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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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My grandmother got me Bully, by Rockstar Games, for Christmas. I eagerly started playing it, and was just about ready to dive into reviewing it for today when suddenly I was struck with the strangest of urges to forget all about Bully and sit down at my computer to play with spaceships.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve dreamed–literally dreamed, like, this was what appeared in my head when I was asleep–about having a tiny, maneuverable craft that could fly through space at warp speeds, letting me jump from beautiful planet to beautiful planet in a few quick seconds of high speed rumbling. This is exactly what EVE Online has been able to offer me. So please understand and bear with me–my enthusiasm for the game is very biased.

However, I have to be utterly honest when I say this is perhaps the most refined MMO experience I have ever played, seen, or could have imagined. EVE Online, with just a few tweaks, could very well be the perfect MMORPG.

I’m going to explain this by using the basics of MMO gameplay. There’s four types of people who are involved in the whole Massively Multiplayer Online experience: Killers, Explorers, Achievers and Socialites. These are the basic psychological and attitudinal gameplay rules that have been analyzed by all kinds of experts such as Richard Bartle, the creator of the Multi-User Dungeon. We all have bits and pieces of each in us, and everyone has a different reason why they play. But for the majority, people have discovered everyone who plays this kind of game has similar motivated goals that drive their experience.

Explorers love to explore. They love to see all the rich and detailed worlds that have been generated by the fantasy game around them. They love finding and claiming new places, knowing where things are that nobody else know. They’re pioneers in the expansion of the game world.

Achievers are determined to beat the game. Not only beat it, but get everything possible. These are the people who get all the epic armor of a single set so they can look monstrously intimidating and almighty.

Socialites are in it to be with people. They love playing with their friends, starting guilds and clubs, knowing and meeting new people.

Killers just want to ruin the game experience for everyone. They find twisted pleasure in breaking the game somehow, or finding a new way to kill people that makes them irritating. They love to be a nuisance–and a successful one at that.

All of these player types fit me almost to a T, leading me to believe that I’m probably simply engineered to be the world’s most MMORPG-tuned gamer. I love every part of an MMO experience, and feel pained when a particular element is missing from the formula.

EVE Online is so amazingly brilliant to me because it misses absolutely nothing. There is nothing the player lacks in experience at all.

Firstly, let’s look at the premise of the game. EVE Online is an MMORPG based around travelling through space, in spaceships. That’s right–there’s no first person shooting, there’s no running around with a sword that’s too big for you. There are no magic points and there are no magic spells. You can’t be a gnome. This automatically turns people away. It seems the term MMORPG is unconsciously supposed to imply ‘ridiculously overpowered barbaric fantasy heroes killing dragons online’. Mega Manly Online Rippling Pecs Games.

In EVE Online, they throw all that fantasy cartoony stuff and throw it right out the window. Your HP bar becomes your ship’s shields and hull strength. When you’re shot down, you don’t come back to life as a ghost–your corporation revives a clone they have of you back in your home base and insert your digitalized mind back into it. You don’t earn experience by fighting–your characters reads books on their own. All you have to do is assign them a skill to learn, and they gain experience points over time, even when you don’t play. Of course, this also means that there’s no faster way of earning those skill sets, which is both the game’s strength and weakness.

So how does this game deliver an almost perfect MMO experience? For Explorers, there’s an entire universe to see, with different stars, planets, mining colonies, everything. It’s massive, and there’s different attitudes of play depending on where you go–going by a security 0 star is officially considered a form of suicide, because of the likelyhood of being shot down. It’s a little bit on the repetitive side, sadly, as there’s no way to see the lush worlds on the planets below. But I’ll come back to that later.

For Achievers, there is an almost ungodly number of things to get. Skills to learn, ships to buy, weapons to upgrade, money to make. There’s always something to do on EVE. You just don’t finish EVE.

Socialites have the ability to form corporations, and work together with corpmates to buy and build and achieve, reach farther than other corporations, and become domineers of the market and the social world. There’s a bit of a problem with this system, but I’ll come back to that in just a few seconds.

