I am quite busy doing things other than writing scathing articles, so please forgive the pause.
In the meantime, some Alex and Squall comic strips!
The prototype for the project I have been slaving over for the past few months is done. I am now relatively free until we begin development! Which means – that’s right – site and portfolio makeover! What, you didn’t actually think I would write about games, did you?
Actually, I might delay the site redesign until I think up something that looks good. So you may see me being productive yet. And of course, I’ll let you know when a playable build of the game is out.
Also, I bought a Cintiq. Be on the lookout for some of THAT.
Andres, what are you doing? Where’s that promised video critique?
I haven’t even begun filming it. An unexpected opportunity came up and I am now actually working on a game for a change. I’m very excited.
Can’t give away any details, but hopefully once pre-production slows down I should be able to find a slow period to either write or record.
This isn’t one of those “I forgot / I was lazy / I didn’t know what to write” circumstances. I am genuinely busy. Trust me. I’ll provide proof someday.
I went ahead and removed the It May Even Be In Our Time. I was sad to see it go, but it was time to move on. And it broke UI every time I switched between menu items.
It’s better this way. 
While I enjoy the written word very much, my dry wit does not seem to be conveying very well and my long-winded explanations about why games are my favorite thing in the world are losing people’s interest. Hence, I’m tempted to try something slightly different: camerablogging.
I’m going to do an experiment and see how well my wit and analysis translate to video. I may be putting a video critique up on YouTube sometime within the next couple of months (it will be embedded in here – you do not need to leave my abode for your viewing comfort) and hopefully it will be interesting, entertaining, funny and far less daunting than my usual six-to-eight paragraphs of large words.
However, to do this, I will need a rather high quality webcam. I am currently looking at this one. It is affordable, really nice and if I don’t end up being good on video then I can always use it for recording home-made pornography and selling it to media companies (I jest, I jest, please, no outrage!).
Any suggestions, opinions, or cries of outrage are welcome!
Over the past couple of months I have purchased an insane number of games off Steam because they were on sale I needed to get a broader scope of interesting game mechanics to look at aside from just “the most recent PS3 titles,” which all look like the same game anyway (God of War IV: Dante Alighieri Goes To Hell). One of the games I got my hands on was the little-known indie title The Void, a spectacular little gem by Ice-Pick Lodge, the Russian developer who did Pathologic prior to that, a very notable title in the Adventure Game world that was Game of the Year in Russia about five years ago.
The Void takes place in a universe between Life and absolute Death: a place of tranquility floating above the nothingness of the end of existence, called the Nightmare. And Nightmare it is: an atheist’s nightmare, where the pleasant promises of the Judeo-Christian Paradise have been avoided and instead the game opts to plunge you straight into a metaphysical Purgatory, where all is dead and your own death creeps steadily towards you, threatening to consume you and pull you into the pits of absolute nothing. Sounds pretty much like Hell to me.
While in this ravaged – yet strangely breathtaking, beautiful and dark – landscape called the Void (where our title hails from), you attempt to keep your soul alive by feeding it scraps of Color, a kind of mystical essence that you can pull out of plants and other curious sources with a bit of struggle.
In the Void (and The Void), Color is life. Color is all. Color is your life; you must feed it into your heart in order to stay alive, and enemies assailing you with cause the Color to bleed from it. Color is your stats; when filling your heart (or hearts, if you begin to acquire more) with Color, depending on the Color you fill yourself with, you’ll become tougher, attack stronger, be more impressive, make things grow easier. Color is your time; when traveling outside the smaller chambers that make up the Void, your color drains from your heart at a steady rate. Color is your power; as Color passes through your heart while in the Void, it filters from your heart into usable Color called “Nerva” – this Color is basically your mana, used to cast spells to fight, to protect yourself, and to manipulate the world around you. Color is your currency; Nerva can also be used to make things grow and feed other barely surviving things in The Void, causing them to over time bloom and produce more Color for the collecting.
If at any point your heart becomes empty of Color, you die, and your soul falls to the Nightmare, the nothingness.
The Void is, at its core, an unending struggle to find Color and keep your soul alive, while frantically avoiding wasting the precious drops.
