My Life as a King

So, interested in how the WiiWare service was going to work, I plonked down 1500 Wii points for Square Enix's Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King (stupid name).

The experience started out quite badly, as purchasing points through the Wii is about as elegant as any of their other online offerings - that is, it's total garbage. Having to input a credit card number, security code, city, state, county and more to get the points is idiotic. It's even dumber that on the last screen where you actually say you want to get the points, they switch the position of the "yes" and "no" buttons, but don't give you any confirmation that you're about to quit and have to reenter all that information again, from scratch.

I honestly almost didn't get past this point, just because the experience was such a pain. What's worse is that the game is taking up 250+ blocks of the Wii's memory, which actually puts it to the point where it's no longer 999+ blocks free - now there are only 700 some odd blocks free. From the sound of it, this would imply that I've essentially only less than three games worth of space left before I have to start juggling them around on an SD card. Given that there are no free trials of WiiWare games, I can guarantee you that it'll make me very, very gunshy about future purchases, as that memory (and the convenience thereof) is extremely valuable.

I honestly don't know how Nintendo's failed so badly at their online implementation - every aspect of it is horrible.

But then, finally, I was able to (without background downloading, naturally) grab the game and play. It's interesting. It's almost like the anti-Dungeon Keeper. You apparently have to manage a small town, commissioning adventurers to do all the assorted crap you'd do in your standard Final Fantasy games while you stay at home and make sure your town's developing based on the revenue you're taking in from taxes and looting the nearby dungeons.

It looks like FF:CC, which is to say that it looks ludicrous. Your characters are semi-SuperDeformed, they wear a traditional excess of nonsensical accessories, and your avatar, the King... well, the term "androgynous" doesn't really do him any favors. Effete? Maybe. Still, it's all saccharine-sweet and still strangely sort of charming, and the process of seeing a town grow still has a nice positive effect, just like you had in old-school Sim City games.

As you post adventures, the people who take the tasks level up and grow stronger. I haven't yet pushed a low-level adventurer into something that's sure to kill them, so I have no idea what'll happen there. I'm only an hour or so into the game, but so far, it's been fun - it's a nice twist on the FF franchise - something that shows the world from a genuinely novel perspective. I'm looking forward to building the city, leveling up the adventurers, and seeing where this all goes.

Definitely good counter-programming to GTA, but good grief, I wish Nintendo's online had been even marginally competent. The whole purchasing experience is terrible, and if Live Marketplace or the PSN store was this bad, Sony and MS would have been torn to shreds. Still, if the quality of the game is any indication, WiiWare does hold some promise. I'm looking forward to World of Goo, and possibly picking up LostWinds.

Quick Bits

Been playing more GTA IV over the week - still trying to wrap my head around it. I've gotten more used to the car physics, and the missions have gotten a little more involved, which is both a blessing and a curse. Failure is now a bit more frustrating, but the overall experience is much more fun.

The world they've created is quite astonishing, but it actually feels a little more sterile than past games. I know that's a bit of a weird thing to say, but it's almost as though they've reached the uncanny valley of interactivity. The city *looks* so realistic, I want there to be more - it now feels like a game system operating on top of the real world, but the real world is missing.

The original complaint is still quite relevant - that they've spent a lot of time modeling things that are mundane. Obviously, this increases the sense of reality, but it's also really annoying. I want to catch a cab to skip to the destination rather than drive, but I need to *find* a cab, which sucks. Still, as the game progresses, it definitely gets better. The story's taken some interesting twists and turns. The writing is passable - certainly better than most games, but what stands out for me is the characterization. Yeah, a lot of the characters are stereotypes or relatively two-dimensional, but they use those stereotypes effectively, then turn them on their head enough that it's a pleasure to see who will stick to type and who won't.

Lots left to do in the game. I'm enjoying it, which means I've gotten over the controls for the most part. It's strange to me that the early parts of the game weren't better than they were, but in the midst of a four-star police chase... that's definitely when the game shines. Looking forward to more of that.

In other games, I've been playing a lot of Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. It's pretty much more of the Advance Wars formula - if you have an older AW game you haven't finished... you might as well keep playing that one. This one has a bizarre aesthetic - it's taken AW's traditional cheery approach to war and made it much more dreary. It's got amnesiacs, the destruction of most of humanity, and a bunch of people betraying each other to survive. Which means it's a really weird turn of events for a game that's lived on its charming bobble-headed approach to combat.