Lastly, Killers have the best lot of all. This game is wonderful if you love to break the game for other people. Since you have the option between being a pleasantly legal miner or a government-defiant pirate, you are capable of almost any style of play. I’ve seen pirates launch after swarms of newbies in a flood of destruction. If you can get a ship that’s quick and strong enough, you can easily assault and annihilate anyone of your choosing (provided they don’t warp away in time), making the game delightfully exciting.

But let’s come back to Explorers and Socialites. The experience is great for everyone. It’s great for Explorers and Socialites. But it’s not great enough. EVE has a wonderfully exciting universe that’s expansive and takes time and patience and know-how to navigate. But there’s not all that much to see. I flew my ship across solar systems, visiting planets, asteroids and space stations. The space stations were all beautiful. The view from space was magnificent. And then it was over. That was it. There were still places to go in the universe, but really–it’s the universe. How different are things going to get from one solar system to the next? The problem with this game is that it lacks the minute depth of something like SPORE for the explore-phile. People want to go down to the planets, look around, see the views, paint the landscapes.

A similar thing happens with Socialites–they have the power to make their own chat channels, to make corporations, to have connections all across the galaxy–but they can never really see their friends face-to face. EVE Online has a beautiful customization menu that allows you to make the most diverse and exciting characters I have ever seen in a game with customization. But all that work is then demoted to a simple profile picture, and no-one will ever see your character’s animated, fully rendered face.

The EVE Online team is currently working on a new expansion (just after releasing the Trinity expansion, jeez) which will supposedly allow players to get out of their ships and walk around in the interior of space stations and interact with other player models. That’s really exciting. I’m praying on that expansion, because I believe it may very well be what EVE has lacking that will make it pretty much the ideal MMO game.

I played through two weeks of the trail version over the winter break. It didn’t take me very long to realize how much strategy and depth there is to EVE gameplay, even though people continued to insist that newbies couldn’t understand the game until they played for at least six months. When my trial expired, I thought, “This is an amazing game. I could spend the rest of my life playing this game.” So I didn’t renew my account. I can’t. It’s dangerous–I may end up sucked into another WoW addiction that I just can’t handle. So I’m giving up EVE–because it’s simply too good, and will take up too much time. I can’t afford to be dedicated to that leisure right now. I mean, I need to review a game weekly! Not only that, but I already keep my WoW needs stifled because I simply can’t pay monthly fees–I don’t have enough budget to do so.

The Trinity expansion was recently declared “The Best Game of 2008.” I have to say, I agree. EVE really left me with nothing but positive impressions. I can’t wait till the new expansion is released, and the worlds will all become fully explorable and social interactions be heavily facilitated.

My final verdict on the game: if you want an MMO that’s not WoW and that’s seriously fun, get EVE. If you like space, get EVE. If you have free time, get EVE. It’s worth it.

And I will envy you.

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It’s done. My critical analysis of SPORE is complete. I promised I would finish it… about a year ago? Well, I’ve had to do some soul searching. And some gaming. And I had to graduate, settle into my job, decide whether or not I was happy with where my life was going…

Anyway, read the critique. It’s here: http://blog.ortizgames.com/gamecrit/the-controversial-spore/
Thanks for the patience, lads and ladies!

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Still working on the SPORE review. Expect it at some point this week/weekend.

In other news, I was reading the blog for Braid (which I can only assume must be written by Jonathan Blow) when I came across this post, which pointed me to a sound byte of two annoyingly-voiced teenagers griping and a Youtube video of David Lynch being David Lynch (beware explicit language).

No disrespect to either Jonathan Blow or David Lynch, but I was really rather disgusted by their obstinacy.

Here’s what I had to say–and say it I did on the blog post comments.

I think it’s absurd to believe in-game advertising cannot be beneficial and should be removed entirely. Developing a game is expensive. Making a game is expensive. You have to pay people, you have to pay budget costs, you have to pay engines, you have to pay publishers and production costs, you have to pay shipping and distribution. And in the end, how much does your game sell for? Sixty bucks. Fifty. Forty. Ten. Then it’s pirated. Sold as Used in Gamestop. Less money made by the developer. Revenue lost. No profits. Studio closes down. Endgame.

