Changed Priorities Ahead

When I started this blog it was with the intention of becoming a games designer. I wanted to show that I thought about games, took them seriously and understood the reasons for the decisions taken in their construction. It was started at a strange time for me, as I had only recently moved to London and felt somewhat ambivalent about gaming in general. Put simply, I felt compelled to play games but didn't really enjoy them, hence the title.

I don't think the blog has been an unqualified success, in the sense that it didn't lead directly to good designs of my own. My writing is better, but not good: my designs improved, but still inchoate. What has changed is the strength of my opinions about games in general.

Broadly, gaming is moving into the mainstream. On one side a series of simple and accessible games, often using specific and novel peripherals, has broken new ground and made gamers of us all. It turns out the ever-evolving joypad was holding us back all along. On the other, the traditional gaming industry and press is focussed ever tighter upon a small section of games, themes and mechanics. An endless stream of space marines, grim futures and prattling weaponry has dominated the schedules.

I am bored of all this, and yet the door for creative designs and ideas is wider than ever. Xbox Marketplace, PSN Store and WiiWare; iPhone App Store and Android Market; Flash aggregate sites like Kongregate and Newgrounds; services such as Steam and sites like Manifesto games. The opportunities for indie developers are tremendous. Concepts such as artgames and the slowly-germinating concept of a "Not Fun" game offer promise of progress. The nature of discourse has moved from the purely theoretical and post-modern to the practical and applicable. Many people are taking games seriously, in a way not seen before.

I am a different person from two years ago. I will be starting a new blog soon, with a tighter focus on music, games and the areas where these two forms intersect. I'm excited again. Nobody else is really covering it, except in a vague "Oh the indie folks love that jazz but it doesn't matter": read the Destructoid review of Groov for a perfect example. We can do better than this.

There will be a few more posts from here, but I'll let you all know when the new blog goes live. In the meantime, thanks if you ever read this, or commented.

What would you do with 4K?

...probably not as much as Notch, who has made seven games for the Java 4k Programming Contest. Most impressive is Left 4k Dead, a tense top-down shooter reminiscent of Tapan Kaikki that makes good use of light to constantly scare the player witless. Play it with the lights down and The Juan Maclean in the background.

Much can be achieved with very little code: Left 4k Dead works so well because it's balanced perfectly, with your weaponry and movement just enough for the number of zombies, your range of vision just enough to evade surprise attacks. The game does not, ever, use more than is required to convey information - for movement, visibility, gunfire. Games like this are the equivalent of blueprints: the structure required the make a given type of game work and no more.

Thanks to Margaret Robertson for the link, which includes more tiny, tiny games.

Race in Resident Evil 5

I don't normally re-post stuff without adding something myself, but in this instance I feel I should. At some point I intended to write about Resident Evil 5 and how it portrays race, but the internet is faster than us mere mortals and GameSetWatch has published an article finer than I can craft on the subject.

Thanks to Sexyvideogameland, who does write slightly more on the subject.

Dave Arneson

Dave Arneson, the other creator of D&D, the one that didn't guest star in Futurama, also passed away last week. Those who knew him have praised his kindness and humility: Warren Spector called him "one of the Good Guys". Dave, and the changes he brought to gaming, will never be forgotten.

Here's an interview that Gamasutra ran after his death. Nice to see that d20s were originally chosen because Dave was bad at maths. In Dave's eyes, the most important part of game design? "Game mechanics. Making a balanced game."

Street Fighter 4

When I'm asked what my favourite game is, I have to pause a moment, searching through the usual suspects - Tetris, Zelda:ALTTP - before I remember with a comforting lurch that it's Street Fighter II. I spent pretty much every day playing it on the SNES from 11 to 18. My experience is not unique; it's common among my friends, and pretty much every boy born at the right time. SFII is our Star Wars. No little attention, then, for the first new instalment in the Street Fighter series for years in Street Fighter IV.

First impressions of SFIV are great: the feel of SFII is retained, in both aesthetic and control. A few faces look odd, but the cartoon faces shown in stills look fine at 60 fps. The new characters aren't quite right, perhaps just the wrong side of silly in two cases, but aren't far off: those characters new to returning SFII players (Sakura, Dan et al) balance it out. Things are close enough to SFII to match exactly the game through the fog of memory, without making exactly the same choices - it's certainly not SFII and a bit.