If you've read reviews, you'll probably have heard that the game's been stripped back quite a bit - most of the new stuff in Dual Strike is gone. To me, I'd say it's for the best. The game feels streamlined and efficient again. One of the things I really enjoyed about Advance Wars was how much it felt like a game of chess or checkers - simple pieces in complex combinations. Everything had a purpose, and each piece's utility was perfectly balanced. With Dual Strike, things got a bit out of hand. Managing two fields of battle with a bunch of units that didn't feel particularly distinct... it got to be a bit much. Where in AW, you could jump right in after not having played for months because there were only a handful of units, with AW:DS when I did the same, I felt lost. With Days of Ruin thus far, even if there end up being more units, the core mechanics have been dialed back a bit, making the focus more on the strategy than trying to juggle multiple fronts all the time.

As for the aesthetic, it's strange - it's almost like Jak 2, for me - something that had the "right" aesthetic in its earlier iteration needlessly tarted up to appeal to brooding fountains of teen angst. I didn't like Jak 2 (the core gameplay also felt focus-tested to death and a clear rip-off of the flavor of the month (at the time GTA3)), but I still like AW:DoR, simply because the game mechanics feel so right.

Other than that, game-wise, not a lot going on. I keep meaning to play more of Viking, but I don't. Instead, I finished Assault Heroes and played some PGR4. PGR is hands-down my favorite racing franchise. Here's to hoping that Activision lets Bizarre do their thing uninterrupted.

GTA IV

I've spent about five hours with GTA IV. Five hours with a GTA game is basically just scratching the surface, but I've played enough to experience the core mechanics and a reasonable chunk of the world.

This game currently has a 99 Metacritic, which (I think) makes it the highest game *ever* reviewed.

That is fucked up.

While obviously no game is perfect, and I don't mind giving a "10" or a "100" or whatever to a game that really moves me even if it has some technical flaws, GTA IV has some serious problems that I can't ignore (on top of the control issues mentioned in the previous post).

The car physics are horrid. I mean really, genuinely, almost-unusably awful. Every single car I've gotten into has barely been able to go around a normal 90 degree turn at a relatively normal speed. The motorcycle handling is abysmal. Yes, I understand "GTA Physics" are not real-world physics, but when your car can't take a single goddamn turn in an entire chase sequence, something is *wrong* with the way you have the cars set up. When I dread driving in a game that's called Grand Theft AUTO you have a pretty serious problem. When you have that problem in one of the two major mechanics of your game, it would seem to me that that's the kind of thing that should affect your score.

Will I get used to it? Probably. But I've been playing for HOURS, and I still can't go around a standard corner with any sort of regularity. It's unbearable.

The second thing (again, this is all in addition to the awful character controls) is that they spend a huge amount of time giving me beautifully animated representations of SHIT I DON'T CARE ABOUT.

You know what the last thing I want to do in a game is? Play pool. There have been dozens, if not hundreds, of shitty pool games throughout the years. I don't want to spend 10, even 5 minutes to play a shitty version of a shitty videogame. Arguments that it lends the world depth and believability have been made, but they don't fly with me. The makers of GTA have spent a huge amount of time building a gorgeous world of epic scope, and they've filled it with minigames I wouldn't even play for free. The bowling sucks. The pool sucks. I haven't played darts yet, but given the quality of the other two games, I'm not all that compelled to.

Take a game like Crackdown - there's an open-world game (by one of the original creators of the GTA franchise) that takes what's fun about the open world sandbox (exploration, visceral combat, freedom of movement) and makes the fun stuff even more fun. GTA IV has taken exactly the opposite approach - they've removed the fun (by making the car physics unmanageable), and increased the real-world tedium (phone calls, people nagging you, etc.).

Yes, the story and characters in GTA are lightyears beyond Crackdown. Yes, the world is more detailed and fully fleshed out. And in the end, I don't care. I don't give a shit you can play darts. I don't give a shit I can buy clothes. I don't give a shit about all the real world bullshit I do *in the real world*. I feel guilty for doing the stuff the game requires me to do because the narrative is REALLY confused about what kind of guy Niko Bellic is. Sometimes I'm free to choose my morality, and other times I'm not - with no clear cut reason why, other than some stuff needs to happen because the core story is linear. It's lazy, it's inconsistent, and it really breaks the feeling of immersion and investment in the character.

