OrtizGames

I can’t talk right now. I’m too busy applying for an internship, applying for scholarships, turning in midterms, working on commissions (due May) and playing Metal Gear Online.

MGO is my only salvation. My nerves are shot and I’ve worked myself down through the skin this weekend. Come Wednesday everything should be turned in, however, and I will be able to breathe once more.

Holding breath until then.

Wish me luck.

MGO is awesome, by the way.

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DOES KONAMI HATE ME? IS THAT IT?

I spent quite a while assaulting the Konami ID site in order to finally land the prize of my Konami ID and Game ID. Only to find that at 12am today, the servers were still down, and official press releases this morning revealed the awful truth. At least the beta has also been extended to the 11th of May instead of the 5th to make up for our lost time.

We’ll get more wind tomorrow of when our server will be back up. For now I’ll just grumble, watch my promo DVD and play GT5.

GT5:Prologue is gorgeous, for anyone who hasn’t played it.

UPDATE: MGO Beta will be starting up on Friday, April 25th at 24:00 PDT… I think that means Friday at midnight, though I remember being taught technically 24 o’ clock doesn’t exist. That’s just 0:0 on Sunday morning.

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I knew this would happen. Violence and games have been pretty much debunked time and time again, but here’s a professional report. There you have it. Now stop pointing fingers.

You’ve been blaming violence and social order on DOOM since the Columbine shootings. Just get over yourself. Crazy people go ape all the time.

I’m sure nobody blamed Jack the Ripper on anything other than Jack the Ripper. It’s the individual’s fault when the individual behaves against the norm. Not anyone else’s. They’re the ones who should recieve the reprocussions. I understand you want to fix the problem, but I think the Columbine shooters had a great deal more problems than video game addictions. They should have been treated psychologically for WHO THEY WERE, not how many games they played.

Thank you, and goodnight.

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To expand a little on what I wrote yesterday, I’d like to share a beautiful quote with you. Special thanks to John for telling me the story, and Mara for being there.

A man walks into Gamestop and begins returning his old games. One of the games he hands over the counter is Shadow of the Colossus. The person at the counter looks at the game, confused, and looks back up at the man.

“Do you mind if I ask… this is Shadow of the Colossus, why are you returning this game?”

His answer will forever make me smile.

“This game makes me think,” he says, furrowing his brow. “I don’t like to think.”

It’s moments like these that reveal which games have achieved the highest forms of art.

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I’m back from GDX, which was somewhat disappointing but yet very inspiring. It’s helped me decide on a lot of things about my future, and what I choose to pursue. But on to other interesting things, because I’m not as important.

The other day Shadow of the Colossus came up again. I love SotC. It’s a beautiful game. Most people agree with me. But then there’s some people who keep prying, nagging, demanding justification as to why it is good. So let’s recap here.

Music, great. Visuals, great. Gameplay –repetitive but refreshing, with the grip system and holding on to dear life from flailing stone beasts’ backs, driving a sword into their weak spots–so yeah, it’s great. Replay value,–I’m still playing it over and over because it’s so short and sweet–great. Story.

Here is where the controversy comes, and what most bothers me. Shadow of the Colossus is done by the absolutely incomparable Ico team, masters of weaving story and lore into gameplay. Every time I sit down to delve into SotC, I feel awed by the grandeur of the universe before me, and mesmerized by the stalking giants though which conquering I may be vindicated. In my eyes, Shadow of the Colossus has a tremendous amount of story. But people keep bringing up to me, what is the theme? What’s the premise? What’s the catch? Why is this story being told?

If you’d stop nattering, I’d tell you.

There’s plenty of themes in Shadow. I’ll get into them later, but they’re there. There’s a premise, too. Someone goes around and kills large stone giants. Simple, right? Themes don’t make a story, however.

The thing about a game is that, unlike a book or a movie or any other experience in which the director guides the viewer by the hand through their mystical, otherworldy vision, in games it’s usually the player taking rein and whipping the director to go faster, to turn, to stop. This makes it an entirely different kind of sensation, and by definition a true experience as opposed to a bystanding observation of the events taking place. In Shadow of the Colossus, Team Ico shed light on something amazing by setting the game up for the player to fill every hole. Nothing about the protagonist’s past is explained, and even the murky details that arise are guesswork at best. But the actions that the protagonist executes throughout the actual body of the game are as clear, concise and blaringly obvious–he goes from one rock titan to the next and brings each down. The scale of each of those actions puts the experience the player actually engages in (as opposed to backstory, which the player will only hear about in the game) on a massive pedestal, and highlights it as most important. So important, in fact, that it’s the premise of the entire game.

Basically, Team Ico wanted the player to make a story him or her self, in order to explain these phenomenally epic events. Whwther the player considers the protagonist a valiant knight, sacrificing him for his princess, or whether he thinks of the hero as a remorseful assassin, regretting his kill when it is too late and doing everything he can to receive pardon once more, or even as a dedicated, fierce lover, fighting to bring back his only with tooth and claw, the action is still the same. In other forms of storytelling, action is usually caused by the elements of the story. In Shadow of the Colossus, the story is sprouted from the action.

