Category Archives: Feature

Feedback Loop: When Rape is Just a Game

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I have always been especially sympathetic to parody, satire, and general irreverence. I’m skeptical of authority and find tradition and convention extremely dubious. And when topics are off-limits or taboo, the benefits to silencing discourse rarely makeup for what’s lost as a result of doing so.

But sometimes the tradeoff isn’t so one-sided.

Earlier this week, Brandon Sheffield uneasily called out a new Kickstarter project for being in poor taste, and urged readers to contact the crowd-funding website and voice their disapproval. They must have done so, because Kickstarter canceled the project later the following day.

The project in question is a fully funded card game wherein the goal is to rape as many school girls as possible in a fixed number of turns. It’s called Tentacle Bento. It’s disgusting. But does it cross the line?

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Waiting to Respawn: Know Your Diablo

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(Waiting to Respawn is Nightmare Mode’s weekly column in which we crawl out from our secluded fortresses to discuss multiplayer and the social aspects of gaming.)

At 12:01 a.m. this morning, Blizzard tightened their grip over our virtual lives (for those able to actually log on) by finally flipping on the servers for the much-anticipated Diablo 3. Evil has returned to the world of Sanctuary and threatens to crush out everything wholesome and pure in the land. Unfortunately, I’m not referring to the demons.

Every game has its share of irritating players that flaunt social graces. These are the guys parking the tank on Blood Gulch’s only rocket launcher in Halo or exclusively using knives in Call of Duty. Sure, they technically don’t break any rules, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be called out on their against-the-grain style.

So what do they look like in Diablo? Take a look at a few of our least favorite below. And try not to feel bad if you recognize yourself among the riff-raff. We all sin.

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Art Game Thunderdome: The Great Gatsby

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It was a cool name with no meaning: Art Game Thunderdome. I had thought the fact that my short-lived video series dealt with hypothetical art games in a rough and tumble manner might justify the title…but ultimately the name was just a hollow ideal. There was no sense of competition, I think—no game to the “art game.” It wasn’t even sound and fury signifying nothing. It was just sound.

Thus we come to the new format of Art Game Thunderdome: Playable Criticism. That’s what I call it, at least. And in terms of our first entry, The Great Gatsby, I can’t help but think that “playable criticism” is somehow more appropriate than “videogame adaptation.” We had one of those last year—the very charming Great Gatsby NES-like. But the game had little sense of procedural purpose, I felt…Aside from loosely adapting the epigraph, last summer’s Gatsby was more or less all setting and superficial context. You got a sense of the time period, but not of the characters. I think we can do more. I believe expression to be infinitely adaptable, no matter the medium. And not just the expression of setting…but the deep structure of the characters themselves. We …

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After Pressing Start: Silent Hill

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I’ve always been fascinated with horror games, but haven’t played many real ones. I haven’t because they don’t exist. At the least, they no longer exist in the mainstream spotlight as they once did. The tense atmosphere of the Dead Space series has always kept me on my toes, but they aren’t horror games. Dead Space is an action horror series. It falls in a genre that focuses on the action element in a horror-like environment. Rather than leaning towards one side, Dead Space lies between horror and action. The series tries to frighten the player with cheap jump scares, but does little beyond that. Dead Space wants to be scary, but cares too much about the action. There’s never any downtime to take things in because something pops out at what seems like every two minutes. Silent Hill, on the other hand, devotes itself to that fear. It does so right from the beginning and dedicates itself to expressing that fear in every facet of its being.

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Ed Del Castillo and The Next Evolution in Fight Games

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Edward Del Castillo likes to play things close to the chest. When his PR rep read my query about implementing reactive audio in fighting games Castillo’s first thought was “did this guy get a leak?” Without revealing the title, the man behind the Command & Conquer series spoke with me on the sound design processes that went into creating what he hopes will be the next evolution in the fighting genre – reactive audio.

Such change, of course, couples with looming clouds of doubt in a genre resistant to change since Yu Suzuki boldly took fighters into the three dimensional realm. Fight games have long since struggled to define emotion through gameplay in an interesting way, but Castillo’s audio system just might change that by handing the emotional keys of the soundtrack to the player.

