Author Archives: Fernando Cordeiro

After Pressing Start: Bioshock’s Elevator Pitch

Written by Fernando Cordeiro on May 4, 2012 at 9:00 am

If you go to an entrepreneurship lecture, you are sure to hear about an elevator pitch: the concept of communicating a value proposition to someone in 30 seconds. If you ever meet Bill Gates inside an elevator, you only have about 30 seconds to try to sell your idea for him to invest. It’s the sort of concept that sounds like bullshit at first. You may feel that only 30 seconds is a disservice to all the time spent on your idea, but making your pitch fast is an absolute necessity: CEOs, angel investors and high-level executives are extremely short of time and the little they have is worth thousand, if not millions. The lack of a good, hard-hitting pitch is a waste of their time.

Many games feel that way. The plot unfolds lazily and the game takes its time to acclimate the player in its world. Sometimes it takes the entire game for us to understand what it is about, e.g. Final Fantasy XII. Sometimes the unfolding feels like it will never fully come, e.g. Dark Souls.

Leaving Japan: What strategies should Nintendo adopt for the Wii U

Written by Fernando Cordeiro on April 21, 2012 at 3:53 pm

There is trouble brewing for the Old Gods. On April 10th, Sony has released some very interesting numbers, announcing a ¥520 billion loss and an operating loss of ¥95 billion. It is the operating loss that matters, for it relates to their actual business activities. Last year Sony had an huge loss as well, but since there was some operating profit, so there wasn’t as much pressure on them as there is now.

Nintendo is quickly following suit. On January, it has announced a 61% drop in their quarterly operating profit and forecasted a ¥45 billion loss for the fiscal year of 2011 – a forecast that’s about to be confirmed as we get closer to April 26th, the day scheduled for Nintendo to announce their earnings.

These are perilous times for Japanese companies – and particularly for Nintendo, whose revenues had already suffered a serious blow with last year 3DS price cut. Sony is a more diversified company, with more fat to burn. Sony’s action plan will be rather obvious: cut the bleeding (aka, disinvest in their TV divisions: the biggest culprits for this year’s losses), bet on the length of the PlayStation 3’s product …

ZIGGURAT and the end of the world during coffee break

Written by Fernando Cordeiro on April 16, 2012 at 9:00 am

A wise man once wrote what I believe to be one of the core tenets anyone who calls himself a game reviewer should have in mind: if you want to know if a game design works, imagine that game with an endless mode. It’s one of those advices so simple and obvious only a genius could have thought of.

And now that genius went off to make his own endless game, ZIGGURAT.

It’s one of those things that leaves me both excited for the results and frustrated about my own inadequacies. Just like when Erik Wolpaw, who used to write hilariously astute reviews and commentary on games in his Old Man Murray website, went off to write arguably one of the best videogames ever made: Portal.

The result is that Tim Rogers, the number one defender of friction in games, made what is, together with Canabalt, the game with the most friction you can find on the iPhone. ZiGGURAT is a genre great game with so much friction I have the impression my iPhone is rumbling even though it lacks a rumble feature.

BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY and the douchebag in all of us

Written by Fernando Cordeiro on March 24, 2012 at 11:46 am

It’s late in Arkham Asylum. Dawn will break soon and it seems like the nightmare Joker would unleash onto Gotham was averted. The game is about to end, but, before it does, a call about Two-Face is overheard on the radio. It seems Batman: Arkham Asylum is all but over for Commissioner Gordon, you and me. But not Batman. He flies off to handle another crisis in Gotham City. He must endure. The game offers us a taste of what it is like being Bats, but just a taste. What that ending says is that never truly became him. His martyrdom must continue after the credits rolls.

Sometime after the first game, mayor Quincy Sharp, former warden of Arkham, together with the help of Dr. Hugo Strange, reallocated all criminals to a closed-off area in Gotham City and named that new prison Arkham City. The developer’s goal in doing this is pretty straight forward: to finally get the full experience of being Batman, as he scours the city for criminal activity.

In doing so, what they have managed to do was to corrupt all that understanding of what it means to be Batman that was so well-crafted in the first game. Batman is no longer a hero. He is a “video game hero”, with all game manias that entails.

YOU ARE HERE: How games have become domesticated

Written by Fernando Cordeiro on February 25, 2012 at 12:11 pm

In their dawn, games used to live in the wild. The savage beasts that they were didn’t care if you managed to collect all the 50 secret gems or if you didn’t realize that fruit basket in the living room was part of a puzzle. These beasts left you to roam without an inkling of direction.

Try to remember the last time you were lost in a game. When you had to wander aimlessly, trying to find something – even if you were still unsure of what you needed to find. In fact, when was the last time you discovered something in a game? Something cool that was not already stated in your objective list? When was the last time you found something that truly surprised you, like a secret dungeon or an item whose existences wasn’t already hinted by the vacant spot in your inventory?

Well, how far back did you have to go? I passed through a couple of Animal Crossings along the way, but was only able to find the “Era of Discovery” – when the blurb “Discover Planet X” on the back of a game box made sense – back in the days of the original Zelda and Metroid. Games during which we were asked to discover what we were supposed to be doing in the first place.

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 …

Archives

Author Archives: Fernando Cordeiro

Meta

Blogroll

Tags

Archives