Thursday, July 30

Hearthstone - Whoa Whoa Whoa, It's Magic

          Magic: the Gathering is an extremely popular trading card game that began in 1993. It’s gone through some substantial rules changes, and new ones are getting introduced all the time. What’s weird is that no game has ever taken it over. There have been a ton a of trading card games since, like Bakugan, Yu-Gi-Oh!, the Pokemon Trading Card Game, and today’s subject: Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft.
          Don’t worry if you don’t know Warcraft, Hearthstone is simple and has a good tutorial, you probably won’t get lost. I’d recommend playing it, because it’s fun and shiny and new and deep.
          But is Hearthstone a better game than Magic? I’ve invested more than a couple hours in both (although only money in one), and there’s really only one major change Hearthstone makes to the Magic formula. There are minor things it does, like using persistent creature health that end up as memory problems in games like Magic.
          Magic is based on two concepts: 1) There are five colours of cards, each with unique abilities, flavour, and philosophies, and 2) You can only play cards of a colour if you have the correct resources available. Each colour of card requires different resources, so you can’t generally play a deck with all five colours, because you won’t have access to the right resources at the right times.
          This principle is the most major element of the game. Benefits include a strong sense of identity in the mechanics and colours, and opening design space for fixing and accelerating your acquisition of resources. The biggest negative is that sometimes, from no fault of your own, even a deck built as well as possible, with all the right ratios and nicely mapped curve, will draw too many resources and too little action, or the reverse. These events are known as Mana Flood, Mana Screw, and Godammit, again?! Really?!
          Most games that ape the Magic formula try to remove this problem by incorporating resources into other cards. In Yu-Gi-Oh!, you play bigger monsters by discarding smaller ones. In some other games, every card is an action and a resource, and can be played either way.
          There are some interesting arguments for keeping this problem in Magic. I think one of the more important ones, or at least the main argument for why Mana Flood and Screw are good things, is that it’s very helpful for newer players. It’s not fun for them to have it happen to them, but every so often, when I newer player is playing a veteran, the veteran will lose because of it. It’s rare; veterans know what hands to keep, what resources they need when, and just can generally outplay newer players. But, that one time it does happen, when that new player beats someone they look up to, it feels great. This is actually a really important part of multiplayer design. It’s the reason characters like Ike exist in Super Smash Bros., or weapons like the Noob Tube in Call of Duty. These are not the best strategies in any of those games, in fact they’re often some of the worst. But when they work, they work well.
          If every time you stepped into a new multiplayer experience, you just got wrecked by every better player, the game would lose its charm very quickly.
          There are always random elements in games. In Hearthstone, the game I swear I’m talking about, your deck is always shuffled, who goes first is random, and because it’s digital, it can do some random things with greater ease than paper games can. And those all help the balance in a variety of ways. But it does change the resource management. Not as much as other games, but instead of asking players to build a base of resources with cards designed around increasing its efficiency, Hearthstone loses a lot of really interesting design space.
          There are a lot of great things about Hearthstone: it uses small numbers, like most games should, the animations and characters have lots of flavour, the pool of cards is huge, and the player base is varied enough that you can find casual and challenging fun at all levels.  Is it a better game than Magic?  Couldn't say.  Give it a shot, and see what you think.

