So, I finished another National Novel Writing Month this week. I can't say it was my best work. On the plus side, I think I know the problem. I need a better voice for the story itself, for one thing. But I can get into this more next week. For now, I'm going over another video game review. The last game I played to completion was Dead Space.
Dead Space is a survival horror game, and like other games of this genre, it is intended to work both to excite the players through normal game play and to invoke fear as any scary fiction is. Obviously the former affects the latter, but I my response to each element is so different that I will treat them separately.
The game takes place in the far future on a space station on the outskirts of human civilization, in the fine tradition of movies from Alien to Event Horizon. You play Isaac Clark, an engineer and part of a team sent to investigate and repair the station, only to learn that by the time they got there, the place is overrun with monsters and most of the crew is dead.
In terms of game play, it's a pretty decent game. You play the game from behind Isaac's back in a situation nearly identical to Resident Evil 4. You can directly aim at targets to hit specific body parts, and the game uses this cleverly by giving enemies weak points on not just their head, but also their limbs. You can blow off one or more arms and legs, and enemies will react appropriately by crawling at you should their legs be gone or even stagger around blindly without a head! There are the usual advancement and customization options, including multiple selectable weapons, upgrades to your weapons and armor, and money to collect and use for new weapons, armor, and supplies.
Nothing here is original, though the setting is very notable. The space setting includes many areas that are now in a vacuum, giving a limited time that to do your job and escape and altering your sound and game play, while other areas (often the same ones) are in zero gravity and let you leap to nearby walls or ceilings. The end result is a very enjoyable game, one I defeated twice in a row in rapid succession, with only two issues that tend to bother me. The first is yet another game that emphasizes enemy grapple attacks, which require wild button flailing to escape each time and occur far to often. The other is a bad habit of enemies popping out of literally nowhere behind you. I understand this is a clever monster tactic, and it makes sense in a game that already warned you about popping out of ventilation ducts and such, but I never thought the game didn't give you enough visual or sound warning that these things attack you.
But nobody plays survival horrors for the action alone. They have to at least try to scare you, and the game does that. That is where things get tricky, though. I know part of that is a personal issue. As I think I said before, monsters make me giggle. I treat the arrival of Pyramid Head like they greeted Norm on Cheers, and horrible abominations just make me want to make my own designs worse. But there are other kinds of fear in games. There is the classic "startle" fear, where something comes out of nowhere, even if the thing is technically not a threat. And there is simple environmental fears, where an oppressive and hostile location is enough to inspire, if not outright panic, at least a continual dread. This game is good at this element, with everything from ominous chanting and songs over the station intercom and the corpses of dead cultists to entire rooms coated with dripping organic material and the still-living victims trapped in nightmarish forms.
And it's here that I had some complaints. Throughout the game, your run into the rare survivors on the space station, though I use the word "survivor" is very loosely. Most of the survivors are either dying from wounds, driven mad to the point of suicide, or both. After a while, the inevitability of these events ruing any shock value. Oh wow, another crazy person shot herself in the head? Shock. It's not like you can do anything about it. You can't give medical attention, intervene before the crazies kill others or themselves, or even kill them yourself to shorten their suffering. There is even one woman who doesn't do anything or suffer any wound; she just stands somewhere, giggling. And you can't do squat! No dragging her to safety, no helping her recover, you can't even say sorry. Two minutes later all the air is dumped from the area and she's dead anyway.
So why should I care? I can understand that your main character is voiceless and his only back story or personality is tied to a girlfriend who worked on the station and may be in danger throughout the game. But it disaffects you after a while. That's why the similarly-named Dead Rising was much more terrifying to me, despite being the wacky, lighter zombie apocalypse. There were tons of obviously doomed survivors, but there were almost fifty people you could also rescue, but most were not obligatory. You could fail to find them in time or lead them to your doom, and if they die horrible deaths, it's because you failed. After all the years of games, screaming walls of flesh or half-human monsters with spike tentacles growing out of the backs don't scare me. The clock does.
Save for Dead Rising, this was probably my favorite of my recently rated games. It was frustrating at times, but also fun, with an atmosphere that doesn't near that of Silent Hill but at least is a good imitation. But as a scary game, it could have been much more effective just by combining the fear with the game play better and by investing me a bit. What's so scary about dead space without live space, after all?
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Rantings: Doing My Good Deed
This discussion actually starts with a review. A few weeks ago, I completed the game Iji for about the fourth time. You may not have heard of this game, and I'd understand, because it's a completely free indie game available, as far as I know, only on computers. Iji is basically a 2-D shooting/action game. You play as Iji, a hapless girl who survived a planetary attack by aliens and turned into a combat-capable cyborg to fight them off. You run around through ten levels, fighting or evading aliens with the occasional boss fight. So far, it's pretty standard. It has plenty of appealing features, including well-animated if simplified characters, an excellent soundtrack, three secrets per level, and RPG-elements like gaining experience and using it to customize your character by improving your maximum health, attack strength, weapons you can carry, and more unusual abilities like strength to kick down stronger doors and larger enemies.
But what really caught my attention in the game were the story and the control you have over it. The game is both incredibly detailed and gritty to an almost nihilistic point. The detail comes from the conversations and the motivations of enemies. Even the final boss is a flawed but relatable figure, earning sympathy despite being responsible for countless deaths. In the meantime, as you progress through the game, you get logbooks from all sides of the enemy groups, from soldiers both in favor of and against their leaders to hackers and criminals seeking to exploit their own forces, to scared and desperate soldiers panicked about their own lives and those of their loved ones.
They also write about you. And these reports, along with the rest of the discussion, change based on your actions. And despite being a cybernetic super-soldier with a morphing weapon, you can happily avoid fights. In fact, if you deliberately avoid killing enough soldiers, you can attract allies among the enemy ranks, form nonviolence pacts, and even avoid entire boss fights! The game keeps track of all your kills, and if you follow a pacifism run, you can end up with zero kills at all. Well, you can end up with any direct kills, at least. Conversely, if you blow your way through every alien in your path, not only will the logbooks and conversation treat you as a murderous lunatic, but Iji herself will speaking differently. If you kills enemies in the beginning, she'll actually apologize to the enemies she kills, but this will stop with time, and eventually she'll start screaming at her foes and laughing at their deaths.
All of this contrasts nicely with a similarly-themed video game I recently played, Mirror's Edge, which I believe I already discussed. We have the same skilled heroine fighting against an evil empire, and in both cases while violence is an option, it's neither necessarily nor encouraged. Faith, a skilled parkour enthusiast, can steal guns from enemies and use them, but it slows her down immensely. And if you don't shoot any enemies (not counting a plot point where you have to shoot a truck with a sniper rifle,) you even get an achievement called Test of Faith.
But unlike Iji, it doesn't matter that much in the game. There is no real point in terms of the story. For one thing, death itself is not an issue. No, you don't have to shoot anyone, but kicking them off buildings where they fall to a horrible death is A-OK! That's even obligatory at one point in the game, where she does that to a villain via cut-scene. And the plot won't be affected by your actions either way. They same police will shoot you on sight regardless of how you treated them before, so barring some personal satisfaction all you're doing is making the game harder (and believe me, it makes a few places where you have to fight much harder.)
These two games illustrate a fairly recent gameplay feature called the "Karma Meter." In addition to simply playing to beat the game, the player can alter the flow of the game, or at minimum the ending, based on how good or bad a person you play as. What that entails is based on the game. In Mass Effect, you are a loyal marine out to save the galaxy no matter what the player chooses, and you can be either an idealistic "good cop" or an intimidating "bad cop." Fallout 3, conversely, lets you be a savior who rescues captives, wipes out entire towns of slavers, and sacrifices yourself for the good of others, or a horrible monster capable of blowing up entire cities for personal profit, murdering your childhood friend, EATING people, or enslaving children.
Am I a fan of this feature? Yes, in general, but it comes at a price. I believe I spoke of the range between linear storytelling and free-form, totally customized gameplay. Neither is bad, but the simple fact is that every branch of a linear story, that story can't be as concise. Letting the player choose, for example, to betray a friend at a crucial moment can have significant impact in both ways, but you just won't have as much time or development cost and space to plan each ensuing path as you could if one path was the only choice. But making excellent stories on both paths is viable. In three of my favorite ideas, one has a normal "bad ending" and a more complex "good ending" by accomplishing special tasks, another has branches towards good, evil, and simply crazy routes, and a third game potentially alter reality based on your actions so the events of the game are either a crusade to save the world or the hallucination of a psychopath.
But a good karma meter needs some standards. First of all, a karma meter needs to be sensible. Fallout 3 has that problem with a few choices. In one instance, killing a man who murdered an entire city full of innocents and is willing to destroy another town simply due to bigotry will result in...negative karma? The technical reason is the character was a more sympathetic one earlier and their karma state couldn't be changed afterward, but it breaks suspension of disbelief and makes the entire game's ethic system seem compromised. Even Iji has a few issues. Your pacifism run prevents you from killing anyone directly, but to accomplish it, you must set a trap that kills someone and help an ally kill another even though you don't fire that last shot. You can also kill people by indirectly sending vehicles or shrapnel at enemies or standing near other targets when an explosive attack flies at you, letting them be damaged by it as well.
The second standard is how much it affects the game if you stick to it. In Iji, the pacifism has almost no effect on the ending. At most a line or two changes, but the rest of the game shows the fruits of your action. Fallout 3 is another positive example. NPCs will comment based on your actions, and some characters will even give you free supplies. The main radio station in the game will also comment on how good or evil your actions were in their various missions and introduce you based on your overall good or evil rating.
The last standard is much harder and is tied to the system's complexity. If a system tracks just one thing, like your kill count, that's fine. But many systems track everything from thievery to murder on the same scale. Usually murder costs you more, but the results are still just numbers. You could go on a city-wide killing spree, and if you give pittance to a few beggars it might balance the scaled, even if you then kill that same beggar! Arguably, certain actions should knock you below maximum range and no actions should correct it, or at least only the noblest actions should correct it. But then what about reform? Can't even the darkest of people get the chance to make things right, at least in the escapism of a video game?
As the system gets more complicated, it requires more effort, but the rewards will be more than worth it. If you care enough to give the game the choices, you should give those choices the respect it deserves.
But what really caught my attention in the game were the story and the control you have over it. The game is both incredibly detailed and gritty to an almost nihilistic point. The detail comes from the conversations and the motivations of enemies. Even the final boss is a flawed but relatable figure, earning sympathy despite being responsible for countless deaths. In the meantime, as you progress through the game, you get logbooks from all sides of the enemy groups, from soldiers both in favor of and against their leaders to hackers and criminals seeking to exploit their own forces, to scared and desperate soldiers panicked about their own lives and those of their loved ones.
They also write about you. And these reports, along with the rest of the discussion, change based on your actions. And despite being a cybernetic super-soldier with a morphing weapon, you can happily avoid fights. In fact, if you deliberately avoid killing enough soldiers, you can attract allies among the enemy ranks, form nonviolence pacts, and even avoid entire boss fights! The game keeps track of all your kills, and if you follow a pacifism run, you can end up with zero kills at all. Well, you can end up with any direct kills, at least. Conversely, if you blow your way through every alien in your path, not only will the logbooks and conversation treat you as a murderous lunatic, but Iji herself will speaking differently. If you kills enemies in the beginning, she'll actually apologize to the enemies she kills, but this will stop with time, and eventually she'll start screaming at her foes and laughing at their deaths.
All of this contrasts nicely with a similarly-themed video game I recently played, Mirror's Edge, which I believe I already discussed. We have the same skilled heroine fighting against an evil empire, and in both cases while violence is an option, it's neither necessarily nor encouraged. Faith, a skilled parkour enthusiast, can steal guns from enemies and use them, but it slows her down immensely. And if you don't shoot any enemies (not counting a plot point where you have to shoot a truck with a sniper rifle,) you even get an achievement called Test of Faith.
But unlike Iji, it doesn't matter that much in the game. There is no real point in terms of the story. For one thing, death itself is not an issue. No, you don't have to shoot anyone, but kicking them off buildings where they fall to a horrible death is A-OK! That's even obligatory at one point in the game, where she does that to a villain via cut-scene. And the plot won't be affected by your actions either way. They same police will shoot you on sight regardless of how you treated them before, so barring some personal satisfaction all you're doing is making the game harder (and believe me, it makes a few places where you have to fight much harder.)
These two games illustrate a fairly recent gameplay feature called the "Karma Meter." In addition to simply playing to beat the game, the player can alter the flow of the game, or at minimum the ending, based on how good or bad a person you play as. What that entails is based on the game. In Mass Effect, you are a loyal marine out to save the galaxy no matter what the player chooses, and you can be either an idealistic "good cop" or an intimidating "bad cop." Fallout 3, conversely, lets you be a savior who rescues captives, wipes out entire towns of slavers, and sacrifices yourself for the good of others, or a horrible monster capable of blowing up entire cities for personal profit, murdering your childhood friend, EATING people, or enslaving children.
Am I a fan of this feature? Yes, in general, but it comes at a price. I believe I spoke of the range between linear storytelling and free-form, totally customized gameplay. Neither is bad, but the simple fact is that every branch of a linear story, that story can't be as concise. Letting the player choose, for example, to betray a friend at a crucial moment can have significant impact in both ways, but you just won't have as much time or development cost and space to plan each ensuing path as you could if one path was the only choice. But making excellent stories on both paths is viable. In three of my favorite ideas, one has a normal "bad ending" and a more complex "good ending" by accomplishing special tasks, another has branches towards good, evil, and simply crazy routes, and a third game potentially alter reality based on your actions so the events of the game are either a crusade to save the world or the hallucination of a psychopath.
But a good karma meter needs some standards. First of all, a karma meter needs to be sensible. Fallout 3 has that problem with a few choices. In one instance, killing a man who murdered an entire city full of innocents and is willing to destroy another town simply due to bigotry will result in...negative karma? The technical reason is the character was a more sympathetic one earlier and their karma state couldn't be changed afterward, but it breaks suspension of disbelief and makes the entire game's ethic system seem compromised. Even Iji has a few issues. Your pacifism run prevents you from killing anyone directly, but to accomplish it, you must set a trap that kills someone and help an ally kill another even though you don't fire that last shot. You can also kill people by indirectly sending vehicles or shrapnel at enemies or standing near other targets when an explosive attack flies at you, letting them be damaged by it as well.
The second standard is how much it affects the game if you stick to it. In Iji, the pacifism has almost no effect on the ending. At most a line or two changes, but the rest of the game shows the fruits of your action. Fallout 3 is another positive example. NPCs will comment based on your actions, and some characters will even give you free supplies. The main radio station in the game will also comment on how good or evil your actions were in their various missions and introduce you based on your overall good or evil rating.
The last standard is much harder and is tied to the system's complexity. If a system tracks just one thing, like your kill count, that's fine. But many systems track everything from thievery to murder on the same scale. Usually murder costs you more, but the results are still just numbers. You could go on a city-wide killing spree, and if you give pittance to a few beggars it might balance the scaled, even if you then kill that same beggar! Arguably, certain actions should knock you below maximum range and no actions should correct it, or at least only the noblest actions should correct it. But then what about reform? Can't even the darkest of people get the chance to make things right, at least in the escapism of a video game?
As the system gets more complicated, it requires more effort, but the rewards will be more than worth it. If you care enough to give the game the choices, you should give those choices the respect it deserves.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
My Life: A familiar story
Yes, I plan on doing an "idea" update. I still will in a day or more. But things changed again, and my mind is kind of directed on other things. Today, my latest temp job, well, became temporary. So I'm unemployed. Yet again. The good news is that this comes just before Nanowrimo, so I have a few days to prepare for that. The bad news is, well, I like money. And now I have to worry about unemployment benefits and the job hunt, in addition to the normal panic finding a roommate and everything else.
So that's my concern for now. That's soft of kept my attention away from Iji and karma meters, but we'll get back to it soon, I promise. Even despite writing some 2,000 words a day in the very, very, very near future.
