The Dust Forms Words

Portal 2: A Wider Aperture

2011-05-10T13:12:00.008+10:00

Here is a truth: that less, quite often, is more.

I mean, how do you write about a pretty darn okay game? How do you do that?

It's easy to write about good games. You set the relevant knobs to "effusive", dig out your box of superlatives, and try and pretend that the entirety of human existence was nary but a prelude to this moment.

And bad games write themselves. You anthropomorphise them, so that one cloven foot is brutally kicking puppies and one malformed paw is enthusiastically saluting Hitler and everything in between is modelled after the style of a particularly unintelligent professional footballer. This is called journalism, and I have heard that in some uncultured backwaters they pay you for it.

But what about the also-rans? Where in the dark night of hyperbole is there room for a star to shine only dimly?

So the critical consensus was that Portal - the original, this is - was frikkin' awesome. I think we are agreed on that. We took a census, or something. And I think we are also agreed that we love it so much that if creators Valve were to come along and leave something on our doorstep - some orphaned and unloved child - that they had chosen to call Portal 2, we would take that child into our home and try to pretend we loved it as much as our other progeny. I think we are on common ground here.

But is Portal 2 really any good? Can it measure up to its older sibling? Do we lovingly hug it each night and sit with it as it falls asleep, or do we just kind of wave at it from the doorway while waiting for this week's episode of Community to download? These are the questions that occupy sentient minds in the lonely hours, and they are questions that demand answers.

Well, Portal 2 is an awkward child. For one thing it's fatter than the original, and for another thing it's lazier. Thirdly, I'm running out of steam on this whole kid-based metaphor so let's abandon it and cut straight to the chase. Portal 2 is a good game, but it's not a great game, and the reason why is that we already played the original Portal, and we didn't need more.

Portal had three killer ideas. One: the portal gun. Two: GLADOS. Three: the design aesthetic. That's what we're here for. Geometric white rooms that we can portal across to give GLADOS the finger.

Portal 2 has two great additions: Stephen Merchant as the voice of a dimwitted AI, and a thing called Conversion Gel. Oh, there are other newcomers, but they're not great. They're just there. They're window dressing to distract you from the central truth that 70% of Portal 2 consists of repetitive busywork to keep you occupied while the voice actors regurgitate their dialogue.

It is, to be fair, good dialogue. GLADOS and her turrets are now supported by a whole range of new characters, both major and minor, and pretty much everything they utter is gold. That's the game, right there, and it's the chief reason that the thing is easily recommendable to just about anyone. You're going to love both the script and the delivery.

But the gameplay falls into two categories: repetitive, and iterative. Either you're doing something you've done before, or you're doing something that's similar to something you've done before. You can combine these two words into one new word called "repetetiterative" but there's no good reason to do so. Repetetiteration is great if you're training someone to learn a task, but when you're following a title as revolutionary as Portal it's disappointing that nobody thunk up anything as clever as the actual portals themselves. The bridges, tunnels and gels that the game dispenses are all variations on puzzle-genre staples, and the portal-enabled twists on them are either trivial or under-explored.

The standout is the Conversion Gel. It's a sticky white paint that gets pumped out of big Mario-style plumbing tubes. Anything it touches becomes a surface which supports portals. This would have been redundant in the first game, but what's new in Portal 2 is that it hoards portalable surfaces like a conservative politician hoards public school funding, only dispensing the goodies when compelled by the combination of absolute necessity and outraged parents demanding to know why their children are getting IT training on a BBC Acorn. Normally in Portal 2 the rooms are made of rusting brown portal-averse metal, with only the occasional frosting of white portal-friendly wallpaper. And yes, often this makes the solutions blindingly obvious - just put the portals on the only place they can possibly go.

So when you get access to the Conversion Gel, it feels great. It feels empowering. Yes, you're still running a fairly linear puzzle, but you're offered the illusion that suddenly you're making the rules. The very first time you get the gel, you're offered the chance to completely paint a large and complex room with it, and it feels great.

And then, of course, you hardly ever see the damn stuff again. So that was nice while it was there, I guess.

This is the dark side of Valve's famous iterative playtesting process. When they get every build of the game played again and again under controlled conditions, yes, it it lets them polish the experience until it shines. But at the same time it can feel like the player has been koshed in a dark alley and had all their "agency" and "free will" stolen by thieves and blaggards. Portal 2 feels very much like one of its new innovations - the "edgeless safety cube" (a ball).

Here is the thing: Valve already made a perfect game about portals. It was called Portal. There was not a single thing in that game to fault. It was flawless. How do you improve on that? How do you expand on that? You can't. A delicious chicken carbonara doesn't look any tastier when you wallpaper your entire house with it.

Portal 2 is good. Portal 2 is very good. But given its antecedents, very good isn't enough to stop it being disappointing.

Less, quite often, is more.

In Brief: Heavy Rain

2011-05-06T12:46:00.004+10:00

This is a nitpick. Let's get that straight. Heavy Rain is an excellent game and everyone should play it.

After all, to really bitch about a game, you have to love it first.

So with that in mind, here is the thing: for a mystery game, Heavy Rain is awful light on the mystery.

I don't mean the big mystery, of course. The game wants you to wonder who the Origami Killer is, and you do wonder, despite the obvious freaking clues pointing at him with giant metaphorical neon arrows, mostly because the game actively doesn't just mislead you but rather actively lies about key events.

But it is a big mystery. It's a mystery that gets introduced about five scenes in and isn't resolved until the final act. Everything in between involves gathering clues, and talking to suspects, and (in the case of journalist Madison) being threatened with rape on three separate occasions. There's car chases and fistfights and a nasty bit of business involving a choice of surgical implements, but you don't resolve that central mystery, or even any subset of it, until right at the end, even on a perfect playthrough.

So what's keeping the player going? Where's the payoff? Scene after scene goes by with no questions answered. I can only speak for myself, but I found it exhausting. After you quicktime your way through your third desperate knife battle in as many conversations, and find yourself still with no new information, you're a long way from being in the coveted "just one more level" zone of addictive play.

So this is what I mean when I say it sucks at the mystery. It needs little questions. It needs little answers. It needs them scattered up and down the spine of the game, because if your gameplay is narrative then you need to offer narrative rewards.

And the questions are there. What's the deal with the cop's addictions? I don't know. The game doesn't explain. Why can't Madison sleep? What's the significance of the killer's poem? Heavy Rain throws these issues out there, and even has them drive plot points, but then seems to forget about them, or at least think that explanations aren't necessary. Properly handled, these could have given the game the sense of structure that occasionally feels missing. They could at least have turned the grim march towards the endgame into something that felt less like a joyless descent into failure.

Heavy Rain is a huge improvement on Fahrenheit, the last game from David Cage and his team at Quantic Dream. But it's still got a way to go in learning to tell a satisfying story. I'm looking forward to their next attempt. Will they continue to improve? Really, that's the mystery that's keeping me engaged here.

Burnout Paradise

2010-02-06T22:00:00.001+11:00

I know that the point of blogging is to present opinions, but sometimes you just have to say, "I don't know what to make of that." For instance, did you know that singer/songwriter Tori Amos was initially approached to take the role of the female lead in George Lucas' awful Howard the Duck movie? No? And... it's kind of hard to know what, exactly, that goes to show.

That's the case with Burnout Paradise. I can't say it's not terrible, because it is. It's absolutely terrible. But I can't say it's not brilliant. Because it's got brilliant coming out of the seams. It's a horrible mistake and a wonderful success and an abortion and a revelation all in one. And you'd think that that should in some way elevate it to the magical heights of Gaming Olympus alongside such balls-out conceptual apocalypses as Metal Gear Solid and Mirror's Edge - but it can't even make its mind up on that and resolves instead to be enjoyable without ever being breathtaking.

The Burnout franchise is a simple thing. You drive a car; the car goes very fast, and often it crashes. The crashes are detailed, epic, and almost pornographic - if lovingly rendered shots of twisted metal are what turns you on. Crashing isn't a punishment for failure as it would be in some games; it's where the game begins, lives, sires children, and dies. You crash, your flailing wreckage takes out a bunch of your rivals, and then you're teleported back to the road with a rolling start, ready to wreak some more carnage.

So Burnout Paradise has the basics in place. There's cars, and there's fast, and there's crashing. The difference from previous installments is the context. Where Burnout Takedown and Revenge (and the apallingly bad Dominator) had presented the gameplay as a series of isolated events, Paradise smushes it all together into a single fully-explorable city scattered with car-oriented things to do. And then makes it all... online.

A persistent multiplayer sandbox themed around the concept of high-speed metal smashing violently into hard objects? Let me ask you this: where do I sign up? Right? What is there not to love? And to a large extent that's not sarcastic. The driving action is solid, there's a heap to do, and the transition between online and offline play is orgasmically simple and sleekly elegant.

There's a problem, though, and it might be apparent from what the developers had to say about Paradise. Said Alex Ward, the game's creative director, "To create truly next-generation gameplay, we needed to create a truly next-generation game from the ground up." It's refreshing to know they were working from the ground up, rather than from left to right or inside to out (those are common beginner mistakes), but I challenge you to find a part of that sentence that isn't composed of buzzwords and cliches. What happened to, "To create fun, exciting gameplay, we needed to come up with solid concepts and then playtest the crap out of them"?

The most egregious sin is the complete castration of the crashing mechanics. Ability to steer your wrecked car into competitors? Gone. Ability to detonate your wreck to nuke nearby rivals? Gone. Much loved Crashbreaker mode, wherein you're challenged to score maximum property damage in a single epic multi-vehicular pileup? Gone - or, more accurately, transfigured into a decent but rather brain-dead mode called Showtime, wherein we learn that a wrecked car cartwheeling down a highway for upwards of ten minutes actually can be more than a little dull.

Another problem is the assymetrical layout of the map. In designing Paradise City, effort was made to include all the classic Burnout locales - beach, highway, countryside, downtown, and mountains - but the result is a map dense with detail on the eastern (city) side and packed with long stretches of nothing on the western (mountainous) side. All events in Paradise City have their finish line at one of the eight cardinal directions of the map, so when a race leaves you washed up at the Observatory in the north-west or the Wind Farm in the West, it's often a long drive eastwards before you can find anything worth doing.

While we're on the map - the serpent in this particular paradise - it's hard to picture the designers sitting around and saying to each other, "I think we can all agree, there's nothing that spices up high-speed racing like pausing the game to see whether you should take the first left or the second." I'm not sure what kind of a brain-spasm led to making "navigating" a part of the basic gameplay of Burnout but it's about as welcome as a feminist at a pro-wrestling match. When you lose events - as you will, frequently - you'll find that although about 10% of the time it's legitimately due to your poor driving, the other 90% of your frustrations will be missing turn-offs, taking sub-par routes, and accidentally driving into "short-cuts" that exit onto different roads going in wildly different directions.

The last of the conceptual problems with the game is the Smashes and Crashes. Throughout the city, giant red billboards and tiny yellow fences are set up. Each time you blast through one, the game gleefully informs you you've collected another Smash (or Crash), and when you hit these things while barrelling down a previously unexplored back-road at 100 miles per hour it's the perfect embodiment of high-speed craziness.

Unfortunately, there's 120 billboards and 400 barricades and you're encouraged to "catch 'em all". Once you're down to your last couple of dozen it's a process of spotting one from a distance, stopping your car, and then slowly circling the block working out how to get to it. The game helpfully tells you which parts of the city the missing collectables are in, but that doesn't change the fact that verbs like "stopping", "reversing" and "driving slowly" are pretty much antithetical to all that Burnout traditionally holds dear.

All of those complaints aside - and they're sizeable complaints - there's still a very solid game under the hood here. Events like "Road Rage" and "Marked Man", that involve violently shoving other cars off the road (or resisting their attempts to return the favour) are brutal, adrenaline-fuelled fun. Anything that launches your car into the air is excellent, whether or not you end up landing safely. There's over 75 vehicles to collect, and each one feels unique and identifiable. The soundtrack's reasonably okay, although the decision to make "Paradise City" play over each and every iteration of the game's endless opening menus is pretty damn inexcusable. And the truckload of free patches and downloadable content that the developers showered the game with long after its release is just this side of Valve's gold standard in ongoing support for middle-of-the-road games.

Two elements particularly stand out as genius. One is relatively simple, which is the Road Rules conceit. Any time you start driving down one of the game's many, many streets, a little timer starts running. You can totally ignore it, or you can floor the accelerator in the hopes of setting a new speed record (or "Road Rule") down that length of road. Your records are stored online and can be compared against the game's par times or the best times of yourself and the people on your friends list. The leaderboards are seamlessly integrated, showing you your friend's best time for whatever road you're currently driving along with a selection of other speed records via a constant text crawl at the bottom of the screen. It's a brilliant, "Care about this, or not," stratagem that makes the long drives back and forth between start and finish lines a lot more bearable.

The other is the online. An in-game interface keyed to the d-pad lets you find multiplayer sessions while driving, and when you enter them you do so without any transition - you're still in the same car with the same velocity on the same stretch of road, only now there's other players. The game tracks heaps of stats about other players and isn't afraid to share them with you in a variety of ways - most prominently through temporarily updating your local leaderboards to include the people you're playing against, but also through pump text at the start of races where your rivals' intimidating takedown and win/loss records are handed out with the enthusiasm of a professional sports promoter. The host can initiate races and other events that automatically gather up everyone in the session, or they can declare one of about 500 "freeburn challenges" which ask players to accumulate a total amount of airtime between them, or all perform a particular jump, or all meet in some ludicrous location like "the top of the waterworks". They range from trivially easy to epically hard and data on what to do, how to do it, and how close you are is well presented and engaging. Or of course you could drive around and smash into each other. That's fine too.

In the end Burnout Paradise is less about the cinematic road violence of previous entries in the franchise, and more about capturing the spirit of all those children who liked to take two toy cars and ram them into each other. It's a sandbox in the truest sense of the word, where the developers have given you moving parts and challenged you to find your own fun. It's a dismal failure as a Burnout game but a raging success as an accessible, understandable experiment in social play. It seems to keep getting $10 cheaper every three months so pretty soon it'll be basically free, which leaves you with no good reason not to check out a copy, I guess. And, y'know, try and beat my times.

Grand Theft Auto IV

2010-01-29T22:00:00.000+11:00

It's tempting to believe your own hype. If you're Mike Myers coming off the success of Wayne's World, Austin Powers, and Shrek, you can honestly believe that spending five years perfectly honing the art of the fart joke really is a kind of genius. If you're hotshot producer McG, creator of The O.C. and Supernatural, you can think that Terminator 5 and The Pussycat Dolls Present: Girlicious are high-concept masterpieces that a salivating public desperately needs to consume.

And if you're Rockstar Games, you can come to believe that people buy Grand Theft Auto games to experience their gritty realism, superlative storytelling, and deep, believable characters.

I say this not to denigrate the GTA legacy. The strange little trilogy consisting of GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas are the definitive gaming experience of the last decade. Most games would settle for any one of exciting high-speed driving, visceral explosive mayhem, or a vast and lovingly detailed urban playground to explore, and GTA has, up until recently, consistently nailed each of those elements with laserlike precision.

Sure, GTA is a franchise about stealing cars, driving them very fast, and then blowing some shit up. But it does it on an epic scale. Which is where, I think, the brain crazies eventually set in. Because it's an easy bit of carelessness to think that an epic scope requires an epic story.

This is something that GTA developer Rockstar very much wanted to do. They wanted to create a protagonist as deep and as complex as their faux-American sandbox cities. They wanted to introduce gamers to a man whose pain and angst they could virtually palpate, even as they fired an endless stream of rocket-propelled grenades at police helicopters. A man who aspired to the heavens even as he stuffed dollar bills into the G-strings of coked-up strippers. This is Niko Bellic, recent eastern-bloc immigrant determined to chase the American Dream and outrun his past as a violent madman - no matter how many innocent civilians he has to beat to death with a baseball bat along the way.

What's being aimed for here is tragedy. It's the story of a man held hostage by his past and repeatedly sodomised by circumstances beyond his control. In the PR for Grand Theft Auto IV it played out pretty attractively, but in execution it was something different. Rockstar promised their game would make tragic violin music play in our heads, and we were all pretty excited about that until they showed us the skull drills and the tiny, tiny violinists. This was not a game of subtle storytelling. It was the equivalent of opera rendered in musical farts; lowbrow, off-putting, and hard to remain in the room with after the first five minutes.

"I'm not gay," declares Niko's cousin Roman in one cutscene. That's good to know; it's not really something we had any lingering questions about, but as exposition goes it's pretty to the point. No one asked him about his sexuality; it's something Roman volunteered. Everyone loves a chatty character, right? Two missions later, Roman says it again, and the point becomes clear - homosexuality is hilarious. Homosexuality, and also "titties", which Roman takes the opportunity to discuss every time he opens his mouth.

This isn't observational comedy. Nobody's suggesting human sexuality is wryly humorous. This isn't a stand-up comedian enquiring, "So, what's the deal with gay people?" It's that schoolyard brand of funny where merely using the word "titties" is enough to provoke sniggers, year-in, year-out. You don't have to understand what "titties" are - the important thing is that everyone else is laughing, and you should too.

That's - let's be fair - exactly what GTA has been serving up in lion-sized portions for more than ten years now. It's nothing new to say that Rockstar is endlessly happy to use the words "woman" and "prostitute" interchangeably, and off-handedly equate "gay" with "mentally unwell". They paint their entire cast with the same psychopathic brush, whether they be male, female, or Jamaican, so there's some equality there, but you're still left with the impression that it's less of a deliberate artchoice than simply that they don't know any better.

Shallowness has never been the bane of a good game. The Mario Bros would not be noticeably improved by attempts to subvert Mario's broad Italian stereotypicality. Pacman requires neither motivation nor backstory (animated TV series notwithstanding). And similarly, an optional layer of depth is rarely anything but a boon to a game. It's great to know that Mega Man has a rich and storied continuity, and at the same time it's perfectly okay to just not care.

Where it all goes wrong is when the developer ties you to your chair and demands at gunpoint that you take them seriously. "This is modern day Shakespeare," screams Rockstar, waving their snub-nosed pistol alarmingly for emphasis. "This is the finest goddamn story ever told by humans. In the future, when Facebook replaces Wikipedia as the font of all knowledge, the group entitled Dictionary Definition Of Pathos will have pictures of our game in its gallery." And then they pause, and add, "Titties," and snigger.

The game opens with a close up of a fat man having sex - because sexuality in the overweight is inherently hilarious - and moves quickly to the apparently unrelated exploits of our protagonist, Niko Bellic. Niko's a man who's just made the journey from Somewhere-That-Used-To-Be-Called-The-Soviet-Union to the balmy shores of America, and is quickly disappointed to find it's not quite the land of milk and honey he'd envisaged. He's pretty conflicted about what to do with his life, and he'll talk about that conflict in endless, vague detail as he takes long, dull drives across the city, goes on extended, half-assed fetch quests for people he can barely stand, and engages a succession of girlfriends on chorelike excursions the game refers to as "dates". Those dates! Never has the process of trying to get laid felt so mechanical and unexciting.

It's GTA as told by a cut-rate Martin Scorsese, where action and plot progression are implied but not seen, and gameplay and interaction are replaced by long, slow cinematic pans, and the sight of neon lights reflected in dark puddles on rain-slick streets tells more than clear goals and understandable missions ever could. The sandbox is gone, and while you may briefly believe you're driving around a large, living city, in reality you're chained to the wheels of a giant, diabolical Simon Says. GTA IV has a series of hoops, and by gum, you're going to jump through them.

The awful mission design is best evidenced by an early job given to you by a Jamaican acquaintance. You're given a description of what you have to do, but it's in Jamaican so thickly-accented that even Niko confesses to not having understood it. Which is a great joke, until it's time to actually complete the mission. Lucky there's some monosyllabic onscreen mission text to get you going. It's a five minute drive from where you get the mission to where the associated gameplay actually starts (a drive that must be repeated each and every time you fail out of the mission), and when you get there you're shown a drug dealer and asked to "follow him without being seen".

This is the game's first on-foot tailing mission, and there's no explanation of the relevant mechanics. The goal has nothing to do with "not being seen" (the dealer looks straight ahead at all times with neck-brace intensity) and more to do with staying within about four to fifteen metres of the dealer while he moves. The limits of the safe tailing zone are not explained, or graphically indicated in any way. When you fail out, there's no indication of what you did wrong - the dealer just starts running, and after a while you lose him.

The dealer's path is a masterpiece of bad game design. It takes him down a back alley, into a residential apartment building and out of the same building through its backdoor, and then across a road to enter yet another building, where he eventually ascends to a third-floor apartment. Who does that? Who walks through somebody else's house to get to their own? Moreover, you could have reached the final destination quite handily by car, but the game for unspecified reasons makes you do it on foot.

The mission ends with a sudden and violent firefight against a half-dozen heavily armed thugs. It transitions from stealth to combat without warning, and of course when the ambush inevitably kills you it's back to the start for another five minute drive and extended stealth sequence before you can try the fight again. It's terrible, but what's more terrible is the central conceit - that the task is put before the outcome. The goal of the mission is to eliminate a nest of drug dealers. A good game would give you the end goal and ask you to find a way to execute it, with tailing this dealer being a strong contender for the dominant strategy. A bad game - which this is - orders you with laughable sternness to do some tailing and then asks at the end, "By the way, can you kill these dudes now?"

What happened to driving around and blowing some stuff up? What happened to those games that revelled in letting you bring your own unique style to a non-stop orgy of velocity and violence? How did the sun-drenched fantasies of Vice City and San Andreas metamorphose into the dingy, depressing muck of GTA IV? I was buckled in for sixty hours of fun but the game I ended up playing couldn't have been more pretentious if it had been wearing a beret.

It sickens me - it physically sickens me - the critical acclaim that many outlets showered GTA IV in. Not every game needs to be Citizen Kane, but even in the shallower end of the art pool there's a difference between something as fun as The Rock and something as misguided as Dead Silence starring Donnie Wahlberg. This isn't big dumb fun, it's big ponderous tripe. It's bloated and self-important and good heavens we can do better than this, people.

It's appropriate, I guess in a way. And all I can say is that whoever stole the GTA franchise and took it on a joyride through the unnattractive clums of GTA IV had a whole bunch more fun stealing it than I did stumbling across its burned out chassis afterwards.

Games of the Decade: #5 - #1

2010-01-22T22:00:00.000+11:00

#5: The World Ends With You (2008)
Nintendo DS
There is more innovation in The World Ends With You than in the rest of the decade of gaming put together. In every single gameplay mechanic it flies so far away from what we've seen before that it's daunting. And yet it is without misstep; from an adjustable difficulty scale directly tied to rewards, to a system wherein you both influence and are influenced by city-wide fashion, to the controversial dual-screen combat mechanics, its eccentricities are both brilliant and consummately executed. And it uses them to tell a story about individuality, teamwork, and culture that's thoroughly worth telling.

#4: Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001)
PlayStation 2
Its sequels were equally outstanding games but it's Metal Gear Solid 2 that to me had the greatest impact of the franchise. There is nothing about Metal Gear that is small in scale; like a gaming Titanic, everything is epic, historic, possessed of a gravitas that slams you in the chest at every opportunity. It's utterly unafraid to abandon its own past successes and explore new ground, it's packed with hidden detail, brilliant twists, and thrilling set-pieces, and the production values put Hollywood to shame. Metal Gear knows how good it is; the game is confident that were no one to ever play it, it would still remain one of the greatest games ever made, and that confident shines through every polygon and infuses every line of dialogue, leaving you awestruck before it.

#3: Dragon Age: Origins (2009)
XBox 360, PC, PlayStation 3
I'm still upset about the callousness of Dragon Age's ending but my outrage would not be possible had not the proceedings up to that point been so perfect. The characters who populate Dragon Age - and particularly your party companions - are the best written characters to ever appear in a video game. You care about them as real people. They are multi-faceted, never stereotypical (well, maybe Oghren), and their approval or disapproval of your actions really matters on a powerful, emotional level. And on top of that the game constantly presents choices that matter - not because of their impacts on the game (although they do, unfailingly, have impacts) - but because you're left knowing that you made that choice. Real meaning comes from within.