There are a *lot* of new systems in SFIV. The revenge mater and its ultra attacks, focus attacks, dashes and their mutant offspring the FADC are all new, and if you're just tuning in from SFII, you've also got super attacks, EX specials and overhead attacks to deal with, not to mention brand-new plain-old specials. When you consider that a game like Tekken doesn't even distinguish between "normal" and "special" attacks any more, having four distinct levels of special move that draw from two different bars that must be charged is a lot to take in. Trying to explain it all to a beginner is too much, and you really do need most of it to stand a chance. With, say, Soul Calibur, you can show the basic controls - pointing out "block" three times - and someone can work it out from there: the attack strings are fairly arbitrary anyway. With Street Fighter - this is not new to SFIV - not knowing how to throw a fireball is a crippling disadvantage, and you can't really work it out. Having so many new systems makes this problem large. The upshot is that SFIV is easy to get good at if you're trying, but very difficult if you aren't.

Is this a bad thing? Probably not: SF is not for casual players. It's based on a set of interacting systems, and learning the systems is necessary to a reasonable level of competition. It's no different from learning to dribble in basketball, or serve and return in tennis: certain skills are required in order to play the game at all. SF sets its bar a little higher than other games: SFIV sets it higher than in the earlier games. It is an intentional point of this game to emphasise the skill involved in playing a fighting game well.

SFIV has made an energetic and slightly tumultuous start with the hardcore fighting games community. Given the level of hype it was always due for prominence as long as it was a good game: early play shows some surprises in weak and strong characters, and some scary combos. David Sirlin has already pointed out the number of link combos, high-difficulty sequences that lead to massive damage off quick attacks. That suggests a fast and lethal game for the highly-skilled, and a high barrier for the not-so-highly skilled. Again, this is not unlike other contests of skill: Roger Federer may be a top 10 tennis player because of his ability to read, react to and control the movement of his opponent, but he's a top 100 player because he can smack a forehand onto a 3" square spot really hard without trying. Mental ability separates the best, but physical excellence is the invitation to compete.

There are a couple of clunking errors of execution. Capcom seem obsessed with a terrible system of button selection, in which you cycle through which button does what. It's a bad error to lock certain characters, especially for a versus competitive game: hiding Gouken was a lovely surprise in the arcade (and what a lovely surprise Gouken is), but a chore in the home version. Finally, Seth's a mistake. Too powerful to allow, he will be the cause of arguments in the house of every version in which he is unlocked. As Dan proves, an underpowered option does not wreck a strategic decision, but an overpowered one does. Besides, a pick-and-choose superhuman clone weapons programme is just *lazy*. Previous SF bosses were Sagat, Bison and Urien, all amazing and unique character designs. Seth is a feeble addition to SF canon and won't be missed.

It says something however, that locking 9 of 25 characters from the first play, and making a character far too good to be allowed by anybody reasonable, are mistakes I'm willing to forgive (though not forget). SFIV has three main aims: to please the old SFII fans led away by Tekken and Soul Calibur from SFIII and the terrible EX series; to give the hard-core community a substantial new series to master, and also to draw more intermediate players into serious play. The first two points I have already addressed, but perhaps the success on the third point can be measured by the demand for not just arcade sticks, but even Sanwa and Seimitsu buttons and parts.

Fallout 3

As we wander the shanty-style town of Megaton, we find a mutated cow, a two-headed Brahmin tethered to a post. Pet, beast of burden, livestock? Jon chips in with his fateful suggestion. “Punch that cow.” Pandemonium ensues. Those Megaton folk love their Brahmin. We were just trying to make some Wagyu beef: in the future, that’s a capital offence. We practically had to run away, kill the pursuing sheriff, and steal all his stuff. Welcome to Fallout 3, the grim future vision where is the only thing that’s sacred is the cows.

I feel I should add that I'm not playing much Fallout 3 myself, just watching my housemate play it. He's enjoying it, because he likes to explore and look under rocks for bugs: Zelda: ALTTP is his favourite game, and Fallout 3 lets him indulge that taste in a big way. Bethesda promised us something other than a post-nuclear Elder Scrolls, but I'm not convinced that's what we've got.

First off, since this a game design blog: VATS. It's a good gimmick but sits awkwardly with the normal combat, which resembles an FPS. Reviews suggest that people play it largely with, or without, VATS but with radically different results. Taking a few free shots before running away to charge APs (VATS fuel) isn't the thrilling combat experience I expected. In fact it becomes too much the RPG, with monsters steaming toward you and exchanging shots until someone (them) dies.

