Ninja Blues: I’m writing there now!
Alright, I’ve got good news and I’ve got weird news.
The good news is, I’m writing about games again! The weird news is, I’m not posting it here anymore.
If you read this site, chances are you also know about my buddy Jarenth and his site Blue Screen of Awesome. He does his weekly column Indie Wonderland, and he’s managed to stick with his weekly routine while I sort of dropped off the face of the blogging world.
So, why did I drop off the face of the blogging world? Well, when I started out I was also sticking to a weekly schedule — a post every Friday. Once I picked up some regular readers I got motivated to post more often, and so I tossed the schedule out the window. Since I was posting on days other than Friday, I didn’t feel the need to post on Friday. Then eventually a week went by without me posting. I felt bad about it, but oh well. Eventually I hit two weeks. Then three. Then four.
As most of you probably know, I suffer from clinical depression. Depression is kind of like an emotional bully that stands behind you all the time, constantly whispering into your ear about how much you suck. When I saw that I hadn’t posted in awhile, my depression told me I was failing all my readers by not posting anything. I felt immense pressure to start writing again, but I felt like my posts had to be really good to make up for the time wasted, and most of the time I was too afraid to pick it back up.
Jarenth originally intended for BSOA to be a collaborative effort between him and his friends, but his friends all dropped off the site, one by one, and it eventually became a solo effort. He and I discussed both of our blogs, and we came to the conclusion that I would feel less pressured if the site I posted on was still getting posts without my constant input. And he was still keen on the idea of a collaborative site.
So, since neither of our individual sites went according to our plans, why don’t we pool our efforts into a new site?
Spoiler: We did exactly that! So feel free to visit ninja-blues.com. Jarenth will continue to write Indie Wonderland posts there, and I have my own column called Talk of the Ninja. (Get it?!) We even commissioned my wonderful and talented girlfriend Val to make the artwork.
I’ve already written two posts (one about Plants vs. Zombies 2, which you should totally play, and one about the prospect of a game about a loving and fulfilling relationship, because it was Valentine’s Day and wouldn’t you know I’ve been feeling lovey-dovey lately.) I have more posts queued, and I have plans to make content of a sort you haven’t seen from me before.
What does this mean for Ninja Game Den? It means the site will continue to do what it’s been doing: collecting Internet dust. But assuming you follow this site because you like my writing, rather than because you like the Ninja Gaiden pun in the blog’s name, then you’ll find what you’re looking for at Ninja Blues. I guess what I’m trying to say is: The good news is that I’m writing again, and the other good news is that my work is sharing a home with that of another video game blogger you might be interested in.
Recent Internet stuff I’ve made
Alright, so I haven’t been posting here, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been releasing any content online. I figured I’d let any people that might still consider themselves “fans” of this blog to know three recent things I’ve done:
1. My friends and I have started a Youtube gaming channel!
Oh, you mean Insert Game Here?
No. We decided to scrap IGH and start a new one. We stopped uploading videos on it awhile ago and when we all gathered around to start again, we didn’t like what we had. We didn’t like that we tied ourselves down to a full playthrough of a super-long game, we didn’t like that having all four (and even five, later on) of us present at once made the commentary a clusterfuck, and we didn’t like that we tried from the start to use our “usernames” rather than our actual names.
So we’re just going to pretend we never made any of that shit, and now we’ve started up a new channel called Self Checkout.
Self Checkout? Why’s it called that? I thought this was supposed to be about video games?
Here, our intro video sort of explains it:
Note: I’m the one in the Hawaiian shirt and straw hat. Yeah, my name’s Justin. That’s the J in JPH.
We’ve posted two videos so far, I believe. I’m not in either of them. We’re going to mostly play games in groups of two or three; the four of us will probably only be together during party games like Smash Bros. I have my own plan for a solo LP, and our new capture card just might allow me to follow through with it.
2. My partner-in-crime Val and I have started a podcast that’s actually not about video games!
You do stuff that isn’t video games?
I know, right? It surprised me too. The podcast is called Read It And Gripe, and in it we read and criticize the hell out of poorly-written young adult fiction. Here’s our first episode:
We read the first chapter of Evermore, which is presumably a hilariously stupid romance/melodrama/tragedy novel, if the hilariously stupid first chapter is anything to go by, but it’s also a playground for nitpickers like us.
We’ve already got a list of shitty books to read the first chapters of, but if you’d like to suggest one, feel free!
3. I wrote a guest post on friend Jarenth’s blog Blue Screen of Awesome.
It’s about a recent indie game called Rogue Legacy, and the post is pretty much the sort of thing you’d expect to read here. I sent it to Jarenth instead because he’s been too busy doing science stuff in the States to write his own weekly post.
So yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to lately. I have a lot more project ideas, but inspiration is hard, damn it.
The Resistance vs. The Game of Life
BEFORE WE START: I’m not going to pretend that this will mark the return of regular updates from NGD. As I said on my other blog, I have neither the need nor the inclination to post every week like I used to, so I’m just gonna post whenever I get the sudden urge to write a big thing like this. No empty promises this time. Here’s one post.
Board games have, for over a century, been commonly used for family nights. You know, the parents and the kids sit around the table, roll some dice, share some laughs, and the little one will probably end up flipping the table in the end? Fun for everyone.
But as Geek & Sundry’s well-received show TableTop aptly demonstrates, board games also have a lot of potential for use at geek parties. And with the internet being an invaluable tool for advertising and purchasing products, we’ve seen independent developers flourishing lately with all sorts of interesting and inventive games.
Last night was my friend’s birthday party, so some friends and I came to her house and played two board games: The Resistance and The Game Of Life. There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of that first one.
This was my first time playing The Resistance; all I knew going in was that it paved the groundwork for the greatest TableTop episode ever:
(Seriously, if you have a spare half hour, watch that episode. It’s solid gold.)
So, here’s the gist of The Resistance. You’re all part of a resistance against an evil authority figure, but the catch is that a small number of you are actually spies from the government sent in to sabotage the Resistance’s plan. (In the TableTop episode there were two spies out of five players. In our game there were three spies out of eight players.) The spies are chosen randomly by drawing cards and no identities are revealed. At the start, the rest of the players have to keep their eyes shut while the spies get to see who they all are. Then they shut their eyes, everyone opens their eyes, and the game begins.
Each round one player is deemed captain, rotating in clockwise order, and that player chooses who will go on the mission. Here, let me show you this:
See that board taking up the bottom left of the picture? That board shows each of the five missions that play out during the course of a game. The number on each one indicates how many players have to go. So, three players have to go on the first mission, four on the second, etc. Once those people are chosen, all players have to vote on whether to approve the mission or reject it. If the majority votes on approving, the mission goes on; if it’s rejected, the mission is cancelled, the captain’s chair moves to the next player, and that person gets to pick for the mission.
Once it’s approved, each player on the mission gets a Pass card and a Fail card. The Resistance members have to choose pass, and there’s no reason for them to choose otherwise anyway. The spies can choose either to pass or fail. And the real kicker: other than the fourth round, all it takes is one Fail card for the mission to bomb.
If three missions succeed, the Resistance wins. If three missions fail, the spies win.
Let me give you a rundown of how our game played out. Bear in mind that to tell this story properly, I have to explain how the game works. If that seems like it’d be boring to read, skip to the picture of the gorilla and the shark.
I am an incredible MS Paint artist.
Person F was the first captain. She picked herself, me, and C. Everyone approved, and the cards were put down, shuffled and revealed. One of them was a fail. First mission failed! At least one of us three was a spy! I told them I wasn’t a spy, but they didn’t listen to me. Of course, none of us listened to C or F when they claimed they weren’t spies. I squinted at C and came to the conclusion that she was totally a spy because she made a weird face. I told her this, and she made more weird faces at me.
G was second captain. He picked himself, D, A, and E. We all approved, and this time two of the cards were Fail! Two failures in a row! That meant the Resistance had to succeed all three other missions in order to win. I thought we were screwed right then and there.
But then A pointed out that this gave us a lot of information. By playing so aggressively, they showed that all three spies have been in a mission so far — this meant we knew that B was absolutely not a spy. This also meant that only one person out of F, C and I were spies. I had to use this knowledge as captain of the third mission.
I picked myself, since clearly I’m not a spy, I mean come on, I keep telling you I’m not a spy! I also picked A; since he was pointing out so much useful information about who may or may not be a spy, I figured he couldn’t possibly be one of them. I picked B, because as previously established, he was 100% trustworthy. As for the last one… I had to pick E as an estimated guess based on body language. He just didn’t seem like he had anything to hide.
We approved the mission, played our cards, and… Four successes. Okay, phew. We absolutely know now that all four of us are legitimate Resistance members; after all, if one of us was a spy, he’d have just played the Fail card and ended the game right there.
The fourth mission, as I mentioned earlier, requires two fail cards in order to bomb. It was A’s turn, and he obviously picked the four of us guaranteed non-traitors. He had to pick one more. After a moment of thinking, I pointed out that we knew for a fact G and D were spies; out of the four from Mission 2, we already established A and E as non-spies. So he picked Person C — again, estimated guess. Not that it mattered a whole lot; we were guaranteed to win that round because four of us were clean.