#2: Portal (2007)
PC, XBox 360, PlayStation 3
No one hates Portal. No one. I don't think there is anyone who was ever born who hates Portal. It's so incredibly rare for the gaming community to come together as a single voice around one game and say, "This is ours." And yet Portal manages it. It's not the portal puzzles themselves, although those are certainly decent, but something about its short, self-assured scope, its mood, its dry humour, and its now ubiquitous cake references and ending theme. We all love Portal, and absent being given a sequel truly eye-gouging in awfulness, I think we probably always will.

#1: World of Warcraft (2004)
PC
There's no real doubt about it - this is World of Warcraft's decade. It's the game that ate a genre - for five years it's had no serious competitors in the Western MMO world, with everyone else squabbling over the meagre second place scraps. It's conquered gaming culture, it's enervated the mainstream, it's inculcated, launched, and raked in the profits of a multi-media marketing empire. It's the single game responsible for the majority of the profits of Vivendi's gaming division (when such a thing still existed) and the driving force behind the merger of Blizzard and Activision into the monstrosity I like to call Blactivision. It's been parodied in print, in song, in film, and in a memorable episode of South Park, it's the worldwide face of online gaming, and as 2010 rolls around despite being five years old in an industry that punishes titles not released this month it's still trending upwards.

Games of the Decade: #10 - #6

2010-01-19T22:00:00.000+11:00

#10: FarCry 2 (2008)
Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC
There is nothing quite like FarCry 2. Certainly there was nothing in its flawed predecessors to suggest this game was coming. It simultaneously operates on many levels - as a free-roaming sandbox game and as a top notch FPS certainly, but also as a breathtaking safari through the African savannah and as a suprisingly deep and introspective meditation on the cycle of violence that plagues that continent. Long after the game finishes it's the quiet moments that will stay with you, the times spent in the long grass, vision tinged yellow with malaria, as this astonishing virtual world turns around you and without you.

#9: Prince of Persia (2008)
XBox 360, PlayStation 3, PC
The Sands of Time games were perfectly good games, but the 2008 Prince of Persia is a masterpiece. From its opening moments it has a command of storytelling, of metaphor, of pacing that few games can even comprehend from a distance. It has only two characters, it explores them with perfect rhythmn and grace, and it makes every challenge a mirror reflecting back on their relationship. It culminates in a powerful ending that offers the only real and meaningful closure the story could have borne.

#8: Bejeweled (2001)
PC
Bejeweled is a strong game in and of itself but here it stands for that entire uncounted legion of games that have represented the single largest growth in gaming over the past ten years - the casual downloadable market. The match-3s, the hidden object games, the small-scale sims and the entire cyclopean empire of PopCap Games. For the world's x-million serious gamers Bejeweled will be the game on this list that they care about least, and for the ten to twenty times as many people who aren't serious gamers but have nevertheless engaged their credit card to purchase a title or two, Bejeweled may well be the only one they've played.

#7: Mass Effect (2007)
XBox 360, PlayStation 3, PC
I named this my game of the year in 2007 and in purely personal terms I stand by that. In Mass Effect, Bioware brings their long and saluted history in the development of Western RPGs and adds to it a focus, precision and vision that they'd not quite reached before. Mass Effect isn't a playground for players to find their own path; it's a coherent beginning, middle, and stunning finale, a tightly wound story that encourages and supports not mere exploring and levelling-up but honest-to-God roleplaying. It's the computer RPG grown up and it deserves every bit of praise it's received.

#6: Rock Band (2007)
Xbox 360, PlayStation 3
Guitar Hero came first but Rock Band outstripped its predecessors and kept growing from there. Implementing a full four-player band and supported by two years' worth of weekly song expansions, Rock Band is the definitive music game of a decade in large part defined by music games. Rock Band is going to be the shared cultural touchstone which to a huge cohort of people will represent this decade in gaming; its place in gaming history as storied as Pac-Man, Golden Axe or Super Mario Bros.

Games of the Decade: #15 - #11

2010-01-15T22:00:00.000+11:00

#15: Animal Crossing (2001)
GameCube
Actually to be honest it's the DS Animal Crossing, Wild World, that was the one I fell in love with but whether you played that, the original, or the recent Wii City Folk (published in Australia under the lamer title Let's Go To The City), it's pretty much the same game. There's no action in Animal Crossing, or narrative in the traditional sense of the world. There's not really any goals, other than a few collections to complete. It's pure social play; you interact with and build friendships with the quirky animals who live within the game, explore and decorate your town, and then share your achievements with friends. It sounds like a kids-only proposition but instead it's deeply compelling and it's one of the most memorable titles Nintendo's ever produced.

#14: Braid (2008)
XBox 360
Braid isn't about time-bending puzzles, retro game homages or a demand for infuriating precision, although it has all those things. It's about emotions, and the game's final level is one of the most powerful ever included in a videogame. The game presents, through gameplay, a hypothetical - what if time ran backwards and allowed us to take back our mistakes - and then goes on to show what mistakes we might take back.

#13: Crackdown (2007)
XBox 360
Crackdown rediscovers what we knew about videogames when they were first born - that the sheer act of virtual movement should be inherently enjoyable, whether or not that movement has a goal or destination. Roaming the streets and rooftops of Crackdown in giant building-spanning leaps is the the most perfect single item of gameplay ever created. Were the game to be nothing more than jumping from rooftop to rooftop it might still be one of the best games of the decade.

#12: Half-Life 2 (2004)
PC
Half-Life 2 is an amazing achievement in and of itself - excessive time spent in sewers and trainyards notwithstanding - but when you add in its two episodic expansions it becomes very near immaculate. The breathtaking set-pieces alone, from the game's beginning to the introduction of Dog through to the heartbreaking finale of Episode 2, are the very best gaming has to offer, but on top of that the characters of Half-Life 2 are some of the most astoundingly realised in a virtual environment. Their expressive faces and realistic eye movement engage you on a subconscious level that others do not and Alyx Vance becomes one of those few creations who is not merely a character but a companion.

#11: Desktop Tower Defence (2007)
PC
Credit for creating the tower defence genre technically goes to a Warcraft custom map but credit for perfecting and popularising it rests entirely with Desktop Tower Defence. The gameplay is simple - use limited resources to buy stationary turrets in the hope of shooting down a line of advancing invaders before they cross the screen - but despite the obscene proliferation of imitators, DTD remains one of the kings of this quirky genre. It's exemplary of the rise of Flash gaming and it's easily possible to put more hours into DTD than many fully-fledged retail games.

Games of the Decade: #20 - #16

2010-01-12T22:00:00.000+11:00

#20: Katamari Damacy (2004)
PlayStation 2
When I say Katamari Damacy, really I'm talking about its sequel/remake We Love Katamari, as the original never made its way to Australian shores. But the games are by and large interchangeable so this entry stands for the entire franchise. Using a giant ball to "roll up" items as diverse as paperclips, watermelons, people and the Eiffel Tower is an inherently enjoyable premise, and the quirky visual style and unforgettable soundtrack are the touches necessary to make this one of the most feel-good pick-up-and-play games in gaming history. You just can't help but love it.

#19: Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved (2007)
XBox 360
Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards. One of this decade's best games is only barely visually distinguishable from something from the 1980s. Geometry Wars brought the dual-stick shooter back into fashion. You fly around a playing field with the left analogue stick, and direct your never-ending flow of bulllets with the right stick. Besieged by an ever increasing swarm of enemies, it appears as if you should die within seconds. Every moment you defy that expectation feels amazing and the whole experience adds up to a visceral, addictive, adrenaline-fueled adventure that more sophisticated games struggle to replicate. Geometry Wars revitalised a genre, gave a kick start to Microsoft's now-successful Live Arcade service, and is a hell of a game entirely on its own merits.

#18: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004)
PlayStation 2, XBox
Seeing as I regard Grand Theft Auto 4 as a vile and unwarranted mutation in the GTA lineage, best quickly forgotten, the pinnacle of the GTA games must surely be 2004's San Andreas. A serious and well-defined protagonist, a sprawling free-roaming landscape of unprecedented size, and a depth and vitality to the gameplay that outstripped its already excellent predecessors all came together to make this the defining sandbox game of the last console generation. It stands here to represent its entire franchise, a franchise that redefined - for better or for worse - the public face of videogaming and invented the urban crime sandbox as a genre quickly populated by imitators both weak (True Crime) and strong (Crackdown).

#17: The Sims (2000)
PC
No analysis of the decade could be complete without mentioning The Sims, one of the world's all-time best-selling games and one of the key steps in placing gaming as a mainstream hobby. Will Wright's little virtual people ensnared the hearts of a legion of gamers and soon millions of people worldwide were recreating their housemates and making them have sex. The Sims 2 and 3 were merely iterative embellishments rather than evolutionary ones so the original will here stand in for the entire franchise and all its expansions.

#16: Saints Row (2006)
XBox 360
Anything Grand Theft Auto can do, Saints Row can do better. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but every so often it substantially improves on the original and that's the case here. The Saints Row franchise has a clearer and more focused concept of what makes GTA fun than GTA does; it's systematically addressed each of GTA's mechanical weaknesses in terms of navigation, mission pacing, scripting, and difficulty, and answered them in clear, unambigous, and obvious terms. It's hard not to see it as the pure and undiluted source of the increasingly murky rivers GTA is floundering through and it's inconceivable that anyone who's spent any length of time with both franchises could continue to prefer what GTA is offering.

Sienna Reads: Muscle March

2010-01-11T14:33:00.005+11:00

An individual of my acquaintance has commenced reading ESRB game rating statements in a phone-sex-line voice, and YouTubing the results. That's a resounding WTF right there but its application to homoerotic Wii posing game Muscle March takes the above and bonds it unwholesomely to a double-digit exponential. Damn exponentials. Sitting there in their superscript. Mocking me. Their day will come.

Games of the Decade: #25 - #21

2010-01-08T22:00:00.000+11:00

#25: Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004)
PlayStation 2
There's some debate about which is the best Silent Hill; we're all agreed that it's one of the first four games, and if you're one of the luddites who favours Silent Hill 2 then insert it here because only one of them is making the list. Silent Hill is - or was, before its recent misadventures through Origins and Homecoming - gaming's pre-eminent survival horror franchise. With none of Resident Evil's campy schlock, and with a wholly unique and disturbing fog-drenched body-horror atmosphere, it was as a fine bourbon to the cheap beer of its peers. The Room was the one that most impressed me; it starts with you awakening in your apartment to find the front door chained shut from the inside, a mysterious hole in your toilet wall, and a series of bloody handprints visible through the fish-eye lens set into your front door. Out the window, the world seems normal - at first. The set-up brough the claustrophobia and malaise of the Silent Hill world home in a very real way and moved past the film-derived tricks of previous titles to really make unique use of the gaming medium.

#24: Max Payne (2001)
PlayStation 2, XBox
Max Payne may well be the best-told story in a videogame. It's a simple story - a noir tale of violence, madness, crime and revenge - but it's told masterfully, with a confidence and maturity few games reach. That the gameplay lives up to the story is all it needs to be one of the best games of the decade. Much like The Darkness it's filled with a glorious attention to detail but there's a self-assuredness here that The Darkness lacks. The sequel is similarly excellent. My hopes for the forthcoming third installment - not developed by the original team - are low.

#23: Kingdom Hearts (2002)
PlayStation 2
Either you're the target audience of Kingdom Hearts, or you're not. If you grew up with Disney movies and Final Fantasy games, then Kingdom Hearts will push more buttons than you knew you had. The initially absurd pairing of Goofy and Donald with SquareEnix characters such as Cloud and Squall quickly convinces you of its genius, and the mindbending trip through a plethora of twisted Disney worlds - including a Hundred Acre Wood where Pooh thoughtfully contemplates his own impending extinction - is one of the most memorable experiences delivered by any game, ever. The sequel improves the gameplay at the cost of some of the first game's originality and accessibility; they're equally fine and this entry stands for both.

#22: Beyond Good & Evil (2003)
XBox, Playstation 2
Michael Ancel's masterpiece Beyond Good & Evil is another game that sold poorly despite being critically lauded. Unhelpful cover art and a title with no relationship to the actual game probably didn't help it. But if you take the time to explore what it has to offer you'll find an expansive, heartwarming world, a dynamic, engaging protagonist, support characters who seem to jump out of the screen, and the best use of photography-based gameplay to tell a thrilling espionage story ever made in a videogame.

#21: Left 4 Dead (2008)
Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC
Valve's co-operative zombie apocalypse shooter is one of the most fan-loved games of the decade. Unique, fast-paced multiplayer gameplay and memorable characters combine to make it a gaming icon. A lack of content and less than a year between its release and planned obsolescence don't seem to have diminished the love that people continue to show for Bill, Louis, Zoey and Francis.

Games of the Decade: #30 - #26

2010-01-05T22:00:00.000+11:00

#30: Guitar Hero 2 (2006)
XBox 360, PlayStation 2
There's no doubt the Guitar Hero franchise is one of the defining icons of this gaming decade, but singling out a particular entry is tough. The original is certainly a candidate, as is World Tour, which appropriated the Rock Band idea of four-player fun. But the one I personally had the most fun with was Guitar Hero 2, which had the perfect mix of on-disc songs, co-op action, appropriate difficulty, and replayability. Let that stand in for the entire franchise here, as the gaming name that brought plastic instruments into every gaming household.

#29: Halo: Combat Evolved (2001)
XBox
Once again I'm letting one title stand in for an entire franchise here. Halo is not, and has never been, the best first person shooter, or the most innovative, or the one with the best story. But by some indiscernible magic it's the one that penetrated a sports-loving car-tuning pot-smoking beer-guzzling male demographic and made them hardcore, committed XBox gamers. It's the franchise that sold a million systems and its protagonist, Master Chief, has become the Sonic or Mario of this gaming decade. And you know, it's not a great game, but it's a pretty damn decent one.

#28: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (2005)
Nintendo DS
Each and every one of the Ace Attorney games is equally wonderful so I may as well highlight the original. These courtroom detective stories ride entirely on the quality of their convoluted, hilarious, heart-pounding scripts, and it's amazing that through iteration after iteration that quality remains undiluted. Playing an Ace Attorney game combines the best aspects of a point-and-click adventure and a well-written pulp detective novel and it's hard to see how anyone who's interacted with one could fail to wholeheartedly love it.

27: Disgaea (2003)
PlayStation 2
This is the best turn-based strategy game ever made. No ifs, no buts, this is it. It doesn't leave room for improvement. Levels of depth are themselves built on levels of depth; whenever you think you've fallen all the way into the game another trapdoor opens beneath you offering hundreds of hours more play. Characters level up, who hold items that level up, which hold within them multi-level dungeons which themselves contain items and characters. A political system allows you to pass votes to rewrite the laws of reality; at the point when you've done everything you can vote the game up to yet another iteration of difficulty and the hunt begins anew.

26: Devil May Cry (2001)
PlayStation 2
God of War isn't going to feature on this list, for three reasons: it came after Devil May Cry, it's derivative of Devil May Cry, and it's less enjoyable than Devil May Cry. Everything that Kratos did, Dante did first and better (although I'll give Kratos credit for all those threesomes, Dante hasn't yet gone there but it seems fair to give him time). The smooth, free-flowing aerial combat of DMC gave birth to the "stylish action" genre which includes such entries as God of War, Wet, and Bayonetta, but despite it all DMC remains the bar that the others have yet to jump.

Games of the Decade: #35 - #31

2010-01-01T22:00:00.000+11:00

#35: Super Smash Bros Melee (2001)
GameCube
Substitue Brawl if you prefer it but Melee is the Smash Bros title that won my heart and it remains my favourite GameCube title of all those that I own. The gameplay alone would be enough to win it a star placing in any list of fighting games or party games, but the illustrious cross-franchise roster of characters (that lets you beat Pikachu with a baseball bat) and the obsessive level of Nintendo fan service contained in every aspect of the title take it shooting out in front as one of the greatest titles released on any platform, ever.

#34: Final Fantasy X (2001)
PlayStation 2
I personally think Final Fantasy X is the best traditional JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Game) released this decade and its lifetime sales figures seem to agree. Whether or not it compares to to the much-loved Final Fantasy VII is open to debate but it kicks the spit out of the anemic and lifeless XII. Yuna's Sending dance remains one of the best and most beautiful cinematic cutscenes in any game ever, the Sphere Grid was a levelling system possessed of extraordinary depth and flexibility, and the characters were lively and filled with a real energy and personality that the angst-ridden archetypes of other games only aspire to.

#33: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002)
PC, XBox
If Morrowind isn't the best Western RPG of the decade it's only because of the surprising depth and vitality that that genre has engjoyed over the last ten years. Offering a wide, vibrant world to explore that allowed players to set their own goals and their own methods of achieving them, it was an experience of a scope and ambition not seen since the excellent Ultima VII. It was marginally superior to its more linear successor, Oblivion, and were it not for Bioware's twin offerings of Mass Effect and Dragon Age it could easily have claimed the decade's RPG throne.

#32: The Darkness (2007)
XBox 360
The Darkness takes a break from running and gunning - although there's plenty of running and gunning - to let you sit down with your in-game girlfriend and watch the entirety of the film To Kill A Mockingbird as your girlfriend drifts off to sleep. The scene lasts 128 minutes (the length of the film) or until you get bored and turn off the television. It's the most notable example of a dedication to characterisation, pacing, and miniscule details that permeates the entirety of one of the decade's most masterful and criminally overlooked games.

#31: Mirror's Edge (2008)
PlayStation 3, XBox 360, PC
To say that Mirror's Edge is anything less than an amazing achievement says more about you than it does about Mirror's Edge. The game has only grown on me with time. It offers a sense of speed, mass, momentum and agility that no game before or since has captured, it delivers a clean and beautiful visual aesthetic, and it says more about the role of guns in videogames and in society with two simple mechanics than the entirety of the gaming industry combined has said before or since. Good film has never had to be accessible film and the same is true of good gaming; Mirror's Edge is good - damn good - and that's something that I believe that more and more people will realise with time.

Games of the Decade: #40 - #36

2009-12-29T22:00:00.001+11:00

#40: WarioWare Inc. (2003)
GameBoy Advance
There's nothing quite like WarioWare Inc. Even the sequels don't manage to quite capture the frenetic charm of the original. Hundreds of three-second games, each requiring only a single action ("Dodge!", "Stab!", "Throw!"), packed back-to-back at eyeball-breaking speed. It's a concept bred from genius and the implementation on its first showing is impeccable. It distills the pick-up-and-play philosophy that made the GameBoy such a hit to its absolute purest and frankly I think Nintendo would be better served by re-releasing the original on new consoles rather than trying to replicate it.

#39: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (2002)
GameCube
The cleverest survival horror game ever made. Not the best - it's covered with edges so raw they'll cut you - but the cleverest. The reason? The sanity system. As your character encounters the supernatural menaces teeming in the game's corners, their sanity begins to slip away, and as it does the game becomes steadily less trustworthy. Doors open into deathtraps, where you watch your character die, only to awaken back outside the door. Mad voices whisper instructions from the speakers. Cockroaches crawl across the inside of your television screen and items you thought you'd acquired turn out to be entirely hallucinatory. In one memorable sequence the game pretends to reset back to the GameCube boot-up icon, purportedly erasing your entire progress since your last save.

#38: Pikmin (2001)
GameCube
A totally unique game mechanic, a legion of adorable characters, and a compelling dog-eat-dog environment to explore and conquer. It's just one of the many triumphs of living legend Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Mario and Zelda, amongst others). Pikmin's originality is matched only by its competence; for many franchises it takes several iterations to refine gameplay to this level but Pikmin achieves it on its first outing. As tiny space explorer Olimar, you use the analogue sticks to sweep your army of plant-like Pikmin around to assault enemies, explore territory, and convey heavy objects back to your ship for transport. It went on to inspire the reasonably decent Overlord games and the less exciting Pikmin 2.

#37: Fahrenheit / Indigo Prophecy (2005)
PlayStation 2, XBox
In Fahrenheit (or Indigo Prophecy to Americans), developer Quantic Dream revisited the early 90s concept of the "interactive movie" and by and large got it right. They developed a compelling mystery, interesting characters, and a new, pulse-pounding way of interacting with and experiencing videogaming that is totally unlike anything before or since. The first two scenes, where you play first as a man struggling to hide a dead body and escape a crime scene, and then as the two detectives investigating that same scene, establish a high point that the rest of the game never quite lives up to, but it remains a breathtaking trip through territory rarely explored by mainstream designers.

#36: Zone of the Enders / ZoE: The Second Runner (2001)
PlayStation 2
I'm including the two ZoE games together as they really form a single, epic game stretched over two installments. The first game is so short you can't help but feel it's not complete and the second game is so tough in spots you'll feel like you missed a tutorial. Together they form a single narrative vision. Hideo Kojima's tale of humanity, rebellion, and spacefaring giant robots is a representation of mecha anime unparallelled in gaming history. It flawlessly defeats the problems of 3D-movement and combat that have been the bane of similar games and goes on to tell a powerful, engaging story spread across two planets and two main characters. They're hard to get your hands on these days but if you get the chance they're not to be missed.

Games of the Decade: #45 - 41

2009-12-25T22:00:00.000+11:00

#45: Wii Sports (2006)
Wii
Wii Sports is one of the most important games ever made, and if it's not higher on this list it's only because despite being important it's not actually that great a game. Bundled with the Nintendo Wii, it's the game that not only introduced the Wii to worldwide audiences (and began an unprecented sales tornado that catapulted Nintendo back to the top of the gaming industry), but it's the game that unlocked a whole new marketplace for Nintendo (and eventually other publishers) to exploit. Ads featuring celebrities such as Olivia Newton-John enjoying tennis in Wii Sports told the world that the Wii was a console not only for gamers, but also for mothers, fathers, families, entertainers, and everyone who doesn't consider themselves "in" on the complex world of videogames.

#44: Sam & Max Save The World (2006)
PC, XBox 360, Wii
One of the defining events of the 1990s in gaming was LucasArts killing the point-n-click adventure genre; one of the defining events of the 2000s was Telltale Games resurrecting it. Through the medium of monthly episodic content, Telltale delivered two "seasons" of excellent Sam & Max games, along with four episodes of Wallace and Gromit, five episodes of Strong Bad, and a final triumphant resurrection of the Monkey Island franchise through the five-part Tales of Monkey Island. Sam & Max Save The World (the first Sam & Max season) stands in for all those accomplishments although it's a thoroughly deserving candidate in and of itself - funny, clever, and fully comfortable with its unique episodic format from the moment it steps out of the gate.

#43: WipeOut Pure (2007)
PlayStation Portable
The whole WipeOut franchise is an exemplary achievement in gaming; WipeOut Pure just happens to be the one I enjoyed most. They're amazing high-speed futuristic racing games but if that was all they were they'd lag behind Criterion's Burnout franchise. What sets WipeOut apart is the mood. WipeOut channels state-of-the-art electronica and trance music and combines it with soothing colour palettes and smooth, eye-pleasing lines to create not so much a game as a mental zone, a meditative state which, above and beyond the finish line, is the real destination of every WipeOut race.

#42: Ico (2001)
PlayStation 2
Ico is a game about holding hands. That's all it's about. It's about journeying from point A, to point B, while holding hands. Point A and point B are both located with an immense, brooding castle that at times is starkly lit and at other times hides in billowing shadows. With no real exposition, with no dialogue to speak of, Ico manages to create a poignantly emotional gaming experience without peer and is a must-play for everyone who aspires to discuss games.

#41: Psychonauts (2005)
PlayStation 2
Psychonauts is a great game, combining witty dialogue, well-crafted humour, and the most original level concepts ever seen in a videogame. But its real significance is in what it's come to stand for. Psychonauts is the game that got nothing but glowing reviews in every publication that reviewed it, and flopped on store shelves. It was a massive financial disaster for publisher Majesco. It's the key argument in the ongoing discussion of the battle between quality gaming and commercial success and as such is one of the most important games of the decade.

