I made a game for a competition entitled OROW (One Room One Week) on the AGS Forums. The game was an adaptation of a short story I wrote called Chatroom. The final-ish, polished version of the game has finally been released to the national interweb.

Go play it again HERE!

Resistance: Fall of Man

2008-07-24T13:17:00.000-07:00

Resistance mounts itself upon three distinct already existing first-person-shooters. Those would be Halo, Half-Life 2, and Call of Duty. In terms of gameplay, Resistance is fast, arcadey, has plenty of vehicle sections, and is carried out in the same manner as Halo. In terms of story, you have an alien invasion, desecrated cities, humans being turned into aliens; zombie creatures, and all that good Half-Life 2 stuff. And lastly, in terms of atmosphere and world, you're ravaging the broken streets of Europe with your fellow comrades in arms, so it's pretty close to playing Call of Duty over again.

Since Resistance seems to borrow so heavily from other First-Person-Shooters, it's hard to find any one unique element in it that shines above the crowd and makes it a game truly worth playing. The story is somewhat interesting, but I felt that it could have been better executed in a style similar to Half-Life, relying more on mystery, player discovery and first-hand experience, than force-feeding information through cut-scenes. The story in Resistance almost ran in a similar style to Call of Duty, where you seemed to be part of a huge war, and not of some sort of narrative. This felt fine in Call of Duty, but since the world in Resistance was unknown to us, it felt to me that it should have been explored a bit more.
As far as the gameplay is concerned, it is fun in its own right, but there is nothing overly great about it. The guns are somewhat unique and well-designed. The enemy AI is pretty much limited to RUSH TEH HUMANS or CAMP BEHIND BOX n' PEAK OUT OVER AND OVER. However, one odd thing about the combat is that avoiding enemy fire seems to be exclusively designated to your ability to strafe and has little to do with how much cover you currently have. This is odd because you can peak out of a box only to have your head blown off by surprisingly accurate enemy laser blasts unless you happen to strafe at the correct moment.
Moving on, the screenplay was somewhat interesting, but seemed to have no real focus or goal to it, throwing me from level to level with no sense of urgency, progress, or future outcome. There were some exciting sequences, but nothing close to the level achieved in Halo, Half-Life, or Call of Duty. Also, many of the more thrilling moments in the game were designated for cut-scenes, which I thought would have had more impact if they were played out instead of watched. Lastly, the screenplay ends with some kind of nuclear reactor showdown, which seems to be the ending level for about 50% of all shooters.

To me, a successful first-person shooter should combine an interesting world, with a strong narrative, have unique and fun gameplay mechanics, and use those in exciting sequences. Resistance does a fairly adequate job in all departments, but does not do anything extremely well to make it worth playing, in my opinion.

7.9/10

Theme Hospital: A Retrospective

2008-07-17T11:50:00.000-07:00

I was just running through Theme Hospital again, and I think I got to... around level 9/12 or so. Theme Hospital is a fun game. It's a strategy game, so the fun stems from you, and the choices you get to make. You get to design the layout of your hospital and your rooms, hire whoever you want on your staff, place benches and drink machines accordingly, and then watch it all in action from above when you open your hospital. However, it is only when you reach the later stages of the game, do the many frustrations and problems of Theme Hospital become apparent.

I would postulate that Theme Hospital fails in the gameplay section for one main reason: gameplay maintenance. Gameplay maintenance--in strategy games--is when you must maintain everything you have created. In SimTower, this would be individually clicking on every apartment and lowering the rent to make your tenants happy. In Command & Conquer, this would be to repair your buildings or create new tiberium silos. Gameplay maintenance is an understandable feature in strategy games, as long as in comes in doses and is fair to the player. In Theme Hospital however, it is taken to a frustrating extent as you get deeper and deeper into the more complex levels of the game. This can pretty much be summed up by a scenario I was in that kind of went like this:
- The voice announcer lady says: "Doctor needed in psychiatry--2 Surgeons needed in--Doctor needed in GP office--Earthquake imminent!--Doctor required in Slack tongue clinic!--Epidemic warning--2 surgeons needed--nurse required in fracture clinic!"
If you've played the game in the later levels, you will find that this is barely, if at all exaggerating the situation. On top of that, you must keep an eye on:
- The condition of your machinery
- The happiness of your doctors
- The health of your patients
- The length of your queue lines
- The cleanliness of your hospital
- Any notifications on the bottom of your screen

