8-bit hacks

Tell me a story

The following entry contains spoilers aplenty for Mother 3, so check yourself.

Months ago, I asserted my belief that the way forward for traditional RPGs (since word is they be broke) was away from the expensive lessons of blockbusters past which often obfuscate their strengths and toward design choices that would open up new frontiers of storytelling. As if that wasn't worded pretentiously enough, this had already happened, I just hadn't found it yet (as so often happens in the world of blogging). In Mother 3, series creator Shigesato Itoi has returned to the fundamental strength of the RPG, to impart a story, and attempts to bring that strength to a new level without putting up any obstacles in the name of progress. The game mechanics are as fundamentally sound as the best Dragon Quests, and the user experience is expertly refined to make sure the game never gets between the player and the creator. Battles are fast, involved, and often optional.  In this respect, Mother 3's greatest innovation is that it doesn't innovate at all. The story is the star, and while it might have room for improvement, what makes the game remarkable is the virtuoso skill with which it's told.

The Path you take = The Path you make

The Path describes itself as a horror take on Little Red Riding Hood, but in the end, it stands far apart from even the best of the horror genre's traditional stewards. Sure, as noted, there are more than enough design issues here to go around, and if I was going to break it down, I'd find several issues with the presentation as well. While I found myself annoyed by the mechanical obstacles in my way, the slow walking speed, the abhorrent object interaction, the motivation tightrope remained steady enough for me to hold my balance all the way to the end. Thus, I will set that aside, at least for tonight.

There are going to be spoilers aplenty in this entry, so consider yourself warned. This is not a review in the gaming sense. I'm going to discuss the game, how it affected me, and my take on it, and the content of the story figures integrally into any discussion we're going to have here.

Indestructible

The video arcade is an interesting phenomenon that I’m sure will make for a fascinating history lesson to kids in 75 years, much like speakeasies did for my generation. Growing up in the 80’s, I never knew a world without them, and kids growing up today will never know a world with them, barring some miraculous revival that I find extremely unlikely. I shouldn’t get too wistful. After all, I directly contributed to its demise.

For me, like much of my generation, Street Fighter II was a defining game. I lined up amongst the throngs, eagerly throwing up my quarter to try and take down the king of the seedy, dimly-lit hall. I treasure the memories, but the minute it came out for SNES, I did everything I could to get my hands on it, and once we could have a reasonably equivalent facsimile of the real thing at home without pumping money into it, it was on, not in a fashion entirely unlike Donkey Kong. Even with my one-year-old baby brother conked out on the couch across the room, we packed everyone in the neighborhood into our den for boistrous and quarter-free winner-goes-on sessions.

Well, it’s 17 years later, that baby brother is about to graduate from high school, but Street Fighter is back, and it seemingly hasn’t lost a step. The fundamentals feel almost eerily familiar, and yet the game is fantastic. What is it that makes Street Fighter’s base mechanic so compelling that 17 years later, a new game can take the world by storm by building on the very same fundamentals? I’m by no means an expert when it comes to this stuff, but I’ll try and take a stab at it.

I wrote in the past about the boldness it took from Keiji Inafune to remember the true quality of Mega Man and make a game that bucked years of wrong turns and recalled the Blue Bomber’s strengths, even if it took going back to a title that felt 20 years old. In my column on Mega Man 9, I intentionally avoided the 8-bit presentation, because while I most certainly enjoyed it, it was a statement of another kind entirely, and I believed the true genius of Mega Man 9 would have been just as achievable no matter what presentation was chosen. Yoshinori Ono has proven me right, as his lavish big-budget next-gen Street Fighter IV succeeds because of many of the same lessons that delighted me so thoroughly about Mega Man’s return. 

While there are several complex fighters that I really do love, Ono seems to have realized that much of Street Fighter’s strength is derived from its simplicity. In games where the command list for each character is 20 pages long for each character, I always end up focusing in on one character pretty much exclusively, not because I’m closed-minded, but because the amount of work required to even understand the strategic place of each character is too intimidating. In comparison, the variation and uniqueness of the characters in Street Fighter II are within players’ reach the first time they play a character. Meandering up to a vacant SFII machine for my first play, and picking Dhalsim on a whim, I was able to grasp made the flexible Indian special as compared to each of his opponents almost immediately. I didn’t know how to do yoga fire, or yoga flame, but I quickly figured out how to stretch, and just how that would help me get to victory.

The basic mechanics, the rhythmic cadence of blocking and timing strikes, the rock-paper-scissors mechanics, they’re all available for even the newest, most amateur player to learn and enjoy. As my friends and I learned our small complements of special moves, the depth of play available to us grew, but the game remained balanced and fun, because even though my Shoryuken packed a mean wallop, my opponent had his Hundred Hand Slap ready to go. When we added the combo layer on top of that, the game remained balanced while adding even more depth, and so on. The fundamentals of movement, striking, blocking, and timing were as relevant in a game between total novices to those with a mastery of all of the techniques that they could come up with.

