2011 / PC — No comments
25
Jan 12

Moonglow

Okay, To The Moon (2011, PC) is a really moving experience, which I don’t often say about a videogame. I genuinely choked back tears, not virtual ones, but real ones.

I read and listen to lots of educated videogame pundits who tell us that story is or isn’t possible or even desirable in games. That emotional connection, or immersion, are not strong suits for games. And that other media are better for affecting people. But then a game like To The Moon comes along and its more riveting and affecting than most movies, and manages to totally win my heart. So now I think videogames are a great format for telling great stories that really can move people.

It’s a time-travel story, about a dying man who employs a futuristic company to replay his dreams and affect his memories for the better – in this case the client wants to be an astronaut who went to the moon. So you jump from memory to memory using the appropriation of motifs to trigger these memories – it’s a case of finding the objects to trigger the memory jump, then finishing a sliding puzzle game to set off the reaction. It all sounds quite silly because it mostly is.

But what works great in a 2D RPG-style exploration setting, is that rather than just chewing up newly explored land, you actually jump through time from the same setting to an earlier one in its lifetime. So the house where you begin the game is unbuilt and becomes open land as you travel back through the memories. It is bitesize chunks of scene and scenery, each lasting a few minutes, with a little dramatic twist each time and lots of dramatic irony. Invariably the characters decide to do whatever it is you just saw in the more recent memory.

There’s lots of mystery as well – motifs and ideas keep re-occuring and you’re not quite sure why they’re there and what they mean, and as you travel back in time all is eventually explained in very neat ways. It’s a great way to intrigue the player and have them emotionally invested in the answers the characters (and us) are seeking.

I hate game dialogue, but I love the smartly written, consistently amusing stuff in this game. Written rather than spoken it can’t get on my nerves, and it really does cleverly reveal character here. Recent experiences with Skyrim and Uncharted have really got me wondering if spoken dialogue is a curse on this generation of gaming, and the words here kind of underline that fact. Most game dialogue is better written. It’s actually a bit like subtitles in foreign movies, which invariably make foreign movies seem smart and sophisticated whereas if you heard some of the words being spoken in English they might fall totally flat.

I salute To The Moon and I will never again claim that stories are not for games. We just need more great stories and fewer crappy ones.

- Buy To The Moon. Twice.

2011 / Browser-Based / IOS / Mac / PC / Ps3 / Xbox 360 — No comments
22
Dec 11

25 Great Games from 2011

Here are my favourite games of this year. A mild spoiler – none have a 3 in the title. Please note that although Minecraft was officially released this year, I banged on about the beta plenty in 2010 and included it in last year’s faves, so no dice this year. This list is also incomplete and inconclusive obviously, as I do not have an omnipotent grasp on an entire year’s game content. Yet.

The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (PC/360/PS3) – I can’t work out if this is a step forwards or backwards for Bethesda’s long-running sandbox RPGs, but it is absolutely essential regardless. For all that doesn’t work or is buggy, there is enough that simply takes the breath away to make it an easy recommendation. Take a few steps in any direction and you will find something that excites either in terms of excitement, architecture or sheer scale, though the cookie-cutter questing and dodgy dialogue are significant flaws. I expect it to pretty much sweep the board in terms of the mainstream best-of-the-year polls, and it feels like vindication – for once one of the most popular games of the year is also one of the best.

Solar 2 (360/PC). Another sandbox title, this time built around the progression of dust in space – from asteroid to planet to sun to star to black hole. By gently nudging your planet or star around a 2D universe the game manages to be totally relaxing and wondrous in a quiet, contemplative way. And the game design just has a sense of wholeness and authenticity to it – a game that starts with a Carl Sagan quote and manages to stay true to those principles cannot fail to be very special indeed.

TripleTown (Browser). Within a 6×6 grid this game manages to tickle new parts of my brain. Bold colourful graphics and lots of lovely little cartoony graphical touches are the icing, but the real filling is a deceptively brain-warping gameplay mechanic where you have to think about 50 moves ahead to plan the perfect town. Elegant design, fantastic gameplay, and just that hint of progression and real-world recognition makes this fulfilling.

Stacking (PC/PS3/360). The idea of stacking Russian dolls with different skills and attributes leads to all sorts of strategic adventuring, but it’s the art style and the characters that really make this game special. Surreal period landscapes, Victorian class values, and fart-based comedy have never combined so effectively – it’s this weird mix of ideas and production values that lifts a game in a genre that I consider antiquated and irrelevant.


Nitronic Rush (PC). A surprise treat, a free, futuristic thing, Tron meets WipeOut – this DigiPen student release is slick, ambitious and incredibly addictive, with the whole kitchen sink thrown at the racing genre. What is amazing is the depth on offer too – the high-level twitch gameplay on offer here is as hardcore as gaming comes. It’s so much more than a calling-card slick arcade racer.

Tiny Wings (IOS). Sheer elegant game-design perfection for me, I just can’t imagine a one-touch game ever being any better than this. Yes it does have the casual veneer of a throwaway title, but I spent months of this year frantically trying to top my high-score, and trying to unlock the secrets of the fine-tuned gameplay. Anyone who says this game doesn’t compare to fully-fledged console titles is flat-out wrong – this is gaming in the true arcade classic sense.

Atom Zombie Smasher (PC). I’m not sure this is anywhere near a classic, a sort of quick-fire zombie tower defence type of game where you fly in to rescue people from an oncoming undead horde. But the presentation is so brilliant, with ironic comic-book interludes and a feeling of over-militarised dystopia. And the game seems like such a singularly voiced, slightly surreal, quietly satirical dig in the ribs of reality, that it’s that feeling that I really take away as being the triumph here.

Jetpack Joyride (IOS). Very little of original value here, but all the brownie points come from the slick presentation, the play-it-one-more-time gameplay, the mission structures and unlockables. Like Tiny Wings, it’s one of those games that has won over almost everyone I have recommended it to – for a minute-long game this somehow has the potential to suck hours out of my life – I don’t know if that’s a plus or not.


The Stanley Parable (PC). It’s been a big year for narrative devices (Bastion, Portal 2, Nous) but this is the best in my opinion, a desolate wander through lonely corridors and strange circumstances narrated in deadpan tones by a storyteller capable of getting increasingly upset should you deviate from the story he is telling. It’s an intriguing exploration of the interactive medium, and its relationship to narrative, and in a year full of very linear mainstream games this is the ironic dig in the ribs at lazy exposition – stories cannot be limited in an interactive medium.

Fate Of The World (2011). As a vision of the impending escalation of disaster from an environmental collapse, this card-game cum political strategy simulator is an eerie mix of gamey gaminess and reality. It’s a no-win type of game, where one simply bats off one lost continent against another, and what is great about it is that it through that gameplay you come to understand the difficulties of choice that might face civilisation in the future. It’s a triumph.

Football Manager 2012 (PC/Mac/IOS). Simply the sim to end all sims, FM continues to streamline in design yet complicate in features the bewildering issues of running a football club. As always with this long-running series, reality meets simulation as often I am watching a match on TV and realise I am watching a player I have simulated, and maybe adapt my sim approach based on the physical appearance of the player. There is no game more complex or mind-consuming out there.


Portal 2 (PC/MAC/PS3/360). The best game story of the year, with the best characters and puzzle elements. The best co-op experience. And with incredible presentation and voice-acting. Yet somehow under the weight of all this production, the game manages to retain the core of gameplay that makes it like no other experience around, the player asked to conceptualise a solution and then carry it out in a virtual space – at its best there’s no other feeling in gaming quite like it.

Hard Lines (IOS). I’ve always been a sucker for light-cycle games – in fact the first full game that I coded was a game very similar to this on the Sinclair Spectrum. So I can speak for the game’s innate addictive qualities, and this is the best ever version of the trope – a chaotic bunch of lines battling to survive in a geometric arena. Great touches – the music, the lo-fi graphical approach that leaves room for some really tight gameplay, and the wonderful little bits of funny dialogue that bring what essentially are straight lines on a grid to life.


Nous (PC). An excellent freeware shooter with a strange structure, presented Portal-like by a rogue computer going slowly mad. The way the game plays with the notion of the player and the game system is an amusing treat, wrapped in a visually stimulating wrapper that constantly shocks and surprises.

Driver: San Francisco (PS3, 360, PC). All of the presentation in this arcade racer is yawn-inducing bullcrap, yet the gameplay idea of jumping from one car to the next like a hi-octane occult spirit is totally inspired, leading to some of the best adrenalin-fuelled thrills-and-spills action I’ve had from a videogame in years. Like Blur last year, it seems like original ideas in the racing genre seem to get lost in the mix as there are so many pixel-perfect racers around these days. A shame.

LA Noire (PC/PS3/360). As a major Rockstar release that everybody has tried, critical tongues have wagged this year over the merits and weaknesses of this game, but it remains a really singular achievement, carrying the milieu of classic noir into some sort of cinematic action thriller. No it doesn’t quite hang together – at its worst it’s a towering failure that proves the limitations of the medium. But yet whether it’s an essential experience or a weak pastiche, it is startlingly ambitious and completely unlike anything else released this year.

Tiny Tower (IOS). Yes this is a freemium release, and yes it is super-addictive, super-cute, and a brilliant bit of game design. This is an era where lots of games are building experiences that don’t ask much of the player other than just to sit and click. But this one does it with style, panache, and innocence, with a dose of good humour thrown in. I read the game as a sort of ironic pastiche of Western urban civilisation, and enjoyed it so much more on that basis.