While the story became very engaging later on, it began terribly slow at first. As a player, you thirst for knowledge, for experimentation, for knowing what the rules of the game are – and they are explained, along with the story, in due time, as you complete each task set before you. Your eagerness must quickly subdued into begrudging patience, awaiting to be rewarded with more information or power only until you’ve completed each task, or you’ll become increasingly agitated with the slow pace of the game and the time it takes for things to grow. I suppose this is to ease the player into the idea that, in the Void, they must take, measure and use every moment, since they cannot waste a second. You must use your time wisely, for you have precious little of it. The Void encourages you to build, to move, to use every second efficiently. The game rewards you for going forward – but it also punishes you for it.
As you learn more of this Purgatory that slowly seems to be dying from some kind of apathy, you are introduced to the central struggle that has caused this world to slowly collapse – a battle between spirits called the Sisters – beautiful young women with very different personalities, most of them eager to see you succeed and feed them the Color they die for – and spirits called the Brothers – monstrous, hulking demon creatures, protectors of the Sisters, supposedly ascended from Nightmare, and therefore, quite possibly from Hell itself, and many all too happy to kill you. The playing field shifts through the game – Sisters become your puppetmasters, Brothers your rivals – then you are the puppetmaster, taking from the Sisters what you need, killing off Brothers one by one. And all throughout, there are hints throughout the story, special chambers, things that make you question exactly what it is you are experiencing, along with vague and fleeting mentions of your living self, and the possibility of breaking free of the Void and returning to life. It is a long and grisly battle, segmented by “cycles,” with each new cycle sprouting new Color into the Void. There are 35 cycles made up of 99 seconds each, and at the end of the 35 cycles, your soul cannot continue, and you die.
The Void is a horror game. But it is not like other horror games you have played; no other horror game I have played so far has tried to do what The Void has done. Since, you see, in no other horror game has my mortality been so palpable. There is always a sense of fear that may grip a player when fighting enemies in any game, but it’s always under the premise that, it’s okay, you’re not really in danger anyway – it’s a game, and you can go look for some health packs in a minute, or re-load your saved game. The Void did not give me that luxury. While traversing the Void, you are always aware of just how little Color you have, of how it’s slowly draining, of how your life is dwindling. When you are forced to use Color to combat, you wince as you apply more and more Nerva to a blow, trying to break your enemy quickly, using as little of your precious Color as possible. If is the fear of starvation, of your dwindling candle, that possesses you throughout the whole game. The name of the first Chapter of your Chronicles is “Famine.” You hunger for Color, and fear the absolute death that comes for your soul if no more sprouts in time.
The game itself coaxes and taunts you as your Color dwindles; as you run low on Color (“Lympha”, it’s called, when it’s still in its raw state) and are forced to use your Nerva to fight, use magic or feed Sisters and plants, you start to hear whispers. “Drop by drop, you come closer to Death,” the game tells you. It’s chilling, and enhances the growing agitation you feel as you scour desperately for sources of Color. You must also beware of making mistakes with your Color, as well – painting a tree with color and not putting in enough means you will get back a minor amount of color, and you will unable to re-paint it until it has shed its leaves after several cycles. Not drawing the right symbols for the right spells will also cause you to lose some color in the process.
Additionally, The Brothers are not present in the Void at first, but appear suddenly near the beginning of the game and from then on make your existence in the Void all the more complicated. They are horrific, mutilated, generally towering over you, speaking in terrible voices, blind. Their very presence on the map inspires fear or apprehension, and God help you if you are forced to combat one of them early on.
I played The Void for about three to four hours straight, then came to a conclusion: Ice-Pick Lodge wants to break your soul, and they want you to give up playing video games forever. The game is maddeningly difficult, and it is quite literally impossible to save yourself from a bad choice earlier on in the game – you often have to load way back in the past, or begrudgingly begin a new game. After looking up a few tips on the Internet (The East and its look-for-help mentality!) I believe I may want to go back and give it another try, and actually complete the game this time around, but the apprehension of running low on Color, the frustration of watching it dwindle, knowing I’m out of luck next cycle and that I don’t know where to get my next batch of Lympha to survive, can be terribly overwhelming, not to mention the fear of angering the Brothers and having them come after you.
Still, its difficulty brings up the question: are they trying to break your soul? Or are they trying to show you just how resilient it is? What does the design say about the theme?
