Category Archives: Feature

A plot analysis of the Modern Warfare trilogy: Part 1 – Illusions of grandeur

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Heavy spoilers for all the Modern Warfare games hide beyond this. Proceed with caution!

Call of Duty games have come to represent everything ”hardcore” gamers loathe about the industry. It is the lifeblood of the biggest publishing monolith, Activision, and it has become an annual experience that doesn’t offer anything new in each iteration. Innovation is faltering in favor of shoving the same game out the door repeatedly. Repetitive multiplayer has become its biggest selling point.

My own reservations regarding the series aren’t as strong as those I’ve just outlined, though. In fact, I rather like the games, although only with regards to singleplayer. Regardless of whether you’re playing through Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare games or Treyarch’s spin-offs, you are guaranteed an action-packed ride. Even this seemingly solid and straightforward formula can turn rotten when it is overdone, though, because while the first Modern Warfare felt like an all-out action film with a dash of political thriller – an excellent combination – the following Modern Warfare games left the realm of reason and normality, and entered the realm of the ridiculous. It was as if they had to outdo the first game by throwing as much over-the-top action in as possible in …

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Love Interest: Sakazaki Yuuya, the Parody

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Mattie Brice picks a date from a visual novel and breaks down how they represent culture’s expression of sexuality. Today she talks about her time with Sakazaki Yuuya from MIST[PSI]PRESS’s Hatoful Boyfriend. Spoilers ahoy!

 

Sometimes it takes a parody to understand convention, laying out the quirks and foibles where the most strident of fans would find the most humor. In short, the recently translated Hatoful Boyfriend reveals the inner workings of otome games better than the typical example could. The English audience has few to choose from, but the appearance of Hatoful Boyfriend notes that otome games have their place in gaming culture. You’re a high school student that goes to a well-off private school… of pigeons. Yes, all of your romance options are pigeons, and the main character is still human. She doesn’t feel out of place, however, and actually can end up romancing most of the pigeons she meets. One is the debonair Sakazaki Yuuya, the popular boy at school with mysterious interests. His playthrough blurs the line between parody and a serious dating sim; you may not be attracted to pigeons, but why do you care enough to learn about him and plan your game …

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Being like a teenager in Uncharted 2, exploring adulthood in Uncharted 3

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Adulthood is difficult to define – sure, there’s the legal definition, which relies on an arbitrary number of years to designate being ‘of age’, but everything is a little hazy beyond that number. With good reason: what it means to be an ‘adult’ is an ongoing consideration; you’re likely to maybe never ‘feel’ like an adult. Maybe one day you wake up and ‘decide’ that it’s about time you called yourself that: an adult. For whatever reason, that’s what you are that day, an adult. Less amorphous, however, is the path toward adulthood, the framework involved in ‘coming of age’. We have a clear understanding of what ‘childhood’ means, and there are markers of ‘adolescence,’ too. In particular, I think that games’ penchant for delving into morality is characteristic of what it cognitively means to be a teenager, and that recent attempts of tapping into adulthood, or perhaps the slightly less esoteric idea of maturity, result in blunder.

Consider, for instance, the difference between Uncharted 2 and Uncharted 3. Uncharted 2 starts out with Nathan Drake scrounging his way out of a train wreckage in the middle of an icy wasteland. The impact of the scene cannot be understated: …

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After pressing start: How tutorials became inefficient

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Ever since game controllers became hand-crippling monstrosities developers have had trouble starting their games. Super Mario Brothers could teach us how to play in exactly three seconds: there’s a goomba walking towards you, and you have to press one of the two buttons to jump over it. The other button you don’t need for four worlds, but you’ll probably figure out what it does by randomly pressing it. There’s only two, after all.

Now the industry standard controller has four shoulder buttons, four face buttons, start and select, two control sticks (each with its own button), and a directional pad. You’re not going to be able to figure out anything for yourself because it’s impossible to know where to start. “Flailing around on buttons” can no longer be a tutorial mechanic, not because games are becoming more “accessible” or anything condescending like that but rather because of the controller’s sheer girth.

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Building Worlds: Signs in Borderlands

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[Building Worlds is a series where Dan Cox examines one facet in a video game and shows you how, from that one angle, an entire society is reflected.]

I walked right past it the first time. I didn’t think anything of another random sign. But then I noticed it again. And again. Every few hours further into the game, there was this sign. These two words kept looking at me from wall after wall. Every time I gained access to a new area, someone was there before me leaving this phrase behind them.

I’ll admit that I thought it was just crude humor at first. This had to be some joke placed in the game by the developers for the player to find. But then I thought about it more. Its placement was purposeful and it was in the same color and layout each time. This was not some recurring joke, but a part of the greater world. Many of the other signs used in the game were, I realized, in the same style too. All of these signs must have been done by the same person! Someone, somehow, was trying to leave messages for others to read.