Blipzkrieg (Browser). I’m not really one for quick-paced real-time strategy, but the exceptional design of this browser gem completely won me over – it has an arcade feel and a quick pace but total freedom within each level, and a sense of complete chaos mixed with tight control. My only disappointment with this game is that I have spelt it wrong on the blog (it is ‘ieg’ not ‘eig’) for six months :( .


Fifa 12 (PC/IOS/PS3/360/Wii). A begrudging nod to this yearly update, a glorified game patch given a full price. But the fact remains that it is probably the best sports sim I’ve ever played, the on-field flow approaching what my tiny mind can only perceive as perfection. Until next year’s iteration comes along. The only weakness in the entire game is the dismal menus and continual ‘press x to continue’ approach – once you’re in-game the thing plays like an absolute dream.

Where Is My Heart? (PS3/PSP). There’s something just so lovingly crafted about this puzzle platformer, in which levels fracture and split up into various pieces like a broken jigsaw to disorientate the player. Is it somehow the sense of being lost in the wilderness, or just the hand-drawn joy of it all, or the surreal simplicity of the little characters, you know the orange one, the dirty brown one and the black one? I like games that cast a spell, and this one does for reasons I can’t quite fathom.


LittleBigPlanet 2 (PS3). A chaotic multiplayer platformer, with almost unlimited possibilities due to the robust level editor encouraging thousands around the world to make their own contributions, this is the community game that has almost come to defy description. Due to the sheer scale of what’s on offer here it’s tempting to simply leave the core to their world and bow out. But treated simply as a co-op platform game alone it’s some of the the best fun I’ve had in gaming this year.

Dungeon Raid (IOS). A brilliantly-designed puzzle game, mixing match-3 mechanics with the tropes of a rogue-like, it’s one of the weirdest sensations around to be playing something that looks like Bejewelled yet plays out like a quest – even a puzzle grid starts to take on the form of a place, and a story of your progress builds without the slightest graphical sense of place. You just imagine D&D from the past and play the game almost as an accompaniment to the imagination.

Forget Me Not (IOS/PC). This is a bit like PacMan, a bit like a rogue-like dungeon hunt, and even a little bit like a chaotic little world system like Minecraft. Yes, a little bit. What the game lacks in longevity, it makes up for with charm – wonderful old-school tiny sprites, on-the-fly mazes and enemies, and retro sound to absolutely die for. It’s the little maze game that could, and every time I dip back into it for twenty minutes I find it to be a delight.

Groove Coaster (IOS). There’s nothing desperately groundbreaking about this music rhythm game, other than that it is incredibly surreal and weird, from the music to the strange three-dimensional patterns it paints. And there’s just something odd about the way it is presented and unlocks itself that makes it memorable. It’s as if playing and liking this game allows one to belong to a leftfield plane of existence.


The Killer (Browser). A short game but no less affecting for that – it’s surprising and thoughtful and has a reason for being, which is more than can be said for a whole lot of games these days.

Other games played this year – Dark Souls, Uncharted 3, Winter Walk, Oiche Mhaigh, Bulletstorm, Water, Batman: Arkham City, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Crysis 2, Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster, Ravenwood Fair, Order And Chaos Online, Epoch, W.E.L.D.E.R., A.R.E.S., Anomaly Warzone Earth, The Binding Of Isaac, Blocks That Matter, Lootfest, Hoard, InMomentum, Jamestown, Nightsky, Revenge Of The Titans, Scoregasm, Vertex Dispenser, Hyperdimension Neptunia, Xenoblade Chronicles, Inazuma Eleven, Brink, Dead Island, Bastion, El Shaddai: Ascension Of The Metatron,  Alice: Madness Returns, Infamous 2, Dirt 3, Kinect: Rise Of Nightmares, Battlestar Galactica Online, Bodycount, Child Of Eden, Conduit 2, Dead Space 2, Dragon Age II, Dungeon Siege III, Dungeon Defenders, Earth Defence Force: Insect Armageddon, Fear 3, Fight Night Champion, Forsaken World, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, Ilomilo, Killzone 3, Kirby’s Epic Yarn, MicroBot, Outland, Rock Of Ages, Shadows Of The Damned, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, Terraria, Lord Of The Rings: War In The North, Tour De France 2011, Brunswick Pro Bowling, Surveillant, Inside A Star Filled Sky, The End Of Us, A Mother In Festerwood, Interlocked, Beneath The Waves, Infinity Danger, Kami Retro, Pragmatica, Sr Mistu, Soul Brother, Continuity 2, Proun, Mythos, The 2D Adventures Of Rotating Octopus Character, Luftrauser, Bamdizzle, Kinect Fun Labs, Poker Pals, Bag It!, Mage Gauntlet, Forever Drive, Reckless Getaway, Frogger Decades, Quarrel, Temple Run, Frozen Synapse, Grand Prix Story, Spy Mouse, Contre Jour, Rally-X Rumble, Drawin Growin, 1-Bit Ninja, DaWindci, Storm In A Teacup, The Heist, Bumpy Road, Snuggle Truck, Coin Drop, Air Penguin, Land A Panda, Call Of Duty 3: Modern Warfare, Nuclear Dawn, Match Panix, Zookeeper DX Touch Edition, Legendary Wars, IStunt 2, Superbrothers Swords and Sorcery. I intend to play less games next year :) .

2011 / PC / Ps3 / Xbox 360 — No comments
14
Dec 11

Swallowed up in Skyrim

Wandering about the landscapes of Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (PC/PS3/360) puts me in a contemplative, sometimes quite melancholy, mood. It’s a mood that sees me as likely to switch off the game and put on some alt folk ballad, as it is to see me run off on an errand for some stolen magical staff in a barrow or cave. This dichotomy seems to have ruled my time with the game so far.

The videos that I see of Skyrim, and the experiences that I see described of the game, are often at odds with my experience. A video of a dragon shout ‘thum’ that knocks the plates and food off a dining table – I don’t do that to dining tables in the game, either out of politeness or too much self-control. A lot of moments in the game seem to come out of self-abandon, where one rushes into every situation with an axe drawn and starts slashing. Yet I’m super-reluctant to go into any encounter with weapons drawn – I want to see who is friend and who is foe. Unless you hear the familiar click of aggravated skeleton of course. No headless zombie has yet proven willing to consider a non-violent solution to an encounter.

For all its majesty, and there is plenty here, I have yet to find the heart of this game. As the hours pass, filled with meaningless errands or grand encounters, I still feel like I’m missing something. The game world is so vast and the characters so many, that I’m quite prepared to admit that I might not have found it yet. But I long for something, anything, that might touch me beyond the surface, a story that might tug gently on the heartstrings, or test my ethics or my morals.

One that comes close is the story of a group of male bounty hunters, come to arrest a woman in my hometown of Whiterun. Denied entry to the city, e bounty hunters want me to lure her out of the town to face trial for her crimes in a distant land. For her part she wants only safe haven, asking me to fight off these aggressive men. I can see that my moral compass is at least in play, yet with no more information I don’t know what or who to believe, and how to justly act. So I choose a third path – inaction. She is not arrested, nor is she safe – the hunters are not satisfied, but neither are they murdered. In this purgatory a sort of balance exists, because I know in this role-playing land that nothing is ended until I make my decisions. So I make none.

In the same way, the war of Skyrim rages, between the ruling Imperial Legion and the Stormcloak rebels. Each ask me to join their ranks, yet I find that if I refuse a state of nervous calm continues. I don’t see any innocents being slaughtered in the streets while the generals pore over their strategic maps in their strongholds while waiting for me to pick my side. I fear my actual involvement may prove precipitous to the situation, resulting in bloodshed of one sort or another. And besides I’m not ready for a war.

Offered the chance to undertake a blood ritual and join a band of werewolves, I decline politely. Sorry, got a busy schedule as it is. But I know that this group wait for me by the altar, waiting for my curiosity to get the better of me. Of course in a virtual world it costs nothing, to say yes and let the whirlwind of adventure carry you, but the real world equivalent might be the offer of the crack-pipe. When I decline it is only because I am human, yet the game waits for me to throw caution to the wind and abandon who I really am. For fun.

So I find myself ducking and diving from grand adventures, and eventually the bustle of the city starts to grate – everyone has a quest for me to fulfill, or a story about their exploits to recount. So I find myself drawn to the wilderness, the company only of the landscape and the odd wandering wolf. I long not for exploration but for something meaningful, perhaps I should mark out some territory and patrol it like a wandering guard.

Please note this is not a complaint, because there are so few games that can make me feel this sort of quiet alienation and strong relationship with the landscape, whether city or wilderness. This is a special sort of gaming where my experience simply cannot match that of my peers, but mark out its own special journey within the grand parameters of Skyrim.

2011 — No comments
11
Dec 11

The Video Gaming Accidents

I think probably the games industry gets the awards show it deserves. The award for vapid, completely insulting awards shows definitely goes to the VGAs.

I’m prepared for awards ceremonies to be full of tub-thumping schlock about popular games that I honestly don’t give a fuck about. I’m prepared to celebrate the variety in gaming, and heck as long as somebody likes a game that’s alright by me. Let’s celebrate it.