Approvals all around, and five success cards played.
A: “Okay, so now we know who’s good. Just pick the same people again!”
Me: “No, no, no! She might have just played a success card to get on our good side so we’d pick her to make us fail this round!”
A: “Oh, shit. You’re right. She might be a spy…”
C: “I’m not a spy, stop calling me a spy!”
It all boiled down to this: C or F. One of the two was a spy, and B had to figure out which one.
Me: “I think it’s C. She’s been making weird faces!”
C: “YOUR FACE IS WEIRD!”
Me: “It’s clearly her. I mean, look at F, she just looks all normal.”
A: “Actually, F has been sitting quietly in her chair trying not to attract attention this whole time…”
Me: “No, it- actually, you’re right.”
A: “I think it’s her.”
Me: “It’s totally her.”
F: “What?”
Me: “Pick C! She’s not the spy!”
C: “I KNOW! THAT’S WHAT I SAID!”
B picked himself, me, A, E, and C.
Approved.
Cards passed down…
Drumroll please…….
Successes across the board!
We came to the conclusion afterward that we won mostly because of how aggressively the spies played early on. It gave us way more information than they intended.
So I hope this has given you an idea of why I had an absolute blast with The Resistance. By the standards of most board games it has very simple mechanics, but those mechanics are finely tuned and calculated to make the perfect storm of teamwork, uncertainty, suspicion, and deception. Person A and I put on our thinking hats and analyzed the situation from top to bottom and that gave us a huge upperhand, but it didn’t make us win outright — we still had to observe how each player was acting and come to conclusions based on subtle cues.
Also: Person C was the Birthday Girl. And I accused her of being a spy almost the entire game. Yeah, she was pissed about that.
Anyway, after that we played The Game Of Life.
I won’t go into great detail explaining the systems underneath The Game Of Life (or LIFE, as it’s come to be known), since it’s far too complicated and you’ve probably already played it anyway. The short version is, you randomly draw a “career” card and a “salary” card and then take turns spinning a wheel to determine how many spaces you move each turn. The salary cards determine how much money you’ll get at each regular pay-day space, and they vary from $20,000 to $100,000 — considering the winner is the person to accumulate the most money by the end, whoever gets the $100,000 card is going to have a huge advantage, simply because of luck.
Then again, almost everything else in the game is based on luck as well.
Most of the game you just spin the wheel, move your piece and either gain money or lose money based on the tile you land on. There are rare occasions in which you get to choose which direction you move on a brief branching path, but other than that, you’re just spinning and hoping for the best. There are many games that factor in dice-rolls or other forms of randomness to add uncertainty, but these games usually at least involve the player in some way. In LIFE there’s practically no strategy, skill or thought involved at all. After a certain point I almost felt like letting Person A spin the wheel for me on my turns, since I clearly wasn’t an important factor in whether I would win or lose.
I don’t know if this is intentional or not. It’s been said by many that Monopoly was designed specifically to be frustrating to play because it was supposed to be a biting commentary on unrestrained capitalism. Maybe this game is a commentary on how random and luck-based real life is? If so, it does a great job of conveying how much life sucks. I’ve also heard the excuse that the game is “meant for kids,” and that excuse I don’t buy, because I remember hating loss based on random chance even when I was little. If I lose, I want to know it was my fault and why so I can work on it in my next attempt.
Between the two games we played, I can’t see how LIFE could be construed in any way as better. As I said earlier, The Resistance is simple, but every mechanic, every aspect of it exists for a specific and important reason. From the number of players per mission to the voting system to the two-fail requirement on mission four, it’s all carefully designed around a gradually increasing sense of tension that almost always raises to a thrilling finale. LIFE, on the other hand, is a giant pile of random elements that either give or take points for no discernible reason other than because you spun the thing and a thing happened.
Then again…
We talked about each game as we were playing through LIFE, since we clearly didn’t have anything to talk about regarding what was happening in the present moment. I pointed out how much less fun I was having than when I was playing Resistance, but Birthday Girl said the opposite; it turns out while Mr. A and I were analyzing the situation and weighing options, C was getting bored of the talking and just wanted to go on with the game. We pointed out that talking and figuring it out is the whole point of The Resistance, and she essentially responded with, (paraphrased) “Well, yeah, but I was getting bored. I just wanted to hurry up and play it, you know?” Person F expressed similar feelings.
I suppose that while The Resistance is undoubtedly a triumph of minimalist game design, it’s also true that not everybody is an over-analyzing, metagaming nerd like me. I still think that LIFE is an over-bloated mess, and I won’t be bringing it to the table if/when I’m a father, but I can acknowledge that it has its appeal for some people.
Different people play games for different reasons.
Insert Game Here
My clumsy adventures into Let’s Play territory continue! A few personal friends and I have started a Youtube channel called Insert Game Here. The first game we’re covering is Super Mario Sunshine. Here’s episode 1:
And here’s episode 2.
Yes, I know the audio for our voices isn’t great. What I don’t know is why episode 2 is so much quieter than episode 1. Bear in mind that I’m not doing the editing this time.
We haven’t decided on what sort of release schedule we’re going for, and we don’t know what we’ll be able to keep up with until we turn this into a routine. Our own work/school schedules tend to conflict with one another, so we don’t know how often we can record episodes. I guess we’ll find out. The important thing to note is that since I’m not editing or uploading the videos, you don’t have to worry about me being lazy and putting off episode uploads for long periods of time.
Alright, now I want to explain what I was talking about with regard to moving platforms in episode 2. I was hoping Aeroguns would add a diagram like I suggested, but he didn’t. In a nutshell, most game devs haven’t figured out how to incorporate the law of inertia into their physics engines yet. The law of inertia states that an object will maintain its velocity until acted upon by an outside force. When I started talking about an airplane and making hand-gestures you couldn’t see, I was talking about this:
If someone or something were to drop out of a moving plane, it wouldn’t just dive straight downward; it would begin moving in the same direction as the plane, and then gravity and wind resistance would gradually turn its direction downward. The same applies if you jump in an elevator, or off the roof of a car as Aeroguns suggested. (Don’t try that at home, kids!)
But in a game, when you jump off of a platform or in an elevator, your momentum isn’t preserved at all. If you jump in an elevator moving down in a typical FPS, you’ll suddenly fly up to the ceiling, and then slowly glide back down to the bottom, and then take falling damage when you land. That’s not how physics works.
Anyway, in other news: Holy shit, has it actually been almost two months since I last updated this blog? Geez. Sorry about that, guys. I got a new job last month, but that doesn’t explain all of the inactivity. I’m gonna try to post more in the near future.
It isn’t too late for a Games of Note 2012, is it…?
LPing is Hard
Hey, do you guys watch Game Grumps? I do. I love JonTron, I love Egoraptor, and I think their Let’s Play show is great so far. I’m especially loving their playthrough of Sonic 2006. I had no idea how bewildering the game is. It’s like every single level has at least one thing horribly, hilariously wrong with it.
Recently a lot of Game Grumps fans have become frustrated by the Sonic ’06 playthrough. I’ve noticed many comments on Youtube and the GameGrumps subreddit complaining about them missing obvious hints about where to go and what to do, and then getting stuck. Here’s an example from today…
In the episode they don’t know what to do when they get to the water. They know Silver (the character they’re playing as) has telekinetic powers, but they don’t know how to use that to get across a very long jump. They try lifting a crate and moving it across with them on top, but it wouldn’t go far enough, and the crates don’t float above the water, so they just die as soon as their power runs out.
When you first reach that point, Silver says “I think I can knock that structure down.” He says it once, without warning. He doesn’t repeat it unless you die and get to that point in the level again. This happened. I think it popped up a total of three times. What this means is that you’re supposed to throw a crate at the wooden structure-thing far ahead of you, which will knock it down so you can jump onto the platform.
So people on Youtube and Reddit tell them they’re idiots for not noticing it.
Here’s the thing. I used to get angry about stuff like this too. I used to get so frustrated whenever (say) Josh on Spoiler Warning made some stupid mistake or couldn’t tell where he was supposed to go even though it was obvious. It used to make my blood boil. “I know he’s a smart guy, how can he not see this shit?!”
Then I tried making my own LP, and I realized that it’s harder than it looks to us viewers. As a viewer, all you’re doing is watching and listening. Jon and Arin are watching, playing the game, having a conversation with a friend, and making sure they aren’t being too boring for the show. You have to divide your attention between your game, your friend, and your show. If you focus on the game, your show will be boring. If you focus on providing entertainment for your audience, then, well, you’ll make stupid mistakes in the game now and then, as Jon and Arin do.
This is harder than it sounds. Don’t believe me? Try it yourself. I have, and I can attest that it requires a lot of practice to make your show anywhere near watchable while also not completely fucking up in the game. But if you’ve never done it, it’s impossible to tell from watching.
Now, as for this particular problem Jon and Arin ran into, let’s consider the following:
- As I said before, Silver only makes the comment about “knocking down a structure” once. Well, once per life spent.
- Most of the tips in Sonic ’06 are vague at best and flat-out useless at worst. And if we’re talking about what Sonic (or Silver, or any other player character) says out loud, well, I can’t tell you how many times he says something stupid and unhelpful. It’s no use!