The planet is full of …

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What do bosses do?

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The first boss I remember fighting was Doctor Robotnik at the end of Sonic 2‘s first level. I couldn’t beat him; I was six, and I hadn’t played a lot of video games that required twitch skills; I’d mostly played PC adventure games. One morning, my six year old self got off the bus from school and my mother, picking me up from the bus stop, ran up to me, yelling, “I beat him! I beat him!”

And from that point on, I never found Sonic 2′s first stage difficult. I got stuck on the second, but I persevered, because I knew if I beat him I’d never have trouble with Chemical Plant again.

Critical analysis views bosses as video game anachronism, awkward homages thrown into modern games. But that’s not what bosses are: bosses are punctuation, the periods, commas, and semicolons of a video game. A good one, a quick stop, can raise tension, building the stakes to new heights, while an easier boss can change the mood dramatically, as well. Rather than just being points where players can express their mastery or a nostalgic adherence to tradition, a good boss can accentuate what a game is trying to …

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Everything old is new: Diablo 3 beta impressions

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I have to admit, I expected something with more panache. With access to Diablo 3′s vaunted beta I expected something daring, something world-shaking. What I got was, well, Starcraft 2: a game of incremental improvements.

This is not to say I didn’t love it. When I think about Diablo 3 my palms get shaky now, even after conquering the beta with two characters, and I want to play with a third, a fourth, a fifth. I’m thinking of interesting skills I could unlock, the wonderfully simple but deep system behind them, and how I could make incredibly broken armor for my character. I keep fiddling idly with the skill set generator, thinking about synergies and how to break the game.

Blizzard games have always been gaming’s comfort food. With the lone, startling exception of Warcraft 3 their games are a sort of non-evil proto-Zynga: they take good ideas other people have and make them better. Warcraft and Starcraft codified and improved upon every Real Time Strategy cliché. Diablo took the roguelike and made it for everybody. And World of Warcraft made Everquest even more addictive; it removed the inconveniences that kept you from playing all day.

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Soundscapes – Guide to speakers and headphones

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What kind of a sound setup do you have when playing games? No matter what you have there are some easy tweaks which could make everything sound significantly better. If you’re so inclined there are then some more elaborate things you could try in order to really get the most out of your speakers. If you’re looking to buy new speakers or headphones you might not have a clue where to start. The purpose of this guide is to help you decide which speakers to get and what to do in order to then get the most out of your purchase. Every room and every situation is different so you might not be able to do much in some cases to improve the audio, but even the most basic tweaks can do a lot.

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Love Interest: Second Date – Ikezawa Hanako, a Trans* Narrative

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In Love Interest, Mattie Brice picks a date from a visual novel and breaks down how they represent culture’s expression of sexuality. Today she talks about her time with Ikezawa Hanako from Four Leaf Studio’s Katawa Shoujo. Spoilers ahoy!

 

(Warning: There are NSFW images in this article.)

(Trigger Warning for trans* transition experiences)

Katawa Shoujo doesn’t make anything easy. Every positive has a caveat, each charming thoughtful moment its headdesk. Last time, I talked about how Hanako’s path exemplified the sexual exotification of disability in the game, mostly through giving the player a main character without a superficially notable disability. Upon a first glance, there seemed to be little application for this analysis outside of criticizing pandering to men’s interests in visual novels, however, my personal connection to Hanako provided me with something else. I saw her do something that triggered a muscle memory from my past: She covers her face.

This is emblematic for the teenage stage of life where you think everyone is always watching you. Appearances matter, especially how you dress, your hair, your face. Imagine having that double fold and outside of high school; that was me. Growing into a …

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After pressing start: Super Metroid and efficiency

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(After Pressing Start is a new series running on Nightmare Mode every Friday by resident narrative guru Tom Auxier. It focuses on beginning, on the stories that happen directly after pressing start, and how those stories influence the arcs of video games. A variety of games he’s totally never talked about before will be featured. This might be sarcasm. Previous Entries:

1.1 Dragon Age: Origins
1.2 Final Fantasy VI and VII
1.3 Planescape: Torment

Have a suggestion about a game to discuss? Post it in the comments!)

Modern games have and exploit their freedom to be inefficient. Given all the technological prowess of modern consoles, hundreds of staffers, professional scores, and micro management, how could they not lavish attention on these facets? Games spell things out for us, make sure we aren’t lost, and take pains to set us on the stage. Retro games and modern indies don’t have that luxury. They have limited graphics, limited sound, limited everything.

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