After Uncharted 2, I made my way back to the Sony area to queue for Assassin’s Creed II. I could have tried it over at the Ubisoft booth, but I was lured by a shorter queue (only 15 minutes in the end!).
While not necessarily a reflection of the game itself, I have to say that this was, for me, the most disappointing demo of the show.
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written by .klik2
After the GoW3 demo, I rushed over to jump in line for the Uncharted 2: Among Thieves demo. I’ll admit, I was looking forward to the game, and fully intend to pick it up in a few weeks, yet after playing the demo, I still felt the need to write at the top of my notes, in big writing, “BUY!!”
This was, for me, the best game of the show.
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written by .klik2
With our little stint at TGS nearly a full week ago, it occurs to me that I got my hands on more games than I have mentioned here. Fortunately, I made quite a few notes following each demo – it seems there is at least one positive thing to be said for all the time I spent in queues.
Anyways, next up: God of War 3.
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written by .klik2
So, as previously mentioned, the one game I got my hands on at Day One of TGS 2009 was Heavy Rain. If you’d like to know what I thought of the demo, keep reading…
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written by .klik2
Wow, the first day of my first TGS.
After a long-ish hike out there, and a minor hiccup getting in (Chi wasn’t given her ticket for the public day), we got in around 1:30.
It was equal parts noisy, nuts and AWESOME!  Being my first experience of something of this particular size and nature, I wasn’t sure what to expect exactly, although my suspicions were mostly correct. A lot of screens playing different videos and blaring noise, the fabled booth babes, and a lot of people wandering around between them.
Most of our day was spend wandering around the halls, checking out the booths and collecting books and whatnot from the various booths, earmarking which games I’d go back and try and get my hands on. Of course, in queue-happy Japan, there was a lot of waiting to be done to get to these games. In the end, I only managed to get my hands on the one game – Heavy Rain. I’ll write up my thoughts on it separately, but it was good – I hope to go back and get another shot at it tomorrow.
Anyways, that’s it for now, time to write up my Heavy Rain thoughts 
written by .klik2
…is the number of Playstation 3’s sold in Japan this week. Pretty impressive–it’s almost 4 times the PS3 sales of the previous week (16,701), and almost 3 times the number of 360’s and Wiis sold. But I digress.
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written by .klik2
\\ tags: cloud black, ps3, self-indulgence, throwing away money
This is a thought that’s been in my head for a while, but I figured it’s time I fleshed it out better both for myself, and for the world at large. The original spark comes from comments from Portal writer Erik Wolpaw in the post-mortem of said game at the 2008 GDC. The basic gist is this: a game tells two-stories, one through it’s narrative, and one through it’s gameplay, and having the two play well together vastly improves the quality of the experience. (Check out Gamasutra’s coverage of the post-mortem, it’s a great read.)
I’m going to suggest that in addition to these two stories, there’s also a third that comes into play: the player’s story. So let’s take a look at each of these in turn:
The Story Narrative: This is the most obvious narrative in the game, and probably also the one that most effort (on the story side) is put into. Traditionally, this has been the main tool in providing the player with motivation to proceed through the game, and it’s also where the majority of the emotional experience of the game comes from. It’s also perhaps the narrative that we best know how to write, as there’s a long tradition of story-telling in many different media, much of which can be adapted to gaming. That said, as a new medium is does have its own challenges and strengths, and there are still great advances that can be made.
The Gameplay Narrative: This is the one that Wolpaw was pointing to, the narrative that’s told through the gameplay. Though not directly a strong method for directly telling a narrative, the best way to look at this is probably in relation to the game’s mood - the gameplay (and the experience of playing the game) can either reinforce it or undermine it. This is something that has perhaps been focused on a lot in the horror-survival genre - the scarier ones routinely have bits of gameplay designed to make the player jump, and to catch you off-guard. At the opposite end of the scale, a lot of old JRPGs are not so good with this, the classic example being when you’re supposed to be in a rush to get somewhere, but there’s actually nothing to stop you from sidetracking as much as you like.