In my opinion, the fun in strategy games does not lie in gameplay maintenance--it lies in the design choices you get to make. I believe that was one main thing Rollercoaster Tycoon tried to achieve, and did it well. It tried to remove many of the micromanagement gameplay features that you see in games like Theme Hospital, and let you concencrate on the fun aspects of strategy games, which in this case was building your park. You didn't have to worry so much about maintaining it.
I think if Theme Hospital focused more on the building aspect and less on the maintaining aspect, it would be a much better game. Several ways they could fix this are:
- Automatically have Doctors who are doing nothing return to the staff room. This removes their anger and keeps them happy, without letting them ask for another tedious raise.
- Have a button to automatically repair all of your machinery, instead of searching your whole hospital for rooms with machines.
- When the queue lines for your rooms get to long, pop up an alert, recommending the player to build another GP Office, or whatever office is required.
- Seriously improve the AI--I would have handymen walking around in circles in vacant areas of the hospital instead of cleaning up messes in the populated areas. I would have the most qualified doctors waiting in empty rooms, while my least qualified doctors would answer job calls when they were the furthest away from the office they were headed to.

Theme Hospital, as it stands, has too much micromanagement, in my opinion. You, as the player, are required to do to many things in a too narrow window of time, and because of that, too many things can go wrong and the game becomes increasingly tedious and frustrating. The only way to win then requires you to do everything right, and nothing wrong.

For an example of what would happen if you removed virtually all of the micromanagement, once again, just look at Rollercoaster Tycoon. All of the rides are equivalent to treatment rooms, except there is no need for employing individual doctors. All staff maintenance is removed by not giving handymen and mechanics 'happiness' bars. Lastly, any ride maintenance is kept to a minimum, and it is barely required to keep your park running. By comparing these two games, you can see what the effects of gameplay maintenance are on strategy games, and which style you may prefer as the player.

La Croix Pan Service Announcement

2008-06-24T11:20:00.000-07:00

That's right kids! You can now play your favorite game in two more languages!
Download Now!

Here are the last panel's lines for your copy+paste+translate convenience:
Потому что почему замените этот внушительный неразборчив текст с тарабарщиной?

честно, рыбы cow опьянение поскаканное расстегаем потока неразличимый tomorrow' дуют пожарными рукавами, котор вне; истиратель телефона тарелки s моя.

La Croix Pan - 1 Year Later

2008-06-13T23:59:00.000-07:00

One year ago I released a little game called La Croix Pan. And I'm not even kidding, it's little! It only has about ten minutes of gameplay!

Anyway, I thought it would be nice to look back at one year of La Croix Pan and all the buzz it has received.

Ratings!
--
From 21 peoples votes so far: (vote here)

Visual:	86%
Immersion:	88%
Puzzles & Pacing:	81%
Overall Enjoyment:	74%

AGS Panel: (what is this?)

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Posted by accolyte on 2007-07-16 at 16:53 (IP logged):
"An immersing and highly realistic description of a snipers work during world-war. A short but rock-solid game which is defenitely worth a play-through even if you dislike shooting."

REVIEWS or NEWS POSTS (archive Updated 6-13-08):
Moby Games
Caiman
Strategy Informer
Xii Games
Indy Gamers
Soldat Movies
OCC Player
Adventure Gamers
Full Games
Malon's Blog
Yesterday's Salad
Gamespot Forum Thread: Adrian's Guide to 2007 freeware games
AGS Pick of the Month (April 2008)

On top of that, there is some exciting news concerning La Croix Pan coming up, but you'll have to wait to see what it is!

Food Reprise #3

2008-06-08T00:05:00.001-07:00

Indigo Prophecy

2008-06-07T11:07:00.000-07:00

Indigo Prophecy (2005)

What Indigo Prophecy Does Right:
- Brilliant Concept: Play as both the murderer and the detective, make split-second decisions regarding your fate, and watch the conflict as you progress through the case.
- Inventive Control Scheme: By preforming different gestures with the mouse, the player can enact different actions all with one click. No more need for different verb buttons such as "Push," "Pull," or any of that nonsense. It's extremely intuitive.
- Well Written Characters: All of the characters in the game have different emotions, motives, dreams, and personalities, and because of that they are easily sympathized with.
- A Mental Heath Meter: Each playable character has their own mental health that you must take care of. This was a great design choice, because it adds meaning to the basic and mundane tasks of everyday life you can perform in the game, as well as to the monumental tasks you can also make.
- Warning Signs for Interactive Cut-Scenes: You know those cut-scenes where a game says "TAP X" really fast in the middle of it, and if you don't, you die? Well, Indigo Prophecy has a lot of extended "simon-says"sequences of this, but they fixed one problem of it that Resident Evil 4 had. The problem was that you didn't know if you were supposed sit back and enjoy a cut-scene, or have your fingers tense, ready to press "A" to dodge when you needed to. Indigo Prophecy blatantly flashes "GET READY!" before each tapping sequence, so, problem solved!

