Mensa: The Game

Posted on May 13, 2012
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I’ve been checking out Fez the last few days. Some of you may have heard about this game in the 5 years its been an indie darling at various GDC’s and other shows. The basic concept is that you’re in a 3D world but can only view it or move along flat 2D planes  which you rotate 90 degrees with the shoulder buttons. Your other actions are jumping and pushing/hefting boxes. It’s all presented in neuvo retro style, with pixel sprites but far, far more going on than was ever possible on retro systems (or in the parlayance of the modern teenager “it looks like Atari”.

I am a fan of puzzle platformers, so Fez sounds like it’s right up my alley – and it is, generally, while playing. However, there are several annoying design choices that get in the way of what I want to be doing. But we’ll get to that.

To start with the positives, Fez is very easy to navigate and explore. Like Portal, its big-budget, non=indie cousin, Fez takes a concept that sounds like a recipe for confusion and disaster and makes it a joy. The system handles environment rotation seamlessly, and there are very few instances of a rotation sending you falling to your death (and if it does, you just respawn where you left off). The graphics are wonderful and display more personality than you’d expect. This includes the various mysterious iconography and ancient devices you come across. The game definitely taps into  that sense of exploring a strange, vague world  that so many retro games used to have.  It’s nice to have that experience again

I’d love the game, but there are just a lot of little things that add up

1) The areas don’t logically link up–and there are so many of them that it’s impossible to focus on solving an area. Just exploring one area will lead you to 3 – 5 other areas… and those distract you into uncovering more, and more, and more, until you’re half a world away and haven’t found or solved much of anything. My friend said this was the point, and to play the game on these terms–okay. So I did that. The problem then becomes, by the time you return to earlier areas you have to re-explore them exactly as you did in the first place, so it feels like you are wasting time re-doing your earlier actions

2) The game is too vague. There is a way to make your game vague and fair, but Fez doesn’t seem concerned with that. I came across a puzzle that had me a little stumped. Then I thought maybe I’d figured it out, so I started to solve it… there is absolutely no indication I’m doing anything properly. No beeps, no glowing lights… I just have to trudge on ahead and hope my hunch is right. So I solved it. Nothing happened. So… I guess I was wrong? It took 20 minutes and was really hard. I should feel smart, but I don’t because  I wasn’t rewarded. I asked my friends last night and apparently I WAS right. However “maybe you were a pixel or two off. It’s really exact sometimes.” Sigh. This affects a variety of areas of the game. For example, you can beat the game with only half the doodads (this is a great thing), but it does not tell you that your save is going to disappear after you do so. So I figured I’d check out what was behind the final door, found the end of the game, and then when I reloaded, could no longer  select “continue game”. Now, there was a New Game +… but when I started that, I noticed a door I had unlocked was now locked once again. I have not played it again since, but I will say I’m seriously worried about how much of the game (of sprawling, random exploration) I have to do all over again just to get back to where I was

3) Game designer Phil Fish keeps making broad, angry statements* about the game industry. Normally I have no problem separating the artist from his art. I love Braid, and couldn’t care less what Mr. Blow’s politics are. However, Fish’s are so extreme and bizarre  for somebody with one major game to his name.  Which again, everyone is entitled to their opinion, and every fan THINKS he knows exactly what the game industry is about, and maybe Fish is just stradddling the line a bit. Fair. But when you pair this with vague level designs, obscure goals, persnickity puzzles, and game wide cyphers… it just comes across (to me) like Fish doesn’t care if I enjoy his game. It’s like he wants me to be impressed by these puzzles he came up with. I’d be much more impressed with the puzzles if I felt the game wanted me to solve them one day.

But I’m going to load up that New Game + and find the rest of those doodads, so what does that tell you.

 

* Of COURSE Microsoft is going to give Minecraft extra favors. It’s a proven success and it’s making them tons of money. It’s in their best interest to bend over backwards to make everything Minecraft-related happen. This is not unusual. Welcome to the game industry.
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Friends You Haven’t Met Yet

Posted on May 10, 2012
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I played through Journey last night. If you have a PS3 you should probably check out this game. Needless to say, I very much enjoyed it. If you’ve played Flower, it is a similar, but more personal, experience. (If you have not, then go play Flower). There’s not a lot I can say; it’s really a game you should play from as blank a slate as possible (and while online).  Normally when I play a good game, I’m super high on it and then my emotions calm down as I’m away from the game and eventually my final opinion settles in a bit tempered.  However, I like Journey more and more as time passes since its completion.