So that's my concern for now. That's soft of kept my attention away from Iji and karma meters, but we'll get back to it soon, I promise. Even despite writing some 2,000 words a day in the very, very, very near future.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Reviews: A whole of lot of flies, not enough ointment
I'll cut the actual reviews short this time. The only game I played since last time is Mirror's Edge, which seems to continue a theme I've seen a lot in my Gamefly rentals. It's a good game, but one with heavy flaws. That's true for pretty much every game I rented this way, including Dead Rising, Zack and Wiki, and Assassin's Creed. Call of Duty 4 is the only exception. I'm starting to appreciate Gamefly for exactly that reason. The games I bought or that were bought for me recently (by some definitions of recently,) are things like Super Mario Galaxy, Bioshock, Mass Effect, and Fallout 3, and while all of them are imperfect, as is everything, they seem much more coherent. Fallout 3, with its many glitches, comes the close, though it's also far too in-depth and long to even consider just being a rental.
The issues that these Gameflied games have are much more serious, with most threatening at least briefly to undermine the entire game or at least stop me from enjoying it. Mirror's Edge's positives include sheer innovation, the very possibility that you can play it without shooting anyone, and the moments where everything just works: when you effortlessly leap across rooftops, catwalks, and other convenient platforms like the trained and intuitive athlete like you're supposed to be. It's negatives include the incredibly precise leaps that require absolute perfection and thus result in dozens of deaths before you can advance, the obligatory or near obligatory fight sequences, and the minimal objects you have when you do fight. It doesn't help that you can maybe survive three attacks before dying. But I stuck with it until the end and tried some of the bonus material before returning it. That's a stop above Zack and a step below Dead Rising, where I beat it twice in a row. In fact, time has only made me appreciate that one more. Not only does it have the scariest enemy I've seen in years (the clock, I mean,) it's the only game that actually gave me nightmares. For a horror game, this is a plus!
I think of a scale when I evaluate these games, at least lately. The qualities and flaws are on both sides of the scales, and if the latter outweighs the former, the scale collapses and the game goes home. That's...true for pretty much all reviews, but more coherently designed games don't really need this treatment. I enjoy the games enough that the flaws are only occasionally noted, while these more questionable games have long stretches that make me question while I'm playing it. Dead Rising's resonating emotions and options outweigh the sheer stupidity, while the hours of wasted time and frustration from Zack removed the puzzle-solving excitement. Mirror's Edge are a generally positive flow with spikes of irritation. Call of Duty 4 had very few problems that I found, but my general disinterest in modern warfare and first person shooters lowered my positive reactions, though the game's famous set pieces were extremely compelling.
I find that the time it takes to beat a level and just advance also factors in. A level of Mirror's edge often took 45 minutes to an hour to finish, with two or three points were I got stuck each time. Dead Rising usually got me SOMETHING every ten to fifteen minutes, especially when I finally knew what the hell I was doing. The fact that I often had to restart levels from scratch was one of the big problems with Zack and Wiki.
Now, there was one issue I had with Mirror's Edge specifically that was less a joy versus anger scale problem and more a thematic one. In this case, it was the choices between passivity and aggression and its role in the story, or sadly the lack thereof. That's worth a more thorough evaluation, though, and comparison with another game entirely. We'll get to that next time, hopefully this weekend, and finally do a thematic discussion instead of another review or rant about my life.
The issues that these Gameflied games have are much more serious, with most threatening at least briefly to undermine the entire game or at least stop me from enjoying it. Mirror's Edge's positives include sheer innovation, the very possibility that you can play it without shooting anyone, and the moments where everything just works: when you effortlessly leap across rooftops, catwalks, and other convenient platforms like the trained and intuitive athlete like you're supposed to be. It's negatives include the incredibly precise leaps that require absolute perfection and thus result in dozens of deaths before you can advance, the obligatory or near obligatory fight sequences, and the minimal objects you have when you do fight. It doesn't help that you can maybe survive three attacks before dying. But I stuck with it until the end and tried some of the bonus material before returning it. That's a stop above Zack and a step below Dead Rising, where I beat it twice in a row. In fact, time has only made me appreciate that one more. Not only does it have the scariest enemy I've seen in years (the clock, I mean,) it's the only game that actually gave me nightmares. For a horror game, this is a plus!
I think of a scale when I evaluate these games, at least lately. The qualities and flaws are on both sides of the scales, and if the latter outweighs the former, the scale collapses and the game goes home. That's...true for pretty much all reviews, but more coherently designed games don't really need this treatment. I enjoy the games enough that the flaws are only occasionally noted, while these more questionable games have long stretches that make me question while I'm playing it. Dead Rising's resonating emotions and options outweigh the sheer stupidity, while the hours of wasted time and frustration from Zack removed the puzzle-solving excitement. Mirror's Edge are a generally positive flow with spikes of irritation. Call of Duty 4 had very few problems that I found, but my general disinterest in modern warfare and first person shooters lowered my positive reactions, though the game's famous set pieces were extremely compelling.
I find that the time it takes to beat a level and just advance also factors in. A level of Mirror's edge often took 45 minutes to an hour to finish, with two or three points were I got stuck each time. Dead Rising usually got me SOMETHING every ten to fifteen minutes, especially when I finally knew what the hell I was doing. The fact that I often had to restart levels from scratch was one of the big problems with Zack and Wiki.
Now, there was one issue I had with Mirror's Edge specifically that was less a joy versus anger scale problem and more a thematic one. In this case, it was the choices between passivity and aggression and its role in the story, or sadly the lack thereof. That's worth a more thorough evaluation, though, and comparison with another game entirely. We'll get to that next time, hopefully this weekend, and finally do a thematic discussion instead of another review or rant about my life.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Reviews: Where Free is Too Much
Like a lot of people, I've lost some interest in the Wii lately. Fortunately, Nintendo has a lot of new games coming out that caught my interest, but it shouldn't have to just be Nintendo. I want to get more third-party games, but there should be more out there than a dork murdering assassins with a light saber (not that I won't get that sequel, too.) I did try one game recently, though: the well-received if largely unsuccessful Zack and Wiki. I don't think anything is surprised that the game didn't do well. The Graphic Adventure genre was nearly dead anyway, with the exception of much cheaper games already tied to popular characters like Strongbad or Sam and Max. What surprised me, though, was how much I disliked the game. I got the game on Gamefly, where besides a monthly fee the games are free to play as long as I want until I'm ready to return it. I usually beat the game first, but here, I quit in disgust about two levels from the end.
There were a few things that bothered me about this game. The normal game play itself was fine, with one exception. There was too much use of the Wiimote (AKA the "waggle" stuff,) some of which merely hurt my hand, but quite a few that didn't work. The worst, and one of the things that finally put me off the game, was the "sword-fighting" in the penultimate level. Not only was it unwieldy and hard to block or attack, but three mistakes and you're defeated and killed! More on that point in a minute. I wasn't too fan of the game's art style, either. I love a lot of anime and Japanese-based design at large, but it can easily become too much. And this game, with its bunny pirates, high-pitched screaming monkeys, and hammy overacting pirate women, was too much. The graphics didn't exactly demonstrate the power of the system, either, not that it matters much for a game in this style.
But these weren't the things that made me give up on the game. What made me give up was the "lives" system. You see, nearly every level in the game has several ways for your character to die or otherwise lose permanently. When you die, you have only two options: start the level (which could take 15-20 minutes for the longer ones,) from scratch, or use up a limited number of lives to continue. That's bad enough for a graphic adventure game, but the real problem is the limited number of lives. It's not a limited number of lives per level, it's a number of lives per game! You only have a handful, and you have to buy more. And each life costs more than the last. To never redo the dozen or so puzzles you could have endured before yet another untimely death, you'd have to get dozens of lives and even grind for money! Have the people who made this game ever played an adventure game?
The question, I suppose, is why the combination of impossible control commands, often purely random deaths based on trial and error design, and having to replay entire levels added up to the last completely given up game for years, and the similarly flawed Dead Rising compelled me to beat it twice and still want to play it more should I find a cheap copy? For starters, as annoying as the AI and some game play issues are in Dread Rising, save points were plentiful enough that you rarely lost more than a few minutes. Wow, save points? Imagine an innovation like that in Zack and Wiki! But I think part of it was the feel of the game. I initially assumed Dead Rising was the easy zombie game, but after I learned otherwise, it was reasonable to assume a Mature-rated game based on a horrific zombie apocalypses. Zack and Wiki is so obviously a children's game that it comes into violent conflict with the difficulty. Hell, besides the limited lives, it also penalizes your score for beating the level. Where does that sound familiar? Devil May Cry, the ultra-violent, adult-themed action game famous for its difficulty. What's the point? Hell, why not just penalize the character's score and leave it at that? A player tries a level, dies a few times, beats the level, and if they really care, they can repeat the level again flawlessly. That's how I handled Dead rising. I beat the game with a bad-ish ending the first time, and then I did it again with the best level and while rescuing all the survivors. That may have literally given me nightmares, but in the end, it felt good. A monkey that turns into a bell can't say as much.
There were a few things that bothered me about this game. The normal game play itself was fine, with one exception. There was too much use of the Wiimote (AKA the "waggle" stuff,) some of which merely hurt my hand, but quite a few that didn't work. The worst, and one of the things that finally put me off the game, was the "sword-fighting" in the penultimate level. Not only was it unwieldy and hard to block or attack, but three mistakes and you're defeated and killed! More on that point in a minute. I wasn't too fan of the game's art style, either. I love a lot of anime and Japanese-based design at large, but it can easily become too much. And this game, with its bunny pirates, high-pitched screaming monkeys, and hammy overacting pirate women, was too much. The graphics didn't exactly demonstrate the power of the system, either, not that it matters much for a game in this style.
But these weren't the things that made me give up on the game. What made me give up was the "lives" system. You see, nearly every level in the game has several ways for your character to die or otherwise lose permanently. When you die, you have only two options: start the level (which could take 15-20 minutes for the longer ones,) from scratch, or use up a limited number of lives to continue. That's bad enough for a graphic adventure game, but the real problem is the limited number of lives. It's not a limited number of lives per level, it's a number of lives per game! You only have a handful, and you have to buy more. And each life costs more than the last. To never redo the dozen or so puzzles you could have endured before yet another untimely death, you'd have to get dozens of lives and even grind for money! Have the people who made this game ever played an adventure game?
The question, I suppose, is why the combination of impossible control commands, often purely random deaths based on trial and error design, and having to replay entire levels added up to the last completely given up game for years, and the similarly flawed Dead Rising compelled me to beat it twice and still want to play it more should I find a cheap copy? For starters, as annoying as the AI and some game play issues are in Dread Rising, save points were plentiful enough that you rarely lost more than a few minutes. Wow, save points? Imagine an innovation like that in Zack and Wiki! But I think part of it was the feel of the game. I initially assumed Dead Rising was the easy zombie game, but after I learned otherwise, it was reasonable to assume a Mature-rated game based on a horrific zombie apocalypses. Zack and Wiki is so obviously a children's game that it comes into violent conflict with the difficulty. Hell, besides the limited lives, it also penalizes your score for beating the level. Where does that sound familiar? Devil May Cry, the ultra-violent, adult-themed action game famous for its difficulty. What's the point? Hell, why not just penalize the character's score and leave it at that? A player tries a level, dies a few times, beats the level, and if they really care, they can repeat the level again flawlessly. That's how I handled Dead rising. I beat the game with a bad-ish ending the first time, and then I did it again with the best level and while rescuing all the survivors. That may have literally given me nightmares, but in the end, it felt good. A monkey that turns into a bell can't say as much.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
My Life: A Time of Endings
As my life gets more hectic, it's getting tougher to figure out my schedule, especially this week. It's my first 40 hour work week since my last job ended, and in the meantime I'm coming to an end to many things. My D&D game will have at the most 4 games left, including the one tomorrow. Everything from television show episode binges to web series are coming to an end and soon. Honesty, that's for the best, since the above work week means that a lot of what I could take for granted is over. This brings us to the beginnings. Sure, a lot of that are returning television shows. It also means starting a new living situation, though fortunately it might mean just having a new roommate for a few months, starting this new job pattern, and starting studies into a new toolset for a job application. Yes, this is all very complicated, and the message itself is disjointed and a bit directionless. But that's my life as well, and soon that phase will also come to an end. By next week, I at least hope to return to doing these semi-regularly.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Reviews: My First Bethesda, and Still More Zombies. Oh, and my life changes again.
Well, so much for THAT permanent change. The Monday after my last post, I finished my job. Or rather, it finished me. Apparently customer service is not my forte. Not that I mind, though part of me was bothered by the way that situation resolved itself. The real problem was how I had to hit the job running. Week one was "training week," except I had no formal training except for a guide to leaf through. Then during week two, I was tossed to a phone while one of their main customer services representatives was on vacation for more than a week and the entire office was being audited! It never got better. And the entire database was archaic, full of discrepancies and elaborate F key commands that differ for every menu. One day of learning these commands and the myriad exceptions would be enough, but updating the system with a real GUI and links to a map (say, with ties to Google Maps,) would cut the time to handle these questions in half.
Anyway, unemployment returned for a few weeks. I technically started a new job, but I'm in training AGAIN, so we'll see how this goes. So I had a lot of free time to play video games, including last month's birthday present, Fallout 3! This is my first Fallout game thanks to my focus on console games and my first Bethesda for pretty much the same reason. And my opinion? It's pretty good and I CAN'T stop playing it.
As a general rule, this isn't my type of game. Sure, it's an RPG, but it's also a shooter, which are fine except I've played little but them lately. Thank you, XBOX! Beyond that, I enjoy RPGS with strong main characters, but I also am not a fan of the constant sense of loss. In Fallout, you have to worry about how much weight you can carry (except ammo weighs nothing, nice that,) every weapon has ammo, and most importantly, every piece of equipment you have will degrade constantly. You have to constantly progress just to stay in place. Eventually, at least, that doesn't last forever. By the halfway point, the game mercifully gives out enough bonus money for minor, otherwise worthless items and just by adding places on your map. Ironically, the game then goes in the opposite direction in that I get too many rewards. The game has a maximum experience level of 20, making missions beyond that point pointless. That will change only when I spend money to get an expansion pack. As a result, I hit the maximum level after seeing barely half of the entire game! Since I plan on getting the expansion pack eventually, actually playing the rest of the game now would be a waste of the experience I would only get after I bought the expansion pack.
To make up for that, I started a second, evil character and am playing him until I'm ready to get the expansion pack. This time, I went out of my way to avoid experience bonuses, letting me see more of the game, though I still get shocked when I gain nearly an entire level from a single, short quest. Having played this game A LOT now, I can safely say that I'm ready to give my opinion. The best thing of this game is the vast number of options. Sure, you can save a town from destruction by evil forces. Or you can work with those evil forces and even press the button that turns the entire city into a mushroom cloud. The game lets you be as kind or evil as you want. Ally with noble knights in powered armors or massacre the downtrodden for evil indistrialists. Save escaped slaves or be a slaver itself. Return home to save your troubled people or murder and EAT your childhood friend! In fact, the biggest downside to the game (save for a glaring number of bugs still, from people reacting strangely to outright game freezings,) are the lack of options! For my "good person" game, I saved whole cities and am considered a messianic saint, but I didn't feel like I was helping the people overall. Hell, because random encounters get worse to match your level, the wasteland gets consistently more dangerous as you act. Thanks to the open nature of the game, this means tons of unique characters can be randomly killed off.
The one thing I really missed was any form of romantic options. Sure, the romance arcs of similar games like Mass Effect tend to be pretty limited, but at least they gave you an option. If I wanted to date, say, the quirky inventor of your hero's home base (unless you explode said home base,) why not set that up? I understand that no video game can equal your imagination. That's what tabletop role playing games (and, err, your imagination,) are for. But I still felt a bit unsatisfied. Still, that that's the worst thing you can complain about in a game, I'd call that a success.
Slightly less successful was the next game I played, Dead Rising. Dead Rising is a very Romero-esque zombie apocalypse game from Capcom. That was strange unto itself, since it was made by Capcom, who already has a zombie apocalypse series. In fact, they have the series that revolutionized the survival horror genre: Resident Evil. Capcom understandably wanted to make this series nothing like the other one, and in a way it was. Resident Evil was supposedly a survivor horror game, but it was a lot like a normal adventure game full of strange puzzles and labyrinthine police station/dungeons along with super-mutant bosses. If anything, Dead Rising cuts back on the horror in favor of the survival elements. In this one, your goal is mostly just to survive 72 hours and get as many survivors rescued and as many mysteries solved as possible. In many ways, the main enemy isn't the zombie horde, but the clock. Often you have to find a way to escort a horde of survivors with only minutes to spare before the next plot point flag.