But the VGAs are not a celebration of anything – it’s a conveyor belt of z-list celebs, a few thoughtless skits around the concept of videogaming, and a few trailers. Heck even the exclusive reveal trailers looked like they were cut for time. The actual awards themselves? Well almost all of the categories were glossed over and the winners mentioned in three-second round-up clips. How can you make an awards show which doesn’t actually give out the awards?

I work in the TV industry, and I know these problems first-hand. Cynical television made by hired people with no genuine interest in the subject they are covering, interested only in filling the time adequately, and working in absolute fear of their own audience. You end up with a thing that is mostly presentation at the expense of content, that serves nobody whatsoever. It just fills airtime in a way that is not disastrous.

I have to say the problem goes beyond just the dreadful excuse for a TV show that I just watched. Looking at the categories, they look like they were thrown together in a 5-minute brainstorm. Any award for writing in a game? Any award for storytelling, or originality, or even gameplay itself? Categories like ‘Best Fighting Game’ are the equivalent of an oscar for ‘Best movie with a cop in it’. There’s no longevity or real point in a ‘Best 360 game’ category – an awards ceremony doesn’t have to be advertorial for a hardware manufacturer, and it ghettoises gaming into bizarre categories where a game like Gears Of War cannot compete with a game like Uncharted. Pointless imo.

I really respect the attempts to bring gaming out of the ghetto and into the mainstream of popular culture. One day the VGAs could be part of that – surely that was the intention in the first place? But to do that they need to actually celebrate gaming, not z-grade television and the careers of Charlie Sheen and LL Cool J.

2011 / Browser-Based — No comments
06
Dec 11

Match Three City-Building

Just had a fun session of the beta of TripleTown (2011, Browser), a simple-looking puzzle game that has hidden depths of spacial awareness and forward-thinking strategy. Calling it a match-3 game is completely unfair, as you actually have to place tiles with intent rather than just aimlessly matching up lines. The little people that wander around give the exercise a human touch, but really this is a game about cleverly matching up patterns, more Drop7 than Cityville. As a freemium game it’s bound to put some players off, but the game really is making me think to the extent that I’m pondering my strategies inbetween sessions. Definitely worth a try.

- TripleTown review (from Killscreen)
- TripleTown website (Spry Fox)

2011 / PC / Ps3 / Xbox 360 — No comments
03
Dec 11

Out-of-car Experiences


I spend far too much of my free time on games with a spectacular amount of polish but very little interesting content. Driver: San Francisco (2011, PS3/360/PC) is a bog-standard arcade racer with dreadful presentation but with one big idea that eclipses every imperfection.

At any moment the player can jump out of the action, like an out-of-body experience, and warp into any other car in the cityscape. It’s half-ludicrous as an idea, and the single-player campaign has to jump through several rather bizarre plot leaps to justify it alongside any sense of reality. It’s an experience that might sit better among the macabre schlock of a Resident Evil game rather than the Driver series, renowned for sub-GTA crime capers rather than occult life-altering experiences.

But for gameplay this car-warping is a revelation. Why chase behind your escaping enemies through the streets of San Francisco when you can warp into an approaching car and hit them head-on? Why lose a race with one mis-timed corner or crash when you can just warp into another competitor’s car? Why ever feel stuck with one poor car when you can warp into a different one in seconds.

What is key to the experience is that allowing you to escape a crash with a warp completely changes the way you play a racing game – it’s no longer about staying on the road, but about taking outrageous risks to gain an advantage. The standard relationships between risk and reward, so fundamental to every other driving game, is completely re-worked here- it’s often a game that feels like no other, which is one hell of a feat in a hideously overcrowded genre.

Take the warp feature into multiplayer and you’re talking about one of the freshest gaming experiences I’ve had in a while. The co-op features are excellent, the highlight being ‘survival’, a high speed co-op escape through checkpoints with a virtual army of cops on your tail – one player can divert the attention of the cops while another goes for the checkpoint and then warp to catch up. Being the cops chasing the getaway drivers involves the warp uch more – any vehicle you warp into mutates into a cop car. With online multiplayer this mode becomes absolute mayhem, with cars thrown left, right and centre at the getaway driver.

Whether it’s just fun or something more than fun I’m not sure. But I think it is fun because it is twisting a familiar experience into something uncanny and different, which is something I think playful art should probably aspire to. I can’t think how another medium could even come close to presenting an experience with the choice to completely alter the perspective at any moment. Actually the feeling of being in the moment but simultaneously not in it, being able to flit from one sense of that moment to another, is the sort of bewildering experience that seems somehow congruent with the post-modern world. In control but out of control.

2011 / PC — No comments
23
Nov 11

I am the manager

It’s tempting not to write about Football Manager 2012 (2011, PC) at all. It’s spreadsheet-style interface looks like a different world to the un-initiated – it’s like to persuade someone that they might enjoy pure maths.

The cult group of gamers who love this title don’t need to be lectured on just how good it is – it’s credentials are so-long established as to be almost irrelevant to the debate. It s a magnificent sim with more depth than almost any game I could even imagine. It is complex to the degree that there is simply no room for another game of this sort in my life.

I’m currently West Ham United, a team with a rich history of youth development and flowing football, but I’m stuck in the lower reaches of the English Premiership playing tightly controlled football to try and eke out a win here and there to survive. I’ve got my world-class youths coming through, but the bigger clubs circle like vultures trying to pick them off, with the new system of player agents adding an extra impediment to progress as I try to turn my club into worldbeaters.

Many consider the 01/02 iteration to be the game’s peak, before extra details like agents, training routines, press conferences and teamtalks came into the equation. Back then there was a sense by which you could actually understand the intricacies of the engine and control them, before the multitude of new tweaks came in to destroy that illusion.

These days you have the sense of an engine running under the hood gently tweaking the statistics in a such a multitude of ways that it’s fairly clear in interviews that the developers themselves (Sports Interactive) aren’t even in control of the simulation itself. It expands and contracts according to its own tune, a small galaxy of players, governed by statistics mixed with randomicity, that really breathe.

In the wake if such an uncontrollable beast, it’s tempting to lose faith and interest – this is the game’s biggest weakness. Stuck in a downard spiral of poor performance on the pitch, the temptation to just turn off and stop is enormous. The reason I don’t stop is that few games feel better when you get it right. When it is going well I don’t ever fully understand why, but that has much in common with the hits and misses of football, governed as much by strokes of luck as skillful management – like all of the very finest games, management of bad luck is just as important as learning how to surf the wave of success.

Every decision you take is like a raindrop in a river – small ripples bounce off the ripples of the other raindrops, with the hope that these tiny drops might affect a genuine change in the current at some point. It’s a hope, a prayer, and that level of control (or non-control) is humbling and off-putting to some players, but to me it brings a sense of wonder and inspiration.

2011 / IOS — No comments
21
Nov 11

Poke-scrabble

The trouble with Scrabble is that it’s elitist – it discriminates against the illiterate. It’s also divisive between language speakers – you stick to your own language only. I’m not sure it even works with Japanese characters. It’s failures are really indicative of the human race’s inability to rise above petty differences :) .

Enter the scene, Poker Pals (2011, IOS), the uniter of all faiths and creeds with the common language of the World’s greatest card game. Yes it is Scrabble(tm) with poker hands rather than words. As long as you know that a flush beats a straight you’ve mastered the nuance of the game pretty much. But ths isn’t a game for the smoky back-room, it’s a game for Soccer Mom’s tea-break. The title is actually a slightly weird conceit for me, because in the world of poker one doesn’t make pals with competitors, one makes acquaintances from whom one hopes to make money.

Actually I love this mash-up – it’s one of those ideas that just work so perfectly well you wonder how it was never thought of before. 52 cards fit pretty neatly on a 7×7 grid, 5-card poker hands seem to fit that grid so neatly, and It leads to games of somewhere between 12-18 moves, which is pretty perfect forthe concentration span of your typical casual gaming numskull, ie me. And the game has resisted the sort of double-score tiles of Scrabble for a simpler system where jokers sit in the corners of the board waiting to be used as a wildcard – it’s simple enough to seem like a stroke of genius.

In a manageable chunk there are a bunch of strategies at play here way beyond just forming a playable poker hand. More acutely vulnerable to quick swings of fortune than Scrabble, this game has much more in common with Othello or Go, where every move has to be weighed against the opponent’s likely response within such a small play area. Leaving dangerous combos open is fatal. Keeping track of what’s left in the deck is also a consideration, there’s a bunch of intuitive probability calculation echoing the great game of poker itself.

Or alternatively you can just take your cards, play the best poker hand you see, and move on. You can have unlimited games running, and with these games all in-play the experience becomes a little like a hypnotic ten-second burst of thought as you respond to the latest move. You’re playing the moment, not the game, if you know what I mean. With notifications active on my ipad, the game has threatened to destroy my day with irresistable popups every 2 minutes.

2009 / Ps3 — No comments
02
Nov 11

Stories …and where they go

I studied film at college in the early 90s – Tarantino was revolutionising popular cinema at the time, I was obsessed with zombie movies (along with a young director friend destined for a Hollywood career) and my thoughts were inspired by the Coens, Wim Wenders, Lars Von Trier and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.. But the most important cultural discovery of that period of my life wasn’t a film, it was Doom.

