Vector, among my quest of trying lots of android games

I've been playing lots of android games! I want to find games that use the platform well, and stuff. I've noticed a few things that might go in a future blog post; most notably that puzzle games are the only genre that's consistently good, nothing has a story, and there are a LOT of games where you do one thing and it requires precision but restarting is extremely fluid. Like flappy bird. Anyway.

I'm playing Vector right now, which is a side-scrolling parkour game! I can tell just by playing it that it's pretty old, mostly because there are dialogs and stuff that don't follow modern android conventions. But, here's where my complaints go!

First thing I noticed was that when I started the app, it showed me a Holo-styled dialog fragment (for those not paying attention, that's like three android versions ago) asking me to download extra content. It doesn't explain - I think it's just that for some reason my tablet didn't download the extra content package that was supposed to come with it - but if you tap no, it exits the app unceremoniously. If you tap yes, it downloads a thing, and then starts the game. Gross. Moving on! The opening cutscene is super dramatic. Like, friendo, we've already seen the 1984 Apple ad a million times. We get it. You're not doing something amazing. Mirror's Edge didn't do a great job at this but they still did way better than you. My biggest complaints are all little things! Like, I bought the "full version with no ads" unlock. I had to wait until the game just offered it to me in a dialog box - I went looking for it early on, and couldn't find it in any menus anywhere. But... The game still has ads in it. Including pop-over ones. Did it do anything? I can't tell at all. There are still ads when I bought the adless unlock??? Who did this. Anyway, moving on.



The menus are all pretty un-responsive - there's often no feedback to let me know that I successfully clicked a button. The only hint I have is because I turned on the setting where it shows touches in the developer options for my tablet. There are also a bunch of instances of buttons for navigation doubling over more natural swiping-based navigation... Which is doubly annoying because sometimes the buttons are the only things that work - instead of tapping on the big level preview, I have to tap the "play" button, which is weird, because the level preview matches how other stuff works. Biggest baffling thing? I put my tablet to sleep and it's still playing the music... What? Why is this happening? You're not a music app...



Oh right, speaking of basic android screw ups - when I clicked to buy the unlock, the screen rotated. Why didn't that dialog fragment show up on top of the existing activity? Why'd it rotate back? I guess it's 'cause I had my tablet set in fixed portrait mode, but still... It should have inherited the game's orientation mode... Also, when I use the power button to sleep my tablet on the menu screen, the game has required a force stop in order to keep running two of two times. We'll see if this has any better luck later.

Anyway, as for the game itself - the animation is delightful and fluid. It's one of those "auto-running, press and swipe at the right times to jump and dodge obstacles" kind of games. The problem is that there's very little feedback. I don't know if I've done the gesture at the right time until the animation has started already, which is frustrating!



A big mechanism involved in progressing to further levels is requiring you to unlock tricks in order to progress. Tricks are used to get points in the game, but, notably, you can only do them at specified points when you run past an icon. Big issue: it's really unclear when I'm actually supposed to do the swipe to activate the trick. The time I instinctively press it - when my character starts overlapping the icon - works maybe 30% of the time. I'm having to artificially add in a delay, and there's no feedback about this. It's really unclear when I'm supposed to do it, and like, jeez, just explain how to play the game, okay? Stop making this all guesswork. This also goes for normal jumps and slides - half the time I end up doing an actual jump over an obstacle, instead of doing a fancy vault. Continuing in the vein of poor feedback, I never feel like I'm actually gaining much speed or time or anything when I do tricks! It ends up feeling like they're kind of moot, when what actually matters tends to be more of succeeding at the big things, like actually making a jump to a platform at all, and stuff.

The other big issue I have is that the levels... Don't have any arc to them. I guess this might be a high requirement in such a simple game, but they just lack rhythm. I can't really nail this down, but it means that they're not particularly satisfying, in the end, which means I'm probably not going to play very much of this game.

Sometimes I get the feeling that doing tricks or fancy vaults actually slows me down. Not a satisfying feeling in a parkour game. I'm calling it - bored of this game. Gonna uninstall and post this.



This game is buggy, kinda crap, and loaded with microtransactions. Not recommended.

Minor thoughts on Remember Me

Okay, I'm starting this a quarter through my third playthrough of this game (in a row, mind you, because I will get all the achievements, dammit) and so it's gonna miss a lot of stuff but I don't care, I just want to build this habit. Granted, a lot of these aren't going to make any sense, if you haven't played the game. Or if you have. Because I have completely omitted any other information than the thoughts I had. Whoops :D

1. I really like that they explicitly make the point that drones only can't scan through walls because of privacy laws. Nice way to limit the technology through non-technological means.
2. Synchronizing with a remembrane is a good way to make a mechanical abstraction of the action of "repeat the complicated action that someone else shows you how to do". You don't have to manually enter the passcode, you just... sync up with their memory of entering the passcode. Nice.
3. Maybe we should have a term for the mechanic/genre where you climb along buildings. I guess that's just the direction that 3d platformers have gone. I wish it felt a little more realistic! Also, fluid. It always feels pretty jarring, unless they're taking the "you are a god of parkour" approach of Infamous and (maybe) Assassin's Creed.
4. Kid X-mas's body just doesn't look realistic.
5. This train that casually starts moving after you board... Definitely looks like it's not even remotely close to capable of moving.
6. The dudes in this game all look the same. I'm lookin' at you, Johnny Greenteeth.
7. Background conversational dialogue, about someone who's nervous: "You're like a cat in a flux chamber." What??
8. Why exactly is there a minefield in slum 404 again??
9. A Zorn says "You are subject to a sigma 8 arrest warrant." What the heck would sigma 8 mean?
10. I really love the Zorns projecting a screaming open mouth in front of them when they roar. It's bullshit in terms of why would you make a robot roar, but like, damn, it's a good visual effect.
11. "This little red riding hood's got a basket full of kickass!" is a hilariously over-the-top and great line. (Delivered to someone who's been hunting Nilin, and shouting Red Riding Hood-based taunts at her)
12. They started exclusively using the spammer to activate things after you get it, and barely ever using the "press e to activate". It's kinda sad! It makes the spammer feel more like just a game abstraction and less like it has any specific meaning in the game world.
13. That carts and tracks puzzle is stupid. It doesn't make any sense. Why were those tracks in that order? Why is this all suspended in the air???
14. Diktat is a major brand / fashion label in this world.
15. The cube climbing puzzle in the conception cube is... Well, it's weird and out of place. But it's a clever way to make that kind of climbing puzzle! Having cubes stacked vertically but out of alignment so that you have to shift around consecutive ones to get on the face that matches the next? Yeah, good.

Subnautica

Subnautica is so good! I love it. I was originally going to write about what I like about it - it's beautiful, it seems like a vivid and well-fleshed-out world, it feels like it makes sense, it's got a good balance of hardness vs silliness. The crafting system is obviously far from realistic, but I do feel like it's really consistent. Minecraft always felt a little too symbolic, to me. This stretches the idea of "what can I make" by adding nanotech fabricators, but other than that it feels really reasonable! Your survival gear just requires you to find sufficient quantities of the raw materials. No need for you to "design" a sword on the crafting bench. So I like that. It's very glowy and so far has done a reasonable job of balancing progression (in building more advanced things) against how hard it is to get the required materials. Following is a brief log of my experiences - don't read if you want to avoid being spoiled for the progression in the game!