I guess I’ll sum it up with a quote that designer Jenova Chen has used in some interviews:

“People will venture out to the height of the mountain to seek for wonder. They will stand and stare at the width of the ocean to be filled with wonder. But they will pass one another in the street and feel nothing. Yet every individual is a miracle. How strange that nobody sees the wonder in one another” – St. Augustine

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Sole Remainder

Posted on May 9, 2012
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I finished Lone Survivor two nights ago. I enjoyed it, and Byrne did a good job of condensing an authentic survival horror into a 2D space without losing atmosphere or psychological weirdness. I feel less AND more strongly about my earlier criticism. As you get further into the game, the SH references stop flowing so thick, which is good. However, there are a few (the item sound) that are always there, and they just stick out more and more as the rest of the game comes into its own. I appreciate nods but I just wish he’d gone his own direction, as the game is good enough to stand on its own.

(Coincidentally it does a LOT of things we did in Shattered Memories, which Byrne had not played at the time he made Lone Survivor.)

While the game is good and Twin Peaksy throughout, I feel in the end it is TOO ambiguous. I read in some interviews yesterday that the goal was really to make the player want to replay the game to see what else he missed, and to fully understand the story after two, or even three, cycles. A very noble goal, but this ambiguity (again in my opinion people) hurts that goal in two ways.

First, gameplay wise. The game never tells you what you should be done–obviously intentional, and obviously used to good effect. It’s survival, and if tutorials keep saying “Eat the Orange to recover 4 health points, 2 stamina points, and 4 water” well… that’s stupid. However, if I replay the game, I sure as hell want to know what I should do differently. There is an end-game tally screen that alludes to some stuff, but I’m still left in the dark on a lot of it. Am I supposed to starve until I can pull together a decent meal? Should I not be sleeping? No idea. And it would suck to replay the whole game just to get the same ending.

Second, story wise. In the end, all the ambiguity left me to “figure out” the story in my own head, using my own life experiences and the game moments that resonated with me (again – good! and intentional, according to those interviews). However, at a certain point don’t we want to know what the author wanted us to know/learn/feel? Yes, of course–thus the idea of replays. However, the story I got was SO sparse, that it just seems like a lot of effort to do that. I don’t have hanging loose ends to wonder about. There are characters I never met, so I don’t know I’m missing out on them. “My” version of the story is complete and coherant in my mind… Byrne’s seems so distant and convoluted (from my point of reference–not in reality) that it’s hard to get motivated for that replay. If there are 3 potential tracks through… Byrne would have been better served to tease each one for all players, so there is something left unresolved in each playthrough, I think.

Then again, I’ve heard Byrne is not a big fan of SH:SM. It’s possible we are both standing on opposite ends of essentially similar game experiences, partial to our own visions

Please don’t take this to mean I don’t like Lone Survivor. I very much enjoyed playing it, and it has a ton of very good ideas and is clever. He handles the “flow” of fear very well, throwing in some weird moments to make you smile. It’s also delightfully retro  in sensibility, mixing Japanese console and PC adventure together in a pleasing way. Fans of horror, adventure games, or indie storytelling  should check it out.

 

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The Pain

Posted on May 2, 2012
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I was just stung by a bee.

In the neck.

At night.

Guess I learned a valuable lesson about getting my wife surprise YogurtLand.

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Only One Left Behind

Posted on May 2, 2012
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So I started playing this game last night, Lone Survivor. It’s basically a 2D, side scrolling survival horror game. I’m about 20 minutes in, it’s pretty good. The one thing I’d say is that it cribs a bit too closely to Silent Hill.
The designer, Jasper Byrne, already parodied/homaged Silent Hill with this previous game, Soundless Mountain (which I have not played but I hear good things about). Yet here in Lone Survivor we’re still hewing closely to SH2. The monsters look the same, the music is reminiscent, and even the sound effect when you pick  something up is similar.