Any money a game can make before it’s actually shipped that is not a debt can be incredibly beneficial for the developer, allowing them to produce more of the same quality work they produced with that first “added” game. As long as the ads are not blatant and a hindrance to gameplay, I can’t really complain. Yes, they seem to destroy the essence of a game at times. But would you rather have something pure or would you rather see your favorite studio shut its doors permanently? I want to see my game developer favorites stay afloat.

You can’t escape advertising. You can’t ban it. It’s everywhere. On your clothes. On your car. On the street. Billboards, shop signs, logos. TV shows, radio programs, music and jingles. Your mom’s stories. Your best friend’s opinion on what game you should play. It’s an AD. It’s selling the qualities of a work in order to obtain the exchange of money. Going out and posting about a game on a forum–it’s an AD. News about a revolutionary game called Braid–it’s a fucking AD.

You NEED ads. You need to advertise. Sometimes games would never see the numbers they raked in without ads, have you thought of that? Some extremely beneficial TV shows like 60 minutes get an absurd amount of revenue from ads.

If the main character in a game is drinking from a Coke can, are you seriously going to complain?

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My critique (not review!) of Monster Hunter Freedom 2 is up. Generally, I have nothing but entirely positive feelings about the game. my only wish is that it seriously were an MMO, because the cooperative play available on Monster Hunter is just lovely, and in order to share it with my buddy Squall back in Mexico I need to either open up some seriously elaborate Ad-Hoc connections to my laptop and through the Internet or just go back to Mexico and sit in his room with him and his girlfriend, all three of us clicking away madly at PSPs.

Which is exactly what I will be doing come Sunday, for two weeks.

I want Rathalos armor.

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Greg Costikyan wrote an article called “Death to the Games Industry” (Part 2 here) about two years ago. As much as I disagree with some of the things he says, I have to admit he’s right in this case. I read this article first around the beginning of this year or the end of last, and I had my own take on it back then. I completely disagreed. After learning a lot about the history of 20th century art, however, and analyzing the market over and over again, turning things around in my head, I’ve come to some very terrifying conclusions.

First off, let’s talk about Clement Greenberg. Clem was an art critic back in the 1950s and late into the 1980s that was known for his high praise of Abstract Expressionist art (more commonly referred to on Teh Interwebs as “Art That Doesn’t Look Like Anything”). Despite the cruel sport of “Clembashing” that has become popular over the years, reducing the critic to nothing more than a rambling old fool who couldn’t love anything more than pictures that look like nothing, Clement Greenberg was one of the most knowledgeable and insightful people of his time that helped establish a careful and precarious balance between what is “Kitsch” and what is “Avant-Garde”. He is the one who saw what no-one else seemed to be seeing: that art must be challenging the prior generation, making it, therefore, “Avant-Garde”, or “advance guard”, propelling art forward. Otherwise, it becomes “Kitsch”: easy, common, unchallenging, almost tacky in comparison. Pointless.

Now, this is especially important, because “kitsch” and “avant-garde” is not only relevant to painting. We see the same trend in literature and movies: compare a new book by Stephen King to his older works. Do you notice the difference? Back in the day, King was edgy, angry. Excited to write for a new audience, a new, darker world. Nowadays, he just releases gore on a payroll. It’s become easy, unchallenging. He’s stopped advancing. It’s the dividing line between avant-garde and kitch!

Now let’s move on to games. The problem with the games industry is that we’re starting to stagnate: to become to repetitive with our formulas. In other words, we’re becoming Kitsch. I call to the stand critically acclaimed games like Halo 3 and Soul Calibur IV. While the Halo 3 craze is slowly dying out, and more and more people admit, embarrassed, that no, Halo 3 isn’t Jesus Christ on Toast, Soul Calibur IV only came out recently and we’re still enjoying the hell out of it. I love it. I do. Personally, I enjoy it, and love it, and can’t wait to get more downloadable content so I can deck out my characters in all the armor I’m missing.