It is part of the appeal of traditional / fantasy RPGs that combat resembles a pillow fight with huge swords and fireballs. It doesn't work for a 21st-century / near-future game where most of the weapons are firearms and many of the enemies are humanoid. Perhaps I wanted something more tactical, with more interesting terrain positions to take up than visible / not visible, and with movement as well as firing measured in APs. That could be considered too complex for a big release: there is plenty going on under the hood of Fallout 3 as is, compared with the Halo, Killzone and Gears-type shooters that the adverts conveyed.

I assume the purpose of the slo-mo animations is to make you feel powerful, magnify your actions: there is, however, something about watching a man take a round in the face, nonchalantly expel some blood, then run up and hit you with a baseball bat that really pricks your balloon. It looks great when it shows a cool kill - perhaps the slo-mo would be best saved for deaths. It's ultimately over-used to add false weight to the combat, but it does throw up the occasional spectacular moment. You'd best not be bored of guns tearing heads off at the neck, though. There's also not much point in aiming for any location other than the head (for damage) or chest (for accuracy). Crippling the leg of people with powerful melee weapons, or shooting the arm of the guy with the biggest gun are ineffectual tactics. A missed opportunity.

The world looks great, absolutely amazing, except it's all brown, as is the fashion of the day, but startling nonetheless. I'm not convinced by a post-apocalyptic world with no working cars but a egregious surplus of robot servants, but that's an objection to the peculiar Fallout setting rather than this specific instalment. There isn't much point to a post-apocalypse world if it wasn't, pre-apocalypse, much like ours. Building a town right next to an unexploded nuclear bomb with no explanation? None at all? It feels like an aggregation of a thousand images, atomic weapon test sites and scrapyards and broken bridges and insect close-ups and the fifties - all the fifties clichés at once. No, not sold, but it certainly looks great and they've filled it with things to make and do. Hats off.

My problem, I think, is that the world feels like an installation for my amusement. I don't believe that the world exists when I'm not looking. For example, there are two ridiculous superhero-styled combatants in one town, duelling unsuccessfully for control. You are encouraged to side with one or the other, or to destroy both. I do not feel, however (and this is about the feel of the thing) that the battle would ever be resolved without my intervention. In fact it doesn't appear that they actually, you know, fight. If I gave one a rocket launcher, it wouldn't tip the balance - there isn't a balance to tip. There are just two characters, issuing mutually-exclusive kill quests.

This is Bethesda's style, mastery and yoke. To use an analogy, their games resemble paintings of machines that, if real, could not work or do not move. Though filled with interesting elements and characters, they don't move in interesting ways. It's not a real machine: it's just a painting, a fake. While I accept that all games that depict worlds are in essence fakes, the game can go some way to suspending disbelief, to resembling a real machine, a genuine system. Fallout 3 never looks like a real post-aftermath world: just a matte painting in the background of a film of one.

Bioshock

My house played through Bioshock last year, but I didn’t post about it here because I played very little of it myself. However I did watch a lot of it and play just enough to get a feel for it. Lots of nice things have been written about Bioshock, most of which it deserves. It's a handsome and sumptuous FPS with a distinct style, a real sense of intent behind its visual design (which could have lapsed into generic steampunk), and a strong sense of horror borne of its unsettling enemies. While its success in exploring the philosophy of Ayn Rand is open to question, the verve of its attempt is not, and we must applaud all attempts by a game to tackle something substantial. In particular, my housemates were impressed by the tension, suspense and raw fear this game generated in them as they played – the equal of any classic horror film.

However, from the perspective of game design, there is a single error that undermines most of the good work: the Vita-Chambers. Player death leads to resurrection at the last Vita-Chamber activated, but all damage done to enemies remains, so that by persistence all obstacles may be overcome. All sense of peril was extinguished for me within an hour, after my first player death. What's the point of a difficulty level? What’s the point of any difficulty or peril at all? Why control my access to ammunition when the Vita-Chamber can fire an endless stream of clones armed with wrenches?

The failing, then, is this: games should always present some method of last resort to progress, and it should be the worst choice available, such that the player never wants to take it. It should guarantee success in some manner, so the player can always advance. Unfortunately, the method of last resort in Bioshock is tedious, and undermines any suspense the game can generate. If you can disregard it, you will enjoy Bioshock: if you can’t, you can’t.