I really want to like it. But I keep hoping it'll be more than it is. The controls are horrible. The car physics are even worse. The missions (so far) have been more tiresome and tedious than interesting. The world, while more realistic, has been less fun than previous iterations of the game. That every reviewer and their goddamn mother has given the game a nearly perfect score is *absurd*.

Fucking Useless

So, this isn't about GTA 4. This is about GTA 4 reviews.

I picked up the game yesterday and gave it a shot. There are many things that are astonishingly good - the rich characterization, the scope of the city and the level of detail and interactivity are revolutionary.

And in terms of reviews, 10/10 isn't "perfect" - there is no perfect game. But when I *read* the reviews, I hope to have some understanding of what I'm thinking about purchasing. And when I read all the major reviews and there's no mention of control problems or that the multiplayer experience is either really unfocused or different enough that it takes a lot of getting used to, I'm generally not expecting to notice that the main character controls like a tank and that the multiplayer experience is a really unfocused mess.

One of the first things that I noticed when picking up the game is that while there's a lot of interesting animations (scaling walls, leaning into turns, etc.) and the character *looks* much better than they ever have before, the controls are incredibly sluggish and unresponsive as a *direct* result. On more than one occasion playing multiplayer, as a result of triggering an animation - some collision response, the animation has caused me to clip through a boundary and fall a substantial distance (the airport map, clipping through a railing next to a ladder, specifically). These are problems with really fundamental things in the game. The last game I played where the character control was so unresponsive was Virtua Striker, in 1999.

Yeah, the game is epic. Yeah, the writing so far has been great, though the contrast between the more realistic art/writing and the pervasive juvenile humor is a bit starker this time around. Yeah, the sheer scope and variety of the game is unmatched by anything else. But the game has problems that really affect a person's enjoyment of it - I suspect I'll get through it and love the game - but the point is that *no* review I've read points this out. Worse, *no* review I've read points out that the camera control is completely non-standard and that there's no option to return it to something more familiar.

Why? This is what a REVIEW is supposed to be about - it's not just the story - this is a GAME, and it's gotta be about the experience. The controls are a huge part of that experience. Yeah, everyone's falling over themselves to be the most sycophantic yes-man for the game, but that's NOT YOUR JOB. PR people get paid a ton to do that sort of thing. YOU are supposed to be CRITICAL. YOU are supposed to do BETTER.

Stop fucking up.

What is Your Game About?

One of the best pieces of advice about game design I've ever heard was, "Figure out what your player is doing most of the time, and concentrate on making that fun." I don't remember where I heard it - I think it might have been at an IGDA meeting or something, but it stuck with me.

What's strange about that relatively straightforward, relatively simple piece of advice is how few game developers really understand the concept, but more, how people can be easily confused because they don't actually know what the core of their game is.

Look at a game like GTA - you could make an argument that what you're doing is running and shooting, but what you're *really* doing, because of the auto-aim is running, picking a weapon with the right capabilities, and then managing the auto-aim algorithms. Yeah, it's a little nitpicky, but it makes a *huge* difference. It's really surprising how many people will suggest auto-aiming as a "tweak" to make a shooter more accessible - it's not a tweak, it's a fundamental revision of what the gamer is required to do on a moment-to-moment basis.

The game no longer becomes about understanding the weapon you're using, aiming at a target, then pulling the trigger at the precise moment where your aim is dialed in. Instead, the game is about selecting the proper weapon, making sure the computer has locked on to the right target, then shooting 'till dead. There's possible decisions to be made re: ammo conservation, which target should be the highest priority, and whether you're using a weapon that has the right range/damage combination - but aim is removed, timing is radically de-emphasized, and a large number of potential variables for weapons (lead time, etc.) are removed from the equation.