Games of the Decade: #50 - #46

2009-12-22T22:01:00.000+11:00

#50: Burnout Revenge (2005)
PlayStation 2, XBox
Take Burnout Revenge as exemplary of any or all of Burnout 3, Burnout Revenge, Burnout Legends or Burnout Paradise, all first-class paragons of racing action. (But the less said about Burnout Dominator the better.) The Burnout franchise takes exceptionally well-implemented high-speed racing and combines it with cathartically transcendental devastation. Not only is crashing a car in Burnout both satisfying and (usually) helpful to your progress, the crashes are rendered with loving artistry to make each and every one a ballet of splintered metal worthy of the most aggressively independent film festivals you can think of.

#49: The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess (2006)
Wii
I've never much liked the 3D Zelda titles. Despite all the praise lavished on Ocarina of Time, it was clunky, filled with tedious busywork, and still struggled with the basics of 3D game design, at that time still an emerging field. Twilight Princess is the finished game for which Ocarina was merely a tech demo. It's an emotive and well-told story wrapped in polished, satisfying game mechanics and to say it's the best Zelda game made to date is one of the highest honours a game can receive.

#48: Vagrant Story (2000)
PlayStation
SquareEnix (or SquareSoft, as it was then known) is a company with a willingness to take risks, and Vagrant Story was a big one. An intelligent, adult story told in an unfriendly gothic world was just the beginning; Square went on to hang the gameplay off a controversial "risk" system that involved lengthy attack chains where each successive blow you landed on an enemy did less damage and raised your vulnerability to reprisals. Together with frustrating box puzzles and an impenetrable crafting system it wasn't everyone's cup of tea. However, the art, story, and mindblowing conclusion were so outstanding that this game deserves to be on any list of first-class games. Sadly for SquareSoft, the risk didn't pay off - Vagrant Story was never a commercial success.

#47: SoulCalibur 2 (2003)
Gamecube, Playstation 2, XBox
It's no secret that SoulCalibur is my fighting franchise of choice, and to be honest I can't understand any alternate viewpoint. The magic of SoulCalibur lies in pacing that is both lightning-fast yet deliberate, a deep range of moves which are simple to execute, and clear visual depictions of the strengths and strike zones of each character that allow both masters and novices to understand the action on screen. SoulCalibur 2 is for my money the best entry in the franchise, although 3 and 4 both have their merits. If SoulCalibur is the decade's best fighting franchise and 2 is its best iteration, that makes SoulCalibur 2 the best fighting game of the decade, right?

#46: LocoRoco (2006)
PlayStation Portable
You can hate the PSP, but you can't hate LocoRoco. It's a unique fusion of music, art, and gameplay to create an addictive, compelling platforming adventure that will stay with you long after you put it down. The conceit of the game is that to guide your small army of singing, blob-like LocoRocos through a level, you don't control the Locos directly but rather tilt the entire world, to send them tumbling down ramps and flying around curves. There's nothing else quite like it - except, of course, for its sequels.

Games of the Decade: 2000 - 2009

2009-12-22T22:00:00.000+11:00

It seems everyone is making "Games of the Decade" lists, and it seems they're doing it wrong. They're recentist, they're genre-centric, and dammit, they're not the list that I would make.

So I'm doing my top 50 games of the decade. They're the games I deem most significant, most iconic, and most downright good over the period between January 2000 and December 2009.

Here's my biases: I regard the PC and PSP as broken platforms; a good game on either platform is struggling against technical incompatibilities and bugs on the PC side, and horrible controls and loading times on the PSP end. There's PC games and PSP games on the list but it's worth noting they're not starting from an even footing.

There's also only two Flash games on the list. There've been a hell of a lot of good Flash games in the last 10 years but it's simply hard to put the majority of them side by side with the 50 best retail games of the decade and say that it's better.

The NGage never existed and the iPhone isn't a gaming platform. There have been some indubitably excellent games for the PlayStation 3 but with the exception of PixelJunk Eden, Flower and Linger In Shadows (none of which make the list... just) I haven't played them so you won't see them here.

50 seems like a lot but it's a hard cut to make. I wanted to include one of THQ's wrestling games on the list both for their massive commercial success and the often overlooked quality of the early-2000s titles - but they just didn't make the list. I wanted to include often-neglected gems like DefJam: Fight For NY or Amped 3 - but they're just not in the best 50 games of the decade. So just because a game's missing from the list doesn't mean it isn't high in my regard.

The list will be counting upwards from 50. Games are in order, with #1 being the Game of the Decade. Updates are every Tuesday and Friday at 10 pm Canberra time until the list is done.

Have fun, and Merry Christmas!

Halo Wars (Multiplayer)

2009-12-18T22:00:00.000+11:00

From my perspective, the only difference between an AI and a 14-year-old American is that the AI is polite.

I think this is what impressed me about Halo Wars. This is a game, like all of the Halo titles, that is clearly built for multiplayer. Around half of the game's achievements are multiplayer-only achievements. And yet, when I firmly informed the game that the "multi" part of the phrase "multiplayer" would be performed entirely by the game's artificial intelligence, it shrugged, started the game, and began duly handing out achievements.

I prefer playing bots. I really do. Not just because on average the XBox Live community is a cesspit of pre-pubescent homophobia and racism which Halo enthusiastically scrapes the bottom of, but because bots offer a more meaningful experience. They play at a level of skill determined by me and they make decisions based on fixed rules, which means that I learn faster by dint of being able to try different things in similar situations, and I can accurately judge my skill gain as while I am getting better they are verifiably remaining the same.

When I say that I want to play multiplayer, sometimes I genuinely mean I want to play with other humans. This is the case with most every co-operative game, and also with rare competitive exceptions like Soul Calibur and Call of Duty 4. But mostly it means that I want to experience the multiplayer content. I want to capture a flag; I want to get a killstreak; I want to narrowly win a hotly contested deathmatch. Experiencing the content is different from experiencing the competition. I don't need to feel like I won teh internetz. I don't need to beat any other real people. I could be the world's worst player and still enjoy beating some bots.

Requiring you to be beat real people in order to experience the thrill of beating people is like a driving game that puts you in control of a real car in a real race against real drivers. It's certainly an experience but to a large extent it's redundant. The very attraction of games is their ability to simulate scenarios and experiences that may otherwise be too difficult, improbable or outright impossible for us to enjoy in real life. Defeating Sephrioth in Final Fantasy VII is not any less enjoyable for the knowledge that Sephiroth is not the avatar of a Minnesota high school student.

It's particularly an issue when it can be hard to identify an AI. In Halo Wars, if you have the chat turned off, the only way you could tell a human player from their gameplay is when they make a mistake. The only signs of human intellect to be seen are indecision, ignorance, and poor judgement; without them it's anyone's guess. AIs here are functionally interchangeable at all but the highest and lowest levels of play.

So in short I had a blast with the multiplayer component of Halo Wars. It was exceptional. It turns out that the average denizen of the gaming internet can indeed be replaced by a machine to the benefit of the world in general. For perfect realism I suppose there should have been an "AI will randomly quit mid-match" check box, to be toggled on or off, but in general I can't help but think that an MMO where all the other players were AIs might be something of a hit.

Crossing The Same Bridge Twice

2009-12-11T22:00:00.001+11:00

The period from February through to August this year was a gaming drought of unprecedented proportions. I'm hard pressed to cite anything from that season that made me excited to own gaming hardware. Eventually September unfolded like a wonderful and exotic flower and since then the nectar has flowed with overwhelming sweetness, but in the wasteland that went before I was forced to go back to some old titles and enjoy them that little bit harder.

Crackdown

Theoretically the goal with Crackdown was to take my points for the game from an anemic 620 up to its current height of 1050. But really it was completely rediscovering what I had already considered to be one of the greatest games produced this console generation. Just moving around in Crackdown is a pleasure that plays on the animal parts of one's brain; it's a symphony of acceleration and exhileration that no game before or since has really managed to nail.

On my first trip though Crackdown I'd noted that it was able to stimulate real-life vertigo when I ascended to particularly high locations; this time I was able to realise the role that the excellent environmental sound effects play in that achievement. I also discovered that the game's driving systems, horrible for the majority of the game, suddenly become intensely enjoyable when you level up the protagonists's driving skill to maximum levels, unlocking a wall-climbing SUV, a missile-spewing APC, and a sleek, elegant racer able to devastate vehicles in its path merely by touching them. Rather than grinding completed content to achieve the game's remaining goals, I found myself using the goals as an excuse to keep interacting with the content. Crackdown is a sublime argument enjoyable process making the idea of meaningful rewards irrelevant.

Saint's Row

There are no words for how much I love the single-player portion of the original Saint's Row but it had frustrated me how many of the game's achievements were tied to multiplayer content. On my first interaction with that content I had no fun, and assumed I was simply over the game; too saturated in it to enjoy this online extension. A more recent attempt to go bareknuckle with the online play has corrected me - the multiplayer is hideously designed, inherently terrible, and to the extent that matches can be found at all in the barren wastelands of XBox Live they are dominated by the kind of spawn-camping software-assisted griefers who flourish in such carelessly-created environments. After an hour or so of being farmed for someone else's achievements I gave it up forever as a bad idea. In turns out the same people who created the majesty of the single player game ARE perfectly capable of designing multiplayer that efficiently murders babies.

Left 4 Dead

Every time I say that quality trumps quantity, Left 4 Dead laughs at me. I came back to it to sample the new Crash Course DLC and the Survival mode. Crash Course, naturally, is great. It's only two levels but they're longer than what came on the disc, which makes for an interesting variation to the game's pacing. There's more of the hilarous off-handed dialogue and a couple more memorable set-piece battles. But once you start replaying it (and particularly if you're going for the Littlest Genocide achievement which involves killing 5,395 zombies exclusively within Crash Course's two maps) the deficiencies of the "director AI" once again become clear, and you find yourself learning possible witch and tank spawn points off by heart and slaughtering the same zombie hordes with mind-numbing regularity.

I ran right into the game's brick walls again, as well. To tackle Expert difficulty you need four players - no ifs and no buts - as the AIs just aren't up to the task. With no guild play or team persistence, attempting to educate random strangers on how to not play like douchebags is a thankless exercise in frustration, and as far as playing with friends either you have three friends with the game and a Live Gold subscription or you don't, and even then getting them online at the same time can be epic. The other DLC - Survival mode - quickly convinced me it was a waste of time. Nothing's less fun than losing because a team member screws up, and Survival mode, with its "fight until you drop" mentality, makes that an inevitability rather than a possibility.

Wet

2009-12-04T22:00:00.002+11:00

I am a fan of B-movies. If there is such a thing as a B-game, Wet is it.

When Activision and Blizzard went through their cyclopean merging last year and formed the entity affectionately known as Blactivision there were inevitable casualties. Two were Brutal Legend and Ghostbusters, who found new homes in the diamond-encrusted maws of EA and Sony, respectively. Another was Wet, a much lower profile development, and the fact that it has reached retail at all is due to the unlikely auspices of roleplaying powerhouse Bethesda Interactive.

Wet is a game which is nothing but rough edges. There's not an aspect of the game you can look at without seeing how money, time and polish would have vastly improved it. Travelling through its rather short story involves pinballing from limitation to limitation, and the whole thing eventually sputters out in an unsatisfying finale.

But, you know what? It's a blast.

This is a good game. It's a good game not because it is rough, and not despite being rough, but simply through enabling us to not care about it being rough. You can run on walls, you can slow down time, and you can shoot fools right in the muthafucking head, and beyond that really everything else is window dressing. If you get to the end and feel like you haven't shot enough fools in the head, you start a new game, maybe on a different difficulty setting, and introduce more heads to more bullets. It's not the milestones that are fun here, but the process of reaching them.

Wet knows it's a B-game. It glories in it. The graphics are overlaid with artificial film scratches, loading times are covered by drive-in cinema adcruft, and the plot is ripped straight from a 70s blacksploitation epic with a gravel-voiced Eliza Duskhu shoehorned into the leading role. Characters with improbable names like "Tarantula" abound; the game treats them with a completely straight face but never manages to elevate them to more than a gun-toting freak show.

Other games have gone down this path; House of the Dead: Overkill is a recent example. But Wet is somehow more authentic, because we, the audience, can see that this could have been a different game. All that separates Wet from something like Devil May Cry is six months in development and a budget to match. It's in the finest tradition of B-movies - reaching for the stars but settling for cardboard and glitter, and like B-movies of old it makes the perfect fit for the bottom half of a double bill. Enjoy a week of Brutal Legend, and follow it with a chaser of Wet.

Wet was clearly never destined for preorders and midnight launches, and in that sense it's a got a refreshing freedom of movement. It's firmly in the "stylish action" genre but it's free to borrow tricks from sources that haven't enjoyed Devil May Cry's level of commercial success. A "never stop running, never stop shooting" philosophy is lifted from Bizarre's The Club. Stylised swordplay and dry humour evoke No More Heroes. A kinetic variety of parkour-inspired motion brings to mind Mirror's Edge. But Wet picks and chooses from these very idiosyncratic games and it largely picks wisely.

Largely. It features one level so rage-inducingly-awful as to nearly make me give up in disgust. About halfway through the game, you find yourself exploded out of a plane in mid-air, and forced to dodge burning pieces of that very same plane while in freefall, while shooting at and being shot at by faceless goons who, like you, are also falling out of the plane, all with the intention of catching up to and utilising a mid-air parachute. It should be the game's definingly awesome set-piece but purpose-built mechanics, cheap one-hit kills, an inability to effectively read the environment and a complete lack of checkpoints make it a brick wall in the path of fun. Once you've solved it once it gets easier on replays but that's poor consolation to those struggling the first time around.

Wet is not anyone's Game of the Year. It's not a critical masterpiece or a roadsign along any of the streets that lead to the gaming nirvana. But it doesn't have to be. Even among mediocrity there is the good and the bad, and in that halfway house Wet is some of the best there is. There is room for the B-game, for that mixture of passion and compromise, of vision and clumsiness, and when a game like Wet emerges from the very heart of that territory it is a joy and a treasure that should not quickly be passed by.

Brutal Legend

2009-11-27T12:36:00.003+11:00

The very best of games don't sell an experience; they sell an identity.

I, for example, have always been a huge fan of metal. Black Sabbath is a personal favourite. Motorhead are excellent. If you asked me to name one song I could never get tired of listening to, it would be Angel Witch. This is a true fact that applies to my entire life and it has applied to my entire life from five minutes after I booted up Brutal Legend until about 48 hours after the credits rolled. And then I was done. Maybe next game I'll establish my credentials in punk.

This is interactivity's shining citadel, the glorious pulsing heart that pumps enthusiasm through the gaming body. "This is Spinal Tap" is a movie about music; "Gitaroo Man" is a game about music; "Brutal Legend" is a game where the music and you are one and the same. The dissociating mechanism of the avatar is sidelined and the subject matter is infused directly into your veins.

This is Brutal Legend. It's a conversation between friends that starts with, "Say, you like good music and good stories, right?" and ends by leaving you convinced you were there at Tampa Stadium listening to Jimmy Page pick out the opening notes of Stairway to Heaven before a crowd of fifty-six thousand fans. It transmutes you into a fan; not so much original as prototypical; a storied soldier in an army a million strong. It can do this because, for Brutal Legend, Metal is not a familiarity with the music, a love of the personalities or a fondness for minutiae but rather an attitude and a manifesto. To be Metal, says Brutal Legend, all you need is a love of good music, a commitment to personal honesty and comradeship, and a nebulous but all-encompassing willingess to rock.

This is the kind of image that revolts some people. It's farcical, in a way. I'm perfectly willing to rock through hours of Brutal Legend, throwing up defiant horns in the face of all those who defy The Metal, and then turn off the console and kick back with some Sarah McLachlan and maybe a couple of sudoku. My metal-ness is entirely confined to the period during which I'm piloting a virtual Jack Black around the inside of my 360, but for that period it is absolute and unassailable. For $60 I've bought inclusion in one of the defining musical phenomena of the last hundred years, and I've done it without having to engage in the messiness of tours, festivals, or interaction with other fans. That's a bargain, if ever I saw one.

Is it hypocrisy or genius? Does it matter? It's not that Brutal Legend is a fantasy; it's that it's such a convincing one. The world presented through the game is one littered with chrome, fire, and semi-druidic monoliths. Noble barbarians wield the power of Metal against gothic organists, glitter-encrusted groupies, and apocalyptic demon beasts. Ozzy Osbourne himself does service as the guardian of the underworld and Lemmy Kilmister tours as a taciturn biker gifted with the healing magic of bass guitar. If this is fantasy it's one that even the genuine articles enthusiastically subscribe to.

As a game, there are shortcomings here. Your lantern-jawed protagonist is regularly called upon to engage in hack-and-slash that could generously be described as shallow. There's a motor vehicle that handles less like a car and more like a bad-tempered rhino. Real time strategy is dabbled in with more enthusiasm than genuine talent, and there's collectables and sidequests that would have looked dated in the era of the Nintendo 64.

But they're not sufficiently bad to stop you playing, and that makes them good enough, because the real treat here is the world itself, and the exhilerating storytelling, scriptwriting, and soundtrack that bring it, vibrating with passion, to life. Every moment spent with the game is a revelation, whether it's hearing the serious but self-aware dialogue, discovering a new and breathtaking metal-inspired landscape, or just kicking back and listening to Black Sabbath belt out another rendition of Mr Crowley. Simply being in the game is a pleasure and even those parts of the game that are trying to kill you are affectionately letting you know that you're not just any enemy but specifically their enemy. It's like being hugged, but with teeth.

This is the awesome pinnacle of ersatz awesomeness. It's art about trash made from art. And if, at a crucial turning point in the game, a chase sequence is punctuated by Dragonforce's epic power-metal ballad Through the Fire and Flames, does it really matter if I only recognise it from Guitar Hero III?

Activity

2009-11-27T12:34:00.002+11:00

Nope, The Dust Forms Words is still dead, until further notice.

But I wrote some reviews the other day, and for lack of anything better to do with them, I'm queuing them up to publish here. They'll go up once a week, on Friday, until they run out.

For anyone still reading, I hope you enjoy.

Back In Canberra

2009-04-20T11:10:00.000+10:00

I'm back from holidays. Swancon was excellent. Thanks to the convention organisers; thanks also to all the awesome people I saw over the last couple of weeks.

Regular posting will resume here just as soon as I'm caught up on sleep.

1995 Called: It Wants Settlers of Catan Back

2009-04-05T19:56:00.002+10:00

It appears Wired Magazine has only just discovered Settlers of Catan. Stay tuned for their groundbreaking follow-up article, "Computers: The Next Big Thing?"

Pull My Finger

2009-04-01T09:06:00.003+11:00

This year's crop of April Fool's jokes are incredibly, incredibly lame. Shame on you, internet. Shame. You've managed to make my information feed useless for 24 hours without compensating with entertainment.

As a side note, April Fool's certainly brings into contrast the inherent strangeness of the game industry. I can't even tell if this is a joke or not.

Final Fantasy Crystal Defenders

2009-03-30T10:27:00.005+11:00

Crystal Defenders is one of the worst tower defence games ever made and should not be played by anyone.

If you're not familiar with tower defence games, they go a little something like this: monsters troop across the screen following a fixed path, and you as the player have to erect towers to shoot them down before they reach the exit.

Crystal Defenders replaces the towers with characters from the Final Fantasy Tactics games, and replaces the monsters with... well, monsters. It's a strictly by-the-numbers affair. If you've played a tower defence game before, you've played this one.

The catch is this: the very best tower defence titles are Flash games, and are completely free to play. Crystal Defenders costs money, it has graphics which would look awkward on a 16-bit console, and it's significantly simpler and shorter than even the most basic of its web-based competitors.

For your money, you get twelve maps (fully half of which are little more than palette swaps), six deployable units, no in-game help or tutorial system, no unlockables, no story or victory animations, and an endless loop of some of Final Fantasy's worst crimes against the musical world.

It's also blisteringly hard. With no kind of guidance or strategy advice, even tower defence veterans will have a tough time clearing 30 waves on each of the maps. The strengths and weaknesses of your units aren't completely clear. Working out which units deal physical damage requires luck, guesswork, and some knowledge of other Final Fantasy games. Debuffs on enemies aren't marked, making it tough to assess the effectiveness of indirect damage, and survival ultimately requires not just killing the enemy, but correctly calling where you'll kill them, in order to allow you to deploy money-gathering thieves. Luckily, the availability of the internet will allow you to completely trivialise the game by playing a perfect round straight off the bat.

Crystal Defenders is available on Live Arcade, Wiiware and iPhone, and I understand it's exactly the same kind of garbage on each platform. It's emblematic of Square-Enix's general contempt for the casual and downloadable market and I urge you to avoid it as though it were made out of babies.

Prince of Persia Epilogue

2009-03-29T13:32:00.011+11:00

After finally getting my copy of Prince of Pesia back from the bandits who've been borrowing it the last month or so, I've at long last had a chance to play through the Epilogue downloadable content.

Following immediately after the game's powerful ending, Epilogue sees the Prince and Elika on the run from Ahriman's power. Taking shelter in a dusty mausoleum, they stumble across a series of tunnels that run under the hills, providing a path to an area of comparitive safety.

The Epilogue doesn't shy away from the game's ending; in fact, the consequences of the ending are the core of the downloadable content. Elika is understandably not impressed by what's happened, but the Prince finally gets the chance to tell his side of the story. Not content with taking victory at a price, the Prince has chosen to gamble everything in the hopes of a more lasting win. Or at least, that's how his rationalisations go; it's clear his real motivations are more emotional than logical.

The writing in Epilogue is some of the best in the game, and as with the original content the dialogue and interplay between the Prince and Elika is the real meat of what's on offer. However, to experience it all you're going to have to put up with some of the most frustrating gameplay that Prince of Persia has to offer.

The gameplay side has seen some small improvements. There's a new attack option available - a running charge - and a new plate to unlock, which opens paths by summoning phantasmal wall sections into being. Also, the horrible plate-initiated flying sections are blessedly nowhere to be seen.

Checkpoints are fewer and further between, though - trips between one area of firm ground and the next can take upwards of a minute, which makes forward progress significantly harder. The rise in difficulty brings into sharper relief the game's mechanical problems, which were more forgiveable when you weren't falling to your death quite so often. The camera is still horrid, for example, sometimes automatically angling to where you need to go next but more often stubbornly pointing at dead ends while you're trying to look up and down for a way to progress.

The levels are unnecessarily dark; distinguishing the lethal shadow-blobs from clean wall at a distance can be tricky. Also, the timed sections make a return, where you have to clear a certain are before black fumes kill you. This mechanic was used well in the original content but here it's frustrating - the dark screen filter cause by the mechanic exacerbates the existing vision problems, and often the effect doesn't give you the necessary time to work out your next move while you're clinging to a mid-wall fissure and struggling with an uncooperative camera.

You'll have to deal with the green plates again, too. Those are the ones that send you charging up vertical walls at high speed. They were originally fun just due to the sense of speed involved; however, late in the original game the cheap collisions with scenery and the requirement to learn the route in advance rather than react on the fly made them a lot less welcome. That trend continues in Epilogue and the twenty minutes or so involving green plates are easily the worst twenty minutes in the game.

A lot of what made the original content addictive is missing, too. The levels proceed linearly, for example. There's no option to choose your next destination or revisit a previous one. You don't cleanse areas, so it's a lot less satisfying finishing a level, and there's no hunting for light seeds. The new collectible item is the "light fresco", a portion of glowing wall that you need to run or slide across to collect. You'll only be rewarded, though, for your first light fresco and your last, and the linear nature of the levels means that missing one (such as by not being aware that they could be collected) removes the incentive to go looking for any others.

For all its flaws, though, Epilogue is a first-class piece of downloadable content. It delivers maybe three or four hours of solid play, it's a non-stop parade of new levels and new challenges, it's built upon the very strong foundation of Prince of Persia's generally excellent gameplay, and it features some of the best story and writing currently available in a videogame.

If you enjoyed Prince of Persia, Epilogue isn't an optional extra, it's a must-have. It's an excellent addition to an excellent game and it only makes me more excited for the next installment of the Prince's adventures.

Hope #2

2009-03-27T10:53:00.004+11:00

Quick heads up: issue 2 of Grant Watson's bushfire-relief publication Hope is about to hit the virtual stands. I'm led to believe that there's something I wrote in it. Go get yourself a copy to find out if this is a true thing.