I used to argue with my fellow students that Doom was a more potent narrative experience than any movie I had seen, and I would compare the beats of film language with the moments in Doom of turning a corner, opening a door or flicking a switch. The comparison used to get shrugs from my peers.

But there has always been an enormous mental barrier for people between the tightly-controlled beats of a drama, and the user-generated beats of a game. This barrier is crumbling slowly, year by year, and is surely destined to fully collapse. But progress sems slow in the hearts and minds of people, for reasons I don’t quite understand. Is it just resistance to change, and the implications of accepting that change?

I’ve been playing Uncharted 2 again, and my takeaway from that experience is the interesting dynamic between the storyline of the game and the mechanics of the action. They are so interwoven that they are inseperable, yet the game operates very differently to the popular drama that we know.

For a start, U2 is 12 hours long, most movies are 90 minutes. But it’s interesting to see that despite having 25ish ‘chapters’, U2 does operate to a fairly similar structure to the classic Hollywood story structures. In other words I don’t think U2 has a longer or more complicated structure than a Hollywood movie. It just takes longer to get to each major beat.

So what might take a moment in a film can take half an hour in U2. The act of chasing the baddies to the train they are escaping on involves a running escape from gunfire, a combat area involving traversal and gunplay, an exploration of the trainyard, a gunfight in an overturned carriage, and then a cut-scene as Drake jumps from Elena’s jeep onto the train. In a movie perhaps only the escape from capture and the jump to the teain would survivethe editing process. Even then there’s another half an hour of play on the train until Drake engages more than just enemy minions.

But I think the mistake that much criticism makes is in earmarking the gameplay sections of a game like this as somehow seperate to the story, when in reality they operate in exactly te same way as the story. As enemy soldiers pour into an area the stakes rise in dramatic terms, every dodge and shoot is a dramatic beat, each kill is a little victory. And a game like U2 is very careful to give combat a structure – near the trainyard a combat section happens while Drake is hanging from some streetsigns, raising the stakes. In the trainyard the combat is an impossible fight against overwhelming odds as multitudes if soldiers,until Elena drives in to save the day. This isn’t just ‘game’. And each combat section will have a beginning, a middle and an end with the stakes rising throughout.

Also game and story are intertwined with considerable effort. Drake’s quips during gameplay guve character. There’s one excellent section where Drake and an enemy banter with each other during their efforts to traverse a tomb – their relationship is that much richer at the end of it. The game is very careful to give every moment an aim, a dramatic motivation. There s very little combat for its own sake in the game – you are either getting somewhere, getting away from somewhere, or trying to survive against all the odds.

It also isn’t somehow ‘worse’ than conventional drama, it is better. Because what might be filler in a movie experience becomes essential in a aming exerience. In a film or a book, the opening of a door will often be skipped or softened through editing, but in a game that moment of uncertainty is potent – what s through that door ad what will I have to do? One of my film heroes, Wim Wenders, argues that film’s obsession with collapsing time for efficiency is in some ways irresponsible and inauthentic – games are a kind of cure for this problem.

The only problem with U2′s ‘story’ experience, in my opinion, is that every failure drags one out ofthe dramatic construct and back into the game. You ‘die’, are thrown out of the dramatic moment, and back to a checkpoint in order to experience the moment again. It’s the equvalent of the film strip breaking and having to replay the scene again once the projectionist has taped it back together. Fable II had an interesting response to ths problem, with no deaths and no checkpoints, but each knockback scarring your character permanently (something that upset my daughter more than any cheap death could do).

I do think, a little like the ‘is it art’ debate, that the word ‘story’ has become a very loaded term to be misused and misapplied at will. The relationship between story and narrative and plot is much more subtle than it is often implied to be, and often the arguments about each owe much to semantics and very little to genuine criticism.

The bottom line – we are human beings, we see and feel stories everywhere. Games realise this, and are the richest canvas I know for going to interesting places with them.

Ps3 — No comments
31
Oct 11

Unfollowing Uncharted 3

Uncharted 3 arrives this week promising the same thrills and spills as the previous entry, one of my favourite games of 2009. But I’ve been surprised just how lukewarm my passion for the new game is, without quite being able to think why?

Of the reviews of the new game, which involvea lot of rubber-stamping its known qualities, the only one that really piqued my interest was Simon Parkin’s critique. His basic point (and it is quite mild criticism) is that the sort of story-led hand-holding that goes on in Uncharted is ultimately quite shallow and limiting. This has led to some uproar – after all most of the single-player campaigns of this blockbuster season will be story-led hand-holding campaigns. And probably Uncharted will offer the best.

But I have to admit that Parkin is broadly right.

Maybe the boundaries have changed in a post-Minecraft gaming universe. I’m still exploring random lands in that game, and still finding hidden corners in Oblivion from 2006. I can’t begin to consider that a game where you undertake a story that you don’t choose, at a pre-decided length, through a selection of well-established gaming staples, is anything other than a sideshow.

So what have I done? I’ve only gone and played through Uncharted 2 again.

I think U2 exists as a sort of proof of concept for action blockbusters played out in a videogame. It’s a tour de force of clever presentational tricks to get you from point A to point Z in a very linear story. I think that was my journey playing the game – a voyage of discovery about how a videogame can be a superior action movie if it wants to be. I’ve looked at the nuts of bots of that game, and I’ve considered the overall structure of the story, and I’ve decided that it doesn’t just mimic a good adventure movie, it IS a bloody good adventure movie.

And the overall lesson is that that probably isn’t a very fulfilling future for the videogame. Corridor stories make great games, but they probably make better movies or books. They’re good escapist fare, but to my eye they’re fairly insubstantial fare. They’re certainly not what is most interesting about games or gaming. If they were the medium really wouldn’t be of much lasting interest.

Then, back to considering Uncharted 3, there just doesn’t feel like much of an upside to playing the game. It will kill a few hours, and a couple of moments will take the breath away, but I feel like I’ve actually experienced the game already. In a way, replaying Uncharted 2 might be a more fulfilling experience than playing Uncharted 3.

Then again, it might not :)

2011 / 2012 / PC — No comments
20
Oct 11

Pirate Karting

The choice of image may be slightly counter-productive, but the idea of packaging together a splurge of creativity from 300 indie developers into one entry for the Independent Games Festival is superb. It’s a statement that what is great about creating games doesn’t always fit into convenient industry pigeon-holes – often games are abrasive, short, uncommercial, and also unpretensious and small in scope. And that sort of creativity should be saluted, awarded, celebrated. Here it is.

- 2012 IGF Pirate Kart

PC — No comments
17
Oct 11

Playing For Money

Recently I was in Barcelona for my ‘day job’ (or the closest I get to one) running the poker rule over the television coverage of the European Poker Tour, now in it’s 8th season. It’s one of the finest poker tours these days, and I’m very proud to have been associated with it since its early days.

Poker, in case you’ve lived under a rock for the past decade, is probably the most popular videogame on the planet. Strangely it barely gets a mention among game enthusiasts, and even those that play it seem willfully oblivious to its game-iness. Partly because of its image problem, its association with gambling, or perhaps just the traditional card-based nature of it, it’s kept as a guilty pleasure in the shadows for players rather than being central to gaming and game criticism.

And poker is so popular because it is the best. Tournament no-limit hold’em, the cadillac of poker, one variation among hundreds of poker games, is a game as subtle and nuanced as any I have played, and more impossible to truly master than supposed brainiac favourites like chess, bridge and backgammon. Or Starcraft.

Attempts to ‘solve’ poker have been around for at least 40 years, with the intense scrutiny really occuring over the last decade. And yet it is unsolved and unknowable, the best theories are hard to ultimately prove, and the game is in constant flux from hand to hand and from tournament to tournament. In fact the attempts to apply ‘best practice’ logic to the fundamentals of the game is actually an exploitable weakness – if you know what the established orthodoxy is, you can adapt strategies to beat it.

There are very few conventional videogames I would put anywhere near the same class as poker. Starcraft is one, and that same principle of finding a strategy to defeat the orthodoxy definitely holds true there. I think Counter-Strike is another, at the clan level, where the intense study of opposition tactics and creative approaches go hand in hand with the basic mechanics. But in a way a game needs immense popularity for these metagames to come into play. So some of World of Warcraft’s less celebrated modes like the battlegrounds and arena combat, along with the basic cut and thrust of pvp, are areas of quite deep study which has elevated them into perhaps more than they ever deserved to be!

But the oddest distinction between poker and other games, which I mean to highlight here, is that poker is played for money whereas other videogames almost universally are not. That seems entirely bizarre to me. We pay for games, sometimes exorbitant amounts, yet expect nothing real in return.

I remember my grandfather, who hated the flashing lights and wall of sound of the amusement arcades, and his disbelief that I would put coins into Spy Hunter, R-Type, Beam Rider and Toobin without even the chance of a return. He thought that if I wanted to play, I should at least have the chance to win. It blew his mind that I played games I could only lose. The irony that he in theory preferred the fruit machines or the penny falls, despite having never knowingly gambled once in his entire life.

The arcade market is largely dead now, and the only bit that really survives are the games with a return, the quiz machines or novelty roulettes or grab-the-prize cabinets. So, largely, my grandfather was right.

I see micro-transactions as a sort-of halfway house. You pay for what you want to play, rather than the flat fee approach. Subscriptions are a different form of this. But again, no actual return is expected – social status alone, or the promise of ‘content’ is the draw.