But it’s stale. It’s the same game it’s been for the past three games; don’t try to tell me about refining and balance and innovation, because I’ve heard it all before. Soul Calibur IV brings nothing new to the table, at all. You can give it stellar reviews. You can say it’s the best fighter game this year. But I can also give a restaurant five stars and say that it’s the best Italian food I’ve ever had. I can also compare two brands of soap, or hair conditioner, or soda, or furniture sets, and tell you which is better. It doesn’t mean it’s revolutionary. And here I must grudgingly concede another point to Costikyan when he says game critique is virtually nonexistant in today’s world. See, I’m not reviewing Soul Calibur IV right now. I could review it and say it’s great. Really, it is. Go buy it. But to critque art, to analyze it and to determine what was done, what was used, whether or not it’s moving forward… to determine whether it’s being avant-garde or kitsch… that’s what we need.

To elaborate on what’s avant-garde, let’s look at Portal for a moment. We all know Portal. It was stupendous. Do you know why? Yes, Glad-OS was awesome. But do you realize that you played through an entire first person shooter without actually firing any bullets? In fact, you never actually hurt anything directly, did you? Other than the Companion Cube. You jerk. But really, Valve in making Portal really challenged us to see what it could be like to play the same game we’ve played over and over again, but this time, do it in a completely differerent way. This time, we’re not going to shoot anything or anyone. This time, we’re not going to hurt people. In that same way, Mirror’s Edge might be doing exactly the same thing, really changing up the idea of what we’ve all experienced. But see, someone had to do it first. That’s avant-garde.

I wanted to disagree at first with Costik’s and my own thoughs. I mean, truly spectacular-seeming games like Heavy Rain and Little Big Planet are only on the horizon, and Fable 2 holds great promise (promises Molyneaux made for Fable 1, but we’re giving him the benefit of the doubt anyway). But we’re out of time already. Gameplay is dying. We need the industry to change fast, or it will be crushed.

Now, a lot of people thought the Wii was the savior of gameplay, and I know game designers all over were extremely enthusiastic about it. But I’ve been calling it for a while now, and nobody seems to have been listening. And now that we’re all more aware of Nintendo’s new end goal, people are walking around with their tails between their legs, and I feel awful because I was expecting it.

Here’s the thing about the Wii that people have been neglecting to think about: when you make a game focused on a new form of play, it’s revolutionary. Right? The Wii doesn’t do that; rather, it gives people the new form of play right off the bat. Therefore, most Wii games are forced designed around motion-sensing capabilities. To be blunt, every Wii game that comes out is basically just hacking off the motion sensor. Show me a Wii game that doesn’t use motion sensing technology in some fashion. It’s its only selling point! The Wiimote doesn’t open up new styles of play; it essentially incarcerates games into one hackneyed mechanic that requires little thought to implement!

Compare Portal to any new Wii title you’re looking at now. Raving Rabbids or that new Shaun White Snowboarding game. Raving Rabbids 2 actually uses the balance board as a sled function just like the Shaun White snowboarding game. And yet it’s so cheap! Anyone could have thought of that. The design requires no real challenge or thought as to how to radically change or improve a player’s experience–it’s just recieve, reprocess, repack and repeat! Whereas Portal took something people hadn’t done before and really moved the face of gaming! It’s now one of the most recognized titles on the market, acclaimed even by extremely embittered Yahtzee Croshaw, recognized internet game critic and author of the video series Zero Punctuation.

I mean, what are you going to do in Harvest Moon for the Wii? Tilt the Wiimote as if you’re watering plants? Move it up and down as if you’re cutting wood? Really? Seriously, think about it. Could it really be that hard to come up with the idea?

No.

Because when you do something once that no-one has ever done before, it’s innovative. When you give someone something nobody has ever done before and you let them all use it for their own creations, it’s a tool. The Wiimote is just another controller. It’s just another joystick. The design of games is still no different.

So gameplay is dying. And according to Costikyan, the industry needs to die, or it will crash itself. This sort of collapse happened in 1983, called the “Atari Crash.” A lot of us hip young freshie designers don’t know about it or can’t concieve of it because we weren’t alive back then. But it was bad, and there was a period of almost nothing in gaming until Japan and Nintendo suddenly brought it back again with the NES. We don’t want that to happen. So we need to look for innovation, for avant-garde games, to stop us from stagnating.