- This is the first time the game has ever required you to knock down any structure whatsoever.
- The structure is pretty damn far away from the platform you’re on, and it doesn’t really stand out. Hell, I saw Silver’s “hint,” and I wasn’t even sure what they needed to do until they spent several minutes trying to figure it out.
So yeah, if anybody is willing to say this is completely Jon and Arin’s fault rather than the game having bad presentation and horrible design, then I’m not sure what to say to that.
As I said at the beginning, I’m a fan of the show, and I’ll admit that that probably affects my reaction to all this. But I’m also speaking as someone who’s tried his hand at LPing, and I can tell you it’s tough work to do well. It’s easy to think someone is an idiot because he made some stupid mistakes in his LP, but remember that playing a game for a co-commentator LP is very, very different from playing a game by yourself, for yourself.
Also, merry Christmas, I guess.
Ninja Blues – Castle Crashers ep. 2.2: Accidental Guest Stars
So, uh, we kind of accidentally had Shamus and Josh from Twenty Sided show up at the 2:26 mark. We’d forgotten we were sitting in their ventrilo server doing nothing.
For some stupid reason the last four minutes of the video got chopped off during the uploading process. I blame Youtube. Sadly, this means you don’t get to see Jarenth lose against the boss, and then against me in the arena. Yeah, I totally beat him in the arena. Twice. Though the first time wasn’t exactly fair (I jumped on a horse).
Also, I know why my voice audio comes before Jarenth’s; it’s because internet lag is a thing. What I’m wondering is why my voice audio comes before the in-game video and audio. If you pay attention you’ll notice that I talk about things a second or two before they happen, or as they happen. It’s something to do with Fraps, I’m sure.
Anyway, this is the last episode we recorded right at the start. Now we actually get to play it again! Stay tuned.
Borderlands 2
I want to talk about Borderlands 2, but first, for the sake of not feeling sleazy, I have to offer a disclaimer.
Earlier this year, I interned at Gearbox Software.
It wasn’t a long internship; I was only there for a week. I’d tell you about what things I did or what my experience was like, but I’m legally obligated not to.
I’m telling you this just in case of the possibility that working for Gearbox has made me biased with regard to their game. I don’t really think it has, since I can wholeheartedly say that I’m not looking forward to Aliens: Colonial Marines, that I don’t care even slightly about the Brothers in Arms series, and that the dev team unofficially calling an easy-to-use skill tree in Borderlands 2 “girlfriend mode” is nothing short of disgraceful.
But you’re free to conclude for yourself whether or not I’m “biased,” I suppose.
Anyway, now to talk about Borderlands 2.
Actually, no; first let’s get everyone up to speed. As I’ve said before, Borderlands was a game I both loved and hated. The most novel aspect of the game was easily the gun variety. There were so many guns ranging in varying aesthetic styles, from the old-fashioned Jakobs six-shooters to the sci-fi themed Maliwan elemental blasters to the military-esque Dahl weaponry. And more importantly, all these guns had different attributes that really affected gameplay in meaningful ways.
Gearbox took the old dungeon crawler template of providing a bazillion different weapon drops of varying stats, but instead of the usual “critical hit chance,” “arcane resist,” “dexterity” and whatever other small numbers that mean nothing to me in terms of running around and hitting bad guys with a sword, these weapons affect things like reload speed, weapon capacity, and accuracy. Yes, both of these hunks of metal are shotguns, but while that shotgun deals more damage and reloads more quickly, that shotgun has far more accuracy so you can deal more damage from a distance.
What this means is that different weapons will appeal to different people based on their own individual playstyles. As you’re looting all these guns, you have to look at them not in terms of which has the highest damage per second, but in terms of how you would use it. This made weapon choice feel more important and more interesting than many of the Diablo-style murder-a-thons that Borderlands took inspiration from.
Unfortunately, while constantly looting guns and swapping them out to find the one that was just your style was a blast, the rest of the game felt rather stale. The environments were samey, the interface was messy, it was plagued by a multitude of bugs, and worst of all, the narrative felt like a total afterthought. The plot was so simplistic it was practically nonexistant, and the NPCs never moved or did anything interesting while on screen, so the game never felt like much more than an endless cycle of shooting dudes, looting corpses and trying out guns.
If you got some friends to play with you, the social experience combined with the gun variety made it just enough fun to overlook all that. I played through the game four times, but I never really felt satisfied with it.
Now that I’ve finished Borderlands 2, I can say that I’m still feeling the love, but I no longer feel the hate. Unlike its predecessor, I feel it’s safe to say that Borderlands 2 is unqualifyingly really damn good, even in single player. And I’ll tell you why:
This man is why.
Anthony Burch, the guy behind Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’? He’s who they got to handle the writing for Borderlands 2, and he did a brilliant job.
I think the best example of how well he handled the material is with Claptrap. Like many others, I hated Claptrap in the first Borderlands. They tried to sell him as a cute, helpful little robot friend, but he didn’t fit that role. He was so irritating, noisy and intrusive that he’s become infamous among gamers. Even fans of the game generally found him detestable.
Having said that: I love Claptrap in Borderlands 2. And he wasn’t replaced with a different character who also happened to be named Claptrap, like Shaundi was in Saints Row 3; all they had to change was the way he’s perceived by the rest of the world. In this game, Claptrap isn’t presented as a cute robot friend; he’s treated as the annoying friend that nobody else in the group really wants to deal with. Nobody is outright cruel to him, but they don’t respect him either. They treat him like what he is; a necessary nuisance. He has good intentions, but he’s irritating as hell, and this time, everybody knows it.
He’s still the same character, but this time he’s endearing and funny. He managed to make me genuinely laugh more than once, and he’s not the only character who did so. This is the biggest improvement upon the original: the writing, and more specifically, the characters. The people in this game are varied, charming and funny, and they interact with one another in great, memorable ways. This is because Gearbox went out of their way to get an actual talented writer (Anthony Burch) who knows how to write solid characters for a comedy.
The most memorable character in the game has to be Handsome Jack, the antagonist. He’s a completely caricatured Saturday morning cartoon villain who goes out of his way to tell you that you suck and he’s totally going to kill you. He’s rich, he’s smug, and he wants to rule the world through ruthlessness, imperialism and money. Here’s a few lines of dialogue near the beginning of the game…
Stuff like this is all over the game. It’s great.
What surprised me, though, is that there’s actually a character underneath the humor. Without spoiling anything, he actually does have cares besides money; there actually is a human being underneath the evil. He is an undoubtedly evil character, but he’s fairly three-dimensional. And that goes for a lot of the main cast. The attention to detail with the characters and dialogue is impressive. And I think part of why the main supporting cast members are appealing is because they actually join you in a few missions, which makes them seem far more real than the MMO-style Borderlands 1 NPCs. It makes you feel like they’re actual people who care about what’s happening in the world.
The story is also a lot more involved and a lot more detailed than that of Borderlands 1, though I suppose the bar wasn’t set that high. It isn’t extremely complicated or profound, but it’s certainly competent. Your goal is established effectively at the start — Handsome Jack took control of Pandora using the riches of the Vault from the first game, and you want to stop him from being an evil jerk. The good guys are introduced, and you’re given adequate motivation to want to protect them.
Unlike Borderlands 1, the story has various twists and turns that make the journey more compelling, and unlike Borderlands 1, you actually know what the hell is going on. The first game’s story is so simplistic and yet there was so much left unanswered; most notably, who was that “guardian angel” character, and what was her motivation to help you reach the Vault? Again, without spoiling anything, those questions are thankfully answered in the sequel.
Most of the other problems with Borderlands 1 have also been fixed. The environments are hugely varied; you start off in a snowy, icy region, and throughout the game you travel through grassy plains, swamps, deserts, caves, industrial complexes, and an urban city. This makes progressing through the game much more engaging. There’s also more enemy variety, which makes the combat feel less samey. The weapon proficiency system has now been replaced by a “Badass Rank” system that works entirely differently, so you don’t feel compelled to restrict yourself to one weapon type anymore. The interface has been cleaned up a fair bit, so you won’t have quite as much clicking in the menus.
And to top it off, the PC version doesn’t feel like a sloppy port this time around. A great deal of effort was put into making it feel like an actual, you know, PC game. Matchmaking is integrated through Steam instead of Gamespy, you can skip the stupid splash screens at the start, and it gives you all the options you’d expect. Hell, it lets you adjust your field of view. How many PC games give you that option these days?
When the game first came out I was shocked by how many reviewers called it “Borderlands 1.5” and claimed it just felt like “more Borderlands.” I can only see that attitude applying if you pay absolutely no attention to the narrative, and even then, there’s a great deal of environment variety and enemy variety we didn’t see last time around. Borderlands 2 isn’t Borderlands 1.5; it’s Borderlands 2: The Awesome One. It’s what Borderlands 1 should have been, and I’m glad to see Gearbox learn from their mistakes.
