Category Archives: Feature

Feedback Loop: Playing To Win

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Photograph by Jodi Miller

I must be one insufferable little prick. As I navigate the Inception-like hallways of Halo: Reach’s Reflection map, a grin spreads slyly across my face. I’m armed only with a DMR, a score of 49 to 49, and a genuine lust for Blue Team blood. “Hallway’s clear,” signals my friend in a fuzz of chatter. It wasn’t. A blue figure jumps around the corner. My heart hesitates, but my finger doesn’t. The shot stays true.

“Competition has one goal: Determine a winner at the end,” writes Brian Campbell for The Escapist. Campbell’s theory about competition and play asserts that intense competition means “the feel of the game becomes far more serious…and less fun.”

But is play really divorced from competition?

Do they live separately, engaging in a failing long-distance relationship where Play decides there’s too much living to do to stay tied down to sweaty-sounding nouns? In a word: No. It’s an argument based on a term-confusion problem that runs rampant in videogame journalism.

Ask five people what videogames are and you might get five different answers: videogames are art; videogames are entertainment; videogames are interactive; videogames are social; videogames are a new form of storytelling. Those five people might …

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Saints Row the Third: The Dystopian Science Fiction Story You Never Knew

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There’s a man that owns half the city. He obtained it all – homes, shops, factories, an airport, and even a nuclear power plant – without a single hint of municipal scrutiny. It wasn’t under the table either, as the man in question is a celebrity gangster with a history of mass murder, rampant destruction, and a comic appreciation for human life. Each day he remains, hundreds die. Cataclysmic gang fight erupts in broad daylight on the hour, complete with automatic weapons, rocket launchers, and even stolen military-grade drone missile strikes.

If it’s not street skirmishes over drug territory or the prostitution business, it’s the corrupt and antagonistic American military, called in to counter the violence by turning it back on the gangs two-fold. Biological weapons ravage the city, military wreckage scatters the streets, and still animated posters of the gangs are projected onto skyscrapers, immortalizing them like the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. The city of Steelport is an awful place to live, a dystopian nightmare of greed, corruption, and violence, and Saints Row the Third, for all it’s immature bravado, will acquaint you with in a way you won’t expect.

Of course, there’s plenty of flagrant nudity and a dildo bats …

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I Have Had A Vision: The MMORPG of the future

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Let us agree on one thing: fuck yellow exclamation points.

You’ve seen them – they lurk above the heads of countless NPCs in countless MMORPGs, signposting quests.  I remember the first time I encountered them, in Lord of the Rings Online. Fresh off of a years-long Final Fantasy XI binge, they ignited a love affair. It was so easy! They showed you exactly where to go for your next dosage of experience points – that kind of thing didn’t exist in the mind-numbingly opaque FFXI.

But over the years, across multitudes of virtual geographies, my love affair has soured. So too has my once fervent passion for the MMORPG.  Stale mechanics, boring stories, and tired routines. Things are changing, though, slowly and piecemeal. If you put them together, I believe, you can form a picture of the MMORPG Of The Future. Don’t worry, there’s no yellow punctuation marks to be found.

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The Campfire: Cardboard politics in Ancient Greece

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The best tabletop games make you feel like some scheming politician in a smokey backroom surrounded by your friends and prospective enemies. Everything feels real because everything is: the armies you command aren’t lines of code and pictures but instead bright primary color wooden cubes and plastic figurines out of an army men package circa 1990. You can hold your armies in your hand. Countries aren’t pixels but cardboard; if you reach out, you could touch your enemies. If you invade them, you move physical things on top of things that are theirs.

In my book the pinnacle of good war game design is Cyclades, Bruno Cathala and Ludovic Maublanc’s 2009 war game set in Ancient Greece. The game blends a competitve auction mechanic with a simplified war game: you bid on the favor of various Greek gods and use their powers to crush your opponents. To this base monsters of Greek myth, intense dice battles, and schemes are added.

But this is the Campfire, so let me tell you a story.

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Losing Your Stride in rComplex

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rComplex is a game of running. It’s not about running, it simply is running. Along the way you will jump, and slide, and occasionally shoot, but all these things are extraneous. This is a game of pure drive, where loss of momentum even for an instant is typically met with smothering death, and that means running.