Where The Wild Things Are

2009-03-26T11:37:00.005+11:00

If you were wondering what Spike Jonze (director of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) has been doing with himself, the answer is: this. Where The Wild Things Are, a faithful recreation of the book that has nothing to do with the book. I have no idea how this is going to play out on-screen but I have the very real sense that it works.

Thanks to The Angriest for the heads-up.

Squeenix Hits Virtual Console

2009-03-26T09:17:00.004+11:00

Hey Wii owners, it's a good week to be you. Not only did Madworld just drop into stores, but the Virtual Console is having something of a rennaissance.

Item the first: Sega, Taito and Nacmo are bringing some of their arcade hits to the service. The arcade versions, mind, not the dodgy console ports.

Item the second: Final Fantasy I through to VI are on their way to the Virtual Console in all their original non-enhanced glory. I assume that the ones that weren't originally released in the West (FF2, 3 and 5) are going to use the translations developed for the GBA / PS / DS adaptations.

Item the third: If you just can't get enough of Cecil The Death Knight from FF IV, you will be stoked by the appearance of FFIV sequel The After Years on Wiiware, alongside My Life As A Dark Lord, which is apparently a sequel to the poorly received My Life As A King.

Wonderella

2009-03-25T09:28:00.005+11:00

So today I was going to talk about hidden object games and their ominous rise to success but instead of that I'm going to instead travel back in time to 2006 so that Wonderella is new and fresh and I can recommend it to you before you discover it for yourself.

Seriously, it is worth reading. You will find The Non-Adventures of Wonderella both compelling and hilarious. True story. I have obligingly linked you to the first comic so you can follow the funny in sequential order. It is the comedy of the human condition. Haven't we all been tricked by leprechauns that one time?

I finish this post on-topic with the following statement-slash-rhetorical-question: Halo Wars - you promised so much but delivered so little - what is up with that?

Max Payne 3

2009-03-24T09:50:00.004+11:00

One thing you can count on: you push a man too far, and sooner or later he'll start pushing back.

New Max Payne game? Yes. Nothing to do with the movie? Thankfully. Developed by Remedy, the people behind the first two? Not so much. They're still "hard at work" on Alan Wake, which will be completed as soon as they solve the pesky problems associated with getting hell to freeze, so this one's being done by Rockstar Vancouver, the team who did Bully. (And, for that matter, Homeworld, under their old name of Barking Dog.)

I didn't like Bully. Apparently, though, I'm in the minority on that, and in any case I'm more than ready to fork out for a new installment of Payne-themed action-noir. For those not familiar with why Max Payne is awesome, go check out this page full of quotes.

Peggle (Live Arcade)

2009-03-23T07:00:00.000+11:00

I first played Peggle on the PC, when Valve inexplicably shipped a demo with the Steam release of The Orange Box. At the time I found it strangely addictive; playing it again today, on XBox Live Arcade, very little has changed.

Like most games by developer PopCap, Peggle's premise is simple. Part Breakout, part pachinko, Peggle sees you firing balls from the top of the screen into a field which is densely packed with coloured pegs. You're aiming to hit as many pegs as possible through a clever series of bounces before the inevitable tug of gravity pulls the ball off the bottom of the screen.

As with good games, the simple premise is easy to understand, hard to master. Your task is complicated by the peg colours. Blue pegs rack up points, but bring you no closer to finishing the level. Red pegs are the key to victory - clear them all to finish the level - and the more red pegs you hit, the higher your score multiplier builds, giving you an incentive to clear red clusters early rather than late. A single purple peg roves randomly around the field; hitting it results in a big point boost. And green pegs unleash special abilities ranging from the chaotic Multiball through to the awesome Zen Shot (wherein the computer subtly adjusts your chosen trajectory to maximise your points).

The Live Arcade version of Peggle is much the same as the PC version. The core experience is a direct port from the PC, identical level layouts and all. On the one hand, aiming your shots with the controller is slower and less precise than using a mouse. To compensate, the Live Arcade edition includes additional Challenge Levels, plus a lame multiplayer mode where players take turns firing balls into the same field. On average it seems exactly as fun as the original.

If you haven't played Peggle yet, you really should. Live Arcade makes downloading the free demo a breeze, so check it out and see whether you're one of the many people for whom Peggle is a horrible addictive drug.

The Maw

2009-03-22T11:32:00.010+11:00

The charm of The Maw's title character completely fails to compensate for the charmlessness of everything else in the game.

The Maw is a title by indie developer TwistedPixel, recently released for XBox Live Arcade. In it, you play a little blue alien who's been captured by some big blue aliens. There's no speech in The Maw, and in fact no dialogue or text of any kind, so we're left to deduce what's going on by the frenzied muggings of the participants. A quick trip to the internet informs that your character's name is "Frank", and that his captors are "Bounty Hunters", although what Bounty Hunters might want from Frank is a mystery.

In any case, the Bounty Hunters' ship crashes within moments of Frank's capture, and as Frank stumbles dazed from the crash site, he comes across Maw, a purple globby-thing who is apparently a fellow captive. Frank finds a kind of electro-leash with which he can lead Maw around, and from that point forward the game involves escorting Maw across the countryside while feeding everything that moves into Maw's steadily growing pie-hole.

There's a central dynamic of "Maw eats things, Maw grows bigger, Maw can eat bigger things" which at first seems like a cheap knock-off of Katamari Damacy. Further time with the game reveals that first impressions are correct. However, none of Katamari's charm is present here. The number of things that Maw can actually eat is quite small, and the environments don't really scale up to match Maw as he grows, which eventually leads to levels where much of the proceedings are completely obscured by Maw's giant head, leaving you to wander around aimlessly in the hope that there's something edible in front of the the big purple noggin that's blocking your vision.

The problems involved in seeing past Maw are compounded by horrid camera controls, which refuse to allow you to look upwards. The levels are three dimensional, so looking up is often fairly important, but the only directional options offered by the camera are "look at Frank's feet" and "look at the grass ten feet in front of Frank".

Speaking of the grass, it's pretty horrible. Ground, mountainsides and sky are rendered throughout the game using only a single low-resolution texture each; it's strongly reminiscent of Nintendo 64 platformers, but without the liveliness and artistic spirit that made the best of that brotherhood sparkle. While Maw and Frank are detailed and well-animated, the environments they traipse through are eye-burningly ugly.

Not only are they ugly, they're small. All but the last couple of levels are aggressively tiny. The game compensates for the small environments by requiring Frank and Maw to move at an infuriating crawl. Never has a game been more in need of a "run" button. When you're moving forward in the level it's not too bad, but if you need to suddenly backtrack to the beginning of the level to find an edible you missed earlier it's controller-hurlingly awful.

As a pseudo-platformer it's obligatory for The Maw to have collectibles. Each level features a finite number of edibles, plus a "hidden" flying bug-thing. Finding these collectibles is never harder than destroying ever object and following every path, but the edibles are often quite small and stand out poorly from the background, so it's easy to miss one just due to the art design. At best, missing one means a long slog back across terrain you've previously covered; at worst, it means replaying the level.

Maw can gain a variety of powers by eating unique animals. These range from a fire-breath to lasers to a ramming horn, and getting the powers is usually more fun than not getting them. In most cases there's only a single power per level; on the few occasions when you switch powers mid-level it's more of a curse than a blessing as if you've missed any edibles only collectible by the first power, it'll take a replay to get them once you've moved to the new power.

It is impossible to die in The Maw. The very few things that actively attack only bump you backwards. Typically, this kind of design decision would be in order to allow you to enjoy sandbox-style play or exploration without the threat of failure hanging over your head, but in The Maw there's nowhere to explore and nothing to do, so it really just feels like you're wandering around a small padded room while wearing a straightjacket. In later levels, the game will literally play itself, with The Maw charging forwards and blowing things up while you as player find your controls suddenly non-responsive.

The nerf-bat level of danger, combined with tiny levels, few activities to engage in, and a miniscule amount of content overall, make The Maw tough to recommend. It's just non-intutive enough to frustrate the children who are (apparently) its target audience, and for mature gamers, even casual ones, there's simply not enough on offer to entertain for more than an hour or so.

Maw itself is a very likeable character, but one character is just not enough to lift this game out of the doldrums. Take your money elsewhere on Live Arcade. It's not as though the rest of the marketplace doesn't spoil you for choice.

Saints Row

2009-03-21T07:00:00.009+11:00

DefJam-signed music artist David Banner first came to my attention for his appearance in the incredibly excellent DefJam: Fight for NY, in which he was a playable character who, in a shoutout to his Marvel Comics namesake, started battles by yelling, "You wouldn't like me when I'm angry - bitch!"

It was dialogue that snapped, that rippled, that drifted across all that followed it like a silken banner blown by distant, heroic winds. In my mind, it raised the bar for speechmaking - the very science of speaking had been evolved. If Franklin Delano Roosevelt had had this technology, we might have realised that we had nothing to fear but fear itself, bitch. Had it been in possession of Churchill, we surely would have fought them on the beaches, bitch, fought them on the landing grounds, bitch, fought them in the fields and, bitch, in the streets, and so forth.

It is with unleavened delight that I discovered the good Mr Banner had delivered the title track to Saints Row. The anticipation of this musical masterpiece seasoned my early experiences with the game. Like all things worth having, acquiring this tune required work; it required unlocking, and by golly I unlocked. Collecting the last hidden CD from within the virtual city of Stilwater, I fired up the in-game music player, turned the relevant knobs to "Banner" and sat back to bask in the glory.

I was not disappointed. The lyrics to Saints Row's flagship tune - itself named "Saints Row" - proceed largely as follows:

"Holla bitch / holla bitch / y'all know me
Mississippi ho / I'm a real O.G.
If you're sick of being sick and you're tired of being broke
Go and get your guns and bring your ass to Saint's Row
Saints Row, bitch!
Saints Row, bitch!
(mumble mumble mumble mumble mumble), bitch!"

I'm telling you this story in order to warn you that had David Banner saying the word "bitch" been the sole redeeming feature of this game, with the rest being an unholy mashup of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy and Imagine Babyz, I would still have given it an enthusiastic pass mark. The man can do no wrong and, if Fight for NY is to be believed, he is not averse to throwing those who anger him in front of subway trains.

It is to Saints Row's enormous credit that it is possible to completely overlook the work of Mr Banner amid what may well be the greatest open-world game ever created by human beings.

Saints Row is a copy of Grand Theft Auto. If the box had borne the GTA logo, it would have been forgivable to mistake Saints Row for another entry in that august franchise. The thing about Saints Row, though, is that it is better.

Grand Theft Auto is the squalid third-world country squatting fetidly on Saints Row's borders. Saints Row is modern; in Saints Row they can afford luxuries like a user interface, a pathfinding overlay, and consistent mission difficulty. In Saints Row even the most ill-made vehicles are fun to drive, few if any cars engage in 360-degree rolls under normal driving conditions, and the whole game can be played from beginning to end without reference to a FAQ, hidden collectibles and all.

It's hard to imagine people who are unfamiliar with the Grand Theft Auto formula - possibly they exist in the darkest depths of Africa, or in the less popular homes for the aged - but for the purpose of refreshing memory it is this: you are set loose in a large virtual city, in which can be found guns, cars, innocent civilians, and police officers, and you are left to your own devices to cause havoc. In and amongst the creation of havoc you may find time to complete "missions", which advance a central storyline, and "side-jobs", which are allegedly optional and reward you by unlocking new weapons, abilities, and customisation options.

In GTA the havoc was great, but the difficulty of both missions and side-jobs would waver between "trivial" and "controller-snappingly infuriating" with all the predictability and grace of an inebriated hobo. Saints Row decides that too easy is, on the whole, a better place to be than too hard, and while you will certainly need concentration and focus to make progress, it's rare to need more than a couple of tries to finish any of the game's challenges.

That's great, because it lets you really concentrate on the game's strengths. The havoc-causing is front and centre, and it is almost exactly as good (in fact, almost exactly the same) as what Grand Theft Auto has been serving up for years. You smash cars into other cars, gun down civilians, blow things up with explosives, and then play cat-and-gun-toting-mouse with the cops until you eventually go down in a blaze of glory. The cops are noticeably more wussy than their GTA counterparts; they're slower to anger, easier to evade, and they're missing the auto-arrest-if-they-catch-you-prone power that made the GTA fuzz so effective. That's fine, though, because you're also able to piss off Saints Row's various rival gangs, and gangbangers are vastly more dangerous than their GTA equivalents.

What's better than all the havoc, though, is the story. If you've played GTA, you'll know that the story there is little more than an excuse to carry you through a succession of unlikely psychopaths who'll make awkward double-entendres while telling you to kill hundreds of innocent civilians (which you invariably do without question).

Saints Row, by contrast, sets you up as a fledgling member of the 3rd Street Saints, one of the city of Stilwater's four major gangs. Pushed into a corner by their rivals, almost completely stripped of territory, Saints leader Julius instigates a campaign to save the Saints from extinction and retake the city. Naturally, you get involved in the fight, and as the battle against the competition heats up you rise through the ranks, eventually taking a lead role in the final onslaughts against Stilwater's key gang figures.

Rather than linking missions to caricatured madmen, Saints Row carefully and efficiently introduces you to Julius' lieutenants - Dex, Tony, Lin, and Johnny Gat. It also brings the leadership of the rival gangs on-stage at any early point - each gang has three well-realised characters in its upper ranks, whose internal politics as shown through surprisingly well-written cutscenes offers a real personality and immediacy to the missions you'll be undertaking.

These aren't just questgivers - these characters have interrelationships. The history and brotherhood between Julius and rival gang-leader Benjamin King gives poignancy to the final missions against the Vice Kings gang. The mixture of hero-worship and frustration that the cool-headed Dex has for the violence-prone Johnny brings him to life as a character, and offers understandable reasons for the often circuitous missions he tasks you with. Lin, sent undercover with the Westside Rollerz, is in danger of coming off as a one-note bitch, but ends up a surprisingly memorable and powerful part of the overall story. Minor characters take surprising twists, becoming tragic heroes or unlikely villains.

Don't get me wrong - this isn't fine art. It's still a violent cops-and-robbers story about two-bit hoods with a dubious moral code. It's derivative and it's contrived and it's frequently crass. But it takes itself seriously, and it's not afraid to occasionally do things just a little better and deeper than it strictly had to, and after the narrative famine that GTA has been offering for years Saints Row makes for a feast of awe-inspiring proportions.

The combination of sandbox and story is supported by a whole host of fine detail that really lets the game shine. You can plot courses on your minimap; you pause the game and set a destination, and the game sketches out an optimal route in glowing blue dots. The pathfinder tool isn't aware of the many shortcuts across private land, and it gets a bit muddled with Stilwater's labyrinthine aerial overpass system, but it's still a vast improvement on trying to memorise the streets of the city's 36 distinct districts.

You've got a cell phone; I've heard a lot of people making a big deal of this feature in GTA IV but Saints Row got there first. You can call friends to back you up in combat, you can call taxis to ferry you quickly around the city, call ambulances for medical attention, and of course call a number of "secret" numbers for short humorous pre-recorded messages.

You can customise your character's clothing and appearance, setting racial type, hairdo, and outfit, with (naturally) more customisation options unlocking as you progress. There's a stupidly large number of radio stations to tune in to as you drive around, although (David Banner aside) the quality of the licensed music is vastly inferior to GTA's typical offering. The hip-hop collection is probably the highlight, featuring Wu Tang Clan, De La Soul, Ghostface Killah, and Xzibit, among other recognisable names.

Saints Row is the game that Grand Theft Auto has always wanted to be. It's loud, it's memorable, it's addictive, and most of all it's incredibly fun and if you're an XBox 360 owner you've really got no good excuse not to have your own copy of this game. Bitch.

Update

2009-03-20T11:47:00.007+11:00

Please pardon the lack of posts; I've had a week or so where I just wasn't in the mood.

Gaming in brief:

- I finished the original Saints Row. It may unashamedly copy Grand Theft Auto lock, stock and barrel, but it's entirely excusable seeing as how it's exponentially better than any GTA up to and including San Andreas. (I haven't played GTA IV yet but I have a sneaking suspicion I'm still going to like Saints Row better.) The user interface is worlds beyond what GTA offers, the mission difficulty is set to "fair" rather than "infuriating", and - the biggest surprise - it has a fully fleshed out plot, complete with intelligent dialogue, characters you really care about, and subtle relationships you'll be thinking about long after you finish the game.

- Caught up some of the XBLA titles I've been meaning to try. The Maw is highly cute but so aggressively small-scale and challenge-less that it feels more like a demo or a toddler toy than a real product. Final Fantasy Crystal Defenders is one of the worst tower defence games I've ever played and it has the added insult of costing money to buy. Peggle is almost exactly the same game as the PC version, which is to say still totally awesome.

- I went back to Mirror's Edge to try to get more achievements, which is practically a first for me. In my house, once I put a single-player game back on the shelf, that's the last time I'll ever touch it, no matter what my intentions might be at the time. I'm speedrunning the story levels, and if the levels were thrilling the first time around they're even moreso when you play them this way. It feels like playing the game as intended; the only thing that stops it from being a perfect gaming experience is the punishingly high difficulty involved in getting a qualifying time at these things.

Don't Look Back

2009-03-08T07:00:00.000+11:00

Time for a browser game; this one's right down the line between "games as art" and "games as brutal platforming challenges".

Terry Cavenagh's Don't Look Back is a reimagining of the Orpheus myth via the medium of the browser game; as the player, you'll descend into hell (this time with a handgun), and retrieve your beloved. The catch: once you've found her, you have to return to the surface without ever looking back.

This is not an easy game but it's not unfairly hard. Each individual room is very tricky, but you've got unlimited lives and a checkpoint at the start of each room, so you'll never have to replay an easy bit to get another crack at the hard bit. If more platformers were like this I'd be inclined to spend more time with the genre.

Don't Look Back is thoroughly entertaining, and an early contender for many of next year's indie and casual awards, so go check it out now before you're the only kid who hasn't.

The Sound of Awesome

2009-03-07T07:00:00.000+11:00

Do you want to know what nostalgia sounds like? It sounds like a video arcade in 1982.

Actually I never visited a video arcade in 1982, what with being only two years old, but it's pretty much the same experience as a video arcade in 1988, which, coincidentally, also sounds like nostalgia.

I say this because someone excellent at coinopvideogames.com took it upon himself to record himself playing games at various arcades between 1982 and 1988, on audio cassette (itself almost prehistoric), and then, more than two decades later, convert those cassettes into MP3s that you can listen to through your web browser.

This is even more awesome than it appears. You may have forgotten that arcade games were loud, and you can hear every sound effect coming out of the machine clearly, including the surprisingly catchy theme to Jungle King. If I had these on a CD I would play it as the background music to my house.

Go check it out! (And thanks to Dinosaur Comics for the heads-up.)

Breaking Stealth

2009-03-06T07:00:00.003+11:00

Stealth gameplay is broken.

It sucks. It always sucks. Stealth is the game element most likely to ruin any game that includes it.

Metal Gear Solid is a huge success. Splinter Cell and Thief and Tenchu have all done more or less okay. They have not succeeded because of their stealth gameplay; they have succeeded in spite of it.

The reason is this: stealth gameplay is broken. It is inherently bad gameplay.

Stealth avoids conflict

Avoiding conflict is not fun. More importantly, it is bad drama. The key to drama is conflict born out of the natual drive of the narrative; good story happens as a result of how that conflict changes those who participate in it.

You could say that the conflict in stealth is the player's desire to not get caught versus the desire of guards to catch the player; however, in most stealth gameplay the guards are not actively looking for the player, meaning they are not dynamic participants in the conflict. Neither protagonist or antagonist are changed by the activity.

Games that succeed in spite of stealth use stealth as a means to build tension, leading up to cathartic confrontations against boss characters or set-piece action scenes.

Stealth does not offer resolution

Stealth does not resolve problems. When you sneak past a guard, the guard is still there. The problem still exists, and may even complicate your further advancement. Your activity has made your situation more dangerous as a result of your activity, rather than increasing your mastery of the situation.

Games that succeed in spite of stealth use stealth as an element of assassination, rewarding your successful stealth activity with the elimination of the guard and a correspondingly less fraught game space.

Stealth removes the ability for the player to pace gameplay

Stealth gameplay proceeds at the pace of the guards. Your motions are dictated by the patrols of non-player characters. This disempowers the player and removes their ability to customise their game experience to their tastes. It creates periods of downtime in which the player can take no meaningful action without causing mission failure and thereby reduces the player to the position of an audience to their own story.

Games that succeed in spite of stealth offer alternative routes for navigating an environment, with each route offering a different pacing and a different level of risk. They also provide meaningful things that a player can do while waiting for guards, or offer a level of environmental detail that is inherently enjoyable to experience during enforced pauses.

Stealth mechanises NPCs

Stealth activity involves the player moving through the gaps in the enemy guard pattern. To successfully engage in this activity, the player requires three types of information: the location of the enemies, the cone of sight of the enemies, and the manner in which the enemies move. This is, obviously, a significantly higher level of information than the enemies have available.

In the most poorly designed games this information is not well revealed to the player; however, when it is available, it renders the guards no better than machines, bound to understood rules of behaviour and possessed of unfeasibily low levels of awareness and intelligence. It can be difficult to respect such enemies and take them seriously. Contemptible opposition isolates a player from the game world and inhibits their ability to become immersed and empathise with their avatar and other characters.

Games that succeed in spite of stealth take steps to equip their predictable NPCs with personality quirks, idle animations, a wide range of context-appropriate spoken dialogue, and patrol patterns that are believable and effective in relation to the environment. These games have NPCs who are inherently intelligent and effective, whose ability to spot the player is limited by the nature of the level design and the competencies of the player character rather than their own inadequacy.

Stealth is binary

You are seen, or you are not seen. You are alive, or you are dead. Where shooting games can include health metres and driving games include finishing times, there is no "almost stealthy". In a worst case scenario, being detected results in death, and you move back to the last checkpoint (or, worse, the start of the level). In a best case scenario, being detected sends guards into an "alert state", where they deviate from patrol routes and possibly even actively search for the player. The player must hide (which involves standing around in an isolated spot and doing nothing, a form of punishment itself.) If the guards find the player, though, we return to that problem - being found equals failure. Not "a bit of failure" or " a portion of failure" - just failure. If you're lucky the stealth game ends and you're now in a fighting game. If you're unlucky, it's back to the checkpoint.

Games that succeed in spite of stealth attempt to make failure non-binary by including multiple alert levels and allowing players to "fight their way free" of guards, effectively making their health meter a substitute "stealth failure" meter. They also make the process of hiding from alert guards a game in and of itself and minimise the "waiting for the all clear" downtime.

----

There are good stealth games; there are good stealth segments inside some games. But it's fighting an uphill battle. You're trying to bring fun to the player, instead of bring the player to the fun. Stealth is inherently broken; don't treat it as a gameplay staple, don't go there unless you know what you're doing, and for heaven's sake don't mix it into an otherwise un-broken product.

God Hand

2009-03-05T07:00:00.005+11:00

The gulf between wanting to like something and actually liking it can be so large.

In God Hand you punch people so hard they fly over the horizon. In God Hand you punch people so hard that they fly into buildings and then the buildings fall down. In God Hand you punch people so hard that their soul comes loose from their body and then you have to punch that as well.

Also, sometimes you kick things hard, too.

This is a winning formula. This is something you can write on a white board and underline a few times and then sit back to watch the money roll in. If I were to write a book on designing "fun", this would be the first chapter, the case study, and most of the conclusion. I would write, "And in conclusion, in God Hand you punch people so hard that your fist breaks the sound barrier, and then the person you have punched flies off into the distance, also breaking the sound barrier."

So what really baffles me is why God Hand isn't fun.

Disclaimer: I didn't finish God Hand. I didn't come close. I just wasn't enjoying it, so I haven't seen the whole game. It's hard to imagine a second act, though, that would redeem the five hours or so I spent with it.

God Hand is a PlayStation 2 title by (now-defunct) Clover Studios, the same clever fellows who made the amazing Okami. Where Okami was the transcendent poster-child of the "games made art" movement, God Hand is something born wholly crafted from the mind of an illiterate 14-year old. It is crass, it is gratuitous, and it is crude in every sense of the word. In God Hand some of the villains are gay men and you punch them so hard you make them straight.