If you really, really disliked Borderlands 1 down to its very core, then I guess you won’t like this one either. Like Borderlands 1, you spend a lot of time gunning down bandits and monsters, looting their corpses and picking which guns to use in the next fight. Like Borderlands 1, the game’s fairly buggy. And like Borderlands 1, the ending is an anticlimactic cliffhanger. (Though it’s considerably better this time because you actually understand what the hell happened.) But if you thought Borderlands 1 was a neat concept with a lot of rough edges like I did, then I think you’re gonna love Borderlands 2, and I’m pretty sure I don’t just think that because my name is in the credits.
Ninja Blues – Castle Crashers ep. 2.1: So Much Poo
After a long delay, here’s episode 2, part 1.
As you may gather from watching the first five seconds, this episode was recorded immediately after our first one. (It took so long because my upload speed sucks and it takes something like five hours to upload a bad-quality ten minute long video, and because I’m lazy and don’t want to do that.)
In this video and the ones preceding it, my voice is picked up before Jarenth’s. This is because my voice is picked up directly through Fraps, while Jarenth’s is delayed because internet. This is why it sounds like I’m constantly interrupting him. I figure this has to do with us communicating through the Castle Crashers built-in voice chat, because I don’t think Ventrilo has the same delay to it. We would just disable Castle Crashers voice chat and use Vent, if the game would let us do that, but it doesn’t, so for now I think we’re stuck with this.
Also, like the stupid that I am, I wrote in my previous post about how this game could be interpreted as sexist, and forgot that I brought that up in the very next video. Whoops.
Also, how about them buttfaces, huh?
As usual, insert hyperlink to Jarenth’s post here.
XCOM: No Medkits For You
Several days ago, a kind soul who goes by the name of Duneyrr gifted me XCOM: Enemy Unknown. It’s half turn-based strategy, half management sim, and all-around a really good game. I’m impressed by how absorbing and challenging it is while also being very accommodating to newcomers. Maybe someday I’ll sing its praises, but right now I want to talk about a serious problem I have with it, a problem that’s made me rage-quit more than once.
- In case you’re wondering: Yes, I did name her Felicia Day. And she ended up being my first Colonel, and my first Psychic. I think the game is trying to tell me something.
In XCOM you get a lot of soldiers. There are four classes (Support, Heavy, Sniper, Assault) and each soldier’s class is determined at random. Each soldier can equip one item for each battle. (Well, except for high-level Support troops who can carry two, but I digress.) “Items” include things like scopes that improve critical hit chance, grenades, protective vests, and importantly, medkits.
When a soldier is shot down in the field, he has a chance to become critically wounded instead of immediately dead. A critically wounded soldier is disabled and in three turns, he will die. In that time you can save him by either eliminating all hostiles and completing the mission, or having another soldier reach him and use a medkit to stabilize him.
So what happens if a character holding a medkit is critically wounded? “Surely,” I hear you wondering, “it would be logical for another soldier to reach her, take her medkit from her disabled body and use it to stabilize her?”
“Well,” I bitterly reply, “I guess Firaxis thought that would be too easy, because instead the answer is that you can’t do anything about it. If you don’t have someone else with a medkit, you’re pretty much fucked.”
“But there’s a logical explanation for this, right?” you inquire.
“Nope.”
The metagame reason for this is because items cannot be exchanged in the middle of battle. A soldier’s item(s) is/are glued to her. From a design standpoint, this makes things a lot simpler to program, and for the most part it’s never a big deal since you always give each soldier the item that best suits her role. (Scope for the sniper, medkit for the support, etc.) But in this particular situation, there’s obviously a very valid reason for why you would want one soldier to take a medkit from another.
You can argue that this is the designers’ way of providing an added challenge for the player. You can say that this forces you to be more careful about who you give the medkits to and how you use your medkit-carrier on the field. (I’d say that there’s already so much challenge for you if you play on the higher difficulties that it doesn’t really need this layered on top, but whatever.) But this is sidestepping the real problem, which is that there’s no explanation for why you can’t do it in the logic of the game world.
If they weren’t being lazy and actually intended for this to be a deliberate feature, they could have acknowledged it somewhere. They could have had an NPC explain that the medkits aren’t handheld objects and are actually attached to the armor of the user. Or something. It’s not that far-fetched, since some of the items clearly are things you can’t easily pick up and give or take, like the protective vests. As it stands, there’s just a black void where the answer should be.
See, this isn’t necessarily a problem with regard to game balance; this is a problem with immersion and cohesion.
Allow me to get off-track for a moment. There’s this show called Tasteful, Understated Nerdrage, where a guy talks about in-depth concepts in video game storytelling and world-building. Here’s my favorite episode:
In the episode he talks about how a multimedia experience like a video game can become something much greater than the sum of its parts when all those parts work together to create a cohesive, effective whole. You see, XCOM isn’t just a turn-based combat sim. The combat is part of something much greater. XCOM creates a big, organic, adaptable story about you trying to save the world from an alien invasion. For the most part, all the different parts of the game (the research, the engineering, the recruiting, the fleet commanding, etc.) all fit effectively as part of this.
The combat is probably the most important piece of the puzzle, since it’s what you spend a huge amount of time interacting in and how you handle the combat greatly affects how well you succeed or how horribly you fail in your overarching mission. And while turn-based combat is obviously not meant to accurately portray how a real combat scenario would look, it symbolizes real combat, and it’s important that the metaphor is consistent with itself.
And in this case, that metaphor falls apart. I can see what the medkit item looks like. It looks like a handheld object. And every soldier knows how to handle medkits; this is a fact established by the game. But for no apparent reason, one soldier can’t take a medkit from another incapacitated soldier. This breaks the illusion of the combat, which breaks the illusion of the game. You might call this a nitpick, but it comes to slap you in the face whenever one or more of your support troops goes down. (And if you play XCOM, you’ll know that this sort of thing happens a lot, whether you want it to or not.)
So, there’s my gripe. An unfortunate flaw in an otherwise (mostly) great game.
Ninja Blues: Castle Crashers ep. 1.2
New half-episode! The opening frame montage thing still isn’t working properly. I tried adding a filler frame before Jarenth’s, on the hopes that it just cuts out the first frame, but it cut out both.
So the monsters kidnap a bunch of helpless princesses, the dudes come kill the monsters, and then kill each other over who ‘gets’ the princess. And then she kisses the winner.
Surely I don’t need to point out what is sexist about this.
You can defend it by saying, “Oh, well, it’s an homage to classic tropes! It’s the hero rescuing the lady, etc.!” or “Well this game shouldn’t be taken seriously, it’s just trying to be silly and funny!” And maybe I’d buy either of those defenses if we weren’t seeing the same trope(s) everywhere else. That’s the thing about games with sexist tropes: They don’t exist in a vacuum. They offer sexist concepts to their audiences. Of course Castle Crashers alone won’t convince me or anyone else to be sexist and think of women as objects for us men to obtain; it’s the fact that so many stories that we consume carry that same message.
Am I saying Castle Crashers is bad because of this? No. I’m saying we should be wary of these tropes and the effect they have on our community.
Anyway, sorry for being That Guy. Here’s Jarenth’s post about the episode.
Ninja Blues: Castle Crashers ep. 1.1
Jarenth and I are doing a new Let’s Play! And it’s not of a laughably terrible game this time.
Also, we came up with a name for our show other than Jarenth and JPH Play. Clever, right?! It was Jarenth’s idea, I think.
You may have seen Jarenth mention this on his site awhile ago. Yes, I’ve had this episode on my hard drive for awhile. It took me so long to upload it because my connection is fairly slow. Also, for some reason Youtube appears to have almost entirely chopped off the opening slide that shows Jarenth’s avatar along with a line of text saying “A mild-mannered glowing eyes man…”
I’m not sure how, or why, this happened. The video on my hard drive doesn’t have this problem, so it’s probably Youtube’s fault. Whatever. Also, sorry about the echo of my voice. I think that’s Jarenth’s headset being stupid.
Anyway, now I can explain what I was saying at around the 4:20 mark: Castle Crashers seems to be a casual beat-em-up for nerd parties, but it comes with a lot of elements we associate with RPGs: Weapon collection, leveling, character unlocking, stat building, etc. It seems strange to me. This seems like the sort of game you’d play through maybe once with some friends, but it looks like they designed it with the intention of you playing it over and over again with the same friends so all of you can unlock and try out all the different weapons and characters.
And one issue with character unlocking is that every character starts at level 1, which means that if you decide to try a different character, you have to start out at level 1 again, and if your friends are sticking to the same characters, then they’re getting ahead of you.
I’m not saying these are bad things to put in a game like this; it just seems strange.
Jarenth’s post about the episode can be found here.
Mark of the Ninja
Guys, I think I’ve found my soulmate.
She’s beautiful, she’s thoughtful, she’s well-rounded, she’s smart, she’s lively, and she understands me. She’s so perfect for me.
Her name is Mark of the Ninja.
Mark of the Ninja is the latest game by Klei, a dev team previously known for Shank. Shank was a 2D beat-em-up that took influence from hack-and-slashers like God of War and Devil May Cry. It was all about stringing together combos of light, medium and heavy attacks to beat down varieties of enemies. I liked it quite a bit, mostly because of the visceral feel. The combat flowed remarkably well, and it carried a great sense of kinesthetic immersion; it made you feel like you were really brawling, even though all you were actually doing was pressing buttons and waggling a joystick. It’s one of the few games I can think of that made me feel feral when playing it.