Street Fighter didn’t always retain this simple elegance, even if it did weather its loss better than many fighting game franchises. Just like the complexity that was added to Mega Man throughout the years did not contribute to his strengths, Capcom’s efforts to spruce up the Street Fighter in the later half of the 90s had often obfuscated the strengths that caused the rise of the game in the first place, working in complex, regressive techniques that worked against the game’s fundamental strengths.

In producing Street Fighter IV, Ono never let his focus slip from the rock solid base that made its legacy so legendary, and the end product is worlds better for it. While as an advanced, veteran player, I appreciate that the existing design is instantly familiar, the accessibility that drew me into the game in the first place is still just as present. Picking up Crimson Viper, I could immediately get a feel for her before learning my first special move, and how she felt different than Rufus, or El Fuerte. Just as in Street Fighter II, the advanced layers of Street Fighter IV don’t fundamentally change the lower levels. The special moves still fit on one page. Grasping each of the higher layers and working it into my game is an easy, fluid experience.

While I’ve heard repeated claims that this system is dumbed down or stuck in 1992, after having a decent amount of time with it, it actually feels as if Ono went through the later Street Fighter games' designs and found a way to fit the best of their mechanics into the existing system without breaking or detracting from anything in the existing system at all. Alpha's Super Meter, SF3’s EX moves, and limited parrying are all there, they’re just retrofit so as to add and not to interfere. Incorporating each of these layers feels as natural as learning your three special moves with Ken, and used right, they can change and enhance the game just as dramatically. The game isn’t dumbed down, it’s just well-designed. There’s a lot of depth to be uncovered as you learn and master each of these techniques, but its genius is that at it’s heart, the game never forgets that it's Street Fighter, and that’s all it ever needed to be.

I’ve been around long enough to know that everyone’s perspective of fighting games varies wildly, and the discussion from the real enthusiast community exists on a completely different plane than I approached this from. How do you read Street Fighter’s design? Do you see the same thing I do, or am I way off and you see just another dated fighter?

Inherit the Wind

There’s an old film fable where Stanley Kubrick commissions a score from the talented composer Alex North for a new film he was working on. Some film about space. Before North was finished with his work, Kubrick showed an early print of the film off to studio executives with placeholder music. Just something out of the public domain; whatever he could dig up. Old music, by guys named Strauss. The end of this story is well known; North's work was discarded, and pieces like Also Sprach Zarathustra and the Blue Danube are instantly associated with Kubrick's epic. Ebert does a fantastic job of summing up just the kind of impact this made on the film:

We are asked in the scene to contemplate the process [a space station docking], to stand in space and watch. We know the music. It proceeds as it must. And so, through a peculiar logic, the space hardware moves slowly because it's keeping the tempo of the waltz.

The undeniable certainty of machines dependent on orbital gravity was a perfect match for the certainty of the Austrian waltz. It fit because that force already has a musical undercurrent, an unwavering consistency and tempo, and pairing it with the Blue Danube only enhanced what was already there.

This isn’t a film blog, so let’s work this back around to games. The brilliant WiiWare Art Style title Orbient builds on these same foundations. As the player slowly glides through space and picks up moons, each new satellite adds its own motif to the music. The music layers together just as the moons layer together, culminating in a deep, majestic symphony.  Because the music is designed to line up with the force of nature, putting you in control of the force puts you in control of the music, if only to a small degree. Even that small degree is an extremely empowering feeling, but the control is only as free as the perfect tempo of gravity allows, of course. It’s perfect for a precise, mathematical game like Orbient, but there’s certainly more potential here, and perhaps if someone were to apply the same principles to another force, we might have something cooking. That’s where Flower comes in.

The Scenic Route

Eurogamer has gotten the attention of a select few in the blogosphere for its review of indie darling and IGF Seamus Mcnally winner Crayon Physics Deluxe. It correctly identifies a quirk with the game's difficulty curve:

CPD presents something of a problem. It can be a fantastically fun and challenging game, but often only if you choose to ignore the obvious route to the finish. One level on the penultimate island clearly wants you to create a weight and pulley system around a floating cloud, but it's impossible not to notice you can literally draw one straight line and complete the level. Years of gaming conditioning tell you to do just that, and expecting players to take the scenic route to a star is a problem in the level design. Success is ludicrously rewarding if you steel yourself to do something a particular way, but you'll know you could always have used the old box, rope and weight trick in a fraction of the time.