Supposedly, people are calling The Void an adventure game with resource management involved. I suppose it sort of is, but that’s also like saying that Harvest Moon is a farming simulation. There is more to it than that – more to see, more to speculate, more questions it brings about, more terror and stress that it causes. On a more introspective perspective, what is The Void? What does it symbolize? Through the difficulty, the mechanics chosen, the story, and the small things the Sisters would say, such as “Nobody cares about anything anymore. And nobody knows why nobody cares,” I’ve begun to believe that maybe The Void is a game about humankind’s struggle to keep the good things in life first… to not lose the flavor and richness of the world in the face of nightmares. To not lose its soul, and the deep apprehension one might feel as the joy of life, of the things around one, begins to fade. Hence, we must find new joy, and use what little joy we have to rework the world around us, make it bloom with things that will fill us with Color anew.
We must not let ourselves grow bone tired and weary of the lives we lead, unhappy, lacking in the love that we once held for them.
The murkiness of the setting in which the Void exists only further accentuates that, giving it a dreamlike, abstract quality: all these strange landscapes seem to have no connection to each other; up and down, in and out don’t really make sense and all doors lead to the same places.
The charm and and meaning I found to The Void was not echoed by everyone and was, of course, completely rejected by a few who felt the game had too many issues and not enough congruency. A good analysis that looks completely the other way from mine is Andrea Morstabilini’s analysis of The Void on Aventure Gamers, and it’s a good read if you have the time.
Myself, I was happy with the purchase, and I still remain fascinated by Ice-Pick Lodge’s amazing use of a single resource to define an entire game experience. Now, I’m going back to playing “the most recent PS3 titles” for a bit. I mean, it was just Christmas. I’ve got loot to enjoy.
I have put my Game Critiques in the body of the blog, just like a standard post, and have removed the stupid Game Criticism button from the top of the page. It was great for an older UI – in my newer one it’s not as effective, and with the presence of my Category list at the top right of the blog it is all too easy to find posts under the “Game Criticism” tag. So you can all just get used to it.
Plus, I was getting annoyed that comments were unavailable for pages, and that doesn’t make any sense to me. WordPress is free, though, so who’s gonna complain? I should try to fix the coding, but I’d have to do that for all my wonderful addons that Tweet my posts and the like, so best adapt to what everyone else is doing and make it work.
New critique being proofread as we speak. You won’t be expecting this one. It’s a kicker.
Happy New Year, by the way. Hope your holiday loot was nice – mine was so unbelievable I may never run out of games to play.
(old post)
It has taken me far too long to settle down and actually write about SPORE.
I think part of the problem has been time, since I have very little of it – however, a bigger problem has been that I’ve been too lazy to do it.
My friend Alex Vance recently uploaded a series of journal entries elaborating on people who are Not Writers – writers who say they write but do not do so as much as they should, and do not try to get over the minuscule hurdles that stop them from writing and hence differ from Writers, who need to write – who eat, sleep and breathe writing. (It is a good read – check it out sometime.)
I have my own name for these, and it is “writters”. It is a playful, mocking name. I now realize I have been mocking myself.
I’ve been trying to write and not doing it for far too long. (Do or no not – there is no try – I know I know)
So let’s talk about SPORE.
A great many people were expecing a great many things from SPORE, and I suppose it’s only fair that on release the general outcry was “This game is not what it should have been.” Plenty of people were baffled by the lack of complexity and intricacy in the gameplay in comparison to more profound civilization games, such as the aptly titled Civilization – I vividly recall Brenda Brathwaite watching me play SPORE feverishly in the same spot for five hours and ask me what I thought, then say someone told her Civilization IV was far better.
In a sense, they were right. In another, they were not.
I’ve heard SPORE be criticized on a lot of grounds that are all very valid. It’s been called “simple,” “stacked all wrong,” “disappointing at times,” “not quite an amazing game,” and, most importantly, “toy.” It is one hundred percent true that SPORE is not so much an immersive journey towards the Win Condition as it is an individual experience of endless possibilities–which is pretty much what most every one of Will Wright’s games have been. I think, however, that many people mistakenly believe the SPORE experience is simple out of a lack of insight into its design.
