Update

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.

The Other Problem With Choice

I've been playing Overlord, which I'm mostly enjoying, but I'm struck by the other problem with choice.

I talked about choice when I did my posts for Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic, and how it's most often handled quite badly, those games being the exception. Overlord handles it badly.

When you attempt to put meaningful moral choices into your game, there are three ways you can go wrong.

One: The choices aren't meaningful. Either the choice has no substantive effect on the story and gameplay, or the player is provided with no information on which to base their choice, effectively making it arbitrary.

Two: The game clearly indicates that there is a right choice and a wrong choice, where players who take the wrong choice are suckers. This can be due to an imbalance of in-game rewards, a less interesting plotline connected to one choice, or simply by the game making the player feel like a complete tool for picking the "wrong choice".

And three: the other problem with choice. Which is that "a wide range of moral conundrums" often just boils down to one decision, repeated ad nauseum: are you a good guy, or a bad guy? Sometimes it's whether to kill the prisoners or release them, and sometimes it's whether to bully the villagers or defend them, but they're not different choices, it's just the same one twice.

Games rarely make the middle ground interesting. Contextual morality isn't rewarded by game mechanics. If you look at Overlord's list of achievements you'll see one for "maximum corruption" and one for "minimum corruption" but there's no points to be had for "a fascinatingly complex character with an off-beat but internally consistent moral code". Once you've made your first decision to kill a peasant, you'd better stick to it or you'll be missing out on a lot of what makes Overlord worthwhile.

Overlord probably isn't the most appropriate target of my ire here; it's something of a special case, where it feels like the ability to not do evil was only inserted to make the core gameplay of "slaughtering every man-jack you see" feel more punchy. It's kind of the reverse of Mirror's Edge in that respect, where the ability to kill makes the choice not to more satisfying.

I'll have a full post about Overlord coming soon; I know you readers are slavering for my opinion of a two-and-a-half-year-old second-stringer game, and I intend to deliver. Stand by for updates.

Mirror's Edge

Screw you all. Mirror's Edge was excellent.

I say this despite my criticisms of its character design, despite years of dissatisfaction with publisher EA, and despite a general antipathy towards platform games stretching back over several decades. I'm sorry, but it was excellent.

Mirror's Edge is a first person parkour (free-running) game. The creation of a parkour game was more or less inevitable after Casino Royale popularised the sport for film and Prince of Persia and Assassin's Creed did it in bastardised form for games. The majority of Mirror's Edge involves traversing an urban rooftop environment from various points A to points B using improbable but physically-possible acrobatics, all at an absolutely breakneck pace. It's unique, it's fun, and it's thrilling from beginning to end.

The excellence in Mirror's Edge stems from two areas. The first is the visual style, which is full of primary colours and sharp vertices. It evokes a highly realistic urban environment while at the same time being easy to read for players moving through it at high speeds. The game looks great, and it does it in a way that enables rather than obstructs play.

The second excellence is in the control scheme, at least as it applies to the XBox 360 version that I played. Almost all of the interactivity is mapped to the two left shoulder buttons of the controller. Left bumper (the upper shoulder) is "go high", while left trigger (lower shoulder) is "go low". You jump, climb, and run up walls by "going high", and you slide, break-roll and leg-tuck by "going low". Actions are context sensitive and always predictable - you very rarely slide, for example, when trying to break-roll, or jump when you want to climb.

Those are the basic controls. Right bumper does a 180 turn, most often used in a wall-run/flip/jump maneuver, and right trigger is "strike", used equally for punching out enemies, booting open closed doors, and crashing through panes of glass in mid-air. The "Y" button allows you to execute time-sensitive disarm maneuvers on enemies.

My main complaint with the controls is that you're always moving forward, so holding the analog stick up to move feels redundant (and starts to hurt the thumb). Given the racing flavour of the game, it would feel more natural and less hand-breaking to have an "accelerate" button mapped to the face-pad. But that's a small complaint. Generally the controls are visceral, intuitive, and achieve the goal of any good control scheme by allowing you to reliably execute the amazing without feeling like you're being babied or talked down to.

Like any platform game, you'll regularly make mistakes, and the cost of a mistake is usually plummeting to your death. Like any good platform game, there's no long term cost for these mistakes. Respawn points are placed intelligently, generally immediately before the start of any significant challenge, and a flubbed jump never costs you more than about 90 seconds of play. Also, you're never required to learn by trial and error - the learning process isn't about how to do things, but how to do things better.