Mark of the Ninja, on the other hand, is a stealth game where you play as a ninja and prowl in the shadows, sneaking past security and assassinating targets. The devs have said in interviews that their motivation early on was to make a ninja game that actually required you to act like an archetypal ninja, rather than almost all other ninja games that basically just consist of beating up armies of baddies.
And let me just say that they succeeded with flying colors. This isn’t just a stealth game; it might be the best stealth game I’ve ever played.
The game runs on a platforming engine, but there isn’t a whole lot of precision platforming involved. The gameplay is mostly about precision timing. I’ve said in the past that at its core a stealth game should feel like a puzzle game, and I stand by that thesis, because that’s exactly what this feels like. Each encounter with guards requires you to analyze the situation and choose your own method of overcoming it.
You have a number of tools at your disposal, and more become available throughout the game — you can shoot bamboo darts to break lights or distract guards, you can throw noisemaker arrows, you can drop spike traps on the floor, you can hurl smoke bombs, and so on. Pacifism is always an option, as is meticulously stabbing each and every guard until the only living creature within three miles is you.
Each level tends to have its own gimmicks that affect the gameplay without forcing you to relearn everything from the ground up. A few levels take place outdoors in a thunderstorm, so every time lightning strikes, the entire area is lit up and enemies can see you for just a moment. There’s one level that takes place in a sandstorm, so you can’t see past a certain distance. A few levels are littered with deadly traps. None of these are jarring like the vehicle sections in your typical shooter; you’re still playing the same game, but the changes force you to look at situations differently.
The levels are big and sprawling, and reward diligent and careful exploration. Each one has three optional challenges and three hidden scrolls; finding the scrolls and completing the challenges gives you points to unlock more tools you can swap out. None of the tools are particularly overpowered or game-breaking, but they add more variety and can help give you an edge in the later levels.
There’s a common tendency for otherwise good stealth games to force in out-of-place combat sequences, usually toward the endgame. (Thief: The Dark Project, Metal Gear Solid and Deus Ex: Human Revolution are all guilty of this.) It’s generally done to ramp up the tension. It’s the kiss of death for stealth games. At best it’s jarring, since we’ve spent the whole game learning to be sneaky and suddenly can’t use the skills we’ve acquired up to this point; at worst it’s dreadful, because the engine is designed for stealth and not combat.
Amazingly, Mark of the Ninja never does this. I kept expecting to run into a boss battle or a bunch of gun-less guards and have to punch them out, but that moment never came. And I’ll tell you why it never happened: because the folks at Klei are smart. They knew exactly what they wanted to achieve with this game and how to achieve it. The game ramps up tension not by throwing you into a boxing match, but by introducing more threatening guards that are more difficult to sneak by or defeat, and by setting up more complex situations where you’ll have to use strategy in order to get by without being spotted.
Completing the game isn’t extremely difficult, but there’s a New Game + mode that introduces additional challenges. And you can always challenge yourself to, say, complete all the levels without killing anyone. Or without using any items. Or without breaking any lights. The list goes on.
This game has a wonderful checkpoint system. The checkpoints are plentiful and you’re rarely expected to repeat long encounters you’ve already completed. And crucially, if you screw up, you can instantly revert back to the last checkpoint without an unnecessary “You Are Dead!” screen or even a loading screen. It hits that wonderful Super Meat Boy sweet spot where each failed attempt leads straight to the next one, so the game can be challenging while rarely being frustrating.
Before I played Mark of the Ninja, I saw that the Destructoid review said this:
“I find Mark of the Ninja to be perfect. Let it stand as the benchmark by which all stealth games are now measured.”
My initial reaction was, “Oh, come on. That’s got to be hyperbole.” But now that I’ve finished it, I think Destructoid is onto something. I’m still a firm believer in the notion that No Game Is Perfect, but this game is the closest to perfect that I’ve seen in a long time.
Before I leave, I’d like to give a big thank-you to Varewulf for gifting me this game. And also a big thank-you to developer Klei for making it. You two gave me the opportunity to feel like a ninja, and I can’t thank you enough for that.
Guild Wars 2: Gravelings Broke My Pants
I recently reached level 80 in Guild Wars 2. This marks the first time I’ve ever reached the level cap in an MMO. For the most part, it’s a very finely crafted game that can appeal to many different people. There’s exploration, fast-paced and aesthetically appealing combat, structured PvP, unstructured PvP, piles of interesting lore, and the whole world is beautiful and lovingly stylized. If you play with a few friends, it’s an absolute blast. It can even be a lot of fun if you’re playing as a loner. It’s highly accommodating.
And then there are the dungeons.
This is me hiding under my associate’s robe, in case you were confused.
Ascalonian Catacombs, or AC as it is now known by historians, is the first dungeon in the game. Bear in mind that the rest of the game works very differently from the dungeons. One of the major selling points of Guild Wars 2 is that the quests and events involve fighting alongside other players without actually having to communicate with them. Anybody who deals any meaningful amount of damage to a monster gains experience for its death, and anybody who contributes to an event’s completion in any way gains rewards afterward. It’s a great way to streamline MMO questing and preserve game flow while also making you feel like you’re contributing to something bigger than yourself.
The dungeons, by contrast, are instanced and encourage (i.e. require) you to join or form a party of five before entering. These are the only places in the game that actually emphasize collaboration between players. (Excluding PvP, but fuck PvP.) This means that Ascalonian Catacombs is the first time the player is expected to actually collaborate with other players.
So, exactly as you would expect, the dungeon is gruelingly difficult to the point of frustration and tedium.
Wait, what?
Us staring hopelessly at the battleground where we will die.
Each dungeon has two modes: Story mode and Explorable mode. I’m not sure if ArenaNet understands what the words “story” and “explorable” mean, because Explorable mode doesn’t have any more exploration than Story mode, or any less story. The way it actually works is that you’re supposed to do story mode first; Explorable mode is a more difficult version of the dungeon that continues the story after Story mode. What they should really be called is Part 1 and Part 2, or perhaps Hard Mode and Fuck You Player.
On our first attempt at story mode, we Total Party Wiped on the second room. The room consists of at least three dudes that each have powerful abilities and massive health bars, and there are several traps that can kill you in one or two hits. Any reasonable game designer can tell you that that’s horrible pacing. Difficulty is a complex thing and it’s hard to get it exactly right, but as a basic rule of thumb, you generally want to introduce one extremely lethal game mechanic at a time. Don’t combine these two elements until we’re acquainted with both.
Tell me this isn’t the dumbest looking ghost you’ve ever seen. This asshole is the boss.
The boss encounters are generally exercises in watching for hard-to-spot attacks that kill everyone in the room if you don’t dodge at the right time. Both the final boss of Story mode and one of the mid-dungeon bosses in Explorable mode have an attack that instantly pulls everyone toward him, and then deals a big AoE attack that is absolutely guaranteed to kill you. You can dodge it if you press the dodge button right as he’s telegraphing it, but his telegraph can be hard to spot. Oh, and since this is an online game, input lag is always, always going to be a thing.
And by the way, that’s a problem in general with the combat, not just with those individual bosses. The dodge ability is something every player has, and it’s essentially about a second (or even less than a second) long move that makes you dodge all attacks while in effect. This is one of many examples of the game trying to make itself feel like an action game. And it works, for the most part, unless you’re lagging ever-so-slightly and you just happened to be dodging a split-second before the attack, even though you can clearly see you were dodging when the attack happened.
Don’t get me wrong; as an action fan I’m glad to see an MMO courting action game elements. But when it demands that we use these abilities at just the right time when input lag is hiding in the shadows, it’s a recipe for frustration.
Oh, and then there’s the gravelings.
Can you tell what’s going on? Me neither.
There’s an event in explorable mode that my guildies and I just could not get past. Gravelings are these annoying black lizard things that jump out from big burrows and nibble at your shins. They come in armies, and this event involved breaking down multiple burrows at once, while fighting off the little pricks, and while defending two energy crystals. If the crystals break, the monsters disappear and you have to try again from the beginning.
We tried the event dozens of times. We tried different tactics, we tried forming together at certain intervals, splitting up, turtling, aggressively attacking burrows, basically anything we could fathom. Nothing worked. One of us switched characters to see if the party setup was the problem. We even tried consulting online guides. Nothing worked!
The icing on the cake is that when you die — and you will die — your armor becomes damaged. Armor costs money to repair, and it only becomes damaged from death. What this means is that the game is going out of its way to punish us for failing at its absurd challenges. Why? I’m already being punished by having to start the stupid event over; why do you have to append more punishment on top of that?! If you expect me to try over and over to complete your dungeon, then fair enough, but don’t break my pants and take my money and expect me not to rage quit!
Shamus didn’t feel like going and repairing his armor during the dungeon. I guess he likes feeling the breeze.
I really hate to say this, but playing through the Ascalonian Catacombs gives me the same feeling that fighting the boss fights in Deus Ex: Human Revolution did. They both feel extremely out-of-place with regard to their respective games, and for all the worst reasons. Guild Wars 2 is otherwise a very gentle, accommodating, accessible and inviting game. This dungeon, on the other hand, is overly punitive and aggressively difficult, and it makes no effort to convey its mechanics gradually. It makes me wonder if ArenaNet outsourced it, because that would explain a lot.