SPORE was an accident, is what I’ve concluded after a great deal of thinking, playing and speculating. It was a very exotic road trip stop on the way to a bigger finale. Will Wright has been one of my heroes for a great many years and I’ve taken a great deal of time scrutinizing his game design pattern and determining how it functions. I have come to believe that SPORE is an excellent game in what it seeks to achieve. Where it faltered and did not receive notable victory was in accomplishing people’s expectations for it.
The following is my theory.
Will Wright has been working on SimEverything for a long while now. It’s a fairly well-known fact that Will Wright wants to encompass the universe in a large simulation tool and allow players to possess and manipulate a tiny, yet massively complex system of simulacra that mimic every fathomable, fashionable part of the Earth.
During this time, he developed this evolutionary system that he believed would be a part of SimEverything.
He did not make SimEverything.
I can’t say how many people I’ve spoken to who express their frustration at SPORE for not being SimEverything. I partly blame EA/Maxis’s advertising campaign for over-hyping the game and trying to have too much of a hand in development (that we will touch on later), but I think a great deal of the issue was people’s misinterpretation of what Will Wright meant when he changed the name of his project from SimEverything to SPORE. In an interview, years ago, I recall him saying something along the lines of “I wanted to call it SimEverything.” I’ve had a hunch for a while now that in Will-Wright-Speak this means “I wanted to make SimEverything, but what I got was SPORE instead.” I knew, from the moment SPORE‘s name was announced, that I was not going to be playing SimEverything. But that was okay. I was okay with that. I just wanted to see what this was about.
Anyone who knows Will Wright as more than just “that game developer that made SimCity and The Sims” knows there is much more to Will than meets the eye (he is a robot in disguise). I recall an extensive and fascinating TED talk (and here it is for your viewing pleasure) where Will stood at the front of the room (while wearing an inexplicable gear on the cast on his arm) and explained SPORE, as he had many times before, and then went beyond SPORE and spoke in depth about his motivations behind the game, his experience in Montessori school that led him to find an interest in toys that teach valuable lessons and ideas through play and his own attempt to build a kind of toy that could enable the same spark of understanding and learning.
To sum it all up, my theory? SPORE is not SimEverything. It is a game meant to explore and educate on principles and theories behind the evolutionary process.
spore (n) a small, usually single-celled asexual reproductive body produced by many nonflowering plants and fungi and some bacteria.
The name somewhat gives it away, in a sense. Will Wright is rather predictable when it comes to nomenclature. He names things for what they are – SimCity was the simulation of a city, SimAnt the emulation of an ant colony. SPORE as a name does not give the impression of being a game about terraforming planets and the intricate struggles of civilizations. Oddly enough, the all-caps plays into it well: SPORE is a game that begins with a miniscule cell which then grows to gargantuan proportions. First, it’s a spore, then it’s a Spore, then it’s a SPORE - first a cell, then a creature, then a civilization. Eventually, the irony of the title speaks for itself – the smallest thing in the organic realm earns the all-importance of all-caps. Now, let’s continue onto more concrete evidence and less philosophical theorizing that nobody believes anyway.
The magic of SPORE theme lies in its presentation and game design. While naysayers argue that SPORE lacks the depth and complexity of so many other games it “emulates”, I believe these “copycat stages” are simplistic because they’re leading the player memetically through a select few key elements in order to bring a larger point into perspective. And that point is the following: as the player builds and evolves their creature from very early on, they’ll find certain traits and attributes earned from body parts and accessories will not help them continue the level they’re playing on. It may be as simple as “I need more firepower”, leading the player to sacrifice a couple of pretty feathers on their creature’s forehead in order to give them a wicked, curved beak. The point is, necessary traits for survival are lost and necessary traits are enhanced to guarantee survival. This is the very core principle of Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest.
While yes, essentially a lot of the basics of evolution are somewhat sidestepped in SPORE such as common ancestry, several generations of dominant and recessive genes, etc. etc. the point is that SPORE still ultimately communicates that important idea behind natural selection, where something ends up determining when parts and features “work” and when they “don’t work”.
If the core of the game had been better communicated, this simplicity could have been overlooked. The point of SPORE is that it is not another Civilization game, it is an evolution game.