A huge source of inspiration for developers and publishers right now should be independent games. Not that independent games are all that great; personally, I usually can’t stand playing many of them. Much like indie film, they rely too much on shock value and mechanics and not enough on substantial experience. For them, it’s all about gameplay: it’s all casual. I’m a hardcore gamers. I’m a narratologist. I like story and plot points and cinematic. I like experience, and my closest friends dying, and the rookie coming out on top and Saving Private Ryan stories. I won’t experience those things in my own life; that’s why I play games, for new experiences.

However, developers need to learn from the indie market! The game I’ve been referring to again and again through this article, Portal, such a great example of what we need, is based off an independently developed student game named Narbacular Drop! I played it, and it was awful. Revolutionary, but terrible. But they had the idea down: portals, gravity, acceleration and perhaps most importantly, the core thesis of designing an action game you never actually hurt anyone or anything. Add some fascinating narrative and make the experience unforgettable, courtesy of Valve, and you have yourself a gorgeous gem of a game that now sells companion cube plushies.

The time is coming where the game market will be flooded by kitsch games that people will buy just because they’re on the market, and slowly gaming will lose its steam. Much like the decline of our contemporary civilization, we can’t let that happen. We need to continue forward, pushing for development, for improvement and preventing collapse at all angles. In this time of dire need, we need avant-garde. Otherwise, it’ll be a sad, slow, funless time before gaming comes back in a rebirth again.

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Facebook recently initiated “Facebook Chat”, a messenger concept people have been dying for since Facebook exploded from a college thing into the next MySpace. It’s become apparent to me within the first twenty minutes of poking at it that the thing is pure evil, since my feed shows up live on everyone’s chat list if they happen to me talking at me (I don’t answer back being the Facebook dissenter I am, of course) so now if it even occurs to me to download some stupid application for the day, even if I hide it on the mini-feed, everyone who happens to be staring intently at me will be notified.

Of course, it’s also unlikely too many people will be interested in me. I am, after all, somewhat boring–particularly on Facebook. But I somewhat dread a game designer contacting me randomly after having seen me on someone else’s site and walking in on me taking a personality quiz for little girls. Not that I do that, or anything. I just might some day. You never know.

And no, I’m not giving out my Facebook on here. Why would I? There’s nothing of interest on there. If you really want to find me, go ahead and try to find me. You know who I am and where I study. It can’t possibly be that hard.

So now you’re thinking, “All right, Andres, how does this tie into games?” Yes, I know I’m a game designer and I should be focusing on things like Metal Gear Online and GTAIV, but instead I decided to talk about Facebook–because believe it or not, in-game communication with players isn’t all too far from what Facebook just integrated.

And since you’re all so picky about MGO and GTAIV, I will talk about them–in context with Facebook.

The thing about most games–and this is mostly when dealing with the online multiplayer aspect of any genre–is that communication is crucial for anything to work in an online setting. The reason Facebook is so successful is because it centers around the idea of communication and connection between human beings. Video games in an online setting have had a hard time hitting the right formula in order to thrive because they haven’t been able to find the appropriate balance of communication versus play. (Brenda Brathwaite would be so proud of me.)

In the instance of Rock Band, you have an absolutely gorgeous system for playing your favorite songs with friends, rocking it out and sharing the moments through an online setting–but the connectivity is so limited you might as well just get together at somebody’s house and play there. There’s no real connection to be made outside your little group of friends. When people go online, they want to be connected to the World Wide Web. In that instance, online play has been dramatically downplayed and remained a disappointment for those hoping for a richer, expanded experience.

To open a little on MGO before we get into the online communications versus play idea, I have to say I love this game. Metal Gear Online is a gold shooter–it feels natural to the touch and very different from so many FPSs I’ve played. While I love first person, I have to say that MGO’s beautiful third-person action so far trumps any Halo, Counter-Strike or Unreal you throw at me. The transitions between shooting and CQC and laying traps is so efficient and quick that someone with the absolute upper hand can be devastated by a few small mistakes, allowing the dark horse to burst out of nowhere with a smack to the face. Not to mention that they have something called “Sneaking Mission”, in which you get to be Snake. You get to be Snake. That’s enough said.