Wednesday, July 29

Way of the Samurai 3 - Historical Sunglasses

          Japanese culture is very interesting to me.  Not so interesting that I’ve ever really sat down and studied it, more through the occasional glimpses into attitudes an perceptions.  I wasn’t sure what kind of accuracy I would find in Way of the Samurai 3, but I was excited to see what the designers and developers decided was important about experiencing Japanese history.
          Way of the Samurai 3 is the tale of you as a samurai who has just been through a violent and horrific battle, trying to discover what your place in the world was, and what you want it to be now.  It seems to be set pretty concretely within the Warring States period, with that kind of historical chaos reflected in the game.
          Here’s what I did in my playtime: Picked radishes, slept in a shack, defeated a bandit on the road, joined the local regent to shore up castle defenses, fetched supplies, wandered for a while, joined a bandit clan, took over the bandit clan, and made war on the local regent.
          In 3 in-game days.  In Skyrim I’d still have been learning to smith iron.
          Permadeath is a weird concept to me, just because it seems so antithetical to games.  But then, it’s strange that we ever came up with anything else.  Games needed to keep you playing, keep you pumping in quarters or hours of your life.  There was a system representing the number of attempts you had to play, which became lives, which became save points, which has become autosaving.  And now iterative death is back in a big way.
          Way of the Samurai 3 comes off like it’s a Japanese Skyrim experience, promising a growing character and changing open world, but it doesn’t deliver in an accessible way.  When I spend hours building my character, acquiring weapons and slick sunglasses, I want that character to stick around; I’m invested in him.  When he dies and is effectively gone forever, that’s running seriously counter to that desire.
The game has save points but no autosaves.  And I’ve been spoiled by autosaving.  Many of us have died nine or more hours into a play session without saving, and losing all that time is immensely frustrating.  Way of the Samurai just sees that moment as the end of my story.  I can choose to ignore that and go back to my save point, but then I find the whole treatment incongruous.
          Is this a Binding of Isaac style iterative attack on a varied and practicable gamespace, or is it a Skyrim style empowerment fantasy where I, a lowly wounded warrior, grow to be the greatest Samurai in the land, on the backs of my power and servants?  Way of the Samurai 3 balances precariously somewhere between, in a way that I don’t think is meant for me.  I would like to delve into this kind of world, but preferably with options beyond “fight” or “grovel.”

          Extra note, while searching for an image to accompany this post, I saw some nutty things.  I don't think there's really supposed to be any historical accuracy here.

          And while that's silly and neat, it'd be nice if the game would've led me to it and not to the boring fetch quests and characters that I found.

Sunday, July 19

Echochrome - Relentless Motion Sickness

          Echochrome is a perspective-based puzzle game that makes me want to throw up after about five minutes of play. I’ve tried many times and from different angles to see if I’m doing more damage to myself than I need to be, but nothing has helped. It’s the kind of game that makes me need to lie down, not least of which because it’s frustratingly hard.
          The puzzles in Echochrome are clever, and the way it makes me think about space is interesting, but in the opening bits of the game I pressed a button and accidentally skipped the tutorial and could not find my way back to it, so most of my puzzling was left to self-discovery. Fortunately I’d learned enough to have a stable foothold and after a quick lie-down waiting for the room to cease spinning, I got through a few puzzles.
          It really does feel like the game is intentionally trying to make me sick. Even the visual effect for hitting a checkpoint is nauseating.
          The game is clever. It’s fun to figure out all the neat perspective tricks you can do, but I never felt the puzzles were inventive, like the system would let me find my own solution. It always felt like there was a right way I wasn’t finding. You can connect pieces of each area together seamlessly and your character can cross over them, but only if the connection is pixel-perfect. Countless times I would push the Go button and the figure would take a step, see my shoddy work, and turn away in disgust.
          Echochrome has a staggering number of user-designed levels that seem so complex that I have no interest in hunkering down to learn them. It’s that kind of thing that happens to new Magic players when they hear about Legacy. I don’t know if the tutorial would’ve helped my feel much less stupid. The basics aren’t complex, but their iterative execution is intolerably precise and slow, made worse by a goal time for each puzzle.
          As far as pure puzzle games go, try Professor Layton. Those puzzles have great variation, theme, and a hint system that lets you decide how important a top score is.
          Echochrome is cool, really, it’s just not what I want. I imagine it was hard to make, and its visual trickery is a lot of fun, but it doesn’t give me those great “Aha!” moments like other puzzles seem to.  I feel bad that the makers clearly worked on realizing this vision, and I couldn't even give it two hours.  But it's just one of those things.  Some people can't watch 3D movies, and I can't play Echochrome.