Unfortunately, in order for the game to adhere more appropriately to a new target market, as per requested by EA (my theory, at least) much of the game’s reliance on evolution to determine ability to survive was dumbed down to a points addition system, where having enough points in one of three basic “skills” (fighting, trading, charming) would allow you to survive by relying on that “skill”. This was a theme followed through the whole game, but was unfortunately so underenforced in order to allow players freedom that it didn’t end up appearing to be a strong mechanic. For a wider target market, however, it worked just right to keep the game accessible.
SPORE‘s original overtones of scientific simulation were, at some point and for some reason, abandoned in favor or a more toony, playful presentation where the end path to any and all creature evolutions is an intelligent civilization with fairly universal social customs and engineering developments (essentially they all have tanks, planes and boats, regardless of whether they’re a race of flying reptilians or plant fish). This is clearly not an accurate representation of how evolution actually works, not to mention that giving the player complete freedom to build their creature however they like strangely has a kind of Creationist conext behind it. SPORE‘s dev team referred to their approach towards explaining evolution as a “creativolution” presentation. Indeed, even from watching the television ad for SPORE, one would get the feeling that the game steers players into believing a Creationist approach to the way the universe was created.
embedded by Embedded Video
How does this tie into my theory about SPORE‘s design purposes, then?
The intermarriage between Creationism and Evolution that’s presented by SPORE results in being both another market move by attempting to avoid the flak from insane individuals who want to force their religion into you and your Subway Sandwich and also being a clever point about the existence of a common ground between religion and evolution. After all, as my mother once said (and I can’t believe I’m quoting my mother in reference to a video game controversy) “God works in mysterious ways – who’s to say God didn’t intend for us all to eventually evolve into what we are now?” Hence, another nick in Will Wright’s initial plans, made for the sake of audience.
SPORE did have its flaws that cannot be ignored, perhaps most notably that the endgame is so difficult to get to that most people didn’t even know it was there (not to mention that the godforsaken Grox are the most irritating, unforgiving and relentless enemy I have ever faced). To be fair, Will has never been one for endgame scenarios, and SPORE reflects that, not really giving you a clear indicator of what it expects from you. The Digital Rights Management (DRM) issues that came packaged with SPORE‘s installation did not help matters, bringing outrage from the community as EA and Maxis struggled to save their game from scurvy-ridden pirates.
In the end, SPORE failed where it should have succeeded – the ideas behind it were all right, but I believe much of Will’s original vision had to be scrapped in order to avoid controversy after controversy that would have plagued the game had they released what he intended. And where were the land missions? Where were the plant design suites for players? Put in expansion packs for later release, in order to squeeze a couple of more cents out of the franchise before it fizzled out.
Several aspects of the unfortunate nature of today’s politically correct world, the overwhelming pirate culture and simply a few ill-placed choices on the accessibility of the game for a wider target market all contributed to SPORE not being the commercial success it could have, should have been.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, let’s keep our seats and wait for SimEverything. Will tried, but he is, after all, like us…
…a robot in disguise.
tl;dr: You jerk, read my critique.