The reviewer is correct. Years of gaming conditioning do force you towards taking the shortcut because the game doesn't tell you you can't. We have become so coddled by expansive achievement-ridden games that practically include a "to enjoy follow these directions" manual built in to a tee that the concept of having seemingly unauthorized fun with a game seems blasphemous. They didn't reward me for avoiding the obvious solution, so how can I have fun with the game? Would this reviewer have given the game a higher score if there was an explicit achievement for clearing a puzzle using only rhombi, or illustrations of Hobbes? The implication that Crayon Physics would be more fun if the creative solutions were somehow authorized or rewarded by the designer is laughable.

No rules, just Art Style

We're waist deep in the gauntlet of heavy hitting fall releases, and frankly, there are just not enough hours in the day to put together a lengthy and well-informed take on everything, not when there's life outside of games to deal with as well. I'm not interested in forcing myself through the gigantic amount of new releases out there just to be first to the table with a full take. It seems like the gaming equivalent of gorging at a really nice all-you-can-eat buffet until you simply can't take another bite. While I may be American, this sort of approach does not seem like the most enjoyable way to play through the massive fall slate. I'll have impressions of everything as I get through it on my twitter feed as it seems to be the most appropriate place for you to find those, but I'm moving at my own pace.

Despite brand new and shiny AAA releases all around me, my defense mechanism to the massive release shock is that I'm retreating to the most fun games I can find, both new and old. I've dipped my toes into the much-hyped waters of Fable II and Fallout 3 but neither have compelled me in the least to invest more time than I already have thus far. I'm playing both Mother games for an upcoming reality check and in the run up to the just-released English patch for Mother 3, but what I find myself getting the most lost in the last few weeks are the simple and engrossing WiiWare games in the Art Style series.

Wii Music: why even doubt EAD anymore

 

I have to admit, I thought Wii Music looked like stupid fun with friends when it was shown off at E3, but I realize now I have sold the latest "Wii" project way short. I should have known better than to doubt given the people involved, but what I didn't realize until I had the game in my hands was just how much control the player actually has over the music. This distinction pushes Wii Music far away from the illusions of grandeur provided by a game like Guitar Hero and makes it one of the freshest and most forward-thinking experiences I've had this year. That mention of GH will be the only one in this article because it and Wii Music have no more in common than Call of Duty and Company of Heroes do, despite both being about the same general subject.

A new hope for the PC

No, this isn't one of those PC gaming is dead posts, just so you know. I've had an on-and-off history with PC gaming. I've had PC-building binges that have lasted for months and cost me way too much money, as I've tried to convince myself that I'm a hardcore PC gaming enthusiast inside. Every time I've tried this, I've failed, ending up with an expensive tower with the newest video sitting mostly dormant outside of the initial 3dmark e-peen shot. I always kept one foot in the water, though, and always made time for the biggest releases.

In the last couple years I've admittedly started to fall away from the PC as a gaming platform completely. While the easy answer is "because console gaming has evolved" I'm not sure I'd go with that as this generation of consoles hasn't exactly set my world on fire. However, this is the generation where I feel less compelled to have a gaming-worthy PC than ever before. Here's my read on the problem.

Little boys love shiny toys

When Nintendo unveiled the DSi to the public a week and a half ago to much fanfare, nothing really stuck out at me as a game-changing feature. Nintendo made a bunch of smart revisions to the design, making it slimmer, making the screens bigger and better, and adding in internal memory to open up the digital distribution arena. However, regardless of how minor these improvements and tweaks were in my eyes, there was one thing I was certain of. I have to buy one. This will be my third DS, but even something as simple as screen improvements was all I needed to make the excuses in my head. Therefore, the most heart-wrenching part of Nintendo's much-covered press event was the fact that since the DS Lite is selling so well in America, we're not going to see the DSi until well into 2009 despite hitting in Japan in November. This was enough to send me off to my favorite importer.

The Tetris trance

Philosophical gamer Iroquois Pliskin with an intriguing entry on what happens to his mind during games of Lumines over at the Versus CluClu Land blog:

There is that way that habituation causes us to internalize extremely ornate forms of reasoning, to the point that we are hardly able to make these inferences explicit. When we're apprehending a new rule-system we have to think about the rules in order to follow them. (“So, if I make a square of four blocks, then they will disappear when the time-line sweeps by” or, “If I press this button and strum with correct timing, then it'll play this note.”) But once you've trained yourself into practice of note-strumming and block-dropping all these explicit rules fall by the wayside, replaced by this kind of thoughtless mastery. That's why we call certain transcendent performances unconscious, or say that C.C. Sabathia was pitching out of his mind last Sunday.

Iroquois does an excellent job of encapsulating a feeling that's been on my mind recently and going over the philosophical implications and what it means to our broader sense of cognition. Of course I've been here, as I have felt my mind slip into this trance, where I'm no longer consciously dealing with the blocks, but rather, just seeing them fit together in my mind.