There’s a certain care that has to be taken in balancing these, as anything intended to too strongly dictate how the player proceeds runs the risk of being too controlling, and ruining the enjoyment of the player. The JRPG example is a good one here - these games are often very reliant on being able to explore every nook and cranny of the world, to take that away would be something of a rude shock.
These two narratives - story and gameplay - comprise the greater part of what the developers are responsible for. But one of the defining features of games, as distinct from most other current media, is that they are interactive, and thus, the end user takes on a vital role in the telling of the narrative. Hence my third narrative, the Player Narrative.
The Player Narrative: By virtue of the nature of games, while playing through them the player is constantly making decisions. On a number of different levels, both conscious and subconscious, the player is authoring a side narrative of their own through this. Most often this could be looked at as the player giving their character additional traits (for example, my characters in Fallout 3 have a particular pre-occupation with shooting things in the head).
This is another area where a disconnect with the story narrative is problematic. Someone once said that the player in a game is like an actor who doesn’t know his lines, and in the face of this ignorance, most players will start to fill in the gaps themselves. If you then throw in a situation where the player has no choice but to go directly against their own idea of what’s going on, you can end up with a situation where a player feels stuck because they have no idea what their character would do in the situation.
On the flipside, when a game can pick up and respond to your player narrative, it can make the game that much more compelling. Where this has been done, it’s often been a rather direct method (ie. the player can directly affect things); those levelling systems where the player can determine how their character grows, are probably one of the most common examples of this. The alterative is a more indirect, subtle one - where the game can observe how the player goes through the game, and respond accordingly.
One very simple example of this is an old favourite of mine, Hikware’s Warning Forever. While there’s little narrative in it, seeing your opponents beef up their defences in response to your attack patterns is far more satisfying than simply facing bigger and bigger opponents each time.
This is something that I feel warrants some more exploration in the future… I would love to see a game that recognises certain patterns in the player’s actions, and has that impact the story.
And maybe I’m just gonna have to go out there and be the one that just. No point just twiddling my thumbs waiting for someone else to, right?
written by .klik2
\\ tags: narrative
So, after much tardiness, a new post! One thing that I’ve been sinking a bit of time into lately is Mirror’s Edge, and now that I’ve finished it off, I thought it only appropriate to write up my reflections on it.
The Awesome:
- The running - I guess I kinda have to start here, being the game’s main focus and selling point. While I’ve always been amazed by parkour, I was initially really meh about this game - to my thinking, the idea to put the whole game in first person would kill the most amazing thing about the sport, being watching the amazing acrobatics and skills of the traceur/traceuse. Not so, however. Once you really get into the game, and particularly if you know the area you’re running through, you can build up a lot of speed and maintain it, and it’s really amazing to play, but also to watch (or so my wife tells me ). Particularly once you get into the speed runs/time trials, getting a good run going is amazing, and really rewarding as well.
- The controls - full props to the guys as D.I.C.E. for the controls. For all the acrobatics you can perform, the controls are really simple: you have an “up” button, which is for jumping, wall running, etc; a “down” button, for sliding, rolling, dropping, and so forth;and a 180º spin button, which is used in conjunctions with the other two for a few of the more complex moves. All of the buttons are context-sensitive, and in the end, I rarely felt that the controls screwed me over. In fact, where I didn’t do exactly what I’d intended, I found myself blaming my own inability. Maybe that’s just me, but for me it’s one sign of a solid control scheme.
- The visual design - the world of Mirror’s Edge is bright and shiny, it’s buildings predominantly white with solid bright colours. It helps further set the game apart, against the recent trend of darker, grittier game worlds, and the theme is carried through the rest of the visual design, including menus and the like. My personal favourite is the stage selection, which displays the city as a series of blank which rectangular buildings, with the buildings on the level route red. It’s simplistic, but striking.
