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.

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?

A Frustrating Tale of Two Cities

On the surface, the new Prince of Persia is a straightforward and inoffensive experience, but Ubisoft Montreal has gotten me thinking through their myriad of design choices toward minimizing frustration above all else, because for the most part they succeed. Between the subtle auto-correction of angles that were just a bit off or distances that were just a bit too short and Elika's "integrated quick-load," I never felt like the game was trying to get in the way. I recognize that this is an utterly challenge-neutralizing move, but it did what it attempted to do, as I had no problem cruising through and seeing everything the game had to offer. Were the game offering something a little more interesting, this would have been an extremely welcome addition. It wasn't, so the design choices only served to streamline and hurry you through an pleasant but ultimately vapid experience. Prince's design choices did at least get my mind percolating, and after finishing it, I found myself going back to, of all things, Mirror's Edge.

Sexy Samus

Good old wholesome Nintendo, right? In this growing era of ever-increasing amounts of violence, sex, bad language, worse conduct, and all around filth pervading our video games, Nintendo comes to the rescue by continuing to release plenty of "E for Everyone" games. Oh, sure, they've at least lightened up and allowed other people to release some of these nasty games on their consoles, but they keep making Mario and Zelda games, and people eat them up. They tried the bloody fighter thing, but Killer Instinct was so blatantly a "see, we can make a hardcore fighter too!" one couldn't help but want to pat them on the head and send them on their way with a Werther's Original.

Nintendo has a secret, though. Sure, they're not going to fill their games with jiggle physics or overt cheesecake or anything like that, but they don't need to. They can be a lot more sneaky about it, thanks to their top heroine, Samus Aran.

Terrell Owens and Team Fortress

I like football. I also like Team Fortress 2. So far, not exactly any big news here, I know. However, it's not that often that one makes me think of the other, except for the most superficial notions of a contest between two teams, or perhaps thinking of large burly men. However, a comment about Terrell Owens during the Monday Night Football pregame did catch my attention. The quote was, essentially, "He'd rather be the MVP on the losing team than catch two balls and win the big game." While I don't know him personally, and can't say if that's true or not, it does seem to match his public image. Essentially, the conflict was one between individual achievement and team success, and that's something that seems to crop up in more than a few games of TF2. I'm not going to go on a rant about big egos: been there, done that. No, this time I'm going to talk about what structures the game has in place to assuage those big egos (actually quite a few), and toss in my two cents about whether or not they work. (mostly, but not always)

The Duel

I know quite well that the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, for those of you who have been living in a cave for the past 8 years) is the hot thing on the game scene nowadays. Two players isn't enough any more, there have to be players everywhere and anywhere. A vertiable sea of interaction! It's not just the MMORPG, of course. The FPS has expanded its multiplayer abilities dramatically, as well, increasing from 4 players maximum in the original Doom, to 16 in Quake, to upwards of 32 and 64 in modern games.  However, I think that beneath this multiplayer massiveness there is still a fundamental dynamic, one that exists between only two people, and has existed ever since one-player games first started to be able to support a second player.

RPGs, what happened? You used to be cool.

I'm having a problem with this generation of RPGs. I'm not quite sure what it is, but something's standing in the way of me getting into so many of the higher profile releases. I'm able to play most of them for one session, in some cases more, but inevitably I lose interest. I've spoke previously about my difficulties with Final Fantasy XII and the wall that game put in my path, but it is not alone. There have been several games over the last few years which have lured me in with creative concepts, so it's not that. It's not the mechanics, either, the degree of strategy and complexity in today's traditional RPGs has never been higher. And it's DEFINITELY not the craftmanship, as few games have more care behind them than major japanese RPG releases. So what is it?

Asymmetry

Though it is obviously a mindlessly simple game, there is something to be learned from the design of the venerable Rock, Paper, Scissors, and it's something that (at least some) game designers have been very slow to embrace: a game can be both asymmetric and yet balanced.

One of my favorite multiplayer games back in ancient history was a classic called Aliens vs. Predator 2. It had its flaws, but what really drew me to the multiplayer game was that you could be the Marine, the Alien, or the Predator, and each faction had its own strengths and weaknesses. All three could compete on their own terms, and yet the game remained fairly balanced. What has really surprised me in the years since is that this sort of gameplay has not appeared more often.