This is the magnificent thing about games. We try so very hard to make games that follow a set storyline like a movie, trying to lead the player from event to event and finally to the end, where we culminate the whole tale and explain our cleverness in setting things up the way they are. I, as a writer, am guilty of that, and so are most other game writers (do not lie). We love our story. It’s our baby. We want the player to discover it, and learn to appreciate it.

But what we forget is that, through play, we make our own stories. I remember countless of imaginary characters my friends and I would invent and adopt in roleplay, running around in empty soccer fields and calling out attacks, chasing each other, trying to escape the nonexistent hordes behind us with nothing but our fighting skill and nerve. That was what play was for me, story. Clearly, it’s resulted in me loving to write and read stories–but I have to remember the player wants that indulging ability to create their own universe, too. It’s the reason games like Morrowind, Oblivion, SPORE, World of Warcraft and Shadow of the Colossus appeal so much to me–they don’t force me into a story, they just give me a universe and invite me to go play. Granted, sometimes it’s not as free as one might think–you can’t avoid the Oblivion main quest forever, World of Warcraft is boring and absurdly slow if you’re not doing quests and there’s nothing to do in Shadow of the Colossus other than run around like a dolt in an empty environment and take down stone giants. But we’re getting there–someday we may make an entirely free universe, where anything is possible within the rules of the world, and people will be free to truly “roleplay”.

Then again, we tried that with Second Life in a way, and it didn’t work out all that well. Maybe we still need more time.

To conclude with Shadow of the Colossus, it’s a game that’s designed with the player’s story in mind, with themes supporting the player’s interpretation of his or her own actions. In the end, the real theme is Sacrifice. You, as a player, give up your six hours to crush these creatures for reasons of your choosing, losing bits of yourself along the way, becoming corrupted, tainted and yet pushing on, even to the point of losing your horse, Arrow–the only other living creature with any sort of unique identity to it in this forgotten world, and the only named character you know, leaving you completely and utterly alone to face the price of your Sacrifice. And in the end, you are cripplingly betrayed, and all seems to have been for nothing.

…But then your sacrifice gives birth to hope.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what you were fighting for. They were your reasons. It was your fight. The game was just a means to achieve it. And that’s what makes a game so much different, and so uniquely beautiful. The fact that the story was strong, well thought out, on purpose–down to dropping you in an abandoned, empty world with nothing but stone giants to remind you of how alone and unsupported you are in your great sacrifice–only a game can do something this amazing.

Only in playing do we truly experience. Watching is never enough. Don’t make a player watch.

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Peter Molyneux is like my “aww” developer. Sometimes he’s so silly he makes me laugh and sometimes he says something serious and I grow more fond of him. I think it may have something to do with how much I enjoy Fable.

Recently on Gamasutra, Peter (Molyneux) talked about how the game design industry has failed in being able to open up gaming for everyone. We’ve made huge leaps, he says, but we’ve gotten stuck here. He uses a controller as an example–how hard it is for the average person to wrap his or her head around the idea of a controller. While it’s true that a ridiculous amount–how many people? There’s statistics–of people play video games, games nowhere close to matching, for example, the number of televisions in the world. The number of computers. How many consoles have we sold? Millions. But how many televisions have been sold? The average American household is bound to have at least 2.73, and 2.55 people [source]. That’s over 300 million televisions. Molyneux refers back to a time when Clive Sinclair boasted people would play the Spectrum instead of watch television in every home in Britain.

We haven’t achieved that–I don’t think the Wii will achieve it either. It may be motion-sensing technology, but it’s still a controller. We’re still making high-technological-knowledge games for the Average Joe.

We need to make the things people know how to use–their hands, their fingers, their eyes–the controllers for the worlds they wish to interact with.  In that sense, I think the Wii a step–if only one step–in the right direction.

“But Andres,” I hear you say, “you’ve always expressed your distaste for the Nintendo Wii! Surely you’re not an utter hypocrite?” I am, in a way, because I think that the Wii’s innovative pointing system is a nice idea. However, I do think visual graphics play a huge part in the advancement of interactivity and mainstream acceptance. Not everyone can identify equally with creativity and imagination. I come from a town where the majority of boys play soccer when they’re kids–not with Legos and action figures. In a way they could certainly imagine themselves as soccer stars, but all this requires very vivid imagery as seen on television and in magazines. Unless those kids, now older, can get a good visual representation of what it is they’d like to be, they’ll have a very hard time suspending their disbelief and enjoying the game because it’s just not what they actually want to do. It’s not an experience. It’s still just a game. I think that gap needs to be bridged, just as much as the innovative controls need to be.