In case anyone ever wondered about why AI seems so stupid in MGS4 for not seeing Snake lying camouflaged on the ground, trust me–I can’t see him either. It has nothing to do with stupidity. He’s just hard to see.

In MGO you have different issues–on the connectivity side, the fact that at any given time there may be no more than 2000 people logged on to the MGO server and all of them are in different closed games makes matchmaking becomes incredibly difficult. You might find yourself trapped in a game with a range of skill levels between 0 and 7, ensuring that if you’re lower level, the game will be too hard and if you’re higher level, the game will be too easy. Communicationwise, MGO seems to have no issues–other than the fact that your email can only hold so many messages and that there’s no private chat, so talking to your friends while on the menu and deciding what you want to do is somewhat difficult. It has many ways of talking while within an actual match, including keyboard, microphone and predetermined communication commands. Of course, once you have a mic you’ll usually just be shouting into it whenever anything happens, since you’re on a private channel with your team. Interestingly enough, Kojima Productions made the interesting choice of disabling your communication when you are no longer capable of speaking–for example, when stunned, asleep or dead. It makes dying all the more frustrating because you can’t comment on it, but it stops a great deal of raging over the communication channels as an amazingly efficient fix. The communication versus play, however, is a tad unbalanced in this scenario, since while MGO plays beautifully like a completely non-standard shooter with different dynamics from any other FPS I’ve ever played online, it needs to have a lot tweaked in order to function correctly–mainly the issue with how easy it is to get a headshot, and how difficult and one sided it makes the game. Getting close to someone is now an art, and relies on a great deal of luck and patience–both of which are not exactly prime elements to focus on in any FPS. You want skill, timing and precision to be the elements to focus your gameplay on. We’ll see if Konami lowers the headshot ratios by when MGO comes out in June–I will most certainly be playing it because it is simply a true pleasure and just amazing fun when your team and you really coordinate.

GTAIV has its own version of gameplay–but I keep feeling after playing it that the entire thing seems somewhat tacked on, like an addition to gameplay merely created to compete with the upcoming release of Metal Gear Online.

First, however, the main game. The game itself is pure gold, and I’m enjoying it very much–though I’m a little disappointed with how the new features of the game don’t really switch up the gameplay. They make gameplay more interesting and efficient and dynamic, yes. But in terms of “new”, nothing fresh really comes to the table. To be expected–it’s another GTA game, and GTA is simply GTA. The story is lovely, however, and I’m enjoying it when I’m not busy working or on my last days of MGO.

Returning to the multiplayer, it seems to be very much the single player game with more players in it, shooting each other. It’s really not as glorious as I expected, and the fact that contacting your friends is practically nonexistent and gameplay modes are nothing short of a repeat of Unreal’s and Team Fortress’s match modes makes it rather disappointing. It’s still kind of fun, but some modes are somewhat pointed or biased and people playing them are downright stupid. I think there were several mistakes made in the GTA multiplayer, and that makes me wonder really if it was in the original plan of the fourth game or if it was put in to try to sell more and build more hype versus the looming colossus of Metal Gear Solid 4.

To close on GTAIV, the game is already starting to stale a little bit on me–and of course I’ll beat the whole thing and enjoy it, but I realize it’s just like playing another GTA, and because I know the gameplay so well I feel like I can’t get anything more out of it other than story–of course the story will be good, with Rockstar’s witty cynicism and newfound ability to narrate. But it’s a sad feeling I’m left with because I only just got the game and everyone’s giving it such high praise. But really, people… it’s Grand Theft Auto. It’s always going to be Grand Theft Auto.

So Facebook has got the formula for connectivity versus play–but do they? I still think even they haven’t refined the formula, because nothing on Facebook catches my attention anymore. I loathe it–I just can’t become interested in wasting time on it. So we still have a lot of experimentation to go… don’t count on the perfect MMO formula just yet, folks.

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