Author Archives: Fernando Cordeiro

MACHINARIUM and Steel-coated Contemplation

Written by Fernando Cordeiro on February 22, 2012 at 4:00 pm

Movies – and by extension, games – are afraid of silence. They are deadly afraid the silence will bore the audience – and a bored audience will walk away. In response, movies and games are now coated with noise, music, action… anything to deter that silence. In the end, they confuse content with busyness.

Machinarium is a game where you play as little robot trying to do some good, correct some wrongs and solve some puzzles as they come along. It is a game very much like a Hayao Miyazaki cartoon, with its whimsical graphics, charming characters, moody soundtrack – and, yes, the silence: various quiet “empty” moments where characters just stand in contemplation. Or maybe that was me? I’m not sure anymore.

DARK MEADOW and the Monologue Conundrun

Written by Fernando Cordeiro on January 26, 2012 at 9:00 am

We shouldn’t like monologues – particularly in games. Games are about agency. They are about the player acting out its desires. Monologues are contrary to that spirit of agency permeating games. They enforce passiveness and reflection. Above all, monologues are intrusive. Unlike cutscenes, one cannot skip a monologue happening in-game.

And yet here is Dark Meadow! A game that basically works as a one-man show, with a comedian stand-up hoping to entertain our protagonist with his musings via loudspeaker – and it’s captivating!

L.A. NOIRE and the Story That Wasn’t There

Written by Fernando Cordeiro on January 20, 2012 at 10:35 pm

Annex - Welles, Orson (Touch of Evil)_NRFPT_03

Hank Quinlan: “Come on, read my future for me.”

In some ways, a game based on Film Noir would be the anti-GTA. Ah, the GTA series! The pursuit of the American Dream! To fight that good fight requires a great deal of optimist, no? The optimist believes the future is within his grasp.

Tanya: “You haven’t got any.”

Noir Films, however, are filled with pessimists who already know that the game they are playing is futile. That what they are playing is actually a poker game of death.

“What do you mean?”

The world is merciless. It’s unforgiving. We are already doomed no matter what we do. In the search of the American Dream, the fall from glory is a surprise; in Film Noir, the surprise would be not to fall from glory.

L.A. Noire isn’t the anti-GTA. It certainly isn’t the gaming equivalent to L.A. Confidential… or Double Indemnity …or even Who Framed Roger Rabbit. L.A. Noire may be many things – but it certainly isn’t Noir.

“Your future is all used up.”

Fixing Reviews: The Lying Score

Written by Fernando Cordeiro on January 3, 2012 at 1:07 pm

Review scores are tricky; they are not for everybody. For a scoring system to have any worth, it must have consistency. Not everybody is ready for that. You can’t call a game a master-piece only to call it a disappointment at the end of the year. Review scores must also be honest and, believe it or not, even less people are ready for that. Here, I’m not talking about the flawed notion some outlets have that the average between 0 and 10 is 8. That’s just being mathematically deprived. Instead, I’m talking about Metacritic, Amazon, App Stores and whatever other place that aggregates scores from users in order to present a single information: that the cosmos has voted and decided that game X is a 8.6 out of 10.

Guess what? They are all lying.

They are lying because they encourage users to lie in their reviews. Yes, that means the liar is ultimately you, Mr. User.

VANQUISH and the Best of All Possible Worlds

Written by Fernando Cordeiro on December 7, 2011 at 4:38 pm

VANQUISH is a videogame developed and published by Platinum Games for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The Xbox 360 version was played for the purpose of this review. It was directed by SHINJI MIKAMI.

In Voltaire’s magnus opus, Candide, Lisbon’s harbor was hit by a storm, followed by an earthquake, a tsunami and a fire. Thousands died, including Jacques, an Anabaptist who was a friend of the protagonist, Candide. Not to worry though, counseled Candide’s tutor, Dr. Pangloss. After all, we live in the best of all possible worlds. If Jacques drowned, it certainly was for the greater good. In fact, reassured Pangloss, the bay outside Lisbon had been formed expressly for Jacques to drown in.

Dr. Pangloss is a parody of Leibniz’s theory of optimism, which states that, since we live in the best of all possible worlds, everything that happens naturally happens for the best. But Pangloss goes a step further in terms sheer absurdity. For example, it was not God that purposefully made people’s eyesight bad, but merely allowed glasses, i.e. the greater good, to exist: “It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have …

A Game For Your Every (and Darkest) Desires: The Rise of Long Tale

Written by Fernando Cordeiro on November 28, 2011 at 12:00 pm

This article is about niches. Why? It all started when I wrote this. Basically, all it said was that DLC should be all-pervasive, for although it is not the most inclusive distribution model there is, it certainly makes more sense than the dominant model. When we talk about inclusive distribution models, we are basically talking about including niches, or rather targetting specific segments of the market, with specific desires – the desire of riding a horse with shining armor, for instance – that weren’t being targetted before exactly because their tastes were so peculiar of their own.