Ways to Categorize and Describe Rhythm Games

How sharp are the edges of the intervals you respond in?

• Do you need to hit the spot as it passes by you?
• Are there different degrees of success/failure for each button/cue? in Rock Band/Guitar Hero, you either hit the note or you don't. In DDR, you are graded on how close you came to perfectly timing it.

How wide are those intervals?

How unambiguous are the cues? How clearly does it tell you when and what to press?

• Rock Band/DDR give you scrolling symbols that pass through a timing line, indicating when you should press the button.
• Geometry Dash and other running games rely on you to know when to press to respond to an obstacle ("If I jump too early, I'll hit the end of that row of spikes...") but they are still clearly cued on the spot.
• Rock Band in performance mode (I have never played it. Why would I? But it exists.) doesn't give you any actual cues, it just relies on you to know when to hit the notes. 
• Crypt of the Necrodancer and Patapon don't tell you what buttons to press. You have to work it out for yourself.

How forgiving is it of mistakes?

• One mistake and you are forced to restart.
• More than X mistakes and you are forced to restart.
• If your score dips below X, you are forced to restart.
• You always play through to the end of the level.
• How much do you lose by missing a note?
• You'll spend the whole song recovering.
• You'll spend the next few phrases recovering.
• You'll immediately recover if you can hit the next few notes.

How does scoring work? Is it pass/fail, percentage of notes hit, or graded according to quality of hits? Or something else?

Is there a combo / multiplier system? How high does it go?

• In some games (Can't think of any examples!) you can basically do unlimited exponential score growth.
• In Rock Band your combo takes like 40 notes to get up to a 4x multiplier, plus you can use star power to double that.

Definitions

This post is my first real attempt at distilling into words my thoughts on the subject; I ask you to bear with me, and try to see what I'm getting at before you counterargue. Also, remember two things: that the definition of art must be murky, and that the boundaries between different media and genres are fuzzy by nature.

A few years ago I just decided that I was going to step away from discussions of what defines the game as an artistic medium. I was disillusioned because all the definitions I saw had, at their crux, the claim that a "game" is defined by either some element of challenge to be overcome by the player, or by the requirement that the player make choices. 

These definitions always rang hollow with me. Many games I play have little or no challenge. Some games I play really require stretching the definition of "choice" in order to have them. Does it really make sense to call "when to press the buttons in rock band" a choice? Conversely, there's definitely no challenge in so many relaxation/simulation games, or freeform audiovisual playgrounds. I think all of these can fit together in one umbrella.

A game is any artwork in which the audience's active participation is one of the primary components of its impact.

Okay, there it is. I like this definition. I've been working with it for about a year now. 

It neatly covers why so many videogames are so compelling - they stick with you because you were doing the things. Mirror's Edge gets its kick because of how your control over the main character makes you feel like you're running and jumping across a city. Dragon Age is fun because, by making the decisions about who to do and what to say, you start to feel a strong identification with the character. The triumph at the end of a good Star Fox 64 run is entirely because I was the one who dodged the lasers and shot the enemies. 

It also can be taken as an umbrella definition that encompasses both of the other definitions. If you define a game by a player's choices, well, those choices are necessarily a matter of player involvement. Similarly, you cannot challenge the player without granting the player some means to actively participate.

Furthermore, it meshes neatly together with one of the most fascinating things about video games as a medium in general: the consistent shittiness of their movie adaptations. Why do video game movies suck? It's simple: in the game, you fight against the ridiculous boss five or six incredibly frustrating times, and when you finally defeat them, you let out a whoop of delight and you're flooded with endorphins for your conquest. In the movie, you watch the protagonist get smacked a few times before defeating the boss. When the audience doesn't actually commit to the battle, and therefore doesn't feel the visceral frustration of actually failing, they do not care about the ridiculous situations video games contrive to put you in. Video game movies suck because the believability and power of video game stories always rely on the fact that the player has actually been doing something in the playing of the game - and that the player has changed as a result.

Since the medium's still pretty young, it's not commonplace to find examples of games that have neither challenge nor choice. What inspired me to write this post is one such game (at least, I'd claim it's a game): If the moon were only one pixel. I adore that page because it communicates the scale of space (this is very difficult to do), but also because it's a perfect example of my kind of game: There's no choice. You are not challenged in any way. And yet, the feeling of size and emptiness and vastness that it communicates cannot be replicated without the player actually scrolling through all that space.

The End of an Era

Skyward Sword. I started it and thought "Holy crap! This is the best Zelda game since Link's Awakening!" Then I kept playing. And kept playing. And kept playing. Zelda games have terrible pacing. They should work on that!

I'm pretty sure that game was at least twice as hard as the other zelda games I've played. Granted, that's not saying much, but it was jarring to have to repeat boss fights two or three times in order to beat them. I'm inclined to say that it would be an improvement, but given the pacing issues of the franchise, potentially dragging things out isn't really playing to your strengths. On the other hand, of course: the difficulty did mean I had to actually use my shield, rather than going with an all-out suicide run attack strategy in every situation.

I loved some of the aesthetics in this game - if I could wear Skyloft denizens' clothes every day of my life, I think I'd be a pretty happy human.

This isn't so much an issue with Skyward Sword in particular, but... Seriously. Cut it out with the effeminate people with masculine bodies being played for laughs or villainy. It's extremely tired and painful. While we're at it, maybe you could work on giving women more agency in the story? I know that Zelda was crucial to Skyward Sword - although that's somewhat a departure from the standard for the franchise - but it was really frustrating how all women are demure and cute by default. I just. When I played this game it was incredibly apparent which characters were played as "normal" and which characters were played as funny, and that frustrated me.

I dunno. I think I might just be... Done with Zelda games in general. All the elements in their stories and worlds fit too strongly into the various patterns, and it's just... Eh. I don't really care any more, and it's a 60+ hour time commitment for something I no longer care about. So I guess I give up on them.

Silent Hill 2, or, Shoofle Gets Too Scared To Play

I wrote about Silent Hill 2 today, which my roommate and I finally finished playing last night. I gave up on it previously, much to his annoyance, because it was just too stressful and scary for me to play. That hasn't happened before. He eventually took up the controller in my stead, but after trading it off to me for boss fights a few times, I picked it back up for the final few bits. After I got my thoughts down, I thought I'd collect some lasting thoughts or impressions; in retrospect, I think they're more interesting than the rest of the review. It's hiding behind the link - here's the TL;DR:

Okay, so, I want to try to get some kind of lasting something out of games more often, so I'm going to try to think about what I learned from each game I play. Silent Hill 2?