What Indigo Prophecy Does Wrong:
- Extended Tapping Sequences: I don't have any personal issues with having "interactive-tapping" cut-scenes, but there are some serious gripes with the ones in Indigo Prophecy. For starters, many of them are ridiculously long (some seem to go up to five minutes in length) and the whole time you are tapping buttons trying to keep up with the tapping buttons indicator. Which made me wonder in the first place, isn't there a better way to make this game more interact-able? I mean, why have the player watch a five minute action scene and have him tap seemingly unconnected buttons on the side-line, when you can instead have the player actually preforming the action in the scene? I would rather play some kind of action/adventure hybrid, than a pure adventure game that has me mash unrelated buttons during every cut-scene.
- Ridiculous Story Payoff: Alright, so the story started off great: you have a guy in a bathroom who murders someone without realizing it, and then you have a couple of cops on his trail. It only gets worse from there, however. I started getting worried after the first "dream" action-sequence-button-mashing thing, where I had to run away from giant bugs resembling enormous beetles. After that, I started becoming increasingly wary when I had to continue these button-mashing-action-sequences to escape my own furniture from flying up and attacking me in my apartment (It was a dream sequence, but come on). Then the whole situation became downright laughable as the main character seemed to gain superhuman powers and started flying and preforming bullet-time out of nowhere. Sure, they explained it a scene or two later by changing the story into some weird amalgamation of Star Wars and The Matrix--the main character now being Luke or Neo--but it was still extremely ridiculous, and stayed so, even after the explanation. Finally, the last act of the story was a total jump into supernatural, science fiction, conspiracy theory madness and never fully explained itself in detail. In the end, the story can barely be redeemed if at all.
- Bonus Cards: You see them in games all the time: power ups. These things lie around the game world, usually animate by rotating, and you as the player must pick them up to gain health or new abilities. There's nothing wrong with this, but Indigo Prophecy actually has them in the dead-serious atmospheric and dark story that they've set up. Think about it: In one section of the story you're investigating the corpse of a victim in the morgue, and then making composition sketches of the killer, and by accident you happen to stumble upon a "bonus" card that gives you ten "points?" These cards seem way out of place, especially since there's nothing else like them in the game. The only reason they serve is to unlock bonus content after you complete the game, the bonus content being stuff like "the making of" videos and soundtracks. Why couldn't they just drop the cards, and unlock certain bonus content depending on the quality of the ending you received? That would've made much more sense and kept the dark immersion factor, in my opinion.
- Superficial Interaction: At one point in the game, I was performing so many mundane actions and trifle moves, I was wondering whether I was actually playing a game, or just clicking every once in a while and watching this 'movie' unfold. I wanted to be making more choices in the game, just like in the first scene, where I had many avenues to run down as I sat in the crime scene. I didn't want to be the little "play" button every time the game decided it want to pause itself for some superficial interaction, but unfortunately, that's what many of the scenes felt like. There would be many cut-scenes where you control the character as he walks from room to room, door to door, but with no real gameplay attached to it.
- The Role of Movies and Games: Since Indigo Prophecy is probably one of the closest things we have today to an interactive movie, the line of how close do we want to be like a movie must be drawn somewhere. Just like in movies, Indigo Prophecy has scenes that have nothing to do with the main plot and seem to just build up character. That makes sense in a movie, but how does it make sense in a game? Yes, we need to care about the characters, but then we start blurring the line between movie and game, as well as between active interaction and passive viewing.

In short, Indigo Prophecy is a game that has a brilliant concept, with some shining areas of execution despite several major gameplay faults, but unfortunately falls flat into a ridiculous narrative mess during the second half.

Final Score: 7.9/10

Lost - Season 4 - Finale

2008-05-30T12:04:00.000-07:00

I think we've finally felt the backlash of getting the flashforwards handed to us.

The one thing that separated this season of lost from the previous seasons for me, was predictability. The flashforwards essentially have told us the end of the season before-hand, so we're just trying to figure out the "HOW" and not the "WHAT" of what is going to happen.
How would you feel if someone told you the ending of last season's superb finale, and then you just watched the episode to find out all the in-between details? That's what it basically felt like for this season's finale, and almost the whole season.