The lack of "horror" also makes the zombie fights less horrific, and they knew it, so they made it more fun. Gone are the evolved super-mutants, with only two varieties of zombies: normal slow, shuffling zombies and slightly more aggressive slow, shuffling zombies. Instead, the boss enemies are all humans gone mad or just evil in the wake of the zombie disaster. The game's appeal comes, at least initially, from an endless hoard of slow-moving, shuffling zombies and the myriad ways you can mess with them.
This coupled with the time and survivor escorting elements, however, made for a game that seemed to hate itself. Yes, it's fun wacky times killing zombies en masse with a lawnmower, or running over them with a car, or putting silly hats on them mid-fight, or beating on them with novelty weapons like huge teddy bears, but if you actually try to, you know, win the game, the difficulty quadruples. Zombies you laugh at when you run past become deadly threats to the five or more very, very stupid people you try to escort to safety. And so you have to go out of your way to save them, which puts you in danger as well, and believe me, nothing is more fun than being grappled three times in a row and having to do quick-time events each time. And so you soon realize you have to forget the joke items and focus on real killing weapons like every other zombie game. The main offender here is a single optional boss fight that becomes an easy mode (or at least less hard mode) option. Defeat him and you get unlimited access to deadly hand-held chainsaws, AND you discover a convenient teleporter that gets you from the single farthest point from safety, a point that normally requires traveling though the most choked zombie points or into a battle with insane convicts armed with a jeep and turret, to within sauntering distance of the safe house.
It makes the game hard to appreciate it. I rented it expecting mindless fun and got something often frustratingly hard. The time limit and stupid victims, who eagerly avoided easy routes to run into swarms of zombies and needed help from inescapable grapples constantly, were a nightmare. Literally. There were some rough nights there. As a game, it worked and it was certainly engrossing (both in pun and non-pun definitions,) but it certainly needed just a little more time to get the rough parts out. And the story had issues as well. It was your usual horror movie cheese, intentionally humorous at times, but it had some clever twists involving multiple endings. If you just survive the 3 days, you get a generally positive ending, but if you finish all the story missions, you can get into longer endings involving secret government conspiracies, obvious sequel hooks, and a fairly uninspired final boss fight. What's odd, though, is the endings don't always make sense collectively. I'll avoid spoilers, but just for an example, one character who is perfectly fine in the normal ending becomes a zombie in the good endings, despite nothing remotely related to this changing. Similarly, the game is really vague about just how you become a zombie. Your fellow survivors become a zombie if they are killed by zombies, sure. But you and pretty much every one of them will get at least damaged by zombies, and yet some parts of the game insist that even a zombie bite could infect you. What, were the zombies just gumming people to death otherwise? Is this Schrodinger's zombie apocalypse?
Ultimately, I'd at least suggest people play these games. Fallout 3 is recommended for anyone with plenty of free time, and Dead Rising to anyone without blood pressure problems. And yes, this is at least two updates I merged into one after the first was embarrassingly late. Things have been weird, lately. I'll get into that more some time in a week or so.
Anyway, unemployment returned for a few weeks. I technically started a new job, but I'm in training AGAIN, so we'll see how this goes. So I had a lot of free time to play video games, including last month's birthday present, Fallout 3! This is my first Fallout game thanks to my focus on console games and my first Bethesda for pretty much the same reason. And my opinion? It's pretty good and I CAN'T stop playing it.
As a general rule, this isn't my type of game. Sure, it's an RPG, but it's also a shooter, which are fine except I've played little but them lately. Thank you, XBOX! Beyond that, I enjoy RPGS with strong main characters, but I also am not a fan of the constant sense of loss. In Fallout, you have to worry about how much weight you can carry (except ammo weighs nothing, nice that,) every weapon has ammo, and most importantly, every piece of equipment you have will degrade constantly. You have to constantly progress just to stay in place. Eventually, at least, that doesn't last forever. By the halfway point, the game mercifully gives out enough bonus money for minor, otherwise worthless items and just by adding places on your map. Ironically, the game then goes in the opposite direction in that I get too many rewards. The game has a maximum experience level of 20, making missions beyond that point pointless. That will change only when I spend money to get an expansion pack. As a result, I hit the maximum level after seeing barely half of the entire game! Since I plan on getting the expansion pack eventually, actually playing the rest of the game now would be a waste of the experience I would only get after I bought the expansion pack.
To make up for that, I started a second, evil character and am playing him until I'm ready to get the expansion pack. This time, I went out of my way to avoid experience bonuses, letting me see more of the game, though I still get shocked when I gain nearly an entire level from a single, short quest. Having played this game A LOT now, I can safely say that I'm ready to give my opinion. The best thing of this game is the vast number of options. Sure, you can save a town from destruction by evil forces. Or you can work with those evil forces and even press the button that turns the entire city into a mushroom cloud. The game lets you be as kind or evil as you want. Ally with noble knights in powered armors or massacre the downtrodden for evil indistrialists. Save escaped slaves or be a slaver itself. Return home to save your troubled people or murder and EAT your childhood friend! In fact, the biggest downside to the game (save for a glaring number of bugs still, from people reacting strangely to outright game freezings,) are the lack of options! For my "good person" game, I saved whole cities and am considered a messianic saint, but I didn't feel like I was helping the people overall. Hell, because random encounters get worse to match your level, the wasteland gets consistently more dangerous as you act. Thanks to the open nature of the game, this means tons of unique characters can be randomly killed off.
The one thing I really missed was any form of romantic options. Sure, the romance arcs of similar games like Mass Effect tend to be pretty limited, but at least they gave you an option. If I wanted to date, say, the quirky inventor of your hero's home base (unless you explode said home base,) why not set that up? I understand that no video game can equal your imagination. That's what tabletop role playing games (and, err, your imagination,) are for. But I still felt a bit unsatisfied. Still, that that's the worst thing you can complain about in a game, I'd call that a success.
Slightly less successful was the next game I played, Dead Rising. Dead Rising is a very Romero-esque zombie apocalypse game from Capcom. That was strange unto itself, since it was made by Capcom, who already has a zombie apocalypse series. In fact, they have the series that revolutionized the survival horror genre: Resident Evil. Capcom understandably wanted to make this series nothing like the other one, and in a way it was. Resident Evil was supposedly a survivor horror game, but it was a lot like a normal adventure game full of strange puzzles and labyrinthine police station/dungeons along with super-mutant bosses. If anything, Dead Rising cuts back on the horror in favor of the survival elements. In this one, your goal is mostly just to survive 72 hours and get as many survivors rescued and as many mysteries solved as possible. In many ways, the main enemy isn't the zombie horde, but the clock. Often you have to find a way to escort a horde of survivors with only minutes to spare before the next plot point flag.
The lack of "horror" also makes the zombie fights less horrific, and they knew it, so they made it more fun. Gone are the evolved super-mutants, with only two varieties of zombies: normal slow, shuffling zombies and slightly more aggressive slow, shuffling zombies. Instead, the boss enemies are all humans gone mad or just evil in the wake of the zombie disaster. The game's appeal comes, at least initially, from an endless hoard of slow-moving, shuffling zombies and the myriad ways you can mess with them.
This coupled with the time and survivor escorting elements, however, made for a game that seemed to hate itself. Yes, it's fun wacky times killing zombies en masse with a lawnmower, or running over them with a car, or putting silly hats on them mid-fight, or beating on them with novelty weapons like huge teddy bears, but if you actually try to, you know, win the game, the difficulty quadruples. Zombies you laugh at when you run past become deadly threats to the five or more very, very stupid people you try to escort to safety. And so you have to go out of your way to save them, which puts you in danger as well, and believe me, nothing is more fun than being grappled three times in a row and having to do quick-time events each time. And so you soon realize you have to forget the joke items and focus on real killing weapons like every other zombie game. The main offender here is a single optional boss fight that becomes an easy mode (or at least less hard mode) option. Defeat him and you get unlimited access to deadly hand-held chainsaws, AND you discover a convenient teleporter that gets you from the single farthest point from safety, a point that normally requires traveling though the most choked zombie points or into a battle with insane convicts armed with a jeep and turret, to within sauntering distance of the safe house.
It makes the game hard to appreciate it. I rented it expecting mindless fun and got something often frustratingly hard. The time limit and stupid victims, who eagerly avoided easy routes to run into swarms of zombies and needed help from inescapable grapples constantly, were a nightmare. Literally. There were some rough nights there. As a game, it worked and it was certainly engrossing (both in pun and non-pun definitions,) but it certainly needed just a little more time to get the rough parts out. And the story had issues as well. It was your usual horror movie cheese, intentionally humorous at times, but it had some clever twists involving multiple endings. If you just survive the 3 days, you get a generally positive ending, but if you finish all the story missions, you can get into longer endings involving secret government conspiracies, obvious sequel hooks, and a fairly uninspired final boss fight. What's odd, though, is the endings don't always make sense collectively. I'll avoid spoilers, but just for an example, one character who is perfectly fine in the normal ending becomes a zombie in the good endings, despite nothing remotely related to this changing. Similarly, the game is really vague about just how you become a zombie. Your fellow survivors become a zombie if they are killed by zombies, sure. But you and pretty much every one of them will get at least damaged by zombies, and yet some parts of the game insist that even a zombie bite could infect you. What, were the zombies just gumming people to death otherwise? Is this Schrodinger's zombie apocalypse?
Ultimately, I'd at least suggest people play these games. Fallout 3 is recommended for anyone with plenty of free time, and Dead Rising to anyone without blood pressure problems. And yes, this is at least two updates I merged into one after the first was embarrassingly late. Things have been weird, lately. I'll get into that more some time in a week or so.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
My Life: A Change For the Permanent-y?
So, change is happening again! Yay! Yay. First of all, I may or may not have found a semi-permanent job again. That's the good news. The bad news is that, for now, it pays $10 an hour so people can scream at me about garbage. In other words, we're talking about customer service. I'm a temp to hire for now, so I'm temping and may get hired for a more reasonable $13 an hour in three months. Whether I'm up to that is another story, but we'll see. In the meantime, I have a more immediate concern. My roommate is declaring bankruptcy and moving out next month. That's not a big problem, since my lease ends that month as well and I was planning on moving out anyway. That means, however, that I need to find a new place and, more importantly, another roommate. I can find a cheaper place than this, yes, but a cheap place paid by myself is still much more than two people paying for a single place.
So that's my next two panic situations. I have at least one link for the apartment issue that I have to check out tomorrow, so my great fear, moving back with the parents, appears to be averted for now. But it's not so simple. Part of me hopes to live in or closer to the city so I can theoretically enjoy it's presence. But that makes me too far from my current job, so I likely can't keep it. No big loss, but it might mean losing my unemployment. And there's also the cost and hassle of moving. Being a nitwit, I bought a lot of nice furniture, and while I finally paid all of it, it's all really damn heavy. I need either a lot of help or movers. Either way, it'll be trickier, but at least it won't be in the winter like the one time I helped my brother move. And I probably won't need to drag a couch up a balcony by a tow rope and almost drop it on a car. That's a good story, that one, but not one I want to relive with stuff I paid for.
So that's the first two phases of my process. This isn't the best time to finally get back to my D&D game and try to sell my screenplay next year. But, I'm doing it anyway!
So that's my next two panic situations. I have at least one link for the apartment issue that I have to check out tomorrow, so my great fear, moving back with the parents, appears to be averted for now. But it's not so simple. Part of me hopes to live in or closer to the city so I can theoretically enjoy it's presence. But that makes me too far from my current job, so I likely can't keep it. No big loss, but it might mean losing my unemployment. And there's also the cost and hassle of moving. Being a nitwit, I bought a lot of nice furniture, and while I finally paid all of it, it's all really damn heavy. I need either a lot of help or movers. Either way, it'll be trickier, but at least it won't be in the winter like the one time I helped my brother move. And I probably won't need to drag a couch up a balcony by a tow rope and almost drop it on a car. That's a good story, that one, but not one I want to relive with stuff I paid for.
So that's the first two phases of my process. This isn't the best time to finally get back to my D&D game and try to sell my screenplay next year. But, I'm doing it anyway!
Thursday, June 25, 2009
My Ideas: Something Quick and Crazy
Like most artists (and wannabes who want to call themselves artists) I get many of my ideas from my life. In my case, though, it tends to be less about my real life, and more about the lives I imagine had things been different. Or, even better, a life that's nowhere near normal and careens headlong into weird. After all, if I can't have a normal life, why not aim for something better? And because I have a decent number of regrets with how my life went, lately, my fantasies relate to how I could alter things if I could start over, armed with knowledge I had (or could get if I had a day to prepare.)
These ideas usually stat with me returning to myself at age seven, right about when my family moves to a new town. That's where I generally pinpoint where things went "wrong" for me. I never really adjusted to a new town, which lead to being bullied and ostracized, which made things difficult in high school, and so on. Now, it wouldn't be rewriting time itself. After all, any change I made could cause some people to die as they otherwise lived, or even prevent them from being born. My niece was born 3 years ago, and I wouldn't want to change anything if it meant effectively murdering her. So instead, I would be reborn in an alternate dimension, where "me number 2" could alter this dimension as I saw fit without consequence.
How I do that depends on how little and opportunity I had. My minimalistic version is mostly a matter of confidence and knowledge. I would approach school, for example, in a more assertive way, and much more importantly I won't give a damn about bullies. I still won't worry about sports, but I can try some that I might enjoy more than friggin' volleyball. You know, martial arts, goofy crap like fencing, even something like track. More importantly, I could focus on my video game interests from a much younger age, learning Japanese and even some programming as early as age eight.
But it wouldn't be my idea if I couldn't exploit it more than that. At the minimum, I could easily use it for simple acts of gambling. I certainly would be one of the few to know who shot Mr. Burns, for example. And of course I'll have at least a general knowledge of who to invest in. Now, my fantasies tend to be far more advanced, including not just one, but multiple iterations of this repeated life, letting me easily track lottery numbers and whatnot. I also included the concept of an extradimensional space that also follows me into the past. This ever-expanding "suitcase" would freeze in time when close, but when opened, I could put objects in for later time-skips. This could include newspapers, textbooks and scientific journals, and other ways to help the people of 1986 thanks to the people of 2009. I could warn celebrities and others of their upcoming deaths to prevent or prepare for them, advance science in 20 year iterations, and even prevent disasters like 9/11!
By iteration 5 or so, my theories become pure science fiction. I could even become a cyborg or something better as early as seven or eight. Eventually, I could even invite people into the extra-dimensional space, letting them travel to other dimensions as well as part of a permanent community dedicated to advancing technology. There is no overt end result, but I hope it ends with understanding space and time enough to end the cycle myself, even traveling to earlier dimensions to help the people I left behind when I traveled into the past; even leaving clones is a possibility. But I also wanted an option to stay behind if I ever was so happy with one iteration that I don't want to leave it behind. In that option, the "suitcase" and all the messages I have in it are left to a normal, otherwise unaware seven year old me and I could continue to live my life.
But eventually, like all my ideas, I eventually decided this could be more than a fantasy. It could be a game idea! The game, tentatively called "New Dawn," takes place in a more limited fantasy dimension, but the idea is the same. The player can improve mental stats and retain memories and evidence to change history, though of course each change results in consequences that the player didn't experience last time. Now, for a video game, a goal might be necessary. Maybe something catastrophic happens right before the time-skip, like an alien invasion or the planet being destroyed, and the player must improve technology or magical research enough to stop this threat, thus ending the time skip. There can even be other people with the same ability, and the player has to compete against them by advancing faster than them or finding them and stopping their progress in some way (erasing their memories? Destroying everything in their suitcases? Just making them happy enough that they won't pass their consciousness to another iteration?)
And because my ideas tend to be weird and focused on relationships, I also had one last addition. Either as the default or as an optional ability, exactly one thing would change about the player with every iteration: the player's gender. This would force a new perspective, and it would potentially open up entire new relationships. I say potentially because I don't even know how to start figuring out the player's sexuality in that situation, let alone that of every potential romantic interested, though in the former the ideal is probably just let the player decide.