1. The absence of enemies defines a horror game. This game got a hell of a lot of mileage out of giving you enemies to fight, and then not giving enemies for you to fight, so you're left with that floaty confused feeling - which intensifies the terror of actually seeing an enemy tenfold. 
2. Leave the player weak and unable to affect their environment. I didn't often die in this game, but I got hit - it was scary, and I used my healing items a lot in contrast to my hoarder tendencies. I didn't down them reflexively, but it was a fairly regular thing. The disruption of getting hit once in every three battles aided my terror, and when I eventually figured out the combat, it became a lot less stressful.
3. If the player character responds ambiguously or in a low-key way, the player responds directly instead. This supercharges things like fear and terror, but can easily bite you in the ass for confusing story and plot. If the player sees the character being scared, then the player just watches it all happen. If the character doesn't show terror, then the player will feel it themselves.
4. Fourth, creepy shit is creepy as shit, but you've gotta play it quiet. Being startled is almost diametrically opposed from being unsettled. The threat of startling overpowers the actual effect of being startled by a million to one.

thanks, silent hill wiki

Pacific RimCity

I saw Pacific Rim last night. I have complicated feelings on it.
(Short and skinny: That movie was aggressively dumb, but I really enjoyed it. It was terrible at women. I don't think they said anything related to science that was right. But that was the best goddamn robot-punches-monster movie I've ever seen.)
Increasingly, though, I'm loving this idea I had a few days ago, for a Pacific Rim game. Unsurprisingly, there's a game of it - I haven't played it and it doesn't sound interesting. It got bad reviews. I know not to trust the-game-of-the-movie. Whatever. Here's my idea:

Pacific RimCity:

Calamity! Your unnamed mid-sized city has been attacked by a kaiju! The nearby military base sent all their forces to try and slow it down, but they didn't manage to stop it until it had carved a swath of destruction from the docks through the industrial sector. Only one business tower was struck, but the casualties are too many to think about - but you're the mayor. You need to start readying your city for the next time this happens, because the reports of attacks on other cities every year prove: this is not going to stop. This is where the player takes control: It's your turn to build up your city, in some kind of cross between Agricola and SimCity, in preparation for the attack. How do you keep morale up? How do you build up your businesses enough that you can pay for the massive robot parts? How do you reconstruct the industrial sector so that you can assemble a Jaeger of your own? These are the challenges you must face over the next year or several!

Fast forward through several turns/years of the game. The player controls the city during this time, mostly on a large scale - they're responsible for some degree of rezoning and city planning, as well as the higher level tasks of allocating resources and defining what direction the city is taking. Now, a klaxon familiar from news reports sounds in your very office: A kaiju has been sighted. Yours is the only Jaeger in the area. It's up to your team of crack pilots!

With you in command, of course. At this point the game switches focus from city-building to real-time tactics, as you have to direct your Jaeger in the battle with the kaiju. The key that ties this into the rest of the game, though, is that you're doing this battle in the city you've just built. You must take care not to do too much damage to the city you're trying to protect. Maybe you've built a buffer of easily-evacuable warehouse districts by the water (it slowed down your manufacturing districts to be farther from the ocean and therefore supplies) and as long as you keep the kaiju distracted there, damage will be minimized. Maybe you put all your Jaeger research into building a machine that could easily control the kaiju on the battlefield - at the expense of armor hardpoints!

Your Jaeger, presumably, wins the day. Now, though, it's time for you to rebuild, refit, and reassure your populace that all is well and you'll be ready for the next attack... And that casualties will be lessened next time, in the face of ever-more-powerful attackers.

Read more for more specifics and gameplay ideas.

Stuck in LIMBO

I had a few other ideas for posts, but I decided to put them on hold so I could talk about a game that missed the mark for me: Limbo.

Limbo is a 2D platformer with a wonderful, creepy aesthetic. There's a very consistent art style that invokes a feeling of near powerlessness in a strange world of large spiders and crushing cogs. You play as a young boy navigating a weird world in shades of grey with death lurking around almost every corner. I think you're looking for your sister, though that is information I've gleaned from other sources than the game.

I picked up Limbo because it garnered a lot of praise as a puzzle platformer. I enjoyed the art style, and the music lends itself to a consistent aesthetic. You feel very alone in this strange world as you manipulate it to avoid death and further your journey.

For the first part of the game, I was somewhat interested. There were a few interesting puzzle moments, and it was interesting that there were also large breaks in the action. But for some reason, it just didn't grab me. It could be that the story wasn't laid out for me or just that the action was too spread out.

The puzzles were either very transparent or obtuse. The latter version left me irritated as it took dying to determine what the rules of the game were. In a few cases, while it was potentially possible to make the right decisions the first time, I found that I couldn't react to new information in sufficient time to live. Puzzles either left me underwhelmed or incredibly frustrated. Either I couldn't determine how to overcome an obstacle or I couldn't execute to the precision needed.

The game lingers a little too long on the death scenes for my liking. There's no easy way to restart a checkpoint once you realize that you've botched a puzzle, so instead you have to surrender to the circular saw or jump into the spiked pit. The scene lingers on your impaled or dismembered form before resetting you. While this may lend to the aesthetic, from a gameplay perspective, it took me out of the experience. Compare that to a game like Super Meat Boy, in which death takes a matter of a second or two before you're back in the saddle again. That approach is designed to facilitate flow, which I never achieved in Limbo. Granted, they have different approaches to the dynamic, but Limbo failed me on this point.

This sums up my feelings on this game

I actually realized while playing the game that I wasn't enjoying the experience. I was just going through the motions in an effort to not let the game get the better of me. Either I was detached from the experience or incredibly frustrated by it. I finally called it quits to write this about 2/3 of the way through when I encountered a puzzle that I'm not certain is solvable. (Obviously it is, as many other people have completed this game, but I can't figure it out. Even turning to a guide has left me with instructions that don't make sense. And before you offer, no thanks, I'm done.) Maybe I'm just bitter because I can't do it. But I'm no longer beholden to this game.

Limbo's main failing points, then, are an odd approach to pacing that didn't keep me invested in the experience and a discrepancy in puzzle difficulty coupled with lingering too long on deaths. I enjoyed the art style and the seamless transition without a HUD or loading screens. The music was largely absent (what is even on the soundtrack?), though, which was an interesting artistic choice. This is the first game I've played in a while that I simply didn't enjoy, despite many reviews to the contrary. I guess we're all entitled to our own opinions, then. Now I'm going to go play more Gauntlet: Dark Legacy while unsuccessfully trying to avoid the Steam sales.

i've had it with art being soft-spoken; my art's gonna ROAR

Let me tell you about Crystal Warrior Ke$ha.
No. Don't let me.
You are Ke$ha and you have no time for my feckless words. Like lances wielded by lady knights, your eye-lasers spear out and click that link, as you begin to play it for yourself.

Okay, you've played it now, right? Good. I just scratched the whole half an article I wrote because I want to talk about Crystal Warrior Ke$ha.

What feelings did the piece evoke in you?
Indomitability.
Power.
Rising strength.
Roughness.

I happen to know that the author has at least a bit of programming skill, but this was not written as a programmer, and that is fucking bad-ass. I can flail my fingers ineffectually at trying to do artistic endeavors in a programming mindset, but why?

Queer writer kids are using Twine to express themselves directly through games. This is the future of games as art. Twine takes this task - writing choose-your-own-adventure games - and presents them in the most sensible format: a text editor. Seriously: why would you do anything else? With Twine you skip having to think about anything except what you're making.

Kill that last paragraph. I don't care. I don't want to talk about games in this analytical way. I want my games to be emotional, I want them to be passionate, I want them to burn with the fire of my life, I want them to tear the player apart and rebuild them as a glittering obelisk of rage and power and speed and I'm going to continue tearing apart my artistic environments until I've destroyed everything that keeps me chained down to concerns of what's reasonable and what I can code - until I've torn to shreds the paper that covers my eyes and blinds me to my canvas.

We want games to be recognized as art? Then we should start making them like artists.