In essence, I thought this season's finale was the weakest of the four thus far. The way the transitions were made into the "future" flashforwards, seemed awkward at best, especially Locke telling Jack that he is going to "have to lie." Also, the way the show went back to the previous flashforwards of last year's finale didn't seem inventive to me; it seemed compulsive. It seemed like the writers had no idea where the show was going last year and needed to go back to these flashforwards to tie up the loose ends, and because they finally decided what the characters would say to each other instead of adlibbing it all.
The setup for next year's season seemed to make every character as dead-serious as ever, and the final twist of the episode wasn't even a twist, thanks to the three minute conversation build-up that practically said, "SO-AND-SO IS IN THE COFFIN LOL WE'RE ABOUT TO SHOW YOU HAHAHA."
And then I was like, 'great, now we can't be worried about that character's fate anymore.'

I really think the writers had the show like this:
Season #1) Season 1 story Arc Covered + Maybe Two + A little of Three
Season #2) Two + Three Arc covered
Season #3) Season Three + Four Covered - But NOT Five, or Six.
And then they got to season 4 and they finally, Finally, decided on which of the many remaining theories they could end the show on over the next two years, and finally set course on that heading.

As for where I think the show is headed next year?
Season #5: It will be the LOSTies trying to get back to the island (haha, a clever switch from season 1), and there will be flashbacks of what happened on the island up to the present day.
Season #6: The LOSTies, the Whidmores, the Others, and all other interested parties (because they're bound to multiply) will finally confront 'The Secret of Lost Island™' and discover it was all a dream thanks to LeChuck.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

2008-05-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

Warning: This review is longer than the actual game.

If Quest for Glory was remade today , it would be very close to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Both games have day/night cycles, thieves guilds, fighters guilds, mages guilds, goblin caves, trolls, tons of side-quests, a huge world to explore, a horse-like creature that you can buy for fast travel, at least three different character classes to choose from, stats that level up in real time as you preform them, a weight system in-game for everything you carry, magical spells, and the list goes on and on (and QFG is a 20 year old game, mind you).

That being said, Oblivion is more of an interactive world than an interactive story, as opposed to other games like Half-Life. Oblivion's main selling point is its enormous depth and size, which easily puts every single Final Fantasy and Zelda game to shame. The world in Oblivion is massive, and just to explore it, without completing any quests, would take dozens of hours and even days to do. In terms of size you could say it's about as big as a small San Fernando Valley, and your horse is as fast as a car. It is this world and the attention to detail in it, that makes the game such a joy just to be in, much like in other games such as Freelancer.
Though despite all of its detail and sheer number of locations, the world in Oblivion feels copied and pasted many times over. After trudging through one small section of the land, you can run into all the game has to offer, which would be shrines, wells, caves, ruins, forts, and towns. Every single section of the world has these same landmarks, and because of that, none of it feels unique. In Quest For Glory, every single landmark was clearly identifiable from the rest. There were locations like 'Erana's Peace,' 'The Druid's Tree,' and 'The Troll's Cave.' Every location in Oblivion feels like a generic copy of each other, and so, that is one aspect of the world that makes me as a player lose my suspension of disbelief.

Oblivion's main fault however is due to its main strength. Because the world is so huge and massive, and the designers wanted the player to be able to roam freely in whatever direction he chooses, this creates a situation where the designers don't know which direction the player will take. Most games today are very linear (like Portal), where the designers specifically create each section of a level to evoke a certain response from the player, and they essentially hold the player's hand until the ending, making sure the player experiences everything he was intended to. In Oblivion, this is impossible since the designers don't know in which order the player will experience the game.

Continuing from that, the designers don't know what level the player will be when he reaches a certain cave. He could be level 2, making all the enemies too hard, or he could be level 15, making all the enemies too easy. In many other RPGs, like Final Fantasy and KoTOR, the games are on a set path of progression, so the designers have a good idea of what level the player is, at a certain section in the game. Because of this they can appropriate the player's skill level and set the enemy's skill level accordingly.

Now, since Oblivion can't do this, rather than risk making certain sections of the game too easy or too hard, the game scales all the enemies whenever the player levels up. This means that whenever you get to level 17 and get a nice set of Glass Armor and a 20 Damage sword, all your enemies will get similar weapons and armor. This is understandable, but it really destroys the game internally.