God Hand is clearly influenced by Capcom's action franchise Devil May Cry. There's a deliberate emphasis of style over substance. The plot is incoherent, the dialogue and voice acting are horrible, and your combat moves bear little to no relationship to the laws of physics. However, where Devil May Cry boasted smooth controls, deep tactical combat, strong level design and above-average graphics, God Hand instead opts for hand-twisting button maps and repetitive brawling in a series of unattractive linear corridors.

Unattractive may be an understatement. God Hand looks God Awful. One could be generous and say that level and enemy designs are "inspired by" such brawling classics as Golden Axe and Streets of Rage, and it's true that there is more than a little deliberate homage here, but the reality is that both Golden Axe and Streets of Rage had significantly more art in a single screen that God Hand can muster over the course of a level. Everything's done in pallets of dull brown. Enemy designs are so generic that even the villains of a Dynasty Warriors game could put them to shame. Ground surfaces are a flat brown while skyboxes are a flat blue. Every wall is set at right angles to another wall and the camera is not afraid of clipping right through surfaces to show you that they have no depth or substance.

The gameplay is standard brawler fare. You punch, and you kick. There are some 100+ punches and kicks available, and you can ultimately map up to 11 of them to your controls at one time, so there's some tactics involved in picking your repertoire. Most enemies are largely similar though, so once you've got a set-up you won't need to change it much. You run around a 3D level, and enemies mosey up you singly or in groups, so as to allow you to punch and kick them.

Every few punches or kicks, enemies will block. When they block, you'll need to back off, as hitting them while they're guarding allows them to do a dangerous counter-attack. So you'll get used to the pattern of punch-punch-punch, wait, punch-punch-punch, wait. Later on you get special "guard-break" moves which simplify the process. You yourself are unable to block, although you can dodge. Blocking was presumably inserted to pace combat and stop players from self-combusting from the sheer awesomeness of non-stop punching.

Defeated enemies sometimes drop money; money can be used to buy new punches. In God Hand you punch people so hard that they turn into currency.

Also, you have a rage meter, which when full allows you to turn invincible and unleash the titular God Hand for 10 seconds or so, and "roulette slots", each of which will let you pull off one of your particularly awesome super-punches. Using a super-punch empties a slot, which you have to refill by finding a magic card dropped by a defeated enemy.

God Hand is really hard, even on the easiest difficulty. Not consistently hard - you'll go from an enemy that just stands there as you punch him straight to a hell-demon that moves faster than you can see. Not interestingly hard - enemies you can't see because of the horrible camera will cheerfully punch you in the back of the head and follow up with a combo that kills you before you can recover. Just hard. Stupidly hard. Death usually means a trip back to the start of the level and up to twenty minutes of play erased. In God Hand people punch you so hard you travel back in time.

I've mentioned how the voice acting is horrible, but it's really just fitting into the overall audio standard. Pretty much every in-game sound effect is some variant of explosion, which at first glance seems to possess a certain kind of awesome but in practice really doesn't. There appears to be only one piece of background music, a kind of surfing-guitar reminiscent of Hawaii Five-O that loops endlessly. Enemies yell "Come on!" at you a lot, and "Oof!" when you hit them, and that's about it.

Actually the whole game feels more like a prototype than a finished game. There's the bare bones of a gaming experience, and a whole mess of awesome punches, but everything else feels like placeholders rather than final product. I can see that Clover were trying something worth trying, a kind of re-invention of the brawler as a genre, but that intention is in no way manifest in what they actually released.

There is a certain class of people who will love God Hand, and these people are not to be ridiculed. There is a genius located deep in the core of this unlovely software, a genius that knows that it is absolutely impossible to ever punch a videogame villain too hard. But those who can look past the eye-gougingly horrible aesthetics and the nun-punchingly torturous gameplay to find that genius will be few and far between, and for the rest of us it's worth mentioning that this game came out late in the PlayStation 2's lifespan, almost no-one bought it, and it's practically impossible to find a copy.

Hardcasual Is Mocking Me

2009-03-04T10:39:00.004+11:00

Oh, sure, they've changed names to protect the innocent, but I think it's clear to all concerned that game journalism humour site Hardcasual has looked into the shallow waters of my soul and constructed some harsh criticism from the muck therein.

That's it, Hardcasual - you're going on the list. Also Leigh Alexander. The list.

Loops of Zen

2009-03-04T09:30:00.004+11:00

Very, very busy at work and not feeling much like blogging after a 12-hour work day, but to tide you over in the mean time here's Loops of Zen.

It's a browser game, and it's simple. You get a board of tiles, each with lines and connections to other tiles, and you rotate the tiles until there's no dead ends on the board - every line must curve back on itself. Surprisingly satisfying and easier than it initially seems.

Go play it now.

Vote In IGF Audience Choice Award

2009-03-03T09:37:00.002+11:00

Voting has opened for the Independent Games Festival Audience Choice Awards. If you followed my series of posts on the IGF finalists, and played some or all of the games mentioned, it's time to go cast your votes.

Only those games with a playable public demo are eligible; that does, however, include games that are only playable on Live Arcade or PSN, so very few voters are realistically going to be able to try out all the finalists.

The Audience Choice finalists are:

*Mightier
*Coil
*Cortex Command
*Retro/Grade
*You Have To Burn The Rope
*IncrediBots
*Dyson
*The Graveyard
*Between
*PixelJunk Eden
*Brainpipe
*Carneyvale Showtime
*The Maw
*Musaic Box
*Osmos

Notes: (a) please don't vote for You Have To Burn The Rope just because it's the easiest one to find and play - only vote for it if you actually think it's the best! (b) please don't vote for Musaic Box, at all.

Go cast your vote!

Beyond Good & Evil

2009-02-25T10:30:00.008+11:00

With Christmas well and truly behind me and the flood of blockbuster next-gen titles temporarily receding, I've taken the time to catch up on some overlooked gems from my PlayStation 2 collection, in particular Beyond Good & Evil.

This is a game from Michel Ancel, the creator of Rayman. At the time of its release, it sold poorly, but it's picked up steam as a cult classic and the general consensus on the blogosphere is that it's time to revisit Beyond Good & Evil with kinder eyes.

I'm glad I did. The game is excellent. After playing through the recent Prince of Persia I had been thinking to myself, "I want more like this," and now I'm feeling a little stupid because it turns out I had "more like this" sitting on my shelf for the better part of two years, completely unplayed.

In Beyond Good & Evil you play as Jade, photographer and surrogate big sister to a gaggle of assorted orphans. When Jade's adopted planet of Hillys is attacked by the militaristic DomZ armies, Jade is pressed into service to find out what the DomZ are up to and why, exactly, the local defence forces aren't doing much about it.

I say that it's a bit like Prince of Persia, and by that I really mean that it handles relationships between the core characters well. Jade is aided by her "Uncle Pey'j", an avuncular pig-man with a gift for mechanics. (Actually, Hillys is populated by all manner of animal-people, although it spurns catgirls and bunny-women in favour of antropomorphic sharks, rhinos and goats.) Later on you'll also team up with "Double H", a likeable resistance fighter who's forever quoting his role models "Johnson & Peters". These characters are really enjoyable to be around, and when the game makes you go solo you'll really feel their loss. The interactions with Pey'j and Double H form the emotional spine of the game.

Really, though, the gameplay is more like Metal Gear Solid meets Pokemon Snap. Jade's role as a photographer isn't a mini-game or sidequest - it's the core of the game. All your efforts are ultimately directed and getting access to places where you can take photos which reveal the truth of the DomZ plan. You compose and shoot your photos yourself, and the game stores the photos you've taken and weaves them into the game in unexpected places, notably to excellent effect in the game's final scenes.

To keep you busy between plot photographs, you're also challenged to photograph every animal species on Hillys, of which there are I think 50-something. Some of these are ubiquitous but others will require finding some very specific environments. The animals are beautifully unique and make sense in the context of the biosphere; finding the rarer specimens can be really breathtaking, whether it's turning out the lights in a deep cave to capture an unrecorded bioluminscent algae in full glow, or catching a giant blue whale in mid-leap as it breaches the waves. The nature photography is so excellent that I found myself wishing that it could have been the main plot.

Sadly, the other half of the game is stealth. Despite my love of Metal Gear Solid I've never enjoyed having to be stealthy, and I like it best as a vehicle for getting myself in the prime position for completely eliminating every guard in sight. Beyond Good & Evil does a pretty passable job at this type of gaming - the controls are tight and responsive, for example - but it still doesn't quite get it right.

The camera doesn't give you anywhere near enough information. It's not clear how many guards are around, where they're walking, or where they can see. This turns the stealth sections into frustrating trial-and-error processes where you'll proceed halfway across an area, realise there's an extra guard you couldn't see, get caught, and have to restart. Thankfully checkpoints are extremely generous and well-placed. Also, the consequences of detection vary. Sometimes you'll merely end up fighting the guards, which is an appropriate punishment as you'll usually win but at a severe cost to your health. On other occasions, however, detection results in immediate death from a previously-invisible hovering laser orb that can apparently shoot through walls.

Were it not for the stealth sections, this would be an extremely casual-friendly game. Nothing anywhere else in the design comes close to replicating the frustration and repetition of the sneaking missions; every time I started into a guarded area I came close to giving up the game for good and I ended up playing with a walkthrough in hand to minimise my negative experiences.

Everything other than the stealth is perfect, though. You can cruise around the watery surface of Hillys in a hovercraft, compete in suprisingly entertaining hovercraft races, discover hidden nooks and crannies, collect valuable pearls, and explore the pedestrian district of Hillys' main city.

That city, by the way, is a triumph. The main canals that connect everything are packed with an amazing variety of water-borne and airborne vehicles moving in every direction at once, while giant television screens hovering in the air boom out propaganda messages. This kind of business is something we've seen in videogames elsewhere, but the fact it intrudes out into the player's space - the other vehicles are using the same areas that you can use - makes it feel real and immediate and alive. It has an effect something like the cantina from Star Wars, giving you the impression of this being a real, diverse world, through the use of only a single scene. The city also grows and changes as you play, with the propaganda messages changing to reflect your exploits and growing numbers of citizens protesting in the streets as you take more photographs and uncover more of the truth.

The graphics are gorgeous. Despite being rendered on a last-generation system I had no cause to fault anything visual about the game. This is largely because it relies less on technical prowess than it does on genuine art; good aesthetics is good aesthetics at any level of resolution. These are clearly deliberate choices - for example, the art uses simple lines and blocky, childlike shapes for all the Hillyan characters, while making the Domz significantly more visually complex, with assymetries and irregular silhouettes. (The only Hillyan to copy this design style is Pey'j, presumably to reinforce him as a "grown-up" and set him apart from the "child-like" Hillys. It's worth noting also that, story-wise, he's not a Hillyan native.)

Jade is a textbook example of how to do a modern female protagonist. She's dynamic, interesting, competent and attractive, without being sexualised, gimmicky or shallow. Part of what makes her work is that she's "just a person", and a late-game twist that sheds new light on her background feels weak precisely because it violates her identity as someone "normal".

The music is fantastic. I've had it stuck in my head for days after I've finished playing the game, and the main theme is a genuine gaming classic.

I love the story, I love the art, I love the characters, I love the thrilling unexpected action set-pieces (in particular an amazing rooftop chase), I love that the action facilitates the story rather than vice versa, and I love that after such a long hiatus it's finally getting a sequel.

Finding a copy of Beyond Good & Evil is easy. It came out for every last-gen system, it's available ~~for the 360 through XBox Originals~~ for PC direct download via Steam, and if you live in Canada they're apparently giving it away for free with certain packs of cheese. If you haven't played it yet, get yourself psyched to complete some annoying stealth in pursuit of a greater good, fire up your system of choice, and sit back for one of the best gaming experiences ever produced.

Trailers, Trailers, Trailers

2009-02-24T09:32:00.002+11:00

- Capcom have announced Lost Planet 2. I'm not sure who, exactly, was clamouring for Lost Planet 2, as the original was pretty dire. Its biggest problems were its clunky controls, horrible scripting and terrible voice acting, so it's pretty funny that to "fix" the franchise they've given it to the Resident Evil 5 producer.

- Bioware have announced Mass Effect 2. You'll recall that the original was my Game of the Year 2007, so I'm pretty hyped about a sequel. I understand you'll be able to port your save game from the first game and continue the same character, so that's pretty awesome. I'm not sure how that squares up with this trailer, though.

- I've been quietly enjoying the rise of "disaster survival" as a new genre of game, and while none of the entries in it have so far been particularly great, I figure it's only a matter of time. Ubisoft's I Am Alive will probably not break the mold, but you never know. (This is actually an old trailer but I figure you probably missed it in the E3 buzz so it's worth digging up now.)

Simple English

2009-02-23T17:04:00.004+11:00

I used to be in favour of writing in Simple English. I rarely achieved it - I lean heavily towards verbosity - but it seemed to be a goal worth aspiring to.

Today's xkcd directed me to the Simple English Wikipedia. A cursory inspection has reminded me that Simple English is disturbingly close to Newspeak, which I note with amusement is a concept that doesn't have a page in the Simple English Wiki. Fifteen things described as "good" and "very good" in under a minute was enough to scare me off the whole Simple English movement. We have a complex language so that we can express complex thoughts; sometimes simpler really is dumber.

I'll probably swing back to simplicity eventually but in the mean time I really want to revel in the fact that I have a whole rainbow of words for expressing approval above and beyond "good".

Hope

2009-02-22T07:39:00.003+11:00

Hope is a new multi-part fanzine raising money for bushfire relief in the Australian state of Victoria.

It is edited by the awesome Grant Watson, with contributions donated by writers, artists and fans in Australia and from overseas. It is supported by the Western Australian Science Fiction Foundation (WASFF), and has received assistance from the Film & Television Institute of WA, Supanova and Big Finish Productions.

Issue #1 is now available in a PDF edition in return for donations. How much you donate is up to you - Grant recommends a minimum of AUS$5.00. If you wish to subscribe to the entire five issue series, make it AUS$20.00 or more.

Hope #1 contains contributions from Mo Ali, Sophie Ambrose, R.J. Astruc, Lyn Battersby, K.K. Bishop, Matthew Chrulew, Stephen Dedman, Mark S. Deniz, d.n.l, Paul Haines, Simon Haynes, Kathleen Jennings, Ju Landeesse, Damian Magee, David A. McIntee, Simon Petrie, Andrew Phillips, Gillian Polack, Robert Shearman and Daniel Smith. The cover is by Rebecca Handcock.

I can personally testify that almost everyone on that list is like a loaded shotgun ready to fire entertainment in your direction; I say "almost" only for lack of exposure to some of the authors rather than any dissatisfaction with their shotgun-like qualities. Personally I'd buy the thing just to get Rob Shearman's contribution; he's the guy who did the Christopher Eccleston Doctor Who story "Dalek" as well as most of the best Who audio plays and the amazing short fiction collection "Little Deaths".

Also, I'm led to understand that an upcoming issue may feature content by me. You should therefore buy the whole series in order to find out.

For information on how to donate and obtain your copies of this excellent project, head on over to Grant's LJ and get out your credit cards or PayPal accounts. I mentioned it's all for charity, right?

Cell Warfare

2009-02-22T07:30:00.007+11:00

I'm still busy working through Beyond Good & Evil - too busy even to play the new Mirror's Edge DLC, if you can believe it - but in the mean time I've got some browser gaming for you.

Cell Warfare is a shameless attempt to recreate the winning formula of Amorphous +. Simple gameplay? Check. Coloured globular enemies? Check. A constant stream of badges and achievements? Check.

It wants to be a dual-stick shooter in the style of Geometry Wars. The arrow keys fly you around the play field, and you click the left mouse button to shoot in the direction of the cursor. It's initially a clunky control scheme but with some practice you'll develop surprising precision. The basic gameplay is fun, but as always with this kind of thing the real hook is trying to score all 78 achievements.

In the end it's more accessible than Amorphous +, if such a thing is possible, although not quite as tactical. Definitely worth a bunch of your time but I can't see myself racking up the four hours or so that I did with Amorphous.

You can play Cell Warfare at Kongregate, or alternatively at Newgrounds, if that's more your thing.

Sex and Violence - Never The Twain

2009-02-20T09:27:00.011+11:00

Okay, I originally wasn't going to touch this, but Leigh Alexander (who I recently discovered to be awesome) has posted on it twice in a week and I think it's probably something that deserves a wider discussion.

If you are reading The Dust Forms Words, the chances are you already have an opinion about violence in games. Probably you think that violence is a legitimate element to include in videogames, it can be fun, and it would be a sadder world if every videogame was non-violent. Certainly violence does not automatically enrich a game, and occasionally it subtracts from the fun. On some occasions violence can be completely tasteless and worthy of condemnation - but we express that condemnation by not buying the product, not through censorship.

For some reason people feel differently when it comes to sex. We're all excited about Madworld, where you can skewer someone with a streetsign and then push them into a meat grinder, but games about sex are in a different realm. Perhaps the debate is murky here because of the domination of the market by Japanese hentai titles, which cheerfully confuse consensual with non-consensual and have no particular bar against including incestuous or underage scenarios at the drop of a hat.

Does it matter, though? These games neither victimise real people nor encourage the consumer to do so; they have no more real-world impact than Wile E. Coyote getting hit by a falling anvil. We make a judgement as to whether we're amused, and if we're not, we simply choose not to reward the creators with money and attention.

But sex in games is not limited merely to the overtly erotic. Indie game Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble, a mature and clever title currently winning all sorts of praise for both its gameplay and writing, has been de-listed from Big Fish Games over complaints about a scene where the player prevents the rape of a friend. Is this worse than saving a friend from being eaten by zombies? Is it worse than any of the various murders that happen in something like Grand Theft Auto?

And then there's a rank further again; Leigh reports on the delisting of RapeLay from Amazon.com. This is a game where the gameplay is, effectively, the violent rape of fictional women. People who would defend Madworld to the death are surprisingly ready to erase RapeLay from society.

What's the line? Isn't fiction fiction? If Madworld doesn't encourage or condone real-life murder, how does RapeLay advocate rape? Can we not agree that fiction can be tasteless without also saying it should be forbidden?

More Of McGee's Alice

2009-02-20T08:58:00.005+11:00

American McGee's Alice is better remembered for its eye-grabbing visual style than for its quality gameplay (or lack thereof). In fact, American McGee as a person is better remembered for his unusual name and his penchant for attaching it to subpar products than he is for creating anything particularly wonderful.

Still, Electronic Arts seem to be willing to give him another shot. Completely ignoring the evidence of Bad Day L.A., Scrapland and Grimm, they apparently think good old American can make a bestseller, and they're therefore producing another Alice-themed title for consoles and PC.

I'm not sure what this goes to show, but I'm personally confused whether to groan, sigh, or roll my eyeballs. Protip: don't do these all at the same time or people will think you are having a seizure.

Inglourious Basterds Trailer

2009-02-18T09:30:00.003+11:00

If you want to be a serious director, there comes a time when you have to make a movie about Nazis. We can all trust Quentin Tarantino to do his in a tasteful and historically accurate manner, I'm sure.

Above is the trailer for Inglourious "Not A Spelling Error" Basterds, and as someone who's loved a lot more Tarantino than he's hated, I'm quite willing to say: hell, yes.

Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game

2009-02-15T07:00:00.002+11:00

Fantasy Flight Games are, hands down, the majestic emperors of the licensed boardgame market. These guys know how it is done. They make really excellent games that play well and capture wholesale the spirit of their source material.

I loved War of the Ring, I was an enthusiastic convert to A Game of Thrones, and now I am thrilled to bits with Battlestar Galactica.

This is, naturally, a game based on the modern incarnation of the show rather than its prehistoric origins, and most of your favourite characters are involved. You can play as obvious choices like Adama, Starbuck or Baltar, or some less overexposed characters such as Tyrol, Zarek and Helo.

Gameplay focuses on the first season-and-a-half of the show and, although the box art shows the bearded Baltar of Season Three, you won't find anything in the cards or rules that spoils stories further along than the discovery of the Resurrection Ship. Every player is, at least notionally, a human, and the co-operative goal is to guide Galactica and her civilian fleet safely to Kobol (not Earth).

However, every player is dealt a "loyalty card" at the start of the game, and another one halfway through. These cards can reveal to a player that they're secretly a Cylon, at which point they begin discreetly sabotaging the fleet either alone or in conjunction with another Cylon player. The Cylons, naturally, win if Galactica runs out of any of the key resources: fuel, food, morale and population.

Play revolves around the handling of crises, one of which is randomly drawn from a "crisis deck" each turn. These are problems which typically involve a choice between two unappealing options (lose 1 food or lose 1 fuel, etc), or a "skill test". In skill tests, players play numbered and coloured cards from their hand secretly into a pool. Cards of the correct colours for the test count towards a goal and cards of other colours subtract; if the total goes over the difficulty of the challenge, the humans pass, but otherwise they fail with disastrous consequences. Cylon players, of course, will normally be secretly playing aganist the vote, masked in their schemes by the contribution of a "destiny deck" which adds random cards to every vote and thereby obscures any toaster shenannigans going on.

The real hook to the game is finding and identifying the Cylons; this can be a really gripping political challenge, with everyone prevaricating as though there is no tomorrow. There is no way to test for Cylons (barring a quirky ability of the Baltar character), so if you think you've figured out who the robots are you'll have to send them to the brig - an action that involves a skill test. Brigged characters are essentially powerless until voted out.

The Cylons can also reveal themselves, which results in them getting shot in the head and sent to the Resurrection Ship. Once revealed, they gain new powers but lose the opportunity to sow dissent; it's clearly intended to only be a valid gambit once the jig is well and truly up.

Looking for Cylons is great fun. This is the core of the game, and it's what brings you back for more. The characters are also really interesting, each one packing unique and surprisingly well balanced abilities. Baltar, for example, is more likely to be a Cylon, but has the ability once a game to test if one other player is a Cylon. Saul Tigh can steal the Presidency and give it to the Admiral. Helo, the ship's "moral compass", can turn a traitorous decision upside down when pressed.

Unfortunately, if there are no Cylons in the first half of the game (because they're coming up in the later "Sleeper" phase) or if all the Cylons have been revealed, the game gets quite dull. With the "possibly a Cylon" factor eliminated, there is generally a clear "best" move in any given situation - the game can practically play itself. Playing a revealed Cylon is also not terribly exciting.

The game also uses a "Sympathiser" mechanic in games with even numbers of players as a way of balancing out the game - Sympathisers join whichever side is losing at the halfway mark - but this mechanic doesn't seem to work very well or be much fun for anyone. Another role that isn't much fun is being a pilot, who's typically expected to fly around Galactica shooting Cylons, but this gameplay is far shallower and less fun than what's happening on ship so few experienced players will volunteer for it.

There's a lot of pieces in Galactica, and the setup time is about 10 minutes, but the profusion of components is generally justified. The pieces are high quality, starting with a really excellent board and moving on to full-colour cards featuring art assets from the show. You get little plastic Cylon Raiders and Human Vipers, and the tokens for each character are a thick piece of card wedged vertically into a plastic base.

Battlestar Galactica isn't a perfect game, but it's still a strong game, and the thrill of playing something which captures the feel of the show so well more than compensates for its mechanical weaknesses. Trying out different characters provides a lot of inherent replayability, and the dynamic also substantially changes with different numbers of players, so there's always something new to see and do when you sit down for a round of Galactica. If you're not a Galactica fan the game is strong enough on its own to support you for two to three playthroughs, and it generally makes sense without having to understand the scenarios and characters involved.

If you're a fan of boardgames and of Battlestar this is a must-buy. It's excellent. For everyone else, it's still strongly recommendable, and a steal if you happen to see it at budget prices.

WTF Theatre Presents: Major Minor's Majestic March

2009-02-14T07:00:00.002+11:00

The guys who did Parappa the Rapper are at it again, trying for the WTF Theatre Award For Excellence In The Field Of Sweet Jeebers What The Hell.

If this doesn't sufficiently blow your mind, the Destructoid guys did their own trailer, featuring their own "music". Some might say it is better than the real thing.

