Two Posts about Games in Tandem

First:

I've been playing two games that both got lukewarm reviews, and both have surprised me based on said reviews.

Magna Carta 2 reminds me of Secret of Mana a little bit.  And while the story is kind of hackneyed and obviously geared towards 15 year-olds, the gameplay is much more satisfying than I thought it would be.  The JRPG aspects of it are tangible, and just leveling up feels fulfilling in a way that many RPGs fail to achieve.

Nier actually blew me away.  The story is amazing and deep, the gameplay is frantic, and I'm convinced that all of the reviews saying the controls are awkward and inneffectual were written by people who didn't play the game long enough to actually get a hang of it.  It takes time and effort to put enough work into the game for it to feel natural to play (the fishing minigame, particularly), but it's a solid game, and hearkens back to the older JRPGs.

And both games just look amazing.  Maybe I'm not up to date with the common idea of what graphics should be, though.  I love any stylized, professional-looking 3d graphics.  Especially anime-inspired.

Second (about a week later):

I've played through most of Magna Carta 2 (I'm stuck at the end farming, because I'm always obsessed with game completion, and the exp system scales based on your level, which makes earning level 99 a real bitch).

But the game mechanics are really enjoyable, and even though the story is really immaturish and hackneyed (as I said earlier), the visuals and artistic themes of the game are superb and satisfying.  The combat is also pretty satisfying, even when farming for hours on end just for the sake of levelling.

I put Nier on the backburner so I could get through Magna Carta 2 first, but now that I'm at the endgame and a little bored, I am starting Final Fantasy XIII.  The old Final Fantasy games are what defined my youth, and while the system is very odd from an RPG standpoint, it seems pretty satisfying, so far.  What really got me playing beyond the first few minutes is the story.  While I heard from a lot of people that the story was kind of gay and childish, so far it seems very realistic in a theatrical sense.  But I'm barely a few hours in, so I guess I could be hugely disappointed the further I get.

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These are two posts I wrote, but never posted.  My writing was supposed to increase in both effectiveness and quantity.  I got a new app that was supposed to be the bee’s middle leg-joints; this was untrue.  Nothing spurs me to write like a barebones app like KeyNote (which is like 10 years old, and the company went under, I believe?  Some random guy picked up the code for it).  Although, I do have to say that Windows Live Writer has helped a lot with my blogging.

Resonance

I bought Resonance of Fate today, and fired up my old Xbox 360.  I had seen a few videos about it a few months ago, and thought it looked pretty cool.

Then I start playing and watch the intro cutscene, and start playing.

Then I find out just how much customization and RPG elements there are in this game.

And the nerd in me rejoices.

Life as writer’s block…

I’ve been reading a few random things that have really piqued my interest.  The first is an e-book called, “Permanent Death”, and it’s about a guy’s experiment playing through FarCry 2 (or 1, but I’m pretty sure it’s 2) on normal difficulty, but only having one life; that is, once he dies once, it’s over.  The thesis statement of this book is something I really find fascinating.  It’s about how the introduction to “multiple lives”, or even checkpoints or other forms of error-correction in playing a game serves to decouple the player from his representation (ie., his avatar).  While it’s virtually impossible to create a game that has absolutely no reliance on multiple lives in some way (even if dying to a game-over screen, and then loading the most recent save), the roguelikes are the only games that I can think of that religiously adhere to a one-life character play-model.

The second thing is a blog by a guy who is playing Minecraft, but in a very unconventional way.  He isn’t crafting, or building, or mining.  He gets up every morning, walks east as far as he can, while taking note of the landscape and whatever else he runs into, and then, at sundown, takes refuge in a makeshift shelter, creating and using only the resources absolutely necessary for survival.  He writes each day as a post, and it’s interesting, even if only for its strangeness.

I like things like this, because it highlights something I really enjoy about games.  Also, it makes a distinction between a facet of myself and something I don’t see in any of the people I know who play games.  Most of the people I know, if they don’t exclusively play only multiplayer, competitive games, play single-player games in a much different way than I do.  I play with a faint hearkening back to my childhood days of pretend.  I play with the theory of “creative play” in the back of my mind, and through this form of indulgence, I am fulfilled on an artistic level, in a way.  Also, it seems to help me focus my own artistic endeavors.  But I think it’s largely overlooked when people think of games; especially single-player games.  Games are mainly seen as ways to be competitive, ways to win, ways to accumulate and dominate, to perfect a strategy, to “hone your micro”.  I despise these forms of game-playing, because I believe it is indicative of an undeveloped mind, and indicative of a mind that is imbalanced in that social sense.