Well aware of the challenges he and his team face, Castillo explains in this interview why his reactive audio system will make gamers care about each punch and why you absolutely shouldn’t call it a rhythm fighting game.  

Nightmare Mode: So tell me a little about this secret project you’re working on.

Ed Del Castillo:  It’s a one-on-one combat fighting game where you move through spaces fighting opponents. And in those scenarios the hero has music that supports …

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Pongs: Video Game Criticism as Game

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Genres are frequently marketing tools that help buyers know what kind of game to expect. Genres help form player expectations. Much like a pop song repeats its chorus at some point, puzzle-platformers always have players jumping around. A haiku has a certain number of syllables and a rhythm games have some rhythmical pattern of actions.

One musical form is variations on a theme; Mozart wrote some variations on what we know today as “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” True to form, Mozart states the original theme and then takes it all kinds of frilly places. Mozart’s variations showed how a simple melody could become a piece complicated enough for concert performance. While the variations are virtuosic, their more complicated melodies are actually less expressive than the original melody. The purpose of the piece is to show the skills of the composer and the performer.

Pippinbar, of Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment fame, composed a browser game called Pongs (2012) which explores the original Pong in thirty-five variations. The minigames are meant for two players, but it’s possible to play both sides at once. Much like Mozart’s variations extend “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” to showcase a performer’s talent, Pippinbarr’s Pongs extends the original Pong. …

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Feedback Loop: Many choices, or none, make a game.

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Is just one choice all it takes to turn a novel into a video game? Before you say yes, consider when a game is created out of many choices and when we are left with none.

Richard Eisenbeis looks at Katawa Shoujo in an April 24 Kotaku article. Eisenbeis holds up the dating sim/visual novel as proof that one choice is all it takes to turn a novel into a game. It is a shallow analysis and the implication that one can stick a choice in a novel and have a game is just false.

If we step away from the screen with only Eisenbeis’s assertion, we lose out on understanding what developers have to do to take a story and turn it interactive.

Creating a good game means understanding the times when a million choices create an interactive work and the instances where no choices are required.

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“Unlocks” and the gamification of gaming

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“LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD INSTANTLY!”

I blinked. I had just launched Battlefield 3, and for some reason there a pop-up promising me…fairness?

“Tired of fighting an uphill battle against Battlefield veterans?” it continued.  “The Ultimate Shortcut Bundle unlocks 119 weapons, gear and vehicle upgrades.” At which point it directed me to a link where I could pay Electronic Arts a mere $40 for said “shortcut.”

The marketing hit close to home. After getting a new job in November, my Battlefield 3 play tailed off. When I resumed regular play in March, I was amused to find that every Tom, Dick and Harry was some sort of general within the games’ “persistent rank” system. The surrealism of a bunch of top commanders duking it out in infantry combat was made less entertaining by the fact that I was a measly sergeant, and was thus outclassed not just in experience, but in the equipment available to me.

Like every contemporary online action game, Battlefield 3 makes use of “unlocks,” which takes the form of additional weapons, accessories, devices, and abilities for the player. Unlocks are, in theory, earned by merit: players who accomplish more earn more points, which in turn unlock more equipment and tactical options.

But …

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Put Mario back on the slippery slope

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We recognize theme with all our senses: the sights, the sounds, the heavy rumble in our hands, the font used to display text. Forgotten in this equation are the game’s mechanics. What the buttons you press do determines how the game talks to you.

In the four and a half years since I first played Super Mario Galaxy, I’ve never replayed it except for reference. I’ve never replayed any of the modern Marios. In this time, I’ve replayed many of the older titles upwards of a half dozen times. Apologists might say this is because the modern games are longer, that I have less emotional connection to them. I offer an alternate thesis: these games have no mechanical theme. Modern Mario has gotten too precise, gone from a happy machine gun to a sonorous sniper rifle.

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After Pressing Start: Bioshock’s Elevator Pitch

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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.

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