I miss when video games were, y'know, video games.
That's an overly dramatic and exaggerated statement, and quite frankly it's a really stupid one too. But it's often how I feel about the current state of games. So many games today are focused on creating an experience or forming a narrative that they often seem to lose sight of why people play video games.
I've been playing Outland, Housemarque's sublime 2d action game that blends elements of bullet hell with classic Metroid-style adventure. Outland has what many people would call a retro or oldschool style: you hit start, there's a quick cutscene explaining the game and then you're in and playing. There isn't an expansive backstory to what's going on. An in-game tutorial might consist of a quick on-screen message telling you that pressing down + jump will cause your character to slide. There isn't any dialogue outside of a narrator explaining the origin of the world and even that's a little heavy-handed for a game of this style. Simply put, there's no fat to Outland. Everything that's there needs to be there and adding anything more would be counterproductive.
Several other things stand out in Outland. The first is that it employs a unique mechanic that doesn't really make sense but is awesome to play with. Outland features a polarity system that is ripped straight out of Treasure's classic shmup Ikaruga. You can switch between light and dark and absorb bullets of the same colour while you can only hurt enemies of the opposite polarity. Why can you do this? Who knows. It's not explained and frankly it doesn't need to be. Sometimes it's more fun to just play with something unique and fun rather than have everything make sense.
Outland often has enemies of light polarity hiding inside a wave of dark bullets. Why don't the bullets hurt the enemies when they hurt you? Because that would ruin the game. It doesn't matter if the game doesn't follow the rules all the way through. It's all about crafting a gameplay experience that makes you feel good while playing it. Outland often has sections where you're dealing with enemies of one colour while two different streams of bullets are filling up the screen. You're constantly shifting around the screen and changing polarities. The gameplay is exciting and frenetic to the point where you sometimes take a step back and marvel at what your hands are doing. Outland is a game that makes your hands feel smart.
Most modern games lose this sensibility. For example, this week I've been playing Assassin's Creed. Assassin's Creed is a fun game: flawed as hell but enjoyable nonetheless. Like Outland, Assassin's Creed takes elements of preexisting games and patches them together into a new experience.
Begin playing Assassin's Creed and you're treated to a trippy sequence where you're not sure what is real and what's not. You're then left playing catch-up as pseudo-main character Desmond also trying to figure out what the hell is going on. From there you're jammed into some kind of reality simulator where you will then go through a 10 minute tutorial on all the nuances of the controls. There are no less than 15 unique buttons and you have to hold buttons down in order to access some of your commands. Once the tutorial is done, you then go into the real game where there's a longer, more expansive in-game tutorial. All told, it will be an hour before you can actually play Assassin's Creed.
The issues do not end there. Assassin's Creed is a game that strives for realism. The game has you doing some seriously mundane tasks: riding a horse in a straight line for ten minutes to get from location to location, patrolling the streets to look for information on where your assassination target is, cutscenes that are utterly uninteresting and lack any kind of persuasive narrative. I am told that the game's narrative picks up towards the end but that strikes me as a huge design mistake. The payoff should be throughout the game and not jammed at the end after you've done everything.
But there's a larger issue with Assassin's Creed that really stands out in my eyes: realism. This is a game that focuses on being a real person with real abilities. Everything that you do in Assassin's Creed is based on the rules of reality. Powerups are in the form of new weapons to kill people or new ways to knock guards down. Compare that to a game like Outland where you might get a power that lets you absorb bullets and use them to destroy all the enemies on the screen. You will never find anything like that in Assassin's Creed.
There is but one enemy type in Assassin's Creed: humans. They might give them different weapons but ultimately they're all the same. The game is restricted by the rules of nature. There's a nifty parkour mechanic that keeps it interesting as you climb from ledges to rooftops, but that's the only thing making the game stand out from a gameplay perspective. And the gameplay is often compromised by having menial tasks to do or having to sit through drab scenes. If Outland is a lean game then Assassin's Creed is a fat one, full of nonsense and tedium.
Let's take a better game: Uncharted 2. Uncharted 2 would get my vote as the most impressive game made during this generation: amazing cinematics blended with exciting gameplay mixed with decent shooting mechanics and fun platforming. Still, Uncharted 2 has the same limitations that Assassin's Creed does: a limited array of actions and enemy types. The platforming -- if you can even call it that -- comes down to finding the spot where you can jump and following that predefined path to its only conclusion. The different enemy types are defined by how many bullets they can take and what weapons they have. Later on you encounter some weird blue guys that seem like Avatar ripoffs (though Uncharted 2 probably predates Avatar), but overall it's nothing new. There's no mechanic in Uncharted 2 that stands out. You can run, you can jump and you can shoot a gun. Again, it's based on reality. The focus is on shaping a narrative over offering a game that's fun to play on its own merits. Uncharted 2 is absolutely successful in this regard.