One of the major complaints levelled against Mirror's Edge is its overuse of combat. Combat is definitely its weakest spot. It takes about three bullets or two pistol-whippings to knock you out on the default difficulty, which is a pretty thin margin of error. Using your character's library of martial arts moves feels clunky and unsatisfying, with the exception of the rather cool strikes she can do if she has a running start. Disarms are much more effective, but late game enemies give you absolutey tiny timing windows to do these, which can be frustrating.

However, a lot of the complaints about combat are misconceived. Mirror's Edge is a game about running, not fighting, and each and every combat encounter in the game can actually be solved more easily by finding the right parkour route than it can with your fists. Late encounters with squads of enemies which initially frustrated me suddenly became laughably easy once I discovered the optimal paths through the area. The infamous "sniper roof" and "server room" encounters on the game's final level have been designed to allow you to sprint through without downing a single opponent, if you're clever.

I love also that although the game lets you get your hands on your opponent's guns, it really encourages you not to use them. When you find yourself holding a firearm, throwing it away feels right, and it's very satisfying to get from start to end without shooting anyone regardless of whether the game awards you its rather finicky achievement for that task. This is how I want games to treat firearms - as a reality, but always in the context of there being a better way.

Anyway, combat may not be the roadblock that some claim, but running towards enemies in Mirror's Edge is not really fun, and these sections should have been brutally pared down. The best parts of the game are the chase scenes, where you're pursuing a fleeing enemy or being hunted yourself. These are the moments when you're genuinely aware of just how amazing your move set is, and there should have been more sections like this. The game doesn't stop often enough to give you time to reflect on its strengths.

The last highlight of the game is its music. The soundtrack is truly excellent, particularly the various remixes of the main theme, "Still Alive". It's one of those tunes that you'll be humming long after you've finished the last level, and I'm pretty sure that hearing it over coming months is going to get me excited about a sequel each and every time.

So - on to the bad stuff, which starts with the narrative. To say that the story of Mirror's Edge has a raging case of the sucks would be an extreme understatement. This is one of the worst stories I've encountered in a very long time. Tetris had a more engaging plot. From the beginning to the end it's badly told, horribly acted, appallingly scripted, schizophrenically paced, and does little to highlight the world, its characters, or any of the themes of freedom and movement inherent in the gameplay. The characters are unengaging and your long-term goals are vague or absent, and in a final kick to the face the game's ending fails to feature its major villain and leaves you stranded on a rooftop while most everyone you know and love is being hunted down like dogs. Plus all of the cutscenes are done in absolutely butt-ugly style of animation that has nothing in common with the clean, precise look of the in-game visuals.

Mirror's Edge is short. The story mode clocks in at maybe seven hours, with a lot of that made up of missing jumps and restarting from checkpoints. You can speedrun each level in less than ten minutes (often significantly less) so theoretically a godlike player could finish the whole thing in an hour and a half. From the way that important story points go missing it feels like maybe some levels were cut in order to get the game out the door on time, although given the overall incompetence of the plotting it may have just been intended that way.

Story mode is half of the game; the other half consists of time trials, which let you play specially arranged sections of the main levels as a timed obstacle course. Given the excellence of the basic gameplay, that's more fun than it sounds. The difficulty here is that the qualifying times for each course can be a little demanding until you find the optimum route, and your finishing time isn't recorded unless you beat the qualifier, meaning that a lot of attempts at a course can result in no visible recognition of succes. It would be nice if times were recorded no matter what, so even when you're sucking you can see whether you're sucking less. Also, you can download "ghosts" of other people's attempts to run against to find better routes and improve your time, but you can only access your friends' attempts, or the attempts of the top 50 or so players in the world, so as far as ghosts go you're limited to "unhelpfully poor" or "unhelpfully good". Ultimately YouTube, as always, is the solution.

The time trials, as I said, are better than you'd think, but it would be nice if they had more structure. The game tracks how many "stars" you've earned across all trials, and gives you some achievements for them (although even the first requires some pretty hefty practice), but there should have been some unlockables keyed to these stars, or some sort of reason to keep shooting for higher levels of excellence beyond the inherent satisfaction of success.

Still, Mirror's Edge attempts to create an entirely new style of gameplay and does a better job of it than 90% of those who try. Very few of its failures are to do with its core mechanics, which means it's created a strong conceptual base for future titles to build on. It's not going to be a game for everyone - the focus on precision and the short tolerance of error means this is a game for a hardcore audience, not casual players - but it's a solid continuation of a type of play which embraces well-loved franchises such as Mega Man and Sonic the Hedgehog and I see no reason why those who enjoyed games like those shouldn't thrill and revel in the realism and freedom that Mirror's Edge brings to that classic tradition.

Two Faiths

This is Faith, protagonist of Mirror's Edge. On the left is the original character design, as she appears in promotional artwork and in the game itself. On the right is a fan-created edit.