Is it a possible video game? Sure, even if that last part might go, and provided the budget for a such an expansive game is there. But it's just as important a thought exercise. What would you do? What are the ethics of removing potential people, or potentially possessing your own seven-year old self? How much of your identity is tied up to your body and your experiences? And after a few iterations, how much of your humanity would be left? After centuries of knowledge and multiple body alterations, would you think of yourself as a person, a monster, or a god? How much evil would you be willing to inflict if you know that, at least from your perspective, it would all be reset? At the very least, it's a good insight into what the hell is wrong with me. As for when the "alternating gender" idea entered into the equation, well, I'll let that one go.
These ideas usually stat with me returning to myself at age seven, right about when my family moves to a new town. That's where I generally pinpoint where things went "wrong" for me. I never really adjusted to a new town, which lead to being bullied and ostracized, which made things difficult in high school, and so on. Now, it wouldn't be rewriting time itself. After all, any change I made could cause some people to die as they otherwise lived, or even prevent them from being born. My niece was born 3 years ago, and I wouldn't want to change anything if it meant effectively murdering her. So instead, I would be reborn in an alternate dimension, where "me number 2" could alter this dimension as I saw fit without consequence.
How I do that depends on how little and opportunity I had. My minimalistic version is mostly a matter of confidence and knowledge. I would approach school, for example, in a more assertive way, and much more importantly I won't give a damn about bullies. I still won't worry about sports, but I can try some that I might enjoy more than friggin' volleyball. You know, martial arts, goofy crap like fencing, even something like track. More importantly, I could focus on my video game interests from a much younger age, learning Japanese and even some programming as early as age eight.
But it wouldn't be my idea if I couldn't exploit it more than that. At the minimum, I could easily use it for simple acts of gambling. I certainly would be one of the few to know who shot Mr. Burns, for example. And of course I'll have at least a general knowledge of who to invest in. Now, my fantasies tend to be far more advanced, including not just one, but multiple iterations of this repeated life, letting me easily track lottery numbers and whatnot. I also included the concept of an extradimensional space that also follows me into the past. This ever-expanding "suitcase" would freeze in time when close, but when opened, I could put objects in for later time-skips. This could include newspapers, textbooks and scientific journals, and other ways to help the people of 1986 thanks to the people of 2009. I could warn celebrities and others of their upcoming deaths to prevent or prepare for them, advance science in 20 year iterations, and even prevent disasters like 9/11!
By iteration 5 or so, my theories become pure science fiction. I could even become a cyborg or something better as early as seven or eight. Eventually, I could even invite people into the extra-dimensional space, letting them travel to other dimensions as well as part of a permanent community dedicated to advancing technology. There is no overt end result, but I hope it ends with understanding space and time enough to end the cycle myself, even traveling to earlier dimensions to help the people I left behind when I traveled into the past; even leaving clones is a possibility. But I also wanted an option to stay behind if I ever was so happy with one iteration that I don't want to leave it behind. In that option, the "suitcase" and all the messages I have in it are left to a normal, otherwise unaware seven year old me and I could continue to live my life.
But eventually, like all my ideas, I eventually decided this could be more than a fantasy. It could be a game idea! The game, tentatively called "New Dawn," takes place in a more limited fantasy dimension, but the idea is the same. The player can improve mental stats and retain memories and evidence to change history, though of course each change results in consequences that the player didn't experience last time. Now, for a video game, a goal might be necessary. Maybe something catastrophic happens right before the time-skip, like an alien invasion or the planet being destroyed, and the player must improve technology or magical research enough to stop this threat, thus ending the time skip. There can even be other people with the same ability, and the player has to compete against them by advancing faster than them or finding them and stopping their progress in some way (erasing their memories? Destroying everything in their suitcases? Just making them happy enough that they won't pass their consciousness to another iteration?)
And because my ideas tend to be weird and focused on relationships, I also had one last addition. Either as the default or as an optional ability, exactly one thing would change about the player with every iteration: the player's gender. This would force a new perspective, and it would potentially open up entire new relationships. I say potentially because I don't even know how to start figuring out the player's sexuality in that situation, let alone that of every potential romantic interested, though in the former the ideal is probably just let the player decide.
Is it a possible video game? Sure, even if that last part might go, and provided the budget for a such an expansive game is there. But it's just as important a thought exercise. What would you do? What are the ethics of removing potential people, or potentially possessing your own seven-year old self? How much of your identity is tied up to your body and your experiences? And after a few iterations, how much of your humanity would be left? After centuries of knowledge and multiple body alterations, would you think of yourself as a person, a monster, or a god? How much evil would you be willing to inflict if you know that, at least from your perspective, it would all be reset? At the very least, it's a good insight into what the hell is wrong with me. As for when the "alternating gender" idea entered into the equation, well, I'll let that one go.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
My Life: Suddenly Getting Busier
Well, I wish I can say I was bored lately. But these last few weeks have been crazy. First of all, I began my quest to find a school this fall, should I get the opportunity to do so. I visited six schools in the last two weeks, including Flashpoint, Depaul, the Schaumburg Illinois Institute of the Arts, the International Academy of Design and Technology, Columbia College, and finally Westwood. Phew! I'm tires just saying all that. But I think I narrowed it down to a few schools.
Even so, I haven't even made my most basic decision: what degree should I get? Another Bachelor, a Masters, or just a more informal certificate from an academy like Flashpoint? Before I can even make THAT decision, I need financial information from FAFSA. I doubtlessly need loans to even start this plan. And beyond that, I'll need employment.
Speaking of which, in between panicking over one of the biggest decisions of my life, I actually have become gainfully employed again! For a month. Until the end of June, I'm working in data entry. Unfortunately, the data entry is manual writing, not the obscenely fast typing skills I developed for years. It also means it pays less, but at least it's steady, extending my unemployment while also making more than I did until recently.
And this job gives an hour lunch and two 15-minute breaks, giving me enough time to make phone calls. So I still can decide and make necessary phone calls while working. My creative writing has suffered, however.
So, for the nonexistent people reasind this thing, the question is this: do I get the masters, taking advantage of my bachelor degree in computer science, a more prestigious degree, and largely night classes that allows for more employment opportunities in exchange for a programming-heavy curriculum I'm less interested in, a second bachelor in two years in an art school that's slightly cheaper but has less options for financial aid and a relatively low success rate, but with more hands-on work and internship experience, and finally a very new, very modern academy with its own student loans but with no current accreditation, giving the strongest focus on game development but also the greatest risk? It's a very difficult question, but fortunately I can delay it until I at least get my FAFSA info.
Even so, I haven't even made my most basic decision: what degree should I get? Another Bachelor, a Masters, or just a more informal certificate from an academy like Flashpoint? Before I can even make THAT decision, I need financial information from FAFSA. I doubtlessly need loans to even start this plan. And beyond that, I'll need employment.
Speaking of which, in between panicking over one of the biggest decisions of my life, I actually have become gainfully employed again! For a month. Until the end of June, I'm working in data entry. Unfortunately, the data entry is manual writing, not the obscenely fast typing skills I developed for years. It also means it pays less, but at least it's steady, extending my unemployment while also making more than I did until recently.
And this job gives an hour lunch and two 15-minute breaks, giving me enough time to make phone calls. So I still can decide and make necessary phone calls while working. My creative writing has suffered, however.
So, for the nonexistent people reasind this thing, the question is this: do I get the masters, taking advantage of my bachelor degree in computer science, a more prestigious degree, and largely night classes that allows for more employment opportunities in exchange for a programming-heavy curriculum I'm less interested in, a second bachelor in two years in an art school that's slightly cheaper but has less options for financial aid and a relatively low success rate, but with more hands-on work and internship experience, and finally a very new, very modern academy with its own student loans but with no current accreditation, giving the strongest focus on game development but also the greatest risk? It's a very difficult question, but fortunately I can delay it until I at least get my FAFSA info.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
My Ideas: Writing For a Teeny Audience
Earlier in this blog (somewhere around the Revolutionary War, I believe,) I last mentioned my earlier experience as a player of Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games. Of course, I never just wanted to play these games. I wanted to run them. This shouldn't be too surprising to any who reads this blog (and other mythological figures.) I not only love the act of creation, I love showing it to the public. I love it when my work is evaluated and, well, recognized. Narcisistic? A little, but that's just a part of being an artist. Besides, if nobody responds to your stuff, you can't improve on it.
Not that it didn't take me a while. I'll focus on the first of my not immediately catastrophic attempt at running a D&D game. There were at least three failures before this point. The first was when I browbeated my friends into the game. Things were already looking bad when one of my friends tore up his character sheet and quit midway through the first adventure. To be fair, he's been known to be a bit overdramatic. It nonetheless lasted for about five or six adventures before the rest of my barely interested friends gave up. Round two was even worse; I got some of my friends (including the guy who quit last time) and the barely interested friends of my brother. It lasted about three or four adventures and ended with the whole party being captured, but at least I got some interesting characters out of that one. Finally, I tried running a game, which eventually became my first 3rd edition game, with the D&D group in college. It went okay for a few adventures one year, but over the summer, two players broke up, one friend quit the group out of the fallout of that, and a fourth left the school, leaving me with about 1.5 players. So it goes.
Finally, after graduating from college, I gave up on the attempt to convince my friends and just posted for ads online. That eventually got me three or four players, and so the game began! This game started with and idea I got a couple of years ago prior. The first adventure used pre-generated characters of a fairly high level and absolutely no relation or alliance. All the characters hunted the Quill of Destiny, an artifact of incredible power that let its user write the future, but only for a limited time. The characters alternated between working together to pass challenges and earn orbs that extend the time they can use the Quill, and happily stealing from each other or fighting to claim the right of the Quill. It didn't help that half the selected starting characters are evil.
And so, at the end of the adventure, three characters made it to the end with the Quill, with one character dead after the others abandoned him to a dragon and another character repeatedly shot by another character. Of those three, two were evil, and they wrote of conquered dragon armies, evil empires built out of the undead, and in one particularly clever idea, day itself would only last a quarter as long as normal. The last guy was neutral and fortunately created some vestige of civilization, albeit underground, which is actually pretty helpful what with the only three hours a day of sun and the almost lifeless surface.
Now that the players could make their own characters, they became special forces for the main underground city. This time, I went creative/weird, and I made them all partially amnesiac. They knew their history, but none of the names of their friends, family, hometowns, etc. It was only after meeting these people that they remembered these names; as if hearing it the first time triggered their memory. Oh, and they all met a strange shadowy figure the day they got the amnesia, saying that they were her children and it was their job to destroy the "usurpers."
The campaign sort of blipped over that last bit for a while, though. It initially is about the characters running a literal underground resistance against the evil orc/dragon and undead empires, but soon they discover a much worse threat. In addition to all the other changes to the standard D&D setting, I included another one; the standard gods were gone, to be replaced by own pantheon. That pantheon consisted of twelve goddesses known as the Sisters. That's right, I got them from the Valley game I mentioned ages ago. But the characters only knew about 11 goddesses. In this world like the original, Bas, the only evil goddess, fell and was forgotten. However, somebody discovered her, and she is slowly rising to power. When she does so physically, she will be a goddess manifest on the material plane, with all the unpleasantness that suggests.
The plot soon revolved on fighting Bas and her forces while simultaneously learning more about the strange world's history. The Quill, it turned out, has been around for millions of years and was created deliberately by a power higher than the gods. Ideally, it appears every time the world was building to an unstoppable climax, leading to a final victory of good or evil. The Quill let some mid-level forces take over and change the story completely, and it would be centuries or millennia before another climax would develop. As a result, there were the ruins of countless civilizations buried in the world, often with advanced technology or other forces unknown to a typical fantasy game.
This time, however, things went wrong. When Bas fell, she made a crater that penetrated many of those ruins, and as she started to recover, she gained access to powers that should have been left alone. And as the players continued their adventures, they discovered more of these ancient land, including an entire hi-tech city (with a nuclear weapon) currently inhabited by the surviving good and neutral dragons.
But all things must end, and this campaign didn't end well, though it came close, right on to the edge. My biggest problem with my longer-lasting games is consistent players. That's what comes from recruiting via online and otherwise using former strangers. Often it's just a matter of time, of course. People get busy, life happens. Occasionally it's the person, of course. In one case, which led to me taking a month off and switching to a game every two weeks instead of every week, a player cussed me out and quit the game after learning I was talking online about weakening his vastly overpowered magical armor. Other times, there were fights between players, and I am not good at conflict resolution, at least not after people are already angry.
But this game died to more traditional reasons. All of a sudden, two players, including the last one to still be there from Day 1, were moving out of state. One of said players was hosting the game for a good year by then, so we lost our regular game site. And that means losing another player who came from the other direction. Half the party gone, we had to end the regular sessions. We tried to at least finish the game by playing online, and for an adventure or two, that worked or came close to it. But in the end, people just drifted away. Everyone was epic level, half the people had barely functioning internet connections or just couldn't show up often, and combat already takes ludicrously long at that stage even before you factor in the delays from online gaming. The campaign's story ended with a few final entries into my enworld-based story hour, using a few comments from the players to modify things. At the most, we were three adventures away from ending the campaign.
That ending has haunted me ever since. What could I have done better? The easy answer, of course, would be to cut out some of the less important adventures, but how would I know when the game would suddenly end? Or I should have accepted that the online game was a half-assed fix at best and sped to the campaign's conclusion, which started with an epic war against Bas and her forces. That led to an actual final battle between Bas herself and the party, of course. But it concluded with the party getting access to the Quill of Destiny just as the two former users and current emperors attempt to use its power a second time. Both sides would attack Bas' own surviving generals, letting the future of the world be rewritten. Now, this last bit I was able to at least do with input from the players, though it resulted in the very climax the Quill was supposed to avoid. So the world of the Quill came to an end, its survivors in a state of eternal "Happily ever after."
As for the amnesia and “destroy the usurpers” thing, it came up much, much later and was promptly ignored by the players. Basically, they were all (or most, at that point) former servants of Lolth, who was pissed that the non-evil underground empire largely consisted of drow who reformed and no longer worshipped her. So Lolth revived her servants in new bodies and altered the memories of everyone on the plane to think the characters, who mostly replaced people that actually died in the real history, were there all along. They never figured that much out, so it never factored into their writings in the Quill, but I thought it was a clever idea nonetheless.
But I wasn't entirely satisfied with that ending, and I assumed neither were some of the characters who didn't write about such things. In the end, it provided me for the initial inspiration of Mesion, the campaign setting I'm currently running. How will it end? I can't say. The characters are 19th level, the world is within months of possibly ending, and in real life, I lost my job and may have to move by the end of August. This could be another heartbreak, or it could be the end I always wanted in my stories. But I'll be sure to say either way, and give a bit more detail about my storytelling method in general, when the time comes!
Not that it didn't take me a while. I'll focus on the first of my not immediately catastrophic attempt at running a D&D game. There were at least three failures before this point. The first was when I browbeated my friends into the game. Things were already looking bad when one of my friends tore up his character sheet and quit midway through the first adventure. To be fair, he's been known to be a bit overdramatic. It nonetheless lasted for about five or six adventures before the rest of my barely interested friends gave up. Round two was even worse; I got some of my friends (including the guy who quit last time) and the barely interested friends of my brother. It lasted about three or four adventures and ended with the whole party being captured, but at least I got some interesting characters out of that one. Finally, I tried running a game, which eventually became my first 3rd edition game, with the D&D group in college. It went okay for a few adventures one year, but over the summer, two players broke up, one friend quit the group out of the fallout of that, and a fourth left the school, leaving me with about 1.5 players. So it goes.
Finally, after graduating from college, I gave up on the attempt to convince my friends and just posted for ads online. That eventually got me three or four players, and so the game began! This game started with and idea I got a couple of years ago prior. The first adventure used pre-generated characters of a fairly high level and absolutely no relation or alliance. All the characters hunted the Quill of Destiny, an artifact of incredible power that let its user write the future, but only for a limited time. The characters alternated between working together to pass challenges and earn orbs that extend the time they can use the Quill, and happily stealing from each other or fighting to claim the right of the Quill. It didn't help that half the selected starting characters are evil.
And so, at the end of the adventure, three characters made it to the end with the Quill, with one character dead after the others abandoned him to a dragon and another character repeatedly shot by another character. Of those three, two were evil, and they wrote of conquered dragon armies, evil empires built out of the undead, and in one particularly clever idea, day itself would only last a quarter as long as normal. The last guy was neutral and fortunately created some vestige of civilization, albeit underground, which is actually pretty helpful what with the only three hours a day of sun and the almost lifeless surface.