But why have we gone down this route so heavily? Why is everything so heavily based on realism and a narrative? This can sound like a 2d vs. 3d thing or an old-school vs. new-school philosophy, so let me offer another example. Shadow Complex is a fun game, the very essence of Super Metroid channeled for the new era. But where Shadow Complex falls short is in its inability to offer anything different from beginning to end. In the beginning you are shooting regular people with a gun and in the end you are still shooting regular people with a gun. Shadow Complex features some fun mechanics like a speed boost and a triple jump, and the progression of the character from weak every-man with a flashlight to armoured supersoldier is very fun, but the graphic style is extremely plain and the enemies are as well. Compare that to Super Metroid, where you fight dozens of different types of enemies and progress through all kinds of different environments. Shadow Complex, by comparison, are a bunch of military complexes for 90% of the game. It is visually uninspired due to the constraints of reality.
Video games have amazing potential. We have the ability to create amazing environments and incredible variety, but most modern games seem to strive for hyper-realism and an obsession with crafting a story. It is a testament to developers today that this generation has been the best one for games: there are 2d action games and sprawling RPGs and space operas and online beat-em-ups and who knows what else. And yet it would be so much better if we took a step back and asked ourselves why we keep striving to make live-action movies instead of going for a fun gameplay idea or something completely alien and unique. Why are we always a human fighting other humans? Why not some bizarre creature? Why are we always in a city modeled after one of our own? Why not an alien planet or an underground world or something truly unusual? Isn't the point of video games to be an escape or to offer something you can't do in real life? Why settle for real life when we can strive for something more?
These are the directions I would like to see games go. Some games already have but I wish we could see more going forward. Any steps away from narrative experiences would be a welcome change as well. I love me some long-winded RPGs and atmospheric experiences but at some point we have to go back to just making games that are fun to play on their own merits. Hopefully we can see more games like Street Fighter 4, VVVVVV, or Portal 2 that have really fun mechanics to exploit and less scripted experiences like a Call of Duty or a SOCOM 4. That's where I would like to see games go.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
The rise and decline of Xbox Live Arcade
There have been a lot of great features added this generation. Online multiplayer isn't new to this gen but it has exploded in popularity, revitalizing once-struggling genres like fighting games and added new dimensions to old ones like platformers or survival horror. Downloadable Content has kept gamers playing for dozens of hours past the ending of said game. Patches and updates have kept console games running smoothly in an era where games are gigantic and out of control. Friends lists and Achievements/Trophies have made gaming a social experience that you share with dozens of friends.
But the real gem of this generation is digital distribution. Xbox Live Arcade has been the trendsetter and for good reason: Microsoft made XBLA a priority from day one and has pushed it since before the console even launched. Every XBLA game comes with a demo. Every XBLA game has 12 achievements for 200 points. Every XBLA game has a size limit.
Or it did, anyway. The original intent of XBLA was to put forth products that would never be available on disc. When XBLA originally launched on Xbox 360, it had a 50mb size restriction. The idea was to create an arcade - bite-sized games that people could play easily. There would be your Pac-Mans and your Galagas and your Hexics and whatever else there, all with a low price point and a marketing push on the 360's dashboard. There would be an opportunity for some new content like Geometry Wars, but XBLA was meant to be a retro thing.
After the smashing success of Geometry Wars, Microsoft got smart and upped that size limit to 150 meg, and later 350 meg. There would still be room for retro stuff like Mega Man 9 or N+ but the new size limit would allow for more meaty, unique experiences. Braid came out in 2008 and put XBLA on the map as a legitimate service to pay attention to. Bionic Commando Rearmed was packed with content at the ridiculously low price of 10 dollars. Castle Crashers proved that the 2d beat-em-up genre was alive and well while rendering the remnants of the dead genre obsolete in the process. Thanks to the low price point and low development costs, people could make refreshingly unique games without destroying a studio if it failed.
Microsoft realized it had something big and removed that size restriction - after all, if somebody wanted to make a large game for their platform, why stop them? Battlefield 1943 showed that you could make a competent multiplayer shooter within the confines of the system, but why go small when you can add tons of features? Why make bite-sized games when you could have full-sized console experiences?
The result is what's plaguing XBLA today. Most notable releases have gone from $10 to $15. Download sizes have ballooned to 2gb. There are 15-20 second load times everywhere to make room for a massive engine. Even Shadow Complex, a game praised as a love letter to Super Metroid, suffers for its choice of engine. Unreal Engine 3 is a powerful piece of tech that has frame drops all over the place and can feel unstable during times where there's too much going on on-screen. Instead of being a tight 2d experience, we get a compromised 2d/3d hybrid that satisfies neither audience. The download size is twice as big as it should be. The visuals are ugly as shit instead of vibrant like a Super Metroid clone ought to be.