Midway File For Bankruptcy

2009-02-13T15:00:00.000+11:00

Midway have filed for bankruptcy, taking them another step towards the end of their prolonged struggle against insolvency. This is really less to do with the global financial situation and more to do with their ongoing inability, over a great many years, to produce games that don't suck.

Bad news (unless you work at Midway) is that they're nevertheless going to continue trading rather than going into liquidation. That allows them to keep perpetrating Mortal Kombat vs DC upon an unsuspecting world, and, if we're extra unlucky, maybe even keep releasing new games.

None of these developments have suddenly taught Midway how to create things that are fun, so the future almost certainly involves some winding-up at some point. Hopefully such talent as they have employed there will wash up on sunnier shores, and the villains responsible for Gauntlet: Dark Legacy will flee to Argentina to escape the wrath of the International War Crimes Tribunal.

Fine, Star Trek Online Looks A Little Bit Awesome

2009-02-13T07:00:00.000+11:00

Okay. Everyone being the captain of their own ship - that's bollocks. Playing a small part of something big is what brings out the very best in MMOs, in my book. I was really looking forward to working in engingeering and saying "She just canna take it" a lot.

But - play any race in Star Trek canon or create your own? Brilliance. It embraces the idea of the Star Trek universe as this vast and infinitely diverse place, it pokes subtle but loving fun at a franchise where a million alien races are differentiated only by skin colour, forehead design and nose architecture, and in the unlikely event that two players make characters who look identical it's not immersion-breaking - it's cultural solidarity.

STO is coming from the guys behind City of Heroes so it's probably no surprise that a robust character creator is front and centre, but still, bravo.

Loose Morals And Go Fish

2009-02-12T15:00:00.000+11:00

In case you're not yet sold on the videogames-and-violence controversy being largely a case of selective reporting, boardgaming blog Purple Pawn has taken the effort to round up no less than nine stories in the last week linking violence to traditional family boardgaming. Go check it out.

These probably came about because people bought playing cards whose contents were not adequately classified. The inherent difficulty in keeping unclassified boardgames out of the hands of children is a real and ongoing issue in our modern society.

Excerpts:

State College, PA: Man plays board games with a few guys, and then one of them later breaks into his apartment and wakes him up by molesting him.

Winona, MI: Sex offender charged with molesting a 6 year old girl during a game of Go Fish.

Chicago, IL: Four women beat and stab a man to death after he breaks one of their cigarettes at a card game.

Alameda, CA: Man stabs to death his friend over a game of chess.

The Genius of Tails

2009-02-12T07:00:00.003+11:00

These days I don't play many platformers, but there was a time when I did. And in that time, the undisputed king of the genre was Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

I love this game. It keeps the speed, the simplicity and the gorgeous graphics from the original, notches down the difficulty so that everyone can enjoy, and makes the whole thing work as a two-player co-operative experience.

One of the ways that Sonic 2 works is that it doesn't try and make the two characters equal and separate. Sonic is the same hedgehog we know from the first game, with a couple of new moves aimed at helping him retain momentum. He's powerful, he's vulnerable, and he has to tackle the levels in the way intended.

Tails, by contrast, is cheerfully broken. He is a fox who flies. He can helicopter around wherever he likes, completely oblivious to the jumping sequences and the avoidance of enemies. The only catch is that the screen is locked on Sonic, so if Tails gets too far ahead or behind, the player will lose control and Tails will magically come flying back to wherever Sonic is.

Sonic 2 is a game built for its demographic. When it imagines two players, it does not see two trash-talking 15-year-olds exchanging yo momma jokes over XBox Live. It sees parents playing with children and older siblings playing with younger siblings. It envisages a skilled player, and their friend.

Only one player is challenged; only one player is called on to perform. The other player merely has to join in; they can be useful, but never a liability. They can interact without detracting from the fun. It is a roadmap for bringing together the hardcore and the casual and for facilitating intergenerational play that will create lasting memories for the participants.

This is a lesson that Sega had learned in 1992 which most developers (including Sega) have forgotten today. It is perhaps ironic that Nintendo, once Sega's chief competitor, has wholeheartedly embraced this strategy while Sega struggles to find even a single audience, let alone two to bring together.

The Valedictorian's Death

2009-02-11T23:00:00.001+11:00

Speaking of excellent tabletop RPG design (we were, weren't we?), I just noticed The Valedictorian's Death.

This is by Paul Czege, the guy who did My Life With Master, and it is both stomach-churningly creepy and awe-inspiringly brilliant. It is a game about looking through the real-life yearbooks of people you don't know, roleplaying the graduating class, and working out who is the culprit in the fictionalised murder of the year's valedictorian.

It's co-operative storytelling, where player stats are entirely about influencing narrative rather than resolving conflict. These rules are actually solid and gamelike, rather than vague and wishy-washy, and at the end a winner is determined in a way that promotes both competition and storytelling. Also, it is 100% free to the public.

You have to check it out right now. Right now, dammit. I am five kinds of envious.

Straight Outta Compton

2009-02-11T18:52:00.003+11:00

"Straight Outta Compton" by N.W.A, rendered as an introspective acoustic femme-rock ballad by Nina Gordon. Unmissable.

UPDATES: While we're talking covers, and while I'm ripping content from Copy Cats, who's heard Sean Connery doing a cover of The Beatles' "In My Life"? Hilarious! Very much in the style of the musical outings of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, but Scottish.

Also, Greg Laswell does "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" as a depressing Eternal Nightcap-esque suicide ballad.

Bars of Black and White

2009-02-11T15:00:00.004+11:00

I'm not typically a fan of room escape games, considering them point-n-click's vapid cousin, but this here's a good 'un.

Bars of Black and White comes from Gregory Weir, the talented fellow behind Majesty of Colours, and it's less of a full fledged challenge than it is a really entertaining proof of concept. You start off, as is typical of these things, trapped in a room with no memory of how you got there, but soon you get your hands on a barcode scanner and you'll start scanning every barcode you can find.

There's really only a couple of puzzles and most of the game consists of some clever jokes about the conventions and limitations of the genre. There's also plenty of shout-outs to other games including the greatest room escape of all time, Silent Hill 4.

As you're probably expecting, it's a browser game, it's undemanding, and it's on Kongregate, among other places. Go have a play, you'll smile.

Monopoly

2009-02-11T07:00:00.001+11:00

Monopoly is a bad game. Monopoly is a bad game that people play. Monopoly is a bad game that prints money as if it had secretly shackled an army of gold-summoning leprechauns to its factory floor.

Monopoly, as a study in game design, is all about the difference between quality and the perception of quality.

We've all played Monopoly, right? I'm talking about the Parker Brothers game on the square board where you're buying property and charging people rent. The one with the fistfuls of paper cash and the little plastic dog.

Yep. It's a bad game.

What does Monopoly do wrong?

Accounting
The game uses an unfeasibly large amount of paper money that players are forever having to pass around the table. You spend as much time adding, subtracting, and making change as you do actually playing the game. To make matters worse the game regularly uses the concept of "ten percent" just to make things that little bit more complex. Admittedly, to some extent the accounting is the game, but I can't help but feel that the satisfying feeling of passing cash around the table could have been retained without turning every player into a mathematician-slash-retail-clerk.

One way to do this would be to standardise the denominations. Remove the $1, $2 and $5 notes and have everything come in denominations of $10. You'd have less change-making over trivial amounts, less game components to sort through, and the maths would be simpler throughout. (You could just as easily deflate the currency and remove the $500 note but (a) humans find big numbers and multiples of 10 satisfying and (b) the big numbers are part of the flavour of the game.)

Slow resolution / exclusive victory condition
A game of Monopoly is decided in the first three passes around the board (often even sooner). After that point the relevant property has been bought, and, barring some truly unlikely dice rolling, the rich are only going to get richer and the poor poorer.

Despite this, it can take hours to actually meet the victory condition in the game. The victory condition is, specifically, to be the last man standing on the board, so you're not winning so much as being the last to lose. Losing is based on running out of assets, and there are relatively few ways for wealth to leave the table, so with each player bowing out everyone else tends to become comparitively better armoured, making it take even longer until the next elimination.

The game should instead declare a victory condition of a player accruing a total of X cash, or being the first to build X hotels. The rulebook does include two alternative victory conditions; one finishes the game after two player bankruptcies, while the other sets a real-world time limit. These are both sloppy solutions to an easy problem. Victory conditions should be based on specific criteria, they should be individual (ie contingent on the success of one player rather than the failure of others), and they should be easily and quickly achievable as soon as any player displays a clear and sustained edge over their competition.

Jail
Jail is just not fun. It might be an icon of the game, but there is nothing exciting about being arbitrarily removed from play for one to three turns. If the element was going to be included in the game, it should have been tactical - contingent in some way upon deliberate player actions.

Mortgage and bankruptcy
First up, mortgage and bankruptcy are just not fun words. Playing a game about mortgages and bankruptcy is not inherently entertaining. Secondly, the rules for both of these parts of the game are complicated, slow, and heavy on accounting. No surprise, then, that these are the two most heavily house-ruled aspects of Monopoly, at least in my experience. It seems everyone I've played with has their own custom way of handling these situations, and almost all of them are better than the game as printed.

An example of the problems with these rules: you can avoid bankruptcy by selling swathes of your property. This is a losing move - you don't recover from selling property in Monopoly. The rich will get richer faster, and you, without a source of income, will get poorer faster. You're still losing, but not straight away, so the game has been unnecessarily prolonged while you continue not having fun. The rules for bankruptcy use, in one paragraph, the terms "one-half", "10 percent", and "principal", which really makes the whole thing sound more like tax law than a family boardgame.

Few meaningful choices
It is always the correct choice to buy property when given the opportunity. It is always the correct choice to build houses once you can. The only meaningful choices come in trades with other players, and trades are easy enough to assess that two good players won't enter into one as both will only offer deals that advantage themselves over the opponent. A lack of hidden information makes for poor trading gameplay.

What does Monopoly do right?

It's tactile
It's fun to play with the Monopoly pieces. Bundles of fake money, tiny little houses, title deeds to property and so on make your accrual of assets feel very real and immediate. You can see and hold your successes.

Expressive avatars
Monopoly wouldn't be the same if you couldn't be a dog, a cannon or a top hat. These icons have little to nothing to do with the gameplay, but they give players a way to express themselves. Everyone has a favourite marker (I like the top hat), and if you've played with young children the idea of "being the doggy" is disproportionately likely to lure them to a game that otherwise has "grown-up banking game" written all over it.

Primary colours
The Monopoly board is bright, clean and distinctive. It's full of primary colours, thick black lines, and iconic cartoons. The board suggests that things in this game are easily understandable and clearly delineated.

The "if only" moment
Humans assess long odds poorly. The hotel on Mayfair happens late in the game, rarely gets landed on, costs a lot to set up, and by the time it gets triggered is unlikely to really upset the apple cart. But the penalty for landing on the Mayfair hotel is so big that rookie players will quite happily descend into bankruptcy while claiming that if only someone had landed on the hotel, everything would be different. The "jackpot" is akin to the "shoot the moon" scenario - the highly unlikely situation that, if achieved, would turn defeat into victory. It doesn't need to ever actually happen - it just needs to be clear that it could. People love these things.

Fast turns, interactive turns
Turns go by quickly. You need to pay attention on other players's turns as you can only collect rent on your properties if you notice someone landing on them. This keeps everyone at the table engaged in the proceedings.

Summary

None of Monopoly's successes make it a good game. The gameplay is, objectively, broken. What it does do is make the process of experiencing that broken gameplay as enjoyable as possible. This makes it an attractive game for casual players, who will be able to enjoy the novelty of the setup for at least a couple of games before they realise its deficiencies. It also makes it a good game for young players, who aren't able to interact with a game on its competitive level but are able to use it as a tool for imaginative and social play, particularly in conjunction with older players. (Monopoly is also pretty good for kids who are at the right age for learning addition/subtraction math.)

Monopoly is not a good game. But it is a good product. It sells, and to some extent it sells deservedly (although it continues to float on brand recognition far more than on its inherent worth). If you have created a game which is, genuinely, a good game, you should probably spend some time looking at Monopoly to work out how to make it a good game that sells.

BONUS POINTS: If you made a list of why Monopoly works (which I just have), and then made a list of why World of Warcraft works, they would be, largely, the same list. Not coincidence.

Wrath of the Lich King

2009-02-10T15:00:00.003+11:00

The other night I finally got around to rolling a Death Knight in World of Warcraft and playing through the starting areas. It was good, I guess - a huge step foward for World of Warcraft, anyway - but it wasn't the Second Coming of Blizzard that I'd been promised.

The more bells and whistles Blizzard hangs on the DikuMUD formula, the more it reminds me that the entirety of WoW is built on the bones of an 18-year-old text adventure. It's like if Namco were still devoting the totality of their corporate effort to getting Pac-Man just right.

In a way it even feels like a step back. The much-lauded "phasing" content, whereby your perception of the world changes as you complete quests, is only a short step from instancing, and the knowledge that other players aren't seeing the same world as me brutally grates on my suspension of disbelief. When I'm taken to the Death Knight assault on Light Hope Chapel I'm unable to forget that this isn't the real Light Hope Chapel but rather an ersatz copy spawned entirely for my benefit, and that elsewhere, in the real Plaguelands, people are interacting with these NPCs entirely oblivious to the devastation I'm wreaking.

I'm hopeful that in as little as five years we'll be looking back on this as the unbelievably primitive scratchings of neanderthals on cave walls, but in the mean time it's perhaps appropriate in an expansion about undeath that the bleached skull of Azeroth should show through so clearly. It feels like in the attempt to hear the story of Warcraft I've lost that sense of it being the world of Warcraft.

Scriball

2009-02-10T07:00:00.002+11:00

Time for a browser game, and today it's Scriball.

I was indifferent to this one at first, but I'm finding I keep coming back to it. You have a yellow ball, which you have to move to the green dot on each level, and the way in which you achieve this is by drawing a line on the screen with your mouse. Make a slanting line, and the ball rolls down. Make a cup, and you catch the ball. Your line can only be so long so you can also pull it out from under the ball to send it plummeting. If you need to get more height, the mouse button tosses your ball into the air.

Simple concept, and familiar to anyone who's played Canvas Curse or Crayon Physics, but still compelling and challenging. Scriball's also got significantly more content than your average Flash game, with 40+ levels, three difficulty settings and a create-your-own-level mode.

Check it out on Kongregate.

Mondayitis

2009-02-09T09:28:00.003+11:00

Not feeling particularly gifted with the eloquent tongue of language this morning so instead of substantive comment I leave you random observations.

- I've turned off the 360 for a while in order to go back and play Beyond Good & Evil on the PS2. I was exactly in the mood for Metal Gear Solid meets Prince of Persia, which is, largely, this game, so I'm feeling a little silly for having had it sit on my shelf for two years without being played.

- Saw Slumdog Millionaire the other week, which is truly as good as everyone says. Danny Boyle's made some fine films in his career but to some extent I've sat through them all just wishing he'd make another Trainspotting. Now he has.

- Some boardgames that are good: Battlestar Galactica and the expansion to Race For The Galaxy. Some boardgames that are really not very good at all: Last Night On Earth, which is officially the worst of the five zombie-themed boardgames that I have played.

Goonswarm Take Down BoB

2009-02-08T07:36:00.004+11:00

Goonswarm took down Band of Brothers on 4 February, bringing an end to the most epic battle in MMO history.

I don't play EVE Online, but man, I love hearing its news. Originating on the Something Awful forums, the Goonswarm guys are notable for their superficially irreverant approach to the game and their propaganda videos. For years they have been at war with Band of Brothers (BoB), who have a reputation as the corporation that the game developers are members of.

On the 4th, Goonswarm subverted a BoB director, used them to dismantle BoB by kicking out the members, stripped the assets, and scrambled the political directives. The alliance is dead and Goonswarm is holding on to the name to stop it reforming. Some estimates value the lost assets at upwards of $5,000 US, possibly significantly more.

Destructoid has a more complete report. Congratulations to the Goons, you've made gaming history.

Star Strike Television and Print Ads

2009-02-07T10:27:00.001+11:00

1982 saw the release of the "exciting new Intellivision space game" Star Strike for Mattel's Intellivision console. The game was heavily influenced by the Death Star trench run sequence from Star Wars and saw the player flying down a scrolling trench and firing missiles at targets. Failure could result in the on-screen destruction of the Earth. The print ad promises "special effects so realistic they appear three-dimensional".

The television ad below features American journalist George Plimpton comparing Star Strike to the Atari VCS port of Asteroids, a game which at that time had already been on the market for three years. Star Strike may have had the prettier graphics, but history has shown Asteroids as the game with infinitely longer-lasting appeal.

Diana, Warrior Princess

2009-02-06T15:00:00.001+11:00

Sorry to be roughly five years behind the times, but my attention has just been drawn to Diana, Warrior Princess, an indy RPG put out by Marcus Rowland and Heliograph Publications.

From the Wikipedia entry:

The game is a parody of Xena: Warrior Princess, and its setting tries to portray the present day with the same level of accuracy that Xena portrays Ancient Greece – i.e. not much. Historical figures are distorted and confused with each other. Diana, Princess of Wales rides around in shining white motorcycle leathers on a semi-sentient motorbike, doing battle with the war-god, Landmines, and Bonnie Prince Charlie, from whom she took her mystic powers of Royalty. She is aided by Fergie, the Barbarian Red Ken and Wild Bill Gates, while Tony the Vampire Slayer battles the sorceress Thatcher and her masked assassin Archer. The milieu also includes figures such as Emperor Norton, Queen Victoria and the "disease" lepus.

Steve Jackson's download service e23 sells copies so I might have to pick one up and give it a spin.

Left 4 Dead DLC, Battlefield 1943 Live, Lego Battles

2009-02-06T11:00:00.007+11:00

Tidbits for those of you who don't obsessively trawl the gaming news:

- Left 4 Dead downloadable content on its way in the form of a "Survival" pack, featuring one new game mode (Survival) and two new Versus campaigns. I assume these are less "new" campaigns than they are adaptations of ~~Blood Harvest~~ Death Toll and Dead Air, the two single player campaigns that didn't make the jump to Versus first time around. (link)

- Battlefield 1943 (a sequel to Battlfield 1942, which I like to refer to as "the one that didn't suck" - take that, internet!) is getting a release on XBox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, which makes me all happy inside. (link)

- The next Traveler's Tales Lego game will not, apparently, be the rumoured Lego Harry Potter or Lego Lord of the Rings but instead the much less exciting Lego Battles, which features no licensed properties but does have plenty of action from classic Lego lines such as "Castles" and "Pirates". Yay? (link)

Equivocation / Meaningful Choice

2009-02-06T07:00:00.001+11:00

Hey, if you're not reading my D&D 4th Edition blog, Eleven Foot Pole, it's probably because you're one of the many people with absolutely no interest in D&D 4th Edition.

But I put up a pair of posts yesterday that you might be interested in if you're enthused by game design generally. I rate them as "worth checking out". On a scale of one to five they score a resounding "Probably!".

In Equivocation I talk about offering players an illusory choice while still running them headlong down the story you have laid out for them. Sometimes treating your players like stooges results in good times had by all.

In Meaningful Choices I shoot down exactly that sort of fake decision, and go on to suggest that there's really only three reasons to give the players a choice at all, being the test of skill, the self-expression, and the player feedback.

Go feast your eyeballs; I'll wait.

Lego Batman

2009-02-05T07:00:00.002+11:00

Regular readers of The Dust Forms Words know that I've had a tumultuous relationship with the Lego games. The original Lego Star Wars was an upstanding gentleman of a game, but the sequels have done little more than steal beer from my fridge and pass out on my sofa. Lego Batman is the best and least stinky of those surly hoboes but it's still not the champion whom once I lionised.

The principle of the Lego videogame is simple; you walk into a world constructed of flimsy, breakable lego, and you start punching until your fists go numb. Repeat 30 times to complete the story mode, repeat 30 times more to finish the sidequests. It's a solid premise - who doesn't like punching stuff?

All these fisticuffs are, of course, dressed in the livery of a well-known franchise, and this time around it's Batman. This isn't the Batman of the recent movies, or even of the comics. It's instead a mash-up of the Tim Burton films and the animated series. It's a shallow exploration of the brand, and Batman devotees will be disappointed that the amount of fan-service on offer is approximately zero.

The place where Lego games go wrong is that the developers invariably feel that punching is somehow not enough, and throw some jumping into the mix. The jumping is the closest you will come in this life to feeling the tangible presence of Satan intruding into our mortal world. Apparently when a Lego minifig jumps it enters a kind of floaty demiplane where the rules of gravity warp and twist. Distance has no meaning and whether or not you land at your destination is dictated by variables understood only by MC Escher.

What's worse, platforms are possessed of a kind of malignant sentience and scorn the tread of your little Lego feet. Frequently you'll land squarely on a ledge only to watch your avatar drift inexplicably sideways as if compelled by magnets, before plummeting over the edge to its doom. For bonus laughs, occasionally you'll respawn only to immediately be victimised by the same deadly drift again.

The Lego games are built around the idea of co-operative play. At all times you have not one but two heroes on screen, and a friend with a second controller can drop in and out of the festivities at their whim. This worked well in the original Lego Star Wars but has been a cause of histrionics and grief ever since. Both players are bound to a single screen, despite some puzzles which really need you to split up. Attempting to move more than a screen away from your partner will drag them along behind you, usually to their death, or cause them to pop out of existence and respawn closer to you, sometimes in a location which is either fatal or inescapable.

There's no option to play two-player over XBox Live or the PlayStation Network, but that's okay because the co-op here is a friend-losing proposition anyway. Sadly, letting the computer control your buddy isn't much better, as the AI takes a cheerful pleasure in getting in your way, pushing you to your death, and refusing to help you with the co-operative puzzles.

The buggy AI may serve to distract you from the rest of the game, which is also riddled with glitches. Respawns occur in broken positions, secret canisters refuse to appear, characters get stuck in inappropriate animations, and Achievements inexplicably don't unlock. There's only so many times that you can write the woeful playtesting off as all part of the childlike joy of Lego before it becomes time to bring out the murderin' axe.

Just to round it all out, Lego Batman features some of the worst level design to every appear in a videogame. Distances can't be judged, threats can't be evaluated, and goals are seldom if ever clear. You can rarely tell what can be smashed up and what can't, and occasionally there are wierd hierachies at work (you can't destroy a street light until you first blow up its light bulb). Boss fights range from the repetitive to the obtuse, and key locations are obscured by horrible camera angles and unbreakable scenery.

That's the bad. There's some good, but none of it in any way compensates for the bad. I mention the good only to explain why Lego Batman is, while objectively awful, still a better game than Lego Indiana Jones.

First up, Batman is awesome. This has been proven by science. If you built a scale replica statue of Batman out of human crap, it would still be pretty awesome simply because it was Batman.

Secondly, there's a good roster of characters, and they're actually fun to use. You're shortchanged on the hero side, as you only get Batman, Robin, Nightwing and the Barbara Gordon Batgirl (and Nightwing looks like he fell into the mutant-vat). But for the villains you get no less than two costumes for the Joker, along with Poison Ivy, Bane, Mr Freeze, the Mad Hatter, Man-Bat, the Riddler, Catwoman, the Penguin, the Scarecrow, Hush, Ra's al-Ghul, Two-Face, Killer Croc, Clayface, Harley Quinn and, for some reason, Killer Moth. It would have been nice to see even more familiar faces such as Zsasz, Black Mask, Talia, Oracle, Azrael, Huntress, Spoiler, and the Cassandra Cain Batgirl, but it's nevertheless a solid list.

The music uses the Danny Elfman theme from the first Tim Burton Batman movie, which is a fine piece of music. Unfortunately, it uses it exclusively, again and again, until your ears are bleeding and you're begging for it to stop. Some variety might have been nice.

Combat has been tightened up from the previous games. The hard-to-target whip from Lego Indy is gone and some very satisfying fists and guns have replaced it. Getting into battle is no longer a chore. You might even enjoy it. Also, while there are still waves of endlessly-respawning enemies, there's notably less than in the last two Lego games, and they're less inclined to turn up while you're trying to do something fiddly.