Now that the players could make their own characters, they became special forces for the main underground city. This time, I went creative/weird, and I made them all partially amnesiac. They knew their history, but none of the names of their friends, family, hometowns, etc. It was only after meeting these people that they remembered these names; as if hearing it the first time triggered their memory. Oh, and they all met a strange shadowy figure the day they got the amnesia, saying that they were her children and it was their job to destroy the "usurpers."
The campaign sort of blipped over that last bit for a while, though. It initially is about the characters running a literal underground resistance against the evil orc/dragon and undead empires, but soon they discover a much worse threat. In addition to all the other changes to the standard D&D setting, I included another one; the standard gods were gone, to be replaced by own pantheon. That pantheon consisted of twelve goddesses known as the Sisters. That's right, I got them from the Valley game I mentioned ages ago. But the characters only knew about 11 goddesses. In this world like the original, Bas, the only evil goddess, fell and was forgotten. However, somebody discovered her, and she is slowly rising to power. When she does so physically, she will be a goddess manifest on the material plane, with all the unpleasantness that suggests.
The plot soon revolved on fighting Bas and her forces while simultaneously learning more about the strange world's history. The Quill, it turned out, has been around for millions of years and was created deliberately by a power higher than the gods. Ideally, it appears every time the world was building to an unstoppable climax, leading to a final victory of good or evil. The Quill let some mid-level forces take over and change the story completely, and it would be centuries or millennia before another climax would develop. As a result, there were the ruins of countless civilizations buried in the world, often with advanced technology or other forces unknown to a typical fantasy game.
This time, however, things went wrong. When Bas fell, she made a crater that penetrated many of those ruins, and as she started to recover, she gained access to powers that should have been left alone. And as the players continued their adventures, they discovered more of these ancient land, including an entire hi-tech city (with a nuclear weapon) currently inhabited by the surviving good and neutral dragons.
But all things must end, and this campaign didn't end well, though it came close, right on to the edge. My biggest problem with my longer-lasting games is consistent players. That's what comes from recruiting via online and otherwise using former strangers. Often it's just a matter of time, of course. People get busy, life happens. Occasionally it's the person, of course. In one case, which led to me taking a month off and switching to a game every two weeks instead of every week, a player cussed me out and quit the game after learning I was talking online about weakening his vastly overpowered magical armor. Other times, there were fights between players, and I am not good at conflict resolution, at least not after people are already angry.
But this game died to more traditional reasons. All of a sudden, two players, including the last one to still be there from Day 1, were moving out of state. One of said players was hosting the game for a good year by then, so we lost our regular game site. And that means losing another player who came from the other direction. Half the party gone, we had to end the regular sessions. We tried to at least finish the game by playing online, and for an adventure or two, that worked or came close to it. But in the end, people just drifted away. Everyone was epic level, half the people had barely functioning internet connections or just couldn't show up often, and combat already takes ludicrously long at that stage even before you factor in the delays from online gaming. The campaign's story ended with a few final entries into my enworld-based story hour, using a few comments from the players to modify things. At the most, we were three adventures away from ending the campaign.
That ending has haunted me ever since. What could I have done better? The easy answer, of course, would be to cut out some of the less important adventures, but how would I know when the game would suddenly end? Or I should have accepted that the online game was a half-assed fix at best and sped to the campaign's conclusion, which started with an epic war against Bas and her forces. That led to an actual final battle between Bas herself and the party, of course. But it concluded with the party getting access to the Quill of Destiny just as the two former users and current emperors attempt to use its power a second time. Both sides would attack Bas' own surviving generals, letting the future of the world be rewritten. Now, this last bit I was able to at least do with input from the players, though it resulted in the very climax the Quill was supposed to avoid. So the world of the Quill came to an end, its survivors in a state of eternal "Happily ever after."
As for the amnesia and “destroy the usurpers” thing, it came up much, much later and was promptly ignored by the players. Basically, they were all (or most, at that point) former servants of Lolth, who was pissed that the non-evil underground empire largely consisted of drow who reformed and no longer worshipped her. So Lolth revived her servants in new bodies and altered the memories of everyone on the plane to think the characters, who mostly replaced people that actually died in the real history, were there all along. They never figured that much out, so it never factored into their writings in the Quill, but I thought it was a clever idea nonetheless.
But I wasn't entirely satisfied with that ending, and I assumed neither were some of the characters who didn't write about such things. In the end, it provided me for the initial inspiration of Mesion, the campaign setting I'm currently running. How will it end? I can't say. The characters are 19th level, the world is within months of possibly ending, and in real life, I lost my job and may have to move by the end of August. This could be another heartbreak, or it could be the end I always wanted in my stories. But I'll be sure to say either way, and give a bit more detail about my storytelling method in general, when the time comes!
Thursday, April 30, 2009
My Life: Employment For a Bit (Originally to be posted on April 30th)
Well, technically I'm working again. This will be true until, at last estimate, Monday. It's a temp job I got, and it's just basic data entry, but hey, it's a start. And it's more money than I make from normal unemployment. That's the good news. The bad news? My car's engine needs repair that will cost me most of any additional money I make. Also my back decided it hated me. I've had my back go out at times, and it usually was pretty bad; I had to walk with a hunch for a few days, exercise is difficult, and whatnot. But that hasn't happened in a while, and this was different. It felt like my side was the source of the problem, specifically my lower left rib. Ironically, the exercises I used to help my other back problems might have caused this one! Sigh.
But as depressed as I was around Tuesday, I'm feeling a bit better now. My back is at least 30% better, though I'm waiting until at least Sunday to actually get some exercise. And tomorrow's a Friday! Which means something again! Meanwhile, the screenplay I mentioned earlier is finished, or at least its first draft is. Now, all I have to do is get it critiqued by friends and family. From there, I'll do a few more drafts and even try to find an agent. Meanwhile, my next task is to find school, preferably something of the design area. If I can't find a permanent on job by August, my lease runs out in August anyway, so why not? But I'll explore that in details later.
But as depressed as I was around Tuesday, I'm feeling a bit better now. My back is at least 30% better, though I'm waiting until at least Sunday to actually get some exercise. And tomorrow's a Friday! Which means something again! Meanwhile, the screenplay I mentioned earlier is finished, or at least its first draft is. Now, all I have to do is get it critiqued by friends and family. From there, I'll do a few more drafts and even try to find an agent. Meanwhile, my next task is to find school, preferably something of the design area. If I can't find a permanent on job by August, my lease runs out in August anyway, so why not? But I'll explore that in details later.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
My Ideas: This Time Lost Beat Me To It
Today, we'll focus on the second of the RPGMaker games that I actually finished. Following my relative success with Oasis, I took a little time off to think about my next idea. I wanted to do something completely different this time, especially after playing the games others created. Some were ye olde generice RPG, yes. Many were even more cliched and formulaic than Oasis. But others found much more clever ways to use the system. The most famous of these innovative games was Remote Control, a game about a guy who is trapped in a television and forced to fight their way through popular (at the time) television show parodies like Pokemon and Xena. There were almost no random encounters and some incredible mini-games, even a fairly thorough dating game.
These inspired me to do something different, but they weren't my direct inspiration. That came from...a movie I don't know the name of. It was a minor action movie a decade ago about a heist that took place during a flood. That flood was what caught my attention. There was the urgency the average grind-happy video game lost, and the ever-shifting environment that turns peaceful settings into new hazards. After working on the idea for a bit, I was ready to get started.
And that was fine at the time. But then the idea got tricky. I'll demonstrate by explaining the plot. A guy wakes up on a mysterious island (I know,) with strange monsters and effects (I KNOW,) along with many people with mysterious, sinister pasts (AARRRGH!) I love Lost, but now I have to rationalize the similarities whenever I mention it. Like I did just now!
Eh, it's different enough that I can continue, and the game play itself is closer to Chrono Cross. I did away with both random encounters and standardized experience. Standard encounters can usually be avoided, though in some areas the path is too narrow to avoid the moving, visual enemies. And while they give money and items (more on that later,) they don't increase levels. Instead, experience is only given in boss fights. The normal path through the game is set so your main character at least will gain exactly enough experience to gain a level at each boss. However, the game is extremely non-linear, and fighting bosses elsewhere can be used to gain experience that helps boost levels.
But exploring is risky in addition to rewarding. Though normal healing and magic-bumping items are available, they're extremely rare, especially in the first couple of days. Instead, health and magic (called sanity points,) are only fully filled when you rest. However, whenever you rest, the day ends. And while the characters don't notice it on the first two days, every day, the island sinks a little, raising the waters. This is most important on the third day, when the island's lone village is flooded. Without the character's help, most of the island's inhabitants will drown or be killed by the monsters that rise up from the water. From there on, the stores are gone, and you have to pick among the surviving villagers as you explore. You will often find that if you go through an easier path to a location and rest there, you can't go back the same way.
All this is tied to the game's plot, as well. After the major twist on day three, the main character (the symbolically named Avery, damn you once again Lost!) learns that every other person on the island, even his friends and ambiguous lover, are guilty of murder or at least manslaughter! This leads them to conclude that the island is a sort of prison and punishment, or perhaps a test of will to the survivors. If they can survive, they might even go free. The mystery is whether the villagers deserve it and why Avery, who is innocent, is also stuck on the island.
The story's mystery and the players' freedom to explore as they see fit also means they can take advantage of the day system as well. Notably, they can use The Machine, a giant factory that characters can use to get new equipment. This is especially helpful after the village and its stores are destroyed, but while The Machine can be used to make more powerful weapons and armor than the village ever sold, it also had its costs. In addition to the game's money system, players had to find materials used to make weapons and armor. Finally, The Machine takes a day to make its products, delaying the results and ultimately making it inaccessible at the end of the game's time limit.
The day system also affects the ending. This affects how many other villagers besides Avery survive the island; the "bad ending" occurs if you wait until the last day to beat the game and only lets Avery live, and the "good ending" lets most survivors of the village (which can't be ever character) survive if the player finishes with at least day to spare. There are also hidden options; the worst ending occurs if you finish on day 2 or if you finish without witnessing the village flood or meeting the survivors afterwards, and the best ending requires Avery to beat the game alone on Day 1, which lets all the characters live.
This is nearly impossible, however, on the first game, so I implemented a New Game+ feature that lets the player keep the level, skills, and equipment of Avery and any other surviving villager. This also grants access to other hidden secrets, especially a hidden area located on the other side of the island from the village. This marsh sinks on Day 2 (the only place to do so,) has the hardest enemies to date, and is guarded by a nearly invincible boss. But beating it grants access to enough high-level enemies to boost the entire party to triple the level available in the normal game and a boss rush feature. But this was no ordinary boss rush. Instead, I got permission to use bosses from a good dozen other RPG Maker games!
Features like this make this my proudest actual game. Its writing may be amateurish compared to my modern standards, but inserting letters one at a time via game pad is agony in any situation. And the puzzles, customization and exploration, attempts at a deeper story, believable characters, and special features are enough for me to use this game in my portfolio, on the rare occasion it matters, even today. Hell, with enough of a budget, I'd probably try to make it today!
These inspired me to do something different, but they weren't my direct inspiration. That came from...a movie I don't know the name of. It was a minor action movie a decade ago about a heist that took place during a flood. That flood was what caught my attention. There was the urgency the average grind-happy video game lost, and the ever-shifting environment that turns peaceful settings into new hazards. After working on the idea for a bit, I was ready to get started.
And that was fine at the time. But then the idea got tricky. I'll demonstrate by explaining the plot. A guy wakes up on a mysterious island (I know,) with strange monsters and effects (I KNOW,) along with many people with mysterious, sinister pasts (AARRRGH!) I love Lost, but now I have to rationalize the similarities whenever I mention it. Like I did just now!
Eh, it's different enough that I can continue, and the game play itself is closer to Chrono Cross. I did away with both random encounters and standardized experience. Standard encounters can usually be avoided, though in some areas the path is too narrow to avoid the moving, visual enemies. And while they give money and items (more on that later,) they don't increase levels. Instead, experience is only given in boss fights. The normal path through the game is set so your main character at least will gain exactly enough experience to gain a level at each boss. However, the game is extremely non-linear, and fighting bosses elsewhere can be used to gain experience that helps boost levels.
But exploring is risky in addition to rewarding. Though normal healing and magic-bumping items are available, they're extremely rare, especially in the first couple of days. Instead, health and magic (called sanity points,) are only fully filled when you rest. However, whenever you rest, the day ends. And while the characters don't notice it on the first two days, every day, the island sinks a little, raising the waters. This is most important on the third day, when the island's lone village is flooded. Without the character's help, most of the island's inhabitants will drown or be killed by the monsters that rise up from the water. From there on, the stores are gone, and you have to pick among the surviving villagers as you explore. You will often find that if you go through an easier path to a location and rest there, you can't go back the same way.
All this is tied to the game's plot, as well. After the major twist on day three, the main character (the symbolically named Avery, damn you once again Lost!) learns that every other person on the island, even his friends and ambiguous lover, are guilty of murder or at least manslaughter! This leads them to conclude that the island is a sort of prison and punishment, or perhaps a test of will to the survivors. If they can survive, they might even go free. The mystery is whether the villagers deserve it and why Avery, who is innocent, is also stuck on the island.
The story's mystery and the players' freedom to explore as they see fit also means they can take advantage of the day system as well. Notably, they can use The Machine, a giant factory that characters can use to get new equipment. This is especially helpful after the village and its stores are destroyed, but while The Machine can be used to make more powerful weapons and armor than the village ever sold, it also had its costs. In addition to the game's money system, players had to find materials used to make weapons and armor. Finally, The Machine takes a day to make its products, delaying the results and ultimately making it inaccessible at the end of the game's time limit.
The day system also affects the ending. This affects how many other villagers besides Avery survive the island; the "bad ending" occurs if you wait until the last day to beat the game and only lets Avery live, and the "good ending" lets most survivors of the village (which can't be ever character) survive if the player finishes with at least day to spare. There are also hidden options; the worst ending occurs if you finish on day 2 or if you finish without witnessing the village flood or meeting the survivors afterwards, and the best ending requires Avery to beat the game alone on Day 1, which lets all the characters live.
This is nearly impossible, however, on the first game, so I implemented a New Game+ feature that lets the player keep the level, skills, and equipment of Avery and any other surviving villager. This also grants access to other hidden secrets, especially a hidden area located on the other side of the island from the village. This marsh sinks on Day 2 (the only place to do so,) has the hardest enemies to date, and is guarded by a nearly invincible boss. But beating it grants access to enough high-level enemies to boost the entire party to triple the level available in the normal game and a boss rush feature. But this was no ordinary boss rush. Instead, I got permission to use bosses from a good dozen other RPG Maker games!
Features like this make this my proudest actual game. Its writing may be amateurish compared to my modern standards, but inserting letters one at a time via game pad is agony in any situation. And the puzzles, customization and exploration, attempts at a deeper story, believable characters, and special features are enough for me to use this game in my portfolio, on the rare occasion it matters, even today. Hell, with enough of a budget, I'd probably try to make it today!
Thursday, April 2, 2009
My Ideas: I'm Writing Another Screenplay! Yay!
For the second year in a row, I'm planning on doing the Script Frenzy. And for the first year in a row, I give a damn. Well, that's not fair. Last year, I wrote for the experience of writing a screenplay, and in most senses, I succeeded. Technically, I failed to submit it in time due to a misunderstanding of when it ended, but I did write 100 pages in 30 days, so in theory it worked. However, it didn't really work as a screenplay. I didn't know enough about the design of a screenplay, to start with. Oh sure, I got the right font and an approximation of the correct layout, but before long it just became another novel with the occasional stage directions. More importantly, I didn't really care. I had a very novel idea, one I wouldn't mind revisiting, but the characters, the plot itself, and every complex detail was figured out as I went, with no outline or even assumptions going in.
Part of it was the timing, though. At the time, I was early into a horrific project at work that ate up much of my free time and more importantly my creative energies. This time around, I'm able to make unemployment work FOR me.
But that's not the important difference. The main difference is the topic of the screenplay. Like most of my novels and notably not in my first screenplay, I used characters, settings, and ideas that I developed for years. But this is different, because it's not just some old concepts. This screenplay is adapted from the pilot and a few other episodes of a television series I wanted to make since approximately high school. Based on characters I made at twelve.