Role Playing Games are all about a sense of achievement. When you gain a new skill, level up, or kill an enemy and get enough gold to buy that new set of armor, you feel like you accomplished something. You want to feel like your character is getting stronger as you keep playing. But if all the enemies followed you every time you made progress to get better weapons and improve yourself, that sense of accomplishment is lost and everything feels pointless. That's what kills Oblivion on the inside, since leveling up and acquiring better items often feels in vain as your enemies will just get better too. To be fair to the game, your character does get better than a few sets of enemies, but these are mostly the weaker creatures like rats and mud crabs. Any character that wields a weapon or armor is always scaled to match you. There is no easy way to solve this problem, but their current solution doesn't seem adequate.

Moving on, Oblivion, like all RPGs, has an epic main storyline. The main quest itself is quite good, although it does take a few pointers from Lord of the Rings, and can probably be beaten in under 20 hours (assuming you skip the side-quests associated with it). However, there is a real lack of tension or building momentum up to the final battle. One of the reasons that attributes to this is the fact that you can drop the main quest for up to dozens of hours to do something else and then come back to it only to finally finish it at your own pace. You can literally leave the main story, right after a critical battle takes place where they need your help, and come back fifty days later to find it waiting for you again.

Now, if you don't want to embark on the main quest, there's plenty of side-quests for you to chill out in and explore this world. There are four main guilds, each with its own quests, requiring you to do special tasks to raise your rank, plus there are normal side-quests that you can do as any character.

But once again, there's a couple of serious issues with all of the side-quests. First of all, the point in doing side-quests for me is to
a) Gain Experience to level up my character for the main quest.
b) Gain Gold to buy new items.
You can scratch (a) out, since all the enemies scale up with you, and you can scratch (b) out as well for one main reason: most side-quests reward you with between 100-300 gold. By the time you actually do most of the side-quests, your character is such a high level that slapping the occasional passer-by on a city road means he drops 2000 gold worth of loot in a 1 minute battle. Now who wouldn't take that any day instead of spending 30 minutes on a lame side-quest that gives you only 200 gold?
I also would've liked it if there were more choices in each quest, like KoTOR's quests, where you could end each quest a good or evil way. Most quests in Oblivion only let you end the quest the way the game wants you to.

There's also another problem with many of the side-quests: Loading screens. Loading screens for cities run as high as 25 seconds, and for houses run as high as 10-15 seconds. This isn't that bad, but when you're traversing this world as much as I am, it becomes a serious nuisance. Many side-quests which you MUST complete in order to raise your rank in the guild of your choice are pretty much summed up like this:
1. Go to the guild hall and get your quest, which requires you to go to another city. (25 seconds of loading to other city)
2. In the other city, enter so-and-so's home to get your task. (10 seconds of walking, 15 seconds of loading)
3. They tell you to go to "blah-blah" cave and kill "blah-blah" (20 seconds of talking)
4. Do it. (25 seconds of loading to outside of cave, 15 seconds of loading entering cave, X# of minutes killing said bad guy)
5. Report back to the guild hall and repeat. (25 seconds of loading to city, 10 seconds of walking to guild hall, 15 seconds of loading to interior, 10 seconds of talking)
This literally has you staring at loading screens for more time than actually playing the game. And sometimes, you're not even required to go kill anything, so you just go back to the return city for another loading screen. And you have to do this about 8-14 times for each guild, each time the reward being a basically useless ring or an insignificant amount of gold. When you're trying to complete all the side-quests one by one, this is the only way to do it, and it becomes extremely tedious.
That's also one thing I liked so much about (Resident Evil and Call of Duty)4--The loading screens in those games were virtually non-existent. I didn't even realize I was in a loading screen by the time the location changed. It was great!

Lastly is the issue with the gameplay's economy, specifically of gold and things you can do with it. I'm a believer in that there should always be something better to buy or something to use your gold on, otherwise there's no point in collecting more gold, thus killing a whole gameplay element. In Oblivion, the extravagances of buying every house, one or two horses, and anything actually useful prices up to about $200,000. I got to that mark faster than I realized (especially due to the fact that every passer-by dropped $2000 worth of loot), which meant that after I bought every house for sale in the land of Cyrodiil, there was nothing more to buy, so I was basically left with another $200,000 in my pocket and truckloads worth of potions and magical scrolls that I would never use.
Knights of the Old Republic didn't have this problem, because there was a special space station in the game that had highly valuable items always up for sale, and it was nearly impossible to acquire every single one, so you always wanted to get more money in that game.