(old post)
I am amazed as I read over the little text at the end of every story arc I play through. Every word in the paragraphs set before me is like a stab straight through my heart. Thirty minutes of irritatingly broken gameplay and I’m rewarded with the most painful realization ever conceived as a gamer, even stronger than realizing Square is never going to make a Final Fantasy VII remake–Fox McCloud is dead. He’s been since dead long ago, possibly around the time of Dinosaur Planet which, in spite of myself, I have to say was a decent platformer that was actually fun once you got over the fact that you were Fox McCloud running around on the ground with a stick and that you were basically playing Zelda. I could tolerate this. It was not what I wanted from a StarFox game, but I could tolerate it. In the same way I could tolerate playing Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2. Trust me, I didn’t like it. But I gave it a chance for story’s sake, and I enjoyed the progression of events, even if I was controlling a queer, skin-tight-suit-wearing prettyboy who wanted to be Solid Snake. This, however, has so far been an unforgivable game. Star Fox: Command puts you at the helm of various pilots which you commandeer through each stage of the game, drawing little paths on the DS touch screen for them to follow. You must fly in front of incoming enemy blips in order to intercept them, and once you’ve drawn up your paths you press Advance (generally any button on your D Pad, in my case), and your ships will fly along their paths, causing enemies to spot them and exclaim, Metal Gear Style, and follow them, ready to be engaged. In that sense, it’s something vaguely similar to a tactical RPG. In fact, it’s reminiscent to the play style of Star Fox 2, the beta of which I still have erotic dreams about. I honestly think SF2 could have been the greatest Star Fox game of them all–no, the greatest space shooter of them all. It held promise, gameplay, graphics–everything refined–had the backing of an incredible story–I mean, that game had it all. And Star Fox: Command could have been everything Star Fox 2 had promised to be and more. But it has none of that. Instead, it borrows concepts, abstracts them, and adds on a tacky art style that makes me shudder and close my eyes, miserable. The tactical assignation system works fine and is simple to understand, but often lags whenever you’re waiting on a turn ending, and it doesn’t ever tell you it’s thinking, so you end up trying to click forward again, wondering if it didn’t register you pressed it the first time only to find that it jumps ahead and skips your next turn because you pressed forward again. It’s nearly cost me rounds of play, which is maddening. Then once you get past the tactical part of the game, you come to the shooting part. You’re prompted which enemy you’ve intercepted you would like to engage, and then you’re thrown into a free-roam square space filled with enemies, where you’re required to apparently “collect star pieces”. They’re essentially medals that look like stars. Yes, I know that sounds like Mario, and I have no idea where they came up with that one. You find these pieces shooting down key enemies that hold them, indicated at the beginning of any stage when you’ve engaged an enemy. The map will be filled with enemy ships, but usually you’ll just end up ignoring them and going after the star pieces, since you really don’t have time to waste–there’s a time limit, and you have to collect time markers dropped by enemies on the field in order to get back precious seconds. Yes, time markers. You control using the stylus, which is suprisingly pleasant, despite my roommate’s insistence that it can’t possibly feel natural. It’s certainly not something I’m used to, but it’s intuitive and comfortable. My hand doesn’t cramp up like when I play Metroid Prime: Hunters, and shooting is a breeze: just press any button, and if you’re a righty like I am it’s all too easy to use Up on the D-Pad. Hold to charge and lock on, like any Star Fox game, and let go to release your charge. Some ships have multilock. It all works fluidly. The only thing that results in impossible for me is firing bombs, which requires you to click a button on your screen – like Metroid Prime for DS’s turn-into-a-ball button, only more terse and idiotic, since you need to fire a bomb rather rapidly in this game whereas changing into a ball in Metroid isn’t necessarily a combat maneuver. However, none of the comfort actually matters. Now, I’m not saying shooting down enemies is easy. I don’t mean that at all. Star Fox: Command is absurdly difficult at times, with enemy fire hailing down on you like God’s angry Reckoning. But most of the time–the majority of the time–there is no skill involved in the game. Most of the time you can shoot down an entire enemy fleet without even looking at the screen. Enemy ships don’t avoid you, and oftentimes will fly straight into you, despite the fact that you’re in a quote unquote “All-Range Mode” scenario (for us Star Fox geeks). All you have to do is keep pressing fire, and eventually they’ll all die. Couple that with your insanely long-lasting barrel roll (draw a little circle on the DS screen) and you’re pretty much a massacre machine. All enemies conveniently have HP bars, too, so you know how close you are to destroying them–not that it really matters–half the time I’m not sure how much my shots actually do to them, anyway. Of course, there’s always the exceptions–some enemies, like these infuriating spinning <em>snail</em> things, don’t seem to take damage when you shoot them regularly, despite the fact that they have a glowing weak spot a la Star Fox 64. I think I even do more damage when I try shooting them in the head on than when I go for