Online poker has a much better model. Of course you can play for free – the freemium model is built in. Of course there are micro-transactions, and not always so micro. But you can take out as well, and this is ultimately the driving factor. Lots of players never withdraw, but the idea that they could is fairly unique in gaming. What actually occurs are thousands of small transactions between players in cash hands or in tournament buy-ins, of which the house takes a small proportion.

Why, I wonder, is this model not used for gaming? It’s a fantastic model for the player and for the game provider. If it’s not here already, then it’s certainly not far away. Facebook credits are an attempt to blur these lines. But I just think that the real-money Deathmatch is not that far away.

Of course some sorts of games will support cash stakes more than others. I’m frankly not sure about the cash-deathmatch in Call of Duty, simply because it may fail to be any fun. But COD elite is a subscription service for improved matchmaking and other tweaks – the cash-based leagues may not be far away (i believe you can already wager playmoney credits in Black Ops). Off the top of my head I think of the Assassin’s Creed multiplayer game as a more likely candidate – a mix of risk and reward, of strategy and luck, without lag and twitch fingers carrying quite so much weight (the mode works using an assassination button rather than aim mechanics).

The problem for games is that they the closed platforms won’t allow this model. Yet! If they did, the poker sites would be there already. Apple won’t support it, nor Microsoft, nor Sony. For pretty much the same reasons that any freemium or subscription service cannot trive on closed systems.

Two predictions -

First, the open systems will eventually win for no other reason than they allow te flexibility needed for these new systems of gaming commerce. That’s why the PC is principally the dominant platform now (despite what console gamers say), and that’s even before online poker and sportsbooks and fantasy football and casinos are taken into account. And I also think that’s ultimately why Android eventually beats Apple, although I do think Apple recognises this and may alter its strategy to counter this problem. Maybe all consoles become more open platforms eventually.

Second prediction – games inexorably move towards the cash stakes model. Simply because it works the best of any system. Freemium and micro-transactions are the baby steps towards that model.

2011 / PC / Ps3 / Xbox 360 — No comments
27
Sep 11

L.A. Noire – more than just black and white

We’re making stuff that’s never been made before. We’re making a type of game that’s never been made before. We’re making it with new people, and new technology.

- Brendon McNamara, Team Bondi.

LA Noire (2011, PS3/360/PC) is a complex beast, either a fascinating failure or a fatally flawed masterpiece. I found it impossible to play without getting bogged down with what works or doesn’t work, simply because it takes a number of risks both with its gameplay and structure. Like Heavy Rain last year, it’s a bold piece of work that’s pushing the medium.

I think the incredible praise the game received in consumer reviews tells only some of the story. Not least because the developer Team Bondi went into administration last month. It’s definitely not a crowd-pleasing game, it’s a serious title that’s very liable to annoy a big proportion of the hardcore action-game fan – the user reviews on Metacritic show this polarising effect, and that presumably trickled through to sales. I agree with this piece that the game is indelibly, implicitly sexist, not only in its lack of decent female characters, but just in the almost-fetishised and certainly inhuman way that you seem to interact with women throughout. But LA Noire is now most famous in gaming circles as a game that took seven years to make, with seemingly neverending crunch-time in the production process, burning out (it seems) several hundred employees, many of which have gone public since with their complaints.

Erm okay, the game…

This is a relentlessly episodic game, to the extent that a title flashes up onscreen to announce each new chapter. That’s not necessarily a weakness, but this is a long game and the structure at times risks monotony. I wonder if at some point in the long development whether they tried a more open structure – after all these are police cases. You could travel to your police station, and pick up a case, and there’d feel like some element of choice (as in any Rockstar game, these choices are generally illusions of choice). As it is you always have a case, so any freedom you feel in the wonderfully realised cityscape is forever tempered by the needs of the case. It’s a city that struggles to quite breathe in the game, and I wonder if this linear approach is the reason.

Another problem I think is pacing. The gameplay often consists of surveying a crime scene and looking for clues, and this is usually slow and methodical. You walk slowly around waiting for the controller to vibrate, basically. I think it works well, and is what has given rise to the game being called a ‘police procedural’. But if the game is mostly this mixed with interviews of suspects, there’s a danger that it becomes one-note. There are action scenes – shootouts, car-chases, fistfights and very novel foot-chases, but they are used as short interludes really, palette cleansers to the rest of the game. And because this is such a guided experience, you can’t create your own relief – either play on or stop.

The interview system is a triumph for the most part. The much-vaunted facial animation system is just a major step forward for gaming, and after some initial culture-shock I found myself riveted to the facial movements of the characters. I’ve read a lot of implicit criticisms that these faces are not real, but games are not real, this is artifice. If I wanted reality I would go elsewhere. I find these criticisms similar to those who criticise the dialogue of Pinter or Mamet for being theatrical, or Lynch for being obscure or perverse. These faces lift the game, give the characters character, and turn te policework from mechanical work into psychological drama, where one’s impulses clash with what can be proven in fact. No game has ever got close to doing this for me before.

Then there’s the detail in the game, which is at times phenomenal. These are the best character models in the most lavish sets in the most detailed city gaming has ever seen. There are dozens of one-off moments that surprise and intrigue. A tiny section in the hall of records has you working a mechanical map to find longitude and latitude on a property, which then requires a calculator to turn into a usable reference, which you then have to wander through the library to find – a few brief moments rendered in incredible detail.

Unfortunately the triumphs do get somewhat swallowed up in the broad sweep of the game, which has great ambition that remains somewhat unfulfilled. The usual house-style Rockstar obsessions are here – the drive towards progress as a corrupting influence, and the savagery under the surface in society. This game tries to tie together a story about returning GIs, corrupt politics, and the crooked movie business. But it’s a weird mix – a lot of the first half of the game is, on reflection, entirely incidental to the main plot. Some strange and frankly mystifying snatches of wartine flashback are periodically thrown in without any real explanation, which the game then expects you to recall almost verbatim to make sense of what comes later. This is a game with literally hundreds of characters, yet the lead character will instantly note a callback that leaves the player scratching their head. On some level it is a disjointed mess, basically.

Cole Phelps, the hero, totally embodies all the strange confusions in the game. They want him to be enigmatic, like the film noir lead, but because he says nothing other than procedure for hours and hours of gameplay you feel that you hardly know him. This is too trivial to be spoiler, but Phelps at one point leaves his wife and child (who we have never seen) to move in with a nightclub singer we have barely met, as part of a love affair barely hinted at and never at any point explained. And this is the main character in whose shoes we tread for 30 hours plus! And in a story that is supposed to major on character and drama!

There’s also undeniably something inauthentic at play in this game – not that it is wrong but just that it doesn’t satisfyingly fit its trappings as a genre-piece. The ‘Noir’ in the title only sporadically makes its way into the actual game, which is actually for the most part flooded with vivid colour – it’s not wrong, it’s just not in the tradition to which it might want to belong (there is an option to play in black and white). Also, there’s something uneasy about playing a cop with a partner in a police procedural in a milieu that belongs to gumshoes and lone heroes. Again it’s not wrong, it’s just weird – few noirs ever were about cops. This is CSI in period LA, and to me that’s an uneasy mix.

It all adds up to an uneven but intriguing experience, that hits the right notes but maybe in the wrong order, that has incredible ambition that comes close to destroying it, that overreaches so dramatically that it is impossible not to respect it for its efforts. I haven’t even mentioned the music, which is fantastic. I want games above all to try things, to be original, to stretch the medium – few titles have attempted that more than this game.

- A real LA detective plays LA Noire (video)
- Main soundtrack theme
- Three Roles I Played in LA Noire by Emily Short

2011 / PC / Ps3 / Xbox 360 — No comments
22
Sep 11

Stuck in the rabbit-hole

Alice: Madness Returns (2011, PC/360/PS3) offers an impressive slice of surreal platforming, but it’s been a struggle to genuinely latch onto anything in the game.

Your avatar is Alice Liddell, a more grown-up version of Carroll’s Alice, and the name of a girl whom Lewis Carroll knew at the time the books were written – there’s a lot of conspiracy theory about the relationship between the author and the girl, and just how much the Alice of the books might be based on her. It’s an interesting topic, but a quick look at Wikipedia confirms that she never lived in London (where the game is set), wasn’t an orphan (as she is in the game) and didn’t suffer a traumatic family fire as a youth (as she does in the game). Not that she has to, but it makes me wonder why the game is ploughing this particular furrow, as it seems to have nothing of any value to say about the real Alice Liddell or her life.

Set design in the game’s version of Wonderland is a problem I can see. There’s a kitchen-sink approach to the worlds you wander through, filled with bizarre imagery. It feels a bit like moving through the old props at the back of a theatre – wonderful objects and always something to look at, yet incoherent and unfocussed. I don’t want to see the scenery from a thousand games, I want to see the scenery from one that I can believe in.

It reminds me of last year’s Epic Mickey. An established cultural icon given a different coat of paint, a new riff on an old character and an old setting. And that’s what both games remain – new riffs on an old theme. It’s a little like watching a covers band – they can stretch the old tunes in a number of new directions, but they’ll struggle to eclipse the originals and will fail to really excite the listener.