Still, despite its issues, the majority of the gameplay in Oblivion is well-balanced and incredibly deep. There are many ways to achieve each of your goals, whether that be killing people, making money, or getting a quest done. One example of this would be the degradable weapons and armor. System Shock 2 also had this, but it was very unbalanced in that game. In System Shock 2, weapons usually started at health level 3/10 when you picked them up, and lost a level only after firing them for several shots. With few replacement weapons around, and only one way of repairing them (through small tools that cost money and were hard to find), the degradable weapons became a nuisance. In Oblivion though, you have a lot of choices of how to solve this problem. You can repair the items yourself with repair hammers (easily acquired anywhere in the world), or you could have them repaired by an in-game smithy, or you could drop the weapon and pick up another one like it, also easily found all over the game world.

The only real issue with the combat is that there is no sure-fire way to take on multiple enemies at once. This can be considered as a feature, forcing the player to tackle one enemy at a time, but it seems odd since every other First Person (shooter) gives you a way to kill multiple bad guys at the same time, usually in the form of grenades, a rapid-fire weapon, or some kind of rocket launcher. The only thing close to this in Oblivion is a splash damage fire/ice/lightning spell, but if you're not a magic character, then you're basically all out of luck.

In conclusion, is Oblivion worth playing? Yes, it is! The sheer depth of the world and everything you can do in it is worth experiencing, much like it is in other huge games, one of those being Freelancer. The first half of Oblivion is excellent, sending you on a variety of different tasks and quests, but then the game has you enter way too many Oblivion Gates, and sends you to a ridiculously hard nightmarish hell for one hour over and over.
As a superficial experience, Oblivion is a great game and a very enjoyable ride. Only if you care about internal game mechanics--and only if you notice it about fifty hours in--will you dislike the game, assuming you have 100+ hours of your life to throw away anyway. As a game, I would recommend it, but if you want a more concise gameplay and storytelling experience, you're probably better off with KoTOR, Zelda, Final Fantasy, or even the twenty year old Quest For Glory series.

Final Score:
9.0/10
(Recommended)

Oblivionisms

2008-05-20T18:00:00.000-07:00

1. Characters in Cyrodiil are a very friendly ol' bunch. They will often come up to each other and greet one another with the phrases, "Well met," and "Hello," then proceed to talk about how vile Mud Crabs are, or another topic of equal conversational value, then end the conversation with a simple "Goodbye" and walk away.
2. In the land of Cyrodiil, insulting a character is totally A-Okay, just as long as you butter them up afterwards and tell them a joke. All will be forgiven and forgotten.
3. All of the caverns in Cyrodiil are made of the same 5 sets of tile pieces, intricately put together in different orders. By opening and blocking different paths, it creates the illusion of a new cave.
4. About 400 years ago, the emperor decided to build approximately fifty forts scattered around random locations in the land, then all at once abruptly abandoned them to decay, only after installing special death traps and dumping treasure chests of loot in conveniently placed locations and dead-ends.
5. There is a 95% chance that the terrain you are walking on is actually above an underground passage, whether this be from a Fort Ruin, a cavern, an Ayleid ruin, a Labyrinth, somebody's Hideout, or some other odd place.
6. When walking along a main road to another city, there is a:
a. 15% chance you will encounter a dangerous wild-life animal, such as a bear, lion, or wolf.
b. 25% chance you will run into a bloodthirsty bandit who wishes to kill you for entering his or her terrain.
c. 10% chance you will run into a goblin, or another monster of equal fighting value.
d. 10% chance you will run into a Highway Man, who wants you to pay up, but you can just out-run him up to the next city.
7. Every shopkeeper in every city offers the finest wares at the lowest prices in all of Cyrodiil.
8. When you ask for help in the epic battle (equivalent to Helm's Deep) from each city and they say 'yes,' this really means them each sending two soldiers while the fate of the world is in their hands.
9. Due to the nature of melee combat and inaccurate archers in Cyrodiil, you can pretty much run through the entire game without killing anyone, as long as you are either:
a) Fast - Achieved through spells or enchantments.
b) Invisible - Also achieved through spells or enchantments.
Best Side-Quest: Knights of the Nine - It's better than the main quest.
Best Accessory: Skeleton Key - You will never break another lock pick again.
Most Boring Guild: Fighter's Guild - Repetitive contracts and tons of loading screens.
Best Spell: Invisibility - You will never have to fight anyone, ever again. (Runner up: Feather - it allows you to carry another sofa back to your house!)
Most Annoying Enemy: Anybody who can summon a monster - This doubles your pain as you have to fight two baddies at a time. (Runner up: The velociraptor - when you try to block its attacks, it still damages you and shakes your screen, and when you try to slash it, it slashes back harder.)
Best Combat Tactic: Shoving the enemy off a high ledge (preferably into a pit of lava at the bottom) - Very useful in the planes of Oblivion!