But then I discovered I actually wrote about the coming of the Ragnarok.

Well, apart from destroying society as we know it, I actually spent time looking through the responses the article got. Many were concerned with the thought of publishers using the powers of DLC for evil (because evil they are, right?), littering the videogame market with unsellable crap or breaking up games to the point where buying a single DLC wouldn’t make any sense anymore as the DLC would be so fragmented it wouldn’t work on its own. Those all seemed like some of the very worst business decisions for any executive to make. …

SUPER MARIO GALAXY 2 – The Double Dip Awful Edition Review

Written by Fernando Cordeiro on November 13, 2011 at 8:40 am

SUPER MARIO GALAXY 2 is a videogame developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Wii. It was directed by KOICHI HAYASHIDA.

I’ve played Super Mario Galaxy 2 from start to finish. That was probably the mistake, as the more you play this game, the less you like it – and I believe the optimal stopping point would be somewhere before World 5. By the time the game opens up its Second Quest, where you must collect 114 Green Stars, my enjoyment of the game had already become a downwards slide towards an endless abyss.

This is not, like Tom has suggested, a good game whose main flaw is being too “artificially perfect”. Super Mario Galaxy 2 gives the impression it was “surgically assembled in a laboratory”, yes, but this doesn’t imply that the result was the Fifth Element (i.e. Milla Jovovich) instead of the Bride of Frankenstein (i.e. shrieking woman who will never love you back). So here is the bottom line: Super Mario Galaxy 2 is the Bride. It is schlock.

Let’s start with its greatest mystery: Starship Mario.

The goal of the game is to collect Power Stars in …

Mortal Kombat (2011) – Review

Written by Fernando Cordeiro on November 5, 2011 at 7:00 am

As the most violent Mortal Kombat game to date arrived (hey, the competition is tough nowadays), we’ve asked ourselves if the violence really was the key to the franchise’s popularity and survival. It wasn’t.

MORTAL KOMBAT (2011) is a videogame developed by NetherRealm Studios and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment for the XBox 360 and PlayStation 3. The Xbox 360 version was played for the purpose of this review. It was directed by ED BOON.

There is a magic moment in each Mortal Kombat game. It’s when you duck and, with perfect timing, throw a High Punch at your unaware enemy. The result is the Uppercut, the granddaddy of the headshot. The Uppercut symbolizes all that is good with a fighting game; that moment when everything connects, you hear a pop and your opponent is sent flying releasing a shower of virtual blood and real shame. If there were a reason why this series managed to stay relevant despite the constant complaints about the mechanics and the game’s “balance”, I think that reason is the Uppercut.

Well, the Leg Trip, with the humiliating thug it provokes, might also have a minor role to play, …

From Avatar Clothes to 1-UPs: Why Everything Should Be DLC

Written by Fernando Cordeiro on October 24, 2011 at 10:29 am

Value.

Everything has value. Or rather, everything has the potential to hold value (or Utility, if you want the proper term) for someone.

Not every value can be easily translated into currency, however. Putting a monetary value on human life, for instance, is controversial. Luckily, we are not talking about these. We are talking about everything else, from physical goods, like the chair you are sitting on, to virtual ones.

For instance, how much would you pay for an Achievement?

Well, if you see that the value of a given Achievement was higher than its price and you had the means to buy it, you would. Of course, you would. It’s the logical decision. If you think a can of oil is worth $1000 (Perhaps you are visiting from a country where cans of oil are a hot commodity like the spices of old, who knows?), you would buy it until you drive the inflation rate up to the point a can of oil is priced at $1000.01 – and that extra cent would make the difference on making the purchase. That point in which you are indifferent between owning the good and having …

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP Review

Written by Fernando Cordeiro on October 3, 2011 at 10:37 am

It’s not a game. It’s a “psycho-social audiovisual experiment”. Yeah… anyways…

SUPERBROTHERS: SWORD & SWORCERY EP is a videogame developed and published by Superbrothers and Capybara Games for the iPhone and the iPad. The iPad version was played for the purpose of this review. It was directed by CRAIG D. ADAMS and JIM GUTHRIE.

You know a game is worth playing when it leaves reviewers so puzzled they have no other choice other to describe the game by using quotes from other people – the game’s creators included.

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (S:S&S EP) is one of these games. It has whimsical pixelated graphics. It has some brilliant soundtrack by Jim Guthrie, which vindicates the “EP” from the game’s name. And the thin fabric uniting this artistic collaboration is a vague quest. It’s just like a videoclip, perhaps a poem. Probably both.

You play as The Scythian. This hints the game might take place somewhere near East/Central Asia. The Scythian has a sword and a shield and is looking for some holy triangles for unexplained motives. It is a quest for martyrdom and while we don’t know exactly the whys, we know that martyrdom is certainly desired. During this …

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