I really, really hope they fix these balance and pacing issues in a patch. It’s simply not fair, and it stands out in an otherwise great game.
A Bundle of Updates
I’m going to provide updates about stuff.
Game Analyses/Reviews
I used to write a lot of reviews and analyses of games here. That’s sort of died off, for the most part. Why is that? I used to blame the fact that depression and work was eating up my time and taking away my motivation to write. That may be part of it, but I think I’ve figured out the real problem:
It’s Twitter’s fault.
Yahtzee mentioned the weapon system in Darksiders 2, which made me think about equipment finding in dungeon crawlers and RPGs in general. If Twitter wasn’t around, I’d have written an entire post about this subject on NGD. Instead I wrote less than 700 characters on the subject via Twitter. I’ve been sharing a lot of my thoughts about games on Twitter lately, and I’m not sure I want that to continue. I get a much greater sense of accomplishment writing a full post here, and I have the space to more adequately explain my opinions.
So I’m going to try to restrain myself on Twitter from here on out. Hopefully this will lead to more posts about games I’ve been playing.
The Game I’m Making
I’m getting the narrative of my game much more fleshed out. I actually have the beginning and the ending all planned, and the middle is… Well, I definitely have a much better idea of it. I’ve also got a title for it, or at least a tentative one: I’m Just Tired. It will make sense in context. I promise.
As for the actual game design, i.e. messing around with Construct: No progress since last time. Sorry. I blame personal stuff and employment.
Oh, speaking of employment…
I Quit My Job
Well, sort of. I turned in my two-weeks notice a few days ago, which means in about twelve days I’ll be unemployed. Moneys be damned, but it was just something I needed to do.
I don’t have any jobs lined up, so I’ll be looking, but in the meantime this will hopefully mean more progress on my game and more posts in the near future. You know, whenever I find time between Guild Wars 2 and sleep.
Oh, speaking of Guild Wars 2…
Guild Wars 2
Awesome game. I’ve been playing it perhaps more than I should. I’ve got a level 52 Asura warrior and a level 13 human thief. If you’re on the Henge of Denravi server and want to hit me up, my account handle is JPH.6087. I’m in the Eikosi League, the official guild of Twenty Sided.
I actually considered making an official Ninja Game Den guild, but since a large portion of the guild would probably just be a subset of Eikosi League, the NGD guild probably wouldn’t get much action.
Oh, but speaking of official Ninja Game Den stuff…
Ninja Game Den Steam Group
I made a Steam group for NGD! Check it out by clicking on this text that I’m typing right here, this stuff, yeah.
I’d love to get us all together and maybe organize some Team Fortress 2 or Counter Strike: Global Offensive sessions. Or something, I dunno. Let me know if you have any ideas or if you’d be up for it!
And hey, speaking of a thing…
New Project
I have a new project in mind that I’ll probably maybe do here, probably. It’s a text-based Let’s Play about a game that I’m not going to reveal until I’m done with work. I’m sorry. Leave me alone! I’m just tired, alright?
Morrowind and the Modern Games Industry
You may recall that I’ve discussed a game called Morrowind in the past. I wrote a post about it in my trademark retro-review-with-a-fresh-perspective format (don’t steal that idea, it’s MINE!) and I also streamed some sessions of it with my superstar tag-team partner Jarenth. You want to know why I stopped doing those stream sessions? I didn’t want to play the game anymore.
Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I stopped initially because of a very serious thing that happened to me, but I continued to not do it because I no longer had any desire to play it.
I’ve already said some mean things about Morrowind in that original post, but to recap: The movement speed is painfully slow, the combat is the epitome of a dull slog, and the stealth does not work properly. In the hours I spent with the game since then I began to learn more about it: namely, that it likes to bog you down with MMO-style “Collect X of Y” and “Go to X and interact with NPC Y” quests, which beautifully complement the atrociously slow movement speed, that the in-game economy is very easily breakable by exploiting potion brewing mechanics, and that the leveling system is convoluted, counter-intuitive and overly punitive.
Whenever people preach about how “old games were so much longer than the crap we play now” I roll my eyes, and this game is a perfect example of why. Yes, it occupies a lot of time, because it flagrantly wastes your time with slow movement and tedious fetch quests. Are we judging quantity over quality here?
Look, I did some digging through Morrowind and I just do not see any appeal. The game is revoltingly ugly (and I’m not just talking about graphical fidelity) and the combat is some of the worst I have ever played. Getting past that, the leveling system and economy system are both broken, and the quests provide no sense of engagement or satisfaction.
Is this really what we should hold up as the height of game design? Completing a million repetitive, meaningless quests so you can one day become the King Of Mages in a world of buggy robots? Exploiting an easily breakable economy and potion brewing scheme to get all the money in a dull, monotonous, overly brown world?
Is it out-of-line for me to call Morrowind a bad game? No, I don’t think so. I won’t begrudge you for your enjoyment of it, but it just does not function like a good game should. People have praised it for its setting and lore, but how much does that really mean when the game you’re playing is a fundamentally broken mess?
You know, back when I wrote that first impressions review of Fallout 1 and my site’s popularity [relatively] skyrocketed, people said I was being “unfair” toward the game because I was judging it by today’s standards rather than the standards of the time.
My response would be this: Yeah, I suppose I am being “unfair.” But if you want a “fair,” “unbiased” review of the game, I suggest you go back and find a review of it from the year it was released, because that’s the only way you’ll be satisfied. And I’ll also add that if you’re willing to criticize me for being unfair, you’ve missed the whole point of my retro review scheme.
A few months ago a certain blog post spread around the gaming community called “Fuck Videogames.” It’s a gross over-exaggeration of some genuine issues in the industry, but one part in particular really bothered me:
“Fuck developers for slapping a new coat of paint on an old game and selling it at full price. Fuck them for doing this every year, like clockwork, for the better part of two decades. Fuck developers for not taking risks.”
I’m not yelling about how these old games suck because I like yelling. I’m doing it to show that that line is bullshit. Many aspects of games have been steadily improving over the years. When I point out how egregiously flawed many of these so-called classics are, you respond with “Well, we have different standards today than we did back then.” And my reply is, “Yes, we do have different standards, because developers now have decades of experience and technology to make better games, and that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Many gamers complain that new games suck so bad and old games were so much better and the industry is totally stagnant and hasn’t improved in any way for like a decade. These same people will then turn around and tell me I’m being “unfair” in my criticisms of decade-old games simply because they’re a decade old. They don’t seem to be aware of the contradiction.
I understand if you think the industry has gone in a direction you don’t like. That’s understandable. It’s a very different place now than it was a decade or two ago, and I’m not going to argue it’s better in every way. But if you’re going to argue that everything about games is worse, then you’re literally, provably wrong. That attitude of yours doesn’t contribute to discourse. It’s thoughtless, pointless, ignorant, indignant bile masquerading as wisdom, and I do not have the patience to listen to that shit anymore.
Look, you can jump!
Alright, here’s the progress I’ve made.
The blue block is the player character. If you look closely, you can see tiny tally marks on the top left corner of it; that shows the animation frame. I made five blue blocks, each with its own number of tallies, and set it to animate automatically. The green block is the platform, and the blue block can jump on it and move around.
So I’ve learned:
- How to animate sprites
- How to set platforms
- How to make a platformer player character
The reason this took so long isn’t because “game design is hard.” What I’ve done here is incredibly simple, and it seriously took me less than an hour to figure it out and implement it. It took so long because lately depression has been hitting with full force and I haven’t felt the drive to do anything except lay in bed or play some of that new Counter-Strike. But I promised updates, and I’m pretty long overdue, so there’s what I’ve got.
Also, since I want to feel like I’m presenting anything of actual value, I’m going to briefly explain the basic concept behind the game I want to make. It might not be the first game I make, since I’m pretty sure my first game is inevitably going to suck, but it’s the one I really want to make, the one I feel might actually be meaningful.
Generally speaking, any artistic project that has any sort of soul behind it starts out with some sort of creative spark; an idea that manifests itself in the artist’s imagination. With games, it’s often the idea of a game mechanic, or an art style, or a new piece of technology that needs to be advertised. For me the idea was a premise, a topic that I feel needs to be explored in a video game.
I want to make a game about suicide.
I’ve only played two games about suicide, and both of them are twisted, offensive mockeries of the subject matter. The first is Adult Swim’s Five Minutes To Kill Yourself, and the other is Karoshi Suicide Salaryman. These are lighthearted games where the objective is to kill yourself. I get the intent; it’s supposed to be a twist on the fact that your objective in most games is specifically to not die. But the way these games present themselves is just so silly and warped that they end up perpetuating the idea that suicide is a joke, and I don’t like that.
My goal is to make a somber, poignant game about struggling with suicidal thoughts; one that may help people understand the perspective of suicidal people, and give depressed people something they can relate to, something that might give them hope.
I really don’t want to explain too much of what I have in mind yet, especially since much of it will probably change by the time it’s finished. But there you have it. I want to make a game about suicide, and I want it to actually mean something.