Iron Man

2008-05-11T19:33:00.000-07:00

Spoilers Follow
Iron Man was pretty good and enjoyable, if not rather predictable. I thought it was great how they made the plot so the main character was forced into "becoming" the 'iron man' in order to escape from these terrorists, but then I started to see where the plot was going after that. When you see that enemy terrorist leader get shot at with the rocket but it slightly misses, you know his face is going to be scorched and he's going to come back for the second half of the movie to take his revenge. And that scene where Tony is testing his boots at 10%? You knew he was going to fly away and break his neck, seriously.

Iron Man seems to share a screenplay in common with a lot of other successful blockbuster movies that are equally enjoyable. This screenplay, which has been employed in Minority Report, Batman Begins, to a lesser extent in Casino Royale, and probably in more movies basically runs like this:
1 - Introduce the main character and the first plot problem of the two-goal story-arc. Also introduce secondary characters like love interests and mentors. All four (including Iron Man) of the above movies sort of do this.
2 - Flashback to show the main character's life and history up to this moment. All of the above movies did this except it didn't really happen in Casino Royale, as far as I can remember.
3 - Flashforward back to the present where the first main problem has been solved. In Minority Report, you could probably say the first main problem was solved in the intro, or it was actually introduced here as the second problem of a three-goal story-arc.
4 - Develop the character and have him change his views (or not). This would be where Batman learns to become Batman in Gotham City, or Iron Man tests out his equipment.
5 - Introduce the second problem of the two-goal story arc. Batman must now save Gotham from the scarecrow. Iron Man must save the middle-east from villainous weaponry. In Casino Royale and Minority Report it's a little more muddled and hard to see.
6 - Twist the story by making one of the secondary characters the TRUE villain (this would be the mentor in Batman Begins, Minority Report, and Iron Man). Now the characters we introduced in (1) have more importance.
7 - Go down to the final showdown and end the movie with some kind of moral statement.

There were some plot holes that I would've jumped at, but they were skillfully, if not patiently resolved at the end of the scenes they were introduced, such as:
- How can you build an iron man suit while terrorists watch you? Oh, he's doing it BEHIND the curtain!
- How can you build an iron man suit in what feels like only a week in movie time? What? It was really THREE MONTHS? Oh-kay!
- If the terrorist's mission was really to kill Tony Stark, why did they keep waiting for him to build the missile? What? They didn't know that he was the real target and so had to negotiate a new deal with their employers about how to kill him? Okay, that makes sense!
But it all worked out in the end.

I don't know if it's me or the CGI, but the whole time I was watching the movie, I wasn't consciously aware that I was watching CGI. Of course you know it's fake, but it just looks so good and blends seamlessly into the live action scenes.

All in all, Iron Man is a pretty entertaining movie that is well structured, makes good fun of superhero cliches (especially the ending), has excellent CGI, and is an enjoyable romp.
Recommended. See it.

The Golden Compass (Movie)

2008-05-04T23:26:00.000-07:00

Three things about the Golden Compass:

First off, the Golden Compass as a movie would benefit from one main thing: more exposition. Every scene and dialog between the characters would try and cram as many story and world elements as possible, and each scene would pass much too fast, without any time for the viewer to become established in this world. I never felt particularly engaged in the story, because it seemed like the movie didn't fully develop anything long enough for me to get settled in it. And to top that off, it seemed like the movie was introducing a new character in every scene.

Second, another thing to note here is the re-ordering of a main section of the plot. In the book, Lyra (Laura?) goes to the North, finds the ghost-kid, goes to the Aperture Science Center for Learning, then to the Bear Kingdom, and then to her fathers observatory for the grandifantasticaluous finale. In the movie, the sequence of events is switched up by sending her to the Bear Kingdom first, and then to the Science Center. The 'people who make this movie' must've did this for a reason, but I can't really see what it is, and I don't particularly see how it strengthens the story at all (or weakens it for that matter).