- The racing - after finishing the story mode, the speed runs and time trials are a welcome extension to the game. While I’ve never been a fan of car racing games, there is something horribly addictive about racing the clock, trying to shave tenths and hundredths of seconds off your time, when the slightest of mistakes has you restarting. Added into that the variety of options for passing through the levels, and the extra challenge of spotting and capitalising on other routes through the environments. Add to that the ghost feature, which lets you see your own or other players’ routes through, and it picks up an extra element, where you can see how other players get through so quickly (if you can keep up ).
- The level design - some of these are a right pain to get through, but I found myself enjoying each of them, particularly once I worked out how to get through them. It’s a combination of the levels and the mechanics, but overcoming each challenge, particularly those that had me stuck for a little while, was immensely rewarding. The inclusion of multiple routes is a welcome touch, and added more fun to it. There are some parts that require some very tight jumps to make (and I hated for it), but the variety of levels more than made up for a few annoyances.
The Underwhelming:
- The story - the story is by no means bad, but it’s hardly great either. It’s also more or less completely separate from the gameplay, which I think is perhaps something of a missed opportunity, it would have been interesting to see more interplay between the two. Despite the emphasis on speed, you can take as long as you like with no ill effects. There are also some excellent little bits of side narrative stashed away through the levels, like the maintenance guy in the subways - even though you never see him, his office and his notices/defacing of signs in the area tell you something about him, which I found really amusing. It would’ve been great if something similar could’ve been used to augment the main story.
- The difficulty - you can expect to die a lot. There is a lot of trial and error in finding your way through a level, and much of the errors will involve death. It’s not something that personally bothered me - in fact I made it harder for myself by deciding to finish the game without killing anyone - but it is something that may turn some people away from the game. It’s kind of a throw back to older games (and some more recent ones, like the PS2 Shinobi game), where death was very frequent. You’ve been warned
- The combat - I’m not entirely decided about the combat in the game… Although, as I mentioned, I didn’t fully experience given I was all about disarming and knocking people out, and never got into the blowing people away with my stolen weapons. It’s certainly fun at some points, and running from a chopper is kinda exhilarating (especially once you’re not getting killed constantly
 ), but I would have loved the chance to just run through some of the levels again, sans opponents, just for the fun of it (something which the time trials with their rigorous checkpoints have so far failed to provide for me).
The Thought-Provoking:
- The story (again :P) - this game is something unique, in my experience at least, in the sense of urgency and drive present in the gameplay. But it is unfortunate to see that not really used in any meaningful narrative way. I think there’s definitely scope in the future for something like this to be explored further, and in many ways this is a perfect gameplay system to explore the idea of more closely aligning the narrative and gameplay stories (…something which I really need to write a post about >_>).
- The review debate - it’s interesting to see the current debate going on about innovation in games, and how reviews should be written, and I’d say Mirror’s Edge has certainly played a role in bringing the debate to its current head. In all honesty, it’s a debate I’ve somewhat avoided, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
In the end, Mirror’s Edge is something different as far as games go at the moment. It’s a lot of fun, and there is a huge sense of achievement to be found in getting your head around the gameplay, and racing through, around, and over the environments and anything else that stands in your way. It’s a perfect example of simple gameplay giving way to a really deep game. I’d strongly recommend checking it out if you have any interest in it, because moreso than a lot of other games, there’s something in there you can only get by picking it up and playing it yourself.
written by .klik2
\\ tags: Mirror's Edge, reflections
So, having had my greasy little hands on LittleBigPlanet, I thought I should note some impressions of it. I want to try and do this as a semi-regular feature for particularly notable games, so look forward to more in the future!
The Awesome:
- The simplicity - this is not a difficult game to get your head around. Fundamentally there are only three main game actions available: movement (left, right, and between the three depth layers), jumping, and grabbing. There’s a fourth - attaching stickers/decorations to objects in the stage - but in the included levels this is only once used for anything other than unlocking extras.
- The physics - your sackperson can interact with many different things on the eponymous LittleBigPlanet, and the physics through which you do this is great. For all the work and complexity in it, it’s not difficult. In the end, they’re obvious - things do what you’d expect them to, and rarely do anything you wouldn’t.