the weak spot. In those cases, a charge shot usually takes them out almost frighteningly fast (they don’t last much for having HP bars). However, some characters don’t have a charge shot–like Slippy, whose ridiculously strong lasers still can’t make up for the lack of a charge shot so they gave him the largest HP bar in the game as well. In these cases, trying to take enemies out can be somewhat infuriating. There’s also the fact that in the tactical bits you have to intercept and engage three different kinds of enemies: fighters, bases and missiles. Bases are just enemies with a giant mothership hovering around that shoots a giant laser. You ignore the mothership, collect the star bits, and then ROB (that infernal machine) prompts you to fly through rings into the mothership while using the barrel roll. Yes, into the mother ship. Like in <em>Independence Day</em>, only less suicidal. Don’t ask me why. When you destroy bases, they stop releasing missiles. We all remember the frustrating Sector Z mission with missiles. Star Fox: Command tries to duplicate that unpleasant experience, a mystery to me, by having you <em>fly through rings</em> while trying to shoot down one of the blasted things. Luckily, these missiles don’t have much HP, but I’ve had them get uncomfortably close to the Great Fox, and if I can’t use charge shot (with characters like Slippy, for example) shooting them down becomes ridiculously difficult, especially since the rings (called “beacons”) are generated seemingly at random and are pretty much relentless and unpredictable. Once you’re done shooting down all the enemies you’ve engaged this turn, the next turn begins. If one of the enemies or a missile manages to hit the Great Fox… well. You lose. You have to start the stage over. You also have Arwing lives again, and those represent the amount of ships you lose. If you run out of life or time in any skirmish with an enemy, you lose an Arwing. But your wingman remains in the game, acting as if nothing happened, despite their catastrophic death minutes ago. All that is <em>tolerable</em>, however, compared to the <em>writing</em>. I was insulted when I first started playing Star Fox: Command and I found out Krystal was in the game. Krystal is a gibberish speaking blue fox from a planet filled with dinosaurs with mystical powers. She is not a fighter pilot. Yet she was in this game, and how. The story revolves around the invasion of a species known as the “Anglar”, which are essentially just gigantic fish people. I imagine they must be somehow connected to Andross, because he’s in every game, but I haven’t finished it yet so I really don’t know. Basically, Peppy (who is a general now) implores you to go stop them, so you do. Predictably. Only, it’s just Fox and ROB at first. You gather up the crew as you go along, learning about how Fox is an emo kid and doesn’t want to risk anyone’s life–which all sounds fairly correct–but then when Krystal starts coming into the conversation everything goes sour. Fox with a love interest is wrong, and Fox with a love interest he pines over is almost painful. The definition of our vulpine hero is “a professional”, and Fox is one to every extreme, constantly striving to live up to the name of his father. Having him sob over Krystal when the girl suddenly turns out in a romantic entanglement with Panther from Star Wolf (Panther, the sloppy replacement for Andrew and Pigma, of all people) is just disturbing. Fox isn’t the only character who’s soul is dead in this game–Falco, our loveable, sarcastic, spiteful jerk suddenly steps out of character constantly through the game in revolting displays of affection. “Krystal!” he cheers at one point, “You sure can fly, girl!” My brain short circuited. Falco–the <em>real</em> Falco–would <em>never</em> offer a compliment if it wasn’t tinged with some sort of sarcasm or tease behind it. To anyone. Even his constant cutting off and dismissal of ROB as a “bucket of bolts” feels horribly forced and not at all heartfelt. Falco is supposed to be a jerk: cocky, insufferable, and internally deeply afraid of losing everyone but unable to deal with it. What happened to Star Fox? Why are Star Wolf good guys in this game? I’ve spent years gunning Wolf and Leon <em>down</em>–why am I helping them out now? It’s been evident more and more until I haven’t been able to ignore it any longer. Assault was a horrible piece of garbage, tolerable only because it had Arwings in it even if they moved far too slowly. But I realize now the issue with Assault wasn’t only the cheap gameplay and sloppy voice acting–but the writing that went into it, and how absolutely dreadful Star Fox plots have become, centered around Fox’s meager attempts to “find love”. Fox has never been about that. Now, he’s been robbed of his choice. Fox McCloud is dead, my friends. I mourn him with great sadness in my heart. Command could have been a decent game, despite its rather broken gameplay–I actually can enjoy myself on each missions, shooting down enemy ships and encountering curiously different final bosses. But it’s the story that firmly declares to me the fact that Nintendo has lost one of their great contenders for good. A lot of people say Nintendo has always had their big sellers–Mario, Metroid and Zelda–but what about Star Fox? That used to be a huge name for Nintendo, a classic that should have been able to maintain a strong and lucid IP for a long time. Everyone loves Fox. He’s a Smash Brothers character. So why did they let him sink so low? People may keep their unwavering faith in Nintendo, but after seeing how they’ve massacred one of my favorite video game characters of all time… well. Let’s just say if they come out with a new Star Fox that’s just as bad as this one, I may never buy another Star Fox again.