That's pretty much all the good points. If you've enjoyed the prior Lego games you're in for a treat, because Lego Batman is very definitely an improvement, but if they frustrated you to tears then you'll find all the same mistakes on display in Lego Batman.

These Balls Are Made For Hiding

2009-02-05T03:00:00.000+11:00

These Balls Are Made For Hiding is your browser game for today.

You're presented with a black field, which conceals invisible circles. You can fire a straight line into the field, which will bounce whenever it hits a ball, or when it hits certain walls. You can take as many shots as you like; once you're happy with one, you click to remove all the balls touched by that shot. Every time you remove balls, all the remaining balls in the field move downwards. If any balls touch the bottom of the field you lose.

So very simple, so very addictive. It doesn't seem to be on any of the good game portals but you can play it at the rather ugly page I'm linking to here.

Icons of Gaming #1: No Gods Or Kings

2009-02-04T15:00:00.000+11:00

This is the screenshot that sold me on BioShock.

BioShock has a lot of memorable imagery - the Big Daddy, the player's hand dispensing lightning, the art deco interiors, and the excellent sound scheme that pervades the entire game. But "no gods or kings" is what made me sit up and pay attention.

This banner hangs over an early entrance hall in the game - above the main elevator, from memory - and in addition to establishing the game's visual style, lighting scheme and dark tone, it tells you that this will be a game about something. BioShock might not be the deepest philosophical exploration in gaming history but it's not for lack of genuine effort, and the objectivist foundations of the city of Rapture are a big part of what elevates BioShock above the pack.

Long before I played the game I saw this screenshot, and once I'd seen it, I knew I had to find out who had hung that banner and what it meant.

What are the images that have attracted you to games - for better or for worse?

Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep Trailer

2009-02-04T09:23:00.002+11:00

This is the secret movie included at the end of Japan-only release Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix. It follows on from the Keyblade War teaser which appeared at the end of regular-style Kingdom Hearts 2.

Birth By Sleep is coming to the PSP only and is a prequel to the original games. My love for Kingdom Hearts as a franchise is at war with my dislike for the malformed little portable that I refer to as "the hand-mangler".

The Haunting (1963)

2009-02-04T07:30:00.005+11:00

I finally got a chance to see Robert Wise's original 1963 version of The Haunting the other night, thanks to Dalekboy.

I am a huge fan of William Castle's 1959 House on Haunted Hill, in which an unapologetically B-grade spookfest is elevated to greatness by one of Vincent Price's signature performances. My highest hope for The Haunting was that it would be like House on Haunted Hill only moreso, and that hope was both met and exceeded.

The Haunting and House on Haunted Hill share some superficial similarities. They are both "spend the night in a haunted house" tales; they both feature groups of strangers drawn together by a charismatic gentleman; both stories have a creepy caretaker couple, an emphasis on the layouts of bedrooms and hallways, and a plot largely driven by a hysterical ingenue who may well be hallucinating more ghostly activity than is actually occurring. House on Haunted Hill, though, is strictly confined to the realm of cliche, despite some wonderfully ghoulish dialogue by screenwriter Robb White, whereas The Haunting is a full-fledged adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House, complete with gorgeous narration of that book's opening paragraph:

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

The Haunting is unusual for a haunted house story in that it consistently underplays its hand. Eschewing ghosts and gore, it instead builds a pervasive horror through nothing more than sound effects, rattling doorknobs, and the continuous internal monologue of lead character Eleanor (played by Julie Harris). The monologue, which in other films would have been a crutch for bad storytelling, here is the star of the movie, and the growing discrepancy between Eleanor's narration and the objective reality on screen is the source of much of the movie's power.

Harris gives a fantastic performance as Eleanor, although Claire Bloom's understated and sympathetic portrayal of lesbian sidekick Theo steals the show. (Compare Bloom with Catherine Zeta-Jones' one-note rendition of the role in the 1999 remake.) The only weak point is Richard Johnson as gentleman host Dr John Markway; Johnson plays the role as a genial, wholesome father figure, while the reactions of the other characters suggest his intentions are considerably more dubious than the acting supports.

This is horror done to perfection; it's easily one of the great creepshows of film history and ranks with The Shining and The Exorcist as a movie that exceeds its genre. If, like me, you'd been slack on seeing this piece of our cinematic heritage, take the time to catch up at your earliest opportunity. And if you see this on DVD at a physical storefront in Canberra, let me know so I can go grab a copy for my own shelf!

E3 2009 Sign-Up Open

2009-02-03T14:42:00.004+11:00

Hey, E3 2009 has started pre-registration. After two years of limpness, the show's apparently going back to the giant mix of tacky-meets-awesome that we all loved.

So if anyone is going to be in Los Angeles over June 2 to June 4 and wants to try for an all-access press pass, let me know and I'll endorse you as a Dust Forms Words official reporter. In return you will owe me at least five exclusive photos and a selection of your show-floor loot.

That is not a deal to be scorned! I think I still have some of the business cards I used to get my industry pass to Tokyo Game Show around somewhere. Let me know.

Dreams

2009-02-03T13:42:00.007+11:00

Here's your browser game for today: Dreams. This provided me not much more than some quick entertainment, but the art style and simple gameplay seem to really appeal to people with less exacting tastes than myself. It's racked up a lot of attention and won some awards so I'd expect there'd be more than a few readers of The Dust Forms Words who'd enjoy it.

It's basically a spot-the-difference game but the clean interface and attractive storybook art make it stand out of the crowd. If you'd like ten minutes or so of quality picture-sleuthing, head on over to Kongregate and check it out.

A Kingdom For Keflings

2009-02-03T10:59:00.004+11:00

A Kingdom For Keflings, available through XBox Live Marketplace, is the game I've been hearing people ask for for years, and now it's finally here.

If you're a gamer who's played Age of Empires or Rise of Nations and wished you could just design your city in peace without worrying about fighting your neighbours, then this game is for you. If you're someone who's played Sim City and felt that managing budgets and approval ratings was taking away from the fun of just building, then this is your game.

In A Kingdom For Keflings you play a benevolent giant who's come to the aid of a tribe of tiny Keflings. The Keflings need to get a town built, and you're just the giant for the job. You'll chop wood, mine stone, and commission construction to get houses, schools and suchlike built. You can also put the little Keflings to work doing the grunt work for you - they're not very good at following orders but they're still faster than doing things yourself.

You make buildings out of components - a house, for example, might require a furnace, a bedroom, and a platform. As you finish buildings, you gain access to new blueprints requiring more complicated combinations of components. Your eventual goal is to complete the blueprint for the massive Castle.

There's no obstacles in A Kingdom for Keflings - nothing takes cleverness or skill. It's just a matter of time. With enough perserverance, you will get things built. You're free to arrange your town as you see fit, look for optimal configurations of Kefling workers, and generally wander around the place getting things done.

You can play as one of a couple of pre-made characters, but you'll probably want to ignore them and instead import your XBox Live avatar, which this game was specifically made to use. It's a great use of the avatar system, and the graphical styles of game and avatar mesh well.

You can also co-operate over XBox Live with one or more friends to build a town together. This is a vast improvement over the single-player game, but unfortunately there's no local co-op (online only), and most of the Achievements won't unlock in multiplayer.

A Kingdom For Keflings is a surprisingly fun game aimed at filling a largely unexplored niche, and as a social platform it's exponentially better. If it remotely sounds like something you'd enjoy, you're probably right in the target market, so download the free demo from XBox Live and check it out for yourself.

Aether

2009-02-02T14:11:00.009+11:00

After I talked about Edmund McMillen's intruiging-but-flawed game Coil last month, I promised I'd say a few words about Aether, which I liked a lot more. JayIsGames have just gone and named it their Casual Adventure Game of the Year 2008 so I suppose now is a good time to ride the Media-Train to Consensus City.

Aether is really, really beautiful. Edmund teams up with the equally talented Tyler Glaiel to deliver a game about loneliness, introversion, exploration and adventure, all of which runs in your standard browser window. You control a boy and his squid-balloon on a mission to the depths of space to help out some emotionally-challenged anthropomorphised planets. Edmund's art is in fine form, understated but effective, and Tyler's piano soundtrack gets the emotional tone flowing from the first screen through to the end.

Unusually for one of Edmund's games, Aether features neither gory violence nor extensive body-horror. In Aether no one is getting raped or murdered, but people are discovering important lessons about life and experiencing simple coming-of-age fables. If you liked things like Gish and Meat Boy you might find Aether a little different, but it's all the better for that difference.

The whole game really feels like a single extended piece of mood-art, like I Wish I Were The Moon or Night Raveler. Its success is less about the story it tells and more to do with how you feel as you experience it. It's gamey enough to avoid alienating the very people most likely to play it, but arty enough to leave an impression long after you've forgotten every other Flash game you played that month.

You can play Aether at Armor Games or Kongregate, and as it will only take you about ten minutes to enjoy there's really no excuse to not.

Strange Chinese MMO Advertising

2009-02-02T12:20:00.004+11:00

I've gotten used to seeing some amusing Engrish on game-related banner ads. Those Chinese MMOs really want us to play, God bless their little hearts.

Tales of Pirates is currently depicting itself as a "FREE! Adventure online game!" with "Dozens of Professions to Develop!" which is pretty much par for the course.

The bit that has me puzzled is its exhortation to "Make Friends to Against Finance Crisis Here!" I don't even know what that means. Pirates have not typically been known for their firm stance against the evil of financial crisis.

Any clue?

Prince of Persia

2009-02-02T10:57:00.012+11:00

Prince of Persia is one of those rare games that is recommendable to absolutely any gamer. Regardless of who you are, it's simply a great experience.

This game, as I have mentioned previously, has a confusing title. It features neither Princes nor Persia in any explicit fashion, it's not a remake of Jordan Mechner's original game, and it has nothing to do with the recent Sands of Time trilogy.

You play as a nameless adventurer who gets lost in a sandstorm while escorting a donkey laden with gold. This "Prince", as the game seems to imply he should be named, soon finds himself caught up with a rogue princess named Elika and involved in a battle to save an abandoned kingdom from the ancient evil of Ahriman.

Prince of Persia is an athletic platforming game in the style of Tomb Raider and ... well, Prince of Persia. You'll be leaping across bottomless chasms, scuttling up and down cliff faces, wall-running along vertical surfaces, and generally clinging in a painful fashion to poles, wall-brackets, and improbable tangles of vines.

The athletic platformer is generally at the mercy of four key design elements. Known collectively, these are the Four "C"s: controls, checkpoints, camera and cartography. By cartography, what I really mean is level design, but Three "C"s And An "L" is not quite so memorable.

The controls are sharp and forgiving. Press a button to jump, and the Prince immediately jumps. When you hit a wall, you cling to it. You can press a button from that position, or more usually as you're approaching the wall, to turn the cling into a horizontal run along the wall or a vertical climb upwards. Wallruns and climbs can be extended at places denoted by a special brass ring; again, you need only press a button as you approach the ring. Timing windows are extremely generous; in my entire journey through the game, I never failed any obstacle by missing the timing.

This is part of a new game philosophy - that the fun is not to be had from overcoming punishingly hard jumps, but merely from experiencing them. The player is encouraged to explore their world rather than fight against it. This is not, inherently, a better or worse way of producing fun than other methods, but it's certainly a much more accessible one. And that ties into the checkpoints, which are plentiful; the game effectively remembers the last time that you had your feet on level ground, and if you fall that's where you'll be taken back to, with no further punishment. That's normally only one or two jumps backwards, although towards the end of the game there are a couple of annoyingly long sections without checks.

The camera is not so excellent. There are two styles of gameplay in Prince of Persia, and only one features a useful camera. Each level is initially linear, asking you to travel a fixed path towards a boss fight. The camera is excellent at presenting this action in a dramatic and understandable manner. Afterwards, though, you need to explore the level to find "light seeds", which are usually tucked away in the level's most remote corners. There's no free-look mode for the camera, so really you can only see the seeds if you're right on top of them, or if you happen to get a lucky glance from a distance. For a lot of the game, you'll have your face pressed right up against a wall or pillar, so spying out these concealed objectives is frustratingly difficult.

Luckily, the level design compensates. The layouts are beautiful, and it's almost always clear which jumps you can achieve. This allows for frequently thrilling action sequences where you're calculating your next move on the fly. Traversing these environments is always entertaining, and it doesn't hurt that they're nice to look at, too.

The only complaint is that the levels are supposed to be representative of a genuine city that people lived in, but the designs don't bear this idea out. Your companion Elika describes how it was all once a bustling metropolis; however, the actual levels are highly abstracted and nothing about them is remotely evocative of real architecture or daily life.

Elika herself is one of the most important elements of Prince of Persia's success. She's an interesting ally; she often has things to say whether you want to hear them or not, but to supplement that you can press a button to start a conversation with her, even in mid-jump. These conversations reveal additional information about the area, about your enemies, and, most importantly, about Elika's relationship with the Prince.

She's worked into the gameplay, too, and her magic provides the explanation for the Prince's ability to double jump and to survive fatal falls. When you miss a jump, Elika, imbued with unreliable and life-draining magic, dives after you and flies you back to safety. There's a great deal of hand-waving as to exactly why she doesn't just fly you to your destination, but the game isn't so much concerned with power and magic as it is with relationships and sacrifice, so these mechanical conveniences prop up the game's tone rather than undermine it.

Each of the 24 levels culminates in a boss fight; with a few exceptions, these are the only real combat situations in the game. The same four bosses are repeated across all the levels, although with different twists, and the game relies on the strength of its fighting system to keep you entertained rather than a variety of opponents. The fighting system is strong, although not THAT strong, but the side benefit of this design decision is that it builds these four bosses as villains who you develop a relationship with through repeated conflict.

The thing I love most about Prince of Persia is that it knows that every good story is about its protagonists. Almost every level, every challenge, and every character in the game is a reflection of that philosophy. When you're solving puzzles in The Windmills, you're not just turning cranks, you're exploring the Prince and Elika's different approach to relationships. When you're fighting The Warrior, you're not just slogging it out with an invincible behemoth, you're looking at Elika's feelings towards her father. This is an example of using game mechanics to tell stories rather than telling stories that happen in between the game mechanics.

By contrast, the worst element of the game is clearly the coloured plates. In order to gate content and attempt to keep the gameplay fresh, the game lets you start making use of magical coloured plates once you've collected certain totals of light seeds. The developers probably saw this as necessary, given that the Prince unlocks his full range of athletic abilities before finishing the first level, but it was still, with hindsight, a horrible mistake.

These plates come in four colours, and you can unlock them in any order. The red and blue plates are fairly unobjectionable, merely flinging you through the air to a new destination. The green plates warp gravity to make you run headlong up vertical walls, and these are mostly fun, although not as much fun as not using them.

The yellow plates, though, send you on a kind of magic carpet ride along a fixed-rail sequence where you have swerve to avoid obstacles. A sparkly camera effect during these segments makes it almost impossible to see what you're doing, and the gameplay's fundamentally misconceived in any case - you'll constantly swerve left to avoid a pillar only to have the fixed-movement drag you right into the very obstacle you were trying to dodge. The yellow plates are so bad that they almost ruin the entire game. It's not hard to imagine someone who accidentally unlocked the yellows before the other colours giving up in disgust, thinking that the rest of the game was going to be just as stupid.

Thankfully, though, the plates stand alone; the rest of the game comes together to produce a genuinely engaging and memorable story. It's capped by an ending which not only brings the game to a satisfying conclusion, but sets up a story worth telling for the second and third games in this inevitable trilogy.

There's little genuine innovation in Prince of Persia; we've seen all this done before, in Sands of Time, in Shadow of the Colossus, in Ico and in Okami. But Prince of Persia brings it all together into a solid, accessible package which anyone can enjoy without requiring legacy skills or being shut out by uneven difficulty. It's not a niche market, it's not an acquired taste, it's just a resoundingly good game.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead

2009-01-29T18:34:00.003+11:00

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead. Starring Jake Hoffman, Devon Aoki, and "Karate Kid" Ralph Macchio. Because Hamlet is a play in which everyone dies. Or comes back as a vampire.

How did no one tell me this was coming? HOW?

2009 - The Year In Advance

2009-01-29T13:11:00.006+11:00

Prince of Persia, Fable 2, GTA 4, Fallout 3 - how is 2009 possibly going to top the games of last year? Surely we've reached the pinnacled of gaming - what is there left to hope for?

To help y'all out, I've compiled a list of some stuff coming up in 2009 in the hopes of reawakening your lust to game.

Q1 2009

Mirror's Edge DLC - Originally slated for January, these abstract new time trial maps are now coming February. Me and the other guy who cares will have ourselves a quiet party, and all you haters can enjoy a very special one-fingered salute.

House of the Dead: Overkill - House of the Dead does grindhouse. I wasn't entirely sure what it would take to get me excited about House of the Dead again, but this is apparently it. Besides, there's only so far you can go wrong with rail shooters about blasting zombies.

F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin - I wasn't crazy about the original, but Monolith has a strong enough record that I'm willing to give them another try. Maybe this time the spooky and the shooty will happen at the same time, rather than taking awkwardly paced turns.

Mario & Luigi RPG 3 - I didn't like Partners In Time, but on their next adventure Mario and Luigi have gotten themselves swallowed by a giant-sized Bowser! You have to co-ordinate Bowser in the real world with the brothers' adventures through his intestines. That sounds like a joke, but I'm serious. What's not to love?

The Sims 3 - Functionally identical to The Sims 2 but using up more of your CPU power! What manner of monster can say no to that deal?

Dawn of War 2 - I never really played the original Dawn of War but I hear people loved it. Presumably they'll also love the sequel.

50 Cent: Blood On The Sand - Hip-hop star 50 Cent and the street-savvy crew of the G-unit take it to the war-torn streets of the Middle East in order to hunt down a valuable golden skull. For serious. Voted "Most Probably Hilarious Train Wreck of 2009" by The Dust Forms Words.

Halo Wars - The people who made Age of Empires bring Microsoft's golden goose to the world of console-based real-time strategy. I'm cautiously optimistic about both the control scheme and the game itself. Even if it's bollocks, you can bet it will be bigger than Jesus.

Q2 2009

Resident Evil 5 - Hands up if you are ready to shoot some undead black men right in the face. Capcom have correctly identified that what the zombie genre was missing was a sense of niggling fear that exterminating the undead caused you to be a gun-toting racist.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars - Rockstar has realised that the DS, the best-selling console of this generation, doesn't have a single Rockstar game in its library, and they're busily fixing that with some yawn-seen-it-all-before GTA action. If you've played a GTA game this decade, don't hold your breath. Otherwise, you're in for a treat!

MadWorld - Best described as Sin City meets The Running Man, stylised black-and-white schlockfest MadWorld has been getting a lot of interest, and in March we get to see if it lives up to the hype.

Hydrophobia - Flood-based disaster survival. I'm really behind the idea of disaster survival as a genre, I think it could be the next big thing, so I've quietly got my fingers crossed for Hydrophobia.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2: Fusion - Actually there's no release date on this yet but given where its press is up to and how it's looking in pre-release press I'd say Q2 2009 is a good bet.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game - Bill Murray should be an unlockable character in every game.

Blood Bowl - Can you believe someone's doing an adaptation of Games Workshop's fantasy football game Blood Bowl? Don't get too excited - it's by "creators of nothing you've ever heard of" Paris-based outfit Cyanide.

Batman: Arkham Asylum - Mark Hamill reprising his role as the Joker. There's a lot of quiet hope that this will be the definitive Batman videogame. I wait to be convinced.

Q3 2009

Brutal Legend - Jack Black, Tim Schaeffer and the eternal spirit of heavy metal combine to give us this totally extreme metal-themed brawler. It's been a battle for this thing to actually reach publication but it's in the home stretch now.

Halo: ODST - The stand-alone Halo 3 expansion is sure taking a bunch of time to come out. Frankly, I'm a bit Halo-saturated right now and it's a little difficult to get excited but maybe I'll change my mind by August.

I Am Alive - Another entry in the growing list of disaster-survival games. Again, I'm cautiously hopeful, but it's by one of Ubisoft's less accomplished studies so it's more likely to be shovelware.

Hitman 5 - Some of you out there will be excited about this. Yeah, you know who you are.

InFamous - Looks like a cross between Jumper and The Force Unleashed. Big, showy, destruction based super-powers are the go. Might be excellent.

The Conduit - It's a shooter, it's on the Wii, and it looks half decent. That's really all it needs to stand out as a unique and quirky title.

Q4 2009

Bioshock 2: Sea of Dreams - Stop getting excited, people! This is being developed by a different team to the first one, being California based 2K Marin, and that very rarely spells good news for a franchise.

Dante's Inferno - The team behind Dead Space adapt middle-ages Italian religious allegory into a survival horror title. I'm frankly amazed this doesn't happen more often.

Dragon Age - Bioware's business strategy has been to move away from reliance on other people's IP and develop their own unique franchises. In that light, you can see generic-but-probably-brilliant fantasty title Dragon Age as them doing Neverwinter Nights minus the D&D name.

God of War 3 - If you've played any of the previous two-and-a-half God of War games you've got a fair idea of what you're in store for with the new one. That's right - quick time events and horribly broken platforming! (And, I guess, some pretty awesome hacking-things-up-with-swords.)

Mass Effect 2 - Apparently we should hang onto our save files because all those universe shaping choices we made in the original are going to keep having consequences into the sequel. Now that's what I'm talking about.

Overlord 2 - I ended up liking the first Overlord game, and with the same team involved the sequel can only be an improvement, right?

Bayonetta - The guy who created Devil May Cry is doing Devil May Cry again, only with a chick. What's not to like?

This Year If We're Lucky

Aliens: Colonial Marines - Gearbox and Sega do their take on the classic film franchise. It's had a troubled development history but maybe 2009 is the year for it to finally reach store shelves.

Alan Wake - Developers Remedy (creators of Max Payne) had better damn well release this thing in 2009 or it's going to be declared vaporware. It's already two years overdue, and if it weren't such a bold idea I would have given up on it long ago.

Heavy Rain - Speaking of chronically overdue story-driven innovative platform exclusives, where the hell is Heavy Rain? Still no official release date from developer Quantic Dream, although a steady trickle of publicity images suggests it's still under construction.

Half-Life 2 Episode 3 - The conclusion to Valve's epic saga has been in the works since 2007; with no showing at E3 2008 and no announcement of a release date it's anyone's guess as to when we'll actually see the thing. I'm putting my money on it being bundled with Portal 2 or Left 4 Dead 2 in the same way that they released Episode 2 in The Orange Box.

Portal 2 - They cast voice actors in June last year, so the odds of a 2009 release are good. On the other hand, Valve has never come within spitting distance of releasing a game on time, so don't be surprised to see this delayed another year.

Rock Band: Beatles - Okay, it's not actually called Rock Band: Beatles, but it's a game using the Rock Band engine developed by the Rock Band guys that will showcase the Beatles. Harmonix have said no new Rock Band in 2009, but then this isn't a Rock Band title, is it?

Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days & Birth By Sleep - The new DS and PSP Kingdom Hearts games will almost certainly be out in Japan by year's end, but translation delays mean we'll only have them in English by Christmas if we're very, very lucky.

LA Noire - The title really says it all; it's by Rockstar, and it's due some time this year. Personally I'm betting on the thing being further delayed or vaporware, but I guess we'll find out.

Pikmin 3 - I love how with Nintendo games you don't really need to see anything more than the title to know what will be going on inside. It's Pikmin, people. Pikmin 3.

StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty - Look - it's got a subtitle! So that we won't get it confused with all those other StarCraft 2 games, I guess.

Parasite Eve: The 3rd Birthday - Actually we probably won't ever see this in the West, let alone this year, but I just love reminding everyone that Squeenix are making a new Parasite Eve game. In your face, everyone who never played the first two.

Final Fantasy XIII - Japan are probably getting it at Christmastime, which means the West will see it some time in, oh... 2013? Epic localisation delays are a constant source of frustration for these sort of things but if you have a modded PS3 and a fluency in Japanese you could beat the curve by importing, I guess. Hey, did you hear that Shiva is now a pair of sexy summonable sisters that transform into a motorcycle? And who says Final Fantasy doesn't innovate any more?