(Now you should go play Twine games: some lung-poppingly funny, some pants-dampeningly hot, some about heavy stuff, and - hell, just check out everything porpentine's made, and then start googling around for Twine games. If I ever hear you saying that these "aren't real games" then I'll bash your fucking nose in. Each twine game can be played in less than ten minutes! Seriously. Go play High End Customizable Sauna Experience, because it's one of the funniest things I've experienced in years.)

(Oh right, and one final thought - if you bristle at my admonishment to "make games like an artist", then I'll admit that art can certainly be made like a programmer - but right now that's the only way games are made. I like chiptunes, but there's so much more to music than the music made by programmers, y'read me?)

Why Every Aspiring Game Designer should DM

All video game RPGs have their roots in Dungeons and Dragons. In some games it shows more strongly than others, in everything from the main stats (STR, DEX, CON...) to even names of specific spells or powers. A friend of mine got me into tabletop a few years ago, and after joining a 3.5e D&D game over Skype with the rest of the SA crew a few months ago, I've become thoroughly hooked.

Two things led to the idea of this post: a D&D exercise in the game design class that I TAed for earlier this summer and my first foray into Dungeon Mastering. For the uninitiated, tabletop roleplaying involves people sitting around a table (or Skype call) with dice, character sheets, and occasionally dungeon grids and miniatures. One person, the Dungeon or Game Master (DM/GM) runs the session. He or she is in charge of putting forth the story, "You receive a letter from courier. It is addressed to you in a flowing hand, but there is no mark of the sender save for a sigil on the seal you've never seen before." She controls the enemies in encounters and enforces the rules of the system (be it D&D or other), or doesn't, as the case may be.

After a brief lesson on balancing, the Game Design professor directed the class to four character sheets for 4e 9th level characters as well as a variety of monsters they might run into. He then challenged them to create two monsters of their own and design an encounter for the four characters to run into. The next class, we playtested some of them. As most of the class had no D&D experience and none of them had any with 4e, there were many balancing problems. A few had monsters with reasonable stats except that they were very difficult to hit, while another group made interesting monsters that weren't hard-hitting enough to pose a challenge to the players. My favorite, however, was the group battling a cyclops that had 1000 HP, keeping in mind that, at this level, characters are doing 14-15 damage per hit on good strike.

I was thinking of that lesson as I approached my first experience DMing. While I love our Skype shenanigans, I longed to have face-to-face conversation and missed the feel of real dice in my hands. So I recruited my brother and housemates to join me in an adventure. I wrote a simple campaign in a system that was effectively D&D-lite to teach them how to play. Despite a few balancing problems of my own, the campaign went well and we're looking for another chance to play. They started as strangers in the dungeon of an unfamiliar mansion and worked their way up to the lord's chambers, where they confronted him in the midst of a blood magic ritual to revive his dead wife. Battling off shadow creatures and crippling fear, one player rolled a critical hit after dipping his arrow in what they assumed was holy water. I described in detail as the arrow zipped through the air, piercing the lord's head and filling him with a brilliant light as he screamed and collapsed. The day was saved.

Sounds a lot like a video game, right? Between these two experiences, I've come to the conclusion that budding game designers should give DMing a shot. While there are aspects of it that don't come up in video games, such as managing rambunctious friends, I still think it's a valuable experience.

1. Story design: The DM is responsible for crafting a story that the players can bring to life. You determine how to throw a disparate set of characters together and what to throw at them to make them grow. Our Skype campaign started with us defending a town and has progressed through our investigation to battling angels and racing to preserve the very fabric of space itself.
2. Dungeon design: Most D&D campaigns involve a bit of dungeon crawling, and that requires putting together a floorplan, as well as a series of enemies, traps, and even puzzles. 
3. Following the rules: D&D has a set of rules that are put forth in the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide. Other books expand the setting and enrich the experience. This gives you an idea of the scale of creating a game and how to work within the restrictions of the medium.

4. Breaking the rules: Sometimes a rule doesn't serve the experience you're trying to create. In our Skype game, one of us had never roleplayed before and three of us had never done D&D. To that end, our DM removed the level penalty for death. (I greatly appreciate this, playing as a sorceror.) We still want to avoid death, of course, and resurrection still costs 5000 gp, but it's much less discouraging this way, which has been helpful to a beginner's campaign.
5. Thinking outside of the box: PCs do some wacky things. I've used my raven familiar to untie ropes and give us another view on something. We've had players attempt to scale a giant worm to rescue a team member caught in its maw. The DM has to call for the proper checks and decide how well a plan will go off.
6. Balancing: As in the example from class above, balancing is a vital but tricky part of game design. Tabletop systems try to help out by using things like challenge ratings, but the dice gods are fickle and some classes aren't built to take on certain threats. For that matter, ask why different dice types are used for different attacks. What's the difference between rolling 2d6 and 1d4+4?
7. Managing player expectations: This is generally built into the system, but still an important point. Players can't generally see the stats of the enemies that they fight, but they'll bring some assumptions to the table: a vampire will be harmed by sunlight, a zombie will have bad reflexes, a dragon won't be likely to fail a Will save, and so on. See how these expectations are built into the system and why they're important.

At the end of the day, DMing and game design both endeavor to deliver an immersive experience to the player. The extensive rules involved in any tabletop system, though particularly D&D, will prepare game designers for the sort of thinking that programming a game requires. Designing a campaign has direct parallels in designing video games of many genres. Dealing with player characters will give you instant feedback and insight into how PCs tackle obstacles and view challenge.

If you've never played tabletop, head to your local game/hobby store and ask - many will run weekly or monthly game nights or host local groups. Look for people playing online. See if any of your friends play or would be interested. If fantasy isn't your cup of tea, give a system like Savage Worlds a try, which is designed to be extensible to any setting you can think of. Get off the computer, grab some dice, and pull up a chair.

It's time for adventure.

Finishing the Unfinished Swan

So after I fell in love with Journey, a few friends pointed me towards the Unfinished Swan. It's a game of exploration developed by Giant Sparrow games, and is only available on PS3. The $15 price point seems a little steep, but it was a delightful experience that I don't regret purchasing. This review will be a little light, as it's a short game and I don't want to ruin the aspect of discovery for those who have yet to give it a try.

You play as Monroe, whose mother was a painter, though she wasn't very good at finishing things. When she died, the orphanage allowed Monroe to keep one of her hundreds of unfinished paintings. He chose her favorite - the unfinished swan. One night he wakes up to find that the swan is gone! He grabs his mother's silver paintbrush and enters a door that hadn't been there before.

The game starts you in a completely white area and leaves you to figure out how to play. The main mechanic is being able to throw balls of paint around, which splatter on the walls and reveal the environment around you. I felt a delightful sense of childlike wonder as I explored this first area, a silly grin on my face. The music sneaks in, revealing itself as the world around you does. The score is perfectly whimsical and the intermittent narration adds to the storybook feel of the game.

Even though the initial area felt like it could be the entirety of the game, the mechanic evolves a few times, keeping gameplay fresh. I was only at a loss for what to do a couple times and never felt that anything was beyond my abilities. It seems like a game that would be great for playing with kids, though the nighttime levels got a little scary for me.

All in all, it was a delightful experience that I've enjoyed sharing with others. After finishing the game, you can use the balloons you've collected to purchase toys and even an initial test level. I may go back to some levels and try to get more of the balloons, especially now that I've gotten the balloon radar.