(old post)
In Monster Hunter Freedom 2 for the PSP, a player begins as a newly hired Monster Hunter arriving in a cold mountain town. The premise is that the player has been sent to replace the old Monster Hunter, who was killed by a beast that attacked the village. While playing this game, a player experiences several aesthetic values from it including Challenge, Self-Expression and the Epic model.
The Challenging model gives a player a specific sense of accomplishment as she works her way through the game. In Monster Hunter, a player will be sent on missions into the wild where she will constantly be challenged by enemies that are more and more difficult to bring down, but will be rewarded with money and rare loot from the corpses of the monsters she hunts. As her prey becomes stronger, she can use the items she collects from the wilderness to improve her own armor and weapons, allowing her to overcome the obstacles before her. Against each enemy she has the chance to practice techniques until she masters her weapon of choice, allowing her to defeat stronger and more agile enemies with skill and determination.
Players also get the ability to experience the Self-Expressive aesthetic, with several fighting styles to choose from in order to take down monsters, and with different types of armor and weapons they can buy or fashion. Each fighting style can change the gameplay completely, with ranged weapons dealing damage from far away and leaving players exposed with very little armor, and close-range weapons dealing massive damage in one blow or very quick bits of damage eating up an enemy’s health. An even more unique piece of equipment is the Hunting Horn, which is a support class for playing in a party, and heals or casts strength buffs on nearby allies. Each piece of armor has its own unique look and build. Players can also improve armor they own and make it stronger without having to change it for other, stronger armor. With several different body part slots to equip armor onto and many different styles and specializations to choose from, players are given the sense of satisfaction from earning their armor and the feeling of freedom that comes with being able to choose their appearance. As they complete missions and defeat more enemies, they also unlock titles for themselves, allowing players to adopt interesting customizable titles such as “Walker of Mountains” or “Racing in The Sky”. Players also get the opportunity to play cooperatively with friends over Ad-Hoc wireless connection. Up to four players can band together in a party and take on missions, allowing them to show off their stats and armor and share their abilities and experiences with each other.
A player is also presented with the Epic model when playing Monster Hunter. He will start out a lowly novice with no titles to his name, and as he completes quests will unlock titles, obtain items, expand his farm, forge more and more prestigious armor and weapons and fight monsters of increasing size and difficulty. The first beast a player will encounter is a terrifying, roaring dragon creature known as the Tigrex, which defeats a player utterly and leaves them stranded in the snow. The player must face the Tigrex again several times through the game, never being able to stand up to its power and being forced to run away, but with every loss comes more and more victories until a player is able to take the Tigrex down. Monsters even beyond the Tigrex will be greater in size, power and terrifying strength, but a player will be able to overcome them all in time, filling him with the feeling of accomplishing Epic and fantastic tasks. Monster Hunter does fall short when showing a player the result of his actions—the creatures he defeats will be alive and well if he ever returns to defeat them, and there is no visible change in the world if he chooses to help troubled people or not. However, the game can be excused in that through the fact that, regardless, a player still feels a great satisfaction from defeating and even capturing monsters, and the more he defeats those monsters, the more rare loot he will collect from their corpses—such as bones, skulls, teeth, hide and more.
Monster Hunter Freedom 2 takes many of the elements from an MMORPG and incorporates them into a unique single-player experience. Part action game, part roleplaying game, part Pokemon-collector game, Monster Hunter tries to give players a sense of challenging, epic play and allows them to express themselves by giving them a great deal of customization in both gameplay styles and visual appeal. Monster Hunter Freedom 2 was a huge success (and continues to be one) in Japan, where it not only has several released games on the PSP but has a large MMO Action-RPG game Monster Hunter Frontier. Unfortunately, in the U.S., it is very difficult to get a copy—however, there is a good chunk of fans who have gotten their hands on the game and enjoy it for its amazing blend of hardcore achievement gameplay and short, ten-to-thirty-minute causal play missions.