This is different from my novels. This isn't about myself, or because I have something to prove. I think I accomplished this over the years. This is the fulfillment of a dream. At the minimum, this is getting a story out of my head after years of contemplations, maturation, and reconsideration. And hopefully, it could be more. I see this involving agents, and friends offering rewriting suggestions, and even selling this to a publisher. And in the wackily optimistic part of my brain, it involves sharing it with the likes of Tim Burton or Neil Gaiman (yeah, it's an animated film) and having them vouch for me, or even doing the direction! Hey, you can't write fiction without having fantastic dreams.
Part of it was the timing, though. At the time, I was early into a horrific project at work that ate up much of my free time and more importantly my creative energies. This time around, I'm able to make unemployment work FOR me.
But that's not the important difference. The main difference is the topic of the screenplay. Like most of my novels and notably not in my first screenplay, I used characters, settings, and ideas that I developed for years. But this is different, because it's not just some old concepts. This screenplay is adapted from the pilot and a few other episodes of a television series I wanted to make since approximately high school. Based on characters I made at twelve.
This is different from my novels. This isn't about myself, or because I have something to prove. I think I accomplished this over the years. This is the fulfillment of a dream. At the minimum, this is getting a story out of my head after years of contemplations, maturation, and reconsideration. And hopefully, it could be more. I see this involving agents, and friends offering rewriting suggestions, and even selling this to a publisher. And in the wackily optimistic part of my brain, it involves sharing it with the likes of Tim Burton or Neil Gaiman (yeah, it's an animated film) and having them vouch for me, or even doing the direction! Hey, you can't write fiction without having fantastic dreams.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Reviews: Obsession, Country Style
Readers (if I had any many) may recall that almost exactly a year ago, I heaped nearly endless praise on a video game, a game that took me about a hundred plus hours to beat. That game, Persona 3, apparently caught the interest of more people than me, making it the first game of the series to be a nearly mainstream hit. And so the game spawned an expansion less than a year later, which I admittedly didn't play, and a full sequel also about a year later. That I played. Oh how I played it.
Nearly everything in Persona 3 is also in Persona 4, so I won't go into detail about it. Like the original, Persona 4 is a fairly traditional RPG where the party doesn't travel the world as usual in these games; they barely leave a single city, and instead it involves the passage of time in that location, as the situation gets apocalyptic. Game play is a mix of randomized dungeons that get unlocked with time, offering tougher enemies that must be matched, and social situations like a dating sim that enhances your character's abilities in combat. The full review can be found here:
http://conqueringcreativity.blogspot.com/2008/03/reviews-thanks-you-makers-of-most.html
The primary difference between the two games is the location, and as a result the entire feel of the game. Persona 3 took place in a big city, while Persona 4's setting is a small, rural town. This change could have been cosmetic, but it permeates throughout the game. You can see it as early as the game's opening menu. Persona 3 opened to a cold, static image done in frigid blues while a minimalist tune plays in the background; the same music played in the lobby of the main dungeon. Persona 4 opens to a scene in the main character's high school, as images of your friends run in and a comforting, elegant remix of the game's main theme plays, inviting the player in.
In Persona 3, everything is mechanical and hurried, matching the frenzy of a city. Almost throughout the entire game, a countdown ominously warns how much time the characters have before another inevitable conflict or narrative event. A calendar is available at all times, letting you schedule nearly everything in advance (except when the unexpected occurs to wreck everything.) Every day is meticulously divided into three parts. You spend after school periods building social links, evenings dungeon crawling or boosting your stats, and late nights studying. In Persona 4, you couldn't access the calendar if you wanted, and the only thing warning you of future deadlines is the weather report. You have two times to freely explore, after-school and night. And night is...limited. Nothing says "you're in the country" like trying to go out in the evening and the game telling you, basically, "where would you go?" And at least at first, the answer is nowhere.
The lack of structure, however, offers the characters a needed independence. In Persona 3, within the first hour or so, the hero moves into town and learns that all his dorm-mates are part of a secret society that fights demons, and he gets press ganged into saving the world. In Persona 4, the characters have to learn themselves that there is another threat from another world, and it is tied to the murder mystery that already claimed two lives. Characters can't even enter the new dungeon until investigating the lives of the victims, and they won't even know how long they have until they learn when the next foggy day will occur, which occurs after multiple days of rain in a row.
Speaking of weather, one should comment on this change as well. The weather on any given day can be sunny, cloudy, rainy, or foggy. This changes the availability of social links (sports and most school friends are unavailable when it rains,) what you can catch when fishing, what restaurants are available to eat, and even the music. It quickly becomes as integral to the settings as the town itself, and even a character in its own right.
But enough about how this game is different, the important question is if it's better. The game's first improvement is that frankly, the characters are much better. Most of Persona 3's party members are interesting, but they tend towards obnoxiousness and many are not all that believable. The Persona 4 party conversely felt like a real group of friends. The biggest star in my eyes is Chie, a short-haired, kung-fu loving tomboy who likes to sing songs about steak. Yosuke, the party's best male friend, has a tendency to act like a jerk at times (though who doesn't,) but at his best, he has a self-deprecating charm reminiscent of Xander from Buffy at his best. And the regular S.Links are much better, with none of the uncomfortably creepy friends that want to date teachers, form cults, destroy their legs for high school sports, or develop creepy fetishes for Japan.
The game play also corrects for much of the original game's gaps in believability. Gone are the need to receive cell phone calls at random days of the week to even do a thing on Sundays or an entire empty summer that prevent you from seeing your friends, even the ones you live with. Now, Sundays and school vacations at least let you see your party member friends and the invitation calls are rarer and more superfluous, indicating special events instead. And your freedom to do new events is much more varied and free. You can do more social links at night, or you can make lunches and share them with friends, boosting your links that way. And without karaoke clubs and whatnot, the main characters can spend time and gain abilities and social links through doing simple part time jobs, reading books, and going out to jobs to meet people there. Consequences link everywhere. Your right response can raise an ability mid-conversation at any point, going to school events raise abilities and related social links, giving answers to your friends in class raise these relationships, and even minor social links are interrelated, with one social link giving bonuses to another as they reveal crushes and friendships between them. It's telling that, despite giving the player an entire month less of time (two months for the better endings,) and moving dungeon explorations to the daytime, it's possible to maximize all social links with a month and a half to spare, while in Persona 3 you had to do everything perfect to the day to maximize them at the last possible moment.
Now, there are still some downsides, including new ones. The worst is a side effect of moving the dungeons to the daytime. The game removed the status effects that come from fighting in the dungeon so long that you get tired. As a result, you could theoretically stay in the dungeon indefinitely. Now, your health and magic never automatically regenerate anymore, so that creates a new limitation, but as you get higher level, new options become available and this becomes less of an issue. But that means that to optimize the game's limited days, you're expected to defeat entire sections of dungeons in a single day, and often you have to then go through the entire dungeon a second time just to beat a bonus boss. Instead of the sprints through the dungeons in Persona 3, which rarely took longer than half an hour or an hour at the most, you could be stuck spending several hours trapped in a single dungeon. The balance between social and dungeon elements gets thrown off, which is the entire point. You don't have to play it this way, mind, but every time you don't, the odds of you getting all the social links get less and less. I don't want to be guilted into tedium. Speaking of tedium, the game's introduction is the longest this side of Dragon Warrior/Quest 7. It takes a good three hours to even see your first fight, and even longer before you can explore the city and dungeons freely. Some of this time sink is a necessary evil when you expect the characters to learn about the story themselves, but some editing would have made it a bit more bearable.
In conclusion, the best way of describing the game is by the mental fugue state it eventually causes. The lulling, ever-changing music, the way that days just pass as friendships are made and developed, the strange sidequests that involve finding stickers for children or building toy models to satisfy the magical fox...at times, it practically feels like a fever dream. But a good fever dream. It takes the revealing, sometimes sad ideal of childhood love and friendship that the last game fulfilled and made it less like a chore and more like an experience. And you can't expect more than that from a game about social life.
Oh, yes, one more thing. For another, far less serious look at this game, check out the endurance run that Giant Bomb is doing. Thrill as they verrrrry slowly play a 90 hour game in half an hour segments a day, most likely for the rest of their lives. You can check out the first one here, and the rest can be found quite easily on the endurance run button, at least for now.
http://www.giantbomb.com/endurance-run-persona-4-part-01/17-219/
Nearly everything in Persona 3 is also in Persona 4, so I won't go into detail about it. Like the original, Persona 4 is a fairly traditional RPG where the party doesn't travel the world as usual in these games; they barely leave a single city, and instead it involves the passage of time in that location, as the situation gets apocalyptic. Game play is a mix of randomized dungeons that get unlocked with time, offering tougher enemies that must be matched, and social situations like a dating sim that enhances your character's abilities in combat. The full review can be found here:
http://conqueringcreativity.blogspot.com/2008/03/reviews-thanks-you-makers-of-most.html
The primary difference between the two games is the location, and as a result the entire feel of the game. Persona 3 took place in a big city, while Persona 4's setting is a small, rural town. This change could have been cosmetic, but it permeates throughout the game. You can see it as early as the game's opening menu. Persona 3 opened to a cold, static image done in frigid blues while a minimalist tune plays in the background; the same music played in the lobby of the main dungeon. Persona 4 opens to a scene in the main character's high school, as images of your friends run in and a comforting, elegant remix of the game's main theme plays, inviting the player in.
In Persona 3, everything is mechanical and hurried, matching the frenzy of a city. Almost throughout the entire game, a countdown ominously warns how much time the characters have before another inevitable conflict or narrative event. A calendar is available at all times, letting you schedule nearly everything in advance (except when the unexpected occurs to wreck everything.) Every day is meticulously divided into three parts. You spend after school periods building social links, evenings dungeon crawling or boosting your stats, and late nights studying. In Persona 4, you couldn't access the calendar if you wanted, and the only thing warning you of future deadlines is the weather report. You have two times to freely explore, after-school and night. And night is...limited. Nothing says "you're in the country" like trying to go out in the evening and the game telling you, basically, "where would you go?" And at least at first, the answer is nowhere.
The lack of structure, however, offers the characters a needed independence. In Persona 3, within the first hour or so, the hero moves into town and learns that all his dorm-mates are part of a secret society that fights demons, and he gets press ganged into saving the world. In Persona 4, the characters have to learn themselves that there is another threat from another world, and it is tied to the murder mystery that already claimed two lives. Characters can't even enter the new dungeon until investigating the lives of the victims, and they won't even know how long they have until they learn when the next foggy day will occur, which occurs after multiple days of rain in a row.
Speaking of weather, one should comment on this change as well. The weather on any given day can be sunny, cloudy, rainy, or foggy. This changes the availability of social links (sports and most school friends are unavailable when it rains,) what you can catch when fishing, what restaurants are available to eat, and even the music. It quickly becomes as integral to the settings as the town itself, and even a character in its own right.
But enough about how this game is different, the important question is if it's better. The game's first improvement is that frankly, the characters are much better. Most of Persona 3's party members are interesting, but they tend towards obnoxiousness and many are not all that believable. The Persona 4 party conversely felt like a real group of friends. The biggest star in my eyes is Chie, a short-haired, kung-fu loving tomboy who likes to sing songs about steak. Yosuke, the party's best male friend, has a tendency to act like a jerk at times (though who doesn't,) but at his best, he has a self-deprecating charm reminiscent of Xander from Buffy at his best. And the regular S.Links are much better, with none of the uncomfortably creepy friends that want to date teachers, form cults, destroy their legs for high school sports, or develop creepy fetishes for Japan.
The game play also corrects for much of the original game's gaps in believability. Gone are the need to receive cell phone calls at random days of the week to even do a thing on Sundays or an entire empty summer that prevent you from seeing your friends, even the ones you live with. Now, Sundays and school vacations at least let you see your party member friends and the invitation calls are rarer and more superfluous, indicating special events instead. And your freedom to do new events is much more varied and free. You can do more social links at night, or you can make lunches and share them with friends, boosting your links that way. And without karaoke clubs and whatnot, the main characters can spend time and gain abilities and social links through doing simple part time jobs, reading books, and going out to jobs to meet people there. Consequences link everywhere. Your right response can raise an ability mid-conversation at any point, going to school events raise abilities and related social links, giving answers to your friends in class raise these relationships, and even minor social links are interrelated, with one social link giving bonuses to another as they reveal crushes and friendships between them. It's telling that, despite giving the player an entire month less of time (two months for the better endings,) and moving dungeon explorations to the daytime, it's possible to maximize all social links with a month and a half to spare, while in Persona 3 you had to do everything perfect to the day to maximize them at the last possible moment.
Now, there are still some downsides, including new ones. The worst is a side effect of moving the dungeons to the daytime. The game removed the status effects that come from fighting in the dungeon so long that you get tired. As a result, you could theoretically stay in the dungeon indefinitely. Now, your health and magic never automatically regenerate anymore, so that creates a new limitation, but as you get higher level, new options become available and this becomes less of an issue. But that means that to optimize the game's limited days, you're expected to defeat entire sections of dungeons in a single day, and often you have to then go through the entire dungeon a second time just to beat a bonus boss. Instead of the sprints through the dungeons in Persona 3, which rarely took longer than half an hour or an hour at the most, you could be stuck spending several hours trapped in a single dungeon. The balance between social and dungeon elements gets thrown off, which is the entire point. You don't have to play it this way, mind, but every time you don't, the odds of you getting all the social links get less and less. I don't want to be guilted into tedium. Speaking of tedium, the game's introduction is the longest this side of Dragon Warrior/Quest 7. It takes a good three hours to even see your first fight, and even longer before you can explore the city and dungeons freely. Some of this time sink is a necessary evil when you expect the characters to learn about the story themselves, but some editing would have made it a bit more bearable.
In conclusion, the best way of describing the game is by the mental fugue state it eventually causes. The lulling, ever-changing music, the way that days just pass as friendships are made and developed, the strange sidequests that involve finding stickers for children or building toy models to satisfy the magical fox...at times, it practically feels like a fever dream. But a good fever dream. It takes the revealing, sometimes sad ideal of childhood love and friendship that the last game fulfilled and made it less like a chore and more like an experience. And you can't expect more than that from a game about social life.
Oh, yes, one more thing. For another, far less serious look at this game, check out the endurance run that Giant Bomb is doing. Thrill as they verrrrry slowly play a 90 hour game in half an hour segments a day, most likely for the rest of their lives. You can check out the first one here, and the rest can be found quite easily on the endurance run button, at least for now.
http://www.giantbomb.com/endurance-run-persona-4-part-01/17-219/
Thursday, March 5, 2009
My Ideas: Let's do someone else's idea this time.
The last post has inspired me to post something new for my ideas. As proud as I am of my original ideals, I also enjoy contemplating other game series and considering the paths they would take. Specifically, I consider how I would make the games if I had incredible power of the game industry. Would my version be better? How would my voice influence the game?
I already did this since I was eight or so with my Megaman ideas. But let's face it, a new Megaman isn't much for innovation. Toss in eight bosses with adjective names, design some levels, figure out the skeletal plot tying it together, and new game! Mind you, even here, I tended to go epic a few games in, but it never really became too complex, especially since I last made one in high school.
But I think Nintendo inspires me to try this again lately. Partially it comes from the long history of the games, with characters still going strong from my childhood and strong archetypal conflicts. At the same time, the games haven't changed much, encouraging brainstorming. What if the Zelda games had slightly different settings?
Even less story-driven series, like Mario Kart, can be innovated through some sort of plot. Smash Brothers Brawl inspired me on this case. They could have just as easily made another chaotic fighting game with slightly better graphics. Instead, they created an entire adventure mode featuring a unique foe that forced all the Nintendo characters (and some Konami and Sega characters,) to unite for their mutual survival.
And since the new Mario Kart caused so many...issues in me, I thought that was another series that deserved a more mature treatment, inspiring new levels as a result. In my version, I'll take advantage of the more serious plot of Mario Galaxy. Based on that game's ending, where the entire Mario universe was basically reset, Mario Kart Me (get it?) focuses on how the universe is changing. The story revolves around a new villain (working name Tinker) who exists outside of all universes and seeks out universes with new potential power and alters them to make them into factories that serve only him. Rosalina learned of this power and seeks out Mario and his friends (and inexplicably friendly enemies,) to harness the power of the reborn universe and return it to normal before Tinker could use that power for himself. The problem is the temptation to control the universe is too great for all but the purest of heart. As a result, when the racers get near that power, the universe starts to alter itself around the desires of the racers as they briefly gain the power for...about the length of a race around a track.