Shadow Complex is only the beginning. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is a well-designed game that feels like a downsized console game. Splosion Man has unfathomable load times and repetitive level design, issues that would probably be fixed if they just made a straight-up 2d game. Shank is maybe the biggest offender: 15 second load times just to get into the game, a game that emphasizes style over substance. Hydrophobia's big draw was its awesome water physics. Somehow a service designed for retro hits is now about water physics.
What happened here? It could just be bad design but I think it's more than that. The old Xbox Live Arcade forced developers to stay within the confines of the system. Many of the drawbacks of modern gaming -- load times, glitches, frame drops -- are alleviated by the fact that modern games look pretty damn good. With XBLA it's become a downsized version of that - all the load times and none of the graphical awesome. We get all of the brown and grey without any of the setpieces. And it's not cool.
Now that's not to say that XBLA is dead - it obviously isn't. Limbo has a damn captivating artstyle while staying within the confines of the service. It may not have been the masterpiece people were expecting (or think that it is, but that's another story), but it absolutely delivers on what the spirit of XBLA should be. Pac-Man Championship Edition DX channels the spirit of Geometry Wars and turns Pac-Man into an amazing arcade experience. Super Meat Boy is not my favourite game in the world but its look and feel is exactly what you want from a downloadable title. There will be countless examples of intelligent design in 2011 and beyond.
But a lot of what's being churned out these days are downsized big-budget games and that's unfortunate. Once developers were given the go-ahead to do whatever they want, the service degraded in a big way. This will read like an anti-3d post but it's not; on the contrary, I want 3d games to be on disc and given the proper attention that they deserve. 3d games have a lot of moving parts that make it difficult to make a bite-sized version. Flower on PSN is a great example of the right way to do a game like this, as is Fat Princess. Both are games that are not limited by the service. Hydrophobia, on the other hand, is a console game being sold as a downloadable because it isn't good enough to warrant a retail release or a $60 price tag. They should go all-out and make it a full-scale game or not try to make it. Either go big or don't go at all.
But the real gem of this generation is digital distribution. Xbox Live Arcade has been the trendsetter and for good reason: Microsoft made XBLA a priority from day one and has pushed it since before the console even launched. Every XBLA game comes with a demo. Every XBLA game has 12 achievements for 200 points. Every XBLA game has a size limit.
Or it did, anyway. The original intent of XBLA was to put forth products that would never be available on disc. When XBLA originally launched on Xbox 360, it had a 50mb size restriction. The idea was to create an arcade - bite-sized games that people could play easily. There would be your Pac-Mans and your Galagas and your Hexics and whatever else there, all with a low price point and a marketing push on the 360's dashboard. There would be an opportunity for some new content like Geometry Wars, but XBLA was meant to be a retro thing.
After the smashing success of Geometry Wars, Microsoft got smart and upped that size limit to 150 meg, and later 350 meg. There would still be room for retro stuff like Mega Man 9 or N+ but the new size limit would allow for more meaty, unique experiences. Braid came out in 2008 and put XBLA on the map as a legitimate service to pay attention to. Bionic Commando Rearmed was packed with content at the ridiculously low price of 10 dollars. Castle Crashers proved that the 2d beat-em-up genre was alive and well while rendering the remnants of the dead genre obsolete in the process. Thanks to the low price point and low development costs, people could make refreshingly unique games without destroying a studio if it failed.
Microsoft realized it had something big and removed that size restriction - after all, if somebody wanted to make a large game for their platform, why stop them? Battlefield 1943 showed that you could make a competent multiplayer shooter within the confines of the system, but why go small when you can add tons of features? Why make bite-sized games when you could have full-sized console experiences?
The result is what's plaguing XBLA today. Most notable releases have gone from $10 to $15. Download sizes have ballooned to 2gb. There are 15-20 second load times everywhere to make room for a massive engine. Even Shadow Complex, a game praised as a love letter to Super Metroid, suffers for its choice of engine. Unreal Engine 3 is a powerful piece of tech that has frame drops all over the place and can feel unstable during times where there's too much going on on-screen. Instead of being a tight 2d experience, we get a compromised 2d/3d hybrid that satisfies neither audience. The download size is twice as big as it should be. The visuals are ugly as shit instead of vibrant like a Super Metroid clone ought to be.
Shadow Complex is only the beginning. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light is a well-designed game that feels like a downsized console game. Splosion Man has unfathomable load times and repetitive level design, issues that would probably be fixed if they just made a straight-up 2d game. Shank is maybe the biggest offender: 15 second load times just to get into the game, a game that emphasizes style over substance. Hydrophobia's big draw was its awesome water physics. Somehow a service designed for retro hits is now about water physics.