Tuesday, July 14

Lone Survivor - A First Foray

          I don’t know that this is a good intro to the horror genre.  I’ve played Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil 4 in the past, but the former I played with a friend so we could laugh and be afraid together, and the second is really more of an action game.  Horror games have always been fascinating to me, this idea of exploring something that’s genuinely awful, something that express a fundamental weakness of being alive.  The Souls games touch on these themes and have some attractive body horror, but I find them more interesting than frightening.
          So I chose Lone Survivor as the first of my horror excursions because its art style made me think I could handle it.  And I can, for the most part.  I even went so far as to obey the horror rituals of turning off all the lights, cranking the sound, and playing alone at night.
          The game is freaky.  There’s a great sequence in a tunnel early on that shows me just how intricate creating horror is.  Pixelated or no, the creeping darkness, shlupping monsters, and cacophonous soundtrack create some real fear deep in my gut.  This game reminds me why I get afraid of the dark.
          Lone Survivor also does a great job of showing me what a real engagement curve looks like.  In most games, I can get a feel for what’s happening.  When I have to backtrack in a Zelda or Souls game, I know what enemies will be where and what they’ll be doing.  But Lone Survivor changes its enemy layout in ways that keep me cautious and on edge.
          Lone Survivor is about the horror I can see coming.  It doesn’t actually work on surprise or jump scares.  It takes the time to show the player that something’s ahead, and lets them fret and stress over what that thing might be.  There’s one scenario where you can see an enemy through the barred window on a door.  The enemy isn’t significantly different from the others encountered so far,  except that it’s easily twice their size.  And the first time you see it is not the time you need to interact with it.  It’s a promise.  It’s the game telling you that this thing is coming, and letting you panic for all the time you need.
          Silent Hill 2, which is lauded as one of the best horror titles of all time, does the same thing with the first appearance of its iconic monster, Pyramid Head.  There is a cutscene introduction to the monster, but your very first encounter is just seeing it standing there, behind some bars, unmoving, waiting for you.
          Lone Survivor has some mechanics that I don’t like as much, like upkeep of hunger, thirst, and sleep.  I’m not sure of all the effects surrounding these stats, but they provide more annoyance than the tension and desperation they’re supposed to evoke.
          Otherwise, the game is a great collection of mystery and horror.  The few NPCs are appropriately creepy, you get a great sense that your character is probably more than a little wrong himself, and the world keeps getting more upsetting and twisted.  I haven’t yet finished the game but I do want to go back to it.  I feel like it’ll give me an unfamiliar sense of satisfaction, a sort of relief that I think is a valuable first real step into the genre.