You have good ideas, Jasper. You don’t need to couch them in Silent Hill language–you can do your own thing.

I found out about this game from a NeoGAF post claiming Lone Survivor was more SH than Downpour. This was a plus in the eyes of the forum, but I’m not really sure it should be.

None of this is to say it’s bad – I enjoyed what I played and can’t wait to get back to it, I am just not sure it’s going to surprise me (though hope I am wrong).

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If Pyramid Head is so sacred, why is all your fanart the Homecoming version?

Posted on April 24, 2012
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Hey, sorry guys. I know I haven’t updated in a while. I got pretty disenchanted after my WordPress App won’t let me log in. If any of you have Word Press and iOS and know what I need to do to make the app work, let me know.

For those of you who didn’t already know, the soundtrack to Book of Memories is available now! It’s pretty great.

It includes a remix of “Love Psalm” – the best song from Silent Hill 2. At some point during Shattered Memories, I went back and listened to Love Psalm and realized that it sounded almost exactly like the pre-vocal vocal tracks that Yamaoka-san would turn in. I wondered if his original intention was to have vocals for this song–since then I’ve been obsessed with making that happen.

During the recording sessions for SH HD Collection, Mary, Akira, and Troy did some SH concerts and I remarked how I wanted to bring that live energy to our credit track. Since BoM was all about rewriting the past, I thought it would be cool to take Love Psalm and remix it, finally putting lyrics to the melody, and bring in Akira to do something as if he’d never left. Then during our BoM recordings, Troy wrote up the lyrics and worked on hammering out the song. Mary also brought in Eyeshine (band frontman: Johnny “the Stampede”  Yong Bosch) to perform the track.

The results are incredible. Troy’s lyrics perfectly capture the themes of Book of Memories, which are obviously close to my heart because I wrote the story. But there are a lot of layers beyond that too. One forumgoer correctly pointed out the  song could apply back to James and Mary, in the game it came from originally. And, of course, the two people singing on the song happened to provide James and Mary’s voices. Coincidence…?

This song encapsulates my thoughts and feelings about Silent Hill, so check it out.  Oh–Akira plays that entire guitar solo, not just “the silent hill part” be tee dubs.

(Of course, all of Dan Licht’s songs are amazing as well. This soundtrack is much more “video game-y” than Downpour’s cinematic approach, so I think a lot of fans who were let down by the earlier game’s music will find a lot to love here. Plenty of callbacks to the creepy SH tracks of old, including sound effects I call “evil washing machine” and “devil’s straw”.)

 

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Now with 100% more iPad posting

Posted on April 6, 2012
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So I went for a walk today and saw a bus stop poster for Men in Black 3. Now, I’ve known for a while they were doing a sequel to MiB but I was able to ignore it–pretend maybe I’d imagined it. But here, staring at a bus stop, I was faced with the cruel reality of the situation. It’s kind of proof that Hollywood is entirely upside down.

The original Men in Black was released in 1997. I was 17 years old. People who are now 17 (for the release of MiB3) were TWO. TWO YEARS OLD. They didn’t run out to see MiB. There’s a good chance many of them haven’t even seen the original movie.

Then there was a crappy sequel we all forgot about. MiB3 is, of course, a direct sequel to these films. Same characters, same continuity.

By contrast, Spiderman came out in 2002 – I was 22. This year, they are REBOOTING this franchise, with a new cast, new continuity, etc. The last Spiderman film was 2007! And the last good one was just 3 years before that! We are still squarely in “direct sequel” range. And you know where today’s 22 year olds were when the original Spiderman came out? Right there in the theater with me, as 12-year-olds.  There is no need to reboot Spiderman! Look how long they waited between “Batclooney” and “Begins”.

So we’re rebooting a recently successful franchise, and we’re sequelizing a comparatively ancient series from my teens. Up is down, B is jump… it’s madness.

From the tagline on the poster (“They are back… in time.”) I can only assume the plot involves going back to the sublime original, and just re-enacting that film in its entirety. But audiences today don’t want the MiB of the 90′s. The original movie was great, don’t get me wrong, and it made The XFiles look stodgy by comparison. But we’ve moved beyond it. Do kids still say “aw HELL nah” anymore?

