OrtizGames

I had a strange and horrible nightmare last night that revealed several things about myself.

In the dream, I was playing a portable game. It could have been any console. Something like an action RPG with 2D graphics and puzzle elements. I ended up beating the game after what felt like an eternity of seeking treasure and fighting giant tortoises with cannons on their backs (I’m already considering the game possibilities of this) only to be taken back to my village and being offered a magnificent reward: a weapon I could later use by continuing the completed game, so essentially I could keep my prior equipment and do more long quests. In spirit, it sounds like a strange hybrid between Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and Monster Hunter Freedom 2.

Anyway, the nightmare happened when I was trying to choose which of the legendary weapons of the village I wanted to have. As I was scrolling through them, I got a preview of that the weapon looked like, but nothing on its stats! Its attack power, special abilities and buffs were nowhere on the screen! And I looked around for some button that would give me the info of the weapon before I chose it, but I couldn’t spot any info on the screen, and was terrified to press any button out of fear that I would accidentally select the weapon when I wasn’t ready.

Then I accidentally pressed the back/cancel button, and suddenly the gifting ceremony was over! I was outside, and I didn’t have any of the weapons! I ran around the village trying to find where the ancient weapons were stored and see if I could still have one, but to no avail. Panicked, I tried to remember where I had last saved my game and whether it would be feasable to simply restart my console and try working back up to that point.

In my desperation, I woke myself up and lay there in stupor, thinking that timeless phrase again: “Oh my god, I’m so glad that was just a dream.”

And then I had to think to myself, “Only a game designer would have a nightmare about bad design choices in a screen for selecting a weapon.”

I must be insane.

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I somehow bumped into a video (aha, it was Kotaku) that detailed the many issues and Hell-like practices of our friendly neighborhood Gamestop on Youtube, to the style of Zero Punctuation.

Watch it here. Do it. it’s important. It’s also NSFW because of language (and the mutilation of stick figures, if anyone around you is offended by that), so get some headphones.

It’s a 9-part video series that goes on and on about Gamestop and how evil it is in everything it does. It even has a very thoughtful, well-thought-out conclusion.

I’ve hated Gamestop for a while now, but it’s usually been from the developer standpoint (which he mentions), where game creators actually get marginal money from sold games by Gamestop because the store relies so heavily on their pawnshop philosophy of buying and selling used games and that money never actually makes it back to the developer. Game devs only make money off the first “new” sale–not only that, but we make the tiniest revenue, with store fees, packing and shipping fees and publisher fees subtracted. In the end, game devs might make something like (this is not a fact) maybe five dollars off every new game sold. Imagine that when facts and figures are reported, we get numbers like “one million copies sold”. Most titles don’t ever get up to one million, and who knows how many of those millions are returns and sales of used copies, which means that in our model that that’s not actually five million dollars of revenue. And then subtract the cost of making the game.

Gamestop sucks on many, many levels, and I plan on probably never shopping there again if I can. I have SPORE reserved at an EB Games so when I get back to the States in a week, I may be making my final purchase. But then again, because Gamestop only holds on to your game for forty eight hours, and sometimes not even that long, my copy of SPORE might be gone already. In which case I will cancel my reservation and get my five bloody dollars back. I hope.

Watch the videos. Watch them. You, as a game consumer (because you are playing games if you are reading my blog, even if you’re a developer) need to be aware of how much money you are spending and saving off your purchases, especially when gas gets this high and every penny saved is earned. I know you’re going to keep buying games, even used games, so watching this video is an incredibly informative experience that teaches you what to do, what not to do, and where you should buy depending on what kind of game consumer you are. Whatever you do, do not shop at Gamestop anymore. And keep informed. Unless, of course, you enjoy being ripped off.

(I have to add: He makes a point about direct download and how it ideally will gradually take down Gamestop and how foolish it is to wait until then, to which I wanted to add as well: you also can’t forget the fact that people enjoy having hard, physical copies of their software, the same way they like getting sculpted World of Warcraft figurines of their level 70s. This means that there will probably always be a physical market for Gamestop to exist in. So it’s up to US, the consumers, to bring it down. Food for thought.)

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I just spent like seven nine hours yesterday playing World of Warcraft. I’m in Mexico with nothing to do for two weeks. I might as well play games. But World of Warcraft the whole day? I really need to play something else. Or do something productive. I guess I’ll go fix Mom’s computer, or something.

Wait, or Monster Hunter. (*finds PSP*)

Someone who is not successful said something that is completely a lie and irrelevant. If exclusives didn’t exist, practically nothing would turn games to one title or the other. It’s getting to the point where everything has the same features and abilities. If exclusives didn’t exist, people would have no reason to buy one console over another, and they’d all end up buying the cheapest one.

They’d buy the Wii. Can you imagine the horror?