Friday, July 10

Stick it to The Man: A Silly Diversion

          I really thought Stick it to The Man was on my list. I played the whole thing through, I kept the best notes of any game I played this year! I’m not going to cross anything on my list out, but I played this game, and damned if I’m not going to talk about it.
          Stick it to The Man is a sort of spiritual sequel to Psychonauts, a fascinating game about a kid who runs away from the circus to go to a summer camp for psychics. It’s wacky, clever fun that churns out so many inventive scenarios and characters that it’d be impossible for me not to love it. Stick it to The Man is a game about a working-class shlub who has an alien land on his head which gives him mind reading and the abilities to pull thoughts and items into his head as stickers, which he can then implant into others’ minds or the real world.
          The first thing that struck me about Stick it to The Man is its ugliness. The game is aesthetically consistent, put people tend to look kind of upsetting, with black bags under their eyes and bulbous purpled lips. The world is mainly 2-D, and it apparently made of paper, which it why things turn into stickers, I guess? The whole premise doesn’t have as much internal consistency as Psychonauts manages, but it’s never enough to break the experience.
          The gameplay is weirdly designed to me. Each area consists of a series of puzzles with an Adventure game sort of logic, but limited enough in variation to be reasonable. Basically it’s find Key A that finds Key B that finds Key C, and so on. The puzzles are logical enough, but the real thing I noticed about them is how they are laid out. Each area is at least somewhat free-roaming, and the first Key in the chain of moves I mentioned above is always the furthest away, or the one you are least likely to get first. By the time you have it, you’ve collected four or five other bits of the chain, and you get to end the area with a satisfying series of entertaining scenes where you see how a man undergoing electro-shock treatment can charge a Car Battery in his mind, or how turning TVs to specific channels get the watchers to think of certain items.
          Puzzles are hard to design well. As a guy who’s played D&D for a fair number of years, puzzles are hard to fit in without making them boring or inscrutable. I don’t know which of those two it worse. Sometimes it’s tempting to resort to riddles, but riddles are almost never easy to figure out. You either know the answer or you don’t, and so the party sits around for an hour, tediously taking shots in the dark until they get it by chance.
          A puzzle is a problem you have all the information for, and the joy in a puzzle comes from what is called “The Aha! Moment.” You know this feeling, it’s when you do a little fist pump when a jigsaw puzzle piece fits where you thought it would.
          Stick it to The Man illustrates this very well. Before you get all the pieces to your puzzle, you will have little to know idea why they aren’t fitting together. But when you get that last piece, you have this cascade of “Aha! Moments,” and the experience really comes together. There’s enough varition in the way these puzzles are set up that it’s never rote, it’s always neat to explore the areas and find the new item. Plus, the game is only about three hours long, so you can knock it out pretty quickly.
          I like looking at and analyzing puzzles, but the real enjoyment of solving them usually is watching the funny little interactions and strange logic that brings you from puzzle too puzzle. Inflate a clown’s dad with helium, plant a target on his belly, fire his son at him out of a cannon, and steal his proud smile at the end. Yep. Ryan North is credited with the writing, and it largely hits home. It has a couple problems comedy often does, but finds a nice middle ground for its plot twists and fun recurring characters. Charting the life of a snarky nurse who gets zombified and forced to sing show-tunes is the kind of inventiveness that made Psychonauts so great.
          There are a couple of moments of tonal break that really took me out of the experience, but overall I liked my experience with Stick it to The Man, and if you’re looking for a quirky gaming experience in between Tales from the Borderlands episodes, you’ll like it too.

Tuesday, July 7

Chrono Trigger: An Element of Time

          I started gaming in the PS1 era.  My first two platforms were a PS1 and a Gameboy I covered with Pokemon stickers.  I had an aunt and uncle that owned an NES, and I would play the heck out of Super Mario Bros 3 whenever I was there.  But I never got to experience the glory days of the NES or SNES.
          The more I go through this list, the more I realize what important machines they were.  There must have been a bunch of crap for them, but so many of the games are held up as classics.  Even the graphical styles have made significant comebacks.  I’m taking too long.  The point I want to get to is that I’m sad I don’t have the time and patience I did when I was younger.  Or even just the time.  I use this excuse a lot, many people my age do, but it really feels like I could've marathon-ed my way through Chrono Trigger in a weekend.
          And I think that I would.  Chrono Trigger really has a lot of great things going for it.  It is fusion of all the understandings and techniques gaming was building upon at the time, when the turn-based RPG could rule the world.  Chrono Trigger is an educated game, it has learned well from its predecessors.  It even has an understanding of the gaming mindset in a way uncharacteristic for its time.
          An example:  Early in the game you visit a carnival, where all kinds of thing are going on.  NPCs are wandering about, people say random things, you can loot garbage for no reason, etc.  It’s a pretty typical setup.  A little more than an hour later, you are brought on trial, and all those NPCs show up as character witnesses to testify against you and your thieving, evil, gamer ways.  I realize now that gaming is slowly moving away from this style, and I'm wondering if the twist will have the same kind of effect the next time the game is remade.
          It’s also a more creative game than one would typically expect for its time.  The time travelling wins big for me just by going to a post apocalyptic future, but it even plays great games with moving between relatively close periods to emphasize the progress of the world.  It tells several grand and small stories at once, and the density is one of those things I love about 80 hour RPGs.
          I can see why Chrono Trigger is the classic it is, why the combo-and-position based combat stands out against the typical lining-up-on-either-side-of-the-field model, and the game eschews a lot of sillier trends of the time, or just improves on the general experience of the genre.
          The game isn’t perfect.  It has good variety and some nice twists in style, but there are still times when I found myself grinding, and I was generally unimpressed with the level and dungeon design.  It may be the compilation of a lot of great learning, but it shows just how much further games had, and have, to go.  I can't wait until I look back at Dark Souls as tedious and uninspired.  That will be a great time for games.
          Also, it’s a strange thing to mention, but the DS has a specific text it uses in almost every game.  It’s bland and utilitarian, but in a game so clearly built on older aesthetics it stands out and really ended up taking me out of the experience.
          Chrono Trigger is good, and worthy of its place in game history, but it’s not the kind of game I’m excited to play more of right away.  I know I’ve been saying this a lot, and maybe it’s the thesis of this project, but Chrono Trigger created trends I’ve seen iterated on over and over.  I wish I could be more solidly in that mindset, in that time, but I can’t.  I can’t be someone who didn’t play Bloodborne earlier this year, and I can’t be a person who has the time in his life to perfect a game asking so much of me.  So, apologies to Chrono Trigger... It’s not you, it's me.