What happened here? It could just be bad design but I think it's more than that. The old Xbox Live Arcade forced developers to stay within the confines of the system. Many of the drawbacks of modern gaming -- load times, glitches, frame drops -- are alleviated by the fact that modern games look pretty damn good. With XBLA it's become a downsized version of that - all the load times and none of the graphical awesome. We get all of the brown and grey without any of the setpieces. And it's not cool.
Now that's not to say that XBLA is dead - it obviously isn't. Limbo has a damn captivating artstyle while staying within the confines of the service. It may not have been the masterpiece people were expecting (or think that it is, but that's another story), but it absolutely delivers on what the spirit of XBLA should be. Pac-Man Championship Edition DX channels the spirit of Geometry Wars and turns Pac-Man into an amazing arcade experience. Super Meat Boy is not my favourite game in the world but its look and feel is exactly what you want from a downloadable title. There will be countless examples of intelligent design in 2011 and beyond.
But a lot of what's being churned out these days are downsized big-budget games and that's unfortunate. Once developers were given the go-ahead to do whatever they want, the service degraded in a big way. This will read like an anti-3d post but it's not; on the contrary, I want 3d games to be on disc and given the proper attention that they deserve. 3d games have a lot of moving parts that make it difficult to make a bite-sized version. Flower on PSN is a great example of the right way to do a game like this, as is Fat Princess. Both are games that are not limited by the service. Hydrophobia, on the other hand, is a console game being sold as a downloadable because it isn't good enough to warrant a retail release or a $60 price tag. They should go all-out and make it a full-scale game or not try to make it. Either go big or don't go at all.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
hello world!
Hello and welcome to my blog for writing about video games and the video game industry. My goal to write informative essays about mature topics -- you know, where 'mature' actually means sophisticated and not, well, God of War or Grand Theft Auto.
Not to say that there's anything wrong with those games. I rather enjoy God of War. But let's be honest -- God of War is a game aimed at 14 year olds. This is true of most 'mature' titles, unfortunately. The simple fact is that big games by their very nature have to appeal to a large demographic and let's face it - video games will always have the largest audience amongst male teenagers. Male teens want to feel empowered by ripping heads off of things and shooting people in the face. Those games will be popular today, tomorrow and ten years from now. It is hopeless to push against that tide.
And that's okay. The nice thing about the video game industry is that the barrier to entry is shrinking every day. You can now write your own game and market it on your own website. There is something out there for absolutely everyone. I believe that video games are similar to movies - every single living person likes something. It's just a matter of finding out what that thing is.
My name is Luke and I am currently 30 years old. I am married with one child. My first video game was Lode Runner on the Apple IIe. The first game I can remember beating is Zork 1. I grew up playing Atari 2600 and PC games but the bulk of my childhood was spent with my beloved NES. I believe that video games have progressively gotten better with each generation and that the current generation of video game consoles have more going for them than ever before. Never before has gaming been in such a good place. Refinements are always coming and, for the most part, these refinements make games better than ever.
There is, of course, a fuckton of things to complain about. I am known for being particularly nitpick-y and criticizing things that I really adore. But that said, I think people focus too much on the negative and lose track of the fact that video games are really damn fun to just play.
I hope you enjoy playing video games as much as I do.
Not to say that there's anything wrong with those games. I rather enjoy God of War. But let's be honest -- God of War is a game aimed at 14 year olds. This is true of most 'mature' titles, unfortunately. The simple fact is that big games by their very nature have to appeal to a large demographic and let's face it - video games will always have the largest audience amongst male teenagers. Male teens want to feel empowered by ripping heads off of things and shooting people in the face. Those games will be popular today, tomorrow and ten years from now. It is hopeless to push against that tide.
And that's okay. The nice thing about the video game industry is that the barrier to entry is shrinking every day. You can now write your own game and market it on your own website. There is something out there for absolutely everyone. I believe that video games are similar to movies - every single living person likes something. It's just a matter of finding out what that thing is.
My name is Luke and I am currently 30 years old. I am married with one child. My first video game was Lode Runner on the Apple IIe. The first game I can remember beating is Zork 1. I grew up playing Atari 2600 and PC games but the bulk of my childhood was spent with my beloved NES. I believe that video games have progressively gotten better with each generation and that the current generation of video game consoles have more going for them than ever before. Never before has gaming been in such a good place. Refinements are always coming and, for the most part, these refinements make games better than ever.
There is, of course, a fuckton of things to complain about. I am known for being particularly nitpick-y and criticizing things that I really adore. But that said, I think people focus too much on the negative and lose track of the fact that video games are really damn fun to just play.
I hope you enjoy playing video games as much as I do.
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