Thoughts on E3: We Are the Revolution

This started as a pretty standard review of what I saw while watching the E3 press conferences this year. I started typing in on tumblr and my thoughts just kinda poured out. Props to shoofle on the subtitle of this post. So here is and expanded version of my reaction to E3:

Microsoft shot themselves in the foot. And probably several more vital parts of the anatomy, but they have enough fanboys and people not plugged in enough to be worried about the used game stuff, internet connection, and potential spying that they’ll stay afloat. None of the new IP really managed to grab my interest, largely because there was little explanation of any of it. (How is Quantum Break also going to be a TV show or something?) And I just can't get over the Kinect being constantly on.

Sony laid a great smackdown on them, and their presenters were much more personal overall. Again, they drew me in with the IP more than MS ever has. I'm excited for Kingdom Hearts 3 and can't wait for Last of Us to hit finally and a host of indie titles (yay!). And with debuting their console $100 lower, it seems to me that Sony won this round. Mostly because they debuted a game console and told us all about how it lets us play games.

Nintendo came out with the game announcements they should have launched with last year. I’m still optimistic for the Wii U, as it’s an interesting controller setup that I want to see game devs play with more. But Nintendo botched the launch in many ways and this isn’t quite enough to put them on the map again. Diehard fans are ecstatic at the announcement of new games for Mario, Zelda, Pokemon and SSB, as well as an HD re-release of Wind Waker. Sure, it's safe. But the buzz around this low-key release proves that Nintendo sticks with what it knows because they do it so very well.

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Overall, I was still underwhelmed. (Keep in mind I caught MS’s, most of EA’s, and the latter half of Sony’s. Missed Nintendo’s but read a quick recap.) I couldn't shake the feeling that I’m not the target audience. This is not a new feeling for me, by a long shot, but I guess I’m finally fed up with it. So many games were announced with grizzled white guys as the PC. The two notable exceptions were Mirror's Edge 2 and Bayonetta 2, both sequels. So many games (I’m looking at you, MS) were unimaginative FPS’s. Even the few that dared a spark of imagination still felt like a shiny new skin slapped on a CoD clone. Few of the performers and demo players were women, and one who was became the subject of an uncomfortable (though likely unintended) rape joke (which has been apologized for, but still).

It hit me yesterday that AAA titles, by and large, are not going to deliver the experience I want to have. They aren’t going to tell the meaningful stories with choices that have real impact, take a chance on female, PoC, and/or LGBTQ heroes, or provide new and refreshing gameplay. (Yes, you get the occasional standout, and feel free to point me to them.) This is not a new revelation, per se, merely the hardest it’s hit me. I’ve just come off of TAing a semester of Game Design, one of my fav classes from undergrad.

I can expect more from this industry.

The games I want to play are going to come from the indie community.

The games I want to play are going to be built by me.

I'm Going To Stop Revising This Post So That I Can Post It (Sorry If It's Scatterbrained, I Welcome Criticism)

I should be working on a thing for a potential employer so that I can get a job, but I'm not. Instead, I feel like talking about thematic consistency and enemy types. I've been playing Red Faction: Armageddon and I love the weapons and destruction in it but damn, if it isn't a terrible game in just about every other way.

Let's list off some enemy type tropes you can encounter in a video game, shall we?

• Snipers! (enemies who avoid you and attack from a great distance)
• Juggernauts! (slow and hard to kill)
• Turrets! (immobile enemies with a lot of health)
• Chargers! (move quickly towards you, melee attack, don't turn fast)
• Swarmers! (low health, low damage, attack in large groups)
• Small fry! (easy to defeat, medium health/damage, attack in small groups or individually)
• Teleport spammers! (enemies who spam teleports)

That's a lot of cool ideas! So when you're making a game, you should try to use a lot of those to make sure you've got variety, right?

If that sounded good, you need to take a deep breath and think about why you're making decisions. Why should the players fight juggernauts instead of snipers? Why put in a horde of swarmers? And should your decisions be influenced purely by an abstract desire for variety?

In Portal, there's only one kind of enemy - turrets! There are other obstacles as well, but all obstacles are  chosen because they're needed for whatever the puzzle in question is. In other words, you never see a situation where, purely to increase difficulty without changing the approach required, four turrets are used instead of three. Rather, four turrets are used because it makes it impossible to approach from the rear, requiring a different strategy. 

This quality - that obstacles are chosen based on the puzzle the designer is constructing, rather than simply how much effort it should take - is, in my opinion, desirable. It translates to non-puzzle games quite well, also: 

• Choosing what obstacles a player faces must be guided by what experience the player is supposed to have. This choice should never be solely based on how long the player should spend or how difficult it should be.

Of course, the exception is when the experience you're trying to build purely flows from the difficulty the player is overcoming.

In Red Faction: Armageddon, the variety of opponents feels totally forced. Enemies come in a wide variety of species (I think?) and as far as I can tell, the only reason for this is that they needed more difficult enemies so that battles could be longer without being boring as hell - which brings to our attention the fact that the battles aren't very fun to begin with.

It's really bothersome because I honestly have no clue what these aliens are supposed to be. Are they a covenant of different Martian races? If so, why are they working together (especially when they seem to be non-sentient)? Are they mutated humans? If so, why do they come in so many forms? Why do living beings have laser cannons and plasma bombs? Ultimately, the answer to all of these questions is the same as the answer to the question of why they've got Snipers, Juggernauts, Turrets, Small fry, and the rest:

• Because the game would be boring otherwise.

When the variety of the enemies you fight is the only thing keeping your combat from being boring, you're doing things very wrong unless that's a pretty major part of your game. Ultimately, Red Faction: Armageddon fails because even the variety of enemies doesn't make for interesting combat. 

Variety should be a secondary concern. It should flow from the other decisions you make.

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I've included my thoughts on enemy variety in some games:

• When Halo did this they owned it and justified it in the backstory. It felt a little forced - "oh, now I'm fighting elites!" - but it was justified by the fact that the Covenant was literally stratified and composed of differing races with differing abilities. Still, feels like forced variety.
• In Red Faction: Armageddon, every battle is just about the same - there are a bunch of small fry, some heavier enemies, a sniper or two, and sometimes a support tower that buffs everyone. Battles feel formulaic and nothing about them is ever driven by the surrounding events in the game. The only effect on my experience of having different kinds of enemies is that in each battle, I have to take out the small fry with my assault rifle, medium enemies with my magic powers, snipers with my beam rifle, and heavier enemies with my heavier weapon. There's never a reason for them to be there. Such forced variety!
• Mirror's Edge had different types of enemies, but they felt like people employed by the same few organizations - the jump from cops to SWAT officers felt like I was stepping up to a harder difficulty, but when the cops started carrying shotguns instead of pistols it was just different people in the same organization - and I tried to avoid them either way. The step from cops to SWAT officers also made sense in the context of the story, as the police force started realizing I was a threat and as politics happened.
• In Valkyrie Chronicles, variety in types of soldiers is a central mechanic and part of the game, so it's totally justified and doesn't feel jarring - and it doesn't feel jarring because this kind of variety is used well. There's no unilaterally harder enemy type to fight, with the possible exception of tanks. Varying difficulty is provided by changing the size of the forces involved, and by changing the conditions and terrain you're fighting in.
• In Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, it absolutely feels like there's a sliding scale of difficulty and enemies are being picked from it purely according to how hard it should be. Forced variety!
• In Portal, there's only one kind of enemy - turrets! There are other obstacles as well, but all obstacles are  chosen because they're needed for whatever the puzzle in question is. In other words, you never see a situation where, purely to increase difficulty without changing the approach required, four turrets are used instead of three. Rather, four turrets are used because it makes it impossible to approach from the rear, requiring a different strategy. No forced variety, not even in numbers!
• Fighting games take extensive care to balance the available characters, so that - if you're controlling for personal skill - you don't choose a character simply because they're better or worse. There is variety, but never the feeling that you're facing an opponent purely because they're harder than the last.