Okay, so I haven’t made the jumpy game yet
Turns out the platformer tutorial isn’t nearly as useful as the top-down shooter tutorial.
Oh, I’m sure it is if you have that image pack I mentioned before — the one that has all the sprites and the background, the one that comes with the paid version of Construct. But I don’t, because I’m not exactly rich right now.
I’m terribly frustrated by the tutorial. It looks otherwise very useful, but it doesn’t give any help to people who don’t have the pre-made images. It says you can “substitute your own graphics,” but it doesn’t say how many images you need, what proportions those images need to be, etc.
I would just use a few stand-ins, but it turns out that unlike the top-down shooter tutorial, this one uses animations. This means each sprite actually uses several images — one for each animation frame. I have no idea how many frames I should make for each sprite and what each frame should look like, and I’m really bothered by the fact that the tutorial doesn’t give me any hint about this. It pretty much just leaves you in the dark if you didn’t buy the paid version.
If this was their way of pressuring me to get my wallet out, that seems downright silly — would anyone with any concept of money really spend $80 to get some images for a platforming tutorial game that nobody is going to play?
So yeah, I’ve kind of slacked off. A more self-loathing me would say I’ve been lazy, but I think it’s really two things: Frustration and anxiety. I’m frustrated because I’m obviously not going to actually learn what I need to know about how to make a platformer from this tutorial, and I’m anxious because this whole animation frames thing has just reminded me of how much of a workload making a game is going to be. I suck at making any respectable artwork, and I just realized I’m going to need to make dozens of images and animate them together to make one visually appealing character in a platform game.
To be honest, I’m not sure if every two days is a good schedule for updates. Especially considering I work five days a week, something tells me some of these updates are going to be very unsatisfying for both me and you. I might change it to once a week. I’m not sure.
In any case, I think what I might do is make some extremely basic images, perhaps just rectangles, and use them as stand-ins for the platforming tutorial. If they have to have animations, maybe I’ll have the boxes wobble around creepily. How could that go wrong?
Construct Tutorial: I’m Gonna Make A Shooty Game
Hey, look! I’m actually following through on my promise! Isn’t it exciting?
Construct includes two tutorials: how to make a top-down shooter, and how to make a platform game. They’re very rigid tutorials, going so far as to tell you exactly which textures to use. The big difference is that while tutorial #1 gives you the images to use, #2 tells you to use images that come with the premium version. It says:
“If you’re using the free edition, you can substitute your own graphics, or try the alternative beginner’s guide which provides all the sprites you need.”
Now, the very first tip Richard Perrin gave in his video was, “Don’t waste money,” meaning you can find everything you need to make a game at absolutely no cost on the Internet. The premium version of Construct 2 is eighty dollars. To put this in perspective, virtually everyone on the ‘net has informed me that Spec Ops: The Line is a glorious work of art, and I haven’t bought it yet because it costs $50. There’s no way I’m going to spend more than that in order to get some pretty pictures so I can make a game nobody is going to play because there’s already a thorough step-by-step tutorial for how to make it online anyway. There may one day be a justifiable reason for me to buy the premium version of Construct 2, but this is definitely not that reason.
Anyway…
Platforming is definitely the genre I’m interested in. I have three games in my head right now, and all three of them are platformers. (In order, there’s a puzzle platformer, a stealth platformer, and an action platformer that may or may not involve RPG elements.) But making my own placeholder art sounds like a time-consuming pain for a tutorial game. I might just make basic stick figures or even just use colored boxes when I get around to it.
But I don’t want to pigeon-hole myself into one genre, and besides, each tutorial suggests that you go through both of them before you wander off to make your own games, so today I’m going to make a top-down shooter.
The final product is to look like this:
That’s… nyeh. I don’t like the aesthetic. But hey, who am I to judge, right? And besides, this isn’t about making an appealing game — this is about learning how Construct works.
So the tutorial begins by telling me to click the New Project button. I’m not kidding; that’s what it says. Let that stand as an example of just how thorough this tutorial is — it gives you every bit of detail you might need to know, and it even has a few warnings like “If a popup says X, that means you accidentally did Y, so go back and do Z to fix it!” It doesn’t just tell you what to do; it explains what you’re doing every step of the way so that you’re actually learning to use the program instead of how to follow instructions.
Whoever made this tutorial is a good teacher as well as a good game designer.
I’m not going to go through each individual step, but here’s the rundown: It first teaches you to apply a tiled background, then how to place individual sprites. Both are extremely simple, essentially just boiling down to opening the image file. After that it explains Events, which feel reminiscent to the triggers in the StarCraft map editor that I remember fiddling with over a decade ago.
Each event has one or more Conditions and one or more corresponding Actions. Once the Conditions are met, the Actions take place. Conditions can be anything from clicking, to one sprite colliding into another, to a set amount of time passing, to a new level starting, etc. Basically anything. And actions cover all sorts of ground from creating new instances of sprites to increasing your score to starting a new level to getting a game over.
Events seem like the glue holding Construct games together; they’re what cause everything to happen in-game.
Construct also comes with some Behaviors, which are basically just pre-packaged assortments of events. There’s one called 8 Directions, for example, which you can apply to a sprite to make it move in sync with the arrow keys. (For some unfathomable reason there isn’t also a WASD behavior.) There’s a Bullet behavior, which makes the sprite move in a constant straight direction. There’s a Fade behavior, which makes the sprite fade out and disappear overtime. There’s also a whole bunch more.
Anyway, that’s about what I learned through this tutorial. Here’s my finished game:
Yeah, looks about right.
Bear in mind, my game isn’t exactly the same as the one provided on the website. There are a few features added that weren’t mentioned in the tutorial, like the Game Over screen or the frames-per-second display. But conveniently, the end of the tutorial provides a link to the Construct file for the demo game, so I can look at the events to see how to do those things myself.
On the whole, I have to say I’m really impressed so far, both with the tutorial and with Construct itself. I now feel like I actually have a rudimentary grasp of how to use this program. It must be a major pain to make game-development software this user-friendly.
Next time I make crappy placeholder art and learn how to make a platformer. Hopefully. Stay tuned!
I Can Too Make Games
Okay, this has been garnering a lot of attention in the indie scene lately, but assuming you’re not a shut-in like me, there’s a good chance you haven’t seen it yet, so…
Richard Perrin, indie game designer, made this video to convince more people who would love to start making games but are terrified of the alleged workload and learning curve behind it (people like me) to start trying. As well as giving tips and telling us that it isn’t as hard to start as we think it is, he lists various free game design tools that can be found on the Web. It’s an extremely useful video, and I’m glad I watched it.
However, the reason I saw it in the first place is because of a Gamasutra article written by Aleksander Adamkiewicz called “No, You Can’t Make Video Games.” It’s a strange article written by someone who seems to be very cynical about the creative process. Here’s one quote that perplexed me:
“The medium doesn’t need the noise of more 8bit platformers and sprite-based nostalgia-driven RPGs without other merit than ‘HEY GUYS, REMEMBER FINAL FANTASY!?’ Be honest Richard, you wouldn’t want to play these games, nobody would, even the creator wouldn’t.”
Have you ever read anything more snobby?
His stance seems to be that if there’s a chance you might not succeed at first, then you’re definitely not cut out for it and you shouldn’t try. He clarifies at one point that he doesn’t want to stop people from trying, but that statement is contradicted by other things he says in his article.
This guy would make the worst teacher ever.
Another quote:
“Richard, I’m really not averse towards the “hands on” approach to learning, but fucking around in Unity will not make a game, and won’t make you a game designer. The same way fucking around in Photoshop will not make art, fucking around in iMovie will not make a movie, and fucking around with Word will not make a novel.”
I think there’s a clear misunderstanding here. Adamkiewicz thinks Perrin is telling everyone how they’re going to make the next Bioshock or Mass Effect, when Perrin’s really only explaining how people can get started. It’s like criticizing an artist for telling people to start painting by saying “fucking around with a brush isn’t going to make the Mona Lisa.”
Adamkiewicz mentions at one point that he “tried” making games awhile ago using RPG maker, and that his creations were allegedly bad. I’m sorry to hear that, but you make mistakes so that you can learn from them. Something tells me this guy is upset about his own failed attempts at game-making, and so he’s taking out his frustrations on this Perrin guy, who thinks people have the potential to make games.
And once people started calling him out, he had to backpedal, hence the update he posted saying “Guys, I’m not saying don’t try, and I’m not saying this, and I’m not saying that…”
Even though he basically did.
The article itself is rather unpleasant, but it’s refreshing to see the backlash to it. Various indie game designers on Twitter have called the Gamasutra article out on its bullshit, and Perrin has written his own response post on his blog.
In particular, I really like some of the things Sophie Houlden has said on her Twitter:
that “you can’t make games” article is such bullshit. the author should feel ashamed, especially if they care about games.
who the hell is he to say people can’t make games? everyone that makes awesome games started out shit. it’s called determination, fuckbrain.
saying not everyone can make games is a massive insult to those of us who have spent YEARS developing our skills. talent is a myth.
You know what? This is the exact kind of motivation I’ve needed for awhile now. I mean, yes, becoming a good game developer is going to take a long time, but nothing worth doing can be done easily.
I’m going to start making games.