And here Alice is given a gore-filled journey, presumably to pitch the game better to the core gamer. It just feels a bit stupid when the rabbit’s head explodes in a shower of blood at the start of the game. Another lowlight is the cliched game areas of Victorian London to wander through with cursing locals, prostitutes and rotten meat, orphans and poverty. The dream world is basically more realistic.

Maybe Carroll’s books are basically too much of a cliched choice in terms of videogames. There are so many games that take one through a surreal dream-like experience, that whatever was novel in the original Alice stories has been mined too often in this medium.  The very act of playing a videogame is really taking a trip down the rabbit-hole – I’m not sure the Alice stories have anything extra to really provide to a gaming experience.

2003 / DS / GameBoy Advance / IOS / Ps2 — No comments
20
Sep 11

Animal Squareheads

I hate match-3 games – I’ve played far too many of them, it seems like a really limited gaming template that doesn’t really go anywhere. I did really like the related RPG offshoot Dungeon Raid, but that was different enough to hardly bear comparison.

So why do I keep coming back to Zoo Keeper DX (2003 (2011 on IOS)?

It really is a basic match three game, pure and simple. I like the level-by-level approach whereby you have to get a certain amount of each type of animal to progress, because it gives the game a more episodic feel than the match-three games that just go on and on and on. Also the difficulty then ramps up in very clear ways level by level, so I can aim for a higher level or a higher score than my last play.

But it’s the little touches that really grab me. The little animal faces that turn into frowns if you neglect them too much, the little gamey trills and buzzes of the chain reactions, just random pleasure noises. And the music – the relentless themes that should drive you absolutely insane, but after hundreds of plays I still have no desire to switch them off.

Every new game is a trip into a parallel universe of boxy animal heads, retro-gamey music and sound, focussed escape into simple puzzledom pitched somewhere between a wordsearch and Tetris. It doesn’t need to be anything else, and game mechanics only have to work, they don’t have to break innovative new ground. I don’t feel like a zookeeper, no. But it’s a place I just consistently want to visit time and time again.

- Play Zoo Keeper (Original browser version)

2011 / Browser-Based — No comments
11
Aug 11

The End

Another web offering that I’ve really been impressed with, The End is a puzzle-based platformer with a dose of philosophy thrown in.

It uses a light/dark system by which the lengthening shadows created as objects block the light sources can be utilised by your shadow self as an alternate-universe to get to tricky spots. It’s really quite a flexible system that can be used in multiple ways – it’s not one-solution-fits-all with many of these puzzles.

And the game is anything but a throwaway flash diversion – this is a fully featured game with three zones filled with levels, boss fights that take the form of a hexagonal-piece board game complete with power-ups. There’s a sort of other-worldly feel to the game, with a strange pulsing soundtrack, clouds and alien landscapes. You’ll meet other players in a sort of pseudo gaming hub, though I think I’m right that these are NPC versions of other players that give the illusion of online play. Either way it’s a clever idea.

And then there’s the subject matter, slightly tacked-on to provide educational value, but no less interesting for that. Levels give rewards in the form of death objects, each attached to a philosophical question. For example the daredevil helmet is the reward at the end of a level which asks whether ‘you’ if it’s possible to happy only living in the moment. The player’s answers plot you on a chart in and around philosophical heavyweights. At the moment I’m most like Albert Einstein which may or may not be fitting :) . There are web links available to push me on to reading material, and profiles of great thinkers.

It’s a game commissioned for 14-19 year olds, but it deserves a much wider audience. And it’s not a short diversion – it’s a full game that is very competitive with most mid-price game releases.

- Exploring Death in ‘The End’ – Jorge Albor
- Play The End

2011 / Browser-Based — No comments
31
Jul 11

Blipzkreig

Terrific game alert.

Blipzkreig is a wonderful fast-paced riff on the sort of quick-fire strategy games like Gaicon Wars or Eufloria. You make paths for your circular mothership with the mouse, and can pick up little circles to add to your army as you go, or later generate them from in-level bases. And armies of squares are there to be vanquished. Fast-paced quick battles – no level really lasts longer than a minute or so. It’s retro-arcade not deep strategy.

I love the thoughtful level design and gentle introduction of game elements. You start with little mazes to navigate, slowly get used to picking up circles with you, get through more complex navigation with doors to unlock, and then the ‘proper’ game mechanics come in, with reinforcements generated through bases, and a procedural feel to the pitch battles. You come to realise that defeat is a possibility as well as victory, as the enemy can destroy your base just as you can destroy theirs. It’s a lovely emergent set of ideas that creep up on you through gameplay, turning into something really very complex and very organic.

It’s best idea is the little generators that power gun emplacements, doors, shields. You can ‘turn’ these with a small squad of troops, and they become crucial, but they must be guarded while they build up strength, and you end up criss-crossing against the screen to guard them from enemy attack. It also means that near-victory can be turned into defeat if a crucial generator is attacked. The game has a great balance to it, without ever not seeming casual and achievable. I could see this game getting very overblown and messy if it were anything but a flash game.

- Play The Game
- Website

2011 / Ps3 / Xbox 360 — No comments
29
Jul 11

Child Of Eden

Turn on itunes and press ctrl-t and you’ll see Apple’s latest effort at mp3 visualisation – planets of light rotate, create shapes, emit bursts of colour, in perfect time with whatever music is on your radar right now. Great fun.

Now turn on Child Of Eden (2011, 360), in which planets of light rotate, shapes fly in and out of vision, bursts of colour. Also impressive, but less procedural, and actually in many cases overblown and messy. Of course this is a game, and I love games. So it gets a pass, but only just.

Of course the primary version of Child Of Eden is as a kinect ‘experience’. And there is joy to be had here, the moments when you actually feel the rhythm and the shooting gallery go together, you’re in the zone, and there’s a transcendent feeling of synergy. Or something. I felt this, but very sporadically, and inbetween long sections of what I could class as near-boredom.

The game itself relates to games like Starblade and Space Harrier – the feeling of flight mixed with shooting gallery. And even After Burner, which I think is the closest relative in terms of gameplay, targetting for precision and spraying bullets for close-up play. But despite the unlockables and the music and rhythm and the kaliedoscopic visuals I don’t think C of E ever surpasses its influences.

And there’s a sense of heavy overblown-ness that I just didn’t ever get from the game’s spiritual predecessor, Rez. This feels like a simple game idea stretched so thin that the holes start to appear. Again I find I disagree with the majority of consumer reviews on game-length – this is not too short, it is too long. It’s illogical to look at an experience which is kind of thin and wish for more of the same, and I will never understand this reviewing trend.

2011 / IOS — No comments
28
Jul 11

Tiny Tower

Tiny Tower (2011, IOS)  is quite the hot young thing, turning heads on the social networks of IOS, and also among the chattering classes of the blogosphere. In Tiny Tower ethics, Jorge Albor basically attacks the game at a conceptual level, while Brendon Keogh’s review celebrates at face value the addictiveness of the game, and Michael Abbott’s Tiny Tower: Fail‘ sums up the dichotomy of being smitten with a game that you’re not sure is worth anything.  Whether TT belongs in the basement or the penthouse is hotly debated.

What is it? Basically a pared down social game with (imo) very nice 8-bit graphics in the style of Game Dev Story, with some cool music, and a very laid back and friendly feel. You build new floors on your tower with money that you make from the mini-businesses on the floors, serviced by employees from tge residential floors you populate. There’s not a whole lot more to it than that, though extras are unlocked with ‘tower bux’, the premium currency that you can top up in-game with real-world money.

It seems too innocent somehow to create such a range of opinions. But there’s no doubt that it creeps into your mind, and I have spent as much time thinking about the experience of playing it as playing it. There are many better games that don’t inspire me as much. I think Jamestown is a much better game but I’m struggling to put together more than a paragraph about it.

And what is more, Tiny Tower is remarkably polite for a game that relies upon micro-transactions. It is totally unlike the majority of such games that flash up potential purchases with dull regularity. I think this is actually the reason it is even debated among the blogerati – were it begging for cash all the time it would be considered too base for consideration.

In Taylor’s Tower, JP Grant celebrates, or at least acknowledges that it is efficiency, not challenge or strategy, that dominates the Tiny Tower experience…

Just as in manufacturing, the work never ends in Tiny Tower; there is no defined end point at which the goal is achieved. There is only more building, more production. There is little incentive to do anything else than figure out the most cost-effective and time-saving way to keep doing what you’re doing.

This hints at my takeaway from the game. As an experience that is basically a simplified model of capitalism in action, I think it can’t help but be interpreted as a satire. If you take Minecraft as a simple comparison, a game where you are given plenty of simple gameplay mechanics but no simple explanation of what it is you are supposed to be for, it’s hard not to take Tiny Tower as laughably simplistic. Just build upwards, create money, serve bitizens, the end. It’s not what you do, it’s how efficiently you do it. One could imagine a great ending for the game would be when you build the tower so high that it simply topples over. Try as I might I simply can’t take this game at face value, but I think that’s a good thing.

At a basic level, the game has too many limitations I think. Rather like a life spent in commerce. There’s no real option except to build businesses and house bitizens to work in them. You can’t really choose the businesses – at first I closed down the burger bar because I just didn’t want it in my tower, but I soon learned to be less selective – at some point in my tower I will have to have every sort of business. There aren’t really any meaningful choices, there’s just efficiency versus inefficiency.