Think of it this way - where is the player's skill required? In a game like Quake, the skill is seeing a target, tracking them, having the right weapon, shooting it at the right time, and managing ammo. In Quake with GTA's auto-aim, for instance, seeing the target may not be an issue - they may be automatically highlighted if they're the only target in the area, tracking them is not an issue (that's the "auto-aim" bit), having the right weapon is solely about range, ammo, and firing rate, and shooting it at the right time is solely an issue of line-of-sight and range. Ammo is pretty much the same, though.

So, that adage about finding what your players are doing most of the time may not be quite specific enough - it's also about finding where you expect the player's skill to be required and ensuring that those decision points are compelling. This means developing the game with a very thorough, detailed understanding of what those decision points are - something like auto-aim changes *everything*. Level design is less about the process of aiming, tracking and maintaining lines of sight - it's less about skill at mitigating the technical differences between weapons and exploiting the actual differences between weapons. If I've got a sniper rifle and my enemy has a shotgun, at a long distance I should be at an advantage, except that I *suck* at using sniper rifles. Auto-aim means that independent of my personal skill at aiming/shooting sniper rifles, I will *always* have an advantage over shotgun guy because my skill doesn't play into the conflict at all.

How does that get resolved? How do you create gameplay out of those kinds of situations? Some of the answers are very similar to how you'd do the same for the manual-aim versions - break lines of sight, create mechanics where a player can mask themselves (smokescreens, invisibility, etc.) - but they're less about confusing the opposing player, and more about forcing the auto-aim algorithm to abandon its lock on you. A good player could predict where you might go, even if they can't see you - a lost auto-aim makes that skill totally useless.

Anyway - it's just strange how many games suffer from people either not fully understanding what the core of their game is, or simply not spending the lion's share of the time on making that fun. Find where the player is making the most skill-based decisions, and ensure they ahve a good time doing it.

A Solved Problem

I recently picked up Blue Dragon for the 360 (this is not the US cover art) for cheap at Toys R Us. While I'm not a real fan of JRPGs, for $15, I figured it'd be worth checking out what Microsoft hung their hopes of Japanese success on.

It's a strange game. It's obviously a JRPG in the traditional JRPG mold both mechanically and narratively. It tries to do a couple things differently, but the differences are so insignificant that they may as well not have existed at all.

The rendering style is somewhat unfortunate, as well. They took some sort of sub-par Akira Toriyama character designs and made them into a plasticky 3-D that only serves to make them even more generic-looking. While in hi-def, it has a distinctive, clean look, the characters just aren't as memorable or interesting-looking as the (still generic) characters from a cel-shaded game like Dragon Quest VIII (also Toriyama-designed characters).

One bit where the game does something really nice is that it has a very unusual depth-of-field effect. Combined with the relatively spare, clean aesthetic design, the game definitely has a unique look to it - the problem is that it's a really unique-looking blandness that still feels boring. It's nice that it's a contrast to Final Fantasy's excessive business, but still not all that appealing on its own.

The big problem for me, though, is that it suffers from one frustrating design failure - you can only save at predetermined save points. This is totally ridiculous, because there are only two reasons to have predetermined save points:

1. You don't have enough memory to save the game's current state in a complete enough fashion - this is obviously untrue, as many other 360 games allow you to save anywhere, and honestly, Blue Dragon doesn't even save that much info.
2. You want to create a specific risk-reward balance - by having save points spread apart, you create an escalating tension the further the player is from a safe haven.

While I can sort of academically understand point 2, it SUCKS when someone invites you to play another game online, and you have to run around like a jackass looking for a save point or lose an hour's investment of time into the game. Worse still, this is a problem that *already* has a solution - allow the player to save & quit. When the player resumes the game, the temporary save file is destroyed, meaning the player can't restore to that state - they can only restore to the predetermined save points. Essentially, this allows the player to indefinitely "pause" the game at any point, but only save where the game allows them to.

Why Blue Dragon doesn't allow this is completely beyond me. It's technically within their grasp. At this point, it's almost purely a design failing. Is there something I'm missing? I just can't see any reason to ever have a save structure like this, when the temporary save & quit solution has existed for years and years. Lunacy.

Delay of Game

In case there are people who actually check this for posts, sorry, tonight's post is going to be late. I've got a cut on my thumb that makes it a bit of a pain to type. Expect a post shortly about how save points in jRPGs are a solved problem and that it's really, really stupid that Blue Dragon doesn't handle them right.