After looking over the tools Perrin suggested, I’ve downloaded Construct, Ren’Py, and sfxr. I’m going to start by making a simple platformer on Construct. I honestly do not have a thorough idea of what I’m going to make, but I’m going to delve right in, open up a tutorial or two, and start learning.
I know how bad I am about sticking with things if I don’t make a schedule for myself, so I’m gonna make a deal. Starting tomorrow I will work on game-making stuff for at least one hour each day, and I will post an update about it here every two days. If I fail to deliver on this, please yell at me on my Twitter or something.
I’m going to start making games.
My Take On “Fun”
Here’s the latest episode of Errant Signal, from Chris Franklin. I’m a fan of his show, as I’ve said before, but I feel kind of ambivalent toward this video.
I actually had a debate with my brother Josh about this exact topic awhile ago. I’ve always been one to claim that Games Must Be Fun, and my brother argued that this mentality is holding gaming back as a narrative medium (basically the exact same point Chris starts arguing at around the 4 minute mark in his video).
One particular point Josh made was, “We don’t have the same expectation for movies.”
My response was, “Actually, yeah, I do.”
Josh: “Didn’t you say your favorite movie was Fight Club? You wouldn’t call that movie ‘fun,’ would you?”
Me: “I… I think I would.”
And I think that really exemplified the crux of the argument. It isn’t a problem with the mentality with which we approach games; it’s a problem with semantics. When I say that games must be fun, what I mean is that games must not be boring. And I stand by that point. If a game is boring, it has failed. The same goes for movies, books, TV shows, etc. It’s the cardinal sin for any medium of entertainment — if it’s boring, that means I’m not engaged and my time is being wasted.
I suppose you could say my definition of “fun” is basically synonymous with “satisfying.” If I say a game is fun, that means I felt satisfied with it after playing it.
The example Chris used for why this is a problem is with Dead Rising. He said gamers hated and complained about Dead Rising only featuring one save file, even though the game did that specifically to force you to make and live through tough decisions. My response would be that Dead Rising’s save feature arguably wouldn’t necessarily lower the ‘fun’ rating for the game if it did achieve its goal. It was designed to heighten tension, and tension can make a game more fun if done properly, at least for me.
I never played Dead Rising, but while I generally despise games that don’t let me save freely and in at least two separate slots, I could see merit in Dead Rising’s approach. After all, I also generally hate games that don’t let you quicksave, but I think Amnesia: The Dark Descent’s lack of quicksaving really heightened the suspense and the horror. If I could have quicksaved, jumped out to see where the monster was and then jammed F9 just before it killed me, I think that would have effectively made the game less fun for me.
I think the problem stems from my and many others’ definition of fun being fundamentally different from Chris’s, Josh’s, and many others’ definition of fun. I guess the easy solution to this would be consulting the dictionary, but I don’t think that will actually change things.
Mind you, I’m not in any way trying to disqualify the validity of Chris’s video. I still think it’s a worthwhile topic to discuss. Semantic arguments are the absolute worst arguments to be part of, but they still need to happen now and again. That’s how language works.
LP Trapped Dead ep. 2.3: Wheelchair Accessible!
And here’s the riveting finale of Episode 2.
I am kind of disappointed that I didn’t get to see the upstairs. Granted, it probably wasn’t much more interesting to look at than the rest of the level, but still. The whole wheelchair thing is bringing up more problems than we initially expected.
Now that we have the sheriff, I’ll be able to play as someone with working legs. That ought to be nice.
Looks like Jarenth forgot what the fuck we were doing too!
Genre Names Are Weird
So, the latest Jimquisition is about the term “art games,” and why it is not a broken term and does not need to be done away with. He makes a good case, and I absolutely agree with him.
The main argument against the term is that calling some games “art games” implies that not all games are art, and that games not classified in that genre aren’t art. That isn’t really the case, as Jim points out.
It reminds me of a conversation I had at college a few years ago. I was sitting with some acquaintances who were talking enthusiastically about some fighting game. Eventually I said, “To be honest, I just don’t really like fighting games.”
I got a bunch of weird, surprised looks from them, but one person in particular seemed shocked. He said something like, “You don’t like any of them? Not even, like, Call of Duty?”
Then everyone gave him a weird look. One of us had to explain that the term “fighting game” doesn’t just refer to all games that involve fighting; they’re specifically games centered around a one-on-one brawl between two characters standing in an arena of sorts, probably with absurdly proportioned bodies and dressed in their underpants if they’re women.
Going off-track. Anyway, if what these people say is true, that calling some games “art games” implies that they’re the only games with any artistic merit, we’d also have to discredit “fighting games” as a term, because most games are about fighting.
I guess Jim’s video reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to talk about for awhile: video game genres have weird names, and sometimes the way we classify them is strange and contradictory.
Some genres are defined by their mechanics or how you play them. Fighting games, as I said, are games that have one-on-one brawls between two characters etc. Strategy games are games about controlling a veritable army with troops and headquarters, and that’s kind of a broad term used for a specific genre again, since you could argue that there’s plenty of strategy to be found in a competitive Street Fighter 4 match. Tactical shooters are shooters that employ realistic elements like iron sights, low damage threshold, and accuracy reduction from movement, which seems to imply that unrealistic run-and-gun shooters don’t involve tactics (they often do).
Then there are genres that aren’t defined by mechanics, but by the emotions they’re meant to elicit. Survival horror, for instance, is meant to engender fear and survival instinct from the player. This can be achieved using any game mechanics the designer chooses, which is why Sweet Home, Dead Space and Amnesia: The Dark Descent are all considered part of the same genre despite playing very differently from one another. There’s also the label of “party game,” which can refer to all sorts of games that are designed for casual multiplayer.
The other big argument against the label of Art Game is that it’s very vaguely defined. That also doesn’t really hold up, because there are other genre names we use that are also very difficult to provide a strict definition for.
The big one, of course, is the RPG, or Role-Playing Game. If you take it by its literal definition it means games that involve roleplaying. (That also requires us to choose a definition for “roleplaying,” because that can technically refer to any game in which you play a role, which would be basically every game ever.) In reality, it refers to games ranging from Diablo to Elder Scrolls to Final Fantasy to Mass Effect, which seem to have little in common with one another when you look at their actual mechanics.
Since the genre evolved from Dungeons & Dragons, ultimately it refers to any game that resembles D&D to any significant degree. Mass Effect doesn’t play anything like D&D, but it involves creating a character, and making choices that define your character’s personality (that’s that roleplaying we discussed earlier) and impact the world around you. Final Fantasy doesn’t have anything like that, but it does have turn-based combat built around commanding each member of party of adventurers. Diablo and Skyrim don’t have that, but they do have exploring, leveling-up, and looting epic gear.
I think the bottom line is that while genres can be hard to classify and sometimes the classifications sound strange or meaningless, that doesn’t discount them as labels. If we all know what I’m talking about when I say “fighting game” or “art game,” then the system is working. If a term becomes particularly outdated, it will probably die away overtime. (Remember how we all used to call first person shooters Doom clones?)
As a final point, I’d like to add that this phenomenon is by no means exclusive to video games. You can probably look up any number of music forums right now and find a heated debate about whether or not KoRn can be legitimately classified as a “metal” band.
And to anyone who’s curious, the Diablo 3 post is coming. It’s… taking awhile.
LP Trapped Dead ep. 2.2: Apply Zombies to Face
When we finished the first episode I was worried that after that the game would just become nothing but repetitive zombie smacking. That would make our LP boring, pointless and damn near unwatchable.
I was wrong. This episode has a lot of interesting stuff; stairs as a mechanic, an electric zombie trap, some horrendous bugs, etc. I hope we keep getting more weirdness.
You know, I honestly think Professor Wheelchair not being able to take the stairs was a really good idea. It’s a neat twist, and it forces you to look at the level layouts differently for each character. It could have made a good game even better; instead it’s just another annoyance in this deplorable experience.
Toward the end of the episode we make the observation that the game feels unfinished. I honestly think something went wrong during development and they had to release before they could apply all the finishing touches. It’s the only logical explanation for the messy controls, the input delay, the innumerable bugs, the crashes, the overly difficult single player, the overly easy multiplayer, etc. No competent designer could look at this shit and think it’s ready for release.
Many AAA developers run into a problem where they have to rush a game out to meet the arbitrary deadlines set by their publishers. Indie developers run into a similar problem, where they have to rush a game out to put food on their tables.
I really want to know about the development of this game. Something went wrong somewhere.
LP Trapped Dead ep. 2.1: Necessary Funsies
Finally, the next episode of our Trapped Dead shenanigans. This one features stairs!
Last time we used music from Kevin Macleod, because that’s what all the internet people do. This time we’re using music from the fantastic freeware action-platformer Iji. That game has absolutely nothing to do with Trapped Dead, but damn it, I am a massive Iji fanboy (still need to make a post about that game) and I say that soundtrack should be in every video, ever.
We would have used it in our first episode, but we needed permission from the guys who made the soundtrack first. Oh, by the way, HyperDuck Soundworks. They made the soundtrack, and a lot of other awesome music. Check that shit out.
This time Jarenth is the one that actually says things about the game we played. Check that out too.
Ninja Game Den 