I've got a lot to say about Mirror's Edge, but I want to take a moment to talk about Faith. And about why the fan-created edit is better.

The key changes in the edit are that Faith has wider eyes, rounder cheeks, a larger bustline, more textured hair, a cleaner face, and the makeup is gone. The edit is better.

It's easy to misinterpret here. It's easy to think the question is, which Faith is more attractive to a male audience? The answer to that question is also the edit, but that's not what I'm talking about here. The edit is better.

It is excellent that the developers made Faith female. I've played through Mirror's Edge, and female was the right choice, on any number of levels. It is also excellent that they saw her as a strong female protagonist, and they carry this through inasmuch as is possible during the appallingly bad storyline.

Another thing that is awesome: they gave her a realistic body shape. That bustline on the edit isn't exactly fantasy, but it's unnecessary and not really ideal for someone who's going to be doing as much jumping as Faith. The original design for Faith includes some good calls, and they are to be commended.

Where they went wrong is the face. And the reason they went wrong is this: Faith's face is closed.

She's the protagonist of the game; more than that, she is the player's avatar. The player needs to be able to instantly identify with her, be welcomed into her world, and feel in tune with her motivations. Instead she's got this... face. In the picture above she's sneering; in game you only see her face a couple of times but it's got an almost robotic detachment to it. Either way, her face is closed - her squinty eyes and dirty skin and ludicrous make-up all come together to make a character who doesn't want you to get to know her.

Faces are icons. Humans, it turns out, are ridiculously good at idenitfying a human face.

We take our cues from the layout of the eyes and mouth. We've got a whole bunch of subconscious stuff going on when it comes to these parts of the body. Eyes which are large in proportion to the head evoke concepts of children, stimulating our urges of affection and protection. Eyes which are open and interested provoke engagement in the viewer (we tend to copy the expressions of people we want to engage with). Eyes with clearly defined edges are more iconic - they more loudly say "human" and therefore allow us to better project on a face; lines which break the outline of the eye make faces look more "alien".

This is basic psychology. It is the sad truth that when it comes to designing faces, there are ways that are better. The edited Faith has a sharper, cleaner face and is therefore measurably more effective at drawing the player into her world.

So, yes. Make realistic characters. Give us achievable female role models. Give us strong women doing awesome things who don't care whether or not they're impressing men. But, seriously, badly designed is not the same thing as interesting, and well designed is not the same thing as pandering to the masses.

Mirror's Edge Demo

Yesterday I played the demo for upcoming EA/Dice parkour game Mirror's Edge. At the time I was impressed but not overwhelmed.

Things they got right:

(1) The controls are intuitive. Left bumper is "go high", left trigger is "go low", and that's all the buttons you'll use 90% of the time. Right bumper is a 180 degree turn, and right trigger is "hit things" which is equally appropriate for punching bad guys and bumping open doors. Face buttons are used for some specific moves including disarming enemies.

(2) Music. Which is gorgeous.

(3) Running. You will actually feel like you're running, not just floating across the environment. There's a real sense of physicality, of momentum, and of speed, which is good when you're generally navigating the environment but becomes awesome once you get some bad guys on your tail.

(4) Graphics are clean, sharp and uncluttered. They look good without getting in the way of your play.

(5) Physics. Faith falls at real-life speeds. That means it's a very short trip from the top of a skyscraper to the bottom, which is nice.

Things that aren't so good:

(1) Anything involving ledges. Shimmying on ledges is painfully slow and badly breaks up the pace, at least in the demo. It feels like this should be about twice as fast.

(2) "Failing" in the tutorial. During the intro level, any time you stuff anything up the game instantly takes you back before you tried. This has two problems; one is that you don't get to see the consequences of your failure. Attempting jumps is only exhilerating when it's understood that stuffing up means falling a really long way. Also the tutorial makes you watch your trainer do each move before you get to do it yourself, and these are effectively unskippable cutscenes you have to watch each time you stuff up.

Things I'm not sure about:

(1) Combat. It felt a little awkward in the demo but you don't get a lot of chances to use it so it may be that I'm just still learning it. It's very timing-based so it's probable that I'll eventually pick up the skill to make it work.

Anyway, having been impressed but not overwhelmed, I've woken up this morning realising that I must have more so I think I'll be buying this when it comes out.

Mirror's Edge Theme

Anyone want to hear the theme from upcoming EA/DICE free-running title Mirror's Edge? Here it is: "Still Alive" by Lisa Miskovsky, set to a fan footage compilation. Nothing to do with the similarly titled, and somewhat more awesome, theme from Portal.

Hey - how weird is it that EA are making original intellectual property that I actually want to play?