But I don’t really believe in judging games for what they aren’t. Just as the mainstream games media are completely graphics-obsessed, so the blogosphere seem either gameplay-obsessed or story-obsessed, often one at the expense of the other, echoing fairly tired academic debates that don’t really hold any real-world value. Tiny Tower falls right inbetween all of these obsessions, and that is why it is a conundrum to many – they enjoy it, but don’t value that enjoyment.

In the end it seems to centre on the perceived worth of a player’s gaming hour, and the idea of this fairly undemanding and only subtly gratifying game wasting everybody’s time. It seems to me that its echoing Jonathon Blow’s stinging attack on World of Warcraft, where he seemed to hint that some systems of gratification were somehow immoral.

I just cannot buy that debate, because it’s based on totally subjective criteria. And it relies on how one judges the play experience of players that we all know are different. Worse, it relies on judging the lifestyles and worth of players themselves. I can’t help but call that what it is – elitism. I’m not saying that it’s wrong, and I’m not saying that I don’t have my own heirarchies of ‘what I think is worthwhile in gaming’, but I just wouldn’t want it to dominate discussion about gaming. Why limit ourselves, and why ringfence certain games?

The World is full of people wasting their time, in one way or another. On that basis I think criticising a game that somebody has created out of thin air to bring enjoyment to other people is wasting more time.

- Nimblebit Website

2011 / Ps3 / Xbox 360 — No comments
20
Jul 11

Fight Night Champion

Boxing delivered with blood-curdling levels of detail is surely something of a hard-sell to a gaming public used to cartoon-ish excess in its combat. In its ‘accuracy’ there’s something off-putting here, the crunch of jaws being broken in slow-motion is more likely to have viewers reaching for a cushion to hide behind than any chainsaw-weilding sci-fi shooter.

As a simulation, I don’t see how much further Fight Night Champion can go. I can see how reach, stance, quickness and tactics combine for the most realistic boxing I’ve ever seen, with levels of subtlety that the boxing fan must drool over. The only limit is the sport itself, where combat plays out to a similar story in each fight – that’s the game’s only weakness that I can see.

But as an amateur dipping my toe, it was the story mode that blew me away. The game throws you into a Rocky storyline that throws all the right punches, from the amateur fights to the Olympics to corruption in the sport to prison brawls. Most enjoyably of all the story just rolls on without menus or career mechanics, just the fights delivered with the story beats inbetween. A fantastic experience only spoilt by a hideous difficulty spike near the end.

The fighting scenarios are clever too. I had to fight with an injured right hand, or protecting a cut, or in a corrupt match where only a knockout could suffice. The story plays as part-tutorial, for which it works a treat, but also brings the game out of the sporting ghetto where such ganes traditionaly exist.

I get the sense that some gamers just don’t do sports, and sports games are certainly seen as a lesser relation. But this is a total misconception, and I absolutely feel that the sports genre, driven by year on year iterations, is probably the strongest line-up in modern gaming. EA Sports leads the way with its mind-blowing models of complexity, with FIFA probably not only one of the best-selling games in the World but also one of the best games period. 2k’s NBA series is hot on EA’s heels, and MLB The Show seems to be right up there, though its unavailable in Europe where I live. Any UK gamer’s equivalent is the Football Manager series, simpy one of the most mind-bogglingy in-depth games there has ever been.

The only danger with sports games is that they simulate so much, and with such complexity, that they actually become indistinguishable from the real-life sports they depict. Is that what we want?

2010 / PC / Xbox 360 — No comments
15
Jul 11

Gray Matter

Gray Matter is a point-and-click adventure that I tried desperately to like. There’s an intelligent attempt at a novelistic level of detail to the environments and interactions. Each location has loads of things to look at and examine. But the noble intentions are totally scuttled by one of the clunkiest game interfaces I have ever used, a left-trigger initiated action wheel of despair, that kills immersion with every single use.

Yet there are novelties here, like a magic trick system by which you follow given instructions using icons and avatars to construct the building blocks of tricks which then become crucial plot devices. I think there are thematic tie-ins here between the magician, the huckster, the psychic, the occult, the fringe psychologist, the fringe scientist who you presumably meet later in the game having tricked your way into their house.

Basically I felt guilty bailing on a game that probably, at some point, will have intersting subject matter despite the clunky dialogue and drama. But at the same time there are hundreds of ‘mystery’ adventure games available in browsers that hit the mark with more regularity than this game.

Actually, on the day I played Gray Matter I also played the 1980 game Mystery House. Also involves a spooky house and a mystery, and clues and such. And which, in terms of interface and satisfaction levels, was probably the better game, despite being 31 years older.

- Official website

2010 / PC / Xbox 360 — No comments
14
Jul 11

A.R.E.S. Extinction Agenda

A.R.E.S. is a Metroid-a-like too in love with its influences to ever breathe on its own. Large colourful graphics just the right side of cartoony to retain credibility as a futuristic run-and-gun shooter. Bosses of credible spectacle, and just enough variety to keep this player onboard. But there’s just not enough going on under the hood to really recommend – no hook, no real originality, a threadbare storyline that doesn’t hit any high notes. This game works, nut is that alone a high-enough recommendation?

- A.R.E.S. Website

PC — No comments
13
Jul 11

Game-heavy

Another ludicrous overspend on the Steam sale. There is a point at which good value becomes bad value, because once again I’ve ended up spending my luxury budget on PC games rather than other things. Like food.

For the record I bought: Solar 2 (again), The Witcher 2, ARES, Atom Zombie Smasher, Lume, Hoard, Jamestown, The Longest Journey double pack, Frozen Synapse, Sanctum, Dwarfs, Capsized, Anomaly Warzone Earth, Magicka, SpaceChem, Vertex Dispenser, Your Doodles Are Bugged, Just Cause 2, and probably a bunch more I’ve forgotten.

What is a growing frustration is the organisational issues involved in being a PC gamer. With special offers appearing daily on various direct download outlets it’s a job to keep up with my existing purchases let alone the future ones. Steam has become almost a platform of its own, yet I have games on Big Fish or Impulse or Green Man or GoG. And then there’s facebook and apparently Google’s upcoming game service to think about. Then the flash worlds of Kongregate or Newgrounds. And then the desperately old-fashioned idea of having games on your start menu or hidden away on your hard drive. Hardly any of these gaming ‘platforms’ are very compatible with each other.

I actually need some sort of organisational software to remind me what it is that I want to play at the moment from the hundreds of available titles that I have at easy reach.

Please note, this is not a middle-class whinge. I appreciate that this is not a problem at the level encountered by a soldier or a nurse. It is an almost insignificant problem compared to drought or war. I appreciate that.

But I think it is of relevance to the gaming industry. The PC markrt is becoming very fragmented, and services like steam aren’t necessarily the saviours they might seem. It used to be that my PC collection sat on a shelf, it now sits in a number of virtual shelves that I cannot see. And the shelf never becomes less cluttered, because nobody throws out their virtual collection. The result will be that new products will find it harder and harder to compete with player’s existing collections. It’s already got to the point where I consider myself to have an unhealthy backlog of purchased games to play and I don’t see that sorting itself out in the near future.

2011 / Xbox 360 — No comments
13
Jul 11

Lootfest

Lootfest, a great-looking action RPG with just enough meat on the bones to make its simple combat and limited depth palettable. I can’t help playing it and thinking of areas in which a sequel could so greatly improve it. A world instead of an island, different villages rather than just one, actual dungeons to explore, online multiplayer. The basics of gameplay are absolutely spot on here, and Lootfest 2, if it builds on this promise, could be a Minecraft-level contender I think.

2011 / IOS — No comments
13
Jul 11

Hard Lines

Hard Lines is superb, gaming crack in light-cycle form.

In my teens my greatest success as a bedroom coder was a light-cycle game on the Spectrum and then the Amiga, which was a minor hit among my close friends. Inspired I suppose by Tron, although by the time the Disney film hit my consciousness the classic light-cycle games were long-gone from the arcades of my youth. It’s like a classic game type with no actual classics to refer to. Blind Alley, a long-forgotten version on the Spectrum, was of very high quality.

This new version throws in the kitchen sink – some great music, a multitude of AI competitors, enough game modes to keep anyone happy. But most importantly it’s still lines on a grid – no need for flashy 3D here, this is a gameplay jaunt, not a spectacle.

To say it works perfectly is an understatement. Frantic action, perfectly pitched. I love the little phrases that the lines say, they give the game just the right amount of character and attitude. The risk-reward is there, the score moments encourage tactical choices, the game-modes offer different experience.

The bottom-line – at the end of every game I am absolutely compelled to press the restart button. What higher recommendation is there?

- Gameplay Trailer
- Spilt Milk Studios

2011 / PC / Ps3 / Xbox 360 — No comments
12
Jul 11

Crysis 2

Nano-technology fetishists rejoice in  Crysis 2, which takes a bold delight in destroying New York during its large-scale firefights against shiny-suited army squads, futuristic troopers and space alien forces, often all at once. It seems nothing exists here that hasn’t been infected, augmented, altered – a fan of plain old humanity will find nothing to enjoy here.

For once the zombies do get the day off – they’re actually in-game but restricted to squirming virus-victims on long-abandoned medical stretchers or twitching on subway benches. I spent the whole game expecting them to get up, grab a nearby pipe or crowbar, and start hacking at my nanosuit, but it never happens. Or rather it probably did happen in alpha or beta but was cut.