- The level design - the levels included in the game (and there are a decent number of them), are brilliantly designed. They range from the initial few tutorial levels to some hideously fiendish ones, yet there is a degree of genius in all of them. Each level tends to have a theme to the puzzles and design, and seeing the way it plays out (and gets more and more complex) is awesome. As a nice touch, they’ve left a lot of the triggers and switches that run the level as visible, so when you get into designing your own levels, you can often go back and discern what makes the included levels tick.
- The Fun! - there is a sense of fun and playfulness throughout the whole game. From the introductory level which is a super basic intro to running and jumping, as well as an entertainingly presented introduction to the Media Molecule staff (my favourite is when you roll an round cylinder with an ‘x’ shape on it into a game in the floor, completing the name “Rex”), to the lightheared opening movie, and the levels and story themselves, everything is fun. Special mention has to be given the casting of Stephen Fry as the narrator - he makes the voiceovers and tutorials particularly engaging, and goes a long way to setting the mood for the game.
- Make your own fun! - This deserves its own section. There is so much room in the game for players to make their own fun, on top of what the game offers. On top of the basic controls, you also have a range of 12 different facial expressions, and ability to control your arms individually, as well as the tilt of your head or hips - a wide range of tools for emoting mid-level. Slapping other players, sending them flying, is also lots of fun. Add to the mix the huge range of costume parts, and you find yourself inventing your own characters - my friend’s “Siesta Pat” for example, who came with an accompanying array of puns about sleeping; my wife’s “Unassuming Hero”, a regular sackboy with glasses and a hero’s cape; and my own “Fragile Sackboy”, a sackboy with a cardboard box - sporting a large “fragile” warning - over his head. This is an awesome party game too - sitting in a room with a couple of friends, yelling encouragement at each other one moment, and abuse the next.
The Underwhelming:
- The camera - the enemy of many many games, LittleBigPlanet suffers its own camera issues when playing multiplayer. The camera will adjust and zoom in and out to show all the players, but things like player deaths can cause the camera to move quickly, disorienting other players and often causing more death. Also, the camera will only zoom out so far, and any players caught offscreen for a certain period of time will die, but the camera sometimes pick an odd player to follow, for example if you have three players standing around somewhere while the fourth runs off, often the fourth will be the one the camera follows, killing the other three.
- The controls - while the controls are excellent for the most part, there are certain situations in which they are a bit of a hastle. The first of these is depth swapping - the game mostly plays out with three levels of depth in the stage, and the controls can be a little sluggish and uncooperative in switching between them. Jumping can sometimes mess around with these as well. You don’t necessarily jump along in the same depth, the game seems to auto-detect where you’re trying to get, and usually quite well, but on occasion it will throw you into the wrong one, which you tend to notice more when it gets you killed.
The Thought-Provoking:
- User-generated content - LittleBigPlanet’s big push towards user-generated content is interesting, because it’s such a big part of the game, it will be interesting to see how that goes. The sheer depth of the creation tools is amazing - for example, a Japanese guy’s put together a level based on Gradius and Tetris - and it will be interesting to see the kind of community that builds up around it, and how long that sustains the game for. It will also be interesting to see how good a job Media Molecule does of filtering out and promoting the amazing user-created levels, as opposed to the flood of average levels that I kind of expect to see. In some ways, it seems like something of a yardstick - how much effort is the average user willing to put into the game?
Overall, this is an amazing simple, fun, lighthearted game. I know it’s something that’s gonna get pulled out at gatherings regularly for some time to come, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of the online content. Straight out of the case the included levels are an amazing showcase of what the game has to offer, and with the promise of further refinements and content coming from the developers themselves, and a plethora of content being churned out as well, it could be a long time before it gets old. Whether it fully lives up to its working title of The Next Big Thing remains to be seen, but it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility.
written by .klik2
\\ tags: LittleBigPlanet, reflections
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