So, I like these kinds of strange, idiosyncratic experiments, and sometimes wish I were truly original enough to think of something like it on my own, or at least, to attempt something like it.

Bioshock

I just finished Bioshock 1.  The series never entered my mind because I didn’t know they were ported to the PC, and hearing that they were the “spiritual successor” to the System Shock games, I was really hoping for an immersive environment, disturbing story elements and a solid ending.  For the most part, I got what I expected.

The levels are very immersive and well-detailed.  It really feels like you’re rummaging through the ruins of a large complex, and you almost always are hurting for ammo enough to appreciate finding a few rounds in a trash can or cabinet.  But, by the endgame, it' all gets kind of meaningless.  I never got completely bored playing, but by the last two levels I was hoping for something different, instead of increasingly redundant level design, with “go here, then go here, then go here” objectives.  All in all, though, it was a rewarding and interesting experience.

The ending, though, disappointed me somewhat.  I only played through the “good” ending (saving all Little Sisters), and while it made sense and everything, it was very short, with a detached narrative.  The last battle is ridiculously easy, which lent even more to the feeling of being short-changed.

I’m about to start Bioshock 2.  From 1’s ending, I doubt the stories will be continuous in any way, save for the general lore of the world in which it takes place.

Taking all of these negative comments, though… they are based on an ideal.  Compared to the stagnant, unimaginative stories of games nowadays, I guess it’s an exceptional game, and a testament to the fact that games don’t need to be “safe” or “PC” at all.  They don’t need to take on the same old archetypes.

So, all in all, I was very satisfied with the experience of Bioshock 1.  For the most part, it reminds me of the good aspects of System Shock 2.  The only downside is that the story is a little too linear, and the narrative a little too forced.  after the 3rd level or so, the element of free exploration was completely lost, and it felt as though I was just going through level by level.  And the creepiness-aspect of it all was very satisfying.  Maybe I just have too high a standard for the way stories are delivered throughout the game.

Morality in Game Storylines

I have always wished the stories in games dealt with the differences between ethical views.  It seems that most games, instead of focusing on ethical problems of any kind, merely try to end at a culturally positive moral result.  When the player helps an "evil" character, there is always a retraction; a justification for doing so.  When a player is given the option of being "evil", it is always "pure evil", without any justification beyond self-interest or greed.

Where are the games that are murky and grey in their dealings with morality and ethics?  Or at least interesting in some way?  I completely lost interest in Fallout 3 because of its ridiculously bland story.  Even the impact of detonating a nuclear warhead, leveling an entire city loses its punch when you play through it.  It’s all stupid, all laughably “evil”.

In writing for my game, I am using morals and ethics in a very personalized way.  The world is fucked up, and people do fucked up things.  Some societies are virtuous, some are empty.  Some worship greed to an alarming degree.

The people who write game storylines must be afraid to do anything really edgy, or they are just so unimaginative that they don’t know how to be.  But that is what I would like as a player.  Not the predictable good and evil, and not the 180-degree twist that ends up being ridiculously planned.  These things need to be more realistic.

The Paranoia of Gaming Corporatism

While looking at different game torrents (looking, not downloading of course), I found this except of a description from a Prince of Persia ISO:

Release Notes:
A little statement about the work involved:
To clear the minds of the individuals who think: "Game x was
done fast and this one taking ages" etc. The way the Ubisoft
DRM works, makes it so that every game is like a brand new
challenge. What it does do, is offload certain parts of the
game to a server, game then requests those things at runtime.
These parts can be anything that the developer wants. In the
case with Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, those things
were:
- Levers logic
- Door timing
- Upgrades
- Abilities
- XP & Levels
- Area codes
Every time you step on a button "in game", it sends a request
to server asking what to do. Server then sends the door code
to open, including how much time it stays open. Levers work
similarly, every time you press the "TAB" button to display
skills, game asks again server: "What skills do player have",
and so on and on.
All that stuff takes a lot of time to implement right and we
do implement it like the original do. All our doors open and
close with exact same time factors as the retail do. We just
wanted to clarify a little how the Ubisoft DRM really does
work, because a lot of those individuals we mentioned in the
beginning of this statement didn't seem to understand, yet
what kind of monster this is. It's not some simply "Values"
going around like it were with Assassin's Creed II.