Magical Overdoses or: Why Skyrim Sucks

I was thinking yesterday about the problem of magic in games. My biggest problem with Skyrim is that the whole game just feels like I'm clicking on enemies until they die, with occasional choices affecting how fast they do so. The graphics are the only thing differentiating a lightning bolt from a gun.

That doesn't really work for me. I want to live in a magic world for a while! Dammit, that's what I paid for. Now, in the case of magic, it's a little bit of an inherently intractable problem - the feeling of magicalness is inherently a feeling of otherworldliness, so it gets destroyed when we're constantly exposed to something.

Which leads to the first strategy for defeating magical overdosing: Spread it out. From a gameplay experience point of view, this is what mana bars, recharge times, and limited charges on magic items do for us. You can even see this in non-magic games - raise your hand if you've ever saved your shots from the aerial bombardment weapon "just in case", only to never actually use them.

[at this point I raised my hand]

That's probably the most powerful counter to magical overdosing, because it cuts right to the core - if you limit the player's chances to use it, the player will perceive that rarity as differentiating it from their other problem-solving options. Of course, everything is relative - if magic is rare but so are bullets, then it won't feel any more special. In my recent experiences playing D&D I've been struck by how effective magic is hard for me to find - but effective combat strategies are just as hard for me to find. (keep your comments about my sub-optimal character design to yourself - I don't care.)

Of course, the other popular strategy is simply to make magic feel different in the game, by clever asset work - if magic is the only thing that makes flashy particle and light effects, then baller for you. Magic feels flashy! Once that gets assimilated into the player's system, though, flashy just seems like another option. Magical overdose again, game over.

The strategy that I haven't seen tried as much, which (I theorize) has much better resistance to magical overdosing, is to change up how the player produces their magical effects. Maybe they shoot by clicking the mouse button or pulling the trigger, but they cast magic by actually speaking words into the microphone - or entering mouse gestures, or tracing out patterns in the game floor. Maybe they have to actually stand up and strike a pose for the camera!

You have to use these techniques sparingly, because if the player constantly casts magic in these ways, then it just becomes a mouse gesture game, or a pattern-walking game, or a silly kinect game. In order to stand out, magic can never become the norm. You're constantly fighting a battle to avoid the player getting used to the magic.

[also, shut up, I haven't actually played Skyrim.]

Wait, I should be working...

Ay yo. I've been busy. Got a job and shiz. Anyway, I've been talking to a new friend here from work a lot about game design stuff, and there've been two interesting takeaways:

I really want to play a game using the Window system. There are a few specifics, but not many; the basic precepts are:

1. Everything about a character should be described with adjectives, rather than numbers.
2. It is the player's responsibility to play their role realistically.
3. A good story is the central goal.

These might seem like pretty obvious rules for a roleplaying or collaborative storytelling system, but having them central to everything, and designing the system from the ground up around them... It makes for a very different system. Making the player responsible for realism, rather than offloading that onto a complex rules system, gets a player much closer to the realism of their character. Making everything more analogue, in terms of not having hard-and-fast rules, means that you don't have to think about the rules - you just think about what's happening. I haven't played using this system, but I really want to.

A lot of games keep track of the level of sanity of a character. It's a fun thought, to be able to simulate going mad. In Window's suggested sanity rules, when your sanity stat drops below the lowest possible, your character is removed from your control and presumably needs to be hospitalized. I thought of a potentially more interesting system:

When a character fails particularly badly at being sane (their sanity stat drops to critical levels, or they roll a critical failure, or whatnot), they do not simply go comatose. Instead, the DM describes what their character sees - hallucinations, vivid or blurred, otherworldly or only slightly shifted from the real world. The player responds to these hallucinations, and needs to deal with them or take severe damages through some other avenue - but here's the kicker: the player's actions in the hallucination also translate to the real world, but not in a way the player knows. So the player might see a floating snake and fight with it, but at any given moment, striking the snake might translate to striking the ally standing next to them... And so on. The key is that the player can control their character in the in-game real world, but they do not know how. Furthermore, to prevent the player from quickly figuring out what to do, the DM can freely switch around what hallucinations represent what in-game real objects. Or play around even further with indirect correspondences! Maybe the heated battle in the real world is turned into a philosophical discussion, or the other way around. The DM would then roll attack and damage rolls, modified by the player's hallucinatory knowledge check. The possibilities are endless!

I think my favorite little bit about this system, though, is the experience as a group. The DM rolls some dice as you're walking down a corridor, and you are thrust into battle - everyone rolls initiative, as you have been ambushed by some eldritch horror. Then, everyone's heads filled with dread, the DM turns to Alex: "You find yourself again in a shifting room of greens and blues,  booming noises emanating from the walls. There is a snake to your left, and a glowing ogre to you right." The rest of the party readies to defend themselves from the frenzied attacks of their mad comrade.

If the DM keeps a consistent hallucination world, then you get two benefits - one, it would rapidly form into a recognizable meme in your group, for much hilarity. Two, it opens the possibility of the hallucination world being... not so unreal after all, when two people are sucked into it at the same time, only to discover that their interactions are perfectly consistent inside the bubble of insanity.

Dungeon Defenders and Orcs Must Die!

I probably should have done this ages ago, seeing as I played these games ages ago. But no matter! Orcs Must Die! 2 has just come out, so let's celebrate by talking about old irrelevant material. Whee! The main reason I want to talk about Orcs Must Die! and Dungeon Defenders together is because they both are part of a new breed of tower defense games, that pulls you out of your tower planting perch in the sky and throws you smack into the middle of the action (Sanctum is another similar game, I think, and I don't know what else there is). Now, the main point of this: I think Orcs Must Die! did this right, and Dungeon Defenders did it wrong. And now I'll explain why.

Now, don't misunderstand. I don't think that Dungeon Defenders is a bad game, and on top of that it's been quite a while since I've played it, so for all I know they've fixed all the problems I had. It's definitely a ton of fun. The aesthetics are ridiculously bright, colorful, and cheery. The characters are all very distinct (well, at least the original 4), and are reasonably balanced. The constant earning of new loot and unlocking of new abilities/towers is extremely addictive. And most of all, there's 4 player co-op. All of that is pretty great. But what's not so great is the general feel of the gameplay. Character movement is slow and floaty, and attacks feel worthless and bland. There's just a general lack of oomph. You get used to it, and it doesn't impede play, but your character will hack and slash through hordes of enemies and it will feel absolutely boring and insubstantial. The insubstantial feeling is only compounded by the hordes of enemies, as higher difficulties and more players will result in more enemies. Speaking of difficulty, the last I played the game the difficulty was extremely out of whack. With only two players, we were able to quite easily beat all of the early stages, but when our party got upped to three, we consistently got wiped out on probably the 3rd level.