Thirdly and lastly, they chopped the ending of the book to smithereens by ending the movie at about page 170/200. Having read the book, I was expecting the movie to end at a certain time, and since the plot wasn't fully comprehensible about what the characters were trying to achieve, the ending just seemed to be slapped on out of nowhere. It was basically like the characters said, "We are going to solve the final problem set out upon by the beginning of the movie!" But instead of them spending the approximately needed twenty more minutes to do that, the movie ends. However, I can see why they didn't want to end a happy children's' tale with a little boy getting killed in order to open up a portal to another world. But then you have to start the second movie with that, so I guess it would just be postponing the inevitable.

Final Score: It's not as good as Enchanted.

LOST - Season 4 - Ep 11

2008-05-03T00:57:00.000-07:00

This last episode of LOST pretty much embodies everything I currently loathe about the show.
1. I hate it when they create more flashbacks/forwards (as it doesn't matter when there's no plot progression) that don't build up character, but instead create melodramatic sequences about people we no longer care about. Even when the flashbacks/forwards create a nice little self-contained story they're still hard to like as they're chopping away time from the main plot.
2. What's the point of letting Jack have a life crisis when we know he gets off the island and is safe?
3. The main thing that I'm interested in is the mystery - Dharma - The Others - The Hatch - Scientific Experiments. When we have these "filler" episodes that supposedly do something other than progress the plot, all it does is make me wait for the next "real" episode where something actually happens. The only thing that happened in this episode is that Claire ran off chasing a hallucinatory vision of a lost family member. And seriously, that gimmick is getting annoying. It might've been cool the first couple times, but they've been using it over, and over, and over for 4 seasons now in the exact same manner with no explanation. And if making Claire run off into the jungle is supposed to be plot progression, then I am sad.

I probably liked LOST best back in season 2. It was the tale of the survivors, and Locke and Jack, in a mysterious hatch on a stranded island, where unknown forces would kidnap the children and certain people on lists, while also loving to play mind games with you; 4-8-15-16-23-42 would repeat on an endless signal that a Navy outpost man heard and went to a madhouse for, and that also happens to be the code for a button which the characters don't know if they should or should not push; and then crazy zany maps of dharma hatches appear on the wall when you put the hatch in lock down mode.
It was mysteriously suspenseful and every element of that mystery was just so intriguing and I loved it.

Now we have the story of characters splitting into so many sub-groups we can't count (The Good Others, the Bad Others, the Jack LOSTies, the Locke LOSTies, the Good Boat People, the Bad Boat People, the Whidmore People), all fighting for something, but we know the ultimate outcome thanks to these flashforwards.
Something feels missing.

Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy (Book)

2008-05-02T09:54:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a book called Douglas Adams written by a guy called Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy. Lots of SCI-FI fanatics loved this book. It was later turned into a movie that was kind of random, nonsensical, not very funny, and pointless.

But this is a review of the book, not the movie.

HHGTtG (hooray acronyms) is meant to be read as a comedy book. And as such, it lacks any real form of plot such as the kind you would find in any Star Trek or Star Wars movie. For that matter anyway, the book also lacks any real conflict, tension, or suspense, and the plot is basically pointless until the last quarter when there is a small revelation that puts the whole sequence of events into perspective but then the book just quickly ends. If the book didn't have that revelation, the whole story would basically be, 'earth man gets world destroyed --> hops on a ship of random alien men --> they frolic around the galaxy for no apparent reason --> the end.' Actually, that's pretty much the entire story, in both the book and the movie, minus the plot revelation.

Since there's no real conflict in the story, the movie tried to fix that by adding in a whole subplot where the crew go save one of their fellow kidnapped crew members from ugly aliens on an enemy world. This didn't really save the movie, but just turned out to be a pointless attempt to add a plot to a comedy story that didn't have one.

Speaking of which, the comedy in the book falls under two categories: narrator comedy, where the author goes off into whimsical facts about this odd universe where everything is so ironic, or, situation comedy, where strange things happen to the characters or they make jokes and have quirky mannerisms.
Narrator comedy works fairly well, but to me, it easily seems to fall under the pretentious category and as such, I can't enjoy it as much while the author blabbles off about space ships and galactic wars about a misunderstood transmission from a planet never yet discovered.
The situation comedy works better for me, but most often times the characters seem to fail to be characters just to create these oddly comical scenes for the narrator.

In the end however, I would recommend the book, as it does have its truly funny laugh-out-loud moments, but as a coherent story, there's not much substance here.
Final Score: 8.1/10

Invading Your Dinner Time Television

2008-04-25T14:50:00.000-07:00