What passes for fun in this game is looking at the next skyscraper and wondering how it will be destroyed, or by what ludicrous plot twist the environment can be deformed. The winner in this competition is the moment central park literally takes off to become an island-in-the-sky fortress, a phenomena that never comes close to being explained.

I loved the feeling of power here. When in trouble I just switch on my shield, or slip into cloak mode and flank the enemy. It really does work brilliantly, particularly in such open combat areas that seem to play out differently for each approach.

What doesn’t work so well is the game’s length in single-player, which takes refreshingly good combat mechanics and repeats them so often that the novelty of the game wears off. I began the game in awe of its great combat, and ended it considering it another Call-of-Duty mixed with Halo also-ran. A pity, because the quallty bar is set ludicrously high here.

The multiplayer hits the right notes for me, but ony within a well-worn formula. Matchmaking took seconds for me, a rarity on console shooters I find, I loved the levelling up in-game, welcomed the speed with which I was respawned and re-specced. Of particular note the radio commands that kept each team objective clear, and gave clues to how to approach them.

But I end up wondering what I take away. An exciting game experience. Another silly set of plot twists with characters I barely get to know, dramatic beats missed or mis-handled. Another game absolutely in thrall to the hardcore gamer, that is desperate to find more intelligent dramatic moments but only for those few precious seconds between combat. I’m grateful for these crumbs of comfort, but hardly satisfied.

2011 / Browser-Based — No comments
11
Jul 11

Keita

Yeah I guess I’m a sucker for hype. The news that Katamari legend Keita Takahashi has joined the developer of ‘social game’ Glitch has suddenly got me interested in their product. Yes the gameplay doesn’t look all that interesting from the trailer, but at least it seems to exist in the sort of surreal fantasy ballpark as Katamari or Noby Noby Boy. The game is from Tiny Speck, and it’s in alpha testing at the moment.

- Glitch website

Uncategorized — 1 comment
10
Jul 11

The Online Skill Gap

I read an interesting analysis of the online game.

At first the playing field is level. There’s no barrier to entry for the new player or the beginner, because everyone is in the same boat.

But after a while a heirarchy starts to appear. The good players have got ahead, and it’s up to the rest to play catch-up. This can be frustrating for the new player, especially if the game pits them against the best of the best immediately. This was one of the triumphs of WOW – the closed-off beginner sections that ease you into the game.

Eventually, the uber-players dominate. These are players who seem to spend every waking hour on the game, with skills that would win them gold medals if there were ever such an event in the gaming olympics. This is where the online skill-gap becomes so great that it can destroy the game – the online tipping point.

I remember Gears of War developers talking about their online component. They loved playing it for the first few days – they are playing the game they made, and they have an in-built advantage. But after a few days the other players have already become so good that they can’t play it without getting utterly burned.

Gears of War isn’t alone. Fifa is like that. Skate is like that. Call Of Duty is a bear-pit. The speed runs that you can download and compete against (in ghost form) on Mirror’s Edge are frankly unbelievable. Street Fighter has been like this for years – you almost cannot ‘begin’ at that game anymore, you will simply be destroyed.

What can be done about it?

One answer is to simply remove competitive skill from the forefront of the game. Unfortunately that risks making games rather boring – most gamers need a challenge. Most MMOs have a built-in system where you can avoid conflict or competition with other players. MMOs seem to attract women players more than any other genre. It’s entirely possible to see the whole point of social gaming as an attempt to avoid this game-destroying phenomenon.

Co-operative play is another model of course, though even that can be ruined by those who know every last corner of a campaign or an instance and simply rush through it, draining it of all fun. Left 4 Dead has a clever system – players who rush forward because they know the levels so well will very likely be picked off by waves of zombies that they cannot possibly repel.

LittleBigPlanet is a model. You still meet other players who have totally mastered the run and jump movement and glide balletically through every space. But there’s no real advantage to them doing so – they have to wait for you for a start, and if you keep dying they won’t get very far. And even if they completely outclass you, there’s no ranking system in LBP other than the one that measures the quality of user-made levels. And if someone excels at that, it’s to the benefit of every other player.

Another interesting idea comes from Noby Noby Boy. As individual players stretch around in their single-player games, they are given the option to upload their ‘progress’ to Girl, a massive online worm who reaches across the galaxy to discover new worlds based on what the entirety of Noby players do. It’s a co-op model where everybody is working together. It’s a very weird component in a game that actually isn’t a game – progress is almost accidental. But nevertheless it’s an interesting model – the idea that every player is working together to a common goal.

But actually, I look at Counter-Strike for my ideal model. A decade old, CS avoids the levelling up that gives experienced players an in-built advantage. It emphasises team play – you cannot simply ‘win’ based on your own skill, but in how you encourage and help others. But crucially it has the luck factor, the headshot – one headshot equals a kill, and even the low-skilled players can fluke it from time to time. There aren’t that many, or certainly enough, games that have ‘fluking it’ built into their design.

There’s a good board-game analogy here. Chess is a brilliant game, but if we had to play Garry Kasparov’s online every time we logged in, it would quickly lose its charm. I’ve tried it, and it does. However, nobody could level that same criticism at poker – the ultimate game of Davids and Goliaths. However bad you are you still have a shot at beating the very best in the World over a hand or over a session – that’s what makes it addictive and welcoming to new players.

In gaming terms, there are probably too many chesses and not enough pokers.

2011 / Xbox 360 — No comments
09
Jul 11

Kinect Fun Labs

So Kinect Fun Labs is a virtual place where fun is had in a laboratory. Unlike real-world science. It’s a free collection of minigames for Kinect that’s available to every Xbox 360 owner with the right scientific apparatus (a Kinect).

Actually what it means is that many of the experiences created for Kinect are not very meaningful, and certainly not anything you might expect to pay for. So they’re given the ‘fun’ title to distinguish them from products of any gravitas, and stuck in the ‘labs’ to excuse their actual lack of quality.

No doubt Microsoft were planning a Kinect Mini-Games boxed release, realised it wasn’t going to pass the quality thresh-hold, and bailed on the concept. This is the result.

Part of the problem is that Kinect just doesn’t work that well. I spent half an hour with my daughter trying to get the fucking Kinect to scan in an object using the camera, so that it could be used in a virtual puppet show. It was a pair of oven gloves, yet the Kinect couldn’t see it, or couldn’t register it, or did register it and make it look completely stupid and cropped in all the wrong places. Is this the exciting new world Microsoft have discovered?

Once we did get the oven gloves scanned in, the Fun Lab slapped a pair of eyes on them then jiggled the object about on the screen for 15 seconds. But don’t worry if this sounds dull, because you could change the kind of googly eyes that the object had.

More impressive was the bit of tech that creates an avatar actually based on your features through the camera. Or at least it would be impressive if I hadn’t already seen the same thing on a 3DS. With the twist here being that you can’t keep the avatar you make. Because this is a fun lab, and there is nothing of real value here.

I really like the Kinect, and I want it to (a) work properly and (b) be used in effective ways within interactive entertainment. Truth is, it’s struggling to do either.

2011 / PC / Ps3 / Xbox 360 — No comments
08
Jul 11

F.3.A.R.

What on Earth does one say about F.3.A.R.? I only say anything because I fear without this post I would forget I ever played it.

It offers entertaining first-person shooting, mostly against squads of soldiers. Remember those squads of soldiers that you fought in F.E.A.R., and who were reprised in F.E.A.R. 2? Yeah, those guys. They’re back. They still shout instructions loudly into their radios – ‘he’s behind the crate’. In enviromments literally teeming with crates to hide behind these soldiers need to be more specific, perhaps use a numbering system for the crates.

So my experience with the game was one long session, maybe 5 hours long, of just shooting soldiers on various levels. Then when I came back to continue my ‘adventure’ the next day, I booted up the game and then a voice in my head, said ‘why bother?’. So I stopped.

So the shooting ain’t so bad. You can possess enemies. The multiplayer has a horde mode, and another mode where you possess enemies and collect skulls. The co-op campaign mode makes it slighty ‘funner’.

I have noticed one problem with games with a 3 in the title. They seem to be content to continue a narrative inherited from a previous installment rather than find an internal justification to exist. This is true of the third Matrix movie and Return Of The Jedi. It is not true of Back To The Future Part III, which has an enclosed story of its own as well as the hallmarks of the series. In the 5 hours of Fear 3 that I played there was little more than a vague idea that I was headed somewhere, which at a basic level is just not good enough for a story-based entertainment.

I wonder why this game was made. The first Fear title had good combat but overall both games were renowned for their mediocrity. Perhaps there’s a hope somewhere that at some point the quality will just take a step upwards and that the series will become a prime triple-A blockbuster release. But at the moment this game seems to occupy the market position that industry commentators seem to suggest cannot exist any-longer – the full-priced mid-quality titles that should get squeezed by the blockbusters on one side, and the low-priced downloadables on the other.

Why do I keep coming back? I suppose because I liked the first game despite its obvious flaws (of the endlessly repeating warehouse/office kind). I would like to play a game that has a good story, genuine scares, and some action as well. Perhaps that’s what keeps the series going – the mere hint of a mix of things that theoretically sound appealing. Even though they generally aren’t in practice.

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