No, what we need is a rebooted MiB. Throw Donald Glover in there as the nerdy but overeager recruit, ready to make his mark. Pair him with Jeff Bridges, the super laid-back hippy agent with his head in the clouds, spouting wild theories about an intergalactic counsel deeming Earth unnecessary (that he’s secretly right about). I’d watch that for 90 minutes; the perfect combination of Chuck and Men Who Stare at Goats.

Is he not a cool and stylish government agent?

But instead of something original and cool, they’re going to drag out the old cast and try to make us care as much as we did when it was a pleasant summer surprise. They could at least have the courtesy to flashy thing us so the jokes seemed fresh and new.

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Well this is stupid

Posted on April 1, 2012
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Apparently photobucket doesn’t want you to see my images.  Give me a bit to figure this out.

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I’m just going to leave this here…

Posted on March 26, 2012
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(the following is a Note from Silent Hill 2. If you don’t care or understand why I’m posting it, pretend it’s a funny cat GIF)

Doctor’s Journal

The potential for this illness exists in all people and, under the right circumstances, any man or woman would be driven, like him, to “the other side.”

The “other side” perhaps may not be the best way to phrase it. After all, there is no wall between here and there. It lies on the borders where reality and unreality intersect. It is a place both close and distant.

Some say it isn’t even an illness. I cannot agree with them. I’m a doctor, not a philosopher or even a psychiatrist.

But sometimes I have to ask myself this question. It’s true that to us his imaginings are nothing but the inventions of a busy mind. But to him, there simply is no other reality. Furthermore he is happy there.

So why, I ask myself, why in the name of healing him must we drag him painfully into the world of our own reality?

Something else is written by hand.

Alessa didn’t create the Otherworld, guys. Get over it.

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Tacos con el Diablo

Posted on March 23, 2012
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I have a problem. Whenever a new novelty food item is released by a fast-food chain, I simply have to eat it.  Curiosity gets in the way of common nutritional sense and off I drive to the local whatever it is. I somehow avoided the McRib for years but now every year I have to get one, even though this year they were terrible somehow.

A few years back for example, KFC announced the Man Down.  The Man Down is a bacon and cheese sandwich with special sauce.  Sounds tame, right?  Well KFC had no room for bread, so they replaced it with pieces of fried chicken.  That’s right.  Fatty, greasy, second-degree-burns-on-your-hand fried chicken.  I waited in line to eat this.

So I was quite interested when I heard about Taco Bell’s latest offering to solve American obesity.  You see, despite their cheap prices and late hours, Taco Bell realized they hadn’t cornered the entire stoner market yet. What were stoners eating instead of 59 cent tacos?  Doritos. Fortunately there was an easy solution: make a taco with a shell made of Doritos. Boom!  White Castle and Del Taco are now out of business.  11:30pm movies are empty.

What Taco Bell says it looks like.

I am curious where this REALLY came from. Taco Bell has a history of taking its employees ‘inventions’ and turning them into actual money-making products.  No, it’s true. When I was just a wee lad, my sister worked at the Taco Bell where the Mexican Pizza was developed.

Shown here.

Regardless, I finally had an opportunity and I drove over to Taco Bell while listening to KROQ to maximize the experience (and to pretend I was in High School and not an adult who knows better).  I was given the choice between “Taco Supreme” or just “Crunchy Taco” version.  I chose the one without 4G because I hate sour cream.  I also got a Mexican Pizza to wash it down with because I KNOW that won’t kill me. I trust my sister–she DID put spaghetti in my hair under the guarantee I would look like Popeye.

What it actually looks like.

Surprisingly, the Doritos Taco looks almost identical to its promotional image.  This is a win. For example, if I want a Big Mac that looks like the Big Mac on television, I have to go to Japan. Good on you, Taco Bell. But what does it taste like?

…turns out, it tastes like a taco. Just a normal, non-insane, Taco Bell crunchy taco.  You get a vague aftertaste like the one you get 30 minutes after eating a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos, but other than that your brain doesn’t register anything crazy or dangerous going on.

Which is of course the point – Taco Bell is murdering your soul and you don’t even realize it. Maybe these cinammon twists can save me.

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