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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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Last post, 2 days ago, I mentioned Play This Thing and Fantastic Contraption in the same breath. Well, Play This Thing went ahead and reviewed Fantastic Contraption, and instead of giving you a link and telling you to go ahead and play it, they wrote up a nice summary and analysis of the game.

Happy coincidence.

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In the spirit of Play This Thing, I decided to talk a bit about some stuff that I usually don’t talk about.

So someone pointed me to this game, Coign Of Vantage, yesterday. New gameplay dynamics at work! So much an art game, but it’s lovely. Now we’ll try to think of how to implement this in a triple A title.

There’s also this game, The Fantastic Contraption, which is also quite interesting and has some lovely gameplay and all my friends from Mexico seem addicted to.

Lastly, and on a more serious note. Here’s the Invaders!, an installation interactive art piece by Douglas Edric Stanley featured at Liezpig.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6KnLWLgK_4]

When I first read about it, I was enthralled by the use of interactivity to provide a critique on the Iraq War. It was stellar. It was awesome. Games as art, right?

But then, as usual, people disliked it. It was too much message for brains that were just too small. The United States, a country that’s going to be permanently touchy about the fact that they were hit hard by terrorists, simply cannot accept any critique about its war strategy. So people bitched. And bitched. And the exhibit simply had to come down. Stanley’s blog states that he pulled it down simply because it was getting so much bad flak (from people at Kotaku, no less) and not because Leizpig organizers asked him to bring it down. And now TAITO is threatening to sue, since apparently this is an infreingement on their Space Invaders intellectual property.

Screw you, TAITO.

In a way, it’s completely understandable that good art should be refused by the masses and understood by few. It’s the same with a lot of controversial art contemporary to the time it was created in. We need artists to challenge us so that we may grow. But I’m still angry. The cream on the cake was TAITO wanting to sue. We didn’t have suing back in other times of controversial art. Suing really makes it difficult now.

Sorry for ending this post on a bad note, but it was just depressing news for this early in the morning.

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Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer

Joystiq gave us their hands-on impression of a Heavy Rain demo/bonus level playthrough yesterday, and as I read it I kept having to stop myself from screaming again and again in pure excitement. Read it now.

Everything I remember from Indigo Prophecy/Farenheit that excited me about games as a storytelling/interactive medium is brought back and hyperextended by David Cage, founder of Quantic Dream and mastermind behind both Indigo Prophecy (known as Farenheit in Europe) and the new title Heavy Rain for the PS3 (also known as Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer).

Because most every hit on my website for the past few days seemed to have been somehow related to Heavy Rain (people continue to read my old Heavy Rain article despite the fact that I have written like, sixty others) I decided to continue reporting on every scrap of information I can get–simply because Heavy Rain really is pushing the boundary on games as a medium that should appeal to more than just kids and teenagers. David Cage has an interview up on Gamasutra in which he talks about a number of things, including his belief that games are really marketed far too much towards teenagers, a reflection of how the industry started: teenagers making games for other teenagers. Even a seriously gritty, mature work such as MadWorld seems to be a fest of all the things that a teenager would find cool, from badasses to blood to chainsaws. There’s also this video interview with David Cage to pore over in which he mentions much of the same thing.

And for now, that’s everything. I’ll continue keeping my eyes out for all information I can, including screens, videos and more, especially since I seem to be such a valuable resource according to search engines.

Thanks a lot for your reading, and I hope my providing concise information is of some use to you interested people!

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My friend Carlos (a brilliant person I will never be able to follow in conversation because he thinks and talks too fast and knows too much for me to understand entirely) pointed me to Bob’s Game a few days ago, before Bob became famous. Bob is otherwise known as Robert Pelloni, a 25-year-old self-taught game designer who created an entire Nintendo DS game himself.

Recently, he got an interview up on France 24, which I read and replied to. In the interview, he talks about his process and the amount of work he put into the game (5 years!).

He also was replied to by a Ubisoft representative, who said, and I quote, ”I don’t think it’s possible for a single person to create a game. Today, designing a videogame is a collective enterprise, putting together a team of about 30 people. Furthermore, publishers need to privilege their own creators, while taking into account trends in the sector.”

Regardless of the context that statement is made in, it is what it is.

You are free to reply to that how you like. My opinion is written up on the interview page, and my rage is just a shade under poignant.

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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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This just in: new screenshots from the highly anticipated (at least I’m highly anticipating) Heavy Rain: The Origami Killer. Pictures can be found here.

We see a girl, a motorbike, a man, and a knife. All of them look eerily real, and yet still have that uncanny-valley sense to them. Hopefully these beta images are just a shade under the final quality–or animating them will bring lifelike spark to these digital personas.

Source: N4G

PS: Yes, I am playing Soul Cal 4. More on that and some other things later.

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