It is a mobile game, and for better or worse carries with it the associations and assumptions that dog the genre. For example, you’ll most likely play it on the bus or subway as a diversion. This seems oddly appropriate, since we’re sort of running then too.

Also like most other mobile games (or at least, most other good ones), rComplex is simple in control and design. As the runner, we need only tap our way through the courses to vault over a picnic table or slide under a wayward ladder, occasionally looking back to tap a shotgun blast into the encroaching black mass of death behind us.

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Fez’s shifting genres

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There’s a quote from Roger Ebert’s review of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans which goes: “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” It sums up perfectly how I feel about the alarmingly modernist Fez.

What Fez is about—the existence of a world, and its idiosyncrasies, fully formed inside a work of art—is not how it is about it. Fez wants to be about the befuddling puzzles that took the world a week to solve, but instead it’s a platformer. Fez oozes brilliant puzzles from every pore, yet the way it goes about delivering its exceptionalism comes in a series of decidedly mundane jumping puzzles and a startling screen-shifting mechanic that’s already old hat.

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Writing on the Wall: The Secret Messages of the Half-Life Universe

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In 1981, a French graffiti artist named Blek the Rat coated Paris in stencil renditions of rats scampering about the city streets. They had no explanation, context, or detail beyond an outline. They were everywhere. Before the infamous Banksy followed in his footsteps, Blek was obsessed with the creatures, intrigued by their ever-present role as the only other living things in cities besides people. He was amused by their tenacity as disease-carrying vermin with the potential to outlive us, so he painted them to remind humanity how unimportant we actually are.

In Portal, as you navigate puzzle chambers at the whim of a twisted, sentient computer, the only acknowledgment of other human beings is in the form of messages left scratched on walls tucked away from the white, clean surfaces of the testing rooms. They begin in Test Chamber 16, where you discover this first incarnation of a phrase that would be come infamous in the gaming community. The phrase aggravates gamers now, but the first time reading the words “the cake is a lie” is what brought us to the dark side of Aperture Science.

Like Erik’s rats, the message taunted us with our own mortality.

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Soundscapes – Music can ruin everything

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Music is powerful. It can tell you what type of game you’re about to play, what time its set in and the intensity you can expect from the gameplay before you see any visuals on screen. Great music can be enough to carry an entire game experience that otherwise would’ve been perceived as tedious by the players, like with some JRPG games. It can also undermine the entire game experience if used incorrectly. This is easily demonstrated in Crysis, where the music isn’t designed for the kind of game that Crysis actually is.

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Building Worlds: Samus of Metroid

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

Samus Aran, bounty hunter extraordinaire, is a warrior. She travels in a gunship, wears a Power Suit and is equipped with an arm cannon. She is part of a fictional universe where constant fighting is the only way forward.

Shoot the doors. In order to progress in the universe of the Metroid games, you must shoot the doors. Different entrances require a variety of types of destruction. Energy blasts, missiles and even bombs that eliminate nearly every living thing nearby are used for the simple action of opening a door. Weapons speak, and new paths are revealed.

Samus opens doors. She walks the ruins of the Chozo, an ancient race of bird-like people and her adopted race. She hunts down Space Pirates and other prey. Yet, neither her name nor accomplishments grace the game titles. It is called the Metroid series because Samus is a weapon. She is a product of her universe.

The games Metroid II: Return of Samus and Metroid Fusion tell the story of how a group of Chozo tried to start a colony …

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After Pressing Start: Dragon Quest IV Chapters of the Chosen

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When the world is falling into despair, the Hero is always ready to catch it. The Villain will inevitably have a head start but the Hero’s accelerated growth will always save the day in the nick of time. Heroes rise to the occasion. They’re punctual. On the other hand, Villains are pretty relaxed about their evil plans. They’ll make time to stop and say hello as the Hero struggles through trials untold. Sometimes they won’t even appear until much later in the plot. They’ll even sit and wait for the Hero to come to them, so unconcerned with the power of friendship and love and confident in their abilities. If villains are the instigators, heroes are the go-getters.

Which makes Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen and its opening somewhat alarming: where is the Hero?

You think it’s Ragnar McRyan at first. After all, he is the first character you play as. That’s how it works, right? Sure, he might look a bit unorthodox for a Hero, with a great blue moustache and hot pink armor, but he can hit things good and he serves a King. That’s Hero material right there. But there was that title screen before the game, …

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