The only thing more amazing to me than the painstaking efforts that pirate groups go through to deliver an authentic game to the thieving public is the ridiculous amount of effort UBISoft went through to “ensure” copy-protection of their game.  Of course, the end result is that it was pointless, and all it really did was help a bunch of game-rippers display their incredible hacking skills.

But is any of that really necessary?  As an old-school PC gamer, needing a live internet connection while playing a single-player game is ridiculous and far too intrusive.  I understand the desperation in their efforts, but when it comes to such ludicrous means, doesn’t that really just show that the financial models of computer games is archaic and ineffective?

Personally, I abhor any game company that manipulates the consumer so much, just to secure their profit.  In my mind, the problem isn’t that people pirate games.  A lot of game piracy comes from experienced gamers knowing that most games released are buggy, have major compatibility issues, or is only done by people who couldn’t/wouldn’t buy the game anyway.  Quality games that are made with passion are usually bought, regardless of how easy it is to pirate, because consumers actually enjoy supporting the developer.  All of the paranoia here comes from the publisher, not the developer.  In my opinion, game publishers are obsolete and unnecessary, just like recording labels.  They aren’t needed to market products like they once were, and the means of marketing a game or CD is much different (and much easier) with the internet.  Also, it is due to the exponential inflation of the costs that go into creating a game that make companies so obsessed with protecting their profits – after all, they spent millions of dollars creating the game.

Hopefully, the trend with games will be that they will become cheaper and easier to create, market, and distribute.  All of this is already possible, but because of the entrenched monopolies involved, it hasn’t really caught on in full force.  When publishers are knocked down a few pegs, and developers have more freedom and power, then maybe games will be created for the art and joy of it – instead of the possible profits of selling a “product”.

My Grand Writing Project…

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to approach my next project – even though I never formally finished my prior on (short story, “The Steel River”).  I am planning on returning to finish that in the near future, though.

The writing project I am undertaking is writing the script for a game.  Since I am working on a programming project as well (a 2D Role-Playing Game), I have been wondering on how to approach the writing for it.  While I would like to do an ultimately open-ended dungeon-crawler, I gravitated toward something else.

I grew up on the Japanese RPGs, like Final Fantasy, Secret of Mana and Xenogears.  While these were all RPGs at their core, they were different than western RPGs on a very key detail.  The storyline in most western RPGs (of course, there are exceptions)  is just a placeholder; not that it’s insignificant, but it is not the main vessel of the game.  The primary function is a means to allow exploration, and open-endedness.  Japanese RPGs are much different, because they are much more cinematic, and large portions of games are very limiting in the player’s freedom, so that a story can be told.  While this can be bad if you want an open-ended game, I really love that aspect of J-RPGs.

So, the writing for my game will basically be a script, a screenplay that will serve as my writing project.  It will be a novel, set to a game.  But more than that, it will also allow me to write extensive lore and descriptions of different characters, factions and locations in the game.  Basically, I want to create an entire world through writing, and implement it in a game.

It sounds very heady and over-ambitious, and I am somewhat remiss to lay my plans all out here, because I read something that confirmed a suspicion of mine.  People who tell others of their grand plans for the future are less likely to carry those plans out to fruition, because of a quirky aspect of the social mind. (look it up)

I have a different blog that I am keeping for this purpose, to slowly shape the fiction of this world and its characters.  I have a lot of ideas swimming around in my head, and am very anxious to get into the meat of it.  But, for some reason, I have not yet found the necessary catalyst to jump into working on it in a serious way.  I just let the ideas percolate, and to my surprise, they get better and more detailed every day.

What Fallout 3 should have been…

Randomly wandering the internet, I found a tech demo of an old engine made by the original creators of Fallouts 1 & 2.  I believe that in some parallel existence, this engine was used for Fallout 3, and the rights were never sold away.  This is why I hate the game industry:  Things that should be works of art are treated like any other product, and intellectual property trumps everything.  If only all kinds of designers had the freedom to use their resources to make the games that really should have been made….