The first half of the new racers revolves around getting to that power via the obligatory tracks. With only two series of tracks, we'd have to cut out several of the usual tracks? The Luigi Track? Gone. The Peach/Daisy courses suffer the same fate, turning the Mario Circuit into the de facto first track. The first set also tosses in your typical beach tack (with a vague Koopa Troopa theme,) a standard ice track (with no character theme, because there is still not one ice-themed character in the whole damn series,) and conclude with a DK mountain track. I wanted to actually use the Donkey Kong games as a reference, after they were ignored, and base the level on the Kremling Island from Donkey Kong Country 2. The music consists of remixed music of various levels from that game, and the stage itself includes bramble jungles near the top before passing through amusement parks, swamps, and lava caverns near the bottom. The next series opens with the usual Wario/Waluigi muddy track reminiscent of BMX or monster truck courses, and continues with a Toad-themed highway level, a ghost house (after missing that stage for several generations now,) and Bowser's Castle to conclude that half.
The second half of the game moves from "the world that is" to "the world that will be," or "will bes" for short. The first set are mostly humorous. Luigi's track imagines him as a hero out of sentai series like the Voltron and Power Rangers that we're familiar with. His subordinates are all toads, save for love interest Daisy, and Mario works as a janitor. Like all these levels, it tries to tell a story as well. In this case, Luigi and his team serve as obstacles to fight the racers on the assumption that they're dimensional invaders, and by the final lap, the heroes merge to form a giant robot that serves as both a threat and an alternate path along the track at points.
The set continues with Yoshi tapping into an ancestral memory of when dinosaurs ruled the world, creating stampedes and flying reptiles as obstacles. Of course, they're all ancestors of Yoshi, so they all have goofy cartoon faces and saddles, which mean they can be ridden. Peach and Daisy end up sharing a level, so the level is divided perfectly to the beautiful, pink, and dainty Peach ideal, and a rougher Daisy version with a sports theme. The path often branches, so characters can choose the less risky Peach side or the short but dangerous Daisy half. Oh, and the theme music for the level has lyrics. And is a duet. Finally, Donkey Kong imagines a jungle-based city, much like those seen in fantasy. As the characters cross through the elevated bridges, ramps, and treetop huts, legions of apes will perform the Donkey Kong Country theme song, with the playable characters performing on the main instruments. That's more a musical tour de force, plus a way to apologize for all the crappy Donkey Kong levels.
The last track set, though, is more serious. The first is also the one I detailed the most. The racers arrive on Bowsapolis, a world were, simply put, Bowser won. The entire Mushroom Kingdom is a dark city, the toads are put into slave labor and attacked with hammers if they fail, and Mario is pilloried. I admit that this level could be a hard sell, for the record, as it significantly darkens the image of many popular characters in the series. For example, Peach is married to Bowser, and quite happily, what with it being his fantasy. There are even blond half-reptile children running around in the opening. The level also features the Koopalings after a long hiatus, who play the level's military-heavy theme song, imagining the Koopa nation as a fascist police state (hey, if the Lion King could get away with it...) Threats include sky-darkening rains of hammers, attacks by both Ludwig Von Koopa and Bowser Junior (though the two start to compete in later laps and eventually collide in their respective vehicles,) and even evil Peach attacks near the end.
The other three levels start with a Rosalina level, which starts out on her space ship/comet, but it soon takes a somber turn into her past, as she imagines the mother that died in her back story has been brought back to life. This moment of weakness to temptation lets Tinker take control, so the penultimate level starts as his fantasy; an endless series of churning machinery and smoke-belching factories. The first lap is a gloomy and dangerous run through here, but by the second lap, Mario's fantasy starts to take control as his pure heart gains control of the universe's potential power. The level becomes a story of triumph as Tinker lays defeated and the universe is restored to normal. This last step occurs as the characters ride the prismatic energy of the universe back home. In other words, we end with Rainbow Road as usual, but here it ties into the story of the game much more clearly.
Ideally, the game can be an easy source of downloadable content as well. Each could contain new characters and willbes for these and old characters, like Wario, who didn't make the cut the first time around. More importantly, the game would give a touch of class and just a new sheen to the new series. As the Mario series goes into its fifth console generation, it needs to make us care not just about the games, but also the characters themselves, and games like this give meaning and remind us and new generations why Nintendo is the master of the archetypal video game character.
I already did this since I was eight or so with my Megaman ideas. But let's face it, a new Megaman isn't much for innovation. Toss in eight bosses with adjective names, design some levels, figure out the skeletal plot tying it together, and new game! Mind you, even here, I tended to go epic a few games in, but it never really became too complex, especially since I last made one in high school.
But I think Nintendo inspires me to try this again lately. Partially it comes from the long history of the games, with characters still going strong from my childhood and strong archetypal conflicts. At the same time, the games haven't changed much, encouraging brainstorming. What if the Zelda games had slightly different settings?
Even less story-driven series, like Mario Kart, can be innovated through some sort of plot. Smash Brothers Brawl inspired me on this case. They could have just as easily made another chaotic fighting game with slightly better graphics. Instead, they created an entire adventure mode featuring a unique foe that forced all the Nintendo characters (and some Konami and Sega characters,) to unite for their mutual survival.
And since the new Mario Kart caused so many...issues in me, I thought that was another series that deserved a more mature treatment, inspiring new levels as a result. In my version, I'll take advantage of the more serious plot of Mario Galaxy. Based on that game's ending, where the entire Mario universe was basically reset, Mario Kart Me (get it?) focuses on how the universe is changing. The story revolves around a new villain (working name Tinker) who exists outside of all universes and seeks out universes with new potential power and alters them to make them into factories that serve only him. Rosalina learned of this power and seeks out Mario and his friends (and inexplicably friendly enemies,) to harness the power of the reborn universe and return it to normal before Tinker could use that power for himself. The problem is the temptation to control the universe is too great for all but the purest of heart. As a result, when the racers get near that power, the universe starts to alter itself around the desires of the racers as they briefly gain the power for...about the length of a race around a track.
The first half of the new racers revolves around getting to that power via the obligatory tracks. With only two series of tracks, we'd have to cut out several of the usual tracks? The Luigi Track? Gone. The Peach/Daisy courses suffer the same fate, turning the Mario Circuit into the de facto first track. The first set also tosses in your typical beach tack (with a vague Koopa Troopa theme,) a standard ice track (with no character theme, because there is still not one ice-themed character in the whole damn series,) and conclude with a DK mountain track. I wanted to actually use the Donkey Kong games as a reference, after they were ignored, and base the level on the Kremling Island from Donkey Kong Country 2. The music consists of remixed music of various levels from that game, and the stage itself includes bramble jungles near the top before passing through amusement parks, swamps, and lava caverns near the bottom. The next series opens with the usual Wario/Waluigi muddy track reminiscent of BMX or monster truck courses, and continues with a Toad-themed highway level, a ghost house (after missing that stage for several generations now,) and Bowser's Castle to conclude that half.
The second half of the game moves from "the world that is" to "the world that will be," or "will bes" for short. The first set are mostly humorous. Luigi's track imagines him as a hero out of sentai series like the Voltron and Power Rangers that we're familiar with. His subordinates are all toads, save for love interest Daisy, and Mario works as a janitor. Like all these levels, it tries to tell a story as well. In this case, Luigi and his team serve as obstacles to fight the racers on the assumption that they're dimensional invaders, and by the final lap, the heroes merge to form a giant robot that serves as both a threat and an alternate path along the track at points.
The set continues with Yoshi tapping into an ancestral memory of when dinosaurs ruled the world, creating stampedes and flying reptiles as obstacles. Of course, they're all ancestors of Yoshi, so they all have goofy cartoon faces and saddles, which mean they can be ridden. Peach and Daisy end up sharing a level, so the level is divided perfectly to the beautiful, pink, and dainty Peach ideal, and a rougher Daisy version with a sports theme. The path often branches, so characters can choose the less risky Peach side or the short but dangerous Daisy half. Oh, and the theme music for the level has lyrics. And is a duet. Finally, Donkey Kong imagines a jungle-based city, much like those seen in fantasy. As the characters cross through the elevated bridges, ramps, and treetop huts, legions of apes will perform the Donkey Kong Country theme song, with the playable characters performing on the main instruments. That's more a musical tour de force, plus a way to apologize for all the crappy Donkey Kong levels.
The last track set, though, is more serious. The first is also the one I detailed the most. The racers arrive on Bowsapolis, a world were, simply put, Bowser won. The entire Mushroom Kingdom is a dark city, the toads are put into slave labor and attacked with hammers if they fail, and Mario is pilloried. I admit that this level could be a hard sell, for the record, as it significantly darkens the image of many popular characters in the series. For example, Peach is married to Bowser, and quite happily, what with it being his fantasy. There are even blond half-reptile children running around in the opening. The level also features the Koopalings after a long hiatus, who play the level's military-heavy theme song, imagining the Koopa nation as a fascist police state (hey, if the Lion King could get away with it...) Threats include sky-darkening rains of hammers, attacks by both Ludwig Von Koopa and Bowser Junior (though the two start to compete in later laps and eventually collide in their respective vehicles,) and even evil Peach attacks near the end.
The other three levels start with a Rosalina level, which starts out on her space ship/comet, but it soon takes a somber turn into her past, as she imagines the mother that died in her back story has been brought back to life. This moment of weakness to temptation lets Tinker take control, so the penultimate level starts as his fantasy; an endless series of churning machinery and smoke-belching factories. The first lap is a gloomy and dangerous run through here, but by the second lap, Mario's fantasy starts to take control as his pure heart gains control of the universe's potential power. The level becomes a story of triumph as Tinker lays defeated and the universe is restored to normal. This last step occurs as the characters ride the prismatic energy of the universe back home. In other words, we end with Rainbow Road as usual, but here it ties into the story of the game much more clearly.
Ideally, the game can be an easy source of downloadable content as well. Each could contain new characters and willbes for these and old characters, like Wario, who didn't make the cut the first time around. More importantly, the game would give a touch of class and just a new sheen to the new series. As the Mario series goes into its fifth console generation, it needs to make us care not just about the games, but also the characters themselves, and games like this give meaning and remind us and new generations why Nintendo is the master of the archetypal video game character.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
[Review] And a reminder I'm not dead
So, want to know what ruins your motivation to write? Sudden unemployment? Want to know what helps? All those unbeaten video games still left over from Christmas, which a responsible and busy adult would have beaten over the course of several months. This makes it hard to focus on making blog posts, especially when nobody seems to read or comment on the blog. Though obviously updating more than once a month will also help.
Fortunately, while I'm still light on new ideas, all these video games mean that I have a lot more semi-recent reviews. I say semi-recent because it was only in last December that I became the semi-reluctant owner of a shiny new 360, and my entire collection consists of games a year or two old as I play catchup and avoid new game prices. The latter is subject to change if and if I get a new and decently paying job, and probably not before. They were certainly quality games, though. In the last two months, I finished Bioshock, Mass Effect, and Persona 4, some of the best games I've played in years. And there was Mario Kart: Wii.
This is the subject of today's post, and admittedly much was already written about this topic. In short, the game has...issues. At times it felt like one of my biggest gaming disappointments, and other times if felt like pure, untainted childhood, or at least the rare good parts. Either way, I played it far more and for longer than I intended, either out of enjoyment or out of vengeance.
To be kind, the game is one of the most schizophrenic titles out there. A lot of gamers use it as a scapegoat for Nintendo's "casual" direction, but that's not quite right. This game's biggest mistake isn't catering to the casual or the hardcore, but trying to appease both, and in doing so, failing miserably.
Most reviewers seem to focus on the "casual" side, so let's start with that. The Mario Kart franchise has had a single rule since at least the N64 title; if you're in first, you won't stay in first, at least not easily. Part of that's just programming the AI to be slower if the player is behind and insanely fast when the player is in front, and ensuring that the assigned "good" computer finish near the front every lap to say in point competition.
But in the Mario Kart games, balance usually comes from items. When you're in first, you won't get anything more useful than a banana peel. Meanwhile, characters in the back can turn invincible, blast the entire battlefield with lightning, or launch an attack that soon hits the race leader with near-certain accuracy. Mario Kart Wii continues this philosophy and makes it much, much worse. The normal race now consists of twelve racers, not eight, and there are even more ways to attack the entire battlefield, like the POW Block, or go from last to first in seconds, like the Bullet Bill. At times, it seems impossible to even RACE in a racing game with all the instant hit effects going off. I believe my record is getting hit with a half-dozen instant doom attacks on a single track.
But that's only half of the game's issue. Yes, the normal race is now a casual free-for-all that can reward luck as often as skill. But Nintendo also included a tradition of unlocking features in the game: new characters, new karts and bikes, even entirely new track sets and difficulty levels. Barely an eighth of the entire game is available from the start. Most of these features are unlocked by playing in "grand prix" mode, a single-player competition across four tracks. To unlock many of these features, one must get the highest score on these four tracks, which usually means coming in first for at least most of those tracks.
Now you can see the problem. Casual players want to play this game with their friends in as relaxed a manner as possible; this is a party game. But to even see half the game, one player has to work, alone, for hours! And that frantic play becomes far less fun when you absolutely MUST come in first regularly to not waste your time. And your only choice if something goes wrong is to quite the entire grand prix. Nothing is more frustrating than racing well enough on three tracks only to fall apart on the fourth, except for maybe racing well on all four tracks, and then getting hit by an automatic attack seconds away from the finish line, watching three or four racers pass you by, and realizing those last twenty minutes were just flushed down the drain.
And then it gets worse. Even if you get gold trophies on all eight tracks for all four difficulties, you learn that there STILL are things to unlock. This is the first console game to rank your performance beyond just the points. Getting enough points for a gold trophy can still easily earn you a "C" or "D" grade. Even getting first on all tracks is not a guarantee. You'll likely get at least an "A" in this case, but to unlock more features, you need to get BETTER than "A" by getting a one, two, or three "star" grade. That's pretty counter-intuitive already if you didn't play the DS game that apparently introduced this feature, like I didn't. And does the game or instructions actually list how you get these rankings? It does not. And to unlock all the cars and characters, you need to get one star or better on EVERY track, on EVERY difficulty (except the mirror tracks that are technically as hard as the normal highest difficulty.) This casual party game requires you to get first on nearly every one of the hardest tracks of the hardest difficulty in a game that explicitly punishes you for being in first. The auto-hit items won't cost you points, not that you'd know that without gamefaqs' help, but it will still drop you to the back of the pack and penalize you in the rankings for your presence there.
Oh, and that's still not all. Even more can be unlocked in the time trials for each of the 32 tracks. Some just require you to race once and set a time. No problem. But each track also has a "staff ghost" to race against it. To unlock additional stuff, you must beat the "staff ghost" and unlock an "expert staff ghost." But do you unlock the expert by beating the staff ghost? Nope! You have to beat the normal ghost by SEVERAL SECONDS to unlock the expert? How many? The game doesn't say, and it varies for every track. Does the game even indicate these second ghosts exist? Not that I can tell, until you unlock one, and then it doesn't say what unlocking these ghosts does.
Sigh. So, in other words, to unlock everything, you have to spend more time than it takes to usually save the world in an epic RPG. All so your friends won't ask what the deal is with the three question marks in the character select screen. This is BAD GAME DESIGN, Nintendo! Casuals don't care about getting one-star rankings or expert ghosts; they just want to have fun racing with their favorite cartoon plumber's friends. And hard-core players aren't interested in unlocking Bowser Jr. unless he offers a significant game play advantage or change. This really wouldn't have been hard. Super Smash Brothers Brawl had at least three methods of unlocking all of its features; the one player game, through some unusual game play event, or just by playing the game's multi-player features enough. How hard is that? Play online or versus enough, and you can drive as Daisy or whatnot! Or offer an in-game store, letting players cash in their "winnings" for new characters. This current method offers nothing but aggravation.