Going back to the Wii, if you’ll notice, I never say anything bad about the Nintendo DS. This is because I have one, and I think it’s an absolutely great console. I love its touchpad and dualscreen technology. But the thing that separates it from the Wii is that it has far more visual capacity than the Game Boy Advance. The Nintendo Wii isn’t capable of a lot more than the Gamecube is. I give a nod of approval any time I see something improving the capacity for visual quality–hence why I’m so enamoured with the PS3. Sure, the Wii can have nice graphics, and we all saw Mario Galaxy and how effectively good looking that was using Nintendo’s secret recipe that nobody else seems to have. But when you compare the difference between an Advance and a DS and you try to match that up from Gamecube to Wii you fall incredibly short. As for the Wii versus the PS3, the Wii doesn’t even come close, while the Nintendo DS comes rather close to the PSP. And while the PSP has nicer graphics, it’s more of a luxurious gadget, and I didn’t get a PSP until relatively recently because I knew Sony had had no experience making portable games. They’ve started getting some rather decent and exciting titles (instead of PS2 ports), however, and that’s certainly pushing their market out.

In the end, Peter is right. We haven’t reached enough people. There’s so much more we could do. If only we could get our technology far enough to where it’s not only stunning but incredibly simple to handle.

Then we’ll be in business.

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When you think of casual games, the first thing that comes to your mind is not Final Fantasy. In fact, usually you’re nowhere near the RPG genre when you’re thinking about casual play. You might consider a shooter or a puzzle game long before you even consider the remote possibility of a casual RPG, and then when you actually stop to contemplate it for a moment, you stop, laugh, and say “Nah, that won’t happen.”

But how little informed we all are!

As a matter of fact, there’s been a few attempts at casual role-playing games in the past. One of the most noteworthy is a PC game by WildTangent (makers of Lumines and Runescape) called Fate. They declare it an “Enthusiast”game (same category as Runescape, an MMO) on their website, but in truth it’s much more a casual game in spirit than a hardcore one. You can play Fate for ten minutes or ten hours, and the result is pretty much still the same experience. And it’s just as addictive as Peggle, so you might end up working it for hours on end and somehow get no sense of accomplishment but all the sense of enjoyment.

There’s been other experiments in the casual/hardcore mix market for RPGs recently in even AAA titles–at least, what I perceive to be triple A. Not only triple A, but the very game we’d never expect to be a casual game. Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core (which I have to say I enjoy immensely) is very much a traditional RPG in the sense that it has a long, spanning story mode that has cutscenes and choices and menus and running around collecting lumber to build flower wagons. But Square Enix and the Kingdom Hearts team therein that was responsible for this amalgam of a game decided to put casual elements into gameplay and allow short, playable bursts of fun for two to five minutes at a time like any good portable game should, and I applaud any PSP title for achieving this standard instead of being a ported PS2 title. This effect is achieved through Missions, a mysterious menu option never before seen in any Final Fantasy game.

It works beautifully–you choose a mission from the Missions menu, complete it, and usually you’ll get another mission to do until you run out of them and need to seek out more through the regular story mode. Missions consist of running around a map and seeking a particular enemy while fighting baddies of differing skill levels (depending on the mission) and picking up treasure chests along the way. You can only access Missions while at a save point, making the transition between missions and saving seamless, quick and effective. It takes about two minutes to run one, and they’re addictive, despite their repetitiveness. There’s just something about Crisis Core‘s seamless battlesystem that makes those two minutes gloriously fun. It might be the fact that in running them, you level up and acquire enhanced items and materia that beef your character and you can use through regular story mode, making yourself vastly more powerful and advantaged. Even so, the game is still challenging, and you have Hard Mode to run through after you complete it once.

Using these kinds of elements in gameplay, Square Enix has toed in on a very different market in a very different way. Remaking Final Fantasy IV for the DS is lovely, I’ll admit, but the truth is that Final Fantasy was never meant to be a portable game. It’s always been a sit-your-ass-down-and-play-that-thing-for-hours game. Seeing a Final Fantasy that has mixes of both gameplay styles makes me content, especially since I’ve noticed from watching the industry that developers think hardcore games are waning. Both elements in a big title like Final Fantasy show that there’s rooms for both styles in the industry, and there’s no reason developers should stop trusting that the epics will sell to the mainstream audience.

In that light, give both games a try. Fate is a fairly low-hardware-specs game and Crisis Core needs only a PSP to work. They’re good fun and I’ve enjoyed both in their own right. When casual games are disguised as RPGs, some interesting things are probably on the horizon. What will Final Fantasy XIII bring? We can only guess.

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Gallery Page has just been uploaded. It’s not all that presentable yet, but the files are on it and you can view my portfolio. So that’s all good.

More to come later. I’m at work and very sleepy.

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APRIL FOOLS! I MADE YOU LOOK!

I’m so tired. I have to finish this porfolio in a week to send off. Little pixels and resolutions and dpi and PSDs and JPEGs and compression rates and everything is on the USB and God I just want to relax and play Crisis Core.

I will have my portfolio done soon, it will be posted on the site, and our scheduled programming will return.

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