Another much more significant problem is the aiming system. Your character is only capable of damaging the enemy that you're locked on to. And you have to be reasonably close to an enemy to lock onto it. And this is just all kinds of problematic. For one, what about the characters with ranged attacks? The huntress and ranger both use crossbows to fight, and their secondary 'attack' merely zooms in a scope for them. But unless the game thinks you're targeting something, you're only shooting blanks, so sniping is a no go. You'd think it wouldn't be a big deal for the more melee based characters, but it still is. Simply put, enemy hordes are big. And it's quite annoying when you charge in swinging, but only deal damage to a single enemy at a time. Thankfully, hordes also tend to be comprised of the weaker enemies, so after a few swings you'll just move on to the next enemy, and I think that hitting enemies you're not locked onto will knock them back slightly. And again, I want to restate that Dungeon Defenders is by no means a bad game. If you're looking for a game that you and a couple of friends can play together, definitely try it out.

But then, there's Orcs Must Die!. In my opinion, Orcs Must Die! absolutely nails the gameplay. It's hard to describe it, but movement and combat all simply feel good. It's all fast and fluid, which is good because combat will get extremely chaotic. In Dungeon Defenders, things were fairly slow paced. Although your movement was slow and floaty, enemies also moved at a crawl, so things only really got hectic when you had enemies breaching your defenses on multiple fronts. In Orcs Must Die! on the other hand, you move quickly but so do your enemies. Unlike Dungeon Defenders, which will have enemies coming from a half dozen paths, in Orcs Must Die! there are only a few options for the enemy approach. It's very easy to place traps in the way of the enemies (and each trap is amazingly fun), but each trap has a cooldown after activating, and there are always enough enemies that a trap taking out one is inactive long enough to let by ten. Things get crazy very fast as you try to hold back the flood of enemies long enough for your traps to reactivate, and it's fantastic. And now that they've added in two player co-op, you get to do it all with a friend. And now I don't have anything else to say about it. Whoosh I'm off.

"Saints Row felt like a book of punchlines slapping my face repeatedly. Yes, I see the comedic content. I just don't care."

Alright, so. I played Just Cause 2 GTA: Japan Saints Row: The Third the other day on my brother's computer, and I have to say: points for style, but your game is one of the shallowest interactive experiences I've had since Scribblenauts. The game started out strong, with an entertaining intro cutscene and mission. After that it just... got really boring. The whole game gave off a very strong vibe of trying for Refuge in Audacity, and it only half-worked. They got the audacity part right, but it gets old fast. After the intro mission, it just felt... Done. Finished. Like there's nothing else to do. It has the sandbox problem in abundance. Just Cause 2 did sandboxing right - in both games my character was absurdly overpowered, with ready supplies of weapons and vehicles to plow through whatever enemies I faced. The worst-case scenario: I might have to take cover once or twice.
But in Just Cause 2 I only had to wander around and find some interesting terrain and suddenly there was an enemy camp in sight, ripe for the picking. It was hard to escape things to do. In Saints Row, on the other hand, the landscape is uninspired, there's no challenge in grinding for cash (regular paychecks, woohoo!), and the few 'story' missions I played were long, boring, and unrewarding.

As for the "wackiness" of Saints Row, it just failed to deliver. Sure, it had silly things. I can fire mind-control octopi at whoever I want, and yes, you can run around hitting people with a dildo, and at one point I saw a van with a giant mascot head on the front with a flamethrower in its mouth. Saints Row felt like a book of punchlines slapping my face repeatedly. Yes, I see the comedic content. I just don't care.

And now, before the end of this short review, I want to mention the sexual content in Saints Row. The immaturity of putting people in bondage gear for no reason isn't what bothers me - what bothers me is that bondage gear is apparently hilarious. Apparently giant dildos are hilarious. It's cheap and offensive. I don't mind the bondage gear or the dildos - I just mind the fact that they apparently count as "humor". Saints Row takes immaturity as a form of humor way too far, to the point that it loses all its shock value and just becomes alternately boring and offensive.

That said, if you want to go around hitting people with a giant dildo, fine. Go do it. Saints Row is your game. Just don't be surprised when it doesn't have the universal entertainment value you might think.

Oh, and for the other side of the review: The driving controls are pretty tight, although the flying is slow and pretty meh. Character customization was surprisingly lacking given how much time I spent and how many options it gives you (I don't know why we need fifty different mascot heads to choose from). Graphics are good, technically speaking, although there's not much interesting to see - the city is boring and repetitive. The shooting was pretty good, although uninspired. The high points, gameplay-wise, were the driving (I'm a sucker for any game with a handbrake) and the fact that whenever you want you can do a randomly-chosen special melee attack which varies from pro wrestling suplexes to flying punches to, uh, the ol' punch-in-the-nuts. I liked that functionality.

Sequence, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, Splice, and Auditorium

It's been a while since any of us have written, oops. Summer is unexpectedly busy. However, to celebrate me getting a shiny new computer to play games on, and the Steam summer sale, I'm going to talk about three games today! As you may have guessed, these games are Sequence, Splice, and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet. Let's make this fast, I want to get back to playing asap.

Sequence I actually got quite a while ago, and I could have sworn I had already written something about it. But then I searched through our post archives and couldn't find anything, and was immensely disappointed in my past self. For some reason I still feel like I've written about this before though, so in case I missed it in my search forgive me if I'm rehashing old territory. Sequence has you playing as Ky, who wakes up in a strange tower filled with dangerous monsters. You are led through the tower by Naia, striving to make it to the top and escape. Along the way, you'll level up, learn new tricks, and all that typical RPG jazz. What spices things up though, is how the battles work. These are far from the standard turn based battles, and are instead rhythm based. Each battle has three screens, each of which has its own set of falling notes a la DDR and those similar games. One screen dictates enemy attacks, another is where you activate spells, and the third allows you to regenerate mana. Miss a note in the enemy attack screen and you'll take damage, or activate a spell and then miss a note on the spell screen and the spell is wasted (thankfully, no penalty for missing anything in the last screen).

Every battle becomes a frantic juggling act balancing defending yourself from enemy attacks, gathering the resources to counterattack, and finding the time to actually counterattack. You've activated a basic spell, but the enemy is making an attack at the same time! Do you sacrifice the mana to defend yourself (and spend some time on the mana screen later earning it back), or do you take the hit and focus on casting the spell? In addition, you only have a limited number of spells you can bring with you into battle. Do you want to bring only attack spells, and end the battle as soon as you can? Or do you just take the most basic ones, and bring mostly healing spells for when things get out of hand? Sequence is practically the only game I can think of that brings me to a state of 'flow' like how Shoofle's mentioned before. When it's going good, I am easily juggling the three screens of falling notes, easily blocking enemy attacks and countering with my own. But all it takes is a single fumble, and suddenly everything falls apart. And it's absolutely amazing. Even though the story and art didn't grab me (not to mention everything is just a static sprite anyway), gameplay is king. The battle system alone was more than enough to keep me playing this game for hours.