Despite all this, and believe me it drove me insane for weeks now, the game itself is fun. The new levels are unique enough, and it also offers many old tracks from all five earlier Mario Kart games. Best of all is the new online mode. Now if you're sick of the Grand Prix death march, you can inflict misery on strangers from all over the country. If enough are in a single match, it could be just as frustrating, but at least you're not being graded for it.
Fortunately, while I'm still light on new ideas, all these video games mean that I have a lot more semi-recent reviews. I say semi-recent because it was only in last December that I became the semi-reluctant owner of a shiny new 360, and my entire collection consists of games a year or two old as I play catchup and avoid new game prices. The latter is subject to change if and if I get a new and decently paying job, and probably not before. They were certainly quality games, though. In the last two months, I finished Bioshock, Mass Effect, and Persona 4, some of the best games I've played in years. And there was Mario Kart: Wii.
This is the subject of today's post, and admittedly much was already written about this topic. In short, the game has...issues. At times it felt like one of my biggest gaming disappointments, and other times if felt like pure, untainted childhood, or at least the rare good parts. Either way, I played it far more and for longer than I intended, either out of enjoyment or out of vengeance.
To be kind, the game is one of the most schizophrenic titles out there. A lot of gamers use it as a scapegoat for Nintendo's "casual" direction, but that's not quite right. This game's biggest mistake isn't catering to the casual or the hardcore, but trying to appease both, and in doing so, failing miserably.
Most reviewers seem to focus on the "casual" side, so let's start with that. The Mario Kart franchise has had a single rule since at least the N64 title; if you're in first, you won't stay in first, at least not easily. Part of that's just programming the AI to be slower if the player is behind and insanely fast when the player is in front, and ensuring that the assigned "good" computer finish near the front every lap to say in point competition.
But in the Mario Kart games, balance usually comes from items. When you're in first, you won't get anything more useful than a banana peel. Meanwhile, characters in the back can turn invincible, blast the entire battlefield with lightning, or launch an attack that soon hits the race leader with near-certain accuracy. Mario Kart Wii continues this philosophy and makes it much, much worse. The normal race now consists of twelve racers, not eight, and there are even more ways to attack the entire battlefield, like the POW Block, or go from last to first in seconds, like the Bullet Bill. At times, it seems impossible to even RACE in a racing game with all the instant hit effects going off. I believe my record is getting hit with a half-dozen instant doom attacks on a single track.
But that's only half of the game's issue. Yes, the normal race is now a casual free-for-all that can reward luck as often as skill. But Nintendo also included a tradition of unlocking features in the game: new characters, new karts and bikes, even entirely new track sets and difficulty levels. Barely an eighth of the entire game is available from the start. Most of these features are unlocked by playing in "grand prix" mode, a single-player competition across four tracks. To unlock many of these features, one must get the highest score on these four tracks, which usually means coming in first for at least most of those tracks.
Now you can see the problem. Casual players want to play this game with their friends in as relaxed a manner as possible; this is a party game. But to even see half the game, one player has to work, alone, for hours! And that frantic play becomes far less fun when you absolutely MUST come in first regularly to not waste your time. And your only choice if something goes wrong is to quite the entire grand prix. Nothing is more frustrating than racing well enough on three tracks only to fall apart on the fourth, except for maybe racing well on all four tracks, and then getting hit by an automatic attack seconds away from the finish line, watching three or four racers pass you by, and realizing those last twenty minutes were just flushed down the drain.
And then it gets worse. Even if you get gold trophies on all eight tracks for all four difficulties, you learn that there STILL are things to unlock. This is the first console game to rank your performance beyond just the points. Getting enough points for a gold trophy can still easily earn you a "C" or "D" grade. Even getting first on all tracks is not a guarantee. You'll likely get at least an "A" in this case, but to unlock more features, you need to get BETTER than "A" by getting a one, two, or three "star" grade. That's pretty counter-intuitive already if you didn't play the DS game that apparently introduced this feature, like I didn't. And does the game or instructions actually list how you get these rankings? It does not. And to unlock all the cars and characters, you need to get one star or better on EVERY track, on EVERY difficulty (except the mirror tracks that are technically as hard as the normal highest difficulty.) This casual party game requires you to get first on nearly every one of the hardest tracks of the hardest difficulty in a game that explicitly punishes you for being in first. The auto-hit items won't cost you points, not that you'd know that without gamefaqs' help, but it will still drop you to the back of the pack and penalize you in the rankings for your presence there.
Oh, and that's still not all. Even more can be unlocked in the time trials for each of the 32 tracks. Some just require you to race once and set a time. No problem. But each track also has a "staff ghost" to race against it. To unlock additional stuff, you must beat the "staff ghost" and unlock an "expert staff ghost." But do you unlock the expert by beating the staff ghost? Nope! You have to beat the normal ghost by SEVERAL SECONDS to unlock the expert? How many? The game doesn't say, and it varies for every track. Does the game even indicate these second ghosts exist? Not that I can tell, until you unlock one, and then it doesn't say what unlocking these ghosts does.
Sigh. So, in other words, to unlock everything, you have to spend more time than it takes to usually save the world in an epic RPG. All so your friends won't ask what the deal is with the three question marks in the character select screen. This is BAD GAME DESIGN, Nintendo! Casuals don't care about getting one-star rankings or expert ghosts; they just want to have fun racing with their favorite cartoon plumber's friends. And hard-core players aren't interested in unlocking Bowser Jr. unless he offers a significant game play advantage or change. This really wouldn't have been hard. Super Smash Brothers Brawl had at least three methods of unlocking all of its features; the one player game, through some unusual game play event, or just by playing the game's multi-player features enough. How hard is that? Play online or versus enough, and you can drive as Daisy or whatnot! Or offer an in-game store, letting players cash in their "winnings" for new characters. This current method offers nothing but aggravation.
Despite all this, and believe me it drove me insane for weeks now, the game itself is fun. The new levels are unique enough, and it also offers many old tracks from all five earlier Mario Kart games. Best of all is the new online mode. Now if you're sick of the Grand Prix death march, you can inflict misery on strangers from all over the country. If enough are in a single match, it could be just as frustrating, but at least you're not being graded for it.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
My Life: Just Took a Turn For the Terrible.
I'll put this simply. On Wednesday, January 21st, I was laid off from work. Effective immediately. I get that week's paycheck, and in a couple of weeks I'm going to get my final paycheck, including all my remaining paid vacation days. So...there's that.
Now I have no idea WHAT to do. Phase one is going to the unemployment office. Phase two is figure out what the hell I'm going to do about my health care. I need something, but my work health care seems to be at least $500 a month, not even counting life and dental, so that's out.
Of course, we go to phase three. I need to actually find a job. Temp work is fine, save for the fact it means no easy health care. A real job would be better; of course. But I haven't really caught up with technological advancements. And let's face it, I haven't really cared that much about programming and computer science lately, despite it being my major. And honestly, most of it isn't even science. It's more like a foreign language class. Except the people who wrote the foreign languages have no language skills.
Maybe I should appreciate this. It could be a fresh start. Already, I assumed that if I don't get a permanent job by August, when my apartment lease runs out, I will just move to Chicago and go to school again. Hey, if you're in a recession, why not ride it out where you're expected to go into debt anyway?
I might even use the opportunity to get a job closer to my ideal. My obvious goals are more creative jobs, like video games, movies, television, or just a novel. But really, any writing job would be a good start. Mind you, this might require some more classes, but then that's the point of going back to school. But it's all up to the future. So, in other words, I could use some tips for the future. Where should I look for a job? Where should I get better health care?
Now I have no idea WHAT to do. Phase one is going to the unemployment office. Phase two is figure out what the hell I'm going to do about my health care. I need something, but my work health care seems to be at least $500 a month, not even counting life and dental, so that's out.
Of course, we go to phase three. I need to actually find a job. Temp work is fine, save for the fact it means no easy health care. A real job would be better; of course. But I haven't really caught up with technological advancements. And let's face it, I haven't really cared that much about programming and computer science lately, despite it being my major. And honestly, most of it isn't even science. It's more like a foreign language class. Except the people who wrote the foreign languages have no language skills.
Maybe I should appreciate this. It could be a fresh start. Already, I assumed that if I don't get a permanent job by August, when my apartment lease runs out, I will just move to Chicago and go to school again. Hey, if you're in a recession, why not ride it out where you're expected to go into debt anyway?
I might even use the opportunity to get a job closer to my ideal. My obvious goals are more creative jobs, like video games, movies, television, or just a novel. But really, any writing job would be a good start. Mind you, this might require some more classes, but then that's the point of going back to school. But it's all up to the future. So, in other words, I could use some tips for the future. Where should I look for a job? Where should I get better health care?
Thursday, January 8, 2009
My Ideas: 16-Bit Deserts and Nonsense
We'll make this one a quickee post, because the idea is a simple one. On the other hand, for this idea, you can actually PLAY it. This is all thanks to my old friend RPG Maker, specifically the Playstaion 1 version. There are others before and after this one, but my interest focused on this one for various reasons. One, I never became interested in the technical details of PC design. With the Playstation version, I can make my own game by just popping in the city.
Second, it was the first example of a memory-card saver that I could find. With the Dex Drive, I could store entire games to my PC and restore it when needed, saving me a fortune on these damn things and letting me play other people's games without losing my own data. Speaking of which, the third reason I used this version is the community. It wasn't huge, but there were sites like rpgpavilion (or something like that, it's been years.) Games were submitted for contests, put up for reviews, and chatted about in message boards. The community was teeny, approximating maybe a few hundred people at tops, but it's enough to get acknowledgment.
I'll get into my favorite game idea later, but my first game was a little simpler. The plot used most of the standard rules of RPGMaker: random encounters, three elemental types that counter each other in a roshambo/rock-paper-scissors scenario, gaining experience through enemy encounters, getting new equipment with every town.
The plot, though, was a bit weirder. In a game full of fantasy worlds of the traditional Dragon Warrior archetypes, I was already using the model of the later Final Fantasies. The story starts in Oasis (also the name of the game,) a school at the border of a massive desert. The desert is the result of a magical disaster, with the worst result being magical portals connecting the desert to other planes. Monsters would instantly appear and then be stranded when the portals vanish just as quickly. The hostile ones wreak havoc, and everyone else is in danger of these monsters or death by exposure or thirst. Oasis rescues these non-hostile arrivals and gives them a home. In exchange, many of them are trained at the school and become mercenaries. If I remember right, they didn't have to, but they were alone on a world they didn't understand with no other job prospects.
But the details of the school didn't matter for long. Soon, Fantax, the main character and a ninja who arrived at Oasis recently, is caught up in a job that changes...everything. I know. He learns that Solos, a lich with sun-control powers and who presumably created the desert, was once the partner of Fadune, the stereotypical wise old man who runs Oasis, were partners before finding a mystical orb of Macguffin-ness. It shattered, and since then the two parts of said orb and two control necklaces for it have been targeted, as they give control over not only the portals, but the land itself.
From there, things get complicated. The characters 1) learn that Solos used to be the good guy, and Fadune was the one who abused the orb, 2) learned that the orb itself was left on the planet by aliens for theoretically benevolent purposes, but now they're coming back to get the orb and conquer everyone because the people screwed it up so much, and 3) one half of the orb is actually embedded in seven people with various weather control magic, including Solos, Fadune, Fantax' chimera rival Geralk'im, and four of his own party members.
The game's mechanics were generic as all get out, but what I liked about the plot, besides it sheer outlandishness, is how things always change. In the best Final Fantasy games and other RPGs, the goal isn't just to go from point A to point B, collecting the X MacGuffins of power in the way. Between (and inside) dungeons, there should be betrayals, discoveries, and intrigue as the overarching plot became revealed. I also enjoyed the puzzles I could make in the last half or so of the game. The anti-gravity puzzle rooms remain a work of beauty and primitive coding I still like to brag about. Err, obviously.
There were a few other minor, fairly standard features. Based on a few primitive decisions, the main character will marry one of three female party members. The entire game's plot also splits based on the result of an early boss fight. It doesn't affect which dungeons, but it will affect some boss fights, random encounters, and even which of two party members will survive to the end of the game and which will die to give Fantax his/her power. Finally, there's a New Game+ mode which makes the above choice much easier to handle. Sadly, the game's nowhere near perfect. The random encounters in particular are more than a bit dated, but options are limited in this game.
As for why I stopped making these games, well, unfortunately the community seemed to dry up. It did so largely unpleasantly in the end, with an unfinished game winning for no good reason about three months after they were supposed to and after the community got so splintered that the creators of the website were insisting the game was dead. It was a sour end, but I still appreciate the game itself. I could even see making a semi-competent (if cheap) RPG out of the concept with the right tools and/or help. But it's the next idea that really holds an appeal so many years later. And we'll discuss that one soon enough.
Second, it was the first example of a memory-card saver that I could find. With the Dex Drive, I could store entire games to my PC and restore it when needed, saving me a fortune on these damn things and letting me play other people's games without losing my own data. Speaking of which, the third reason I used this version is the community. It wasn't huge, but there were sites like rpgpavilion (or something like that, it's been years.) Games were submitted for contests, put up for reviews, and chatted about in message boards. The community was teeny, approximating maybe a few hundred people at tops, but it's enough to get acknowledgment.
I'll get into my favorite game idea later, but my first game was a little simpler. The plot used most of the standard rules of RPGMaker: random encounters, three elemental types that counter each other in a roshambo/rock-paper-scissors scenario, gaining experience through enemy encounters, getting new equipment with every town.
The plot, though, was a bit weirder. In a game full of fantasy worlds of the traditional Dragon Warrior archetypes, I was already using the model of the later Final Fantasies. The story starts in Oasis (also the name of the game,) a school at the border of a massive desert. The desert is the result of a magical disaster, with the worst result being magical portals connecting the desert to other planes. Monsters would instantly appear and then be stranded when the portals vanish just as quickly. The hostile ones wreak havoc, and everyone else is in danger of these monsters or death by exposure or thirst. Oasis rescues these non-hostile arrivals and gives them a home. In exchange, many of them are trained at the school and become mercenaries. If I remember right, they didn't have to, but they were alone on a world they didn't understand with no other job prospects.
But the details of the school didn't matter for long. Soon, Fantax, the main character and a ninja who arrived at Oasis recently, is caught up in a job that changes...everything. I know. He learns that Solos, a lich with sun-control powers and who presumably created the desert, was once the partner of Fadune, the stereotypical wise old man who runs Oasis, were partners before finding a mystical orb of Macguffin-ness. It shattered, and since then the two parts of said orb and two control necklaces for it have been targeted, as they give control over not only the portals, but the land itself.
From there, things get complicated. The characters 1) learn that Solos used to be the good guy, and Fadune was the one who abused the orb, 2) learned that the orb itself was left on the planet by aliens for theoretically benevolent purposes, but now they're coming back to get the orb and conquer everyone because the people screwed it up so much, and 3) one half of the orb is actually embedded in seven people with various weather control magic, including Solos, Fadune, Fantax' chimera rival Geralk'im, and four of his own party members.
The game's mechanics were generic as all get out, but what I liked about the plot, besides it sheer outlandishness, is how things always change. In the best Final Fantasy games and other RPGs, the goal isn't just to go from point A to point B, collecting the X MacGuffins of power in the way. Between (and inside) dungeons, there should be betrayals, discoveries, and intrigue as the overarching plot became revealed. I also enjoyed the puzzles I could make in the last half or so of the game. The anti-gravity puzzle rooms remain a work of beauty and primitive coding I still like to brag about. Err, obviously.
There were a few other minor, fairly standard features. Based on a few primitive decisions, the main character will marry one of three female party members. The entire game's plot also splits based on the result of an early boss fight. It doesn't affect which dungeons, but it will affect some boss fights, random encounters, and even which of two party members will survive to the end of the game and which will die to give Fantax his/her power. Finally, there's a New Game+ mode which makes the above choice much easier to handle. Sadly, the game's nowhere near perfect. The random encounters in particular are more than a bit dated, but options are limited in this game.
As for why I stopped making these games, well, unfortunately the community seemed to dry up. It did so largely unpleasantly in the end, with an unfinished game winning for no good reason about three months after they were supposed to and after the community got so splintered that the creators of the website were insisting the game was dead. It was a sour end, but I still appreciate the game itself. I could even see making a semi-competent (if cheap) RPG out of the concept with the right tools and/or help. But it's the next idea that really holds an appeal so many years later. And we'll discuss that one soon enough.
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