I've deliberately left the MMOs off the list; I don't expect many of them to actually make it onto shelves, and even fewer of those that do to survive six months. You'd have to be crazy developing a new MMO in this market. Anyway, what are you excited about for gaming in 2009?

House of the Dead: Overkill - New Trailer

2009-01-29T09:37:00.006+11:00

House of the Dead: Overkill trailer. All new, all hilarious. Once again, there is no possible way that the game can be better than its marketing. Although this footage does look as if some of the ad campaign humour has made its way to the actual game, which is a good start.

No Zack & Wiki Sequel

2009-01-29T09:02:00.006+11:00

It's come to my attention that Wii point-n-click title Zack & Wiki was totally unprofitable for publisher Capcom. In fact, according to the seldom-reliable VGChartz, it has to date sold just over half a million copies (0.54 million). That makes it the 84th best-selling game for the console, but still not a money-spinner according to Capcom marketing dude Colin Ferris in a recent interview.

To put that in perspective, it beat the pants off the combined sales of Okami across all platforms (0.34 million) and kicked No More Heroes right in the nuts (0.19 million) but when even the abominable Red Steel can muster an even million in sales and the reissue of House of the Dead 2 & 3 squeaks in at 0.95, you have to consider Zack & Wiki as something of a commercial failure. (Link's Crossbow Training - not even a real game - is listed at nearly three million units. I guess they just sold that many Wii Zappers, for some reason.)

Seriously - you idiots bought more copies of Guitar Hero Aerosmith than you did of Zack & Wiki? What kind of cretins are you?

The half million isn't impressive, but probably more important to Capcom was that it almost completely failed to shift units in the month following its release - four weeks after landing at retailers it still hadn't cracked 100,000. Also, it probably wasn't helped by a complete absence of press buzz and bizarre statements by producer Hironobu Takeshita that gamers who were having difficulty with the game's puzzles were just "not paying enough attention".

Anyway, the long and the short of it is, don't go expecting a sequel any time soon. Which is a sadness no real words can explain.

Hey, here's some silver lining - other games that haven't sold so well on the Wii include Alone in the Dark, SoulCalibur Legends and Pimp My Ride, so I guess there's some justice in the world.

NOTE: I am aware of the irony in this post, given that I gave an effusive although tongue-in-cheek review for the House of the Dead reprint while simultaneously savaging Zack & Wiki. It should be clear from this that you should not actually listen to me. You should buy every game I talk about, and then join me in hating on the ones that are actually quite loveable.

Some Of The Finer Points Of Lego Batman

2009-01-28T18:54:00.003+11:00

There will be a full review of Lego Batman in time; the short version will be that it's better than Lego Indy without being actually good. Some of its high points:

* You can play as the Joker, you can get his costume from the cover of The Killing Joke, and you can shoot Barbara Gordon in the spine.

* You can play as Bane and break Batman's back across your knee. (There is an Achievement for this.)

* You can punch Dick Grayson in the face until his head falls off.

That's a good start, but I was disappointed to find that Jason Todd is not present to recreate his fateful encounter with the Joker, and neither Black Mask nor Spoiler are available to continue the theme. I would also have liked, for comic effect, Thomas and Martha Wayne - when Martha Wayne breaks into her lego pieces she should spill little pearl-coloured studs.

I guess some dreams are not meant to be.

Action Button Does Gears of War 2

2009-01-28T15:22:00.005+11:00

I don't point out other people's reviews often, but Action Button has something great to say about Gears of War 2. It starts out with Penny Arcade-style hyperbole and ridiculousness, and then, without letting up the gonzo tone, segues smoothly into intelligent critique of the game design. I link it as evidence that, Zero Punctuation to the contrary, you can be funny, intelligent and positive at the same time.

Go check it out.

NOTE: You should be aware that these guys did not like most of the recent DS/GBA Castlevania games, so their judgement is suspect at best. Just saying, is all.

The World Ends With You - Dust Forms Words Game Of The Year 2008

2009-01-28T10:29:00.006+11:00

The World Ends With You is the game that everyone should have played last year, and for what it's worth I'm giving it my Game of the Year.

I've already said a lot about TWEWY, so before I talk about why it gets the trophy, I'll say a little about why the other contenders don't.

Braid was a hell of a game. It was this year's undisputed poster-child for "games as art", and despite my unfortunate discovery of its misguided "alternate ending" it remains a very special and enduring experience. It excels musically, visually, narratively, and through its plethora of fascinating time-based mechanics. But it's limited in scope. Last year, when I described why I gave Mass Effect the thumbs up over Portal, I talked about ambition and how an "almost" on the grand scale could be greater than perfection in miniature. Without in any way criticising Braid, I'm passing it over simply because TWEWY does something bigger and more expansive.

Prince of Persia I haven't reviewed yet, but I have finished, and I am a huge fan. I love the punishment-free gameplay, I love the art style, I love the character interaction, and I love the controversial ending. This is how I want my games to be. And it's tempting to slam it for the epically misconceived coloured plate sections, which in the context of an otherwise perfect game are like drawing a penis on the Mona Lisa, but really I'm passing it over because it's not actually innovative. Everything in PoP is something we've seen before, and while there's an artistry in arranging the familiar to new and excellent effect, it's less an evolution of gaming than it is merely a refinement.

I loved Mirror's Edge, although the world seems to be against me on this, and I seriously considered it for Game of the Year. I think it's a deeper and more clever game than people have realised yet (although obviously not in its storytelling, which blows goats) and given time people are going to start coming back to this with new and more appreciative eyes. But, you know, it wasn't that good, and loud complaints about its combat, plotline, and uneven difficulty are not entirely without foundation.

Smash Bros Brawl and Rock Band were only 2008 releases because they took so damned long to get to Australia, and, while I enjoyed them both, neither was a revelation. Brawl was merely iterative upon the excellent Melee, and Rock Band let an uneven song selection and a host of peripheral and user interface issues stop it from being the definitive rhythmn game that it wanted to be.

No More Heroes got a golf clap and an A for effort. Keep doing what you're doing, Goichi Suda, I love that you're out there doing it, and feel free to wake me up when you get it right.

Left 4 Dead was a fantastic experience while it lasted but in the absence of more content it's not really in my Game of the Year contemplation.

You all apparently loved Fable 2; I hated it, as I do all Peter Molyneux's misbegotten works. Enough said on that topic.

Far Cry 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, Saints Row 2, Dead Space, Metal Gear Solid 4, LittleBigPlanet and Fallout 3 are all contenders that I just didn't get around to playing this year. I had a brief experience with Dead Space that satisfies me it was unlikely to take the crown, and while I look forward to enjoying Saints Row 2 I'm pretty sure that a game that so happily wallows in its own juvenilia was probably not going to be my pick for the year. Likewise, my past apathy towards user content suggests that LittleBigPlanet was probably not going to change my world.

Far Cry 2 and GTA 4 are more problematic; both showed promise of being the open-world game "all growed up". Although experiences with the PSP Grand Theft Auto games left me feeling weary about the entire genre, there's every chance that one or both of these titles would have won me back. I can only say that one person simply can't play every top-shelf title released during the year, and if I'm doing these titles a disservice then I can at least be comfortable that they certainly haven't been overlooked or under-recognised by the world at large.

Metal Gear Solid 4 and Fallout 3 are the two missed titles that trouble me most. They are both new and epic iterations of franchises that I love, made by developers that I trust. It is highly likely either game could have found a place on my list of the greatest games of all time. But again, it's simply impossible to play games as fast as they're released, and both games have been adequately covered in other venues.

So that brings me back to The World Ends With You, which is, I feel, a title as underappreciated as it is wholeheartedly excellent. On its face it is a full-length JRPG, a genre famous for its staidness and adherence to formula, and yet it innovates in every single game mechanic. It's hard to find any aspect of the TWEWY experience which has been done before.

The game difficulty is not only fully customisable along multiple axes, but is also seamlessly integrated into the overall gameplay. Equippable items tie into a "fashion" system, which is influenced by player activity and deliberately underlines and supports the key themes of the story. The entire game operates simultaneously on a literal level and several metaphorical levels, from the "noise" enemies through to the player being invisible to the teeming crowds around him. The game accurately and interestingly uses the real-world location of Shibuya as its backdrop, to non-trivial narrative effect, and when you finally finish the main plotline the game offers significant replayability that goes above and beyond the traditional "new game plus" option.

Any one of the points above would have made The World Ends With You a special and noteworthy release; finding them in combination is breathtaking. Add to that an art style which is unquestionably perfect for the subject matter and an urban-groove soundtrack that you can listen to all day long and you end up with a game that feels years ahead of its time.

There is more genius in The World Ends With You than in every other game I have played this year put together. I have no qualms about naming it the Dust Forms Words Game of the Year 2008, and if you haven't yet played it, grab your DS and find a copy immediately.

Michael Atkinson to Gamespot

2009-01-28T08:52:00.003+11:00

South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson, foremost Australian proponent of videogame censorship, has delivered an exclusive statement to Gamespot, which you can read here.

Before we get into ripping it to shreds, it should be acknowledged that this is progress. Atkinson has provided, for the first time, a detailed, reasoned statement on his position on censorship. He is still, of course, deeply wrong, but the first step in creating change is bringing the relevant parties to the debate.

Atkinson's position is founded on four fundamental misapprehensions, none of which are supported by research. The first is that there exist such a thing as "damaging images and messages". The second is that these images and messages are found in videogames to a greater extent than they are in government public service announcements and the nightly news. The third is that the interactive nature of video games makes content more inherently mature or threatening. And the fourth is that parents are unable or dangerously unwilling to monitor the media use of their children, to a greater extent than is true for DVD content.

It's also a bit worrying that the South Australian Attorney-General, in a statement presumably parsed by his advisors, is unable to get the name of our classification authority right. He refers to the Office of Film and Literature Classification, which has been officially known as the Classification Board for close to a year now.

Also, Atkinson's reference to his children suggests that this is his only direct experience of videogames. Surely we deserve better than a stance dictated largely by the man's relationship with his sons?

It's telling that Atkinson delivers a statement rather than an interview; it's suggestive that the fine detail comes not from Atkinson but from his advisors. It reveals that, even briefed in advance, the South Australian Attorney-General would not be able to intelligently discuss the key issues in the area he's legislating.

Anyway - check out the statement for yourself.

Wii Game Shortage

2009-01-27T09:10:00.004+11:00

If you're looking for some reading, Mitch Krpata has a great article up at Insult Swordfighting about where, exactly, all the games for the Wii might be. Apparently locked in Nintendo's safe, to ensure we won't buy them and thereby make their console unprofitable. If they'd just get around to keeping a bit more of the Ubisoft shovelware in that safe the Wii might be getting less of a reputation for bargain-bin gaming.

Eleven Foot Pole

2009-01-23T18:36:00.003+11:00

Hey guys, heads up. I've realised I have a whole heap of things to say about D&D 4th Edition; there's some fascinating design going on in that thing. The level of detail I want to go into is considerably greater than I'd normally subject people to on The Dust Forms Words, so I'm putting that discussion off-site.

So if you don't care about RPG design or D&D 4th Edition, keep reading here and you won't notice a thing.

BUT if you would like to get into the nitty-gritty of what makes 4th Ed tick, I'm doing that on a blog suggestively entitled Eleven Foot Pole (http://elevenfootpole.blogspot.com). I make no promises to update or maintain this new project; follow at your own risk.

Trailers From Hell

2009-01-23T15:03:00.003+11:00

I haven't had time for a full post today, but I do have time to direct you to Trailers From Hell, which is very excellent.

The site is all about film industry notables providing spoken commentary on trailers for films both well-known and obscure. It's got a great mix of humour and genuine insight and almost every trailer makes for top-notch watching.

Those involved in the project include big-screen directors Eli Roth (Hostel), Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) and John Landis (The Blues Brothers), TV directors Jesus Trevino (Babylon 5), Alan Arkush (Heroes), and Michael Lehmann (The West Wing), and a smattering of scriptwriters such as Chris Wilkinson (Nixon) thrown in for good measure.

(Visit Trailers From Hell)

Credit goes to the incomparably sexy Dalekboy for pointing the site out to me.

A Bit More On The IGF

2009-01-22T16:26:00.004+11:00

Just quickly, because many of you don't follow the comment threads:

IGF Chairperson Simon Carless dropped by to rebut some of my comments about the selection of the 2009 Independent Games Festival finalists. He makes good points, and if you're interested in seeing what he has to say (and my response) you should have another look at that post (and add your own thoughts!).

Non-Stop

2009-01-22T12:39:00.008+11:00

International Hobo (and more particularly Chris Bateman) have taken it upon themselves to put quick-time events (QTEs) on trial.

You've seen this mechanic, no doubt - normal gameplay gets interrupted, and you're asked to quickly press the buttons displayed on screen in order to do something awesome. Yahtzee Croshaw calls it "press X not to die", and that's fair to some extent (Prince of Persia), but it's just as commonly "press X to disembowel" (God of War) or "press X to become one with the Matrix" (Fahrenheit).

It's a terrible mechanic. It's crude, it's abstracted, and it's punitive towards casual and beginning players who may not be prepared to suddenly press X without warning.

I applaud it. More, please.

Because you have to take baby steps. To achieve something good you have to vomit up something bad. And while your average QTE is a crime against gamers everywhere, it's the first incarnation of something much better that we've been heading towards since the late 1970s.

Gaming should be non-stop. And I don't mean by this that gaming must be an epilepsy-inducing cavalcade of action, but rather that the player should never be shut out of the game. At each and every moment that the hardware is active, the gamer should have the option of contributing something relevant to the play.

Take some examples from board and card games. These games usually feature players having distinct "turns". In bad game design, when it is not your turn you have nothing to do. In good game design, what you do during other people's turns is just as important as what's going on during yours.

Magic: the Gathering uses "interrupts", which can cut into an opponent's turn and allow you to respond to their moves. This gives you a good reason to watch your opponent closely, and look for just the right moment to surprise them with your interrupt. Another example might be the popular Monopoly house rule which states that if you fail to claim rent you miss out, again giving players an incentive to watch each others' turns.

In these examples, even though a player is not actively making moves on the game board, they are engaged because they have the potential to influence the game.

Videogames have been plagued with interactivity problems since their inception. Non-interactive features have become staples of the medium, such as long cutscenes, lengthy dialogues, and scripted sequences. Players are regularly asked to wait until they can play again - and there is not even the rationale of it being "someone else's turn".

It's not good design. Gaming should be non-stop. And QTEs are an attempt to fix that.

QTEs are an attempt to add interactivity to what would otherwise be downtime. Yes, it's cool just to watch Kratos ripping off a minotaur's head, but it's significantly cooler to be engaged in it. Yes, it's great that the Prince doesn't die when he loses a fight, but the introduction of a QTE gives the illusion that he doesn't die because of something the player did. It's better than non-interactivity, and it's better than removing the feature altogether.

And yes, it's still pretty awful. It's a bad solution to a real problem, but it's better than no solution to the problem, and when iterated over a raft of games it creates a dialogue among developers about how do we do it better? It's a step on a stairway that's going to lead us to better gaming - a shaky step, but an important one all the same.

And sure, next time you see a game use QTEs in a really ham-fisted way, feel free to blast the developers, because they can find a better way. There is another road, and it's going to take us to some really excellent places.

But just remember that long before we got to walk that road, we had to start looking for it.

Independent Games Festival - The Rest

2009-01-22T08:52:00.005+11:00

So I'll confess - I got bored of trawling through the 2009 Independent Games Festival finalists, and judging from my blog traffic reports I'm guessing you did too. Too many of the games just didn't have any public media to base a meaningful post around. I'd recommend to the IGF that they make the provision of a public-release trailer a condition of entry in future years, to help facilitate a meaningful discussion around the awards.

Anyway, for the sake of finishing things off, here are the finalists I didn't get around to doing a full post about:

Zeno Clash

A first-person brawler with a nice flavour to it, even if the sound effects are a bit Duke Nukem 3D. I love the look of the bone-sword, and also the speaking alien near the start of the trailer. Developers Ace Team have a very professional looking site, too. This looks like one of those games that you wouldn't know was an independent release unless someone told you.

Retro/Grade

A very cute concept is on display in Retro/Grade - it's a Gradius-style shoot-em-up, played in reverse. Time runs backwards, and you have to catch your incoming laser shots while dodging the enemy's lasers. Mistakes "damage the space-time continuum". I love the concept, although I think in practice it might end up being functionally identical to your regular sort of shoot-em-up. Also, there's not exactly a lot of variety on display in the demo above. The official site has another teaser video, if you want more.

Between
This game, by Jason Rohrer, is available in full for free, which is awesome. There's a couple of catches though. One is that the game is, for some reason, only available at the moment through the online version of Esquire Magazine, so if you object to visiting digital men's magazines you're out of luck. (If not, though, you can grab it here.) Secondly, it requires two players, two networked computers, and a server. What's it about? I have no idea, other than that it explores "consciousness and isolation". Sounds fascinating.

Cortex Command
I'm completely out of enthusiasm for describing these games, which is a shame because the last one is Cortex Command, which I have been hearing through the buzz is "frikkin' awesome". You should, apparently, check it out. I understand it to be a little like Worms, only with butt-kicking robots, or somesuch. You can download a pretty extensive demo through the official site, or alternatively shell out for the fully-featured final release. If you play it, tell me whether you liked it.

I'd finish up by saying that while there are some excellent games in the full set of IGF finalists, there are also a lot of games that are conspicuous by their absence. You Have To Burn The Rope, for instance, is cute, but it's the shallowest shore of an ocean of games from the last year that have been exploring similar themes, and it's disappointing to see it featured when titles like Shift 3, which have actual gameplay, are missing. The Maw, already enjoying a well-publicised retail release, hardly seems to need the leg up, while Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble has been struggling for just this kind of love from day one. The inclusion of Musaic Box is a joke in bad taste, especially when Dark Room Sex Game and I Wish I Were The Moon were completely ignored.

It's really not clear what agenda the IGF is trying to promote through its selections, and I think that weakens the value of the awards as a whole.

Coil developer Edmund McMillen, who was nice enough to stop by after I was less than kind to his game, has been saying something similar over on his development blog, although less politely, and I'll direct you to his comments.

Overlord

2009-01-21T11:50:00.006+11:00

Review of Overlord for those who have played Pikmin:
Overlord is basically a re-skin of Pikmin. It's not quite as good as Pikmin but it's better than Pikmin 2.

Review of Overlord for everyone else:
Overlord is a game about terrorising a fantasy realm using a squad of goblin-like "minions". Despite the title, the game never really makes you feel like an all-devouring titan of evil, but the core game mechanics are solid enough that it's a lot of fun anyway.

You play as the helmeted guy on the cover of the box, who's experienced a long "sleep" after a titanic final battle between good and evil. Brought back to life by devoted minions, you're told to get busy about rebuilding your dark domain of evil.

Your chief tools for evildoing are the aforesaid minions, who are the real stars of the show here. These guys come in an unruly mob, initially comprising only five of the little buggers but eventually snowballing out to an even fifty. You control your character with the left analogue stick (at least, on the XBox 360 you do), and you can use the right stick to "sweep" your minions ahead of you. Minions making contact with vases and crates will smash them and loot whatever's inside; minions who come across an enemy will get stabby with it until it is dead. Large items can be lifted, if you have enough minions, and carried back to your tower.

Minions can automatically equip themselves with whatever they find in the environment, including ancient weapons, the skulls of fallen enemies, or, in a pinch, hollowed out pumpkins. Each minion is rendered separately and it's great to see the little guys levelling themselves up. Their voice work is also quite excellent, and their cries of "For me?" and "Mine!"when they loot new gear never get old.

Minions come in four flavours. Your basic browns are the grunts of the game, good for combat and lifting. Reds are fragile but can extinguish fires and have a ranged attack. Greens are immune to poison and have a "backstab" ability in combat, whereas blues can swim and are the only ones who can damage magical enemies.

Early in the game the focus is on rebuilding your dark tower and tracking down the missing minion colours, which requires a fair amount of exploration and puzzle-solving, but towards the end there's a shift towards killing "heroes", who are effectively the boss monsters of the game.

I say "monsters" because although you're supposed to be evil, there's really little opportunity to be villainous. Much against your will, you'll find yourself pressed into helping out whingy villagers, rescuing princesses, and beating the crap out of all manner of abomination (carnivorous unicorns are a personal favourite). The "heroes" themselves have been corrupted until they're really villains, such as a fat cannibal halfling and a dwarf with a pornographic love of gold.

Still, the core gameplay is solid and remains reasonably entertaining through to the end, which is 20 or so hours of play. There are some uneven spots, and some areas that clearly weren't thoroughly playtested, but if you struggle through the rough patches you'll be rewarded with more fun afterwards.

One thing that particularly wasn't fun was the grinding. To upgrade your character's armour and weapons you'll need to sacrifice minions in epic quantities. Gaining the necessary minion lifeforce requires killing enemies of a certain type. To get the necessary amounts through normal play requires re-visiting levels many, many times. It wasn't until I was three quarters of the way through the game that I discovered you can grind much faster fighting against common beetles in the tower's "arena" area, which lets you re-fight any opponent you've encountered previously. Although faster, this was still a grind, and pretty bady broke the pace of the game.

The ending of the game is great. It turned out that the story was a little more thought-out than I had assumed, and the final sequences were a fitting conclusion to what had gone before. My appreciation of the ending is as much to do with my low expectations as it is to do with the ending's inherent excellence, but it still left quite an impression.

If the basic game isn't enough to keep you busy, there are several multiplayer modes, which can be played online, or via local splitscreen if you download a free patch. There's also a downloadable expansion for about $15 AUD but I wasn't quite enthusiastic enough to try that out.

Overlord didn't exactly shake the world when it came out, but I think it's a better game than it was given credit for at release. Now, a couple of years later, you've got a great opportunity to try this out at second-hand prices, and it's well worth a look.

Closing The Book

2009-01-20T10:09:00.008+11:00

It's a child's response, isn't it?

Sensing that the story is not going to have a happy ending, you close the book. The resolution remains unread, the story remains unfinished, and the tragic conclusion is indefinitely postponed.

The mature reader does not close the book. The mature reader turns the last page, experiences the ending for better or for worse, and then draws a conclusion as to whether it was a well-told story.

I'm really talking here, of course, about the new Prince of Persia, which has... an ending. Just the one. There is no alternate ending; if you play the game to its conclusion, there is only one manner in which things can be resolved. This ending is not to everyone's tastes.

The thing is, the game starts to roll the credits a good five to ten minutes before the actual ending, but then stops. Judging from the blogosphere, a good many people, sensing what is coming next, choose to take that as the end of the game and stop there. Not because they've stopped enjoying the gameplay, but because they want to pretend that what comes next njever happened. They feel it's a better story if they stop there.

Another example is Shadow of the Colossus. Throughout that game, the player is given the sense that what they are doing is wrong, and that with each colossus defeated they are making things palpably worse for everyone concerned, including their own character. Some people choose to stop playing before finishing the quest - again, not through dissatisfaction with the gameplay, but because of a desire to avert the otherwise inescapable tragic conclusion.

That's wrong, isn't it? It's like making an alternate ending to Death of a Salesman where nobody dies and everybody rediscovers their lost love of life. The point is the tragedy. The point is the experience.

I say this, but then I look at Braid. That is a fantastically deep and moving game, right through the main story and concluding with the final level. And that's what I thought for six months or so, until I found out about the bonus stars. Suddenly it was revealed I hadn't finished the game, and the new ending turned everything into a contrived mess about nuclear physics.

I am quite happy to say there are no bonus stars. I am quite happy to take the ending which I liked, and ignore everything that came afterwards. It is an exponentially better game this way. I see this as no different to loving the original Dune novels and ignoring the Kevin J. Anderson / Brian Herbert rubbish which has come out recently.

How do I reconcile this? On the one hand, finishing a story early is deliberately refusing to engage with the authorial vision, and denies you the right to claim to have genuinely experienced the work. On the other hand, a little wilfull blindness can allow you to perceive art and quality where otherwise there may only have been mediocrity.

Thoughts, anyone?

NB: No spoilers please!