Next up, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet! This one's a strange one. I've gotten to a point where I'm entering some water, and was instantly reminded of Aquaria. And it's pretty easy to see why, too. Both are Metroidvania style games that forgo the usual platformer aspect of the game, with Aquaria taking place entirely underwater, and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet having the player be a free flying UFO. Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet (I'm just going to call it ITSP from now on) plays essentially like a dual stick shooter, though the player has to constantly juggle their abilities to select the best one (or the required one) for the situation. The game has a very unique aesthetic, but honestly that's all I really have to say in favor about the game. It follows the Metroidvania style of blocking off passages and forcing you one way until you have the prerequisite item that allows you to pass the other way, but I didn't find it as fun as I usually do other Metroidvania games. Fighting felt dull and boring. The upgrades didn't feel like they were granting me very much power, and the environments felt too constrained. While there were aspects of exploration involved, there are few of them and the rewards for venturing off the path are meager. The aesthetic is interesting, but not enough to hold the game up on its own, and pales in comparison to the absolutely gorgeous aesthetics of Aquaria. I don't know. I really wanted to like this game, and it sat near the top of my wishlist for a while, but honestly I'm disappointed.

This is Auditorium

Thankfully, I saved Splice and Auditorium for last. Splice and Auditorium are by Cipher Prime. I played Auditorium quite a while ago and absolutely loved it, and it looks like Cipher Prime has managed to duplicate the magic with Splice. But first, I want to talk a bit about Auditorium. Auditorium is a very simple puzzle game (originally a Flash game, now available on mobile devices and Steam), where you use manipulators to direct a flow through some containers. Early levels are extremely simple, but later levels add multiple colors and get deviously difficult. But the main reason I loved Auditorium is the music. The game is silent at the start of each level, but as you redirect the flow to pass through the containers, the music starts to build up, one part at a time. The music is slightly repetitive, but I think the tracks are absolutely beautiful. I highly recommend this one (and they're working on a sequel!)

This is Splice

Ok. Now for Splice. Splice is a cell based puzzle game of sorts. You start with a tree of cells, and have a limited number of splices to make in order to reach a target tree that has a certain configuration. The game itself is also extremely simple: activate a cell 'mutation' by clicking on the cell, splice by dragging cells around. But like Auditorium, this game also absolutely fantastic music. Actually, as we speak (er, as I write this), I'm searching for where I can download the entire damn thing, because I want it now. And actually, I don't have much else to say about Splice. I've never seen puzzle mechanics quite like Splice before, so the novelty is extremely appreciated. I haven't played enough of the game yet to say for sure, but the puzzle mechanics seem extremely solid, and the game feels like it's going to ramp up in difficulty fairly soon. I'm excited, so I'm going to end this post now so I can go play. Peace!

Amnesia: Because a dark scary castle is a great place to spend a Saturday

I'll admit it: I'm a scaredy-cat. I don't do horror movies or haunted houses (unless I'm working them). I jump at little sounds and still sometimes get spooked by things that go bump in the night. This is why I didn't actually play Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a first-person survival horror title from Frictional Games, for myself - I watched as a friend of mine, Alex, played. I should get credit however for not running away screaming (and helping with puzzles).

Amnesia starts you in an apparently empty castle. You can't remember anything, but you find a note addressed to you directing you to kill Alexander, who is in the Inner Sanctum. It's signed by you, so it's gotta be legit. Assuming that your previous self knew what was going on, you proceed gaily through the castle to find him. The rest of the story is disseminated through pages of your torn-up diary and, interestingly, the load screens. (There's a minimum time set to display the message, in case you're playing on a really fast computer.) They do a good job of keeping you in the dark, but informing you enough that you remain intrigued. And, yes, amnesia is a well-known crutch of writing, but they work with it quite well.

Because when I steal and rip apart a diary, I leave all the pages in a convenient order for him to follow.

Amnesia's got a couple of interesting mechanics going for it. The main one is a balance between light and dark: enemies can see you if you're standing in the light, but standing in the darkness for too long makes you lose your sanity. You also have no weapon, so your only options when you see an enemy are to run or crouch in the darkness, praying it won't find you. Oh, and don't look at the enemies too much - you'll lose sanity. You also lose sanity by experiencing "unsettling events." Lack of sanity makes it harder to control your character and your vision will shift and warp. Eventually you just crumple to the ground in what I assume is a blubbering mess. Solving puzzles and staring at light regains sanity.

Another interesting mechanic is that doors are opened and shut with click-and-drag with an option to slam them quickly with the right mouse button. While it took Alex some getting used to at first, he tells me it was eventually pretty intuitive. It allows the player to swing a door open for a peek into the next room (which we didn't use much), but more importantly, it impedes a player who is running away flailing. Running from an enemy is that much harder when you have to remember which way a door swings and spin around quickly to slam it shut.

I didn't expect the game to be as puzzle focused as it was. Overall, I expected more enemies, but it turned out to be a good balance given the no-weapons part, and contributed well to pacing. The castle was reasonably linear without feeling like it - because you're never given a map and have to rely on limited tinderboxes and lantern oil to find your way around, it feels bigger than it is. It's also nicely impossible to get too lost or wander forward without all the tools you need. A few times we had some difficulty tracking down the last cog or pipe because Alex had a tendency to pick up and throw them around, but overall the puzzles weren't too bad. The game will generally give you a hint if you try to use an item but need something else as well. Many puzzles were fairly trivial, though - the game is relying on the horror mechanic.

Next up on our scenic tour, the sewers...

I think the sounds are actually the scariest part of the game. I know many people *cough Jeremy cough* who couldn't make it five or ten minutes into the game, and it takes about ten to find the first enemy. (Though you do catch glimpses of things moving before then and frequently try to go the other way only to have the game force you to Even longer before you're in actual danger - the game uses the first encounter to teach you how to hide from them. The aesthetic is very well done overall, becoming scarier as you descend deeper into the castle and uncover the more gruesome parts of the tale.

The sanity mechanic worked reasonably well, though both sanity and health are described on your inventory screen with a series of descriptors rather than any numerical scale. While this was a reasonable choice for the game, it was a little frustrating for seasoned gamers who wanted to make sense of it. Sanity, for instance, ranges from "Crystal clear" to "..." with descriptors in between like "A slight headache." This system didn't seem to correspond with the aforementioned warping of the screen, though. I suppose it is somewhat appropriate that we spent the game not understanding the insanity scale.

As far as enemies go, while there were less encounters than I expected, the various encounters were well designed. There was never a time we felt that getting by was impossible, though many were close calls of slamming doors behind us and crouching in a corner as the creature pounded at the door. A few times we got by because an enemy simply didn't spawn, though we're unsure whether that was a glitch or the game pitying us. When something kills you, the screen will bring up a message, which is generally something like "You must carry on..." but ocasionally explains a new enemy trick for you (like the helpful "Run!"). While it was clear after dying once what needed to be done, it was a little odd to have to die to get it. I suppose an observant player could figure it out in most cases, and luckily death didn't set you back too far. The pacing was mostly good, with high points and lulls, even if it got a little predictable. We still got spooked though, to the game's credit.

You've - you've got something on your chin there, dude.

Overall, Amnesia does a lot of things about survival horror right. While it isn't a genre I play often, I do think it's perfectly suited to video games due to interactivity. Amnesia, possibly because it lacks the graphics budget of a AAA studio, goes back to survival horror's roots in early 3D gaming, which relied more on darkness and surprise than impressive and creepy enemy models because they simply couldn't be rendered. Amnesia's enemies look a little goofy when you stare at them for a while, but they'll still make you jump when you turn around to find one right behind you. I recommend it to anybody who's at all interested in the survival horror genre, even if you get scared. The triumvirate for beating Amnesia (only 2 required) is to play in daylight, with a friend, and/or without sound. Mix and match so that you can get through it, but I do recommend enjoying the sounds - they add a lot to the experience.