Sunday, July 5

The Binding of Isaac: And Me, to My Screen

  When I put Isaac on my list, I really thought I was going to dislike it.  The art style was all I really had to base my opinion on, but it reminded me of games like Alien Hominid, which were fine, but always too silly and chaotic for me to feel like I was actually developing.  Maybe I was just bad at those games.  And trying to get used to WASD is Isaac is no picnic either.  I have never been a PC gamer, but with my recent purchase, I hope that will really change.
  The Binding of Isaac doesn’t have to be as interesting as it is.  It’s put a lot of work into its flavour and framing devices.  Isaac is a young boy whose mother hears the voice of God tell her that her son is evil and must be killed.  Isaac flees his murderous mother and drops down a trap door in his room, into a series of descending prisons filled with shit and horror.  That’s not hyperbole; it’s all blood, shit, and tears.
  The game plays from a top-down perspective, and reigns as maybe grand ruler of all Roguelike games.  A Roguelike incoporates elements like permanent death, procedurally generated rooms and layouts, and generally builds itself on replayability.  The number of items, secrets, enemies, and bosses is a impressive just in its scope`.  I’m playing the Rebirth rerelease of Isaac, so there’s even more to be found than when the first release took the community by storm.
The Binding of Isaac walks a strange line between mindless fun and dark, upsetting ideas.  As I understand it, the game’s subject matter comes largely from the experiences of its creator, and it’s hard not to see all the messed up parallels to what could be real life, and how a child might have to contextualize those events.  There are upsetting items and upgrades like “Mom’s Coin Purse” which drops an assortment of pills around you, or a buddy character representative of your stillborn baby sister.  Is it tasteless?  I don’t know.  The gameplay doesn’t really care.  When I see a syringe item, I immediately jam it in my head, because it’s likely to give me a lot of great boosts.  I down pills not knowing what they are, I’m excited when I get blood clots and torn skin, and I just think of that stillborn sister as a friend who gives me additional attacks.
Maybe I’m only now really stepping back and thinking about all the things these elements could mean.  They’re probably not all part of the creators’ lives, but many of these things exist, and many people have to find ways to deal with them.  I can have a great time playing Isaac, and I understand how upsetting the subject matter is.  If Isaac is trying to make this point, then I worry about how well it’s understood through the addicting gameplay.  But then, the point isn’t subtle.  Blind devotion to anything is harmful and dangerous to you and anyone around you.  Maybe even being blindly devoted to the play of a game without reminding yourself of the larger context in which that games takes place.